AUSTER, M. Monument in A Landscape - The Question of 'Meaning'
AUSTER, M. Monument in A Landscape - The Question of 'Meaning'
AUSTER, M. Monument in A Landscape - The Question of 'Meaning'
Tipo de Article
documento:
Termos do *MONUMENTS
assunto: *MEMORIALS
Contagem de 4100
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ISSN: 0004-9182
DOI: 10.1080/00049189708703194
Número de 34496
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ABSTRACT
Public monuments are of special interest as focal points of meaning in the landscape. Cultural
geographers, in attempting to come to terms with questions of meaning, have begun in recent years
to think in categories more typical of literary studies than of social science. In this paper the concept
of 'allegory' is used as a device for illuminating the possible meanings of a monument. The affinities
between monumental and allegorical works are discussed. A thirty-year-old memorial column in
Armidale, NSW, is taken as a case study. The meaning of this structure to present-day observers is
particularly debatable. Several possible readings are proposed, formulated in allegorical terms. It is
suggested that such an approach can produce insights that might not otherwise come to the surface.
KEY WORDS
Monuments; landscape meaning; interpretation; allegory.
and problematic, and 'it is so easy to strip the message from the sculpture that monuments often
function as images of mute mystery'. With or without inscription, a monument is somewhat
equivalent to a public noticeboard. In this sense a monument is not merely a structure in a
landscape, but almost literally a text. This being the case, modes of analysis derived from the
humanities may be at least as appropriate as those more typical of the social sciences. The same
may be true of cultural geography in general. It is interesting that when in 1994 the journal Ecumene
was founded--subtitled 'A journal of environment, culture, meaning' and conceived as being
'geographical', at least in a broad sense--the editors (Cosgrove & Duncan 1994, pp.1-5), in a
significant comment on their decision not to adopt the Harvard system of referencing, observed that
'endnotes are better able to convey the contingent, open-ended and discursive nature of knowledge
and understanding which develop through debate and criticism rather than through progressive
construction of theory and empirical refutation or proof' (p.3). In other words, the scientific model of
discourse would be dumped in favour of what might be called the literary model.
'The claim that knowledge can be organised effectively and engaged meaningfully only within
traditional subject boundaries is demonstrably untenable', remarks Edwards (1996, p.221). And is
this particularly true of geography? 'If it is the case', writes Anderson (1996, p.123), 'that creative
thinking can sometimes happen in the borderlands--at the meeting of disparate communications
lines ... the juncture point where tributaries converge and strangers collide--then it seems to me that
human geography is genetically programmed for trans-disciplinary conversation'. The present paper
is a trans-disciplinary experiment. It makes use of a concept that belongs more in the field of
literature or the fine arts than in geography. I propose to explore the possibility of interpreting a
memorial column in terms of allegory. The relevance of allegory lies in its central concern with
meaning, especially with meaning that has a certain complexity, that operates on more than one
level, and that may require explanation. The word is derived from the Greek allos, meaning 'other'.
We may say, I think, that when we speak of attaching meaning to an object in the environment, we
are talking about the way in which we make sense of it by perceiving and interpreting it in terms of
typologies, associations, categories, memories, ideas, and so on: by reference, in fact, to things
other than the object itself.
Allegory is about coding and decoding. It is a story in which one thing represents another: a story in
which this represents that, the latter usually being in some way deeper or higher or more abstract or
more general than the former. On the other hand, the proper understanding of allegory may involve
not so much the discovery (and privileging) of a 'real' meaning at the expense of a surface meaning,
but rather an appreciation of the relationship between the two meanings. As the Cambridge guide to
literature in English (Ousby 1995, p. 16) tells us, 'allegory does not consist in the simple substitution
of one object or action for another, but relies upon a correspondence between the literal and
metaphorical levels to help elucidate the meaning'.
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because extension in time is of the essence of a monument, it has a narrative quality: it speaks of
'then' and 'now'. But there is a curious congruence between monumental and allegorical works,
going beyond narrativity. So far as I know, it was Angus Fletcher, the literary critic, who first drew
attention to the connection. He described allegorical works as 'monuments to our ideals' (1964,
p.360). He based his argument on allegory's concern with moral instruction. In his introduction to a
pictorial appendix, he justified an interest in the visual expression of allegory by noting that
'ritualised, iconographic stories tend towards points of fixation, their agents being transformed into
static images' (p.369). The fluidity of history is solidified into simplified and somewhat statuesque
representations.
Allegories, and monuments, tend to use concrete visual forms to communicate moral meaning.
Allegory tends to preach: as do monuments (the word monument comes from the Latin monere, to
advise, admonish, instruct, remind). Allegory may use personification. In a similar way, a monument
may communicate a moral sentiment by associating it with the life of a person. The raising of the
monument transports that person into the realm of the general, the timeless and the exemplary. The
imperfect human being is gradually forgotten but his namer--it does tend to be his, rather than hers--
is preserved to personify general qualities of aspiration and achievement. It would not be going too
far to say that a monument deals with exactly the kind of relationships that are often associated with
allegory: between the temporal and the eternal, the contingent and the transcendent, the material
and the spiritual, the real and the Real, the specimen and the type, the mortal and the immortal. A
monument is an ancient, one might say archetypal, response to the passage of time: a device to
stare out time and extinction. Flesh is made stone. Via the monument, we save that which is
temporary by connecting it to--or embodying it in--that which is enduring (saving from floppy to hard
disk). A monument is an expression in concrete of what might otherwise be expressed in religious
practice or allegorical narrative.
DREAMER OF DREAMS! I TAKE THE TAUNT WITH GLADNESS KNOWING THAT GOD,
BEYOND THE WORLD WE SEE, HAS WOVEN THAT WHICH COUNTS WITH MEN AS MADNESS
INTO THE FABRIC OF THE YEARS TO BE.
A generation has passed. Most of the people who now glance at the column, when they visit the
lookout area in front of it, can have no very clear idea of what or whom it commemorates. Its style is
twentieth century abstract. A plain shaft of concrete, clad in panels of marble-chip aggregate, rises
directly from the ground. Thirty years ago, when it was created, its meaning was relatively plain, but
as the years pass the column becomes more enigmatic. A column in a landscape, lacking any
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information as to when it was erected, or who designed it, or what or whom it memorialises, indeed
presents a hermeneutic problem. It demands interpretation.
There is no explicitly allegorical sculpture to help the viewer: no figure of Learning, leaning on one
elbow and perusing some ancient volume. Only a blank column, and a short verse, the authorship of
which remains unknown, despite considerable research (Auster 1996). The verse conveys a vague
sense of the human spirit creatively at work in the landscape. There is an echo of O'Shaughnessy's
'... we are the dreamers of dreams'; also of some lines by William Morris, from The Earthly Paradise,
that begin with the same phrase: 'Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time' (Morris 1890, p.1).
I mentioned that the verse was scribbled over. The graffito itself turns out to be of considerable
interest, being no common obscenity or message of teenage love. Though not easily decipherable, it
reads, amazingly:
This, it turns out, is a pronouncement from the Book of the Law, published in 1904 by the English
magician, mountaineer, diabolist and mountebank Aleister Crowley (see Wilson 1971, p.358). The
book was dictated to Crowley in Cairo by the god Horus, or so we are to believe. The phrase 'Do
what thou wilt' came from Rabelais: 'Fay ce que vouldras' was the motto of the abbey Thelema in
Rabelais' tale Gargantua. It was seen as an irreligious maxim. So this graffito is a kind of obscenity;
although an unusually educated one--possibly the product of adolescent Satanism and late night
gatherings in this relatively lonely spot. What is it about the monument that would attract this sort of
attention? Is it simply a convenient writing surface near a deserted car park? Does the 'dreamer'
inscription provoke a pseudo-Nietzschean response? Does the monument resonate, as eternal
Obelisk, with memories of ancient and unchristian ceremonies? Its uncommunicativeness (save for
four lines of mysterious verse) seems to reflect the emptiness that is often felt to characterise the
Australian landscape experience (Hills 1991). Allegory, it has been said, is 'a natural language for
visionary strangeness and intensity' (Clifford 1974, p.4). Here it is not the content but the lack of
content which stimulates that sense of strangeness.
On the face of it, at least to those who know its history, this is a monument to the life-work of David
Drummond--NSW Minister for Education and later Federal Member for New England. It celebrates
the bringing of tertiary education to rural New South Wales. But now, to most visitors to the site, its
meaning is less clear, much more dependent on what the visitor brings to it. One begins to see it as
a case study in the communicative complexities of memorials. There is a painting by Poussin which
captures some of the complexity. Three shepherds and a female figure examine a Roman
sarcophagus in a bucolic landscape; one of the shepherds is kneeling to decipher the inscription,
which reads ET IN ARCADIA EGO: 'I, too, in Arcadia'. Whose words are these, we may well wonder,
and to whom are they addressed? Is it the dead man? Is it Death, reminding the living of his
presence even in Arcadia?
Meanings
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On one side it is assumed that to interpret a text means to find out the meaning intended by its
original author or--in any case--its objective nature or essence, an essence which, as such, is
independent of our interpretation. On the other side it is assumed that texts can be interpreted in
infinite ways. (Eco 1994, p.24)
A monument is a 'text' that is primarily pictorial rather than verbal. Ernest Gombrich (1972, p.2) once
commented that images 'occupy a curious position somewhere between the statements of language,
which are intended to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we can only give a
meaning'. Similarly, Debray (1995, p.60) observes that 'one cannot make a text mean just anything
one wants--an image, one can'. The inscrutability of the Drummond memorial enables it to carry a
more open-ended burden of meaning than a more specific structure, a figurative sculpture, for
example, would do. The monument invites viewers to attach their own meanings and metaphorically
add their own graffiti.
To build a column in an uncultivated landscape is to transform the scene into something more
resembling some cultural ideal of beauty: to humanise nature and convert it into a work of art, in
which state it is the more capable of being apprehended in allegorical terms. A tract of relatively
meaningless landscape (meaningless to nonAboriginal society, that is) is charged with European
meaning. The insertion of the column formalises the landscape and to some degree appropriates it.
A hillside that might still be perceivable as a semi-Aboriginal landscape (in fact this hillside here in
Armidale did have local Aboriginal associations) now lies within the cultural domain of the classical
and European world.
Allegory is commonly about abstractions and concretions. An abstract quality (such as Justice) is
made visible, brought to life, in a concrete form such as the figure of a female goddess or a judge.
How might this apply in the case of the Drummond Column? Several possibilities come initially to
mind, none of which takes us very far:
The man Drummond is the abstraction. The column is the concrete representation of
Drummond.
On the contrary, it is the column itself that is the abstraction or generality. It is not a unique
sculpture so much as a standard form. It is a universal: not column but Column. It exists in an
abstract and relatively timeless realm. David Drummond, the man, is, or was, the concrete
particular: the specific time-bound case, the active embodiment and historical personification of
the qualities that inhere in the monumental principle.
No; neither of the above is quite right. Since time is tending to erase the column's link to
Drummond, the abstract element these days is merely the idea of, say, Honour in Perpetuity. The
(metaphorically) concrete embodiment of that Idea is the (literally) concrete column.
We must dig deeper. Drummond was influential in the establishment here in Armidale first of a
teachers' college, in the 1920s, and then, in the 1930s, a university: developments that profoundly
affected the town's future. The scene spread out below the monument, then, could be said to
represent Political Achievement. At the time of the construction of the column, one of the options
considered for an inscription was the one on Wren's tomb in St Paul's Cathedral: Circumspice, si
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monumentum requiris ('If you seek his monument, look around you'). The action of the allegory, one
might say, lies in the interaction between the Founder and his works. In a time of anxiety about
university funding, there is a certain tension in the scene.
But with the loss of the plaque, with its biographical details on Drummond, we have moved into a
phase in which (except in some people's memories) there is no longer any connection between the
column and a known historical individual or event. The viewer is left only with History as an abstract
conception. Another interpretation, then. Standing in front of the column, viewers bring themselves,
as figures of flesh and blood in the concrete and visible present, into an allegorical relation with the
idea of the Past. The viewers, representing the Present, confront the column, representing the Past.
Of course, it is at the same time their own past: they are the Past's ambassadors to the future.
Another meaning, perhaps, lies in the fact that this is no longer the monument it once was. Imagine
a story that takes thirty years to read; or a speeded-up film. The trees grow up, encircling,
concealing. Cracks appear in the cladding panels. Graffiti obscure the verse engraved on the front of
the column. The plaque that named the man in whose honour the column was erected disappears.
Older residents die or move away; the town is full of young people and newcomers who have no
knowledge of the man. Soon the meaning of the monument can be interpreted as more or less the
reverse of what it once was. Once the message was thta 'the memory of Drummond shall be
preserve'. Now it is about the transience of ffame, the ephemerality of public honour, the shortness
of social memory: the 'Ozymandias' syndrome. As the years pass, the monument that apparently,
like all monuments, stood for Permancece is revealed as actually being about Decay. The
monument in its youthful pride represented the former. The cracks, the weeds, the absent plaque,
the graffiti, appearing gradually but remorselessy, represent the latter. We walk in an art gallery of
the imagination where, as it were, The Advance of Civilization confronts Melancholy of a Decaying
Monument in a Wood.
Or consider again the rudely scribbled graffito: DO WHAT THOU WILL SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF
THE LAW. Where once we had a rock to be interpreted as a memorial to Drummond, now it is to be
seen as a display of officialdown overwritten by youthful rebellion: the scene represents Fame
overcome by Anarchy. One could even conceive a further level of complexity. Imagine that copies of
this paper were available in a box to perceive herself, as it were from behind or above, as a
protagonist in the scene. The meditating on the multiple meanings of a Monument. It would be as
though one of Poussin's shepherds, pondering the Roman tomb, were to have an out-of-body
experience--to step back out of the painting and observe himself as a figure in an artfully arranged
landscape. The title on the frame would now read, 'You, too, are part of the allegory': ET TU IN
ALLEGORIA.
Monument forms, purely as architectural objects, are readily received, being drawn from a well
known vocabulary: the arch, the wall, the mound, the pillar, the grove, the fountain and so on, with
variations and ornamntations. A column is a variety of a generic type. The modernist concrete shaft
in the trees stands within an understood tradition. On the other hand, it is silent. Like a literary text--
an exceptionally sparse text--it embodies only an indeterminate and, one might say, abstract set of
potential meanings. These meanings are made concrete by the active viewer/reader. The viewer, as
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with any texzt, must participate in the filling in of gaps and the construction of coherence. There is a
distance between the abstract and mysteriously unreachable meaning of the thing in itself and the
subjective but relatively concrete meanings(s) supplied by the receptive viewer. In an overall sense,
the allegorical quality of the experience, one could argue, is to be found in the play between the
multiple (perhaps conflicting) understanding welling up in the mind of the viewer, all of which in some
way relate to a deeper meaning which is unreachable other.
Conclusion
The layers of meaning embodied in the monument--or attached to it--are multiple. The inherent
meaning is inaccessible, indeed non-existent. The column is a canvas, to which meaning(s) are
applied like superimposed layers of pigment, and each layer contributes to the depth of meaning.
Great memorials, it has been said, are curiously non-committal:
Liberty's torch can stand for Victory. Or Fidelity. Or Truth... The Sphinx says nothing to us; it is blank
in its stare as the sky and silent in its posture as the sand. (Gass 1982, p.138)
The Drummond Column is hardly one of the world's great memorials; but certainly it is sufficiently
non-committal to serve as a case study for interpretive experiment. Enough has been said here, I
hope, to show that a concept drawn from literature and the fine arts can provide a framework to
generate insights that might not otherwise have come to the surface.
Afterwords: a dialogue
Social Scientific Geographer: Couldn't you have interviewed a sample of visitors to the site? Got
some objective data?
Humanist Geographer: Well ... maybe. But I suspect the results would have been superficial. The
interviews would have had to be extremely searching.
Social Scientific Geographer: But what's the point, finally? I mean if this is just a one-off game of
introspective imaginings?
Humanist Geographer: The point is that meaning, to a large extent, is subjective and contingent. The
point is to provoke. To look at something from a new angle.
Acknowledgement
The sketch of the Drummond Column (Figure 1) was prepared by Mr Alan Sutherland in 1965, when
funds were being raised for the construction of the column. This sketch is reproduced by permission
of Mrs Kathleen Vickers.
REFERENCES
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AUSTER, M. (1996) 'The Drummond Column: a mystery remains', Journal of the Armidale Historical
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~~~~~~~~
By MARTIN AUSTER
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