Crystallization

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 2, Chapter 10, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

These pieces are tedious but interesting in the one respect that they present in compressed form the method of reasoning through visual opposition that Ruskin had introduced in Unto This Last and elsewhere. The Lecturer invents a dream in which Egyptian laborers strain to convert bricks into a building, which they cannot do until a goddess (the Egyptian predecessor of Athena or Wisdom) magically transforms the bricks into a perfect pyramid, crimson and glowing, like a ruby. When the children then see the actual ruby, they understand "crystallization," the "formative power" of nature, and the true economy that opposes the Valley of Diamonds as an "imaginary" ideal. Here Ruskin combines his ideas about nature, religion, architecture, and society into a set of oppositions -- crystals, gold, pyramid of ruby, noble building, harmonious economy, and so forth, on the one hand, and dust, dirt, bricks of clay, servile building, competitive economy, and so forth, on the other. These antitheses, belonging ultimately to the opposition of purity and corruption, clearly exemplify what Jacques Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence, since the second series is an absence of energy present in the first, just as divine inherence and withdrawal constitute purity and corruption. These antitheses are Ruskin's argument, which can expand to incorporate other elements as well. Winnington itself, which embodies the first series, stands to the Valley of Diamonds as presence to absence; it is "true" in the sense that Ruskin uses the word in Unto This Last.

Last modified December 2000