These are the menhir, or standing stones, at Monteneuf in Brittany, a megalithic site comprising some 420 carefully-arranged blocks. I had the chance to visit this place several years ago and remain enchanted by those stones. They are such an imposing part of the built environment, of a landscape infused with human work, yet their presence seems anomalous because their construction is so distant. They produce a powerful effect of meaning -- that is, they elicit the feeling that they must mean something, that they must have something to say. Why else would they have stood there for so long? Or, how could they have remained in place all those years without learning a thing or two to pass on to future generations.
Interestingly enough, they haven't actually stood all that time. Most of the stones were toppled in the middle ages and the full extent of the site wasn't known until twenty-five years ago, when a forest fire exposed stones that had been buried beneath brush, moss, and earth. During archaeological excavations, forty or so stones were re-erected.
I visited Monteneuf with a former professor of mine, Anne Harris, who is a medieval art historian. She is particularly interested in when and why the stones were brought down and has written about the site on her blog, Medieval Meets World:
"Paleo-botany revealed that the stones had been put down around the year 1000 - that's the medieval chapter I'd love to uncover. Putting down megaliths is difficult (as difficult?) work - a tremendous effort, it seems in response to a tremendous force or pull of the stones. There may be nothing more than the paleo-botany to tell the tale (though there are plenty of decrees in England and France from the period banning gathering at stones and trees), but I would like to keep going with it, see where it takes me. I bought the archaeological report right before the office closed and felt lucky."
If the stones themselves won't or can't speak, we can turn elsewhere: archaeology, paleo-botany, medieval law, and so forth. The history that could be written would be fascinating, no doubt. But I want to focus on today is that sense of fascination itself. It is, I think, rooted in the effect of meaning I mentioned above: we cannot shake the sensation that these stones have something to say. The fact that they were raised in some distant past, knocked down maybe a thousand years ago, and partially restored recently suggests that they have been able to produce this feeling throughout their history: it was powerful enough to motivate people to do the very difficult work of carving them out, transporting them, and raising them up; it was intimidating enough for people to tear them down, and it remains fascinating enough for archaeologists to dig them up and for tourists to visit them, take pictures, and write about them years later.
What makes this fascination work, I think, what has captured my attention, is a kind of historical break. These stones are ostensibly from a past so distant and remote as to be lost entirely. The menhir testify that some people, at some time -- probably over a good length of time -- thought it was worthwhile to make this big, enigmatic arrangement of giant rocks. It must have had meaning to them, of course, but it is the very loss of this meaning, the fact that we can never know why exactly anybody would bother to do this, that captivates us. The stones themselves persist, commemorating their own loss of meaning, which, in itself, opens space for creating new meanings.
I don't mean to suggest that we can't know anything about the purpose or function of these megalithic arrangements. Archaeology, geology, paleo-botany, and a host of other fields all prove otherwise. I do, however, believe that such studies cannot exhaust the menhir's capacity to enrapture. Even if we knew exactly when and how they were built, how they functioned as spaces in the societies that built them, and what people did at them, they would continue to fascinate because that past seems so utterly broken off from our own.
Their creators and the world they lived in have died, not just an ordinary death, but a historical death, too. In this sense, the menhir are like graveyards or ruined tombs -- not just of human remains, which some of them are (dolmen, or neolithic tombs, are part of the site) -- but of history as a storehouse of knowledge. Perhaps, if I may be allowed to wildly speculate on something I don't actually know about (honesty is a good policy), it was precisely as a graveyard that the stones frightened their medieval neighbors, who saw in them a place threatening to reanimate the pagan past, to bring it back from beyond the grave.
Death, in this case, does not put an end to knowledge; instead, it calls it forth. I discussed Abdelfattah Kilito's book The Author and His Doubles[1] in my first post and I want to return to it briefly again, partially because I like it so much, but also because Kilito shows how the break created by death, literal and historical, becomes productive in Islam. The death of the Prophet Mohamed brings an end to a brief period of direct divine intervention in human affairs, epitomized by the revelation of the Qur’ān. As Kilito writes, "no intermediary was left, and Heaven fell silent once and for all. . . . A breach had opened never to be closed, and struggles for power began that were never to end" (35-6). No human intermediary, that is; the Qur’ān itself remained, of course, and continued to speak divine revelation, as the Prophet himself would have before. As new conflicts emerge or new questions arise, the solution is to be found in this holy text. Yet their is a problem here, too. Kilito writes, "the Divine Book is not always easy to understand: it contains ambiguities", "apparently conflicting assertions", and "eschatological references of a controversial nature" all of which the Prophet might have clarified, if he were still present (36).
Or perhaps he did actually clarify them in his lifetime. He had spoken and adjudicated on many subjects throughout his lifetime; "Nothing could be simpler," Kilito writes, "than to rely upon his words to resolve the difficulties of the Qur’ān and confront the problems that arose in his community after his death" (36). Scholars therefore began to collect oral recollections of the Prophet's words and deeds, now known as Hadith, that might illuminate their understanding of the Qur’ān. This became a massive undertaking that spanned a rapidly-growing empire and occupied many centuries' work. The scale of the task was only further complicated by the problem of false Hadiths, which required the development of a whole theory of transmission and jurisprudence to differentiate between the genuine and the impostors. As a result, the Mohamed's death became an occasion for scholarship and an impetus for the development of entire sciences.
Algerian writer Assia Dejbar's novel Le blanc de l'Algérie[2] takes up the productivity of death in another, more ambiguous context. The book is a kind of anti-eulogy to the many Algerian authors whose lives were cut short by disease, war, or assassination throughout the twentieth century. I say anti-eulogy because the narrator seeks to remember her dead compatriots as though they were still present. Her impulse is to make memories haunt the present rather than consign them to the past through a ritualized commemoration. Evoking the white linen of burial clothes, the narrator exclaims to the dead, "Oh, mes amis, pas le blanc de l'oubli, je vous en prie, préservez-moi!" [Oh, my friends, not the white of forgetfulness, please, spare me that!] (56).[3] The risk is not simply that, once buried in the ground, they will be forgotten, but that they will be buried again a second time, beneath layers of religious ritual, of media commemoration, of political appropriation. Djebar's narrator pleads instead: "Je ne demande rien: seulement qu'ils nous hantent encore, qu'ils nous habitent" [I don't ask for anything: only that they continue to haunt us, that they live in us" (56).
Djebar tries to bring this haunting about through a careful recounting of her narrator's connection to each author and the circumstances of his or her death. In this way, her novel is sort of like a secularized Hadith. She pieces together details along with the authority on which she presents them: this or that friend who was present for the death, the funeral, or the burial. The aim, however, is not to imagine what life would be like had these people not died. That is, in a way, unthinkable, as tragic as their deaths may have been. For, again, death becomes productive in its own way. For had Camus, for example, not died, "eh bien, Camus l'Algérien aurait terminé son roman Le Premier Homme, et d'autres mystères, pour lui, pour nous, se seraient obscurcis..." [well, Camus the Algerian would have finished his novel The First Man and other mysteries, for him and for us, would have been obscured...] (111). The inevitably unfinished state of works left at death is not so much a missed opportunity in the past, but an invitation for thought in the future. Djebar's narrator exemplifies this as she gives a conference on this unfinished work of Camus amid her recollections of other writers lost.
Always lurking at the edge of Djebar's anti-eulogy, however, is the possibility of forgetting. She cites the journal of Mouloud Feraoun, an author and school administrator assassinated by the the French paramilitary Organisation de l'armée secrète during the political negotiations following the Algerian war of independence, where Feraoun pondered an end to the struggle that "permettra enfin à ceux qui seront encore là de se remettre à vivre, en commençant par oublier" [that will finally allow those who are still there to begin life again, starting by forgetting" (112). Would living on, in some sense, necessitate forgetting?
The very possibility of forgetting and the mechanism by which one could forget the requires more reflection. I would not say, for example, that we have forgotten the meaning of Monteneuf; rather, it is buried in earth and in time. This is not the same burial as that which Djebar is fighting, which is a kind of forgetting through memory. Yet even when something or someone is buried, more often than not the tomb remains.
It is not sure, however, that a tomb can always speak any more than a megalith. Sometimes even a grave that is visited regularly and whose history is known can be forgotten. A few days ago, I walked out to the Marinid tombs, which sit on a hilltop on the northwestern edge of Fes. The Marinids ruled Morocco from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries and built these tombs in the fourteenth century.
Although the structures themselves are modestly interesting in their own right, the place is mostly known today for its panoramic of Fez.
As such, it attracts fewer locals than it does visitors, who walk from the four-star hotel next door or are driven up the hill in rented four-by-four vehicles. Unlike anonymous stones rising up in the forest, these ruined tombs feel very much a part of Fes as they overlook the old city and its aged, red walls. The apparent disjunction of its location next to a fancy hotel is, in fact, rather characteristic of the city, where the old and new, the crumbling and renovated, and the informal and regulated everywhere stand side by side. The Marinids are just another piece of Fez's 1200-plus year old history.
What fascinates me about these standing stones is how they become everyday, banal. As tourists gather in front of the empty, crumbling mausoleum, they turn to gaze at a modern city whose ancient core is an integral part of its texture. As they point their cameras, they aim over and past the more modest, whitewashed stones of the Bab el-Guissa cemetery that occupies much of the hillside.
The gesture of turning one's back to the tomb to look out over the city is significant. Where menhir impose themselves, the Marinids have retreated into the background. They still attract our attention through an architectural accident. If putting their mausoleum on a hilltop kept it in view of the people, the direction of that gaze has been reversed. No one in the old city looks up at the tombs; instead, foreigners, who might well have been forbidden from setting foot near the mausoleum in its day, look down on the city, their backs to the grave.
In Fes itself, new kinds of stones are standing.
The white blocks that jut up out of this empty lot give the impression of a sparsely-populated graveyard. Instead, they are power and water hook-ups for new apartment buildings. The concrete foundations have already been laid, but are not visible behind the brush that has grown up around the perimeter of the site. If the standing stones of ruins, tombs, and megaliths mark the location where the past happened, perhaps where it can still be found, these blocks are signs pointing to the future. It is to these blocks, rather than the broken rocks on the hill, that Fes is oriented.
For Djebar, however, death points as much to the future as it does to the past: the dead "nous signifient avec une ineffable mélancolie que ce sera bientôt notre tour" [the dead notify us, with ineffable melancholy, that it will soon be our turn] (90-1). Such melancholy seems appropriate to the (literally) overlooked Marinid tombs and the modern buildings going up in the city below: perhaps they mean to say that, one day, those below will be like those on the hill.
But that's to make a jump from the effect of meaning to creating meaning itself. Ruins have been made to mean many different things across history.[4] There are particular conditions that make this slippage possible at all: apartment foundations can appear meaningful to me because they resemble graves, something else that produces an effect of meaning, either by imposing itself on the viewer or by withdrawing from notice. In other words, they produce an effect of meaning by resembling something else that produces an effect of meaning; a visual analogy that creates a relation between them, provided you look at things a certain way, at least for a moment. So, no, the city doesn't have to be melancholic; the ruins on its hillsides don't have to foretell its gloomy fate. There are points of view where, at specific instants, that phenomenon emerges.
In Fes itself, new kinds of stones are standing.
The white blocks that jut up out of this empty lot give the impression of a sparsely-populated graveyard. Instead, they are power and water hook-ups for new apartment buildings. The concrete foundations have already been laid, but are not visible behind the brush that has grown up around the perimeter of the site. If the standing stones of ruins, tombs, and megaliths mark the location where the past happened, perhaps where it can still be found, these blocks are signs pointing to the future. It is to these blocks, rather than the broken rocks on the hill, that Fes is oriented.
For Djebar, however, death points as much to the future as it does to the past: the dead "nous signifient avec une ineffable mélancolie que ce sera bientôt notre tour" [the dead notify us, with ineffable melancholy, that it will soon be our turn] (90-1). Such melancholy seems appropriate to the (literally) overlooked Marinid tombs and the modern buildings going up in the city below: perhaps they mean to say that, one day, those below will be like those on the hill.
But that's to make a jump from the effect of meaning to creating meaning itself. Ruins have been made to mean many different things across history.[4] There are particular conditions that make this slippage possible at all: apartment foundations can appear meaningful to me because they resemble graves, something else that produces an effect of meaning, either by imposing itself on the viewer or by withdrawing from notice. In other words, they produce an effect of meaning by resembling something else that produces an effect of meaning; a visual analogy that creates a relation between them, provided you look at things a certain way, at least for a moment. So, no, the city doesn't have to be melancholic; the ruins on its hillsides don't have to foretell its gloomy fate. There are points of view where, at specific instants, that phenomenon emerges.
Something lays beneath, making this all possible, that I have only addressed indirectly to this point: these objects are material links to the past and actually do have quite a lot to say as material stuff. It is the persistence (and transformation) of the material itself that makes the effect of meaning possible, but the material itself speaks in its own way. Speech is a faulty metaphor here, because it constantly drags us back toward "meaning". (If this weren't a blog, I might give myself a headache for a week trying to sort out how to not make a mess of this distinction. For now, we'll keep things a little loose.)
What I'm trying to get it as importance of the stuff itself and how we can apprehend it. This is the business of archaeology (and many other fields, of course), which can seek understanding through the material conditions of stuff alone. To get there, however, we must ask the right questions: before wondering what menhir or gravestones meant to their builders or to us today, we must be attentive to to what they are in their materiality. What kind of stone or brick? Where is it from? What is it composed of? Is it worked and, if so, how? Where is it relative to other objects at the site, both similar and different? If it had to be dug up, what was above, below, and around it? How was it uncovered? And so on.
Whether such thick description can be done without slipping into some kind of analysis or exegesis is an open question. There is always some kind of selection or choice: we go to this place and not that, we ask some questions and not others. We work via analogy: this place is like that, in this way or another. We always bring something to a tomb; if it is only ourselves, our presence, that is already quite a lot. And I don't think we should want to do away with that: it's in the encounter itself that fascination begins.
What I'm trying to get it as importance of the stuff itself and how we can apprehend it. This is the business of archaeology (and many other fields, of course), which can seek understanding through the material conditions of stuff alone. To get there, however, we must ask the right questions: before wondering what menhir or gravestones meant to their builders or to us today, we must be attentive to to what they are in their materiality. What kind of stone or brick? Where is it from? What is it composed of? Is it worked and, if so, how? Where is it relative to other objects at the site, both similar and different? If it had to be dug up, what was above, below, and around it? How was it uncovered? And so on.
Whether such thick description can be done without slipping into some kind of analysis or exegesis is an open question. There is always some kind of selection or choice: we go to this place and not that, we ask some questions and not others. We work via analogy: this place is like that, in this way or another. We always bring something to a tomb; if it is only ourselves, our presence, that is already quite a lot. And I don't think we should want to do away with that: it's in the encounter itself that fascination begins.
[1] Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture. 1985. Trans. Michael Cooperson. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001.
[2] Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.
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