The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture

Abstract

Susan Stewart has sculpted a book. If her poetry collection, Columbarium (2003), avowed its controlling Empedoclean element to be water, then The Ruins Lesson presents itself as Empedoclean earth. Readers will savour the pliable, ten-by-seven inch paper covers. The weight of 400 pages gives haptic depth to the cover image’s autumn browns and muddy ochres. Steadying the volume with one hand while the other fans creamy pages, the book opens like a magic box to eleven, centre-bound colour plates. There are forty pages of endnotes, eighty half-tones and photographs (several by the author) interspersed throughout, and a bountiful bibliography. I cannot recall a book with so many references to personal communications with authors, curators, librarians, and archivists. Readers are almost set in motion imagining Stewart plying devices and platforms in assembling this book. The Table of Contents points to an irony. The first two chapters, ‘Matter’ and ‘Marks’, seem to offer themselves as pedestal, foundation blocks of the book’s subtitle. Yet reading them, one finds surprising veins of attention. These swell in Chapter III, ‘Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores - On the Ruin of Women’, with finely calibrated cultural critique, and art and literary analyses. The next three chapters—‘Matrix’, ‘Model’, and ‘Mirrors’—continue the roughly chronological engagement with ideas and images. Chapter IV gives an account of the emergence of ruins appreciation; V establishes ruins as a genre within representational arts, mainly prints; VI takes up ruins in Romanticism, especially Blake, Wordsworth, and Goethe (Mary Shelley’s ruined creature makes an appearance). The final two chapter titles do not deploy ‘M’, echoing the ironic façade of the first two chapters. Chapter VII considers fragments and the unfinished, topics developed with different emphases in earlier essays by Stewart.