Ruin Nation: Ruins and Fragments in Eighteenth-Century England

William Gilpin, writing of the challenges involved in constructing an artificial ruin, claimed that “to give the stone its mouldering appearance—to make the widening chink run naturally through all the joints . . . —and to scatter heaps of ruin around with negligence and ease, are great efforts of art.”¹ The naturalization of a fabricated ruin (any new ruin unadorned by the appropriate vegetation would be woefully “incomplete”) not only challenged ambitious landscape gardeners, as well as theoreticians of the picturesque, but also spoke to broader aesthetic and cultural values, specifically, to the debates about authority and authenticity that accompanied the eighteenth-century passion for all things ruinous and fragmentary. Both books under review here contribute to an increasingly substantial body of critical work addressing fragments and ruins in the long eighteenth century. Inger Sigrun Brodey’s Ruined by Design probes the more politically ambivalent aspects of ruin in its diverse cultural manifestations, while Sandro Jung’s The Fragmentary Poetic focuses on the fragmentary, not as a form, but as a modality that animates much poetic experimentation in the eighteenth century.

Ruined by Design directly links the eighteenth century culture of sensibility to ruination, and investigates not only the claims, but also the costs and limits of the widespread cultural investment in ruin. A substantial portion of Brodey’s study explores the many ways in which ruins were viewed in a period dominated by the aesthetic and cultural discourses of sensibility and of the picturesque: at one extreme, with nostalgia, pessimism, and a sense of tragic loss, and at the other, with utopian fervor, optimism, and hopeful idealization. Related to the widely expressed preference for fragments (from Diderot’s “Salon of 1767” to Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening of 1778), ruined buildings are shown to function in a manner suggestively akin to “natural” language: Brodey argues that just as authentic expressions of feeling required syntactically disordered sentences, a particular rhetoric of ruin inflected the forms of building that accompanied English garden design (67). Indeed, Brodey argues for, and systematically explores, a strong connection between language, gardens, buildings, and those literary narratives that display a central ambivalence by disrupting the authority invested in the conventional omniscient narrator, and by giving voice to things that “disrupt, freeze, silence, or interrupt narrative” (68). In the world of buildings as well as texts, we tend to find the architect, or the author, posing as a kind of archaeologist, who discovers rather than creates. The more imaginative activities of John Soane come immediately to mind, but the instance Brodey examines in detail is Monville’s fascinating Column House outside Paris, a habitable ruined structure vaguely reminiscent of the Tower of Babel (123–27). The art of accident, and its associated rhetoric of ruin, is also prevalent in the tradition of the picturesque, where the imprint of the designer on the landscape—the “marks of the scissors”—must be carefully erased. As these remarks indicate, Brodey mobilizes a variety of related issues, and views them across a range of discourses. Thus, the anti-narrative impulses at work in sentimental novels, which disrupt narrative order in the name of increased immediacy, intimacy, or as a reflection of virtue—and thus reflect the contradictory impulses of sensibility at large—are equally evident in the “tension between the urge to monumentalize and the urge to destroy” that animates the architectural folly (72).

While one might quibble with Brodey for drawing an analogy between the eighteenth-century “man of feeling” and “1960s flower children or hippies” (xv), the attention she pays to questions of authority and rebellion, in relation to the cult of sensibility, produces a nuanced analysis. Brodey brings out clearly the fundamental dilemma experienced by the man of feeling in all his attempts to assert himself: his claims to artless authenticity lead him to disdain the authority he depends...