Parable thinking in W. Faulner's novel "A fable"

Parable thinking in W. Faulner's novel "A fable"

Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University

Department of Foreign Philology

Parable thinking in W. FAULNER’s novel “A FABLE”

Graduation Paper

by Yana Kolomiets

student of the Department

of Foreign Philology

5 E/Sp group

Scientific Adviser:

Associate Professor

Alekseyeva N.S.

Reviewer:

Associate Professor

Kononova Zh.A.

Kharkiv - 2010

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I. W.FAULKNER AND HIS CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

1.1            Development of a writer

1.2            W. Faulkner’s aesthetic views

PART II. FEATURES OF A PARABLE

2.1 Parable as a genre

2.2 Form and content of parables

PART III. W. FAULKNER’S “A FABLE” AS AN PIECE OF PARABLE THINKING

3.1 General characteristic of the novel

3.2 Allegoric character of the novel

3.3 Christian symbolism in the novel

3.4 The figure of Christ in the novel

PART IV. Methodological reccomendations FOR TEACHING FAULKNER’S CREATIVE WRITING

Conclusion

ReferenceS

INTRODUCTION

American literature, to which Faulkner belongs, is comparatively new. Yet among many writers that it includes, there are those whose works present special interest for literary criticism. William Faulkner is, undoubtedly, one of the most significant and outstanding representatives of American literature. More than simply a renowned Mississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Among his greatest works are the novels all set in the same small Southern county - novels that include Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all, A Fable- that would one day be recognized among the greatest novels ever written by an American.

A Fable occupies a curious position among Faulkner's works. Written during the period of his greatest acclaim, the first major novel he produced after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950, it appeared at a time when critics were undoubtedly most disposed to heap praise upon him for the slimmest of reasons. A Fable was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955, but was considered a failure by practically all the reviewers and many of the influential critics; few commentators have since found reasons to alter their opinions.

Since Faulkner’s literary career his works had been studied well and many critic works were published. But there still there are some “white spots” in these studies, and the novel A Fable is one of them. Actually it is not studied properly. In critical reviews not much attention is paid to parable thinking in this novel that is very important for direct comprehension of the philosophical ideas and concepts presented here.

Thus, the topicality of the research consists in the fact that at present parable as a genre attracts more attention of the researchers as a strong aesthetic and philosophical phenomenon.

Undertaking our research, we formulated our aim as discovery and the analysis of the parable thinking in Faulkner’s novel.

The aim determines the concrete tasks of the diploma paper:

·          to consider Faulkner’s life and its connection with his creative activities, as it is necessary for the understanding of the novel;

·                    to highlight the main features of parable, its peculiarities and the differences between parable and novel;

·                    to single out the parable thinking in the novel.

The object of the research is W. Faulkner’s writings and parable as a literary genre.

The subject of the research is the novel A Fable and features of parable thinking in it.

Realization of the tasks has been accomplished with the help of the following methods:

·                   historical-sociological method which means historical and sociological conditions of the writing;

·                   biographical method of the research to consider Faulkner’s life and its connection with his creative works;

·                   descriptive method which involved gathering information about the writer’s life and creative activities, examining it deeply and thoroughly and for analyzing the text proper;

·                   method of text interpretation to study the novel properly, to single out the parable thinking in it.

Scientific novelty consists in the fact that the phenomenon of parable thinking in this novel has been studied for the first time.

Practical value of the research is that the results can be used during the lessons of English literature at school or seminars on World literature at higher educational establishments.

PART I. W. FAULKNER AND HIS CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

1.1 Development of a writer

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons born to Murry and Maud Butler Falkner. He was named after his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, the Old Colonel, who had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with his former business partner in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi. A lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil War colonel, railroad financier, and finally, a best-selling writer of the novel The White Rose of Memphis, the Old Colonel, even in death, loomed as a larger-than-life model of personal and professional success for his male descendants.

A few days before William’s fifth birthday, the Falkners moved to Oxford, Mississippi, at the urging of Murry’s father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner. Called the Young Colonel out of homage to his father rather than to actual military service, the younger Falkner had abruptly decided to sell the railroad begun by his father. Disappointed that he would not inherit the railroad, Murry took a series of jobs in Oxford, most of them with the help of his father. The elder Falkner, meanwhile, founded the First National Bank of Oxford in 1910.

When a young man William demonstrated artistic talent, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies. His earliest literary efforts were romantic, conscientiously modeled on English poets such as Burns, Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne. While still in his youth, he also made the acquaintance of two individuals who would play an important role in his future: a childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone.

William’s other close acquaintance from this period arose from their mutual interest in poetry. When Stone read the young poet’s work, he immediately recognized William’s talent and set out to give Faulkner encouragement, advice and models for study [21, p.202-214].

Earlier, Faulkner had tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force, but he had been turned down because of his height. In his RAF application, he lied about numerous facts, including his birth date and birthplace, in an attempt to pass himself as British. He also spelled his name “Faulkner”, believing it looked more British, and in meeting with RAF officials he affected a British accent.

Though he had seen no combat in his wartime military service, upon returning to Oxford in December 1918, he allowed others to believe he had. He told many stories of his adventures in the RAF, most of which were highly exaggerated or patently untrue, including injuries that had left him in constant pain and with a silver plate in his head. His brief service in the RAF would also serve him in his written fiction, particularly in his first published novel, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1926.

Back in Oxford, he first engaged in a footloose life, basking in the temporary glory of a war veteran. In 1919, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi in Oxford under a special provision for war veterans, even though he had never graduated from high school. In August, his first published poem, L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune, appeared in The New Republic. While a student at Ole Miss, he published poems and short stories in the campus newspaper, the Mississippian, and submitted artwork for the university yearbook. In the fall of 1920, Faulkner helped to found a dramatic club on campus called The Marionettes, for which he wrote a one-act play titled The Marionettes but which was never staged. After three semesters of study at Ole Miss, he dropped out in November 1920. Over the next few years, Faulkner wrote reviews, poems, and prose pieces for The Mississippian and had several odd jobs. At the recommendation of Stark Young, a novelist in Oxford, in 1921 he took a job in New York City as an assistant in a bookstore managed by Elizabeth Prall [23]. His most notorious job during this period was his stint as postmaster in the university post office from the spring of 1922 to October 31, 1924. By all accounts, he was a terrible postmaster, spending much of his time reading or playing cards. When a postal inspector came to investigate, he agreed to resign. During this period, he also served as a scoutmaster for the Oxford Boy Scout troop, but he was asked to resign for “moral reasons” (probably drinking).

In 1924, his friend Phil Stone secured the publication of a volume of Faulkner’s poetry The Marble Faun by the Four Seas Company. It was published in December 1924 in an edition of 1,000 copies, dedicated to his mother and with a preface by Stone [35].

In January 1925, Faulkner moved to New Orleans and fell in with a literary crowd which included Sherwood Anderson and centered around The Double Dealer, a literary magazine whose credits include the first published works of Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson. Faulkner published several essays and sketches in The Double Dealer and in the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the latter would later be collected under the title New Orleans Sketches. He wrote his first novel Soldiers’ Pay, and on Anderson’s advice sent it to the publisher Horace Liveright. After Liveright accepted the novel, Faulkner sailed from New Orleans to Europe, arriving in Italy on August 2. His principal residence during the next several months was near Paris, France, just around the corner from the Luxembourg Gardens, where he spent much of his time; his written description of the gardens would later be revised for the closing of his novel Sanctuary. While in France, he would sometimes go to the café that James Joyce would frequent, but the interminably shy Faulkner never dared speak to him. After visiting England he returned to the United States in December [42].

In February 1926, Soldiers’ Pay was published by Boni and Liveright in an edition of 2,500 copies. Again in New Orleans, he began working on his second novel Mosquitoes, a satirical novel with characters based closely upon his literary milieu in New Orleans; set aboard a yacht in Lake Pontchartrain, the novel is today considered one of Faulkner’s weakest. For his third novel, however, Faulkner considered some advice Anderson had given him that he should write about his native region. In doing so, he drew upon both regional geography and family history (particularly his great-grandfather’s Civil War and post-war exploits) to create “Yocona” County, later renamed “Yoknapatawpha.” In a 1956 interview, Faulkner described the liberating effect the creation of his fictional county had for him as an artist: “Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top” [37, p.165].

Faulkner may have been excited by his latest achievement, but his publisher was less thrilled: Liveright refused to publish the novel, which Faulkner had titled Flags in the Dust. Dejected, he began to shop the novel around to other publishers, but with similar results. In the meantime, believing his career as a writer all but over, he began to write a novel strictly for pleasure, with no regard, he said, for its eventual publication. The purged novel, trimmed by about a third, was published in January 1929 under the title Sartoris [40].

After The Sound and the Fury was published in October 1929, Faulkner had to turn his attention to making money. Earlier that year, he had written Sanctuary, a novel which Faulkner later claimed in an introduction he conceived “deliberately to make money”. The novel was immediately turned down by the publisher. Faulkner’s need for income stemmed largely from his growing family. In April, Estelle Oldham had divorced Cornell Franklin, and in June she and Faulkner were married at or near College Hill Presbyterian Church. Estelle brought two children to the marriage. Faulkner, now working nights at a power plant, wrote As I Lay Dying, later claiming it was a “tour de force” and that he had written it “in six weeks, without changing a word” [41, p.310-316].

Though his hyperbolic claims about the novel were not entirely true, As I Lay Dying is nevertheless a masterfully written successor to The Sound and the Fury. As with the earlier work, the novel focuses on a family and is told stream-of-conscious style by different narrators, but rather than an aristocratic family, the focus here is on lower-class farm laborers from southern Yoknapatawpha County, the Bundrens, whose matriarch, Addie, has died and had asked to be buried in Jefferson, “a day’s hard ride away” to the north. The novel would be published in October 1930.

That same year, his publisher had a change of heart about publishing Sanctuary and sent galley proofs to Faulkner for proofreading, but Faulkner decided, at considerable personal expense, to drastically revise the novel. The novel, which features the rape and kidnaping of an Ole Miss coed, Temple Drake, by a sinister bootlegger named Popeye, shocked and horrified readers, particularly in Oxford; published in February 1931, Sanctuary would be Faulkner’s best-selling novel until The Wild Palms was published in 1939 [42].

In January 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama. The child, born prematurely, would live only a few days. Faulkner’s first collection of short stories, These 13, would be published in September and dedicated to “Estelle and Alabama”.

Soon after Alabama’s death, Faulkner began writing a novel tentatively titled Dark House, which would feature a man of uncertain racial lineage who, as an orphaned child, was named Joe Christmas. In this Faulkner’s first major exploration of race he examines the lives of outcasts in Yoknapatawpha County, including Joanna Burden, the granddaughter and sister of civil rights activists gunned down in the town square; Gail Hightower, so caught up in family pride and heritage that he ignores his own wife’s decline into infidelity and eventual suicide; and Lena Grove, a (literally) barefoot and pregnant girl from Alabama whose journey to find the father of her child both opens and closes the novel. At the center of the novel is the orphan, the enigmatic Joe Christmas, who defies easy categorization into either race, white or black [40].

The year 1932 would mark the beginning of a new sometime profession for Faulkner, as screenwriter in Hollywood. During an extended trip to New York City the previous year, he had made a number of important contacts in Hollywood, including actress Tallulah Bankhead. In April 1932, Faulkner signed a six-week contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in May Faulkner initiated what would be the first of many stints as screenwriter in Hollywood. In July, Faulkner met director Howard Hawks, with whom he shared a common passion for flying and hunting. Of the six screenplays for which Faulkner would receive on-screen credit, five would be for films directed by Hawks, the first of which was Today We Live (1933), based on Faulkner’s short story Turn About [35, p.47-52].

Faulkner returned to Oxford in August after the sudden death of his father. With the addition of his mother to his growing number of dependents, Faulkner needed money. He returned to Hollywood in October with his mother and younger brother Dean, and sold Paramount the rights to film Sanctuary. The film, retitled The Story of Temple Drake, opened in May 1933, one month after the Memphis premiere of Today We Live which Faulkner attended. That spring also saw the publication of A Green Bough, Faulkner’s second and last collection of poetry.

In June, Estelle gave birth to Faulkner’s only surviving daughter, Jill. The following winter, Faulkner wrote to his publisher that he was working on a new novel whose working title, like Light in August before, was Dark House. “Roughly”, he wrote, “the theme is a man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the man’s family. Quentin Compson, of the “Sound & Fury”, tells it, or ties it together; he is the protagonist so that it is not complete apocrypha” [17, p.14-15].

In April 1934, Faulkner published a second collection of stories, Doctor Martino and Other Stories. That spring, he began a series of Civil War stories to be sold to The Saturday Evening Post. Faulkner would later revise and collect them together to form the novel The Unvanquished (1938). In March 1935, he published the non-Yoknapatawpha novel Pylon, which was inspired apparently by the death of Captain Merle Nelson during an air show on February 14, 1934, at the inauguration of an airport in New Orleans. A few months later, in November, his brother Dean was killed in a crash.

In December, Faulkner began another “tour of duty” in Hollywood working with Hawks, this time at 20th Century-Fox, where he met Meta Carpenter, Hawks’ secretary and script girl, with whom Faulkner would have an affair. Late that month, Faulkner and collaborator Joel Sayre completed a screenplay for the film The Road to Glory, which would premiere in June 1936 [42].

Today We Live (1933), starring Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford, and Robert Young, was Faulkner’s first credited screenplay and the only one he wrote for the big screen based on his own published fiction.

Faulkner spent much of 1936 and the first eight months of 1937 in Hollywood, again working for 20th Century-Fox, receiving on-screen writing credit for Slave Ship (1937) and contributing to the story for Gunga Din (1939). In April, his mistress, Meta Carpenter, married Wolfgang Rebner and went with him to Germany. Back at Rowan Oak in September, Faulkner began working on a new novel, which would consist of two short novellas with two completely separate casts of characters appearing alternately throughout the book. Faulkner’s title for the book was If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, consisting of the novellas The Wild Palms and Old Man.

In February 1938, Random House published The Unvanquished, a novel consisting of seven stories, six of which had originally appeared in an earlier form in The Saturday Evening Post. A kind of “prequel” to Faulkner’s first Yoknapatawpha novel, The Unvanquished tells the earlier history of the Sartoris family during and immediately after the Civil War, focusing especially on Bayard Sartoris, son of the legendary Colonel John Sartoris who, like Faulkner’s real-life great-grandfather, was gunned down in the street by a former business partner.

While in New York in the fall of 1938, Faulkner began writing a short story, Barn Burning, which would be published in Harper’s the following year. But Faulkner was not finished with the story. He had in mind a trilogy about the Snopes family, a lower-class rural laboring white family who, unlike the Compsons and Sartorises of other Faulkner novels, had little regard for southern tradition, heritage, or lineage. The Snopes, often regarded as Faulkner’s metaphor for the rising “redneck” middle class in the South, more interested in avaricious commercial gain than honor or pride, were to be led in the trilogy by the enterprising Flem Snopes, who in the original story Barn Burning had appeared only briefly as the eldest son of Ab Snopes [41, p. 310-318].

In January 1939, Faulkner was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. That same month, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem was published under the title The Wild Palms. In April 1940, the first book of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, was published by Random House. Featuring a reworked version of Barn Burning and other stories Faulkner had published, including Spotted Horses, the novel follows Flem Snopes from being the poor son of a barn-burning sharecropper to his securing a storekeeper’s job, as “fire insurance”, in the hamlet of Frenchman’s Bend (in southeastern Yoknapatawpha County).

Throughout 1941, Faulkner spent much of his time writing and reworking stories into an episodic novel about the McCaslin family, several members of whom had appeared briefly in The Unvanquished. Though several stories that would comprise Go Down, Moses had been published separately, Faulkner revised extensively the parts that would comprise the novel, which spans more than 100 years in the history of Yoknapatawpha County.

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