| |
Also currently reading:
Bodleian MS Digby folios 37 recto -50 verso and 95 recto- 145 recto. I adore this page at Oxford where they have scanned digital facsimiles of their manuscipts at a fantastically detailed resolution.
Questions to Mull Over:
1. Why isn't everyone secretly in love with Benjamin Britten?
2. How did I manage to hate Earl Grey tea for twelve years of my life?
3. Why isn't eveything written in Carolingian Miniscule?
I haven't posted in a while, because I've been writing and generally trying to get back into the groove of the academic style in time for the fall term. This is a (very early) draft of the essay I'm most excited about:
“Peculiar Splendor”: The Aesthetic of Suffering in Brideshead Revisited.
“To Sebastian he said: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pincushion,’…” Anthony Blanche
Brideshead Revisited is not so much a novel of protracted nostalgia as it is one of hagiography. The character of Sebastian Flyte often assumes the revered aura and significance of a saint in the course of Charles Ryder’s remembrances. Anthony Blanche aptly characterizes this idolization by comparing Sebastian to his namesake, Saint Sebastian. He can be stuck “full of barbed arrows”, because he is a martyr and a testament to the lost cause of the English aristocratic lifestyle. But Blanche’s analogy works on several levels, and a comparison between the life and representation of Saint and dipsomaniac undergraduate is profitable in examining Brideshead Revisited’s spiritual, moral, and sexual implications.
Saint Sebastian’s life, as given in William Caxton’s first English edition of the Archbishop of Genoa’s lives of the saints, was quite a tumultuous one. After completing a number of Christian acts and miracles in secret, he revealed himself as a Christian to the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian promptly ordered that Sebastian be executed at the hands of the archers he had once commanded in the armies of Rome. The image of Sebastian bound to a tree or pillar and pierced with arrows, is the most common representation of his fate in Renaissance iconography*. Perhaps because of the visceral drama of the scene, Saint Sebastian was one of the most frequently used subjects for such paintings and frescos.
The iconography of Saint Sebastian is unique for several reasons. First, because the “suffering” saint sometimes does not appear to be suffering at all, and second, because his appearance is often quite emasculated and eroticized. Dürer’s “Young Man as Saint Sebastian” (c. 1505) and Boltraffio’s “St. Sebastian” are excellent examples of the former, while among the numerous examples of the latter, those of Giambattista Cima da Conegliano in the National Gallery in London, and Perugino’s many portrayals, serve to justify this conclusion as well. Sometimes pictured on a triptych juxtaposed with another, fully clothed and bearded saint, these hairless, scantily draped Sebastians, take on an air of hedonistic submissiveness*.
The artistic admiration of this pose common to Renaissance iconographers is also common to Waugh’s Charles Ryder. Sebastian Flyte’s suffering, like that of Saint Sebastian, is a thing to be fetishized. It is because Sebastian is doomed that he is lovely. He is “… entrancing with that epicene beauty, which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind” (26). Alcoholism appears to be a sin of his father, visited upon Sebastian as martyr of the Marchmain legacy of Catholicism, wealth, and propriety. While Brideshead is the scion of the family, it is Sebastian who bears its burdens. He tells Charles that it is “very difficult to be a Catholic” (75), but what he really means is that it is very difficult to be the Catholic, the aristocrat, the Marchmain. Penultimate in the era that is to see the apocalypse of their way of life, Sebastian’s hagiographer duly notes how he becomes the archetypal sufferer for all of his kind.
In his fall from grace, Sebastian Flyte, despite his great personal responsibility for his own decline, manages to appear through the lens of Charles Ryder’s fond remembrance as a passive and beatific victim of fate. Even when vomiting, “there is a kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian’s choice, in his extremity…” (25). No wonder Anthony Blanche wants to stick him full of arrows. But, one must now ask, are there ends besides those of class and church to all of this adorable suffering? Sebastian is just “so charming” by virtue of his sensualist self-martyrdom (45). Charming, in fact, in precisely the same way that Saint Sebastian is in Perugino’s piece at the Louvre. This Sebastian stands, ensconced by a Corinthian promenade and bright gardens, his glowing, nude and hairless form barely sheathed by a thoughtfully placed colored scarf. The scarf appears to be slipping, and the scant two arrows a mere accessory to this veritable Arcady of the submissive erotic. We see no blood on the marmoreal flesh of the saint, nor it is visible on the young student who is “the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty” (23). They have no need for the mess of the corporeal, for inelegant pain. They’re ravishing without it.
There’s a long way, however, between being ravishing and having sex. Many recent academic critics of Brideshead Revisited have been inclined to take an explicitly sexual reading of the homosocial relationship between Charles and Sebastian. Others dispute this claim, stating that the novel provides no concrete support for such a conclusion. My proposition would be, that, despite the delicious fun of controversy and debate, it doesn’t really matter what Waugh’s protagonists do in bed. What does matter is that Anthony Blanche’s comment opens an avenue for us as readers to see Charles’ remembrance as a hagiography. Sainthood, in the Flyte paradigm, may have a clearly sexual subtext, but this subtext serves only to enhance, not supplant, the quasi-religiosity of Charles’ affection for Sebastian. Homoerotic fetishization of both Sebastian the saint and Sebastian the undergraduate serves as a form of worship. Whether it is consummated or not is irrelevant, because what matters in Brideshead Revisited is the perceived nobility of suffering. Through his sainthood and beauty in Charles’ eyes, Sebastian is made a universal parable for a place, a people, and a time in the consciousness of England.
* Sebastian, it should be noted, is not said to have died from these arrow wounds. It is claimed that he was nursed back to health with the aid of the virgin Irene, and later ordered killed again by Diocletian, whereupon he was promptly beaten and his body thrown into the municipal sewer.
* See especially Bellini’s “Triptych of St. Sebastian” (c. 1460-64) and Filippino Lippi’s “Sts Sebastian, John the Baptist, and Francis”.
|
| | Posted 7/28/2005 1:12 AM - 3 Views - 6 eProps - 3 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
