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Ruskin's Maze
RUSKIN'S MAZE
Mastery and Madness
in His Art

By Jay Fellows

Princeton University Press

Princeton, New Jersey
 Copyright © 1981 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jetsey
In the United Kingdom Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey
All Rights Reserved
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the
Paul Mellon Fund of Princeton University Press
This book has been composed in Linotron Baskerville
Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press booh
are printed on acid-free paper, and binding matenah are
chosen for strength and durability
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton
University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Library of Congress Cataloging tn Publication Data

Fellows, Jay, 1940-

Ruskin's maze.
1. Ruskin.John, 1819-1900—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PR5264.F43 828'.809 81-47124
ISBN 0-691-06479-2 AACR2
For John Rosenberg, who showed light
through dark, if not blind, mirrors
and Laurence d'A. M. Glass, Gerhard Joseph,
Sean Sculley, and Marcia Stern, who know
something about the territories around Cy-
prus Avenue, Nottinghill Gate, and Stock-
ton's Wing.
 Table of Contents

A Note on Sources ix
Permissions ix
Acknowledgments xi
Preface xiii

Part One
Strange Chords: Masterful Geometries
Introduction
A Travel Diary toward Nothing but a Dream: Shadowy
Types for Concluding Images and "The Excavations of
Silence" 3
One
Strange Chords of Incipient Orthodoxy:
Centres and Epicycles 29
A. Cock-Robinson-Crusoe Conceit and Other Geometrically
Central Issues 29
B. The Parallel Advance: Panorama as Central Responsibility 38
C. The Vantage Point of the True Centre: Problems in the
Transcendental Altitude of the Self 45

Two
Central Men and Awful Lines: Attempts and Failures
in Mastery 60
A. The Central Man 60
B. The Awful Lines of Time 63
C. Cross-References ad infinitum: The World of the Index 68
D. Mastery, Makeshift and True: Glimpses of "Shattered Majesty" and
"Stately and Unaccusable Wholes" 73

Three
The Frosts of Death 85
A. The Man in the Middle: Mediation as Subtraction 85
B. The "True Centre" as Condemned Space 89
C. Juggling, Trick Riding, and the Avaricious Imagination of Repletion 98

Four
Vacancies, Kindly and Deadly: Sweet Transitions and
Jarring Thoughts 105
A. The Syntax of Architecture: St. Peter's Divided 105
B. Slow Travel; The Extension of Time and Space 115
C. The Dead Spaces of Satin: Transitional Absence 120
 viii ' Contents

Five
Circumferential Considerations: Lines without
Beginnings or Endings 127
A. The Architecture of the Index: The Taming of (Museum) Centricity 127
B. The Art of the Provinces: Suburban Efficacy 140
C. The Garland of Thoughts: A Case for Fanciful Extension 143

Part Two
Lucent Verdure and
Asymmetrical Decompositions
Six
Labyrinths of Presence, Labyrinths of Absence:
Initial Experiences of the Superimposition of Contrasting
Designs 159
A. The Theatre of Blindness: Items, Queries, Laws, the Bestiary, and
Originally Invisible Dramatis Personae 159
B. Lurid Shadow, Lucent Verdure: Early Manifestations of the
Centripetal Maze 178

Seven
Capricious Sinuousities: Venice and the City as Mind 198
A. White Clues: Instincts for the Exit 198
B. Colubrine Chains: The Maze of Consciousness 205
C. The Gothic Anomaly: Peripheral Shadows of Madness and Narrow
Caution 212

Eight
The Excavations of Silence: Double Labyrinths and the
Architecture of Reluctant Nihilism 222
A. The Threads of Thought: Unsystematic Intimations of the
Centrifuged Style 222
B. Paratactical Texts of Ripped Immanence: From Ariadne to the
Shears and Penultimate Tablet of Atropos 240

Appendices 275
 A Note on Sources

All references to The Works of John Ruskm, edited by Ε. T. Cook

and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols., Library Edition (London,
1903-12) will appear in parentheses after quotations from the works
themselves.

Permissions

Selected passages from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity

in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault, translated by Richard How­
ard. Copyright © 1965 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by per­
mission of Pantheon Books, Inc., a Division of Random House, Inc.
Selected passages from The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskm, edited
and annotated by Helen Gill Viljoen. Copyright © 1971 by Yale
University. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

"Domination of Black" by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1923 and

renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected
Poems of Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
and Faber and Faber Ltd.
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 Acknowledgments

I want to thank Margaret Case, Jerry Sherwood, and Robert E.

Brown, whose editorial help and friendship have proved invalua-
ble. Further, I would like to express my gratitude to John Hejduk,
Robert Langbaum, and J. Hillis Miller for encouragement at var-
ious stages of the transformation of the manuscript. Harold
Bloom's awareness of the blood of the text—an awareness that
matches Ruskin's own—has been an inspiration which has provided
courage when that was lacking. Shane Gould, who accompanied
me through the streets of Arklow, showed me the path from the
abyss of those right-angled labyrinths of absence. Finally, I would
like to thank both Linden Arden, who involved me in the difficulties
of a dark way, and Ann Douglas, whose "thread," unsevered,
showed me the way out, as if to that light just before "dazzlement."
If we wish to outline an architecture which conforms to
the structure of our soul . . . , it would have to be con-
ceived in the image of the Labyrinth.
—Nietzsche, Aurore
 Preface

Penultimately, Ruskin's consciousness (and even Ruskin himself)

might be considered a double labyrinth—a three-dimensional place
of cutting edges, where the double axe itself doubles.1 Earlier, he
will be concerned with a single Maze of recollected Lucent Verdure:
it is as if, close to an "overlapping" Circumference, under the pres-
sure of an impacted and exploding repletion, that single Maze had
doubled in a necessitous accommodation that is part of an almost
final disintegration. The design of an excessively dense coherence
becomes a quasi-textual design of double labyrinthine ruins that
are not entirely decipherable. For a moment, a reader may look
for a translator who would render the language of a double con-
sciousness monological, when the dialogical is only wishful under-
standing for the dichotomic reader/listener. Then the reader, or
listener, must become a dance partner, interested in the partici-
pation of sinuous movement among the ruins rather than eluci-
dation in the clear light of day. Certainly, close to the end, there
are cutting edges that will either double or halve Strange Chords/
Cords of "intellectual" nerves, until, immediately before a White
Silence, there is the counterpoint of a "marred music" that may
require highly idiosyncratic lyrics.
Or perhaps it could be said that if Ruskin, one of the "lacertine
breed" (xix, 365), with the double labyrinth of his "three-dimen-
sional" consciousness, is eventually to become a dancer without a
partner (as the end may suggest)2—like a solitary crane3 (in the
1
Cf. W. H. Matthews, Mazes 6? Labyrinths: Their History and Development (New York,
1970), p. 34: "the great German archaeologist Schliemann, during his researches
at Mycenae on the mainland, unearthed from one of the graves an ox-head of gold
plate, with a double axe between the upright horns. T h e double axe was also the
sign of the Zeus worshipped at Labraunda in Caria, country to the north-east of
Crete, on the mainland of Asia Minor, where the implement was known as the
labrys." Later, dealing with maze etymology, Matthews, without a finality that is
nevertheless provocative, suggests: "The present position, then, is that the Labyrinth
is the House of the Double Axe, the implication being that the Cretan example was
not, as formerly believed, a miniature reproduction of the temple of Hawara, but
that the latter was actually given the title by analogy with the building at Knossos"
(p. 176).
2
T h e design of this book, beginning with an introductory "Travel Diary" and
ending with the double labyrinths of Part Two, the silence or bellowing of sacred
crocodiles that are still submerged—an ending, that is, in a significant sense, an
"antiphonal" response to the Part One, which is essentially preparation for that
overriding "response" of contention/solution—suggests movement as well as se-
quence. And the shape of this book is largely dependent upon the reciprocal motion
 xtv · Preface

metamorphoses of Ruskin's eventual bestiary), awkwardly stomping

in front of the vertiginous reflection of a bull's-eye that is not, at
least for a moment, blind to its multiplicity—he is, essentially (and
close to the end), antiphonal, like Athena of the Air, who is also
Athena of the Earth. With Ruskin, it is as if a compelling sense of
unity, or interrelation, were being undercut, perhaps by the blades
of those double axes. At times, this doubleness is lateral, between
sides, as if there were a "bicameral" dialogue between the right and
left hemispheres of the brain, or the labyrinthine/serpentine An­
tiphonal Contention that informs the mediations between the
Centre and Circumference; and, at other times, this doubleness is
expressed vertically, as if a buried, even "dead," creature were
attempting to communicate with someone or something elevated,
alive, though barely intact. Yet there is something about the Rus-
kinian antiphon that remains solipsistic and beyond integration—
almost, it might appear for a moment, inadequate. (The crane is
lonely and the eye of the bull is, more often than not, blind to
everything, including itself: a blind focal point that is like the dead
between Centres and Circumferences that traverses a kind of geometrically in­
formed choral space of "antiphonal contention " Furthermore, it fundamentally
begins in the beginning and ends, if not at the ending, at least, penultimately But
the weight is not distributed evenly The itinerary is directed toward the end, despite
sub rosa impulses to "cross-reference ad infinitum" if prophecy fails, the book's
gravity is nonetheless located in the "nothing but process" toward conclusion, though
the final chapter fulfills—or places in context, albeit in a context of disintegi ation—
some of the images/allusions of the "Introduction," as if imitating the spirahng,
Ruskiman "language of return "
Still, while proceeding, I hope, with a critical tact for sequence, even if that
sequence has aspects of the reciprocal to it, the design of Ruskin's Maze is not modeled
after a strictly one-way phenomenological history Ruskin's first book, The Poetry of
Architecture (1837-38), is important close to the end of this study What is perceived
as correct in theory may well prove true in performance, Ruskin's notion of the
"noun substantive," in a characteristic amalgamation of architectural design and
syntax (Ruskin's language often "builds" or "deconstructs," as if language were
stone, a stone that, as "white marble," will suggest solutions), is youthful dogma that
becomes especially important—and practical—later With Ruskin, and so with this
book, there is a strong sense of "return," the design of the Helix virgata that fascinates
Ruskin—even before the final return of the autobiography, Praetenta And this
impulse to return to first principles—though often with a significant difference (as
with his shifting attitudes toward "Greek-fret" or lights against a dark background)—
creates a problematical "sequence" of spirals, as if there were a logic, as well as
architecture, of the snail
3
See Janet Bord, Mazes and Labyrinths of the World (New York, 1975), ρ 12 "The
best-known maze dance is the Geranos (Crane) dance on the island of Delos, sup­
posedly first danced by Theseus with the companions he had rescued from the
clutches of the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth Some of the participants wore
animal masks " The dance will reappear, as will animals without masks
 Preface · xv

end of a "blind lane."4 But what goes on vertically Between—as if

a kind of "marred music" resulting from contrary superimposi-
tion—may turn out to be a kind of blindly visionary, "inner lan­
guage" of extreme significance.
Close to the end, the Ruskinian "vertical antiphon" is, to the
anxious reader, occasionally like an echo for a man who has become
both deaf and amnesiac immediately before the sound returns.
Disappointed (at least until he comes to appreciate an aesthetics of
absence), he waits for phrases returning from silence that will sur­
round the "ruins of language" with a context of sense, as if the
paratactic might be restored to a condition of labyrinthine syntax
in the same way that Ruskin would himself "recover" both a land­
scape and language lost in "error" But further, when what lies
"Between," in the "horizontal antiphon," has been filled, perhaps
to the extent of repletion, the antiphonal quality of Ruskm's work
does not, like orthodox dialectic (or stereoscopic vision), possess a
conclusion of conventional synthesis—a presumably fortunate con­
fluence like a meandering underground river5 rising to meet its
visible and conscious counterpart. If Ruskin is eventually alone
(and desertion before disconfirmation informs much of his per­
formance), he is not, in any case, unified in his loneliness. Rather,
solipsistically antiphonal, with only himself as company, he is, as
4
Dance, the optics of the Maze, and the blindness that attends both those optics
and madness itself, make a quotation, essentially anthropological, from W Jackson
Knight's Vergil Epic and Anthropology (New York, 1967), ρ 267, at least intriguing
That the "blind march" at Eleusis was a maze movement seemed almost certain,
but was still an inference Excavation has discovered no architectural maze in
the telestenon there But now the gap is filled by the Malekulan evidence, which
for the first time gives a parallel to the location of a maze design at the entrance
of a cave entered at death, indicating of course a change of state, from one
kind of life to another The evidence goes further still, for the Malekulans
search blindfolded for the anklets which they wear when they perform maze
dances at funeral rites, doubly emphasizing the principle of the "blind march,"
and showing that for them it belongs to the maze, at the point where the ideas
of exclusion and secrecy meet
Some sense of the panoramic encompassment of labyrinthine concerns, which, as
we shall see, are Ruskinian concerns, is suggested here Penultimately, during Rus-
kin's own Maze dance of broken syntax, but before either funeral rites or rebirth,
there will be the "Blind Guide that had celestial light"
5
Linking human anatomy with the earth, in an analogue of essential design that
would not dismay Ruskin, Janet Bord points out that the "body of the earth does
in fact contain many spirals [lines that turn to return], according to research carried
out by the late Guy Underwood Working with his divining rod, he spent many
years surveying ancient sites in Britain in order to plot the underground streams,
and many times his results were in the form of spirals, as illustrated in his book The
Pattern of the Past" (Bord, Mazes and Labyrinths, ρ 11)
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