Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist

by Fredric Jameson

The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work of the great modernists – Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats – who were his sometime friends and collaborators. Lewis’s originality, however, can only be fully grasped when it is understood that, unlike those writers, he was essentially a political novelist.In this now classic study, Fredric Jameson proposes a framework in which Lewis's explosive language practice - utterly unlike any other English or American modernism - can be grasped as a political and symbolic act. He does not, however, ask us to admire the energy of Lewis's style without confronting the inescapable and often scandalous ideological content of Lewis's the aggressivity and sexism, the predilection for racial and national categories,the brief flirtation with fascism, and the inveterate and cranky oppositionalism that informs his powerful polemics against virtually all the political and countercultural tendencies of his time.Fables of Aggression draws on the methods of narrative analysis and semiotics, psychoanalysis, and ideological analysis to construct a dynamic model of the contradictions from which Lewis's incomparable narrative corpus is generated, and of which it offers so many varying symbolic resolutions.

Genres: Criticism, Literary Criticism, Politics, Lit Crit

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fully ripened late Jameson is some of the most turgid critical prose this side of Habermas, but this, oh, this is really very readable. You don’t need to buy into all of the Marxist fripperies to get that there’s something here that’s not dwelt enough on by Kenner and other Lewis admirers, viz. that whatever his genius WL was a nasty broken man, very deeply deceived about himself in some fundamental ways. But more importantly, bundles of insight into The Childermass, TWB, and lots of WL that I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s a deep reading Jameson is doing here and I’ll surely return in future.

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not familiar with Wyndham Lewis at all. So the references are difficult to consider, but nonetheless Jameson provides a fairly deep reading of modernism in the mode of fascism. The language and characterization of Wyndham acts as a symbolic force. In many ways, perhaps Jamesons's reading was cutting edge at the time of publication, but now, it's largely Lacanian and discourse analysis with a psychoanalytic framework is fairly overdone.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jameson wrote no other book-length studies of fiction writers.

In the Interwar period, with the recession of revolutionary prospects and the Stalinist destruction of revolutionary working class leadership worldwide, many petty bourgeois intellections turned right, embracing churches, states, ressentiment, and everyday resentments. Lewis was part of an international phenomenon: Benda, Celine, Lovecraft, and Pessoa all followed their own paths, but in a generally similar tendency and direction.

Jameson cannot quite bring this all into focus because he again refuses to grapple with the interwar revolutionary work of Leon Trotsky and fellow Bolshevik Leninists who defended Lenin and the first four congresses of the Comintern.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I tried to find a method for literary analysis, this book was a constant yet also elusive reference on how to read and write about literature.