 |
|
Western culture has long been fascinated with the power of ruin and decay.
By Max Page
April 2003
"If I am lonely in a foreign country, I search for ruins," Christopher
Woodward writes in his grand tour of European ruins and how artists and
writers have interpreted them, In Ruins. "If I am stressed or
unhappy, I close my eyes and remember these moments of absolute peace in
the embrace of ruins." The author freely admits to having long been
under the "soporific spell of decay." I know what he means.
My memories of travel are punctuated by solitary encounters with ruins:
walking one foggy morning down the ramp into the Roman Forum, Blue Guide
in hand, intent on identifying each and every stone; searching the Agora
in Athens for the place Socrates stood before the judges; finding a
BMW dealership on the site of my father's destroyed home in Berlin.
Anyone who has succumbed to "ruinlust"--and I confess to being
one of them--will happily go on this book's highly personal, if sometimes
frustrating, journey. Woodward reminds us that much of European culture
is bound up in images of ruins: painting real and invented ones, constructing
classical follies in various states of decay, and preserving lost places--the
abbeys of England, the remains of ancient Rome, the sites of wartime disasters.
The power of ruins lies in their physical embodiment of time, in their evidence
of human creations and whole civilizations brought down. They represent
the "hand of Time, and the contest between the individual and the universe"
and have inspired artists since the Renaissance because they lay bare a
fundamental human dilemma: the battle between achievement and frailty.
Observers create their own images, Woodward insists, for "a ruin is
a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator."
And these projections are radically different. In 1819 Shelley believed
that the crumbling Baths of Caracalla proved that tyranny will always eventually
be crushed. For Dickens the sight of the decaying Roman Colosseum was "the
most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable." What depressed
him enthralled at least one infamous twentieth-century visitor: in the slow
disintegration of the Colosseum's ancient bricks Adolf Hitler found a lesson
in how to build an empire that would fall apart gloriously.
Woodward is at his best exploring the odd corners of European ruinenlust:
artificial ruins created on English country estates; paintings that
imagine London utterly destroyed; Charles-Louis Clérisseau's trompe
l'oeil painting covering the walls of a monk's room at Santa Trinità
dei Monti to make it seem as if he were living inside a ruin. Most touching
is the chapter on Sir John Soane (Woodward worked at the quirky museum of
architectural fragments in Soane's former London home). Both a celebrated
architect to high society and a melancholy introvert, Soane was so ruin
obsessed that he crafted an artificial one at the back of his house,
and wrote an elaborate history of how it would be "discovered"
and studied by earnest antiquarians long after his death.
Woodward appreciates these "serious follies" for their "strange
magic" but reserves his wrath for the one person who would sap their
enchantment--the "cold-hearted archaeologist"--offering rhetorical
elbows to those who have cleaned up, labeled, and roped off ruins in the
interest of preserving them for posterity. He opens with an elegy for the
Colosseum, where great artists and writers once were inspired by the sight
of nature slowly reclaiming this monument to the city's glory--before the
professionals took over. "Today," Woodward writes, "it is
the most monumental bathos in Europe: a bald, dead, and bare circle of stones.
There are no shadows, no sands, no echoes and if a single flower blooms
in a crevice it is sprayed with weed-killer." Now the shackled ruins
have no ability to inspire. "If the archaeologists had arrived before
Shelley," he grumbles, "there would be no Prometheus Unbound."
Woodward's attacks are witty but misplaced. So much of our fascination with
ruins was first inspired by the discoveries of Pompeii and other ancient
sites that were unearthed, documented, and preserved. The author is undoubtedly
glad that archaeologists and preservationists have uncovered and protected
the ancient Roman ruins in Bath, creating attractions that draw people to
his city. Preservation efforts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
inspired a new fascination with classical architecture, which led to the
lovely classical revival palazzo that is the home of the Holburne Museum
of Art, where Woodward is director. The tension between preservation and
decay is a complex one. But to blame archaeologists for destroying the romance
of ruins is naïve.
The relationship between nature and ruins is similarly fraught. Woodward
dreams of ruins succumbing slowly to nature's inexorable power. "No
ruin can be suggestive to the visitor's imagination," he writes, "unless
its dialogue with the forces of Nature is visibly alive and dynamic."
But not all nature is equal. The remains of the Italian town of Noto, destroyed
by earthquake in 1693, are depressing, "lonely and sinister" because
a forest fire "left every stone charred, every tree black and
leafless." But are not forest fires a force of nature? I
remember what a flash fire did to the undergrowth around the Temple
of Poseidon at Sunion one summer, when I was forced to run to the water
to avoid the flames. As we walked across the hot black soil after the
fire had died down, the ruins gained a new power, their bright whiteness
set off from the smoking earth.
Woodward seems to want nature on a leash. He likes lichen and grass but
not forest fires; he appreciates trees growing in the Colosseum but
not the dramatic destruction caused by floods or earthquakes. What
he longs for is a picturesque landscape as created by English painters and
their patrons. His ideal is Ninfa, an Italian city destroyed in 1382 and
"rescued from modernity" in the 1880s by an Englishwoman, Ida
Wilbraham. Under her care "archaeologists were banned," Woodward
says proudly, and the ruins allowed to decay slowly amid her newly planted
gardens.
In his chapter on the ruins of wars Woodward rises above these unconvincing
arguments and presciently asks the central questions we must ask in the
wake of September 11. How do we "preserve in perpetuity a moment of
destruction: the tragic purity of the flames, the hushed silence and
rubble of a bomb site, and the cloud of fine debris that hung in the
air before gently settling on your clothes"? And, equally important,
"Who decides the moral of the story?"
As we wrestle with what to do with the remains of the Twin Towers, we would
do well to consider the long history of Western culture's obsession with
ruins. Before 2001 ruins were places that Americans visited when they went
abroad on vacation. Since September 11, when the nation was witness to war
on American soil, they have preoccupied us. We've experienced the bouts
of depression and rage of firsthand witnesses to war. But the tragedy
is that despite extensive public debate, the most important decisions about
the ruins of the World Trade Center have already been made. We have cleaned
them up: thousands of metal beams have been carted away to barges, ferried
across New York harbor to Fresh Kills landfill, and then sold off to
contractors around the world. With remarkable and disturbing speed Ground
Zero has become another construction site, another episode in Manhattan's
relentless cycle of destruction and rebuilding.
After reading In Ruins, one can't help wishing that some of the rubble
was left as a place where memory could find purchase. Pieces of the
building considered potentially useful for a memorial have been preserved,
partly at the urging of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director, Philippe
de Montebello, and others. The three-story facade that miraculously survived
the collapse sits at Fresh Kills waiting to be returned to Ground Zero for
its new life as a memorial and tourist attraction. But there is something
artificial about the whole process. After Woodward's book, the beautiful
plans and models of the recent proposals seem lifeless. They make sterile
settings for a future memorial, when our most eloquent materials for that
memorial have been hauled away.
Last winter, after viewing the design proposals on display in the World
Financial Center's Winter Garden, I walked across the street and looked
down into the abyss that was once the World Trade Center, recalling lines
from John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1617), which Woodward
quotes: "And, questionless, here in this open court / Which now lies
naked to the injuries / Of stormy weather, some men lie interred."
Interred in this open court--that at least would be some consolation. The
injury after the injury is that the victims are not there at all.
Max Page is author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940
(University of Chicago Press). He is the editor (with Steven Conn) of
the forthcoming Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture,
Their Cities, and Their Landscape(University of Pennsylvania Press).
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
