Principles of Stratigraphy: Methodology
2. A Justification for Excavation
A poem, suggests Michael O’Neill, is a ‘place’ where the ‘most nuanced reading of a previous poem or poetry occurs’.109 As a kind of ‘literary criticism’ poetry is conditioned by influence, not as a Bloomian ‘struggle between male egos’ but as ‘an interplay between indebtedness and individuation’.110 Where that poem is also a response to ‘place’ it thereby necessarily acknowledges, mediates and critically transforms the spaces, places, and landscapes of its
109 Michael O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British,
American, and Irish Poetry Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 11.
poetic precursors. I contend that locating the insights of spatial criticism within literary-historical frameworks enables a more nuanced critical account of poetries of place, one that reveals ‘the hidden roads that go from poem to poem’ and back again; the stratified landscapes that lie beneath.111 As O’Neill suggests, the critical approach that is an inevitable corollary to concerns with literary legacy is a ‘mode of close reading that allows attention to both
individuality and relationship’.112 In this thesis close reading and literary-history combine with a concept of excavation as a critical tool to enable new insights into contemporary poetry’s deep dialogue with place. While the scope of this thesis is limited to accounting for the various transformations of excavatory models in a selection of work by these poets and to some extent their precursors, I hope to provide a critical approach that can be applied more widely to the field of contemporary poetry and place.
I suggest that there are several advantages to using excavation as a critical model of engagement with contemporary poetry and place. First, as Falci observes, a vast amount of post-war poetry proceeds by way of the
archaeological mode.113 He names Heaney, Hill and Peter Riley as exemplary excavators in this vein, while also highlighting the urban stratigraphy of poets such as Carson and Fisher. In suggesting that poets like Carson revise and renew archaeological poetics Falci begins to unearth other genealogies of excavation besides the ostensibly dominant model of poets such as Heaney and Hill. However, this approach already tends to homogenise existing excavatory strategies, neglecting the way in which poets like Hill continually reconfigure their own models. Falci’s analysis is also necessarily limited due to the constraints of the topic within a single essay, therefore while his work provides a good foundation, it is unable to develop these excavatory models in any detail. While the volume of poetry that engages with excavation is one good reason for commencing such a study, my approach goes beyond accumulating observations of archaeological or geological tropes, and seeks to turn metaphor into model.
Second, using excavation as a model enables me to widen the debates around existing uses of critical spatial tropes. Part of my criticism of current
111 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973), p. 96; O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air, p. 11.
112 O’Neill, p. 11. 113 Falci, p. 202.
approaches to place, space and landscape in literary studies is the tendency either to accrue too much political potential to abstract spatial metaphors, or to ground metaphor so firmly in place as to render poems no more than arbiters of socio-spatial practice. My approach tries to tread a line between these two poles, recognising both the suggestive metaphoricity of excavation and the need to locate its allusiveness in aesthetic as well as social practices of
particular places. If recent discussions of literary landscapes are often limited to the social practices of place, I contend that critical excavation opens out the possibilities of accounting for a richer palimpsest of place, constituted by the intersection of various different strata – aesthetic and historical as well as social.
A third advantage to excavation is its association with temporality, whether this be the deep time of geological science which extends beyond a human lived experience of time, or the historical time more often associated with the stratification of human communities and the recovery and interpretation of archaeological finds. It is important to note here that excavation is a
necessarily broad term when applied to the writers under discussion, who draw simultaneously on geology and archaeology, and also from the conceptual registers of farming, gardening, burial practices and geomorphology. Each of these repositories of knowledge or experience function according to different timescales and rhythms, which often intersect in the material and textual sites of any given poem. The model of excavation that I develop is an attempt to tease out the complexity of relationship between past and present, and to observe the collision of temporalities present in these various poetics of place.
This critical approach also enables me to combine spatial criticism with literary-history, a balance that I suggest is in need of redress. As an
interpretative strategy excavation reveals how poets themselves unearth literary traditions of writing place; Oswald entitles her own rewriting of Homer’s Iliad in these terms. It also describes my own approach to conducting research for this study. Whether allusion to previous writers is explicit or suggestive in the work of these poets, my own excavatory strategy has required mining the layers of earlier texts for resonances and echoes.114 By deploying excavation as a critical tool in this way it may appear that I resort to an epistemology that seeks to
114 This has included undertaking archival research in the Geoffrey Hill archives at the
University of Leeds, and using published versions of other primary source materials, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ letters and draft versions of Paul Celan’s Meridian speech.
uncover what is ‘hidden’ in text and landscape, and which perhaps naively reaffirms the notion that the ‘whole landscape’ is indeed ‘a manuscript’ that ‘we’ have ‘lost the skill to read’. Although I do suggest that recent emphases on reading the socio-spatial within texts has to some degree inhibited our critical ability or at least desire to read for aesthetic resonances, I do not adhere to the notion that there is a point of origin, textual or otherwise, that can be recovered and reconstructed into a singular coherent tradition of writing place.
As Philip Schwyzer points out in his cogent analysis of excavation in Renaissance literature, many of the terms for ‘acts of reading and interpretation’ use archaeological language. He further suggests that the use of this
‘excavatory lexicon’ in literary criticism has less to do with any contact between the disciplines of archaeology and literary studies, and is more likely a result of the abundance of archaeological metaphors in the work of thinkers such as Freud, Walter Benjamin and Foucault.115 The preponderance of spatial theories, over and above methods drawn directly from the discipline of geography that Sheila Hones observes in recent literary criticism bears out this suggestion.116 Schwyzer points out that whether allied to a model that seeks to unearth what is buried (Freud) or which renounces depth (Foucault) these ‘radically different literary-critical methodologies can be perceived by their practitioners as equally “archaeological”’.117
While is not my particular intention to draw explicitly on either Freud’s or Foucault’s model of archaeology – indeed, if Schwyzer is correct, then these metaphors and ways of thinking are necessarily implicit in any critical
excavation – my approach is nevertheless more aligned with a ‘Foucauldian archaeology [that] never seeks the origin or its absence’ as Giorgio Agamben puts it.118 According to Agamben this model of interpretative archaeology must ‘engage anew the sources and traditions’ in order to establish how the ‘archē’, the origin or precursor is constituted and read in the context of these
traditions.119 The ‘archē’ or archaeological find is not a critical ‘given’ or a
‘substance’, however, neither is it in the context of landscape writing a textual or historical shard that attests to a contiguous tradition; rather as Agamben
115 Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: University Press,
2007), pp. 6–7.
116 Hones, p. 1307. 117 Schwyzer, p. 8.
118 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009),
p. 79.
suggests it is an ‘operative force’ within a ‘field’ of historical tensions.120 In this sense what I attempt to unearth in these poetic landscapes is a less an origin or coherent tradition than a series of interconnected ‘currents’ – textual, historical, social and natural – in which the poem and its precursors are constituted and become at least partially legible. The suggestiveness of reading, writing, and interpretation as processes of excavation make this particular spatial trope a good foundation for constructing a model that is able to account for these various dimensions of the spaces and places of poetry.