Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (review)

Paul Eggert's brave book considers together architectural restoration (houses, churches), art conservation (Rembrandt, the Sistine Chapel, and Leonardo da Vinci), and textual scholarship (German scholarship—including Gabler's Ulysses, Shakespeare and Middleton, Dreiser and Lawrence). If a musicologist objects to the failure to include musical "texts" in this panoply, it is not from a "déformation professionelle," but because there is much to be learned from similarities and differences involving this repertory. Still, Eggert has done more than anyone else to bring together reflections pertaining to different art forms and to show their connections.

Since he himself is known primarily for textual work in English literature, it is not a criticism of his project to say that his observations about architecture and art tend to follow grounds well-defined by writers in these disciplines, whereas his most original contributions are those pertaining to textual scholarship. Some forty years after "authors" were pronounced dead by French critics, they remain with us, a stubborn coterie of persons who refuse to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet Eggert is sensitive enough to the problems raised by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida to know that simplistic views of the "text" are no longer possible. He raises the problems in terms of architectural monuments, demonstrating the ways in which efforts to restore these monuments are intimately tied to the reasons for which the restorations are undertaken. He examines the controversies that have surrounded the Rembrandt project over the past forty years and the changing ways in which issues of authorship, workshop, connoisseurship, and scientific evidence have interacted. Most of all, he substitutes the concept of "document" for that of "text," rendering the efforts of textual scholarship problematic in new and original ways. This book is important more for the way it poses problems than for its ability to provide totally satisfactory answers, but only from an approach of this kind are new methodologies likely to arise.