As the essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, realism and Reconstruction are inextricable. In the U.S., realism was born in the crucible of the Long Civil War,1 emerging as a vital mode for apprehending and describing a “reality” shorn of Idealisms and Transcendentalisms. That is one of the many reasons the Civil War and Reconstruction repeatedly appear in realist art and literature, from novels such as Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Henry James’ The American, and W. D. Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (all of which are about soldiers or former soldiers),2 to the poems of Sarah Piatt and Frances E. W. Harper and the paintings of Winslow Homer. Many of the writers primarily known for their commentary about Reconstruction, like Albion Tourgée and George Washington Cable, developed a realist style and philosophy which they saw as a natural expression of Reconstruction's aims and effects.3 And such connections merely hint at the range and variety of mutual influences that linked realism to Reconstruction, both of which were rooted in a similar system of print networks, historical conditions, and cultural values.Recent scholarship, however, has made it abundantly clear that realism and Reconstruction were complex, protean movements. Realism arose in Europe in the early- nineteenth century, acquired a variety of proto-forms in the antebellum U.S., and spawned an eclectic range of literary, philosophical, and artistic forms, from Pragmatism (a metaphysical realism) to Naturalism (an offshoot of realist fiction), and appeared in a kaleidoscopic array of media, from paintings to magazines, photographs, sculptures, poems, and short stories. This is one of the guiding threads of criticism on realism, from the institutionalist accounts of Nancy Glazener, Gene Andrew Jarrett, and Elizabeth Renker4 to the philosophical work of György Lukács and the legal analysis of Brook Thomas: realism is a diverse mode of representation that is produced by a wide range of texts, formats, genres, ideas, aesthetics, and platforms.5 Similarly, scholarly accounts of Reconstruction have transformed our understanding of its historical and cultural parameters. If we view Reconstruction not simply as a short-lived political experiment but as a dynamic set of ideas about race, democracy, and the force of law—an “unfinished revolution,”6 in Eric Foner's words—then it is something that materializes out of the world made by the American Civil War and extends through the early-twentieth century.If that is indeed the case, and realism and Reconstruction are both culturally variable and historically convergent, it invites broader questions about the relationship between realism and Reconstruction both inside and outside of the United States. Is the link between these movements primarily rhetorical, political, epistemological, or some combination thereof? Is the contiguity between realism and Reconstruction a matter of historical accident—a fortuitous and aleatory collision of texts, ideas, and circumstances specific to the late-nineteenth century United States—or might it signify a general relationship between realism and post-civil war culture? In this brief speculative essay, I seek not to answer all of these questions but to provide a framework for future research and indicate some possible lines of scholarly inquiry. The tentative argument I wish to pose is that realism and Reconstruction are mutually entangled because they provide complementary ways of reordering and reimagining reality in the wake of intrastate warfare.The difficult and enduring task of reconstructing a country ravaged by civil war is something that the U.S. has in common with many countries, from Sudan to Spain, China, and Angola.7 As Ann Hironaka observes, “lengthy civil wars are a distinctive feature of the post-World War II era” and “these civil wars have been enormously costly in terms of human suffering.”8 High-intensity, intrastate conflicts—whether in the U.S., Sri Lanka, Myanmar, or the Philippines—involve a distinct set of pressures and challenges, because civil wars do not merely destroy a polity; they also destroy the social and cultural bonds that previously held that polity together, disrupting the entire phenomenology of belonging that organized prewar society. Civil war is a reality-shattering as well as a nation-shattering event. It is not a coincidence that in many cases, intrastate conflict spurs experiments in literary, philosophical, or artistic realism, which provide a way to contain the chaos and impose a sense of order on a world subject to radical and extensive change. As James once remarked, “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak. . . . But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”9One could certainly argue that this is a matter of coincidence, and that the tie between realism and Reconstruction is the result of a distinct set of national, historical, cultural, and institutional conditions specific to the nineteenth-century United States. That interpretation is supported by excellent recent scholarship which has contextualized realism and Reconstruction alike in granular detail, accounting for the literary dynamics of “Jim Crow secularism” in the late-nineteenth century, the federal government's uneven military occupation of the postwar South, and the role of regional places, cultures, dialects in the construction of a purportedly national realism that was lodged in northeastern centers of power and prestige.10 Nonetheless, there are distinct patterns of connection between realism and postwar culture that recur across national boundaries, and scholarship on the transnational dimensions of U.S. literature has demonstrated that such global patterns of connection are ubiquitous—one could even say foundational—in U.S. literary history.11To underscore this point, let's play a quick game. Where and when did the following events occur?Most Americans who consider this sequence of events immediately think of the Civil War and Reconstruction. But the above paragraph recaps the history of twentieth-century Spain, which was ravaged by a civil war from 1936 to 1939, experienced decades of repression under General Franco, then commenced La Transición, an effort to shift—legally, culturally, and ideologically—from autocracy to democracy. In a broad sense, Spanish Reconstruction is an ongoing project that continues to play out in the realm of public space, where the cultural memory of the Guerra Civil Española is hotly contested. In recent years, numerous public memorials have been destroyed or attacked, from the grave of General Franco to the monuments for the International Brigades.If the similarities ended there, the cultural situation in Spain would present an interesting but ultimately inconsequential echo of the cultural situation in the post-Civil War U.S. However, Spanish Reconstruction spurred a great deal of realist art and writing. Whether in spite or because of the intense ideological and religious divisions that fueled the conflict, the literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War tends to emphasize the brutality of modern battle and the notion that war is where idealism goes to die, paralleling the realist fiction of Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and other unromantic writers of the U.S. Civil War. Moreover, Spanish realism, like its U.S. counterpart, is multigeneric and protean, involving a wide and ever-evolving array of stories, works, techniques, and genres, ranging from the socialist realism of Carlos Fontsere to the short stories of Francisco Ayala, the poetry of Octavio Paz, magazines such as Plural, Ariel, and Vuelta, novels such as Ramon Sender's Requiem for a Spanish Peasant (1953) and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and realist films such as José Antonio Nieves Conde's Surcos (1951) and José Luis Borau's Furtivos (1975).The poetry that emerges out of the Guerra Civil Española and La Transición is particularly redolent of poems about the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, suggesting that intrastate warfare—and its enduring aftermath—generates a shared set of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological concerns, many of which are central to realism. Consider “The Tolerance of Crows” (1937), a poem penned by Charles Donnelley, an Irish activist who was killed at the Battle of Jarama: Death comes in quantity from solvedProblems on maps, well-ordered dispositions,Angles of elevation and direction;Comes innocent from tools children mightLove, retaining under pillowsInnocently impales on any flesh.And with flesh falls apart the mindThat trails thought from the mind that cutsThought clearly for a waiting purpose.Progress of poison in the nerves andDiscipline's collapse is haltedBody awaits the tolerance of crows.12War is but the reduction of the body and the soul to brute matter. If “Body” (tellingly, an unpossessed noun dissociated from any sense of connection or belonging) merely “awaits the tolerance of crows,” the world is determined not by ideals but by force. Whether it takes the form of a bullet, poison gas, or battle-plans, that force dissolves almost everything that is worth preserving: discipline, childhood, even life itself. In that regard, “The Tolerance of Crows” is remarkably similar to some of the poems in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces (1866), which lament the mechanization of modern battle and the rise of cold, utilitarian logic. Modern war, Melville declares, is a war of machines: “No passion; all went on by crank, / Pivot, and screw, / And calculations of caloric.”13 As Renker has argued, “Melville's realist poetry eschews traditional poetic illusion and attempts to offer a new mode of poetic vision, one that is compatible with (although surely not identical to) the realist projects of his age.”14 Donnelly places a similar emphasis on the fact and feeling of destruction, reiterating a question Melville posed at the outset of Reconstruction: “What like a bullet can undeceive?”15To “undeceive” is to see reality as it is, free from romantic ideality. Yet how does one know whether or not one is deceived? The most haunting claim that one finds in the realist literature of Reconstruction is that truth is only acquired through experience, and in particular through suffering. As Auden declared in his poem “Spain”: The stars are dead. The animals will not look.We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, andHistory to the defeatedMay say Alas but cannot help or pardon.16Auden's concern about history's impotence is bound up with a broader concern, in much of this literature, about the relationship between fact and fiction in the wake of intrastate conflict. In both the U.S. and in Spain, many writers were keenly aware of the ways in which the physical battles slowly but surely gave way to cultural battles, as the fight over memory and identity became a “continuation of the Civil War by other means.”17George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) provides an illuminating and affecting account of that continuation. Orwell's memoir about his time in Spain is realist in both style and perspective, and it chronicles numerous experiences that shattered his illusions, from his dealings with the sordid realities of camp (“The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet”) to the terrors of the battlefield (“The essential horror of army life . . . is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. . . . A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting in happens to be just”).18 But Orwell is particularly anxious about the fate of the war's memory during and after Franco's rise to power. By the end of the 1930s, the battle over Spain had begun to morph into a battle over the past and its relationship to the present, as ideologically motivated writers on both the right and the left obscured the reality of the conflict and muddled its meaning. “I know it is the fashion,” Orwell says, “to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway,” and to a degree this is true: “I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased.” But modernity warps memory and truth alike in a way that is qualitatively distinct: what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.To drive this point home, Orwell turns back to World War I: If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science.” There is only “German Science,” “Jewish Science,” etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.19The horror of modernity is the horror of censorship, which suppresses reality and its apprehension. In his Homage to Catalonia, Orwell approaches writing as an anti-totalitarian act that insists—verbally, ontologically, and even haptically—that truth indeed exists and the best way to discern it is through direct experience.20 Orwell thus develops, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, a version of what the Pragmatists developed in the wake of the U.S. Civil War: a philosophical realism predicated on facts rather than precepts. For Orwell, as for the Pragmatists, empirical reality rather than belief must be the basis for all actions and inquiries.21Reconstruction, wherever it occurs, is not simply a legal or political movement but a set of ontological changes and challenges, and realism presents a vital means for reconceiving and renegotiating a world transformed by civil war. As Howells famously declared, realism existed before it ever acquired a proper name “or put on her capital letter.”22 Scholars have verified Howells’ assertion, documenting the formal variety and intellectual vibrancy of realist texts, perspectives, and techniques, many of which emerged long before the late-nineteenth century and lasted for a long time after it. In that regard, we might view Reconstruction and realism—from a comparative point-of-view—as complementary ways of apprehending a world that has been violently modernized and fundamentally remade.Marshall Berman observed, decades ago, that the experience of constant upheaval is the experience of modernity itself: To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. . . . [Modernity] pours us into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.23Berman's account of modern life is as sweeping as it is eloquent, but it leaves out a vital aspect of modernity: the dialectical entanglement of civil wars and Reconstructions, which have proliferated in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This “maelstrom” of modern experience is inextricable from the ways in which numerous countries throughout “this terraqueous globe” have been remade, often quite radically, by civil wars, which have created the conditions for many types of realism and neo-realism to emerge. Thus, from a comparative perspective, realism and Reconstruction are not accidental cousins. They are kindred movements that require and produce one another, not only in the U.S. but also far beyond its borders.