Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030269050
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

© The Author(s) 2019

E. Mitsi et al. (eds.)Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imaginationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Efterpi Mitsi¹ , Anna Despotopoulou¹ , Stamatina Dimakopoulou¹ and Emmanouil Aretoulakis¹

(1)

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

Efterpi Mitsi

Anna Despotopoulou (Corresponding author)

Stamatina Dimakopoulou

Emmanouil Aretoulakis

End Abstract

In a footnote to the first stanza of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto 2, Byron reflects on the meaning of the ruined Parthenon:

We can all feel, or imagine, the regret with which the ruins of cities, once the capitals of empires, are beheld; the reflections suggested by such objects are too trite to require recapitulation. But never did the littleness of man, and the vanity of his very best virtues, of patriotism to exalt, and of valour to defend his country, appear more conspicuous in the record of what Athens was, and the certainty of what she now is. (Byron 1980)

The poet argues that the thoughts triggered by the sight of ruined cities, like Athens, where he arrived in December 1809, are “too trite” for explanation. At the same time, these reflections generate many lines of poetry, lamenting the ruination of the Parthenon not only due to the ravages of time but also because of the looting of conquerors and “plunderers.” In stanza 6, the temple’s “broken arch, its ruined wall, / Its chambers desolate, and portals foul” form a sad contrast to the glory of ancient Athens, where “this was once Ambition’s airy hall, / The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul” (Byron 1980, 2.46–9). Emphasizing the removal of the Parthenon sculptures by Lord Elgin as the worst kind of vandalism and imperialism, Byron recognizes that these “relics [are] ne’er to be restored” (2.132); the ruin cannot be recuperated, ruination as a historical and political act cannot be reversed. Sitting on “this massy stone, / The marble column’s yet unshaken base” (Byron 1980, 2.82–3), Harold is not a mere ruin-gazer but a critical reader of ruins, connecting imperial with cultural politics and condemning the British as the “plunderers of yon fane” (2.91). In that same footnote, the poet suggests that the littleness and vanity of Byron’s contemporaries have turned ruins into commodities, and Athens itself into “a scene of petty intrigue and perpetual disturbance, between the bickering agents of certain British nobility and gentry” (1980, 2. note p. 189). Moreover, in a note to the papers appended to the poem, Byron adds that Elgin could indeed “boast of having ruined Athens” (“Appendix to Canto the Second,” Note [A]). Yet, in the midst of ruins, a new hope of recovery arises, the political renewal of Greece itself.¹

On 20 July 2015, just over 200 years after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , the cover of Time magazine showed an image of the Acropolis looming above Athens, with the Parthenon at the foreground. The headline “State of Ruin”² connected the topos of Byron’s “Sad relic” with the condition of Greece as a failed state on the verge of yet one more economic disaster. The ruin, which in the early nineteenth century “nor ev’n can Fancy’s eye / Restore what Time hath labour’d to deface” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 2.85–8), has become synonymous in the early twenty-first with the state itself. The subtitle under the headline, “The battle to save Greece, the euro and the dream of a united Europe,” also evoked the philhellenic dream to liberate Greece from oriental despotism, linking it to the post-war ideal of a united Europe, itself emerging from the disaster and the ruins of World War II. Thus, the state of ruin forewarns of the ruin of a union which has been founded on a common currency and shared political and social values. It is still uncertain whether the battle was victorious, with Brexit having replaced the fear of Grexit and with the rise of anti-European, far-right nationalism throughout Europe.

In the autumn of 2018, the 6th Athens Biennale, entitled “ANTI,” used emptied and abandoned Athens landmark buildings to house its exhibits, which set “to challenge our faith in emancipation and humanism by doubting prevalent resurrections of ideas of the ‘human .’”³ In one of these venues, the Benakeios Library, located on the side of the Old Parliament of Greece and closed to the public since 2004, a video by Chinese artist Cao Fei shows the ruins resulting from the demolition of old buildings in China strangely reflected on the debris falling from the room’s ceiling. The video, entitled Rumba II: Nomad, focuses on a group of vacuum cleaning robots navigating in a demolishing area in Beijing and vainly trying to clean the dust and rubble of urban destruction.⁴ The surreal element of the cleaning robots is counterbalanced by a man collecting brick by brick the remains of the past. Will something new be built from the ruins of the past, or is his effort as futile as that of the wandering robots? Cao Fei, born in 1978 in Guangzhou and living in Beijing, reflects on the frenzied rhythm of destruction, construction and urbanization occurring in China today but also on the human obsession with progress and renewal concurrent with the fear of ruin, obliteration and oblivion. In the ruined nineteenth-century Benakeios library, different states of ruin come together, material and symbolic , local and global. The boundaries between rubble and ruin, between debris and monument are blurred, as viewers contemplate and recognize their own fascination with ruins.

Focusing on the ruin as metaphor and as a materiality that triggers appropriations and imaginings across different cultural experiences and forms of writing, the chapters of this volume seek to understand what determines a given object “as a ruin” and how it interacts with the past as a palimpsest, inscribed by the continuous attempts to assign meaning to its incompleteness. The ruin predominantly recalls a classical or distant past and is valued as a silent yet privileged ground for its reconstruction or continued influence. Ruins have enduring, interconnected, but also distinct legacies, as historical realities, material and/or aesthetic objects, and as categories of thought. Following the critical discourse on ruins, Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination makes an original contribution to recent discussions on the significance of ruins and fills a gap in the existing scholarship. Despite important studies of the meaning of classical ruins in Western culture, from Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins (1953) to Julia Hell’s very recent The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome (2019),⁵ as well as explorations of the idea of ruin in specific historical periods, the ruin as materiality and metaphor in British and American literature and culture has not been sufficiently discussed. In literary studies, scholars have mostly studied ruins in the context of Romanticism. Thomas McFarland (1981), Elizabeth Harries (1994), Gillen Wood d’ Arcy (2001) and Sophie Thomas (2010) explore fragments and ruins as central notions in Romantic authors, centring on the crosscurrents between architectural ruins and textual fragments in Romantic literature and on ruins as expressions of the space between the visible and the invisible . More recently, Andrew Hui (2017) reflects on the shifting meaning of ruins in the Renaissance through readings of Petrarch, Du Bellay and Spenser. Both Macaulay and Hui have shown the genealogy of the “cult of ruins,” emerging in the Renaissance through poetic collections such as Du Bellay’s Antiquités de Rome (1558), which admired the greatness of classical ruins, while lamenting the fall of empires and civilizations. As Macaulay argues, “the Renaissance desire to build up the ancient ruins into their glorious first state” is counterbalanced by the lamentation over the ruin as “wreckage of perfection” (1953, 192–193). At the same time, according to Brian Dillon, already in the Renaissance the ruin was transformed from “a legible remnant of the past” to a “scattered cipher: a text that was alternately readable and utterly mysterious” (Dillon 2005 [2006], par. 1).

The moral reading of ruins, which made them emblems of the transience and temporality of human life and ambition, changed in the eighteenth century, as ruins became autonomous entities rather than enigmatic remains of an original work, testifying to their own survival from oblivion. As Maria Vara writes in Chapter 2, it is then that the Gothic becomes the main language of the ruin, paving the way for phantasmagoric spectacles set in ruined monasteries and castles. Also in the eighteenth century, replicas of ancient Greek monuments are reconstructed in Britain, aesthetically appropriating t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Allegory – Animation – Appropriation
• Part II. Re-collection – Trauma – Aftermath
• Part III. Contemplation – Preservation – Resistance
• Back Matter