“What did we learn, Palmer?”
“I don’t know sir.”
“I don’t fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.”
– Burn After Reading

Nothing changes. The past is awful and the future is terrible. This, of course, is the basis for much comedy. Because people tell themselves otherwise, even as they turn a blind eye to what they’ve done and ignore how what they’re doing will only make things worse, and delusion and idiocy is funny stuff — at least for the people watching.
Take this guy Paul Pennyfeather, the lead of Decline and Fall. He gets kicked out of divinity school and has to find work teaching at a shithole boarding school in godforsaken Wales. He makes no impression on the boys in his charge but luckily has one of their mothers seduce him. Yet before they can be married, he’s imprisoned after being implicated in the white slavery ring his beloved has been running for years. He willingly takes the fall and does a stretch of time before being sprung by his regretful ex, who in the meantime has started fucking the drunk rich dickbag who got Paul expelled in the first place, and returns to divinity school to resume his studies. The end, no moral. But plenty of laughs!

For instance, the reason Paul gets the boot from his college (a not-at-all-disguised Oxford) is because he’s stripped naked by that partying drunk rich dickbag and his cronies and his dazed nude wandering is evidence of moral failing on his part as opposed to theirs. Well, that’s sort of awful actually. But more light-hearted is Paul landing if not on his feet, then on the fatty part of his ass at Llanabba boarding school*, where he and his fellow teachers oversee a horribly-organized track and field event where a student is shot in the foot. The student subsequently gets gangrene, loses the foot and then his life. Hmm. But at least the man directly responsible for this is later savagely tortured and murdered by a psychotic prison inmate as part of a misguided rehabilitation program. Huh.

What makes Evelyn Waugh such a sick bastard is that all of this is funny. The progressive deterioration of the shot boy happens entirely offscreen to the consternation of no one and the lack of fuss over things and the lack of interest in anything other than maintaining the status quo makes them cruelly hilarious. “There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit,” Paul tells his unruly students to shut them up and put them to work so he doesn’t have to.
Everyone bobs along in their place and the only thing remotely different about Paul is that his bobs have higher highs and lower lows. The people he meets in his journeys — particularly the proud “bounder” and public-school man Grimes who is also a bigamist who fucks and runs at every opportunity, and the priest Prendergrast who is too wishy-washy to believe in anything, let alone the gospel he’s supposed to preach — are like him, mid-tier cogs in a contraption that fills space before being switched over into another part of a machine maintained with indifference but run by and for the rich.

Fortunately, Waugh is not some revolutionary — he craps on everyone. The master of Llanabba is a horrible snob who believes the Welsh subhuman and expounds on this at awful (and awfully funny) length. But when actual Welsh people appear in the narrative, they’re crude, greedy near-savages willing to extort in the name of piety. A magnificent Tudor mansion is denigrated as being a ridiculous sop to aristocracy and the rigid bluenosery of preservationists, and then is torn down and replaced by a monstrosity with electricly-lit floors and aluminium domes designed by a Bauhaus reject trying to solve “the problem of all art — the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form.” A new prison warden forgoes bread and water for dialogue and education, and the blood runs red.

There is a reading of Decline and Fall that looks at Paul’s journey as an indictment of class structure — he can never transcend his status to a level of higher nobility, even by attempting to marry in — and that is certainly part of the story. But he’s also an entirely passive twerp who is comfortable to be led, whether to school or bed or jail, and who can fall back on what status he has to be moved. He’s happiest when placed in solitary confinement in jail, not doing anything, and he ends the story ignoring the idle rich enacting the same kind of debauchery on an unsuspecting student that he suffered. He goes along and in the end gets along, even if it’s back to where he started.

And it’s unlikely he’s even learned not to do any of this again. Why should he? He’s in England between the wars, the king is on his throne and all is right with the world. It’s not like there’s a Depression around the corner, or a war around the corner after that. Waugh’s title is a bit ironic now, riffing on the end of another empire, but I don’t think he intended clairvoyance. He’s just saying, same as it ever was, we’re always falling down and saying it’s the end. But it’s not, because we keep finding new ways to fuck up. Or worse, rediscovering the same old ways.

It’s pretty funny, when you think about it. When the people watching have the self-awareness to recognize themselves in what they see (or the blinkered glibness of only recognizing others), we call that “satire” as a way of letting ourselves in on the joke. Safer to say you’re seeing through a funhouse mirror than one that reflects clearly. What could you learn from that?

*my experience with British writers describing boarding schools has convinced me that the most unrealistic part by far of the Harry Potter books is that the students are not constantly miserable.