The Poetics of Mockery : Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God and the Popularization of Modernism

Abstract

The Poetics of Mockery reconsiders Wyndham Lewis’s adversarial role in the modernist movement through a close reading of his prodigious satire of 1920s cultural politics. It presents a new interpretation of The Apes of God as a Menippean satire, with attention to its style, characterization, allegory, and historiography, and to Lewis’s polemics of the period. Previous studies have emphasized Lewis’s ‘external method’ of visual narration and the personal attacks on the London art world. This one delineates also the rhetorical and parodic elements in his mechanistic caricatures of literary impression and its proponents, besides the theory of participation and the ‘player’ behind his schizoid image of the modern subject. The study reinterprets the apprenticeship plot as a carnivalesque discrowning based on the primitive themes of the shaman and the scapegoat. It explores the ways in which the discursive ‘broadcasts’ — on the social exploitation of a subjectivist aesthetic, publicity as imposture, cultural levelling — are dramatized in the sado-masochistic bond between impresario and naïf and in the contradiction of carnival institutionalized. Lewis is shown using his rivals’ ‘mythic method’ to implicate the avant-garde itself in nascent mass culture. The study includes an analysis of the scandal surrounding Lewis’s private edition of The Apes and the defence of ‘non-moral’ satire presented in his subsequent pamphlet Satire & Fiction. Drawing upon unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, it demonstrates how Lewis’s own devious publicity campaign re-enacted the crux of the novel and epitomized his conflicts with his contemporaries. This book, originally published in paperback in 1995 under the ISBN 978-0-901286-52-9, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.