University of Oregon

History's Stamp: Wyndham Lewis's The Revenge for Love and the Heidegger Controversy
Author(s): Brett Neilson
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 24-41
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771454
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BRETT NEILSON

History's Stamp:
The
Wyndham Lewis's
and
the
RevengeforLove
Heidegger
Controversy
SHIFTS in both his political and
ESPITE SUBSEQUENT
aesthetic beliefs, the literary reputation of Wyndham Lewis
was irreparably damaged by a series of pro-Nazi pamphlets he
modwrote during the 1930s. More than other Anglo-American
for
his
is
remembered
Ezra
Pound-Lewis
ernists-including
this
he
Yet
also
advocacies.
during
period
reactionary political
produced the most lauded of his literary works, The Revenge for Love
(1937). Although admirers of this novel have sought to read it
against Lewis's fascism, arguing that the work transcends its political
them from within, I believe that The
discourses or dismantles
Love
and parodies these critical positions;
animates
Revenge for
of
this text provides a means for reassesscareful
a
indeed,
reading
the
aesthetic dimension of modernism.
to
fascism's
centrality
ing
how
the
dismantling of totalizing narrative schemes
By showing
of totalitarian ideolocan be compatible with the endorsement
relations
reconsiders
the
this
among narrative form,
paper
gies,
it
In
so
and
aesthetics,
doing,
ideology.
highlights the links between
fascism and modernity that have been central to recent debates
concerning Martin Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism.
I compare Lewis's narrative strategies to the early Heidegger's
that the political
of ontology to demonstrate
temporalization
in
the
Love
lies
of
The
mythic dimension of its
Revenge for
meaning
In
Time
Man
and
Western
structure.
(1927), Lewis launches
temporal
of
an attack on theories of history, but the Nazi mythologization
national destiny leaves its mark upon his narrative work, registering modernism's failure or, if you like, history's stamp.
My decision to read Lewis's novel in the context of the Heidegger
controversy is not fortuitous. For a start, there are historical coincidences that link the careers of these thinkers. Both declared
their support for Nazism in the early 1930s only to make retrac-

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/25

tions that have been judged insufficient or disingenuous.

Lewis's
most notorious pro-Nazi document is Hitler (1931), although he
had been advocating fascism for Anglo-Saxon countries since The
Art of Being Ruled (1926). Throughout the 1930s he continued to
produce works supporting Nazism, including The Old Gang and the
New Gang (1933), Left Wings Over Europe (1936), and Count Your
Dead: They Are Alive (1937). Only on the eve of World War II did he
retract this position in The Hitler Cult (1939), and-not
surpriswas obliged to leave Britain (for his native Canada) until
ingly-he
the end of the war. Heidegger's case is more complicated, since as
rector of the University of Freiburg, he participated not only in
the philosophical justification
of Nazism but also in its political
administration. Although his rectorship at Freiburg was relatively
brief (from May 1933 to June 1934), scholars continue to debate
whether he ever fully abandoned his belief in Nazism's historical
potential.1 Most commentators
agree that there is an intellectual
works of the late 1920s and
continuity between his philosophical
his pro-Nazi writings of the early 1930s. Even those thinkers who
defend Heidegger's later philosophy, after the so-called Kehreof 1935,
admit that the ideas of "destiny" (Geschick) and "historicality"
(Geschichtlichkeit) developed in Being and Time (1927) underlie his
celebration of Nazism in his infamous Rectoral Address, "The Self
Assertion of the German University" (1933).2 I believe that these
categories also explain the ideological significance of the narrative scheme in The Revenge for Love. Lewis's pro-Nazi writings are
more headstrong and polemical than Heidegger's carefully measured
of both
philosophical
arguments, but the political significance
their works lies in a particular (reactionary) inflection given to the
temporality of modernity.
There is, of course, no evidence that Lewis had read the works
of Heidegger or that these thinkers were even aware of each other.
None of the many studies that document the evolution of Lewis's
political thought claims a specific relation to Heidegger.3 By argureflections on time and ontology
ing that the early Heidegger's
can clarify the political meanings of The Revenge for Love, then, I
suggest neither a relation of direct influence nor a coincidental
convergence of ideas. The relation between The Revengefor Love and
Two books in particular are responsible for the recent furor surrounding
Heidegger's engagement with Nazism: Victor Farias, Heideggeret le nazisme (1987)
and Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger:Unterwegszu seiner Biographie (1988). For the most
complete collection of materials regarding the controversy, see Richard Wolin, ed.
The HeideggerControversy:A CriticalReader (1993).
2 See
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger,Art and Politics (1990) and Jacques
Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1989). Both thinkers argue that
Heidegger's engagement with Nazism was the result of a surfeit of metaphysics in
his early work.
3 For example, see Wagner and Bridson.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/26

Being and Time is best understood in the more general context of

Nazi intellectual speculation. Such an approach is not a matter of
reducing generically diverse texts to equivalent expressions of fascist
ideology. Rather, I search for narrative/structural features that imbue
these works with similar political meanings despite their assignation to different discursive fields: philosophy in the case of Being
and Time and narrative fiction in the case of The Revengefor Love.
In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (1991 ), Pierre Bourdieu
develops an approach to Heidegger's philosophy that allows such
a comparison to take place. Bourdieu describes a distinct configuration of revolutionary conservative thought, an ideological matrix or
system of common mental schemata that engenders the National
Socialist vision of the world. No single ideologue mobilizes all of
these schemata, which, for this reason, neither fulfill the same
functions nor have equal importance in the different systems in
which they are inserted. But each thinker is able to "produce, from
the particular combination
of the common schemata which he
mobilizes, a discourse that is perfectly irreducible to the others,
although it is only a transformed form of all the others" (25).
Bourdieu understands Heidegger's philosophy as one such discourse.
This allows him to draw parallels between Heidegger's work and
the less formalized discourses of other revolutionary conservative
thinkers like Oswald Spengler and ErnstJfinger. Such an approach
to Heidegger
embodies a "dual refusal, rejecting not only any
claim of the philosophical text to absolute autonomy ... but also any
direct reduction of the text to the most general conditions of its production" (2). My reading of Heidegger alongside The Revenge for Love
involves a similar intergeneric comparison. I attribute a political meanconcepts, namely the notions of "destiny" and
ing to Heideggerian
"historicality," which, as common schemata of National Socialist
thought, appear under a different guise in Lewis's novel. Doubtless there are other thinkers besides Heidegger
who mobilize
these schemata and whose works might also provide a useful point
of contrast for The Revenge for Love. My decision to limit the comparison to Heidegger stems from the considerable debate that has
followed the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger et le nazisme
(1987). These recent arguments, which have provided new ways of
thinking about the relations between philosophy, art, and politics,
have not yet been fully integrated into the criticism of Lewis's
work or the study of fascist modernism as such.
The Revenge for Love conforms loosely to the kind of narrative
patterning thatJoseph Frank calls "spatial form," constantly breaking
and retracing the same time period from a different perspective.
Lewis divides the work into six sections, each of which introduces a
new character as if the narrative were starting over again. First we
meet Percy Hardcaster, a Communist agitator who loses a leg while

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/27

escaping from a Spanish jail. The next four sections are set in
London, introducing a group of characters who move in that city's
Bohemian circles: Victor Stamp, an unsuccessful Australian artist;
Jack Cruze, a loutish accountant who gives financial advice to the
wealthy Communist painter Tristram Phipps; Sean O'Hara, an
Irish arms smuggler; and Gillian Phipps, Tristram's privileged
wife. At the end of each section something happens to draw the
characters together, but not until the novel's end does a plot begin
to emerge: Sean O'Hara plans to smuggle guns into Spain and
decides to employ Victor Stamp as a decoy. In the final section,
Victor and his partner Margot meet their deaths after running
down a Spanish civil guard, and Percy Hardcaster finds himself
back in a Spanish prison. However, although these final events
take place with a sense of tragic inevitability, they ultimately fail to
fuse the text into an organic unity. And because The Revenge for
Love's complex narrative system both disrupts the sequential
unfolding of time and raises questions of an existential-ontological
nature, criticism of the novel has tended to focus on what I believe
is a false question: whether the central characters achieve genuine
in the face of the dehumanizing
discourses that
self-recognition
construct them.
Much of this debate concerns Margot Stamp, Victor's loyal companion. Hugh Kenner, for instance, finds Margot to be "the key to
the meaning of the book" (Wyndham Lewis 125), since her "love"
for Victor cuts through the "unreality" of the novel's official languages
(of political power, class affiliation, and financial preeminence).
Kenner's argument assumes that The Revengefor Love attains a transcendent humanism that overshadows its ideological
meanings.
Critics who read the novel in a political light, on the other hand,
Chief among these readers is
argue for Margot's inauthenticity.
that
"the passive and victimized
Frederic Jameson, who concludes
marks
no
transcendence
of...
[Lewis's] mature narrative
Margot
for
my purposes, the differsystem" (Fables of Aggression 146). But,
ences between these readings are less instructive than their similarities, for Jameson's approach to The Revenge for Love shares key
elements with Kenner's despite its emphasis on the political dimensions of narrative technique.
Fables of Aggression locates a disjunction between Lewis's stylistic
and his
practice (at the level of individual sentence production)
narrative technique (at the level of social and cultural representation). Jameson seeks to historicize this gap, which he parallels to
the distinction between "molar" and "molecular" forms developed
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. In his view the
the
molar (or narrative) logic of Lewis's novels short-circuits
momentum of his avant-garde stylistic innovations, channeling their
transgressive energies into a "libidinal apparatus" that perpetuates

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/28

the ideology of protofascism. At the same time, he claims that,

among Lewis's works, The Revenge for Love achieves an "unaccustomed emotional resonance" (Fables of Aggression 145). Although
Margot Stamp may not transcend the narrative system, she represents "an attempt to readapt the techniques of satiric externality
to a figure which is the structural inversion of its customary degraded and mechanical content" (147). In this way, The Revenge for
Love challenges its own ideological meanings. For the first and last
time in Lewis's work, a "genuine emotion, a real sympathy and
released" (148). This is
feeling for the victims, is unexpectedly
most evident in the novel's closing moments, where the imprisoned Percy Hardcaster drops whatJameson
calls "the realest tear
in all literature" (177). ForJameson, Hardcaster's sorrow serves to
"rue" the "terrible innocence" of fascist intellectuals, providing a
painful reminder of the power of "insubstantial" ideas to "strike
down real flesh and blood" (176). While this reading does not affirm Kenner's argument for a transcendence
of the narrative system, it does claim that "genuine emotion" functions as a mode of
resistance to fascist ideology. Despite their conflicting conclusions
regarding Margot Stamp, both Jameson and Kenner affirm that a
defense of human subjectivity is the most effective guard against
fascism's technological
and psychological violence.4
I believe that the narrative system of The Revenge for Love questions this premise and thus exposes the mutual implication of these
In this I follow, with some
apparently opposed interpretations.
important reservations, Reed Way Dasenbrock, who contends that
Lewis's "deepest engagement with fascism is on the level of imagination and plot (the kinds of stories he tells), not on the level of
ideology or practical politics" ("Wyndham Lewis's Fascist Imagination" 89). What Dasenbrock highlights in The Revenge for Love is its
famous narrative technique of "false bottoms." In his analysis, the
novel exhibits the groundlessness of all self-explanatory and totalizing narrative systems by removing a series of "false bottoms" from
beneath its apparently unified discursive schemes. At the literal
level, this means the reader encounters an unusually high number
of peripeteia as the plot twists through a series of unexpected revelations, from Percy's discovery of a set of escape plans at the bottom
of a basket to Victor's realization that he is smuggling bricks and
4 This is not to claim thatJameson sharesKenner'ssubscriptionto a humanistic
notion of subjectivity.Jameson's position is closer to Adorno, who recognizes the
reduction of individual and subjective choice in the era of organized society but
refuses to counter with a reaffirmation of bourgeois interiority. Like Adorno,
Jameson holds a dialectical conception of subjectivity,which readily commutes
into traditional notions of objectivity. The crucial point is that he opposes
Heideggerian argumentsfor the dissolution of subjectivity,claiming that they are
complicit with fascism'scolonization of the subject. In this he confirms Adorno's
ofAuthenticity
(1973). ForJameson's
analysisof Heidegger'sphilosophyin TheJargon
reflections on subjectivityin Adorno see LateMarxism,pp. 123-26.

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/29

not guns into Spain. Indeed, the novel was originally called "False
Bottoms," a rather appropriate title for a book that parodies Gide's
Les Faux Monnayeurs in its middle sections and involves its protagonist
in an art-counterfeiting
racket. For Dasenbrock, however, Lewis's
concern with "false bottoms" extends beyond this almost mechanical
sequence of revelations to present a "critique of ideology and of any
political action based on ideology" (93). He argues that The Revenge
for Love offers support for "the extrapolitical politics of fascism" by
representing "political life" itself as "a gigantic false bottom" (93).
Yet he also concludes that there is nothing essentially fascist about
Lewis's narrative strategies, since American writers like Norman
on "creative
Mailer and Thomas Pynchon, whose meditations
paranoia" work to "left-wing, libertarian" ends, employ similar
techniques (95).
Although I am in broad agreement with Dasenbrock, I believe
he too quickly places the novel beyond the realm of fascist ideology.5
There are two problems with his argument. First, if the narrative
system of The Revengefor Love questions the coherence of all discursive schemes, there can be no extra-ideological viewpoint from which
Lewis might launch a critique of ideology. As Ernesto Laclau argues,
of the rhetorico-discursive
of the irreducibility
the recognition
of
text
the
a
removes
possibility of an extra-discursive
operations
from
such
a
which
critique of ideology might proceed.
ground
This does not imply that "ideological critique is impossible-what
is impossible is a critique of ideology as such; all critiques of ideology
will necessarily be intra-ideological" ("Death and Resurrection" 299).
When he argues that The Revenge for Love develops a "critique of
ideology and of any political action based on ideology," Dasenbrock
nature of Lewis's critique.
ignores the necessarily intra-ideological
This omission in turn gives rise to a second problem: his refusal to
Lewis's involvement
with that central element of
acknowledge
Nazi ideology, anti-Semitism.
Dasenbrock admits that Lewis's conspiratorial fiction "is readily
echoed in anti-Semitic thinking and writing," but by asserting that
"Lewis is not at all anti-Semitic at any point" (94), he takes the belated
apologies of TheJews: Are They Human? (1939) at face value and
ignores the precedent of fictional characters like Jan Pochinsky in
Tarr (1928) and Julius Ratner in The Apes of God (1930). Anyone
who doubts the centrality of anti-Semitism to Lewis's work should
consult David Ayers's definitive study, Wyndham Lewis and Western
5 Dasenbrock is doubtful as to whether such a
thing as fascist ideology exists. He
places an emphasis on cultural rather than political and social forms. However, it
is precisely to the cultural realm that Zeev Sternhell turns in his classic essay on
"FascistIdeology" (1976). Focusing on the French and Italian precedents, Sternhell
argues that fascism emerged as a cultural phenomenon long before it became a
practical force in order to emphasize the mythic or aesthetic dimension of fascism's
mass appeal.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/30

Man (1992). Drawing on Freud's case history of the paranoid

Daniel Paul Schreber, Ayers relates the conspiratorial
motifs of
Lewis's fiction to the Nazi propaganda line that identifies communism as a Jewish plot. He claims that The Revenge for Love develops
two powerful anti-Semitic stereotypes: Peter Wallace, ne Reuben
Wallach, the "manipulator-Jew" who spouts Marxist doctrine and
Jewish apocalyptic history, and Isaac Wohl, the "victim-Jew" who
works happily in the art counterfeiting
workshop where Victor
(180). I suggest that this anti-Semitism
Stamp is so discontent
must also be understood in the context of the novel's temporal
structure, since it is via the ideological overcoding of its narrative
scheme that The Revenge for Love buys into the "Nazi myth" of the
German people as a racial-spiritual whole.
My starting point here is the reading of The Revengefor Love offered
by Toby Foshay in Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde (1992).
Foshay emphasizes Lewis's deployment of the Nietzschean
trope
of ressentiment (revenge). Like Dasenbrock, he studies the novel's
narrative system of "false bottoms," but he extends his analysis to
explore the ontological implications of this temporal arrangement.
His reading relates the novel's mechanisms of plot to Heidegger's
of ressentiment as the central category of Nietzsche's
understanding
It
is
worth working through Foshay's argument methodphilosophy.
it
material.
since
ically,
encompasses some difficult philosophical
the
on
Nietzsche
he
follows
in
lectures
First,
by arguing
Heidegger
that ressentiment is not about ethics and morals but about the metaphysical nature of Being. Next, he recalls a line from Thus Spoke
Zarathustra in which Nietzsche characterizes ressentiment as an "antipathy toward time." He then invokes the argument of Heidegger's
Being and Time by which time's transitoriness upsets the ontological
status of Being as present to itself. This means he can read The
Revenge for Love as an exploration of ressentiment, implicating the
novel in the "destruction
of ontology" that is central to postanti-foundationalist
critiques of metaphysics. He
Heideggerian,
finds plenty of evidence for this in the discourse of being and
nothingness that surrounds the novel's narrative system.
In The Revengefor Love, the lifting of a "false bottom" inevitably
For instance, when Margot
raises the specter of nothingness.
on
she
is
an "immense false bottom"at a
worries
that
treading
Stamp
fashionable London cocktail party, she also senses that the words
she hears "register nothing."
It all seemed to register nothing-orjust nonsense. They recited to each other, with
the foolish conceit of children, lessons out of textbooks . . . She could not reach
out to express her misgivings, into the difficult realms of speech, where all these
disparities of thinking and acting would fall into place and be plausibly explained:
but she was conscious nonetheless of a prodigious non-sequitur at the center of
everything she saw going on around her-of an immense false bottomunderlying
every seemingly solid surface, upon which it was her lot to tread. (153)

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/31

Foshay contends that this rhetoric gives Margot's "love" the "character of ressentiment" (120), corroborating Jameson's position on
the authenticity of this character. Yet he also finds that Lewis's
softens the novel's "avantof nothingness
repeated invocation
commitment"
with
a
"formalist
aesthetic of free
garde political
its
his reading
underpinnings,
play" (108). Despite
philosophical
thus does little more than Dasenbrock's
to register the novel's
anti-Semitism or complicity with official Nazi positions. Ultimately,
as if the novel
Foshay relegates the political itself to nothingness,
dismantled its own ideological meanings.
with the difficult issues
What is missing here is a confrontation
In part, this
own
political
engagement.
surrounding Heidegger's
is understandable, since Foshay draws his argument about ressentiment
such as
from Heidegger's
Nietzsche lectures. For commentators
Derrida
these
are
the
Lacoue-Labarthe
and
very
Philippe
Jacques
texts that mark Heidegger's turn away from a philosophy that lends
this point. Nor
itself to Nazism. Yet Foshay fails to acknowledge
of figures like Richard
does he account for the counterarguments
Wolin, who claim that Heidegger rejected Nazism's "debased historical actuality" but maintained a belief in its "true historical potential."6
Furthermore, he draws directly on Being and Time to ratify his arguments about Lewis's narrative scheme, associating the temporal
structure of The Revenge for Love with the ontological strategies of
text. And both Heidegger's defendants
this earlier Heideggerian
and detractors agree that the strictly existential-ontological
aspect
of Being and Time is underwritten by a prior and unstated concepunexamined set
tion of history, associated with a correspondingly
of sociological assumptions. The Revenge for Love embodies a simiof
dimension
lar relation between history and the ontological
time, as Lacoue-Labarthe's
analysis of the early Heidegger will, I
think, help demonstrate.
is the leading figure of a group of French
Lacoue-Labarthe
who, while seeking to save the work of the late
Heideggerians
Heidegger, argue for the complete coherence of Being and Time
of 1933. His work
with the philosopher's
political engagement
provides an effective counter to Foshay's analysis of The Revenge for
Love since Lacoue-Labarthe argues that Heidegger's "most radical
'political' gesture" was his "overvalorization of the philosophical"
288). Indeed, although Foshay's argument
("Transcendence"
identifies a connection between Lewis's narrative system of "false
bottoms" and the early Heidegger's ontological maneuvers, his inter6 See Richard
Wolin, The Politics of Being (1990) and "French Heidegger Wars"
(1995). Wolin bases his argument on a reading of Heidegger's 1935 lectures An
Introduction to Metaphysics,which distinguish between "the inner truth and greatness of the National Socialist movement" and the inauthentic "works that are being peddled nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism."

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/32

pretation of The Revenge for Love as a critique of political engagement

rests upon an assumption that the political is external to the metais, the subjugation within the novel of the political
physical-that
to the formal operations of the narrative. For Lacoue-Labarthe,
however, the political meaning of Heidegger's work lies precisely
in a similar attempt to quarantine the philosophical from the political. By locating in Being and Time an excess of metaphysics, he
argues that Heidegger's famous "destruction of ontology" fails to
upset the subject-centered
paradigm of Western philosophy. He
thus places Heidegger's early work at the end of a long metaphysical
tradition, the "onto-typological" tradition, which understands the
political as "the sphere of the fictioningof beings and communities"
(Heidegger 82). In this reading, Heidegger's attempt to reveal the
groundlessness of Being cannot be separated from his understanding
of "destiny" as the "historicizing" of peoples (Volk). His political
to his ontological
thought is inherently connected
philosophy,
even though his critique of metaphysics seeks to deny this link.
But in this equally, and above all, that in referring all practice-and privileging
social and political practice-to
the activity of philosophizing (or in Greek all
praxis to theoria, in the strongest sense), it is inevitable that the philosophical or
"theoretical" should determine themselves in this very movement as essentially
political. There is not, in other words, an exteriority of the political in relation to
the philosophical-doubtless
not even a true division between the philosophical
and the political: every philosophical determination of the essence of the political
obeys a political determination of essence; and the latter inversely presupposes a
gesture that one can only characterize as political. This belonging-together of the
philosophical and the political is as old as philosophy (and as old as what is still
called politics). And this is what Heidegger always submits to, even in the desire to
subjugate the political, or at any rate to circumscribe it. ("Transcendence" 288)

This argument, if we accept Foshay's parallel between the metaphysical aspects of Lewis's narrative system and Heidegger's "destruction of ontology," explains why Lewis's attempt to relegate the
political to nothingness is itself a political act. Far from signaling a
the system of
of politics by the metaphysical,
circumscription
"false bottoms" reinscribes the political in the narrative by its enactnihilism. Thus, when Percy Hardcaster
ment of a philosophical
to a panic-stricken Margot by
defends his political commitment
declaring, "It's better to have a Cause to live for, than nothing . . .
Even a cause is better than nothing" (295), he assumes an opposition between politics and nothingness that the narrative ultimately
cannot sustain. Similarly, when Victor and Margot discover bricks
and not guns in the "false bottomed vehicle" they use to escape the
Spanish civil guard, it becomes clear they are locked into a destiny
beyond their control. The car, which is "full of nothing," carries
them toward their death (their future) with a velocity that seems
to reflect the book's final narrative impetus (they die by falling off a
In this way, the system of "false bottoms" produces a
precipice).
sense of fatality that overdetermines the novel's political meanings.

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/33

Only by noting how Lewis's installation of a "nothingness at the

heart of the most plausible and pretentious of affirmatives" (247)
underlies the Stamps' final plunge, is it possible to understand this
reassertion of the political. The Revenge for Love puts into action
Heidegger's claim (at the 1929 Davos colloquium) that "nothingness
must not be a cause for pessimism and melancholy, but must lead
us to understand that there is only genuine reality where there is
resistance and that it is philosophy's task to snatch man from a life
that would be limited to using the works of the mind and ... throw
him back against the harshness of his destiny."7
Victor's and Margot's death also carries an allegorical meaning.
At one point in the narrative, Victor is likened to Nazi Germany.
Although this comparison is insufficient to anchor the text in a stable
system of national allegory, such as that which Jameson attributes
to Lewis's Tarr,8 it nonetheless invites a reading that maps a specific
nationalist (and nationalistic)
narrative on to the Stamps' final
drive. Tristram Phipps announces the analogy when he discusses
Victor's frustrated destruction of a faked van Gogh self-portrait.
"Victor, I think, suffers from an inferiority-complex."
"I must say I haven't noticed it!" burst out Freddie.
"Oh, yes, Victor is very much like Germany!" Tristy smiled at himself at his
simile. Victor as Germanyappeared to him a particularly good joke-both
against
Victor and against Germany.
"He is a brute, and the Germans are brutes!" Freddie agreed.
"Can a man be like a country?" inquired Abershaw.
But Tristy was somewhat pleased with his simile for Victor. He could not have
his exposition curtailed.
"Victor really is like the Third Reich!" he repeated. "He is very nationalist. His
nation is Victor! And he suffers from a permanent sense of injury. He really does
believe that you are very unjust!"
The three "Allies" present scowled at Tristy, whose face confessed to his childish
pleasure at having found the formula for Victor Stamp. (244-45)

At first Tristram's "simile" does indeed seem a "good joke," but its
underlying seriousness becomes evident as the novel goes on. By
noting Victor's likeness to the Third Reich (significantly via the Nazi
propaganda line that depicts Germany as the injured party), Tristram
encourages us to interpret the Stamps' escape attempt as a reflection
on Germany's historical fate. Such a reading adds further complexity
to the narrative scheme. Victor's final dash can no longer be understood as simply a matter of individual fate; instead, it acquires the
significance of a collective destiny. Moreover, I believe that this
nationalist overcoding of Victor's flight can be best explained as a
version of the Heideggerian idea of "destiny." As developed in Being
and Time, this category connects authentic selfhood (chosen in a
7 Lacoue-Labarthe cites these lines from
Heidegger's 1929 Davos Colloquium
with Ernst Cassirer in Heidegger,Art and Politics 18-19.
8
ForJameson on "national allegory" in Tarr, see the chapter of Fables of Aggression entitled "From National Allegory to Libidinal Apparatus" 87-104.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/34

moment of "ecstatic" decision) to the actualization of a historically

given collectivity. It is here that Heidegger's thought becomes susceptible to Nazism, since he finds the fulfillment of such a "destiny"
to involve the "repetition" of the "heritage" of a "people" (Volk). Thus
Lacoue-Labarthe
equates the idea of "destiny" in Being and Time
with the "unyielding spiritual mission" that, for the Heidegger of
the 1933 Rectoral Address, forces "the fate-of the German people
to bear the stamp of its history" ("Self-Assertion" 470).
Implicit in this parallel is a link between Stamp's last name and
his resemblance to Nazi Germany. That this coincidence
is more
than accidental is suggested by Lacoue-Labarthe's argument concerning the early Heidegger's complicity with Nazism. In naming the
tradition that supposedly passes from Plato to
"onto-typological"
Nietzsche and on to the early Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe
draws
on the work of Ernst Jiinger, who thinks of "the relation of form
and what it brings into form, Gestaltung (figuration), as the relation
between stamp and impression (Stempel/Prdgung) " ("Typography" 55).
The Revenge for Love is everywhere obsessed with acts of stamping
or marking, from its calligraphic reproductions of Victor's signature
to its description of the counterfeit van Gogh self-portrait that Victor
ruins with his boot-"Victor
mark!" (243). By far its
Stamp-his
most violent act of stamping, however, is the flattening of a Spanish
civil guard, the innocent victim of Victor's and Margot's escape
attempt. If we understand the Stamps' final drive in terms of the
idea of "destiny," then this event registers the mark
Heideggerian
of collective, historical forces upon the protagonists' fate: it is, if
you like, history's stamp. That is why Lewis describes this episode
not in terms of human agency or existential decision, but according to a logic of technological
necessity.
Victor did not stop. There wasno Victor there to stop. Or there wasVictor-Victor
who would not stop; and then there was the man in their path, who would not
move. Nothing would shift that stockstill person, helmeted and gunned. He was a
fixture, intended to be there-he had alwaysbeen there, stockstill in that road!
And he had a bullet to stop Victor at his fingertip. But whywould not Victor stop?
He would not stop because he couldnot. It was this machine-itwould not stop: he
was attached to a twenty-tonmagnet, which rushed to meet the lifted gun . . .
There was the deadly instrument-there was the vessel of propulsive power, they
mustmeet, they were compelled by their natures to clash. This was a fatality that
came into play the moment it wasmachines, not men, that mattered. (321)
This passage implies something more than a critique of the dehuThe machine does not simply
manizing aspects of technology.
Victor's
enfeebled
overpower
subjectivity; rather, it produces a
narrative movement that derives its impetus from technology's
"propulsive power." As Russell Berman writes of fascist modernism,
literature itself "becomes the machine, the weapon, with which to
accost the atavistic remnants of subjectivity so as to conquer them
for the new order of function and power" (Modern German Novel

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/35

218). Lewis's description of Victor's drive as a "fatality" that comes

into play when it is machines, and not men, that matter, thus suggests that a defense of subjectivity is no longer possible, and that
now, indeed, it is machines that matter. To this extent the passage
also recalls the post-Kehre Heidegger, who, as Gianni Vattimo explains,
claims "that technology-in
representing the fulfillment of metato
an
act of overcoming or Verwindung"
humanism
physics-calls
It
even
be possible to relate this over(End of Modernity 41).
may
of
humanism
to
later disappointment
with
coming
Heidegger's
Nazism for failing to fulfill its historical mission. Yet to privilege this
potential connection between the passage and Heidegger's post-Kehre
writings is to overlook the way in which the "fatality" of the Stamps'
the pre-Kehre Heidegger's
dash recalls even more fundamentally
rhetoric of "destiny." Lewis's narrativization of this "fatality" demonof history and modernity that resembles
strates an understanding
more closely the arguments of Being and Time than it does the
emphases of Heidegger's later work.
For Victor and Margot, the killing of the civil guard combines
the guilt of murder with the certainty of their own death. In this
sense the "fatality" that motivates their plunge shares important
calls "being-toward-death,"
since
qualities with what Heidegger
death is the end that, projected ahead, represents the possibility of
closure. Both Lewis and Heidegger understand death as the productive limit of human existence, but neither ties this finality to
the facticity of the individual's perishing. For Heidegger, dying is
to be understood from an
not an event in time but a phenomenon
existential-ontological
perspective. He distinguishes the ending of
a living thing from the ending characteristic of Dasein-that
is, the
structure of death as "the ownmost nonrelational
ontological
not to be bypassed" (Being and Time 233). This
potentiality-of-being
of
allows him to move ontology in the direction of a hermeneutics
historical existence. Heidegger contends that the anticipation of death
gives rise not only to the subjective experience of time, but also to
the idea of "historicality" as the existential ground of historythrough a "being-with-others" that involves the "repetition" of a
national "heritage." According to Peter Osborne, it is here that the
political meaning of Being and Time becomes clear. By advocating an
authentic "resoluteness" in the face of death, Heidegger attributes
to history a logic of "repetition" through which the "power of destiny
becomes free" (436). As Osborne explains, "historicality narrativizes resoluteness as repetition: the repetition of the heritage of a
people" (172). In its closing stages, The Revenge for Love performs
a similar narrativization of history, which, while less directly concerned with the "heritage" and "destiny" of the German people,
of the "fatality" of history within the
involves an investigation
of
terms
and
being
nothingness.
ontological

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/36

If, as I suggested earlier, the "analogy" between Victor Stamp

and Nazi Germany is more than fortuitous, then the "fatality" of his
death can be compared with the "destiny" that Heidegger finds to
"stamp" the history of the German "people." There is of course no
between the two writers' views on "destiny"
absolute coincidence
and "historicality." Lewis does not understand Victor's death as an
authentic moment of decision, nor does he emphasize the "beingwith-others" that for Heidegger manifests itself as national belonging. The Revengefor Love likewise positions itself in a discursive field
different from that of Being and Time, thus avoiding the purely
both
articulation of Heidegger's work. Nonetheless,
philosophical
texts mobilize a set of common schemata, which-despite
assuming
similar ideological meanings.
different functions in each-produce
Most crucial among these schemata is the belief that death is the
horizon of life, the projected moment of closure that retroactively
impels the forward drive of narrative and seals the individual's fate
into a collective national destiny. Heidegger makes the connection between death and national-historical
belonging through a
complex argument that equates the finitude of temporality with
the ontological status of "historicality" as a mode of being. Lewis
establishes this link by means of an "analogy" (Victor Stamp as Nazi
Germany) that subsequently overcodes the ontological operations
is different,
of the narrative system. The mode of argumentation
essence
of
existence
as
the
but in both instances a sense of futurity
or
to
combines with the idea of "destiny"
"fatality"
produce a radiof
view.
cally reactionary point
Admittedly, there is disagreement as to whether the purely existential or deconstructive aspects of Being and Time can be separated
the legacy of
from the book's political meanings. Remembering
as
Hannah
Arendt
such
of
andJean-Paul
Heidegger
early interpreters
Sartre, Ridiger Safranski, for example, claims that Heidegger's
fundamental
ontology is "vague enough to allow for different
in
political matters" (Martin Heidegger 168). This vagueness
options
stems from Heidegger's refusal to discuss what he calls "the problem of the ontological structure of world-historicizing"
(Being and
Time 440). By restricting his interest in time to its role as the horizon
of being in general, Heidegger avoids an
for the understanding
of
world
history. He thus opens his work to political judganalysis
ments that are unmediated by the discipline of social or historical
theory. Significantly, thinkers like Arendt and Sartre, who build
of
on Heidegger's
ontology but reject the political implications
his work, question this failure to integrate historical analysis into
stress the centhe concept of Dasein. Both of these philosophers
to
of
ontology, challenging Heidegger's
trality
"being-with-others"
view of death as a projected limit that brings the individual into
contact with primordial being. In The Human Condition Arendt

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/37

thus counters Heidegger's philosophy of death with a philosophy

of being born, matching his critique of helpless addiction
to
everydayness with her notion of amor mundi. Similarly, in Being and
"projecting oneself
Nothingness Sartre contends that Heidegger's
toward death" serves only to "deprive life of all meaning" and to
conceal the ontological
of "being-for-one-another"
significance
(544). Both of these thinkers derive important lessons from Being
and Time. On the question of death, however, they concur with
Theodor Adorno, one of Heidegger's
harshest critics, who complains that Heidegger is "an accomplice of all that is horrible in
death" (156). By contrast, Lewis corroborates Heidegger's analysis
of death, describing Victor's fateful drive in terms that remove it
from social mediation at the same time that they attribute to it the
destiny.
significance of a national-historical
The Revenge for Love carries a political meaning even though the
novel's official rhetoric opposes the subservience of being to any form
of political commitment.
Although Foshay is right to claim that
the repeated lifting of "false bottoms" opens the text to the nihilistic
operations of ressentiment, The Revenge for Love cannot simply be
Such a
read as a straightforward critique of political engagement.
of
the
novel
as
a
formalist
treats
critique
ideology, and as
reading
such it implies that aesthetic categories circumscribe or master the
novel's political discourses. This kind of interpretation risks replicating at the level of literary analysis the "aestheticization of politics"
of fascist ideology. In
that Walter Benjamin finds constitutive
to
declare
Lewis's
short, any attempt
politics external to the narraof the autonomy of the aesthetic, a
tive involves a reaffirmation
doctrine that the text itself holds up for scrutiny.9
Significantly, the novel's primary disputation regarding the relation
between aesthetics and politics occurs when Victor argues with the
Marxist ideologue Peter Wallace about the political significance of
a Picasso print that hangs on the wall of a Bloomsbury apartment.
The episode is remarkable not only for its self-reflexive qualities
(Lewis negotiates the political meanings of an important modernist
work), but also because, as David Ayers notes, it contains the
For Ayers,
novel's most egregious expressions of anti-Semitism.
Peter Wallace is the novel's "manipulator-Jew." His argument that
the Picasso print is an example of "bourgeois art" distresses Stamp,
who cannot abide the doctrinaire nature of such criticism. At the
height of his frustration, Victor resorts to racial slurs, referring to
the art historian Carl Einstein, the author of a book on Braque
that Wallace cites, as "one of those Jewish smart-alecks from Paris"
9 Andrew Hewitt voices a similar uneasiness with this type of analysis: "To analyze
fascism as aestheticization smacks, in turn, of aestheticization, and the attempt to
establish a universalizable model on the basis of literary production alone risks
replicating at the level of theory the practice of aestheticization itself" (3).

COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
/38

(148). Although Ayers has a great deal to say about this scandalous
statement, he fails to explore the link between Victor's antiSemitism and his advocacy of "art for art's sake" (as Wallace puts
it) when it comes to his defense of the Picasso print. This oversight
precludes a reading of the novel in relation to Lacoue-Labarthe's
claim that "racism-and anti-Semitism in particular-is primarily,
fundamentally,

an aestheticism"

(Heidegger 69). The Revenge for Love

does not explicitly make this association, but Lewis's characterization of Isaac Wohl, the Jewish art forger who prefers "to be somebody else than to 'be himself,"' (230) closely parallels a Nazi
anti-Semitism that characterizedJews as "infinitely mimetic beings,
or, in other words, the site of an endless mimesis,which is both interminable and inorganic, producing no art and achieving no appropriation" (Heidegger96).
If, as Hannah Arendt

claims in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

anti-Semitism is indeed "the center of Nazi ideology" (6-7), this

resurfacing of racial discourses must undermine any reading of
the novel as a general critique of ideology. Indeed, Stamp's antiSemitic attitudes simply articulate his "destiny" to the "Nazi myth"
of German racial purity. As Isaac Wohl comments in response to
Tristram's initial comparison of Victor to the Third Reich, "I
shouldn't like to be aJew-inside Victor"(245). Read in the light of
this remark, Victor's future-bound drive acquires a repetitive logic
that seeks to revive the mythic origins of the German "people" as
a racial-spiritual whole. Furthermore, as Lacoue-Labarthe and
Jean-Luc Nancy point out in the "The Nazi Myth," this kind of
mythologizing is endemic to Nazi thought. Nazism views its historical
destiny as an attempt to build a racially pure Germany, calling
upon a distant origin to justify its present actions. Yet such an origin
is clearly a fiction, an ideological construct rather than the reflection of a historical or cultural continuity. This is why Nazism must
be understood as a "national aestheticism" or as the "fictioning" of
a national community. Such mythologizing involves the social mobilization of archaic forces that are resistant to modernity, but this
does not mean that Nazism is itself archaic. Rather, as Osborne
suggests, it embodies a "bad modernity" based upon a misrepresentation of temporality:
This structure-the structure of radical reaction within and against modernity-is
of necessity contradictory, since one of the things it aims to reverse is the production
of the very temporality to which it is itself subject. Radical reaction cannot but reproduce, and thereby performatively affirm, the temporal form of the very thing
against which it is pitted (modernity). Hence the necessity for it to misrepresent its
temporal structure to itself as some kind of "recovery"or "return." (Politicsof Time167)

This analysis corroborates my reading of The Revengefor Love by

showing how the novel disrupts the progressive temporality of
modernity only to make ideological recourse to a mythological fiction of origins. Earlier I noted that The Revenge for Love corre-

LEWIS & HEIDEGGER/39

sponds to what Joseph Frank calls "spatial form," supposedly a

feature of modernist literary texts. By doing this, I
well-recognized
dimension of
did not mean to suggest that the formal/aesthetic
modernism's critique of modernity is inherently totalitarian. Dasenbrock is right to point out that Lewis's narrative techniques are
deployed to "left wing, libertarian" purposes by writers like Mailer
and Pynchon. At stake in The Revenge for Love is not a strict narrative ideology (where political meaning is invariably inscribed in
narrative form), but the ideological overcoding of a narrative system that acquires political meaning in the historical/geographical
contexts of its enunciation. As W.J.T. Mitchell argues, the "space-time
problem in the arts" is "a dialectical struggle in which the opposed
terms take on different ideological roles at different moments in
I would add, in different cultural/geographical
history" (98)-and,
locations. The political meaning of The Revenge for Love thus lies
less in the formal qualities of its narrative system than in the allegorical cues it provides to the mythical significance of its spatiotemporal operations. Yet this does not mean that this narrative
scheme is politically neutral, lacking in ideological freight. I have
attributed a meaningful status to apparently coincidental factors,
like Victor's last name, to show that the novel's susceptibility to
Nazi ideology is more than accident or error. Like Heidegger's
Being and Time, The Revenge for Love fails to overcome the production
of modernist temporality, falling back on fictions of "destiny" or
"fatality" that are inseparable from national myths of racial-spiritual
purity. It is a sobering thought to remember the praise the novel
of
has received for its appeals to humanism or its dismantling
the
attests
to
if
that
because
inability
praise
only
political meanings,
of some of this century's most influential critical methods to discern the ideological operations of fascist modernism.
Murdoch University

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