"Was Anyone Hurt?": The Ends of Satire in A Handful of Dust

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2003 by Greenberg, Jonathan

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

Oscar Wilde

Wallace Stevens wrote that death is the mother of beauty, but for Evelyn Waugh death more often gives birth to comedy. In Decline and Fall, a schoolboy is killed by a stray bullet from a track official's misfired pistol. In Vile Bodies, a gossip columnist puts his head in an oven when he can no longer get into the right parties. In Black Mischief, the hero unwittingly consumes the stewed body of his lover during an African emperor's funeral rites. Such a casual acceptance of violent and untimely death has become an emblem of Waugh's sensibility, the signal characteristic of his dark humor. In Waugh's fiction, life is nasty, British, and short.

With an ambivalence characteristic of Waugh's critics, Conor Cruise O'Brien has called this apparent indifference to death a "schoolboy delight in cruelty" (50), distancing himself morally and emotionally from Waugh's delight while still praising the author's peculiar talents. O'Brien discerns, even as he reproduces, a discrepancy in the fiction between ethics and pleasure, a gap that some theorists have argued is endemic to satire itself, which assumes a moral stance in defense of traditional, communal values, but exults in the representation of the vice and folly it excoriates. As Michael Seidel has put it, despite his "curative, meliorative, or restorative role," the satirist is inevitably "implicated in the debasing form of his action" (3,4).1 In order to clean up, you have to get dirty.

If Waugh's fiction offers a useful case study in the paradoxes of satire, it is equally valuable for the questions it opens in understanding modernism. For Waugh's attitudes toward both modernism and modernity more generally are similarly vexed. As George McCartney has written: "Waugh's response to the modern was marked by certain fruitful ambivalence. In his official pose he was the curmudgeon who despised innovation, but the anarchic artist in him frequently delighted in its formal and thematic possibilities" (Roaring 3).2 Although Waugh later in life repeatedly denounced modernist formal experimentation, his early fiction nonetheless came to embody a modern sensibility in its apparent rejection of the novel's traditional ethical obligations. Even in matters of form, he didn't consider himself a traditionalist, but rather grouped himself with writers such as Firbank and Hemingway who deployed what Waugh sometimes called, following Wyndham Lewis, an "external method."3 Indeed, in Waugh, the satiric and the modern often look very much alike; while the author may claim to satirize a decadent modernity, the disruptive mechanism of his satire fosters the very modern decadence he decries.

A Handful of Dust brings to the fore this tension between Waugh's implicitly reformative, conservative impulse and his subversive and thoroughly modern-if not precisely modernist-enjoyment of the aesthetic possibilities of cruelty. The novel is the story of Tony Last, an English aristocrat thoroughly devoted to his family estate, Hetton, and to the unchanging routines that the decaying neo-Gothic country house embodies. It tells of the dissolution of Tony's family, his beliefs, in a sense his entire world. But the novel also tells the story of the dissolution of satire; in it Waugh both thematizes and enacts the breakdown of the comic-ironic sensibility that characterizes his early work. Understanding this breakdown, in fact, can explain a longstanding and unresolved critical conundrum-the abrupt tonal shift of the novel's concluding chapters, which modulate away from the comic into the mode Freud called the uncanny. What I argue in the following pages, in short, is that in A Handful of Dust Waugh pushes his satire to such limits that it must take another form.

I

Early in the novel, Waugh gives his readers a kind of object lesson in the ethics of comedy. While Tony and his young son, John Andrew, walk to church, John tells his father a story he has heard from the stable manager Ben about a mule named Peppermint "who had drunk his company's rum ration" (37) in the First World War and subsequently died. Tony finds the story "very sad" (37), but John Andrew responds: "Well I thought it was sad too, but it isn't. Ben said it made him laugh fit to bust his pants" (38). What seems important here is not merely the difference in the men's reactions-Ben finds comedy where Tony finds pathos-but the hierarchy among them. If Waugh is joking about the simplicity of John's logic, he is also using the boy to comment critically on Tony's easy sympathy for a long-dead mule. John's acceptance of Ben as the authority in such aesthetic judgments, in other words, indicates not only Tony's parental neglect (Drewry 6)-a failure to instill in his son the values of his social class-but also the outmoded nature of those very values. Waugh expects his readers to understand that, in this case at least, a cruel reaction trumps a sympathetic one.