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from stance of some rogue Norse deity. English humour
is first BLASTED “quack English drug for stupidity
and sleepiness/ Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalising
like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious
chemistry of laughter” and then BLESSED “the great
barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild
MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the
ancient fair of LIFE”. France is seen from both sides
too, damned for “SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH”,
praised for “Masterly pornography (great enemy of
progress), depths of elegance, Great Flood of LIFE
pouring out of wound of 1797.” Entrancing poetic pronouncements,
mad with possible wisdom, spark with
the force and rapidity of machine gun fire. “BLESS
ALL SEAFARERS. They exchange not one LAND
for another, but one ELEMENT for another. The more
against the less ABSTRACT. BLESS the vast planetary
abstraction of the OCEAN.”
Here was an artform not seen before: writing, but
writing which seeks to attain the form of visual art
rather than literature, more precisely aiming to emulate
the ever-shifting contours of the vortex from which the
movement takes its name. (Lewis’ friend James Joyce
was also beginning to cultivate this ‘writing as visual
art’, but Ulysses was only started after Blast was first
published, and would not be finished for a decade.)
This is a writing which seeks to shake and unsettle the
mind rather than cultivate or ‘improve’ it. The thoughts
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
of the manifesto making up this vortex are therefore
wildly and wilfully contradictory, at once revolutionary
and reactionary. The contradiction is essential. Lewis
states in the manifesto “We need the unconsciousness
of humanity – their stupidity, animalism and dreams”
also “Intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter and seer, not
in the object or content.” The message is essentially the
form itself, and so taken as a piece of writing, it lays
itself open to charges of shallowness, meaninglessness.
What is the use of a manifesto that spends equal time
lauding and assailing the same targets?
But there is no ‘use’, because this is art, all of which
as Wilde said is “quite useless”. The thrill of the angular
sentences, the unexpected words jutting forth like rogue
corkscrews, produce a kinetic rush which is its own
reward. Grammar, morality, congruity, indeed sense
are all swept away by the vortex, an acidic word play
which finds its apotheosis in an art of destruction, destruction
of form and format, of meaning itself. And yet
at the same time, one can find more truth and wisdom
in its scattershot pronouncements than in a hundred
more measured and erudite tomes, in the same way that
Nietzsche is read far more than Kant. His conclusions
may be wrong most of the time, but he has a far more
interesting time getting there. Then again, this is not
philosophy, but entertainment. Entertainment indeed,
this is writing as art, but taken at its most base level, it
is essentially humorous.
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