Peter Washington
‘These Fragments I Have Shored Against my Ruins’
Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism
By Cathy Gere
University of Chicago Press 272pp £16 order from our bookshop
In Darwin’s bicentenary year the cultural chatter is inevitably all about the importance of evolutionary biology to our understanding of the world, but it could be argued that other Victorian sciences were at least as significant, especially geology and archaeology. The three are closely related and Darwin drew on them all. Each reconstructs a version of the past from evidence in the present. As anyone who reads Poe and Conan Doyle will know, these disciplines flourished at the same time as the new genre of detective fiction, which adopted a similar approach to crime. But forensic criminology is not only reconstructive; it is also prophetic. At a certain point in the investigation the detective often finds himself able to predict the identity of the criminal and even his future behaviour. In some cases the denouement of the story depends on this ability, most touchingly in ‘Silver Blaze’, which turns on Sherlock Holmes’s feeling for equine psychology.
The notion of history as the source of augury is hardly new – the Old Testament could not exist without it – but, except for a few individuals little regarded at the time (Boehme, Blake, Herder), the Enlightenment silenced prophetic voices from
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings