Shiloh in Fiction

Abstract

On the banks of the Tennessee River, on the 6th and 7th of April 1862, roughly 3,500 men from Union and Confederate armies died in battle, on a field that took the name Shiloh from a log church near the settlement of Pittsburg Landing. It was the bloodiest encounter of the Civil War so far. Gone was the romantic innocence of Rebs and Yanks who had marched off to war in 1861, says historian James McPherson (413). Chronicler James McDonough calls the battle colorful, dramatic, blundering, and confused in his book Shiloh, subtitled In Hell before Night (v). For the untried armies, Shiloh was a profoundly disorienting experience, and Americans have been trying to get their bearings ever since. Historical narration, says theorist Jorn Rusen, the general of orienting practical life in time by mobilizing the memory of experience, by developing a concept of continuity and by stabilizing identity (12). But this fundamental practical function (18) of telling stories about the past, Rusen warns, is not always well appreciated by professional academic historians. To the extent that academic historians concern themselves mainly with methodological and intradisciplinary issues, they cede their primary of orientation in history to popular historians-or, just as often, to popular novelists. Rusen's typology of historical narration can be illustrated vividly with examples from fictional narratives of the April 1862 battle of Shiloh. Such an illustration can promote an understanding of what historical novelists do when they set out to write fictions that make a claim to the historian's orienting function. Shiloh is a landmark that writers and readers use to orient themselves to the American Civil War and its continued salience in American temporal experience. In History: Narration-Interpretation - Orientation, Rusen distinguishes four types of historical narration. Traditional narrative, the first, repeats origin stories in order to affirm the permanence of a culture's dispensations. Exemplary narrative, the second, draws on the past to guide future conduct; we learn wise courses and eschew foolish or vicious ones by looking to past events. Critical narrative, the third, identifies problems in traditional or exemplary accounts, revising them to draw contrarian conclusions and to deny given patterns of identity (12). Genetical narrative, the fourth, seeks to understand how the process of forming memories of the past has shaped those memories. In genetical narratives, the past is always a site of negotiation; history is no longer an eternal verity, an object lesson, or even a locus for revision, but a process of formation and reformation. For Rusen, these four types of narration are grounded in anthropological universals and serve the necessary social functions of affirmation, regularity, negation, transformation, respectively (12). Broadly speaking, each of the four types of historical narration gives way to the next in both cultural phylogeny and individual ontogeny. Cultures develop myths, then teaching stories, then critical consciousness, and then critical self-consciousness about the history-making process. Thus, a child first learns traditions, then their application as lessons, then to critically evaluate those traditions and lessons, and then to analyze how those traditions, lessons, and critiques emerge in a dynamic process. Rusen speculates that the individual's acquisition of these narrative types in the process of development may be parallel to the acquisition of cognitive abilities or moral abilities, as formulated by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg (Rusen 17-18). The interplay of phylogeny and ontogeny means that each of the four types of narration is continuously in practice. Because of the need to teach children or socialize assimilants, cultures never outgrow traditional or exemplary narratives. There were past eras where only traditional narrative was practiced, or only traditional plus exemplary narrative. …