Language as a constituent of the repressed in Evelyn Waugh’s short stories : the limitations and expressions of a genre

Abstract

This dissertation aims to look at the shorter fiction of Evelyn Waugh, an English author from the first half of the twentieth century, a time which sees Modernism establishing itself firmly, and evaluate whether the shorter form allows more space for the unconscious to emerge through language. Against the framework of Modernism, I discuss the binaries and oppositions that are present in the writing of Waugh like his English sensibility and his affiliation to an older, traditional order, of him being a modernist author and anti-modernist at the same time, and the ironic realistic stance that he has towards his characters while creating caricatures of them to satirize English society. In the first chapter, I analyse the stories from the psychoanalytic theoretical framework of Freud, on how the language of the repressed consciousness is foregrounded, and Lacanian theory, to understand better the relationship that there is between the Waughian ‘Subject’ and the Symbolic Order. My aim is to understand how the Lacanian triad of the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary lends itself to the structure of the language of the unconscious to operate on various levels of a linguistic nature especially within the notion of the imago. In the second chapter, I look at a more contemporary outlook on the principles of the short stories and utilizing the critical commentary on the theory of Lacan by Slavoj Žižek to take a deeper look at the Waughian binaries. The short stories analysed in detail are ‘Period Piece’, ‘A House of Gentlefolks’, ‘The Manager at ‘The Kremlin’’ and ‘An Englishman’s Home’. Throughout my dissertation, I have framed my reading first within the principles of the short story genre, looking at the development of the form from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Then I continue by making affiliations between the genre and modernism and how shorter fiction encapsulates the mood of the era. My reading of Waugh’s stories to traces the author’s dualistic tendencies that inhibit his writing and I analyse them from the Lacanian theoretical framework to interpret how the language of the unconscious inhibit the brief genre of the short stories.