34 pages • 1 hour read
Evelyn WaughVile Bodies
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Thousand-Pound Debt
Early in the novel, Adam wins a bet over an inconsequential shell game played in a hotel parlor, winning the substantial sum of a thousand pounds (close to 37 thousand in 2022). This is enough money to start his life anew with Nina Blount, his fiancée. However, the money was won drunkenly, and disappears quickly into the hands of the Major, who bets it on a long-odds horse in a coming race. Adam’s search for his thousand-pound note, and later for his winnings on the race, structures the novel as the money disappears around every corner and swells to amazing proportions. When Colonel Blount signs a check for a thousand pounds, Adam celebrates all night until he realizes the check was signed “Charlie Chaplin.” As with the cheap sources of happiness and regret found throughout the novel, money flits at the edge of perception without ever manifesting. It is a goal Adam never reaches.
The Chaos of the Motor Car
“I thought we were all driving round and round in a motor race and none of us could stop,” says Agatha Runcible after she has been admitted into a psychiatric hospital, “[a]nd car after car kept crashing until I was left all alone driving and driving” (241). Just before the race, the narrator observes the building and rebuilding of the motorcar Agatha will drive as its being outfitted for a professional race. Compared to commercial cars, which “are bought all screwed up and numbered and painted,” the racecar is described as “a vortex of combining and disintegrating units,” an entity constantly in a state of flux (204). In this sense, the motorcar is a metaphor for modern English society, in which Prime Ministers are constantly being replaced, and where money is constantly being jerked out of one’s hand by an unseen force.
Telephonic and Cinematic Style in Prose
In the introduction to Vile Bodies, Waugh states, “I think I can claim that this was the first English novel in which dialogue on the telephone plays a large part” (viii). Indeed, Chapter 11 takes place entirely on the telephone. Its quick, inexpressive lines—rather like text messages—describe the emotionless dissolution of Adam’s and Nina’s marriage plans. A process that might be portrayed through character interiority and negotiation in an older novel here takes a few short pages of truncated and unadorned dialogue. This passage demonstrates the influence of modern technology on the style of Waugh’s novel.
Cinema adds a visual element to this sensory effect of truncation. Waugh (who worked on film production when he was a young man) emulates cinematic style with his quick chapters and disembodied point of view, in which the protagonist suddenly recedes while random figures such as the Prime Minister suddenly take the close-up plane. At other times, the narrative eye looks out the window of a moving train, which clips along at the pace of a film reel. Interiority is flattened by this cinematic approach, making life a constantly churning set of images one can never take the time to reflect upon.
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By Evelyn Waugh
