On the rolling hills of Gettysburg, the Civil War unfolds – the war dead strewn the otherwise idyllic landscape, where they will remain until “Taps” is played, or until the call of “Reanimate!” blares over the PA system. The spectacle utilizes performance, affect and ghosts to commemorate the Civil War.  While commemoration is one of the main reasons reenactors participate in the hobby, these events are also about something more – getting to “see the elephant.”

 

 “Seeing the elephant,” for reenactors, is experiencing a “moment,” a “time warp;” it is “actually being there.”  As they dress in their woolen uniforms for the day’s activities, they actively step back in time in their minds, hoping to experience the past through embodiment. 

 

Therefore, the reenactor’s body functions as a site of memory.  In the performance of the past, reenactors allow their body to affectively attach to the body of the dead. This practice points to a particular type of memorial practice – commemory.  Acts of commemory function in the nexus of performance, affect and haunting.   Civil War Reenacting, particularly its emphasis on “seeing the elephant,” is a poignant example of commemory in the American memory and heritage industries. 

 

The “co-” of commemory denotes how commemory works with the memories and experiences of the dead. These memories co-mingle with the memories and experiences of the living, in order to enfold time on itself, bringing forth the dead in a remembering that is commemorative specifically because it is performative. An audience is necessary for commemory – whether that audience is paying to be there, or is comprised of the ghosts of place.

 

This paper will explore the notion of commemory through Civil War reenacting in general, and the penultimate experience for a reenactor – “seeing the elephant” – specifically.  Through this example of commemory, I aim to show how the past is embodied through performance, functions as an affect, and, when conjured through affect and performance, is always already haunted.

 

“Seeing the Elephant”

“Seeing the elephant” is a phrase used by Civil War soldiers as well as reenactors.  For Civil War soldiers, “seeing the elephant” meant that they had been in battle.  Being able to declare this was a source of pride in having fully realized their soldiering/masculine potential.  For reenactors, it signifies having had a “profound confusion of time,” that “moment” or a “period rush” (Schneider 35).   Saying “I have seen the elephant” is a performative speech act.  The phrase connects the reenactors to the past, allowing them to declare their work at reenactment events as “authentic.”  By utilizing the same phrase as Civil War soldiers, reenactors performatively bind themselves to the past/dead through their utterance of the phrase.

 

“Seeing the elephant” as a reenactor is so palpable that for some, such as Marchand and Sandusky, the experience engenders a visceral reaction: (click here to listen, select "On why they do it") Marchand’s recounting of “seeing the “elephant” is illustrative of how reenactors’ present bodies can be possessed by the past.  It is through the performative that the experience of Civil War soldiers can be felt in the present.

 

Commemory: Performance

Acts of commemory begin with the performative. This aspect creates spaces for the stagings, as well as audiences for the spectacles.  Reenacting is a necessarily performative hobby, as “Reenactors must satisfy three audiences: each other, the public, and the Civil War dead” (Cash vi).  Reenactors do so by inhabiting a liminal space between pageantry and history, past and the present, living and dead.  

 

Roach’s concept of the “kinesthetic imagination” is critical for understanding the performance of reenactors, as it is the corporeal experience that enables them to “feel” or “live” the history, and thus “see the elephant.”  The kinesthetic imagination is “a way of thinking through movements - at once remembered and reinvented” (Roach 27).  Through movement, the reenactor’s body remembers that which it never experienced, (re)inventing an experience in the present, using notions of past as a reference.  History and memory are thus mediated through the body of the reenactor.  Their body (re)animates the past and now a living body, rather than the war-dead, is the referent for the experience of the Civil War for reenactors and spectators alike. 

 

The experience of war is brought forth by the bodies of reenactors, and the simulated battlefield functions as a stage for the performance.  The location of a reenactment’s battlefield is a “deathscape,” a place to bring back the dead through the bodies of the living.  The transformation of a space into a deathscape occurs partially though the performative and can be contested and (re)interpreted through the power and negotiation of memory.  These sites are “mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death,” a liminal space where memory can play and where “the living can undertake various forms of performance and embodied practice in relation to the dead” (Nora 19, Young and Light 137).

 

Performances at reenactments ignite a “memorial consciousness,” with reenactors serving as “monstrous doubles” for the American imagination, allowing themselves to be ritually sacrificed for the benefit of the society’s quest for commemory.  Through a performance of sacrificial violence, the reenactors’ speech and movements display the past so that others can bear witness to the honor of the dead.

 

Performing so that memory can live on is an important part of the hobby, but for reenactors, the affectual aspect of reenactment is what draws them back into woolen clothing summer weekend after summer weekend. It is the “electricity” of the experience.

 

Commemory: Affect

Bodies not only preform, but are affected by, acts of commemory.  The affects in the space of the reenactment “stick” to the bodies during the performance(s) of remembering, experiencing, and mourning.  Memory is “an affective form of knowing,” and the affectual experience for all present at the event is generated by the performance of the reenactors (Sakamoto 163). 

 

Reenacting bodies are at once sites of transmission and of reception of affects.  The association between an object and an affect is negotiated through habit, and history.  Historical, or past, time operates as an affective object during reenactments, and can be read as a sticky object which reenactors interact with through their embodied performance.  In their performative engagement with the past, reenactors become sticky objects themselves.  Spectators in turn experience the reenactor as the sticky object that mediates affects.  Through watching the reenactors’ embodiments of historical time, spectators can also “feel” or experience the past. 

 

In order to receive and transmit the affect of past time, reenactors embody history through their costuming and performance - their “impression.” A combination of character, persona, costume and historical knowledge, a reenactor’s impression is the core of their hobby experience.  I have not been able to find a reenactor that can explain to me why they use the word “impression,” but the term is perhaps most fascinating when read using an affect theory lens.  While she is not referring to reenactors in her work, Sara Ahmed posits that “An impression can simply be an effect on the subject’s feelings...can be a belief...can be an imitation...can be a mark on the surface...We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression.  It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very ‘mark’ left by the press of some surface upon another” (Ahmed 29-30).  Using Ahmed, the reenactor’s impression can be understood as their allowance of the press of history to be enacted on their body.  Not only are reenactors inwardly engaging with the past, but their physical bodies display markers of the past (and markers of their present engagement with the past; black powder burns are scarring).

 

For reenactors, the affective is not transmitted through text, but through bodies in close proximity to other bodies, and to fetishized objects of the past, affectively imbued with the residue of historical time. In these encounters, all bodies are engaging with commemory, allowing the stickiness of the past to comingle with the receptive present.  Yet, in conceiving of time as an affective, sticky object, we need to wonder “…what if time (re)turns? What does it drag along with it?” (Schneider 2). Stuck to the bodies of the reenactors, historical time drags into the present particles of the past, (re)created by and for the present bodies.  The mixing of past time with present time creates a zone that is not then and not now, but, rather, a time that operates in the liminal, affected with the past, but not the past, or even of the past.  The “past” in this zone of time is the reenactor’s construction based on their research, reenacting experience, and prosthetic memories of the Civil War.  In this zone, bodies are oriented towards affective reception.  Here, reenactors can function as “living historians,” as they commonly refer to themselves, reanimating the past through an embodied entanglement with history, affectively engaging with the past and creating an archive in the present. 

 

Commemory: Haunting

 Their performances affectively bind Civil War reenactors to the dead.  This binding, or haunting, is the final key component of commemory.  It is the potency of the past, specifically of the dead, situates commemory as a duty-bound act of national importance. 

Roach argues that the truth of the kinesthetic imagination is “the truth of simulation, of fantasy or of daydreams... [it] flourishes in the space where imagination and memory converge” (Roach 27).  I would also add that the truth of the kinesthetic imagination the truth of a haunting, located in a space where haunting can emerge and thus converge with imagination and memory. 

Reenactors’ coveted “moments” are times of explicit haunting.  In the moment, the reenactor’s body is not his own, but serves as a vessel for the work of a ghost.  The movements of the body are affected by the ghost and the reenactor connects himself through words to the legacy of the dead when he states that he has “seen the elephant.”

 

Uttering the phrase “Seeing the elephant” opens the crypt of the Civil War to reenactors, connecting the present to the past, and enabling the haunting of the reenactor and the reenactment space.  The crypt, the “psychic space fashioned to wall in unbearable experiences, memories or secrets,” is pried open by the embodied performance of the dead by the reenactors, bringing memories and perhaps secrets into the present (Schwab 78).  Even though “most cultures share a tendency to silence traumatic histories,” Civil War reenactors purposefully enact the trauma, putting themselves in the position of the “monstrous double,” (re)experiencing the trauma in order to understand and share it (79).  Experiencing haunting and being haunted are productive experiences for reenactors.  Through the “press” of ghosts upon them, reenactors’ impressions are informed by their co-mingling with the past. 

 

Abraham and Torok’s work posits that haunting is internal, by a phantom that is a “liar;” whose “effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secret remains shrouded in mystery” (Davis 374).  Yet, what haunts reenactors and reenactments are not conceptualized as lying phantoms intent on misleading, but rather spirits that want to be understood.  Reenactors understand themselves as translators of the experiences of the dead for the living. While the ghosts are internalized by the reenactors, they are not necessarily always haunting the reenactors, except in the deathscape of the reenactment event.

 

Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting is the most productive way of understanding the work of reenactors. Gordon writes: “To be haunted is to be tied to social and historical effects” (Gordon 190). It is to be aware of your surroundings, to listen and feel, and to allow the affective to take root in the body.  Gordon uses the term “haunting” to describe “those singular yet repetitive instances when...your bearing on the world loses direction, then the over-and-done with comes alive...Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future” (xvi).  Gordon’s work on haunting can be understood by reading the body of the reenactor as text.  The combination of the kinesthetic imagination and the affective pull of the past is what raise these specters in reenacting.  The “over-and-done with” of the Civil War is (again) alive in the bodily movement of the reenactors, collapsing the present and the past into a moment betwixt and between both sets of time.

 

A ghost, for Gordon, “has a real presence and demands its due, your attention” (xvi).  Reenactors give the ghosts attention through their performance and through their engagement with time, creating an act of commemory that is as much for the dead as it is for the living.  Reenactors typically do not use the word “ghosts,” but rather “orbs” to describe those ghosts that are felt, yet only seen through the lens of a digital camera.  Orbs are mediated through a lens, present and not present, hinting at the presence of something that is not alive, but not quite dead.  In their interaction with the living, orbs create a path through the constraints of space/time, negotiating historical time in the present, engaging with present bodies, enticing the living to understand their secrets.

 

 

Civil War reenactments are acts of commemory, utilizing the bodies of the reenactors as couriers through time, while participants as well as spectators are sites of reception for the affects stuck to the reenacting bodies.  Through this particular act of commemory, Civil War reenactors are not just (re)creating a site of memory, but more critically, communicating to their spectators (living and dead) a unique notion of what America, and American men, were, are and should be.  The weight of the dead adds an authenticity to the enactment, binding the past and present in order to shape a notion of the nation.