Abstract
In Simon Armitage’s long poem ‘Killing Time’ (1999), a range of social and cultural tropes associated with the liminal, the historical and the uncanny combine to bring recent events into a new focus. Highlighting the contested space and time of historical record, and of the literary, the chapter explores how and why emergent structures of feeling haunt Armitage’s ostensibly celebratory poem, casting long shadows over humanity’s perceived lack of progress in the millennial moment.
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Notes
- 1.
Simon Armitage, Killing Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).
- 2.
A ‘millennium’ is widely understood as a period of time equal to one thousand years, or a ‘kiloyear’. Since the Western Gregorian calendar begins with a number 1, each period of a thousand years concludes with a date that ends in 000. However, in the astronomical calendar the year starts at 0, and consequently there were international debates in the year 1999 about whether the beginning of the year 2000 should or should not be celebrated as marking the ‘beginning’ of the millennium.
- 3.
Charles B. Strozier, The Year 2000: Essays on the End (London: New York University Press, 1997) p. 2.
- 4.
Strozier, 1997, p. 5.
- 5.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Open University Press, 1967) pp. 95–96.
- 6.
Don DeLilo, Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991) p. 80.
- 7.
Erected in October 1999, the London Eye is a 125 metre tall landmark that surpasses the height of other, more famous, features of the London skyline including Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral. In ‘Killing Time’, this landmark of the millennium is represented as little more than a political tool, ‘powered by hot air and other parliamentary emissions’ that are ‘piped up’ from the parliament building on the opposite bank of the River Thames in London.
- 8.
Andrew Motion also penned a poem to commemorate the turn of the millennium in 1999. The finished work—‘2000: Zero Gravity: The Millennium Report’—was published in the English daily newspaper The Guardian, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/dec/27/poetry.millennium>
- 9.
Simon Armitage quoted in Alex Macdonald, ‘Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed’, The Quietus, 12 October 2014 <http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-interview-next-generation-poetry>
- 10.
Killing Time was adapted as a made-for-television film screened on New Year’s Day, 1 January 2000 on English television station Channel 4. The adaptation offers a more straightforward narrative, one that follows the progress of ‘Millennium Man’, a kind of everyman protagonist, as he travels through England collecting objects from the past that have been forgotten or ignored. The central narrative of the film is interspersed with footage of real people surrendering their own memory objects from the past thousand years, culminating in a final and symbolic pyre, burning memory and time, at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London, the Prime Meridian of Greenwich from which time around the world is measured.
- 11.
Simon Armitage quoted in Robert Potts, ‘Mean Time’, The Guardian, 15 December 1999 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/dec/15/poetry.artsfeatures>
- 12.
Simon Armitage quoted in Robert Potts, ‘Mean Time’, The Guardian, 15 December 1999 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/dec/15/poetry.artsfeatures>
- 13.
Simon Armitage quoted in Alex Macdonald, ‘Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed’, The Quietus, 12 October 2014 <http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-interview-next-generation-poetry>
- 14.
Simon Armitage quoted in Alex Macdonald, ‘Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed’, The Quietus, 12 October 2014 <http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-interview-next-generation-poetry>
- 15.
Gordon, 2008, p. 18.
- 16.
Due to the high population of the areas featured in the path of totality, this natural spectacle became one of the most-viewed total solar eclipses in human history. Many people organized eclipse-watching parties, or set up video projectors to record the event. The occasion of the solar eclipse is presented by the news media as a natural wonder, one prime for mediation and authentic experience, with pictures of the eclipse shadow beamed live from the Mir Space station.
- 17.
Laura A. Janda, ‘The conceptualization of events and their relationship to time in Russian’, Glossos, Issue 2, Winter 2002. p. 3.
- 18.
Walter Benjamin, 1969, p. 263
- 19.
Gordon: 2008, p. 139.
- 20.
Jeffrey Weinstock (ed.), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) p. 8.
- 21.
Gordon: 2008, p. 15–16.
- 22.
Derrida, 1989, p. 61
- 23.
Derrida, 1994, p. 11.
- 24.
David Weaver (ed.) The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2006) p. 226.
- 25.
Simon Armitage quoted in Robert Potts, ‘Mean Time’, The Guardian, 15 December 1999 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/dec/15/poetry.artsfeatures>
- 26.
Simon Armitage quoted in Alex Macdonald, ‘Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed’, The Quietus, 12 October 2014 <http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-interview-next-generation-poetry>
- 27.
Simon Armitage quoted in Alex Macdonald, ‘Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed’, The Quietus, 12 October 2014 <http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-interview-next-generation-poetry>
- 28.
In the aftermath there was international debate about the motivations of the killers and the extent to which the attack could have been prevented. ‘Columbine’ became part of the common vernacular when referring to school shootings, and the killings even spawned an online fan culture of fellow discontents who termed themselves ‘Columbiners’.
- 29.
Derrida, 1994, p. xviii.
- 30.
Gordon, 2008, p. 63.
- 31.
Pierre Macherey, ‘Marx Dematerialised, or the Spirit of Derrida’ in Michael Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 2008) p. 19.
- 32.
Esther Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) p. 10.
- 33.
Simon Armitage quoted in Alex Macdonald, ‘Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed’, The Quietus, 12 October 2014 <http://thequietus.com/articles/16464-simon-armitage-paper-aeroplanes-interview-next-generation-poetry>
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Shaw, K. (2018). Chapter 1 The (Spectral) Turn of the Century in Simon Armitage’s ‘Killing Time’ (1999). In: Hauntology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74968-6_2
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