ABSTRACT
Connie Willis’s fiction returns again and again to cathedrals as they are being endangered, destroyed, or restored: from St. Paul’s in London in her 1982 “Fire Watch” to St. Michael’s in Coventry (rebuilt in Oxford) in To Say Nothing of the Dog. Each of these works highlights the ways that memorial word and image fail to capture the real presence of these cathedral spaces. The memorial or the monument is insufficient and, worse, can be co-opted by nationalist and capitalist agendas; what is needed, Willis hints, is sacrament. The sacramental, rather than conveying a one-way didactic message, allows for a re-embodiment of the sacred throughout a network of agents. Viewing place as one agent in a sacramental network aligns sacramentality with posthumanism, in contrast to the individualist, cognitive nature of humanist memory. This essay combines posthumanist memory studies and sacramental theology to argue that Willis’s cathedrals are not passive objects for the historian to remember, but rather active participants in meaning-making. Using the posthumanist concept of distributive agency, I suggest that Willis’s cathedrals involve networks of both humans (patrons, historians, protesters) and nonhumans (built spaces, material objects, rituals, and even cats) that both preserve and transform the meaning of place.
