Beyond the trope of a haunted setting for gothic characters or mauve hangout for teenagers trapped in a budget horror film replete with green slime, the graveyard is frequently a place of reflection: both of individual experience and time itself. Common to all characterisations of the graveyard aforementioned is its stasis in time and space; its atmosphere is typically one of sombre mood, a quiet setting where noise is out of the ordinary (hence its easy lend to the gothic genres), and its location removed from the surrounding urbanity of mobility and fluidity, a place seemingly dislocated from its spatial setting. Yet this stasis is actively and always undermined by movements of organic growth (lichens, moss etc.), demography (as more graves expand its space), and time (as living connections to particular graves shift with demographic cycles and Mr Smith, Loving Husband and Devoted Father, 1889-1957 shifts from an active monument visited weekly and decorated with fresh flowers to a forgotten name, half corroded to a Mr Smi glanced over on the way to more contemporary plaques). It is this contradiction of stasis and fluidity in the marriage of memory and place that makes graveyards so interesting.
I’m driving through Paris, thinking about the Vichy regime, national memory and the Vélodrome d’hiver, when we pass a massive graveyard awkwardly slanted and slotted between two dual carriageways and a medley of roundabouts. A sea of grey plaques of varying shapes and efforts, interspersed with dying plants and ribbons. A statue to an eighteenth century figure, apparently held in place by the surrounding vines’ embrace, juts out of a wall by the road a few minutes later. I don’t catch his name or purpose worth monumentalising, and I wonder if many (any?) drivers negotiating Paris would notice him. The Eiffel tower is of course the monument one thinks of when Paris is called to mind, a psychological relation normalised by the relentless capitalisation of the monument in the sale of the city and its ideal. Trying to spot it makes me think of the Statue of Liberty, that figure that curses through the full-American blood of their constitution, and the fact that it was a present from France. What are they monuments to?
The Whitehall Cenotaph is perhaps (one of) the most sacred monument in the UK, embedded at the heart of Westminster and its democratic flesh. A comparison between the Cenotaph and Mr Smith’s grave would probably read hollow to many, but I want to think about them through the tension of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) and milieux de mémoire (environments of memory), a tension coined by French historian Pierre Nora.
Nora’s central argument is that lieux and milieux de mémoire are mutually exclusive, the former substituting for the contemporary absence of the latter. Essentially: sites of memory are deliberate constructions of concentrated memory, orchestrating space to particular purposes of commemoration, whilst environments of memory, distinguished by the mark of ‘reality’ in Nora’s opinion, are spaces where memory is spontaneous and naturally occurring through a vital link between that which is commemorated and its experience by living people. Following this reading of memory, the Whitehall Cenotaph is a lieu de mémoire deliberately constructed to memorialise the national loss and sacrifice of WWI in the absence of its natural recollection when one enters the space of Westminster.
Graveyards sit ambiguously in this tension. Rescaling Nora’s theory from the national to the most local level, and in perpetual shift in relation to the living, they exemplify the rather more complex reality that, in my opinion, lies behind Nora’s abstract dichotomy, altogether too much a simplification of memory. On the one hand, graveyards are the ultimate lieu de mémoire: deliberate constructs of commemoration concentrated in defined spaces, forcing the memory of a life (and, by associative extension, lives) in their place. On the other hand, they are inherent milieux de mémoire: one cannot help but think of mortality and life in their site, initially inwardly and then associatively, and their broader space (typically one of intimate association with the persons commemorated) naturally provokes spontaneous recollection of the respective person. Lieu and milieu de mémoire. Simultaneously.
I digress. I meant to write about how graveyards, when you think about it, are monuments to everyday lives, and that monuments aren’t just statues of national identity, commemorating heroism or shame, always intentional, but everyday efforts to remember what (or indeed who) has meaning in our own lives. It breaks down even further: blogs, diaries and Instagram feeds as curations of particular everydays for others and future selves; flowers tied to pylon cables by motorways and interspersed with photographs as grassroots monuments; and marches, protests and urban movements as spontaneous lieux de mémoire activating particular memories to (re)activate absent milieux de mémoire (think feminist protests or marches for Black Lives Matter, in and of themselves sites of memory that simultaneously activate an environment of memory by forcing recognition and commemoration of a particular presence, their history and their future). But then it all begs the question: does a monument have to be monumental? Or - who defines that which is, and the scale of the, monumental?
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