Modernism, the lost generation’s artistic fate, the avant-garde, surrealism: these are historically inseparable from Mina Loy’s writing career. To the hallmarks that denote these concepts, Insel is no exception. Melville House’s publication of Insel revisits this posthumously published novel and includes the addition of a previously unreleased ending. In this expanded edition, a lyrical finish is brought to surface in “Visitation.” This inclusion offers a poetic, elegiac, and spiritual architecture culminating the novel as a richly observant meditation. This new section was carefully transcribed from Loy’s typescript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Elizabeth Arnold and Sarah Hayden’s scholarly introductions to the novel offer commentary on the process of converting handwritten passages and emphasize the premise that Loy’s fictive novel Insel is a portrait of her relationship with German surrealist artist Richard Oelze.
Insel, which means “island” in German, is a portrait of relationships; however, the complexity of those interpersonal relations may be reevaluated to consider that half of any social interaction occurs within the isolation of one’s own mind. Thus, the relationship depicted in the novel is potentially another facet of Loy’s own reflection. As Loy writes of Wuthering Heights, “I never remember for very long, after having read it, what it’s about—yet whenever I think of it—I find myself standing on wild moors—alone with the elements—elements become articulate—.” (p. 16) As an analogy, reading Insel summons a desire to walk through scattered margins of a mind reading another mind reading a photograph in a mirror.
In Insel, the subjective and objective are not dichotomous realities, nor is reality itself a singular entity. Loy’s novel emphasizes the possibility that human consciousness operates from primal embodiments rarely perceived. The novel is riddled with psychic projections, interstices between perceptions:
As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble—one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a moment exposed the “man-of-light.”
… Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables. (p. 77)
This illuminated intimacy, rife with impermeable boundaries and semi-private symbols (such as “scabs”), signify the parameters of the novel’s primary relationship, which is the loose plot of the exploratory lyrical text. Mrs. Jones narrates:
Without association (as usual) the idea of Insel rose in my mind. Quite different to thinking about someone. I was overcome with that imbecilic self-satisfied laughter, that Parnassian guffaw. It had nothing to do with any humor known to the intellect; being a sort of blank camouflage for all intellection. With me it was always filtered with a faint derision. But even this derision I took for granted. (p. 128)
There is a sense of a melded perspective between Insel and Mrs. Jones that surpasses the physical structures of ordinary friendships, as explored through entry and cessation. Generally, the most incredible spiritual, revelatory experiences in the relationship occur within Mrs. Jones’s psyche:
My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value returned as I looked up in the bare swept room. An especial clarity of the light I had noticed before to be associated with his presence was this evening so accentuated I could actually dissect it. Its softly bedazzling quality was not of any extra brightness, but of a penetrant purity that uplifted my eyes. I could discern among the unified flood of customary light an infiltration of rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitessimally finer than the gossamer halo round a lamp in the fog—a white candescence that made the air look shinier, with the same soothing shimmer as candles at mass in sacred houses, only indescribably acute. (p. 116)
This incantatory awareness of “other,” of the space beyond, between and within, is an act of the consciousness as inner eye and both the inlet and the outlet of being alive. Loy consequently suggests the multifariousness of a loving mind, or “island,” as it were. What we are afforded to see when we see with exuberant awareness is the highest sensibility of love. This is the fundamental quest at the heart of Insel. The novel’s primary focal point is a relationship built on conversations and observations, givings and takings. The relationship underscores the highest aspirations and capacities between artist and friend. These offerings in themselves act as a realization of one’s own capacity to experience inner and outer beauty at a sacred, nearly hallucinatory level. At the end of the novel Loy writes:
until as in the confusion of uneasy dreams I must identify that Beam controlling a surrealist man with the high-light on a fallen curler __ __ the scintilla assuming an intermediary significance ___ the phosphorescent drug-addict, like a guinea-pig for experiment, flickers within range of my speculations. It is, in as far as I am aware, no particularly cleanly matter from which radium is extracted. (p. 167)
Mrs. Jones’s final visitation of Insel is the last discovery on a trail of epiphanies. The new section, “Visitation,” presented in near-diary format, captures the lyricism, the new movements of poetry that engulfed Loy’s contemporary ideologies, including surrealism. In this last section, Loy reaches beyond the stiff currents of everyday realities to unveil the ultimate crusade: a mind in reverie of its own driftwood and gloss.
Insel
By Mina Loy
Melville House (May 2014)
ISBN: 9781612193533