(1996) and A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (2011). Parkes was president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America in 2021-22 and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2022-23.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Modernism and the Aristocracy at the Oxford University Press website.Initiating the novel’s falling action, the death of John Andrew [Last] also launches alternative ways of imagining aristocratic boredom, especially as it relates to the time and place of waning empire. Taken utterly for granted by Waugh’s characters, intimated by the narrator only in occasional indirect references to the “global context,” the imperial dimensions of aristocratic boredom remain largely unspoken in the first half of A Handful of Dust. Waugh may be playing on expectations created by his previous novel, Black Mischief (1932), which, as Jonathan Greenberg has argued, puts colonial-imperialist boredom front and center. But when Tony Last leaves England, the complacency underpinning such reticence is exposed to view. In Handful’s later chapters, Waugh develops a three-fold portrait linking boredom to heartless cruelty (Mrs. Rafferty), intellectual stupidity (Dr. Messinger), and animal cunning (Mr. Todd), each in turn subjecting Tony to an intolerable period of waiting. Charting an ironic history of colonial imperialism, the unholy trinity of exiles associated with these boredoms sums up what Waugh portrays not only as the lapsed condition of the British aristocracy but also as the spiritual emptiness of modern humanity as a whole.Ford is very much on target as far as my own page 99 is concerned. First, it discusses Evelyn Waugh, who (like Ford himself) appears in two separate chapters. Second, this particular page offers a fair snapshot of the manner as well as the matter of my book. It occurs in the middle of the second chapter, which pairs Waugh with the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen to examine representations of aristocratic boredom in British fiction written between the world wars.
The picture emerges gradually, as Waugh begins by consolidating Hetton’s position as the scene of interminable waiting, a purgatorial boredom. Shirking his duty to break their terrible news to [his wife] Brenda, who is still in London with Beaver, Tony sends [his friend] Jock, precipitating the cruelest of all comic moments in English fiction when Brenda, realizing that it’s her son not her lover who has died, exclaims “Oh thank God . . . ” and bursts into tears. Tony meanwhile stays at Hetton to “see” to things; almost instantly, time seems to stretch over a void. “What are you going to do while you’re waiting?” asks Mrs. Rattery, Jock’s straight-talking mistress. Echoing the Madame Sosostris episode in The Waste Land (1922), the acknowledged source of the novel’s title, Mrs. Rattery proposes playing patience, “a heartbreaking game”, as she informs Tony in a cold-hearted declaration that sounds in tune with the novel’s anti-humanist strain.
The emphasis here is on literary responses to a more general sense of the British aristocracy – deprived of much of its traditional power, land, and purpose by social, political, and economic changes at home and in the wider global-imperial system – as marooned by history. But this is also a literary emphasis. My focus remains on the expressive opportunities that such perceptions presented to writers still trying to “make it new” (in Ezra Pound’s well-worn phrase) even if some of them (like Waugh) wanted to make the new look old. My attention is directed accordingly to the structural organization, affective design, and generic interplay of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust as it probes the expressive possibilities of waiting: making readers wait as his characters wait through extended episodes that combine comedy, satire, and cruelty.
In this way, the account of boredom given here looks backward and forward to other chapters of my book: back to Chapter 1, which considers stupidity, and forward to Chapter 5, which dwells on cruelty and kindness. Other chapters focus on nostalgia and sophistication, which, though not explicitly present on page 99, might be inferred from my commentary on Waugh’s handling of boredom, cruelty, and stupidity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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