Simpson - Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition

UNDER THE HAMMER

THE CLARENDON LECTURES IN ENGLISH 2009

Frontispiece: Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1967), in Second Floor, Public Space, The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, The David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced by permission 2009 The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

JAMES SIMPSON

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP

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James Simpson 2010

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I dedicate this book, with love and
admiration, to my children Emile,
Olivier, and Clelia Simpson

A confession: throughout the deeply pleasurable, not to say exhilarating process of writing this book, I developed a taste for the illicit. All but one of the following chapters is an act of breaking and entering academic shops not my own. I can only hope that my readers will also experience the frisson of transgression I enjoyed, although of course they may be provoked every now and again, when they feel I have strayed too far, to phone the police.

Books are the product and source of conversation. The conversation that began this book was over breakfast with the inspiring Andrew McNeillie, who invited me to deliver the Clarendon Lectures, under the auspices of both Oxford University Press and the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, in May 2009. The two weeks I spent in Oxford were unquestionably the most pleasurable of an academic life, thanks in no small part to the hospitality of Sally Mapstone and Vincent Gillespie.

Many friends, colleagues, and students have tried to keep me on the straight and narrow, for which I offer the warmest thanks. The following were especially generous: Amy Appleford, Tim Bahti, Larry Buell, Ian Donaldson, Milad Douehi, Philip Fisher, Jorie Graham, Grazia Gunn, Nicholas Halmi, Jeffrey Hamburger, Anna Huber, Jason La Fountain, Barbara Lewalski, Nina Lbbren, Luke Menand, Carl Schmidt, Peter Sacks, Daniel Shore, Nicholas Watson, and Nicolette Zeeman, who first started me thinking about iconoclasm. Many of these interlocutors and friends are colleagues in the Department of English, Harvard University, whose collective intellectual ambition and warmth of intellectual friendship nourished the book at every turn. Dozens of graduates in this department enlivened my thinking. I do not mean to enlist the colleagues here named as supporters of the positions taken in this book: many are not. Neither is Richard Strier, of the University of Chicago, who nonetheless provided the most tenacious and exacting opposition I have ever encountered in academic debate. My thanks to him are very warm indeed.

My wife and daughter, Luisella and Clelia Simpson, both offered penetrating comment at different moments.

Nicole Miller courageously and successfully undertook Herculean tasks at every level of the project. My debt to her is very large. The librarians of the Lamont Library, Harvard University, gave detailed help with the bibliography.

I completed the notes to this book in the magnificent Biblioteca Berenson of the Villa I Tatti, thanks to the warm and humane hospitality of its Director, Joseph Connors, and his wife, Franoise.

Frontispiece: Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1967), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

ON February 26, 2001, the Taliban leader of Afghanistan, Mullah Mohammad Omar, issued a decree ordering the destruction of all statues in Afghanistan. Only Allah, the Almighty, he decreed, deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else. The principal targets of the decree were, however, the two huge statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Central Afghanistan (Figure 1). Carved into the rock face in the second century CE, these statues were reportedly visited by pilgrims from across Central Asia.

It took about one week for rocket launchers to destroy the statues (Figure 2). The Talibans principal justification