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THE NATURE OF GOTHIC C H A P T E R 3   Artisanship, Intuition, and the Representation of Expertise skill’s sticking points This chapter shifts the focal points of Talking Shop in several ways. It considers the work of nineteenth-century artisans and tradespeople as well as the output of writers. It analyzes crafted artifacts as well as texts. Most important, it turns to closer questions about how skill might be made legible in the furnishings market, describing specific aesthetic patterns and theories about the translatability of certain styles rather than—my subject in the previous two chapters —the varied imperatives negotiated within a print culture of workmanship. I return to Hawthorne, in the initial section of this chapter, to locate his interest in the discourses of craft in a new context. Focusing on broad questions of genre, I have argued that Hawthorne’s early fiction is driven by the author’s meditations on craft as a textual medium. The interpretation of The House of the Seven Gables that opens my concerns here—and that introduces the dynamics of craft’s marketability traced in the rest of this book—has to do more narrowly with the emergence of a specific style, the Gothic, as an initial cultural form through which handicrafts skills were thought to be most describable. Taken together, the two preceding chapters might be said to explore tactics that were essentially compensatory: the authors I have examined hinted that craft’s narratives , despite representing labor in an immaterial medium, might nonetheless constitute a viable sphere for revivifying practical labor, reinvigorating traditional workmanship, and defending a relation with real things. This chapter and the next instead explore tactics that were explicitly proactive: the figures I examine transformed the very definition of skill to reflect the terms of the market’s demand for craft as a recognizable style and a subject animated by its depiction. Skill, to repeat a point that structures much of Talking Shop, appears poorly translatable or transferable in the Platonic tradition describing its virtuousness as its telos. Vitruvius’s De Architectura is typical: Vitruvius lodges the merit of craft in the artisan’s ability to realize an intention established before the work ∞≠∏ talking shop begins. The practice of making (fabrica) is the ‘‘continued and expert practice of skill by the hands’’ according to the mandates of the design (propositus); the principles of the design, in turn, should be clearly visible in the final product.∞ Vitruvius inextricably ties outcomes to their initiating purposes by representing the two concepts as grammatical inverses of one another. Form appears as quod significat, that which signifies, and purpose as quod significatur, that which is signified (3). Intent is thus bound to result, plan to product: the two concepts are complementary sides of the same process, indeed of the same word. Skill, in this model, is the essential agent of craft, for it ensures the continuity of beginnings and ends. Peter Dormer, one of craft’s most important recent theorists , depends on just this aspect of skill when confessing his own failure to meet the standard of ‘‘honest work.’’ That failure is accidental: trying to mold a clay sculpture of a man and a cat, Dormer ends up sculpting a woman whose long overcoat provides the structural stability he could not achieve in the projected model. Shifting goals in the middle of making something, of course, is commonplace. But it is also, Dormer claims, antithetical to the purest and most honest application of crafts knowledge. In Dormer’s essentially Vitruvian model, craft loses definition at the limits of skill. Artisans ‘‘work strenuously to clarify their goals and seek out rules . . . that will keep them to the sticking point.’’≤ The Gothic idioms of nineteenth-century e√orts to revive workmanship, however, suggest a less stable relationship between craft and skill, of artisanship and its sticking points, than these accounts of workmanship’s virtues. In craft as in its other aesthetic outlets, the Gothic Revival—the focal point for the formal crafts movement between 1840 and 1890—emphasized qualities of sensibility , unexpected occurrences, and subjectivity against standards of certainty and predictability. To trace ways in which the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined skill through the Gothic is to follow threads that the Platonic and Vitruvian heritages tend to obscure. Those threads interweave the virtues of skill not with narrow concentration but with the broader patterns of craft’s emergence as a way...

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