Author of Death: Ambrose Bierce and the memento mori By Keith Mears Ambrose Bierce, in his short story ‘One of the Missing’ suggests ‘the dead have no voice’. In another of his tales, ‘Killed at Resaca’, he asserts ‘[l]et me do justice to a brave man’s memory’. Dealing with a similar topic in his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln emphasised the inadequacy of words when attempting to consecrate and hallow the grounds of the newly created National Cemetery. Avoiding any divisive distinctions, stated ‘[t]he brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract’. Indeed, suggesting that the world would show little interest in his musings (that it would, in fact, eventually forget them), Lincoln urged ‘it can never forget what they did here’. Walt Whitman, wary of the politics of remembrance, suggested ‘the real war will never get in the books’. In a similar vein, Geoff Ward, in his recent work on the writing of America, has argued that [post-Civil War] the South was to gain readmission to the Union on the condition that it adopted a state of voluntary amnesia. As he put it, America had to accept that one ‘of the alternative pasts had not … ever taken place’. We might crossreference all of these statements with the American psychologist Thomas Szasz who stated: ‘[t]he stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget’. This, then, should be our concern: the way the American Civil War [hereafter the Civil War] was remembered. Or, more accurately, forgotten. Endorsing Whitman’s comment noted above, this is an attempt to consider a particular historical gap that emerged as a result of the Civil War – one that employs Ambrose Bierce as a lens in that consideration. This goal in mind we might invoke the French historian and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who, delivering an address to the Interfaith Memorial Service on Yom HaShoah, the Jewish day of remembrance, declared: ‘The horrible – the inverted image of the admirable – needs to be rescued still more from forgetfulness by the means of memory and narration… by remembering and telling, we not only prevent forgetfulness from killing the victims twice; we also prevent their life stories from becoming banal. The danger of banality may be greater today than the danger of sheer forgetfulness. Historians, sociologists, and economists may claim to explain the tragedy so thoroughly that it becomes merely one case of barbarism among others. Even worse, an alleged full explanation may make the event appear as necessary, to the extent that the causes … would be held to exhaust the meaning of the event. The task of memory is to preserve the scandalous dimension of the event, to leave that which is monstrous inexhaustible by explanation. Thanks to the memory and to the narratives that preserve this memory,
the uniqueness of the horrible … is prevented from being levelled off by explanation.’ Hopefully the way in which Bierce sought to preserve the uniquely horrible dimension of the Civil War can be shown in this essay. In order not to leave those in the dark to whom Ambrose Bierce is a foreign name, a small biographical introduction is necessary. Born 24th of June 1842 to Congregationalist parents, Bierce was a Unionist veteran of the Civil War who attended several important battles in the western theatre of war – Shiloh, Chickamauga and Stones River amongst others. Although Bierce’s period of service saw him encounter Confederate forces elsewhere, the battles mentioned were singularly bloody and each has a proud statistic relating to the degree of death produced. Stones River is a fine example. Defending an elevation later known as ‘Hell’s halfacre,’ Bierce’s regiment registered 113 dead and wounded, with the division total lying at 429. A high tally. It was at this battlefield that Bierce’s commanding officer, General William Hazen, after commending his men’s bravery (‘the best service rendered by my command in the war was the battle of Stone[s] River’), became the first officer of the Civil War to erect a monument to the dead. Additional to the measure of death that Bierce encountered through his career – one that saw him elevated to first lieutenant and topographical engineer – an event impacted on the rest of his life whilst he was part of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. Undertaking his topographical duties at Kennesaw Mountain, Bierce was shot in the head by a Confederate sniper. The date is variously attributed, though it seems Bierce either received an early birthday present on June the 23rd, or a belated one on the 27th. Apparently, the bullet struck him in the left temple, fractured the temporal bone and burrowed around the side of his skull to a point behind the left ear. Hazen described the resulting wound as ‘very dangerous and complicated … [with] the ball remaining within the head from which it was removed sometime afterwards’. In terms of Civil War medicine, complicated seems an understatement; according to Peter Parish the chance of surviving a wound in the Civil War era was seven-to-one. The nature of the wound would obviously affect that figure. The result of the encounter at Kennesaw left Bierce suffering from fainting fits – periods of life lost and never regained – for the rest of his days. It seems safe to say that the bullet had an impact upon his life, and created a situation where he was as close to death as is humanly possible. This border position (with his adopted devil’s advocacy) gave Bierce a degree of distance – albeit a distance that comes from a situated and limited location – and is
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something that we can dwell on later. The Civil War was forgotten as soon as it ended. Or, put differently, it was immediately re-imagined. Although a Civil War entered the American collective memory, the Civil War did not. By forgetting one part of the conflict, the entire nature of the conflict altered. Indeed, beyond this revisionism, Reconstruction era America saw a great number of changes emerge. The Unionist states attempted to foist a moral and cultural hegemony on the South – the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Black Codes and the ritualistic process required to gain readmission to the Union stand as good examples. The Union’s introduction of the police-state policy of Reconstruction acted not only as a means of asserting their victory, but as a means of homogenising the American cultural identity. To this end a necessary suppression of the memory of the secessionist rebellion occurred. The Southern states, for their part, reinvented their secessionist goals via the ‘Lost Cause’ and in the process managed to avoid confronting the issue of slavery that caused their secession in the first place. Additionally, the necessary transformation of the labour system, through the introduction of a virtual peonage, was a step removed from antebellum slavery. Of a more hostile nature, the actions perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan showed a heretoforeunseen widespread violence against the Black body. Indeed, although the Civil War was an immensely destructive conflict, the years succeeding the rebellion saw a different kind of destruction in the increasing effacement of the memories that the struggle produced. The industrialisation and modernisation that the Civil War catalysed fostered the drive to rebuild the former Confederate states economies and physical appearances. The advances in architecture that industrialisation cultivated meant that buildings were becoming technologically obsolete. As James Marston Fitch noted of this new inventiveness: ‘At no time before or since has American building been so unselfconscious, so blithely forgetful, of the shadows of the past or the weight of the future … The metallurgical industries, enormously accelerated by the exigencies of war, were now moving into a position to supply structural steels … to replace the less satisfactory wrought iron and cast iron of earlier days.’ Similarly, the completion of the trans-continental railroad, with the golden spike of industrialism hammered home at Promontory Point in 1867, operates as a perfect metonym for a ‘United’ States history that required that the Confederate raison d’etre be entirely forgotten. Penning his Civil War texts mainly during the late 1880s and early 1890s, Bierce was writing at a time when the Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ was losing influence and sentiments of reconciliation were increasing. The ever-decreasing possibility that the ghosts of the rebellion represented a threat to America allowed the memory of a Confederacy to enter the public forum as a serious topic of discussion. Through this reasoned integration the Confederacy was reconnected to American history. This acceptance of the reimagined and re-constituted Confederacy underscores the willingness of America to forget the events of the Civil War,
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and – in this forgetting – neglect the memory of those who fell. Alternatively, this willingness to accept the new South (or the new Confederacy) back into the fold of American national identity may have stemmed from the neglect of the bodies of those Confederates who fell. To take this point further let us consider two of America’s most culturally charged sites – the current National Cemeteries of Gettysburg and Arlington. Why cemeteries though? As Richard Meyer has suggested, monuments in cemeteries establish patterns of communication with those who use or view them in a number of ways. Although Meyer stresses that the verbal and visual images expressed on the face of gravemarkers provides the observer with the most information about the cultures and individuals that produced them, he also notes the other voices through which they speak. These markers accordingly serve as ‘tangible intermediaries in the ongoing communicative process leading to a richer understanding of the history and cultural values of community, region, and nation’. Why is this of relevance? Prior to the American Civil War, the rural cemetery was a thriving public space, gracefully and thoughtfully designed to produce introspection and leisurely philosophising. It was also highly individualistic. However, a conflict the size of the Civil War produced a reconsideration of burial practices, altering the way America preserved the memory of those who perished. As James Stevens Curl has pointed out ‘in the course of Victorian times, respect for the dead, like compassion for the underdog, became usual [requiring] that all the dead in battle should be decently buried and properly commemorated’. Continuing, he adds, ‘The American Civil War was the first war of modern times in which proper cemeteries for all ranks were laid out.’ The sheer number of dead that the Civil War generated, combined with the conscription of non-professional soldiers, meant each individual death required commemoration as acknowledgement. Consequently, Curl suggested that ‘commemoration was perhaps compensation’. Yet, it was compensation on certain terms. With the first deaths of the Civil War, the War Department announced that all graves of Union soldiers would be properly marked and registered by the federal government – each burial site was to be marked with a simple white cross … In death a homogenization was perpetrated by the federal government. However, as we shall see, this was a selective practice. Possibly remembered more for Lincoln’s address than for the bodies buried there, Gettysburg offers an apt genesis point for the consideration of the segregation of Unionist and Confederate dead. Despite the egalitarian nature of Lincoln’s address, the initial intentions of the cemetery challenged this perspective. When the bodies in the cemetery were being reordered according to state affiliation, an agent of David Wills, a representative of Pennsylvania’s Governor Curtin,
swore that no enemy tainted the ground where martyrs to the Union lay. That statement has long been disproved. Nevertheless, the cultural capital that was invested at Gettysburg was initially limited solely to a Unionist perspective, despite its being the ‘high water mark’ of the Confederacy and a central feature of the ‘Lost Cause’ mentality. Indeed, it was only in 1882 that Confederate veterans finally returned to Gettysburg to meet their Union counterparts, with the ceremony repeated in 1887. Attempting to explain this memorial discrepancy Gabor S. Boritt has argued that, in the three decades after the Civil War, the role of the hero was given primarily to Union soldiers (at the obvious expense of Confederate veterans). He goes on to note that following the conciliatory aspects saturating America in the late 1880s, the creation of a national park at Gettysburg in 1895 came about due to the perceived need to place markers on the otherwise bare Confederate side of the field. However, despite the resulting legislation, it was only in the early 20th century that the Federal government finally marked the Confederate battle line and Virginia and North Carolina added memorials to the field honouring their war dead. Although Gettysburg is of unquestionable importance in the memorial scheme of the Civil War, it is put in shadow by the Valhalla of American cemeteries, 166-hectare Arlington National Cemetery. Originally part of the Lee estate, Edwin M. Stanton – under the ‘Act for the Collection of Direct Taxes in the Intermediate Districts within the United States’ – ordered the founding of Arlington in 1864. Whilst now holding the title of National Cemetery, Arlington, like Gettysburg, only became so at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, it was only in 1900 that President McKinley, acknowledging the need for reconciliation, signed legislation that allowed Confederate war dead a separate dedicated section of the cemetery. How are we to react to the situation as suggested by Arlington pre-McKinley if we accept that the physical remains of the Unionist and Confederate troops act as physical symbols for their respective societies? At this stage, a closer examination of Bierce’s Civil War texts should help us construct a picture of the way in which he created a situation analogous to the loss created by the Civil War. In many of his more successful pieces Bierce employs a tactic that manufactures a gradual erosion of meaning, a tactic that necessitates a re-reading of the material. This open-endedness creates a negligible product – a vanishing that challenges the reader’s assumptions and presuppositions. Whilst Bierce’s texts are abstractions of the Civil War operating in the public realm, they are also individualised portals concerned with remembering. This is certainly the case in Bierce’s most successful, and frequently anthologised, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. In this text the protagonist, Peyton Farquhar, is torn from his imagined escape from a Federal execution by the snapping of the hangman’s noose around his neck. The reader, following Farquhar through the text, falls prey to the same surprise; the text that is being read is no longer the text it appeared to be. In this respect, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ (as are many of Bierce’s texts) is an exercise in non-closure; meaning has been lost and needs to be regained. Yet, even with a revised reading of the text with the new information a
vacuum results. Although the reader may be wise to the subterfuge of the text, all that remains as a meaning is a loss. Or, put differently, a death. Consequently, it is tempting to view Bierce’s texts as literary gravemarkers in terms of the Civil War. If this is the case, however, due to the lack of physical association (unless we view them as gravemarkers for Bierce himself) we must perceive them as cenotaphs representing the Civil War. This is an idea from which we can get some mileage. Benedict Anderson has noted that ‘no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs’. Continuing, he states that although such tombs are uninhabited by mortal remains or immortal souls, ‘they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings’. Accordingly, we can see a direct metonymic link between the bodies created by the Civil War and the particular political and cultural perspectives of the warring factions. The bodies were more than mere individuals; they were direct proxies for the Union or the Confederacy – in their death they became the physical vehicles of remembrance. This point leads nicely into Bierce’s texts. Because of the ineluctable emergence of death within his texts, Edmund Wilson suggested that ‘Death may perhaps be said to be Ambrose Bierce’s only real character’. This is debatable, although the frequency of death in Bierce’s texts is not. What is of concern is the manner in which the bodies of the dead are treated. Obviously all bodies created by a war have a violence committed against them, but some of Bierce’s cadavers are treated particularly harshly or meet their ends in unusual ways. In ‘The Coup de Grace’ bodies of fallen soldiers become fodder for rooting swine. In ‘Chickamauga’, the body of a woman lies, its clothing deranged, with the brain showing though a jagged hole created by a shell. In the description, the suggestion of rape is obvious, with necrophilia a possibility. Worse than simple physical violence against their mortal remains, some of Bierce’s protagonists suffer a historical violence. In ‘One of the Missing’ a Union Lieutenant fails to recognise the body of his own brother due to a covering of dust, despite his sibling dying minutes earlier. In ‘The Story of a Conscience’ unmarked graves are the final resting places of the two protagonists. In ‘One Kind of Officer’, although there is no conclusion to the text, the protagonist hopes for an unmarked grave. If we accept that the body became a touchstone for the remembrance of the Civil War, an interesting possibility emerges. Although there was a proliferation of memorials erected in both the Southern and Northern states after the Civil War these were only representations of the real. They existed, and still exist, as simulacrum – as romanticisations that valorise alternative
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readings of the conflict. They represent a remove from reality. The bodies of the Civil War dead (especially those of the Confederates), however, were not; they represented the physical evidence of the conflict and were something that could not be forgotten. These bodies played a part in the Civil War, and to sweep them under the historical rug in the way that America required represented not only a disservice to their memory, but also to the Unionist dead, who would, ostensibly, have perished for nought. This criticism of the neglect of the bodies of the Civil War dead is something that we can see in Bierce’s texts. Furthermore, contrary to the air of reconciliation and the need to forget, Bierce details – in a piece written in 1903 – his discovery of between 80 and 100 Confederate graves at a valley of the Greenbrier River in West Virginia: ‘Two, only two, have apparently been disinterred for reburial at their homes. So neglected and obscure is this campo santo that only he whose farm it is … appears to know about it ... Yet other men must be still living who assisted to lay these Southern soldiers where they are, and could have identified some of the graves. Is there a man, North or South, who would begrudge the expense of giving to these fallen brothers the tribute of green graves? One would rather not think so. True, there are several hundreds of such places still discoverable in the track of the great war. All the stronger is the dumb demand – the silent plea of these fallen brothers to what is ‘likest God within the soul’. They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary bearers of false witness in the aftertime.’ Indeed, a year later, Bierce was still ruminating on the function of memory in an instalment of his Devil’s Dictionary in the New York American. ‘Monument, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated. The bones of Agamemnon are a show, And ruined is his royal monument, But Agamemnon’s fame suffers no diminution in consequence. The monument custom has its reduction ad absurdum in monuments “to the unknown dead” – that is to say, monuments to perpetuate the memory of those who have left no memory.’ The functioning of memory combined with Bierce’s ‘literary bearers of false witness’ becomes of increasing interest when placed beside two more of his vituperate definitions from his Devil’s Dictionary. Two months before Ulysses S. Grant died
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in 1885, Bierce published a definition of ‘History’ which has broad relevance to the historiography of the conflict (with a shade of a suggestion towards Grant’s coming Memoirs). ‘History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.’ A damning indictment of the trend of self-justification and buck-passing that culminated in the publication in 1887 of Century Magazine’s coffee-table history of contention. Century’s manner of historical memory produced the perfect war – a revisionist dispute where the leaders of the Civil War armies could contend against each other without the spectre of death haunting the proceedings. Yet Bierce’s obsession with the nature of history did not end with this aphoristic turn. In 1892, the year that his collection of Civil War short stories Tales of Soldiers and Civilians emerged, Bierce reconsidered his initial definition and offered a fuller, albeit less pithy, enunciation of his understanding of the niceties of history. ‘History German critics are making much of Zola’s inaccuracies and inveracities in his account of the battle at Sedan, and calling on the military authorities to put them down. This is ridiculous; it is of no importance what occurred at Sedan, but when such a man as Zola writes it is of capital importance that he say what he will. Students of history are not going to him for their profitless knowledge; they want the plain unvarnished tale of the mousing dullard. Does it matter that Waterloo was not fought in the way that Hugo imagined it? Would we willingly give up his sunken road of Ohain because it did not exist, or his Cambronne because the actual Cambronne was not a blackguard? It is not known that events at the siege of Troy by the cowards and the savages of Agamemnon’s following occurred as Homer relates them; it is not even known that there was a siege of Troy. Is the Iliad less precious for that? Suppose there was a siege of Troy and suppose a papyrus were discovered whereon a Trojan eye-witness had uttered the mind of him in austere reprobation of Homer’s inaccuracies, pointing out that Diomed did not inflict a wound upon Venus, nor Achilles’ horses have a word to say, that Æneas was not there, and that Hector footed it featly about the walls of the city only twice. Who but a historian would care for all that? Historical events are valuable only as suggestions to great writers and great artists. For anything else it does not matter who beat at Salamis or Lepanto, which side John Sobieski fought at Vienna, or how many Frenchmen laid down their legs at Sedan. Anyhow, we can never know the truth about such matters; and in point of picturesqueness the falsehoods of fiction are far and away superior to those of history. In holding that Roman history was nine-tenths lying, Niebuhr was nine-tenths right; to have been wholly right he only needed to add that Roman history’s remaining tenth was lying too. And that is what ails all history – which may be defined as a false account of crimes not worth telling.’ Bierce expressed a position that holds a certain weight. This is not to say that he was ignorant or dismissive of the possibilities presented by the writing of history, be it literal
or sculptural. Indeed, his initial forays onto the battlefield of historical memory – ‘What I Saw of Shiloh’, and ‘A Little of Chickamauga’ – are journalistic pieces of descriptive remembrance more comfortable in historical space, yet exhibiting the same fragility as Bierce’s more fictional pieces. At this point a small detour may provide us with a profitable medium for juxtaposing Bierce’s texts with the more physical forms of memorial. The architectural theorist Christopher Woodward, in considering the nature of ruins, has commented on Hitler’s announcement of the policy of ‘Teorie von Ruinwert’; a policy intended to sustain the architectural permanence of the Third Reich. Paraphrasing Hitler,Woodward noted that steel and ferro-concrete were no longer to be used in the construction of official Nazi buildings because they were too perishable. Accordingly, the ‘Teorie von Ruinwert’ was introduced where ‘the use of marble, stone and brick alone would ensure that at the fall of the 1,000-year Reich they would resemble their Roman models’. Prior to this treatment of Hitler’s architectural ambitions,Woodward had considered the multiple meanings that ruins offer, declaring that ‘to statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of mortal man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time …’ Following his consideration of Hitler this is amended to ‘poets and painters like ruins and dictators like monuments’. Public monuments are permanently situated physical instruments for forgetting. Kirk Savage has noted that public monuments are ‘meant to yield resolution and consensus, not to prolong conflict’. They are points of closure designed to mediate all of the possible historical interpretations in a single object and impose a particular version of events. This is not to say that they are changeless in their meaning. They are, nevertheless, physically the most conservative of memorial forms. Moreover, they are sites that can repeatedly be employed by society to fulfil a moral obligation of remembering and to pay respect to the dead. Showing this enthusiasm for the memorial, Savage comments upon the novelty of the public monument to mid-19th century America, suggesting that, at that time, the concept ‘still meant something vital and precious’. Furthermore, he notes that during that period ‘Public monuments were much rarer … Before the Civil War one could stroll though most streets or squares without ever encountering a bronze statue of a departed hero or even a simple stone shaft marking a historic event.’ However, and illustrating the potential violence that may occur to monuments, he pre-empts these statements by noting that memorials are (today) taken very much for granted.
Contrasting the spatial solidity of monuments, the deferral of meaning that exists within Bierce’s pieces situates them both within and without of the historical space. According to Michel de Certeau, ‘Historiography tends to prove that the site of its production can encompass the past: it is an odd procedure that posits death; a breakage … [that] denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge. A labor of death and a labor against death … [writing] places both absence and production in the same area.’ Although Bierce’s texts are productions of death they avoid ‘appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge’. They are more fragile than that. Bierce’s fictional texts, although positing a death, do not labour against it in the way that conventional historical texts do. In short, his texts are the more transient of the two (and taking Ricoeur’s speech noted earlier, this makes them powerful players in the attempt to record the Civil War). Of course, with this juxtaposition of fiction and history and transience and permanence, we return to the idea expressed by Woodward in his consideration of Hitler’s ‘Teorie von Ruinwert’. Ultimately, whilst history becomes monolithic and historically self-conscious, historical fiction places itself within the realm of history whilst accepting that a degree of ruin will occur. To bring Ricoeur back into the fray, ‘It is not when the novel has a direct historical or sociological role, combined with its aesthetic role, that it poses the most interesting problem with respect to verisimilitude. The true mimesis of action is to be found in the works of art least concerned with reflecting their epoch … The quasi-past of the narrative voice is then entirely different from the past of historical consciousness.’ A potentially profitable route towards a conclusion is that of Bierce’s role of topographical engineer. Considering the notion of topography, cultural geographers James Duncan and David Ley note from close readings of topography (the science or practice of describing a particular place, city, town, manor, parish, or tract of land) and survey (the act of looking at something as a whole, or from a commanding position), that ‘running alongside a language of “objective science” is another language of power’. Consequently, topography – and the act of surveying – is a system of knowledge that encompasses the world and a science of domination that confirms boundaries: in short, a totalizing gaze that sees the world and orders it accordingly. This combination of observation and ordering is of relevance. When writing the texts comprising his Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Bierce had been living in and around San Francisco for some 25 years. In the Atlantic and midWestern states at that time, reconciliation was in danger of erasing the more distasteful memories created by the Civil War. The West Coast is a far remove from the battlefields of the Civil War, and this distance may have allowed Bierce’s memories to remain unchallenged. As Thomas Campbell put it, ‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, and robes the mountain in its azure hue.’ Except that, in this instance, distance may have allowed Bierce to avoid the re-imagining so prevalent elsewhere in the United States. This is not to suggest that Bierce existed in a state of
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quarantine as far as the altering of the history of the Civil War is concerned. Indeed, in 1914 – before seeking oblivion in Mexico or in the Grand Canyon – Bierce spent nearly three weeks re-visiting all his old Civil War battlefields (by then many years as cemeteries). It was apparently the third time he had undertaken such a tour. It seems safe to assume that Bierce held more than a small degree of familiarity with the sites. Yet, as noted above, Bierce’s texts do not allow for a transcendental or definitive representation of the Civil War. As Edmund Wilson noted, the period of the Civil War produced ‘a remarkable literature which mostly consisted of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports’. Yet, at a time when there was a glut of memories presented in ink, Bierce expressed the majority of his experiences in fictional form. Similarly, his autobiographical writings on the Civil War are selective and presented in such a way as to avoid a sense of closure. So how to conclude? In his Devil’s Dictionary Bierce defined a cynic as: ‘A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the
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Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.’ Bierce – with his eyes plucked out due to his faulty vision – is perhaps one of the few lenses we can use to view an alternate representation of the Civil War and acknowledge the need to remember death. References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London and New York:Verso. Bierce, Ambrose. 1998. ‘A bivouac for the dead’: A sole survivor – bits of autobiography. Ed. S.T. Joshi and D. E. Schultz. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. ‘Chickamauga’: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Ed.Tom Quirk. Penguin Books. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. ‘The Coup de Grace’: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Ed. Tom Quirk. Penguin Books. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. ‘Killed at Resaca’: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Ed.Tom Quirk. Penguin Books. Bierce, Ambrose. 1998. ‘A Little of Chickamauga’: A Sole Survivor – Bits of Autobiography. Eds. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Knoxville:The University of Tennessee Press. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Ed.Tom Quirk. Penguin Books. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. ‘One of the Missing’: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Ed. Tom Quirk. Penguin Books. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. ‘The Story of a Conscience’: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Ed.Tom Quirk. Penguin Books. Bierce, Ambrose. 2000. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Ed. David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. Athens and London:The university of Georgia Press. Bierce, Ambrose. 1998. ‘What I Saw of Shiloh’: A Sole Survivor – Bits of Autobiography. Eds. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Knoxville:The University of Tennessee Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Writing of History.Trans.Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Curl, James Stevens. 2002. Death and Architecture – an introduction to funerary and Commemorative Buildings in the Western Tradition, with some consideration of their setting. Sutton Publishing Ltd. Duncan, James and David Ley. 1993. Place, Culture, Representation. London and New York: Routledge. Fatout, Paul. 1954. ‘Ambrose Bierce: Civil War Topographer’: American Literature 36. Fitch, James Marston. 1966. American Building:The Historical Forces that Shaped It, 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: Riverside Press, Cambridge. Meyer, Richard E. 1992. ‘Introduction, ‘So Witty as to Speak’’: Cemeteries and Gravemarkers – Voices of American Culture. Ed. Richard E. Meyer. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. Morris, Roy, Jnr. 1998. Ambrose Bierce – Alone in Bad Company. Oxford University Press. Parish, Peter J. 1975. The American Civil War. Eyre Methuen: London. Ricoeur , Paul. 1995. ‘The Memory of Suffering’: Figuring the Sacred – religion, narrative and imagination.Trans. David Pellaur. Minneapolis: Fortress press. Ricoeur, Paul, 1988. Time and Narrative.Vol. 3.Trans, Kathleen Blaney and David Pellaur. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury. 1992. From Puritanism to Postmodernism – A History of American Literature. Penguin Books, 1992. Savage, Kirk. 1999. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves – race, war and monument in nineteenth-century America. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ward, Geoff. 2002. The Writing of America – Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present. Cambridge: Polity. Wills, Garry. 1992. Lincoln at Gettysburg –The Words that Remade America. Touchstone. Wilson, Edmund. 1987. Patriotic Gore – studies in the literature of the American Civil War. London:The Hogarth Press. Woodward, Christopher. 2001. In Ruins. London: Chatto and Windus.