Scholia Reviews ns 17 (2008) 2.

Victoria Emma Pagán, Rome and the Literature of Gardens. Classical Inter/Faces. London: Duckworth, 2006. Pp. 160. ISBN 0-7156-3506-9. UK£12.99. Further Details.

John Henderson,
Fellows' Garden, King's College, Cambridge

This sinewously written gathering in the coming idiom of contemporary 'cultural criticism' makes a point of knowing it is way too soon to figure out how it's to be appraised, and sets about relishing the licence to explore its own performance. The final chapter deliberately puts the business of reviewing up for reappraisal (and, so far as I am concerned, pre-appraisal), alongside the full range of the changing and (inevitably [?]) asymptotic precipitates generated by shifts in the conceptualization of what counts in and as classical studies -- I mean the whole business, of works of scholarship, stonking journalism, hagiographic mythopoeia, glitzy retro-kitsch, and the rest. Rather than work an idea or three through an assembled bulk of more-or-less given material on, from, and about antiquity to make a story bidding for authority through occluded persuasion conducted in matt rhetoric, the novel mode works a saltatory trajectory that departs from one or two expected case-studies to fashion a loose- weave progression through ever more paradedly associative disquisitions that lead us anyhow-somehow through a vertiginous barrage of improv slogans, theoretic aperçus, infolded excursuses, toward an ever more salient self- reflection on where the old récits and the new incisions have come from, and where meditation on their interaction might take us -- indeed where they have taken us already once we follow through these muscular pages. No 'rose garden'.

No reader of RLG should expect any horti-pictures, let alone -plans -- once they're through the compelling (reverse ekphrasis) cover-design, which makes us see through the assembled greats of classical art and site of our fantasy repertoire, via a simultaneously superimposed/recessive picture-frame, to the irresistible invitation of one of our favourite 'garden room' murals from Pompeii à la duckworth, toward the third-level centrepiece view into the woodland of Ian Hamilton Finlay's godforsaken Little Sparta at Dunsyre, South Lanarkshire; our path (and in-sight-path, get it) wends past/off-centres a dreadful colossal 'garden centre' gold-painted head of Apollo -- (woefully) dubbed Apollon Terroriste -- frontal, staring but unseeing from the undergrowth right through us. (IHF'll do for the purpose and in fact Pagán does a great slide- lecture on the site, not included here; but he was so naff, only gardeny types could really get off on his ready-mades all in a row. Today, back-to-naturally, McSparta is a nonsensical 'heritage' fiasco, like all monu-mentalized 'processual art'. That happening . . .) Inside, 36 short sections chop up 5 chapters over 146 non-illustrated pages; or rather, 5 chapters to be imagined as responses sparked by provocative inscriptions fixed/placed at turns in Pagán's garden-book, in the form of dicta/oracles from IHF such as stud the perishing Little Sparta stuntscape.

1. Columella's garden-poem is the initiatory anchor in what we were expecting. (Pagán still writes it down as 'seemingly innocent and rather monotonous [my italics]', but that's the fault of her intentionally dull chunks of translation -- expect no Latin here -- and she shows just how precisely Columella's empire produce digs us into sensorized coordinates for culture through textual gardening.) And this temporary poet's partnership with Virgil's apt sidelining of the kitchen-garden beside the farmhouse nucleus of the largescale sprawl of agrobusiness serves us notice alongside Columella's readers that the garden gate controls the scene as founded on boundary maintenance, highlighting exclusion/expulsion and the transformative marking of entrance-ment for the experience within. 'Garden of Empire' (pp. 19-36).

2. The second location is unexpected but still delivers straightforwardly on the promised determination on Roman focus, and the post-nostalgia-trip of bloody-shovelling through the sancta to clear our ground for the real deal of cosmopolis: we're off for a sunny promenade in the swanky urban 'central park/centrepark' pleasure-gardens currently replacing/re-placing (re-cycling?) the mass paupers' graveyard courtesy of multi-coloured éminence Maecenas in the form of his nobody discovery Horace's eighth Satire; off, that is, for some paradise politics, the transformative experience of 'a trancelike mode that abandons rational analysis and revels in the moment', as the poet imagines himself as Priapus-prick set to expel witchyregression from the culture park/text pleasance. A moonlight horrorshow that Pagán works into a loss of consciousness/sense of self from which the garden gnome awakes -- to incarnate the RLG experience and quasi-theme: 'the garden's potential to rob me of my senses'. Already the flatophiliac city-bound excursion/incursion around Horace's midriff plonks us right into a choice midden where Pagán can foreknow and pre-claim: 'at least I know where I have over-interpreted, under-theorized, and hyper-rhetoricized' (p. 123).

3. From t/here, we go where we go not because we're bound to, but because it will give us cause to attend to wandering/wondering why = 'The Garden of Representation' (pp. 65-92), where the temptation to cart Messylina round in a mucky wheelbarrow before having her weeded from history by a hatchetman slips Tacitus' grand internal censor, and there she is, the hot refuse paragraph that inclaudes itself in just to show it can't be k-k-k-ept out. A 'garden scene' con-position we weren't exactly expecting, and one that jumps us into Forché's lacerating poem on the Hiroshima Garden Shukkei-en through the anxiety of representation -- the impossibility of ever living up to putting the past in place, the historians' curse of incompetence when it comes to living up to their commission to write real true live writing this side of rhetoric or past mimesis. The compost in composition: Classics.

4. The final chapter will pick up the tab, with Augustine scrumping pears in the 'Garden of Redemption' (pp. 93- 120). The inter/Milan reverie of this conversion- conversation will explain all, save the bacon. You'll come to, with a start, once it dawns that this unexpected tour is out to entrance, bewitch, slip the censor, as Pagán plays spell-binding fiction-writer transforming the autographic understanding that has been thoughtwalking us through her garden of litter. 'We have come a long way from Columella's poem'. Truly -- long, long ways round. So (got it yet?) think some more about that, with Coetzee's novel novel, The Life and Times of Michael K: why? (Yes, ask:) 'In the end, I set Augustine and Coetzee side by side not for their similarities, but to throw into sharp relief the clearest of their differences' (p. 112). Pagán trusts us, now the book is done, as book, what she hopes she can call 'two simple questions: "How much can an author afford to spend on a garden? And how much does it cost the reader to ask?"' (p. 119).

5. But there remains outstanding 'The Invention of Gardens' (pp. 121-146). / But this is a fifth wheel on the cart. This starts by re-cycling: 'A logical place to start . . . With Cato's treatise On Agriculture . . .' (p. 121). Pagán reviews her audacities, the leaps and boundaries her associative patches of forced blooming have dreamed up along the tour: Coetzee and Rome? 'Such comparisons run the risk of attenuating the force of my argument about ancient Roman literature' (p. 123). You just wait: for immediate launch into Stoppard, in his Arcadia and (you guessed) in The Invention of . . . (Slugs. See, I'm dreaming the dream revel.) She's getting us to the point, the point of RLG in/and this INTER/FACES series, away from where Classics formerly trod, wandered, and fantasised. I wish she hadn't, I suppose, wheeled out the Housmans on us ('Yes, but . . . is Stoppard any good at women . . .' [cf. pp. 137-40] doesn't get my hedge trimmed), but here she goes: '. . . before the dawn of a new era of scholars who take as their starting question not the "what" but the "why", and to my mind, obviously, go a step further toward understanding the past, even if only by inches' (p. 133).

So. 146 pages to the inch. Pagán shows us (how) to think gardens -- to think with gardens, to think her way round the thought-garden (in her patch it's 'down the garden path' where my idiom goes 'up', but I'm just jealous), and though traditionally no one but classicists can stand classicists when they do this and it shows, her fresh go at showing that once you start inventing a place in/for culture, everything that grows or goes or wants to get in or mustn't, or whatever, comes with Rome/Literature spread all over it envisages the now factual world in which classicists are, like dinosaurs, a novelty act without a past. But what she's doing, and knows she's doing as well as can be expected, so far as can be told, so far, is telling the as-we-say-postmodern story of thinking in a miso-historical world, where the positivist carapace has gone, the 'logic' of the expected is now simply done for, and we can't even look to turn the other face to any 'public'. The process of working over a plot so that what shouldn't be in can turn out to belong, and set off the whole effect, however the 'happening' came about, is what we have now, the best we can see; and if that means fudging and faking and gilding to waymark the path, then that's got to feature, prominent as these duff gnomai epigraphs, as the fallible condition of possibility for the exegesis, through self-reflection. Ditto, if harder, for what got left by the wayside, unincluded for no good reason or swept away with the other waste. Where she won't let it be missed, Pagán dares to let go, plenty, and let intelligence . . . roam.[[1]]

NOTES

[[1]] And she told me already, à propos writing the critical (beastly) review: 'The critic cannot simply rave.' Aaah . . .