Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900 (review)

Martin Griffin (English, University of Tennessee) has conducted a close reading of carefully selected texts by five authors in order to highlight different modes of irony in post-Civil War literature, and argues that the South ultimately controlled the post-bellum battle to define what the war had been about. As he puts it, the defeated region "won the cultural struggle over American memory within twenty-odd years of the war's end." (15) His principal works, are James Russell Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode (delivered July 21, 1865), matched with astute comparisons to poems by Whitman; Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866); James's Bostonians (1886); Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambrose Bierce (1892); and Lyrics of Lowly Life by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896).

At times the texts interconnect in intriguing ways. At a crucial moment in The Bostonians, for example, a southern man courting a Boston woman happen to stroll past the new Memorial Hall in Cambridge, the site of Lowell's low-key delivery little more than a decade earlier. Striking differences in perspective between Bierce, James, and Stephen Crane are noted. Griffin's familiarity with apt philosophical texts provides illuminating insights from Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard (especially concerning irony), and Benjamin. Modern experts in critical theory (Kristeva, LaCapra, and others) are also invoked to good purpose. Griffin wears his learning lightly. These allusions are not ornamental. Dunbar is surprisingly compared with Rilke and Frost—unlikely but apt.

The book makes an important contribution to the much-explored genre of collective memory studies by highlighting such naysayers as Bierce, Dunbar, and The Bostonians (the latter two barely mentioned in Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War [1973]). Griffin explains that Ashes of the Mind is "an exercise in the recovery of memory, an effort to move the cultural furniture slightly to give a better view of an obscured pattern of American writing. Indeed, writing as memory, in certain instances even as countermemory that challenges an established consensus, is an explicit theme in this book." (8) Hence the illuminated concept of countermemory provides a major contribution of the project and justifies its emphasis on some fairly neglected poetry.

In terms of its larger mission, the book is also a deliberate effort to divert attention from the in-depth treatment already devoted to such post-war writers as Whitman and Dickinson and, ultimately, "to look at the uncomfortable, ambivalent, and complicating presence of Civil War memory and commemorative culture" in northern literature as it transitioned from the gentility of Lowell to the proto-modern use of dialect in Dunbar's "Corn-Song." Symptomatic of Griffin's focus is his observation that Melville's Battlepieces and Aspects of the War "reveals an understanding that the memory of the war will likely be as distorted and misdirected as the proximate politics of the conflict themselves" (92).

Griffin insists upon "the ironies of American historical amnesia and [finds] the desire for an easygoing folk memory of an unproblematic national past" (208). I am not persuaded that it was unproblematic for everyone, as his own intriguing Coda reveals, nor that Basil Ransome in The Bostonians is altogether representative of a generalized triumph of southern perspective in what the author repeatedly calls the "American national imaginary." Members of the GAR, so potent politically in the 1890s, might suggest otherwise.