AI as Literary Critic

pseudo-Eagleton and pseudo-Bloom on Wyndham Lewis

One of my roles at Arizona State University has been to design and become lead instructor on a new transdisciplinary BA called Culture-Technology-Environment, in which the Humanities disciplines - literary and media studies, history, philosophy, religious studies etc. - are applied to some of the great issues facing the world today: the environmental crisis, cultural relations, adaptation to new technologies. I wrote in the excellent startup journal Public Humanities about our ambitions for the degree. As far as the technology element is concerned, a major focus is - of course - adaptation to the world Artificial Intelligence.

So I have become very intrigued by the potential and pitfalls of AI: as a research tool, as an analytic vehicle, and - perhaps? - as a creative force. One of my first experiments with this was to test out its ability to imitate distinctive prose styles. So I asked ChatGPT to write two 1,000 word essays on the importance within the Modernist movement of the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, one in the style of the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton and the other in the style of the “strong misreader” Harold Bloom. I was impressed - and somewhat alarmed - by the quality of the result. Which appeared in a matter of seconds. This was the Eagleton version:

The Enemy Within: Wyndham Lewis and the Shock Troops of Modernism

Wyndham Lewis is the great contradiction at the heart of Modernism, the one who hurled the grenade then stood back to critique the explosion. That the movement’s most abrasive avant-gardist should have ended up flirting with fascism and penning books with titles like Hitler ought to raise more than an eyebrow; but in a sense, this was the logical conclusion of his role as Modernism’s internal saboteur. Lewis was Modernism’s id: aggressive, brilliant, reactionary, and unrepentantly élitist. Where Joyce was joyfully polyphonic, Pound esoterically anarchic, and Woolf delicately fissured, Lewis was a boxer in hobnailed boots, knocking the stuffing out of polite aesthetics. And, like any true ideological pugilist, he wrote as if there were always someone across the page to be thumped.

Born into that quintessentially Modernist condition—dislocation—Lewis was Anglo-Welsh, raised partly in Canada, and educated in England, but belonged fully to no place or class. If one wanted to construct a dialectical model of the Modernist artist, Lewis would be the synthesis of Nietzschean Übermensch and Marxist critic of bourgeois flab. He loathed the masses even as he dissected the vapid culture they were fed. A man of the Left who flirted with the Right, an anti-capitalist who despised democracy, Lewis was never quite at home in the drawing room or on the barricade.

Let’s not forget: Lewis founded Blast—a magazine that sounded like a Marxist artillery shell but read like Ezra Pound channeling a Dadaist drill sergeant. Blast was Vorticism’s banner, a movement that—like so many of the early twentieth-century artistic manifestos—promised to destroy everything except, conveniently, its own contributors. Lewis declared war on Victorian sentiment, Georgian limpness, and the “lethargy of the middle-class mind.” His prose was explosive, his politics incendiary, and his aesthetic violent. He wished to whirl the age in a centrifuge, reducing its sickly moral custard to something hard, bright, and angular. “We are Vorticists,” he proclaimed, as if this were not a claim but a threat.

And yet, for all his bombast, Lewis was no mere provocateur. His critique of the commodification of art, of the dilution of serious culture into pasteurized entertainment, remains deeply relevant. Time and Western Man (1927), his polemic against the cult of relativism, is in part a blistering attack on Bergsonian flux and the idea that temporality is a condition of meaning. For Lewis, this worship of becoming led only to ideological mush. In his own unflinching (and unfashionable) way, he defended the integrity of the artwork against the encroaching soft tyranny of “feeling” and “process.” He smelled the postmodern rot before it had properly set in.

If we are to think of Modernism as an aesthetic revolt against bourgeois liberalism—a revolt by alienated artists who saw in Impressionism, Symbolism, and later Cubism and Vorticism a language adequate to the horrors and upheavals of late imperial capitalism—then Lewis is its most conscious revolutionary, and also its most reactionary. Here lies the rub: Modernism was both a refusal and a retreat. It shouted down the dead forms of Victorian culture but often did so by adopting an aristocratic contempt for the demos. Lewis, as ever, took this to its logical conclusion, sneering not only at the culture industry but also at those poor unfortunates who consumed it.

His fiction, too, is a study in social tension. Tarr (1918) is as close as English prose gets to brutalist architecture—jagged, unmannered, uncompromising. Its anti-hero is a Nietzschean satirist adrift in bohemian Paris, denouncing everything in sight with sublime disdain. This isn’t storytelling as much as a series of ideological detonations, often hilarious, frequently offensive, and always politically charged. Lewis understood, perhaps better than anyone, that narrative was a battleground, and the novel a weapon either for or against the dominant class. He didn’t so much write fiction as wage war on it.

But it would be a mistake to cast Lewis solely as an ideological wrecking ball. For all his paranoia and polemic, he was a sensitive diagnostician of cultural decay. His essays on advertising, mechanization, and the creeping philistinism of consumer society display an uncomfortably prescient grasp of what Guy Debord would later call the society of the spectacle. That Lewis lacked Debord’s revolutionary optimism is only to say that he saw more clearly the moral exhaustion of the age, and with it, the impotence of the artist under capitalism. Art was either elite or it was ersatz. There was, for Lewis, no middle ground. And if this made him unsympathetic, it also made him right.

Even his political missteps—support for Mussolini, an ill-advised attempt to “understand” Hitler—were rooted in a desperate search for intellectual coherence in an age of chaos. He would later recant, and his 1939 book The Hitler Cult savaged the Nazi regime with his characteristic venom. But one cannot help feeling that, like Pound, he mistook aesthetic form for political content, imagining that fascism’s uniforms and slogans were a form of cultural hygiene. It was a catastrophic misjudgment, but not an accidental one. The desire to purify culture often leads one into the arms of tyranny.

Wyndham Lewis was Modernism’s necessary evil. He forced the movement to confront its own contradictions: its aesthetic radicalism and political conservatism, its elitist disdain for the crowd and its utopian dreams of transformation. He remains a prickly figure, impossible to canonize and equally impossible to ignore. If we are serious about understanding the politics of art—how Modernism both resisted and reproduced the logic of capital—then we must wrestle with Lewis, who made enemies because he knew how culture makes them too.

In an age where art risks becoming yet another flavour of lifestyle, Lewis’s uncompromising insistence that art must be dangerous, difficult, and divisive is bracing. He may have been the enemy of many things—liberalism, relativism, comfort, clarity—but he was also the enemy of cultural complacency. And that, for all his faults, is a fight still worth having.

And here is the Harold Bloom:

Wyndham Lewis: The Strong Misreader of Modernism

There is a sense in which Wyndham Lewis, that angular prophet of English Modernism, stands apart from the major tradition even as he enters it by force of sheer antagonism. Lewis did not merely resist influence; he weaponized it. He sought not the warmth of literary kinship but the icy air of confrontation. And in so doing, he enacts with brutal clarity the central trope of all literary achievement as I have elsewhere defined it: the anxiety of influence. If Ezra Pound, that bizarre and sometimes brilliant impresario of Modernism, curated tradition through reinvention, Lewis set fire to it in order to forge his own vision in the furnace of its ashes. His art, his prose, his criticism—all are agonistic.

Lewis’s true precursor is not Pound, nor even Joyce, but Jonathan Swift: satirist, misanthrope, and connoisseur of human folly. Yet unlike Swift, who remained anchored in a theological vision however scabrous, Lewis dwells in the void. His satire is not corrective; it is annihilating. In this he anticipates not the Moderns but the posthumanists—yet he possesses what they lack: a style born of power. In Tarr, he gives us a novel that reads like an act of assault—on sensibility, on convention, on the softening world. It is as if Nietzsche had taken up novel-writing in a rage at the decadence of even his own followers. And in this, Lewis joins the canon not by gentle ascent but by ambush.

One cannot read Lewis without being struck by his strength. I use the term deliberately, in opposition to the prevailing critical fashion that would prize moral intention over aesthetic achievement, identity over individuation, grievance over greatness. Lewis’s greatness is precisely that he offends. He has the nerve, the imaginative authority, to write outside his time while claiming to understand it more intimately than any of his contemporaries. If there is an anxiety in Lewis, it is the anxiety of precedence—not that he must live up to the dead, but that the dead might still stand in his way.

In The Apes of God, his encyclopedic demolition of Bloomsbury pretension and intellectual foppery, Lewis does not merely satirize the modern cultural elite—he disqualifies them. One finishes the book not with laughter but with awe at the scale of his negation. And while it is often said that Lewis was a bitter outsider, this is to mistake rhetorical posture for metaphysical stance. Lewis’s power lies not in exclusion but in transcendence. He did not wish to join the modern literary establishment because he believed, perhaps rightly, that he could outlast it.

Harold Rosenberg once wrote that Modernism is less a movement than a “tradition of the new.” Lewis, paradoxically, offers us something rarer: the new that wishes to be ancient. Not in manner, but in magnitude. He believed in form, in hierarchy, in the unyielding separateness of great art. His painterly eye sought the abstraction of Vorticism not to break from the past but to revive its intensity. One thinks here of Blake—another visionary draftsman of apocalyptic fervour—and of Wyndham Lewis’s own claim to be “The Enemy.” Like Blake, Lewis crafted a myth of himself: oppositional, scornful of the crowd, yet unassailably original. His enemy status is not cultural but ontological. He is the adversary of the ephemeral, the destroyer of artistic compromise.

This is why Lewis matters. He reminds us—more even than Eliot or Joyce—of the cost of artistic autonomy. Where Eliot harmonizes tradition and individual talent, Lewis severs them, and yet survives. In Eliot one finds the burden of inheritance sublimated into liturgical resonance. In Lewis, inheritance is an iron chain to be shattered. He chooses, always, rupture over synthesis. But he never lapses into incoherence. He is not a nihilist, as his critics too often suggest, but a gnostic—convinced that behind the appearances of civilization lies a grim metaphysical truth that only the artist can render visible.

It is, of course, unfashionable to praise Wyndham Lewis. His politics—complex, regrettable, ultimately disavowed—have made him suspect. But the canon is not a moral register; it is a record of aesthetic power. To read Lewis well is to contend with his contradictions without denying his genius. The “School of Resentment”—that weary alliance of politicized criticism—would banish Lewis from the syllabus. But it is precisely their resentment that proves his greatness. He demands more than moral compliance; he demands imaginative courage.

If Modernism was the last great age of the individual writer, then Lewis is its unacknowledged legislator. He outstrips the movement’s pieties, disturbs its orthodoxies, and remains, still, unassimilable. That is the mark of a canonical author. Lewis does not flatter his readers; he challenges them to meet him on his own terms. Few can. Fewer still try. But those who do emerge altered, deepened, scorched.

Let the schools go on resenting. The canon, if it is to endure, must continue to include those whose value lies not in comfort, but in confrontation. Wyndham Lewis is one such figure. He is not merely a writer of Modernism. He is one of its defining agonists—and for that, he must not be forgotten.

What do fellow literary Substackers think of all this?