SOURCE: “Wyndham Lewis: Fascism, Modernism, and the Politics of Homosexuality,” in ELH, Vol. 60, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 527-43.

In the following excerpt, Hewitt responds to Fredric Jameson's conclusions in Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis as Fascist, and explores Lewis's attitudes toward nazis and homosexuals.

It is with a certain dismissive embarrassment that Fredric Jameson—in his treatment of Wyndham Lewis, a writer he otherwise admires—finally confronts the writings collected by Lewis under the title Hitler.¹ Characterizing this book as a “slapdash series of newspaper articles,” Jameson nevertheless uses this text to construct his theory of protofascism. If the embarrassment seems political—and if it is couched in aesthetic terms—I would nevertheless contend that it is neither aesthetics nor politics which is at issue here.² What Lewis is at pains to articulate—and what Jameson fails to foreground—is a socio-sexual analysis of fascism as the “inversion” of...