The Building in the Text: Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton. (Reviews).

Roy T. Eriksen, The Building in the Text: Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton

University Park, PA Pennsylvania Stare University Press, 2000. xxi + 194 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-271-02022-9.

This book is an extended celebration of an approach to literary composition that privileges spatial patterning of texts, notably through antithesis and repetition, on the basis of the ancient rhetoricians' conception of the periodic sentence. In Eriksen's view, this approach, requiring "topomorphic reading," is both widespread in classical antiquity and consciously developed, even theorized, in ancient writings on rhetoric. Throughout the Renaissance, the periodic sentence is central -- both as vital component and paradigm -- to prose and poetic composition, allowing the production of elaborate textual architectures. This is not least the case in texts representative of the preoccupation, characteristic of Renaissance culture, with the discussion of the newly emerging "arts of design," including architecture, from the point of view of their underlying principles, their "logic." In such writings, though certainly not exclusively there, Eriksen insists on the prevalence of compositional structures that evoke or even imitate specific architectural forms or processes, notably the dome.

A leitmotif in the book is an assertion of the ancient rhetorician Demetrius comparing the members in a periodic style to the stones "supporting and holding together a vaulted dome." Unfortunately, this passage does not seem to be known to the Renaissance authors under discussion, but Eriksen proceeds in his introduction to emphasize Augustine's use of periodic constructions in certainly influential writings and, more importantly, his ascription of religious significance to such structuring, as symbolic of -- and instantiating -- cosmic order. The major rhetorical devices involved operate both at the level of structure and that of ornament. Indeed the "intriguing nexus between ornament and inner structure" is a major theme of the book, though curiously when Eriksen turns his attention to Alberti, he neglects the distinction of beauty and ornament crucial in the De re aedificatoria, and in most subsequent discussions of Alberti's architectural theory.

Eriksen's initial discussion of Alberti comes, as one might expect, in the opening chapter, though the chapter's beginning immediately signals the distinctiveness of his enterprise. It starts in England, with evidence for the architectural plotting of texts by Shakespeare and other authors, paradoxically in a culture still lacking actual buildings constructed according to classical principle. Nevertheless, the concern with textual monuments is easily documented, while Eriksen emphasizes also the impact of scriptural references to or metaphorizations of the process of building, which color classically derived topomorphisms, some times subversively. On the other hand, the basic alignment of English Renaissance intellectuals derives, according to Eriksen, from Alberti's Christianized (or Augustinian) adaptation of Ciceronian concepts; especially those introduced in discussions of the crafting of text and underlying Alberti's account of the design process. The chapter ends with the familiar poetic opposition of a rchitecture and text as rivals in assuring immortality, with text victorious, but this topic invited poets (notably Shakespeare) to elaborate "stunning tectonic structures." Such structure was not for its own sake, however, and Eriksen stresses the moralizing or at least persuasive dimension of the textual tradition in question.

The following chapter also takes a surprising turn. After references to Augustinian ideas about textual structure as mirroring divine order, Eriksen swerves to a genre of unedifying but highly crafted poetry that nevertheless seems echoed in some of Augustine's discussions. The genre in question centers on the front door of a house that is assaulted by revelers or an impatient lover seeking access to his mistress within. Typically the door itself is represented as uttering laments over its undignified predicament, and the dyadic structure of the poems concerned appears to echo the door's dividing function, the separation of interior and exterior. This inscription of a radical discontinuity in poetic structure as well as content is certainly suggestive in relation to the Renaissance as an era of sharpening social and spatial divisions. Eriksen does not take this up, however; instead he pushes the discussion back to the resemblance of the effect of poetry to heavenly music "in its measured harmonies." There is a missed opportunity here, perhaps because of Eriksens constant insistence on transcendent models -- and even purposes -- in Renaissance literary and artistic production.

The two following chapters deal with literary responses to -- and echoes of -- famous domes. Alberti's famous evocation of Florence cathedral (in fact, Alberti does not specify the dome, as Eriksen implies) is analyzed as "architecturally composed" and as instantiating Alberti's particular interest in the moral aspect of all design work, whether literary or architectural. Eriksen suggests a "general theological context for the creation of . . . visionary works of art" such as Brunelleschi's dome. Here the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo is adduced to provide the primary, though admittedly recherche, example of transcendent grounding.

In the following chapter, Eriksen addresses Vasari, giving particular emphasis to Vasari's paean to the design of St. Peter's dome in the Life of Michelangelo. Vasari's whole historiographical project seems to Eriksen to instantiate a ""work of epic scope and intention." Eriksen relates Vasari's compositional procedure to contemporary ruminations on the epic poetry of the kind, turning on the paragone between Ariosto and Tasso. The position of Ariosto's defenders (or even that implicit in his poem) is given short shrift, though the Orlando furioso certainly exemplifies a compositional, not to say aesthetic, approach far removed from that privileged by Eriksen. Tasso is the main subject of the final two chapters, which take Eriksen to a discussion of Milton, whose epic is however found to be informed by a reading of the Orlando furioso. Still, Eriksen focuses on the Tasso's Gerusalemine liberata, and to Tasso's use in this and other works on the use of "metaphors of shape and space."

It is all the more striking, then, that Eriksen admits the apparent resistance of Tasso's poem to a reading attentive to structural patterning, rather than to the "multifarious seductive textual surface." Eriksen insists that "mixed unity does not preclude unity of design," but the Tasso he presents is nevertheless author of what Terence Cave has called "a cornucopian text" (The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, Oxford, 1979). Eriksen does not cite David Quint's important book, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, 1983), which emphasizes the tendency in Renaissance texts to excessive subversion of the authoritative classical models that they ostensibly respect. It is striking that Eriksen does not address the phenomenon of "mannerism" as such, instead treating literature in general in Italy and England (to which he restricts discussion) as a relatively homogeneous tradition, at least from the point of view of topomorphics. In this respect this book is subject to the same line of critique as the famous work of Ernst Curtius on topoi in medieval and Renaissance literature (original edition Europdische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern, 1948). But where Curtius identified topoi as recurring on the level of content, Eriksen, whose book curiously lacks any explicit reference either to Curtius or to the important debates his work has engendered, explores the self-conscious exploration of structural topoi in ways that explode any boundary of form and content, structure and ornament. For this reason this book is of considerable interest not only to readers committed to a more formalist approach to Renaissance literature.