The satirical grotesque in Evelyn Waugh's novel "Decline and Destruction"

Abstract

The present research is carried out in line with literary stylistics, focusing on the linguistic and expressive means of artistic representation of reality and the peculiarities of their use by one or another author. The research material was the novel "Decline and Destruction", written by one of the recognized masters of the English satirical novel Evelyn Waugh. The "Decline and Destruction" of twentieth–century England is a cross-cutting theme of the entire work of I. Vo, whose stylistic dominant is the satirical grotesque. The above-mentioned determined the purpose of the study, which consists in explicating the main mechanisms and means of creating a satirical grotesque in the novel, exposing and ridiculing the vices of English society in the 1920s, sharpening and criticizing the shortcomings of the existing education system in privileged educational institutions in England.  In accordance with this goal, the article considers the problem of the emergence of the term "grotesque", its connection with the aesthetic category of the comic is indicated, the role and place of this artistic device in the work of I. Vo are indicated. It is revealed that with the help of a satirical grotesque, Vo creates his own special – secondary to the real – world, violating the boundaries corresponding to our ideas of plausibility, for which any means available to the author are suitable. The study showed that the key mechanisms determining the grotesque beginning of the novel are a combination of mutually exclusive, hyperbolization, reification of characters, etc. A special satirical expressiveness and tragicomism, brought to the point of absurdity, is manifested at various levels of the work's organization (lexical, onomastic, morphological, syntactic, graphic). From this point of view, the novel "Decline and Destruction" is being studied for the first time, which determines the novelty of the research undertaken and outlines further prospects in the field of research devoted to the work of Evelyn Waugh and the satirical grotesque, in particular.