Against Sports and Humour: Lewis’s Abjuration of Delectation

[Further notes on McLuhan’s Reading of Wyndham Lewis]

Lewis, says McLuhan, is a mystic or visionary of the comic, moving towards the pole of intelligibility instead of that of feeling:

Lewis makes great and grim comedy of the horror of spirit shackled to the dying animal or human body. His own point of view in comedy is expressed as opposite to Bergson's when he says that laughter results from the spectacle of things (that is, persons) trying to behave as though they were alive. Bergson found the key to laughter in persons behaving as though they were things. Bergson had not the courage of his own philosophical position.[1]

It is precisely Lewis’s Gnosticism and his consequent “un-worldliness” that makes Lewis “so intense … and evaluation so fearless,”[2] and for McLuhan, so valuable. Unlike Joyce, who expressed ambivalence in regard to both Gnosticism and Catholicism, McLuhan finds that Lewis has value and importance in the technological age because of his courage to push his Gnosticism to the extreme:

It just happens that in the new age of technology when all human arrangements from the cradle to the grave have taken on the hasty extravaganza aspect of a Hollywood set, the nihilist philosophies of neo-Platonism and gnosticism have come into their own. Existence is an empty machine, a cheap art work, they have always said. The soul is a shabby mechanism, the body a monstrous one. The spirit or artist says to body and soul, a plague on both your prisons. And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One.”[3]

And it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-PIatonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other.[4]

McLuhan states that the situation was so obvious to Lewis in the 1920s that he devoted the next two decades to warning us and explaining the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy and physics, and everyday activities in commerce and social engineering.[5]

[1] McLuhan, “Nihilism Exposed,” review of Wyndham Lewis, by Hugh Kenner, Renascence 7, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 98.

[2] Ibid., 99.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 98.

[5] Ibid. “Electrically, mans struggles are with principalities and powers, and Lewis presents the struggle more vividly that any other writer of the 20th century,” (McLuhan, “The Lewis Vortex: Art and Politics as Masks of Power,” MS., 6).