ABSTRACT
Wyndham Lewis’s tentative testing the immersive precept upon himself in The Childermass proceeds organically from the novel’s conceptual grounding in carnival. The authorial surrogate in Lewis’s manifesto of high modernism, ‘The Code of a Herdsman’, is Benjamin Richard Wing. While the Vorticists of 1914 had come across as exhilarating real-life manifestations of the vivacious comedian of ‘Suite Clownesque’, by 1925 Lewis and Ezra Pound more closely resembled the ‘haranguing spectres’ that torment the vulnerable marionette of ‘Humouresque’. Meanwhile, James Joyce’s polyvocal prose is blamed for breaking down coherent categorisation in a manner that recalls G. K. Chesterton’s approval of 'the man the mob' has been melted in a monstrous furnace’, disintegration of discrete personality that finds a corollary in Bailiff’s chaotic consciousness. T. S. Eliot found convenient foil in Chesterton’s purposefully scattershot digressions upon cultural ephemera, against which he sharpened his reputation for scrupulous professionalism and, in so doing, created the contrary taste by which he was to be relished.
