"A panegyric preached over an empty coffin"

Waugh, or, the inevitable end of community

Julian Jiménez Heffernan

pp. 84-104

in: Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Julian Jiménez Heffernan (eds), Community in twentieth-century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

One of the plot-lines in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, described by the narrator as "Sebastian's drama" (167), closes with the image of the despondent young man living on half in, half out of a missionary "community" (Brideshead 289) near Carthage, one he had unsuccessfully tried to enter as a lay-brother.¹ This account of Sebastian searching for "rest in the sepulcher o religion" (Edmund Campion 72) epitomizes the narrator's tendency to assess aspects of the characters' identity and development in terms of their ability to enter or escape from pre-existing communities. This ability, moreover, is in the case of some characters—especially Charles, the homodiegetic narrator—supplemented with a yearning to conceive of new ways of communal co-existence. Brideshead Revisited thus shows a concern with community that is perfectly consistent with the sociological interest in communal configurations informing the mainstream of British nineteenth-century realist fiction. It is, in this restricted sense, an old-fashioned novel. Still, being old-fashioned is hardly an embarrassment when the old is also a good fashion. In fact, the fashion of Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope and Eliot constitutes a sophisticated narrative manner, a flexible textual device apt to internalize the kind of rhetorical stance enabling Goethe to intimate, in Die Wahlverwandschaften (1809), that marital relations are like chemical compounds, a tropological conjecture which helped place the conundrum of interpersonal relations—in short, the challenge, the what, how, where, when and whose of community—at the very center of Western fictional agenda. Predictably Brideshead Revisited also revisits the trope, with the tenor slightly altered and a little scientific updating:

Cited authors

Goethe Johann Wolfgang

Waugh Evelyn