text:
Richard Hakluyt and Early English Travel

By Nandini Das
October 26, 2016

The Principal Navigations, Richard Hakluyt's great championing of Elizabethan colonial exploration, remains one of the most important collections of English travel writing ever published. As well as the escapades of famed names such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Nandini Das looks at how the book preserves many stories of lesser known figures that surely would have been otherwise lost.

In June 1586, William Harborne, the first English ambassador to the Ottoman court at Istanbul, wrote a letter. It was a tricky matter that he was trying to negotiate — the release of a few Englishmen taken prisoner by the Ottomans. The person who would decide the fate of the prisoners was Uluç Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor (or Beglerbeg of Algiers), himself a European Christian renegade, a Calabrian who had risen from the rank of an Ottoman oar slave to become the hero of the Battle of Lepanto and the Ottoman High Admiral. Harborne’s efforts to free the English prisoners had already made him deeply unpopular with the Beglerbeg, but Harborne was not writing to him. His letter was addressed instead to the Beglerbeg’s Eunuch and Treasurer, Assan Aga, and he wrote as one Englishman to another.
Referring to the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers in Egypt, “I trust you be ordained another Joseph”, he writes, “to folow his example in true pietie, in such sort that notwithsta[n]ding your body be subject to Turkish thraldom, yet your vertuous mind free fro[m] those vices”. In return, he would be assured of the favour of Elizabeth I and the gratitude of Harborne and his countrymen, “wherby both my selfe & others in that place having found you in all good offices faithfully affectionated, may in like case performe the like towards you, when & where you may have occasion to use me”. We do not know whether the prisoners received their freedom. Neither do we know what happened to Assan Aga, the recipient of that letter. He is only seen again, looking back at the viewer in full Turkish costume, in a chance portrait made two years later (ca. 1588) in a German traveller’s notebook. But thirteen years after Harborne wrote his letter, an English book would preserve at least a trace of who he was and who he used to be. Within its pages, a whole history of adventure, captivity, and transformation of a young man from Bristol, Samson Rowlie, son of Francis Rowlie, is condensed in a single terse headnote: “To Assan Aga, Eunuch & Treasurer to Hassan Bassa king of Alger, which Assan Aga was the sonne of Fran. Rowlie of Bristow merchant, taken in the Swalow.”
Harborne’s letter to the English renegade working behind the scenes of Ottoman government comes to us within the pages of what is perhaps the greatest collection of travel writing ever to be put together in any language, with a title as sonorous as the ambition behind it: The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over Land to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1500 Years: Divided into Three Several Parts According to the Positions of the Regions Whereunto They Were Directed; the First Containing the Personall Travels of the English unto Indæa, Syria, Arabia . . . the Second, Comprehending the Worthy Discoveries of the English Towards the North and Northeast by Sea, as of Lapland . . . the Third and Last, Including the English Valiant Attempts in Searching Almost all the Corners of the Vaste and New World of America . . . Whereunto is Added the Last Most Renowned English Navigation Round About the Whole Globe of the Earth.
In years that followed, The Principal Navigations would become, in many ways, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial ambitions, but it also serves as a unique record of figures and voices, of lives and experiences like that of Samson Rowlie, that could so easily otherwise have been lost. It seems appropriate to celebrate it this year, the 400th anniversary of the death of the man who compiled it almost single-handedly, and in the process helped to lay the foundations of a moderately-sized island nation’s rather disproportional global influence and presence in the furthest corners of the world.
Richard Hakluyt (1553–November 23, 1616), the orphaned second son of a Welsh family that had settled in Hertfordshire a few generations ago and supported in his studies through the benevolence of the state and guild scholarships, was introduced to the wonders of geography as a young boy through the chance glimpse of “an universal Mappe” lying on the desk of his older cousin and guardian. Later, Hakluyt would tell the story of how that impromptu lesson in the new advances in geography had ended with the Bible; his cousin and namesake, Richard Hakluyt Senior, had called upon the verses of Psalm 107, that speak of those who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” It was a claim that would have rung true for Hakluyt, growing up at a time when the expansion of European influence and trade across the world was well under way.
Elsewhere in Europe, a roll-call of great names that would become familiar to schoolchildren in ages to come had been accumulating for some time, from Marco Polo’s late thirteenth-century expeditions to China, to Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India and the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World in the late fifteenth century, but those figures and narratives were merely indicative of a significantly wider surge of global awareness within Europe. English participation in that great surge, however, as an older and wiser Hakluyt would come to realise, was piecemeal, under-funded, and disorganised. English seafaring expertise was not in short supply; if the exploits of Hakluyt’s contemporaries like Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Humphrey Gilbert himself were not enough to prove their credentials, the English victory over the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 — albeit with significant assistance from bad weather and bad tactics on the part of the Spanish — was testimony enough. But the Armada also illuminated the problems that plagued English seafaring and its future. The English fleet was an extemporary mixture of vessels, with the navy reinforced by hired and volunteer merchantmen and boats that were often better furnished and victualled than the notoriously ill-furnished royal ships. It was manned by sailors driven by very different incentives (from untried noblemen to privateers, merchant-adventurers, and fishermen volunteers), and led by men constantly fighting a losing battle against a seriously cash-strapped Exchequer and state support that either came too late or was absent altogether.
The Principal Navigations was driven by Hakluyt’s acknowledgement of that neglect. In his dedicatory letter to Elizabeth I’s Principal Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, he tells the story of how, during his only trip abroad to the French court in 1583–88 to serve as chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador, he had “both heard in speech, and read in books other nations miraculously extolled for their discoveries and notable enterprises by sea, but the English of all others for their sluggish security, and continuall neglect of the like attempts [. . .] either ignominiously reported, or exceedingly condemned.” Yet there were “few or none” who were able or willing to respond to that insult, and no one cared “to recommend to the world, the industrious labors, and painefull travels of our country men”. Hakluyt’s response, first in the folio volume of three parts in 1589 and then in the hugely expanded three monumental volumes of the second edition in 1598–1600, was meant above all to be a commemoration of those men. “For, which of the kings of this land before her Majesty, had theyr banners ever seene in the Caspian sea?” he asks rhetorically in that letter to Walsingham.
Which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor of Persia as her Majesty hath done, and obtained for her merchants large and loving privileges? who ever saw before this regiment, an English Ligier in the stately porch of the Grand Signor at Constantinople? who ever found English Consuls and Agents at Tripolis in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Balsara, and which is more, who ever heard of an Englishman at Goa before now? what English shippes did heretofore ever anker in the mighty river of Plate? passe and repasse the unpassable (in former opinion) straight of Magellan, range along the coast of Chili, Peru, and all the backside of Nova Hispania, further than any Christian ever passed, travers the mighty bredth of the South sea, land upon the Luzones in despight of the enemy, enter into alliance, amity, and traffike with the princes of the Moluccaes, and the Isle of Java, double the famous Cape of Bona Speranza, arive at the Isle of Santa Helena, and last of al returne home most richly laden with the commodities of China, as the subjects of this now flourishing monarchy have done?
Hakluyt’s paean of praise is quite an effective preview of the treasures in store within the pages of his volume, but what made The Principal Navigations both unusual and path-breaking was not just its immense range or its focus (Hakluyt promised in his introductory letter to the reader that he would “meddle in this worke with the Navigations onely of our owne nation”) —  it was its approach. When Hakluyt came to compile his collection, he had, essentially, two models to follow. The first of these were the books published by writers like the German geographer Sebastian Münster, who had built their reputations by compiling what Hakluyt rather waspishly dismissed in The Principal Navigations as “wearie volumes . . . of universall Cosmographie”. These were magisterial geographical descriptions of the world seen through the heuristic lens of Christian doctrine, which mixed classical and medieval authorities, often fairly indiscriminately, with snippets of data gathered from contemporary travel. The second was offered by European scholars like Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, or the English Richard Eden. These were men whom Hakluyt admired, who depended far more on current first-hand accounts (although often through translation and summary) than on the second-hand redactions of the old cosmographies. But they focused mostly on non-English sources. Beyond these texts in print, however, thousands of documents circulated in private correspondence at home and abroad, and in the papers of the English trading companies: a store of both foreign and English voices, fleeting, scattered, incomplete, immensely vulnerable to both time and human carelessness.
These are the voices that The Principal Navigations preserves. Hakluyt’s advertised aim, as he declares in his preface, was to allow “those men which were the paynefull and personall travellers [to] reape that good opinion, and just commendation which they have deserved, and further that every man might answere for himselfe, justifie his reports, and stand accountable for his owne doings, [he had] referred every voyage to [its] Author, which both in person hath performed, and in writing hath left the same”. “Whatsoever testimonie I have found in any author of authoritie appertaining to my argument, either stranger or naturall”, he notes, “I have recorded the same word for word, with his particular name and page of booke where it is extant.”
Among the pages of The Principal Navigations, therefore, we find texts like Thomas Stevens’ letter to his father. In the correspondence, Stevens — an English Catholic who escaped to Rome to train as a Jesuit priest, and became the first Englishman in 1579 to reach Goa — described what lay in store for sailors in the tricky passage around the Cape of Good Hope: “Their gums waxe great and swell, and they are faine to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the bodies becommeth sore, and so benummed, that they cannot stirre hand nor foot, and so they die of weaknesse, others fall into fluxes and agues, and die thereby.” A decade later, in his account of a journey to Benin in 1588 in search of the lucrative pepper trade, Anthony Ingram describes how after a long journey and despite collecting 64 serons (one seron is roughly 6–7 lbs) of pepper and 28 elephants’ teeth, they struggle to get the goods to the ship because the men are so weakened by “the disease of the fever”.
There are wonders: Dionyse Settle’s first person account of Martin Frobisher’s 1577 voyage to northeastern Canada records a glimpse of icebergs and a dead narwhal, whose single tusk, “of length two yards lacking two inches,” made the sailors conclude that they had seen a “sea unicorn”. There is the tedium of travel and tragedy: Stephen (or István) Parmenius’ letter to Hakluyt himself, dated August 1583, records his disappointment on arrival at St John’s Harbour as a member of the crew on Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to Newfoundland. “The trees for the most part are Pynes”, Parmenius wrote, and “all the grasse here is long, and tall, and little differeth from ours.” There were no wonders, not even a single mermaid — even though they were supposed to be around (Theodore de Bry’s America would depict them at St John’s Harbour a few years later). And the “island which your men call Penguin because of the multitude of birdes of the same name”? Well, grumbled Parmenius, “wee neither sawe any birds, nor drew neere to the land, the winds serving for our course directed to another place”. He was referring, of course, to the Great Auk — unrelated to the penguin, although it was the first bird to be called penguin — which was to become extinct by the 1840s due to overenthusiastic hunting by early explorers. When they had stocked up on supplies “in this place”, Parmenius hoped, “we purpose by the helpe of God to passe towards the South”, to the greater things “that are reported of those Countreys, which we go to discover.” But Hakluyt would have known the end of that particular story. Bookish, earnest young Parmenius was lost at sea just weeks after writing his letter, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself. Only two of the five ships had returned, carrying their own reports and those of the lost men.
Hakluyt organised such documents alongside more formal, historical accounts and reports, chronologically and in three parts according to region (so the first document is an account of King Arthur’s supposed conquest of Iceland in C.E. 517, and the last is Hakluyt’s own translation of a report on Spanish navigation that was provided by a captured Spanish pilot Pedro Diaz, dated February 1586). He also divided them according to type, under two separate headings: the “Voyages” themselves, and official documents, information, and correspondence connected with those voyages, the “Ambassages, Treatises, Priviledges, Letters and observations” that often supplement, interrogate, and occasionally contradict the stories told in the narratives that accompany them.
His first edition in 1589 ran to over eight hundred densely-packed folio pages. By 1600, the second edition had grown even bigger, running to over 1,760,000 words in three folio volumes and about two thousand pages. And this was not all. At the same time as he was collecting this huge expanse of material, others published their own accounts and translations with Hakluyt’s encouragement: Thomas Hariot, who wrote about his influence in The Briefe and True report of the new found land of Virginia (1590) and John Pory, who claimed that Hakluyt was “the onely man that mooued [him] to translate” John Leo Africanus’ History of Africa, were two among many. Hakluyt’s own translations included, among others, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’ enormously influential treatise, the Mare liberum (The Free Sea or The Freedom of the Seas), which argued that no nation could impose restrictions on seafaring trade since the sea did not belong to any single nation. His reports on trade opportunities and commodities, navigation conditions, and local inhabitants were commissioned by London’s growing trading companies like the Virginia Company and the East India Company, while The Principal Navigations became one of those books that their ships were recommended to carry as essential reading. By the time of his death, Hakluyt’s work and advocacy of Protestant English settlements and colonies in the New World, both in writing and as an advisor to the state and the trading companies, had become the cornerstone of English colonial and imperial plans and established the legacy of English explorations in general.
Hakluyt died on November 23, 1616. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, although the exact location of the burial site is now lost. At the height of the British Empire, Victorian scholars like the historian J. A. Froude understandably celebrated his work as the great “prose epic of the modern English nation”, and the eponymous Hakluyt Society was established with the aim to follow his example in publishing accounts of travel and exploration, an aim it continues to pursue to this day. In recent years, however, both The Principal Navigations and Hakluyt himself have started to demand our attention yet again, but perhaps not for quite the same reasons. Hakluyt’s legacy was not just a nationalistic celebration of English imperial ambitions. The Principal Navigations memorialises not just the successes of English travels, the great figures and great wonders, but also the elusive traces of those who disappeared, the disappointment of the non-event, the tedium of travel, and the absence of wonder. Beyond the great figures of Raleigh, Frobisher, and Gilbert, beyond the pioneering circumnavigations of Drake and Cavendish, Hakluyt’s collection stands testimony to the ordinary traveller and the individual experience of travel — fragile, unexpected, and so often hostage to fortune. From shadowy figures like Samson Rowlie, “taken in the Swallow” and transformed into Assan Aga, the Ottoman eunuch treasurer, to voices like that of young Parmenius of Buda, who had hoped to write a new Latin epic, did not get to see the penguins, and sunk with a ship called The Delight, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations bears witness to the lives of hundreds of travellers, without whom the story of “English” travels and voyages would be much the poorer.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 26, 2016

author: Nandini Das


text:
Decoding the Morse
The History of 16th-Century Narcoleptic Walruses
By Natalie Lawrence
June 14, 2017

Amongst the assorted curiosities described in Olaus Magnus' 1555 tome on Nordic life was the morse — a hirsute, fearsome walrus-like beast, that was said to snooze upon cliffs while hanging by its teeth. Natalie Lawrence explores the career of this chimerical wonder, shaped by both scholarly images of a fabulous North and the grisly corporeality of the trade in walrus skins, teeth, and bone.

To the far north, on the coast of Norway, there lives a mighty creature, as big as an elephant, called the walrus or morse, perhaps so named for its sharp bite; for if it glimpses a man on the seashore and can catch him, it jumps on him swiftly, rends him with its teeth, and kills him in an instant.
A woodcut of a four-footed, boar-tusked, thickly whiskered creature clinging to a cliff-face accompanied this description of the rosmaro or morse in Olaus Magnus’ Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A History of the Northern Peoples, 1555). The Swedish ecclesiastic had never himself seen such a fearsome beast, but as part of an exercise in the marketing of marvels, the accounts of other respected scholars were, if anything, of rather more value. They certainly allowed Magnus to create a more fantastical product, which could only suit his aims better.
The de Gentibus built on Magnus’ lavish Carta Marina (1539), one of the first and most spectacular maps of the North to be published. Across the land masses are depicted the strange peoples, unusual creatures, and odd land formations Magnus described in his text: hunters spearing bear-like seals on the ice floes and women milking reindeer, whilst fires belch from the cavernous pits of “Islandia” and fierce tribes war with each other across the ice. The seas are filled with ferocious sea beasts disporting themselves, sending great waterspouts into the air, writhing around ships, and playfully mauling one another.
These images were largely the fantastical products of generations of scholarly minds. Magnus wanted to present the North as an impenetrable region of wonders and marvels — flesh-eating Scricfinns, magicians, vast whirlpools, and flaming volcanoes — at the very edge of the known world. Importantly, he wanted to portray wonders that were resonant to an audience in Catholic southern Europe. He needed support from the church against the threat of Protestantism that encroached from vocal Protestant clerics. Bringing his neglected corner of the world to the attention of the Catholic powers in the South was Magnus’ way of demonstrating that it was a part of God’s realm worth protecting. To do so, he used practical, local information, but, ironically, also based much of his description on classical scholarship and southern European perceptions of the North. He was reigniting images of the “septentrional lands” rather than generating them: selling mythologies back to the traditions that had created them.
The morse was one such arctic wonder. Magnus went on to relate how:
Using their tusks, these animals clamber right up to the cliff-tops, as if they were going up a ladder, in order to crop the sweet, dew-moistened grass, and then roll back down into the sea again, unless, in the meantime, they have been overcome with a heavy drowsiness and fall asleep as they cling to the rocks.
Hunters would sneak up on the napping behemoths, tie ropes around their tails, and, from a safe distance, wake the animals with a hail of stones. The startled morses, flinging themselves into the ocean to escape, were stripped of their valuable skins, and, weakened by loss of blood, became easy prey for the hunters.
Magnus acquired this image from a long lineage of clifftop snoozers. The Catholic bishop Albertus Magnus had described in his De Animalibus (1250) “hairy whales” with “the longest tusks” by which they “hang from the rocks of cliffs when they sleep”. In order to catch them:
a fisherman, coming close, separates as much of its skin as he can from the blubber near its tail. He passes a strong rope through the part he has loosened and he then ties the ropes to rings fixed into a mountain or to very strong stakes or trees. Aroused, the fish, as it tries to escape, draws off its skin from its tail down along its back and head and leaves it behind . . . it is captured in a weakened state, either swimming bloodless in the water or lying half-alive on the shore . . .
In the early sixteenth century, a Polish diplomat, Maciej z Miechowa, had described the “mors” that climbed cliffs with its long teeth1 and the Scottish historian Hector Boece had described “an grete fische” in the “Orknays” that was bound by the tail while asleep, and died from its wounds while struggling to free itself.2
The walrus was a relatively unfamiliar creature in sixteenth-century Europe, despite the fact that walrus parts had been circulating for hundreds of years through trade with Greenland, Iceland, and Russia. The medieval Lewis chessmen, featuring shocked-looking bishops and terrified pawn soldiers gnawing at their shields, were made from walrus tusk during the twelfth century. This trade was reflected in the European names for the walrus. The name, morse, was borrowed from the Russian and Lapp name morsz, whilst the Scandinavians and Dutch used Rosmarus and Walrusch, probably derived from the Old Norse hvalross (hairy whale).
One illustrious piece of walrus to make its way south in the sixteenth century was a head sent to Pope Leo X in 1521 by Bishop Walkendorf of Trondheim. On its journey, it was painted by an artist in an effigy on the wall of Strasbourg town hall, accompanied by a poem:
In Norway they call me “walrus”,But I am “cetus dentatus”.My wife is called Balaena.I am well known in the Eastern SeaI make mighty thunder in the sea . . .To battle and fight is nothing to me,One finds many thousands of my comrades . . .. . . Had I lived my life to the fullI would not have devoted it to whales.The bishop of Nidrosia had me stabbed on the shoreThe Pope Leo had my head sentTo Rome where many men saw me.
This doleful lament from a slain whale-husband is a rare personification of an animal about which few people in Europe were very certain. In the same year, perhaps this very same walrus head was subject of a sketch by Albrecht Dürer, who at the time was travelling the Netherlands making and selling prints and drawings.
Tusked amphibious beasts, that may or may not have been based on walruses, existed in various sixteenth-century scholarly works. Some of these harked back to classical authorities: Pliny had described a “sea-elephant”, with which the Arctic beast sometimes became identified. Disentangling circumstantial similarity and actual representation is not easy. The elephant-like “morsus” represented on the 1516 world map of Martin Waldseemüller, was most probably the result of such confusing names and a mainland trade of mammoth teeth through Russia.
Once Europeans began hunting walruses in the Arctic themselves in the late sixteenth century, however, undeniably walrus-like creatures began to appear in natural histories. This wasn’t a simple process of “discovery” of walruses. Nobody except the hunters who killed walruses on the Arctic ice saw living walruses: carcasses were immediately channelled through the marketplaces of northern European shores into apothecary shops, curiosity cabinets, and natural histories. Walrus hides were carted off to the tanners and the ivory and bone sent for carving into combs and knife handles, or ground up. The blubber was rendered into soaps, lamp fuel, or cooking oil. Tusks and penis bones were sometimes gilded, carved, and polished for luxury sales to curiosity collectors.
Apothecaries placed ground-up walrus tusk for sale alongside other exotic and costly medicinal substances: walrus ivory was often billed as possessing similar qualities to “unicorn horn”, a traditional panacea against all poisons. “Unicorn horn” could itself, in reality, be any of a number of powdered, osseous things, from narwhal or walrus tusks to elephant bone. As long as the apothecary was of good repute, nobody would be any the wiser. They certainly weren’t going to be protected from poison, whatever species the powder contained.
Walruses were physically and metaphorically dismantled and reassembled; they were cut up into transportable parts by hunters and put back together in various guises by scholars who constructed their very own walrus-creatures from walrus artifacts and older textual accounts. These quasi-mythical images had lives of their own. Magnus’ image of narcoleptic cliff hangers was particularly long-lived. Parts of walrus images were also broken up and scattered into other depictions. Imposing, walrus-like tusks or bristly manes were featured by many cartographic denizens of treacherous oceans. Elements of the morse were used in depictions of monstrous sea-beasts such as the “sea-pig”, “sea-boar”, “sea-wolf” and “sea-lion” in various books of monstrosity.
There were, in fact, a number of first-hand accounts from hunters published in this period describing the slaying of hundreds of “see-horses” on the Arctic ice, heroic battles with enraged and red-eyed creatures in the waters, followed by the heavy work of flensing (skinning) and dismantling the slain beasts. But very few scholars seemed interested in these kinds of images of what a walrus was, preferring the monsters depicted in more authoritative, erudite accounts. One of the most important was by the prolific Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner, in his Historiae Animalium (Vol. IV, 1558). Gessner worked to weave all the material he could find on anything remotely walrusy to construct the most complete account of this creature, including Magnus’ description.
Gessner cast a sceptical eye over his sources: he was less than certain of the accuracy of Magnus’ fantastical account, while the finned and four-limbed image from the Strasbourg town hall image was clearly an extrapolation, having been produced from a severed head. The walrus existed only as a scattered set of body parts and imagery, insufficient material for Gessner to determine the creature’s nature, even had he wanted to. Which he probably didn’t. Just like Magnus’ northern wonders, monsters that retained an air of intangible mystery sold rather well to the markets of curious punters. Gessner’s account was exhaustive, but did not provide a definitive “walrus”.
It was only in 1612 that a whole, living walrus was brought to mainland Europe. A walrus pup arrived in Amsterdam, along with the stuffed skin of its mother, on a Dutch hunting ship. It was described by Dr Everhard Vorstius of Leiden University, as a “sea-beast . . . much like a seal” with holes for ears and a bristly beard. This small animal “roared like a boar” and was placed in a barrel of water to relax. He was fed porridge oats, at which he sucked slowly and grunted as he ate. Vorstius finished with the ominous mention that the walrus’ fat was rather “toothsome”.
This porridge-slurping pup was co-opted into the roster of morse images in later descriptions, but sat awkwardly with the fierce-toothed behemoths. It certainly did not replace them: they were far too powerful and too resonant with traditional preconceptions of what the Arctic must be like. The walrus remained a nebulous beast from an intangible and wonder-filled North, long after Magnus purported to reveal its secrets.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Natalie Lawrence

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
W. B. O’Shaughnessy and the Introduction of Cannabis to Modern Western Medicine

By Sujaan Mukherjee
April 19, 2017

Cataleptic trances, enormous appetites, and giggling fits aside, W. B. O'Shaughnessy's investigations at a Calcutta hospital into the potential of medical marijuana — the first such trials in modern medicine — were largely positive. Sujaan Mukherjee explores the intricacies of this pioneering research and what it can tell us more generally about the production of knowledge in colonial science.

In 1833, a twenty-four-year-old Edinburgh graduate arrived in India, an assistant surgeon in the East India Company. He had failed to acquire a license under the London College of Physicians and Surgeons, but had already established himself as an exciting young medical researcher, authoring an important paper on cholera following an outbreak in Europe. This man was William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, an Irish physician who would — over the next few years working in India — make significant contributions to the history of research in electricity, telegraphy, pottery, and, his primary discipline, medicine.
The colonial peripheries had no shortage of impressive polymaths, but what sets O’Shaughnessy apart is the manner in which, while conducting research in his many areas of interest, he not only tapped into elaborate local knowledge networks and structures, but also rigorously documented them, thoroughly crediting his sources both bibliographic and human. O’Shaughnessy also stands out on account of what was, arguably, his most significant contribution to medicine: the claim that cannabis could be used as a medicinal drug. As an intoxicant cannabis was fairly common in India, as O’Shaughnessy noted, but he demonstrated its potential use in a medical context, particularly as an anaesthetic. The papers on his experiments with the plant were published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in late 1839 — and were also read in front of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta in October of that year. In them we find detailed records of his prescient experiments and a fine example of his unique style of research.
His first series of cannabis experiments were conducted on an unfortunate menagerie of animals (fish, vultures, and storks, amongst others, ) and also, perhaps not without controversy today, a few children — all subjected to various preparations and extracts of Cannabis indica. The first experiment, for instance, involved administering “ten grains of Nipalese [sic] Churrus, dissolved in spirit” to a “middling sized dog”. O’Shaughnessy’s breathless notes read: “In about half an hour he became stupid and sleepy, dozing at intervals, starting up, wagging his tail as if extremely contented, he ate some food greedily, on being called to he staggered to and fro, and his face assumed a look of utter and helpless drunkenness.”1
O’Shaughnessy then tried variants of these initial treatments on a number of maladies. He describes the effect on four patients suffering from rheumatism, on a case of hydrophobia, and on cholera and tetanus victims before issuing a warning about the delirium that may be occasioned by inappropriate dosage. Some of the reports wouldn’t be out of place as descriptions of a merry stoner’s night in (minus the video games). One rheumatism sufferer, to whom “half a grain of Hemp resin was given in a little spirit . . . became talkative and musical, told several stories, and sang songs to a circle of highly delighted auditors, ate the dinner of two persons . . ., sought also for other luxuries I can scarcely venture to allude to, and finally fell soundly asleep, and so continued till the following morning ”. Perhaps not unsurprisingly the next day the patient, “begged hard for a repetition of the medicine”.2
Elsewhere O’Shaughnessy describes a somewhat surreal episode in which a rheumatism patient administered with cannabis enters a state of “catalepsy”, whereupon his rigid limbs could be moved only with the help of medical staff, who could place them in “every imaginable attitude” where they would remain “no matter how contrary to the natural influence of gravity” — all while the patient remained completely “insensible”. The commotion of events ended up rousing a second patient, similarly dosed, who became “vastly amused at the statuelike attitudes” he witnessed, and then proceeded, after a sudden “loud peal of laughter” to exclaim that “four spirits were springing with his bed into the air”.  After a subsequent “uncontrollable” fit of the giggles this second patient then took up the strange condition of the first, his arms and legs “remain[ing] in any desired position”. Despite the slightly chaotic scenes, within a day or so both patients were much relieved of their rheumatism, and in three days completely cured.3
Interestingly, it is while recording a failed treatment of hydrophobia that O’Shaughnessy notes one of the fundamental arguments for this medicine: even if it failed at curing the actual root of the illness, “at least one advantage was gained from the use of the remedy — the awful malady was stripped of its horrors”. If the illness was terminal, at least cannabis could enable the physician to “strew the path to the tomb with flowers”.4
The argument is not unfamiliar today, and indeed, in a prescient echo of more recent advocates of cannabis’ legalisation, O’Shaughnessy also downplays the drug’s supposed negative effects compared to certain other popular legal narcotics. He writes, “As to the evil sequelae so unanimously dwelt on by all writers, these did not appear to me so numerous, so immediate, or so formidable, as many which may be clearly traced to over-indulgence in other powerful stimulants or narcotics, viz. alcohol, opium, or tobacco.”5
The interest of O’Shaughnessy’s medical students was also clearly piqued. He reports that several ended up experimenting on themselves and describes in detail one particular auto-experiment by a “retiring lad of excellent habits” which, twenty minutes after ingestion, led to the “most amusing effects I ever witnessed”.
I found him enacting the part of a Raja giving orders to his courtiers; he could recognize none of his fellow students or acquaintances; all to his mind seemed as altered as his own condition; he spoke of many years having passed since his student’s days; described his teachers and friends with a piquancy which a dramatist would envy; detailed the adventures of an imaginary series of years, his travels, his attainment of wealth and power. He entered on discussions on religious, scientific, and political topics, with astonishing eloquence, and disclosed an extent of knowledge, reading, and a ready apposite wit, which those who knew him best were altogether unprepared for. For three hours and upwards he maintained the character he at first assumed, and with a degree of ease and dignity perfectly becoming his high situation. A scene more interesting it would be difficult to imagine. It terminated nearly as rapidly as it commenced, and no headache, sickness, or other unpleasant symptom followed the innocent excess. 6
In and amongst these colourful accounts, O’Shaughnessy’s paper is peppered with references to other instances in which his fellow medical men had employed the administration of cannabis to alleviate patients’ symptoms. The list includes his cousin Richard O’Shaughnessy, Dr Bain of the Police Hospital, Mr O’Brien of the Native Medical Hospital, and not least, James Esdaile (another Edinburgh student, best known for his experiments with mesmerism at the Hooghly Imambarah College, which he recorded in his 1851 book Mesmerism in India). The historian Shrimoy Roy Chaudhury feels that it was the “conquest of pain in surgery” that granted British medicine historical credibility in India.7 Hemp played a key role in this. And veterinary science got involved as well — among notable experimenters in this field was the firm Hughes and Templar, who claimed to have cured three out of “five cases of horses suffering from tetanus” with the hemp resin.8
Before setting out the details of his experiments, O’Shaughnessy offers a background to the drug in four sections: its botanical character, popular uses, historical details, and medicinal properties. But he does all this with a little help from his friends: some regular and some, as that other great “generalist” Sherlock Holmes would call them, irregular. The network, as the following series of annotations to O’Shaughnessy’s article will demonstrate, is an incredibly wide and diverse one.
For the historical and statistical data he thanks the following: “the distinguished traveller the Syed Keramut Ali, Mootawulee [guardian] of the Hooghly Imambarrah”, “Hakim Mirza Abdul Razes of Teheran”, Pandit Madhusudan Gupta, “the celebrated Kamalakantha Vidyalanka, the Pandit [sic] of the Asiatic Society”, and Mr DaCosta.9
Syed Keramut Ali, former Great Game “Newswriter” under Arthur Conolly in Kandahar, helped O’Shaughnessy with Persian references and a few manuscripts. Additional translation help may have also come from “Mr Da Costa”, who is presumably Lewis Da Costa, a polyglot and a prolific translator serving as assistant Persian translator to the Government of India in the 1840s. O’Shaughnessy wished also to appeal to Hindu authorities and the most obvious names listed in this regard are Madhusudan Gupta — celebrated as the first Indian to dissect a cadaver (though recent histories have questioned this claim) — and Kamalakantha Vidyalanka, who was appointed teacher of rhetoric at the Sanksrit College and became part of the British judicial system as a pundit. Vidyalanka appears to have had no direct link with medicine but provided O’Shaughnessy with a number of obscure Sanskrit references to the use of hemp, including a prohibition for Brahmins in particular found in the texts of Manu.
While reaching out to his scholarly friends on the one hand, O’Shaughnessy also sought advice from the deputy superintendent of police, Mr McCann, on official surveys regarding the consumption of “gunjah”. But if he wanted to know about the daily lives of his consumers, he needed someone “irregular”. For such purposes he tapped into the experience of one Ameer, “the proprietor of a celebrated place of resort for Hemp devotees in Calcutta, and who is considered the best artist in his profession.” For understandable reasons, that is all we ever learn regarding the identity of Ameer.10
It is perhaps thanks to Ameer, that O’Shaughnessy’s report is so able to display an exceptionally close knowledge of the uses of the various extracts. While Sidhee, Subjee and Bang (“used with water as a drink”) is “chiefly used by the Mahomedans of the better classes”, Sidhee (“ground, mixed with black pepper, and a quart of cold water”) is the “favourite beverage of the Hindus who practice this vice”. Gunjah, on the other hand, is “used for smoking alone”, and one rupee weight mixed with dried tobacco “suffices for three persons”, although you find “four or five persons usually join in the debauch”.  The demography is curious, especially in the case of Majoon, (a hemp confection which is “a compound of sugar, butter, flour, milk, and Sidhee or Bang”) which is consumed by all classes, “including the lower Portuguese or ‘Kala Feringhees,’ and especially their females”.11
For interested parties, let it be known O’Shaughnessy has provided ample details to try out your own nineteenth-century recipes. He distinguishes between each type of extract and offers specific descriptions of how they are prepared, although the one which he recommends in greatest detail is meant for medicinal use only. Inadvertently he also maps the availability of the finest quality of each kind — sourcing his churrus as he did from Nepal, thanks to Dr A. Campbell of the Bengal Medical Service, a man with the dubious distinction of changing the course of Darjeeling’s history when as superintendent he oversaw a huge population rise between 1839 and 1849. The first part of the article also offers a rare glimpse into the contemporary consumption habits — an account that differs in tone and content from the usual official surveys.
If we discard the binary model often used to understand the exchange of knowledge (scientific, legal, or otherwise) between the colonial centres and peripheries, and turn to the idea of networks (as the historian Kapil Raj, for instance, has done), we realise that the networks that produce knowledge are much more complex than they appear at first glance. In W. B. O’Shaughnessy we have someone who is rigorous in noting down all the different sources of information that he taps into, and we realise that, upon closer inspection, even the nodes of a network give way to many other interconnected webs.
In the thirty-one-page Report on the Investigation of Cases of Real and Supposed Poisoning (1841), found in the National Library of India (Kolkata), we see our doctor sitting in the centre of another web of intrigue. After a call-out, people sent O’Shaughnessy items ranging from “the remains of a chapattee, which is said to have been the cause of death of Dasi Bania” to “a stomach . . . and the small intestines with the contents thereof, all stated to have been removed from the body of a man” found dead in the Native Hospital. O’Shaughnessy, who was Chemical Examiner to the government, received mails from persons in different posts in the British government from all over Bengal. He would send back his reports with details of his chemical analysis, opining whether there may have been foul play. He often struggled with forms of poison (often with the common bish which is available at any Calcutta market) that were not yet recognised by Western medicine.
O’Shaughnessy’s language seems to anticipate at times the medico-forensic phrasings of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson. He begins Case 12 thus:
These are by far the most interesting cases which I have ever met with. The respectability of the individuals implicated; the extraordinary period which elapsed during which the bodies were exposed, without coffins, to the destroying influences of the heat and rains of Bengal; the curious changes which the poison underwent . . . constitute an array of circumstances scarcely surpassed in medico-legal interest by any but those of the celebrated Laffarge trial.12
This was not his first encounter with the science of criminal activity. In 1830, a young O’Shaughnessy arrived in London, struggling to find permanent employment. Soon after, urged by the editor of the Lancet, he published an article on “Poisoned Confectionary”, the result of an extensive study. Along with a Dr Green, he purchased “at several shops, different specimens of coloured confectionary, and of colourless articles wrapped in stained paper.” Each colour was analysed rigorously. The yellow, for instance, was understood to be a result of adulterating the candies with either “gamboges, massicot, Naples yellow, the chromate of lead, or vegetable lakes.”13 A report on the study was published  in an 1831 issue of The Medico-chirurgical Review and Journal of Practical Medicine, in which the writer remarks: “Dr. O’Shaughnessy is evidently a clever chemist, and his industry appears equal to his talent in the department of human knowledge”.14
The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal published in the span of a few months two other experiments performed by O’Shaughnessy. In 1839 he reports on his use of the Galvanic battery for the “successful destruction of the wreck of the Equitable at Fultah Reach”, where the Sydney-bound ship “leaden with wheat, rice, rum, &c.,” had touched on the sand below and turned over “in six to seven fathoms of water”.15 The first one, however, anticipates his later work on telegraphy — a form of communication that would be taken seriously only after 1847, with Lord Dalhousie’s appointment as Governor General.16
At the Botanical Gardens in Shibpur (he already had cordial relations  with the persons in charge, such as Nathaniel Wallich), he experimented with the first telegraph circuit. After laying the cables, the two ends starting and ending where he positioned himself, he used to a pair of modified watches “of the cheapest kind”. (This is before his visit to England where he learnt of the Morse.) “Round the second hand was placed a card dial laid off with three concentric circles divided each into twenty parts.” He omitted “vowels and superfluous letters” (reminiscent of today’s SMS truncations), and using this he successfully sent across messages. Each signal took about three minutes to transmit, and both watches were “then allowed to run to No. 1 or zero, and stopped”.17
Diagram of the telegraph system, featured in  O’Shaughnessy’s “Memoranda relative to experiments on the communication of Telegraphic Signals by induced electricity” in Journal Of The Asiatic Society Of Bengal (1839) — Source.
It is in his work on the telegraph system — and particularly his role in rebuilding it after it was largely destroyed in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 — that we can see more clearly the dubious nexus between such scientific projects and the endeavours of colonialism, a connection made more explicit at moments of political crisis. As far as O’Shaughnessy’s contribution to medicine is concerned, its correlation with colonial power is perhaps not as obvious. Yet it does contribute, even if unintentionally to the larger discourse of knowledge/power, relating to what Shiv Visvanathan and Ashis Nandy call the “industrial grid”. Western medicine, through sheer claim of objectivity, marginalised traditional, and subsequently termed, “folk medicine”, while at the same time deriving its legitimacy on foreign soil from references to indigenous texts and social practices, through Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic scholars and local practitioners. In this regard O’Shaughnessy was no exception. Rather than thinking only of centres (individual or institutional) of knowledge production in the colonies, we’d do better then to focus more on the complexity of networks and exchanges — the go-betweens, as Kapil Raj calls them — that played such a key role in the production of the colonial sciences. It is here, in light of such an approach, that the detailed notes left behind by William Brooke O’Shaughnessy prove so invaluable, offering a rare and honest glimpse into how such networks functioned.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Sujaan Mukherjee


text:
Lofty Only in Sound
Crossed Wires and Community in 19th-Century Dreams
By Alicia Puglionesi
April 5, 2017

Alicia Puglionesi explores a curious case of supposed dream telepathy at the end of the US Civil War, in which old ideas about the prophetic nature of dreaming collided with loss, longing, and new possibilities of communication at a distance.

In the predawn of July 21, 1865, a young man in Cambridge, Massachusetts, woke from a deep sleep with a strange phrase on his lips. “What they dare to dream of dare to die for”, he recalled saying to himself, before slipping back into unconsciousness, wondering dimly “whether [the words] really expressed a lofty thought, or were lofty only in sound.” Later that day, the man, who gave his name as Mr. W., was surprised to hear the line delivered from a podium by the famous poet James Russell Lowell at a Harvard commemoration ceremony for students killed in the Civil War. Lowell’s version replaced “die for” with “do” in order to fit the rhyme scheme, a discrepancy which left Mr W. pondering “whether I liked his sentiment or mine the most”.1 Decades later Mr. W. still recalled the coincidence vividly enough to submit his account to Harvard psychologist William James, “hoping that these reminisces may be amusing to your society” — that is, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), a group devoted to collecting and studying supernormal mental phenomena. Self-deprecation aside, Mr W. clearly saw more than mere amusement in this incident that he continued to ponder for so many years. Had a force more powerful than random chance actually transmitted Lowell’s as-of-yet unknown verse to Mr W. while he slept?
Dreams so often feel trivial and momentous at the same time. They hold the promise of revelation if only one could pin down a face, a location — like the common dream of words on a page that dissolve just before their meaning registers. The history of dream interpretation is almost as slippery as dreams themselves; the practice spans cultures, but manifests in highly specific forms, shaped by particular ways of understanding the relationship between mind and world. In religious texts, dreams usually predict the future, like Jacob’s ladder or Pharaoh’s dream of famine in the book of Genesis. In their revelatory capacity, they can unite believers with the divine and connect members of faith communities. In other settings dreams can shed light upon past events, and even have legal standing, as in the famous “Greenbrier ghost” case of 1897, where a murdered woman appeared in her mother’s dreams to out her former husband as the killer.2
A major transition occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when religious, spiritual, and symbolic modes of dream interpretation were challenged by rationalist accounts that explained dreaming as a product of mental mechanisms. British philosopher David Hartley, in his 1749 Observations on Man, listed three mechanistic causes of dreaming that would become standard: “First, the impressions and ideas lately received, and particularly those of the preceding day. Secondly, the state of the body, particularly of the stomach and brain.” The third source of dream content was “association”, a law by which sensations and responses became emblazoned in the brain, which many Enlightenment thinkers proposed as the basis of learning and memory. During sleep, Hartley claimed, the mental law of association continued to operate, but without any sensory input and without the rudder of reason steering it. Thus unmoored, the brain “carried on from one thing to another” at the mercy of bodily fluctuations.3
The work of natural philosophers like Hartley signaled a concerted Enlightenment effort to debunk centuries of mysticism around dreams: American iconoclast Thomas Paine proclaimed in an 1807 essay that biblical prophecies were merely “riotous assemblage[s] of mis-shapen images and ranting ideas”, exploited by power-hungry priests to delude the people.4 His case never quite won out over the old mystical mode — instead, the two commingled, with natural and supernatural, medical and moral interpretations of dreams feeding into each other throughout the nineteenth century. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), when Scrooge announced to Marley’s ghost, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese”, he echoed Hartley and the medical authorities of his day.5 However, Dickens played it both ways, since Scrooge’s astral travels were also very real. Dickens demanded that Scrooge, and the reader, open their hearts to spiritual riches beyond the material realm of mere mustard and money.
Dickens believed that dreams could tell us something meaningful, even if the message was mediated by physiology, and the broader public seemed to agree. Fortune-telling guides could assert a divine origin while also noting that “dreams which persons have in the beginning of the night, especially if they eat heavy or solid suppers, are not so much to be depended on.”6 Knowledge of physiology’s impact on the mind made it all the more fascinating to parse out where one ended and the other began. Anecdotes like Mr W’s flooded the American Society for Psychical Research throughout the 1880s and 1890s; they circulated in magazines, newspapers, and journals, where letter writers were just as keen as ever to discuss nocturnal visions. More than in times past, they were likely to take note of bodily states, and to speak of the mind as in some ways mechanical: an “intellectual apparatus”, a clock, engine, or camera. The new scientific psychology did not conquer older understandings of dreaming, but it helped to reshape the language of dreamers.
The amusement Mr W felt about scooping the great poet James Russell Lowell was mixed with a genuine conviction that he received the line telepathically during a liminal state of consciousness. Psychologists speculated that thoughts had a basis in invisible vibrations or waves that acted upon the brain;  if these waves did not respect the boundaries of the individual skull, they might communicate from one mind to another. In nineteenth-century theories of mind, sleep was a prime time for mental permeability, when the barriers of reason and attention dissolved.
Lowell himself inadvertently supported such a model of mental permeability with his account of the poem’s origins. In the days leading up to the commemoration ceremony, he said he was “hopelessly dumb”, stricken with writer’s block. Composing an ode to the Civil War dead in the summer of 1865 was an intimidating task even for a poet of Lowell’s stature. The Confederate army surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse only three months before, and Lincoln’s assassination deepened the nation’s misery just as relief was in sight. An estimated 750,000 soldiers, more than 2 percent of the American population, perished on the battlefield or in the ruins. Lowell’s mind was strained to its limits by the difficult task at hand, but also by the general despair of a country awash in its own blood. It would not surprise psychical researchers who studied such states that the Ode manifested “in a flash of sudden inspiration” that felt to Lowell like an outside force working through his pen.
“It all came with a rush,” Lowell recalled, “literally making me lean and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it.”7 The visceral impact of his effort — he claimed that he lost ten pounds — was intertwined with the psychic element, nerves frayed by the intensity of the message they conducted. Lowell reported writing most of the piece between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on the night before the ceremony,8 supporting neatly the idea that Mr W.’s strange experience occurred at the peak of Lowell’s emotional labor. Perhaps the spirit of the Ode was literally in the air, like electricity, magnetism, and the other invisible forces captured by nineteenth century physics.
If so, the invisible force wringing Lowell’s nerves bore a distinctively national imprint. As a poet, he was selected to channel the passions of his less-articulate fellow citizens in the wake of a devastating war. Even if the night of July 21 was not quite as revelatory as his account makes it out to be, he told the story of the Ode’s creation the way he did to make his channeling function explicit. It would make sense to contemporary readers that the psychic energies of a nation might overwhelm a medium’s capacity and ricochet to other, lesser receptacles; for instance, the innocent Mr W. sleeping nearby in Cambridge.
Based on personal details provided in his letter, we can identify Mr W. as Charles Pickard Ware, an English teacher known for publishing a collection of American slave songs in the 1870s.9 Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, who presented Ware’s story in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, diagnosed a case of “most beautiful pseudo-presentiment”. He thought that Ware’s unconscious mind, whipped into a heightened emotional state during Lowell’s delivery of the “Commemoration Ode”, simply conjured a false memory of the previous night’s dream.10 Royce set out to debunk Ware’s suggestion of telepathy with a psychological argument about how the mind works. “Pseudo-presentiments”, he explained, could be “created or reinforced by dreams” that occurred after the supposedly foreseen event. “By an instantaneous and irresistible hallucination of memory”, the agitated mind projects the dream into the past “so as to make it seem prophetic, or at least telepathic.”11 Royce placed this case on a continuum of susceptible mental states ranging from the temporary unreason of sleep to the elation of poetry to paranoiac delusions, all of which could produce astonishing experiences like Ware’s.
It’s unlikely that Ware was asking to be compared to a paranoid asylum patient when he sent his recollections to the ASPR. Though he didn’t name what happened to him, he strongly insinuated that a form of telepathy or clairvoyance was at work — a real, rather than a deluded, communion. This was certainly at odds with Royce’s pathological framing, yet the two sides of the debate both claimed a methodology rhetorically aligned with the spirit of modern science. Both tried to elaborate a set of law-like, rational processes that eliminated the need for any supernatural agency. Advocates of telepathy saw thought as a material or energetic substance that could travel unconsciously between minds, similar to the behavior of electricity or magnetism. Royce took the position increasingly shared by psychologists in the later nineteenth century; they agreed that thoughts emerged from some wave- or electricity-like process acting on brain cells, but they restricted this process to the individual’s brain. Supernormal experiences arose from errors in our skull-encapsulated machinery, not from outside signals.
Despite skepticism from some scientists, people took the idea of spontaneous, unconscious mental transmission quite seriously, as a possibility and as a danger, in an age when powerful ideas crisscrossed the nation through new and mysterious channels. From mass print to the telegraph to the railroad, burgeoning communication systems collapsed time and space through increasingly rapid connections. They brought unprecedented economic growth, creating new forms of investment and trading that depended as much on information flow as they did on the movement of commodities. Such precipitous connectedness also posed a threat to the socioeconomic order: it allowed laborers to organize, abolitionists and suffragists to rally. Dangerous ideas could spread uncontrollably, and many worried that hardware might not limit their range.12 The line between technology and telepathy blurred, with medical men like William Carpenter explaining the nervous system as a telegraph and extending its reach beyond the individual body; he believed that “nerve-force”, as a form of electricity, could “exert itself from a distance, so as to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another.”13 This popular analogy turned the country into a literal body politic that could succumb to hysteria or mass frenzies originating with a single disturbed citizen.
Much of the American medical and scientific work on this topic appeared in the 1870s, which meant that its authors shared a common point of reference for mass psychic upheaval: the Civil War. For instance, Philadelphia physician and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell wrote about mental permeability and contagion in a decidedly negative light: if people could see each others’ true thoughts, “the whole fabric of civilization would crumble”, one of his characters warned.14 During the war, Mitchell served in the Turner’s Lane army hospital, where he studied the lingering effects of nerve injuries through intimate conversations with men who had actually seen civil society crumble around them and who had fought in its ruins. In his subsequent decades of practice, Mitchell urgently counseled patients and the public on shoring up their nervous power to defend against the intrusion of alien psychic forces. Though he denounced psychic mediums as frauds, Mitchell wrote so incessantly about mental barriers and scenarios of penetration that his concern about volatile powers of mind is unmistakeable. Perhaps, like Walt Whitman, another Civil War medic, Mitchell was plagued by “dreams’ projections”, sentenced each night to “thread my way through the hospitals”.15 What war reporter Ambrose Bierce called a “spiritual darkness”,16 unleashed over four years of brutal killing and halted only with fragile documents, left a generation wary of the violence lurking below the surface of American life.
Others, however, saw great potential in harnessing the mental forces that stirred men from remote villages to take up arms. During the war, dreams had joined people to a common cause in very tangible ways. They appeared, of course, in political speeches and poems — Whitman again, with his imperiled “dream of humanity, the vaunted Union”.17  Dreams and premonitions forged a meaningful connection between civilians, soldiers, and the distant leaders whose choices determined their fate — especially Abraham Lincoln, who traversed the dreamscape of Civil War America as restlessly as he stalked the White House's corridors. But dreams also pervaded private letters, journals, and newspaper reports of more intimate encounters. People felt linked with imperilled loved ones through moments of clairvoyance, premonition, or dream communion.
For instance, on a July night in 1863, Sarah Oates saw a vision of her son John, wounded and dying.18 Her dream extended even to his burial, giving her a chance to be virtually present as the young man was lowered into an unmarked grave. The grave was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles away. Two days later, the letter arrived telling of John’s fatal injury, but Sarah had already gone into mourning. Countless families treasured and circulated such stories; they acted as a virtual salve, helping bend violent death on the battlefield towards the nineteenth-century ideal of a “good death” which occurred at home surrounded by loved ones. Psychic manifestations of familial love in times of crisis suggested that these invisible bonds might transcend even a war of brother against brother.
By stretching love and intimacy across vast distances, and by troubling the presumed boundaries of the self, the act of dreaming remained more than a physiological function of the brain during sleep. From its earliest links with prognostication, dreaming connoted an expectant gaze towards the future, a hope (or promise, or fear) for the waking world. The Enlightenment’s dismissal of divine prophecy changed the register in which dreams spoke to the collective destiny of families, communities, and nations. Dreams became a metaphor, but one still linked to interiority and revelation. In the satirical device of illustrating a politician’s nightmare, we see a Thomas Paine-like jab at the persistence of superstition.
Yet the cartoonist who lampooned Abraham Lincoln as a trembling dreamer worked within the tradition of casting the president as a sort of secular prophet. Only a few years before the start of the Civil War, artist Louis Maurer produced a decidedly unironic image of George Washington dreaming of liberty and justice in the midst of his generation’s war for national independence — not an idle wish, but the hoped-for outcome of waking struggles shared by mighty generals and humble soldiers. Representations of enslaved African Americans showed them suffering the torments of this dream’s constant denial. Equals in mental mechanism must be equals in their capacity to imagine a better life,  and thus, in theory, equals in democratic politics.
Pitched warfare over this very claim had barely ended when Charles Ware woke abruptly, before sunrise, on a friend’s couch in Cambridge, where he’d traveled to attend a memorial service for his former classmates. “What they dare to dream of dare to die for” arrived, like a telegram, instantaneously and preformed, piercing his slumber. At the time, Ware was still young and harbored literary aspirations. Though he never succeeded as poet, perhaps his moment of communion with the renowned James Russell Lowell affirmed a private sense that Ware, too, had access to a higher plane of inspiration. The less we think of Ware as gifted or inspired, however, the more his experience appeals to a broader notion of dreaming as a perhaps too-democratic pathway for shared sentiment and action. The violent upheaval of war seemed to demonstrate that the stirrings of individual hearts were highly contagious. The line in question, “And what they dare to dream of, dare to do”, refers to the collective political dream that led Harvard’s undergraduates into battle. Whether people decided to classify such dreams as symbols, portents, or mechanical blips, they took on an indisputable, concrete reality for many nineteenth-century Americans, and their power to manifest in catastrophic ways gave skeptics pause.
Anecdotes of dream communion represent a kind of “dream work” distinct from the later Freudian sense of the term: dreams “worked” in the narrative context of people’s lives to account for sometimes-mysterious shared experiences. At the same time, much of the reading public followed current psychology and viewed dreaming as a physiological activity of the brain — the result of electrical or etheric impressions moving along telegraph-like circuits.19 This left ambiguity as to where the boundaries of the unconscious fell — was it restricted to the individual mind, or part of a larger psychic economy? Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” appeared to leap the divide between two strangers, confounding distinctions of authorship. Despite scientific efforts to rationalize and individualize dreaming, it retained its old portentousness in an hour when the need to unify diverse citizens was an overbearing anxiety.
Whether through science or art, dreams proved difficult to regulate for practical aims. Lowell could testify to this challenge. While one line of his poem made a profound impression on Charles Pickard Ware, the full version was a flop with his audience at Harvard, and nobody bothered to reprint it in the newspapers.  Despite a profusion of theories, neither poets nor psychologists seemed any closer to mastering the laws of dreaming, inspiration, and sympathy.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Alicia Puglionesi


text:
Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass

By Kelly Sullivan
October 12, 2016

With their intricate line and often ghoulish tone, the works of Irish artist Harry Clarke are amongst the most striking in the history of illustration and stained glass design. Kelly Sullivan explores how, unknown to many at the time, Clarke took to including his own face in many of his pictures.

The Irish stained glass artist and illustrator Harry Clarke was prolific, producing, in his short life, over a hundred stained glass windows. But beyond Ireland, it was his illustrations that brought him international renown, particularly in the United States where printers flooded the market with pirated editions of the six illustrated books he produced between 1915 and 1931. His illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, published by George G. Harrap, London, in 1919 and reissued in 1923, was his most popular work, a macabre exploration of the human psyche. The cover to the second updated edition of 1923 shows a bearded figure pulling aside a stage curtain as if to welcome readers into the disturbing world of Poe’s — and Clarke’s — imagination. The stage itself appears empty but for a small door cut into the flat green wall in the background. Through the door, we see a miniature figure raising a mitre into the air. Clarke’s dust-jacket image is at once a symbolist invocation of horror, with its border of decaying carcasses, distorted figures, and larval growths, and also a deliberate reference to one of the most intriguing and enigmatic self-portraits in modern art history, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Although Clarke does not portray himself on the cover of Poe, nor in the gruesome illustration for “The Case of M. Valdemar” which similarly alludes to Las Meninas, both images — with their significant perspectival gaze back to a small open door framing a silhouetted figure — signal Clarke’s abiding interest in hiding his own face in his works, and his recognition of the long history of self-representation in Western art.
In Las Meninas, Velázquez brings to center stage the newfound importance of the artist in the world of high society and culture. His painting, ostensibly a portrait of Infanta Margaret Theresa, playfully portrays the King and Queen — who would occupy the position of the viewer — in a mirror on the back wall. Yet key to the work is the tiny silhouette of the Queen’s chamberlain, a man reputed to be related to the artist, framed in a lighted doorway. This striking figure draws our attention to the artist himself, poised similarly at the left of the composition with his hand ready to put brush to canvas. Like the doubled royal portrait of both infant daughter and her parents, the painter doubles himself in this visual echo.  ※※Indexed under…Silhouettesin doorways
Clarke’s cover image replicates the composition of Velázquez’s painting, but removes all the figures with the exception of  the curtain-opening  master of ceremonies  — a figure in the position of the painter’s self-portrait — and the silhouette. Although Clarke’s bearded figure bears no resemblance to the artist himself, the structural allusion to Las Meninas serves as an invitation to recognize the many self-portraits Clarke did leave in stained glass, in illustrations, and in parodic caricatures sketched for friends. Through it, Clarke also signals his descent from a long line of artists drawn to the self-portrait, from medieval scribes who included their own figures in illuminated manuscripts, to Clarke’s drawing instructor at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, William Orpen, a well-known painter specialising in self-portraits, whose 1907 A Bloomsbury Family (an image Clarke likely saw in exhibition in Dublin) can be seen to also deliberately reference Las Meninas.
In his first completed book, the illustrated Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1916), Clarke includes some of his most recognizable self-portraits. Before the stories even begin, we are faced with an image of Clarke, in the garb of a Harlequin figure, emerging as if stepping onto stage next to the “list of illustrations” — a playful reminder to recognize the artist behind the book.
In “Great Claus and Little Claus”, as the figure of Little Claus, the artist shows himself with his characteristic combed hair, again wearing the checkered pants of a Harlequin. Great Claus is reportedly his friend Vincent Wood. Clarke hides himself in the curtain framing the second drawing, distracting us from the more grotesque scene played out behind: Great Claus has just thrown a hatchet into the forehead of Little Claus’ grandmother (who happened to have been dead already).
Already in this early self-portrait, Clarke associates himself with one of the comically gruesome elements of the work. As Little Claus, he outsmarts his neighbor, grows his fortune, and avoids an untimely death on several occasions — but he kills three men in the process. The color illustrations to this early work reproduced badly, but a robber holding aloft a medieval battle axe in his illustration for “The Snow Queen” seems to have Clarke’s features, and sports a grubby five o’clock shadow.
Clarke presents himself as similarly bedraggled in the undated Self-Portrait as a Drunken Saint, a playful sketch in which he appears winged and haloed, with his iconic cigarette and unruly spike of hair at the back of his head. Yet for all its lightheartedness, this portrait hints at just how much pressure he must have felt to keep up with ecclesiastical stained glass commissions as well as book illustrations and orders for commercial clients. He worked seemingly endlessly, and suffered from poor health, a combination of which ultimately led to his early death in 1931, at only forty-one.
In another undated caricature, this time as a monk working in a decaying medieval garret, Clarke shows himself designing a stained glass window, with another window hanging over his desk. Clarke’s caricature looks remarkably like the work of Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century Benedictine monk known for his illuminated manuscripts, particularly his depiction of Plato watching Socrates write, the frontispiece to Prognostica Socratis basilei, a fortune-telling book held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Clarke would have been familiar with Paris’ work through his careful study of medieval art, and he likely knew Paris favored including self-portraits hidden in his illuminated manuscripts.
Some of Clarke’s most interesting drawings were made as gifts for friends, and so went unpublished (or, in some cases, were deemed too offensive by his publishers and pulled from books). In The Mad Mulrannies (an illustration to J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World) given to Thomas Bodkin in 1917, Clarke includes a portrait of his friend Séan Keating whose easily distinguishable features adorn characters in many illustrations and at least one or two stained glass windows. The faces and figures of the Mulrannies seem to pile up endlessly, but Keating turns his head as if to address the figure next to him — a self-portrait of the artist, dressed in what might be the chasuble of a priest, and with his arms crossed in a symbolic manner.
In one of Clarke’s most striking self-portraits, the 1914 Mephisto (produced a full decade before he would illustrate Goethe’s Faust), he depicts himself as Mephistopheles, a glass of absinthe held enticingly in his hand. This early portrait, with its bold use of a solid color wash in a fevered absinthe tint, draws a line of evolution through the similarly color-washed cover of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, to the vivid green of the end papers of his illustrated Faust by Goethe, published by Harrap in 1925.
Clarke’s earlier Mephisto hinted at his sense of personal connection to this story of temptation, evil, and damnation. Now, as if to further emphasize the association of himself with suffering, he depicts himself as Faust, the man who bargains with Mephistopheles. In his dummy mockup for Faust, Clarke’s portraits are all the more revealing of his own features; a sketch for the headpiece of the table of contents offers a tender, realistic portrayal of his own eyes seeking out the viewer.
This self-portrait sketch becomes all the more notable in light of the pervasive images of eyes used to create a sense of surveillance in the Faust illustrations, as in the image of a bespectacled Clarke-as-Faust, or the scene in which he attempts to free Margaret from her dungeon. When Faust and Mephistopheles travel on horseback, it is the steeds who glance back at Clarke’s caricature-like portrait.
Some of the most tortured illustrations in Faust are the tail pieces and small designs used to close chapters: in these, Clarke shows faces gnawed by rats, layers of bodies skewered on a sword, and he concludes with his own face in the unrelenting grip of Mephistopheles.1
Clarke believed Faust to be his best book, but reported in a letter to a friend that his publisher felt the illustrations were “full of stench and steaming horrors”. Clarke defended his work in another letter, saying it was “terribly, terribly sincere . . . ’tis horrid, I know — in fact, I had to laugh at my creations or I would have become morbid.” Surely the inclusion of self-portraits helped him — and help us — to get the joke.2
In a more surprising blend of the saintly with the sinful, Clarke didn’t limit self-portraits to book illustrations — his face also makes its way into his religious stained glass work. As one of the leading artists of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, Clarke’s windows (and those his studio continued to produce in his style up until the 1970s) are instantly recognizable. His oftentimes strange vision became part of the established visual idiom of a newly independent Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. Ireland had no indigenous stained glass work, but Clarke’s careful study of medieval aesthetics and techniques led critics to think of him as the inheritor of a broader European tradition. He traveled to see medieval glass in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Rouen, Amiens, and elsewhere. The playfulness and horror of the Gothic grotesque no doubt captured his imagination, and he brings a Gothic-influenced depiction of suffering, trauma, and death — often combined with a jesting playfulness — to his own glasswork.
His self-portraits figure in his stained glass from the very start. In his first major commission, the Honan Hostel Chapel windows, he portrays himself amongst a group of plague victims ostracized from St. Gobnait’s community in St. Gobnait (1916). His distorted face, with one eyeball destroyed by plague, is almost unrecognizable, but he hints at his likeness with his initials (and the window’s date) on the figure’s green cape.
Clarke appears again in the small Our Lady of the Sorrows window completed in 1917, this time hidden near the top. In the companion window, Saint Joseph, he once more finds Seán Keating’s distinctive features irresistible, and gives them to St. Finbarr, featured in the lower panel depicting Joseph’s death. These two windows hang at eye level — unlike most of the stained glass he created for churches — perhaps in hope that certain visitors would recognize him and his friend.
If Clarke’s interest in medieval stained glass techniques and the Gothic grotesque seems to mark his work as retrogressive, his self-portraits provide insight into a particularly modern means of composing. Clarke was fond of photography, and even records in his work diary a day spent “mucking [about] & taking photos”.3 On some occasions, he used photographs to set up models for difficult scenes in his windows, a practice he may have borrowed from Seán Keating who often did the same.4 For the 1920 Crucifixion in St. Michael’s Church in Terenure, Dublin, Clarke had trouble accurately depicting the angle of the crucified Christ’s body in the massive window positioned high in the wall; he asked his brother Walter to take his picture as he posed as Christ with his hands tied, and he designed the window from the prints. So Clarke’s Terenure Crucifixion, modeled off his own body, becomes a self-portrait — of a sort.
By the mid-1920s, Clarke was making some of his most accomplished stained glass, works peppered by his self-portraits hidden in and amongst the action.  In his circa 1923 The Widow’s Son, one of two remarkable lights made for the Catholic Church in Balbriggan, County Dublin, one of the disciples almost hidden behind Jesus’ left shoulder, and wearing a spotted purple scarf, seems to have Clarke’s long nose and full, pouting mouth.
In the 1924 Dempsey Memorial Lancet Window of St Maculind, made for St. MacCullin’s Church, Lusk, just eleven kilometers down the road, Clarke portrays himself among the sick parishioners gathered around the Irish St. Maculind for healing. Also present in this circle of faces meticulously arranged in a vesica piscis is the memento mori of a half-decomposed figure nearly all skull.
Harry Clarke has been praised as one of the greatest inheritors of the medieval glass tradition. Something of the grotesque humor in the suffering figures of Gothic glass must have appealed to Clarke’s sensibilities, particularly in the later years of his life when he knew he was dying from tuberculosis. By 1930, when work was picking up for the studios with the first commissions from the United States completed, Clarke had to spend more and more time in a sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland. Back in Ireland, an important commission came from a church in Newport, County Mayo, and Clarke designed and oversaw as much of the Last Judgment as he was able to do. Nevertheless, he died before the window was fully complete, and it was up to the skilled workmen in his studios to finish it from his drawings and color schemes. Thus Clarke’s last self-portrait is a kind of posthumous one: in the Last Judgment’s lower right corner, we see Clarke himself — portrayed upside down in a sickly green — descending to hell amongst the tortured souls and grotesque creatures he so often envisioned.
The legacy of poor health that plagued Clarke throughout his life must have had a profound effect on his work, evidenced not least of all through his inclination toward self-portraiture. Although he left few private letters and offered little insight into his personal life, a note in his 1914 work diary indicates that thoughts of illness might have been a source of anguish — and perhaps of inspiration — even then. Scribbled and then circled amidst a list of business acquaintance addresses, Clarke writes out the final lines of  J. M. Synge’s last (unpublished) poem, asking, “What will they write / of my poor passage to the stall of night?” It is, however, in fact a misquote, with the original reading “What year will they write”.5 Was Clarke perhaps deliberately misquoting Synge, whom he admired, and who, like him, died early after fighting illness and writing for many years under the conviction of his coming death? Synge’s poem indicates his anxiety about the final date of his impending death in 1909, but Clarke’s misquotation seems to hint at a concern, instead, about an artist’s reputation.
Although Harry Clarke found renown as a stained glass artist in Ireland, and his illustrations reached an international audience in the 1920s and after, he remains obscure, a legacy he may have anticipated and tried to counteract through active allusion to the long tradition of self-portraiture in art. As one of the leading figures of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, Clarke’s images helped shape the Irish Free State’s visual idiom in the 1920s and beyond, but his long-term reputation as an artist seems to have been hindered by the fact he worked primarily in the medium of stained glass. If his troubled, and often troubling, windows, illustrations, and self-portraits provided a coherent outlook for an Ireland in the coming times, it appears to have been a dark vision, one in keeping with the apocalyptic futures so many modernists foresaw in the 1930s, the decade he only just glimpsed. Like many other artists working in this time, his work reflects the shaping forces of early-twentieth-century modernism: of military, technological, scientific, and intellectual shifts that turned artists and writers toward an examination of interiority and psychology.
Clarke didn’t have to leave Dublin to experience the extremes of early-twentieth-century modern life: in 1916 in Dublin, the Easter Rising brought urban warfare directly to the city’s streets, and the subsequent War of Independence and Irish Civil War kept the British colony and later Irish Free State in a constant state of violent conflict.6 Perhaps more profoundly, Clarke witnessed first-hand extreme poverty, urban decay, and disease; the aristocratic Georgian mansions that lined the streets of north inner-city Dublin near to where Clarke had his studios represented the worst housing conditions of any city in the United Kingdom.7 His 1922 illustration, The Last Hour of the Night, directly responds to these conditions in the capital city, with a Nosferatu-inspired figure prowling through the shambles of Georgian tenements, and the monuments of colonial Dublin still burning after the battles of the War of Independence and Civil War, a personification of the Gothic afterlife of postcolonial rule.8
Clarke’s scene vividly portrays the connection between his medieval-inspired imagination and interest in the grotesque, and the political and social events of the early twentieth century that shaped his work. His self-portraits offer another response to these same shaping forces, indicating to us just how much his personal vision, and his experience of modern Dublin, influenced the stained glass and illustrations he made. Yet for all the modernist unease in evidence in his work, his self-portraits also provide moments of humor and even self-preservation. We can see his portraits as the artistic measure of the times — dark, foreboding, “full of steaming horrors” — but also as invitations to laugh with him at his creations, so none of us grows too morbid.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 12, 2016

author: Kelly Sullivan


text:
Out From Behind This Mask

By D. Graham Burnett
July 27, 2017

A Barthesian bristle and the curious power of Walt Whitman’s posthumous eyelids — D. Graham Burnett on meditations conjured by a visit to the death masks of the Laurence Hutton Collection.

The Laurence Hutton Collection consists of 103 unique objects in 76 boxes stored in the Rare Books Department of Princeton University’s Firestone Library (Call Number CO770). Most of the cartons contain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plaster “death masks” — castings made from molds formed directly on the face of notable deceased individuals shortly after their expiration (there are also, in the collection, several “life masks”; a few castings of the skulls of famous persons; a small number of bronzes and carved busts; and three casts ostensibly taken from human hands — including the writing hand of Goethe, his right). Assembled by the American littérateur and essayist Laurence Hutton (1843–1904), the bequest is said to comprise the largest collation of funerary plasters in the United States.
An ancient funerary custom, casting from the face remained a significant memorial practice in Europe and America into the early twentieth century, but the tradition declined rapidly after the 1860s when photography rose to prominence as the primary technology of commemoration. The heyday of the messy business of death mask casting (the face of the fresh corpse had to be liberally smeared with tallow to prevent adhesion of the mold) correlates with the rise of a modern culture of celebrity across the watershed of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries -- people wanted memorial tokens of “great men” (and women too) in a new era of mass culture. But there was more: the same period saw peak enthusiasm for physiognomy, the science that endeavored to discern human character in the physical manifestation of facial features like the nose and the forehead. In this sense, funeral casting was entangled with impulses both moral and forensic: the angle of Schiller’s brow might have something to teach us about genius, so it needed to be preserved and distributed; at the same time, “scientifically speaking”, it was not clear that all the signs of genius could yet be clearly read in a forehead, so the collection of lots of evidentiary material was propaedeutic to a truly empirical understanding of the human visage.
Enthusiasm for all this faded across the second half of the nineteenth century. The story of Hutton’s own collection provides good evidence for the changing mood: he sourced his first acquisitions from a dustbin in lower Manhattan circa 1865 — they had been discarded by the widow of a gentleman, recently deceased; her gesture (she asked the servants to throw out “the nasty, ghastly things”) accorded with a broader shift in mortuary sensibility in the era. But young master Hutton, something of an eccentric, found himself beguiled by the placid visages of Burns, Washington, Sheridan, and Lord Brougham staring up, ghostlike, from the ashcan, and he loaded them into a wheelbarrow, whence they emerged as the nucleus of his collection — or, perhaps better, the first little seeds of his quiet mania for the impression of death’s soft seal upon unbreathing lips.
The collection is affecting. After several hours perusing the still, white shapes in a windowless study center in the basement of Firestone Library, one emerges as from a kind of reading-room Sheol to find that every living face now discloses something of the form it will someday take when slackened and supine. The effect would seem to proceed from a kind of reversal or unwinding of the representational logic from which the masks themselves derive their power — death masks are uncanny not simply because they look like a dead person (though they generally do), but more because they were made from a dead person. This outstrips what the semioticians call “iconicity” (icons are the signs that work because they resemble what they seek to signify) and entangles us in queasy and potent dynamics of participation and immediacy — dynamics of actual continuity. The dynamics of residue. Such forms of continuity and contact always have about them a shiver of real intimacy, even of contamination. Some of the power of death masks clearly proceeds from their preserving a kind of “cold chain” of direct touch to the dead. And this may account for something of the way they seem to convey their placid pallor to the living. After a time, one comes to see through them.
Hutton himself was not insensible of such matters. In one of his many essays on the collection, he wrote of an episode in which several actual hairs of the deceased could be discerned on a death mask, as if the plaster had some strange life within it. The explanation was more prosaic: Inadequately lubricated, a hair here and there had come to be fixed in the plaster from which the mold was made. Then, when the mask itself was formed in that mold, the latter yielded its plucked bristle back to the precise locus (on the death mask) from which it had been pulled (on the human).
What sort of artifact is this? What is the nature of the historicity of such a hair? What role can it be said to play in the economy of representation?
In a historical moment enthralled by new forms of ethereal dematerialization and frictionless access (to the past, to texts, to commodities, to information, to each other), we are, I think, in need of a theory for such a bristle.
*
One reaches, perhaps, for Roland Barthes’ notion of the “punctum” from Camera Lucida, the French author’s great meditation on photography and death. A punctum is the point in a photograph that wings woundingly at the viewer from out of the mere “subject” of the image — it is that which whistles out from what the photograph “manifests” (what it manifests to “studium”, which Barthes defines as that familiar condition of self-possessed attention to an image). Here is what Barthes says: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” It is the part of a photograph that intimately implicates the viewer — though not simply any old form of implication will do. The punctum specifically implicates mortality. We might say that the punctum is the moment we discover a kind of death-navel (in ourselves, in the photographic image), since the punctum is the still-not-wholly-healed scar of an invisible umbilicus linking each of us to fatality, our un-mother.
And what then of a beard bristle such as Hutton describes?
Barthes is interested in photographs. The analytic of the punctum belongs to photography as form, as a specific technology of image making — one that works in time in particular ways, one that memorializes photographically. But the bristle is not a photographic proposition. It comes from another place, and interrupts another representational system.
What, then, is a thingly punctum? A reified punctum? A punctum that escapes the logic of representation to participate in the corporal economy of the relic?
One answer: A reminder of the extent to which we rely on the logic of representation to hold death at bay.
This seems particularly significant to consider in the context of death masks, which discharge this function of representation very imperfectly.
*
There is, for me, a proper Barthesian punctum in the photograph above, which depicts the death mask cast of Walt Whitman in the Hutton Collection. No, it is not the fact that the sculptor (the young Philadelphia artist Samuel Murray, assisted by his mentor Thomas Eakins) chose to elaborate the traditional frontal “mask” into a full sculptural head — though this is uncanny. Nor is it the wonderful frankness of the beard, which has been permitted to show as limp and wet (as it would have been, soused with animal grease), rather than tooled to appear suitably leonine or Mosaical — though this too gives the work a stark immediacy. No. The punctum for me lies in the bard’s closed eyes, and the sense of what lies behind those plaster lids — for the living Walt Whitman actually saw Hutton’s collection of death masks with his own living eyes. Which is to say, the plaster cast of Whitman’s eyes can be understood as a figure for something like the consciousness of the collection itself: it is locus in the collection of a representation of the collection; it is the site where the collection maintains its self-(un?)awareness. We might go so far as to say that these cast eyelids should be understood as the death mask of Hutton’s collection as a whole, which, no longer displayed in his handsome townhouse halls, has come to be, rather, entombed in the sepulchral catacombs of an underground library.
And that’s not all.
Shortly before he died, Whitman took a long look at an engraved portrait of himself made by the English illustrator and pamphleteer William J. Linton — an image published in a late edition of The Leaves of Grass, where it was tipped in on coated paper opposite the great death poem “The Wound-Dresser” (which it therefore kissed forever within each copy of the closed book). The poet’s meditation upon this figure of himself occasioned yet another poem, one of his last, entitled “Out from Behind This Mask”, subtitled “To Confront a Portrait”.
The first stanza will serve as ventriloquy and epitaph, annunciation and last word:
OUT from behind this bending rough-cut mask,These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,This common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in youfor you, in each for each,(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears — O heaven!The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)This glaze of God’s serenest purest sky,This film of Satan’s seething pit,This heart’s geography’s map, this limitless small continent, thissoundless sea;Out from the convolutions of this globe,This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus,Mars,This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe,Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;)These burin’d eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time,To launch and spin through space revolving sideling, from theseto emanate,To you whoe’er you are — a look.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: D. Graham Burnett