Draw Breath

Continuing the memorial theme, though perhaps in a less interventionist manner than with the previous photo...

There was an interesting post last week on No Caption Needed, where Hariman pointed to the poignancy of Vietnam veterans looking through lists of names on a memorial in Chicago. In some ways, these memorials serve a function somewhat like graves, to be explored for resonances almost like photograph albums. I think, however, that they serve a less edifying purpose.

I have two things to say about these sorts of memorial. First, we ought not mistake the lists of names as necessarily democratising the memorial. That is, this is not simply replacing pictures of chiefs on horses with individual reminders of the common man. In fact, there's something vaguely fascistic (only in this narrow sense) about the obliteration of individuality involved in the relentless engravings. Which is not to say that the Vietnam memorials don't function as Hariman describes them, with veterans and families searching for names among the mass.

What I am saying is that, over time, the memorial will act more as a single free-floating icon for curiosity of tourists, with the names behaving more like a sequence of decorative hieroglyphs than like individual signifiers. The intended effect is very much different to that brought about by the sorts of books of names hidden away everywhere from Islandbridge to Passchendaele. In the end, though, the memorial will be a similar (though perhaps less immediate) icon to the Menim Gate in Ypres, where the sheer volume of names render any single one almost invisible.

For the moment, the crudity of the Vietnam memorial is blunted by the fact that it acts as a "museum of living memory,"¹ with the immediacy of expression by veterans and their families partly creating the spectacle for the visitor, who is positioned at least in part as voyeur.

Second, this kind of sculpture cannot but be seen as a museum, with the names acting as much as a nationalist statement as the British Museum or (more explicitly) as the Panthéon. I posted something brief and perhaps a bit naive on this some years ago, that museums act as statements about the place of nations in the world. Monuments and memorials behave in the same way, though sometimes more obliquely and less effectively especially when they're part of an inconvenient inheritance (think the Fusiliers' Arch/Traitors' Gate at Stephen's Green Dublin). Feelings about Vietnam in the USA have tended (recently at least) to track general feelings about the First World War in Britain and it's very telling that these two unpopular wars have been memorialised with sculptures of names. The suggestion seems to be that, though each was was a terrible policy mistake the important point of reflection ought to be the supposed collective courage of the soldiery. Again, however, just as with the Menim Gate, the memorials tend to recruit individuals into a new mass. The collectivity of the dead works as a new rallying point: the individual's courage in service to the state is to be officially celebrated even when they were the victims of murderous governmental folly.

When the veterans are long gone we will not be left with empty signifiers and nor will we be left with forgotten graves. We will be left with the individual lost in the name of state legitimacy. Again.