A World with a View: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scenic Values by Christopher Tunnard (review)

164 Books Inversion is less likely to be humorous when it is covert. Enemiesmay be described byattributing to them the opposites of one's own, supposedly good, qualities. A preference for homosexuality in a culture that condemns it may lead a man to choose a criminal instead of a legal career, with the covert intention of getting into gaol where homosexuality is socially accepted. Thus failure, from the viewpoint of the dominant culture, is the best way to success from the viewpoint of deviant individuals (Bruce Jackson). Seasonal celebrations, in which the prevailing norms are reversed, may be a safety valve for potentially hostile forces. They may also re-establish a sense of community that has been disrupted by the rigidity of workaday routines (Roger Abrahams and Richard Bauman). Babcock clearly intends this book to justify symbolic inversion as an intelligible field of study. As such, the concept is a formal one; it appeals to structuralists, among both anthropologists and literary critics, who are the chief contributors to this book. The concept has potentially wider applications. It can be seen as an essential part of the thinking of both Marx and Freud; and the somewhat scattered examples collected together in this book might have made more sense in a larger context of historical and psychoanalytic studies. The ambition of the undertaking would beenormous. Babcockherself hints at such an ambition when she quotes from Kenneth Burke: 'The study of man as a specifically word-using-animal requires special attention to this distinctive marvel, the negative.' This book is a beginning, richer in suggestions than conclusions. Most of the essays in this book are concerned with antitheses that society sustains over a period, the broadsheets of the World Upside Down beingagain a typical case, spanning four centuries. Such static antitheses may be a conceptual necessity for any social system, as Babcock suggests: 'We seem to need ... a category of "inverted beings" both to define and to question the orders by which we live.' Dynamic antitheses, through which social orders alter, do not figure large in this book. Systematic antithesis has played a large part in the recent history of the visual arts; but here a static element may underlie the apparently dynamic; phases of innovation follow one amother, but innovation , as such, survives as a standing antithesis to the 'Establishment' and has done so for a century in industrial countries. AWorld witha View:AnInquiry into the Nature of ScenicValues. Christopher Tunnard, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 1978. 196pp., iIIus. $15.00. Reviewed by Barry S. Maitland* The subject of Tunnard's study isgivenin his subtitle 'An Inquiry into the Nature of ScenicValues, and its scope iseverybit as wide as that somewhat indefinite term 'scenic values' suggests. He begins by considering the development of a scientific view of landscape as provided by geologists, botanists and agricultural scientists. The artistic viewis then outlined through the attitudes and references of painters and writers. The more specificfield of landscape as the design of gardens, occupies a third section and the town as landscape, or townscape, a fourth. Finally examples of attempts to preserve or to enhance scenic values in a selection of locations around the world are reviewed in a fifth section. Thus the fieldof study comprises the appreciation of the whole external environment, natural and man-made, which Tunnard sees as having been artificially compartmentalized to date. To cover the historical developments in this field, not once, but in five distinct sweeps, in a book of modest size, suggests that the result will not be exhaustive. Rather one might expect that the overall view gained would generate a framework or a thesis that could be developed in subsequent works, and the titles of both the book itself and of the concluding chapter The All-Embracing View would seem to imply that this is the author's intention. Unfortunately, such a central line of argument is not apparent in the body of the book, and the lack of it makes all the more confusing the leaps from Zurich to Melbourne and from Cowper to Cain that such a compressed account entails. At times this succession of lightning tours of the scenesand personalities that *Dept. of Architecture...