Monthly Archives: January 2012

Ambrose Bierce: “Chickamauga”

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“Realism” is an element of some of Abrose Bierce’s short stories (particularly those concerning the Civil War), but the term is of little value when discussing his often fantastical imagination. In his essay “The Short Story” he writes: ‘Probability? Nothing so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs . . . Everything being so unearthly improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the audacity to relate anything all.’ ”

Bierce’s stories can be roughly divided into three categories: those about the Civil War, horror and the supernatural, and comic or “tall” tales. Though his plots are mostly contrived, he writes with great economy and vividness, and his stories often have a caustic, almost misanthropic edge to them. The shot story was clearly an ideal medium for him.

His contrivances of plot include reordering of the time scheme such as analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward), exploration of dreams and the surreal, and a preoccupation with the vagaries of perception. Through these techniques, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to record how humans record experience before organizing it conceptually.

In his most horrifying war story, “Chickamauga,” a deaf-mute child witnesses the retreat of the Confederate soldiers after the eponymous battle and wanders out toward the battlefield and encounters men crawling away from battle. The child thinks they are playing a game and tries to ride on the back of one of them, but the soldier flings him to the ground and then

turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.

The child retreats and then drawn by a great fire, leads the men as if into battle with his toy sword. Soon he recognizes the burning building as his own home, his mother lying dead before him, and he utters “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries — something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey — a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.”

The reversal of physical orientation is complete and serves as an emblem of the reversal of the story: war as a matter of youthful enthusiasm and heroism revealed as bloody horror.

Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man

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From among his few short stories, William Austin’s fame rests primarily with one, “Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man,” which became immensely popular and a favorite of Hawthorne and Longfellow. Austin incorporates legends of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman into a New England setting, much as [[Washington Irving]] had done with Knickerbocker materials in “Rip Van Winkle.”

The storytelling method is sophisticated in that Austin recounts Rugg’s situation by means of one narrative nested within another. The frame storyteller is Jonathan Dunwell, who presents events that transpire chiefly during 1820, although there is a distortion of time that heightens the sense of the supernatural.

After spending a stormy night with friends in Concord, Rugg and his young daughter, Jenny, fail to reach Boston and are cursed thereafter to travel continuously in an antiquated carriage (even by 1820 standards) and become precursors of storms (like the older Flying Dutchman).

Originally published on September 10, 1824, in the New England Galaxy in the form of a letter to the editor but carrying the title “Some Account of Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, Late of Boston, New England, in a Letter to Mr. Herman Krauff,” it was signed “Jonathan Dunwell,” about whom nothing was known. For the next seventeen years, the true author, a local attorney named William Austin, concealed his identity.

This collection of great American short stories contains over thirty of the finest ever penned by American writers from Washington Irving to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance and Other Essays

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Three of the essays in this collection (“History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-soul”) sprang from the 1836 lectures on the philosophy of history Emerson delivered at the Boston Masonic Temple.

“History” really isn’t about history but how to convert the burden of the past into a survival kit for the future. “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.” Emerson believed that history could not be ignored, but for it to have currency we must imagine ourselves in it. “We . . . must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten images to some reality in our experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”

Emerson’s essay on the unalienated human being, “Self-Reliance,” the essay for which he is most remembered, is a synthesis of the self-rule of classical stoicism, the bildung of Goethe, the ideas of Schleiermacher, the knotty musings of Kant — translated into a coherent, accessible English. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But it is not a mandate for selfishness. It recommends self-reliance as a starting point — not as a goal. A better society will come about only as an association of fulfilled individuals. Whereas “Self-Reliance” emphasizes the individual, “The Over-soul” focuses on the common mind. “Self-Reliance affirms individualism; “The Over-soul affirms “that great nature in which we rest,” a nature variously described as “a common nature,” “the great heart of nature,” “the common heart,” and “the great, universal mind.” The link between these two essays is Emerson’s idea that the power of the individual is the power of our common nature.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Also in this collection is “The Poet,” the finest piece ever penned about literature as a process, a form of expression as fundamental as any basic drive — like sex — but also one of the main purposes of human life. Poetry is not a skill or a trade, but a reflection of the human spirit, the inner fire: “For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.”

The last essay in this collection is “The Divinity School Address,” given July 15, 1838, to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. Emerson had not been invited by the officers of the school, but by the senior class. What he delivered that evening was so objectionable to the clergy that nearly thirty years passed before he was invited to speak again at Harvard. Emerson’s address was both an attack on formal historical Christianity and a proposition of a personal religious consciousness, a sort of declaration of the divinity of the human. Emerson ended his talk with advice that asked a lot of the young graduates: “Let me admonish you to go alone; to refuse the good models . . . and to love God without mediator or veil.” The address would be Emerson’s last face-off with organized religion, though he would remain a deeply religious and spiritual man throughout his life.