On character of the Professor Silenus in ‘Decline and Fall’ by Evelyn Waugh

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!

Quite a statement by the Professor Silenus*! Clearly Silenus adores machines and their efficiency. The admiration is so great that it even overshadows the simple fact (and without a doubt, a very sad fact for the Professor himself) of his human origin. Here, I might classify Silenus either as a hypocrite or as an intellectual lunatic in the process of realisation of his own hypocrisy. But what has been done is done: he proclaimed to hate human kind. Sooner or later he would have to cope with both: the ‘vile’, imperfect world and duplicity of own values. This dreadful scenario might be resolved in few ways. The first, and the easiest one, is to spare oneself from everything at once (the myriad of methods can be employed: poison, sharp razor, etc, etc). The second one, is to adapt to the world’s imperfections, simply to give up one’s believes. And the third is to try to purify the world to suit one’s aspirations. The character of the spirit of the Professor Silenus or indeed his real-life prototype Le Corbusier without a doubt would select the most ambitious solution to the personal problem and would take a mission to change the world.

This is my take on Corbusier’s work. In the end of the day, it was, first of all, the personal matter of resolving the collision of polar values. The world change was just a tool to prove or persuade that individual ideals can and should be accepted on the global scale. Corbusier’s fascination with the machine and the consequences of this facination briefly discussed above represent the dramatic difference between origins of European and Russian Modernism. I will discuss this dissimilarity in a separate blog.

*By the way Silenus in Greek mythology is forever drunk part man, part beast creature, companion of Dionysus. The name also refers to the double nature of the Professor, a human who hates human kind.