Monuments and Melancholia

Memorials always exist in a fraught relation to fear of disappearance: information stored solely as memory has a tenuous existence. Once forgotten, it has disappeared forever. Memorials always articulate this anxiety of forgetfulness when recollection has been instituted as a moral duty.

The solution the memorial adopts in its battle against ephemeral memory is an old one: it externalizes the information by recording it in some physically enduring form. Traditional formats of the monument, including the statue of a soldier and the plinth listing the names of the dead, demonstrate two types of such preservation. The heroic statue captures and stores the image of the fallen, while the inscribed names capture the words by which they are known. Of these, the name is infinitely more effective in serving the purpose of recollection than the generalized image. This is because the sound of the name of a person one knows is instantly evocative of a whole range of memories and associations concerning that person. Names seem to have the ability to cover the entire breadth of a person's behavior and character, as well as one's own interaction with them. They appear to function as the agglutinative center around which all the complexities of personhood gather, designating a core identity, yet accommodating an infinitely wide range of associations concerning the person. In the memorial, these qualities of individual specification and character summation appear to ensure the eternal memory of the person in question.

There is, however, a crucial problem concerning the use of names which radically affects their performance in the memorial. There exists a fundamental asymmetry in relation to the evocative quality of names which relates to whether or not, upon hearing a name, one is acquainted with its bearer. If one has no acquaintance with the named person, then the mention of his or her name will bear almost no connotations, and the manifold suggestions of the person's subjecthood, s