Memoirs for the earth: Jacquetta Hawkes's literary experiments in deep time

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 87-106

  Lorimer, Hayden ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Body; Earth; Geology; Landscape; Memoir; Time

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; CULTURAL LANDSCAPE; GEOLOGY; LITERATURE REVIEW; PSYCHOLOGY;

EID: 84855841594     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474011432377     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. J. Hawkes, A Land; (London, Cresset Press, 1951).
2. Born 5 August 1910, Jessie Jacquetta Hawkes was the daughter of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, a Nobel prize-winning scientist.
3. In 1933, she married Christopher Hawkes, then Assistant Keeper at the British Museum. Her second marriage in 1953 was to playwright J.B. Priestley. She died 18th March 1996.
4. Cover description from re-print edition: J. Hawkes, A Land (Pelican Books, London, 1959).
5. Between its original publication and appearance in the popular science Pelican series (an imprint of Penguin Books) A Land was re-printed by the Readers' Union in 1953.
6. Evidence of any greater engagement between the two writers is slim. Stamp included Hawkes's co-authored volume Prehistoric Britain in his bibliography, though no specific reference was made to it in the text. Hawkes was more direct, fishing out of Structure and Scenery a single quotation: 'We are fortunately living in one of the quiet periods of the earth's history'.
7. Diplomatic and acidic, she attributed the line to a 'well known geographer', then judged Stamp's treatment of sub-surface processes complacent and lacking for dramatic effect: '[his] nonchalance suggests that if St Paul's were suddenly raised ten thousand feet in the air we could all go tobogganing down the Strand'.
8. Hawkes, A Land, p. 38.
9. Generally regarded by publishers as a staple subject category, with reliable sales return, geological literature has, of late, enjoyed a creative resurgence. Re-branded as earth writing, the works of popular science writers promise to tell the life story of the planet and to answer the fundamental questions of our existence.
10. For example, see: B. Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (London, Doubleday, 2004)
11. R. Fortey, The Earth: An Intimate History (London, Harper Perennial, 2005)
12. J. Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth's Deep History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010).
13. The localization of earth writing to the British scene has continued in works such as
14. R. Fortey, The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past (London, Bodley Head, 2010)
15. I. Vince, The Lie of the Land; An Under-the-Field Guide to the British Isles (London, Boxtree Books, 2010).
16. The narrative-driven model is applied at a continental scale to North America
17. in J. McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York, Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 1981).
18. Earth writing and archaeology are once again brought into recent correspondence
19. in F. Pryor, The Making of the British Landscape: How we Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today (London, Penguin, 2011).
20. Numerous seminal examples of rock and stone work in words might be suggested; a quartet is flagged here. All too aware of how the very idea of primordial ancientness of age undermined a cornerstone of his faith, Hugh Miller, Ross-shire stonemason, celebrated autodidact and newspaper editor, gave poised though understated expression to geological wonderment in his personal celebration of the science, The Old Red Sandstone.
21. Though evidently a stylist of stone, Miller sounds a note of caution against over elaboration: 'no man who enters the geological field in quest of the wonderful need pass from the true to fictitious'. A different literary approach is taken by Kenneth White, whose self-styled project of geo-poetics seeks to animate the stories of stones.
22. White is a writer whose words ensure that readers attend closely to the manner of his description. He finds a kindred spirit in Tim Robinson who, having turned over what seems like every stone on the Aran Islands, shows a love for all things lithic and local. Nan Shepherd's mineral meditations on the granite expanse of the Cairngorms, re-configures plateau geography into one, single living mountain mass.
23. H. Miller, The Old Red Sandstone: or, New Walks in an Old Field (Edinburgh, John Johnstone, 1841)
24. K. White, On Scottish Ground (Edinburgh, Polygon, 1988)
25. T. Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1986)
26. Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1995)
27. N. Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1977).
28. Comparable kinds of question are given critical consideration in D. Matless, 'Nature Voices', Journal of Historical Geography 35(2) (2009), pp. 178-88.
29. Though for effective examples see: B. Braun, 'Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada' Ecumene, 7(1) (2000) pp. 7-46
30. D. Massey, For Space (London, Sage, 2004).
31. Excerpt from 'Man in Time'.
32. J. Hawkes, Symbols and Speculations (London, Cresset Press, 1949), p. 43.
33. 'We were a family extraordinarily reserved among ourselves, as silent as trees in our emotional lives, and that may be the reason why I remember the occasion so very clearly. My father, who hated bicycling, and always rode, if he could be induced to mount at all, in a painfully stiff and angular manner, suddenly looked down at me and said, "My dear, how bright your eyes are. They really are dancing."'
34. Hawkes, A Land, p. 123.
35. Hawkes, A Land, p. 43.
36. Hawkes, A Land, p. 43.
37. Hawkes, A Land, p. 9.
38. J.J. Hawkes, 'Exhibition Techniques: the South Bank Exhibition at the Festival of Britain', Museum V (2) (1952) p. 105.
39. Site plans, diagrams and illustrative photographs appear in I. Cox, The South Bank Exhibition: A Guide to the Story it Tells (London, H.M. Stationary Office, 1951).
40. Memories of the project were first recollected on its 25th anniversary in M. Banham and B. Hillier (eds), A Tonic for the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1976).
41. The 60th anniversary year has produced a series of new reminiscences, for example
42. see I. Sinclair, 'The Festival of Britain, 60 years on' The Guardian, 23 April 2011.
43. New historical commentaries have also appeared, B. Turner, Beacon for Change: How the 1951 Festival of Britain Shaped the Modern Age (London, Aurum, 2011)
44. B. Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003).
45. She continued her rationale for design:The question of coherent narrative must be of key importance to our subject. These pavilions were arranged to tell a story, and for this purpose the public were led through them along a fixed circuit, an arrangement which appeared successfully to rouse interest and hold attention.
46. Hawkes, Exhibition Techniques, p. 105.
47. J.J. Hawkes, 'The Beginning of History: A Film', Antiquity (1948), pp. 78-82.
48. Hawkes, 'The Beginning of History: A Film', Antiquity (1948), p. 81.
49. Details of work behind the scenes are also explained in Hawkes, The Beginning of Film (1948).
50. For a critical retrospective, see: C. Finn, (2000) 'Ways of telling: Jacquetta Hawkes as film-maker', Antiquity 74, pp. 127-30.
51. Hawkes, 1948, p. 82.
52. R. O'Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 17.
53. D. Matless, 'Properties of ancient landscape: the present prehistoric in 20th-century Breckland', Journal of Historical Geography 4(1) (2008), pp. 68-93.
54. A. Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London, Thames and Hudson, 2010).
55. See also, K. Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927-1955 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007)
56. C. Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain (Farnham, Ashgate, 2009).
57. The figure of the White Goddess was commonly invoked in Hawkes's descriptions of the cultural life of early British peoples, lending weight to Robert Graves's theory of the existence of ancient matriarchal world civilizations. During the 1950s, Graves's ideas were accepted as orthodoxy among the archaeological community. Today, his revisionist historical formulation of social organization is regarded as largely imaginary, the product of complex personal passions and desires.
58. R. Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1948).
59. J. Hawkes and C. Hawkes, Prehistoric Britain (London, Pelican 1943; republished London, Chatto and Windus 1947), p. v.
60. J. Hawkes and C. Hawkes, Prehistoric Britain (London, Pelican 1943; republished London, Chatto and Windus 1947), p. vi.
61. Hawkes, A Land, p. 9.
62. Hawkes, A Land, pp. 38-39.
63. Hawkes, A Land, p. 61.
64. Hawkes, A Land, p. 61.
65. Hawkes, A Land, p. 84.
66. J.W. Dunne, An Experiment in Time (London, Faber & Faber, 1927).
67. J. Hawkes, Early Britain (London, Collins, 1945).
68. At the time Turner and Hawkes were engaged in an extra-marital affair.
69. However, it is noteworthy that the text's most recent reprint, dating from 2001, appeared in a 'Classics in Consciousness' book series.
70. R. Graves and A. Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-39 (London, Faber & Faber, 1941).
71. E. Gagen and D. Linehan, 'From soul to psyche: historical geographies of psychology and space', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, pp. 791-97
72. N. Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998).
73. V. Stewart, 'J.W. Dunne and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s', Literature and History, 17 (2) (2008), pp. 62-82.
74. J.W.N. Sullivan, 'Dreaming of the Future', Times Literary Supplement, 29 September 1927, p. 659.
75. W. Lewis, Time and Western Man (London, 1927).
76. The other works of psychology that had significant influence on Priestley were those of
77. E.A. Abbott and P.D. Ouspensky. Flatland (London, Seeley, 1884)
78. Abbott's satirical novel postulates that human experience of the world may have more dimensions than we are ordinarily able to discern. Should we be able to perceive this more complex topology then its multiple dimensions would appear to us as movements in time.
79. In New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art (London, Routledge, 1931; translated, R.R. Merton)
80. Ouspensky offers the theory that time exists around a circle so that all happenings of a person's life are, theoretically, repeatable. The possibility raised by this idea is that we continually relive our lives.
81. A theoretical principle that continues to exercise and excite theoretical debate in contemporary geography, for a recent critical review
82. see, R. A. Dodgshon, 'In what way is the world really flat: debates over geographies of the moment', Environment and Planning: D Society and Space, 26(2) (2008), pp. 300-14.
83. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, p. 11.
84. D. Collins, Time and the Priestleys: The Story of a Friendship (London, Sutton Publishing, 1994).
85. The online version of Christine Finn's unpublished biography of Jacquetta Hawkes is available at: (20 November 2011).
86. See also, C. Finn, 'A rare bird', Archaeology: A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America 54(1).
87. Hawkes, A Land, p. 40.
88. O'Conner, The Earth on Show, p. 453.
89. Hawkes, A land, p. 25.
90. The artistic possibilities of exploring relations between living tissue and mineral remains are displayed
91. in I. Halperin, Physical Geology: A Field Guide to Body Mineralogy and Other New Landmass (Berlin, Berliner Madizinhistoriches Museum der Charite, 2010).
92. It is noteworthy that comparable geological titles appearing under the Pelican imprint at the same time as A Land observed an altogether more conventional narrative structure, directing readers' attentions according to the regional scenery of Britain.
93. See, for example, A.E. Trueman, Geology and Scenery in England and Wales (London, Pelican, 1949 [first published 1938]).
94. J. Hawkes, 'Art in the Crystalline Society', The Penguin New Writing, 1949, pp. 102-114, 104.
95. The further popularization of psy-knowledge led to titles such as Dreams and Nightmares, by psychopathologist J.A. Hadfield (London, Pelican, 1956) that also appeared in the same popular science paperback series as A Land. Considered together, the pairing reflects the troubled temper but enquiring nature of the times.
96. It is important to acknowledge how Hawkes's narrative treatment of later historical episodes in Britain's long island story (i.e. the mechanization of traditional craft skills, and the increasing urbanization of life) can be subject to comparable levels of cultural interpretation, though these lie outside the province of this particular article.
97. Matless, p. 90.
98. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London, Harper Perennial, 2008 [first published 1962]).
99. Reality as a stage set: Travis Elborough talks to J.G. Ballard', pp. 2-7, in Ballard, The Drowned World, (2008).
100. J.G. Ballard, 'Time, memory and inner space', pp. 10-13, in The Drowned World, 2008. (Originally published in The Woman Journalist, 1963).
101. Ballard, The Drowned World, p. 43.
102. Narrative comparisons can be drawn with the fantasy novel by
103. W.S. Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded (New York, Grove Press, 1962)
104. Which posits the idea that deep beneath the earth there exists a vast mineral consciousness thinking in slow formations of crystal. In works such as 'On a raised beach' and 'Briggflats', British Modernist poets Hugh MacDiarmid and Basil Bunting were experimenting similarly with an expressive language for the sense of deep time exposed in geological rock formations.
105. B. Bunting, Briggflats (Northumberland, Bloodaxe, 2010 [first published 1966])
106. H. MacDiarmid, Collected Poems (Edinburgh, Canongate, 1971).
107. R. Jefferies, After London: Or, Wild England (London, Cassell, 1885).
108. For this information, I am indebted to Doreen Massey who considers Jefferies' position as a narrator of England's geological landscape
109. in D. Massey, 'Landscape/space/politics: an essay', catalogue for P. Keillor, Robinson in Ruins, DVD (London, BFI, 2011)
110. In Will Self's novel The Book of Dave, a tale of London's catastrophic flooding is told from the future and the perspective of a tiny, primitive community of survivors.
111. W. Self, The Book of Dave (London, Viking, 2006).
112. O'Conner, The Earth on Show, p. 452.
113. J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, Duke University Press, 2010)
114. N. Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London, Sage, 2011)
115. T. Morton, Ecology without nature (Boston: MA, Harvard University Press, 2009)
116. E. Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004)
117. M. DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Non-linear History (London, Zone Books, 2000).
118. J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 117.
119. Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London, Continuum, 2008).
120. J. Hawkes, A Land (London, Collins, 2012).