"You see, it's all happened before"

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter two
One of the deceptive things about reading any old book is that things change. The last chapter, for example, was set on a grand old ocean liner. We look back on such a thing with nostalgia, everything acquires a brown tint like an old photograph. At the time, however, the ocean liner was the latest thing. It was the symbol of everything that was new and stylish. Waugh underlines this by having Julia say that there is something about it that makes everyone behave like a film star. He underlines this by having the Hollywood director and Celia's suggestion that Charles talk to him about set design while describing the boat itself like a Hollywood film set. And he underlines this by talking about the modern conveniences such as there only being chilled or hot water on board.

And then the storm to show that even such very modern luxuries are fragile.

And that is perhaps the most important thing for us to remember when reading this book. It describes a period between storms. Between one horrid war and another even more horrid. Millions had died in the first and they had imagined they were fighting a war to end war. And then here we are again.

Painful repetitions haunt the novel.

A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be born—that was how it felt ....

We can imagine this a little. We know what it is like to fall into the same bad habit again and again. The sister you always have a fight with and you start off every time meaning not to and then things start to go off the rails like they always do. The frustration we have meaning to change some bad habit, get out and exercise, but we do just what we always do instead.

That's the sense that Waugh is counting on and I think he achieves very well. We read this chapter with an awful sense of dread. That is why people so often remember the first part as being about halcyon days in Oxford and the second about this horrible loss. In fact, there is very little happiness in the first part. There at least seems to be more in the second part. But we read every page waiting for that blow.

And so, we reach the very last page of the chapter and read this:

'Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.'

And we think, 'Oh crap, it's contra mundum again; Julia's demons are haunting her the same way Sebastian's did him and now the same horrid things are going to happen again.' So, from now on, nothing can be as beautiful as those few fleeting moments of bliss in the first part because we've been through this before. Somewhere along the line someone explained to us that 'et in Arcadia ego' was death speaking and he was saying that even in our most blissful moments he is already there and now we can't pretend. We cower like a regularly beaten dog waiting for it all to go wrong again.

The flaneur
In chapter two of book one and again here in book three, Waugh relies heavily on a realist technique originally developed by Flaubert. A flaneur is a like a loiterer only with, as a great Muriel Sparks title has it, someone loitering with intent.

Picture a young woman in a bar. She is hoping something will happen. She wants a magical meeting leading to romance, adventure or maybe just dirty sex. So she sits there in sexy clothes hoping the right person will approach her. Meanwhile she is recording what is happening around her in a bored way. She isn't like a camera because a camera doesn't care and she cares, she just doesn't particularly care about what is happening just now. So she runs through the details of what is happening in an impassive way. The details seem random. The walls were green; a middle-aged woman who didn't look like the type to sit in a bar alone was looking for something in her purse, perhaps money, maybe her cell phone so she could call the friend who was late; over in the corner, two young men were sitting at the table of an older man she thought might be gay and she wondered if they were negotiating something or, and she worried about this a bit, if they were setting him up so they could rob him or even just beat him up; in the background, as if her thoughts had caused them to respond, she heard a police car coming down the boulevard its siren wailing. Suddenly, the siren got louder, and she turned to see that it was because the door had opened and she saw three girls her own age who had wandered in. They stood there at the door and scanned the room. They were girls from her college and they too had somehow decided to enter this bar, a bar the students never went to because it had a reputation. She noticed one of the girls eyes settle on her and felt herself being assessed. The other two girls don't notice her but one of them said, "Let's get out of here," and they all laughed as if they all had simultaneously decided that they could never imagine sitting in such a place; as if they couldn't imagine allowing their skin to touch the upholstery.

That's the style. It's a familiar style now, I just made that paragraph up. It's a realist style

Waugh kicks the style in in a big way this chapter. And so we float along as the Duke of Clarence comes in and we see that he is a twit. And then Mr. Samgrass makes a brief appearance. And then the critics. And then a photographer. And then and then. All the time we are waiting for a moment with Julia again. But then Anthony shows up and delivers another remonstrance just like he does in chapter two of book one. And if you go back to that chapter, you'll notice that Waugh uses the flaneur technique there too.

Although Waugh moves us much faster here. he takes two whole chapters to get from the two remonstrances in chapter two to the train ride to Brideshead at the end of chapter three with the cutlery jingling. Here that takes only one very short chapter to get from remonstrance to a train ride with, and this repetition is no accident, cutlery jingling. The seeming halcyon days will arrive with chapter three this time. This, of course, increases our sense of doom. The last time we went to hell in a hand cart, this time we're on the express elevator.

Like in book one, the days are significant. This time it's Friday. The entire thing happens on Friday. The key moment is when Charles, sometime mid afternoon on Friday (What other event happened mid afternoon on Friday?) remembers his last exhibition when he had detected Celia in adultery. And he tells us:

 I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.

Do you believe that? I don't. He has let slip his own, repeated affairs earlier. This sounds more like a man who has convinced himself that he has been wronged when he was really just looking for an excuse to leave Celia all along. That brief, sly lapse of hers. "Manumission" means to be set free from enslavement and Charles was no slave. Following this moment, there is a sort of trip to the underworld and a return.And then a train ride.

But things aren't exactly the same. This time Charles is impervious to Anthony's criticism. Like last time, he recognizes that Anthony has a point but now he doesn't care. It's well-reasoned abuse but the Charles who hears it this time has hardened himself to life.

And I think that is the sleight of hand here. Waugh the conjurer has us paying attention to Julia with his right hand while he pulls a switch with his left. We're all worried about what is up with Julia; with her personal demons and how they are going to tear her and Charles apart. Meanwhile, though, something is happening with Charles; something in him, as Anthony says, has died.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.