Just under a hundred years ago, charting Mrs Dalloway’s progress
through the streets of London, Virginia Woolf casually mentions “Havelock” in
Trafalgar Square. There was no need to expand on that single word and remind us
that “Havelock” is a prosaic statue of a bulky male figure, best foot forward
on a plinth, the ensemble erected to remind us of Major General Sir Henry
Havelock whose permanent legacy is a Narrative
of the War in Afghanistan. Today, no
one - office worker or tourist - sees “Havelock” in Trafalgar Square; the
monument triggers no memories and elicits no interest beyond the occasional
cursory glance at the inscription on the plinth. “Havelock” has subsided to the
level of the Narrative; both are now simply
documents of the past, of interest to professional historians and those in
Afghanistan who kept alive the oral memory of invading armies and treated the return
of the British to Helmand in 2006 as just a new chapter in an old story, a spare
princeling enhancing the sense of narrative continuity.
Had Virginia Woolf casually mentioned “Nelson” in Trafalgar
Square there would (still) be many passers-by and tourists who would know a bit
about Nelson even if no more than might be encompassed by a gloss or footnote.
In that sense, “Nelson” still works as a monument which can activate a memory in
a way that “Havelock” and “Napier” - also on a Trafalgar Square plinth - can’t.
“Nelson” has a place in popular memory though that will eventually fade.
In 2000, as is well-known, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone
suggested that Havelock and Napier (but not Nelson) should be removed from the
square. It didn’t happen and the subsequent consolidation of a notion of
“Heritage” now makes it likely that the two uninspiring lumps of metal will
stay put in their prime location, indefinitely.
“Heritage” is a bric-à-brac shop idea; it does not
discriminate. As long as it’s over a hundred years old it’s an antique and therefore
valuable - though in the case of “Heritage” it is so valuable that it is not
for sale, not to be moved, and not to be improved (as owners of Grade II*
listed homes will know, draughts being part of our Heritage too).
In the past, when we were busy creating “Heritage”, things
were different. The Victorians always felt free to change their minds. They erected and shortly after removed from
Trafalgar Square someone called Edward Jenner - do you need a gloss? smallpox
vaccine? - who went up in 1858 with Prince Albert present but was promptly
moved out in 1862. I don’t know why. General Gordon - Siege of Khartoum -
lasted longer. He was put up in 1888 and removed in 1943, re-surfacing ten
years later. In 1948, Churchill - no gloss needed - had asked for Gordon to be
put back in the Square but though he was Prime Minister in 1953, the statue did
not re-appear there but on the Victoria Embankment where it remains.
*
In a well-known essay dating to 1940, the art historian
Erwin Panofsky drew a distinction between documents
and monuments since deployed in a
variety of modified forms, most recently in John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (University of
Chicago Press 2022). Every fragment of our cultural past which survives becomes
a document (not necessarily on paper
- a potsherd is a document in this sense) which can be archived and studied as
we try to understand how we got to here from there. A document becomes a monument when it strikes us as having
intrinsic value, worthy of some form of appreciation in which it is treated as
something other than evidence for something else. From one point of view, any
Renaissance painting is a document of its times; from another it may be
something valued because it’s a remarkable work of art.
Statues confuse matters and are meant to. They seek to
impose themselves as monuments when they often are, or become, no more than
documents. Statues of Stalin or the Kims are informative and provide evidence
about the character of entire regimes; that we readily understand. Our own education, even if quite limited,
will allow us to see that those statues are aesthetically and artistically not
terribly interesting. Let’s be that polite.
But the nearer we get to home, the more clouded our
understanding becomes. Havelock and Napier belong in a museum or its warehouse
- all museums house very much more than they ever display. Even then, they will
be of limited interest - they certainly break no new ground in the history of
art. If we started seriously to remove all the dead monuments we would soon run
out of storage - at which point, the sensible thing is to photograph and send
the thing in itself to the scrapyard, as if dealing with tombstones from
defunct cemeteries.
Putting up statues which add “diversity” does not solve the
intrinsic problem that statues seek to impose narratives which alone they are
incapable of sustaining. Proponents of “Diversity” also seek to impose their own
valuations which may well not be widely shared, in which case the new statues
become just like the rest, street clutter to which only dogs and pigeons are
attracted. For their purposes, lumps of stone and metal are all they need.
Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square is already learning that lesson.
Another lesson is simply this: a monument is something
which has to be discovered; it may require some excavation before it turns into
a great novel or a great painting but there comes a point when it begins to
impose itself. That is something which Nelson’s Column may have
achieved. But a monument is not something you can simply erect.
Trevor Pateman, 25 January 2023
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