Intertextual Links: Proust's and Waugh's Novels | Lecture notes Architecture

EVELYN

WAUGH

NEWSLETTER

Volume

18,

Number

3 Winter, 1984

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST: PROUSTIAN ELEMENTS

IN

EVELYN WAUGH'S

BRIOESHEAD REVISITED

By Richard

G.

Hodgson

University of British

Columbia

Les vrais paradis son! les

paradis qu'on a perdus.

Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouve

It has been acknowledged

for

some time that Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945)

bears a number of intertextual relationships to Marcel Proust's A

Ia

recherche du temps perdu

(1913-22),

in

other words, that the English novelist consciously (and perhaps unconsciously

as

well) incorporated

into

the fabric of his novel a significant number of Proustian elements. Styl-

istically, of course, what Waugh himself called the "rhetorical and ornamental language"' of

Brideshead Revisited

strongly

resembles the ornate and

highly

polished style

of

much of A

Ia

Recherche. But apart from the question of style, many readers

of

Waugh's novel have remarked

that the allusions

to

Proust's

work

in Brideshead Revisited are much more

subtly

integrated into

the novel than the

two

specific references to Proust which the novel

contains.'The

reader familiar

with Proust who delves

into

the fictional universe

of

Brideshead Revisited cannot help but share

David Lodge's

opinion

that

"the

whole novel is heavily Proustian in feeling."' In a very short but

suggestive article published in 1975 and entitled "Brideshead,

or

Proust and Gide Revisited,"'

Francis Heck pointed

out

some

of

the most obvious thematic similarities -including

childhood

innocence, death, and homosexuality -and

drew

a

number

of

other parallels between the

two

works, but the full extent to

which

Waugh used Proust's novel as a model has never been fully.

examined. The purpose

of

this study is to show that the Proust ian elements in Brideshead Revisited

are to

be

found

throughout

the novel

to

such

an

extent that echoes

of

the imaginary world

of

A

Ia

Recherche pervade the

world

of

Brideshead in many different ways and at many different

levels.

Probably the most obviously Proustian element

of

Brideshead Revisited has to do with the

functioning

of

the human

memory

and with the various ways in which the past encroaches upon

the present, however irretrievably lost that past may be. When, in the dark days

of

World War II, the

Narrator

of Brideshead, Charles Ryder, hears the name

of

Brideshead, his memories of the past,

"the phantoms

of

those haunted late years,"' begin to come back to him by the same process

of

involuntary memory

which

enables the Narrator of A

Ia

Recherche to retrieve his past and to

transform it,

as

Charles does with his, into a work

of

art. It is interesting that it

is

especially in the

passages

of

Brideshead in

which

Charles evokes his memories

of

Oxford and

of

his earlier days

at Brideshead, the passages most directly linked to what the Narrator

of

A

Ia

Recherche calls

"!'immediate, delicieuse et totale deflagration du souvenir,"' that the style becomes particularly

Proustian. It

is

also interesting that what

is

retrieved from the past in both novels

is

described in

terms

of

both space and time. In Waugh's novel, the emphasis is on space (Brideshead re-visited),

but

of

course the return to Brideshead immediately brings back to Charles a flood

of

memories

tied

to

a very specific

point

in time. In Proust's novel, it

is

primarily time which

is

regained (Le

Temps re-trouve),

but

this retrieval

of

le

temps

perdu

is

described

throughout

A

Ia

Recherche in

spatial terms (Com bray, Venice, "ville

et

jardins").7 Clearly, time al]d space in Brides head Revisited,

as

in A

Ia

Recherche, are related to each other and at the same time to the eminently Proustian

theme

of

memory.

In addition to the remembrance of things past, Waugh indulges

throughout

Brides head, in

another

very Proustian activity, the description and analysis

of

social change, not only at the

level

of

what Proust calls "le kaleidoscope

social"'

but also with respect to more profound and

long-lasting modifications in the social hierarchy.

Although

it is not

of

the same dimensions,

Waugh's

portrait

of

the society

of

his time

is

remarkably similar to Proust's.

It

is not

difficult

to

see

that

Waugh is primarily interested, like Proust, in the

upper

classes and in their evolving

relationships with the

other

segments

of

society. Waugh, like Proust, obviously deplores many

of

the changes

which

European society has undergone since the Industrial Revolution and in

this respect,

as

in others, shares the French novelist's nostalgia

for

the past. It

is

this preoccupation

with the realities

of

present-day society, in relation to the much more stable social structures

of

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