Brideshead Revista’d: Bacchus, Beelzebub and “the Botanical Gardens”
by Simon Whitechapel
A fractal repeats its characteristic pattern on endlessly deeper levels. The pattern may be very simple or very complex, and though to call Evelyn Waugh a “fractal novelist” in the latter sense is presently no more than a sophomoric conceit, there are undoubtedly genuine mathematical patterns to be uncovered in his work by future researchers.
These researchers may discover that the “fractal” of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) repeats its pattern of meaning at deeper and deeper levels, and that the superficial level is contradicted by the deeper, and the deeper by the deeper still. To see one possible example, seize and tug the thread of Sebastian’s Oxonian “ivy.” After his first full meeting with the Protestant Charles Ryder, the Catholic Sebastian Flyte announces:
“I must go to the Botanical Gardens.”
“Why?”
“To see the ivy.”
It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.
“I’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens,” I said.
“Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There’s a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don’t know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.”[1]
What is the meaning of the ivy? It seems an obvious symbol of Sebastian’s love of nature, but may also represent his flight into hedonistic paganism: it is closely associated with Bacchus, god of wine and revelry, who wore a wreath of ivy and bound his enmaddening wand, or thyrsos, with ivy and vine. Bacchus is often portrayed as hermaphroditic,[2] and Waugh later describes how Sebastian’s beauty has foreshadowed that of his sister Julia: “She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and strangeness.”[3] And so Charles’s visit to the Botanical Gardens and its ivy may represent his initiation into the cult of hermaphroditic Bacchus and his break with his previous life and tastes.
After the visit, Charles describes how, “When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.”[4] The screen is “painted” with “a Proven