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summary post on THE UNVANQUISHED

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I wanted to give a quick tour through several excellent posts on  The Unvanquished from this week and give some broad-strokes comments on the text. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the main arc of the text moves from the chaos of the Civil War–specifically the moment after the fall of Vicksburg, MS when the war “came home” to northern Mississippi–to the rapid rollback of the Reconstruction in the aftermath of the war. One of the text’s most fascinating aspects is that this story can’t be stabilized by using the usual metanarratives of tragedy or comedy. The Rebels are neither victorious nor defeated (the title expresses this ambivalence); the Sartorises are neither preserved nor extinguished (John will never be The Sartoris in the eyes of many, does not achieve vengeance, but neither is he killed or exposed as a coward); there is no love match to guarantee the future (Drusilla flees, leaving Bayard at the altar, as it were); the status of the African American ex-slaves is left markedly uncertain (they are largely assimilated to a sentimental “loyal” role, preserving white supremacy against the “Yankees” but a figure like Ringo unsettles any simple equation between blackness and subservience). I’m fascinated by these loose ends and ironies, especially in light of the way Faulkner returns to these themes in a more experimental and daring way in AA! and GDM (more on that later, of course). For those interested in reading more of the historical background of this moment, check out this excellent encyclopedic piece on the destruction of Southern cities in the Civil War.

More locally, I was interested to read your takes on the texts. If you haven’t, read Sal’s riffs on size in the text, and especially regarding John Sartoris. Also check out Katie’s excellent analysis of the figure of the family silver in the text: she helps us to see a certain materialist bent in Faulkner’s work that thinks carefully about the contradictions that pertain between cash value and other forms of value. Stephen gives a great reading of the figure of the locomotive in the text, with a special emphasis on how locomotion appears to Bayard and Ringo, how ideas of modernization relate to racial antagonisms. Finally, see Melanie’s work on dreams and dreaming in the text: from Granny to Ringo to Bayard to John to Drusilla to Loosh, nearly every major character expresses his/her imagination of the War, a traumatic event that defies cognition or representation, through dreams in one way or another.

Freedmen and mobility

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The Unvanquished features many depictions of masses of emancipated slaves simply moving as the Confederate army in MS and AL collapses and slaves begin following in the wake of Union troops as they burned their way through the South, culminating in General Sherman’s 1864-5 “March to the Sea.” This is an important part of the history of the Civil War and its aftermath, as formerly enslaved people followed Union forces to escape their masters in some cases and enjoyed the intoxicating freedom of escaping their spatial entrapment within plantations to explore, to visit family and friends, or simply to move.

Faulkner’s text represents this complex web of desires and movements rather reductively, figuring freedmen as a faceless mass (almost zombie-like) motivated in lock-step by the figure of the “Jordan.” This, too, has its roots in history, as slave culture developed a creative reading of the Old Testament in which enslaved African-Americans were the Jews in the desert and white plantation owners were the Pharoah. Many of the “sorrow songs” focus on this narrative, and one can easily imaging that the songs referenced in the text would have been, for example, “Roll, Jordan, Roll” or “Go Down, Moses” (which Faulkner used as the title for his 1942 story cycle we’ll read in a few weeks). Here’s a taste: