Theoretical Considerations:
What follows are brief selections from anthropologists, literary theorists, and philosophers that may provide a framework for reading and thinking about
--Whitman's poem "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown"
--other Civil War writings by Whitman
--wars, wounds, language, and bodies.
Thinking about the body:
1) Mary Douglass:
"The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived." (Natural Symbols, 65)
2) Carroll Smith-Rosenberg:
"The biological body, transformed by the human mind into a cultural construct, undergoes a second metamorphosis, emerging as the symbolic representation of the social forces that created it. Bodily parts, functions, boundaries, points of entrance and exit, openings, excretions are endlessly transposed into metaphors . . . " (Disorderly Conduct, 48)
3) Roland Barthes:
"Imagery, delicacy, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art. Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author's personal and secret mythology, that sub-nature of expression where the first coition of words and things takes place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed . . ." (Writing Degree Zero, 16, 17)
Thinking about war:
Elaine Scarry:
1) The injured body disappears:
"The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring. Though this fact is too self-evident ever to be directly contested, it can be indirectly contested by many means and disappear from view along many separate paths. It may disappear from view simply by being omitted: one can read many pages of a historic or strategic account of a particular military campaign, or listen to many successive installments in a newscast narrative of events in a contemporary war, without encountering the acknowledgment that the purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue" (The Body in Pain, 63-64)
2) The injured and dead bodies reappear in numbers as body counts to prove who won and to make the political decisions at the end of the war seem vivid and real and significant.
"The activity of injuring in war has, then, two separable functions. It is the activity by means of which a winner and a loser are arrived at. . . . . If in the midst of the American Civil War, one learns that a battle is occurring in which there are so far 20,000 casualties, it will very much matter to know whether the North has lost two thousand and the South eighteen thousand . . . Such differences will determine who is victorious in the battle . . . and which is 'loser.' . . .
But once the war is over, these verbal constructions will tend to be replaced by one in which the casualties . . . collectively substantiate, or are perceived as the cost of, a single outcome: 'Racial justice and national unity were to be crucial to the United States as a nation: 534,000 died in the Civil War.' . . . Both the citation of the collective deaths as a single reality and the citation of one side's death as certification of either its victory or its defeat arise because of the referential instability of the body that allows it to confer its reality on whatever outcome occurred. . . .
. . . the visible and experienceable alteration of injury has a compelling and vivid reality because it resides in the human body, the original site of reality, and . . . this reality can be conferred on either set of disupted issues (or as sometimes happens, a mixture of issues from the two sides) . . . (The Body in Pain, 116-117, 121)