Wyndham Lewis's Mythic Method: From Transcendental Aesthetic to Transcendental Causation

Abstract:This article argues that Wyndham Lewis's understanding of historical etiology maps out a region of hidden, or unthematized, causes in relation to their observable effects in the empirical world. The motor of history, for Lewis, is transcendental insofar as it is not reducible to the field of phenomenal reality it influences. I unfold Henri Bergson's revision of Immanuel Kant's transcendental aesthetic into a notion of transcendental life, and consider the role it plays in Lewis's Vorticist art. I argue that in intervening at the level of the transcendental causes of life and history, Lewis's art contains a function of ideological critique. Finally, I examine how historical causation is conceptualized and critiqued specifically through aesthetic technique via a reading of The Vulgar Streak (1941) and Lewis's response to Paul Cézanne's paintings