Lovely Bones: The Contested Invention of the Unknown Soldier

By Alessandro CarreraNovember 13, 2014

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body by Laura Wittman

THE TIME WAS the beginning of the 1960s, shortly after the centenary of Italy’s unification. In an Italian elementary school, a third-grade teacher — who was a repository of patriotic legends — was telling her pupils how the body of the Unknown Soldier had been chosen to be buried in that gigantic, marble-white, ugly Roman monument hovering over Piazza Venezia, known as Vittoriano (Victory Shrine) or, more commonly, Altare della Patria (Altar of the Motherland). As the gentle grandmother that she was, the white-haired teacher in a black apron told her class, as if it were a fairy tale, how the nameless remnants of 11 Italian soldiers who died on the Austrian front in World War I had been arranged in the cathedral of Aquileia, on Italy’s Northeastern border. Eleven women who had lost their sons in the war were called to “recognize,” symbolically, bones they could not even see. (The coffins were already closed when they arrived.) One of the women, graced by a supernatural instinct, pointed her finger toward one of the caskets and said, “It’s him, it’s my son.” Duly impressed, the authorities took that casket to Rome and on November 4, 1921, enshrined it in the Altare della Patria, the same ominous structure that, on good days, the Romans call “the type-writing machine” and, on bad days, the world’s biggest urinal.


This is the story my third grade teacher told her class. It is remarkable for two reasons: first, because I still remember it 50 years later; second, because — to my surprise — it is true. Honestly, I always thought that she made it up. Then I read Laura Wittman’s fascinating book The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body. Wittman, who is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University, has assembled an impressive array of material on the genealogy, history, and mythology of the Unknown Soldier in Italy, France, and Great Britain. Because of the intense national drama that accompanied every stage of the sanctification of the Unknown Soldier, she gives the most extensive treatment to the Italian case. Thanks to Wittman I can now give an identity to the mother who “recognized” the remnants of her son. Her name was Maria Bergamas, a “woman of the people” from the Triestine region that the Italian army reclaimed from Austria in World War I.


In fact, Maria Bergamas did more than point her finger and say, “That’s him.” Believing that she had heard a trembling of bones coming from one of the coffins, she threw herself on it and cried, “Giovannino! Giovannino!” The other women fell silent. The religious and military authorities overseeing the ghastly ceremony decided that that was enough evidence to select those particular remnants and ship them to Rome. Strangely enough, however, the Unknown Soldier has not been remembered as Giovanni or Giovannino — not even in the anecdotal history popularized by weekly magazines. Except for Maria Bergamas, whose story was told in the press but soon excised (my third-grade teacher did not mention names), no one has ever called the remains of Giovanni Bergamas anything but miles ignotus, “milite ignoto,” Unknown Soldier. The collective removal of his name is a mystery of unanimity as well as anonymity.


In Wittman’s extensive research, which covers media, literature, cinema, and cultural criticism, the Unknown Soldier becomes a free-floating signifier. It symbolizes a nation’s submission to the war and at the same time is a token of resistance against the removal of suffering ostensibly achieved by glorifying an embarrassing bag of “lovely bones.” Due to the ambiguity of his symbolism — in equal parts mute acceptance of the war and subtle resistance to it — the Unknown Soldier has always been an odd kind of Other, one that comforts rather than threatens. The ceremony that elevated his mortal remains to the status of national symbol made him into something akin to a lost little brother. As recently as November 17, 2003, 300,000 Italians gathered in Piazza Venezia to pay respect to the coffins of 19 Italian soldiers killed in an ambush during the second Iraq war. Regardless of the vociferous debate over Italy’s participation in the war, and the discussion in the media about the status of the dead (were they victims, heroes, martyrs?), no one disputed that the monument to the Unknown Soldier was the right place to gather and mourn. As long as the Unknown Soldier resists identification (name, social class, political appropriation), he belongs in the archetypal dimension of “safe” mourning (safe for both the authorities and the people). Yet his holiness, as Wittman’s book amply demonstrates, is the result of a complex give-and-take between pagan ritual and Christian liturgy, decadent fascination with death and exorcism of the corpse’s threatening power. Anthropological and political genius joined forces in the collective invention of the Unknown Soldier. The individual mourning that started it all underwent an amazing sea change that turned Giovannino’s “mysterious materiality” (Wittman’s words) into the nation’s mystical body.


Yet the “lovely bones,” cleaned up as they were (there was a great emphasis on their being “white,” with no traces of flesh), resisted, and still resist, full sublimation. The Unknown Soldier has made history without being part of it, and history cannot claim him. It is his casket that makes mourning possible, yet no one except Maria Bergamas truly mourned him. (Her picture in Wittman’s book portrays a solemn, statuesque figure who could have inspired Caravaggio’s Madonna.) The nearly 60,000 names inscribed in the US Vietnam Memorial have made it a place where veterans feel free to cry in public. On the contrary, the Unknown Soldier has always been an incomplete ritual, the birth of a myth that never fully matured and must be constantly “fed” with funeral crowns (in Italy, on every official occasion) to placate his perceived restlessness. The US Vietnam Memorial belongs to the symbolic order of the nation in a way that the European monuments to the Unknown Soldier do not. In fact, as Wittman shows, the cult of the Unknown Soldier was Europe’s answer to the creeping feeling (perfectly expressed in Abel Gance’s J’accuse in its three versions, 1919, 1921, and 1938) that so many dead soldiers could not simply rest in anonymous ground without coming back, in one way or another, to haunt the living.


Perhaps we can think of this as a vast “Antigone complex” that swept Europe after World War I. The soldiers whose identities were lost and who did not receive proper burial reenacted the predicament of Antigone’s brother left to rot outside the gates of Thebes. In the postwar European drama, however, the roles of Creon (the state) and Antigone (veterans, relatives, the media, the people) were not as sharply divided as in Sophocles’ play. The powers-to-be made an effort to appear sympathetic to Antigone’s reasons (“We will give symbolic burial to all the dead by choosing one of them”), while Antigone agreed to negotiate the symbolism of the ceremonial. With one significant exception, which Wittman discusses at length, no one in Italy opposed the monument to the Unknown Soldier. The authorities wanted closure; the Church was largely in favor; the growing Fascist movement remained on the sidelines; the newly formed Italian Communist Party accepted the monument as a reminder that the infantry soldiers and not the generals had carried the war’s burden.


One of the few dissenting voices came from the charismatic, militaristic, nationalistic poet, novelist, playwright, polemicist Gabriele D’Annunzio. A larger-than-life figure, idolized by many and despised by others, D’Annunzio was also a certified war hero. He volunteered, risked his life more than once, saw comrades fall, and lost an eye in a 1916 (as a pilot) landing accident. While he was recovering from the wound, he wrote Notturno, a strikingly innovative prose poem that lyricized his war experience and celebrated in quasi-religious terms the sacrifice of his fellow soldiers. In 1919, after Italy was denied the Dalmatian provinces and felt betrayed at the Versailles Conference, D’Annunzio coined the expression “mutilated victory” and, in an extraordinary stunt of aestheticized, decadent yet subversive poetic politics, set up an army of irregulars that for more than a year occupied Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia). An international treaty and five days of shelling from Italian warships ended the Fiume experiment in January 1921 and marked the beginning of D’Annunzio’s embittered inner exile. He decided to publish Notturno on November 4, 1921, the same day of the Unknown Soldier ceremonial (the book was actually published a few weeks later), but did not attend. His absence spoke volumes, but it also came as a relief to the authorities.


D’Annunzio contained multitudes and whether he learned some humility from his war experience is hard to tell. Wittman seems to give too much credit to D’Annunzio’s “Franciscan” attitude toward the plight of the humble soldier (why are common folk always supposed to be humble?), yet his distaste for the pomp and circumstance surrounding the inauguration of the monument was sincere. It was also motivated by his interpretation of the war: a mutilated soldier was called up to symbolize a mutilated victory. Wittman makes the point that in parallel with Sigmund Freud’s wartime reflections (Mourning and Melancholia, 1917), the psychological politics at play in the shrines to the Unknown Soldier, not just in Italy but also in France and in Great Britain, was to keep the dead alive but buried. The specter of the “return of the dead” had to be avoided at all costs.


For his part, D’Annunzio saw that the new shrine was meant to erase the uncomfortable presence of the dead among the living. His idea of monument was a simple white cross up in the Alps with one carved word: resurgo. Not resurrexit (“he rose from the dead”) but “I am resurging,” now and forever, less in the Christian sense than in a mythical, Christian-pagan meaning. In a way, D’Annunzio wanted the Unknown Soldier dead but not buried, always bearing witness, always walking among the living, breaking the muteness that was one of the most common symptoms of what today would be called PTSD and after World War I was known as “shellshock” or “war neurosis.”


What undermined D’Annunzio’s dissent was, once again, his aestheticism. To him, the war was an artistic endeavor, the collective masterpiece of the Italian people. Ultimately, it was sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake. Father Giovanni Semeria, war chaplain of the Supreme Command — but also one of the Modernist Catholics who stirred panic in the Church at the beginning of the 20th century — spoke more somber words when he asked on November 2, 1921, whether the Unknown Soldier ceremonies would be “a glorification of warriors or an apotheosis of war.” About the other remarkable absence, namely Benito Mussolini’s, who would seize power less than a year later, Wittman makes the intriguing point that he did not want to be associated with a dead man. In the following years, his “intact” body became in fact the vessel through which the “mysterious materiality” of the Unknown Soldier’s remnants would be channeled into the mystical body of Fascism.


In addition to Abel Gance’s J’accuse, Wittman discusses briefly, but poignantly, the war documentaries of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. There are many chilling moments in Prigionieri della Guerra (Prisoners of the War, 1996), the first installment of the “War Trilogy” that took the two filmmakers 10 years to complete. Having found in the early 1990s a treasure trove of forgotten footage from World War I, they painstakingly re-filmed, painted, and slowed down every frame, forcing the viewer to “watch” what otherwise would be lost in a fleeting moment of horror. (Their work has now gained worldwide reputation and had a 2009 MoMA retrospective.) A slow-motion scene many viewers would rather forget, but probably won’t, shows dozens of bodies of soldiers thrown one by one into a mass grave. In the words of Robert Lumley, author of the first comprehensive analysis of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s work,


Corpses are taken from a cart, dragged to the edge of a deep trench, and tipped unceremoniously onto a pile of bodies below. At this point, it is entirely unclear and clearly irrelevant as to which army is victorious and which is defeated. The soldiers have metamorphosed into rigid and awkward bundles to be manhandled like any other cargo. The slowing down of the film turns the movements of the living into an ungainly danse macabre.


Borrowing a paradoxical quote from the French novelist Michel Tournier’s Vendredi, “an object [that] has suddenly been degraded into a subject,” Wittman refers to Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s re-filming as a demonstration that the corpse is not a mere “thing” that gives no access to its own death. (One might argue that the corpse is in fact the thing.) By slowing down the falling of bodies into the mass grave (a gesture that veritably annihilates the futuristic sublimity of speed), Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi “degrade” the “thingness” of the corpse in order to restore its lost humanity.


Wittman has organized her material thematically rather than chronologically — a choice that makes the book rather labyrinthine. Fragments of information come back and accumulate from one chapter to another, and even the most attentive reader must keep track of the additions to the story. Appropriately, she includes the war writings of Giuseppe Ungaretti, F. T. Marinetti, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline in her analysis (and, briefly, Robert Musil’s diaries, which is a brilliant move). It is a pity, however, that she left out Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (Journal of War and Imprisonment), a strong critique of the war “from within” from someone who had believed in it and then saw his patriotic dreams shattered by chaos, incompetence, and cynicism.


The missing reference to Gadda, however, does not detract from the high quality of her book. Emblematic is Wittman’s powerful description of the Unknown Soldier’s journey from Aquileia to Rome. The people supposed to witness the passing of the train in complete silence often violated the orders and celebrated their lost brother according to their regional customs and religious inclinations. But the most touching moment happened in Aquileia after the authorities decided that the casket Maria Bergamas had hugged was to become the final, overdetermined, impossible symbol of visible invisibility. The other women who were present mourned for the remaining caskets more than they did for the one that was going to receive glorification in Rome. The 10 who were not chosen were the ultimate unknown soldiers, the ones that history would mercilessly erase.


¤


Alessandro Carrera is Director of Italian Studies at the University of Houston.

LARB Contributor

Alessandro Carrera is Director of Italian Studies at the University of Houston. He has edited Massimo Cacciari’s The Unpolitical: For a Radical Critique of Political Reason (Fordham UP, 2009), Italian Critical Theory (“Annali d’Italianistica,” 2011), and the forthcoming Europe and Empire (Fordham UP, 2015).

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