The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature - Tapa dura

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I call this body of nineteenth-century literature preoccupied with the possibilities and perils of bringing the dead to life “necromantic” literature. Necromantic literature distinguishes itself from ghost stories by its disinterest both in spectrality—“how the past lives indirectly in the present, inchoately suffusing and shaping rather than determining it,” as Wendy Brown describes it—and in traumatic recurrence: “The specter begins by coming back, by repeating itself, by recurring”. Necromantic literature instead focuses on how material corpses, even metaphorical ones, are exhumed, reanimated, and manipulated by the powers of the present into lively, readable historical bodies. In some texts, like The Ring and the Book, waking a corpse into modern readability is a nearly literal poetic act: when Robert Browning asks in the poem’s introductory book, “How title I the dead alive once more?” he grammatically collapses reanimated corpse and new poem into a single entity. Others, like Our Mutual Friend and Bram Stoker’s 1903 The Jewel of Seven Stars, make the desire to resuscitate a dead body into readable life into a monstrous mandate, whether that resuscitation happens at the level of form, as in Dickens’s novel, or in a dark cellar crammed with electrical equipment and Egyptian curios, as in Stoker’s.

Bodies and stories are often interchangeable in necromantic literature, revival and rewriting presented as analogous in kind, if not always in degree. The first stanza of Wilde’s poem offers a stark example of this as it jumps from its fantasy of reanimating Ireland to revising the biblical Exodus story to better suit Wilde’s needs as a woman poet. However, the parallel structure of this stanza doesn’t present revival and rewriting as metaphors for one another the way Browning’s poem does. Instead, it presents two different but intertwined versions of the work of the poet, one resuscitative and one revisionary, each demonstrating that reimagining the past into present-day lives requires both active aesthetic work and a recognition that such work will leave an inescapable imprint on whatever new lives it produces. In the case of Wilde’s first stanza, we can see the imprint in two ways: nearly literally in the image of the present age lending its glow to the newly revived body of Ireland, and effectively in her transformation of Exodus from a story of liberation to one of revival. Whether reanimating dead Ireland or reimagining Miriam as a necromancer in her own right, this stanza encapsulates the impulse of necromantic literature more largely to revive its dead bodies in order to reconstruct the past into new literary and political stories. As I argue throughout this book, texts that bring bodies back to life simultaneously reimagine the past to suit present-day needs and self-consciously reflect on the mechanisms, ambitions, and dangers that inhere in such daring acts of reanimation. Yet necromantic literature isn’t simply historical revival literature in a different guise, self-conscious of its inauthenticity though such revival literature may be. Necromantic literature is about the ways poems, stories, and histories try to revive the past. It literalizes the aesthetics and politics of such revivals to examine them, question them, undermine them, and sometimes even celebrate them.