The transformation of frontier mythology in short stories by Ambrose Bierce (based on the "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians", 1891)

Demenyuk Veronika Maksimovna Postgraduate student, the department of Foreign Literature, Institute of Philology and Journalism, Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod  603000, N.Novgorod, Bolshaya pokrovskaya st., 37. demenyuk.veronika@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The events of the Civil War in the United States served as a kind of trigger for the displacement of key patterns in the socio-cultural space of the young state: the type of society (slave-owning) is changing and, as a result, a whole historical layer that determined its specifics is disappearing. Along with the actual disappearance of southern plantations as a household reality, which with the abolition of slavery come into a state of decline, there is a natural redistribution of semantic accents in the mentality of America as a whole: the pre-war idea of dividing the states into the Old South and the democratic North is leveled, and the question of the nature of true "Americanness" arises with a new force", which actualizes the search for one's own national identity.

            Already the first settlers, who formed the core of the future American nation, felt an urgent need to form clear contours of their own identity: the missionary path to a new earthly paradise required not only literal practical determination, but also a vividly formulated ideology that would allow them to overcome the physical and moral trials of a new incredibly difficult life. S. Huntington writes that for Americans as for the nation of immigrants is less characterized by the definition of their own identity through the geographical or climatic characteristics of a certain area in which they live ^[1], and in this regard, culture and especially the Christian religion, which retains a huge influence on the souls of people to this day, acquire fundamental importance ^[2].

The Puritan pilgrims, pioneers of the future frontier, considered themselves adherents of the "true" faith: the concept itself, which arose initially "as a mockery" and then transformed into a "means of self-defense" ^[3], semantically goes back to the postulation of the strictest, "pure" principles of morality applied to the church, society, and the state. The creation of a new state, an ideal puritan community, "where everyone's life will be better, richer and fuller, where everyone will have the opportunity to get what he deserves" ^[4], was literally supposed to turn the whole world by his example. Thus, a rather categorical and conservative form of religious worldview, meeting the resistance of the local indigenous population, only strengthened in the national consciousness: in the conditions of a difficult climate and the bloody advance of the frontier deep into the continent, the key idea of the God-chosen new people acquired a truly tragic sound.

The American frontier myth, as a complex representation of the world and its structure, according to one of the modern frontier researchers R. Slotkin ^[5], includes a protagonist living in a kind of shelter, a refuge from the dark forces associated with the alien and unidentified space of the frontier. It is the wild element, which is not only positioned as chaos, sweeping away everything in its path, but as a sinful space, destroys the primordial peace of the frontisman and requires him to resolve to cleanse him of sin and vice. Thus, R. Slotkin writes, the task is imposed on the frontisman by divine providence to help this wild and sinful reality of the frontier to make a moral and spiritual rebirth.

            For the American writer and publicist Ambrose Bierce, national mythology becomes the main source for creating a monumental canvas about the modern mores of America, allowing the reader to present a certain slice of the socio-cultural space of the United States. At the same time, it cannot be said that the author uses national mythology as a certain specific system of images or motives, for him it is much more significant to be able to penetrate with its help into the essence of national thinking, to try to read through it the historical development of American identity. Moreover, thanks to the use of archetypal models, A. Beers expands the narrative space from a specific historical context to universal scales – his texts contain a single metatextual concept of the existence of man in the world. In the most vivid form, this is manifested in his main text, which brought him the greatest fame – the collection "About soldiers and Civilians" of 1891, which is the object of research in this article. For A. Beers in this collection, the division into two thematic contrasts, "Soldiers" and "Civilians", is fundamental ^[6], according to which the distribution of texts within the collection takes place. However, upon closer examination, the visible opposition is removed, allowing the author to make more global generalizations.

First of all, A. Beers paints the artistic world of his works in an atmosphere of closed procedural characteristic of the frontier. The cyclical nature inherent in mythological time a priori is vividly emphasized in the author's texts and is endowed with a negative connotation that creates an atmosphere of hopelessness: the vicious, endless movement of the frontier will never end, defining the essence of A. Bierce's heroes as both lost and doomed to eternal wandering of people. First of all, this is manifested in the "acting" heroes, the characters of military stories, who actually show the desire for violence inherited from frontismen: "The brave spirit of his ancestors awakened in the child for thousands of years was brought up on the unforgettable exploits of many generations of discoverers and conquerors who won battles, the outcome of which was decided by centuries, and built cities of stone on the conquered lands" ^[7] ("Soldiers": "Chickamauga"). However, the cyclical movement of American life also affects the average person, who is closed within his daily routine: "He was overcome by remorse, belated and useless, and therefore especially deep.  It already seemed to him that the disembodied inhabitants of the other world, whom he had insulted, were about to pounce on him, violating their peace and the integrity of their shelter.  And yet the stubborn boy did not back down, even though he was trembling all over. Healthy blood flowed in his veins, the hot blood of frontiersmen. Only two generations separated him from the conquerors of Indian tribes. He moved forward again"^[8] ("Civilians": "Appropriate situation"). Thus, in the view of A. Beers, the frontier is not so much a stage in the history of the state, but a fatal predestination, unconsciously present in the life and fate of anyone connected with this land by blood, a kind of aesthetic inheritance received by any American regardless of his current social status and individuality.

 Most of the characters in both parts do not have any individual traits, they exist and act within a cyclical routine by the blind inertia of life. Some of them at the same time may have some bright memorable character trait that distinguishes the hero from other acting characters, brief information about his family and origin may be given, but at the same time each of these heroes turns out to be fundamentally impersonal and is not even called by name, which the reader will never know. Especially tragically, A. Beers emphasizes this loss of identity in the conditions of a fratricidal war, where the son is forced to fight on the side against the father ("Soldiers": "The Horseman in the Sky"), and the head of the family to shoot his own family estate ("Soldiers": "The Battle in Coulter's Gorge").

The heroes of A. Bierce, even in a conditionally peaceful time, are permanently in a state of anxiety, ready to react to the minimal threat of the unknown with violence ^[9] - in a fight, but often with an enemy without an external embodiment. He manifests himself as the alter ego of the character, with whom the heroes of the narrative and the reader face at the peak of emotional tension. This is what happens, for example, with the character "Real Monster" from the part "Civilians": the main character, on a tip from a close friend, goes to dig up gold, which was hidden from prying eyes under an unknown grave in the thicket of the forest. Here A. Beers masterfully demonstrates his mastery of the suspense technique: the closer the hero gets to gold, the more he begins to feel unmotivated, but all-consuming fear and horror, linking what is happening here and now with his past. It begins to seem to him that the grave hiding the hidden gold belongs to his former lover: "Then his feelings gradually returned to him: the tide of horror that flooded his consciousness began to recede. But when he came to himself, he began to treat the object of his fear with a strange carelessness. He saw the moon gilding the coffin, but he did not see the coffin itself… Just as if you look at the sun for a long time, it will first appear black and then disappear, so his soul, having exhausted all its reserve of fear, was no longer aware of the existence of the object of horror" ^[10]. It begins to seem to him that a revived dead man wants to attack him, in which he recognizes the features of his former lover, because based on their joint past, she has every reason to take revenge on him. Succumbing to his fears, the hero is drawn into a fight with a fatal outcome – as the reader learns in the finale, fighting with a dead man, the hero fatally wounds himself. In the study of the borderline states of the human psyche, A. Beers directly inherits his predecessor of late American Romanticism, E. Poe ^[11], but already removes the traditional romantic duality (rational and irrational, healthy and sick consciousness). He is interested not so much in distinguishing these oppositions as in the possibility of distinguishing them, the process of transition from one state to another as a kind of timeless constant.  The sense of danger, threat hanging over the world, becomes decisive for the artistic world of A. Beers – the war waged by his characters does not end with a specific historical event, but continues with an existential war with the universe, becomes a state. Invisibly present in the texts of A. Bierce, the character of the inexorable fate of life overtakes each hero in its own way, but absolutely inevitably everyone, and leaves no hope: no hero of A. Bierce, even with a highly developed biography, has no family or offspring, which symbolically shows the author's pessimistic position towards the future, as this the country, and humanity as a whole.

In this context, the key archetypal own/alien dichotomy is transformed ^{[12, p. 28]}, within which the main task of the frontier is realized - the development of an unfamiliar continent and the appropriation of an unfamiliar, alien space. Analyzing the detailed everyday space described in the texts, there is an obvious change in scale – the very space of the life of A. Bierce's heroes turns out to be fundamentally alien and hostile, destroying the mental integrity of a person and destroying his identity. The heroes find themselves in the wrong place and at the wrong time ("Civilians": "Middle toe of the right foot"), witness time jumps incomprehensible to human consciousness ("Civilians": "Man and Snake") and they can overcome the linearity of historical time, unconsciously and often not in physical embodiment, moving between time points ("Civilians": "A resident of Carcosa"). The world is thereby affirmed by A. Beers as a fundamentally unknowable person, which directly correlates with his main thesis about the impossibility of the existence of objective truth and the subjectivity of the perception of reality in the consciousness of each individual. In this mysterious world, a person turns out to be like the pioneers of the frontier - an eternal wanderer, always and everywhere an outsider to whom this universe is indifferent. Coming from nowhere and going nowhere in the cyclical metamorphosis of life, a person is never able to find anything truly his own, and, consequently, to know and assert his own identity, and attempts to overcome this lead the heroes of A. Bierce to tragic consequences. If in mythological archaic representations the macrocosm of the world directly depends on the microcosm of man ^[13], then in the representation of A. Beers, represented in the texts of the collection, the world turns out to be a huge empty earth, without beginning and without end, a space fundamentally inanimate and alien to all human. People in his artistic reality are brought up by the violence of the frontier, reinforced in the national consciousness by the destructive bloody Civil War, they are not able to establish a connection with the world as well as with each other, because they cannot overcome their fear of the alien, interpreting everything around them as dangerous and alien. Thus, the idea of the constant development of an alien space from the scale of the national character in A. Beers expands to a universal, philosophical perspective, giving it timeless features.

Moving, transition is the core plot of all the texts of the collection: the heroes of A. Bierce are active and active, but all their actions do not lead to any result, because on the scale of the macrocosm, a person is insignificant, unimportant. So the hero of the most famous text "The Incident on the bridge over Owl Creek" experiences in his head the whole story of escape from execution, which turns out to be only a figment of his own imagination, a moment lived in his mind. The heroes of the conditionally eternal frontier of A. Bierce are not able to find peace even at the threshold of death, they are constantly moving in search of something that in the process of searching completely loses its meaning for them. Even when their body formally dies, their consciousness continues on its way, as happens with the hero from the part "Civilians" in the text "Resident of Carcosa", the story of which is told by the spirit itself, summoned at a seance. Thus, A. Beers again refers us to the fatal cyclicity of the frontier – by completing one stage of movement, his heroes are not able to truly stop, but only thereby launch a new round of their endless movement; the death of one character in the world of the author's literary texts only causes another, the same impersonal hero without a name, to take his place.

Let us recall the religious code, which is extremely important for the concept of the frontier and the American consciousness in principle [14 – p. 4]. A. Beers was born and grew up in an extremely religious family, whose origin goes back to the first migrants of the Great Puritan Migration of 1620 – 1640, while subjecting Puritan values to constant criticism. Christian symbolism permeates many of A. Beers' texts and reveals itself at different levels: the eschatological motif and the associated image of the horseman ("Soldiers": "Rider in the Sky"), the travesty of the exodus plot ("Soldiers": "Chickamauga"), the constantly emerging motive of madness, which turns out to be a kind of epiphany for his characters about the true picture of the world and its transformation due to this into a blessed martyr ("Soldiers": "The Battle in Coulter's Gorge"). At the same time, all religious symbols are placed by the author in an inappropriate context, on the one hand, thereby demonstrating an obvious decrease in high pathos, on the other hand, emphasizing the absurdity of the described situation, its context. So the new messiah turns out to be a deaf child, unable to realize that he is present at the bloody retreat of crippled soldiers from the battlefield, mistaking them for strange animals ("Soldiers": "Chickamauga"). Thus, it would seem that A. Beers again connects the supporting semantic elements of frontier mythology in his text, but makes them work in an unexpected way. The heroes of A. Bierce turn out to be not missionaries of the frontier, behind whose back stands the same divine vertical and blessing for the spread of the "faith of civilization" among the wild and unbridled chaos of the world, but on the contrary – God-forsaken people, cut off from any possible God, light and meaning, outside of any moral guidelines.

In the artistic reality of A. Beers, in this way, the religiously grounded mission of the frontisman turns out to be fundamentally impossible, since the external cyclicity of human existence turns out to be tightly connected with his true nature - in fact, A. Beers refers us here to the concept of original sin and actualizes it in a new context. The crisis of morality demonstrated by A. Beers on the examples of his heroes turns out to be motivated not only by historical dependence on the harsh conditions of the frontier, which formed a craving for violence in a person, but also by the actual nature of man, which cannot be overcome: "At that time, all this vast space was inhabited only by a few inhabitants of the "frontier" - these restless souls, who, having barely managed to build themselves a more or less tolerable dwelling in the forest thicket and achieve a meager well-being, bordering on poverty in our terms, left everything and, obeying an incomprehensible instinct, went further west to meet new dangers and hardships there in the struggle for the miserable comforts that they had just voluntarily rejected." ^[15] ("Civilians": "Boarded up window").

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the frontier mythology used by A. Beers becomes not only an important element of the poetics of his collection "About Soldiers and Civilians", but also forms his author's philosophical and aesthetic program. Using a number of key patterns for the frontier myth (opposition of one's own / someone else's, transformational displacement, religious symbolism and motivation), the author studies not only the national characteristics of contemporary Americans who survived the monumental shock of the events of the Civil War, but also the universal nature, creates a universal image of a person who has lost touch with the world and with his own identity.