‘Vistas framed by a ruined door’: Anthony Powell’s Poetics of Ruins
‘There is something inherently beautiful in ruined shapes’, Anthony Powell observed in his review of Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins, later giving expression in his fiction to the aesthetic delight experienced in the contemplation of ruined buildings. In A Dance to the Music of Time, his major pos...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2012-12-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1324 |
| Summary: | ‘There is something inherently beautiful in ruined shapes’, Anthony Powell observed in his review of Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins, later giving expression in his fiction to the aesthetic delight experienced in the contemplation of ruined buildings. In A Dance to the Music of Time, his major post-war work, a favoured visual motif is that of a view framed by pillars, preferably those of ruined doors. Though the narrator’s perception of contemporary architectural fragments is shaped and mediated by pictorial reminiscences—especially of Piranesi, Canaletto, Pannini and Hubert Robert—the inevitable temporal implications of ruins also offer a range of narrative possibilities. This article concentrates on the opening of the fifth volume of Dance—Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant—where a bombed-out public house in London provides the scenography for a temporal perspective which leads from a post-war moment of contemplation to reminiscences of a much earlier, pre-war, time. The narrative opening, both threshold and frame, does not only transmute historical destruction into story material: it gives verbal shape to the interaction between visual and temporal perspectives, and, like the roofless, wall-less architectures of baroque paintings, it engulfs the imagination, thus exceeding its obvious structural and narrative function. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |