Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory

8. Mould, Rubble, and the Validation of the Fragment in the Discourse of the Past

8 Mould, Rubble, and the Validation of the Fragment in the Discourse of the Past Stephen Bann This chapter is going to be, initially at any rate, a tale of two stones. The first is a stone that looks like nothing in particular, which would hardly produce any reaction in you at all, if you saw it on a country road, unless you just happened to trip over it. All of you will know of the remarkable feat of engineering which, completed in the recent past, has succeeded in depriving Great Britain of its status as an island. I refer of course to the Channel Tunnel. Imagine the situation down there under the Channel when the two vast subterranean holes, one commenced from the French side and the other from a valley beneath the Downs, behind Folkestone, edged ever more closely toward each other through the limestone rock, until finally there was just a thin membrane separating the two workings: on one side, you could say, there was France, and on the other side, England. This screen of rock, facing like the god Janus in two directions, for a brief time epitomized the radical heterogeneity of two cultural systems brought into abrupt collision. It was to keep this status only for that instant, but as it happened, the official photographer of the Tunnel project gathered up the fragments as soon as the breakthrough had taken place. This is one of them (see Figure 8.1). Turning it over, we can still imagine one face as being England, the other France. My purpose here is to discuss the particular discursive regimes to which this and a few other such objects and images belong. In this particular case, I shall have no hesitation in suggesting that it belongs to the discursive and indeed epistemological regime known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as 133 “curiosity,” a regime whose governing principles have been brilliantly described in the writings of Krzysztof Pomian and rehearsed more recently in my own, more particularized study of the Cabinet of John Bargrave, Under the Sign: John Bargrave As Collector, Traveler, and Witness.1 The Anglo-French Janus Stone, if so we can call it, fits within the parameters of that practice of collecting that was relentlessly directed toward the singular object. This was indeed the primary reason the scientific spirits of the age, such as Bacon and Descartes, so strongly attacked curiosity: in attaching itself to the special and singular case, it militated 134 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s Figure 8.1 “Janus Stone,” photo by Stephen Bann. against the inductive approach, which drew logical conclusions from the observation of whole classes of objects. In the case of this stone, an opposite mechanism is put into operation. Out of the almost indefinitely large number of pieces of rubble that remained from that large partition, this particular one has been chosen not for its representative or generalizing properties but because I choose to see it as a symbol. I choose to store it in the top drawer of my dressing table just as John Bargrave chose to store in his Cabinet of Curiosities, “several pieces of cinders, pummystone, and ashes of the Mount Vesuvius, near Naples.”2 I should add that Bargrave chose to memorialize Mount Vesuvius in this way for a precise reason: Mount Vesuvius was, on each of the four journeys he undertook throughout Europe in the 1640s and 1650s, the “poynt of my reflection,” in other words, the precise spot at which he “[faced] about” to commence his return journey. Just as the twin signatures of England and France are inscribed on my odd little stone, so the cinder from Vesuvius is a marker for a journey , an indication that it has been undertaken and completed successfully. What needs to be done to consolidate the status of my object, which I am endowing with a mild level of apotheosis by talking about? Bargrave’s “cinders, pummystone, and ashes”are lying around in his cabinets. For want of clear labeling , I at any rate cannot tell one from another. Bargrave did, however, perform upon certain of the objects he bought or filched in Rome a secondary process of symbolization. A chip of an obelisk lying in a Roman circus, or a piece of Roman glass known as paste antiche, was cut and polished to form...