Lionel Johnson’s Modern Ruins

Abstract

Palaces tremble down, or reel To ruin, while stars in dread Fade far into their quiet deeps, Before deep destroying roar: Heavenward costliest incense leaps, And madness falls from Heaven more. Lionel Johnson, Dawn of (1888) (1) Lionel Johnson's Dawn of conjures a dream vision of world in violent flux, where end shall begin new earth has already begun to arrive. Revolution becomes naturalized, taking form of a gale force that seeks to storm life and leaves us to wander waste (ll. 46, 62, 80). These apocalyptic presentiments exhibit same agitation that powers much of Johnson's poetry. I argue that alongside all of Johnson's anxieties about future, past figures in distinctly modern terms as the wreck of immemorial years (l. 44)--that is to say, as ruins. The ruins of Decadence collude with other savage forces of modernity, such as contagion and fragmentation, but where fragment or transmission typify destruction in a relatively abbreviated span of time, ruin involves longer stretches. Entailing history and memory, generational and epochal ends, ruin excels in its existence as benchmark of time. (2) If creation of fragment denotes an explosive energy that obliterates all contexts and remnants lack any aesthetic unity that would offer a stable relationship between parts, then ruin retains traces of its past. Georg Simmel theorizes ruin as an aspect of our general fascination with decay and decadence, where contradictions inherent to ruin work out through the rich and many-sided culture, unlimited impressionability, and understanding open to everything, which are characteristic of decadent epochs. (3) Paul Zucker perceives ruins as heterogeneous monuments to assembling powers of art and disassembling capacity of nature that can no longer be considered works of art, since original intention of builder has been more or less lost. (4) With fabricator's original stamp lost, ruin becomes a blank ready to be imprinted by another, however there always remains an aesthetic unity dominated by whatever has been preserved as fragments of original architecture (p. 3). More recently, Robert Ginsberg has delineated aesthetic experience of ruin as a precise engagement with a newness or freshness constituting genuine innovation in face of familiar as [t]he ruin invents and not merely endures. (5) Peter Fritzsche also addresses a theory of ruin accounting for its variations, distinguishing between ruins of nature, which are a part of cycle of degeneration and regeneration, and ruins of history, which are sites of human destruction witnessed in social, economic, or political catastrophe. (6) Johnson's expressions of ruin involve both natural cycle and what Fritzsche terms historical cycle, but capacity of ruin as literary emblem renders it impossible to separate these two functions--after all, material substance of architectural ruin becomes dematerialized through language. Consequently, Johnson's writings often mediate nostalgia generated by natural ruin with awareness that turn-of-the-century's volatile social landscape engenders its own devastation. Thus Johnson's depictions of natural ruin are always entwined with anxieties about present and future. Though critical work on Johnson remains relatively sparse, it is widely agreed that his poetry reveals a complex relationship between antiquity and modernity. James G. Nelson attributes this to a strain of autobiography running through Johnson's work, writing how, even at fifteen, he removed himself from the crass and feverish world of his day, losing himself in books, a small group of literary friends, and his dreams of more comely ages. (7) In introduction to his edition of Johnson's poems, Ian Fletcher contends poet constructs a country out of past by blending Classical and Celtic, ritual and legend, into a textual space offering refuge (p. …