Autumn 1997
Volume 24, Number 1

November 13, 1982, was an unforgettable day in America. Over 150,000 people, many of them Vietnam veterans, descended on Washington for the opening of the Vietnam memorial. Wheelchairs, fatigues, old army jackets, and a sea of decorations followed the brass parade toward the park between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. After the sundry speeches, when the fences guarding the memorial finally came down, there was a prolonged, uneasy silence as people surveyed the wall, approached it, touched it, walked along it, searched it for the names of fallen kin or comrades. One by one, veterans began to break down. Strangers embraced, weeping in each other's arms. Mothers, fathers, wives, daughters, sons, relatives, and friends of the dead also broke down, and before long the scene of spontaneous grief moved reporters and broadcasters to tears as well.

[...] One's initial impression of the memorial wall from a distance is that of its dramatic horizontal extension, yet as one descends along the pathway toward the highest part of the wall the anxiety of the vertical gradually wins out over that of the horizontal stretch to infinity. Joyce's image of the snow, by contrast, works the other way around. The verticality of the snow's descent gives way, by the end of the last paragraph of The Dead, to a more sublime impression of its vast horizontal extension over all of Ireland. Yet the effect in both cases is similar. The tense relationship between extension and descension gives both symbols their sublime epic reach.

By that I mean the reach into collectivity and generationality. As in Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Joyce, the wall evokes a generic multitude of the dead, an entire generation of sacrificed Americans. From a distance the thousands of small markings in the granite appear as part of the stone's texture. When one realizes that they are not texture but the names of the dead inscribed along the entire stretch of the wall, one is struck by the sheer profusion that characterizes this class of veterans who met their death in Vietnam. One gets an impression of Virgil's vast hosts of the dead in their incalculable numbers, or of the legions of shades that inspired in Dante's pilgrim the famous line, "I had not thought death had undone so many." When we speak of 59,000 dead, that is a crushing figure even in its abstraction. But allow their names to occupy space and suddenly the "so many" undone by the war find an measure for their immoderate excess.

The epic's vocation, as well as its burden, is to contain such excess in its narrative, ideological drive toward synthesis. We have seen, if only briefly and in passing, what moral strains and pressures this put on Virgil as well as Dante when it came to representing or accounting for the fates of history's plethora of victims. In the case of the memorial wall, the excess of names is uncontainable, not because the wall cannot accommodate them--it does--but because in its mute memory of the Vietnam War, it proclaims, or seems to, that each one of its inscriptions is one too many. The excess lies in the moral doubt raised in and by each and every name. The wall, in its conception and its material presence, is pervaded with the pathos of an early, sacrificial death reminiscent of Virgil's infernal scene of "high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys / and unwed girls, and young men set upon / the pyre of death before their fathers' eyes." Yet Rome--that "eternal idea in the mind of God" which would honor or redeem these deaths--is missing.

Robert Pogue Harrison is professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. He is the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992) and The Body of Beatrice (1988).