Closed fists, open hands: Literary modernism and the rhetorics of protofascism and radical humanism (Wyndam Lewis, Rebecca West, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound)

Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, an epic paean to what West viewed as Yugoslavia's multiethnic democracy of the 1930s, can be viewed as a summary metanarrative for the clash between two great strands of literary modernism, a struggle that manifested itself in literary, cultural, personal, and political contexts.; On the one hand there is modernist antihumanism, perhaps most overtly presented in the writings of Georgian avant-garde intellectual T. E. Hulme. In his posthumously published Cinders, Hulme, perhaps the most analytical spokesperson for antihumanism in the months preceding the publication of Wyndham Lewis's Blast, referred to his philosophy as the "Valet to the Absolute" (19). Hulme and his antihumanist contemporaries in Georgian London, most notably Pound and Lewis, were servants to this Absolute, an absolute that was set in opposition to life---cacophonous, multifarious, amorphous life. This antihumanism is by no means an abberration among the Georgian avant-garde; an examination of a journal like The Egoist reveals just how widespread these attitudes were among artists and intellectuals. It was artists like Wyndham Lewis, with their roots in the antihumanist millieu of the Geogian avant-garde, who became oriented positively in various ways to fascism through what Frederic Jameson has labeled "protofascism." For Lewis, protofascist ideology was the corrective to "degeneracy," to cacophonous mulifariousness, to democracy's egalitarian mediocrity, to familial sentimentality---in short, the corrective to the offensiveness (from his perspective) of concrete, quotidian and multifarious humanity as it actually dares to exist.; In contrast, Rebecca West, a contributor to Lewis's Blast, represents a modernist trajectory that defends the value of the concrete, quotidian individual in the West, in all of his or her organic imperfection and finitude. This strand of modernism does not want to dispense with the tradition of humanism; rather, this trajectory wants to extend radically the value of individual human lives as the cornerstone of political, social, and aesthetic reference.