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Title: Inferior Religions
   [The eighth story in Lewis's 1927 collection The Wild Body:
   A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories]
Author: Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1882-1957)
Date of first publication: 1927
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928
Date first posted: 18 January 2011
Date last updated: 18 January 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #702

This ebook was produced by Barbara Watson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This ebook was produced from images generously made
available by the Internet Archive






INFERIOR RELIGIONS

by Wyndham Lewis


PART I

To introduce my puppets, and the Wild Body, the generic puppet of all, I
must project a fanciful wandering figure to be the showman to whom the
antics and solemn gambols of these wild children are to be a source of
strange delight. In the first of these stories he makes his appearance.
The fascinating imbecility of the creaking men machines, that some
little restaurant or fishing-boat works, was the original subject of
these studies, though in fact the nautical set never materialized. The
boat's tackle and dirty little shell, or the hotel and its technique of
hospitality, keeping the limbs of the men and women involved in a
monotonous rhythm from morning till night, that was the occupational
background, placed in Brittany or in Spanish Galicia.

A man is made drunk with his boat or restaurant as he is with a
merry-go-round: only it is the staid, everyday drunkenness of the normal
real, not easy always to detect. We can all see the ascendance a
'carousal' has on men, driving them into a set narrow intoxication. The
wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of movements upon the donkey inside
it, in drawing water from the well, that it is easy to grasp. But in the
case of a hotel or fishing-boat, for instance, the complexity of the
rhythmic scheme is so great that it passes as open and untrammelled
life. This subtle and wider mechanism merges, for the spectator, in the
general variety of nature. Yet we have in most lives the spectacle of a
pattern as circumscribed and complete as a theorem of Euclid. So these
are essays in a new human mathematic. But they are, each of them, simple
shapes, little monuments of logic. I should like to compile a book of
forty of these propositions, one deriving from and depending on the
other. A few of the axioms for such a book are here laid down.

These intricately moving bobbins are all subject to a set of objects or
to one in particular. Brotcotnaz is fascinated by one object, for
instance; one at once another vitality. He bangs up against it wildly at
regular intervals, blackens it, contemplates it, moves round it and
dreams. He reverences it: it is his task to kill it. All such
fascination is religious. The damp napkins of the inn-keeper are the
altar-cloths of his rough illusion, as Julie's bruises are the markings
upon an idol; with the peasant, Mammon dominating the background.
Zoborov and Mademoiselle Pronnette struggle for a Pension de Famille,
unequally. Zoborov is the 'polish' cuckoo of a stupid and ill-managed
nest.

These studies of rather primitive people are studies in a savage worship
and attraction. The inn-keeper rolls between his tables ten million
times in a realistic rhythm that is as intense and superstitious as are
the figures of a war-dance. He worships his soup, his damp napkins, the
lump of procreative flesh probably associated with him in this task.
Brotcotnaz circles round Julie with gestures a million times repeated.
Zoborov camps against and encircles Mademoiselle Prronette and her
lover Carl. Bestre is the eternal watchdog, with an elaborate civilized
ritual. Similarly the Cornac is engaged in a death struggle with his
'Public.' All religion has the mechanism of the celestial bodies, has a
dance. When we wish to renew our idols, or break up the rhythm of our
navet, the effort postulates a respect which is the summit of
devoutness.


PART II

I would present these puppets, then, as carefully selected specimens of
religious fanaticism. With their attendant objects or fetishes they live
and have a regular food and vitality. They are not creations, but
puppets. You can be as exterior to them, and live their life as little,
as the showman grasping from beneath and working about a Polichinelle.
They are only shadows of energy, not living beings. Their mechanism is a
logical structure and they are nothing but that.

Boswell's Johnson, Mr. Veneering, Malvolio, Bouvard and Pcuchet, the
'commissaire' in _Crime and Punishment_, do not live; they are congealed
and frozen into logic, and an exuberant hysterical truth. They transcend
life and are complete cyphers, but they are monuments of dead
imperfection. Their only significance is their egoism. So the great
intuitive figures of creation live with the universal egoism of the
poet. This 'Realism' is satire. Satire is the great Heaven of Ideas,
where you meet the titans of red laughter; it is just below intuition,
and life charged with black illusion.


PART III

When we say 'types of humanity,' we mean violent individualities, and
nothing stereotyped. But Quixote, Falstaff, and Pecksniff attract, in
our memory, a vivid following. All difference is energy, and a category
of humanity a relatively small group, and not the myriads suggested by a
generalization.

A comic type is a failure of a considerable energy, an imitation and
standardizing of self, suggesting the existence of a uniform
humanity,--creating, that is, a little host as like as ninepins;
instead of one synthetic and various ego. It is the laziness that is the
habit-world or system of a successful personality. It is often part of
our own organism become a fetish. So Boswell's Johnson or Sir John
Falstaff are minute and rich religions.

That Johnson was a sort of god to his biographer we readily see. But
Falstaff as well is a sort of english god, like the rice-bellied gods of
laughter in China. They are illusions hugged and lived in; little dead
totems. Just as all gods are a repose for humanity, the big religions an
immense refuge and rest, so are these little grotesque fetishes. One
reason for this is that, for the spectator or participator, it is a
world within the world, full of order, even if violent.

All these are forms of static art, then. There is a great deal of divine
olympian sleep in english humour, and its delightful dreams. The most
gigantic spasm of laughter is sculptural, isolated, and essentially
simple.


PART IV

I will catalogue the attributes of Laughter.

   1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.

   2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and
      smelling self-consciously.

   3. Laughter is the hark of delight of a gregarious animal at the
      proximity of its kind.

   4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid
      emotion.

   5. Laughter is the representative of tragedy, when tragedy is away.

   6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight.

   7. Laughter is the female of tragedy.

   8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing
      and flapping about until it dies.

   9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the
      anarchist.

  10. Laughter is the mind sneezing.

  11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or
      in expression dynamic.

  12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and
      unchangeable.


PART V

The Wild Body, I have said, triumphs in its laughter. What is the Wild
Body?

The Wild Body, as understood here, is that small, primitive, literally
antediluvian vessel in which we set out on our adventures. Or regarded
as a brain, it is rather a winged magic horse, that transports us hither
and thither, sometimes rushing, as in the Chinese cosmogonies, up and
down the outer reaches of space. Laughter is the brain-body's snort of
exultation. It expresses its wild sensation of power and speed; it is
all that remains physical in the flash of thought, its friction: or it
may be a defiance flung at the hurrying fates.

The Wild Body is this supreme survival that is us, the stark apparatus
with its set of mysterious spasms; the most profound of which is
laughter.


PART VI

The chemistry of personality (subterranean in a sort of cemetery, whose
decompositions are our lives) puffs up in frigid balls, soapy Snowmen,
arctic carnival-masks, which we can photograph and fix.

Upwards from the surface of existence a lurid and dramatic scum oozes
and accumulates into the characters we see. The real and tenacious
poisons, and sharp forces of vitality, do not socially transpire. Within
five yards of another man's eyes we are on a little crater, which, if it
erupted, would split up as would a cocoa-tin of nitrogen. Some of these
bombs are ill-made, or some erratic in their timing. But they are all
potential little bombs. Capriciously, however, the froth-forms of these
darkly-contrived machines twist and puff in the air, in our legitimate
and liveried masquerade.

Were you the female of Bestre or Brotcotnaz and beneath the counterpane
with him, you would be just below the surface of life, in touch with a
tragic organism. The first indications of the proximity of the real soul
would be apparent. You would be for hours beside a filmy crocodile,
conscious of it like a bone in an X-ray, and for minutes in the midst of
a tragic wallowing. The soul lives in a cadaverous activity; its
dramatic corruption thumps us like a racing engine in the body of a car.
The finest humour is the great play-shapes blown up or given off by the
tragic corpse of life underneath the world of the camera. This futile,
grotesque, and sometimes pretty spawn, is what in this book is
snapshotted by the imagination.

Any master of humour is an essential artist; even Dickens is no
exception. For it is the character of uselessness and impersonality
which is found in laughter (the anarchist emotion concerned in the comic
habit of mind) that makes a man an 'artist.' So when he begins living on
his laughter, even in spite of himself a man becomes an artist. Laughter
is that arch complexity that is really as simple as bread.


PART VII

In this objective play-world, corresponding to our social consciousness,
as opposed to our solitude, no final issue is decided. You may blow away
a man-of-bubbles with a burgundian gust of laughter, but that is not a
personality, it is an apparition of no importance. But so much
correspondence it has with its original that, if the cadaveric travail
beneath is vigorous and bitter, the dummy or mask will be of a more
original grotesqueness. The opposing armies in the early days in
Flanders stuck up dummy-men on poles for their enemies to pot at, in a
spirit of ferocious banter. It is only a shell of that description that
is engaged in the sphere of laughter. In our rather drab revel there is
a certain category of spirit that is not quite inanimate and yet not
very funny. It consists of those who take, at the Clarkson's situated at
the opening of their lives, some conventional Pierrot costume. This is
intended to assure them a minimum of strain, of course, and so is a
capitulation. In order to evade life we must have recourse to those
uniforms, but such a choice leaves nothing but the white and ethereal
abstraction of the shadow of laughter.

So the King of Play is not a phantom corresponding to the sovereign
farce beneath the surface. The latter must always be reckoned on: it is
the Skeleton at the Feast, potentially, with us. That soul or dominant
corruption is so real that he cannot rise up and take part in man's
festival as a Falstaff of unwieldy spume. If he comes at all it must be
as he is, the skeleton or bogey of veritable life, stuck over with
corruptions and vices. As such he could rely on a certain succs
d'estime: nothing more.


PART VIII

A scornful optimism, with its confident onslaughts on our snobbism, will
not make material existence a peer for our energy. The gladiator is not
a perpetual monument of triumphant health: Napoleon was harried with
Elbas: moments of vision are blurred rapidly, and the poet sinks into
the rhetoric of the will.

But life is invisible, and perfection is not in the waves or houses that
the poet sees. To rationalize that appearance is not possible. Beauty is
an icy douche of ease and happiness at something _suggesting_ perfect
conditions for an organism: it remains suggestion. A stormy landscape,
and a pigment consisting of a lake of hard, yet florid waves; delight in
each brilliant scoop or ragged burst, was John Constable's beauty.
Leonardo's consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads, and
heads of massive female aesthetes. Uccello accumulated pale parallels,
and delighted in cold architecture of distinct colour. Korin found in
the symmetrical gushing of water, in waves like huge vegetable insects,
traced and worked faintly, on a golden pte, his business. Czanne liked
cumbrous, democratic slabs of life, slightly leaning, transfixed in
vegetable intensity.

Beauty is an immense predilection, a perfect conviction of the
desirability of a certain thing, whatever that thing may be. It is a
universe for one organism. To a man with long and consumptive fingers, a
sturdy hand may be heaven. We can aim at no universality of form, for
what we see is not the reality. Henri Fabre was in every way a superior
being to a Salon artist, and he knew of elegant grubs which he would
prefer to the Salon's painter's nymphs.--It is quite obvious though, to
fulfil the conditions of successful art, that we should live in
relatively small communities.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

The following changes were made to the original text:
Page 238: progess ==> progress
Page 242: like ==> liked

Minor variations in spelling and punctuation have been preserved.




[End of Inferior Religions, by Wyndham Lewis]
