The Enemy of the Stars

Abstract

What follows, by way of a preface to a series of readings primarily of Lewis’ interwar work, is a reading of the experimental Vorticist play, Enemy of the Stars (1914), followed by a brief résumé of Lewis’ main work of political analysis, The Art of Being Ruled (1926). As this analysis indicates, the concept of the self expressed in Enemy of the Stars is superseded in the political work of the 1920s, but is carried up into that work in a different form, and remains an important point of reference for the campaign in defence of the personality which it preceded. This campaign involved Lewis in increasingly unsubtle assertions in his polemical work, although the fiction of this period is self-reflexive and equivocal. The campaign concluded with Lewis’ flight from England at the outbreak of war. In the subsequent years, after the grotesque failure of a Nazism which he had, with some qualification, supported, his guard seemed to relax and many of the old polemics were dropped. His late semi-autobiographical novel reveals the failure which it documents in its punning title: Self Condemned (1954). What precedes this partial surrender and confession of failure is the most elaborate defence of the Self ever mounted, a massive campaign rendered all the more Quixotic by the confessed insubstantiality of the concept at its centre.