by Maria O’Connell “The Linear B tablets have a stark beauty. Some have smooth, charcoal-gray surfaces resembling slate, others are reddish brown, still others are bright orange. (The color depends on the level of oxygen to which they were exposed when the palace burned down)…On the backs of the tablets…scribes left traces of themselves in the…
Author: Maria O'Connell
The Futility of All Ambition: Humanity, Language, and the Affront of Ruined Archives
H.G. Wells has an entire ruined museum complex in his novel, The Time Machine (1895). The “Palace of Green Porcelain” contains glass cabinets and numerous specimens, all of which, including the machinery and animal skeletons on display, interest the narrator because he wants to learn about the development of the world in the future. However,…
Ruins and Memory: Cormac McCarthy’s Archaeological Imagination
Cormac McCarthy is a writer whose novels are haunted by ruins, whether the remains of an old inn in his first novel, or the recent ruins of a destroyed world in his last. His characters find petroglyphs, mummies, and ruined villages strewn along their path. He never gives any kind of exact detail about their…