Evelyn Waugh’s Artistic Outcry in Love among the Ruins of a Godless World

• Main Author: Julie Morère
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2013-10-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Evelyn Waugh; Love among the Ruins; dystopia; comedy; ambivalence; Tennyson
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/701
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

In 1953, Evelyn Waugh published Love Among the Ruins, a Romance of the Near Future, a dystopian macabre comedy curiously contrasting with the seriousness of his post-war novels. In Love Among the Ruins, a semi-reformed arsonist falls in love with a bearded ballerina in a world fully given over to a godless perverted Welfare State promoting euthanasia and a science-led compassionless humanity debilitating individual existence. Waugh’s stance is very ambiguous, leaving the readers’ expectations indignantly unfulfilled as he rebels against his Modernists predecessors’ denial of the human mind’s ‘determining character—that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose’ (‘Fan-Fare’, 1946), but also seems to question the very principles on which his whole literary world is grounded. Over the ruins of the war, the novella builds a futuristic England which has itself receded to ancient Roman and Greek aesthetics, an ambivalence which shows Waugh’s fascination for Greek architectural orders (as being metonymic of the lost order of the world), and his own self-criticism for his tendency to always look back on a bygone world closer to the ethics of a Tennysonian romance. Satire violates the rules of genre and comes close to anarchy with the author’s defiant transgeneric experiments, while the iconotext resorts to metapictural games with hand-drawn beastly parodies of Canova’s artwork. Through the visual rhythm imposed by the alternation of text and image, the reader accesses a decentered morale and better perceives Waugh’s denunciation of a spiritless world. Such tragic awareness gives the novella the dimension of serious art with the perfectly bridled restraints of the ironic stance, making lucent the failures and the bleak realities of the modern world.