An Etymology of Excavation

In order to ensure that the framework for this study is both flexible and robust enough to encompass the different excavatory strategies of the writers that I examine, I draw on concepts associated with archaeology and geology alongside a broadly philological approach; the latter seeks to tease out some of the resonances of the term excavation especially in its relation to writing,

inscription and the act of making. Interleaving the conceptual register of

disciplines concerned with material spaces and places, with one whose object is language and text is also in the spirit of this study with its overarching aim of locating spatial criticism within a literary-historical framework. Although reading and interpretation are metaphorically aligned with archaeological practice, there are also long-standing associations between writing and excavation that a little etymological digging reveals.121 The Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘excavate’ from the Latin ‘excavāre’, meaning ‘to hollow out’.122 This is not only the act of making something ‘hollow by removing the inside’ but also means to excavate something into another ‘form’ through the process of hollowing. Excavation thus implies creative making as well as demolition or unearthing; the removal of earth out of (ex-) the ground produces a material and symbolic space – a cave or cavus.123 _{The production of space entailed in excavation is as much an} aesthetic act of inscription as it is a hollowing out of physical terrain.

120 _{Agamben, The Signature of All Things, p. 110.}

121 _{See Schwyzer, p. 6, for a brief discussion of the association between reading, interpretation,}

and archaeology.

122 _{Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘excavate’.}

123 _{The cave is of course an archetypal space in Western literature and culture from Homer,}

This dual effect of hollowing out and formation is also found in the Old English verb grave or graef which despite its different philological roots, also means to ‘dig, form by digging, to dig out, or excavate’.124 Claudia Brodsky Lacour observes that by the thirteenth century the meaning of ‘grave’ had expanded to include ‘the notion of excavation both as historical uncovering and aesthetic formation, the partial removal of matter signified by ‘carve’ and

‘engrave’.125 _{Again the potential to make or form something through digging is} implied here, and is more clearly demonstrated in the additional definitions of ‘grave’ as ‘to form by carving’ or ‘to engrave an inscription, figures, upon a surface’.126 _{The shift between unearthing and inscription displaces the potential} abstraction of a void, indeterminate in shape and volume, onto a permanent form, for to ‘grave’ becomes ‘to impress deeply’ or ‘to fix indelibly’.127 As

Brodsky Lacour suggests, the removal of matter from one place to another and the subsequent opening in the ground (the grave) is the prerequisite for another kind of displacement, the body that takes ‘the place of the earth it displaces’. Thus ‘the artificial production of space as meaningful form’ and the ‘placement of a body’ converge in the obsolete but nevertheless suggestive term ‘grave’ – to bury, and to engrave.128 Literary excavation is both a hollowing out and an act of engraving, a process through which a space or surface is formed and inscribed with meaning, the dead are emplaced and displaced, and something is uncovered or laid bare. Poet-excavators therefore inhabit all of these

meanings as they write places into existence, unearth the dead, ventriloquize the past, hollow out and reproduce landscapes and literary traditions.

Aside from my etymological definition of excavation outlined above, literary studies has already begun to the plumb the depths of the

‘archaeological imagination’.129 Scholars like Michael Shanks, and Ian Hodder,

124 _{Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘grave’. Both ‘excavate’ and ‘grave’ were in use in}

this manner during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

125 _{Claudia Brodsky Lacour, In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the}

Referent (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. 136.

126 _{Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘grave’.} 127 _{Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘grave’.} 128 _{Brodsky Lacour, p. 36.}

129 _{There have been several recent publications on the subject in Renaissance, Victorian and}

Modernist literature and a number of trans-historical studies, all of which suggest a renewed scholarly interest in the dynamic between excavation and literature. For period specific studies see: Schwyzer; Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); Sasha Colby, Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). For more general trans-historical approaches see Jennifer Wallace, Digging the

Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (London: Duckworth, 2004); John Hines, Voices in the Past: English Literature and Archaeology (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004); Karin

working in the discipline of archaeology, have provided the foundation for

subsequent discussions of the ‘archaeological imagination’ in other areas of the humanities such as literary studies.130 Such an ‘imagination’ Shanks suggests, exceeds the discipline of archaeology itself, and ‘is rooted in a sensibility, a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time an temporality, the fabric of history’.131

Transposed to a literary context, the term is often used as a catchall to describe the use of archaeological, geological and other excavatory tropes in literary texts; indeed Heaney’s use of farming and gardening (plough, spade) metaphors for writing are often referred to in this way. As Karin Sanders

remarks, the conjunction of archaeology and ‘imagination’ offers both the writer and the critic the ‘freedom to ‘abstract’ from material realities’. Nevertheless, while it is an ‘elastic term’ open to various definitions there are a recognisable set of principles that characterise the archaeological imaginary in literary criticism.132 As with concepts borrowed from other spatial disciplines, any account of excavation in literary texts struggles with the abstraction or

simplification that takes place when principles from one field, archaeology, are transferred to another, literary studies. It is to ameliorate this problem that I began with an account of excavation situated in the object of literary enquiry – language and etymology. The only way to negotiate this difficulty is to

acknowledge the metaphoricity and linguistic resonances of excavation while simultaneously challenging the reduction and reification of archaeological paradigms in literary scholarship. This is precisely what my reading of these poets attempts to effect. Throughout the subsequent chapters, I argue that their work transforms and revises the conventional excavatory principles that I

outline here: 1) the relationship between past and present; 2) the recovery and Sanders, Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). There has also been some useful work on Heaney and on Hill’s Mercian Hymns, although there has been little if anything on other contemporary poets in respect of excavatory poetics. See Christine Finn, Past Poetic: Archaeology in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Seamus

Heaney (London: Duckworth, 2004); McHale; John Kerrigan, ‘Earth Writing: Seamus Heaney

and Ciaran Carson’, Essays in Criticism, 48.2 (1998), 144–168; C. D. Blanton, ‘Nominal Devolutions: Poetic Substance and the Critique of Political Economy’, The Yale Journal of

Criticism, 13.1 (2000), 129–151; Robert Macfarlane, ‘Gravity and Grace in Geoffrey Hill’, Essays in Criticism, 58.3 (2008), 237–256.

130 _{See Ian Hodder, Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past (London: Routledge,}

1995). Michael Shanks has published widely on the subject of the ‘archaeological imagination’ and ‘sensibility’ but for an up-to-date account see his, The Archaeological Imagination (Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press, 2012).

131 _{Shanks, The Archaeological Imagination, p. 25.} 132 _{Sanders, p. 14.}

interpretation of finds; 3) the processes of unearthing; 4) the exhumation of the dead. Inevitably there is a degree of overlap between these principles; there is also a cross-over in the ways that Hill, Carson, Monk and Oswald transform these concepts in their work. Therefore, while I demonstrate some of these conventions in Seamus Heaney’s discursive and poetic practice in the following section, I do not at this stage align these principles or their revision with the other poets in this study. Instead, the chapter outlines that conclude the introduction summarise the ways in which these poets engage to different extents with each of the four principles set out below.