Through the Negative: The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

edited b y

William E . Cain Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

FROMV(71THK THE FRAME Storytelling in Africi?n-Americi? Fiction Bertram D. h s h e THE SELFWIRED Technology and St~bjecttl~tty in Contetnporm y N m atizje Lisa Yaszelz THE SP?CE-\UD PL-\CEOF ,\/IODERhIS\I The Lzttle Magmzne 1% N e u Yo?k Adam LlcKlble THE FIGUREOF COP\SCIOUS~ESS Wzllzatn rantes, Henry Jatnes, irnd E d ~ t hIVhm ton 1111 M.Kress WORDOF MOUTH Food and Flct~onafter Freztd Susanne Skubal THE V(7.4STE FIX Seizures of the Sacred born Upton Sincl~zir to The Sopranos William G. Little WILLTHE CIRCLEBE UI\TBROIZEI\T? Family and Sectioni?listn in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, CLlrt~thers,Llnd Z ~ c k e r , 1830-1 845 John L. Hare POETICGESTURE Myth, LVollace Stez'ens,, i?nd the M o t ~ o n s of Poetzc Langt~agt' Kristine S . Santilli BORDERM O D E R I ~ I S L I Intercult~tralReadings in A~.izerici?nLiterdry Moderniswi Christopher Schedler THE MERCHAKTOF MODERUISXI The Econotntc 7ew zn Anglo-Atneitcan L~telatule,1864-1 939 Gary Martin Levine

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

THE ,\/I.?I
T~RIT THE ~ CITX G Urban Vtszons and Ltterary hlodernzstn Desmond Harding OF FINANCE CAPITALISM FIGURES Writing, Cldss, i?nd Ci?piti?lin the Age o f Diekens Borislav Knezevic

THE B O O I ~ BALA~CIVG Fmlkner, 1\1orrtson, tznd the Econontzes of Slavel y Erik Dussere D BEYOKDTHE S O ~ BARRIER The ]i?zz Controz,ers)~in Twentieth-Centztry Atnerican Fiction Kristen K. Henson SEGREGATED MISCEGEV.TIOV O n the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin Arnerici?n Literdry Traditions Carlos Hiraldo DEATH,LIEN, AND ~ ~ O D E R I ~ I S L ~ Tri?zoni? and Narri?tive in British Fiction from H m d y to Woolf hriela Freedman THE SELFN THE CELL Gender tznd Genre in K'oolf, Forstel; S~nclmr,and Li?wl enee James 1. Miracky SATIRELQTHE POSTCOLONAL NOVEL V 5. Naipaztl, Chinzti? Achebe, Sal~.izi?n Rushdie John Clement Ball

T H R O U GTHH E NEGATIVE The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Megan Rowley Williams

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Published 111 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 ~~~~~~~~~.ro~itledge-ny.con~ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 1 1 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE \\-\\-\\-.routledge.co.uk Copyright

O 2003 by Taylor & Francls Books, Inc.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data \Xiilliams, hlegan Rowle!: 1969Through the negative : the photographic image & the written word in nineteenth-century American literature I hlegan Rowley Williams. p. cm. - (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96673-6 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Literature and photography-United States-History-19th century. 3. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864-Knowledge-Photography. 4. Melville, Herman, 18 19-1891Knowledge-Photography. 5. Crane, Stephen, 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 0 0 - K n o w l e d ~ h o t o g r a p h y . 6. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910-Knowledge-Photography. 7.Photography-United StatesHistory-19th century. 8. Visual perception in literature. 9. Photography in literature. 10. Description (Rhetoric) I. Title. 11. Series. PS374.P43W545 2003 813'.309-dc21

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Although few women appear on these pages, this book has been written by the women in my life who taught me to read in many different ways. For Gladys, Mainan, T, Mums, and Barbara.

And lastly, for Jack for telling me what I really should see and do and for lending me his library so I could do so.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Moveinent and Frederick Law Olinsted Three: Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes: The Cultural Work of the Civil War Photograph Four: "Sounding the Wilderness": Representations of the Heroic in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War Five: Seeing in Circles: The Moving Panorama and Images of a Sanitized History in Mark Twain's Life O n the Mississippz Six: Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage Epilogue: Foundations of Dust and Stone Notes Works Consulted

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

List of Illustrations

Introduction, Plate 1. Studying the Art of War, Fairfax Court-House, June 1863, Alexander Gardnec Introduction, Plate 2. Portrait of Federal Soldier (Horse Artillery), between 1860 and 1865, rephotographed 1961. Plate 1.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 3/4 Length Portrait, Seated, Facing Right, circa 1862, photograph by Mathew Brady Studio. Plate 1.2. Photogenic Drawing, 1844. Plate 2.1. A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863. Plate 2.2. Postmortem Photograph of Child Holding Rattle, Circa 1860. Tintype. Plate 2.3. Prospect Park, Brooklyn, circa 1900. Plate 2.4. Lawrenceville School, 2002. Plate 2.5. Burnside Bridge, Across Antietam Creek, MD, September, 1862. Plate 2.6. Pontoon Bridge, Across the Potomac, At Berlin, MD, November, 1862. Plate 2.7. Chesterfield Bridge, North Anna, VA, May, 1864. Plate 2.8. Quarles' Mill, North Anna, VA, May 1865. Plate 2.9. Dunker Church Battle-field of Antietam, MD. Plate 2.10. Gettysburg, July 1863. Plate 2.11. Culpeper, VA, November 1863. Plate 3.1. General Sherman's Campaign, from sketches by Theodore R. Davis, published in Harper's Weekly, July 2, 1864. 5 prints. Plate 3.2. Dedication of Monument on Bull Run Battle-Field, 1865. Plate 3.3. Libby Prison, Richmond, VA, April 1865. Plate 3.4. Old Capitol Prison, Washington, DC. Plate 3.5. Ruins of Arsenal, Richmond, VA, April 1865. Plate 3.6. A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, Gettysburg, July 1863. Plate 3.7. Signal Tower, Elk Mountain, Overlooking Battle-field of Antietam, September 1863. Plate 3.8. A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, VA, April 1865. Plate 3.9. What do I Want, John Henry? Warrenton, VA, November 1862. Plate 3.10. Slave Pen, Alexandria, VA, August 1863.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 3.11. Nashville from the Capitol. Plate 3.12. Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train. Plate 3.13. City of Atlanta, GA, No. 1. Plate 3.14. Ruins in Columbia, SC, No.1. Plate 3.15. The New Capitol, Columbia, SC. Plate 3.16. Ruins in Columbia, SC, No.2. Plate 3.17. Ruins of the Railroad Depot, Charleston, SC. Plate 4.1. Herman Melville, 1861. Photographed by Rodney Dewey. Plate 4.2. Lieutenant Grant, at His Head Quarters, City Point. Photographed by Brady. Plate 4.3. Frontispiece, Leaves of Grass, 1855: engraving based on daguerreotype of Whitman made by Gabriel Harrison. Plate 4.4. A council of war at Massaponax Church, VA, May 21, 1864. Plate 5.1. Panorama of London from the Albion Mills, 1792-93. Frederick Birnie after Robert Barker. Aquatint. Plate 5.2. The Jolly Flat Boat Men, painted by George Caleb Bingham, esq.; engraved by T. Doney; printed by Powell and Co., circa 1847. Mezzotint. Plate 5.3. Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley, California, circa 1865 or 1866, by Carleton E. Watkins. Plate 5.4. Low Water in the Mississippi, circa 1865, printed by Currier and Ives. Colored Lithograph. Plate 5.5. The Gettysburg Cyclorama. Photographic Reproduction of the Panoramic Painting by Paul Dominique Phillippoteaux. Plate 5.6: Winter View of Cavalry Stables, Giesboro Point, DC. (Panorama). Plate 5.7. Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond (Panorama). Plate 6.1. Stephen Crane, war correspondent, and John Bass of the New York ]ournal, posing on a fake rock for a studio photograph in Athens, Greece, 1897. Plate 6.2. Nibsy's Alley at 47'12 Crosby Street. Circa 1890. Plate 6.3. Under the Dump at Rivington Street, or "An Italian Home Under A Dump." Circa 1890. Plate 6.4. Family in Poverty Gap, New York City tenement room. photograph by Jacob Riis. Circa 1889. Plate 6.5. Hell. Flashlight of a Low Basement Dive. Circa 1895. Plate 6.6. Confederate Prisoners bound for Cox's Landing, Virginia, under guard. Unidentified photographer. 1864. Epilogue, Plate 1. Oakes Ames Memorial Hall Civil War Cairn, December 2002. Epilogue, Plate 2. The Easton Winter Parade and Olmsted's Civil War Cairn, Easton, Massachusetts, December 2002. Epilogue, Plate 3. New York September 1 1 book cover. Photograph by Steve McCurry. Epilogue, Plate 4. Twin Towers, right panel. Photograph by Joel Meyerowitz. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to the Lafayette College English Department for support from the Louis Haupt Conarroe Fund, and to William Van Wert, Carolyn IZarcher, Timothy Corrigan, and Michael IZaufmann for their support.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

INTRODUCTION

Still Narration

Born in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne was thirty-five years old when the daguerreotype was invented in 1839. When he died in 1864, he had spent half his life with the photograph and half without it. A person in the twentyfirst century, unable to conceive of a world where one would not see hundreds of advertisements, photographs, and commercials in a single day, can only imagine the incredible ruction and the shifting of world perspective that accompanied the advent of photography. In this century, we have become accustomed to participating in the versions of history presented by a work such as Robert Zemeckis's immensely successful Forrest Guwzp (1994). In this modern-day paradigm, distinctions between individual and private histories, between important past moments and insignificant present experiences, collapse (Sobchack, "History" 3). Tom Hanks is pasted into frames containing Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy, and the viewer is impressed with the ease with which our visual culture presents versions of history that are endlessly fluid and able to be re-configured. Although the uses of video and digital photography fall outside the purview of my analysis here, this study argues that the advent of photography in the nineteenth century forced writers, readers, and photographers to negotiate a new conception of history. An analysis of the nineteenth century can, in other words, help the modern reader to see how the intersection of visual culture and history that comes to fruition in Forrest Gump first became possible. Individuals in the nineteenth century were confronted with a new understanding of the past that relied on the fundamental knowledge that communal and national versions of the past could now be manipulated, edited, and changed. Whereas Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville fight against this new tyranny of the visible by criticizing the photograph as a one-dimensional and proscriptive medium, writers such as Mark Twain and Stephen Crane play with what they perceive to be the multiplicity of the visual by incorporating inventions such as the panorama and the snapshot into their writings. This study attempts to explain this disruptive moment by charting how nineteenth-century writers responded to the new intersections and clashes between a visual and a print culture that were redefining their world. It is a theoretical, historical, and critical exploration into the relationship between Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

2

the advent of photography and the flourishing of American Literature in the nineteenth century. The cultural impact of photography in the nineteenth century compares in importance to the changes that accompanied the invention of single point perspective in Italian Renaissance painting (Crary 5). The discovery of photography revolutionized the ways we, as individuals, think about vision, cultural memory, and nation. Meaning literally "a way of writing with light," photography was discovered in 1839 in France by Niepce and Daguerre and in England during that same year by William Henry Fox Talbot. With the success of American Daguerreotypes at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, Horace Greeley heralds in this new era in American history by announcing, "in Daguerreotypes . . . we beat the world" (Greeley 1 9 ) . In "A Visit to Plumbe's Gallery" in 1846, Walt Whitman comments on the eerie experience of the portrait gallery, "You are indeed in a new world-a peopled world, though mute as a grave. We don't know how it is with others, but we could spend days in that collection, and find enough enjoyment in the thousand human histories, involved in those daguerreotypes.. . . Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality" (Rabb 21). In 1889, at the end of his life, Whitman looks at the proliferation of this visual medium and sees the same ability to proscribe single versions of history that Hawthorne contests in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), "if we could have three or four or half a dozen portraits-very accurate-of the men: that would be history-the best history-a history from which there would be no appeal" (Traubel 3: 552-553). By the close of the 1850s, the photographic process was firmly entrenched in the United States. The singleness of the daguerrean image had been replaced by the so-called wet-plate process, which allowed numerous paper prints to be made from a single negative (Trachtenberg, Reading 22). As Greeley's comment intimates, from its inception in the United States, the photographic image was wedded to a particularly American desire for technological advancement and immediate history. More than seventy years after Greeley, in the heart of the photo-secession movement, Paul Strand remarks further on the singular relationship between the United States and the camera: America has really been expressed in terms of America without the outside influence of Paris art-schools or their dilute offspring here. . . . Moreover, this renaissance found its highest aesthetic achievelnent in America, where a small group of men and women lvorlzed with honest and sincere purpose, some instinctively and few consciousl!; but without any background of photographic or graphic formulae, much less any cut and dried ideas of what is Art and what isn't; this innocence was their real strength. Everything they wanted to say had to be worked out by their own experiments: it was borll of actual living. In the same way the creators of our slzyscrapers had to face the similar circulnstance of no precedent, and it was through

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Introduction

3

that very necessity of evolving a new form, both in architecture and photography that the resulting expression was vitalized.. . . Thus the deeper significance of a machine, the camera, has emerged here in America, the supreme altar of the new God. (Strand 143 and 150)

From the association of photography with newness to the loaded term "experiment," Strand's comments graft the experience of United States history onto the aesthetic experience of photography as a Romantic vision of a new beginning. The photograph, as a new art form, reflects the comparatively brief existence of the American Project. Its instantaneous ability to transform the present into the past makes the photograph the quintessential mirror of the "new" American experience and of our desire for an immediately usable past. At the same time, its mechanical aspects reveal a secularized form of the Puritan calling. In Strand's terms, the camera has sprung onto the American scene both as a result of innate American ingenuity and as a machine to document our national ability to discover new frontiers of expression and technological achievement. Standing with more distance from the aesthetic movement of the photo-secessionists, Susan Sontag still seconds Strand's contention that there is something particularly American about photography: Photography in Europe was largely guided by notions of the picturesque (i.e., the poor, the foreign, the time-worn), the important (i.e., the rich, the famous), and the beautiful. Photographs tended to praise or to aim at neutrality. Americans, less convinced of the permanence of any basic social arrangements, experts o n the 'reality' and inevitability of change, have more often made photography partisan. Pictures got taken not only to show wllat should be admired but to reveal what needs to be confronted, deplored-and fixed up. American photography implies a more summary, less stable connection with history; and a relation to geographic and social reality that is both more hopeful and more predatory.. . . In addition to romanticism (extreme or not) about the past, photography offers instant romanticism about the present. In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it. As Berenice Abbott writes: 'The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes past.' (Sontag 63 and 67)

In Sontag's argument, photographs provide a sort of "pocket relation" to the past (Sontag 16). In their freezing of a moment in time, pictures show an individual or a culture in the act of attempting to "contact or lay claim to another reality" (Sontag 16). In short, we, as individuals and as Americans, take pictures of the way we want our world to be. Like the fictitious letter "A" that engenders The Scarlet Letter, photographs are "found objects," inventions that furnish a country plagued by a sense of absence with an immediate history. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

4

Through the Negative

With its entrance onto the cultural scene in 1839, the camera forced the United States as a culture to renegotiate the concept of history, of how we narrate a story of nation and of individuals. Across the board, the members of F. 0 . Matthiessen's American Renaissance have something to say about the photograph. In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaims in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly that the daguerreotype, this "mirror with a memory," has "fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality" (Holmes, "The Stereoscope" 74 and 73). Emerson notes in his journal, "the daguerreotype is good for its authenticity. N o man quarrels with his shadow, nor will he with his miniature when the sun was the painter" (Emerson, The Journals 8: 106). Emerson's disciple Henry David Thoreau connects this medium to writing when he states, "in the daguerreotype her [Nature's] own light is amanuensis, and the picture too has more than surface significance" (Thoreau, The Journals 1:65). At the same time that each of these writers articulates a theoretical position on photography, he constructs his own public image. Walt Whitman's life-long love affair with the camera has been aptly detailed by critics such as Miles Orvell and Alan Trachtenberg. It is paralleled, perhaps, only by Mark Twain's endless re-creations of his public image. Both authors saturated print culture with their likenesses. James Waller argues that Twain cultivated his public persona with a deliberation that would only be surpassed by the film star of the thirties (Waller xi). In a similar fashion, Hawthorne visits Brady's Washington studio in 1862 for a carte-de-visite and writes home to his wife, "the world is not likely to suffer for lack of my likeness. I had a photograph of imperial size taken yesterday (a thirty-dollar photograph) and the artist promises to give me a copy" (Gollin 379). Brady himself remembers Edgar Allan Poe being coerced into the studio, where he showed the common nineteenth-century fear that the daguerreotype would steal his internal life force as he " 'rather' shrank from coming, as if he thought it was going to cost him something" (Goldberg 202). From its discovery, the photograph threatens to monopolize representations of the visual. The photograph, a seemingly perfect and indisputable recreation of the external world, makes all other forms of description superfluous. Once one possesses a photograph, one no longer needs words. If realism is the yardstick by which representation is measured, why write when one can narrate with photographs? It is not accidental that literary realism follows on the heels of photography, earlier in France than in other countries. Paul Valery (1871-1945) exclaims, in retrospect, "from the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters. . . . In verse as in prose the decor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place" (Nochlin 4 4 ) . As both impressionism and literary modernism attest, however, the camera's co-optation of realistic representation ultimately frees both word and image from the obligation to depict the real. In contrast to the twentieth century's sense of the liberating power of Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Introduction

5

the camera, Charles Baudelaire virulently opposes the photograph. Although other nineteenth-century writers praise the photograph's ability to reflect the external world and call for its techniques to be incorporated into literature, Baudelaire argues that realism is not the reflection of the external world, but of an internal imaginative world. To Baudelaire, the photograph is an extension of that "idolatrous multitude," the bourgeoisie. He declares in 1862 that the relationship between the written word and this visual medium can only be antagonistic: Poetry and progress are two ambitious men that hate each other, with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along a pathway one or the other must give way. If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art's activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether, thanlts to the stupidity of the masses, its natural ally (Baudelaire 88)

Whereas the daguerreotypist uses a mechanical instrument that appears to lack many of the subjective manipulations of portraiture, the writer describes using metaphors and similes-using, in other words, images that evoke a world for the reader to inhabit by comparing it to another, absent world. While Baudelaire clings to this absent world as the proper province of the literary text, other nineteenth-century writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, equivocate on the photograph's ability to expose a more prescient reality than the literary text can. At the end of The House of Seven Gables (1851), the character Holgrave, both a daguerreotypist and a writer, uses a photograph to expose Judge Pyncheon's hereditary disease, and Hawthorne imbues the daguerreotype with many of the same middle-class associations Baudelaire attributes to it. At the same time, Hawthorne reveals a world where the word and the visual image have become inseparable. Photography resists being confined by a defining critical language, yet it has long been characterized by its ability to spawn myriad oral and written narratives. A paradoxical and almost compulsive desire to narrate the single meaning behind the photograph defines our modern negotiation of the relationship between word and image. Numerous modern works testify to the human desire to discern and "tell the story" behind the photograph. Foremost among these are Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup and Agnes Varda's Une minute pour une image, a French program televised in 1983. In Varda's work, a single photograph was aired with voice-over commentary, and spectators were then asked to interpret what they had seen. In contrast to these twentieth-century interpretations of the photograph's ability to prompt the production of literary narrative, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables concurs with Baudelaire's forecasting of the photograph's ability to eclipse narrative. At the novel's end, Holgrave's photograph of Judge Pyncheon unveils the "truth" about the Pyncheon family, but the definitive singleness of the narrative surrounding this image intimates that the daguerreotype is also accompanied by a bittersweet break with the past. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

6

Through the Negative

Holgrave's final use of the daguerreotype suggests that the photograph has replaced the production of different narratives in history; it accomplishes a sterile evacuation of both the ominousness and the comfort that occur when traces of the past are left undisclosed in the present. The study of how nineteenth-century authors manipulate the photograph in their public lives and writings is a necessarily immense project, and I have chosen to concentrate this study on authors who treat the new visual professions in their fiction or make direct reference to photography in their poetry. This book begins by analyzing the character of the Daguerreotypist in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. This novel is crucial to the study of the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and photography because Hawthorne provides a pre-Civil War reading of the cultural importance of photography. After reading The House of the Seven Gables as a prototype for the ways antebellum writers responded to the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, this analysis turns to the cultural importance of the Civil War photograph as it appears in George Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign (1866) and Alexander Gardner's Photogmphic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866). It is my assertion, in the chronological organization of this research, that the Civil War was an intensely "photographic" moment that forever altered the ways we, as Americans, picture nation and the modern relationship between print and image culture. As the endless collection of stills that comprises Ken Burns's The Civil War Series (1990) or the static shots that punctuate John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951) reveal, the Civil War photograph becomes one idiom through which this conflict was, and continues to be, understood in both written narrative and contemporary film. During the nineteenth century, unprecedented losses on the front led to a nationwide need to visualize the battlefields and to articulate a single meaning behind this conflict. Published as engravings in Northern periodicals during the war or hung in public galleries, these photographs accomplished the cultural work of making the seemingly futile conflict and attrition of this first modern war meaningful. The primary ideological purpose of these images was to allow the viewer to envision a return to a Union that had been tested and strengthened by war. These photographs responded to a nationwide need for information about the battles, and they proposed a version of this conflict that would be accepted by the Northern audiences of Leslie's or Harper's Weekly. The images promised their nineteenth-century audience a version of this conflict that remains "true" today in its twenty-first century representations. In a theoretical reading of the Civil War photograph, chapter two analyzes the emergence of pastoral ideology in the rural cemetery movement and the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted and explains how two competing discourses-one associated with death and the other with the edenic promise of the pastoral-combined in the Civil War photograph to document the triumph of the American landscape over the specter of national division. By Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Introduction

7

Introduction, Plate 1. Studying the Art of War, Fairfax Court-House, June 186.3, Alexander Gardner. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylmnia Library, Philadelphia, PA.

drawing on the new pastoral tradition articulated by Frederick Law Olmsted in his well-publicized plan for Central Park, chapters two and three argue that these photographs proffered the delivery of sacred landscapes, of a land that had been fought over and imbued by war with the sacredness foretold by John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill" and the nineteenth-century pastoral tradition. A close reading in chapter three of the images of nation presented by Gardner and Barnard paves the way for an examination of three post-war authors who theorize a relationship between the photograph and the written word. In chronological order, I treat Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War (1866), Mark Twain's Life o n the Mississippi (1882), and Stephen Crane's T h e Red Badge of Courage (1895). Each of these texts makes a distinct argument about the importance of the photograph and visual representation in telling the history of the Civil War. Each recognizes and debates the relative significance that the photograph and the written word will hold in remembering the Civil War for future generations. Melville's Battle-Pieces, a collection of poetry firmly grounded in the tradition of British Romanticism, juxtaposes literary images with photographs of General U.S. Grant and argues that the written word is needed to inscribe a missing sense of personal and national responsibility onto the superficial Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

8

surface image of the photograph. Twain's Life on the Mississippi looks back on the days before the Civil War and critiques the nineteenth-century literary and pictorial panorama as a way of seeing both the American landscape and American history. In The Red Badge of Courage, Crane revises previous images of the Civil War by having Henry Fleming experience history in the snap-shot distillations that became culturally available through Jacob Riis's documentary photography and through the invention of the Kodak camera in 1888. The argument that the Civil War photograph is the idiom through which we understand this moment in history raises one of the central problems confronting any study that combines visual and written representations. While different schools of literary theory have been carefully demarcated and defended throughout this century, no coherent foundation for photographic criticism has emerged. Susan Sontag comments o n the paucity of critical terms surrounding the medium: The language in which photographs are generally evaluated is extremely meager. Sometimes it is parasitical on the vocabulary of painting: composition, light, and so forth. More often it consists in the vaguest sorts of judgments, as when photographs are praised for being subtle, or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or-a favorite-deceptively simple. The reason the language is poor is not fortuitous: sa!; the absence of a rich tradition of photographic criticism. It is something inherent in photography itself, whenever it is viewed as art. (Sontag 138-39) In the final sentence, Sontag attributes this critical absence to two forces: on the one hand, it is the result of some inherent defining characteristic of photography, o n the other, it is the fault of aesthetic critics, rising out of the photo-secessionist movement, who limit photography's cultural reach to the world of art. These two explanations are, in fact, quite different. While the narrowness of the argument against the aesthetic school can easily be dispelled, "something inherent in photography itself" implies that, a t its base, in its relation to time, history, or space, photography is unrepresentable and unreproducable in words. It is this tension between narrative and photography that informs Sontag's text and provides the premise for my own discussion. While photography is somehow resistant and antithetical to the act of narrative description, written words are, after all, the only ways we have to understand these works. Thus, Sontag argues that photographs "are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing" (Sontag 3), and she discusses the "normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait" (Sontag 37). When Roland Barthes attempts to "formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography" (Barthes 9), he confronts the tension between written and visual media and turns to Latin and a pre-visual culture for his terminology. Narrative in Barthes's analysis Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Introduction

9

is meant to impose an order on the elusiveness of photography as a medium, but even his sequentially numbered analyses and his reliance on Latin cannot approach the medium's "universal" characteristics. Barthes differentiates between an image's studium, its engagement with a culture and an individual's general taste, and the image's punctum, that "accident" which "pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)"[Barthes 26-27]. To control the proliferation of the visual through the act of language definition, Barthes nostalgically relies on Roman culture to provide the terms for a form of experience completely alien to preindustrial existence, while Sontag reproduces no photographs in her analysis. Overall, Sontag argues that we, as a culture, should be respectfully afraid of the dominance of the visual:

X capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the worltings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images. (Sontag 178-79) According to this analysis, visual images are the way that modern man is convinced to accept capitalism and to cease trying to construct an alternate political reality. If he desires "social change," he is now asked to accept it by proxy, to believe that when he sees it enacted on celluloid, it stands in for concrete reality. In short, the logic of our culture has come to be based on the idea that we are willing to accept photographic images as exact mirrors of our daily existence and, simultaneously, to enjoy them as entertainment. In what is perhaps the ultimate move to contain this colonizing power of the visual and reinstate the primacy of written narratives, Sontag refuses to print the photographic image with her text. O n Photography negotiates the balance between visual and written representation by narrating a history of visual representation without visual images. The text, which concludes with a collection of ungrounded quotations that are simply presented as a list, exhibits a tension between two ways of making the reader see our reliance on the visual. The aphoristic collage of these quotations does with words what the snapshot does. It presents the world as a "series of unrelated, freestanding particles" which transform "history, past and present" into "a set of anecdotes and fnits divers" (Sontag Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

10

Through the Negative

23). By translating the fragmented history presented by photographs into words, O n Photography tries to jolt the viewer out of a blind acceptance of photography's reality. In opposition to this collage-format stands the work's meta-narrative impulse-its desire to fix, in words, a complete history of visual representation. At the beginning of Camera Lucida, Barthes expresses a similar desire: "I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity" (Barthes 1 2 ) . Barthes's narrative narrows this history by filtering it through his first person voice and photographs, some which can be reproduced for the reader and some, like the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother, which "I cannot reproduce" because "it exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the 'ordinary' " (Barthes 73). While O n Photography eschews the first person voice, it reveals the same impulse to locate and contain the importance of photography by telling a "History of Looking" as Sontag traces how "post-World War I America committed itself more boldly to big business and consumerism" (Sontag 47). As twentieth-century attempts to narrate the relationship between a word and an image culture, Sontag's and Barthes's texts enact many of the tensions that are seen in nineteenth-century negotiations with the visual. At the same time that nineteenth-century authors are caught trying to tell a "complete" and linear history of the Civil War, they are brought back to the fracturing that the advent of the photograph brings to the sense of history and narrative. They constantly equivocate between the subjective representation that is aligned with a print culture and the idea that words are filtered through an individual's consciousness and the illusion that the photograph, as a product of a machine, provides an objective and total picture of time and place. My own analysis here, by definition, participates in these two ways of telling and enacting a history of representation. While the individual chapters give distillations of a single author's work, the overall impulse of this work is to tell a meta-narrative, in the nature of Alan Trachtenberg's Reading American Photogmphs, about the early clashes between a written and a visual culture. As such, this study is clearly weighted toward the written word. It reproduces photographs, but it also argues that all visual images are, in some sense, hybrid texts. Even when we are confronted with an image without a caption, we try to "still" its meaning through the act of narration. We attach to it our own words and subtitles in an attempt to confine its endless proliferation of meaning. While this study attempts, in part, to "still" photography by defining and telling a version of its history, in no way do I mean to imply that the photograph cannot tell us about ourselves and about the ways we want to see. One of the liabilities of Sontag's O n Photogmphy is that it tends to position the consumer as a mindless entity who cannot exercise powers of selective interpretation over the visual texts that confront her. My work is firmly

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Introduction

11

grounded in the belief that we, as viewers, enjoy looking at photographs and attempting to understand the challenges they pose to the act of narration. It argues that a narrative analysis of the photograph enlarges our understanding of nation and culture at the same time that it expands our visual and written vocabularies. As the previous comments intimate, part of the narrative unrepresentability of the photograph stems from this medium's convoluted relationship to time. Barthes writes of this difficulty: Here is where the madness is, for until this day n o representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medmm, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, sha~edhallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality. (Barthes 115)

According to Barthes's analysis, the photograph immediately convinces the viewer that what we see depicted did, in fact, occur and that it will always continue to happen in this way. In other words, the concrete presence of the image belies its interpretive and ideological nature. Looking at the formal group portraits that are a staple of Civil War photography, the images fill our vision, and we begin to believe that these are the quintessential expression, the whole story, of this war. In other words, these images become what Whitinan refers to as "the best history-a history from which there would be no appeal." According to these posed photographs, the Civil War was a civilized war, a war before the trenches and mass destruction of the first "modern" wars. This is the Civil War of the re-enactment battles where men play at death and bivouac as comrades by their campfires; it is not the Civil War of Gardner's "Harvest of Death." In a seemingly tautological equation, we equate seeing with knowledge when we look at these photographs. In Sontag's words, "photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.. . . Only that which narrates can make us understand" (Sontag 23). We can easily imagine telling someone, regarding a newspaper image of a foreign war, "you've seen the photographs. You know what it's like." In this explanation, the photograph replaces actual historical experience. It operates to the exclusion of other images, and it is presumed to tell the complete story. The experience of the photograph is equated with living the scene it depicts. Paradoxically, the photograph allows us to be both inside and outside its frame. This picture may be a bounded image, literally cropped by its sides, but in our imagination it becomes total.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

12

Through the Negative

Introduction Plate 2. Portrait of Federal Soldier (Horse Artillery), between 1860 and 1865, rephotographed 1961. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Reproduction Number LC-B8 184-10178).

In both Sontag's and Barthes's explanations, the photograph is a violent medium because it "fills the sight by force" (Barthes 91). In a strange pairing of sight and blindness, the photograph is accompanied by a certain paralysis and an inability to see beyond the image's frame. Like Eddie Adams's famous 1968 photograph of the Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan's point-blank execution of his prisoner, the photograph becomes the primary version of the past that we know and remember. Barthes describes this paradoxical duality: Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Introduction

13

Ultimately-or at the limit-in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close you eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,' Janouch told Kaflta; and Kaflta smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.' (Barthes 53)

In a continued claim about the colonizing effects of the photograph, Barthes makes the interesting observation that "the only way I can transform the Photograph is into refuse: either into the drawer or the wastebasket" (93). While we may look to the visual image to provide a sense of the past, in Barthes's work it stands as a replacement for history and permits us the release to stop looking at history. If the photograph contains all that we need to know about the past, and we file it away, we are dedicating ourselves to living in an eternal present. We are relying on technology to assume the burden and responsibility for individual and cultural memory. In a strange return of the Greek myth of Orpheus, the camera takes us into infernal regions, into an inescapable flirtation with presence and absence. Once we look backwards into the past using the camera's lens, the past forever disappears from us and ceases to maintain any concrete form. Unlike Orpheus, however, who forever mourns Eurydice's exile, the invention of the camera provides man with a welcome release from the trajectory of humanist history. With the camera as our mecl~anicalmemory, man no longer needs to narrate a relationship between the past and the present. The discarded image stands in for this relationship, and man is free to inhabit a present that relies solely on his marriage to technology. Ultimately, by taking Sontag's extreme dictum "only that which narrates can make us understand" as a point of departure, this book attempts to return Orpheus's look, to refute Barthes's assertion that the photograph can only be transformed into refuse, by narrating the distinct moments in literature when nineteenth-century authors confront the camera.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

CHAPTER ONE

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past in Nathaniel Hawthorne's

The House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), published after The Scarlet Letter and after Hawthorne was already an acclaimed author, provides one model for the ways antebellum writers attempted to understand the entrenchment of daguerreotypy in their world. This romance raises metarepresentational questions about the relationship between print and visual culture through its main character, Holgrave, the Daguerreotypist. A textual interpretation of the relationship between Holgrave and storytelling, this chapter reads The House of the Seven Gables as Hawthorne's portentous warning that photography is taking hold in the modern world at the expense of written narrative. He associates the daguerreotype with a decline in the importance of print culture and with a burgeoning middleclass consumer economy that ruptures the connection between his present and the Puritan past. Like most men of his time, Hawthorne was not immune to the fad for daguerreotypes. Whereas Ralph Waldo Emerson traded daguerreotypes in his correspondence with Thomas Carlyle and praised this new medium for its realism, writing in 1846, "Thanks to the Sun! this artist remembers what every other forgets to report" (Emerson 400), Hawthorne visited daguerrean galleries on numerous occasions. O n March 31, 1862, he called on Mathew Brady's Washington Gallery and had both an Imperial size portrait and smaller cartes-de-visites taken. During this week in Washington, Emanuel Leutze painted his portrait, and Hawthorne joked in a letter to his wife Sophia, "the world is not likely to suffer for lack of my likeness" (Gollin 3 79). Besides the obvious use of the daguerreotype as a form of advertising for the nineteenth-century writer, the advent of photography raises numerous metarepresentational questions about the relationship between visual and written media. The photograph brings an incontrovertible authority to an argument, be it to Jacob Riis's indictment of the tenements in H o w the Other Half Lives (1890) or to the engravings from photographs used to illustrate the Century's Battles and Leaders (1884) of the Civil War. Through the simple fact of its astounding presentness, the photograph eclipses the written word. In both How the Other Half Lives and the Century series, the reader needs the photograph as an aid to memory; without it, we are Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

16

Through the Negative

Plate 1.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 3 ~ 4Length Portrait, Seated, Facing Right, circa 1862, photograph by Mathew Brady Studio. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (ReproductionNumber LC-EH824-414).

less inclined to believe either the squalor of the nineteenth-century tenement or the carnage of the Civil War existed. Faced only with the written words of these two narratives, we could easily discard and forget the social images they convey. As these two works show, by the end of the nineteenth century, authors increasingly relied upon a hybrid of photograph and text to lend power to their documentary narratives. O n e startling example of this hybridization was the Tauchnitz edition of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, or Transformation, as it was titled in British and Continental editions. Beginning in the 1860s, booksellers in Italy produced illustrated editions of Tmnsformation that included blank pages onto which the tourists could paste photographs of the famous Roman monuments (Sweet 25). As a hybrid text Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

17

that doubled as a photo album, the Tauchnitz Marble Faun followed in the footsteps of Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844) by requiring new reading strategies and choices from its readers. Unlike the collaboration between Henry James and Alvin Langdon Coburn over the collected edition of James's fiction (1907-9), however, Hawthorne had no role in the production of the Tauchnitz edition. Although it was a prestigious honor for this work to be chosen by Tauchnitz and this selection underscores the fact that The Marble Faun was the most popular of Hawthorne's four novellength works in the nineteenth century, the inclusion of unmarked pages posed a singular challenge to the written word; these empty pages allow the reader to claim control and authorship over the text. They relegate Hawthorne's narrative to the periphery and argue that his words are a framing device to present the reader's personal memories of the Continent. While the nineteenth-century pairing of photograph and text reveals the inevitable transition from a written to a visual culture, it does not account for the representational challenges that new visual forms-such as the photograph, the panorama, the diorama, and eventually the cinema-posed to the imaginative world of the fiction writer. In 1850, Hawthorne registers the new attention to detail that the photographic process foregrounds when he writes that The House of the Seven Gables "ought to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture" (Williams, "Aspiring Purpose" 221). Eleven years earlier, in 1839, he reacts to the invention of the daguerreotype by wishing, in a letter to his wife Sophia, that: there was something in the intellectual world analogous to the Daguerrotype [sic] (is that the name of it?)in the visible-something which should print off our deepest, and subtlest, and delicatest thoughts and feelings, as minutely and accurately as the above-mentioned instrument paints the various aspects of Nature. (The Letten, ed. Woodson et al. 384)

Hawthorne's initial response to the photograph is optimistic. He welcomes the idea of a medium that could transform the emotional valence of words into scientific minutiae. A similar attempt to confront the questions of visual perspective surrounding the daguerreotype appears in the first publicly available book of photography by Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot's 1844 The Pencil of Nature outlines the possible applications of this "new art" to the reader's world. In the intricate lace pictured on one plate or the plant leaf on another, The Pencil of Nature suggests that the daguerreotype opens a new scientific world on the level of scale. With its attention to detail, the daguerreotype makes the viewer see new things. It contains a fluidity of scale that could be either microscopic like Talbot's leaf or an expansive exercise in surveillance like the first aerial views of Boston taken in 1860. O n a literal level, the daguerreotype speaks louder than words and endangers the role of the literary author. An introductory note in Talbot's work hints at this potential threat: Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

18

the plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves and not, as some personas have imagined, engravings in imitation.. . . They are impressed by Nature's hand; and d a t they want as yet of delicacy and finish of execution arises chiefly from our want of sufficient lznowledge of her laws. (Talbot n. pag) Here, in Talbot's conceptualization, photography emerges as a purely mechanical process that separates man from his final product. The "artist," be he a writer with a pencil or an engraver, has literally been written out of this picture. All he does is prepare the scene so that nature can do her work. One plate in particular in The Pencil of Nature, "A SCENE IN A LIBRARY," interrogates the future relationship between word and image. As an image of a shelf filled with books, this plate is an anomalous inclusion in this text. It raises the rather obvious question, "why take a photograph of a book?" Is Talbot subtly hinting that literary production needs to be documented and reproduced because it is a disappearing art? Or is he simply recording the centrality of the written word to both his and his viewer's worldview? The plate that follows this one, a "FAC-SIMILE OF AN OLD PRINTED PAGE," provides one answer t o these theoretical questions. O n the facing page, Talbot instructs, "To the Antiquarian this application of the photographic art seems destined to be of great advantage." While the confluence of these two photographs of the library shelf and the old printed page may be purely coincidental, the repeated association of the written word with pastiless cannot be doubted. Talbot, as the author of one of the first photographically illustrated texts, would have guessed that his text required new and different ways of reading that forced the reader to "read" photographs sequentially. O n one level, at least, The Pencil of Nature reconfigures a world for its viewer where the photographic image achieves primacy. The written word in this text is relegated to manual status. Words teach the reader how to read these new visual images; once read, they need not be revisited, and the photographic plates become the sites to which the reader returns. The Pencil of Nature's sequential organization and subject matter argue for a competitive relationship between the writer and the visual image. In

Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction, Susan Williams pinpoints the potentially antagonistic relationship between the antebellum writer and the new art of photography: "these writers were attracted to the ability of the photograph to reveal hidden truths, but they also realized that such truth-telling challenged the pictorial power of their own art. In response to this threat, they began to redefine the pictorial power of narrative by using fictional portraits to create an alternate form of representation" (Confounding xi). In Williams's examination, writers such as Hawthorne use the fictional portrait to confront their anxieties about the literary marketplace. Through these portraits they ask fundamental questions about the value of the written word (Confounding 14). In a Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

19

X Scene in a Library, Photogenic Drawing, 1844. Courtesy of the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television/Science and Society Picture Librar!; Bradford, U.I<.

Plate 1.2.

world increasingly proliferated by the visual images in circulation, the nineteenth-century author manipulates the fictional portrait to assert control and ownership of his texts. The portrait thus becomes a site where the author resists the mass market (Confounding 3 3 ) . While concentrating more on photography than Williams does, Carol Shloss's In Visible Light: Photogmphy and the American Writer, 1840-1940, makes a similar argument. According to Shloss, the governing principle or metaphor in Hawthorne's work is "distance" and detachment. Throughout his life, Hawthorne searches "for a way to represent psychological distance that does not preclude connection to the world" (Shloss 29). In the character of Holgrave, he finds an image for himself as author that addresses these questions of distance, and he becomes the first American author, in a series that includes Walker Evans and James Agee, to "name the camera's most negative mode of engagement with the world and to equate that with his own predicament as a textmaker" (Shloss 257). Shloss and Williams examine Hawthorne's relationship to the photograph in a detailed manner that has been absent from most contemporary scholarship. For the most part, studies in literature and photography have been content simply to name Holgrave as one of the earliest fictional treatments of the photographer. These discussions do not consider that Hawthorne Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

20

Through the Negative

develops and sustains a critique of photography in his other writings, paying particular attention to the representational issues surrounding portraiture in both painting and photography. While Hawthorne centers his most developed critique of photography on the character of Holgrave, another daguerreotypist appears in his 1843 short story "The Birth-mark." As a mad scientist who is so wedded to progress that he cannot see death and destruction, Aylmer provides several clues to Hawthorne's ambivalent relationship with emerging visual technology. In his laboratory, Aylmer regales Georgiana with "optical phenomena" and "the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief, that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world" ("Birth-mark" 267). He proposes to take "her portrait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal" (268). Sequestered in a room "excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his chemical processes" (266), Georgiana literally becomes a photographic plate, a one-dimensional image that Aylmer is in the process of developing. When Georgiana dies, Hawthorne equates daguerreotypy with death and warns that no good will come of this process that promises to deliver images that rival God's creations in their perfection and purity. Aylmer's photographic process is clearly the copper-plate daguerreotype process, but what is striking about this tale is the temporal disjunction it enacts. In the first line, the narrator defines the story's time frame, "In the latter part of the last century, there lived a man of science-an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy-who, not long before our story opens, had made experience of a spiritual affinity, more attractive than any chemical one" (259). "The Birth-mark" was published in 1843, and its opening sentence places the action firmly within the later part of the eighteenth century. In other words, this narrative occurs a good fifty or more years before the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. This skewed chronology suggests that this story, as a precursor to The House of the Seven Gables, is a meditation upon the potentially harmful inception of photography. Through Aylmer, Hawthorne implies that the photograph could be an emissary of death in the future-in the nineteenth century he and his readers already inhabit. Ultimately, as the "momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of Time, and living once for all in Eternity, to find the perfect Future in the present" (278), Hawthorne uses Aylmer to sound a central ambivalence towards technological advancement and visual experimentation. Although many critics do not, it is important to draw a distinction between the painted portrait and the photograph in Hawthorne's work. Published two years before the invention of the daguerreotype, Hawthorne's sketch "The Prophetic Pictures" eerily forecasts the future of portraiture and reveals the intrinsic value that Hawthorne places in painting. Painted portraits carry with them centuries of conventions in western painting, in terms of composition and arrangement, that hearken back to the Dutch Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

21

masters and beyond. As a relatively new art form, photography works within the conventions of single point perspective, but it is also a "new" art that carries with it an association with technology that is completely absent from painting. "The Prophetic Pictures" (1837) connects the painted portrait with the rich evocation of the past that Hawthorne sees as central to the production of narrative. In this story, Walter and Elinor Ludlow commission their portraits and find their faces slowly, in the course of their marriage, turning into the melancholic countenances of the paintings. In this complicated meditation upon the relationships between "seeing" and the progression of time and history, the painter exclaims upon the glorious powers of Art: 'Thou are the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms, that wander in nothingness, start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou sllatchest back the fleeing moments of History With thee, there is no Past; for, at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages, in the visible performance of the very deeds, ~11ichmade them what they are. Oh, potent Art! as thou bringest the faintly revealed Past to stand in that narrow strip of sunlight, ~11ichwe call Non7, canst thou summon the shrouded Future to meet her there? Have I not achieved it! Am I not thy Prophet?' ("The Prophetic Pictures" 467)

In its discussion of the relationship between time and portraiture, "The Prophetic Pictures" occupies a transitional moment between painted portraiture and the daguerreotype. Unlike the daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables, the portrait in "The Prophetic Pictures" allows the past to coexist with the present. At the same time, it forecasts the invention of the daguerreotype as it describes an image's power to document an undisputed reality that has occurred, and will always occur, as it is depicted within a frame. In the final scene, the painter is drawn back to the portraits and finds the husband drawing a knife upon his wife. The couple becomes the final version of the fate the painter foretold, and the narrator asks: "is there not a deep moral in the tale? Could the result of one, or all our deeds, be shadowed forth and set before us-some would call it Fate, and hurry onwardothers be swept along by their passionate desires-and none be turned aside by the PROPHETIC PICTURES" (469). Although the discussion of portraiture in this sketch imbues painting with a sense of history that is alien to the newness that would be associated with the daguerreotype, "The Prophetic Pictures" illustrates Hawthorne's intrinsic fear of visual culture. These portraits may foster a sense of the "Past," but they are also in danger of proscribing a single and inescapable version of history. In The House of the Seven Gables, technology and the potential tyranny of the visual collide in the character of Holgrave. Hawthorne aligns Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

22

Through the Negative

Holgrave, against Hepzibah and her brother, with the bourgeois forces of modernity. In the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, Holgrave is a self-made man. He is an "adventurer" who discards a number of careers, including writing, as a passing fancy (HSG 177).He represents newness and technology, and his daguerreotypes stand in marked contrast to the haunted portraits of the Pyncheon family that line the halls of the family home. In the general air of mystery that surrounds Holgrave, Hawthorne expresses the nineteenth-century confusion and fear of photography. To the eyes of the older generation, the daguerreotypist represents a benign combination of alchemy and necromancy; thus, Hepzibah tells her niece Phoebe that her boarder "practised animal-magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion now-a-days, should be apt to suspect him of studying the Black Art, up there in his lonesome chamber" (84). Hawthorne does not draw the character of Holgrave without problematizing the very modernity he embodies. The novel ends with the final closure of a Shakespearean romantic comedy. Holgrave takes a picture of Judge Pyncheon which reveals to the world that he, like his predecessor, died of a congenital disorder and was not, in fact, murdered by his cousin Clifford. The disclosure of this disease frees Hepzibah's family and culminates in the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave. This happy ending champions photography as a medium that can both document the "true" reality and enact a better present. While some critics have read this disappointing and neatly tied ending as evidence of the author's desire to cater to a popular audience, I read this novel's dissipation of energy against its more general questions of metarepresentation. Hawthorne depicts the unstoppable forces of modernity in Holgrave, but his prefabricated ending also registers a sense of loss that accompanies Holgrave and Phoebe's union. As in all of Hawthorne's work, the narrator of The House of the Seven Gables constantly evades and slips away from the reader into numerous points of view and perspectives. Part of the ironic lack of resolution at the end of this work stems from the disjunction between this multiplicity and the single point of view the photograph comes to be associated with in the text. It is my contention that throughout the novel Holgrave and his art embody an equivocal fixing of perspective. At the end, while Holgrave's photograph ultimately unveils the "truth" about the Pyncheon family, the definitive singleness of the narrative surrounding the daguerreotype intimates that it is also accompanied by a bittersweet break with the haunting of the past in the present. It has long been an accepted commonplace of literary criticism that the past in Hawthorne's work nurtures the production of literary narrative. "The Custom-House" narrator finds a "certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded" and uses it to build The Scarlet Letter (SL 24). In The Marble Faun, the statue from antiquity lives in the present and determines the actions of the characters, while the House of the Seven Gables affects the viewer like "a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompaCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

23

nying vicissitudes, that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction" (5). As these examples clearly indicate, Hawthorne's production of the romance as a literary form springs from found objects and the act of rescuing them from the past. Hawthorne's relationship to the past, however, is as shifting and equivocal as are his narrative voices. His retrieval of the past provides the opportunity for a unique flourishing of literary romance, yet this past also carries with it a burden of guilt and sin that often threatens to crush characters like the Custom-House narrator and the Pyncheons. The narrator of "The Custom-House" explains a dual relationship to the past that can, in some sense, be read as a blueprint for the power that the past holds over the Pyncheons and many of Hawthorne's other characters: And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. . . . In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can Itnow what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to lznow. But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far baclz as I can remembec It still haunts me, and induces a sort of homefeeling with the past, \vl~ichI scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town.. . . He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was lilzewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, \vl~ichwill last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burialground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust!. . . . At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them-as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year baclz, would argue to exist-may be now and he~lceforthremoved. (SL 8-9)

In this passage, the narrator's memories of his ancestors stand in direct opposition to a general American inability to value history. Whereas his "countrymen" have moved to more prosperous environs, the narrator chooses to experience Salem through his ancestors. To him, the past's "roots" and "dust" provide solace for the town's economic decline and for the evacuation Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

24

T h r o u g h t h e Negative

of "modernity" to other, more accessible, ports and cities. In addition to providing a sense of "homefeeling" comfort, the narrator's assumption of the burden of the past naturally includes his ancestors' "persecuting spirit." In the "preface" to T h e H o u s e of t h e Seven Gables, Hawthorne explains the proliferation of past voices and people upon which this tale centers: The point of view in which this Tale comes under the Romantic definition, lies in the attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very Present that is flitting away from us. It is a Legend, prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the Reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events, for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to render it the more difficult of attainment. (2)

This passage portrays the evocation of the past through narrative as necessary and desirable. The resurfacing of the past brings with it a complication of the "broad daylight" and harsh clarity of modernity; it adds a sense of depth and texture to the single point of view provided by the present, and it supplies a respite from the relentless and "flitting" movement that characterizes modernity. The novel's first chapter immediately applies this narrative method to the Pyncheon home: With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circulnstances amid ~11ichthe foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east-wind-pointing, too, here and there, at some spot of more verdant lnossiness on its roof and walls-we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the present d a y Still, there will be a connection with the long past-a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete-wl~ich, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how lnuch of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit, in a far distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, ~11ichmay darkly overshadow their posterity. (6)

In this abbreviated synopsis of the history that "would fill a bigger folio volume," the narrator counsels that the past, and a present that is quickly turning into the past, provide the "germ" and the "seed" that determine the fate of future generations and provide a rich "soil" for the production of lasting narrative "Legend." Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

25

In contrast t o the multiplication of stories a n d legends that surrounds the House, Holgrave embodies the Franklinian precepts of progress through invention a n d technology: Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old, (laclzing some months, wl~ichare years, in such a life,) he had already been, first, a country-school~naster; next, a salesman in a country-store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political-editor of a country-newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and the middle states as a pedler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of Cologne water and other essences. In an episodical wa!; he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering success, especially in many of the factory towns along our inlandstreams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return, to see Italy, and part of France and Germany.. . . His present phase, as a Daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer, who had his bread to earn. (176-177) In this rather lengthy character description, Hawthorne relies o n historical precedents to build Holgrave's character. In the wake of the economic crisis of 1837, daguerreotypy appeared as a viable career for many because it provided a relatively stable income that did not require a n enormous outlay of capital. Ryder, a well-known Cleveland photographer, seconds the image Hawthorne paints of the daguerreotypist, "It w a s n o uncommon thing t o find watch repairers, dentists, a n d other styles of business folk t o carry o n daguerreotypy 'on the side'! I have known blacksmiths a n d cobblers t o double up with it, so it was possible t o have a horse shod, your boots tapped, a tooth pulled, o r a likeness taken by the same man; verily, a man-a daguerreotype manin his time, played many parts" (Taft 4 8 ) . Like Ryder's jack-of-all-trades, Mathew Brady, the most renowned of all nineteenth-century photographers, w a s heralded as a self-made m a n . T h e American Phrenological Journal pronounced in 1858 that Brady, "like all men w h o have impressed themselves with a powerful originality upon a n age prolific in such characters, is a selfmade man, and owes his present exalted position a n d remarkable artistic and business success mainly t o his o w n unaided efforts a n d devotion t o a high conviction a n d purpose" (Trachtenberg, Reading 3 8 ) . This chapter is not concerned with debating the finer points surrounding the historical accuracy of Hawthorne's portrayal of the daguerreotypist as a character type. Of interest here in the comparison between these written portraits of the daguerreotypist is the idea t h a t H a w t h o r n e locates the daguerreotypist's alliance t o a burgeoning consumer economy as his most

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

26

Through the Negative

definable characteristic. From his first appearance, Holgrave is clearly aligned with the marketplace. In the face of Hepzibah's reluctance to open a penny shop to support herself, Holgrave tells her, "these feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in the midst of your enterprise" (44).While Holgrave lives in Hepzibah's house, he maintains a studio in the town where customers come to have their "likenesses" taken. The daguerreotype gallery, operated by men like Mathew Brady and the fictional Holgrave, was itself a celebration of the middle class. It provided the same bourgeois customer that Hepzibah detests with an image of himself. Hung with daguerreotypes of the illustrious at the same time that it provided a service to the man on the street, the nineteenth-century daguerreotype gallery provided the middle class with new possibilities for inclusion and democratic representation (Panzer 53). Not coincidentally, in 1850, the year previous to the 1851 publication of The House of the Seven Gables, Brady published The Gallery of Illustrious Americans-twelve daguerreotypes of "representative" Americans that were issued each month to subscribers. This work inaugurated a new articulation of public identity and was one of the first photographic projects to take America itself as subject and theme. The representative men daguerreotyped by Brady and lithographed by D7Avignon included the presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore; the senators John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Silas Wright, and Henry Clay; the generals John C. Fremont, Winfield Scott, and Lewis Cass; the artist Audubon, the historian Prescott, and the minister and poet William Ellery Charming. In the divisive years before the Civil War, this work articulates a desire to define a national community (Trachtenberg, Reading 52). The economic failure of the Gallery, however, argues that by 1850 no audience was willing to support the fiction behind the Gallery and its "union-building" ideas (Panzer 65). As John Wood writes, the American daguerreotype "reflected America's self-image-a grand, admirable, naive vision of our own destiny. But it was a vision that began to waver and crumble under the weight of the chains and shackles we suffered on our own brothers and sisters" (Wood 25). In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne mocks the idea that the daguerreotype has the power to represent our unified democratic nation by having Holgrave hang a portrait of Uncle Venner, the indigent town handyman, in the entrance to his studio (157). While the idea that photography is only one of many transitory ways to prosperity for Holgrave might initially be read as this narrative's attempt to lessen the lasting importance of daguerreotypy, this depiction also emphasizes Holgrave's endless powers of self-invention. Just as Sontag argues that photography encapsulates a particularly American relationship to history, The House of the Seven Gables aligns photography with an American desire to continually remake and reinvent the self. Until 1853, Mathew Brady's New York Miniature Gallery abutted Barnum's Museum, and Trachtenberg points out that each was a place "of both putting on and encountering appearances, a place of illusion and recognition, a place where the very making of illusion Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

27

could be witnessed" (Reading 39). Holgrave is firmly entrenched in an American tradition of men like Benjamin Franklin, Mathew Brady, and Jay Gatsby who spring from their "Platonic conception" of themselves (Fitzgerald 99). Like Franklin, Holgrave knows how to create and advertise his public image. Hawthorne foregrounds Holgrave's ability to transform himself for material gain, and he describes photography as yet another outgrowth of Yankee ingenuity for "the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land" (181). This connection surfaces many years later in Robert Taft's seminal study, the first in this century on its subject, Photography and the American Scene (1938). Taft accounts for the "superior" flourishing of daguerreotypy, a European invention, in the United States by continually drawing reference to "mechanical ingenuity and competition. The love for things mechanical was traditionally a Yankee trait, and this Yankee ingenuity is apparent in the art of daguerreotypy, as well in other lines of endeavor" (Taft 72). It is not my intention here to debate the "superior" history of the American daguerreotype; my point is simply that daguerreotypy, as it develops in the United States during the nineteenth century, intersects with a language of American Protestantism that still persists in our twenty-first-century discussions of photography. Hawthorne, like numerous critics and writers after him, emphasizes photography as a technological advancement-a profession and an invention that, as Talbot's Pencil of Nature intimates, threaten to erode the historical relationship between the writer, visual manipulation, and illusion. At the same time that Hawthorne aligns Holgrave with the "modern" forces of technology, he warns his reader that photography severs the present from the past. In The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Richard Chase establishes a precedent for reading Hawthorne allegorically that stems from the Puritan typology many nineteenth-century writers implemented in their fictions. Chase suggests that the American romance, as opposed to the British Novel, is built around a highly colored plot that relies heavily upon mythic and allegorical forms of discourse. When Chase's theoretical position is combined with Hawthorne's concern in The House of the Seven Gables with time, this romance becomes an allegory of different states of time and uses of history. Phoebe stands with Holgrave as the embodiment of the future dominance of a consumer economy as she tells Hepzibah, "you shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman, as I am a housewife!" (78). The final union of Phoebe and Holgrave records the "consummation" of the forces of modernity she and Holgrave each represent separately. Holgrave's photographic solution to the crime allows the daguerreotypist to break the connection between the present and past; by exonerating Clifford from the murder of his rich uncle, the photograph also frees Phoebe and Holgrave from the burden of history. The daguerreotype serves its purpose in uncovering a hidden truth, and this "modern" couple need never look at the past again. In contrast to Phoebe and Holgrave, Hepzibah, Clifford, and Uncle Venner vehemently resist technological advancement and cling to all things Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

28

Through the Negative

old. O n his return from prison, Clifford cannot accustom himself to the ''new'' railroad and watercart, "the idea of terrible energy, thus forced upon him, was new at every recurrence, and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much surprise, the hundredth time as the first" (160-61). Clifford, in fact, is completely controlled by his past-"with a mysterious and terrible Past, which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing" (149).As the "old maid" "alone in the old house" (30), Hepzibah is similarly written upon by history, and Uncle Venner is "a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself, but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions" (62). An allegorical reading of these characters as embodiments of temporal moments, be they past, present, or future, helps to explain Holgrave's antipathy towards all things past. The narrator presents this struggle: "It seemed to Holgrave-as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century, since the epoch of Adam's grandclddren-that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew" (179). At the same time that Hawthorne connects Holgrave with a break with the past, both the ending of the text and the imagery which surrounds the daguerreotypist suggest that this technological advancement is accompanied by a sense of loss. This concomitant flatness and evacuation are evident in a first person description that occasionally surrounds Holgrave. In key moments, the strangely absent first person narrator who begins this work resurfaces t o pronounce on the future ramifications of photography. One such moment occurs following the depiction of Holgrave's relationship to the past: At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after much and careful inquir!; we never happen to hear another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, wl~ichmakes fools of themselves and other people. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing-day. But our business is with Holgrave, as we find him on this particular afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon-garden. (181) In the first person plural narration of this passage, Hawthorne sounds his desire for the daguerreotypist's disappearance. As the man who eleven years earlier asked his wife whether "Daguerreotype" was "the name of it?" Hawthorne hopes here that photography, like the other nineteenth-century visual inventions such as the zootrope and the phenakistiscope, will fade Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

29

into obsolescence. To prefigure the flatness of this novel's ending and Holgrave's ultimate responsibility for its neatly-tied ending, Hawthorne warns his reader that disappointment is all that should be associated with the photograph. Like the cheap cottons that quickly lose their color, life, and longevity, the daguerreotypist is destined to be tainted and destroyed by his association with immediate material gain and sensory gratification. One of the most problematical dynamics of Holgrave's character is his contradictory espousal of the forces of modernity and his association with the Maule family history. For a character who continually expresses his desire to sever his relationship to the past, Holgrave carries a paradoxical amount of history around with him. He is the descendant of the Maule family, the family the Pyncheons cheated out of their property title and who later pronounced the curse that the Pyncheons should die choking on their blood. As the authors of this curse and the inheritors of an ability to mesmerize, the Maules initially connect Holgrave to the Puritan past of witches, decay, and inherited sin that spawns narrative in Hawthorne. O n closer examination, however, the reader discovers that Holgrave desires not to create and promulgate such narratives, but to help them achieve closure and to disappear. Thus, he responds to Phoebe's query about why he has chosen to live in a house that is so obviously imbued with history: "Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however! . . . The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just been declaiming" (184). For the most part, contemporary critics have chosen not to investigate the question of Holgrave's motivation; his own words, however, aptly disclose his relationship to narratives about the past: 'Shall we never, never get rid of this Past!' cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation-'It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long wl~ileago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think, a moment; and it will startle you to see d a t slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word!' (182-183)

In this passage, Holgrave indirectly tells Phoebe that he is studying the Pyncheon family's history in order to "decently bury" and lay his own family narrative to rest. Throughout the work, Holgrave is associated with a search for narrative closure that precludes the fruition or production of more narrative. Hepzibah, in her moment of crisis with the dead Judge, remembers the artist because "young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had been conscious of a force in Holgrave, which might well adapt him to be the champion of a crisis" (244).At the same time that Holgrave brings with him new possibilities for closure as the "champion of a crisis," the curse Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

30

Through the Negative

his family visits on the Pyncheons prophesies a literal termination of the act of narration. The ancient M a d e pronouncement that "God will give him blood to drink!" envisions the ultimate expiration of the act of storytelling as the Pyncheon mouth is pictured filled with blood and not with words. Holgrave closes the book on his family's history through two visual mechanisms: mesmerism and the camera. After her first meeting with Holgrave, Phoebe rebels against a "certain magnetic element in the artist's nature" (94) that stems from the "strange power" of the M a d e "family eye" (26). According to this "wild, chimney-corner legend" (197), to avenge himself for being cheated out of his inheritance, Holgrave's ancestor Matthew Maule hypnotizes Alice Pyncheon and controls her for the rest of her life. This tale establishes a confluence between the mesmerizing eye of the photographer and the camera itself. Susan Williams offers one way to interpret Holgrave's "double eye" by suggesting that nineteenth-century writers emphasized the magical qualities of the daguerreotype in order to downplay its mimetic qualities and re-establish the primacy of the word (Confounding 35).Williams's analysis assumes that the nineteenth-century author was able to contain his anxiety about the pervasive power of the photograph through his fiction. This tension, however, as it plays itself out, again and again, in The House of the Seven Gables is uncontainable and unresolvable. The image of the Maule family eye, in particular, provides a locus for discussions about control over an audience. At one point, Matthew Maule commands Alice and tells her father, "she is mine!. . . . Mine, by the right of the strongest spirit!" (206). The Maules, and by implication Holgrave and his camera, are gifted with the ability to create and maintain an eternally captive audience. Through their eyes or through the optical extension of a camera, they have a colonizing effect on their audience's mind. Matthew fills Alice's mind with thoughts only of himself. He reduces her to a machine like-drone who obeys his every command, be it to laugh hysterically in church or walk in her nightdress down the rainy street. It is Matthew's "object to convert the mind of Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world" (206). This image of the telescope transforms Alice into a lens and defines the Maule "family eye" as a kind of contagion that everywhere proliferates a dependence on the visual. The idea of communicability surrounding the M a d e inheritance is, of course, further substantiated when Holgrave hypnotizes Phoebe by telling her Alice's story. After the tale, Holgrave notices:

X veil was beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him, and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his attitude, there was the conscio~isnessof power, investing his hardly mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over Phoebe's yet free and virgin

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

31

spirit; he could establish an influence over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the ill-fated Alice. (211-212) While this scene might initially appear to tie Holgrave to oral narrative, I would contest that by having Holgrave tell this story, Hawthorne registers the complicated dependence of narrative on the "new" visual arts in his world. This sketch reveals a new kind of power over an individual-the ability to erase his subjectivity-that has been inaugurated by the camera and other "mesmerizing" optical inventions. In this changing world, written narrative has been relegated to a position where it reaffirms the power of optical invention. It is the optical world, harnessed by Holgrave as an emissary of the middle class, that offers ways to see the previously unseenwhether this be the photographic "truth" about the crime or the human unconscious that is accessed through hypnotism's "fixing" of the eyes. By framing Holgrave's tale within his own, Hawthorne tells his reader that the only story he can tell is one which, like Holgrave's, bows to the superiority of the optical lens and reproduces the new-found human reliance upon this powerful and, itself anxiously hypnotizing, world of technological invention. From the outset of The House of the Seven Gables, the camera is portrayed as an instrument whose sole purpose is to expose the past, terminate of the act of narration, and eradicate mystery. Although Phoebe first criticizes the daguerreotype of the Judge by complaining, "I don't much like pictures of that sort-they are so hard and stern; besides dodging away from the eye, and trying to escape altogether. They are conscious of looking very unamiable, I suppose, and therefore hate to be seen" (91),the primary function of the daguerreotype in this romance is to fix and stabilize the image. Part of the "escaping" nature of the daguerreotype was, of course, due to long exposure times. Lasting over a minute and accompanied by a neck brace that correctly positioned the sitter's head, the daguerreotype process often reproduced grimaces of pain and the sense that the sitter did not know what to focus his eyes upon. Critics from Hawthorne's time to our own have commented o n the peculiar ability of the daguerreotype, as an image o n a polished copper plate, to elude the viewer by acting both as an image and mirror. In "Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique," Alan Trachtenberg explains some of the possible historical factors that determine Phoebe's initial response to daguerreotypy: From the beginning the daguerreotype excited people into states of awe, wonder, reverence clashing with belief, and provided a frisson of something preternatural, magical, perhaps demonic. A fliclzering image on mirrored metal, encased like a jewel in a decorated box, the daguerreotype seemed a silnulacrum of the real: too real to be understood as just another kind of copy of the world, too immediately compelling to seem only a likeness. Its effect derived, too, from the image's capacity to negate itself d e n viewed Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

32

in another light at another angle, to cancel itself into shadow, and rematerialise, as it were, from within itself. When the eyes go black and the eye cavity appears a blank socket, how startling it is to find in your hands the visage of a sltull-as if, as one recent writer puts it nicely, the image 'contains its own death's-head.' ("Lilteness" 175-176) In addition t o the daguerreotype's negation of itself, this image without a negative documents the act of the self looking; it contains both the ability t o shift the image within its frame a n d t o act as a mirror t h a t reflects the viewer's complicity a n d enthrallment with the visual apparatus. It is this unique interplay between viewer a n d image that Hawthorne thematizes in Holgrave's tale by having Alice become s o consumed by looking that she literally becomes the "telescopic medium," the personification of the optical apparatus itself. While Phoebe initially reacts to the shifting nature of the daguerreotype, the primary function of the photographic image in The House of the Seven Gables is not to indicate multiplicity, but t o imply stasis a n d fixity. Holgrave revises Phoebe's distrust of the flickering nature of the daguerreotype when he reinterprets the photograph of the Judge for her:

I can assure you that this is a modern face, and one which you will very probably meet. Non7, the remarltable point is, that the original wears, to the world's eye-and, for aught I Itnow, to his most intimate friends-an exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny good humor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be coaxed out of it, after half-a-dozen patient attempts on my part. Here we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as ice. Look at that eye! Would you like to be at its mercy? (92) Holgrave's speech d r a w s o n the nineteenth-century popular belief that photography a n d "sun-writing" exposes the individual's innermost soul. According t o Holgrave, Phoebe is incorrect in her initial assumptions about the daguerreotype a n d needs to be converted to his position. This image does not "escape" the viewer's gaze a n d further enshroud the sitter in mystery. It works t o dispel uncertainty and makes the Judge's cruelty, o r what had previously been hidden, visible. O n e manifestation of Holgrave's theory o n the daguerreotype even appeared in the popular nineteenth-century convention of taking photographs of the dead; it was believed that such a photograph could reveal t o the world whether the individual h a d died with a clear o r a guilty conscience (Williams, "Inconstant" 166). The practice of taking photographs of the deceased is, of course, particularly relevant t o The House of the Seven Gables because it is through his image of the dead Judge that Holgrave resolves his historical narrative a n d dispenses with the past. The photograph of the Judge raises one of the most

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

33

problematic and confusing issues surrounding the photograph, in both the critical discourses of our time and Hawthorne's: the image's relationship to time. If, as in The House of the Seven Gables, the photograph implies stasis, a stoppage of the act of narration, and a recourse into single and clearly discernible meanings, the photograph becomes associated with a framing of an eternal present tense. O n the subject of the photograph's temporality, Susan Sontag writes, "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt" (Sontag 15). When Sontag's ideas are applied to the daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables, a remarkable relationship between the inside and the outside of the frame is revealed. The portrait captures time; it freezes the present and simultaneously assures that this present will be memorialized as the past by future moments. In this way, the daguerreotype can be said to contain the past. It transforms the present into the past at the same time that it emphasizes the unswerving progression of time and modernity outside the frame. This final component is, I think, crucial to an understanding of the unsatisfying closure achieved at the end of The House of the Seven Gables. In Hawthorne's final pages, Holgrave uses the photograph to bring his historical narrative to completion, but the minute the daguerreotype of the Judge is taken and interpreted, it ceases to have meaning and is discarded. It becomes one more object that is forgotten in the course of the "transplantation" and "flitting" experiences that increasingly define the visual world of modernity. As a focal point of the narrative, once it has been successfully read, the daguerreotype is replaced by Holgrave and Phoebe's nuptials and by the temporal progression outside the frame. Ultimately, while the daguerreotypist's alliance to consumer economics marks the photograph as a force of modernity, in the final pages Hawthorne alerts his reader to another "modern" characteristic of the photograph: it espouses the forward progression of time because its very purpose is to create a disposable past. The end of The House of the Seven Gables produces uneasiness in the contemporary reader because the anxieties Hawthorne focuses on the advent of photography are never resolved; their presence contradicts the catharsis that should accompany Phoebe and Holgrave's union. Shloss provides one interpretation of this work's conclusion when she describes it as "essentially a grim meditation about the effects of ancestral sin. It presents a theme that Hawthorne used frequently, yet the story is distinguished by the optimism of its ending. Where many Hawthorne tales project a continuing series of dire consequences into the future, The House of the Seven Gables ends with a ritual release, the breaking of a curse, and the escape from the past" (Shloss 41). While Shloss accepts this happy ending, her remarks on its "ritual" nature also intimate that this denouement feels rehearsed and is more appropriate to a Shakespearean comedy than to a novel haunted and structured around the presence of the past. Holgrave takes the picture of the dead Judge Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

34

that reveals to the world that Jaffrey Pyncheon, and the man Clifford purportedly murdered, died of natural causes. He exposes himself to the world as a M a d e and the missing deed to the property is found. In the face of these plot manipulations, Hawthorne's warning about the colonizing expansion of the camera is finally substantiated. The camera has been used to untangle and explain these different narrative threads; it has created a sanitized "modern" world at the expense of the "depth" and "texture" that occur when narratives of the past are allowed to haunt and comfort the present. The final association between photography and death at this narrative's end is one of the most clear examples of the unreconciled anxieties about technology that propel this text. Holgrave describes the picture of the Judge that Phoebe says "is death!": X feeling which I cannot describe-an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or consummation-impelled me to make my way into this part of the house, where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be useful to Clifford-and also as a memorial valuable to myself; for, Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with that man's fate-I used the means at my disposal to preserve this pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death. ( 3 0 3 )

In his description of his motivations, Holgrave's equation here of "catastrophe" and "consummation" infuses an element of doubt into the "ritual release" of their final union. These two words are not, after all, synonyms, and by using them in tandem, Hawthorne suggests two antithetical ways of looking at this romance's resolution. The double-edged sword that ends The House of the Seven Gables stems from these twin-forces of "catastrophe" and "consummation" that characterize the new world Phoebe and Holgrave inhabit. A preponderance of garden imagery surrounds this final coupling: The bliss, which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy, shone around this youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was forgotten. Xt such a crisis, there is no Death; for Immortality is revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere. ( 3 0 7 )

It is evident from this description that Holgrave and Phoebe's new and "hallowed atmosphere" grounds itself in a break from the past and from the myriad narratives it has produced. If there is "death" at the center of their new universe, it is the death of the past and the end of the compulsion to narrate multiple interpretations and versions of history. The photograph of

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

35

the Judge is the key component in this closure because it embodies a definitive singleness of meaning. After the daguerreotype is exposed, the past no longer needs t o be looked at; in the singleness of interpretation and the consensus it embodies, it suppresses all narrative and the consciousness of anything "sad or old." The House of the Seven Gables's final release into an eternal present is most strongly revealed by Hepzibah and Clifford's parting from their house: "They were chatting and laughing very pleasantly together; and-as proves to be often the case, at moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibility-Clifford and Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to return thither at tea-time" (318).In this scene, the two characters most strongly connected with the past and with an antipathy toward technological progress throw away the house that has produced so many stories as if it were a replaceable object. Throughout this work, the first person narrator has clearly aligned himself with this house's history. It lends the name to his story, enframing it, as it were. If this house is jettisoned, then SO, too, are our narrator and any record of this romance. In the opening chapter, the narrator remarks: On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom fail to turn down Pyncheon-street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities; the great elm-tree, and the weather-beaten edifice. The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within. . . . Still, there will be a connection with the long past-a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wl~ollyobsolete-which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to lnalze up the freshest novelty of human life. (5-6)

These passages form the closest thing to a statement of purpose that can be found in The House of the Seven Gables. Here, the narrator expresses his hope that his narrative, like the "edifice" of this manse, will be able to "live" in his reader's present and heal the modern fracturing of past and present. In essence, the narrator wishes for a world that is belied by his closing pages. In this world, the past and the numerous intricacies it generates will not be carelessly abandoned by the present. He searches for a world where Holgrave will not be able to remark that the Judge should have built his country-estate in stone and not wood, "Then every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and thus giving that impression of perma-

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

36

nence, which I consider essential to the happiness of any one moment" (314-315). By the end of this romance, with the different versions of the past safely contained in the single frame of the daguerreotype, it is possible for Holgrave to express an admiration for the l~ouse's"exterior" and all things past. Since he has been the successful agent of seeing that the past is safely discarded, he can wish for a structure that fosters the "impression of permanence." Holgrave's image relegates history to being only the external trappings of his home; the image of the inside of this estate, completely gutted and emptied by each generation, reveals his new-found allegiance to the past to be the surface-lie that it is. When the opening and closing descriptions of The House of the Seven Gables are juxtaposed, one unresolved mystery remains that Holgrave does not bring to closure. A great deal of criticism has been written on this narrative, but no critics have seen the disappearance of Hawthorne's first person narrator as significant to the tale's trajectory. They have chosen, instead, to see this voice, in its gradual disappearance, as a stage-prop that the progression of the work no longer required. Or they have viewed it as a mark of the author's hurried and poor craftsmanship. The dimming of this voice can be interpreted in another way, however. Read within the context of Hawthorne's ambivalent relationship to the daguerreotype, his narrator's disappearance becomes a statement on one of the losses that accompanies our "modern" reliance on the visual. While hardly a constant presence in this romance, the first person appears at moments to highlight the act of telling itself. As a voice, it is opposed to the infinitely shifting "you" and the declarative statements that characterize so much of Hawthorne's writings. This narrator materializes to describe Phoebe reading aloud to Clifford: The effect is as if the voice had been dyed black; or-if we must use a more moderate simile-this miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is like a black silken thread, on wl~ichthe crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take their hue. (135)

The self-reflexive "use a more moderate simile" of this passage suggests that the function of this narrator is to underscore the latent possibilities of verbal creation. This voice works, against the closure embodied by the daguerreotype, to emphasize the infinite expansiveness and multiplicity of words. It surfaces in the Alice Pyncheon story, that "wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its extravagances, my narrative essentially follows)"[197] and when the ghosts visit the Governor's portrait in that "fantastic scene" that "must by no means be considered as forming an actual portion of our story" (281). In contrast to the daguerreotype's mechanical reproduction of sight, this narrative voice relies on first hand experience; thus, when Phoebe hears Judge Pyncheon's "queer and aukward ingurgitation," the reader is emphatically told "which the writer never did hear, and therefore cannot describe" (124). Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Daguerreotype Images of a Disposable Past

37

The first person voice in The House of the Seven Gables is by definition a dissenting voice. It wants the reader to see the importance of the past, of verbal creation, and of first hand experience, and to realize that these qualities need to be transmitted by human narration and not by a machine. By the end of the text, however, this voice concedes to the dominance of technology and to the objectivity of science. In the final pages, the exposure of Judge Pyncheon's framing of Clifford is a peculiarly unauthored narrative. The narrator surfaces to punctuate his departure, absence, and disinterest as the reader is told "according to this version of the story.. . . it is averredbut whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend to have investigated" (311).Just as a "sun image" or daguerreotype appears unauthored, the final accepted version of the Pyncheon past cannot be ascribed to a person; it is single and incontestable. Ultimately, in the text's parting image when Maule's Well sends up a "succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have seen fore-shadowed the coming fortunes" (319), Hawthorne tells his reader that in the future Phoebe and Holgrave inaugurate, visual technology, and not individual man, will tell the stories that mesmerize us.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

CHAPTER TWO

Mapping the Literal The Pastoral Tradition of the Rural Cemetery Movement and Frederick Law Olmsted

In the years before, during, and following the Civil War, Americans faced the task of representing national division and destruction in ways that reaffirmed their collective exceptionalism and the success of the American Experiment. Whether in the national battlefields that were constructed in the 1890s or in the photographic collections that were published immediately after the war, Americans were engaged, to use Richard Slotkin's terms, in the process of grafting this crisis onto their "l~istoricalsense" of themselves as "a people and culture" who, strong and unified, lead the world in technological advancement (Slotkin 6-7). Perhaps the most famous photograph of the Civil War is Alexander Gardner's "A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863." In this image, dead soldiers lie in a meadow. The field fades into the horizon, punctuated only by the figure of a man on horseback who presides over the image like the grim-reaper. As the title indicates, two competing visual languages define this image. The first mobilizes the association between photography and death that is seen in the daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. The second invokes the pastoral tradition of "harvest" and looks forward to a time when the American landscape will redeem death. This chapter analyzes these two discourses and argues that they eventually combine in Alexander Gardner's Civil War photographs to document the triumph of the landscape over death and national division. In a decade that saw landscape architecture emerge as a respected profession and the success of Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park, Gardner's photographs of the Civil War battlefields promised that the United States would be returned to the edenic promise of the endlessly receding pastoral meadow. Olmsted, the first man in the United States to take the title of "landscape architect," is an American icon. The national coverage of Central Park's construction and the Park's success made him even more well known in the nineteenth century than he is today. Noting the fame of the unfinished Central Park, the famous horticulturist A.J. Downing remarked on the "Parkomania" sweeping the nation (Schuyler 101). Literary critics tend to see the pastoral as a literary construction, but nineteenth-century viewers learned to read the conventions of redemption embedded in the Civil War Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

40

Through the Negative

Plate 2.1. A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

photograph from the literal landscapes of the rural cemetery movement of the 1830s and from Olmsted's park systems. This chapter's comparison between two landscapes-that within the Civil War photograph and the actual nineteenth-century constructions of cemeteries and parks-demonstrates a departure from the work of other critics. In Traces of War: Poetry, Photograph)
Mapping the Literal

41

sis of real places and cultural conditions. In an application of Buell's thesis, this chapter contends that the landscapes in the Civil War photograph can be read by analyzing the directions implicit in the two most famous nineteenthcentury developments in landscape design-the rural cemetery movement and Olmsted's park systems. The rural cemetery movement and the memento mori of the nineteenth century bear witness to a revolution in the ways Americans perceived death. Although the nineteenth-century preoccupation with death was culturally coded as a female proclivity, in reality it was a national concern. The morbidness of the period's female poets is relentlessly satirized by Mark Twain in Emmeline Grangerford's "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd" whose "soul did from this cold world fly, / By falling down a well" (Twain, Huck Finn 85). From its inception, the photograph became a primary way that the nineteenth century used to theorize and understand its relationship to death. The first book to incorporate photography in a written text, John Walter Jr.'s Record of the Death Bed of C.M.V (1844), in fact dealt directly with death. Created by Walter in memory of his sister, Catherine M . Walter, this privately published pamphlet was illustrated by Henry Fox Talbot. Although this work did not have The Pencil of Nature's circulation (Newhall, "Introduction," n.pag.), the subject matter indicates that death was seen as a fitting subject for photography from the time of its invention. Loving parents frequently had daguerreotypes taken of their dead children. These pictures became their last, and sometimes only, record of their loved ones. In "Sex, Death, and Daguerreotypes: Towards an Understanding of Image as Elegy," David E. Stannard tries to understand why these photographs hold such power to disturb us today, why they are equaled in the horror they produce by only the clay impressions from Pompeii. "The very idea of wanting to gaze upon and contemplate a postmortem representation of a loved one is thoroughly anachronistic to a people who happily pay large sums of money so that mortuary cosmeticians will make the deceased look as lifelike as possible" (Stannard 104-105). Perhaps, as Stannard suggests, part of the power of these images is that they present "an unambiguous and unblinking representation of the portrayed individual's uniqueness as a singular human being with a singular personality." This is "a singular personality, in the case of the postmortem daguerreotype, that tragically had ceased to exist. Like the daguerreotype itself, which could neither be retouched nor reproduced, the person the daguerreotype depicted in all of her or his 'extraordinary particularity,' once destroyed, was destroyed forever" (Stannard 99). The memento mori reveals the camera as a technological invention that both documents death and acts as an artificial memory. By rescuing a dead child's face from oblivion, the memento mori allows the viewer the comfort of believing he will never forget what his child looks like. These works are among the most disturbing of all photographs, in part because they express such palpable need and nostalgia for the time before death. Children in the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

42

Through the Negative

nineteenth century were notoriously difficult to daguerreotype because they moved; they often needed braces to be kept still. The memento mori, however, portrays an unwanted stillness. In these images, both subject and viewer relinquish themselves to death. Unlike the formal Civil War photographs which challenge death by having the subjects stare defiantly at the camera, the memento mori concedes to death. It does so by turning the child into an object that can be collected as easily as the widely circulated cartes-de-visites. Not only was death a fundamental subject of the nineteenth-century photograph, but the medium itself was strongly linked to causing death in both its subjects and its practitioners. Even men with powerful imaginations like Edgar Allan Poe shrank from the camera out of a fear that it would steal their souls. In addition, the potassium cyanide used in the process contributed to the popular idea that photography was a dangerous activity and led to psychological imbalances, disease, and death. Weekly reports of poisoning occurred in the photographic journals (Jay 179). In the most notorious case of the century, on December 6, 1885, Henry Adams's wife Marian drank from the bottle of potassium cyanide that she used in her darkroom and died (Moreland 367).

Plate 2.2. Postmortem Photograph of Child Holding Rattle, Circa 1860. Tintype. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of American Histor!; Photographic History Collection.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

43

Both Sontag and Barthes explore the nineteenth-century equation between death and the photograph. Sontag writes, "such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only a n image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask" (Sontag 154). In a more extended analysis of the relationship between photography and death, Barthes describes "that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead" (Barthes 9), and, "I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake"(96). According to Barthes: Ultimatel!; what I am seelting in the photograph taken of me (the 'intention' according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph. Hence, strangely, the only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the camera.. . . For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, cloclts, watches-and I recall that a t first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmalting and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were cloclts for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. (15) As Barthes's meditation on the haunted nature of all photographs suggests, from its inception, the camera literally forced the public to "see" the harsh realities and power of death. At the same time that the memento mori confronts the nineteenth-century public with a new form of death, the rural cemetery movement of the 1830s imbued the contemplation of death with a transcendental and saving spirituality. In the 1830s cemeteries moved out of the cities in a reaction to the overcrowding of urban church graveyards, the rise in property values, and the belief that cemeteries spread disease. The first experiment of this kind was Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Opened in 1831, Mount Auburn was an immediate success. Two thousand people attended the consecration ceremony. The roads to the cemetery became so filled with coaches that the horticultural society had to regulate access so that only proprietors and their families were admitted on Sundays (Schuyler 44). Mount Auburn was followed by Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia (1835) and Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn (1838). In contrast to the anachronistic memento mori, the rural cemetery has become such a part of our twenty-first century consciousness that it does not seem strange to spend a Sunday afternoon in the bucolic settings of Mount Auburn or Laurel Hill. Rural cemeteries can be found in most of the cities on the east coast, and they are an unnoticed part of our daily landscapes. With their secluded ponds and winding paths, even today these parks offer a peaceful escape from the urban experience and seem somehow remote from the very death they enclose. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

44

The pastoral ideology at the heart of the rural cemetery movement emerges in American history with the first settling of this country. John Winthrop's "City upon the Hill" promises that the first settlers were being watched by God and, if they succeeded in the test He put before them, they would be rewarded with Paradise. Of course, the most frequently cited example of the American pastoral tradition is Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia." In Jefferson's vision, the United States will become a nation of small, forty-acre single farms. Building upon Jefferson's plan, in 1862 Lincoln passed the Homestead Act granting public land to a settler after five years of residence. Both Jefferson's and Lincoln's plans privilege the small-time farmer who works the soil independently. In this ideology, the rural scene becomes the "site of independence, virtue, pleasure, and Americanness," and it deserves strong political representation (Sweet 73). Like the first settlers of the New World who believed that they were coming to a paradise on earth that would allow them to begin again, the pastoral discourse portrays the American landscape as fertile in its abilities to cleanse man and remove death and sin. At the same time, this paradise has a more sinister side for, like any paradise, it comes with a test. It is man's ultimate proving ground, and his success there is the proof that he is one of God's chosen people. The success of the rural cemetery as a cultural institution lay in its ability to combine nationalist discourse and the Romantic tenet that landscapes enrich the mind. The rural cemetery was the nationalistic answer to the frequent European allegation that the American landscape, if not downright primitive, lacked the "improving influence of a long, obvious heritage of historical associates supplied by ancient buildings, monuments" (French 57). In G. P. Putnam's collection of essays, Home Book of the Picturesque ( 1852), celebrated authors like James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, and Washington Irving speak about the value of the American landscape and its relationship to culture and art. Cooper argues that whereas we see "ample pages of the history of the country and the character of its people" in the European landscape, the American landscape has not been similarly inscribed: we concede to Europe much the noblest scenery, in its Alps, Pyrenees, and Apennines; in its objects of art, as a matter of course; in all those effects wl~ichdepend on time and association, in its moments, and in this impress of the past which may be said to be reflected in its countenance; while we claim for America the freshness of a most promising youth, and a species of natural radiance that carries the mind with reverence to the source of all that is glorious around us. (Putnam 69)

In a world that was becoming increasingly fragmented, the rural cemetery allowed nineteenth-century man to participate in a collective commitment to an interactive and livable history. In short, it promised the nation a Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

45

foreseeable future that was built upon the memorializing of a communal past. The grim memento mori provided occasions for grieving. The rural cemetery allowed Americans to commit to a life beyond death; thus, the charter of Mount Auburn guaranteed "the perpetual occupancy of the dead" (Schuyler 43). In his plans for the Oakland cemetery in San Francisco, Frederick Law Olinsted stated that a cemetery needed to be "a place of our common grief, our common hopes and our common faith; a place wherein we may see and feel out sympathy with one another" (Beveridge 218). Thirty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the pastoral landscape of the rural cemetery created a world that was defined by consensus and by a mutual appreciation of the dead, the national past, and the national future. The rural cemetery, in other words, allowed death to be redeemed. In a way that would be rearticulated by the Civil War photograph, pastoral spaces like Mount Auburn transformed death into something positive that served a national purpose inaccessible to the more private memento mori. David Schuyler argues in The N e w Urban Landscape that the nineteenthcentury shift from "country to city, from farm to factory, was perhaps the most fundamentally dislocating experience in all of American history." This rupture "demanded innovative solutions that would protect public health, provide areas for recreation to ease the psychological adjustment to a new urban environment, and redirect the spatial growth of cities" (Schuyler 2). Clifford and Hepzibah's travels on the railroad in T h e House of the Seven Gables clearly supports Schuyler's thesis. Images of the frantic experiences that defined life in the nineteenth century abound throughout Hawthorne's fiction. Just as the railroad threatens to cut a swathe through the town of Middlemarch in George Eliot's novel, causing one character to exclaim, " 'Now, my lads, you can't hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not' " (Eliot, Middlemarch 604), the steam engine in Hawthorne's "The Old Apple-Dealer" (1843) embodies all that is destructive about nineteenth-century tecl~nology: The shriek of the engine, as it rushes into the car-house, is the utterance of the steam-fiend, whom man has subdued by magic spells, and compels to serve as a beast of burden.. . . The travellers swarm forth from the cars. All are full of the momentum which they have caught from their mode of conveyance. It seems as if the whole world, both morally and physically, were detached from its old standfasts, and set in rapid motion. ("The Old Apple-Dealer" 719-720)

Contemporary critic Jacques Aumont reflects upon the widespread cultural significance of the railroad, "the changes that the railroad wrought not only in our perception of geography but also, and more profoundly, in our conceptions of space and time are well known." According to Aumont, "this new spatiotemporality involved not only the physical destruction of traditional spatiotemporality but also the replacement of an older morality, linked Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

46

Through the Negative

to nature with new values, such as the desire for acceleration or the wish to sever roots" (Aumont 235). Like Hawthorne's fiction, Olmsted's landscapes are defined by a fear of what teclmological progress might bring to the future. It is inconceivable for any modern New Yorker to imagine the city without Central Park. In the absence of this central space, the city would become, like so many other unplanned cities, a monumental exercise in concrete and steel, a testimony to the extent that humans will tolerate living in an inhospitable environment. In a paper prepared in 1870 as part of the popular discussion of Boston's need for a park system, Olinsted uses the example of Central Park. "It must be remembered, also, that the Park is not planned for such use as is now made of it, but with regard to the future use, when it will be in the centre of a population of two millions hemmed in by water at a short distance on all sides" (Sutton 92). This statement is amazing for the breadth of vision it reveals, as if Olinsted were somehow clairvoyant and able to graft his own experience of New York onto the hectic and overwhelming world of the twenty-first century. In many ways, the revolution in landscape architecture in the mid-nineteenth century is a reaction to technological innovations like the railroad and camera that redefined traditional concepts of time, space, and identity. In "Snapshots: The Beginnings of Photography," Robert Ray explains this new "modern" environment: [Mlodern urban life provoked a crisis of "legibility." As newcomers swarmed into the cities, abandoning their native surroundings that time, size, and tradition had rendered effortlessly comprehensible, anonymity became a condition that almost everyone experienced at some point during the day-in a remote quartier, visited for the first time on business; on an unltnown street, turned down by mistake; in a neighborhood encountered in the morning rather than the afternoon. (Ray 294)

Within the context of this new urban lifestyle, the photograph presented the nineteenth-century viewer with a form of the gaze, vacillating between anonymity and immediacy, that had no historical precedent. In "A Small History of Photography," Walter Benjamin quotes Max Dauthendey's discussion of the daguerreotype: 'At first one does not trust himself,' he reported, 'to look for very long at the first pictures he has made. One shies away from the sharpness of these people, feels that the puny little faces of the people in the pictures can see him, so staggering in the effect on everyone of the unaccustomed clarity and the fidelity to nature of the first daguerreotypes.' (Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography" 203)

In Benjamin's famous discussion, the advent of photography presents the middle class viewer with new formulations of his identity. Dauthendey's Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

47

description makes the experience of looking at one's photographed image analagous to the eerie claustrophobia of the urban experience where one feels, on a crowded subway or city street, "that the puny little faces" of the people "see him." Benjamin writes that it is through photography that "one first learns" of the "optical unconscious" (203), whereas Barthes argues that "the Photograph is the advent of myself as other; a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity" (12). Even today's viewer is familiar with the intrinsic sense of denial and difference that comes from looking at photographs of himself that "don't look like me." In Leaves of Grass (1855),Whitman, the representative poet of New York City, captures the fragmentation of identity that accompanies the photograph. As "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos"(50), he is "afoot with my vision" (59). "Song of Myself" (1891-92) explores the fluid intermixing of past and present, self and other, that the camera emphasizes: The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of mone!; or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. (191) In these lines, Whitinan wishes to distinguish between his individual soul, the "Me myself," and the national history told by "fratricidal war." This preservation of individuality, seen so often when we aver that a photograph does not look like "me," struggles against Whitman's desire as a poet to be all-encompassing. The voice of Whitman as "kosmos" represents the collective nation, in all its greatness and faults: The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same, And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same. (237) Whitman and Olmsted both, in their different mediums, chronicle the changes in man's world view that accompanied the inventions of the nineteenth century. While language and landscape might initially seem to be antithetical mediums, one literary aild the other literal, both artists had visions of what the United States was, and both had convictions of how it could be shaped in the future-either through words or natural forms. "Vision" preoccupies Whitinan while Olmsted points in his discussions to the new dominance of the visual in his culture. Not only did Olmsted turn landscape architecture into a profession, but a brief synopsis of his career shows him to be a renowned man of letters. He came to landscape design late in life, having spent his early years trying to succeed as a gentleman Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

48

Through the Negative

farmer in Connecticut and Staten Island. Olmsted, who frequently published under the name of "Yeoman," firmly believed that rural pasttimes "tend to elevate and enlarge the ideas" (Schuyler 26). In 1852 he published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, a travelogue that examined the naturalistic works of men like "Capability" Brown and Joseph Paxton. This book was followed in 1861 by The Cotton Kingdom, a chronicle of Olmsted's travels in the Southern States and his discovery of the economic fault lines behind slavery. In 1858, he and his partner Calvert Vaux won the competition for Central Park. Political entanglements and the Civil War would interrupt Olmsted's work on the park, and from 1861 to 1863 he was secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission. Olmsted's own description of Mount Royal, a park outside of Montreal that he began work on in 1874, reveals how his conception of landscape architecture blurs the boundary between literary and literal pastoralisms: [Llet any Inan ask himself wl~etherthe value of such views as the grandest the mountain offers, is greater when they are made distinct spectacles or d e n they are enjoyed as successive incidents of a sustained landscape poem, to each of which the mind is gradually and sweetly led up, and from ~11ic11it is gradually and sweetly led away, so that they become a part of a consistent experience. (Beveridge 89)

Although the greatest achievements of Olmsted's life are his physical creations-the "landscape poem" formed from Central Park, Prospect Park, the Biltmore Estate, and the "Emerald Necklace" of the Boston park system-it is important to note that he was a central participant in the literary scene before the Civil War. In yet another example of his endless ability to reinvent himself, in 1855 he became the managing editor of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, a leading journal of political criticism and literature that published such works as Thoreau's Cape Cod and Melville's Benito Cereno (Beveridge 25). Mirroring the encyclopedic tradition of the age that manifested itself most noticeably in Audubon's Birds of America, Olmsted planned to write a comprehensive study of the state of civilization in America before he died. Titled the Pioneer Condition, this unfinished work aimed to chronicle the elements that made Americans American (Rybczynski 253). If it does nothing else, the trajectory of Olmsted's career suggests that the nineteenth century did not, as criticism does today, distinguish between literal and literary pastoralisms. In an obvious extension of the transcendentalist idea that man's inner being is influenced through his eyes, Olmsted believed that the urban ills that damaged man's soul could be cured by changing his visible environment. Many critics have seen precedents for Olmsted's work in the rural cemetery movement, and it is worth noting that he would have passed Greenwood cemetery on his commute from Brooklyn into New York (Rybczynski 45). At the heart of each of Olmsted's designs lies the trilogy of a meadow, a grove Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

49

Plate 2.3. Prospect Park, Broolzlyn, circa 1900. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Reproduction Number LC-D401-12690).

of trees, and a body of water that marked "Capability" Brown's landscapes. Again and again, visitors to Prospect Park in Brooklyn express surprise at the oasis Olmsted constructs in the middle of this busy city. In the compacted space of a thousand yards, the visitor takes in an entire sequence of spring, pond, glen, and ravine. Olmsted manipulates perspectives and pathways so successfully that the visitor is tricked into forgetting that at the end of Long Meadow lies Flatbrush Avenue (see Rybczynski 412; Hiss 58; Olin 162-163). Olmsted presents his parks as a cure for a crisis in vision, declaring, "a man's eyes cannot be as much occupied as they are in large cities by artificial things.. . . without a harmful effect, first on his mental and nervous system and ultimately on his entire constitutional organization." The urban park, in other words, provides escape from "the rigidity and confinement and protrusion of art of the ordinary conditions of the city" because it can "refresh and delight the eye and through the eye, the mind and the spirit" (Beveridge 34). Writing about the Boston park system, Olmsted argues that in these spaces, "an influence is desirable, however, that, acting through the eye, shall be more than mitigative, that shall be antithetical, reversive, and antidotal. Such an influence is found in what, in notes to follow, will be called the enjoyment of pleasing rural scenery" (Sutton 244). Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

50

Through the Negative

Less despairing than Hawthorne about the deleterious effects of technology, Olmsted nevertheless contends that the pastoral landscape is needed to cure a disease of the eyes. Olmsted's parks proffer a respite from the relentless and "flitting" movement that characterizes Hawthorne's conception of modernity. In an undated manuscript, he writes, "we have nowhere on the western frontier a population newer to its locality and so little socially rooted or in which it is possible for a man to live so isolatedly from humanizing influences and with such constant practice of heart-hardening and taste smothering habits as that to be found in our great Eastern cities" (Schuyler 94). While Olmsted believes that urban landscapes are needed to readdress the modern problems of the city, it must not be forgotten that he is, at heart, fundamentally committed to capitalism and to the very system that creates these problems. Olmsted wishes parks to provide rest for citizens, but he is quick to reassure the Park Commission for the City of Boston that these spaces will contribute to capitalism's continued success. "There is no doubt that the health, strength, and earning capacity of these people is increased by the park; that the value of life in their quarter of the town is increased; that the intrinsic value, as well as the market rating, of its real estate is increased" (Sutton 259). Olmsted's pastoral landscape simultaneously solves the problems of modernity and perpetuates them. It offers citizens a momentary respite from the hectic life of the capitalist workday, but it also bolsters their strength so that they can return to their work, be more productive, and preserve the very system that led them to take refuge in the park in the beginning. Drawing upon Emerson's belief that landscape "soothes and sympathizes," Olmsted observes, "the evil to be met is most apt to appear in excessive nervous tension, over-anxiety, h a t e f u l disposition, impatience, irritability, and that the grateful effect of a contemplation of pleasing rural scenery is proverbially regarded as the reverse of this" (Sutton 248). In Olmsted's theoretical explanations, the urban park becomes a corrective to modern alienation. His work, in effect, is the physical manifestation of Emerson's famous description, "In the woods is perpetual youth.. . . Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (Emerson, Selections 24). Emerson desires his soul to be filled with the wildness and peace of nature, and he sees these scenes entering his soul through his eyes. The image of the "transparent eyeball," however, is problematical because it is associated both with sight and blindness. The eye, after all, perceives by refracting light as a lens; if it were transparent, literally filled with "nothing," it would not be able to refract light and see the external world. In this image, Emerson reveals a desire similar to Hawthorne's wish to be able to control the visual images that barrage modern man. He wants to "see all," but if his eyes are, in fact, transparent, this all and "nature" will only exist as internal scenes. In Emerson's world, man can build interior landscapes that protect him from the flitCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

51

ting and saturated experience of modern visual culture. Ultimately, Olmsted's brilliance lies in his ability to translate Emerson's mindscapes into physical environments on a level of scale that far surpasses Thoreau's Walden. Unlike the City Beautiful movement at the turn of the nineteenth century, which extends the city into the park by filling it with didactic monuments that codify man's technological achievements, Olmsted's parks bring the country into the city. The "Emerald Necklace" of tree-lined parkways Olmsted planned to connect Boston's Franklin Park to the Arnold Arboretum and the Fenway reveals his conviction that rural landscape, suburb, and urban center must be integrated. Olmsted invents the concept of the parkway to protect man from the urban experience. Although Olmsted's plan for the Jainaicaway in Boston was never fully realized, driving from Franklin Park into the city of Boston today it is easy to see how this road would have provided shelter from the harsher effects of the urban experience. Double rows of oak trees, buttressing the road, screen out the jarring effects frequently experienced when entering a city like New York through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the George Washington Bridge. O n an even greater scale, Central Park strikes the modern visitor as a wholly natural landscape. In this illusion of "naturalness" lies its greatness. From this perspective, the area feels unplanned and Olmsted's sole contribution as landscape architect of Central Park becomes reduced to the fact that he was smart enough to advocate that this area be fenced off and its inherent pastoralism preserved. By planting tall trees on the perimeter of the park, Olmsted and Vaux insured that the viewer, once inside the park, cannot see the city-even though the park is less than a mile wide. The ground of the park was also raised to create the sheep meadow or what came to be called "Greensward," and diagonal vistas were created to prolong the sense of distance. The technological manipulations behind Central Park's reveal an ironic reversal. The space was designed to soothe the eyes and provide solace from an increasingly visual world, but it does so by "tricking" the eyes. The artifice and technological feats behind this landscape are astounding. When Olmsted was architect-in-chief from 1858 to 1861, he had an army of as many as four thousand employees working for him. His plan was to install drainage tile under 500 acres of the park. The blasting and filling needed to construct the meadow areas, the Mall, and the traverse streets required the land to be completely remade. In his later estimations, 500 million cubic yards of soil and rock were moved in this creation. Olmsted equates this with "nearly ten millions of ordinary city one-horse cart-loads, which, in single file, would make a procession thirty thousand.. . . miles in length" (Beveridge 56). As Beveridge notes, Olmsted's plan changed the ground level by four feet (Beveridge 56). In Central Park, technology becomes the solution to the problems presented by industrialism. In a similar contradiction, the ideology behind Olmsted's parks argues that these spaces illustrate the continuity and promise at the heart of the American Project. Yet as landscape, Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

52

Through the Negative

Central Park is based on artifice. In literally remaking the physical environment, it points to the inability of the national landscape to hide the fissures inherent in the American pastoral ideology. The many cultural discourses that Olmsted's landscapes mobilize resurface in the Civil War photograph. The meadow is the defining feature of the Olmsted landscape, and in works like Central Park and Prospect Park, he creates a receding horizon that suggests a world characterized by unending possibility. In a time that experienced the "closing" of the American frontier, Olmsted re-creates the solace and the promise of new beginnings that the concept of the West previously provided to American city dwellers. Laurie Olin has argued that Brooklyn's Prospect Park is the most successful example of the healing relationship Olmsted wanted to create between landscape and citizen. To Olin, Central Park is a "patchwork quilt of objects and entertainments stitched together in a rectangular setting or frame-episodic and jumbled" (Olin 162). The 2001 New York City Marathon, held in the wake of the Trade Center bombings, belies Olin's contention that Central Park fails to realize Olmsted's unifying vision. The marathon travels through five boroughs, with the finish line in Central Park. The last few miles, winding through Central Park, are the most grueling, but in 2001 they were also the reward. In a way even Olmsted could not have foretold, this space, crowded with people of all nations waving American flags, seemed to synthesize the endurance of the human spirit and America's plans, monuments, and technology. Although Central Park presents a unifying national space in 2001, it is important to distinguish between Olmsted's pre-and post-Civil War landscapes. In much the same way that Mathew Brady's Gallery of Illustrious Americans was an economic failure because Americans in the 1850s could no longer believe in its communal images, Olmsted's landscapes did not achieve their full communal and unifying function until after the Civil War. As Olin observes, "Prospect Park is a meditation on post-Civil War America. It presents Olmsted's renewed inspiration drawn from the scenery of the far west and his emotional trai~scei~dei~talism-the grandeur and roughness of the landscape on the one hand and yearnings for peace and prosperity, for agriculture and industry to serve the needs of the nation and to produce graceful, livable cities on the other" (Olin 163).Whether due to the specter of national division or political infighting, as Olin points out, Central Park is a more divided and fragmented environment than Olmsted's later landscapes. There can, however, be no doubt that Olmsted intended this space to evoke a renewed sense of American community. In August of 1859, he called Central Park "a democratic development of the highest significance & on the strength of which, in my opinion, much of the progress of art & esthetic culture in this country is dependent" (Schuyler 94). As this statement reveals, Olmsted believed that the very foundation of nineteenth-century culture was at stake in his landscape constructions. His landscapes were meant to be

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

53

statements on the past, present and future of the Republic. All of the plans for Central Park were geared towards creating unity. In the innovative decision to sink from view the three transverse roads that cross the park, Olinsted and Vaux created one park instead of three. Central Park was to be a place where the citizens of New York could reaffirm their common bonds. It was, first and foremost, an exercise in democracy. In a statement to the Park commissioners in 1858, Olinsted declares: It is one great purpose of the Park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have 110 opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, d a t a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondaclzs is, a t great cost, to those in easier circumstances. (Rybczynslzi 177) Repeatedly, Olinsted underscores the need for a park to promote a "gregarious" and "neighborly" feeling (Sutton 74). Whereas Hawthorne's visions of Salem reveal a dying town that has been unable to weather the urban revolution, the meadow at the center of all of Olmsted's parks illustrates his fundamental belief that the central green of the New England town can be resurrected in the middle of the modern city. This rebuilding of the American community around the communal green is most evident in Olmsted's plans for the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey where the buildings encircle a green and attempt to promote in the students feelings of domesticity and community (Beveridge 126).

Plate 2.4. Lawrenceville School, 2002. Courtesy of Barbara Bird, Photographec

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

54

Through the Negative

Several of Alexander Gardner's photographs invoke the pastoral vision of a democratic community driving Olmsted's landscapes. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War was published in 1866. The title resurrects the eighteenth-century tourist's search for picturesque and pastoral vistas that stimulate the imagination. The tradition of pastoral touring and sketching harkens back to the British Romantic poets and Wordsworth's famous "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," but the Romantic roots of the Sketch Book potentially conflict with its "photographic" medium. The "photographic" nature of this work suggests that it is an exercise in documentary reportage that has coordinates in the "real" world. From the outset, this work declares itself as episodic and fragmented. It is a mixture of pictures of military installations, formal group portraits, battlefields, and landscapes, betraying its foundation in two potentially conflicting traditions: the Romantic evocation of internal landscapes and the photographic documentation of external landscapes that are littered with death. Several of the images in this collection, most noticeably "Burnside Bridge, Across Antietain Creek, MD., September, 1862," "Pontoon Bridge, Across the Potomac, at Berlin, MD., November, 1862," "Chesterfield Bridge, North Anna, VA., May, 1864," and "Quarles' Mill, North Anna, VA., May, 1865," express Olinstedian landscapes and reveal how the pastoral landscape can redeem death. Although technology, in the form of a bridge or mill, occupies

Plate 2.5. Burnside Eridge, Across Antietain Creek, MD, September 1862. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 2.6. Pontoon Bridge, Across the Potomac, At Berlln, MD, No~einher1862. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Plate 2.7. Chesterfield Bridge, North Anna, VA, May 1864. Courtesy of the Unixrsity of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

55

56

Through the Negative

Plate 2.8 . Quarles' Mill, North Anna, VA, May 1865. Courtesy of the University of

Pennsylvania Libras!; Philadelphia, PA. the foreground in each image, the background of each completes the trilogy of the Olmsted landscape by providing a body of water, a grove of trees, and a horizon that is defined by an endlessly receding pastoral meadow. In the "Chesterfield" image in particular, the temporary structure of the bridge contrasts with the road that disappears into the distance through the field in the background. The constructions of rural cemeteries and urban parks would have accustomed the nineteenth-century viewer to the idea that a landscape under construction was ultimately intended to provide an oasis. After all, Central Park remained a huge construction site and lay unfinished at the heart of the largest growing city in the United States for much of the century. Looking past the blurred figures of men in uniform in "Chesterfield Bridge," the temporary bridge and the great pile of dirt on the right of the image could easily depict part of Central Park. In their own ways, both the soldiers and Olmsted's workers are committed to a similar goal. While the landscaper's work is dedicated to bringing the garden into the city and to creating a democratic space of community in the middle of a capitalist society, the soldiers in the image are dedicated to resurrecting the sense of a unified and communal national landscape. The soldiers, in other words, are committed to bridging the distance between the viewer and the distant pastoral meadow. They protect these fields and guarantee that, just like in Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

57

Central Park, the signs of man's incursions into the landscape will soon be revegetated and subordinated to the unifying image of our landscape republic. This promise is most clearly evoked by the dialogue between the "Chesterfield Bridge" image and the plate that follows, "Quarles' Mill." The mill image delivers the promise "sketched" in "Chesterfield Bridge." In 1864 a road leads through a landscape under construction, but in 1865 this road has brought viewer and nation to an idyll, to a literal reinstatement of man's ability to combine industry and agriculture, north and south, in a peaceful landscape. "Quarles' Mill" provides a picturesque vision of the future state of the nation, and several images scattered throughout the Sketch Book suggest that, in the manner of Olmsted, this landscape has the power to return the viewer to the communal space of the New England town. The peaceful "Dunker Church Battle-field of Antietam, MD." could itself be placed around a New England green or on Olmsted's Lawrenceville campus. In several plates, a collection of white tents lies between the image of a town and the viewer; this composition is most noticeable in "Gettysburg, July, 1863" and "Culpeper, VA., November, 1863." The Gettysburg image, in particular, is striking because it shows no evidence of the carnage that occurred in July. The accompanying text emphasizes the importance of the town. "Gettysburg, the scene of Lee's defeat in 1863, is a post borough and

Plate 2.9. Dunker Church Battle-field of Antietam, MD. Courtesy of the University of Pennsyl~aniaLibrary, Philadelphia, PA.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 2.10. Gettysburg, July 1863. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Librar!; Philadelphia, PA.

Plate 2.11. Culpeper, VA, November 1863. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Mapping the Literal

59

capital of Adains county, Pennsylvania.. . . It stands on elevated ground, in the midst of fertile farming country" (Gardner n. page). In the photographs from Gettysburg and Culpeper, the tents act as a protecting buffer between the town and the viewer; the viewer can see the center of each town and the church steeples in the distance. Literally, in these pictures, the Union army is protecting the communal and religious centers of the nation. These photographs promise that the Union army, a town in and of itself, dedicates itself to preserving the green centers of our towns and the ideological solace associated with a "fertile farming country." In Olmsted's report on Franklin Park, he quotes John Ruskin and provides the reader with a summation of the healing power of the American pastoral landscape: Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think . . . that a time is to come when . . . men will say, 'See! This our fathers did for us.' (Rybczynslzi 364)

In this poetic statement, Olmsted invests his landscapes with the same republicanism that can be found in the Civil war photograph and in the rural cemetery movement. In contrast to the memento mori, the landscapes in Gardner's photographs and in the rural cemeteries are imbued with the power to fortify the American project. Olmsted reassures his audience that we are dedicated to building a physical environment that satisfies our need for solace from urbanism and the internal fissures within the American project. At the same time, these landscapes provide a ready-made sense of history; they are the literal voice-pieces of "our fathers." Ultimately, as an image, the Civil War landscape photograph has a map-like quality; it reveals the nineteenth century's idealistic plan for our physical environment and argues that the democratic community Olmsted tried to build in his parks is an attainable goal.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

CHAPTER THREE

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes The Cultural Work of the Civil War Photograph

While Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables paints a grim picture of the emerging modern relationship between man and the photograph, not even Hawthorne could foretell how the Civil War would redefine this relationship and determine the future ways that we, as an American people, would look at the photograph. In a departure from the previous chapter's concern with analyzing the history of nineteenth-century pastoralism, this chapter analyses two texts, George Barnard's Photogmphic Views of Sherman's Campaign (1866) and Gardner's Sketch Book (1866). In a combination of words and visual images, these hybrid texts interpret the Civil War as a profound restructuring of the ways Americans theorized their relationship to the camera and to their national landscape. It is this complex restructuring of the relationship between man, photograph, and national landscape that will concern this chapter. In the face of innumerable photographic revisitations of the Civil War, this chapter chooses two widely available reconstructions of the Civil War that appeared in 1866. It begins by examining the larger historical context in which these photographs were transmitted. After analyzing the ways Oliver Wendell Holines negotiated the Civil War photograph's manipulations of space and time and created a discourse through which this medium could be assimilated into our culture, I focus on the images themselves, as they appeared directly after the war. It is only by looking at the photographic texts of the Civil War, I contend, that we can begin to unravel the complex relationships later authors like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane formulate between the photograph, themselves as writers, and their national landscape. Numerous writers and critics have attested to the peculiar silence in literature surrounding the Civil War. Unlike the amazing flowering of literature, the "American Renaissance," that accompanies the tensions and conflicts leading up to the Civil War, armed battle did not bring with it an outpouring of national epics. William Dean Howells expresses this sentiment cogently in 1867 when he writes, "our war has not only left us a burden of a tremendous national debt, but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely" (Aaron xv). From the critical perspective Howells inaugurates, seminal works like Walt Whitman's SpecCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative imen Days (1882) and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) emerge as exceptions to a rule of literary silence surrounding this moment. Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War furnishes one alternative to the negativity of Howells's statement. Aaron explains the premise behind his work, "One would expect writers, the 'antennae of the race,' to say something revealing about the meaning, if not the causes, of the War. This book argues implicitly throughout that, with a few notable exceptions, they did not." Aaron continues, "it can still be argued (and I shall do so) that the paucity of 'epics' and 'masterpieces' is no index of the impact of the War on American writers. As I shall seek to show, the War more than casually touched and engaged a number of writers, and its literary reverberations are felt to this day" (xviii-xix).Mired down by the huge scope of his endeavor, namely the desire to trace how more than twenty writers responded to this conflict, Aaron's introduction takes recourse in the indisputable statement that the Civil War greatly affected American writers. This generalization aside, Aaron raises a crucial point in nineteenth-century studies. By emphasizing that the "literary reverberations" of the war "are felt to this day," Aaron argues that we must learn to listen to the silence and to the omissions that surround this historical moment. According to Aaron, we must learn how to read differently in order to understand how men of the nineteenth century and today try to come to terms with this national crisis. Many of the wars in history have been wedded to a particular medium and its internal conventions. As the first "television war," the Vietnam War emerges as the most recent example of this phenomenon. The idiom of the Vietnam War was visual from its first television re-enactment. Although initially subject to the cultural silence and representational delay following John Wayne's pro-war and government funded The Green Berets (1968), in the wake of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978),cinema has become the "idiom" through which this conflict is understood and interrogated in the United States. Just as the writer about the Civil War must confront the photographic idiom of this conflict, writers about Vietnam address the strong cinematic grounding of this war in their narratives. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), in particular, is a collection of short stories that continually reiterates the difficulty of "telling" this war in words; the narrator exclaims, "In other cases you can't even tell a true war story. Sometimes it's just beyond telling" (O'Brien 79). O'Brien's narrator takes recourse in the cinematic technique of stop-action when he describes how war conditions his peace-time environment, ''he took pleasure in the steady sounds of the engine and air conditioning. A tour bus feeling, in a way, except the town he was touring seemed dead. Through the windows, as if in a stop-motion photograph, the place looked as if it had been hit by nerve gas, everything still and lifeless, even the people" (O'Brien 162). As a war correspondent, Michael Herr struggles in Dispatches (1968) with the sense that the Vietnam War has already been scripted by the movies. Herr, himself the co-author of the screenplays for Apocalypse N o w (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

63

describes a "Mythopathic moment; Fort Apache.. . . More a war movie than a Western, Nam Paradigm, Vietnam, not a movie, no jive cartoon either" (46). As both O'Brien and Herr incorporate cinematic images, techniques, and expectations into their writing, they reveal how film itself has become the primary medium through which this conflict is represented. The stills that structure Ken Burns's The Civil War Series (1990) and the static shots that punctuate John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951) suggest that the Civil War photograph is the idiom through which this conflict was, and continues to be, understood in both written narrative and contemporary film. If, as both Aaron and Holines suggest, the Civil War is characterized by literary silence, the invention of the camera in the years preceding the war and the profitable sale of images during the conflict mark it as a photogenic war. Just as film continues to be the forum through which the Vietnam War is explained, the Civil War photograph plays a pivotal role in determining how we, as Americans, understand this conflict and continue, in the twenty-first century, to approach this moment in history. Aaron suggests that we read the silences surrounding the Civil War more carefully, and we must do so with Hawthorne's and Olmsted's discussions of what it was like to inhabit a new visual culture foremost in our minds. At the same time, we must also recognize that these images carry with them their own omissions, gaps, and silences. They do not provide solutions to the problems of representation that Aaron discusses. In their physicality, these images raise the same issues of race, corporeality, and allegiance that may account for the wide berth nineteenth-century writers gave this conflict. While these images struggle with the representational problems of depicting a nation at war with itself, they perform an indisputably ideological function. Published as engravings in Northern periodicals during the war or hung in public galleries, they accomplished the "cultural work," to use Jane Tompkins's term, of making the seemingly futile conflict and attrition of this first modern war meaningful. This chapter argues that the primary ideological purpose of these images was to allow the viewer to experience this war by proxy and then to return to the image of a Union that had been tested and strengthened by war. They promised their Northern audience a delivery of sacred landscapes, of a land that had been fought over and imbued by war with the sacredness foretold by the rural cemetery movement and the American agrarian tradition mobilized by Frederick Law Olmsted. In the face of the explosion in war studies that accompanied the breaking of the taboo around the Vietnam War, the Civil War photograph remains peculiarly immune to analysis. Instead of being read as a composition that elicits a preconditioned response, the Civil War photograph is used almost solely as an exact historical transcript from which to reconstruct battlefields and the movements of armies. Perhaps this silence indicates that these photographs have effectively done their cultural work. As emissaries of Union ideology, these pictures assure the audience that this conflict was necessary, that it strengthened the country and heralded in a new era marked Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative not by the difficulties of reconstructing a divided nation after a civil war, but by God's reaffirmed protection of his chosen people. In general, these photographs provide a palatable version of the Civil War; they remain unexainined because they proffer a welcomed sense of distance that is the lens through which we still prefer to see our nation and its conflicts. Scholarly difficulties contribute to the silence surrounding further research into the meaning of these works. It is almost impossible to distinguish between the work of the different photographers during this period. Authorship was rarely recorded, and often the name of a gallery that purchased the plate appears instead of the name of the man who took the photograph. In an age when authorship is all-important, we, as critics, feel that we must be able to ascribe individual characteristics to these photographers in order to understand their cultural place. The issue of a photograph's authorship was, of course, a concept that the nineteenth century negotiated with some difficulty because of the custom that well-known studios had of printing their names on images that they had bought and that they had, in effect, had no role in producing or commissioning. Sontag discusses the problem of photographic authorship that persists into our century, "It makes sense that a painting is signed but a photograph is not (or it seems bad taste if it is). The very nature of photography implies an equivocal relation to the photographer as auteur; and the bigger and more varied the work done by a talented photographer, the more it seems to acquire a kind of corporate rather than individual authorship" (Sontag 133-134). Sontag's discussion of "corporate" authorship points to our tendency to see the photograph as a cultural expression; as opposed to an individually authored work like a painting of piece of sculpture, a photograph is often perceived as an outpouring of a collaborative relationship between viewer, scene, and photographer. It occurs with the "naturalness" and lack of conscious artifice that today's tourist also finds in Olmsted's Central Park. This chapter elides this problem of authorship by arguing that the Civil War photographers be seen as a group of individuals who came to be linked by a series of common conventions. As the war progressed and they discovered what kinds of images attracted attention and were profitable, they reached a loose "corporate" consensus about the idioms through which the war would be told. It is the intention of this chapter and book to locate these conventions and to show how they influenced contemporary written attempts to represent the Civil War. Timothy Sweet's Traces of War: Poetry, Photogmphy, and the Crisis of the Union is one of the few works to examine the ideology at play behind the Civil War photograph. Sweet begins his study with the premise that the American Civil War "arose from a crisis in representation" where all structures of representation, from the political status of new territories to language itself, were in crisis (Sweet 1). According to Sweet, the representational questions of what constituted a person, his rights, a state and its rights, and what constituted the "body politic" were the real issues over which this war was fought. The war was waged to discover whether physiCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

65

cal violence could bring about ideological consensus. The Civil War photograph thus emerges as a marker of two existing and potentially contradictory claims: it foregrounds the triumph of violence as a means towards obtaining a stronger Union, and it promises a peaceful national future devoid of sectionalism. In response to Alan Trachtenberg's proposal that the Civil War photograph subliminally promotes obedience to economic and political institutions and their internal hierarchies, Sweet argues: Whitman, as if to anticipate Aaron's conclusion about all Civil War literature, claimed that 'the real war will never get in the boolts.' What did get in the boolts were attempts to envision the meaning of the war in terms of existing ideological schemata.. . . The fact that the 'real war' did not get in the pictures or texts that purport to represent it, while so many were willing to believe that it did, aided the construction of an affirmative, nationalist ideological meaning for the war.. . . Where Whitman and the photographers draw a pastoral or picturesque frame around the war, and thereby enlist nature in the service of legitimating its violence, Melville's Battle-Pieces reflect critically on any such attempt to naturalize the war or its ideological implications. (Sweet 6-7)

As Sweet notes, it is unclear whether Whitman's statement that "the real war will never get into the books" refers exclusively to literary representations or includes the pictorial. If Whitman's claim is read primarily as a literary reference, the viewer is tempted, by the exactitude and illusive reality of photography as a medium, to believe that these photographs contain the record that the written word cannot capture. While Sweet makes the point that the "modern" viewer cannot look at the Civil War photograph and believe it represents the "real war," these photographs still seduce us with the belief that they put something into the frame-literally into the "picture" of history-that the written word cannot. Trapped by the lingering sense that we, as a culture, have been unable to represent this conflict correctly, Whitman's claim sends us on an eternal search for "authentic" objects, maps, and details that will unquestionably validate an image of "the real war." In an anachronistic validation of Sontag's argument that our society is "built, a d hoc, out of scraps and junk. America, that surreal country, is full of found objects. Our junk has become art. Our junk has become history" (Sontag 69), the Civil War photograph becomes another twenty-first-century "found object" in our attempt to discover the quintessential representation of this conflict. Part of the ideological power of the Civil War photograph stems from the manner in which it was presented to the public. The technology to transfer photographs directly into newsprint was not discovered until the 1880s. The American public would have seen these photographs in two ways: hung either in a gallery or transformed into engravings that were published in the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative weekly newspapers. That these works existed in newsprint at all was a result of Frank Leslie's invention in the early 1850s of the means to translate engravings into print in ten days instead of the previous three weeks; this technology involved cutting the wood block into sections so several people could work on it simultaneously (Stanchak vii). During the war, popular newspapers like Frank Leslie's Illustrated and Harper's Weekly also employed a series of sketch artists. Soldiers were offered money to complete drawings that had the immediacy of eyewitness accounts. This new kind of reproduction equated immediacy with reality; it assumed that if someone had seen the battle he drew, the witnessing presence of his eyes was enough to authenticate it as a "true" image. In a manner that looks almost cartoonlike to our twenty-first-century eyes, rifles in these drawings are drawn discharging to offer the allusion of action. Our modern reliance on the photograph as a form of objective documentation makes it difficult to imagine a world where a drawing is seen as a vivid and non-subjective transcription of an historical event. These engravings forecast the future of war photography at the same time that they mark the disappearance of the drawing as an historical record. They contain a breadth of focus that asks the pen to capture the detail, totality, and depth of a photograph. Gazing at these works, it is clear that by the time of the Civil War the photograph has become the litmus test for accurate historical documentation. As early as 1862, only nine months after the war began, Frank Leslie produces the Pictorial History of the American Civil War. This work includes the engravings that raised his circulation in the previous months. At the same time that the engravings made from sketches feed the audience's newfound desire for "first-hand experience," they differ profoundly from the Civil War photograph in the ways they approach and interpolate the viewer. Unlike the Civil War photographs that are noted for their symmetrical composition and for the head-on manner in which the camera captures groups of soldiers, the viewer of the engravings is a distinct trespasser. In the reproduced drawings, scope of action, not individuality, is delivered to the audience. Obviously, the camera is not a presence; thus, there is no eye contact and none of the aura of individual portraiture and the posing of bodies, dead or alive, that is characteristic of the Civil War photograph. In these sketches, the viewer sees through a perspective that will not be found in the photograph. We see side profiles, the backs of people, and as close an approximation of movement as the pen can depict. In an attempt to compensate for the camera's attention to detail, far more levels of action occur in the field of vision in these sketches than would be possible to compress in a nineteenth-century viewfinder. As the oxyinoronic publication date of Frank Leslie's Pictorial History of the American Civil War (1862) suggests, from the very first the Civil War was characterized by an obsessive concern with recording this conflict for posterity. At the beginning of the war, carriages of local Washingtonians with their luggage ticketed through to Richmond, hoping to see battle or take a Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Figure 3.1. General Sherman's Campaign, from sketches by Theodore R. Dayis, published in Harper's Weekly, July 2, 1864. 5 prints. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Diyision (Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-104544).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative souvenir home, crowded the roads around Bull Run and blocked the retreat of the Union Army (I
Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

69

common with the formal and static quality of the Civil War photograph. This quality results partly from nineteenth-century technology. Shutter speeds made the capturing of "live" action impossible, and the cumbersome size of the photographic apparatus made transportation difficult. Unlike the Civil War photograph, Fenton's images do not contain corpses. While it was an accepted social custom for photographers to take images of dead children, before Gardner's Antietain death series, a clear distinction was drawn between this, a deliberate restaging of a personal death for the camera, and the capturing of a seemingly accidental and unrehearsed battlefield death. While landscape photography never achieved the popularity of nineteenth-century portraiture, from the beginning the American public tried to understand their war photographs by fitting them into the lens of the pastoral. An 1862 review of Brady's war photographs integrates the war photograph with images of the American garden: Photography came to us smilingly and trippingly, fragrant with meadows and beautiful with landscapes, seemingly the handmaid of Peace. She had a bucolic air.. . . Consequently, one may be pardoned for starting with surprise when she suddenly flashed from the clouds, helmeted, plumed, and be-belted, a t once the Minerva and the Clio of the war. ("Photographic Phases" 5) The incredible loss of innocence registered in this review suggests that the Civil War photograph presented a profound rupture in American ideology: it made "real" the sectional strife and the political concessions that the nation had spent much of the nineteenth century trying to mitigate. As has been aptly documented by numerous critics of this period, the antebellum avoidance of political conflict is most apparent in the techniques employed by the literature of the "American Renaissance." In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a found object to retreat two hundred years into the past. Melville's Moby-Dick physically distances itself from the conflict of the continental United States and grafts the pastoral promise onto the ocean itself. Ishmael refers t o this "water-land"(Melville, Moby-Dick 2 6 4 ) . H e confesses, "I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow" (Moby-Dick 3 4 8 ) and "[slpite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer" (95).Similarly, in Wnlden Thoreau escapes into the woods and refuses to partake in politics. What frequently sounds in the reviews of the Civil War photograph is a note of betrayal. The photograph gives war a concrete site; it no longer allows the viewer to avoid the conflict in the manner of Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau. Whereas the photograph first appeared to be an instrument that would reinstitute a world of beauty and order, the

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative earliest reviews of the war photograph show writers struggling to articulate a relationship between the language of American pastoralism and the physical violence and national division of the war photograph. As Frassinato cogently argues, Civil War photography can be divided into two periods: those photographs taken before and those taken after Antietam. Antietain was the first battlefield in American history to be covered by photographers before the dead had been buried. As a conflict occurring relatively early in the war on September 17, 1862, Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in American history. Twenty-six thousand Americans died there (Frassinato, Antietam 17). Gardner's "Death Studies" brought home to Americans the fact that this was not to be the ninety-day struggle both sides foresaw. Unlike the mortuary portraiture that shows death by "natural" causes, the death studies emphasize man's power to kill himself. They document the end of the humanistic faith in man's ability to use science and technology to perfect himself and his nation. To this day, it is difficult to measure the motivations that impelled Gardner to add scenes of corpses to a series of Civil War photographs that had previously included only scenes of camp life, military equipment, landscapes, and the portraits that the soldiers sent home to their families. Did Gardner believe that the addition of corpses added a meaning and a context to the war that had previously been missing from the reportage? Did he, in other words, see it as his moral obligation to provide his Northern audience with "modern" images of war? Did he take it as his duty to juxtapose the previously unpeopled landscapes, the physical and ideological backdrop over which the war was being fought, the literal site of conflict, with corpses that told both of the cost in American lives and of the inevitable anonymity of this human expenditure? Or did he, with the newfound professionalism of photography, see a remarkable chance for turning a profit? While these questions will always be cause for debate, two definitive observations can be made about the Antietam death studies: they were a financial success and, as such, they changed forever the conventions of war photography. The monetary success of the Antietam views can be measured by the fact that they continued to sell throughout the war and beyond. Months after the war ended, and years after the battle itself, cardboard mounts of these views were still being issued. At the same time, Gardner's gain drove photographers to hasten to future scenes of battle in order to provide their public with "day-of" images of human wreckage (Frassinato 286). O n October 20, 1862, the New York Times reports on the experience of seeing these photographs at Brady's Gallery on Broadway: Ms. BRXDY has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of \vat If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it. Xt the door of his gallery hangs a little placard, 'The Dead of Antietam.' Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them, and you find them

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes bending over photographic views of that fearful battle-field, taken immediately after the action. Of all objects of horror one would think the battlefield should stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loath to leave them. ("Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam" 5)

Not surprisingly, for a public that had never before been confronted with photographs of an anonymous and unrehearsed death, this reviewer reacts to the immediate physicality of the series. In his eyes, these images take their value from their ability to give the viewer the illusion of immediacy. To him, these photographs are only equivalencies, they are replacements and standins for "authentic experiencem-"sometl~ing very like" being physically confronted with these bodies. They offer the viewer a combination of immediacy and the security of distance. At the same time, the "fascination" of these scenes raises issues of collective responsibility and personal guilt that are missing from the engravings. With the turned faces of the corpses, unable to make eye contact with the viewer or to control the camera's invasion of their last rite, the anonymity of these bodies accuses the viewer and marks our physical absence from the scene. They ask the viewer who slhe is whose only participation in this war is to observe another's death with "terrible fascination." As if drawing too close to the psychology of this war series and the difficult questions it poses, the reviewer soon retreats into a language of American pastoral regeneration: But there is poetry in the scene that no green fields or smiling landscapes can possess. Here lie men who have not hesitated to seal and stamp their convictions with their blood,-men who have flung themselves into the great gulf of the unlznown to teach the world that there are truths dearer than life, wrongs and shames more to be dreaded than death. And if there be on earth one spot where the grass will grow greener than on another when the next Summer comes, where the leaves of Autumn will drop more lightly when they fall like a benediction upon a work completed and a promise fulfilled, it is these soldiers' graves. ("Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam" 5)

These lines try to recuperate the death of these photographs, to imbue the anonymity of death with meaning, by telling the viewer that the reason for this conflict is literally written into the land and will be revealed by America's potential for infinite renewal. In a series of Persephone-like garden images that trace back to T h e Tempest and to the earliest images of the New World, this review endows the physical soil of America with the same endless powers of rebirth that was concretized by the rural cemeteries of the 1830s and Olmsted's parks. In Traces of War, Sweet explains the ideology behind Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

72

Through the Negative

the surfacing of pastoral images such as these. Sweet argues that during and after the Civil War, the pastoral, as both a literary mode and an American ideology, was one of the primary tools and techniques used in literature, photography, and politics to enlist support for the violence of this war. A statement such as Whitman's declaration "America herself is the greatest poem" thus becomes a crucial articulation of American pastoralism. It mobilizes the discourses of literature and politics to create an image of the American soil that promises an endless productivity, on the levels of literature, agriculture, and the national destiny of America's chosen people. By taking recourse in this pastoral ideology, the reporter on the Antietain series allows the viewer to avoid any discussion of the roots behind this corpse's appearance in the landscape. The body simply becomes the necessary edenic test, the sacrifice of blood and faith, that the land requires to continue its regenerative powers. Like many Northern reports of the war, no mention is made in this article of the conflict's actual causes. Here, in a mirroring of Lincoln's refusal to recognize officially the Confederacy, the war occurs in vague ideological terms like "convictions," "wrongs," and "shames" that completely elide the issue of a nation divided. While Gardner's Antietam series raises the question of what this war, in its physicality, means, this article inaugurates a double language. It maintains the illusion of photographic immediacy at the same time that it creates distance between the viewer and the reality of death; it effectively escapes the questions first posed by the corpse by describing the war as a type of divine mandate that must be unconditionally fulfilled. The search for a critical language to soften the seeming immediacy of the Civil War photograph appears in Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Sun-Painting and Sun Sculpture; with a Stereoscopic Trip Across the Atlantic." Published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 shortly after the beginning of the war, this is one of three pieces that Holmes wrote on photography for this periodical. Holmes discusses photography's value by pointing to its ability to provide pictures of distant lands without the viewer ever having to leave his "fireside" or get a "cold" (Holmes, "Sun-Painting" 16). The Civil War photograph itself served as a kind of travelogue since the landscapes it presented were the first images of their country that many Americans ever saw. Ironically, while depicting the physical effects of sectionalism, the Civil War photograph also unified Americans by giving them a physical "look" at the rest of their country. In 1861, the Union private Ainbrose Bierce describes the newness of the Virginia landscape and the alien nature of America outside his hometown, "Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor a hill as high as a church spire. To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and breadth, but thickness" (Horowitz 218). Written "principally to wake up an interest in a new and inexhaustible source of pleasure" (29), Holmes's "Sun-Painting" piece tries to reconcile Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes the camera with war by pointing t o the camera's ability to move-to literally focus o n something else and become a n instrument of omission. In a restless travelogue, this sketch moves all over the world. The scattered fragmentation points t o Holmes's anxious search for a critical language through which t o filter the war photograph. However, descriptions of h o w "Canterbury visits us" in the photograph cannot disguise this narrative's inability t o come t o terms with the war photograph's potential (Holmes, "Sun Painting" 23). At one point, Holmes confronts the specter of sectional division: We are all ready to embark now. Here is the harbor; and there lies the Great Eastern at anchor,-the biggest island that ever got adrift. Stay one moment,they will ask us about secession and the revolted States,-it may be as well to take a look at Charleston, for an instant, before we go.. . . In the distance, to the right, Fort Sumter, loolzing remote and inaccessible,the terrible rattle which our foolish little spoiled sister Caroline has insisted on getting into her rash hand. How ghostly, yet how real, it looms up out of the dim atmosphere,-the guns loolzing over the wall and out through the embrasures,-meant for a foreign foe,-this very day (April 13th)turned in selfdefence against the children of those who once fought for libertj at Fort Moultrie! It is a sad thought that there are truths wl~ichcan be got out of life only by the destructwe analyszs of was. Statesmen deal in proxmate pr~nczples,-unstable compounds; but war reduces facts to their simple elements in its red-hot crucible, with its black flux of carbon and sulphur and nitre. Let us turn our back on this miserable, even though inevitable, fraternal strife, and, closing our eyes for an instant, open them in London. Here we are at the foot of Charing Cross. (19) Holmes's brief excursion into Carolina intimates that, like the other visited sites such as Canterbury Cathedral and Charing Cross, this scene will soon become a n antique, a charming reminder of a necessary but brief moment in o u r national development. W h a t is remarkable a b o u t this description, however, is that once Holmes actually enters into the photograph h e describes, he cannot find a language t o get o u t of it. H e cannot avoid the images of national division it forces upon the viewer. The war begins in this description as a n infantile tantrum that the patient Northern parent must punish and endure in order to strengthen our national family. Once the photographic image is presented to the viewer, the conflict achieves a n immediacy a n d a gravity at odds with the wayward child metaphor. Instead of depicting a past moment, the photograph shows national division o n "this very day." Instead of bucolic landscapes, the war photograph delivers a chemical exactitude, a transcription of reality that is far t o o similar t o the "carbon a n d sulphur a n d nitre" of armed battle. Faced with the fact that the war photograph is a harbinger of future death and division, Holmes's only recourse is to retreat physically to another continent in the hope that his reader will pass over the photograph of Charleston H a r b o r as just another album picture.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative While Holmes cannot find the language with which to assimilate the war photograph in this article, by the time he writes his next piece, "My Hunt after 'The Captain'" (1862), he discovers the saving powers of America's physical landscape. In this second article, Holmes searches for his son at Antietam and comments on a friend's death in terms nearly identical to those broached by the review of Brady's photographs in the New York Times article; the language of American pastoralism again recuperates death. In the "curse which our generation is called on to expatiate" (Holmes, "My Hunt" 3 7 , the soldier's "blood must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices that will make her soil sacred forever" (69). In terms that similarly reveal the widespread cultural currency of the rhetoric of pastoral redemption, Samuel Wilkeson of the New York Times describes his son's death. Sent to report on Gettysburg, he was told that his son had been wounded in the leg and died. That night, on July 4, he wrote from the Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, "who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fasted upon a central figure of transcendingly important interest-the dead body of an eldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?" Wilkenson turns from his criticism of military mismanagement to a moving evocation of the sacred pastoral landscape, "0,you dead, who died at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up to see Christ spanning this battlefield" (I
Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes of our cabinet as we would have the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented. (Holmes, "Doings of the Sunbeam" 11-12)

Holmes suggests one of the cultural functions these photographs perform when he compares hiding them in a "cabinet" to a physical act of burial. This analogy argues that the Civil War photograph performs a cathartic function for a collective and representative "we." At the same time that it works on survivor's guilt and emphasizes the viewer's living presence, once experienced, like the memento mori, it allows the viewer to achieve closure. In Holmes's account, the photograph becomes the primary medium through which this final parting with the past is enacted. In this remarkable image of one of the ways Americans tried to make sense of this national crisis, Holmes proffers a way of understanding the Civil War photograph. As a discardable object, to be collected, filed away, and forgotten, the Civil War photograph became a means by which Americans could control this conflict. Be it to place the photograph in Holmes's "cabinet," to make order out of the chaos of battle by placing it in the sequence of an album, or to treat it like one of "various trophies," the photograph's existence as object allows the viewer to exert a physical control over the war that could not be enacted by the written word. By relegating the Civil War photograph to the closet, Holmes wishes for a world where what the photograph depicts no longer impinges because it cannot be seen. Once inside his "cabinet," the site and subject of the photograph disappear. It remains a tangible object, but it leaves behind no trace of its emotional impact. The image of the cabinet dilutes the physicality of the photograph at the same time that it registers the profound social rupture this image causes. Holmes pits the physicality of the medium against itself. As an object, the photograph can be hidden; thus, he wishes for its physical existence to enact its disappearance and obsolescence. He wants to close literally the door on the kind of images this new technology allows. Ironically, Holmes nostalgia for a previsual culture parallels the fate of the Civil War photograph in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many of these works were destroyed to be used for greenhouse glass, and Mathew Brady himself went bankrupt before he finally convinced the government to purchase part of his collection. At the same time that the nineteenth century discovers a discourse through which to filter the immediacy of the Civil War photograph, the difficult relationship between this medium and time abets the Civil War photograph's removal into a distant and unexamined past. The very immediacy of the photograph, its startling "presentness," underlines a division between the viewer's moment and that depicted by the photograph. In other words, the same technology that Holmes rails against also imbues this conflict with an aura of pastness. As we have noted, from the very beginning of the Civil War, with the eye-witnesses and scavengers at the First Battle of Bull Run, this war took on an immediate pastness. Even in the midst of its presentness

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative and immediacy, we, as a culture, were busy turning it into the past. The 1862 review of Brady's photographs in the New York Times theorizes the relationship between the war photograph and history: So frail is our domestic architecture, and so uncertain the tenure of the picturesque even in the most deserted and lonely regions of the land, that five years might well suffice to obliterate all the leading accidental characteristics of any one of the scenes wl~ichour children will care to revisit, and desire to see, in imagination at least, as their fighting fathers saw them. Let us, then, heartily acltnowledge our obligations to such an 'abstract and brief chronicle of the times' as this which MR. BRADY has been so earnestly and unobtrusively malting up for us. ("Brady's Photographs of the War" 5)

As Holmes's cabinet image argues, the Civil War photograph allows us to contain, closet, and fetishize this moment in history. According to the New York Times article, photographs exist because the scenes they depict no longer do. The image is taken at the moment when the viewer knows that the scene is fading away from view and will be forgotten. Photographs thus function both as Sontag's "junk" yard antiques and as reminders of a past that can no longer be accessed. The image becomes the physical embodiment of memory, but unlike the unexplained surfacings of individual memory, its power stems in part from its dual nature as a relic of another time and as a concrete object that can be discarded. At the same time that this article links the photograph to the erasure of battle scenes, it records the concomitant disappearance of the Southern lifestyle. The Civil War is frequently understood as the inevitable clashing of two incompatible economic systems, Northern Industrialism and the feudal Southern plantation system. James McPherson defines the difference between these two systems, "[t]hrough most of American history the South has seemed different from the rest of the United States.. . . The South more closely resembled a majority of the societies in the world than the rapidly changing North during the antebellum generation. Despite the abolition of legal slavery or serfdom tl~roughoutmuch of the western hemisphere and western Europe, most of the world-like the South-had an unfree or quasifree labor force." In contrast to the South, "the North-along with a few countries of northwestern Europe-hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past before 1861" (McPherson, Battle Cry 860). Although the New York Times article was written early in the war, it firmly portrays the Southern landscape as part of the same disappearing past McPherson depicts. It is the Southern landscape, the literal site of battle, which must be recorded for posterity. The war, like the "picturesque" Southern plantations, must be documented by the camera because the two are destined for obsolescence. In a manner similar to the nineteenth century's search for a discourse Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes through which to filter the immediacy of the Civil War photograph, the title of Alexander Gardner's Photogmphic Sketch Book of the War, the first published collection of war photographs, indicates this work's desire to mitigate the "real" documentary power of photography. As a self-declared "sketch book," this work offers itself as a hybrid form, existing in the liminal space between engravings, photography, and journalistic reportage, and recalling the studies and walking tours that young Romantic artists, such as Olmsted, made of England or of the Connecticut Valley. It promises the reader not a complete history, but deliberately selected moments and fragments. A brief introductory statement presents this work: As mementoes of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that the following pages will possess an enduring interest. Localities that would scarcely have been lznown, and probably never remembered, save in their immediate vicinity, have become celebrated, and will ever be held sacred as memorable fields, where thousands of brave Inen yielded up their lives a willing sacrifice for the cause they had espoused. Verbal representation of such places, or scenes, may or may not have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith. During the four years of the war, almost every point of importance has been photographed, and the collection from wl~ichthese views have been selected amounts to nearly three thousand. (Gardner, n.p.)

Gardner's reference to these images as "mementoes" is strikingly reminiscent of Holmes's discussion of women combing the battlefields looking for ways to remember Antietam. The return of this concept substantiates the idea that part of the ideological value of the Civil War photograph stems from its existence as a physical object. In the absence of real "trophies" like the letters, clothing, or diaries that onlookers often took off the dead soldiers, the photograph becomes an indisputable object, an "authentic" miniature recreation of a physical landscape. Gardner's images do not need more than a few introductory words; on their own "merit" they will be "accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith." When this volume closes with the "Dedication of Monument, on Bull Run Battle-field," one of the promises of the introduction is brought to fruition. Taken in June of 1865, this closing image represents the reader of the Civil War album to himself. It shows people, like the viewer, in the act of turning this war into a physical object from which he can walk away. In a telliilg recuperation of a divisive moment, of a "civil" war that pitted American against American, Gardner's introduction asks the viewer to believe that the photograph can be an instrument of reunification. In "Doings of the Sunbeam," Holines precedes his analysis of the Antietam death series with an anecdote about the unifying power of the photograph. In Holmes's account, a photograph passed between strangers has the power Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

Plate 3.2. Dedication of Monument on Bull Run Battle-Field, 1865. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Libras!; Philadelphia, PA.

to join two unknowing relatives. Holmes writes, "another point which must have struck everybody who has studied photographic portraits is the family likeness that shows itself throughout a whole wide connection" (Holmes, "Doings" 10). Like Holmes's tale, the photograph in Gardner's preface links hitherto unknown things. It functions as a visual travelogue for the viewer, making him more aware of the topography and communal breadth of his nation. Gardner's Sketch Book, in effect, enables the rural American to link himself to a web of sacred national places, to common pastoral places made exceptional by battle, without asking why these "memorable fields" are meaningful or how geographical reunion and global communication can be mistaken for ideological consensus. The Sketch Book is composed primarily of images of batteries, breastworks, bridges, and camp scenes that concentrate on the daily life and technology behind the Civil War. One pair of photographs in the second volume, however, confronts questions of sectionalism and attempts to provide a representational solution to Northern and Southern ideological differences. The two photographs, "Libby Prison, Richmond" and "Old Capitol Prison, Washington," link Northerners and Southerners together in a common experience. The symmetry between these two sequential plates is itself striking. Both images were taken on a corner opposite the prison and the architectural structure dominates above the few people clustering on the streets. The Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

79

splicing of the images of a Confederate and a Federal prison argues that, although on different sides, Northerner and Southerner are united by the fact that they endured parallel experiences. They fought the same battle in a distant conflict, in a vague war without causes that Holmes obliquely terms "the curse" (Holmes, "My Hunt" 37). Perhaps what is most astonishing about the paired prison images is their determined absence of bitterness. Written from a Unionist perspective, with photographs taken by Northerners during the war, the accompanying text refuses to name the notorious atrocities committed in Southern prisons. Southern armies could barely feed and clothe their own men, let alone provide housing and food for thousands of prisoners. In the summer of 1864 alone, more than a hundred men died every day in the Georgia sun at Andersonville. In total, 13,000 out of the 45,000 men in Andersonville died of disease, exposure, or malnutrition. The worst Southern prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, had a mortality rate of 34 percent. The worst Northern prison at Elmira had a death rate of 24 percent (McPherson 796-97). In contrast to these stark facts, the text accompanying the Richmond image states cryptically that "THE Old Tobacco Warehouse is too well known to need much description." O n the following page, the narrative discloses that "Captain Wirz, the Andersonville prison-keeper, was imprisoned here, and expiated his crimes upon the gallows in its yard, as had numbers of offend-

Plate 3.3. Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia, April 1865. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Librar!; Philadelphia, PA.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

Plate 3.4. Old Capitol Prison, Washington, DC. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

ers before him." This epitaph asks the viewer to believe that whatever unnamed debts, emotional and physical, were incurred by the harsh conditions of war, they have now been paid in full. In an obvious metaphor, these presented after the end of hostilities promise that Northerners and Southerners will no longer be trapped by sectional differences. This reunion is brought to further closure by a third picture that follows, the "Ruins of Arsenal, Richmond." In a disruption of the symmetrical composition that characterizes much Civil War photography, this image balances a pile of shells, cut off by the right side of the frame, against the backdrop of a skeletal arsenal building. A group of men stands talking and sitting in the middle of the frame upon another pile of shells, as if to testify that the work of the war has been accomplished. The technology that made this violence possible can only exist as surplus in the world they, and their observers, inhabit. Quite literally, the Arsenal photograph depicts the camera in the act of constructing a livable version of history as it splices and edits the pile of shells in the front of the image out of the frame. According to the Arsenal image, the primary purpose of the camera is to record the disappearance of war, the moment it ends. Richmond, the capital and heart of the Confederacy, fell in April of 1865, and its defeat marked the death throes of the Confederacy. The written text here, however, refuses to allocate blame for the wreckage within the frame. In all probability, the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

81

Rebels were responsible for the ruin within this image because they torched everything of military and industrial value in Richmond before they fled. The Yankees' first task upon entering the city was to extinguish the flames that had spread when mobs took over the city. In an ironic reversal of what had come to be a war of attrition and "total" warfare, with the North slowly decimating the breadbaskets of the South, the South burned more of their own capital than the Yankees did of Atlanta or Georgia (McPherson, Battle Cry 846). By refusing to make the South responsible for the devastation within this picture, this text asks its viewer to believe that the war's violence was simply a necessary step, a cleansing rite, which needed to be visited upon the South. The facing page explains, "The Tredegar Iron Works, where the Confederates manufactured a considerable portion of their artillery, were situated a short distance to the left of the ruins shown here, and escaped the conflagration." This passage suggests that the destruction within the photographic frame is more the exception than the rule. In effect, it validates the possibilities of reconstruction because a space exists outside this image that has been untouched by war. While the mention of the Tredegar Works promises regeneration, definite cracks appear in this ideology of rebuilding. The arsenal photograph is a peculiar double image; it uses the war scene to convey peace, and it represents the latent threat of continued hostilities. It is not, after all, a field or a

Plate 3.5. Ruins of Arsenal, Richmond, VA, April 1865. Courtesy of the University

of Pennsylvania Librarj, Philadelphia, PA. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative peaceful landscape that remains untouched in this description. The arsenal, as a symbol of the Southern war machine, speaks of the ephemeral quality surrounding the post-war ideology of reunion and pastoral paradise. Lurking behind the ruined arsenal, the reference to the untouched iron works fully negates this collection's surface ideology of national unity. James McPherson's exhaustive study Battle Cry of Freedom: T h e C w d War Era places the Tredegar Works within the context of Southern attempts to industrialize in the early 1850s. During the sectional crisis between 1846 and 1851, Southerners frequently complained of their "degrading vassalage" to the Yankees. The South did not have the factories to manufacture cloth. It exported all but five percent of its raw cotton to Northern mills and was thus forced to pay an added tax when it reimported two-thirds of its clothing and manufactured goods from the North or from Europe. Not only did the South lack factories, it had no ships with which to trade with Europe (McPherson, Battle Cry 91-92). In contrast to this economic "vassalage," the Tredegar Works stood as one of the few examples of the South's ability to industrialize on a larger scale and to employ slaves as well as white workers in illdustrial enterprise (McPherson, Battle Cry 97). From this historical perspective, the reference to the Tredegar Works outside the frame of the arsenal photograph suggests that the sectional differences that caused the war continue to exist beneath the surface of these photographs. O n the one hand, the presence of the Iron Works allays fears of total annihilation by arguing that not all of the South looks like this barren wasteland. The space outside the frame suggests that the South can be rebuilt without the vengeance of a war of "total" destruction. O n the other hand, the only space beyond the frame that the text can reference implies the continued life of sectional difference and the South's lurking bid for economic independence. As a self-declared distillation of the war that promises images of national reunion, the Sketch Book is characterized by a deliberate process of image selection. Perhaps this work's most marked omission is the Antietam death series. While Gardner includes powerful images of death from Gettysburg such as "A Harvest of Death," "Field where General Reynolds fell," and "A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep," his images of Antietam are determinedly peaceful. As a professional photographer, it is curious that Gardner would exclude his most famous series from this collection. In terms of composition, this omission transforms the depicted carnage of Gettysburg into an isolated incident, and not the norm, in this war. Perhaps Gardner assumed that the Gettysburg images, building as they did upon the technology of the Antietam series, were technically superior. Or perhaps he wished to excise the moment when the photograph and an anonymous death were first connected for the American public. Frassinato recognizes a similar silence in Gardner's treatment of Antietain when he notes that the only photograph in the Sketch Book that Gardner neglects to date is plate twenty-one, the "Dunker Church Battle-field of Antietam" (Frassinato 292). Gardner does not date this photograph because it was taken after the war. This photograph of the white strucCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

83

Plate 3.6. A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, Gettysburg, July 1863. Courtesy of the Uni~ e r s i t yof Pennsylvania Lihrar!; Philadelphia, PA.

ture, standing so serenely in the midst of a field with two men in the foreground, offers the viewer the ultimate return to pastoralism. In this image, the ideological structure of the church-the literal symbol of the United States's divine mandate-clearly survives the war unmarred. This photograph erases any evidence of the war. All the marks on the Church have been repaired. Images of death have been replaced by two living civilians who appear to have different skin tones in conversation with each other, and we are given an image where the American landscape testifies to its powers of rejuvenation. The written text facing the Dunker Church photograph marks a divergence between the written word and the photograph. It reports, "THIS Church is located on a ridge near Sharpsburg, on the battle-field of Antietam, and suffered severely in that engagement" and "the slaughter here was fearful." The pairing of written text and image in these two pages suggests that the written word provides something ancillary to the photograph. It proffers a degree of violence and division that can be read back into the physical image if the viewer so chooses. Unmistakably, the visual text dominates this pairing. It is the first thing the viewer sees and the page to which s/he returns for verification. What is remarkable about this coupling is that the physical image exists to expose the written word as a lie. The viewer can find no record of carnage in the landscape Gardner selects, Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

84

Through the Negative

and this absence presents us with a distinct choice. If we want, we can write death back into the landscape, but this remains a choice outweighed by the visual representation of the landscape's power to turn death and destruction back into life. The photograph which follows the Dunker Church image, the "Signal Tower, Elk Mountain, Overlooking Battle-Field of Antietam, September, 1862," emphasizes a key point of view that the Sketch Book denies. The five men in this picture pose tranquilly around a wooden log structure, staring out onto the battlefield. It is they w h o glance over the battlefield in

Plate 3.7. Signal Tower, Elk Mountain, Overloolzing Battle-field of Antietam, September 1863. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes different directions. They own the view, and their seeming calmness and immunity from violence distances the viewer from any responsibility for this war's human and physical devastation. The written text facing this photograph reads: A rebel correspondent of a Richmond paper, who claims to have been an eye-witness of that battle, thus writes on the succeeding da!; of the part taken in it by the Signal Corps of the Union Army: 'Their signal stations on the Blue Ridge commanded a view of our every movement. We could not make a manoeuvre in front or rear that was not instantly revealed to their keen look-outs; and as soon as the intelligence could be communicated to their batteries below, shot and shell were launched against the moving columns. It was this information, conveyed by the little flags upon the mountain-top, that no doubt enabled the enemy to concentrate his force against our wealtest points, and counteract the effect of wl~ateversimilar movements may have been attempted by us.'

Like the aura of pastiless that surrounds Holmes's writings on the photograph, this passage imprints an aura of physical distance upon the photograph. Not only is this a photograph of the men who observed war, but the written text refers for authority to a man who might have been an "eyewitness." The gap between authorizing narratives, between a Northern image and a "rebel" account, gives the viewer a type of blanket understanding of the war; it creates a written narrative into which different images can be inserted without worrying about their exact temporal and physical correspondence. This image transforms the camera from an instrument that initially heralded "immediacy" into a machine that facilitates and enables distance, both in terms of time and physical space. It is enough in this frame for the viewer to have watched men watching and witnessing the aftermath of battle. This frame allows the viewer the luxury of experiencing this conflict, and all generic Civil War battles, vicariously. This vicarious experience had historical precedents because in 1863 the Union Army faced a serious loss of manpower that prompted Congress to enact the draft. Of the men selected in the four drafts, one fifth fled, one eighth were sent home because quotas had already been filled, and three-fifths were medically exempt or were released because they were the only source of income for their family. A draftee could either hire a substitute, which removed him from all further drafts, or pay a commutation fee of $300 that would not exempt him from the next draft (McPherson 600-01). Like the wealthy nineteenth-century man who could pay another to fight for him, in a double remove, by possessing this "Signal Tower" photograph, we have evidence of the battle, images of our own watching of the battle, and we are allowed to experience the Civil War by proxy. While the soldiers in the "Signal Tower" pose deliberately and avoid eye contact with the camera's lens, a different form of witnessing emerges in the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative gruesome "A Burial Party on Battle-field of Cold Harbor." This image depicts five black men interring the badly decomposed remains of Union soldiers. It is one of the most remarkable photographs in this collection because it is so difficult to articulate a saving pastoral ideology for it. Next to the Gettysburg series, it the only photograph to bring home the immediacy of death. This is one of the two images that represents men of color in the series. The second, Gardner's photograph "What do I want? John Henry-scene near Warrenton" demarcates race much more clearly than "A Burial Party." It depicts a black manservant in all his "untutored nature" providing a group of soldiers with food and drink. Trachtenberg describes the relationship between the Civil War photograph and race: 'On the whole, just as Northern rhetoric emphasized the cause of "Union," called the rebels "rebels" rather than slaveholders, and made the defeat of secession rather than slavery the most prominent war goal, the photographic record tends to banish blacks to the margin of visibility-their presence unacltnowledged even when plainly there.' (Trachtenberg, Reading 110)

In a war purportedly fought in part over the issue of slavery, the first "mementoe" of race in this collection is the second plate, "Slave Pen, Alexandria, Va., August, 1863." Whereas the image of the deserted slave

Plate 3.8. X Burial Party, Cold Harbor, VX, April, 1865. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

Plate 3.9. What do I Want, John Henry? Warrenton, VA, November 1862. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA.

pen exists as a relic of a past time and set of beliefs, the man in the center of the frame in "A Burial Party" stares directly into the camera. Either he or the photographer has chosen to position himself directly next to the cart so that both he and a skull gaze out in unison upon the reader. The anecdote that concludes the accompanying written narrative suggests that this image is a rare representation about vision and our ability to "see" race, "[a]mong the unburied on the Bull Run field, a singular discovery was made, which might have led to the identification of the remains of a soldier. An orderly turning over a skull upon the ground, heard something within it rattle, and searching for a supposed bullet, found a glass eye." The problem with the double gazes of the skull and living man within the photograph, however, lies in the equation between the living black man and the dead, presumably white, soldier. The clear suggestion here is that the only time a black man will be able to sit next to and approach the representative status of a white man is when the white man is dead. Here, the middle black man may gaze at the camera just as defiantly as the soldiers in Civil War group portraits, but his life is still weighed in value only against a dead white man. Quite literally, the black man will only be represented by the camera when it wants to capture another, more important, white presence. While the racist ideology behind the Civil War photograph is by no means surprising, in "A Burial Party" this meaning emerges in tandem with the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

88

Through the Negative

Plate 3.10. Slave Pen, Alexandria, VA, August 1863. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylmnia Librar!; Philadelphia, PA.

ideology of pastoral regeneration. One of the few critics to approach the nineteenth-century photograph's articulations of race, Alan Trachtenberg discusses a series of studio portraits of slaves: Without a public mask to mediate their encounter with the lens, the eyes of the enslaved Africans can only reveal the depths of their being-for, as naked slaves, they are permitted no social persona.. . . The illustrations are trapped within a system of representation as firmly as the sitters are trapped within a system of chattel slavery. And they powerfully inform us of our own entrapment. We lznow how to view conventional portraits-but to gaze upon naked bodies, male and female, of persons dispossessed of themselves, is another matter. (Trachtenberg, "Reading" 56)

In contrast to the Zealy photographs Trachtenberg examines, the social identity of the black men in "A Burial Party" is unclear. Were they soldiers, contrabands, or local freedmen? The written text writes, "THIS sad scene represents the soldiers in the act of collecting the remains of their comrades," but it also confusingly explains, "the soldiers, to whom commonly falls the task of burying the dead, may possibly have been called away before the task was completed." These words mitigate the horrendous nature of the black men's task by referring to them as "soldiers," on equal footing with the men Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

89

whom they bury. This bid for equality is undermined, however, because these men are performing a task that other "soldiers" abandoned and that the local Virginians refused. In a rare moment of sectionalism, the narrative accuses the South: "[ilt speaks ill of the residents of that part of Virginia, that they allowed even the remains of those they considered enemies, to decay unnoticed where they fell." The "unnoticed" of this passage is crucial because it suggests that these black soldiers inter these men to confer "notice" upon them. These soldiers perform a signifying act-even if it is an act that the narrator would prefer to see fall into the hands of white citizens. In their own selflessness, they thank these white soldiers for fighting this conflict for them by burying them, and they join the dead soldiers in their understanding of the meanings of this conflict. Part of the unreadability of this photograph stems from the ways it undermines the very ideology of bi-racial consensus it purports to uphold. The black soldiers in the background of this frame are hunched over their shovels. N o words that the text applies to them can deny the fact that they look like plantation workers. Unlike the carefully posed camp scenes where all white soldiers face the camera head-on and are in equal focus, the camera in "A Burial Party" denies the background soldiers the articulation of selfhood that comes from making eye contact with the lens. In contrast to the marginalized men behind him, the blank stare of the middle soldier gazes reproachfully at the camera. His sitting position comments on the disgusting nature of his work and his "pastoral" plantation-like surroundings. This man at center stage is not l~onoringthe soldiers on the cart before him; he is refusing them burial and does not thank them for fighting for his freedom and for the position he now occupies in society. Taken during the month when hostilities ceased, this image raises the important question of what kind of reconstruction will be possible in the wake of this conflict. Like the "arsenal" image, on the surface this picture suggests a national consensus between blacks and whites, a literal burying of racial tensions and of all the fears of insurrection that preceded the Civil War. This discourse, however, cannot be sustained because the photograph asks the viewer to decide what exactly is being buried in this photograph. On one level, this photograph represents an extreme version of pastoral regeneration because it shows death already half-decomposed and in the act of being returned to the soil. This interpretation, however, leaves no room for the center soldier's unwillingness to work or for the narrator's discomfort with the fact that black men are touching and burying white soldiers. While we might like to believe that our sacred national ground can absorb racial tension and use death to enrich the future, the man in the center of this frame speaks of the ultimate failure of this ideology because he declines laying these men-and the differences in political, economic, and social representation they espouse-to rest. George N. Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign directly confronts the representational problems of depicting the Southern landscape Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative that Gardner's Sketch Book broaches. In 1863 Barnard joined Sherman's campaign as the official photographer for the Military Division of the Mississippi as it marched from Tennessee through Georgia to the sea and then north through the Carolinas. Instead of the fragmented moments of Gardner's Sketch Book, this work promises a breadth of vision and a totalizing overall perspective. It offers, like the signal tower on Elk Mountain, a unified vantage point and an ideological orientation on Sherman's notorious scorched-earth policy. A self-declared military history, Photogmphic Views takes refuge in the seeming objectivity of maps, defenses, and Rebel works, and Barnard's introduction concentrates on the exact location and movement of troops. In December of 1866 Harper's Weekly provides one way of reading this work: These photographs are views of important places, of noted battle-fields, of military worlzs; and, for the care and judgement in selecting the points of view, for the delicacy of execution, for scope of treatment, and for fidelity of representation, they surpass any other photographic views which have been produced in this country-whether relating to the war or otherwise.. . . We believe that only a very limited number of these volumes are issued; but although, from its expense, the book can not be populaq those who can afford to pay one hundred dollars for a work of fine art can not spend their money with more satisfactory results than would be realized in the possession of these views. (Review of Photog~aphicViews of S h e ~ m a n i Campaign 771)

In its concentration on "points of view" and "scope of treatment," this review notes the deliberate composition of perspective that emerges in this series. Much more of a sense of physical landscape and vista emerges from this work than from Gardner's. The over-arching perspective which defines Photogmphic Views results in part from the mountainous topography of the region through which Sherman marched. The bird's-eye view that defines this collection is best represented by the famous "Nashville from the Capitol." This image pictures the columns of the capitol's edifice on the left and looks down on the statuary and canons with the town receding in the distance. When the Harper's reviewer speaks of "possession of these views," he calls attention to the ideological force behind Barnard's perspective. In these images, the camera, and therefore the viewer, adopt the gaze of the conqueror. As we look over these landscapes devoid of people, we see a country that has not been written upon by war and division. Unlike Gardner's Elk Mountain photograph where the viewer stands in the distance and watches others take in the view, in Barnard's image we "possess" this landscape. The photograph becomes our trophy and the document of our ownership. The land itself unfolds into the distance in these images to reinstitute the myth of the frontier and of an American re-beginning. Civil War literally lies Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

91

Plate 3.11. Nashville from the Capitol. Courtesy of the Collection of the New Yorlrk Historical Society (PR-002-395).

behind the viewer here. Just as the receding meadow lay at the heart of Olmstead's landscapes, in views such as those taken from Lookout Mountain, Barnard presents the viewer with the very land and virgin territory his ancestors sought. With few vestiges of human habitation, this land has renewed itself and again promises unending possibilities for self-invention and rebirth. Ironically, Barnard's work idealizes the impulse of western expansionism and asks its audience to forget the fact that this impulse brought the Civil War to a head. Historians have argued that the I
Through the Negative of these images lack evidence of active conflict, military occupation, or soldiers. These photographs are already a re-enactment. They bring the photographer and the observer together in a desire to remember these places, but to remember them without the imprint of war. The "total warfare" for which Sherman's March to the Sea is renowned is omitted from this series. N o record can be found of the fifty mile-wide swathe of destruction that followed the march of 60,000 troops purportedly given license to plunder and pillage (Newhall, "Preface" vii). The most remarkable sequence of photographs in this collection is the final fifteen works taken in Savannah, Columbia, S.C., Fort Sumter, and Charleston, S.C. Like Gardner's "Richmond arsenal," the stark skeletons of buildings left after war raise the question of the South's ability to recover from total physical and psychological decimation. Instead of alluding to a space outside the frame, Photographic Views offers an ideological recuperation of these scenes of destruction by concentrating on the saving power of Northern technology. "Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train" and "City of Atlanta, Ga., No. 1" are two images that proffer Northern technology as both the means to the South's destruction and to her resurrection. The first shows a line of empty wheel bases and interrupted tracks, the second a collection of trains in the destroyed railway depot. Both of these pictures emphasize that the North won this war of attrition because of its industrialization and superior rail power. McPherson details this difference, "But like Alice in Wonderland, the faster the South

Plate 3.12. Destruction of Hood's Ordnance Train. Courtesy of the Collection of the New Yorlr Historical Society (PR-002-395).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes

93

Plate 3.13. City of Atlanta, GA, No. 1. Courtesy of the Collection of the New York Historical Society (PR-002-395).

ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall.. . . By an index of railroad mileage per capita and per thousand square miles, the North remained more than twice as well supplied with rail transportation in 1860. And the amount of capital invested per mile in trackage and rolling stock was 30 percent greater in the free than in the slave states." According to McPherson, "while per capita investment in manufacturing increased no faster in the North than in the South during the 1850s, the population of free states grew more than that of slave states (40 percent to 27 percent) so that the southern share of national manufacturing capacity dropped from 18 to 1 6 percent. The effort to bring the spindles to the cotton failed" (McPherson 95). In the depot image, men stand aboard the empty cars as if to ask, "where do we go from here?" With no tracks for the railway cars, this photograph depicts the physical dead-end of the Southern social system and asks who will provide the resources for its rebuilding. Quite literally, these cars are going nowhere fast without the intervention of Northern capital and resources. The wrecked depot suggests that the only way that the South will be able to rebuild her landscapes and return to the pastoralism of Barnard's other views is by emulating the North and relying upon it for help. Whereas the reference to the Tredegar Works emphasizes the sectionalism behind the South's bid for economic independence, the destruction within the Barnard images emphasizes the South's child-like helplessness and underscores the inevitability of Northern intervention. In another surface Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative depiction, like that between the black soldier and the white remains, these images assure the viewer that the very agents behind this total destruction, the Northern occupying army and the industrial power behind it, will rescue the South. These images present an ultimatum received and accepted. The South's only chance for continued life depends on its abandoning the social system of feudal agrarianism. As an economic power, the North stands behind these frames with the promise that it will intervene and rebuild the South in its own image and remove the last vestiges of destruction and sectional division. In an ironic reversal, it will be the machine, the instrument that has revealed its ability to scar the landscape and to divide, that will clean up the land and return it to the pristine frontier seen in the rest of Barnard's photographs. This promised erasure of sectional differences resurfaces in the scaffolding that surrounds the church in the "Ruins in Charleston, S.C." and in the crane that hovers over the "New Capitol, S.C." These images picture the South's phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes. They portray the machine, that symbol of the North, as the instrument by which the South will literally rebuild its structures of government and faith. In the process of rebuilding a "new" South, one presided over by Northern occupying troops, the United States will be returned to the days of consensus when regional differences existed but were not nationally divisive. The final photographs of the ruins in Columbia and Charleston, S.C. are the most powerful of Barnard's images and the most difficult to assimilate into the ideologies of pastoral restoration and national consensus. A church appears in the first of these images, but it is not accompanied by the scaffolding of reconstruction or by the peaceful backdrop of Gardner's "Dunker Church." In the second of these images, large columns stand stripped of their marble casings down to their brick bases. These columns, symbolic of both government and of the Southern plantation system, punctuate the end of an unrecoverable economic system. What is most shocking about these images and about a photograph like "The Ruins of the Railroad Depot, Charleston, S.C." is their stark beauty; no people or machines disrupt the clear view of the silhouetted skeletons of these buildings. These three photographs from South Carolina are haunted photographs. Harper's Weekly describes this book as a work of "fine art," and these pictures possess an aesthetic beauty. They provide a starkness that could itself be recuperative because it offers the luxury of an aesthetic distance that is not available in Gardner's Antietam and Gettysburg studies. Gazing at these images for the first time, the twentyfirst-century viewer is plagued by the sense that she has seen these pictures before. Something is infinitely familiar about them. They nostalgically picture the South's death in a manner reminiscent of the Tara that is "gone with the wind" and "can now only be found in the books." At the same time that these images document the disappearance of a way of life, their barren vistas, like the soil of Tara, invoke the American pastoral ethos and emphasize the regenerative and cleansing powers of the land. Colonnades of columns lie against the sky like remnants of Roman ruins, and these Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 3.14. Ruins in Columbia, SC, No.1. Courtesy of the Collection of the New York Historical Society (PR-002-395).

Plate 3.15. The New Capitol, Columbia, SC. Courtesy of the Collection of the New York Historical Society (PR-002-395).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 3.16. Ruins in Columbia, SC, No.2. Courtesy of the Collection of the New York Historical Society (PR-002-395).

Plate 3.17. Ruins of the Railroad Depot, Charleston, SC. Courtesy of the Collection of the New Yorlr Historical Society (PR-002-395).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Sacred Relics and Renewed Landscapes photographs give the message that now the United States, this country that has been plagued by an absence of "ancient" history, has ruins and historical sites to legitimize her existence and her difficult rebirth. Whereas authors like James Feniinore Cooper once decried the lack of traces of history and national character left upon the American landscape (Putnam 55), the Civil War photograph and monument now reveals a landscape that has been written upon. Shifting through the violence and wreckage of this conflict, they locate its meaning in its creation of a national history built on the modernization of the South and the necessary pastness of her agrarian lifestyle. Like the grassy transept of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, these images and structures provide physical sites for remembering, for worshipping the land and understanding the new vista and depth of our national history. Ultimately, as the ruins of South Carolina bring Photographic Views to closure, they promise that the landscape of the Civil War will emerge from this conflict cleansed of sectional divisiveness. The land will be strengthened by a struggle that has given her a history and awoken the restorative qualities of her soil. In all the photographs of these landscapes and ruins, we have been given relics of the sacred, "mementoes" that speak of the pastness of this conflict.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Sounding the Wilderness" Representations of the Heroic in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

In August of 1866 Herman Melville surprised his reading public by publishing a book of poetry entitled Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. A parenthetical statement of purpose prefaces this collection: [With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed. The events and incidents of the conflict-malting up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the warfrom these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind. The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation-moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctivel!; one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusivel!; and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.] (Melville, Battle-Pieces n. pag.) N o t surprisingly, Melville, a notoriously private author, marks the end of his seven-year literary silence with parentheses. H e uses punctuation t o hide his entrance into the realm of social commentary. Melville's reference t o "an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond" suggests that this w o r k is a n attempt t o counteract the harsher forces of Reconstruction a n d a "revolt from acting o n paper a part any way akin t o that of the live dog t o the dead lion" (Battle-Pieces 264). The subordination of purpose that begins Battle-Pieces emphasizes t w o contradictory impulses a t work here. At the same time that Melville wishes t o shelter his public reappearance, this work wishes t o impact the post-War political scene by representing it. Timothy Sweet, in his seminal study Traces of W a r , argues t h a t whereas W h i t m a n a n d the Civil W a r photographers d r a w a pastoral a n d picturesque frame around the war, Melville's BattlePieces reflects critically o n the attempt t o naturalize the violence of this w a r

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

100

Through the Negative

Plate 4.1. Herlnan Melville, 1861. Photographed by Rodney Dewey. Courtesy of the Eerkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, MA.

and its ideological implications (Sweet 7). Building upon the foundation articulated by Sweet, this chapter takes a closer look at Melville's representations of the heroic. It contends that Battle-Pieces, released the same year as George Barnard's Photogmphic Views and Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch-Book of the Civil War, weighs the power of the written word against the act of representing this historical moment photographically. Ultimately, as these poems juxtapose literary and photographic images of General U. S. Grant, they argue that the written word is needed to inscribe a sense of personal and national responsibility onto the history told by the photograph's superficial surface image. In a substantiation of this claim, this chapter begins with a brief analysis of the deliberately written nature of Melville's preface. It then turns to a biographical explanation of Melville's relationship to Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

101

"modern" technology and to an examination of how photographic expectations caused reviewers to see this work as a "failure." The chapter concludes with a reading of this collection's "schizophrenic" form and suggests that Melville uses the figure of General Grant to argue for the importance of remembering history with words and not surface visual images. In a conceit reminiscent of Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire," Melville's prefatory paragraph tells his reader that the version of the Civil War that emerges from this volume has been written by nature. It is, in short, a composite and universal history that is available to any generic and open "mind." In a collection of "moods variable," of "contrasted" dramatic monologues that bring together a chorus of many different voices, this work proposes a democratic consensus of the type that had previously been seen in Walt Whitman's use of the catalogue as literary form. As moments of strife "Recollected in Tranquillity," Melville's poetic reconstruction of the Civil War accommodates individual and warring positions; it is, like Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," "in its nature well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations" (Wordsworth 152). As Timothy Sweet's discussion of Battle-Pieces in relation to Coleridge suggests, the comparison between Melville and the British Romantics is fairly commonplace in literary criticism. This theme stems from connections Melville himself makes. Melville compares his time and the historical context of Romanticism in the note that accompanies "The Conflict of the Convictions": The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860-61, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions, affected some minds that believed them to constitute one of the great hopes of mankind, much as the eclipse \vl~ichcame over the promise of the first Frellch Revolution affected kindred natures, throwing them for the time into doubts and misgivings universal. (BP 247)

By positioning his first foray into poetry in line with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's renovations of the British lyrical tradition, Melville makes an aggressive bid for his work's reception and posterity. In 1866, writing about the Civil War, Melville revises the idealistic and pantheistic visions of British Romanticism in terms of history and his place within it. At the same time that Melville democratically provides a place for readers of all allegiances, his reference to Coleridge stands as a warning of the ultimate message and structure behind this text. While these poems might initially be masked by the delightfully ephemeral quality of "wayward winds," a darker message lies behind their relationship to nature. Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" begins with a peaceful and recumbent pastoralism that corresponds to the idealism first imparted by the French Revolution as the sounds of the harp "Over delicious surges sink and rise, / Such a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve / Voyage Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

102

Through the Negative

on gentle gales from Fairy-Land" (Coleridge 327). So, too, does the reader come to Melville's Civil War retrospective wishing for peace and for a restoration of romantic images of war and national promise. After four hard years of battle, after unprecedented casualties and the realization that the technology of war had far outstripped medical advances, the American people wanted to return to the seemingly idyllic days before they fell into the "knowledge" of the inunie ball and the ironclad. They wanted to be told that their sacrifices had been worth the cost. While Melville's introductory note does not openly reveal whether or not Battle-Pieces will satisfy these desires, this answer can be found in the trajectory of Coleridge's poem upon which this collection is structured. Coleridge's poem ends with the appearance of the "Incomprehensible": For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; Who with his saving mercies healed me, X sinful and most miserable man, Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid! (Coleridge 328) In contrast to the elfin heights that dominate the poem's beginning, Coleridge ends by firmly positioning man on earth with the reminder of his sinfulness. In Coleridge's world, man has always just fallen; in the wake of the French Revolution, he carries with him the eternal retention of his "wildered and dark" descent into knowledge. When Melville's preface is read within the context of British Romanticism, Battle-Pieces becomes grounded in a crucial redefinition of the relationship between author, nation, and audience. It dedicates itself to leading the reader toward the inward images that will heal the wounds of the war but will refuse to allow the reader to forget its occurrence. This collection will thus continually remind a nation of its "guilt." It will repeat images of a people who have fallen because they have permitted themselves to "prosper to the apoplex" and have forgotten their founding covenant with God and with each other (BP 15).At the same time, the poems will provide the images to make this fall livable and regenerative. By placing himself alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge, Melville underlines the importance of voice in this work. In contrast to the visual interpretations of the war provided by the Sketch Book and Photographic Views, this collection offers inward images. Structured around dramatic monologues and a chorus of individual voices, it is aggressively verbal and literary. Reading over Melville's preface, there can be little doubt that his expectations of this work and of the writer's role in the era of Reconstruction are high. Part of the poignancy of Melville's introductory greeting stems, of Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

103

course, from the knowledge of its resounding failure. Out of a printing of 1,200, only 482 copies of Battle-Pieces were sold (Hook 191). This volume would be Melville's last excursion into public life. The New York Times complained of Battle-Pieces's "treasonable language" and desire for a nonpunitive reconciliation with the South (Scholnick 424). Melville's conception of Reconstruction as an unnecessarily harsh and punitive program imposed upon the South by northern Radicals was, of course, overturned by historians almost thirty years ago. The interpretation that prevails today is best summed up in Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1 877: So ingrained was the old racist version of Reconstruction that it took an entire decade of scholarship to prove the essentially negative contentions that 'Negro rule' was a myth and that Reconstruction represented more than 'the blaclzout of honest government.' The establishment of public school systems, the granting of equal citizenship to blaclzs, and the effort to revitalize the devastated Southern economy refuted the traditional description of the period as a 'tragic era' of rampant misgovernment.. . . By the end of the 1960s, Reconstruction was seen as a time of extraordinary social and political progress for blaclzs. If the era was 'tragic,' it was because change did not go far enough, especially in the area of Southern land reform. (Foner xiii)

At the same time that the New York Times complained of Melville's "treasonable" criticism of Reconstruction, Harper's, a magazine to which Melville subscribed, praised Barnard's "splendid volume," thereby emphasizing the primacy of photographic representations of this conflict. In order to understand the ambivalence towards the photograph that defines Battle-Pieces, Melville's reaction to his increasingly visual world must be examined. In a moment that is rare because it came from a private man who said it was "a vile habit of mine to destroy nearly all my letters" (Leyda 664), Melville describes the changing world he inhabits. In 1857 his journal records his visit to London's famous Crystal Palace exhibit: April 29-May 1 Lay a sort of waterlogged in London.-Reverie at the 'Cock.' Chrystal Palace-digest of universe. Alllambra-House of PansiTemple of [?I. &c&c&c.-Comparison with the pyramid.-Overdone. If smaller would look larger. The Great Eastern. Pyramid.-Vast toy. N o substance. Such an appropriation of space as is made by a rail fence. Durable materials, but perishable structure. Cant exist 100 years hence. (Leyda 576)

At the Crystal Palace, Melville would have been exposed to both the giant panoramas he discusses here and to the award-winning work of American photographers such as Mathew Brady. Clearly, only a sense of curiosity Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

104

impelled Melville to visit the renowned exhibit that was heralded as the event in mid-century Europe. There is no room for optical tricks such as the panorama in his world. According to Melville, the Crystal Palace is an insufficient substitute for reality. Its surfaces provide the reader only with a "digestm-with a summary replacement for the vastness of human experience. The optical games, the "toys" of the Palace, do not even deserve the fullness of his words. They can be summarized by "&c&c&c," and they are symbolized by the skeletal image of a rail fence. They will not last. The Palace's exhibits register in Melville's world only as distractions, and they become "perishable" symbols of man's newfound ability to "see" without seeing-to "see" without firsthand experience and without a sense of scale. In contrast to the plenitude of photographs of Whitman and Twain, few photographs of Melville survive. Perceiving the photograph and the written word to be two distinct worlds, he was reluctant to use the photograph to publicize his authorship. Melville would, however, have come into direct contact with the advent of war photography. During the last year and a half of the war, he lived in New York City on 26th Street and would have passed the photographic studios on Broadway in his travels around the city.1 These biographical details suggest that Melville inhabited a world that increasingly relied upon the photograph as the barometer of the real, and photographic expectations seem to have increasingly influenced the ways critics reacted to his own work. Many reviews measure this collection against an expectation of immediacy and eye-witness reportage that is at odds with the world of nineteenthcentury poetry. On the third of September 1866, the Philadelphia Inquirer complains of the work's deadening sense of distance: [W]e are surprised to learn that the entire collection was not only penned after the fall of the Rebel capital, but that that event suggested to the poet the composition of this entire collection. This confession at the outset certainly dulls the edge of the reader's enjoyment to ltnow that the first poem, 'The Portent,' was suggested by the suppression of the Rebellion, to a poet who lived when what he chooses to regard as the portent of the war was enacted; and the sadness he feels by seeing young men marching off to the war only touched his bosom after thousands of them had died and the war was concluded. (Higgins 514)

This review is remarkable for what it says about the limits of what the public wants to hear about the recent war. First, they are looking for "enjoyment," for the vicarious thrill that comes from the illusion of participating in action as it occurs. The audience has been conditioned by the Civil War photograph to expect immediacy and eyewitness reportage. If this reader cannot be given the traditional images of the heroic that flow from the Victorian poet's "bosom," he wishes to dwell in the immediate. Instead of Melville's weighti n g ~and reconsideration, this reader wishes to concentrate on representaCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

105

tions that provide instantaneous and objective perceptions that need not be revisited or read reflectively. In February of 1867, William Dean Howells reviews Battle-Pieces in the Atlantic Monthly and accuses Melville's poetry of the same deadness and flatness that the Philadelphia Inquirer criticized. Howells focuses on "The Scout toward Aldie": you are lost to every sense of time or place, and become as callous at the end as the poet must have been at the beginning to all feeling involved, doubting that 'The living and the dead are but as pictures.' (Higgins 527)

In Howell's terms, Melville's poetry lacks emotional depth. Ironically, within the context of Melville's own criticism of visual culture, this collection possesses the superficiality of "pictures." Howells fails to see that Melville, like himself, is engaged in the struggle against "pictures." He believes that Melville experiences the events of his poem by proxy and without the emotional engagement that Howells' writing itself, presumably, displays. While this charge of critical distance is true, in the main, Melville wrote the poem to which Howells refers, "The Scout toward Aldie," after participating in a scouting party on April 18, 1864, from Vienna, Virginia. Melville intended to visit his cousin Henry at his cavalry camp, but Henry was absent and Melville accompanied the troops on a hunt for the elusive Mosby, the guerrilla who made a career out of threatening Washington. During this raid, Confederate prisoners were taken and Melville witnessed the braining of one of these prisoners by a guard (Garner, "The Scout, Part 2" 6 ) . Melville's scouting experience, when coupled with his following visit with Grant and the Army of the Potomac, make him the only major American writer to have participated directly in the war. As his brother Allan paraphrases it, Melville went to Henry's cavalry camp on a literary mission-so that he "should have opportunities to see" the army that he might "describe" it (Garner 298). By the time of his departure on April 16, 1864, Melville had already begun work on Battle-Pieces. Melville's further travels to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac and his interview with Grant are documented in "The Armies of the Wilderness" (Garner 325-329). The "authentic" experience structuring "The Scout Toward Aldie" make it one of the most discussed poems in Battle-Pieces. The scope of this poem illustrates the numerous styles and forms with which Melville experimented. In contrast to Mosby's institution of a new kind of guerrilla warfare, the literary forms of "The Scout" are deliberately archaic and accomplish a strange summary of the history of English literature. There is a forest marriage that is reminiscent of A Midsummer's Night's D r e a m (205), a chapel that recalls Sir G a w a i n and the Green Knight (194), and an itemization of characters based on their clothing that parallels "The General Prologue" to T h e Canterbury Tales (191). Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

106

Through the Negative

The numerous styles and voices that comprise Battle-Pieces make it a difficult text, yet few of the disparaging nineteenth- and twentieth-century analyses suggest that Melville uses the rigid and confining structure of traditional rhyme schemes to mark a new world being born from painful and awkward transitions. The dissonant form of Battle-Pieces, in other words, is not read as a deliberate reflection of a world rife with innumerable ruptures and reconsiderations of issues such as the continued faith in humanism and god, the purposes of technology, and the endurance of the American project. The opening lines of "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight" declare this collection's poetics: PLAIN be the phrase, yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His Orient pomp, 'twould ill befit O v e r ~ n u c to l ~ ply The rhyme's barbaric cymbal.

(61)

As they were for Hawthorne, the new ironclads like the Monitor were for Melville an ambiguous symbol of a new world.2 In "The Stone Fleet" Melville mourns the useless sinking of old whalers to block the bay of Port Royal. In the notes, he lists the names of the ships as if they were casualties equivalent to telegraphed death lists of individual men. He begins this "Old Sailor's Lament" with the lines, "I have a feeling for those ships, /Each worn and ancient one" (31).In contrast to the history carried by the ships of "The Stone Fleet," the "Spices and shawls and fans she bore;/A whaler when her wrinkles came-" the surface of the Monitor is smooth and evinces "No passion; all went on by crank, / Pivot, and screw, 1 And calculation of caloric" (62). In "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight," Melville articulates the demise of an epic and romantic vision of war when he writes "warriors/Are now but operatives; War's made / Less grand than Peace, /And a singe runs through lace and feather" (62). The Monitor is one of the quintessential symbols of the Civil War for Melville, and this poem speaks of a need to match her construction, "the ringing of those plates on plates" with new poetic forms.3 At the same time that Melville hears this call for newness, he realizes that there will always be those, like himself in his nostalgia for the "Stone Fleet," who will not want to allow an older order of epic poetry and its accompanying conception of an ordered world to vanish. "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight" suggests that there can be no "beautiful" and "uplifting" poetry of the Civil War. The subject itself weighs down the poem and makes it "ponderous." To write beautiful verse would be sacrilege, an erasure of the departed. Not surprisingly, the contemporary reviews revolt against the violence of the forms that this collecCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

107

tion often imposes upon its reader. O n January 10, 1867, the New York Independent writes: He attacks every word, however unmanageable, quite confident that he shall find a rhyme for it;. . . . and 'Shenandoah' makes another Mormon marriage with half-a-dozen unfit terminations, of which 'star' is the least unlike. (Higgins 525)

The San Francisco Evening Bulletin provides a graphic image of one reader's reaction: "the versification is at times harsh and limping. . . . but when Herman Melville affects the obscurely profound and dislocates the parts of speech from sheer contempt of good English, we confess it makes our gorge rise" (Higgins 521). These comments indicate, quite aptly, that Melville often declares war on both poetic form and his reader. What these reviews neglect to mention, however, is that Melville approximates the experience of war and its aftermath in words. His verse invites its reader to hear "limping." Because vision is often paired with blindness in Melville's world, this collection asks its audience to hear and not simply "see" the scenes of war. In these poems, Melville deliberately supplements the faculty of sight with that of the ear because, as his description of the Crystal Palace reveals, he equates the idea of seeing with particularly "modern" forms of blindness and omission. The reviews of Melville's poetry overlook his ability to compose flawlessly lyrical poems when he so wishes. They refuse to entertain the idea that his harsh lines are themselves conscious and deliberate choices. The opening lines of the polished "Dupont's Round Fight" testify to Melville's control of his medium: IN time and measure perfect moves A11 Art whose aim is sure; Evolving rhyme and stars divine Have rules, and they endure.

(30)

Stanton Garner cautions the reader to pay special attention to the moments of polish in Battle-Pieces because there is a "suspect and disturbing nuance, a note of deceptiveness of the kind that one detects whenever Herman-the later writer-offers slickly crafted poetry or prose" (Garner 124). If Garner's warning about the relationship between form and content is heeded, the deliberately poetic moments in Battle-Pieces record this form's ability to lie, to use artifice to resurrect the older world of whalers and glory. The dramatic monologues, the poems of finely crafted verse, and the blank verse of a poem such as "The House-Top" emphasize a world that is attempting to find ways to represent itself and its changing social order. Garner compares Melville, in his combination of old and new poetic forms, to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman: Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

108

Through the Negative

Some new literary breeze was blowing; it is not a coincidence that in just over a decade these three innovators began to delineate a new territory in American poets!; a territory that would belong to them, whether or not the public acltnowledged it, from just after the middle of the century until its last decade. It was as though all three had heard the call of Emerson for a new, democratic poetry. Still, no one of them followed the path of either of the other two. Whit~nanwas the iconoclast who reshaped the tradition of versification and verbal protocol until it was scarcely recognizable as the vehicle of Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes. In her rough ballads Dicltinson despoiled the fluid line, the elegant clichC, and the genteel sentiment. Melville employed in part and on occasion the democratic zeal and idiosyncratic vocabulary of the one and the metric crudity, the 'colloq~iialism, the prosaic, the anti-poetic, the ironical' as Newton Arvin has put it, of the other, but he differed from them both in that he was the romancer-turnedpoet who translated his symbolic habit, his mastery of dialogue, and his skill at manipulating point of view into a poetics of his own. (Garner 442)

Garner's image of Melville as a combination of Dickinson and Whitman supports the feeling that there are forces in conflict, combination, and contradiction throughout his poetry. Unlike Dickinson's and Whitman's poetry, however, I would argue that one of the prime purposes of Battle-Pieces is to use different poetic forms to mark a world in transition between the pre-Civil War days and an unknown future, between an epistemology of old verse forms and modern ways of seeing. Melville chooses to write only parts of this collection in the beautiful blank verse of the "House-Top." Unlike Whitman, he cannot abandon himself completely to the representational forms of the future. He begins with the archaic versification of a poem like "The Portent" to portray a nation that is still not quite ready to relinquish her older forms of representation-both on an artistic and on a political level. Garner is not the only critic to have noticed Battle-Pieces's "almost schizophrenic" amalgam of styles and worlds (Bernstein 187). While the New York Independent uses the phrase "Mormon marriage" to describe an aspect of the poetry, the New York Round Table places this combination within the inflammatory context of miscegenation: The dreariest reading, in our way of thinking, is this sort of nondescript writing, which is neither honest prose, though it loolts like it, nor do~vnright poetry, whose domain it invades, but a forced and unnatural marriage of both; a marriage wllich never should have been made, but wl~ich,having taken place, should be broken at once. (Higgins 520)

This passage startles because of the vehemence of its terms. In no way do the concepts of the "dreariest reading" and "nondescript writing" balance the image of a "forced and unnatural marriage." By placing the mixture of

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

109

poetry and prose within the context of nineteenth-century race relations, Round Table reveals the strength with which worlds and representations collide in Battle-Pieces. This collection is more than a combination of seemingly antithetical forms of poetry and prose. In its intermingling of styles and voices, it puts antagonistic views of nation and representation in dialogue and asks difficult questions such as, "Does the sad South still cherish hate? / Freely will Southern men with Northern mate? The blacks-should we our arm withdraw, / Would that betray them?" (232). It juxtaposes Southern voices and landscapes with Northern vistas. A northern eulogy of Stonewall Jackson pragmatically ends, "Justly his fame we outlaw; so /We drop a tear on the bold Virginian's bier, 1 Because no wreath we owe" (80). This Northern voice speaks to the next page, "Stonewall Jackson. (Ascribed to a Virginian.)" and seconds the Southern consensus that "ONE man we claim of wrought renown / Which not the North shall care to slur" (81 ) . At the same time that Battle-Pieces joins alternate voices and worlds together, it looks forward to a day when the union of North and South shall be accomplished without vengeance and hatred.4 It envisions a day when opposites shall merge, when archaisms and free verse, a faith in the glory of manumission and an awareness of the horrific advent of modern technology, shall be reconciled. Ultimately, one of the ironies of this collection's images of unification is that they determined part of the work's reception by invoking a profound hatred and fear in its audience. To the Round Table and many readers in 1866, the image of this new world of reconciled opposites was still as fearful and abhorrent as the idea of a marriage of black and white. "The Portent" begins Battle-Pieces and announces the shocking corporeality of this collection: Hangzng born the beam, Slowl)' swa)'zng (szlch the law), Gazlnt the shadow on j30zlrgreen, Shenandoah! The cztt is on the crown (Lo, John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hzdden zn the cap Is the angznsh none can draw; So )'OZW filtztre weds zts face, Shenandoah! But the streamzng beard I S shown (IYTezrd John Brown), The meteor of the was. (11.pag)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

110

Through the Negative

The movement of John Brown's body strains against the constraints of this poem's fourteen-line sonnet structure and provides the metronome for the collection as a whole. At the same time that these poems astonish the reader with their descent into a hitherto-unknown physicality, literally marking time and space with corpses, they also provide moments of retreat (Adler 136).A personal note intrudes into "The Portent" and signals Melville's innate understanding of the human desire to escape the Civil War. O n the eve of secession, when the Constitutional Convention convened in Baltimore and the Republicans nominated Lincoln for president in Chicago, Melville opted to disengage. On May 30, 1860, he and his brother Tom left Boston Harbor on the Meteor, a clipper ship bound for Sail Francisco (Garner 52). Ostensibly, the purpose of this voyage was to cure Melville's ill health. Seen, however, within the context of "The Portent" and the strangely personal and jarring interjection of "Weird John Brown," this journey was an escape. If John Brown's body becomes the physical sign to the nation that war was inevitable, Melville admits to the reader that the advent of the war was first told in his consciousness by the clipper ship Meteor and by his desire to vacate the site of national conflict. Aboard the ship, he was isolated from the mail, newspapers, and the telegraph. When he disembarked in San Francisco four months later, the governor of South Carolina was advising secession if Lincoln became president (Garner 59). At the same time that this collection offers the morbid image of John Brown's swinging body, it also provides universal moments of pastoral retreat. Hennig Cohen notes these two voices at work in "The Portent": Because the Shenandoah Valley was noted for its fertility and beauty and had already accumulated a romantic aura, and because of the euphony of the word itself, it is an apt choice for the refrain.. . . With 'John Brown,' it forms a double refrain wl~ichenhances the meaning as well as the formal unity of the poem. The "Shenandoah" refrain suggests fertility, life, and peace; the 'John Brown' refrain suggests devastation, death, and was. . . Symbolically, the image of the Shenandoah Valley represents the outcome of the sins of the South and a n extension of the sins of the nation and of manlzind. (Cohen 204)

Most noticeably, the pastoral surfaces in "The March into Virginia: Ending in the First Manassas": N o berrying part!; pleasure-wooed, N o picnic party in the Ma!; Ever went less loth than they Into that leafy neighborhood. In Bacchic glee they file toward Fate, Moloch's uninitiate:

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness" Expectancy, and glad surmise Of battle's unlznown mysteries.

(23)

These lines resurrect the days before the war when no one thought the conflict would last more than three months-days when hundreds of Washingtonians became tangled in the retreat of Union soldiers as they journeyed to the Manassas battle-field for souvenirs and "eye-witness" experience. "The March into Virginia" envisions the return to a world before the technological horrors of modern warfare became known, but the body of John Brown literally hangs over the course of history and the trajectory of this collection. This pastoral retreat is further ironized and exposed by the end of the poem when some soldiers "ere three days are spent-/Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare" (23). While reader and author might like to rest forever in this moment of "Bacchic glee," "The Portent" declares this collection's intention to return the reader, in retrospection, to images of broken covenants and human carnage. In a strange manipulation of the chronological order of history and of these poems, Melville does not even list this completely italicized poem in his table of contents. By refusing to include "The Portent," he suggests that the exact moment when the war became inevitable cannot be cited. This beginning cannot be traced to a single event because, as the intersection of the national and the personal in "The Portent" intimates, this moment was always in the making in America. The poem's omission from the table of contents emphasizes a central theme in Battle-Pieces: it tells the reader that she must look beneath the immediate surface, beneath the artificiality Melville associates with the photograph and beneath the seeming order of the written word, to reconstruct a new version of the Civil War. As a whole, Battle-Pieces is centrally concerned with measuring and weighing ways of representing the Civil War and its aftermath. The presence of the poem "On the Photograph of a Corps Commander" foregrounds this collection's concern with evaluating the photograph as an adequate representation of the war. "Corps Commander" begins with the familiarly heroic image of a general: AY, man is manly. Here you see The warrior-carriage of the head And brave dilation of the frame; And lighting all, the soul that led In Spottsylvania's charge to victory, Which justifies his fame. A cheering picture. It is good To look upon a Chief like this,

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative In whom the spirit moulds the form. Here favoring Nature, oft remiss, With eagle mien expressive has endued X man to kindle strains that warm.

(105) The exact identity of the anonymous "Corps Commander" has never been determined. Without providing supporting evidence, Garner argues that Melville honors General Winfield Hancock in this poem (Garner 325).John Hollander states that the photograph is one of Hancock engraved on the May 28,1864 cover of Harper's Weekly (Rabb 41). In contrast to Hollander and Garner, James Waller argues that "The Armies of the Wilderness" and "Corps Commander" were inspired by a picture of Grant propping himself against a tree near City Point (Waller 77-83; 84). While the exact historical referent to this poem will probably never be known, I would argue that the concern in the previous poem, "The Armies of the Wilderness," and throughout all of Battle-Pieces, with Grant's character suggests that this mysterious commander is Grant. The fluid identity and the anonymity of the "Corps Commander," however, are profoundly significant. By refusing to give this commander a name, Melville makes this poem a deliberately generic treatment of heroism that could be applied to any Civil War general. If one takes heed of Garner's warning that the moments when Melville meshes form and content deceive the reader, the line "in whom the spirit moulds the form" suggests that "Corps Commander" is more that a monument to a great commander. It is a discussion of the very act of representing this greatness in words and photographs. The two opening stanzas suggest that the photograph is a prime conveyor of romantic images of war. In the photograph, the viewer can find a "brave" and "manly" image of the war. As a criticism of seeing history photographically, this poem, with the "spirit" that "moulds the form," is curiously flat when compared to the "Armies of the Wilderness" that directly precedes it. Literally, there is no depth in "Corps Commander." "Corps Commander" provides an image of the Wilderness campaign that contradicts the death and destruction portrayed by the previous "The Armies of the Wilderness." Looking at "Corps Commander," one would never guess that this campaign was, as James McPherson describes it, bloody beyond all precedent. The Federals had suffered some 44,000 casualties, the Confederates about 25,000. This was a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare. These two armies had previously fought several big setpiece battles followed by the retreat of one or the other behind the nearest river, after which both sides rested and recuperated before going at it again. Since the beginning of this campaign, however, the armies had never been out of contact with each other. (McPherson, Battle Cry 733-34)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding t h e Wilderness"

Plate 4.2. Lieutenant Grant, at His Head Quarters, City Point. Photographed by Brady Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Reprod~ictionNumber LC-USZ62-101673)

The pairing of "Corps Commander" with the grisly "Armies of the Wilderness" argues that the camera is centrally concerned with the sanitizing act of cleaning up and manipulating the images of history after they occur. "Corps Commander" is a poem that literally puts a surface and a limit on the horror that precedes it. In Battle-Pieces, Melville describes one of the great paradoxes of photography; he exposes the "hard realism" of photography as being essentially romantic in nature, and he counters its epic heroism with inner realism and what he portrays as the more truthful medium of language itself.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

114

Melville's search for a way to represent the Civil War comes strikingly to the forefront in "Donelson," a poem structured around a group of town'speople's reactions to the telegraph bulletin. In its splicing of news and individual voices, this poem foreshadows the "camera eye" and "newsreel" sections of Dos Passos's USA Trilogy: About the bulletin-board a band Of eager, anxious people met, And every walzeful heart was set O n latest news from West or South. 'No seeing here,' cries one-'don't crowd''You tall man, pray you, read aloud.' IMPORTANT.

W e learn that General Grant, Marchuzg born Hew)' overland, And lolned bj, a force up the Cwnberland sent (Some thlrt)' thousand the conunand), O n Wednesda)' a good posltlon wonBegan the slege of Donelson. (33-34)

"Donelson" is invested in analyzing the written transmission of history, and the observer's comment that there is "no seeing here" underscores the obvious fact that the telegraph and the written word do not offer the immediate visual images of the photograph. As this poem progresses, it further demonstrates the superior power of the written word. Just as this collection as a whole advances chronologically, the poem measures the passage of time with a minuteness that the photograph cannot. At first, bold headlines like "LATER FROM THE FORT" and "FURTHER" punctuate the crowd's anxious waiting for news (35 and 37). As the work continues, time slows inexorably. The telegraph reports, "Great suffering through the night- / A stinging one" and counts the passage of hours with the titles "1 P.M." and "3 P.M." (43). While a photograph can mark great changes, instantaneous moments, and the contrast between life and death, it cannot represent the slow passage of minutes and hours. Unlike words, it cannot describe a change in onlookers that is both internal and intrinsic to the experience of the Civil War. The reportage of death in "Donelson" marks a turning point in the collection away from the glorified pastoral images of war and towards the graphic death of "The Armies of the Wilderness." The italicized voice delivers death: Granti ~nvestnwntzs completeA senuczrcular one. Both wzngs the Cumberland's margln meet, Then, backward c~trvzng,clasp the rebel seat. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness" O n Wednesda)' thzs good work was done; But of the doers some lze prone. Each w o o d each hzll, each glen was fought foq The bold znclosmg lme w e wrought for Flamed wzth sharpshooters. Each clzff cost A l m b or lzfe. But back we forced Reserves and all; made good ozlr hold; And so we rest. 135)

As the measuring of "each hill, each glen" with body parts suggests, one of the purposes of the written word in this dramatic monologue is to remind the reader of the physical cost of war. "Donelson" creates a sense of shared responsibility and indebtedness between reader and soldier by its depiction of the landscape and by its use of the shifting first person narrative voice. In the straight narration of the unitalicized sections, characters are introduced with distancing and generic terms such as "the reader" and "the man who read this to the crowd." In opposition to this narration, the italicized telegraph sections employ a "we" that joins soldiers, reporters, and the audience. As the telegraph sections progress, the reader literally comes to own a piece of the action-with its accompanying victory, "rest," and casualties. In a self-conscious move to document the representative powers of the written word, the telegraph sections of "Donelson" invoke a world where the reader cannot escape the idea of personal culpability that the photograph allows him to elide. Unlike a nineteenth-century photograph which would never place images of death in dialogue with a commander, the poem, as Melville invents it in Battle-Pieces, becomes a form of representation that deliberately foregrounds issues of accountability by placing the commander, Grant, the reader, and dead and living soldiers together in paragraphs. While literary critics note the appearance of several Civil War generals in Battle-Pieces-the most notable are Lyon, Stonewall Jackson, Lee, and McClellan in "The Victor of Antietam," Melville's democratic tribute to a commander wronged by his government-none has observed that Grant emerges as a sustained character, and not simply as a symbol, in the progression of these poems. In the movement between "Donelson," "Shiloh," "Chattanooga," and "The Armies of the Wilderness," Melville traces Grant's career and entrance onto the national scene at the same time that he questions the representational power of word and photograph. The treatment of Grant is inextricable from the collection's movement away from the pastoralism of "The March into Virginia" and into the technological horror of the war as a whole. In keeping with the early days of the war, a lingering air of idealism pervades "Donelson." While there are corpses and culpability here, this piece still imagines a world of implied consensus symbolized by the joining of author, audience, and soldier in the narrative voice of "we." As Melville was very much aware, the siege of Donelson was a battle charCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

116

acteristic of the early Civil War. Grant's "investment is complete" because this victory marked his first appearance on the national scene, but the surrender of Fort Donelson did not have the carnage of later battles. It was a single swift blow that had none of the exhaustion of peoples and lands that defines Grant's winning policy after Shiloh (McFeely 115). The surrender of Fort Donelson, in other words, has more in common with a romantic image of warfare than it does with the coming "modern" warfare of the Civil War. The use of the democratic first person voice in "Donelson" thus documents a moment of innocence when both audience and author believed that the written word could provide complete images of the cost of war and the totality of its conflicts. This belief is most firmly imprinted in the poem's closing stanza: Ah God! may Time with happy haste Bring wail and triumph to a waste, And war be done; The battle flag-staff fall athwart The curs'd ravine, and wither; naught Be left of trench or gun; The bastion, let it ebb away, Washed with the river bed; and Day In vain seek Donelson. (52)

Throughout this poem, language has been used as the medium to convey a "new" kind of history and chronology. In a moment of faith, these closing lines imply that words can also be used to create a sense of pastness, to place the battles of the war behind a nation. There is no sense in "Donelson" of the endless surfacing of tensions and broken landscapes which haunts the later "Apparition: A Retrospect." N o voice of doom proclaims here, "All may go well for many a year, /But who can think without a fear / Of horrors that happen so?" (155). The moment in the war that "Donelson" encapsulates is characterized by the belief that words can approximate the nature of this conflict. It renews faith in the poet and speaks of his ability to help a nation heal by forecasting a future when the national dividing lines of "ravine" and "trench" are bridged. In contrast to the optimism at the end of "Donelson," "The Armies of the Wilderness" underscores the imperative need for the written word to remind the nation of death, despair, and broken covenants. As one half of the paired image that ends with "Corps Commander," this poem reveals Melville's representational solution to the surface patriotism and glorification of the photograph: In glades they meet sltull after sltull Where pine-cones lay-the rusted gun,

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness" Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat And cuddled-up skeleton; And scores of such. Some start as in dreams, And comrades lost bemoan: By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had chargedBut the Year and the M a n were gone. (101)

In the anonymous "they" of these lines, Melville probes the ultimate irony of a war between brothers. Whoever "they" may be, both sides of this conflict will be laid side-by-side and made equal by death. At the same time that "they" are victims of fratricide, the soldiers in the Wilderness campaign are victims of the landscape. In this series of battles, they fought over land that had been contested years before in the battle of Chancellorsville (McFeely 166). They faced the memories of the "skeletons" of this previous battle, and they became trapped by the very topography they were defending. In relentlessly close firing, men were ensnared by the terrain of convoluted roots, mud, and trees. The forests quickly caught fire and the wounded were unable to escape (McFeely 167-68). In short, the soldiers became casualties of the same landscape that has operated in the American consciousness since the first settlement as both an edenic garden and a maze-like test of hellish proporti0ns.j Recent historical interpretations of Grant's Wilderness Campaign vary. James McPherson defends Grant by writing: Grant's purpose was not a war of attrition-though numerous historians have mislabeled it thus. From the outset he had tried to lnaneuver Lee into open-field combat, where Union superiority in numbers and firepower could cripple the enemy. It was Lee who turned it into a war of attrition by sltillfully matching Grant's moves and confronting him with an entrenched defense at every turn. (McPherson, Battle Cry 734)

While the reader may question how McPherson's defines "a war of attrition" if it is not won by "superiority in numbers and firepower," McFeely proffers a different version of this campaign: In May 1864 Ulysses Grant began a vast campaign that was a hideous disaster in every respect save one-it worked. He led his troops into the Wilderness and there produced a nightmare of inhumanity and inept military strategy that ranlts with the worst such episodes in the history of warfare. One participant, for whom the picture was still clear thirty years later, wrote of Inen 'piled upon each other in some places four layers deep, exhibiting every ghastly phase of mutilation. Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and the writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded Inen still alive and struggling to extricate

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

118

themselves from their horrible entombment.' X nation's adulation of the general deserves inspection in the light of this exercise in carnage. When they made Grant a hero, what was it they celebrated? (McFeely 165)

The title Melville gives to his poem about the campaign, "The Armies of the Wilderness," illustrates his firm desire to tell a version of history that differs from the great man theory. His concern here is with the "Armies," with a scale and a number of men that far exceeds any conception of individuals. The only relevance the "Corps Commander" has to the "Armies" stems from his relationship as a part to their whole. The commander's name is deliberately left out of the more adulatory "Corps Commander" as if to withhold final praise and as a reminder that the commander's relationship to his men must be scrutinized. "The Armies of the Wilderness" invokes the scale of this campaign when it refers to the "scores of such" who are dead. This shorthand refuses to give death a number. It surrenders these dead to the startling anonymity that Holmes and so many other reviewers of the war try to counteract. In an abbreviation that reveals the limits of all forms of representation, this poem tells the reader that a final probing of the limits of representation, and the institution of a necessary silence, are the only viable depictions of these men. The poem closes with a final reinstitution of man's reluctance to see these scenes and numbers put into words: Long the)' wzthhold the roll O f the shroudless dead. It 1s rlght; N o t )'et can we bear the flare O f the funeral llght.

(1041

This final stanza broaches the idea that once actions are put into words, once they are written on paper, they become real. The "it is right" of this quotation is curiously equivocal because at the same time that it agrees that both the living and the "shroudless dead" should be protected by silence, these words are pronounced by an anonymous narrator whose very act of speaking represents this conflict and interrogates the borders of its depiction. In Battle-Pieces Melville questions the limits of visual and written representations; in "Chattanooga" he literally takes the physical measure of Grant:

X KINDLING impulse seized the host Inspired b j heaven's elastic air; Their hearts outran their General's plan, Though Grant colnlnanded thereGrant, who without reserve can dare; And, 'Well, go on and d o your will,' He said, and measured the mountain then:

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness" So master-riders fling the reinBut you must Itnow your men.

190)

Here, Grant becomes the embodiment of democratic principles. He is able to understand his soldiers because he comes from them. There is an intrinsic correspondence between the General and the physical topography of the nation; thus, he successfully "measured the mountain then." Melville appends a note to this poem which questions the General's reaction to his troops running away from his command to capture Look-out Mountain: General Grant, at Culpepper, a few weeks prior to crossing the Rapidan for the Wilderness, expressed to a visitor his impression of the impulse and the spectacle: Said he, 'I never saw any thing like it:' language wl~ich seems curiously undertoned, considering its application; but from the taciturn Commander it was equivalent to a superlative or hyperbole from the talkative. The height of the Ridge, according to the account at hand, varies along its length from six to seven hundred feet above the plain; it slopes at an angle of about forty-five degrees. (249-50)

By following the description of Grant with a recursion into the landscape, Melville makes the obvious analogy that Grant springs from the American soil. Just as Look-out Mountain is one of the startling feats of nature that rises from the Western plains, "Donelson," "Shiloh," "Chattanooga," and "The Armies of the Wilderness" follow Grant's meteoric rise from obscurity. In "The Armies of the Wilderness" all the regiments are spread out across the landscape. Literally the whole nation is represented in microcosm on the bluffs. The Confederate prisoner points out this panorama, " 'Yonder-see-are our Georgians; on the crest, /The Carolinians; lower, past the glen, /VirginiansAlabamians-Mississippians-Ikntuckian / (Follow my finger)-Tennesseans" (95). Against this background, Grant emerges as a representative product of all parts of the nation, regardless of their sectionalism. In the early poems of Battle-Pieces, Grant's individual character is inextricable from his public or national image. In "Donelson" and "Chattanooga" he is the Grant the reader recognizes, and Melville becomes deliberately complicit in the dissemination of this image. This is the Grant who stands before Timothy O'Sullivan's camera at City Point in 1864. In a diffidence reminiscent of Whitman's 1855 frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Grant comes before his observer as the quintessential expression of American individualism and simplicity. Of course this everyman quality was one of Grant's signatures. He met Lee, who was dressed in his full formal uniform, at Appomattox Court Horse in a uniform dirty from riding all day. McDonough relates several anecdotes about Grant: Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

120

There was nothing about his appearance that caused the average person to remember him. When he arrived at Pittsburgh Landing on April 6, in the fury of battle, and gave an order t o the colonel of the Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, that officer just stared blankly at him. The colonel did not Itnow who Grant was, and Grant was compelled to identify himself before the Inan would take action. Later on in the day at Shiloh, Grant inadvertently wandered into the line of vision of a signal corpsman who was sending messages across the river relative to the disposition of William Nelson's troops from Buell's army A young lieutenant, who had been assigned to keep the corpsman's view unobstructed, likewise did not recognize Grant and yelled out at the general: "Git out of the way there! Ain't you got no sense?" (McDono~igh28)

By the end of the war and the time Battle-Pieces was published, Grant was a national hero of epic proportions. In thanks for the Union victory, he received a house at 20rh and Chestnut Streets from wealthy Philadelphians and everywhere filled sidewalks with crowds wishing to give him accolades (McFeely 232). In the City Point photograph, Grant stands alone, refusing to sit, just as he disdains the traditional army regalia and the sword that would signify his rank and importance. He is the common man, emerging from his unremarkable Ohio and West Point background to substantiate the myth that anyone can succeed and remake himself in the United States. Battle-Pieces establishes Grant as a new type of democratic hero, but it also builds up this image to interrogate and explode it. "The Armies of the Wilderness" adds depth to the surface depiction of "Corps Commander" by portraying the General as the perfect leader for this horrific modern war. In the wake of the unprecedented carilage at Shiloh, Lincoln considered withdrawing Grant. Secretary of War Stanton wired Grant's superior Halleck, "the President desires to know.. . . whether any neglect or misconduct of General Grant or any other officer contributed to the sad casualties" (McFeely 116). In this inquiry, Lincoln and Stanton buck against a new kind of total warfare, and Grant becomes the embodiment of this technological "advancement." As their questioning suggests, the battle of Shiloh or Pittsburgh Landing changed the scale of fighting in the Civil War. O n April 6, 1862, 75,000 Federal and Confederate soldiers converged on Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River (McDonough 9 6 ) . By the time General Beauregard ordered his troops to retreat on April 7, the South had lost one of the definitive battles of the Civil War and the North had broken the Memphis and Charleston Railroad-the only line connecting the Mississippi River to Virginia. Melville was very much aware of this historical trajectory. His poems follow Grant through his bloodiest battles and increasingly question the General's character. In the midst of the seductively pastoral "Shiloh. A Requiem. (April, 1862.)," he deposits a line that bears with it a marked pronouncement on the subsequent course of the war. Against a scene where Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

121

Plate 4.3. Frontispiece, Leaves of G~ass,1855: engraving based on daguerreotype of Whitman made by Gabriel Harrison. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Libras!; New York (PML 6069 Frontispiece).

"swallows fly low / Over the field in clouded days, 1 The forest-field of Shiloh," he adds the apparent aside, "(What like a bullet can undeceive!)"[63]. In his examination of Grant, Melville concentrates on the same personal responsibility that worried Lincoln. "Chattanooga" broaches the subject of Grant's conscience: Grant stood on cliffs whence all was plain, And smoked as one who feels no cares; But mastered nervousness intense Alone such calmness wears. 190) Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

122

These lines move from the external image of Grant with his ubiquitous cigar to the omniscient narrator's pronouncement of the General's profound concern for his men. As this collection follows Grant through his various campaigns, however, it cannot sustain the level of certainty revealed in "Chattanooga." Just as the complete narrative of Battle-Pieces marks a transition from the pastoral berry-picking party of "The March into Virginia" to the skeletal remains in the Wilderness, Melville's narrators ask the reader to descend into knowledge in our evaluation of Grant and the heroic. The turning point in the portrayal of Grant's character occurs at the beginning of Part I1 of "The Armies of the Wilderness": The May-weed springs; and comes a M a n And mounts our Signal Hill; A quiet Man, and plain in garbBriefly he loolzs his fill, Then drops his gray eye on the ground, Like a loaded mortar he is still: Meekness and grimness meet in himThe silent General.

(99)

In contrast to the poetic conventions of renewal that are evoked by the "May-weed springs," Grant becomes the physical embodiment of war. N o longer is he simply an outpouring of the unique American landscape. Here, with his eternal bird's eye view, he is the instrument of modern warfare itself. He is "meek" because he is the agent of a "grim" force larger than himself. The eternal silence with which Battle-Pieces imbues him stems only from anticipation, from the moment when he will unleash and deliver death. In a reversal of a photograph taken at Bethesda Church in June of 1864 where Grant, his generals, and his men in the Wilderness campaign hold a meeting outdoors on pews taken from the church, in "The Armies of the Wilderness" he transmits broken covenants to his men: They snug their huts with the chapel-pews, In court-houses stable their steedsKindle their fires with indentures and bonds, And old Lord Fairfax's parchment deeds; (98)

The Bethesda Church photograph of Grant and his generals reveals a new order that necessitates a break with the sacred and with the division of the three parts of government. The commander aild his generals have reconfigured the house of God by bringing the pews outside. In a god-like appropriation of power, they merge religion and government into a single mission. The recasting of this image in "The Armies of the Wilderness" extends the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

123

ramifications of Grant's assumption of a God-like office. In the inverted world of this poem, the armies follow their leader in his breaking of the traditional structures of government: they furnish their tents with pews and keep their horses in court-houses. As the Bethesda Church photograph suggests, Grant has taught his people to sit around him worshipfully; he has literally brought the church into the army, and his men continue in his path in the necessary task of subverting the branch of the law and the "courthouses" to the army. In the wake of transformed laws and the "fires" of renegotiated servitude, these lines question what world will be left to inhabit if the original political contracts and religious covenants of the American project have been replaced by a commander and his generals. "The Armies of the Wilderness" fractures the heroic surface of "Corps Commander" and shows the fruition of the image of Grant as "a loaded mortar" in the stanza: The foe that held his guarded hills Must speed to woods afar; For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth With the slowly-smoked cigar-

Plate 4.4. X council of war at Massaponax Church, VA, May 21, 1864. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Reproduction Number LC-B8 15-0732).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative The scheme that smouldered through winter long Now bursts into act-into warThe resolute scheme as a heart as calm As the Cyclone's core.

(100-101)

In the ultimate revision of the image of a man in "Chattanooga" whose calmness masks "nervousness intense," these lines raise the far more terrifying possibility that Grant feels nothing for the men he maneuvers and commands. In other words, if the carnage of the Civil War attains a scale that is impossible to wrap the mind around, even more incomprehensible is the idea that Grant has become the instrument he commands to his very core. Probing into his depths, this poem asks if he has only the coldness and the automaton-like exactitude of the inunie ball or the Monitor. Throughout "The Armies of the Wilderness" an interrupting italicized voice appears that places the quotidian losses and experiences of this war within the larger context of history and nation. At the beginning of Part 11, immediately after the "Signal Hill" passage, another appraisal of Grant appears: Were men but strong and wzse, Honest as Grant, and calm, War wozdd be left to the red and black ants, And the happy world dzsarm. 199)

Garner reads this passage without irony, stating that Melville thought Grant to "be the kind of man who, had he been given the larger management of affairs, would have prevented the suffering" (Garner 327). According to Garner, Melville refers to the "Brute Neighbors" chapter in Walden in order to emphasize Grant's humanity. While Garner's optimistic analysis might fit "Corps Commander," it does not coalesce with Melville's use of Thoreau as a literary reference. In "Brute Neighbors" Thoreau draws a world devoid of humanity: It was the only battle wl~ichI have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. O n every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.. . . I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference.. . . I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue.. . . Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

125

gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, wl~osebreastplate was apparently too thiclz for him to pierce.. . . The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill. (Thoreau, Walden 155-157)

When this excerpt from Walden is read back into the image of Grant in "The Armies of the Wilderness," the poem's lines say nothing about Grant's pacifism. Melville's use of Thoreau, like so much of Battle-Pieces, is a maze, a literary riddle that brings the reader one step closer to understanding his versions of the Civil War. In "Brute Neighbors" it is quite clear that the ants are not insects. They live in the human environment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and Thoreau himself testifies that "the more you think of it, the less the difference" between animals and humans. If, as Melville suggests, war under Grant "would be left to the red and black ants," it would most certainly "disarm" the "happy world," but not in any sense of a charming renewal. These human ants would decimate the "happy world" because they demonstrate the same internecine warfare that led to the Civil War. The brilliance of Melville's comparison between Grant and Thoreau lies in the commander's "calm." Almost fifteen years prior to the Civil War, by excitedly watching the ants, Thoreau curiously foreshadows the visitors to Brady's galleries who gazed with fascination upon Gardner's corpses. At the same time, Melville suggests that Grant, with his eternal bird's-eye-perspective, is observing the battles of his troops with singular disinterest. In short, this analogy argues that Grant feels the same "excitement" and detachment watching soldiers die as Thoreau felt placing insects under a microscope or that a camera might portray. Ultimately, if "Corps Commander" allows both viewer and reader to glide along a surface representation of heroism, the doubling of Grant and Thoreau in "The Armies of the Wilderness" delves into the depths of the representation of the epic hero as he developed during the Civil War. As "Corps Commander" intimates, its audience may very well want to stay on the surface, to linger within the photograph's frame. Whereas the photograph contains a sanitizing lack of depth, Melville's literary images convey an inconceivable emptiness. They tell the reader that modern man, that the "modern hero," has himself been turned into a mechanical instrument whose disinterest precludes the possibility of depth and of a soul. At the end of this analysis, the scope of Melville's intentions in BattlePieces impresses itself upon the reader. In a humanistic attempt to lead the reader toward a better understanding of the post-Civil War world, this collection contrasts its faith in the relationship between writer and reader with the world of broken covenants it depicts. O n every level, this collection has portrayed a broken world: brothers have broken their familial bonds, the American people have failed in their founding covenant, one race Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

126

of men has betrayed another, the chosen landscape has proven itself immune to the deaths piled upon it, and individual man has lost his soul and his obligation to God. In the face of this, Melville dedicates himself to representing the war, in its "aspects," in the hope that these representations will help rebuild a world based on Union. In the closing prose "Supplement," he warns against the divisive Northern desire for vengeance, "WERE I fastidiously anxious for the symmetry of this book, it would close with the notes. But the times are such that patriotism-not free from solicitude-urges a claim overriding all literary scruples" (259). In keeping with his abhorrence of division, he provides the South with a voice and presents his audience with a choice: the "great qualities of the South, those attested in the War, we can perilously alienate, or we may make them nationally available at need" (267).In light of the care with which Melville weighs his representations of the war and their ability to further unification instead of the divisive forces of Reconstruction, the commercial failure of Battle-Pieces becomes tragically ironic. It is with this failure in mind that this collection becomes inextricably linked as a symbol to "A failure, and complete, 1Was your Old Stone Fleet" (32). In the midst of Battle-Pieces's idealistic revisioning of the relationship between author and nation, perhaps Melville recognized that his career had taken the path of the Old Stone Fleet. Perhaps he realized that this collection, with its critical measuring of popular forms of representation and popular heroes, did not belong to the time in which it was written. Looked at with the hindsight called forth by its title, "The Apparition. (A Retrospect.)" adds an air of skepticism to Melville's musings about his work's posterity and the power of the written word: CONVULSIONS came; and, where the field

Long slept in pastoral green, X goblin-mountain was upheaved (Sure the scared sense was all deceived), Marl-glen and slag-ravine. The unreserve of I11 was there, The clinkers in her last retreat; But, ere the eye could take it in, Or mind could comprehension win, It sunk!-and a t our feet. So, then, Solidity's a crustThe core of fire below; A11 may go well for many a year, But who can think without fear Of horrors that happen so?

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

"Sounding the Wilderness"

127

In this beautifully written poem about the explosion of the Petersburg mine, Melville sounds a final warning to his reader about the importance of representing this war. The famous Battle of the Crater was one of the most technologically innovative ideas of the war and one of its most tragic executions. In June of 1864, Colonel Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania, a regiment of many coal miners, proposed that he and his men run a mine shaft under the Confederate fort 150 yards away and blow it up. The explosion blew a hole 170 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, and buried a Confederate regiment and artillery battery. In a confusion over whether to send black troops, as planned, into the breach, the Federals released unprepared white troops. These troops soon lost their advantage and sustained 4,000 casualties. Grant describes his last-minute decision to switch divisions: "it would then be said . . . that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front" (McPherson 759). Looking back on the fiasco, Grant mourned, "It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have" (McPherson 760). According to Melville's description of this tragedy, the eye as an organ is driven by its propensity for blindness; faced with a crater of hitherto unforeseen proportions, the eye refuses to "take" in the magnitude and the rapidity of the explosion. The mind cannot form a visual image for this catastrophe of modern technology, and it is left to words, in the years after the conflict, to disrupt the surface of previous representations-to literally put death and destruction back into the "Solidity" of photographic representations like "Corps Commander." If the reader does not interrogate the surface of the Civil War, if she does not put depth back into its surface representations, this conflict and its causes will resurface, spectre-like, in the landscape of her present. In a faithful outpouring of humanism, Melville asks the reader to learn from this conflict and from the ways it is represented. Ultimately, as Battle-Pieces leaves the reader with the threat of future disruption and conflict, we can only hope that instead of being unable to learn from history and to repair the symbolic geographical ruptures and divisions of this collection, the volcanic return in "The Apparition" foretells the restoration of Battle-Pieces to its rightful place in the twenty-first century.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

CHAPTER FIVE

Seeing in Circles The Moving Panorama and Images of a Sanitized History in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Melville argues in Battle-Pieces that visual images cannot capture this moment for posterity; words, in his humanistic vision, are needed to interrogate the photograph's superficial surfaces. Written almost twenty years after the Civil War, Mark Twain's Life o n the Mississippi (1883), by contrast, describes actions that occur before and after the war. As a curiously hybrid text that lies somewhere between autobiography and travelogue, Life o n the Mississippi has been ignored in favor of the later Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Critics have, however, been quick to note that the famous "Raftsmen's Passage" appears in both works. This section, chapter three in Life o n the Mississippi, appeared in the 1876 draft of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in what is now chapter sixteen and was inserted in 1883 into Life o n the Mississippi; in 1884, the passage was omitted from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the publisher's suggestion (HF 233). This chapter attempts to remedy the omission of Life o n the Mississippi from critical studies by examining it within the context of the panorama. After discussing the panorama's historical context, it argues that Life o n the Mississippi mounts an implicit critique of the totalizing vision associated with the panorama and exposes this medium's inability to represent the Civil War. As the confusing intra-textual quotation of the "Raftsmen's Passage" intimates, part of the critical reluctance to examine Life o n the Mississippi stems from its lack of cohesion. It reads like two works patched roughly together. Chapters four through seventeen appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875 as "Old Times on the Mississippi." These chapters, detailing Twain's initiation as a cub-pilot, are usually considered the most engaging. Twain, urged by his friend and editor William Dean Howells to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly, tells of the ease with which his prewar experiences as a steamboat pilot translated themselves onto paper, "I take back the remark that I can't write for the Jan. number. For Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods and I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory and grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilot-house. He said, 'What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!' I hadn't thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run through 3 months or 6 or 9?-or about 4 months, say?" (Meltzer 164). Like Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

130

Through the Negative

the mythical river that runs through Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a symbol of the perpetual American childhood, the "Old Times" section is a nostalgic glorification of a time before the Civil War that had long since disappeared by the time of its publication. Twain establishes his claim as a recorder of the dying steamboat trade, "I am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day-and no man ever has tried to scribble about it yet.. . . I a m powerfully moved to write. Which is natural enough, since I am a person who would quit anything in a minute to go piloting, if the madam would stand it" (Meltzer 164). Part of the idyllic peacefulness and ease that imbue the first eighteen chapters of Life on the Mississippi stem from the link Twain makes between his literary form and the popular visual medium of the travelling panorama. Twain's contemporaries were quick to note the panoramic elements of his works; thus, Walter Besant reviews Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1898, "[tlhere is no motive in the book; there is no moral; there is no plot. The book is like a panorama in which the characters pass across the stage and do not return.. . . All happens by chance; the finger of providence-which means the finger of Mark Twain-is nowhere visible" (Besant 659). In the 1840s, the Mississippi became the subject of the immensely successful moving panorama. Painted on a scroll that could either take the audience up or down the river, moving panoramas encapsulate a particularly American way of seeing. John Banvard, the creator of the first Mississippi panorama, traveled thousands of miles of the Mississippi in order to provide his audience with an accurate portrayal of the river's most notable and picturesque points. The popularity of this "three mile painting" cannot be understated. In nine months the work attracted 251,702 visitors in Massachusetts, and special trains were contracted to bring visitors from nearby towns to the panorama (Hyde 132). The governor of Massachusetts and members of the state legislature passed resolutions of appreciation (Dondore 820). In London, Banvard estimated that 1,259 people a day saw the huge canvas (Hyde 133). Twain was well-acquainted with the moving panorama. He grew up on the Mississippi in Hannibal, Missouri, not far from St. Louis which was a center of the panorama industry during the 1840s and 1850s (Dahl22).1At the turn of the century, Twain poignantly declares himself a citizen of the nineteenth century and its cultural expressions, "the 20th Century is a stranger to me. I wish it well, but my heart is all for my own century. I took 65 years of it, just on a risk, but if I had known as much about it as I know now I would have taken the whole of it" (ICaplan 357). The panorama taught Twain ways of seeing, and these in turn condition the tale of the river that emerges in Life o n the Mississippi (Dahl 30). Its digressive and occasionally didactic style mirror the episodic lecture that would have accompanied the visual unrolling of the canvas. This chapter begins by examining the characteristics of the Mississippi panorama that make it a particularly American form. My overall concern is Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

131

not to belabor the familiar observation that panoramic elements fill Twain's work. Too often critics, while remarking on this phenomenon, fail to analyze the fundamental questions about history and nation that lie at the base of any artist's use of the panorama. This tendency afflicts Twain studies in particular. With a few exceptions, Twain critics have been content simply to list the qualities this work shares with the painted panorama. To my knowledge, there have been no critical works to date to examine Life on the Mississippi's panoramic elements, or even the more general question of the theoretical concerns behind the literary application of the panorama, with the detail and historical precision of Stephan Oettermann's and John Francis McDerinott7s studies. The best article I have found on this subject was published in 1961 by Curtis Dahl. Dahl's "Mark Twain and the Moving Panoramas" provides an excellent touchstone from which to begin to combine a cultural and literary analysis of Life on the Mississippi's use of the panorama. Dahl concentrates on the panorama as a form of seeing that has distinct conventions that have to be learned, by both viewer and artist. In reference to Twain, Dahl argues that the moving panorama "molded his vision and thus helped to determine the content and points of view of his books. When he came to write about the Mississippi, he saw the river (as I have indicated in my comparison) largely as the panoramas of the Mississippi had taught him to see it" (Dahl30).In contrast to the general tendency in Twain studies to ignore the questions of history and nation that are implicit in the panorama as a literary form, this chapter argues that the need to include the Civil War in Life on the Mississippi precipitated an abrupt change in Twain's approach. When Twain returns to the river and writes the second half of Life on the Mississippi in 1882, he mounts an implicit critique of the panorama as a way of seeing both the American landscape and American history. Quite simply, Twain is able to sustain the panorama as a literary form in "Old Times" until he confronts the presence of the Civil War. At that point, he must contend with the changed character of the rivet Chronologically, the two sections of Life on the Mississippi correspond to the panorama's periods of popularity. After a respite from its fevered reception during the 1840s and SOs, the panorama reappears in the 1880s with works such as the painting of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle. Although the panorama's popularity surged during the period when Twain was writing, the second half of Life on the Mississippi argues that this form cannot be reconciled with the post-Civil War landscape. As a form, the panorama resists change. All the events on the canvas occur simultaneously. With its images of a totalized and harmonious whole, the panorama cannot capture the defining characteristic of civil war-division. In the face of the panorama's revival, the second half of Life on the Mississippi exposes this limitation. The panorama can chronicle neither the demise of the steamboat, the closing of the frontier, nor the division and destroyed landscapes the Civil War left in its wake. N o full or complete record of the seven profitable and popular moving Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

132

Through the Negative

canvases of the Mississippi remains. These paintings have either been destroyed by fire or lost. McDermott counts five "tremendous likenesses" of the Mississippi. They were painted, respectively, by John Banvard, John Rowson Smith, Samuel Stockwell, Henry Lewis, and Leon Pomarede. In his conclusion and appendices, McDerinott references three other panoramas of the Mississippi: Hudson's Mississippi Panorama of the O h i o and Lower Mississippi O n l y (1848); the Dickeson-Egan Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley which is now owned by the St. Louis Museum; and John Stevens's Panorama of the Sioux War (1862).Four circular panoramas exist in the United States today (Oettermann 347). They are the Battle of Gettysburg painted by Paul Philippoteaux, presently housed at the Gettysburg Cyclorama Center in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; T h e Battle of Atlanta painted by William Wehner and residing in Atlanta, Georgia; and T h e Palace and Gardens of Versailles painted by John Vanderlyn and on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The final circular panorama, the A r m y of Cumberland, was painted by William Travis and can be seen at the National Museum of American History, Sinithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The first three of these works were restored in the early 80s (Oettermann 347). Since no moving panorama survives, it is impossible to do more than approximate the experience of viewing this medium. At best, the twentyfirst-century critic can piece together the reviews, the accompanying lecture books, and the preliminary artistic studies and paintings. As a term, "panorama" was coined by Robert Barker in 1793 when he decided to build three rooms in Leicester square. Barker's "invention" of the circular painting was deemed important enough to warrant a royal patent in 1787 (Bergmann 121). While it may seem strange to put a patent on a way of seeing, the extent to which the panorama departs from western pictorial conventions cannot be underestimated. The panorama accompanies the opening of the public picture gallery in Europe, and its depictions of local scenes like London from Albion Mills gave the new bourgeois viewing audience the means to see itself depicted. In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Walter Benjamin notes that for the first time, "the city dweller, whose polit-

Plate 5.1. Panorama of Lolldon from the Albion Mills, 1792-93. Frederick Eirnie after Robert Barker. Aquatint. Courtesy of the Yale Center for Eritish Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, CT. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

133

ical superiority over the country is expressed in many ways in the course of the century, attempts to introduce the countryside into the city. In panoramas the city dilates to become landscape, as it does in a subtler way for the flaneur" (Benjamin, "Paris" 150). In Benjamin's cursory analysis, the panorama emerges with a change in the scale of living. It surfaces first in England. As a product of the Industrial Revolution, it attempts to resolve the conflicting emotions of disengagement provoked by technological "progress." The overview and total view of the panoramic vista are a panacea to the claustrophobia of a seemingly shrinking world with its encroaching rail systems and factories. The panorama, in short, is an anodyne to the world Melville depicts in "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" where both protagonists are caught in a series of increasingly alien interactions with the city they inhabit. It allows the viewer to place himself within the landscape and fosters the illusion of total control over this environment. In what Stephan Oettermann terms "see-fever," nineteenth-century man "discovers the horizon" and turns from looking upwards to God to looking down upon his physical environment. The panorama, as an invention, signals man's need for overview and for a representation of the totality of a scene, as do the contemporary Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty with their observation towers and decks (Oettermann 11). The panorama illustrates a need for synthesis in an increasingly complicated world, a world that literally changed in scale with the Industrial Revolution. The experience of these circular paintings, however, did not confer the comfort and the command they initially promised. By physically surrounding and confining the viewer, the panorama removes him from a stable subject position and places him, once again, within a world that is overwhelming in the number of its details and distractions (Galperin 42). Attempting to provide a sense of perspective, these circular paintings succeed only in trapping the viewer and reaffirming a world that has literally lost its frame. The subjects chosen for the first circular panoramas reveal the volatile terrain the form promises to control. The two primary subjects of Barker's paintings are representations of the City of London and battles, namely the most famous Battle of Waterloo (Oettermann 112). These topics suggest the

Plate 5.1. (continzd)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

134

panorama's inextricable linkage with a new and nascent form of nationalism. The British viewing public can see in these paintings both its industrial and military successes, and these triumphal images are meant to instill the new bourgeois public with a unified, and necessarily patriotic, world view. The argument that the panorama emerges simultaneously with nationalism is substantiated today by the fact that two of the twentieth-century panoramas were built by countries fighting for self-definition and recognition. In 1968 a panorama of the Battle of Al-Qadissiya was constructed in Bagdad. This panorama commemorates the battle fought in 637 AD between the Arabs and the Persians. During the battle, the Arabs put out the eyes of their opponents' elephants and all of the Persian elephants panicked and fled. The panorama is accompanied by sound effects. The second panorama is the Panorama of the Arab-lsmeli War constructed by the Egyptian Army in 1988. In the Heliopolis on the outskirts of Cairo, this rotunda houses the largest panorama in the world (Hyde 199-210). In contrast to the variety of subjects treated by the European panoramas, the American panoramas before the Civil War concentrate on a single theme-the Mississippi Rivet This focus suggests that Americans imbue the river with an epic stature that coalesces with the images of themselves they want to see in these tumultuous years. The American moving panorama, as a form, differs profoundly from the circular panorama because it attempts, for the first time, to create motion on a two-dimensional surface (Oettermann 70). In an 1849 review, the Louisville Courier documents this form's "magic realism": We are amused a t a respectable old gentleman from the countr!; in the vicinity of Rock River; of which a beautiful view is given in this picture, who sat apparently wrapt in the contemplation of the ever changing scenes, giving utterance occasionally to some commendatory remark. When all a t once he burst out, 'well, who'd a thought it,-if they haven't got my very house right down here on this picture, yes,-that's the place,-barn-the big walnut tree,-the old gate'-and as the picture came more fully into view-'if there ain't old Bally and the white mare, well, it 1s surprising how the mischief he come to get it so natural I don't Itnow, stop the boat and let me get out.' (McDermott 139-4011 This review is reminiscent of the stories about spectators of the first films who abandoned their seats in the face of oncoming trains or waves (Hansen 26). While the believability of the panorama or the silent film is suspect to the cynical twenty-first-century viewer, each of these anecdotes describes the viewer struggling to learn a new way of seeing. The man before the moving panorama must discover how to read images that move from left to right. For the first time in history, he is asked to synthesize visual images with the accompanying soundtrack of lecturer and pianist. The similarity in the reactions of the viewer to the panorama and silent Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

135

film suggest that the panorama, in its attempts to wed sound and image and to depict movement and temporal progression, is an early prototype for film. Critics of the panorama argue that film and television provide the closest approximation for the viewing experience of the panorama. William Galperin argues that the "Diorama and the Panorama as prototypes-or, better still, as the components of an 'archeology of cinema'-remember the agency that a visible image, in cooperation with a romantic spectator, is capable of producing" (Galperin 71). A similar attempt to connect the panorama to twentiethcentury representation occurs in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium when Oettermann states that the panorama's eyewitness portrayal of the military make it the contemporary equivalent of TV journalism (Oettermann 44 and 125). In his introduction, Ralph Hyde describes the cultural backdrop to his work, "the decision of the National Film Theatre to mount a season of widescreen films in conjunction with Panoramanin! allows us to bring the story up to date and to make connections between a major contemporary art form and its immediate precursors" (Hyde 7). The comparison between moving panorama and film illuminates the history and defining characteristics of film as a medium at the same time that it helps the twenty-first-century viewer to approximate the panoramic viewing experience. The panorama is first replaced by photographic images in the 1840s. Although it later experiences a revival, the form becomes obsolete with the coming of the cinema in the 1890s as companies like the Pooles integrate film into their panoramic programs (Hyde 135). The relationship between panorama and film, however, does not account for the conscious artificiality and the broad stroke of the moving canvas or for the proliferation of recognizable "river types" and caricatures that dominate these huge paintings. In opposition to the Louisville Courier, I would argue that the nineteenth-century viewer of the Mississippi pictures is never fooled by the reality of what he sees. He does not confuse the world he inhabits with that depicted. Instead, on the moving surface, he sees the ideological depiction of the America he desires. He experiences the image of an America that is characterized by an endless frontier, union, and a happy reconciliation with the institution of slavery. N o one gazing at the idealized scene in George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flat Boat Men believes that anyone could mistake this sentimental surface for reality. This is a fiction that they want to believe in and inhabit. In terms of twenty-first-century viewing experiences, the artificial elements of the panorama makes it more similar to a Disneyland ride than to early film. American panoramas add mummies, skeletons, and faux terrain, while several of the European moving panoramas transport the viewer to distant places and times with stage props and vicarious journeys of the kind encountered on Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride (Rathbone, Catalogue 131). At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, the audience sits in railway cars on a trip from Moscow to Peking on the TransSiberian Railway or makes up the seven hundred spectators bound on the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

136

Plate 5.2. The Jolly Flat Eoat Men, painted by George Caleh Eingham, esq.; engrayed by T. Doney; printed by Powell and Co., circa 1847. Mezzotint. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Di~ision(Reproduction Number LC-USZC4-49041.

journey from Villefranche to Constantinople. In this second journey, the "traveler," sandwiched between two moving panoramas, must even weather a Mediterranean storm (Hyde 135). While the proliferation of details and the extension of the field of vision prompted spectators to call the panoramas "nausearamas," for the most part panoramas offer sanitized versions of history. Like the vocal machine seagulls at Disneyland whose sole purpose it is to keep "real" birds from sullying the park, the moving panorama provides a world devoid of ideological conflict and cleans the dirt, pollution, and other bi-products of the Industrial Revolution. Curiously enough, "Tom Sawyer's Island," circled by the steamboat Mark Twain, in Disneyland is the only part of the theme park that Walt Disney designed entirely himself (Fishkin 147). Warren Susinan provides a cogent analysis of Disneyland that can be read backwards to understand better the nineteenth-century panorama: In 1955, there opened on the outsltirts of Los Angeles a fabulous amusement park. Built by Walt Disney, the world-famous cartoonist and creator

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

137

of Mickey Mouse, it was an extraordinary effort to create a collective representation of a utopian and ideal American world, a very special lzind of world. In contrast to other examinations, it is important to explore how Disneyland (and later Disney World) can be seen as an attempt to resolve the tensions within the structure of desire. Disneyland is a world of the self-contained. At its center, Main Street USA, is a community of consumption where you can buy everything you want. Yet it is also the ideal prototype, the expression of the ideal vision of America, with all the repressed instincts remaining repressed. Here, the instinctual has not returned, for the amusements and rides raise only those pleasures wllich can be satisfied within the limits of the Disneyland itself. . . . As a matter of fact, the whole environment is ordered so that one can feel a sense of mastery as one participates in it. It makes one feel good about a society which is neatly balanced among the past (conveniently analyzed), the present, and the future. It is all contained; it tells the whole story; it provides the mythic essence of what life was supposed to be like in the 1940s and 1950s. (Sus~nan31)

Susman's description of the viewer's "sense of mastery" parallels early responses to the panorama as an attempt to control the rapidly expanding industrial city. While Susinan here concentrates solely on how "good" Main Street USA makes one feel about society, the inevitable saturation that comes at the end of a Disney day similarly mirrors the dislocation and "nausea" that nineteenth-century viewers of the panorama describe. The definitive study of the American moving panorama is John McDermott's T h e Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi. Since this work's publication in 1958 and the City Art Museum of St. Louis's exhibition in 1949, few critics have discussed the moving panorama as a form particularly suited to the topography of the United States and to the political climate preceding the Civil War. In the recently translated T h e Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, Stephan Oettermann broaches the topic of the moving panorama's American genesis. Oettermann argues that Europe's circular painting is "visually inadequate to the situation" in which Americans find themselves in the nineteenth century. Whereas the circular panorama reflected a huge expansion of perspective for Europeans, Americans "were dealing with dimensions in their own country that could not be grasped or conquered simply by climbing to an elevated point and surveying the horizon" (Oettermann 323). Oettermann substantiates his point by citing Charles Dickens's review of the opening of Banvard's Mississippi Panorama published in the Examiner on December 16, 1 8 4 8 : But it is a picture three miles long, ~11ichoccupies two hours in its passage before the audience. It is a picture of one of the greatest streams in the known world, whose course it follows up\vards of three thousand miles . . . .

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

138

T h r o u g h t h e Negative

These three miles of canvas have been painted by one man, and there he is, present, pointing out what he deems most worthy of notice. This is history Poor, untaught, wholly unassisted, he conceives the idea-a truly American idea-of painting 'the largest picture in the world'. . . . Few can fail to have some interest in such an adventure and in such an adventurer, and they will both repay it a m p l y . . . The picture itself, as an indisputably true and faithful representation of a wonderful region-wood and water, river and prairie, lonely log hut and clustered city rising in the forest-is replete with interest throughout. Its incidental revelations of the different states of societ!; yet in transition, prevailing at different points of these three thousand miles-slaves and free republicans, French and Southerners; immigrants from abroad and restless Yankees and Down-Easters ever steaming somewhere; alligators, store-boats, show-boats, theatreboats, Indians, buffaloes, deserted tents of extinct tribes, and bodies of dead Braves, with their pale faces turned up to the night sky, lying still and solitary in the wilderness, nearer and nearer to which the outposts of civilisation are approaching with gigantic strides to tread their people down, and erase their very track from the earth's face-teem with suggestive mattes. We are not disposed to think less ltindly of a country when we see so much of it, although our sense of immense responsibility may be increased. (Oettermann 329)

Dickens intimates that the size of the panorama is directly proportional to the magnitude of the ambitions behind the American project. Like the mammoth 20-by-24-inch negatives that the San Francisco photographer Carleton Watkins creates of the Pacific Northwest, the length of the Mississippi panorama suggests an aggressive attempt on the part of the painter to measure visually the importance and the length of the United States' history and landscape (Snyder 182). The paternalistic tone of this review betrays Dickens's reaction to the panorama's inherent sense of excess. In Dickens's description, he and England occupy the position of a laissez-faire parent before a child, the United States, whom they know is doomed to fail. Dickens reads the size of the panorama as an assertive publication of the strength and superiority of the United States. In rebuttal, he turns the river into a diminutive "stream" and focuses on the slaves and Indians, two sure signs that the American project is floundering, if it has not already failed. The size of the Mississippi panorama makes it a precursive form, punctuated by the same excess in expenditure and viewing time that Vivian Sobchak locates in the Hollywood historical epic. According to Sobchak, it takes 222 minutes for the South to fall in G o n e With t h e Wind, and the spectator's body is literally written upon by this experience (Sobchak 36). In both G o n e With t h e W i n d and, I would suggest, the panorama, history is made literal and material through scale. Just as Fleming's viewer physically experiences the duration of the South's fall, the viewer journeying from Villefranche to Constantinople "on board" the panorama at the Exposition Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

139

Plate 5.3. Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley, CA, circa 1865 or 1866, by Carleton E. Watltins. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (ReproductionNumber LC-USZ62-794.54).

Universelle undergoes a bout of seasickness. The image on the canvas or screen becomes "real" only through its monetary, temporal and proportional excesses. The historical accuracy, and its accompanying cost, were selling points of both the Hollywood epic and the nineteenth-century panorama. David Selznick spent over one hundred thousand dollars to make the women's costumes for Gone With the Wind, and an additional ten thousand was required to launder these meticulously researched costumes during the six months of filming (Clinton 135). It supposedly took four hundred days, a huge outlay of time, capital, and materials, for Banvard to complete the preliminary sketches for the Mississippi panorama that was to make him a millionaire (McDermott 26-27). Banvard's anonymous biographer tells us that when the artist went to work on his sketches in 1841, he was determined "to paint a picture of the beautiful scenery of the Mississippi, which should be as superior to all others, in point of size, as that prodigious river is superior to the streamlets of Europe-a gigantic idea!-which seems truly kindred to the illimitable forests and vast extents of his native land" (McDermott 23). At the same time that the panorama's extension of the pictorial frame indicates an endlessly regenerative world of possibility, this expansion and Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

140

Through the Negative

the sheer proliferation of details also signal the ultimate unrepresentability of crucial nineteenth-century issues, most particularly slavery and the Indian question. Just as the slave and free states pushed westward in the search for land that had not yet been exhausted by tobacco and cotton, the panorama extends the frame in the hope that with enough physical space, the societal forces behind these issues will come into balance and achieve a "compromise" that will keep the nation together. Dickens's review suggests that Great Britain has a "responsibility" to save the United States from itself. By contrast, most American commentary on the Mississippi panorama sees in it a depiction of the unified strength of the United States. Although the Mississippi divides the East and West and historically acts as the gateway between the free North and the slave South, the river has long held the mythical stature of unifying agent. Even the expatriate T. S. Eliot underlines the importance of this river to the national consciousness, "there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big rivet In my early years, the river made a great impression on me, and it was a treat to be taken down to the Eads Bridge in flood time. My people were Northerners and New Englanders, and I have spent many years out of America altogether; but the Missouri and the Mississippi river have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world" (Eliot, St. Louis Post-Dispatch). The nineteenth-century responses to the Mississippi reveal a nation in the process of constructing the mythical and unifying importance of this body of water. The popularity of the American moving panorama as a type of mass entertainment suggests that this medium crystallizes a national desire in the decades leading up to the Civil War to see represented the "reality" of the United States as a land of illimitable promise. O n November 27, 1850, Fredrika Breiner writes, "the Mississippi River is the great cosmopolitan which unites all people, which gives a definite purpose to their activity, and determines their abode, and which enables the life of every one, the inhabitants themselves and their products, to circulate from the one end to the other of this great central valley" (Rathbone, Catalogue 156). In a similar vein, in 1826 Timothy Flint, a Presbyterian minister taking his family west from Boston, describes the boats that converge on the Mississippi, "they have come from regions, thousands of miles apart. They have floated to a common point of union" (Rathbone, Catalogue 159). O n the panorama's moving canvas the Mississippi River becomes an image that counterbalances the series of crises that inched the United States toward Civil War during the forties and fifties. Much like Huck Finn's childhood experiences on the river, the panorama nostalgically recreates a time that never existed. There is no Nat Turner Rebellion or Harper's Ferry on the panoramic screen; thus, Western Monthly Magazine declares in 1836, "we are glad that we have a native artist, who . . . has had the good sense to train his taste in the school of nature, and the patriotism to employ his genius on subjects connected with his own country. We are proud of such

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

141

men as Audubon and Catlin" (Rathbone, Catalogue 69). Perhaps one of the most remarkable testimonies to the American desire to see our country through the panoramic gaze occurs when Henry David Thoreau, one of the nineteenth-century writers most critical of U.S. policy at home and abroad, writes: Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi; and as I worked my way up the river in the light of today and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had loolted up the Moselle, now loolted up the Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff,-still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,-I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different ltind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we ltnow it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men. (Thoreau, "Wallting" 1747)

In an image that is clearly in dialogue, in concept if not in fact, with Dickens's reduction of the Mississippi to an insignificant "stream," Thoreau reads the panorama as America's competitive bid for entrance as a significant agent into the course and development of the "future" of western civilization. O n the panoramic canvas, the spectator finds an American "Rhine" that promises to surpass even the greatest achievements of Western Europe. Not surprisingly, the medium of the panorama forestalls any discussion of the ideological rifts in the United States. Quite literally, this form skims upon a world of surfaces. From the perspective of the middle of the river, the audience never enters the great plantation homes or the slave quarters depicted. The panorama creates slavery as something that happens behind closed doors. When slaves are portrayed, they are caricatures of the "happy slavem-often equipped with tambourine and wide-spread grin. The lecture accompanying John Rowson Smith's Four Mile Panorama supports the view of slavery as an acceptable and benign evil by remarking that in Natchez slave women "dressed in gaiter boots, silk bonnets with flowers, and silk cardinals, all of the latest New York fashion" (McDermott 64). As the panorama exposes its audience to seemingly new places, people, and notions, it performs a markedly didactic function. In the excerpted narration, the spectator is educated into believing that slavery cannot be all bad if slave women dress better than most white women. Continuing this validation of slavery, the artist points out the house of "a colored slaveowner" (McDermott 64). The viewer is clearly meant to recognize that if a black man is willing to enslave people like himself, if slavery is in essence ratified by people of color, then it must be a benevolent institution.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

142

Figure 5.4. Low Water in the Mississippi, circa 1865, printed by Currier and I x s . Colored Lithograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Reproduction Number LC-USZ-C4-1563).

In contrast to the panorama's predictable image of southern race relations, John Whittier's The Panorama and Other Poems (1856) predates Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi in its desire to expose the limitations of panoramic vision. In his abolitionist lecture, Whittier manipulates and overturns the panorama's consecration of the virgin landscape: X village straggling in loose disarray Of vulgar newness, premature decay; X tavern, crazy with its whiskey brawls, With 'Slaves at Auction!' garnishing its walls; Without, surrounded by a motley crowd, The shrewd-eyed salesman, garrulous and loud, . . . never scrupling, with a filthy jest, To sell the infant from its mother's breast.. . . Look once again! The moving canvas shows X slave p l a ~ ~ t a t i slovenly o ~ ~ ' ~ repose, Where, in rude cabins rotting midst their weeds, The human chattel eats, and sleeps, and breeds; And, held a brute, in practice, as in law, Becomes in fact the thing he's taken foc . . .

(Whittier 198-99)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

143

In a poem that is more remarkable for its manipulation of a mass medium than it is for its verse, Whittier attempts to harness the propagandistic elements of the panorama. He tries to use its verisimilitude to convince his audience of his abolitionist message. At the same time that Whittier uses the frontier caricatures that punctuate a piece like The Jolly Flat Boat Men and much of Twain's works, he moves beyond the two-dimensionality of the panorama to open the doors that the moving panorama fixes shut. While the moving panorama is dedicated to portraying a world devoid of national tensions and divisions, its verbal narration is driven by the central fear that the world the canvas depicts is, at best, vanishing or, at worst, never existed. The anxiety over this disappearing landscape surfaces in the pamphlet accompanying Smith's panorama: In America the country itself is ever on the change, and in another half century those who view this portrait of the Mississippi will not be able to recognize one twentieth part of its details. Where the forest now oovershado w the earth, and affords shelter to the wild beast, corn fields, orchards, towns, and villages, will give a new face to the scene, and tell of industry and enterprise, which will stimulate to new and untiring efforts. Places of small population will have swelled their limits, and there will be seen cities where are now beheld hamlets-mansions in the place of huts, and streets where the foot path and deer tracks are now only visible. H o w much might be gathered of ancient manners and histor!; had our ancestors bequeathed to us worlzs of a similar description. (McDermott 55-56)

The panorama, in the accompanying narrative, manufactures and delivers an immediate sense of history. Much like Olmsted's plans for Central Park, the panorama preserves an edenic pastoral moment in the United States' history, and it determines the nature of any future change by reassuring the audience that it will be defined by the twin boons of "industry and enterprise." A notable concern with recording the "vanishing Indian," the buffalo, and the unsettled western territories is characteristic of the panorama and indicates a desire to make "real" a world that is on the road to extinction. A description of the Sioux performing a "war dance upon the Grassy Plains which stretch away in the distance" accompanies the Banvard panorama. The painting then takes the spectator to the Grand Prairie, "with its tall waving grass, and myriads of wild flowers-one of the most beautiful sights in nature.. . . In the foreground is Mr. Banvard, seated upon a log, with his rifle by him, and his little skiff moored by the bank of the stream. Upon the gum tree, near him, will be seen one of the gorgeous tints of American foliage" (McDermott 34-35). In this montage, the panorama tells us that while the Indian and the buffalo may die, the rich landscape of the United States, the prairie and the bread-basket of the nation, will always be available to support us.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

144

O n a fundamental level, Banvard's appearance before the audience as both narrator and subject allows the audience to place itself within the panorama and to see itself against the bucolic background of the frontier. The inclusion of the figure of the artist as a way of signing his work is a staple of the panorama. Philippoteaux includes himself in his Gettysburg panorama. In the midst of the battle, this Frenchman stands against a tree, transformed from painter into soldier. While the Park Ranger at the Gettysburg Cyclorama theorizes this way of signing by suggesting "how else would you sign a circular painting?" the differences between signing with your name and with your full body need to be more fully considered within the context of nineteenth-century discourses surrounding the body. The inclusion of the artist's figure as signature illustrates the panoramic belief that bigger is better. At the same time, this replacement argues that the pictorial representation of the author's body is more authentic than its depiction in words, and it forces the audience to enter into the painting in order to find this hidden signature. Banvard's inclusion within the frame allows the viewer to take physical possession of the scene depicted. The artist literally combines the roles of panoramist with Midwestern land speculator when his show displays fertile prairie land that could be purchased for $1.25 an acre (Rathbone, Catalogue 129). A conversation between a squatter and the artist of Samuel Stockwell's panorama repeated in the Reveille pokes fun at the question of who owns the panorama's views: 'Look y r , you, with that awful ugly hat; what in thunder are you sittin' out thar in the rain for? Who are you? What are you goin' to do?' Sam replied facetiousl!; 'I am going to canvass the Mississippi.' The puzzled squatter wanted to l a o w if he was electioneering. 'No,' said Sam. 'I am going to "take the river."' 'Whar as you goin to take it to?' 'All round the country and over to England.' 'Well,' thought the squatter, 'afore you kin d o that, you'll hev to get an awful big tub, and sot yourself at the mouth to draw it off.' 'Oh, no,' says Sam. 'I am drawing it off now.' (McDermott 72)

The play on the double meanings of "draw," "canvas(s)" and "take" reveals that physical possession and ownership of the "new" territory is at stake. By implication, the mock fight between the squatter and painter over property rights foreshadows the eventual struggle over whether this land will be free or slave territory. In the face of this contested landscape, the panorama registers the compulsive desire to catalogue characteristic of nineteenth-century pre-Civil War discourse. Walt Whitman's incorporation of the catalogue into his poetry is, of course, the most frequently cited example of this impulse. According to Miles Orvell, Whitman's catalogue theorizes a "new relationCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

145

ship between part and whole that a mass civilization would establish" (Orvell 3). By "eschewing the tight organization of conventional poetry in favor of a loose, free-flowing, disorganized encyclopedia, Whitman had found the literary equivalent for one of the key patterns in nineteenthcentury popular culture, the organizational principle underlying the gallery, the panorama, and the exhibition hall-the containment of an infinitely expandable number of parts in an encompassing whole" (Orvell28). The panorama, with its plethora of details, appears at the same time as the daguerreotypist Robert Vance's monumental project to daguerreotype and display every aspect of the northern California environment.^ In a similarly encyclopedic project, John James Audubon travels the lower valley of the Mississippi to catalogue its birds for his legendary Birds of America (1827-30). Not only does Audubon desire to paint his subjects in their natural environment, but, like the scale of Watkins's mammoth negatives, he determines to draw each bird in actual size (Rathbone, Life 34). In yet another manifestation of the all-embracing attitude of the age, George Catlin arrives in St. Louis in 1830 and begins a journey into the Far West that culminates in his monumental Illustrations of the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North America Indians (1841). Catlin explains the inspiration behind his project: I have flown to their rescue, not of their lives or of their race (for they are 'doomed' and must perish), but to the rescue of their loolts and their modes, at wl~ichthe acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death; yet phoenixlike they may rise from the 'stain on a painter's palette,' and live again upon canvas and stand forth for centuries yet to come-the living monuments of a noble race. (Rathbone, Catalogue 37-38)

This description is most notable for its disregard for the fate of the "vanishing Indian." Catlin's approach to the Indians parallels Audubon's treatment of birds, which he kills and bags in order to paint. They are objects that must be collected and duly recorded in order to give a young nation, a country plagued by an absence of history and increasingly deep signs of political fissure, a foundation upon which to stand. In a paradoxical reversal, Catlin's description of the Indians' rebirth on the canvas acts as both an apology and as a rationale for their extermination. While the Indians are "doomed," they may find solace in the "living monuments" of their existence that provide the United States with a concrete sense of history. In the first chapter of Life o n the Mississippi, Twain outlines the work's structure, connecting it to a desire shared with the panorama to manufacture national "monuments" and an immediate sense of history: Let us drop the Mississippi's physical histor!; and say a word about its historical history-so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slulnbrous first

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

146

T h r o u g h t h e Negative

epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; a t its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in d a t shall be left of the book. The world and the boolzs are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course lznow that there are several comparatively old dates in American histor!; but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time wl~ichthey represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;-as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it. (Twain, Life on the Mississippi 41)

In this declaration of the poetics of his text, Twain dedicates himself to making his audience "see" history. This work shall make the argument that "unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity" (Twain, Life 42). Like the panoramist, Twain shall, in short, wed words to "pictures" in this text. This hybrid literary form will impress us with the magnitude, the physical length and literal importance, of our country's history. Just as the viewer patiently endures the time it takes for the South to fall in G o n e With t h e Wind, in this passage Twain wants his reader to live in "real time" an approximation of past events, and he searches for a literary mode that will provide this experience. The question of how to make history a "real" and physical space occupies Twain for most of his life. In an essay titled "How to Make History Dates Stick," he counsels his audience of children, "pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick" (Twain, "How To" 141). He supports this assertion by outlining the tactic he used to help his children memorize the reigns of English rulers: I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.. . . The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was such that they were no mar to history.. . We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too.. . . I offered prizes, too-apples. I threw one as far as I could send it, and the child that first shouted the reign it fell in got the apple. ("How To" 145-47)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

147

According to both this lesson plan and the statement from Life on the Mississippi, in order for a reader to grasp history, he or she must be literally transported. He or she must either stand within the physical reign of a ruler or "see" a sunset. Just as the length of the panorama testifies to the depth and importance of the American landscape, the literary text must portray the "stretch of time" and magnitude of the United States' past. The number of times that Twain compares his literary project to painting in Life on the Mississippi are almost too numerous to count. He devotes the chapter titled "Frescoes from the Past" to the same caricatures that populate the panorama. Here, the rough frontiersman appears and shouts in all his bravado, "Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!-Look at me!" (Life 53). By his own admission, this frontiersman is a drawing of a readily recognizable type. As a "brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker," he carries visible markers that make him an exaggeration and a cartoon in words. This frontiersman appears against the backdrop of the unsettled wilderness that populates "Old Times on the Mississippi." His freedom of speech and movement springs from the "wilds" he inhabits. This autonomy is one of the characteristics that the Mississippi pilot shares: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. I
When this passage declares that writers "of all kinds" are "servants of the public," it forces the reader to read the expectations of the nineteenthcentury audience back into the text. It asks the reader to question how the panoramic appearance of Twain's words and images is itself determined by his understanding of what the "public" wants to hear. This question serves almost as an apology for the marked omission of black slavery from a passage on "manacled" servitude. As if in an aside, Twain tells his reader that he does not mention slavery here or within the work as a whole because its insertion would rupture the panoramic conventions upon which his text is modeled. To open the door on slavery, be it with words or with paint, would break the totalized frame of the panorama and the image of national unity upon which it is predicated. Not only would it raise the specter of civil division, it would expose as nothing more than a painted fiction the free and open frontier that the panorama is determined to validate. A great deal of critical attention has been devoted to the question of Mark

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

148

Twain's stance on slavery and race. Using Tom Sawyer's, and hence Mark Twain's, re-enslavement of the free Jim as their primary support, critics such as Evan Carton argue that Twain forms his persona around exploiting, performing, and profiting from the institution of legal slavery (Carton 160). According to this line of inquiry, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain looks back to slavery and nostalgically wishes to prolong it. While some attention must be given to Tom's cruel treatment of Jim, this analysis ignores the fact that non-institutional slavery was still very much alive during Reconstructioil when Twain was writing. As Fishkin herself asks, "if one is not willing to show racists, how can one effectively satirize racism? (Fishkin 143). It is similarly difficult to reconcile Carton's image of Twain with the fact that Twain married the daughter of Jervis Langdon, the abolitionist who was a "conductor" of the Underground Railroad and who helped Frederick D o u g h s escape from slavery (Fishkin 79). Langdon became "central to the process by which Sam Clemens remade himself into Mark Twain" (Fishkin 75), and his influence is illustrated by the fact that in 1 8 8 5 Twain paid the board for Warner T. McGuinn, one of the Yale Law School's first black students (Fishkin 101). Fishkin provides the most comprehensive negation of the image of Twain as a racist when she argues that the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn censures the virtual re-enslavement of free blacks in the 1 8 8 0 s (Fishkin 97). In Lighting Out for the Territory, Fishkin supports her argument by outlining Twain's childhood and adult interactions with slavery. Twain's Hannibal experiences made him into a "brilliant chronicler of the process by which people who thought of themselves as good managed to tolerate evil in their midst" (Fishkin 59). Twain describes slavery in Hannibal: there was nothing about the slavery of the Hamibal region to rouse one's dozing l ~ u ~ n a ninstincts e to activity. It was the mild domestic slavery, not the brutal plantation article. Cruelties were very rare and exceedingly and unwholesomely unpopular. To separate and sell the members of a slave family to different masters was a thing not well lilted by the people and so it was not often done, except in the settling of estates. I have no recollection of ever seeing a slave auction in that town; but I am suspicious that that is because the thing was a common and commonplace spectacle, not an uncommon and impressive one. I vividly remember seeing a dozen black Inen and women chained to one another, once, and lying in a group on the pavement, awaiting shipment to Southern slave market. Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen. Chained slaves could not have been a common sight or this picture would not have made so strong and lasting an impression upon me. The 'nigger trader' was loathed by everybody. He was regarded as a sort of human devil who bought and conveyed poor helpless creatures to hell-for to our whites and blacks alilte the Southern plantation was simply hell: no milder name could describe it. If the threat to sell an incorrigible slave

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

149

'down the river' would not reform him, nothing would-his case was past cure. Yet I remember that once when a white Inan killed a Negro man for a trifling offence everybody seemed indifferent about it-as regarded the slave-though considerable sympathy was felt for the slave's owner, who had been bereft of valuable property by a worthless person who was not able to pay for it. (Meltzer 17)

While Twain glosses over this murder in a cursory and distanced manner, when he was ten, in 1845, he watched a white master kill a slave with a piece of iron (Fishkin 21). Twain is conscious of the underlying evilness of slavery at the same time that his description of the "mild domestic article" sugarcoats the surfaces of the issue in a manner similar to the panorama's elision of ideological questions. One could argue that Twain spends his whole life trying to reconcile the cultural blindness of his childhood years with his subsequent realization of slavery's moral wrong. Like the landscapes depicted in the moving panorama, the territories that populate the banks in Life on the Mississippi demand to be settled and suppress the ideological issues of sectionalism and slavery: The dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grapevines, the grassy noolzs and vistas glimpsed as we swept b!; the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunlzs, and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown away there. (Life 104)

"Thrown away" argues that landscape, to be valued, must perform a cultural purpose. It must, in other words, be observed, cultivated, and owned by more than this solitary first-person voice and anonymous "one." This passage establishes an important parallel between the act of seeing and ownership that the panorama exploits. According to Twain, if "vistas" are not seen and "intruded" upon by a plural audience, by a culture as a whole, they might as well be "wasted and thrown away." The chapter "Sounding" further examines the relationship between panoramic painting, writing, and cultural memory that the description of the "thrown away" landscape broaches. This title refers both to the marking of the river bottom and to Twain's search for a literary form that can do with words alone what the panorama does with word and image. "Sounding" advocates an extended perspective by advising that "the surface of the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand" (Life 109). The distanced overview that Twain champions as being necessary to the cub-pilot and to the reader in their mutual goal of "learning the river" is essentially the perspective that the nineteenth-century panoramas, balconies, and bird's-eye vantage points proffer. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

150

Through the Negative

Throughout this work, Twain mirrors the panorama's didactic purpose by vowing to teach the reader the river: The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book-a boolz that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a boolz to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to slzip, thi~llzingJOLI co~ildfind higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a boolz written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparlzlingly renewed with every re-perusal. (Life 94)

The invocation of the universal "you" in this passage functions much like Banvard's inclusion of himself in his panorama. The author stands in for the reader as surrogate, and the importance and beauty of the national landscape he senses in consequence becomes the reader's, both read and seen. Just as the panoramist captures the landscape in enough detail to make the spectator remark, "if there ain't old Bally and the white mare" (McDermott 140), the apprentice must memorize the "faint dimple on its surface" that to the pilot, was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this boolz saw nothing but all lnanner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading mattes. (Life 94-95)

A curious intertextuality occurs in this passage with its italicizing of "italicized." This altering of the type-face functions in part to fulfill the first chapter's promise to make pictorial this work's scenes from the past. The fact that the reader sees "italicized" indicates that we, too, can see the water as a vivid physical picture. The water, according to Twain's descriptions, is both oil painting and book, but the reader, like the spectator of the panorama, must be taught how to read its existence in new ways. While the river may be a book, while it may adopt a form the reader recognizes, Twain's use of "italicized" reminds the reader that it is imperative for this history and landscape to live in our minds, not as dead statistics and letters, but as word and image wedded together. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

1.51

This passage "sounds" an important premonition of the author's inability to sustain the panorama as a literary form in the face of the Civil War's presence. While Twain and the reader may both learn how to see panoramically, to see with the detail and sense of overview required by the moving paintings, the description of "hideous" terrors lurking under the water's surface intimates that a sense of loss will inevitably be associated with this perspective. Twain substantiates this warning: N o w when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to ltnow every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I Itnew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. A11 the grace, the beaut!; the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset wl~ichI witnessed when steamboating was new to me. X broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal. (Life 95)

The unknown underwater terrors and Twain's statements about loss forecast the eventual trajectory of Life on the Mississippi and the fate of the panorama as a form of representation within it. At this moment in the text, the romance of the panorama and Twain's pre-Civil War sunset is threatened by a "blood" that colors the image and threatens to imbue it with a death and loss that were absent from Twain's first experience. Throughout the opening chapters, Twain bemoans his poor memory and doubts that he will ever be able to "learn" the river in the ways his pilot assures him are necessary. Not only does he need to memorize the river in daylight, he must be able to picture it in the dark, both ascending and descending it, and he must somehow fill in the topographical gaps that occur during his four hour breaks. At one point, the steamboat pilot berates him for his forgetfulness: 'My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to Itnow it just like A B C.' That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges. (Life 76)

In his act of compiling an uninterrupted picture of the river, the cub-pilot employs the overview and the illusion of a "total" history that the panorama fosters. An interesting hint at the brainwashing capacity of the panorama occurs in this passage as Twain describes himself as a gun, a tabula rnsn that Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

152

needs to be filled with the information his pilot disseminates. Clearly, Twain was able to "learn" the river with the detail his pilot demands because he transmits these images to his reader. By conveying this information, he suggests that a primary purpose of the panoramic overview is to establish a useable past where there had been only "dismal" absence and blankness. The short "A Section in My Biography" provides the narrative bridge between the straight narration of Twain's apprenticeship and his return to the Mississippi in 1882. Just as the painted panorama conveys an image of American history without conflict, throughout "Old Times on the Mississippi" the presence of sectional division is noticeable only by its absence. Twain tries to dispense quickly with the war's existence: Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed-and hopedthat I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California . . . . In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow drifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilothouse. Let us resume, non7. (Life 166)

Twain introduces the war as an inconvenience and an aside. "By and by the war came" to disrupt the smooth, panoramic unfolding of life on the river and to end the decades that were "smooth" and "prosperous." The war appears on the pages of Life on the Mississippi and in Twain's 1885 "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed" without causality. The narrator of "The Private History" elides the question of his wartime allegiance with the cryptic sentence, "the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi and I became a rebel" (Twain, "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed" 120).According to Twain, the Civil War is a necessary evil that must be endured without questioning its ideological underpinnings. Life on the Mississippi glosses over the war and reveals the narrator's desire to "resume" in exactly the same place that "Old Times" ends. Twain wishes to add more scenes and another reel to the length of his work. He does not want to go back over ground previously described and re-evaluate it. The changed scene that confronts him on the river, however, requires him to return to the scenes of his apprenticeship: But the change of changes was on the 'levee.' This time, a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melanchol!; this was woful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone, his

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

1.53

power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous. Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend! Here was desolation, indeed. (Life 172)

In an ironic reversal of the panorama's focus on the vanishing Indian and the optimistic push to settle the virgin wilderness, Twain revisits the river and faces his own extinction as a steamboat pilot.The pilot has taken with him the frontiersman, his mythic freedom, and the ease with which he switched between caricatures. In his place are men chained to industry and "progress" in a manner reminiscent of the "operatives" who work the paper mill in Herman Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids" (Melville, "The Paradise" 213). If, as Oettermann argues, the panorama both celebrates the Industrial Revolution and tries to mitigate its alienating influences, when Twain returns to the river he finds the masking capacities of this moving form inadequate. After offering a brief hiatus and respite, the panorama inevitably returns the viewer and reader to a world of unstoppable industrial progress and to the sectional division the medium purports to elide. O n his 1882 journey, Twain finds that the landscapes before him are not a natural extension of the scenes he previously inhabited. They merge, replace, and revise his former "pictures," and he cannot simply add them to "Old Times on the Mississippi": At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had lznown it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how c~iriouslythe familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses-saw them plainly enoughbut they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses, wl~ichhad formerly stood there with perfect distinctness. (Life 370-71)

This description reveals how inadequate the panoramic overview is for a depiction of United States history. The panoramic images that Twain delivered to the reader in "Old Times" cannot encompass different temporal moments. Like Catlin's painted "living monuments," they function to inaugurate a better present, a present with a manufactured sense of both immediate history and future promise. As such, they make no allowance for their Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

154

own passing, for their relegation to the status of historical objects or album "photographs." Oettermann argues that the panorama's invention contains the seeds of its eventual obsolescence because its "greatest flaw" is the "rigidity and lifelessness of the whole." For the first time in the history of pictorial representation, "the panorama created in the beholder an awareness that a truly complete representation of reality requires more than the perfect reproduction of a space and the bodies contained in it; it needs the motion of those bodies as well, that is, the dimension of time" (Oettermann 129). In Oettermann's analysis, the panorama spells its own death because it raises the viewing expectations that only the cinema could fulfill. While the river canvas might literally move and allow the spectator to see different scenes, its scenes are static and frozen like the "photograph" in Twain's mind. Ultimately, as Twain returns to his childhood home and hunts for a form of representation that can encompass the mixture of past and present in his mind, he points both to the panorama's limitations and tries to do with words what the cinema eventually accomplishes through pictures and the flashback. In Twain's work as a whole, the author describes the Civil War as an interrupting event, tangential both to his narratives and to the course of United States history. In Roughing It (1872),his novel about the war years, he makes so little mention of the war that the reader can easily forget that the plot unfolds during this period. In an elision of the events occurring on the eastern coast and at Gettysburg during this pivotal point in the war, Twain writes, "the year 1863 was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination of the 'flush times'" (Roughing It 281). Roughing It sustains the panoramic allusion more easily than Life on the Mississippi because the Civil War occurs at a temporal and geographic distance from its landscape. Panoramic references appear throughout this western narrative as the narrator continually cites the "broad panorama of mountain ranges and deserts" (303), "the most stupendous panorama of mountain peaks" (90), the "everchanging panorama of the forest (beyond and below us)" (375), and "the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web work of lava streams" (400). Twain spends considerable effort exploring ways of integrating the Civil War into his works and autobiographical writings. But for him, the Civil War is primarily a question of narrative manipulation and rearrangement. A rare reference to his personal Civil War experience prefaces "My Boyhood's Home" in Life on the Mississippi: I could not clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for d e n I retired from the rebel army in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person ~ 1 1 0had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at retreat it was not badly done. I had done 110 advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. (Life 370)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

1.55

This paragraph alludes to Twain's brief enlistment and subsequent desertion from the Marion Rangers after a few brief weeks of service. Just as Huck Finn leaves the text explaining "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (HF 229), during the Civil War Twain abandons the land under contention in favor of the adventures of the Far West. The question of Twain's regional allegiance can, and has, been tossed around endlessly by critics. Casting Twain as a "Western" talent who helped to heal sectional hatred, Ivan Turgenev remarked, "Now, there is a real American-the first American who has had the kindness to conform to my idea of what an American ought to be. He has the flavor of the soil" (Budd 13). Born in Missouri, and spending part of his adult life in the Far West and in Hartford, Connecticut, Twain can be identified as a Westerner, Southerner, or Northerner William Andrews argues for Twain's wholesale identification as a "southern writer" and reads Life on the Mississippi as an advertisement "for a new kind of southern self, one whose proven roots in the antebellum world and progressive views of the postbellum scene enable it to bridge the chasm between the Old and New Souths" (Andrews 4). Neil Schmitz concurs with this regional identification and labels Twain a "literary scalawag, a Southern writer in Unionist discourse and narrative" (Schmitz 79). In contrast to these two critics, Forrest G. Robinson suggests that Twain leaves the South in Life on the Mississippi with relief. As Twain heads North and ends up in Chicago, "a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities" (Life 416), he is reassured by the signs of progress and life (Robinson 39). After descending into the morass of Twain's regional identity, it becomes clear that Twain is an endless shapeshifter. The number of identities he holds in his lifetime is comparable both to the size of the panorama and to the encyclopedic impulse of the age. In an 1877 letter to the editor of New York World, Twain reflects on his Franklinian ability to reinvent himself endlessly, "Where is the use in bothering what a man's character was ten years ago, anyway? . . . I do not value my character of ten years ago. I can go out any time and buy a better one for half it cost me. In truth, my character was simply in the course of construction then" (Fishkin 94). Twain has long figured as an American icon, comparable in stature to giants like Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. Twain himself courted this image, and demands for his likeness mushroomed during his lifetime. A conservative estimate counts six hundred and fifty photographs of the author (Budd 4), and Shelley Fisher Fishkin remarks that "'Mark Twain,' like 'the United States of America,' is an idea." Twain even registered his pen name as a trademark with a patent office (Fishkin 128-29). In a celebrated exchange, when asked, "Are you an American?" Twain responds with a bravado characteristic of his frontier characters, "No, I am not an American. I am the American" (Budd 13).In a similar act of self-definition, he describes himself as the "self-appointed Ambassador at Large of the U.S. of American-without a salary" (Fishkin 144).Throughout his life, as he becomes increasingly Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

156

Through the Negative

famous, he is forced to synthesize his missing war experiences with his status as the self-declared representative American. He confronts, in other words, the problem of reconciling his desertion from the defining national moment of the century with his right to act as national spokesman. As the self-declared representative American, Twain concocts a version of his Civil War experience that glosses his marked absence from this defining national conflict. At the end of "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed," the first-person narrator in this non-fictional piece comes to an epiphany after killing a man that ideologically justifies his subsequent desertion: he was as sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been their brothec . . . And it seemed an epitome of war, that all war must be just that the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity, strangers whom in other circulnstances you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled. ("The Private History" 139)

In keeping with the convention of war photography that Gardner's Antietain series inaugurates, Twain brings his autobiographical war narrative to closure by portraying a corpse as the "epitome of war." Unlike the brief mention of his Civil War experience in Life on the Mississippi, the partly fictionalized "Private History" provides a moral vindication of Twain's departure from the army. In a move that fortuitously foreshadows ultimate re-Union, the narrator refuses to fight because he does not want to kill a stranger who is his "brother" (Peck 10). N o evidence has surfaced to substantiate the death in "The Private History," and critics conclude that it is pure fiction (Gerber 42). As if to compensate for his missing war experience, throughout his life, Twain actively courts the Generals of the Civil War. After publishing Grant's immensely successful Memoirs, Twain publishes the reminiscences of the Union commanders McClellan, Hancock, Sheridan, Custer, and Badeau. Writing to Howells, he says, "[mly sluggish soul needs a fierce upstirring and if it would not get it when Grant enters the meeting-place, I must doubtless 'lay' for the final resurrection" (I
Seeing in Circles

1.57

Twain further manipulates his Civil War experience by transforming the coming of age experience in "The Private History" into a moment he shares with General Grant. For most of his adult life, Twain is compared to Grant. In an aside, the Chicago Tribune states that, "next to Grant, he wears the belt for smoking" (Fisher 491). At the end of "The Private History," the protagonist reports, "[iln time I came to know that Union colonel whose coming frightened me out of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent-General Grant. I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was unknown as I was myself; at a time when anybody could have said, 'Grant?-Ulysses S. Grant? I do not remember hearing the name before' " ("The Private History" 141).The General's and Twain's experiences occur in places far distant from each other, but in this account they are joined. Twain further cements this bond when he notes that Grant told him that during this time "his heart was in his mouth, but from that day forth he never had a tremor again in the war. He had been in war before but this was the first time he was responsible" (Paine 183). In his revisioning of history, Twain binds himself to Grant in a mutual coming of age experience where both realize the magnitude of war. He validates his Civil War experience by sharing both its physical landscape and its emotional experience with the Union's greatest general. "Vicksburg during the Trouble" is a pivotal chapter in Life on the Mississippi because it raises the question of how Twain can describe the war and its effects on the landscape he is cataloguing without having experienced any of its battles. As my previous comparison between the panorama and Disneyland argues, the panorama thrives on illusion. One can experience foreign places and landscapes by watching them on a screen. Indeed, as the trips from London to Hong Kong and along the Mediterranean suggest, the moving panorama becomes a replacement for travel itself. Twain taps the panorama's literary and visual drive to reproduce experiences without actually having them to compensate for his Civil War absence. The beginning of "Vicksburg" validates the panoramic tenet that place and history can be experienced through written and pictorial reenactments: Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Viclzsburg's tremendous warexperiences; eartl~worlzs,trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc.. . . Life in Viclzsburg, during the six weeks was perhaps-but wait; here are some materials out of \vl~ichto reproduce it:Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand noncombatants; the city utterly cut off from the world-walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries.. . . The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops.. . . Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Viclzsburg? Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

158

Through the Negative imagination of another nonparticipant than could a Viclzsburger who did experience it? (Life 257-258)

The "precipices, etc." of this excerpt reduces the Civil War to a list written in shorthand. By taking refuge in rapid-fire reportage worthy of a newspaper, these lines hint that anyone can approximate the Civil War experience. It does not matter that two important components of this experience-fear and ideological conviction-are absent from Twain's narration. He assures his audience that he can give us the "materials," the recipe, out of which to concoct our own original Vicksburg. By watching others experience this battle, we experience history at one remove. We find doubles to stand in for us, and we take comfort in the safe distance of a history experienced by proxy. In a departure from the straight past-tense narration that structures "Old Times on the Mississippi," Twain's treatment of the war occurs in the present tense. His rapid staccato sentences are meant to convince the reader of the ease with which we can imaginatively transport ourselves to another time. They argue that history need not be experienced first hand. It is enough to hear Twain's sanitized voice-over narration and to watch a plastic, Disneylike reproduction of certain stock Civil War scenes. A strange conflation between the author and "history" occurs in the summation sentence: "[tlhose are the materials furnished by history." Quite obviously, these are not the materials of history; they are Mark Twain's words, but in the tautology that this passage exploits, the voice of the author becomes the voice of history. "Vicksburg" continues the panoramic theme of experiencing history by proxy when Twain relates: Years ago, I tallzed with a couple of the Viclzsburg non-combatants-a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people told it without fire, almost without interest. A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent forever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their tallzs about it was gone. (Llfe 259)

To Twain the value of the Civil War lies in its literary potential. He describes men made "eloquent forever" and wishes to experience a few brief one "week" war episodes in order to achieve narrative immortality. According to these lines, the point of history is entertainment. Twain is singularly uninterested in the boredom of Vicksburg as a defining characteristic of the battle. War is important to Twain only as a "novelty." He discards the desensitization and shell-shock of the Civil War as being unworthy of narration, and the twenty-first-century reader wonders what he would have done with the waiting that defined the trench warfare of World War I or the guerrilla Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

1.59

combat of Vietnam. By conflating historical narration, entertainment, and "novelty," this passage essentially grafts panoramic expectations onto the literary text. It allows the reader, like the panorama's spectator, to accept short excerpts and entertaining distillations as worthy substitutes. In the place of firsthand experiences which reveal the tedious and often painful passage of "real" time, Twain praises narration that condenses and edits time in order to convey an approximate and reduced sense of "lived" history. Although "Vicksburg during the Trouble" begins by valorizing the literary panorama as a form of representation that removes the need for firsthand experience, the chapter cannot sustain the fiction of a history experienced by proxy. Twain disrupts his own co-optation of history by allowing the voices of original experience to speak: What the man said was to this effect:'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week-to us, anyway. We had n't anything to do, and time hung heavy Seven Sundays, and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.. . . N o glass left; glass could n't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses vacant-looked like eye-holes in a sltull. Whole panes were as scarce as news.. . .' This man had kept a diary during-six weeks? No, only the first six days. The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, oneloosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicltsburg having now become commonplace and matter of course. (Llfe 259-261)

The direct quotation of this piece and Twain's subsequent sampling of extracts from published "diaries" raise the obvious issue of how much he poaches from other people's histories. Who is to say that the firsthand stories and voices in Life on the Mississippi are not fictions concocted "to this effect" by Twain himself? One might object to this accusation by pointing out that a stenographer accompanied Twain on his return trip to the Mississippi. The mere presence of this recorder, however, does not guarantee the reliability of these first-person accounts. While the reader may never know the extent to which Twain stole the stories he collected upon his journey, one thing remains certain: by including these voices in the second half of his text, Twain underscores the limitations and failings of the panoramic form. As his pastiche of temporal moments in "My Boyhood's Home" illustrates, the panorama cannot represent different temporal moments simultaneously. Unlike contemporary film, it cannot join together past, present, and future with recognizable conventions like the flashback and the voice-over. In a characteristically American fashion, the only progression of time the moving Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

160

Through the Negative

panorama can encompass is forward, into a more improved and perfected future that merges seamlessly with the present the spectator inhabits. In other words, the panorama cannot express this anonymous man's recounting of the "windows of the houses vacant-looked like eye-holes in a skull" because to do so would be to represent a regression and the advent of a less perfect future. Twain's inclusion of the first-person accounts exposes the fault lines in any panoramic history. The panorama as a medium dedicates itself to creating a unified and totalized whole that is, in essence, at odds with the defining characteristic of civil war. The break into plural voices in "Vicksburg" reveals that the panorama cannot achieve a unified image of the Civil War, yet this chapter as a whole struggles with and resists this realization. Twain interrupts the first diary excerpt with the aside, "(guess the word he is going to use now, and see how far it can be missed,)" and he exclaims, " [w]e will borrow one more remark from him and let him go. He is recalling casualties which occurred during the siege; and unconsciously makes a most curious slip of the pen" (Life 262). Both these disruptions undermine the authority of the firstperson accounts and further cement Twain's authorial presence.They focus the reader on the semantic issues of language and narrative production rather than the content of this man's story; they underline Twain's attempts to unify the diverse accounts into a single cohesive narrative. While Twain ultimately co-opts these first-person excerpts, he has difficulty bringing "Vicksburg" to closure. The section's final paragraph reveals his inability to construct a totalizing panoramic narrative for this national conflict: Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night. I insert it in this place merely because it is a good stor!; not because it belongs here-for it does n't. It was told by a passenger-a college professor-and was called to the surface in the course of a general conversation which began with tallt about horses, drifted into tallt about astronomy, then into tallt about the lynching of gamblers in Vicltsburg half a century ago, then into tallt about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute over free trade and protection. (Life 267)

When Twain replaces the Civil War with a "good story," he suggests that the war does not make a "good story." It does not make good narrative because the author must enter into the anecdotes, ordering and reducing them, in a way that he does not do with the other "tall tales" he includes. He must vouch for the benefits of a history lived by proxy. His narrative interventions in the first-person accounts undercut the validity and authority of these voices and are prompted by the problems with his own possession and telling of Civil War history. Ultimately, as "Vicksburg" tries to lose the narrative thread of Civil War in a completely unrelated anecdote, this chapter argues that there can be no closure in a Civil War narrative. If the panorama Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

161

as a form promises a concrete sense of ending and a picture of the future, this closure is belied by the sectionalism of the Civil War that haunts the spectator's present. In an effort to provide a synthesis of the return trip to the Mississippi, Twain relies in the second half of Life o n the Mississippi increasingly on nineteenth-century encyclopedic discourse. "A Few Specimen Bricks" reconciles the changed landscape along the Mississippi with the panoramic form by turning to the pre-Civil War travel narratives of foreign tourists: Mrs. Trollope, alone of them all, dealt what the gamblers call a strictly 'square game.' She did not gild us; and neither did she \vl~ite\vashus. Would you like a specimen-paragraph from her book-and a fac-simile of one of the book's lithographs, to illustrate the paragraph and at the same time resurrect the hair- and hat-fashions of 1827? Scene, Cincinnati. Its population probably 20,000-had reached about 10,000 seven years before. (Life 220)

This description is panoramic to the extent that it couples narrative and illustration and purports to transport the spectator to a foreign place. Like the original panoramas, the passage affords its reader the luxury of travel without moving. "A Few Specimen Bricks" is a curious chapter because it is a collage of travel narratives from the 1820s through 1840s. The appearance of these dated travelogues reveals the strong nostalgic desire in Life o n the Mississippi to resurrect the mythic landscape of "Old Times." At the same time, the list-like quality of Twain's sampling displays the nineteenth-century catalogue gone wild. The compulsive multiplication of details promises its reader that we can return to this past time if we collect enough travel stories, enough "specimen bricks." In an image that anticipates the cinematic flashback in its deliberate selection of distilled images that lead the viewer into an edited version of the past, Twain creates his present by manipulating choice "bricks" and set pieces of history. The title and concept of "A Few Specimen Bricks" place it in dialogue with Walt Whitman's Specimen Days. Published the year before Life on the Mississippi, Specimen Days recounts, sometimes in graphic detail, Whitman's experience in the Union army hospitals. Whitman's work shares with Twain's the nineteenth-century propensity for the catalogue as the narrator relates, "[i]nteresting cases in ward I; Charles Miller, bed 19, company D, 53rd Pennsylvania, is only sixteen years of age, very bright, courageous boy, left leg amputated below the knee; next bed to him, another young lad very sick; gave each appropriate gifts. In the bed above, also, amputation of the left leg" (Whitman, Specimen Days 183). Showing an almost morbid fascination with casualties, Whitinan defines the war through a list of wounds. In contrast, Twain's "A Few Specimen Bricks" speaks back to Whitman and argues that the present can be reconstructed using a sanitized version of the past. Whitman's title evokes a continuum of time with a selection of days Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

162

being representative of the war as a whole. Twain's "bricks" offer an alternative vision as they purport to go to the foundation of nation and find the images that are fundamental to the existence of our country. In a critical evaluation of his "specimen" travelogues, Twain writes: A11 the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. The descriptions of fifty years ago d o not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day-except as to the 'trigness' of the houses. The white\vash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look. It is the blight of the wac Twenty-one years ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had been in 1827, as described by those tourists. (Life 288)

This passage acknowledges the enduring effect that the war has had on the southern landscape; however, just as the panorama keeps the doors of the plantations closed to ideological analysis, these lines restrict the war's impact to surface appearances. The war is simply a "blight." In contrast to Whitman's graphic images of the lasting physical damage of war, Twain treats war as a passing disease that can be cured with a coat of paint. All that is needed to return the spectator to the edenic landscape of 1827, to nullify the annoying "trouble" of regional division, is the manipulation of surfaces and mediums. The external landscape in this passage becomes the canvas, and history can be cleaned and sanitized as easily as oil paint can be scraped and reapplied. In the same way that "Vicksburg" tests the limitations of a panoramic representation of history, the second half of Life on the Mississippi fails in its attempt to use encyclopedic panoramic discourse to bridge the sectional differences exacerbated by the Civil War. As Life on the Mississippi progresses, the image of the total and unified landscape of the panorama breaks down, and the spectator confronts a country divided into regions and defined by irreconcilable differences. Twain digresses into a list of southern industry: The Rosalie Yarn Mill, of Natchez, has a capacity of 6,000 spindles and 160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with 4,000 spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000, all subscribed in the town.. . . The changes in the Mississippi River are great and strange, yet were to be expected; but I was not expecting to live to see Natchez and these other river towns become manufacturing strongholds and railway centres. (Life 282)

Natchez emerges in this description as the technological future heralded by the opening panoramic descriptions of the wilderness. O n another level, however, the endless quantification and counting of "spindles" and "looms" Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

163

draw quite close to the "astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names" that the first chapter deplores. In keeping with the nineteenth-century belief that bigger provides a more "realistic" representation, Twain tries to approximate the change in the postCivil War landscape by delivering a vast quantity of statistics. Yet instead of rendering a more vivid picture of the transformed southern landscape, this description further cements sectional differences by attempting to remake the South into the image of northern industry. What, in other words, is Natchez in this passage but a Lawrence or a Lowell, Massachusetts? The industrial backwardness that helped the South lose the war is nowhere to be found in this image. In fulfillment of Barnard's photograph of the crane lurking over the ruins of Columbia, South Carolina, Twain's South mirrors the North, and North and South are joined in their identical visions of progress. The only way Twain can synthesize the South's liininal postwar existence into a total panoramic landscape is to erase its regional identity and paint it over with images of northern industrial progress. Ironically, while the occupying troops were withdrawn from the South in 1876, Twain's depiction accomplishes its own form of colonization. Critics have discussed the ramifications that moves like Twain's had for southern literary history; according to William Andrews, the 1880s were a "transitional point in southern literary history" where " 'the southern quest for literary authority' (to use Lewis P. Simpson's phrase) confronted major black and white writers with a common problem: how to authorize a brand of first-person narration largely alien to the southern literary tradition at a time when the South's own authority, indeed, its very identity, lay very much in doubt" (Andrews 3 ) . As Life on the Mississippi progresses, the image of the South as an alien land becomes increasingly apparent. In a chapter titled "Southern Sports," Twain takes his reader on a round of social conversations that define the banks of the Mississippi as a land no longer familiar to either Northerners or Southerners: In the South, the war is what A D . is elsewhere: they date from it. A11 day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the lvaw or aftah the waw. It shows how iintimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of d a t a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading boolzs at the fireside. (Life 319)

In this metanarrative about how to represent the post-Civil War southern landscape, Twain literally talks around his subject. He talks about Southerners trying to talk about the Civil War. In this double move to define the impact of the war, "Southern Sports" drives a further wedge into the panoramic image of peaceful union. As a travelogue, the chapter provides Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

164

northern citizens with a visit into a land that is not, upon closer examination, their home country in either language or chronology. In other words, it foregrounds sectional differences and the panoramic overview's limitations in dealing with the ideological questions of a divided nation. At the same time, like the image of the panoramist within the picture, the description literally allows the Southerners to see themselves again. It shows them in the comic act of verbally negotiating a new history and lends an air of determinism to both their chronology and to Twain's own efforts to find a literary mode through which to portray their changed social landscape. Life on the Mississippi directly confronts its difficult search for a literary form with which to represent the postwar southern landscape when Twain speaks of the "Sir Walter Scott" disease: Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checlts this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcef~illystill. . . . Sir Walter had so large a hand in malting Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the \vat It seems a little harsh toward a dead Inan to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition.. . . But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it-clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. (Life 327-28)

According to Forrest G. Robinson, Twain's "angry critique of 'the Sir Walter disease' is testimony to a close, conscious awareness of the power of fictions to define vital aspects of social experience" (Robinson 40-41). I would argue further that Twain's criticism of Scott marks one more step in his ultimate exposure of the panorama's limitations as a fictional form. Like Scott's own historical constructions of a seamless and monumental past, what is the panorama if not a series of "encl~antinents" and an "old inflated style"? Even though the panorama enjoys a renaissance during the 1880s, its reapCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

165

pearance is the brief resurrection of a n "obsolete" f o r m a n d a "dead language." While these passages describe the southern writer's fight t o portray his changed social condition in the aftermath of war, it is important t o note that Twain does n o t delineate between himself a n d these writers. H e admits, "I f o u n d the half-forgotten Southern intonations a n d elisions a s pleasing t o my ear a s they h a d formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music t o me, but then I was born in the South" (Life 316). As a selfproclaimed Southerner, Twain aligns himself with the writers w h o cling t o antiquated forms like the moving paintings. At the same time, he pushes the limits of romantic forms like the literary panorama only t o find that they cannot sustain images of the post-Civil War South. Twain finally moves t o dispense with the panorama as a literary form in the second t o last chapter when he meets a traveling panoramist w h o tells his audience, "you always w a n t a strong frame, you know, t o t h r o w u p the nice points of a delicate picture a n d make them stand out": The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two-but not very powerful ones. After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands to St. Paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't is n't-anything,-I-can-do-it-anytime-I-van-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that I presently began to suspectBut no matter what I began to suspect. Hear him:'. . . and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul, giant young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of colnmercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house-ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever-' 'Have you ever travelled with a panorama?' 'I have formerly served in that capacity.' My suspicion was confirmed. (Life402-404) This caricature of the panoramist is drawn by a n author w h o has studied a n d used the panorama a s a literary style. Twain was clearly attracted t o the figure of the panoramist because he parodies him in another short piece, "The Launch of the Steamer 'Capital.'" In this story, a scriptural panoramist is paired with a pianist w h o insists o n singing raucous drinking songs a s accompaniment. In this humorous play o n the potential discrepancy between image a n d soundtrack, the characters become so involved in another passen-

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

166

Through the Negative

ger's recounting of the panorama that they miss the launch of the "great steamboat" (Twain, "Launch" 178). To depict and discount the panoramist in both of these works, Twain effortlessly mobilizes one of the staples of the panorama as a form, the caricature and the overblown sketch. The panoramic lectures valorize the theme of progress, the existence of a "new" edenic culture, and reveal a fascination with the vanishing Indian. Twain exaggerates these goals to the point of absurdity in the passage from Life on the Mississippi. He grafts the qualities of the "noble savage" onto the antithetical forward marching "civilization," creating an oxymoron that is ironic in its contradictions and in the ways the Indian comes to embody the very force that heralds his extinction. In effect, this sketch makes a panorama out of the panoramist. It blows him up to the point where he becomes the butt of a joke. By turning the panoramist into a buffoon, Life on the Mississippi breaks with the panorama as a form of literary representation. It asks the reader to question whether the previous narrative has all been an elaborate trick leading up to the moment when we realize that the panorama asks us to accept false images of a unified nation and an endless frontier. Has Life on the Mississippi, ultimately, been an attempt to make the reader conscious of both our own and the author's predilection for panoramic images that glorify nation and allow ourselves to "see" ourselves in a world defined by progress? When Twain follows his caricature of the panoramist with the Indian legends "Peboan and Seegwun," "A Legend of White-Bear Lake," and the appended "The Undying Head," the answer to this question further eludes the reader. Twain takes refuge in this staple of the panoramic lecture, and the reader confronts a shape-shifting author who refuses to establish the single point of view that would allow his reader to define his narrative purpose. Twain explains his inclusion of the "most idiotic Indian legend" of WhiteBear Lake, "I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I could, but the task is beyond my strength. The guidebook names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' Without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader" (Life 413). Gazing at the final images of Life on the Mississippi, the reader can choose to believe that Twain ends his work with a resurrection of panoramic elements in order to test the spectator and his new-found knowledge. Just as Twain does not have the "strength" to "resist" reimmersion in panoramic discourse, he warns of the ease with which we, too, are willing to lose ourselves in panoramic narratives. Conversely, the reappearance of these Indian tales can be read as Twain's admission of his failure to find a new form with which to represent the changed southern landscape. Life on the Mississippi may, in short, have depicted breaks with the literary panorama, but at the end of the narrative Twain concedes that he set himself a "task" beyond his "strength" in his desire to expose and provide a literary alternative to the panorama's failings as a medium. Ultimately, both of these interpretations leave the reader with a similar and potentially singular Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

167

overarching narrative. Life on the Mississippi warns us that the nineteenthcentury literary and pictorial panoramas simply codify and advance a universal need in this industrial age to synthesize our national landscapes and inhabit sanitized versions of the past. With Mark Twain's warning that we be suspicious of seeing panoramically fresh in our minds, we may question the extent to which a totalizing perspective is integrated into our twenty-first-century viewing practices. Ken Burns' epic The Civil War Series (1990) provides one answer to this question since it begins by taking a moving camera through the still surface of a panoramic photograph of Richmond. Burns's reanimation of this photographic panorama literally narrates cinema's beginnings by translating one of its prototypes into a moving picture. At the same time, the presence of this panorama at the beginning of the series suggests, in line with Mark Twain's musings in Life on the Mississippi, that the panoramic view is central to our cultural attempts to see and understand the American Civil War. The 1884 Gettysburg panorama portraying the "High Tide of the Confederacy" proffers yet another instance of the extent to which the panorama conditions and defines current images of nineteenth-century American history. Three hundred and sixty feet long, the canvas is a perfect circle with each foot corresponding to an angle's degree. The Cyclorama's Park Ranger, the twenty-first-century double for the panoramist, reassures his audience that we are in the "exact" middle of the battlefield, and local Civil War buffs nod their heads knowingly. N o one questions that on this platform we are asked to inhabit a physically impossible subject position. Not only do we accept the illusion that we can see in three hundred and sixty degrees, but we are fooled into believing that all the action of July 3, 1863, occurred simultaneously and can be represented on a single canvas. We suspend our disbelief and inhabit a position that combines the omniscience of the literary narrator with the overarching perspective of the bird'seye view. Nothing blocks the view in this painting. There are no interrupting or hidden elements, and spectators are given eyes in the backs of their heads. Surely, if we can accept that we see in circles, we have set the stage for the moment when we accept without qualification the idea that the camera pans in mimicry of the human eye. If we embrace the panorama's illusions, then we also believe that the panorama's extended frame portrays a complete history. Even the rare panoramic Civil War photographs convey the fallacy that they speak fully on their subject. A picture such as the idyllic "Winter View of Cavalry Stables, Giesboro Point, DC." sanitizes the scene of war by portraying a pristine snow-covered landscape that is devoid of people, while the haunting "Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond" tells us that we are looking at one of the lowest and most desolate moments in the Civil War. Like both these photographic panoramas, the Gettysburg Cyclorama reassures veteran and noncombatant alike because it exists as the complete representation of this day in history. Painted on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gettysburg, the carnage Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 5.5. The Gettysburg Cyclorama. Photographic Reproduction of the Panoramic Painting by Paul Dominiclue ~ h i l l i p ~ o t e a u~xo. u r t e s yof the Museum Collection of Gettysburg National Military Park.

Plate 5.6. Winter View of Cavalry Stables, Giesboro Point, DC. (Panorama). Courtesy of the Medford Historical Society, Medford, MA. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Plate 5.5. Continued

Plate 5.6. Continued

169 Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

170

depicted allows the veteran to honor his comrades by literally seeing them again. In a manner similar to the "Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills," the Cyclorama's all-embracing view displays the worst, in terms of both human casualties and the "high water mark" of the Confederacy. It officially permits the viewer to close the story on this moment and to experience history by inhabiting a physically impossible viewpoint. In William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1948),Chick Mallison speaks of the cultural importance of the Battle of Gettysburg when he remembers his uncle's soliloquy: 'It's all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two ocloclt on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Picltett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other loolting up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's

Plate 5.7. Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond (Panorama). Courtesy of the Medford Historical Societ!; Medford, MA. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Seeing in Circles

171

all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all lznow that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Ma)'be this time with all this much to lose and this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself t o crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.' (Faullzner 190-191)

The Cyclorama's representation effectively makes Chick's revisitation impossible by forever preserving the climax of Pickett's Charge when Confederate General Armistead falls mortally wounded from his horse to the right of the red battle flags. The panorama immortalizes as definitive the moment in the battle and, by implication, in the war, when the "tide" turned and the South was lost. In Mallison's memory, the course of the war is never about to

Plate 5.7. Continzted.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

172

Through the Negative

change from Southern victory to defeat. In this painting, by contrast, the North is always winning. Ultimately, by enlarging the frame, each of the panoramas we see before us today, be they photographic or painted, comforts the spectator in a manner similar to the return of the Indian legends at the end of Life on the Mississippi. Although Twain may counsel us to distrust the panoramic perspective, he cannot provide an alternative to the complete and sanitized versions of history that it proffers. Be it by delivering images of winter stables, desolate and unpeopled ruins in Virginia, or the carnage at Gettysburg, the panorama's extended frame offers the viewer the ultimate release, for if the panorama depicts all, it finally allows us the luxury to stop looking.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

CHAPTER SIX

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History in Stephen Crane's T h e Red Badge of Courage

Unlike the works discussed thus far-works that either treat the Civil War obliquely or are overshadowed by the author's single masterpiece-Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) has long been considered the definitive fictional treatment of the Civil War. Against a background of growing nationalism and the military revivalism of the 1890s, The Red Badge revises previous ways of representing the Civil War. Indeed, the novel is in part a vehicle for Crane's profound examination of perception and representation. In "The Spectacle of War in Crane's Revision of History," Amy I
Through the Negative

1 74

For generations of readers, this novel circumscribes the limits of the war novel as a genre. In 1942 Ernest Hemingway states: [Tlhere was no real literature of our Civil War, excepting the forgotten 'Miss Ravenall's Conversion' by J. W. De Forest, until Stephen Crane wrote 'The Red Badge of Courage.' Crane wrote it before he had seen any was. But he had read the contemporary accounts, had heard the old soldiers, they were not so old then, talk, and above all he had seen Mathew Brady's wonderful photographs. Creating his story out of this material he wrote that great boy's dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it would ever live to see. It is one of the finest boolzs of our literature because it is all as much of one piece as a great poem is. (Hemingway, M e n at 1 V a ~2 )

In a similar fashion, H . L. Mencken proclaims this novel's social and literary importance by remembering that it arrived on the literary scene "like a flash of lightening." Joseph Conrad says it "detonated with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive" (Davis 129). Written by a twenty-one-year-old author who told Book Buyer, "I had never been in a battle, of course, and I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field" (Sorrentino, Correspondence 228), The Red Badge participates in the late nineteenth-century revival of interest in the Civil War. This novel is contemporaneous with celebrations of the "anniversary" of battles like Gettysburg in which former Union and Confederate soldiers met on the land they had previously fought over. The presence of these soldiers provides a coda and a sense of closure to a century. It suggests that this war was fought for this moment-for a time when opposing sides could meet, in nostalgia and peace, as representatives of a strong and unified nation that was now defining itself through the policy of Manifest Destiny. The construction of national battlefield parks like Shiloh and the publication of Century Magazine's Battles and Leaders of the Civil War series are key components to the rewriting of the Civil War in the 1890s (Horowitz 171).The Century series, begun in 1884, analyzes each battle by bringing the first-person voices of Union and Confederate officers together. It reconstructs history as a pointillist whole where the often divergent and contrasting versions and prints of each battle are meant to cohere in the single act of memorializing the past before it disappears. Commenting on these "battle anniversaries" and the text's purpose, the preface to the series notes an "increase in the number of fraternal meetings between Union and Confederate veterans" and reinforces the "conviction that the nation is restored in spirit and in fact, with each former opposing side now contributing its share to the "new heritage of manhood and peace" (Johnson "preface"). The Century series exerts a direct influence on Crane's composition and

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

Plate 6.1. Stephen Crane, war correspondent, and John Eass of the New York Joz~rnal, posing on a fake rock for a studio photograph in Athens, Greece, 1897. Courtesy of the Stephen Crane Collection, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Libras!; Charlottes~ille,VA.

conception of T h e Red Badge. After spending hours during March and April of 1893 in his friend Corwin K n a p p Linson's studio scrutinizing these volumes, he began T h e Red Badge as a clear attempt t o capitalize o n the renewed interest in the Civil War a n d to solve constant financial problems; thus, he writes, "I deliberately started in t o d o a potboiler, something that would take the boarding-school element-you k n o w the kind. Well, I got interested in the thing in spite of myself, a n d I couldn't. I couldn't. I had t o

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

176

Through the Negative

do it my own way" (Sorrentino, Log 91-92). Initially, Crane wants to appeal to the audience attracted to works like Tom Sawyer, but he is ultimately unable to limit himself to the restricted readership of this genre. At the same time, he discovers a need to correct the military revivalism of the Century series. As he complains to Linson: "I wonder that some of those fellows don't tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they're as emotionless as rocks" (Sorrentino, Log 89). In keeping with the argument that the Civil War was an intensely photographic moment, nineteenth- and twentieth-century reviews locate a visual element at the core of The Red Badge. In 1895, the Press proclaims, "this is war from a new point of view, and it seems more real than when seen with an eye only for large movements and general effects" (Stallman 97). Thomas Wentworth Higginson titles his review in Philistine, "A Bit of War Photography" (Stallman 97), and Harold Frederic declares, "like the camera which exposed the romantic distortions of generations of battle painters, Crane's 'photographic revelations' suddenly illumined the authentic face of war" (Walcutt 89). In each of these comparisons between the novel's realism and photography, the photograph becomes the undisputed standard of objective representation and truth-telling. Twentieth-century critics concur with the nineteenth-century reviewers in their assessment of this work's visual and photographic elements. Kaplan suggests that the narrative "focus has the effect of freezing all motion within a static snapshot-like frame" (ICaplan, "The Spectacle of War" 96). Carl Van Doren argues that Henry is a sort of American version of Baudelaire's and Benjamin's flaneur, "a lens through which a whole battle may be seen, a sensorium upon which all its details may be registered" (Nagel, "Impressionism" 244). If, as nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics agree, The Red Badge is photographic in form, a natural extension of this hypothesis would be to suggest that Henry sees photographically, that he is a living camera within the text. Literary criticism in general, however, has been wary of defining too narrowly the ways Henry sees and perceives his experiences. But this critical tentativeness may also have its roots in the protagonist himself. The events of this novel are filtered through an extremely slippery subjective narrator and Henry's questionable perceptions. At least twice in the novel, Henry, this protagonist who believes in his "superior powers of perception" (RBC 254), is "born" and "given" "new eyes," an addition that marks his objectivity as suspect (RBC 270 and 288).1 Not only does Henry continually revise his experiences, but a more omniscient third-person narrator intervenes between Henry and the reader to provide yet another level of textual uncertainty.2 While any analysis of The Red Badge of Courage must address these textual problems, they must not deter the critic from "looking at Henry looking." In a key textual moment, Henry experiences the world around him as if he were a camera:

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

177

It seemed to the youth that he saw everything. Each blade of the green grass was bold and cleac He thought that he was aware of every change in the thin, transparent vapor that floated idly in sheets. The brown or gray trunlzs of the trees showed each roughness of their surfaces. And the men of the regiment, with their starting eyes and sweating faces, running madly, or falling, as if thrown headlong, to queer, heaped-up corpses-all were comprehended. His mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that after everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there. (RBC 291)

Henry's photographic vision in this passage allows him to anesthetize himself against the horrors of battle. Henry sees in stilted frames. He "comprehends" the shapes and outlines before him, and the reduction of his perceptions to discrete images literally allows him to remove himself from the picture. In an earlier passage, Henry, using his "usual machines of reflection" ( R B C 316), sees in photographic "picturings" and in "impossible pictures" that are separate frames ( R B C 193 and 198). Henry's thought process bears out Melville's contention that the photograph reduces issues of personal and national responsibility to a superficial and one-dimensional surface. With his transformation into a camera-like machine, Henry achieves an anesthetizing distance that elides emotional questions such as "why he himself was there." As the discrete "impression" of Henry's mind intimates, his perceptions never cohere into a unified image or narrative. In this regard, the text's subtitle, "An Episode of the American Civil War," takes on added significance. Just as Henry cannot synthesize his war experiences, this novel presents the reader with a single unnamed battle that reveals neither the meaning of the war as a whole nor its causes. If Twain's Life on the Mississippi mounts an implicit critique of seeing history panoramically, but ultimately cannot escape the desire to inhabit a sanitized and unified version of our national history, The Red Badge documents a more final rupture in the belief that history can be experienced as a panoramic continuum. O n both thematic and formal levels, the novel connects the Civil War to the end of certain ways of seeing. Try as he might, Henry cannot piece together the fragments of his actual experience into the mythic images that first propel him into battle: "he had burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds" (RBC 193). At the same time that Henry's experiences of battle never live up to the "large pictures" he first seeks, experiencing the Civil War through Henry's eyes does not provide the antidote to the sense of social disorder promised by the images of reunification and international conquest circulating in the 1890s. The novel deliberately omits any

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

178

Through the Negative

mention of politics. H. G. Wells questions in 1900, "was ever a man before who wrote of battles so abundantly as he has done, and never had a word, never a word from first to last, of the purpose and justification of the war?" (Aaron 210). According to Daniel Aaron, Crane's omissions begin an American tradition of representation that divorces war from its ideological context(s); this tradition finds its most recent and striking culmination in the official television representations of Vietnam. By omitting an explanation of the causes of the Civil War, The Red Badge refuses the reader the luxury of piecing this moment back together into an ideological whole. Nineteenth-century reviews condemn the author's unwillingness to furnish a unified image for the conflict. One critic writes of the overall sense of dislocation that starts on the grammatical level of the text's sentences: "the short, sharp sentences hurled without sequence give one the feeling of being pelted from different angles by hail-hail that is hot!" (Mitchell, N e w Essays 6). The Lotus complains, "the fondness Mr. Crane shows for chromatic effects-a sort of 'poster' commentary-cannot be such a consistent passion with all his readers" (Stallman 95). At the same time, The Spectator blames the novel's disjointed modes of seeing on a psychological imbalance in Henry: "the nervous system on which Mr. Crane chooses to illustrate his prelection [sic] is not a normal organism but an abnormal one,-morbid, hypersensitive, and over-conscious" (Stallman 98). Some readers, like the critic from the Times, swear to the text's cultural realism by exclaiming that the "Red Badge of Courage is a fragment, and yet is complete" (Stallman 101). Others, like the writer for The Spectator, resist the idea that Henry's dislocated vision has become an entrenched way of seeing in the society they inhabit. The Spectator dispenses with the novel's visual element by relegating it to the domain of the "abnormal." By contrast, twenty-first-century literary critics try to understand this element by comparing it to painting, cinema, or photography. Critics who tie The Red Badge to photography or cinema, however, are content to note in passing that the work possesses cinematic or photographic elements. A. Robert Lee notes, "without ado, cinematically we might now say, Crane shows us boundaries-latitudes and longitudesactually coming into being. Night gives way to dawn, fogs lift, cold eases" (Lee 36). O n a similar critical trajectory, Edwin Cady remarks, "he handles point of view more like a movie camera than perhaps any predecessor had done. The reader stands to see somewhere back of Fleming's eyes. Sometimes the reader gets the long 'panning' shot, sometimes the view only Henry could see, sometimes an interior view limited only by Crane's ignorance of the methods Joyce would discover" (Cady 78). It is unfortunate that these three culturally determined representational ways of seeingpainting, photography, and cinema-have been kept separated in literary criticism of this war novel. An analysis of the influence of visual culture on The Red Badge across its entire spectrum would be a necessarily huge critical project, far larger than this chapter's perameters allow. It is, however, Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

1 79

important to note that the sequestering of these media belies the cataclysmic realignment taking place at the end of the nineteenth century in the ways the culture organizes and represents experience. Impressionism, the snapshot (1888), and cinema, created by the Luiniere brothers in 1895-96, all bear witness to the broad shift in the nineteenth century from a written to a visual culture. Although critics locate crossovers in the effects that cinema, photography, and painting have on the world of T h e Red Badge, painting receives the most attention, beginning with James Nagel's groundbreaking Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (1980). In his analyses, Nagel cautions that "no reading of T h e Red Badge of Courage can be complete which does not deal with the significance of perception in the novel as both a methodological and thematic component" (Nagel, "Impressionism" 245). Nagel's discussion blurs the distinctions among the visual media by arguing that Crane uses a " 'camera eye' technique" and a third-person limited narration that is the natural expression of literary Impressionism (Nagel, "Stephen Crane" 83 and 79). Nagel's definition of Impressionism reveals the extent to which the act of seeing has become suspect by the end of the nineteenth century: "the fundamental method of Impressionism is the presentation of sensation so as to create the effect of immediate sensory experience, a device which places the reader at the same epistemological position in the scene as the character involved." According to Nagel, "the limitation of narrative data in fiction to the narrator's projection of the mind of a character is central to Impressionism, as is the suggestion that the perceiving intelligence is a qualification of the definition of reality, that perceptions are relative and potentially unreliable, that interpretations of reality are forever tentative, and that other minds may perceive the same phenomenon in other terms" (Nagel, "Stephen Crane" 76-77). If, as Nagel maintains, by the end of the nineteenth century the old adage of "seeing is believing" had come under intense scrutiny and interrogation, SO,too, can one chart the camera's transformation from Holgrave's vehicle of truth to a medium for the promulgation of doubt and misapprehension. As Henry's endless regeneration of "new eyes" and his deluded sense of his "superior powers of perception" confess, photographic vision in T h e Red Badge does not clarify events. This form of seeing may allow the protagonist to achieve a numb distance, but since the camera, too, can now lie, his memory becomes filled with a series of discrete images and frames that are ultimately transitory, unstable, and replaceable. As the introduction to this chapter suggests, one of the major cultural changes in the visual culture that determines the photographic form of T h e Red Badge is the invention in 1888 of the Kodak camera. N o longer chained to the labor of the wet-plate process, a new generation of "amateur" photographers is born in the nineteenth century's final decade. Innumerable photo clubs spring up around the country, a fact that is evidenced by a letter from July 3, 1896, to Crane: Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

180

Through the Negative I have the honor to inform you that you have been elected to honorary membership in the Kauai I
Crane accepts this "distinction with many thanks," and while no further correspondence exists to document a continued relationship with the Kodak H u b , this exchange marks Crane's connection to the cultural world of snapshot photography (Sorrentino, Correspondence 243). In 1891, Harper's Magazine remarks upon the cultural ubiquity of the Eastinan slogan, "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest": "it is heard on the street, in the cars, at the theatre, in the clubs, and, in fact, wherever men and women congregate. The comic papers have burlesqued it, statesmen have paraphrased it, and it is repeatedly used to point a moral or adorn a tale" (Newhall, The History 129). With the Kodak camera, for the first time in history, the public confronts the possibility that it can produce and manipulate innumerable and slightly different versions of "reality." Eastman describes the Kodak as a "photographic notebook" that is "an enduring record of many things seen only once in a lifetime and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost" (Newhall, The History 129). Eastman implies that the Kodak takes episodic and accidental pictures. It is a pictorial "notebook," composed of images that are hastily jotted down and preserved. As an aid to memory, almost as a replacement for this faculty, this camera immortalizes images that would, by definition, be forgotten. Ironically, while the photographs placed in this "notebook" protect distinct moments for posterity, there is nothing to guarantee that this "book" will ever be opened. As Oliver Wendell Holmes's description of his "cabinet" so firmly illustrates, the album allows the viewer the luxury of relegating distinct moments to an unexamined and unopened past. The episodic and accidental nature of the Kodak is similarly revealed by the fact that its images are named "snapshots," a term taken from hunting and used to describe firing from the hip without taking careful aim. Most of the people who take "snapshots" are not interested in

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

181

the artistic composition of their images; they want to document a quickly disappearing present. Nineteenth-century technology aided the ready availability of these Kodak images by providing a photo-finishing center. The camera came loaded with film and its $25.00 price included the developing process (Newhall, The History 129). In 1895, New York's Automatic Photograph Company boasted that it could produce 157,000 prints in a ten-hour day (Newhall 126). Looking backward, Walter Benjamin sees this discovery of mass reproduction as a turning point in history that has both liberating and apocalyptic possibilities. The film industry's "illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations" inaugurate a new and potentially fascist way of controlling the "masses" (Benjamin, "The Work of Art" 232). In Benjamin's analysis, the flip side of this new form of social control is the fact that avantgarde movements in film and photography have not yet pursued the image's ability to give everyone access to "authorship" and thus generate new forms of social thinking and responsibility (Benjamin, "The Work of Art" 232 and 236). With the invention of film and mechanical reproduction, a work of art's "aura" disappears. It no longer carries "the authenticity of a thing" that is "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history that it has experienced" (Benjamin, "The Work of Art" 221). According to Benjamin, the invention of film raises the possibility that culture can be inundated with a series of celluloid images that have no historical precedent. Mass reproduction enables a culture as a whole to experience history as a series of immediate and unconnected presents, like the discrete images that Henry stores in his memory. Benjamin brings to fruition Melville's warning that the photograph allows the viewer to elide questions of personal and national responsibility; for Benjamin, celluloid carries no history. If it is not used to reveal "entirely new structural formations of the subject" (Benjamin, "The Work of Art" 236), it risks being turned into a medium of indoctrination that does not need to be placed in dialogue with other images or with a history of western representation. Like the photographs Oliver Wendell Holines wishes to erase, the photograph then becomes a discardable object that promises the viewer, and culture as a whole, a new form of control over the representations of history. In a description that carries a premonition of Benjamin's warnings, the narrator of The Red Badge remarks upon the soldiers' endless retelling of their actions: "they speedily forgot many things. The past held no pictures of error and disappointment" ( R B C 305). The soldiers revise their previous "pictures" of cowardice, and Crane intimates that if individual memory is composed of isolated frames, so, too, can one replace a frame and provide an edited and "new" version of an individual's history. It is the larger cultural ramifications of this concept, in terms of social memory and history, that Benjamin finds both freeing and frightening. The complete technological

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

182

Through the Negative

manipulation of reality is the most disturbing counterpart of the invention of mechanical reproduction. In this new world, "[tlhe equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology" (Benjamin, "The Work of Art" 233). With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of the Nazism that follows Benjamin's essay, mechanical reproduction can be viewed as a preamble and precondition to an Orwellian universe. The invention of celluloid lays the ground for complete governmental manipulation. In contrast to Benjamin's image of a new and interactive form of communication, "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" thus becomes a testimony not to an increasingly efficient printing process and "saved time," but to an individual's first step toward the ultimate relinquishment of control over the act of image making. In keeping with Benjamin's discussion of celluloid's manipulative possibilities, Henry's photographic vision is accompanied by an endless ability to revise and replace his perceptions of himself. At several points, he berates himself for his cowardice: "[a] dull, animal-like rebellion against his fellows, war in the abstract, and fate grew within him. He shambled along with bowed head, his brain in a tumult of agony and despair. When he looked loweringly up, quivering at each sound, his eyes had the expression of those of a criminal who thinks his guilt and his punishment great, and knows that he can find no words" (RBC 234). Although the hated image of his own flight envelopes Henry, the line "knows that he can find no words" raises the possibility of a representational crisis and the idea that this image can be annulled. N o verbal narration can replace his visual image of himself. The oral stories that his fellow combatants spin cannot erase this picture, but this line hints that another visual image, another "picture," could be substituted for this experience. This visual antidote surfaces later in the text when "to the youth there was a considerable joy in musing upon his performances during the charge. He had had very little time previously in which to appreciate himself, so that there was now much satisfaction in quietly thinking of his actions. He recalled bits of color that in the flurry had stamped themselves unawares upon his engaged senses" (RBC 302). In this description, Henry's previous memory of fleeing disappears. His mind becomes a blank strip of film that is simply "stamped" with the latest reconstructed image of his heroism. One of the issues that most occupies literary critics is the question of whether Fleming is a hero at the end of the text and whether he learns and grows from his war experiences. The interpretation of Henry's faulty perceptions within the context of Benjamin's apocalyptic implications, however, precludes the possibility that the protagonist consciously develops in the course of the text. Each experience and new revision of his role within this conflict is a discrete and separate image, with the latest taking precedence only because it is the most recent. Much has been made of the novel's seemingly epiphanic ending: Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

183

Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but a sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. So it came t o pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed. He had come from hot plo\vshares to prospects of clover tranquill!; and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars faded as flowers.. . . He had rid himself of the red siclzness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of \vat He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool broolzs-an existence of soft and eternal peace. Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds. (RBC 3 18)

At first glance, the traditional sense of an awakening that accompanies the literary trope of "a golden ray of sun" promises that Henry matures to become a "man" in the course of his experiences. I would argue, however, that a lasting epiphany is not possible in this text given the nature of Henry's photographic perceptions and memory. Epiphany, as a moment of sudden understanding, is predicated upon the idea that a single moment will clarify all past moments. Nowhere in the text does Fleming demonstrate the ability to compare the snapshot distillations of his experiences or to see these images in lasting relation to each other. Henry's eyes may seem "to open to some new ways," but what is this text but a series of "episodes" where the protagonist continually sees in "new" ways? With his endless powers of revision and erasure, the problem is not that Fleming learns to perceive in new ways and images, but that none of these ways of seeing lasts beyond the mere exposure time of an immediate present. T h e Red Badge's textual mirroring of the theme and content of the Century series suggests that Henry simply recycles the experiences of others. This textual reproduction negates the idea that this novel is a bildungsrom a n . If Henry changes, he simply mutates into other, already produced, characters. In particular, the ending of T h e Red Badge recalls the language and theme of "John Collins's" report of Chancellorsville. A member of the 8'11 Pennsylvania Cavalry, Collins writes: The Plank road, and the woods that bordered it, presented a scene of terror and confusion such as I had never seen before. Men and animals were dashing against one another in wild dismay before the line of fire that came

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

184

crackling and crashing after them.. . . The horses of the men of my regiment who had been shot, mingled with the pack-mules that carried the ammunition of the Eleventh Corps, tore like wild beasts through the woods. I tried in vain to catch one . . . . In the very height of the flight, we came upon General Howard, who seemed to be the only Inan in his own colnlnand that was not running at that moment.. . . Under different circulnstances I should have considered it my duty to follow and find my command, and report for duty with it. But I could not go past the general. Maimed in his person and sublime in his patriotism, he seemed worthy to stand b!; and out of pure compliment to his appearance I hooked up my saber and fell into the little line that gathered about him.. . . X horse, that had followed the company riderless from the charge, was given to me, and my confidence and respect came back as I mounted him, for I was no longer a fugitive, but a soldiec (Johnson, Battles and Leaders Vol. 3: 183-185)

After reading Collins's description, Crane's comment about the unemotional nature of the Century Series seems inaccurate, at best. Given this discrepancy, the reader can only hazard a guess that Crane, conscious that he is retreading familiar ground, wishes to publicize his novel's originality by stating, "I wonder that some of those fellows don't tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they're emotionless as rocks" (Sorrentino, Log 89). While Crane does not mention the battle in The Red Badge by name in the actual story, he identifies it in "The Veteran" (1896), his story about Henry as an old man. To date, Harold Hungerford's " 'That Was at Cl~ancellorsville':The Factual Framework of The Red Badge of Courage" remains the best examination of this novel's historical coordinates and sources. Altl~oughdiffering in their use of firstand third-person voices, Crane's and Collins's descriptions of Chancellorsville contain the same sense of mass confusion, panic, and flight. Just as Henry Fleming makes innumerable excuses for his cowardice, Collins tries to couch his rationale for retreat by stating that he almost followed his "duty" to find his "command," a regiment in retreat behind the line of attack. Collins is tempted by cowardice, but he ultimately learns to be "a soldier" in an experience that parallels Fleming's concluding statement that "he was a man." Crane's decision to retell the battle of Chancellorsville is significant because this battle, in retrospect, became the proving ground for two generals. Historically, the conduct of Lee and Hooker at Cl~ancellorsvillesuggests that heroism must always be accompanied by its antithesis, extreme fear and mismanagement. Chancellorsville was a tremendous victory for Lee's army and would afterwards be stitched across the banners of the Army of Northern Virginia (Foote 316). Against numerical odds, Lee outmaneuvered

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

185

Hooker's superior forces and turned his flank. Lee held Hooker's 80,000 men in place with 37,000 (Foote 307). While sustaining less than 13,000 casualties, Lee was able to inflict 17,000 (Foote 314). Horace Greeley of the Trzbune exclaimed, "My God, it is horrible. Horrible. And to think of it130,000 magnificent soldiers so cut to pieces by less than 60,000 half-starved ragamuffins" (Foote 315). In an attempt to explain his sudden loss of confidence in his superior forces and position, Hooker confessed, "I was not hurt by a shell, and I was not drunk. For once I lost confidence in Joe Hooker, and that is all there is to it" (Foote 315). At the same time that gross mismanagement defined the Union's fate at Chancellorsville, the Confederate Army was prey to its own fatal mistakes there. As the leader of the flank attack on Hooker, Jackson would refer to this maneuver as tlle "most successful movement of my life" (Foote 317). In retrospect, however, this rout loses some of its glory because it cost tlle Confederates Jackson's life. Believing that tlle enemy had been defeated, Jackson stayed at the front of the line of attack. Against an officer's suggestion, "General, don't you think this is the wrong place for you?" he replied, "The danger is over. The enemy is routed. Go back and tell A. P. Hill to press right on" (Foote 301). In a moment of confusion, the pickets turned and fired upon the General and his staff, inflicting the wounds that would lead to his subsequent death from pneumonia. In a statement that reveals how Chancellorsville redefined epic conceptions of the heroic, Lee exclaimed, "he has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right" (Foote 311). Historian James McPherson maintains that the Confederate mistakes at Cl~ancellorsville extended well beyond tlle battlefield. This battle led to a Confederate "postCl~ancellorsvilleaura of invincibility" (McPherson, Battle Cry 647) that resulted in Lee's astounding misjudgments at Gettysburg: "the boost that the battle gave to southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible" (McPherson, Battle Cry 645). All stories, especially within the contained genre of the war novel, are a retelling of previous recitations. The resurfacing of Collins's story in Crane's novel may simply be the result of one author immersing himself too completely in the work of another. In contrast to this reasoning, I contend that The Red Badge's narrative reproduction comments directly upon the nature of Henry's ability to develop and change. If Henry, in this final scene and in the trajectory of the novel as a whole, is simply repeating the experiences of others, if he sees himself only in their images, he is incapable of change. Like the frequently similar "snapshots" taken by the amateur's camera, he is, in effect, reduced to being an empty vehicle for widely dispersed and readily available cultural images. At the same time that the invention of the snapshot radically expands visual possibilities in the 1890s, Crane notes in passing in a New York Daily

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

186

Tribune article from July 24, 1892, the effects Jacob Riis's photo-documentary work has on the United States and the ways the middle class thinks about itself: The thousands of summer visitors who have fled from the hot, stifling air of the cities to enjoy the cool sea breezes are not entirely forgetful of the unfortunates who have to stay in their crowded tenements. Jacob Riis, the author of 'How the Other Half Lives,' gave an illustrated lecture on the same subject in the Beach Auditorium on Wednesday evening. The proceeds were given to the tenement-house work of the King's daughters. Over $300 was cleared, which, at $2 each, will give 150 children a two-weeks outing in the country. (Crane, "On the Jersey Coast" 22) 3

Crane provides an equivocal evaluation of the power of Riis's photographs when he states that they make their audience "not entirely forgetful of the unfortunates." O n the one hand, this phrase argues that Riis's magic lantern shows create an indelible impression on the audience's minds. In the midst of the summer leisure, amidst the sun and the light, Riis's claustropl~obicimages linger and subtly alter the middle class surroundings. O n the other hand, this review raises the specter of forgetfulness. Crane, by presenting the power of the documentary photograph through the negative of "not entirely forgetful," mounts an implicit critique of this new medium that comes to fruition in The Red Badge. From this perspective, the act of attending Riis's magic lantern shows replaces active social reform. Instead of prompting the viewer into action, these performances foster complacency because they provide only momentary flashes of what it feels like to be poor. The experience of poverty by proxy permits the middle class audience to believe it is actually living in the tenements. It also allows them the luxury of "forgetfulness" because, by definition, this sudden illumination of understanding, this "magic lantern show," necessarily ends and enables the viewer to return to "the cool sea breezes" feeling enlightened. No matter how they are interpreted, Crane's remarks reveal that H o w the Other Half Lives (1890) expands the camera's social role. While little research has been done on the provocative relationship between Riis and Crane, the two were most certainly aware of each other. Crane's work, from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets to the episodic nature of T h e Red Badge, reveals the influence of Riis's newly implemented flash-powder technique. At the July 20th lecture, Crane would have seen lantern slides of the photographs that were reproduced by the half-tone process in H o w the Other Half Lives. Further documentation exists of personal interactions between Crane and Riis. O n July 26, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt tells Anna Roosevelt Cowles that he ate the week before with a Professor Smith, Jacob Riis, and Stephen Crane (Roosevelt 550). While this chapter is not concerned

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

187

with defining the personal relationship between Riis and Crane, these biographical notes support the argument that, even setting aside the public notice that the publication of How the Other Half Lives occasioned, Crane would have been forced to confront and talk about the work that, in Peter Hales's words, "invents documentary, at least as 20th-century photography has understood the term" (Hales, "The Hidden Hand" 57). In "Jacob Riis and Urban Visual Culture," Maren Stange argues that the panorama is one of the historical precedents to Riis's magic lantern shows. The images in Riis's lectures, like the moving panoramas, never appear unmediated: "Riis's actual physical presence as mediator between the audience and the photographs virtually embodied the overseeing, 'master' narrator familiar to readers of realist literature" (Stange, "Jacob Riis" 291). Stange locates the same touristic quality at work in Riis's lectures that can be found in the nineteenth-century panoramas: "he rephrased the claims of countless earlier exhibitors who offered urban 'excursionists' vicarious travel to exotic, unknown, and distant territory. Particular forebears among such purveyors may have been the entrepreneurs who emerged during the craze for moving panoramas of the rural South and unsettled West that swept the country in the 1850s" (Stange, "Jacob Riis" 292). According to Stange, Riis's work is defined by its bourgeois values and by the middle-class audience to whom it was addressed. Riis "recoiled from workers and workingclass culture, especially when he saw that culture's potential for a solidarity in opposition to the individualist and entrepreneurial values of the middle class" (Stange, "Jacob Riis" 278). Riis offered a " 'respectable' perspective on the photographs he showed." He assured his audience that "they were the 'half' designated by history and progress to colonize and dominate. Just as panorama promoters' fulsome congratulation of their audiences affected to assume not only their curiosity, but also their privileged position as those who would soon colonize the uncivilized landscape, so Riis's phrases convey his understanding that his 'excursionist' is at once tenderly refined and sternly reform minded" (Stange, "Jacob Riis" 293). Critics are divided over the question of whether Riis's images spurn the audience to social action, by causing intense anxiety, or breed middle-class complacency. In his excellent formalist analysis of Riis's photographs, Peter Hales contradicts Stange's interpretation. Instead of the argument that these photographs impose an essential distance on the relationship between the middle and lower classes, Hales argues for their immediacy: A11 the techniques we've seen so far acted s~ibconscio~isly to arouse the anxiety level of Riis's audience. The only way to reduce that anxiety, for Riis's viewer and readers, was to take Riis's position, become an urban environmentalist, and work to eradicate the slums themselves. Riis's photographs were emphatically not cathartic in Aristotle's sense of the term, for they did contain their own resolution of the empathy between subject and audience

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

188

which, Aristotle argued, characterized truly artistic tragedy. Instead they left the Victorian viewer in a powerful state of moral angst. (Hales, "The Hidden Hand" 55)

My discussion of the moral epiphany guaranteed by Riis's photographs lies closer to Stange's argument than to Hales's because it is predicated upon the idea that these images allow the viewer to experience a resolution to his moral angst and to the civic problems they present. I believe that viewing these images is itself a cleansing act and, instead of prompting the audience towards Hales's social action, the experience of the claustrophobia and darkness of these views is premised upon verisimilitude. The images themselves are sufficient punishment and restitution for the middle class audience's position of privilege, and the photograph becomes a replacement and an alternative to concrete social action. Just as Riis's magic lantern shows and Twain's Life o n the Mississippi participate in the same widening cultural definition of authentic first-person experience, Maggie and T h e Red Badge are centrally concerned with playing out the cultural implications of new forms of visual entertainment. Not only does Crane believe that fighting on the "football field" provides a close enough equivalent to fighting in the Civil War, but his tale causes one Civil War veteran to proclaim in the Roycroft Quarterly in 1896, "I was with Crane at Antietam" (Carruthers 159).In an attempt to experience first-hand the life he describes in his fiction, Crane descends into the Bowery, the "streets" of Maggie, and later becomes a war correspondent. O n February 27, 1894, Corwin ICnapp Linson explains Crane's transient slum existence: This was the period of his tramp studies, written for a press syndicate. He disappeared from view for days, and was suddenly dug up loolting as if he had lived in a grave. All this time he had inhabited the tramp lodginghouses nights, and camped o n the down-town park benches days. With grim delight he related how an old acquaintance had passed him a foot away, as he sat with a genuine hobo in front of the City Hall, and how the police had eyed his borrowed rags askance, or indicated with official hand that another bench needed dusting. (Sorrentino, Log 97)

While the limits of this chapter confine me to Crane's life before he travels abroad to report on war, he spends his life after T h e Red Badge pursuing the experience of war in fact. Before the Greco-Turkish war, he mirrors Fleming's idealism in a letter to William Howe Crane: "I expect to get a position on the staff of the Crown Prince. Wont that be great? I am so happy over it I can hardly breathe. I shall try-I shall try like blazes to get a decoration out of the thing but that depends on good fortune and is between you and I and God" (Sorrentino, Correspondence 285). In a similar vein, Crane adopts Henry's position as a spectator by proclaiming on the field of battle that

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

189

"from a distance it was like a game. N o blood, no expressions of horror were to be seen; there were simply the movements of a tiny doll tragedy" (Davis 204-05). In Active Service, his novel based on the Greco-Turkish War, Crane defines the reporter's function in terms that reveal the nineteenthcentury dominance of the visual: "the war-correspondent arises, then, to become a sort of cheap telescope for the people at home; further still, there have been fights where the eyes of a solitary man were the eyes of the world; one spectator whose business it was to transfer, according to his ability, his visual impressions to other minds" (Crane, The Third Violet and Active Service 172). At the same time that Crane's characters and his authorial persona cannot be separated from the dominance of nineteenth-century visual culture, Crane entangles his reader in the act of watching Maggie and Henry looking. In The Virtues of the Vicious, one of the few recent exceptions to the critical refusal to connect Crane and Riis, Keith Gandal discusses Maggie's voyeuristic elements: Crane is of course sardonic about the rabid pleasure-seeking of his Bowery characters, and Maggie might be described as one of the first novelistic renditions of individuals essentially stupefied by mass-culture entertainments. But while Crane is derisive about his characters' thirst for spectacle, his relationship to Bowery entertainments is not simply critical, but complicit. He was also a consumes. We l a o w that he partook of the very nightlife and street life that he describes-and not merely as an objective researches. (Gandal 84)

While Crane's work implicates author, reader, and character in the participation and production of spectacle, behind Riis's work lies a nineteenthcentury utopian discourse and a faith in the documentary power of the photographic image. Crane takes Maggie's subject matter and a new use of light and dark from Riis's text, but not Riis's faith in man and the democratic political system. Initially, it might seem strange to position Riis in the utopian tradition along with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887). But Riis's exposure of the darker side of our social system is grounded in the belief that man, once confronted with indisputable photographs of poverty and suffering, will remedy these social evils. Riis's project does not contain Bellamy's socialism, yet both authors are convinced of man's ultimate perfectibility. With a conservative confidence in capitalism, Riis argues that the tenement problem will be solved not by changing the economic system, but by rechanneling its energies to concentrate on charity. He writes, "[tlhe business of housing the poor, if it is to amount to anything, must be business" (Riis, How the Other Half Lives 201). Riis frequently falls into an idyllic praise of charitable organizations such as the foundling house:

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

190

Black as the cloud is it has a silver lining, bright with promise. New Yorlr is to-day a hundredfold cleaner, better, purer, city than it was even ten years ago.. . . It is one of the most touching sights in the world to see a score of babies, rescued from homes of brutality and desolation, where no other blessing than a drunken curse was ever heard, saying their prayers in the nursery at bedtime. Too often their white night-gowns hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly bruised by inhu~nanhands. In the shelter of this fold they are safe, and a happier little group one may seek long and far in vain. (Riis, How 146)

One of Riis's primary goals is to provide space, air, and ventilation to the urban poor. The darkness of his photographs becomes the supporting argument for the need for windows and city parks. He exclaims over the transformation of the notorious Mulberry Bend into a park. "It is now five years since the Bend became a park and the police reporter has not had business there during that time; not once has a shot been fired or a knife been drawn. That is what it means to let the sunlight in!" (Alland 210). The appearance of the sun in this description provides a direct contrast to the artificial image that closes The Red Badge. While Riis might believe that mere acts of perception, of seeing images of urban squalor, will change the perceiver, Crane posits no such faith in the visual image's lasting power. At the end of his novel, he takes Riis's convention of "letting the sun in" and empties it of its political import and social content. In Crane's image, light has no lasting effect on social reality. The closing image of Henry seeing in "new ways" and of national peace are simply single snapshots in an endlessly changing series of frames. The extent to which Crane adopts Riis's manipulation of light and dark while emptying it of its social message is best evidenced by examining Riis's flash-powder technique. Riis declares that "[tlhe worst tenements in New York do not, as a rule, look bad" on the outside (Riis 197). This statement provides the incentive for the camera's entrance into their interiors. Once it invades the tenements, the camera furnishes the supporting evidence for social change because, as Riis admits, his words "did not make much of an impression-these things rarely do, put in mere words-until my negatives, still dripping from the dark-room, came to reinforce them. From them there was no appeal" (Alland 16). In these lines, Riis almost directly repeats Whitman's desire for several dozen portraits to be taken of men because they would be "the best history-a history from which there would be no appeal" (Traubel 3: 552-553). In Riis's revisitation of Whitman's democratic project, social blindness does not exist, and sight is purely a physical condition. If you place an image before an audience, it will, by definition, be seen and given a social existence. Put in the terms of a simple tautology, "seeing is believing" in Riis's world. To both Melville and Crane, the photograph allows the viewer the luxury of hiding and of an anesthetizing distance. For

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

191

Riis, the visual image is a panacea for the numbing effects of words. The culture as a whole has become so immune to written language that only through visual images can a sense of social responsibility be fostered. Riis explains his discovery in 1887 of the flash-powder technique: "one morning scanning my newspaper at the breakfast table, I put it down with an outcry that startled my wife sitting opposite. There it was, the thing I had been looking for all these years. A four-line dispatch from somewhere in Germany, if I remember right, had it all. A way had been discovered, it ran, to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way" (Alland 26). Not surprisingly, Riis describes finding this technique in its own terms-as an epiphanic flash of light that he "had been looking for all these years." Although a technical improvement, flash-powder came equipped with its own problems. It filled the room with smoke and allowed only one exposure. Even more problematic, it momentarily paralyzed and blinded its subjects and woke sleepers. Numerous critics have commented on the heightened sense of contrast behind Riis's pictures and on the stark movement from dark to light within his frames. Many of Riis's images are taken in narrow alleys. In a picture such as "Nibsy's Alley," the camera is surrounded by darkness while the frame moves the viewer into an area of

Plate 6.2. Nibsy's Alley at 47 '1, Crosby Street. Circa 1890. Courtesy of the Jacob Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

192

Through the Negative

light that surrounds the boy and girl. Literally, the message behind this technique is that the camera will bring its subjects into the light-a healthier environment lies at the end of the tunnel for them. One reason for the marked contrast in Riis's photographs is that the flash literally traps its subjects in their surroundings. Ironically, although intended to liberate its subjects from their environment, Riis's flash-powder technique more firmly imprisons them within it. It emphasizes the whiteness of the subjects' faces at the same time that it transforms their eyes into a dead surface. In a marked example of Riis's exploitation of his subjects, at one point his use of the flash made his subjects' room catch fire and, because he blinded the tenants, he was forced to put out the fire alone (Alland 28). Like the Stephen Crane who writes about war without first hand experience and who is photographed in the romantic pose of a war correspondent before he first sees combat, Riis describes himself as a "war correspondent" (Riis 58). Riis's self-depiction clearly highlights the image of himself as a man in alien territory. In a posed photograph, such as "Under the Dump at Rivington Street" or "In Poverty Gap, an English Coal-Heaver's Home," the subjects gaze blankly into the camera or their eyes shift blindly to the side of it. If the impetus behind Riis's use of the flash is to change perception, to

Plate 6.3. Under the Dump at Rivington Street, or "An Italian Home Under A Dump." Circa 1890. Courtesy of the Jacob Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

193

bring about a social epiphany in his audience, this is clearly an epiphany denied his blinded subjects. The striking contrast of light and dark is a literary technique that Crane takes from photography throughout his life. In his discussion of Riis's documentary technique, Peter Hales notes that Riis's dangerous use of powder results in a visual world where everything is clearly described and illuminated (Hales, "The Hidden Hand" 54). In the same way that Riis gives his viewer an overload of visual information, Crane packs the visual frames of his characters to the point where they overflow with details that cannot be assimilated into the character's thoughts. Thus, Henry "saw everything. Each blade of the green grass was bold and clear. He thought that he was aware of every change in the thin, transparent vapor that floated idly in sheets" (RBC 291). Riis's flashes are meant to be accompanied by a concomitant moral understanding and enlightenment. Hales writes, "cleanliness, light, air, health: Riis repeatedly revealed their loss even as the slum dwellers seemed to struggle desperately to attain these Victorian ideals" (Hales, "The Hidden Hand" 56). In contrast to Riis's epiphanic disclosures, seeing in photographic flashes of light does not clarify the world for Crane's characters. In 1899 Crane describes a field hospital:

Plate 6.4. Family in Poverty Gap, New Yorlrk City tenement room. Photograph by Jacob Riis. Circa 1889. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Di~ision(Reproduction Number LC-USZ62025686).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

194

The flash of the impression was lilze light, and for this instant it illumined all the dark recesses of one's remotest idea of sacrilege, ghastly and wanton. I bring this to you merely as an effect-an effect of mental light and shade, if you lilze; something done in thought similar to that which the French Impressionists d o in color; something meaningless and at the same time overwhelming, crushing, monstrous. (Crane, "Wounds in the Rain," The Vrguua Edztzon VI 254)

In this rendering of flash photography into words, Crane raises the "monstrous" proposition that these sudden moments of perception, of photographic and literary epiphany, are "meaningless" because they do not last in the human memory or prompt any social change in human behavior. Just as Henry sees war in frames that allow him to reduce images to their discrete elements such as the "bold and clear" blades of grass, flash photography, as Crane describes it, allows the viewer to reduce experience to its formal "effects," to its accumulation of details. In Crane's discussion, this process is "wanton" because it allows man to dispense with images, like those of the wounded and dying, that should have a lasting emotional valence. Like Holmes's cabinet, flash photography, instead of bringing with it a sudden and lasting clarification of perception, becomes a tool to aid man's ability to forget, a literal "stop action" device in the process of constructing social and individual memory. A less theoretical example of Crane's formal manipulation of the technique of flash photography occurs when Henry discovers his "courage": He himself felt the daring spirit of a savage religion-mad. He was capable of profound sacrifices, a tremendous death. He had no time for dissections, but he lznew that he thought of the bullets only as things that could prevent him from reaching the place of his endeavor. There were subtle flashings of joy within him that thus should be his mind. He strained all his strength. His eyesight was shalzen and dazzled by the tension of thought and muscle. He did not see anything excepting the mist of smoke gashed by the little lznives of fire, but he lznew that in it lay the aged fence of a vanished farmer protecting the snuggled bodies of the gray men. (RBC 311)

As a further indication of this novel's narrative slipperiness, this passage advises that Henry "had not time for dissections" at the same time that the protagonist breaks war down into components as small as individual "bullets." Henry feels "flashings of joy," the formal component of his way of perceiving his experiences photographically. Like the snapshot that distills time into an instant, he sees in "flashes" that fill him with a "dazzled" "joy" because they cordon off whole experience into the distinct and controllable parts that allow him to maintain the image of his "daring spirit." In Maggie (1893), the work written closest in time to the publication of Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

195

Plate 6.5. Hell. Flashlight of a Low Ease~nentDive. Circa 1895. Courtesy of the Jacob Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York.

How the Other Half Lives, Crane adopts Riis's technique and subject matter. In addition to their uses of light and dark, both Riis and Crane use an anthropomorphism that turns the tenement or the army into a sinister living thing. In H o w the Other Half Lives, Riis writes, "thousands of lighted windows in the tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall" (Riis 102). The Red Badge uses a parallel image to describe "the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills" (RBC 190). It is not surprising, however, given Crane's belief in the camera's ability to lie and delude, that Maggie, the story of a young tenement girl's fall, holds none of Riis's redemptive promise. When Maggie returns to her mother for forgiveness and shelter at the novel's end, there is no possibility that any of the characters will learn from her fall: As the girl passed down through the hall, she went before open doors framing more eyes strangely microscopic, and sending broad beams of inquisitive light into the darkness of her path. On the second floor she met the gnarled old woman who possessed the music-box. 'So,' she cried, 'ere yehs are back again, are yehs? An' dey've lticlted yehs out? Well, come in an' stay wid me tehnight. I ain' got no moral standin'.' From above came an unceasing babble of tongues, over all of which rang the mother's derisive laughtec (Maggie 62)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

196

Through the Negative

Like the subjects of Riis's "Hell," Maggie stands in the middle of this frame bathed in light. Riis justifies the act of looking at prostitutes by arguing that the image will bring their salvation. The camera becomes an extension of God's presence; thus, he proclaims, "[wlhen I look upon that unhappy girl's face, I think that the Grace of God can reach that 'lost woman' in her sins" (Alland 88). The "microscopic eyes" in Crane's image, by contrast, are textual doubles for the reader, in her position as voyeur and curiosity-seeker They question why one would want to look at a "lost woman," whether represented in a photograph or in a work of fiction. When Maggie is placed in relation to Riis's work, Crane's clear criticism of the documentary photograph emerges. In the passage quoted above, the tenement gazes upon Maggie to feel its superiority. Through the presence of its innumerable "eyes," the reader is told that she, too, may look at a picture like "Hell" out of a desire to feel the self-righteousness of social epiphany. Riis's documentary convention of bathing the prostitute in light promises that the viewer's mere act of looking will cause this "lost woman" to be reached by the "Grace of God." In a mockery of this convention, in the novel's final chapter Maggie's mother is told of her daughter's death: She shook her great shoulders frantically, in an agony of grief. Hot tears seemed to scald her quivering face. Finally her voice came and arose like a scream of pain. 'Oh, yes, I'll fergive her! I'll fergive her!' (Maggie 74)

While many critics read these final lines as a testimony to the fact that Maggie's mother learns from her ill-treatment of her daughter, the repeated similes "like a scream of pain" and "seemed to scald" argue that the mother is not feeling authentic pain. She performs this histrionic scene for the benefit of the watching tenement. It is a deliberate spectacle. Crane further ironizes this pseudo-epiphany by preceding it with the description, "[tlhe inevitable sunlight came streaming in at the windows and shed a ghastly cheerfulness upon the faded hues of the room" (Maggie 73-74). In these lines, Crane presents his reader with a choice that is at the center of his works. We may believe that social redemption is possible and that the camera is an extension of God's presence. We may see the sun's appearance as providing the rationale behind our act of looking. In other words, we have looked at these frames of a tenement prostitute because we want to participate in her redemption, even if this sunlit moment occurs after her death. On a more cynical level, the sunlight mocks the documentary photograph by suggesting that this medium must always be accompanied by an artificial sunlight which promises the viewer a false epiphany and the deluded promise that we, as a society, can learn from the act of looking. The color tone and indictment of society's voyeuristic tendencies make Maggie's final appearance one of the darkest images in literature:

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

197

She went into the blaclzness of the final block. The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. The structures seemed to have eyes that looked over her, beyond her, a t other things. Afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance. Street-car bells jingled with a sound of merriment. When almost to the river the girl saw a great figure.. . . Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions. At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproacl~ableness,came faintly and died away to a silence. (Maggie 68)

These paragraphs recall the fear of the metropolis that the panorama as a form attempts to assuage. The city is transformed into a monstrous living personage, and the nineteenth-century sense of being overloaded with information in an increasingly complicated world is magnified to the point where the girl feels herself surrounded by a thousand "eyes" and "shutters." In a total reversal of the light and dark iconography that informs Riis's work, the act of seeing in Crane is accompanied not by illumination but by an extension of moral darkness. While the reader and these "eyes" may watch Maggie's final disappearance, we watch not to save her but simply to observe another form of spectacle in our increasingly visual world. These eyes point directly back to the audience itself. They are the eyes of the city, of the camera, of the viewer of tenement photography or the reader of tenement fiction, and in Crane's fiction they see Maggie only as a blank absence or as a form of entertainment. Amy Kaplan's "The Spectacle of War in Crane's Revision of History" provides critical insights on the role of the city in Crane's work: Altho~ighit is a critical commonplace that Crane uses war as a metaphor for city life in his urban writing, it is less noted that he inverts this metaphor in The Red Badge of Courage. He describes the battlefield with urban metaphors that overlay the countryside and leave only traces of the rural landscape. The approaching army is described as a train, for example; soldiers become 'mobs' and 'crowds,' and officers are compared to political bosses cajoling the masses. The battle itself is repeatedly called a vast 'machine' that produces corpses and worlzs according to mysterious orders. The main character moves from a farm into an army whose conditions resemble those of the industrial city of the late nineteenth century (Kaplan, "The Spectacle of War" 89)

According to I
Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

198

Through the Negative

rural landscape and the second growth forest that surrounds Chancellorsville into the threatening image of the modern industrial city, and the Civil War becomes a conflict that cements the extension and dominance of alienating northern technology. Thus it is that the landscape turns on Henry several times in T h e Red Badge. Just as Hooker misjudges the terrain and refuses to believe that General Jackson could approach his flank through the thick underbrush surrounding Chancellorsville (Foote 291-94), the land frequently becomes Henry's own Birnan Wood as its "foliages now seemed to veil powers and horrors" ( R B C 289). I
Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

199

The forest still bore its burden of clamoc From off under the trees came the rolling clatter of the muslzetry Each distant thicket seemed a strange porcupine with quills of flame. X cloud of dark smolze, as from smoldering ruins, went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enameled sky ( R B C 285)

In the tradition of George Barnard's stark outlines of Columbia, South Carolina, this description pictures the forest as "smoldering ruins." Henry's pastoral environment turns into a decimated city, and this passage marks a moment when both he and the narrator perceive his environment in terms of its outlines and "strange porcupine" silhouettes. Henry mirrors the narrator's propensity to see in outline: The rushing yellow of the developing day went on behind their backs. When the sunrays at last struck full and mellowingly upon the earth, the youth saw that the landscape was streaked with two long, thin, black columns which disappeared on the brow of a hill in front and rearward vanished in a wood. They were like two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night. ( R B C 204)

In these lines, just as in the novel's final image, Crane turns the literary conventions of sunlight and dawn upside down. Here, sunlight does not carry with it the traditional sense of awakening and renewal; it is used to mark the scarring of the landscape. The armies slide over this terrain like serpents and punctuate its fall from a place of edenic promise to an environment of lurking evil and continued national division. Henry's and the narrator's disposition to view this conflict in outlines, in chunks of black and white silhouettes, emphasizes the novel's central ideological stance-its refusal to provide an explanation of the war's political causes. The triumvirate of Crane, Henry, and the narrator are willing to outline the borders and edges of this conflict, but they refuse to fill in the shapes and spaces that would give it a political meaning. Images meld into one another in this work and underscore the sheer futility behind any attempt to instill this war with meaning. The repeated descriptions of the field of action obscured by smoke and chaos accentuate the formal impossibility of seeing the Civil War through any sort of totalizing lens: The billowing smolze was filled with l~orizo~ltal flashes. Men running swiftly emerged from it. They grew in numbers until it was seen that the whole comlnand was fleeing. The flag suddenly sank down as if dying. Its motion as it fell was a gesture of despaic Wild yells came from behind the walls of smolze. X slzetch in gray and red dissolved into a moblilze body of Inen who galloped like wild horses. ( R B C 219)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Through the Negative

200

Not surprisingly, this novel's descriptions of battle have much in common with the paralyzing "horizontal flashes" that accompany Riis's use of flash photography. In Crane's descriptions, however, these "flashes" do not illuminate the meaning of the conflict. Unlike Riis's camera, they do not enable Henry to see into difficult, dark, and hidden places. They jumble the war scene further, literally blinding the protagonist and the viewer and inhibiting any attempts to reconstruct the Civil War's final meaning. Crane wrote that he wished this novel to create a "psychological portrayal of fear" (Sorrentino, Correspondence 322). To accomplish this end, he believed "it was essential that I should make my battle a type and name no names" (Sorrentino, Correspondence 161). This comment was occasioned by John Phillips's request that Crane write a series of sketches about Civil War battlefields. Crane visited Fredericksburg in January of 1896 because he realized that he could not "evade" the veterans in this project as he had in T h e Red Badge by making his battle a "type." After this initial journey, Crane did not involve himself further in Phillips's plan (Sorrentino, Correspondence 160-161). As his visit to Fredericksburg suggests, Crane was attacked by Civil War veterans for his unauthentic and unspecific descriptions of a soldier's life. Army General A. C. McClurg complains, "the hero of the book, if such he can be called, was an ignorant and stupid country lad without a spark of patriotic feeling or soldierly ambition. He is throughout an idiot or a maniac and betrays no trace of the reasoning being. N o thrill of patriotic devotion to cause or country ever moves his breast, and not even an emotion of manly courage" (Pease 155). By reducing Henry's war experiences to a "type," The Red Badge makes the kind of historical recuperation that was occurring in texts like Battles and Leaders impossible. In its absence of names, the fighting in this novel attains a kind of universality that removes it from any historical context. It is, indeed, difficult at times to remember that Henry's experiences occur during the Civil War. An exact time and place cannot be ascribed to the novel's events, and this absence raises the frightening question that there is no meaning, no ideological explanation or detailed interior, behind the silhouettes of action that Henry perceives. In a moment that is remarkable because it is one of the few times in the novel when Henry's presence as a soldier is related to a larger political cause, the narrator describes: He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of ~11ich he was a part-a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country-was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality \vllich was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more that a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.. . . He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, lnalzing still another box, only there was furious haste in his movements. He, in his thought, was careering off in other places, even as the carpenter

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

201

who as he works wl~istlesand thinlts of his friend or his enem!; his home or a saloon. And these jolted dreams were never perfect to him afterward, but remained a mass of blurred shapes. ( R B C 222)

Ostensibly, this passage provides an explanation of Henry's motivations, but in reality all it does is offer the reader a choice between undefinable items in a series. A similar refusal to ascribe meaning to patriotic symbols occurs when Henry proliferates the flag with possible meanings: Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture t o him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power. He kept it near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and an imploring cry went from his mind. ( R B C 294)

Henry is fighting for "an army, a cause, or a country," but neither he nor the narrator can settle on a single meaning behind these terms. Like the flag itself, Henry's terms are so vague and without referents in the novel as to signify nothing. The progression of the series describing Henry's motivations, from the smaller "regiment" to the larger "country," puts each choice at farther remove from Henry's motivations and inner consciousness. The idea of a unified "country," one of the images through which the 1890s recuperated this "crisis," is the last and most distanced explanation possible for Henry's actions. The photographic form of outlining in The Red Badge leaves it for the reader to replace this series and fill blankness with her own explanation of the Civil War. Faced with an endless proliferation of vague and undefined forms, shapes, and choices, Crane's novel suggests a frightening possibility: that there was no distinct moral and over-arching national cause behind this conflict. It was simply the result of many individual men driven to war by their own personal definitions of heroism and innate "rage."4 Once they became a part of this army, they were swallowed by a machine-like entity that was the ultimate extension of modern industrialism. While this ''common personality" may be "dominated by a single desire," none of its soldier automatons can define this "desire" (222).As an expression of man's natural aggression, the regiment as a whole offers the release of a violence that can be expressed without the need to consider larger moral and historical ramifications. At the same time that The Red Badge refuses to provide a synthesizing political explanation of the Civil War, the novel's darkening of images and elongation of perspective adapt the photographic techniques seen in such Civil War photographs as an unidentified photographer's "Confederate Prisoners" or Gardner's "A Harvest of Death." These two images are characterCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

2 02

Through the Negative

Plate 6.6. Confederate Prisoners bound for Cox's Landing, Virginia, under guard. Unidentified photographer. 1864. Courtesy of the Medford Historical Societ!; Medford, MA.

ized not by the clear outlines of the more formally posed group photographs, but by their attempts to elongate and punctuate the distance between the viewer and the image's background. While the blurring of the Civil War photograph, or even of a later picture such as Riis's "Nibsy's Alley," results in part from the nineteenth-century camera's inability to capture moving action, the dissolving background landscape of these static Civil War photographs cannot be wholly explained by technical shortcomings. Instead, it suggests a distinct choice on the part of the Civil War photographer. The topographical distance between the viewer and the picture's background expands the field of vision and gives the spectator a sense of the total or complete vision most frequently associated with the panorama. In a purely utilitarian sense, this distance mobilizes the landscape to put images of death in the past. It relies on the terrain to punctuate and prove the viewer's physical removal from the death and defeat depicted in the middle of the frame. This receding horizon is part of the idiom through which the Civil War photographer depicts this national crisis and tries to theorize the place its images of death and division will hold for future generations. Not surprisingly, this idiom reappears in the twentieth century with John Huston's 1951 film The Red Badge of Courage. The stark black and white cinematography of this film and its use of fog mimics a Civil War photograph such as "A Harvest of Death." Indeed, the shots are so static that they frequently transform the movie into what seems like a collection of still frames. At the same time that Huston relies upon the conventions of the Civil War photograph, Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

2 03

to give this film its documentary feel he implements a grainy medium closeup shot that has its roots in the Farm Security Administration's photographs from the Depression. In an ironic reversal, if Crane's novel takes the ideology of reunification out of the war by turning Henry into a camera, Huston's film infuses Henry's story with a political message. It asks the viewer to validate a Cold War ideology of blind allegiance to nation in the face of an unknown and terrifying force. After initially negative reviews, this film was extensively edited. As a text that is itself deeply intertwined and paradigmatic of the ways Americans perceive war, The Red Badge of Courage reappeared during the Vietnam War when it was remade in 1974 for television. In contrast to later cinematic versions of this novel, throughout The Red Badge Henry searches for the distanced point of view that defines "A Harvest of Death." Since its appearance in 1895, critics have remarked upon Henry's position as a voyeur throughout the novel. Like an album compiler, Henry collects views of the war. He tries "to observe everything" (RBC 211), and he becomes "deeply absorbed as a spectator" (RBC 308). "The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go close and see it produce corpses" (RBC 238). In these excerpts, Henry exhibits the alienation that is characteristic of Crane's "psychological" portrait of war. In a literal sense, Henry adopts the camera's machine-like insensitivity, its inhumanity, as he perceives war as occurring someplace distant and outside himself. He sees himself at two removes, as is evidenced by haltingly tautological descriptions such as "he now thought that he wished he was dead" ( R B C 250). The redundancy of "he thought" and "he wished" underscores Henry's inability to feel authentic, first-hand emotion. In this numbing dislocation, it is as if he were seeing and describing himself in a photograph, or, at the very least, were demonstrating the alienation that comes after a whole generation has lived its life being able to see itself in photographs. In an ironic sense, Henry's detachment fulfills his idyllic dream that "a man became another thing in a battle. He saw his salvation in such a change" (RBC 214). While the protagonist does not encounter the epic and heroic "change" he first imagines, war forces him to manipulate point of view and to separate himself from images of death and destruction. The narrator delivers another of the views that Henry collects: To the right and to the left were the dark lines of other troops. Far in front he thought he could see lighter masses protruding in points from the forest. They were suggestive of u~mumberedthousands. Once he saw a tiny battery go dashing along the line of the horizon. The tiny riders were beating tiny horses. (RBC 226)

In an unusual fracturing of the a-temporal narration that characterizes most of this novel, Henry's perception of the battle in miniature is punctuated by the more definite time marker of "once." This marker intrudes as if to Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

2 04

Through the Negative

announce that this distanced point of view is itself an antidote to the previous scenes of chaos. While seeing in outlines and silhouettes omits the need for an ideological explanation of this conflict, it also burdens Henry with the presence of unimagined and threatening "thousands." The experience of seeing in miniature, however, through what we would call a zoom lens, wraps Henry in an anesthetizing remove from the larger world. As such, it is worthy of being marked by time in a novel that determinedly tries to stand outside time and history. At the end of this analysis, it should be clear that in the course of The Red Badge Henry collects perspectives and mobilizes points of view that will distance him from any sort of emotional epiphany. Henry learns, in effect, how to see as a camera. Able, at the beginning of the novel, to see in outlines and frames, Henry's story becomes the narrative of how battle forces him to manipulate these perspectives in order to achieve a distanced release from the death and history that surround him. Given Henry's clinical and dehumanized desire to see the machine of war "produce corpses," it is difficult to fit his development into traditional matrices of a character's progressive change. How much more problematical does it become if we are to argue that Henry functions as a "human" camera in this work? At its base, this analogy joins the camera, the machine historically associated with progress and "clearer vision," with a dehumanization and a distance that we would like to confine to our century. If the camera's ability to lie and manipulate history is restricted to our postmodern era of world wars, we are able to protect the sanctity of our Civil War photographs and to look back nostalgically upon a mythical nineteenth-century ability to represent national truths that the twenty-first century has squandered and lost. At the end of the narrative, Henry reflects upon his experiences: He understood then that the existence of shot and countershot was in the past. He had dwelt in a land of strange, squalling upheavals and had come forth. He had been where there was red of blood and black of passion, and he was escaped. His first thoughts were given to rejoicings at this fact. Later he began to study his deeds, his failures, and his achievements. Thus, fresh from scenes where many of his usual machines of reflection had been idle, from where he had proceeded sheeplilze, he struggled to marshal all his acts. At last they marched before him clearly. From this present view point he was enabled to look upon them in spectator fashion and to criticise them with some correctness, for his new condition had already defeated certain sympathies. Regarding his procession of memory he felt gleeful and unregretting, for in it his public deeds were paraded in great and shining prominence. Those performances which had been witnessed by his fellows marched now in

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Snapshot Memory and Flashes of History

2 05

wide p~irpleand gold, having various deflections. They went gayly with music. It was pleasure to watch these things. He spent delightful minutes viewing the gilded images of memory. (RBC 3 16)

In his own montage-like recapping of events, Henry leaves the novel in much the same place that he began it when he imagined peoples secure in the "shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess" ( R B C 192). He thinks in "shot and countershot," and he edits his thoughts the way that montage edits cinematic narrative. In contrast, however, to the ways that a concept such as Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage attempts to inscribe the viewer in the action, Henry's use of montage distances himself from his experiences. Inexorably, his memory "proceeds" forward as one slide replaces and erases its predecessor. As a frightening precursor to Walter Benjamin's argument that celluloid forever transforms the possibilities of constructing different social histories and realities, at the end of The Red Badge Henry filters through the images, the slides of his memory. He mobilizes his ability to erase his cowardice by acknowledging that if an event is not "seen," if a public photograph of it does not exist, it never occurred. Thus, the narrator pronounces that Henry "had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man" (RBC 273). Henry collects, "spectator fashion," the frames that convey the images of himself he desires. Marshaling "all his acts" and mobilizing his "usual machines of reflection," he inhabits the world that Hawthorne foretells in The House of the Seven Gables. In this world, technology, and not individual man, comes to tell the stories that "mesmerize us." History and memory are created by selecting images according to an ominously prescriptive standard of "some correctness." As Crane's soldiers themselves realize, the individual and national pasts are sanitized so that they go "gayly with music" and hold "no pictures of error and disappointment" (RBC 305).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

EPILOGUE

Foundations of Dust and Stone

Each of the authors and photographers discussed in this study struggles with how we should "see" history. Do we, they individually ask, find historical reality in visual images, words, or in a combination of the two? The bombings of the World Trade Center Towers once again foreground this essential question: in the face of such enormity, how should we remember the tragedy and preserve its "essence" for posterity? In an odd inversion, many have turned to the past for ways to approach an inexplicable present, and so solutions worked out in the watershed conflict of the Civil War reemerge, transformed, to interpret the present. In this coda, I want to draw parallels between how the nineteenth century negotiated the representations of the Civil War and how contemporary photographers are attempting to come to grips with the "reality" of the Trade Center bombings. Olmsted's design for a Civil War cairn in North Easton, Massachusetts, provides one model for how the future should commemorate the traumatic moments of the past. Olmsted, as in all his plans, imbues the Civil War cairn with a sense of pastness. One walks through an archway and around the monument to a small meadow-like enclosure, finding again the promise that lies at the end of most Olmsted landscapes. This field-in-miniature overlooks H. H . Richardson's Oakes Ames Memorial Hall and resurrects the pastoral in the midst of a town square. Just as Central Park and the Emerald Necklace attempt to preserve the pastoral for the future in the face of Olmsted's certainty that it would soon disappear, the clearing on the top of the cairn serves as a metaphorical resting place for the town soldiers whose names were to appear on the archway (Beveridge 180). In this tiny meadow, enclosed by huge boulders, Olmsted gives to the soldiers all that he saw as the best in his culture. Death and the pastoral combine in this space, as they did in so many of the rural cemeteries and the photographs of the nineteenth century, to make the current observer aware of the concrete things that were lost in order to construct this moment. Today, when one walks above Olmsted's Civil War cairn, there is no record that this monument was meant to memorialize the Civil War. Olmsted intended to punctuate the archway with the names of the town's soldiers who served in the war, but they were never inscribed, and the names of those who died do not surround the flagpole. By the time I visited the site Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Epilogue Plate 1. Oakes Xmes Memorial Hall C i d War Cairn, December 2002. Courtesy of the author.

in December of 2002, the only mention of war was a plaque honoring the veterans of WWI, and the cairn had become a backdrop for the winter parade. This absence of historical specificity brings a strange and discomforting anonymity to this beautiful monument. That anonymity-the fate of what was to have been a Civil War memorial-reveals two conflicting impulses at work, twin impulses that might be said to characterize every photograph and every attempt to preserve a moment in history: the desire to remember and the desire to forget. By designing a cairn, a literal marker on the path the future will take, Olmsted told his contemporaries that the division and carnage of the Civil War should remain a tangible presence in their journey forward. As he did in all his landscapes, Olmsted incorporated growth into his conception of this monument. He planned for the townspeople to place stones around the flagpole and for children to cultivate the Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Foundations of Dust and Stone

209

cairn's banks (Beveridge 180).The idea of the communal cairn is a beautiful one because it allows for the possibility that this monument will grow and change meanings as it is altered by future generations. This landscape's communal nature reveals Olmsted's desire to control, in part, the future meanings and forms of his work. His foresight also betrays his certainty that future generations would try to erase the memory of the Civil War. Today, one can only wonder what he would have thought were he to see Christmas decorations and advertisements from local retailers covering this site in a complete expunging of the Civil War. The bombings of the Twin Towers, like the Civil War, have become one of those watershed moments that we, as a culture, proclaim we will "never forget." In much the same way that people remember exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot, people today speak of what they were doing when they first heard of the bombings. In an interview with Dan Rather, Magnum photographer Gilles Peress describes this moment as "the most traumatic historical event that has happened in this country since the Civil War. It marks the turning of the page from one page of history into another page of history. And everyone knew it instantly. That a page had been turned" (Rather, "Interview"). Given its source, this statement is astounding; Magnum is a cooperative started by Robert Capa in the years following World War 11, and its sixty or so members have collectively chronicled the postwar scenes of destruction from Vietnam, to Rwanda, to Iraq and Bosnia and Afghanistan (www.magnumphotos.com). Like most Americans, I spent the day of the bombings glued to my television, watching and rewatching what seemed like an endless media loop of

Epilogue Plate 2. The Easton Winter Parade and Olmsted's Civil War Cairn, December 2002. Courtesy of the author. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Epilogue Plate 3. New York September 1 1 boolz coves. Photograph by Steve McCurry Courtesy of Steve McCurryIMagnum Photos for the photograph and PowerHouse Boolzs as the publisher of the boolz New York September 1 1 by Magnum Photographers.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Foundations of Dust and Stone

211

planes colliding with steel and buildings falling. Although the Magnum photographers might proclaim that television is "fleeting" and "disappears up a chimney," the televised loop with images of people jumping from the towers remains seared in my memory, as I am sure it does for most of the nation (Rather, "Interview"). This footage had a relatively short shelf life, however. As a culture, we quickly reached a saturation point and wanted something else, some other record. Within days, the media loop of the towers falling had been replaced by photographic stills representing the faces of the rescue workers and the site itself. Even with the technology of television available to us, the idiom of the Twin Tower bombings came to be photographic-as it had for the Civil War. A moment on the Pennsylvania Turnpike crystallized this sense for me. I looked at the rear window of the pickup truck in front of me and saw a large photograph of the towers burning above the command "NEVER FORGET." A strange dichotomy is implicit in this slogan because its very presence assumes that the spectator, and the owner of the pickup truck, has already begun the process of forgetting. The photograph, in essence, exists as a reminder, but the very need for a prompt betrays the sense that this tragedy will inevitably slip from mind. The slogan is also telling. The visual image itself is not enough. It requires verbal explanation. In much the same way that Melville's poetry testifies that words are needed to inscribe meaning onto the surface value of the photograph, "NEVER FORGET" gives the onlooker directions or cues. Its subtext implies that consensus has been reached in the interpretation of this image and of the conflict itself. The caption, in other words, bears witness to a fear and an assumption: fear that the image might be misread and an assumption that there is a "right" way to read the image. The Magnum photographers record the almost universal drive to document this moment in history as it was occurring. Susan Meiselas observes that the photographic response to the tragedy revealed each individual's sense that he or she had "to make an image to make this real to me" (Rather, "Interview"). And other viewers share in this compulsion. Public photographic galleries have sprung up all over New York. The photographs in "here is new york: a democracy of photographs" were taken by both professional and amateur photographers and are such a comprehensive record that images hang from the ceilings on strings (www.hereisnewyork.org). Visiting these galleries is perhaps the closest that we shall ever come to understanding how the viewer at Brady's gallery felt when confronted with Gardner's Antietain series for the first time. According to one Magnum photographer, in the wake of tragedy people are drawn to photographs because they "want something they can hold in their hands" (Rather, "Interview"). Just as Oliver Wendell Holmes wished to relegate his photographs to a "cabinet," the bombings have mobilized what can be seen as an almost universal national desire for history to become displaced onto an object. Starting in the nineteenth century, individual interCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

212

Through the Negative

nal images were no longer perceived as adequate representations of history; they needed to be replaced by concrete objects, by photographs, that could be interpreted and negotiated communally, in much the same way that Olmsted's plans for the Civil War cairn demanded. Just as Olmsted's huge boulders are universal grave markers at the cairn, the photograph of the Trade Center bombings becomes a portable cemetery. In the absence of bodies and of a concrete place reserved for the contemplation of this tragedy, the photograph becomes both the site and the occasion for grief. As one observer of "here is new york: a democracy of photographs" reveals, she went to the gallery because she wanted "to let it out a little" (Rather, "Interview"). Not only has the photographic gallery been resurrected from the nineteenth century, but the observation platform over the site now provides observers with another site for grief. In the New York Times, Frank Rich decries this platform: '911 1' is now free to be a brand, ready to do its American duty and move product. Ground zero, at last an official tourist attraction with its own viewing stand, has vendors and lines to rival those at Disneyland. (When Ashleigh Banfield stops by, visitors wave and smile at the TV camera just as they do uptown at the 'Today' show.) Barnes and Noble offers competing coffee-table books handsomely paclzaging the carnage of yesteryeac (Rich, "Patriotism" i

After visiting Ground Zero and watching people stand quietly in the bitter cold for five hours, or seeing the care with which the Magnum book has been composed, it is hard to reconcile Rich's editorial position with the reality of this site and its cultural representations. Rich's position seems somehow obscene, at best. In opposition to Rich's contention that the observation deck has the touristic feel of Disneyland, I would argue that the need for the platform stems from the same impulse that prompted the construction of viewing platforms in the nineteenth century. Just as citizens of the nineteenth century tried to control and understand their complicated urban world by building observation sites like the Eiffel Tower and by painting bird's-eye panoramas, we, as a nation, visit the observation deck out of a communal desire to somehow get "on top" of this horrific moment. One of the most astounding things about the Ground Zero site is that it marks a space where the city and technology have turned upon themselves. The title of the exhibition "here is new yorkX-borrowed from E. B. White-is particularly apt. It implies that Ground Zero encapsulates this urban city and the fate of our financial and technological progress. In this moment in time, this city has been reduced to a lower-case existence. As Olmsted's plans for Central Park reveal, Americans partake of a tradition in which our landscapes, in particular our urban ones, symbolize everything we want our nation to be. Looking at an excavated pit where tons of Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Foundations of Dust and Stone

213

concrete and steel once stood, one sees the ultimate fracturing of this belief. As the name itself suggests, where can one possibly go from "Ground Zero"? According t o Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, "Ground Zero" was a term first used in 1946 to document the detonation point at Hiroshima. While we will probably never know which network first used this term in the hours following the bombings, as a concept it evokes a particularly American duality. It is defined both as the point of detonation of a nuclear bomb, as the place where rapid change and activity originates, and as the very beginning or "square one." How, one might ask, can total decimation be a "rebeginning" and tie into the regeneration promised by the American project? When read within the context of the atomic bomb, the "square one" meaning of this oxyinoronic term implies that total destruction is necessary as a cleansing ritual to create a tabula rasa and erase the sins of the past. Thus, in true form, at Ground Zero the past has turned on the present and destroyed both past and present-in the form of our Icarus-like faith in the skyscraper as a symbol of our economic might, our belief in the airplane as a sign of our technological dominance, and our assurance of the godliness of capitalism and the righteousness of our political policies in the Middle East. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln is able to recuperate the death implicit in the Civil War landscape by stating: in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. (Lincoln 1505) In contrast to Lincoln's creation of pastoral hallowed ground, no such recuperation of the physical site of the World Trade Center bombings is possible-except perhaps by concentrating on "Portraits of Grief" and on the heroism of the workers and firefighters. In these well-known images, the faces of survivors themselves become the landscape that we read for signs that the American project will endure. The people in the towers died for no reason; unlike Lincoln's image of the Civil War soldiers, the victims of the bombings did not lay a firmer foundation upon which our nation can advance in its destiny. Quite literally, looking a t the hulking remains at Ground Zero and their gradual disappearance into dump trucks, the senseless tragedy of the Trade Centers has revealed the American project to be built, in part, upon a foundation of dust. The recent outcry over the potential sculptural transformation of the photograph of three firefighters raising the flag over Ground Zero reveals the extraordinary desire today to make the bombings meaningful (Rozhon). In the place of the three original white men, the sculpture plans to depict Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

214

Through the Negative

one white, one Hispanic, and one black man. By changing the races of these men, this proposed sculpture would, of course, make the bombings meaningful as a moment when the United States showed the strength and determination it takes from its melting pot composition. Quite literally, the proposed sculpture writes the race that the Civil War photograph omitted back into the frame. It seems not to matter to the developer that, in this photographic instance, the melting pot nation and its implied consensus never existed. The last-minute addition of race to the frame marginalizes it as a surface corrective and implies that the United States has "solved" its problems with race; it reveals the problem of our century to be, as W. E. B. DuBois foretold in 1900, "the problem of the color-line, the question as to how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair-will hereafter be made the basis to denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization" (DuBois 56). Chroniclers of the debate surrounding this sculpture note that the firefighter photograph is similar to the one that was used as a model for the Iwo Jima national monument in Washington (Rozhon), yet few question the similarities between these two structures-one completed and the other proposed. Both are epic depictions of a watershed moment in history, and both represent the unequivocally patriotic act of raising the flag in the face of extreme difficulty. The multicultural transformation of the proposed monument must, of course, be considered, but what is more relevant, within the context of this study of the nineteenth century, is the fact that this debate reveals the more general question of how easily a photograph can be edited. By reproducing another, previous monument, this proposed sculpture wishes to circumscribe and bring to consensus the ways that we allow ourselves to experience history. It reveals a desire, perhaps one that the public universally shares, to make Henry Fleming's world a reality. In this world, the viewer will only be allowed to experience recycled experiences of history. Just as The Red Badge of Courage repeats the accounts of the Century Series, the design for the sculpture evokes the experience already created by the Iwo Jima monument and photograph and by the final scenes of The Sands of Iwo Jima. As Mark Twain's critique of the panorama reveals, the desire to synthesize history is always made problematic by our inability to create a comprehensive narrative from the divisions and watershed conflicts that punctuate that history. The encyclopedic discourses of the nineteenth century teach us that one of the ways we have fought this inability to represent history has been to collect objects. As different as the photographs in the Brady archive or Audubon's birds might initially seem, both projects are motivated by the same impulse found in Olmsted's communal cairn or in the anonymous pile of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. All of these collected objects reveal our hope that if we can accumulate enough objects, we can stop ourselves from forgetting. Ironically, as the fate of Olmsted's cairn indiCopyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Foundations of Dust and Stone

215

cates, the very premise of this object-related sense of history acknowledges our human desire to erase painful moments from our consciousness. At the same time, this object-related history cannot fight against the fact that once these moments are turned into objects, they are in danger of following in the steps of Olmsted's stones and Henry Fleming's memories. Once memory becomes an object, it has the power to be an eternal reminder to us, but it also carries with it the ability to be discarded. Joel Meyerowitz's archival project for the Museum of the City of New York is the final, and perhaps most notable, example of the ways in which nineteenth-century models have resurfaced in our attempts to preserve the importance of the Twin Tower bombings for posterity. In the days following the bombings, Meyerowitz, a photographer most known for his study of street scenes and for his immensely successful Cape Light (1978), negotiated with the Museum of the City of New York to collect images of the site and to photograph this sight for a solid year (Meyerowitz, "Joel Meyerowitz"). Meyerowitz spent the days before the bombings planning a show at the Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery titled "Looking South: New York City Landscape, 1981-2001." The events of September 11 made this show especially poignant, and Meyerowitz likens his new archival project to Roy Stryker's

Epilogue Plate 4. Twin Towers, right panel. Photograph by Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of the Xriel Meyerowitz Gallery, New York, NY. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

216

Through the Negative

plans for the Farm Security Administration in the thirties. The impulse to archive, however, has its roots in the nineteenth century's desire to document the ways of life and landscapes it felt were quickly disappearing. Meyerowitz takes his images with an old wooden Deardorff Camera, and he makes it clear that "its connotation is nineteenth century" (Meyerowitz, "Interview with Terry Gross"). This camera produces prints that are 80 times the size of those created by a 35-millimeter camera. Harking back to the tradition of Carleton Watkins's mammoth prints of Yosemite, Meyerowitz plans to exhibit his photographs in prints that will be ten feet high ("Joel Meyerowitz"). According to Meyerowitz, this technique is the most unmediated and "objective" form of photography; it will allow the viewer to have a "visceral reaction" by literally entering into the frame as one cannot when one watches these events on television. One listener who called into the WBUR station during Meyerowitz's interview asked him if he felt his project was similar to Mathew Brady's. Meyerowitz responded that he has "stepped into shoes of those who had been in a particular place in a particular time" ("Joel Meyerowitz"). Meyerowitz places himself in a tradition of documentary photographers, but two characteristics of his Ground Zero photographs speak to the limitations inherent in this form. The "connotations" of his camera might be "nineteenth century," but Meyerowitz photographs in color. His colors jump off the page and push the photograph's two-dimensional limits. At the same time, Meyerowitz continually reaffirms the need for his viewer to step into these photographs. In a line with Melville's criticism that the photograph is all surface and has no depth, Meyerowitz attempts to make his prints possess depth by imagining the viewer literally walking into them and transforming them into a three-dimensional landscape. While today's viewer will never know for certain what Meyerowitz means when he says that his camera evokes the nineteenth century, I would argue that what is "nineteenth century" about his technique is its faith in the idea that man can be forced to "see" and remember history. Like Watkins's photographs of the disappearing west, Meyerowitz's huge photographs suggest a sort of desperation-the sense that the larger the photograph, the more certain both photographer and observer can be in the success of their mutual project of preserving the past. The sheer aggressive size of this mammoth photography speaks to its commitment to fight the impulse to erase and omit. After all, the larger the canvas, the less likely the spectator might be to forget the image. Meyerowitz speaks of his desire to make a "record" because "if there are no photographs there's no history. An event like this needs a history" ("Interview with Terry Gross"). This equivocal and evocative statement is reminiscent of Henry Fleming's thoughts. Like a geometrical proof when it is read backwards, it says that we, as individuals, must have photographs to have a past. While the viewer might well question how mankind managed to preserve "history" in the centuries before the camera, the more important Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Foundations of Dust and Stone

217

theoretical issue the statement raises is the idea that we can only remember if we have photographs. Meyerowitz wants people to feel these photographs in their "gut," but his plan to build an archive also takes its inspiration from placing these "visceral" works firmly in the past. The task, for Meyerowitz, is how to photograph "beyond the moment as a historian." Some day, he theorizes, people will see these pictures and exclaim, "look at how they treated fire-hydrants in that time" ("Joel Meyerowitz"). The reduction of this tragedy to something as concrete and simple as a fire hydrant is itself problematic because it contradicts the "gut" immediacy Meyerowitz wishes to provoke. When Meyerowitz comments that this "stuff is going to look so antiquated" to the future, he expresses his own desire to place this moment firmly in the past. Meyerowitz believes that the horror one feels in one's "gut" from his photographs comes from the viewer's "agency" ("Joel Meyerowitz"). One might well question how the viewer can posses agency if the photographer has himself decided that these works will soon be "antiquated." Perhaps this can occur as a result of what Meyerowitz terms the "shiver of memory." For a brief instant, the viewer is meant to feel the finger of the past touching him, bringing him back to the moment when he first learned about the bombings. Meyerowitz's desire to have his photographs prompt the visceral reaction impelled by the crisis itself brings the contemporary viewer face-toface with the same questions posed by the moving panorama and Fleming's photographic vision: how many times can one experience a moment for the first time before it becomes lessened in its intensity-a command performance and another history experienced by proxy? Meyerowitz plans to mount his archival exhibit in book form and in a gallery in 2004 ("Joel Meyerowitz"). One might well wonder whether one will want to walk back into the site of the Trade Center Bombings in two years. This, of course, is the problem of Holmes's cabinet, the archive, and the encyclopedia as concepts. They presuppose a lasting impulse and desire to remember. By 2004, shall we still feel the need to remember this crisis, or shall we have been successful in cataloguing it and placing it firmly in the past? If we visit the Meyerowitz exhibition, will it be only to appreciate and collect these photographs as aesthetic objects? Meyerowitz and the Magnum photographers speak of the difficulty of creating an aesthetics of this horror. As one Magnum photographer says, the plumes of smoke coming from the towers are a "majestic moment," but one that is haunted. "This is the moment when all these people died" and we "inhaled 6000 souls" (Rather, "Interview"). In a similar fashion, Meyerowitz likens the site to Pompeii, where all is "entombed in dust," and questions how it can be "both horrifying and beautiful at the same time?" ("Interview with Terry Gross"). In their comments, these photographers underline the basic aestheticizing way in which a photographic history comes to be read. Once an image is enclosed in a frame, we start to look at it as a work of art and to ignore the world outside its frame. This circumscription, Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

218

Through the Negative

perhaps, might be what makes Frank Rich speak of the Disneyland-quality surrounding representations of the bombings. I have several photographs from "here is new york" hanging on my walls, and many people have asked me ''why?" I can only say that I keep these images in view because, perhaps like Meyerowitz, I do not want to live in a world where we can forget conflict and division as easily as Henry Fleming does. I also believe that the aesthetics behind these photographs, their haunting beauty, is what saves them from taking on Rich's touristic feel. Looking at these works, one is always aware that they represent only a partial glimpse of the past. These photographs might "still" the past, but they also return Orpheus's look because they propel the viewer into the world outside the frame. They are pieces of the past, and in their beauty they provoke a profound sense of survivor's guilt in the viewer. They cannot capture the whole any more than a single portrait of a Civil War recruit tells all about the man or Gardner's pastoral Dunker Church photograph gives a universal or generalizable picture of the Civil War. In the Magnum photographs and in the works of Joel Meyerowitz, no less than for those of Brady, there is always something outside the frame, something missing that points to the ultimate incomprehensibility of the moment in history. In pointing to the vast gulf separating image and words from "reality," these photographs create a world that is a combination of Olmsted's and Melville's projects. In this world, the viewer steps through the negative and back again, collecting words and images like stones that will forever remind us of the promise of the future, the importance of the present, and the pain of the past.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Notes

CHAPTERFOUR: "SOUNDINGTHE WILDERNESS" 1.

X cursory look at Melville's actual interactions with war photographs must include the pictures of his cousin, Henry Ganse~oort,who began his military ser~icewith the S e ~ e n t hMassachusetts. This regiment was quartered in Washington in the unfinished capitol building and had Mathew Brady as its official photographer (Garner 99). A picture of Gansevoort and the 13th New York Camlry at Vienna, Virginia, in 1864 is attributed to Alexander Gardner (Leyda, Plate XII). Melville presented a tinted photograph of his son Malcolm to his son's Volunteer Company after Malcolm's suicide in 1867 (Leyda 691). Like many nineteenth-century Ainerican families, the Melvilles and Gailsevoorts were caught up in the novel exchange of photographs. In 1863 Melville's wife Lizzie sent a n h o t o ~ r a n hof her camera-shr husband to the rest of the family in a wave of p i k e - s w a p p i n g (Garner 269): Although the rest of the family took this opportunity to update its photographs, Melville simply recycled the Davis and Company amhrotype he had taken in 1861 before he departed for his journey to Sail Frailcisco on the Meteor (Leyda 617). O n September 16. 1860. he wrote to his children from aboard the Meteoc, "ltlhe nicture which I have of you & the rest, I look at sometimes, till the faces almost seem real" (Leyda 626). In probably one of his last personal experiences with photograph!; Melville jests in a letter of October 5, 1885, to Mrs. Ellen Marett Gifford: > '

L

L

J

L

It is now quite a time since you first asked me for my photo:-Well, here it is at last, the veritable face (at least, so says the Sun that never lied in his life) of your now venerable friends-venerable in years.-What the deuce makes him look so serious, I wonder. I thought he was of a gay and frolicsome nature, judging from a little rhyme of his about a Kitten ["Montaigne & His Kitten"], which you once showed me. But is this the same man? Pray, explain the inconsistency, or I shall begin to suspect your venerable friend of being a two-faced old fellow and not to be trusted. (Leyda 793-94)

2. Hawthorne describes the arrival of the iron-clad and nostalgically recalls a less

"modern" time: There will be other battles, but no more such tests of seamanship and manhood as the battles of the past; and, moreover, the Millennium is certainly approaching, because human strife is to be transferred from the heart and personality of man into cunning contrivances of machinery, which by and by will fight out our wars with only the clank and smash of iron, strewing the field with brolzen engines, but damaging nobody's little finger except by accident. Such is obviously the tendency of modern improvement. (Hawthorne, "Chiefly" 411-412)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

220

Notes

3. The half-finished iron dome of the capitol building is another symbol of the modern world for Melville. In "The Conflict of Conyictions" an italicized voice proclaims: (Tzde-mark And top of the i?ges' strife, Verge where they called the world to cotne, The last c z d ~ m c eof hfeHa hi?, the rztst on the Iron Dome!) 116)

In contrast to the Jeffersonian simplicity of the previous design, the new dome was palatial; it was so huge that it could not he carved out of stone like the rest e k e the of the huildin~.It was manufactured from iron and nainted white to " appearance of stone. As a trompe-l'eoil and a piece of deliberate artificialit!; the dome becomes for Melyille a symbol of the play between surface and depth in our culture's constructions of nation (Garner 77). Whitman also remarks on the unrepublican nature of this edifice, stating it is "by far the richest and gayest, and most un-American and inappropriate ornamenting and finest interior workmanship I eyer concei~edpossible.. . . Eut.. . . the style is without grandeur, and without simplicity" (Garner 8 1). 4. Many thanks are due to Carolyn Icarcher for her thoughtful reading of a draft of this chapter. In an attempt to reconcile Melville's earlier idealism and his embracine u of other races with the conservatism of this collection. Icarcher concurs with Aaron in his criticism that "the crux of the weakness we sense in Battle-Pieces is that Melville's anguish is focused almost entirely on the fraternal bond linking the white men fighting for Right with those fighting for Wrong" (Karcher 276): After the Civil War, Melville, like so inany northerners of his generation, seems to have been overcome by a sense of guilt toward the defeated South that drove him to transfer his allegiance from the Negro to the southerner as America's chief victim. Not until the end of his life did hlelville recover his youthf~ildream of human brotherhood. In the opening pages of his last novel, Billy Btldd, written after a thirtyyear retreat from prose fiction, Melville once again portrays a darlcskinned sailor-this time not a Polynesian, but an African-as a heroic savior and fuses his image with that of the white 'Handsome Sailor,' Billy Budd. (Karcher xii)

Karcher sees the opening scene of Billy B u d d as a moment when Melville "has at last become free to dismiss the phantasm of race with complete serenit!; and to embrace once again the dark brothers of his youth" (307). Other critics have been less empathetic and haye read the "Supplement," in relation to Reconstr~iction,as Melville's "one real failure of historical and poetic imagination" (Adler 159). 5. The landscape emerges as a character in Battle-Pieces and is itself worthy of more than the cursory analvsis critics. myself included. have allowed it. Throughout this collection, the landscape identifies and marks the differences in soldiers. The "Men of Maine" fight in "A land how all unlike their own,/With the cold pine-grove overgrown" (168), and "Lee in the Capitol" talks of armies "Both of the palm and of the pine" (235). In "Malvern Hill" and "Verses Inscriptiye and Memorial," the landscape betrays man because it remains impervious to the soldier who fights for it. "Malvern Hill" questions, "Does the elm wood/Recall the haggard beards of blood?" and ends with the denial: >

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

,

Notes W e eltns of h l a l ~ w nHill Retnetnber every t h i q ; But sap the twig will fill: KQzgthe world h o w it will, Leazjes tnzist be green in Spring. (68)

In "The Scout Toward Xldie" the forest emerges as a character in liege with Mosby. "I'm for the South! says the leafage green" (2121, and the mysterious wood is "Moshy's hall" (190).

1. The best analysis of the mythic, historical, and touristic existence of Hannibal, Missouri, the town that dominates both Twain's and Huck Finn's childhoods, appears in Shelley Fisher Fishkin's wonderful collection of essays, Lighting O u t for the Territory Reflections on Mark Twain and American Cultwe. In "The Matter of Hannibal" Fishkin describes visiting Twain's birthplace: Vivified through hlark Twain's imagination, Hannibal would become the scene of archetypal innocent idylls of childhood, the quintessential hometown. But it would also become a flash point of guilt, an emblem of bad faith and corruption, of moral rot, of barbarism-the underside of an arcadia that was innocent only in imagination.. . . ,\/lark Twain's Hannibal is a palimpsest that yields diverse and often contradictory meanings. It is also a microcosm of America itself-its promise and its potential, its guilt and its shame. In The Burden of Sozithem History, C . Vann Woodward observed that 'the tragic aspects and the ironic implications' of American history have been obscured by 'the national legend of success and victory and the perpetuation of infant illusions of innocence and virtue.' Hamibal eventually came to evoke, as no other single locale in the nation would or could evoke, both the innocence and the irony of American history. (Fishlcin 14-13)

2. A prohlein arises when citing from McDermott's Panoramas of the Mississippi. When excerpting the panoramic lectures in his text, McDermott does not provide his reader with their full citations. 3. Vailce brings this project to New York for exhibition in 1851 (Hales, Silver Cities 35). While the constraints of this chapter haye lead me to focus solely on the panorama of the southern landscape, the western tradition of the urban panorama deser~esattention and inclusion in any discussion of this medium's American manifestations. Peter Hales's Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 offers an insightful reading of the panoramic iinpulse as it relates to western expansion and urban boosterism: San Francisco's daguerreotypists succeeded in inalcing the panorama not only a mechanism for including a maximum of information about the city, but a potent symbolic device for describing urban life in the instant city. (Hales 30)

Hales contends that the "urban information boom of the 1850s was the result of a generalized national pressure to unify the country and present that unity to both national and international viewers" (Hales 37).

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Notes

222

CHAPTER SIX: SNAPSHOT MEMORY AND FLASHESOF HISTORY 1. This chapter uses the Appleton edition of The Red Badge. This ~ e r s i o nappears in novel form in October of 1895. Both Henry Binder and Hershel Parlter make a case against this edition. Parlter argues that Crane's editor Hitchcock "sanitized" the text for contemporary readers and war xterans (Parker 43). Binder states: The Xppleton edition pleased the contemporary audience and has become a classic of American literature, but it is not what Crane conceived the story to be. Most contemporary readers found the Appleton Red Bddge to be an account of a young man's growth from confused youth to resolute manhood; but ever since the first close readings appeared in the 1940s, modern critics have argued inconclusively as to whether or not this growth takes place; and still others have said that Red Badge is a flamed work mhich cannot be satisfactorily explicated. What happened is that Crane wrote an ironic story in the manuscript, a story in mhich the central character does not undergo any positive growth; and then apparently in response to editorial suggestions at Appleton, made or allowed two series of deletions in the novel just prior to publication. These deletions confused the original irony; reduced the psychological complexity of Henry Fleming, the main character; also obscured the function of Wilson and the tattered man; and left the test incoherent at several places, in particular the final chapter. (Binder 9 )

While Binder and Parker's reading of this novel as an indictment of the traditional coining-of-age-through-war theme supports my own analysis, I haye chosen to use the Appleton edition. Not only is the Virginia edition missing several pages, hut any attempt to discern an author's illtentions leads into an inescapable critical morass. More importantly for this chapter, the analysis of the relationship between culture and a novel must use the edition of the novel that we, as a culture, have read since 1895. 2. While this chapter is not concerned with a formalist analysis of the different narrative voices in this work, it is necessary to understand, as Tholnas Kent writes, that in The Red Badge: Crane confronts a distinctly twentieth-century problem, man's limited ability to know the meaning of existence, and he refuses to endorse without serious reservations any metaphysical precept, any moral or ethical value structure, including determinism. In The Red Bddge of Coztmge, epistemological uncertainty may be seen to function on two levels: on the narrative level within the test where characters and events are interwoven and on the extratextual level, or audience level, where judgements must be made by the reader about the meaning of the text.. . . So, in a sense, Crane inanages to transform the very structure of the test into its own subject matter. In addition to the epistemological uncertainty that is treated overtly on the narrative and extratextual levels, Crane compounds the reader's difficulty by employing a subtle, mystifying narrator who revels in producing ironic commentary and ambiguous conceits. (Kent 6221

In contrast to much formalist criticism, this chapter does not distinguish between the narrator's yoice, Henry's voice, and Stephen Crane's presence. While I believe that such a separation can be made, this distinction lies beyond this chapter's scope. 3. Although thls review is anonymous, both Sorreiltmo (Log 76) and Fried attribute it to Crane (Fried 24). 4. While this study is not concerned with debating the "true" reasons the Civil War soldier went to war, James McPherson's What They Fought Fo1; 1861-1865

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Notes

223

p r o ~ i d e sa suggestive correction to Crane's erasure of the Civil War soldier's ideological moti~ation.In his introduction, McPherson argues against the theory that Civil War soldiers did not espouse a political cause: The ideological motifs that almost leaped from so many pages of the letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers have caused me to reject the paradigm as far as they were concerned. Not all, of course, but a large number of those men in blue and gray were intensely aware of the issues at stake and passionately concerned about them. To set the stage for the evidence I will present to support this assertion, it is worth noting again that these were the most literate armies in history to that time-more than 80 percent of Confederate soldiers and more than 90 percent of white Union soldiers could read and write. hlost of them were volunteers, in contrast to tx~~entieth-century wars in which most soldiers have been draftees or long-service regulars.. . . They continued to vote during the mar, not only electing some of their company and regiinental officers but also voting in state and national elections. Americans were the world's preeminent newspaper-reading people in the nineteenth century. Soldiers continued this habit during the war whenever possible, eagerly snapping up newspapers that mere sometiines available in camp only a day or two after publication. Nor did the taboo against discussion of ideological issues that seemed to prevail in World V(7ar I1 exist during the Civil War. (McPherson, V%at They Fought For 41

Later in his introduction, McPherson defines these "ideological issues": These themes of liberty and republicanism formed the ideological core of the cause for which Civil \Par soldiers fought, Confederate as well as Union. Ainericans in both North and South believed themselves custodians of the legacy of 1776. The crisis of 1861 was the great test of whether they were worthy of the heritage of liberty bequeathed to them by the founding fathers. O n their shoulders rode the fate of the great experiment in republican government launched in 1776.. . . The profound irony of the Civil War was that Confederate and Union soldiers, like Davis and Lincoln, interpreted the heritage of 1776 in opposite ways. Confederates fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government; Unionists fought to preserve the nation created by the founders from dismemberment and destruction. (McPherson, What The11 Fozcght For 6-7)

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Works Consulted

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New Yorlz: I<nopf, 1973. Adlel; Joyce Sparer. War in Melville's Imagination. New York: NYU Press, 1981. Alland, Alexander, Sc Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. With a Preface by Ansel Adams. New Yorlz: Aperture, 1973. Andrew, Dudle!; ed. The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photograph)'. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1997. Andrews, William H. "Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, and the Problem of Authority in New South Writing." Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 1-21. Aumont, Jacques. "The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze." The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photogmphy. Ed. Dudley Andrew. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1997. 231-258. Barnard, George. Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign. 1866. With a New Preface by Eeaumont Newhall. New York: Doyes, 1977. Barthes, Roland. C a n w a Lucida: Reflections on Photograph)'. New Yorlz: 1981. Baudelaire, Charles. "The Modern Public and Photography." 1862. Classic Essaj~s on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenherg. New Hayen, CT: Leete's Islaid Eooks, 1980. 83-89. Benjamin, Waltec " N (Theoretics of I<nowledge; Theory of Progress)." Trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth. Philosophical Forum 15. Nos. 1-2 (198.3-84). . "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century." Reflections: Essa)'s, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. New Yorlz: Schoclzen Eooks, 1978. 146-162. . "A Short History of Photography." 1977. Classic Essa)'s on Photograph)'. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Have, CT: Leete's Island Boolzs, 1980. 199-216. . "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illunzinations. Ed. Hannah Arendt and Trans. by Harry Zohn. New Yorlz: Schoclzen Boolzs, 1968. 217-251. Eergmann, Hans. "The Panoramas of New York, 1845-1860." Prospects 10 (1985): 119-37. Bernstein, John. Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Besant, Sir Waltec "My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book." Munse)"s Magazine 18 (Feb 1898): 659. Eeveridge, Charles E., and Paul Rocheleau. Frederick Law Olnzsted: Designing the Ainerican Landscape. New Yorlz: Rizzoli International Publications, 1995. Binder, Henry. "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody I<nows." Studies in the Novel: Special Number on Stephen Cmne, 1978. Ed. Hershel Parker. X.1 (Spring 1978): 9-47. "Brady's Photographs from the Seat of Wac" N e w York Times 2 6 July 1864: 4. Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

226

Works Consulted

"Erady's Photographs of the War." New York Times 2 6 September 1862: 5. "Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam." N e w York Times 2 0 October 1862: 5. Buberger, Joe, and Matthew Isenberg. "Preface." Russell's Civil War Photographs: 116 Historic Prints by A.J. Russell. New York: Do~el;1982. N. pag. Eudd, Louis J. "Mark Twain as an American Icon." The Cainbridge Companion to Mark Twain. Ed. Forrest G. Robinson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995. 1-26. Euell, Lawrence. The Environnwntal Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: H a r m r d UP, 1995. Eurns, Ken. The Civil War Series. PBS, 1990. Cad!; Edwin H. "The Red Badge of Courage." Critical Essajs on Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. 76-98. Carnes, Mark C., ed. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. Ed. Mark C. Carnes. New York: Agincourt Press, 1995. Carruthers, Sharon. "'Old Soldiers Never Die': A Note on Col. John L. Burleigh." Studies in the Novel: Special Number on Stephen Crane, 1978. X . l (Spring 1978): 158-160. Carton, Evan. "Speech Acts and Social Action: Mark Twain and the Politics of Literary Performance." The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain. Ed. Forrest G. Robinson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995. 153-174. Chase, Robert. The American Novel and its Tradition. Garden Cit!; N Y Doubleday, 1957. Clinton, Catherine. "Gone With the Wind." Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. Ed. Mark C. Carnes. New Yorlz: Agincourt Press, 1995. 132-135. Cohen, Hennig, ed. The Battle-Pieces of Herman Melville: Edited with Introduction and Notes by Hennig Cohen. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1963. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Eolian Harp: Composed at C l e ~ e d o n ,Somersetshire." 179511796. The Norton Anthologjl of English Literatwe. Vol. 11. Ed. M . H . Abrams. New Yorlz: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993. 326-328. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in The Portable Stephen Crane. 1893. Ed. Joseph IZatz. New Yorlz: Penguin, 1969. 3-74. . The Red Badge of Courage in The Portable Stephen Crane. 1895. Ed. Joseph IZatz. New York: Penguin, 1969. 189-3 18. . Tales of War: The Little Regiment, "An Episode of War," Wounds in the Rain, and "Spitzbergen Tales." Vol. VI. The Universitjl of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane. Ed. by Fredson Bowers. 1 0 vols. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1969-76. . The Third Violet and Active Service. 1896 and 1899. Vol. 111. The Uniuersity of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Cmne. Ed. by Fredson Eowers. 10 vols. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1969-76. Crar!; Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: O n Vision and Modernit)' in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Dahl, Curtis. "Mark Twain and the Moving Panoramas." Ainerican Quarterly 1 3 (Spring 1961): 20-32. Davis, Linda H. Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane. New Yorlz: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Dayis, William C., ed. Touched By Fire: A National Historical Society Photographic Portrait of the Civil War. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 1997. Diffley, I
Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Works Consulted

22 7

Dingus, Rick. The Photographic Artifacts of Timothy O'Sullivan. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico Press, 1982. Dondore, Dorothy. "Banvard's Panorama and the Flowering of New England." N e w England Quarterl~~ XI (December 1938): 817-26. DuEois, W. E. E. "To the Nations of the World." Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century. 2nd Edition. Ed. by August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Francis L. Brodericlr. New Yorlr: Macmillan, 1971. East, Charles. "A Yankee in Dixie: Baton Rouge Photographer A.D. Lytle." Touched By Fire: A National Historical Society Photographic Portrait of the Civil War. Ed. William Dayis. New York: Black Dog and L e ~ e n t h a lPublishers, 1997. 197-232. Eliot, George. Middleinarch. 1871-72. Ed. by W.J. Harvey. New Yorlr: Penguin, 1965. Eliot, 7.S. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 4 N o ~ e m b e r1948. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. TheJoumals and Miscellaneous Notebooks. Vol. 8, 1841-43. Ed. William H. Gilman and J.E. Parsons. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970. . "Nature." Selections from Ralph Waldo Enwrson. Ed. by Stephen E. Whichec Eoston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. 21-56. Faulkner, William. Intruder in the Dust. 1948. New York: Vintage, 1991. Fisher, Victor, and Michael B. Frank, eds. Mark Twain's Letters Volume 3: 1869. Berkeley: UP of California, 1992. Fishlrin, Shelley Fisher. Lighting out for the Territor)':Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Charles Scrihner's Sons, 1980. Fogle, Richard Hartec "Melville and the Civil Wac" Tzdane Studies in English 9 (1959):61-89. Fonel; Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1 877. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. Fredericksburg to Meridian. Vol. 2. New Yorlr: Vintage, 1963. Fralin, Frances. The Indelible Image: Photographs of War from 1846 to the Present. New York: Ahrams, 1985. Frassinato, Williams. Antietam: The Photographic Legac)' of Anwricai Bloodiest Da)'. New Yorlr: Scribner's, 1978. . Gettysburg: A Journey in Time. New York: Scribner's, 1975. Fried, Lewis, and John Fierst. Jacob Riis: A Reference Guide. Eoston: G. I<. Hall, 1977. French, Stanley "The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the 'Rural Cemetery' Mo~ement."Ainerican Quarterly 26.1 (March 1974): 37-59. Galperin, William H. The Return of the Visible in British Ronzanticism. Baltimore, MD.: John Hoplrins UP, 1993. Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Gardnel; Alexander. GardnerS Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. 1866. New Yorlr: Dover, 1959. Garner, Stanton. The Civil K7ar World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: UP of I
Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

228

Works Consulted

Gerher, John. "Mark Twain's ' P r i ~ a t eCampaign.'" Civil War History 1 (March 1955). Goldberg, Viclri. Photograph~lin Print: Writings from 181 6 t o the Present. New Yorlr: Simon and Schuster, 198 1. Gollin, Rita. "'Getting a Taste for Pictures": Hawthorne at the Mailchester Exhihition." Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal (1977): 81-77. . "The Mathew Brady Photographs of Nathaniel Hawthorne." Studies in the American Renaissance 1981: 379-391. Gollin, Rita, and John Idol, Je Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Knowledge and Uses of the Visual Arts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991. Greeley, Horace. T h e Daguerrean Journal 2 (1851): 19. Hales, Peter. "The Hidden Hand: Jacob Riis and the Rhetoric of Reform." Exposure 20.3 (1982): 52-58. ---. Silver Cities: T h e Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1 91 5. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and B a b ~ l l o n :Spectatorship i n American Silent Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991. Hart, James D. T h e Oxford Companion t o American Literature. 3rd Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1956. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birth-mark." 1843. Selected Tales and Sketches. Ed. Michael J. Colacurcio. New Yorlr: Penguin, 1987. 259-278. . "Chiefly About War Matters." 1862. The Complete Writings. Old Manse Edition. Vol. XVII. 361-420. -. T h e House of the Seven Gables. 1851. Ed. Milton R. Stern. New York: Penguin, 1965. . The Letters. Ed. Thomas Woodson et al. The Centenary Edition of the Worlrs of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1985. . The Marble Faun. 1860. New York: Signet, 1961. . "The Old Apple-Dealer." 1842. Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches. New Yorlr: The Library of America, 1982. 714-720. . "The Prophetic Pictures." 18.37. Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches. New York: The Library of America, 1982. 456-469. . T h e Scarlet Letter. 1850. Ed. Seymour Gross et al. New York: Norton, 1988. Hemingway, Ernest. "Big Two-Hearted River: Part I and 11." 1925. In O u r Time. New Yorlr: Scribner, 1966. 133-156. ---, ed. M e n at War: T h e Best War Stories of All Time. New York: Crown Publishers, 1942. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New Yorlr: Vintage, 1968. Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parlrec Herman Melville: T h e C o n t e m p o r a r ~Reviews. ~ Cainbridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Hiss, Tony. "Experiencing Places." T h e N e w Yorker (22 June 1987): 45-68. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. "Doings of the Sunbeam." Atlantic M o n t h l y 12 (July 1863):l-15. . "My Hunt after 'The Captain.'" Atlantic Monthl)' 10 (1862): 738-64. . "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph." 1859. Classic Essays o n Photogm p h y . Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, CT: Leete's Island Eooks, 1980. 71-82. ---. "Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture; with a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic." Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861): 1-3-29. Hook, Andrew. "AMel~ille's Poetry." Herman Melville: Reassessments. Ed. A. Robert Lee. New Jersey: Barnes and Nobles Boolrs, 1984. 176-198. Horowitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches porn the Unfinished Civil War. New Yorlr: Vintage Boolrs, 1998.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Works Consulted

229

Hungerford, Harold R. "'That Was at Chancellors~ille':The Factual Framework of T h e Red Badge of Courage." American Literature 34 (1963):520-31. Huston, John, die T h e Red Badge of Courage. 1951. Hyde, Ralph. Panoranzania! T h e Art and Entertainment of the "All-Enzbracing" View. London: Trefoil, 1988. Jay, Bill. "Death and the Darlrroom." Fields of Writing: Readings Across the Disciplines. Ed. Nancy Comley et al. New Yorlr: St. Martins, 1984. 178-92. Johnson, Robert U. and Clarence C. Buel, eds. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. 4 vols. New Yorlr: The Century Company, 1887-88. Kaplan, Amy "The Spectacle of War in Crane's Revision of History." N e w Essays on The Red Badge of Courage. Cambridge: Cambridge, UP 1986. 77-108. Kaplan, Justin. M K Clenmzs and Mark Twain: A Biographj,. New Yorlr: Simon and Schuster, 1966. I<archer, Carolyn L. Shadow over the Promised Land: Slaver); Race, and Violence in Melville's America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980. Kent, Thomas. "Epistemological Uncertainty in The Red Badge of Coumge." Modern Fiction Studies 27.4 (Winter 1981-1982): 621-629. Knightle!; Phillip. First Casualty: From the Crinzea t o Vietnam: the War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt Erace & Compan!; 1976. Lauter, Paul, General Editor. T h e Heath Anthology of Ainerican Literature. Eoston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Lee, Robert A. "Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Coumge: The N o ~ e l l aas ' M o ~ i n g Eox.' " T h e Modern Anzerican Novella. Ed. Robert A. Lee. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 30-47. Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Docunmztar)' Life of Herman Melville 181 9-1 891. 2 vols. New Yorlr: Gordian Press, 1969. Lincoln, Abraham. "Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863." T h e Norton Anthologj~of Anwrican Literature. Vol. I. Ed. by Nina Baym. New Yorlr: W. W. Norton and Compan!; 1989. 1504-1505. Magnum Photographers. N e w York September 11. With an Introduction by David Halberstam. New Yorlr: Powerhouse Boolrs, 2001. . www.magnumphotos.com Marx, Leo. T h e Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal i n America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Ma!; Lary, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989. McDermott, John Francis. T h e Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1958. McDonough, James Lee. Shiloh: In Hell Before Night. I<nox~ille:Tennessee UP, 1977. McFeely, William S. G m n t : A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton and Compan!; 1981. McPherson, James M. Battle Cr)' of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New Yorlr: Ballantine Boolrs, 1988. . W h a t The)' Fought Fol; 1861-1 865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994. Meltzer, Milton. Mark Twain Hirzself: A Pictorial Biograph)'. New Yorlr: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960. Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. 1866. With an Introduction by Lee Rust Brown. New Yorlr: Da Capo Press, 1995. . Billj, Budd, Sailor. 1924. The Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

230

Works Consulted

with an Introduction by Warner Berthoff. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. 429-505. . "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." 1855. The Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed. with an Introduction by Warner Berthoff. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. 202-222. . Pierre; or The Ambiguities. 1852. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1971. . White Jacket; or, T h e World in a Man-of-war. 1850. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Vol. 6 in The Writings of Herinan Melville. E ~ a n s t o n ,Illinois: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1970. Meyerowitz, Joel. Cape Light: Color Photographs. Edited by Bruce I<. Macdonald. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1978. . "Inter~iewwith Terry Gross on Fresh Air." NPR, Washington. 23 October 2001. . "Joel Meyerowitz: Catching History as it Happens." Interview with Tom Ashhrook. WEUR, Boston. 24 December 2001. J o e l Meyerowitz. Ed. by Colin Westerbeck. New York: Phaidon Press, 2001. . www.joelmeyerowitz.com Milder, Robert. "The Rhetoric of Melville's Battle-Pieces." Nilzeteelzth-Centztrjl Literature 44 (September 1989): 173-200. Miller, Francis Tre~elyan,ed. T h e Photographic History of the Civil War. 1 0 ~ o l s . New York: Review of Reviews, 1912. Mitchell, Lee Clark, ed. Introduction. N e w Essajls o n T h e Red Badge of Courage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 1-23. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986. , ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Moreland, Kim. "The Photo Killeth: Henry Adalns on Photography and Painting." Papers on Language and Literature 27.3 (Summer 1991): 356-70. Morris, Wright. Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memor)'. New Yorlr: Aperture, 1989. Nagel, James. "Impressionism in T h e Red Badge of Coumge." T h e Red Badge of Courage. Ed. Donald Pizec New Yorlr: W. W. Norton and Compan!; 1994. 243-257. . "Stephen Crane and the N a r r a t i ~ eMethods of Impressionism." Studies in the Novel: Special Number o n Stephen Crane 1978. Ed. Hershel Parker. X.l (Spring 1978): 76-85. Newhall, Beaumont. The Historjl of Photographjl from 1839 t o the Present. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982. . Introduction. The Pencil of Nature. London: Da Capo Press, 1968. N. pag. . "Preface to the D o ~ e Edition." r Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign b)' George Barnard. New Yorlr: Dover, 1977. iii-vii. Nochlin, Linda. Realism. Baltimore: Penguin, 1971, O'Brien, Timothy T h e Things They Carried. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Oettermann, Stephan. T h e Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. Trans. By Deborah Lucas Schneidec New Yorlr: Zone Boolrs, 1997. Olin, Laurie. "Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture." Landscap"oumal (Fall 1994): 149-168. Orvell, Miles. T h e Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina UP, 1989. Paine, Albert Bigelow, Ed. Mark Twain's Notebooks. New Yorlr: Harper and Brothers, 1935.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Works Consulted

23 1

Panzer, Mary. Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Parker, Hershel. "Getting Used to the 'Original Form' of The Red Badge of Coumge." N e w Essays on T h e Red Badge of Coumge. Ed. Lee Clark Mitchell. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 25-47. Pease, Donald. "Fear, Rage, and the Mistrials of Representation in The Red Badge of Courage." American Realism N e w Essa)'s. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Baltimore: Johns Hoplzins UP, 1982. 155-175. Peck, Richard E. "The Campaign that . . . Succeeded." American Literarjl Realism 21.3 (Spring 1989): 3-12. "Photographic Phases." N e w York Times 2 1 July 1 8 6 2 5 . "Pictures of the Dead at Antietam." N e w York Times 20 October 1 8 6 2 5 . Pizer, Donald, ed. Critical Essa)'s on Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Boston: G. I<. Hall, 1990. Putnam, G. P. T h e H o m e Book of the Picturesque; 01;American Scener); Art, and Litemture. 1852. Gaines~ille,Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1967. Rabb, Jane M., ed. Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990. Albuquerque: New Mexico UP, 1995. Rathbone, Perry T., ed. Mississippi Panorama: T h e Catalogue of a n Exhibition. St. Louis: City Art Museum, 1950. , ed. Mississippi Panorama: T h e Life and Landscape of the Father of Waters. St. Louis: City Art Museum, 1950. Rather, Dan. "Inter~iewwith Six Magnum Photographers." 60 Minutes II. CBS, New York, 2 6 December 2001. Ra!; Robert B. "Snapshots: The Beginnings of Photography." The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photograph)'. Ed. Dudley Andrew. A~istin:U of Texas Press, 1997. 293-307. Review of Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign by George N . Barnard. Harper's IY~eeklj~ 1 0 (1866): 771. Rich, Frank. "Patriotism on the Cheap." 5 January 2002. The N e w York Times on the Web. ww~v.11yt.co1n/2002/01/05/opi11io11/05Rich.html Riis, Jacob A. H o w the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenenmzts of N e w York. 1890. With an Introduction and Notes by Luc Sante. New Yorlz: Penguin, 1997. -- . "On the New-Jersey Coast: Summer Dwellers at Asbury Park and Their Doings." N e w York Daily Tribune 24 July 1892: 22. Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biogmphy. Amherst: U Mass Press, 1996. Robinson, Forrest G. "The Innocent at Large: Mark Twain's Travel Writing." T h e Cambridge Companion t o Mark Twain. Ed. Forrest G. Robinson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995. 27-51. Roosevelt, Theodore. T h e Letters of Theodore Rooseuelt. Ed. Elting E. Morison. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1951, Rozhon, Tracie. "Casting C i ~ i cPride in a Utopian Mold." "Week in Review.'' T h e N e w York Times. 20 January 2002. w~v~v.11ytimes.co1n/2002/01/20/~i~eelzinreview/20ROZH.html. Russell, A. J. Russelli Civil War Photographs: 116 Historic Prints b)' A . J. Russell. With a Preface by Joe Buberger and Matthew Isenberg. New Yorlz: Dover, 1982. Rybczynslzi, Witold. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick L a w Olmsted and American in the Nineteenth Centurj'. New Yorlz: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Schmitz, Neil. "Mark Twain's Civil War: Humor's Reconstructive Writing." T h e Cambridge Companion t o Mark Twain. Ed. Forrest G. Robinson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995. 74-92.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

232

Works Consulted

Scholnick, Robert J. "Politics and Poetics: The Reception of Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War." Ainerican Literature 49.3 (Noyeinher 1977): 422-30. Schuyler, David. The N e w Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of Cit)' Form in Nineteenth-Centuq America. Baltimore: Johns Hoplrins UP, 1986. Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. The Rizwside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 930-975. -- . T h e Tragedj, of Macbeth. T h e Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 1306-1342. Shloss, Carol. In Visible Light: Photogmphy and the Anwrican Write?; 1840-1 940. New York: 1987. Shulinan, Robert. " T h e Red Badge of Courage and Social Violence: Crane's Myth of His America." Critical Essaj~so n Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Ed. Donald Pizec Boston: G. I<. Hall, 1990. 202-216. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the Frontier; 1600-1 860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 197.3. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: T h e American W e s t as S)'inbol and M l ' t h . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950. Snyder, Joel. "Territorial Photography." Landscape and Power. Ed. W. J. 7. Mitchell. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. 175-201. Sobchaclr, Vivian. "Introduction: History Happens." T h e Persistence of Historj,: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Ed. Vivian Sobchaclr. New Yorlr: Routledge, 1996. 1-14. . "'Surge and Splendor': X Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic." Representations (Winter 1990): 24-48. Sontag, Susan. O n Photograph)'. New Yorlr: Doubleday, 1973. Sorrentino, Paul, and Stanley Wertheim, eds. The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. 2 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. . T h e Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Cmne, 1871-1900. New Yorlr: Macmillan, 1994. Stallman, R. W. Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliograph)'. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1972. Stanchalr, John, ed. Leslie's Illustrated Civil War. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1992. Stange, Maren. "Jacoh Riis and Urban Visual Culture: The Lantern Slide Exhibition as Entertaininent and Ideology." Journal of Urban History 15.3 (May 1989): 274-303. ---. S ~ v ? b o / of s Ideal Life: Social D o c u i n e n t a r ~Photograph~l ~ in America, 1890-1950. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. Stannard, Dayid E. "Sex, Death, and Daguerreotypes: Toward an Understanding of the Image as Elegy.'' America and the Daguerreot)'pe. Ed. John Wood. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991. 73-108. Stein, Sally "Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacoh Riis." Afterimage (May 1983): 9-15. Stilgoe, John R. "Landscape in Limbo." America and the Daguerreotype. Ed. John Wood. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991. 58-72. Strand, Paul. "Photography"(1917) and "Photography and the New God" (1922). Classic Essays o n Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenherg. New Hayen, CT: Leete's Island Books, 1980. 141-151. Sullivan, Constance, ed. Landscapes of the Civil War: New131Discovered Photographs fi.oin the Medford Historical Societ)'. New Yorlr: I<nopf, 1995. Sundquist, Eric J. "Introduction: The Country of the Blue." Ainerican Realism: N e w Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkills UP, 1982. 3-24. Sutton, S. E., ed. Cizilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick L a w Olnzsted's Wrtitings on Citj, Landscapes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT UP, 1971. Susman, Warren, with the assistance of Edward Griffin. "Did Success Spoil the United

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Works Consulted

233

States? Dual Represelltations in Postwar America." Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War. Ed. Lary M a y Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989. 19-37. Sweet, Timothy. "Photography and the Museum of Rome in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun." Photo-textualities: Reading Photographs and Litemture. Ed. Marsha Bryant. Newark: UP of Delaware, 1997. 25-42. . Eyaces of War: Poetr): Photographj; and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore: Johns Hoplzins UP, 1990. Taft, Robert. Photogmphy and the Anwrican Scene. New York: Dover, 1938. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation. London: Macinillan, 1988. Talbot, W. H. Fox. The Pencil of Nature. 1844. London: Da Capo Press, 1968. Thoreau, Henry David. The Journals of Henr). David Thoreau. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H . Allen. New Yorlz: Dover, 1962. . Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1846-47. New York: Signet Classic, 1980. . "Walking." The Heath Anthology of Anwrican Litemture. Vol. I. Ed. Paul Lautec Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. 1737-1758. Tomplzins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1 860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essays on Photogmphy. New Hayen, CT: Leete's Island Boolzs, 1980. . "Lilzeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique." The Portrait in Photograph~l.Ed. Graham Clarke. London: Reaktion Boolzs, 1992. -- . Photogmphy in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. Martha A. Sandweiss. New York: H. N. Abrains, 1991. . Reading American Photographs: Images as Histor); Mathew Brad), to Walker Evans. New Yorlz: Hill and Wang, 1989. Trauhel, Horace. With Walt Whitinan in Camden 6 vols. New York: 1914. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Ed. by Sculley Bradley et al. New Yorlz: W. W. Norton, 1977. . "How to Make History Dates Stick." What Is Man? New Yorlz: De Vinn Press, 1906. ---. "Launch of the Steamer 'Capital.'" 18 November 1865. Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 18.72-1 890. New York: Library of America, 1992. 178-183. . Life on the Mississippi. 1883. With an Introduction by James M. Cox. New York: Penguin, 1984. . "The Primte History of a Campaign that Failed." 1885. The Portable Mark Twain. Ed. Bernard De Voto. New Yorlz: Peneuin. u , 1946. 119-142. . Roughing It. 1872. With a Foreword by Leonard ICriegel. New Yorlz: Signet, 1980. Updike, John. "Mel~ille'sWithdrawal." Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: ICnopf, 1983. 80-106. Walcutt, Charles Child. Ainerican Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1956. Wallel; James. "Visions and Revisions of Mark Twain: Samuel L. Clemens in the Camera's Eye, 1851-1885." Diss. Duke Uni~ersit!; 1991. Westerbeck, Colin. Joel Me)'erowitz (Phaidon 55s). New Yorlz: Phaidon Press, 2001. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 185511891-92. With an Introduction by John Hollander. New York: Vintage, 1992. ---. Specimen Days. 1882. The Civil War Reader: Literature. Ail11 Arbol; Michigan: State Street Press, 1996. 17.3-260. Whittier, John Greenleaf. "The Panorama." Anti-Slaver)' Poems: Songs of Labor and Reform. New Yorlz: Arno Press and the New Yorlz Times, 1969. 193-210.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

234

Works Consulted

Williams, Susan S. " 'The Aspiring Purpose of an Ambitious Demagogue': Portraiture and The House of Seven Gables." Nilzeteelzth-Celztztr)' Literature 49.2 (Summer 1994): 221-44. . Confounding Images: Photogmphy and Portraiture in Antebelluin Anwrican Fiction. Philadelphia: U Penn, 1997. -- . "'The Inconstant Daguerreotype': The Narrative of Early Photography." Narrative 4.2 (May 1996): 161-74. Wood, John, ed. America and the Daguerreotjlpe. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991. . "The American Portrait." America and the Dagueweotjlpe. Ed. John Wood. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991. 1-26. Wordsworth, William. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems." 1802. The Norton Antholog)' of English Literatwe. Vol. 11. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton and Compan!; 1993. 141-152.

Copyright 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.