In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

83 When we consider how often the works of William Faulkner grapple with the Civil War and its legacy, it should surprise us that the writer had so little to say about the Confederacy’s oft-mythologized troops.1 After all, the Mississippi-born author “was growing to manhood” during the years between 1890 and 1920, when the Lost Cause civil religion “flourished especially.”2 The Myth of the Lost Cause functioned substantially—one might say predominantly—as a military phenomenon. As Gary W. Gallagher has observed, the Lost Cause explanation for Confederate secession and defeat “drew strength from the pages of participants’ memoirs, from speeches at veterans’ reunions, from ceremonies at the graves of soldiers killed while serving in Southern armies and other commemorative events, and from artwork with Confederate themes.” As a “public memory of the Confederacy” that positioned “wartime sacrifice and shattering defeat in the best possible light,” the Lost Cause placed courageous Confederate soldiers at center stage.3 Yet in sharp contrast to other southern writers of the early- and mid-twentieth century, Faulkner played down the cultural role of uniformed Confederates in his fiction and public statements. Soldiers in gray exist as distant, often shadowy figures in his writing; those we do see up close shed their uniforms quickly and “are largely incommunicative about their War experiences.”4 To be sure, Faulkner appeared to go out of his way to silence veterans, to remove their voices—and hence their interpretations of the conflict—from the postwar society he portrayed. The Confederate soldier’s memoir, so clearly a source and reference for scores of others who wrote about the war, seems to have left few traces in Faulkner’s pages.5 Chapter Three The Eggshell Shibboleth of Caste and Color Too Civilian Narrators in Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished 84 Scars to Prove It What should we make of the fact that the premier writer of the twentiethcentury South draped a mantle over the postwar literary and oratorical efforts of veterans? Contrary to the conclusions of many critics, Faulkner remained fascinated by the military side of the Civil War his entire life. Moreover, the figure of the Confederate soldier played an important role in his family and community history. As Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara Bellows pointed out, Faulkner “lived in the last generation that saw the Confederate veteran as a reality,” a generation that often romanticized that figure as a symbol of traditional values standing in opposition to the twentieth-century “commercial and cultural Americanization of Dixie.” Yet if Faulkner realized that veterans had shaped southern life to a remarkable degree, he also believed that a martial understanding of the war could severely limit one’s vision of American history and culture. Indeed, for all its drama and bloodshed, the battlefield existed for Faulkner as only the loudest and least evocative representation of the nation’s Civil War.6 Of course, it was the issue of race that gave the war its most enduring meaning—morally, legally, and culturally. During the 1930s, the racial legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction could be found wherever one looked. Among other phenomena, the war left its imprint on Jim Crow laws and practices throughout the South, the Scottsboro case in Alabama, congressional filibusters over antilynching legislation, and Depression-era racism against black workers. Yet for all these reminders that race was essential to the Civil War and its aftermath, in the popular imagination the story of the war remained one of a grand “military competition between brave people for no particular reason other than the honor of it all.” In writing Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Unvanquished (1938), Faulkner sought to restore race and race relations to the story of the Civil War and to help revise nearly seventy years of narratives about the conflict. He had not yet entered public debates about such subjects as integration and civil rights, but as has been said of him in another context, these novels “suggested he was thinking about the present while he talked of the past.” By showing that race was central to the foremost crisis in American history, Faulkner prompted American readers to likewise acknowledge the centrality of race to their own experiences.7 Faulkner’s writing suggests that only by de-mythologizing the South’s Civil War can we understand its relevance to American culture and life in the twentieth century and beyond. To combat the legacy of the Lost Cause, [18.117.148.105] Project...

Share