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Brideshead Revisited

Just when you think everything is safely destroyed, we learn that poor beleaguered history, as record of “the builders and the tragedians,” is affirmed

Folks

• Charles Ryder, our narrator, an ingenue from the upper middle class who’s seduced and educated by an older, nobler family. As a disenchanted officer of the early WWII, product of parents sacrificed to WWI, his journeys represent the generation after the lost generation, too young to serve in WWI, a product of the optimistic 20s. From a mild Bloomsburyan start, he rebels with his romantic friendship w/Sebastien, a life of sensuality and nature, preferring the Romantic to the Modernist, then “loses his illusions” b/c of cruel Lady M and dabbles in respectability and Cold Hard Facts (culminating in a rebellion to Latin America, playing Gauguin with insipid, tepid results), relights the magical fire (in the form of Sebastian’s sister), which turns out to be illusory, though his epiphany at end end shows him to be happy he was involved in the tragedy at all.

• Sebastian Flyte, Lord Flyte, son of the Marquis of Marchmain, who wants to stay in his childhood, for reasons that aren’t beautifully illustrated but which we can probably assume to be the unhappy mixture of Catholicism and homosexuality; clutching to his teddy bear Aloysius at first, he loves nature and is quite charming to all; impulsive, he works by imperatives (I must do this now). His alcohol leads him to disgrace, and being hounded about it makes him run away. So like his father, he ends up running away yet reconciling himself to the Church. For Charles, he is the “forerunner” of Lady Julia. According to his own testimony, he just needed someone to take care of, rather than constantly being taken care of himself by others, esp his mother. (Misogyny, Waugh?)

• Anthony Blanche, the aesthete par excellence, he has an acquired stammer and flamboyant personality and legitimate aesthetic background (Gide, Proust, and Cocteau all know him); he represents the “bad set” (sodomites), although Charles notes that he’s more like a spoiled child than anything else, just wanting to shock and prove his dominance. He’s called a liar, but even the fantastical lies he tells turn out to be true. Perhaps he represents the unfortunate power of art, for Charles never likes him, but you must admit he was right.

• Nanny Hawkins, the elderly nanny who never gets older until the start of WWII. The children’s devotion to her is a charming characteristic allowed them.

• Lady Julia, the most popular debutante during the first truly bright Season after the war, she’s got a bob and represents the hope of high society after the war. Cross and unimpressed at first, wayward and willful (say the society matrons), she is quickly divested of her early romance (her husband will not stay away from his mistress), but her chance at early happiness is ruined because of her religious upbringing, which she can’t shake herself from. She is brave but can’t do it in the end.

• Brideshead, the eldest son, who has absolutely nothing outside of his inherited position—the forms of feudal engagement w/his community—unless we count his prodigious matchbox collection. He has “no spark of contemporary life” and can’t take the family into the future due to the bad marriage he made, for she’s too old to give him a child and because his dad disinherits him after that marriage (led into it by his hobby, showing that his one non-noble action ruined his inheritance!)

• Lord Marchmain, who never returns from war (lives with an Italian, Cara), is Byronic, large, lazy, bigger-than-life and trying to contain it in a small box. Some say he was the last many truly “hounded out of society,” while other’s say he’s a “volcano of hate,” but all we really know is that at his death he comes back to England and Brideshead and Catholicism. He shows us that even an apparently successful independence from Britain will not in the end last.

• Lady Marchmain, supposed to be the villain of the piece, a pious but powerful, high-spirited, chivalrous woman who needs no makeup to look impressive. She is a vampire with a quiet, low voice, whose loss of three virtuous brothers in the first War gives her a reason (or excuse?) for trying to control everyone around her. Her religion is supposed to be the cause of all the problems, but what does this religion represent?

• Cordelia Flyte, the youngest daughter, quite religious and precocious, who ends up happily a spinster volunteering for various religious and state needs: Spanish Civil War, for example. She will nurse the next generation and has no illusions, but she won’t herself make an active contribution to it. Without Sebastian’s breakdown, her father’s mortal reasons, or Julia’s attempt to escape, she accepts the heritage her mother brought her.

• Cara, Lord Marchmain’s life partner. She’s the voice of reason in this book, always urging one to take the big picture view of tolerance and wisdom. Her respectability disappoints Ryder’s licentious expectations, showing that the sordid isn’t always where one would expect it.

• Samgrass, the All Souls history don hired to keep an eye on Sebastian after he writes Lady Marchmains’ brothers’ bio. A legimist by trade, who keeps track of royal lineages, he nonetheless loses Sebastian: is history no longer an aid to us?

• Celia Mulcaster, Charles’ chic manageress wife, a perky and cute woman who ends up moving to the next man after being disappointed by the distant Charles. She shows us where romance is moving: a world of power grabs and professional networking that can fold in a moment, as soon as real passion finds its way in, but that always stays reasonable and in good working order.

• Rex Mottram, Julia’s husband, a profiteer adventurer imported from Canada who wants a well-connected wife to put the cherry on top of his political career. Until the war, he is seen as being on the wrong side of the war, being a bully rather than a liberal. A noveau riche stock character with a “harsh, acquisitive” nature, he probably should’ve married Celia. He has simple needs, direct means of getting there, and little of anything else. Julia’s says he’s only a tiny part of a whole man.

Themes

• Collapse of generation, of progress
  • From an agricultural-noble system to a modern business oriented one of suburbs
    • See descriptions in “Prologue” and “Epilogue”
    • Everything is “marked for destruction” within a very few years
  • The madmen through the railings are the “undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress” (4)
• Brideshead
  • As historical palimpsest
    • It is a long-term family collaboration, from the stones of the castle to the domes, wings, fountains, and finally the chapel added on by each generation
    • “buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist’s pride and the Philistine’s vulgarit, and repaired the clumsiness of dull workmen. (226)
    • History is inscribed into the house.
    • Various fads (Arts and Crafts; chinoiserie) leave their marks
• Food
  • Lush descriptions used in the Oxford section to amplify the sensuous delight of that time
    • Oxford is a fantasy of wine, strawberries, Chartreuse, Cointreau, Fuller’s Walnut Cake and plovers’ eggs
  • Perhaps a stand-in for sexual descriptions that one might expect from a book written today
• Jewelry / Luxury / Huysmans References
  • Turtle
    • The diamond-encrusted turtle Rex gives Julia disappears immediately
    • If you try to make the living into art, it will die
  • Celia’s jewelry
    • She has jewelers hand-make her jewelry that mimics the mass-produced
    • Charles’ and Waugh’s scorn for her says this is stupid: Waugh does not embrace the mass-produced
• Relationships
  • About him losing track of Flytes during the late twenties/early thirties: “they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics…a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me.” 235
  • Allegory doesn’t work any more: specialist knowledge ruins it; you can’t pretend to know everything
• Art
  • Julia damns it as mediation: he always sees them as a play or a painting, and she gets sick of it
    • But her religion does a similar thing: God is punishing her for marrying Rex: “Perhaps that is why you and I are here together like this … part of a plan” (259)
  • Ultimately, Charles learns that you can’t really plan life: instead, you can do things, but you can’t know their issue, their final effect. The builders don’t know what’s going to happen w/what they do, and it’s more beautiful because you don’t know. You must act, but you can’t really plan or control: that’s what screws it up.
  • Everywhere art’s connection with transcendence is denied, laughed at
    • It’s architecture that truly wins here: it builds an environment
    • Even though his paintings are messed up in Brideshead, the actual buildings are okay. They are damaged, but he sees it only as the next stage in its history.
  • Bloomsbury canned
    • He is ashamed of his Roger Fry fire screen and sells it
    • B-bury seen as obvious and common by this time
  • His Painting
    • Charles does technical work that only involves lots of time rather than talent
    • His love of Brideshead leads to his job: painting noble houses of England
      • He had the fashionable opinions, moving from Ruskin to Fry, he admits, but underneath it all: “my sentiments at heart were insular and medieval,” a love of the baroque and romantic (82)
    • Apparently, he believes in art as means, not end (94), but what should it lead to?
    • His books symbolically allow him to possess these properties (Ryder’s County Seats, Ryder’s English Homes)
    • It’s mind-numbing, sentimental work
      • We shouldn’t be worshipping the past?
      • Or it’s the wrong way to understand them, as superficial glamor
    • He tries to break out, goes to Latin America to get his inspiration back
      • It’s a Romantic bid, or one worthy of Rimbaud and Gaugin
      • It represents faith in art
    • But it’s a failure. It only titillates narrow-minded society matrons.
      • Celia points out it’s like imperialism: “You see Charles lives for one thing—Beauty. I think he got bored with finding it ready-made in England; he had to go and create it for himself. He wanted new worlds to conquer” (267). You might say that because the depressingly instrumental and hygienic Celia says it, it’s inadmissable, but here’s the thing: I don’t care about intentionality here, but interpretation: that’s how the audience sees it, as finding new worlds to steal beauty from.
      • Blanche and he both admit it’s pretty much sentimental dribble merely transposed onto a different landscape
      • Says that it’s the view that’s wrong, not the subject
• Romanticism / Fantasy / Real Life
  • Charles enters a world of romance that he feels cured of once Sebastian is lost
    • He thus believes he is cured and on solid ground
    • But then he gets back in the whirl
  • He has a Second Round
    • In this round, there is also waste, but there is a new understanding
    • It’s not after all about destruction; nothing can truly leave you forever
  • He was in it for Love (magic, romance), then for Possession (satisfaction), and finally for Memories (history)
• Getting to Know People, esp. by art
  • Opera Glasses Metaphor
    • By sophisticated methods, you can see someone perfectly clearly
    • But you won’t be able to touch the person
    • It’s an illusion
  • Adrian Porson, the person closest to Lady M, writes a poem about her that doesn’t show her real personality at all
    • Art won’t let you get to know people
  • Although Cordelia’s chatter would help give him a key to the mystery, he’s thinking about his art
    • “I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s Renaissance.” (222)
    • It makes him think “You’ll fall in love,” taking care of Cordelia in one fell swoop, but we see that he’s wrong.
    • As an artist, he knows people even less than others
    • His art actually distracts him from actually existing humanity, instead leading him to mediated historical fantasies
• Modernity Parade
  • Roger Frye and Omega
  • Photography
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Gauguin
  • Anthropology
  • Billboards
  • Saussure
  • Telephones
  • “Criminal Types”
  • Determinism
• Style
  • Crazy-ass conceits: huge metaphors!
  • Narrator admits adulterating dialogue for reader’s ease, for convenience
• Love
  • As hints towards something great that you can never actually secure through love, but through which you see hints of it
• Rearranging Memories
• Appearance v Reality
  • Outer peace hides turmoil
  • In insulated spaces (the upper class atmosphere, like Captain’s dining room) you can’t hear the approaching storms (war, like the storm they sail through)
• Catholicism
  • It is seen to ruin a family through superstition
  • Catholic element makes this more than just about the end of traditional English culture that culminated in Edwardian period
    • If it were, the family would be C of E
  • So what’s going on?
    • Waugh must be tapping into something English before the Reformation
      • An England that survives from medieval times: about the heritage of all generations, not just Victorian
    • Or, he’s not talking about England, but about Europe
    • Or, he’s not really making an allegory
      • 1944: are you less willing to make an allegory now, Waugh?
  • But, keep in mind, the old Ryder notes something smart about religion
    • He admits he didn’t realize back then that religion could be seen as a coherent philosophy, as a type of history and tradition, or as pure beauty (87)
    • So, is the condemnation of religion condemning all those others? Or does it mean that religion isn’t to blame?
      • Otherwise, what separates Waugh from the Nazis? (ie, blaming religion)
• Language
  • Can’t express thought, actually
    • Thoughts are “inexpressible” but you can know them by sympathy
  • The Bishop on the ships, Saussure-like, notes that words are mere “conventional symbols” (247) being skeptical of which is the sign of the age
  • Words and Illness
    • Sebastian, when he’s supposedly mortally wounded, has broken a bone in his ankle “so small it hasn’t got a name”
    • Lord M is dying of “a long word,” Cara says, speaking of his heart ailment.
• Charm Kills.

Questions

• Handful of Dust
  • Also has hero escape to Central / South America
    • Both of them fail to have the revolution they’d wanted
    • Charles’ art is superficial, and Tony is doomed to read Dickens to a half-caste would-be tyrant in the bush
    • One wants to conquer knowledge, and the other beauty, by conquering the new land, but fail
  • Also shows how divorce won’t really solve anything, won’t make you happy
    • It’s just a new arrangement of the same bad stuff
  • Cruise ship = romantic flirtation (that won’t last, that’s a chimeric salvation)
• The Good Soldier and BH R
  • Both published around world war
  • Both contemplate the fall of European society
    • Both say that it’s the sacrifice of a better generation so that a worse generation might have room to live (the Hoopers of the world, he calls them)
  • Both use first-person memoir method
    • Moralistic asides are made: do we trust them?
  • Both thematize reinterpretation of life and memories
    • 79: “again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all
      our previous knowledge must be rearranged;” this is “a part of life itself”
  • What’s the difference?
    • GS committed to stylistic innovation
    • BH R more optimistic
    • GH horrific, whereas BH R more satiric
• Leisure Spaces
  • Places of sudden intimacy that wouldn’t otherwise happen
  • In public, you can tolerate things you wouldn’t in your private, domestic space
    • Lady Brideshead to be says she wouldn’t mind seeing Julia in London, but refuses to be in the same private home as her as her guest
  • Cruise Ship
    • Decoration: it’s American
      • This particular one isn’t rococo pretty: “huge without any splendour, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and preposterously magnified” with decorations “like the trade mark of a cake of soap whcih had been used once or twice” with everything the color of blotting-paper (236)
      • Designed by “sanitary engineer” (237)
      • “where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity” (237)
      • “No shadows” = no history
      • I think it’s an American vessel, though b/c of all the ice. Andrew says it might say US has the future
    • “He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.” (94)
      • Charles and Julia come together on the cruise ship.
      • 252: He knows where to look for her, where to pretend to happen upon her, because she knows where her room is and has access to public entrances (in this case, the elevator, which he hangs out at till she passes)
      • “It was the theme of the evening that we should all be seeing a lot of each other, that we had formed one of those molecular systems that physicists can illustrate. (244) (Now we know he’s used to them 235)
    • It’s an excuse for conspicuous consumption, presents and flowers everywhere (244, 250)
      • Julia asks what is it about a cruise ship that makes everyone act like a movie star, getting hair cuts, shaves, massages, champagne whenever you want
    • There’s even a criminal apprehended at the landing-stage! Echoes of Christie even without clear motivation! (263)
    • Bad Weather changes the situation completely: it creates intimacy unexpectedly
      • Sometimes because people are gone, esp Charles’ wife: “as though the place had been cleared for us, as though tact on a Titanic scale had sent everyone tiptoeing out” (255): seen as conventional politeness, but in extreme form
      • It is even more intimate than the regular extra-intimacy of cruise ships: 253-4: “Mind if I join you? Nothing like a bit of rough weather for bringing people together.”254: “But for this we might never have met. I’ve had some very romantic encounters at sea in my time,” says the nameless man they meet one night during storm, but never again after the party he has with them ends in him injuring himself badly, which actually leaves the space open for them to have sex in)
      • That’s when they actually have sex: 261
      • The few Seasick Days are used as a large metaphor for the coming storm of WWII: 247 (“The gale which, unheard, unseen, unfelt, in our enclosed and insulated world, had for an hour been mounting over us, had now veered and fallen full on our bows” 247)
  • Pastoral journey to Mexico and Central America just like Handful of Dust
• Problem: incoherent
  • You can’t get much conclusion out of this book: it’s rather incoherent
  • For example, says he’s over Ruskin, yet he goes to the Ruskin School of Art and approaches the arch. history of England like Ruskin
  • For example, you are not supposed to think Charles’ art quite a waste, but you aren’t supposed to respect it, either
  • Perhaps Waugh using some of the material of modernism without its stylistic experimentation, without its historical moment, is of necessity going to be botched. We need something new.
    • Allegory fails; it’s imperfect
    • Forster had managed it quite tidily….