Review | Fragmentary Modernism: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, c.1896-c.1936
Reviewed by Josh Iaquinto, University of Sydney
Any encounter with the debris of the past must at some point confront the presence of fragments. Not only ubiquitous but surprisingly ill-defined, fragments—whether material, textual, or both—appear almost everywhere. From papyrus scraps plundered from vessels buried at Oxyrhynchus (present-day Al-Bahnasa, Egypt), to torn medieval manuscripts repurposed as binding material by early modern booksellers, to architectural ruins left in the opulent gardens of eighteenth-century gentry, through to the innumerable typographical fractures of the twentieth century, all are grouped within the capacious and incongruent category of fragment.
Fragments, as Nora Goldschmidt argues, are “not only a marker of present experience” but “a stark fact of the remains of the past” (1). These material “remains of the past”—the scraps of tattered Greek papyrus, the ruined monoliths chiseled with Latin inscriptions, or the broken remains of Ancient Greek and Roman statuary—form the nucleus of Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, c.1896-c.1936. A professor of classics and ancient history at Durham University, Goldschmidt’s book casts a wide net over the rubble of ancient Greece and Rome while attempting to repair a “perceived breach between modernism and classical scholarship” (4). Aimed at accounting for the fragmentary quality of modernist art and literature—the persistent use of partial or incomplete literary forms or sculptures that resemble damaged Greek marbles—the book presents an historicist interpretation of the parallel rise in the transcription, translation, publication, and dissemination of newly-unearthed fragments of classical antiquity that caused a sensation in the early twentieth century. While this may at first seem a well-trodden path—“border[ing] on cliché” (1) Goldschmidt calls it—the book uncovers a litany of fresh insights into modernist experimentation in part through the sheer copiousness of its evidence. Through magnificently detailed accounts of the unearthing, publication, and display of fragmentary writings, Goldschmidt presents a host of innovative readings that examine how the modernist production of literary fragments (the experimentations in form that resulted in truncated, fractured, or seemingly incomplete literary works) was sparked by encounters with the material remains of the classical past.
Fragmentary Modernism begins with H.D.’s momentous claim, “It all began with the Greek fragments.” In describing “what has been called the ‘apotheosis of the fragment’ in the first half of the twentieth century,” Goldschmidt maintains that breakthroughs “in the discovery and dissemination” (2) of Graeco-Roman fragments were “not peculiar to modernism: it was a joint cultural production shared between modernists and classical scholars engaged in bringing the fragments of antiquity to light in modernity” (2-3). While at some points treading close to equating modernism with the fragment alone (as opposed to the capacious understanding of modernism that circulates today) what makes this project so intriguing is that these parallel strands of inquiry and influence are reciprocal: what Goldschmidt describes as “a feedback loop” (12). “[T]he fragments of the past were invested with a borrowed modernity,” Goldschmidt contends, “as the modernist fragment came to shape the very material on which it was based” (2).
“Modernism may have begun with Greek fragments,” Goldschmidt writes, “but the results were impinging back on the world of classical scholarship” (112). Such a reciprocity between classical inspiration and modernist creativity (or between the collapsed past and an imaginative present) is a welcome addition to the scholarship on fragments, which tends to frame this influence as one-sided. Fragmentary Modernism carefully treads the line between arguing that all literary fragments must have a fragmentary precursor (that is, the modernist literary fragment could only come about through the influence of an earlier fragment and not from another source) and the equally misleading assumption that since modernists produced fragmented forms, then any contemporary fragment is by necessity modernist.
Largely focused on the work of a handful of poets and artists based in London at the turn of the twentieth century—T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. along with Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska—Fragmentary Modernism sketches a series of case studies that reveal what Goldschmidt calls “networks of influence” (4) between the developing modernist experiments in fragmentation and early-twentieth-century art practices, museum curatorship, classical philology, and archeology. Beginning with a thorough account of the translation of papyrus fragments in chapter one, Goldschmidt argues that the remaining papyrus scraps that carried inscriptions attributed to Sappho “became enmeshed in ways of writing and presenting literary texts associated with the fragmentary discourse of the avant-garde, bringing the thrill of modernity to the fragmentary remains of antiquity” (20). This process of “bringing the thrill of modernity to the fragmentary remains of antiquity” involved incorporating conventions of papyrus transcription—ellipses, brackets, empty page space, out-of-sequence numbering, irregular punctuation—drawn from early editions, most notably Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (1885). As Goldschmidt notes, a copy of this volume was not only owned by “Pound, H. D., Mary Barnard, and E. E. Cummings” but one of its translations even “reads like a proto-modernist fragment poem not unlike Pound’s ‘Papyrus’” (25). While Goldschmidt presents some compelling evidence for the modernist absorption of ancient papyri, the effects of this engagement are often left to implication rather than to specific examples.
Chapter two—perhaps the most accessible to readers unfamiliar with classical antiquity—examines the effects that editions of Petronius, the Presocratics, and The Odyssey had on Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Burnt Norton (1936), and Pound’s Canto 1 (1917), arguing that classical philology was reshaped in turn by the spread of modernist writing. As Goldschmidt observes, “Modernism gave a new value to the classical fragment as fragment, and the result shaped not only the literary production of the twentieth century but the ways in which editions of ancient texts in fragments could be produced and read” (76). In a captivating series of readings, Goldschmidt shows how Eliot and Pound brought the insulated world of philology and textual scholarship from the academy to “the arena of cutting-edge artistic production” (75). But what exactly these fragments meant to Eliot’s and Pound’s readers, and what kinds of literary effects they achieved, is left somewhat underdeveloped.
Chapter three, “Inscriptional Modernism,” makes a wonderfully spatial argument for how ancient inscriptions preserved in stone found an irregular pathway into modernist practice through their physical proximity to Bloomsbury group meetings. In a fascinating account, Goldschmidt retraces the steps of Bloomsbury members reaching their meeting place in the old Round Reading Room of the British Library by passing through the “Hall of Greek and Latin Inscriptions,” which held “an extensive collection of inscribed ancient stone” (78). “In a period when Pound was urging his contemporaries to write poetry like ‘weather-bit granite’,” Goldschmidt notes, “the Hall of Inscriptions offered concrete monuments to parallel the stone they sought to emulate in their poetry” (78). Goldschmidt’s untiring research goes so far as to uncover when H.D., Pound, Virginia Woolf, Eliot, and W. B. Yeats acquired a reader’s ticket needed to enter the room (Woolf in 1905, Pound in 1906, H.D. in 1911, Eliot in 1914) and presents a ground-floor map of the library, showing exactly how and where they would have come into contact with the artefacts on display in the Hall of Inscriptions. Revealing a similarly reciprocal influence among art object and precursor, chapter four examines the sculptures of Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska that mimic the damaged and partial forms of classical sculptures displayed in the British Museum. Chapter five explores the (again reciprocal) transformations wrought on the field of archaeology by the modernist interest in fragments.
Dedicated to uncovering how fragmentary literary and visual art forms were not only produced in the early twentieth century but also how they should be understood in the twenty-first, Fragmentary Modernism emphasizes Heather Bamford’s insightful formulation, in Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600 (2018), that every era is characterized by various “cultures of the fragment.” Much like Romanticism, modernism looms large in the critical landscape and has a tendency to divert attempts at finding a fresh perspective on how fragmentation as a literary practice came about. As Goldschmidt writes, “Understanding the full extent of those interdisciplinary entanglements [between modernists and the work of classical scholars] not only exposes a crucial driver in the emergence of the modernist fragment; it forces us to re-evaluate the extent to which modernism is baked into how we perceive, construct, and present the fragmentary texts and objects that constitute our access to the past” (6). This re-evaluation of assumptions about how the study of modernism and a familiarity with modernist literature shaped attempts at understanding classical fragments places Goldschmidt’s work in a company of scholars, such as Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Sandro Jung, and more recently Daniel Diez Couch, who have attempted to accomplish similar goals in their studies of eighteenth-century fragmentary literary forms.
However, since literary fragments as a form are in large part a critical invention (each scholar sets the parameters of exactly what constitutes a fragment, which can vary wildly), Goldschmidt often does not give sufficient explanation of precisely how they are to be understood as fragments. While the book explores precisely that transformation between the material fragments of the classical past and the largely literary fragments designed by modernists, there remain meaningful differences between them that Goldschmidt at times subsumes under the broad concept of fragment rather than giving them sufficient differentiation. Nevertheless, Goldschmidt succeeds in arguing that certain formal qualities of modernist textual and artistic practice (typographical experimentation or sculptures that appear like partial Greek marbles) were impracticable without the influence of the material fragments of their classical precursors.
Formidably well-researched and a treasure trove for associated scholarship, Fragmentary Modernism operates well beyond the familiar consensus as to the centrality of the fragment in modernist literary and visual production. By excavating the conjunctions between classical and modernist literature and scholarship, Goldschmidt makes an important contribution to the growing literature on interdisciplinary accounts of fragment-making.
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