Author: DAW
Older visitors to this site my remember Spike Milligan’s Q series, including the moment when the cast steps forward to ask: ‘what are we going to do now?’
Harry Callaghan asked the question armed with a Magnum 44 ‘the most powerful hand gun in the world’ but we only have Lewis’s publications (Blast to the fore) to aim at deniers of their importance for the cultural history of the twentieth century avant-garde, and Lewis’s mediations thereof. So the first question: what kinds of blogs are we looking for on this site in times of cultural violence?
This question is likely to generate complex frames of reference. For example, during one of our monthly Reading Group sessions (join for free!) Paul Edwards asked us to debate whether Lewis’s work after 1919 had lost something in…well, what? My immediate thought was: Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. Given Lewis’s intertextual credentials during the Vorticist period we might be thinking about clinamen, tessera, daemonization,and askesis as textual strategies adopted in the face of precursive modernisms. And what about post-Vorticism? How are we to understand Lewis’s return (of the Nietzschean repressed) to a realist mode of narrative in, say, The Revenge for Love after he’d interrogated realism in Enemy of the Stars? And what are we to make of the turn away from his own avant-gardism by the time he published The Demon of Progress in the Arts?
I raise these questions to illustrate how awkward it can be to come to terms with Lewis’s oeuvre and how difficult it is to see round the corners of some of his apparently obvious strictures where notions of a ‘social totality’ are concerned. Was Lewis really a misogynist? An aesthetic elitist? A politically dubious oddball outsider – that ‘lonely old volcano of the Right’, as Auden put it? To what extent does his work stage important matters, leaving readers to sort out the more nuanced implications thereof? Isn’t it the test of substantive modernisms – and indeed the arts generally – that they pose questions of interpretation and valuing? And do not these questions ask us to reconsider our approaches to historiography, when it has to be dealing with things that were treated differently ‘back then’? What does ‘responsible’ criticism mean in this context?
All this is only another way of asking why reading Lewis’s works remains an important reference point for the post/Enlightenment world, not least when they wander into questions of how to represent otherness. We can begin here with the Wild Body stories, where ‘wild’ seems to signify a fascination with phenomena that are otherwise overwritten by the observer’s gaze, and Lewis’s attempts to theorize it – see ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’, where ‘The root of the comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person’: is the ‘comic’ somehow restorative of what has been lost to reified modernity? Is this the ‘root’ of satire in The Apes of God? Then there is the question of whether it is possible to celebrate Lewis’s writing if it contains questionable contents (e.g Paleface, The Philosophy of the Melting Pot). Can aesthetic enjoyment be separated from other categories? Can Art, as Lewis’s predominant critical category, survive its engulfment by histories, herstories, and other marks of difference?
We have to consider whether Lewis’s works are now simply part of a modernist archive that failed to repair modernity’s depredations. Lewis’s readily deconstructable sense of ocularcentric critical detachment (‘The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest’) has come under philosophical fire from Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational neo-pragmatism (truth becomes circumjacent, contingent, relative), and the world as we now know it. Marshall McLuhan’s disquisitions on ‘media’ are themselves paradoxical as a description of phenomena that cannot be contained, let alone mastered. Are we, then, to understand Lewis’s objective critiques of reality to be a species of objectivism, governed by Art as a master trope that supposedly constrains its anathemas, even as it aestheticizes them as non-rational? How is Lewis’s work to be re-framed in this context? I mention McLuhan not simply because one of our Reading Group’s regular USA contributors insists on his importance for Lewis, but because we need to reconfigure detachment to cope with something more sinister (and potentially more liberating?) than the zeitgeist discussed in Time and Western Man. It is now forty years since Hal Foster curated Postmodern Culture, which includes Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’. Baudrillard’s prescient concluding paragraph throws down the McLuhanesque gauntlet to modernism, and indeed to the survival of critique beyond Adorno’s negative dialectical view of the culture industry. It seems to me that we need to sift Lewis’s work for any help it can give us, when the very idea of progressive social change has become dirempted by the means rather than the message. Here, the ‘schizo’ postmodern subject becomes one of Lewis’s cyphers in The Crowd. This subject (properly now she/he/they) becomes prey to
the overexposure and transparence of a world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.
Is this too bleak a view? To what extent can Lewis, Adorno and Baudrillard be compared in McLuhan’s version of reality? To what extent do we academics, who present ourselves as rational experts or critics, have to re-read Lewis’s idea of the vortex – that collector of phenomena to be re-shaped for a Vorticist sense of self – with our contemporaneity in mind? What does it mean to read Lewis contextually in our media saturated ‘moronic inferno’? What has changed in the history of hermeneutics? What kind of identity can the self hope for in these circumstances?
Or if all this is beside the point, what exactly is the point of reading Lewis’s works? More blogs please…