Haunter of graveyards and morgues, the necrophile embodies our worst fears and our most base desires. In a society in which the image of the corpse is no longer sacred—the huddled bodies of babies twisted like Bellmer dolls on a bloody path in My Lai, the quasi-Ballardian obsession with the remains of Diana, Princess of Wales, Tamil Tiger suicide bombers embracing naked and dead in the back of a truck—the sexual desire for the dead transgresses even the media’s exploitation of human mortality. For the necrophile, as embodied in the character of Sergeant Bertrand, the object of desire—what may be my petite brunette or your American sailor—has been supplanted in fantasy and reality by a motionless body, sometimes intact, sometimes bursting at the fleshy seams with gases and insects. ‘It’s hard to visualize but the day may come when genital sex is a seriously life-threatening health hazard… At that point the imagination may claim the sexual impulse as its own, an inheritance wholly free of any biological entail. As always with such inheritances there will be any number of new friends eager to help in its spending.’[18] The sublimated purity of so-called normal attraction is superseded, desire is displaced into a simulacrum of the infinite and unknowable other—an ontological seduction, the improbable contradiction of coition between the living and the dead. What drives a man (or woman) to ford a river, climb a wall, risk injury and capture, even his/her own death to dig up a corpse and copulate with it?
From the banks of the Nile, the young slave boy smells the rotting flesh, hears jackals in the hills and fears that the incarnations of Sobek have already found the body. He envisions the crocodiles pulling the woman’s body through the papyrus to the river, the twists and rolls, as they tear apart the corpse’s arms, legs, head, and torso. Yet, the water remains calm and he walks on through the reeds. The stench increases as he comes to a clearing. He sees the body of Ekibé, wife of SutenAnu, stretched out in the midday sun. One more day, and the embalmers can have her corpse. Her body, once beautiful, is now a bloated writhing mess of flesh. No man would desire congress with it. Surely. He lays down his sling and unwraps his skirt, his penis hard and arched as he moves towards the body.
‘Sequence in slow motion: a landscape of highways and embankments, evening light on fading concrete, intercut with images of the young woman’s body. She lay on her back, her wounded face stressed like fractured ice. With almost dream-like calm, the camera explored her bruised mouth, the thighs dressed in the dark lace-work of blood. The quickening geometry of the body, its terraces of pain and sexuality, became a source of intense excitement. Watching from the embankment, Travis found himself thinking of the eager deaths of his childhood.’[19]
Throughout history, myth shrouds the necrophile, allied as s/he is with shady religions, shamanism, vampires, and werewolves. Banished to the margins of the real the necrophile is a ghoul, a seer, a shapeshifter, the embodiment of a human monster, devoid of ethics, an anti-moralist—the epitome of evil. This mythologizing, it can be argued, is a means of distancing ourselves from something we do not understand or fear either as an urge within ourselves or as a danger to community and society. As Slavoz Žižek argues in his defence of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, ‘We have two universes: the modern, open ‘risk society’ versus the safety of the old secluded universe of Meaning—but the price of Meaning is a finite, closed space guarded by unnameable monsters. Evil is not simply excluded in this closed utopian space—it is transformed into a mythic threat with which the community establishes a temporary truce and against which it has to maintain a permanent state of emergency.’[20]
The necrophile becomes a mythical monster in order for society to maintain a moral status quo. Necrophilia becomes the ultimate fetish, the last paraphilia, and the weather gauge for society’s moral storms.
Fifteen hundred years ago, in a valley close to the northeastern coast of Peru, near to where in 1534 the Conquistadors would build the city of Trujillo, a Mocha artisan puts aside the vases depicting scenes of anal and oral sex he has made for the priests and the lords. He takes up a thin blade and uses it to roughly incise the leathery clay of the unfired pot. Later, having watched the costumed lords and priests drink the blood of the captive warriors, he pulls the pot from a smoking pit, on the surface, earth-red on cream, is a fine-line drawing of a voluptuous woman her hands encircling an erect penis—the woman is masturbating a skeleton.
‘Sex, of course, remains our continuing preoccupation. As you and I know, the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else. What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people become mere extensions of the geometries of situations. This will allow the exploration, without any taint of guilt, of every aspect of sexual psychopathology. Travis, for example, has posted a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect.’[21]
Facts about Sergeant Bertrand’s life are sketchy but using medical and historical records, literature, art, and other case studies, this book hopes to flesh out an analysis of his mania. The details lead to a study of Bertrand and historical necrophiles: from Ancient Egypt, the Moche Civilization of northern Peru, and Herodotus to modern necrophiles such as Carl Tanzler, Gary Ridgway, Mark Dixie, Ted Bundy, and Dennis Nilsen. Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Angela Carter, Colin Wilson, Cormac McCarthy, and J.G. Ballard have all written about necrophiles and/or necrophilia, and the necrophile plays a significant role in the Gothic tradition and in Surrealism. The ultimate transgressive act has interested writers from Homer, through the Marquis De Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Swinburne to contemporary novelists such as Poppy Z. Brite, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joyce Carol Oates. The image of the necrophile has inspired Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Moreau, Salvador Dali, and Jean Benoît. Films as diverse as Re-Animator, Corpse Bride, Clerks, Weekend at Bernie’s and Katashi Miike’s Visitor Q have used necrophilia for dramatic or comedic purposes. Popular television series such as True Blood, Family Guy and Two and a Half Men have touched on the subject, while in CSI: NY’s second season, a plotline in the episode ‘Necrophilia Americana’, involved a woman’s body found surrounded by American carrion beetles (Necrophila americana), the only witness being a young boy who may or may not have interfered with the body. Japanese anime and manga feature many necrophiles or characters with necrophiliac tendencies. Using these as embedded interpretations in the text, the ‘art’ of necrophilia—in a necrophagic way, eating its body from the tail (tale) onward—provides a cultural response to the medico-legal aspects and psychological analysis of the men and women drawn to sex with dead bodies.