HISTORY'S STAMP: WYNDHAM LEWIS'S THE REVENGE FOR LOVE
AND THE HEIDEGGER CONTROVERSY
DESPITE SUBSEQUENT SHIFTS in both his political and aesthetic beliefs, the literary reputation of Wyndham Lewis was irreparably damaged by a series of pro-Nazi pamphlets he wrote during the 1930s. More than other Anglo-American modernists-including Ezra Pound-Lewis is remembered for his reactionary political advocacies. Yet during this period he also produced the most lauded of his literary works, The Revenge for Love (1937). Although admirers of this novel have sought to read it against Lewis's fascism, arguing that the work transcends its political discourses or dismantles them from within, I believe that The Revenge for Love animates and parodies these critical positions; indeed, a careful reading of this text provides a means for reassessing fascism's centrality to the aesthetic dimension of modernism. By showing how the dismantling of totalizing narrative schemes can be compatible with the endorsement of totalitarian ideologies, this paper reconsiders the relations among narrative form, aesthetics, and ideology. In so doing it highlights the links between fascism and modernity that have been central to recent debates concerning Martin Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism. I compare Lewis's narrative strategies to the early Heidegger's temporalization of ontology to demonstrate that the political meaning of The Revenge for Love lies in the mythic dimension of its temporal structure. In Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis launches an attack on theories of history, but the Nazi mythologization of national destiny leaves its mark upon his narrative work, registering modernism's failure or, if you like, history's stamp . . .
There is, of course, no
evidence that Lewis had read the works of Heidegger or that these thinkers were
even aware of each other. None of the
many studies that document the evolution of Lewis's political thought claims a
specific relation to Heidegger. By
arguing that the early Heidegger's reflections on time and ontology can clarify
the political meanings of The Revenge for
Love, then, I suggest neither a relation of direct influence nor a
coincidental convergence of ideas. The
relation between The Revenge for Love
and Being and Time is best understood
in the more general context of nazi intellectual speculation. Such an approach is not a matter of reducing
generically diverse texts to equivalent expressions of fascist ideology. Rather, I search for narrative/structural
features that imbue these works with similar political meanings despite their
assignation to different discursive fields:
philosophy in the case of Being
and Time and narrative fiction in the case of The Revenge for Love . . . Like Heidegger's Being and Time, The Revenge for Love fails to overcome the
production of modernist temporality, falling back on fictions of "destiny" or "fatality"
that are inseparable from national myths of racial-spiritual purity. It is a sobering thought to remember the
praise the novel has received for its appeals to humanism or its dismantling of
political meanings, if only because that praise attests to the inability of
some of this century's most influential critical methods to discern the
ideological operations of fascist modernism.