Documentos Latinoamericanos

As has been shown, the anomalous foundation of the chimney induces madness, or folly, in the narrator, and this takes on an erotic connotation in a scene of masturbation. In architecture, the term “folly” is bestowed upon “any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder” (OED). For example, installing “half-buried ruins” on the grounds of one’s country estate to give off a playful air of antiquity could well constitute such a folly (Reynolds 113). Based on Scribe’s estimation of the chimney in Melville’s story, the magnitude of the structure is entirely devoid of economic sense (9:366);71 it is what Pieter Boogaart has termed a “folly of passion” (87). The chimney fails as a proper architectural edifice in another important way. Being out of proportion with the rest of the house, in John Ruskin’s theory of proportionality, which is inherent to the picturesque, the chimney would

71 _{Mr. Scribe’s estimation of the narrator’s chimney is of course more or less ironic, as his own abode is} outfitted with “four chimneys in the form of erect dragons spouting smoke from their nostrils” (9:368), and thus no less foolish than the narrator’s.

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fail to elicit a “single feeling of pure material beauty” (Downing 10), as it is too “cumbrous” (Ruskin 69). To achieve beauty in proportion, a building “will neither be too long nor too broad, too low nor too high” (Downing 11). The problem of defining “the beau idéal of a chimney,” as Ruskin puts it (65), has to do with the fact that “we may imagine what it ought to be, [but] we can never tell, until the house is built, what it must be” (65). Caught between two modal verbs—denoting expectation and obligation, respectively—the chimney as a concept creates a problem for the architect, since ideally, but not practically, the chimney would not be fashioned until after the completion of the house proper. While to Ruskin a chimney can never be beautiful on its own terms—it can only be considered as such in a supplementary way, becoming a “beautiful accompaniment” to the house (63)—it is crucial to the formation of a pastoral “scene of peace,” attenuating the decorous stillness of smoke rising from the top of the chimney (63). For Ruskin, beauty and utility are close cousins— “what is most adapted to its purpose is most beautiful” (77)—and any given chimney should always adhere to the “variety” of the house it is attached to.72 The variety of the house, be it English, French, or American, will therefore determine the architecture of the chimney. Melville’s chimney, as a result, would be judged entirely inappropriate according to Ruskin’s aesthetics, as it disrupts the “organic continuity” of the house, to which it belongs (see Dow Adams 267). The chimney is at its base “precisely twelve feet square,” which, as the narrator gleefully exclaims, indeed seems an inordinate “appropriation of terra firma for a chimney” (9:357). And “its dimensions, at times, seem incredible,” even to him (358). It works against the propriety of magnitude, and its sublime shape can only properly be comprehended “by a sort of process in the higher mathematics” (358).

72 _{Architecture must always pay close attention to its surroundings, and conform to national norms. The} archetype of the English cottage, for example, in Ruskin’s scheme, will reflect the “snugness” of the British landscape; like “every quiet nook and sheltered lane,” the English cottage will be “equally small, equally sheltered, equally invisible at a distance” (13).

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Appreciation of form is innate to the human condition, according to Downing. It therefore follows that, “the want of proportion in a building is felt as a great and irremediable defect” (12). Ruskin’s scheme, however, allows for “fantastic chimneys, provided they are kept in unison with the rest of the building” (74). Of course Melville’s chimney has a real function in the story, to let out smoke, which it nonetheless only achieves in a partial way, as we have seen. (The narrator’s house itself is not asymmetrical, we should note, and

proportion and symmetry need not be present at the same time, according to Downing [14]). The architectural folly can be traced, in part, to the Latin word, follis, as Boogaart points out, “meaning something convex, such as bellows” (90). While not in shape, the chimney, as a “blower,” can functionally be related to this etymological origin. But this is more or less completely overshadowed by its figurally ambiguous property as a point of folly. From the French, la folie denotes or points to an unsound state of mind, but it can also mean “delight” or “favorite abode” (OED).73 The chimney thus represents a heimlich sort of delightful madness. Sacredness is never far from madness, and the foundation itself is inscribed with both qualities, as the anagrammatic hint of the name, Dacres, tells us. Usually, a folly will denote an outside structure, something like an obscene, “inflated” or convoluted garden ornament, but the central property of follies is a lack of utilitarian purpose; rather, they “are idiosyncratic buildings whose primary purpose is to please,” as Boogaart’s definition tells us (87). Tracing the etymology of “folly” to the French further, we learn that what used to be called a folie was a sort of “second home” which afforded the occupant a reprieve from the “public laws” governing “the cabarets and taverns” in eighteenth-century France (see

73 _{The folly as “delightful” structure is usually linked to “consumer desire for the [British] middling and upper} classes,” starting by the end of the eighteenth century (Reynolds 89). Nicole Reynolds notes that especially the archetype of the “laborer’s cottage”—imbued as it were with harmony and “rural virtues”—became “the kind of retreat from the duties of class or profession and the distractions of urban” that was seen as desirable at this time in British society (89). The American architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, revered the archetype of the English cottage, which he saw as the paragon of “domestic virtues” and “rural beauty” (26). Ironically, then, the modest habitat of poor country laborers thus became an “emblem of foolish luxury” (Taylor 426).

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Boogaart 90-91). La folie, as a temple de l’orgie,consequently came to be associated with “licentiousness” (91). From an eighteenth-century French police report, Boogaart extracts a number of terms related to the folie of one Baron de La Haye: “scandaleusement, nudité complète, monstrueux désirs and milles choses secrètes dont on ne sauvait parler sans rougir” (91). Such a structure seems to have been lifted straight out of Sodom. The chimney in Melville’s story provokes an ecstatic state in its “owner”—it puts him outside himself in a moment of “monstrous desire” (see Boogaart 91). As a beacon of ecstasy, it can therefore, in an ironic way, be considered an “outside” structure, by its very dislocation to the inside, or the way in which, by virtue of its function, it traverses inside and outside. And again the preposterous is seen to turn on a transversal and consequent confusion of two diametrically opposite points. We can thus refer to the chimney, somewhat pleonastically, as a “mad” folly.

Architecture, according to Jacques Derrida, “inaugurates the intimacy of our

economy, the law of our hearth (oikos), our familial, religious, and political oikonomy, all the places of birth and death, temple, school, stadium, agora, square, sepulcher” (Psyche, Volume II 90). The folly, on the other hand, can be related to the conception of “architectural

transformation[]” (Dow Adams 270). “When a building is built for one purpose but used for another […] the idea of form representing function is altered” (270). And this represents to Horatio Greenough, whom Adams quotes, a severe “symptom[] of decline” (270). Follies, however, purposefully subvert the original intention of their structure, or they can aim at artifice by utilizing naturally occurring structures, such as the grotto, for spectacular means or to invoke a romantic fantasy, “remote both in time and place” (Pierson 14). Follies also have an erotic component. As Mark C. Taylor points out, the word “derives from the stem ‘beu’ (swelling, flowing, flowering), which it shares with the Greek ‘phallos; phallus,

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from the regulations that police routine behavior” (426), and it is thus not surprising that the narrator of “Chimney” should feel an “it(c)h” whenever he is near the base of his “swelling” chimney. Recalling Goldberg, follies align with sodometries, therefore, in the way that they offer a switch-point between the licit and illicit—they trouble normative notions of

architectural propriety by creating habitats for what may otherwise not suffer the light of decency.

The architectural base of Melville’s chimney puts us on the path towards a minor architecture shrouded in “near-darkness” (Ricco 70): total darkness defies any kind of exposition, and complete revelation betrays the quality that darkness holds. Minor

architecture, in this way, belongs to the litotetic grey zone of the in-between, caught between two extremes: light and dark. The “secret closet” of the chimney, much speculated about by the characters in the story, may “conceal problematic aspects of [the narrator’s] identity,” as Katja Kanzler has pointed out, since it is rumored that the narrator’s ancestor and the builder of the house, Dacres, “made his fortune not as a merchant but as a pirate” (325). In “The Encantadas,” Melville suggests that both pirates and poets are wont to be “self-

transforming,” “bemocking,” and “self-upbraiding” (9:142); the metaphysical poet, Abraham Cowley, is alluded to. As such qualities tend to “run[] in the blood,” according to Melville, it “might not seem unwarranted” (142; my emphasis) to identify a comparison to the narrator of “Chimney” here. The litotetic construction of this passage connotes a sense of mock- modesty. The teasing deferment of knowledge that defines litotes also has some of the “open secret” about it; the truth winks at us from the abyss.74 The secret chamber of Melville’s

74 _{Litotes simultaneously connotes a level of indeterminacy and excessiveness by the preposterousness of the} doubly negative: it refuses clear affirmation, while turning towards an affirmative gesture against itself. Bryan Short states that litotes “protect[s] poetic language from genealogical determination while opening it to incessant phantasmic echoes” (146). And here we should note the temporality of litotes: it is a crossing of prolepsis with anteriority; the initial negation looks towards the second and final negation that, while slowing the progression of narrative by turning back towards the first negation, completes the scheme. In Short’s

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chimney nevertheless remains hidden. But some of its allure resurfaces in another text. In addition to a sense of spatial impropriety, architectural follies often lack “historical consciousness” (Reynolds 139). Nicole Reynolds uses the example of nineteenth-century architect, George Soane, to show how the inclusion of follies in homes and museums can induce in the viewer a feeling of “spatial dislocation” and “temporal disorientation” (114). Similarly, the sacredness of the chimney serves to unhinge spatial limitations—as in the straightening out of the narrator’s sciatica during his ecstatic digging—and, by allusion, the preposterous spirit of the chimney re-emerges in the exotic context of “The Encantadas.”