Losing Our Heads

Beheadings in Literature and Culture

Regina Janes

• Editore: NYU Press
• Anno: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814743010
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria

What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished—but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared—and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more “barbaric”or “primitive” past?

Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity's cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salomé and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa’s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head.

1
Introduction to a Beheading

A Head Is Always a Sign of Something

Beheading is among the most ancient, widespread, and enduring of human cultural practices. Examples occur in every place, time, and level of culture. In Ashurbanipal’s Nineveh, seventh-century B.C.E. Assyrians heaped heads beneath palm trees, the harvested fruits of victory, tallied by meticulous scribes (fig. 1.1). In his fourteenth-century progresses, Tamerlane piled heads into monitory mountains. Heads were carried aloft by Japanese warriors of the twelfth century, shrunk by Jivaro in the twentieth, tossed by Aztecs in their ball games, collected in baskets by Jehu and the Nazis, preserved in niches by pre-Roman Celts. Headsmen took them off throughout Europe until the end of the eighteenth century, when the guillotine modernized the practice until the end of the twentieth. The Third Reich decapitated the traitors of the White Rose during World War II; the French last used their guillotine to execute a capital sentence in 1977. Saudi executioners still decapitate with a sword, and western newspapers and Internet sites eagerly report it.

In spontaneous political actions, medieval peasants, Burmese rebels, Latin American death squads, enlightened British officers, and genial U.S. soldiers have severed heads for display. In September 1988, popular risings in Burma produced the people’s decapitations of numerous public officials, their heads hung from tree limbs. In 1990, in South Africa, the leader of a criminal gang in the townships was seized, killed, and decapitated. His head was circulated through the schools in the township as a warning. In 1998 Indonesians hunted and decapitated ninjas to halt their sorcery. In 1945 American troops decollated a Japanese and propped his head on their tank as a trophy; Life magazine chose not to print the photograph. In 1991, American troops decollated an Iraqi and propped his head on their tank as a trophy; Life chose to print the photograph.¹

Fig. 1.1. King Ashurbanipal triumphs over the allies of Shamash-Shum-Ukin. From the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. (© Copyright The British Museum)

Historically, decapitation is a public and social act, with public uses, functions, and audience. Beheading occurs in authorized forms as a tactic in warfare, an aspect of a legal system, or an access to mystical empowerment. Its unauthorized forms seek to redeploy, for public or for private uses, the magical, symbolic, and real power monopolized by authority.

Representations of decapitation are still more pervasive than the practice. They appear in every possible medium: stone walls, photographs, epics, paintings, histories, films, comic strips, mustard pots, coffee cups, and newspapers. From nursery rhymes to Nabokov, Botticelli to Louise Bourgeois, the Celtic beheading game to Mortal Kombat, unattached heads are all about us—in fish tanks in horror movies, on Saturday morning cartoons (Beetlejuice does a lot with his head), in French-language video learning programs such as “La Guillotine” (if you miss the vocabulary word, the guillotine cuts off the aristocrat’s head), in scandalous video arcade games (Mortal Kombat’s once notorious, now banal “final move”), in popular movies from the first full-length Ben Hur to Braveheart, Mononoke Hime, and Kill Bill Vol. I.

In medieval literature, the challenger in the Beheading Game of Irish folktales acts a superhuman fantasy of power. He can put his head back on when someone else cuts it off. In Peggy Glanville Hicks’s opera The Exchanged Heads, a bereaved wife makes the ultimate Freudian slip. Restoring her husband and his best friend to life, she puts the heads on the wrong bodies. Judith displays Holofernes’s head; her ephebic cousin David carries Goliath’s; Perseus makes off with Medusa’s, and Salome attends St. John’s. The severed head in contemporary western culture is a grisly and uncanny object. In other cultures, as once in our own, it is an object of mystical veneration.

Beheading always signifies, but always signifies differently within specific codes supplied by culture. In many cultures, the head is the life.² In ours, for a century, the head has been the penis. In all, the head is a sign. Neither essential flesh nor irreducible bone, heads are plastic. Taking meaning from the discourse in which they are inserted, heads make meanings within that discourse. In terms of Saussure’s distinction in the sign between the signified and the signifier, a head is a signifier, and its signified depends on the discursive system into which it is inserted.³ Setting no limit on the utterances, the body provides a universal grammar, with morphology (forms) and syntax (arrangement of parts).

Beheading is the body’s catachresis: a violation of the rules of the body’s grammar that generates a sensation of dismay, horror, delight, or absurdity. “Catachresis” names the shocking literary figure that goes “against use”: kata chresthai. Abusing the order of meaning, catachresis wrenches words from their proper contexts and puts them where they do not belong. Wrenched from its body, a head no longer performs its usual acts and is no longer available for self-confirming, assertive, or responsive uses. Its open eyes no longer move. Selves know themselves only through the body of the other (“Head Matters”), and such catachreses undo the claims of community, founded on sympathetic identification with others who define us.

With a severed head, the self, defined and confirmed from infancy by the responses of others, encounters an other that fails to give the accustomed, mutually defining responses. As a sign, the severed head communicates aborted communication. Others’ heads, smiling, speaking, listening, responding, establish our reality. From them, we learn that we are, and how we are doing. A head that does not respond is a mirror that gives back no reflection although we stand before it, searching for ourselves in the other. When something is wrong with the other, we feel it as something wrong with us. We do not like being “cut dead,” and we call it by its right name. We have come calling, but the other/self is not at home. Freud finds such transactions uncanny: “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”⁴ Humans know nothing longer, and with less interruption, than responsive faces. When a face fails to respond, the known and familiar have been made strange, and the unexpected, mysterious subtraction of presence and fullness frightens and dismays. The uncanny head disrupts the cognitive process of sympathetic identification fundamental to social identity. Failing to perform its usual work of defining the self through interaction, the other calls the self into question. A severed head is always the same, disturbing.

It remains disturbing until it is naturalized within a system of meanings. Then the disturbance subsides as constructed meaning replaces the natural social horror of the severed head. In Peirce’s terms, the severed head shifts from icon to symbol, from a sign indicating death to a sign promising any meaning but death.⁵ Death’s fleshed face, a severed head is always iconic of death. As symbol, however, the severed head evokes meanings beyond itself, unrelated to itself or its production, within a discursive system one must know to interpret the symbol.⁶ Who would suspect without being told that Dante’s Bertran de Born holds his severed head before his body like a lantern to signify schism? The hideous, pathetic object that is a severed head dissolves into a realm of signification that simultaneously erases/re-cognizes the object and justifies its contemplation. The iconic head provokes disturbance that symbolism neutralizes and appropriates as vitality. In an intricate antithesis, in head cults the head iconic of death holds life. Collecting heads, headhunters appropriate the life of their human prey. Turning heads into signs enables modern critics to consider heaps of human heads with the equanimity of Tamerlane.

Traditional Beheadings

Preceding language and art, cherishing the head coincides with recognizing death. Neanderthals, our speechless cousins, preserved crania and scattered flower petals over bodies in graves.⁷ The earliest ancestral human skulls, discovered in 2003, lack lower jaws and other skeletal parts. They also show marks of cuts, suggesting they were removed for symbolic purposes.⁸ Separating the head from the body, the ancestors created a thing, a severed head, to use as a sign. Without language, their sign is for us, as perhaps for them, only partial, a signifier lacking an articulable signified. Atoning for the silences of the Neanderthals and homo sapiens idaltu, human cultures have elaborated five principal types of traditional, authorized beheadings: the ancestral head, removed after death, not taken by violence; the trophy head, taken in warfare or raid; the sacrificial head, taken from a living person by decapitation in the performance of a religious rite; the presentation head, taken in a political struggle to remove a contender or rival; the public execution, proceeding from a legal decision. By excluding violence, the first of these—a head not taken by violence but preserved for worship—marks an essential category: the venerated head, possessed of mystic powers that communicates with an invisible realm of being. Of these socially authorized decapitations, only the public execution survives, as a traditional Islamic form of humane execution, the west having abandoned capital punishment by decapitation in the 1970s.

Commentators tend to blur the types since distinguishing them requires looking at severed heads, objects one would prefer not to see. Jean-Louis Voisin, assimilating the Romans to what Fernand Benoît calls “the Mediterranean air of the severed head,” demonstrates the prodigious variety within Roman practices, yet designates his Romans simply “chasseurs de têtes,” headhunters.⁹ The types matter, however, if their surviving traces are to become visible.

The ancestral head, collected and venerated within the group, may be the oldest type, if homo sapiens idaltu and Neanderthal skull rings exemplify it. Reported by Herodotus as a seemingly anomalous variation on the trophy head, the Issedonians preserved their fathers’ heads as skull cups for use at the annual festival of the fathers. The protective head is neither the head of an enemy, nor a head taken in a hostile action. The fathers seem to have died naturally, since Herodotus does not characterize the nation as parricidal. “In other respects [the Issedonians] observe justice,” he affirms. At Entremont in southern France, a Celtic head-cult site, six skulls were found belonging to men over forty-five “perhaps suggesting ancestor-worship.”¹⁰ Through the nineteenth century in Brittany, families kept skulls in boxes, ark-shaped coffers with openings that made visible the contents, inscribed “Here lies the head of . . .”¹¹

Such peaceably secured heads persist in the religious relic, which may be secured by natural death or recovered after an enemy’s violence. When Margaret Roper rescued and preserved the head of her father Sir Thomas More, she simultaneously resisted tyranny and honored the father, an individual acting within a patriarchal community.¹² Religious relics occasionally pose a problem of canny opportunism. Among the Issedonians, the wise son doubtless knew his father, and the finger of St. Theresa of Avila is probably hers. The churches of medieval Europe, however, brimmed with desirable heads: John the Baptist, James the brother of Christ, Matthew the Evangelist, St. Philip—prestigious saints associated with Christ a millennium earlier. From what bodies those heads were taken, and their identity, the Lord—or the head taker—only knows.¹³

The most recent form assumed by the venerated head is the shrine commemorating atrocity. In Rwanda and Cambodia, skulls are heaped in remembrance of violence suffered. The head still protects and heals the survivors, restored and reconnected with the dead through contemplation and meditation. Severing the head once prevented the dead from coming back; these shrines collect heads to prevent the killers from coming back. Memory replaces magic. Such radically different cultural constructions share only the evocation of mystical power, appealing to a realm beyond immediate sense experience, through the presence of a sacred head.

Venerated heads share access to mystical power with the trophy head—a complex, ancient, enduring, and irrepressible icon of death, emblem of war, sign of the warrior, symbol of life. Exuberant, triumphant violence makes the trophy head at once invigorating (to takers) and horrifying (to their neighbors). A social sign of individual martial prowess, the trophy head is an always ritualized, widely distributed, terror-inducing sign of victory. Reaffirming and strengthening group bonds against outsiders whose heads are taken during the group’s activity, whether war or raid, the trophy head gestures toward a transcendent realm that the head in no way resembles: life, not death, power, not impotence. The head is hunted for the sake of a power the head confers and continues to possess even after it is severed, a power that can be appropriated, possessed, and transferred to the taker. Yet the head is also hunted for power over the head as a sign of the warrior’s success relative to other warriors. That power is real (indexical, in Peircean terminology), not symbolic. The head marks a difference between the dead and the not-dead, the loser and the victor.

The symbolic component of headhunting is usually invisible to outsiders. Non-participants shrink from the visible horror of the spiked, shrunken head or assimilate the practice to systems they do understand, for example as a sign of the warrior’s personal prowess within the group or as evolutionary advantage. The Mundurucú of northwestern Brazil, who still make their neighbors very nervous, used to collect human heads for their contribution to animal hunts and gave a special title to the successful headhunter: Dajeboisi, mother of the peccary. Trophy heads, carried into the forest on hunts for game, influenced the spirit protectors (“mothers”) and improved the availability and supply of peccary, the most desirable game.¹⁴ To ensure the heads were working, the Dajeboisi refrained from sexual intercourse for three rainy seasons. In a Mundurucú myth of the origin of the peccary, collected by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the peccary were originally human, transformed into wild pig while copulating and grunting like pigs. An alternate form of the myth emphasizes that antisocial behavior by the humans warranted their transformation into peccary.¹⁵ The myths make the pair, “human head/peccary spirit mother” metonymic, elucidating the human head’s effect on the invisible realm of peccary spirit mothers, abutting the visible material world. For outsiders, the connection between human he...