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

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

3.1 General characteristic of the novel

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. Not only did some reject it as art; they were actually angered by much of what they saw in it. The near unanimity of opinion regarding it is not curious in itself; the reluctance, with which many critics reject it, aside from Faulkner’s reputation and obvious disappointment, points up one of the novel’s peculiarities. If one were able to relegate it to the scrap heap of trivia, and if the negative critical opinion were widespread and consistent that it is trivial, A Fable would present few problems. But many, who rejected it, regardless of the extent of their rejection, have noted the novel’s vast scope, its wide compass in the process of their analysis [35, p.45-58].

It is readily admitted that the novel was among Faulkner’s most ambitious undertakings, as one dissenting critic called it, “a heroically ambitious failure”. No one has hinted that Faulkner wrote it to capitalize upon the wider recognition his Nobel Prize afforded him. A Fable was certainly not hastily conceived or written; it took nearly nine years for Faulkner to complete it. It was perhaps the most carefully planned of all his books; an examination of the wall of his study at Rowan Oaks corroborates this opinion. That a great writer may write an occasional bad novel is hardly news; the contention that A Fable is an aberration gets support from another widely held view regarding the total Faulkner canon. One tendency, to see Faulkner as the chronicler of Yoknapatawpha County, whether his work is viewed n general as all part of the loose “saga” of Yoknapatawpha or not, is bolstered by the interlocking of events and characters throughout many of the major novels and stories. Concomitant with this general attitude is the opinion that his best works have all been contained within the complex imaginary Yoknapatawpha world, a world grown out of close observation, introspection, and lived experience concerning the region and people he knew and loved best [11, p.115-146].

Although A Fable is among this less currently approved group of novels, it is not to be degraded merely for this reason. Opinion varies widely concerning the “form” of A Fable, whether it is an allegory or a thesis-novel or an attempt to construct a mythology. The functions of the characters are seen in multitudinous relations, and thematic interpretations transcribe an arc that is majestic in its scope. Although the variety of opinion in this regard may serve as testament to the novel's richness, the general opinion is that it attests to the confused form and substance of A Fable. The most pervasive attitude regarding the novel is that it is primarily an intellectual failure, ill-conceived and ill-made. Faulkner has been accused of many offenses against taste and tradition - the less-than-illustrious history of early Faulkner criticism in America bears eloquent testimony to this fact, but only very rarely has he ever been accused of carelessness in handling his materials. That Faulkner, whose proved ability to exercise exquisite control over extremely complex literary structures (Absalom! Absalom! or The Sound and the Fury to name only two) could be so blind, could commit so many obvious blunders in one novel without being sublimely careless, simply seemed absurd [13].

The “agony and sweat” he admittedly poured into writing A Fable rules out carelessness as a cause. Also, the very enormity of its apparent failures, the grand inconsistencies it seems to trumpet, according to critics, seemed somehow to demand a reexamination. The novel simply could not be as bad as some opinions would have it its very power to evoke such strong reactions as late as 1962 seemed to work perversely against the very criticism which railed against it. Witness the opening sentence of Irving Howe’s critical appraisal. Only a writer of very great talent, and a writer with a sublime deafness to the cautions of his craft, could have brought together so striking an ensemble of mistakes as Faulkner has in A Fable. Howe's adjectives almost seem to belie the very claims he makes [17, p.289-300].

When William Faulkner’s A Fable appeared on the literary scene in 1954, the immediate response from the book reviewers was intense and various, both in temper and interpretation of its meaning and worth. This variety in itself is not unique, but what is striking about the early criticism is the utter confusion engendered in minds that were presumably attuned to the many complexities of literary nuance. Nonetheless, the early reviewers were for the most part either disappointed or downright hostile, according to their commitment to their various literary or religious creeds. Whether hostile or merely disappointed, the early criticism actually posed more questions than it answered [23].

A Fable was for the most part condemned from both literary and religious viewpoints. The frustration which A Fable caused to certain book reviewers is perhaps best summed up by the reaction of Harold C. Gardiner in America: “... it is clearly a symbolic novel; it is just as clearly, save to those who dare not say boo to geese, a mystery, a riddle, an enigma, for which a key is sadly needed. Indeed, after a careful and laborious reading of 437 pages, I have begun to suspect that there is no key, it is hardly worth the search, for it would at best open only an empty box…” [23, p.67].

Vivian Mercier noted that “aside from implying that the Christ of today is the Unknown Soldier, the book seems to offer us a hodge podge of clichés” [23, p.22]. He then went on to speculate on Faulkner's social instincts. The delay in completion was owing to an instinct not to, because Faulkner was “an introvert trying to write an extrovert’s novel [23, p.126].

J. Robert Barth read A Fable as an indication of Faulkner's shift forward from the “negative critique” of the Yoknapatawpha cycle to a more positive attitude toward man. Barth also offered some excellent insights, such as noting the necessity to see the novel's dynamism in terms of a “tension of opposites”. He also maintained that meaning emerged, not from the novel's resemblance to the Passion, but from the attitudes the two major characters represented. Unfortunately, Barth did not carry these insights as far as he might have, but he is nonetheless almost unique as an early reviewer in his reading. V. S. Pritchett also saw A Fable as an indication that Faulkner was emerging from “destructive despair to conscious affirmation”. Pritchett then dubbed A Fable a “fantasy to a past dispensation”, with Faulkner a poet - historian whose purpose in writing it was to “isolate and freeze each moment of the past”. A Fable at the last was “a blast at the impersonality of modern life” [23, p.123-154].

Carvel Collins saw A Fable as no marked departure at all, noting that Faulkner had used the Passion as early as 1929 to inform the structure of The Sound and the Fury. Collins saw the essential conflict as a clash between Old Testament and New Testament values. He offers some pertinent observations about Faulkner's works as a whole and A Fable in particular. Faulkner's works have always suffered from summaries of them, he noted, and A Fable would suffer most of all owing to the Biblical parallels. Time has proved Mr. Collins right in this observation, but his own review, though sympathetic and helpful in some respects, is actually an oversimplification of the complex structure of A Fable .The reviewer for Newsweek offered some helpful observations about the structure of A Fable, noticing that the novel was structured around a series of conflicts between opposing ideas and characters. But the review is actually more misleading than helpful at the last, since the reviewer sees no “intellectual center” in the novel. It is “a complicated allegory … in a complicated private idiom” [21, p.45-46], and the reviewer surrenders up some of his confusion when he notes that “the reader sometimes has the disconcerting feeling of standing in the middle of a tragic fun house with all the trick mirrors focusing on him at once” [10, p.13].

The central question A Fable asks is “What is man?” and the answer is that he is most foul. Taylor saw the theme of A Fable as the “helpless bestiality of man” [18, p.10-11], one ending where real Christianity begins, and ended by chastising Faulkner. Referring obliquely to the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he noted that “You do not lift the heart of man by grinding his face in the dirt. Amos Wilder, a year after Taylor's article, wrote that A Fable provided an example of an earlier “uncorrupted” Christianity”. Certain critics focused primarily upon structural features in A Fable. As a result their findings are generally more pertinent than those who reacted personally to the more obvious features of the novel. James Hafley noted the basic antagonism of the Corporal and the Marshall, but immediately reduced this antagonism to a conflict between the man of faith and the man of reason. A Fable presented the failure of democracy, the “rational end of the Western tradition”, and illustrated the necessity to “escape the crowd” either through martyrdom or the military [18].

Philip Edward Pastore believed A Fable to be a fable without a strict moral - it is more descriptive than prescriptive. It is essentially a description of two opposing sets of moralities shown in their complex interactions both ideally and historically. Failure to realize this point is what causes much of the confusion of many of the critics who demand a much more cogent argument by Faulkner to support their ethical view, whether it focuses on Christianity or pacifism. While this conclusion may seem less palatable for those requiring poetic justice or established morality in fiction, it is nonetheless testament to the high degree of sophistication of Faulkner’s world view, a world view shaped considerably by the sophistication of Bergson’s ideas on morality and religion, especially as they appear in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, to state that all the conflicts emanate from this basic opposition of intellect and intuition may seem overly simple as an explanation of the complex action of A Fable. It is simple in that it admits a resolution or “synthesis” which is less complex than Schendler’s, since it merely describes a condition instead of forcing through to an ethic which must “transcend” (i.e., “deny”) the very ironies the novel spends so much time describing. It is less complex yet more dynamic than Straumann’s eclectic, suspended, tripartite stasis. Its focus is also more precise than either of these two admirable critics allow [32].

The essential opposition of intuition and intellect as a means of ordering and giving meaning to the human condition penetrates to the heart of A Fable and encompasses every ramification of the conflicts which appear upon the surface.

Some clues to the broad intellectual basis and, in a larger sense, to the whole intellectual environment within which A Fable may be read, occur in a conversation between Faulkner and a young Frenchman, Loic Bouvard, at the Princeton Inn on November 30, 1952. Faulkner happened to be passing through the city, and a mutual friend arranged the interview for Bouvard, who was studying for his Ph.D. in Political Science at Princeton. The atmosphere was informal and conducive to candor, but Bouvard noted that Faulkner was always careful, in fact deliberate, in answering his questions. The conversation finally became centered upon Camus and Sartre, when Bouvard informed Faulkner that many of the young people in France were supplanting a faith in God with a faith in man, obviously a reference to the atheistic existentialism of these two writers. Faulkner's reply is more pertinent than is apparent at first [7].

“Probably you are wrong in doing away with God in that fashion. God is. It is He who created man. If you don’t reckon with God, you won’t wind up anywhere. You question God and then you begin to doubt, and you begin to ask Why? Why? Why? - and God fades away by the very act of your doubting him”. But he immediately qualified his statement. “Naturally, I'm not talking about a personified or a mechanical God, but a God who is the most complete expression of mankind, a God who rests in the eternity and in the now” [14, p.203].

One is perhaps not surprised that Bouvard was more interested in hearing Faulkner's ideas on man and art, since the interview did take place only after the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and that speech's apparent humanism, plus the vogue at that time of “existentialism”, would certainly have exercised their influence upon a young French intellectual. What is surprising is the ease with which Bouvard reduced Faulkner's statements about God to “Faulkner's deism” especially since Faulkner had immediately made it clear that he meant neither “a personified or a mechanical God” I shall attempt here to rectify an error in reaction to which Bouvard, as well as many later critics mentioned above, fell victim [7].

For what Bouvard thought were separate and distinct categories were much more closely joined than he realized, were in fact in some ways practically fused. Here are meant the categories “man” and “god”. Faulkner, like Bergson, is often speaking about one in terms of the other (“a god who is the most complete expression of mankind”), but only within the necessary limits of how they define each category. Faulkner is not as precise in A Fable as is Bergson in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion, but the resemblances are there. Faulkner's library does not yield a much-thumbed copy of the Two Sources of Morality and Religion; nevertheless the hypothesis that Bergson’s work forms the intellectual basis of A Fable remains valid, since no other works of Bergson are recorded there either, and their availability to him need not be restricted to Faulkner's personal library [7, p.208-239].

Simply noting that Faulkner has never been reticent in acknowledging Bergson’s influence upon him, I shall proceed upon the assumption that he was aware of Bergson's ideas on the “vital impetus”, and all the ramifications there of, even though he may not have come across them neatly compressed within the covers of the work to which I shall refer. A comparison of Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion with A Fable will show parallels both in subject matter and language which suggest more than mere coincidence.

Bergson’s conception of the “dialectic” and Faulkner's dramatization of it lie below the “wars” in A Fable and the essential conflict is not New Testament Christianity against Old Testament orthodoxy, nor Christ against Caesar, nor the apostolic church against the institutionalized church, nor war against peace, nor a projected humanism against a traditional transcendent super-being. It is a simpler yet more profound opposition which may manifest itself in any of these more apparent conflicts. Indeed, most of the above-mentioned “conflicts” are not real conflicts at all, but would fall within one of these two basic oppositions, the intellect, since most would be subsumed under static religion.

3.2 Allegoric character of the novel

What A Fable “is” seems to be a central question for some critics in determining its structural features. Thomas H. Carter, for instance, felt that it was basically cleanly structured, but “the other sub-plots obscure the simple rightness of the Corporal’s story”. Many see the essential failure occurring in the attempt to mix genres and tones which, in their view, it is impossible to mix. Most critics read A Fable as an allegory which has either been contaminated or enriched in a dreadful way by certain “realistic” features which clash with the main action, the Passion whether it is contaminated or enriched is apparently owing to whether the critic personally prefers the realistic or the symbolic mode.

One may easily contrast this opinion to that of Hyatt Howe Waggoner, who sees the novel’s process as “almost the opposite of the symbolic”, one that emerges from “an interpretation of scripture based on the supposition that historic Christianity was founded upon a hoax”. Roma King feels that Faulkner’s view is basically Christian, but that the book fails because he has “no systematic intellectual grounding or comprehensive theology”, and the allegory “gets lost among naturalistic irrelevancies and details”. But for Lawrance Thomson the “allegorical skeleton sticks through the flesh unpleasantly”. And Irving Howe considers the book to be “a splendidly written fable that is cluttered and fretted with structural complexities appropriate only to a novel”. And finally, we may go to Carter again, who delivers another critical edict. “Whatever its symbolic structure is A Fable must be judged by the standards of naturalistic fiction” [9, p. 147-148].

The parallel between the representative of the open society and dynamic religion, and the inherent antagonism that this new being must project upon the established institutions, is thus clearly drawn. Another facet of the “deep dialect” - one which is based on experience - is thus established and one may draw obvious implications from the parallel, fusion as it were, of dynamic religion with the open society. The Corporal is both the representative of the open society and that individual who has immersed himself in the elan vital, and, as his confrontation with the priest illustrated, has embodied within himself, as a “species composed of a single individual”, the power to overcome the casuistry of dialectic simply by “being”. The Corporal is one who, in the Bergsonian sense, has immersed himself into “real” time, which “if it is not God, is of God”, and the “religion” which emerges from this inundation is one which cannot be defined by ethical laws or theological argument. It is “a religion of men, not laws” [3, p.187].

One may still reasonably ask why Faulkner had to choose the obvious parallel to the Gospel stories, why he could not have demonstrated these ideas on their own merits rather than borrow from the Gospels. Bergson may again supply us with an explanation. But just as the new moral aspiration takes shape only by borrowing from the closed society its natural form, which is obligation, so dynamic religion is propagated only through images and symbols supplied by the myth-making function. A careful reading of the novel shows the reasons for the trappings of Christian allegory in A Fable.

The most striking “supernatural” incident parallels, in a rough way, the “multiple deaths” of the Corporal, it occurs in the scene describing the Groom's return to the town in Tennessee where they had first raced the horse. He had earlier appeared at the church, but now appears at the loft above the post office where the men are shooting dice. He suddenly appears there, no one speaks, he goes to the game, a coin mysteriously appears at his foot “where 10 seconds ago no coin had been”, he plays the coin, and immediately wins enough for food. The scene below describes his exit and return:

“ He went to the trap door and the ladder which led down into the store's dark interior and with no light descended and returned with a wedge of cheese and a handful of crackers, and interrupted the game again to hand the clerk one of the coins he had won and took his change and, squatting against the wall and with no sound save the steady one of his chewing, ate what the valley knew was his first food since he returned to it, reappeared in the church ten hours ago; and - suddenly - the first since he had vanished with the horse and the two Negroes ten months ago” [14, p.194].

The necessary response is a crude one, but it nonetheless resembles the Corporal’s ability to cut past speech and force action. The Groom’s mysterious abilities to create the fierce loyalties of those around him links him to the Corpoml also. It is this ability which carries over into the main action, and is the means by which he and the Runner are joined. But in the context of the main action, the Runner is a different person, a point which will be taken up below. His mysterious qualities are even highlighted in the near play on words Faulkner employs in Sutterfield’s pronunciation of his name, “Mistairy” for Mr. Harry. The Groom is, in a sense, “resurrected” also. His mysterious reappearances are not the only point of resemblance in this sense. Faulkner describes him at the very beginning of the “horsethief” episode as having undergone a sort of rebirth as a result of his experiences with the horse. The rebirth is somewhat analogous to the Corporal’s final interment in the tomb of the unknown soldier, since it suggests outwardly everything that he was not previously, and also points to the anonymity of the Corporal as far as the world is concerned.

“Three things happened to him which changed completely not only his life, but his character too, so that when late in 1914 he returned to England to enlist it was as though somewhere behind the Mississippi Valley hinterland ... a new man had been born, without past, without griefs, without recollection” [14, p.151].

What Faulkner has done in his treatment of the Corporal is to let the action around the Corporal speak for him rather than letting him speak for himself; often the action seems to run a contradictory course to what is being verbalized by cliaracters around the Corporal. This observation goes to the heart of the Corporal’s character and the implications toward which his presence in the novel points. The Corporal, for all his taciturnity and seeming passivity, is the essence of action - meaningful action. He is the essence and embodiment of what Bergson considers the mystic, the representative of “dynamic religion”. The Corporal, if not exactly suspicious of ritual, at any rate has no need of ritual, for ritual is extraneous to the dynamic religion he represents. It is, as Bergson states, “a religion of men, not rules”, a religion in which “prayer is independent of its verbal expression; it is an elevation of the soul that can dispense with speech. Bergson, in attempting to define “dynamic religion”, equates it with mysticism, but not the Eastern type of mysticism we generally identify with the Hindu ascetics. These are not true mystics, according to Bergson.

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