ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a discursive level of the novel, which is connected to Wyndham Lewis's philosophical writings. This writings help us effect entry to its metaphysical kernel. Lewis has a recognized place in the history of modernism primarily because of his leadership of the Vorticist movement in London in 1914. While the boundaries of that movement are difficult to fix, its importance as a British response to the various European avant-gardes is not in doubt. In terms of its understanding of the consequences of modernity it follows the lead of Italian Futurism, though with its own inflection and by no means uncritically. The one novel of Lewis's that has a conspiracy at its heart belongs to this period of maximum paranoia; The Revenge for Love was written during 1934-1935. Its background, the unrest that would later lead to the Spanish Civil War and the reactions of fashionable left-wing London society to it, given Lewis's troubling political sympathies during the period.
