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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by Kelly Anspaugh

NOTES

1 For the whys and wherefores of Lewis's persona non grata status, see Jeffrey Meyers's biography The Enemy; on the advantages that may attach to such status, see "On Not Reading Wyndham Lewis," prologue to Fredric Jameson's Fables (1-23).

2 Scott cites Meyers's biography, which exposes Lewis's irresponsibility in sexual matters.

3 Jameson comments that "far from dissolving the personality into its external determinations, as Lewis's transformations do, the Joycean phantasmagoria serves to reconfirm the unity of the psyche, and to reinvent that depth-psychological perspective from which . . . private fantasies spring. . . . [In Lewis] it is not the unification but rather the dispersal of subjectivity which is aimed at" (57-58).

4 Scott does however devote a chapter to Molly in her 1984 book Joyce and Feminism (156-83).

5 That Scott is primarily interested in West as a feminist is clear from the title of her recent essay "Refiguring the Binary, Breaking the Cycle: Rebecca West as Feminist Modernist."

6 Frederic Jameson has different tastes:

To face the sentences of Wyndham Lewis is to find oneself confronted with a principle of immense mechanical energy. Flaubert, Ulysses, are composed; the voices of a James or of a Faulkner develop their resources through some patient blind groping exploration of their personal idiosyncrasies from work to work. The style of Lewis, however, equally unmistakable, blasts through the tissues of his novels like a steam whistle, breaking them to its will. (25)

Jameson later returns to the Joyce/Lewis opposition: "The sentences of Joyce are composed according to a principle of immanence, God withdrawing from view behind his creation: in Lewis, however, sheer proliferation stands as the sign and ratification of his mechanistic enterprise" (32).

7 Lewis incorporated "Satire and Fiction" into Men Without Art, the passage Scott quotes appearing on pages 98-99. Scott does not note this.

8 Patrick Parrinder also notes this quick shift from praise to blame in Woolf's essay: "As soon as her essay asks this question [about whether Joyce was "spiritual" enough], Woolf's reservations about Joyce's achievement start to appear" (161).

9 That Woolf may indeed play theoretical precursor to Bloom's ephebe - that is, that Bloom may derive much of his theory of anxiety from Woolf - is a possibility that has yet to be given adequate attention by critics. For a reading of Woolf's response to Ulysses in the text of Jacob's Room, see Garvey.

10 Carolyn Heilbrun quotes Woolf's comment "what I'm doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce" and observes, "this was not true, but reflects that female diffidence, that lack of confidence which male writers do not experience that has led her critics, and Joyce's admirers, to take her at her word" (60). Regardless of whether or not what Woolf feared was true was in fact true, my point is simply that she feared, and that this fear may have caused her to react with hostility.

11 Lewis would return to this charge in his long-suppressed satire on the London book world, The Roaring Queen (1936; 1973), where he caricatures Woolf as "Rhoda Hyman," the "Highbrow Queen of Literary London," who awards herself the prize for "the Year's Cleverest Literary Larceny" (96). The charge has been raised at least twice since. In 1947, William York Tindall wrote that Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway, her first important work, is indebted primarily to Joyce. His three complementary characters, Bloom, Mrs. Bloom, and Stephen, are matched by her Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway" (304). More recently William D. Jenkins has pointed to even more parallels between Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, and concludes that Woolf's novel "suggests, at least to this common reader, a Ulysses in little: a very well-bred, perhaps overbred, miniature, not tricky, startling, or obscure" (515). Carolyn Heilbrun dismisses Tindall's observations as "nonsense" (63), and her fellow Woolfian Jean Guiguet does not stoop to mention - neither in his essay on Woolf and Lewis, nor in his essay on Woolf and Joyce - Lewis's charge.