Story Time Research Articles

<em>Excavating Victorians</em>, by Virginia Zimmerman

Reviewed by: Excavating Victorians James Paradis (bio) Excavating Victorians, by Virginia Zimmerman; pp. x + 231. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, $65.00, $21.95 paper. "A Roman bracelet discovered in the mudflats of the Thames," Virginia Zimmerman writes in her introduction to Excavating Victorians, not only "suggests the mortality of the woman who once wore the jewel," but also presents the finder with an "opportunity to reanimate the woman." A trace from the past, the bracelet "asserts its presence as … an object of study and interest, both scientific and aesthetic" (20). The recovery and, indeed, invention of the remote past by nineteenth-century geology and art in their encounters with trace fragments, including fossils and human artifacts, is the unifying thread in Zimmerman's analyses of a diverse selection of geological, archaeological, and literary works by Charles Lyell, Gideon Mantell, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles Dickens. Building on the work of Gillian Beer, she explores the ways in which Victorian artists and intellectuals answered the challenges of a shift from a Biblical cosmology, which "framed time and stressed the centrality of human life," to a geological time scale that "exceeded the limits of plot" (1). Nineteenth-century artists and men of science did much more than register a sense of loss when their feelings of human uniqueness began to falter as they encountered a new secular vastness. They also reinvented themselves as imaginers and narrators of a compelling new vision of time. In her introductory chapter on the semiotics of excavation, Zimmerman's theoretical discussion of the "multi-temporality" of trace objects, especially fossils, weaves together elements of the work of Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Anne McClintock, Tony Bennett, and Johannes Fabian, among others. This probing if sometimes repetitive discussion begins with Ricoeur's concept of the trace, the "tempo-object" that transcends time, acting as a bridge between past and present. Like the shingles rattling rhythmically in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867), these objects dissolve "temporal boundaries" (8), linking the present to a past of unsettling proportions. Drawing on museum historians like McClintock and Bennett, Zimmerman argues that texts, like museums, offer "spaces where time is miniaturized into a controllable system" (11). As time is compressed in the arrangement of objects in narrative and in space, the beholder stands both inside and outside of time. As the geologist and poet interpret remnants of past worlds, they gain a measure of control over the past, even as their own position within the framework of that past diminishes. This imaginative encounter with the past through the medium of the trace, Zimmerman argues, saturated the excavatory media of Victorian popular science and literary texts devoted to "rescuing the individual from the abyss" (24–25). In her next chapter, "The Victorian Geologist: Reading Remains and Writing Time," Zimmerman examines the development of a new form of geological narrative that converted artifacts into the plots and processes of popular stories. She explores the changing concept of authorship that enabled writers like Mantell and Lyell to shift [End Page 281] "time's story" from a Biblical to a geological one in sweeping narratives of "the Earth's agents of change" (28, 27). From geological writing, we turn to a long chapter on Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley (1847). This epic poem, she argues, reflects a narrative strategy self-consciously modeled on that of the geological narratives: Tennyson's subtitle "references the temporal medley associated with a collection of traces, each excavated from its own historical moment and then brought together and displayed in the present, whether in a museum or a poem" (71). Although the parallels she draws between geological and poetic narrative are debatable, the exploration of geological themes in Tennyson's work is detailed and convincing. The final two chapters examine the Victorian use of archaeological narrative and the endurance of the human past, as well as the "broad use of archeology and excavation" in two of Dickens's novels, Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) (24). In "Accidental Archeology in London and Pompeii," Zimmerman offers a meandering yet stimulating meditation on the decay of civilizations and the efforts of...

The Sun Also Rises: A Memory of War

When strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech [Wales] and revisit my favourite country, I could not help seeing it as a prospective battle field. Robert Graves (287) terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind. Ernest Hemingway, Across the and into the Trees (92) Paul Fussell argues that World War I was an inescapable part of postwar poetry For instance, he says that Eliot's The Waste Land--with its archduke, canals, rats, dead men, its setting of blasted its focus on fear--is more profoundly a of than one had thought (325-26). He cites similar remarks by Hugh Kenner on some of Pound's early cantos (326). The following suggests that Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is much more narrator Jake Barnes's of war than has been recognized, in terms of landscape, imagery allusions, and a recurring story of wounding. In this complex, poetic novel, war and wounding constitute a major pattern of allusion. Philip Young long ago pointed out that a certain bend in the river in Big Two-Hearted River reminds Nick of the place in Italy where he had been wounded (47, 53). [1] Similarly, readers have noted in The Sun Also Rises, as matters of imagery and action parallels, subtle allusions to Jake's war wounding. For instance, John W. Aldridge says that Cohn's knocking Jake out in Pamplona is a reenactment of Jake's war wounding (158-59); others (noted below) see Brett's emotionally wounding Jake in similar terms. The following discussion continues this line of inquiry. It sees the novel's events as being shaped by a recurring story-of-wounding pattern. This brief, three-part sequence of action starts with going to, traveling to, a place of threat--usually climbing a steep hill, then descending. Next comes an emotional wounding by Brett, which Jake associates (perhaps during the story's time, certainly while writing the story) with his unmanning sexual wounding during the war. The sequence concludes with his departure: usually it is a retreat to a room or bed (as if to a hospital bed). (In Pamplona these unmanning emotional woundings and retreats to bed are, in a sense, reiterated by Mike and Cohn.) The Paris and Pamplona sections conclude with a major and climactic wounding, which is followed by Jake's retreat to a place of recuperation (Burguete and San Sebastian). [2] But in terms of implied of war, there is considerably more in the novel than this recurring story of wounding. In a discarded preface to the completed novel, Hemingway said that it is something [the war] that is finished; there may be another war, none of it will matter particularly to this generation because to them the things that are given to people to happen have (Reynolds, The Paris Years 327). If this novel is about something that is finished, this suggests that its allusions to the prestory past concern not merely Jake's wounding but other events from the war, and, as it turns out, the early postwar period too--things that have already to this generation. These allusions to things past are implied in landscape, food, statues, cafe names, and so on. Often they are memories of big events in the war (military offensives or breakthroughs) and the postwar period. For instance, Georgette's name may allude to the 1918 German offensive (Opera tion Georgette) in Belgium. In chapter 1, the quarrelsome scene at the Cafe Versailles seems a memory of the quarrelsome peace talks at Versailles in spring 1919. (Imagine a post-Civil War novel narrated by a wounded war vet opening at the Cafe Appomattox.) Our theme, then, is this: In this novel--which transpires in a fictional year that resembles 1924-25--the prestory past, what has happened to this generation (in our time. ca. 1914-22). is never far from narrator Jake Barnes's mind. (Perhaps it is the emotionally wounding proximity of Brett Ashley that brings back to Jake, our thoroughly beaten-up narrator, suppressed of the past. …