The unethical storytellerWyndham Lewis and humanity unredeemed

Resumen

Wyndham Lewis, the enfant terrible of British modernism, is mostly regarded as a thinker and essayist, as a writer of explosive position pieces, rather than as a storyteller. His characters, grotesque and mechanical, are deprived of all humanity, which many believe it is a strategic disaster for fiction. However, his very first attempt at fiction, a collection of short stories included in the book "The Wild Body" (1927), reveal a conscious attempt to turn into stories certain semi-autobiographical pieces initially published in the form of the descriptive sketch. My paper will deal with Lewis's commitment to Story, regarded as a non-threatening medium which communicates knowledge, and to short story as a modern narrative practice with a cryptic nature and a hostile moral. Before analysing the uses that Lewis made of Story I will look at the kinds of coherence and at the ethical values historically attributed to Story as a structure of meaning and to the short story as a modern genre in order to reach a fuller understanding of the kind of fiction that Lewis was promoting.