A decadente burguesia britânica, expulsa para o desterro de professores numa escola, a viver num ciclo de aparência e podridão cómica e superficial. Caricaturas exageradas ou fieis? O puro Paul Pennyfeather é um Cândido do início do século XX, manipulado e destruído pelas más intenções das pseudo elites à sua volta.
76 One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish 125 I could have forgiven him his wooden leg, his slavish poverty, his moral turpitude, and his abominable features; I could even have forgiven his incredible vocabulary, if only he had been gentleman 133 There is a home and a family waiting for every one of us. We cannot escape, try how we may. It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There is no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential homebuilders, beavers and ants. 151 For three centuries the poverty and inertia of this noble family had preserved its home unmodified by any of the succeeding fashions that fell upon domestic architecture. No way had been added, no window filled in; no portico, facade, terrace, orangery, tower of battlement marred its timberland front
224 Well, I might put you into the arts and crafts workshop. I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression 227 the next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life. (...) It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals or impression he was making; in fact, to be free.
Otto Friedrich Silenus, an architect in Evelyn Waugh´s 'Decline and Fall', a book first published in 1928. He embodies an amusing stereotype in this comical novel which I finished reading while I was in Geneva.
“It was Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus’s first important commission. ‘Something clean and square,’ had been Mrs Beste-Chetwynde’s instructions.
Professor Silenus – for that was the title by which this extraordinary young man chose to be called – was a ‘find’ of Mrs Beste-Chetwynde’s. He was not yet famous anywhere, though all who met him carried away deep and diverse impressions of his genius. He had first attracted Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s attention with the rejected design for a chewing-gum factory which had been reproduced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. His only other completed work was the décor for a cinema film of great length and complexity of plot – a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer’s austere elimination of all human characters, a fact which had proved fatal to its commercial success. He was staring resignedly in a bed-sitting room in Bloomsbury, despite the untiring efforts of his parents to find him – they were very rich in Hamburg – when he was offered the commission of rebuilding King’s Thursday. ‘Something clean and square’—he pondered for three days upon the aesthetic implications of these instructions and then began his designs.
Professor Otto Silenus as sketched by Evelyn Waugh
‘The problem of architecture as I see it,’ he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro concrete and aluminum, ‘is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,’ he said gloomily; ‘please tell your readers. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.’
‘I suppose there ought to be a staircase,’ he said gloomily. ‘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? What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! 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 the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and doing of the machine, the vile becoming!’
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