Vortex, Aporia, and Parousia: Wyndham Lewis\' Blast and Scriptural Apocalypse

Vortex, Aporio, ond Porousio: Wyndhom Lewis' Blost ond Scripturol Apocolypse

Jonothon Penny

Vorlex. Aporio, ond Porousiq: Wyndhom Lewis' Blosf ond Scripturol Apocolypse Jonothon Perry University of Oltowo This essay is drawn from the fust critical chapter of my doctoral dissertation, "Eschatology, Prophecy, and Revelation: Modes of Apocallptic ifl the British Twentieth Century," and focuses on the fust number of Leuris' short-lived, but very influential peiodrcal Blatt, linking his notion of "vortex" with the restless agnosticism and fundamental eschatological anxiety of the

pre-War generation. Obsessed with history and the place

of

'qWestern Man" within that history, Lewis meant Vorticism to be an esthaton-a. "last thing"-in the wodd of art, and wjth Blast he managed to develop a narrow, secular apocalypse that (pre)figured, and was necessarily swallowed up in, the chaos of the Great War. Indeed, Lewis would later teflect that the Q1621 \fl21-"a bigger BLAST than minefl had rather taken the wind out of my

8\. A comparatir.,e reading of the Apocafipte with the textual and logical arraflgement of Blast f-II illumines Lervis further as the "prophet of a nerv fashion it zrt" sat\s" (Blastiug and Borubardieing

(Blasting and Bonbardieing32).1 Furthermore, at least in the context of the vorticist movement, Lewis was also a godf,gure (6)-the editorial consciousness and "volcanic force" (?ound ctd. Wilson, 39) of the whole proiect, and the majority 2g{1e1-ll'[6 claimed thirry* years after the demise of the movement that 'a/orticism . . . was what I, personally, did, and said" ("Introduction." Wlndhan ltwis and Vorticisn 3). As it found expression in the first number of Blast, Lewis' Vorticism represented by its textute and vision the chaos and noise of an apocalyptic mood in modem England, but also rcvealed Irwis as an

not only to aestheticize of representing modern experience,

apocallptician who intended apoca/upsis

as

way

^ but to actualize the end of an aesthetic tradition (Tine and Wutern L[an 38).

Lewis is ideal for this study in that three important

of these is his share in the modem eschatolog'ical anxiety that characterizes so much of the work of the twentieth century. N{any of the characters in his better known fictions (Tarr, Rottng Lli//, Self Condemned, The Apes ,f Co4 arc effete, ianguid, and often degenerate, and either represeflt the slorv decay ef moral, ethical, philosophical, or physiological health, or worry over it obsessively. Lewis has this in common with Joyce, Forster, Waugh, elements intersect in his career. The fust

Dostoevsky, Greene, and a host of other authors, and it is this stain in modetnist fiction-what Kermode calls the

"less lurid modem forms"

of

aPocalvpse-that

has

preoccupied critical &eatments of apocalyptic eschatologrsince tlre publication of The Sense of An Ending Kernode's mastenvork on the subject (187). Kermode reasserted in his 1999 epilogue that what triggers apocallptic aru'rienfor the modems is that apocallpse "still carries with it the notions of a decadence and possible renovation, still represents a mood finally inseparable from the condition of life, the contemplation of its necessary ending, the ineradicable desire to make some sense of it" (187).

As Fredric Jameson puts it, Lewis was the "exemplary

practitioner

of one of the most powerfi:l of

ali

modernistic styles" (3). But he was also "an agyessive ideological critic and adversary of modernism itself in all its forms" (idem): the "Enemy," by his own designation and critical practice. That contradiction manifests in his eschatological sensibility as well. For all his share in that eschatological sensibility, one gets the sense that Lewis, a

satirist, rvas less concerned about that arival of the endabout the apocalyptic "tock," as Kermode calls it (45)than he was impatient with the complexion and

mechanics of the "kairol' ot "aeaart/' or season that inhabited, "intemporally," the time between the genesis of tick and the apocalypse of tock Q{ermode 47, 795-96) that seemed to drag on around him. Other modemsWoolf, Ford, Joyce, and Lawrence-embraced a notion of the preseflce (presentness) of time, often quite radically, in either tuming to secular realism, or in confining the scope of their narratives and narrative stnlctures experimentally to moments of tirne, or representing the momeflt as one of "intemporal significance" for the individual (I{ermode 47). Time in Lew-is' fiction is sluggish, and human action both futile and repetitivc within its frame, a concept brought cosmically to aesthetic fi,llfillment in the "apocalyptic" Childerza$ set in a purgatorial between-space (and time)

characteized

by finzy temporal, material,

and

p sychological boundaries ar,d fuzzier theologies.

That sense dovetails nicely with the second important element in Lewis: his eady interest in the Bergsonian

philosophy

of time-time

lrxtlr, r,ot

episteme,

atd

^s therefore as something we expedence rather than know, and can therefore affect. I-ewis later lurned from Bergson, but in this early stage, he applied that notion to

a theory of Art, and herein Iies the root of

Lewis'

Vorticism: Art, like Time, and like Being, must have a stop if we are to break through and irlto a neu/ age or place or mode of reptesentation. I see this as an aporetic

r80a

Vortex, Aporio, ond Porousio: Wyndhom Lewis' Elosf ond Scripturol Apocolypse

Jonothon Penny tendencv in Lewis'vorticism, and as tvhat sets him apart from the other modems. As an aesthetic project, B/a$ is rather ironicallr' fulI of the vim and spirit of eschatologrcal hope in its attempt to bring about the conditions favourable for a total renerval: a second coming of sorts.

That coming is only figurative, of course, as ^ secularization of what is promised h the Apotalpr. This secular modemist eschatologv rvas tvpically reflected thematicaill' as anxieq, and annihilation, and aesthetically as endlessness, multipie endings, seizures, exhaustions, apertures, and closures of various kinds that all lead to paraii,sis or rvaylessness: oot hope, then, but mere eschatological expectation-a bored and feckless kind of dread. In Lervis, hou,ever, that expectation carries rvithin

it

a substirute for paroutia.

J\,Iany moderns-like Pound and Eliot, f61 in5121g6discovered material from the past and tried to "make it nev/'in order to mark out a path for the future of the arts (see Pound's "Art Vortex" n Blast /). What differentiates Lervis fiom his contemporaties, at least in Blasl 1, is an

unwillingness to provide a substitute-to pin down or articulate a theory except as an antithesis to what was already happening. Indeed, Lewis was often bemused at Pound's ear\ association with Vorticism, rejecting the elder's romantic, reanvard looking "archaism" as being able to "lay no claim to participate in the new burst of art" (Time and Vestern Man 38), and limiting his contribution n Blart 2 to poems. Lewis' own manifestoes aod blasts are negative in that they tend merely to clear the wav. In a sense, then, he was a proto-post-

with the un-knorvability ot of rvhat was coming, and projectrng his

structuralist, grappliflg

ineffability

despair as hope or desire into an aporetic-a pathless, but inevitable-sp^ce'. vortex. That is, \rorticism rvas not ^ the end, but the means to bring about an end, the gateway to an essentiai pathlessness. And this difference is the third of the elements of Lewis' cateer that nake Blafi useful fot a study of the connections between modemist literary eschatologl,' and scdptural apocalypse: Lewis wanted to achieve that vortex, that aporia, not by tevoh,ing art out irrto something expansive that rvould filI the wodd, but rather by creating a ftnal, essential point of energy and activity.

In this

respect, Pound's and Lewis' views of \rorticism were similar. Pound was attracted to this essentialism, which he considered akin to his own Iiterary imagism. The image, as he put it, is "a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy"; a notion he exemplified in reducing a poem of thirty-two lines to the two-line "In a Station of the Nfetro" (ctd. tJflilson 35).

Lewis himself described \/orticism as a "u,hirlpool" at whose heart is a "great silent place where all the energf is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist" (idem). Rather than a point of visual focus, then, the "heafi" of the vortex is the locus of the artist,

and the vortex, potefltially, a thing he has

made.

Llowever, that sense of vortex as a drain or downward,

tBl

narrorving spiral is unstable in \rorticism. Indeed, the recurring s1'mbol in both numbers of B/a$ suggests that the vorticists who knerq at arry :ate, sarv the "mechanical centre" of the vortex as an upward mol'ement. As Lervis wrote in 1937, piot to the Wat, the "wodd ',vas getring, frankly, extremely .illy. . . . It rvent on irnitating itself rvith an almost reLigious absence of originality: and some of us foresaw an explosion" (Bkttng and Bombardiering 15). l'l.J return to that notion later, but for norv let me suggest that

one could view vortex as a point of turbuleflce that sapped the energy of other movements, or one could vierv it as a poiat of concentrated porver that figuratively "blasted" the rvodd of Art: a "burst of afi," indeed, but one that occurs out of "stillness" (B/art 7, 148) and cootemplative 5ils16s-$e1h notions at odds with the "noise" of the \rorticists and their rather quarrelsome and garish periodical.

On this point, Lewis remarked tn Tirue atd LV/estern Man that Blast was a destructive project, bent on ruining

the elitist "Royal Academic tradition" because of its tendency to produce anything but individuals, and to ignore those deserving of cultivation and experience from lower classes (37-38). I'm not sure those two models are mutually exciusive. One could view the "blast" modcl by analogy as usi-ng a destructive force to cap another: like frghti"g fire with fre, or quite literally using explosives to cap gas fues by depriviag the fire of ox1,gen. Or we might invoke a veil image, and suggest that the vorticists sought to draw or force the energy that rvas wasted in the world of Art through a point of concentratiofl-afl aporctic partition-and out into a rarv explosion of artistic creativiq; in any form. It rvould matter only that it was vital, "vivid," and "violent" (Bkrt /, 7). Indeed, Lewis' vofiex tpr'ililg ap first clarion call is "Long l-ive the gre t in the centre of this torvn!" (Blatt 1, 7;^ttrny emphasis). It rvas eady days yet, however, and English society v"-as, in Lewis'view, still culturally overflril by the effete and the derivative. In order to exorcise that influence, Lewis wanted to cfeate a vaculun_a \roid_pure and undeflled by either uadition or the langtrid, disingenuous being that he so often satirized: a void that could be filled by something positive and pure and new.

But Vorticism was chiefly a visual artistic movement, project "mn chiefly by Painters . . . [rvho] do their rvork first, and, since they must, write about it afterwards" (Blast 2,7). And there were multiple vortices, at least in print. Pound and Gaudier-Breszka each offcred a textual r.'ortex in Blail 1, and GaudierBreszka offered another from the trenches iust prior to his death, u,hich Lewis prhted n Blast 2. These vortices tend to be "personal" (see Edwards 13) and somervhat ar,d B/ast was a redactive

and so treatmeflts of the theory and of Vorticism tefld to be circumlocutory and

heterogeneous,

intention

histoticist rather than interpretive, but we can make some general amateur obsen ations. In painting and sculpture, Vorticism seems to force everything into a center, as if the images were being dtawn out through, or driven

a

Voriex, Aporio, ond Porousio: Wyndhom Lewis' Blosf ond Scripturol

Jonathon Penny

anguiar\ into, some point in the canvas, or, in our other view, finds the "mechanical center" and then uses its energy against itself. That "center" isn't ahvays ceflt2l to the image, nor does it appear to be arbitrary; some idiosl,ncratic logic orients and informs vorticist painti"g and sculpture-we may have a hint to what that logic is in Lewis' whirlpool analogr'.

But what might vortex look like in a written text? \X/hat does a textual voftex do to the text itsel0 Does vortex devolve thematically? through periphrasis or refrain? through some centripetal or centrifugal figure

SITS LIKE A

GOD BUILT BY

AN

ARCHITECTUR.AL STREAN,I, FECUNDED BY l\tAD BLASTS [OF]SUNLIGHT. The fust stars appear and Argol comes out of the hut. This is his cue. The stars are his cast. He is rather late and snips into it's [sic] place a test button. A noise falls on the cream of Posterity, assembled in silent banks. One hears the gnats' song of the Thirtieth centuries.

aror:nd rvhich orbits or into which disappears the meaning of the whole? Is it as "simple" a matter as concentrating the emotion or energy of the text into a singular image, as in Pound's imagist poems? \What is removed or drained from the text, and what remains as potential energy as revealed or yet-to-be revealed? Would the exhaustion and anxiety that became commonplaces in

modem fiction serve as draining points for a vorticist deconstruction, leaving something positive and creative in their wake? Or would it be the apocalyptic sensibility that such exhaustion and anxiety elicit, which "blasts" forth tn its orvn eschatological power, and anlilrilates and creates, then, the "gteat silence" ofthe heart ofthe vortex?

Other than the ostensible persoaal "ve1[665"proclamations of an aesthetic theory or view that puflctuate B/ast, the text ofttrs us a view- of several others that occur subtly or "naturallv" in the structue and arrangement of the text as a rvhole' I refer to many of these later in comparing Bkst with Apocafipte, so I rx''ill refer to one in particuiar at this point. The structure of Eneml of the Stars, z play that Lewis included tn Blast 7 as "an example of what a truly modem literature might be" The @,drvards 13), is "mad" to say the least (Blast 1, 61). play seems to begin at several different points, and, as

wdtten, is unperformable, si-nce much of the action and poetry of the play is natrative rather than dialogic, and since the textual elements of the play seem to run into the performative. For instance, the fifth page of text (61) is part prologue, part stage direction, part poetry, and as the theatre is aranged vertically, stadium-sry*le, seems to describe/interpret not only what the audience sees, but how it is seeing it, as if the audience, like the "stars," were the "cast" of characters, or the stars themselves, looking down on their enemy. I've reproduced the page belorv for clarity's sake:

ARGOL.

IN\ESTr\(ENT OF RED UNI\ERSE. EACH FORCE ATTE,NIPTS TO SFLAKE, HIN{. CENTR,TL AS STONE. POISED NL\GNE,T OF SUBTLE, VAST, SELFISI I THINGS.

LIES LIKE HUX6N STRATA OF INFERNAL BIOLOGIES. WAIKS LIKE WARY Ifi,

SHIFTING OF BODIES IN DISTANT EQUIPOISE.

t82|

'fhey strain to see him, a gladiator who has come to fight a ghost, Humaniry'-the gteat Sport of Future NIankind.

He is the prime athlete exporent of this sport in it's [sic] pakny days. Posterity slowly shks into the hypnotic tratce of Art, and the Arena is transformed into the flecessary scene.

THE RED !(/ALLS OF THE, UNI\E,RSE NOW SHUT THEI\T iN, WITH THIS CONDEN,{NED PROTAGONIST.

THEY BREATHE IN CLOSE ATI,,fOSPHE,RE OF TERROR AND NECESSITY TILL THE XECUTION

IS O\TER, THE RE,D WALLS RECEDI],, THE UNI\G,RSE SATISFIED.

THE BOX OFFICE RE,CEIPTS FL\VE,

BE,EN

E,NORI,IOUS.

THEACTION OPENS. In addition to its cryptic and essentialll' poetic imagery, the pronouns of the first section of all-caps are strictly antecedent-less and thus neady indecipherable, though rve might assume that Argol is its obiect. Its mood is at odds with what follows, and our sense that Argol is

being described in that section is initially called hto question by the mundanity of Argol's actions (the scene carries with it the sensibility of a grammar school examination before giving way to a purgatorial one), by

his appearance from within the hut (initially veiled, in

other words, from the audience's view while the "prologrre" speaks), and bi, the implied temporal change

from "N[AD Bi-ASTS tOE SUNLIGHT" to

the

The third-person plural "they" of the appearance of second section is also without definite antecedent, except symbolically the "stars" or "cream of Posterity" that gather around him, and thus, as I suggested earlier, the audience themselves. This is a spatial enclosure, and one that literalizes the shape of a vortex as whidpool, with the "condemned protagonist" at its silent ceflter, the locus of performance and creation. A1l eyes are on him, but the experience belongs to all. Once he is (presumablv) executed, and the "universe [is] satisfied," that sense of enclosure is relaxed, or opens up agail as the 'walls stars.

recede.

Vortex, Aporio, ond Porousio: Wyndhom Lewis' Blosf ond Scripturol Apocolypse

Jonathon Penny It is aiso a temporal enclosure, where past and future, or rather beginning and end, are collapsed into a single

destructive realities Lewis aod his colleagues were then experiencing, often fusthand.

point of presentness. This "prologr:e" or dumb-show

If,

both embodies and siruates the action of the shorv before "the action opens," but it also predicts the "real" outcomc of the performance itself-"the box office receipts ha'"'e been enormous"-io the present perfect: that is, as a thing aiready known or accomplished. Of course, I'm taking this far more seriousi), than Lewis himself rvould: his prediction about box office receipts is comic. The point is that the play works aesthetically to invoke \rortex as a conceit, collapsing boundaries of performance, time, space, textualiq,', and edttorial/creative intention to focus the energy of the play and blast the audience's apperception of the play and of itself.

of the Stars":

see Edrvards

Set violently against both tradition, espccially romanticism and impressionism, and the burgconing Futurism of his day, Lewis makes room in B/a$ for traditional literary forms: like the fust chapter of Ford's The Cood Soldier (here

printed as "Beati Immaculati" from

Heufer's "The Saddest Story": Blar 1, 87-97); or rhe arguably impressionist rvorks of Frederick Gore whom he praises posthumousll, for a growing consciousness, a futural gaze, and a natural indir"iduality if not his work to

date (150); or short fiction by Rebecca

seeks

that new aesthetic.

Within the context of a generally accepted modern eschatological anxiety, however, this impulse signals that the influence of scriptural apocallpse is more profound than critics of the period often think. The possibiliq' of a generic similarity betu,-een Blatt ar,d Apocaljpn-----even if that sirnilarity is more abstract and intentional than it is

structural

or

figurative-suggests

that

"apocalypttc"

literature always already evokes scriptural apocalypse, and the eschatological hope inherent in it. Specifically, as an aesthetic and secular apocallpse, Blast looks forward in hope to the coming of a nerv w-ord, a nerv theory and practice of art, and is thus not merely "apocalyptic" il its eschatolo$cal anticipation of an end, but also ir its hope

of emancipation and renerval. Let me here catalogue, poiat by point, what are subtle but compelling similarities. They do not entirely persuade mc to think that Lewis patteffied Blatt I aestftetically after t\e Apocalpn, but they do suggest that something of the power of the Apocafi,pse, what Frye called our "grammar of imagery" (141), and what Kermode would refer t