Toward a Pitiless Fiction: Abstraction, Comedy, and Modernist AntiHumanism

Abstract

Countering the trend of modernist fiction, Wyndham Lewis and Laura Riding sought to eliminate, rather than illuminate, psychological depth. The Wild Body (1927) and Progress of Stories (1936) issue from a critique of the role of empathy in the arts, which is rooted in anxiety about power and culture in mass democracies. Theories of abstraction and of comedy are implicated in these fictions as means to a primary end: the replacement of empathetic response with an "anesthesia of the heart." Lewis hoped to effect a fundamental political transformation, Riding, a spiritual one. In the service of their visions, they used fiction to resist imagining other subjectivities

Spiral and Vortex: Robert Smithson and the Cinematic Spaces of Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan

“…Where previous commentators have read Spiral Jetty through the neo-Bergsonian lens of Deleuze's (1986Deleuze's ( , 1989 books on cinema, Lewis' (1966) polemical inversion of Bergson's (1998) critique of the "cinematographical method" (p. 307) of discontinuous perception enforced by a pragmatic intellect to extract meaningful forms from the flux of lived experience suggests a more likely prototype for the concrete comedy staged by Smithson's earthwork (see Baker, 2005;Colman, 2006Colman, , 2013Uroskie, 2005). In its paradoxical stasis and obdurate materiality, Spiral Jetty's cinematic discontents strongly recall Lewis' contrarian practice of "non-moral satire": his anti-humanist reworking of Bergson's theorization of the comic as a mechanism of social regulation intended to disrupt, and thereby reform, the rigidities of habit (see Hokenson, 2013;Ophir, 2006;Stinson, 2012). What else is the still point at the centre of the "vortex" imaged by Lewis and Pound but the static frame of Bergson's mental film reel?…”