Some further aspects of Waugh's satire

The following excepts are from Douglas Patey's The Life of Evelyn Waugh:

Characters in Waugh’s first novels seem empty, without psychological depth, because they have no depths to probe; an “external”, un-subjective presentation accurately captures their modern selves.

The literary form in which such limited “characters” are most at home is satire. As Wyndham Lewis observed in a book that Waugh said “no novelist and very few intelligent readers can afford to neglect, Satire and Fiction (1930): “To let the reader ‘into the minds of the characters,’ to ‘see the play of their thoughts’ – that is precisely the method least suited to satire. That it must deal with the outside…is one of the capital advantages of this form of literary art.” Satiric characters, Waugh agreed in 1937, tend to be “mere dialectical abstractions”.
p. 58

Satire typically defines characters through their roles (teacher, lawyer, doctor); behavourial rules follow from roles, but characters do not live up to them. Through just such structural irony the satirist is able to teach without preaching – without making his standards of judgment tediously explicit; no commentary beyond the assignment of role is necessary to point up indecorum, leaving the narrator free to pretend neutrality or even admiration. (“It was a lovely evening,” we hear of the Boller party.)

As Waugh often said, such irony depends on a fund of unspoken agreement between writer and reader about how characters inhabiting roles should act. Calling on antecedently shared values, satire is thus a fundamentally conservative literary form, one that usually ratifies moral and social norms. Like Austen’s or Pope’s, Waugh’s mockery of the rich and titled (such as the deliciously named Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington) constitutes not an attack on hierarchy but on individuals’ failure to live up to their rank. This conservatism makes satiric irony irritatingly manipulative to those who do not share the writer’s values. pp. 62/63

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