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The Archaeology of Ruin-Time

Chapter 7 addresses the peculiar archaeology of the blitzed landscape, when air raids made new ruins out of modern-day infrastructure, even while revealing older ones from London’s Roman past. Theorists have often conceived of the temporality of ruins as a dialectic between pastness and futurity, ending and return, and these tensions pose representational challenges in the wartime present, when ruins from different eras populated the visual landscape. This chapter argues that wartime works responded to this environment by engaging in their own acts of imaginative archaeology, excavating past ruins to find continuity with those of the dislocated present. It reads a wide array of visual and literary texts: from the romantic paintings of the Recording Britain scheme to portraits of bomb damage made by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, and from the paratactic poetry of H.D. to the hallucinatory short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.