Hydriotaphia, "The sensible rhetorick of the dead; Kitzes, Adam H
Studies in English Literature, 1500 - 1900
01-01-2002
Hydriotaphia, "The sensible rhetorick of the dead
Byline: Kitzes, Adam H
Volume: 42
Number: 1
ISSN: 00393657
Publication Date: 01-01-2002
Page: 137
Type: Periodical
Language: English
In
Philosophy where truth seemes double-faced, there is no man more
paradoxicall then my self; but in Divinity I love to keepe the road,
and though not in an implicite, yet an humble faith, follow the great
wheele of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles
or motion from the epicycle of my own braine.
I love to lose
my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo. Tis my
solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved
aenigma's and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation and
Resurrection.
-Religio Medici1
Thomas Browne's
published works are no "well-wrought urns." They are more like the urns
he writes about with such interest in Hydriotaphia (1658): subject to
corruption, hard to pin down, and seemingly animated by some spectral
agent that carries them along an undetermined trajectory. Or perhaps
they are closer to the Sphinx-another of Browne's favorite figures-in
that they mumble something to us, but what that is nobody can fully
make out. He did not always prefer things this way, however. The
Epistle to the Reader in Religio Medici suggests that he published his
text in order to undo the corruption that his writing had already
suffered: "This I confesse about seven yeares past, with some others of
affinitie thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at
leisurable houres composed; which being communicated unto one, it
became common unto many, and was by transcription successively
corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse. 112
Nor is his writing entirely inscrutable; far from it, in fact. But to
the extent that it does make sense, it verifies a principle at which he
ultimately arrives: any act of communication tends to mean what it says
less and less over time.
Just what is the relation between
this process of decay in language and the paradoxical statements Browne
is known to have been so fond of composing? In this essay, I address
this question by arguing that, over time, Browne came to regard them as
two aspects of a single problem. I also hold that in Hydriotaphia,
Browne's attitude toward paradox went through substantial
revision-substantial enough to produce real changes in his public
persona. His notion of paradox evolves from a rhetorical technique that
performatively demonstrates the major precepts of his arguments about
reason and nature (as we see it in Religio Medic, to the presence of
irresolvable contradictions that lie at the basis of any society united
by language. The discovery Browne makes in the Hydriotaphia is that
every society is subject to corruption and ruin, not from an external
cause but from the material that constitutes it in the first place.
Thus,
while Religio Medici may be the most personally revealing testimony
Browne gives about his writing, it only tells part of the story. The
passages cited at the beginning of this essay characterize Browne's
early attitude toward his own writing and thought. Both demonstrate his
skepticism about human reasoninevitably, our most basic principles of
argument and reason give way to an abyss of complications.3 This is
developed further in sections 13-6, where he implies that even the
principle that the universe corresponds to a reasonable order can only
be taken on faith. He assures us, "Natura nihil agit frustra, is the
onely indisputable axiome in Philosophy," without demonstrating the
truth of it-a crucial distinction, since the true and the axiomatic are
never the same things.4 Instead, he merely asserts it, and the axiom
may turn out to be no more than a conventional statement that natural
philosophers need to agree upon. Even when he compares God to an
excellent artist, he tempers it with conditional phrases: "Now this
course of Nature God seldome alters or perverts, but like an excellent
Artist hath so contrived his worke, that with the selfe same
instrument, without a new creation hee may effect his obscurest
designes."? Browne's God is hardly the transcendent clockmaker who
steps outside the universe after setting it in motion. Rather, this is
a God who may occasionally intervene to touch things up. And how
often-seldom? When? How do we know?
Under these circumstances,
human reason can only posit but never fully comprehend the order that
governs the natural world and that is taken as the expression of God's
(artistic) genius. To take his own metaphor from section 16, we can
read natural objects as God's hieroglyphics, but we do not necessarily
understand what they say.6 Given these conditions, the best recourse
would be to accept the authority of already established religious
institutions. If human reason can never fully represent the order of
the world, the conventional order of the church can provide a
reasonable substitute. As he says in section 3 about his sympathy for
pilgrims and friars, "for though misplaced in circumstance, there is
something in it of devotion."' While their expression may not be
correct, their intention is honorable and more or less acceptable given
the alternatives.
In Hydriotaphia, where Browne focuses on
human ceremonies directly, he pushes this conclusion to an "oh
altitudo" of its own. As he understands it there, the very faculty of
reason itself stems from the fictional apprehension of a world that
resists such an apprehension all along. The fact that we have rational
or systematic thought turns out to be based on a verum-factum
principle-there is truth because it has been made; without giving shape
to the world, without building it, there is no possibility of
discussing it in terms of reason. This is nothing like the
contemplative attitude he had taken in the Religio Medici, where he
suggested that when we say that there is a world, we merely recognize
and appreciate an artistic order that precedes us and exists so that we
may contemplate it.8 In Hydriotaphia, if a world may be said to exist,
it is only because we have the capacity to say "This is the world." No
longer is there any assurance that our description of it constitutes
some mimetic re-presentation of a pregiven order; if there is any
appearance of order in the world, it literally has been dug up from the
ground. Thus, when he asserts that "All customes were founded upon some
bottome of Reason, so there wanted not grounds for this," we ought to
be more than a little suspicious of what he is trying to get across.9
In Hydriotaphia, the bottom of reason is no longer reason itself, but
something that has more to do with aesthetics.
In order to
explain this idea further it will be helpful to explore how Browne
understood the creation of artificial products, specifically funerary
urns. Indeed, if Hydriotaphia merits further consideration, it is
precisely because in it Browne foregrounds questions about the
production of what might be called the rhetorical artifact, and by
studying the human-made object he is able to address what compels a
society to fashion the world the way it does. What interests Browne
about the urns is that their production also is the production of
artifacts as rhetorical objects. It is not just that human beings build
urns, it is that by building them they create meaningful objects
capable of delivering certain messages. But the urns' effectiveness is
limited, if not altogether short circuited, by the stages that precede
their actual production. Strictly speaking, they are not products of
reason. They are the products of preliminary ideas that lie wholly
outside of reason, and they are composed of material that never quite
does what reason expects of it. Thus Hydriotaphia also discusses the
breakdown of their capacity to function as rhetorical objects. Like the
earthy substance from which the urns are composed, this capacity too is
subject to decay.
Browne's interest in the decay of
communication is present from the outset. As early as the dedicatory
epistle, he treats the urns as disruptive agents and questions the
extent to which they are readable. The immediate occasion for
Hydriotaphia is the discovery of forty or fifty urns in a field at Old
Walshingham. Right away, Browne wants to treat them as speaking
vessels, contrasting them to the great Roman Hippodrome urns, and
noting their sad, sepulchral voices-it is almost as though they have
addressed him directly and that his essay is a response to their
summons. At the very least, as remnants of human artistry, they ought
to be saying something.
At the same time though, the urns bear
a resemblance to certain statements so violently torn from their
original context that, while one may be able to determine what they
say, one remains at a loss as to what they might mean. He acknowledges
that they have intruded unexpectedly from what he had assumed to be
their proper domain. 10 It is this sense of surprise that inspires
Browne's essay as much as anything else. As he makes clear, what
prompts a response from him is the fact that they have surfaced for at
least a second time: "We are coldly drawn unto discourses of
Antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things,
or make out learned Novelties. But seeing they arose as they lay,
almost in silence among us, at least in short account suddenly passed
over; we were very unwilling they should die again, and be buried twice
among us."I They are not significant as historical artifacts, but as
testimonies to a kind of repetitiveness in history.
Still,
even if they stand for repetition within history, it is a repetition
that paradoxically remains unpredictable and erratic. The past intrudes
upon him in a way that breaks down our experience of temporality as a
well-ordered process. As he makes clear in the opening two paragraphs
of his introductory epistle, the course of human events is governed by
the unexpected: "But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he
is to be buried? who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are
to be scattered? The Reliques of many lie like the ruines of Pompeys,
in all parts of the earth; And when they arrive at your hands, these
may seem to have wandered far, who in a direct and Meridian Travell,
have but few miles of known Earth between your self and the Pole."12
Unlike the historical narrative he had mapped out in his earlier
writings, which posited that the world would only last six thousand
years, the urns represent a narrative in which events may recur in a
peculiarly irregular, perhaps random order.
The implication is
that the urns communicate by means of paradox. As the epistle suggests,
what makes the urns fascinating is that their double lives refer to at
least two historical contexts. While Browne maintains that they do have
expressive value, the statements they make are multiple: "We cannot but
with these Urnes might have the effect of Theatrical vessels, and great
Hippodrome Urnes in Rome; to resound the acclamations and honour due
unto you. But these are sad and sepulchral Pitchers, which have no
joyful voices; silently expressing old mortality, the ruines of
forgotten times, and can only speak with life, how long in this
corruptible frame, some parts may be uncorrupted; yet able to out-last
bones long unborn, and noblest pyle among us."13 For all his interest
in mute voices that speak without being heard, the rest is hardly
silence. If anything, it is chatter. Significantly though, what results
from this pluralization of "voices" is not only a series of competing
discourses about their significance, but also their decay. By conveying
not forgotten times, but "The ruines of forgotten times," Browne
suggests that in fact the urns are not miraculous vessels that can
resurrect the past itself. If the historical object harbors several
voices at once, none of what they express ever is wholly decipherable.
14 The fact that they have partially survived the relentless process of
corruption only adds to the sense of alienation he feels when
confronting their more obscure aspects. For Browne, the urns seem to
have an emblematic significance, but that significance turns out to be
none other than their inability to function properly as emblems of
anything.
Browne makes a similar point in Fragment on Mummies,
a text that serves in some ways as a companion piece to Hydriotaphia.
The fragment is largely concerned with the difficulty of understanding
historical remains. As he suggests, this difficulty arises not because
they have been destroyed, but because just enough of them have survived
to convey some sense after all. We falter at historical understanding
not because the past is wholly nonsensical, but because it does make
sense, albeit only in part; while we can comprehend its remnants in
part, we have no way of knowing what else lies beyond our grasp. The
image of limited familiarity and communicability is underscored by a
second image of Time and his sister Oblivion, who sit on the Sphinx and
the pyramid, and who stand for the fundamental inaccessibility of the
ancient civilization for moderns. The Sphinx prompts Browne to describe
a different kind of conversation in the final section, one marked by
extreme confusion, and which attributes our sense of history not to
memory, but to oblivion itself: "History sinketh beneath her cloud. The
traveller as he paceth amazedly through those deserts asketh of her,
who buildeth them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he
heareth not."15 For Browne, history, like the bodies and clay pots he
writes about in Hydriotaphia, is decomposition. Any aspect of
familiarity is tainted by a radical alterity, an effect that makes the
apparently familiar all the more deceptive in the end.
This
paradox ultimately matters because the other side of Browne's project
in Hydriotaphia is to discuss the formation of communities by
speculating on the public functions the urns held for the people who
built them. The living and dying engage in a number of discursive
exchanges with one another, and a great deal of his essay is an
elaboration on how these took place. His frequent emphasis on the
element of spectacle in several funeral rituals indicates that he
recognized a connection between them and other kinds of theatrical
performance. This is most explicit in the case of the Indian Brahmin
who burned himself alive in Athens and declared "In his last words upon
the pyre unto the amazed spectators, Thus I make my se!fe Immortal"16
The Brahmin calls out to the audience with all the awareness that he is
being scrutinized by them, almost as though he wanted nothing less than
to stage death itself. But the account only makes clearer a theme that
can be detected among all the stories that Browne touches upon, namely
that death is a scene. While the dying priest throws himself into the
fire of immortality, the living convert the event into a performance
done for their own benefitor rather, illumination.
Similarly,
the purpose behind burial is not to place everything so deep that it
cannot be discovered. Unlike "the truth" that lies behind the
intellectual obscurities that so fascinate Browne himself, the corpse
is placed in such a way that it will show itself, at least every now
and again. It very much functions as a public record, and in this
sense, the urns, like the stage shows that accompany funeral events,
work as a kind of letter to posterity: "Even such as hope to rise
again, would not be content with centrall interrment, or so desperately
to place their reliques as to lie beyond discovery, and in no way to be
seen again; which happy contrivance hath made communication with our
forefathers, and left unto our view some parts, which they never beheld
themselves." 17 The point to burial is never to dispose of the corpse
for eternity, but just the opposite. The body is laid to rest precisely
in order to ensure that it will continue to communicate, whether by
happy contrivance (as is the case with the Norfolk urns) or a more
deliberate method.
In fact, what is most significant about the
urns is that they form the basis for a system of symbolization within
the culture that produces them. If Browne has been only marginally
concerned with the Norfolk urns themselves, he nevertheless is absorbed
by their capacity to figure forth. This process of figuration works on
several levels. In the opening lines of chapter 2, he alludes in
passing to the "Solemnities, Ceremonies, Rites of their Cremation," an
indication that the dead are inscribed within a network of symbolic
signification. 18 Equally important though, Browne notes that through
the activity of producing the urns, or burying the dead, nations
involve themselves in the production of figures. As he indicates when
describing the differences among the vessels (in the same passage):
"Not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described."19
The urns function as figurative representations of the nations that
produced them; their presence serves as testimony to the society that
has placed them there-although this is not least because so many
nations also store other records of their world alongside them. Again,
in chapter 2, he discusses the way nations combined such things as
combs, plates, and musical instruments with their urns, as though
constructing a microcosmic rendition of their culture, and he concludes
that "Now that they accustomed to burn or bury with them, things
wherein they excelled, delighted, or which were dear unto them, either
as farewells unto all pleasure, or vain apprehension that they might
use them in the other world, is testified by all Antiquity."zo
All
this interest in urns as figures occurs, to be sure, with an eye on the
living and their own needs, as much as on the dead and theirs. Toward
the end of chapter 3, after an extended meditation on the various uses
that the living have for their ancestors' remains, Browne describes the
Roman practice of erecting monuments by the main roads. Their function
is to serve as "Memorials of themselves, and memento's of mortality
into living passengers. . . The sensible Rhetorick of the dead, to
exemplarity of good-life, first (my emphasis) admitted the bones of
pious men, and Martyrs within Church-wals; which in succeeding ages
crept into promiscuous practise."21 Even our material substance can
function on a didactic level. Again, we sense that what is of greatest
importance is not what they were examples for but the fact that they
could have been used as examples at all, as though these ancient
activities were close to the origin of the very practice of
exemplification, a device that Browne himself very much relies on in
his own essay. If he seems to borrow a great deal of terminology from
the fields of rhetoric and poetics to describe these various customs,
it is because he recognized that the emergence of the two practices
somehow went hand in hand with the different methods of burying the
dead.
As it turns out then, there are two elements that
characterize the human attitude toward death. These are the capacity to
recognize in advance a relation to death that is neither directly
experienced nor entirely false, and the capacity to fashion the
material world into an object that represents that first recognition,
and that explains ourselves to ourselves. Incidentally, one can explain
the difference between human beings and other animals, such as the ants
and bees that he considers at the end of chapter 1, by noting that it
is only the former which possess hands capable of building machines
that can represent death. The difference then does not consist in the
ceremonial element of death (which may turn out to be a function of
certain biological features), but in the ability to produce objects
that convey another level of significance to this seemingly more
primary activity.
In this regard, we can observe that the
manufacture of urns amounts to an early form of craftsmanship that even
animals who seem to mourn for their dead do not produce, and Browne
takes great pains to emphasize it as the activity that defines human
beings as such. It is enough to note on a strictly lexical level the
number of times he points out that the graves were made, contrived, or
developed according to a particular mode, throughout the section where
he discusses various nations' funerary customs. On its own this seems
like a superfluous detail to note even once. However, Browne points it
out several times for a particular reason: the ability to manufacture,
to radically reshape the earth as it is originally given, becomes the
faculty that defines humanity as such.
This defining element
of humanity can also be understood as a poetic faculty. That is to say,
it needs to be understood as poiesis, although in a much more radical
sense than the one in which Sir Philip Sidney had used the term in the
Apology for Poetry. Whereas for Sidney, poetry is considered
essentially as a linguistic matter that derives from the Greek term for
making things, Browne emphasizes that any human-made object can be used
in a process of figuration, whether the object is linguistic or not.
However, while an aspect of figuring forth may be extended to all modes
of human production, there remains an element of contingency to it. If
the craftspeople in Browne's study can be understood as poets, they
deliver neither a golden world, nor even a brazen onetheirs is
definitely a world of earth. Human artistry at its original state in no
way corresponds to the artistry of God, as Browne had given it in
Religio Medici. While God, understood as artist, produces a world he
has already planned in advance-and planned reasonably-the human simply
produces. An object brought forth by technical means may transform the
space one lives in, and it may help that space to correspond more
closely to the needs of the producer-but none of this is to say that it
explains the world as an ordered creation. This would partly account
for such profound differences in the funeral ceremonies across
different nations. They share a sense of arbitrariness that reminds an
observer that any one set of conventions could just as well be
otherwise.
In the absence of reason, manufacturing is
conditioned by the imagination. The production of urns corresponds to
an already imagined relation between life and the source of life.
Because of the role imagination plays, Browne can account for the use
or avoidance of cremation among nations by discussing the place that
fire held within various systems of thought: "The Chaldeans the great
Idolators of fire, abhorred the burning of their carcasses, as a
pollution of that Deity"; "The Aegyptians were afraid of fire, not as a
Deity, but a devouring Element, mercilessly consuming their bodies, and
leaving too little of them"; "The Scythians who swore by winde and
sword, that is, by life and death, were so farre from burning their
bodies, that they declined all internment and made their graves in the
ayr."22 As these moments suggest, the motivation for various customs
consists of primary beliefs that can be asserted, but not necessarily
explained-again, not reason, but "some bottome of Reason." Without
these first principles, the funeral ceremonies would not be able to
exist. But even with them, the ceremonies still are far from
apprehending the truth about the origins of life.
However, it
is difficult to say which event precedes the other: an image of an
afterworld that demands some response in the form of burial and ritual
or the mere occurrence of production that demands some sort of
narrative to account for it. It is at this point where Browne's
consideration of the urns arrives at a certain limit. On the one hand,
he accepts more or less on its own terms the notion that both the
monument and the ceremony can function within a community as a rhetoric
of exemplarity-the corpse can stand for a larger precept. Hence, in his
analysis of the apparent folly in various ceremonies, he repeatedly
identifies figures that serve a didactic end: "That they kindled the
pyre aversly, or turning their face from it, was an handsome Symbole of
unwilling ministration," and further, "Christians which deck their
Coffins with Bays have found a more elegant Embleme. For that he
seeming dead, will restore it self from the root, and its dry and
exuccous leaves resume their verdure again; which if we mistake not, we
have also observed in fures."23 The function of the urns is thus
twofold: systematically to inscribe the individual corpse within the
community's network of rules and regulations, and to maintain a certain
continuity among the various members of the community itself, wherein
any one member can identify with a larger group by virtue of this
customary bond. On the other hand, the superstition and folly that rest
at the foundation is not something Browne expects us to take lightly.
As he points out repeatedly, the foundation for the symbolic function
is itself dependent upon an imaginative apprehension of death-or
rather, an apprehension of the unapprehensible. As he writes toward the
end of chapter 4, "But all or most apprehensions rested in Opinions of
some future being, which ignorantly or coldly beleeved, begat those
perverted conceptions, Ceremonies, Sayings, which Christians pity or
laugh at."24 This constitutes one of the more profound contradictions
central to the formation of civil societies, as their very structure is
grounded on a concept that can only be misrepresented.
As it
turns out, the verse poets-he mentions Dante and Homer by name, and
perhaps one could even add Socrates to this list-provide the most
necessary service. While he does not claim to accept their writings as
truth and even goes so far as to question the reasons behind their
portraits of the afterworld, he also realizes that they convey an image
of death that lies beyond the opposition of true and false. In fact,
this very attempt at depicting the afterworld repeats what occurs at
the moment when the nation is founded: "Nor were only many customes
questionable in order to their Obsequies, but also sundry practices,
fictions, and conceptions, discordant or obscure, of their state and
future beings."25 What exactly is fiction in this case, and what does
it have to do with the constant oscillation between reason and
superstition that hitherto has been dominant in the work? Why does he
bring the term into play? While he does use it just before turning to
the poets' conceptions of the afterworld, he nevertheless suggests
something more profound than a mere oral or textual narrative.
Instead,
fiction implies a perceptual relation to the world that demands the
production not only of discursive narratives, but also of mechanical
products that would serve as props. What marks the human condition is
an awareness of a void that is at once both unforgettable and
unknowable-and which we depend upon for life itself, but cannot enter
without extinguishing ourselves. The void created by the thought of
death operates in a manner similar to the images of fire that occur at
the beginning of the treatise, offering us the image of truth that we
can behold, even if we can never fully grasp it. Fiction is the
condition predicated on the need to explain, or account for ourselves,
to ourselves. But even before the explaining starts, the production of
fiction has already occurred, to the extent that physical objects are
already being built. Put in more graphic terms, it is the recognition
of this void space within ourselves that demands some sort of filling
in, covering up, or burying. While the act of building urns as figures
may represent a desire to fill this void, we end up missing it all the
same. Thus Browne identifies the manufacture of urns, and the
production of the community that accompanies that process, as the
response to a primary fiction. In this sense though, reason never fully
separates itself from fiction, since it is fiction itself that serves
as the injunction to provide ourselves with reason.
Browne's
list of vain follies and superstitious customs, therefore, is not
simply an entertaining digression but the study of a process that he
perceives as basic to the formation of cultures. By attempting to
ascribe a certain value or meaning to their existence, cultures
appropriate the material world for personal ends. In the same gesture
of appropriation, however, there emerges a disproportion between matter
in its originally given state and the figurative value it receives. To
put it another way, the natural material is put to a use that exceeds
its original function, and while the handmade object receives a
figurative meaning, it is an entirely questionable meaning. The moment
the corpse obtains a cultural significance by being placed in an urn,
it begins to communicate, even to take on the characteristics of a
theatrical vessel, as Browne suggests in the opening epistle; however,
it does so with a "voice" that is not its own but the ventriloquized
voice of those who fashioned it.
At first glance, this
disjunction between the object and its cultural value only seems to
matter to Browne in cases where the body clearly has been violated. He
clearly is disturbed by more perverse activities-activities that
convert the bodies into profane instruments. Toward the end of chapter
3 he complains: "To be knav'd out of our graves, to have our sculs made
drinkingbowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport
our Enemies, are Tragicall abominations, escaped in burning Burials."26
The premise is shocking. By turning the skull into the drinking bowl,
or the body into soap, one confers a sense of usefulness onto the
corpse that neglects the human being's formerly transcendent value.27
In a slightly different sense, one confers a false value when using the
body as a symbol within an exchange system, an appropriation which can
only be described as an act of violence. In the last chapter, he
laments, "Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and
Pharaoh is sold for balsoms,"28 and in the Fragment on Mummies he gives
a fuller and far more acerbic description of the process: "But the
common opinion of the virtues of mummy bred great consumption thereof,
and princes and great men contended for this strange panacea, wherein
Jews dealt largely, manufacturing mummies from dead carcasses, and
giving them the names of kings, while specifics were compounded from
crosses and gibbet leavings. There wanted not a set of Artificers who
counterfeited mummies so accurately, that it needed great skill to
distinguish the false from the true."29 The mummy fragments-counterfeit
mummy fragments at that-instill a false symbolic value not once but at
least twice, if not more.
Still, it is never clear that Browne
resolves, or even feels he can resolve, the radical discrepancy between
the actual value of the substantial material and its so-called
figurative worth within the sphere of human commerce, even when he
turns to supposedly more sound instances. These instances turn out to
be more sinister than one might have suspected. Certainly, when he
discusses the rhetorical function of the virtuous Roman citizen, he
confronts this problem, as that body also takes on a function for which
it had not been designed and thus undergoes a violation. He returns to
it just as emphatically when he describes the Christian emblems, which
he does right in the midst of his analysis of the folly and
superstition governing human customs. Indeed, he seems to have this
problem in mind when he tries to explain "How the bulk of a man should
sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes. 30 While he observes that
fire can consume all but the lightest of material, the remark draws
attention to a radical discrepancy between ourselves and the stuff of
which we are composed. In the end, Browne never does resolve the
tension between the human tendency to manufacture the useful object and
the equally human tendency to convert the once living body into
supposedly useful objects as well. It is a disturbing predicament,
since an object usually does come alive insofar as it can convey
meaning to someone. But by turning corpses into figurative objects
and/or instruments, and by ascribing a value onto them, instead we
convert them into things that may be characterized by any number of
terms-useful, functional, limited, finite, dead.
In the middle
of chapter 3, Browne asserts that "The commerce of the living is not to
be trrnsferred [sic] unto the dead."3" The immediate context for the
remark is a reaction to individuals who plunder graves in order to
steal valuables that had been buried alongside the corpse, and who find
the most civilized forms of rhetoric to justify their barbarism. We no
longer should bury gold coins with the body, as they tend to linger in
the earth rather than travel to any world beyond. More important
though, the remark appears more or less at the midpoint of the essay,
and as the work unfolds the line becomes a thematic center as well: do
not incorporate the dead within the enterprises of the living, as it
amounts to an abuse of figuration. For once the body is subjected to
this process of instrumentation, nothing can be said to remain outside
it.
This last concern is crucial, since it indicates a certain
desire on his part to retrieve an aspect of the individual human that
could remain by definition inalienable-if indeed such a retrieval were
possible and not a vain desire that only emerges after it is too late
to do anything about it. For after all, even simply to identify the
corpse as corpse-to say, as it were, "This is a corpse"-is already to
impose a figurative meaning upon it. Even the most benign gesture
becomes a violation of the body in the name of a fictional public
order. By this consideration I mean to suggest that within Hydriotaphia
Browne meant to cast doubt over his own beliefs about the legitimacy of
any sort of ceremony as the grounds for a public order. In the
remainder of this essay, I would like to discuss how this doubt
manifested itself
Browne's political conservatism has been
accepted as an established fact. Religio Medici makes clear that in the
face of crisis he preferred the traditional authority and ceremonies of
the Church of England.32 Critics also have suggested that his writing
may have been engaged with political conflicts after all. He challenges
the belief in the imminence of the apocalypse-although he bases his
concluding remarks about the uselessness of mausoleums upon this
belief, he advises that the event will not occur for some time.33 This
has been read as a response to more radical positions, such as those of
the Fifth Monarchists. Likewise, at some point in his life his
fascination with funeral ceremonies probably indicated an opposition to
the Puritan rejection of ceremonies, implying that the Interregnum's
policy was in some way "abnormal." Achsah Guibbory argues that Browne's
emphasis on ceremony contained an oblique attack on the parliamentary
prohibitions of funeral rituals. She notes that "to have no rites at
all would place humans beneath the animals. The discovered urns remind
us of the universality of burial ceremonies, this `universal truth'
making it evident that the Puritan abolition of burial rites radically
disrupts and violates human practices that go all the way back to the
earliest recorded antiquity."34 Nevertheless, she concedes that for
Browne this is not enough for him to overlook their "vain, carnal, and
ineffective" nature.35 While writing Hydriotaphia, however, Browne
seems to have revised his position on both of these matters.
By
1658, Browne seems to have suspended his belief that an eschatological
event would ever arrive-such a belief imposes a narrative upon the
course of world events that no longer could be sustained except
provisionally. Even his contention that the world would end by the year
2000 may have looked like wishful thinking. As Christopher Hill points
out, while people did continue to anticipate the apocalypse during the
Interregnum and Restoration, the belief was not as widespread as it had
been before the Civil War, and its credibility was diminishing. By the
Restoration, apocalyptic prophets and enthusiasts largely were being
written off as delusional, or afflicted with melancholy.36 To be sure,
Browne does refer to the end of the world in Hydriotaphia, as he had
done in Religio Medici, and the reference is usually taken to mean that
Browne saw the apocalypse as an inevitable event. But in the very
language with which he expresses the argument, he suggests certain
misgivings about the truth of it: "But in this latter Scene of time we
cannot expect such Mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear
the Prophecy of Elias (That the world may last but six thousand years),
and Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methusela's of
Hector. "37 This is hardly unconditional affirmation of Elijah's
prophecy, but a gesture of ironic separation. Browne does not indicate
whether the phrase "latter Scene of time" should invoke the idea that
we are in the final stages of a single, universal performance, or
simply one more scene among a seemingly endless series. In the account,
it is ambition, rather than Browne himself (who incidentally considered
himself an opponent of ambition), that fears Elijah's prophecy. By the
same token, ambition feels only fear, not certainty, as if to suggest
no more than a nagging sense of doubt. The world may last but six
thousand years-then again, it may not. Browne does not refuse the
prophecy altogether, and he warns that complete rejection of an
afterworld is "The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a
man."38 Instead, he examines it as one more vain belief to be added to
the list that he had documented earlier. When he proclaims "Happy are
they, which live not in that disadvantage of time, when men could say
little for futurity, but from reason," it is apparent that he does not
include himself within that group.39
The admonition not to
build memorials for the dead does not necessarily indicate a
preparation for the end of the world then, and in fact the work ends on
a very different note, namely a refusal to participate in the rhetoric
of burial that he had been analyzing throughout. While Browne had once
represented his own publication of Religio Medici as an attempt to save
his text (and hence his public persona) from ruin, his writing after
Hydriotaphia suggests nothing of the sort. Browne does not offer much
commentary on the Restoration, and specifically he does not comment on
their ceremonies of execution. During his later years, his writing
indicates a desire for increased separation from the political sphere.
The final paragraphs of the Hydriotaphia already indicate that he would
prefer a life of privacy to one of active participation in public
affairs. The work ends by asserting the virtues of private life,
reminiscent of a passage from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
which describes "Those excellent Philosophers . . . [who] sequester
themselves from the tumultuous world . . . that they might better serve
God & follow their studies."40 As Browne's own final beatitude
makes clear, "Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so
with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the
next, who when they dye, make no commotion among the dead, and are not
toucht with that poeticall taunt of Isaiah."41 The difference is that
he does end up advancing a manner of living, but one which refuses the
world of politics and its culture of death. I do not mean to suggest
that Browne completely isolated himself from all civic affairs or from
contact with the rest of the world, which is not the case. He accepted
a knighthood from Charles II, and as a replacement for somebody else,
no less.42 These things aside, he seems to have become more concerned
with his domestic affairs and professional work than anything else,
ceasing to publish-perhaps refusing to write any more "literary" works
for the public eye.
The move is significant since the
Restoration government did occasionally make recourse to death as
public spectacle. The leaders of the Restoration did not hesitate to
make an example out of several leaders of the revolt. Ronald Hutton
describes the punishments for several regicides, following the
Convention of 1660: "The most important of these men were Cromwell
himself, Henry Ireton, who had led the army into Pride's Purge, and
John Bradshaw, the President of the regicide court. The Convention
resolved to mark the twelfth anniversary of the regicide by having them
taken from their tombs in Westminster Abbey and hanged in their
shrouds, before their skulls were impaled in Westminster Hall beside
some of the trophies of October."43 He continues, noting that the
bodies were put on display at Tyburn where they became a kind of
entertainment and object of sport. To be sure, Browne did not have the
gift of foresight-when he wrote Hydriotaphia, he could not have known
that the monarchy would return, much less that it would treat a select
number of its enemies with such contempt. The connection is strictly
coincidental, but it is an uncanny coincidence all the same. Perhaps
that is what makes their faint resemblance to Browne's admonitions in
chapter 3 so disturbing after all is said and done.
Browne
clearly has civil war on his mind as he writes his epitaph: 'Tabesne
cadavera solvat / An rogus haud refert."14 The lines from Lucan's
Pharsalia, which serve as the treatise's epitaph, are hardly a
reference to the hackneyed belief that omnia vincit mors; they refer to
the imperial army's massacre of the republican forces, a massacre so
devastating that Lucan writes these lines as an expression of despair.
It is difficult not to make a connection between these lines, which
seem to capture the failure of political opposition to lead to anything
but mass destruction, and the civil war that Browne himself had lived
through. If this is the case, then the political significance of
Hydriotaphia becomes a bit more clear: by the end, it serves as an
indictment of political struggle in favor of the solitary life, a
gesture which is often considered to be a sign of the failure of the
polis and the faith in rhetoric that the polis is supposed to engender.
If Browne's analysis of rhetoric in the Hydriotaphia is correct, then
retreat would have to come across as the only possible recourse. And by
placing distance between himself and the affairs of his day, by placing
himself beyond the conventions and opinions of his society, Browne did
his best to live the final years of his life as much as he could in
accordance with the position he loved best-para doxon.
FOOTNOTE
NOTES
FOOTNOTE
I would like to thank Heather Dubrow for reading and commenting on
earlier versions of this essay.
FOOTNOTE
I Epigraphs are from Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (Menston UK:
Scolar Press, 1970), pp. 11, 17.
2 Browne, Religio Media sig. Av.
3
See Rosalie L. Colie's Paradoxia Epidemics: The Renaissance Tradition
of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). Coke's book is
less concerned with Browne's writings than the title suggests;
nevertheless, her work lays out many problems of interpretation that
pertain to him.
Browne, Religio Media p. 30. Browne, Religio
Media p. 33. Browne, Religio Media p. 32. Browne, Religio Medici pp.
5-6. Browne, Religio Media p. 27.
FOOTNOTE
9 Browne,
Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or A Briefe Discourse of the Sepulchrall
Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk, The English Replicas (New York: Payson
and Clarke, 1927), p. 5.
10 Browne, Hydriotaphia, sig. A3. " Ibid.
12 Browne, Hydriotaphia, sig. A2-A2v. 13 Browne, Hydriotaphia, si .
A2v.
FOOTNOTE
14
It is hardly an accident that he wavers when trying to identify the
people who had created the Norfolk urns. Browne encounters this problem
in various other cases as well, and the effect can be irresistibly
funny: '[T]o what Nation or person belonged that large Urne found at
Ashburie (Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 29).
15 Browne, Fragment on
Mummies, in The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne. ed. Geoffrey
Keynes, 4 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 3:46972, 472.
FOOTNOTE
16 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 7.
17 Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 2-3. 11 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 14.
19 Ibid.
FOOTNOTE
10 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 23.
21
Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 46-7. 22 Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 7-8. 23
Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 55-6. 24 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 66.
25 Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 60-1, my emphasis. 26 Browne,
Hydriotaphia, p. 48.
27 See Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne: "A Man ofAchievement in
Literature" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962).
FOOTNOTE
28 Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 78-9. 11 Browne, Fragment, pp. 470-1.
30 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 43.
31 Browne, Hydriotaphia, pp. 41-2.
32 See Michael Wilding, Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English
Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
33
Browne departs from his contemporaries by pushing the date to around
2000, much further in the future than most contemporaries would have
argued (see Wilding, pp. 99-100).
34 Achsah Guibbory, "A
rationall of old rites': Sir Thomas Browne's Urn BuriaU and the
Conflict over Ceremony," YES 21 (1991): 229-41, 237.
35 Guibbory, p. 240.
FOOTNOTE
31
Christopher Hill, "John Mason and the End of the World," in Puritanism
and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of
the Seventeenth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp.
323-36.
37 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 73. 38 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 67. 39
Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 66.
FOOTNOTE
40 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Tudor
Publishing, 1927), p. 215.
41 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 82.
42
C. A. Patrides, "Above Atlas his Shoulders': An Introduction to Sir
Thomas Browne," in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. Patrides
(London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 21-52.
43 Ronald Hutton,
The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and
Wales, 1658-1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 134.
44 Browne, Hydriotaphia, p. 84.
AUTHOR_AFFILIATION
Adam
H. Kitzes is a doctoral candidate in the department of English,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is completing a dissertation
on melancholia and political conflict in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England.
Copyright Studies in English Literature c/o Rice University Winter 2002