Hewing the Human

Abstract

Abstract “Hewing the Human” considers the Ovidian figures of Echo and Narcissus as two templates for imagining posthumous life via stone. The Narcissus story illustrates a self-preservative fantasy by mirroring the self in a stony effigy. A focal case study is John Donne’s effigy in St. Paul’s which heralds Donne’s vision of reuniting with Christ, the cornerstone, in the heavenly afterlife. By contrast, Echo’s story offers a more dialogic reanimation. Voice collaborates with stone to project life across time. Through a reading of George Herbert’s meditations on Christ’s sepulcher (in devotional lyrics) and of Edmund Spenser and Sir John Harington’s depiction of Merlin’s lively entombment (in their rewriting of Orlando Furioso), the chapter demonstrates how the desire for a stony afterlife is stubbornly syncretic. Yet while these lithic posthumous futures promise reanimation via the monumental human, they do so in ways that are both startlingly familiar and unnervingly alien.