Consider Phlebas …

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life.

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Whether it is with the corpses on the walls of catacombs in Palermo or the intricate assembly of bones in the ossuary in Sedlec, there has always been an urge to make present and embody reflection upon mortality; to contextualize our life experience by understanding it as finite. However, much modern Western experience of death and dying has been relegated to the environment of the hospital and the counsellor, a situation that Philippe Ariès calls ‘invisible death’ (Ariès 2008: 559–601). Memento Mori – somewhat ancient reminders of mortality – force us to reflect upon not only the pervasive nature of death but also specific moments in history and conflict when death becomes omnipresent. Here ‘Memento Mori’ aims to reveal such a work of memory through performance as it seeks to represent a moment most feared but increasingly obscured.

Attempts to counter the concealment of death are being undertaken in a number of academic environments, including the Centre for Death and Society at The University of Bath, United Kingdom, established in 2005, and the interdisciplinary Centre for Life and Death Studies at Durham University, UK. Beyond research environments, specific facilities for the clinical and forensic study of dying, death and decomposition, most notably the ‘body farms’ of the University of Tennessee, USA, are places where thoughts and acts on death have been allowed.

Common to many studies on death and dying are ritual events, the affirmation of existence through acts of commemoration, which, though differing widely in detail across cultures, are often broadly similar in terms of their significance and purpose. It is in the funeral that death's performative nature becomes most apparent. Just as the resounding ‘Consider’ of T. S. Eliot's sailor Phlebas calls us towards the inevitable, the post-death ritual offers a moment where participants and onlookers consider not only the specifics of one person's death but the realization of all our deaths. Death inaugurates a space in which conventional reality breaks down, where history and memory come to the fore, set against the usual turmoil of future achievement and efficacious time-management. This space of death might be understood therefore as providing us with the same sort of temporal displacement as is effected by performance, for such staged spaces equally disrupt and reorder our encounters with the everyday.

In this issue there are themes that recur through each article, and like any post-mortem, the introductory articles start with issues relating to the determination of facts: of what we assume we know from what we see. This appears key to any understanding of death and dying, for it presents the dilemma of wanting to know about death (causal detail) while not wanting to know death (proximity to the dying and ‘dealing with’ the inert). Everyone is involved in the interstice between theatre and reality (pp. 4-13), and in relation to performance – and the event of death – the difficulty of determining the status of the witness is doubly apparent. Theatrical metaphors abound in relation to death, the theatre being a space where issues of absence and presence are at a premium (pp. 140-147). In funereal environs there are uncomfortable realities where we become caught somewhere between being voyeurs and reluctant audience, while in other places and cultures performance encounters may be more an unwitting participation in an enactment event, be that in the grand cemetery of Port-au-Prince, Haiti (pp. 41-47) or a night on the island of Janitzio, Mexico (pp. 23-31). Issues of ritual fidelity or performance transgression, such as suicide, occur at a liminal point between tradition and taboo (pp. 32-40). They raise questions of individual identity that collapse back into a cycle of history more concerned with effects, and perpetuity, than with affect and ephemera.

Such problematic positioning of self in relation to others raises another theme that appears in much of the work here: the value afforded the body, as object, in presentation. The dead begin a new relation with the living where displays, or glimpses, of the cadaver – be it museum or hospital – bring the parallels between the living and the dead back into view. From the theatrical unmasking of the body to the careful storage of the dead, through to ideas of embalming and plastination, our remains are afforded new narrative ‘lives’ for future audiences (pp. 48-57 and pp. 58-65). Curating death today is arguably about the problem of propriety ever since the museum became a place for activity and mediated interactivity. How might we encourage a visitor or spectator to play with the dead, with their art and artefacts?

It is worth emphasizing the number and variety of images that accompany the articles: death demands visual representation – as words fail – yet also resists it; social codes and ethical limits always regulate what can be displayed. We may wish to impose respectful images, periods for silence to honour the dead, but death is often more active and vocal in other strange ways and languages that maybe we have yet to learn or contend with (pp. 131-139). Consider also the local (and very vocal) outrage expressed concerning the embalmed body of the vagrant ‘Diogenes’, kept in a secret compartment in Robert O. Lenkiewicz's library (pp. 110-122). In direct contrast we can reflect on the veneration given to saintly artefacts of the body (pp. 90-99) or even the disturbing poignancy of the condensing breath of John Crews (pp. 81-89). The body, or things of the body, appear to be simultaneously both horrific and fascinating. As objects of contemplation – true memento mori – the body's remains call upon ideas of collective memory (and collective destiny) and individual resistance. Perhaps death can be an active and exciting display after all? But aren't such confrontations with death and dying in works of art and performance just disturbed titillations or the manifestations of morbidity? Can they really show us anything of ourselves other than glimpses of the future, through the lens of the past?

In his extended essay, The Gift of Death, on Jan Patočka, responsibility and death, Jacques Derrida writes:

Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given,’ one can say, by death. It is the same gift, the same source, one could say the same goodness and the same law. It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible. (1996: 41)

It is perhaps in this manner that performance is ‘delivered’ too, allowing collective witness of the turmoil of the individual. Which is perhaps why the last theme that runs through many articles involves some form of ‘personal’ aspect. Performance as ‘a rehearsal for death’ (pp. 72-80) is necessary for everyone when in attendance, in proximity, to death, the dying and the dead (pp. 100-109 and pp. 123-130). Perhaps it is the fear of revealing the personal that prevents people from wanting to get too close to death and makes them leave it as the work of others. To do so is to deny death, to deny us our ultimate ‘singular’ performance, but strangely this last performance is not really for us. It is for our audience, for those who stay behind after the curtain has fallen.

One author here asks, ‘What is it that resembles, that migrates so, across the years from one body to another?’ (p.22), recalling the expression of a dead friend in the face of his brother. Performance itself is an endless migration of resemblances, of echoes, that call us to affirm our lives, so particular and ‘irreplaceable’, and thereby understand our responsibilities to each other in this life and, for that matter, in this death, even if it is in that performance over there.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Issue Editors would like to thank Steve Allison at The Design Stage for his excellent work and Sandra Laureri for her clear and efficient management of this issue. We also express our thanks to Richard Gough for his help and advice at crucial moments. Thanks also to José Antonio Padilla Pedroza at the National Museum of Death, Aguascalientes, Mexico, for photographic permissions.