‘You Must Speak with Two Tongues’: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature

By 1914 the Vorticist artists had arrived at a style and aesthetic for their work through various routes, all of them independent of the concept of the vortex itself. For Wyndham Lewis, who along with Pound was the chief theorist of the movement, the concept of the vortex had mainly a rhetorical significance. Typically, he liked its potential for symbolizing contradictory qualities – first, Futurist dynamism, second, the stillness at its centre, the point of 'maximum energy'. Similarly, he liked the contradictory implications in the title of the magazine, Blast: simultaneously a destructive explosion and the germ cell from which an organism grows. The Blast manifestos were also double-barrelled. The Blast–Bless formula of the opening pages of the magazine was modelled on Apollinaire's 'L'anti-tradition futuriste' and its 'rose à' and 'merde à' format. What is different, and characteristic of Lewisian Vorticism, is that the Blast manifestos do not simply line up heroes and villains, for what is blasted on one page may be blessed a few pages later. France, England and Humour all receive this treatment. Self-contradiction is programmatic, self-conscious, playful but aggressive:

We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes.

We discharge ourselves on both sides.

We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the same cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours. ¹

This is a violent, expressive version of Nietzsche's 'perspectivism'. Perspectivism, or the multiplication of points of view, was Nietzsche's response to a weakening of faith in the coherence of the world and our models of it, a failing confidence in the Romantic idea that behind the world of appearances there lay some authentic absolute, or absolute authenticity. The whole of modernism turns around this crisis, which has its roots in the material history of modernity at least as much as in the philosophy that accompanies, or in Nietzsche's case seems to predict it.