Book of Paper, Book of Stone: An Exploration of Alice Oswald's Memorial

The one will kill the other. The book will kill the building.” With these stark words Victor Hugo predicted the outcome of the revolution in information technology set in motion by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. What he meant was that the printed word would replace architecture as the primary mode of human expression, that “the book of stone, so solid and so durable” would make way for “the book of paper, more solid and more durable still” (Notre-Dame de Paris, pt. v, 2). Writing several centuries after Gutenberg, on the eve of a building boom that would define the face of Paris up to the present day, Hugo must have known that he was overstating his point. Not only do buildings still serve as focal points of cultural selfdefinition, many if not most great works of art draw their power from a combination of different modes of expression. Far from being mutually exclusive, then, monumental architecture and the printed word can be combined to magnificent effect. Alice Oswald’s Memorial is a case in point. In order to explore the poem’s dual nature as a book of paper and a book of stone, it is helpful to view several of its defining characteristics in the context of various physical war monuments, both ancient and modern. Thus this essay is intended as a contribution to the study of war and memory, which of late has given rise to a surge of scholarly publications in the field of Classics and beyond.1 Memorial is a continuous poem without any punctuation that can be divided into three parts: Part A (pages 1–8) consists