Ambrose Bierce wrote about America when the U.S. Census Bureau announced the disappearance of a “contiguous frontier line,” to use historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s words. Those were the days when the pioneer’s advance into the impenetrable territories of the West was coming to an end. Although with a time gap of at least twenty years from the occurrence of the real events, the writer fixed his fictional magnifier on one of the bloodiest pages of American history: the Civil War. With his collection of short stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Ambrose Bierce, while drifting apart from any literary and social conformism of his time, also started to explore another Frontier: the human conscience. Most of his characters, in fact, accept the same challenges of those who devoted themselves to gold hunting and accumulation: the confrontation with the unknown, an obvious source of constant fear. More specifically - to use an anachronistic expression of Zygmunt Bauman – this is a “liquid fear”, a fluctuating anxiety, which in Bierce’s work is frequently condensed in images of water. The rivers and creeks of an America at war are not only invasive probes into the bleeding body of America, but they also frequently become reservoirs with hallucinatory powers, such as in Bierce’s famous short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” where water is a symbol of both life and death. Or as in “Chickamauga,” for example, where the rapid waters of a brook epitomize the extremes of both a physical and metaphorical advance in the forest of its young deaf-mute protagonist and of a subhuman swarm of soldiers. This paper, then, is an attempt to analyze the many symbolic implications of water in some of Ambrose Bierce’s works. My intention is to demonstrate how the many different forms of water (from rain to creeks, from tears to rivers) foster a discourse on irony and fear within the perimeter of a metafictional dimension. Either disillusioned or too scared by the horrors of their experienced world, Bierce’s characters overcome the limitations of their conventional objective reality to inscribe themselves within a fictionalized subjective world. In many instances, water is a channel for (if not the pivotal pole of attraction of) a process of reinvention of the ineffable, only to eventually find out that death, the real enemy of this “Total War” (Italo Calvino), is unavoidable.
The Hallucinatory Power of Water: Irony and Liquid Fear in Ambrose Bierce’s Works
FARGIONE, Daniela
2010-01-01
Abstract
Ambrose Bierce wrote about America when the U.S. Census Bureau announced the disappearance of a “contiguous frontier line,” to use historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s words. Those were the days when the pioneer’s advance into the impenetrable territories of the West was coming to an end. Although with a time gap of at least twenty years from the occurrence of the real events, the writer fixed his fictional magnifier on one of the bloodiest pages of American history: the Civil War. With his collection of short stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Ambrose Bierce, while drifting apart from any literary and social conformism of his time, also started to explore another Frontier: the human conscience. Most of his characters, in fact, accept the same challenges of those who devoted themselves to gold hunting and accumulation: the confrontation with the unknown, an obvious source of constant fear. More specifically - to use an anachronistic expression of Zygmunt Bauman – this is a “liquid fear”, a fluctuating anxiety, which in Bierce’s work is frequently condensed in images of water. The rivers and creeks of an America at war are not only invasive probes into the bleeding body of America, but they also frequently become reservoirs with hallucinatory powers, such as in Bierce’s famous short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” where water is a symbol of both life and death. Or as in “Chickamauga,” for example, where the rapid waters of a brook epitomize the extremes of both a physical and metaphorical advance in the forest of its young deaf-mute protagonist and of a subhuman swarm of soldiers. This paper, then, is an attempt to analyze the many symbolic implications of water in some of Ambrose Bierce’s works. My intention is to demonstrate how the many different forms of water (from rain to creeks, from tears to rivers) foster a discourse on irony and fear within the perimeter of a metafictional dimension. Either disillusioned or too scared by the horrors of their experienced world, Bierce’s characters overcome the limitations of their conventional objective reality to inscribe themselves within a fictionalized subjective world. In many instances, water is a channel for (if not the pivotal pole of attraction of) a process of reinvention of the ineffable, only to eventually find out that death, the real enemy of this “Total War” (Italo Calvino), is unavoidable.
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