Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union by Timothy Sweet (review)

122Rocky Mountain Review TIMOTHY SWEET. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 240 p. The American Civil War arose from a crisis in political representation" (1); and, "Representation has been in crisis for more than a century" (205). By these assertions, Timothy Sweet means: first, that language failed to produce a consensus that could have prevented the war; second, that "Poetic and photographic representations ofthe war aided political discourse in the project of legitimating the violent conservation of the Union by reflecting on and participating in the transformation of wounds into ideology during and after the Civil War" (2); and third, that "Far from restoring representation as the ground ofthe American state, the war has left only a representational crisis" (203). To support his contention that language had failed, Sweet quotes a sentence from Emerson's "Speech on Affairs in Kansas" (1865) and mentions the KansasNebraska Act. To show that poetry and photography legitimated the violence, Sweet analyzes Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps (1865) and photographs by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, Timothy O'Sullivan, and James Gibson. Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces (1866), however, "reflect critically on any such attempt to naturalize the war or its ideological implications" (7). To prove his point that representation is still in crisis, Sweet appends a five-page epilogue analyzing Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" (1960), a poem that "locates the political as well as the aesthetic meaning of this crisis in traces of the Civil War" (205). Such a summary makes Traces of War sound abstract and reductive, but Sweet's readings of poems and photographs proceed with specific examples and lead to insights, and he includes brief discussions of works by Bryant, Lincoln, Sherman, and Whittier. Sweet builds on the work of many eminent Americanists, but he also borrows ideas from theorists such as Barthes, Derrida, Jameson, Pitkin, Scarry, and Sontag. Although never explicitly stated, Sweet's own ideology seems to include some pacificism, Marxism, and antiauthoritarianism, a mixture evident in his thought-provoking assertion that "Patriotism is an aesthetic product like romance and adventure; the patriotic response is stimulated by icons or emblems that serve as loci of the state's supposed values" (4). Sweet admits the challenge ofproving his thesis: "To extrapolate from aesthetics to politics is often difficult, especially when the artifact or aesthetic theory under examination does not display a manifestly 'political' content" (105). He nevertheless makes that extrapolation by demonstrating the ideological functions of seemingly apolitical aesthetic constructs such as pastoralism and the picturesque. Unfortunately, parts ofhis analysis use fashionable critical jargon that lacks precision—terms such as "valorize," "marginalize," "naturalize," "interdiction," "rhetorical slippage." He might have avoided some of the fuzziness by taking account of other critical approaches. His otherwise impressive and extensive bibliography lacks mention of William H. Shurr's The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857-1891 (1972), of the 1982 dissertation (on Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces) written by Shurr's student Gaymon Bennett, and of Kerry C. Larson's Whitman's Drama of Consensus Book Reviews123 (1988), which gives a reading ofDrum-Taps significantly different from Sweet's. Although Sweet convincingly shows that much of Drum-Taps reveals Whitman's hope that a national consensus could be restored, Larson's analysis also convinces in showing that "Whitman hints not so much at a final defeat of his vision of consensus as its grim perversion, one that builds altars to the unreal majesty of a phantom republic which commands all and is commanded by no one" (213). However one reads Whitman and Melville, one wonders why Sweet decided to prove his thesis about ideology and the state by analyzing poetry read by relatively few Americans and probably none of their leaders. Until the recent PBS special on the Civil War, even Brady's photographs were seen by comparatively few. Surely, newspaper reports and illustrations reflected and shaped the popular mind more powerfully and directly than did Whitman's poetry. Sweet's choice of subject matter may stem from his confusion over the causal connection between the war and the crisis in representation. By quoting Emerson, he implies that...