Answering the Call: Telephonic Fascism and Faulkner’s Angel of History

Abstract

As Nazism was securing its grip on Germany, Walter Benjamin wrote of the "necessity of a theory of history from which fascism can become visible." With the election of Trump and the resurgence of hyper-nationalist and far-right politics globally, we too need a theory that can bring the neofascism of the present into relief. This chapter suggests that William Faulkner's post-war fiction can help generate such a theory, by illuminating the path from the Cold War to the neofascism of Trumpism. Drawing on AiméCésaire's insights that fascism's origins lie in colonialism, and critical scholarship that reads the post-Reconstruction South as emblematic of US necolonial policy, this chapter argues that it is in Faulkner's literary engagements with the post-World War II modernization of the South via the genres of the noir and the road novel that Faulkner's most important engagements with fascism are to be found.