Battle-Pieces and the Problem of Beauty

Cody Marrs reconsiders the relation between violence, aesthetics, and subjectivity in Melville’s Civil War poems. Battle-Pieces is steeped in the war’s sensorial phenomena; indeed, it tends to be less concerned with the... [ view full abstract ]

Cody Marrs reconsiders the relation between violence, aesthetics, and subjectivity in Melville’s Civil War poems. Battle-Pieces is steeped in the war’s sensorial phenomena; indeed, it tends to be less concerned with the war as such than with the plays of light, sound, and color to which it gives rise. In this regard the volume seems to veer toward the “aestheticization of politics” that Benjamin defined as the essence of fascism. Yet the effect of these somatic immersions and impressions flows in the opposite direction, leading not to the concretization of an autonomous subject but to the self’s dispersal. The fragmentation of Melville’s mind characterizes the book’s broader treatment of the war, as the poems migrate from perspective to perspective and from fragmented sensation to fragmented sensation. Battle-Pieces thus provides a crucial test-case, Marrs will argue, for thinking about the types of non-individuated personhood that are generated or induced by violence.