SOURCE: "The Short Stories of Wyndham Lewis," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall, 1970, pp. 615-24.

In the following essay, Materer discusses Lewis's comic theory and sense of irony in The Wild Body, arguing that the narrator of the sequence of stories, Ker-Orr, like Lewis, views the world from a detached but not disinterested perspective and sees comedy as springing from the discrepancies between human beings' physical bodies and intellectual aspirations.

The short stories of Wyndham Lewis were enthusiastically received by critics like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot when they were first published and have earned renewed praise in the past few years. As an editor of The Little Review, Pound, supported by Eliot in The Egoist, championed Lewis' early writings and welcomed him as a fellow revolutionary.¹ In recent years, V. S. Pritchett and John Holloway in England, as well as Raymond Rosenthal in America...