Walpole's "Description of the Villa"

While reading Horace Walpole’s A Description of the Villa, I tried to keep in mind several questions raised at the end of our last class: if we contend that a list can, in fact, make an argument, what is the argument here? What is the purpose of publishing this list and what did Walpole achieve by doing so?

In considering these questions, I spent far too much time thinking about the life of teacups and what it means to take an object created for a specific, practical use and making it a display-object.  In the list of objects in The China-Room, he includes items that don’t seem to have much to recommend them compared to items described as having some exotic origin or material, or were either given as a gift or previously owned by someone of consequence. For example, included in the list is “A tea-pot and milk-pot, six cups and saucers, of modern china, with grey landscapes” (28). The items in this entry would certainly have a use-value outside of this collection (they have a purpose: serving tea, which is an everyday affair), but would they have any kind of display value if not included with the other objects? It seems that its display value (and therefore its exchange value) is increased significantly merely by its proximity to other items of value and its inclusion in this collection. So one purpose, I think, of publishing the list is to solidify the exchange value of comparatively unremarkable items by virtue of having once been a part of Horace Walpole’s collection. In this sense, Walpole has set himself up as the arbiter of the item’s exchange value.

In the preface he notes that one purpose of publishing the list is to offer future owners “an authentic certificate of their curiousities” (13), but how does he authenticate them in the first place, in a way that gives him the authority to authenticate them into the future? As we’ve seen with other authors we’ve encountered so far, he calls on the aristocracy and “people of taste” to lend credibility to value, and he states that much of his collection was gleaned from collections of other people of consequence. If the list (as he seemed to intend) survives the existence of the collection, he ultimately hijacks the history of the object. We now know little more about the object’s origin other than that it came to him from a particular source. He authenticates the value of the object with reference to other “celebrities,” and sets himself up as the “celebrity” that lends it value into the future.

I would be interested to discuss some of these questions in regard to Baudrillard’s suggestions about the collection (and in this case the catalog of a collection) as an idealized reflection of self and as a deep-seated (and potentially destructive or damaging?) psychological project.