Systems of order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh

Abstract

'Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh' is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. 'Systems of Order' suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.