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

Chapter 4 - Bierce and Transformation

4 Bierce and Transformation However, other forces at play in the Civil War signalled something far more potent than combat’s cost in lives: that the very nature of combat did not fit, and could not be made to fit, within the framework of soldier expectations. Forces of change and novelty made themselves felt less dramatically and drastically, but they slowly chipped away at soldiers ’ resolve, and their results were over time more dispiriting. Ultimately they led many to the realization that they could not fight the war they set out to fight. The engine of change was technological modi fication. An advance in weaponry overthrew the efficacy and then the moral meaning of the tactics soldiers wished to employ, robbing of signi ficance the gestures they had been determined to make. Gerald F. Linderman, 1987 Man’s vestiges were nowhere to be found, Save one brass mausoleum on a mound (I knew it well) spared by the artist Time To emphasize the desolation round. Into the stagnant sea the sullen sun Sank behind bars of crimson, one by one. “Eternity’s at hand!” I cried aloud. “Eternity,” the angel said, “is done.” Ambrose Bierce, “Finis Aeternitatis,” 1892 The fiction writer who seemed to be haunted by the memory of the Civil War to a greater degree than any other of his generation was Ambrose Bierce. For Bierce, this condition was not a matter of a contaminated political legacy or the fear of a morally dysfunctional national 134 imaginary such as that which overshadowed Melville’s Battle-Pieces. Rather, it was rooted in something we have come to grasp, almost to be casually familiar with, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the persistence of a traumatic memory of combat experience within the psyche of the individual veteran. The stories that Bierce began to publish in the late 1880s and that finally appeared in the collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1892 are unique in late nineteenth-century American writing. They speak of a painful excavation of items of consciousness from a quarter of a century earlier, and a merciless, almost nihilistic representation of contingency, violence, and unresolved conflicts of character and environment. These narratives stand as a crafted rebuke to the many sentimental accounts of the war that presented, directly or indirectly , a model in which a terrible national division had now been mutually transcended. That model of memory and commemoration was centered on reconciliation between “the Blue and the Grey” and gestured toward the intersectional celebrations of various anniversaries of the war in which both Union and Confederate veterans would take part, culminating in the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913—which was, coincidentally, the year Bierce disappeared and presumably died. Bierce’s stories are almost completely free of any representation of the Civil War as a political struggle about ideas, no matter what such ideas were about or how they had changed or shifted. Partly for this reason, it often appears that the absence of politics in Bierce’s fiction , rather than enabling a notion of reconciliation, renders it moot. His narratives have long since left the cozy exchange of veterans’ stories behind and confront the insoluble difficulties of reconciling memory and time, history and experience. Furthermore, although Bierce’s contribution to the new literary realism, a mode that would include fiction and reportage by Stephen Crane, Harold Frederic, William Dean Howells, and Richard Harding Davis, was unique in its detached objectivity and precision , his own status within the moving parts of American literary history has always been somewhat fragile. This state of affairs has more than one explanation, including the lack of a finished novel or even a novella, as well as the distracting effect of the patchwork quilt of war stories, stories of the supernatural, poetry, satire, and journalism that, together, make up his collected writings, but it does seem that a certain grudging acceptance of Bierce at the fringe of the canon, but no nearer, has been the b i e r c e a n d t r a n s f o r m a t i o n 135 modern academic consensus.1 His influence and prestige may have been higher among fiction writers than among critics and may be more substantial outside the United States than at home. For example, a few years ago, Robert von Hallberg published a series...