Blasting the bombardier: another look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf - Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by Kelly Anspaugh

It has been with considerable shaking in my shoes . . . that I have taken the cow by the horns in this chapter.

(Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art 140)

In her essay "Jellyfish and Treacle: Lewis, Joyce, Gender and Modernism," Bonnie Kime Scott - leader of what she herself terms "the current wave of Joyce feminist criticism" (169) - offers an analysis of two modernisms: a "male modernism," as she puts it, embodied in the person and works of Wyndham Lewis, and a female modernism, best represented by Virginia Woolf. "I hope to demonstrate," Scott says,

how Joyce coincides with some of Lewis's definitions early in his career, and how he and Lewis parted company in the 1920s, partially over the issue of the feminine. It is a debate that previously came to us under the masculine designation of Joyce as "the time man." As we play with new definitions involving gender and modernism, we discover that "the time man," one of "the men of 1914" [Lewis's term] was at least part woman. (169)

Scott's objective is to set up two poles, the masculine (Lewis) and the feminine (Woolf), and to show how Joyce and his work are closer to the feminine pole than heretofore supposed. In the course of doing so, however, Scott presents a seriously distorted view of the writers involved, their interrelation, and the attitude toward gender offered in their texts. In this essay I will attempt to correct this view, or at the very least offer a counter-view.

If Virginia Woolf is the modernist critics love to love - at least contemporary critics - then Wyndham Lewis is the modernist critics love to hate.(1) Scott clearly participates in this group antipathy. She tells us near the beginning of her essay that she wants to "compare aspects of gender and modernism" in Joyce's Portrait and Lewis's Tarr, both of which were first published in Harriet Shaw Weaver's magazine The Egoist in 1918. Scott prefaces her analysis with the comment "I think it interesting that Miss Weaver could identify with Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's novel, but never took to Tarr in the same way," and goes on to observe that "it seems typical of Lewis's incapacity for friendship, or his capacity for envy that he tipped off Miss Weaver to Joyce's considerable drinking" (169). Although Scott ostensibly wants to show that Joyce's apologetic letter to Miss Weaver about his drinking serves as "a critique of male camaraderie" (169), it seems to me all too typical of commentary on Lewis that the critic begins with an ad hominem bash, letting the reader know that Lewis was a thoroughly unpleasant person, a classic paranoid, and that we should be on our guard against both him and his works. In short, Scott begins her analysis by blasting the ex-bombardier, by reinforcing the already established view of Lewis as the modernist bogeyman.

As she begins her comparative textual analysis, Scott observes that whereas Joyce's Portrait offers a representation of childhood, Lewis's Tarr "takes up where Joyce's leaves off. Lewis offers no sympathetic evocation of childhood; he had little sympathy for children" (170). A bad sort was Lewis, leaving a number of illegitimate children in his Enemy wake - as Scott is clearly aware.(2) What is more, although "Lewis was strongly attached to his own mother, and vice versa" - that is, although Lewis was a spoiled mama's boy - "he refuses to grant the mother an important place in his writings" (170). The fact that Joyce could be similarly ungrateful Scott concedes in a quick parenthesis: "(It has been argued by Colin MacCabe that Joyce did the same through much of Dubliners)" (170). So we see that the critic, even after her textual analysis begins, persists in her ad hominem argument - even when it imperils her thesis that Lewis and Joyce were different.

Scott observes that both Tarr and Stephen "conceive of God and power as male, and like Aristotle and Nietzsche, place the female at the bottom of their conceptual hierarchies, with the mud, the vegetables, and the jellyfish" (170). In the course of her analysis of the sexual relationships in Lewis's novel she remarks that

there is some validity to Fredric Jameson's claim that Lewis is more richly dialogic than Joyce . . . though I would restrict this observation to their early stage of writing or to the strictest sense of dialog. Lewis's is a very restrained and protected dialog, compared with the exchanges eventually performed in Finnegans Wake. Though Tarr has a network of relationships, there is no depth or substance in any of them. (171)

Although granting Jameson's analysis "some validity," Scott misses Jameson's point: that Lewis's novel is a satire of surfaces, written precisely against the metaphors of "depth" and "substance" that she apparently values.(3) Bertha, the first woman with whom Tarr becomes entangled, Scott describes with disapproval as "bourgeois, sentimental, vegetative" (171), a description reminiscent of Joyce's view of Molly Bloom as a "perfectly sane full amoral fertilizable . . . Weib" (Ellmann 517). Scott, however, never mentions Molly Bloom,(4) and moves on to the second of Lewis's women: "Tarr encounters an alternate, more masculine woman in Anastasya, a figure Rebecca West described in her review of Tarr as 'the kitch Cleopatra from Dresden,' though, in a more serious vein, she also praised Lewis's Russian sensibilities" (172). Again Scott's rhetoric is slippery: she quotes West's passing negative comment on one Lewis character while she notes in passing West's "praise" for Lewis's sensibilities. She might have quoted instead the following from West's review of Tarr: "a beautiful and serious work of art that reminds one of Dostoevsky only because it is too inquisitive about the soul, and because it contains one figure of vast moral significance which is worthy to stand beside Stavrogin. The great achievement of the book, which gives it its momentary and permanent value, is Kreisler, the German artist" (176). The character West so much admired appears in Scott's analysis only as the "fascist" rapist of Bertha (174) - although Scott admits that in his presentation of the rape "Lewis has made a powerful connection, and a statement on the victimization of women as art object" (15).(5)