Читать онлайн "Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia" - Finbow Steve - RuLit

But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vaults, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust: The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.[89]

The American poet Kenneth Rexroth argued that Thomas Vaughan’s mystical writings under the name ‘Eugenius Philalethes’ were exegeses on sexual methodology, particularly Tantric sex, in which the sexual fluids of the yogi and yogini cover the body of the initiate.

When the playwright William Congreve—author of The Mourning Bride—died in 1729, his mistress Henrietta Godolphin, 2^nd Duchess of Marlborough, had a realistic mannequin made, dressed it in Congreve’s clothes, fitted his death mask to it and slept with it, finally taking it to her grave in 1733. In the early eighteenth century, Sir John Price had his first wife’s body embalmed and placed in his bed. He, his corpse, and his second wife slept together. When his second wife died and he, too, had her embalmed and placed next to his first corpse bride, his third wife politely asked if he would not mind burying the bodies, after all, there could not have been much room.

The Marquis de Sade’s Justine, published in 1791, depicts various acts of necrophilia. After being split nearly in half by the engorged penis of a sexually-enraged donkey, a young woman, her intestines spilling out onto the floor, dies and her wound is penetrated by an onlooker while another licks the donkey’s excrement-stained anus.[90] In Juliette (1797-1801), a father rapes his daughter’s disinterred corpse and Juliette asks four men to sodomize her dead sister. In The 120 days of Sodom (1785), a man hires prostitutes and visits funeral parlours, standing over the coffins, he has the women masturbate him so that his semen splashes onto the dead bodies.[91] Another man sodomizes the body of a dead boy while kissing the buttocks of a dead girl. Yet another kills a woman while buggering her and then has vaginal sex with the body. A father copulates with his daughter while pretending she is dead. Corpses—fresh or putrid—are subjected to vaginal, anal, and oral sex, wounds are penetrated, and they are given enemas and raped with dildos. Foucault writes, ‘In Sade, sex is without any norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own nature, but it is subject to the unrestricted law of a power which itself knows no other law but its own; if by chance it is at times forced to accept the order of progressions carefully disciplined into successive days, this exercise carries it to a point where it is no longer anything but a unique and naked sovereignty: an unlimited right of all-powerful monstrosity.’[92]

As Blanchot would have it, Sade resides in the ‘anonymous tomb of his renown,’[93] his books are edifices of desire and death, his removed skull as psycho-scientifically studied as that of the poisoned skull of Gloriana in Middleton / Tourneur’s necrophiliac The Revenger’s Tragedy. Sade created the space of transgression, the architecture of a will to desire where human bones are used as dildos disregarding and destroying any laws of nature, any divine interference, and royal proclamation, he opened the ‘uncanny abyss of freedom without any ontological guarantee in the Order of Being.’[94] In Sade’s works necrophiliac ‘eroticism seems to derive from the transgressive and fetishistic nature of the act rather than from a specific focus on the dead body as a sexually arousing object… necrophilia is a graphic expression of the libertine’s megalomania, in that the dead body’s utter defencelessness allows him to enact the fantasy of total domination.’[95]

In the early 1860s, the British prime minister Lord Palmerston and his ministers attempted to protect Queen Victoria from her perceived ‘necrophilia’.[96] The object of this (mis)perception, the Albert Memorial—completed in 1872, ten years after the death of Victoria’s beloved Prince Consort—showed how the queen ‘pushe(d) to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such.’[97] She incarnated that desire in the elaborate Gothic structure standing 54m tall. The statue of Albert seated beneath and within the tower, transforms the memorial into a Gothic spaceship, Albert as pilot, a steampunk version of Giger’s Alien space jockey, surrounded by the marbled metaphorical continents, blasting into the Victorian fundament, on its way to sexual congress with its mammarian / vulval partner the Royal Albert Hall, transmogrifying both into the copulatory Victoria and Albert Museum with its thrusting towers and supple domes. Albertopolis, Victoria’s monument to her lover, is an area/arena of death and desire, a hallucinated topology of lack, absence, and death. The Albert Memorial’s phallocentric thrust embodies Victoria’s symbolic necrophilia in which Albert’s dead body metamorphoses into a giant gilded statue, a form of ‘Venus statuaria,’ love for or intercourse with a statue as seen in the agalmatophilia of Krafft-Ebing’s ‘story of a young man (related by Lucianus and St. Clemens of Alexandria) who made use of a Venus of Praxiteles for the gratification of his lust; and the case of Clisyphus, who violated the statue of a goddess in the Temple of Samos, after having placed a piece of meat on a certain part. In modern times, the ‘Journal L’evenement’ of 4^th March, 1877, relates the story of a gardener who fell in love with a statue of the Venus of Milo, and was discovered attempting coitus with it.’[98] An extreme form of Pygmalionism, Victoria’s symbolic necrophilia, her building of memorials, concert halls, and museums for her dead lover, enacts a ‘religious fetishism and phallus cult’[99] of Albert.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this symbolic necrophilia manifests itself in Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s L’age d’or, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Death (two bronzed inflatable dolls on a LI-LO in the 69 position), and the articulated/de-articulated dolls of Hans Bellmer, Katan Amano, Ryoichi Yoshida, Marina Bychkova and, more recently Sarah Lucas’s Black and White Bunny and Pauline Bunny. The sex doll’s inanimate concupiscence actualizes a symbolic necrophilia, its gradation of life-like appearance and touch made terminal and morbid by their thanatoid presence, their living absence. As dolls and robots become more human, the ‘uncanny valley’[100] effect develops in which humans feel a revulsion to the robot/doll, like the corpse, the doll/robot is both nearly human and fully human and neither. Both the agalmatophile and the necrophile transgress this ‘uncanny valley’ and transform this revulsion into desire. In 2007, Erika LaBrie took part in a commitment ceremony with the Eiffel Tower and became Erica ‘Aya’ Eiffel (she has had previous ‘commitments’ to her archery bow and the Berlin Wall), in an objectum (object sexuality) variation of Victoria’s symbolic necrophilia with the Albert Memorial. These acts strip ‘sexuality of all functionality, whether biological or social; in an even more extreme fashion than “normal” sexuality, (they put) the body and the world of objects to uses that have nothing to do with any kind of “immanent” design or purpose.’[101] Achilles, Dimoetes, Herod, Greenlee, von Cosel, Bertrand and even Queen Victoria show that ‘[t]here is no form of human sexuality which does not marginalize need or substitute a fantasmatic object for the original and nutritive object.’[102] Maybe the necrophile, symbolic or not, discovers that ‘the deepest chords of humanity are better struck through a dedicated artificiality than a simulation of humanness.’[103]