- Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, October 2015. 736 pages. $39.95. Hardcover.
ISBN 9780691157788.
This tome counters the wish of
Diogenes the Cynic, who wanted his corpse to be tossed over a wall to be
devoured by beasts. Berkeley historian Thomas W. Laqueur, whose earlier books
compiled cultural surveys of the body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, and
of masturbation, turns to another intimate subject: “What death leaves behind
through the dead body” (xiv) takes the reader chronologically through four
in-depth phases of “why the dead body matters” (1).
Laqueur applies the longue durée approach
of the French Annales school to prehistoric and ancient times. Respect
for the corpse, acknowledgement of its occupation at the borders of nature and
culture, placement of the death of one within the social order, and how the
dead “help make” our modern world comprise part 1. However, the bulk of
Laqueur’s evidence derives from 1680-2000, within the purview of his expertise
in English, Western European, and North American settings. This imbalance
qualifies the breadth of his subtitle, but it enables a very detailed account
of the post-Enlightenment gradual transition from churchyard and ecclesiastical
supervision to cemetery and secular commemoration. Laqueur plumbs archives.
Documenting this shift from a space
where the dead count within a weakened clerical presence, in slow pivot to a
twentieth-century emphasis upon names and who the dead were, structures parts 2
and 3. Laqueur ends with what the dead consist of, when the radical revival of
cremation represents a rejection of the bodily resurrection of the hallowed
cadaver.
This arc spans vast accumulations of
material, physical and spiritual, intellectual and religious. The enchantment
and re-enchantment of the living towards the dead offers “the greatest possible
history of the imagination” (17). Having despaired of extracting the
testimonies of those dying, Laqueur asks instead what the living “did with and
through real dead bodies,” by analyzing “what their acts meant and mean to
them” (18). Relics, idolatry, aura, fakery, and necromancy display early human
attempts to deal with this mortal predicament. Revenants, souls, and spirits
share varieties of “persistence of being” as a “shared community” within a
“complex of meanings” in his second chapter. Here, the power the dead exert
over our own minds encompasses erudite reactions from Epicurus and Calvinists
through Milan Kundera and Slavoj Žižek.
This collective effort of caring for
what is left of the departed dwells within a “gap between what they are and
what we take them to be” (81). Religion, art, politics, and poetry, in this
scholar’s estimation, would not exist otherwise. This grand statement may give
pause, as it may elude verification. It attests to Laqueur’s ambitious attempt
to add the particular to the cosmic.
In such sweeping claims, this book
leaves its most powerful impact. The granular accumulation of proof will assist
academics, for it gathers arcane studies and diligent interpretations into a
valuable volume. Yet as hundreds of pages demonstrate, these particulars pile
up as densely as did effluvia and bones in dank churchyards that archeologists
have unearthed and gravediggers had lamented. The “regime of the dead” presses
down indelibly. Laqueur calculates the ratio (miniscule) between the remnants
left by bones and fluids in comparison to the amount (considerable) excreted by
the living within an industrialized city. Victorian reformers demanded hygiene.
Their false claims of the danger of the rank corpse accelerated the trend away
from crammed churchyards to planned meadows. There, increasing ranks of the
dead did not wait for Judgment Day in elegiac and venerable plots where
families had long relegated their village departed. In cemeteries, picnickers
and strollers could enjoy their visits, where the “new regime” created “a novel
and luxuriantly protean space” (212).
Romantic-era notions of pastoral slumber
presaged communal creation of the funeral industry and the bureaucratic
register. Dramatizing memory, venerating preservation, admitting finitude, and
defying salvation, modern habits of paying respect to the departed superseded
ecclesiastical rites.
Burial plots and fancy funerals
appealed as the poor imitated their betters. Exhumations exemplified the
rationales for artistic, legal, criminal, medical, and clerical examinations.
Again, Laqueur totes up intricate processes, which counted on the assurance
that all the dead, in peace or especially in war, were accounted for,
regulated, and tallied up neatly.
Naming the disembodied embeds them
as a “reinscription of loss, one of its poor avatars, a substitute, a
placeholder, a trace of a trace” (366). Laqueur may move his readers in such
pauses from his scrutiny. He displays the “unprecedented scale” of technical,
political, and emotional means by which recent mourners, brokers, claimants,
and heirs collude to ensure post-mortem precision. Less than a third of
twenty-six billion people born between 1500 and 2010 are known to us. Mormon
genealogists labor to baptize all dead. Obituaries proclaimed public notice as
newspapers expanded literacy and popularized devotions. These ceremonial
practices generate a “commemorative culture” from the Civil War on, one which
left thousands of memorials, modest or monumental, to the “absent but present
dead,” among which were many vanished or irretrievable casualties of the Great
War.
The author rarely admits the
personal, but an aside merits mention. His father’s 1929 alma mater, a Hamburg
gymnasium, lists those who died “fighting for Germany” together with those “as
victims of the Holocaust” (423). Technological and emotional imperatives
combine in massive records of both world wars, which made “knowing both
possible and necessary” (466).
Cremation demoted death “to its
physiological basis,” says Laqueur (509). Protestants interpreted the restoration
of the body at the Last Judgment as metaphorical. The need to rest a body in
sacred ground dwindled. Body, memory, and locale nevertheless persist today as
obligations. Continuity in The Work of the Dead, Laqueur concludes,
endures even as medical progress prevents acceptance of mortality among
desperate families who seek, inevitably, miracles.
Date of Review:
December 29, 2017
About the Author
Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the
University of California, Berkeley. His books include Making Sex: Body and
Gender from the Greeks to Freud and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of
Masturbation. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Reading Religion (1/4/18)
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