Waugh Who

There is indeed nowadays an armed and steadily growing posse of masters. What with masterclasses, master’s degrees, and masterpieces around every corner, one begins to deliberate over the validity of whether or not one has been duped all along—hoodwinked, shammed out of his birthright that he is yet too an undiscovered master of something or other. Much like the words “amazing,” “crazy,” “awesome,” “impactful,” “unique,” and, every half-literate’s favorite, “problematic,” “master” has taken the initial and regretful Cheeto-crud-on-the-fingers-bathing-suit-tucked-under-the-panniculus stumble towards its bellyflop into meaninglessness. This is all to say that one should, at the very least, attempt to choose one’s words with some intention, and it is with not a little attention that I classify Evelyn Waugh as past master status. And, although Waugh claimed P.G. Wodehouse “the head of (his) profession,” it is in Waugh’s short story Scott King’s Modern Europe in which one may be masterfully classed on the rhetorical devices, grammatical gifts, and narrative tones it takes to make a worthy work of wit. 

Rhetorical devices are the invisible patterns upon the page that make readers smirk and wonder at how a human with only one frontal cortex could turn a phrase so well, the same invisible patterns that make writers lower their heads, peep intermittently out the window, and wait for the approach of the rioting public with hot oils and blunt instruments who had just gotten hip to the jig that he’s been passing off Ancient Greek hand-me-downs at freshly woven silk prices. Waugh, in the course of less than forty pages, performs the unabashed huckstering worthy of a Middle Eastern bazar. 

Most people, even my father, a man of precisely no reading at all, knows what a simile is. Most people, however, do not know a good simile whenever they see one. Allow me to play the purveyor: “He had been cross-questioned about his past and his future, the state of his health and finances, as though he were applying for permanent employment of a confidential nature.” Scott King, Waugh’s British protagonist seems to be rather discontent with his brief examination upon entering the nation of Neutralia: allegorized post-war, socialist continental Europe. The always playful transferred epithet scoots in shortly thereafter, titillating lookers-on with a quick one to the ribs about the story’s oddly breathtaking communist town hottie, Miss Sveningen: “Think of her striding between the beds, a pigtail, bare feet, and in her hand a threatening hairbrush.” Anaphora makes its first appearance twice when King speaks to the comically ingratiating communist professor, Dr. Fe: “There was more than politeness in Dr. Fe’s greeting; there was definite solicitude,” this repetition creating an emphatic effect. That same professor’s depiction of Neutralia’s liberation is eye-squinting in that unique way that many of us now may very readily connote with some contemporary views under the iron regime of Critical Theory: “Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians.” This fine use of isocolon, better known today as parallelism, achieves a repetition that, in conjunction with its connotation in the repeated word here in question, creates an ironic effect suggestive of successful academic menticide—also a very relatable theme for today’s universities. And a good mix is always appreciated. Consider the following right upstairs, left to the liver of alliteration and overstatement: “But here the din banged back from gilding and mirrors; above the clatter and chatter of the dinner table and the altercations of the waiters, a mixed choir of young people sang folk songs, calculated to depress the most jovial village festival;” though, for me, this is sober empiricism.

Yet one can create feats of wit with good, old grammar as well. Consider how much this simple absolute adds to an otherwise commonplace description: “He took Whitemaid by the arm and led him out of the hall to a cool and secluded landing where stood a little settee of gilt and plush, a thing not made for sitting on.” The key as regards witty grammar is to tincture its instances with a taste of the playful. A settee in indeed constructed entirely for humans to rest their limbs as they see fit, but Waugh revokes that privilege, suggesting something curious about the furniture that leads the lips of readers curling accordingly. In English, the Passive Voice has been, for some reason, forbidden by literary authorities as weak and spineless, and the writerly equivalent of filching the last of grandma’s money from her purse. The passive voice, however, is much funnier than the active voice, as it deletes the subject, indeed suggesting the subject as entirely unimportant, further intimating the subject’s stiff-lipped reaction to the scenario, perhaps mildly offended by it all: “Scott-King petulantly joined issue on this point. Strong words were used of him. “Fascist beast.”—“Reactionary cannibal.”—“Bourgeois escapist.” If his sentence were used in the active voice, the same image of rejection would simply not be enforced. Even something as simple as verb tenses can be used to inspire the acquisition of new facial muscles: “The waiters had drunk and were drinking profusely of brandy and there was a bottle at hand.” Verb tenses, and therefore the passing of time, can be used to achieve humorous results. Here, we have the past perfect tense followed by the past continuous tense, followed still by present bottle, suggesting the protractedness of the activity. This usage of two tenses in direct succession also aids in producing a kind of scene-transition effect, wherein we see the waiters drinking, then perhaps some time goes by, after which we expect the waiters to have completed the sluicing, only to find that they have unnaturally prolonged the activity.

In truth, one could almost give all of the above-mentioned the heave-ho, if one had an infallible command of narrative tone. One of the combinations above used overstatement, a fine comedic tone forsooth, but the understatement is the undisputed heavyweight champion: “The party trailed out through the swing doors into the dusty evening heat, leaving the noblemen to compare their impressions of Miss. Sveningen’s legs. The subject was not exhausted when they returned; indeed had it risen earlier in the year it would have served as the staple conversation for the whole Bellacita season.” Legs tend to have that effect on men, a woman’s legs all the more, a Nordic snow-queen’s of mythological length being thus a certainly. Yet understatements need not be about legs; they can indeed be about any body part and its function: “He hiccupped without intermission throughout the long dinner.” Here, a simple “he hiccupped a lot” would have had the same logic but lost all the sense. Comedians and comediennes alike make sweeping statements. Comedy is meant to make grotesque spectacles of otherwise quiet characteristics or foibles. To suggest that the man next to whom you spent your morning commute emitted a scent wicked enough to send Lot’s wife sprinting out of the salt is a slightly more entertaining image than reporting that he smelled bad. Therefore, get out your broom and sweep. Waugh could push one with the best of them: “The foyer was empty save for Miss Bombaum who sat smoking a cigar with a man of repellent aspect.” A man of repellent aspect? It is additionally funny due to its receiving no further description, thus no debate can be made. He was bloody repellent. That is all. This is not to be confused with making a witty aside. Witty asides are slivers of smartly crafted opinion that show the reader that the writer has thought a lot about the subject at hand, usually not positively. When describing a confused gaggle of herd-mind socialists, Waugh proffers the following: “Noah’s animals cannot have embarked with less sense of the object of their journey.”

Just like cashiers at the grocery, writers of comedy should change registers, making the switch from high language to low, the ornate and well-spoken to a slag-lad of the gutter: “Scott King was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet; provident Nature who shields the slow tortoise and points the quills of the porcupine, has given to such tender spirits their appropriate armor. A shutter, an iron curtain, fell between Scott-King and these two jokers.” Just as finally seeing the hilarious things at which everyone’s already hacking up their insides violently is an enjoyable time for most, should one, to achieve the same effect, place powerful images at the end of sentences. It is the long-awaited reveal; the man walking carefully along the icy sidewalk who has finally begun to dance—the cologne-drenched gentleman in the BMW who has been revving it for hussies coming it out of the bar at 2:00 a.m. finally losing grip on his latest drift, remodeling his vehicle upon the nearest metal road barrier; or, a beautiful giant of a Nordic female upon a balcony in a bath towel devouring a large cut of meat: “The windows stood wide open onto the balcony and on the balcony, modestly robed in bath towels, sat Miss Sveningen eating beefsteak.”

If one has not yet deduced the general pattern for oneself, it is indeed the clever changes and juxtapositions, whatever those might be, that carry the day and take home the big win. One very effective way to experience this is to suddenly change either the mood of the narrative or the characters proximity to the events before-described, as in the following: “Dr. Fe, when they met, showed the reserve proper of a man of delicate feeling who had in emotion revealed too much of himself. It was a happy day for Scott-King. Not so for his colleagues.” Or, “Scott-King petulantly joined issue on this point. Strong words were used of him. Fascist beast—Reactionary cannibal—Bourgeois escapist. Scott King withdrew from the meeting.”

The Mystery of the Modern Narrative

The contemporary reader, whenever she is not watching Netflix, assumes that she is a detective. Since Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, readers, rather than experience literature, investigate it. Previous to Poe’s invention in Detective Fiction, literature pursued a very different mystery: the portrayal of empathy, human intuition, and their combined relationship with our imponderable Human Condition and its connection to the meaning of all. Good things. However, from the Enlightenment’s rampant rise of science and Modernity’s subsequent Industrial Revolution came electric lighting, from electric lighting the ability to combat darkness, from the ability to combat darkness the opportunity to read books late into the night, from the opportunity to read books late into the night to highly increased literacy rates, from highly increased literacy rates to the profuse outpouring of a million new authors, nearly all of whom learning their trade by way of the Detective Story, the most seminal of those being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation in Sherlock Holmes. This is what bakers call bitter-sweet, for more people can read, but, as with all businesses that bloat beyond good means, the quality of the readership, and–as can be readily reviewed today by a cursory dekko at contemporary bookstores–the quality of the authors, and, therefore, the work. Our infatuation with Sherlock Holmes and the narrative form pursuant thereto thusly permeated into all writerly attempts. Identical to the formulaic armature of a Sherlock Holmes story, the familiar Preferred Modern Narrative includes a gripping introduction to warrant the case, suspense by way of narrative secret, sleuthing by way of narrative clues, the ever-ubiquitous Red Herring, and finally the story’s solving. To modestly bolster the assertion that we are indeed, until this very moment, unknowingly rewriting Sherlock Holmes, a brief investigation of Silver Blaze, Doyle’s first story from his collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, may be in order.

 First impressions are not everything, but they are darn close. Story introductions retain a similar logic. And the contemporary reader, an entity exceedingly impatient with such initial conferences, does not like to pursue a subject without an official writ issued by the normative authorial power. To warrant the case of a story is to create, through the pithy portrayal of narrative circumstances, enough reasonable suspicion for the reader to begin investigation. The contemporary reader, as do the junkies at the main train station, lives hard and fast, and similar dossiers arrive fresh at the grocery store daily; therefore, this warrant should arrive first-thing and full of intrigue. What the contemporary reader finds intriguing is up to the color of her humors, but it is the swiftness with which it is served where the Detective Story, unfortunately, excels. Consider Silver Blaze’s immediate writ of narrative execution in the following:

“The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so  many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute, undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns. On Tuesday evening…”

There is much promised here: tragedy, personal importance, surmise, conjecture, hypothesis, social critique, Truth—Doyle even posits the meta-suggestion that it is our, the readers’, duty to see what inferences may be drawn, even being so kind as to supply us with the information that it all began on a Tuesday evening. Herein provided are the contemporary craft essentials so sought-after by those so hungry to make it to the supermarket shelves, or, nowadays, any shelf at all: a sense of tension, meaning, reader participation, mystery, and the much envied  sense-of-time—all within the first-two-page instant gratification we desire. Someone’s life is on the line. The issue with this model, however, remains: why we should care? The Modern writer says to herself, between said binge-bouts of Netflix, as Classical Literature, she knows, is merely social control (isn’t university easy?): Why write good character when one can write a secret?

We shall all go to our graves having hid something from those we love. Thus, the establishment of a narrative motive by way of secret is indeed a natural and poignant choice. Contemporary fiction would stand dumbfounded, mouth and eyes agape, without this Detective Fiction-based parlor trick. From Humbert Humbert’s arguably illegal psychology portrayed in Lolita to the farcically low-stakes outings propelling any P.G. Wodehouse story, a secret may be of any magnitude. How a secret is written, however, has been relatively similar since the Detective Fiction’s incipience. Something as simple as the expositive confirmation that “it [was] obvious…that there were many people who had the strongest interest in preventing Silver Blaze [a horse] from being there at the fall of the flag, next Tuesday” is enough.

The trail would go blue-cold, however, without an air of general suspicion and distrust—an atmosphere rife for sleuthing—from which the reader could deduce the most pertinent facts. This may be done in any story by way of clever, perfectly paced exposition that, unbeknownst to the reader, sends her on the hunt for narrative clues. It is indeed no mystery at all as to why the Silver Blaze’s second page should, with its familiar set up, leave the contemporary reader’s ears pricked upward and in belief that the game be afoot:

“…At King’s Pyland, where the Colonel’s training-stable is situated. Every precaution was taken to guard the favorite. The trainer, John Straker, is a retired jockey, who rode in Colonel Ross’s colors before he became too heavy for the weighing-chair. He has served the Colonel for five years as a jockey, and for seven as a trainer, and has always shown himself to be a zealous and honest servant. Under him were three lads, for the establishment was a small one, containing only four horses in all. One of these lads sat up each night in the stable, while the others slept in the loft. All three bore excellent characters. John Straker, who is a married man, lived in a small villa about two hundred yards from the stables. He has no children, keeps one maid-servant, and is comfortably off. The country round is very lonely, but about half a mile to the north there is a small cluster of villas which have been built by a Travistock contractor for the use of invalids and others who may wish to enjoy the pure Dartmoor air. Travistock itself lies two miles to the west, while across the moor, also about two miles distant, is the larger training establishment of Capleton, which belongs to Lord Backwater, and is managed by Silas Brown. In every other direction the moor is complete wilderness, inhabited only by a few roaming gypsies. Such was the general situation last Monday night when the catastrophe occurred.”

Just like Mama MFA made, the above expository fiesta contains just enough precise yet enigmatic information as regards all pertinent actors and associations appurtenant to the plot that the reader has therefrom gathered enough evidence to bypass the stage of reasonable suspicion and pursue the dictates afforded to probable cause.

Due narrative process, however, gets in the way of even the most veteran literati. Familiarity with administering arrests by the dictates of lexical law proves to that reader the red herring’s reign as powerful as ever. The red herring takes many forms. The red herring is a now-common literary device that presents a kind of narrative clue to the reader that intends to mislead or distract that same reader away from the true object of pursuit. The red herring now takes on many forms of deception, but the most traditional form comes from Detective Fiction’s redirection of suspicion upon an otherwise innocent party. Silver Blaze employs a classic Sherlockian misdirection contrived by meandering the reader away from the logic of a case and towards that of an otherwise innocent character’s possible motivations for wrongdoing: “‘Yes, and that is a factor which we must certainly not neglect. As Desborough, their horse, was second in the betting, they had an interest in the disappearance of the favourite. Silas Brown, the trainer, is known to have had large bets upon the event, and he was no friend to poor Straker.’” 

So, whodunit?

Again: who cares?

Consider the meta-mouthpiece for the modern narrative, Sherlock Holmes, and his egotistical epilogues at the end of each story, which are equally a treat and a chore to read. In the Silver Blaze’s case, Colonel Ross’s dialogue, during Sherlock’s ending analyses, stands in for the thoughts of the contemporary reader, stating “‘You take my breath away.” Admitting that “‘(He) ha[s] been blind.” Further confessing that “You have made it perfectly clear, Mr. Holmes.” And it is this logic-machine of a man with an athletic form of Aspergers, sociopathic cold-bloodedness, a simultaneous cocaine/heroine addiction, a near-robotic man suffering from perpetual sleep-deprived torment—Doyle’s anthropomorphized cautionary tale of Modernity’s effects on the spirit for the world—to whom we owe our thanks for the modern narrative.