"Nihilism exposed".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

Wyndham Lewis. By Hugh Kenner. New Directions. $2.50.

Most of this book is devoted to the novels of Lewis, and consequently to a discussion of characters, plots, and the Lewis theories of person, self, society, and the artist. It is an unfriendly book but it also presupposes much familiarity with the work of Lewis. For the unprepared reader the book is not likely to lead to a closer inspection of him. That, however, one hopes may prove not to be the case.

Lewis is in most respects the most eminent British painter of this century. His writings, Kenner admits, constitute "the most astonishing literary career of the twentieth century." Lewis is the man "to whose mind the Cartesian split and the Nietzschean energy were not hobbies but lifeblood," and who "was better equipped than anyone else to write out of inner knowledge the tragedy of his time." Lewis has this kind of representative importance. To an exceptional degree his work has raised to the level of intelligibility what Eliot described as the "dissociation of sensibility" that set in late in the sixteenth century.

For Lewis has accepted, along with Yeats and Pound and Eliot the doctrinaire premises which produced the split. In a word, his triadic view of spirit, intellect, and sense is the neo-Platonic and Buddhist view of the opacity of the intellectual knowledge and the illusory character of the human self. There is no vitality or reality in mind or self or the world. But Art is of the spirit, the divine spark in man (which is not the self in this doctrine) and art alone can impregnate the world with some quality of reality. I may not be untypical of most Catholics in having been slow to apprehend this matter. But the Romantics and the symbolists necessarily regarded art as more real than the external world. The Catholic doctrine of the body-soul composite confers a substantiality on the existent such as it has had in no other view, pagan or heretical. All pagan religion and philosophy reposes immediately or ultimately on the doctrine of preexistence. The core of this doctrine is the notion that man imprisons an uncreated divine spark within his body and within his soul. But the human self is no more identical with this bit of divinity within us than the same spark is identical with a stick or a stone. But the imagination of the poet or genius is more nearly identical with this bit of divinity within us than the same spark is identical with a stick or a stone. The imagination of the poet or genius is nearly identical with this uncreated spirit. The least vision or action of the genius is thus more real than all the rest of existence.

These views flooded into Europe in the fifteenth century. They underlie all the mechanic-materialisms from Descartes to John Dewey, since it is the merest whim whether these views are used to structure a Berkleyan idealism or a Darwinian mechanism. In this respect Hobbes was no more a materialist than Marx. Both regarded matter as an irreducible mental state. But mental states might well change with some rearrangement of the cosmic powers or aeons. And it is the business of the artist to be constantly shifting the scenery of existence about in accordance with his infallible intuitions of the cosmic weather. Art is revolution.

This is also the Coleridgean notion of imagination. Fancy is for Coleridge the imagination as understood merely in the tradition of Christian philosophy. The creative imagination in the Christian tradition is an intellectual power, not a super-human emanation from "spirit" or from the uncreated divine spark in the human soul.

On the other hand, Lewis, like Eliot and Yeats and Pound, assumed the Pythagorean and neo-Platonic doctrine of spirit and imagination as a divine or superhuman power. This power is no part of the human soul or intellect but merely imprisoned there. The tragedy and comedy of the human condition is a result of the juxtaposition of this divine spark with matter, sense, and intellect--a familiar existentialist conception, necessarily involving the doctrine of pre-existence.

Lewis makes great and grim comedy of the horror of spirit shackled to the dying animal or human body. His own point of view in comedy is expressed as opposite to Bergson's when he says that laughter results from the spectacle of things (that is, persons) trying to behave as though they were alive. Bergson found the key to laughter in persons behaving as though they were things. Bergson had not the courage of his own philosophical position.

And it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other.

This situation became so evident to Lewis in 1920 that he devoted the next two decades to warning us about and explaining the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy and physics, as well as our everyday activities in commerce and social engineering in this century. His political and social analysis pursued a humanist course but his art remained on the plane of the doctrinaire super-human level of abstract art and neo-Platonic "spirit."

His uncompromising exposes of nihilism, in the time-philosophers and positivists, went parallel with an artistic nihilism which gave "spiritual" force to his humanist pamphleteering. The result was that his double talk angered elites who were playing these same games while his art frightened the ordinary public.

A case in point is his current novel Self-Condemned, which is set in Toronto and at Assumption College in Windsor. His central character Rene (reborn) Harding flees the success that he has won in England and sets out on a quest of self or soul-annihilation. He thus defies the gods in the manner of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. He refuses to accept his full term or sentence in the human condition. He willfully seeks the "subhuman" conditions of a colonial metropolis as a means of freeing himself from the merely human fetters of comfortable English life.

This annihilation pattern of spiritual metamorphosis is the plan of all of the novels of Lewis. Usually, however, it is failure, driving the self to some sham existence to insure security and livelihood, that spurs his characters to extinction. But, for Lewis, to exist humanly is to be a failure.

The Revenge for Love was to have been called False Bottoms. That powerful work, like the Apes of God, is a presentation of the English art world, and of left-wing revolution, which reveals the shams and false bottoms of all popular and human fronts whatever A Catholic can read such books with approval insofar as he finds them a revelation of the hollowness of merely human hopes. But it is necessary to recognize that for Lewis, as for the great pagan tradition of neo-Platonism and gnosticism, existence as such is the ultimate sham. To exist is damnation. To exist humanly is to be self-condemned or damned to the material incarnation of selfhood.

It just happens that in the new age of technology when all human arrangements from the cradle to the grave have taken on the hasty extravaganza aspect of a Hollywood set, the nihilist philosophies of neo-Platonism and gnosticism have come into their own. Existence is an empty machine, a cheap art work, they have always said. The soul is a shabby mechanism, the body a monstrous one. The spirit or artist says to body and soul, a plague on both your prisons. And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: "I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One."

This pagan unworldliness carried to its ultimate mystical point is what makes the work of Lewis so intense and his evaluation so fearless. The many who share his philosophy but who have lacked the courage to live or express it, he has pilloried and derided in the greatest satires in our language. They have had their revenge; but too easily, for they control the press and all the means of artistic reputation--so they have suppressed Wyndham Lewis.

It is hoped that Kenner's survey of his literary emanations will obtain him some serious attention.

"NIHILISM EXPOSED" (3)

(3) Renascence 8.2 (1955): 97-99.

H. Marshall McLuhan

St. Michael's College, University of Toronto