Gap Between Figural Representation and the Sources of Meaning in Nature

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 10, Chapter 6, 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.

In passages like this Ruskin acknowledges in the "darkness" of revelation the gap between figural representation and the sources of meaning in nature, an acknowledgement characteristic of what de Man finds heroic in romantic poetry. To what extent in fact does Ruskin renounce the "nostalgia" of the romantic marriage? In a forceful analysis, Michael Sprinker finds in Ruskin a pervasive recognition of the gap, which allowed him to construct "a more comprehensive theory of the imagination than any of Ruskin's Romantic predecessors (save, perhaps, Blake) could have openly or comfortably accepted" ("Ruskin on the Imagination," Studies in Romanticism 18 [1979], p. 118)‹and this despite the fact, as Sprinker correctly shows, that Ruskin offered contradictory accounts of the mind's power to convey truths of nature. But for Sprinker, Ruskin never ultimately loses sight of the fact that all representation produces a "figural displacement" of an object in the perceptual field: "The imagination is a kind of universal translator that does not so much bridge the gap between reality and figure as disclose the figurative basis of all true perception of reality" (p. 123). And in the theory of the grotesque and of myth, which Sprinker equates with allegory in de Man's sense, Ruskin decisively rejects the Coleridgean symbol: "In other words, the symbol is another version of what Ruskin calls the pathetic fallacy, and it is diametrically opposed to the allegorical art Ruskin values so highly" (p. 134). Now, for Ruskin the purpose of figurative expression is a further enhancement or "expression" of essences and powers not possible to a realistic art. In Modern Painters II he writes, "depriving the subject of material and bodily shape, and regarding such of its qualities only as it chooses for particular purpose, it forges these qualities together in such groups and forms as it desires, and gives to their abstract being consistency and reality, by striking them as it were with the die of an image belonging to other matter" (IV, 291). Sprinker comments: "The meaning or value of the image or sign conceived by the imagination is totally independent of the 'material and bodily shape' it assumes in nature.... Its meaning as a sign derives from a 'peculiar conjunction' of 'qualities' that the imagination has, seemingly arbitrarily, chosen to bring together" (p. 130). But this statement is incomplete: the choice is not arbitrary because the quality must remain the same, the new shape chosen in order to render that quality more vivid (as, for example, when Satan is compared to a comet). The same problem limits Sprinker's comments on myth. As he notes, "Nature is genuinely allegorical (or mythic), but only in the sense that imagination responds to the stimulus of nature by disembodying natural forms and submitting them to the discipline of a system of signs within the myth (or work of art). The myth has reference to the facts of nature (problematic in themselves) only insofar as nature is the source that inspires it, never the order that governs it" (p. 137). This point is well stated, but the phrase "only insofar as nature is the source that inspires it" is a major concession; for at the same time that Ruskin believes myth to be a system of signs (so that "reality" for us is a system of great religious myths), he holds also that those signs refer to real powers that are literally "inspired," that the efficacy of myth depends always on its bringing to us a heightened sense of the world's freshness and immediacy, and that vital forces are part of a physico-spiritual continuum. (In this context see also Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], 241, and Chapters 10-12 below.) Ruskin's declaration of independence cannot so easily be distinguished from romantic nostalgia. His own nostalgia, if that is the right word, consists in a belief not only in myth as the manifestation of an eternal imaginative consciousness in cooperation with nature but also in virtue as a pure essence, like inner light. His thought, in other words, remains radically logocentric. It makes him, in my opinion, a very limited moral philosopher and ultimately carries him beyond the bounds of sanity. But in his theory of imagination, at least, his insistence on the external world as a perpetual source of creative inspiration and his insistence on the genuine communicative possibilities of great art make him a challengingly complex figure, saving him from other sorts of sterilities than the nostalgic marriage with nature.

Last modified December 2000