Depicting the Hollow Men

My Deliberate Practice of Evelyn Waugh’s Minimalist Technique

“In the actual artist practice may be delight or slavery, but it’s compulsory, and this compulsion separates the artist from the amateur, journeyman, or hack. Those who aren’t driven to practice may as well fess up and go into real estate, write home for money, or teach.

            The artist practices in order to know.”

--David Mamet, “Moby Dick,” from Recessional

And so today I think through what I want to practice, deliberately and imitatively, as I continue to work on my short story, “Pursuit Among the Ruins.”

Consider the following episode from Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies (1930)—beginning at the bottom of p. 36 where I have put a green star in the margin and proceeding to the end of the newspaper headline on p. 38.

Here Waugh puts on display what has been called his “minimalist” technique, a technique which he utilized throughout his career, but which especially characterizes his first five novels: Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938).

In a 1930 review of W.R. Burnett’s boxing novel Iron Man, Waugh himself describes the technique in the following way:

‘There are practically no descriptive passages except purely technical ones. The character, narrative, and atmosphere are all built up and implicit in the dialogue, which is written in a vivid slang, with numerous recurring phrases running through as a refrain. Ronald Firbank began to discover this technique, but his eccentricity and a certain dead, ‘ninetyish’ fatuity frustrated him. I made some experiments in this direction in the telephone conversations in Vile Bodies. Mr. Ernest Hemingway used it brilliantly in The Sun Also Rises. It has not yet been perfected but I think it is going to develop into an important method.’ (from “The Books You Read,” pp. 300-01 in the 2018 Oxford University Press edition of Waugh’s Essays, Articles, and Reviews: 1922-1934).

In fact, I believe Waugh—along with Hemingway—brings the technique to a great height of perfection. (You can also find minimalism employed, for example, by Joan Didion, Muriel Spark, Raymond Carver, and the late Cormac McCarthy in The Road.)

What are the key characteristics of this minimalist technique as Waugh practices it?

1.      The lack of obtrusive narration. The narrator, in other words, does not comment. “There are practically no descriptive passages except purely technical ones” (e.g. “It was about now that Adam remembered that he was engaged to be married.”) And there are certainly no passages where the narrator reflects, Trollope-style, upon the action, dispensing social commentary and philosophical views.

The narrator’s view of the characters is essentially clinical. Diction is either flat or is suffused by a “dandyish mockery” of the events. As Robert Frick argues (“Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh”), this helps to underscore the grotesque through the use of absurd understatement rather than wild exaggeration:

“Well, I asked Agatha Runcible to dinner.”

“Why?”

“She’d just had all her clothes taken off by some sailors.”

“Yes, I know, it’s all in the evening paper tonight.”

2.     Characters are introduced without biographical preliminaries. When Adam Fenwick-Symes is introduced in Vile Bodies, Waugh satirizes the customary character biography:

“Two minutes before the advertised time of departure, while the first admonitory whistling and shouting was going on, a young man came on board carrying his bag. There was nothing particularly remarkable about his appearance. He looked exactly as young men like him do look…” (7).

3.     The narrative progresses largely through dialogue. This is clearly on display in our selection from Vile Bodies. As Waugh alludes to in the review quoted above, and as we see in our selection, Vile Bodies made famous the exchange of dialogue through telephone conversations—a device that we now often see updated in the use of emails and text messages and social media posts.

4.     The absence of nuanced introspection of consciousness; a refusal to articulate the complexities of desire, motivation, and reflection. Minimalism, in short, does not allow access to the “inside” of the character. Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount talk about their plans to marry, but we have no sense of how they feel about this momentous decision apart from what we can glean from their dialogue and Waugh’s use of italics:

“Oh, I say. Nina, there’s one thing—I don’t think I shall be able to marry you after all.”

“Oh, Adam, you are a bore. Why not?”

5.     The avoidance of subjective identification with any single consciousness. Waugh typically cuts sharply from one character’s point of view to another. “By shifting his perspective from one character to another within a scene or chapter, the narrator avoids subjective identification with any single consciousness. Describing narrative events and impressions from a unitary point of view tends to lessen the distance between a narrator and his material. The illusion of detachment diminishes as the narrator and his reflector become identified. Waugh’s narrator retains a semblance of distance by constantly shifting his point of view” (Frick, “Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh”).

This lack of opportunity for subjective identification allows for reflection upon what is being expressed. It has a more cerebral poetic effect. It can reveal the incommensurability of viewpoints. The narrative becomes more like a Platonic dialogue, a lived dialectic that, for Waugh as well as for Plato, often ends in aporia, a “knot” or impasse, without overt comment as to where things went wrong.

What is Waugh’s point in employing minimalist technique? Above all, it is a way of depicting the maimed modern self.

As Douglas Lane Patey puts it in his magisterial The Life of Evelyn Waugh:

“the modern, subjectivist self—cut off from the larger systems of which it is part, from the traditions which inform, and inform us of, our nature—remains always in a state of ‘wayward childishness,’ condemned to be a mere ‘type’ of humanity, not one of ‘God’s individuals.’ Without the shaping discipline of tradition, the individual is left at every moment to reinvent himself, with no guide but his own wayward appetites…. Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies are populated by such maimed modern selves, characters whose lives comprise (in the name of a popular stage revue of the late twenties) ‘one damned thing after another’ and who readily shift identities because they lack the tools with which to achieve any coherent, stable self” (56).

Patey continues:     

“Distrust of the merely ‘subjective’ was thus as congenial to Waugh in his novelistic practice as in his religion: the two are connected. By the late 1920s he had come to believe that human lives and selves take their meaning from their place in a larger system—a household, a family, a civilized order supported by grace. But no such informing tradition sustains ‘all those exiles’ who by a ‘fatal deficiency’ have cut themselves off from the ‘whole cycle of rich experience which lies outside personal peculiarities and individual emotion (Labels 205-6). Outside the whole of which he is properly part, the individual can be only a meaningless, unfulfilled (though perhaps colorful) fragment” (57).  

“The point comes clearest in Waugh’s treatment of what would always be a central theme in his fiction (and his theology): love, the inbuilt hunger for connection with others beyond ourselves. The early novels are full of maimed moderns like Adam and Nina in Vile Bodies who hunger for ‘something more’ but cannot articulate what….

“‘To know and love one other human being,’ says Charles Ryder, ‘is the root of all wisdom’ (Brideshead Revisited 41); but such wisdom, Waugh suggested from the outset of his career, is denied those whose spiritual house is not in order. Cut off from saving tradition, unable to realize themselves fully, these characters never grow up or grow whole. Characters in Waugh’s first novels seem empty, without psychological depth, because they have no depths to probe; an ‘external,’ un-subjective presentation accurately captures their modern selves” (57).

Waugh’s minimalist characters are examples of Nietzsche’s “last men”…

“In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the eponymous hero predicts the coming of the last man:

“Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? Thus asks the last man and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small.”

The last man is timid, enervated, self-enclosed, and self-satisfied, an industrious economic animal who always finds it in his interest to go with the flow, to conform to the dictates of common opinion. Yet he does not regard this conformity and passivity as slavish because there is no one person to whom he submits. In  following the majority, he does but follow his own will. Zarathustra expatiates:

“No shepherd and one herd. Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse….One has one’s little please for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.’ When Zarathustra speaks these words to ordinary citizens, instead of being insulted by his description of their shallow and petty souls, they clamor, ‘turn us into these last men.’”

(from Thomas S. Hibbs, Shows About Nothing, 11)

Another way of saying it is that Waugh’s characters are—in C.S. Lewis’s terms—“men without chests,” human beings lacking in the spirited element that ambitions greatness.

“My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to awakened from from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.” (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man,13-14; page numbers below refer to the Word on Fire Academic edition).

In light of this, notice how inarticulate Adam and Nina are in Vile Bodies. They do not have bold, rich interior lives full of passionate authenticity. Inside they are deserts.

Bishop Barron often speaks of the magna anima: the great souls that expands outward, beyond the ego, in service to others. Waugh’s characters, like the young people Lewis worries about, are characterized by the pusilla anima, the “small soul” that contracts into itself. Bishop Barron on the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23 but see Mt 7:20: love, joy, peace, patience, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control). The fruits are the effects of the great-souled person expanding ouward. Patience, for example, is putting up with what is irksome in another or in a situation.

At bottom, minimalism attempts to picture an anthropological thinness.

Or what Walker Percy calls the “ontological impoverishment” of the modern self. A loss of the full reality of the human person. How does minimalism picture ontological impoverishment?

Again, the inner life of the soul, of the ego, of the place where ideally the Trinity dwells, is not shown. As if to indicate that it doesn’t exist or is damaged or impoverished in some way. The story is not so much an histoire d’une âme but the record of an animal on the hunt. Or a mechanism pushed along by desire and chance. Waugh indicates this in his choice of title for Vile Bodies, taken from Philippians 3:17-21.  

Aristotle in the Poetics, Chapter 14, says that the tragic effect can be achieved by a synopsis of plot alone. It is not necessary to enter into the inner world of the characters. As well, the tragicomic effect of Waugh’s stories can be achieved by showing what the character’s say and do, without the depiction of the character’s inner life.

What about Hemingway’s iceberg theory regarding minimalism—that most of what is important in a story lies beneath the surface of what is done and said? Waugh admits to learning from Hemingway (see The Sun Also Rises). For both Waugh and Hemingway, minimalism indicates an emotional life below the surface, but an emotional life that is itself something of a desert.  

At the same point in the early 20th century (1925), T.S. Eliot was also reflecting on the ontological impoverishment of modern man…

T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

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If you would like to read my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, you can pick up your copy here on Amazon or here at Chrism Press.

Reviews on Amazon always most welcome.

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