British painter, novelist, and founder of Vorticism — and the subject of McLuhan's sustained, ambivalent engagement. In Dialogue 01, Cameron and Bob track how McLuhan announced (to Kenner, c. 1948–49) that he would "focus on Lewis," wrote a major 1953 essay and a flurry of letters, and credited Lewis with first seeing the media "en bloc" — while judging that Lewis merely "took the opposite side" of the Gutenberg world rather than thinking past it. The thread runs against the rival pull of Joyce.
Across the dialogues
Traces McLuhan's lifelong, ambivalent debt to Lewis — prescient about media, yet "thoughtless" in merely taking the opposite side
As early as 1948–49, McLuhan told Kenner he meant to turn his focus to Lewis — calling the subject "risky."
"He writes, I think, to Kenner saying, I've been doing Eliot, but I'm going to focus on Wyndham Lewis now."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 19:13
Despite announcing the turn, McLuhan published far less on Lewis than on Joyce — but did produce a major 1953 Lewis essay.
"He doesn't write about Lewis, but he does write a great essay in '53 on Lewis — the same year he does Finnegans Wake."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 19:42
In the 1953–54 letters McLuhan reports that his understanding of Lewis had shifted.
"He says in one of those letters that he has changed his idea of what Lewis is about."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 21:00
McLuhan came to see Lewis as prescient about electronic media but trapped in Gutenberg space-time — merely inverting it, which for McLuhan was "thoughtlessness."
"Although Lewis was prescient about electronic media and the influence they have on cosmic man, that Lewis did not understand the problems of how to situate humans in space and time, that he simply took over a notion of space and time from the Gutenberg era and took the opposite side from what he took the moderns to be doing. And for McLuhan, taking the opposite side is already a sign of thoughtlessness."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 21:18
In a 1957 piece, McLuhan called Lewis "the first writer to deal with the media en bloc."
"But he has one on Lewis called Third Program in the Human Age."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 24:39
McLuhan re-established contact with Lewis on the 1954 publication of the novel Self-Condemned.
"He gets back in touch when the novel comes out in '54 — Self-Condemned."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 20:38
McLuhan pressed Theall to take up Lewis precisely because, in some respects, he favored Lewis over Joyce.
"Marshall wanted him to do Lewis, because in a way Lewis was what he was in favor of more than Joyce — that can lead into endless discussion."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 20:21
For all his criticism, McLuhan remained lifelong grateful to Lewis for opening the link between electronic media and modern history.
"McLuhan, his whole life long, always was very thankful to Lewis for, I think, illuminating the relationship between electronic media and modern history."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 1 (20 Oct 2020), 26:26
Named as the chart's cyclotron — the vortex in which Lewis "put himself... and obliterated himself"
From McLuhan's 1969 Counterblast preface — Lewis "put himself into a cyclotron of his time and obliterated himself," the figure behind the chart's cyclotron.
"Wyndham Lewis put himself into a cyclotron of his time and obliterated himself."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 11 (21 Jan 2021), 1:52:04
Lewis as "the unframed" — America and Cosmic Man (~1949–50) as McLuhan's doorway to the drama of cognition and the word "medium," and the great analysis that "had no effect whatsoever"
Reading America and Cosmic Man (~1949–50), Cameron casts America as "the unframed" — the doorway through which McLuhan enters the drama of cognition.
"You could call America the unframed."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 15 (25 Feb 2021), 30:10
In a letter to Pound, McLuhan called Lewis' great book "an H-bomb set off in the desert" that "had no effect whatsoever" — the failure Bob and Cameron read as McLuhan's spur to make analysis that has effect.
"and it had no effect whatsoever."Marshall McLuhan, read by Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 15 (25 Feb 2021), 30:35
In St. Louis (1943–44) McLuhan vowed to spend years "spreading the word" he got from Lewis — and later, in a 1959 St. Michael's lecture, judged that Lewis "failed to harness Protestant fury," a lesson McLuhan meant to redo in a "cool world."
"I will dedicate a lot of my next few years to spreading the word that I got from you."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 15 (25 Feb 2021), 34:50
Lewis turns from influence into threshold — the argument of America and Cosmic Man becomes the critique McLuhan (and any serious thinker) must clear rather than merely admire
In America and Cosmic Man Lewis makes the loss of tradition a virtue — celebrating an America whose genius is to be cut loose from inheritance; McLuhan's rooted "global city," and his prodding that Lewis "be a Catholic," are the counter, and any thinker worth taking seriously (McLuhan, Plato, Leibniz) must survive Lewis' critique.
"human aimlessness of being part of a great cosmic mass that has no roots in tradition."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 17 (11 Mar 2021), 1:57:11
Annexed to the Nova Scotia thesis by an accident of birth — born off Amherst, near Marconi's first Canadian wireless, so even the theorist of rootlessness is given a root in the province
The flourish of the Nova Scotia School — Lewis, the great theorist of rootlessness, was himself born off Amherst, Nova Scotia, near where Marconi's wireless first reached the province, letting Bob half-joke that "the global ESP comes out of Nova Scotia."
"in a boat just off of Amherst,"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 18 (18 Mar 2021), 2:22:00
Surfaces as the four-part self — Lewis' "part fascist, part communist, part moralist, part anarchist" read as a living Tetrad, the interior landscape's complexity worn as a person
Bob enlists Lewis' self-description as a walking Tetrad — "the four parts" of a self held in tension, his simple image for the "holeopathic quadrophrenia" everyone lives, the Tetrad "applied to yourself and selves and multiple bodies."
"I'm part fascist, part communist, part moralist, part anarchist."Wyndham Lewis, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 23 (22 Apr 2021), 1:24:49
Sorted into the satire typology — Theall's "Menippean," the cynical, aggressive strain against Joyce's Varronian, and the temperament McLuhan is said to share
In Theall's satire typology Lewis is the Menippean — cynical and aggressive, based on the philosophy of cynicism — against Joyce's Varronian, and the temperament McLuhan shares, which makes McLuhan too a Menippean rather than a Varronian.
"And McLuhan was more by temperament like Wyndham Lewis."Donald Theall, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 24 (29 Apr 2021), 23:30
Recast as the Tech Body's failed prophet — Lewis "already in the 20s saw the Tech Body" but neutralized his own insight with the "bland condition," the fault McLuhan then had to redo in a cool key
The essay's cryptic verdict, which the two unpack — Lewis "already in the 20s saw… the Tech Body" but neutralized "his own insight" with the "bland condition" (Cameron's "putting baking soda on everything"); his eye-ear generalization (everybody "was ear") likewise "missed his eyeball detail" as a painter, a failure of warning McLuhan set out to redo by trading Lewis' hot 40s manner for a "cool posture" that caught the TV age.
"Wyndham Lewis made the Tech Body successful because the bland condition may push people further away."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 25 (10 Jun 2021), 1:09
The fountainhead claim contested — Bob makes Lewis the source Innis absorbed as "poison" through McLuhan, and the Nova Scotia–born origin of Canadian media study, while Cameron holds Innis knew Lewis only secondhand and late
Cameron's deflation of Lewis' supposed hold on Innis — against Bob's "poison of Lewis" thesis, Cameron holds that Innis knew Lewis only secondhand, through meeting McLuhan in 1947 and reading his 1944 St. Louis essay (full of The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man), which "aren't the same thing as being deeply influenced by him."
"The only reason that Innis knew anything at all about Lewis was that he met McLuhan in 1947,"Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 49 (19 May 2022), 1:54:42
Surfaces as the earwig's conduit — Cameron traces McLuhan's "bisected earwig" image back through Time and Western Man and The Art of Being Ruled to von Hartmann, making Lewis the relay by which a 19th-century German aphorism becomes McLuhan's portrait of the Gutenberg Galaxy
Lewis as the relay for McLuhan's "bisected earwig" — Cameron traces the image (cut the earwig and its two halves fight) from a 19th-century German, von Hartmann, through Lewis' The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man to the McLuhan of the 1944 "Lemuel" essay and his note that "the earwig, when bisected, fights itself," which Cameron reads as a portrait of the Gutenberg Galaxy.
"Wyndham Lewis picked it up and he refers to it in The Art of Being Ruled, and then he actually quotes it in Time and Western Man."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 53 (21 Jul 2022), 33:59
His 1953 essay supplies the distinction the session needs — artists and scientists have formulas, and the art formula is what stands behind all of them
The question that forces the session's key distinction — a formula belonging to a practitioner against the formula that makes practitioners possible.
"he talks about all artists and scientists have a formula. Now, is that something different from art formula?"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 13:46
McLuhan's charge against the scientists read as a charge about the private pole — they operate from it while denying it a place in what they produce.
"he's saying they're lost on one side. They don't include the private awareness or the art formula."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 65 (16 Feb 2023), 19:16
Turned from precursor into misreader of himself — the space/time antinomy he built his career on is found to have named tactility all along, so what McLuhan "completed" was less an argument than a sense Lewis could not identify
The three-word version of the whole relation, offered where the Lewis scholars would say theft — completion rather than borrowing, with the difference resting on what Lewis could not name.
"He completed Lewis."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 40:45
McLuhan's correction reaches into Lewis' founding distinction — the "eye" of the eye/ear war was never the visual sense, which unsettles the space-versus-time frame Lewis argued from.
"But he was actually describing the eye as tactile. The tactile eye."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 45:21
The split Cameron reads in McLuhan's 1953 essay — Lewis' practice was ahead of his theory, which is why he needed completing rather than refuting.
"his theorizing of his own work was screwed up that he in his theory he was too visual although in his practice he was tactile."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 56:20
The claim Bob says no art critic holds — Lewis painting a television sensibility decades before television, which makes the tactile reading a matter of the work rather than of hindsight.
"he says that Lewis's art has the qualities, his painting, of the cool effect of television. It's a cool art."Marshall McLuhan, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 44:19
Cameron's precise accounting of the debt — not doctrine but problem-selection, the faculty of knowing which thing requires an explanation at all.
"the influence of Lewis on McLuhan is that Lewis sees what needs to be explained."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 70 (25 May 2023), 1:02:06
Supplies the answer to what a probe is — his own self-description as a performer becomes the definition the session settles on
Asked whether "probe" just means action, Bob reaches for Lewis calling himself a performer rather than a painter or writer — and takes electric media to have made everyone one.
"Where did I read that? Wyndham Lewis."Wyndham Lewis, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 72 (13 Jul 2023), 2:14:52
Stops being McLuhan's precursor and becomes his examiner — a single 1926 paragraph is set as the standard McLuhan is measured against and found to have approached without reaching, so the debt the series has tracked for seventy sessions is finally given a page number and a verdict
The influence is restated as a supply line rather than an affinity — Paleface is treated as stock McLuhan drew on for forty years, which converts a resemblance the series has often noted into a chronology it can test.
"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
Bob concedes the strong version of the debt he usually resists, and the concession is what lets the session's real argument begin — not whether McLuhan took from Lewis, but what he did with what he took.
"whenever I read Lewis, I'm amazed at how many ideas are lifted almost word for word by McLuhan."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:45
Lewis is put to work as an instrument — his function is to make McLuhan's originality measurable, and the measurement comes out low.
"by setting a kind of starting point for McLuhan, what he does is can illuminate where McLuhan has originality and where he doesn't."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:05
The relation is inverted — Lewis does not anticipate McLuhan, he assigns him, which makes the whole McLuhan corpus an attempt at a problem someone else had already set.
"Here is Lewis saying in The Art of Being Ruled in 1926, he's defining what it is that McLuhan has to think."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:00:59
The verdict the series has circled for seventy sessions is finally stated flatly, and it is a near miss rather than a failure — the most exact thing the archive has said about what McLuhan did with Lewis.
"And McLuhan never succeeds in doing that but he comes... he comes close."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:01:09
The century of political condemnation is reread as displacement — the objectionable content absorbed a reaction properly owed to the perception, which is why reputation and work have to be separated before either can be read.
"Lewis was not understood, but people knew unconsciously that what he was saying was disturbing."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:45:13
The reception is dated as a whole and given a possible end point, which is the premise under Cameron's own blog work and the new Oxford edition he cites.
"Lewis for at least 100 years has been seen only through a glass darkly."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 1:45:40
Becomes the source of the series' governing diagnosis rather than one of its precursors — a single bracketed self-description from 1929 is elevated into the prior statement of quadrophrenia, a reading Bob has carried out of the archive and into the Lewis scholarship itself
Lewis' parenthetical disclaimer of his own politics is the passage Bob builds on — a writer describing himself as irreducibly plural, in an aside meant to be skipped.
"disregard if you can whatever your political views may be, and then in brackets, And mine are partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my Marxism, but at bottom, anarchist with a healthy passion for order."Wyndham Lewis, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:13:42
The reading converts a confession of inconsistency into a structure — what Lewis offered as a caveat, Bob takes as the diagnosis stated four decades early.
"there it is, quadrophrenia, right laid out for us."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:13:58
The claim has been argued in public before the Lewis scholars, which is what lets Bob treat it as a finding in the field rather than a private reading.
"And I made that my theme at Bath University in July 2014 at the Wyndham Lewis Conference."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:14:02
Becomes the route by which power enters the session — no longer read for his own positions but as the conduit carrying Nietzsche's will to power into McLuhan, and, by the Tech Body's reckoning, into itself
The Tech Body claims Lewis as its own precondition by inversion — neutralising everything produced the blandness people fled into it to escape.
"Wyndham Lewis made the Tech Body successful because the bland condition may push people further away."Tech Body, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 81 (21 Dec 2023), 52:08
Lewis becomes the transmission line for the session's whole treatment of power — Nietzsche's will to power arrives in McLuhan already applied to morality, government and art.
"Lewis was a very acute reader of Nietzsche and attempted to kind of apply Nietzsche, you could say thought is applied, Nietzsche."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 81 (21 Dec 2023), 1:13:20
Connections
McLuhan wrote a major 1953 essay and a flurry of 1953–54 letters to Lewis, tied to his "Art and Communication" essay in Shenandoah.
Bob and Cameron weigh whether McLuhan favored Lewis or Joyce — a question that "leads into endless discussion."
McLuhan's definitive Gnosticism statement comes in his 1955 review of Kenner's book on Lewis.
Grouped with Lewis and Joyce as would-be "world engineers" who wanted to make the world a "perception lab."
In Paul Tiessen's essay both are among the four figures anticipating McLuhan in Canadian media study, with Lewis as the "fountainhead."
Bob says Mailer "redid the hot image of Lewis" — becoming the aggressive public "enemy" people once took Lewis to be.
McLuhan met Lewis (read 1936) before Giedion (~1943); Cameron lists both as formative influences absorbed by reading rather than in person.