THE EVOLUTION OF THE
HERO-FIGURE IN
EVELYN WAUGH’S EARLY FICTION
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been a drastic change in the attitude of writers towards the conception of the hero. Hitherto, the hero has been truly heroic, of a noble nature, full of positive traits as piety, vigour and vitality. A number of factors such as the disruption of the western civilization, the waning of religion, the rise of industrialism, Darwinism and the impact of scientific scepticism, not least the triumph of bourgeois morality and sentimentality have contributed to the gradual disappearance of the traditional hero.
In modern fiction the place of the hero has been taken by what Sean O’Faolin describes as the anti-hero, in his book “The Vanishing Hero”. Such a figure is seen prominently in the novels of a number of modern novelists including those of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Aldous Huxely. This anti-heroic figure is projected as groping, puzzled, cross, mocking, frustrated and isolated without any aim or pattern in life.
Paul Penny feather, the protagonist of Waugh’s “Decline and Fall” is a victim marked by colourlessness and ordinariness. He leads an “uneventful” (1) life at Scone college, Oxford, where he is “someone of no importance” (2) When he is expelled for indecent behaviour, he reaches Llanabba on the advice of the porter. When love is aroused in this passive youth, Fortune and circumstance lead him to misadventures in the value-free world of King’s Thursday, residence of an archetypal Fortune figure, Margot. When given a chance to choose his future, he does not grab the opportunity for a better career, but simply returns to Oxford, his false refuge.
In the second novel, “Vile Bodies” the hero Adam Fenwick Symes is more experienced than Paul. He has atleast a vague notion of his goals and so he is privileged a few spells of sanity. He consciously allows Fortune to govern his-actions. Like Paul, he too disregards marriage as a sacred religious ceremony which brings stability to a wayward life, but Adam never takes it seriously and urges his fiancee, Nina not to “get intense about it”. (3) That is why the writer punishes him with a loss of job and makes him lose track of the drunk Major, who could give him financial stability, so often.
Waugh presents in “Black Mischef” two central figures in contrast to each other. Seth, the innocent Emperor of Azania, is too idealistic in his out look and fails in his attempts to bring order to his land of ageless barbarism. He mistakes western civilization for order and progress. For Waugh, this is a secular endeavour and hence doomed to fail. Seth’s confident assertion that his army can crush the rebellion and his constant rantings, “I am the New Age. I am the Future” are a measure of his innocence.
In Basil, however, the innocence of immaturity leads to amorality and to irresponsible cruelty which permit him to victimize others. He is an exploiter and a bounder. Unlike Paul and Adam, he is not governed by Fortune. He sows the seeds of rebellion in General Connolly, till then a symbol of progress for Seth, that finally lead to Seth’s death and to his disaster.
Tony Last, of “A Handful of Dust” is as Waugh once pointed out, “a humanist.” Last has the broad, simple outlines of a hero of myth. Unlike the other early protagonists, Tony “embodies the pathos of a wooden puppet that suddenly weeps real tears”.(5) Though Waugh approves of Tony’s nostalgia for the cloistered and vanished life of Hetton, he is set against the excessive dependence of Tony on it, and Tony’s priorities for good behaviour and chivalry, rather than religion. Tony’s quest for order and refuge suffers because it is not activated by religion. He seeks the unendurable city of man, which, for Waugh, is a gross parody of the city of God. His romance with the West Indian girl Therese whom he meets on board, also fails because she is a representative of the Catholic hierarchial city of Trinidad. Finally, he falls into clutches of the illiterate and half-caste Mr. Todd and thus lives in servitude to his own savagery awaiting release in vain. Tony does not seek the right goal and his fault is excessive tolerance.
Thus, the early heroes of Waugh are anti-heroes and victims. Though Waugh delights in some of their pleasure-seeking acts, he does not approve of them totally. An innocent led into a world of evil and experience in which he is victimised by Fate and by his lack of direction-this is a recurrent feature in almost all of Waugh’s novels, though it is modified in his later fiction. It is their failure that he depicts, as they operate in a world without pattern and he insists that they lack the vitality to change it.
REFERENCES
1. Decline & Fall, (penguin edition) p.11
2. Ibid
3. Vile Bodies p. 13
4. Black Mischef p. 44
5. The Situation of the Novel, Macmillan 1970 (1979) London-Bergonzi Bemard p. 89