Wyndham Lewis' 1929 book, written in 1927 after his first visit to the United States. It reaches this archive sideways: Cameron is drafting a blog post on it when episode 76 begins, and the post — not the book — is what he reads from. Paleface is used here for two things at once: as evidence that Lewis set the agenda McLuhan would work on from the 1940s to the 1980s, and as a hundred-year-old description of a world taken over by morality, which the session reads as the earliest account of what the 2020s call wokeness.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the book Cameron is writing about rather than one the pair are reading — which is why it frames the session without ever being quoted, supplying the opening premise that Lewis set the problems McLuhan would spend forty years working on, and returning at the far end as the century's sharpest description of what would later be called wokeness
The book enters the archive as work in progress rather than as a text on the table, which is why the session quotes Cameron's reading of it and never the book itself.
"Lately, on the blog, I've been working on Lewis's 1929 book, Pale Face."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 0:51
The claim that opens the session and organizes its first eighty minutes — Lewis as an input to McLuhan rather than a contemporary, which is what makes the originality question askable at all.
"it's quite amazing how much of that book feeds into the following decades."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:01
The book's second use, at the far end of the session — read now, it is not a period piece but a report filed a century early from the condition the present takes to be new.
"If you read Paleface today, in the age of wokeness, it's like somebody set out in 1929."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:47:22
The one sentence Cameron extracts from the whole book, and the hinge of the session's late argument — moralization as a media effect rather than an ethical development.
"They wrote that the world has become a moral place. That's what Lewis says. Everything has been taken over by morality."Wyndham Lewis, quoted by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:47:51
The formula that converts Lewis from prophet to diagnostician — nothing has been added since 1927 but instantiation, which is exactly the chemistry-and-alchemy relation Cameron uses all session against Bob's chronology.
"100 years later, all the world has done is made concrete what Lewis could already see in the abstract."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:48:04
Yields the single term the series had been missing — a word Cameron says appears nowhere else in Lewis, which McLuhan reverses into the one faculty that might open the circle
The book's importance narrows to one passage, and the scarcity is the argument — a term this isolated is likelier to have been taken than absorbed.
"Lewis brings up the concept of arrest. And I haven't been able to find it anyplace else in Lewis's work."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 2:32:15
Paleface enters the archive as the site of a polarity reversal, which is the pattern the page keeps finding — Lewis supplies the diagnosis and McLuhan flips its sign.
"McLuhan is able to take something that Lewis has as a negative and see it as a positive and see it as a potential break with this circle that we've been talking about all morning."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 77 (9 Nov 2023), 2:34:26
Connections
Lewis' 1929 book, written in 1927 after a first visit to the United States.
Cameron's claim for the book is that McLuhan read it in the 1930s and that its problems feed his work from the 1940s to the end.