The Solferino Church and Expectations About Narrative-Andrew Hurst

Andrew Hurst

Near the halfway point of Lee’s The Surrendered, Sylvie and her family visit the church at the old Solferino battlefield. Upon walking into the church, Sylvie looks at the walls of the church:

“And then she heard them as if she were on the stage peering at out the audience of a macabre opera house, the coally voids of countless eyes speaking to her all at once. Look at us, they said to her, in a single voice. We were never divine” (187).

In order to understand the relevance of the above passage, it is necessary for the reader to look up the pictures of the church that Sylvie and her family visited. The pictures are truly gruesome and affecting: the massive walls of the church are completely covered with the bones, skulls, and skeletons of fallen soldiers. The novel depicts the journey to the church as a type of “pilgrimage” (184) to a “monument to the wronged and righteous dead” (183) that Sylvie’s family was wont to visit. Such sacred or noble descriptive words suggest to the reader that the church will serve as a righteous monument to war; however, upon seeing actually seeing pictures of the church—for Lee provides only sparse description of the interior—the reality of the church becomes clear: the whole display is not a sacred space dedicated to the dead but rather a flippant and profane display; the interred bones were certainly not “divine,” as the bones whisper, but seem instead to be merely part of “just a packed storeroom” (186) like the Solferino Museum that was also dedicated to the battle. Thus, the Solferino church’s display seems to call attention to the disjunction between the sacred, heroic narrative of war—symbolized by the bones having been interred in a sacred space and the lofty descriptions of the church—and the profane reality regarding such a narrative.

            Keeping this conclusion in mind, Lee may not have included vivid descriptions of the inside of the church in order to mislead the reader in order that he—Lee—might emphasize the importance of distinguishing between potentially manipulated, idealistic-driven narratives and genuine narratives. The war genre is particularly susceptible to similar manipulation, as seen in the dishonesty that Joyner feels Crane’s Red Badge of Courage shows to the veteran by promoting an idealistic and unrealistic model of war and death.