The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!: Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence

Abstract

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!:Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence Caitlin Cawley (bio) Introduction William Faulkner's life was shaped by war. He lived through World War I and World War II, and despite being born thirty years after President Andrew Johnson signed Proclamation 157, "Declaring that Peace, Order, Tranquility and Civil Authority Now Exists in and Throughout the Whole of the United States of America," the Southerner wrote about the wrote about the uniquely American Civil War throughout his work. In 1950, Faulkner used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to address the question that had come to define humankind in the wake of atomic warfare: "When will I be blown up?" Twelve years later, as he lay dying in Byhalia, Mississippi, the United States was once again preparing for war, this time in Vietnam, a conflict which would lack the Manichean frames of reference shaping America's collective memory of the First and Second World Wars. That war would come to epitomize Jason Compson Sr.'s advice to his son Quentin in The Sound and the Fury: "[N]o battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools" (76). Faulkner created a body of work that, among many things, labors to subvert the conditions and illusions that support war and, in turn, underwrite the modern individual's terrorised state. And while scholars have attended to this labor for decades, there is little critical consensus over Faulkner's views on war and its antinomy, pacifism. Like many of his fellow modernists, Faulkner had a complicated relationship with pacifism that reflects the socio-political climate in the United States and Europe between WWI and WWII as well as the writer's personal history. [End Page 127] In 1918, the Mississippi native made a rather ignominious attempt to join the fight against the Central Powers. Inspired partly by the legacy of his great grandfather who served as an officer in the Civil War and partly by by his heartbreak over a beloved high-school sweetheart marrying another man, the twenty-year-old joined the Royal Air Force in Canada. He never saw combat, but Faulkner made a mountain out of his five months as a RAF cadet, posing for years as a combat veteran and fabricating an elaborate mythology around this posture. Donald Kartiganer sums up the paradoxes that characterize this layer of the Southerner's biography as Faulkner "honoring the combatants of that war through the flattery of imitation and yet also [importantly,] mocking the mythology that had attached itself to them … Faulkner's war consists of zany theatrics, gallant pratfalls: gestures so empty of serious military content that they become at once farcical and heroic" (632). Faulkner's ironic and critical bellicosity found its way into his interwar fiction as well. His writings from the period are replete with naive Southern characters who enthusiastically participate in the Civil War and First World War. And while Kartiganer insists that Faulkner's "doubleedged performance becomes the key to the wars he described in his fiction, wars that reflect, with increasing complexity, the characteristic Southern conflict of 'looking two ways'" (632), Faulkner's life and interwar fiction also register a broader transatlantic intellectual and political movement. By the 1930s, pacifism had gained significant ground on the left. However, Hitler's programme of remilitarization led many of the American writer's British contemporaries to question their campaigns for peace and disarmament. At the Labour Party Conference in 1935, the party leader, George Lansbury, decided to support rearmament despite his self-professed commitment to Christian pacifism (Briggs 314–5). Virginia and Leonard Woolf were in attendance at the conference, and like England's pacifist-leaning literati, the couple was divided on the decision. Virginia reflected on the conference in her diary, writing that her "sympathies" were with "non-resistance," and through figures like Antigone and mediums like her political pamphlets, she worked to advance a precedent for resisting perpetual warfare, culminating in her pacifist manifesto Three Guineas (1938) (Woolf 315). Leonard, on the other hand, who was closely involved in...