Waugh and Rand

Evelyn Waugh isn’t that funny? Well, the motor race in Vile Bodies is, but nothing in Decline and Fall seems to reach above the comically tragic. So what is the tragic message? Perhaps it is when Professor Silenus turns up in Corfu, apparently destitute, but still a man of splendid isolation, to finally explain the meaning of life to Paul Pennyfeather. Why he should be the one to do this, with the message ‘some people should really not to join in such a spinning wheel of absurdity (sic)’, explaining that the odds are stacked against some people from the beginning and that they should have the grace to sit it out. Of course, Silenus is a good parody of the modern architect; detached, dissatisfied, aloof, alone, unlikeable and seeing himself at the centre of the spinning wheel, but you would expect better closing moments to come from Captain Grimes, who of course, thanks to his utterly spurious education and capacity to roll with life’s punches, always climbs out of ‘the soup’. That would be more comforting. Waugh’s Prof Silenus is definitely not comforting, either in his work, or his demeanour and neither is the world Waugh depicts, where only sardonic amusement gets you through the day.

Howard Roark isn’t likeable either, but he embodies a certain virtue. Try to find virtue in Waugh? That’s impossible. Roark’s virtue is certainly attractive, but it is played out against the most vulgar of melodramas where all issues are black and white, and surely reeking of the McCarthyism (note the power of the press and the menace represented by Elseworth Tooey as an ‘undercover’ political activist, the ranting of the mob and so on). In the Fountainhead nobody stands a chance either, that is unless they stand very close to the mast, or is it mask, of truth and probity, amidst a world of deflowered opportunity. How very American… how very obviously American. Perhaps here we can see why Zizek ‘admires’ Rand for her overt orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which is almost embarrassing, and one perfectly suited to melodrama, or the rhetoric of the Tea Party.