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Bringing the Ditch Nearer:

Bringing the Ditch Nearer: Reading and Teaching the Twentieth-Century Literature of the American Civil War Coleman Hutchison The University of Texas at Austin Humanities Texas Teacher Enrichment Workshop 1 February 2013. "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

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Bringing the Ditch Nearer:

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  1. Bringing the Ditch Nearer: Reading and Teaching the Twentieth-Century Literature of the American Civil War Coleman Hutchison The University of Texas at Austin Humanities Texas Teacher Enrichment Workshop 1 February 2013

  2. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." ~ William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

  3. "History is what trained historians do, a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action, and therefore more secular than what people commonly call memory. History can be read by or belong to everyone; it is more relative, and contingent on place, chronology, and scale. If history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community. Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised. Memory often coalesces in objects, sites, and monuments; history seeks to understand contexts in all their complexity. History asserts the authority of academic training and canons of evidence; memory carries the often more immediate authority of community membership and experience. Bernard Bailyn has aptly stated memory's appeal: 'its relation to the past is an embrace . . . ultimately emotional, not intellectual.'" ~ David W. Blight, "Historians and 'Memory'" www.common-place.org · vol. 2 · no. 3 · April 2002 "In moving across almost a hundred and fifty years, I am mindful of the mutabilities of both historical memory and literary metaphor. As it shifts from lived experience into memory, the Civil War changes over time, becoming an increasingly attenuated presence. Yet there is no simple progression away from an immediate version of the war offered in the 1860s to increasingly remote war stories from later years. The Civil War is remote in some texts of the 1860s and urgent in, for example, many works of the 1890s and 1960s, when its memory and symbolism become freshly energized. The memory of the war is as much a political as a temporal phenomenon, and a Civil War novel of the 1890s is as much about the 1890s as it is about the 1860s." ~ Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War

  4. For the Union Dead Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.The old South Boston Aquarium standsin a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.The airy tanks are dry.Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;my hand tingled to burst the bubblesdrifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.My hand draws back. I often sigh stillfor the dark downward and vegetating kingdomof the fish and reptile. One morning last March,I pressed against the new barbed and galvanizedfence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,yellow dinosaur steamshovels were gruntingas they cropped up tons of mush and grassto gouge their underworld garage.Parking spaces luxuriate like civicsandpiles in the heart of Boston.A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girdersbraces the tingling Statehouse,shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shawand his bell-cheeked Negro infantryon St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston,half of the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

  5. Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gentle tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die—when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.On a thousand small town New England greensthe old white churches hold their airof sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flagsquilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldiergrow slimmer and younger each year—wasp-waisted, they doze over musketsand muse through their sideburns…Shaw's father wanted no monumentexcept the ditch,where his son's body was thrownand lost with his "niggers."The ditch is nearer.There are no statutes for the last war here;on Boylston Street, a commercial photographshows Hiroshima boilingover a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"that survived the blast. Space is nearer.When I crouch to my television set,the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.Colonel Shawis riding on his bubble,he waitsfor the blesséd break.The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,giant finned cars nose forward like fish;a savage servilityslides by on grease. ~ Robert Lowell (1964)

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

  7. Southern History Before the war, they were happy, he said,quoting our textbook.  (This was senior-year history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,and better off under a master's care. I watched the words blur on the page.  No oneraised a hand, disagreed.  Not even me. It was late; we still had Reconstructionto cover before the test, and — luckily — three hours of watching Gone with the Wind.History, the teacher said, of the old South — a true account of how things were back then.On screen a slave stood big as life: big mouth, bucked eyes, our textbook's grinning proof — a liemy teacher guarded.  Silent, so did I. ~ Natasha Trethewey (2006)

  8. For the Confederate Dead I go with the team also. —Whitman These are the last days my television says. Tornadoes, more rain, overcast, a chance of sun but I do not trust weathermen, never have. In my fridge only the milk makes sense— expires. No one, much less my parents, can tell me why my middle name is Lowell, and from my table across from the Confederate Monument to the dead (that pale finger bone) a plaque declares war—not Civil, or Between the States, but for Southern Independence. In this café, below sea- and eye-level a mural runs the wall, flaking, a plantation scene most do not see— it's too much around the knees, height of a child. In its fields Negroes bend to pick the endless white. In livery a few drive carriages like slaves, whipping the horses, faces blank and peeling. The old hotel lobby this once was no longer welcomes guests—maroon ledger, bellboys gone but for this. Like an inheritance the owner found it stripping hundred years (at least) of paint and plaster. More leaves each day. In my movie there are no horses, no heroes, only draftees fleeing into the pines, some few who survive, gravely wounded, lying burrowed beneath the dead— silent until the enemy bayonets what is believed to be the last of the breathing. It is getting later. We prepare for wars no longer there. The weather inevitable, unusual— more this time of year than anyone ever seed. The earth shudders, the air— if I did not know better, I would think we were living all along a fault. How late it has gotten . . . Forget the weatherman whose maps move, blink, but stay crossed with lines none has seen. Race instead against the almost rain, digging beside the monument (that giant anchor) till we strike water, sweat fighting the sleepwalking air. ~ Kevin Young (2007)

  9. Suggestions for Further Reading David W. Blight. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. ---. American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Civil War Memory http://cwmemory.com/ Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Martin Griffin. Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Tony Horwitz. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Flannery O'Connor. "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" in A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. 153-166. George Saunders. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella. New York: Random House, 1996. Barry Schwartz. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard: Poems. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Robert Penn Warren. The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial. New York: Random House, 1961. Elizabeth Young. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Kevin Young. For the Confederate Dead: Poems. New York: Knopf, 2007. Also: coleman.hutchison@mail.utexas.edu

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