‘I am planning a small review’: The Enemy and the General Strike

Abstract

Lewis’s ideas about authoritarianism and the ‘masses’ changed significantly after the publication of The Art of Being Ruled in March 1926.This chapter focuses upon the events of the months succeeding this, during which time Lewis’s articulates certain revisions to his argument. In the appendix to ‘The Revolutionary Simpleton,’ published in the first issue of The Enemy, January 1927, Lewis revealed the first signs of a more humanist criticism which would gradually effect a reverse in his attitude to the rational-industrial project, to mass-production, and to the status of the subject in a corporatised society. The genesis of this reversal is tracked over a specific chronology, examining Lewis’s interactions with the Parisian avant-garde, his changing attitude to the concept of ‘revolution,’ and his response to the General Strike of May 1926, which Lewis later referred to as the summit of his ‘political education.’ This chapter maps these interrelated subjects within the ‘Appendix’ and then examines further intersections in The Apes of God, a novel that features the General Strike as a thematic centrepiece. This chapter aims to reframe some of the trajectory of Lewis’s politics, in line with the increasingly nuanced scholarly analysis of Lewis’s thought within recent modernist studies.