HISTORY’S GHOSTS
A new book examines what we can learn from modern and historic burial practices
Iinvite the reader to imagine herself as an archaeologist around the year 3000, 1,000 or so years from now, excavating a European city — or a city of North or South America, or Australia; much of the colonial world would work, and so might Singapore or Shanghai with some of the details changed — whose destruction could be dated with some precision to the year 1900: a city frozen in time like Pompeii. She would look, as her professional predecessors had, for evidence about what that city’s inhabitants did with their dead, those strange artifacts that speak so powerfully of what matters to a civilization.
Were she engaged with late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, she would be looking for the concentration of graves in the midst of human habitation, at a gathering- in of the dead from a variety of locations, each with a deep history. But archaeologists a millennium from now will be looking at the ruins of the Western civilization that supplanted the old regime of the dead that had grown up by the eighth or ninth century. Instead of the ruins of many small and not very imposing churchyards with a few modest tombs and a small number of grand ones inside the remaining walls of an adjacent church, archaeologists would find at the outskirts of the early 20th- century city huge expanses, hundreds and even thousands of acres in size, packed full of grand monuments difficult to distinguish from those of earlier civilizations: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, medieval Irish, European baroque, in relatively pure form but, more likely, each one in a strange bricolage of historical elements. Almost all of these would be stone, but perhaps by some extraordinary circumstance a great iron mausoleum might have survived if only in traces of ferrous oxide. Maybe even a photograph preserved in glass, like a fly in amber.
It might well be puzzling to our excavator that instead of a tidy progression of styles through the ages there had been a sort of historical compression in which all of them came into being at roughly the same time. No churches would be found nearby. In 1750, all the graves would have been oriented toward the east, toward Jerusalem, to greet the resurrection. In 1900 or 2000, they were oriented toward walkways or topographical features — views of a valley or a river — that might still be visible.
Amidst these great tombs there would be many contemporaneous mass graves with hundreds of unnoticed and unmarked bodies in each. Places like this — the remains of Père Lachaise in Paris, or Highgate and Woking in London, or Underhill in Hull, or Olsdorf in Hamburg, or Rockwood in Sydney, or the large, beautiful, classical Jewish cemeteries at Weißensee in Berlin or Bracka Street in Lodz, or the hundreds more that had mysteriously appeared on the European urban landscape during the course of a century and, increasingly, in the countryside as well between 1800 and 1900 — would demand serious attention. So too would national cemeteries and burial places all over the world, from Washington, D.C., to the gathering of the communist elite cadre in Shanghai — all of these constituted new, selfconsciously crafted communities of the dead.
Further excavation might reveal in each of these cities the ruins of something else having to do with the dead: buildings in the Romanesque, Tudor Gothic, neoclassical, or some other historical style beneath which were the outlines of high-tech furnaces that bear a remarkable resemblance to steelmaking ovens found in other excavated industrial sites. Great — unbelievable — luck in the exploration of Woking, near London, would turn up intact a modest building with an overly large chimney looking like an early Industrial Revolution ironworks, in which the British Cremation Society incinerated its members before the far grander facility at Golders Green was built in 1902. Perhaps these ruins would be rightly interpreted as crematoria, but that would be difficult at many sites because their designers had intended to hide what happened there. The temple- like structure above the ground dedicated to the living was meant to disrupt the image of a factory for the destruction of bodies that the regenerating furnaces below ground suggested.
In fact, the whole matter would be puzzling: nothing like it could be found in any late-18th- or early-19th- century sites; mountains of evidence from the graveyards of almost two millennia before would have borne witness to the fact that Western Europeans had stopped cremating their dead well before the year 1000, and much earlier in most places; there are no identifiable cremations after that as there had been in Neolithic, classical and northern medieval sites before that time.
And finally, our archaeologist would find — assuming that weather and water had not eaten away at the stones — millions of names on gravestones and tens of thousands on very large, unprecedented, name- bearing monuments. If the excavation were of the western European countryside or the Gallipoli peninsula, the battle lines of the almost forgotten Great War would be traceable through individual names and lists of names. Our explorer might even come upon the ruins of the Vietnam Memorial. The AIDS quilt would have disintegrated, although perhaps some photographs might have survived. Perhaps the millions of names of the Jewish dead would have survived on some list: at Yad Vashem or at smaller national sites. There would be names everywhere.
All this would be startling to our imagined archaeologist. Between the mound and stele at Marathon and the first national cemetery at Gettysburg there had been nothing like this. Names would be relatively scarce in the churchyards of 1750 or 1800, but in the civilian cemeteries excavated from 1900, they would be everywhere. Each of these developments, literary sources might suggest, was the result of some problem solved (an excess of urban bodies, hygienic considerations in the context of new medical knowledge) or of some new ideal or belief or taste ( democracy, nationalism, death understood as sleep in beautiful surroundings, neoclassical aesthetics). And interpretations built on this sort of evidence would not be wrong.
But I invite my reader to take a broader view; to take the new sites from 1900 as seriously as we take ancient and early Christian archaeology in our effort to understand the slow decline and eventual assimilation of one civilization by another. Something momentous has happened. The ruins I am imagining do more than reflect views about death; they are evidence for the social and cultural work of the dead in our era and other eras.
I want to make clear that I am not being delusional by claiming that the dead do work, in the sense that a physicist would understand the term :“weight lifted through a height,” displacement of a mass over some distance in the direction of a force. Diogenes had a point: the dead — or in any case their bodily remains — can do nothing because they are nothing. They cannot even lift a stick to fend off beasts. Consequently, it would seem that they could not do the far more demanding work I have assigned them. With the exception of ghosts and other unquiet spirits — that is, with the exception of the not- quite- dead or the differently dead — the dead as represented by the dead body are dead. They therefore do not work ( or play) in the space and time of our world. This is the fundamental fact about them; it is the meaning of the universal great divide between life and death.
These are my subjects only in the ways in which they affect how we regard the really dead, the remains of the dead. All of the dead, including the not- quite- dead, are different from us, whatever else they might be. It is precisely because of this that they are central to making culture, to creating the skein of meaning through which we live within ourselves and in public. The history of the work of the dead is a history of how they dwell in us — individually and communally. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics and time. It is a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead — again, I will be speaking primarily of the dead body — with meaning. It is really the greatest possible history of the imagination.
In any given instant, the living may well be able to give an account of their beliefs about where, who or what the dead are, or what death is, or how the dead might operate in this world or some other: roughly speaking, “attitudes toward death” or “religious beliefs” or “beliefs about the dead.” But the power of bodies is remarkably independent of views of this sort. If this is the case, it might seem more appropriate in our disenchanted world to speak not of the work of the dead but rather of the living: we — not the somehow revenant dead — are the ones doing the real work. Point taken. Let me therefore be clearer. I am offering a social history of what real living people in the depths of time — and especially from the 18th century on — did with and through real dead bodies, and a cultural history of what their acts meant and mean to them.