Ford Madox Ford held a major yet paradoxical stance within modernism. His relationship to his literary context is characterised by a vibration between the tribute to his artistic heritage and enthusiasm for the imperative of novelty that defines modernism. The reluctance to inscribe Ford within the modernist canon may be explained by the difficulty to reconcile his work’s contradictions and consequently to delineate a stable aesthetic system. Ambivalence is indeed at the core of the author’s aesthetic project, particularly so in Parade’s End. The tetralogy describes a contradictory relationship to its ideological, aesthetic and philosophical heritage and to the past; it initiates an irreconcilable dialectic between the ideal of a past inhabiting the present and the notion of newness that such nostalgia implies. The text conveys a reluctance to resolve the confusion it generates: it is thus impossible to establish a fixed line between the values of tradition and those of modernity. The fundamental dimension of negativity endows the text with a paradoxical dynamism. The nostalgia of a stable ideology, of a satisfyingly coherent narrative and of a subject that can be grasped as a whole, is simultaneously sublimated and derided. The crisis of ideological, aesthetic and ontological systems of thought that is thus made blatant does not result in the development of an alternative system; it does not however lead to void either, but to lets us delineate a system that has yet to be created. The text is constantly moving towards an aesthetics whose contours are merely suggested.