‘Vistas framed by a ruined door’: Anthony Powell’s Poetics of Ruins

‘There is something inherently beautiful in ruined shapes’, Anthony Powell observed in hisreview of Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins, later giving expression in his fiction to the aestheticdelight 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 thoseof ruined doors. Though the narrator’s perception of contemporary architectural fragments isshaped and mediated by pictorial reminiscences—especially of Piranesi, Canaletto, Pannini andHubert Robert—the inevitable temporal implications of ruins also offer a range of narrativepossibilities. This article concentrates on the opening of the fifth volume of Dance—Casanova’sChinese 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 ofa much earlier, pre-war, time. The narrative opening, both threshold and frame, does not onlytransmute historical destruction into story material: it gives verbal shape to the interactionbetween visual and temporal perspectives, and, like the roofless, wall-less architectures ofbaroque paintings, it engulfs the imagination, thus exceeding its obvious structural and narrativefunction. « Les formes ruinées possèdent une sorte de beauté intrinsèque » observait Anthony Powell danssa critique de l’ouvrage de Rose Macaulay Le Plaisir des ruines, avant d’exprimer dans sa proprefiction le plaisir esthétique suscité par la contemplation de bâtiments en ruine. Dans A Dance tothe Music of Time, son œuvre maîtresse publiée après guerre, le narrateur affectionneparticulièrement les perspectives encadrées par des piliers, de préférence en ruine. S’il perçoit etdécrit les fragments architecturaux contemporains à travers le filtre de réminiscences picturales— Piranèse, Canaletto, Pannini et Hubert Robert, en particulier — les implications temporellesinhérentes aux ruines offrent par ailleurs de multiples possibilités narratives. Le présent articlese concentre sur l’ouverture du cinquième volume de Dance, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant: lesruines d’un pub londonien, détruit par un bombardement, y composent la scénographie d’une‘Vistas framed by a ruined door’: Anthony Powell’s Poetics of Ruins Études britanniques contemporaines, 43 | 20149