Wyndham Lewis

Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
It's not Paris though, they're these weird little backwaters full of horrible, parasitic russians/poles and hysterical peasant women. Nothing glamorous about it.

It is pretty good, don't get me wrong, and I don't really understand the context of it yet. Not a world I'm familiar with.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
This guy's got such an odd style. Sometimes some of his sentences could go in that prissy locution thread, but it's always so scathing/mocking that 'prissy' doesn't seem like the right word for it.

" When a customer is confessing in the fullest way his paraesthesias, allowing this new host an engaging glimpse of his nastiest propriums and kinks, Bestre behaves, with unconscious logic, as though a secret of the most disreputable nature were being imparted to him. Were, in fact, the requirements of a vice being enumerated, he could not display more plainly the qualms caused by his rôle of accessory. He will lower his voice, whisper in the client's ear; before doing so glance over his shoulder apprehensively two or three times, and push his guest roughly into the darkest corner of the passage or kitchen."
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
"The Eye was really Bestre's weapon: the ammunition with which he loaded it was drawn from all the most skunk-like provender, the most ugly mucins, fungoid glands, of his physique. Excrement as well as sputum would be shot from this luminous hole, with the same certainty in its unsavoury appulsion."
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
This Bestre story's great, better than the first two I think, or maybe I'm just getting my head round what he's about more now.

Some good stuff about the eye - Brestre has 'substituted' the mouth for the eye as a weapon, that reminded me of that brilliant Mark E Smith lyric "With print you substitute an ear for an extra useless eye" (remember @luka mentioning McLuhan's influence here ages ago, but I haven't read McLuhan)

That thing that we're all just flesh puppets adapting to the environment around us.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Some really maddening sentences in this book - wtf is this supposed to mean? Read it about 10 times and still have absolutely no idea.

"Would this boy have met death with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an old and despondent mountebank—like some stubborn prophet who would not forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds—always of the gloom of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?"
 
versh

versh

Well-known member
The bit about his opposition to Bergson was the most interesting to me:

The appeal to ‘deadness’ is a rebuke to Bergson’s exalted concept of a universal evolutionary vitality which ‘makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter’. Bergson ended Creative Evolution (1907) by encouraging the philosopher of the future to see ‘the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming’. Lewis was not remotely attracted by the idea of melting into anything – ‘we should retain our objective hardness, and not be constantly melting and hotly overflowing’ – so he had a double complaint to make: not only does Bergsonian thought strip you of ‘the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend’ but it also takes away ‘the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them’. Bergson often writes with heady rapture about things interpenetrating and merging, and Time and Western Man is largely a statement of Lewis’s opposite preference, ‘them standing apart – the wind blowing between them, and the air circulating freely in and out of them’.
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Bergson makes more sense to me, Lewis comes off like a cartoon character zipping around attempting to plug leaks in a dam. I just don't feel that rigidity he so prized. It can be temporarily constructed, but the structure will immediately be assailed by what Bergson described and it will eventually win.
 
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Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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Gonna try and give that lrb article a proper read soon, had a flick through last night but a lot of it was going over my head tbh. Could relate to this, cos my first reaction to the writing style in wild body was one of repulsion, though I started getting into it the more I read:

‘Mr Lewis is the greatest prose master of style of my generation,’ Eliot said in a late appreciation, ‘perhaps the only one to have invented a new style.’ Not everyone has responded so positively: ‘the worst writer of English prose in the 20th century’, the philosopher Anthony Quinton believed; and Bonamy Dobrée identified in Lewis ‘an almost panic-stricken avoidance of the cliché’. But such divergent views are probably different ways of seeing the same thing: if the style is in some ways bad, it is bad in the same way that Hulme praised Lewis’s paintings for being ‘bad’ representations of what they depict.
 
versh

versh

Well-known member
It's a fairly dull article, I read it in bits and pieces while doing other things. There were some interesting moments though, namely the bit I mentioned above and this bit about people and things:

‘The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person’; everyone was up for the treatment because ‘they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.’ It may not seem the richest joke, but it has impeccable philosophical credentials, drawing as it does on Henri Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France Lewis had attended in the early years of the century. ‘We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing,’ according to Bergson, meaning those moments when someone trips up some steps or walks into a lamppost, losing ‘the living pliableness of a human being’ and exhibiting instead ‘mechanical inelasticity’.
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(Bergson seems to be the common thread when it gets interesting.)
 
versh

versh

Well-known member
Can't believe someone in 2024 decided to republish 42 volumes of Wyndham Lewis. Who's the audience? The only people I've heard mention him have been the handful on here.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Y
versh said:
It's a fairly dull article, I read it in bits and pieces while doing other things. There were some interesting moments though, namely the bit I mentioned above and this bit about people and things:



(Bergson seems to be the common thread when it gets interesting.)
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Yeah that bit about the thing behaving as a person is in the wild body I think, one of the standout bits
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
versh said:
Can't believe someone in 2024 decided to republish 42 volumes of Wyndham Lewis. Who's the audience? The only people I've heard mention him have been the handful on here.
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I was thinking the same, his writing seems a lot more trapped in its time than Eliot or Pound or Joyce (from the little I've read of him). Not that it wasn't innovative or interesting, but he's very much a minor figure compared to those three big names and it's hard to see what audience he would have nowadays outside nerds who want to read everything modernist.
 
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