Of what type of time and space is the grave as chronotope constituted? In temporal terms, I argue that it participates in what Bakhtin calls ‘the historicity of castle time,’ which, in some literary works, bears ‘a somewhat antiquated, museum-like character,’ but can also (as in the oeuvre of Sir Walter Scott) be animated by emphasizing how the past lives on in the castle’s architecture, furnishings and present inhabitants (1996: 246). Thus, while it may treat the past as a closed chapter, this historicity may also actively recall and medi- ate the past in the present. In graveyards, this happens, for example, by the way the names of living community members echo those inscribed on the headstones.
In addition, the grave is entangled with biographical time, the individual life course of which it signifies the ending. It does not, however, necessarily remove the deceased from all temporality or narrative potential, as it may launch him or her into a literal (spirit- ual/religious) and/or metaphorical afterlife (the inscription of the dead in personal mem- ory and/or history).1 Robert Pogue Harrison, in The Dominion of the Dead, calls that
which is liberated upon the proper disposal of the physical remains ‘the afterlife of the image’ (2003: 142). The dead live on as images to be utilized by the living. This survival requires a ritual detachment from the corpse as ‘the connatural image, or afterimage, of the person who has vanished’ which ‘embodies or holds on to the person’s image at the moment of demise’ (Harrison 2003: 148). At the same time, it may remain tethered to the grave as the designated space-time of commemoration/conjuration: at specific intervals, individuals, communities or nations pay tribute to the dead – and revive their image – by attending (to) their resting place. The chronotope of the grave, then, is characterized by a transitional temporality that, at the moment of burial, closes off biographical time to open onto a potentially complex, multiple survival in the cultural imagination, which can be divided into religious/spiritual time (for example, a form of eternity), historical time (which may musealise or re-animate) and personal memory.2
In terms of their spatial organisation, graves presuppose, possibly universally, a location in a familiar place: one ought to be buried where one is from or somewhere one knew and loved rather than in a foreign land or at sea. Conventions of where exactly graves should
be placed within familiar space vary historically and culturally, yet some distinction between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ places of burial is usually maintained. The location of the grave is, if not necessarily public, at least accessible to the descendants of its occupant, the ability to return to the site being central to its commemorative function. Graves also tend to be fundamentally hierarchical spaces: distinctions of class, gender, race and reli- gion determine where a person’s grave will be, what it will look like, and whether or not it will be marked. Finally, the grave is a sacred space, not only because it commonly marks the deceased’s religious affiliation, but because it is a space not to be disturbed. Any encroachment is considered a desecration, as the space of the grave is supposed to be non-interchangeable, stable and exclusive (only family members should be buried together and mass graves are an abomination).
On the basis of the above, the chronotope of the grave is characterized by a transition from biographical time to religious, historical and/or personal memorial time occurring in a familiar, proper, accessible, hierarchical, sacred, non-interchangeable, stable and exclu- sive space. Far from terminating a character’s narrative potential, it facilitates further sto- ries of the dead, both as dead (in whatever afterlives the cultural framework foresees) and as living on as their image becomes available to the living. There are some stories, how- ever, the chronotope of the grave has difficulty accommodating: non-burial, for example, is problematic because it prevents the transition from taking place and forecloses mourn- ing and commemoration, while reburial multiplies the supposedly unique moment of tran- sition and challenges the sanctity and non-interchangeability of the gravesite. Only when the imperative to leave the dead in peace is trumped by the need to bury them in a more familiar, proper or accessible place in order to (re)inscribe them into history or memory more effectively is reburial sanctioned within the evaluative framework of the grave chro- notope. The stories I analyse below all involve infringements of the grave’s usual tempo- ral and spatial determinations in their particular cultural setting. These infringements, through the strong emotions they incite, only serve to reinforce the normative (and rela- tively stable) nature of the grave chronotope’s narratological and social function in deter- mining what stories the dead should (and should not) partake in.
Before turning to the literary texts, the grave’s ideological function as heterochronotopia needs to be specified. Significantly, the cemetery is used by Foucault to illustrate how the same heterotopia can operate in various ways, in different cultures or periods. He charts the development, in Western-European culture, from the sacred, centrally located ceme- tery as a site of Christian resurrection to the secularised cemetery with its individualised graves that was considered a site of disease and removed to the outskirts, where it para- doxically gave rise to a ‘cult of the dead’ (1998: 181). While Foucault does not specify the function of the cemetery heterotopia, I suggest it is a heterochronotopia of compensa- tion, which aims ‘to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticu- lous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed and jumbled’ (1998: 184). The modern cemetery and grave in particular are places where the dead are actually decom- posing, but where this decay is disavowed through distance and compensated for by the solid presence of gravestones that keep the dead in their proper, separate place and, in their orderly, hierarchical arrangement, counteract the chaos of everyday life.
As Jacques Derrida insists in Specters of Marx, keeping the dead in place is essential to facilitate mourning in the Freudian sense of a finite process in which affective ties to the deceased are gradually severed to make room for a new love object: ‘Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where – and it is necessary (to know – to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more!’ (1994: 9). In order to successfully complete the mourning process, it needs to be confirmed that ‘the beloved object no longer exists’ (Freud 2005: 204). Graves provide this confirmation by confining the remains to a particular, static place and precisely dating their demise. As heterochronoto- pia of compensation, this final resting place is supposed to remain impervious to the flow of time. Much like the museum heterotopia described by Foucault, it is associated with ‘the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself out of time and inaccessible to its ravages’ (1998: 26).3
My reading of the grave as chronotope associated it with the historicity of castle time, which entails a ‘danger of excessive antiquarianism’ but may also emphasize the way the past continues to affect the present (Bakhtin 1981: 246). When the grave chronotope acquires the ideological function of heterochronotopia of compensation, however, the ‘museum-like character’ of the grave as a site of closure and disappearance is heightened, crowding out its relation to the open-ended temporalities of living on (Bakhtin 1981: 246). In the context of the grave as heterochronotopia of compensation, non-burial and reburial disturb, I will show below, because they prevent the enclosure of the past in the past and reveal the sense of order associated with the grave to be illusionary, artificial and tempo- rary.