Bradshaw, Wayne (2019) Fighting for the Soul of Fiction: Denial of the Inner Life in the Works of Wyndham Lewis and Ivy Compton-Burnett. In: [British Association for Modernist Studies International Conference]. From: BAMS International Conference 2019: Troublesome Modernisms, 20-22 Jun 2019, London, UK.

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Abstract

In 1934, the painter, novelist, critic and eternal contrarian, Wyndham Lewis, jibed of Mrs Dalloway: “Outside is terribly dangerous—in that great and coarse Without” but “this dangerousness does, after all, make it all very thrilling, when peeped-out at, from the security of the private mind” (Men Without Art 139). Across his vast body of criticism Lewis repeatedly assaulted the device of “presenting the character from the inside” on multiple fronts (Lewis The Art of Being Ruled 348). He denounced its association with William James’s psychology; he pilloried it as part of a Bloomsbury obsession with Henri Bergson; he derided it as a proliferation of Stein’s “picturesque dementia” (Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled 348); and he diagnosed it as a symptom of the pervasive “time-cult” that he criticised at length in Time and Western Man (1927). This paper proposes that Lewis’s observations about the stream of consciousness technique shed new light on the work of another oft-sidelined and troublesome modernist, Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. While the two never met—and the combative Lewis would almost certainly have derided Compton-Burnett as an “Amateur” who had “adopted art either as a disguise or as a desultorily followed highbrow game” (Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled 344)—both writers eschewed depictions of inner life in their fiction in favour of preoccupations with rigid external appearances. In the work of both authors, the novel became a kind of stilted closet drama populated entirely by self-destructive automata set in motion by their seemingly indifferent creator.

Item ID:	80449
Item Type:	Conference Item (Abstract / Summary)
Copyright Information:	© 2023 British Association for Modernist Studies.
Date Deposited:	13 Sep 2023 23:45
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