Brideshead Revisited

I heaved myself out of bed to go to the global literature class today, which I missed last week. I can’t say I really enjoyed the book--the first I’ve actually read for this class. Gorgeously written but the characters are unappealing and I ultimately don’t understand some very basic things. Why did everyone hate Lady Marchmain, for example. I have to say, though, I understood a heck of a lot more than I understood when I was reading similar books as a college student. Partly because I understand more historical and cultural references than I would have then. I find that I enjoyed Tess's lecture notes more than the book itself. I randomly chose a selection from this week’s lecture:

"Chapter 4 brings another change of mood as they celebrate languor, which, for Charles belongs essentially to youth (well, at least a certain image of Georgian youth). Charles, as narrator, steps out of the past to emphasise how fond his memories are of this time. The house becomes almost a character. For Charles it is an aesthetic education; a whole new system of nerves are alive within him (p.74). Interestingly, the aesthetic is converted into the sensory or even sensuous. The crowning glory of the Baroque spectacle is the fountain, which Sebastian sets Charles to draw; an ambitious commission. The fountain (of youth, presumably) is to feature later in the novel in one of its most important scenes, so Waugh is rightly building up its significance early on.”

She said Waugh was a conservative Catholic who opposed Vatican II and who was racist, anti-Semitic, and classist. But a damn fine writer. She quoted a line from Yeats about “the filthy modern tide” to capture Waugh’s contempt for the present and infatuation with the past. I guess I’m a bit sympathetic on this count because I think it is part of the human condition to think the world in which we came of age was a finer, more civil, less brutish place than the world we inherit as adults.
1-24