David Lafferty

The claim of this study is that the “master subject” of Lewis’s literary works was a cultural divide that I refer to as the modern kulturkampf or “culture war” (the English translation of kulturkampf , and now common parlance), and that may be most simply described as the sharp, politicized cultural division between the Old and the New in the modern world. Lewis’s confrontation with the kulturkampf , the parameters of which he was constantly redefining, guided his rhetorical strategies and the construction of his authorial persona, especially in his employment of reactionary ideas and rhetoric. I examine the development of Lewis’s vision of the kulturkampf in his polemical works and in the fiction in which his polemical voice and authorial persona are most apparent, analyzing in loose chronological order the emergence of Lewis’s “politics of the intellect” in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and The Lion and the Fox (1927); his engagement with kulturkampf rhetoric in his critique of T.E. Hulme’s vision of thekulturkampf , his public feud with the editors of transition , and his analysis of the age war in The Old Gang and the New Gang (1933); his political polemics of the 1930s, with a focus on his contribution to “revolutionary conservative” ideology in Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! (1937); his post-war return to the British kulturkampfin Rotting Hill (1951); and finally his radical re-evaluation of the dimensions of the kulturkampf in the last two completed books of the unfinished Human Age tetralogy.

Throughout, I argue that the purpose of Lewis’s engagement with the kulturkampf was threefold. First, it allowed him to refine his politics of the intellect–the practical goal of which was the protection of the intellectual, and the utopian goal of which was to bring the kulturkampf into a new “political equilibrium.” Second, it allowed him to harness the literary and political violence of others as a means of creating confusion and controversy, thus reinforcing his position as the “Enemy.” Third, it functioned as a vehicle for his evangelical impulses, his goal being to expand the political consciousness of the average middle-class Briton.