[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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