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 prevailing political and sexual paradigms. In this paper I wish to examine the way in which one leading modernist figure attempts to chart both his fascination—and subsequent disenchantment—with fascism in terms of a theory of “inversion.” I will argue that Lewis's analysis of modernity—his critique of contemporary politics, and his original enthusiasm for Nazism—is structured taxonomically in terms of an analysis of homosexuality.

We might begin by looking at the interpretive exclusions practiced by Jameson's analysis when confronted with the libidinal structure of Lewis's protofascism. In a division of narrative and ideology quite alien to his usual method of critical reading, Jameson writes:

The political point made here is that Nazi street violence is essentially a reaction to Communist violence and provocation; yet the inevitable narrative point is rather different: ‘But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive [the tourist], with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home … Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees) after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men …’ (24). With this characteristic and obsessive motif out of the way, we come to the political analysis proper.³

Firstly, a curious division is set up between the two things Jameson is otherwise concerned to link—namely, “the political point” and “the inevitable narrative point.” This latter, moreover, appears as something to be got “out of the way” in order to clear the ground for “the political analysis proper.” Given Jameson's methodological insistence upon a notion of “libidinal apparatus” as the mediation of narrative and political structures, the division drawn at this point is startling, to say the least. The “inevitable narrative point”—the encounter in the ‘Eldoradi’ bar—is evaded rather nicely, and the question of sexual undecidability introduced by the transvestite is rendered decidedly apolitical. In what follows, I seek to mend that division, to recuperate the narrative of these “bland Junos-gone-wrong” as itself something inevitably and crucially political rather than something to be got “out of the way.”

Lewis wishes to present fascism as the essence of the political, as politics unencumbered by the moralizing concerns of liberal western democracies—concerns Lewis has already addressed in The Art Of Being Ruled.⁴ What are opposed in Hitler are “moralist culs de sac” (H, 22-23), and prohibition is cited as the prime example. Prohibition notwithstanding, however, the direct sexual coding of these culs (de sac) cannot be ignored. In his most lapidary articulation of the relationship of morality to politics, Lewis observes that “the Bank is more important than the Backside” (H, 22). It is “sex-moralism” that Lewis is gunning for: “The sex-moralist is not only a bore,” he asserts, “but should, I think, always be suspect” (H, 21). The sexual politics that concerns Lewis—or, rather, which does not concern him, which he shuns as a diversion—is predominantly a politics of anality. It is a politics which, in The Art of Being Ruled, he has already identified with the “homo,” the “invert,” the “joy-boy,” the “exoletos,” and the “shaman.”

“Inversion”—as both phenomenon and structure—is a continuing obsession in Lewis's work—and it is only in terms of the later Hitler writings that the political machinations of The Art Of Being Ruled can be understood. I will, therefore, begin with a consideration of the construction of homosexuality in Hitler in order to understand how, at one level, this text seems to complicate the one-sided presentation of homosexuality as effeminacy in the earlier work, but how, in fact, it serves to render explicit certain sexual and political tensions already operative in The Art Of Being Ruled. Finally, it will be possible to trace the process of Lewis's disappointment with fascism through his reworking of the homosexual construction in the 1939 recantation test, The Hitler Cult.⁵

In Hitler, Lewis resigns himself to a curious methodological paradox. Berlin will be presented as “the quartier-général of dogmatic perversity—the Perverts' Paradise, the Mecca of both Lesb. and So.” (H, 21). To realize the incommensurability of morality and politics, the Anglo-saxon reader—the “sightseer”—must nevertheless take a diversion through the gilded halls of the transvestite bar, the ‘Eldorado.’ There, he will encounter that scene which Jameson passed over so quickly:

But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive him, with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home. Still, he will have to be a sightseer of some penetration not to think that his sight-seeing eyes may not this time be destined to gloat, upon what he had promised them they should find there. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine showgirl guardees), after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. Oh dear!—so, after all, the sightseeing eyes are going to be satisfied! And they will goggle at the slightly smiling bland Edwardian ‘tart’ at their side—still disposed to regard this as a hoax after all, for it is too like, it is too true to nature by far. (H, 24)

Before asking exactly what this scene is doing here, we should first look closely at its dramatization of deception and revelation with respect to transvestism. The expectation of the “sightseer” is itself disguised—travestied perhaps—by a set of double negatives: “he will have to be a sightseer of some penetration not to think that his sightseeing eyes may not this time be destined to gloat, upon what he had promised them they should find there” (emphasis added). Denuded of its negatives, the sentence indicates that the sightseer has, in fact, come in search not of women, but of the transvestite—and that, “after all, the sightseeing eyes are going to be satisfied.” In other words, the deception of the transvestite does not lie primarily in the convincing representation of a woman, but in the unconvincing representation of a transvestite. Deception and disappointment cannot be disentangled. The “original”—that which is sought—is the transvestite, not the woman. At the moment of revelation, it is no longer a question of the man impersonating the woman, but rather of an imaginary woman impersonating the man who impersonates her. The transvestite who simply looks like a woman is not enough, for what is required is a double deception: firstly, deception—in the sense of disappointment—that this woman is, after all, only a woman, followed the recognition of the deception, of the fact that she is a man.

The paradoxical situation of the transvestite, then, results from the double-bind of all representation. He is “too like, … too true to nature by far.” Strangely, the transvestite is not rejected as something contrary to nature: quite the opposite, s/he is potentially too true—to the extent, even, of a “dull naturalism.” The transvestite must be like enough to convince, but unlike enough for the sightseer to recognize the art of impersonation. As a result:

The ‘feminine’ will never be quite the same for him again. Who can say if this will be for his good or no? The sex-absolute will to some extent have been disintegrated for him by this brief encounter—it will have caused him to regard, with a certain skeptical squint, all specifically feminine personality. This may, after all (it is not too venturesome to believe), be of great use to him, even, in the subsequent conduct of his life. Such radical Enttäuschang might even be of great economic value to the average sightseer, in his struggle with nature and her expensive traps and tricks. (H, 20)

The transvestite lifts femininity out of the realm of biology and into the realm of politics in a way which, according to Lewis, the woman cannot. The feminine—estranged from the body of the woman—reveals itself as a categorial and political construction. The realm of the political becomes synonymous with the realm of signs. The transvestite denatures and politicizes not only the category of the feminine, but the very modality of representation itself. Only where the feminine is reduced to a system of signs opposed to the dictates of biology does it reveal itself as an ideological social construct and material for political reconstruction. The naive faith in appearance and the naive faith in woman are shed at one and the same time.

The questions foregrounded by Lewis here, however, are less questions of gender than of modes of representation—aesthetic questions. “Too true to nature by half” the transvestite enacts “the dull naturalism of the male copycat,” which, Lewis nevertheless asserts, “is not to be despised” (H, 27). Far from offering something “unnatural”—the usual moralistic response to homosexuality—the transvestite offers only a “dull naturalism.” Lewis's position is, after all, aesthetic rather than moral. But what is the aesthetic value of his judgment? He does not despise such naturalism—but why not, if it is so “dull”? The answer would seem to lie in the impossibility of the deception. In order that the transvestite be a transvestite, a certain game must be played with representation. The man apparently disappears into the woman—representation is complete. But in order to be complete as representation, a certain residue—exemplified here by “the male token of the chinstubble” (H, 25)—is necessary to mark the play of signifier and signified. This gendered residue represents that element of the signifier which will not subsume itself in the signified. Thus, transvestism reveals the precise limitations of naturalism, subtly deconstructing its own aesthetic.

At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we should, perhaps, pause at this encounter with the transvestite—this experience of “Enttäuschung”—and trace its political implications for Lewis's own subsequent disappointment with fascism. For, from the perspective of the encounter in the ‘Eldorado,’ this disappointment—chronicled in 1939 in The Hitler Cult—will prove not to have been a disappointment at all. Lewis—the sightseer” in search of a specifically German phenomenon—will have found it not in fascism, as he had thought, but in the transvestite whom he had sought to depoliticize and marginalize. This realization emerges by 1939, as Lewis reflects that:

Nietzsche, who was a philologist de carrière, believed that the word Deutsche was to be traced to the same root as the verb täuschen (to deceive). The Germans, he said, were the people who deceived: a deceptive people. (HC, 41)

If the transvestite might be said to be an embodiment at all, then she is the embodiment of the Germanic Täuschung. Far from offering a diversion to the journalist in search of the new German essence, the transvestite—whose existence as representation seems so contrary to all essence—is that essence. Like the transvestite—or so, at least, runs the narrative of Lewis's own disappointment—Germany does not offer that essence which was sought. This deception and disappointment, indeed, is Germany's essence. And if the sightseer is obliged to travel to Berlin to grasp the essence of the political, he will be disappointed: that is to say, he will grasp that essence as deception.

If the transvestite shatters all faith in the signified—the feminine—he also shatters all faith in the infallible signifier. S/he cannot be resolved into either gender. And the Germans—the Nazi “ascetics of politics” (H, 28)—are no less irresolute. When you feel that they reveal their essence, they deceive. But this deception is their essence, and is, therefore, no deception at all. This is the “radical Enttäuschung,” the recognition that the deception is not a deception, that we are deceived in thinking it so. Lewis wishes to write the issue off as a simple Enttäuschung in the object—the feminine—but it should be remembered that the sightseer did not come in search of the feminine in the first place. He came in search of deception—or, rather, of Enttäuschung of de-deception—and this is what he finds; the sightseer in the transvestite, Lewis in fascism. In other words, a careful reading of the ‘Eldorado’ episode will reveal as disingenous Lewis's later narrative of his own political disappointment.

As we shall see with reference to The Art Of Being Ruled, Lewis is not guilty of simply conflating the transvestite and the homosexual. In fact, the transvestite both radicalizes and negates Lewis's characterization of the “invert.” Where the invert will use signs—“a red tie, or its equivalent in the approved badges of sexual revolt” (AOBR, 237)—the transvestite is a sign. Above and beyond the figure of the transvestite, there is in Hitler a second paradigm of homosexuality, which occurs in the context of Lewis's critique of “exoticism.” The first indication of this substrain comes in Lewis's enumeration of the sexual diversions offered by the Berlin nightlife—diversions that include the “sad wells of super-masculine loneliness” (H, 13). In contrast to the effeminization both exemplified and deconstructed by the transvestite, these locales offer an exaggeration and perversion of an image of masculinity. If the transvestite paradigm is itself already ambiguous enough, the thematization of homosexuality is now further complicated by this second model of super-masculinity.

Clearly, the superimposition of a masculine-feminine dichotomy onto the question of homosexuality merely serves to reassert a gendered order that homosexuality itself threatens to disrupt within Lewis's argument. Nevertheless, it is important to note the context in which homosexual super-masculinity is elaborated. Seeking an ideological pedigree for the “super-masculine,” Lewis presents it as emerging from a tradition which also spawns the Nazi “Blutsgefühl”:

Nationalsocialism builds upon this blood-feeling! What Walt Whitman termed ‘the talk of the turning eyeballs’—it is that that you are required to understand. But whereas Walt Whitman (with his cosmic enthusiasms, his bursting and blatant romanticism, his lyrical cult of a universal brotherhood) sought to enlist this sort of fleshly second-sight in the service of diffusion, the present-day Blutsgefühl doctrinaires invoke it on behalf of a greater concentration. (H, 106)

Lewis goes on to stress the differences between the two models represented by Whitman and by Nazism respectively. The distinction between fascism and the super-masculine lies in that very asceticism of fascism, in its concentration, as opposed to the diffusion of the invert. However, the similarities (for Lewis) must not be overlooked: the homosexual poet is being used both as an opponent and as a precursor of a certain Nazi racialism.

Whitman—while never acknowledged by Lewis as a homosexual figure—is located within a tradition of “exoticism,” which apparently stretches back even further to Blake. It is in describing Blake that Lewis betrays the terms within which this second homosexual paradigm—the paradigm of super-masculinity—might be thematized. He imagines:

The naked figures of Mr. and Mrs. Blake squatting in their suburban conservatory among the flower-pots playing at being Adam and Eve before the Fall, taken straight out of the puritan Bible. …

He claims that they:

match very well the rhetorical nudity of ‘Walt,’ genitals well to the fore in true patriarchal fashion, in the Atlantic surf upon the distant shores of the New World—the New Anglo-saxony at that time. (H, 107)

Whitman and the Blakes mark the attempt to represent that edenic state prior to representation itself—and it is the phallus of Whitman (“well to the fore”) which grounds that mode of representation. If we have spoken so far of a certain anality in the model of effeminization, it is clear that Whitman's super-masculinity is to be understood both genitally and patriarchally.

While Lewis mocks Whitman as an example of Western exoticism—and therefore as a symptom of the decline he seeks to chart—he nevertheless lets him stand as the emblem of a racial “New Anglo-saxony.” To leap ahead once more—preempting both my own argument and Lewis's political development—the implications of Whitman for Lewis's experience of fascism will also be made explicit in the 1939 book on The Hitler Cult. Here—mocking Hitler's own “exoticism”—Lewis will note that “Adolf Hitler bathes in the music of Wagner much in the same way as Walt Whitman bathed in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean” (HC, 61). It is the similarity between Whitman's and Hitler's Blutsgefühl—rather than any differentiation—which proves more persistent in Lewis's political vision. If we note in passing that by 1939 Lewis is also referring to Hitler as a “dreamy-eyed hairdresser” (HC, 103), taking note of his “beautiful eyes” (HC, vii) and the temperament of “a hysterical prima donna” (HC, 78), it will not be hard to imagine the type of ideological reconciliation which is going to take place in Lewis's characterizations of homosexuality and fascism: fascism itself will eventually be rejected as in some sense “homosexualized.” We should note, however, that this assertion—which will legitimate Lewis's repudiation of National Socialism in 1939—is already quite clearly present in the text of Hitler which is so much more favorable to fascism.

In broadening his model of homosexuality to include the supermasculine, Lewis polarizes not only between the masculine and the feminine, but between the rhetorical and the representational as aesthetic modalities. The transvestite was to be understood with reference to a certain system of representation, which he merely seemed to transgress (as a man representing a woman) but which he in fact exemplified. This representation was figured as a form of clothing—a cross-dressing. What Whitman offers, meanwhile, in the ostentatious self-evidence of his genitals, is a “rhetorical nudity.” From the realm of clothing, the realm of the sign, we seem to have arrived at the possibility of a truth stripped of its dependence upon signification.

In terms of the naivete Lewis is criticizing, one would be tempted to interpret this denuding as an escape from rhetoric, as a stripping away of language in the immanence of ostentation—the presentation of the phallus. But this nudity is itself merely “rhetorical.” Lewis is rejecting the naivete of any pre-linguistic political utopia. What Whitman in fact offers—along with his doubtless most impressive penis—is naked rhetoric, pure presentation. Not, that is, the immanence of the true—but rather the immanence of the medium itself, of rhetoric. In other words, what we have is an asceticism—comparable to the political asceticism of the Nazi, though not necessarily to be conflated, politically, with it. But this homosexualized asceticism is at the same time an aesthetic, a “rhetorical nudity”—naked rhetoric, but a nakedness which is itself merely rhetorical, rather than real. It cannot be decided whether this ascetic aesthetic is “pure” precisely because it can only ever be the presentation of “impure” aesthetic representation in its “pure” ascetic form.

It is obvious, then, that Lewis seeks to ground his political thought within a tropology of homosexuality. The question is: how to theorize this fact? It is tempting—in the light of the obvious misogyny in The Art Of Being Ruled and Lewis's insistent characterization of the “homo” as the child of the suffragette” (AOBR, 244)—to subsume the treatment of homosexuality within the broader framework of a feminist critique of gender binarism. Any such temptation should be resisted for two reasons. Firstly, the presentation of homosexuality—or “inversion” to use Lewis's ideologically loaded term—is by no means restricted to the terms of effeminization. By privileging and foregrounding this model—in the very use, for example, of the term “inversion” to suggest an axiomatic binarism of masculine and feminine—Lewis seeks to manipulate a scandal in order to confirm rather than question the gendered terms of his political critique. In fact, it is the figure of the non-effeminized homosexual that will cause Lewis much greater political embarrassment. Secondly, if the question of “sex-moralism” insists on raising its head in Hitler, it does so through the figure of a transvestite, who is not a necessarily homosexual figure, and who is troubling precisely because s/he resists the consignment of gender to the realm of biology. If politics exist in the public realm as the manipulation of signs of power, so too does transvestism. Moreover, the gender ambivalence of the transvestite provides a momentary and inevitable check to Lewis's critique of effeminization. As we shall see, s/he threatens not simply the straightforward social organization of gender, but also the critical gaze of the Anglo-saxon political sightseer.

Hitler seems to leave us with two crucial images. On the one hand, there is the transvestite, who is at once the apogee and the apocalypse both of effeminization and of a representational model of truth. On the other hand, there are the super-masculine, the homosocial exoticists of patriarchy. At a certain point in both paradigmatic presentations of inversion—both in the transvestite and in the super-masculine—the invert critiques precisely those ideological commonplaces of effeminization and universal brotherhood with which Lewis seeks to identify him. More than this, there are moments—most notably with Whitman's “turning of the eye”—when the invert comes perilously close to embodying precisely those political options which Lewis himself is seeking to put forward. The obsessive repression of sexuality—and the compulsive return of this repressed in the text of Hitler—would suggest that Lewis's “tolerance” of homosexuality (effected by virtue of its exclusion from the political sphere) is homophobic in the most radical sense of the word.⁶ Not only is the depoliticization of sexuality always and necessarily a political disenfranchisement, but homosexuality itself fundamentally questions the analytic categories around which Lewis orients his political world-view. The question of homosexuality must necessarily occur obsessively in the texts precisely because it is a phenomenon that scrambles the political codes which Lewis has earlier attempted to establish in The Art Of Being Ruled.

Even in The Art Of Being Ruled, however, the gendered binarisms around which Lewis sought to thematize inversion are threatened by an instance of transvestism. In this case, however, Lewis consciously manipulates a narrative of transvestism toward a critique of democracy. He traces the shortcomings of democracy back to an exemplary act of cross-dressing:

It often occurs (and we have to-day a unique picture of this in contemporary western society) that the ruler becomes a confirmed practitioner of one of Haroun al Raschid's most objectionable habits, namely that of spending his time disguised among his subjects as one of them. This tendency in a ruler is very much indeed to be deplored. (AOBR, 96)

It is only when this notion of democracy as a fraternizing disguise is placed alongside Lewis's gendered model of power—in which “the contrast between the one class and the other is more like that between the sexes than anything else. The ruled are the females and the rulers the males” (AOBR, 95-96)—that Haroun al Raschid's disguise reveals itself as drag. Disguised among his subjects, Haroun al Raschid must dress as a woman—for the subject is always a woman, the ruler always a man. Thus, the transvestite is the emblem of modern Western democratism—a ruler disguised as the ruled, a man disguised as a woman.

The reappearance of the transvestite in Hitler, then, is the disguised reappearance of the democratic. In refusing simply to condemn the transvestite, the Nazi refuses a simple inversion or condemnation of liberal democracy. Thus, this “diversion” through the ‘Eldorado’ is not a diversion at all; rather, it is crucial to Lewis's understanding of fascism as something more radical than simple inversion. In The Art Of Being Ruled Lewis has already confessed that

all the phrases of the sex-revolt—from the suffragette to the joy-boy are equally political at the start—as they certainly become at the finish. … Is it not the same old hag that in a ‘morality’ would be labelled Power, and for whom pleasure in the simplest sense, means very little, who has pupped this batch of related passions? (AOBR, 241)

In other words, the “diversion” offered by the Backside might not be altogether incommensurable with an insistence upon the “essence” of politics. In its essence, the political distills itself into a form of sexual politics. The politics of feminism and the politics of homosexuality are both born of Power, and Power—the category central to Lewis's analysis of the political in Hitler—is presented as a character in a ‘morality.’ Morality—or the ‘morality’—provides both stage and scenario for the political.

It is not, then, a question of simply noting the veiled political importance of the invert, but rather of identifying the invert as that instance in which the moral inevitably becomes a political issue. The invert is paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic—and it is for this reason that Lewis must consistently refashion the radical revolutionary possibility of homosexuality into mere “inversion,” into a purely determinate revolt against the intellect in which

Each little sensation has to be decked out as though it were a ‘big idea.’ Again, simple sensation has become ashamed of itself. It is persuaded to complicate itself, to invert itself with a movement of mechanical paradox. So, in reality, sensation pure and simple is disappearing, and a sort of spurious idea is everywhere taking its place. (AOBR, 244)

The strategy of this analysis will have become familiar to us. The revolt of sensuality against the intellect—by presenting itself as “a big idea”—has already undone itself and capitulated before the conceptualism it ostensibly opposes. Inversion is not simply the reversal of a certain value-system, it inverts each term into its other.

But even in this “mechanical”—that is, “spurious, utilitarian” (AOBR, 14)—form of revolution, neither of the original binary terms remains intact. In this presentation, the sensation is “decked out” as a big idea, as if transvestism were once again being taken as the model of inversion. However, the paradoxical reduction of the flesh to a “big idea” more accurately characterizes the ideology of that Whitmanesque, super-masculine homosexual, who—“genitals to the fore in true patriarchal fashion”—makes a “big idea” out of a small bodily organ. What Lewis seems to be suggesting is that a phallocentric patriarchy—as a “big idea”—is itself essentially effeminate. Subtly, the dichotomous model of Hitler—the division into effeminized and “super-masculine” models of inversion—is being undone. The super-masculine is itself being grounded in a notion of travesty, “decked out” as a big idea. What this entails is a reduction of the questions of revolution and homosexuality—the questions of a homosexual politics—to questions of representation and transvestism.

The very terminology of the language of “inversion” already suggests the position ascribed to homosexuality in Lewis's examination of revolution. Nothing could be more simple, more mechanical, or more “spurious,” than this simple inversion of terms. And yet, as we have seen in the case of the transvestite, the trans-coding of gender can never be reduced to a simple inversion of terms. Although Lewis argues in The Art Of Being Ruled that sexual inversion merely revolves around the organizational axes of the given world, his analysis of this particular “vicious circle” nevertheless produces—in the circle—a figure for the permanence of revolution celebrated elsewhere in the text.⁷

Having located the phenomenon historically, it remains for Lewis to pinpoint the sociological locus of inversion. There are three fundamental factors in Lewis's account. Firstly, as we have seen, he is quite clear, arguing that

The sex-revolution of the invert is a bourgeois revolution, in other words. The vetit bourgeois type predominates: a red tie, or its equivalent in the approved badges of sexual revolt, tells its theatrical tale. The puritan conscience, in anglo-saxon countries, provides the basis of the condiment and gives sex-inversion there its particular material physiognomy of protest and over-importance. (AOBR, 237)

The invert must remain petit bourgeois in his dependence upon the value-system he affronts. However, at the same time as he expresses his distaste for the petit bourgeois invert Lewis goes on to state a preference for the “true-blue invert” for “certainly he gives the impression of being much more male in the traditional and doctrinaire sense than any other male” (AOBR, 238). The “super-masculine” reasserts itself here—subsumed under the general category of inversion—but asserts itself as “true-blue.” In other words, Lewis is envisaging a genuine—perhaps “blue-blooded,” or “aristocratic”?—revolutionary impulse emanating from the phenomenon of inversion. The division derived from Hitler—the dual model of inversion as a caricature of the feminine (transvestism) and as a caricature of the masculine (the super-masculine)—explicates itself in socio-economic terms, by suggesting a division into petty bourgeois and aristocratic models of revolt. The critique of bourgeois inversion is a sustained one. Elsewhere, the world of the petty bourgeoisie is referred to as “an unreal, small middle-world or no-man's land” (AOBR, 108), and it is, perhaps, this formulation which best encapsulates the socio-political and historical significance of the invert for Lewis. The petty-bourgeoisie is itself characterized as a “no-man's” land, and it is precisely the “no-man”—the invert—who has come to occupy it.

The second and third vectors for tracing the emergence of “inversion” as a pressing political question are both related to the war. Lewis argues that

it is in the experiences of wartime that we must seek not only the impulsion, but in some sense the justification of sex-inversion, apart from its role in relation to the disintegration of the family unit (AOBR, 279)

Thus, “inversion”—as well as being a petty bourgeois phenomenon-results from the disintegration of the family unit. This observation, however, merely describes its “impulsion”: it will be in a third strain of analysis that Lewis will characterize its “justification.” Rather than seeing homosexuality as a reaction to the brutal masculinity of war, or as the frightened reaction of men seeking to avoid their role in that war, Lewis sees inversion as war by other means. Since the war to end all wars nevertheless left the violent structures of European expansionism intact, some other form of depopulation of the brutal white European must be found.⁸ Militarism was to have been its own cure—the militarists were to have killed each other off, but given the failure of the First World War in this respect, Lewis offers homosexuality as an alternative:

Nature—let us give her credit for it—has come to the help of her children … by way of the glands, namely. I believe that (in one form or another) castration may be the solution. And the feminization of the white European and American is already far advanced, coming in the wake of war. (AOBR, 51)

In other words, “inversion” is not so much a reaction to war as a continuation of it, aimed at the depopulation of Europe and North America!

Thus far, then, Lewis has isolated three factors in his genealogy of modern homosexuality: the disintegration of the family, the war-experience, and the emergence of the petty bourgeoisie. This particular configuration of determinant factors should itself raise a few eyebrows. For is it not precisely the same configuration which has long been held to be responsible for the emergence of fascism at a crucial moment of the modernist project?⁹ Moreover, Lewis's own ambiguity in respect of each of these instances suggests that the invert might—by the very logic of self-inversion—surreptitiously represent the brand of fascism which so interests Lewis himself. Lewis too despises the family: and while despising brutality he nevertheless celebrates war as a decimation of the “brutal white European.” Only in respect of the petty bourgeois origins of the inverts' revolution is he resolutely oppositional—and even here he holds out a possibility of reconciliation in his guarded celebration of the “true-blue invert.”

The possibility arises, then—no more comforting to gay theory than a would be to Lewis—that the traditional political dichotomy of democracy and fascism, far from being supported by a certain caricature of homosexuality, is deconstructed by it. The collapse of the family, the war experience and the emergence of the petty bourgeoisie—the historical preconditions of fascism and, for Lewis, of inversion—already indicate the possibility of this conjuncture. The key figure, it would seem, in the establishment of a continuum from inversion to fascism will be the “true-blue” invert, rather than the petty bourgeois effeminate or transvestite. This true-blue invert, however—“more male in the traditional and doctrinaire sense than any other male”—cannot automatically be identified with our second, Whitmanesque model of the super-masculine. Firstly, Whitman's “exoticism” is intrinsically effeminate for Lewis, and—by making a “big idea” (a phallus) out of the penis—patriarchy itself is by no means exempted from the charge of effeminization. Presenting his genitals to the camera, Whitman seems not simply to be showing them off, but to be offering them for that castration which Lewis thinks might be the solution to European militarism.

Is there, then, a third figure in whom the militarism of the fascist and the revolutionary potential of the invert might transcend the limitations of petty bourgeois effeminacy? To find such a figure is the challenge that Lewis sets to any analysis which would seek out a political conjunction of homosexuality and fascism in his work. In fact, such a figure does exist in Lewis's oeuvre, and he will become all the more important as Lewis revises his analysis of fascism in the thirties. It is “Frederick the Great, living with his heiduques and grooms” (AOBR, 201) who will finally complete the implicit homosexualization of Lewis's own political project. With Frederick, “living on familiar patriarchal terms with [one's] servants” (AOBR, 201) seems to have become an intra-masculine affair, rather than the necessarily transvestite practice exemplified by Haroun al-Raschid.

The ambiguity of Frederick—as a revolutionary and reactionary homosexual figure—lies in his “travesty of revolution” (AOBR, 201), for now the travesty of revolution seems finally to have become travesty as revolution. It is as if Frederick were, so to speak, engaging in travesty not by dressing as a woman, but by refusing to do so. The fixation of transvestism to the feminine object has been completely overcome. The transvestite has dressed himself as a man, and thereby engages in the deception intrinsic to him. Revolution is no longer established within a simple paradigm of transgression—the signifier's masquerading as the signified—but rather in the transgression of that transgression. Revolution, in this instance, really is the “vicious circle” of undecidability: is it a man, a woman as man, a man as woman as man …? Moreover, Frederick marks the point of convergence of the two models of inversion elucidated in Hitler, combining—in his particular form of authoritarian revolution—travesty and masculinity.

What is it then that Frederick—with his grooms and heiduques—tells us about the political configurations developed by Lewis through the twenties, which were subsequently to make fascism so appealing to him? More than anything, Frederick renders impossible any reduction of the homosexual question to a more simplistic opposition coded in terms of gender. To reduce the homosexual to a figure of effeminization is to accept at face value a dichotomy of gender which the homosexual serves to question. The transgression which is effected by super-masculinity is more troubling to Lewis's politics not simply because the invert—who in Hitler questions the primacy of the feminine—now also questions the integrity of masculinity, but because he begins to appear as the double of Lewis's own political project. Sociologically, the collapse of the patriarchal family, the war experience, and the emergence of the petty bourgeoisie are as crucial to Lewis's analysis of inversion as they have been to analysts of fascism. The only constituent of this ideological trinity which Lewis himself—as a political thinker—would look upon with distaste is the centrality of the bourgeoisie. And by recognizing in the fraternal and fraternizing tendencies of Frederick the Great a “true-blue” aristocratic model of inversion, he is, in effect, opening up fascism as a realm of homosexualized politics to which he would be sympathetic.

It would stretch the limits of this paper to describe what that politics would look like. The aristocratic (homosexual) fascism which Lewis advocates should not be mistaken for fascism's empirical historical instantiation. We can only begin to outline the terms of the political sphere occupied by the true-blue invert, for Lewis's disappointment with Nazism forces us to respect a distinction between his intellectual and political project and the empirical, historical phenomenon of the Third Reich. At the same time, however, we have already observed the way in which the “Enttäuschung” of 1939 is itself prefigured in the earlier works and cannot, in fact, be understood as a disappointment in the everyday sense of the world. “Enttäuschung,” in 1939, is the realization rather than the disappointment of the political project which Lewis articulated through the twenties and thirties.

Taking up where Hitler and The Art of Being Ruled left off—with Frederick as a historical and homosexual precedent for Nazism—The Hitler Cult subtly reevaluates some of the topoi of the earlier works. Thus, connections which we have reconstructed from those works (Whitman, for example) are made explicit. Frederick's role, too, is elucidated: “Frederick the Great was a National Socialist, as well as degenerate and what we should call to-day a crook” (HC, 131). Notable in this passage is the way in which a discourse of degeneracy is applied to homosexuality for the first time only when Lewis seeks to reverse the terms of his earlier critique and to present fascism—rather than liberalism—as effeminization. Previously, degeneration was itself implicitly valorized as the post-bellum possibility of depopulating an overly aggressive Europe. Clearly, in order to distance himself from compromising political miscalculations, Lewis is obliged to re-introduce—paradoxically, in an “inverted” form—precisely that moralism which was previously to be excised. Apart from the super-imposition of this arbitrary and extrinsic value-system, however, little has changed in Lewis's structural presentation of the forces of fascism and inversion. As we have seen, fascism and “inversion”—at least as presented by the texts in question here—were never as antipathetic as Lewis would have had us believe.

Having set up Frederick as a degenerate and a National Socialist, Lewis subsequently goes on to distinguish him from Hitler in the following terms:

As to Frederick the Great, another of his models, to whom Hitler is sometimes compared, no two men could be less alike. That arrogant homosexual tyrant had about as much in common with Adolph Hitler as the Duke of Wellington would with Lord Nuffield. (HC, 78-79)

Historically, and retrospectively, Lewis at last admits the embroilment of a certain homosexual strain in Nazism, but argues that:

The Röhm ‘purge’ may almost be regarded as a show-down between the homosexual and the non-homosexual end of the National Socialist movement. (HC, 95)

Lewis settles his accounts with fascism and homosexuality long after Nazism itself has already confronted the question, it would seem. The problem with Hitler—which provides the ostensible grounds for Lewis's rejection of the regime—is, quite precisely, not homosexuality, for:

The present German Chancellor is in the habit of threatening suicide: he weeps with considerable facility, his perorations are shaken with sobs; he storms and rages like a hysterical prima donna; he is very alive to flattery. Yet he is not homosexual, like many Germans. It is that that makes him a puzzle of a man. (HC, 78)

In other words, while using homosexuality as a moral smoke-screen for his political distancing from fascism, Lewis in fact rejects Hitler not because he is homosexual—but because he is not.

The problem with Hitler, it would seem, is something other than his simple heterosexuality (in fact, Lewis comments upon his abstention from women and claims to find this the most unsettling characteristic of all). Does Hitler himself not replicate that “Enttäuschung” central to the political epiphany of the Hitler book? He acts like a homosexual, Lewis implies, but he is not one. In the same way, the transvestite acts like a woman, but is not one. But to restrict ourselves to this parallelism is to fall prey to Lewis's revisionist reconstruction of his own political development. The sightseer of 1931 never came in search of women: he wanted the transvestite and—after a momentary and necessary disappointment—got exactly what he wanted. Likewise, Lewis sought fascism and got what he wanted. The political disappointment is, in fact, a realization—Enttäschung is a liberation from one political Täuschung by means of another.

In other words, in the Hitler book Lewis seeks to hold at bay a certain homosexual taxonomy which implicitly underpins his politics—whereas the 1939 repudiation seeks consciously to invoke that tax-economy to legitimate a retreat from fascism. The mea culpa implicit in this gesture seeks to exonerate the political project by invoking a moral (and homosexual) scapegoat. If Hitler is not homosexual, Lewis is implying, the pretense at being homosexual is itself “homosexual,” typical of the homosexual's aestheticized play with appearance. This, if anything, is the lesson to be learned from the encounter in the Eldorado’ bar—the irreducibility of representation to either term in the dyad of representation. And this is, indeed, the lesson which Lewis has learned, and which allows him—in this entirely disingenuous self-distancing from fascism—to attribute both to inversion and to fascism that aestheticization of politics which so led him astray. Having enjoyed the spectacle of the ‘Eldorado’ for what it was, Lewis would now have us believe that he was, in fact, seduced into fascism by one of those “bland Junos-gone-wrong.” The “political point” and the “inevitable narrative point” which Jameson sought to differentiate prove to have been one and the same all along.

Notes

1. Fredric Jameson, Eables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis. The Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979). Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chutto and Windus, 1931). Subsequently abbreviated as H.

2. Jameson (note 1), 179.

3. Jameson, 180.

4. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (New York: Haskell House, 1972. Reprint of 1926 ed.). Subsequently abbreviated as AOBR.

5. Wyndham Lewis The Hitler Cult (London: Dent, 1931). Subsequently abbreviated as HC.

6. Lewis's notion of tolerance is, it should be pointed out, somewhat unusual. For example, he praises the Nazi's refusal to be misled into moralizing, and presents the Nazi's indifference to these matters in the following terms: “And of course all these Bars and Dancings, with their Kaffir bands, are for him the squinting, misbegotten, paradise of the Schiebertum. ‘Juda verrecke!’ he would no doubt mutter, or shout, if he got into one. Sooner or later he would desire to be at the head, or in the midst, of his Sturmabteilung—to roll this nigger-dance luxury-spot up like a verminous carpet, and drop it into the Spree—with a heartfelt Pfui! at its big sodden splash” (H, 28).

7. Lewis distinguishes in The Art of Being Ruled between fundamental and merely superficial forms of revolution. Claiming that revolution has become a universal ideology and has therefore lost revolutionary potential, he argues that “there is permanent revolution, and there is an impermanent, spurious, utilitarian variety. … There is creative revolution, to parody Bergson's term, and destructive revolution” (AOBR, 14).

8. Lewis addresses this question in the chapter entitled “Different Solutions to the Problem of the Yahoo” (AOBR, 47-51).

9. These elements of Lewis's presentation also form the core, for example, of the influential analysis presented in Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, 3rd ed. (New York, 1970).