In order to experiment with potential dry farm rotations, as well as cover crops that can best scavenge excess nitrates and soil management regimes that can increase soil fertility at depth, farmers must be given both research support and a safety net for their own on-farm experimentation. Funding to mitigate the inherent risk in farmers’ management explorations will be key in further developing high-functioning dry farm management systems. Expanding land access to farmers who are committed to exploring dry farm management can additionally benefit these explorations.Dry farm tomato systems on the Central Coast point to key management principles that can both help current growers flourish and provide guidance for how irrigation can be dramatically decreased in a variety of contexts without harming farmer livelihoods. In these systems, managing nutrients at depth–at least below 30cm and ideally below 60cm–is necessary to influence outcomes in fields where surface soils dry down quickly after transplant. Fostering locally-adapted soil microbial communities that are primed for water scarcity can improve fruit quality. Farmers can otherwise manage nutrients to maximize either yields or quality, giving latitude to match local field conditions to desired markets. As water scarcity intensifies in California agriculture and around the globe, dry farm management systems are positioned to play an important role in water conservation. Understanding and implementing dry farm best management practices will not only benefit fields under strict dry farm management, plant grow trays but will provide an increasingly robust and adaptable example for how farms can continue to function and thrive while drastically reducing water inputs.These works all employ textual space and the space of the city to create monuments to ambiguous and divided histories.
All three of these texts lay a particular importance upon space, both the physical space in which the texts take place and the textual space the author creates. At its most basic, a monument is the combination of memory and space, a concretization of memory that is both the product of a collective desire to commemorate and the locus of subsequent commemorative activities, such as pilgrimages or ceremonies. Thus the texts I have chosen to investigate here, and texts like them, have a claim to monumentality in that they have a pronounced spatial aspect and are specifically concerned with a past moment that has both personal and collective importance. By thinking of these texts as monuments, one can move towards answering an otherwise puzzling set of questions: why do so many memoirs and novels of historical violence lay such a heavy emphasis on space, especially the space of the city, and why are so many formally innovative? Considering a text as a monument also emphasizes the spatial aspects of these texts, providing a framework for understanding them not simply as texts among texts but also as monuments among monuments. Each of these texts is in dialogue with traditional, physical monuments; in each there are moments when the protagonist must consider the ways in which a physical monument memorializes, and the ways in which it may also fail to do so. The texts consider how physical monuments seek to shape memory and whose agenda they serve. Implicit in these encounters with monuments is the alternative of the text itself, the ways in which the textual monument can add a voice, complement or enter into dialogue with the physical monument. Language, from which these monuments are built, may be a powerful way to influence the “collective frameworks” for memory of which Halbwachs speaks.
Language is a product of the collective and creates the social space in which a community exists. On the other hand, because words may have many layers of meaning and association, they may bridge the gap between the purely personal and the purely collective, allowing individual memories to influence and change the “collective framework.” It may be worthwhile to consider what we mean by the term monument, and how a text may also lay claim to the word. A monument maybe triumphant, as in Roman victory columns and the Arc de Triomphe, or it may stand as a reminder of a painful past experience, like Henri Pingusson’s Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, on Ile de la Cité. In many cases, a monument develops layers of meaning over time, creating multiple dialogues between different moments. Even when layers of meaning are not added purposely, the meaning of any monument changes over time as newer historical events cast the subject of the monument in a different light. The Arc de Triomphe, for instance, is a monument that has acquired state-sanctioned layers of meaning and has also, because of its extraordinary symbolic importance, attracted others who would use and change the symbol. First built by Napoleon to celebrate his victories, after World War I the tomb of the Unknown Soldier was placed underneath it, complicating the meaning of the arch. When, in 1940, the occupying Germans marched around the arch, they were both capitalizing on the symbolic importance it already had and adding yet another layer of meaning. Such physical public monuments are political instruments. A monument constructed or approved by the state represents a purposeful shaping of public memory, whether tacit or explicit. These monuments express the explicit agenda of those in power and also may reveal an agenda unexpressed by them elsewhere.
A monument may express the unity of the nation that created it, since to erect a monument at all implies a certain agreement among the various constituencies about what to memorialize and how to do it, but it can also show the anxious efforts of those in power to smooth over differences between factions. Tombs represent a kind of nexus of institutional and personal monumentalizing. On the one hand, an individual tomb has less of a claim to expressing collective memory than a monument created and funded by a large group. On the other hand, they are public monuments to the memory of a person. Whereas a small, highly personal memento is inaccessible to others and not meant to resist the damaging effects of time, a tomb is built of weather-resistant stone and can be visited by any member of the public. The grave, positioned as it is between collective monument and private memento, may seem a good solution to the problems of memorializing I mention above. It is personal enough to express individual complexity, but public enough to avoid hermeticism. Yet, for the authors I discuss, the grave can still be problematic. For Kofman, the words said over it cannot capture the complexity of the person underneath, and their relationships with others. For Perec, the grave cannot fulfill its promise to serve as a boundary; it cannot provide a space for the dead so that they can be truly “at rest” for the mourner. In Rodoreda, the fixedness of a tombstone, its immobility and the way it yokes a single name to a single body, overvalues the past and a specific place, denying the mourner the ability to grow and change, to move forward in time. The word monument, whether referring to large public monuments, to personal graves or to texts, derives from the latin “monere,” to remind or warn . A “monument” was not always a physical edifice. At first, the Latin word monumentum referred to “a commemorative statue or building, tomb, reminder, cutsom grow room written record, literary work” . At this early moment in its life, the word intriguingly connects writing and literature with commemoration and also with death. A dress is still an object that encloses space. In the texts I analyze, Perec, Kofman and Rodoreda similarly critique monumentality, suggesting smaller memorial objects that, especially in Perec and Rodoreda, are be pieced together to form a shape. Yet textual monuments are not just monuments on the metaphorical level; texts can function as monuments quite literally. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Torah became a temple in writing, a substitute for and representation of the missing physical temple. In their introduction to From a Ruined Garden, a collection of translations of yizker-bikher, memorial books written in Yiddish to document and commemorate Jewish communities in Eastern Europe that were liquidated during the Second World War, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin touch on how the need for historical memory in the absence of the physical temple provided a template for textual memorial forms that emerged much later . When survivors of the war, as well as those who remembered the towns and cities even though they had emigrated earlier, wished to memorialize a place and its occupants, they were imagining the text they created as a literal monument to those who had died. “It is worthwhile noting,” write Kugelmass and Boyarin, “that when landslayt from the town of Zwolen set out to produce a memorial book, their expressed intention was ‘to create a monument’” . Many memorial books have “a table of contents . . . and title page [with] drawings of gravestones as their backgrounds,” making very clear the book’s function as a textual monument . The original yoking of literary works to space, memory and death that can be uncovered in the meanings of the original Latin word monumentum thus continues to cling to the word monument. We can trace it from Horace through Du Bellay, as they describe literary monuments as simultaneously living and dead, all the way to the memorial books translated by Kugelmass and Boyarin.Like a building, a city is a city because of its boundaries. The boundedness of the city took on particular significance during the Occupation and the Spanish Civil War .
Rodoreda’s protagonist never leaves Barcelona, and Perec and Kofman give particular weight to the moments when they enter or leave Paris. Their texts are not just buildings or structures: on another level, they are also city-texts. Kofman and Rodoreda even name their texts after city streets, cementing the relationship between the book and the city. Following Benjamin, we can see that the city is the space of history. In his article on this topic, “Archiving,” Michael Sheringham elaborates on this point. The city is a “memory machine” . Palimpsestic, it is the place of history while in the countryside “myths hold sway” . A city, in this formulation, is thus the proper home of monuments. If the city is a nation’s microcosm, then the monuments placed there speak for the whole. And if the city is a psyche writ large, monuments are concretized memories, a culture’s memory cues. In the texts I analyze, the city itself is also a kind of monument, a giant memory palace whose spaces and buildings can function like a spatial monument. The narrators move through the space of the text seeking to construct their identities through the city and its monuments. Their experiences evacuate the traditional monuments of meaning, however, and they find themselves adrift in a city without landmarks. The text itself becomes the missing monument. A monument is a piece of a system for perpetuating memory, working together with rituals of memory and the visitors themselves. Whether textual or physical, monuments are thus containers for memory, or locations where memory may take place. Monuments, by providing a literal space for memory, help to preserve it for, and transmit it to, those who come later. They therefore always function in relation to time, creating a dialogue between the past and the present. A monument might be understood as an expression of time in space, existing in the present but acting as a pointer to a moment in the past and thus stretching back in time. Created as a permanent reminder of an event, monuments have a claim to a certain timelessness. Physical monuments are traditionally made of durable materials like stone or metal, designed to withstand the effects of time. Yet in their apparent timelessness, they nonetheless evoke the timefulness of the relationship between the visitor and the past event. A visitor senses his or her own mortality in the face of a more permanent structure like a monument, and is also conscious of the distance between the present and the memorialized past event.