Great War, Cold War, Total War

Although the past two hundred years have witnessed a host of efforts to conceptualize the extraordinary intensity and scale of military operations in the post-Napoleonic era, no agreement has been reached about whether the distinctiveness of modern warfare should primarily be regarded as a product of economic, political, or technological change. Nor has a consensus emerged as to what is at stake ideologically in treating modern conflicts as inherently more devastating than earlier ones. In these discussions, the First World War has consistently enjoyed paradigmatic status as a world-historical event of unparalleled consequences. Heralded as the original industrialized slaughter in which the boundary between the military and the civilian was all but completely dissolved, the "Great War" has also been accorded enormous cultural significance as "the moment in which the new sensibility of English—and international—modernism comes fully into existence."¹ For different reasons, the Cold War has come to be viewed as uniquely formative, as well. Characterized by the efforts of its central protagonists to avoid a full-blown confrontation, this new form of permanent strife impacted every sector of society; yet it was a war based not on sustained hostilities, but on the mutual ability of the US and the USSR to maintain the threat of a nuclear exchange that neither could survive.²

At first glance, these two models of "all-pervasive" conflict appear to be diametrically opposed. The former depicts modern warfare as omnipresent, unrestrained violence, whereas the latter presents us with the constant menace of imagined violence, a possibility that can never be permitted to become a reality. In both cases, however, war is distinguished by its unlimited, and potentially interminable, nature. The thesis of this essay is that a better account of the far-reaching, often paradoxical influence of these two archetypes of combat is essential for understanding how major military events have shaped and continue to shape the cultural and historical consciousness of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One of the only authors to have grasped the full implications of these dynamics, I argue, is William Faulkner. In his novel A Fable, set in Western France late in World War One, Faulkner reflects on the interplay between totality and permanence that defines the experience of a world continuously at war, offering a new vantage point from which to reconsider the ideological legacy of 1914–1918 as both the "war to end all wars" and the founding of modern military culture.

It is by no means clear that A Fable is primarily concerned with the war it overtly depicts. In proposing that nations depend on a deadlocked stalemate with their foes for their very existence, the book, written between 1944 and 1953, situates itself within the political climate that emerged in the US following the Second World War, when the interdependence of military and industrial interests became quasi-official government policy. As Noel Polk has argued:

Though set during World War I, A Fable is really a meditation on the state of the world following World War II—it is a Cold War novel which dramatizes the inextricability of the military hierarchy from the political and economic and cultural hierarchies that run the world's nations, hierarchies that know no political boundaries and often connive with each other to insure their own survival, no matter the cost in blood to the expendable grunts who form the teeming masses of those whose lives are in their control.³

This interpretation is persuasive when one considers the regularity with which the soldiers in A Fable identify an abstract entity termed "greed" as the controlling force in their lives. Human combatants are repeatedly presented as existing solely in order to serve the war machine, which in turn obeys the injunctions of a military-capital logic that rapaciously demands ceaseless conflict. At the same time, the thematic prominence of World War One in Faulkner's corpus rivals even his interest in the Civil War.⁴ In neglecting to ask why the First World War has been chosen to stand in for the Cold War, Polk overlooks a major concern of A Fable...