Digging
up the Dead:
Consecration, Desecration,
and
Some Questions about Archeology
by Carl Pfluger
I.
I grew up in a New England town of which I have sometimes said, not
entirely facetiously, that the best, the liveliest place in it, is the
cemetery. I do not say this in disparagement of the presently living inhabitants
of my home town—who are, after all, no worse
than ordinary—but merely in recognition that
it is the tangible remains of some three and a half centuries of continuing
historical existence that above all gives a certain sense of human depth
to this one particular, otherwise not especially remarkable patch of the
globe. And this is a sense shared, more or less, by all the citizens, regardless
of their origins—regardless of their blood
relationship to the bodies buried beneath those stones. Certainly the majority
of them, like myself, do not stem from families rooted here from the beginning,
but some kind of corporate identity is nonetheless open to all; and the
cemetery, with its visible and palpable artifacts from times past, is the
most generally accessible approach to that identity: to that community
spread so much more extensively—and more impartially—through
time than through space.
The headstones here are also,
like all really old monuments, of considerable aesthetic and historical
interest. Death’s-head, cherub, urn-and-willow: one may trace some of the
softening of Puritan theology over the eighteenth century in the succession
of these designs carved on the arches of the stones. And the epitaphs—often
enough mere banal doggerel—occasionally show
the quaint charm that comes of a colonial tradition in which it is not
always easy (and perhaps not desirable) to separate “folk” from “learned”
elements. Here is my favorite among these, in memory of a sea-captain who
died in 1786:
Tho Boreas’ Blasts & Neptune’s Waves
Have toss’d me to and fro
In spite of Death by God’s Decree
I harbour here below
Where I do now at anchor ride,
With many of our Fleet
Yet once again I must make Sail
Our adm’ral Christ, to meet.
—But of course that is exceptional, one of
the rare gems of this collection: an idiosyncratically sparkling glimpse
of personality catching the eye across the gulf of centuries, one of the
special treats which a tourist of graveyards may occasionally expect to
reward his peregrinations. The majority of these inscriptions are more
routine, though poignant enough: most commonly variations on that Latin
tag already old when this churchyard was new: Sum quod eris, I am
what you will be. It is the universal cry of the dead to the living, their
last affirmation of a continuing communion with us.
I have always enjoyed cemeteries;
but I began thinking more intensively, and more publicly, about this peculiar
devotion of mine when I heard about the campaigns of some Indian tribes
to reclaim the remains of their ancestors: remains which had been, over
the past couple of centuries, lifted by archeologists (or in some
cases by “mere” grave-robbers—though from
some points of view the distinction between these two callings has not
always been macroscopically visible) and re-deposited in various museums
around the United States. The Indians in this argument are not very happy
about the treatment of their ancestral remains by “white” archeologists;
and this is of course only a part of their amply justified complaint against
the treatment of Indians by white people generally. Responding to this
protest, the archeological profession has invoked the universal values
of science, and all the particular benefits (medical, forensic, etc.) which
can be derived from science. There seems to be a conflict of values here:
perhaps even of sacred values, given the quasi-sacred status which science
itself has acquired in our time. But it is also, in an obvious sense, a
conflict about power and possession. As long as native Americans remain
a dispossessed people, they can scarcely be expected to feel comfortable
with having their people’s bones pawed over by representatives of a system
they do not control. And this is a conflict which has arisen elsewhere
as well: everywhere, in fact, where a people’s traditional sense of themselves,
their identity, and their place on “their own” land has collided with the
enterprise of archeology—an enterprise which,
we should do well to remember, was launched in large part by that quintessentially
nineteenth-century hybrid of capitalist and visionary, Heinrich Schliemann.
In the Middle East, where more
layers of history lie impacted upon one another than anywhere else on earth,
this conflict has been far more intense (and more convoluted) than in our
own country. Palestinians, long before the intifada, staged protests
against Israeli digs; Syrian authorities were obviously discomforted by
the discovery of the lost city of Ebla in the late 1970s, because some
of the names unearthed there seemed to confirm the patriarchal narratives
of the Old Testament, and therefore to validate Zionist claims to the land
of Israel; and a few years ago, when a tomb in Jerusalem produced the body
of a man who had been crucified, scholars and media outlets fell over themselves
re-assuring us that of course there was no reason to suppose that
this was the body of . . . well, you know who. And so it has gone ever
since Schliemann’s epic squabbles with the Ottoman authorities.
Again, some of this is “merely”
political: Palestinians, for example, will find it obviously opportune
to protest almost anything done by Israeli agencies. But a deeper ambiguity
shows itself here, too. Islamic societies have themselves been ambivalent
about the pre-Islamic past of their own countries: the godless arrogance
of Chosroes, or of the Pharaohs, is a commonplace of Muslim oratory; and
the general tenor of Muslim regard for the relics of those “Days of Ignorance”
was set by the Caliph al-Mamun—generally one
of the more enlightened of early Muslim rulers—who
in the ninth century bored a tunnel into the Great Pyramid in a futile
effort to lay his hands on Khufu’s treasure. But then, Muslims stand in
relation to the really ancient remains of their own region rather as we
post-Columbian immigrant Americans do to the remains of the Amerinds: the
Arabs too are relative newcomers, invaders whose presence in most of the
Middle East antedates the Euro-African settlement of the Americas by less
than a thousand years—and what is that, sub
specie aeternitatis? Such obvious historical discontinuities, such
breaks in the natural growth of countries and communities, might make it
at least superficially easier to take a “cool, detached, objective” attitude
toward the remains of the dead, to treat them as objects of mere scientific
or aesthetic interest—but the full story is
still more complex and ambiguous than that.
Here, as often, the Jews may provide
a useful illustration, in their frequent rôle as an “exceptional”
people whose uniqueness, under closer examination, turns out to be less
than is easily assumed. In contrast to their Arab neighbors, Israelis have
pursued archeology with a passion that has seemed at times to elevate it
to the status of a second national religion. It is easy enough to see why,
at least up to a point. By digging deeply enough, they may produce remains
of their own ancestors: tangible evidence of their claims to the land.
And this has always been one of the chief social functions of burial grounds,
of the ceremonial deposition of one’s dead. Often, the archeological enterprise
has come as a violation of this pact between the living and the dead; but
in Israel it has at least as often served as a re-affirmation of it, asserting
with all the force of a scientific demonstration the continuity of the
Jews who returned under the Zionist dispensation with those who had lived
in these places more than two thousand years ago. The Arabs, then, may
well have reason (even aside from the usual resentments of alien scrutiny:
Euro-centric, “Orientalist” and all that) to fear the subversive potential
of this intrusive digging: it threatens to expose the comparative recentness
of their tenure of the land, as it brings to light something of the antiquity
of the Jews.
Yet even this contrast is not
entirely simple. Muslim regimes have also deployed archeology as a political
weapon, and even on behalf of the pre-Islamic cultures of their own nations.
The late Shah’s attempt to identify himself with the Achaemenid dynasty
(most flamboyantly displayed in his theatrical reconstruction of Persepolis)
may have ended with his reign, but it would be surprising if nothing like
it ever re-appears in Iran; and Saddam Hussein’s bizarre and vulgar cult
of Nebuchadrezzar is only one more case in point. Meanwhile, Israel itself
has not been free of all contradictions on this issue either. Some of the
loudest protests against Israeli digs have come from the most Orthodox
among the Jews themselves: zealous partisans of a piety that revolts against
the “sacrilegious” operations of Israel’s own more or less secularized
archeological savants. That cool disinterment of the dead, that cold-blooded
handling of human bodies which archeology requires (as does surgery, for
that matter, and some other professional services to humanity) does indeed
serve some kind of higher—or at least broader—sense
of sacred values; but it also demands a certain distancing from the more
usual feelings of particular human communities—from
the general sense, e.g., that the dead should be “left in peace.”
II.
That such feelings are universally human is shown by some of the very
archeological investigations which, at one level, inflict such an outrage
upon them. They seem, moreover, to have existed even before our species
reached its present form: Neanderthal skeletons have been found carefully
laid out and accompanied by floral offerings. A modern theory of human
origins holds that the Neanderthals, because of certain limitations of
their laryngeal architecture, were incapable of spoken language as we know
it, and therefore would hardly qualify as fully human according to our
customary terms; yet they apparently shared with us this concern for the
dead which, perhaps more than any other single trait, sets us apart, as
humans, from the other animals. It seems fitting, therefore, that the first
recorded conflict between traditional piety and the modern disciplines
of archeology should have occurred over their bones. In 1852, near Aurignac
in southern France, the remains of at least seventeen ancient skeletons
were accidentally discovered in a cave. The mayor promptly ordered their
re-burial in the parish churchyard; and a few years later, when Edouard
Lartet, a pioneer in the emerging study of early man, came looking for
them, he got no co-operation from the church custodians in his attempt
to exhume them for his scientific studies: they resisted telling him the
location of these new/old graves.
We may smile a little at the naïveté
of the provincial functionaries who arranged these Christian obsequies
for people whose religion, if any, would have been incomprehensibly alien
to their own Catholic Christianity; whose language (again, if any!) remains
utterly unknowable to us; whose only bond indeed to those who re-buried
them was that they were also human, and that they had lived in this same
corner of what we now call France. But we must also accord them a measure
of respect. A certain awe of the dead—it may
take the form of reverence (as in the element of ancestor-worship which
remains a component of all our religions) or of mere vulgar terror (as
in the commonest of ghost stories)—has undeniably
strong and deep roots in our human natures. And one of the strongest of
these roots is the sense of shared place, with its multifarious ideas of
belonging, of community, and of title to the land: the sense that where
“my” dead are, there is my home, my hearth, my earth. This sentiment was
already ancient in the time of Abraham, who (according to Genesis 23:17-19)
purchased the sepulchral cave of Mamre for his kin—but
it still has force to move us today. I felt it myself when with my own
hands I poured my mother’s ashes over the roots of her favorite beech tree,
on a hillside which I can still see from the window as I write; and it
can even surface, freshly and unexpectedly, in the public discourse of
our modern, enlightened and secularized societies—as
it has, for example, in the recent history of Canada and Québec.
The 1980 referendum campaign on
Québec independence took on some disturbingly racist overtones when
the late Québec Premier René Lévesque (in an irritable
moment, unworthy, I believe, of his own best feelings) taunted Canada’s
Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau with his “English” middle name. Responding
in an uncharacteristically extemporaneous speech, which is widely credited
with turning the tide of the campaign, Trudeau called to witness the cemeteries
where that name of his mother’s family may be read on two centuries of
tombstones planted on Québec soil. Trudeau has sometimes been criticized
(especially by English Canadians) for being “too rational, too intellectual”—all
those things that have been part of the stereotype of French character
since—well, since Descartes—but
here, certainly, he struck the right emotional chord. In countering an
irrational prejudice, volumes of reasoned argument may be far less effective
than the heartfelt cry of another, more generous, irrational feeling: in
this case, that sense of a common inheritance evoked by the solemn deposition
of one’s dead.
III.
Into the traditional ambience of awe, reverence, or at least of decent
respect—with its correlative abhorrence of
grave-robbers and all such disturbers of the peace of the dead—the
archeologist intrudes as the ultimate defiler, a systematic and professionally
blasphemous predator—or worse, as a parasite,
a scavenger, a ghoul—one who makes his living
off the dead, heartlessly picking over those sacred relics for his own
profane and alien purposes. Certainly Schliemann’s career does nothing
to dispel this impression. Alternately tricking or browbeating the Greek
and Turkish authorities as the opportunity arose, he operated with the
transcendent willfulness of an authentic robber baron—an
epithet equally appropriate, after all, to a nineteenth-century entrepreneur
(which he was for most of his life) and to those Homeric heroes who were
his literary and spiritual inspiration.
But then, should we not really
ask: how peculiar was this predatory/parasitic attitude to Schliemann,
or to the whole archeological enterprise of which he is himself the founding
hero, if not exactly the patron saint? From the broadest of bio-centric
perspectives, are not all of us pillagers and parasites of the dead? We
all live, more than we generally care to acknowledge, at the expense of
those who have gone before us; we inhabit houses which were built by them,
and enjoy the fruits of all their labors: material, political, social and
cultural. Speaking most broadly, human beings are like all other species:
we live on the dead and disintegrating bodies of other organisms, all ultimately
growing out of that mold, that soil, into which we all again return. Ashes
to ashes, earth to earth; humus to human (the phonological likeness here
is not accidental) and back again: all who live, live by feeding on the
remains (what a pregnant word!) of the dead; and this has been so
ever since our kind of oxygen-breathing life began to thrive on the wastes
of the largely self-exterminated anaerobic bacteria which were the first
generation of life on this planet.
In such a perspective, our relations
with the dead do not look all that different from our relations with the
living: both are equally permeated with ambiguities and uncertainties,
equally “tainted,” or enriched, with a fertile mixture of actions, gestures
and motives. And so, equally ancient and primitive as that sense of sacred
separation from and sequestering of the dead, is a contrary impulse, its
coeval polar opposite, which we find equally evident in the funeral rites
of all peoples: the desire to bridge the gulf between them and us, to welcome
the dead (and to be welcomed by them) into some kind of continuing communal
and commensal relationship. What else is the point of all those epitaphs
in which the dead fictively speak to the living? Such tombstones are like
the time capsules which came into vogue a few decades ago; and the more
imposing and elaborately planned a burial is, the more it partakes of this
image: a message in a bottle dropped into the ocean of time, hoping to
encounter a reader somewhere among the endless waves of humanity to come.
. . . But the messages encoded in these capsules are various, and even
more varied are the rites with which men have launched them into that elemental
abyss.
In what is perhaps the earliest
literary demonstration of cultural relativism germane to this topic, Herodotus
tells us (III, 38) that King Darius of Persia once brought together some
visitors from the most distant frontiers of his empire, Greeks and Indians.
What price, Darius asked the Greeks (whom the Persians tended to regard
as willing to do anything for money) would you demand for eating the bodies
of your fathers? The Greeks, in a paroxysm of righteous indignation, responded
that nothing could induce them to commit such an outrage, and they begged
the King not even to mention such an abomination again. Darius then confronted
them with some of his Indian subjects who (so the story goes) did in fact
eat their fathers’ bodies as part of their usual obsequies—and
who were equally horrified and revolted when they were told about the Greek
usage of cremation—thus confirming, according
to Herodotus, the word of Pindar that “custom is king of all.” (“Custom”
here translates the Greek vóµos [nomos] which also
has the meanings of “law” and “convention”: everything human beings do
which is somehow “contrary to nature.”)
Literally and physically eating
the dead may be rare among actual human communities; but the shock which
these Herodotean Indians offer to our sensibilities arises mostly from
their confronting us with the starkest possible presentation of one of
the poles between which all our rites concerning the dead tend to divide
themselves. Such anthropophagy is the “fast forward” setting of the re-cycling
mode: it brings the atoms of the dead back into circulation with a minimum
of intermediation. (Cremation does this too, rather more fastidiously.)
Against this we may set all those modes of containment and encapsulation—burial
(especially in sealed coffins), entombment, embalming, etc.—which
seek to preserve the bodies of the dead for as long as possible, pretending
to fortify them against the inevitable processes of decay, dissolution,
and eventual re-incorporation into other forms of life. These variations
may reflect divergent theories of personal immortality—resurrection
versus re-incarnation, for example—or they
may express different degrees of value assigned to the individual personality
per se. Monumental tombs are, if nothing else, forceful assertions of the
personalities of their rich and powerful owners, demanding a recognition
from posterity comparable to the deference they had received in life from
their contemporaries. They want their names to be remembered, and the proclamations
of their exalted selves to be read, for ever after. But once the continuity
is broken—tongues forgotten, gods abandoned—who
will ever more remember these individuals, who will read their lives, if
not those cool, detached and desecrating archeologists, who have labored
so assiduously at just this task of “reading” the remains of the ancient
dead?
And so it is at least an entertainable
notion that the dead whose remains are so cavalierly handled by the archeological
profession would not in fact have been entirely displeased by their treatment.
Certainly the Pharaohs did not want their treasuries rifled by vulgar tomb
robbers (as most of them in fact were, already before the beginning of
the Christian Era)—but can we be so certain
that their vanity would not have been gratified by the prospect of having
their splendors displayed for the admiration of millions on our public
television specials or in our arty coffee-table books? I think not. The
homage paid to these remains, even (or especially?) by those of us moderns
whose nominal motives are “merely” scientific or aesthetic is hardly less
flattering than what they received from their own peoples. More than three
thousand years after his death Tut-ankh-Amen, in life one of the most insignificant
of the Pharaohs, has become (thanks to the latter-day “tomb robbery” of
Carter and Carnarvon) the object of a cult at once commercial, academic,
and popular; a cult in almost the literal sense of the word, more genuinely
devoted to the perpetuation of his name than that offered in his own time
by the nominally faithful servitors of his own court. The long lines of
visitors (pilgrims, one is tempted to call them) who came so eagerly to
see his special exhibit when it toured the world some years ago at least
manifested a more personal interest in this one rather pathetic royal individual
than did his immediate successors who, embroiled in their own politics,
gave him as cursory an entombment as Egyptian conventions would allow—and
who not long afterward covered his sepulchre with rubble, inadvertently
preserving it (uniquely among Pharaonic tombs) for the curious pillagers
of our time.
We may contrast this, amusingly
and instructively, with the treatment accorded the body of Lenin—who,
unlike Tut, was one of the authentically powerful personalities of his
own day. Lewis Mumford compared the mummification of Communist founder-heroes
to those of the “Pyramid Age”—but the differences
are striking and ironic. The Pharaohs were secreted away, immured against
light and the inspection of the masses; whereas Lenin and his epigones
were placed immediately in glass cases, as if to short-circuit (in the
typically Leninist maneuver) the long processes of history, seeking to
achieve instantly that status of museum-piece icons for which Tut, and
Schliemann’s “Agamemnon,” had to wait at least an intervening age. But
the sullenly shuffling subjects who, in the heyday of Communist power,
trooped cowed and obedient past the artfully-preserved bodies of their
lately-deceased masters seem an awkward counterfeit of the crowds who came
of their own free will to view the remains of those modernly excavated
ancient rulers. And now that Lenin’s name is recalled with execration in
his own country, and the brief saeculum of Communism seems to be
on the cusp of passing away, what future (“radiant” or otherwise) awaits
these precocious mummies? Will they now be consigned to their own Marxist
“ash-heap,” while the world, at the turn of a new historical cycle, gazes
reverently at the relics of the “feudal” and “servile” past?
IV.
From the very beginning of philosophical thought there has been a persistent
strain of radical criticism that revolts against all the fuss which people
have made over the dead, insisting that there is no reason why human remains
should not be disposed of like any other worn-out old trash. “Corpses are
more fit to be thrown out than dung,” said Heraclitus, early in the 5th
century B.C.—which, considering the rôle
of manure in re-cycling the nutrients of any living community, perhaps
concedes more than the misanthropic old sophist intended. “Let the dead
bury the dead,” said another, presently more famous, ancient authority—which
did not prevent his name from being invoked by nearly two millennia of
posterity in obsequies as solemn and elaborate as any tradition has ever
seen.
The Cynic/Stoic tradition—which
claimed Heraclitus as one of its precursors, and made a great point of
“living according to Nature”—was especially
vociferous on this issue. Concerning Diogenes the proto-Cynic (the one
who lived in a tub, carried a lantern “looking for an honest man” and told
Alexander the Great to move his shadow) there are at least three accounts
of what he wanted done with his own body. Prop it up as a scarecrow, he
said; or else throw it into the river as fish-food—“that he might be useful
to his brethren,” as his biographer Laertius puts it, in what to modern
ears might sound like an early statement of Deep Ecological conscience.
But who could be expected to do anything at all with his body, he was asked,
since he lived such a solitary life, without even the few slaves deemed
necessary for a respectable Greek existence? “Whoever wants the house,”
he replied—by that time, apparently, having
traded up from his tub.
“Whoever wants the house” —now
that
is both Cynic and cynical; but it does highlight unflinchingly one part
anyway of our normal relations with the dead. At least this anecdote helps
us see how the name of the most austerely moralizing school of ancient
philosophy could have become selectively narrowed down to its modern sense
of exposing the cheapest material motives to all our actions. Diogenes,
like most representatives of his school, invoked the authority of “Nature”
to disparage the “conventions” of human society—but
his was a narrowly dogmatic idea of nature, conceived from a relentlessly
individualist perspective. Like Darius in the story of Herodotus, he noticed
the infinite variability of human customs; and from this he concluded that
none of them could qualify as “natural” according to his crudely scientific
paradigm. Diogenes called his vehement denial of convention “cosmopolitan,”
a word he seems to have invented; but this cut-rate cosmopolitanism overlooks
a more profound insight, one confirmed by all anthropology—including
anthropology’s dirty-handed operational arm, archeology—that
it is a truly universal feature of human societies to observe some laws,
some conventions: about, among other things, the ceremonial treatment of
the dead. No particular custom may be any more natural than another; but
from the Neanderthal burials in the Shanidar cave to, say, the funerals
which became such potent rallying-points in the struggle against apartheid
in South Africa, the ritualized deposition of the dead has continued to
evoke some of the strongest feelings in our human natures.
Yes, what we do with corpses (and
even more, the spirit in which we do it) really does matter; the will of
the dead and the spirit of the living should here find some common ground
of meeting and understanding. My mother’s ashes leaching every year into
the soil of her own hillside, and the ashes of those murdered at Auschwitz
(processed by the German chemical industry into commercially usable fertilizer)
were alike re-cycled in a manner which from some scientific perspective
might seem to be equivalent; but no one in his right mind could fail to
see the difference: a difference made by the sense of shared remembrance,
of community; a sense conspicuously absent from the hypertrophied individualism
of Diogenes and his imitators. Compared with such “philosophical” antinomianism,
archeology (together with all its ancillary sciences) is as profound an
act of reverence, of piety, as any which human beings have ever offered.
For the archeologist, no matter how “callously” he may handle the remains
of the dead—bringing them up from their graves,
subjecting them to the most intrusive physical and chemical analyses—is
above all concerned with understanding them: with reading them, with finding
a meaning to their lives. And in this he is inviting them into the broadest,
the most inclusive, community of which we (at least in our present state
of development) are capable. Ultimately, he re-deposits them in museums;
but a museum (originally a temple of the Muses) may well be the most authentic
shrine which has yet been produced by our own culture: relative, time-bound,
and ethnically conditioned, no doubt; but no less natural for all that:
our own particular variation among all the others that have been played
(and will continue to be played) on the universal human themes of life
and death.
It seems impossible to go very
far along these lines of reflexion without running into that (modernly
not very fashionable) dualism of body and soul, flesh and spirit. In all
funeral rites of which I have any knowledge, the flesh is given over, sooner
or later, to the eternal, elemental processes of the world—“re-cycling”
is only the current bio-technical jargon for this—but
something else of the dead remains among the living, something for which
different people have found different words: spirit, soul, ba, ka, atman,
nous or “active intellect”; for which I at this moment can find no
better word than memory. There is, perhaps, some confusion here
in our usual terminology. When we speak of the “remains” of the dead, we
most often refer to those inert physical components—flesh,
bones or ashes—which are the visible objects
of our attentions. But of course those are the very things which, according
to most of our sacred taboos, are supposed to be sequestered away from
the living. They generally do not remain with us, but apart from us. What
does remain with us is memory. The dead continue to have some sort of existence
among us only insofar as they continue to resonate in the lives of their
successors, their survivors.
Yes, the point of all funeral
rites is memory: a mental action, perhaps even an immaterial one; but we
exercise our memories by performing some sort of overt act with those tangible,
corporeal parts of the dead—“the remains”
in the usual sense of the term—and to forget
this is to risk disparaging, desacralizing the body even in life. And this
may point us toward that other feature found in most, if not all, funeral
customs: the element of continuity, communion, even commensality; which
last has taken the form of everything from sedate memorial dinners to the
Archaic Greek practice of placing feeding tubes in graves, through which
the heirs of the dead could pour libations of wine and oil into the throats
of their decomposing fathers: a grisly enough custom to our delicate modern
sensibilities, but one that makes the point clearly enough. We want our
dead friends and relations to continue dining with us, even as Don Giovanni
invited the Commendatore to dine with him, sharing our food in what is
(so primatologists inform us) the most basic social ritual, not only of
our species, but of our entire zoological order. Feeding the dead, or letting
the dead feed us; somehow, these do not seem all that different: and so
the Greeks and the Indians of Herodotus’s story may not, after all, have
been beyond reconciliation.
V.
The dead, we say, would wish to be “left in peace.” On the other hand,
they also wish to be remembered—and this must
mean, remembered in all their individuality, all their particularities.
But who, then, best remembers the dead? Not necessarily their kin and heirs—they
in fact may have the strongest motives for forgetting them, for covering
them up and concealing their debt to them. Nor is it only their friends:
enemies, even those with whom they have actually been at war, may sometimes
remember most vividly those whom they themselves have killed. The complex
and haunted feelings which white Americans have about the Indians provide
one instance of this; and so also does the Iliad, that ultimate
classic which was such a formative obsession of our prototypical scientific
grave-robber/archeologist, Heinrich Schliemann.
The brawling chieftains of the
Iliad
are, to modern feelings, not a very sympathetic sample of humanity. Violent
and predatory, they live mostly (as Thucydides already observed) by piracy
and robbery: helping themselves to whatever they can get by force of arms.
But even in the midst of this strenuously parasitic activity they show
remarkably tenacious memories for the provenance of their acquisitions.
Fighters will interrupt battles to recount the origins of their prized
possessions—tripods, cups or armor—much
as they recount their own genealogies; and it hardly seems to matter to
them whether these were inherited from their fathers or plundered from
some luckless victim of their spears: all are recalled with equal attention.
Whatever the other limitations of their sympathies, Homer’s heroes did
not forget what they owed to the dead—even
those whom they had sent down to the dust with their own hands. Shamelessly,
they flaunt the predatory/parasitic relation which all the living have
to all the dead. And in this at least Schliemann was fit to be their votary,
with his lust to recognize those whose tombs he was plundering, to identify
them with the names he “remembered” from Homer. “I have looked upon the
face of Agamemnon,” he said when he lifted that famous gold mask from Mycenae.
Well no, it can’t really have been Agamemnon, say the more chronologically
exact diggers who have succeeded him—but then,
who was “Agamemnon,” except for the memories and the imaginations cherished
about him? Schliemann, who did at least imaginatively identify himself
with his “Agamemnon,” with his “treasury of Priam,” may be closer in some
ways to the Amerindians who feel they belong to “their” people’s
bones than he is to the academically trained custodians of our museums,
who in any number of ways may have a more factually accurate knowledge
of the materials in their collections. Communal identity is not always
easy to pin down precisely, after all. When I walk through my favorite
graveyards, enjoying the stones which have become so familiar to me, I
do not look different, outwardly, from a pious descendant of one of the
colonial families buried there; but insofar as I am appreciating them historically
or aesthetically, do I not in some measure approach the “cold, heartless,
scientific” attitude toward these relics, even though I am not subjecting
them to the more intrusive probings of physical or chemical analysis? —Yes
. . . . and so at last I too am somehow a kindred spirit of Schliemann’s—but
whether more akin to his romantic or his predatory side, it would be hard
for me to say.
Modern, scientific archeologists
are not at all comfortable with Schliemann and his willful ways, even though
he is the founder-hero of their own profession, any more than modern people
generally can feel comfortable with the primitive warrior kings of the
Iliad.
But Schliemann, in all his contradictions, remains a totemic figure, not
only of archeology, but of much else in our Western-based but increasingly
global culture—it seems strangely appropriate
that much of his “Trojan” hoard, purloined by him to Berlin, and lost in
the murk of the Second World War, should now re-surface in the newly-liberated
Russia: that is a tale Homer himself would have loved!—and
Homer is still the premier classic of the Western canon, whose heroes,
with their catholically memorious re-cycling of the artifacts of the dead,
may serve as tolerably useful models for a rough ethic of predatory piety:
alike in our dealings with the moldering remains of the human dead (ineluctably
dissolving into their organic-chemical components) and with all the eternally
re-cycling elements of the organic world.
“So they held the funeral of Hector,
tamer of horses.” That is how the Iliad ends, after a gruesome and
spiteful series of combats—the detailed recital
of which is often as tiresome to the modern reader as the experience of
being trapped in a bar with a clutch of rabid sports fans who recall every
tedious play from some game of twenty years ago—with
a funeral, and a reconciliation. After Achilles has vented his hyperbolic
wrath, outrageously desecrating Hector’s corpse, he reverts at last to
normal humanity, recognizing his common bond of life and death with the
Trojans, and yields the body back to to Priam for a decent cremation—the
very “decency” to be sure, which so outraged the Indians of Herodotus!
But still: if Achilles and Priam
could finally be reconciled (even in the midst of war) over the body of
Hector; if the Greeks and the Indians at the court of Darius could somehow
recognize the human value of each others’ customs; it should not be impossible
(now that everyone has, in however vulgarized a manner, been touched by
some recognition of a global unity embracing the whole Earth) to achieve
some kind of reconciliation over the treatment of all our dead. And perhaps
we need not, and should not, look for too exclusive, too precise a definition
of our attitudes. As I, walking among the stones of my familiar graveyards,
am simultaneously a tourist and an investigator, a votary and a voyeur,
so should we all acknowledge the commensality of our feasts with the dead;
with those with whom we shall all soon enough be. Sum quod eris,
do you say? Indeed: I shall be what you are; so shall we all.
Copyright © 1993 by Carl Pfluger.
This essay first appeared in Hudson Review, Winter
1993. Reprinted with permission.
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