and a skull are first conjured up and then persistently reduced to a trunk or a one-eyed stare, until finally they reach the ultimate state in minimalization, 'Three pins. One pinhole.' Simultaneously the act of narration has taken over as subject. In effect Beckett has deconstructed the traditional form of narrative by seizing on the conventionally marginalized process of narration and reinscribing plot and character within this new hierarchy. This is a particularly appropriate strategy for a postmodernist to take if one accepts the hypothesis that one way of defining postmodernism is that it deconstructs modernism. In the case of literature such an act of deconstruction cannot ignore the logocentric use to which narration puts language. 'Words are a form of complacency,' Beckett wrote. In Worstward Ho he launches his fiercest assault on the deceptive way in which language has been used to privilege the pervasiveness of meaning, order, linearity.
The absence of a named speaker in Worstward Ho naturally directs the reader's attention to the role of language in this text. Opening with a linguistic reference back to Ill Seen Ill Said, it establishes within the first paragraph a new pared-down syntax that is simultaneously demanding and rewarding: 'On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.' That last sentence is also the sentence with which the piece ends. It incorporates the paradoxical nature of Beckett's last major attempt to force language to express the inexpressible, nonlinguistic void. His object is to use language to negate its signifying properties, something that he knows is ultimately unattainable. But he can at least 'fail better,' rob words of their positive semantic value by creating neologisms that draw attention to their deceptive nature. 'What words for what then? How almost they still ring.' To take the ring out of them Beckett employs double and treble negatives: 'Unlessenable least.' 'Nohow naught.' 'Unmoreable unlessable -865- unworseable evermost almost void.' Beckett turns words on themselves, compelling them to acknowledge their inadequacy, using their negation to accommodate the presence of true formless being. Yet even the radical antilanguage he forges in this text cannot always prevent the old ring from seeping through: 'Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void.' Beckett announced at the start of his writing career his program: 'An assault on words in the name of beauty.' His last major text takes this assault to its furthest point even as it produces the aesthetic effect in the name of which he conducted his lifelong verbal war on words.
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Satire between the Wars: Evelyn Waugh and Others
'Oh, dear,'she said, 'this really is all too bogus.'
WITH his usual economy, Evelyn Waugh needed only one word to express British satire's dominant theme between the world wars. Bogus was his word and his preoccupation. In Vile Bodies (1930), for instance, the term becomes a nearly universal expression of scorn. A social climber is known as 'the most bogus man;' a suitor muses about marriage, wondering whether or not it 'ought to go on-for quite a long time… Otherwise it's all rather bogus, isn't it?'; a Jesuit, seeking to explain the younger generations dissipation, observes that 'this word 'bogus' they all use' is 'in some way historical,' denoting, as it does, their 'almost fatal hunger for permanence.'
Not only does the word chime sourly through Waugh's second novel, its synonyms and analogues resonate with telling persistence in the works of his fellow novelists-Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Graham Greene, among others. Diverse as these writers unquestionably are, their works, especially their earlier works, are united in their attack on a world that seemed to them increasingly synthetic. The general disillusionment that followed the Great War left them preternatu -867- rally alert to sham in everything from inferior goods to personal relationships to political ideologies. They became satirists, giving the lie to every pretense of order and authority mounted by a discredited officialdom. They were always ready to mock the establishment that had led the previous generation into a spectacularly wasteful conflict and was now haplessly stumbling toward a second conflagration.
Waugh registers the mood perfectly in Vile Bodies. The opening pages introduce us to Walter Outrage, 'last week's prime minister.' Despite his name, Outrage is timorously ineffectual. Crossing the English Channel, he is so anxious about the threat of rough waters that he doses himself with chloral. Repairing to his cabin for a drugged nap, he dreams of Oriental women, 'a world of little cooing voices, so caressing, so humble;… little golden bodies, so flexible, so firm, so surprising in the positions they assumed.' In his waking state, however, it turns out that Outrage once again falls quite short of his name. He is just as panicked by his temptations as he is by bad weather. Having been unable to refrain from flirting with the wife of the Japanese ambassador, he dithers irresolutely, unable to push the moment to its crisis when the obliging woman accepts his invitation to a private dinner. As in personal affairs, so in foreign. When someone refers to the war that is coming, he is befuddled. Why hasn't he been informed, he angrily wonders, adding with lame bravado, 'I'll be damned… if they shall have a war without consulting me… What do they want a war for, anyway?' As captain of his state, Outrage is clearly bogus.
The bogus theme is a commonplace in the fiction of this period. In novel after novel, it reveals itself in the increasingly synthetic elements of everyday life, especially architecture. The stately homes that populate Waugh's narratives, for instance, usually turn out to be of spurious provenance. Typically, they date from the eighteenth century but have been remodeled in the nineteenth in a faux-Gothic style favored by Victorian sentimentalists. Even those houses that seem to have retained their architectural integrity are fatally compromised by their changed surroundings. One of the few authentic eighteenth-century homes to make an appearance in his fiction is described as just barely maintaining its 'grace and dignity and other-worldliness' as the 'last survivor of the noble town houses of London' now 'become a mere 'picturesque bit' lurking in a ravine between concrete skyscrapers, its pillared façade, standing back from the street and obscured by railings and some wisps of foliage.' In this portrait, the genuine past is being -868- squeezed from the frame by quaint simulations and blocks of functional modern housing.
With the passing of traditional architecture, an ersatz culture arises amid the wreckage. In Brideshead Revisited (1946), Waugh's narrator Charles Ryder takes on the ambiguous task of painting ancestral homes on the eve of their demolition. In elegiac tones, he theorizes that people are 'something much less than the buildings' they make and inhabit. They are 'mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.' This conceit, however, becomes anything but reassuring when applied to twentieth-century living quarters. If architecture determines identity, it follows that the tenants of the bogus buildings that clutter the
