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In the past few weeks, we have read and heard a number of
responses to monuments to Confederate leaders, Conquistadors, and other
historical figures who have exploited and oppressed Black and indigenous
people. Although these monuments are physical objects, they still may be read
as texts, as physical instantiations of narratives, so literary critics have
insight to offer on their meanings. Literary critics and theorists can examine
the conflict over monuments as an example of what happens when two communities
of readers project the expectations of different genres onto a single text.
In many ways, readers of monuments—those who uncritically
defend them as evidence of national "history" and
"heritage" and those who object to them as physical reminders that
Black and indigenous lives do not matter in the United States—are like the
readers of the epic and the novel that Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his essay,
"Epic and the Novel." Those who wish to preserve the monuments think
of them as "epic objects" in Bahktin's terms. Monuments are
represenative of "national tradition" and "not personal
experience" and an "absolute epic distance separates" them from
contemporary life (13). The supportive
viewer of the monuments sees them as "speaking about a past that is to him
inaccessible," and sees them with the "reverent ppoint of view of a
descendant" (13).
Despite contemporary claims that monuments do nothing more
than "honor Confederate soldiers who are buried in unmarked graves all around
the South" (Frank Powell, June 16, 2020, Spring Hope Enterprise & the
Bailey News), those who erected the monuments sought to memorialize the
"lost cause" of the Confederacy. Over and over again in news accounts
of organizing efforts, we can read an effort to memorialize not only the
soldiers, but the Confederate period. In an account of the Confederate Monument
organizing efforts in 1888, one "recording secretary" of the
association exclaims, "How unfortunate it would be should one single name of
a soldier who died for our lost cause be omitted from this roll."
In the
account of the Orangeburg, South Carolina, monument, the newspaper reports that
the monument was "erected by our noble women to commemorate, for all time,
the patriotism and grand deeds of those dear departed heroes who gave up their
lives in the grand struggle of the Confederate War" (11 October 1893,
Times and Democrat). At the same time Confederate monuments rose around South
Carolina, white South Carolinians were bemoaning their state, and calling for
military rule in order to avoid "Negro Domination." Senator John
McLaurin (07 Dec 1898, The Manning Times) made his point of view completely
transparent: according to McLaurin: "In looking for the solution of these race
evils," such as an insistence on the building of railway infrastructure
and educational institutions for Black citizens, "we say at the outset
that it calls for the same solution—that of white supremacy—that has followed
throughout the world's history. The superiority of the white, the inferiority
of the black, is a principle recognized by sociologists, which no ...sentimental
utterance can obscure. It has been exhibited in all ages, and the instances
which Egypt gave in early days are today repeated in the advance of Anglo-Saxon
civilization under the baners of the Sirdar and the driving back of the black
hordes at Khartoum." Even in his own time, McLaurin conjures the epic
distance of ancient history in his justification for white supremacy.
So we may say that those who wish to see the monuments
remain as memorials to Confederate dead are naive in their belief that these
are neutral memorials, but they also claim that they represent a
"history" so far distant from us that it no longer touches our
present. Those who wish for the monuments to come down read them in the way
Bakhtin suggests we read the novel: in the novel, the artistic object
"acquires a relationship—in one form or another, to one degree or
another—to the ongoing event of current life in which we, the author and
readers, are intimately participating. This creates the radically new zone for
structuring images in the novel, a zone of maximally close contact between the
represented object and contemporary reality in all its inconclusiveness—and
consequently a similarly close contact between the object and the future"
(31). We see, over and over again, reports of the pain that these monuments
cause those who interact with them. The editors of the Wilmington News Journal
characterize this interaction in these novelistic terms: "For modern
African American citizens to have to walk in the shadow of the man [Robert E.
Lee] who led the crusade to preserve slavery is a daily slap in the
face—indeed, to any American supportive of racial justice amid recent reminders
of how elusive it is" (June 16, 2020).
These monuments are, themselves, characters in the unfolding
novel of American life.
Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich), 1895-1975. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University
of Texas Press, 1981.
