"Ryder" and "Charles"
Ryder
Many of the names in this book are not accidental. They all have special significance. Sometimes the significance is explained by looking up the relevant saint. Aloysius and Sebastian for example. Sometimes the significance is explained by looking up another fictional character, for example, perhaps obviously in "Cordelia" but also in "Charles' As I will argue further down. Sometimes the significance is explained by considering the meaning of the word that is the name; "Boy" Mulcaster, Sebastian "Flyte" or Charles "Ryder" for example. Boy is boyish, Sebastian is in flight and Charles is a rider.
A rider as opposed to a walker I mean. He is a guy on a horse, which is to say, a guy on a cheval which makes him a chevalier and that requires him to be chivalrous. All through Brideshead, Waugh plays with various romantic ideals and the one associated with Charles is knightly behaviour. This is a recurring theme in Waugh and some of the most surprising characters aspire to it. Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags for example.
The thing that really differentiates Charles from Hooper in the prologue, for example, is that "Hooper was no romantic."
And Charles is a romantic who aspires to be knightly. We can see this right through the story. He comes to like Hooper not because Hooper is likable but because the new CO fails to treat Hooper according to the proper standards of knightly behaviour and, in this one thing, Hooper shows himself to be nobler than the CO.
All through the book, Charles repeatedly shows himself to be the one (almost the only one) who can always be counted upon to do the chivalrous thing. He treats women in a chivalrous fashion, he remembers that the priest should receive a donation for his duties, he is the one who can be called upon by Julia and sent on a quest for Sebastian and, when called, he says yes.
But knightly behaviour is a tricky thing. It's tricky, first of all, because knights act. They don't introspect. In the Chanson de Roland, if Roland comes into a burning house where there is a damsel tied to a post and a dragon and three soldiers to prevent him from rescuing her, he doesn't think about the best way to proceed. He just cuts the dragons head off and stabs the three soldiers, grabs the girl and runs. He has an idea, bravery, and he acts according to it.
But Roland's life gets more complicated as time goes on. In the earliest telling of his story, he was probably just a killing machine. He fought for the king and proved his worth by slaughtering great massses of bad guys. But then he becomes a Christian knight. Now he has to slaughter great masses of bad guys only he has to do so as a Christian and you can see how that might make his life more complex what with "Thou shalt not kill" and all. But that isn't all. After being a Christian killing machine for a while, he then becomes a Christian killing machine who is a courtly lover. And now he has to love women in a courtly but definitely erotic way and you can see how that might be complicated if to so much as look at a woman with lust is to have already committed adultery.
Charles Ryder is trying very hard to fulfill all these ideals in the modern world. (He's not the only knightly character, by the way. There is another who is even better than him at this even though Charles doesn't see it that way. I said in my last post that we cannot trust Charles' version enough to take it at face value. There is another character that he sneers at and he wants us to sneer at too who is actually also an exemplary knight.)
and "Charles"
Why Charles? I think it is because of Charles Swann from Proust. (There are a number of allusions to Proust in Brideshead and I'll get to at least two of them as I go through the book.)
Waugh had mixed feelings about the two men generally taken to be the greatest modern novelists—James Joyce and Marcel Proust. He thought that both started well but that they both ended up writing books that were insane (Waugh's word). We might think Waugh was just being provocative here but I think he really meant it. Waugh likes the modernist techniques of Proust but thinks that Proust uses them to reach an end that is crazy. Relevant disclosure, I think Waugh is right about this.
For the benefit of those who haven't bashed their way through the first volume of Proust, let me explain what the relevant technique is. Proust wrote his great novel in part as a response to a critic named Saint-Beuve. Saint-Beauve said that if you really want to understand an author, you needed to understand their biography. Proust shows us that the actual biographical details of a story are not important.
Here is how he does it. The first part of Swann's Way is the story of the narrator's youth and his obsessive pursuit of his mother's good night kiss. He wants this kiss so badly that he is willing to risk everything—the respect of his parents, the mockery of servants, what little standing he has with other adults in his life—in order to get it. By plotting and scheming he gets the kiss he desires but loses something else in the process. Then he switches gears for the second part and tells us that he is going to tell us a a story about Charles Swann that took place before the narrator was born. It is a very different story; it is the story about Swann's falling in love with a courtesan named Odette de Crecy and how jealousy makes him value and treasure this woman, a woman who can be had by anyone and has been had by practically everyone, above everything else he has in his life. He is willing to risk everything in order to get her.
I trust you see the point. We have two completely different biographies and yet the child Marcel is able to tell the story of the adult Charles Swann because the jealousy and insecurity that drives them both to love is the same. A good writer, Proust shows us, can take a character and put that character into completely different life stories. Therefore, knowing the events of the writer's life is pointless.
By the way, there is yet another twist. In part three of Swann's Way Charles is married and in love but our narrator is also, we realize with a jolt, now in love with Odette and, more surprising, so are we. For it is Odette, the woman anyone could have, who is the real hero of In Search of Lost Time. She, and she alone, lives up to the standards of art.
Anyway, back to Charles Ryder and the other characters in Brideshead. One trick Waugh uses several times over is to plant very similar characters into very different biographies. I've already hinted at one; there is another knightly character. But there are other pairs and we should keep an eye out for them.
To some extent, biography is just a screen in this novel. The natural events of the characters lives, the things we would normally take to be the things that define them, are often irrelevant because there are other characters living similar lives inside different biographies. Rather, as Waugh drops broad hints all over the place, the really important events in their lives are supernatural events, specifically the important events are God's acts of grace towards them.
(This telling the same story with different lives inside them is not new by the way. Tomorrow I will take a huge digression to give an example of the same from the greatest English novelist. I mean of course Charlotte Collins. That name may not mean anything to you but, trust, me, you've read at least one of her books or you've seen it acted on screen.)
The first post in the Brideshead series is here.
The next post is here.
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