Ambrose Bierce, "Chickamauga"—Short Story Month 2016-Day 4

The anti-war theme of Ambrose Bierce's story "Chickamauga" depends on the basic tensions between child world and adult world and between fantasy and reality.  The boy's fantasy world of playing at war is his only reality; consequently, when he encounters the genuine external reality of war it seems curiously fantastic to him; thus he is able to integrate it effortlessly into his fantasy play world. 

Bierce develops the story on the ironic realization that the adult view of war often springs from child-like views in which men glorify battle, only to find out too late that the reality of it is horror and death.   The primary communicators of this fantasy image of war in Bierce's story are books and pictures which glorify war, for the boy has been taught "postures of aggression and defense" by the "engraver's art."  Thus when he encounters the actuality of war, the boy responds to it as if it were merely the fantasy pictures he has seen or the world of play-reality he has known.

As is typical of many Bierce stories, style and technique are practically everything in "Chickamauga."  Although Bierce was writing during a period of American Literature characterized by realistic depictions of external reality, Bierce maintained his allegiance to romanticism.  Often compared with Edgar Allan Poe, Bierce focuses not so much on external reality but rather on the strange dream-like world that lies somewhere in between fantasy and reality.  Thus, the genius of his stories depends not so much on the theme, which is often fairly obvious, but on the delicate and tightly controlled way that Bierce tells the story and creates a nightmarish world that involves the reader emotionally.    

The fact that the boy is a deaf mute emphasizes his childish fantasy world detached from external reality and makes more plausible the primary device of contrasting the child's view of war as a game with the adult's view of it as a horrifying actuality.  It enables Bierce to set up a strange dreamlike effect as we see the events primarily from the boy's point of view.

 However, even as the story depends on Bierce's developing the perspective of the child, in which the reader is made to see the maimed and bleeding soldiers as circus clowns and child-like playmates, this point of view is counterpointed by that of an adult teller--sometimes in a developed background exposition, sometimes in a flat declarative statement.  For example, when the boy seems to see some strange animals crawling through the forest, the narrator simply says: "They were men." When the boy sees men lying in the water as if without heads, the narrator simply says: "They were drowned."

This narrator is not named in the story, but is presented as a disembodied presence who not only sees what the boy sees, but also sees the boy and draws conclusions about the boy's responses. The boy's mind is as inaccessible to him as it is to the reader.  This technique enables the reader to respond both to the boy's point of view and to the adult teller. As the narrator says about the scene witnessed by the boy, "not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer."

And indeed it is the elder observer who establishes the ironic tone at the beginning of the story which mocks the warrior-fire, the heroic race, and the notion of a spirit of battle in the boy which make him born to "war and dominion as a heritage."

It is the subtle tension between this adult point of view and the childish perception of the boy that creates the story's impact and reflects its theme.  At one point in the story when the boy (because of his deafness) sleeps through the battle that rages nearby, the adult narrator says he was as "heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as the dead who had died to make the glory."

Because of this structural counterpoint the narrator has no need to make any more explicit comment on the action.  For the juxtaposition of the two perspectives creates a tragic irony of war as something more than an heroic and childish game, even as it makes us see how war depends on just such a childish point of view to persist. 

A film version of this story, part of a trilogy of Bierce stories by French director Robert Enrico, begins with pictures of fighters behind the opening credits. The film is eerily silent, with grotesque images of men crawling across the ground as the camera pans the area disclosing more and more wounded and silent soldiers.  Visual images in the film are not as violent and graphic as those described in Bierce's story; however, the anti-war theme is stronger in the film than in the story because of the stark juxtaposition of images of childlike "playing at war" and adult reality.

Tomorrow:Chekhov's "Grief" (also translated as "Lament" and "Misery")

Artifice and Endings in the Short Story: Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?"

Since the beginning of the short story as an historically-recognized genre, writers and critics have agreed that the form depends more on a tightly-unified structure and a formalized ending than the novel does. However, critics have often argued that consequently the short story is not realistic, not natural, and therefore not worthy of critical consideration. The assumption underlying this judgment is that since life itself is continuous, the novel is the only narrative form capable of imitating that continuity; the short story, on the other hand, because it is spasmodic and intermittent, is artificial.  Since the short story cannot follow the chronological development of character, but must select a point at which the author can approach life, it has no essential form and thus generates a unity that is abnormally artificial and intense. 

Why, I wonder, when discussing an aesthetic object, should we take "artificiality" to be pejorative, especially the artificiality of unity and endings?  Henry James, in his preface to Roderick Hudson, reminds us that stopping places in fiction are always artificial.  As James puts it, since universally relations stop nowhere, "the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."  Similarly, J. Hillis Miller has noted that it is always impossible to tell whether a narrative is complete.  If the ending is considered a tying up into a knot, the knot could always be united again; if the ending is considered an unraveling, a multitude of loose threads remain, all capable of being knotted again.  This is why, Miller says, the best one can have is the "sense of an ending."

The coiner of that nicely-turned phrase, Frank Kermode, also reminds us, "We always underestimate the power of rhetorical and narrative gestures."  Endings, says Kermode, "are always faked, as are all other parts of a narrative structure that impose metaphor on the metonymic sequence."  In other words, any time we arrange a narrative sequence to achieve a meaningful end, that is, any time we make use of the processes of repetition and similarity to convert a temporal flow into metaphoric sets, we inevitably "fake" the ending.  For this faking of an ending is the very act that makes meaning out of the "one-damned-thing-after-another" that meaningless events always are; such faking thus constitutes the essence of narrative art.

Still, many critics have argued that the faking of endings was primarily a negative characteristic of nineteenth-century short fiction; they are fond of citing such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Frank Stockton, and O. Henry as the chief culprits.  Not until the work of Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson and Joyce, many critics like to claim, did the short story develop a "natural" structure that was "open-ended," reflecting a realistic "slice-of-life."

           

However, I would argue, in spite of all the praise for the realism of the modern short story, from the "slice-of-life" anecdotes of Anton Chekhov to the intense "hyperrealism" of Raymond Carver, the twentieth-century version of the genre has remained highly formalized, artificial, and metaphoric, like its nineteenth-century antecedents. What has changed is that a new convention of the form developed to increase the illusion of everyday reality.  From Chekhov to Sherwood Anderson to Bernard Malamud to Raymond Carver, the short story has been bound to a highly artificial, rhetorically-determined unified structure, and therefore formalized ending, which depends upon the artificial devices of aesthetic reality.

 The Russian formalist critic Boris Ejxenbaum was alone among early twentieth-century critics to recognize that what O. Henry, one of the most notorious practitioners of the artificial ending, exploited in his stories was a convention unique and essential to the short story genre.  Ejxenbaum argues that the difference between the novel and the short story is a difference in essence.  Whereas the novel ends with a point of let-up, the short story "gravitates toward maximal unexpectedness of a finale concentrating around itself all that has preceded."  O. Henry understood this important aspect of the short story, Ejxenbaum argues; his pervasive tendency was to "lay bare the construction of a story and subject the plot to parodic play.”  By this means, continues Ejxenbaum, the O. Henry story opened the way to the regeneration of the short story ala Chekhov, Anderson, and others at the beginning of the twentieth century.

I suggest, however, that the laying bare of the conventionality of the ending of short stories began long before O. Henry. To illustrate my point I will comment briefly on one nineteenth-century story famous for its "artificial" ending--Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."

Purely a story of technique; the "content" of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a pretext for a game Bierce plays with the conventions of narrative endings.  The story explicitly and sardonically exploits the idea of the reader (and the protagonist) being pulled up short as Peyton Farquhar comes to the end of his rope and faces the ultimate and only genuine "natural end" possible--death.  However, in this story death is forestalled in the only way it can be forestalled--through an act of the imagination and an elaborate bit of fiction-making that the reader initially takes to be actuality. 

The story is made up of three sections that correspond to three fictional elements--static scene, exposition, and action.  But all of these elements are self-consciously ironic in presentation and thus undermine themselves.  The first part of the story, the only part in which the realistic convention suggests that something is "actually happening," seems quite dead and static, almost a still picture, highly formalized and stiff.  At the end of Part I, the teller tips the reader off to the play with time that the story, because it is discourse rather than mere event, must inevitably make:  "As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant.  The sergeant stepped aside."  The self-reflexive reference here is to the most notorious characteristic of fiction --the impossibility of escaping time. In spite of the fact that the author wishes to communicate that which is instantaneous or timeless he is trapped by the time-bound nature of words that can only be told one after another.  It is this purely rhetorical acceptance of the nature of discourse that justifies or motivates the final fantastic section of the story.

The second play with the convention of time in the story is the insertion at the end of Part I, purely and perversely by the demand of discourse rather than by the demand of existential event, of a bit of exposition that tells the reader who the protagonist is and what he is doing in such a predicament.  The reader sits patiently through this background formality while the protagonist plummets into Part III of the story--which itself is of course a depiction of that which does not happen at all except in the flash (which can only be recounted in words) that takes place in the protagonist's mind.  It is thus only because of discourse that Farquhar's invention of his escape from hanging, drowning, and death by guns and cannons makes the reader believe that the escape is taking place in reality. 

At the conclusion, when the protagonist reaches the end of the fall, the verb tense of the story abruptly shifts from present to the ultimate past tense:  "Peyton Farquhar was dead."  At this point, the reader is forced to double back to look at the tone and details of the story which created this forestalling of the end--a forestalling which is indeed the story itself, for without it there would have been no story.  Postponing the end of the story until the ultimate and inescapable end of death is the subject of Bierce's self-conscious and self-reflexive discourse.        

Thus rather than being a cheap trick dependent on a shocking ending, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a complex narrative reflecting both in its theme and its technique the essential truth that in discourse there is no ending but an imaginative, that is, an artificial, one.  As Boris Ejxenbaum has shown, the stories of O. Henry, rather than being trivial tricks, likewise lay bare the conventions of the short story's dependence on the artificiality of the ending, for all endings in narrative discourse are inevitably artificial.  It is simply that in the short story this artistic truth is laid bare rather than concealed behind the conventions of realism as it often is in the novel.  However, at the end of the nineteenth century many critics, bound to the naive notion that narrative must replicate the real, scorned the stories of O. Henry and rejoiced when the stories of Chekhov seemed to signal the resurgence of realism.

The question that should be asked is:  How "realistic" is Chekhov's realism?  One of the primary characteristics of the modern short story ala Chekhov is the expression of a complex inner state by the presentation of selected concrete details rather than by the creation of a projective parabolic form or by the depiction of the contents of the mind of the character. Significant reality for short-story writers beginning with Chekhov is inner rather than outer, but the problem they have tried to solve is how to create an illusion of inner reality by focusing on external details only.  The result is not simple realism, but rather a story that even as it seems a purely surface account of everyday reality takes on the artificial aura of a dream.

In Raymond Carver’s "Why Don't You Dance?" from What We Talk About When We talk About Love, the first question the reader asks is: why does the man put all of his furniture out on the front yard?   Because things are described as "his side, her side," although no "her" is present, the reader can infer that the story is about the breakup of a marriage.  However, the answer to the second question the reader asks--why does the man arrange all the furniture outside just as they were inside and plug in all the appliances?--is more problematical since the motivation for his making everything appear outside the house as they once were inside the house can only be explained metaphorically.  "Things worked," says the narrator, "no different from how it was when they were inside." 

But they are different, of course, precisely because what was previously hidden is now manifested for everyone to see.  And of course this is what the modern short story since Chekhov always does. The problem, as it is in this story, is that the manifestation, although it looks like external reality, suggests internal reality.  The story does not supply the realistic answer to why the man plugs everything in, only the metaphoric answer to why everything is indeed plugged in.  In other words, that everything is plugged in is not motivated by the psychology of the character but rather by the aesthetic demands of the discourse.

That everything is plugged in on the lawn is of course a static metaphor.  What the frozen situation needs to make it a dynamic story is the entrance of the young couple who provide what is always necessary for meaning to be manifested in fiction--repetition and recurrence. If the man who has put out the furniture is in a movement of transition from one situation to another, then the couple is also involved in such a transition.  They are the beginning of the story that has ended for the man, for they make use of the materials of his story to create their own.  In the epilogue, which constitutes the "end" of the story, the girl is telling someone about it weeks later.  "She kept talking.  She told everyone.  There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying."  Thus, the story ends with the frustration of trying to reveal by merely telling.  The key line--"There was more to it"--refers to a basic convention of all modern short stories---that indeed there is more to it than the mere external details. 

            A narrative, by its very nature, cannot be told until the events that it takes as its subject matter have already occurred. Consequently, the "end" of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the discourse.  It is therefore hardly necessary to say that the only narrative which the reader ever gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event so that there is nothing left for it but to move toward its end in its aesthetic, eventless way, i.e., via tone, metaphor, and all the other purely artificial conventions of fictional discourse.  Thus, it is inevitable that events in the narrative will be motivated or determined by demands of the discourse that have nothing to do with the psychological or phenomenological motivation or cause of the actual events.

The short story's most basic assumption is that everyday experience reveals the self as a mask of habits, expectations, duties, and conventions. But the short story insists that the self must be challenged by crisis and confrontation.  This is the basic tension in the form; in primitive story the conflict can be seen as the confrontation between the profane, which is the everyday, and the sacred, which are those strange eruptions that primitive man took to be the genuinely real.  The short story, however, can never reconcile this tension either existentially or morally, for the tension between the necessity of the everyday world and the sacred world is one of those basic tensions that can only be held in suspension.  The only resolution possible is an aesthetic one.

If the novel presents life as it is actually experienced, as some critics like to claim, it is only life as a set of categories, that is, in terms of the profane everyday world of necessity.  In this sense, the novel is the most conceptual, least artistic narrative form.  And indeed in the history of the development of narrative forms this seems to be the case. Not until the late nineteenth century when James and Conrad made the novel less conceptual and more aesthetic, and thus less realistic and more symbolic, were critics ready to accept the novel as an artistic form. 

When critics scorn the short story for the artificiality of its highly unified structure, when they take it to task for the falsity of its placing so much emphasis on its ending, they obviously forget in their demand that all narrative follow the conventions of realism that the essence of art is artifice.  Consequently, they forget that the short story is the most artificial and thus the most artistic of all narrative forms.

The Short Story Genius of Ambrose Bierce

The Library of America has just announced a new author in their series of editions of great writers: Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs. The book includes Bierce’s greatest collection, In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), as well as Can Such Things Be? The Devil’s Dictionary, and Bits of Autobiography, and Selected Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi, who has edited several other books on Bierce, it is due out in bookstores on September 1, 2011.

I have always been a great admirer of Bierce’s stories, for in face of the increasing demand for realistic novels in the late nineteenth century, he remained faithful to the short story as a form. In my opinion, Bierce, like Poe, is a brilliant short-story writer who has been snubbed by many academic literary critics who scorn the short story as being artificial and trivial. Thus, it should not surprise you that my favorite definition from Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is:

Novel--A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes -- some of which have a large sale.

My favorite Bierce stories, included in this new collection, are:

The Man and the Snake
The Eyes of the Panther
The Death of Halpin Frayser
A Horseman in the Sky
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Chickamauga
A Son of the Gods
One of the Missing
Killed at Resaca
The Affair at Coulter’s Notch
The Coup de Grâce
Parker Adderson, Philosopher
The Mocking-Bird

Critics who have accused Ambrose Bierce of artificiality and lack of depth usually make such claims based on expectations derived from the realistic novel. By insisting on a faithful adherence to the external world, advocates of realism allow content, often ragged and random, to dictate form. As a result, the novel, which can expand to better create an illusion of everyday reality, is the favored form of the realists, while the short story, which requires more artifice and patterning, assumes a secondary role. Those writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century who were committed to the short story instead of the novel were well aware of this fact. When Ambrose Bierce entered into the argument raging between the romantics and the realists, he attacked the William Dean Howells school of realistic fiction by arguing that to them, "nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man's most commonplace experience. It is not known to them that all men and women sometimes, many men and women frequently, and some men and women habitually, act from impenetrable motives and in a way that is consonant with nothing in their lives, characters and conditions.”

Bierce says that the capable writer does not give probability a moment's attention, except to make the fiction seem probable or true in the reading process. Nothing is as improbable as what is true, says Bierce; the unexpected does occur, "but that is not saying enough; it is also the unlikely--one might almost say the impossible.” Bierce's characters, like those of Flannery O'Connor's, have an inner coherence rather than a coherence to their social framework. As O'Connor says, "Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected.”

Bierce's most obsessive concern in the short story is not simple macabre horror, but rather the central paradox that underlies the most basic human desire and fear--the desire for a sense of unity and significance and the fear that the realization of such a desire means death. In terms of story telling, Bierce knew that the desire manifested itself as the compulsion to present life as if it were a fictional construct, that is, as if it had significance and meaning, beauty and order.

Bierce's characteristic short story dynamic is to distance his characters from the ordinary world of everyday reality--by presenting them in a static formal posture or picture, by putting them in a dream-like autistic state, by putting them on a formal stage. When this formal picture or frozen sense of reality is broken, the result is often the shock of entering another country, another realm of reality; the result is disillusion, despair, or death.

The simplest and most straightforward example of this technique of presenting a frozen reality and then ironically undercutting it is "Killed Resaca," in which Lieutenant Herman Brayle, the archetypal good soldier, sits his horse like an equestrian statue even in a storm of bullets. In a foolishly heroic and fatal gesture, he rides into battle, "a picture" described as "intensely dramatic, but in no degree theatrical." However, when the narrator returns a letter to the Lieutenant's lady friend, a letter that romantically states she could bear to hear of her lover's death but not of his cowardice, the heroic picture or statue of the Lieutenant is undermined when she, disgusted at the blood on the letter, flings it into the fire.

Bierce’s story “Chickamauga" is a particularly rich example of this theme of unreality being presented as reality until the spell is broken and the illusion of heroic order shattered. The story focuses on the two basic worlds: child and adult, fantasy and reality, innocence and experience. This is a story in which nobody listens. We say to child, "do you hear me?" We say to adults in war, "Why don't you listen?" When he reaches home, it is as if he has gone a long way to stay where he was; the plantation "seemed to turn as if on a pivot." The story ends with son's loss of mother, just as the war has to do with mothers' loss of sons. "The child was a deaf mute" completes the pattern of the adult observer. The story is another example of Bierce presenting stories in which language is inadequate and in which heroic pictures are startled into terrible life and in which illusory reality is startled into the reality of our deepest fears.

Of course, Bierce's most famous narrative play with the frozen moment of time and the power of imaginative reality is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The story explicitly and sardonically exploits the idea of the reader (and the protagonist) being pulled up short as Peyton Farquhar comes to the end of his rope and faces the ultimate and only genuine "natural end" possible--death. However, in this story death is forestalled in the only way it can be forestalled--through an act of the imagination and an elaborate bit of fiction making which the reader initially takes to be actuality.

The story is made up of three sections that correspond to three fictional elements--static scene, exposition, and action. But all of these elements are self-consciously ironic in presentation and thus undermine themselves. The first part of the story, the only part in which the realistic convention suggests that something is "actually happening," seems quite dead and static, almost a still picture, highly formalized and stiff. At the end of Part I, the teller tips the reader off to the play with time that the story, because it is discourse rather than mere event, must inevitably make: "As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside." The self-reflexive reference here is to the most notorious characteristic of fiction --the impossibility of escaping time. In spite of the fact that the author wishes to communicate that which is instantaneous or timeless he is trapped by the time-bound nature of words that can only be told one after another. It is this purely rhetorical acceptance of the nature of discourse that justifies or motivates the final fantastic section of the story.

The second play with the convention of time in the story is the insertion at the end of Part I--purely and perversely by the demand of discourse rather than by the demand of existential event--of a bit of exposition that tells the reader who the protagonist is and what he is doing in such a predicament. The reader sits patiently through this background formality while the protagonist plummets into Part III of the story--which itself is of course a depiction of that which does not happen at all except in the flash (which can only be recounted in words) that takes place in the protagonist's mind. It is thus only because of discourse that Farquhar's invention of his escape from hanging, drowning, and death by guns and cannons makes the reader believe that the escape is taking place in reality. At the conclusion, when the protagonist reaches the end of the fall, the verb tense of the story abruptly shifts from present to the ultimate past tense: "Peyton Farquhar was dead." At this point, the reader is forced to double back to look at the tone and details of the story which created this forestalling of the end--a forestalling which is indeed the story itself, for without it there would have been no story. Postponing the end until the ultimate and inescapable end of death is the subject of Bierce's self-conscious and self-reflexive discourse.

Thus rather than being a cheap trick dependent on a shocking ending, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a complex narrative reflecting both in its theme and its technique the essential truth that in discourse there is no ending but an imaginative, that is, an artificial, one.

If you have not read Bierce, I recommend his stories to you as brilliant examples of the short story as a genre.