CONFERRING WITH THE DEAD: NECROPHILIA AND NOSTALGIA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BY SCOTT DUDLEY O that it were possible

we might But hold some two days' conference with the dead, From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure I never shall know here. The Duchess of Malfil This nostalgic lament, uttered by the Duchess of Malfi just before her death, looks back to an earlier, though not so distant, cultural moment when it was still possible to hold "conference with the dead." It simultaneously summons the images of the dead-the corpses, the severed body parts, and the skeletal remains-that are such a notable feature of this play as well as of seventeenth-century theater and culture in general. Derided as mere sensationalism, or, more recently, explored as a site for the emergent scientific objectification of the body and subsequent privileging of the Cartesian subject, the relics of the dead that accumulate in plays like The Duchess of Malfi, in fact, engage a counter-reformation, Roman Catholic aesthetic and theology about the dead body that most frequently clusters around discussions of relics and the efficacy of prayers to the saints. The remains of the body that accrue throughout the literature of this period participate in a uniquely seventeenth-century negotiation between emergent and residual cultural concerns about history, the nature of the body, subjectivity,

representation, and epistemology. The necrophilia that surrounds these body parts reconstitutes, in an altered form, the residual cultural impetus to have access to the past through the physical, and, in the best new historicist fashion, thereby to hold "conference with the dead." Earlier criticism of Jacobean theater was primarily concerned either to denigrate it for the "Tussaud Chamber of Horrors" that it frequently stages, or to justify it for its ability to depict a higher moral or theological order that triumphs over the macabre.2 A decade ago Francis Barker argued that the "glorious cruelties" of the Jacobean theater "articulate a mode of corporeality" in which the body is not "that effaced residue which it is to become, beneath or behind the proper realm of dis-course."3 In a similar fashion Karin Coddon has argued that the necrophiliac desires that run throughout The Revenger's Tragedy serve to "parody and to interrogate contemporary, increasingly scientistic notions of the body."4 These arguments, while seminal, do not account for the continuing power of residual cultural forces which complicate the distinctions between subject and object, discourse and body, present and past in this period. In the first half of the century the cultural tensions concerning corporeality, subjectivity, and epistemology, which had long been present in Reformation debates over issues of salvation, relics, and images, took on a new intensity in the increasingly frequent and often heated controversies regarding miracles performed at the shrines of saints. . The corpses and body parts that appear on the Jacobean stage-for example, Gloriana's skull in The Revenger's Tragedy, Annabella's heart in 'Tis Pity

She's a Whore, or the severed hand in The Duchess of Malfiparticipate in these theological debates. Unlike the corpses on the dissecting table or the view of the dead body taken by Protestant theology, body parts on the Jacobean stage are endowed with extraordinary material potency. They thus stage the moment in seventeenthcentury culture when the corpse can be seen either as an object that has been emptied of all subjectivity, as Protestant theology and the emerging scientific discourse of anatomy claim, or as an object in which attenuated and even enhanced subjectivity and agency still reside, as Catholic polemics about relics insist. The intrusion of the macabre into these plays revives earlier cultural concerns which here return in an alienated form to mark the distance between the dominant and residual culture, and which expose areas of epistemological and affective human experience that the dominant culture does not and cannot address.5 Such residual cultural concerns come most clearly into focus in Catholic propaganda such as The Life and Death of Mr Edmund Geninges Priest (1614). In this tract, which was subsequently censured by the Protestant Richard Sheldon, the author juxtaposes grisly details concerning the death of the Catholic martyr with the eroticized desire of a young "virgin."6 After Edmund Geninges's body had been quartered, and as it was being drawn back to Newgate to be boiled, the author recounts how the crowd, eager to see the body "peece by peece," was satisfied by the executioner as he took up one of the "fresh bleeding quarters" Such seventeenth-century Catholic tracts privilege the corpse not only for its ability to contain the sacred, but also for its capacity to

underwrite cultural and institutional certainty. In Purgatories Triumph (1613) the Jesuit John Floyd cites the many "miracles done at the Reliques, & by the Intercession of Martyrs" as proof of the veracity of the Catholic Church. According to Floyd, the "tables & pictures of handes, feet, eyes, heads & other partes of the body, hung up, as tokens of miraculous cures obteyned by the Martyrs intercessions . . . abundantly suffice to witness the truth of Christianity."'2 In a similar fashion Robert Chambers, translator of Miracles Lately Wrought, argues that because of the miracles done at the shrines of saints and especially at the shrine of the Virgin Mary, all people must be able to iustly and with verie good consequence inferr that holy Pilgrimages, honoring of holy Images, confession of our sinnes to the priest, acknowledging of the real presence of Christ his bodie in the blessed Sacrament ... praying to sainctes, yea (in brief) ... the whole doctrine and practis of the Catholik Apostolik and Romaine Church to be grateful and highely pleasing unto the Maiestie of God.3 onal veracity. Elaine Scarry has demonstrated that "when some central idea or ideology" ceases "to elicit a population's belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation," a society will then borrow "the sheer material factualness of the human body" in order "to lend that cultural construct the aura of 'realness' and 'certainty."'14 This process, which Scarry calls "analogical verification," is clearly at work in these texts.'5 In the face of a culture that continued to marginalize it, in the midst of its

disappointment that James failed to reestablish the Church of Rome in England, and in an attempt to counter the emerging discourses of Protestantism as well as of science that challenged its devotional rites both in England and on the continent, Roman Catholicism, ever more residual, sought during the Counter Reformation to substantiate itself physically within the faithful. In the "handes, feet, eyes, heads & other partes of the body, hung up, as tokens of miraculous cures" the "assurednes of Catholic doctrine" was inscribed on the bodies of Catholic believers. It was not only the live body that served this verifying purpose, but more potently the dead one, for these miracles were accomplished at the shrines or by the relics of saints. Such epistemological and institutional power had long been granted to dead bones. From the eighth century forward relics had been used to confirm oaths, settle disputes, and to enforce peace treaties.16 The central act of Christian devotion itself needed to be verified by the dismembered body of a saint. Every Catholic altar required a relic. In this way Christ's sacrifice was substantiated by the martyr's sacrifice, and Christ's real presence was confirmed by the real presence of the saint's body. But the Counter Reformation's relentless insistence on the physical, and especially on the body as proof of the soundness of the Catholic Church, only shows, a crisis in substantiation, as Scarry points out. Thus the more the faithful insisted on the efficacy of relics, and the more they asserted the soundness of their Church, the more they also marked the moment of rupture separating them from a past that was already gone.

The analogical verification these relics offered drew on a theological system that invoked a radically different understanding of the status ofrepresentation from that which the emergent Protestant culture allowed. In continental tracts such as Histoire des Miracles, and in similar English propaganda concerning relics, Catholic polemics exploited a medieval semiotics which in the seventeenth century functioned as a residual cultural force challenging the epistemological status of the emerging Protestant culture. The insistence on the epistemological efficacy and necessity of the physical is grounded in a theological understanding of representation that allows for very little distance between the sign and the signified. For medieval theologians like Aquinas, images and relics do not so much represent the saints they portray, as embody them and partake of their nature. In the Summa, Aquinas concedes that worship "cannot be given to any but a rational being," but goes on to argue that since what the image portrays is rational and worthy of reverence, so too is the image itself in view of its function as image. The "movement of the mind to an image is identical with movement to the object represented." The second commandment prohibits worship of images primarily because the idols the pagans made depicted objects unworthy of worship and because, prior to the incarnation, God was immaterial and therefore could not be represented. Aquinas employs a similar argument to justify the adoration of relics. Reverence is owed to the saints because they were members of Christ, and, he emphasizes, "this is primarily true of their bodies, which were the temples and instruments of the Holy Spirit." It is for this reason that

God grants "honor to their relics by performing miracles when they are present."18 While Aquinas grants that the "dead body of a saint is not numerically [sic] the same as it was when living since the soul, which is the form of the body, is no longer present," he adds that it is, nevertheless, "materially the same and as such will be reunited to its form." Consequently, "we do not venerate a lifeless body for what it is in itself, but by reason of the soul which once was united to it."19 Through these relics the past continues to live in the present. The relic constitutes the continuing presence of the saint in the world-a deposit that guarantees the saint's ongoing interest in the community of the living.26 Conversely, the prayers offered at the shrine operate as the claims of the living on the dead. There is then a kind of conversation Scott Dudley 283 between the past and the present Church was the one, true, visible Church. Protestants, of course, disagreed. To them the miracles were either fabrications or Satanic counterfeits sent to tempt away the people of God. John Polyander, the author of A Disputation Against the Adoration of Reliques ... , argued that relics were nothing more than "the bones and garments of rotten bodies returned into ashes," "dead and corruptible things . .. which neuer had any communion with humane life.""29 For Polyander the honor of the saints lives only in the "memories of men," not in their dead bodies which are full of "shame," "foulness," and "stinke before the sight of others."30 Similarly, Calvin argued that the duty of Christians was to bury the dead in obedience to the injunction that "man is dust, and to dust will return." To "raise them up in

sumptuousness and splender" is to fabricate a "premature resurrection."3' For Calvin the point of burial is to raise "our eyes from gazing upon a grave that corrupts and effaces everything, to the vision of renewal" that is promised in the resurrection.32 Being a "foule" thing, the corpse, even the corpse of a saint, could never function as the potential site of holiness in Protestant ideology. Furthermore, the physical body can no longer operate as the uncomplicated site of knowledge as it does in Catholic epistemology. Miracles can be counterfeited by Satan or fabricated by Catholics; therefore, all physical signs of God's presence must be interpreted. "Miracles are no sure note of the truth of religion," Richard Field argues in The Fifth Booke of the Churche (1610). It is uncertain if they are "Gods owne worke" and "we may iustly feare some fraud." It is only "by the inward testimonie of God's spirit" that we can be assured that a miracle is "the immediate and peculiar worke of God."3 7 A chasm has opened up between the signifier and the signified. There is no longer a double exchange of meaning between representer and represented, rendering it more difficult to experience God in the physical world. The truth value of any physical object now rests with the observer, not in the physical object that is observed. The object cannot speak; it has no agency of its own. If it is to signify at all, it can do so only as a subject makes it speak through his or her interpretation of it. Subject and object are thus bifurcated, whereas before, in the doctrine of images and of relics, they shared a permeable boundary. For Catholics this bifurcation of subject and object and the gap of

representation and interpretation that arises from it abolishes religion by making every man his own authority. If the miracles cannot be believed, if they are discredited as fraudulent or Satanic even in the face of eyewitness accounts, then, asks John Floyd, what can be said of the biblical miracles "wherein Christianity is grounded," which could not hold up as true under similar interpretative scrutiny. Like the "miracles lately wrought," the heretics in those days also "did see with their eies and somtimes feele in their bodies" the truth of God as it was incarnated in the physical world. If the physicality of miracles is not a sure proof of invisible truth then the credit of all human relations is "cracked" and there are no means left "to make any history."38 Elaine Scarry remarks that "what is remembered in the body is well remembered," and the tree against which I lean will always be more real than the chair that I can imagine.39 Scarry documents the ways in which ideologies and cultures become more real once they are incarnated in the body. Protestants then have a problem, for the cured bodies, the images, relics, altars, and basilicas all embody the history and veracity of the Catholic Church-the antiquity and authority of Rome made manifestly visible to a culture that, as Keith Thomas and Philippe Aries have demonstrated, still clings to belief in sympathetic magic, the apotropaic powers of objects, and the potential healing capacity of corpses, in spite of emergent Protestant (and scientific) arguments to the contrary.40 The Duchess of Malfi registers these theological and cultural concerns about the power of the body and the authority of the past. The

overt rhetoric of the play creates an atmosphere in which it is impossible to "hold conference" with the dead or to access the prestige and stability of the past that the dead provide. Much of the conflict of the play, in fact, is driven by the Duchess's rejection of the forms and precepts of the past. Death within the play is imagined as annihilation ("the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns").42 Conference between the dead and the living, and between the present and the past, becomes impossible, and corpses provide no analogical verification of the truth. Necrophilia is the appropriate emblem for this cultural moment. The offense of necrophilia is that it attempts, against all empirical evidence to the contrary, to convert a subject that has become an object back into a subject again. The necrophiliac lycanthropy that Ferdinand develops at the end of the play is the macabre embodiment of a cultural obsession to invest the dead body with a passive subjectivity

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm argues that for the necrophile "only the past is experienced as quite real, not the present or the future. What has been, in other words, what is dead, rules his life: institutions, laws, property, traditions, and possessions . .. the past is sacred, nothing new is valuable, drastic change is a crime against the 'natural' order."47 In this view, there is little distance between necrophilia and nostalgia. On the Jacobean stage and in the culture necrophilia is often destructive, misogynist, obsessive, totalitar-

ian. It is also nostalgic. Ferdinand's violent desire to control his sister's body and to enforce the institutional, moral, and social traditions to which he clings is only a step from his lycanthropic desire to dig up dead limbs. Vindice's misogynist prostitution of Gloriana's skull realizes the cultural desire to fix ontological and epistemological categories around the dead body and thereby establish order where confusion reigns. Necrophilia is the displaced, uncanny desire to dig up the past and make it live again-to recover a trace of the lost other in order to fill the cultural and institutional gaps created by new ideologies. Defined this way, necrophilia is more of a cultural than a personal obsession. It is the reactionary compulsion of a culture that feels cut off from the sacred past that once gave life meaning, and from the institutions, traditions and laws that once established order. Both pathetic and uncanny, it is that desire-manifested throughout seventeenth-century culture-to have conference with the dead and with a past that can only be experienced as rupture.