Modernism, Satire and The Novel by Jonathan Greenberg

MODERNISM, SATIRE, AND THE NOVEL
In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric

sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisenti-
mental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to
guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated,
detached, and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering.
This sensibility challenged the novel’s humanistic tradition, set
ethics and aesthetics into conflict, and fundamentally altered the
ways that we know and feel.
Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh,
Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett,
and others, this book analyzes a body of literature – late modernist
satire – that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic, and
poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feel-
ing. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics,
Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a
persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.
jo na t h an g re en be r g is Associate Professor of English at

Montclair State University. He has published essays on numerous
twentieth-century writers including Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie,
Evelyn Waugh, Nathanael West, and Ian McEwan. A comedic writer
himself, he has also won an Emmy Award for his writing for children’s
television.
MODERNISM, SATIRE,
AND THE NOVEL
JONATHAN GREENBERG
Associate Professor, Montclair State University
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107008496
# Jonathan Greenberg 2011
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2011
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greenberg, Jonathan Daniel, 1968–
Modernism, satire, and the novel / Jonathan Greenberg.
p. cm.
isbn 978-1-107-00849-6 (Hardback)
1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Satire–History and criticism. 3. Emotions in literature.
I. Title.
pn56.m54g75 2011
809.30 9112–dc22
2011009239
isbn 978-1-107-00849-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without
laughing.
Oscar Wilde
I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source;
I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is “bitter,” I must laugh at the
laugh.
Nathanael West
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said – half-laughing through her tears, it all
seemed so ridiculous – “I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t think those are real tears?” Tweedledum inter-
rupted in a tone of great contempt.
Lewis Carroll
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
Samuel Beckett
Contents
List of illustrations page ix

Preface xi
List of abbreviations xviii
1 Satire and its discontents 1

The double movement of satire 3
Satire, modernity, and the grotesque 7
Rethinking modernist antisentimentality 11
Feelings of suspicion 16
2 Modernism’s story of feeling 21

Forms of indifference: Wilde and Beerbohm 22
Forms of aggression: Pound and Lewis 26
Satire emergent: Joyce and Huxley 33
Late modernism 40
3 The rule of outrage: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies 47

Waugh’s Purgatorio 48
All the terrors of the pseudo 54
Everyone is a bomb: espionage, anarchy, modernism 61
4 Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust 70

The death of Peppermint 71
Phantasy with a ph 80
5 Cold Comfort Farm and mental life 92

Some perversions of pastoral 93
Gorgeous emotional wallowings 100
Tolerable comfort 109
6 Nathanael West and the mystery of feeling 115

The terrible sincere struggle 116
The sun is a joke 122
vii
viii Contents
The book of the grotesque 126
The refuse of feeling 131
7 Nightwood and the ends of satire 138

Great defaming sentences 140
We go up – but we come down 145
Remember Lady Macbeth 150
Second-hand dealings with life 155
8 Beckett’s authoritarian personalities 161

Moran as bureaucrat and father 164
Moran’s comic law 171
Follow me carefully: Molloy’s obsessions 176
Notes 184
Index 215
Illustration
Figure 1. “Sad Movie” by Charles Addams,

New Yorker (1946) page xii
ix
Preface
the uncle fester principle

A 1946 Charles Addams cartoon, “Sad Movie” (see Fig. 1), shows a movie
theater full of people watching a film. We don’t see the screen, but the
faces of the audience members – eyes wide, brows furrowed, tears running
down cheeks – tell us that they are watching something distressing, maybe
tragic. In the second row of the weeping crowd, slightly off-center, sits a
familiar Addams ghoul, the character later named Uncle Fester, his face lit
up in a grin. As in so many Addams cartoons, no caption is provided. His
smile is the only punchline the joke needs.1
By making a spectacle of the audience, showing not the action onscreen
but the reaction in the seats, the cartoon diverts attention from the
upsetting events of the film to the comic impropriety of Uncle Fester’s
laughter. Addams’s joke hinges on the discord between Fester’s cruel
pleasure and the heartfelt tears of the crowd. But although it is the deviant
reaction that makes the scene a joke, it would be too simple to call Fester
the object or the target of our laughter. For we are complicit with him; we
feel that he shares our emotional distance from the movie, and hence our
aesthetic superiority to those moved to tears by the spectacle on the
screen. “The mind is complex and ill-connected, like an audience,”2
William Empson wrote; this audience is complex and ill-connected like
a mind. Indeed, I suggest, Addams’s audience gives us a picture of the
modernist mind. Some minds are full of Uncle Festers in the seats of their
intrapsychic cinemas, others have only one, but without any we are not
fully modern. Call this the Uncle Fester Principle.
The reader’s complicity with Fester derives partially from her know-
ledge of the fictionality of the cartoon, and of the movie within the
cartoon. A real man laughing at real suffering might violate protocols of
decorum, if not morality or sanity, but he has more latitude if he is
laughing at make-believe suffering. This process of accounting for
xi
xii Preface
Figure 1. “Sad Movie” by Charles Addams, New Yorker, March 23, 1946. p. 31.
# Charles Addams. Reproduced with permission of the Tee and
Charles Addams Foundation
fictionality in one’s emotional response to perceived events, what Freud

called “reality-testing,”3 is always at work in our understanding of repre-
sentations, and the fact that both movie and drawing fail the reality test
makes it easier for us to understand the moviegoer’s reaction as funny
rather than cruel or lunatic.
But fictionality hardly tells the whole story. For Uncle Fester, judging by
his looks, may very well be cruel or lunatic; that suspicion is in fact part of
his charm. And under the right conditions anyone might laugh at real
horrors. Instead of fictionality, the comedy of the cartoon hinges on the
question of sensibility. The urbane New Yorker reader might well prefer to
think of herself as sharing a dark sense of humor with Addams’s moviegoer –
free to indulge her cruelty, or at least to laugh at the tear-jerker with its
tired conventions. Henri Bergson famously claimed that laughter requires
Preface xiii
a “momentary anaesthesia of the heart,” an absence of sympathy with
the object of the laughter, and Fester certainly exhibits this anaesthesia.4
Yet such an insight still prompts the question why some viewers should
experience this anaesthesia and not others. There is a social dimension at
work: the cartoon, though hardly high culture, belongs to a higher stratum of
culture than the movie, if only because it appeals to an audience that is more
educated, sophisticated, worldly. Indeed, the best term for the quality of this
sensibility might be modern. For our ideas both of modernity and of
modernism itself are tied up with the ways in which we respond to various
works of art and other representations. What saddens us, frightens us,
outrages us, amuses us – these are indices of our modernity.
This book is guided by a group of questions concerning such an idea
of modernity. How do different kinds of fictional representations of
suffering make us feel? What aesthetic and cultural functions do such
representations perform? Can ethical and aesthetic responses to a repre-
sentation be separated, and what happens if they conflict with each other?
And to what extent is our capacity to think of ourselves as modern, as fully
at home in modernity, contingent on an aesthetic training, an antisenti-
mental education?
My discussion of what I call late modern satire proceeds along both
conceptual and historical axes. I attempt to understand the dynamics and
the significance of ambivalent affective responses, on the part of both
authors and characters, to suffering – responses which often include various
combinations of laughter, fear, and pity. At the same time, I want to show
how the works in question not only express but also test their own sensibil-
ity, their own modernity – at times their own relation to (various ideas of)
modernism. Thus modernism as I understand it entails not only new
understandings of key philosophical concepts (temporality, subjectivity,
epistemology), nor merely a new repertoire of devices and techniques for
representing such new understandings (free verse, stream of consciousness,
spatial form), nor even a new cluster of technological developments (auto-
mobile, cinema, factory) which, with their attendant socioeconomic ram-
ifications, might be seen as causes of those “superstructural” changes in the
first place. Whether you take your version from Wilde or Shaw, Woolf or
Lawrence, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, modernism – or, more loosely, being
modern – involves codes of sophistication, codes which imply how we
might respond emotionally both to the fact of human suffering and to the
aesthetic forms that representations of such suffering must assume.
As a result of my effort to look at the intersection of a generic or modal
term (satire) with a period term (modernism), my opening two chapters
xiv Preface
will serve as a kind of double introduction to the themes of the later ones.
Chapter 1, “Satire and its discontents” describes the dynamics of satire,
along with related genre terms, the grotesque and the sentimental; despite
my conceptual emphasis, I try to address the relevance of these terms
specifically for the modernist era of literary history. Satire, I argue, is a
contradictory phenomenon in which its purported moralism or conserva-
tism is conjoined with sadistic or anarchic desires, so that satire often in
the end describes its own collapse or undoing. Complementary to this
analysis of satire is an analysis of the affective excess, often called senti-
mentality, that modernist satire aims to avoid, denounce, or expose; and
while the accusation of sentimentality is such that every expression of
emotion risks incurring it, the threat of that accusation nonetheless exerts
enormous pressure on modernist literature.
Chapter 2, “Modernism’s story of feeling,” further historicizes the
emergence of modernist satire. This chapter provides a narrative of the
modernist engagement with affect with attention to key figures from
the earlier, more canonical decades of the modernist era who represent
different stances regarding feeling. It culminates in a discussion of the
1930s (an era for which I use the term “late modernism” in order to mark
its belated relation to modernism as traditionally described), the decade in
which the bulk of the novels I study were written and published. I have
selected these novels not from any single national tradition, but from the
literary culture that cut across Great Britain, the United States, and
Ireland, as I aim to provide a sampling of late modernist work that is
wide-ranging yet coherent. Some of the novels that I discuss are immedi-
ately recognizable as satires, while others are valuable to this study because
of their place on the outskirts of that generic territory.
In-depth readings of those novels begin in Chapter 3, which looks at the
single figure most closely identified with English satire in the early-to-middle
twentieth century, Evelyn Waugh. Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) proves par-
ticularly fruitful for understanding the confluence of modernism and satire
because it explores tensions identified in the introductory chapters between
humanist and antihumanist strains of modernism, and between reformative
and anarchic impulses of satire. Challenging traditional readings of the novel
as a targeted attack on the young, rich, and idle, I read it as an elaborate
exposure of the processes by which satire both expresses and spawns moral
outrage. In Chapter 4 I turn to Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), in which
the author’s treatment of death attacks Victorian sentimentality but also
questions the satiric attitudes toward suffering that the novel presents as
modern. This impasse explains the puzzling shift of the novel’s ending: as this
Preface xv
drawing-room comedy flees the drawing room for the jungle, it modulates
into the mode Freud called the uncanny – that side of the grotesque
characterized by fantasy, anxiety, and repetition compulsion.
In Chapter 5 I investigate the relationship among satire, sentimentality,
and gender in the fiction of the 1930s through a reading of Stella
Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Gibbons’s novel is useful here
because it upends the traditional association of satire with masculinity
and sentimentality with femininity. Critiquing the emotional excesses of
both earlier high modernism and (putatively) female sentimentalism, it
offers instead as an emotional protocol what Georg Simmel called a blasé
attitude, a mode of social relation that turns out to be surprisingly
consistent with a feminist, reformist politics.
Chapters 6 and 7 treat American writers of the grotesque, Nathanael
West and Djuna Barnes. West’s fiction, especially The Day of the Locust
(1939), explores a persistent conflict between using suffering as a source of
comic pleasure and a discomfort with such “worldliness and wit.” Caught
between the sentimental claims of a suffering public and an antisenti-
mental impulse to transform such claims into pleasurable rhetoric, West’s
novels end up stalemated. His own best critic, West ultimately reveals his
uncanny representation of the self as a fear of the consequences of satire.
Chapter 7 then examines Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), in which what I call
“anti-procreative” thematics – sterility, impotence, abortion, infanticide –
imply a frustration of inheritance. For Barnes, the modern is the satiric in
its rejection of generational continuity. But if the novel is satiric in its
attitude toward tradition, it also inscribes the uncanny as a space of
authenticity marking satire’s limit, and so demonstrates the hidden prox-
imity of the two modes.
In Chapter 8, finally, Beckett’s Molloy (1951) pushes the chronological
framework of the study past the thirties and past the Second World War –
and, moreover, expands it to include an Irish writer and an (initially)
Francophone text. Beckett examines the nature of fascistic authority in a
world that (at least vaguely) resembles wartime Europe, and his satire of
modern authoritarianism and compulsion turns out also to be yet another
satire of satire’s own stringency, one in which the pressures of modern life
are registered in the affective modulations both of the characters and of
the act of reading.
Taken together, these readings provide a survey of late modernist satire
in which recurrent themes emerge but peculiarities of individual authors
and texts are, I hope, appreciated. By no means do they exhaust the
catalogue of late modern satirists. Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett,
xvi Preface
Dawn Powell, Flannery O’Connor, and Flann O’Brien could all merit
chapters in a longer study – yet they mark the emergence of a sensibility
that is still very much at work in our culture at large, in which ironic
detachment and sentimental excess seem always to be in contest. For as
late modernist authors struggled to find forms in which to portray the ways
that people experience, manage, and represent suffering, they provided
new structures and models for feeling and expression. They recognized
implicitly that if we are to praise literature for an ennobling moral quality of
extending sympathy, then we must also recognize its power to play to our
cruelty and stimulate our sadism.
It is therefore not by lauding writers for emotional magnanimity or
chiding them for political insensitivity that we recognize the force of their
achievements. Lionel Trilling, writing soon after the historical moment
I examine in this book, complained that although “We have the books that
praise us for taking progressive attitudes” we lack those “that raise questions
in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to
refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses.”5
Trilling, whose own examination of our moral engagement with literature
will provide an important critical touchstone for me, was expressing a
skepticism about claims for the virtues of literature that, to my mind, is
as necessary in today’s critical climate as in his own. Late modernist satire,
for all the pleasure it might give, raises still too frequently unasked questions
about what might lie behind our good impulses.
In its long, slow growth from dissertation proposal to book, this study has
benefitted from the generous attention of friends, teachers, and col-
leagues. Maria DiBattista has provided guidance and insight in every
stage of this book’s writing, and she has encouraged me throughout to
hold fast to my convictions. Michael Wood has read my work with
patience and acuity, and helped me to find the interesting ideas hiding
behind my sometimes obvious ones. Doug Mao and Justus Nieland have
read multiple chapters of this work and, sharing their intelligence and
expertise, pointed me toward new directions for my argument. Discussion
with graduate school classmates and teachers also informed this book;
Sally Bachner, Michael Goldman, Martin Harries, Jonathan Lamb, Gage
McWeeney, Lee Mitchell, Dan Novak, and Jeff Nunokawa deserve special
thanks. My colleagues at Montclair State University have provided a
congenial atmosphere for my professional life, and many have helped in
different ways. Lee Behlman, Emily Isaacs, Lucy McDiarmid, and Art
Simon generously read chapters and offered valued advice; Brian Cliff,
Preface xvii
Naomi Liebler, Mary Papazian, and Tanya Pollard helped me to navigate
the publishing world; my students, especially Norman DeFillipo, Anne
DeMarzio, Terrence Ferguson, Katie Keeran, Peggy LeRoy, Sandy Reyes,
Andrew Smethurst, and Curtis Zimmerman, prompted me to think anew
about many of the texts I discuss. Chris Gaillard, Robert Caserio, and
Michael Coyle also deserve thanks for their help at various stages. At
Cambridge University Press, Ray Ryan, Gillian Dadd, Jo Breeze, and
their staff have provided editorial guidance, and the comments of my two
readers, Jesse Matz and Ed Comentale, helped to broaden and deepen the
argument of the book.
Several institutions also supported the writing of this book. Princeton
University granted me a Presidential Fellowship and a year of study at the
University Center for Human Values; Montclair State provided a Global
Education Grant, a Separately Budgeted Research Grant, and a year’s
sabbatical. The Interlibrary Loan staff at Montclair State’s Sprague Library
has obtained for me numerous books essential to my research. Chapter 4
appeared in somewhat different form in Novel: A Forum on Fiction; it is
reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Chapter 6
appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, and is reprinted with the permis-
sion of the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press. A small portion of
the preface appeared in altered form as a book review in Modernism/
Modernity; it is also reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University
Press. A few short passages in Chapters 3 and 5 are drawn from an article in
Modernist Cultures, and are reprinted with the permission of that journal.
My sister and brother, Judith Greenberg and David Greenberg, have read
portions of this book and informed it with their own scholarly expertise. My
children, Hank and Maggie, are younger than this book and still too young
to be interested in the details of my argument, but their excitement about its
publication gives me hope that some day not too far off they will open this
book with scholarly interest, or at least amused curiosity. My wife, Megan
Blumenreich, has been a wonderful, patient, sensible, devoted, and intelli-
gent companion throughout the labor of writing this book. She has read
and offered advice on all aspects of it; her love, care, and support have
sustained me during its composition. Her devoted encouragement and
gentle criticism have made the work immeasurably stronger.
My parents, Robert and Maida Greenberg, were the first to show me what
intellectual inquiry entailed, and in their own thinking and scholarship I have
seen what dedication and rigor can accomplish. The extent of their belief in
my work, while bordering on the ludicrous, has been invaluable, and the
depth of their interest continues to gratify me. To them I dedicate this book.
Abbreviations
CCF Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (1932; New York: Penguin,
2006).
DL Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, in Nathanael West:
Novels and other Writings, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (1939; New
York: Library of America, 1997).
HD Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1934).
M Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett:
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, trans. Samuel Beckett
and Patrick Bowles (1951; New York: Grove, 1955).
N Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1937).
VB Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1930).
xviii
chapter 1
Satire and its discontents
Modernism changed the way we know and feel. Modernist literary works,
and the intellectual and cultural currents from which they drew force, not
only chronicled but also fostered changes in what Raymond Williams has
called “structures of feeling.”1 Williams, recall, introduces this concept in
an attempt to capture the inchoateness and complexity of an experience
that is shared or social, even though it may be still emergent and therefore
misrecognized as “private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.”2 Just as “no
generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors,” just as
“manners, dress, building and other forms of social life” evolve gradually
over time, so, Williams posits, an ever-changing but pervasive “set” of
interlocking affective dispositions exists across a culture, forming a com-
plex “structure” that can be discerned in “characteristic elements of
impulse, restraint, and tone.”3 Like most talk of feeling, this is pretty
fuzzy, but it furnishes a theoretical starting-point from which history can
attend to the felt quality of experience and from which feelings, which
common sense might take to be unchanging and universal, can be
historicized.
As students of affect theory are aware, exactly such a historicization of
feeling has recently been taken up by scholars in literary studies, who have
argued that because modernity constitutes a new and in many ways unique
social formation it cannot help but impinge on the ways that life is lived
and feelings are felt. Sianne Ngai contends that a new set of minor,
noncathartic, “ugly” feelings are characteristic of life under mature capital-
ism: “the nature of the sociopolitical itself has changed in a manner that
both calls forth and calls upon a new set of feelings – one less powerful than
the classical political passions.”4 Elizabeth Goodstein looks at boredom as
an affect peculiar to the last century and half, when a modernity born out
of processes such as “secularization, rationalization, and democratization”
produced “experiential transformations” that “literally altered the quality of
human being in time.”5 And Justus Nieland, examining modernism’s
1
2 Satire and its discontents
representation of public performance, argues that feeling within modern-
ism was reconfigured by seismic shifts in the character of an always
mediated public sphere, shifts to which human beings as individuals and
as collectivities were required, often abruptly, to adapt.6 Without disavow-
ing all continuity of human experience over time, then, we might recognize
that during the era of modernism people were experiencing – were feeling –
their world in new ways. As Ezra Pound put it in 1913: “if we still feel the
same emotions as those which launched the thousand ships, it is quite
certain that we come on these feelings differently, through different
nuances, by different intellectual gradations.”7
Feeling, then, has its own story within modernism, and one of the central
points of this book is that an account of satire – specifically what I call late
modernist satire – is indispensable to telling that story. This claim might
seem surprising, since the great age of satire is generally held to be the
eighteenth century, and satire’s presence in modernism is often taken to be
minor and peripheral.8 Yet it is equally possible that the low profile of
modernist satire derives from its very centrality: that satire is not spoken of
simply because it goes without saying. Chris Baldick makes this point in
claiming that, in modernist-era Great Britain at least, “Satire was invisible
because omnipresent,” inherent in the attacks on the “false idols” of Victor-
ian culture that dominated new thinking about sex, religion, and politics.9
Baldick quotes Cyril Connolly’s 1938 diagnosis: “This is a satirical age and
among the vast reading public the power of an artist to awaken ridicule has
never been so great.”10 Yet what Connolly attributed to a plethora of good
material might also be seen as an increased disposition and ability to find
material, a change in a structure of feeling, the rise of a modernist sensibility.
The raw material for satire may always have been there; what was new was a
way of seeing the world that made this material available to ridicule.
Of course, particular modernist-era writers have long been recognized
and studied as satirists, but these studies have generally been cordoned off
from larger discussions of modernism or buried in the notoriously
unfunny stacks of “humor studies.” Only recently has the confluence of
modernism and satire been looked at more closely, most notably in Tyrus
Miller’s Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World
Wars.11 James English and Michael North have at the same time reopened
the topic of the comic novel, and Nieland has included a section on
comedy in his discussion of “eccentric feeling” in modernism.12 This book
seeks to build on the work of these scholars and others by positing satire as
a way of thinking, feeling, and writing central to modernism – to the very
notion of what it meant for modernists to be modern.
In the analysis that follows, I use a variety of terms – satiric and
sentimental, ironic and comic, grotesque and uncanny – which, like most
genre terms, provide markers for the ways in which various kinds of
literary works have engaged (or disengaged) their readers’ feelings. Under-
standing the dynamics of satire and of the sentimentality it ostensibly
refuses will then help to recast an account of modernism as one in which
different affective possibilities are always contending and jostling, and in
which modernism itself can be seen as an effort, or a variety of efforts, to
grapple with the problem of how to feel.
the double movement of satire

Most definitions of satire – too many to cite here13 – have seen a moral
aim as a necessary component of the mode.14 The satirist is a “moral
agent” according to George Meredith, is “an ipso facto moralist” according
to Harry Levin, “takes a high moral line” according to Northrop Frye.15
This moral element separates satire from pure comedy; the objects
of satiric laughter are experienced not as trivial but as “harmful or
destructive.”16 It also tends to make satire a conservative mode, the
argument runs, since satire paints its target as deviating from a strong
and stable set of communally held beliefs and at least implicitly urges
reform. Such “conservatism,” suggesting both a certainty of authorial
meaning and a promotion of social consensus, resembles what Wayne
Booth has called “stable irony”; irony is stable, according to Booth, if
“once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then
invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions.”17
This conservatism describes something different from a writer’s overt
political views; while in a case such as Evelyn Waugh’s the writer’s
outspoken traditionalism appears to reinforce his satiric ridicule of all
that departs from age-old standards, a novelist on the left like Nathanael
West has just as frequently been read as conservative in the sense that, in
his biographer’s words, “his satire was designed to return man to himself,
to his ‘lawful callings’.”18 Thus, while satire is sometimes thought to trade
in politics to the fault of being trivial – does anyone really care that the
Treasurer of Lilliput was meant to represent Robert Walpole? – it is
equally often felt to be redeemed by a metaphysical insight into that
chimerical entity called human nature.19
Yet even if in satire the timely ultimately gives way to the timeless, political
carping to moral vision, unadulterated moralism does not, according to
the typologists, produce satire, but leads instead to sermon, invective, or
polemic. To achieve its moral aims, satire has been understood to
deploy techniques that involve wit, play, and fantasy. According to
Alvin Kernan, satire has “two poles,” “a rigid moral system” and
“a graceful style”; Frye sees a “token fantasy” as well as “an implicit
moral standard” as essential.20 This playful or provocative dimension
of satire, moreover, is not purely festive or comic, but involves mockery,
malice, and derision.21 The result is that satire can appear anarchic,
subversive, and destructive. Kernan’s “two poles” of satire create an
unstable force field in which an ethical content clashes with a playful
and often destructive form, in which subversive means are used to
promote conservative ends.
It was, however, the peculiar achievement of modernist-era thinkers to
attempt a theoretical resolution of this paradox by recognizing in the
moral motive of satire a mere disguise for more primitive delight in
the depiction of corrupt targets. A key figure here is Wyndham Lewis,
who, in his 1934 treatise, Men Without Art, announces that “the greatest
satire is non-moral.”22 “There is no prejudice so inveterate,” he claims,
“even in the educated mind, as that which sees in satire a work of
edification. Indeed, for the satirist to acquire the right to hold up to
contempt a fellow-mortal, he is supposed, first, to arm himself with
the insignia of a sheriff or special constable.”23 But Lewis rejects these
reformative and didactic claims of satire and seeks instead to recover
ridicule for its own sake as healthy, primary, and pleasurable. Lewis
describes a “perfect laughter” that, if it could be realized, “would be
inhuman” – one that would not let moral compunction prevent it from
taking delight in “the antics dependent upon pathologic maladjustments,
injury, or disease.”24 This non-moral conception of satire, as Martin
Puchner has pointed out, owes a debt to Nietzsche, who already in his
Genealogy of Morals rejects what he calls an “ethics of pity” by invoking the
origin of the modern European novel:
Consider, for instance, Don Quixote at the court of the Duchess. Today we read
Don Quixote with a bitter taste in our mouths, almost with a feeling of torment,
and would thus seem very strange and incomprehensible to its author and his
contemporaries: they read it with the clearest conscience in the world as the most
cheerful of books, they laughed themselves almost to death over it.25
Hence Nietzsche’s famous slogan: “To see others suffer does one good. To
make others suffer even more.”26
If Nietzsche is Lewis’s direct precursor in rediscovering the primal
cruelty of literary satire, Freud is an equally important antecedent.
Freud, like Nietzsche, exposes the ruses of morality, the ways in which
morality serves as cover for repressed motives and desires. In his 1905
study of jokes, Freud not only makes the fairly obvious observation that
satire partakes of the structure of what he calls tendentious jokes;27
more fundamentally, he posits that the sources of pleasure in such
tendentious attacks are multiple and layered. In distinguishing between
the “joking envelope” and the “thought it contains,” Freud argues that
the pleasure of a joke is – to use the word he made famous in discussing
dreams – overdetermined.28 On the one hand, “the pleasure in a joke is
derived from play with words”29 – from the indulgence of a childish,
playful tendency to “jest” that in the adult has been suppressed by critical
reason. On the other hand, however, the jest is supplemented with
meaning that is “intended to protect that pleasure from being done away
with by criticism.”30 The meaning of a joke protects the pleasure that the
playful content produces. Yet when Freud arrives at his specific analysis of
the tendentious joke he reverses his terms; in this special case, he contends,
the authority to be circumvented is not just the inhibitory critical faculty
but the repressive one.31 Now it becomes the “envelope,” or form, of a
joke that serves as protection, offering an “incentive bonus” or “fore-
pleasure” that relaxes moral inhibitions so that the transgressive content
of the joke can be enjoyed.32 The pleasurable form now protects the
(tendentious) meaning from censorship. Thus it is that “the highest stage
of jokes, tendentious jokes, often have to overcome two kinds of inhib-
ition, those opposed to the joke itself and those opposed to its purpose.”33
Freud thus reconciles how contradictory impulses work in concert: the
moral pretenses of satire do not simply contradict but in fact make possible
its aggressive sources of pleasure.34 In satire, moral outrage and
sadistic pleasure have the same stimulus; whether a joke appears in good
or bad taste depends only on the strength of internal and external
inhibitions.
To this Nietzschean-Freudian move beyond good and evil, Lewis adds
a Bergsonian concern with the materiality of the human. Already in his
earlier (1927) account on comedy, Lewis riffs on Bergson’s famous theory
of the comic as “something mechanical encrusted on the living.”35 Writes
Lewis: “The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting
from the observations of a thing behaving like a person.”36 Despite his
predominant anti-Bergsonism, Lewis here retains Bergson’s link between
laughter and the recognition of the human as thing-like, and endorses the
premise of a fundamental contradiction between matter and mind. Yet,
as Justus Nieland notes, Lewis’s formula is “a reversal of the humanist
terms of Bergsonian laughter” that locates the comic in the human-
like behavior of the thing, rather than the other way around.37 While
Bergson’s account of comedy tells a story in which human flexibility or
“spirit” is ultimately triumphant, Lewis drops this last step, concluding
with the recognition of the human being as mechanical: “But ‘men’ are
undoubtedly, to a greater or less extent, machines. And there are those
amongst us who are revolted by this reflection, and there are those who
are not.”38
Rejecting the Bergsonian “internalist” interest in flux and subjectivity
and interiority, Lewis favors instead an “external approach,” the method
of the eye, which he associates with scientific objectivity and Hulmean
classicism. His surface-oriented satirist offers no recognition of human
elasticity: “It will be his task . . . like science, to bring human life more
into contempt each day . . . It will, by illustrating the discoveries of
science, demonstrate the futility and absurdity of human life.”39 The ugly
materiality of the human body for Lewis turns out to be only one more
source of pleasure: “What you regard as hideous has the same claims on us
even as your ravishing self. We are the reverse of squeamish . . . This
matière which composes itself into what you regard I daresay as abortions,
is delightful to us, for itself. No artist yet has experienced any personal
repulsion for a grotesque that sprang up beneath his hand.”40
Thus, as Michael Seidel notes, for Lewis “the creative, meliorative, or
restorative role of the satirist is part of a preserving fiction, a mere saving
of appearances,” and consequently the satirist is always “implicated in the
debasing form of his action.”41 Like Swift’s broomstick, he becomes dirty
in the process of cleaning; he is a moral garbage collector who reveals his
affinity with the filthy material he purports to purify. So described, the
satirist is a perfect example of what William Ian Miller calls a “moral
menial,” a class of people that includes lawyers, politicians, and hangmen
(not to mention Lewis’s “sheriff or special constable”). Moral menials,
according to Miller, “perform functions in the moral order similar to
those played by garbagemen and butchers”: “Moral menials deal with
moral dirt, or they have to get morally dirty to do what the polity needs
them to do. And despite the fact that we need to attract people to this
kind of labor, we still hold them accountable for being so attracted.”42
The existence of such border guards reminds us “that the boundaries
that separate vice from virtue, good from evil, pure from polluted, are
permeable, and worse, necessarily permeable.”43 Walking this line, the
satirist experiences the classic ambivalence between enjoying an illicit
desire and experiencing guilt over that enjoyment – what Italo Calvino
describes as “the mixture of attraction and repulsion that animates the
feelings of every true satirist toward the object of his satire.”44
Thus emerges what I will be calling the double movement of satire : on
the one hand, the satirist speaks for a community, exaggerating and
ridiculing his target in order to urge reform; on the other, he is a renegade
who enjoys the subversion of traditional values, delights in his own
aesthetic powers, even savors the cruelty he inflicts.
satire, modernity, and the grotesque

Of these two notions of satire, “conservative” and “subversive,” it is surely
the first that Evelyn Waugh had in mind when, in a 1946 piece for Life
magazine, he rejected the word as a description of his own works:
Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes
homogeneous moral standards – the early Roman Empire and eighteenth-
century Europe. It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite
cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no
place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service
to virtue. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create
little independent systems of order of his own. I foresee in the dark age opening
that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories.
They were not satirists.45
In suspiciously similar language, Waugh’s sometime nemesis, W. H. Auden,

writing only six years later, dismissed the relevance of satire to the modern
age. His analysis diverges from Waugh’s only in that Auden’s despair arises
not from the scope of the century’s democratic tendencies but from the scale
of its brutality:
Satire flourishes in a homogeneous society where satirist and audience share the
same views as to how normal people can be expected to behave, and in times of
relative stability and contentment, for satire cannot deal with serious evil and
suffering. In an age like our own, it cannot flourish except in intimate circles as
an expression of private feuds: in public life the evils and sufferings are so serious
that satire seems trivial and the only possible kind of attack is prophetic
denunciation.46
Waugh and Auden alike voice nostalgia for a bygone age when satire was
possible, and both men understand their own age as qualitatively different
from past history. Their statements thus share not only an implied theory
of satire, but also assumptions about modernity: both agree that the extent
of modern corruption, no matter what its source, has led to the
endangerment, if not the outright extinction, of a once-great genre.
Auden’s “prophetic denunciation” and Waugh’s monastic withdrawal
similarly interpret modernity as an era of unprecedented rupture, and
posit a thorough redefinition of the role that literature can take in the
heterogeneous social formation of modern democracy.
A third contemporary, Theodor Adorno (born the same year as
Waugh, three years before Auden), also claimed, in 1951, that modernity
makes satire impossible. For Adorno too, the loss of satire stands for the
loss of much more:
The impossibility of satire today should not be blamed, as sentimentality is apt to
do, on the relativism of values, the absence of binding norms. Rather, agreement
itself, the formal a priori of irony, has given way to universal agreement of
content. As such it presents the only fitting target for irony and at the same time
pulls the ground from under its feet. Irony’s medium, the difference between
ideology and reality, has disappeared. The former resigns itself to confirmation of
reality by its mere duplication. Irony used to say: such it claims to be, but such it
is; today, however, the world, even in its most radical lie, falls back on the
argument that things are like this, a simple finding which coincides, for it, with
the good.47
Those familiar with Adorno’s vision of an administered culture will
recognize his central complaint: when culture cannot stand outside of
ideology, what results is a thoroughgoing conformity and a Panglossian
refusal to imagine a better world. Adorno’s argument is thus a mirror
image of Waugh’s. He maintains that modernity has produced not a
“disintegrated society” but an overly integrated one, too monolithic for
any critic to surmount: “There is not a crevice in the cliff of the established
order into which the ironist might hook a fingernail.”48 According to
Adorno, in fact, the belief Waugh expresses is “sentimental” – presumably
because of the benign, if not affectionate, view it takes of obedience to
inherited norms. (More on sentimentality, however, in just a bit.)
With some distance from these midcentury assessments, we can say,
I hope, that the century just past, despite its indisputable evils, was neither
as shamelessly libertine as Waugh complained nor as stupidly conformist
as Adorno feared; and we do not diminish its horrors by noting that it has
mercifully allowed modes of expression other than Auden’s “prophetic
denunciation.” All these assessments may feel slightly off the mark, then,
not only because they rely on an overly narrow definition of satire but also
because they give us pictures of modernity that too greatly betray their
authors’ preoccupations – pictures of a present that, in the massiveness of
its corruption, utterly overwhelms the possibility of any critical
engagement at all. Yet in complete opposition to this view, I suggest not
only that modernism and satire are not incompatible, but that they are
very nearly the same thing. For modernism’s complex relation to the past
can actually seem to align it with satire; if, as Seidel argues, satire
undermines and disrupts the inheritance of traditional literary forms, then
satire itself can be viewed as a force or agent of modernity.49 Satire and
modernism are similarly susceptible to the (incompatible) accusations of
both rearguard conservatism and decadent libertinism. On whichever side
we place any of the major writers and thinkers of the time, what is clear is
that satire, like modernism itself, requires a rift between the new and the
old; it can only exist in the space opened between them.50
The modernity of satire, then, lies less in a particular moral, religious,
or philosophical set of values that critical interpretation might recover
from a novel or poem or film or play than in a kind of temperament or
outlook, a satiric sensibility – a characteristic of the implied author and
reader who savor the transgressive pleasures that satire affords, who may
deride the chaos of modernity but also need it, even help to create it.
Hence what I call (modifying a term from Richard Rorty) ironic
redescription proves a central operation of modernist satire. “Anything
can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed,” notes Rorty, and
what else is satire but a way of redescribing things in order to make them
look bad?51
In making things look bad, satiric redescriptions frequently produce
the grotesque. This term, which we have already seen Lewis invoke in his
defense of satire, is at least as imprecise as “satire”;52 Mary Russo points
out that the term can refer either to “discernible grotesque figures or style”
or to “the rather vague and mysterious . . . category of ‘experience.’”53 The
grotesque can describe either objective content – often, but not necessarily,
deformed, misshapen, or hybrid bodies – or subjective experience – the
emotional instability that grotesque content tends to produce in a reader.
This emotional instability, moreover, is itself fundamentally ambivalent,
mixing contradictory affective conditions. In a passage essential for
theorists of the grotesque, John Ruskin saw the mode as “composed
of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful”: “As one or the other
of these elements prevails, the grotesque falls into two branches, sportive
grotesque and terrible grotesque; but . . . we cannot legitimately consider
it under these two aspects, because there are hardly any examples
which do not in some degree combine both elements.”54 The “ludicrous”
element of the grotesque, its comic, playful, or “sportive” side, has
obvious affinities with satire, irony, caricature, and cartoon, which stay
on the surface of the object and exaggerate or deform their targets with the
aim of ridicule. The “fearful” element has a different set of generic
affiliations (the Gothic, the fantastic, horror, and, most crucially, the
Freudian uncanny) that hint at a troubled interiority and move from
laughter to anxiety. As Ruskin notes, these two elements do not disentan-
gle easily. The laughter provoked by the grotesque is always uneasy,
nervous laughter, never wholly free from disquiet.
There is yet another dichotomy to the grotesque as a critical concept,
a dichotomy in the history of theorizing about it. While analyses of the
grotesque have attempted to understand the grotesque in Jungian, Hei-
deggerian, feminist, race-theory, deconstructive,55 and, above all, Freud-
ian56 frameworks, the two most influential theories of the mode, those of
Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser, are both over a half-century old;
they offer, moreover, radically divergent interpretations. Bakhtin’s theory
opposes the grotesque body to the classical. The grotesque body for him is
“the epitome of incompleteness,” “a principle of growth,” “ever unfinished,
ever creating.”57 This material body stresses functions like ingesting and
excreting and serves as one of Bakhtin’s major symbols of the concept of
carnival, which brings about the festive suspension or inversion of social
hierarchies. In the Bakhtinian grotesque, decay is a stage of renewal,
individual death part of a collective life.
Kayser’s theory, in contrast, is based primarily in Romanticism rather
than the Renaissance and emphasizes the “ominous, nocturnal and abys-
mal features” of the grotesque “that frighten and puzzle us and make us
feel as if the ground beneath our feet were about to give way.”58 Drawing
on much of the same material as Freud does in “The Uncanny,” Kayser
sees the grotesque in loosely existential terms, as an invocation of, and
play with, a fundamental human alienation from the world. Like Freud,
Kayser emphasizes subjective experience over objective content, and his
focus is the individual not the collective; he stresses Ruskin’s fearful
element rather than the ludicrous. For Kayser, the grotesque expresses
not a fundamental unity of all things organic, but a fundamental division
between self and world.
Bakhtin himself suggests a historical narrative that allows for at least a
tentative reconciliation with Kayser. Whereas Bakhtin’s medieval and
Renaissance grotesque thrived during an era when collective folk culture
was vibrant, the rise of the bourgeois subject reduced the grotesque to a
nocturnal, subterranean, isolated phenomenon. As a result, the oversized,
celebratory laughter of Rabelais “was cut down to cold humor, irony,
sarcasm,” and grotesque imagery “acquired a private, ‘chamber’ character.”59
He concludes: “Kayser’s definition can be applied only to certain mani-
festations of modernist form of the grotesque.”60 But of course the mod-
ernist grotesque is my interest here, and therefore Kayser’s existential
thematics are most germane to my reading of late modernism. Such
affective conditions indeed link the grotesque to the “alienated” self that
Fredric Jameson (among many others) takes to be one of the defining
features of modernist art and literature.61 Hence the grotesque often
appears in modernism as a mark of psychosexual degeneration – Mann’s
Aschenbach, for example, or Leopold Bloom in “Circe” – and it might be
seen as part of the era’s widespread interest in primitivism, regression,
decadence, and other allied categories. Thus even if modernism is too vast a
field to make any blanket statements about its relation to such categories –
whether it celebrates, disavows, analyzes, fetishizes, or exorcizes unreason
or barbarism – we might nevertheless see the grotesque as deployed
by modernism as part of a new emphasis on the redemptive value of
negativity: what Kenneth Burke, writing about Djuna Barnes, called “a
kind of transcendence downward” in which “corruption and distinction
become interchangeable terms.”62 In this sense, this entire book might
be seen as a short subchapter in a long history of the divorce of beauty
from truth.
The grotesque as I use it then is neither wholly synonymous with nor
wholly discrete from satire. It is more like a limit-case, in which satiric
laughter or indignation becomes difficult to sustain and slides into a more
uncanny affective state. The grotesque is both the target and the method
of satire; satire, in its “conservative” impulse, may decry and ridicule
grotesque content, but it also, in its “subversive” impulse – in representing
its targets as grotesque – creates or promotes the very grotesquerie it
purports to eradicate. The satiric mode both relies on grotesque imagery
and evokes a grotesque reaction. The grotesque in turn can be seen as
either a problem, a sign of a decadent and disordered world, or a solution,
an aesthetic mode capable of representing the disorder of the world and
presenting a reader or viewer with an authentic emotional experience. But
to understand what exactly an authentic emotional experience might be,
we will first need to explore the inauthentic – or, as it is often called, the
sentimental.
rethinking modernist antisentimentality

A full account of modernist satire must recognize the prominence in
modernism of the reaction against sentimentality, a reaction found in
writers as disparate as D. H. Lawrence (who calls sentimentality “the
garment of our vice”) and James Baldwin (who calls it “the signal of secret
and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty”).63 With the rise of feminist
theory and the revision of the canon in the 1970s and 1980s, of course, the
modernist reaction against the sentimental fell out of critical favor, and
much scholarship sought to rehabilitate that aesthetic category, restoring
attention to disparaged or forgotten works. An exemplary study here is
Suzanne Clark’s Sentimental Modernism, which reads the modernist rejec-
tion of sentimentality as a sign of an “adversarial relationship to domestic
culture” on the part of “beleaguered avant-garde intellectuals,” an animus
that produced “a contemptuous treatment of women” and the mass-
cultural artifacts they often consumed and produced.64 Drawing on
Andreas Huyssen’s identification of mass culture as the feminine “other”
of a masculine “high” modernism, and Jane Tompkins’s recovery of
nineteenth-century American women’s texts, Clark’s feminist critique of
a patriarchal bias against the domestic neatly meshes with a Marxist
sociological account of the historical enshrining of the literary as an
autonomous cultural sphere.65 This argument, for the most part, has passed
into conventional critical wisdom, so that even Michael Bell, a critic
largely sympathetic to the projects of the canonical male modernists,
concedes that in modernism “the vehemence of the hostility to sentiment,
often tinged with snobbery and implicitly gendered, tended to throw the
baby of feeling out with the bathwater of sentimentality.”66 And who
would argue that the modernists took extreme positions in their rejection
of emotion? To allay any doubt on the issue, we only need to recall that
remark of T. S. Eliot’s which would delight generations of psychobio-
graphers: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from
emotion.”67
Despite the merit of such analyses, however, I do not intend to add
one more brush stroke to a portrait of a misogynistic, fascistic male
modernism, withdrawn into its library, unable to talk about its feelings.
For one thing, this portrait reduces modernism, in Lawrence Rainey’s
words, to “little more than a reactionary, even paranoid fear of popular
culture,”68 a reduction that has been largely discredited by renewed
attention to the productive traffic between different strata of culture in
the era. But, even more fundamentally, making an aesthetic case for the
sentimental under the banner of populism does not necessarily lead to a
more progressive politics than an “elitist” rejection of it. For it is a central
tenet of modernist antisentimentality that feeling can be coercive, the
most subtle method of enforcing the stifling conditions of an oppressive
modern world. Hence Milan Kundera’s insight that the sentimental can
be tyrannical: “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to
object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns
supreme.”69
That said, neither am I interested in protecting modernism, or anyone’s
variety of it, from often deserved political attacks. I freely concede that
some of my favorite writers held views or made jokes that were fascist,
racist, sexist, homophobic, or simply obnoxious. Evelyn Waugh’s
benighted Africans are plainly racist caricatures; Stella Gibbons giggles
at her own anti-Semitic stereotypes; Nathanael West makes fun of
dwarves. The critic James English has argued, in response to overly
formalistic analyses of comedy, that the mapping of the politics of a joke,
is, like the analysis of any cultural event, a complex process; whether
comedy works to enforce or resist cultural norms will vary according to
context and audience. The comic, as English puts it, is multiaccented.70
The joke-work of modernist satire, as my readings aim to show, is
particularly likely to be volatile, more prone even than most literature
to ramify in divergent directions, to assume contradictory political
valences.
But, while defending modernism or particular modernists as cham-
pions of dissent is no more my interest than exposing the ideological
sins of once-canonized giants, recognizing that early twentieth-century
antisentimentality had behind it more than the reinforcement of a privil-
eged social position does make possible a fuller understanding of the
modernist sensibility. Something not too distant from this claim seems
implicit in Charles Altieri’s argument that many of the major modernist
poets and painters aimed “to set the feelings against the emotions”71 – an
argument in which he distinguishes inchoate feelings (“the basic building
blocks for other affective states”) from more defined emotions (which
“involve the construction of attitudes that typically generate some kind
of action or identification”).72 Poetic attention to feeling in opposition to
emotion becomes in Altieri’s account a way of resisting “dominant
cultural attitudes” that gain authority and force through emotional
appeal, and hence a way of valuing an affective “subtlety and fluidity”
outside of or prior to the recruitment of feeling for some ideological
stance.73 Similarly, Sianne Ngai has critiqued the “politics of compulsory
sympathy” embedded in sentimental fiction,74 while Martha Nussbaum
has recognized the coercive power of feeling in her argument that
emotions are “social constructs” that are “taught . . . through stories”
but that can also be “dismantled.”75
If the sentimental, then, represents what is seen as most coercive about
emotion – its mobilization of feeling for the purpose of assimilating
affective life to “dominant cultural attitudes” – then satire is a major,
perhaps an essential, component of the modernist resistance to such
coercion. Satire – with its sibling concept, the grotesque – often seeks to
undermine precisely those dominant, conventional, or clichéd forms of
representation that are based on stirring a reader’s compassion. Such an
undermining is likely what T. S. Eliot had in mind in 1917 when he
declared: “We only need the coming of a Satirist – no man of genius is
rarer – to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge since
Dryden and Pope laid it down.”76 It is equally the impetus behind
Thomas Mann’s assertion that in modernism the grotesque had become
“the genuine anti-bourgeois style” and its generic instability “the striking
feature of modern art,” and Flannery O’Connor’s invocation of grotesque
affect as a counterweight to sentimentality.77 This conception of senti-
mentality as the handmaiden of a coercive, even tyrannical, ideology,
wielding its power through the construction of a bourgeois public taste,
completely reverses the political charge of modernist hostility toward
sentimentality, and puts the modern satirist on the side of skepticism,
rebellion, and creativity.78
Of course, satire is not the only way in which modernists sought to
solve the problem of the sentimental, and questions of affect prove central
to many non-satiric novels in the modernist canon. In Ford Madox
Ford’s The Good Soldier, for example, John Dowell attributes Edward
Ashburnham’s sexual infidelities not to libertinism but to sentimentalism,
while in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh uses the same term
to dismiss Clarissa’s taste in literature and “attitude to life.”79 And while a
novel such as E. M. Forster’s Howards End repeatedly stresses feeling as a
guarantee of truth, it still conjectures that “the private emotions” may
have “their gutter press” and can be stirred up for malign purposes.80 In
these novels and in many others, the sentimental seems less an epithet
than an enigma, a marker of the peculiar ways that our affections and
longings attach themselves to unlikely or unworthy objects.
As its central presence in these works might suggest, then, the sentimen-
tal proves stubbornly hard to define. The term, Eve Sedgwick notes, has a
“strange career,” which extends “from the later eighteenth century when it
was a term of high ethical and aesthetic praise, to the twentieth when it can
be used to connote, beyond pathetic weakness, an actual principle of
evil.”81 Jay Dickson offers an authoritative summary of this career, in
which a sensitivity to human feeling in the face of an increasingly
industrialized and rationalized world comes to be seen instead as vulgar,
vicarious, and exploitive falseness, disparagingly associated with the masses
and with the feminine.82 This transition makes any artistic venture a poten-
tial cause for ridicule; as Suzanne Clark points out, all commitment –
political, erotic, emotional – is put at risk for foolishness.83 Dickson poses
the question: “at what point does earned sentiment – the hallmark of the
artist – become excessive, and potentially risible, sentimentality?”84 On
what principle does one discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate,
appropriate and excessive feeling? It cannot really be done, no more than one
can (to recall Freud) distinguish a joke in good taste from a joke in bad taste.
As Dickson notes, then, sentimentality “adheres to the same definition as
that proposed for obscenity by the Supreme Justice Potter Stewart’s quip
about pornography: you know it when you see it.”85 But we can hardly rest
here, because even this test only reinstates the criterion of feeling it seeks to
identify and expunge.
Often the rap against sentimentality is that the feeling is, in Dickson’s
terms, “unearned,” that a certain labor of participation in suffering is
necessary for tears to be genuine. That criticism is clearly evident in the
line from George Meredith that Stephen Dedalus famously quotes in
Ulysses (“The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the
immense debtorship for a thing done”86) or in Flannery O’Connor’s
claim that “sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually
in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.” For O’Connor, the
sentimental, by taking a short cut to innocence, evades a “slow partici-
pation” in the death of Christ; it offers redemption without pain and
thereby effects “an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which
strongly suggests its opposite.”87 The sentimental in her formulation is a
denial of sin, of evil, and ultimately of the theological necessity of
suffering; the denial, moreover, appears now not only as an aesthetic
flaw but as a kind of corruption itself. O’Connor’s explicitly theological
framework thus makes clear what is hidden in Meredith’s or Joyce’s
secular critique: the degree to which the sentimental lies at the crossroads
of morality and aesthetics. By “skipping over” the “concrete reality” of
suffering, sentimentality allows the emotional satisfactions of compassion
without the emotional work of earning them. It is an emotional laziness
or cowardice in which the reader or writer, by avoiding a kind of
aesthetic labor, fails morally. He convinces himself that he is innocent
when he is guilty. Yet this criterion of labor, helpful as it may be
in understanding what we mean by sentimental, makes the process
of identifying the sentimental no less circular than before, since the
adequacy of a reader or writer’s labor or participation in suffering relies
(once again) on the criterion of feeling.
feelings of suspicion
Given that the logic of sentimentality is circular – you know it when you
feel it, but that feeling must not be a sentimental one – the question how
to tell sentiment from sentimentality becomes impossible to answer
except in the particular case. The crucial questions to be addressed, then,
might be reframed – not as what is sentimental, but as what lay behind
modernist antisentimentality, and how satire emerged as its opposite or
antidote. One place to begin such an inquiry is with Paul Ricoeur’s claim
that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud bequeathed to modernist literature an
“underlying legacy of hermeneutic suspicion.”88 In the late nineteenth
century, class, morality, and sexuality came to be seen as objects
demanding interpretation, considerably less transparent than common
sense might take them to be. Such suspicion affected the modernist
understanding of not only the outer world but also the emotions, as
theoretical concepts such as false consciousness, ressentiment, and repres-
sion allowed even the most strongly felt feelings to be interpreted as self-
deception or ideological mirage. This insight, as Michael Bell notes,
impeded the ability of emotion to guarantee value: “The growing
recognition that emotional life may run underground, and may even
present overt manifestations directly contrary to true meaning, added a
whole new dimension to its unreliability.”89
But the notion that feelings can even be unreliable is a curious and
perhaps counterintuitive one. Lionel Trilling took up this problem in his
1971 lectures, Sincerity and Authenticity. In describing the quality that he
calls “sincerity” – defined as “a congruence between avowal and actual
feeling” – as a significant criterion in “the moral life of Europe,” Trilling
takes as his paradigm the Polonian imperative, “To thine own self be
true,” and argues that such truth to oneself is absent from previous ideas
of virtue.90 But beginning in the nineteenth century comes a second
shift: “a judgement [is] placed on sincerity that it is not authentic”;
sincerity is displaced as a criterion for moral and literary value by the
elusive quality Trilling calls “authenticity.”91 This “polemical concept”
(whose problematic implications Trilling confronts) is also a negative one,
defined predominantly as a rejection of some prevailing source of value:
society for Rousseau, money for Marx, technology for Ruskin, nature for
Marinetti.92 Most crucially, an artist cannot achieve authenticity simply
through loyalty to his or her feelings, since those feelings, culturally
shaped and silently serving unacknowledged interests, are often precisely
what make him or her inauthentic. Authenticity, rather, demands from
the reader or artist a kind of psychic labor, “a more strenuous moral
experience than ‘sincerity’ does”;93 this strenuousness recalls the critique
of sentimentality as unearned or facile redemption. Thus sentimentality
(a term Trilling does not himself use), while characterized by falseness,
would not be, in Trilling’s framework, insincere, but rather inauthentic. It
is not a deliberate or conscious feigning of feeling but rather an unfeigned
experience of false feeling – a feeling whose falseness derives from its
production within a psychosocial or ideological frame that is itself under
indictment. Indeed, in its most insidious form, sentimentality appears to
be virtually synonymous with sincerity.94
Trilling’s account overlaps in important ways with Fredric Jameson’s
recent discussion of the problem, where, following Adorno, he suggests
that “we should think of the quintessential modern gesture as one of
taboo rather than discovery.”95 By this logic, “modernism is seen as
originating in an ever-keener distaste for what is conventional and out-
moded, rather than as an exploratory appetite for the unexplored and
undiscovered.”96 Much like Trilling’s authenticity, Jameson’s “taboo”
works negatively:
The taboo is very explicitly a taboo on previous kinds of representational form
and content: not the oldness of the older emotions as such, but the conventions
of their expression; not the disappearance of this or that kind of human relation-
ship, but rather the intolerable commonplaces with which it had become so
intimately associated as to have been indistinguishable.97
In both Jameson’s own language and in the process he describes, however,

the taboo on a form of expression easily slips into a taboo on certain kinds of
feeling themselves: “The outmoded and conventionalized literary expres-
sion, now identified as sentimentality, can also be seen to designate the
obsolescence of a certain emotion in and of itself.”98 This slippage makes it
difficult, often impossible, to say whether the “fault” of sentimentality is
ethical–psychic (feeling things wrongly) or aesthetic–technical (expressing
feelings artlessly).
Both Trilling and Jameson, then, suggest that modernist aesthetics
turned on an ever-heightening suspicion of feeling – a suspicion of
both feeling itself (conceived psychologically in some pre-linguistic, pre-
representational sense) and of feeling expressed (realized in some linguistic,
narrative, or other aesthetic form). In poetic practice this suspicion often
manifests itself as a resistance to the pull of feeling, or an advocacy of
emotional detachment. We might think here of Wallace Stevens’s
“The Snow Man” (1921) with its stripping away of human emotional
investments in the natural world, its rejection of the pathetic fallacy in
favor of an emotionally barren encounter with a stark winter landscape. Or
the similarly hibernal “Lapis Lazuli” of William Butler Yeats (1936), which
finds in a carved-stone image of Chinese monks a “tragic gaiety” that,
rejecting a publicly minded, feminine hysteria in the face of looming war,
chooses instead to gaze out upon the tragic scene from a lofty height with
equanimity and quiet joy. Even W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”
(1940), in situating suffering within a lively panorama of human and animal
activity, endorses the wisdom of those Old Masters for whom indifference
to pain may not be laudable but must at least be acknowledged. All three
poems ground their aesthetics in a disavowal of what Nietzsche called
the modern “overestimation and predilection for pity,” or what, I am
arguing, became identified in modernist shorthand as sentimentality.99
Like Nietzsche glancing back at Cervantes at the opening of the seventeenth
century, these poets look outside their own cultural or historical moments
(or, in Stevens’s case, outside culture itself) for better models of how to
respond to or represent suffering.
In theoretical or philosophical expressions of modernist poetics, a
similar affective stringency has gone by the name of “impersonality,”
a term which has found its most canonical articulations in Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the essays of T. S. Eliot. For
Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, recall, “the personality of the artist,” in moving
from a personal lyric form – “the simplest verbal gesture of an instant of
emotion” – to an impersonal dramatic one, “refines itself out of existence,
impersonalises itself.”100 For him, the properly “dramatic” or “esthetic
emotion” is “static” rather than “kinetic” because it stimulates neither
arousal nor revulsion as do didactic or pornographic arts; in the aesthetic
emotion, “The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”101
Eliot also advocates the “depersonalization” of the poet in the creation of
art, seeking to separate the “personal emotions” of the poet (which have
little place in his definition of lyric) from “the emotion in his poetry.”102
Hence the famous definition of the objective correlative, which finds a
verbal form wholly adequate to an affective condition.103
How, and whether, these prescriptions were realized, by Joyce, Eliot, or
others, have long been topics for debate. Nonetheless, one potential
consequence of critical attention to Joyce’s “aesthetic emotion” or Eliot’s
“emotional adequacy” has been the view that the artist’s task must be the
sorting-through and refinement of feeling, the eradication of false feeling
to get to the true. The modernist artist in this conception comes
to resemble his Romantic forebear, a representative man with a more
comprehensive soul who can distinguish gradations and qualities of feeling
in a way that the larger public cannot – the twist being that the modernist
must possess an even more finely tuned aesthetic sense, since Romantic
excess, grandiosity, and anthropomorphizing of nature are now among the
false feelings he must guard against. And, to be sure, in even the most
ruthless satire there often emerges an occasional gesture where poignancy
is salvaged; the balance is merely shifted so that increasing quantities
of cruelty or suffering are required to justify (to “earn”) the rare moment
of tenderness. In a way, this is a version of the old claim that the satirist
is really a closet sentimentalist, that the cruelty of satire is but another way
to arrive at those very affective indulgences that are purportedly jettisoned.
It also allows a recuperation of modernism within what I am loosely
calling a humanist tradition – one in which ethical identification
and imaginative sympathy remain fundamental to the construction of
characters, stories, and meanings. And, to be sure, it would be a mistake
to identify modernism too narrowly with irony itself, since, as Maria
DiBattista observes, modernism frequently retains “a boundary beyond
which irony may not pass,” a retention that signals modernism’s
“inner debt to Romanticism and the cult of the heart.”104 One useful
way to think about late modernism, indeed, is that it suspects an
earlier modernism of not making good on its promises to banish the
sentimental.
But while for certain authors, no doubt, such seeking of a golden
affective mean – between irony and pity, or cruelty and compassion, or
the reality principle and the pleasure principle – may suffice, finding a
middle ground is not always possible. For it is precisely the difficulty of
the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality that is at issue.
Once feeling is understood as potentially sentimental, all appeals to
feeling run the same risk. Rather than recovering some precarious balance
where sentiment is present but not excessive, then, I want to suggest that
this concern with feeling is rather a sign that modernism is inevitably
caught between its humanist tendency and an antihumanist one that seeks
to reject ethical identification completely. As Ella Zohar Ophir notes, in
modernist literature – as opposed to the visual arts – the new value of
abstraction less often proves to be anti-representational than it does anti-
empathetic.105 Its target is less mimesis than cathexis. Modernism exhibits
many different ways of negotiating this dilemma, of assessing both the
advantages and the liabilities of cutting free (or attempting to cut free)
from the humanist, ethical concerns that have historically been central to
the novel. To examine how modernism handles this negotiation, I offer in
the following chapter a short survey of the decades of early and high
modernism before the 1930s, a survey that suggests by way of representa-
tive figures how late modernist satire gradually emerges as a cultural
dominant.
chapter 2
Modernism’s story of feeling
Seen through an ever-more-powerful critical microscope, the object once

known as modernism is dissolving under our gaze. For some time now
new (or renewed) attention to writers who for reasons of race, gender,
politics, technique, or talent had been neglected by scholars has radically
expanded, undermining a small canon of authors ( Joyce, Eliot, Woolf,
etc.) and works taken to exemplify Anglo-American high modernism;
cultural history has further demanded that maps of modernism make
room for popular forms ranging from newspapers to film to jazz.
At the same time, the same canonical works have been subjected
to new critical approaches in order to reveal their implication in wider
social discourses.1 As a result, an increasing amount of energy has gone
into dismantling a high modernism that, we are gradually coming to
understand, nobody actually practiced.
At the risk of simplification, however, I follow Pericles Lewis in his
contention that the term modernism retains enough coherence to consti-
tute a valuable critical tool.2 In favoring Lewis’s description over Lawrence
Rainey’s characterization of modernism as merely “a constellation of
agents and practices,” or that of critics such as Peter Nicholls who signal
the heterogeneity of the era’s culture through the plural modernisms,3 I by
no means disdain critical attention to the history of modernist patronage,
publication and marketing, nor do I deny that the variety of modernist
literature was for years ignored in a myopic reverence for a few great
names. I mean, rather, that the work of theorizing modernism does not,
for me, conclude with the abandonment of theory; and that I find Lewis’s
threefold crisis of representation, of liberalism, and of reason to provide a
formulation of modernism that is neither too stringent nor too vague. At
the same time, however, my own discussion does not center on the
categories of technique, politics, and philosophy that have historically
dominated discussions of modernism. Instead, I focus on problems of
affect, and provide an account of feeling within modernism.
21
22 Modernism’s story of feeling
In this chapter, I divide this account of modernist feeling into four
parts. First, I examine the affective protocols associated with an early
modernist aestheticism, through attention to the writings of Oscar Wilde
and to Max Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson (1911). From there I turn
to a reaction against that aestheticism, as found in the polemics of Ezra
Pound and in Tarr (1918), the first novel of his sometime collaborator
Wyndham Lewis. In both of these moments, I discern anticipations of the
satire of the 1930s: Wilde and Beerbohm cultivate an indifference to
ethical concerns, while Pound and Lewis exemplify satiric aggression.
Next, I examine two novels of the so-called high modernist moment,
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923), both of which
reveal the emergence of satire as an increasingly prevalent cultural mode.
Finally, I briefly describe the late modernism of the 1930s as it has been
theorized by other scholars and as I see it manifested in the writers I study
in this book’s later chapters. While such an account may imply a rigid
chronology, my point is the opposite; history doesn’t move in a line, and
the satiric practices of the 1930s are clearly anticipated in earlier works of
modernism. Yet because those earlier works have generally been studied as
examples of a modernism fully realized, viewing them as antecedents to a
later historical moment may shift our focus and help us to see aspects of
these works that criticism has overlooked.
forms of indifference: wilde and beerbohm

Fredric Jameson suggests that modernism can be said to have not one
but two originary “moments,” moments I will for brevity’s sake call
Symbolism and Futurism. The first, which Jameson associates with organic
metaphorics, he uses to describe not only Symbolist poetry but also
Impressionist painting, Art Nouveau, late Victorian aestheticism, and
philosophical vitalism; the second, linked to technological motifs, can
be found in Futurism, cubism, Vorticism, and the “purer formalisms” of
movements such as architecture’s International Style.4 It is in the earlier,
Symbolist moment that we might note a first shift in the theorization of
affect, a move away from a Romantic or Victorian investment in feeling as
a guarantee of value. This is the shift that Lionel Trilling identifies from
sincerity to authenticity, and a key figure for Trilling is Oscar Wilde, who
maintains a “principled antagonism to sincerity.”5 Wilde marks the
moment where sincerity becomes sentimental and the importance of being
earnest becomes laughable. Declaring that “all bad poetry springs from
genuine feeling,”6 he separates questions of feeling (“genuine feeling”)
from those of expression (“bad poetry”), and questions of ethics from those
of aesthetics. In this new hierarchy, the aesthetic now takes priority: “There
is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or
badly written. That is all.”7 This dichotomy then further extends to the
separation of content and form:
And just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small
country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave
Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from
subjects of little or no importance . . . the true critics can . . . produce work that
will be flawless in beauty and instinct with intellectual subtlety.8
As genuine feeling leads to bad poetry, so bad feeling (Emma’s “sordid and
sentimental amours”) can produce genuine poetry (“a masterpiece of
style”). Style is elevated over subject matter, form over content, aesthetics
over ethics, expression over feeling. What ensues, finally, is Wilde’s celebra-
tion of artifice over nature, and of lying over truth.
As Trilling observes, Wilde’s polemical rejection of Victorian duty,
earnestness, and sincerity entails the endorsement of a “doctrine of masks”
which “proposes the intellectual value of the ironic posture.”9 Upholding
the value of irony, Wilde professes antagonism toward Victorian morality,
and to aesthetic practices that rely on it. Sounding much like Nietzsche
decrying our compunction at laughing at Don Quixote, Wilde sees “the
mere existence of the conscience” as “a sign of our imperfect develop-
ment,” and views a morality based on “self-denial” and “self-sacrifice” as
“part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history
of the world.”10 The result is a thorough skepticism whether our moral
impulses serve any good beyond human vanity. The celebration of artifice
thus entails a pronounced suspicion of the moral sentiments and suggests
in their place a new emphasis on certain feelings – cruelty, indifference,
aloofness – characteristic of satire.
It is at this historical moment, moreover, that indifference is recognized
both as a precondition for laughter and as an affective state symptomatic of
new social conditions. Wildean aloofness is at once akin to the freedom from
emotion that Henri Bergson sees as necessary to the comic and to “the blasé
attitude” that Georg Simmel sees as emblematic of modern metropolitan life.
A fuller account of Simmel, Bergson, and the blasé will be offered in Chapter 5;
for now it is enough to emphasize that Wilde’s stance creates space for what
Freud saw as the “benevolence” or “neutrality” necessary for successful joke-
work.11 If strong affect, as Freud contends, interferes with the pleasure that
tendentious jokes afford, then low affect allows a receptivity to such pleasures.
But while Wilde has long been taken as the exemplar of aestheticist
indifference, this “moment” in the development of modernist satire is
perhaps best represented by that enigmatic work of his friend and protégé,
Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson. As a celebration of pure style, and as
a narratorial display of a blasé indifference to the ethical stakes of his
characters’ fates, the novel is far more successful than Wilde’s own moral-
istic The Picture of Dorian Gray. Robert F. Kiernan describes the ornate,
self-conscious manner of Zuleika Dobson as “the play of high style against a
higher awareness of that style’s absurdity,” and he places the book within
a tradition of the “camp novel,” taking the absence of clear targets as
grounds for denying it the label of satire.12 Here Kiernan is merely following
the lead of the seventy-four-year-old Max himself, who, in a prefatory
note to the 1946 edition, blithely disavows any political, social, or ethical
commitment behind his narratorial equanimity, and exhorts the reader to
look at the novel not as a “satire” but as “just a fantasy.”13 Indeed, with only
a few exceptions, critics of the novel have found its frivolity incompatible
with the darkness that is seen to characterize satire (untroubled, apparently,
by its conclusion in a mass suicide). For Beerbohm, then, even the indirect
“commentary” or polemicism of satire is still subject to being recuperated as
a socially minded or utilitarian earnestness in disguise. But in Zuleika
Dobson, he insists, all art is quite useless.
Yet if Beerbohm’s own stated position, readable in his self-celebratory
style and irony-laden characterizations, suggests a withdrawal of authorial
affective commitment, he hardly shies from the representation of intense
feeling. The subject of the novel, after all, is love. It is the tale of the arrival
at all-male Oxford of the bewitchingly beautiful eponymous conjuror,
with whom every one of Oxford’s undersexed undergraduates falls self-
abasingly in love. Yet because Zuleika herself can only love a man who
refrains from the abasement that love demands, all desire in the novel
must remain forever unrequited. Thus, while the reader’s level of emotion
and the narrator’s are kept to a minimum, the characters experience their
own feelings at a feverish intensity that can hardly be comic to them.
Feelings in Zuleika Dobson are as irrefutable as facts. Despite her often
sadistic treatment of the men who adore her, Zuleika herself is a slave to
her own feeling and can only act in accord with its tyrannical demands.
Her opposite number, a dandy called the Duke of Dorset, is equally in
thrall to his own heart, and as a result his experience of passionate love
shatters his adherence to a personal code of style. “A theory, as the Duke
saw, is one thing, an emotion another,”14 Beerbohm writes, and the entire
novel stages a conflict between the Duke’s “theory” – his adherence to his
dandiacal style – and his “emotion,” which everywhere is treated as some-
thing that comes upon the characters from without. Through the act of
feeling, the Duke abandons the theoretic world for the experiential; a true
Lacanian subject, he discovers himself exactly at the moment of self-loss:
“he had no soul till it passed out of his keeping.”15 Beerbohm’s most
whimsical and memorable illustration of this external property of feeling
is rendered through the supernatural changes of color that Zuleika’s pearl
earrings and the Duke’s pearl studs undergo, changes which signal the
characters’ emotional states before they themselves are conscious of them.16
Here Zuleika Dobson seems curiously to resemble a contemporaneous
text like Forster’s Howards End, whose narratorial earnestness and com-
mitment to the truth of feeling would otherwise seem to lie at some
distance from Beerbohm’s ironical maneuvers. But Forster tends to value
this force of feeling, whereas for Beerbohm its compulsory quality is all
the more reason that feeling should be resisted. For while emotion, in
opposition to theory, is irrefutable in Zuleika Dobson, it is also social.
Descending from aestheticism to life, from theory to emotion, involves
for the Duke a loss of social and aesthetic distinction. Loving Zuleika
makes the Duke merely “one of a number,” rather than one “aloft and
apart.”17 Previously aloof from public circulations of feeling – “Never had
he given an ear to that cackle which is called Public Opinion” – the Duke,
having fallen, now sees the epidemic of love for Zuleika as equivalent
to “the noise made on the verge of the Boer War,” a mob psychology
or groupthink that threatens to devastate Oxford. The narrator agrees: “If
man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this
time, some real progress toward civilization. Segregate him, and he is no
fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost – he becomes just
a unit in unreason.”18 In spite of Beerbohm’s disavowals, the novel can
indeed be taken as a satire on “the herd instinct.” The story is a parable
about how publicly circulating feeling can overcome a private style.
Yet Beerbohm’s own style, unlike the Duke’s, furnishes proof against
feeling’s dangerous seductions; numerous readers comment on the novel’s
“dehumanized characters” and the low ethical stakes of the action.19 The
multiplicity of Beerbohm’s playful stylistic devices – the sprinkling of
archaic, Francophone and neologistic diction, the slapstick gags under-
cutting scenes of high drama, the ludic intervention of the supernatural,
the parodic devices of melodrama – all work to deflect attention from
the empathic claims of the characters’ emotional lives onto the artifice
of the novel itself. Beerbohm’s success in banishing earnestness is nowhere
more evident than in the novel’s treatment of death. While the casual
execution of a minor suitor, dispatched with blasé manners, anticipates
Evelyn Waugh’s technique (“And last of all leapt Mr. Trent-Garby, who,
catching his foot in the ruined flower-box, fell headlong, and was, I regret
to say, killed”), more characteristic of Beerbohm is the mass suicide with
which the novel climaxes:
And over all this confusion and concussion of men and man-made things crashed
the vaster discords of the heavens; and the waters of the heavens fell ever denser
and denser, as though to the aid for waters that could not in themselves envelop
so many hundreds of struggling human forms.20
Here sympathy for the characters is denied through the virtuosity of the
writer’s performance – the alliteration and assonance, the biblical echoes
and cadences, the fanciful imputation of motive to nature – a performance
that seems at first to rise to the importance of its subject and then to
surpass it utterly. In so mitigating emotion through linguistic exhibition,
Beerbohm, like the conjuror Zuleika herself, dazzles with virtuosity; he is
“the omnisubjugant.”21 Zuleika Dobson, c’est Max. The deaths of so many
of England’s fine young men, an eerie anticipation of the war that will
soon ravage the Continent, remains an exercise in style.
forms of aggression: pound and lewis

If Wilde and Beerbohm will here have to stand in for a general “moment”
in the story of modernist feeling, then what Jameson sees as modernism’s
second originary moment, Futurism, will have to be represented by the
reaction against Symbolism and aestheticism as articulated in the Vorticist
aesthetics of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Granted, lumping
Vorticism and Futurism together may appear problematic given the overt
proclamations of enmity between English and Italian factions, but
I deploy the term Futurism in the broad sense that Pound himself uses
when he writes, in 1914, that “we are all Futurists,”22 and I follow Marjorie
Perloff in uniting the warring parties underneath a single avant-gardiste
banner. For, despite the doctrinal heterogeneity within this Futurist
moment, Pound and Lewis share with Marinetti a contempt for deca-
dence, art pour l’art, and the cult of beauty. Their break with the
Symbolists is clear enough: the revolutionary posture of the later genera-
tion rejects as ineffectual the reclusive aestheticism of the earlier one; its
swaggering bravado disdains its predecessors as effeminate; its diatribes
against prettiness recast Paterian impressionism as one more kind of fakery;
its trademark genre, the manifesto, supplants the Wildean epigram.
Nonetheless, the saturation of Futurist rhetoric with disgust for
Symbolism suggests an anxiety born of proximity.23 Pound shares with
Wilde a rejection of moralizing about art – “Good art however ‘immoral’
it is, is wholly a thing of virtue. Purely and simply . . . good art can NOT
be immoral.”24 Like Wilde, he firmly separates the ethical and the
aesthetic, and takes all talk of morality in art as benighted Grundyism.
Pound also emphasizes the necessity of technique, form, and control, so
that however much he might reject the particular style of the Symbolists,
the emphasis on style itself (and consequent adoration of Flaubert)
remains firmly in place. And if Wilde’s stance of moral indifference in
“The Critic as Artist” owes something to Nietzsche’s critique of a hyper-
trophied conscience in the (mis)development of the species, then so too
does Marinetti’s provocative, if pompous, declaration that art “can be
nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”25 Behind both originary
modernist moments lies the same rejection of Victorian sentimentality.
That Futurism shared an antisentimental stance with its immediate
precursor suggests a literary history that works via differentiation: each
movement’s need to distinguish itself from its predecessor dictates that
the predecessor’s rejection of sentimentality be rewritten as merely an
illusory break, a continuation of sentimentality by other means. As
Marinettian Futurism redefines fin-de-siècle aestheticism as a sentimental
cult of beauty, so Lewis and Pound’s Blast manifesto denounces
Marinetti’s automobilism as a “sensational and sentimental” rehash of
Wilde.26 The narrative of early modernism begins to look like an effort of
each new splinter movement to surpass the previous in the completeness
of its antisentimentality.27
But, as important as the ideological content of the antisentimental
stance is the change in tone that separates these two moments. Pound,
Lewis, Marinetti, even Lawrence – their attitudes are anything but blasé.
And here lies their most pronounced contrast with Wilde and Beerbohm.
There is among the Futurists an abundance of polemic that publicizes and
justifies the revolutionary stance of their own art. These Futurist polemics
share an argumentative, exhortative, antiacademic style, prone to sudden
exclamations, slangy coinages, and derisive insults. As Perloff notes, “the
aggressive, polemical tone, the unusual typography . . . the extensive use
of onomatopoeia, pun, and extravagant metaphor, and the ‘destruction of
syntax’ and parole in libertà” are features that cut across particular schools
or movements within the Futurist moment.28
It would be too hasty to conflate Futurist polemic or manifesto with
satire itself, but two crucial qualities must here be noted that are relevant
to the mechanisms of satire: (1) the ostensibly reformative or revolutionary
motive of changing a corrupt modernity, and (2) an enthusiasm for that
change whose violence often takes precedence over its professed ends. For
Pound and Lewis, the “aggressive, polemical tone” is tied to the paradox-
ical position of the satirist in modernity, decrying fads and fashions while
shrilly insisting upon newness. The opposition both to a corrupt modern-
ity and to all the faulty modernisms that help to constitute that modernity
begins to look like opposition for its own sake. Indeed, this aggression is
something the Futurist polemic shares with important portions of Pound’s
early poetry, whose most memorable lines are often those which – to
borrow the phrase with which Pound himself praised Yeats – strip poetry
of its perdamnable rhetoric. It is equally a hallmark of Lewis’s novelistic
style, which has from Pound through Kenner and Jameson regularly been
lauded for its violence and energy.
This violence with which Pound and Lewis confront a corrupt moder-
nity is itself a kind of affect. Thus, while Hugh Kenner notes Pound’s
lifelong emphasis on technical rather than psychic criteria for poetry
(corresponding to what I have called in Wilde the priority of aesthetics
over ethics), Michael Levenson argues in response that in Pound’s
poetics a residual “psychic” criterion remains.29 In Pound’s famous
“A Retrospect” (1917), for example, sentimentality is expectedly disdained
(Poetry should be “austere, direct, free from emotional slither”), yet
emotion remains a source of value (“Only emotion endures”).30 And if
there is a hint of a contradiction in valuing emotion but not emotional
slither, it is resolved by the distinction between false and true emotion.
And true emotion, for Pound, is found in nothing other than satire itself:
“I prefer satire, which is due to emotion, to any sham of emotion.”31
In “A Retrospect,” Pound leaves implicit the assumption that the
emotion underlying satiric ridicule is authentic because it is negative
and critical, but he comes closer to spelling out this idea over a decade
later in “The Serious Artist” (1929). In this later essay Pound’s tastes seem
to have changed little. Although he praises beauty because it “reminds one
what is worth while,”32 he is again anxious to qualify his enthusiasm in a
way that distinguishes his own appreciation for beauty from the bogus
gushing he finds in aestheticism: “I am not now speaking of shams.
I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty.”33 Even
the diction here (sham, slither) is kept intact from “A Retrospect.” As in
the earlier essay, too, satire retains its critical, anti-slitherious function.
Therefore, whereas “the cult of beauty” corresponds for Pound to the
medical function of hygiene, “the cult of ugliness” is valuable for performing
the complementary function of diagnosis, locating what is corrupt in
culture. And satire reappears as an adjunct to this diagnostic function:
“satire, if we are to ride this medical metaphor to staggers, satire is surgery,
insertions, and amputations.”34 In short, satire eradicates emotional slither
so that real beauty can be discerned. Pound’s medical metaphor, then,
promotes a view of satire as a corrective force but at the same time a
violent and invasive one.35
But while Pound’s essays contain a valuable, if glancing, recognition
of the importance of satire to Futurist poetics, Lewis’s Tarr (1918) offers
a richer case study. Tarr is satiric, first of all, through its mockery of modern
sophistication, particularly its send-up of the “Bourgeois Bohemians,” the
bad artists and sentimental poseurs who populate Paris’s Latin Quarter.
The Englishman Hobson is mocked for the “sentimental indulgence” of his
deliberately shabby tweeds; the painter Lowndes has “just enough money to
be a Cubist”; Bertha, Tarr’s fiancée, walks naked around her apartment,
taking an “air bath” amid a plaster cast of Beethoven and a photograph of
the Mona Lisa.36 This ridicule of aesthetic pretensions and second-hand
tastes suggests the conservative or moralistic tendency of satire I have
discussed: Tarr manifests an urgent need to distinguish good art from
bad, even good modernism from bad, at the same time that it also
anticipates a tendency that emerges more fully in satire of the 1930s wherein
modernism’s oppositional and satiric energy begins to take itself as its
own target.
Given Lewis’s own repeated dismissals of bourgeois moral standards,
this moralistic reading of Tarr may seem counterintuitive; yet such a
reading was easily available to the novel’s first critics. In his 1937 Blasting
and Bombardiering, Lewis recounts Tarr’s critical reception: “‘A painful
commentary on modern morals,’ said a provincial paper. ‘But it has a
powerful fascination,’ it added. Whether the ‘fascination’ lay in the
morals or the manner of presentment the writer does not say.”37 While
Lewis pokes fun at the philistinism of the provincial reviewer and his
outdated concern for moral content, the reviewer’s clichéd language still
recognizes Tarr’s fundamental outrage with modernity. Nor is it off the
mark to note that this outrage takes on a moral coloring; even the current
tendency to read Lewis as a cultural critic capable of diagnosing the ills of
capitalism despite his right-wing leanings – one reader calls him “a one-
man Frankfurt school of the right”38 – retains a touch of this moralistic
revulsion from the modern.
The moral outrage underlying Tarr’s satire of modern artists places it in
contiguity with Lewis’s polemics and manifestos, whose doctrinal objectives
often seem entwined with the dramatic action of the novel. The title
character’s dialogues, which Kenner has described as “Blast manifestos
dramatized,”39 are frequently cited in discussions of his creator’s artistic
principles, and Tarr’s conversations with Anastasya even feature those
repeated exclamations of “Bless” and “Curse” without which no modernist
manifesto would be complete.40 Tarr’s argument for the deadness and the
externality of art is fully consistent with Lewis’s later treatises, and he
distinguishes his own principles from the frauds about him in terms
reminiscent of Pound’s: “The second [condition of art] is absence of soul,
in the sentimental human sense . . . No restless, quick flame-like ego is
imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside.”41 Pater and his acolytes,
derided as sentimental humanists, are the obvious targets here, and from
this attack on flux and egoism it is only a small step to the “external
method” of satire valorized in Men Without Art.
Tarr’s attack on what Lewis calls “Humour” similarly anticipates
Lewis’s later position of the 1930s. The novel opens with a preface that,
as Martin Puchner points out, itself takes the rhetorical form of a mani-
festo.42 This preface dwells on “the maudlin and the self-defensive Grin”
of the Englishman, which, Lewis asserts, “usually accompanies loose
emotionality.”43 This critique of British humor becomes an explicit motif
when Tarr renounces his Englishman’s humor as emotional weakness, a
“national institution” that “provides you with nothing but a first-rate
means of evading reality.”44 Thus Tarr traces all his “mock matrimonial”
problems with his sometime fiancée Bertha to humor, and resolves “to
gaze on Bertha inhumanly and not humorously.”45 Tarr eventually names
this failure to be inhuman as “sentimentality” and concludes: “He had
humanized sex too much.”46 In short, the slither of Humor is opposed to
the form-giving, inhuman gaze of the painter’s eye, which Lewis later
identifies with satire: “There is laughter and laughter. That of true satire
is as it were tragic laughter. It is not a genial guffaw nor the titillations
provoked by a harmless entertainer.”47 To the Grin, then, Lewis opposes
the Grimace, which signifies not evasion but confrontation: “If you look
very closely at my grin, you will perceive that it is a very logical and
deliberate grimace.”48 Only the animality of the satiric grimace, in contrast
to the evasive geniality of the humorous grin, provides the basis for
emotional and artistic integrity.
Yet while Tarr advocates for the emotional coldness that Lewis would
later characterize as satiric, it is less clear whether Lewis actually achieves
inhuman, satiric distance from his representations. Tarr, to be sure, never
succeeds in extricating himself from the “slop of sex.”49 Having
temporarily escaped his sentimental attachment to Bertha, he finds
himself embroiled in an equally sentimental relation with Kreisler; he
realizes that, despite his efforts, “the curse of humour was in him.”50
And Lewis himself also fails to escape the curse of humor. As one critic
after another has noted, Lewis creates in Kreisler a much more vivid and
engrossing representation than he achieves with Tarr, his authorial
mouthpiece. As Kenner puts it, Lewis is “surreptitiously backing a rival
horse,”51 siding with the chaotic energy of the pathetic yet vital Kreisler
rather than the disinterested cool that Tarr attempts to achieve. The two
characters in fact might be seen as embodying the two poles of satire
I have described; while Tarr discourses didactically on the principles
by which modernist art can properly respond to a bogus modernity,
Kreisler actually lives the aggressive energy of satire, which leaves behind
its didactic aims in its outraged opposition to just about everything.
Whether in the hilarious Bonnington Club dance, the grotesque duel
(where slapstick misfortune slips into macabre revulsion), or his own
suicide, Kreisler’s solution to a problem is always action, usually violent
action. There is, then, substantial slippage between the codified affective
regimens articulated in Lewis’s polemics and the more unpredictable
practice of novel-writing: the impulsiveness of Kreisler overwhelms
the intellection of Tarr.
Indeed, in Tarr, experience is always leaving theory disappointed. Tarr
avers that art is “ourselves disentangled from death and accident,”52 but in
the novel accident usually gets the last laugh. Characters are constantly
discovering their own narratives of self-definition to be contradicted by
events, and they strain to form new narratives that will offer at least the
illusion of control over life. As Paul Peppis writes: “Since persons can
control neither their raging desires nor the actions of others, social activity
becomes as chaotic as Kreisler’s fanatic dances. Every scene, every inter-
pretation, every plan of action invariably goes horribly wrong.”53 Tarr
approaches Bertha with newfound indifference, only to discover her
“ironical unsurprised eye” mocking him and turning his hard-won indif-
ference into “truculen[ce].”54 Kreisler, after seeing Anastasya with Soltyk,
resolves to insult her in order to reclaim some control over events, even
though he knows such an insult will fail to win her from his rival. Bertha,
having spontaneously kissed the brutish Kreisler, constructs an account
in which he appeared to her in need of help, thus “effacing, in some sense,
the extreme involuntariness of the . . . incident.”55 In Tarr, one cannot
author oneself outside of a hermetic world of art, because the contingen-
cies of life are just too great.
One of the novel’s most significant instances of experience defying
theory is Kreisler’s rape of Bertha, a scene that, as Ann Ardis points out,
has largely been ignored by critics. Ardis maintains that this critical
neglect speaks to a reluctance to confront the ethical questions involved
in reading the rape, and argues that Pound and Lewis demand of their
nascent modernist readership a willingness to overcome the “ideological
response to violent content (i.e., a rape)” inherent in realist fiction.56 It is
certainly the case that Lewis posits a trained readership that breaks with
realist traditions of ethical engagement; yet it is equally that case that
rejecting the narrative conventions of realism is not the same as dispensing
with ethical engagement altogether. Indeed, one could easily argue just
the opposite: that for a narrator deliberately to cultivate sympathy
according to a realist (or sentimental) narrative model would – especially
given Tarr’s own indictment of sentimental patterns of feeling – interfere
with not only aesthetic but also ethical judgment. To use Pound’s phrase,
realist conventions would produce only a “sham of emotion.” The ques-
tion thus becomes not whether Lewis engages a reader’s ethical faculties in
representing the rape, but rather how – the answer being that narratorial
neutrality becomes for Lewis the most effective method of shaping read-
erly affect without giving way to fakery.
Yet to endorse narratorial neutrality as a means of indirectly implying
moral judgment raises its own problems, as Ardis notes, nowhere more
explicitly than in Lewis’s own comparison of the rape to a joke:
As she stood there she looked like some one on whom a practical joke had been
played, of the primitive and physical order, such as drenching, in some amusing
manner, with dirty water. She had been decoyed into swallowing something
disgusting. Her attitude was reminiscent of the way people are seen to stand bent
awkwardly forward, neck craned out, slowly wiping the dirt off their clothes, or
spitting out the remains of their polluted drink, cursing the joker.57
Although Lewis in Tarr does not confine himself to the external method
he later advocates,58 in this moment the aftermath of the rape is repre-
sented in painterly or sculptural terms. Feelings are only implied through
the outward signs of posture and gesture; passions can be read only because
they are stamped on lifeless things. From Bertha’s physical appearance,
however, the narrator associates to a very different sort of event, a practical
joke – a humiliation of significantly lower moral consequence. And while
the narrator’s descriptions of practical jokes retain the sexually laden
imagery of “drenching” and “swallowing,” the shift from rape to joke
entails an uncomfortable aestheticization of the victim’s body.
Because comparison of the rape-victim to the joke-victim is made in
purely visual terms, its moral dubiousness can, at first, only be inferred. Yet
Lewis’s narrator enunciates the difference between the two soon enough,
pronouncing the “desperate practical joke” to be “too deep for laughter.”59
Lacking the laughter that for Bergson restores humanity, Kreisler’s sexual
assault both is and is not a joke: “At its consummation there had been no
chorus of intelligible laughter.”60 Lewis’s treatment does not deny the
possibility of a reader’s moral outrage, yet neither does it nurture that
outrage. Tarr has vowed to view Bertha “inhumanly,” and he later regrets
having humanized sex too much. But in this scene the Bergsonian “anaes-
thesia of the heart” necessary to joke-work takes on darker connotations,
equated now with Kreisler’s cold-hearted sexual violence.
satire emergent: joyce and huxley

Having looked at two originary moments of modernism, I want to
turn briefly to the moment of high modernism after the First World
War, circa 1922. The hypercanonical novel here is Ulysses, and its place in
the modernist story of feeling doubtless merits a study unto itself. Jay
Dickson has in fact provided an in-depth account of the novel’s engage-
ment with the sentimental tradition, finding echoes of it in, for example,
Stephen’s pained encounter with his underfed sister, Dilly, or in Bloom’s
sympathy for the extended labor of the pregnant Mina Purefoy. But
Dickson’s analysis of the sentimental in Ulysses must be complemented
by the recognition that even as Joyce negotiates the claims of feeling with
an eye to the sentimental or humanistic tradition, he also indulges his
satiric side quite lavishly. To be sure, the novel is generally viewed as
“comic” rather than “satiric,” and Joyce’s view of his characters is typically
regarded as forgiving of human failings. Yet this reading has not always
dominated Joyce criticism. An early critic, Imagiste Richard Aldington,
condemned the novel as “more bitter, more sordid, more ferociously
satirical than anything Mr. Joyce has yet written . . . a tremendous libel
on humanity.”61 Soon after, Carl van Doren and Mark van Doren
described the novel as “savagely satiric,” and even Kenner’s 1956 Dublin’s
Joyce reads Ulysses primarily as a satire.62
But even if a contemporary reader is prone to regard Bloom as a figure
of compassion first and of ridicule second, the satiric spirit is nonetheless
present in Ulysses: it is given the name Buck Mulligan. The Falstaffian
figure of Mulligan, presiding over the novel’s opening, exhibits traits
of both the indifferent Wildean dandy and the aggressive Lewisian
materialist – sometimes aloof and witty, sometimes combative and cruel,
invariably performing a social role. Robert Bell goes so far as to take Mulligan
as the guiding spirit of the novel, characterizing him as a Shakespearean
clown in contrast to Stephen’s humorless Malvolio or Jacques.63
As a materialist and a violator of boundaries, Mulligan embodies the
Bakhtinian grotesque body; referring everything to one bodily function or
another, he reduces ideals to the level of the material lower stratum.
Stephen’s mother’s death, for example, becomes an anatomy lesson:
“And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own?” He
invokes his perspective as a medical student – a profession that has a long
association with the role of the satirist – who (as Pound would have it)
performs surgery, insertions and amputations: “I see them pop off every
day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting-
room. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else . . . To me it’s all a mockery and
beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning.”64
Religious beliefs and rituals are similarly reduced to the corporeal.
Mulligan’s “Ballad of Joking Jesus” reverses the process of transubstanti-
ation, reducing spirit to body:
If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine
He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.65
This delight in the excretory re-surfaces when Buck interrupts Stephen’s

Shakespeare seminar:
–The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard you
pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He’s out in pampooties to murder you.
–Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.66
Urination on Synge’s door is very much Buck’s contribution to literature,

an avant-garde clowning turned performance art that in a later day and
age might have won him a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts. The gesture here debunks not Stephen’s self-indulgent grief or
superstitious religious rituals, but his literary pretentions.
Buck’s reductive materialism is often accompanied by outright aggres-
sion. From the beginning of the novel he is continually placing Stephen
under intellectual siege, offering the reader what Bell calls “a valid satiric
critique of Stephen.”67 “He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his,”
Stephen thinks; and later, when Buck appears in the National Library,
“Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?”68 Mulligan questions Stephen’s
aesthetic principles (or pretensions) and engages him in a bawdy and jesting
but fundamentally threatening intellectual swordplay. In this sense, as
Maureen Waters observes, “Although he is often comic, Mulligan’s
purpose is to negate or destroy.”69
To these qualities of materialism and aggression, reminiscent of the
Lewisian satirist, a third crucial characteristic must be added: histrioni-
cism. For Mulligan, satire or wit is a social mode, a way of displaying
(mostly to other men) his own intellectual and sexual prowess. As critics
frequently note, he is a Wildean figure in his dandyish dress, his aura
of ambiguous sexuality, and his willingness to play the jester at the court
of the British Empire; Stephen considers him one of a “Brood of
mockers.”70 Buck is not only histrionic but necessarily histrionic, and
when he doesn’t have an audience he summons one out of the air:
“For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul
and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One
moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence all.”71
Mulligan is not merely acting here: he is pretending to be a stagemaster
who pretends to be a priest, pretending to have an audience that he can
transform into a congregation, all for the benefit of his real audience,
Stephen, and the even realer audience beyond him, Joyce’s readership.
It is in fact impossible to take any of Buck’s lines without some kind
of irony; he always seems to be speaking someone else’s words, and
never fully seriously. While all the characters in Ulysses assume social
roles, Buck is qualitatively different from the novel’s principals,
Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, in that he has no stream of consciousness
that we overhear; he exists only as a performance. As a thought experi-
ment we might imagine what it would mean to be granted access to
Buck’s solitary consciousness as we are with Stephen, Bloom, and Molly.
It is hardly overstatement to suggest that it would destroy the
representation.
Mulligan’s histrionic clowning modifies the aggression and negativity
of his debunking satire with a happily irreverent freedom from authority.
When the Dublin literati, including Stephen, earnestly discuss the greatest
of literary authorities, Buck has little use for such obeisance:
Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled.
–Shakespeare? He said. I seem to know the name. A flying sunny smile rayed in
his loose features.
–To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. That chap that writes like Synge.72
(Yeats notoriously overpraised Synge as writing like Shakespeare.) No one
possibly believes Buck to be this ignorant, nor does he expect anyone to.
This feigned ignorance, rather, really is Buck’s own theory of Shakespeare,
just as pissing on Synge’s door really is his contribution to literature. This
is a sophisticated philistinism that engages the eggheaded intellectual
contest in the reading room by pretending not to engage at all. His
play-acting excuses him from the argument while trivializing it at the
same time.
To be sure, the fraternal rivalry between Stephen and Mulligan is
ultimately displaced by Stephen’s more humane relation with the
father-figure, Bloom. Even Bell, who argues that Mulligan’s spirit of
joking infects the novel’s narrative style, must grant the ultimate predom-
inance of Bloom, who “becomes the novel’s center of value,” offering a
“comic” view opposed to Buck’s “satiric” one.73 The reasons behind this
movement away from Mulligan’s satire toward the more sympathetic
mode of comedy may be peculiar to Joyce’s psychology or aesthetics,
yet the triumph of Bloom – talking earnestly about injustice and love –
also suggests that the presence of satire within the moment of high
modernism is, to use Raymond Williams’s distinction, “emergent” rather
than “dominant.” (One might similarly find a visible, if emergent, strain
of satire in that other monument of 1922, The Waste Land.) Thus, for
Joyce, notes Waters, “satire is merely one facet in the larger comedy; the
writers who came after him, or were younger contemporaries, were less
optimistic.”74 Waters’s survey of Irish writing points out the wider trend
I mean to underscore: that in the late modernism of the 1930s satire
becomes a cultural dominant at long last.
One of these “less optimistic” writers, not Irish but English, was Aldous
Huxley, who enjoyed in the 1920s and 1930s critical prestige nearly equal to
Joyce’s; he was commonly described, Jerome Meckier notes, as both the
voice of his generation and its intellectual and sexual liberator.75 The Irish
satirist Flann O’Brien pays (deliberately verbose) homage to both men
equally in the opening pages of his 1939 At Swim-Two-Birds: “Each of [my
books] was generally recognized as indispensable to all who aspire to an
appreciation of the nature of contemporary literature and my small collec-
tion contained works ranging from those of Mr. Joyce to the widely-read
books of Mr. A. Huxley, the eminent English writer.”76 I focus here on
Antic Hay, his 1923 novel, not only because of its contemporaneity with
Ulysses and The Waste Land, but also because it constitutes a compendium
of the motifs and concerns of modernist satire, which will be taken up in
different ways by the 1930s authors I discuss in my later chapters.
The modernity Huxley depicts is one of utter belatedness, lacking all
possibility of meaning or redemptive value. The protagonist, Gumbril, Jr.,
observes of one character, “Other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge –
they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own.” Yet
he soon realizes that this secondariness is only an extreme version of his
own: “He too was an assimilator.”77 This is what Tyrus Miller has a called a
“condition of generalized mimetism,” a world where all is copy or sham.78
Gumbril therefore struggles to find values in which he can believe; his
skepticism discredits religion, science, education, art, political reform, and
even, for the most part, love. This problem of belatedness is, moreover, self-
reflexive in that it poses a problem for the novelist as well as the character:
what options remain for the artist after the heightened self-consciousness of
modernism has discredited older values and modes of expression? Thus
Gumbril tells his friend, the painter-poet Lypiatt, that “you can’t say
‘dream’” in a poem, “Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty-two”; it is
“altogether too late in the day,” adds the aesthete Mercaptan.79 The force of
the word has been nullified by Freudian talk of latent and manifest content,
and modern codes of “literary tact”80 condemn such high-flown language as
implicitly sentimental.
The problem of belatedness that permeates Antic Hay arises specific-
ally as a result of capitalist modernity, manifested in a catalogue of
technological developments that saturate the public sphere: “Cinemas,
newspapers, magazines, gramophones, football matches, wireless tele-
phones.”81 Even Gumbril’s tailor can recognize these amusements not as
the liberating gifts of a new utopian age, but as a further constriction of
the modern subject: “take them or leave them if you want to amuse
yourself. The ordinary man can’t leave them. He takes; and what’s that
but slavery?”82 In this world (anticipating Waugh’s Vile Bodies) servants
read newspapers that feed them grotesque accounts of violent crimes to
satisfy their baser instincts, while sentimental tales reassure them of their
good hearts: “For them, Her Majesty the Queen spoke kindly words to
crippled female orphans; the jockeys tumbled at their jumps; Cupid
was busy in Society, and the murderers who had disemboweled their
mistresses were still at large.”83
A post-war milieu in which nineteenth-century belief in progress has
been discredited by mass death, Huxley’s modernity is one in which the
utopian enthusiasms of an earlier modernist moment have begun to wane,
and modernism itself has been commodified. Gumbril’s fantasies of
wealth include “drawings by Picasso and Lewis,” the terms “modern”
and “Futurist” are used to describe curtains, and a businessman informs
Gumbril that “there is no better training for commerce than a literary
education.”84 As in Tarr, modernism itself is subject to satire, and the novel
presents an array of ludicrous figures espousing or embodying various
strains of modernist dogma (including the sexually rapacious Coleman, a
Mulligan-like clown, who is ceaselessly performing, parodying Christian
liturgy and interrupting intellectual conversations with bad puns).
Of all the artists in the novel, Lypiatt alone might seem to offer a
positive model, since he mounts the most sustained protest against
modern imitation and the modernist accommodation to it. Lypiatt, like
the Futurists, rejects the art-for-art’s-sake credo as sterile and seeks to
reintegrate life and art. Favoring an art “for God’s sake,” he scorns both
Bloomsbury talk of significant form and the Wildean insistence that
subject matter is incidental to the success of the artwork:
Life only comes out of life, out of passion and feeling; it can’t come out of
theories. That’s the stupidity of all this chatter about art for art’s sake and the
esthetic emotions and purely formal values and all that. It’s only the formal
relations that matter; one subject is just as good as another – that’s the theory.85
Such a protest places Lypiatt close to Huxley himself, who sees morality as
central to art and rejects the idea that art can be grounded in form alone.86
But Huxley is self-critical enough that he makes Lypiatt a bad artist.
Myra Viveash realizes that Lypiatt’s own paintings “are so bad” precisely
because they have “no life in them,”87 and she notes that his talents are
best suited for Cinzano advertisements. But Huxley intimates that
Lypiatt’s artistic failure is due to his own personal, emotional failure –
his tendency toward sentimentality. Lypiatt “sees himself as a misunder-
stood and embittered Prometheus,” and after receiving a bad review
imagines himself as Christ crucified: “There, he was making literature
of it again. Even now.”88 Antic Hay indicts the excesses of the sentimenta-
list as well as the sterility of the aestheticist. Huxley may scorn Wilde’s
aestheticism, but Lypiatt illustrates beautifully the Wildean principle that
all bad poetry comes from genuine feeling.
The structures of feeling within modernity are thus a major theme of
Antic Hay. Gumbril’s foray into capitalism requires that he learn to exploit
“the social instinct, the instinct of the herd,” through advertising.89
In Huxley’s analysis, capitalism turns out to be based not on the rational
operations of markets but on the manipulation of feeling, on exploiting
the capacity of the public to feel good about consuming a product and to
feel bad about failing to do so: “We must pull the strings of snobbery
and shame; it’s essential to bear mockingly on those who do not wear
our trousers.”90 Yet if susceptibility to emotional manipulation is to be
feared, the hardened blasé attitude of Huxley’s urbane sophisticates proves
equally perilous. Myra, emotionally deadened from having lost her true
love in the war, best demonstrates this indifference; she is always bored
and her search for stimulation proves fruitless. Her ennui comes to
resemble a dull anxiety, a fear of introspection and repose – what Gumbril
elsewhere calls “Restlessness, distraction, refusal to think, anything for an
unquiet life.”91 In contrast to this need for stimulation, Gumbril does
discover a few things that he can value: Mozart’s twelfth sonata, the girl
Emily whom he loves but mistreats and loses, and those “quiet places in
the mind”92 that offer a retreat from the chaos of modernity (and hint at
the mystical direction of Huxley’s later work). But while Antic Hay
summons moments of poignancy amid its pervasive disgust for modern
life, these moments are few and far between.
The indifference that Myra and most of the modern sophisticates
experience is also shown to have a moral cost. One evening, while
Gumbril and his friends are out, he overhears the story of an unemployed
working-class man who has lost the horse that provided him with his only
means to make a living. While Gumbril’s friends smirk about their
disdain for the poor, Gumbril finds himself “consumed with indignation
and pity . . . like a prophet in Nineveh.”93 Yet his companions remain
indifferent. Gumbril’s thoughts, meanwhile, give way to a contemplation
of the enormous scale of suffering in the world as he considers the fates of
wounded veterans, homeless elderly, asthmatic servants, desperate sui-
cides. Anticipating Nathanael West’s fiction, the extent of suffering here
is so vast that it leads to despair rather than action.94
In a different way, the pathetic but risible Lypiatt later makes his own
protest against a satiric norm: “Every man is ludicrous if you look at him
from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in is heart and
mind. You could turn Hamlet into an epigrammatic farce . . . You could
make the wittiest Guy de Maupassant story out of the life of Christ.”95
Lypiatt brings to the fore one final theme of modernist satire – the idea
that any ideal can be debunked by a sufficiently satiric view: “Everyone’s a
walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time.”96 Anything can be
made to look good or bad by being redescribed. Choices of language,
genre, tone and expression shape affective possibilities. Yet such a realiza-
tion also reopens the possibility of compassion and dissolves the basis on
which a choice can be made, for the satiric and the farcical can also be
rewritten. In this way, Huxley’s satire proves important for the story of
modernist feeling not only because it suggests a lack of redemptive
possibilities in modern life, nor only because it spoofs so many preten-
tious intellectuals and bad artists, but also because it begins to question
the cruelty and aloofness that makes satire possible in the first place.
late modernism
The story of modernist feeling from the close of the nineteenth century
through the 1920s thus presents no single dominant position, but rather a
series of tonal possibilities and thematic concerns that make possible the
satire of late modernism. The notion of late modernism itself deserves a
few words, since it has only relatively recently emerged as an era worthy of
discrete nomenclature. The reasons for this emergence are numerous: the
expansion of modernist studies beyond the old canon has licensed critical
attention to the twentieth century’s middle decades; the exhaustion of
efforts to schematize modernism and postmodernism has invited study of
transitional or anomalous works; the mere march of time has threatened
literary studies with the embarrassment of having to posit a “post-post-
modernism” unless new periodization can be imagined. Thus the rupture
between modernism and postmodernism has opened up to become a
period unto itself, and critics are coming to heed Tyrus Miller’s exhort-
ation that the cultural activity of the era cannot be adequately understood
through the concept of transition alone.97
Like modernism and postmodernism, the idea of late modernism is
often caught between a narrow chronological sense and a formal and
nonhistorical one, and I try here to avoid both traps. For the sake of
coherence, my focus is on novels of the 1930s, but I make no claim that
late modernism ends abruptly with the Second World War, and
I recognize continuity with earlier works of modernism and later works
of postmodernism. Nor do I claim that the works under study are
exhaustive of the possibilities realized in the 1930s; rather, I identify
something like a cultural dominant, a set of family resemblances in a
group of novels produced in a short space of time. Taken together,
I suggest, the commonalities of the novels I examine appear significant
enough to constitute more than a historical accident, and charting those
commonalities is itself a form of history.
In much literary history, of course, the 1930s have been seen not as an
outgrowth of modernism, but its eclipse. The crisis of the Great Depres-
sion, the promises and threats of Communism and fascism, and the
looming possibility of another world war all shifted attention from
aesthetics to politics. Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation, still one of
Late modernism 41
the most important studies of the decade, discerns in the poetry, fiction,
and essays of English writers of the 1930s a steadily increasing pressure
to take political action.98 Confronting politics in a way the writers of
the 1920s had not felt compelled to, the Auden group developed a mode
Hynes calls parable in order to address these new concerns. Yet, despite
certain similarities, the public, civic mode of the Auden generation (or, in
the US, the publicly political mode of a new generation of social realists)
is by and large not the one adopted by the writers in this study. While the
political atmosphere of the decade is visible in some of the works I discuss,
and available through critical recovery in others, these writers’ politics,
when they do appear, are often mitigated by irony, and their extra-
fictional commitments represented satirically, if at all.
Alan Wilde, one of the first critics to call the 1930s a period of late
modernism, agrees with Hynes that “external events forced on the thirties
writers a series of troubling contradictions, centering in particular on the
rival claims of artistic vocation and political commitment.”99 He argues
that a new emphasis on clarity, transparency and rigor – exemplified by
Isherwood’s, “I am a camera,” or Orwell’s comparison of good prose to a
clear window – suggests a moral and linguistic severity, a need to see and
represent the world clearly.100 Yet Wilde maintains that even as such new
ideals resolve certain tensions between art and politics they also compli-
cate notions of character and self, and he thus turns his focus to subject-
ivity as a way of marking off phases of modernism. For Wilde the “chief
paradox of the decade” becomes the problem of the “subversion of depth
through . . . attention to surface.”101 Placing the 1930s writers somewhere
between the depth-model of modernism and the surface-model of post-
modernism, Wilde finds in the turn to surfaces “something like a new
sensibility,” one which “defines in the most basic way both the moral
program of late modernism and the aesthetic retrenchments of its
writers.”102 Despite “the assumption of a self” in later modernism, then,
there is an agnosticism about the workings of that self: “it is at the last the
radically external view that is ascendant . . . we can do no more than
register the unaccountable and unpredictable vagaries . . . of character in
all its contradictions.”103
The category of subjectivity is also important to a major book-length
treatment of late modernism, Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism. Miller’s
study, which centers on Barnes, Lewis, and Beckett, shares many of my
concerns, including a focus on the role of laughter and satire and the
representation of human behavior as shot through with automatism.
Miller argues that in the era of late modernism “the vision of a general
depersonalization and deauthentication of life in modern society” puts
“subjectivity at risk of dissolution,” a risk to which satiric laughter and
grotesque bodies can be read as responses or symptoms.104 Miller brings
together an apprehension of modernity as secondary and simulated, a
view of the self as discontinuous and dispersed, and a literary approach
that rejects traditional modernist attempts to preserve or recuperate the
self through heroic artistic gestures.
I aim both to extend and to revise Miller’s important theorization of
late modernism. First, I attempt, through a more thorough unpacking
of terms such as satire, grotesque, and uncanny, to add specificity to an
understanding of those late modernist concerns with surface and depth,
outside and inside, self and character that have been identified by Miller,
Wilde, and others.105 For if an earlier confidence in the ability to represent
interiority gives way to a new awareness of human automatism and a
reluctance to represent a coherent personality, such awareness and reluc-
tance are deployed in a variety of ways. In some cases, human mechanism
is exploited for comic or satiric laughter, whereas in others it constitutes a
source of uncanny apprehension.
Second, I would argue that despite his acknowledgement of “an already
belated relation to high modernism as ruin,”106 what Miller describes is
often less a late version of modernism than what Marjorie Perloff has
called a “counter” or “other” modernism – a tradition that would include
works of Pound, Stein, and Marinetti. In Perloff’s words, this counter-
modernism was “iconoclastically anti-psychological, anti-formalist, and
anti-aestheticist” and “its Utopian energies . . . were directed, not toward
the making of beautiful autotelic objects, but toward changing the
world.”107 As Miller to some degree acknowledges, the ostensibly late-
modernist rejection of what he calls “an aesthetics of formal mastery” was
always part of the modernist landscape, which at the time doubtless
appeared less neatly partitioned than it does to us after generations of
critical work.108 Given the visibility of Lewis, Marinetti, and Pound in
pre-First World War London, a Joycean or Eliotic “mythic method”
might be seen as a reaction against this iconoclastic, anarchic counter-
modernism rather than as a provocation for it. (Michael Levenson’s
Genealogy of Modernism in fact argues for something very much like this
account.109) Thus Miller’s argument slips from a theorization of laughter,
satire, and automatism as the central components of late modernism to a
more familiar divide between a progressive avant-garde aimed at a poetics
of dispersal and a conservative high modernism aimed at sanctifying
art. Lawrence Rainey has argued that such a schematization tends to
Late modernism 43
result in invidious and unsustainable comparisons between an elitist and
repressive “modernism” and a more “self-aware and emancipatory” tradition
embodied in “the historical avant-garde and postmodernism.”110 Satire thus
tends to disappear from Miller’s analyses of particular texts, in favor of
reading his chosen writers as critics of the bad old high modernists: Beckett
becomes the anti-Joyce, Barnes the anti-Eliot; Lewis the anti-everyone.
I hardly wish to deny Miller’s achievement in identifying a late mod-
ernism with a satiric proclivity, and my criticisms should be taken as
recognition of the force of his arguments. Yet I would maintain that, for
the writers of the 1930s, Lewis, Marinetti, and Pound were as much a
part of the landscape in which they found themselves as were Eliot,
Woolf, and Joyce. I don’t therefore see the late modernists as seeking to
overturn the aesthetic project of an ossified “high modernism,” for in
certain ways they very much sought to extend it. My account of late
modernism is consequently not focused on either Hynes’s return to the
political, or Miller’s proto-postmodern poetics of dispersal, nor even
Wilde’s emphasis on restoring transparency to language in a kind of
“moral clarity” of the left. Instead, I focus on understanding the affective
ranges of satire, the uses and disadvantages of aloofness, indifference,
aggression, cruelty, pleasure, anxiety, and revulsion as they play out through
the late modernist novel.
To be sure, the belatedness of the late modernists, their having come
after modernism, is central to such an understanding. Joyce, Woolf, and
Eliot grew up in a Victorian culture whose residue is evident everywhere
in their work, but the writers I discuss were all – with the exception of
Djuna Barnes – born after the turn of the century and grew up in an
emerging “modernist” culture that was already reinterpreting that older
Victorian moment. For this later generation, modernism had already
happened; as Henry Green noted, Joyce and Kafka were for his generation
“cats who ha[d] licked the plate clean.”111 Michael Gorra argues that the
later generation of modernists (at least in England) turns away from
the idea of the modernist novel as “having fulfilled the promise of the
nineteenth-century novel” in providing “a new sense of freedom.”112
Instead, these writers display a sense of “impotence before history,” and a
“belief that everything important had happened already”; for Gorra, even as
late modernism continues “the modernist attack upon convention,” it “can
only negate the clichés of [its] culture rather than transcend them.”113 And
although his periodization is slightly different, Jameson likewise discerns a
belatedness in late modernism: “The situation of the first or classical
modernists can never be repeated since they themselves already exist.”114
At the same time, however, Jameson also seeks to link late modernism to its
historical conditions: “Late modernism is a product of the Cold War, but
in all kinds of complicated ways . . . the Cold War spelled the end of a
whole era of social transformation and indeed of Utopian desires and
anticipations.”115 Late modernism, in short, turns modernist skepticism
against modernism’s own revolutionary and romantic tendencies.
Therefore, while I do not see these writers as seeking to overthrow
modernism, I do see them as having learned modernism in its many
varieties, and in a sense learned it too well. For the writers of the 1930s,
modernism was not yet the stuff of textbooks, but it was available by a
kind of shorthand, and thus highly susceptible to ironic redescription.116
This late modernist skepticism toward earlier modernist enthusiasms
extends to Lewis’s own idiosyncratic version of modernism, and Lewis’s
aesthetics are consequently no surer guide to late modernist novelistic
practices than are Wilde’s or Eliot’s or Woolf’s. Thus Waugh describes in
Vile Bodies how the once-incendiary style of Blast has been adapted for
party invitations; Stella Gibbons caricatures D. H. Lawrence’s sexualized
landscapes; Nathanael West writes of a whorehouse madam who discusses
Gertrude Stein to provide an atmosphere of culture; Robin Vote appears
in Barnes’s Nightwood as a figure from an Henri Rousseau landscape;
Samuel Beckett transforms Yeats’s heroine from the Countess Cathleen to
the Countess Caca. Never mind that Waugh endorsed Lewis’s theory of
satire, that Gibbons’s tone embodies Simmel’s blasé attitude, that West’s
own stylizations can sound highly Steinian, that Barnes’s novel partakes of
the primitivism that she recognizes as a prefabricated form – for all these
writers, modernism was no longer new. For the late modernists, sexual
transgression had lost its shock, revolutionary manifestos had lost their
urgency, and innovation had lost its originality.
Having learned modernism, then, the late modernists represented
themselves as more sophisticated than the sophisticates, and their new
norms of sophistication are visibly at work in their treatment of feeling.
To offer only the briefest of examples, in The Dream Life of Balso Snell,
Nathanael West’s John Gilson finds it impossible to consider the idea
of death “sincerely” because his thoughts inevitably take the shape of
clichés:
No matter how I form my comment I attach to it the criticisms sentimental,
satirical, formal. With these judgments there goes a series of literary associations
which remove me still further from genuine feeling. The very act of recognizing
Death, Love, Beauty – all the major subjects – has become, from literature and
exercise, impossible.117
Late modernism 45
Gilson’s immersion in literature, his modernist critical sensibility, pre-
vents the articulation of feeling because all such articulations are recog-
nized as banal. Life becomes a copy of art. Not only the sentimental, but
also the satirical and the formal are seen as received literary tropes that
prevent an experience original with the self. Thus while modernists
rejected sentimentality through various strategies (Wildean aloofness,
Lewisian classicism, Eliotic impersonality), the late modernists came to
see that those very strategies which had been staked out by their predeces-
sors, and which had pointed the way to satire, failed to resolve their
concerns about how to represent feeling – indeed about how to feel. For
them, modernism can itself appear as either unpersuasively sentimental
(as in Gibbons’s version of Lawrence), or unsustainably inhuman (as in
Waugh’s version of Marinetti). But, either way, modernism turns out to
provide more problems than solutions.
Thus many of these works remain skeptical about the reliability of
feelings and their expression. In a passage that Waugh used as an epigraph
for Vile Bodies, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass suggests such a
skepticism, although it disguises its insight as a riddle or a joke:
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said – half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so
ridiculous – “I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t think those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone
of great contempt.118
However fictional Alice is, she is certainly no more fictional than

Tweedledum, and, she would like to think, probably a little bit less so.
Reading these lines from Carroll, we laugh, like Uncle Fester at the
movies, at tears which, however false they may appear, stubbornly insist
on their own reality. Whether tears are real tears, whether suffering is
ridiculous, whether to laugh or cry – these questions preoccupy the fiction
of the 1930s, suggesting that because affect itself is so mobile, so given
to changing shape and guise, true feeling might never be distinguished
from false.119
Out of this dilemma the late modernists did fashion their own solu-
tions of a sort. For although the novels I discuss are (except for Gibbons’s
Cold Comfort Farm) generally stories of failure, decay, and abjection, and
tend to be more negative and critical than affirmative or utopian, they are
by no means monolithically so. Indeed, their very existence still indicates
the novelistic achievement of finding a form in which to treat such
pessimism or skepticism. This is by no means to say that out of the ashes
of life comes the reborn phoenix of art – only that the novels examined
here of necessity discover their own representational strategies in con-
fronting problems of feeling. Indeed, these strategies are as interesting for
their own failures and contradictions as for their successes in offering clear
aesthetic prescriptions or models.
Late modernist satire thus presents a cluster of questions, themes, and
strategies rather than a single neat doctrine. It often advances an antihu-
manist strain of satire and champions various stances – restraint, irony,
aloofness, ridicule, aggression – in challenging the perceived inauthenticity
of sentimental feeling or moral sentiment within both modernism and
its precursors. These stances sometimes endorse or even celebrate the
comic-satiric work of affective regulation, ethical detachment, or defiant
cruelty. Yet late modernism’s wariness of compassion (and its ruses) is also
frequently balanced by a creeping wariness of satire’s own strategies and
consequences; and thus in many novels satire breaks down or gives way to
a grotesque aesthetic based in aversive feelings of uncanny anxiety, fear,
and revulsion – feelings which furnish a kind of emotional bedrock
or Trillingesque authenticity. This self-undoing (of) satire becomes an
appealing form for late modernists because it recognizes paradoxes and
problems in the moral, aesthetic, and affective standards developed during
historical modernity. Late modernist satire thus registers the impact of
powerful social and psychological forces on that elusive dimension of
human life – how we feel.
chapter 3
The rule of outrage: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh, even more than Wyndham Lewis, is probably the most
enduring satirist among British modernists, though he rejected both
labels for his own work.1 Yet while Lewis’s reputation has undergone a
triumphant rehabilitation in recent decades, Waugh still suffers from
the preconception that his work is minor. Symptomatically, Fredric
Jameson’s Fables of Aggression, a book in part responsible for Lewis’s
soaring reputation, initiated its restorative project in 1979 precisely at
Waugh’s expense: “At best, in Britain today, [Lewis] retains a kind of
national celebrity and is read as a more scandalous and explosive
Waugh.”2 In other words, Waugh is merely a less scandalous and
explosive Lewis – a less scandalous and explosive version, moreover, of
the “old,” misread, unreconstructed Lewis, of Lewis the eccentric gadfly
rather than of Lewis the radical innovator and analyst of modernity
who emerges in Jameson’s feverish study. Waugh’s rejection of his
contemporaries’ emphasis on interiority and consciousness cannot
wholly account for this omission, for this same rejection has been the
very basis for the critical reinstallation of Lewis in the modernist canon.
But Waugh has – despite some excellent critical efforts – yet to find a
regular place in wider critical accounts of modernism.3 Located between
the high and the low, he fits awkwardly into a narrative of the “great
divide”; chronologically, he was born after the “men of 1914” but never
belonged to the “Auden generation”; conservative but not extremist, his
politics (unlike those of Lewis or Marinetti) have rarely proved interest-
ing to dialecticians.4 Yet his sensibility exemplifies what I named the
Uncle Fester Principle: the idea that modernism can be regarded as a
kind of refusal of, or ambivalence toward, affective excess, particularly
in the creation of or response to representations of suffering. It is
therefore precisely as a satirist that Waugh is necessary to an account
of modernism.
47
48 Waugh’s Vile Bodies
waugh’s “purgatorio”
Vile Bodies, Waugh’s second novel, merits particular interest not just
because it shows his satiric procedure at work, but also because it can be
read as a work about satire – or at least about the mechanisms of morality,
authority, cruelty, and affect that prove central to my understanding of the
mode. Published in 1930, it is sometimes described as an English equiva-
lent of The Sun Also Rises, a chronicle of the dissolute and spiritually empty
lifestyle of a lost generation of young upper-class socialites, whom Waugh
calls the “Younger Generation” or the “Bright Young Things.” In keeping
with the view of Waugh as a cultural conservative, the novel has been read
as a satirical condemnation of this set and of the decaying English values
that have led them down a moral dead end. Although Waugh had not yet
converted to Catholicism when he wrote the book, it is still seen as a
critique of modernity and its accompanying irreligious humanism.5
While one can hardly deny that Waugh views his characters with a
certain disdain, it is important to recognize, as several critics have,6 that in
this novel, as in much of his early fiction, Waugh plays both sides of the
fence – he betrays some sympathy for the Bright Young Set even as he
subjects them to ridicule. Their vitality animates his novel; their energy is
impossible to separate from his own. Moreover, wherever one locates the
author’s sympathies, the novel offers an elaborate staging of the very
mechanism by which satire both expresses and engenders moral senti-
ments. In other words, if Lewis was correct in claiming that “satirists
suffer much as a class from an uneasy conscience – are always asking
themselves ‘how far they may go’,”7 then the satirist’s guilty conscience
may signal a covert knowledge that he transgresses his own moral sanc-
tions. Consequently, we might be able to read Vile Bodies not as, or not
only as, a condemnation of the manners and morals of a particular social
class, but also as the struggle of a young satiric novelist to explore the
constraints of his trade. Waugh’s satire proves to be a fruitful text for
exploring the satirist’s dual role as mouthpiece for and object of public
outrage. For the transgressive comedy of Vile Bodies invites, even as it
levels, charges of immorality and cruelty – charges that for the whole of
the author’s career would continue to dog the wag.
As observed in Chapter 1, satire has a long association with the idea
of hygiene – cleaning the body and the body politic even as it trades in
filth. What I call the double movement of satire derives from satire’s
existence on the borders of socially, politically, or morally muddy terrain.
Because it is impossible to clean up without getting dirty, the satirist’s
moral justification for his attacks contains the possibility – at times, the
inevitability – of its own undoing. It is this idea of bodily cleansing, and
in particular of satire as purgation, with which I begin my discussion of
Vile Bodies. For the novel opens with a scene of literal physical purgation;
in the rough passage of a boat across the English Channel, almost all of
the characters introduced are on the verge of vomiting, and an American
evangelist explicitly interprets this physical illness as a moral trial: “If
you’re put out this way over just an hour’s sea-sickness . . . what are you
going to be like when you make the mighty big journey that’s waiting
for us all?” (VB, p. 17). No sooner have the passengers reached land,
moreover, than another purgation ensues: the second chapter opens in a
customs office, whose officers, charged with protecting the health of the
nation, attempt to eradicate criminals, contraband, and other pollutants
from abroad. They detain two members of the Bright Young Set, the
flighty Agatha Runcible and the novel’s hero, the aspiring writer Adam
Fenwick-Symes.
Adam’s troubles begin when he reveals to a customs officer that he is
carrying books:
The man’s casual air disappeared in a flash.
“Books, eh?” he said. “And what sort of books may I ask?”
“Look for yourself.”
“Thank you, that’s what I mean to do. Books, indeed.”
Adam wearily unstrapped and unlocked his suitcase.
“Yes,” said the Customs officer menacingly, as though his worst suspicions had
been confirmed, “I should just about say you had got some books.”
One by one he took the books out and piled them on the counter. A copy of
Dante’s Purgatorio excited his especial disgust.
“French, eh?” he said. “I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t
wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books” – how he said
it! – “in my list . . . If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at
least stop its being brought in from the outside.” (VB, pp. 22–23)
Although the joke here is largely at the expense of the official who
mistakes Dante for pornography, and of the government behind him,
Waugh’s joke goes deeper than scoring points off a philistine function-
ary.8 There is – as will become increasingly evident – a grain of truth
in the error of the customs agent. As anyone knows who has spent time in
the “Erotica” section of a mega-bookstore, the line between literature and
“literature” is a hazy one. Aesthetic interest can cover less noble motives.
Thus although Waugh is clearly attempting to reduce the censor’s
stance to the absurd, he keeps alive the notion that literature itself is
dangerous. When the customs officer discovers Adam’s “memoirs,” the
manuscript becomes a bomb and Adam an anarchist out of Conrad’s
The Secret Agent: “Gingerly, as though it might at any moment explode,
he produced and laid on the counter a large pile of typescript” (VB, p. 23).
This metaphor of bomb-throwing (to which I will return) then gives way
to an excremental metaphor – the memoir is a “pile of typescript,”
“downright dirt” (VB, p. 25). The censor is ridding the body politic
of its waste. The reference to Dante’s Purgatorio thus offers an oblique
echo of the purgative process being carried out in the customs office.
Aesthetically Adam’s book is indeed of excremental quality, but more
significantly for now its very corporeality makes it suspect. Another banned
book mentioned is “Aristotle, Works of (Illustrated)” (VB, p. 24), and
the parenthetical “Illustrated” implies that any visual representation of the
human body is necessarily indecent.9 By the censor’s logic, all books are
dirty books, all bodies vile bodies.10
From the first pages, then, Waugh places Adam’s motives for writing
and reading under scrutiny. And as Adam’s literary pretensions meet the
skepticism of the customs officer, so the customs officer’s moral preten-
sions meet the skepticism of the savvier satirical narrator. It is after all the
censor, not Adam, who exhibits the prurient interest in books; the volume
of Dante “excited his especial disgust.” The customs officer thus resembles
the “moral menial” described by William Ian Miller – someone who
“perform[s] functions in the moral order similar to those played by
garbagemen and butchers in the system of provisioning.”11 Because moral
menials trade in moral dirt for the sake of the larger polity, they are
necessarily vulnerable to the charge of being excited by their own disgust.
Therefore although Adam is the writer of books, the customs officer in his
own way performs a function akin to the satirist’s in identifying threats
to the established order. In his excitement over books, and in his capacity
to question such excitement in others, he exhibits the two faces of satiric
judgment. This same logic, moreover, is at work in the simultaneous
interrogation of Agatha, who, much to the reader’s delight, is “mistaken
for a well-known jewel-smuggler” and “stripped to the skin by two terrific
wardresses” (VB, p. 23). Agatha’s body is exposed to the reader just as
Adam, taken into the “inner office” of the customs bureau, is exposed to
the government’s cache of confiscated pornography. The novel is begin-
ning to display the vile bodies of its title.
The complementary nature of moral outrage and sexual-sadistic excite-
ment are hardly limited to these opening scenes of interrogation. When
Agatha emerges, reapplying lipstick and rouge, she announces that she is
going public with her shame: “The way they looked . . . too, too shaming.
Positively surgical . . . As soon as I get to London I shall just ring up every
Cabinet Minister and all the newspapers and give them all the most shy-
making details” (VB, p. 24). The mobility of Agatha’s affect here is
striking: shame is converted first into indignation, then rapidly into
exhibitionism. However “shaming” and “shy-making” her experience
may have been, Agatha finds such pleasure in her own moral outrage
and sexual humiliation that she seeks to publicize them as widely as
possible (“every Cabinet Minister,” “all the newspapers,” “all the details”).
Indeed, in the course of the chapter, numerous characters enjoy Agatha’s
moral outrage; behind this outrage they partake of the prurience, cruelty,
and “surgical” invasiveness of the “two terrific wardresses.” Agatha tells her
friends about her degradation, the newspapers embellish the episode, and
the demand for voyeuristic details rises. By that evening the story is that
Agatha has “had all her clothes taken off by some sailors” (VB, p. 37).
At the end of the chapter Adam observes “an indignant old woman” (VB,
p. 38) reading the evening headline and pronouncing yet another moral
judgment: “Disgraceful, I calls it . . . Nasty prying minds. That’s what they
got” (VB, p. 39). Prying minds, of course, are what the indignant readers of
such stories – and of novels such as Vile Bodies – themselves possess.
From an initial affront, then, moral outrage and voyeurism dissipate
and multiply through the novel, never losing their complementary nature.
Adam’s editor, Sam Benfleet, knows exactly what kind of material his
market demands: “It was one of his most exacting duties to ‘ginger up’ the
more reticent of the manuscripts submitted and ‘tone down’ the more
‘outspoken’ until he had reduced them all to the acceptable moral
standard of his day” (VB, p. 32). Meeting “the acceptable moral standard
of the day” involves not only censorship but “gingering up”; the reading
public demands some sex, only not so much that it can no longer deny its
own prurience. (The proliferation of scare quotes itself signifies the public
demand for euphemism and the sophisticate’s derision of it.) Mrs. Ape,
the American evangelist, dresses teenage girls as “angels” to attract an
audience for her religious cause; eventually she leaves England to “ginger
up the religious life of Oberammergau” (VB, p. 150). It is no accident that
in this novel the once-and-future Prime Minister is named Mr. Outrage:
the engine of moral indignation set in motion with Agatha’s body search
soon leads to the collapse of Prime Minister Brown’s government and the
return of the rule of Outrage in Britain.
In Vile Bodies, then, a novel in which the vileness of the body both
attracts and repulses, in which bodies are repeatedly probed, searched,
and purged, noble motives are relentlessly exposed or ironically
redescribed as justifications for baser ones. And as outrage masks voy-
eurism, so shame covers for exhibitionism. Despite her “shy-making”
humiliation, Agatha hardly seems shy at all. After going public with
her story, she shows up at Archie Schwert’s party half-naked in “Hawai-
ian costume” (VB, p. 66) ready for the society-page photographers. Such
a hypocritical attitude toward publicity was of course every bit as
familiar to Waugh’s readers as it is today in the age of Diana Spencer
and Paris Hilton: “Everyone looked negligent and said what a bore the
papers were . . . but most of them, as a matter of fact, wanted dreadfully
to be photographed and the others were frozen with unaffected terror
that they might be taken unawares and then their mamas would
know where they had been” (VB, p. 67). In this culture of celebrity
permeated by tabloid journalism and hypertrophied exhibitionism,
Waugh discerns the fundamental complementarity of private shame
and public exposure.
This interrelation of voyeurism and exhibitionism, of outrage and
shame, reaches a climax when Agatha, still in Hawaiian costume and
finding herself at breakfast with Prime Minister Brown and his family at
10 Downing Street, covers her (still mild) embarrassment by reading
aloud from the gossip pages. She finds herself reading about her own
exploits the previous night, satisfying her voyeuristic tastes with an
account of her own exhibitionist behavior. She now simultaneously
produces and consumes public outrages – incidents which, interpreted
by newspapers and other mechanisms of publicity, supply narratives,
images, and feelings for public consumption. And it is only through the
illuminating power of these mechanisms of publicity that Agatha dis-
covers where and in whose company she is breakfasting:
Suddenly the light came flooding in on Miss Runcible’s mind as once when, in
her debutante days, she had gone behind the scenes at a charity matinee, and
returning had stepped through the wrong door and found herself in a blaze of
flood-lights onstage in the middle of the last act of Othello. “Oh my God!” she
said, looking round the Brown breakfast table . . .
Then she turned round and trailing garlands of equatorial flowers fled out of the
room and out of the house to the huge delight and profit of the crowd of
reporters and Press photographers who were already massed round the historic
front door. (VB, pp. 74–75)
Agatha’s realization jolts her into a moment of shame; transformed from

the agent of mockery to its target, she recognizes that she has been
laughing at herself. In a delightful further irony, her flight from the
floodlights (both the gazing eyes of the Brown family and the remembered
spotlights of the play) takes her once again through the wrong door and
out into a third blaze of light, the popping flashbulbs of the press. Her
embarrassed and hasty exit exposes itself as a grand and dramatic entrance
(“trailing garlands of equatorial flowers”). The escape from voyeurism
proves to be an even greater subjection to it; life and performance are one.
Far from merely offering a bitter chronicle of a morally dissolute social
set, then, Vile Bodies deftly anatomizes the social and psychological
mechanisms of outrage and shame and the voyeurism and exhibitionism
that they barely conceal. And so in those moments when the facade of
morality falls away from these feelings, the result is plain cruelty. Agatha’s
friends are cheered by tales of her suffering, while Adam amuses his
fiancée Nina with the story of the hapless Simon Balcairn being “horse-
whipped” at the newspaper office (VB, pp. 121–22). Later, at the motor
races, spectators make no effort to hide their sadism, cheerily discussing
“the possibilities of bloodshed,” and seeking out “the most dangerous
corners” (VB, p. 230) as viewing places. (Nathanael West describes a similar
phenomenon in The Day of the Locust with his portrait of Californians
hoping for the violence of a plane crash to relieve their boredom.) Insurers
look to make money off the risk of dismemberment, while religious
fanatics proclaim bloodshed necessary for salvation. Even boys seeking
autographs are “predatory” (VB, p. 225).
The novel thus constitutes a veritable catalog of instances in which
morality is exposed as voyeurism, exhibitionism, and cruelty. As a satire,
Vile Bodies ostensibly performs this exposure not only to elicit laughter, but
also to call attention to the corruption of a modern culture that disguises its
meanest motives with such claims. Yet if calling attention to such vice
remains a perennial justification for satire, this justification can hardly
escape its own demystifying logic. Indeed, the author’s willingness to use
death – Flossie Ducane’s fatal drunken fall from a chandelier, Simon’s
suicide after his failure as a columnist, Agatha’s death after her crash in the
auto race – to elicit laughter fatally undoes any claim to moral authority. In
short, Vile Bodies cannot help but expose its own morality to the same
charges of hypocrisy that it levels. Waugh’s critique reveals that the satirist
is, in Michael Seidel’s formulation, “implicated in the debasing form of his
action.”12 It is thus not only the young writer Adam whose motives are
questioned, but also the young writer of Vile Bodies himself. As the moral
pretense of English public opinion stands exposed as naked bloodlust, so
too does that of the satirist and his laughing reader.
Of course, this is not to suggest that the only impulse behind the
reading and writing of Waugh’s novels is cruelty. In fact, one function
of Waugh’s exposure of cruelty – his own and his characters’ – often
appears precisely to be obtaining some purchase on the reader’s sympathy
by “proving” the author’s unsentimental attitude toward suffering. Thus
many critics have remarked with admiration on Waugh’s capacity to
evoke sympathy in the midst of cruelty, pity in the midst of irony, by
the subtlest modulations in tone. Because death and loss are presented in
laconic, undemonstrative, or ironically amused language, Waugh can
conjure sympathy without courting melodrama.13 But (as will become
clearer in Chapter 4), what is notable is that such emotion is arrived at
only by subtraction. Affective minimalism is necessary precisely because
Waugh has mounted a pervasive interrogation of various emotions,
threatening ironically to redescribe all virtuous feelings as justifications
for baser ones. Still, despite this emotional restraint, affect abounds in Vile
Bodies – it just exists in the wrong places. On the personal scale, it appears
almost absent as characters and narrator alike regard various cataclysms
with wry amusement or blasé indifference. But, in the public sphere,
outrage, excitement, and shame appear as excessive, attaching themselves
to the nearest and frequently most trivial objects at hand.
all the terrors of the pseudo

In Vile Bodies, then, the satirist is implicated in his own dismantling of the
moral sentiments of his characters, and reveals, through his treatment of
others, the processes by which his own implicit claims to moral authority
can sanction a wide variety of transgression. I now want to turn to a
parallel process in the novel – how the satirist’s stance toward modernity’s
conflation of fiction and reality reveals a similar ambivalence in which a
subversive delight in the chaotic comic possibilities of this conflation is
balanced by a “conservative” anxiety over the loss of a moral and epi-
stemological certainty that accompanies a confidence in a stable idea of
reality. For the interpenetration of fiction and reality characterizes
Waugh’s entire vision of modernity. His satires, Vile Bodies chief among
them, describe the processes by which, in an age of mechanical reproduc-
tion, forms of mass communication seem to place human beings more
than ever before at a remove from the world they inhabit. This is the
condition that Tyrus Miller has described as a “condition of generalized
mimetism”14 and which I argued in Chapter 2 is a central concern of the
satires of Wyndham Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Contemporary literary
theory of course knows these themes well, but even in the 1910s and 1920s
writers were beginning to identify a new tear in the fabric of reality, as in
D. H. Lawrence’s scornful remarks: “Heaven knows what we mean by
reality. Telephone, tinned meat, Charlie Chaplin, water-taps, and World-
Salvation, presumably.”15
A more ambitious analysis of this new (un)reality came in Walter
Lippmann’s 1922 Public Opinion, where the journalist-turned-political
scientist described the object of his study as “the human response” not
to public events themselves but to a “pseudo-environment” created
through the representation of events in the mass media and inserted
“between man and his environment.”16 “Those pictures [of the environ-
ment],” writes Lippmann, “which are acted upon by groups of people, or
by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with
capital letters.”17 According to Lippmann, Public Opinion – a collective
human response to the pseudo-environment – has effects in the real world
behind those representations. The existence of this collective opinion thus
allows the public to affect events it has never directly experienced. This
new kind of mass experience, he argues, requires a new kind of analysis:
“The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the
triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture
of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out
upon the scene of action.”18
As we saw briefly in Beerbohm and Huxley, this new understanding of
how feeling circulates through a vast public that is given coherence
through mass-mediated images and narratives provides satire with cause
for anxiety and scorn about the loss of truth, certainty, and individuality.
As Michael North and Justus Nieland have both argued, the public sphere
during this time came to be seen not (in Habermasian fashion) as a
neutral marketplace of ideas for rational debate and consensus-building
but rather as an arena permeated by unconscious prejudices and unin-
formed opinion.19 Vile Bodies, indeed, goes beyond Zuleika Dobson and
Antic Hay in the extent to which it attempts to represent the opinions of
an inchoate public rather than just those of individuals. Like Lippmann’s
Public Opinion, Vile Bodies offers an anxious analysis of the “triangular
relationship” between actual events, public representations of them, and
personal and collective responses to those representations; like Lippmann
decrying the dangers of the pseudo-environment, Waugh too specifically
warns against “all the terrors of the pseudo.”20 Of course, Waugh’s novel,
unlike Lippmann’s treatise, also delights in the potential for absurdity that
the terrors of the pseudo generate; the destabilizing, disruptive force of
modernity always provides for Waugh the consolation of good material.
And far more than his precursors Beerbohm and Huxley, Waugh is able
fully to exploit the opportunities for comic misunderstanding that arise
when the mechanisms of the pseudo-environment are laid bare.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the primary way in which the pseudo-environment
was “inserted” between the public and its environment was through
newspapers. Patrick Collier has detailed the ways in which, during these
decades, newspapers were often blamed for the promotion of intellectual
laziness, the cultivation of a taste for the sensational, the corruption of the
English language, and the malfunctioning of an expanding democracy.21
Consequently, an analysis of the interaction of the press, the stories it
reports, and the reading public is among Lippmann’s major concerns.
The economic motives of the newspaper industry, Lippmann recognizes,
demand the loyalty of a consuming readership, a public which in turn
demands that “facts” be presented within a familiar narrative – as Lippmann
says, within “a pattern of stereotypes”:22
News which does not offer this opportunity to introduce oneself into the struggle
which it depicts cannot appeal to a wide audience. The audience must participate
in the news, much as it participates in the drama, by personal identification. Just
as everyone holds his breath when the heroine is in danger, as he helps Babe Ruth
swing his bat, so in subtler form the reader enters into the news. In order that he
shall enter he must find a familiar foothold in the story, and this is supplied to
him by the use of stereotypes.23
Since news is so constrained by stereotypes (the word is Lippmann’s
coinage), Lippmann questions the belief that the press can safeguard the
operation of democracy by keeping a public informed. On the contrary,
“analysis of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism
seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and
therefore . . . intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.”24 Yet
while the defective organization of public opinion can be disturbing, it
also creates room for some of Waugh’s most pervasive jokes in both this
novel and the later Scoop, where the fictional reports of incompetent war
journalists in Africa ultimately have global political consequences. In both
novels the desire of the newspaper writer to get the facts gives way to his
desire to get the story, news is constrained by stereotypes, and invented
objects take on almost Borgesian extratextual existence.
In Vile Bodies, the newspaper writer who takes center stage is not the
war correspondent but the gossip columnist, and in his creation of a
fictional pseudo-environment he becomes, through the power and range
of his invention, a stand-in for the novelist. Both are inventors, observers
of manners and morals, experts on the intimate. The first comparisons
between the two figures are implicit, attributing to both figures an inside
knowledge and an inventive power: regarding Outrage’s travels in Paris
we learn that “what [his bodyguards] did not know about his goings
on was not worth knowing, at least from a novelist’s point of view”
(VB, p. 5); of Simon, the narrator remarks with weary identification, “It
is so depressing to be in a profession in which literally all conversation
is ‘shop’” (VB, p. 114); later Simon creates “lie after monstrous lie” (VB,
p. 144) in his final column. But the similarity between novelist and
columnist becomes explicit only in the second half of the novel, once
Adam himself takes over for the (now-dead) Simon as “Mr. Chatterbox.”
Forbidden from mentioning any of the personalities libeled in Simon’s
raving swansong column, Adam begins “a series of ‘Noble Invalids,’ which
was, from the first, wildly successful” (VB, p. 153). He writes about “deaf
peers and statesmen, then about the one-legged, blind and bald” (VB,
p. 153), painting deliberately sentimental portraits of stoical sufferers
that elicit approving letters from all over England. Inventing freely,
Adam completely inverts the genre of the gossip column, playing on the
moral self-satisfaction that accompanies sympathy rather than the moral
outrage that accompanies voyeurism. He replaces the sensational and the
pornographic with the sentimental in exactly the way that television news
shows do when they balance tales of sex crimes with human-interest
features about dogs and cats saving children from floods or fires. The
facility with which Adam effects this inversion reinforces the connection
between the moral claims of sentimental narratives and their voyeuristic
underside.
Although this critique of the sentimental remains a constant through-
out Waugh’s early fiction, Adam drops the Noble Invalids series and
instead begins creating characters out of the blue. This outright fictional-
izing cements the identification of gossip writer and novelist and further
demonstrates the comic possibilities in the last leg of Lippmann’s triangle:
“human response . . . working itself out upon the scene of action.” The
comedy lies not simply in Adam’s wanton fictionalizing but in the way his
fictional characters begin to inhabit reality. When Lord Vanburgh, a rival
columnist, picks up on Adam’s creations, and spins new stories about
their private lives, Adam, with the same territoriality that Cervantes
showed in reclaiming Don Quixote from Avellaneda, contests Vanburgh’s
tales by creating newer ones to contradict them. His fictional characters
become celebrities, and their outlandish habits (most notably the wearing
of a bottle-green bowler hat) become current fashion.
But even this strategy taxes Adam’s powers, and he finds his creativity
running dry: “As a last resort, on those hopeless afternoons when inven-
tion failed and that black misanthropy settled on him which await alike
on gossip writer and novelist, Adam sometimes found consolation in
seizing upon some gentle and self-effacing citizen and transfiguring him
with a blaze of notoriety” (VB, p. 161). The narrator not only underscores,
yet again, the parallel between Adam the columnist and Waugh the
novelist, but also explicitly recognizes the ignoble emotions that can
inform fictional creation. If in other places it is sexual prurience or greed
that contaminates the satirist’s moral motives, here it is “black misan-
thropy.” The “blaze” of notoriety, like the “blaze” of publicity that greets
Agatha as she flees 10 Downing Street, offers heat as well as light.
To its chaotic mingling of reality and fiction the novel opposes Lottie
Crump’s hotel, a place with old-fashioned customs and decor, a haven from
modern confusion where one “can still draw up, cool and uncontaminated,
great, healing draughts from the well of Edwardian certainty” (VB, pp. 40–
41). Yet such certainty, a vestige from a lost pre-war world, itself exists only
within the pseudo – within a cheesy simulacrum of Edwardian England.
More typical of Waugh’s modernity is the estate of Nina’s father, Doubting
Hall (“Doubting ’All” (VB, p. 86)), where the senile Colonel Blount
mistakes identities, misconstrues meanings, and utters total non sequiturs.
Adam, on his first visit, is greeted by a man he does not yet know is the
Colonel in an extravagant vaudevillian exchange:
“What do you want?”

“Is Mr. Blount in?”
“There’s no Mr. Blount here. This is Colonel Blount’s house.”
“I’m sorry . . . I think the Colonel is expecting me to luncheon.”
“Nonsense. I’m Colonel Blount,” and he shut the door . . .
Adam rang again.
“Yes,” said Colonel Blount, appearing instantly.
“I’d wonder if you’d let me telephone to the station for a taxi?”
“Not on the telephone . . . It’s raining. Why don’t you come in? Have you come
about the vacuum cleaner?”
“No.”
“Funny, I’ve been expecting a man all the morning to show me a vacuum cleaner.
Come in, do. Won’t you stay to luncheon?”
“I should love to.” . . .
They shook hands . . . Colonel Blount picked up a telegram and read it.
“I’d quite forgotten,” he said in some confusion. “I’m afraid you’ll think me very
discourteous, but it is, after all, quite impossible for me to ask you to
luncheon. I have a guest coming on very intimate family business. You
understand, don’t you? . . . To tell you the truth, it’s some young rascal who
wants to marry my daughter . . .”
“Well, I want to marry your daughter, too,” said Adam.
“What an extraordinary coincidence. Are you sure you do?”
“Perhaps the telegram may be about me. What does it say?”
“‘Engaged to marry Adam Symes. Expect him luncheon. Nina.’ Are you Adam
Symes?”
“Yes.”
“My dear boy, why didn’t you say so, instead of going on about a vacuum
cleaner? How are you?”
They shook hands again. (VB, pp. 89–91)
Such comic confusions of logic and identity, indeed, are hardly confined to
Doubting Hall; throughout the text we see instances of absurd coincidence,
mistaken identity, and the confusion of the fictional and the real.
Vile Bodies is in fact populated by an epidemic of nonexistent people
and false names, of which Adam’s creations for his gossip column are only
the most prominent. When Adam first calls Nina, they both pretend that
it is not she who answers the phone:
“May I speak to Miss Blount, please?”
“I’ll just see if she’s in,” said Miss Blount’s voice . . . She was always rather
snobbish about this fiction of having someone to answer the telephone.
(VB, p. 37)
When Sam Benfleet gives bad news to his writers, he invokes the name of
his cruel-hearted and penny-pinching boss, “Old Rampole,” who turns
out to be, if not quite fictional, the nearest equivalent: he never reads a
single contract, and his “chief interest in the company was confined to a
little book of his own about bee-keeping, which they had published
twenty years ago and, though he did not know it, allowed long ago to
drop out of print” (VB, p. 36). The night they first have sex, Adam and
Nina sign false names in the hotel guest book (VB, p. 120). Colonel
Blount signs his name “Charlie Chaplin” on the check he gives Adam
(VB, p. 109). Adam, Nina, Ginger, and Agatha sign more false names
when they go out clubbing (VB, p. 172). Simon, Adam, and Nina all take
on the nom de plume “Mr. Chatterbox.” And, in the final chapter, Adam
returns to Doubting Hall on its own absurd terms; without the slightest
physical disguise and to the astonishment of the help, he commits
adultery with Nina while nonchalantly assuming the identity of her
husband, Ginger.
But while the proliferation of the pseudo is the source of much laughter
in Vile Bodies, this fakery has a dark side, and the pseudo has its terrors.
Many commentators have observed the gradually darkening tone of the
novel: the manic energy of the Younger Generation peters out, the delight
in anarchy gives way to world-weariness, the amused voice of the satirist
becomes moralistic and strident. But although several critics have argued
that the novel is fundamentally inconsistent in tone, and have traced this
inconsistency to Waugh’s discovery of his wife’s affair and the darkening
of his own personal mood,25 the weariness of the novel’s second half
retains significant continuity with the energy of the first. Just as the moral
outrage of gossip readers leaves behind the negative image of the cruel
bloodlust of the spectators at the motor races, so the relatively benign
comedy of the Colonel’s illogic has as its underside the uncanny exposure
of the mind in a state of decomposition. Instead of the Colonel’s daffi-
ness, it is Agatha’s delirium that takes center stage in the latter half of the
book. When Adam visits her in the hospital, she notes that “people are
disappearing” (VB, p. 266); it is not just that the young people’s parties
are breaking up, but that the proliferation of extraneous, invented, and
imagined characters in the text now seems to be reversing itself. The final,
lame semblance of a party in the hospital room leads to a worsening of
Agatha’s condition as she slides into hallucination:
She was sitting bolt upright in bed, smiling deliriously, and bowing her bandaged
head to imaginary visitors.
“Darling,” she said. “How too divine . . . how are you? . . . and how are you? . . .
how angelic of you all to come . . . only you must be careful not to fall out at
the corners . . . ooh, just missed it. There goes that nasty Italian car . . .
I wish I knew which thing was which in this car . . . darling, do try and drive
more straight, my sweet, you were nearly into me then . . . Faster . . .”
(VB, p. 271)
Reason withdraws, as perception, memory, and fantasy are intermingled in

a phantasmagoric collage. The recombination of conscious and unconscious
material, of the real and the fantastic, creates that juxtaposition of
the ludicrous and the fearsome that Ruskin saw as the essence of the
grotesque. Of course, the withdrawal of reason in Agatha’s mind is only
an extreme case of the apparent withdrawal of reason in the modern world
outside. But if the previous lunacies of Colonel Blount have weighted the
balance toward the comic and the fanciful, here the madness takes on more
unsettling tones. The “imaginary visitors” who assume such vibrant reality
throughout the novel are now solely confined to Agatha’s mind.26 The
pleasurable presence of fantasy in the world gives way to a chilling sense of a
dangerous loss of control.
The interpenetration of fantasy and reality that permeates Vile Bodies
clearly anticipates the metafictions of postmodernism, but Waugh links
the phenomenon to Lewis Carroll, from whom he borrows his two
epigraphs for the novel. The second epigraph presents the entanglement
of fiction and reality as a problem bound up with questions of feeling:
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said – half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so
ridiculous – “I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t think those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone
of great contempt. (VB, unnumbered p.)
The insistence on the fictionality of what appears to be a real world is in
keeping with Waugh’s later position, taken in denying the satirical nature
of his work, that “the artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of
today is to create little independent systems of order of his own.”27 But
despite Waugh’s, and Tweedledum’s, insistence on the line between
fiction and reality, the reader is caught up in the pleasure and illogic
of the paradoxes that the epigraph implies. As Robert Murray Davis
comments, Waugh uses the epigraph “both to deny and affirm the reality
of his characters’ suffering.”28 Alice’s combination of laughter at the
ridiculous and tears over her own suffering thus epitomizes the mixed
emotional response that Waugh’s fictions often provoke. Is the epigraph
an affirmation of the power of lunacy to leaven sadness? A cold denial of
human suffering for the sake of a fictional construction? A claim that
emotions evoked by unreal events should not themselves be considered
genuine?29 The text may sanction all of these interpretations to different
degrees, but perhaps the most persuasive reading is that there will always
be one more level of fictionality to our (pseudo-) environment than we
are aware of. One may say that we should not cry over fictional events,
but we do and we will, despite being told not to. Living in pseudo-
environments among pseudo-events and pseudo-people, we will all inev-
itably experience pseudo-feelings.
everyone is a bomb: espionage, anarchy, modernism

We have seen in Vile Bodies how moral feelings such as shame, outrage,
and even sympathy are exposed as doing satire’s dirty work, licensing the
pleasures of cruelty, voyeurism, and self-display. Satire similarly enjoys,
even as it decries, modernity’s confusion of the fictional and the real, a
confusion that calls into question not only the reality of our environment
but also the authenticity of our emotional responses to it. In turning to the
rather vague political subplot of Vile Bodies, I want to trace a third, parallel
contradiction in the satirist’s stance, a contradiction in his attitude toward
anarchy and the latent political and social implications of modernism.
In The Auden Generation, his landmark study of English literature in
the 1930s, Samuel Hynes remarks that “Waugh was the first English
novelist to see his own time as a period entre deux guerres”;30 while
previous writers examined the fallout of the First World War, Vile Bodies
makes repeated, if subtle, references to both the past war and the “coming
war” of which Father Rothschild speaks (VB, p. 184) and with which the
novel ends. Hynes links the dissolution of the Bright Young Set not just to
a general human condition or the particulars of Waugh’s biography, but
to the political crosscurrents of a turbulent historical moment. The novel
actually suggests connections between the events of the front page and
those of the gossip columns quite overtly, as when Simon laments that he
can’t write about Agatha because “they’re featuring her as a front-page
news story tomorrow over this Customs House business” (VB, p. 62).
Amid the rounds of party going, political instability is subtly but persist-
ently present in this England of “the near future”: the government of
Great Britain changes repeatedly; Adam has an economics textbook
confiscated along with his ill-fated memoir; on the first page of the novel,
a Jesuit from a family of international Jewish bankers is revealed to be
carrying a false beard in his suitcase.
But what exactly is the nature of this relationship between a vague
suggestion of political subterfuge and a reckless lifestyle of party going?
Within the novel, the editorial page – that mechanism which, according
to Lippmann, “reinforce[s]” public opinion by “giv[ing] the reader a clue
by which he engages himself ”31 – provides an easy answer. Upon the
collapse of Brown’s government, “The Evening Standard had a leading
article, which drew a fine analogy between Public and Domestic purity,
between sobriety in the home and in the state” (VB, p. 100). Yet the
narrator’s ironic intonations render such fine analogies facile. The novel
attempts another answer when Lord Metroland asks Father Rothschild
whether the current political instability can explain “why my stepson
should drink like a fish and go about everywhere with a negress” (VB,
p. 185), and Rothschild can offer no definitive response, no overarching
theory: “I think they’re connected . . . But it’s all very difficult” (VB,
p. 185). In this case the connection is not too easy but too vexed. Hynes
himself suggests that the behavior of the Bright Young People is a
generation’s self-definition, achieved through a “withdraw[al] from
history, into parties, into a passive submission to accidental events,”32
a reaction to political forces that seem too vast for them to master or
oppose. But even this explanation, while more expansive than those the text
explicitly offers, fails to address the question of why their retreat should so
resemble the political activities from which they are withdrawing, why the
distinction between the news pages and the gossip pages should dissolve so
easily. Ultimately, the novel seems stubbornly to refrain from answering
the question of whether the connection between large-scale political
instability and small-scale social anarchy is causal or coincidental.
But if this lack of an articulated connection “between Public and
Domestic purity” might limit the extent to which Vile Bodies can be read
as offering any specific political insight into Europe on the verge of war, it
also reinforces the reader’s sense of an omnipresent and polymorphous
threat of chaos and instability. It is worth noting that instability, whether
social or political, is often represented in the novel by the foreign, and in
particular by a sexualized racial other: Margot sends Chastity to South
America to undertake her career as a prostitute; the object of Prime
Minister Outrage’s adulterous advances is a Japanese Baroness; Mrs. Ape’s
religious revival is compared to “a negro camp-meeting in Southern
America” (VB, p. 143); Prime Minister Brown mistakes Agatha for “a
dancing Hottentot woman” (VB, p. 74); and images of “savages,” espe-
cially “Red Indians” recur frequently. Yet this imagery does not identify
real sources of disorder or subversion so much as it tinges Waugh’s
London with a pervasive sense of having been already irreversibly con-
taminated by the foreign. Images of a pristine and pure England are
invoked, but only to mock the idea of purity, as when Ginger garbles
John of Gaunt’s famous “sceptred isle” speech from Richard II. In Vile
Bodies, a pristine England only exists in Shakespearean monologues.
The novel might even be said to aspire in its very structure to keep the
foreign element on the fringe; it begins on the English Channel and ends
on a battlefield in France, while otherwise remaining within the geograph-
ical boundaries of England. The seasickness of the ferry passengers,
furthermore, mirrors Nina’s sickness on the airplane as she leaves England
for her honeymoon, another physical purgation marking passage in and
out of the nation. The novel thus presents a contradiction between a
desire to contain anarchic forces by locating them in specific foreign
elements, and an acknowledgement (with Rothschild) of the virtual
impossibility of articulating the connection between large-scale political
and small-scale social turmoil. In this contradictory logic, the novel
perfectly reproduces the thinking of the customs officer when he declares,
“If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its
being brought in from the outside” (VB, p. 23); an ideal of purity is
invoked with the same gesture that dismisses it as an unrealizable fantasy.
The most visible internal threat to the body politic is the press itself.
The specter of espionage, arising in the customs house when Adam is seen
as a potential anarchist, reappears when Simon penetrates Margot’s party
disguised as a clergyman in a false beard. The leaders of the older
generation – Rothschild, Outrage, and Metroland – expose him in a
scene that parodies the genre of the spy novel:
Suddenly Father Rothschild turned out the light.
“There’s someone coming down the passage,” he said.
“Quick, get behind the curtains.” . . .
The three statesmen hid themselves . . . They heard the door open. The light was
turned on. A match was struck. Then came the slight tinkle of the telephone
as someone lifted the receiver.
“Now,” said Father Rothschild, and stepped through the curtain.
The bearded stranger who had excited his suspicions was standing at the table
smoking one of Lord Metroland’s cigars and holding the telephone . . .
“Stay exactly where you are,” said Father Rothschild, “and take off that beard.”
(VB, p. 139)
Incongruously imposing the high drama of an act of international espionage

on the apprehension of a petty newspaperman, the scene hints at an
anxiety about the illicit and subversive potential of the gossip columnist
himself. It epitomizes the way that the threat of political subversion is
comically deflected and diffused into episodes of moral, social, and even
ontological disorder (e.g., Adam’s creation of fictional beings), while at the
same time betraying the high stakes of the novel’s anxiety about its own
trade in gossip.
The repeated images of bombs, flashes, and explosions reveal a similar
structure, gesturing toward the wars and revolutions on the Continent, but
ultimately returning to the material of the gossip pages. In Lottie Crump’s
hotel, the former “King of Ruritania,” a refugee of the First World War,
laments the demise of his wife, who, after the assassination of many royal
relatives, now “thinks everyone is a bomb” (VB, pp. 44–45). But despite the
genuinely murderous consequences of the political bomb-throwing she has
witnessed, other explosions in the novel seem dangerous only by way of the
facile public–private analogy proffered by the editorial pages. In the customs
office, Adam’s memoir was treated as an explosive device; at Doubting Hall,
he misunderstands the “shooting” of Wesleyans to mean the massacre of
religious dissenters rather than the creation of a commercial film. The film,
when it gets shown, itself disappears in a flash of light with “a sudden
crackling sound,” and “a long blue spark” (VB, p. 302), while at Archie
Schwert’s party “There were two men with a lot of explosive powder taking
photographs in another room. Their flashes and bangs had rather a dis-
quieting effect on the party” (VB, p. 66). The flashes and bangs are like the
“blazes” that publicize Agatha and Ginger; publicity, like terrorism, is
represented with a burst of light. In sum, the gossip columnist is taken for
a spy, the memoirist a terrorist, the filmmaker an executioner, the press
photographer a bomb-thrower. All these figures might be seen as stand-ins
for the novelist-satirist, who, as we have seen, resembles the columnist in his
creation of narratives and images for public consumption, and who now, like
Simon in his false beard, proves subversive to the state.
However ambivalently Vile Bodies treats this association of political
anarchy and aesthetic activity, the link was of course familiar in the
climate of literary modernism, despite the later separation by critics of a
politically revolutionary “avant-garde” from a formalistic “modernism.”
Waugh’s own position toward radical aesthetic practices, moreover, was in
1930 considerably more ambiguous and uneasy than his later disparage-
ment of Joyce and others might suggest. The pastiche composition of Vile
Bodies itself has been seen as an outgrowth of modernist experiments, and
Waugh saw his work as learning from the formal innovations of Firbank,
who, Waugh wrote in 1929, discarded “the chain of cause and effect,” and
“from the fashionable chatter of his period, vapid and interminable . . .
plucked, like tiny brilliant feathers from the breast of a bird, the particles
of his design.”33 Remaining “objective” where other modernists are
“forced into a subjective attitude,” Firbank’s novels mark a specifically
technological advance; they “may be compared to cinema films, in which
the relation of caption and photograph is directly reversed; occasionally a
brief, visual image flashes out to illumine and explain the flickering
succession of spoken words.”34
In addition to Firbank (who might represent the indifference I have
argued is characteristic of modernism’s aestheticist moment), the novel
also engages with the more politically volatile Futurist moment. Waugh’s
own distaste for the aestheticist tendency to wallow in drowsy numbness,
and his preference for literature that engages with the technological
changes of its time, is put quite clearly in his 1930 essay on the 1890s:
The truth is that the poor decadents were, less than anyone, in touch with their
own age. All the time that they imagined themselves lapsing into over-civilized
and slightly drugged repose, that apostle of over-civilization, Mr. Edison, was
hard at work devising the telephone bell which was to render the whole of the
next generation permanently sleepless.35
For Waugh, the noise and energy of the machine, with the excess social
activity they induce, are the true legacy of the 1890s, rather than the
aristocratic retreat from daily life; he sides here with the Futurist embrace
of change rather than aestheticist retreat from noise. Shortly after the
publication of Vile Bodies, Waugh reviewed Lewis’s pamphlet, “Satire and
Fiction,” which would later be incorporated into Men Without Art. He
found Lewis’s ideas on satire, and in particular on the “external method”
of rendering of character (in opposition to the dominant modernist
emphasis on interiority and subjectivity), to be particularly valuable for
his own writing: “The whole of this part [Lewis’s theory of satire] is
immensely interesting, particularly the observations about the ‘Outside
and Inside’ method of fiction. No novelist . . . can afford to neglect this
essay.”36 George McCartney in fact has argued that Waugh relied on
Lewis for a theoretical articulation of his opposition to the perceived
irrationalism of Bergsonian vitalism.37
Yet even if Waugh the critic finds Lewis philosophically congenial,
Waugh the author of Vile Bodies does not spare Lewis his ironic derision.
The novel makes teasing reference to party invitations “that Johnnie
Hoop used to adapt from Blast and Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. These
had two columns of close print; in one was a list of all the things Johnnie
hated, and in the other all the things he thought he liked” (VB, p. 65).
The avant-garde aesthetic has been reduced to an empty fad. (This is, as
I have noted, a recurrent motif in late modernist satire, where earlier
revolutionary modernisms are ironically redescribed as passing fashion
or outworn cliché.) Such skepticism toward the antihumanist side
of avant-garde aesthetics is consistent with Waugh’s 1928 representation
of Otto Silenus in Decline and Fall. An émigré architect, Silenus under-
stands the challenge of modern aesthetics to be “the elimination of
the human element from considerations of form.”38 He claims: “The
only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house
machines, not men . . . All ill comes from man.”39 In case the satiric
accents are not strong enough, the narrator adds, “His only other
completed work was the décor for a cinema film of great length and
complexity of plot – a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the
producer’s austere elimination of all human characters, a fact which
proved fatal to its commercial success.”40
In Vile Bodies, however, it is the motor races that offer the most
extended critique of anarchic or revolutionary modernism, and the main
target is Marinetti’s Futurism.41 Not only is the most ruthless driver in the
race an Italian named Marino, but Marinetti’s whole aesthetic of
machines and motion is parodied. Marinetti of course upheld the
machine and specifically the automobile as the emblem of his new
movement:
We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the
beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like
serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot – is
more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.42
The narrator of Vile Bodies opines that “motor cars offer a very happy
illustration of the metaphysical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘becom-
ing’” (VB, p. 227), and while this passage has sometimes been taken as
Waugh’s endorsement of a machine aesthetic, the ironic tone of the next
paragraph calls that endorsement into question:
Not so the real cars, that become masters of men; those vital creations of metal
who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers,
clinging precariously at the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to
a stock-broker. These are in perpetual flux; a vortex of combining and disinte-
grating units. (VB, pp. 227–28)
The cybernetic merging of human and machine is described as a mélange
of Bergson (“vital,” “flux”), Marinetti (“cars,” “metal”), and Lewis and
Pound (“vortex”), and the narrator seems as skeptical of the dehuman-
ization of art as he is excited by it. Like the malfunctioning film projector,
the race car does not embody the transcendent possibility of a new
modern age, but only futility. When Adam and his friends visit the Speed
King, the sight is hardly an aesthetic wonder:
The engine was running and the whole machine shook with fruitless exertion.
Clouds of dark smoke came from it, and a shattering roar, which reverberated
from concrete floor and corrugated iron roof into every corner of the building so
that speech and thought became insupportable and all the senses were numbed.
(VB, pp. 225–26)
Marinetti’s vaunted motion and speed are reduced to “fruitless exertion”
as the human element is extinguished by the mechanical. Once again we
have imagery of smoke, followed by the “shattering roar,” if not the
exploding light, of some unseen combustion. The revolutionary potential
of the machine aesthetic that overcomes human limitations is redescribed
as purposeless and dehumanizing sensory overload.
To mock this most aggressively antihumanist strain of modernism
that Lewis and Marinetti represent would seem less remarkable if it did
not come so close to an indictment of Waugh’s own satiric method,
which seems to draw on the very externalist, almost behaviorist, pre-
scriptions that Lewis himself offered. In other words, the target of the
satire seems dangerously close to the very aspects of modernity that
satire itself embodies. For if satire diagnoses the mechanization of the
human, it also brings about, even celebrates, this mechanization.
Numerous readers of Waugh have noted that keeping his characters
weak, passive, and unheroic is central to his technique; they remain less
fully developed in their humanity than the implied author.43 Waugh’s
socialites are named to represent their status as objects rather than
subjects: the Bright Young Things. And Agatha’s madness, as we have
seen, is unsettling, even uncanny, in its revelation of human character
as mechanistic.44 Waugh’s satiric attacks on antihumanist, Marinettian,
and Lewisian modernism thus implicate the novel’s own dehumanizing,
satiric technique. The novelistic principles that can render the charac-
ters of Vile Bodies as insubstantial as the inventions of a gossip colum-
nist themselves begin to look like a threatening tendency of modernity
itself.
The connection between small-scale domestic and large-scale political
instability thus remains suppressed, subsumed in a concern over a more
generalized anarchy that comes to be represented by modernism –
specifically, by an antihumanist version of modernism that celebrates
the increasing saturation of the world with technology. Yet if the political
themes of the novel remain underdeveloped, it is the character around
whom the hints of political subterfuge seem to cluster who might be
taken as a final surrogate for the satirist in this novel, the character who
perhaps even more perfectly than the gossip columnist embodies satire’s
power. This surrogate is Father Rothschild. With his supernatural omnis-
cience – he predicts the war at the end of the novel – and “his happy
knack to remember everything that could possibly be learned about
everyone who could possibly be of any importance” (VB, pp. 1–2),
Rothschild has a mind that would be the envy of any young gossip
columnist or memoirist. And he is also a figure of authority. When he
speaks at Margot’s party, his words resonate with such a tone of know-
ingness that critics regularly take his diagnosis of “a fatal hunger for
permanence” as the author’s own. A conspiracy-theorist’s fantasy come to
life, he represents the fusion of two great institutions: with his Jewish
surname he embodies the wealth of European banks, while with his title
Father he carries the religious authority of the Catholic Church. Like the
satirist, he speaks from a position of superiority with the backing of
communal and institutional power.
Yet, at the same time, there is something suspicious, even duplicitous
about Rothschild. He may seem wise, but his physical appearance is
downright grotesque:
His tongue protruded very slightly and, had they not been so concerned with
luggage and the weather, someone might have observed in him a peculiar
resemblance to those plaster reproductions of the gargoyles of Notre Dame.
(VB, p. 2)
Seidel observes that satirists, like the targets they deride, are often repre-
sented as ugly or deformed: “it is one of the more plaguing paradoxes
about the satiric mode that the satirist, having taken on a kind of
monstrosity as his subject, makes something of a monster of himself.”45
He points out that “the first represented satirist in Western literature,
Thersites of the Iliad, is also the most deformed warrior in the Greek
camp.”46 Thus Vile Bodies’ most powerful enforcer of stability himself
resembles a repulsive gargoyle – and a cheap imitation at that. If he
preserves the security of the state by exposing Simon at Margot’s party,
he also carries a false beard of his own. And while Adam and Agatha are
detained and harassed at customs, the physically repugnant and politically
suspicious Rothschild remains utterly unmolested by the officials: “Father
Rothschild fluttered a diplomatic laissez-passer and disappeared in the
large car that had been sent to meet him” (VB, p. 21). Waugh was not
yet a Catholic himself when he wrote this, but the scene suggests that the
weighty moral authority of a religious institution such as the Roman
Catholic Church might provide the anarchist-writer with the diplomatic
laissez-passer to avoid satiric censure. Rothschild’s freedom is the novelist’s
fantasy of being whisked past one’s own intrapsychic customs bureau, of
evading one’s own censors, of not having to ask how far one may go. For
Vile Bodies ultimately suggests that the more secure one’s position of
moral authority the greater one’s license to engage in the anarchic bomb-
throwing, the sadistic bloodlust, and the shameless voyeurism of satire.
chapter 4
Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust
In Evelyn Waugh’s universe, life is nasty, British, and short. Amid the
author’s clear-eyed dissection of national patterns of feeling, characters are
killed with invention and glee. In his first novel, Decline and Fall, a
schoolboy, Lord Tangent, is shot by a stray bullet from a track official’s
misfired starting gun. In 1932’s Black Mischief, the hero unwittingly
consumes the stewed body of his lover during an African emperor’s
funeral rites. In Vile Bodies, as we have seen, a gossip columnist puts his
head in an oven when he is banned from the best parties, a prostitute
falls drunkenly to her death from a chandelier, and an exhibitionistic
socialite dies following an accident suffered in an auto race she enters on a
lark. By the time Waugh wrote A Handful of Dust, the seemingly casual
acceptance of violent and untimely death had become the signal charac-
teristic of his dark humor.
With an ambivalence characteristic of Waugh’s critics, Conor Cruise
O’Brien has called this apparent indifference to death a “schoolboy
delight in cruelty,”1 distancing himself morally and emotionally from
Waugh’s enjoyment while still praising the author’s peculiar talents.
O’Brien discerns, even as he reproduces, a discrepancy in the fiction
between ethics and pleasure, one that maps precisely onto the double
movement of satire.2 And if Waugh’s fiction exemplifies the paradoxes of
satire, it is equally valuable for the questions it opens in understanding
modernism. As seen in Vile Bodies’ ambivalent treatment of an anarchic
modern world, Waugh’s attitudes toward both modernism and modernity
are vexed. In George McCartney’s words: “Waugh’s response to the
modern was marked by a 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.”3 In
short, although Waugh later in life repeatedly positioned himself as anti-
modernist, his early fiction came to embody a modern sensibility in its
apparent rejection of the novel’s traditional ethical obligations. Hence, in
70
Waugh, the satiric and the modern often look very much alike; while the
author may claim to satirize a decadent modernity, the disruptive mechan-
ism of his satire fosters the very modern decadence he decries.
While my reading of Vile Bodies aimed at revealing the paradoxes of
modern satire, how its attack on authority and on false morality doubles
back to undermine its own implicit normative claims, A Handful of Dust,
I will argue, pushes these contradictions even further, so that the very tone
characteristic of Waugh’s satiric method itself begins to break down. 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 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. In A Handful of Dust, Waugh pushes his satire
to such limits that it must take another form.
the death of peppermint

Early in the novel, Waugh gives his readers an object lesson in the ethics
of fiction. 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” in the First World War and subsequently died (HD, p. 37).
Tony finds the story “very sad,” 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” (HD, pp. 37, 38). Important here is not merely the
difference in protocols of feeling – Ben finds comedy where Tony finds
pathos – but the implied hierarchy among them. If Waugh is joking
about the simplicity of the boy’s logic, he is also using John to comment
critically on Tony’s easy sympathy for a long-dead mule. John’s accept-
ance of Ben as the authority in such aesthetic judgments, in other words,
indicates not only Tony’s parental neglect4 – a failure to instill in his son
the values of his social class – but also the outmoded nature of those very
values. For the cruel reaction here trumps the sympathetic one. Ben’s
response makes Tony’s seem naive and foolish; Tony’s does not make
Ben’s seem inordinately cruel.
72 Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without
laughing,” quipped Oscar Wilde, and like the death of Nell for Wilde, the
death of Peppermint for Waugh forces a choice between laughter and
tears. Wilde presumably laughs at Dickens’s literary treatment of the
death of Nell, his manipulation of his readers’ emotions, not the child’s
death per se. (Little Nell, being fictional, has no death per se; her death
has no existence outside Dickens’s representation of it.) By laughing, and
boasting about his laughter, Wilde rejects the entire system of values
embedded in Dickens’s novel and the culture from which it springs.
Thus Lionel Trilling claims that Wilde’s target is not merely “insincerity”
(claiming virtuous feelings one does not experience) but the Victorian
value of sincerity itself – the obedience to the social code that demands
these virtuous feelings. Compassionate feeling, having failed to guarantee
aesthetic quality, becomes the object of Wilde’s suspicion.
This suspicion of the authority of feeling – the indifference discussed in
Chapter 2 – situates Wilde as an important precursor to Waugh and a key
figure in an influential strain of modernism. Wilde has become, Eve
Sedgwick notes, “the very embodiment of . . . modernist antisentimenta-
lity,”5 and it is the specific flaw of sentimentality that, I have argued,
modernist aesthetics after Wilde often sought to repudiate. The loss of
faith in feeling as a guarantee of moral or aesthetic value thus generates
a very powerful idea of what it is to be modern. If we turn from an idea
of “modernism” as a school or movement to a sense of “modern” as a
sensibility, then modernity becomes a synonym, or near-synonym, for
words such as sophistication, urbanity, refinement, aloofness. The anti-
sentimental stances of writers such as Wilde and Waugh, and the value
placed on qualities such as wit or indifference, signal not merely cultural
distinction but a deep skepticism of inherited ideas of what it means to
know and feel.
Placed in this context, A Handful of Dust becomes a much more
significant novel for understanding modernism than its somewhat ortho-
dox formal surface might suggest. Ben’s laughter at the death of Pepper-
mint, for example, can now be understood as a refusal to let the kind of
“genuine feelings” that Wilde scorns deprive the mule’s rum binge of its
inherent comedy – as a rejection of Tony’s reflexive sentimentality. The
act of expressing sympathy, even the act of feeling it, comes too easily to
be accepted as meaningful. Thus Ben’s laughter is only one of many
instances in the novel that bring to the fore a case of suffering only to
undercut, ironize, or move past the ostensible sympathy the situation
appears to elicit. Take the very first words of the book:
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No one I am thankful to say,” said Mrs. Beaver, “except two housemaids who
lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court. They were
in no danger. The fire never properly reached the bedrooms I am afraid. Still they
are bound to need doing up, everything black with smoke and drenched with
water and luckily they had that old-fashioned sort of extinguisher that ruins
everything.” (HD, p. 3; Waugh’s italics)
Before the reader even knows the topic of conversation, she hears an
apparent expression of compassion that provokes a deceptively complex
response. Mrs. Beaver voices sympathy for the victims of the fire but her
concern is immediately revealed as insubstantial, since she cares only for
those of her own class. The injured (or dead?) housemaids are an after-
thought; Mrs. Beaver implicitly dismisses their fates as deserved, since
their injuries resulted from foolish panic. The reader, moreover, makes a
second correction in understanding Mrs. Beaver’s initial sentence. When
Mrs. Beaver says the maids “lost their heads,” the reader, still unaware of
the fire, can easily take this phrase literally. How indifferent is Mrs. Beaver
to the maids’ suffering? Cold-hearted enough to dismiss their decapi-
tation? And even when we learn that they “lost their heads” in only a
figurative sense, we never discover the women’s ultimate fates. Did they
survive? How badly were they injured? Was anyone hurt? Mrs. Beaver
moves onto her true concern, the property damage that her business can
financially exploit.
Mrs. Beaver’s initial concern with human suffering is revealed as mere
conversational reflex, or idle curiosity, soon forgotten. The novel, to be
sure, does not cultivate our sadism toward the housemaids; if anything,
Mrs. Beaver’s cavalier treatment of them may arouse a little sympathy or
readerly indignation. Yet the narrative is content to let the Beavers’
conversation unfold and to leave the residual question of the housemaids
unaddressed. Instead, we laugh at the virtual nakedness of Mrs. Beaver’s
greed, or the shabbiness of her effort to cloak this greed in false compas-
sion. The novel’s concern is less with who is hurt, or how badly, as with
how some people respond when others are hurt. This book is not about
the housemaids or about Peppermint the mule, but about various
responses to their fates.
A Handful of Dust is full of such small evasions. Jenny Abdul-Akbar,
the former wife of a Moroccan prince, bears “the most terrible scars”
(HD, p. 121) from her husband’s abuse but comes off as a comic figure,
absurdly eager to confess the details her “frightful nightmare” (HD, p. 115)
to near-strangers. The prostitute Milly is absolutely blasé when telling
Tony about the circumstances that led to the birth of her daughter: “I was
only sixteen when I had her. I was the youngest of the family and our
stepfather wouldn’t leave any of us girls alone. That’s why I have to work
for a living” (HD, p. 181). When Brenda reads to Tony from the morning
papers, her disengaged sensibility runs together nightmarish grotesqueries
and social gossip:
Reggie’s been making another speech . . . There’s such an extraordinary picture of

Babe and Jock . . . a woman in America has had twins by two different husbands.
Would you have thought that possible? . . . Two more chaps in gas ovens . . . a
little girl has been strangled in a cemetery with a bootlace . . . that play we went to
about a farm is coming off. (HD, p. 18)
As we saw in Lippmann’s analysis of public opinion and throughout Vile

Bodies, the newspaper serves as a metonymn for modernity itself, flatten-
ing all distinctions between news, crime, scandal, sensation, politics, and
entertainment. In Brenda’s reading of the paper, as in Milly’s and Jenny’s
recollection of their abuse, violence remains a mild disruption on the
surface of the text, troubling the reader briefly but remaining infused with
the comic-ironic tone that pervades the novel. If the novel does hold any
sympathy for the suffering of Brenda, Milly, or the girl in the cemetery, it
refuses to make a direct plea for compassion. Such a plea, presumably,
would only give way to something resembling Tony’s naive and senti-
mental affection for a mule poisoned by rum. Instead, the material of
“frightful nightmare” (to use Jenny’s phrase) is converted, through a kind
of emotional alchemy, into social comedy.
Such moments, frequent as they are, may lead the reader to expect a
kind of moral failure in Waugh’s characters, but they hardly prepare her
for the novel’s most shocking instance of a troublesome response to pain –
Brenda’s reaction to her son’s death. (John Andrew dies in a hunting
accident.) Jock Grant-Menzies travels to London to tell her the news, and
when Brenda hears that “John” has died she mistakenly assumes Jock to
be speaking of her lover, John Beaver:
“What is it, Jock? Tell me quickly, I’m scared. It’s nothing awful, is it?”
“I’m afraid it is. There’s been a very serious accident.”
“John?”
“Yes.”
“Dead?”
He nodded.
She sat down on a hard little Empire chair against the wall, perfectly still with her
hands folded in her lap, like a small well-brought-up child introduced into a
room full of grown-ups. She said, “Tell me what happened? Why do you
know about it first?”
“I’ve been down at Hetton since the week-end.”
“Hetton?”
“Don’t you remember? John was going hunting today.”
She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. “John . . . John Andrew . . .
I . . . Oh thank God . . .” Then she burst into tears. (HD, pp. 161–62;
Waugh’s ellipses)
That Brenda feels relief and thanks God that her son has died instead of
her loathsome lover clearly reveals her depravity and secures the reader’s
moral judgment against her. Her response to the news – unlike her
reaction to the news report of the strangled girl – is so shocking that
whatever laughter it might provoke is overwhelmed by the shock or
revulsion a reader likely experiences.
But if Brenda’s moral failure provides interpretive certainty in one
sense, it offers only confusion in another. For Brenda’s reaction validates
Mrs. Rattery’s earlier comment to Tony that the death might not upset
Brenda as much as he fears: “You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt
people” (HD, p. 149). Echoing the novel’s opening question – or
obliquely answering it – Mrs. Rattery’s remark intimates not only that
Tony’s naive faith in Brenda’s decency will be disappointed, but also
that in Waugh’s universe all human passions are too thickly disguised
for others to assess accurately. Waugh’s external method – the tech-
nique, which he praised in Lewis, of rejecting the representation of
consciousness and describing observable behavior alone – does not so
much deny the interiority of the self as it suggests that self is unknow-
able, buried beneath sedimented layers of social custom and ritualized
expression.
Unlike the death of Little Nell, or of Lord Tangent in Decline and Fall,
or of the schoolgirl in the cemetery, John Andrew’s is one fictional child’s
death at which no one can laugh.6 Yet the comedy manages to proceed.
Brenda’s friends see the death as gossip for their circle, and Jenny
narcissistically blames herself: “O God . . . What have I done to deserve
it?” (HD, p. 157). The most ridiculous response is that of Brenda’s
mother, who writes what Brenda calls “a sweet letter”:
. . . I shall not come down to Hetton for the funeral, but I shall be thinking of you
both all the time and my dear grandson. I shall think of you as I saw you all three,
together, at Christmas. Dear children, at a time like this only yourselves can be any
help to each other. Love is the only thing stronger than sorrow . . . (HD, p. 170;
Waugh’s italics, ellipses)
The grandmother’s clichéd expressions of grief, contradicted by her
refusal to be inconvenienced by travel, bear no more weight than
Mrs. Beaver’s professed concern for the victims of the fire. The platitudes
return us from the discomfort of the death to a world where narrator and
reader are both more comfortable: we again laugh at the moral inadequacy
of the novel’s characters.
While other characters come off more respectably, nearly all are impli-
cated in the collective refusal to assign blame or take responsibility for
John’s death; the refrain of “nobody’s fault” does not indicate any kind of
stoic acceptance of the uselessness of blaming, but rather, by directing
attention to the many small acts of irresponsibility that made the accident
possible, suggests an unseemly readiness to write off the whole episode, as
if in an unspoken pact among the guilty. In contrast, Tony, despite his
own blank, apparently affectless behavior in the wake of the shock, soon
proves unable to assume the indifference, to the death and to Brenda’s
affair, which comes so easily to Brenda and her friends. The middle of the
novel, in fact, focuses on the very clash between his pain and the noncha-
lance of those around him. Thus, when Brenda’s mother urges Tony to
take Brenda back, the reader begins to feel what must be Tony’s outrage:
I will tell you exactly how it happened, Tony. Brenda must have felt a tiny bit
neglected – people often do at that stage of marriage. I have known countless cases –
and it was naturally flattering to her to find a young man to beg and carry for her.
That’s all it was, nothing wrong. And then the terrible shock of little John’s accident
unsettled her and she didn’t know what she was saying or writing. You’ll both laugh
over this little fracas in years to come. (HD, p. 175; Waugh’s italics)
The suggestion that the death (safely euphemized as “little John’s acci-
dent”) and the break-up of the marriage (“this little fracas”) might be the
subject of laughter is outrageous – an outrageousness particularly remark-
able in the work of a novelist who so often displays his own modernity by
laughing at death and suffering. Waugh, who in Vile Bodies so deftly
exposed the variable and ignoble motives tied up in moral indignation,
now cultivates, on Tony’s behalf, the reader’s own outrage.
We have arrived at a paradox: Waugh, whose “schoolboy delight in
cruelty” seems to owe so much to Wilde’s stance of laughing at the death
of Little Nell, directs his greatest indignation at the character who
trivializes the death of John Andrew and laughs at the subsequent
dissolution of his parents’ marriage. Waugh’s own attitude toward
Wilde embodies this paradox. He repeatedly derided Wilde as a figure
of fashion, and described him as “at heart radically sentimental,”7 even
though the anti-Dickensian Wilde seems most influential on Waugh
precisely in his rejection of sentimental poses. Likewise, the modernity
of Brenda and her friends, whose delightfully extreme nonchalance shares
much with the postures of Waugh the satirist, itself now becomes subject
to the author’s ironic inflections. Terry Eagleton observes in both the
characters and narrators of Waugh’s fiction “an inability to be surprised
and disoriented by experience,” and Ian Littlewood has similarly noted a
“sophistication” shared by characters and narrator, which he describes as
“the refusal to be shocked, disoriented, embarrassed or involved.”8 Yet this
very quality – which Vile Bodies illustrated so vividly in the flattened or
misplaced affect of the Bright Young Things – becomes quite visibly the
target of satiric condemnation in A Handful of Dust.9
Brenda and her clique are implicitly condemned because they transform
life into a kind of art to be judged only on aesthetic, not moral, grounds:
[Brenda’s] very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy;
Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her
among the luminous clouds of deity. If, after seven years looking neither right nor
left, she had at last broken away with Jock Grant-Menzies or Robin Beasley . . .
it would have been thrilling no doubt, but straightforward drawing-room comedy.
The choice of Beaver raised the whole escapade into a realm of poetry for Polly
and Daisy and Angela and all the gang of gossips. (HD, pp. 74–75)
Drawing-room comedy is the genre through which Brenda and her friends
usually view their world, a genre populated by “joke figure[s]” such as
Beaver. But the invocation of the “realm of poetry” and the “touch of
fantasy,” echoing Tony’s private vocabulary of English Romance, suggests
that Brenda’s own world view is also built on fantasy. Brenda’s Wildean
equanimity may stand in contrast to Tony’s more overtly outmoded
devotion to a Victorian way of life, but both characters understand the
world through a set of aesthetic forms at once grandiose and clichéd.10
Ironic postures of indifference, so often characteristic of Waugh’s own
narrative tone, become Waugh’s target every bit as much as sentimental
affectations of feeling. If weeping at the death of Nell can allow us, too
easily, to judge ourselves sensitive and humane, cold laughter can with equal
ease allow us to congratulate ourselves on our hard-headed sophistication.
That such aggressively antisentimental postures, whether Wilde’s or
Brenda’s, reveal themselves as susceptible to the charge of sentimentality
suggests a larger contradiction within the idea of sentimentality that
Sedgwick has discussed at length: the collapse of the distinction “between
sentimentality and its denunciation.”11 Sedgwick notes that accusations of
sentimentality tend to expose the accuser to similar charges, according to
the logic of “it takes one to know one”: “Only those who are themselves
prone to these vicariating impulses . . . are equipped to detect them in the
writing or being of others.”12 As a result, merely “to enter into the
discourse of sentimentality . . . is almost inevitably to be caught up in a
momentum of . . . scapegoating attribution”13 – trying to expose the “real”
sentimentalist. Yet that act of exposure is specifically what the paradoxes
of the term “sentimental” imply cannot be done, since naming or denoun-
cing a “real” or “closet” sentimentalist only adds one more link to a
potentially endless chain. Waugh, I suggest, runs up against precisely
this paradox. His own satiric sensibility, so acute in detecting the senti-
mental in others – including literary precursors such as Wilde – now
cultivates readerly sympathy for Tony in a decidedly unsatiric, even
sentimental, manner, and he indicts those characters whose accents of
indifference most closely echo the authorial-narratorial voice itself.
A brief look at Waugh’s personal biography might help to make the
point. Waugh’s biographers have noted that Tony’s situation resembles
Waugh’s own after his first wife (also named Evelyn) left him for a lover.
In a letter to Harold Acton, Waugh expresses frustration that friends and
relatives are urging him not to make too much of the affair:
Everyone is talking so much nonsense on all sides of me about my affairs, that my
wits reel. Evelyn’s family & mine join in asking me to “forgive” her whatever that
may mean . . . I did not know it was possible to be so miserable & live but I am
told that this is a common experience.14
In a letter to Henry Yorke (Green), furthermore, Waugh voices a desire to

find solace in the humorous reactions of others to his plight: “If you hear
any amusing opinions about my divorce do tell me. Particularly from the
older generation. The Gardner line is that I am very ‘unforgiving’.”15
Finally, a few months later, Waugh again writes to Yorke:
I have decided that I have gone on for too long in that fog of sentimentality &
I am going to stop hiding away from everyone. I was getting into a sort of Charlie
Chaplinish Pagliacci attitude to myself as the man with a tragedy in his life and a
tender smile for children.16
The parallels between the letters and the novel are significant. Like Tony,
Waugh feels pressure to affect a blasé sophistication others seemed to
possess quite naturally, and, like the narrator of his novel, he shifts
attention from the experience of pain to the amusement derived from
the responses of others. Yet the differences are equally instructive. Most
obviously, the glaring asymmetry that there is no dead son in Waugh’s life
implies that the author needed a dramatic incident to precipitate the
collapse of the Lasts’ marriage. It suggests that Waugh loads the dice in
favor of Tony, manipulating his reader’s emotions in a manner worthy of
Wilde’s Dickens. More subtly, however, Tony never expresses the dissatis-
faction with, and persecution by, the responses of others that Waugh
articulates in his letters; these feelings are only implied, left for the reader
to experience. Nor does Tony seek solace by mocking those who respond
to his fate in “amusing” ways; this too is left to the reader. Finally, Tony
never assumes enough self-consciousness to regard his own feeling of
victimization as sentimental in the way that Waugh does (likening himself
to Chaplin); in the novel, it is Brenda’s piggish brother Reggie who
suggests that Tony is merely “taking the line of the injured husband”
(HD, p. 204). In short, the whole range of feelings that Waugh expresses
in his letters – anger, self-pity, self-reproach – are in the novel either left
implicit or put into the mouths of untrustworthy characters. This is
wholly in keeping with Waugh’s adherence to a Lewisian external
method that refrains from rendering the interior lives of characters, but
it also suggests that certain reactions are suppressed for the sake of the
aesthetic or affective demands of the genre.
There is, moreover, an important exception to Waugh’s external method
in the novel, and it is the ultimate indication of the author’s sympathy for
Tony that he violates his aesthetic principles in order to render his hero’s
interior mental state.17 When Tony is compelled to stage an affair legally to
justify his divorce, the madness of his circumstances begins to terrify him:
For a month now he had lived in a world suddenly bereft of order; it was as
though the whole reasonable and decent constitution of things, the sum of all he
had experienced or learned to expect, were an inconsiderable, inconspicuous
object mislaid somewhere on the dressing table; no outrageous circumstance in
which he found himself, no new mad thing brought to his notice could add a jot
to the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears. (HD, p. 189)18
The episode at Brighton, in which Tony is forced into increasingly

ridiculous behavior, appears farcical to the reader, but to Tony it seems
“phantasmagoric, and even gruesome” (HD, p. 189). This rift between
the comic and the “phantasmagoric” or “gruesome,” visible in the
narrator’s departure from principle in order to enter Tony’s mind,
points up the limitations of the “drawing-room comedy” genre epitom-
ized by the mock-affair. Waugh must explicitly tell us that the events are
phantasmagoric and gruesome because the protocols of his method
demand that he represent these same events as comic.
However effective Waugh’s satire may be as a critique of sentimental-
ity, then, it also appears incapable of rendering certain emotional states. In
drawing-room comedy, phantasmagoria will always appear as silly, never
gruesome. The problem Waugh’s satire faces thus may be the paradig-
matic challenge of all literature. Roland Barthes has written:
A friend has just lost someone he loves, and I want to express my sympathy.
I proceed to write him a letter. Yet the words I find do not satisfy me: they are
“phrases”: I make up “phrases” out of the most affectionate part of myself; I then
realize that the message I want to send this friend, the message which is my
sympathy itself, could after all be reduced to a simple word: condolences. Yet the
very purpose of communication is opposed to this, for it would be a cold and
consequently inverted message, since what I want to communicate is the very
warmth of my sympathy. I conclude that in order to correct my message (that is,
in order for it to be exact), I must not only vary it, but also that this variation
must be original and apparently invented.
This fatal succession of constraints will be recognized as literature itself.19
For Barthes, the aim of literature is not to express the inexpressible, but
rather, working with a received, public language, to “unexpress the
expressible,”20 to render an essentially banal emotion in an original
language. Hence the indirectness of literature, hence the ironic represen-
tation of grief. One could of course dismiss the problem altogether, and
dispense with the effort to render grief; to do this might be to realize the
theoretical possibilities suggested by Lewis in his insistence that “perfect
laughter, if there could be such a thing, would be inhuman,” or by other
champions of modernist abstraction, such as José Ortega y Gasset, who
urged the “progressive elimination of the human, all too human elements
predominant in romantic and naturalistic production.”21 But Waugh,
pulling back from the antihumanist position as he did in Decline and
Fall and Vile Bodies, rejects this option and presses upon his reader the
ethical dimension of his characters’ struggles. What results is a satiric
attack on ironic attitudes – a satire that ceases to look like a satire, a
drawing-room comedy that flees the drawing room for the jungle.
phantasy with a ph
Tony’s flight to South America in the novel’s final chapters, and the fate
he meets there, provide a drastic change from the rest of A Handful of
Dust, not only in setting but also in tone, even genre. Quite possibly the
first reader to worry about this shift was his friend Henry Yorke, who
wrote to Waugh in 1934:
I feel the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren’t you
mixing two things together? The first part of the book is convincing, a real picture
of people one has met . . . But then to let Tony be detained by some madman
introduces an entirely fresh note and we are with phantasy with a ph at once.22
Yet if the generic and geographical shifts undermine the social realism of
the novel, this perceived discrepancy has a clear explanation in the genesis
of the book. Waugh initially composed and published the episode of
Tony at “Chez Todd” – in which Tony is rescued but then held captive by
an old man, Mr. Todd, who forces him to read aloud, over and over, the
complete works of Dickens – as a free-standing story entitled “The Man
Who Liked Dickens”; only later did he write the rest of the novel.23 The
“fantastic” short story, by this argument, possessed unity on its own, but
clashed with the comic-satiric tone of the novel that was appended to it.
Waugh, however, while acknowledging the “fantastic” and artificial
nature of the episode, insists to Yorke that it is necessary: “The Amazon
stuff had to be there. The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of
savages – first Mrs. Beaver etc. then the real ones, finally the silver foxes at
Hetton.”24 Yet Yorke objected to tonal, not thematic discord; Waugh
never answers his complaint. Is it possible, then, to go beyond a merely
genetic explanation of this tonal shift? Rather than seeing “mixing two
things together” as a flaw resulting from the vagaries of the creative
process, might we see the disjunction as symptomatic of the very ques-
tions that occupy the novel?
In calling the final episode “phantasy with a ph,” Yorke situates the
story within an aesthetic tradition that dwells on the “phantasmagoric”
and the “gruesome” – to use the terms from Tony’s interior monologue in
Brighton. Freud famously called this tradition “the uncanny,” and Wolf-
gang Kayser used the term “the grotesque.” This latter term, recall, has
generally been characterized by a duality or ambivalence that, in Ruskin’s
analysis, combines “two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful.”25 In
the ludicrous aspect of the grotesque lie its affinities to satire and
caricature; in the fearful side – that side emphasized in Kayser’s seminal
study – its relation to Freud’s uncanny. The conclusion of Waugh’s novel,
then, moves from one face of the grotesque to another, from laughter to
fear. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” wrote T. S. Eliot in the
line that gave Waugh his title, and in this ending the phantasmagoric and
the gruesome, the materials of what Jenny Abdul-Akbar calls “frightful
nightmare,” are no longer converted into comedy. Of course, the idea that
reading Dickens interminably – a lifetime of reading the death of Little
Nell – might be a Dantean punishment indicates that Waugh has not
entirely abandoned the comic, and I will return to the comic undertones
of these concluding chapters. But the reader’s laughter, as Yorke’s
response attests, becomes increasingly uneasy.
Criticism of A Handful of Dust has avoided linking the novel’s ending
with Freud’s uncanny, whether because Waugh’s readers have obediently
followed the author in their distaste for psychoanalysis, or because such
concerns have not seemed germane to their efforts to locate in the novel a
stable system of moral and religious beliefs. In a widely accepted reading,
Richard Wasson has argued that it is a kind of poetic justice that Tony
should live out his days endlessly reading the author so deeply associated
with the Victorian values that have led him astray.26 Without wholly
rejecting Wasson’s argument, I want to suggest that a psychoanalytic
reading can help not only to discern thematic parallels between the two
parts of the novel but also to account for why Waugh’s novel breaks out of
the confines of the drawing room, literally and figuratively. If, as I have
argued, the satiric mode of the opening chapters of the novel stages a
failure of feeling, relentlessly working to avoid excessive sentiment by
allowing reader and narrator to laugh at the moral inadequacy of its
characters, these final fantastic chapters reintroduce sentiment, only in
an estranged, uncanny guise.
Like the genre terms I discussed in Chapter 1 (satire, sentimental,
grotesque), the uncanny as a literary category has been the subject of
significant theoretical work. For some years it functioned as a minor
buzzword of deconstructive criticism, whose dead authors so often left
ghostly traces.27 But Freud used the term in a much less metaphorical
sense; in defending his foray into aesthetics, he defined that field as “the
theory of the qualities of feeling,” and wrote of the uncanny: “It is
undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and
horror . . . Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which
justifies the use of a special conceptual term.”28 Freud himself has some
trouble further describing this variety of fear or anxiety, as his descriptions
tend to slide into psychoanalytic explanation of the origins of the feeling.
But in his literary discussion he reserves the term for those works – most
extensively, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” – that elicit in readers
this feeling of anxiety or dread. Ghost stories, tales of the supernatural,
Gothic novels, horror movies, and the like are thus natural (although not
necessary) loci of the uncanny.
A brief review of Freud’s theory may be useful. For Freud, the experi-
ence of the uncanny derives from either the revival of repressed infantile
complexes or the confirmation of surmounted primitive beliefs.29 The
category of “infantile complexes” includes such Freudian favorites as the
castration complex and “womb-phantasies,” while “primitive beliefs” – for
example, in animism, magic, or evil spirits – entail a failure to demarcate
psychical from material reality. This failure in turn stems from an over-
valuation of the power of one’s own thoughts, or a projection of those
thoughts onto the external world.30 In short, it is the regression to magical
thinking, linked to the childhood of the individual or the species, which
induces the feeling of the uncanny. But there is a second condition
necessary for the production of the uncanny in fiction, a condition less
psychological than narratological. The phenomenon that produces the
uncanny must survive the process of “reality-testing,” that is, scrutiny to
determine whether it is real or illusory. An author can deliberately create
supernatural fictional events that do not stand up to reality-testing (e.g.,
fairy tales), and therefore do not seem uncanny. By the same token,
however, an author can manipulate the reader to believe more fully in the
reality of supernatural phenomena than she would in real life by first
establishing a reader’s faith in the reality of the characters; as a result,
fiction can, more easily than life, induce the feeling of the uncanny.31 The
uncanniness of Waugh’s conclusion is thus enhanced by the author’s having
first created, in Yorke’s words, “a real picture of people one has met.”
What is it, then, in “Du Côté de Chez Todd” that induces the feeling
of the uncanny? Where is the fear in A Handful of Dust? To begin, we
might recognize in Tony’s exile a variation on the modernist paradigm of
the voyage as a return to beginnings. Like Conrad in Heart of Darkness,
Waugh uses the barbarism of the wilderness to comment ironically on the
savagery of “civilization.”32 A latter-day Marlow exploring the blank
spaces on the map, Tony finds himself at the remotest reaches of Euro-
pean exploration: “The stream which watered [Mr. Todd’s land] was not
marked on any map” (HD, p. 285). For both authors, too, the journey to
the ends of empire is a temporal regression; Marlow explicitly calls his
voyage a trip back in time, and Tony returns to a world of animistic belief
in which, Todd suggests, there exist magic potions for every purpose,
including raising the dead (a favorite uncanny theme). Even in Waugh’s
composition of the novel, the tale “began at the end” with the short story
about reading Dickens.33 In all sorts of ways, the conclusion in the jungle
turns out to be the origin of the narrative.
In typically modernist fashion, moreover, Tony’s regression is psycho-
logical as well as anthropological. He travels back to a land of childhood
as well as pre-civilization; geographical dislocation becomes the occasion
for, or literalization of, a metaphorical exploration of the self. Deep in the
Amazon jungles, he finds himself seeking an idealized version of his
childhood home, a lost city he imagines as “Gothic in character, all vanes
and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and
terraces, a transfigured Hetton” (HD, p. 222). Tony traverses the ocean
seeking the Hetton that eluded him in England.
Chapter 5, “In Search of a City,” serves as a transition into this world of
childhood fantasy. Throughout the chapter, Tony’s memories of England
and fantasies of the City work their way into his conscious and semi-
conscious thoughts as he daydreams or drifts off to sleep; ultimately, he is
stricken with a hallucinatory fever, and they overwhelm his senses. Like
Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies, Tony envisions an absurd and often comic
series of events, pasted together from scraps of memory, perception, and
his own romantic imagination. These passages have the logic, or illogic, of
Joyce’s “Circe” episode, occurring on the border of reality and imagin-
ation, of rationality and absurdity, of consciousness and unconscious-
ness.34 They effect the generic transition that Yorke commented on, a
passage from a comic-satiric mode to “phantasy with a ph.” They also
signal a kind of psychic transition, as Tony, feverish, weak, and beset by
visions, is reduced to childish whimpering:
All that day Tony lay alone, fitfully oblivious of the passage of time. He slept a
little; once or twice he left his hammock and found himself weak and dizzy . . . He
lit the lantern and began to collect wood for the fire, but the sticks kept slipping
from his fingers and each time that he stooped he felt giddy, so that after a few
fretful efforts he left them where they had fallen and returned to his hammock.
And lying there, wrapped in his blanket, he began to cry. (HD, p. 277)
The emotion stifled by the social pressures of Tony’s world, and by his
own upper-class English manners, now emerges unchecked. When Tony’s
guide, Dr. Messinger, dies, the narrative surrenders its objective point
of view in favor of simply recording Tony’s hallucinations as if they
were real:
At last he came into the open. The gates were open before him and trumpets
were sounding along the walls, saluting his arrival; from bastion to bastion the
message ran to the four points of the compass; petals of almond and apple
blossom were in the air; they carpeted the way, as, after a summer storm, they lay
in the orchards at Hetton. Gilded cupolas and spires of alabaster shone in the
sunlight. (HD, p. 283)
The narrative mode has shifted considerably from the detached and
straight-faced, if slightly amused, recording of social behavior; it now
describes sense-impressions wholly internal to Tony’s mind.
When the next chapter opens, however, the narrative has returned to
an objective point of view, and instead of a golden city with gates and
spires, we see Mr. Todd’s hut, made, in Yeatsian fashion, “of mud and
wattle” (HD, p. 284). There is no grand castle, but a little house in the
woods. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim writes that in fairy
tales “the house in the woods and the parental home are the same place,
experienced quite differently because of a change in the psychological
situation.”35 Positive and negative associations are split between the safe
parental home and the dangerous house in the woods in order to organize
the ambivalent feelings attached to domesticity and family. And lest we
apply Bettelheim’s symbolic code too freely, the text has already pointed
us in this direction with its references to Hetton; the hut is indeed “a
transfigured Hetton,” although not transfigured as Tony imagined. It is a
space at once home and not home, familiar and unfamiliar – precisely the
terrain that Freud called the unheimlich. For, in Freud’s theory, the
uncanny is familiar but appears as unfamiliar because our knowledge of
it has been repressed: “the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression.”36 Tony
has traveled from the drawing-room comedy of England, through a
jungle of confusion, and emerged into a clearing. This enclosed space is
both the unconscious psychic space of childhood and the literary space of
“phantasy with a ph.”
Discerning the parallels between the stately country home of Hetton
and the little house in the jungle makes clear that the two parts of the novel
share thematic concerns beyond the rather obvious analogies Waugh him-
self described between savagery at home and abroad. And while the fear
provoked by Tony’s powerlessness at the hands of Todd can be understood
on a merely psychological plane, a psychoanalytic reading accounts for
a number of otherwise peculiar details. For example, Tony relies on
Todd for his daily food; when Tony refuses to read to him, the old
man deprives Tony of his supper. Todd provides medicine too, which
Tony drinks down like a little boy: “‘Nasty medicine,’ [Tony] said, and
began to cry” (HD, p. 288). Most strikingly, Todd first appears as
menacing when he describes his neighbors: “The Pie-wie women are
ugly but very devoted. I have had many. Most of the men and women
living in this savannah are my children. That is why they obey – for that
reason and because I have the gun” (HD, p. 288). The old man’s sur-
prising and unsettling sexual potency makes him the father of the
whole community around him, and the gun, while offering a joke about
the obedience of children, serves as a garish emblem of phallic power.
Supplying food and medicine, fathering children, enforcing his will as
the law, Todd’s behavior makes perfect sense if his hut is understood as a
dream-like, transfigured Hetton and Todd himself as a transfigured
father. In the original short story, Mr. Todd was called “Mr. McMaster,”
and Tony turns out to be a prisoner at this master’s house just as he for so
many years was unable to leave his father’s estate.37
But, in spite of the paternal role that Todd assumes, much of his
behavior fails to fit such a model. Todd is illiterate, infantile, and needy;
he demands to be read to like a stubborn child. In fact, it is Todd who
explicitly compares Tony to his father: “You read beautifully . . . It is
almost as though my father were here again” (HD, p. 293). Like a child as
well, Todd habitually strikes a pose of mock-innocence when he knows
he is doing wrong. This childlike old man, moreover, constitutes
“a unique audience” for Tony to read to, in an oddly disturbing passage:
The old man sat astride his hammock opposite Tony . . . following the words,
soundlessly, with his lips. Often when a new character was introduced he would
say, “Repeat the name, I have forgotten him,” or “Yes, yes, I remember her well.
She dies poor woman.” He would frequently interrupt with questions . . .
He laughed loudly at all the jokes and at some passages which did not seem
humorous to Tony, asking him to repeat them two or three times; and later at the
description of the sufferings of the outcasts in “Tom-all-alones” tears ran down
his cheeks into his beard. His comments on the story were usually simple.
“I think that Dedlock is a very proud man,” or, “Mrs. Jellyby does not take
enough care of her children.” (HD, pp. 292–93)
The simplicity of Todd’s concerns, his unsophisticated diction, his
attempt to follow along silently, and, above all, the utter excess of his
emotional (indeed sentimental) reactions belong more properly to a
young child than to an old man. Thus, if Todd’s earlier name, McMaster,
suggests his role as paternal master, it also more deeply might suggest his
role as son; like the “un” in unheimlich, the “Mc” (“son of”) in McMaster
is “the token of repression.”
With the sentimental reactions of a child, but the sexual and punitive
power of a father, Todd can be said to represent the son’s usurpation of
paternal authority, Tony’s triumphant rival in an oedipal struggle. Tony’s
captivity, after all, evokes a complex of desires and fears bound up with
succession and inheritance, impotence and generativity, usurpation and
punishment, which have been latent throughout the novel. Tony’s sur-
name, Last, signals the extinction of his line, and John’s death leaves him
without an heir. The death and the divorce bring about the end of Tony’s
procreative life. The emergence of Mr. Todd in the novel’s final episode is
a defamiliarizing, a rendering un-homely, of the familial romance already
operating among Tony, Brenda, and John Andrew. For, young as he may
be, John Andrew is a sexual rival of his father, and Waugh’s insights into
childhood sexuality are wonderfully Freudian. When Brenda, to assuage
her guilt, tries to engineer an affair between Tony and Jenny, it is the son
who falls for the “Princess”: “I think she’s the most beautiful lady I’ve ever
seen . . . D’you think she’d like to watch me have my bath?” (HD, p. 118).
Later, when Jenny says good-night, he is even more forward:
They sat on John’s small bed in the night-nursery. He threw the clothes back and
crawled out, nestling against Jenny. “Back to bed,” she said, “or I shall
spank you.”
“Would you do it hard? I shouldn’t mind.”
“Oh dear,” said Brenda. (HD, p. 119)
To recognize the sexual rivalry between Tony and John is to see that it is
more than mere coincidence – indeed more than the author’s rigging up
a joke at Brenda’s expense – that John Beaver and John Andrew Last share
a first name. For while John Andrew might be Tony’s rival in an
intrapsychic struggle, John Beaver is both a second and more literal sexual
rival. We have another case of a psychoanalytic “splitting,” where the
potentially patricidal agent is symbolically divided into a good figure and
an evil one, between an innocent victim, John A., and a loathsome
perpetrator, John B. Brenda’s mistaking one for the other, while mani-
festly displaying her own misplaced affections, may also voice a latent
textual desire to kill off the evil rival while sparing the good one. Her
mistaken conclusion that John Beaver has died summons an alternative
situation with which the reader and author, in their implied sympathy for
Tony, would probably be much happier.38
But the psychoanalytic content of Tony’s situation is only one source of
the uncanny anxiety that Waugh’s phantasmagoria produces. For Freud’s
essay on the uncanny, as Neil Hertz observes, contains an important
ambiguity. Hertz notes that Freud wrote “The Uncanny” while he was
working out the theory of the repetition compulsion that would be
described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and that Freud viewed the
repetition compulsion as a fundamental source of the uncanny.39 But,
Hertz argues, Freud is not always clear whether it is the content of the
repetition or the mere fact of repetition that arouses anxiety; often
the former seems trivial in comparison to the latter: “Whatever it is that
is repeated – an obsessive ritual, perhaps, or a bit of acting-out in relation
to one’s analyst – will . . . feel most compellingly uncanny when it is seen
as merely coloring, that is when it comes to seem most gratuitously
rhetorical.”40 When involuntary repetition appears uncanny, the particu-
lar act that one finds oneself repeating might seem utterly benign – as
benign, even, as reading a novel by Dickens.
For, in a peculiar way, the triviality, even the silliness of Tony’s fate is
exactly what makes the scene so disturbing, giving it a power over readers
that even Marlow’s confrontation with Kurtz no longer quite possesses.
The repetition is, in Hertz’s phrase, “gratuitously rhetorical,” or purely
formal. Indeed, Todd’s demand for reading echoes Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, where Freud cites the child’s desire to hear a familiar story
repeated as an example of the repetition compulsion par excellence :
If a child has been told a nice story, he will insist on hearing it over and over
rather than a new one, and he will remorselessly stipulate that the repetition shall
be an identical one.41
When Mr. Todd articulates a desire for repetition he is every bit as

“remorseless”:
You see, they are the only books I have ever heard. My father used to read them
and then later the black man . . . and now you. I have heard them all several times
by now but I never get tired. (HD, p. 292)
Mr. Todd quite literally is the compulsion to repeat; he forces Tony to
read and reread to him, in what has seemed to most readers an endless
repetition.42 As his German-derived name would indicate, then, Todd is
an externalization of Tony’s own death drive, the drive that gives rise to
the repetition compulsion, which Freud describes as “the inertia inherent
in organic life” the instincts that “tend toward the restoration of an earlier
state of things.”43 The novel’s title, in fact, while directly invoking The
Waste Land, may also, via Eliot, allude to Genesis 3:19, where God
announces the mortality of Adam in language that perfectly illustrates
this tendency of life to revert to an inorganic state: “Dust thou art, and
unto dust shalt thou return.” As an externalized agent of Tony’s own
unconscious instinct, Todd/McMaster is Tony’s master, the law that
“overrides the pleasure principle,”44 the law that Tony must obey even
as he recognizes the absurdity of such obedience. And the final event that
secures Tony’s enthrallment to Todd is the loss of his watch. Tony, who
knows that “time is different” in Todd’s forest (HD, p. 288), has now been
stranded in the province of the unconscious, which, as psychoanalytic
theory has it, knows no sense of time.
In this estranged form, Todd’s arbitrary exercise of authority very
literally assumes the “daemonic character” that Freud attributes to the
repetition compulsion.45 Of course, before and after Freud, literary works
have embodied elements of the unconscious as devils, vampires, evil
spirits, or little old men in the jungle. As Hertz notes, the relation between
“demonic” and “psychological” explanations of uncanny experience is one
of manifest to latent. Within the rules of a given fictional world, there
may indeed exist “real” demons or spirits, but their affective power still
derives from their psychodynamic origin.46 The idea of the unconscious
as demonic thus reminds us of what Slavoj Žižek calls “the status of the
unconscious as radically external.”47 To see ourselves as the puppets of
unconscious forces is to realize the automatism of our own selves, the
stubborn unconsciousness of the unconscious.48
Of course, recognizing the automatism of our behavior is also the
source of laughter in Bergson’s theory of the comic as “something mech-
anical encrusted on the living”;49 similarly, it is central to Lewis’s extern-
alist prescriptions for satire. The uncanny thus shares this fundamental
perception with the comic, and the proximity of the two modes in
Waugh’s work is no accident. Yet there is a difference. Freud himself
(discussing none other than Oscar Wilde) notes that the comic tends to
work against the production of uncanny anxiety: “Even a ‘real’ ghost, as in
Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, loses all power of at least arousing
gruesome feelings in us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself by
being ironical about it and allows liberties to be taken with it.”50 Laughter
serves as a corrective force, rescuing us from the gruesome, whereas the
uncanny fails to restore us to ourselves.51
In the novel’s uncanny conclusion, then, the reader not only confronts
the violent oedipal psychodynamics underlying the novel’s social comedy,
but also glimpses the phantasmagoric underside of the novel’s satiric
disavowal of sentimentality. Sentiment, combated so aggressively in the
novel’s earlier episodes, returns – and literally with a vengeance. Waugh’s
use of Dickens thus offers a variation on Wilde’s laughter at the death of
Nell. This time around, the sentimentality of the Victorian author
induces not laughter but horror; Dickens is not aesthetically laughable,
as he was for Wilde, but aesthetically dreadful. The heart of darkness is
revealed to be the sentimental pieties of Victorian culture. In its antisenti-
mental operations Waugh’s fiction thus helps to illustrate the paradoxes
in the manner that modernist literature structures and models the ways
in which we respond emotionally to the pain of others. The collapse of
satire into the uncanny suggests that the efforts of so many modernists to
escape the sentimental might give rise to an undertow in which the claims
of feeling reassert themselves in negative form.
In an interesting footnote to Todd’s encounter with Dickens, Waugh,
in 1953, reviewed a study of Dickens in which he, not surprisingly,
referred to Dickens as a “tear jerker.” Yet he also recognized the novelist’s
“unique genius,” and in Dickens’s habit of mesmerism saw an apt
metaphor for the author’s peculiarly compelling power over his readers.52
Strikingly, Waugh compared Dickens to Chaplin, the same figure
of sentimentality to whom he had likened himself, disparagingly, two
decades before:
The happiest comparison perhaps is to Mr. Charles Chaplin, in particular to the
film City Lights. There we have scenes of appalling sentimentality and unreality . . .
but we have a unique genius in full exuberance . . . We all have our moods in which
Dickens sickens us. In a lighter, looser and perhaps higher mood we fall victim to
his “magnetism.” Like Mme. de la Rue we unroll from our sensible ball and do
what the Master orders.53
Without entirely dropping his ironic tone, Waugh concedes that however
“unreal” the emotion that Dickens and Chaplin elicit, it retains its pull on
even the most sophisticated of readers. Here the sentimental itself appears
as uncanny: the tear-jerker captivates us just as the hypnotist does; the
“Master” Dickens forces us to obey his will just as the Dickens-loving
McMaster forces Tony. If satire points out to us the ludicrousness of our
sentimental impulses by reducing human character to the laughably rigid
operation of mechanized emotions, then the uncanny describes our sus-
ceptibility to feeling as a more disquieting subjection to demonic or
unconscious forces.
A decade later, Waugh testified a third time to Dickens’s uncanny
power. In his autobiography, A Little Learning, he recounts how his
father, another man who loved Dickens,54 would read to his sons:
For some eight years of my life for some three or four evenings a week . . . he read
to me, my brother and to whatever friends might be in the house, for an hour or
more from his own old favourites – most of Shakespeare, most of Dickens, most
of Tennyson . . . Had it not been so well done, there might have been something
ludicrous about the small, elderly, stout figure impersonating the heroines of
forgotten comedies with such vivacity. In fact he held us enthralled.55
Although the experience is recounted as pleasurable – even bordering on
the “ludicrous” so amenable to Waugh’s satire – this Dickensian scene of
domestic novel-reading curiously anticipates (or echoes) Tony’s encounter
with his own bizarre father-figure, Mr. Todd. Indeed, in Ninety-Two
Days, the account of his South American travels that furnished material
for A Handful of Dust, Waugh conceded that while reading Dickens in the
jungle he recovered a pleasure in reading he had not experienced since
childhood.56 Like the novel, these autobiographical accounts suggest that
the engagement with Dickens is a situation of supernatural enthrallment
to a master with uncanny powers – uncanny because, as in childhood, the
sentimental pull of the novel can still possess us.
chapter 5
Cold Comfort Farm and mental life
Did Evelyn Waugh actually write the cult classic, Cold Comfort Farm
under the female pen-name Stella Gibbons? According to Gibbons’s
nephew and biographer, Reggie Oliver, such was the conjecture of one
contemporary reviewer who was skeptical that a woman journalist could
have authored such a witty novel.1 Although the reviewer’s suggestion
may today seem both sexist and bizarre, it recognizes, as Faye Hammill
observes, “the similarities between Waugh’s comic and parodic practice
and Gibbons’s” even as it misses the feminist force of the novel.2 Even
more significantly, perhaps, it makes explicit the assumption that satire
is primarily a male mode of writing. Dubious as this assumption may
sound, it is only a correlative of the widely accepted critical view that the
sentimental is a female mode – a view endorsed by both boosters of
sentimental fiction such as Jane Tompkins, and detractors, such as Ann
Douglas.3 Their debate, although begun as an aesthetic-political argument
about nineteenth-century American fiction, clearly has relevance to both
the valuation of twentieth-century consumer culture and the agenda of
contemporary feminist scholarship. But, despite the differences, both
sides share certain assumptions. As Philip Gould has noted, Tompkins’s
“revisionist critique” of Douglas ends up reproducing “Douglas’s gen-
dered premises for understanding nineteenth-century sentimentalism.”
Tompkins may reject Douglas’s criteria for aesthetic value but she “does
not interrogate the category of sentiment so much as revalue it as a
feminine possession. [Her] revisionism is founded, in other words, on
the same opposition between male and female writers that underlies
Douglas’s work.”4
One way to complicate such a schematic position has been to attend to
the suffering male as a site of sentimental cathexis, as in the works of Eve
Sedgwick, Julie Ellison, and others – to show, in other words, that the
structure of sentimental affect is by no means essentially feminine.5 But
another approach is to attend to the figure of the female satirist, to explore
92
the way in which the very different affective dynamics of satire can
structure women’s writing as well as men’s. While other female satirists
of the 1930s might serve to develop this argument – Dorothy Parker or
Dawn Powell in the United States, or Ivy Compton-Burnett in England –
my case study here will be Cold Comfort Farm. For Gibbons’s novel is
both sharp enough in its satire that it could be mistaken for Waugh’s, and
compelling enough in its feminism that it has been claimed for a
tradition of female middlebrow writing,6 and this convergence itself
argues against any easy alignment of antisentimental poses with elitism
and misogyny – an alignment, it should be clear by now, that seems to
me too readily assumed in contemporary criticism. The witty woman, as
Regina Barreca notes, has long been regarded as dangerous and subversive
of social norms;7 reading Gibbons can unsettle, I suggest, both the
patriarchal prejudices of the 1930s and the critical orthodoxies of literary
study today. To get beyond the old oppositions, then, we should attend
to the complexity of the ways in which Gibbons positions her protagonist
and her novel within discourses of class, and the way that class in the
novel moves along multiple axes – wealth, language, education, literacy,
manners, and, most crucially here, affect.
some perversions of pastoral

Stella Gibbons was born a year before Waugh, and achieved literary
success just a few years after him, with Cold Comfort Farm in 1932. In the
novel, Flora Poste, having completed her education and lost her parents,
decides to live with her rural cousins, the Starkadders, at Cold Comfort
Farm in Sussex, where she assumes the Herculean task of “tidying up”
their unruly lives. Despite some vague and ominous Gothic mysteries
hanging over the decaying farm, Flora single-mindedly achieves her
aims, as one by one the comically barbarous and filthy Starkadders are
cleaned up and/or shipped out of Cold Comfort – a project for which
Flora deploys a panoply of modern fads and technologies ranging from
birth control and psychoanalysis to cheap consumer goods and the
promise of celebrity. Thematically, the central conflict is the clash
between Flora’s modern, urban way of life and the traditional, rural
one of the Starkadders; as Chris Baldick says, the novel “pits contem-
porary rationality against regressive primitivism and romanticism.”8
Onto this clash can be mapped numerous other thematic oppositions:
future/past, intellect/emotion, culture/nature, sublimation/desire, clean-
liness/dirt, normality/deviancy, and so on. Stereotypically, of course,
94 Cold Comfort Farm and mental life
these oppositions have been gendered, with masculine culture seen as
imposing form upon the raw material of a feminine nature. Gibbons,
however, as a female comedian, significantly complicates that formula-
tion by presenting a heroine who unswervingly champions the benefits
of modernity, culture, and rationality, and who in taming a wild nature
through the strength of her own female agency undoes the linking of
that nature with any purported feminine principle.
Frequently characterized as a satire, Cold Comfort Farm is by almost all
accounts a funny book, although it generally lacks the pessimistic under-
tones that pervade Waugh’s fiction and that are often associated with the
satiric. Oliver’s assessment is illustrative: “What is striking about the
comedy of Cold Comfort Farm is that, while maintaining a keen satirical
edge and making few concessions to sentimentality, its values are essentially
humane.”9 Still, if Gibbons seems less cruel than Waugh, her novel can
hardly support Emily Toth’s idealistic claim that women’s humor is
neither exclusive nor mean-spirited, for it scores many of its laughs through
the ridicule of Flora’s uncultured country cousins.10 Like Vile Bodies, Cold
Comfort Farm is set in the “near future,” that favorable setting for science
fiction, where for the purposes of political propaganda, Futurist fantasy, or
satiric emphasis, incipient cultural trends can be imaginatively exaggerated.
Like Waugh’s work too, it often appears to refuse not merely sentimental
but empathetic engagement entirely. On the other hand, in many ways
Gibbons reverses the terms of Waugh’s project: she champions the urban
modernity of the class that he calls the Bright Young Things (with one
crucial exception, to be discussed below – Flora hates parties) and attacks
the putatively traditional customs of the benighted countryside.
As caricatures, the Starkadders show almost exclusively the comic face
of the grotesque which, to recall Ruskin’s formulation, embraces both
the ludicrous and the fearful; and if the reformative motive of satire
works by ridiculing the deviant, Cold Comfort Farm seems a textbook
case of authorial derision in the service of reform. (Again, I offer this
definition only provisionally, since the double movement of satire
ultimately breaks down the very distinction between normality and
deviancy.) Still, Gibbons easily wins the reader over to her project of
imposing on the deviant Starkadders the rudiments of Flora’s Enlighten-
ment Code, which is drawn in equal parts from Jane Austen and a
fictional philosophe dubbed the Abbé Fausse-Maigre. Indeed, Flora’s
whipping her cousins into shape enacts quite ruthlessly the kind of
disciplining and policing regimes that literary studies have come to
associate with the social-discursive analyses of Michel Foucault. Every
deviant, unruly, or dangerous practice, from incestuous sexuality to
slovenly dress to regional habits of speech, is standardized, brought into
line with Flora’s own metropolitan, bourgeois norms.11
Symptomatically, the Starkadders, although they live only a train ride
from Flora’s London, are repeatedly introduced through metaphors of
colonial encounter. When Flora first meets her Aunt Judith, for example,
the elder relation regards Flora with stupefaction: “So, Flora mused, must
Columbus have felt when the poor Indian fixed his solemn, unwavering
gaze upon the great sailor’s face. For the first time a Starkadder looked
upon a civilized being” (CCF, p. 49). Later, when cousin Reuben accedes
to Flora’s social norms by offering a handshake, Gibbons updates Keats’s
encounter with Chapman’s Homer: “This was the first sign of humanity
she had encountered among the Starkadders, and she was moved by it.
She felt like stout Cortez or Sir James Jeans on spotting yet another white
dwarf” (CCF, p. 120). Of course, the Cortez and Columbus comparisons
are jokes, jokes that gain their force from the (disrupted) assumption of a
significant difference between Flora’s English country cousins and actual
“savages.” But in both cases the joke gives away the quasi-imperialist
nature of Flora’s tidying-up. Flora may not be exactly a conquistador, but
she is more than once compared to Florence Nightingale (CCF, pp. 20,
163) and behaves very much like (take your pick) a tourist, a social
worker, a missionary, or an anthropologist, all of whom, it should be
noted, perform relatively similar work in the Foucauldian order of
things. (To the extent that Flora is herself satirized for these missionary
tendencies, Cold Comfort Farm exhibits another typical dynamic of satire,
in which the “sympathetic” characters more closely identified with the
position of the satirist, such as A Handful of Dust’s Tony Last, are
themselves subjected to satiric scrutiny.12) Hence even before she arrives
at Cold Comfort, Flora amusedly imagines Sussex life to enact the sort of
violent rituals she would most likely know through racist colonial stereo-
types: “Perhaps the farm belongs to Judith now, and her man was carried
off in a tribal raid from a neighbouring village” (CCF, p. 25).
This analogy between the rural and the colonial in Cold Comfort Farm
extends well beyond these few moments of laughter, into the novel’s
representation of language. The natives of Sussex speak a foreign tongue,
a language filled with obscure words of apparently Saxon origin (scrantlet,
snood, mirsky, wennet) and possess a regional accent that surpasses in its
eccentricity even the most impenetrable passages of Wuthering Heights.
(“Mun I? . . . Mun I, Miss Judith? Oh, dunna send me. How can I look in
her liddle flower-face, and me knowin’ what I know? Oh, Miss Judith,
I beg of ’ee not to send me” (CCF, p. 36)). Flora’s struggles to grasp this
“local idiom” (CCF, p. 85) offer Gibbons a rich vein of comedy. Flora
sometimes imposes on her cousins more modern manners of speech –
asking to be called “Miss Poste” or “Miss Flora” rather than “Robert
Poste’s child” (CCF, p. 57) – while at other times she has to ask the
meaning of various regionalisms, as she slowly “learn[s] how to translate
the Starkadder argot” (CCF, p. 116). Eventually, however, she masters
the dialect:
“If ye doan’t mean you, who do ye mean?”
Flora abandoned diplomacy, and said, “You.”
“Me?”
“Ay, you.” She patiently dropped into Starkadder. (CCF, p. 118)
In language, then, as well as in other customs (dress, diet, hygiene,

sexuality), the colonial metaphors serve to widen the distance between
progressive city life and regressive country life into a gulf not between
cousins, but between nations or races or even species. Indeed, an evolu-
tionary divide emerges in Gibbons’s imagined future almost as stark as
that between H. G. Wells’s Eloi and Morlocks.
Yet even if the Starkadders, as deviants to be disciplined, or savages to
be civilized, suffer a healthy dose of ridicule, Gibbons’s real target, as
initial reviews realized, often appears to be less the rural per se than the
rural novel.13 Gibbons’s experience as a reviewer of such novels is in fact
frequently cited as a key source of her inspiration. From the first, the
Starkadders are seen to conform to all the clichés of “novels dealing with
agricultural life” (CCF, p. 26) – a tradition that includes Gibbons’s largely
forgotten and predominantly female contemporaries as well as more-
remembered canonical predecessors ranging from the Brontë sisters to
the Powys brothers.14 Baldick points out that despite our general associ-
ation of modernism with metropolitan locations and experimental tech-
niques, the realist regional novel was still thriving in 1932. Like little
imperialists, the regional novelists struggled to stake out their terrain:
“The careers of many of these [rural] novelists illustrate a process by which
steady popularity could be achieved by cornering the market in the
fictional celebration of a particular unclaimed territory.”15 For these
would-be Hardys, the literary marketplace of modernism amounted to a
scramble for England.
The rural novel, infused with Gothicism, had become so well known a
set of conventions that not only can Gibbons count on her readers getting
her references but Flora herself can know in advance exactly how her
cousins will conform to generic expectations. Seth and Reuben are named
Seth and Reuben because “highly-sexed young men living on farms are
always called Seth or Reuben” (CCF, p. 14); the Starkadder matriarch Aunt
Ada Doom (remembered best for the tag line, “I saw something nasty in the
woodshed”) is pegged as “the Dominant Grandmother Theme” (CCF,
p. 57); Meriam the hired girl is recognized as the creation of “women
novelists” who “occasionally creat[e] a primitive woman, a creature who
was as close to the earth as a bloomy greengage” (CCF, p. 69). Hackneyed
plot devices such as the dark family secret and the curse lying on the place
are also deployed parodically. Crucially, too, Flora is steadfast in refusing
to accept these conventions and the “medieval superstition” (CCF, p. 126)
that they imply. She responds, for example, to being told about the curse on
the farm with unflappable rationality: “perhaps Cousin Amos could sell the
farm and buy another one, without any curse on it, in Berkshire or
Dorsetshire?” (CCF, p. 56). In thoroughly frustrating the reader’s desire
to know what nasty something Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed or what
wrong was perpetrated against Flora’s father, Gibbons shows herself to be
similarly rejecting such premodern irrationalism.
Because Gibbons’s primary target is a set of literary conventions rather
than the lives of real farmers, she parodies not only the plots and charac-
ters of the rural novel but also, famously, its narrative description, which
teems with metaphor and hyperbole and which anthropomorphizes and
sexualizes the landscape:
The brittle air, on which the fans of the trees were etched like ageing skeletons,
seemed thronged by the bright, invisible ghosts of a million dead summers. The cold
beat in glassy waves against the eyelids of anybody who happened to be out in it.
High up, a few chalky clouds doubtfully wavered in the pale sky that curved over
against the rim of the Downs like a vast inverted pot-de-chambre. (CCF, p. 86)
Raymond Williams cites the first chapter of Lawrence’s The Rainbow as
the locus classicus of “the rural-sexual metaphor”:16
They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the
breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes
under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding.
Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that
opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their
ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire.17
Williams goes on to discuss the way Gibbons spoofs such purple prose:
Some of the more vulnerable examples came to the obvious parody of Cold
Comfort Farm, but what has to be said about that odd work is not easy.
The excessive gestures of some of the regional novels led straight to this kind of
satire, but what is also drawn on, in it, is a suburban uneasiness, a tension of
attraction and repulsion, a brittle wit which is a kind of evasion by caricature.18
In hesitant and choppy language, Williams goes on to argue that what is
evaded – both in Gibbons’s novel and the works of the “women novelists”
whom she parodies – is the “tension of an increasingly intricate and
interlocking society,” a tension already explored in the rural novels of
Eliot and Hardy. In contrast to these Victorian greats, he claims, the post-
1900 rural novel fabricates rural isolation precisely because such isolation
no longer exists: “The degree of isolation which is actual in the nine-
teenth-century novels can easily become, in their apparent successors,
factitious.”19 And because this isolation is only factitious, as Wendy
Parkins notes in enlarging on Williams, modernity has to be understood
not solely as the urban but as a dynamic whole that encompasses both
country and city, and, crucially, the characters’ mobility between the
asynchronous temporalities of the two.20
Cold Comfort Farm’s comedy therefore results not simply from the
urbane urbanite’s depiction of the rural, but rather from the confron-
tation of what Bakhtin called two chronotopes, or time-spaces, whose
juxtaposition is characteristic of an unevenly developing capitalist mod-
ernity. In other words, there would be much less to laugh at without
Flora to represent the modern, urban reader’s mixture of amusement
and revulsion toward the rural. Modifying Williams’s claim that the
novel is an “evasion by caricature” of the early consequences of global-
ization, we could say instead that Gibbons’s novel rather identifies and
plays out the desire within an “interlocking society” to restore and even
to heighten the diminishing differences between urban and rural, in
order to attenuate or repress the social relations between them.21 Such
a heightening in fact would deny not only the social but also the familial
relations between country and city: Flora is expressly not interested in
her inherited “rights” to the farm. She balks at accepting free room and
board because “if she lived at Cold Comfort as a guest, it would be an
unpardonable impertinence were she to interfere with the family’s mode
of living; but if she were paying her way, she could interfere as much as
she pleased” (CCF, p. 63). The exchange of money keeps the relationship
professional rather than familial.
At the same time, however, this desire for separation between the urban
and rural is undercut by repeated reminders of their interlocking nature.
Life on the farm is permeated with suggestions of the modern well before
Flora’s arrival – Seth stealthily looks at Parisian “art” postcards under the
dinner table and turns out to be a cinema junkie, while Meriam’s mother
aspires for her grandsons to form a jazz band.22 (This discovery of the
familiar in the heart of darkness is a version of the same joke with which
Waugh ends A Handful of Dust, where Tony’s Brazilian adventure con-
cludes with a confrontation with Dickens and domestic English culture.)
Because of the latent kinship of city and country, Sussex life proves to be
surprisingly recognizable to the young protagonist who has spent time
among London’s artier crowds. A tense conversation with Cousin Seth is a
“conversation in which she had participated before (at parties in Blooms-
bury as well as in drawing-rooms in Cheltenham)” (CCF, p. 82); sitting in
silence with her cousins gives her “the feeling that she was acting in one of
the less cheerful German highbrow films” (CCF, p. 89). In fact, Gibbons
and Flora both prove ingenious in finding unexpected parallels between
the two chronotopes, whether it is in comparing the preacher Amos’s
expression of silent fury at the intrusion of a tardy parishioner to that of
maestro Sir Henry Wood when disturbed during a performance of
Beethoven’s “Eroica” (CCF, p. 97), or in likening a tableau of stunned
Starkadders shadowed by firelight with a gallery of waxworks at Madame
Tussaud’s (CCF, p. 170). Here the novel uncovers a hidden similarity
between rural and urban experience and produces laughter through the
unlikelihood of the conjunction. Thus even as the novel’s exaggeration of
the difference between city and country works to repress or disavow
Flora’s similarity to the Starkadders, at the same time – moving in the
opposite direction – it undermines that difference in order to expose the
false idealizations of the regional novel.
One way to resolve this tension between competing forces in the novel
is to posit a gap between author and character. Flora may seek to disavow
her connection with her barbaric cousins, but Gibbons one-ups Flora
by reminding her, and us, of that connection. She thereby reveals what by
now might be a familiar structure of desire whereby it can only be
recognized when exhibited in another. So while Flora apprehends her
difference from the Starkadders, Gibbons reveals that such difference is,
to use Williams’s word, factitious, a fantasy of difference created precisely
for enjoying vicariously whatever unruly pleasures the Starkadders are
shown to enjoy. Hence George Orwell’s cutting observation on the rural
novel: “Experience shows that overcivilised people enjoy reading about
rustics (key-phrase, ‘close to the soil’) because they imagine them to be
more primitive and passionate than themselves.”23 The pleasure of reading
about the rustic is vicarious, one that can be simultaneously enjoyed and
disavowed.
gorgeous emotional wallowings

The satiric force of Gibbons’s novel then is directed less at the Starkadders
of the world than at the novelists who create them. It takes as its primary
target not the mundane realities of (modern) English rural life but the
excesses of a neo-Gothic or neo-Romantic strain of writing that valorizes
everything that Flora abhors – what she calls “gross romanticism” (CCF,
p. 135). For this reason, the novel’s fictional Foreword positions both the
author and her reader against a highbrow obscurantist modernism that
Gibbons’s first-person authorial persona calls “Literature.”24 With an
allusion to “Tintern Abbey,” Gibbons dedicates her book to the fictional
novelist Anthony Pookworthy:
Your books have been something more to me, in the last ten years, than
books. They have been springs of refreshment, loafings for the soul, eyes in the
dark. They have given me (in the midst of the vulgar and meaningless bustle of
newspaper offices) joy. It is just possible that was not quite the kind of joy you
intended to give, for which of us is infallible? But it was joy all right. (CCF, p. 6)
The twist on Wordsworth here is double: first, for Gibbons it is not

nature which consoles the author amid the din of towns and cities but
rather nature writing; and second, because the joy Gibbons experiences is
not Wordsworth’s “joy / of elevated thoughts” but instead the uninten-
tionally provoked mirth (known all too well by college professors and
second-string book reviewers like Gibbons) that is occasioned by excep-
tionally bad writing. Against Pookworthy’s highbrow excess Gibbons
positions not only herself but also her middle-class, often female readers,
“all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar
and meaningless bustle of offices, shops, and homes” (CCF, p. 6), readers
for whose sake she has “adopted the method perfected by the late Herr
Baedeker,” and marked particularly lush passages with asterisks: “In such a
manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels, and paintings by
men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to
passages in novels” (CCF, pp. 6–7). Gibbons’s reader, like her narrator, is
a tourist in the land of Starkadder.
This middlebrow, commonsense taste manifests itself not only in the
Foreword but throughout the novel. Gibbons makes cracks about
Bloomsbury bohemianism and its penchant for swapping sexual partners,
and sends up Freudianism via the (unfortunately anti-Semitic) depiction
of Mr. Mybug, who finds sexual imagery everywhere, and whose intellec-
tualism poorly conceals an unsavory and misogynistic sexual rapacity.
Modernist drama gets its lumps in a line about Eugene O’Neill plays, “the
kind that goes on for hours and hours, until the R.S.P.C. Audiences
batters the doors of the theatre in and insists on a tea interval” (CCF,
p. 177), and in the form of an experimental play on the London stage:
a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a

man employed as a waiter in a restaurant who dreams that he is the double of
another man who is employed as a steward on a liner, and who, on awakening
and realizing that he is still a waiter employed in a restaurant and not a steward
employed on a liner, goes mad and shoots his reflection in a mirror and dies. It
had seventeen scenes and only one character. (CCF, p. 146)
Avant-garde film, finally, is represented when Flora recalls a date with a

“friend who was interested in the progress of the cinema as an art” (CCF,
p. 93) and who takes her to a screening of “a film of Japanese life called
Yĕs, made by a Norwegian film company in 1915” that consists entirely of
“close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four
suicides, all done extremely slowly” (CCF, p. 93).25 While the audience,
dressed in outlandish bohemian style, sits rapt, Flora finds one “conven-
tionally dressed” viewer who shares her tastes, a Hollywood producer
whose “gaze had dwelt upon [Flora’s] neat hair and well-cut coat with
incredulous joy, as of one who should say: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’”
(CCF, p. 94). The metaphor of colonial encounter, seen earlier in Flora’s
interactions with the Starkadders, here applies equally well to her exist-
ence among barbaric bohemian cinephiles.
It might appear in these instances that Gibbons is simply turning her fire
from the rural to the urban, from the unsophisticated to the ultrasophis-
ticated, and these jokes are certainly reminiscent of Waugh’s filmmaker-
turned-architect Otto Silenus whose desire to transcend the human form
leads him to create buildings without staircases. Yet these supposedly
forward-looking urban modernists are in fact represented as precisely those
“overcivilized people” who promulgate the value of the rural and the
primitive and write the very novels that Gibbons spoofs. (It is in a London
flat, after all, that a naked Rupert Birkin expounds the virtues of African
art in Lawrence’s Women in Love.) It is well beside the point that Gibbons’s
jokes might conflate the anti-Freudian Lawrence with the psychoanalytic-
ally minded Bloomsbury, and lump both of them with the vaguely Dadaist
plays and films whose inanities she details with such glee. For such
discriminations hardly matter in the bigger picture, a picture in which all
varieties of modernist experimentalism, primitivism, or neo-romanticism
are conflated with the behavior of the Starkadders themselves.
For this reason, most critics, following the Birmingham English Studies
Group, discern a middlebrow stance not only in the Foreword but in the
novel as a whole.26 Yet, while the send-up of highbrow international
modernism is undeniable, it would be far too simple to read Cold Comfort
Farm as the revenge of an unpretentious middlebrow woman writer on a
pervasively male high modernism. For, even as Gibbons spoofs modernism
and upholds bourgeois socioeconomic hierarchies (Flora has to instruct the
Starkadders in the proper use of their servants), she singles out for ridicule
various “women novelists” (CCF, p. 67) – of whom the most significant are
generally understood to be Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb – whom she
classifies according to the kinds of literary clichés they peddle. Rather than
siding with the middlebrow woman novelist against the highbrow male
modernist, Gibbons is in fact triangulating – working both sides of Andreas
Huyssen’s great divide. What Joseph Litvak says of Flora’s adored Jane
Austen holds true equally for Gibbons herself: “Playing both sides against
the middle – against itself – middle-class sophistication vulgarizes mere (i.e.,
aristocratic) sophistication and sophisticates mere (i.e., lower-class) vulga-
rity.”27 (In Gibbons’s case, “aristocratic” and “lower-class” would denote
aesthetic or cultural strata rather than strictly socioeconomic ones.) Even
her Baedeker joke in the Foreword is double-edged, catching with one
stroke the highbrow aspirations of modernist Pookworthys and with the
other the middlebrow desire for an easy shortcut to aesthetic elevation,
the need for what Ezra Pound wryly called a “Guide to Kulchur.” In Cold
Comfort Farm, then, putatively male high modernism and putatively female
sentimental popular fiction become almost indistinguishable in their flights
of stylistic and emotional excess.
These apparent complications make more sense, however, if we frame
the conflict of the novel less as one of cultural strata (middlebrow versus
highbrow) and more as a problem of affect. Gibbons and Flora both
assume that blasé attitude diagnosed by Georg Simmel, and enacted, as
we have seen, by Wilde, Beerbohm, and Waugh. Simmel’s theorization of
the blasé derives directly from the contrast of country and city life that
Gibbons explores. In his 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,”
he claims that levels of affect differ in the metropolis and the provinces.
In reaction to the intense stimulation of metropolitan life, he argues,
the individual “creates a protective organ for itself” by “reacting [to
stimuli] primarily in a rational manner.”28 As a result, “the essentially
intellectualistic character of the mental life of the metropolis becomes
intelligible as over against that of the small town.”29 An extreme form of
this intellectualistic character is what he calls the blasé attitude, a radical
intellectualization which levels distinctions and sees all things as quantifi-
able and interchangeable – in the same way that the abstract character of
money replaces more concrete social relations. (Flora, recall, tries to keep
her relationship with her cousins one of fee-for-service.) As Simmel puts it
in The Philosophy of Money, “The blasé person . . . has completely lost the
feeling for value differences. He experiences all things as being of an
equally dull and grey hue, as not worth getting excited about, particularly
where the will is concerned.”30
Flora, much like the Bright Young Things of Vile Bodies or Brenda
Last’s circle in A Handful of Dust, embodies this blasé attitude.31 One of the
first things we learn about her is that “The death of her parents did not
cause her much grief” (CCF, p. 9). She has caused a minor scandal at
school because of her inability to “care about lacrosse” (CCF, p. 12) or
other athletic games; when asked what she does care about, Flora is “not
quite sure” (CCF, p. 12). She can barely conceive of anything that excites
emotional commitment. Most of the activities she finally comes up with
are framed in the negative: “not being bothered to do things,” “not being
asked to express opinions,” “laughing at the kind of joke other people
didn’t think at all funny” (CCF, p. 12). The negatives imply that respond-
ing to stimulus in even the most perfunctory way requires an excessive
expenditure of energy, and that the only acceptable response to the
emotional commitments of others is a private and minor sense of amuse-
ment. When it comes to marriage, too, Flora is pragmatic and unromantic,
regarding it with a “compelling, . . . almost Gallic, cynicism” (CCF, p. 14).
Flora can’t even be moved by parties; the one form of stimulus that seemed
capable of exciting Waugh’s Bright Young Things leaves her flat.
If Flora suffers from a deficit of affect, however, Cold Comfort Farm
offers a surplus. Aunt Ada Doom, the matriarch of the farm (whose very
name provides a rhythmic echo of the place’s), revels in everything Flora
abhors:
Persons of Aunt Ada’s temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were
what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out,
and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making
unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional
wallowings. (CCF, p. 57)
Her daughter Judith, similarly, has “a habit of multiplying every emotion

she felt by twice its own weight” (CCF, p. 203), while Cousin Harkaway is
“given to bursts of fury about very little, when you came to sift matters”
(CCF, p. 39) – here the narrative voice takes on the blasé outlook of Flora
herself. Indeed, Flora realizes early on that “things seemed to go wrong
in the country more frequently, somehow, than they did in Town” (CCF,
p. 21). That the country, not the city, should be the site of emotional
display accords fully with Simmel’s assessment: “The mental life . . . of the
small town . . . rests more on feelings and emotional relationships.”32 Yet
we should also note some distance now from Simmel’s formulation: while
for Simmel (as for Lawrence in the passage cited above) the country offers
affective rhythms associated with “the steady equilibrium of unbroken
customs,” it appears for Gibbons as wild and regressive.33
But if Flora can’t abide excessive emotion, why does she head off to
Sussex in the first place? The short answer is that even as she aims to
discipline the Starkadders’ unruly affect, Flora also seeks to experience the
affect for her own pleasure. Here we see again the tension between Flora’s
disavowal of her kinship with the Starkadders and the consistent narrator-
ial recognition of it – the tension that Orwell discerns in mocking the
overcivilized for their pleasure in reading about the rustic. Such tension is,
moreover, a version of the duplicity that I am arguing is characteristic of
satire itself, excoriating vice and representing it in the same gesture. What
the Starkadders offer Flora is pleasurable stimulation. Flora believes that
living with relatives will be “more amusing” (CCF, p. 20) than working,
which offers only the routinization of experience that Simmel and many
other social theorists discerned as a signal aspect of modern urban life.
Even the skeptical Mrs. Smiling concedes that life with the Sussex cousins
“does sound interesting and appalling” – although ultimately not interest-
ing enough to overcome Flora’s blasé attitude: “You will soon grow tired of
it, anyhow” (CCF, p. 26). When Flora boards the train for Howling(!),
Sussex, she reassures her friends that she will “find it very amusing and not
at all too much for me” (CCF, p. 30), and later finds the place “not without
its promise of mystery and excitement” (CCF, p. 58). In the end, the place
makes good on this promise; just before her departure she tells Reuben that
her stay has “been the most enormous diversion” (CCF, p. 211).
Without doubt, there is, in addition to this pleasurable “diversion,” a
hint of revulsion or horror that plays around the edges of Flora’s con-
sciousness as she anticipates and actually experiences life on the farm.
Her first words in Sussex are “How revolting!” (CCF, p. 46), and the
“revolting,” “appalling,” “mysterious” aspect of Cold Comfort Farm
suggests the “fearful” side of Ruskin’s grotesque. Yet throughout the novel
Flora fulfills her pledge to her friends by mastering such revulsion and
taming her own affect, with the end result that the Sussex holiday
provides just enough of an affective charge to divert her, but never so
much as radically to disconcert her. No longer merely a descriptive term,
used by Simmel to identify a reaction on the part of the modern subject to
metropolitan life, the blasé is now a prescriptive one, an emotional
protocol imposed with the aim of extending bourgeois norms.
In its imposition of modern codes of affect, then, Flora’s quest to
discipline the Starkadders departs from the paradigmatic nineteenth-cen-
tury novelistic plot as formulated first by Georg Lukács and later by Walter
Benjamin as a search for the meaning of life on the part of a hero who senses
the fragmented nature of modern existence.34 Such a formulation – what
Lukács called “transcendental homelessness,”35 and which, Elizabeth
Goodstein argues, owes a direct debt to Simmel’s attention to “the subjective
effects of modernization” and his analysis of the ways in which the subject
resists or adapts to the demands of modernity36 – posits a gulf between an
inner need and an (unattainable) outer meaning. As Lukács puts it, “The
novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer
directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a
problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”37 However, Flora’s
desire hardly hints at the heroic, Lukácsian scale of reconciling individual
(ized) experience with the meaning of life. For she seeks nothing so grand as
“the meaning of life” but only desires “amusement.” And amusement – as
opposed to pleasure, or joy, or ecstasy – designates merely a base-level
pleasurable stimulus, the smallest possible elevation of affect above boredom
itself. Thus where Lukács finds in the grand aspirations of the novelistic
subject a heroic desire for meaning, Gibbons replaces the heroic character
with a type, a type whose inmost desires are no more than itches, whims,
and hankerings.
In this idea of a type, rather than a fully individuated character, we can
see the frustration of what Simmel calls the Romantic urge for individual
distinction, the desire of “individuals who had been liberated from their
historical bonds . . . to distinguish themselves from one another.”38 Thus
while the Romantic strain of the novel – or even what I’ve earlier called
the humanist-ethical strain – places a premium on what Simmel calls the
individual’s “qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability” as “criteria of his
value,”39 Wyndham Lewis’s anti-Romantic “classicism” scoffs at such an
individuating desire and chooses instead to see all human beings as types.
Indeed, the reduction of characters to types is exactly what Lewis calls the
external method of satire.
Moreover, as soon as the novel’s conflict is framed as a problem of the
regulation of affect – of avoiding both boredom and emotional overload –
then once again its many seemingly superficial references to the colonies
prove telling. Mrs. Smiling’s numerous suitors earn from Flora and
Mrs. Smiling the Whitmanian nickname of “the Pioneers-O” for their
far-flung travels to the outposts of empire: “All the Pioneers-O had short,
brusque nicknames rather like the cries of strange animals, but this was
quite natural, for they all came from places full of strange animals” (CCF,
p. 10). Sure enough, whereas Mrs. Smiling’s hobbies include “the imposing
of reason and moderation into the bosoms of some fifteen gentlemen of
birth and fortune who were madly in love with her” (CCF, p. 10), her
suitors conversely are marked by affective regression, as Flora observes:
“Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the
human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired” (CCF,
p. 30). Thus the emotionally profligate Pioneers-O serve for Mrs. Smiling
the same function that the effusive Starkadders serve for Flora: that of
providing affective stimulus through the vicarious experience of regression.
In addition to the goal of amusement, however, Flora confesses to
another motive behind her visit to Cold Comfort; she hopes to “collect . . .
material” for a novel she will someday write that she intends to be “as
good as ‘Persuasion’, but with a modern setting” (CCF, p. 19). The novel
for her is a kind of travel writing (again the Baedeker reference in the
Foreword proves resonant), a gathering of exotic rural experience and
packaging of it for the consumption of the metropolitan stay-at-home.40
In like manner, the Pioneers-O return from the colonies with their own
hoard of narrative treasures, real-life tales that still possess the ability to
thrill; at a dinner in London, a suitor named Bikki “pleased [Flora and
Mrs. Smiling] by corroborating all the awful rumours they had heard
about [Kenya]” (CCF, p. 10). For the city-dweller, therefore, the colony
(or the countryside) offers not only resources and labor to be exploited but
also life experiences that are still capable of rousing affective response.
Indeed, this stimulative potential of the colony goes a long way to
explaining the modernist cultural interest in the colonial itself: it serves
as a counterweight to the deadening effects of the European metropolitan
present. If Picasso weren’t bored with European art, he might never have
picked up those African masks.41
In short, while both the countryside and the colony are marked by
emotional tempest, Flora seeks both to impose and to project outer calm
on Cold Comfort just as Mrs. Smiling seeks to impose it on her Pioneers-
O. Flora imposes it through modern technologies. When instructed in the
use of birth control, Meriam is told to use her “intelligence” to ensure that
“nothing will happen to [her]” (CCF, p. 69), while the intractable Aunt
Judith, oedipally fixated on her son Seth, is simply sent to a Viennese
analyst who re-routes her emotions onto old European churches: “It was
one of his disagreeable duties as a State psycho-analyst to remove the
affections of his patients from the embarrassing objects upon which they
were concentrated; and focus them, instead, upon himself. It was true that
they did not remain focused there for long: as soon as he could, he switched
them onto something harmless, like chess or gardening” (CCF, p. 201).
Indeed, this therapeutic re-channeling of affect is what has already
happened to Mrs. Smiling, whose only erotic commitment is her hobby
of collecting brassieres (a sublimation of sexuality through shopping), and
even to Flora herself, whose own “harmless” hobby is nothing less than the
very project of disciplining the Starkadders that constitutes the novel.
But as important as Flora’s imposition of equanimity on Cold Comfort
Farm is her imposition of it on herself. Throughout the novel, Flora’s
interactions with her cousins, and her social exchanges more generally, are
characterized by disinterestedness in her pursuit of predetermined aims, a
kind of professional neutrality that emerges in the repeated comparisons
of social relations to games of strategy. Thus although Flora “detested
rows and scenes,” of the kind favored by the Starkadders, she gains a
reduced pleasure from more bloodless intellectual games and contests:
“[She] enjoyed quietly pitting her cool will against opposition. It amused
her; and when she was defeated, she withdrew in good order and lost
interest in the campaign” (CCF, p. 129). A conversation with Seth strikes
her as “a kind of jockeying for place, a shifting about of the pieces on the
board before the real game began” (CCF, p. 82). When she tries to ignore
the unctuous Mybug, “he was forced to open the game with, ‘Well?’
(A gambit which Flora, with sinking heart, recognized as one used by
intellectuals who had decided to fall in love with you)” (CCF, p. 101).
Flora’s reduction of social exchange to strategic calculation wholly con-
cords with Simmel’s analysis of metropolitan habits of mind: “The
calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money
economy corresponds to the ideal of natural science, namely that of
transforming the world into an arithmetical problem.”42
Indeed for Simmel (as for Benjamin after him) the experience of
modernity is figured as a traumatic shock, characterized as it is by “the
unexpectedness of violent stimuli,”43 and the blasé attitude is a direct
response to this shock. Thus an emblematic modern figure is the trauma-
tized veteran of the Great War, central to texts such as Mrs. Dalloway,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Sun Also Rises, and, as we saw, Antic
Hay. Gibbons plays on this trope in the description of Flora’s London
friend Claud, who “had served in the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ’46”
(CCF, p. 160), and whose resigned acceptance of life’s follies and injustices
matches any of Hemingway’s wounded and stoic soldiers: “He had seen
his friends die in anguish in the wars. For him, the whole of the rest of his
life was an amusing game which no man of taste and intelligence could
permit himself to take seriously” (CCF, p. 160). Behind Claud’s formula-
tion of social relations as a game of strategy or an arithmetical problem lie
very real human stakes. Yet the narrator, equal to or exceeding Claud in
indifference, gives no further hint of those stakes, and even implies that
the traumatized veteran shocked into aloofness is itself a narrative con-
vention worthy of spoofing.
Still, to say that Flora, like Claud, regards social relations as a game is not
to say that she cannot experience heightened emotional states, only that she
makes every effort to avoid such heightened states or to restore herself to a
state of calm – that is, that she believes “her own conduct must be carefully
regulated” (CCF, p. 155). When cousin Amos, a preacher in the Church of
the Quivering Brethren, describes physically striking a female congregant
with a Bible in order “to let the devil out of her soul,” Flora seems
disturbed by the misogynistic violence, but soon regains her poise: “‘And
did it come out?’ asked Flora, endeavouring with some effort to maintain
the proper spirit of scientific enquiry” (CCF, p. 90). When Judith, speaking
of Meriam’s yearly pregnancies, claims, “’Tes the hand of Nature, and we
women cannot escape it,” Flora is irritated, but maintains her outer calm,
as we learn in a parenthetical aside: “(‘Oh, can’t we?’ thought Flora, with
spirit, but aloud she only made such noises of tut-tutting regret as she felt
were appropriate to the occasion”) (CCF, p. 64). Or again, when Urk
intercepts a letter for her – importantly, one from her cousin Charles with
whom she is (against her pragmatic beliefs about marriage) falling in love –
she experiences “a start of indignation” but allows her anger to come
through only in her “crisp” tone of voice and a short wisecrack (one that
itself is facetiously censured by the even more blasé narrator):
“Who’s writing to you from Howchiker?”
“Mary, Queen of Scots. Thanks,” said Flora, with deplorable pertness, and twitched
[the letter] out of his hand. (CCF, p. 140)
As a general rule, much of the comedy of the novel sets Flora as a “straight
man” in exactly this way, as she determinedly keeps her cool amid the
astonishing and outrageous excesses of life at Cold Comfort. At the same
time, she seeks to minimize any other possible source of excitation, which
might distract her from her reformative project. For this reason she
chooses not to have Charles come out from London to escort her to
a ball: “if Charles came to partner her she would be conscious of a certain
interest in their own personal relationship, a current of unsaid speeches,
which would distract her feelings and perhaps confuse a little her
thoughts” (CCF, p. 137). Even in the narration, the “speeches” must be
“unsaid” – like Flora’s unspoken parenthetical thoughts in the exchange
with Judith cited above – and Flora only owns up to the possibility of “a
little” confusion. Her erotic attachment is acknowledged only to be
deemed impermissible in the next clause; like a boxer before a champion-
ship bout, Flora regards libidinal excitation as a dangerous distraction
from her disinterested professional goals.
Flora then embodies internally the same struggle to master affect that the
novel more generally dramatizes; on both counts, by and large, she suc-
ceeds. Flora not only acknowledges her desire for this success but in fact
presents it to herself as a struggle between competing world views: “It would
be a triumph of the Higher Common Sense over Aunt Ada Doom. It
would be a victory for Flora’s philosophy of life over the sub-conscious life-
philosophy of the Starkadders” (CCF, p. 134). In defeating Aunt Ada, Flora
sees herself as triumphing over female sentimental excess. Her conviction of
the rightness of her cause is bolstered by her recognition that the sentimen-
tal itself serves as a cover for power relations, a kind of ressentiment, or, to
use Sedgwick’s neologism, ressentimentality.44 Through this ressentimen-
tality Aunt Ada transforms her own vague sense of injury (from having seen
that something nasty in the woodshed) into a tyrannical ability to subject
others to her will: “It struck her that Aunt Ada Doom’s madness had taken
the most convenient form possible” (CCF, p. 119). Flora articulates the
modernist hermeneutic of suspicion as directed toward affective life. The
blasts of emotion emanating from the matriarch are interpreted as tools of
domination, and Aunt Ada’s long-nurtured wound is ironically redescribed
as an exercise in aggrandizing self-deception. To be sure, the men at Cold
Comfort Farm can be equally excessive in their emotions, and equally
exploitive, but in making the tyrant of the farm a matriarch, Gibbons
suggests that Flora’s battle is not merely over the sentimental but over the
representation of the female as sentimental.
tolerable comfort
It is this triumph of the Enlightenment maxims of the Abbé Fausse-Maigre
over the ressentiment of the Brontëan madwoman in the attic45 that
Gibbons signals in her choice of the novel’s epigraph, Jane Austen’s
famous first-person intrusion in the first line of the last chapter of
Mansfield Park: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.” Gibbons
implies – to resituate the epigraph in its original context – an Austenian
desire to “quit such odious subjects,” “to restore everybody . . . to tolerable
comfort,” and “to have done with all the rest.”46 It is crucial here to discern
the importance of Gibbons’s choice of Austen’s comic-satiric mode of
writing as a means of achieving the desired “tolerable comfort.” Bored
with, or uninterested in, the emotional wallowings of Aunt Ada and her
ilk, Gibbons deliberately deploys a tonal approach to her subject – a
sensibility – that can both represent and master the affective surplus that
Cold Comfort Farm provides. This approach is nothing less than satire
itself. In Gibbons’s Foreword, the author distinguishes the comic-satiric
mode of her own book, which is “meant to be . . . funny” (Gibbons’s
ellipses) from Pookworthy’s more ambitious literary endeavors, which are
“not . . . funny” (CCF, p. 6) and which she describes as “records of intense
spiritual struggles, staged in the wild settings of mere, berg or fen . . . more
like thunderstorms than books” (CCF, p. 6). (That cliché of the sublime,
the thunderstorm, should also recall Aunt Ada’s pleasure in emotionally
stormy weather.) Gibbons’s satiric provocation of laughter is an alterna-
tive, even an antidote, to the emotional deluges of sentimental fiction,
including those of sentimental modernism.
By disciplining the affect of Cold Comfort Farm, then, Gibbons-as-
Flora achieves the kind of emotion-free state that Henri Bergson sees as
necessary to the production of the comic. The comic for Bergson, like
the urban for Simmel, is characteristic of the intelligence rather than the
passions. Bergson notes “the absence of feeling which usually accompanies
laughter,” and argues that, for comedy to succeed, something quite like
the blasé attitude is required: “It seems as though the comic could not
produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul
that is thoroughly calm and unruffled . . . Laughter has no greater foe than
emotion.”47 Bergson’s concluding formulation is striking: “the comic
demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart.”48 Like
Simmel, too, the post-Darwinian Bergson notes that life requires the
organism to respond to stimuli and adapt to a changing environment:
“What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention
that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain
elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in conse-
quence.”49 This “elasticity of mind,” like Simmel’s “intellectualistic”
mental character of the metropolitan, is for Bergson a characteristic of
the human, as opposed to the rigidity that makes people mechanical or
thing-like. It is precisely such intelligent or abstract adaptability that Flora
demonstrates in achieving her reformative goals. Never in thrall to her
passions, she is steady but never mad in pursuit, dogged but never obsessed.
Thus the novel itself, in imposing Austenian tidiness on the Brontëan
countryside, preserves just enough of the unruly emotions of the Starkad-
ders to cause pleasure, but never so much as to incite revulsion or violence.
There is, however, a significant glitch in this reading of the novel as a
story of the affective modernization of Cold Comfort Farm, and that is the
novel’s ending. This ending imposes on an otherwise idiosyncratic narra-
tive a highly conventional marriage plot in which Flora, after arranging her
cousin Elfine’s wedding, agrees to marry her handsome cousin Charles,
who then whisks her away from Sussex in his airplane, the Speed Cop II. As
the propellers begin to roar, Flora leans against Charles and puts aside her
cares: “Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops,
she adored being bossed about. It was so restful” (CCF, p. 232). Such an
ending seems to indulge all of the sentimental tendencies – the reader’s
and the heroine’s – so professionally kept at bay for the course of the
novel. The cool exterior in fact begins to crack a bit earlier when Flora
concedes a “something strangely like affection” (CCF, p. 203) for the farm,
and the narrator (with no ironic Baedeker-style asterisks) lavishes praise
upon the beauty of the countryside, which now is beginning to resemble a
landscaped English garden more than a Brontëan moor: “There were no
clouds in the blue sky, whose colour was beginning to deepen with the
advance of night, and the face of the whole countryside was softened by
the shadows which were slowly growing in the depths of the woods and
hedgerows” (CCF, p. 203). The apparently conventional ending seems
lifted straight out of Hollywood romances, and appears to give in to
exactly the kind of sentimentality that women are accused – even by
Gibbons – of producing and consuming. Does this conventional ending
represent a capitulation to sentimentality? Or is it, as Reggie Oliver
suggests, merely a compromise-formation, in which a modicum of affec-
tion can be admitted only after author and heroine alike have proven
themselves sufficiently tough-minded? It must also be asked what are the
consequences of this ending for the novel’s feminist possibilities. Is this
reversion to sentiment a feminist affirmation of the value of feeling? Or,
conversely, by acknowledging the sentimental in Flora does it reinstate the
hierarchies that the blasé Flora and the satiric Gibbons had seemed so
successful at overturning?
Those critics who do comment on the ending tend to see it as a move
away from satire toward “nostalgia and romance,”50 and Parkins sees a
reversion to a nineteenth-century “narrative of the woman as domestic
manager.”51 Now it may be that this critical suspicion of the romantic
happy ending is a result of the triumph of modernist aesthetics, a suspi-
cion that makes love itself appear as sentimentality. As Suzanne Clark
writes: “Episodes of love . . . appear in the modern, rational conversation,
the discourse of our times, as something to be gotten over, grown out
of.”52 The questions, then, about how to interpret the ending of Cold
Comfort Farm only replicate the larger debate about the sentimental in
culture more generally, distilled in the still-volatile 1980s debate within
feminism between Douglas (who contends that the sentimental is com-
plicit with patriarchy) and Tompkins (who argues for its aesthetic value
and political force). Indeed, Rita Felski has shown persuasively that
women within modernism were paradoxically represented as both outside
of modernity – primitive and pre-cultural – and emblematic of it – though
generally emblematic of the “demonized” aspect of a cultural formation
characterized by needless and mindless consumption. Gibbons, in this
light, may be said to face a double-bind in her theorization of the modern.
In rejecting the misogynist characterization of the female as primitive,
emotional, and outside of culture, she makes Flora an agent of civiliza-
tion. But she then finds herself running up against the equally misogynist
cliché of the woman as representative of the “vulgar materialism brought
about by capitalist development.”53
To a degree then, any critical suspicion of the affective stances
prompted in the novel’s final pages ultimately signals a more fundamental
double-bind in theorizing what Felski calls the gender of modernity.
However, there is yet another interpretive possibility I want to introduce.
That possibility begins with Regina Barreca’s reading of Mansfield Park’s
final marriage – a marriage that has historically produced similar dissatis-
faction among readers. Writes Barreca about Fanny Price’s all-too-perfect
union with Edmund Bertram: “Austen refuses to provide the final satis-
faction of a romance achieved through routes other than the path dictated
by the textual necessity of a happy ending.”54 Austen acknowledges her
reader’s desire for, or the generic demand for, the marriage between
Fanny and Edmund, but she provides it in such a cursory way as to signal
the weakness of her own commitment to such conventions. It is hardly a
stretch to believe that Gibbons uses the identical strategy in Cold Comfort
Farm, or even that she learned such a strategy from Mansfield Park.
Gibbons draws her epigraph from that novel and has Flora read the book
“to refresh her spirits” (CCF, p. 206) as Cold Comfort Farm nears its
climax. Flora Poste shares the initials of her name with Fanny Price, and,
like Fanny, her chosen mate is a cousin who anachronistically plans to be
a country parson. (Gibbons’s own husband was, just as anachronistically,
himself a country parson; but all that tells us is that Gibbons modeled her
own life, as well as her character’s, after a Jane Austen novel.55) The
prominent allusions serve not only to invoke a general Austenian aesthetic
of tidiness but also to recognize Austen’s own duplicity in the use of the
marriage plot. Thus, rather than simply surrendering her agency to a
husband, Flora agrees to be bossed around by Charles for the simple
reason that Gibbons/Flora has already exerted such mastery in designing
Charles as the cliché of the perfect husband. Charles is a machine Flora
has built, another modern appliance – like the new brush she gives Adam
to replace the thorny twig he uses to clean the dishes – that can relieve her
of one more wearying task of domestic management.
The feminist possibilities of the novel then can survive this parodic but
perhaps not wholly cynical concession to romance.56 Flora, inarguably,
has shown herself a model of a modern, educated woman. She advocates
birth control to Meriam, the hired girl, and thus frees her from the yearly
spring pregnancies that have come upon her seemingly as naturally as the
budding of the sukebind flowers. (That Flora possesses the knowledge of
how to instruct Meriam in contraception suggests too that she is not
herself inexperienced sexually.) She quietly bristles at the pet theories of
the misogynistic Mybug, who suggests that women lack souls and that
Branwell Brontë was the real author behind his sisters’ successes. And
Flora’s Enlightenment values certainly include the sexual liberation of
women:
There they all were. Enjoying themselves. Having a nice time. And having it in
an ordinary human manner. Not having it because they were raping somebody,
or beating somebody, or having religious mania or being doomed to silence by a
gloomy, earthy pride, or loving the soil with the fierce desire of a lecher, or
anything of that sort. No, they were just enjoying an ordinary human event, like
any of the other millions of ordinary people in the world. (CCF, p. 217)
Literary studies have become so used to knee-jerk critiques of Enlighten-

ment that the liberatory claims of Flora’s reforms can easily seem a
Foucauldian ruse of power. To be sure, disciplining those labeled deviant,
even through apparently benign mechanisms, has historically caused
much suffering. But in speaking in favor of liberal, reformist feminism,
in siding with the politics of Marie Stopes rather than Flem Snopes,
Gibbons also speaks for social organization as a triumph of not only the
human, but also the humane. For Enlightenment may be an incomplete
project, but it is not a misguided one. Indeed, in this valorization of the
ordinary and the normal, in the linking of the reformed Starkadders to
millions of others, Flora – as a comedian and a satirist within the text –
enacts a leveling of distinctions and renders the Starkadders “ordinary,”
merely a few among “millions.” Such a leveling is, more than anything,
blasé: “The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward distinc-
tions between things.”57
chapter 6
Nathanael West and the mystery of feeling
Understanding the place of satire within modernism entails, I have

been arguing, attention to the ways in which modern feeling can take
on surprising new guises. Every bit as much as Waugh and Gibbons,
Nathanael West explicitly thematizes problems of feeling throughout his
writing. Often in his work, the mere experience of particular emotions,
especially in response to scenes of suffering, becomes a source of conflict
for characters and readers alike. As Justus Nieland has observed, West
“regularly refuses to provide the affective codes that might give his reader
a clue about how to feel.”1 Such conflict arises because even as West’s
fiction subjects sentimental expressions of feeling to intense satiric
scrutiny, it is no less searching in its scrutiny of satire itself, and of
the ironic or joking postures that accompany it. In fact, the artistic quests
of virtually all West’s protagonists can be seen very simply as efforts to
resolve the tension between the claims of satire and those of sentiment.
West’s fiction at once manifests and resists a satiric impulse, and the push
and pull of this ambivalence constitute the central dynamic of his work.
At the age of nineteen, writing in the Brown University literary maga-
zine, West already discerns this conflict: “In reading Euripides, we find
ourself ready to classify him at moments as a satirist and at other moments
as a man of feeling. Of course he was both. Sometimes he seems like a
religious man and again like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was
a great playwright.”2 In this formulation, wry in its own tone if bland in
its conclusions, satire negates feeling, and both pose risks for the writer:
excessive feeling leads to religion and mysticism, while excessive satire
leads to performance and charlatanry. In The Dream Life of Balso Snell,
similarly, John Gilson remarks: “I always find it necessary to burlesque the
mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh
is ‘bitter,’ I must laugh at the laugh. The ritual of feeling demands
burlesque.”3 Feeling for Gilson is mere ritual, empty adherence to a
prescribed norm; both sentimental feelings and the bitter negation of
115
116 Nathanael West and the mystery of feeling
those feelings must be rejected. In contrast to this ever-more-ironic
suppression of feeling stands “mystery,” a term that gestures at the
unknowable and the authentic, and which, I will argue, is never wholly
negated in West.
What follows is an exploration of this “mystery of feeling” in West’s
writing, the need to burlesque this mystery, and indeed the need to
burlesque the burlesque. I examine West’s extra-fictional writings and
his fate among his critics, and find within them a tension between self-
definition and political commitment – a tension which fundamentally
structures West’s last novel, The Day of the Locust, producing a dominant
mood that has been called grotesque. West deploys two distinct valences
of the grotesque: the grotesque as the sign of tormented interiority
(derived in part from Sherwood Anderson) and an externalist grotesque
that depicts the human as mechanical (in the manner of Wyndham
Lewis). The West that emerges in my reading is thus neither (quite) the
modernist-as-expressionist who gives words to the agony of existence, nor
the modernist-as-ironist who regards such agony with cold-eyed detach-
ment. Ultimately, West’s grotesque representations provoke an uncanny
dread, and paradoxically affirm the importance of the feeling they set
out to negate.
the terrible sincere struggle

In moving across the Atlantic, from Waugh and Gibbons to West, many
of the dynamics of late modernist satire remain clearly recognizable. But
there is no doubt that West operates on a wider social canvas than the
English contemporaries I have treated, and abandons the subgenre of the
comedy of manners. Consequently, a broader public – which in Waugh
appears as a disembodied force of public opinion vaguely impinging on an
insular upper-class world – is in the American writer addressed directly, as
a massive if still often anonymous social entity. This obvious concern with
working-class suffering has been crucial to the attempt of recent critics to
claim West for a progressive strain of experimental literature that descends
from a Continental “avant-garde,” and to attenuate his connection to a
putatively more formalistic, apolitical “modernism.”4 According to critics
such as Rita Barnard and Jonathan Veitch, such a depoliticized, “mod-
ernist” version of West was created by a post-war liberalism that took the
suffering of his angst-ridden, sexually frustrated, Dostoevskian heroes,
and their withdrawal into dream, delusion, and art, as symptomatic of a
vaguely existentialist human condition – a “metaphysical sense of the
helplessness of man trapped in an unstable universe.”5 In contrast, Barnard,
Veitch, and others have related West’s work to consumerism, professional-
ization, and mass media, resituating his novels within the historical and
ideological context of 1930s America and finding in them a critique of a
world permeated by simulacrum and commodity-fetishism.6
As it turns out, this politically refurbished version of West conforms
well to the once-standard narrative of literary history in which the 1930s
mark a return to politics from the formalistic concerns of the 1920s.7
Whatever the flaws in that narrative, the enormous political and economic
upheavals of the decade undoubtedly registered on some of its most aloof
wits, as Dorothy Parker attested in 1937:
I want to say first that I came to Spain without my ax to grind. I didn’t bring
messages from anybody, nor greetings to anybody. I am not a member of any
political party. The only group I have ever been affiliated with is that not
especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the
out-of-date garment of a sense of humor. I heard someone say, and so I said it
too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. I don’t suppose I ever really
believed it, but it was easy and comforting and so I said it. Well, now I know.
I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be.
And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.8
West was friendly with Parker and had familial connections to her cele-
brated circle of wits; his sister, Laura, married and wrote screenplays with
S. J. Perelman, while his wife, Eileen McKenney, was the subject her own
sister Ruth’s stories in the New Yorker. Yet if these biographical links
suggest particular geographic or institutional locations for late modernist
satire, the more fundamental similarity between West and Parker is the
shared notion that satire can be outgrown, that irony can be and must be
put aside when political commitment finally calls.
Yet there is a crucial difference. While Parker avers with confidence
that “there are things that never have been funny, and never will be,” West
struggles to make such a renunciation. Thus, even those who aim to
recover a political West must concede that his is a peculiar case. His
politics were progressive, and in the later 1930s he attended meetings of
the Hollywood anti-Nazi League, but he had, by the spring of 1939,
rejected the mode of the prominent leftist writers of the day.9 In a letter
to Malcolm Cowley, he describes himself as divided – committed to the
cause but unable to accept its literature:
Take the “mother” in Steinbeck’s swell novel – I want to believe in her and yet
inside myself I honestly can’t. When not writing a novel – say at a meeting of a
committee we have out here to help the migratory worker – I do believe it and try
to act on that belief. But at the typewriter by myself I can’t.10
Whereas Parker self-importantly renounces her comic tendencies, West wor-
ries that he can’t escape his: “I’m a comic writer and it seems impossible for me
to handle any of the ‘big things’ without seeming to laugh or at least smile.”11
His uncontrollable comic proclivities, he fears, are also hurting him
commercially. To Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he voices the
identical complaint:
Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the “schools.” My books
meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I’m
lucky to be published. And yet I only have a desire to remedy all that before
sitting down to write, once begun I do it my way. I forget the broad sweep, the
big canvas, the shot-gun adjectives, the important people, the significant ideas,
the lessons to be taught, the epic Thomas Wolfe, the realistic James Farrell – and
go on making what one critic called “private and unfunny jokes.”12
A private and unfunny joke is something of an oxymoron, since, as Freud and
Bergson both note, jokes are inherently social. Yet West’s jokes are unshared
and noncathartic, achieving no therapeutic release.13 His joking style thus
defeats any political impulse. He mentions to Cowley an excised scene from
The Day of the Locust: “I tried to describe a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League,
but it didn’t fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film. The
terrible sincere struggle of the League came out comic when I touched it and
even libelous.”14 A Midas of irony, everything West touches turns into a joke.
West’s letters, in short, articulate a rift between his ethical-political
ambitions (“the terrible sincere struggle”) and the aesthetic constraints of
his sensibility (“private and unfunny jokes”), a rift that has been reproduced
in the critical debate over the meaning of his work as political or ironic.15
Could West reconcile his political beliefs and his comic mode of writing? In
a letter of June 1939, West articulates a solution to his friend Jack Conroy:
As I understand it, Balzac, Marx thought, was the better writer, even revolution-
ist, than [Eugène] Sue, despite the fact that Sue was a confirmed radical while
Balzac called himself a royalist. Balzac was the better because he kept his eye
firmly fixed on the middle class and wrote with great truth and no wish-
fulfillment. The superior truth alone in Balzac was sufficient to reveal the
structure of middle class society and its defects.16
His own “great truth,” West implies, is superior to the “wish-fulfillment”
that the neonaturalists trade in. Of course, many readers have found that
in West’s novels the very problem with a modern, artifice-ridden culture
lies in its false promise of just such an easy wish-fulfillment – what is
elsewhere named sentimentality. By implication, the neonaturalist aes-
thetic would be a symptom of the same sentimental culture it denounces,
and the rejection of the wish-fulfillment it proffers would be necessary for
any legitimate political critique.17
What is the role for satire in this formula? If one accepts the assump-
tion that satire is a normative, moralistic mode, its function seems clear
enough: comic ridicule (technique) works in the service of social criticism
(content). But, as I’ve tried to demonstrate, satire’s moral impulse can
mask, even license, more primitive energies; satire, by delighting in the
representation and ridicule of vice, unleashes the moral entropy it pur-
ports to decry. Even if West at times can be seen as excoriating vice, the
anarchic power set free by his satire regularly exceeds the aims of moral
correction. The problem is not simply that the author himself claimed
to have “no particular message for a troubled world (except possibly
‘beware’).”18 It is that West employs the same satiric method in treating
causes with which he claims sympathy (like the struggle of the anti-Nazi
League) as in treating ideologies he rejects.
For example, in A Cool Million, the simple-minded hero, Lemuel Pitkin,
witnesses a didactic Communist “playlet” that shows an old grandmother
defrauded of her life savings by ruthless capitalists.19 But it is impossible to
read West’s presentation of this play as an indictment of capitalism. We
laugh at the clichéd symbolism with which the salesman entices the grand-
mother to surrender her money, but the play itself relies on a symbolism no
less inert. From the “old white-haired grandmother knitting near the fire” in
“a typical American home,” to the “sleek, young salesman” with the “rich
melodic voice,” to the “idle breeze [that] plays mischievously with the rags
draping the four corpses,” the entire drama is written to highlight its own
predictability; it treats the reader as if she were as mentally under-equipped as
Lem himself.20 While it is true that Lem – to our surprise and delight – is
profoundly upset by the play, this sensitivity is less a sign of his ethical
convictions than of his stunning idiocy. Rather than engaging our sympathy
for the grandmother’s plight, the comedy disengages us. The delight the
novel takes in its depiction of the Marxist morality play suggests a sensibility
that puts aside political concerns for comic indulgence.
An even more tangled treatment of Marxist theory occurs in Miss
Lonelyhearts, where the editor Shrike distributes to partygoers letters that
the advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts has received:
This one is a jim-dandy. A young boy wants a violin. It looks simple; all you have
to do is get the kid one. But then you discover that he has dictated the letter to his
little sister. He is paralyzed and can’t even feed himself. He has a toy violin and
hugs it to his chest, imitating the sound of playing with his mouth. How
pathetic! However, one can learn much from this parable. Label the boy Labor,
the violin Capital and so on . . .21
What first appears as an economic problem, satisfying a wish for a
commodity, becomes instead an example of brute, irremediable suffering.
The boy desires not a violin, but the ability to play one, and his inability
to reproduce the beauty of music renders his suffering all the more acute.
Yet, with a single sentence, “How pathetic!”, Shrike at once sums up and
dismisses the emotional appeal of the boy’s longing. Instead he reads the
story as a “parable” of capitalism – a reading that, in its attempt to recover
a political meaning, becomes an empty rhetorical exercise. As the “and so
on . . .” suggests, the Marxist metanarrative is reduced to a predictable
cliché. The very gesture of interpretation is here literally no more than a
parlor game in which a case of suffering is “a jim-dandy” because and only
because it offers a significant interpretive challenge.
Thus it is that despite their indifference to the boy’s pain, Shrike’s
verbal pyrotechnics – he speaks like a “circus barker”22 and fills his
sentences with rhymes and rhetorical ornaments – afford the reader of
Miss Lonelyhearts considerable pleasure. They constitute a form of verbal
play that Ronald Paulson has seen as central to the comic: “the recovery of
a transgressive category (imagination, ridicule) by turning it into an
aesthetic object – that is taking it out of a moral discourse . . . and into
an aesthetics of pleasurable response.”23 Shrike reduces Marxist analysis to
a smug metaphor-making (or literary criticism) in which imposing a
theoretical vocabulary affords aesthetic pleasure but remains sundered
from experience. If his previous novels are any indication, then, West
had no choice but to eliminate the meeting of the anti-Nazi League from
The Day of the Locust. Had he left it in, it would never have withstood his
own satiric powers.
This opposition between the ironic (private, theoretical, aesthetic) and
the sincere (public, experiential, ethical-political) constitutes not just an
obstacle in West’s search for artistic principles, but the basic conflict of his
major works, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. For the two
novels are in many ways versions of the same story. In both, the hero
confronts widespread human suffering: Miss Lonelyhearts is psychically
overwhelmed by the tales of poverty, rape, disease, and disfigurement he
encounters in the letters of his readers, while in The Day of the Locust, Tod
Hackett is haunted by the “starers,” the anonymous unfulfilled Midwes-
terners who “had come to California to die” (DL, p. 242). These heroes
both experience their own spiritual and sexual longing, an inner emptiness
that had by West’s day already become an emblem of the modern
hero. The suffering of West’s protagonists is thus amplified by or even
produced from the suffering of those around them: Shrike observes that
the advice columnist is himself one of the letter-writers, and Tod thinks
that he might “suffer from the ingrained, morbid apathy he liked to draw
in others” (DL, p. 336). In both novels, finally, the fulfillment of charac-
ters’ ethical-political ambitions curiously resides in aesthetic solutions.
Like West himself, Miss Lonelyhearts (writing columns) and Tod Hackett
(painting canvases) seek rhetorical modes adequate to the task of repre-
senting or relieving the pain of the masses.
This division parallels the split between what Richard Rorty has called
“private irony” and “liberal hope.” Private irony, according to Rorty, is the
work of breaking free from ideological constraints symbolically to forge
one’s identity, while liberal hope describes the ambition to create a social
order in which pain and cruelty are relieved. The first aspires to maximize
personal freedom, the second to minimize collective suffering. In Lone-
lyhearts, the advocate of private irony is Shrike; in a famous passage, he
rewrites “The Vanity of Human Wishes” in order to demolish every set of
ideals (pastoral retreat, hedonism, art, religion) that Miss Lonelyhearts
might offer his readers. A Rortian ironist, Shrike is skeptical of all “final
vocabularies,” of all “set[s] of words which [people] employ to justify their
actions, their beliefs, and their lives.” Shrike believes that “anything can be
made to look good or bad by being redescribed,”24 and he makes Miss
Lonelyhearts’ beliefs look bad by ironically redescribing them. Or, to use
Paulson’s term, he aestheticizes them: by moving the question of suffering
from a moral to an aesthetic register he allows pleasure in the verbal
presentation of a painful situation. Miss Lonelyhearts, taught by Shrike
“to handle his one escape, Christ, with a thick glove of words,” has therefore
become a reluctant ironist as well, doubting all final vocabularies.25 Hence
the novel begins with a case of writer’s block, with the columnist deprived
of words that he finds “sincere.”26 But whereas Shrike (like Rorty) seems
confident, even smug, in his ironism, Miss L. longs for something pre- or
extra-rhetorical; in Rorty’s terms, he wishes to be a “metaphysician” again.27
Does this mean that West believed suffering could be ameliorated if
only we could still take seriously the “final vocabularies” that the Shrikes
of the world render untenable? Such a view would again square with
the idea of satire as a conservative mode that calls for an end to practices
that destabilize communal values, a reading in which the ironic Shrike
becomes the primary target of the author’s scorn. But it is a mistake to
read Miss Lonelyhearts as a lament for a bygone world of stable beliefs.
Miss Lonelyhearts may think, “If only he could believe in Christ . . . then
everything would be simple and the letters extremely easy to answer,”28
but his final religious experience must be taken as parodic: it leads him to
misconstrue the intention of the cripple Doyle, who arrives at the apart-
ment of the delusional columnist not to receive healing but to kill him.
The novel is as uncomfortable with the hero’s sentimental relapse into
religiosity as with Shrike’s belligerent assertion of irony. This stalemate
suggests a fault line within West’s sensibility and his conception of his role
as an artist. It is a more extensive tracing of this fissure that I undertake in
turning to The Day of the Locust.
the sun is a joke

The Day of the Locust differs from Miss Lonelyhearts in that, unlike his
predecessor, Tod Hackett has relinquished the goal of relieving the suffering
of the masses, and seeks instead only to represent it. If for Miss Lonelyhearts
the failure to produce a successful public rhetoric becomes a private crisis
in which he can neither alleviate nor forget the suffering he faces, Tod
conversely begins by seeking a private, painterly rhetoric that becomes
entwined with his concern for a suffering public. Approaching the problem
from the other side, Tod ends up with the same dilemma: what demands to
make of his art. When he contemplates his magnum opus, then, he is
caught between two views of his function as a painter: “He told himself
that . . . he was an artist, not a prophet. His work would not be judged by
the accuracy with which it foretold a future event but by its merit as
painting. Nevertheless, he refused to give up the role of Jeremiah” (DL,
p. 308). To see the painting as prophecy is to see it as political, an insight
into the destructive energies of the mob, a warning about the decline of
civilization. (Such a view has become the enduring popular conception of
West, a herald of the apocalyptic violence which his novel’s conclusion
enacts.) To judge the work on “its merit as painting,” on the other hand,
rejects the importance of its political insight for presumably formal con-
cerns. And, although the prophetic role is already a curtailment of the role
of savior that Miss Lonelyhearts assumes, in the internal debate over the
function of Tod’s art we see the same clash between public, ethical impera-
tives and private, aesthetic ones that structures the earlier novel.
As a modern artist, seeking to reconcile these imperatives, Tod
renounces the naturalistic painting of “fat red barn[s], old stone wall[s],”
and “sturdy Nantucket fisher[men],” and concludes that “neither
Winslow Homer nor Thomas [sic] Ryder could be his masters” (DL,
p. 242).29 The old, fat, sturdy subjects of Tod’s earlier art signify perman-
ence, tradition, and Yankee pastoral values, but since this stability is of
little use to the artist of the modern metropolis, Tod must find a new
model in the satirical cartooning of Goya and Daumier. Yet Tod’s
aesthetic search is hardly restricted to moments when he thinks about
his painting. When he tries to persuade the aspiring starlet Faye Greener
not to resort to prostitution, he is at a loss for words: “He had to say
something. She wouldn’t understand the aesthetic argument and with
what values could he back up the moral one? The economic one didn’t
make sense either. Whoring certainly paid” (DL, pp. 319–20). Like Miss
Lonelyhearts facing the blank page, Tod can find no final vocabulary, no
“argument” or “values,” whether moral, aesthetic, or economic, to justify
his desire to keep Faye from prostitution. And when he finally finds
speech his words are laughable: “Suddenly he began to talk. He found
an argument. Disease would destroy her beauty. He shouted at her like a
Y.M.C.A. lecturer on sex hygiene” (DL, p. 320). Tod himself cannot
believe in this language, borrowed en masse from an outworn discursive
system, and the narratorial voice slides into ridicule.
Thus, much as Tod’s desire to do aesthetic justice to the starers drives him
toward the cartoons of Goya and Daumier, so the rhetorical poverty he faces
in his exchange with Faye attracts him to the screenwriter Claude Estee’s way
of sneering at the world: “Tod liked to hear him talk. He was master of an
involved comic rhetoric that permitted him to express his moral indignation
and still keep his reputation for worldliness and wit” (DL, p. 255). This
description of an “involved comic rhetoric” seems to suggest a model for both
Tod and West himself – a satiric mode that offers the promise of combining
the two classical strains of satire, Juvenalian outrage and Horatian urbanity.
If Shrike’s imitators are “machines for making jokes,”30 then Claude is a
machine for making metaphors. When Tod declines to attend a brothel
because he finds them “depressing . . . like vending machines” (DL, p. 255),
Claude elaborates on the “lead” Tod feeds him:
Love is like a vending machine, eh? Not bad. You insert a coin and press home
the lever. There’s some mechanical activity inside the bowels of the device. You
receive a small sweet, frown at yourself in the dirty mirror, adjust your hat, take a
firm grip on your umbrella and walk away, trying to look as though nothing had
happened. (DL, pp. 255–56)
Claude revels in the construction of the rhetorical trope; he responds

not to Tod’s expressed emotion but to the inventiveness of the
simile. Like Shrike, Claude transforms a call for sympathy into a
pleasurable verbal artifact.
In his preference for play with metaphor over immersion in feeling,
Claude has a long line of precursors in West’s work, up through and
including Shrike. (West himself, in a 1934 application for a Guggenheim
fellowship, referred to “the impossibility of experiencing a genuine
emotion” and to “the necessity of laughing at everything, love, death,
ambition, etc.”31) This kind of private joking is an under-appreciated
aspect of West’s own narrative style. For example, his description of
Romola Martin seems more a linguistic experiment in the manner
of Gertrude Stein than an effort at mimesis: “Her youthfulness was
heightened by her blue button eyes, pink button nose and red button
mouth” (DL, p. 270). Whatever shred of representational value might
exist in a phrase such as “button nose” becomes merely an opportunity
to explore how the figure of the button might be deployed. Like Stella
Gibbons playing with the descriptions of landscape in Cold Comfort
Farm, West forsakes mimesis and embraces a pleasure found in non-
sensical jesting with words.
But before we take Claude’s “involved comic rhetoric” as the author’s
aesthetic prescription, we should note that “worldliness and wit” them-
selves come under attack in The Day of the Locust, just as the satirist Shrike
is himself satirized in Lonelyhearts. West mocks the fashion-following style
of the sophisticates Tod meets at a party at Claude’s house. Like the
partygoers whom Shrike entertains with the letters in Miss Lonelyhearts, or
like Brenda Last’s coterie in A Handful of Dust, these celebrants take a
certain moral indifference as essential to their code of sophistication. One
woman, Joan Schwartzen, speaks in “a loud, stagey whisper” (DL, p. 253)
and feigns delight at the pretensions of her hosts. When Tod meets her,
she is discussing tennis:
“How silly, batting an inoffensive ball across something that ought to be used to
catch fish on account of millions are starving for a bite of herring.”
“Joan’s a female tennis champ,” Alice explained. (DL, p. 252)
Delighting in the silliness of her pretended radicalism, Joan pre-emptively
mocks any critique of her bourgeois values. Tod and West may tell us that
Claude can combine witty worldliness with moral indignation, but for
Joan one comes precisely at the expense of the other. West is too
thoroughly modern, too worldly, to accept any simple appeal to earnest
sentiment, yet he is suspicious enough of his own ironic temperament to
show worldliness at its worst.
One might surmise that in West’s novels (as elsewhere) there are good
ironists and bad ones, and that Joan is simply a less original and less
successful wit than Claude. But even Claude is implicated in the culture
of artifice and pretense that pervades Tod’s universe; he lives in “an exact
reproduction of the old Dupuy mansion near Biloxi, Mississippi,” “teeter[s]
back and forth on his heels like a Civil War colonel and [makes] believe
he [has] a large belly” (DL, p. 252). Faye too adopts worldliness as a pose;
after her father’s death she and a friend start speaking in a gangsterish slang
which “[makes] them feel worldly and realistic, and so more able to cope
with serious things” (DL, p. 317). Faye’s father, the aging vaudevillian Harry
Greener, “clown[s] continuously” because joking has become “his sole
method of defense” (DL, p. 261). The joking persona becomes a mask
one never takes off. Even the dwarf Abe Kusich seems trapped in his
combative role: “Abe’s pugnacity was often a joke” (DL, p. 248).
The very idea of the joke, in fact, associated throughout the novel with
sophistication, implies a coarsening of the capacity to experience feeling
that lies at the heart of the plight of the starers. For in their own way what
these transplanted Midwestern hicks suffer from is – paradoxically – an
excess of worldliness: “Both [the newspapers and the movies] fed them on
murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolu-
tions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke.
Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates” (DL, p. 381). The starers
themselves endure the same fate as West’s heroes. The vicarious experi-
ence of horrors with which the mass media inundate them fails to satisfy
their “palates.” These lowbrow “sophisticates” are like Beagle Darwin of
Balso Snell, who has from too much reading assumed in his thought and
speech a “literary coloring” that “is a protective one – like the brown of
the rabbit or the checks of the quail.”32 Like Beagle, the characters of The
Day of the Locust disappear into the ironic or joking roles that they enact.
For so many of West’s characters, then, in The Day of the Locust and
elsewhere, the joke, the laugh, or the “involved comic rhetoric” run the risk
of trapping their user in a jaded, ironic role, shutting off the capacity for
experience. To make things worse, it doesn’t always work. The rhetorical play
that Claude indulges in fails as a defense against pain when Tod tries it out:
[Faye’s] invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to
murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing
yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You
couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails
into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time
to sweat or close your eyes.
He managed to laugh at his language, but it wasn’t a real laugh and nothing was
destroyed by it. (DL, p. 251)
As Tod equates sex with a suicide leap, he begins to enjoy the excesses of
his own linguistic conceit. The elaborate figure of speech spawns its own
figures, as the vehicle becomes the tenor of secondary metaphor (teeth are
nails, the skull a pine board – hints of a crucifixion?). But the attempt to
aestheticize experience misfires; laughter fails to “destroy.” If ever there
was a private and unfunny joke, this is it. Tod shares it with no one and it
is too weak to destroy any authoritarian presence. Like Claude’s elabor-
ation of the love-as-vending-machine metaphor, or Shrike’s elaboration of
the boy-as-Labor metaphor, Tod’s “joke” entails a writer’s delight in the
construction of analogies – only now presented as a noncathartic internal
reverie that leaves his world unchanged.
the book of the grotesque

Having displayed its suspicion of worldliness and wit, it is not surprising
that The Day of the Locust periodically attempts to affirm the value of
sentiment against irony, to transpose aesthetic judgments back into ethical
terms. Early in the novel, Tod passes two houses with incongruous
architectural styles, “a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced
for archers” and “a little highly colored shack with domes and minarets
out of the Arabian Nights” (DL, p. 243). But although just a moment
before Tod has considered destruction by dynamite as the only recourse
against such ugliness, he responds differently here:
Both houses were comic, but he didn’t laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager
and guileless.
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless,
even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are
sadder than the truly monstrous. (DL, p. 243)
Instead of destroying or deriding, Tod finds pathos in the “guileless”

sincerity of the houses. The homeowners have money; their struggles are
not material, but aesthetic or spiritual – a “need for beauty and romance”
that recalls the paralyzed boy in Miss Lonelyhearts who simply wishes to
play the violin. Of course these houses, in their eclectic appropriation of
historical styles, have exemplified for critics the disfiguring of reality by
simulacrum rife throughout West’s fiction – what Alvin Kernan has called
“a grotesquely phony and pitifully illusory world.”33 But the apprehension
of the discordant forms that Kernan calls grotesque and that West calls
monstrous inspires compassion in Tod.
Tod shares this need for beauty and romance. Just before noticing the
houses, he has observed the environment around him, with his character-
istic painter’s eye: “The edges of the trees burned with a pale violet light
and their centers gradually turned from deep purple to black. The same
violet piping, like a Neon tube, outlined the tops of the ugly, hump-
backed hills and they were almost beautiful” (DL, p. 243). The “almost”
here is telling; nature (seen as it is through comparison to the technologies
of advertising) aspires yet fails to achieve beauty. But, because Tod’s eye
seeks out beauty amid the ugliness of nature he can recognize the aspir-
ation toward beauty even in the hideous melange of architectural styles.
The desire of the houses to satisfy a need for beauty and romance is
touching in its innocence and nearly tragic in its failure – as if the gulf
between the ethical urge to recognize this need and the aesthetic urge to
reject its results is unbridgeable.
The same affective pattern emerges when Tod considers Faye’s
mannerisms:
Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play.
From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made
him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and
the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers,
he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed. (DL, p. 292)
In going “backstage,” Tod recognizes the labor (“the perspiring stage-

hands”) behind the performance and surrenders his critical stance for a
sympathetic one. What would from an aesthetic standpoint appear
“ridiculous” instead stirs compassion. Again, a grotesque situation – here
it is West’s own word – no longer provokes ridicule because aesthetic
terms are translated into ethical ones.
Although this oscillation between the claims of satire and feeling tends,
as in Miss Lonelyhearts, to produce a frustrated stand-off, as the novel
progresses Tod begins to apprehend a third option for his art: “He had
lately begun to think not only of Goya and Daumier but also of certain
Italian artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of Salvator
Rosa, Francisco Guardi and Monsu Desiderio, the painters of Decay
and Mystery” (DL, p. 325). Attending a meeting of one of California’s
many religious cults, Tod sees in the masses he will paint the exaggeration,
decadence and disorder typical of a grotesque aesthetic:34
As he watched these people writhe on the hard seats of their churches, he thought
of how well Alessandro Magnasco would dramatize the contrast between their
drained-out, feeble bodies and their wild, disordered minds. He would not
satirize them as Hogarth or Daumier might, nor would he pity them. He would
paint their fury with respect, appreciating its raw, anarchic power and aware that
they had it in them to destroy civilization. (DL, p. 337)
One night a man stands up and spews “a crazy jumble of dietary rules,
economics, and Biblical threats” (DL, p. 337). In representing the scene,
Tod rejects both satire and sentimentality: “Tod didn’t laugh at the man’s
rhetoric. He knew it was unimportant. What mattered were his messianic
rage and the emotional response of his hearers” (DL, p. 338). The man’s
rhetoric may be laughable, but his emotion, and that of his audience, is
not. Tod can now recognize a value in the “emotional response” – the
mystery of feeling – that a “crazy jumble” of rhetoric can provoke. He
finds in the emotion of the cultists a cathartic capacity to “destroy” that
his private, ironic metaphor-making lacks. And, by acknowledging
rather than ridiculing this emotional response, he moves away from John
Gilson’s impulse to “burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source.”
Mystery, rather, is precisely what he values in his new artistic masters.
He recognizes feeling, not in the form of pity, but in the form of anger
and terror. These aversive feelings offer an alternative to both sentimental
pity and satiric ridicule – a grotesque aesthetic that reinstates feeling as a
guarantee of authenticity.
No doubt, such a reading is at least partly assimilable to a common
view of The Day of the Locust that sees West as rehearsing a familiar, if
extreme, version of a basic modernist narrative: the corroded pillars
supporting civilization finally crumble to expose the fundamental barbar-
ism of humanity. If this violence is not endorsed, it is recognized as
inevitable, and somehow more real than the illusions of modernity. The
novel’s most famous scenes – the bloody cockfight and the concluding
riot – are thus only eruptions of a simmering violence, eruptions that
result from repeated frustrations of desire. West is hardly subtle in
punctuating the novel with scenes of imitated violence as well – carnage
on the studio lot when a movie set collapses, the “mock riot” that
Claude’s friends stage when their “dirty film” is interrupted – that suggest
a capacity for violent play to spill over into something more threatening.
But while I would hardly deny that in West frustration often gives way to
violence, neither am I content to rest with this (relatively obvious)
recognition. What is perhaps less obvious, and more telling, is the
underlying pattern of frustration and eruption, and the way in which that
pattern itself emerges from the stalemate of contradictory imperatives –
the imperative to articulate sympathy for suffering masses, and the
imperative to aestheticize suffering through satire.
Moreover, if a violence born of frustration is the only catharsis available
in West’s fiction, it is hardly one with great political promise. To be sure,
the pessimism of this relatively widespread “regressive” reading of West
can be countered by the claim that Tod’s art offers a more positive
model – the grotesque aesthetic – for managing the violence he perceives.
Yet before upholding “The Burning of Los Angeles” as a triumph of
modern art, we must first observe that Tod’s aesthetic ambitions are only
realized in (a description of) an unfinished painting that no real reader
ever sees. Whatever power or success one wants to grant the artist who
finds a visual form to represent modernity, the question as to how, or
whether, West himself realizes a grotesque aesthetic remains more or less
unanswered.
How then might West more usefully be understood as a writer of the
grotesque? Theoretical formulations of the mode overlap significantly
with Fredric Jameson’s famous description of modernism (indebted to
Lukács) as characterized by a discord between inner and outer worlds. For
Jameson, such discord is evident in a work like Edvard Munch’s Scream,
whose depiction of a disfigured, agonized human face constitutes “a
canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation,
anomie, solitude, social fragmentation and isolation.”35 Munch’s “expres-
sionist” aesthetic “presupposes,” in Jameson’s analysis, a view of the
subject as divided, a view on which rests “a whole metaphysics of
the inside and outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the
moment in which, often cathartically, that ‘emotion’ is then projected out
and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the
outward dramatization of inward feeling.”36 West undoubtedly draws on
such “modernist” deployments of the grotesque as “wordless pain” and
“inward feeling”; however, I want to argue that, arriving to modernism a
generation late, he also refashions these paradigms in ways that question
Jameson’s expressivist model.
West’s novel features an abundance of grotesque representations of phys-
ically and comically malformed bodies – a funeral director with “a face like a
baked apple, soft and blotched” (DL, p. 315), an “old woman with a face
pulled out of shape by badly fitting store teeth” (DL, p. 321), and many other
satirical cartoons worthy of Hogarth, Goya, or Daumier. Yet in other cases
the cause of grotesquerie seems harder to locate. Homer Simpson’s body, for
example, is first described as something closer to the Bakhtinian classical
ideal; he is “well proportioned,” “his muscles [are] large and round,” and “he
has a full heavy chest” (DL, p. 268). Nonetheless, his physical appearance
induces unease: “Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he
looked neither strong nor fertile. He was like one of Picasso’s great sterile
athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves”
(DL, p. 268). The outlandish metaphors that render the secondary characters
grotesque give way in Homer’s case to a more vague intimation of “some-
thing wrong.”
Significantly, that same phrase is also used in Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood
Anderson’s own “Book of the Grotesque,” to describe his character Wing
Biddlebaum. When George Willard looks at Wing, he thinks: “There’s
something wrong, but I don’t want to know what it is. His hands have
something to do with his fear of me and of everyone.”37 The comparison
between Wing and Homer has been made before, but the points of contact
are worth examining.38 Both men possess nervous, overactive hands; Homer
comes from Wayneville, Iowa while Wing lives in Winesburg, Ohio; both
men lose their shyness when shown sympathy. More generally, The Day of
the Locust, like Winesburg, Ohio, is a series of character sketches, verbal
correlatives of the “set of lithographs” which Tod works on in preparation
for his grand canvas.
Anderson’s use of the grotesque, in which the grotesque body is viewed
as a symptom of a crippled or deformed psyche, clearly conforms to
Jameson’s description of a depth-oriented “expressivist” modernism. The
stories of Winesburg, Ohio in general, and “Hands” in particular, offer a
narrative about the psychic costs of repression. Biddlebaum, as “the town
mystery,” desires to keep “hidden away” his hands, which, we are told,
“made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality.”39
Ultimately we learn the story of the hands: the schoolteacher Wing used to
“[caress] the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads” with
his active hands, but when he is falsely accused of “unspeakable things” and
driven from town by an angry mob, he must live out his life in fear of
human contact.40 The hands are the physical manifestation of a repressed,
transgressive, and ultimately tragic sexuality. Like the other grotesques of
Winesburg, Wing struggles with what Jameson calls “wordless pain,”
which results in this case from the confining codes of a small-town
Victorian morality. Most crucially, Wing is not primarily rendered in
satiric terms: in presenting his characters’ psychic deformities Anderson
seeks to elicit not laughter but pity or sympathy.
Twenty years later, West still relies to a degree on this “depth” model
of a “modernist grotesque” character whose outward features are only
symptoms of a damaged interior state. Like his precursor Wing, Homer
is, in his experience of “wordless pain,” a modernist paradigm; we are told
he experiences an “anguish” that “is basic and permanent” (DL, p. 291).
Homer’s overactive hands, like Wing’s, are a classic illustration of the
Freudian idea that a somatic symptom inevitably reveals the illness of the
psyche; we easily surmise that Homer’s “anguish” stems from repressed
lust – at one point Homer’s “fingers twined like a tangle of thighs in
miniature” (DL, p. 290). Like Wing too, Homer is mistaken for a
pedophile and attacked by an angry mob, and, like Wing, he has been
traumatized by his own sexual desires. In his compulsive symptomatology
and his tormented struggle with his memories, then, Homer seems a
textbook case of repressed sexuality, and it is only fitting that when Tod
sees Homer curled up asleep he is reminded precisely of “a book of
abnormal psychology” (DL, p. 372). The Day of the Locust too is “a book
of abnormal psychology,” offering, like Winesburg, Ohio, a series of case
studies. Indeed, Tod himself is introduced as a contrast between inner and
outer, between an “almost doltish” appearance and a complex interior,
with many “personalities” stacked up “like a nest of Chinese boxes” (DL,
p. 242), and his deep, irrational lust for Faye is depicted as the modernist
angst that Jameson finds in Munch’s painting: “He shouted to her, a deep,
agonized bellow, like that a hound makes when it strikes a fresh line after
hours of cold trailing” (DL, p. 308). And of course the novel ends with
another famous scream, as Tod, carried off from the riot in a police car,
“began to imitate the siren as loud as he could” (DL, p. 389).
the refuse of feeling

Both Tod and Homer thus exemplify a kind of grotesque character that,
often explicitly, illustrates the modernist story of latent internal struggle
finding its way to the body’s surface. But if in this deployment of a depth-
psychological model West works within a “high” modernist world view, it
is crucial to note that he not only borrows but also reworks Anderson’s
material. For West’s is a world in which modernism itself is already a too-
familiar story, where the Hollywood madam Audrey Jenning displays her
impeccable “refinement” by “discussing Gertrude Stein and Juan Gris”
(DL, p. 257) with her clients. The transgressive sexuality so fundamental
to Lawrence or Joyce is for West already – like everything else – a joke.
The “dirty film” with which West replaced the meeting of the anti-Nazi
League arouses in its viewers not desire but a parody of desire; when the
cameraman fails to focus the projector, the crowd “imitated a rowdy
audience in the days of the nickelodeon” (DL, p. 258), whistling and
stomping. The film itself is described as a series of clichés as banal as the
Communist stage play in A Cool Million:
After some low comedy with the father’s beard and the soup, the actors settled
down seriously to their theme. It was evident that while the whole family desired
Marie, she only desired the young girl. Using his napkin to hide his activities, the
old man pinched Marie, the son tried to look down the neck of her dress and the
mother patted her knee. Marie, for her part, surreptitiously fondled the child.
(DL, p. 259)
The film plods along in an equally deliberate manner until, as it nears its
dramatic climax, the machine jams, in a moment reminiscent of the film
screening in Vile Bodies: “there was a flash of light and the film whizzed
through the apparatus until it all had run out” (DL, p. 239). The “theme”
that the “actors” treat “seriously” is of course not an iota more serious
than the lame beard-in-the-soup gag, and the depiction of incest, lesbian-
ism, and pedophilia hardly even ruffles the audience of sophisticates.
Similarly, in the final riot, members of the mob, on hearing that “a
pervert attacked a child,” seem amused and make jokes about another
“pervert” who “ripped up a girl with a pair of scissors.” One man asks,
“What kind of fun is that?”, while another jokes that a pair of scissors is
“the wrong tool” (DL, p. 386). West refuses to exalt sexual transgression to
a status of authenticity and deprives it of its capacity to shock. Thus
even as his novel leans on an idea of alienated man, warped by lust,
defined by an inner experience of pain, it elsewhere questions these very
modernist assumptions. West layers onto his tormented grotesques an
involved comic rhetoric utterly lacking from Anderson’s sketches. (Susan
Hegeman calls Homer “a caricature of a Sherwood Anderson charac-
ter.”41) Even as he deploys Anderson’s still affectively powerful techniques
to evoke a wordless pain, West indulges a satiric tendency in which the
grotesque is less about inwardness than about adherence to the external.
The grotesque, the violent, the regressive: these categories, it turns out, are
subject to the same dialectical shuttling – are they cause for compassion or
cause for laughter? – as everything else in West’s work.
In contrast to Anderson’s “internalist” grotesque, then, The Day of the
Locust also deploys Lewis’s “externalist” one. As Tim Armstrong observes,
“throughout the text, bodies are mechanical, with a matching artificiality
of voice.”42 Such a pattern of “human bodies reduced to puppets, mario-
nettes, and automata” is, as Wolfgang Kayser observes in his seminal
study, “among the most persistent motifs of the grotesque.”43 Indeed,
West repeatedly describes human bodies as robotic or puppet-like: Abe
“look[s] like a ventriloquist’s dummy” (DL, p. 354); Earle Shoop resem-
bles “a mechanical drawing” (DL, p. 299); Homer is compared to “a
poorly made automaton” or a “badly made automaton” (DL, pp. 267,
381); Harry Greener acts like a “mechanical toy which had been over-
wound” (DL, p. 279). Clearly, West is drawing on the association of the
comic and the mechanical that had been already postulated by both
Bergson and Lewis. For Lewis, as we have seen, the resemblance of the
human to the machine does not result in Bergson’s affirmation of human
adaptability, but in an antihumanism. Writes Lewis: “‘Men’ are undoubt-
edly, to a greater or less extent, machines. And there are those amongst us
who are revolted by this reflection, and there are those who are not.”44
West, in his repeated evocation of the puppet and the machine, is (to use
Kayser’s term) reducing the human, tacking away from Anderson to a
more Lewisian aesthetic.45
Even when explicit comparisons between people and machines are absent
from the novel, bodies still behave with a strange independence from the
minds that inhabit them. The eight-year-old Adore Loomis performs a
popular song, which he accompanies with “a little strut” and an “extremely
suggestive” (DL, p. 335) bit of pantomime: “He seemed to know what the
words meant, or at least his body and his voice seemed to know. When he
came to the final chorus his buttocks writhed and his voice carried a top-
heavy load of sexual pain” (DL, p. 336). The uncanny suggestion is that the
sexualized body and voice are somehow more knowing than the innocent
boy.46 Faye Greener’s body exhibits the same unconscious knowledge. As
she chats with Claude, he and Faye’s other admirers sit enraptured:
None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh,
shiver, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen
and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the
red plush of the chair back. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions
was that they didn’t really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure.
It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to
excite her hearers into being uncritical. (DL, p. 357)
The extended recitation of Faye’s various gestures highlights the mechan-

istic nature of her movements; there is indeed something “strange” –
something uncanny – in the suggestion that her body might be operating
on its own agenda.
Of course this convergence of the human and mechanical can be
understood as a variation on the phenomenon, characteristic of theories
of the postmodern, whereby experience disappears into representation,
and performed roles overwhelm any possibility of an authentic self. The
Day of the Locust, however, shows little postmodern comfort with such a
loss of authenticity, but rather represents it as a fear – a fear that emerges
in the reactions of characters to the uncanny prospect of a body reduced
to automatism. When Homer witnesses Harry’s seizure, “He was terrified
and wondered whether to phone the police. But he did nothing” (DL,
p. 279). The disturbing effect of Harry’s “purely muscular” (DL, p. 279)
behavior is enhanced by the continuity of the seizure with his “normal”
conduct, as he slips undetectably from his clownish sales pitch into his
mechanistic spasm. In the same scene, he uses a stage laugh, another
muscular spasm, to frighten Faye: “This new laugh was not critical; it was
horrible. When she was a child, he used to punish her with it. It was his
masterpiece. There was a director who always called on him to give it
when he was shooting a scene in an insane asylum or a haunted castle”
(DL, p. 284). Harry’s laugh is horrible rather than critical, prompting not
ironic distance but visceral fear.
At a few crucial moments, moreover, The Day of the Locust explicitly
suggests that this reduction of the human to an automatic bodily mech-
anism implies a disappearance of the interiority so central to ( Jameson’s
version of) modernist aesthetics. By deliberately questioning characters’
capacity for feeling, the novel dramatizes the uncanny anxiety latent in the
representation of them as mere bodies. For example, when Homer sits on
his shabby patio, dumbly watching a lizard catch flies, the narrator
struggles to characterize his condition: “Between the sun, the lizard and
the house, he was fairly well occupied. But whether he was happy or not
is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither” (DL,
p. 276). The narrator’s doubt about Homer’s capacity for feeling is
particularly striking because the narrator has confidently assumed omnis-
cience at other moments in the novel; he has told us when Homer
experiences fear, excitement, and lust. But he remains oddly tentative
about whether to call Homer happy. The narrator’s problem is not
whether he can know Homer’s mind – we have seen that he can – but
whether Homer’s condition can at all be described by conventional
categories. We are told that Homer possesses “emotions,” but that there
is something odd about them:
He felt even more stupid and washed out than usual. It was always like that. His
emotions curved up in an enormous wave, surging and rearing, higher and
higher, until it seemed as though the wave must carry everything before it. But
the crash never came. Something always happened at the very top of the crest and
the wave collapsed to run back like water down a drain, leaving, at most, only the
refuse of feeling. (DL, p. 273)
Like the elusive “something wrong” (DL, p. 268) in Homer’s appearance,
the “something” that “always happen[s]” to Homer, the failure of cathar-
sis, defies naming. Despite Homer’s deep anguish, what he feels is the
absence of feeling, or “at most, only the refuse of feeling.”
Tod entertains the same anxiety when he observes Harry suffering from
chest pains. Even the man’s physical agony, he notes, has become an antic
performance:
Tod began to wonder if it might not be true that actors suffer less than other
people. He thought about this for a while, then decided that he was wrong.
Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing
to do with its intensity. Harry suffered as keenly as anyone, despite the theatri-
cality of his groans and grimaces. (DL, p. 311)
Here again is the problem of feeling and expression so ubiquitous in
modernist treatment of affect: Tod’s inability to find a correlation
between experience and expression leads him to doubt the very existence
of Harry’s pain. Yet he steps back from this radical possibility and
concludes that suffering retains a material, biological basis in “the heart
and nerves” that is independent of the artfulness with which the sufferer
communicates it. Just as the ugly houses in the foothills communicate a
need for beauty and romance in spite of their outlandish architecture, so
Harry’s theatricality still (just) manages to convey his pain.
But Tod’s doubt is as important as his conclusion. Indeed, he is not the
only one to question the reality of Harry’s pain. In a review of a vaudeville
performance Harry had given years back, a critic wrote: “The pain that
almost, not quite, thank God, crumples his stiff little figure would be
unbearable if it were not obviously make-believe. It is gloriously funny”
(DL, p. 263). Knowledge of the fictionality of Harry’s suffering transforms
the audience’s potential pity and horror into laughter. But the perform-
ance goes right up to the edge of the “unbearable,” the power of its
comedy deriving precisely from the magnitude of the pain that it ultim-
ately assures us is unreal. In other words, comic laughter, infused with
sadism, depends upon a point of view that confines the suffering to a
fictional space. But since the reader has already been told that Harry’s
clowning is a deliberate attempt to hide real-life pain – “It was his sole
method of defense” (DL, p. 261) – she cannot be as confident about the
“make-believe” nature of Harry’s pain as is the reviewer. Thus the inescap-
able mediation of all feeling through expression, whether onstage or off,
renders indeterminate the nature of Harry’s suffering and creates the
perception that his capacity for experience hovers uneasily – uncannily –
between fiction and reality. For the reviewer, Harry’s aesthetic triumph
causes make-believe pain to appear real, while for Tod, Harry’s aesthetic
failure causes real-life pain to appear make-believe. In both cases, how-
ever, an ethical judgment must be suspended so that an aesthetic one can
be rendered.
In this surrender of ethical standards of judgment for aesthetic ones lies
the very dynamic of the satirical impulse – at least as formulated by Lewis
in his valorization of the mechanical and the inhuman. West – or that part
of his sensibility that finds expression in Shrike and Claude, his machines
for making jokes – can reduce his characters to automata and reject the
experiential appeal of suffering in favor of the pleasures of metaphor-
making. But for West, unlike the brasher Lewis, this automatism brings
an uncanny fear. The idea that the characters of The Day of the Locust have
no feelings to be sympathized with but only bodies to be laughed at
reveals itself as a fear of the consequences of satire. Ironic aloofness
collapses into uncanny dread when satire recoils in the face of its own
dehumanizing representations.
The novel contains at least one other crucial moment where it denies
the capacity of its characters to suffer pain. Just before the final riot, Tod
speculates on what will become of Faye:
Tod wondered if she had gone with Miguel. He thought it more likely that she
would go back to work for Mrs. Jenning. But either way she would come out all
right. Nothing could hurt her. She was like a cork. No matter how rough the sea
got, she would go dancing over the same waves that sank iron ships and tore away
piers of reinforced concrete. (DL, p. 375)
In assuring himself that “nothing could hurt” Faye, Tod is defending

himself against the fear – also a fantasy – that Faye will become a
prostitute. Again, Tod lets his metaphorical imagination carry him
away, delighting in the conceit of Faye as an object impervious and
insensate:
It was a very pretty cork, gilt with a glittering fragment of mirror set in its top.
The sea in which it danced was beautiful, green in the trough of the waves and
silver at their tips. But for all their moon-driven power, they could do no more
than net the bright cork for a moment in a spume of intricate lace. Finally it was
set down on a strange shore where a savage with pork-sausage fingers and a
pimpled butt picked it up and hugged it to his sagging belly. Tod recognized the
fortunate man; he was one of Mrs. Jenning’s customers. (DL, pp. 375–76)
The free-associative linguistic play – reveling in its own powers of inven-
tion, keeping at bay an anxious compassion – literally runs aground with
one of the novel’s most arresting images of the grotesque. As Tod’s
painterly progress culminated in a grotesque aesthetic, so his personal
internal language comes to rest in imagery that evokes neither irony nor
pity but rather revulsion. The primitive “savage” returns us to an uncanny
space (“a strange shore”) that turns out to be the whorehouse, this novel’s
familiar and unfamiliar space of sexuality; the savage’s corporeality – his
“pork-sausage fingers” and “pimpled butt” and “sagging belly” – remind
Tod of Faye’s own corporeality, and render the prospect of her prostitu-
tion horrifying. Unlike Lewis, Tod indeed is revolted by the idea of
regarding Faye as merely a body. As when he imagined sex with Faye as
a suicide leap, Tod’s language again fails to destroy. The ethical claims of
Faye’s humanity remain. A grotesque image of the human body – meaty,
pock-marked, excessive – serves to reaffirm, through the revulsion it
elicits, Tod’s human relation to Faye.
chapter 7
Nightwood and the ends of satire
One contention of this book has been that far from being simply anti-
modern, satire occurs at the scene of modernity, that satire is dependent
upon and symptomatic of the modern. For modernity implies not only
newness but also a degenerate culture against which the modern orients
itself. Matei Calinescu has described this dynamic in his analysis of
progress and decadence, terms which, he argues, “imply each other so
intimately that, if we were to generalize, we would reach the paradoxical
conclusion that progress is decadence and conversely, decadence is pro-
gress.”1 For Michael Seidel, similarly, satire at once marks the disruptive
emergence of novelty and the senescent decline of tradition. Its irony is
both a symptom and a cause of the weakening of literary inheritance: “In
satiric narration, irony is . . . a negation of that phase of narrative that
counts on making such things as saga, legend, myth, fable, and determina-
tive allegory seem legitimate or authoritative . . . Irony must come at the
end of inheritable literary transmissions, so that irony is a step in the
direction of revision.”2 Seidel extends this claim about literary forms to
the thematics of satire; because of satire’s concern with its own legitimacy,
its anxieties about literary continuities find representation in figures
of failed familial and biological inheritance. Seidel concludes: “Satire’s
actions depict the falling-off or exhaustion of a line . . . The origin of
satiric being is the absurd or suspect birth.”3
In reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as satire, I therefore foreground
its themes of cultural tradition, familial inheritance, and sexual generativ-
ity. In the novel, these phenomena are represented negatively: tradition is
on the wane, inheritance is in jeopardy, sexual reproduction is in crisis,
and all are represented through what I call anti-procreative imagery –
sterility, impotence, infanticide, abortion. Thus, although Barnes, unlike
Waugh, Gibbons, or West, is not generally described as a satirist, Night-
wood’s strategies of stymieing inheritance manifest the miscarriage of
generational continuity which Seidel recognizes as central to the mode.4
138
Nightwood and the ends of satire 139
This is not to deny two interrelated factors that strongly prevent the
comfortable classification of Nightwood as satire, a mode to which malice
and wit have been seen as essential. First, despite Barnes’s sense of humor,
the reader’s need to devote great cognitive energy to the interpretation
of symbolic meanings and syntactical structures is likely to impede
the psychic release that constitutes laughter. Second, while the novel
represents many characters with decided mockery – joking about Felix
Volkbein’s pomposity, Jenny Petherbridge’s stupidity, and Matthew
O’Connor’s stinginess – the two central characters, Nora Flood and
Robin Vote, are largely treated without such derision. Robin is a cipher;
because she is understood in a symbolic rather than a psychological
framework, it is almost impossible to satirize her. Nora does appear
susceptible to moral and psychological judgment, but although her grief
over Robin’s desertion has sometimes been regarded as excessive (hyster-
ical, obsessive, melancholic) the implied author’s judgment upon her
never takes the shape of pointed ridicule.5
But if Nightwood sits uncomfortably on the fringe of the satiric, there
seems to be consensus that the novel fully belongs to the related tradition
of the grotesque.6 As many have noted, it upends traditional hierarchies
such as male/female, day/night, human/animal, and reason/unreason in a
“process of hybridization or inmixing of binary opposites” that has been
taken as definitive of the mode.7 Indeed, the presence of the grotesque,
with its ambivalent, uneasy laughter, may, more than any other factor,
account for the repeated linking of Barnes with West – from their joint
1946 publication in the New Directions New Classics series, to their
juxtaposition by John Hawkes and Stanley Edgar Hyman in the 1960s as
precursors of postmodernism, down to an array of recent scholarly treat-
ments.8 To be sure, Nightwood ’s cast of transvestites, circus performers, and
others on the social margins may strike some readers, as T. S. Eliot feared,
as “a horrid sideshow of freaks.”9 The characters are certainly compared
to freaks: O’Connor likens himself to “the bearded lady” (N, p. 100), Robin
to “the paralysed man in Coney Island . . . who had to lie on his back in a
box” (N, p. 146), Felix to a legless girl who “used to wheel herself through
the Pyrenees on a board” (N, p. 26). Such grotesque figuration not only
opens a critique of patriarchal or heterosexist norms (as numerous feminist
and queer readings have shown) but interrupts and ironizes historical
continuity as such. Nightwood is therefore both radically modern and
exceptionally anti-modern. It discards not only tradition and history but
also such consolations as narrative and love, yet it also represents the
modern as a scene of unredeemed cultural wreckage. Thus I mean my title
140 Nightwood and the ends of satire
“the ends of satire” to suggest both the aims of satire and its limits, the work
satire does and the points at which it becomes no longer tenable.
great defaming sentences

A reading of Nightwood as satire must begin with Dr. Matthew Dante
O’Connor, the homosexual transvestite whose talk dominates the novel.
Like Eliot’s androgyne Teresias, O’Connor possesses long experience of
suffering that he expresses in weary, prophetic tones;10 like a psychoana-
lyst, he is a doctor to whom ailing patients turn for knowledge of dreams,
sexuality, and the unconscious;11 like Dante’s Virgil, he leads characters
and readers through the dark wood of the novel. Yet he is also a kind
of satirist. The plots of most satires, Alvin Kernan points out, “lack a
conventional story, intricately contrived and carefully followed,”12 and
O’Connor’s speech is full of narrative digressions: “I have a narrative,
but you will be put to it to find it” (N, p. 97). His torrent of epigrams,
anecdotes, and philosophical pronouncements often has little to do
with the core “story” of the novel and instead takes place at the level of
discourse; this discourse is marked less by conventional norms of narra-
tivity than by the associative chains of Freudian primary process. After
digressing onto the topic of the thick toenails of a friend’s husband, he
declares, “My mind is so rich it is always wandering!” (N, p. 105), and the
word wandering is instructive. Like Robin’s night-roaming, his wandering
speech seems promiscuous in its affection for whatever riddling tale or
fine-spun phrase crosses its path. His anecdotes often fail to deliver on
their promises of meaning, and his free-associative mode surrenders
sentimental attachment to bourgeois terms of reading much as Robin’s
nocturnal flânerie surrenders traditional erotic attachments. In his talk,
satire’s formal disruptions mirror its thematic ones.
A second characteristic that marks O’Connor as a satirist is what Alan
Singer calls his “pontificatory idiom.”13 Like West’s Shrike, O’Connor
speaks in “great defaming sentences” (N, p. 158) characterized by a florid,
histrionic, and ironic manner; he wins attention by shouting “some of the
more boggish and biting of the shorter early Saxon verbs” (N, p. 15). This
histrionicism raises the suspicion that O’Connor is nothing but bluster,
and the doctor freely admits that he is “the greatest liar this side of the
moon” (N, p. 135), counting himself among the Irish who possess “the
power of the charlatan” (N, p. 31). The doctor is a charlatan in deed as
well as word, as Felix recognizes when O’Connor is called to treat Robin,
who has fainted: “Felix now saw the doctor . . . make the movements
common to the ‘dumbfounder,’ or man of magic; the gestures of one
who, preparing the audience for a miracle, must pretend that there is
nothing to hide.” O’Connor distracts his audience with a show of mock-
honesty “while in reality the most flagrant part of [his] hoax is being
prepared” (N, pp. 35–36). The “hoax” the doctor is preparing here is the
theft of some cosmetics and 100 francs – part of a pattern by which the
impoverished O’Connor himself is satirized as a fraud and a sponge who
is constantly cajoling others into paying for his drinks, unable, when
invited to dine with Felix, to think of anything but what he will order.
Yet Felix does not disdain the doctor’s fraudulence: “Felix thought to
himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar”
(N, p. 30). For all their flourishes and embellishments, O’Connor’s “every
jest and malediction” conceals “seriousness” and “melancholy” (N, p. 39).
I will return to the way in which this satiric jesting suppresses O’Connor’s
own melancholic affect, but the “seriousness” of the jest also denotes the
tendentious work of satire.
This tendentious work is, specifically, the de-idealization of false values,
a task particularly appropriate to O’Connor’s medical profession. Intro-
duced as “a middle-aged ‘medical student’ . . . whose interest in gynaecol-
ogy had taken him half way around the world” (N, p. 14), he works as an
abortionist. While the critical tendency has been to interpret O’Connor’s
medical role as a sign of his function as a healer, it continues the
association of surgeon and satirist that we’ve seen in Pound, Lewis, and
Joyce. Like the satirists before him, O’Connor asserts the material basis of
human existence: “I, as a medical man, know in what pocket a man keeps
his heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys, and genitalia
these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow
to lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall!” (N, pp. 21–22). As Joyce’s Buck
Mulligan reduces death to the failure of cerebral lobes, so O’Connor
situates hearts and souls within the “confusions” (N, p. 22) of the material
body. Or, as he later remarks: “Even the contemplative life is only an effort,
Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out” (N, p. 134).
Even as he ruthlessly exercises his own intelligence, O’Connor reminds his
interlocutors that the “contemplative life” valued by Western philosophy is
little more than a strategy to repress or sublimate bodily drives.
To each character, O’Connor debunks a chosen ideal. To Felix, the
lover of nobility, he scoffs that a king is revered only because “he has been
set apart as the one dog who need not regard the rules of the house.”
While royal subjects are “church-broken, nation-broken,” their rulers
“may relieve themselves on high heaven” (N, p. 39). Similarly, to the
lovesick Nora, O’Connor explodes the notion of sexual fidelity. He
suggests that dream-life and desire are inherently promiscuous, and that
love itself is mere sentimentality:
For what is not the sleeper responsible? What converse does he hold and with
whom? He lies down with his Nelly and drops off into the arms of his Gretchen.
Thousands unbidden come to his bed . . . Girls that the dreamer has not
fashioned himself to want scatter their legs about him to the blows of Morpheus.
(N, pp. 86–87)
The sleeper’s lover, moreover, lying beside him, is guilty not only of
infidelity but of every horror known to the House of Atreus:
When she sleeps, is she now moving her leg aside for an unknown garrison? Or in
a moment, that takes but a second, murdering us with an axe? Eating our ear in a
pie, pushing us aside with the back of her hand, sailing into some port with a ship
full of sailors and medical men? (N, p. 87)
O’Connor revels in his own rhetoric, decorated with the neat counter-
point of Nelly and Gretchen, the faux-poetic invocation of Morpheus, the
shining comic-surrealist touches like the ear in the pie. As in Freud’s
description of tendentious jokes, the form of O’Connor’s speech provides
a pleasure which circumvents censorship and allows the hearer to enjoy its
transgressive substance.
This debunking of values sometimes leads to an outright advocacy of
decadence. Discussing Robin, the novel’s most central figure of the
archaic, the doctor claims, “In the acceptance of depravity the sense of
the past is most fully captured” (N, p. 118), invoking a primordial state of
confusion prior to the establishment of rational categories. He maintains
that “cleanliness is a form of apprehension,” a fear of the disorderliness of
our primitive beginnings (N, p. 118). We regain contact with this primi-
tive disorder, he claims, when we read of murder and violence in the
newspaper, and the vicarious emotion we experience is “a way to lay hands
on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating” (N, p. 119). Having lost our
animal nature, we gain a “tension in the spirit which is the contraction of
freedom” (N, p. 119). O’Connor thus insists upon our proximity to our
animal origins, and discerns the psychic toll we pay for the repressions we
have undergone in attempting to rise above them.
O’Connor himself is represented as physically malformed or gro-
tesque; like Vile Bodies’ Father Rothschild, he is marked as a satirist
by his ugliness. O’Connor has a “small slouching figure” (N, p. 29) and
describes himself as “the funniest-looking creature on the face of the
earth” (N, p. 98), “born as ugly as God dared premeditate” (N, p. 153),
with “a face on me like an old child’s bottom” (N, p. 91). Part of the novel’s
pervasive dog motif, he himself appears canine, holding his hands “like a dog
who is walking on his hind legs” (N, p. 32), hailing a cab with “a bulldog
cane” (N, p. 24). To Felix, O’Connor’s crude habits parody the manners of a
bygone aristocracy: “His manner was that of a servant of a defunct noble
family, whose movements recall, though in a degraded form, those of a
late master” (N, p. 30). O’Connor thus embodies decadence even as he
advocates it. “To be satirically conceived is to be rendered monstrous –
too singular, too materially degenerate to carry on,” writes Seidel,14 and
O’Connor affirms his own sterile status: “I’m the last of my line” (N, p. 139).
Thus an anti-procreative imagery surrounds O’Connor, suggesting a
degenerative process less moral than biological. Like other men in the
novel, O’Connor is associated with impotence. He tells Nora of a night in
which, wishing he had been born a woman, he entered a church and spoke
to his penis, which “was lying in a swoon”: “And there I was holding
Tiny, bending over and crying, asking the question until I forgot and
went on crying, and I put Tiny away then like a ruined bird, and went out
of the place” (N, pp. 132–33). Karen Kaivola describes this scene as
“delightful and liberating” because it stages “an undoing of the sign of
male power and privilege.”15 But if this imagery contributes to a feminist
sexual politics, it can only be a satirical politics that locates itself in
the suffering of a character himself socially marginalized.16 Moreover,
O’Connor is associated not only with the failure to produce life, but –
as an abortionist – with the undoing of it. (Wyndham Lewis, recall, likens
the material of satire to an aborted fetus: “This matière which composes
itself into what you regard I daresay as abortions, is delightful to us, for
itself.”17) O’Connor thus articulates an abortive rhetoric, a language that
thwarts cultural and biological transmission. In one gruesome riff, he
speculates on a world in which aging is reversed:
How more tidy had it been to have been born old and have aged into a child,
brought finally to the brink, not of the grave, but of the womb; in our age bred
up into infants searching for a womb to crawl into, not to be made to walk loth
the gingerly dust of death, but to find a moist, gillflirted way. And a funny sight
it would be to see us going to our separate lairs at the end of day, women wincing
with terror, not daring to set foot to the street for fear of it. (N, pp. 98–99)
Although the image initially suggests a gentle return to the womb,

O’Connor finds a cold laughter in the terror of the women who would
undergo this reverse-delivery, and reveals the regressiveness, if not the
sadism, of his vision.18
Yet although he is an abortionist in rhetoric and trade alike, O’Connor
also harbors an unrealizable fantasy of a life as an extravagantly fertile
woman. He imagines a past life as “a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock
with a sailor” (N, p. 90), announcing his wish for “a womb as big as the
king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner”:
“God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss
up a child for him every nine months by the calendar” (N, p. 91). He even
suggests that his desire for motherhood has caused him to claim his
brother’s children for his own, “to adopt his brother’s children to make
a mother of himself” (N, p. 73), to “[sleep] with his brother’s wife to get
him a future” (N, p. 73). Later, he drunkenly hints that he has fathered
these children. In contrast to his abortive rhetoric, then, stands an explicit
womb envy that seeks a “future” through procreation.
O’Connor, however, recognizes this fantasy as a cliché, itself already
satirized. Thumping the dock with a sailor, boiling a good man’s pota-
toes, tossing up a child every nine months – O’Connor emphasizes the
banality of his fantasy of motherhood with a double-edged effect. He
underscores the modesty of his desires, even as he ridicules their outra-
geous impossibility. Andrea Harris points to the estranging effect of
O’Connor’s cross-dressing as a species of parody (Nora discovers him
sleeping in a blonde wig and woman’s nightgown), viewing it as a de-
naturalizing of gender roles, and implicitly attributing a kind of satiric
work to O’Connor’s transvestism or travesty.19 But while O’Connor
is surely mocking norms of femininity he is also mocking his own long-
ing for it. Merely finding words for his desire reduces it to banality.
By inflecting his lament for his never-born children with self-satire,
O’Connor posits generational continuity as ludicrous.
What results is pathos, although a peculiar kind, similar to the intense
but hesitant sympathy that West’s heroes feel for the masses. The misery
O’Connor expresses for the impossibility of his fantasy coexists with an
equally persuasive laughter at that fantasy. Therefore, although the doctor,
like West’s Shrike, redescribes cherished ideals as sentimental pieties, as
the novel progresses he becomes a Miss Lonelyhearts, overwhelmed by his
compassion for others.20 As in West too, this compassion transmutes into
angry frustration at those who seek solace from him. To Robin, he cries:
“And I was doing well enough . . . until you kicked my stone over, and out
I came, all moss and eyes; and here I sit, as naked as only those things can
be, whose houses have been torn away from them to make a holiday, and
it my only skin – labouring to comfort you” (N, p. 153). Felix’s intuition
that the jests and maledictions of the doctor conceal melancholy turns out
to be well-founded. Satiric derision gives way to pathos. Of course, how
one assesses Barnes’s provocation of that pathos will vary, since norms of
sentimentality vary widely. Yet readerly affect here is especially unstable.
While the other patrons of the cafe scorn the doctor’s tirade as
boozy sentimentality – “‘Drunk and telling the world,’ someone said”
(N, p. 164) – their scorn also separates the reader’s position from that of
the fictional characters and rewards the reader for possessing greater
sympathy. In any case, O’Connor’s own affect undergoes a marked shift,
as his ironism doubles back on itself. Hypersensitive to the suffering of the
world, he expresses the desperation of one who has seen through all
consolatory fictions including the pleasures of his own verbal skills. This
fate is at least one of the ends of satire.
we go up – but we come down

With his ironic and histrionic speech and his emphasis on the bodily and
the material, Dr. O’Connor is, then, the voice of satire in Nightwood; his
ironic redescription of inherited values finds figural expression in the
blockage of his and others’ procreative impulse. But in a broader sense
Nightwood as a whole can be understood as satiric, for Barnes’s novel
stages an end to the idea of familial inheritance secured through the
continuity of fathers and sons. In this sense, Nightwood ’s vision of
modernity strongly resembles that of a work more conventionally recog-
nized as satire, Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. At first glance, of course,
Barnes’s ornate, winding sentences and her disjunctive leaps in time,
space, and logic suggest an aesthetic practice worlds away from Waugh’s
sharply focused dissection of the English upper class. Thematically, how-
ever, both novels concern betrayed lovers, and both situate their explor-
ations of erotic loss within a context of declining cultural traditions and
waning sexual generativity.
In A Handful of Dust, recall, Tony Last is slavishly and sentimentally
devoted to his family estate and to the aristocratic traditions with which it
is associated. When Brenda says that keeping up the estate is “pointless,”
Tony responds: “Pointless? I can’t think what you mean . . . We’ve always
lived here and I hope John will be able to keep it on after me. One has a
duty toward’s [sic] one’s employees, and towards the place too. It’s a
definite part of English life which would be a serious loss” (HD, p. 19).
Hetton represents for Tony the preservation of “English life” and noblesse
oblige, and its survival rests upon the perpetuation of the family line. It is
not Hetton that is maintained for John’s sake, but John who has been
born to preserve Hetton. In Nightwood, the Italian-Viennese Jew Guido
Volkbein similarly reveres the aristocratic traditions of Europe. And while
Barnes’s treatment of Guido’s “remorseless homage to nobility” (N, p. 2)
may not be as mordant as Waugh’s mockery of Tony, it retains a satiric
bite. Guido, we learn, adopts the title of Baron in order “to span the
impossible gap” (N, p. 3) between his Jewish descent and the Christian
world in which he lives. To shore up his claim to his invented lineage, he
marries an Austrian woman, Hedvig, who walks with a “goose-step of
a stride” (N, p. 3) and embodies the martial virtues of her nation to the
point of caricature. He even provides her with a house befitting his
assumed nobility – a Viennese Hetton decorated with a false coat of arms
and “life-sized portraits of [his] claim to father and mother” (N, p. 6) that
are actually “reproductions of two intrepid and ancient actors” (N, p. 7).
As in Waugh, much of the problem with revering tradition is that
tradition is already saturated with what Waugh called the pseudo; when
Guido attempts to assume Hedvig’s Austrian goose-step, he appears with
a Bergsonian rigidity that renders him “dislocated and comic” (N, p. 3).
Because Guido’s ambitions are incomplete without a son to carry on
his faux-aristocratic line, the novel begins with the problem of perpetuat-
ing the clan. The labyrinthine first sentence describes a birth:
Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of
perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval
of the people, Hedvig Volkbein – a Viennese woman of great strength and
military beauty, lying on a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the
valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather
coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads,
stood the Volkbein arms – gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a
son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken. (N, p. 1)
The second, a death:
Turning upon this field, which shook to the clatter of morning horses in the
street beyond, with the gross splendour of a general saluting the flag, she named
him Felix, thrust him from her, and died. (N, p. 1)
Just as the aging Hedvig has apparently entered into motherhood with
suspicion, so the very syntax of the first sentence seems to postpone Felix’s
birth – and the birth of the novel – as if it fears its own death. From the
beginning of this novel, death shadows birth, stalks it. The tremor
produced by “the clatter of morning horses in the street beyond” is only
the first occurrence of the novel’s often sinister animal motif; as in a
Dutch still life, horses, dogs, and cows assume the significance of omens.
Nightwood’s first sentence thus describes a satiric origin, a suspect birth.
As if in confirmation of this suspicion, the second sentence begins with a
literal “turn” in which Hedvig “thrust[s]” away her son. Felix, born amid
emblems of family and nation, is immediately thrust from them. These
sentences, adorned as richly as Hedvig’s bedding, intertwine the perpetu-
ation of cultural institutions with the biological perpetuation of races and
families. Yet they do so suspiciously, presenting birth as an omen, subtly
sabotaging the continuity they describe.
Guido’s determination to produce an heir who will secure the aristo-
cratic affiliation of his own blood both succeeds and fails. In one sense, he
succeeds triumphantly, as his son Felix inherits both the title of Baron and
his father’s “obsession for what he termed ‘Old Europe’” (N, p. 9). Felix,
like his father, recognizes the importance of biological succession, and
desires a son “who would feel as he felt about the ‘great past’” (N, p. 38).
Yet, paradoxically, Felix’s very need for a son, re-enacting his father’s
anxiety about succession, only points up the tenuousness of his own
connection to the tradition whose survival he wants to ensure. Hence to
O’Connor Felix betrays an acute awareness of the fragility of aristocratic
traditions in a modern world:
“To pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future.”
“And so a son?”
“For that reason. The modern child has nothing left to hold to, or, to put it
better, he has nothing to hold with. We are adhering to life now with our
last muscle – the heart.” (N, pp. 39–40)
The exchange is cryptic, but it is clear that Felix considers procreation to

be a “gesture” that “includes” both the past and the future. He expresses
the same idea to Robin when he explains to her his desire “that she
might bear sons who would recognize and honour the past” since “with-
out such love, the past as he understood it, would die away from the
world” (N, p. 45).
Whatever fun Barnes derives from Felix’s fascination with the “great
names” (N, p. 17) of the past, then, she recognizes that this fascination is
less a denial of modernity than a considered, if quixotic, response to it.
For Felix, the modern assault on tradition requires the very devotion that
he recognizes as arbitrary. If the old motivations for maintaining a
connection to the past have been exposed as false, then devotion must
be warranted by love alone. Felix’s position here is not far from Walter
Benjamin’s valorization of book-collecting, which he upholds as a way of
undoing the work of modernity. As Benjamin puts it in his own quaint
old-world manner, to buy a book is “to give it its freedom – the way the
prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights.”21 The
collector’s loving relation to the collected objects has a custodial quality,
rescuing them from promiscuous wandering through the marketplace.
Collecting is less a practice of commodification than a protest against it.
Felix too is something of a collector, a “taster of rare wines, thumber of
rarer books” (N, p. 10) – although Barnes’s phrasing here has a hint of
that satire which is never fully absent from Felix’s portrait, suggesting
something both pathetic and risible in his indulgences. And Felix’s
father was a collector as well, having assembled for Hedvig the tokens
of his false ancestry in “a fantastic museum of their encounter” (N, p. 5)
that includes fragments of classical sculpture, coats of arms, grand
pianos, Spanish rugs, studded desks, velvet curtains, and the portraits
of Guido’s “parents.” Through their inheritability, such collected
objects promise the Volkbein men, as they do Benjamin, a continuity
preserved against the commercial forces of modernity. Indeed, when
Felix is reintroduced, seven pages and thirty years after his birth, it is
the fetish objects he has inherited – the paintings of his fictional
grandparents – that have preserved for him his father’s dream: “Felix . . .
turned up in the world with these facts, the two portraits and nothing
more” (N, p. 7).
Barnes’s attention to problems of inheritance may also help to explain
the meaning of her choice of a Jew as a central character – a choice which
has been both applauded as sympathetic and deplored as bigoted.22 For
the Jew, in Barnes’s symbolic scheme, stands outside inheritance: “The
step of the wandering Jew is in every son. No matter where and when you
meet him you feel that he has come from some place . . . some country
that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has
been nourished on but cannot inherit” (N, p. 7). Figures of ingestion –
devouring, nourishing in secret – lend the Jew a vampiric coloring;
stereotypical of the modern, he consumes instead of preserving. Yet, for
Barnes, the Jew is not devoid of history, but rather too burdened with his
history to render his own past as inheritable: “A race that has fled its
generations from city to city has not found . . . enough forgetfulness in
twenty centuries to create legend” (N, p. 10). The Jew must therefore
reacquire his tradition second hand; he “becomes the ‘collector’ of his
own past” only once “some goy has put it back into such shape that it can
again be offered as a ‘sign’” (N, p. 10). Barnes suggests a relation to the
past necessarily mediated by meanings created not by the Jews themselves
but by “Christian traffic in retribution.” This traffic “has made the Jew’s
history a commodity; it is the medium through which he receives, at the
necessary moment, the serum of his own past that he may offer it again
as his blood” (N, p. 10). Like Benjamin’s collector, Felix can find in these
old stories, now figured as commodities, a defense against modernity.
Tradition is factitious – a serum absorbed into the blood and passed off as
the body’s own.
Modernity spells the end for the Volkbein line, as it does for the Lasts
in A Handful of Dust. In A Handful of Dust, Tony’s young son John is
killed during a fox hunt, ironically one of those very aristocratic traditions
that Tony is so keen to preserve. In a similar irony, Felix’s fascination with
the traditions of his people’s historical oppressors results in the aspiration
of his son (also named Guido) “to enter the church” (N, p. 108) and
consequently lead a sterile life. Guido, described as “mentally deficient
and emotionally excessive” (N, p. 107), fulfills O’Connor’s prediction that
Felix’s “aristocratic” line will end in decadence and “madness”: “The last
child born to aristocracy is sometimes an idiot, out of respect – we go up –
but we come down” (N, p. 40). O’Connor here describes what Seidel calls
the gravitational principle of satire, “the defeat of systematic and organic
continuity,”23 a principle evident in the novel’s refrain of “going down”
and “bowing down.” O’Connor concludes with a characteristically scato-
logical image: “In the king’s bed is always found, just before it becomes a
museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep” (N, p. 40), droppings
that denote the earthbound direction of all satirical redescriptions.
But if Guido fulfills O’Connor’s prediction that all noble lines produce
their black sheep, the “emotionally excessive” boy also, ironically, ful-
fills his father’s expectation that he adhere to tradition with the heart.
O’Connor expresses this irony to Felix a decade after their first encounter:
“‘Aristocracy,’ he said, smiling, ‘is a condition in the mind of the people
when they try to think of something else and better – funny,’ he added
sharply, ‘that a man never knows when he has found what he has always
been looking for.’” (N, p. 121). While Felix has perceived Guido’s religious
calling as “a demolition of his own life” (N, p. 108), O’Connor recognizes
that the boy, because of his strangeness, is a breed apart, a shadow-image
of the aristocratic exceptionality Felix has always sought. In Felix’s devo-
tion to the sensitive and vulnerable boy, Barnes again swerves from
the satiric, finding poignancy alongside ridiculousness in the scenes of
Felix dragging Guido from cafe to cafe, drinking heavily. The final
image of Felix in the novel is a decidedly restrained image of fatherly
affection: “‘Come,’ he said, taking the child’s fingers in his own. ‘You are
cold.’ He poured a few drops of oil and began rubbing Guido’s hands”
(N, p. 123). Felix’s aristocratic fantasies contain their own undoing, and
he is left clinging to his future as well as his past with only his heart.
remember lady macbeth

The Volkbein story is one of fathers and sons, and Felix’s hopes of forging a
meaningful relationship to the past rest on the perpetuation of patrilineal
tradition. Robin, his wife, matters to him mainly as a vehicle for producing
an heir. But Felix’s tale is only one part of Nightwood, and Robin’s resist-
ance to Felix’s scheme is crucial to the frustration of inheritance in the
novel. Robin’s role in this satiric task, however, cannot be understood
without a broader discussion of her character, since Barnes’s portrait of
her renders uncertain the paradigms by which fictional characters are
generally interpreted. Because Robin’s motives are enigmatic, her frustra-
tion of inheritance cannot readily be understood as any kind of conscious
decision. It can be made sense of, on the contrary, only as the work of the
novel itself, or as part of the modernity that the novel takes as its subject.
Robin comes across as peculiarly passive. When she first appears, she is
literally unconscious, and much of her story is a series of awakenings in
which she appears never truly to awaken. As Felix courts her, he notices
that she is unusually “silent” (N, p. 41); when she accepts his marriage
proposal, the surprised Baron takes it as evidence that “Robin’s life held
no volition for refusal” (N, p. 43). Her capitulation to Felix’s demands
for a son is in keeping with this apparently volitionless nature. Yet Robin
does offer a quiet, passive resistance to Felix’s scheme that partakes of
“a stubborn cataleptic calm” (N, p. 45). Thus, when the novel’s second
scene of childbirth arrives it recalls the first in its refusal to offer the
slightest note of joy or consolation:
Amid loud and frantic cries of affirmation and despair Robin was delivered.
Shuddering in the double pains of birth and fury, cursing like a sailor, she rose up
on her elbow in her bloody gown, looking about her in the bed as if she had lost
something. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake!” she kept crying like a child
who has walked into the commencement of a horror. (N, p. 48)
The passage describes not Robin’s thoughts but her behavior – or, rather,
it describes her behavior by describing hypothetical thoughts: “as if she had
lost something,” “like a child.” Described with a Lewisian attention to
externals, Robin seems a mere witness to the “horror” that is her own
experience. Yet even after this abrupt “entrance” into her own conscious-
ness, it is a week before Robin fully rejects Felix’s plan: “A week out of bed
she was lost, as if she had done something irreparable, as if this act had
caught her attention for the first time” (N, p. 48). Here the “as if” occurs
twice more, and seems extraneous: how could the act not be irreparable?
The phrase, however, is a signifier of exteriority, a marker of the refusal to
venture any psychological interpretation of Robin’s behavior that would
mitigate its strangeness. Barnes uses the device again when Robin finally
leaves Felix: “She looked about her, about the room, as if she were seeing
it for the first time” (N, p. 49). Robin remains viewed from without.
Yet this external representation is not primarily comic. The gesture
with which Robin attempts to cancel out the “horror” of motherhood
assumes a form that is itself dreamlike and horrific: “One night, Felix,
having come in unheard, found her standing in the centre of the floor
holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down,
but she brought it down gently” (N, p. 48). While Robin’s gesture can be
understood as a step in the forging of a less constrictive sexual identity, its
violence cannot be subsumed by a progressive politics.24 The threatened
violence replays Hedvig’s “thrusting” away of the newborn Felix and
dramatizes an underlying suspicion about perpetuation. Thus Robin’s
relationship with Nora parallels in many ways her marriage to Felix.
The parallels become most striking when Robin destroys the doll that
the women share as “their child” (N, p. 142). As Nora tells O’Connor:
I would find her standing in the middle of the room in boy’s clothes, rocking
from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us – “our child” – high above
her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face. And one time,
about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once
I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to
the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it; and then, as I came
crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and
stiff, whirling over and over across the floor. (N, pp. 147–48)
The doll, as Nora has explained, is “the life they cannot have” (N, p. 142).
Robin’s brutalizing of the doll-child is thus doubly “anti-procreative” in
that it destroys a “child” which itself exists in place of a life never born.
For O’Connor, the doll also signifies sexlessness because of its strange
symmetrical perfection – “the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves
of sexless misgiving” (N, p. 148), and this same image of the sexless doll
surfaces in the description of the trapeze artist Frau Mann: “The span of
the tightly stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as
unsexed as a doll . . . The needle that had made one the property of the
child made the other the property of no man” (N, p. 13). According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “unsex” means “to deprive or
divest of sex, or of the typical qualities of one or the other (esp. the female)
sex,” and Barnes exploits the ambiguity of the word in her description of
the mannish woman who is both deprived of sex, stitched up as she is, and
literally divested (undressed) of the “typical qualities” of femininity. The
unusual word, moreover, inevitably alludes to its inaugural usage:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers. (Macbeth, I. v. 40–48)
Lady Macbeth’s words refer to her earlier worry that her husband’s
“nature” might be “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” to carry out
Duncan’s murder; unsexing means replacing that milk of human kindness
with the “gall” of “cruelty” – withdrawing nourishment in order to
obstruct inheritance.
The entire play Macbeth, itself a nocturnal and wooded tragedy, is
concerned with issues of lineage and procreation that overlap substantially
with Barnes’s novel. In understanding Robin, therefore, one can hardly
ignore Barnes’s description of her as “the born somnambule” (N, p. 35).
Even though Jane Marcus argues that the term alludes to Bellini’s La
sonnambula,25 it is hard not to heed O’Connor’s advice to Nora: “remem-
ber Lady Macbeth” (N, p. 129). For Robin’s gesture of “holding the child
high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down” strongly echoes
Shakespeare’s play:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (Macbeth, I. vii. 54–59)
Shakespeare’s third reference to the milk of human kindness entails yet

another image of thwarted procreation: infanticide.
Robin too, like Frau Mann, is doll-like, lacking “human kindness” not
only in the sense of a nourishing gentleness but also in the sense of
belonging to the human kind; O’Connor deems her “outside the
human type” (N, p. 146). He describes to Nora a similarity between
her love for the boyish Robin and the attachment a child feels for a doll:
“The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll
because it resembles but does not contain life, and the third sex because
it contains life but resembles a doll” (N, p. 148). Felix also thinks
of Robin as doll-like; she reminds him of “an old statue in a garden”
(N, p. 41) and a ship’s “figurehead in a museum” (N, p. 38) whose
fearful symmetry implies the same sexlessness as the “identical cleaved
halves” of the doll O’Connor describes. This pattern of imagery sur-
rounding Robin, like the animal imagery that also surrounds her,
positions her on the fringes of the human – or, as Kaivola says,
“antithetical to culture.”26
As noted already, dolls are an old uncanny motif. Freud recognizes the
uncanniness of “the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously
constructed dolls and automata,” and discusses the tendency in children
for “treating their dolls like live people.”27 The animating fantasies of the
child, he argues, illustrate “the subject’s narcissistic overvaluation of his
own mental powers.”28 Adults, however, find the animate doll uncanny
because it betokens the return of repressed “residues of animistic mental
activity.”29 In the somnambulistic Robin, then, it is her proximity to the
inanimate – the fact that she “contains life but resembles a doll” – that
evokes uncanny feelings. Like “the living statues” (N, p. 13) on display
at Count Altamonte’s party, Robin hovers between the animate and the
inanimate.30 In combining the two meanings of unsex – assuming an
“unfeminine” murderousness and an asexual innocence, Robin displays
both a dollishness and a capacity to destroy the doll. She is, as O’Connor
notes, innocent and fearsome at once.
Robin’s doll-like nature is also linked to her hands. Gazing at her as she
sleeps in a chair, Felix notes her “one arm fallen over the chair’s side, the
hand somehow older and wiser than her body” (N, p. 44). His attention
to this unconscious bodily wisdom recalls his father Guido’s perception of
Hedvig’s “condensed power of the hand, patterned on seizure . . . as
sinister in its reduction as a doll’s house” (N, p. 4). When Felix watches
Robin handle objects, “he experienced an unaccountable apprehension.
The sensuality in her hands frightened him” (N, p. 42). Robin herself
is likened to an uncanny amputated hand when she leaves Nora to roam
the cafes of Paris: “Robin was an amputation that Nora could not
renounce. As the wrist longs, so her heart longed” (N, p. 59). The
amputated hand – the hand possessed of its own volition – is of course
another well-established locus of the uncanny, seen in West’s Homer
Simpson and Anderson’s Wing Biddlebaum.31 A cluster of interconnected
images (dolls, hands, symmetries, unsexing) thus surrounds Robin and
renders her uncanny. As we have seen, however, the same doll-like,
inhuman quality can also describe the technique of satire. And, as Freud
observes, the comic element of satire mitigates uncanny effects by emo-
tionally disengaging the reader from the text. Yet Robin seems to defy
satirizing. That Robin’s uncanniness proves immune to satiric treatment,
then, suggests that satire requires a residual notion of the human in order
to reduce its characters to caricature. Robin, outside the human type,
cannot be accused of vice. Just as the satiric can temper the effects of the
uncanny, so the uncanny can prevent the emergence of the satiric.
Robin’s uncanny aura becomes the focus of the novel’s conclusion, in
which Robin “go[es] down” (N, p. 169) on all fours, laughing, barking,
and baring her teeth in erotic play with Nora’s dog – a regression that
provokes fear in others. Jenny “accuse[s] [her] of a ‘sensuous communion
with unclean spirits’” (N, p. 168), and the chapter itself is entitled “The
Possessed,” punning on the demonic and erotic senses of the word.
The dog too seems frightened, backing away and whimpering. But from
this disquieting moment of uncanny reduction Barnes again salvages
something like sympathy:
Then she began to bark also, crawling after him – barking in a fit of laughter,
obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on
with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He
ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying
with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until
she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and
the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along
her knees. (N, p. 170)
The paragraph begins with Robin reduced to a mechanistic “fit of laughter”
(N, p. 170) and recalls other moments in Nightwood of laughter as corporeal
automatism. Yet as the passage surrenders its Latinate diction and present
participles, the motion and energy of the scene give way to the stasis of the
unadorned past tense. The initially profligate doubling of language – “head-
on with her head,” “this way and that,” “grinning and crying,” “shorter
and shorter,” “head to head” – is dissipated as grammatical inversion (“soft
and slow his feet went padding”; “low down in his throat crying”) and
increasingly monosyllabic language slow the reader’s pace. The dog now
takes on the affect that Robin never herself expresses. While her behavior
appears mechanistic, its actions look increasingly human. The dog almost
speaks for Robin, its inarticulate, animal crying being the most authentic
form that an expression of suffering can take in Nightwood.
second-hand dealings with life

To review: while Robin’s function in the novel might be seen as satiric to
the extent that she serves as an unconscious agent of, or metaphor for,
forces that block inheritance, the novel’s representation of Robin never
becomes satiric, never feels laden with caricature, precisely because it
adheres to the aesthetic protocols of the uncanny. In the same fashion,
Nightwood never satirizes Nora’s love for Robin or questions its authenti-
city. Even if the novel hints at an element of narcissism in the way that
Nora treats Robin as a fantasy object, or of melancholia (as Victoria Smith
has suggested) in the way she fails to recover from her loss, to ridicule
Nora’s expressions of love would be to diminish the uncanny power of
Robin’s hold over her. Instead, the novel suggests that Nora’s passion for
Robin sets a standard by which other loves can be measured. Significantly,
it invokes the force of Nora’s passion during its introduction of Jenny
Petherbridge, the woman for whom Robin deserts Nora, and it does so
deliberately in order to discredit the value of Jenny’s feelings: “As, from
the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of
speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew,
Nora’s for Robin. She was a ‘squatter’ by instinct” (N, p. 68). It is by
way of juxtaposition to Jenny’s stolen feelings that Nora’s passion appears
authentic, the original of which Jenny’s is the copy.
In contrast to the uncanny power of love that Barnes displays in Nora’s
attachment to Robin, her treatment of Jenny is ruthlessly and unabatingly
satiric. Indeed, my claim that Nightwood never fully exercises a satiric
treatment of human character must allow for the significant exception of
Jenny. For the most unequivocally satiric passage of the novel is undoubt-
edly the beginning of “The Squatter”:
The words that fell from her mouth seemed to have been lent to her; had she
been forced to invent a vocabulary for herself it would have been a vocabulary of
two words, “ah” and “oh.” (N, p. 66)
To men she sent books by the dozen; the general feeling was that she was a well-
read woman, though she had read perhaps ten books in her life. (N, p. 67)
She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to
those who cannot think for themselves. She was master of the over-sweet phrase,
the over-tight embrace. (N, p. 68)
One inevitably thought of her in the act of love emitting florid commedia dell’arte
ejaculations; one should not have thought of her in the act of love at all. (N, p. 68)
All of these insults, and many others, share a logic of appropriation:
“Her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with second-hand
dealings with life” (N, p. 66).
This second-hand quality notably extends to Jenny’s emotions: “Since
her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back
upon the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and related, and
over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad” (N, p. 68). She seemed to
suffer and grow glad, the narrator tells us, because after this indictment
one must question what “real” suffering and gladness are. Hence when
Barnes describes Jenny’s “appropriation” of Nora’s love, the borrowed
nature of this love renders it “dishonest”: “When she fell in love it was
with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a
dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions” (N, p. 68).
A second-hand emotion is, we must assume, something more subtle than
mere fakery. The peculiar suggestion is that there can be an emotional
state that would feel just like a real emotion yet lack its reality. But this
possibility is summoned only through explicit narratorial intervention;
the narrator’s assertion of knowledge – exposing to the reader the “real”
Jenny behind the false public perception of her – is necessary to make
Jenny a figure of ridicule. This access to a special plane of knowledge
about Jenny is, furthermore, only possible through the heightened
epistemological authority that a heterodiegetic narrator possesses over
her fictional subjects. Barnes is playing her narratorial trump card –
omniscience – in order to guarantee Jenny’s secondariness.
Recent critics who have addressed the function of laughter in Nightwood
have recognized Jenny’s peculiar emptiness. Tyrus Miller remarks that
Jenny’s character “embodies secondariness and compulsive repetition,”
while Justus Nieland describes her as “primarily secondary in her emo-
tional life, all bourgeois characteristicness but absent the interior vitality
of modernist character.”32 Both critics take the function of laughter in
Barnes’s text as closer to a Lewisian program of signalling inhuman
automatism than to a Bergsonian agenda that would restore human
sociability. Yet in both of these otherwise compelling readings the actual
satire of Barnes’s representation of Jenny subtly escapes. Miller remarks
that “the savagery of Barnes’s depiction . . . requires little comment” and
instead views Jenny metafictionally, as a belated reader of the text of
Nora’s love. Nieland, in contrast, takes Jenny as representative of the
way that the category of personality – of personhood – fails to account
for affect in all of the novel’s characters; for him Jenny’s “comic
gestures, like the protocols of her emotional life, epitomize how laughter
in Nightwood . . . contraindicates the human.”33 For Miller, Barnes’s
treatment of Jenny requires little interpretation, while for Nieland it is
an interpretive key that extends to the novel as a whole.
Satire escapes in these readings perhaps because the distinction between
Barnes’s characterization of Jenny and her characterization of Robin is not
fully attended to. This distinction is especially elusive because the meta-
phors and techniques with which Barnes derides Jenny are often remark-
ably similar to those she uses to establish Robin’s uncanny strangeness.
For example, while Robin is likened to “a beast turning human” (N, p. 37)
and “a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin” (N, p. 146), Jenny too hovers
on the borders of the human: “somewhere about her was the tension
of the accident that made the beast the human endeavour” (N, p. 67).
Likewise, the motif of the severed body part, which Barnes uses to
communicate the uncanny power of the bond between Nora and Robin,
resurfaces in the picture of Jenny: “She had a beaked head and the body,
small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy;
they did not go together. Only severed could any part of her have been called
‘right’” (N, p. 65). But the device that endows Robin with a frightful
primitivism renders Jenny a caricature, and she proves to be the only person
O’Connor has seen whom he deems to be uglier than himself (N, p. 98). Her
pattern of appropriating the objects of others and assembling them haphaz-
ardly extends to her appearance, so she becomes no more than an incoherent
compilation of parts, a visual definition of the grotesque.
Barnes’s scathing portrait of Jenny redeploys for its satiric ends not only
the particular uncanny trope of the severed body part but also the more
general pattern of unconscious bodily knowledge that permeates the
depiction of Robin. But while in Robin the unconsciousness of the body
seems atavistic, provoking apprehension in characters and reader alike, in
Jenny, it provokes amusement. The way Jenny tells a humorous story
resembles the action of a mechanical toy:
Hovering, trembling, tip-toeing, she would unwind anecdote after anecdote in a
light rapid lisping voice which one always expected to change, to drop and
become the “every day” voice; but it never did. The stories were humorous,
well-told. She would smile, toss her hands up, widen her eyes; immediately
everyone in the room had a certain feeling of something lost, sensing that there
was one person who was missing the importance of the moment, who had not
heard the story; the teller herself. (N, p. 66–67)
Barnes’s description is similar to West’s account of Faye Greener enchant-
ing her suitors in Hollywood, yet West’s passage does not achieve the
ruthlessness of Barnes’s, since West’s narratorial voice gradually occupies
the space of male sexual excitement and suspends critical judgment.
Jenny’s stories, however, excite neither lust nor sympathy, as Barnes builds
to a withering punchline.
Thus, while Jenny resembles Robin in certain ways, in others she is
Robin’s diametrical opposite. To Robin’s “stubborn cataleptic calm” is
opposed Jenny’s “panicky” nervous energy (N, p. 65). Robin’s affinity
with prehistory and nature lends her an air of authenticity, but Jenny
suffers from an excess of culture. Robin’s animality is metonymic (she is
kin to lionesses and dogs), whereas Jenny’s is metaphoric (her beaked head
suggests a human-animal analogy). Moreover, even though Robin is
outside the human type, it is Jenny alone who “defile[s] the very meaning
of personality in her passion to be a person” (N, p. 66). The verb to defile
(originally to defoul) sounds a scatological note and consequently a moral
judgment, and thus, while Robin is nicknamed “La Somnambule,”
Jenny is “The Squatter,” an epithet in which Kenneth Burke sees not
only a reference to her rapacity but also to the posture of excretion.34
Finally, whereas Robin is excluded by her “primitive innocence” from
O’Connor’s moral condemnation, Jenny receives his unqualified scorn:
“That woman . . . would use the third-rising of a corpse for her [own]
ends” (N, p. 116).
It is in the depiction of Jenny, then, that Barnes displays not only the
wit and malice that characterize satire, but also the moral condemnation
that it so often carries. This short chapter is also, not coincidentally, the
point in the novel where the exceptional anger of the narratorial voice may
be likely to tempt the interpreter with the allure of psychobiography. It is
the point where Nightwood approaches “nigh T. Wood” – near to Thelma
Wood, the prototype for Robin, whose name, as Barnes claimed to have
realized only after the fact, is encoded in the book’s title.35 But just as
Waugh, in A Handful of Dust, saves his bitterest insults not for the fickle
Brenda (based on his ex-wife) but for her lover John Beaver (based on her
lover John Heygate), so it is not Thelma but Henriette McCrea Metcalf,
the model for Jenny, who gets the worst of the author’s bile.36 The
recourse to biography is tempting because the text here chooses sides
quite openly; this is where the narrator puts her thumb on the scale in
order to make sure the reader comes away with the desired moral judg-
ment on Jenny. And the simplest explanation for the narrator’s uncharac-
teristic anger is to psychologize the narrator by conflating her with the
scorned lover who wrote the book. Biography enters interpretation
because (satiric) narratorial affect appears gratuitous.37
Now I am not actually claiming validity for such a biographical
reading, which would require a detailed engagement with Barnes’s life
and close reading of her correspondence. The point is that the malice in
Jenny’s depiction stabilizes the moral frame of the text, reasserting an
interpretive order in pronounced contrast to the novel’s ubiquitous dis-
solution of norms. The ridicule of Jenny is not merely an expression of
anger at the character on the part of an author or narrator. On the
contrary, the narrator’s portrait of Jenny as a fake actually sanctions her
anger at the woman. Barnes constructs Jenny as morally debased and then
mocks her for being drawn that way.
This is not to say that Nora herself wholly escapes from authorial (self-)
satire, that she is never ridiculed for her narcissism or possessiveness. But
it is to say that the authenticity of her love is guaranteed within the text by
the satiric treatment of Jenny’s emotions. Nora gains the moral high
ground through the narrator’s abasement of Jenny. This moral polariza-
tion of Nora and Jenny may itself be seen as a reaction-formation,
a protesting-too-much against the threat that Nora’s own love too is
ultimately inauthentic. After all, Nora’s love itself has been preceded
in any number of ways: within the text (by Felix), intertextually (by
Catherine and Heathcliff), biographically (by grandmother Zadel).38
But even such an interpretation of the novel’s stark moral judgments
would still accept the premise that the text carefully calibrates the authen-
ticity of the characters’ love with their moral standing.
In short, satire surfaces in the text to make clear the author’s moral
arrangement of the characters. By establishing Jenny as a creature whose
“present is always someone else’s past” (N, 98), as a woman unable to
connect with the past in any way other than imitation, the novel dooms
her to presentness. Jenny’s imitation produces only an ironic or secondary
relation to the past. She thus represents the underside of the modernist
equation of originality and authenticity: making it new is impossible for
her. Because she degrades things by appropriating them and imitating
them, she herself is degraded by the author. Or, better put, she is degraded
by being represented as an agent of degradation; she is satirized by being
rendered as a force that mocks the emotions of the past in its uncritical
reproduction of them.
In contrast, Robin’s uncanniness retains implicit authorial approval,
made all the stronger by the degradation of Jenny’s imitative existence.
If we return to O’Connor’s analogy, in which Robin offers the sort of
contact with the primitive that the modern reader gains by reading of
violence in the newspaper, the function of this uncanniness becomes
clearer. O’Connor’s recognition of newspaper reading as vicarious thrill-
seeking might recall Waugh’s Brenda Last cavalierly skimming through an
account of a little girl’s strangulation, or West’s “starers” who crave their
daily dose of murders and sex crimes. Yet, for Waugh, the reader’s
participation in the thrilling affect of sadism is clearly a moral failing.
In West, the vicariation, attributed to anonymous masses, is presented
first of all as a social symptom. For Barnes, however, it is not even clear
that this vicariousness is condemned. For such vicarious access to the
primitive is, after all, something that not only the newspapers provide;
it is also supplied by modernist fiction itself, through works such as
Nightwood.
Thus, while the trend of finding in Nightwood a democratic embrace of
anti-essentialism is laudable enough, this novel retains a heavy investment
in authenticity. Incontestably, Nightwood repeatedly shows history, trad-
ition, and aristocracy – not to mention gender, sexuality, and race – to be
“splendid and reeking falsification[s]” (N, p. 11); it recognizes perform-
ances behind the confining, often tyrannical reduction of people to racial
or sexual types. Yet if things like Jewishness, femininity, even personality
are shown to be inauthentic, this exposure actually serves to guarantee a
more fundamental authenticity on the level of the uncanny, the nonlin-
guistic, or the creaturely. It may be that ultimately Barnes’s uncanny is
itself a ruse, since every bid for authenticity can be redescribed as
sentimentality, and literary history is full of aspiring prophets who sound
to more modern ears like overheated adolescents. But that is only to say
that any literary strategy has risks. It should not prevent us from discern-
ing how Nightwood uses satiric unmasking to secure the uncanny as
authentic. Like her creation Dr. O’Connor, the satirist Barnes makes
the movements common to the dumbfounder, offering a series of
“honesties” that allow her to prepare the most flagrant part of her hoax.
chapter 8
Beckett’s authoritarian personalities
Samuel Beckett, long discussed as a, if not the, final figure in the great
procession of modernist writers, is a natural if not unavoidable figure in
any investigation of late modernist satire. Yet while Murphy (1938) might
seem the obvious choice for the completion of a study that has focused on
the 1930s, I here choose to read a later novel, 1951’s Molloy, sacrificing a bit
of chronological unity in order to adumbrate how the idea of late
modernist satire can be extended into the post-war years. In doing so,
I aim to avoid a simplistic historicism by acknowledging the ways in
which some of the post-war themes that emerge in this reading – Beckett’s
treatment of authority and compulsion – can, despite the undeniable
impact of the war and the Holocaust, yet be seen as the fulfillment of
emerging pre-war tendencies.
Chronologically, Molloy serves as an optimal text for reading Beckett as
a late modernist. If any theorization of late modernism must rest in part
upon discerning a skepticism toward or revision of earlier modernist
practices, then the post-war moment would seem to solidify what was
already emergent in the 1930s: the exhaustion of modernist romantic,
revolutionary, or utopian energies. In describing late modernism, Fredric
Jameson argues that “the Cold War spelled the end of a whole era of social
transformations and indeed of Utopian desires and anticipations”1 – and
in a different sense the Holocaust too put an end to such utopianism. At
the same time, the major trends (and resurgent utopianisms) most fre-
quently identified with postmodernism had yet to attain cultural central-
ity, so that the immediate post-war years present a lacuna in standard
periodizations of the century.
Formally, too, Molloy might be called late modernist. While it con-
tinues the modernist breaking of realist conventions, it also effects
a second break, a break from Beckett’s own modernist masters that
is frequently signaled through allusion. Take, for example, this funereal
double reference to Joyce:
161
162 Beckett’s authoritarian personalities
I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the
black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great
measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the
poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes
the proud and futile wake. (M, p. 51)2
If Beckett here implies that Joyce’s Wake is futile, he elsewhere disdains
Proust’s faith memory, a rejection he signals through satiric reference to
Marcel’s adored blossom: “The white hawthorn stooped towards me,
unfortunately I don’t like the smell of hawthorn” (M, p. 27). And for good
measure, Beckett redescribes Yeats’s Irish heroine as a cloacal mother: “for
me the question did not arise whether to call her Ma, Mag or the Countess
Caca” (M, p. 17).3 The post-war trilogy, then, and Molloy in particular,
might be seen as a linchpin between a modernist Beckett sloughing off the
influence of his precursors, and a postmodernist Beckett who makes pos-
sible the nouveau roman and large portions of poststructuralism.4
But since (I am arguing) satire is a dominant sensibility in late
modernism, it should be noted that the function of laughter in Beckett’s
fiction has become linked to his status as a modernist. Beckett of course
has long been recognized as a comic writer, and his debts to vaudeville,
silent films, and circuses do not need further tallying. In his fiction and his
plays, bodies break down and decay; language drifts into paradox or
nonsense; philosophy dead-ends.5 Still, the interpretation of this comedy
has become highly contested. Paul Sheehan has decried the “glib carica-
ture” of an existentialist Beckett as a heroic artist working to salvage value
from nihilism, an artist whose humor performs a “cathartic, therapeutic,
and heroic” function in enabling the individual to transcend the mean-
inglessness of existence.6 Sheehan calls this outdated stereotype the
“humanist Beckett,” but it is also, for Tyrus Miller, a modernist Beckett
in whom critics have found a testament to the redemptive powers of art.
Miller reads Beckett’s work not as a high modernist glorification of art,
but as a late modernist revelation of “social and semantic contingency”:
the discourse of Watt, for example, “has little to do with artistic inten-
tionality or self-conscious purification of the language of the tribe,” but
rather “testifies to Watt’s loss of autonomy, his increasing subjection to an
impersonal language-machine,” while in Murphy, Beckettian laughter
serves to provide “the comic face of social domination.”7
Yet as salutary as it is to jettison the easy clichés of (modernist,
humanist) laughter in the face of despair, Miller’s move to elucidate the
subjection of Beckett’s characters to sociopolitical and linguistic structures
gives us instead an equally familiar image – a postmodern Beckett that is
Beckett’s authoritarian personalities 163
already visible in Jameson’s 1979 description of “the openly schizophrenic
discontinuities of such postmodernist ‘texts’ or écriture as Beckett’s Watt,”
and which Jameson identifies as paradigmatic of the postmodern condi-
tion.8 (I will leave aside the further objection that the vilified “modernist”
Beckett is in a chronological sense not properly “modernist” at all, but
itself late modernist, the product of post-war existentialism.) As Miller
revises the narrative of Beckettian comedy from a modernist story of
liberation to a Foucauldian parable of domination, laughter becomes
merely the most ingenious weapon in the arsenal of power. In this quick
reversal, it is easy to see an unintended consequence of Foucauldian
thought, one against which Eve Sedgwick has warned: “his analysis of
the pseudodichotomy between repression and liberation has led, in many
cases, to its conceptual reimposition in the even more abstractly reified
form of the hegemonic and the subversive.”9 Recognizing as hegemonic
what had first appeared subversive merely shifts the cachet of liberatory
critique from the author to the critic, who thereby achieves the standing
to free us from our false faith in the redemptive powers of art.
What’s wrong here, then, is not the possibility that Beckett might in
certain accounts look like a cliché of a modernist and in others look like a
cliché of a postmodernist. That hazard is probably inevitable. What is
wrong is the choice itself, which imposes a rigid binary that Sedgwick
aptly calls moralistic, and erases “the middle ranges of agency”10 – the
eastward movement of the slave on the deck of the westward sailing boat,
to use Beckett’s metaphor. The debate over whether laughter is transgres-
sive or normative beats a hasty retreat from the bewildering affective
encounter with Beckett’s writing to the safety of one of two stable,
fortified, and unexciting positions. In contrast, Shane Weller has argued
that Beckett’s comedy might best be seen as anethical, while Ruby Cohn
has noted simply: “So ambiguous are Beckett’s comic heroes that we
scarcely know . . . whether we laugh at or with.”11 Indeed the very problem
of how to read laughter is foregrounded in Molloy, when Lousse buries her
dog: “I thought she was going to cry, it was the thing to do, but on the
contrary she laughed. It was perhaps her way of crying. Or perhaps I was
mistaken and she was really crying, with the noise of laughter. Tears and
laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me” (M, p. 37). As Weller notes,
Beckett defeats before it is raised the notion that laughter will be unitary,
easily explicable, or even distinguishable from its opposite.
I want to revisit the question of laughter in Beckett by recognizing that
the pleasurable affects usually associated with the comic emerge in our
reading of Beckett from an interplay of other feelings that include
irritation, boredom, frustration, anxiety, and surprise. While I think
Beckettian laughter is a good thing to the extent that it gives me pleasure,
I still find it duplicitous: liberating in its capacity to free us, however
temporarily, from oppressive emotional identifications, but malicious and
even sadistic in the way it lifts inhibitions that can possess legitimate social
or ethical value. Recognizing this duplicity would at the least reveal the
limits of reading Beckett within the moralistic binary of hegemony versus
subversion. (Might every act of subversion cast the shadow of a nascent
hegemony?) It would also illumine Beckett’s mode as a kind of satire.
Although Beckett’s satire is not the English comedy of manners we see in
Waugh and Gibbons, nor the symbol-heavy American grotesquerie of
Barnes and West, it shares with those works a tendentiousness that cannot
easily be sentimentalized as benign or reparative.
Initially, my reading of Molloy will examine how Beckett’s satire takes
as a target the exercise of paternal authority within the modern state
marked by the threat of fascism; it will do so with reference to two key
texts, Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Adorno’s The Authoritarian
Personality. Beckett’s representation of fatherhood undermines sentimen-
talized ideals of the bourgeois family, and reveals sadomasochistic dy-
namics at work in the exercise of modern social, political, and religious
authority. It implicates the reader in its sadistic structures, yet exposes the
operations of that sadism. Turning from the character of Moran to
Molloy himself, I then extend this reading of authority to a broader
reading of compulsion, in which Beckett’s laughter can be seen as occur-
ring on the border between compulsion and freedom. The modulations of
affect in Beckett prove irreducible to a humanist or antihumanist posi-
tion, since they exist in the interspace that constitutes those positions in
the first place.
moran as bureaucrat and father

Molloy is divided into two parts. In the first, the lame and dying Molloy
sits in his “mother’s room” and writes pages for vaguely identified
men; these pages, which presumably constitute the first part of the novel,
tell of Molloy’s journey through an unnamed town and its surrounding
country – on his bicycle, on crutches, crawling on his back – to his
mother. The second half of the novel introduces a new narrator, one
Jacques Moran, whose narrative is a report of his mission to find Molloy,
undertaken at the command of the enigmatic, Godot-like Youdi. Moran
embarks on the mission with his son Jacques, Jr., who is “thirteen or
fourteen” (M, p. 94); as the search goes on, Moran comes increasingly to
resemble Molloy, in the nature of his adventures, in the physical infirm-
ities that overcome him, in the aimlessness of his journey and of his
discourse.12 On returning home, he concludes by declaring that the first
words of his report are false.
In perhaps Beckettian fashion, I begin my reading of Molloy in the
middle, with the priggish and moralistic Moran. Despite Moran’s obnox-
ious qualities, the first encounter with him is likely to bring some measure
of comfort. For Moran craves precision. “Vagueness I abhor” (M, p. 99),
he declares, and this abhorrence functions as a surrogate for or extension
of the reader’s own antipathy – an antipathy that has been provoked
by the reading of the first half of the novel. Molloy’s narrative, after all, is
full of maddening vagueness and vagaries, offered to the reader in an
almost continuous ninety-page block of unparagraphed type; turning the
page to discover a new, apparently more precise voice, the reader finds in
Moran’s report reassuring certainties. Moran provides proper names,13
paragraphs, days of the week, months of the year. He owns a house,
knows his neighbors, attends a local church, and even refers to Flaubert
and Goering – linking us, however tenuously, to a world we think we
know. Religious, propertied, employed, widowed, Moran holds an iden-
tifiable and (initially) stable position within familiar social structures.
Moreover, while the exact the nature of Moran’s employment (taking
orders from the messenger Gaber on behalf of Youdi) is vague, even here
his task is one of restoring legibility, working on behalf of the reader’s
desire to re-establish the comforts (setting, character, motive) of realist
narrative. As H. Porter Abbott has pointed out, Moran is a writer of an
administrative “report,” and “Beckett’s use of the report as a narrative
device” exerts a steady “control over our response.”14 John Guillory has
recently described the report, with its cognates, the form, and the memo,
as the quintessential modern genre of writing, one that is produced far
more regularly than poems or scientific papers. The report, Guillory
observes, is “linked to the theme of bureaucracy”; born from the needs
of twentieth-century administration, it is “founded on the deliberate
suppression of rhetorical techniques” including the inefficient social
niceties of the nineteenth-century business letter.15 The report, in sum,
aspires to a certain affective quality, the no-nonsense manner of the
bureaucrat. Thus Moran emerges as an anti-rhetorical, even anti-literary
voice: “It is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to
literature” (M, p. 151). Promising to ascertain the facts, names, and dates
that are inexact, contradictory, or missing in Molloy’s narrative, his report
is a “paltry scrivening” (M, p. 132), an administrative and supplementary
text that will classify and clarify the first. Moran thus also serves as a
surrogate reader, and works in alliance with the actual reader seeking
clarification of Molloy’s cryptic text. In addition to promising a less literary
mode of language, then, the report form intimates the presence of what
Abbott calls “an elaborate bureaucracy.”16 (Beckett’s attention to the lan-
guage of bureaucrats is preceded by Melville, Conrad, and Kafka, and
anticipates the underworld networks of Pynchon and DeLillo.17) Of course,
the increasingly Molloy-like Moran is both funny and interesting to the
extent that his discourse fails to conform to the protocols of its bureaucratic
genre. Yet the conditions under which he is compelled to write are crucial
to understanding his role in the novel.
To make sense of the elusive “Molloy affair” (M, p. 98), Moran needs
to gather information like a detective or spy: “Peeping and prying were
part of my profession” (M, p. 94). Beckett’s evocation of the detective
genre allows him to invoke the professionalization of both labor and
feeling covertly celebrated by that genre – the modern professional
detective’s “ethical” code of executing his task while bracketing any
“personal” interest or emotion. Beckett thus registers the pressures of an
administrative modernity in both the genre of his text and the tone of his
narrative. Moran’s role as an agent of meaning – working on behalf of a
bureaucratic authority, returning to familiar protocols of communicative
language, promising classification and knowledge-production – occurs
within a specifically modern (or late modern) social formation.
Throughout the report, Moran’s role as a restorer of meaning and
authority overlaps substantially with his role as a father. (Moran’s narra-
tive of fathers and sons, with its oedipal dynamics, complements Molloy’s
mother-centered quest, marked by pre-oedipal themes.18) His opening
paragraph introduces this theme:
It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping.

Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. My lamp sheds a soft and
steady light. I have trimmed it. It will last till morning. I hear the eagle-owl.
What a terrible battle-cry! Once I listened to it unmoved. My son is sleeping. Let
him sleep. The night will come when he too, unable to sleep, will get up and go
to his desk. I shall be forgotten. (M, p. 92)
A scene of nocturnal stillness, an agitated father guarding a peacefully

sleeping son, harsh outdoor weather contrasted with a flame-lit sheltered
interior – Beckett’s “It is midnight” indubitably references Coleridge’s
“Frost at Midnight,” locus classicus of paternal tenderness, where, with his
infant Hartley sleeping “cradled by [his] side,” Coleridge, like Moran,
finds vexation in calmness itself:
’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness.19
Even Moran’s eagle-owl, the objective correlative of the agitation that

disturbs his mind, alludes to Coleridge’s opening lines: “The owlet’s cry /
Came loud – and hark, again! loud as before.”20 But Beckett replaces the
rich images and rhythms of the lyric monologist with the clipped and
methodical cadences of a diarist, the adored infant with a repulsive
adolescent, and the exuberant hopes of a father for his child with a bitter
prediction that the son’s life will only repeat, blindly and mechanically,
the father’s disappointed course. Most importantly, the idealized loving
relation between father and son in Coleridge’s lyric will be revealed in
Beckett’s text as fraught with sadism and violence. And so the novel’s
conclusion – “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight.
The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not
raining” (M, p. 176) – is not merely an early postmodern acknowledge-
ment of the rhetoricity or fictionality of historical discourse, but a confes-
sion of literary artistry that specifically disavows the false paternal
sentiment in which the narrative originates.
As I have noted, even such works as Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and
Barnes’s Nightwood – hardly warm and fuzzy tales of spiritual uplift – seek
out their rare moments of poignancy in father–son relationships: Tony
taking John Andrew’s small hand in his own as they walk to church, Felix
Volkbein rubbing oil into the chapped hands of the simple-minded
Guido. Such feelings are also one of the key emotional touchstones of
Ulysses, where paternity may be a legal fiction but Leopold Bloom’s
repeated imagination of his dead son Rudy still alive at age eleven and
memories of his suicide father stimulate a reader’s compassion for the
doubly bereaved hero. But Moran’s few moments of paternal affection
hardly summon such sympathy. They rarely last long before degenerating
into suspicion and anger in sudden affective reversal: “I drew him to me.
What do you say to that? I said. Did he love me then as much as I loved
him? You could never be sure with that little hypocrite” (M, pp. 119–20).
(Maria DiBattista has in fact characterized Beckett as “the master of
the emotional upheaval and affective reversal.”21) The Moran–Jacques
relationship offers a comic-satiric debunking of Coleridgean paternal
affection, favoring a view of fatherhood steeped in sadomasochism and
rivalry.22 At one point Moran even fantasizes that “I could chain my son
to me in such a way as to prevent him from ever shaking me off again”
(M, p. 129): the master–slave relationship of Godot’s Lucky and Pozzo is in
the wings.
While this sadomasochistic relationship functions as an ironic
redescription of the Coleridgean exaltation of the bourgeois family, it
also carries a political charge in post-war Europe. For Molloy is con-
temporaneous with a movement in political theory and social science
that sought to understand, in the wake of totalitarianism and genocide,
the psychological dimensions of fascist and anti-Semitic thinking.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) may be the
most famous text of this moment, and in France a signal work was
Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question (1946), while in the United
States, Richard Hofstadter’s slightly later “The Paranoid Style in
American Politics” (1964), sought to fuse social history with psycho-
analysis in order to understand racism and McCarthyism. However, at
least according to the commentator Irwin Katz, “the dominant influ-
ence on thinking about the causes of ethnic prejudice” during this time
“was Adorno et al.’s (1950) psychoanalytically inspired study, The
Authoritarian Personality.”23 The study, written by Theodor Adorno
and several colleagues at the Institute for Social Research in conjunc-
tion with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study, funded by the American
Jewish Committee, and published by Harper and Row, “proposed that
bigotry was a component of a more general antidemocratic ideology
commonly found in personalities marked by cognitive rigidity,
repressed affect, and self-alienation.”24 Drawing on theoretical work
dating back before the war (particularly that of erstwhile member
Erich Fromm), The Authoritarian Personality aimed, in Richard
Sennett’s words, “to be much more historical and specific than was
Freud about the ways culture plays a role” in shaping such personalities;
Adorno’s “concept refers to an intersection” of psychological and social
forces.25
Specifically, Adorno posits an “authoritarian syndrome” that “follows
the ‘classic’ psychoanalytic pattern involving a sadomasochistic resolution
of the Oedipus complex” whereby the superego “assumes an irrational
aspect.”26 Adorno elaborates: “The subject achieves his own social adjust-
ment only by taking pleasure in obedience and subordination. This brings
into play the sadomasochistic impulse structure both as a condition and a
result of social adjustment.”27 Such an “adjustment,” which allows for the
“gratification” of “sadistic as well as masochistic tendencies,”28 results
from the particular way in which oedipal rivalries are “resolved” after love
for the mother is forbidden:
The resulting hatred for the father is transformed by reaction-formation into
love. This transformation leads to a particular kind of superego. The transform-
ation of hatred into love, the most difficult task the individual has to perform in
his early development, never succeeds completely. In the psychodynamics of the
“authoritarian character,” part of the preceding aggressiveness is absorbed and
turned into masochism, while another part is left over as sadism, which seeks an
outlet in those with whom the subject does not identify himself: ultimately the
outgroup.29
This developmental conflict ultimately has ramifications in the realm of
the sociopolitical: “The Jew frequently becomes a substitute for the
hated father.”30
The centrality of Beckett’s writing to Adorno’s larger defense of literary
modernism is well known: Beckett’s works through their very forms offer
a critique from within of social conditions that the polemical art of Brecht
or Sartre can only emptily proclaim.31 But my point here is not to
rehearse, challenge, or untangle Adorno’s argument, only to indicate the
immediacy of the connection between Adorno’s analysis of authoritarian-
ism and his championing of modernism. In the 1962 essay “Commit-
ment,” Adorno reviews the “insights of social psychology into the
authoritarian personality” – his own insights, that is – and remarks:
“[The authoritarian personality’s] hostility to anything alien or alienating
can accommodate itself much more easily to literary realism of any
provenance, even if it proclaims itself critical or socialist, than to works
which swear allegiance to no political slogans.”32 The political charge of
committed art can easily be reversed because of its failure to offer any
formal resistance to right-wing authoritarianism (indeed, it may formally
reduplicate authoritarianism), whereas, in the works of Beckett and Kafka,
the “mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system of rigid coordinates
that governs authoritarian personalities.”33 Here, however, I want to offer
a different deployment of Adorno’s insight: Beckett’s novel is relevant to
an analysis of authoritarian structures simply because it constitutes a
portrait of precisely those proto-fascist or authoritarian personality traits
that, as Adorno claims in a contemporaneous essay, emerge in modernity
as “not simply the reoccurrence of the archaic but [as] its reproduction
in and by civilization itself.”34
The above excursus will be forgiven, I hope, if we can now see the
benefits of regarding Moran as an Adornian authoritarian personality.
Such a type, despite the conceptual objections psychoanalysts and social
scientists have raised about it, neatly brings together Moran’s role as a
bureaucratic professional hunting down the wayward Molloy with his role
as a non-Coleridgean father. Moran’s narrative enacts the intertwining of
familial power relations with wider social structures that Adorno remarks
upon; the oedipal relationship between Moran and his son parallels and
reproduces his professional relationship with Youdi. When Moran forbids
his son to bring his stamp collection, he explicitly mimics Youdi’s bur-
eaucratic edict: “You leave both your albums at home, I said, the small
one as well as the large one. Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic
present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes with
you” (M, p. 109). Borrowing Youdi’s grammatical forms of command as
well as obeying their content, Moran extends into the family the relation-
ship of domination which governs his professional life.
It is worth noting here, with Richard Sennett, that no less an authori-
tarian personality than Stalin pronounced, “The state is a family, and I am
your father.”35 According to Sennett, the totalitarian authority deliberately
aims to revive the linkage between the head of family and the head of state
that had been dissolved with Locke. Adorno too claims that “the psycho-
logical image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all-powerful
and threatening primal father.”36 If we then observe with Alan Astro that
the name Youdi not only suggests God (reversing the syllables of dieu) but
is also an old French slur for Jew, derived from the Hebrew yehudi,37 then
Adorno’s claim that “the Jew frequently becomes a substitute for the
hated father” takes on new specificity in reading Moran’s report. When
we observe as well, with Anthony Uhlman, Moran’s offhand mention of
Goering – “Who is this bicycle for, I said, Goering?” (M, p. 141) – and we
note that the bicycle is actually for the Goering-like Moran,38 then
Beckett’s text begins to appear at least somewhat rooted in its historical
location. Moran’s obedience to the idealized yet hated Youdi suggests an
identification with an ego-ideal in the form of leader of the sort that had
been recently demonstrated all too vividly in Europe: “the leader’s image
immediately gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority
and to be the authority himself.”39 Beckett’s representation of Moran as
both dictatorial father and subordinate functionary thus displays not only
Adorno’s insights into the authoritarian character type but also Sennett’s
further discernment of a crucial attribute of the relationship to authority
under modernity – that it is characterized by “a split between authority
and legitimacy,”40 in which authorities are resented and discredited in
defensive compensation for the subordinate’s sense of shame at his own
subordination.
moran’s comic law

The historical proximity of Adorno’s writing on authority and Beckett’s
novel thus open a vantage from which Beckett’s own analysis of author-
ity can be profitably placed in a specific post-Holocaust context. Yet
there remains an important difference between The Authoritarian Per-
sonality and Molloy that few will deny: Adorno’s text is not nearly as funny
as Beckett’s. It could be conceded of course that certain interviews with
racists and anti-Semites in Adorno’s volume might raise a chuckle if we
imagine them spoken by Moran: “Actually there is more underhanded-
ness amongst Armenians than there is amongst Jews, but the Armenians
aren’t nearly as conspicuous and noisy.”41 But such an amusing thought-
experiment only testifies to the imaginative accomplishment of Beckett’s
text, which delicately balances the absurdity and the horror of Moran’s
fascistic thought. That the mind of a rigid and rageful functionary who
is “still obeying orders” (M, p. 132) should interest Beckett in the
aftermath of the Second World War is not surprising: the churchgoing
Moran is in many ways a representative citizen of Vichy France. But
more curious is the degree to which Moran’s sadistic personality should
become the site of so much laughter. Simon Critchley seems correct in
noting that Adorno tends to misread or ignore Beckett’s humor, and
Adorno’s own moralistic streak may make him somewhat tone-deaf to
Beckett’s comedy.42 But the laughter that accompanies Moran’s sado-
masochistic interactions with his son and others suggests the double
movement of satire that I have tried to show throughout this book.
Beckett finds a form in which he can ridicule Moran’s authoritarian
thinking but also, at the same time, inhabit that thought, and inhabit it
joyfully.
By no means should such a claim be taken to suggest the crude
psychobiographical position that either Beckett or his father possessed
an authoritarian personality. (Nor do I want to suggest that Adorno’s
concept itself has diagnostic value outside the generalized sense in which
I am invoking it.) While James Knowlson reports that Beckett did have a
violent temper, and even as a boy “display[ed] the meticulousness that was
to be one his most striking characteristics as an adult,”43 he also reminds
us that Beckett risked his life in the fight against fascism (where he, like
Moran, often awaited orders from vague sources) and throughout his life
showed sensitivity to even small acts of cruelty. Still, Knowlson points
out, “Molloy is full of . . . echoes of [Beckett’s] childhood,”44 including key
details from Moran’s narrative, such as Jacques, Jr.’s stamp collection
and his teddy bear, Baby Jack, whose real-life prototype the prepubescent
Sam could not sleep without.45 Such poignant affect – sentimental value –
invested in Winnicottian transitional objects might then suggest a tension
between Beckett’s own exacting (sadistic) meticulousness and his own
childlike (masochistic) vulnerability; Beckett might be said to use Moran’s
narrative to scrutinize tender childhood memories as a way to question
nostalgic or sentimental treatments of childhood that would deny the
force of the sadomasochistic aspect of familial relations.
In turning to an appreciation of the comic side of Moran’s fascist
tendencies then, it will be useful to bring in not only Adorno but also
Gilles Deleuze, who specifically relates sadism and masochism to the
comic: “The comic is the only possible mode of conceiving the law, in a
peculiar combination of irony and humor.”46 Deleuze sees irony and
humor as strategies for “subversion of the law”; irony is tied to sadism,
which posits a “primary nature” anterior to the end of the law, while
humor is tied (very tightly) to masochism, which defeats the law by
making it malfunction, turning punishment into pleasure, and hence
cause for reward.47 Moran’s sadism, even as it claims the law as its
justification, thus “ironically” reveals itself as a “primary nature,” and an
end to itself.48 Thus Moran – consistent with the double movement of
satire – savors both his enforcement of the law and his own subjection to it.
A “pompous, orthodox bourgeois,”49 he claims to be “meticulous and calm
in the main” (M, p. 114) and to have a “methodical mind” (M, p. 98); he
even remarks, “I rather enjoyed dotting my i’s” (M, p. 117). At the end
of his journey, when he is limping home in torn clothing, filthy from
his own incontinence, he still wears his tie knotted, “out of sheer
bravado, I suppose” (M, p. 171) – bravado signaling his pride in
(masochistic) submission to social strictures that have become wholly
formal. Nowhere does Moran better illustrate what Deleuze calls the
pure formalism of the law than when he enforces it, in true Kantian
fashion, despite his dislike of its consequences: “I finally decided that to
go back on my decision . . . would deal a blow to my authority that it
was in no condition to sustain. I did so with sorrow” (M, 121). Here the
law reveals itself, in Deleuze’s phrase, as “self-grounded and valid solely
by virtue of its own form.”50 Moran’s “sorrow” – “this hurts me more
than it hurts you,” as the cliché goes – is a residual pathos that survives
the renunciation of human sympathy and indicates the gap between the
demands of the law and the claims of personal sentiment. The law must
be formal, inhuman, cold – like the satiric impulse itself, which loses its
force as soon as it shows any signs of mercy or compassion.51
The moral Moran in fact has internalized the law to such a degree that
he no longer associates it with Youdi himself, and certainly not with the
messenger Gaber, whom he views as an utterly illegitimate rival. By the
end of his narrative, Moran confesses that he only fears Youdi “from
the force of habit”:
And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and
exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a
cause that is not mine, and patiently fulfil in all its bitterness my calamitous part,
as it was with my will, when I had a will, that others should. (M, pp. 131–32)
Moran’s very will has been subsumed by the internalized edict, which he
obeys even as he denies that it is his own. In fact it is precisely because the
cause is not his own that he enjoys serving it. And so, neatly illustrating
the authoritarian personality’s ambivalent relation to the loved and hated
leader-imago, Moran adds: “And this with hatred in my heart, and scorn,
of my master and his designs” (M, p. 132).
The sadism of Moran’s adherence to moral principle is most visible in
the gratuitous physical violence that he inflicts on his son: “I was some-
times inclined to go too far when I reprimanded my son, who was
consequently a little afraid of me” (M, p. 95). Deleuze notes that “when
the superego runs wild, expelling the ego . . . then its fundamental
immorality exhibits itself as sadism,”52 and Moran’s fear-inspiring repri-
mands reveal the paradoxical condition of the superego as fundamentally
immoral. Moran’s cruelty, furthermore, entails a displacement of the
proper object of his sadism, which is himself:
I myself had never been sufficiently chastened. Oh I had not been spoiled either,
merely neglected. Whence bad habits ingrained beyond remedy and of which
even the most meticulous piety has never been able to break me. I hoped to spare
my son this misfortune, by giving him a good clout from time to time, together
with my reasons for doing so. (M, p. 95)
Moran’s pedagogical justification for his violence – “together with my

reasons for doing so” – of course rings hollow; it is emotionally tacked
onto the “good clout” just as the phrase is grammatically tacked onto the
sentence.
Yet it is not merely sadism that renders Moran a comic figure. Rather,
the comedy stems from fluctuations in affect, particularly the escalation
of intensity that occurs when the world fails to conform to Moran’s
authoritarian schemes: “The more things resist me, the more rabid
I get” (M, p. 156). His violence derives from a need for obedience, and
when a recalcitrant world fails to obey him, his rabidity increases. This
rising violence provides many of the novel’s biggest laughs, including a
wonderful slapstick scene when Moran tries to rouse Jacques from bed:
Desperately he clung to his sleep. That was natural. A few hours sleep however
deep are not enough for an organism in the first stages of puberty suffering from
stomach trouble. And when I began to shake him and help him out of bed
pulling him first by the arms, then by the hair, he turned away from me in fury,
to the wall, and dug his nails into the mattress. I had to muster all my strength to
overcome his resistance. But I had hardly freed him from the bed when he broke
from my hold, threw himself down on the floor and rolled about, screaming with
anger and defiance. The fun was beginning already. This disgusting exhibition
left me with no choice but to use my umbrella, holding it by the end with both
hands. . . . Shame on you, I cried, you ill-bred little pig! I would get angry if
I were not careful. And anger is a luxury I cannot afford. (M, pp. 126–27)
Despite Moran’s cruelty here, the reader is likely to experience amuse-
ment or even delight. Moran’s matter-of-fact reporting of his methods,
his transparent self-justifications, his clinical diction, and above all his
ability to reflect on the struggle with understated ironic detachment – all
shift attention from Jacques’ suffering to Moran’s own pronounced
emotional deficiencies, which enable him to inflict extreme pain and
prevent him from expressing remorse afterwards. At the same time, the
subdued affect of Moran’s narrative tone does nothing to conceal Moran’s
own heightened affect during the struggle itself. Moran’s irony aside, the
struggle is fun. Indeed, Beckett’s technique is particularly remarkable for
the way in which it allows Moran to maintain two affective levels at once:
a calmness in tone characterizes the level of narration, while on the level of
the narrated events the states described possess enormous intensity. The
suppression of affect is, moreover, essential to Moran’s image of himself as
a good servant of the law, and he can no more allow anger to unsettle him
than he can his occasional pang of compassion. Thus when Moran feels
his anger rising he seeks to restore his calm and meticulous surface:
“Quiet, Moran, quiet. No emotion, please” (M, p. 132).
In this suppression of emotion, Moran bears a curious resemblance to
Gibbons’s Flora Poste, who exerts her own authority over her relations at
Cold Comfort Farm in as cool and professional a manner as she can
muster. Flora’s much greater success at her affective regulation, however,
allows the reader to retain a view of that task as salutary, and Gibbons’s
novel consequently describes satire as a benevolent kind of regulation that
makes happiness possible. In Molloy, on the other hand, satire itself is an
uncontrollable force, a superego run wild. Moran is anything but blasé,
while Flora’s affective pattern is predicated on the very flexibility that
Moran lacks. Moran simply cannot attain Flora’s modern ironic cool – or
he can only attain it when he occupies his narratorial role, from which he
can recollect his emotion in tranquility. Thus the narrative produces a
steady tension between control and its loss, evident in the device of
euphemism or understatement, which stifles emerging narratorial affect:
“[I] took the iodex and rubbed it into my knee . . . Let it soak well in, said
my son. He would pay for that later on” (M, p. 119). Or later: “I looked
at my son. He began to protest. I soon put a stop to that” (M, p. 156).
True indifference can only be achieved in retrospection, as when Moran
tries to recall why his son abandoned him: “That night I had a violent
scene with my son. I do not remember about what . . . I have had so many
scenes with my son” (M, p. 160).
Despite his efforts to quell emotion, to administer the law in a profes-
sional way, Moran is always simmering, just on the verge of boiling over.
Beneath his “meticulous and calm” surface is an overwhelming quantity
of explosive tension. Thus, like many a familiar sitcom character, Moran’s
temper erupts in rage with pleasing regularity. The affect that is central to
Moran’s character, then, is not blasé indifference, but irritation. Irritation,
Sianne Ngai notes, is more a mood than an emotion; she quotes Annette
Baier’s claim that “moods are either objectless, or have near all-inclusive
and undifferentiated objects.”53 Unlike anger, irritation suggests both
“hyperresponsiveness”54 and underresponsiveness; the irritated person gets
irritated at everything, even though the removal of any specific provoca-
tion will fail to relieve the predominant feeling.55 Moran is a figure of
irritation par excellence, with a litany of arbitrary dislikes:
Now if there is one thing I abhor, it is someone coming into my room, without
knocking. (M, p. 102)
If there is one thing that gets on my nerves it is music. (M, p. 105)
I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals.
As for God, he is beginning to disgust me. (M, p. 105)
The sight of my moustache, as always, annoyed me. (M, p. 119)
There is something about this strict sit of hats and caps that never fails to
exasperate me. (M, p. 130)
Hurrah! cried my son. How I loathe that exclamation! I can hardly set it down.
(M, p. 157)
Irritation proves to be a supremely comic affect in part because – unlike a
morally justified anger – it is inexhaustible, always promising another
predictable funny explosion. While anger might expend itself, irritation,
despite the low level of affect that it suggests, is actually closer to sadism,
because it needs no spur beyond itself. Both the proliferation and the
triviality of objects of Moran’s annoyance therefore suggest a tempera-
ment already on the lookout for a cause for rage, a law always anticipat-
ing its own violation and preparing its punitive, violent apparatus
of “enforcement.” And of course this enforcement will accomplish
little, since the next idiosyncratic object of irritation has yet to be
announced or even determined. For Moran, irritability, manifested in
the multiplicity of his pet peeves, thus reveals the law as arbitrary in its
object. As Deleuze notes, “The law cannot specify its object without
contradiction.”56
Thus the very qualities that make Moran terrifying to his son also make
him, to the reader, thoroughly comic. His violent impulses exist in a state
of constant tension, simply waiting for some tiny violation to provoke
them into rage. His reverence for and obedience to the law are a desire to
subject a recalcitrant world to his own whims, whims which merely serve
as a pretext for finding the world unsatisfactory and exerting control over it.
Moran’s affective pattern is one of a constant movement between
control, irritation, and explosion, a simmering of annoyance that erupts
in rabid violence but offers only the most temporary of catharses before
arising again.
follow me carefully: molloy’s obsessions

In turning to the first half of the novel, Molloy’s narrative, I want to
suggest that Moran’s fascistic tendencies can be seen as a special case of a
larger phenomenon, and that his characteristic affective pattern – building
tension or irritation leading to sudden and violent, if comic, explosions of
rage – is typical of Molloy as well, who in so many other ways seems
Moran’s opposite. This sort of obsessive-compulsive fussiness is a much-
discussed feature of Beckett’s pre-war fiction, and characters such as
Murphy and Belacqua struggle with a world that resists their demands
for order. These characters of course pre-date Beckett’s experience in
France under German occupation, and the comedy generated by their
obsessive rigidity and sudden explosions might argue that Beckett’s
engagement with European fascism (which he witnessed rising during
his time in Germany during the 1930s) is only part of a larger interest in
the nature of compulsion and anger. Still, what Adorno says of Freud
could equally be applied to Beckett, that the “intuitions” of the analyst
might be “capable of anticipating [sociopolitical] tendencies still latent
on a rational level.”57 Freud, writes Adorno, “developed within the
monadological confines of the individual the traces of its profound crisis
and willingness to yield unquestioningly to powerful outside, collective
agencies.”58 Similarly, Beckett’s pre-war attention to compulsive and
authoritarian types might bespeak a latent political intuition about the
way the human personality gets squeezed in modernity.
Although Molloy shares with Moran an exacting relation to the
world, he rejects the apparatuses of the law that Moran loves to enforce:
“To apply the letter of the law to me is not an easy matter” (M, p. 24).
Molloy confounds the law with his literalness; when asked by a police-
man for his “papers,” Molloy produces only the old “bits of newspaper
to wipe [him]self . . . when [he has] a stool” (M, p. 20). Yet the lawless
Molloy also confesses to “a mania for symmetry” (M, p. 85), a mania
with which he justifies the sadistic violence he inflicts on a hermit whom
he meets in the forest. Having kicked the old man in the ribs on one
side, Molloy notes, “I rested a moment, then got up, picked up my
crutches, took up my position on the other side of the body, and applied
myself with method to the same exercise” (M, p. 84). While Moran
covers his sadism with the bourgeois demands for filial obedience and
moral education, Molloy invokes as his rationale a purely mathematical
concept of symmetry. It makes perfect sense then that Molloy considers
himself a good citizen despite his lawlessness: “I have only to be told
what good behaviour is and I am well-behaved, within the limits of my
physical possibilities” (M, pp. 24–25). He makes the very possibility of
“good behaviour” dependent upon rationality – upon the determination
of clear “principles”:
And if I have always behaved like a pig, the fault lies not with me but with my
superiors, who corrected me only on points of detail instead of showing me the
essence of the system, in the manner of the great English schools, and the guiding
principles of good manners . . . For that would have allowed me, before parading
in public certain habits such as the finger in the nose, the scratching of the balls,
digital emunction and the peripatetic piss, to refer them to the first rules of a
reasoned theory. (M, p. 25)
Molloy’s failure to obey the law, he maintains, results not from a lack of
respect for it, but from the failure of his education to provide him with a
coherent justification for various prohibitions. A philosopher of the
bodily function, Molloy seeks “the first rules of a reasoned theory.”
Molloy’s mania for symmetry also resembles Moran’s meticulousness
in its obsessive quality, and to enter into Beckett’s writing means to enter
into Molloy’s obsessions. “Follow me carefully” (M, p. 77), he enjoins the
reader as he sets out to describe in meticulous detail the differences
between the “old” pain in one leg and the “new” pain in the other. This
description, which rehearses several pages of arguments and counter-
arguments, is merely one of an abundance of examples of what Deleuze
calls “the exhaustive and the exhausted” in Beckett, where an attempt at
the systematic intellectual consideration of possibilities accompanies “a
certain physiological exhaustion.”59 Crucially, Molloy’s exhaustive
rehearsals are, like Moran’s, counter-balanced by a characteristic gesture
of sudden outburst. Molloy describes his encounter with a social worker
who tries to feed him some toast and tea:
Against the charitable gesture there is no defence, that I know of. You sink your
head, you put out your hands all trembling and twined together and you say,
Thank you, thank you lady, thank you kind lady. To him who has nothing it is
forbidden not to relish filth. The liquid overflowed, the mug rocked with a noise
of chattering teeth, not mine, I had none, and the sodden bread sagged more and
more. Until, panic-stricken, I flung it all far from me. I did not let it fall, no, but
with a convulsive thrust of both my hands I threw it to the ground, where it
smashed to smithereens, or against the wall, far from me, with all my strength.
(M, p. 24)
Deriding the mnemonic powers of the Proustian tea, Molloy here
unmasks the social worker’s compassion as a guise of the coercive law,
redescribing the sentimental gesture of charity as a ruse of power. Yet his
resistance to the law manifests an affective pattern just like Moran’s
enforcement of it: the accretion of tension through a careful examination
of a situation – typical here is the repetition with variation of the phrase
“thank you lady,” and the present-tense philosophical aside – which
culminates in a violent gesture of defiance.
Molloy notes, while discussing his sucking stones, “I would sometimes
throw away all I had about me, in a burst of irritation” (M, p. 45), and this
“burst of irritation” is his signature comic device. Repeatedly, irritation or
anxiety, throbbing along at an affective level well below rage or panic,
builds incrementally until a breaking point is reached and tension is
released through a sudden, violent flinging-away. This flinging-away or
burst of irritation is characteristic not only of Molloy’s physical behavior
but also of his thought and his language. For example, he painstakingly
reasons through the relationship between words and objects but then
suddenly discards the whole issue: “To hell with it anyway. Where was
I?” (M, p. 32). Equally illustrative is his slapstick account of how he
communicates with his deaf (and presumably blind) mother: “I got into
communication with her by knocking on the skull. One knock meant yes,
two no, three I don’t know, four money, five goodbye” (M, p. 18). Yet
because his aged mother cannot count past two, the code fails:
It was too far for her, yes, the distance was too great, from one to four. By the
time she came to the fourth knock, she imagined she was only at the second, the
first two having been erased from her memory as completely as if they had never
been felt, though I don’t quite see how something never felt can be erased
from the memory, and yet it is a common occurrence. She must have thought
I was saying no to her all the time, whereas nothing was further from my
purpose. (M, p. 18)
Beyond the familiar Beckettian themes of fallible memory and physical
decay, we see here a meticulous i-dotting like Moran’s – an exploration of
the consequences of every phrase, in a language that enacts the process
of thinking through the problem. Yet such meticulousness gives way to
sudden violence:
Enlightened by these considerations I looked for and finally found a more
effective means of putting the idea of money into her head. This consisted in
replacing the four knocks of my index-knuckle by one or more (according to my
needs) thumps of the fist, on her skull. That she understood. (M, p. 18)
Molloy’s thought here picks up the detached tone of his previous rumin-
ations with a technical description of the problems in implementing the
code. But the calm way in which the violence is narrated vanishes, and the
affect of his language intensifies with the sadistic thumps on the head
(“That she understood”). And no sooner does Molloy succeed in estab-
lishing communication than he flings away the entire undertaking: “In
any case I didn’t come for money” (M, p. 18).
This pattern of total immersion in obsession followed by a violent
renunciation of the affective investment in the object of the obsession
might usefully supplement Ngai’s discussion of Deleuzean exhaustion in
Beckett, an affective state she calls stuplimity. Ngai coins this portman-
teau, fusing stupor and sublimity, to capture the quality Beckett has of
appearing as “simultaneously astonishing and deliberately fatiguing,”60
inspiring through the sheer agglutination of prose, or through the
exhaustive rehearsal of combinatorial possibilities, a mix of awe and
tedium. For Ngai, stuplimity offers neither the transcendence of the
sublime proper, nor the cynical, critical distance typical of a glossy
postmodernism. Instead, it achieves a cognitive and affective paralysis
that wears away the reader’s defenses and produces “a condition of utter
receptivity in which difference is perceived (and perhaps even ‘felt’) prior
to its qualification or conceptualization.”61 While Ngai focuses largely on
Beckett’s later writings, she does cite Molloy as an example where Beckett’s
“fatigues can be darkly funny.”62 Grouping Molloy with the stubborn
comic mechanical performances of slapstick comedians such as Keaton
and Chaplin, Ngai invokes Deleuze’s theorization of humor as a maso-
chistic subversion of the law to account for a slapstick “going limp
or falling down” that enables “small subjects” moments of resistance
“in their confrontation with larger systems.”63 The quasi-fascist agency
hunting down Molloy would be one such system, but that agency itself
might only be a special, extreme case of the increasing bureaucratic
control impinging on modern life.
Yet the extension of Ngai’s concept of stuplimity to account for the
repetitiveness of slapstick is only partially convincing. For slapstick,
despite its repetitiveness, never inspires tedium or awe – that is, unless it
ceases to be funny.64 While laughter in Beckett indeed derives from
obsessive-compulsive repetition or tedious-awesome exhaustion, it also
signals the break from the tedium of obsession. Like a piece of driftwood
happily discovered, laughter is something the reader can cling to in the
oceans of possibilities in which Beckett’s prose immerses her. Or, to
change metaphors, laughter not only accompanies but enacts the gesture
of flinging away, reversing the tense and obsessive enumeration of possi-
bilities. For Beckett’s reader, laughter brings about a release akin to what
the rageful flinging away accomplishes for the character. Laughter is kin to
Moran’s beating of his recalcitrant son with an umbrella, or Molloy’s
unprovoked pummeling of the charcoal-burner.
The process is perhaps best illustrated through Molloy’s famous
sucking-stone episode – an approximately 2,500-word account of Mol-
loy’s efforts to distribute among his four pockets sixteen stones that he can
suck one at a time, while in the long run sucking them all equally. The
problem of how to distribute and choose the stones, of course, is entirely
Molloy’s own construction, “a goal I had set myself” (M, p. 70); like
Youdi’s orders, the imperative is wholly arbitrary. Yet like most uncon-
sciously imposed obsessions, its arbitrary nature does not mitigate the
unpleasure it causes, and Molloy experiences feelings of “anger and
perplexity” (M, p. 71), along with “anxiety” (M, p. 74).
Temporary relief from this steady pulsation of unpleasure arrives when
Molloy is struck by the possibility that he might “sacrific[e] the principle
of trim” (M, p. 71) – the principle of even distribution of stones among
his pockets. Giving up the mania for symmetry promises a release from
compulsion and brings an emotional surge: “the meaning of this illumin-
ation . . . began suddenly to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of
Jeremiah” (M, p. 71). Yet this sudden glory quickly dissipates as Molloy
begins to examine his solution in detail: “All (all!) that was necessary was
to put for example, to begin with, six stones in the right pocket of my
greatcoat, or supply-pocket, five in the right pocket of my trousers, and
five in the left pocket of my trousers, that makes the lot, twice five ten plus
six sixteen . . .” (M, p. 72), and on and on for several more sentences. And
so, once again, the reader is immersed in the mad and maddening
rehearsal of the new method of distribution.
Eventually, Molloy recognizes that his obsessive desire to suck the stones
“with method” (M, p. 74) is unimportant, even trivial – as obsessions
generally are: “And deep down it was all the same to me whether
I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone” (M, p. 74).
Just as the mania for symmetrical distribution has been discarded, so now is
the need to suck stones in the first place: “But deep down I didn’t give a
fiddler’s curse about being without [any stones]” (M, p. 74). Thus, after
days on the beach puzzling over the problem, and pages of the reader’s
immersion in the reversals of his attempt to solve the impossible problem,
the whole obsession is blithely dropped, in another abrupt and astonishing
gesture of flinging-away: “And the solution to which I rallied in the end was
to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now
in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or
swallowed” (M, p. 74).
The sucking-stones episode, then, is merely the most elaborate example
of a pattern in Molloy’s narrative between an immersion in obsession and
a release from it, a release which is invariably accompanied by sudden
change in affect. The overcoming of obsession, which the reader generally
experiences as comic, registers a shift in scale whereby the all-consuming,
massive obsession that offers only tedium and awe is suddenly recognized
as small or unimportant. Surely this pattern fits Freud’s analysis of the
comic whereby an “inhibitory expenditure” of energy “suddenly becomes
unutilizable” and “is discharged by laughter.”65 It also fits Critchley’s
suggestion that Beckett’s texts parody philosophy rather than philoso-
phize;66 they produce laughter, we might add, not merely from the failure
of philosophy but from the failure of the obsessive tendency of intellec-
tion itself.
As I have noted probably too many times already, the recognition of
this mechanical, compulsive quality is also the essence of Bergson’s notion
of the comic, which restores human sociality by supplying the flexi-
bility that the obsessive-compulsive lacks. Father Ambrose remarks to
Moran the old Aristotelian observation, crucial to Bergson, that laughter
“is peculiar to man”: “Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find
that funny . . . Christ never laughed either, he said, so far as we know”
(M, p. 101). (Baudelaire, who remarks on the absence of divine laughter, is
alluded to here as well.) And while any reader of Beckett should remain
wary of wisdom coming from such a source, there is something salutary in
a Bergsonian reading of Molloy that lets us see the sociable side of a writer
who is commonly made out to be the least sociable of artists. Molloy’s
professed aim is, after all, the fundamentally polite gesture of “say[ing] my
goodbyes” (M, p. 7). His deathbed farewell, idiosyncratic as it is, partakes
of the rich novelistic tradition of teary, sentimental scenes of dying.
A Bergsonian reading of Beckettian laughter no doubt overplays Beck-
ett’s sociality and underplays the fact that in all this repetition, obedience,
and sadism there remains something uncanny and inhuman. Paul
Sheehan has noted the centrality of compulsion in Beckett, seeing it as
an inhuman reworking of an ethical notion of obligation.67 Indeed, the
entire novel Molloy is an exploration of compulsion, whether that explor-
ation proceeds through Moran’s moralistic, sadistic authoritarianism,
or through Molloy’s abstract mania for symmetry. This compulsion is,
of course, the very situation of writing in Beckett: the need to write is
famously in his work an exacting, sadistic, unconscious injunction, one
that demands a ruthless and impossible precision.68
Thus Molloy obsesses, but he also desires to get to the end of his
obsession:
And if I failed to mention this detail in its proper place, it is because you cannot
mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not
worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention
everything you would never be done, and that’s what counts, to be done, to
have done. (M, p. 41)
To have done, to be done, to rest: as Freud frames the idea in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, life is but a way of the creature dying on its own terms.
Molloy continues: “Oh I know, even when you mention only a few of the
things there are, you do not get done either, I know, I know. But it’s a
change of muck. And if all muck is the same muck that doesn’t matter, it’s
good to have a change of muck, to move from one heap to another a little
further on” (M, p. 41). What initially looks like a death drive, the wish to
be done, shades into a desire for change, for new muck rather than old.
Beckett thus places thanatos and eros side by side, another set of doubles,
another pair of clowns – or, as he calls them in The Unnamable, another
pseudocouple:69 “For in me there have always been two fools, among
others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the
other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further
on” (M, p. 48).
The whole process of determining whether Beckett’s satire critiques or
affirms “the human” is, to use Beckett’s own phrase, a mug’s game.
Rather, what Beckett and our critical struggles with him reveal is the
proximity of these affects, the close cohabitation of compulsive subjection,
and sudden, surprising freedom. Registering the pressures of modernity’s
power arrangements, Molloy indicates the interdependence of two sides
of authoritarian behavior. For if totalitarian structures deform the person-
ality into a docile machine for the execution of a repressive will and
persecution of what Adorno called the social outgroup, they also stand
revealed in Beckett’s fiction as susceptible to satiric derision. While
Beckett’s life would seem to suggest that he believed action not writing
must be the first response to such violence, his literature may still give us
some understanding of the conditions under which such violence is
produced. In this sense Beckett as well as any writer lays bare the impos-
sible bind of late modernist satire. Unable to accept the clichés and
deceptions of sentimentality, uneasy with the sadism of his own satiric
negations, Beckett, like the other writers in this late modernist company,
performs the impossible trick of making something out of nothing.
Notes
p r ef ac e
1 Iain Topliss discusses this cartoon in The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William
Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005), pp. 166–68. See also my review in Modernism/Modernity,
13.2 (2006): 401–03.
2 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions,
1974), p. 68.
3 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xvii, trans. and ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 251.
4 Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1956), p. 64.
5 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Society and Literature
(New York: Harcourt, 1978), p. 207.
1 s a t i r e an d i t s d i s c o n t e n t s
1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977),
p. 132.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., pp. 131–32.
4 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2005), p. 5.
5 Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualties: Boredom and Modernity
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 3, 7.
6 Justus Nieland, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2008).
7 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
(New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 11.
8 Harry Levin’s judgment is characteristic: “It is generally agreed that English
satire enjoyed its heyday during the first half of the eighteenth century;
it declined as, with the emergence of mere sentimental and romantic
touchstones, wit deserted malice and mellowed into humor.” Harry Levin,
184
Notes to pages 2–3 185
Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (Oxford
University Press, 1987), pp. 199–200.
9 Chris Baldick, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement, The Oxford English Literary
History, vol. x (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 235.
10 Quoted ibid., p. 234.
11 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World
Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Although Miller does
view satire as central to modernism, it should be noted that the Lewisian
strain of modernism he discusses is in his analysis largely opposed to the old
modernist canon of Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, and the rest. I discuss
Miller’s book in depth in Chapter 2. Another recent study of modernist
satire is Lisa Colletta, Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British
Novel (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Colletta observes a confluence of satiric
and modernist themes, such as the estrangement of the individual from a
wider social community, conditions of extreme violence or brutality, and a
predominant mood of helplessness or despair.
12 English looks at the particular political contexts and valences of comic, ironic,
and satiric texts to analyze how those texts construct and limit communities;
North focuses on the representation of the machine and of the mechanical as a
special site of laughter. James English, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor
and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1994); Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford
University Press, 2009). Nieland’s reading of comedy posits an eccentric, even
dissident, vein of laughter that resists the coercive sociality implicit in Bergson’s
view. See Nieland, Feeling Modern.
13 A partial list would include Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1965); Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); Leon Guilhamet, Satire and the
Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987);
Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1994).
14 Guilhamet usefully distinguishes between satire as a genre and satire as a
mode, echoing Paulson’s distinction between the “form” and “tone” of satire.
Guilhamet, Transformation, p. 7; Paulson, Fictions, p. 4. Within generic
discussions of satire, a further distinction exists between formal verse satire
and prose (or Menippean) satire. In Guilhamet’s terms, my discussion focuses
on the satiric mode in narrative fiction; I stress attitude and sensibility rather
than specific generic attributes.
15 George Meredith, “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Sprit,”
in Sypher, Comedy, p. 44; Levin, Playboys and Killjoys, p. 197; Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 224.
16 Guilhamet, Transformation, p. 7.
17 Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 5.
Booth’s emphasis on the constructive (even benevolent) dimension of irony
extends to the laughter elicited by satire.
186 Notes to pages 3–6
18 Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of his Life (New York: Carroll and Graf,
1970), p. 320.
19 See, for example, Italo Calvino, “Definitions of Territories: Comedy,” The Uses
of Literature: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt, 1986), p. 64.
20 Kernan, Plot of Satire, p. 9; Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 224.
21 Robert F. Kiernan suggests that a purely playful dimension characterizes the
tradition he calls the “camp novel.” Robert F. Kiernan, Frivolity Unbound: Six
Masters of the Camp Novel: Thomas Love Peacock, Max Beerbohm, Ronald
Firbank, E. F. Benson, P. G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett (New York:
Continuum, 1990).
22 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 103.
23 Ibid., p. 106.
24 Ibid., p. 112.
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967),
pp. 66–67; Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and
the Avant-gardes (Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 130.
26 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, p. 67.
27 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed.
James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 115.
28 Ibid., p. 162.
29 Ibid., p. 160.
30 Ibid., p. 161.
31 Freud at this point had not worked out the tripartite scheme of the id, ego,
and superego.
32 Freud, Jokes, pp. 167, 68.
33 Ibid., p. 214.
34 Cf. Norman Holland, Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989). Griffin distinguishes between pleasure that “derive[s]
from the wit” of satire and pleasure which stems “from the pain of the attack,”
and usefully catalogs varieties and theories of satiric pleasure. Griffin, Critical
Reintroduction, p. 161.
35 Bergson, “Laughter,” p. 84.
36 Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Spar-
row, 1982) p. 158.
37 Nieland, Feeling Modern, p. 51.
38 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, p. 116.
39 Ibid., p. 226.
40 Ibid., pp. 228–29. Kenneth Burke’s 1937 theory is similar: asserting that “the
satirist attacks in others the weaknesses and temptations that are really within
himself,” he sees satire as founded on an act of projection in which the satirist
shares and takes pleasure in the corrupt or grotesque nature of his target, but
he hides this pleasure by projecting it onto a target whom he can punish.
Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), p. 49.
41 Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton University
Press, 1979), p. 3. Stephen Weisenburger deploys Seidel’s theory in his
book on postmodern “Black Humor,” Fables of Subversion: Satire and the
American Novel, 1930–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
42 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1997), p. 184.
43 Ibid., p. 185.
44 Calvino, “Definitions of Territories: Comedy,” pp. 62–63.
45 Evelyn Waugh, “Fan-Fare,” The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh,
ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 304.
46 W. H. Auden, “Notes on the Comic,” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays
(New York: Random House, 1962), p. 385.
47 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F.
N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), pp. 211–12.
48 Ibid., p. 212.
49 Seidel, Satiric Inheritance, p. 263.
50 Cf. Christian Thorne, “Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the
Market, and the Invention of Literature,” PMLA, 16.3 (2001): 537.
51 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University
Press, 1989), p. 73.
52 Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes the grotesque as a “species of confusion”
that “call[s] . . . into question our ways of organizing the world.” Geoffrey
Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and
Literature (Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. xxi, 3. Bernard McElroy
emphasizes the grotesque within modernism as an encounter with the mon-
strous; its function is “to direct our attention to the undignified, perilous,
even gross physicality of existence, and to emphasise it by exaggeration,
distortion, or unexpected combination.” Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the
Modern Grotesque (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 11.
53 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity (New York:
Routledge, 1994), p. 7.
54 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 115.
55 For a Jungian approach, see Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English
Literature (Oxford University Press, 1967); Heideggerian: Deiter Meindl,
American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1996); feminist: Russo, Female Grotesque; race theory:
Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American
Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
56 Several works offer models of the psychic mechanism by which feelings
of anxiety and amusement are produced, for example: Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic
Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities, 1952); Holland,
Dynamics; Michael Steig, “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 29 (1970): 253–60.
57 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 26.
58 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich
Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 18.
59 Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 38, 37. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White view the
grotesque as the resurfacing of cultural material that has been repressed in the
constitution of class hierarchies and bourgeois norms. Peter Stallybrass and
Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1986). In this vein see also Terry Castle, The Female Therm-
ometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford
University Press, 1995).
60 Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 48. Attempts to examine the grotesque within modern-
ism include John R. Clark, The Modern Satiric Grotesque (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Mark Fearnow, The American Stage
and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque (Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Joseph R. Millichap, “Distorted Matter and Dis-
junctive Forms: The Grotesque as Modernist Genre,” Arizona Quarterly,
33 (1977): 339–47.
61 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 11–12.
62 Kenneth Burke, “Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s
Novel Nightwood),” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature,
and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 244, 246.
63 D. H. Lawrence, “The Crown” [1915], Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 60; James
Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” [1949], Collected Essays, ed. Toni
Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 12.
64 Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of
the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1, 4–5.
65 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmod-
ernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Jane Tompkins, Sen-
sational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford
University Press, 1985).
66 Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (New York:
St. Martin’s, 2000) p. 160.
67 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (New York:
Harcourt, 1964), p. 10.
68 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 2. See also Jessica
Burstein, “A Few Words about Dubuque: Modernism, Sentimentalism, and
the Blasé,” American Literary History, 14.2 (2002): 227–54.
69 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry
Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 250, 252.
70 English, Comic Transactions, p. 17. The term multiaccented English borrows
from Valentin Voloshinov.
71 Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 50.
72 Ibid., p. 48.
73 Ibid., p. 50.
74 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, pp. 207–08.
75 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature
(Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 287–88.
76 T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre” [1917], To Criticize the Critic and
Other Writings (New York: Farrar, 1965), pp. 1, 89.
77 Thomas Mann, Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter
(New York: Books for Libraries, 1968), pp. 240–41; Flannery O’Connor,
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitz-
gerald (New York: Noonday, 1961), p. 162.
78 Two recent studies of American modernism understand grotesque repre-
sentation as broadly satiric or antisentimental. Joseph Entin examines how
left-leaning writers used “sensational” representation to question the senti-
mental pleasure of empathetic identification with the poor, while Susan
Edmunds focuses on the grotesque as a way of representing the “domestic
exterior” – the area in which an emerging welfare state extended the social
and cultural work of sentimental female domesticity. Joseph Entin, Sensa-
tional Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Susan Edmunds,
Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the US Welfare State
(Oxford University Press, 2008).
79 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (New York: Random House, 1983),
pp. 26–27; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, 1981), p. 36.
80 E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 65.
81 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), p. 150.
82 Jay Dickson, “Defining the Sentimentalist in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly,
44.1 (2006): 20–22.
83 S. Clark, Sentimental Modernism, p. 3.
84 Dickson, “Defining the Sentimentalist in Ulysses,” 22.
85 Ibid., 23.
86 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House,
1986), 9.550–51. In quoting from Ulysses, I follow convention in citing chapter
and line number rather than page number.
87 O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 147–48.
88 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 33.
89 M. Bell, Sentimentalism, p. 148.
90 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971), pp. 2, 4.
91 Ibid., p. 11. Authenticity may ultimately be an empty concept; still, it retained
considerable value for many modernist writers.
92 Ibid., p. 94.
93 Ibid., p. 11.
94 “Undoubtedly, the modern shift from sincerity to authenticity is best repre-
sented discursively in Nietzsche.” M. Bell, Sentimentalism, p. 167.
95 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002), p. 126.
96 Ibid., p. 127.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Nietzsche, Genealogy, p. 19.
100 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin,
1992), p. 233.
101 Ibid., p. 222.
102 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” pp. 7, 10. Eliot also addresses
the topic in “The Metaphysical Poets,” where he introduces his notion of a
historical dissociation of sensibility; see Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,”
Selected Essays, p. 247.
103 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” Selected Essays, pp. 124–25.
104 Maria DiBattista, First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction (University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. 31.
105 Ella Zohar Ophir, “Towards a Pitiless Fiction: Abstraction, Comedy, and
Modernist Antihumanism,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 52.1 (2006):
92–120.
2 m o de rn i sm ’ s s t or y of f e el i n g
1 The bible of postmodern architecture itself quotes Richard Poirier’s descrip-
tion of Joyce and Eliot as a prototype for postmodernism. Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1972), p. 72.
2 Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. xvii.
3 Lawrence Rainey, Introduction to Modernism: An Anthology (Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell, 2005), p. xxiv; Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
5 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
6 Ibid.
7 Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (New
York: Bantam, 1982), p. 3.
8 Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed.
Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 221.
9 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 120. Steven Jones maintains that the
values of sympathy and sincerity themselves emerged as a Romantic
reaction against Popean wit and satire: “Romantic or sentimental modes
come to be defined negatively, as meaning something very close to
‘unsatiric’.” Steven Jones, Satire and Romanticism (New York: Palgrave,
2000), p. 8.
10 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” p. 217.
12 Robert F. Kiernan, Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel: Thomas
Love Peacock, Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, E. F. Benson, P. G. Wodehouse,
Ivy Compton-Burnett (New York: Continuum, 1990), pp. 39, 42.
13 Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, Or an Oxford Love Story (New York:
Penguin, 1988), unnumbered prefatory note.
14 Ibid., p. 90.
15 Ibid., p. 32.
16 Rei Terada makes the case for the nonsubjective nature of feeling. Rei Terada,
Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001).
17 Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, pp. 114, 178.
18 Ibid., pp. 66, 100, 111.
19 F. W. Dupee, for example, comments, “Beerbohm’s dehumanizing of his
characters does perhaps ask for a bit of explaining. For me, there is only one
moment in the book when it is possible to ‘feel with’ any of them.” F. W.
Dupee, “Max Beerbohm and the Rigors of Fantasy,” The Surprise of Excel-
lence: Modern Essays on Max Beerbohm, ed. J. G. Riewald (Hamden, Conn.:
Shoe String Press, 1974), p. 183.
20 Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, pp. 103, 209.
21 Ibid., p. 22.
22 Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary
Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 77.
23 Marjorie Perloff notes that the major figures of the Futurist moment retain
strong affinities with their fin-de-siècle forebears, that Marinetti “was writing,
as late as 1909, decadent versions of Baudelairean lyric,” that Pound’s
Imagism in the early 1910s was “a free verse based on the vers libre of the
French Symbolists.” Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde,
Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press,
2003), pp. 83, 163.
24 Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed.
T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 44.
25 F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Let’s Murder the
Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, ed.
R.W. Flint (Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), p. 51.
26 “Long Live the Vortex!”, Blast, 1 (June 20, 1914), 8. dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/
1143209523824858.pdf.
27 This logic would then be one of many places in which Joseph Litvak’s writing
about sophistication would apply well to an analysis of modernism; he views
“culture as a contest of sophistications, where victory often redounds to those
who best disavow their sophistication.” Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets:
Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), p. 5.
28 Perloff, Futurist Moment, p. 111.
29 Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, p. 134.
30 Pound, “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays, pp. 12, 14.
31 Ibid., p. 13.
32 Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Literary Essays, p. 45.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 The association of satire and surgery is an old one. See Mary Claire Randolph,
“The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory,” in Satire:
Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1971), pp. 135–70.
36 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: The 1918 Edition, ed. Paul O’Keefe (Santa Rosa,
Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1990), pp. 33, 45, 51.
37 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), p. 87.
38 Reed Way Dasenbrock, quoted in English, Comic Transactions, p. 80.
39 Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), p. 30.
40 As Douglas Mao remarks, “Tarr himself seem[s] composed more of polemic
than of feeling.” Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of
Production (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 95.
41 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, p. 300.
42 Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revoluton: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-
gardes (Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 122.
44 Ibid., p. 42.
45 Ibid., p. 43.
46 Ibid., p. 314.
47 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, p. 113.
48 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, p. viii.
49 Ibid., p. 30.
50 Ibid., p. 243. Michael Levenson’s reading hinges on Tarr’s failure to free
himself from his own sexual drives and achieve a disinterested artistic con-
sciousness. Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Char-
acter and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge University Press,
1991), p. 141. Peter Nicholls also comments upon Tarr’s inability to negotiate
the social world; see Nicholls, Modernisms, pp. 183 ff.
51 Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, p. 43.
53 Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and
Empire, 1901–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 150.
55 Ibid., p. 179.
56 Ann Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict: 1880–1922 (Cambridge
57 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, pp. 191, 192.
58 For a fuller discussion of Lewis’s failure to adhere to externals, see Levenson,
Modernism and the Fate of Individuality, p. 126.
60 Ibid.
61 Richard Aldington, “The Influence of Mr. James Joyce,” in Modernism: An
Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. (University
of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 400.
62 Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
The quotation from the van Dorens is from Robert Bell, Jocoserious Joyce: The
Fate of Folly in Ulysses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 64.
63 R. Bell, Jocoserious Joyce, pp. 8, 12, 35. My view of the satiric in Ulysses is
anticipated by both Bell and by Maureen Waters, “James Joyce and Buck
Mulligan,” The Comic Irishman (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1984), pp. 95–109.
64 Joyce, Ulysses, 1.204.
65 Ibid., 1.589–93.
66 Ibid., 9.568–74
67 R. Bell, Jocoserious Joyce, p. 8.
68 Joyce, Ulysses, 1.152–53, 9.483.
69 Waters, Comic Irishman, p. 106.
70 Joyce, Ulysses, 9.472.
71 Ibid., 1.21–23.
72 Ibid., 9.507–11.
73 R. Bell, Jocoserious Joyce, p. 8.
74 Waters, Comic Irishman, p. 91.
75 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1969), pp. 1–2.
76 Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press,
1998), p. 12.
77 Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), pp. 97, 99.
78 T. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 158.
79 Huxley, Antic Hay, p. 39.
80 Ibid., p. 41.
81 Ibid., p. 31.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., pp. 108–09.
84 Ibid., pp. 14, 88, 103
85 Ibid., pp. 41, 67.
86 See Aldous Huxley, “The Substitutes for Religion,” Aldous Huxley: Complete
Essays, vol. ii, 1926–1929, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan
R. Dee, 2000), p. 254. I thank Sandy Reyes for bringing this source to my
attention.
88 Ibid., pp. 62, 179.
89 Ibid., p. 100.
90 Ibid., p. 103.
91 Ibid., p. 193.
92 Ibid., p. 123.
93 Ibid., p. 56.
94 Cf. “The incident occurs, but nothing can be done with it: it is merely one
more symptom of an obscure malaise . . . There is no attempt to relate the
fact of poverty to the social system which permits Gumbril and his friends
their privileged fantasy-lives.” Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in
Modern Literature (New York: Schocken, 1970), p. 41.
96 Ibid.
98 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in
the 1930s (London: The Bodley Head, 1976).
99 A. Wilde, Horizons of Assent, p. 42.
100 Ibid., p. 99.
101 Ibid., p. 43.
102 Ibid., p. 108.
103 Ibid., pp. 101, 117.
104 T. Miller, Late Modernism, pp. 42, 63.
105 These others include Irving Howe, Fredric Jameson, and Joshua Esty. Howe
describes a modernism of three phases, each defined by a different view of
the self, from “an inflation of the self” to “a minute examination of its own
inner dynamics” to “an emptying-out of the self.” Irving Howe, Decline of
the New (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 5. Fredric Jameson’s Fables of
Aggression emphasizes Wyndham Lewis’s dispersal of subjectivity and the
value he places on satiric laughter. Joshua Esty’s A Shrinking Island: Modern-
ism and National Culture in England (Princeton University Press, 2004)
looks primarily at the later works of earlier modernists such as Forster,
Woolf, and Eliot, and sees in their later writings a retreat from metropolitan-
ism and an effort to shore up a notion of English culture.
107 Marjorie Perloff, Preface to F. T. Marinetti, Let’s Murder the Moonshine:
Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, ed. R. W.
Flint (Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), p. 5.
108 Lewis, who is a central presence in Miller’s study, was a key figure in early
modernism, but Miller argues that late modernism returned to aesthetic
possibilities temporarily eclipsed by high modernism. T. Miller, Late Mod-
ernism, pp. 18, 20.
109 Levenson notes “a persistent ambiguity in early modernism: the desire for
the autonomy of form and the claim that the root source and justification for
art is individual expression.” From this ambiguity arise two strains of
modernism, one he calls “classical” (and which is in effect a romanticism by
other means), the other “antihumanist.” Both strains have been called
“objective,” leading to critical confusion. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modern-
ism, pp. 98, 119, 135.
110 Rainey, Introduction to Modernism, p. 2.
111 Henry Green, Interview, “Henry Green: The Art of Fiction #22,” Paris
Review, 19 (1958), 16. www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/
4800.
112 Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 1.
113 Ibid., pp. 12, 14, 18.
114 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, pp. 199–200.
115 Ibid., p. 165.
116 As Jameson puts it, what makes late modernism late is not only the existence
of modernism but also its theorization: “what guides such practice and
enables it in the first place is very precisely that moment in which the
modern has been theorized and conceptually named and identified in terms
of the autonomy of the aesthetic.” Jameson, A Singular Modernity, p. 197.
117 Nathanael West, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell,” in Nathanael West: Novels
and Other Writings, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Library of America,
1997), p. 23.
118 Quoted as an epigraph to Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Boston: Little, Brown,
1930), no page number given.
119 Cf. Eve Sedgwick’s observation that “affects can be, and are, attached to
things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions,
and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus one can be
excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy.” Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003), p. 19.
3 t h e r ul e o f ou t r ag e : e v el yn w au g h ’s “ v i l e b od i es ”
1 Waugh’s rejection of satire is quoted in Chapter 1. On modernism, see his
comments on Joyce, who “started off writing very well,” but “ends up a
lunatic.” Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903–1939 (New
York: Norton, 1987), p. 208.
2 Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as
Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
3 See, among others, George McCartney, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and
the Modernist Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
4 An exception is Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern
Literature (New York: Schocken, 1970).
5 Robert Murray Davis, Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time (Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America, 1989), p. 59; Jeffrey Heath, The Pictur-
esque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and his Writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1982), p. 81; Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature
and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: The Bodley Head, 1976), pp. 58–59;
Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1965), p. 160; William Myers, Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil (London:
Faber, 1991), p. 18.
6 See Frederick Beaty, The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A Study of Eight
Novels (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 53; Michael
Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 157.
7 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 11.
8 Adam Parkes has taken this scene as emblematic of the ways in which British
modernism as a whole “was shaped in significant ways by an ongoing dialogue
with a culture of censorship.” Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship
(Oxford University Press, 1996), p. viii.
9 The “Illustrated” works of Aristotle refer to a falsely or facetiously attributed
pseudoscientific work describing the processes of human reproduction and
pregnancy. In Chapter 10 of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom looks through a copy of
Aristotle’s “Masterpiece” in a bookseller’s stall.
10 Cf. Gorra, The English Novel, p. 165.
11 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Press, 1979), p. 3.
13 Myers points out that Nina, Adam, and Ginger are each given moments of acute
vulnerability in order to maintain their humanity; Alain Blayac distinguishes
Waugh’s “humour,” tinged with sympathy, from intellectual “wit,” and argues
that it serves as “the touchstone and instrument of the writer’s wounded
affectivity”; Ian Littlewood goes so far as to claim that the emotional moments
in Vile Bodies teeter “on the edge of sentimentality.” Myers, The Problem of Evil,
p. 18; Alain Blayac, “Evelyn Waugh and Humour,” in Alain Blayac (ed.), Evelyn
Waugh: New Directions (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 115; Ian Littlewood, The
Writings of Evelyn Waugh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 19.
14 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World
Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 158.
15 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking,
1964), p. vii.
16 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 10.
17 Ibid., p. 18.
18 Ibid., p. 11.
19 Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford
University Press, 1999); Justus Nieland, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of
Public Life (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
20 Waugh, “Let Us Return to the Nineties but not to Oscar Wilde,” The Essays,
Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London:
Methuen, 1983), p. 123.
21 Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006).
22 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 19.
23 Ibid., p. 224.
24 Ibid., p. 19.
25 See Davis, The Forms of His Time, p. 129; Myers, The Problem of Evil, p. 144;
Stannard, The Early Years, p. 205; Robert R. Garnett, From Grimes to Brides-
head: The Early Novels of Eveyln Waugh (Toronto: Associated University
Presses, 1990), p. 59.
26 The change in tone parallels the differences Freud detailed between jokes and
dreams. The hallucinatory nature of dreams, like that of Agatha’s psychosis, is
a sensory phenomenon, whereas jokes are not. Moreover, “a dream is a
completely asocial mental product” while “a joke . . . is the most social of all
the mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure”; a dream dispenses with
intelligibility, while a joke requires intelligibility. Thus “the dream-work
operates by the same methods as jokes, but in its use of them it transgresses
the limits that are respected by jokes.” Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1989), pp. 214–15, 222.
27 Waugh, “Fan-Fare,” Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 303.
28 Davis, Forms of His Time, p. 15
29 This last reading is the one shared by Blayac, “Evelyn Waugh and Humour,”
p. 116, and Garnett, From Grimes to Brideshead, p. 72.
30 Hynes, Auden Generation, p. 60.
31 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 224.
32 Hynes, Auden Generation, p. 62.
33 Waugh, “Ronald Firbank,” Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 57, 58. The joke
about the bottle-green bowler is lifted almost directly from Firbank’s The
Flower Beneath the Foot.
34 Waugh, “Ronald Firbank,” pp. 58, 59. For a discussion of Firbank’s influence,
see James Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1966), pp. 5–10.
35 Waugh, “Let Us Return to the Nineties,” p. 125.
36 Waugh, “Satire and Fiction,” Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 102.
37 George McCartney, “The Being and Becoming of Evelyn Waugh,” in Evelyn
Waugh: New Directions, p. 143.
38 Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), p. 159.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 On Waugh and Futurism, see McCartney, “The Being and Becoming”;
Brooke Allen, “Vile Bodies: A Futurist Fantasy,” Twentieth Century Literature,
40.3 (1994): 318–28; and Archie Loss, “Vile Bodies, Vorticism, and Italian
Futurism,” Journal of Modern Literature, 18.1 (1992): 155–64. McCartney
recognizes the attack on Marinetti in the motor-racing scene as well, but
perhaps overemphasizes Waugh’s intellectual alliance with Lewis. Allen rec-
ognizes Lewis as a target, while noting that the antihumanism of Lewis and
Marinetti had a technical influence on Waugh. Loss likewise sees an ambiva-
lent attitude toward Futurism and Vorticism; for him, Waugh deploys certain
Futurist strategies, such as an emphasis on motion, but cannot celebrate the
machine as his predecessors do.
42 F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” Let’s Murder
the Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur
A. Coppotelli, ed. R. W. Flint (Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun and Moon Classics,
1991), p. 49.
43 Davis, for example, suggests that Waugh deploys “an aesthetic rather than a
psychological conception of character.” Davis, Forms of His Time, p. 21. See
also Carens, The Satiric Art, p. 60; Gorra, The English Novel, p. 159; Kernan,
The Plot of Satire, p. 149.
44 Gorra argues that Vile Bodies exhibits an awareness of the disquieting or even
disgusting as well as the comic consequences of the vision of the human as
mechanical. The English Novel, p. 162.
46 Ibid., p. 4.
4 l a u g h t e r an d f e a r i n “ a h a n df u l o f du s t ”
1 Donat O’Donnell, [Conor Cruise O’Brien], “The Pieties of Evelyn Waugh,”
in James Carens (ed.), Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh (Boston, Mass.: G. K.
Hall, 1987), p. 50.
2 Terry Eagleton has criticized exactly this “conflict between a sense of morality
and a sense style” in the early fiction, but my own aim here is analytic rather
than didactic. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature
(New York: Schocken, 1970), p. 43. See also Jeffrey Heath, The Picturesque
Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1982), p. 84.
3 George McCartney, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist
Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 3.
4 Thomas Drewry, “Tony Last’s Two Children in A Handful of Dust,” Evelyn
Waugh Newsletter and Studies, 25.3 (1991): 5–8.
California Press, 1990), p. 132.
6 Calvin Lane identifies this death as the first moment in Waugh’s fiction where
he allows compassion for his characters. Calvin Lane, Evelyn Waugh (Boston,
Mass.: Twayne, 1981), p. 60.
7 Evelyn Waugh, “Ronald Firbank,” The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn
Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 56–57; see also
“Let Us Return to the Nineties But Not to Oscar Wilde,” Essays, Articles, and
Reviews, pp. 122–25.
8 See Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés, p. 47; Ian Littlewood, The Writings of Evelyn
Waugh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 14. Eagleton claims that this tonal
quality impairs Waugh’s critique of upper-class manners because it puts
forward no valid alternative. Eagleton’s complaint – that the satire fails to
maintain a stable, didactic irony – displays a moralistic discomfort with
double movement of satire.
9 Littlewood again comes close to my view: “Implicit in the book is a recogni-
tion that those attitudes of sophisticated detachment which had been part of
the glamour of the social milieu to which he once aspired were, from the
inside, potentially vicious.” He later claims A Handful of Dust “deliberately
puts far more strain than any previous [novel] on [Waugh’s] habitual mech-
anisms of defense. Detachment is harder to maintain, humour more difficult
to find, romanticism a more dangerous commitment.” The Writings of Evelyn
Waugh, pp. 24, 146.
10 James Hall sees the central theme of Waugh’s work as “the sad history of all
rebellions in manners, the slide from bold experiment to fashionable cliché.”
James Hall, The Tragic Comedians: Seven Modern British Novelists (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 46.
11 Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 153.
12 Ibid., pp. 153, 156.
13 Ibid., p. 154.
14 Evelyn Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New Haven,
Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), p. 39.
15 Ibid., p. 40.
16 Ibid., p. 41.
17 For similar views, see Frederic J. Stopp, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist
(Boston: Little Brown, 1958), p. 93; James Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn
Waugh (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), p. 85.
18 It is further significant that Waugh uses neither directly quoted mental
language nor free indirect discourse to render Tony’s thoughts, but instead
the technique Dorrit Cohn has called “psycho-narration” – narratorial lan-
guage that assumes neither the voice nor the idiom of the character. This
technique allows him the least obtrusive departure from his external method,
since he never has to alter the voice of the narrator, providing Tony’s feelings
without forcing Tony to undergo uncharacteristic bouts of introspection.
Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness
in Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 46.
19 Roland Barthes, Introduction to Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. xiv.
20 Ibid., p. xvii.
21 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell), p. 112; José
Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and
Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 11. For a comparison of Lewis
and Ortega, and their common interest in promoting an antihumanist aesthetic,
see Ella Zohar Ophir, “Towards a Pitiless Fiction: Abstraction, Comedy, and
Modernist Antihumanism,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 52.1 (2006): 92–120.
22 Quoted in Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903–1939
(New York: Norton, 1987), p. 377. Eagleton voices a similar complaint, objecting
that “the American exploration reveals the hollowness of English culture as
‘metaphysically’ rather than socially determined,” thereby undermining the
effectiveness of the novel’s social critique. Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés, p. 56.
23 Julian Jebb (ed.), Writers at Work: Third Series (New York: Viking, 1967),
p. 109; Waugh, “Fan-Fare,” Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 303.
24 Waugh, Letters, p. 88.
25 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. iii (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 115.
26 Wasson’s reading has corrected the assumption that Waugh endorses Tony’s
attachment to big houses and Victorian ideals. Yet it reads the novel as a
morality tale, stabilizing Waugh as a normative, Christian satirist, and inad-
equately acknowledging the contradictions inherent in his method. Richard
Wasson, “A Handful of Dust: Critique of Victorianism,” in Critical Essays on
Evelyn Waugh, 133–43. See also Brooke Allen, “The Man Who Didn’t Like
Dickens: Evelyn Waugh and Boz,” Dickens Quarterly, 8.4 (1991): 155–62;
Jerome Meckier, “Why the Man Who Liked Dickens Reads Dickens Instead
of Conrad: Waugh’s A Handful of Dust,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 13.2
(1980): 171–87.
27 Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Shoshana Fel-
man (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 94–207.
(London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 219.
29 Ibid., p. 249.
30 Ibid., p. 250. Stanley Cavell and Eric Santner both point out that there is no
necessary contradiction between an explanation of the uncanny that relies on
the persistence of magical thinking and one that relies on castration fears,
since it is in the oedipal phase that the repression of magical thinking takes
place. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 155–56; Eric Santner,
On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press,
2006), pp. 190–91.
31 Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 250.
32 On Conrad, Dickens, and Waugh, see also Meckier, “Why the Man Who Liked
Dickens Reads Dickens Instead of Conrad”; Allen, “The Man Who Didn’t
Like Dickens”; McCartney, Confused Roaring.
33 Waugh, “Fan-Fare,” Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 303.
34 Michael Gorra in fact suggests that this passage was explicitly modeled after
Joyce. Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning
Tower (New York: St Martin’s, 1990), p. 176.
35 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 170.
36 Ibid., p. 245.
37 For similarities between Todd and Tony, especially in their capacities as
fathers, see Heath, The Picturesque Prison, pp. 105, 113, 118. For the original
short story see Evelyn Waugh, “The Man Who Liked Dickens,” in The Book
of Fantasy, ed. Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and A. Bioy Casares
(New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 304–14.
38 Freud describes a similar “splitting” in “The Sandman”: “In the story of
Nathaniel’s childhood, the figures of his father and Coppelius represent the
two opposites into which the father-imago is split by his ambivalence;
whereas the one threatens to blind him – that is, to castrate him – the
other, the ‘good’ father, intercedes for his sight. The part of the complex
which is most strongly repressed, the death-wish against the ‘bad’ father,
finds expression in the death of the ‘good’ father.” Freud, “Uncanny,”
p. 232.
39 Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 98.
40 Ibid., p. 102.
41 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1989), p. 42.
42 See, e.g., Allen, “The Man Who Didn’t Like Dickens, p. 155. John Howard
Wilson dissents, holding out hope for Tony’s return to Hetton. John Howard
Wilson, “A Note on the Ending of A Handful of Dust,” Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter, 24.3 (1990): 2.
43 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 43, 44.
44 Ibid., p. 24.
45 Ibid., p. 41.
46 Hertz, The End of the Line, p. 105.
47 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 43.
48 Cavell remarks on the same phenomenon when he understands fantastic
literature to rest on “discoveries of otherness or estrangement,” particularly
the Freudian realization of our “estrangement from our own soul.” This
estrangement, what Cavell in a different context calls horror, entails “the
perception of the precariousness of human identity.” See Cavell, In Quest of
the Ordinary, p. 185 and his The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
Morality and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 418.
49 Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 84.
50 Freud, “Uncanny,” p. 255. Similarly, in his discussion of “The Sandman,”
Freud argues against the doll as a source of the uncanny in the story precisely
because of its satiric coloring: “Nor is this atmosphere [of the uncanny]
heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia
with a faint touch of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s
idealization of his mistress.” Freud, “Uncanny,” p. 227.
51 Cavell suggests that, following Bergson, “we might conceive of laughter as the
natural response to automatonity when we know the other to be human,” thus
construing “laughter as some reverse of amazement.” Hence “the perception
of the comedy . . . is essential to, is the same as, the detection of the madness.”
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 415.
52 Waugh, “Apotheosis of an Unhappy Hypocrite,” Essays, Articles, and Reviews,
p. 447.
53 Ibid.
54 Dickens was Arthur Waugh’s favorite author, according to Stannard, The
Early Years, p. 25.
55 Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), pp. 71–72.
56 Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days (London: Methuen, 1991), pp. 120–21.
5 ‘ c ol d c om f o r t f a r m’ a n d me n t a l l i f e
1 Reggie Oliver, Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons (London:
Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 111.
2 Faye Hammill, “Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary
Culture between the Wars,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 47 (2001): 842.
3 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,
1790–1860 (Oxford University Press, 1985); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of
American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).
4 Philip B. Gould, “Introduction: Revisiting the ‘Feminization’ of American
Culture,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 11.3 (1999): i–xii.
California Press, 1990); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-
American Emotion (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6 e.g., Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class,
Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford University Press, 2001).
7 Regina Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in
British Literature (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1994), p. 15.
8 Chris Baldick, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement, The Oxford English Liter-
ary History, vol. x (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 294–95.
9 Oliver, Out of the Woodshed, p. 120.
10 Cited in Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed, p. 21.
11 Wendy Parkins suggests that in the novel “female agency simultaneously
conceals and deploys middle-class authority.” Wendy Parkins, “Moving
Dangerously: Mobility and the Modern Woman,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature, 20 (2001): 88.
12 “The comedy flows in part from the parody of Flora as an interfering upper-
middle-class woman who uses her leisure to meddle in the personal lives of
others.” English Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
Birmingham, “Thinking the Thirties,” in Francis Barker (ed.), 1936: The
Sociology of Literature: Practices of Literature and Politics (University of Essex
Press, 1979), p. 18.
13 See reviews quoted by Oliver, Out of the Woodshed, p. 112.
14 Raymond Williams cites as Gibbons’s precursors Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-
Smith along with D. H. Lawrence, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, and the Powyses. Hammill adds the Americans Edith Wharton and
Eugene O’Neill as well as the English contemporaries H. A. Manhood and
Hugh Walpole. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford
University Press, 1973), p. 253. See also Oliver, Out of the Woodshed,
pp. 113–17; Hammill, “English Literary Culture,” passim.
15 Baldick, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement, p. 171.
16 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 252. Jacqueline Ann Ariail cites the
description of Egdon Heath in Hardy’s The Return of the Native; see Jacqueline
Ann Ariail, “Cold Comfort Farm and Stella Gibbons,” Ariel 9 (1978): 63–73.
17 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 2.
18 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 253.
19 Ibid.
20 Parkins, “Moving Dangerously,” 86–87.
21 K. D. M. Snell writes: “In Cold Comfort Farm, the apparent distance between
the rural and urban worlds was magnifed.” Quoted in Hammill, “English
Literary Culture,” 848.
22 Cf. Parkins, “Moving Dangerously,” 87.
23 George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1954), p. 228.
24 See English Studies Group, “Thinking the Thirties,” pp. 8, 15; Hammill,
“English Literary Culture,” 839.
25 As Lucy McDiarmid suggests to me, “Yĕs” likely alludes to the modernist
fascination with Japanese Noh drama.
26 Humble calls Flora “the epitome of middlebrow sensibilities.” Humble, The
Feminine Middlebrow Novel, p. 31. Most of the critics cited here emphasize the
middlebrow, anti-modernist side of Cold Comfort Farm without recognizing
its own assertion of aesthetic and class superiority.
27 Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 29.
28 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” On Individual and Social
Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (University of Chicago Press,
1971), p. 326.
29 Ibid., p. 325.
30 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David
Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 256.
31 “As the epitome of middlebrow sensibilities, Flora’s disdain is carefully
balanced: she expresses no shock at the antics of the free-living highbrows,
rather a weary contempt, produced partly by over-familiarity . . . she moves in
social circles in which these ‘types’ are encountered all too frequently. The
eternal literary standards of Dickens and (elsewhere) Jane Austen are her
counters against the intellectual fripperies and fashions of the highbrow,
which are presented as ephemeral by contrast.” Humble, The Feminine
Middlebrow Novel, p. 31.
32 Simmel, “Metropolis,” p. 327.
33 Ibid., p. 325.
34 Writes Lukács: “The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive
totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of
meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms
of totality.” Georg Lukács, “From The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-
Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature,” in Michael
McKeon (ed.), The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 186. See also Walter
Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,”
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken, 1968), p. 99.
35 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 185.
36 Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 268.
37 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 186.
39 Ibid.
40 Oliver notes that Gibbons spent Easter 1931 at a farm in Sussex working on
the novel, Out of the Woodshed, p. 111.
41 Marianne Torgovnick discusses the Eurocentric misreading of African art as
expressionist. Marianne Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern
Lives (University of Chicago Press, 1990).
43 Ibid., p. 325.
44 Sedgwick, Epistemology, p. 154.
45 Humble writes that in Cold Comfort Farm “a conflict between an Austen and
a Brontë world view is played out” in which ultimately “the Brontë-plot is
consigned to the past: the modern world requires the open rationalism of an
Austen.” The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, pp. 179–80.
46 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: Norton, 1998),
p. 312.
47 Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 63.
48 Ibid., pp. 63–64.
49 Ibid., p. 72.
50 Ariail, “Cold Comfort Farm and Stella Gibbons,” 69. See also Parkins,
“Moving Dangerously,” 89. The Birmingham English Studies Group writes:
“In the closing pages Flora Poste leaves the ordinary world which she has
created on the Wings of Romance, in her lover’s aeroplane,” but judiciously
adds, “There are hints here that the formulaic romance is being parodied.”
English Studies Group, “Thinking the Thirties,” p. 16.
51 Parkins, “Moving Dangerously,” 88.
52 Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of
the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 2–3.
53 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1995), p. 88.
54 Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed, p. 23.
55 Oliver, Out of the Woodshed, p. 97.
56 There is significant variation too within the interpretations of the novel’s
gender politics. The English Studies Group emphasizes the fact that “All of
the women in this text, whether under the dominance of Aunt Ada or of
Flora, are assigned to the same subordinate role within familial sexual rela-
tions.” English Studies Group, “Thinking the Thirties,” p. 17. Parkins sees a
reversion to nineteenth-century models of female agency that were limited to
the domestic sphere. Parkins, “Moving Dangerously.” Ariail sees the novel as
a woman writer’s struggle against male predecessors. Ariail, “Cold Comfort
Farm and Stella Gibbons.”
6 nathanael west and the mystery of feeling

1 Justus Nieland reads the “affective estrangement” of Miss Lonelyhearts as a
rejection of both “the aristocratic black humor of the surrealist avant-
garde” and the “affective universality of slapstick” – and consequently of
both the high modernist transcendence of material world offered by
surrealism and the Enlightenment models of feeling in the public sphere
encouraged by slapstick. Justus Nieland, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities
of Public Life (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 196, 210.
2 Nathanael West, Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings, ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 396.
3 Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, ibid., pp. 25–26.
4 See especially Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abun-
dance (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Philip Brian Harper, Framing
the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (Oxford University
Press, 1994); Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture and Professional-
ism (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jonathan Veitch, American Super-
realism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). On the (dubious) distinc-
tion between a “constructive,” conservative Anglo-American “high moder-
nism” and a radical European “avant-garde,” see Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), p. xv; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986), pp. 31, 163.
5 Max F. Schultz, “Nathanael West’s Desperate Detachment,” Critical Essays on
Nathanael West, ed. Ben Siegel (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), p. 151. Similar
views include Daniel Aaron, “Late Thoughts on Nathanael West,” in Modern
Critical Views: Nathanael West, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea
House, 1986), pp. 61–68; Norman Podhoretz, “Nathanael West:
A Particular Kind of Joking,” in Critical Essays on Nathanael West, pp. 80–86.
6 Veitch, American Superrealism, p. xx; Barnard, The Great Depression, p. 168;
Harper, Framing the Margins, p. 53; Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and
Professionalism, p. 164.
7 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (New York: Penguin, 1983),
pp. 126–27. Bradbury acknowledges the persistence of continuing formal
experiment.
8 Dorothy Parker, “The Siege of Madrid,” The Portable Dorothy Parker
(New York: Viking, 1973), p. 589.
9 Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of his Life (New York: Carroll and Graf,
1970), pp. 344–53.
10 West, Novels and Other Writings, p. 795.
11 Ibid., p. 794.
12 Ibid., pp. 791–92, 793.
13 Cf. Harold Bloom’s claim that “West’s humor has no liberating element
whatsoever.” Harold Bloom, Introduction to Nathanael West: Modern Critical
Views, p. 4. Sianne Ngai’s discussion of “ugly feelings” arising from “situ-
ations of suspended agency” similarly emphasizes their “noncathartic” nature
and political ineffectuality. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 1, 6.
15 The curious factoid that Trilling and West simultaneously attended New
York’s De Witt Clinton High School may suggest that their common ques-
tioning of sincerity betrays a larger generational or cultural concern. Martin,
Nathanael West, p. 35.
16 Quoted ibid., p. 336.
17 A political reading of West accepts this argument more or less at face value.
Thus Barnard asserts that for West “the social realist techniques of the thirties
are suspect” since they can lapse into a nostalgic “glorification” of a suffering
proletariat, while Veitch maintains that West “suspected that the pretensions
to innocence, the return to a populist provincialism that [Ma Joad] repre-
sented, harbored the seeds of a homegrown fascism.” Barnard, Great Depres-
sion, p. 163; Veitch, American Superrealism, p. xiii. Yet one can invoke West’s
criterion of “truth” as an end for art that adopts any variety of modes and
serves any variety of ideologies. Flannery O’Connor, in many ways a literary
disciple of West’s, maintained that her own brand of grotesque comedy
provided a model not for leftist but for Catholic art, and precisely because
of its “reality” or “truth.”
19 Nathanael West, A Cool Million, Novels and Other Writings, p. 224.
20 Ibid., pp. 223, 225.
21 Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, Novels and Other Writings, p. 119.
22 Ibid., p. 118.
23 Ronal Paulson, Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. xii.
24 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University
Press, 1989), p. 73.
25 West, Miss Lonelyhearts, p. 95. Cf. Mark Conroy’s deconstructive reading,
which sees the novel’s problems as problems of language. Mark Conroy,
“Letters and Spirit in Miss Lonelyhearts,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Modern
Critical Interpretations: Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (New York: Chelsea
House, 1987), pp. 111–24.
26 West, Miss Lonelyhearts, p. 59.
27 Ibid., p. 74.
28 Ibid., p. 88.
29 Steven Weisenburger argues that the painting goes beyond normative, “gen-
erative” satire to a “degenerative” mode of satire “that develops, not from the
logic of ‘objects’ or ‘targets’ that shapes his earlier satires, but from narratives
of violence and degeneration.” Steven Weisenburger, Fables of Subversion:
Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1995), p. 45. See also Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 59–60.
30 West, Miss Lonelyhearts, p. 75.
32 West, Balso Snell, p. 42.
33 Kernan, The Plot of Satire, p. 55.
34 Although West is almost reflexively described as a writer of the grotesque,
criticism has done little to explain the usefulness of the term. On West as a
writer in the grotesque tradition, see Susan Edmunds, “Modern Taste and the
Body Beautiful in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust,” Modern Fiction
Studies, 44:2 (1998): 306–30; Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque
(New York: Macmillan, 1989); Dieter Meindl, American Fiction and the Meta-
physics of the Grotesque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996).
35 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
36 Ibid., p. 12.
37 Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin, 1960), p. 31.
38 Daniel Aaron, “Waiting for the Apocalypse,” in Critical Essays on Nathanael
West, p. 79; Martin, Nathanael West, p. 312; Susan Hegeman, Patterns for
America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton University Press,
1999), p. 156.
39 Ibid., pp. 28–29.
40 Ibid., pp. 31, 32.
41 Hegeman, Patterns for America, p. 156.
42 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study
(Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 238.
43 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 183. Freud identifies the
same phenomenon. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xvii, trans. and ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 226.
44 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell), p. 116.
45 Lewis’s comments on dwarves in Men Without Art anticipate not only
the Spanish dwarf of his own The Revenge for Love, but also West’s
(still uncreated) Abe Kusich: “Dwarfs in Spain are the objects of constant
mirth, on the part of their ‘normal’ fellow-citizens. Everyone pokes fun at
them, there is no hypocrisy, as with us, and the dwarf gets on very well
indeed. He is treated as a pet animal, and enjoys himself very much.”
Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, p. 112.
46 Of Miss Lonelyhearts, Nieland observes West’s “insistent presentation of
characters as alienated from their affects, which are mechanical, stylized,
and stagey.” Nieland, Feeling Modern, p. 210.
7 ‘ ni g h t w oo d’ and t he end s o f s at i re
1 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Deca-
dence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987),
pp. 155–56.
Press, 1979), p. 63.
3 Ibid., p. 264.
4 Jane Marcus’s groundbreaking Bakhtinian reading views the novel as an anti-
authoritarian Rabelaisian epic with “deep roots in folk culture,” but over-
emphasizes the celebratory dimension of the novel, and ignores Bakhtin’s
reading of modernism as an era characterized by a reduced laughter. Jane
Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” in
Mary Lynn Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 221–50. Tyrus
Miller notes Barnes’s “satiric attitude toward tradition” but does not
apply this idea in a sustained way to Nightwood. Miller, Late Modernism:
Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), p. 124. Justus Nieland focuses on laughter in the novel
as the sign of an extra-human animality that disrupts norms of personality,
“a comic repudiation of emotional propriety and the sort of immanent
community implied by Bergson’s comic theory.” Justus Nieland, Feeling
Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2008), p. 248.
5 Victoria L. Smith reads the novel’s language as a symptom of Freudian
melancholy. Victoria L. Smith, “A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of
Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood,” PMLA, 114.2 (1999): 194–206.
6 Donald J. Greiner, “Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the American Origins of
Black Humor,” Critique, 17.1 (1975): 44; Louis Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna
Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York University Press, 1977), p. 115;
Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” pp. 221–50; Mary Russo, The Female
Grotesque, pp. 171–72; Sheryl Stevenson, “Writing the Grotesque Body:
Djuna Barnes’ Carnival Parody,” in Silence and Power, p. 81. Andrew Field
has gone so far as to call the “grotesque” the “unifying principle” of all
Barnes’s work. Andrew Field, Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 33.
7 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 44.
8 John Hawkes, D. J. Hughes, and Ihab Hassan, “Symposium: Fiction Today,”
Massachusetts Review, 3.4 (1962): 784–97; Stanley Edgard Hyman, “The Wash
of the World,” Standards: A Chronicle of Books for our Time (New York:
Horizon, 1966), pp. 58–62.
9 T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New
Directions, 1937), p. xvi.
10 Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 43, and many
subsequent critics.
11 Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” p. 233, and many subsequent critics.
12 Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1965), p. 151.
13 Alan Singer, A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discontinuity and Discourse in the
Modern Novel (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1983), p. 60.
15 Karen Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia
Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1991), p. 82. Similarly, Marcus sees the novel’s pattern of impotence as a
“celebrat[ion of] the nonphallic penis, the limp member of the transvestite.”
Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” pp. 228, 229.
16 Cf. Merrill Cole’s claim that “Nightwood punishes the politically well-
intentioned.” Merrill Cole, “Backwards Ventriloquy: The Historical Uncanny
in Barnes’s Nightwood,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 52.4 (2006): 399.
17 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964),
pp. 228–29.
18 The cancellation of life presents a Schopenhauerian view of procreation, and
squares with Phillip Herring’s claim that Barnes viewed perpetuation of the
species as sinful, or at least misguided. Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and
Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), p. 207.
19 Andrea Harris, Other Sexes: Rewriting Differences from Woolf to Winterson
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 76.
20 Cf. Nieland, Feeling Modern, p. 225.
21 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflec-
tions, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968),
p. 64.
22 See Meryl Altman, “A Book of Repulsive Jews?: Rereading Nightwood,”
Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.3 (1993): 160–71; Lara Trubowitz, “In
Search of ‘The Jew’ in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood: Jewishness, Antisemitism,
Structure, and Style,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 51.2 (2005): 311–34.
24 For example, Bonnie Kime Scott’s suggestion that the narrative voice is
unreliable here because it assumes Felix’s point of view, and that Robin’s
gesture is “perhaps better seen as a religious rite,” seems quite wishfully to
deny the extremity of Barnes’s vision. Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Mod-
ernism, vol. ii, Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 115.
25 Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” p. 241.
26 Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded, p. 83.
(London: Hogarth, 1961), pp. 226, 233.
28 Ibid., p. 240.
29 Ibid., pp. 240–41.
30 Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” and Cole, “Backwards Ventriloquy,” discuss
uncanny motifs in the novel.
31 Also cited by Freud, “Uncanny,” p. 244.
32 Miller, Late Modernism, p. 139; Nieland, Feeling Modern, p. 219.
33 Miller, Late Modernism, p. 156; Nieland, Feeling Modern, p. 221.
34 Kenneth Burke, “Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s
Novel Nightwood),” p. 249.
35 “Nigh T. Wood” is Barnes’s own phrase. Quoted in Cheryl J. Plumb,
Introduction to Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts,
ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1995), p. ix.
36 For Metcalf as prototype of Jenny, see Herring, The Life and Work of Djuna
Barnes, p. 162.
37 Note Herring’s parenthetical in his account of Nightwood’s origin: “it was
fundamentally written out of love (except for the ‘Squatter’ chapter),” ibid.,
p. 165.
38 For an account of Barnes’s possibly sexual relationship with her grandmother,
Zadel, see ibid., pp. 54 ff.
8 b e c k e t t ’ s au t h o r i t a r i a n p e r so n a li t i e s
2 The Belgian philosopher Arnold Geulincx compared the mind’s limited
freedom to that of an eastward-walking passenger on a westward-bound ship.
Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 50.
3 On Beckett’s relation to precursors, see ibid., p. 38; Neil Corcoran, After Yeats
and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford University Press, 1997),
p. 31.
4 See, among others, Begam, The End of Modernity, and Anthony Uhlmann,
Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
5 Many critics treat the comic in Beckett. Ruby Cohn catalogs varieties
of laughter, recognizing, according to the typology of Watt’s Arsene,
that Beckett’s laughter can be ethical (bitter), intellectual (hollow), or pure
and “dianoetic” (mirthless); Hugh Kenner emphasizes the abstract or
mathematical quality of his comedy, arguing that Beckett’s comedy “selects
elements from a closed set, and then arranges them inside a closed field”;
Andrew Gibson focuses on the comic effects that derive from the subversion
of narrative conventions; Shane Weller examines the ethics of Beckett’s
comedy in the context of Continental philosophy; Michael North focuses
on the motifs of doubling, repetition, and seriality, which “generate possibil-
ity out of repetition.” Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), p. 287; Hugh Kenner,
Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon, 1962),
p. 94; Andrew Gibson, Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from
Cervantes to Beckett (New York: Palgrave, 1990); Shane Weller, Beckett,
Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Michael
North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 162.
6 Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), p. 153.
7 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World
Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 195, 203, 190.
8 Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as
Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 35. Jameson
develops the notion of écriture as schizophrenia in “Postmodernism and
Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend,
Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–25.
9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
10 Ibid., p. 13.
11 Weller, The Ethics of Alterity, p. 131; Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 8.
12 For a thorough comparison of Molloy and Moran, see H. Porter Abbott, The
Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973), p. 100.
13 Cf. Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 123.
14 Abbott, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett, p. 102.
15 John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004): 112,
114, 116.
16 Abbott, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett, p. 103.
17 Steven Weisenburger claims that American satire of the post-war era develops
not from the context of a bourgeois society but from a bureaucratic information
society. Steven Weisenburger, Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American
Novel, 1930–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 6.
18 Cf. Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy,
Literature (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 162.
19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight,” The Complete Poems, ed.
William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 321.
20 Ibid.
21 Maria DiBattista, First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction (University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. 220.
22 Martha Nussbaum claims that Moran’s relationship with Jacques displays
“parental punishment strangely mixed with paternal care, love blocked by the
need to discipline.” The result is that “each instance of affection must be
checked by guilty moral resolve.” Martha Nussbaum, “Narrative Emotions:
Beckett’s Genealogy of Love,” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and
Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 300.
23 Irwin Katz, “Gordon Allport’s ‘The Nature of Prejudice’,” Political Psychology,
12.1 (1991): 130. Cf. Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 257. While the intellectual
concerns in Beckett’s France may not have been exactly those of Adorno’s
American setting, European émigrés such as Adorno and Arendt were fully in
dialogue with French intellectuals such as Sartre.
24 Katz, “Gordon Allport’s ‘The Nature of Prejudice’,” p. 130. T. W. Adorno,
Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson et al., The Authoritarian Personal-
ity (New York: Harper and Row, 1950).
25 Richard Sennett, Authority (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 24, 25.
26 Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, p. 759.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 T. W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Brian O’Connor (ed.),
The Adorno Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 319–51.
32 T. W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds),
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 303.
33 Ibid.
34 T. W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,”
ibid., p. 124.
35 Sennett, Authority, p. 75.
36 Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” p. 124.
37 Alan Astro, Understanding Samuel Beckett (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1990), p. 61. Cf. Philologos, “On Language: Waiting for
Youdi,” Jewish Daily Forward Online, Nov. 12, 2004. www.forward.com/
articles/4523/.
38 Cf. Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, p. 48.
40 Sennett, Authority, p. 45.
41 Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, p. 609.
42 Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, p. 157.
43 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York:
Grove, 1996), p. 37.
44 Ibid., p. 336.
45 Ibid., pp. 36–37.
46 Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism (New York: Zone
Books, 1989), p. 86.
47 Ibid., p. 87. Deleuze’s essay aims to revise Freud by decoupling sadism from
masochism. Deleuze argues that sadism and masochism enact very different
paths for libido. Yet he acknowledges that each does produce the other.
As I will show, Moran indeed displays both sadistic and masochistic
dimensions.
48 Cf. Cohn: “All the heroes of Beckett’s French fiction invite our laughter at
their savage drives – Moran’s towards his son, Molloy’s towards his mother,
Malone’s towards his creations, the Unnamable’s towards his creators.” Cohn,
The Comic Gamut, p. 287.
49 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” p. 118.
50 Ibid., p. 83.
51 This production of sorrow or shame from the renunciation of affection in the
name of the law is rife throughout Moran’s narrative: cf. M, pp. 102, 109, 161.
53 Quoted in Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2005), p. 179.
54 Ibid., p. 190.
55 Beckett to Thomas MacGreevey, Oct. 5, 1930: “How can one write here,
when every day vulgarizes one’s hostility and turns anger into irritation and
petulance?” Quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 124.
58 Ibid.
59 Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel
W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 154. Deleuze is preceded by Kenner, who sees
Beckett as inheriting a tradition of inventory from Joyce’s “Ithaca” chapter of
Ulysses, a technique whereby “the more trivial the matter the more space is
devoted to its analysis.” Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians, p. 82.
60 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 260.
61 Ibid., p. 261.
62 Ibid., p. 294.
63 Ibid., pp. 294, 297.
64 Interestingly, Adorno abhorred Chaplin’s use of slapstick in The
Great Dictator as an indulgence of sadism and a trivialization of political
reality in the service of polemical art. Adorno’s avoidance of the more
obviously sadistic slapstick moments in Beckett indicates, perhaps, the
Achilles heel that is his own moralism. For Adorno’s differences with
Benjamin on slapstick, see Justus Nieland, “Killing Time: Charlie Chaplin
and the Comic Passion of Monsieur Verdoux,” Modernist Cultures, 2.2
(2006): 190.
66 Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, pp. 141–44.
67 Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism, pp. 170 ff.
214 Notes to page 182
68 “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say
what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that
is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition” (M, p. 28).
69 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy,
Malone Dies, The Unnamable, trans. Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles (1951;
New York: Grove, 1955), p. 297.
Index
Abbott, H. Porter, 165, 166 Dr. O’Connor as satirist, 140–45

Acton, Harold, 78 grotesque in, 139–40, 142–43, 157
Addams, Charles, xi inheritance in, 139, 145–50
Adorno, Theodor W., 8, 17, 168–70, 171, parallels to Barnes’s life, 158–59
176–77, 183 ridicule in, 139, 141, 146, 155–58
aestheticism, 22, 24, 25–27, 28, 38, 42, 65–66; Barreca, Regina, 93, 112
see also symbolism Barthes, Roland, 80
affect. See modernism and affect; satire and Beckett, Samuel, 41, 44
affect; sentimentality and James Joyce, 161, 162, 167
Aldington, Richard, 33 and Marcel Proust, 162, 178
Altieri, Charles, 13 and William Butler Yeats, 162
Anderson, Sherwood, 116, 132–33, 154 as humanist, 162–64
Ardis, Ann, 32 as late modernist, 161–62
Armstrong, Tim, 132 as postmodernist, 162–64
Astro, Alan, 170 Molloy, 161–83
Auden, W. H., 7–8, 18 and detective/spy novel, 166
Austen, Jane, 94, 102, 106, 109, 110,
and midcentury analyses of fascism, 168–69
112–13
and sadism/masochism, 168–69, 171–73,
authenticity, 11, 16–17, 22, 46; see also Trilling,
176, 177, 179, 182
Lionel
and slapstick, 173–74, 178–79, 180;
in Djuna Barnes, 154–55, 159–60
see also Molloy, sudden violence in
in Evelyn Waugh, 61
compared to Cold Comfort Farm, 175
in Ezra Pound, 28
in Nathanael West, 116, 128, 132, 134 irritation in, 175–76
Moran’s narrative as bureaucratic report,
Baier, Annette, 175 164–67
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10, 11, 34, 98, 129, 208 obsessive-compulsive patterns in, 176–83
Baldick, Chris, 2, 93, 96 parallels to Beckett’s life, 171–72
Baldwin, James, 12 paternity in, 166–68, 168–71
Barnard, Rita, 116, 117, 206 sudden violence in, 179, 180, 181
Barnes, Djuna, 11, 41, 43, 44, 164 Murphy, 161, 162, 176
Nightwood, 138–60 Waiting for Godot, 168
anti-procreative imagery in, 143–44, Watt, 162, 163
145–49, 151–53 Beerbohm, Max, 22, 27, 55, 56, 102
characterization in, 150–51, 153, 154, Zuleika Dobson, 23–26
155–60 Bell, Michael, 12, 16
compared to A Handful of Dust, 145–46, Bell, Robert, 34, 36
149, 158 Benjamin, Walter, 105, 107, 147–48, 149
compared to Macbeth, 151–52 Bergson, Henri, 67
compared to The Day of the Locust, 158 on anaesthesia of the heart, 23, 33
compared to Ulysses, 141 on comic rigidity, 89, 110–11, 146, 181
215
216 Index
Bergson, Henri (cont.) Davis, Robert Murray, 61
contrasted with Wyndham Lewis, 5–6, Deleuze, Gilles, 172–73, 176, 178, 179, 180
33, 66, 133 DeLillo, Don, 166
on sociality of the comic, 118, DiBattista, Maria, 19, 167
156 Dickson, Jay, 14–15, 33
Bettelheim, Bruno, 85 Don Quixote, 4, 23, 57
Birmingham English Studies Douglas, Ann, 92, 112
Group, 102
blasé attitude. See Simmel, Georg Eagleton, Terry, 77, 194, 198, 199
Booth, Wayne C., 3 Eliot, George, 98
Brontë, Emily and/or Charlotte, 95, 96, Eliot, T. S., 12, 14, 21, 43
109, 111, 113, 159 and impersonality, 18, 45
Burke, Kenneth, 11, 158, 186 mythic method of, 42
on Nightwood, 139
Calinescu, Matei, 138 The Waste Land, 81, 140
Calvino, Italo, 6 Ellison, Julie, 92
caricature, 9, 13, 81, 94, 98, 146, 154, Empson, William, xi
157; see also cartoon; satire as English, James, 2, 13
ridicule/mockery Esty, Joshua, 194
Carroll, Lewis, 45, 61
cartoon, 9, 123, 129 Felski, Rita, 112
Cavell, Stanley, 200, 201 Firbank, Ronald, 65, 197
Clark, Suzanne, 12, 15, 112 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 118
Cohn, Dorrit, 199 Flaubert, Gustave, 23, 27, 165
Cohn, Ruby, 163 Ford, Ford Madox
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 164, 167 The Good Soldier, 14
Collier, Patrick, 56 Forster, E. M.
comedy. See the comic Howards End, 14, 25
comic, the, 163, 171–76, 178–83 Foucault, Michel, 94, 95, 163
as multiaccented, 13 Freud, Sigmund, 131
Baudelaire’s theory of, 182 and Theodor Adorno, 168, 176
Bergson’s theory of, 5, 89, 110–11, 181 as hermeneut of suspicion, 16
Deleuze’s theory of, 172; see also Deleuze, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 87, 88, 107, 182
Gilles on jokes, 4–5, 15, 23, 118, 142, 181, 197
Freud’s theory of. See Freud, Sigmund, on on reality testing, 83
jokes on repetition compulsion, 87–88
opposed to satire, 3, 4, 33, 36 on the uncanny, 10, 71, 81–83, 85, 87–90,
opposed to the uncanny, 60, 71, 79, 81, 82, 89, 153–54
151, 154 parodied by Stella Gibbons, 100, 107
Paulson’s theory of, 120 primary process, 140
slapstick, 25, 31; See Beckett, Samuel, Molloy, Fromm, Erich, 168
slapstick in Frye, Northrop, 3, 4
Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 93 Futurism, 22, 26–28, 66–68; see also
Connolly, Cyril, 2 Marinetti, F. T.
Conrad, Joseph, 50, 83, 166
Conroy, Jack, 118 Gibbons, Stella, 44, 45, 115, 116, 138, 164
Cowley, Malcolm, 117, 118 and Evelyn Waugh, 92, 93–94, 101, 102, 103
Critchley, Simon, 171, 181 anti-Semitism of, 13, 100
cruelty, 43, 53, 173, 174; see also sadism Cold Comfort Farm, 92–114, 124, 175
and sentimentality, 12, 19, 54 alleged sentimentality of conclusion, 111–14
as characteristic of satire, 23, 40, 46, 48, 70, and affect, 111–14
76, 152 and highbrow modernism, 100–2
masked by moralism, 51, 53, 61 and the rural novel, 99–100, 102, 110
Richard Rorty on, 121 as pro-Englightenment, 113
Samuel Beckett’s sensitivity toward, 171 characterization in, 94, 105
Index 217
colonial metaphors in, 95–96, 101, 106 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 102
disciplining and policing in, 94–96, 104, Kayser, Wolfgang. See grotesque, Kayser’s
105, 106–7, 108–9 theory of
Goodstein, Elizabeth, 1, 105 Kenner, Hugh, 28, 30, 31, 33
Gorra, Michael, 43, 198, 200 Kernan, Alvin, 4, 126, 140
Gould, Philip, 92 Kiernan, Robert F., 24, 186
Green, Henry, 43, 78, 80–81, 83 Knowlson, James, 172
grotesque, 9–11, 34, 46, 69 Kundera, Milan, 13
and sentimentality, 14
Bakhtin’s theory of, 10, 11 late modernism, xiv, 11, 19, 22, 40–190, 161–64;
in Djuna Barnes, 139–40, 142, 157 see also modernism; Miller, Tyrus
in Nathanael West, 116, 127, 128–33, 137 Lawrence, D. H., 12, 27, 44, 45, 55, 97, 101,
Kayser’s theory of, 10, 11, 81, 132, 133 104, 131
relation to satire, 11 Levenson, Michael, 28, 42, 192, 194
Ruskin’s theory of, 9–10, 60, 81, 94, 104 Levin, Harry, 3, 184
Guillory, John, 165 Lewis, Pericles, 21
Lewis, Wyndham, 9, 22, 26–33, 37, 41–45, 48, 54,
Hammill, Faye, 92 80, 141, 143, 156
Hardy, Thomas, 96, 98 and Evelyn Waugh, 47, 66, 67–68, 197
Harris, Andrea, 144 and Nathanael West, 116, 132–33, 136–37, 208
Hawkes, John, 139 Blast, 27, 30, 44, 66
Hegeman, Susan, 132 Blasting and Bombardiering, 29
Hemingway, Ernest, 48, 108 external method. See satire, external method of
hermeneutics of suspicion, 16, 72, 109, 112, 126 Men Without Art, 4–6, 30
Hertz, Neil, 87–89 Tarr, 29–33, 38
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 82 The Revenge for Love, 207
Howe, Irving, 194 Lippmann, Walter, 55–56, 57, 74
Huxley, Aldous, 22, 54, 55, 56 Littlewood, Ian, 77, 196, 199
Antic Hay, 36–40, 107 Litvak, Joseph, 102, 191
Huyssen, Andreas, 12, 102 Lukács, Georg, 105, 129
Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 139
Hynes, Samuel, 40–41, 43, 62 Mann, Thomas, 11, 14
Mao, Douglas, 192
ironic redescription, 9, 39, 44, 52, 54, 66, 67, 109, Marcus, Jane, 152, 208
121, 144, 145, 149, 160, 162, 168, 178 Marinetti, F. T., 16, 26–27, 42, 43
Isherwood, Christopher, 41 and Evelyn Waugh, 45, 47, 66–67
Marx, Karl, 16
Jameson, Fredric McCartney, George, 66, 70, 197
expressivist theory of modernism, 11, Meckier, Jerome, 36
129–31, 134 Melville, Herman, 166
occasional feverishness of, 47 Meredith, George, 3, 15
on late modernism, 44, 161, 195 Miller, Tyrus, 2, 37, 40, 54
on modernism as taboo, 17 on Djuna Barnes, 156–57, 208
on periodizing modernism, 22, 26 on late modernism, 41–43, 185, 194
on Samuel Beckett as postmodernist, 163 on Samuel Beckett, 162–63
on Wyndham Lewis, 28, 47, 194 Miller, William Ian, 6, 50
Jones, Steven, 191 modernism
Joyce, James, 21, 42, 43, 131, 141 Adorno’s theory of, 169; see also Adorno,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 18 Theodor W.
and Evelyn Waugh, 65, 84, 195 and (anti)sentimentality, 11–13, 13–14, 16, 18,
Finnegans Wake, 161–62 27, 28; see also sentimentality,
Ulysses, 11, 15, 22, 33–36, 141, 161–62 modernism and affect
and 1930s, 40–41, 43, 117
Kafka, Franz, 43, 166, 169 and affect, 1–2, 13, 16–20, 38–39, 44–46, 72,
Kaivola, Karen, 143, 153 115–16
218 Index
modernism (cont.) “A Retrospect,” 2, 28
and gender, 12, 112 Blast. See Lewis, Wyndham, Blast
and impersonality, 18, 45 Guide to Kulchur, 102
and satire, 2, 9, 14, 36, 47, 115–16; see also satire on satire as hygiene, 28–29, 34, 141
and the grotesque, 10–11, 14 “The Serious Artist,” 28–29
as highbrow formation, 12, 32, 100–2 Waugh’s allusion to, 67
as non-existent, 21 Powell, Dawn, 93
as object of satire, 29, 37–38, 44, 66–67, Proust, Marcel, 162
100–2, 131, 161–62 Puchner, Martin, 4, 30
as sensibility, 2, 9, 13, 41, 45, 47, 70, 72, 162; Pynchon, Thomas, 166
see also satire, as sensibility; Uncle Fester
Principle Rainey, Lawrence, 12, 21, 42
as taboo, 17–18 Ricoeur, Paul, 16
as threefold crisis, 21 Rorty, Richard, 9, 121
association with anarchy, 65–68 Ruskin, John, 9, 10, 16, 60, 81, 94, 104
association with metropolitan centers, 96 Russo, Mary, 9
humanist and antihumanist strains of, 5–6,
19–20, 30, 33, 46, 65–68, 80, 105, 162–63 sadism, 7
Jameson’s theory of. See Jameson, Fredric, in Adorno’s theory of authoritarianism, 167–69
expressivist theory of modernism in Djuna Barnes, 143
opposed to avant-garde, 42, 65, 116 in Evelyn Waugh, 50–51, 53, 69, 73, 135–36, 160
periodization of, 22, 33, 40 in Freud’s theory of jokes, 5
modernity in Max Beerbohm, 24
and (im)possibility of satire, 7–9 in Samuel Beckett, 164, 171–73, 176, 177, 179, 182
and authority, 169–70, 183 in Wyndham Lewis and Friedrich Nietzsche,
and public sphere, 25, 37–39, 54–58, 74, 160 4–5
as belated/secondary, 37–38, 42, 125, 159–60 sadomasochism. See sadism
as bureaucratization, 165–66, 183 Santner, Eric, 200
as conflation of fictional and real, 54–61 satire
as waning of traditions, 145, 147–50 and affect, 23–24, 28–29, 30, 32–33, 44–46, 54,
Moral menial. See Miller, William Ian 55–56, 61, 72, 76–77, 78–80, 109–11,
115–16, 126–27, 127–28, 144–45, 164, 172,
Ngai, Sianne, 1, 13, 175, 179–80 175, 183; see also satire, and sentimentality
Nicholls, Peter, 21 and digressive plotting, 140
Nieland, Justus, 1, 2, 5, 55, 115, 156–57, 208 and modernism, 2–3, 9, 14, 37–38, 41, 43,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 16, 18, 23, 27 65–68, 71, 139; see also modernism
North, Michael, 2, 55 and modernity, 7–9, 29, 37–38, 54–55, 138–39,
Nussbaum, Martha, 13 165–66
and sentimentality, 11, 14, 19, 28, 33, 57, 72–74,
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 70 77–78, 89–90, 94, 109, 111;
O’Brien, Flann, 36 see also sentimentality
O’Connor, Flannery, 14, 15, 206 and the grotesque, 6, 9–10, 11, 34, 82, 89, 132,
O’Neill, Eugene, 101 139–40, 142
Oliver, Reggie, 92, 94, 111 and the uncanny. See uncanny
Ophir, Ella Zohar, 19, 199 as anarchic/subversive, 3–5, 27–28, 31, 53, 65,
Ortega y Gasset, José, 80 68–69, 118, 119–20
Orwell, George, 41, 99, 104 as gendered (or not), 92–93, 111, 113, 202
as hygiene, 6, 28–29, 34, 48–49, 141
Parker, Dorothy, 93, 117, 118 as ironic redescription. See ironic
Parkins, Wendy, 98, 111, 202 redescription
Pater, Walter, 26, 30 as materialist reduction, 5–6, 34, 41, 89, 105,
Paulson, Ronald, 120, 121, 185 132–34, 136, 137, 141–42, 156
Peppis, Paul, 31 as moralistic/conservative, 3–4, 7–8, 24,
Perloff, Marjorie, 26, 27, 42, 191 27–28, 29, 31, 48, 50, 53, 69, 76, 94, 119,
Pound, Ezra, 22, 26–29, 30, 32, 42, 43 121, 123, 158
Index 219
as non-moral, 4–6; see also Lewis, Wyndham Uhlman, Anthony, 170
as performance, 35, 120, 140–41 uncanny, 11; see also Freud, Sigmund, on the
as pessimistic/“dark,” 24, 36, 60, 94 uncanny
as ridicule/mockery, 2, 3, 4–5, 10, 28, 29, 33, in Djuna Barnes, 153–55, 157–58
48, 94, 96, 102, 117, 119, 123, 139, 141, 146, in Evelyn Waugh, 60, 68, 81–198
155–58, 159, 171, 183 in Nathanael West, 133–34, 136, 137
as sensibility, 9, 71, 78, 110, 118–19, 136, 162 Uncle Fester Principle, xi, 47
as travesty/cross-dressing, 144
double movement of, 6–7, 31, 48, 53, 70, 94, van Doren, Carl, 33
119, 171, 172, 199 van Doren, Mark, 33
external method of, 6, 30, 32, 66, 68, 75, 79, Veitch, Jonathan, 116, 117, 206
89, 105, 116, 132, 150 Vorticism, 22, 26, 197
Horatian, 123
Juvenalian, 123 Wasson, Richard, 82
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 14, 72, 77–78, 92, 109, Waters, Maureen, 35, 36
163, 195 Waugh, Arthur, 90, 202
Seidel, Michael, 6, 9, 53, 69, 138, 143, 149 Waugh, Evelyn, 3, 115, 116, 138, 164
Sennett, Richard, 168, 170 A Handful of Dust, 70–91, 167
sentimentality, 3, 8, 11–16, 44–46, 160; compared to Cold Comfort Farm, 99, 103
see also satire, and sentimentality compared to Nightwood, 145–46, 149, 158
and Aldous Huxley, 37–38 compared to The Day of the Locust, 124
and Djuna Barnes, 140, 142, 144–45 conclusion of, 80–90
and Evelyn Waugh, 54, 57, 72–74, 76–80, critique of sympathy in, 71–76
89–91, 145 indifferent treatment of pain and death,
and James Joyce, 33 71–78
and Nathanael West, 119, 122, 126, 128 parallels with Waugh’s life, 79
and Oscar Wilde, 22, 23, 27, 72, 76 A Little Learning, 90
and Samuel Beckett, 167, 172, 178, 182, 183 and Charles Dickens, 79, 81, 88, 89–91
and Stella Gibbons, 92–93, 94, 102, 109–12 and F. T. Marinetti, 45, 66–67
and Wyndham Lewis, 27–30, 32 and Ronald Firbank, 65
rejected by both symbolists and futurists, 27 and Stella Gibbons, 92, 93–94, 99, 101, 102, 103
Sheehan, Paul, 162, 182 and Wyndham Lewis, 47, 66
Simmel, Georg, 23, 44, 102–3, 104–5, 107, 110 Black Mischief, 70
sincerity, 16–17, 22, 23, 72, 118, 120, 121, 126; Decline and Fall, 66, 70, 75, 80, 101
see also Trilling, Lionel ideas on satire, 7
Singer, Alan, 140 Ninety-Two Days, 90
sophistication, 44, 72, 77, 191 racism, 13
in Aldous Huxley, 39 Scoop, 56
in Evelyn Waugh, 77, 78 Vile Bodies, 47–69
in James Joyce, 36 anarchist violence in, 64–65
in Nathanael West, 124, 125, 132 and “the pseudo,” 54–61
in Stella Gibbons, 102 and Blast, 44, 66
in Wyndham Lewis, 29 and futurism, 66–68
stable irony. See Booth, Wayne C. and purgation, 48–50
Stein, Gertrude, 42, 44, 124, 131 anticipated by Antic Hay, 37
Stevens, Wallace, 18 as critique of humanism, 48
Swift, Jonathan, 3, 6 characterization in, 68
Symbolism, 22, 26, 27 compared to A Handful of Dust, 71, 74, 76,
Synge, John Millington, 34–36 77, 80, 84
hall door pissed on, 34 compared to Cold Comfort Farm, 94, 103
compared to The Day of the Locust, 132
tendentious jokes. See Freud, Sigmund, on cruelty in, 53
jokes epigraph from Lewis Carroll, 45, 61
Tompkins, Jane, 12, 92, 112 Father Rothschild as grotesque, 69, 142
Trilling, Lionel, xvi, 16–17, 22, 23, 46, 72 moral outrage in, 50–51
220 Index
Waugh, Evelyn (cont.) violence in, 122, 128–29, 132
political subplot of, 61–64 The Dream Life of Balso Snell, 44–45,
shame in, 50–53 115, 125
voyeurism and exhibitionism in, 50–53 Wilde, Alan, 41, 43
Waugh, Evelyn Gardner, 78 Wilde, Oscar, 22–24, 35, 44, 45, 102
Webb, Mary, 102 and Aldous Huxley, 38
Weller, Shane, 163 and Evelyn Waugh, 72, 78, 79, 89
West, Nathanael, 3, 39, 44, 138, 139, 164 compared to Ezra Pound, 26–28
A Cool Million, 119, 132 laughing at the death of Little Nell, 72,
bigotry against “little people,” 13 75, 76, 81, 89
Marxist interpretation of, 116–17 The Canterville Ghost, 89
Miss Lonelyhearts, 119–22, 123, 124, 126, 127, 144 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 24
struggles to reconcile art and politics, 120 Williams, Raymond, 1, 36, 97–98, 99
The Day of the Locust, 116, 120–21, 122–37 Wilson, Edmund, 118
automatism in, 132–36 Woolf, Virginia, 21, 43, 44
characterization in, 125, 129–30, 130–31, Mrs. Dalloway, 14, 107
132–35 Wordsworth, William
compared to Nightwood, 158 “Tintern Abbey,” 100
compared to Vile Bodies, 53
grotesque in, 127, 128–33, 137 Yeats, William Butler, 18, 28, 36, 44, 85, 162
painting in, 122–23, 127–28, 129 Yorke, Henry. See Green, Henry
private jokes in, 118, 123–26, 137
sexuality in, 130–31, 131–32, 133, 136–37 Žižek, Slavoj, 89

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MODERNISM, SATIRE, AND THE NOVEL

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric

jo na t h an g re en be r g is Associate Professor of English at

# Jonathan Greenberg 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

isbn 978-1-107-00849-6 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

List of illustrations page ix

1 Satire and its discontents 1

2 Modernism’s story of feeling 21

3 The rule of outrage: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies 47

4 Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust 70

5 Cold Comfort Farm and mental life 92

6 Nathanael West and the mystery of feeling 115

7 Nightwood and the ends of satire 138

8 Beckett’s authoritarian personalities 161

Figure 1. “Sad Movie” by Charles Addams,

the uncle fester principle

fictionality in one’s emotional response to perceived events, what Freud

Satire and its discontents

the double movement of satire

satire, modernity, and the grotesque

In suspiciously similar language, Waugh’s sometime nemesis, W. H. Auden,

rethinking modernist antisentimentality

In both Jameson’s own language and in the process he describes, however,

Modernism’s story of feeling

Seen through an ever-more-powerful critical microscope, the object once

forms of indifference: wilde and beerbohm

forms of aggression: pound and lewis

satire emergent: joyce and huxley

This delight in the excretory re-surfaces when Buck interrupts Stephen’s

Urination on Synge’s door is very much Buck’s contribution to literature,

However fictional Alice is, she is certainly no more fictional than

The rule of outrage: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies

Agatha’s realization jolts her into a moment of shame; transformed from

all the terrors of the pseudo

“What do you want?”

Reason withdraws, as perception, memory, and fantasy are intermingled in

everyone is a bomb: espionage, anarchy, modernism

Incongruously imposing the high drama of an act of international espionage

Laughter and fear in A Handful of Dust

the death of peppermint

Reggie’s been making another speech . . . There’s such an extraordinary picture of

As we saw in Lippmann’s analysis of public opinion and throughout Vile

In a letter to Henry Yorke (Green), furthermore, Waugh voices a desire to

The episode at Brighton, in which Tony is forced into increasingly

When Mr. Todd articulates a desire for repetition he is every bit as

Cold Comfort Farm and mental life

some perversions of pastoral

In language, then, as well as in other customs (dress, diet, hygiene,

gorgeous emotional wallowings

The twist on Wordsworth here is double: first, for Gibbons it is not

a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a

Avant-garde film, finally, is represented when Flora recalls a date with a

Her daughter Judith, similarly, has “a habit of multiplying every emotion

Literary studies have become so used to knee-jerk critiques of Enlighten-