History's Stamp: Wyndham Lewis's The Revenge for Love and the Heidegger Controversy

Abstract

D ESPITE 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. My decision to read Lewis's novel in the context of the Heidegger controversy is not fortuitous. For a start, there are historical coincidences that link the careers of these thinkers. Both declared