Reading Ruskin Writing - John Ruskin - Bibliography

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Dave Hickey

So the writing is dense and the later writing even more so. English literature would have to wait until James Joyce for more elaborate explosions of cultural reference and allusion than those found in Fors Clavigera, a series of personal meditations Ruskin published as pamphlets between 1871 and 1884. For spirits like Ruskin's fellow dons at Oxford and their contemporary descendants, in search of ready knowledge, such explosions of allusion and reference are invariably exasperating, in Joyce or Ruskin. This, however, is no mason not to read Ruskin, because we don't read Ruskin for his thoughts, we read him for his vision and conviction--for his writing, and because he makes us think. We read him because even though Ruskin is occasionally a fool, he is never stupid, never cold and never boring. Here he is responding in a letter to a believer's assertion that the Bible is the "word of God":

Nothing could ever persuade me that God writes vulgar Greek. If an angel [with] all over peacock's feathers were to appear in the blue sky now over Castle crag--and write on it in star letters--`God writes vulgar Greek'--I would say--`You are the devil, peacock's feathers and all.'

A contemporary reader, having been exposed to excerpted apercus of this sort, and confronting the intimidating mass of Ruskin's writings, has a right to ask about the possibility of personally gaining access to them. The tendency is to stand in a state of extreme frustration at the edge of what seems to be an impenetrable jungle, fully aware that it is populated by angels in peacock's feathers and at a loss for a way in. By way of entrance, I would suggest The Stones of Venice (1851), Ruskin's history of Venetian culture as told by its architecture. Specifically, I would suggest an unabridged version of the section entitled "The Nature of the Gothic," which expounds at some length on Ruskin's primary, informing idea that human beings, being predisposed to resist boredom, invariably resist authority and seek freedom, whose physical signifier is irregularity, variety and intricacy. From this premise, Ruskin derives his critique of contemporary architecture and contemporary government as "planning practices" that isolate themselves from the actual creative work of building. Ruskin's question is this: How can an ethical architect, or an ethical bureaucrat, possibly design a structure that degrades the spirits and steals the souls of the beings who actually build it--that destroys them with repetitive labor which requires of them nothing of their humanity?

From this question, one may achieve access not only to the writings of Ruskin but to the entire discourse of postindustrial culture as well; and one may locate Ruskin within this discourse by regarding The Stones of Venice as the only achieved precursor of Walter Benjamin's unrealized Arcades Project, which was planned to be what Ruskin's volumes are--a cultural history told through the proliferating relationships of material artifacts, in Benjamin's case the shopping arcades of 19th-century Paris. Benjamin's writings, in general, offer us the most congenial contemporary entry point into Ruskin's sensibility. Ruskin is by far the better writer of the two, but both Ruskin and Benjamin are confirmed mystical materialists, lovers rather than fighters, who understand the technological and economic changes afflicting the world they live in and, fully aware that one cannot go back, remain irrevocably nostalgic for a lost way of seeing and being. When Ruskin laments the loss of "awe" and Benjamin laments the loss of "aura," they are lamenting the same loss, equally unaware that the industrial culture they saw flourishing around them was not going to last forever, that another time might present itself in which freedom, eccentricity, foolishness, clear streams, blue skies, variety and intricate diversity might once again attain the status of virtues toward which human beings would aspire.