Gidal 2015
Gidal, Eric. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Print.
12: I deploy the hybrid taxonomy of the Ossianic unconformity as a figurative conceit to explore how a marginalized and discredited literature provides a compelling language to register and reflect upon the social and spatial disruptions of industrial modernity and the stratigraphic consciousness of geological deep time. 14: As the land itself becomes perceived less as a place and more as a spatial and temporal event, the book comes into its own as the authentic Ossianic object – a memorial record of a vanishing moment within the landscape of industrial modernity and a product of the urbanized communicative networks facilitating the shaping of that new terrain. 15: These geological forms, both past and present, help us to perceive the environmental significance of textual irregularities in the poems of Ossian through a kind of biblio-stratigraphy. As geological unconformities reveal periods of dislocation and erosion in the discontinuous strata of sedimentation, textual unconformities reveal periods of economic displacement and environmental transformation in the irregular divisions assembled on the surface of the page. 161: The mariner who gazes across to the tombs of ancient warriors, when standing on board an iron steamer, gains new status as a reckoning with a future state, an insertion of possibilities within the elegiac mechanisms of Ossianic verse, and a dialogue between stratigraphic inscriptions and the engines of the industrial age. 179-180: The mariners who gaze upon the warrior’s tombs now ride aboard an iron vessel. The books they hold in their hands, interchangeable and reproducible products of steam-powered knowledge, have become the new standards of authenticity to measure the land upon which they gaze. And the rocks that they encounter have been sliced and quarried, revealing sedimentary evidence of shifting continents and rising and receding oceans over eons of Earth’s vast history as well as the far more recent intrusions of industrial terraforming and economic exploitation. 181: …I have sought to underscore the critical capacity these reflexive and mediating laments acquired over the course of the nineteenth century. The long reception history of these poems, which were themselves contorted records of a much longer history of reception and transmission, is as integral to their meaning as the Gaelic legends and ballads they reshaped. The uniquely hybrid quality of these volumes and their layered sediments of translation and divergence reveal variations and irregularities born of a momentous acceleration in environmental history. The textual and rhetorical unconformities with which we have been occupied bear signatures of violent contests of displacement and extraction in an industrializing archipelago, an “incremental and accretive” unfolding of what Rob Nixon has termed the “slow violence” of environmental degradation. 182-3: Lined up on a bookshelf, these works form a kind of biblio-stratigraphy of textual sediments and paratextual intrusions. Tracing the signatures of social and spatial changes that have produced them allows us to perceive the dynamic and protean nature of environmental and social conditions over wide scales of time and to recognize in the books themselves textual manifestations of the proleptic self-eulogy that Macpherson made a rhetorical master trope of his Ossianic poems.
