Dominion of the Dead Book

At the end of this remarkable study Harrison writes:

'The contract between the living and the dead has traditionally been one of mutual indebtedness, for reasons that Vico [New Science] probes and that I, in his wake, have sought to clarify. The dead depend on the living to preserve their authority, heed their concerns, and keep them going in their afterlives. In return, they help us to know ourselves, give form to our lives, organize our social relations, and restrain our destructive impulses. They provide us with the counsel needed to maintain the institutional order, of which they remain the authors, and prevent it from degenerating into a bestial barbarism. The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.'

This seemingly simple sounding relationship, though, has become, for the reader a profoundly complex history of place, linguistics, and culture in all senses of the word. Harrison gradually adds layer after layer to our understanding of what death and the dead mean to the living as we move through space and language. It seems to me that the crux of the book is the extent to which the dead (or rather how we relate to the dead) determine or enable our future actions, in particular the concept of Heidigger's 'repetition' or retrieval being either an empty attempt to precisely recreate the past or else to improve upon it in the more contemporary environment we actually live in, depending on how a person employs it.

But there are twenty other aspects of the book that could be crucial as well. The chapters treat:
1) the physical earth and its physical dead
2) architecture and the dead
3) the house centered around burial places and shrines to the dead, enabling us to look outward and contemplate, and homelessness
4) language and grief
5) the origin of our basic words; lex and logos
6) 'choosing your ancestor'; Vico, Heidigger and others on the realm of the dead and authenticity
7) Chrisianity and the empty tomb; Chrisian rituals continuing traditional Roman veneration of ancestors
8) Names of the dead, Homer, Virgil and Dante on death and the underworld; war memorials
9) The corpse--presence and absence, the 'disappeared'

It would be helpful to start with a good understanding of Heidigger; I didn't and it nearly did me in, but Harrison provides help. You would be aided also by a prior reading of Vico's New Science, which Harrison relies on heavily, but quotes are included.

For example:
'Vico's quest for the principles of civil society led him, he says, into "the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity" (New Science, sect 331). He was obliged "to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures [of the first men], which we cannot at all imagine and comprehend only with great effort" (sec 338)…Yet for all the darkness of that night enveloping the earliest antiquity, "there shines [in this night] the never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind" (sec 331). I take this axiom to be crucial, not so much for the reason Vico scholars frequently draw attention to it--namely as evidence that the verum factum principle (we can know only what we make) remains the epistemological foundation of the New Science--but because it postulates that the human mind retains its prior modes of synthesis and carries them over into its subsequent modifications. Were the mind not retentive in this metasynthetic way we could neither share the words of the dead, nor understand the worlds from which those words come down to us, nor decipher the heiroglyphs in the early fossil record of poetic wisdom. Indeed, there would be no such thing as civil society at all, since it is precisely in the human mind's vast reservoirs of retention that we find its principles, or enduring beginnings.'

Heidigger and Vico are constants throughout, but who else hasn't Harrison read? You will discover new dimensions to almost every book you've read (or mean to read) as he develops insights about Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire and his devotion to Poe, Leopardi, Ungaretti, Marianne Moore, Freud, Conrad, the Greek dramatists, Foscolo, Thoreau, Descartes, Rilke, Rimbaud and of course Homer, Virgil and Dante. His extensive bibliographic commentary at the end of the book could supply several years worth of critical theory/anthropology/art history/etc. reading.

Looking over the bibliography prompts the reader to realize just how much analysis is packed into this book, and what a journey Harrison has conducted his reader on. In fact he has been his own Virgil, leading the reader through aspects of the underworld as the living perceive it--through intense tutorials in which one has to wrestle with how the dead still inhabit our world, through language, structure, and literature. Some tutorials are absolutely abstract--Dasein and authenticity--others are as concrete as the Vietnam war memorial. He also challenges one on to deeper reading and memory, as in his example of how Homer, Virgil and Dante use the metaphor of falling leaves and death.

This is the kind of book one could dip back into profitably many times. I know I will reflect back on it many times as I read in the future and think about how a new (to me) book could be woven into this discussion.

To close: Harrison on Lincoln's Gettysburg address as a sema, or grave marker, starting from Whitman's 'When Lilacs...':

'Whitman addresses the dead Lincoln as a living "you," for the corpse is still very much alive. Not only is it making an actual journey, it is also an animate force acting upon and drawing together the new nation, reborn now of the tolling bells an shadowy light. One could say that the temporal passage of Lincoln's body across the spatial expanse of the nation effectively brings an end to, or better, "buries," the Civil War--"buries" in the sense of becoming the enduring foundation of a nation 'So conceived and so dedicated." In the magnitude of its tragedy, his death became, and to this day remains, a source of unity in the Union, a unity that the Constitution, for all its elightened provisions, could not provide.'