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On Battle-Pieces: The Ethics of Aesthetics in Melville's War Poetry

The rise of Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) in American studies, where it now commands recognition for its technical sophistication and its penetrating treatment of the Civil War, has derived, in the main, from a fundamental insight: In the wake of national cataclysm, Melville adopted an aesthetic that would capture his own ambivalent response to the war and his sense of its uncertain meanings for American history. And he realized a corresponding poetics through formal effects that involve obliqueness or partiality of vision, the difficulty of utterance in the face of catastrophic violence, and the strange blend of ambiguity and continuity in human knowledge. Battle-Pieces, we now agree, embodies a rough and defective unity, and thereby assumes an important ethical stance, namely the urgency of recognizing the Civil War’s place in national history, or war’s place in human history, and, more narrowly, of finding a path toward national reconciliation.1 Melville not only fit an aesthetic form to his understanding of the war but also carefully thematized aesthetic problems in order to illuminate the nature of ethical thought and exertion, which he deemed inseparable from the country’s political crisis and its future as a democracy. Melville figures aesthetic experience in the poems (where his various speakers and characters respond powerfully, if not always consciously, to society’s symbolic structures and textures) and evokes particular aesthetic responses in his readers. The ethical meanings of the poetry are most vividly revealed in the dynamic between these two effects. Beyond their overt conciliationism, then, the deeper ethical movements of Battle-Pieces spring from Melville’s attitudes toward information and knowledge, social dynamics and the workings of culture, and ethics itself.