kleph
29-03-2007, 03:23 AM
William Faulkner once famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Although the quote is often used to depict the weight of southern traditionalism on the lives of those who live there today, that is not how it serves in the book Requiem for a Nun. Instead, Faulkner is simply stating how past acts resonate in, and ultimately shape, the present.
This is also the dividing line where fellow southern writer Shelby Foote finds greatness in his study of the most traditional southern topic – the Civil War.
The Civil War: A Narrative is a ponderous 1,655,000-word account of the four-year conflict that claimed more than 620,000 lives and decided the fate of our nation – for better or for worse.
Instead of an overview of the vast conflict or a down-to-the-last-man expository tome, Foot decided to use his strength as a writer to tell the tale in a manner of a great story.
Opting to take the route of Homer rather than Herodotus. Footnotes were dispensed with and the footnotes and the larger themes of the war's origin and ramifications are left on the wayside. Although the The Civil War: A Narrative can be a touch rough going at time, it’s overarching emotional power is the true legacy of its success.
"My hope was that if I wrote well enough about what you would have seen with your own eyes, you yourself would see how those things, the politics and economics, entered in. I quite deliberately left those things out,” he said in an interview. "My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape."
Foote, who passed away last year, was an unlikely chronicler of the conflict. The avuncular persona most associated to him was a direct result of his appearance in Ken Burn’s 1990 PBS series The Civil War. His real life was tumultuous and stormy. A college dropout, a court-martialed Army veteran of World War II, Foote spent his life following his muse, often to the expense of everyone around him.
The genesis of The Civil War: A Narrative can be found in his novel Shiloh which provides an account of the two-day battle of the war as seven monologues of Southern and Northern soldiers. The work, submitted for publication in the mid-1940s was considered too experimental but it opened the doors for other projects and, eventually, a suggestion to pen a short history of the war itself.
The Civil War: A Narrative was released as three volumes between 1958 and 1974. Foote famously wrote the work longhand with an old-fashioned dipped pen. Often compared to Faulkner, Foote’s models stepped a literary generation further back, to Proust, Joyce and Mann. Most importantly, behind them all was the long shadow of Flaubert.
He admitted his labor was like "swallowing a cannonball." It begins with Jefferson Davis stepping down from his position as US Senator to shortly take up the mantle of the first – and only – president of the confederacy. More than 1,655,000 words later it ends with Davis final release from prison after the end of the conflict.
It is written with a consummate flair and lyricism that most accounts of the war omit. He mixes the narrative power of great fictional works such as The Red Badge of Courage with the historical account of the conflicts gleaned from the 128-volume War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
He then took that rich raw material and shaped it with his own literary skill. He opens the chapter recounting the battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam as it is known in the South) with this passage:
"It came in gray, with a pearly mist that shrouded the fields and woodlands, and it came with a crash of musketry, backed by the deeper roar of cannon fire that mounted in volume and intensity until it was continuous, jarring the earth beneath the attackers and defenders."
The effect is to live the war as a tumult of days, much as the participants did. Knowing the outcome does nothing to detract from the uncertainty of how the events will unfold – much like the participants experienced during each day of those terrible four years.
(It is due to this that having a straightforward overview of the war to read along with Foote’s work can be a huge help. Bruce Catton’s excellent The Civil War first published in 1960 is perfect for this.)
Moreover, this approach allows Foote to grapple with the great problem of the war and the horrible contradictions of the South. There is a certain paradox to the South, a strange and uneasy assimilation of opposites. You cannot be swayed by the lyrical beauty of it without being reminded of the untoward ugliness that lies alongside it.
The Civil War: A Narrative is an excellent example of this. It’s a conflict of epic proportions with battlefield drama rarely matched in the history of conflicts. But the underlying issue of slavery and the obscene toll of human life is a brutal check to "It is good that war is so horrible lest we learn to love it too much."
And it is impossible to avoid the fact the underlying moral question of slavery and its importance to the conflict. No matter how much you understand the very real political issue of state’s rights and the still powerful logic that the Union army invaded the south – the fact the war was fought to preserve the institution of slavery must never be forgotten.
It’s a terrible paradox that you must either reject or embrace completely. There isn’t any other option. And given the body count, it provides a tragedy that begs for a literary voice. And Foote provides it.
But as he embraced the power of his subject, he also looked around and recognized it’s legacy around him – and it left him profoundly upset.
“I’m beginning to hate the one thing I really ever loved — the South. No, that’s wrong: not hate — despise. Mostly I despise the leaders, the pussy-faced politicians, soft-talking instruments of real evil.”
Yet these same men were the ones that propelled the country on a course of destruction he labored 20-years to give a complete account. It wasn’t poetic irony, it was cold hard truth of a matter laid bare by a consummate artist.
It was the past alive and well in the present.
This essay also appears on my website, Klephblog (http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1).
Although the quote is often used to depict the weight of southern traditionalism on the lives of those who live there today, that is not how it serves in the book Requiem for a Nun. Instead, Faulkner is simply stating how past acts resonate in, and ultimately shape, the present.
This is also the dividing line where fellow southern writer Shelby Foote finds greatness in his study of the most traditional southern topic – the Civil War.
The Civil War: A Narrative is a ponderous 1,655,000-word account of the four-year conflict that claimed more than 620,000 lives and decided the fate of our nation – for better or for worse.
Instead of an overview of the vast conflict or a down-to-the-last-man expository tome, Foot decided to use his strength as a writer to tell the tale in a manner of a great story.
Opting to take the route of Homer rather than Herodotus. Footnotes were dispensed with and the footnotes and the larger themes of the war's origin and ramifications are left on the wayside. Although the The Civil War: A Narrative can be a touch rough going at time, it’s overarching emotional power is the true legacy of its success.
"My hope was that if I wrote well enough about what you would have seen with your own eyes, you yourself would see how those things, the politics and economics, entered in. I quite deliberately left those things out,” he said in an interview. "My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape."
Foote, who passed away last year, was an unlikely chronicler of the conflict. The avuncular persona most associated to him was a direct result of his appearance in Ken Burn’s 1990 PBS series The Civil War. His real life was tumultuous and stormy. A college dropout, a court-martialed Army veteran of World War II, Foote spent his life following his muse, often to the expense of everyone around him.
The genesis of The Civil War: A Narrative can be found in his novel Shiloh which provides an account of the two-day battle of the war as seven monologues of Southern and Northern soldiers. The work, submitted for publication in the mid-1940s was considered too experimental but it opened the doors for other projects and, eventually, a suggestion to pen a short history of the war itself.
The Civil War: A Narrative was released as three volumes between 1958 and 1974. Foote famously wrote the work longhand with an old-fashioned dipped pen. Often compared to Faulkner, Foote’s models stepped a literary generation further back, to Proust, Joyce and Mann. Most importantly, behind them all was the long shadow of Flaubert.
He admitted his labor was like "swallowing a cannonball." It begins with Jefferson Davis stepping down from his position as US Senator to shortly take up the mantle of the first – and only – president of the confederacy. More than 1,655,000 words later it ends with Davis final release from prison after the end of the conflict.
It is written with a consummate flair and lyricism that most accounts of the war omit. He mixes the narrative power of great fictional works such as The Red Badge of Courage with the historical account of the conflicts gleaned from the 128-volume War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
He then took that rich raw material and shaped it with his own literary skill. He opens the chapter recounting the battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam as it is known in the South) with this passage:
"It came in gray, with a pearly mist that shrouded the fields and woodlands, and it came with a crash of musketry, backed by the deeper roar of cannon fire that mounted in volume and intensity until it was continuous, jarring the earth beneath the attackers and defenders."
The effect is to live the war as a tumult of days, much as the participants did. Knowing the outcome does nothing to detract from the uncertainty of how the events will unfold – much like the participants experienced during each day of those terrible four years.
(It is due to this that having a straightforward overview of the war to read along with Foote’s work can be a huge help. Bruce Catton’s excellent The Civil War first published in 1960 is perfect for this.)
Moreover, this approach allows Foote to grapple with the great problem of the war and the horrible contradictions of the South. There is a certain paradox to the South, a strange and uneasy assimilation of opposites. You cannot be swayed by the lyrical beauty of it without being reminded of the untoward ugliness that lies alongside it.
The Civil War: A Narrative is an excellent example of this. It’s a conflict of epic proportions with battlefield drama rarely matched in the history of conflicts. But the underlying issue of slavery and the obscene toll of human life is a brutal check to "It is good that war is so horrible lest we learn to love it too much."
And it is impossible to avoid the fact the underlying moral question of slavery and its importance to the conflict. No matter how much you understand the very real political issue of state’s rights and the still powerful logic that the Union army invaded the south – the fact the war was fought to preserve the institution of slavery must never be forgotten.
It’s a terrible paradox that you must either reject or embrace completely. There isn’t any other option. And given the body count, it provides a tragedy that begs for a literary voice. And Foote provides it.
But as he embraced the power of his subject, he also looked around and recognized it’s legacy around him – and it left him profoundly upset.
“I’m beginning to hate the one thing I really ever loved — the South. No, that’s wrong: not hate — despise. Mostly I despise the leaders, the pussy-faced politicians, soft-talking instruments of real evil.”
Yet these same men were the ones that propelled the country on a course of destruction he labored 20-years to give a complete account. It wasn’t poetic irony, it was cold hard truth of a matter laid bare by a consummate artist.
It was the past alive and well in the present.
This essay also appears on my website, Klephblog (http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1).