Catholic could behave so horribly, he responded that were he not Catholic he would hardly be human at all.)
In telling the tale of Helena's discovery of the True Cross, Waugh was testifying to his conviction that we are meant to discover our purpose not in sophisticated metaphysics or otherworldly mysticism but in the ordinary world of the senses. In short, he believed that physical reality was sacramental. When Helena undertakes her mission, she has no interest in theological speculation. Nor does she care for the subtle distinctions of Christian dogmas such as the hypostatic union. Her search is not inward, but entirely outward. Her vindication is to be achieved not by retreating from but rather by engaging with the ordinary world. She is convinced that once she finds the 'solid chunk of wood' on which Christ was crucified, she will have also reached a crucial intersection of time and eternity. This plain, homely artifact will prove that the external world is knowable and responds to our longing for meaning and certainty. If she is right, Waugh suggests, then our minds' representations, from the most pedestrian to the most sophisticated, even when misshapen or mistaken, can never be wholly futile. They arise from our interaction with the meaningful and knowable reality that surrounds us. As such, our perceptions and thoughts always carry with them revelatory potential. Waugh was convinced that viewed correctly-that is, through the eyes of faith-daily experience does nothing less than inform us, however imperfectly, of our purpose as created beings.
Helena's mission, then, speaks of Waugh's belief that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh, which is to say, in the argot of current literary criticism, that the original sign and its referent were one and the same. It followed for Waugh that, however uncertainly and fleetingly, language must have the power to put us in touch with the real presence of reality's eternal being, no matter how confusing our day-to-day experiences. Truth was to be located neither in the mind nor in experience but rather at their fruitful intersection. In his opinion, this homely position was enough to explode the lures of solipsism, ideology, or any other gnosticism. -893-
It hardly need be said that many do not find Waugh's religious convictions congenial, including many of his own church. But this makes his current return to popularity all the more intriguing. Whatever one thinks of his answers, the questions he raises in Helena speak to our current anxieties. What can we know with certainty? How can we achieve a moral consensus without an appeal to absolute principles? Are we, as some recent neo-Kantian philosophical schools suggest, trapped in the web of our own semiology, forever uncertain about the nature of external reality? And, if so, are there any sound reasons to refrain from scrapping traditional concepts and refashioning human nature to meet political exigencies?One doesn't have to subscribe to Waugh's theology to appreciate the urgency of his argument, not when so many find it so difficult to distinguish between the genuine and the bogus in human affairs.
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The Reaction against Modernism: Amis, Snow, Wilson
DURING the 1950s-around the time that the nouveau roman was beginning to emerge in France and the postmodernist novel in America-many English novelists were moving in a different direction, turning back to traditional modes of fiction writing. Rejecting the experimental techniques of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and other modernists, the new generation of writers looked mainly to nineteenth-century authors for inspiration. Not all of the English novelists of that period were part of antimodernist movement; Lawrence Durrell, Nigel Dennis, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch are some notable exceptions. But many others, including C. P. Snow, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Doris Lessing, William Cooper, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, Pamela Hansford Johnson, David Storey, Honor Tracy, and Keith Waterhouse, rejected experimental writing and made a conscious effort to return to an earlier style.
By the early 1950s an element of hostility toward experimental writing was emerging in English literary circles. The following comment on the state of contemporary fiction by an anonymous reviewer in the
Priestley's remarks appeared in the London Sunday Times, whose editor, Leonard Russell, held similar views about modernist writing. C. P Snow described how, at the Savile Club in 1948, Russell listened sympathetically as he attacked 'the Virginia Woolf novel of sensitivity and plotted its overthrow.' Soon afterward, Russell offered Snow a position as a reviewer for the Sunday Times. Snow accepted, and between 1949 and 1953 he wrote well over a hundred reviews for that publication as well for the New Statesman, the Spectator, and other weeklies.
Other novelists of this period were also active as reviewers. Kingsley Amis, a poet and critic as well as a novelist, began reviewing books for the Spectator in 1953; he subsequently published some hundred pieces there. Around the same time, Angus Wilson was publishing articles and reviews in Encounter, the Listener, the New Statesman, the Observer, the Spectator, and other English journals. Snow, Amis, and Wilson thus became prominent both as advocates and as practitioners of an antimodemist aesthetic. As Wilson said in 1964,
A novelist like Snow and, to some extent, I myself, Amis, and others, have felt since [World War II] that the traditional novel still has much to offer. Man's relation to society was not given its place in novels like those of Virginia Woolf-a weakness of Woolf. The weakness of Virginia Woolf is not any kind of stated social belief, but the unstated social acceptance of the society in which she lived; in a way, it was her strength, because it allowed her to forget about society and examine the personality as a kind of metaphysical unit. English society was changing very greatly in 1945, and it has been changing really very much ever since then… These changes led us to revive, in some degree, the traditional forms, I think.
Wilson contributed actively to the revival of interest in traditional fiction. He published studies of Dickens, Trollope, and Kipling, as well as articles and reviews in which he dealt sympathetically with Victorian writers. Snow began writing fiction before the Second World War, but his major output came afterward. He also completed critical studies of the authors he admired: a book on Trollope and another, The Realists, on eight nineteenth-century novelists. Amis similarly expressed his antipathy toward modernist writing in his reviews and critical essays and, like Wilson, published a book on Kipling. -896-
