The Bog People by P. V. Glob - who in return so often gave their faces her blessing

I will ease myself back into Scandinavia by going back to the beginning, to the Iron Age tribes unearthed in The Bog People (1965) by Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob.  Glob was closely involved with the excavation and analysis of some of the most famous bog people found in Denmark, including the Tollund Man and the Grauballe Man, so he writes in some detail about those finds, including numerous photographs of the mummies and their artifacts.  Also photos of the various bogs, all of which look exactly the same.  Subsequent chapters catalogue other discoveries of bog people in Denmark and elsewhere and draw some conclusions about the society and culture in which the bog people lived and died.  His argument is that a number of the mummies were the victims of human sacrifice.

Last summer I saw some bog mummies for myself, in the Gottorf Castle in Schleswig, including the Windeby “Girl” (actually a boy).  The bog people are a fascinating subject for their own sake, uncanny in the preservation of their faces, or eyes, or fingerprints, or stubble, depending on the luck of the bog.  Black and white photographs are ideal for conveying the resigned expression of the Tollund Man, even if the expression must to some large degree be a matter of chance.

Why, though, read this book on the subject?  It is incomplete and outdated, containing errors of fact (see the parenthetical above) and interpretation.  Why not read a more recent book?  Why does NYRB Classics have it in print?

Two reasons.  One is that Seamus Heaney read it (“my Christmas present to myself back in 1969”) when Rupert Bruce-Mitford brought it into English (I am actually reading this edition, not the NYRB version).  He was deeply struck by the humanity of the mummies and wrote a number of outstanding poems about them.  Still, another book with the same photos would do.

The second reason is that Glob’s book has become literature, and who reads literature for its accuracy?  I did not really understand this until the final quarter of the book, a long chapter titled “When Death Came” which is about the meaning of the deaths of these people.  It begins:

Death is the inescapable lot of man, and it comes in many guises.  Among the Iron Age people from the peat bogs we have seen signs of death in its grimmest forms.  Young and old, men and women, met their ends by decapitation, strangulation, cutting of the throat, hanging and drowning.  Very probably they suffered torture, mutilation and dismemberment before they died.  Yet these are the ones the bogs have preserved as individuals down to our day, while all their relative and contemporaries from the eight centuries of the Iron Age have totally vanished or at the most only survive as skeletons in their graves. (144)

Glob is writing with the distance and rhetoric of a scholar, constructing a culture and religion out of the physical evidence in the museum he ran, not just the mummies and their nooses and blindfolds but a stunning silver cauldron and some gods hacked out of logs whose survival is as unlikely as that of the bog people.  Still the gaps are so large, and Glob’s sympathy for these distant people is so great.

The Tollund man and many of the other bog men, after their brief time as god and husband of the goddess – the times of the spring feasts and the wanderings through the villages – fulfilled the final demand of religion.  They were sacrificed and placed in the sacred bogs; and consummated by their death the rites which ensured for the peasant community luck and fertility in the coming year.  At the same time, through their sacrificial deaths, they were themselves consecrated for all time to Nerthus, goddess of fertility – to Mother Earth, who in return so often gave their faces her blessing and preserved them through the millennia.  (190-1).

Glob wrote a legitimate successor to Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658), another work that begins with descriptions of recently discovered archeological remains and slowly turns into a meditation on mortality, how they died leading to why they died culminating in why we die.

A passage that I can no longer find - Borgesian Brownian Sebaldian Sebald

The photographs in Sebald’s novels undermine the facts of his fiction by seeming to guarantee them.  A man in a dark coat stands on an empty winter beach.  The text says “this picture” was taken by Uncle Casimir and is of the narrator of The Emigrants, who is also more or less the author.  Sebald possesses the picture because his uncle sent him a copy “two years later, probably when he had finally shot the whole film, together with his gold pocket watch” (89).

I mention this photo not because it is particularly interesting – in fact it is particularly dull – but because I was amused to find a second reference to it in the new book of poems – confirmation! – although  of what I cannot say.  But this is one of Sebald’s recurring jokes, the inclusion of fragments of evidence of some vague something that actually prove nothing.  The reproduction of a pizza lunch receipt in Vertigo is a highlight of the technique.  The story must be true – here is the receipt!  I am always tricked for a moment, too.

I wonder what the ratio of fact to fiction is in Sebald’s books.  High, I assume.  In The Rings of Saturn Sebald spends a couple of pages summarizing the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which begins with the discovery of an encyclopedia  “which contains four pages that are not in any other copy of the edition in question,” pages that are fictional in the sense that Borges made the whole thing up, but have an indeterminate status within the story itself.  Four fictional pages are enough to reshape the world, at least within a text.  The chapter ends with the Borges story colonizing the Sebald novel. 

And then see how the novel ends (the chapter has been about silk and silkworms):

And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons all over mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.

In the Borges story, Uqbar is in some sense discovered in a mirror, and the story (and Sebald’s chapter that employs it), both end with a mention of Browne, so Sebald deliberately linked these endings.  But the key of course is the lost remarks.  I assume that enterprising Sebaldians have either identified the passage or proven that it does not exist.  I am not sure which outcome I prefer. 

Someday all of this work will have been done, indexed and catalogued, the relevant parts of every book Sebald identified in footnote, or, who knows, linked directly to the text.  I must admit that part of the fun of reading Sebald is that my own little discoveries still feel fresh.

In literature there are no such things as beautiful subjects - Or, The expression of man’s delight in God’s work

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter, posited two “axiomatic” “truths”:

(1) that poetry is purely subjective, that in literature there are no such things as beautiful subjects, and that therefore Yvetot is the equal of Constantinople; and  (2) that consequently one can write about any one thing equally well as about any other.*

Yvetot is a small town in Normandy; in other words, nothing, or Hell, or both.  How unwise to follow Flaubert too far in any direction, and here he clearly goes too far.  How unfortunate that I agree with him.   What is beauty in literature?  What is beautiful writing?  In dark moments, I suspect that there is no such thing.  Flaubert may be claiming that he can write beautifully about ugly subjects, any subject.  I'm not even sure about that.

I never use the word,”beauty,” not about writing.  I don’t know what it means, so I don’t use it.  Startling, original, invigorating, sublime, good, but not beautiful.  I would like to reclaim the concept.  Oh, that would be so much work.  I have in front of me a Modern Library collection titled Philosophies of Art and Beauty.  The compilers have thoughtfully selected 63 pages of Kant, 63 pages of Hegel, and 47 (only?) pages of Schopenhauer for me.  Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin.

Actually, I use the word all the time, about scenery, and art, and music.  Direct sensory stimuli.  Sir Thomas Browne “cannot tell by what Logick we call a Toad, a Beare, or an Elephant, ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best expresse the actions of their inward formes” (Religio Medici, 1642, paragraph 16).  Browne goes too far the other way, doesn’t he?  If I call all of God’s creation beautiful, I’ve emptied out the word again.  But he’s right – if I want to say that the garden toad is ugly and the iridescent poisonous frog is beautiful, I should think about why.

John Ruskin tried to find that Logick.  One reason I read him is that his aesthetics underpin a lot of received ideas about beauty.  Like Browne, he needs God for his argument, or Nature.  Beauty in art, any art, is “the expression of man’s delight in God’s work” (The Stones of Venice, Vol. I, 1851, XX.iii).  Note that the human creator is necessarily present here.  In Plate VII, above, Ruskin looks for beautiful forms in nature and finds them everywhere – in mountains, branches, shells, and leaves.  The top curve is a view of a Swiss glacier.  My favorite, for some reason, is the bottom middle one, a direct tracing of half of a bay leaf.  Beautiful man-made form imitates beautiful natural form.  Readers of Alan Hollinghurst will observe that Ruskin is updating Hogarth’s Line of Beauty here.

Too bad Ruskin wrote so exclusively about visual art.  I want to argue by analogy, borrowing from the visual arts, but the fit is so poor.  Can any writer describe (beautifully!) the curve of that bay leaf?  Fundamentally: open a book with your favorite page of beautiful writing (calligrammes excepted) and set it next to your most reviled page of ugly writing.  Print out something from Wuthering Expectations, perhaps.  Step back several feet.  The additional mediation required by literature changes too much.  Ruskin provides just a clue.

I would hate to see “beautiful” go the way of “lyrical,” which now, as a description of prose, means little more than “uses adjectives.”  I don’t know how to use the word.  I should learn.

Advice and guidance much appreciated.  Anything:  aesthetic manifestos, critical dissections, single sentences as piercingly lovely as the last umber ray of the autumn sun reflected from a still turquoise pool into, um, the crystalline eyes of a, hmm, a tourmaline, let’s see, fritillary.

* Letter to Louise Colet, 1853, as found in Jonathan Raban’s recent New York Review of Books piece (p. 27) on Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary.  Raban does not otherwise specify the date of the letter, and I can’t find the passage in the Penguin Classics Selected Letters of Flaubert (1997).

Great God! But for one single instant show thyself! - or, the Sub-Sub-Librarian's path to Heaven

Herman Melville was a deep reader of Sir Thomas Browne,* author of Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus (both 1658).  In the former, what first appears to be little more than a catalogue of historical burial customs slowly rotates into an ironic Ecclesiastean meditation on the meaning of death and the purpose of life.  The longer, more mysterious, The Garden of Cyrus gathers together every scrap of knowledge related to the number five that Browne’s disorientingly vast learning can provide.  What can it all mean?  Browne, playfully, or frustratingly, refuses to say.  It means many things to many people.  It means everything.  Nothing.

Browne’s prose is a magnificently supple instrument, an artistic achievement independent of subject, and Melville’s own prose owes a debt to Browne and many other 17th century writers.  But Melville learned something else from Browne.  Take any subject – any subject at all – and the imaginative writer can pull and twist and embellish it into something meaningful, or something that appears to be meaningful.  Whales, or the sea, or whiteness.  Any one is enough to get somewhere.  Now, combine them, intertwine them.  Make the whale white.  Anything you want to find can be found therein.

It’s all a trick, a writerly trick (sorry, technique).  Most literary art does something similar – a symbolic structure is created in the hope that some new meaning arises.  Few books are as explicit about the technique as Moby-Dick, where an entire alternate symbolic system, “a complete theory of the heavens and earth,” is directly tattooed on one of the characters.  Queequeg’s tattoos are “a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them” (Chapter 110).  Little wonder, then, if I have trouble reading Melville’s own mysteries, and I suspect that “himself” is not just Queequeg but Melville.

“Great God! But for one single instant show thyself!” Starbuck cries near the end of the book, echoing any number of characters in Clarel.  But He does not, or, worse, He does and is unrecognized.  Melville’s own search for God included a massive amount of reading, an accumulation of masses of information.  The right book, the right combination of books – could they somehow reveal something?  What?  Some people seem to read books, and even write about them, as some form of time-killing, an alternative to television or crossword puzzles.  Not me.  But then, why?  What am I looking for?

At the end of Moby-Dick, in one of the craziest of crazy moments, the sinking whale ship snags the “sky-hawk” that has been harassing Ahab and drags it into the sea:

And so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. (Ch. 135)

Moby-Dick is surprisingly well-stocked with archangels, but this one, on the next-to-last page, reminds me of those on back on page 3, the ones who were going to be driven from heaven against the coming of the saintly Sub-Sub-Librarian.  So that’s one down, it seems.  You’re almost there, you grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub.  Almost there.

* Please see here for an entire blog centered on Sir Thomas Browne.   Please allow that blog to lead you to W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995):

And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness.  What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world.  (p. 19)