Lilly Archive Project
Justin, Ming, Derek, Natalie
Introduction
We went to the Lilly Library and looked at
items from three collections: the puzzle collection, Clifford Odets, and Edgar
Allan Poe. In flipping through the papers describing the Odets collection, the
words “Death Mask” jumped out at us: just those two words on a single line, no
other description or explanation. Naturally we were drawn to this intriguing
entry. And when the librarian asked us if we wanted to see it, we all said “yes,
please.” We asked, thinking it might be some kind of wooden mask used in a
foreign country. Instead, we had found a plaster death mask of the deceased Clifford
Odets himself (see Figure 1), which was made at his death in 1963 (he died August 14, of
cancer, at age 57). Clifford Odets was famous for plays such as Waiting for Lefty (1935) and the
screenplay of Sweet Smell of Success
(1957). This post has been written in parts connected only loosely together.
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| Figure 1. Death Mask of Clifford Odets (1957) Photograph by Derek DiMatteo. |
Justin’s thoughts
‘Death Mask’ – these
are two words one does not often associate with the archival remains of a
little-known playwright housed in a Midwestern university library. Yet they
appear, unaccompanied by additional text, in the “Guide to the Clifford
Odets Papers in the Lilly Library.” Seeing the words ‘death mask’ immediately
conjures visions of ritual performance masks purchased during global travels or
perhaps images of spooky disguises used for costuming in a non-realistic play.
Thus, it is rather a surprise when a Lilly librarian brings to you a cardboard
box graffitied with magic marker that holds voluminous bubble wrap enveloping a
stark white plaster cast of a deceased man’s face. As soon as the bright visage
is pulled from its cardboard home, romantic visions quickly vanish and one
realizes that the term ‘death mask’ refers, quite literally, to a plaster
reproduction of a person’s face made shortly after death and just prior to
interment. The experience is best described as ‘creepy’ and invites a host of
questions in regards to the mask’s creation as well as queries concerning its
inclusion in the university archive.
A death mask is an oddly difficult
archival object in which to ‘dance’ academically, especially in the absence of
any accompanying data concerning its creation or previous homes. It is solely
evidence of the living, breathing corpus that is no longer present to interact
or to perform. The death mask functions much like film or photography works for
performance: it serves as evidence for what was once present, but is now lost
forever – that which can only be faultily re-membered through memory,
description, and visual representations. As Peggy Phelan notes, “Without a
copy, live performance plunges into visibility –in a maniacally charged present
– and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the
unconscious where it eludes regulation and control”(Phelan 148). The human body
mirrors performance, as neither remain present ad infinitum, but both
are lost to a perpetual present from which they necessarily disappear.
The death mask is a reminder of the
body that once was extant, but how adequately does it ‘ghost’ the person it
represents? Andrew Sofer reminds us that “spectators bring associations from
previous productions with them to the theater, and that these ‘ghosts’ color
their experience of the current performance” (63). ‘Ghosts’ in real, lived
experience work in the same way: associations from prior experience are
conjured, creating a specter of what preceded. But what prior experience is
recalled when an unwitting student stumbles across the ‘death mask’ of Clifford
Odets in a search of the Lilly Library? The mask is a representation of a
largely unknown man who once lived, but does it provide information beyond the
fact that he indeed lived? A ‘ghost’ depends on memory. It is not only important
how accurate or faulty a memory may be (as evidenced in Phelan’s discussion of
Sophie Calle’s installations), but also that a memory exists. Without memory is
there anything to ‘ghost’? If a ghost appears, but there is no memory, is the
imagination just playing tricks? Thus, how problematic is imagination?
Ming’s thoughts
So, Odets's death mask. A plaster mask taken after the mortician spruced Odets up and before he was interred...well, in our language, after death, “he” becomes “his body”, “the body”, or “the corpse”--so, before his body was interred? Which distinction brings me to one of the themes I've visited before when I discussed literary translation and performance studies: the two disciplines have in common a tendency to use violent metaphors to describe rendering. With his death mask, Odets is rendered here, but how many layers are there to the palimpsest? The man, who after death is no longer, in English, “the man” but “the man’s body”. The body, the mask, the mortician, the loved one who presumably asked that the mask be made. Then outward: every box it's been in, the journey it traveled to the Lilly, everyone who has seen it, which now includes me. To know that this very plaster lay on a dead man's face, to look upon the shape his mourners must have looked upon if he had an open casket...that his face looks calm does little to calm my own nerves. Why was I getting the willies? The mask was made in 1963; not too long ago. But because the process is not a culturally familiar one to me, I felt odd seeing this man's death mask. Mask-layer notwithstanding, there seemed to be a layer missing, a layer of rendering that might have made it acceptable: oil on canvas, rendering his likeness; a needle on a record, rendering his voice. In the absence of as much rendering as I found normative, not enough of it had the effect of inserting sacrilegious me into a sacred space: I felt as I looked at the mask the way I might feel stumbling into a church where someone who thinks herself alone is praying audibly. And yet, it was something made to be seen, to record how he looked—and look I did, with the willies and also a sense of fascination. Harris brings up the concept of “fetish” early in “Palimpsested Time”, touching on Marx's thought that fetishism is “guilty of 'magical' thought, insofar as it allegedly anthropomorphizes inert objects by lending agency to them” (6). If this "magicking" of objects is a crime, most of the authors we've read recently have committed it. Agency is lent to inanimate objects up the wazoo in our recent readings, not least the ones touching on photography. I see every photo as a ("polychronic"?) palimpsest with infinite layers, among which linger the time it is taken, and every time it is seen, every person who sees it and touches it, and underneath it all the person who took it and the subject it objectified. Then there are Geertz's “thick descriptions” of the objects involved, the discursive, cultural, and historical lives to which the subject in the photo and the subject of the photo each belong. It goes on and on. Accordingly, our readings of late have nodded again and again to the stories we tell ourselves and each other about heretofore inanimate objects, and the codes of repression and exhibition enforced and reified by our “dance with things”, by our decision to see (or, Wexler would remind us, not see) them as active agents. Harris contends on page 16 that matter need not be “animate” to be necessary to the temporality of supercession or to that of explosion, perhaps suggesting that matter therefore is an undeniable agent in whatever reality there is to a construct of time. I wonder, was Odets's mask made in order to negate time? Negate time the way Debord's spectacle is “a negation of life which has invented a visual form for itself”? Why are all these theorists proclaiming that an inert thing can have a suppressive (or, for that matter, an animating) effect on abstractions? How can an object negate time or life; how can an object invent? These theorists are looking at a thing and endowing it with agency in the (admit it) fictive textual world they create, the way Brecht endows epic theater with agency when he says it “admits it is a demonstration” or the way Blank and Jensen do the same when they refer to what a play “asks of us”. What does Odets's death mask ask of us? I'm still not sure, but Harris might agree that whatever its scriptive function the mask is a palimpsest in that it is undeniably a “collation of diverse inscriptions that accrue over time”: perhaps inscribed by the man's face, the mortician, even viewers who knew him and the viewers who, like me, experience the visage as an archival item and not a reminder (17). Harris might also agree that, as a palimpsest, the mask is a “complex, polychronic assemblage of material agents”: plaster, mortician, face, corpse, viewers, graffitied cardboard box.
Derek’s
thoughts
Polychronic assemblage, indeed. The
Odets Death Mask “both is a material presence and it encodes other material and
immaterial presences” (Stallybrass, qtd in Harris, 9). Its material presence is
quite literally that of a plaster mask created in 1957. The other material
presence it encodes is the physical features of Clifford Odets’ face at the
time of his death. The primary immaterial presence (at least for those who knew
Odets) is perhaps akin to what Sofer calls the “felt absence” (67), i.e.
the memory of a living, corporeal, walking/talking Clifford Odets. As Harris
notes, “these other presences are…the memorial marks of the past”, and are
emphatically not of the present, and thus the mask is “out of time with itself”
or “untimely” (10), inhabiting the present moment but also “alien to and out of
step with it” (11). Because of these other presences, because of its
untimeliness, the plaster mask connotes “the persistence of the past in the
present” (11). The mask does so by encoding the corporeal past, allowing it to persist
into the present: Clifford Odets’ facial features have been written into the
plaster, an act of supersession. But at the same time the mask resists
“absorption into a homogenous present” (11). After all, we are gathered here in
the Lilly Library, without having known Odets or having any memory of him. As
scriptive objects, masks invite the viewer to put them on, but this perversely scriptive impulse is resisted
when we know this is a death mask. Instead, the mask takes on a spiritual or sacred scriptiveness that invites
viewers to activate their memories of Clifford Odets. But we who never knew
Odets cannot conjure a memory of him as we look at the mask. So for those who
see the mask without any memory of Odets, other immaterial presences are
encoded: one of imagination (spectator is invited to imagine a living Odets)
and one of ghosting (spectator is reminded of other deaths, of the faces of
loved ones seen at wakes/funerals past). This explosion of memory and
imagination shatters the integrity of the plaster mask as memory “punctures the
illusion” of the mask’s material “wholeness or finality” (16). In this way, the
juxtaposition of the highly detailed—indeed, the life-like—mask with the
irruption of imagination and/or memory of the “dust of the past” allows the
material and immaterial presences to “converse” in the “temporality of
conjunction” (16). The mask is of 1957, but our gaze works on the plaster text
to read the features and bring it to life.
Natalie’s
thoughts
It would seem that this death mask is an excellent example
of Phelan’s key claim about performance, that it only becomes itself through
disappearance: the mask performs the memory and the absent body of Odets, as
others have mentioned, only in the wake of his death, in the disappearance of
the life that animates the face captured here. I think the disturbed and
unsettled feeling that others have described as accompanying seeing such a thing
has very much to do with Phelan’s claim and Ming’s sense that there was a
“layer missing.” What the death mask seems to promise is exactly what it cannot
give, contact with the material body. The “needle” of a recording of his voice
or the “oil” in a painting of him would give concrete elements for us to hold
on and attach ourselves to in the representation of this man—we’d know we were
only getting a representation, but having other materialities would provide
other points of contact. But the death mask DID made contact with the face—it
actually touched it, yet it can never allow us that same experience, or even a
more mediated form of it like a painting or recording could. I think that it is
not simply the loss of the body here, then, but the endlessly impossible desire
to do just what the mask would seem to be doing—making contact with the
material body—that is being performed by this object. I think it also promises
to surrender the substance of death to us but can’t give that over either—not
just his death, but any death, the concrete experience of death in general. In
doing so it makes us witnesses to a performance that we can never actually see.
If this object is indeed performing, then it matters in what
context it takes place. Justin has already pointed out how some responses that might
be called forth by the mask can’t be elicited if the viewer doesn’t have
certain information. Certainly, the functions death masks used to serve—as
physical remainders of the deceased in the absence of photography or genetic
profiles to be archived not just by the family but also by the state, and as
guides to painting portraits of the deceased—are either outdated or unlikely to
be called upon now. I think it’s fair to say that if you don’t know who this
person is, then if this mask is prominently displayed in a museum, library, or university
building—which is apparently where many of these masks end up—another aspect of
its “scriptedness” might concern generating an impulse to create and consult an
archive about them. If the mask is just displayed in the glass case of a
university library with the person’s name and date of birth and death, it
suggests their importance to a certain “we” that the viewer is excluded from
without knowing the referent. This might seem obvious, but I think it’s important
to consider the ways in which this might be displayed now, and how the contours
of the performance would change in other contexts.
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| Figure 2. Clifford Odets, book photo and death mask Photographed by Derek DiMatteo. |
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