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

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

The reference to John of Patmos--and, as Tumanov suggests, beyond the Johannine text to a whole tradition of apocalyptic literature rooted in Revelation--serves as a reminder that Tournier's novel is saturated in intertextual allusion that frequently takes on a life of its own, quite independent of its textual anchors. In fact, the bog bodies qua bog bodies disappear from the text after their initial discovery and do not reappear until their symbolic reincarnation at the end of the novel. In the meantime, and this is my second observation, they undergo a literary transformation into the Erl-King and the child he entices away from his father, and it is in this guise that they are incorporated into Tiffauges's reading of the world in terms of his own destiny. In this respect, they might be called "paper" bodies--a term used in bog-body archaeology to denote those bodies that have been reported but not preserved. The flight into language (from referent to signified) effected by the act of naming is entirely cons onant with an apocalyptic tradition that divorces sense from reference and renders signifiers available for misappropriation (Tumanov 428-30). It is just such a process that leads to the elaboration of Tiffauges's personal mythology--a system that, through its very coherence, challenges the reality of the real world. In the end, it is only Ephraim's counter-revelations of the historical reality of Auschwitz that expose the hollowness of Tiffauges's construction and bring the whole textual edifice tumbling down about his ears. (It is significant that an allegory of misreading is already buried deep in the genotext of the novel's title, which itself rests on a translation error. As Tournier remarks in Le vent Paraclet (118-19), Goethe took his title, "Der Erlkonig," from Herder who in turn took it from Danish folklore. (10) But in the course of his borrowings, Herder translated the Danish eller (elves) as Erlen (alders) because in his East Prussian dialect the word for alders was Eller. Both elves (metaphorical ly) and alders (metonymically) send the reader back to the peat-bogs of Denmark and the folklore surrounding the bodies that haunt them.)

My third observation concerns Tournier's bog bodies as signposts, a metaphor that foregrounds the "spatial turn" taken by a novel in which all roads lead to Auschwitz. Despite their intrinsic temporality, these bodies lose much of the depth associated with archaeological tropes as they are disseminated across the surface of a text resembling a landscape or a map. Here most motifs are overdetermined and function as textual crossroads, points of intersection of two or more of the thematic itineraries that criss-cross the fictional landscape, covering it with an intricate hermeneutic grid that leaves no referential residue. I will limit my discussion to two brief examples, both drawn from the novel's abundant fauna. The giant elk befriended by Tiffauges in East Prussia embodies tropes of blindness and marginality, both central to the novel, and functions, as we have seen, as a "messenger from the mists of time." But it is also, as we know from Heaney, the kind of animal that turns up in skeletal form in bogs and finds its way from there into many a museum. Similarly, the herd of auroch (bos primigenius redivivus), bred by Nazi geneticists and allowed to run wild in the nature reserve at Rominten, articulates themes of racial purity, primordial nature, authenticity, and the return to barbarism. But auroch also occasionally turn up in bogs and one is tempted to ask whether Tournier, a voracious reader of German, might not have come across a passage in Goethe's Vergleichende Anatomie, Zoologie that recounts the discovery of an Urstier skeleton in a peat-bog near HaBleben in 1821(360-68). In addition to their rich thematic function, then, both elk and auroch establish, by means of intratextual patterns of repetition and variation and the novel's unusual capacity for semiotic integration of extratextual elements, multiple links with other motifs, including the two bog bodies, as they are woven into a tight textual and intertextual mesh. (11)