Modernism and Time Part II: Wyndham Lewis versus ‘Subjective Time’

The following is an excerpt from Luke Gilfedder’s “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” published in September 2025 by Logos Verlag Berlin.

 

Lewis felt it was no surprise that those who experienced the cultural collapse and apocalyptic change of the early twentieth century came to “see and feel everything” in fragmented, subjective “revolutionary terms.” In response to these new conditions, Lewis’s contemporaries, like Bergson, sought to establish a new, revolutionary connection with time that displaced concerns with the “rational self” in favour of reviving “lived, immediate experience” (Beck, 2019, p. 81). For instance, the creative aspect of Jünger’s Worker was his construction of a ‘new subjectivity’ from crises, one acclimated to the “particular demands” of a totally mobilised landscape characterised by danger, “variability,” and the “malleability of the deployment of men and means” (Jünger, 2015, p. 74, p. 207). Similarly, Benjamin exchanged objective universal temporality for the “subjective experience” of qualitative time, where “every instant is lived in its incomparable singularity” (Mosès, quoted in Beck, 2019, p. 151). Benjamin’s “politics of interruption” represented a radical revision of the Augenblick or decisive-moment theme—central to conservative revolutionaries like Heidegger and Jünger—and an integration of subjective, “epiphanic” visions of time into politics, a vision through which Benjamin aimed to counter the crises engendered by capitalist teleology (Beck, 2019, p. 148).

Conversely, Lewis regarded subjective time as another consequence of the anthropocentric worldview developed during the Renaissance, which culminated in romanticism. The “subjectivism” of the romantic, ‘Faustian’ (or today ‘suprahuman’) man was “associated fanatically” with a “deep sense of the reality of Time” as “against ‘Space,’ the “pure Present” of the antique world. He maintained that subjective time was one of the “ultimate phases” of a “universal attack” upon ‘Substance,’ upon the “common-sense of the Schoolmen”, and, finally, upon the whole “rationalist body of dogma… the beliefs of the Classical World.” The temporal instability of the early twentieth century—Spengler’s “Faustian or present period”—turned mankind into a “very quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation,” rendering him a “shifting basis on which no equilibrium of habit and civilisation could be established”; in other words, a “Subjective Man.”

Similarly, for Taylor (1989), the temporal instability and ‘crisis consciousness’ of the early twentieth century shifted modern culture’s centre of gravity of culture from the unified “I” of Romanticism to the “fragmented ego” of modernism (Beck, 2019, p. 60). In aesthetic terms, this shift was reflected in the transition from a subject rooted in expressivity (Romanticism) to a self rooted in experience and language (modernism)—particularly the subjective comprehension of time. [1]

This shift was epitomised by Bergson’s philosophy, which advocated a radical pivot in philosophy from studying objective “abstract time” to emphasising the “lived time” of our inner subjective experience. Bergson (1910, p. 114) paradoxically considered lived time as “concrete time”—the real-time we experience in our own conscious life—and to this “concrete time of duration”, which took the shape of continuous flux, he gave the name durée.

In The Childermass, Bergson’s position is represented by the Bailiff, a Devilish Mr Punch who is completely obsessed with subjective time and durée (Schenker, 1992, p. 146). Responding to a critical appellant at his court (Macrob), he shouts:

Eternity is in love with the productions of Time! The Eternal loves Time if you do not! …Time is the mind of Space – Space is the mere body of Time. Time is life, Time is money, Time is all good things! – Time is God! (Lewis, 1965b, p. 229)

Here, time is understood not as an abstract entity but, à la Bergson, as an immediate subjective experience, as durée—an inner experience grasped by intuition (Taşdalen, 2003, p. 11). For Lewis, in an age that increasingly values the subjective and the self, “Time” becomes “God” (Schenker, 1992, p. 147).

The very environs of the book—the phantasmagoric time flats— can be considered a sardonic dramatisation of this logic, a manifestation of Bergon’s durée put into “crazy practice”. It is as if Lewis is saying: “You want a world without Space, a featureless world given over to Time? Very well; here is what it will be like!”. Pullman and Satters are thrust into the deepest clouds of “space-time”, a Bergsonian hell where the objective world has been degraded into a farce of subjective time, with everything in constant flux. As Bergson (1911a p. 2) put it: “The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.” Macrob is one of the few who dares challenge this notion of constant becoming and change, protesting to the Bailiff: “This static degradation is the opposite, even, of the becoming to which you are so partial”—a direct retort to Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1910, p. 207), which (in strikingly similar terms) discusses the extra-spatial “degrading itself into spatiality.” As a consequence of his protest, Macrob is cut into “fragments… stuffed and stamped” into a “large executioner’s basket.”

The Childermass suggests that, for Lewis, the emphasis on change in subjective time is a distortion of the natural order, a “rendering back” to LIFE—that “feverish chaos”—all that the mind had taken from her to build into forms and concepts. [2] This is why he rejected Futurism and Spengler as “Romantic” for fetishising time and instead championed “ahistoric” and “static” Classical cultures (Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian) for their emphasis on the “hard-edged” forms of space, as well as the ‘Classical Man’ who focused on the “immediate and sensuous… the ‘spatial’”. [3] For Eden (2023, p. 121), these assertions underscore Lewis’s essentialism, his devotion to ‘essence’ as contrary to ‘being’ and ‘becoming’—an essentialism expressed in Time and Western Man’s preference for Parmenides, who emphasised the unchanging and eternal nature of reality, over Heraclitus, the ‘weeping philosopher’ who proposed there is “nothing but dissolution and vanishing away, so that the river into which you step is never twice the same river, but always a different one”. [4]

Edwards (2016) also reads Time and Western Man as a critique of philosophies of becoming for their propensity to dissolve both individual personality (subject) and external world (object) into “streams of… breathless transformations”, none of which have any more reality than any other. The modernist disciples of Bergson’s ‘subjective time’ wish to return us to that ‘feverish chaos’ of pure sensation, where “identities dissolve”, and there is no “coolness of separation between you and me or between either of us or the senses that compose the empirical world” (Edwards, 2016, p.104). Lewis considered this a struggle between the ‘classical’ spatial world of common sense and a ‘dogmatic primitivism’—a primitivism which, in its oxymoronic incarnation among his contemporaries as ‘modernist primitivism’, he critiqued in his 1929 work Paleface. [5]

For Lewis, the pursuit of unity—the guiding motif of modernism’s turn to myth, primitive intuition, and ‘Time-worship’—threatened the disastrous collapse of the sacrosanct dualism between subject and object. His endorsement of the “rational logos” against modernism’s irrational inclinations was thus a theoretical strategy aimed at restoring this dualism and preserving the oppositional binary upon which individuality and (crucially) art—as we see in the next chapter—depended. To counter these philosophies of ‘becoming’ that defy easy separation between subject and object, Vorticism figured “movements of vision” as an “arrest and detachment from the great mechanism of the world” (McLuhan 2011, p. 11). McLuhan categorises Lewis’s artistic intellectualism as essentially Schopenhauerian: for Schopenhauer, who derided the German Idealists’ obsession with historical becoming, the principal worth of aesthetic beauty also lay in achieving a state of “pure contemplation, temporarily suppressing all willing, i.e., all desires and concerns” (Schopenhauer, quoted in Sutherland, 2018, p. 13).

Yet this conclusion—that Lewis simply adopts a traditionalist notion of a superior, metaphysical, immortal, and ahistorical realm of Being against the flux of modernity—is problematised in The Childermass. Lewis’s depiction of characters in the afterlife—who are not ‘purified’ essences but remain as socially conditioned as they were in life—suggests the ‘anti-traditional’ Heideggerian critique that, contra Evola, Being itself is inherently “changeable” and “historical” (Cleary, 2020). Once again, we find a postmodern scepticism—or, more precisely, Shakespeare’s “signifying nothing!”—undercutting Lewis’s metaphysics.

The Time Flats’ satiric take on Bergson’s ‘subjective time’ also engages with broader trends concerning subjectivity in the post-war period, an era characterised by significant advancements in language, science, and psychology, all of which contributed to a more fragmented perception of reality. Saussure introduced his linguistics of “perception and not of expression” (Greimas, cited in Schleifer 1987, p. xix), Freudian subjectivity gained prominence, and Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged Newton’s absolute concept of space and time. According to Lewis (1989a, p. 18), the colliding “constellations” of “wars and revolutions” with the resultant changes in meaning and consciousness created a sense of departure from the past, a feeling that “something had been skipped.” Language, struggling to keep pace with this rapid “change-stream”, decayed with “imprecision—the mere act of naming and describing could no longer capture the new sensibilities of the time.

In response, modernist literature broke from both Romanticism and its mid-nineteenth-century successor, literary Realism. Novels like Ulysses (and, more self-critically, The Childermass) adopted new experimental styles, rejecting critical aspects of literary Realism such as the reliable narrator, a stable sense of self, chronological narratives, and objective, unified perspectives of society and neat narrative closures (Childs, 2000; Yakin et al., 2014). Such changes reflected modernism’s scepticism regarding the possibility of absolute moral values and their increasing uncertainty about the nature of linear progress and objective temporality itself. Whereas Lewis turned outward to a ‘non-ethical’ and aggressively externalist satire, his contemporaries—influenced by Bergson, Freud, and Saussure— “turned inward”, placing a heightened valuation on the subjective and showing a fascination with the fragmented self (Konzett, 2015, p. 171). [6] Although Freud de-centred the individual and Einstein de-centred time, Saussure’s de-centring of language had the most immediate impact on this ‘inward turn’ in literary modernism. Saussure’s work contradicted the traditional realist view of language as a reflection of society, proposing that language “does not reflect” reality but constructs it (Chandler, 2002, p. 28). This perspective inspired modernism’s relativism and subjectivism, which later in the century developed into the nihilism of postmodern art.

Georg Lukács (1962, 1977) consequently critiqued modernism’s inward turn to subjectivity, seeing it as diametrically opposed to realism’s engagement with life. We must be wary, however, of overstating the difference between realism and modernism (Baldick, 2004). Unlike postmodern writers—who believe language is the only way to access reality—modernists still viewed language as a medium for conveying the world. Where postmodernists contend that ‘reality’ can only be interacted with subjectively via language, Modernists maintained that there did exist such a shared world, only that language was being stretched to breaking point in its endeavour to encompass it (Childs, 2000). The Childermass shows the struggle of this endeavour, and while a less ambitious work than, say, the proto-postmodernist Finnegan’s Wake (1939), it strives to be a book about the world (or at least, about a world), not the book “as the world” (Schenker, 1992, p. 139). [7]

The challenge for Modernism—existing “temporally and theoretically” between realism and postmodernism (Childs, 2000, p.62)—was that it became increasingly difficult to communicate a shared reality through language as words began to “slip, slide,” and “perish” under the “tension” of modernity (Eliot, 1959, p. 160). Paradoxically, this led to subjectivity emerging as a unifying concept for interpreting modern life. Individual perception was yoked to the collective historical consciousness of discontinuity, a phenomenon evident not only in Woolf’s pluralisation of subjectivity or Proust’s “subjective discontinuity” (Weinstein, 2005, p. 180) but also in the works of Jünger, Benjamin, and Bloch. [8] The writings of these modernists underscore the interconnection between a subjective apprehension of personal time and a fragmented collective consciousness of modern history (Beck, 2019).

Yet this modernist-Romantic shift from the “rationalist body of dogma” to collective subjectivity—a “new sensibility… now self-affirming or self-creating” (Pippin, 1991, p. 41)—was firmly opposed by Lewis. His emphasis on the critical intelligence’s role in revealing modernity’s degradations reflected a contrasting desire to revive classical Enlightenment values, seeking to confront the crises of time and values by reinforcing what remained of the Enlightenment’s rationalist aspirations (Wragg, 2005a). This explains why the vortex, rather than “freezing time”, offers a vantage from which one can observe the process of time from “outside itself” (Sutherland, 2018, p. 13)—the observer embodying Lewis’s belief in the power of the independent intellect and, above all, the artistic intellect to throw the mechanised world of flux into relief.

 

Full citations and references are available in “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” pp. 295–369.

link to Endnotes