Abstract
Despite Evelyn Waugh’s conviction that Helena (1950) was his greatest work, the novel receives less critical attention than his well-known interwar satires and his postwar hit, Brideshead Revisited (1945). This article argues that the novel accomplishes Waugh’s self-conscious postwar effort to rehouse his satiric impulses in a mode that resists both the “dark” laughter of modernism and the sentimentality risked in mid-century Catholic fiction. With metafictive attention to genre and style, Helena exemplifies what this article terms “sacramental humor.” Waugh’s fictionalized St. Helena embodies the contrast between satire that seeks to correct or destroy and humor that seeks to heal.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.Adorno, Theodor. Minima moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005 .
2.Berger, Peter L. Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience . New York: De Gruyter, 1997 .
3.Chesterton, G. K. Collected Works . San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986– .
4.Colletta, Lisa. Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 .
5.Dale, Alan. “To Crie Alarme Spiritual: Evelyn Waugh and the Ironic Community.” Modernist Cultures 2.2 (2006): 102–14 .
6.DeCoste, Marcel. The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh: Faith and Art in the Post-War Fiction . Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015 .
7.Flor, Carlos Villar, and Robert Murray Davis, eds. Waugh without End: New Trends in Evelyn Waugh Studies . Bern: Peter Lang, 2005 .
8.Greenberg, Jonathan. Modernism, Satire, and the Novel . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 .
9.Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012 .
10.Guillamet, M. Eulàlia Carceller. “Religion and Reconciliation in Helena .” In Flor and Davis, eds., Waugh without End , 211–23 .
11.Kantra, Robert A. All Things Vain: Religious Satirists and Their Art . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984 .
12.Knox, Ronald. Essays in Satire . 1928. Reprint, London: Sheed and Ward, 1955 .
13.Lewis, Pericles. “Modernism and Religion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism , ed. Michael Levenson. 2nd ed. 178–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 .
14.Lindvall, Terry. God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert . New York: New York University Press, 2015 .
15.McCartney, George. Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition . 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004 .
16.Milthorpe, Naomi. Evelyn Waugh’s Satires: Texts and Contexts . Lanham, MD: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016 .
17.Mooneyham, Laura. “Comedy among the Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism of Comic Form.” Twentieth-Century Literature 40.1 (1994): 114–38 .
18.O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose . Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. 1957. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970 .
19.Query, Patrick. “Catholicism and Form from Hopkins to Waugh.” In Flor and Davis, eds., Waugh without End , 37–44 .
20.Potts, Matthew. “The World Will Be Made Whole: Love, Loss, and the Sacramental Imagination in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping .” In “The Sacramental Text Reconsidered,” ed. Matthew J. Smith, special issue, Christianity and Literature 66 (2017): 482–99 .
21.Stannard, Martin, ed. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984 .
22.Tomko, Helena M. Sacramental Realism: Gertrud von le Fort and German Catholic Literature in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, 1924–46 . Leeds: Maney, 2007 .
23.Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder . 1944. 1945. Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1982 .
24.Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall . 1928. Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1977 .
25.Waugh, Evelyn. Helena: A Novel . London: Chapman and Hall, 1950 .
26.Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh . Ed. Michael Davie. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976 .
27.Waugh, Evelyn. The Essays, Articles, and Reviews . Ed. Donat Gallagher. London: Methuen, 1983 .
28.Waugh, Evelyn. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh . Ed. Mark Amory. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1980 .
29.Waugh, Evelyn. The Life of Right Reverend Ronal Knox . 1959. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2011 .
30.Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 .
31.Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988 .