Abstract
In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in each case focused upon a new kind of national “hero”—the unknown soldier or warrior. The first instances appeared in France and Britain in 1920, followed by the United States in 1921, and Belgium in 1922. Other nations followed suit over the years, with the most recent WWI Unknown Soldier monument dedicated in 2004, in New Zealand. The motivational calculus of these national tombs was, of course, the massive number of combatant dead whose remains could not be identified. This paper takes up the two very different arguments composed by these commemorative sites. The first argument was directed to surviving family members and was articulated most explicitly by the French as a hypothetical enthymeme “this could be your husband, your father, your brother,” etc. The second argument has been directed to national and international collectives as a constitutive proclamation of legitimated nation-state or Empire Although this argument is particularly explicit in postcolonial gestures of independence on the part of former dominions of old empires, it was evident in even the earliest cases of the tombs of the unknown.
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Notes
Despite injunctions by Grossberg and others, “articulation” (or an approximate equivalent, “suture”) is all too often asserted as a stand-in for relationality, rather than established by the sometimes difficult work of locating the dense, cultural relations and circulations that cultural studies calls its practitioners to engage. Although this paper is much too brief to attempt to follow and document all the trails and relationships, we have attempted to be as comprehensive as possible in mapping the most important ones that gave rise to the arguments posed by the national tombs of the unknown, especially in the early years of this commemorative practice.
It is important to note here that we are not arguing simply that places are “captioned,” that words about them do the arguing, and that the places themselves are mute. Instead, we are suggesting that a place may come to argue by its participation in a larger public discourse. As we will suggest below, the arguments made by the tombs of the unknown relied on their material existence, constituting a set of deictic enunciations that were formative to the arguments. The arguments could not have been constructed in the absence of those enunciations, because they form necessary components of the arguments. Note the frequent use of terms like “this” and “here.”
The origin of this practice is occasionally, though rarely, disputed. Regardless of its origin, the practice certainly did not gain any real traction internationally until after WWI.
Indeed, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker (2002) claim that it was “the Great War’s commemorative invention par excellence and a gift to posterity bestowed by war’s brutalisation” (p. 196).
The Meuse tourisme website labels Verdun the “Capitale de la Grande Guerre.” For the French, Verdun remains as the singular symbol of the war, just as the British see the Somme as the principal symbol. Verdun’s significance to the French is predicated in part upon the fact that the long, bloody battle was understood as a French military victory, in that the German advance on Verdun was repulsed. But it was significant also because of the large number of French soldiers who took part in the battle; most French divisions were rotated through Verdun for short periods. That is the primary reason offered by Kramer (2007), that “Verdun thus became the symbolic site of the struggle for the liberation of France for almost all French soldiers” (p. 217).
We have taken the liberty of adding punctuation to this inscription; the grammar of the inscription on the stone slab is marked by spacing rather than grammatical markings. The same is true of the inscription on the Tomb of the Soldat Inconnu in Paris.
We are grateful to our reviewers, Robert C. Rowland and Angela G. Ray, for their respective proffers of these concluding insights about the first enthymeme.
As Anderson (2006) observes, “As late as 1914, dynastic states made up the majority of the membership of the world political system” (p. 22), but “The First World War brought the age of high dynasticism to an end. By 1922, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Ottomans were gone… From this time on, the legitimate international norm was the nation-state…” (p. 113).
The exact dating of the essay about the Tomb of the Unknown from the Quartermaster Review is unclear; it is posted as 1963, but a head note to the essay says that it was published in 1958.
According to Inglis, the possibility of an Australian national tomb of the unknown had been raised long before 1993 and rejected on the grounds that the British Unknown Warrior represented the entire British Empire’s unknowns (1999, p. 340).
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Blair, C., Balthrop, V.W. & Michel, N. The Arguments of the Tombs of the Unknown: Relationality and National Legitimation. Argumentation 25, 449–468 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9216-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9216-9