Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque by Cynthia Wall (review)

When I opened Cynthia Wall’s book, the first thing I noticed was a small “ix” in the right-hand margin, a third of the way down the page, next to the first line of text. It took me a minute to figure it out—what a surprise to find a page number just there! This was the first of many moments I was drawn to look closely at the page while reading Grammars of Approach, a study that argues that “marks on the page ... can be quite sophisticated and deliberate constructors of nonlexical meaning” (136). How often do we stop reading to attend to the font on the front and back covers of a book? Such are the pleasures of Wall’s wonderful study, and kudos to the University of Chicago Press for the care it has taken in its production.

Grammars of Approach describes a transformation in landscape theory that shifts attention from the object of the approach (the house) to the perception of the viewer. The turn in landscape architecture was mirrored by changing theories and practices of print and syntax, allowing Wall to use the transformation of “approach” from verb to noun as the starting point for a broader cultural history. Through her study of the topographies of “land, page, and narrative,” Wall reflects on how the move ment from “the grand straight avenue ... to the winding approach” mani fests the aesthetics of the picturesque (17). “The term ‘picturesque,’” Wall confesses, “is used shamelessly loosely throughout the book” (6). But its celebration of “the irregular, the textured, the oblique, the unexpected, the interruptive” allows it to capture the dynamics this study wants to examine (6).

Wall begins with those elements of the architectural approach that are central to the study as a whole: its shift of emphasis from landowner to observer, from linear to winding, from emblem to plot. Humphry Repton, writing and working in the moment between Capability Brown and picturesque theorists Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, is a key player in Wall’s story, “a historical and a metaphorical representation of the root system” connecting a larger pattern of transformations across landscape, page, and narrative (24). Repton’s Red Books, “exquisitely crafted collections of water colors, ground plans, and copperplate-hand descriptions bound in red morocco,” teach their readers a new “narrative of motion” (31). The conclusion of chapter 1 introduces us to the eighteenth-century novel’s “approach,” beginning with Anna Letitia Barbauld’s account of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as a “long avenue” to an “old mansion” (40). Wall argues that Clarissa’s plot, in fact, “is both avenue and approach, inescapable and recombinant, direct and deviating” (42). Analyzing Clarissa here highlights how “picturesque” designates a way of reading as well as a historical reference point in Grammars of Approach, a way of looking for, as well as at, the “fantastic roots of trees” in unexpected places (26).

Chapter 2 shifts from the psychology of approach to its prepositional aspect, starting with the park gate lodge. “When we slow down and look around and between instead of simply straight ahead,” Wall notes, “things like the park gate lodge swing into view” (57). The topographical view so popular in the eighteenth century allows appendages to the great house, like the park gate lodge, to “tell their stories” (80). The small building “initiates the Relations of Place between entrance and end” (50). Frances Burney’s Camilla provides a narrative representation of the park gate lodge’s effects, revealing how characters navigate thresholds: “It opens the gate quite literally to a flurry of narrative and psychological approaches to the house” (57). The chapter concludes with a wonderful reading of the London Bridge’s clearance in the middle of the eighteenth century, a transformation that revealed “how much lay in between the Great Stone Gate and the City itself” (89).

The “linguistic picturesque” serves as the focus of chapters 3 and 4, which study...