260 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Midst of Life in England and in the 1898 American edition. Another collection of
stories, Can Such Things Be?, followed in 1893. More than half the stories in the first
collection, and many in the second, deal with the Civil War; they reflect their author’s
feelings of revulsion for military life, and his bleak, bitterly comic view of existence
in general. Some of these stories capture the vicious confusion of battle, just as, say
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) by John William De Forest
(1826–1906) does. In “A Horseman in the Sky,” a young Union soldier is forced by
circumstances to kill a Confederate officer who happens to be his father. Others use
stream-of-consciousness and suspense endings to explore the subjectivity of time.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” for example, presents the fantasy experienced
by a man who is being hanged, in the final seconds of his life. And still others deploy
a fluid, almost surrealistic prose style and black humor to dramatize physical and
emotional violence. So, in “Chickamanga,” we see a battleground strewn with corpses
through the eyes of a child. The child sees but does not understand – although,
thanks to an ironic narrator, the reader does – until the end, when he comes
across the ruin of his home and the dead body of his mother, “the greater part of the
forehead ... torn away.” A deaf mute, he then utters “a series of inarticulate and
indescribable cries – something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling
of a turkey – a startling, soulless, unholy sound.” It is the wreckage of a language,
used in response to the “wreck” he sees around him; he has awoken, hopelessly and
helplessly, to the horror of life. The same dark light that simultaneously illuminates
and shadows these stories also informs Bierce’s poems, and the ironic series of
definitions – such as the definition of realism quoted earlier – collected in The Devil’s
Dictionary (1911). In 1913 Bierce traveled into war-torn Mexico to escape American
civilization and to seek, he said, “the good, kind darkness.” He must have found it,
for he disappeared. To this day, it is not known when, how, or exactly where he died.
At first sight, there are few connections between William Dean Howells and Henry
James (1843–1916). Both saw writing as a serious vocation, and the writing of fic-
tion as a form of artistic endeavor equal to any other. Both were influential, Howells
exerting a powerful influence on his contemporaries and James mostly on his suc-
cessors. Both addressed their work to what they saw as “the real thing,” to use James’s
phrase: to the strenuous realities of material, mental, and moral existence. But the
differences between them are clear. Howells, in his very emphasis on the “common-
place,” tended to concentrate on human likeness, typicality, and give priority, if not
a monopoly, to the social context. James, on the other hand, was intensely interested
in what he called “the special case”; that is, he chose to focus on how common moral
conflicts and shared social concerns were realized in the complexities of individual
experience and encountered by the individual consciousness. Howells used a variety
of fictional techniques, but all of them were characterized by the directness of the
journalist or historian. James, on the contrary, was what Joseph Conrad famously
called him, “the historian of fine consciences.” And to write this history, thoroughly
and accurately, he devoted a lifetime to finding and developing the right fictional
tools. “There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth,” James wrote in his
preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881), “... than that of the perfect dependence ofGGray_c03.indd 260ray_c 03 .indd 260 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM