The Civil War and its (Hi)story:William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished
The Civil War and its (Hi)story:William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished

Summary/Abstract: It is difficult to find, even nowadays, another event in the history of the United States to have led to so many and diverse literary productions. History, turned into fiction, has been represented, re-constructed, challenged, and re-fashioned to suit different ages, different interests and different vantage points, from the sentimental and melodramatic to the tragic, mythical or ironic. The objectivity of the scientific endeavor has been repeatedly undermined by the subjectivity of literature, but, in spite of this obvious transposition from history to literature, many literary texts have claimed truthfulness, reliability and accuracy because Southern literature, from its beginnings rooted in the plantation/historical romance, used history as justification of its social and economic system and then, after its failure, as source of meaning and understanding of Southern paradoxes. In the context of this interplay between history and fiction, William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished is listed among the novels dedicated to the Southern experience in the Civil War. Long dismissed as a less important novel, The Unvanquished is not merely another War novel, but a subtle and meaningful investigation of how history is created, remembered, transmitted and how the “story” of a historical event has the force to unite individuals and sustain them in moments of failure, defeat and “historical terror” (to use Mircea Eliade’s terms). The aim of our paper, therefore, is to trace the mechanisms of storytelling and to show how history is replaced, in the human conscience, by myth and how this newly fashioned fictional representation of reality has the tendency to take over the historical fact and influence the behavior of the Southerners living through the War and conditioned by its legacy.

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