Roger Scruton

Subtitled ‘On Order in Architecture’, Joseph Rykwert’s exploration of the classical Orders, and their meaning for the many architects who have made use of them, has the shape, size and trimmings of a magnum opus. Footnotes and bibliography take up one third of its six hundred pages, and the text is burdened with photographs, plans and drawings illustrating each period of the classical style. On some pages almost every sentence is fortified by a footnote, and scarcely a paragraph passes without introducing some new writer or architect relevant to the theme. No doubt Rykwert has read even more items than the two thousand or so listed in the bibliography; but I cannot help wishing he had read less. For his theme is of the first importance, and deserves the utmost clarity of argument, and a willingness to come forward with a plain statement, whether or not an authority can be found to back it up. As it is, I was led groaning with redundant knowledge through the maze of Rykwert’s text, no more convinced at the end than along the way that it really has an argument.

Semiotics, semiology, hermeneutics, structuralist criticism – so many labels, but how many things? If there are distinctions here, they seem to be largely hereditary. The term ‘semiotic’ comes from C.S. Peirce, ‘semiology’ from Saussure. ‘Structuralism’ has meant one thing in anthropology, another in linguistics; its application to literary theory comes partly through the work of Propp and the Russian formalists. ‘Hermeneutics’ once indicated the nice interpretation of Biblical texts; now it denotes the nice interpretation of everything. In all these things, however, the niceties seem to be the same: technicality at the expense of theory, analysis at the expense of content, intensity at the expense of depth – in short, ‘vain babblings and oppositions of science, falsely so called’ (I Timothy vi, 20). And yet, wherever literature is taught, students have to perceive it through the veil of this new scholasticism, their observations muddled by technicalities borrowed from a thousand premature sciences, distracted by ‘methods’ which regard Mickey Mouse and the Mona Lisa, Superman and King Lear, advertising jingles and the works of Schoenberg, as equally legitimate objects of inquiry. Is this movement a reaction against critical moralism, expressed with a hesitancy so great that only massive recourse to technicality can prevent it from knowledge of its impotence? Or is it the first step towards some new critical method, a method sufficiently general as to assign an interpretation to everything that could be regarded as a ‘sign’?