Against the ‘decay of literary decency’: Waugh’s ‘call to order in times of hysteria’

• Main Author: Julie Labay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2008-05-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/9427

Throughout Waugh’s non-fictional writings, the reader becomes acquainted with the literary, artistic and philosophic views of the British writer and his contemporaries. The focus of this paper will be on the dual nature of the author’s admiration for everything modern in the early non-fiction (he considered himself ‘the creature of the Zeitgeist’, ‘Felix Culpa?’, Commonweal, 16 July 1948), and at the same time, the use of tradition in his post-war writings as a standard against which modern civilization might be measured. For Waugh, the rise of totalitarianism, the development of atheism and the dissolution of the sacred were consecutive to the destruction of the founding values of British and Western culture and society after the wars, and entailed the decadence of literary or aesthetic standards. This study will show how non-fictional writings become the means through which Waugh’s anxieties and doubts about the meaning of existence are expressed, and where the literary and aesthetic values that he deems indispensable to the survival of the modern world are theorized.