Evelyn Waugh's Commedia: Sword of Honour as an Epic Response to James Joyce

Abstract

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour is epic in not merely its sweep but also its use of the conventions of the genre, modeling itself especially on The Divine Comedy. The trilogy, which alludes constantly to classical and contemporary authors, is self-consciously literary so that Waugh may claim a place in the literary tradition and assert his aesthetic principles, especially in response to James Joyce. The trilogy parodies Joyce’s work, primarily through the figure of the mad novelist Ludovic, but the doubling of Joyce and Ludovic is part of a series—the protagonist Guy Crouchback and Waugh, Ludovic and Guy, Ludovic and Waugh, Waugh and Joyce—by which Waugh critiques his earlier Brideshead Revisited and distinguishes the trilogy from Joyce’s novels. He uses Joycean allusiveness, including to two Joycean motifs, flying through the air and the nostos of the father, to present Ulysses’ author as obscure and egoistic, from which follows isolation. The trilogy, in contrast, presents the ideals of lucidity and people bound by charity, including across generations, especially through literature and the home. After his reflection on a letter from his father prompts Guy to raise Virginia and Trimmer’s child as his own, he experiences homecoming, by which he is bound to others, to a place, and to work as a farmer. Guy’s pilgrimage ends comically, as another Commedia, with him plowing his field and playing with friends, what Waugh has been doing all along with, respectively, his war experiences and the authors whose works have inspired his modern epic.