Re: [Marxism] Reactionary authors

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 10:10:58 +1200 Philip Ferguson
<philip.ferguson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Jim F wrote:
> >Sometimes reactionaries like Balzac, or to take a more recent
> author,
> Evelyn Waugh, have deeper insights into their societies than authors
> who
> are more politically progressive, perhaps because their reactionary
> ideology helps to give them the distance necessary to assess the
> world
> around them in a clear-eyed, realistic manner.
>
>
> I agree with the general point you are making, like Louis saying
> that
> art has to stand as art not by some pc standard.
>
> However, I don't see Evelyn Waugh as a great novelist.  'Brideshead
> Revisited' is just a pathetic soap opera about a sorry-assed
> self-obsessed bunch of privileged people who seem to have no
> redeeming
> features at all, but whom the repulsive Waugh portrays as being
> worth
> our interest and even sympathy.

I don't think that *Brideshead Revisited* was his best work
(Waugh, himself, apparently came to take a juandiced
view of the book in his later years).
There is lot to be said for novels like *Decline and Fall*,
*A Handful of Dust*, and his satire on journalism, *Scoop*.
*Brideshead Revisited* does have it moments though,
with some of its characters like Anthony Blanche,
who was based on his old Oxford friends, Harold Acton
and Brian Howard.

>
> Yeh, the poor upper-class English Catholics.  My heart goes out to
> them!
>
> There are reactionaries who write great novels, but Waugh ain't one
> of
> them in my view.  'Brideshead' is just too wallowing in nostalgia
> and
> too soap operaish to even be considered serious literature in my
> view.
>
> Phil
>
>
>
>
>
>
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