This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [95]
Bierce, too, found the role of survivor troubling. The war had left him, he observed, “sentenced to life,” and the war dead haunted him and his prose, just as the Confederate corpse so disturbed Brainerd Byring. The line between battle’s survivors and battle’s dead is blurred for Bierce. “When I ask myself,” he once remarked, “what has happened to Ambrose Bierce the youth, who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that he is dead.” Rather than the purposeful and providential Christian death, Biercean death is often a surprise, sprung on the reader, as in the story of Byring, as it is on its victim—even, paradoxically, when it is suicide. The notion of death involving human preparation or agency, the central tenets—and hope—of the ars moriendi, is entirely alien in Bierce’s world. It is instead death that possesses agency—like the apparently moving corpse—to exert its claim upon the living, and it is in this sense that it becomes, as Wilson remarked, Bierce’s central character.62
Bierce’s best-known story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” exemplifies death’s surprise and man’s futility in its depiction of a southern spy about to be hanged. Peyton Farquhar seems to have escaped his fate when the rope snaps and plunges him into the creek, permitting him to flee the Yankees and return home to his wife. But his escape proves a fantasy in which the reader too has been fooled. The story ends with Farquhar swinging from Owl Creek Bridge. The power of Bierce’s irony derives from his insertion not just of the main character but of the reader into the gap he creates between appearance and actuality. Like Farquhar, his startled reader is left hanging.63
Dissenting from his era’s romanticization of death, fully embracing Darwinian notions of “nature red in tooth and claw,” mocking the doctrines and authority of organized religion, Bierce had little faith in any afterlife. In his Devil’s Dictionary he defined the Dead with rhymed irreverence:
Done with the work of breathing; done
With all the world; the mad race run
Through to the end; the golden goal
Attained and found to be a hole!64
The afterlife for which so many Americans avidly searched was not heaven but simply the void of the grave. Death was “hideous,” and it was complete in itself; it was not a passage to another life; it was not the embodiment or instrument of patriotic or religious purpose. But Bierce was moved as well as horrified by the dead, which was why they continued to haunt him. Both the Confederate and the Yankee slain deserved reverent attention; just as death defined life, the dead represented the real meaning of the war. “We know we live, for with each breath / We feel the fear and imminence of death.”65
Herman Melville did not share Bierce’s extensive military experience, but he did understand the loss of innocence that rendered initial expectations absurd. Forty-two years old at the time of Fort Sumter, Melville spent most of the war on a Massachusetts farm, struggling to recover from what seemed to him the demise of his literary ambition in his critical and commercial failures of the 1850s. But the participation of close relatives in the army gave him a window into the conflict, and in the spring of 1864, on the eve of the Wilderness campaign, he undertook a tour of Virginia battlefields. He managed to secure an audience