Paper presented at Keele University, May 2001 and again at Reading University in June 2001. Death is never completed as there are always leftovers. There are the literal remains of the body which, within western culture, are vital to the mourner’s sense of how to mourn successfully; there are those who are left over or behind who must make sense of their loss; and then, more often than not, there are monuments. Elegy theory pays a great deal of attention to the nature of the monument, as does art history and social anthropology, and certainly the memorial is the moment when the privacy of mourning meets the public gaze of the community. At this most difficult of meeting points, private and public, we often like to construct something to mark the occasion, something arresting and affecting. But which occasion are we commemorating with our monuments to that which has been lost? Elegists and psychoanalysts tend to stress the affective importance of the monument as an essential step toward...
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