Caesar’s Death’s Head
and The Hidden Face of Defiance
Police-officers
tell us that it is very difficult to make a prostitute confess anything
concerning her _souteneur_. Thus,
Rosa L., whom her 'Alphonse' had often threatened to kill, even putting the
knife to her throat, would say nothing, and denied everything when the
magistrate questioned her. Maria R., with her face marked by a terrible scar
produced by her _souteneur_, still
carefully preserved many years afterward the portrait of the aggressor, and
when we asked her to explain her affection she replied: 'But he wounded me
because he loved me.' The _souteneur's_
brutality only increases the ill-treated woman's love; the humiliation and
slavery in which the woman's soul is drowned feed her love." (Niceforo, _Il Gergo_, etc., 1897, p. 128.)[i]
Here are some of the details we
find in the description of Caesar and his wife Imoinda: cutting of the throat,
production of a violent sign to be seen by others, the persistence of love in
an act of cruelty, silence, and slavery.
This is what we expect to find as the background to the appearance of
bloody wounds, threatened murder, and even murder in sexual crimes, and what
the sexologists (Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebbing, etc.) of the fin de siècle and on through to World
War II confirmed: not just the violence itself, here mostly against women, and
in this instance a prostitute, but also the claims of love both by the
perpetrator and his victim. They deal
with mental phenomena—symptoms, syndromes, cases—that they name after literary
figures, the Marquis de Sade for sadism and
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch for masochism.[ii]
This report, whether or not it is
accurate as a fact about particular persons, reminds us of several key aspects
of a psychohistorical approach to history: (1) passions roused by events or by
misperception of events can be more persuasive than the truth observable by objective
spectators; (2) the passion known as love is rarely if ever a romantic
attachment and desire roused by noble generous and caring relationships but
deep mental aberrations that recapitulate and reactivate dysfunctional primary
relations between infants and mothers, thus passing from generation to
generation trauma experienced in archaic times, even when there may be gaps of
centuries or more between exacerbating circumstances; (3) the dialectic of
sadism-masochism forms only part of the tension that binds two types of persons
into a vicious circle of abuse, humiliation and anxiety; (4) the capacity for
self-delusion is great and can become contagious, affecting other contiguous
persons not originally part of the earlier traumas or irritations; (5) groups
based on shared child-rearing practice and experience of similar abusive events
may reinforce one another’s irrational needs to deny, to project outward and to
introject rationalizations, fabulations into art, literature and drama, and
self-balming dreams, discourses and cultural acts of charity or sacrifice.
It is sometimes now explained
that such phenomena result from “hard-wiring” of the brain or genetically-coded
connections between immediate impressions of compassion and impulses of
empathy, as though brains were merely computers or superficial organs
determined by archaic evolutionary needs for survival. My argument—that of psychohistory—is opposed
to such evolutionary, deterministic, one-directional explanations: the
mind-brain-hormonal-nervous system should be seen rather as complex,
reversible, dynamic and subject to historical change. In this I follow Lloyd de Mause who explains:
While
adaptation to the natural environment is the key to genetic evolution,
relationship to the human environment is the key to psychological evolution, to
the evolution of “human nature.”
Psychogeneis is also the key to cultural evolution, since the range of
evolution of childrearing in every society puts inevitable limits upon what it
can accomplish—politically, economically and socially.[iii]
Nevertheless, going further and
against some of the determinism inherent in this kind of psychohistory, which
also manifests in paradigmatic schemes of coordinated chronological schemes of
types of childrearing, characteristic social structures and relationships, and
moral attitudes—certain individuals and small groups have been historically
capable of limiting the pains, the reverbatory disturbances of nervous energy,
and generating alternating discourses, gestures, ritual processes and aesthetic
codes. Indeed, as deMause himself notes,
citing other researchers in the field, “early environment actually change
genetic expression.”[iv] While Jews in general have developed
processes for absorbing the shocks of persecution, expulsion and mass murder
and turning them into narratives of salutary suffering, engaged performances
with God and the Law, and so constantly re-inventing their immediate
circumstances, languages and customs into manifestations of midrashed
continuity in the midst of cosmic shock and dispersion;
Crypto-Jews have sometimes been
able to manipulate the surface signs of submission, conversion and
self-loathing to maintain secret stories, dreams and rituals of continuity,
interpreting the anxiety, hurts and losses as superadded proof of their
superiority over those former co-religionists who avoided the worst of the
persecutions or escaped from the Lands of Idolatry and reconnected to existing
rabbinical communities; Marranos, seemingly less certain of which identities to
take as true for themselves or to display to the external and always hostile
contextual society, have also donned masks and duplicitous faces, but done so
by constantly stripping away surfaces and replacing them with newer versions of
themselves.
When the young narrator, her
mother, and some other women hear of Caesar/Oronooko’s capture and the murder
of Imoinda,
We
ran all to see him; and, if before we thought him so beautiful a Sight, he was
now so alter’d, that his Face was like a Death’s Head black’d over; nothing but
Teeth, and Eyeholes (p. 63)
Instead of the beauty of his face
and total appearance which had so caught their eyes and filled their minds with
romantic thoughts about him, they now perceive a grotesque ugliness—he is
reduced to a skull, virtually empty, with glowing white teeth and empty
eyes. He has been stripped of more than
the handsome exterior, however. When he
tells his story, and tries to evoke sympathy for the sacrifice of his pregnant
wife as a means of saving her from a fate worse than death, the women,
especially the young, impressionable Aphra Behn, feels at once disgusted by
what he looks like and what he has done, as well as drawn towards his noble
character and the courage with which he endured the ignominy of slavery and the
rudeness of the rabble settlers.
Yet a final sustained portrait of
the grotesque follows, just prior to the narrator’s pledge of loyalty to the
memory of the Royal Slave:
He
had learn’d to take Tobaco; and when he was assur’d he should Dye, he desir’d
they would give him a Pipe in his Mouth, ready Lighted, which they did; and the
Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire,
after that, with an ill-favoured Knife, they cut his Ears, and his Nose, and
burn’d them; he still Smoak’d on, as if nothing had touch’d him; then they
hack’d off one of his Arms, and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the
cutting off the other Arm, his Head sunk, and his Pipe drop’d; and he gave up
the Ghost, without a Groan, or a Reproach. (p. 64)
In
this passage, the dismemberment becomes so over the top that one cannot easily
focus on its cruelty or the suffering the victim endures stoically; rather, one
think of a bear cartoon skit in which the Monty
Python Circus players enact a knight who tries to stand up fighting as one
by one his limbs are cut off. The
grotesque here, in other words, virtually falls into the comic; in the sense of
comedy explained by Henri Bergson as the transformation of the organic into the
mechanical. Moreover, it seems—because
it is the slave who requests a pipe and attempts to keep puffing while his body
is mutilated—as though he were both an automaton beyond pain and a puppeteer
directing his own body’s demise.[v]
The
women spectators are appalled and condemn the cruelty, inhumanity and rudeness
of the white male colonists.
Nevertheless, the procedure of execution does not end with the killing
of the rebel; it carries on into the final stage of the public show:
They
cut Caesar in Quarters, and sent them to several of the chief Plantations. One Quarter was sent to Colonel Martin, who
refus’d it, and swore he had rather see the Quarters of Bannister, and the
Governor himself, than those of Caesar, on his Plantations; and that he cou’d
govern Negroes without Terrifying and Grieving them with frightful Spectacles
of a mangl’d King. (pp. 64-65)
Aside from Martin, who denounces
the procedures of this dreadful execution, it must be assumed that the other
three portions of the corpse were accepted, indeed, welcomed by other
planatation-owners as a useful lesson to display before their African
slaves. Yet this man’s words are useful
to examine, as the words have in our own time been laden with Romantic/Gothic
overtones and lost some of their ancient and medieval significance and also
diluted by the development of cinema and computer graphics, not to mention
contemporary horror novels.
Look at terrify, grieve, frightful, mangled and even spectacle.
Terror. Perhaps we have regained some of the sense of
terror with the advent of daily and world-wide acts of terrorism, including in
response a War on terror, although many politically-correct post-modernist
commentators have mocked former US President George W. Bush’s terminology as
inappropriate (as they also did his use of the term “crusade” at the beginning
of that war). As an acute version of
fear, terror from terrere carries the sense of something
that deters, a bugaboo, an apotropaic face or other sight—a horrid spectral
vision of the underworld or the other side, something so frightful it can kill
or at least astonish (turn to stone) the victim. In other words, it is not that the pain
inflicted on Oroonoko was terrifying, but that his quartered corpse was sent
about to terrify the other slaves into submission.
Grief. Here the grieving is what causes the sense of
oppression, burdening the one who sees the sight with fear, causing grievous
injury to their minds and hearts. That
is, the root sense here is not that of lamentation and mourning over a loved-one’s
death, which is how the primary sense has shifted for our common usage—we now
expect a surviving spouse, for example, to go through a natural process of
grieving to feel intensely the loss of the partner, to then return to a more
normal equilibrium after a relatively short period of time, learning to accept
the death, to reintegrate into the community of relatives and friends, and thus
not fall victim to despair. But for Col.
Marin and the narrator, the basic meaning of grief lies in its ability to frighten, oppress and terrorize. It is in itself more than a hardship or a
loss: it is a disappointment, a cause for rage and hopelessness. In the passage above, the bloody quartered
part of Orooonoko’s body both terrorizes and grieves the slaves who see
it.
Fright. Like fear, to which the word is etymologically
related, fright comes on suddenly: it is a shock, a destabilizing apparition, a
horrible sight, as it is the condition of fearfulness evoked. The terrors of the night, the horrors of the
walking dead, the grief of seeing a normal human body reduced to a bloody,
mangled pulp causes this state of extreme helplessness.
Mangle. Perhaps known as a machine to press and smooth
cloth, the mangle, the word as a verb and then as an adjective describing what
it has done, is more ambiguous in its origins.
To be sure, it came to mean that which mutilates, disfigures, defaces,
crushes, lacerates, tears and makes unrecognizable, but the earliest sense of
mangle comes from the name of a war machine,
magnanon, a device drawn by a pulley to crush down the defenses and the
defenders of a fortified place. Yet the
Indo-European root lies in in the putative *mang-
which means to embellish, to deceive, to create a false image of
something. Thus to mangle something
carries within itself the destruction of the familiar and the production of the
frightfully illusory. The “mangl’d King”
no longer looks like a human being, has lost all its natural vigor and cultural
charm, and become a broken and crushed mass of mere flesh. This is the spectacle of terror, fright and
grief.
Spectacle. It is a show—an organized public display—of
something marvelous, frightening and wonderful, but also a sight so dazzling
and fearful it tends to blind, to confuse and to disorientate the
spectators. When used as a synonym for
eyeglasses, then in the plural especially, spectacles enhance and correct
vision.[vi]
[i] Cited
by Havelock Ellis in Studies in the
Psychology of Sex, vol. III “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain,
The Sexual Impulse in Women” (London: 1927-1933), Project Gutenberg.
[ii] Here one
thinks of the old quip: A masochist cries out again “Hit me, hit me, please, I
beg you, give me pain” and the sadist replies with a sardonic grim, “No, I will
not give you the satisfaction .”
[iii] Lloyd
deMause, “Childhood and Cultural Evolution” The
Journal of Pscyhohistory 26:3 (1999) 649.
[iv] DeMause, “Childhood
and Cultural Evolution,” 648. Whereas
many popular versions of evolutionary genetics stress the role of changes to
the DNA code brought on by radical shifts in environmental conditions, lading
towards the selection of mutations that prove effective in favoring species-survival
in the group over long periods, this kind of psycho/cultural evolution examines
the all-important expression of existing factors in the genetic codes, so that
small but decisive developments can occur rapidly—in less than a generation
sometimes but certainly within historical time—and also be further reversed,
inhibited or even reversed. Emotional
states triggered by and influencing additional hormonal activity can and do
stimulate these changes in expression of the genes and allow for individuals
and small groups what amounts in some instances to almost wilful control over
their human environment. This does not
mean, of course, that the participants in these small-scale psychic events are
aware of or understand correctly the nature of their actions—giving greater
control over education to parents who are relieved from public duties and thus
encouraging closer emotional bonding, for instance, or choosing sensitive young
men and women for long-term activities that preclude or delay child-bearing
into early adulthood and lead towards more mature and “intrusive” (that is,
“involved”) parenting in subsequent generations. These are features to be found more often in
Jewish communities than in the surrounding societies. In terms of persecutory times, those Jews
forced into more constant surveillance of their children, greater care of
marital choices, and protection of some offspring rather than others are
select-bearers of the hidden traditions leads towards the high number of key
personality traits rare or random even among predominantly Jewish
populations. Not all these personality
traits are positive or deemed necessary by later generations, as the parental choices
would necessitate taking untrustworthy children—in the sense, that they are too
excitable, too open in their speech, too drawn towards public church rituals—to
be dedicated as monks, nuns or soldiers and thus out of the household as soon
as possible. It would be an interesting
line of research to follow the careers of those converso individuals who grew
into violent persecutors of their former Jewish families and neighbours to see
what at what age they felt themselves to be abandoned by their parents and cast
from indulgent, warm, nurturing families into harsh, cold over-disciplined institutions.
[v] It is
also almost inevitable that the reader is drawn to Jonathan Swift’s poem on the
undressing of a decrepit old prostitute who, returning from her nightly rounds,
removes her gaudy but raggedy clothes, then her wig, false teeth, wooden leg
and other bits and pieces that made her appear to her clients as an attractive
sexual object. Swift’s main purpose is
to satirise the society of spectacle and superficial beauty, his secondary
purpose—and then the strength of the poem—is to cast the satirical gaze on the
guardians of society who reduce women to this awful state, exclude any other
remedies than whoredom, and exult in their moral superiority over her. Here, of course, Behn’s focus is more
ambiguous and tenuous: since it is not so simple a matter as contrasting the
stoic dignity of Oroonoko to the lack of compassion in the
executioner-torturer—particular in the use of “an ill-favour’d Knife,” one that
is dull and rusted and so meant to increase the pain and humiliations of the victim. The black victim almost is allowed to attain
tragic grandeur but the keying of his loss of control to the status of his
tobacco pipe blocks that generic avenue of approach,
[vi] Or as the joke goes:
“Have you heard about the man who fell
into the glass-grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself?” This to a great extent is what Oroonoko did
when he asked for his tobacco pipe and stood silently at the centre of the show
of his dismemberment was enacted.
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