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By Cordelia
Death by Communication
Although Drew Gilpin Faust’s article was entitled “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying” I found that the art of dying was more a communication of dying. Reading this article with an eye for information transfer, the blatantly obvious example was, of course, the communication of deaths to families back home. This came, as Faust stated, primarily through newspapers but often, it came in letters from other soldiers or organizations who made pacts to communicate the information. I found this interesting in contrast to the mentioning of dying soldiers clutching photographs of their loved ones (children, spouses, etc.) in their last moments on the battlefield as we also studied early photography as a form of communication. However, in this Civil War situation, photographs contained life and memories of life, whereas newspapers and letters, more classical forms of information transfer, contained death.
I also found the anecdote about the soldier who punished himself severely after not communicating to a dead soldier’s family of his death to be quite interesting as it was considered to him to be an absolutely heinous offense. In regards to information transfer, it was not the death that he felt bad about, but his lack of communication that gave him grief. In this sense, it seems that for the soldiers, communication was the most important part of the war, itself. This also reminds me of the telegraph and how its original creation was based on the fact that Samuel Morse was away on work and could not be contacted in a speedy manner to be alerted of his wife’s death. Though not mentioned by Faust, once again death is linked through communication.
I found it interesting that this connection could be made at the time in history that it was because of the Victorian tradition of the family gathering at the deathbed and hope for reunions in the afterlife. Because of this social tradition, it was very important for Civil War-era Americans to die at home, however the war made it impossible. This led, of course, to an increased want for ready communication, which was not necessarily made available through simple newspapers.
In a blog post Alec made a while back, he mentions how our generation has the technological means to create more realistic photography in regards to high definition, color, and video cameras. This reminded me of something Dr. Nelson mentioned in my American Literature class a few days ago about how modern film and television are heralded as the most realistic forms of media, yet music doesn’t play in the background of our own lives and we never get on a plane and then, a split second later, appear in Paris. Basically, he meant that there are conventions of all media that audiences unconsciously accept and look past. In the same way that our generation can look back on movies like the original King Kong and laugh at the implausibility and unrealistic aspects of it, future generations will do the same with our films. I think about this in regards to Faust’s discussion of photographs. At the time, those were the absolute most realistic portrayals of people, and even though we may look back and think about how much they could use improvement, the soldiers of the Civil War were able to unconsciously accept the conventions of them and use them as a source of comfort and really, information transfer, in their final hours.
