Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited

Abstract

Waugh’s novels mourn the collapsing tradition of Englishness once long-established social forms of life have begun to disintegrate. His narratives set in the 1930s focus on the deterioration of physical locations and places, as well as the dissolution of cultural practices and inherited ideals.1 Waugh identifies the public school, sports field, men’s club, and particularly the country house repeatedly at the center of his fiction as epitomizing a uniquely English tradition; he represents these places in various stages of decline and decay. The country houses of the nation—and all they stand for—are literally falling apart. The decaying homes of England’s aristocratic classes, even while they continue to stand, signal what has already largely passed into history: a national tradition where transcendental certainties secured linguistic meaning, Britannia ruled the waves, and people knew their proper place in the social hierarchy. In representing the decaying country house as a synecdoche for an array of fragmenting cultural experiences, Waugh’s fiction describes a multiplicity of literal and symbolic deaths, telling stories about the passing of characters, dissolution of religious faith, decline of the aristocracy, and collapsing authority of British imperialism. But his novels do not simply describe the decline of the country house. They seek, more fundamentally, to mourn the disintegration of a national tradition and adjudicate the significance of this loss for the future.