(Re)Constructing the Past in George Saunders’ “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”
The American Civil War (1861-1865), which cleaved the country into two halves, the North and South, is known as one of the most violent, tumultuous, divisive events in American history. Yet, instead of reflecting the actual brutally violent realities of the country’s past, the war is reconstituted in America’s collective memory as a sanitised consumer product. This tension between the imagined and the actual is the catalyst for the titular story of George Saunders’ 1996 collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which uses its historical theme park setting in order to draw attention to the ways history manipulates or constructs the past in a way that either obscures or valorises the violence within American history. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum is key to understanding how the theme park space functions. Baudrillard defines the term simulacrum as ‘ha[ving] no relation to any reality whatsoever.’[i] What this means is that no matter how […]