Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis’s masked faces, mecahanical peasants and absurd artists are all figures from the tradition of the gothic and carnival grotesques—humans merged with animals, machinery and automatons in mocking and disturbing ways. The Wild Body, BLAST, The Apes of God, the 1928—and 1918—editions of Tarr, and the The Revenge for Love, all show that Lewis’s ambivalent interest in, and hatred of, the mechanised body captures, in simultaneously visual and literary terms, the unsettling hybridity of modernity. Lewis’s bodies attack the superficiality of scientific reductionism and movements towards mass-culture by providing a means of seeing beyond their visual façades. To do this, Lewis’s bodies theorise a connection between humour and horror through what he terms ‘painful satire’. Through the grotesque’s visual and linguistic irreconcilability, Lewis’s satire explodes the ‘normal’ world we inhabit and prevents us from escaping the reality he reveals. Lewis’s grotesquery providing a way of peering behind the socially constructed façades that constitute the all-controlling system of ‘normal’ modernity. Consequently, his bodies are useful for understanding how the grotesque body is configured in modernism, and why it was so relevant to the rapidly changing culture of the early twentieth century.