Lewis in Contention: Identity, Anxiety, and the London Vortex

This essay argues that Wyndham Lewis' attempts to consolidate an identity for Vorticism against other contemporary avant-garde movements were riddled with anxiety and conflict. That anxiety and conflict pervade its creation suggests the tenuous nature of Vorticism beneath its facade of brash, satiric polemic, and they trouble the movement's self-definition as autonomous, authoritative and startlingly innovative. They also reveal that Lewis' Vorticist endeavors were more reactive than groundbreaking. At a fundamental level, the visual and textual innovations brought into play by Vorticism were exclusionary and too indebted to other avant-garde movements, on both national and international levels, to permit its solidification into an independent entity or its establishment of a preeminently English avant-garde as part of the cultural landscape. Notably, the revolutionary agendas of Italian Futurism, Bloomsbury formalism, French-based Cubism, and the British women's suffrage movement were more successfully publicized and longer lasting than Vorticism. Lewis' angst-ridden combativeness when confronted with competition can be traced in his interactions with contemporaries and in his work. It surfaces in his contributions to the two issues of his journal, Blast, his manifesto "The Code of a Herdsman," and in the 1918 version of his Vorticist novel, Tarr. In effect, Lewis' authorship of Vorticism can be read as an artistic experiment marked by a fear of assimilation, paradox and the compulsion to beat the competition.