Relational Structures in Wyndham Lewis's Fiction: Complexity and Value

This study is an attempt to induce understanding of the modern social views shaped by Percy Wyndham Lewis in his early abstract narrative Tarr (1918), his humorous novel Snooty Baronet (1932), his social satire The Vulgar Streak (1941) and his auto-biographical work of fiction Self-Condemned (1954). American Resource Theory of social exchange by Uriel G. Foa is the introductory sociological framework proposed to explore the idiosyncratic relationship between interpersonal behaviour and social interactions in these four creative worlds. This theory has its interest and indeed its strengths. First, it is based on empirical research. Second, it very usefully acts as a way of structuring Lewis's vast oeuvre. Third, it allows the development of a number of interesting lines of investigation in this book. However, due to its limitations to undertake the discussion of economic questions and of matters like intellectual integrity or love (issues of crucial importance in understanding Lewis) accurately, the theories of more flexible and more radical thinkers like Arnold, Beauvoir, Berman, Blau, Cartwright, Christie, Cook, Darwin, Donnenwerth, Durkheim, Geis, Gergen, Giddens, Goldmann, Gray, Jones, Kelley, Longabaugh, Parsons, Skinner, Simmel, Thibaut, Weber and Wilson, among others, are used as well.

Following Lewis's critic Munton (1997: 5), the writing and thought of Lewis has been misrepresented in the last twenty years by some scholars who have used the apparatus of research to mislead their readers about the nature of certain ideas. The implications based on the arguments of these scholars are obnoxious in many occasions because they aim to fulfil their particular, often distorted, desires rather than to illuminate Lewis's production. As a result, many recent critics and readers consider the artist as violent, anti-Semitic, misogynist and homophobic nowadays (1998). Owing to these facts, this study follows Munton's, yet with various modifications as no sociological research of this type has ever been undertaken in Lewis's critic. This approach is very powerful because it permits to say many novel things about the artist and his work, illuminates the nature of the interpersonal behaviour and relationships of his characters and enables to do justice to his energetic social observations.

In the author's view, Lewis portrays the wrong ways in which economic and non-economic resources intertwine in modern Western society by experimenting with the English language in radical ways. Here Melania Terrazas posits that these four fictional worlds are skewed in form and significance due to the imperative desire of the artist to reflect the ways in which contemporary technological, scientific, political, economic and social doctrines influenced the rules of practice that governed interpersonal behaviour and relationships both in intimate institutions such as family, love and friendship and in larger ones like employment, stores, restaurants and hotels in the modern Western world by turning out them to be very dehumanised in form and significance. For this reason, the author attempts to clarify, first, the trends of behaviour and relationships whose distorted form and nature respond to his aesthetic desire to show and question contemporary social phenomena by using unconventional satirical techniques; and second, to call attention to the specific patterns of conduct and interpersonal relations whose peculiar appearance and outcome respond to the view of the world and of human relationships of Lewis exclusively.

Lewis's fiction is an example of the fact that he is as much a fascinating writer as a tremendously perceptive social critic. In this book Melania Terrazas attempts to shed new light on the extremely personal nature of his fiction and on its dialogic idiosyncrasy, aspects that can be seen as examples of the great energy of his mind rather than of his bias, for they often prove him not wrong, but quite right.

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