‘Acts of communal memory’: Landscape, Memory and Place Names in Alec Finlay’s Work

In 2010 Alec Finlay together with Ken Cockburn set out on a journey on foot through Scotland, guided by Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi. Their responses to the encountered landscapes were gathered in a volume titled The Road North (2014). Stepping over temporal and geographical limits,Finlay and Cockburn entered in a dialogue with the seventeenth-century text, offering a phenomenological mapping of place focused on corporeal experience and blending in elements of cultural and historical survey of the land. In his work, Finlay frequently maps the terrain with his feet, feeling his way through place in detailed itineraries. Exploring the relationship between language and landscape, Finlay does not strive for fixed meanings, but concerns himself with the dissemination of sense, which is illustrated by his use of tanzaku, or ‘place-name translation’. His place writing and sited projects become moveable maps focused on ‘place-awareness’. The chapter explores ways in which Finlay’s work combines mapping and ecopoetics. It discusses how his work, concerned with chorography, which focuses on small regions and specific locations, entwines language and topography. Finally, following J. Hillis Miller’s statement that ‘Landscape “as such” is never given, only one or another of the ways to map it’, the chapter argues that in his numerous collaborative projects, Finlay proposes open texts onto which are mapped various consciousnesses.