SOURCE: “Wyndham Lewis, Blast, and Popular Culture,” in ELH, Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 403-19.

In the following essay, Tuma discusses Vorticist tenets as evidenced by the material Lewis wrote or accepted for the journal Blast.

Several critics and literary historians have noted Wyndham Lewis's fascination with the popular culture of England and France in the years before World War I. For the most part, this scholarship has been concerned with the influence of various forms of popular culture on a developing style—on Lewis's idea of satire, or his creation of a “visual text” in the manifestoes of Blast. We know, for instance, that Lewis's delight at seeing clowns, jugglers, and mountebanks in Brittany informs the early stories eventually collected in The Wild Body, in terms of both subject matter and the idea of the fictional character as a Polichinelle worked by a “showman” author.¹ Bernard Lafourcade and...