Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки, Vol 19, Iss 1(160), Pp 233-243 (2017)

литература и кино, английская литература, модернизм, Уиндем Льюис, интермедиальность., History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature

The paper considers the influence of the cinema on the satirical novel The Apes of God (1930) by English modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis as contextualized by its author’s predominantly negative perception of the cinema in his fiction and criticism. For Lewis the critic, the cinema was an embodiment of stereotyped modern popular culture as well as a powerful instrument of ideological control, which erases the differences between individuals and their ways of thinking. Accordingly, in The Apes of God the cinema is represented as an anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic mass-made cultural product, whose model serves passively mechanical characters satirized by the author as a model for perceiving and interpreting their lives. Conceived as such, the cinema stands in stark contrast with the text of the novel. Detailed metaphorical descriptions of the least significant movements of objects and characters seen from a short distance act as a deliberate literary antithesis to such popular cinema effects as slow motion and close-up. Thus, Lewis’s novel is a consistent articulation of its author’s opposition to the cinema both on the level of content and that of form. Overall, The Apes of God is a characteristic example of aversion to the cinema shared by many English “high” modernist writers.