Ruined by Design

Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility

Inger Sigrun Brodey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136095382
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By examining the motif of ruination in a variety of late-eighteenth-century domains, this book portrays the moral aesthetic of the culture of sensibility in Europe, particularly its negotiation of the demands of tradition and pragmatism alongside utopian longings for authenticity, natural goodness, self-governance, mutual transparency, and instantaneous kinship. This book argues that the rhetoric of ruins lends a distinctive shape to the architecture and literature of the time and requires the novel to adjust notions of authorship and narrative to accommodate the prevailing aesthetic. Just as architects of eighteenth-century follies pretend to have discovered "authentic" ruins, novelists within the culture of sensibility also build purposely fragmented texts and disguise their authorship, invoking highly artificial means of simulating nature. The cultural pursuit of human ruin, however, leads to hypocritical and sadistic extremes that put an end to the characteristic ambivalence of sensibility and its unusual structures.

1 Redeeming Ruin

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

—Genesis 11:4

There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety— where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them …

—Laurence Sterne

Upheaval characterizes many areas of mid-to-late eighteenth century European life. It was not only a time for self-conscious new beginnings, but also a time for recovering (and at times inventing) origins of all kinds—whether the original human language, the state of nature, or the geography of the antediluvian Earth. Events and scientific discoveries reinforced the sense of significant beginnings and endings into a form of millenialist self-importance. Examples include the eruption of the American and French Revolutions and resulting experimentation in nation building; the growing age of exploration and naval discovery; the dawn of the microscope and drastic improvement of the telescope, revealing new worlds both far away and close at hand; and the discovery of the ashen, fiery fates of Pompeii and Herculaneum; as well as the more immediate devastation resulting from the Lisbon earthquake of 1757. It was a time of optimism in widening human achievements and utopian fantasies, as well as sullen reminders of the fragility of peace, innocence, and even civilization itself.

Despite the Lisbon earthquake and the presence of recent ruination from civil war and other natural and human disasters, irregularities and jagged edges became increasingly valuable in the novels and gardens of sensibility. A particularly vivid example is an English garden in Germany—the Garden of Wörlitz, which included two artificial volcanoes

Figure 2

that were added between the years of 1788 and 1792. These volcanoes had lamps and sound effects to enhance the simulated eruptions. These fake eruptions could be seen and admired from great distances (see Figure 2). Such a demonstration suggests not only tolerance of ruin, but also the purposeful mimicking of destruction.

This elaborate domestication of wildness provides an excellent example of the human ambition to frame the terrifying forces of nature for our own aesthetic purposes, even if it means artificially recreating the wildness in order to frame it within the garden as a whole. Unconsciously subscribing to the mental habit of sensibility, including its insecurities, perhaps, landowners and patrons in the culture of sensibility frequently attempt to rise above chaos and above human limitation through art and material culture—even if they must recreate chaos to seek this end.

In his immensely influential Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), written half a century before the first flowering of the literature of sensibility, Thomas Burnet planted some of the seeds of the incipient appreciation of fragmentation and irregularity. In Theory, Burnet attempts to explain the phenomena of Genesis through scientific language. He describes the original state of God’s created Earth, the “Mundane Egg”: “In this smooth Earth were the first Scenes of the World, and the first Generations of Mankind; it had the beauty of Youth and blooming Nature, fresh and fruitful, and not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture in all its body; no Rocks or Mountains,

Figure 3

no hollow Caves, nor gaping Chanels, but even and uniform all over … ’twas suited to a golden Age, and to the first innocency of Nature.”¹ Subsequently, Burnet movingly portrays mountains as antediluvian reminders of the fallen state of humanity and as decrepit, if awe-inspiring, ruins of the original, smooth perfection of God’s creation (Figure 3).²

Burnet’s thesis regarding the origin of mountains influenced many prominent philosophers in the culture of sensibility, particularly Shaftesbury. His “physico-theological” account was remarkable for using geology rather than allegory as the key to access scriptural truth, for using scripture to look at Nature in terms of its ancient wholeness (anticipating the revisionist aesthetics of sensibility and Romanticism) and for suggesting that we have first-hand access to Eden: “we have still the broken materials of that first world, and walk upon its ruins.” Burnet’s thesis, strengthened by other aspects of the subsequent culture of sensibility, eventually lent the Alps new glory in their own right (even in their deplorably fragmented state). What were, in the mid-seventeenth century, “Warts, Wens, Blisters, Impost-humes” and “Nature’s Shames and Ills,” had become “temples of Nature built by the Almighty” and “natural cathedrals, or natural altars.”³

The redemption of ruination and natural irregularity begs important questions for the culture of sensibility: are the psychological and social equivalents of jagged cliffs, volcanoes, and tempestuous storms equally admirable in human nature? Is it possible that a new confidence in the disruptive, mercurial elements of the self coincides with a new appreciation for irregularity in art and the increase of chromaticism and dissonance in music? If so, then not only are Sterne’s Yorick’s tingling nerves and fibers key to his virtue, but his passionate eruptions may be as well. The Terror following the French Revolution complicated the new admiration of the passions and its accompanying confidence in human self-determination. Rousseau, Goethe, Herder and other authors attempt to create or reclaim authorizing origins that satisfy emerging democratic impulses by establishing the possibility of self-sufficiency without isolation, of self-government without chaos, and of virtue without external regulation.

Authors within the culture of sensibility, including Rousseau, Goethe, and Herder, reappropriate the stories of the first fourteen chapters of Genesis in hopes of validating natural virtue, spontaneity, and irregularity: they reinterpret the expulsion from Eden, the fall of Babel, and the flood by asserting natural goodness; they reclaim the fallen world, its ruins, and its irregularities; and they establish the ethical and aesthetic superiority of ruination—as well as a new pedagogy and new hierarchy under the pretense of eradicating hierarchical relations .⁴ There is of course nothing new about reinterpreting Biblical authority to support particular arguments about political or moral philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, for example, uses Genesis in his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, to argue for unlimited sovereign power. In his interpretation of the fall and expulsion from Eden, Hobbes makes an explicit connection to the need for sovereign power to be absolute. Not only do human beings have inescapably selfish tendencies, as well as the “restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death”—tendencies that are displayed whenever there is no “common power to keep them all in awe,” but, quoting Genesis 3.5 and 3:11, he writes: “it [is] clear that the commands of them that have the right to command, are not by their subjects to be censured, nor disputed.” He concludes: “So it appeareth plainly, to my understanding, both from reason and from Scripture, that the sovereign power, whether placed in one man, as in monarchy, or in one assembly of men, as in popular, and aristocratical commonwealths, is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it.”⁵ Despite the fact that it predates the culture of sensibility by more than a century, Hobbes’ Leviathan provides a theory that devotees of sensibility loved to hate (just as seventeenth-century Latitudinarians had hated it).

Half a century later, in his Second Treatise on Government (1690), John Locke relies on textual evidence from Genesis to propose a natural human right to private property and a natural inclination towards society. According to Locke, God gave Adam and his descendants the earth—the first emergence of property. The difficulties emerging from property, were, according to Locke, somewhat remedied by the natural human sociability described in Genesis 2:18: “God having made man such a creature, that in his own judgement it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination to drive him into society, as well as fitted him with understanding and language to continue and enjoy it.”⁶

Whereas these seventeenth-century authors do not limit God’s authority, Rousseau and other eighteenth-century authors involved in the culture of sensibility draw on Genesis in order to increase the human sense of selfdetermination. “La religion nous ordonne de croire que Dieu lui-même ayant tiré les Hommes de l’état de Nature … , ilssontinégaux parce qu’il a voulu qu’ilsle fussent; mais elle ne nous défend pas de former des conjectures tirées de la seule nature de l’homme et des êtres qui l’environnent, surce qu’auroit pu devenir le genre-humain s’il fût resté abandonné à lui-même.” [Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself took men out of the state of nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings surrounding him, about what the human race might have become if it had remained abandoned to itself.]⁷ Rousseau’s separation of belief and conjecture leads to a concomitant separation of scriptural origins and self-actualizing origins.

The eighteenth-century tendency to reinterpret Biblical authority concerning human nature while still wishing for Biblical sanction recalls sensibility’s philosophical insecurity. While rebelling, theoretically, against God’s Old-Testament authority, the authors in this chapter nonetheless require Biblical authority to make their point. In other words, the point is not so much to prove Genesis wrong, as to reinterpret or reappropriate Genesis for the purposes of the culture of sensibility. But the desire to reclaim Genesis for the culture of sensibility, rather than to disregard it, is itself an expression of philosophical insecurity, using optimism about human nature to assert independence from traditional religious authority, while only half suppressing a lingering fear that human nature may indeed be fallen. Philosophers representing the culture of sensibility felt torn between Christian views of original sin or selfishness and Hobbesian views of human isolation and solipsism on the one hand, and the hope and desire to believe in natural goodness, transparency, self-determination, and the possibility of earthly community and meaningful intimacy, on the other. In order to reclaim Genesis’ authority to accord with democratic impulses and a sense of natural goodness and transparency, authors influential for the culture of sensibility revise Old Testament stories to diminish the prevailing sense of sin, hierarchy, and of a single, omniscient authority external to the individual agent. As altered myths are sought, and faith diminishes in the classical or Judeo-Christian conceptions of reason and virtue, new popular mythologies “abduct” (in Roland Barthes’ terms) signifiers already laden with meaning from familiar and loved cultural contexts into alluring new “mosaic[s] of signs.”⁸

As we see in this chapter, authors reappropriate Genesis in hopes of validating natural virtue, spontaneity, and irregularity by reinterpreting the expulsion from Eden, the fall of Babel, and the effects of Noah’s flood. Prominent authors expound upon the benefits of Noah’s flood, which changed the configuration of the earth’s surface in favor of irregularity and picturesque adornment and the beauty of the Alps, previously seen as ruins of the Flood and thus reminders of human fallen nature. They also describe an Adam and Eve who withstand original sin and instead can exhibit natural goodness, rely on intuition, and achieve mutual transparency. They question God’s felling of the Tower of Babel, yet claim the ability to recreate the original, universal human language of the passions, as well as to recreate new gardens of Eden that allow the new Adams and Eves to indulge in their innocent passions and that enable landscape to speak “the original language of Nature.” While the search for the origin of language and the “Ursprache” by no means originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, it did however change its character from searching for the rational, philosophical perfection desired by Leibniz to the uncensored authenticity of the “wilde Mutter” described by Herder.

In other words, as this chapter progresses from archaeological and geological ruin, to purposeful fragmentation in landscape gardening, to attempts to reclaim the language of nature in human conversation, we will see that these seemingly disparate traditions evince a similar objective. In these disparate domains, a similar dynamic takes place: the culture of sensibility tacitly redeems and elevates an aesthetic of ruination and fragmentation as a symbol of new hope in human nature and new democratic aspirations. The devastation described in Genesis is reclaimed in favor of the picturesque, while God’s jealous authority is dampened in favor of decen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sensibility and its Discontents
• 1 Redeeming Ruin
• 2 The Anatomy of Follies
• 3 Reading Ruin
• 4 Constructing Human Ruin
• Afterword: The Luxuries of Distress
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index