On Evelyn Waugh's 'Decline and Fall'

Evelyn Waugh’s book ‘Decline and Fall’ was actually quite an entertaining piece to read (especially after all these rather long, end-of-the-world, rather difficult texts of the past weeks. The name obviously resembles the famous book ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ by Edward Gibbon. The character who is most interesting for us architects (in the being) is a man who calls himself Professor Silenus. Now, at first I actually thought this was a pun, a play with the sound of the word as it actually sounds a bit like ‘silliness’. This kind of fits the somewhat silly behaviour when he hasn’t moved for hours except for his arm and jaw that mimic the movements of eating a cookie although he had actually finished eating it by that time. But after doing some research I found out that the name is actually derived from Greek mythology in which Silenus was the tutor of Dionysus. Being the comrade and tutor of the god of wine meant that he was drunk very often and would then become very knowledgeable and wise (oops yeah quite the opposite of my first thought then…). This also fits as Professor Silenus has his bright moments too when talking about Paul’s life at Luna Park and how it is like

‘a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. It's great fun (…) But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone’.

 This for me shows that Professor Silenus is quite a complex character. The protagonist however is Paul Pennyfeather, who at the beginning of the book is a twenty years old young man with quite strong morals, studying at the fictional Scone College in Oxford (Scone college, HA! I love all these names, for me this is classic English humour, love it! Although it does remind me of a classic German comedy show too, which you all probably won’t know anything about of course, but it is exactly about these rather long surnames like Beste-Chetwynde, Digby-Vaine-Trumpington etc. that make it somehow ridiculously English, of course in the German sketch the fun part is also the fact that she cannot really pronounce the names and starts to lisper whenever she tries to say something with a ‘th’ in it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygK3yvUee4), from which he is expelled and then forced to work as a teacher in a public school. He gets engaged to the mother of his disciple Peter, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, who made fortunes with brothels, for which he goes to prison for after taking the responsibility for his fiancées’ business to protect her. She then marries another guy who helps him fake his death to get out of prison. Pretending to be a distant cousin of the original Paul Pennyfeather, he goes back to Scone College where he starts to work as a teacher again. He is back at square one, unlike Faust for example. No happy end despite being quite a humorous little novel. But back to Professor Silenus. He has a thing for machines and hates humans as they are unefficient.

 ‘What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! (…) How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! This half-formed, ill-conditioned body! This erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of engine, and between them men, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!’

I had to think of Le Corbusier and his fascination with machines and couldn’t stop thinking that he is actually Professor Silenus come alive. Silenus was hired by Mrs Beste-Chetwynde to redesign the famous ‘Kings’s Thursday’ manor and had only one guideline to follow: Make it

                                                              ‘clean and square’.

He thinks about the design for three days and then starts the work. In the end he hates his design as he does

‘not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful’.

 He then moans about needing to design a staircase

'Why can't the creatures stay in one place? Up and down, in and out, round and round! Why can't they sit still and work? Do dynamos require staircases? Do monkeys require houses?’

 The most important and fascinating part of the story however is Silenus’ speech about the ‘wheel of life’. It reflects Paul’s life very well I think. Paul tried to get to the centre of the wheel where one can keep ones balance and therefore have a pleasant live. But most people get thrown off before they reach it, so did Paul, and quite badly too. But that’s what life is all about, isn’t it? Getting thrown off that ever spinning wheel, trying to find you place of comfort in the middle and trying not to be thrown off again. I really enjoyed reading this novel. It was funny and well written and actually gets you thinking about some of the metaphors used in the text.