Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Southern France

by Gustaf Sobin

Interpreting vestige with the eloquence of a poet and the knowledge of a field archaeologist, Gustaf Sobin explores his elected the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc. Drawing on prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, the twenty-six essays in this book focus on a particular place or artifact for the relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival curiosities for Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation on existence Artifacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons.

As much travel writing as meditative discourse, Luminous Debris is enhanced by a prose that tracks, questions, and reflects on the materials invoked. Sobin engages the reader with precise descriptions of those very materials and the messages to be gleaned from their examination, be they existential, ethical, or political.

An American expatriate living in Provence for the past thirty-five years, Gustaf Sobin shares his enthusiasm for his adopted landscape and for a vertical interpretation of its strata. In Luminous Debris he creates meaning out of matter and celebrates instances of reality, past and present.

Genres: Poetry, History, Nonfiction, Archaeology, France, Essays

250 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their “delectable valleys” and “fanciful curves” and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global moment, Sobin reads the prehistoric record like a species of postmodern poem, alive to the absences, elisions, fragments, and traces that restore our earliest ancestors from silence to the fragile contours of memory. Who but a poet like Sobin could see Stone Age arrowheads as “hyphens” connecting predator and prey, or an ancient quarry as the “inverted grammar” of a missing city? His prose turns Ionian pottery motifs into “the calligraphy of Logos” and place names into “breath shreds … endowed with all the material attributes of objects.” If Sobin occasionally makes prehistory sound like a giant example of slow poetry, rearguard and hectoring and nostalgic for a lost authenticity, he also recovers from the dull-as-dirt discourse of professional archaeology an “imminently semiotic” précis of our own condition here at the bleeding edge of human history.

[Jeanne Julian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. The portraits of the ancient past, revealed in archaeological finds, was fascinating(I'm not up on my prehistoric eras, but I could still follow his lead). The linkages the author develops between their lost worlds and ours made our ancestors seem not quite so foreign--one of the objectives of the book being "the search for antecedents." How remarkable the prosthetic ear, made from a shell, attached by surgery to a skull in Neolithic (3rd millenium B.C.E.)! My favorite chapter was the last one, on Roman aqueducts, perhaps because the "evidence" is more conspicuous and so clearly parallels contemporary issues with water and "rights" and the public good. Also, maybe the author wasn't jumping to his own rapturous conclusions about these "vestiges": I was often stymied and a little aggravated when the author would say (or imply) "we can only conclude...." I would think, "That's the ONLY possibility?" Was he omitting other information--with which other experts but not casual readers like me might be familiar--that grounded his assumptions about the nature of the ancient cultures? Or else, was he overlooking some other possibilities that could arise? It seemed to me there were a lot of alternatives for, for instance, the significance of or motivation for certain burial practices he described. Anyway, I did finish the book, learned from it, and admired Sobin's lyrical intelligence despite some frustrations with it.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

--In which the outermost ripple is contingent on the first ripple--

In this magnificent prose collection, the poet Gustaf Sobin situates himself "in regard to our own evolving," primarily in the French regions of Provence and Languedoc and in the human regions of vision, language, self-representation, and plain subsistence. His attention to language material is as keen as his knowledge of historical and archeological material--the Bronze Age earring is as dear as the syllable. From soil vestige and from the debris of human existence, with an eye to erosion and with terrific, metaphorical precision, Sobin makes this luminous revelation.

Read it, whoever you are, whatever you like. It will arrest you.