Abstract
I draw on my sensory experiences of the Acropolis ruin (and the Acropolis archaeological museum) followed by a visit to the Epidaurus complex (especially the theatre) to explore the themes of destruction, melancholy, preservation, hospitality (and intimacy), among others, as they evoke both the ruins of cultures and global preoccupations with the cultures of ruin. In a “presentist” theoretical move, this essay reflects on the affective and imaginative impact of these classical ruins during the immediacy of my contact with them. The centre of “gravity” of my musings on the monuments is “now, rather than then”: evoking their materiality, I consider how they produce affective consolations by re-imagining the past.
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Notes
- 1.
A presentist theoretical lens is useful in reading “ruins and fragments” without following the impulse of reading them historically, or inserting them into a context of fixity—one that bears the weight of a cultural and/or national consensus. I draw on Terence Hawkes formulation of presentism as it applies to drama to emphasize the “situatedness” of the present. “Placing emphasis on the present can’t help but connect fruitfully with the current realignment of critical responses that stresses the performance of a play as much as its ‘reference’: that looks at what the play does, here and now in the theatre, as well as—or even against—what it says in the world to which its written text refers” (Hawkes 2003, 1–6).
- 2.
I am indebted to Rajagopalan (2017) for this formulation.
- 3.
For a full account of the complicated and trivial mostly domestic reasons that led to the “theft” of the Parthenon “marbles” (friezes and sculptures), see Mitsi (2014). Despite justifications given today that claim the “protection” of the marbles, Mitsi’s essay tells a different story of the arrogance of power manifested in a domestic colonial drama.
- 4.
For a rich discussion of the complex relation between hospitality and intimacy, see Apostolos Lampropoulos, Chapter 16 in this volume.
References
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Singh, J.G. (2019). Afterword: The Consolations of Ruins—From the Acropolis to Epidaurus. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_17
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