Pressed duck!

The Season of Brideshead
Brideshead Deserted, Chapter 1
Now that meal. I've separated it out from the rest of chapter 1 because it is the turning point in the novel. It's all Sebastian up until Rex and Charles eat together and it's all Julia afterward.

And here is where I make enemies of some readers. A lot of people—I was one of them the first few times I read the book—take everything Charles tells us about this meal and about Rex at face value. We want Charles to be right and everyone else, especially Rex, to be wrong. It is a tribute to Waugh's genius that we do feel that way—that is the way he wants us to react. But he also expects us to be intelligent enough to recognize that there are problems with Charles' story. Remember that he is the sickly child and it is up to us to figure out what is wrong with him.

This meal offers us some powerful hints because Charles is both threatened and jealous of Rex and that effects how he presents the story.

The most blatant example of this is the way Charles presents Rex's tastes as flamboyant and even crass and, by implication, Charles' own tastes as subtle and refined.

Except that he orders pressed duck! A pressed duck is a very special item. It requires a specially slaughtered bird which is still in its blood that that is then partially cooked. This bird is brought from the kitchen and the final preparation is done in front of the diners. It is pressed in a mechanical device that pushes the juices out and these are cooked along with the meat. This is one very ostentatious choice.

As he recounts the meal, Charles mocks Rex for the kinds of things he hears—about death and bankruptcy—and yet he wraps the tale up with a bit of gossip of his own about how the wedding didn't some off as Rex had planned. It's the sort of thing Charles hears.

And for all his insistence that he doesn't want to hear about what Rex has to say about himself and what he is doing, what Charles really doesn't want to hear about is Rex and Julia. Even recounting it all these years later, he doesn't want to do anymore than cite disjointed phrases.

Julia has been slowly looming up in the story and she will explode, fully blossomed in the next chapter. We know that Charles is sexually attracted to her. But he doesn't seem to really want her until she is linked to someone else. This is very Proustian. In Proust, people fall in love and stay in love driven by jealousy and insecurity. As we see read about how Julia falls in love with Rex over the next few paragraphs and then of how Charles falls in love with her, we might keep this in mind. How much of this relationship is driven by jealousy and insecurity? And  we might reconsider, in retrospect, how important this jealousy and insecurity was to Charles falling in love with Sebastian.

Finally, for I will be brief-ish today, let's consider two criticisms that Charles directs towards Rex, two sneers really.

The first concerns Brenda Champion. Charles says that Rex owes his place in the world to Brenda Champion. She is the one who got him access to society. And he further says that once she was no longer of any use to him, Rex loses interest in her.

The second thing Charles says of Rex is that he sets about acquiring Julia as if she were a bit of real property he was trying to get the best deal for.

Keep those two things in mind and see if they might apply to anyone else as the story goes along.

By the way: I will be posting on Brideshead tomorrow.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.