Decline and Waugh
For most students of a particular generation, their very first taste of popularized ‘dystopia fiction’ is George Orwell’s seminal 1984. For a younger crowd, it might instead be any of the many derivative young adult titles that sprouted up after—and including—The Hunger Games. Still others may reference Ayn Rand’s Anthem or, more popularly, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. There might even be a hipster in the crowd that would point to We, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920 effort that’s credited with kicking off the genre.
All of this is well and good, aside from the young adult titles. The end of the old world in the trenches of 1918 signaled the arrival of a new one, and whatever it was to be, the total dominion over the individual by the state was to be a key component in this new political equation. Crowns had been torn from the bloodied heads of kings, which meant that subjects were out; democracies and republics had arisen, and administrations staffed by bureaucrats had come to take their places, which meant that citizens were in. One may question whether there’s a relevant distinction to be made between the two, but rest assured, it can be spotted quite easily.
A subject maintains loyalty to a person and to a people, and the ruling apparatus is merely this consideration given political form: a system whose importance is defined by the people themselves who operate it. A citizen, on the other hand, has both social security and selective service numbers, and is effectively a unit for the government to throw in front of a firing line if he doesn’t pay his taxes or if it’s simply convenient enough to wage a war. Whether that firing line is in the courtyard of a prison or, alternatively, the advancing troops of some other liberal democracy, at times seems to be the only expression of agency that this poor citizen is allowed to exercise.
When one considers the development of the dominating political models of the first half of the twentieth century, this distinction between what had come before and what proceeded hence becomes obvious. Communism had triumphed in Russia and festered across Eastern Europe, Liberalism, or more specifically considered as ‘liberal democracy’, had entrenched itself in America and Western Europe, while a variety of authoritarian models broadly defined as fascist came to dominate the central powers. It is no coincidence that it was these loosely-defined ‘fascist’ states which arose in direct response to the Communist threat, nor is it a coincidence that authority was crafted specifically to fight authority. But this is a topic for another time.
What all models had in common was their absolute rejection of the old order, which created between them far more similarities than any of their proponents tended to want to admit. But make no mistake, despite these forms of authoritarianism (liberal democracy included) sharing both fundamental and superficial similarities, where they differed was substantial. But modern political systems remained, nonetheless, modern: a government’s responsibility to its people had been replaced by the jealous safeguarding of creatures reduced to economic units.
It was against this worldwide revolution that dystopia fiction arose as a response, or perhaps, a coping mechanism. Politically active writers found themselves trying to make sense of what these political models entailed, and more importantly, what the future of the societies they governed would look like. Even the most optimistic of progressives in the West found themselves reasoning into apologies for eugenics-ruled societies kept sane and stable by the use of mandatory drug abuse and widespread sexual deviancy. As Huxley’s novel has indicated, this turned out to be the road map for the American century. But like so many progressive dreams, the sleek infrastructure and total lack of criminal activity in Brave New World remained fantasies; our drugs have made us more unstable and the sexual revolution has made us more depressed.
But if we return to our list for a moment, we’ll find one book that would remain unsuspiciously absent from anyone’s recommendation. It’s possible it would not be considered because its author did eventually write a ‘proper’ entry into the dystopia genre, although it wouldn’t be until 1953. It’s also possible that, given its status as an ostensibly comedic satire, it simply didn’t register as a proper dystopia because its author was describing, with the appropriate English humor, the state of society at the time. And one unwritten rule about dystopic writing is that any writer who indulges in it isn’t supposed to hit the nail too firmly on the head. We aren’t supposed to be living in a dystopia now, right this very minute! That would be ridiculous; we would have recognized it. No, we’re supposed to be warned against the one we’re always and obviously slipping towards but, for some reason, never arrive at.
In this sense, proper dystopian fiction, rather than a warning or allegory, is better understood as a distraction from the reality of civilization’s descent into the secular-modern abyss. The social ramifications of the total state, be it presented in praise or in horror, all point in the same direction: the unraveling of any and all means by which to adequately define personhood, identity, and ultimately, meaning.
This is best considered in our subject-citizen divide, which was mentioned earlier. A subject has direct knowledge and tangible access to the defining elements of life: his family, his neighbors, the customs, traditions, and memories passed on through both of these institutions, as well as the local parlance of how laws are executed. There is a living tradition that can be found rooted in even the innocuous behavior of neighbors that cannot be articulated, regimented, or defined into the sterile arithmetic of a misapplied bureaucracy. Even the very houses they live in are augmentations, renovations, and steady additions to structures designed by previous inhabitants, torn down only when particularly neglectful absentees let them pass into ruin, or when decimated finances make the building prohibitively expensive. By this definition, subjects may not necessarily need a king in order to exist, but the king is the capstone on a civilization of subjects; he is not merely some dictator but the man who ties together the living traditions still alive in his people: the link between past and present given a name and a face.
The citizen, by contrast, lives in an over-designed box made to accommodate the perpetual student: bacheloric, curated, purposefully engineered and, ultimately, demolished every thirty years to be replaced by the exact same thing. The citizen’s house is a receptacle for the citizenry. It’s a place for the units of the state to be stored for regeneration until they’re scheduled to return to their posts. A citizen doesn’t have to necessarily agree, explicitly, to his status as a stand-in for an automated economic unit; he just has to accept that he will be considered as such by the state and, eventually, never given enough free time to behave otherwise. Hyperbolic as it sounds, the distance between this conception of the total society and that of our current status in the West is not as far as it seems, especially now that working from home, which invites the office into one’s own living room, has been so normalized.
It’s important to note here that the state in this sense does not have to be the government, either, as in liberal democracy the ruling apparatus is as much extra-governmental as it is classically statist. Any system that effectively rules over the lives, property, and beliefs of a people sufficiently fulfills the definition of a state, even if the legal body so-called has contracted out these duties to publicly traded (or private) corporations.
The horror encapsulated by dystopian fiction is exactly this, then: the forced participation in the lie of progress. The dystopia is engineered for the success of society, but it is instead the lived experience of its total decline. The promises of the revolution are not revealed as failures by the dystopian genre per se, but rather that the fulfillment of these promises results in a society that cannot be lived in. This explains why the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell remain so much more believable than those of Rand or Zamyatin; Huxley and Orwell wanted to believe in the future: they wanted the progress and all it entailed, but, at least in Orwell’s case, knew the disaster that was just around the corner. Rand’s criticism in Anthem made for a novel that was as juvenile as it was short, while Zamyatin’s We was the same reactionary narrative repeated for the same reasons.
The most effective dystopic fiction is not, then, properly ‘dystopic’ in its genre. It reflects the world in a satirical mode without blowing it into far-fetched progressive delusion or fleeing into the contortions of pure fantasy. It is thoroughly immersed in the lived experience of the dystopia’s unfortunate victims, who eat and breathe its poison and yet remain, for the most part, either totally unaware of its existence or, less fortunately, recognize the decline around them but seem totally unable to articulate it with any effectiveness.
And there is a book like this. What we’re talking about here is Evelyn Waugh’s debut novel: Decline and Fall.
Decline
Waugh’s novel is not customarily considered dystopian fiction for all of the reasons listed above. It does not take place in a fictionalized, hyper-totalitarian England, nor in some totally made-up island paradise that hides a dark secret. It does not feature a surveillance state—as such, at least—nor are there secret police who break down doors and cart people off to interrogation rooms in the middle of the night. There is no Big Brother, no Dear Leader, no gene splicing or caste systems. There is only England, circa 1928, and the members, or whom pass as such, of its higher and lower societies.
Decline and Fall was written, marketed, and remains in popular consciousness an ostensible comedy, and to its credit, with the right frame of mind, one will find hilarity on nearly every page. But in much the same manner, one cannot help but draw comparisons to Brazil, the dystopic-themed film of Terry Gilliam from 1985. There, the humor of the Monty Python veteran was plunged into the deeply tragic world of a total society run entirely by self-important incompetents. Perhaps this is what inspired the comparison to such fiction at the heart of this piece: a world run by delusional idiots, even ones who are well meaning, can only be depicted within the frame of a comedy, but this does nothing to soften the blows of the tragedy such an idea entails. In fact, it makes them land a bit harder.
Waugh wrote the novel not long after reading Oswald Spengler’s monolithic Decline of the West and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the themes of both are writ large across the manuscript. The main character, Paul Pennyfeather—“of no importance,” as one of his schoolmasters remarks in the first chapter—begins the book with being expelled from seminary for a crime of public indecency. He’d been mobbed by a crowd of unruly students from next door and stripped of his trousers. In sudden need of employment and living accommodations, he is shipped off to teach German, a language with which he as no familiarity with whatsoever, to a mildly remote and drastically under-performing boarding school in Wales, where he encounters and befriends his eccentric fellow professors.
Through one of his students, a talented organist whom Paul is charged with tutoring in the instrument, despite having about as much knowledge and experience with it as he has with the German language, he meets and becomes romantically involved with a rich socialite of questionable taste and frightening work. His intimacy with her, and particularly her line of work, results in his arrest on the charges of human trafficking on the very morning of their highly-publicized and much-looked forward to wedding. The courts are particularly unkind, and he gets sent away for years—first to a prison operated by a rehabilitation-minded bureaucrat whose side interest in psychology effectively runs the show, and then to a labor camp in, predictably, Wales.
Finally, yet again, through no particular fault of his own, his death is arranged to be faked at a mental institution, whereupon afterwards he decides to grow a mustache and re-enroll at the same seminary that he had been expelled from, and even under the same name. Nobody seems to bat an eye, and life goes on for Pennyfeather much as if the whole adventure across those years of his life had never happened. Except for one character’s appearance at the end: his old beau’s son, who in some sense had gotten him tied up into all of the events of the book in the first place. Now older and attending the same seminary as Paul, the boy is a drunken mess who is quite literally sick to his stomach. They reminisce about their involvement in the affairs of the book before Pennyfeather sends him to bed and resumes his studies on obscure heresies of the early Church.
At first glance, Decline and Fall’s focus is the conflict generated, or the lack thereof, by the meeting of inattentiveness with total disinterest. Most of the characters remain so distracted by their own pretenses or attention to decorum that they lose control over the immediate affairs of their lives. This, however, opens the door for being controlled by some greater social aspect: power, typically, or authority, but in this case, Waugh presents no specific greater power or authority that fills the void of these characters’ attentions.
One might argue the contrary point, that authority and structures of control in fact dominate the narrative, and on this they would be correct. The novel’s structure itself points in that direction, from passing through the hard structure of a boarding school to the soft structure of high society and terminating in the hardest structure of prison, only wind up back at the beginning. But the irony of Decline and Fall is the emptiness of these structures. Their rules and conditions are followed by their keepers and inmates not out of fear or intimidation, for the most part, but because everyone involved seems to have nothing better to do, and this is the only thing they know. Even the prisoners come across as boredly apathetic to the guards, despite threats and deeds of violence.
Waugh’s point about the social structure of England isn’t then that society is a prison, per se, though that point starts to shine through in the last segment. It’s that society is empty, and that even its prisons, where order is self-evidently imposed by and understood according to the very term itself, is just the dull reiteration of the empty platitudes and inattentive signaling found in high society. This is the decline he refers to. The characters of the novel pretend as though, or perhaps cannot even recognize that the structures they’re occupying are the ruins of a civilization. The proverbial sheep are grazing already in the forum.
Dystopia in Allegory
One could also read more directly into these characters certain allegories for various classes of English society, too. It’s possible that this is a dangerous route for interpretation, given that allegory is so frequently wrought with misrepresentation or willful contortion of the text. However, should Decline and Fall be recognized as an entry of dystopic fiction, allegorical interpretations are impossible to avoid.
The good Captain Grimes can serve as something of an indicator of England’s socially and economically destitute lower-middle class, limping along (literally) a decade out from the then-most catastrophic conflict in human memory. They are getting along to go along, frequently drunk, and constantly “in the soup” up to their necks. And when the going gets exceptionally tough, there’s always a way to fake one’s death and start over somewhere else—even when it means abandoning hearth and home.
This last bit is key to understanding Grimes’ as a stand-in for the Englishman: abandoning hearth and home. He was a war vet that went a bit mad after a dishonorable discharge for drunkenness at wartime, abandoned his first wife with whom he had barely any contact anyway, and had survived thus far as a drifting character who took jobs wherever it seemed appropriate to do so. When applied to the society at large, we see parallels Waugh no doubt implied: the lower classes have lost what integrity they could once find in the family, in their locality, in their homes, and they’re steadily being driven into desperate insanity. Not that this is particularly specific to the lower classes, as these are motifs that affect characters of every social position in the novel, but Grimes characterizes this detached sense of desperation quite specifically.
Or take Prendergast, an ex-priest of the Church of England, too easily cast into the allegory for England’s national faith among the so-called respected classes. He is inconsequential in his actions, unable to wield any authority whatsoever, scoffed at and belittled by both students and colleagues alike, often to his face, and—as the events of the sports day depict with no small amount of brutality—incompetent to a fault. He is an expert on liturgical minutiae and theological history, but as he mentions to Pennyfeather somewhat early in the story, he simply could not find a reason to keep believing in what the church required, and in fact, did not seem to believe that anyone else actually believed it, either.
Prendergast nonetheless returns to the faith later in life, if only because a bureaucratic appointment gave him an opportunity to administer and preach to the prison system. There, he encounters Paul again during his time in prison, but interacts with him only a little. Unfortunately, this is where a particularly mad inmate who claimed to hear the voice of God and believed himself to be a messiah brutally murders the churchman by sawing off his head. It’s not hard to guess what Waugh could be saying here. The Faith in England has been decapitated: the secularized liberal modern and the serious religious believer cannot coexist in the same body. Prendergast may have been unserious himself, but he died in the cloth and preached the Word nonetheless, and it seems no small coincidence that, as Waugh is keen to make note, everyone heard the commotion of his death and no one lifted a finger to stop it. The faith in England at large has been fed to the demonic quite specifically as a result of the country’s social system.
Consider too: Philbrick, whose first introduction is as the questionable butler on staff at the school in Wales. A man of as many self-alleged talents as backstories, he spins yarns to swindle his way into, he hopes, riches and luxury, often without success. He’s a regular in the prison system, we learn later, and favored by both the guards and the fellow inmates. Bonds of loyalty carry a curious significance to him, even when the bonds of matrimony obviously don’t. If there is an allegory here, it is slightly less obvious than the other two at the school, and yet his position and behavior are the most relevant clues. Who is tasked with carrying out the orders of the people in charge? Who is the help of the society, those who exist to serve it, the custodians of the law? Who lies, cheats, and steals their way, when they aren’t failing at everything else, into positions of relative comfort, and remains charming enough—if a little off-putting and exuding an air of mild disrespectability—to keep polite company? He sounds like a politician, when it’s framed that way.
Finishing out the school’s staff, we cannot forget Doctor Fagan, the guy in charge, a man of the older generation that has watched with a resigned and unhappy self-interested apathy as the world he knew has slipped into not just irrelevancy but disdain. The castle he lives in has lost whatever purpose it had for existing, but the bills pile up and he needs something to occupy his time: that is, ultimately, the extent of the reason that the school exists there in the first place. Later on, he turns it into an ad-hoc mental institution. He is unpolite, mildly delusional, competent enough to keep the gears of the machine functioning, and wholly unenthusiastic about the talents, or lack thereof, of those who are to succeed him. And his daughters, too, lack whatever charm it took to attract husbands earlier in life.
As for the rest of the cast, we have the Beste-Chetwyndes, Peter and his mother Margot. Peter’s the schoolboy that Pennyfeather is told to instruct in the ways of the organ: a talented boy with no particular future prospects, over-mothered, and more interested in gossip and pranks than anything that could possibly be confused as productive. Meanwhile, Margot is a beautiful socialite daughter of the sexual revolution, a character frame made quite clear not just by her introduction with a famous and crass black jazz musician as her personal accoutrement, but also by her drug abuse and her line of work: recruiting girls for a string of bordellos that her company runs in South America.
And then there are more obvious allegorical types in the minor characters like Otto Silenus, the robotic architect of the re-envisioned and totally modern King’s Thursday estate, himself a caricature of Walter Gropius and the obscene, anti-human utilitarian philosophy that he helped usher into the twentieth century. Take also the prison warden, Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, a mentally deranged amateur psychologist that turned his bureaucratic appointment into an opportunity for human experimentation. The psychological torture induced by his run of the prison, all in the name of progressive justice, of course, appropriately reeks of the sort of self-important, delusional expertocracy that sums up the liberal order. And as for Arthur Potts, well, a fed is a fed.
So we can see somewhat plainly, if allegory is to be believed, an organizing road map of English society at the time Decline and Fall was written: the English working class, its national church, its politicians, the older generation of people ostensibly in charge, the bureaucrats they appoint to run institutions, its educated elite, and even the general status of socialite women and the rising generation who has to put up with the ruins. And at every point, we see too that it is a total society in all but perhaps name, because its totality remains obscured and hidden under the complete disinterest of its characters. It peeks through, here and there, in reiterations of past jokes that recycle through the narrative like a buried melody in a piece of chamber music, rising to the surface when a character suddenly realizes that it is impossible to escape from whatever is going on, because they can’t first articulate why they want to escape at all. Even Pennyfeather, who is given this escape several times and without his consent, ends up voluntarily returning to the grind by the end of the book. And why? Because that’s all he knows. Maybe it’s even what he wanted.
It is important to note that even if we are to approach these characters in the mode of allegory, most of them are nonetheless nuanced and, more importantly, likable. The mark of Waugh’s comedy may be perhaps that he treats these characters with enough admixture of detachment and familiarity that even at their most despicable they remain charming enough to entertain. When this is extrapolated out into the realm of his allegory, the tragedy of Waugh’s dystopic presentation deepens: the social structure is run by horribly incompetent people that, should you meet them, will stir in your soul movements toward pity rather than the contempt they probably deserve.
Dystopia Revisited
1984 ends with the protagonist recognizing that there is no escape from the system, and that its efforts to maintain social stability, either by indoctrination or by threat of it, work. The course of that novel takes Winston Smith out of his conceived beliefs about what the system is, across the romp of sexually-fueled rebellion, only to wind up back in the same system once more and even more thoroughly wedded to it. Decline and Fall would come across, structurally, as something of a parody of this, were it not for the fact that it was written twenty years earlier.
Where 1984’s message was the horrific consideration that the system’s grasp is inescapable, Waugh’s novel is, somehow, even more bleak: no one cares. This isn’t to be confused with the idea that nothing really matters, as such a theme would certainly undermine any investment into the book on the part of the reader. Rather, it’s that things probably do matter a great deal, but there is no one left in society capable of determining by how much because no one in society cares anymore. This is exactly the decline expressed by the title: everyone is so preoccupied with their own sense of themselves that they simply don’t care about anything else. The irony of such self-obsession is that it empties from them any ability to care even about themselves.
Consider that the only instances in which there is a sense of social relevance are ones in which evils are treated as horribly tedious inconveniences. Philbrick’s failed schemes that finally come back to bring him to jail, for instance, or Grimes’ despair and disappearance after he became Doctor Fagan’s son-in-law. The entire Lucas-Dockery ‘experiment’ is treated similarly, drawing the explicit ire of prisoner and guardsman alike. But all of these are brought to attention only because they’re each so disruptive. It was inconvenient for Phillbrick to be an irascible conman. It was inconvenient for Grimes to be so distraught as to fake his death. And it was enormously inconvenient for a two-bit hobbyist to run a prison as if it were a mental asylum.
Social evils, then, aren’t pointed out and punished for the sake of maintaining the moral fiber of society, at least not in any recognizable sense. Rather, the moral fiber of society has been reduced to a small handful of general platitudes, and the guiding principle of them is this: don’t be an inconvenience. The system punishes inconveniences in order to maintain order, and that means everything from scapegoating perfectly innocent people when necessary to simply ignoring problems that require too much effort to solve. This is a far greater horror than the dystopias generally presented to the public, as the abandonment of justice typically means that power and authority are the arbiters of punishment and order. But a society such as depicted here is one in which even power and authority are treated with a very practically-minded contempt and apathy, which means that no one is really in control and worse still, again, no one really cares. It’s a society where meaning has been left to die.
It is for this reason that Waugh’s words at the very beginning of the book, that the novel is to be remembered primarily as a comedy, are so ironic. By modern sensibility, the only way to write a story this dark is to cloak it in the comfortable drapes of detached bemusement. Dystopia fiction tends often to collapse under the weight of its own importance, but Waugh navigates around that by making Decline and Fall so ostensibly comedic. As a result, it’s more relevant. It is drenched in meaning, even as its main theme concerns the efforts of its characters to abandon it.
As such, it is not difficult to see its relevance today. All one needs do is look around at his workplace, at his school, on the curated feeds of his social media apps, at the drivers on the road or the fellow travelers on the bus, at the service workers behind the registers of the fast food chains or retail stores, at the states of our politicians, the words of our doctors, the deeds of our public safety enforcers. We can tell that the total society is here because we cannot be left alone, and it’s one that resembles Decline and Fall far more than it resembles either 1984 or Brave New World.
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