3What are the underlying relations between Brideshead Revisited, Dante’s and Rossetti’s works? How can a new and modern work emerge from those connections? Those questions will be tackled through the exploration of Waugh’s novel as a palimpsest in which metamorphoses and re-presentations are at work.

Palimpsests

4In its form and contents Evelyn Waugh’s novel becomes a chamber of echoes in which ‘[. . .] his ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously’ (Eliot, 14). This ‘historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity’ (ibid.). Waugh and Eliot are not usually considered by critics as sharing the same views on literary form and the values of their time, but they appear to be reconciled on the issue of the role played by intertextuality—although Waugh’s use of it tends to be read as an expression of his conservatism. Stepping aside from this reading of Waugh’s works, this article intends to consider the author as a conservationist or a curator, rather than a conservative prig. The novel is thus seen as part of cultural and literary continuum which has ‘been going on for nearly two thousand years’ (310). More precisely, the novel acts as a museum in which tradition is preserved and re-written.

8The picture illustrates the Vita Nuova embodying symbolically the death of Beatrice as treated in that work. The picture is not intended at all to represent death, but to render it under the semblance of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated at a balcony overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven […]. You will remember how Dante dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her death, and for this reason I have introduced it as my background, and made the figures of Dante and Love passing through the street, and gazing ominously at one another, conscious of the event; while the bird, a messenger of death, drops the poppy between the hands of Beatrice. She, through her shut lids, is conscious of a new world as expressed in the last words of the Vita Nuova—‘that blessed Beatrice who now gazes continually at His countenance’. (Quoted in Waugh, 131.)

9Rossetti’s painting represents Beatrice in ecstasy and her soul departing from earth leaving behind Dante and earthly love to join god. She sits in the foreground, her face turned heavenwards and her eyes closed, as though she were about to receive holy communion. The allegories of earthly love—the figure of Love itself and Dante—and Death—the flower and the bird—are transcended and kept in her shadow or in the background, thus creating a chiaroscuro which puts Beatrice’s bliss in the foreground. The painting offers two levels of interpretation. It is not only Beatrice who is portrayed but also Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s wife and model. The woman in the centre can be seen as the embedding of three different characters: Beatrice, Elizabeth and Elizabeth as Beatrice. Like Dante, Rossetti refused to accept the death of his loved one. Waugh reports that, after Elizabeth’s death, ‘Rossetti became convinced that she was not really dead; she was in a trance, the result of the laudanum’ (Waugh, 110). She, too, had attained eternal life.

11Jeremiah’s, Dante’s and Rossetti’s experiences are indeed recognisable in Brideshead Revisited. Because the connection with Waugh’s work is not obvious in the diegesis—except for one common feature: the phrase from the Lamentations—the reader has to search for those echoes since, as the epigraph suggests: ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she, they are not they’. Likewise, Antoine Compagnon proposes that there is a kind of depersonalisation in the process of quoting: ‘Composant des monstres, je finis par accepter la fatalité de l’échec et de l’imperfection. Rien ne se crée. [. . .] Cela ne ressemble plus à rien; je ne m’y reconnais pas moi-même’ (Seconde main, 16). In creating Charles Ryder, Waugh made a portrait of multidimensionality. The protagonist occupies three different functions in the narration. He is ‘Ryder’, the homodiegetic older narrator; ‘Charles’, the younger character—R. M. Davis uses the character’s first and last names to make the distinction clear—as well as ‘the intermediate I’ who ‘interpose[s] himself between the ‘now I’ and the ‘then I’ ‘(quoted in Cook, 198). Moreover, the narrator and the characters of the novel are not mere beings acting in the field of a particular novel. They are, as it were, personifications of archetypal themes, personalities and actions in a given culture and have counterparts in it. Waugh purposely cultivated those echoes as a means to express his attachment to tradition.

12Charles Ryder turns to religion ‘for the sake of the woman [he] loved’ (322). Julia becomes his guide, like Beatrice was to Dante. In the three works, the women characters are pictured through the filter of the artists’ devotion to them. The novel makes clear that they remain artistic creations: Beatrice is not Beatrice, Elizabeth is not Beatrice, Julia is not Beatrice.

Metamorphoses

14The fountain on the terrace at Brideshead, one of Charles’s early subjects, is a miscellaneous arrangement of sculptures. ‘Tropical vegetation’ grows beside ‘wild English ferns’, there are ‘camels and cameleopards’; it is overlooked by an ‘Egyptian obelisk’ (79) and was ‘weathered two hundred years by the suns of Naples’ (317). Charles, through his drawing, becomes imbued with the history of the fountain and its hyperbolic aspect. This display of a variety of elements acts as a ‘life giving spring’ (80) whose excess throws the beholder into a creative trance. The artist becomes a chamber of echoes within which space and time are abolished. Although he had chosen, at Oxford, to follow the ‘puritanism of Roger Fry’ instead of the ‘puritanism of Ruskin’, his stay at Brideshead awakens ‘sentiments’ in him which ‘at heart were insular and medieval’ (79). A few years later, as he paints Marchmain House—which stands as another token of tradition—, Charles imagines himself walking ‘the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet’ (213). His own contribution to the endurance of tradition emerges from art again, when he becomes an architectural painter and makes ‘portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased’ (216)—his vocation, characteristically, was inspired by the success following his drawing of Marchmain House. The first step towards transcendence is made through art, material objects becoming permanent signs and symbols through artistic creation.

17At first, God’s mercy appears as a threat which lingers over the characters. Cordelia says of those who have turned away from religion: ‘God won’t let them go for long’ (212); ‘He brings them back to Him with a twitch upon the thread’ (212). This is precisely what Waugh is doing to his characters. The author typically acts as a deus ex machina, his story’s twist representing the twitch. The characters go through a phase of anagnorisis which leads them to look back on their previous acts. The twitch is above all metaphorical, a mental process of re-membering—as in putting back together the various parts of their selves.

18Charles instantly recollects the signs he had taken for threats and sees them with the eyes of a redeemed man—somebody who has reconciled sacred and profane: ‘The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley’ (324). Charles’s old world has collapsed but a new and better one is born out of the ruins, harmonious and immaculate. Faith in god’s grace—and, more largely, maturation—destroys illusions and gives access to bliss. In the end, Ryder’s spirits are revitalised and he sees his surroundings with a renewed joy: ‘“You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” said the second-in-command’ are the last words of the novel, wiping out the pessimism of the prologue.

19On a first level, Waugh’s catechism seems to submerge the text, annihilating the possibility of a metaphorical reading. His purpose, in this regard, could be more linked to religious propaganda than to artistic creation. But this would be without taking into account the richness of Waugh’s characterization, which creates a moral chiaroscuro. As in Graham Greene’s works, the characters are confronted to a choice which reflects the complexity of the human mind and how it can be cleft in two when confronted to a dilemma.

Re-presentations

20Some characters of Brideshead Revisited stand out as paradoxical icons. Lady Marchmain and two of her children—Cordelia and Sebastian—form a kind of Trinity although the narrator gives an image of them which appears as a negative—in the photographic meaning of the word—to an icon. The relation between the representation of the icon and the personality of the characters is one of antithesis. However worldly and remote from holiness Cordelia’s, Sebastian’s and their mother’s deeds might seem, these characters are nevertheless considered as saintly by the others, including the narrator. This unusual choice is Waugh’s way to present how human beings can be torn apart between morality and immorality, past and present, continuity and change. Human fate, to Waugh, seems to be to live in limbo. To him, the mind is unfathomable. One can only record what one sees from the outside. This belief has its stylistic counterpart in his works. Refusing psychological realism, which the author considered as illusory, the focalization remains external, dialogue prevails. Thus, the character of Lady Marchmain remains an ‘enigma’, as Waugh himself confesses in a letter to his publisher (quoted in Davis, 153). The key to this mystery might be to consider her as the representation of a saint, a charismatic idol before whom the others kneel or whom the others desecrate.

21Sebastian’s case is the thorniest of all. Is he the charming boy who has ‘a kind word for everyone’ Anthony Blanche has warned Charles against (51)? Is he a degenerated, ‘half-heathen’ (86) dipsomaniac, or a ‘real Samaritan’ (206), ‘very near and dear to God’ (293)? A thorough understanding of his personality and relation to religion may be achieved by regarding him as a kind of alter ego to Cordelia. She says herself, talking about her brother: ‘there are usually a few odd hangers-on in a religious house, you know; people who can’t quite fit either to the world or the monastic rule—I suppose I’m something of the sort myself’ (293). In fact, Sebastian’s main problem—expressed through his dipsomania—comes from the fact that he lives in a perpetual limbo, unable to grow up, to step out of Arcadia and acknowledge his faith as something more than a ‘lovely idea’ (84). He is ‘in love with his own childhood’ (100), yet he is redeemed by his love of god. Sebastian can thus relapse into Arcadia during his drinking bouts but his devotion to god, while he is in Africa, is flawless. He cannot be considered as living in sin: like Beatrice who gives up her earthly existence, he leads a quasi ascetic life, refusing to eat (289) and, as it were, letting his body vanish to become pure spirit.

23But above all, he is the reincarnation, as it were, of Saint Aloysius. This is an illustration of what R. M. Davis calls Waugh’s ‘shifting emphasis from sociology to eschatology’ (Davis, Forms of His Time, 84). Sebastian’s ‘forerunner’ (245) was his teddy bear Aloysius, an image of the saint who, although he was himself ill, devoted his life to the care of the sick. As Cordelia puts it: ‘no one is ever holy without suffering’ (294).

24Ryder is not only a narrator, he is also a painter who endeavours to depict events, people and places. From different points of view, he can thus be seen as being in charge of—narratorial and pictorial—representation. His narration is pervaded by pictorial references as he sees the world with a painter’s eyes. His portrayal of the object of his love produces at times an ‘effet tableau’ (Louvel, 23): the narration gives the reader the impression that he is beholding a painting. But, in Waugh’s novel, the vision is ephemeral and movement resumes almost at once. The lengthy effet tableau has been superseded by snap shots. The narration thus bridges the gap between tradition and modernity: the imagery remains traditional—evocative of the Fine Arts—but the technique is definitely modern.

25Ryder’s first acquaintance with Sebastian leaves a long-lasting imprint in the narrator’s memory. Ryder recalls: ‘my first sight of him was in the door of Germer’s’ (30). The moment attains eternity as it is transformed into a picture—in the modern meaning of the term, designating a photograph—, Sebastian being framed by the door casing. Sebastian keeps the status of pictorial representation throughout the novel. But unlike Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Sebastian is Janus-headed: he is character and painting. It is he—not an image of him on canvas—who undergoes the changes wrought by his vices: ‘drink [. . .] seemed to wither Sebastian’ (206). Charles, in ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, strives to give stability and eternity to his ‘enchanted surroundings’ (35). As the narration tries to capture Sebastian in a frozen image, he constantly escapes to go back to life. On their first meeting, Sebastian appears framed again—in Charles’s window—but only for an instant, after which he falls out of the picture, ‘leaning forward well into the room’ (31).

26Drawing mental pictures of people is the expression of Ryder’s quest for stability and of his fight against the flight of time. But the characters seem to elude this restriction. Some pictures are forever evanescent or incomplete. Julia comes to prevail in Charles’s life, as though she had taken over Sebastian to perform a part he could not have fulfilled. Ryder remembers: ‘as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand out clear and firm’ (172). The visual imagery is a constant feature of the novel. Here, Sebastian’s decrepit picture has become antiquated and his replaced by Julia’s brand new and tangible one.

27The descriptive passages devoted to Julia, as Charles becomes more and more involved with her, render her under the semblance of an icon. Unlike Sebastian, Lady Marchmain and Cordelia who are presented under a shifting light, Julia’s character sustains Ryder’s picture of her. She becomes Beatrice, the beautiful woman who acts as a guide towards God. She has the looks of the women in Renaissance paintings, with her ‘full quattrocento loveliness’ (210), and is an ageless figure of eternity, being ‘neither child or woman’ (173). She ‘live[s] apart in a little world’ (174). Although she comes back to the world during her affair with Charles, the event itself comforts her to her position on a pedestal. At the beginning of their relationship, Charles sees her differently, ‘not at all Florentine, not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself’ (227–28). His love for her has brought her back to the realm of humanity. Her descent from the pictorial sphere goes hand in hand with her apostasy.

29But Julia cannot be framed and worshipped. She is made of flesh and blood and, like Cordelia, is meant to live in the world. She puts her holiness into acts and becomes a guide on earth towards Heaven: unlike Beatrice, who is already in Paradise, Julia accompanies her admirer in the world during the whole experience.

30Through the analysis of the different echoes present in Brideshead Revisited, a characteristic pattern of the novel is revealed. The leitmotiv offers a variety of interpretations. In the same way, Waugh’s characters are complex and their personalities are often double-sided. Sebastian’s ‘holiness’ can thus appear questionable at first glance and his presentation as a saint has left many readers at a loss. Waugh chooses to picture a process of maturation, the inner struggles at work in some of the characters rather than unfailing devotion. The novel is thus strewn with paradoxes which convey the presence of two—complementary rather than contradictory—sides within a same character. This peculiar status is expressed in the title of the novel. The phrase ‘sacred and profane memories’ (my emphasis) does not foretell definite evolution from one to the other. Moreover, the term ‘sacred’ comes first and thus does not stand as the conclusion of a movement. Rather, ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are juxtaposed, put on the same level, which seems to imply that one aspect can be found in the other. Although some characters go towards the same purpose and eventually find redemption, they are never entirely sacred or completely profane. Charles needs a guide to evolve from modernism to traditional and, more specifically, timeless values.

31The wistful tone of Ryder’s descriptions, the way he dwells on his time at Oxford show his attachment to his listless youth itself—not only because this time was a ‘forerunner’ in his evolution. Brideshead Revisited’s obvious catechism becomes, through an anamorphosic process, a reminiscence and a journey into a forgotten Golden Age—that of youth. Waugh’s novel, Rossetti’s painting, Dante’s poetry and Jeremiah’s lament can thus be appreciated for their melancholy evocation and re-calling of a long-gone, cherished past. In this regard, a-temporal Arcadia stands as a pendant to Heaven.