[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21st century veterans’ stories!]
On how the
protagonist’s status as a veteran adds to a novel’s ironies, and why that’s not
the whole story.
Earlier
this year, I dedicated a post in
my April Fool’s series to the great Albion Tourgée’s historical and
autobiographical Reconstruction novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools
(1879). I focused there on the novel’s ironies, so would ask you to check out
that prior post and then come on back from some thoughts on how that element can
be connected to veterans’ stories.
Welcome
back! Like
Tourgée, the novel’s protagonist Comfort Servosse—the narrator mostly just
calls him The Fool—is a Civil War veteran, with the opening few chapters depicting
his service with the Union army. Although the novel then jumps ahead four years
to focus on Servosse’s move to North Carolina and time in that state during
Reconstruction, that Civil War service thus becomes a foundation for everything
that follows, on at least two ironic levels. More obviously, Servosse chooses
to move his young family and blossoming legal career alike into the heart of enemy
territory, a choice that immediately foreshadows why this might indeed be the
titular “fool’s errand.” And more subtly but even more ironically, that time in
the Reconstruction South will constitute, at least in the novel’s presentation
of it, a far more difficult and painful battle than did his Civil War military
efforts. Given how badly Reconstruction
ultimately went for African
Americans and their allies, that’s a very telling and bracing irony to be
sure.
But it’s
not the whole story, not of this novel and certainly not of Reconstruction.
More exactly, the fact that white supremacists, both in the former
Confederate states and (especially) on the
national stage, successfully managed to sabotage and torpedo Reconstruction
and move the country even closer to a white
supremacist exclusionary state than it had been in the antebellum period, shouldn’t
in any way minimize the impressive and inspiring work of African Americans and
allies (like Albion
Tourgée) in fighting for a more equal and just South and America. While the
tortured irony of A Fool’s Errand can be difficult to parse, or at least
to reduce to any single clear point, I would argue that the title itself is
meant ironically as well—that this Reconstruction-era work was genuinely a
knight’s errand, the most worthy thing this character and author alike could be
part of at that moment, indeed a fully worthy extension and amplification of
their Civil War service; and that it was not them but rather all of us who were
fools, as much for failing to support those efforts as in all the other ways in
that painful period.
Next
veteran’s story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?
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