Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  But the soldiers scalping their enemies' bodies were not thinking of their own deaths. In his novel The Thin Red Line, James Jones wrote of an "imagination problem," the problem being that American soldiers were unable to imagine their own deaths. One critic describes a scene in which the soldiers of Charlie Company are confronted with a report of the desecration of a fellow soldier's corpse, describing how "every soldier could imagine— but could not endure imagining— himself as that abject figure. And so each resorts to some mental strategy to magically forestall undergoing such a ritualized physical humiliation." Most avoid the fear of death by resorting to an ever-increasing brutality. "Obviously," one character remarks, "the only way really to survive in this world of humansocalledculture we had made and were so proud of, was to be more vicious, meaner and more cruel than those one met." It is precisely in acts of savage brutality that these American soldiers avoid facing their own mortality, as if, by becoming themselves inhuman, they can avoid the fate awaiting all humanity. The war trophy— the skull collected by Natalie Nickerson's boyfriend— no longer reminds the American sailor that he will die. It now assures him instead that it is the Japanese soldiers who have died and will continue to die.

  The Renaissance tradition offered up one skull that was not anonymous, that had an identity, that most famous of skulls, Yorick's. Hamlet's soliloquy on the former court jester is an act of reclamation, rescuing Yorick's skull from a pile of anonymous bones and giving it a name and a history. In the process, Hamlet transforms it from an abstract memento mori into the trace of a specific person.

  The most famous line in the soliloquy—"I knew him well!"— would find its way into a literary work that came out of World War II tackling the problem of war trophies. Winfield Townley Scott's poem "The U. S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull" details the process by which a head becomes a skull. Skinned, gutted, dragged behind a ship in a fishing net, and finally bleached white in the sun, the skull in Scott's account evolves until it is "made elemental, historic, parentless by our Sailor boy," a sailor who cannot now, after all that work, say, "Alas! I did not know him at all."

  A poet and literary critic by trade, Scott fell into journalism

  during the war just to make ends meet, and in the process he saw much of the depravities of World War II firsthand. In the years following, he came to Hamlet as a way to comment on the barbarism of the Pacific conflict. Addressing a skull is always a confrontation with an uncanny otherness; in this case, the confrontation is with an other not divine but racial. Scott's poem uses the trophy skulls to reveal the always problematic relationship between human and dehumanized enemy. In the context of war, the iconographic figure of death itself is no longer as alienating as the more radical otherness of an enemy from another race.

  Mostly Scott's poem is about work. Five of its stanzas call attention to the human material and labor that must be employed to create an anonymous symbol of death. The skinning and the scraping, the months in the fishing net as the salt water works the bone: The death's head takes time. Inverting Hamlet's graveyard scene, Scott's sailor does not reclaim a nameless skull; he effaces an individual life, with all the violence present in such an act. Scott turns an abstract symbol that causes us to reflect on our own mortality and relationship with God into a meditation on brutality and savagery, one in which the savagery is projected onto the victim as an inhuman animal, explicitly as a means of avoiding that personal confrontation with death at the heart of the memento mori.

  Published after the war, Scott's poem was a condemnation of the brutalities he had seen, but Crane's Life magazine photo, published during the heart of the war, had a different set of intentions. Life magazine was not quite outright government propaganda, but it definitely fulfilled an agenda in its presentation of the war. In particular, the magazine editors used captions and commentaries to guide their readers in how to read its photos. A May 1945 photo essay titled "The German People" used captions to create a specific narrative of the recently defeated Germans and their national character. The opening image of two teenagers and an older man is accompanied by a caption that reads, in part, " These faces are unhappy but hard and arrogant," in case the viewer finds their expressions inscrutable or enigmatic. This kind of ideological coaching, reducing the manifold possibilities of the photo to a single meaning, was an editorial hallmark of Life magazine.

  But the encounter with the memento mori is always pedagogic. The entire concept of the memento mori is marshaled around its command function: Remember that you will die. In the seventeenth century, this function was made particularly clear in emblem books like George Wither's A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Modern, published in 1635. Wither had come into possession of a book of emblems by the famous Netherland engravers, the van de Passe family but found their captions lacking. After writing a few new verses for some of the images, Wither was encouraged by friends to "moralize" the rest. Skulls appear prominently in nearly a fifth of the forty or so illustrations, and in almost every case, they are accompanied by variations on the same senti ment. "The rage of Death, which thou shalt see, Consider it, and pious be," reads one, while another reads, "Live, ever mindful of thy dying, For Time is always from thee flying."

  One might expect this kind of pedagogic message in de La Tour's work as well. The iconographic significance of the penitent Magdalen was fairly well established by the time de La Tour produced his series of paintings on the theme during the 1640s. In addition to the skull, the paintings all feature the same set of symbols: the mirror indicating vanity, the burning flame symbolizing the soul in the process of purification, the chin resting on the hand to signify melancholic reflection, and so forth. To a seventeenth-century audience well versed in iconographic references such as these, the paintings would convey a familiar narrative, that of a former prostitute who contemplates her own mortality as she abandons the world of the flesh in favor of divine salvation, someone who'd taken messages like Wither's to heart. But the power of de La Tour's paintings may lie in the way they refuse the simple didacticism of an emblem caption: By focusing on the moment before the conversion, de La Tour refuses the look of gratified salvation, offering instead the enigmatic look of melancholy, which stands in mute tension with the pedagogic aim of the memento mori tradition.

  What de La Tour's paintings and Wither's emblems suggest is that the memento mori tableau, however striking, cannot speak for itself and must be spoken for. Ralph Crane's photo for Life magazine appears to say something definite, something striking,

  F I G U R E 7 : Mary Magdalene with a Night Light ( 1630– 1635), Georges de La Tour LOUVRE, PARIS, FRANCE/GIRAUDON/ THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  but exactly what it says depends on the caption underneath it. When the photo first ran in Life, it was accompanied by the following text:

  When he said goodby two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: "This is a good Jap — a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach." Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo. The armed forces disapprove strongly of this sort of thing.

  It is difficult, in such a short paragraph, to get a clear idea of exactly how Natalie Nickerson felt upon receiving the skull or what was going through her mind as Crane took the photo; all we have of her mental state is the photo itself and the sentence "Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo." But, as with the caption of the "unhappy, hard, and arrogant" Germans, we're told how to read the image: The Japanese soldier is a "Jap" and thus unlike Nickerson's "big, handsome Navy lieutenant." Beyond this, the caption suggests a glibness, a cavalier attitude toward the skull, an editorial jocularity that is not reflected on Nickerson's face. If anything, she seems melancholic; she seems more like de La Tour's Magdalen than the magazine editors suspect.

  The disjunct between the jocularity of the caption and the detached quality of Nickerson's expression is str
iking. It's not clear, especially after the space of so many years, to what degree the photo was staged. The tableau seems unmistakably arranged to mimic the memento mori paintings, but it's difficult to surmise how much influence the photographer had on Nickerson's facial expression. If her look was a natural response to the human skull before her, it would seem to conflict, however subtly and momentarily, with the seeming callousness with which she reportedly named it Tojo. Her expression, perhaps, marks an authentic confrontation with death more than a celebration of one more enemy soldier dead. If Nickerson's look was staged, it suggests that Crane as a photographer was more interested in mimicking the memento mori images of artists like de La Tour than he was in setting up an image that would bear out Life's ideological aims.

  Crane's photo, perhaps surprisingly, provoked significant outrage, not just among Life's readership but among the armed forces as well. For the remainder of the war, high-ranking officers, such as the army's judge advocate general, Major General Myron C. Cramer, made repeated, if futile, attempts to force commanders in the field to put a stop to the practice of collecting war trophies. Genuinely offended by the indecency of the Life photo and aware of the violation of the Geneva Convention regulations that it represented, these few voices of reason also knew full well what an opportunity the photo provided for Japanese propaganda. It was for the latter reason, and not for the desecration of an enemy corpse, that Natalie Nickerson's "big, handsome Navy lieutenant" was ultimately reprimanded.

  More outraged, of course, were the Japanese. On August 10, Crane's image was sent to Tokyo from Berlin, and the national response was shock, anguish, and vitriol. Crane's photo was reprinted throughout Japan as a symbol of American barbarism, most notably in Japan's largest daily, Asahi Shimbun, which editorialized:

  This is truly the picture in question that has starkly revealed true American barbarism. . . . We, as Japanese, find it difficult to bear looking at it. A prayer spontaneously wells from our hearts— a prayer of blessing for the spirit of that Japanese war dead. The next instant we feel indignation pressing fiercely within our breast. Even on the face of the American girl can be discerned the beastly nature of the Americans. Let us all vow the destruction of American savagery from the face of the earth.

  Despite the unsettling nature of the image, I'm not sure I see "the beastly nature of the Americans" inscribed on the face of Natalie Nickerson, any more than I see in her the glib chauvinism that the Life caption suggests. Having spent years looking at this photo, I'm still not sure what one could read in her expression other than a private and inscrutable confrontation with death, an experience that is not easily translatable into nationalist rhetoric of any kind.

  In 1933, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin predicted that the caption of a photograph would become increasingly important; without it, he wrote, "all photography construction must remain arrested in the approximate." In the case of Crane's staged portrait of Natalie Nickerson and her Japanese skull, Benjamin's assertion seems undeniable; it is the caption that works to shoehorn a photo's otherwise ambiguous content into a stable ideological message. Divorced from captions and bombastic propaganda, an image defies simple, didactic meaning— arrested in the approximate, the image of Natalie Nickerson offers instead a silent and unspeakable confrontation with the dead.

  Part Three: An Indelicate Eros

  ·nine·

  The Mother of Pornography: Agatha

  Medieval artists had very little use for breasts. In an age when the body was mainly the site of sinful pollution, and women in particular were considered inferior and not worthy of much attention, breasts were fairly maligned in much of early Christian art. When medieval painters did depict women, they portrayed them as boyish, their bodies nearly indistinguishable from those of their male counterparts. For the most part, women and men were distinguished on the basis of dress rather than physique. So for hundreds of years, breasts simply didn't enter into the iconography of the Christian church.

  The lack of breasts complicates the depictions of one saint in particular, Agatha, who is noteworthy precisely for her breasts. A noble-born woman traditionally said to have lived between 231 and 251, Agatha early on proclaimed her intention to remain chaste. One suitor in particular, a lower-class Roman prefect named Quintianus, grew frustrated by her resistance to him, denounced her as a Christian, and turned her over to the authorities. Hoping to break her of her chastity, Quintianus had her sent to a brothel, but even imprisoned there, she resisted the advances of the clients. At this point Quintianus had Agatha tortured, including the excision of her breasts, which, as it turns out, were miraculously restored with Saint Peter's help, so Quintianus finally had to have her executed. The story of the breasts became a central part of the story, though, which is why she's often depicted holding them on a tray or plate before her— if she once withheld her body from suitors and rapists, she now seems to offer it freely to us.

  Like many saints, Agatha is defined iconically by her torture. But while her story was well known, it was rarely depicted in Western art. For being one of only seven female saints mentioned in the canon of the mass and patron of Sicily, her image is astoundingly rare. She wasn't portrayed with anything like the frequency of Catherine and her wheel, Sebastian and his arrows, or George fighting the dragon.

  But then, it's hard to tell Agatha's story in pictures if you're not accustomed to depicting breasts. When breasts do appear, as in the case of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, they often signify nurturing, which clearly isn't applicable to the obvious sexual violence in the Agatha legend. And so, when she is depicted, she's often shown with her breasts already removed and with gaping wounds oozing blood on her chest.

  So it's easy to understate the effect, in 1520, of Sebastiano del Piombo's depiction of Saint Agatha. Of course, by the Renaissance, breasts had reentered the picture, but Sebastiano's painting was among the few to represent Agatha's mutilation in such graphic terms. It remains unsettling, I think, not just because of its violence but because it so clearly borders on the pornographic.

  F I G U R E 8 : The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (1520), Sebastiano del Piombo PALAZZO PITTI, FLORENCE, ITALY/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

  To invoke the word pornography opens up a whole hosts of issues that, once raised, will not go away. Not the least of which is what constitutes pornography itself— some five hundred years after Sebastiano's painting, most legal and cultural definitions still use some version of Judge Woolsey's famous comment: "I know it when I see it."

  In its modern form, pornography emerges with the printing press. Erotic images and literature long predate Gutenberg, but only with the press did they become cheap enough to produce images and texts that could be, in a word, consumed. And so the primary distinction between the erotic and pornography, we could say, was one of class, age, and gender. Mature, upper-class men had long had what Walter Kendrick calls "secret museums" and considered themselves "responsible" enough to pore over their collections of erotica and read classical authors like Ovid. It was primarily the lower classes, children, and women who they feared could not keep control of themselves in the presence of such material. Put another way: The printing press allowed for the invention of pornography because it finally put a certain form of representation into the hands of those perceived to be too immature to handle it. So, historically speaking, a better definition of pornography might be: "I know it by seeing who sees it."

  The fear about these vulnerable groups— the poor, children, and women— was that they were not sufficiently developed, morally, intellectually, or aesthetically, to keep control over their bodies. They are prisoners of their senses. To see pornography is to act, to be unable to keep from acting, and to act antisocially. Educated men, it was thought, could view pornography and restrain themselves, but these lesser social groups could not.

  Curiously, in the early 1980s, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon inverted this traditional hierarchy, asserting that it was the men, not the women or children, who
could not control themselves when confronted with pornography and who could not help immediately setting about raping women or committing other undesirable actions. For this particular form of second-wave feminism, the groups were reversed, but the relationship between pornography and prisoners of their senses and desires remained the same. It is the same debate that reappeared with regard to heavy metal in the 1980s and again after the massacre at Columbine High School with regard to violent movies and video games. The difference between us and them is that they have no control over their senses, and because of this they are dangerous and cannot be trusted with images that you and I can safely view and enjoy.

  Of course, the story of Agatha and her tormentor Quintianus immediately presents itself as an allegory for this very problem. Agatha is aristocratic; she is pure; she deals with the abstract questions of the mind and the spirit. Quintianus is base; he is captivated by his senses; he sees the beautiful Agatha and cannot retrain himself. He must act. And he is, quite significantly, lower class— the class distinction in Agatha's story is not unimportant— the lower classes are dangerous precisely because they are uncontrol lable and cannot control themselves. Agatha, resisting this lascivious, lower-class gaze, seems to me an allegory for a larger culture, perhaps the church itself, resisting or at least trying to resist the onset of pornography.