Intercambio de recursos en la ficción de Percy Wyndham Lewis

Résumé

This study is an attempt to induce understanding of the modern Tarr (1918), his humorous novel Snooty Baronet (1932), his social satire The VulgarStreak (1941) and his autobiographical work of fiction Self-Condemned (1954). American Resource Theory of social exchange by Uriel G. Foa is the sociological framework proposed to explore the idiosyncratic relationship that exists between the interpersonal behaviour and resource exchanges of Lewis' main characters in these four creative worlds. In this regard, our analysis follows the results of various hypotheses proposed by Foa, which were tested in laboratory experiments and field studies. In order to describe their impact on the attitude and social encounters of Lewis' main dramatis personae. Lewis portrays the wrong ways in which economic and non-economic resources intertwine in modern Western society by experimenting with the English language in radical ways. For this reason, we attempt to clarify, first, the trends of behaviour and relations whose distorted form and nature respond to his aesthetic desire to show and questionm contemporary social phenomena by using unconventional satirical techniques; and second, to call attention to the specific resource seeking related events whose peculiar appearance and outcome respond to the view of the world and of human relationships of Lewis exclusively. In our view, these four fictional worlds are skewed in form and significance due to the imperative desire of the artist to reflect the ways in which contemporary technological, scientific, political, economic and social doctrines influenced the rules of practice that governed interpersonal behaviour and relationships both in particularistic institutions such as family, love and friendship and in non-particularistic ones like employment, stores, restaurants and hotels in the modern Western world by turning out them to be very dehumanised in form and significance. For all these reasons, we do believe that his fiction constitutes a very valuable example of the fact that Lewis is as much a fascinating writer as a tremendously perceptive social critic.