The Lakehead University Bumper Book of Baby Names
Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster to "the Titanic" April 15, 1912.
So reads the inscription on a gravestone in Halifax, organised by a team of Canadian sailors who presumably had a relatively direct experience of this tragedy, and witnessed the human cost of techno-hubris long before the James Cameron movie would bury the event itself under 6,000 feet of celluloid. Ninety years later, scientists have been tripping over press-conference camera cables in their enthusiasm to announce that the Unknown Child is now - "thanks to DNA testing" - known.
Researchers from Lakehead University Ontario have breathlessly informed us that the tiny corpse once had a name, Eino Panula, and, at 13 months, the beginnings of a life. Apparently his mother, Maria, had died with all her five children when the Titanic sank to the icy depths. And we now know this thanks to a genetic match with a close relative, Magda Schleifer, a retired Finnish bank clerk. But what no one seemed to ask during this press conference was why this so-called "mystery" was considered a simple problem of identification in the first place. Why was this considered a mystery to be solved by forensic means? - as if the world can no longer cope with the symbolic power of an anonymous sacrifice.
Historically speaking, the various "unknown soldiers" and other such generic sacrificial figures,
are powerful and meaningful because of their very anonymity. As nameless martyrs,
they could symbolically stand for all those who lost their lives in tragic, absurd,
needless and/or infuriating circumstances - regardless of age, rank, class and other
such contingent factors. They represent an empty space, or blank screen, on which we
can project ourselves beyond the everyday, beyond the petty squabbles of ego and autobiography.1
The notion that we might dig up the remains of an unknown soldier and identify them as, say,
Corporal Benjamin Franks, a darts player from Leeds who was allergic to peanuts and enjoyed
breeding ferrets, is not the kind of information that inspires reflection on our possible
roles within the collective insanity of war or industrial accidents (quite interchangeable
terms, incidentally).
This compulsion to name and profile is surely a symptom of our anxiety surrounding the notion of identity itself. In an age of dissolving reference points, such as community, nationality, history - and even coherent personality - identity has become something to be pinned down like a butterfly; a process as reassuring as it is fatal. And this compulsion has crossed some kind of limit-point when we dismiss the symbolic resonance of anonymous victims, and refuse to allow them to rest in this cherished anonymity. Like spidery zombie-engineers, we exhume them, and dissect them, and drag them back into the flourescent light of laboratories: growing identity in petrie dishes alongside the weaponized anthrax spores. In such a process, bureaucracy reaches its terrifying zenith, so that even the dead are no longer safe from the microscopic violence of interpellation: of forcing people to identify themselves for the purposes of smooth administration. (A process chillingly satirized in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, whereby a simple spelling mistake can lead to wrongful torture and death, not to mention hefty body-disposal bills for the bereaved family.)
When bulldozed from out of the ground, investigators found only a wrist bone, "weighing less than a quarter ounce and three teeth." There was also a copper medallion inscribed with "Our Babe" placed in the coffin by the sailors, which may have helped preserve the bone fragment from oxidation. One of the scientists involved, Dr. Ryan Parr, believes that "the romantic explanation is that the sailors felt so much for that little boy, that they put the medallion [in there] to make sure he was preserved long enough for us to find him and identify him." And yet, it is only in our debased and desiccated era that such an invested interpretation could describe itself as "romantic." ("Presumptuous," would be closer to the mark, I feel. Or even "delusional.")
Conceptually, we are only two steps away from the situation described in K. W. Jeter's novel Noir, in which people who die without settling their debts are reanimated to work as zombies until their financial obligations have been settled. Ms. Schleifer, the Finnish relative of the Now-Known Child, stated that these findings "have brought closure to the story of Maria and Eino." Within such a statement, the mystery is solved, completed and thus disposed of, like a crossword puzzle that you can now toss triumphantly into the bin and forget about immediately.
Disaster originally means "bad star." Given the theme of closure we could link these bad omens to the stars in Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God," in which a similarly-insensitive team of scientists devise a computer program to identify the name of God - that final enigma, which even the secular cult of science continues to be obsessed with (via the pseudonym of Grand Unifying Theory of Everything). In this story, once the name of God is processed and revealed, the stars begin winking out of existence one by one.
But in our "tombraider" world, there is no such thing as genuine closure, and the fresh tragedy of the Unknown Child is that the deceased are forced to forever de-cease. And why? For the sake of historical trivia and cultural vandalism. As the Holocaust artist and memorial-designer Jochen Gerz says, "Memory is like blood, it's fine as long as we don't see it." And as Jean Baudrillard so eloquently puts it, "our atrocity, the one that distinguishes us from all others, is the act of gathering the pieces and running them through a computer to establish the identity of the dead."
© Dominic Pettman
