Fables of Aggression ─ Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist As Fascist

The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work ofthe great modernists - Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats - who were his sometimefriends and collaborators. Lewis's originality, however, can only be fullygrasped when it is understood that, unlike those writers, he was essentially apolitical novelist.

In this now classic study, Fredric Jameson proposes a framework in whichLewis's explosive language practice - utterly unlike any other English orAmerican modernism - can be grasped as a political and symbolic act. He doesnot, however, ask us to admire the energy of Lewis's style without confrontingthe inescapable and often scandalous ideological content of Lewis's works: theaggressivity and sexism, the predilection for racial and national categories,the brief flirtation with fascism, and the inveterate and crankyoppositionalism that informs his powerful polemics against virtually all thepolitical and countercultural tendencies of his time.

Fables of Aggression draws on the methods of narrative analysis andsemiotics, psychoanalysis, and ideological analysis to construct a dynamicmodel of the contradictions from which Lewis's incomparable narrative corpus isgenerated, and of which it offers so many varying symbolic resolutions.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.