Making the "New Death" New:A Fable and Faulkner's Revisit to World War I Atsushi Marutani Several critics have argued that the impact of World War I gave rise to the American modernist writing of the 1920s and '30s. Not only did the number of dead soldiers and the grotesque physical damages on human bodies change the minds of those who directly experienced what Pearl James, borrowing from Winifred Kirkland, has called the "New Death," but the war also influenced the way people mourn for the dead at home (James 1–10). In particular, David A. Davis illuminates the war's impact on southern modernism by introducing the terms "proximal modernism" and "distal modernism" (6). While highly experimental works of modernism embrace the newness associated with modernization, the US South represents the peripheral and ambivalent response to the immediate circumstances of modernity from a distance (6–8), and the First World War made southerners experience the disruptive effects of modernity before the region became modernized (10–11). With Faulkner as the most obvious exception, southern writers of the period were less experimental than their contemporary artists, reflecting social and cultural disparities between the South and other regions. on one hand, Faulkner, who did not actually fight in the war, portrays the invisibility of the dead and the wounds brought home from the distant war in Sartoris (1929), representing a quintessentially modernist experience of loss (James 164–67), but on the other, the "distal modernism" can also be observed in Soldiers' Pay (1926) (Davis 179). Even The Sound and the Fury (1929) shows that Faulkner suffered from a "mobilization wound," a humiliating experience of being rejected by the US Army and therefore feeling "emasculated" by the war (Gandal 5; 151–66; 199–211). [End Page 71] While the war's influence on Faulkner and its representations in his works are somewhat remote from the battlefield, he remains unique because of his sustained interest in and idiosyncratic treatment of World War I. He revisited the war fifteen years after it ended when he came across the idea of using a christian fable to write about war in 1943.1 That idea became A Fable (1954), in which Faulkner reversely brings the "distal" ethos of the South to the "proximal" battlefield. Placed in the middle of the war novel, an episode set in the South tells a story about a crippled racehorse and a band of horse thieves, members of which were killed in the war. The representation of the New Death in this "distal" southernness embedded in A Fable, I argue, should be understood in the context of the distinction that Fredric Jameson has made between "high modernism" and "late modernism" (165). In contrast to classical modernists such as Pound and Eliot, who envisioned a restoration of culture holding to the Absolute and Utopianism (168), late modernism is "a product of the cold War" (165) that insisted on aesthetic autonomy more radically than high modernism. For late modernists, "high literature and high art mean the aesthetic minus culture, the aesthetic field radically cleansed and purified of culture (which mainly stands for mass culture)" (179). Late modernism is such "a belated construct" (164), a form of modernism ideologized under cold War politics. While A Fable was appraised by late modernist critics, Faulkner seems to stick to the high modernist vision of culture in the novel, intending to make it have "a genuine function to redeem and transfigure a fallen society" (178).2 The "southern" undercurrent permeates A Fable as a whole, molding it into a high modernist reflection upon the war. In "A Note on A Fable," Faulkner writes that the novel is "not a pacifist book," that on the contrary he "holds almost as short a brief for pacifism as for war itself, for the reason that pacifism does not work, cannot cope with the forces [End Page 72] which produce the wars." These "forces" are not actual firearms but rather "man's aptitude for belligerence and his thirst for power," against which "man must either find or invent something more powerful" to end war. Faulkner says that he intended to show this "by poetic analogy, allegory" (162...
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Jan 1, 2020
Jens Herlth 
Open Access