Where London Stood: Humour and the Elusiveness of the Past

A completely different approach to the subject of the ruined contemporary city. Although the cases here rely on the same symbolic vocabulary, they do so for a different effect - avoiding the melancholy of the expected approaches and instead parodying the traditions of archaeological writing.

David Macaulay's "Motel Of Mysteries" presents us with a humorous account of an archaeological excavation of a twentieth Century motel, in which everything is meticulously excavated, recorded ... and misinterpreted. The "vast funerary" complex unearthed by Howard Carson contains wonders such as the "Great Altar" (Television), a statue of the deity WATT (bedside lamp) and the Internal Component Enclosure (or Ice box). Conveniently, it also includes some nice depictions of ruins from this lost culture, such as a buried St. Louis Gateway Arch to the left of this text.

A second example comes from earlier in the twentieth Century:

…These ruins are now all that is left of the once famous Cockni cathedral of St. Paul's. It was a superb day in early autumn when we halted to survey the scene, and my talented friend, Dr. Tite Opkins, took up his post on one of the shattered arches, in order to make a sketch of the ruins. Another colleague, Mr. Mustard Snip, proceeded to make some solar prints of the immediate neighbourhood, which is one much haunted by bitterns.
Prof. Blyde Muddersnook, P.O.Z.A.S. (1911) "When the Zealander Comes," in Strand Magazine, September 1911.

This passage, and indeed the whole account of the archaeological expedition to Lun-Dun, is a reference to a quotation from Lord Macaulay:

And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Thomas Babington Macaulay Essay, On Ranck's "History of the Popes" 1840.

(See The Zealander).

One thing that both examples have in common is the emphasis they place on the difficulties in getting back to the original meaning of objects from the past, the elusiveness of the past. This is a common conceit in more serious passages - e.g. in The White Mountains (see Twentieth Century Science Fiction for discussion of Christopher's book).

Posted at Nov 11/2005 02:25AM:
Ray Girvan: Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 short story Mellonta Tauta, although it doesn't feature a ruined city in detail, has a similar comic tone. A balloonist traveller in the year 2848 expounds his misunderstandings about the ancient Amriccans, on the basis of the few artefacts (particularly the cornerstone of a monument to George Washington) found at the site of Manhattan.