The rhetoric of war: an evaluation of Evelyn Waugh's military novels
Jamkhandi, Sudhakar Ratnakar
Jamkhandi, Sudhakar Ratnakar
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Date
1980
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Abstract
The Second World War augmented Waugh's Catholicity, his conservatism, his instinctive wrath, and his romantic inclinations. These forces, which were filtered through his acidic pen and which shaped his artistic sensibility, reveal in his novels that he warred against not only the Second World War but also against the Twentieth Century. Waugh's response to war, embodied in Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited, and Sword of Honour (includes Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender), taken together, is unique among a body of war novels in that these novels provide an immediate as well as a reflective response the the last war. In them, we find the mind of the last of the romantics which at first looked at the war with a crusader's zeal, only to be disillusioned by the fact that war--all wars--cannot cleanse a civilization of its ills. Yet, embedded in these novels, despite the growing realization that war is crazy and meaningless, Waugh is able to envision a new and better England through the acceptance, unwilling though it is, of the New Man by the old Catholic aristocracy. And, finally, in these novels we find treated the entire war, from the Phoney War of 1939 to the very end, when the fighting man goes home to take up where he left off or to start anew, as Guy Crouchback did. The mood of the civilian population before and during the war; the army, in and out of action; establishment making its way through the muddle created by the Phoney War and the strategies it adopted for the eventual ending of the war; the countryside ravaged by the evacuees and the gentlemen-adventurers and the New Men of the proletariat--all of these are rendered so realistically that it is surprising that critics, with a few exceptions, have failed to accord Evelyn Waugh a prominence (in Britain's literary annals) that is definitely his. If his early works showed him as being merely clever, his later works--they betray his enthusiasm for war and his disillusionment deriving from it; both perspectives are justifiable when seen in the context of his total outlook--shows Waugh's fullest realization of the novelist's art as he gives order to one of the most chaotic and catastrophic moments in man's history. His is a sane representation of a world gone insane, for in his works is discernible a movement from faith in the regenerative powers of war to faith in the regenerative powers of the Roman Catholic Church. Much of the virility of the local nature of Waugh's message weakened in the light of his Catholicity. Through his adherence to Catholicism his art gains a universality through it be a vision of a truth.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Waugh, Evelyn, 1903-1966
World War, 1939-1945--Fiction
World War, 1939-1945--Fiction
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Genre
Dissertation
Description
Format
227 leaves, bound
Department
English
Advisor
Odom, Keith C.