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

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

The bog bodies in The Erl-King are described by the narrator as messengers from the mists of time--"messager[s] de la nuit des temps" (Le roi des aulnes 295). The phrase becomes a leitmotiv that underscores the affinity felt by Tiffauges-- who describes himself on the novel's very first page as having "issued from the mists of time" 'issu de la nuit des temps' (The Erl-King 11; Le roi des aulnes 13)-- not only with the Iron Age man in the peat but also with the blind giant elk he befriends and that itself is seen in retrospect as preparing the way for the discovery of the bog bodies (Erl-King 167). But if the two bodies are messengers, the precise nature of the message they bear remains unclear. For Professor Keil it would seem to consist in a simple confirmation of those elements of Nazi ideology derived from Germanic myth. Similarly, for Tiffauges they serve to strengthen his conviction that he has "immemorial origins," "roots that went back into the deepest mists of time" (Erl-King 155) and that he has bee n singled out for an extraordinary destiny. (In this, the bog bodies resemble. the messenger in apocalyptic literature who mediates between a mythic space-time and a "real" space-time. Vladimir Tumanov assigns this role in The Erl-King to Nestor, Tiffauges's childhood mentor at St Christopher's, but clearly the bog bodies fulfill the same function in a different register in this intrinsically polyphonic novel.) Unlike Heaney's bog bodies, which come freighted with thematic structures from a distant past that serve to frame and illuminate, however problematically, the historical events of the present, Tournier's bodies seem to travel light, relatively unburdened by the time and place from which they spring. Rather than full symbols, they are empty vehicles waiting to be filled, signposts rather than signs. As such they are useful guides to the way this disturbing text is ordered and a pointer to how it might best be read. The following observations address three distinct but overlapping issues.

First, as empty "signs" open to almost any manner of interpretation and appropriation by the receiver, the bog bodies participate in the paranoiac proliferation of signifying systems that characterizes not only Tiffauges's attempts to decipher the world but also the workings of Nazi science and ideology. In this universe, as Tiffauges is not slow to remind us, everything is sign. Thus, when Professor Keil appropriates the bodies as Nazi kitsch, he is simply installing them as part of a vast shimmering machine of flags, parades, uniforms, and symbols whose function is to intoxicate and seduce, to induce a state of emotional exaltation grounded in the twin principles of belonging and exclusion. (One historical Nazi interpretation of bog bodies takes a very different tack to achieve a similar result. In an address to officers of the Waffen-SS on February 18, 1937, Himmler explains the fate of bog bodies in language that none too subtly evokes the "final solution": "The worthy professors who find these bodies in peat do not realise that in ninety out of a hundred cases they are looking at the remains of a homosexual who was drowned in a swamp along with his clothes and everything else. That was not a punishment, but simply the termination of such an abnormal life" (Van der Sanden 167). (9) Whether they are invoked as quasi-mythological Germanic ancestors or as "degenerates" to be disposed of, the bog bodies find themselves slotted willy-nilly into the manichaean binaries of sameness and difference, purity and dirt that structure and mobilize the discourses of both Nazi science and Nazi ideology.) More particularly, the discovery of the bog bodies in The Erl-King foreshadows the apocalyptic proliferation of empty signs and symbols in the novel's final chapter. As one of the characters warns Tiffauges, symbols become dangerous when severed from their referents and their power is allowed to go unchecked: "Have you read the Apocalypse of St John? It shows terrible, grandiose scenes that light up the sky--fantastic animal s, stars, swords, crowns, constellations, a great chaos of archangels, sceptres, thrones and suns. And all that, undeniably, is symbol and cipher. But don't try to understand it--don't try to find the thing to which each sign refers. For these symbols are diabols, and no longer symbolize anything. And saturation with them brings the end of the world" (Erl-King 260).