The Columbia History of the British Novel

the transcendental principle behind all traditions. Tony's dedication is shallow and, ultimately, sterile. He had thought his life would form a link in the continuous development of a purposeful future. Instead, he loses his heir and his estate. There is nothing to bequeath. Doomed to the Sisyphean task of reading the entire works of Dickens over and over again to his Brazilian captor, Tony meets his appropriate fate. He had affected the forms of the Victorian gentleman without troubling himself to examine the assumptions upon which these forms were based. His punishment is to be lifted out of history altogether and spend his last days steeped in what Waugh thought to be a sentimental fantasy of nineteenth-century life recorded in the melodramatic pages of Dickens's novels. It is a grotesque but fitting nightmare.

The lesson Tony learns too late in A Handful of Dust is the same one Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and Guy Crouchback in Sword of Honour must master: the tradition they value so highly is not theirs by right of class, education, sentiment, or talent. While such distinctions may enable one to appreciate the tradition more deeply and to contribute to it more fully, these considerations must be secondary to its real mission, which in Waugh's view was to make God's word manifest in the world. No matter how genuine its provenance, when any aspect of this tradition is not serving this purpose, it becomes as bogus as any of the quaint Gothic makeovers or Bauhaus atrocities he ridicules else-885- where. This aspect of Waugh's intention is often misunderstood. He paints such charming portraits of country houses and their upper-class inhabitants that more than a few commentators have gone astray. In the case of Brideshead, Waugh even had to sustain the charge of perverting his religious devotion by fusing it with a romantic idealization of the aristocracy. In fact, he meant something quite different.

At the end of Brideshead Revisited, Ryder finally overcomes his abiding snobbery when he is forced to realize that his romance with the aristocratic Flyte family and their Roman Catholic culture is but a stage in a much more important journey, one with a decidedly Dantesque echo. He is seduced into accepting God step by step, first being drawn to his imperfect creatures: the charming Sebastian, then his sister Julia, and finally the Brideshead estate itself. Each in turn works a spell on him until he finds himself enamored of the principle upon which their lives, their home, and their tradition rest. But this is not enough. There is another step to be taken and it can only be gained through loss.

The novel opens and closes with Ryder once again at the Brideshead estate many years after his original involvement with its residents. He has been posted there unexpectedly in his capacity as an army officer during the Second World War. While nostalgic, his return is not an entirely happy experience. It was here that his engagement to Julia, the estate's heir, foundered irreparably. His feelings are further complicated by its present condition. The house has been transformed from a seat of aristocratic tradition into a military barracks. All has changed. As in the sixteenth century when the forces of the Reformation besieged it, history has once again violated the chaste Brideshead. Soldiers swagger through the halls and courts, cursing casually and throwing their spent cigarettes negligently into the fountain. But then Ryder notices that the light outside the chapel still burns and quite a few of the men attend services there. Brideshead has provided these men with a retreat from the horrors of war, and in doing so the house continues to serve its real purpose. It doesn't belong to the Flytes, much less to Ryder. It belongs to all who can read its message. Ryder finally understands: if tradition doesn't provide such occasions, it has no justification.

In Unconditional Surrender (1961), the last volume in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Guy Crouchback learns that even noble aspirations can turn bogus. To become the gentleman he has always longed to be, he must abandon his notions of chivalric heroism and noblesse oblige. As he entered the Second World War, he saw himself as a knight march-886- ing against the 'huge and hateful… Modern Age in Arms' as it revealed itself in the Warsaw Pact between Hitler and Stalin. But in Yugoslavia he confronts the unromantic truth in the plight of Mme Kanyi.

Mme Kanyi, a Jewish refugee displaced by war and trying to save her people from the Yugoslavian Partisans, wonders how so many could have thought the conflict would lead to any good. Like Orwell's George Bowling, she has no interest in assigning blame. Everyone is guilty.

Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere.

Then she asks if there were people in England who had also seen the war as a means to achieve their personal ends. Guy, who had hoped to redeem his sterile life in virtuous combat, blurts out, 'God forgive me… I was one of them.' Even the best of intentions can prove false, as Guy discovers tragically once again after this conversation. When he tries his best to save Mme Kanyi, he not only fails, he unwittingly provides cause for their execution. The Partisans have observed his meetings with her and use them as evidence to prosecute her.

Guy is not the knight-errant he envisioned himself to be at the war's beginning. There is, however, something for him to do. However inglorious in the world's eyes, it is 'the chance of doing a single small act to redeem the times.' Upon returning to England, he takes in his deceased wife's illegitimate child as his own. The novels ending makes clear that this genuine act of charity redeems Guy from his bogus notions about what it takes to be a gentleman.

The Solid Sum of Two Plus Two

Satire is the genre of the plainspoken. It's taken up by people who are viscerally opposed to mystagogy and ready to attack it where and whenever it raises its hydra-headed complexities. It's not surprising, then, that satirists as politically diverse as Waugh and Orwell would have been repelled by contemporary gnosticisms, especially fascism and communism. In their assessment, such systems were nothing more than elaborate intellectual excuses for brutally acquiring power over others. -887-

They both urged resistance to the dehumanizing designs of all modern political systems. The power of plain speech and objective truth were their chosen defenses.

Orwell's last novel, 1984, and Waugh's tenth, Helena, couldn't be further apart in subject matter and tone, yet they have a common purpose. Orwell's is a grim parable of present tendencies projected into the near future; Waugh's, a spritely reworking of a Catholic legend dating from the fourth century. Both novels, however, are equally committed to exposing the destructive effects of modern thought, especially when it expresses itself as a ruthless solipsism capable of liquefying objective truth in the solvent of expedience, whether personal or political. This is why the protagonists of both novels undertake desperate struggles to establish standards of objectivity. Both Winston Smith and Helena seek some principle that can guarantee the knowability of external reality. In the absence of such certitude, those in power will inevitably package the truth to fit their own designs.

In 1984, Orwell pushes this tendency to its limits and, doing so, reveals the consequences of believing in nothing. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, the danger of losing one's faith in a knowable world outside the self is not that one will believe in nothing but rather that one is liable to believe in anything. In Orwell's totalitarian state, this is precisely what is required of the citizenry. They are expected to pass the test of indiscriminate faith. They must believe in what they know to be false. Not just pretend, but believe it unreservedly. This is an exercise in mental gymnastics called doublethink. One is supposed to give unhesitating assent to official pronouncements that are self-evidently false. Although the Party leaders can and do rewrite history to conform to their changing policies, this alone does not satisfy them. They want to demonstrate conclusively to their citizens that they have the power to make anyone believe anything. The ceaseless broadcasts, pouring forth from ubiquitous telescreens, announce transparent lies. Absurdly optimistic predictions of economic improvement are routinely contradicted a few weeks later without comment. People are called upon to applaud a brutal victory over a heinous enemy who a few days before had been portrayed as an irreproachable ally.

This is not just the political expedience of keeping up with changing events. The Party actually uses these reversals as occasions to deliberately strain the credulity of even its most submissively loyal members. Winston is particularly shocked the evening the Party calls upon the -888- people to switch loyalties in midsentence. During a particularly feverish rally, they are led suddenly and inexplicably to chant execrations on a nation they had been cheering as an ally only a moment before. At the same time, their former enemy is instantly transformed into their most trusted ally. The government that can get its people to doublethink perfectly, to give full-hearted assent to what they know to be incontestably false, has in effect destroyed the grounds of intellectual and moral resistance in advance. Such a state of epistemological incoherence deprives the individual of the fulcrum of objective truth. There is nothing on which to exert the lever of personal conviction.

When the dissident Winston Smith is apprehended, he is put through sustained brainwashing designed to