“To Sebastian he said: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pincushion,’…” Anthony Blanche
Brideshead Revisited is not so much a novel of protracted nostalgia as it is one of hagiography. The character of Sebastian Flyte often assumes the revered aura and significance of a saint in the course of Charles Ryder’s remembrances. Anthony Blanche aptly characterizes this idolization by comparing Sebastian to his namesake, Saint Sebastian. He can be stuck “full of barbed arrows”, because he is a martyr and a testament to the lost cause of the English aristocratic lifestyle. But Blanche’s analogy works on several levels, and a comparison between the life and representation of Saint and dipsomaniac undergraduate is profitable in examining Brideshead Revisited’s spiritual, moral, and sexual implications.
Saint Sebastian’s life, as given in William Caxton’s first English edition of the Archbishop of Genoa’s lives of the saints, was quite a tumultuous one. After completing a number of Christian acts and miracles in secret, he revealed himself as a Christian to the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian promptly ordered that Sebastian be executed at the hands of the archers he had once commanded in the armies of Rome. The image of Sebastian bound to a tree or pillar and pierced with arrows, is the most common representation of his fate in Renaissance iconography*. Perhaps because of the visceral drama of the scene, Saint Sebastian was one of the most frequently used subjects for such paintings and frescos.
The iconography of Saint Sebastian is unique for several reasons. First, because the “suffering” saint sometimes does not appear to be suffering at all, and second, because his appearance is often quite emasculated and eroticized. D
пятница, 15 апреля 2011
contra mundum