The bog body as mnemotope: nationalist archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier - Seamus Heaney, Michel Tournier - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

The sometimes beautifully preserved Iron-Age bodies that used to turn up from time to time in the peat-bogs of northwestern Europe have moved and intrigued writers since P. V. Glob published his classic archaeological account, The Bog People, in 1965. Locating the specificity of the literary bog body in its ability to compress time and to render the past visible in the present, the figure functions as a mnemotope, defined provisionally as any chronotopic motif that manifests the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the life of a culture or an individual. Texts by Seamus Heaney and Michel Tournier serve to focus a study of the play of mnemotopic values in archaeologies purporting to shed light on the workings of national and cultural memory. Analysis of these texts foregrounds the part played by bog bodies in rhetorical strategies that have proved particularly controversial.

In following the entrails of ancient Nordicisms may we not be in danger of overlooking, for instance, the polylingual coincidence whereby bog, in modern Danish, is the word for book?

(Brown 153)

"High modernism," writes Brian McHale, "conspicuously privileged the spatial dimension of verticality or depth; indeed, the figure of depth was arguably one of modernism's master-tropes" (239). Which is not to claim that the widely held view of a modernism characterized by its temporal dominant is in urgent need of revision. "For 'depth' in modernism is spatialized time, the past (whether personal and psychological or collective and historical) deposited in strata" (240). Given the requirements of an argument framed by an overarching distinction between modernist and postmodernist poetic practices, McHale's sustained emphasis on the tensions between space and time comes as no surprise. His highly entertaining analysis of the archaeological tropes of modernism and their postmodernist detournement consistently foregrounds the devices used by modernist poets to privilege time over space, depth over surface, and the ingenious efforts of postmodernist poets to reverse those hierarchies. For my part, less concerned with making distinctions between modern and postmodern I will be slower to oppose time and space in my reflections on archaeological narratives, preferring to dwell, at least initially, upon their articulation in the work of archaeology and on the different ideological constructions placed upon that work, particularly with regard to issues of nation and nationalism. My approach will be informed by Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope.

As with any chronotope, the artifact in an archaeological excavation is "the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied," where "[t]ime becomes, in effect, palpable and visible"; it functions as "the primary means for materializing time in space," "makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins" (Bakhtin 250). Bakhtin's "Concluding Remarks," a late postscript (1973) to "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," are of particular interest here in that, turning away from the major chronotopes of the essay proper providing the basis for distinguishing between genres, they focus attention on minor chronotopes or chronotopic motifs. As motifs, these chronotopes are coextensive with the texts in which they appear, as are the artifacts I wish to discuss. Since the primary function of the archaeological artifact as chronotope is to materialize a past in the present, to serve as a vehicle for personal and cultural memory, I will refer to it as a mnem otope, a term that should be fairly transparent but that I will define provisionally as a chronotopic motif manifesting the presence of the past, the conscious or unconscious memory traces of a more or less distant period in the life of a culture or, metaphorically, an individual. Of course, the mnemotope might come in many guises and be inflected by attitudinal values ranging from nostalgia and melancholy through desire, obsession and remembrance to horror and denial. Its preferred genre might be pastoral or testimony, but it might function equally well in western or film noir, historical romance, epic or ghost story. In intertextual terms its potential range is vast, running the gamut from homage and remake to parody and pastiche.

Among the archaeological motifs explored by McHale are the bog bodies that figure in Seamus Heaney's late modernist sequence of eight "bog poems" to be found in Wintering Out ("The Tollund Man" [47-48] and "Nerthus" [49-50]) and North ("Come to the Bower" [31], "Bog Queen" [32-34], "The Grauballe Man" [35-36], "Punishment" [37-38], "Kinship" [39] and "Strange Fruit" [40-45]). Heaney had read about the bodies in a work of archaeology, P.V. Glob's The Bog People, published in Danish in 1965 and translated into English in 1969. He had been moved by Glob's lyrical descriptions of the sometimes beautifully preserved Iron-Age bodies that turned up from time to time in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe, and was intrigued by the archaeologist's recourse to theories of ritual human sacrifice in order to explain their presence in the bogs. But while it is true that the theme of human sacrifice figures prominently in archaeological and literary accounts alike (Brothwell, Ross and Robins, Turner and Scaife, Van der Sa nden; Atwood, Drabble), I would argue that it is not the defining feature of the genre. (1) For though speculation about how the body came to be in the bog is an integral part of any bog body narrative, it does not in itself define the body's chronotopic value. Far more important than either the Iron-Age world of the bog people or the modern world of their archaeological reappearance is the very particular way the bodies mediate the relationship between the two. Bog bodies have an extraordinary power to abolish temporal distance, to make the past present. They are not skeletal remains; they have flesh on their bones and that flesh bears the marks of their living and their dying. They have hair and beard stubble and faces with expressions we think we recognize. They have stomachs that still contain the grains and seeds and plants they ate as their last meal. In a word, with their peculiar capacity to compress time, bog bodies are exemplary mnemotopes and speak of a life anchored in an everyday that was then bu t is also now. To an extraordinary degree, bog bodies allow us to see time.