SOURCE: A review of Fables of Aggression, in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer, 1980, pp. 307-10.

In the following review, Murray offers a negative assessment of Fables of Aggression.

In his Prologue to Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Fredric Jameson suggests that one of the most “extreme” of Wyndham Lewis’ “experimental texts,” The Apes of God, is “virtually unreadable for any sustained period of time” (p. 5). Alas, so too is Fables of Aggression.

Jameson’s often digressive study is not itself “experimental,” although it is the result of what Jameson calls a “methodological eclecticism”—a bit of narrative analysis here, a lot of psychoanalysis there, with some “modern approaches to ideology” and a dash of Marxist sermonizing thrown in for good measure. The de rigueur jargon of contemporary criticism also flourishes here and is often encased in a prose style not unlike that of...