Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics

Notes

Notes 281 Chapter One Introduction 1. Slavoj Žižek alludes to Roland Barthes’s term “L’effet du réel” to differentiate between how he describes the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Barthes’s discussion: “… in contrast to the Barthesian effet du réel, in which the text makes us accept its fictional product as ‘real,’ here, the Real itself, in order to be sustained, has to be perceived as a nightmarish unreal spectre” (Žižek, Welcome 19). The Real also refers to the Lacanian term, which often seems elusive and enigmatic, but it is crucial in psychoanalysis to aim at an encounter with the real to understand the deepest roots of traumatic behavior. The repetition of “the nightmarish visions of catastrophe” (17), images that express our collective fears of destruction, suddenly become a happening, and those images or effects become real, demanding that we do not “mistake reality for fiction” (19). Although I do not use psychoanalytic theory to study the poetic representations of ruins, I often refer to the effects of the real to signal how ruins provoke in the spectator/reader an encounter with the consequences of modern progress or warfare—an awakening to reality. 2. Owen Barfield has thoroughly described the epistemological development of the word ruin: “In the classical contexts themselves it nearly always carries with it a larger sense of swift, disastrous movement ‘ruit arduus aether’of a deluge of rain… In any case it is noticeable that, when the substantive ‘ruina’came to be formed, it contains this last part only of the meaning of the verb… it could now mean, not only the falling itself, but the thing fallen” (113, 115). 3. José María Ferri Coll summarizes well the evolution of the topos (21). 4. Bruce Wardropper also discusses how Le sentiment des ruines is not found in the Spanish Baroque topos: “The love of ruins is something which arises in the eighteenth century, and reaches its climax in the Romantic period. It is not until the seventeenth century that the English garden begins to sprout artificial ruins… But in this as in so much else Spain avoids contamination with the Romantic tradition of the north” (305). The English and the French sentiment des ruines may not be manifested in the Spanish Baroque poems, and nineteenth century Spain did not exploit the Romantic topos of ruins, yet Spanish poetry was also fascinated by relics and abandoned monuments, and Bécquer’s obsessions with human ruins and the metaphor of ruins and stones are notorious (see Rimas XLV). 5. See M. Morel, R. Foulché-Delbosc, and J. G. Fucilla. 6. For another relevant revisionist essay on the topic, see Begoña López Bueno. 7. “If Garcilaso’s enormous influence in the sixteenth century turned poets’ attention from Rome to Carthage, the baroque poets of the 282 Notes to Pages 7–10 seventeenth century brought their vision back to Rome itself” (Wardropper 300). 8. Du Bellay’s poem creates a chain of allusions, referring to Janus Vitalis’s verses “Qui Romam in media quaeris novus advena Roma / Et Romae in Roma nil reperis media...” 9. As Gonzalo Sobejano indicates: “Del engaño de lo firme, en la primera sección, se pasa al desengaño de lo fugitivo, en la segunda” (106). 10. Emilio Orozco Díaz states that “las dos ruinas que con más frecuencia cantan nuestros poetas son las de Itálica y las de Sagunto” (134). Among the poets who write to Itálica’s ruins are el Conde de Villamediana , Rodrigo Caro, Francisco de Medrano, Francisco de Rioja, and Pedro de Quirós. 11. Jean Starobinski reiterates that in the eighteenth century: “La poétique de la ruine est toujours une rêverie devant l’envahissement de l’oubli... On l’a remarqué, pour qu’une ruine paraisse belle, il faut que la destruction soit assez éloignée et qu’on en ait oublié les circonstances précises...: l’Histoire, le Destin” (“La mélancolie” 180). This effort to erase the historical traces of the ruined site is also prevalent in the English eighteenth-century fascination with ruins. Goldstein also refers to Lord Kames and his Elements of Criticism (1762) to emphasize how English Gothic Revival had a political purpose within the evolution of the topos of ruins. For Lord Kames, Gothic ruins were better than Classical ruins, placed in parks and gardens, because they “symbolize the triumph of time over art without the uncomfortable suggestion...