Death masks and elegies are responses, visual and verbal, to the death of a beloved (famous) person. While the mask’s purpose is to preserve the dead’s face, as the foremost marker of identity, the elegy praises his/her life and seeks to offer consolation to the mourners. In my analysis, based on Mary Jo Bang’s poem “ The Role of Elegy,” however, I take a critical stance on these two cultural tokens of hallowing the dead. The face, I argue, is three-dimensional, consisting of the static dimension, which provides information about the person’s sex, race, and age; the dynamic dimension, which renders the face a tool of communication by means of which we can both reveal and conceal what is going on inside our brain; and the invisible dimension, which conjures up the wholeness of its owner. Emmanuel Levinas builds his theory of ethics on this third dimension. We encounter each other face-to-face whereby the other appeals to me and demands my ethical response to his/her wholeness. The ultimate imperative is, “Thou shalt not kill me.” The death mask is supposed to preserve the spirit of the deceased. However, the adoration for the deceased’s face, frozen and still in the moment of death, preserves nothing but the static dimension, the indicator of his/her identity on the surface. Motionless, it need not be engaged with. The elegy works in a similar way. It constructs a life story of and for the dead that evokes more of what the person was supposed to be (like) than what he/she actually was. The elegy’s narrative therefore designs a profile that the deceased will never be able to live up to. Both the death mask and the elegy, in spite of honoring the dead, cancel out their real essence. Metaphorically speaking, they “kill” the dead.
About the presenterGudrun Maria Grabher
Full Professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she chaired the Department of American Studies for 13 years. She has a PhD in American Studies, and MA degrees in German Philology, in Philosophy, and in English. She taught as a guest professor at the American Studies Department at the University of Notre Dame, IN, in 2007. Her special fields of interest are American poetry, American literature and philosophy, literature and the arts, medical humanities; law and the humanities. She is currently working on a book about facial disfigurement in American narratives.