Ruins and Fragments ─ Tales of Loss and Rediscovery

For many of us, ruins are alluring, puzzling, and endlessly fascinating. In this elegant book, Robert Harbison seeks to explore why. What is it, he asks, that makes us suspicious of works or histories that are too smooth, too continuous? That makes us feel fragmentariness has a kind of meaning in itself before there’s any content to fill it? Is it that urban experience is inherently discontinuous and fragmented, or that the only truths we can believe are partial ones?

Eminent author Robert Harbison guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, and shares with us tales of loss and recovery. The shape of his book is determined by a belief that ruins and fragments are crucial to understanding where we are now and how we got here. His story begins with ancient fragments, and recounts how later history has recuperated, restored, and exhibited them, and even how ruins have been found in unlikely places—such as a Hellenistic fragment from Pergamon located in remote Nottinghamshire. He moves beyond ancient ruins and ancient literary fragments, such as Aeschylus’s plays, to consider how modernist architecture has a fragmentary effect, and how its use of concrete made some buildings look ruined before their time. He also considers architecture that has worked with ruins, from the Castelvecchio in Verona to the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. He segues into literature, and the works of Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, revealing how writers both revel in fragments and how they create anew from literary rubble. Harbison also considers the visual arts, from Schwitters’ collages to Ruskin’s drawings, as well as cinematic works from Sergei Eisenstein to Julien Temple. His book does not shy away from the deliberate creators of ruin, those who find redeeming value in destruction—Gordon Matta-Clark physically attacking buildings, for example, or dispossessed youth scribbling their graffiti on hostile surfaces. In the end destruction is balanced by the contrary of ruin, attempts at reconstruction. A huge wealth of cases—Williamsburg, Warsaw, Angkor and many others—all convince us it is easier said than done.

Whether focusing on ancient or modern ruins and fragments, in visual or literary form, Harbison writes poetically without being sentimental. Far from “ruin lust,” his book seeks to explore fragments without fetishizing them. In doing so he offers new ways of understanding the history of modernity, while delighting in our perception of the world as a puzzle and the ways in which we can construct new forms of meaning.