Fresh corpse. Instead of other thing.

Instead of other thing.
Semiotics on extremes.

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Memento mori. Post mortem photograph taken around 1880.

Robson. Around 1880: Post mortem photograph.
Petrolia Heritage Museum.

Fresh corpse.

Fresh corpse: what remains after death, immediately after, instead of another immensely valuable entity, a person who was alive, somebody who perhaps had been loved by other. It is not somebody but something that is already corrupting, painfully located, close in time, to that somebody totally extinguished, to whom recently had given the body, it is to say the support, it is to say the signifier.

Unexpected full-body sculpture which can inspire the recognition of another entity, the previous owner of the body, of whom now it is completely separated, but to whom, however, basing on the similarity of the apparent, still can, for some purposes, replace.

The body is, in semiotic terms, neither more nor less than a successful representation. Our fascination and our horror to the corpse have, therefore, a clear semiotic assignment: iconism. They are horror and fascination that are borned of the hyper-realism of the corpse taken as iconic sign.

Genre: Memento mori. Subgenre: post-mortem photograpy. Photographic memory of a recently deceased person, habitual request of the family at that time. The post-mortem photography belongs to the dawn of photographic era, given the logical lack in the family trousseau of other photos more pleasent and under the next consideration: better a photo of the dead person than no photograph at all.

The instant constantly updated by the photographic reproduction shown above is, therefore, the moment in which the dead girl is placed between her parents. That moment in which this super icon that is the corpse of a young girl is at the very moment of being registered on another icon, a photograph, and delivered by this means to the unlimited posterity.

What overwhelms us, what no longer can be tolerated by our sensitivity, is precisely the moment of the practice of forcing the corpse to pose as alive. An specially that moment at that those alive parents, the closest to her, forced themselves to pose as ignoring that fact.

It is very surprising for us the importance that these people atribuited to the ownership of such these photographs. We have to think that this iconic cohabitation of alive and dead people, to what the nineteenth century family suited itself, apparently, with naturality, comes urged by the childish desire of owning the enduring picture. What makes the scene a bit more sinister still.

What the picture vividly updates now and here is just the ceremony of such a deception. We are urged by the image to guess these other "not photographic" tools for photographers: the hanger, probably made of metal, which had to serve several times to keep up the corpses (and which was probably built for taller corpses than the girl one, because she appears on her toes). We also imagine the tiresome work of composing, loading and hanging the body (perhaps with the help of the parents), supporting the head, composing dress, hairstyle and gesture, to force the body to represent, ultimately, her absent life, etc.

André Bazin, the great theorist of realism in art, intuited Egyptian mummies as a representation of the same epistemic rank than the cinema (1958-1962: 23). But the corpse, and therefore the mummy too, provides us just what the cinema can never rescue: the body, the original carrier of the portrayed person. The only owner of its aura.

There is, for this purpose, no iconic sign that can even compare to a nice fresh corpse.

Rubén Díaz de Corcuera.
Super icons.
June 12, 2009