Playing the Monument Game

Monuments conclude tacit narratives. They provide a happy ending and a sense of purpose to a process frequently marked by neither. There is no such thing as a private monument, a fact that the funeral industry understands better than does its clientele. We may assume that how we remember our dead is a matter purely between us and them. Yet in fact all sorts of people evaluate with their gaze what we have erected and come to their own conclusions about the relationship between relics and relicts.

When monuments go public, the stares and the consequent interpretations grow more intense. The more public the monument, the more deliberate the intention and the more shaped the message. Joan Coutu’s Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire surveys in depth a number of public and private monuments from what we now think of as the First British Empire (its huge American portion lost in 1783) of the 1700s. Global in its scope...