You Must Remember This...

Memorial Mania, by Erika Doss (2010)


We cannot change our memories, but we can change their meaning and the power they have over us.  --David Seamands

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. --Albert Einstein

It’s a likely bet that Erika Doss wasn’t an invited guest at any of the myriad of media events held two months ago to mark the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. A professor of American Studies at Notre Dame trained as an art historian, Doss is the author of Memorial Mania, which explores the memorials raised to events and personages, major and minor, in the United States. Her terrain is the intersection of material culture and historical memory, as expressed in built memorials that cast emotion in physical form.

Her sprawling book looks at memorials that range from roadside crosses marking the site of fatal accidents, to the AIDS Quilt, to war memorials, to the new national September 11 memorial at the World Trade Center. By and large, she argues, these memorials reflect the identity politics and grievances of the elites who erect them.

Doss’ criticism raises the question not only of who is mediating and giving material form to historical memory, but what the adequate interpretative memorial would look like. She seems to favor, for example, an alternative to the official 9/11 memorial of a figure in free fall that made me think of the emotive quality of Edvard Munch’s painting (and visual icon of the anti-abortion movement),  “The Silent Scream.”  Ten years after the horrifying events of that day, it is asking a lot to assume that witnesses, survivors, relatives, first responders and the general public are willing and able to accept a memorial that links the three plane crashes with a narrative of American adventurism in the Middle East. 

                                             "Tumbling Woman," by Eric Fischl

                                   "The Silent Scream," by Edvard Munch

The Indian Memorial at Little Bighorn (renamed from Custer Battlefield), for Doss, is too little, too late, failing to capture the myth of the frontier, and disseminating stereotypes about American Indians. Other commemorative representations of Native Americans and their history, are infused with “warrior expectations,” not least from Indians themselves.

Doss acknowledges the right of those who participate in or are affected by events to contribute to interpreting their meaning, in memorializing them. But don’t the privileged as well as the marginalized share in this right?

Another weakness in her argument is her focus on the visual nature of memorials. Even when built of granite, these monuments are too fragile to bear the fraught weight of historical interpretation Doss would assign to them. Ultimately, the chisel and the hammer must be supplemented by words, photos, recordings and other tools of the modern interpreter’s art to create the fully faceted, representative memorials Doss so ardently and eloquently advocates.