Monuments, Memorials and Site Inscriptions

In what I've read of academics writing about monuments and memorials, I find little agreement about the definitions of those two terms. A memorial invokes memory, obviously, but it need not necessarily be dedicated to the memory of a deceased individual. A monument is, well, big, it is built to be noticed. Art historian Michael J. Lewis proposes that, “a monument is the expression of a single powerful idea in a single emphatic form, in colossal scale and permanent materials, made to serve civic life. (Materials and size distinguish monuments from memorials, of which monuments are a subset).” (2). Lewis was writing in Imprimis, a free pamphlet distributed by the right-wing ideologists at Hillsdale College in Michigan. The title of his piece “The Decline of American Monuments and Memorials” critiques the new Martin Luther King memorial and the plans for a Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial.

In studying Quebec City I have come to focus on the connection between monuments, memorials, and place. This relationship is not obvious, for whereas a gravestone is meant to mark the site where that person is buried, a memorial need not mark any particular site. Kirk Savage, the author of two fine books about the monuments and memorials of Washington, D.C., in writing of the Lincoln Memorial, says “the monument is not, properly speaking, a sacred site. Typically it holds no relic or spiritual trace of a past presence. The site of the Lincoln Memorial, for instance, did not even exist in Lincoln’s lifetime; it sits quite literally on mud dredged from the Potomac River bottom” (6). Savage goes on to explain how in the 19th century the National Mall was a park with many trees and winding paths, but few museums or monuments. The city had plenty of statues of great men, but they were dispersed around the city such as in the circles where radiant streets meet. In the late 1800s and early 1900s a modernist plan cut down all the trees and added the reflecting pool, a series of new museums that continues today, and streets and parking for cars, changing “public grounds” into “public space.” Public space is abstract, relational, and visual. For instance the new plan emphasized the axis running through the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial and RFK stadium at the eastern end. This made possible the huge marches and celebrations for which the Mall is famous. With all those trees still in place few people could have watched MLK give his “I have a dream” speech or Barack Obama take oath of office at his inauguration.

So the many memorials in DC create a network or hierarchy of place and power, in that the relative significance of the person can be discerned from the size and location of the monument, but few of them actually commemorate events that occurred at that location. Washington DC was built from scratch to be the capital city, it did not arise from an important pre-national event, as Quebec City did.

I want to analyze instead the ways in which much smaller monuments or memorials commemorate events and persons connected with the spot which they mark. I will call it a site commemoration or site inscription. Among the most common is the now-cliché "George Washington slept here" or more general "so-and-so lived here." However, these are often intended less to honor the historical individual than to enhance the value of the building on which the plaque is mounted. I am specifically interested in site inscription as a simple marker on the (presumptive) site of an event, a non-monument that has no statue, no representational or artistic content, only a sign or plaque, often mounted on a rough stone, with simple text such as the “Here Wolfe fell” and the "Montcalm, Vaincu, Blessé a mort ici" that I discussed in an earlier post. The site inscription doesn’t really qualify as a monument (because it is too small) nor as a memorial (since it doesn’t necessary involve death nor a single person).  

At a site inscription there’s nothing to touch, nor to look at, no palpable connection to a person or event. There's no mortal remains and no relic (although such relics connected with the site may be found elsewhere). The site inscription invokes (or tries to invoke) among viewers an act of commemoration that resembles the reverence and singularity of a gravesite, without the metonymic relic. The marker doesn’t try to manufacture an aura (as at the Lincoln memorial) but only invoke one, as if the aura already inhered in the site or place. I think Native American “sacred sites” and the New Age religiosity about “sacred spaces” may have helped to sustain this effect and make it more influential. This abstraction is akin to the simplicity of radical protestant houses of worship, Quaker meeting house. The power must reside in the minds and memories of the viewers. At many such markers there are no scheduled events to bring together the community of commemorators, and so it must be an an individuated ritual or invoke an imagined community. It is up to the visitor to determine how to feel or whether to care, but the political interpellation (to use Althusser’s term) is usually pretty obvious.

One of the most provocative of these site inscriptions in Quebec is at the base of the Cote Gilmore, next to a stoplight on the busy Boulevard Champlain, the former Anse à Foulon before the anse or cove was filled in to build an industrial port. This granite boulder bears a plaque reading: “The first Reigning Sovereign / who ever set foot upon Canadian soil, / King George VI, / Made his first landing here, at Wolfe’s Cove, / Together with / Queen Elizabeth, / on the 17th of May, 1939.” (with French text below, of course). This is a powerfully imperial Anglo gesture and I can imagine how it might have provoked a francophone response (although I don’t yet know when it was erected). If the King visited of course he had to come ashore, and why does it matter where? Because it was the same spot where Wolfe came ashore the morning of Sept. 13, 1759 for the battle that secured the conquest of New France.

Halfway up the Côte Gilmore, a street so steep it is closed in winter and poses a challenge to avid cyclists in summer, is this monument. I think the two go together, and invite the tourist to climb the hill as a reenactment of Wolfe's conquest, even as it implies King George himself did in 1939. As Serge Tisseron writes in a study of monuments: “entrer dans le monument ou, mieux encore, l’escalader, permet de nous l’approprier et de nous l’assimiler bien mieux que de seulement le regarder.”

He was thinking of massive monuments such as the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty, but I think the same holds true for site inscriptions that trace sequential commemorations. The archetype would be the via dolorosa in Jerusalem, following the fourteen (originally only eight) stations of the cross, each of which is marked with one or more plaques or signs. The tourist or pilgrim cannot see direct evidence of what happened on that site, and in some cases the location or event is disputed, but site inscriptions ask the viewer to commit to an act of memory, and a sequence of inscriptions is more effective at putting the visitor through an initiation ritual, at installing a sense of loyalty or belief.