“After the Eruption”: Melville and the Cultural Memory of the American Civil War

Abstract

A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 145 the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance” (v). For theorists like Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Marita Sturken, such variability and variance is at the heart of any experience of collective memory. Thus, by charting Melville’s interest in and infl uence on cultural memory, the panel put literary studies in closer conversation with recent work in Civil War history that has emphasized contested memorial practices. In “Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand”: The Liminal Dedication of Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War Robert Arbour Indiana University This paper begins and ends with an often overlooked aspect of Battle-Pieces. However ordinary Melville’s dedication may seem, it invokes not “three hundred thousand” soldiers who died in the Civil War, but their “memory,” framing the sui generis book as a self-conscious memorializing project that interrogates from the start the production of cultural memory. Artfully nebulous, the dedication draws on several contemporary strategies for commemorating the war even as it resists each of them. Its impersonal yet conventional rhetoric converses with the dedications of popular sentimental poems in 1866. Its typography braids together the permanence of the epitaph and the volatility of the newspaper poem and the telegraphic bulletin. Its lapidary form suggests the monuments in the national cemeteries where the Federal dead were identifi ed and reinterred while its anonymity evokes the mass graves that housed Confederate corpses or the inevitable blankness of the customizable memorial lithographs marketed to American families during the war. An index of the poetry it precedes, the dedication also indexes Melville’s literary career, reaching back to the ironic dedication of Israel Potter to connect the work of the aspiring poet to the anxieties over popularity and public memory in his forgotten prose. The dedication of Battle-Pieces is a liminal pastiche that challenges precisely the unitary memory it addresses and reveals any cultural memory, of war or of a writer, to be a collage of diverse cultural texts, as fl uid as it is incomplete. Melville and the Shaping of the Civil War Canon Timothy Sweet West Virginia University This paper considers Melville’s place in the Civil War’s literary canon, focusing on the centennial of the war as a key moment, particularly as canon-building