the oubliette

is not a thing, exactly. well, sort of.

In the closing scene of Sergei Parajanov’s The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985), Zurab — the film’s sincere and devout protagonist — is sealed (willingly) within the walls of the ever-collapsing, titular Suram fortress. Where each preceding attempt at its construction had failed (the ground is bogged, too loose, and incapable of supporting the foundations of the structure), his “sacrifice” (and it is indeed envisioned as a sacrifice, a willing self-death) ensures — by whatever bizarre act of god — that the castle finally stands, and survives without falling; and thereby ensures the defence of the land. Zurab’s body has become brick; his blood made commensurate with the spatial system of the architecture; making his body, then, a kind of technology; and the Suram fortress a tomb that lives, and a tomb that guarantees life, just as it takes it away. [1] Regular blood and soil shit, y’know.

The idea of a living burial within walls — the act of being “immured” — appears and disappears within the history of architecture. Cursory, and arguably vague research (i’m sitting messily on my sofa) reveals its decidedly mythical personality; a thing that might have happened, or was said to have happened, just as few “obvious” cases ever reveal themselves. Burial alive has a long and nasty history, but we might never know just how prevalent — or “exceptional” — it was. The asphyxiative burials of ancient Persia, as well as “some ambiguous evidence of immurement” as a practice of coffin-type confinement in Mongolia. It is said that the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome, who lived under a strict vow of chastity and celibacy, were to be immured alive should they break that vow. An 1846 dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquities by Sir William Smith explores, in some grievous depth, what this actually meant: of how the condemned were “placed in a closed litter” and carried — in a living simulation of a funeral — to “a small vault underground”, specially prepared “containing a couch, a lamp, and a table with a little food.” The sources reveal about ten occasions when this happened. Speculative or not, it’s incredibly creepy shit.

Brick is a dead thing, though living forces continue to work upon the hard fact of a building; tectonic movement, weathering and decay. all buildings are — in this way — zombified, undead rather than inert. The act of immuration implies a smudging together of the dead and the not-dead; even as it exists as half-myth, and as a terrifying rumour. We feel that the past is filled with horrible tortures and unpleasant ghosts - and so we do much to populate that past (sometimes, I wonder, in an effort to cleanse the current era of its own blood and gore).

The oubliette emerges as a latter-day cousin to the death-like practice of ancient immuration. A tiny, deepened and intentionally-dug “cell” into which people are thrown and then forgotten about. Without ceremony, sacral significance or any meaningful cultural fait accompli. The condemned are simply to be forgotten - and thrown into ambiguity.

During the course of her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva bottles the scent of the “abject”, alighting — as if by chance — on the perfect description of “death” by oubliette: writing: “Because, while releasing a hole, [abjection] does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it [ . . . ] on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.” The “forgotten” or thrown-away subject - a murderer, or “worse”; a traitor - is lobbed into the oubliette to be forgotten about, yet never escaping the danger of being forgotten; not finally, terminally “ended”, but sort of presumed dead, without the oh-so medieval confirmation of death’s reality (a head publically sawed off and stuck on a spike). The subject might be thrown away, disappeared; but - like a body caught on the evaporating lip of a black hole - they are trapped in an endless state of Schrodingerian un-death.

I was first introduced to the idea of the oubliette when I was a kid of about eight or nine, through some sort of history book or even — and this might be a post-facto imagination, tbh — my actually seeing one, in the dungeons or cellars of a medieval castle in the waist-band of England. I think I remember it very well; perpetually oublietted in my memory. A hole in the very pit of a prison, with a grill secured above it. The space within (or, more properly, below) was barely big enough for a person to stand up in (because you could not sit in it, could you). To be locked up here for any length of time (like, say, more than one minute) would be agony. Shorn of context or any sense of the non-dramatic, I presumed that this was the fate of pretty much all wrongdoing.

Fine, some digging (appropriately enough). Rather than a fortified cultural norm, immurement seems to emerge out of the galaxy-brain of the punishers when confronted by a crime that they find particularly too much. In 1610, Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed was “immured in a set of rooms [ . . . ] for the death of several girls, with figures being as high as several hundred.” She was named the “blood countess.” It is likely that, here, the immurement was really a form of house arrest. She was supplied well with food, and died four years later. Others seem to have taken to immurement out of a particular psychotic rage. Jezzar Pasha, the so-called “tyrant of Beirut,” — and the Ottoman governor of Lebanon from 1775 to 1804 — is said to have “immured alive a great number of Greek Christians when he rebuilt the walls [of the city] The heads of these miserable victims, which the butcher had left out, in order to enjoy their tortures, are still to be seen.”

Catholic monastic tradition also speaks to those who were confined, behind walls, for "breaking their vows of chastity.” It is said that this punishment was preceded by the phrase “vade in pacem” - go into peace. We find a story about Jeanne, widow of Be. de la Tour, a nun of Lespenasse, who - in 1246 - had committed acts of heresy was confined “in a separate cell in her own convent - [ . . . ] in fact, the living tomb was known as the in pace.”

In each case, the place of immuration was often secondary; a reconfigured space — a room, or series of rooms — that had been appropriated for this purpose, rather than designed specifically as an oubliette.

But the oubliette is a different order of possibility from the appropriated place of immuration. It is a cell created precisely for this reason - to hold the living/un-living body of the oublietted person (idc if that’s good french, get off my back). Because the body disappears into the oubliette, it becomes a body that is always implied, always deferred. The prisoner “was here,” and was here forever. A prison made especially to condemn the victim to forgetting. Somewhere to be disposed of.

Alleged oubliette of La Bastille, Paris

But the idea of the oubliette as a waiting-to-be-filled space — as an intentional part of the process of making castles, prisons, fortresses — seems very scant in the architectural literature. Each example that i find seems to be dismissed by a competing account, by a sort of sober “don’t be silly” counter-explanation. We hear that the alleged oubliette of La Bastille (as diagrammed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in his 1854 - 68 Dictionary of French Architecture) was really a place for the storing of ice. In the 12th c. Alnwick and Cockermouth castles in the north of England, we find that their so-called “oubliettes” were, in fact, secret holes for the hiding of precious goods during times of siege, or even just simple cisterns.

A thought. Maybe we search the past for a history of the debased and find only the seedy light of our own projection. I’m not saying “the past” wasn’t grim (because it really fucking was); but the oubliette seems to be the singularity of our backwards projection of the cruel into our own murky past. The mopped-brow relief of a modern age where the nation-state “does not do torture,” even while it continues to do it (albeit with a different name - even if it involves trying a person into a stress position for 48 hours while blasting them with Slipknot).

So the oubliette is emptied, just as it is filled by our seedy little imaginations. A part of us might want it to be true, so ghastly and improbable does it sound. But when we actually glance at its history, we can only find acts of unplanned or exceptional immuration; the twisting and making-horrible of conventional, domestic space and its transformation into a place of torture - a mucky inversion of the perceived, soul-decrying crimes of the person condemned. Immuration seemed to emerge out of some ghastly shock-horror or mawkish belief that a holy rule had been trespassed. The oubliette — as a forgetting pit of death — seems to have been exaggerated; something we have built backwards into the past.

But then again, medieval kingdoms tended toward proper shithousery - so who knows tbh.

[1] The Legend of Suram Fortress was Parajanov’s return to film after 15 years of censorship - and oftentimes imprisonment - within the Soviet Union.