Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist

Prologue /

ON NOT READING

WYNDHAM LEWIS

DEOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, NARRATIVE analysis: these are the coordinates within which the following study seeks to construct an interpretive model of one of the most striking, ambiguous and little known bodies of fiction produced in English in recent times, a corpus which explicitly demands such interpretative frameworks by its brutal foregrounding of politics and sex and its ostentatious practice of style.

Wyndham Lewis is surely the least read and most unfamiliar of all the great modernists of his generation, a generation that included the names of Pound and Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Yeats; nor can it be said that his painting has been assimilated any more successfully into the visual canon.¹ Lewis was a presence for his contemporaries, but we have forgotten their admiration for him. At best, in Britain today, he retains a kind of national celebrity and is read as a more scandalous and explosive Waugh; while internationally his name remains a dead letter, despite the diligent efforts of Hugh Kenner and others to make a place for him in some Pound-centered modern pantheon.²

Yet it has been my experience that new readers can be electrified by exposure to Tarr, a book in which, as in few others, the sentence is reinvented with all the force of origins, as sculptural gesture and fiat in the void. Such reinvention, however, demands new reading habits, for which we are less and less prepared. Anglo-American modernism has indeed traditionally been dominated by an impressionistic aesthetic, rather than that—externalizing and mechanical—of Lewis’ expressionism. The most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages: such wills to style have seemed in retrospect to reconfirm the very privatization and fragmentation of social life against which they meant to protest.

So it is that the initial, passionately subversive force of the modernist symbolic act is ever fainter and more distant for the contemporary reader, within the société de consommation with its various postmodernisms; and this not least because the modernist canon has itself become classical, institutionalized within the university, its stylistic innovations meanwhile fully integrated into the commodity system with its ever increasing momentum of style—and fashion—change. If it is idle to deplore, as Trilling does in Beyond Culture, the loss or repression of that original antisocial resonance of the great modernisms,³ it is on the other hand a matter of some historical gratification to come upon a modernism which is still extant and breathing, an archaic survival, like the antediluvian creatures of Conan Doyle’s Lost World hidden away within a forgotten fold of the earth’s surface. The neglect of Lewis is thus a happy accident for us, who can then, as from out of a time capsule, once more sense that freshness and virulence of modernizing stylization less and less accessible in the faded texts of his contemporaries.

There were of course excellent and objective reasons for Lewis’ neglect: reasonable motives, which it would be naive to ignore, for the resistance of sophisticated modern readers to that particular brand of modernism he had in store for them. A consistent perversity made of him at one and the same time the exemplary practitioner of one of the most powerful of all modernistic styles and an aggressive ideological critic and adversary of modernism itself in all its forms. Indeed, Time and Western Man (1927) diagnostically attributes the aberrant impulse of all the great contemporary artistic and philosophical modernisms to what he called the Time Cult, to the fetishization of temporality and the celebration of Bergsonian flux. However illuminating this diagnosis may have been, it had the unfortunate effect of forcing his readership to choose between himself and virtually everything else (Joyce, Pound, Proust, Stein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Bergson, Whitehead, etc.) in the modern canon.

Meanwhile, at the very moment in which the modernisms of the mainstream discovered their anti-Victorian vocation and developed a battery of onslaughts on moral taboos and repressive hypocrisies, an analogous gesture finds Lewis affirming the oppressiveness of the sexual instinct and unseasonably expressing a kind of archaic horror at sexual dependency. The polemic hostility to feminism, the uglier misogynist fantasies embodied in his narratives, the obsessive phobia against homosexuals, the most extreme restatements of grotesque traditional sexist myths and attitudes—such features, released by Lewis’ peculiar sexual politics and abundantly documented in the following pages, are not likely to endear him to the contemporary reader.

This esprit de contradiction of Lewis’ polemic and aesthetic production alike is but another face of that aggressivity which was a lifelong constant of both the form and the content of his works, and of his own characterological style. To the aggressive impulses Lewis found within himself we are of course indebted for the astonishing pathology of figures like Kreisler (in Tarr). But there is no point denying the oppressiveness with which such impulses gradually become dominant, are generalized and projected outwards as a global hostility, not merely to his own characters, but also to the quasi-totality of his contemporaries as well, not excluding his own readership. The latter may therefore be forgiven occasional reactions like that of Hemingway to the real-life Lewis.⁴ On the stylistic level, such intransigence drives the more experimental texts to extremes which make some of them virtually unreadable for any sustained period of time (this is at least my own current feeling about The Apes of God [1930]).

Ideologically, Lewis’ brief flirtation with Nazism—celebrated in the notorious Hitler (1931)⁵—stands as a symptom somewhere in between his deep misogyny and his violent anti-Communism. The episode itself may have been no more (but no less) serious than the comparable enthusiasms of Pound, Yeats, Shaw and others; yet it entitles us to raise the issue of our title—the affinities between protofascism and Western modernism—on the occasion of a work that continues to enlighten us about this subject even after Lewis’ repentant conversion to more socially acceptable forms of anti-Communism, most notably with his fellow-travelling adherence to Roman Catholicism during World War II. The stance of the postwar polemics—see, for instance, The Writer and The Absolute (1952), a blistering attack on Sartrean engagement and the concept of a political vocation for literature—only reconfirmed his sterile and chronic oppositionalism, his cranky and passionate mission to repudiate whatever in modern civilization seemed to be currently fashionable. The more sombre and dramatic turns in Lewis’ personal destiny—his forced and impecunious exile in Canada during World War II, the blindness visited on the great painter during his final years—do not necessarily redeem the querulous posture of the nay-sayer or make it any more immediately attractive to the unfamiliar reader.

In spite of all this—yet in some deeper sense, surely, because of it—Lewis’ intellectual, formal, and ideological trajectory was marked and monumentalized by a series of remarkable novels, each one utterly unlike the next, and all of them without analogy among the production of his contemporaries. We have already mentioned his artist’s novel, Tarr (written in 1914, and published in two versions, in 1918 and 1928). The mid-thirties Graham-Greene-type thriller, The Revenge for Love (1937), invests Bolshevik conspiracies with a characteristic and unmistakably personal resonance. The autobiographical Self Condemned (1954), bleakest of all Lewis’ works, records the dark night of the soul in the icy dreariness of exile in wartime Canada. Finally, spanning thirty years, the immense unfinished Human Age (whose first volume, The Childer-mass [1928] constitutes a veritable summa of Lewis’ narrative modernism) unexpectedly confronts us with the supreme realization of what has to be called theological science fiction.

Such texts, which reveal Lewis to have been among the most richly inventive of modern British writers, merit un-apolegetic rediscovery and can sustain enthusiastic reading as well as the closest critical scrutiny. Yet the juxtaposition of their formal innovation with the ideological and libidinal content identified above raises issues of a more theoretical nature and confronts us with interpretive and methodological problems which we must now address.

The present study takes as its object what I have elsewhere called the political unconscious in Lewis’ works, thus necessarily obliging us to make connections between the findings of narrative analysis, psychoanalysis, and traditional as well as modern approaches to ideology. The methodological eclecticism with which such a project can be reproached is unavoidable, since the discontinuities projected by these various disciplines or methods themselves correspond to objective discontinuities in their object (and beyond that, to the very fragmentation and com-partmentalization of social reality in modern times). It is therefore less important to justify a disparate range of theoretical references than it is to take some initial inventory of the objective gaps and disjunctions within the texts themselves.

First and foremost among such discontinuities is surely that formal incommensurability which confronts the reader of any modern text, but which is usefully exasperated by those under study here, and which we can convey in terms of the unsatisfactory alternative between stylistics and narrative analysis, or in other words, between the micro- and the macro-level of cultural artifacts. Every serious practicing critic knows a secret which is less often publicly discussed, namely, that there exists no ready-made corridor between the sealed chamber of stylistic investigation and that equally unventilated space in which the object of study is reconstituted as narrative structure. In practice, whatever the solution adopted, there is always an uncomfortable shifting of gears in the movement from one of these perspectives to the other: nor does the assertion of this or that homology between style and narrative do much more than to pronounce resolved in advance the dilemma for which it was supposed to provide a working answer.

To grasp this discontinuity as an objective reality in our culture, rather than as a methodological inconsistency which might be solved by tinkering with the methods in question and readjusting them to each other, requires us radically to historicize the gap between style and narrative, which then may be seen as an event in the history of form. The name of Flaubert is a useful marker for this development, in which the two levels of the narrative text begin to drift apart and acquire their own relative autonomy; in which the rhetorical and instrumental subordination of narrative language to narrative representation can no longer be taken for granted. The plotless art novel and the styleless bestseller can then be seen as the end products of this tendency, which corresponds to the antithesis between what, following Deleuze and Guattari,⁶ we will call the molecular and the molar impulses in modern form-production no less than in contemporary social life itself. In this use, the molecular level designates the here-and-now of immediate perception or of local desire, the production-time of the individual sentence, the electrifying shock of the individual word or the individual brushstroke, of the regional throb of pain or of pleasure, the sudden obsessive, cathected, fascination or the equally immediate repulsion of Freudian decathexis. To this microscopic, fragmentary life of the psyche in the immediate a counterforce is opposed in the molar (from moles, the mass of molecules organized into larger organic unities), which designates all those large, abstract, mediate, and perhaps even empty and imaginary forms by which we seek to recontain the molecular: the mirage of the continuity of personal identity, the organizing unity of the psyche or the personality, the concept of society itself, and, not least, the notion of the organic unity of the work of art. This distinction allows us to respect the specificity of the narrative level, while grasping its function to recontain the molecular proliferation of sentences on the stylistic level.

We will therefore read Lewis’ sentence-production as a symbolic act in its own right, an explosive and window-breaking praxis on the level of the words themselves. The narratives on that view become what the Russian Formalists would have called the motivation of the device, that is, the formal pretext which enables such stylistic production and lends it justification after the fact. Yet considered on its own terms, Lewis’ molar forms, the macrologic of his narratives, prove to have a very different dynamic from the momentum of the sentences themselves: what was in the latter sheer production and energy now veers about into the negative element, into an intolerable closure, an atmosphere of violence and destruction which the narratives articulate into a self-perpetuating sequence of rape, physical assault, aggressivity, guilt and immolation.

At this point, the molar level, the narrative frame, must be the object of a different kind of investigation, one which requires as its precondition some acknowledgement of the objective status of this new level.

To invoke psychoanalysis and ideology at this stage is not to suggest that we have left behind the discontinuities and methodological double standards that plague stylistics. Here too, on the contrary, the antithesis between the apparently distinct realms of the sexual and the political, between childhood and society, archaic fantasy and ideological commitment, infantile wish-fulfillment and adult value, reflects an objective dissociation in contemporary experience. At the same time it projects and reinforces a whole psychologizing and subjectivizing ideology deeply engrained in American society: wherever a depth-psychological explanation of political commitment is invoked, indeed, we may be sure that the end product of the operation will be a reduction of the political to the psychological, a transformation of the former into so many projections to which the clinical response can only be the adaptation of the individual to some more realistic assessment of an outer world, now locked like a thing-in-itself outside personal experience.

To such a dilemma, the repudiation of the findings of psychoanalysis seems an inadequate, if not an impossible, solution.⁷ I would suggest that the situation is fundamentally modified if we insist on isolating from that properly psychoanalytic material (in which, particularly in Freud’s own work, it plays so decisive a part) an autonomous narrative moment or instance with a specificity and a dynamism of its own. To isolate an independent narrative function in psychic life is then to win some distance from the ruses by which the unconscious can be seen to make use of it. This is the signal advantage of the model which has been our working solution in the following study, and which, following J.-F. Lyotard, we will call the libidinal apparatus.⁸

The semi-autonomy or objectivity of this model makes for practical consequences which are quite distinct from those of analogous formulations in earlier theory, which range from Charles Mauron’s notion of the personal myth developed in a writer’s oeuvre to Frye’s more Jungian concept of the narrative archetype.⁹ The first inevitably drives narrative production back into the history of the individual psyche; the second, by positioning the social and collective dimension of narrative at the beginning of history, short-circuits the complicated process whereby an empty narrative schema becomes invested with concrete social and ideological content. The theory of the libidinal apparatus marks an advance over psychologizing approaches in the way in which it endows a private fantasy-structure with a quasi-material inertness, with all the resistance of an object which can lead a life of its own and has its own inner logic and specific dynamics. Such a view then allows us to understand its various uses and investments as a process of appropriation and reappropriation, as a structure which, produced by the accidents of a certain history, can be alienated and pressed into the service of a quite different one, reinvested with new and unexpected content, and adapted to unsuspected ideological functions which return upon the older psychic material to re- or overdetermine it in its turn as a kind of retroactive effect (Freud’s Nachträglichkeit). On such a view, then, the libidinal apparatus becomes an independent structure of which one can write a history: and this history—the story of the logical permutations of a given fantasy-structure, as well as of its approaches to its own closure and internal limits—is a very different one from that projected by the conventional literary psychoanalysis or psycho-biography, which take as their object of study something to which we no longer have access, and which is therefore here bracketed from the outset, namely the private psyche of the biographical individual, Wyndham Lewis himself.¹⁰

The concept of the libidinal apparatus will indeed allow us to reverse the traditional priorities of psychoanalytic and psychologizing interpretation. In particular, it will lead us to the conclusion that the objective preconditions of the narrative structures that inform Lewis’ imagination, far from being familial or archaic, are rather to be sought in a very different space, namely in the objective configurations of the political history of pre-1914 Europe. We will see that it is the diplomatic system of the pre-War nation-states which provides a narrative apparatus, an objectified fantasy-structure, only thereafter reinvested and over-determined by the libidinal and the instinctual. This seemingly untestable hypothesis is then dramatically and as it were experimentally verified by History itself, which, with the Great War, dislocates the older diplomatic system and effectively prepares a wholly new force field, in which, not the older nation-states, but rather the great new emergent and transnational forces of Communism and Fascism, become the subjects of history. Of such a momentous upheaval, the narrative system of Tarr is a striking casualty; and the formal break whereby on its ruins there emerges, in Lewis’ post-War work, a whole new libidinal apparatus, a new psychic energy model as well as a whole new ideological dynamic, will indeed be the central story