National Memorial Arboretum Talk, September 2012 I have promised in my abstract to talk about literary narratives about the

Second World War written since 1945, and the evidence they provide that the meanings of the war have changed over nearly seventy years. I will come to this, and I will also say something about the role of literary form in the production of the historical significance of the war. But I want to begin with what for me is a more speculative connection between the past and its representation, and I can best identify it with a question is a literary text a war memorial? Does imaginative writing about war share any of the functions of the war memorial, especially in the way it addresses the past to present and future generations? Do literary texts command or elicit in their reading publics responses which are in any way comparable to those commemorative behaviours which war memorials enjoin or catalyse? What kinds of remembering do war literature and war memorials determine, and do individual readings/commemorative acts contribute to some collective consciousness of the past? There have been some attempts to perform critical work with the metaphorical connections between war literature and war memorials, connections made by literary writers of the Great War. Indeed, texts like Wilfred Owens Anthem for Doomed Youth and Richard Aldingtons novel Death of a Hero (1929) contested the legitimacy of formal modes of commemoration. Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz has recently inaugurated the genre of commemorative fiction. She draws on the work of the Canadian literary critic Evelyn Cobley, who twenty years ago proposed that the impulse to record the experience of war represents a memorial act, noting that the memoir is closest, etymologically and functionally, to the architectural memorial (Sokolowska-Paryz, 11). The US veteran and critic Samuel Hynes argues that publication of combatants letters and diaries constitute acts of commemoration: these literary texts of commemoration are [I]n a sensemonuments (Sokolowska-Paryz, 10). Cobley and Hynes agree that textual witness is a comparable prosthesis to memory, but note the discrepancy between Cobleys memorial and Hynes monument. The art critic Arthur Danto scrupulously distinguishes these nouns to discriminate between two acts of recall with very different senses:

We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget. Thus we have the Washington Monument but the Lincoln

Memorial. Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends.Very few nations erect monuments to their defeats, but many set up memorials to the defeated dead. Monuments make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life. The memorial is a special precinct, extruded from life, a segregated enclave where we honor the dead. With monuments we honor ourselves. (Arthur Danto, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Nation, 1985) What to Danto is a distinction is to others a matter of historical development: the commemoration of war is seen to shift from the celebration of triumphs to an honouring of the dead. A similar tendency is noted in war literature, which supposedly ceased to be heroic at the beginning of the twentieth century. But I think the oppositions which Danto employs are salutary in pointing to the ambivalences in the contemporary representations of war.

War memorials are often textual, bearing inscriptions and the names of persons killed by war (Barber 1949, 67: dead monument or a living memorial). Two recently inaugurated, but significantly incomplete, memorials to war, Jane Hammonds Fallen and the Armed Forces Memorial here at the National Memorial Arboretum, bring the textual rather than the spatial or architectural dimension of commemoration to our attention. And they do so in ways that amplify Dantos contrasts between myths and ends, triumph and defeat, ourselves and the dead.

SLIDE 1 Fallen is metaphorical, non-massive, and additive: its primary figurative association is natural, but the inscribed printed leaf forms are also a literalization of the euphemism for the dead in war - the fallen and leaves in an ongoing book-keeping of military casualties in Iraq. In its heaping, rather than columnar ordering, of the names of dead soldiers, Fallen alludes to memorial practices such as the display of thousands of shoes at the Auschwitz Museum, repeated in the exhibit of shoes from Majdanek at the Washington Holocaust Museum. Fallens inscriptions make it unambiguously a war memorial, but its form and its concurrence with the event it commemorates make it a critical memorial, designed to elicit a self-reflexive act of piety, an ambivalent stance which finds an echo in the historically unprecedented situation in Britain today, whereby a war (Iraq and Afghanistan) is widely repudiated, but the soldiers fighting it are universally regarded as heroes.

SLIDE 2 The Names Plinth, by contrast, makes significant architectural and historical reference, which include the Portland stone faced piers of Lutyens Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme and the black granite of Maya Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But I want to focus on the inscriptions. Amateur photographer Trevor Rickard, contributing to the Geograph project (a photographic archive documenting each square mile of the British Isles), noted in 2009 that the huge amount of blank space is somehow just as thought-provoking as the moving experience of scanning the hundreds of names already there. The novelist Pat Barker, who I interviewed in the same year, spelled out the provocation: SLIDE 3 What are we as a species doing to each other? All the villages in the Yorkshire dales have their Great War memorial, usually with several names from one or two families; in other words brothers dying, and then crammed into a tiny space at the bottom are the Second War dead, there is no room for them because the earlier war was the War to End Wars, it was not going to happen again. Now the Armed Forces Memorial that was dedicated recently to the dead in the wars since 1945 has an immense space left for future names. The spaces are left to be filled and that is where we are. The wars since 1945 number 46 according to the NMA website: this is a number very few could enumerate, or be ready to acknoweldge, but Barkers where we are is the bureaucratic assumption that there will be many more wars, many more names. We think of a war memorial as oriented to the past but as aimed (lest we forget) into the present and future: like an epitaph, the memorial incarnates those it names. Barber (1949) reminds us, however, that the function of a memorial is to symbolize the feelings of a social group. In this we might recognise a structural analogy with the work of literary imagination which takes for its subject an historical war, but whose representation is shaped by the moment in which it is written.

Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender (1961) (volume 3 of The Sword of Honour Trilogy) [Westminster Abbey, 29 October 1943] Each member of the crowd carried a respirator valueless now, the experts secretly admitted, against any gas the enemy was likely to employ,

but still the badge of a people in arms.Bombing had ceased for the time being but the livery of the air-raid shelter remained the national dress.The sword they had come to see stood upright between two candles, on a table counterfeiting an altar.It had been made at the Kings command as a gift to the steel-hearted people of Stalingrad.The people were suffused with gratitude to their remote allies and they venerated the sword as the symbol of their own generous and spontaneous emotion.

Pat Barker, The Man Who Wasnt There (Virago, 1989) he tried to look at the pictures in his film annuals, but all the films were jumbled together in his head. He was tired of them anyway: the clipped, courageous voices, the thoroughly decent chaps, the British bombs that always landed on target, the British bombers that always managed to limp home. They told lies, he thought. They said it was easy to be brave.

Robert Harris, Fatherland (1993) And then he saw it. Almost buried at the base of a sapling: a streak of red. He bent and picked it up, turned it over in his hand. The brick was pitted with yellow lichen, scorched by explosive, crumbling at the corners. But it was solid enough. It existed. He scraped at the lichen with his fingernail like dried blood. As he stopped to replace it, he saw others, halfhidden in the pale grass ten, twenty, a hundred