“He came to think of his life, and all life, as a maze of unexpected turns, a labyrinth (or crinkle-crankle, the Chaucerian word Ruskin liked to use) of fortunate passages and obstructing dead ends.”
Guy
Davenport is writing about the brilliant, prolific and sometimes mad John
Ruskin, whose identification with mazes and labyrinths is elaborated in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and
Labourers of Great Britain (1871-84). Ruskin saw the Dedalus-designed,
Theseus-navigated Cretan labyrinth as an apt metaphor for human life. Davenport’s
ten-page essay is, in part, a review of Tim Hilton’s two-volume biography of
Ruskin.
Crinkle-crankle is an unlikely word that might have shown
up as a rhyme in an Ogden Nash poem. (With ankle?
Rankle? Frank’ll?) Here is the OED’s definition of crinkle-crankle as a noun: “a winding in and out, a zigzag. Also
(as a mass noun): sinuosity; intricacy, complexity; convolution.” And the
adjective: “twisting in and out, zigzag; sinuous, serpentine; intricate;
convoluted.” No citations from Chaucer or Ruskin. For the adjective, we hear
from Coleridge, Thomas Manning in a letter to Charles Lamb, and Geoffrey
Grigson in his essay collection The Harp
of Aeolus (1948): “Yeats is a pagan, but a purer writer, less
crinkle-crankle in his substance.” In England, a crinkle-crankle wall is one that zig-zags or undulates. Five years ago I found crankle in Charles Lamb.
Inevitably,
Ruskin’s prose must be described as crinkle-crankle. Davenport closes his essay
with a characterization of Ruskin’s voice:
“It is, even
at its most querulous and preacherly, not writing but speaking. It is, in a
beautiful sense, thinking aloud at its most congenial, conversational, richly anecdotal,
and always observant. . . . He takes nothing for granted; his readers are
children to be taught, to be beguiled into learning. For one of his Oxford lectures
he brought a plow, to make certain that his students knew what one looked like.
(The lecture was on sculpture.)”
[The Ruskin
essay, first published in Harper’s in
2000, is collected in Davenport’s The
Death of Picasso (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003).]
Great entry on a wonderful Davenport essay. A footnote: the passage Guy D. probably had in mind, in mentioning Chaucer, occurs in the latter's description of the labyrinth in The Romaunt of the Rose: "And, for the hous is crinkled to and fro, / And hath so queinte weyes for to to— / For hit is shapen as the mase is wroght..."
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