Urban Space as Memory Place or How People Play with Death (“Forest Lawn” aka “Beverly Pantheon”)

Abstract

The article discusses the construction of personal and collective memory through the commodification of burial places and rites in what could be called the (un)conscious play with death. Described by Foucault as a heterotopia, the cemetery creates a simulated utopia that life and death are intertwined and that, through the commemoration of the dead, the living could aspire to an afterlife existence. My focus to support this view is on “Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery” in Los Angeles, California, a perfect example of death commodification and American consumerist culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and on its fictional representation in Aldous Huxley’s novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) as “Beverley Pantheon, the Personality Cemetery”. The purpose of the article is to foreground the way in which in pristine urban spaces, as Los Angeles was at the turn of the twentieth century, people used their unlimited imagination to build heterotopias of deviance, such as graveyards, churches, and houses, in order to turn them into profitable businesses. Urban space and culture also mean the formation of individual and collective cultural and social memory, which usually manifests in heterotopic, hyperreal places.