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| Wyndham Lewis: |
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| The Complete Wild Body |
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Edited by Bernard Lafourcade
Illustrations by Wyndham Lewis |
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This edition not only makes available the full original text of Wyndham Lewis's brilliant, long-neglected 'Wild Body', but also makes clear the savage magnitude of this remarkable collection of stories, providing a copious assembly of early texts not included in the original 1927 edition. This additional material called ''The Archaeology of the Wild Body'' comprises nearly half the present volume and provides invaluable hints about the development of a work that the editor calls ''Lewis's great initial outburst and everlasting source of references for what was to prove most actively vital in his vision.''
His narrator in these tales (whose characters in Lewis's words are ''little dead totems'') is Ker-Orr, a soi-disant ''soldier of humor'' who also describes himself as ''a large blond clown, ever so vaguely reminiscent (in person) of William Blake, and some great American boxer whose name I forget. I have large strong teeth which I gnash and flash when I laugh ... But all the fierceness has become transformed into laughter.''
The laughter of the Wild Body, a headstrong infant civilization standing on the pre-war ruins of its parents, is hard, incisive and accurate. Here is part of Lewis's inventory of the attributes of that laughter. |
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| 1 |
Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph... |
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Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-conciously. |
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Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind... |
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Laughter is an independent, tremenously important, and lurid emotion. |
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Laughter is the representative of tragedy, when tragedy is away. |
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Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight. |
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Laughter is the female of tragedy. |
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Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies. |
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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. |
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418 pages, Cloth Trade, 6'' x 9'' (230 x 150 mm)
36 b/w illustrations, English
ISBN: 0-87685-552-4 |
| $ 25.00 |
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| About the Editor: |
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Bernard Lafourcade was born in 1934 in Grenoble and attended the universities of Grenoble, Oxford (Worcester College) and the Sorbonne. He was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Savoy in Chambéry.
Co-author of 'A Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis' (Black Sparrow, 1978), he has written a number of articles on Lewis and translated 'Cantleman's Spring-Mate' (Paris, 1968), 'Tarr' (Paris, 1970), 'The Revenge for Love' (Lausanne, 1980) and 'The Wild Body' (in collaboration, Lausanne, 1980).
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