TITLE:

THE UNETHICAL STORYTELLER: WYNDHAM LEWIS AND HUMANITY UNREDEEMED

Author:

María Jesús Hernáez Lerena

Institution:

Universidad de La Rioja

E-mail:

mjesus.hernaez@dfm.unirioja.es

Wyndham Lewis, the enfant terrible of British modernism, is mostly regarded as a thinker and essayist, as a writer of explosive position pieces, rather than as a storyteller. His characters, grotesque and mechanical, are deprived of all humanity, which many believe it is a strategic disaster for fiction. However, his very first attempt at fiction, a collection of short stories included in the book The Wild Body (1927), reveal a conscious attempt to turn into stories certain semi-autobiographical pieces initially published in the form of the descriptive sketch. My paper will deal with Lewis’s commitment to “Story”, regarded as a non-threatening medium which communicates knowledge, and to “short story” as a modern narrative practice with a cryptic nature and a hostile moral.

Lewis refused to consider narrative as a medium to display psychological interiors at a time when modernist writers where securing a model of short story based on the lyric mood and on the understatement. Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce popularised this model, which short story readers became addicted to, especially with writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, or Eudora Welty. It is now difficult to enjoy short stories whose main assets are not emotion and subtlety, two characteristics conspicuously absent from Lewis’s stories. Lewis  replaced feelings by methods of behaviour.

Before analysing the uses that Lewis made of Story I will look at the kinds of coherence and at the ethical values historically attributed to Story as a structure of meaning and to the short story as a modern genre in order to reach a fuller understanding of the kind of fiction that Lewis was promoting.