Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture PDF
Preview Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture
Losing Our Heads Losing Our Heads Beheadings in Literature and Culture Regina Janes a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London new york university press New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2005 by New York University All rights reserved A version of chapter 3 appeared in Representations© 1991 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from Representa- tions,Number 35, by permission of the University of California Press. “Cuisine Bourgeoise” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a di- vision of Random House, Inc. Edward Gorey, “Number Nine, Penwiper Muse,” from Amphigorey © 1972 by Edward Gorey. Reprinted by permission of Donadio and Olson, Inc. Copyright 1972 by Edward Gorey. All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise indicated. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Janes, Regina, 1946– Losing our heads : beheadings in literature and culture / Regina Janes. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8147–4269–3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–8147–4269–6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–8147–4270–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–8147–4270–X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Beheading—History. 2. Beheading in literature. 3. Executions and executioners in art. I. Title. HV8552.J34 2005 306.9—dc22 2005006791 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Dale, who prefers that people keep their heads, and Charles, who can spot a Salome dancing in the remotest cathedral window. Contents Preface ix Prologue: Head Matters 1 1 Introduction to a Beheading 10 2 Bouncing Heads and Scaffold Dramas 41 3 Power to the People: His Pike and Her Guillotine 67 4 At the Sign of the Baptist’s Head 97 5 African Heads and Imperial Décolletage: Beheadings in the Colonies 139 6 Epilogue: Craniate Origins and Headless Futures 176 Notes 197 Index 243 About the Author 255 vii Preface Why should anyone, especially nice people like you and me, be interested in a topic so repellent as beheadings? Why should anyone, especially sophisticated people like you and me, regard so widespread a cultural practice as beheadings as repellent? About 160,000 years ago, homo sapiens idaltu separated heads from bodies.1 Homo sapiens sapiens still does. Disagreeable, fascinating, hor- rific, laughable, headless bodies and bodiless heads are all around us. Tim Burton, whose Sleepy Hollow (1999) sent heads flying, claims severed heads create unease that one cannot put one’s finger on.2 Garrison Keil- lor begins the millennium with a snowboarding beheading in Lake Wobe- gon where “we don’t have many beheadings.”3 Snoopy horrifies himself by accidentally beheading a snowman. Decapitating murderers horrify the rest of us, populating our prisons, our films, and our fictions. Horror or comedy: decapitation owes its current characteristic shudder to the placement of violence within the modern ideology of the body. Decapita- tion, like other mutilations, makes visible a violence that the west has been campaigning to make invisible since the seventeenth century, when our body-based ideology begins to emerge. We have faith in the materiality of the body and believe in its rights. We suspect that body is more important than soul, and we know “that bodily being [is] most real, most pressing, most undeniable.”4Our selves are bodied, and among the body’s rights is protection from violence. Cen- tral to heroic, aristocratic, or military society, violence, circumscribed, shifts to the margins of commercial, democratic, domesticated society, where the borders are to be defended. It does not stay there, however, but leaks back in, dominates popular media, decimates neighborhoods, de- stroys nations, and serves up the week’s headless corpse in the news. A practice to be repressed, controlled, “disciplined,” rather than fostered, encouraged, and enjoyed, violence is what sex used to be—a dirty secret ix
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