The Problem of Romanticism in Wyndham Lewis

Abstract

IN 1918, AS THE BOOK VERSION of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr went to press, the young Carl Schmitt was putting the finishing touches to his Political Romanticism (1919). Schmitt would later develop a keen interest in Lewis, wondering in his diaries if he were not a ‘related soul’.1 Lewis never reciprocated the interest, but it is understandable why Schmitt may have felt a strong sense of kinship: both stressed the value of enmity; both directed their animus at representative democracy and liberalism; both had very public trysts with Hitler; and, most important for my purposes here, they had a mutual loathing of Romanticism. Their polemics may have been set against a Romanticism built largely of straw, but they nevertheless raise important and difficult questions about the meaning and possibility of freedom. Schmitt eschewed many of the usual definitions of Romanticism, all of which he took to be symptoms of an underlying metaphysics – namely, a ‘subjectified occasionalism’.2 The association of Romanticism with an ill-conceived model of subjective freedom was hardly new – Hegel, for instance, had repeatedly criticised it upon these lines – but the invocation of occasionalism was an enterprising form of re-branding. In the seventeenth century, occasionalists such as Malebranche had denied that there was any real causality within the world – God was the only true causal agent. Romantics, according to Schmitt, also believed that there were no real, mundane causes: the Romantic ego had supplanted the occasionalists' God as the sole cause of everything. The result was both a massive inflation and an impoverishment of human agency. All events were merely existential events – or mere ‘occasions’ for the ego's correspondence with itself.