It is perhaps little surprise that societies that have an ambivalent attitude to the dying have such a complex relationship towards the dead themselves and towards their graves. The figure of the graverobber is a fitting one for our times. The iconic graverobber is the looter-archaeologist, combining knowledge of ancient history with more or less admirable motives for recovering buried treasure or mystical artifacts. Portrayed in movies such as La Chimera (2023) or The Mummy (1932, 1999, 2017), the graverobber is semi-heroically looking to make a fortune through pilfering ancient tombs of their culturally significant and/or valuable artifacts. The pinnacle of this sort of graverobber is of course the unscrupulous Egyptologist, with an eye on the pharaoh’s riches and dismissive of the supposed curse attached to the tomb.
If this plunderer is a well-known character, driven by greed and likely to pay the dramatic price for this, a different type of graverobber has tended to focus on the value of the body itself. In Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) we see a group of doctors crowding around a corpse, with the partially dissected arm of the dead body being reached into by a surgeon’s metal instrument. As medicine emerged as a science, the practice of using real dead bodies in anatomy training required a steady flow of corpses; the corpse in The Anatomy Lesson is taken to be a criminal who was convicted of armed robbery and executed earlier the same day.
Although it drove forward the understanding of human anatomy in a way that using other animals could not, medicine’s requirement of a continual inflow of bodies powered a derivative industry, namely that of the procuring of corpses to be conveyed over to the surgeons for dissecting. Often these corpses were recently executed criminals, pre-emptively robbed from the grave. As Mark McNally details, dissection was seen as a further punishment for criminals, and in eighteenth-century London riots against surgeons at the gallows were a counterpart to the Friendly Societies that workers contributed to for a proper burial—both were attempts to save the body of the condemned from falling into the hands of the dissecters. The practice of body-snatching reaches its fictional peak in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which combines graverobbing of corpses with reanimation in one of the most memorable Gothic stories in English.
Without extending the analogy too far, we might say that cultural graverobbing today has become normalized. The graverobber above all represents a sacrilegious pillaging of the past; that which ought to stay dead and buried is relentlessly mined, without even the modernist aspiration to transform it into something distinctively new. Drawing on past cultural ages and movements is nothing new, but the Renaissance can be distinguished from our contemporary retromania (the ceaseless plundering of the recent cultural past) both because it represented the desire for a full rebirth of culture (rather than a recycling) and also because it reached back beyond living memory for its inspiration. By contrast, contemporary retromania is marked by ever shorter cycles of repetition: while the 1990s looked back to the 1960s, the 2010s looked back to the 1990s and the 2020s to the 2010s. The graverobbing has moved from the ancient tombs of Pharaohs to the recently-buried.
The Renaissance can be distinguished from our contemporary retromania (the ceaseless plundering of the recent cultural past) because it represented the desire for a full rebirth of culture (rather than a recycling).
At the same time, we might consider that the nature of contemporary cultural graverobbing has become ever more contemptuous of its source material and increasingly sceptical that any buried treasures are worth handling carefully. The archaeologist Indiana Jones is perhaps the most famous cinematic representation of a graverobber of sorts, although Indy is driven not by greed but by the desire to see important objects preserved and displayed in a museum. In a predictive but cruel twist, the Indiana Jones franchise has now assumed a graverobbing aspect of its own, as the iconic but ageing hero portrayed by Harrison Ford is undermined by his younger and more competent female counterpart (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge of “Fleabag” fame). The graverobbing here is precisely the process through which the reputation of the hero built up over the course of a series of classic films in the 1980s has been vandalized in the 2023 film, which portrays Indy/Ford as a failed loser who needs to be shaken up by the new hero. This is a similar process to the ritual humiliation of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars sequel films (or Obi Wan Kenobi in the Disney Plus television show); the breaking down of the older, established character for contemporary viewers.
The graverobbing here is the process through which the reputation of the hero of the classic films in the 1980s has been vandalized in the 2023 film, which portrays Indiana Jones/Ford as a failed loser who needs to be shaken up by the new hero.
Are we, then, stuck in a fruitless and demoralizing robbing of the graves of our cultural past? An alternative to robbing graves is, of course, digging them. As Mathias Énard notes in his The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild (2023), gravedigging is one of the two oldest professions. What is surely the most famous representation of a gravedigger is to be found at the start of the fifth act of Hamlet (1623), where Hamlet meets the gravedigger and his assistant preparing to bury Orphelia. These gravediggers are clowns for Shakespeare, in the sense of figures who turn social hierarchies upside down (rather than in the more modern sense of physical or lowbrow comedy). The gravedigger’s proximity to death and earth—to a greater extent than with the more modern figure of the undertaker—makes his a suitable profession for the philosophically inclined.
If philosophers from Cicero to Montaigne to Critchley are correct that to philosophize is to learn how to die, then gravediggers have a clear head start on most people, given their understanding of what happens after death and their everyday proximity to it. If gravediggers are clowns in Shakespeare, they are no laughing matter for a thinker like Marx. In Marx and Engels’s famous formulation, the bourgeoisie, in its ascent to world domination, has in fact done nothing more than produce its own gravediggers: the proletariat. The gravedigger, for Marx, is a metaphor for the tendency of historical developments to self-undermine; it is the antagonistic element produced by the development of capitalism that will in due course bring an end to that system. We do not have the same today faith that the working class is in a position to bury the bourgeoisie, and so the figure of the gravedigger preparing a resting place for his class enemies has lost much of its resonance. Instead, our troubled relationship with the past is in part created by the movement from the figure of the gravedigger to that of the graverobber; we no longer create the conditions for the burial of the past, instead we can only pilfer from it.
