Stonehenge: Decoded! ; or, What's so Secret about the Past?

by Mary Kate Hurley

[fig. 1: Aliens over Stonehenge, pilfered from the National Geographic site here]

If one searches ITM for "Stonehenge", a number of results come up, many associated with JJC's Weight of the Past project. I have not seen the special on the National Geographic Channel to which the title of this post refers to, though I'm hoping to catch it on a rebroadcast at some point. However, when I ran across Robin McKie's article on the Guardian entitled "Leave these stones their eternal secrets".

The article didn't really provoke much comment (or at least anything that was really productive), but I thought it might be of interest to ITM, particularly because of this part of McKie's process, which is in the ending of her article:

And that, of course, is the wonderful thing about Stonehenge: there are more theories about its meaning and purpose than there are stones inside it, a trend that goes right back to the idea, popular in the Middle Ages, that its monoliths had been assembled on Salisbury Plain by Merlin, though exactly why he bothered to do so remains a mystery.

In fact, Stonehenge took at least 1,000 years to build, starting from rings of wooden poles to its current complex status and its use clearly changed over the millenniums. Recent studies suggest it may have been 'Christianised' in the first millennium AD and at one point was used as a place of execution by the Anglo-Saxons to judge from the 7th-century gallows found there. This multiplicity of use increases opportunities for archaeologists to pin their pet theories to the great stone monument.

The crucial point is that every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves, as archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes once remarked. Hence in medieval times, it was built by giants, while in the 1960s, at the dawn of the computing era, researchers said you could have used it as a giant calculating machine, while in more mystical New Age times, it was clearly a spaceport for aliens. 'In fact, you can come up with just about any idea to explain a structure like Stonehenge if you stare at it for long enough,' says archaeologist David Miles.

Just what that the latest patch of Stonehenge theories says about the 21st century is less clear. I would argue that the World Heritage site is probably best viewed today as a monument to government prevarication and deceit. Having promised a decade ago that it would bury and realign the roads that surround and disfigure Britain's most important ancient monument, ministers now seem to have abandoned any attempt to protect the monument and restore the site to its ancient glory, for the simple reason they are too mean-spirited and short-sighted to see its value.

What interests me here is the assertion, made clearer by the end of that final paragraph, that "every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves," commonly attributed to Jacquetta Hawkes. McKie makes an interesting point, though she doesn't really flesh it out. She seems to be arguing, if I read between her lines correctly, that every age dreams the Stonehenge it deserves -- or more likely, the Stonehenge that can speak to it, in that time, in that place.

Of course, "Stonehenge" is not really the monument it was at its building (whether by Merlin or under the influence of Aliens or as a burial ground), much less in its "original" usage -- rather, "Stonehenge" is a kind of shorthand, by which we mean all the things which intervened, the multiplicities of usages and all the "theories" about its origins that exist in the intervening time. The question McKie doesn't really ask, and the one which I think may be necessary to ask, is whether Stonehenge, World Heritage site, is important in and of itself, or only important in so far as "modernity" recognizes something in it.

It raises a question that I'm addressing in my current dissertation chapter, on time in the Old English Orosius. I'm planning another post on this, when I've figured out what it is I'm trying to do with Bakhtin, but there's this part of The Dialogic Imagination, in "Discourse in the Novel" that keeps obsessing me:

every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word it anticipates…The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue. (280)

However, in his "Epic and Novel" (which I should really reread at some point, Bakhtin makes the point that "The dead are loved in a different way. They are removed from the sphere of contact, one can and indeed must speak of them in a different style. Language about the dead is stylistically quite distinct from language about the living."

It all returns to a question that for me is not really answerable: can there really be a conversation between the living and the dead -- the past and the present? Or is the past destined to be a kind of straw man, whose script is always written by the living?

Or is there a way in which past words -- or past monuments -- are, in an odd Bakhtinian* way still actively responding to a kind of "answering word its future" -- our present -- will provide? Can we expand a notion of a "living dialogue" so far?

Work Cited
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series ; (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

Cross posted at ITM.

Read More...

Summary only...

Fragments Shattered by History

So on Saturday, as I've mentioned here, I will be responding to this paper by Aaron Hostetter , a colleague of mine from Princeton. This will all take place as a part of the fourth annual ASSC Graduate Student Conference.

So here, for your Valentine's Day evening perusal, is my remark/question for our discussion. Any critiques or questions would be quite helpful -- this was the first time I've read Andreas. Though I find it quite fascinating, it's also insanely complex. One day that characteristic of Old English poetry will stop surprising me. With a little luck though, I'll never lose that complexity's delight.

So: Go read Aaron's paper, "A Tasty Turn of Phrase: Cannibal Poetics in Andreas". Then, refresh your memory of the story with any one of these posts on Heather Blurton's Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature from the ITMBC4DSoMA event this summer. I should note that in my haste I've not had the time to read through all of the entries, though I certainly hope to do so by Saturday's session. Then, return here to read my entry in this ongoing discussion of Anthropophagy. My bibliographical notes are not terribly precise, as I'm mostly going on what I've read from Aaron's paper: however, I'll have to add it in tomorrow morning, when I have time to figure out what I was drawing on! My title could also use a lift -- any ideas would be appreciated!

Fragments Shattered by History


Aaron argues that as a poem, the Andreas makes a comment on the relationship between the past and the present: most specifically, that fragments of a past identity inhabit the present construction of self – more importantly, they inhabit the text’s present construction of cultural identity. Using the poetic borrowings of Andreas, and making clear their poetic effect, the argument culminates in the assertion that, in the case of the “sad anthropophagites” of the Anglo-Saxon corpus:

the act of devoration leaves the eater with a raw sense of the self in time, of ones utter dependence on the presence of the past with which to construct a present, and a lingering sense of absolute difference from the apparent integrity of those pasts.

In some senses, his argument squares with the recent work on the poem done by Heather Blurton: in her dissertation, and its rendering in book form, Blurton argues that we might productively read the poem not merely for its conversion narrative, but for its “cannibal narrative” – a narrative that tells a story of invasion and conquest and the subsequent, postcolonial hybridity that results. Andreas, she argues, deliberately depicts the Mermedonians in ways which echo the descriptions of Anglo-Saxon warriors in other poems. Clearly, Blurton picks up on the same tendency which Aaron highlights: the citation of other Anglo-Saxon poems is used to an effect in Andreas, and to read the poem in any other light flattens a nuanced reading – performed by the poem – of those texts, and the culture which produced them.

As an opening provocation to discussion, I would like to reframe the question which Aaron is asking us to consider. In doing so, I want to engage with the idea of this solitary “self-in-time” – to ask, directly, the question of what the Mermedonians are doing in Anglo-Saxon England. If the self is related to the other in Andreas through a metaphoric act of consumption, devoration, or put in the slightly more post-colonial term favored by Blurton, incorporation – the question raised becomes more than simply one of “self” and “other” per se. The intermingling performed by the act of anthropophagy, and the intersection of the past and present that occurs in the building of cultural identity, suggests that the time of this “meal” is, to borrow a phrase, “out of joint.”

The question this raises about Andreas is the way in which the pasts upon which the present feasts are only apparently integral: the ways in which their narrative wholeness is shattered by the onset of a different kind of history. In Augustine’s conception of history, the human interpretation of history’s narrative is fundamentally altered by the intersection of the divine with the human: Christ’s advent necessarily rewrites the linear narrative of human history, and the truly integral events (his birth, death, resurrection and final judgment) shape the interpretation of any other narrative (though, and importantly, it doesn't annihilate the presence of all other narratives, which could be said to haunt it). My question then, is this: if we were to let the conversion narrative shape the cannibal narrative of the text, might we understand this story of sylfætan as an interpretation of the non-Christian digestion of history. Fundamentally incomplete, the past can only disappoint those who wish to use its narrative to shape the future from its fragments: those stories need interpretation, direction, a space to develop into that does not return to the same, human story. Rather, human history needs a divine supplement – otherwise, how could anyone seeking to feed on its remnants find adequate nourishment?


cross posted at ITM

Read More...

Summary only...

Harry Potter and Time

I've been reading Ron Silliman's blog for awhile now, and so have come to both enjoy and expect its brilliant thought on poetry and the world. Today's post, it seems, speaks to some of the issues of time that have been discussed -- here and also over at In the Middle of late, though from a very different subject matter. His post today reviewing the new Harry Potter film is well worth a read, for wonderfully interesting insights on both the films and on time. An excerpt:

This is the intersection between film & time, something that has fascinated both photographers & their critics almost since the dawn of daguerreotypes. We see a star, say, Judy Garland frozen at a particular moment in her adolescence in The Wizard of Oz, even knowing full well what a sodden mess she later made of her adult life, but in this scene, this film, she is for all purposes perfect. The intersection works other ways as well. Think of how many times in recent years you’ve seen some old film with a pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen in it, playing some sleazy young thug. You may have seen the film, or parts of it, a half dozen times on the telly, never before paying attention to this secondary role whose actor seems to have been selected for his ability to convey sliminess. Or the next time you see To Kill a Mockingbird, note Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, or catch Harrison Ford as a young officer in the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now, or both Ford and Duvall in minor spots, Duvall technically uncredited even, in Francis Ford Coppola’s great detective drama, The Conversation.

It doesn’t need to be film, or cinema, to create these effects. Any photograph of Abraham Lincoln, for example, carries this effect, or any still of JFK & Jackie in the convertible in Dallas before that turn onto Elm Street. Or even a photo of the New York skyline with the twin towers still intact. Or maybe a sun-bleached Polaroid with your dead grandparents, or an uncle who died before you were born. There was a world once, all of these objects say to us, in which so much had not always already happened. In which the irrevocable, that irreversible flow chart, had not already occurred, with all the consequences that can never be undone.

HP5, as the critics have all noted, is a much darker film. Potter is, as he says, “angry all the time.” Ron Weasley has his own surly moments, as does Nigel Longbottom. It’s the dark night of the teen years, only in this fable the dysfunctionality of the family (fabulously figured by Sirius Black’s literal family tree, many of its faces burned or blackened by scandal & conflict, the worst yet to come) is weighted with the whole axis of good & evil. In the portraits that invariably decorate the walls of this film, old Hogwarts faculty, dead ancestors, even kittens move & blink & meow. So also in the aging of its cast, this curious & flawed film franchise manages to figure its most powerful message, that of time.

It's an inspiring piece -- one I'm still too busy to address with the attention it deserves. But I was caught by his words -- particularly There was a world once, all of these objects say to us, in which so much had not always already happened. In which the irrevocable, that irreversible flow chart, had not already occurred, with all the consequences that can never be undone. He catches here part of the difficulty in deciphering the messages (intended or not) bequeathed to us by the past. There is a way in which these representations are never simply objects -- they become, in their own right, the sign of a world already past. Yet, caught momentarily in a picture or a film -- those of us who live always already after glimpse a moment where things still could have gone differently, where the world as we know it was still in the process of becoming. A temporal oddness asserts itself (at least, it does in my mind, which is by no means representative!): the intuition of a world in which our present becomings will have already passed. The knowledge that we're not immune to the effects of time. All commonplace thoughts, until they're brought home in a striking vision of a world that could have become differently.

Read More...

Summary only...

Studies in Chronos: La Jetée and 12 Monkeys

I may have mentioned this movie before, but La Jetée is one of my favorite movies of all time. Why, you ask? Well, not because it's the basis for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, though god knows that's the reason I found it in the first place. So late last night, as I wasted time not-reading due to the non-arrival of my luggage from the second half of my flight, I found this blog which links to Google video online versions of the film both in French (and note that the username of the poster of said movie might be mildly offensive, though the movie itself is well worth the momentary offense...) and English.

It's an interesting story, moving in its simplicity and the starkness of its black and white still photographs, the monologue of the voice over telling the story in third person omniscient. Yet there's something about it -- as there was with the movie 12 Monkeys -- that seems difficult to trace. And what's bizarre about the film isn't its strained relationship to the idea of chronological time. Rather, La Jetée focuses on something that 12 Monkeys elides somewhat: the centrality of the protagonist's "twice lived fragment of time". He sees a moment that defines his whole life, an experience so real it connects him to the past in a palpable way. He can be linked back in time because of this memory. They send him back, to see if it can be done -- and then when they realize that they can send him back, before the third world war and the nuclear attack that destroyed Paris, they can send him forward, to find in the world of the Future a way to save humanity -- "he said his piece, since humanity had survived, it cannot refuse its own past the means of its own survival. That sophism was taken as Fate in disguise."

And here I will give away the ending: in order to save the man's life from the executioners who no longer need him to save humanity, the humans of the future come back through time to offer him asylum in their "pacified" world. He chooses, instead, to return to the scene of his childhood, the death he had seen as a child that had haunted him his whole life: and he finds, on his arrival, the woman's face at the end of the pier. He sees a man who has tracked him through time -- and realizes that "there was no way out of Time and he knew that this haunted moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death."

As usual, I've fixed on a few words from these final moments of the movie. "he knew there was no way out of Time." In the movie 12 Monkeys, the woman he's been visiting is a scientist(he sees her multiple times in the past), and she speaks of different times when someone has appeared in the past, making predictions about the coming plague --

According to the accounts of local officials at that time, this gentleman, judged to be about forty years of age, appeared suddenly in the village of Wyle near Stonehenge in the West of England in April of 1162. Using unfamiliar words and speaking in a strange accent, the man made dire prognostications about a pestilence which he predicted would wipe out humanity in approximately 8OO years. Deranged and hysterical, the man raped a young woman of the village, was taken into custody, but then mysteriously escaped and was not heard of again.

.
Of course, the 1995 version multiplies the complexities of the 1962 version, including a plot about bioterrorism and the possible extinction of the human race.

But the question from La Jetée resonates still: "there was no way out of Time." In an age of Astrophysics and advanced relativity theory -- I wonder how it is that Time becomes a sort of fetishized site of longing -- a simultaneous repulsion to the corruption of the Time line via our own future intrusions, and the longing for our pasts, our own childhoods, the moments that--in ways we could never understand without a way to return, to live them again--shape our lives. I'm also curious in what ways someone could be "out of Time." You can see where the danger lies in time travel there -- the need in science fiction for the policing of the timeline, and the strictness of the rules of time travel, or even the fact that in many science fiction worlds you can't change the past, only observe it. It's a fear of intermingling, of hybridity -- the mixing of times. I wonder if it isn't partially a fear -- projected onto a future that we will never see, using a technology that is, for all intents and purposes, unobtainable -- of the way in which history is written. Time travel, if it were to interfere with or change the course of human events, suggests that these stories of our past might have been written differently -- that they are not a fixed point of reference for our current identity.

How might the world change if history could be observed, truly observed -- by someone who played no part in it? Or moreover -- by someone empowered to change it? Further: how might our conception of history change, if the past was no longer fixed?

Read More...

Summary only...

Augustine in the Sunshine

Well, actually -- I've spent the last few days reading books on theories of history, narrative and medieval historiography. I've made some fascinating discoveries, too.

The library here at Wake is closing in about 20 minutes, so this will be brief. I'll add to it tomorrow. But first -- and I know I've heard about this elsewhere, but I just finished Patrick Geary's book, Myth of Nations, which provides a really easy to read overview of an early medievalist's view of the rise of nations and nationalism. I don't know what the critical reception to it has been, but I felt like its attempt at translating some of the more complex theories into a form that a more generalized audience would understand was both helpful and important to future discussions of the nation and national identity. A moment I found particularly interesting:

Both in large hegemonic states and in aspiring independence movements, claims that "we have always been a people" actually are appeals to become a people--appeals not grounded in history, but rather, attempts to create history. The past, as has often been said, is a foreign country, and we will never find ourselves there. (p. 37)

A tension I'm finding in that quote, interestingly enough, is in that last line, which is haunting (and for good reason). "The past...is a foreign country, and we will never find ourselves there."

While I "believe" Geary on that point, I wonder if there's anyway of writing "History" as we know it and not ending up stuck in this narritivized setting....

More soon, with thoughts on the Homi Bhabha's introduction to Nation and Narration and Brian Stock's Listening to the Text all of which is tied up in my mind with the text my freshman comp class will be working with for their final papers -- Adrian Hastings' "Nation and Nationalism" from The Construction of Nationhood. Tomorrow will bring bibliography for all this thought and more musings. Any of either in the interim or after are appreciated...

For now, ZSR Library is closing, and they're going to lock me in if I don't get moving!

Read More...

Summary only...