A photograph of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture Marble Arms (1923) appears on the front cover of Nora Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism. Since the Renaissance, art historians and theorists have been fascinated by how an artwork relates to the artist’s mental intention: what is the relationship between the disegno in the artist’s mind and the painting and the sculpture that has been produced? Epstein’s sculpture might be seen to figure the sculptor’s hands amputated from the mind of the artist. It is a neoclassical object presented as removed from the rest of the body and the soul it could have been attached to. It is a fitting front-cover image for this wonderful book’s exploration of modernism’s engagement with antiquity in the early twentieth century, epitomising the fragmentation of the transmission of ancient culture into the modern world. Torn from their original intentions and contexts, pieces of the ancient world float like mindless, severed limbs in the wasteland of modernity. This book examines that fraught relationship between Mediterranean antiquity and the complex cultural politics of early twentieth-century modernity.
Goldschmidt organises her narrative on the ways in which classical studies (via papyrology, textual criticism, epigraphy, and archaeology) provided much of the matter for modernist literature and art, whilst at the same time, modernist writers and artists offered aesthetic and philosophical paradigms for classical scholars and archaeologists. Goldschmidt eloquently explores “the feedback loop of mutual influence” (p. 112) whereby “Modernism and classical scholarship came together in a vital network of reticulated interactions that crossed almost every area of the discipline into modern art and writing and back again. Above all, the modernist obsessions with the fragment reacted in tandem with the intense activity of classical scholars who were unearthing, deciphering, and disseminating the pieces of antiquity for modernity’ (p. 182). Goldschmidt’s succinct book makes a big, significant contribution to thinking about how the modernist aesthetic of the fragment provided a key context for the emergence of classical studies as a discipline at least in the Anglosphere in the years and decades around 1900. Goldschmidt brings together a wealth of detail – some stories already well known and others neglected and unfamiliar – to demonstrate the crucial significance of modernist fragmentation for classical studies and the importance of classical studies for modernist aesthetics.
After the Introduction sets the scene, Chapter One (‘Papyrus’) concentrates on the impact of the new glamourous science of papyrology on poetic production in the early twentieth century. Ezra Pound’s ‘Papyrus’:
Spring …
Too long …
Gongula …
replays Sappho (Fr. 95 Lobel-Page), showcasing, as Goldschmidt explains, how the springtime of antiquity is a gone-girl, as it were, a lost object of desire. Goldschmidt demonstrates the profound importance of Henry Wharton’s Sappho and the discoveries at Oxyrhynchus for the form and meaning of numerous poems by canonical modernist writers. As Goldschmidt sums up, ‘If Pound’s “Papyrus” looked like one of the new fragments of Sappho edited by the new papyrologists, the work of classical scholars, too, began to look more and more like versions of Pound’s “Papyrus”’ (p. 44). Chapter Two develops the argument by examining the new look of editions of ancient texts which from the mid to late nineteenth century onwards became increasingly interested in the fragmentation of ancient textuality. ‘The new philology’, as Goldschmidt calls it (p. 47), comprised ‘a series of ground-breaking editions that laid bare the complex history of loss and erosion involved in the transmission of classical texts’ (p. 48). But rather than seeking to write a triumphalist history of classical scholarship – a story about how we have learnt more and more and got better and better at the job – Goldschmidt shows how these new scholarly productions offered a new ‘way of seeing the texts of classical authors as more radically fragmented and unstable than ever before’ (p. 49). Goldschmidt juxtaposes the poetry of T.S. Eliot with Herman Diels’ Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Heraclitus provides Eliot with a vocabulary to sum up how ‘[w]ords strain,/Crack and sometimes break … perish/Decay’ (Burnt Norton V, 13-16, quoted on p. 65). The chapter goes on to examine the role Homer’s Odyssey plays in Pound’s Cantos. Goldschmidt highlights the importance of the Analyst-Unitarian debates about the integrity of the Homeric epic texts, to read Pound’s poetic response to these debates as being a hyperfragmentation of Homer.
If the first two chapters discuss textuality, the following three concentrate on visual and material culture. Chapter Three acts as a lynchpin – between textual and material culture – with its focus on ‘Inscriptional Modernism’. Goldschmidt shows the importance of the display of ancient inscriptions in the British Museum for H.D. The influence of John William Mackail’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology on both H.D. and Pound is explored in fascinating detail. And if Mackail’s edition had such an impact on the ‘laconic speech of the Imagists’ (Pound quoted at p. 112), then, as Goldschmidt also shows, when Mackail was elected president of the UK’s Classical Association in 1903, he spoke of the importance of the ‘speech of the new generation’ for classical scholars: ‘Modernism had something to offer “even for scholars”’ (p. 112). The institutionalisation of classical studies in the Anglosphere emerges in dialogue with modernism. In Chapter Four (‘Modernism and the Museum’), Goldschmidt builds on the previous chapter, by examining the change in restoration policy from the late nineteenth century onwards. Previously, it was normal to restore ancient sculptures, and plaster casts were hugely important for the visual and haptic experience of ancient sculptures. But the rise of a new sort of positivism and with it an accentuation on the historical distance between ancient and modern worlds saw to it that the unrestored fragment asserted a new epistemological and cultural authority from the early 1900s onwards. Goldschmidt shows how the British Museum responded to modernist aesthetic ideology, just as modernist sculptors were also inspired by the fragments on display in the British Museum. The final chapter (‘Archaeologisms’) moves from Bloomsbury in London, to thinking more broadly about the importance of ancient fragments of sculpture and architecture in modernism. The late nineteenth century witnessed a fascination with ‘archaic’ Greek culture (Schliemann’s excavations captivated the public imagination—he had linked his excavations to Homeric epic, which was associated with archaic Greece in the nineteenth-century imagination and scholarship). Again, antiquity and modernism chimed with one another: archaeologists became aware that archaic Greek sculpture was carved directly in stone (as opposed to using clay modelling before doing the carving), which had a deep impact on modernist sculpture, just as modernist sculpture framed scholarly receptions of ancient material culture. The chapter culminates with a tour of Arthur Evans’ Knossos. A photograph (Figure 5.8, p. 179) encapsulates the imbrications of scholarship and modernism: the image shows ‘a curtailed flight of steps to nowhere … flanked by “broken” concrete pillars lead[ing] up to an imaginary third storey from what Evans called the ‘Piano Nobile’ above the Throne Room’ (p.178). Restoration as derestoration. Archaeology as modernist art.
Goldschmidt concludes with a meditation on the fortunes of the classical fragment. On the one hand, with postmodern poetics, the fragment has been further fragmented, as Goldschmidt shows with Anne Carson’s riff on Pound’s riff on Sappho:
not
]
]
Gongula
But if for Pound the springtime of antiquity was gone, for Carson, perhaps, it is not simply gone. Indeed, as Goldschmidt goes on to show, we might now be living at a time when the restoration of the fragmentary has become important again as is evidenced in new digital technologies. Or perhaps, to be more precise, as Goldschmidt explains, we are living in an age of hyperreality which blurs the categories of original and copy, fragment and restoration. Goldschmidt’s book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of classical studies in the Anglophone world. It brings together a wide range of case studies which enriches our understanding of the cultural politics which shaped the emergence of classics as a discipline which in turn has had much to say to the cultural politics of the twentieth century. The book tells a story which will fascinate both classicists and specialists in modernist literature and art.