The following article is a short essay and review realised as part of a take-home exam for Postromantic Materialism course held at the University of Leuven in 2014-2015. You can also read an essay about To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, NW by Zadie Smith, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach , The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai and The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen.
Waugh borrows his title from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” one of the foundational texts of (English) Modernism. Investigate the notion of Modernism and discuss its relevance to Waugh’s work.
Starting from the incipit of the novel, Waugh declares his idea of writing something as much closer as possible to the real human nature. He quotes line 27-30 of the first part of The Waste Land, titled the Burial of the Dead. It is a clear reference to the plot of the novel: the story focuses on a couple, Tony and Brenda Last. After their son’s death in a car accident everything changes. Brenda demands the divorce and Tony leaves for an expedition to Brazil where, after being rescued by Mr. Todd, is forced to read aloud Dickens’ novels to him. Tony is declared dead and Brenda marries an old friend. This very brief summary can’t provide an overview of the several themes in the writing. “The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world” (see Encyclopedia Britannica Online). Critics tend to divide the modernism into two periods: the pre-modernism, with Joseph Conrad’s Hearth of Darkness novel as milestone, and postwar modernism taking as a major example the Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. It is not a coincidence that these two major works come together in Waugh’s novel. It could be related with the idea of defining in literature how a deeply changed world influenced the lives of normal people. Modernism is often related with the historical period between the two world wars, when disillusion and fragmentation broke the reception of a novel as an entertaining piece of art. In modernism perspective, modeling and the subject matter more than the general plot or idea of a novel.
Morality also plays a big role in modernism and it is a highly deepened topic in Waugh’s novel, lying into the opposition between the modernism -represented by The Waste Land and Heart of Darkness– and the artificial and sentimental view of the society.
Bibliography
S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922. Consulted online on Project Gutenberg’s website http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1321/1321-h/1321-h.htm, 25th October 2014
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, Modernism (art), http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/387266/Modernism, 25th October 2014