Bringing the Ditch Nearer: Reading and Teaching the Twentieth-Century Literature of the American Civil

War

Coleman HutchisonThe University of Texas at Austin

Humanities Texas Teacher Enrichment Workshop 1 February 2013

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

~ William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

 

"History is what trained historians do, a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action, and therefore more secular than what people commonly call memory. History can be read by or belong to everyone; it is more relative, and contingent on place, chronology, and scale.

If history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community. Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised. Memory often coalesces in objects, sites, and monuments; history seeks to understand contexts in all their complexity. History asserts the authority of academic training and canons of evidence; memory carries the often more immediate authority of community membership and experience. Bernard Bailyn has aptly stated memory's appeal: 'its relation to the past is an embrace . . . ultimately emotional, not intellectual.'"

~ David W. Blight, "Historians and 'Memory'" www.common-place.org · vol. 2 · no. 3 · April 2002

"In moving across almost a hundred and fifty years, I am mindful of the mutabilities of both historical memory and literary metaphor. As it shifts from lived experience into memory, the Civil War changes over time, becoming an increasingly attenuated presence. Yet there is no simple progression away from an immediate version of the war offered in the 1860s to increasingly remote war stories from later years. The Civil War is remote in some texts of the 1860s and urgent in, for example, many works of the 1890s and 1960s, when its memory and symbolism become freshly energized. The memory of the war is as much a political as a temporal phenomenon, and a Civil War novel of the 1890s is as much about the 1890s as it is about the 1860s."

~ Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War

For the Union Dead

  Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium standsin a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;my hand tingled to burst the bubblesdrifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh stillfor the dark downward and vegetating kingdomof the fish and reptile. One morning last March,I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,yellow dinosaur steamshovels were gruntingas they cropped up tons of mush and grassto gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civicsandpiles in the heart of Boston.A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girdersbraces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shawand his bell-cheeked Negro infantryon St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,half of the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, [Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th], 1897, bronze relief, Boston

Southern History

Before the war, they were happy, he said,quoting our textbook.  (This was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,and better off under a master's care.

I watched the words blur on the page.  No oneraised a hand, disagreed.  Not even me.

It was late; we still had Reconstructionto cover before the test, and — luckily —

three hours of watching Gone with the Wind.History, the teacher said, of the old South —

a true account of how things were back then.On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth,

bucked eyes, our textbook's grinning proof — a liemy teacher guarded.  Silent, so did I.

~ Natasha Trethewey (2006)

Suggestions for Further ReadingDavid W. Blight. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 2001.

---. American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Civil War Memory http://cwmemory.com/

Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Martin Griffin. Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.

Tony Horwitz. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Flannery O'Connor. "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" in A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. 153-166.

George Saunders. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella. New York: Random House, 1996.

Barry Schwartz. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard: Poems. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Robert Penn Warren. The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial. New York: Random House, 1961.

Elizabeth Young. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kevin Young. For the Confederate Dead: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Also: coleman.hutchison@mail.utexas.edu