Modernist Moonlight: Illuminating the Postwar Dread of Flags in the Dust

Abstract

Modernist Moonlight: Illuminating the Postwar Dread of Flags in the Dust Erin Penner When William Faulkner describes the night sky in Flags in the Dust through the eyes of a young Bayard Sartoris, he abruptly abandons the romance of his early poetry and fiction. Bayard’s moonlight “treacherously” exposes the land below, “as though the moon’s rays were thin glass impacting among the trees and shrubs and shattering in brittle musical rain upon the ground” (44–45).1 Bayard’s moon is not a dreamy symbolist trope or part of the “moonlight and magnolias” tradition of southern historical fiction. Instead, it evokes the nighttime air raids that first appeared during World War I and quickly became a fixture of modern warfare. Moonlit air raids expand the fear of attack beyond daytime hours, beyond the front lines, and even beyond the armistice that brings Bayard home. Although the characters of Flags in the Dust dismiss World War I as a “foreign” concern2 that is now at an end, aviation eradicates the protections afforded by a remote location. It renders even rural Mississippi vulnerable to attack. Through the dread of his returning airman, Faulkner checks the Civil War narrative that threatens to dictate the terms of his fiction, and he asserts in its stead an inherently modernist Yoknapatawpha topography. Faulkner’s efforts, however, are not limited to dragging Mississippi into modernity. The South’s Civil War nostalgia enables him to [End Page 503] recognize a similar dynamic emerging in the war literature of his own era, a decade after the end of World War I. Though Faulkner returned to Mississippi from military training in Toronto without ever seeing battle, his experience with the Lost Cause narrative prepares him to fight the romance that tempts even writers who had been at the front. Faulkner’s struggle against nostalgic narrative from one former battleground helps him reshape the narrative that is being formed from the mud of a much more recent one. In Flags in the Dust, first published as Sartoris in 1929, Bayard Sartoris is a pilot accustomed to combat, but conflicts continue into his civilian life, as he argues with older relatives about the relative merits of the wars that circumscribe their lives. Nostalgia for the Civil War prevents Bayard’s community from recognizing that young Bayard’s war is also their war. Through his war experience, Bayard recognizes a relationship with the world beyond Mississippi that others in his community cannot see; their conception of war is shaped by the intimacy of the Civil War, which was fought on their land. Bayard’s perspective reflects the new geography of war, one that is charted in terms of air raids. Paul K. Saint-Amour outlines two means by which modern warfare violates any lingering feeling of safety for those who are not themselves combatants. A bomber has the “capacity to leap over conventional military fronts and strike the enemy’s cities,” where it is notorious for the “wild imprecision of its targeting” (7). Technological advances result in greater civilian casualties and the loss of a geographic boundary for military engagement. Such forces also extend the dread of violence into the future, as citizens become aware of the existence and power of new military tools. In Saint-Amour’s concise formulation, the “front is anywhere futurity is attuned to imminent military force” (7). Faulkner’s penchant for pilots thus reflects not only his own brush with the war, but also a recognition of aviation’s role in mapping modernity. He is more successful than his protagonist in courting readers who may share the Sartoris habit of preferring their wars behind them. Faulkner turns to narrative description to argue for the perverse imminence of World War I: the significance not only of the casualties it has already exacted, but also its technology’s ongoing threat to modern Mississippi. [End Page 504] Despite its war-ravaged protagonist, Flags in the Dust does not tend to appear on lists of Faulkner’s World War I fiction.3 Don H. Doyle voices the sentiments of many critics in arguing that for “William Faulkner the Civil War was the major crisis in...