Grotesque realism, satire, carnival and laughter in Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis

Abstract

Despite the fact that the works of the British writer Percy Wyndham Lewis display a satirical vision of reality, whose roots are to be found in the carnivalesque humour of the Middle Ages, as theorised by Mikhail Bakhtin, and which calls attention to the common features Lewis’s works share with such Latin American writers as Borges or García Márquez, Lewis’s works have had a very limited impact in Spanish-speaking countries. This article analyses one of Lewis’s least known novels, Snooty Baronet (1932), from a Bakhtinian point of view that shows the way in which Lewis’s fiction is full of characters whose actions seem as absurd as their own existence and which are fictional alter egos of the author, endless variations of the I/eye, only made real by grotesquely detailed descriptions of themselves and of the disconnected world of carnival, satire, and laughter that surrounds them.