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

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

Clearly, Tournier's novel does not share the archaeological ambitions of a narrowly constructed Freudian psychoanalysis. (14) Unlike Liz Headleand, the psychoanalyst in Margaret Drabble's A Natural Curiosity, it does not aspire to discover "what really happened. [...] At the beginning of human time"(75). (15) Nor does it propose, like Heaney's bog poems, that the myths of the past can illuminate the history of the present. Instead, its archaeology is much closer to what Foucault understood by the term: "[Archaeology] does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be 'allegorical'" (138-39). The Erl-King achieves its own refusal to be "allegorical," not by eschewing allegory but by foregrounding it as a "discourse in its own volume, as a monument," by multiplying its instances, and its failures, through a proliferation of mistranslations and misreadings. The point of the exercise lies not in the search for a beginning, the excavation of a more authentic self, or the restoration of a lost or tainted purity, but in the critical re-presentation of a discourse that attempts all those things. The novel is "archaeological" in its determination to present the discourse of an allegorical archaeology as discourse, and its "archaeology" of Nazi Germany lays bare not the distant origins and hidden meanings of Nazi discourse but the Nazi discourse of distant origins and hidden meanings. For all these reasons, the novel's attitude toward the mnemotope, as a vehicle of cultural, national, and racial memory, must be one of profound mistrust. That is why Tournier's bog bodies are also, and above all else, book bodies, their "archaeological" meaning spu n out of a web of (inter-)textual threads, a network of correspondence and allusion that, in its monumental facticity, renders untenable the ideological fiction of truths revealed by "messengers from the mists of time," whoever they may be.

Notes

* This essay is part of a research program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My sincere thanks to the Council and to my research assistants Jennifer Cottrill and Marianne Krajicek.

(1.) The archaeological accounts range from dry science through Glob's lyricism to the sensationalism of Ross and Robins. Turner and Scaife and Van der Sanden offer the most reliable and up-to-date information. The nationalist stakes in bog body archaeology came to the fore after the discovery of Lindow Man, when British archaeology entered the lists in barely concealed competition with more established German and Danish schools already in disagreement on fundamental questions of interpretation. Van der Sanden later added a Dutch voice to the chorus.