MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper explores the problematics of memorialization, the efforts to secure in the public memory a set of meanings aligned with a national cultural narrative that will persist over an extended period of time. Focussing on two memorials, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and the Samuel de Champlain memorial in Orillia, we illuminate the challenges of securing dominant and enduring readings of memorial texts. Public monuments and memorials are generally designed to establish, buttress, or reinscribe a national narrative. The monuments then position members of a culture within that narrative, promoting the creation of a specific national and/or personal identity. Both the producers and the consumers of such memorializations are historically situated and thus have available to them a distinctive culturally determined repertoire of strategies for creating or reading memorials, strategies which are typically taught and reinforced by various public institutions. Taken together, these strategies create a horizon of expectations, establishing interpretive protocols which govern the generation of normative meanings.

The stability established by these protocols can be undermined when the narratives underpinning them become contested, destabilized, or just plain obsolete. As a result, the monuments and memorials depending on them are less likely to be read as the original creators intended. The monuments and memorials may become irrelevant to a new generation, or that generation may insert them into a new narrative and reread them within that revised context, rescuing them from incomprehension and irrelevance, but thwarting the intentions of their creators. It is not just individual monuments that face this uncertain future, but also the discursive conventions that give rise to them and are used to read them: the abandonment of such conventions or the development of new ones to suit new circumstances, also pose a potential threat to older monuments or invite newer modes of memorialization.