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

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

The ambiguities of this ending--En-King or St Christopher, damnation or salvation, or, at a higher level of abstraction, Hegelian Aufhebung or unresolvable dualism--are symptomatic of a novel that maintains a Flaubertian aesthetic distance from its central character and offers no moral vantage point within the text from which to condemn Tiffauges's frequently disturbing behavior. Moreover, although Tiffauges himself in no way sympathizes with the Nazi cause, he nevertheless serves that cause while singlemindedly pursuing his own (very different) ends. The full extent of his complicity is brought home only late in the novel when Ephraim's account of the horrors of Auschwitz reveals the existence of a universe that systematically and malignantly inverts Tiffauges's highly idiosyncratic rituals and obsessions (302). Here, of course, we are on dangerous ground, for any novel that appears to derive the all-too-familiar referential details of the death camps from a textual logic already intricately aestheticized th rough its fugal transformations of recurrent themes and motifs and perversely personalized through its roots in the central character's beliefs and behaviors inevitably invites accusations of both aestheticization and trivialization. Those accusations have been duly made and, as in the case of Heaney, deserve to be taken seriously. (7) But, faced once more with an issue of considerable political, ethical and aesthetic complexity--the responsible representation in fiction of the Shoah and, more generally, of Nazi Germany--my response must again be limited to an assessment of the role played by the bog-body motif in such a representation.

The comparison with Heaney involves certain inevitable dissymmetries that should be pointed out for clarity's sake. Whereas the bog bodies in Heaney are absolutely central, not only to the few, mostly short lyrics that constitute the corpus of bog-poems, but also to their critical reception, in Tournier they are confined to a short and diegetically self-contained episode in a long and immensely rich novel and, to my knowledge, have elicited no critical interest whatsoever as bog bodies. Significantly, Tournier's reading of Glob has passed unnoticed and plays no part at all in the accusations of aestheticization, mythologization, and trivialization that have been made against the novel. (8) The comparison is worth making, however, for two reasons. First because, as I shall argue, the structural role played by the bog bodies in The En-King is out of all proportion to their diegetic presence; in the aesthetic, thematic, and intertextual networks they support, the bodies are in fact central to the issues that con cern us here. Second, because the comparison promotes a better understanding of the levels at which the aesthetic functions in the two authors, for while the aesthetic qualities of Heaney's lyrics are inseparable from the poet's own voice and inform the entire analogy between past and present, the mnemotopic values in Tournier's novel are not directly attributable to the implied author but are thematized in different ways by characters whose constructions are ultimately contested by the text's own aesthetic structures.