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

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

Just as many of the novel's individual motifs and topoi are reprised and inverted in Ephraim's revelations about Auschwitz, so the tightly woven web of themes and motifs that maps out the surface of the text is taken up (sublated, aufgehoben) in the infernal map of the death camps and the railway network that links them with the rest of Europe:

Over all Wehrmacht-occupied Europe, but chiefly in Germany, Austria and Poland, nearly a thousand villages and hamlets made up an infernal map of its own which subtended the ordinary country and had its own centres and capitals, and also its own sub-prefectures, junctions and sorting-offices. Schirmeck, Natzviller, Dachau, Neuengamme, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Oranienburg, Theresienstadt, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Lodz, Ravensbruck...Ephraim spoke of these as familiar landmarks in the world of shadows which was the only one he knew. But none shone with such black brilliance as Oswiecim, thirty kilometres southeast of Katowice in Poland, which the Germans called Auschwitz. It was the Anus Mundi, the great metropolis of degradation, suffering and death on which convoys of victims converged from every corner of Europe. (Erl-King 302)

It is this map of infamy that finally opens Tiffauges's eyes to the full extent of the Nazi horror, as History, brutally reasserting its claims, turns his allegories and mythologies to derision, exposes the hollowness of his systems, and reconfigures his (mis-)readings of the world in the realization that everything in his own experience must be reconstrued in light of Auschwitz, the terminus of History and the vanishing point of the novel's vertiginous textual structures. After Auschwitz, after the ruin of representation and the failure of language, (12) it is difficult to follow those critics who see the return to vertical--or, in Tiffauges's terminology, phoric--imagery in the novel's final scene as a gauge of transcendence, of salvation. When Tiffauges looks up as he sinks into the bog and sees "a six-pointed star turning slowly against the black sky" (317), we are inevitably reminded of another failure of language, another verbal confusion, neither historical nor mythological but literary. I am thinking, of course, of Felicite in Flaubert's "Un coeur simple," of her "mistranslation" of Paraclete as parrot (Paraclet as perroquet) and of her deathbed epiphany when she sees the heavens open and her stuffed parrot Loulou transformed into the Holy Spirit, "a gigantic parrot soaring above her head" (61). (13) Seen as the self-consciously literary construction it undoubtedly is, The Erl-King traces a textual itinerary, from its title to closing sentence, that might be encompassed within an infinitely expansive but flattening and deflating four-term homology that proposes that Erlen is to eller as perroquet is to Paraclet.

The "superficiality" of Tournier's text, its relentlessly ironic suspicion of tropes of depth and origin, is achieved in large part through a textual and intertextual play of differance, of displacement across complex networks of signifiers and signifieds. Peter Burger's "postmodern" reading of the novel notes some of the formal properties of the text but then asks the wrong question--"The decisive question for the interpretation of the novel is as follows: can this connection [the parallels between Abel Tiffauges and National Socialism] be regarded as a serious attempt at a mythical interpretation of German history during the Nazi period?"--which it answers in the negative because the novel "places before us a closed chain of signifiers, referring to nothing else" (Burger 103). The question--which might, with appropriate substitutions, be legitimately asked of Heaney's bog poems--is wrongheaded here precisely because the novel offers, among other things, a very powerful critique of mythical interpretations o f history. But in order to produce that critique it is obliged to reproduce the structures of mythic thought, just as it reproduces the structures of apocalyptic thinking in its critique of apocalyptic interpretations of history, a tactic that Saul Friedlander misreads and chastises as uncritical complicity with the apocalyptic kitsch of Nazi aesthetics (22-23, 42). Similarly, in order to counter the strategies of seduction implicit in the Nazi aestheticization of politics, the novel has to run the political risk of being aesthetically seductive. A more interesting (and more appropriate, though not necessarily "decisive") question might then be: in what sense can The Erl-King be regarded as an "archaeological" novel and can fictional archaeology tell us anything of interest about German history during the Nazi period?