Abstract
This second chapter on responsibility emerges from Henry Sidgwick’s perplexity in The Methods of Ethics over the classical belief in “war as a permanent unalterable fact” (21). Common opinion relies on historical analyses to teach about the failure of responsible societies to construct peaceful utopias, but in “This Strange Institution Called Literature” (1989), Jacques Derrida wonders whether the novelist “doesn’t ‘treat’ history in the course of an experience which is more significant, more alive, more necessary in a word, than that of some professional ‘historians’” (55; emphasis original). As a modernist in dialogue with the contingency of his own artistic vision, William Faulkner enters this debate in A Fable (1954), establishing praiseworthy yet necessarily implicit resonances between aesthetics, the two world wars, and the Holocaust.
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Notes
- 1.
Snow had perhaps read William Faulkner’s “Interview with Russell Howe” in which he had counselled African Americans to “Go slow” (258) on the issue of suffrage.
- 2.
Snow , who had earned a PhD in physics and who had initially worked as a physical chemist, makes no mention of similarly culpable scientists, “yet Nazi thought could just as easily identify itself with modernity, with science, and with advanced technology” (Schulze 187).
- 3.
Although Faulkner initially based Stevens on Phil Stone, many critics, including Cleanth Brooks (Yoknapatawpha Country 279), Michael Grimwood (220), and John Kenny Crane (11), have interpreted the fictional lawyer as Faulkner’s own shadow.
- 4.
Einsatzgruppen were employed behind the frontlines in the eastern campaigns. The first indictment in the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals (October 1946–April 1949) is “Crimes against Humanity,” and the third part of this indictment concerns the Einsatzgruppen: “Beginning in May 1941, on the orders of Himmler, special task forces called ‘Einsatzgruppen’ were formed from the personnel of the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, and other police units. The primary purpose of these groups was to accompany the German Army into the eastern territories, and exterminate Jews, gypsies, Soviet officials, and other elements of the civilian population regarded as racially ‘inferior’ or ‘politically undesirable’” (15).
- 5.
The temporal register of reversal retains its presence during the formal break produced by the “Notes from a Horse Thief” section. The lawyer believes that the outcome to the Reverend Tobe Sutterfield’s arrest is wrong. “It’s backwards,” he complains. “The law spirits a nigger prisoner out of jail and out of town, to protect him from a mob that wants to take him out and burn him. All these folks want to do is to set this one free” (830).
- 6.
“The 1917 mutinies on the French front,” confirms Pitavy, “were immediately known in France and abroad” (“Two Orders” 414 n.41).
- 7.
“The inadequacy of the sources, reflecting in good measure the secrecy of the killing operations and the deliberate unclarity of the language employed to refer to them,” explains Ian Kershaw, “has led to historians drawing widely varying conclusions from the same evidence about the timing and the nature of the decision or decisions to exterminate the Jews” (132).
- 8.
“In its long process of composition, the work stages the representational conflict between two competing media,” as Solomon elucidates: “beginning life as a screenplay, A Fable was always held in tension between potential manifestation as novel or film” (116).
- 9.
“The apparent need to find a supreme culprit,” as Kershaw warns of equating Nazism with Hitlerism, “comes close to trivializing” historical debate. This desire “divert[s] attention from the active forces in German society which did not have to be given a ‘Führer Order’ to turn the screws of Jewish persecution one thread further until extermination became the logical (and only available) ‘solution’” (121). In a small way, Faulkner’s Einsatzkommando members contribute to the history of everyday life, or Alltagsgeschichte, which German historians developed during the 1980s in their studies of the Third Reich.
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Wainwright, M. (2021). Responsibility (II): A Fable. In: Faulkner’s Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68872-1_8
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