The View from the Tower. Origins of an Antimodernist Image (review)

The View from the Tower. Origins of an Antimodernist Image. By Theodore Ziolkowski. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press 1998. xvii plus 195 pp. $ 29.95 paperback.

The great Princeton Magister Ludi excelled here in a true master game for "turro-philes" which uplifts mind and heart alike in our so far advanced time of decay and "Age of Feuilletonism." In this game he unveils the discovery of a hitherto practically unrecognized but truly dominating symbol of Western civilization. With an embarras de richesse of knowledge and a little tongue in cheek he singles out four great figures of Western literatures and psychography, all of whom made their mark after World War I, all of whom--at least for some time--lived in towers, and for all of whom towers played a constitutive role, both literal and symbolic. In addition, all four of them sublimated their obsession with towers into truly towering expressions of spiritual dimensions. The four are William Butler Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Carl Gustav Jung.

With a playful ease and brilliancy Ziolkowski differentiates the specific individual attitudes of their "turrophilias" and also points out their integral common denominator. The book also furnishes pictures of Yeats' Thoor Ballylee, of Jeffers' Hawk Tower and Tor House, of Rilke's Chateau de Muzot, and of Jung's tower-complex at Bollingen.

The four chapters about each of these tower inhabitants are surrounded by a novella-like frame at the beginning about "Proud Towers" and at the closing about "Broken Towers." It is this frame which makes the book a general comparative overall view of the tower symbolism in culture and literature. The introductory chapter about "Proud Towers" gives a condensed worldwide short history of the remarkable continuity in the various symbolic meanings associated with towers from classical antiquity down to Montaigne, Vigny, and Barbara Tuchman.

In comparison to the relatively flat symbolism of the older, conventional literary towers of Miltonic solitude and the conventional topos of "tower, lamp and book" the literary output of these four great figures transcends these narrow borders. There is the ascent of consciousness in the case of Yeats, the internalization of reality in the encounter with angels of Rilke, the "Inhumanist" meditations on the decline of civilization of Jeffers, and finally the Jungian ruminations on the integration of the personality.

The amazing result is the unbelievable condensation in which, on very few pages, deeper insights and greater accomplishments of the understanding of the four authors' work have been reached than in extensive studies about them. This is achieved by combining the tower "thematics" with biographical facts and quotes of their spiritual works into one united context which is made transparent by Ziolkowski's vision. For example new light has been shed on some pivotal verses of Rilke's 5th, 7th, and 9th Duino elegy in a very precise manner and surpassing earlier insight--though entire books have been written on these elegies alone.

The closing chapter or second half of the frame lists authors using the tower symbolism who follow later in the development of literature than these four. Here the meaning of the tower symbolism is most often a sign of decay. It is no longer a code of spiritual refuge and no mystical values are associated with the tower image as it was in the case of the four authors for whom the tower was more consequential than the architectural dimensions of the rather squat structures at Ballylee, Carmel, Muzot, and Bollingen.

T.S. Eliot used the image of "falling towers" to proclaim his vision of disintegrating civilization in The Waste Land , Stephen Dedalus abandons, in Ulysses, the Martello Tower at Sandycove and so it continues to Thomas Bernhard's Amras and the prayer tower at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa--which possibly amounts to a "postmodern melange" of renewal, institutionalization and parody.

Besides sheer admiration for the book, there is only one slight critical...