Aditya Sinha: Looking into our wasteland of savagery

I recently read Evelyn Waughrsquos fabulouslywritten A Handful of Dust 1933 which is simultaneously a hilarious novel while being a most depressing read Waugh was a great 20thcentury English satirist and his Scoop 1938 is a riotous look at journalism through stylised prose Briefly Scoop is about a man of the declining rural gentry who is the nature columnist for a London newspaper but is mistakenly sent off to East Africa to report on a crisis Incidentally after several LOL misadventures he does manage a lsquoscooprsquo that is credited to the foreign correspondent in whose place he is mistakenly sent Scoop never resorts to abuse contrast that to the illiterate hordes in contemporary India whose intellectual achievement is to call journalists ldquopresstitutesrdquoTechnology and modernity have apparently done nothing to civilise the beast if the savagery of Donald Trump is any indication PicAFPWaughrsquos A Handful of Dust is depressing because it is situated inside a crumbling marriage presumably modelled on Waughrsquos own a few years earlier his first wifersquos name was also Evelyn friends referred to them as HeEvelyn and SheEvelyn Incidentally Waughrsquos great depression is set during the economic Great DepressionIt is about Tony Last and his wife Brenda who live in his ancestral home Hetton Abbey mdash a Victorian mansion in Gothic style whose rooms are named after characters from King Arthurrsquos tale presumably Tony is the lsquolastrsquo of that gentry Tony does not want to let go of Hetton Abbey despite its cost even though Brenda feels imprisoned in it She falls into an affair with an impoverished society man John Beaver and spends her time with a parasitical London set that vicariously enjoys the affair as it unfolds Brenda herself confesses to the affair after a domestic tragedy She leaves Tony who travels deep into the Amazon jungle in search of a mythical lsquoCityrsquo mirroring the City of London presumably He loses contact with civilisation and meets the halftribal halfEuropean Mr Todd who saves his life But Mr Todd also takes Tony prisoner so that Tony can read Toddrsquos collection of Charles Dickens to himWaughrsquos writing pierces the heart of two matters marriage and human nature Marriage is such a precarious and impossible Westphalian balanceofpower that it often ends in a Cold War type standoff each partner held back by the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction yes marriage is MAD Brendarsquos feeling of imprisonment is uncannily familiar Often individuals allow themselves to be imprisoned because they rationalise that marriage is a neverending negotiation though it is more corrosively a state of compromise in which both think theyrsquove lost the balance of powerMarriage nowadays seems anachronistic because of economic democratization among the sexes and because extended lifespans far outlast the lsquonaturalrsquo life of a marriage Many argue that marriage provides stability but that is just a facade They argue it provides companionship in old age but most elderly couples canrsquot seem to stand the sight of one another and look trapped in mutual dependency No wonder then that a bureaucrat friend mentioned a colleague who was planning on a modest wedding for her daughter As she put it marriages donrsquot last more than fourfive years anyway so what would be the point of an extravaganzaIn A Handful of Dust Tony is the ldquolastrdquo to learn of his wifersquos affair the entire Bavarian set in London enjoy too much gossiping about the affair ldquoHard cheese on Tonyrdquo is as sympathetic an utterance as anyone makes Several have themselves had brieflylived affairs Still their cruel comments reveal the novelrsquos other Hobbesian truth that whether in Londonrsquos dining houses or in the Amazonian rainforest humans are at heart savage even if they enjoy Dickens Our traditions call it matsyanyaya the law of the fishes where the strong prey on the weak Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan saw the life of man in the state of nature as ldquosolitary poor nasty brutish and shortrdquoTechnology and modernity have apparently done nothing to civilize the beast if the savagery of Arnab Goswami or Donald Trump is any indication Instead technology has shrunk the planet to reveal only cyberglimpses of human naturersquos unrelenting ugliness Just ask anyone whorsquos been trolled on Twitter Scientific discoveries like that recently of gravitational waves ought to push us up a rung on the evolutionary ladder but not quite Wersquore still blindly bound by the prejudices of faith beheading or lynching one anotherIn A Handful of Dust Waugh takes the most intimate human connection marriage to reveal our wasteland of savagery and if two people canrsquot escape the asphyxiation of association then society likely canrsquot either No surprise that the modern world around us often seems more depressing than the saddest of stories Waugh got his novelrsquos title from TS Eliotrsquos The Waste Land which says ldquoour society promises to show us fear in a handful of dustrdquo That possibly exemplifies our modern conditionSenior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the anthology House Spirit Drinking in India to be published in May He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom