FABLES AND REFLECTIONS

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit some of the most interesting and important memorials in the United States, perhaps some of the most thought-provoking in the world. I won’t go into all of them here – I will reserve my thoughts on the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall for a later post (I’m still trying to sort out how to write about them). I also saw, briefly the memorials to the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It’s the latter which has prompted the title of this post.

Maya Lin designed the memorial in 1981 and I think it stands out as a fine piece of memorial architecture for a number of reasons. One of these is its ambiguity. Unlike many other memorials around Washington, this is not a directly positive memorial, not is it a “big man on brass horse” affair. Perhaps my bias towards projects such as the Sunday Times Heritage Project makes me discount these typical memorial strategies in favour of more abstract, intimate pieces.

Maya Lin’s memorial is a question more than anything else – it REMEMBERS but does not impose a specific morality on the viewer. Of course, you could argue that the mere existence of the memorial glorifies war and imposes the moral, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Conversely, the massive list of names could be viewed as an indictment of war. Ambiguity. I don’t think a memorial is significant JUST because of ambiguity – but in this specific case, when opinions about the war are themselves so divided and ambiguous, it seems particularly fitting. Where in another monument ambiguity could be seen as a failure, here I think it is one of the greatest successes.

Many Vietnam Vets vehemently disagreed with the monument, at least partly because of its ambiguity. They wanted a monument which reflected their views on the war, their experiences and their trauma. Maya Lin was adamant that the piece remain simple. And thus a monumental debate was raised. I see this as a second [most probably unintentional] success of the memorial. I believe that debate about the way we remember our past – indeed debate about whether “we” should remember some collective fable of “our” past at all – is an essential part of memorialisation. This importance is twofold – first, it keeps the memory active. Second, it questions the aims of memorialisation.

The former is important to counter the tendency to allow stone to take the burden of memory (an idea in James Young’s Texture of Memory) and thus make it inactive. When there is debate, it forces a society to confront the event being remembered, to be active in their treatment of it. I also think that it forces people to confront uncomfortable aspects of the event. In this case, it allowed for a deeper understanding about the needs of Veterans and dialogue around opinions on war. I admit I am no expert and so I’ll qualify the previous statements with a, “please comment.”

The latter importance is one I am more comfortable confronting. Again I think this was unintentional, but Lin’s structure and the controversy surrounding it raise an important question for the Heritage sector: WHO do we build memorials for? Here the Veterans and many others felt the memorial was for them, and should thus reflect their views. It should be a patriotic memorial – this led to the creation of an ancillary monument of the more literal variety which in my opinion is far less effective than the original.

Lin and others saw memorialisation in a broader light and I fall into that camp. I think that a memorial must be for a [the?] public and must recognise a range of existing opinion. Its aim should be to challenge and question opinions, to make the viewer look inwards. I fear monuments which impose a viewpoint as the outward, concrete manifestations of dangerous nationalist historiography. In this way I think Lin’s memorial is excellent – it is remembrance and it is for Remembrance.

Lists of names attract me. I like that individuals are acknowledged rather than being subsumed into an essentialised soldier – not unknown exactly; more undifferentiated. I also like that the list of names slows the viewer down – you cannot take it all in at once. There is no way to glance and move on. A name catches your eye, you read it, you read the next, you are drawn into this devastating list of loss. Although you probably have no connection to the person behind the name other than our common humanity, for a moment you ARE the monument. Aloud or sub-vocally, you say his name. Those syllables attach themselves to you, bring the lost a micron closer. In that moment you link to history. Perhaps you glimpse fear, suffering, bravery, sacrifice, brutality, innocence; you do grasp humanity. You may run your fingers along the names, trying to gain some physical link to this foreign past. Regardless of your views of war in general, or the Vietnam War itself, I think you cannot fail to empathise with, feel for, that name you read, that individual. For me at least, a list like the one on this memorial allows me to separate an abhorrence of war and war-makers from a respect and honour for individual [mostly drafted] soldiers.

The stone of the memorial is black, highly polished, reflective. This reflection is to me an important success of the memorial. Whenever you look at a name you are forced to look at yourself. As you look at the past, you also look at the present. Just as there is no way to glance unseeing at the names, you cannot separate yourself from the monument. There is a powerful message here about the impact of the past on the present and about the way the present impacts on how we view and represent the past.

It is this forced interaction, forced debate, forced thought, forced reflection on the fables we create of our past that I think are so effective about Lin’s design. This is no static stone – it is a question which each viewer answers and answers anew at each viewing.