Civil War Gothic

Grotesqueries abound: heaps of dead bodies, babbling brooks of blood, orphaned limbs and viscera spread sporadic across the contested plots like mushrooms in a dank field. Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering paints some truly disturbing pictures in the mind. Not just of the dead and dying either, but of the wretched families North and South caught in what may have been unending anxiety about the fate of a loved one – reading about these trials I resolved that I would never let my son Linus join the military. I don’t think it was Dr. Faust’s intent in writing her book to terrify contemporary parents into becoming avowed pacifists, but that was the effect many passages had on me. Even to vicariously “realize” these sufferings was coming almost too close to despair, to the abyss – not everyone is so rock solid in their faith in a precious afterlife. I really like Swedenborg, but he did claim to have personally talked with angels – it’s a beautiful theology, but a bridge too far for me to take solace in and on which to rest my hopes of immortal reunion.

 I was originally going to write this post on the curious efficacy that a gothic, grotesque aesthetic has in exploring themes otherwise taboo, like death and morbidity. Yet, in doing so, I was forced to confront Dr. Faust’s account of Melville’s, Bierce’s and Dickinson’s varying struggles with meaning in the face of so much suffering. In this section, a new but perhaps philosophically prior problem arose. For instance, here is Dr. Faust summing up Emily Dickinson’s poetic innovations in relation to the war: “This is a crisis of language and epistemology as much as one of eschatology; it is about not just whether there is a God and whether we can know him but whether we can know or communicate anything at all.” Dr. Faust does an excellent job in describing how the Civil War’s horrors put into question even the most basic of human assumptions, including communication and consequently representation. And this strikes me as particularly problematic for the historian who would attempt to objectively relate – represent – an event that was so catastrophic at the time that it called into question the very possibility of representation. That is, how does a historian do justice to historical atrocities? How to describe the indescribable? For if even Herman Melville had to resort to poetry, what hope does a mere mortal have to capture the truth or meaning of an event which problematizes truth and meaning?