THE LEWIS VORTEX: ART AND POLITICS AS MASKS OF POWER

[Written in 1970-71 and destined for L'Herne (The French Journal).
 Actual publication unknown. The finding guide issued by the
 National Archives lists a typescript but does not indicate if it
 was published. -- from a note by George Sanderson]

	The Wyndham Lewis idea of the vortex as a mask of power relates both 
to art and to technology as an organizing centre for the absorption and 
expression of human energies.  Whether it be a city, a newspaper, a poem, 
or a painting, Lewis regarded it as a vortex, a significant expression of 
human energy.  In his study The Lion and the Fox he considers the process 
of desacralizing the King.  The process of desacralizing the King, of 
reducing the charismatic and corporate image of the monarch to secular, 
individual status--this is a familiar theme in Shakespeare.  The process 
by which the corporate lion is destroyed by the private and individual 
fox is one of fragmentation.  Machiavelli, with his divide and rule 
approach to power, fascinated and terrified the sixteenth century, if 
only because he compressed all that the new science and technology of his 
age was expanding into explosive cultural reality.  Underpinning 
Machiavellis formula was the fragmenting power of print, on one hand, and 
a bit later of the infinitesimal calculus, on the other.  Letters, the 
language of civilization, and number, the language of science, both 
assumed a new fragmentizing intensity that multiplied the means of both 
analysis and of applied knowledge.

	The new instruments of analysis were extensions of our physical 
powers that confronted a traditional structure of social roles and of 
corporate images.  The private wits or senses of man were unleashed from 
their corporate restraints.  The Fox was pitted against the Lion.  The 
individual found new means of rivalry with collectively organized 
energies.

	In King Lear Shakespeare opens his play with the King himself 
launching a program of fragmentation of his external kingdom.  The 
reverberation of this deed quickly reduces all the social roles of his 
society to chaos.  Finally, the inner kingdom and pattern of his own 
consciousness feel the same disruption of fragmented functions.  His wits 
and senses rebel.  In the play Othello there are some central patterns 
related to King Lear.  To an Elizabethan audience, the witty fox Iago 
would have appeared, not only as a typical Machiavellian malcontent, but 
as the familiar figure of the falconer.  The method of the falconer was 
to seel the eyes of his birds while pampering all their other senses.  
This process of sensory specialism and fragmentation had been followed 
for centuries by falconers in order to gain control of the bird, and also 
to channel or specialize its energies in a pattern of visual obsession.  
Iago can wear his heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at, just as he can 
supply ocular proof for his big falcon Othello, whose eyes have been 
seeled in advance.  Iago can do this because he is one of the new men 
free to exercise his wits outside any depth commitment to a social role.  
He is a man without a social mask or role.  He is barefaced, honest Iago, 
the rootless operator and manipulator of power.  In fact both Othello and 
Iago are presented as professional soldiers.  They are 
specialists...fragmented men.  They are not gentlemen.

	In Lear and Othello, demonstrations of private wit leaping free from 
traditional obligations and constraints are vivid dramatizations of the 
principal trauma of the Renaissance.  Today we experience it in reverse.  
The explosive individual energies are being compressed and imploded by 
electric circuitry.  Knowledge is being speeded and compressed into 
mythic forms of multiple but simultaneous determinancies.  Jobs are being 
shaped into integral roles by team play.  The fragmented work patterns of 
the mechanical age are being rolled up onto the synchronized tapes that 
have swallowed the assembly-line.  We move into a sphere where the hand 
of man has never set foot.

	It is not strange, therefore, that we should feel an especial 
fascination for Oedipus Rex and its companion Oedipus at Colonus at this 
time.  There is much that is relevant for us in these plays.  Oedipus, 
the corporate image or mask of tribal Thebes, sets forth on an individual 
quest for private identity.  Plunging into the collective tribal 
unconscious to discover himself, he discovers a web of guilt and horror.  
His corporate tribal mask is rent asunder.  He is fragmented out of 
Thebes by the force of his private explosion of insight, and goes to 
detribalized or civilized Athens, seeking peace of mind and a lessening 
of the collective quilt weighing on his now private consciousness.  In 
Athens he discovers a private absolution from guilt, and the means to a 
corporate hero death.  The tormented and fragmented self that his life 
quest had fashioned from his sleuthing in the collective mind, is united 
once more with the corporate mask of his culture.

	The trauma of our present time is that of fragmented and mechanical 
man suddenly confronted by the seamless web of human kinship and 
responsibility in an electric and organic age.  Browning was, perhaps , 
the first English writer to encounter this vision of our condition 
artistically, and to devise corporate masks or poems to body it forth.  
In his Sordello, he explored the role of the artist as crowd-master, or 
as the manipulator of corporate energies.  As the corporate social roles 
collapsed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the role-less man, 
the honnete homme without a mask, came forward as the type of the sincere 
and unaffected person.  Earlier, as in the case of honest Iago, this 
barefaced, role-less individual, this new breed of respectable honnete 
gens, appeared to a traditional society as dubious and ambivalent.  But 
even for Moliere, the role-less malcontent or individualist misanthrope 
has begun to appear as the only viable pattern for the gentleman.  The 
faithful mask-wearers, or conventional role-players, lack adaptability 
and mobility and have begun to look like cartoonish and Blimpish husks.  
In an increasingly specialist and individualist world, the man in the 
mask began to seem hypocritical.  It is helpful to keep in mind that a 
mask or role is not an extension of the wearer, so much as a putting on 
of the collective powers of the audience.  When the society becomes 
analytical and fragmented, the wearing of a corporate image or mask 
becomes almost impossible, save in the anonymous sector of the social 
services, of generals and butlers and schoolmarms.

	As the specialist and individualist world of fragmented roles or 
jobs emerged as a new commercial society, it became plausible to present 
Tom Jones, the foundling, the role-less and misbegotten, as the type of 
the uninhibited and spontaneously natural man.  The absence of a 
corporate mask became a mark of virtue.  For language, itself, is the 
collective mask of a culture, even as its resources and powers for 
channelling perception are the prime concern of the poet. With language, 
the poet assumes the corporate mask and manipulates it like a puppet.  
For puppets are iconic, abstract patterns that capture corporate energies 
in a form that commands audience involvement in depth.  The simply 
gesture or bounding line calls for much viewer participation for its 
completion.

	Beginning with Madame Bovary Flaubert turned to making corporate 
masks based on study of the popular attitudes of his audience.  The 
Illuminations of Rimbaud owed much to the popular art of the press and 
the illustrated magazines.  Above all, Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire is 
both a study of the corporate life and limbs of the industrial 
metropolis, and an assuming of this corporate life as a new mask of 
poetry:

		Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre delicat, 
		--Hypocrite lecteur,--mon semblable, --mon frere!

	The sudden reversal whereby the audience becomes the speaker and the 
speaker assumes the collective mask of the image he presents, was a 
revolution that involved all subsequent writing.  Stephen Dedalus is not 
Joyce, nor an artist, but the audience of the time in its corporate 
imaging of art and the artist.  Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not Pound, but 
the collective voice and image of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages 
as they manifest a corporate attitude to art and life.  The audience is 
the speaker.  The audience is the actor.  And so with Prufrock and Other 
Observations, Not the poet as speaker, but the audience as corporate 
image or mask.  Eliot explains this matter apropos Tiresias in his notes 
to The Waste Land.

	[Percy Wyndham] Lewis turned his observation to the popular art
vortex of London and especially Bloomsbury in the early twentieth
century.  THE APES OF GOD shows him manipulating and commenting on this
massive artefact fed from Paris and Vienna. Beginning with THE CHILDERMASS
however, and followed by MONSTRE GAI and MALIGN FIESTA, Lewis turned first
to the newspaper and then to radio as magical instruments of instant
transportation.  Whether it is the telegraph, the telephone, radio or TV,
men and events are now translated and transported everywhere instantly.  In
THE HUMAN AGE [the trilogy of CHILDERMASS, MONSTRE GAI AND MALIGN FIESTA]
Lewis turned to study the new angelism of man and the Magnetic City.
Electrically, man's struggles are with principalities and powers. Lewis
presents the struggle more vividly than any writer of the twentieth
century.  In the matter of seeing human organization as both vortex and
mask, Lewis is the bridge from Baudelaire to the present.