|
George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis and the
Origins of Cultural Studies
Alan Munton
This
paper is part of a research project supported by the Spanish Ministry
of Science and Technology (BFF 2002-02842), the Communidad
Autonóma of La Rioja (ANGI-2002/05), and the University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain (API-02 –
35). It was given in the Orwell Centenary section of the 9th
International ‘Culture and Power’ conference held at the Faculty of
Letters of the University of Lisbon, 4-7
November 2003.
To bring together in one discussion George
Orwell and Wyndham Lewis is to associate two
apparently very different writers, one of whom—Orwell—holds an
established place in the history of cultural
studies, whilst the other—Wyndham Lewis—is not thought to have any links whatever with cultural studies. Orwell is
part of the history of British socialism, Lewis, if he is known at all, is remembered as
the most reactionary of the modernists.
Yet I shall argue today that the dialogue that took place between
Orwell and Lewis between 1932 and 1952 is
crucial to our understanding of the history of cultural
studies. Let me hint at what is to come by
saying that whenever we use the phrase ‘the global village’ to describe new relationships between
centre and periphery, we are quoting
Wyndham Lewis. As cultural critic, Lewis is present but unrecognised.
There is a second difficulty: modernism and
cultural studies do not meet. Lewis was a high modernist, and high modernism is not a point
of reference for cultural studies. Rita
Felski has very recently written a vigorous denunciation of the way in
which ‘cultural studies [is]
oblivious to modernist studies’, so that (she writes) ‘when
“modernity” appears at all in cultural
studies, it is often there to be refuted, derided, or
denounced, a handy catch phrase for
conservative politics, old hat metaphysics, and snobbish aesthetics’.
That is exactly how Lewis has been conceived, though the critical
situation is beginning slowly to change.
Felski urges that we need to ‘reverse the optic’, as she puts it, ‘to realize that modernist studies can
throw light on cultural studies, as well as the other way around’ (502). I am doing that here; and
I am taking a further step, toshow that
modernism and cultural studies are, in the case of Orwell and Lewis,
closely linked.
My third introductory point concerns the
history of cultural studies in Britain. In 1967 and
1968 I was writing my MA a Birmingham University, and had the sense to attend a few meetings of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies. The CCCS was founded
by Richard Hoggart, author of Uses of Literacy, and I recall
Hoggart quoting Orwell’s remark
about ‘common decency’ being a value in English life. Hoggart, as he
admitted himself, was not a theorist, and the
future did not belong to him. He gave up the Centre in 1968. Nevertheless, it is important to
recall that Orwell was an important point of reference for CCCS in its early days. Towards
the end of 1968 I was the subject of
a seminar at the Centre, following a successful student sit-in that
year for which I was press
officer—even revolution was organized! I was asked to describe my
experiences with the press and
television in what I now see was an early attempt to analyse the
material processes by which representation is
achieved by the media. That meeting was led by Stuart Hall, and although nothing seems to have
come of the project, the attempt points
forward to the characteristic concerns of cultural studies with process
and representation.
The transition from Hoggart to Hall at this period permits me to
prepare for what follows by
pointing to this structure: under Hoggart, Orwell’s way of exploring
culture, in such an essay as
‘Boys’ Weeklies’, was predominant; under Hall, it is through
Althusser and Gramsci that the crucial
questions of ideology and hegemony are developed.
What, then, was the relationship
between Wyndham Lewis and George Orwell? Wyndham Lewis was born in 1882 and was therefore eleven
years older than Orwell. Lewis
became established in 1914 as the leader of a British avant-garde in London
with the publication of the
magazine Blast and the success of the Vorticist movement in
painting. He published the novel Tarr
in 1918: it is a story of bohemian life in Paris
before the First World War. Orwell read it in
the 1930s. For Lewis the experience that transforms his attitude to European culture is the First
World War, in which he fought as a
gunner. Orwell’s transforming war experience comes proportionately
later, when he takes part in the
Spanish Civil War in 1937.
When Lewis published his criticism of Joyce, Pound and Bergson in Time
and Western Man in September 1927, Orwell had just returned to England from Burma, a convinced
anti-imperialist. In 1928, Lewis published The Childermass,
perhaps one of the most difficult
of all modernist texts; in the same year, Orwell was down and out in
Paris, and at the very end of that year, his first published
article appeared. In 1930, as Orwell
is getting established in literary London,
Lewis publishes The Apes of God, an intimately knowledgeable satire upon 1920s literary London.
Lewis was then at the height of
his career. Towards the end of 1930, he visited Germany and in March 1931 published
Hitler, the book that ruined his reputation. The following
year Orwell remarked to Eleanor
Jaques that he has been reading Lewis’s magazine The Enemy, and
that Lewis ‘seems to have
something in him’.
At this point Orwell begins to track Lewis’s work. Later in 1932 Orwell remarks to Brenda Salkeld that Lewis
has ‘evidently got some kick in
him’. His incipient interest is indicated by his next remark: ‘Whether
at all a sound thinker or not, I can’t
be sure without further acquaintance’.
Further acquaintance evidently
followed, because in 1939 Orwell writes a shrewd review of a book by
Lewis that shows he had caught up
on his reading and knew what Lewis’s politics had become
during the 1930s. It was between 1931 and 1937
that Lewis published the books and articles
that have led to him being identified as a conservative, authoritarian
and incipiently fascist author.
This remains a widely-held view which ignores the change that
took place in Lewis’s thinking in 1937. If
later critics have failed to notice or acknowledge Lewis’s philosemitism of 1939 (for example),
George Orwell did recognise what
had occurred, and I shall return to this review in a moment.
In 1941, the relationship between Orwell and Lewis becomes one of mutual
recognition. In that year Lewis published a
novel about class in England, The Vulgar Streak, and wrote to ask
his publisher to send a copy to, amongst others, ‘Mr Orwell (I
dont [sic] know his first name’.4
Orwell evidently received the book, for he quotes from it
in a major essay, ‘The English People’: ‘The
English working class, as Mr Wyndham Lewis has put it, are “branded on the tongue”’, he
writes, and adds later: ‘No one should be “branded on the tongue”. It should be impossible...to
determine anyone’s status from his
accent’.
This episode shows both an agreement on class, and that Lewis recognised
Orwell’s importance in British culture long
before the successful publication of AnimalFarm in 1945.
In 1942 Orwell recognised Lewis as a European
modernist; in 1943 he described the
essays in The Enemy as among the few ‘really good pamphlets’
published in recent years. There
are further references during the war, until in 1945 he returns to Tarr
and Snooty Baronet as ‘good bad books’. And in 1946 he makes a blunder,
writing in the New York Trotskyist journal
Partisan Review that Lewis had become a Communist. This
gaffe did not affect the climax
to this public dialogue, the long discussion of Orwell that Lewis
prepared in The Writer and the Absolute,
published in 1952.
The convergence between Orwell and Lewis is first apparent in the 1939
review I mentioned earlier, where
Orwell recognises that Lewis had moved towards the left. He is
reviewing a little-known book by Lewis about England and Englishness entitled The Mysterious Mr. Bull—Mr Bull
being John Bull. Orwell writes ‘I do not think it is unfair
to say that Mr. Wyndham Lewis has “gone left.”
Lewis has declared himself ‘a “revolutionary”
and “for the poor against the rich”’, which is unexpected, given the
nature of his earlier writings.
Orwell goes on to read the change in Lewis’s position
through his own recent experiences in Spain, where as a member of the POUM fighting
for the Republic, he found himself denounced
as a ‘Trotsky-fascist’. Orwell’s consequent distrust of the official left emerges when he remarks
that Lewis shows ‘a curious readiness’
to trust the leadership on the left and ‘to take their “antifascist”
enthusiasm almost at its
face-value’. Lewis’s new position, Orwell believes, is likely to lead
to him becoming one of those
‘denounced as Communists by Fascists and as Fascists by Communists’ (p. 354). This is what had happened to Orwell
himself, and I point to this remark
as marking a significant convergence between Orwell’s position and
Lewis’s.
Another convergence occurs when in 1952 Lewis devotes five chapters to
a wide- ranging discussion of
Orwell in The Writer and the Absolute, entitled ‘Orwell, or Two
and Two Make Four’. His discussion is devoted
to getting the politics out of this most political of writers. For Lewis, everything in Orwell
before Nineteen Eighty-Four is that of a conventional political mind, ‘the story of a man who
rescued himself from a convention, and
finished his life in a burst of clairvoyance’.
Lewis’s own position is that ‘Every
writer should keep himself free from party’ (p. 193), a view that he
had held since his earliest
writings before the First World War, but which intermittently broke
down to permit his right-wing
enthusiasms. Freedom from party gives the opportunity to achieve
‘objective truth’, Lewis says, by which he
seems to mean coming into possession of an inclusive sense of reality, a comprehensive understanding
of politics that is not in any way
partisan, but which recognises all the forces at work at any moment.
Lewis concludes that in Nineteen
Eighty-Four Orwell very nearly achieved this: ‘He went much
farther on the road to an ultimate political
realism than any of his companions or immediate English contemporaries’ (p. 193). In other
words, Orwell came close to believing
what Lewis himself believed. It is an early example of the ‘Orwell
agrees with me’ syndrome. And it
is my second example of a convergence between these two writers.
As the conclusion to this first part of this argument, I want to point
to the significance of this
convergence for cultural studies itself, in what I have called the early
or Hoggart model. I have mentioned in passing
Orwell’s 1940 essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, in which he discusses the significance of such comics for
boys as Magnet, with its stories of Greyfriars School and the fat boy Billy Bunter. Orwell concludes the essay
by saying that these stories are
‘sodden in the worst illusions of 1910’, and that ‘The fact is only
unimportant if one believes that what is read
in childhood leaves no impression behind’—and
Orwell evidently believes that such popular writing does affect those
who read it.
Orwell’s article was written in 1939. In 1934 Wyndham Lewis published a
book of critical essays entitled Men
Without Art, an argument for the survival of art in difficult
times. In the Introduction he wrote that
implicit in the serious work of art is all of politics,
theology and philosophy, and goes on to say
this of popular writing:
But what is
not so clear to very many people is that the most harmless piece of
literary entertainment - the common crime
story, for instance, or the schoolboy epic of the young of the English proletariat centred
around the portly figure of Bunter,
‘the owl of the Remove’ (see Magnet Library, weekly 2d., of all
newsagents) is at all events politically and
morally influential.
This will be exactly Orwell’s point. Whether
there was any influence in this instance, is not really my concern. But we can now point to an historical
continuity between what Lewis proposed
in 1934, through Orwell’s popular-cultural essays of the 1940s, and
down to the early work of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the mid-1960s.
The question that now suggests itself is this: if there is a continuity
between Lewis, Orwell and the
early Hoggart phase of cultural studies, is there any continuity
between Lewis and the much more theoretically
advanced work initiated later by StuartHall? As I have said already, this was marked by
Althusser and ideology and Gramsci and
hegemony. In Lewis’s theoretical critique of modernity Time and
Western Man, the 1927 book
published just as Orwell returned from Burma, we do indeed find the terms ‘ideology’
and ‘hegemony’. Both occur in Lewis’s ‘An Analysis of the Mind of James
Joyce’, where he shows how Ulysses is
suffused with unexamined ideas about time. Here, ‘ideology’ is the leading term, and describes the process
by which certain ideas, clusters of
thought or ways of thinking become dominant. ‘Hegemony’ describes the
outcome. Lewis does not expect
his readers to find these concepts easy to grasp, but his warning of
difficulties ahead contains key terms such as
‘theory’ and ‘dominance’. He writes, forexample: ‘When such a dominant theory is applied in
literature or in art . . . even less does anyone grasp the steps by which that theory has entered
the mind of the author or artist
. . . . In short, any of the hundred ways and degrees in which assent
is arrived at, and an
intellectual monopoly or hegemony consummated, is . . . more arcane to
the majority than is the theory
itself.’
We might today object to ‘applied’ in that passage, but
Lewis’s recognition of the existence of
dominant ideas or tendencies in thought, his point that ideas may come to dominate through a multiplicity of
routes, that assent is achieved, and
that a monopolistic or hegemonic situation can and does emerge in the
field of ideas and of creative
art, presents us with a theoretical structure that is valuable in
itself and remarkable for its
time.
Lewis develops ‘ideology’ in complex ways.
Again warning of difficulties, he writes
that ‘Some . . . analysis of the domination achieved by an idea and how
it ceases to be an idea and
becomes an ideology, as Napoleon called it, an instrument of popular
government has to be undertaken’ (p.85). He
speaks of ideas being replaced by an ‘ideologic simulacrum’ (p.78), and describes the artist’s
resistance to ideology: ‘It is equally his
[the artist’s] business to know enough of the sources of his ideas, and
ideology, to take steps to keep
these ideas out, except such as he requires for his work’ (p.
136). This suggests that even the
self-aware artist is not immune, and hints that Lewis is
aware that in the reception of
ideology complex subjective processes are at work.
These concepts of hegemony,
dominance and control move the discussion into questions of power. Even before the
work I have been describing, Lewis had begun a major critique of the state from
within literary modernism This occurs in a book entitled
The Art of Being Ruled, published in 1926. There, Lewis makes the crucial link
between the
state and ideology when he
writes: ‘[W]hat
we call conventionally the capitalist state is as
truly an educationalist state’.
The history of cultural studies does not return to this
question until Althusser argues that
in modem capitalism the main ideological state apparatus (ISA) is education.
Finally, we can ask from a position
within recent work in cultural studies, whether Lewis at any time attempts a
critique of the material processes of cultural production. In
1932 he published a book entitled Doom
of Youth in which he reproduced texts from newspapers and magazines, and then
developed a critical discussion of them. The texts are not reproduced photographically,
but the book attempts a typographic version of the newspaper original. Cultural studies
does not return to this device until Marshall
McLuhan takes it up in the 1960s,
when it was regarded as a brilliantly original strategy.
The method then influenced Richard
Hoggart’s 1967 publication, Your Sunday Paper. In
this same book Lewis turns to the
best-seller as a social document that ‘cannot lie’
about its society. Although he makes
a mistake about the transparency of the popular that has been repeated in more recent
cultural studies work, this is a significant historical development. In
the conclusion to Doom of Youth
Lewis again makes the kind of point that caused Orwell to declare in 1939 that he had ‘turned
Left’, arguing—and this is in 1932—that
the popular press has a purpose: ‘The Popular Press is strictly reading
matter for wage slaves; it is the
bulletin for the slaves’ (p. 255). With Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ in
mind, and recognising the hegemonic structure
implied by Lewis’s metaphor, we can see why Lewis should have appealed so strongly to Orwell, and
conversely why Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four should have appealed to
Lewis. There is a sense in which each of these writers helped to write the other.
The Orwell-Lewis relationship requires, it
seems to me, a revision of the history of cultural studies. First, we must recognise that the
ideological critiques conducted by Wyndham
Lewis are the actual foundations of the field, though they have not been
recognised as such. Second, the Orwell-Lewis
relationship is one of convergence and recognition, and this is worth attending to. Thirdly,
there is a history to the relationship that is divergent. Lewis initiates the study of popular
culture, but he has no followers because
his reputation on all fronts had been ruined by his 1930s politics. In
practice it is Orwell whose work
on popular culture is recognised and accepted as the historical
precedent and model for the Birmingham CCCS.
It remains unclear how much influence Lewis had on Orwell in that respect. When the Orwell
model was dropped at Birmingham after 1968, there
followed the more substantial theorisations of ideology and hegemony.
Looking back, we see with some astonishment
that this development had already been anticipated in Lewis’s work. Cultural studies actually
originates in a forgotten tributary of high
modernism.
[1] Rita Felski, ‘Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies:
Reflections on Method’, Modernism/modernity 10, 3 (September
2003), [501].
]
George Orwell, ‘Letter to Eleanor Jaques’, The Collected Essays,
Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume I: An Age Like This
1920-1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
Books, 1970), p. 106. Henceforth CEJL I. Letter
written ‘14? June 1932’.
CEJL I, p. 126. Dated
‘[September? 1932]’. Orwell has been reading about Lewis’s novel Snooty
Baronet, published 15 September. He again mentions The Enemy,
published in three numbers, Nos. 1-2 in 1927, No. 3, 1929.
]W.
K. Rose (ed.). The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen,
1963), p. 307. Letter dated 9 November 1941.
George
Orwell, ‘The English People’, CEJL III: As I Please
1943-1945, p. 19, p. 51.
George
Orwell, ‘The Rediscovery of Europe’, CEJL II: My Country Right or Left 1940-1943,
ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), pp.
197-207, esp. p. 206. ‘Pamphlet Literature’ ibid., p. 285. CEJL
IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950, p. 21. ‘London Letter
to Partisan Review’, ibid., p. 188.
George
Orwell, ‘Review of The Mysterious Mr. Bull by Wyndham Lewis; The
School for Dictators by Ignazio Silone’ in The Complete Works
of George Orwell Volume Eleven: Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937-1939,
ed. Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1998), p. 353. First published in New English
Weekly, 8 June 1939.
George
Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies, in CEJL I, p. 531.
[Wyndham
Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (1927; Santa Rosa CA:
Black Sparrow
Press, 1993), pp. 86-7.
Wyndham
Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, ed. Reed Way
Dasenbrock (1926; Santa
Rosa, CA:
Black
Sparrow Press, 1989), p. 106.
Wyndham Lewis, Doom of Youth (London: Chatto and
Windus,
1932), p. 246.
back to Alan Munton page
back to contents page
|