Dislocating Reality in "The Leg"

In late 1925, as he was traveling through Europe, William Faulkner wrote to his mother: "I've written a queer short story, about a case of reincarnation" (Selected Letters 31). Since reincarnation is an unusual topic for Faulkner, to say the least, it seems evident that the story in question was "The Leg." Although this strange tale was not published until 1934, in Doctor Marttino and Other Stories, Joseph Blotner speculates that it was inspired by Faulkner's tour of England and France in 1925, when he was twenty-eight years old (169). Faulkner's writings in the 1920s were very much affected by his walks through Northern France and Brittany. André Bleikasten recounts that while in France in 1925, Faulkner's first trip out of Paris was to go see the battlefields around Rennes, Rouen, Amiens, Compiègne and Ponte-Sainte-Maxence (105), the sites where American troops fought during the Great War. His letters demonstrate that this touristic experience deeply affected him. In early October 1925, after visiting Northern France, a region radically different from the fashionable French Riviera his American counterparts favored,¹ Faulkner took the ferry from Dieppe to reach England.

World War I looms large in a number of Faulkner's productions of the decade, in his first published novel Soldiers' Pay in 1926, and also poems ("The Lilacs," 1920), short stories ("Mistral," probably written in 1926, "Ad Astra," 1927), and even the unpublished review essay "Literature and War,"² written around 1924. The First World War haunted Faulkner's literary imagination throughout his career. Yet Faulkner never experienced the war directly, a frustration that Bleikasten describes as follows:

Faulkner's nonexperience of the war may indeed be said to have proved as traumatic to him as actual participation in it had to other Americans of his generation. The wound was there, even though, unlike Hemingway's, it was an imaginary one, and it would keep festering for many years.

(Ink of Melancholy 17)

Faulkner's Great War was borrowed from veterans' stories and authors' writings, mythicized, and perhaps above all, fantasized. But none of Faulkner's other war narratives ever plunged quite as deep into fantasy territory as "The Leg."

On paper, "The Leg" is a war story. At least, it starts as one, before taking a surprising turn. The plot begins in 1914 in England, before the war, and centers around two Oxford students, David and George, and their friendship. Suddenly and without fanfare, the war breaks out, and George is killed during the battle of Givenchy while David is seriously injured and loses a leg. The important word here is the verb "lose": it is used not only metaphorically, as the expression suggests, but also quite literally, as David's amputated leg has gone rampant—a literal phantom limb. In the military hospital, David, after the amputation, starts to engage in conversations with the ghost of his dead friend George, begging him to find his leg and make sure that it is genuinely dead. But the leg has other plans. At the end of the story, David discovers that his lost limb has been reincarnated in an altered version of himself, a Doppelgänger of sorts, which wreaks chaos and causes a series of tragic deaths while David is recovering in the Observers School and getting used to his prosthetic leg.

"[A] queer short story, about a case of reincarnation"—indeed. "The Leg" is an anomaly in the Faulknerian corpus, for multiple reasons. For one, Faulkner is not known for writing fantastic pieces. Also, while "The Leg" displays few elements that are characteristic of Faulkner's work, the story also foregrounds Faulkner's experimentations with the Gothic. But should it be considered exclusively in the light of Faulkner's work of the 1930s, or rather as an autonomous piece, interesting for its specificities? Additionally, it has received relatively little critical attention.³ We can certainly agree it is a baffling, disconcerting story. Numerous critics, as Edmond Volpe documents, have tended to dismiss it as a substandard supernatural tale (57), unworthy of Faulkner's most emblematic...