On Friday 22nd June, David Bullen and I attended the launch of the Art of Fragments network, a group promoting and exploring collaborations between artists and academics around the theme of (particularly ancient) fragments, hosted by Dr Laura Swift of the Open University and Russell Bender of the theatre company Potential Difference, and funded by the British Academy. The day was a great opportunity to share ideas and experiences around collaborations of this type, as well as to hear about other successful past and ongoing collaborations. As my role at By Jove is primarily pet Classicist, I was particularly struck by reflections from Oliver Taplin among other academics on the successes and failures of their collaborations with creative artists, and was keen to take some of the advice forward in our future work. Of course, By Jove’s work is collaborative by nature, not just between academics and artists but between artists of different types: the majority of our productions have been the result of a collaborative process of devising between writers, actors, and dancers, as well as researchers both in theatre and in Classics and literature. We hope that our involvement in the network will be an opportunity to expand even further on the types of collaborations we undertake, and to connect with other artists and academics doing similar work.
Athenian ostraka
For me, though, the primary take-away from the day was a more scholarly, or indeed creative, question: what is a fragment? The classical background of many attendees meant that discussion focused in the first place on the tragic fragments – pieces of plays that no longer exist in their entirety written by the Athenian tragic playwrights. In literary terms, there also exist fragments of poetry – the fragments of Sappho being some of the most famous – as well as fragments of other literary genres, including oratory, my own field of research in my day job. Fragments also exist in the physical world – we might think of the shards of broken pottery, ostraka, which were used as a kind of ‘scrap paper’ in the ancient world, as well as voting tokens in the famous Athenian political procedure of ‘ostracism’, and are often used in the modern world to reconstruct whole vases. Statuary, too, can be fragmented; some of the most famous statues from the ancient world are broken – I always think of the Nike, or Winged Victory, of Samothrace, an imposing figure lacking her head. Those who have seen or worked with papyri know that texts as physical objects may have holes or tears in them. A key inscription that I used in my PhD thesis was used as a paving slab as some point in its life, leaving the text badly damaged. Buildings, objects, literary sources – many of these exist in fragmentary forms.
The Nike of Samothrace, 2nd c. BCE
But fragments might also be something more than these traditional ideas. Almost every object or text from the ancient world is in some way ‘fragmented’ even if it appears whole. Firstly, it is separated from its original context, divorced in some way from many of the references that might help us to understand it. Whole plays might be fragments of trilogies that no longer exist, as highlighted by David Stuttard during the network launch event. Statues that appear whole might in fact lack the polychromy that decorated them at the start of their lives. Elsewhere, fragmentation might offer even less than a line or two of Sappho – many plays and other texts exist only by title, and no works survive by arguably of the most famous ancient Greeks, Socrates.
Amidst all this fragmentation, it might seem counter-intuitive to forcibly fragment our sources even further. But of course, that is exactly what we at By Jove, and indeed many modern receptions of old stories, do. Of course, I would never condone taking a hammer to an ancient object – but slicing up an established narrative is a different beast. We might seek to cut out and extract the women from canon narratives, such as the Iliad and Odyssey or Shakespeare’s Henriad – cracking these stories open in order to extract the fruit of women’s experiences. We might take the kernel of an established narrative – say, Medea’s story – and build a new world around it, maintaining just enough of the original that it holds its shape, but filling in the gaps with new perspectives. We might slice across literature and scholarship, seeking queer or feminist readings of ancient characters.
In doing so, perhaps fragmentation can be a radical act – one that rejects the shape of the (patriarchal) canon, pulling it apart and putting the pieces back together in a form that suits a different agenda. The nature of that agenda is not automatically virtuous – Classicists might think of the shameless (mis)use of Thucydides to support various militaristic or political motives. But if, in fact, there are no new stories, then what we must do is necessarily handle fragments of the past – and perhaps, if we can hold one or two so they catch the light just right, we might see our reflections there.
