A Day In Gettysburg-‘They’ and Civil War Memory

A few days before Baltimore we visit Gettysburg, an unbelievably neat and tidy giant diadorama, with straight lines, wide avenues in parts, cute awnings and clean streets that stirred my urban chaotic psyche. I invariably look for some crazy energy, the institutional ‘madness’ of the ‘Afro-modern’ space, ‘natives’ and their ‘life-energy’ and its dominance of the architectural and the material. Gettysburg refuses to indulge me. Between older spruced up buildings that have metal plates that say ‘Civil War History’, stand T-shirt and Civil War paraphernalia shops and possibly the biggest commercial game in town, ghost-tour offices.

Next to this Disney-like apparition lies the memorial Gettysburg battlefield, green sweeping lawns dotted with all sorts, shapes and sizes of monuments like uneven dragon’s teeth. Giant grand figures on horse, small and large headstones with memorabilia dot this grand static vista open to the multitude of possible interpretations and re-enactments of America’s ‘Great War’, that continues to be narratively, and in places, politically contested. American history seems addicted to the epic form, and I feel its pull here. Standing before the sweeping physicality of the actual battle-field, I expect hordes of old soldiers to appear before my eyes, horses to start galloping and the noise, heat and dust that re-enacters try and summon every year, that ghosts spotters claim to see every night, to come to life. Later that evening, I enter a tavern with waitresses dressed like 19^th Century maids, dead strips of ermine and mink decorate the walls. I want to ask for ‘porridge’ on the menu but one of my fellow writers tells me that it is mere soup. There is little heat, noise and dust and present-day Gettysburg as some wit described the whole American Civil War - but the present tries to pulls all the stops to try and re-live whatever is both possible and can be transacted. At least for the 1 million visitors that come here every year.

In a place where a ‘nasty, untidy, brutal’, as described by our guide, war was fought, everything is anaesthesicised. Gettysburg College is all green lawns, brick buildings with high ceilings, and pretty co-eds. Spring though delayed comes through in the afternoons. I attend a senior creative non-fiction workshop and encounter the largest possibly indifferent social group in Gettysburg to the grand ‘history’ they are immersed in - college students from elsewhere in America.  

One female student says the general attitude on campus is that the whole present ‘Civil War’ scene in the town is ‘cheesy’. As we discuss relativity in ‘point of view’ in non-fiction and fiction, a male student says that there is such a surfeit of knowledge of the Civil War in present-day Gettysburg that it is ‘nutty’, and intimidating. This body of knowledge is held by what the student describes as an anonymous ‘they’. ‘They’, he say, know where every single body is buried. Someone adds that the Civil War seems to change for each student once they come to Gettysburg, a lot of information is imbibed from ‘they’ and many go back home to correct the relative positions that family and friends hold. During the session, the Civil War narrative seems to be the one subject that these students of creative non-fiction are least interested in during the discussion. And what myself and the writer’s group that I am part of are here for. We will move on and they will receive another group like us who will invariably want to talk about it.

When I explain a piece that I sent before-hand to the students, it seems to me later that the session is a particularly fruitful, an excellent conversational exercise in cross-purposes. I tell the students, somewhat facetiously, that I come from a place where the difference between fiction and non-fiction is that I can be sued for the latter. That, the ‘truths’ of fiction and ‘facts’ of non-fiction can be used inter-changeably to say what I need to say about where I come from. When I think about this in light of the part of the discussion on contemporary Gettysburg and the Civil War, I realize that this might be of little significance to these students. I leave feeling from that class that the seemingly overt historical weight of the American Civil War, a huge American institution, might ultimately satiate natural curiosity to a point, blur against one’s own ‘individual’ narrative concerns in non-fiction. And then that the material fact of Gettysburg with its T-shirts shops, ghost tours further robs what they could take seriously in narratives of other forms unless they took to satire or comic art. Somebody in our group fortuitously reminds us at the end of the Gettysburg visit that being in one place for a day can produce a novel, being there for a week, a short story and that it becomes impossible to write anything about a place after one has been there for a year.