characters and consciousness-networks like Woolf and Mansfield, but through the eyes of a Wyndham Lewis: a network of theories posing as characters, but more amusing than most books like that

Folks

• Theodore Gumbril, bored schoolteacher who quits in order to experience life in London. With a mind like Bloom’s, always trying to invent, he loves mysteries, joins all groups; “not passionate but sensual and sentimental,” he decides to turn himself from the Mild and Melancholy man he is to the broad lusty Complete Man; but ends up damning distraction and restlessness
• Gumbril Senior, an old architect with utopian dreams and a love of birds. Nice, he has dreams and is not beyond good and evil; he does dream of a better humanity (an overman) and wants humanity to overreach its limitations and become something more; he is a Nietzsche but still with morality rather than hyper-individualism
• Mr. Porteous, Senior’s friend, whose son gives Senior a chance to be truly charitable and show Gumbril that goodness still exists
• Boldero, the capitalist who wants to make “Tudor homes more Tudor than they actually are;” he is an advertising genius; a “mental caterpiller” who absorbs knowledge endlessly, he apes experts very well (which reminds Gumbril of himself, to his immense dissatisfaction)
• Bojanus, Gumbril’s tailor, a secret Leninist who’s extremely well-read and well-spoken; believes that he and Gumbril only are the “sensitive” ones (34-6 a Stirnerian critique of freedom)
• Casimir Lypiatt, a failed painter/poet, an old-school Romantic-Symbolist who believes in the Spiritual in Art, theorizes about the artist constantly; refuses to support himself as an ad painter; unbelievably sincere, he has some good principles but can’t execute them.
• Mr. Mercaptan, a simple decadent sensualist who disdains Lypiatt’s spirituality; an essayist, he is anti-philosophy and anti-utopian (that is, anti-Dostoevsky and anti-Wells), only living for the refinements of civilization; 221: bibelots
• Shearwater, a physiologist studying the kidneys; he is a positivist until he falls in love with Myra
• Rosie, his wife, whose pretend games of being the Grand Lady lead her to an affair with Gumbril, which leads to sex with Mercaptan and Coleman—and her disillusionment with romance, making her return to Shearwater; she plays the Great Lady to Gumbril’s Complete Man, but she likes the Mild and Melancholy version better in the end
• Coleman, the empty spark of energy who speaks in absurdities; wants whatever is at once both “the sordid and the significant”
• Zoe, his partner, who clearly hates him and would murder him if she could
• Myra Viveash, a victim of WWI, her only true love died in battle, and now she seeks to solve her boredom in a senseless round of entertainments and enjoyments of modern life: lights, signs, ads, stimulants, depressants, cars, cafes, and jazz bands, which she wishes could be automatized (264); a breathless dynamo, she makes everyman fall in love with her
• Emily, Gumbril’s true love, lost because he skips out on her to spend the day with Myra; loves music, flowers, and the countryside, just like him, but believes he’ll get bored of her so takes off

Themes

• Exceptionalism
  • Some people try to think they are special; no one else is; they are just the herd (Gumbril won’t accept it)
• Nietzsche:
  • Gumbril wonders if we’re all truly beyond good and evil
  • it turns out that the jerks in the book “are,” but the nice ones are not
    • Gumbril Senior does believe in humanity getting better and better (still hope)
  • Nietzsche given a fair consideration, but not championed totally
• Simulation
  • Architecture and Interior Design
    • Boldero wants a house “more Tudor than Tudor”
    • Gumbril damns Arts and Crafts-derived furniture in department stores as fakes, as middle-class corruptions of a good thing (229)
    • 114, 147: Omega Workshops and futurism in design already passe
  • The Beaver and Masculinity
    • Coleman and Gumbril make themselves more many by donning fake beards
    • And yet the women just end up scared by the beards, though they were seduced by the bead
    • The Beaver ensares the woman as advertisement, but Gumbril’s real nice self keeps them there with him
    • These men can’t keep up with the demands of being Manly
  • Rosie’s Grand Lady: she pretends to be Myra, but in the end doesn’t like it; it’s too cruel for her
• Architecture
  • The boy’s school
  • The Tudor houses
    • cf Waugh’s Hetton in Handful of Dust
  • The model of London as a utopian city (149-55)
    • Sold to the Victorian and Albert to save his friend from financial ruin
    • Failure?
• Advertising
  • 130-3: Boldero on advertisements, showing how you manipulate all of humanity’s best feelings and fears, especially social fears (including a fun poke at D H Lawrence’s lumbar ganglia region)
  • 135-6: no more magic potions; all products scientifically proven
  • Alcohol advertisements: Myra saysthat’s what Lypiatt’s art looks like now (84, 96, 223, 226, 239, 242, 260), and then Gumbril wants Lypiatt to do his ads
  • Using advertisements as an example in conversation
    • 205: Eno’s Fruit Salts (a childhood memory)
    • 251: before-and-after adverts
  • 275: Myra loves “electric sky-signs”
  • 101: Advertisements link an image to an object irreversibly (baby reaching out equals a soap brand)
• Consumption
  • Its danger: getting bored of the products (Myra gets bored of them and has to move on)
  • 264: she can’t recapture the taste of raspberry syrup
  • 270: the most “desperate” measure to taking is having kids
• Hope versus Modern Cynicism
  • Myra is all modern cynicism, about emptiness of life behind all her attempts at gaiety
  • 269: the beautiful looks silly in the morning
• Marxism: worries about lower class rampant
• Theatricality: in politics, in sex, everywhere (100, 248, 85: even infecting artists)

Modernism

• It’s a free romp through the main theories of modern life: decadence, neo-classicism, Nietzscheanism, Stirnerism, Marxism, cynicism, spiritualism, fakery
• Krafft-Ebing, Lenin, Barres, Chesterton, Wells—all mentioned by name
• 138: cult of the new
• Myra’s love for the trappings of modernity
• Obsession with trying to find out someone’s “real” self

Essays

• Advertising Men and Literature: Boldero says the best education for an adman is a liberal arts education (135, 142, 205)
• Generational Class Difference Plot: what about the universal plot structure of someone being born in a high social class but then getting ditched from it, so they know the high class culturally but really belong to lower class financially (34): it happens all the time!
• Architecture and Simulation in Modernity: this is the time when people start antiquing, so they try to recreate history; hence you have the Gothic Revival house in Waugh’s Handful of Dust, as well as Boldero’s more Tudor than Tudor houses; as well as the Arts and Crafts slash Omega Workshops fad; anyway, do a cultural studies analysis on the birth of simulation in architecture
• Shopping as the Education of the Modern Cathectic Muscle: The shopping scene down Bond Street where Rosie and Gumbril pick each other up (37): window shopping is a process of mobile, revolving cathexis: they practice focusing emotional/sexual energies on successive items to buy or not buy, alternating with cathecting onto each other: it’s training for modern life b/c you must be able to keep recathecting to get used to the modern city (a la Simmel); human relationships become just another moment of recathecting (see how Rosie moves from Gumbril to Mercaptan to Coleman, and Gumbril to Emily—but they both get burned and have to stop doing so; and for Myra, it won’t do with people, even though she tries 257, 258 riding through to see all the pretty lights she likes; Gumbril doesn’t like that restlessness but she says “those things are me”; 262 she wants an auto jazz band; “it’s not just food, you know,” she says, referring to the fact that food isn’t the only thing she gets sick of and must pass on to the next thing—insatiable = empty)
  • My lists and catalogs are recathecting

• “Man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance” (169)
• “The people we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians” (192)
• “Somewhere there are men with power, living reasonably” (201)