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A LA’IUURIAN CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY
IN EVELYN WAUGH'S A HANDFUL OF DUST

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6/01 c:/ClRC/DaieDuo.965-p. 15

A LATOURIAN CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY
IN EVELYN WAUGH’S A HANDFQL QF DQ§T

By
Todd A Corner

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTERS OF ARTS
Department of English

2002

E l-i'l‘ I l‘! ’

\II \II Ill .llll

ABSTRACT

A LATOURIAN CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY
IN EVELYN WAUGH’S A HANDFUL QF DU§T

By

Todd A. Corner

an0 Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, argues that modernity is
characterized by two separate practices: 1.) the work of translation in which
“hybrids of nature and culture” are created; 2.) the work of purification in which
nature and culture are separated into two distinct ontological zones. Once the
relation between nature and culture is comprehended (despite the work of
purification) the modern project grinds to a halt. It becomes difficult to act in the
world when one’s work with nature is seen to so clearly affect culture. It is only
through a certain tunnel vision that the West can think of what it does as
successful. I argue that Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust presents the reader
with a staggering series of grotesque hybrids of nature and culture. Through the
depiction of such dangerous hybridization, Qgfit calls into question the modern
project. Indeed, by foregrounding the reckless manner in which hybrids are
formed Waugh deals a blow to both modernity and colonialism, signaling a return
to a premodem world in which nature or culture is not dominated or emancipated
at the expense of others. Waugh’s text implies a return to a world in which

hybrids of nature and culture are created both more slowly and carefully.

To Dawn

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Eyal Amiran was with me from the beginning. It was through Eyal that I
first read Evelyn Waugh and Bruno Latour and it was in his modern literature
seminar that this essay originated. Just a few years later, the debt I owe Eyal is
more than this meager essay can reveal. Apart from Waugh and Latour, l readily
trace my interest in mechanicity. Flann O’Brien, and postmodernism to my time
with him. As my scholarly interests evolve, I anticipate that his influence will run

much deeper. Thank you.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Body ................................................................................... 1

Works Cited .......................................................................... 35

Then when the war was over the politicians did what they could to
keep us all wired in; but I escaped regularly. Nowadays, I
suppose, if such things were still required, I could get a doctor to
certify that I needed to go abroad for my health. I begin to stiffen
early in December. Stooping, turning, kneeling, climbing in and
out of modern motor-cars, which are constructed solely for
ccntortionists, becomes increasingly painful. By Christmas I look
out on the bare trees with something near melancholia. (Waugh A
I . | . E E' 6)

Intriguing on its own with such mechanical metaphors as 'wired in,” the
above passage and Waugh’s need for 'retreat' seem to speak to England’s
sense of lack during the first half of the century—a lack originating in part from
its identification with the industrial age, and the concomitant conception of itself
as too staid, mechanical, plain. As Declan Kiberd has noted, this unglamorous
self-concept spurred on an evolution in thought toward the unrepentant colony
on the neighboring island (Kiberd 20, 30). The 'savage' Irish stereotype no
longer simply supplied a premise for invasion and colonization; the Irish
became a means by which this mechanical ethos was staved off. This concept
of the relationship was, as is well known, not entirely shared. Irish recalcitrance
undoubtedly led to an increased shifting to other areas of the empire who were
perhaps less in tune with Britain’s tactics and therefore more amenable to
such parasitism. Simultaneously, within the literary and philosophical

community theoretical movements like the Leavisites and the New Critics

implicitly or explicitly devoted themselves to the rediscovery of a place for
“sensuous particularity,” an organic society, or golden age (Eagletcn 36, 46).
Henri Bergson, with his emphasis on intuition, “appealed to those looking for
an animalistic relation to the world to satisfy their longing for a sense of the
mystical wholeness that had gone out of their lives” (McCartney 148). It is out of
this environment that Afiandmmtflust sprung.

Bruno Latour’s WW provides a means for
understanding these roughly congruent movements. Latour argues that to be
modem is to simultaneously engage in two practices: 1.) the work of translation
in which “hybrids of nature and culture’ are created; 2.) the work of purification
in which nature and culture are separated into two distinct ontological zones
(1 0):

So long as we consider these two practices of translation and
purification separately, we are truly modem—that is, we willingly
subscribe to the critical project . . . As soon as we direct our
attention [to both practices] . . . we become retrospectively aware
that the two sets of practices have always already been at work . . .
(11)
Modemity’s “critical project” is encapsulated in the dual pursuit of culture’s
emancipation and nature’s exploitation (9). Once modernity comprehends the
inextricable connection between nature and culture as premodems do, its
various pursuits come to a standstill: ”Should we not have tried to put an end to

man's exploitation of man? Should we not have tried to become nature’s

masters and owners?” (original’s emphasis). Once accepted. the
comprehension of these relations between nature and culture forces the
modem to relinquish the dangerous pursuits in which so many hybrids have
been recklessly created, in effect ending modernity. For Latour, the
contemporary world is one in which the process of purification cannot go on.
There are too many hybrids of nature and culture to assimilate, or purify: 'lf
reading the daily paper is modern man’s form of prayer, then it is a very strange
man indeed who is doing the praying today while reading about these mixed-
up affairs. All of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day” (2).
The above epigraph speaks directly to this through Waugh’s implicit criticism of
an automobile (nature) which has been so divorced from culture, though made
for it, that the human body does not fit within it; or, similarly, of a culture which
uses science to constmct nets (“wired-in”) for its citizens, rather than bridges.
Waugh implies a premodem world in which hybrids of nature and culture are
recognized and formed both more slowly and carefully.

Waugh’s interest in the “exotic” African experience is of a different order
than one might first suppose (Igunst 7). The exotic becomes that site beyond
the ”waste” of “politics” and modemity’s hybridization. It is a privileged site
beyond mere stereotype. Asking whether the specific movements above
mitigate or assist modernity’s project is beyond the scope of the present study.
Clearly the focus on the exotic (in the common sense) and sites of ‘sensuous
particularity” could be read as assisting in the modern colonial project. We

must ask whether these movements are trying to avoid facing the reckless

hybridization all about them, becoming instrumental in assisting the modern
project, or whether they offer critiques of modernity? My argument restricts itself
to Waugh: AflandflLoLQusj puts forward a series of grotesque, nature-culture
hybrids, forcing the reader to question modernity in the same way that Latour’s
newspaper reader is confronted with the explosion of hybrids. As with Alarms:
mm, most of his examples of hybridity tend to be of machines (nature)
poorly attuned to humans. At other points, animal-human hybrids do much the
same work. With these hybrids, Waugh demonstrates the dangers of the
modern preoccupation with seeing nature and culture as distinct, leading as it
does to headstrong hybridization.

There are two contrary movements in the text: a motion away from (Tony),
or toward hybridity (Brenda). Brenda is the exemplary modern. Tony, cuckold, is
given a small measure of sympathy by the similarly rejected Waugh, but he
essentially acts no differently than his spouse. As the central image of the
novel, Hetton Abbey serves as a barometer of Tony and Brenda’s position vis-
a-vis hybridity. The fact that Hetton is a “fake,” as one critic has termed it, due to
its mid-century reconstruction in the Gothic vein works only to intensify the
wonder at the owners” divergent opinions on its grotesque architecture
(Hastings 309; Waugh 13; Waugh references refer to Dust from this point on).
Thematically, the great horror of hybridity is constantly foregrounded through
images of machines, industry, animals. Thus, we are already alerted to
Hetton’s always already tainted state in the first dozen pages when we read of

the clock tower "disturb[ing]' sleepers in a way akin to Waugh’s “modern motor-

cars” (14). The difference in the way in which they view Hetton has to do,
ultimately, on which practice, the work of translation or purification, that they
engage in. Hetton epitomizes Latourian purity for Brenda—a purity that frees
her to recklessly create more hybrid relations with Beaver (via translation).
Tony's relation to Hetton is restricted to purification. Only when the project of
purification is overburdened by hybridity does Tony leave in search of another
space of potential purity. Brenda's infidelity brings into sharp relief the lie that is
Hetton, that is, its own always already hybrid state. Early on, however, Tony
revisits his plans for repairing the ceiling in ‘Morgan le Fey,” or of 'revivfing]” the
practice of lighting a fire in the church (Waugh 35). Indeed, “he had many small
improvements in mind, which would be put into effect as soon as the death
duties were paid off' (13). The undertaking offers the promise of engagement,
filling Tony with happiness while ”[alll over England people were waking up,
queasy and despondent” (16). Tony is oblivious to Hetton’s monstrous
architectural hybridity as he seeks to purify it. His inattention speaks to the
ability of modernity to purify the world into sweet smelling ontological zones.

Brenda sleeps in the aptly-named Guinevere; a room described as
housing a tomb-like fireplace (Waugh 14). Her (and the rest of her London
cohort's) dislike of Hetton is exemplified in the attempted installation of “white
chromium plating” in Hetton’s morning room, a plan engineered by Mrs. Beaver
against Tony's will (106). This is the most visible sign of Hetton’s hybridity and
the way in which the London and the mechanical world are beginning to

overrun Tony’s clearly defined world. Brenda’s desire for change is no more

apparent than in her choice of lover..Where Tony stands for traditional concepts
of fidelity, John Beaver represents little more than a social leech. He has no
objects of devotion save Mrs. Beaver and his only interest resides in meeting
others of a certain social stratum; he is the epitome of the ”restive” (modern)
searcher for the new who, when not at a party, is inseparable from his phone
(2, 8, 238). ”Beaver” is feminine and “cold as a fish” while Tony—to follow the
binarial tendency of the novel—represents a masculine tradition (66, Hastings
307). One might with some exaggeration echo Hamlet: Tony is Hyperion to
Beaver’s satyr (1-2, 140). Waugh also pointedly compares Beaver to a circus
performer, a woman “who looked like a fish” (56). These eruptions of the
mechanical—the phone, the plating—and the animal images—fish,
beaver—proliferate madly in the text like the nature-culture hybrids they signal.
Next to the stolid, unsurprising Tony, Beaver, though ”pathetic,” looks
refreshing and engaging. Brenda’s friends are also surprised by her interest in
Beaver. ”He must have something we didn’t know about” (Waugh 67). Trapped
as Brenda’s sister Marjorie and friends are in the social circles of London,
Beaver, also a resident of that city, is distinguishable only for his dullness and
penury. For Brenda, recently escaped from the purity of Hetton, he and adultery
are novel adventures. Brenda flees Hetton Abbey in part for the classical
lacanian reasons: the illusory purity of Hetton Abbey creates a lack and
consequently a desire for the other, that is, hybridity (Zizek 8). (For Tony, desire
works in the opposite fashion. It is hybridity that creates a desire in him for a

return to purity. Desire intrudes here as well as Tony’s search becomes a

search for what he now lacks: a modern world in which the hybrids are not so
numerous that they cannot be assimilated.) In light of their mutual cat
attributes, the sensuous and conveniently barren Princess Jenny Abdul Akbar
provides a useful comparison: Despite ”scars” from her ”black” husband, a
Moulay from Morocco, she persists in an ”uncanny fascination” with the East
(113-117). Brenda, similarly, has no reason to desire Beaver—a fact that she
realizes—except for the false veneer that she puts on him, inscribing him as
Other. An integral part of Beaver’s allure is that Brenda feels needed as a
teacher, ”[Beaver has] got to be taught a whole lot of things” (66). Beaver’s
disinterest in her except as an means to society must also be attractive to
Brenda who must now reverse positions and act as the instigator in contrast to
her more passive role in courtship with Tony (65, Hastings 308).

Combined with her economics course (designed to mask her infidelity),
Brenda’s mission to teach and need to be loved by her subject echo colonial
concerns (83). If Brenda is indeed “going native,” then in Robert Young’s
words, it should be no surprise that ”economic and sexual exchange [ajre
intimately bound up, coupled with each other from the first” (181-182). The fact
that a train, a symbol of both commerce and the phallus, links her to Beaver
and mechanicity is doubly telling in this context (Lundmark 58). According to
Latour, there are two parts to the modern project: the emancipation of humanity
and the control of nature (9). Early in the novel, Tony concerns himself with
controlling nature in the form of Hetton Abbey. Tony’s flight to the Amazon

combines both of these projects as a microcosm of colonialism. Brenda is

confined, by contrast, to the emancipation of the colonized in the form of Beaver
as we have seen above. Hetton and England operate as centers from which
colonial activity sets out to the margin, in this case, London and Brazil.

It is, finally, John Andrew’s death that prompts the disclosure of hybridity
at Hetton Abbey. Tony is not the ”Last” of his tradition until John Andrew dies.
John Andrew is even more enthralled with Hetton, hence his enthusiasm for
hunting, an activity his father neglects to some shame from his neighbors
(Waugh 25). John Andrew acts as a site of a common purpose for Brenda and
Tony. In view of his biological debt to his parents, one might also see him as
equally a part of both of the spaces, Hetton or London, that they occupy. John
could just as well mature into his father’s image as into Beaver’s image with
whom he shares a name and an overt fascination with women, whether they be
conventionally exotic, Polly Cockpurse, or simply exotic, Jenny Abdul Akbar.
Tony is immune to such attractions. Finally, John Andrew is perhaps the scene
for one of the few specific agreements between Brenda and Tony: At one point,
they ”anxious[ly]” urge on John Andrew’s interest in hunting (21).

John Andrew solidifies Hetton’s hybrid relationship, but then in a
situation that parallels his hybrid being and the marriage he constitutes
synecdochally, the world of Hetton shreds as machine, animal, and human
meet. Two motor-driven vehicles, a bus and ”motor bicycle,” and a horse
converge on a bend. The bicycle which ”had been running gently in neutral
gear” back-fires, causing Miss Ripon’s skittish horse to collide with John’s

pony, leading to his fall, and then tragedy as a hoof connects with the young

boy’s head (Waugh 142). Nature and culture collide in the first fatal hybrid of the
novel. The passengers of the bus are ”amused” apparently by what must
always be a strange sight—humanity’s oldest conveyance meeting its newest
on equal terms. But they are safe, enclosed within the bus’s mechanical
womb. Knowing that John Andrew’s death results from his first participation in
a fox hunt underlines the problems of Brenda and Tony. Their agreement even
on such a minor issue as fox hunting is only a temporary illusion obfuscating
intense differences.

Tony leaves Hetton because it has been tainted by Brenda’s admission
of infidelity following their son’s death of which the chromium plating is the
most obvious reminder. Hetton’s hybrid status emerges as modernity fails to
adequately purify one of its hybrid situations, revealing the danger of mixing the
machine with culture. For Tony, who above all admires tradition as embodied in
Hetton, any perversion of a part is a perversion of the whole. He will not take
Brenda back despite Reggie St. Cloud’s intervention, ”No, I just couldn’t feel the
same about her again” (Waugh 203). Nor does Brenda react sympathetically to
Tony’s earlier overtures regarding a vacation from Hetton. She soon leaves him
to stay with a friend in London (169). Tony rationalizes her betrayal through the
human need to escape from reminders of the tragedy, and then states to Jock
Grant-Menzies that ”I can’t tell you what she was like here . . . quite mechanical"
(my emphasis, 171). Neither death, the mechanical, nor adultery are defining
characteristics of Hetton for Tony, but are traits seen as belonging to London.

Hetton, Brenda, and England have become ”poisoned,” sites that must be

escaped and cleansed (217). Tony’s escape to South America, mirroring
Brenda’s to London, allows for the quiet renovation of the morning room in
which the chromium plating has been partially installed (275).

Tony’s expedition in search of the City of ”radiant sanctuary” is just as
much an attempt to leave something behind as it is a focused attempt at
finding a new world. For moderns, ”hybrids present the horror that must be
avoided at all costs by ceaseless. even maniacal purification” (Latour 112;
Waugh 222). Danger lies ahead in Brazil, but nothing is more sinister than that
which once known, or thought known, becomes unknown. An expedition might
have been a good avenue of escape if it were not a typically modern gesture
and perhaps the exemplary way of evading local hybrids. Shortly into the
journey, Tony discovers from a fellow traveler how original his escape is: ”Well I
daresay it’s more interesting than it sounds . . . else people wouldn’t do it so
much” (221). In his search for a new place that will not overwhelm him with
hybrids, Tony’s actions indicate that he has fallen into the grossest form of
center/margin thought which exoticizes the ”margin” as a place of retreat as his
own world becomes too much to bear. The irony is that formerly Tony despised
traveling (215-216). By fleeing to Brazil and dismissing knowledge of hybridity,
Tony only exacerbates the problems of hybridization in another location and
ends up in the hands of a character driven mad by hybridity.

As Paul Carter argues in W, the pastime of
European exploration is a paradoxical avocation at best (174). If exploring is the

act of discovery, often the explorer finds what has never been lost. Even in

10

1934, the Brazilian rain forests were not lost, nor their indigenous inhabitants,
nor the mythical city that Tony and Messinger are ostentatiously searching for.
There is no “virgin” land where they walk, the Pie-Wie, or Macushi, or others
long ago explored it:
But spatial history does not advance. Or, better, it only advances
by reflection, by going back and looking again at already trodden
ground. The ground is not virgin: it already has a history. It is not a
question of interpretation, of correcting what is already there, of
replacing it with a better route. It is a question of interpretation, of
attempting to recapture and evoke more fully ‘the world of the text’ .
. . . If this process is not to become a tyranny, effacing what it
attempts to describe, if it is to avoid the positivist fallacy of
supposing its own account of events decisively replaces the
original one, then it is essential that it respect the difference of the
historical texts it deals with. (Carter 174)
Despite the aid of the most sophisticated equipment, it is the explorers who are
lost, both literally and, for Tony, metaphorically (Waugh 249). The rote
motivation of the expedition and the explorers’ reliance on mechanical
implements are menacing clues signaling reckless hybridization. Exploration’s
”primary object is not to understand or to interpret: it is to legitimate” (Carter xvi).
One might best understand the search for the “City” as the act of starting over
again. Tony loses Hetton, his son, and his wife for a time, yet there are other

worlds, untainted and pure, spaces that might be reconstructed in their image,

11

or as he would imagine them. Only by erasing the past in Latour’s terms does
he lose the lesson of his own history, the lesson of hybridity. While Carter was
concerned with how Australia was spatially constructed in history, Tony’s
exploration may be viewed as an attempt to “replace the original” past and start
clean, a dangerous process in which he must make the above “positivist
fallacy.” The successful reconstruction of Tony’s own vision of the city which is
directly paralleled with Gothic Hetton and idealized as the “radiant sanctuary,”
would legitimate Tony (Waugh 222, 282-283). Like the other colonial margin
that Brenda inhabits (with Beaver as her object), Brazil represents a new
frontier that is malleable on the basis of its inferiority, the rote justification for
imperialism. For Tony, Brazil metaphorically symbolizes a new Hetton, one in
which he is needed, once again, to engage his purifying powers. His and
colonialism’s mistakes flow from the separation nature and culture. If this
separation was not made, the act of mapping would be seen as what it is, the
oppressive reconstruction of a people. If this division had not occurred, Brenda
would not have flown to London, nor Tony to Brazil.

Tony’s escape is fated for failure. His journey is grimly foreshadowed by
Reggie St. Cloud’s archeological activities described, unsubtly, as the
“desecration” of tombs (Waugh 200). With Reggie as Brenda’s brother, Waugh
further points to how Tony has moved toward the extreme modernity embodied
in Brenda. Tony and Messinger are searching for a city, even though it might
not be the London of Beaver and Brenda. At their first meeting at the Greville

Club, Dr. Messinger begins their conversation anecdotally with the theft of his

12

machine guns ”by a Nicaraguan calling himself alternately Ponsonby and Fitz
Clarence” (218). Messinger’s name bears a resemblance to the German word
for knife, das Messer, a suspiciously metallic instrument. If one notes the
opening four letters, the name also alludes to hybridity and the danger it
represents: “mess” points to both a mixture and confusion. Later, during Tony’s
sickness we learn that Messinger is “in love” with John Beaver. Waugh writes
them into the same mechanical universe (287). Regardless of his intestinal
frailty, Messinger’s proficiency in telling the time during the night by the
“succession of sounds” attests to his experience (235). Their failure lies in the
denial of nature’s connection to culture. For example, while Messinger makes a
“compass traverse” of their route, the journey begins to become unreal,
”mythical,” as the rivers and streams begin flowing north and south
simultaneously: “A discovery of genuine scientific value,” Messinger remarks
(250). Messinger’s science and mechanical implements cannot provide the
answers to such fantastic occurrences though the scientist’s arrogant remarks
are in complete keeping with the established Latourian separation: The
division amounts to kind of blindness. Messinger is for this reason unable to
fully realize the uncertain position that they are in, and because of this, they
forge ahead in modern fashion, headless of the hybridic consequences of their
reckless drive forward. Waugh’s point is clear when, despite protective netting
designed to prevent such an occurrence, a vampire bat bites Messinger’s
“great toe” (237).

This drawback is dramatized through their interaction with the Macushi

13

tribe. A number of men and women from this tribe are paid to lead Messinger
and Tony toward Pie-Wre country whose inhabitants will then (it is hoped) lead
them to the City. At the front of this crew is cigarette-obsessed Rosa who
speaks English due to two years with a “black man,” Mr. Forbes. Rosa and the
rest present the perfect picture of ambivalence and mimicry. Rosa obsesses
after cigarettes, carries a broken umbrella, and wears a calico dress like the
other women (Waugh 245). Ultimately, these “Indians” who bear the tortuous
cabouri fly like cows and find humor in the accidental knifing of one of their own,
do not comply to Messinger’s conception of them (Waugh 254, 256). The group
wavers on the edge of Pie-Wre territory where Rosa, whose face has now
grown “blank” in contrast to her earlier loquaciousness, states that the Macushi
must return to dig cassava (257, 261). Messinger believes they are stalling for
more goods and begins by offering cigarettes to Rosa, then “bottles of scent
and pills, bright celluloid combs set with glass jewels, mirrors . . . brass
cartridge cases and flat, red flasks of gunpowder” (261-262). Faced with this
treasure, the Macushi are unresponsive. Finally, Messinger: “It’s a pity. But
they’ll fall for the mice, you see. I know the Indian mind” (original emphasis) At
first, it appears that he does ”know" the “Indian mind:’
They were of German manufacture; the size of large rats but
conspicuously painted in spots of green and white; they had large
glass eyes, stiff whiskers, and green and white ringed tails; they
ran on hidden wheels, and inside them were little balls that

jingled as they moved. Dr. Messinger took one out of the box,

14

unwrapped the tissue paper and held it up to general scrutiny.
There was no doubt that he had captured his audience’s interest.
Then he wound it up. The Indians stirred apprehensively at the
sound . . . The effect exceeded anything he had expected. There
was a loud intake of breath, a series of horrified small grunts, a
high wail of terror from the women, and a sudden stampede.
(262—263)
Messinger expects the Macushi will return to the camp they had so quickly left
and, excited as they are by the mechanical mouse, greedily take up Tony and
Messinger on their offer. They do return, but only in the middle of the night, and
only to retrieve their possessions and leave. The “explorers” are stranded.
One cannot easily argue the view that Rosa and the others fled simply
from ignorance. Telling signs point to Rosa’s inherent shrewdness: Her early
verbosity turns to reticence when Messinger’s requests become repetitive and
demanding (262). In her own way, Rosa is menacing. Like Caliban whose
master provided him with the tools to curse, Rosa may also curse, but she has
an added tool, the imperialist’s assumption of superiority, an assumption that
equates to over-confidence. Tony and Messinger are also hampered by the
inevitable objectification that colonialism and the nature-culture division create.
When a society is made an object, said society is expected to behave calmly
and according to the rules by which machines operate. In this episode the
Macushi ’assertj. . .] themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial

power and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the

15

imperial centre” (Ashcroft et al. 2). Ironically, this definition of post-colonial
literatures by the authors of W signals the
dispossession that Waugh feels within his native country.

Waugh’s portrayal of the Macushi’s response is intriguing. Familiar and
accepting as they are with rifles which are both mechanical and deadly, it is
unlikely that they are frightened in the conventional sense by a rat-like mouse or
even the sound of Messinger winding the mouse. They do, finally, return for
their possessions. Rather, they realize that this mechanical device,
masquerading as a living entity, is perverse. In a response to a letter of
criticism by Henry Yorke in 1934, Waugh writes that they were ”impelled by the
mechanical simply to go home” (Amory 88). Had he inserted ”mice” the point
would have been clearer. However, the indication of people who “couldn’t do
two things at once” bolsters the argument that they saw the inconsistency
inherent in fleeing from the mice only to return to steal. To do so, would be to
negate the menace of the mice. More generally, this interaction highlights how
different, how hybrid the colonial relationship is with the Macushi’s pursuit of
food and Tony and Messinger's pursuit of an un-lost city. The mice with their
whiteness, connoting the English (culture), and the green, connoting nature
(object-culture), are a concretization of the relationship.

While the Macushi appear preternaturally aware of the mouse’s hybrid
being and are frightened accordingly, Tony, too caught up in the project of
modernity and hybridization, is worried that it may fall over on the ground and

prove uninteresting to the Macushi.

16

Modems do differ from premodems by this single trait: they refuse
to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids
present that horror that must be avoided at all costs by a
ceaseless and, even maniacal purification. (Latour 112)
The Macushi’s premodem comprehension of the possibly perverse quality of
hybrids of nature-culture that I am arguing for (and that Messinger and Tony are
oblivious to) is also apparent in the way the Macushi return to the camp.
Previously, certain goods were stolen. During their nocturnal return—at which
the women dispose of their clothes for stealth—no objects are stolen (Waugh
266). They desire no more of explorers and mechanical mice. Their stubborn
dismissal of mechanical gifts makes them doubly menacing as their actions
cannot be understood in light of the modern division, or the modem’s own
propensity for the new. Rosa and her people do not comply with the subject-
object distinction that enables colonialism, but force the separation once again
in a staggering and deadly reversal of expectations.

In Waugh’s diary entry for March 28, 1933, a paragraph which begins
with a description of “Indians,” assumedly Macushi, and their predilection for
pets ends with, “[wjrist-watch attracts attentions. Indian craze for any new thing”
(Davie 382). In his letter, Yorke writes, “[tjo tell you the truth I was furious that the
natives did not steal all the stores. I can’t and won’t believe that natives are
honest, it’s too much” (Amory 88-89). As Waugh’s work is directed toward the
English, the rejection of the experience above is understandable. The

implication is that the English are those who possess a “craze for any new

17

thing,” a point the novel supports in particular through Brenda’s movement of
desire and impatience with boredom. As Hetton serves as a foil for London, so
the Macushi do for those in England. Waugh’s idealization of the Macushi
assists his thematic needs: England’s faulty reliance on stereotypes, the
dangers inherent in an attraction to machines, and the cold and ruthless
human-machine hybrids that result.

During his hallucinatory fever in the jungle, Tony begins confusing
“Green Line Buses” which cannot “turn the corner safely at Hetton Cross” with
mice (Waugh 280). Soon, the hybrid mice reappear in Tony’s mind as “green
line rats” or “mechanical green rats” which frighten villagers and Reggie St.
Cloud out of their homes. These are all parallel images of culture’s citizens
recognizing hybridity and the dangers of reckless hybridity and following Tony’s
example by fleeing. The foremost extension of the mice is the appearance of
the ”mechanical green fox” in Bruton Wood (Waugh 281). Like the mice, this fox
has ’a bell inside him,” and frightens the person who sees him. Nor is it a
surprise when we learn that Brenda would not have been frightened by a
mechanical mouse; she is already lost to the side which valorizes reckless
mechanical hybridization (269).

Interspersed through Tony’s hallucinations are memories of a card
game with ”that Shameless Blonde.” The card game, ”animal snap,” requires
the players to imitate animals at times. Mrs. Rattery chooses a hen for Tony
and a dog for herself, linking her both to the mechanical fox and to “green line

rats” through her name. This card game occurs immediately following John

18

Andrew’s death and prefigures the life Tony will soon live. Waugh
ostentatiously makes Rattery’s obsession with cards into a parody of the role of
chance: “under her hands order grew out of chaos; she established sequence
and precedence” (Waugh 150). Rattery, being unemotional, disinterested,
unthinking—”Don’t you ever take a rest from thinking?” she asks Tony—is the
embodiment of modernity. She, pointedly, will not think about the nature-culture
collision that just resulted in the death of John Andrew. Wrth her airplane,
Rattery embodies the end result of culture’s obsession with the nature in the
form of the machine that begins with the pursuit of the new (in society, cinema,
planes) and ends with a disconnected home life, apathy, and lack of love. This
last trait is illustrated in her ignorance of her two sons whereabouts: “They’re at
school somewhere. I took them to the cinema last summer” (158). Rattery is no
less menacing than a mechanical mouse. Nevertheless, Tony chooses to link
himself to a machine-human hybrid in the guise of Mrs. Rattery while his son
lies only a few hours dead (147).

All of these images of the fox culminate in James Todd whose surname
has traditionally been affixed to foxes due to their assumed cleverness.
Following the disappearance of Messinger, Tony breaks off on his own,
feverish, to make his way out of the forest. Todd discovers and nurses Tony
back to health. Todd, whose mother was “Indian” and father a Barbadian or
English missionary, more fully than Rosa exists in that in-between state of
English and not-English (Waugh 289). He speaks English but cannot read and

his favorite author is the quintessentially English Dickens, a strategic

19

appropriation. He rules over the local population, many of whom are also his
sons or daughters, like a monarch with a rifle, invoking another common trope
of imperialism. As with Rosa, Tony is hoodwinked. Three Englishmen
searching for Tony venture into the region, but Tony has been drugged by
flattery—”It is almost as though my father were here again’—his own conceit,
and finally by an actual drug slipped into a drink during a local celebration
(292). Todd’s lies assist Tony’s faith in colonialism, yet inevitably indicate how
faulty, hybrid, and dangerous that relationship is. Todd is finally a reflection of
Tony’s own duplicity, of how Britain’s imperialism mirrors the actions of
Dickens who parades as a conscientious liberal while bedding a servant.
Perhaps the most subtle yet striking irony of the novel is that Tony begins the
novel rejecting the fox hunt, an “emblem of the disorder and dislocation of
upper class England,” only to go on a hunt himself of another variety, ending up
as the prey of the fox (Heath 111).

Desperate to keep his eloquent reader with him, Todd presents a
search party with Tony’s watch and shows them a cross erected over a
previous captive’s grave to end their search for Tony. Of course, Todd is not
truly “native,” and certainly less so than Rosa. Rosa’s own westemized traits
had not affected her premodem ability to recognize dangerous hybrids and
reject Tony and Messinger. Todd, by contrast, has become so deeply
influenced by the modern world that he has lost his discriminatory ability. His
use of nature—the gun, watch, cross—work rather to harm Tony than to

emancipate him. Todd’s pious mimicry of Dickensian sentimentalism mixed

20

with the cunning use of the watch as decoy point to exactly the horror articulated
in the mechanical mice. Waugh gives Dickens another face, a grotesque
visage not easily ignored. Edmund Wilson’s observation of the “pervasive
sense of terror’ in W is profoundly related to the “unblinking”
queue of hybrids which find their fullest articulation in Todd (Carens 85). The
horror comes from Tony’s inability to sidestep hybrids through his flight from
Hetton. Todd, finally, is the ultimate image of the ineswpability of hybridization.
Faced with this abundance, the modern project comes to a screeching halt. In
”Win, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges relates a saying by an Uqbarian
heresiarch that “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the
number of mankind” (68). As the similarity of their names should indicate, Todd
of course is a mirror image of Tony. Mirrors are an affront to human mortality
through their eternal, unblinking projection. They mock us with our own image
and imply the void within us. Todd reveals Tony’s own inevitable hybridity, his
inability to purify modernity’s glut of hybrids, and ultimately his own finitude.
Todd’s name contains within it this hint of finitude: der Tod means death in
German. In the person of Todd, Tony comes face to face with the
consequences of reckless hybridization, death, and that there is no utopian
escape from it.

Todd, as a composite of the mechanical and culture, is a mess of
contradictions. Todd gives away Tony’s watch while retaining his own gun, yet
one more dose of death imagery. More importantly, Todd retains Tony, who for

him, represents a mechanical infusion into his already racially hybrid existence.

21

Tony’s identity cannot be separated from his duties which are finally the
”mechanical[. . .],” repetitious, and exhaustive reading of Dickens (299, 302). He
becomes for all intents a time-keeping device as each novel or page signals
an end and a new beginning, a process that hauntingly mimics Rattery’s own
obsessive, mechanical card playing. Jeffrey Heath has seen Todd as I
“boredom itself” (118). But Todd is no less bored than Rattery. Todd is, like
Rattery, an exemplary, if twisted, modern. Tony, in flight from hybridity, has
instead found himself finally in a position in which he can flee no longer from
the failure of the modern project. Todd’s actions indicate an extreme ability to
confuse a person (culture) for a machine (nature). As the foremost image of
colonialism, through Todd it becomes clear how modernity and colonialism are
intimately related. If the general view of the colony is as “retreat,” as Waugh
termed his vacations from industrialized England, then Todd’s final
appropriation of the modern practices of translation and purification signals a
final moment of menace as the realization that sites of retreat have also been
polluted.

Todd has become deranged because he lives simultaneously in the
world of the Amazon and of Dickens. His confusion of Tony as a human watch
when Waugh’s experience demands the possession of the watch and
dismissal of the human speaks to his modern status. Todd has lost his ability
to make value judgments of the suitability of hybrids while being tainted by the
modern. Both the world of Rattery and that of Todd esteem the new in the

modern manner I have been outlining. The difference is that in the less

22

hybridized world of England where no premodem world is presented, Rattery
may remain sane while risking her human qualities. In a colonialism in which
two dissimilar worlds mix, Todd’s attempt to be modern in a premodem society
leads to his own madness. As both sire and dictator over the local population,
the tension between treating them alternately as subject (culture) and object
(nature) is too much to bear. With the inconsistent addition of his own hybrid
heredity—an indigenous mother and failed missionary as father—he is led to
insanity.

Tony has fallen into an extreme version of modernity to the point of
suggesting, deliriously, that Todd buy a motor bicycle, “much faster and noisier”
(287). Like Todd before him, he has become ill being modern in a premodem
world. Tony and Todd become an image of the earlier Tony and Brenda with
some difference: The relationship is not voluntary and they do not hold an
object, like a son, in common. Their union is built on threat. The colonial
situation has been inverted as Tony becomes the nature-object to be exploited.
Todd, who must stand in for the colonized to this degree, becomes more
English than the English, utilizing Latour’s dangerous division.

Waugh’s biographer, Selina Hastings, places the blame for Tony’s fate
on “immaturitlyj” and lack of religion. Tony never did light that fire in the church
and religion was the furthest thing from his mind when John Andrew dies.
“[Alfter all the last thing one wants to talk about at a time like this is religion,” he
says to Rattery (Hastings 308; Waugh 35, 158). Hastings’ remarks refer only to

the specific marital problems in which Tony finds himself. However, from a

23

Latourian perspective the same analysis could be made. “No one is truly
modern who does not agree to keep God from interfering with Natural Law as
well as with the laws of the republic,” writes Latour (33). Such a God is present
but “crossed-out,” unavailable and too distant to interfere with society or nature.
According to Latour, the concept of God has evolved so that the modern project
may commence despite the original Christian conception of a premodem God.
As Tony’s mechanical ritual of church going shows, his God is not a personal
God to whom he could address his grievances and look for healing (35). It has
all the artificiality of the modern division behind it. This also provides a
response to the charge of Christian complicity with colonialism: It is not the
inherent fault of the religion; instead, Christianity has been subverted to aid the
modern project. Had both Tony and Todd’s father not faced a “crossed-out”
God, they might have remained at home and dealt directly with their problems
rather than using Others to de-face their problems.
As the clairvoyance of illness reveals, Tony was lost long before James
Todd:
I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is
different. There is no City. Mrs. Beaver has covered it with
chromium plating and converted it into flats. Three guineas a
week with a separate bathroom. Very suitable for base love. And
Polly will be there. She and Mrs. Beaver under the fallen
battlements . . . (Waugh 288)

There is no possibility of returning and remaking Hetton, or finding that

24

legendary City. Mrs. Beaver, London’s societal pimp, has tainted both projects
with her chromium plating and her son, another sort of metallic plating. A return
to Hetton would only find Polly Cockpurse and Mrs. Beaver nearby, threatening
the already ruined project. Tony has come to the realization that drives the
novel: There is no site free from reckless hybridization; nor can he evade his
complicity in modernity. Unfortunately, this appears to be an occasion where
humankind cannot bear too much reality as Todd’s insanity and Tony’s failure
to escape indicate. For Tony, we see how he is finally paralyzed into non-action
through his confrontation with hybridity. Todd, by contrast, is the extreme
example of what could happen to someone dedicated to the modern project. If
he is not insane, he is certainly a man devoid of human feeling, mechanical in
a way similar to Brenda and Rattery.

Waugh’s novel operates as a “conceit” as he terms it in one of his letters
(Amory 88). If a conceit is a “complex, startling, and highly intellectual analog[yj,”
then the question must address what exactly is being compared in the novel in
such a fashion (Holman 283). Waugh tells us that he intends the character of
Tony to be juxtaposed against the savages in the novel, like Mrs. Beaver, the
“real” savages, and the savages represented by one of the last images in the
novel, the fox farm. Also, the “civilized,” e.g. Mrs. Beaver, and 'savage” are
juxtaposed, with the “civilized” ultimately found wanting as the idealized,
premodem actions of the Macushi indicate. Waugh’s letter simply lumps all
three together, while judging from the actions within the novel, the British take

home the prize for savagery. On the first page, when Beaver asks “Mumsey” if

25

anyone was hurt in a house fire she says, “No one, I am thankful to say . . .
except two housemaids” (3). Mrs. Beaver readily treats servants as if they were
objects. Such a comparison strongly casts suspicion on the civilized nature of
the colonizer and questions the moral basis of colonization.

According to Elleke Boehmer, despite his jabs at imperialism‘s ”civilizing
mission” and “the white man’s self-discovery,” Waugh fails to separate himself
from the imperialistic center (165-167). “British superiority” continues to act as
a basic assumption about the world and ”Waugh’s devices do not mask the
underlying social and political structures of his world.” Satire is the attempt to
get at the truth behind our presumptions—the ignorance behind the
ostentatious show of intelligence, the meanness of the elite and the
“barbarism’ of the ”civilized." To the extent that Waugh writes for an English
audience and that his satire—the most subtle didacticism—is aimed at this
audience, Boehmer is correct. Clearly, her case is overstated in relation to A
W. Waugh’s argument against colonialism has less to do with
the Other than it has to do with England’s own particular social obsessions
which may tear apart a family with its borders, while outside they prompt
insanity and death, not it should be noted through the fault of the premodem
world. Tony, Messinger, and Todd’s destines are decided by the modern
division of nature—culture. The juxtaposition of the two ”savage” worlds
equalizes the two. It is not simply that Waugh pictures the Empire in decline, as
Boehmer argues, but the entire modern and colonial enterprise which bases

itself on reckless hybridization is questioned. The decline is simply, as Latour

26

would argue, the result of a modernity which had been too successful: The
modern world has been so profligate in its hybrids that evidence of them, both
good and bad, can no longer be hidden, and once this happens, modernity and
its pursuits are in danger.

The mechanical imagery within the novel does not exist alone, assisting
in further delineating where this illness comes from. Instead it is allied with
animal imagery, as with Beaver, Cockpurse (a monkey), Jenny (a cat), Rattery,
Todd, Brenda (a cat) (55, 17). The mechanical exacerbates animal qualities. At
the end of chapter three, Tony describes Brenda as “mechanical.” As the
central chapter, ”English Gothic ll,” begins two pages later, Brenda informs
Cockpurse that Tony’s anger has her feeling like a “beast” (171-173). She
repeats this again in similar fashion shortly after Tony rejects Reggie St.
Cloud’s proposition of £2,000 as alimony for his sister (206-209). Creating
evidence of his infidelity at Brighton, Tony is described as an “Unnatural beast”
by onlookers when he asks if his adulterer’s daughter may swim. Apparently,
he does not realize how unsafe the sea happens to be at that moment (original
emphasis, 198-199). All three incidents involve infidelity, either marital or with
tradition as exemplified in Hetton. They involve a movement away from Hetton.
What is particularly important to note is that here, for once, Waugh’s characters
are forced to evaluate their actions. The fact that they have stopped using
people as people but have confused nature and culture, gives at least Brenda
pause.

Tendril, the vicar at Hetton since returning from his military post,

27

continues, uncomprehendingly, to give unmodified and repetitive sermons to
his parishioners from his military days, placing them among tigers and camels
on a “barren continent” (79, 39). Returning home from the “subjugat[ion]” of
natives, he is unable to make the switch from object to subject. His sermons
have no relation to his parishioners who are not surprised since “few of the
things said in church seemed to have any relevance to themselves.” Tendril’s
niece also rode the fatal motor bicycle. The religious are further implicated
through Todd’s father who as a failed missionary leaves his white wife for gold
only to take up with an indigenous woman (289). Todd’s possession of a gun
and his racial hybridity irrevocably changes the relation between him, the
surrounding indigenous population, and Tony. The latter become subjects to
be controlled and hence objects as I argued above. Of course, Todd has his
counterparts in England. To those who lead a mechanical life, unconscious of
the nature-culture division, feeling like an animal is only just for they, like
animals and the machines they mimic, are unconscious of their effect on the
world around them.

Jenny Abdul Akbar’s “truly Eastern disregard for the right property of
things” may indicate Waugh’s feelings regarding the origin of the confusion
between culture and nature (156). Movement away from home, though not
necessarily to the East, does signal a detachment which aids in the use of
nature and people as “things.” The characterization of Jenny would seem to
indicate that the origin of England’s confusion and division originates in the

East. However, Jenny's “uncanny fascination” with the East is not that of the

28

native; the indigenous seldom profess a “fascination” with their own
home—happiness or satisfaction perhaps, but seldom more. She is most
likely a transported Jew who has bought into the contemporary zeitgeit. Waugh
implicates then, the othering process which exoticizes that which does not fit
the category of the normative, the technology that has enabled commerce and
travel between the East and West, and the increasing dissociation that
technology prompts. Each of these catalysts uphold and are diffused through
one another.

Tony, in contrast, rarely goes abroad and has no interest in the East as
we learn from his conversation with Jenny and his rejection of her as a
replacement for Brenda (214, 114). The first Macushi that Messinger and Tony
meet is, like Rosa, also dressed in a calico dress, and though she comes
forward in greetings, she is “devoid of comprehension and curiousity.” Her lack
of English would explain the former, but not the latter. She is not addicted to the
new, unlike Rosa who has clearly been influenced (241). While the first
Macushi politely serves cassiri, she serves no purpose in the narrative other
than to indicate how much she prefers her own world over that of England.
Boredom and desire are a constant theme for Brenda and the “restive’ Beaver
(238). The cult of the new that is so intertwined and dependent on mechanical
production and advertising compels us to be less than human and more
animalistic; less human because we move on from lover to lover, or expedition
to expedition, destroying lives and artifacts, moving forward only through

forgetfulness. Tony’s work at Hetton is part of this movement to the new. Hetton

29

is engaging and new to him in its calm hybridity and excites him more than
Brenda whom he takes for granted. Modernity makes us see things as objects
alone, separating the social factor from the equation, enabling Brenda or
colonialism to work its work of destruction. The search for the new is aided by
the tension at home which forces a closer alignment of nature and culture by
virtue of their proximity, while overseas or over the telephone, isolation works its
magic. The pursuits of the modern may be free of all protest with the effects out
of sight and this would explain why Waugh so strongly implicates the East and
colonialism.

But this is not the end of the complications for the modem.’[Tjime is
different” in the ”forest” Tony reminds us several times (288). Time, for the
modern, only appears “when we bind together the cohort of elements that
make up our day-to-day universe” and then replace that “cohort” with another in
a “subsequent period” (Latour 72-73). The fabric of time is strained whenever
the impression of order is dispelled by the “mixing up [of] different periods,
ontologies or genres.” Obviously, many hybrid juxtapositions within the novel
work to disrupt this order. When Messinger disappears, that, in combination
with Tony’s illness, is enough to disturb time for the protagonist. Messinger’s
death by drowning is ironic because in Latour’s terms it is precisely the
conception of a “turbulent flow of whiripools and rapids” that will upset time. As
Lennart Lundmark and Latour both argue, once time is disturbed, modernity is
wrecked. How can “progress” continue when events are spread out all over the

“calendar?” Previously, the modern had with an emphatic gesture wiped out the

30

past, seeing itself as cut off from it by virtue of time and their own arrogance
(Latour 68-69). The effect is decisive. In part it is the divisive separation of time
that enables the work of purification: Valid scholarship regarding hybrids
cannot be accomplished if the past is suppressed because with the past one
must also lose part of the complexity that modernity seems intent on erasing
(70). The past, which has always been there, in the face of a modernity
overburdened with hybrids may now return.

Todd’s symbolic abrogation of the watch has an even more potent
meaning for Waugh. As Tony is attempting to figure the time in England versus
Brazil, he muses that the sun “came to them at second hand and slightly soiled
after Polly Cockpurse and Mrs. Beaver and Princess Akbar had finished with it”
(Waugh 237). The colonial mission, like Brenda’s mission, exists to dispel that
ubiquitous boredom of a purified realm in the ”craze for the new” hybridic
relation. Along the way, this finely honed reflex dissolves families, traditions,
and cultures. Todd’s gift of the watch is symptomatic of this “soil[ing]’ as Tony
is torn away from his home through this ultimate symbol of progress. The three
searchers will return to collect a reward with the watch as evidence; Tony’s heir
will, ironically, join the commercial class, by instigatlng a “silver fox” farm (308).
Progress continues at Hetton, but with menacing reminders of the past, a
motor bicycle, a broken clock to be repaired once the death duties are paid off,
and Richard and Teddy Last’s resumption of fox hunting. Nowhere in the novel
is there an attempt to demonstrate a non-hybridized world, or the possibility of

one. Even at the early stage when Tony and Brenda urge on John Andrew’s

31

entrance into fox hunting, they foreshadow the hybridity of James Todd who
combines in himself both nature in the machine and the culture of the colonizer
and colonized (21).

The final and most successful of all the hybrids l have discussed is the
novel itself. Yorke also wrote by way of criticism, “I feel the end is so fantastic
that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren’t you mixing two things together?
The first part is convincing, a real picture of people one has met and may at any
moment meet again” (Amory 88). If the mark of a successful artistic hybrid of
two worlds is the radical sharing of an intermediary, the novel’s “John Andrew’
is the series of hybrids that begin appearing in the early portion of the novel and
continue through the “fantastic” end. With such a consistently applied trope,
there can be no disproportion between the realism and the “fantastic” portion of
the novel. When Yorke will not consider the fantastic and realistic form of the
novel together, he allows such hybrids and the work of modernity to progress.
Waugh’s novel acts as an ostentatious linking of the practices of hybridization
and purification, dealing a blow to the project of modernity. Closely allied with
modernity, colonialism likewise depends on the strict division of nature and
culture. Yorke further criticizes the Brazil episode as “seem[ing] manufactured
and not real” (Hastings 314). Rather, what are “manufactured” are Yorke’s
modern sensibilities which are incapable of viewing the world as a whole or
people as subjects who also perform the function of objects. The Machushi's
failure to steal and Yorke’s disbelief of this fact signal his entrapment in the

modern discourse that separates civilized and uncivilized, colonizer and

32

colonized, and center and margin by an illusory while substantial chasm.

All the movement within the novel on the part of Tony and Brenda cleariy
illustrates the importance of desire to modernity. Brenda flees Hetton for the
promise of hybridity. Disturbed in his project of purification, Tony flees Hetton
for a less ostentatious site of hybridity. Brenda returns to Tony in Jock Grant-
Menzies—Tony’s only friend—while Tony attempts a return to Hetton in the City.
Tony and his hair Teddy are likewise trapped in their rote glorification of a past
that never was (Wasson 137, Waugh 308). Tony rejects the ostentatious
hybridity of Hetton following Brenda’s infidelity, but then becomes trapped in
that which he would escape. The hybrids proliferate. Like the Leavisites, those
who flee must theorize a better worid, a totally different world, implicitly denying
that every world is a mental construct that depends on a prior world for its
being. Indeed, such a world arises out of a self that now, tainted by hybridity,
cannot leave behind this past. In other words, Tony’s flight is impossible
because he is constituted by that from which he flees. But the flight continues
by an ontological division which allows the subject to evade hybridity and
imagine an illusory realm of purity. In fleeing the once repressed hybridity of
Hetton, Tony, on a more practical level, simply creates yet one more reckless
hybrid. There is no escape from hybridity, nor from the boredom and desire that
is a result of the successful purification of nature and culture into two separate
zones. Realizing this fact is to face the interdependence of culture and nature,
and one’s own non-modern status. Each engagement within the novel,

marriage, infidelity, exploration, or home maintenance holds within itself some

33

relation to nature and the mechanical world. These engagements suffer
equally from the problem of desire. As such activities become repetitive they
tend to produce a desire for the other, leading to yet more hybridization as in
Brenda’s case. This repetition need not entail a closed door, but rather, if
pursued consciously, an opportunity to live more imaginatively in that same
space with the added benefit of fewer faulty hybrids. To accept that a place,
person, or time is always a hybrid of nature and culture is to face the fact of
hybridization and to return to a premodem state. It is also to entertain an
automobile which fits the needs of society, or a family that remains ”whole.’ To
reject reckless hybridization is to jeopardize the pursuits of modernity and
colonialism.

Faced with the social and psychological effects of the machine age and
modernity, Waugh’s answer to how we can stop exploiting ourselves and
others is only partial and, at last, inadequate: stay close to home, accept the
fact of hybridity, recognize the short-sightedness of desire, and form new
hybrids more carefully. Sadly, for the populace of Waugh’s novel, this
knowledge and the need to live creatively—that is its corollary—comes much

too late.

34

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Borges, Jorge Luis. Wotan: Trans. Andrew
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Carens, James F. W. Seattle: University of
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Carter. Paul. Wm London:
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Davie, Michael. Wan. London: Weidenfeld and
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Hastings, Selina. WWW. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

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Kiberd, Declan. Wad. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
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Latour, Bruno. WW. Trans. Catherine Porter.
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McCartney, George. QontuoodBoadnojxolxnflauonjnddneModomist
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