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

What the Corporal attempts to do, and succeeds in doing for a while, is exactly this. All the action of A Fable is generated by his act of mutiny. This failure will be explained within that context, but for the moment we may see this characteristic, dynamism, operating in relation to the Corporal in the particular way Faulkner has chosen to portray it. The Corporal does not have the gift of rhetoric - he has no need of it; action, experience, is his primary method of expression. His monosyllabic answers to the casuistic arguments of the priest and the Marshall are not owing to stupidity or sullenness. An examination of his answers to most of the questions put to him shows that he does not answer the question directly so much as simply state a “fact” which ultimately has bearing upon the question. For example, in answering the priest’s charges that he must bear the responsibility for Gragnon’s execution, he simply repeats:

“Tell him [the Marshall] that” [14, p.364-366].

To the Marshall’s long argument in the “Maundy Thursday” scene, he first answers simply, “there are still ten” (meaning his disciples), when the Marshall indicates the futility of his martyrdom [14, p.346]. To the last part of the Marshall's argument, when the Marshall expands at length upon the “narrative of the bird” to reinforce his offer of life, the Corporal simply answers:

“Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing worth it” [14, p.352].

The Corporal is equally taciturn in other scenes. He does not speak his first word until page 249; he speaks fewer words than any other major character in the novel, unless one considers the Groom to occupy equal stature, and even the Groom is referred to as constantly mouthing curses, even though Faulkner does not record them for the reader.

Actually, the Corporal’s lack of speech is simply part of his makeup. He is exhibiting the mystic temperament as Bergson conceives of it. A calm exaltation of all its faculties makes it see things on a vast scale only, and in spite of its weakness, produce only what can be mightily wrought.

This passage, which goes far to explain the Corporal’s peculiar actions also in relation to the other characters in the novel and the events which surround him, bears a resemblance to Faulkner’s description of the Corporal as he calmly watches from his prison window above the rage and turbulence of the crowd below.

“He looked exactly like a stone-deaf man watching with interest but neither surprise nor alarm the pantomime of some cataclysm or even universal uproar which neither threatens nor even concerns him since to him it makes no sound at all” [14, p.227].

The Corporal is able to transcend much of the human passion that is normally aroused either in argument or in anxiety over one's future. Bergson may offer a reason for the Corporal’s “odd” qualities of character when he writes of the difference between ordinary ideas of love and the mystical love of mankind.

The Corporal, as mystical, intuitive man, then, becomes the embodiment of the open society, which must emerge from the universal love of mankind, as well as the embodiment of the “dynamic religion” which is embodied in men, not rules.

It is the Corporal’s “presence” which causes action more than any direct action he engages in. By this method his effect is felt throughout the entire novel. He has no personal eloquence, nor radiance, nor energy of the usual sort associated with action. The key to his effectiveness lies in his presence. He is dynamic in the deepest sense, not merely kinetic. He embodies in himself all of the facets and possibilities that the complex of attitudes arising from and involved in the refinement of the intuition posit. Just as the Marshall depends upon ritual, meeting, dialectic, and intelligence, so does the Corporal have no need for any of them. He is beyond the . neces sary rhetoric of the preacher, the casuistry of the plotter, or the energy of the builder. He is effective nonetheless, because his presence alone suffices to cause meaningful action. As the old man at the ammunition dump, who first informs the Runner of the Corporal’s mission, tells him:

“- Go and listen to them, the old porter said, - you can speak foreign; you can understand them.

- I thought you said that the nine who should have spoken French didn't, and that the other four couldn't speak anything at all.

- They don’t need to talk, the old porter said. - You don’ need to understand. Just go and look at him” [14, p.67].

Events which occur as a result of the Corporal’s “presence” are the action of A Fable. Although he is not described energetically, the Corporal embodies dynamism in everything he does, as opposed to the essentially static character of his antagonist, the Marshall, who engenders much kinetic activity in the novel. Images of movement and stasis surround these two antagonists constantly and reinforce their essential characteristics.

The Corporal and the Marshall are brought together at the beginning of A Fable in a confrontation scene which foreshadows the later, climactic “Maundy Thursday” scene above the city of Chaulnesmont. More important than fore- shadowing is the way in which each is described in relation to the other in this scene.

“The Corporal is riding in a lorry earring the 13 “ringleaders” of the mutiny to the stockade. It passes the Hotel de Villa where the three generals still stood like a posed camera group [the Corporal and the Marshall] stared full at each other across the moment which could not last because of the vehicle’s speed - the peasant’s face above the corporal’s chevrons and the shackled wrists in the speeding lorry, and the grey, inscrutable face above the stars of supreme rank and the bright ribbons of honor and glory on the Hotel steps, looking at each other across the fleeting instant” [14, p.17].

The setting of this first encounter clearly puts the two in opposition in more than mere foreshadowing; they are immediately seen in terms of motion and stasis. The “deep dialectic” of the human condition is thus very early joined, with each antagonist’s essential qualities pointed up by the setting in which each appears. The Corporal is dynamic, moving, even though manacled. The Marshall is static, posed, though apparently free. The two are seen in paradoxical relationship at the very outset, also, since the apparently “free” omnipotent man, the Marshall, is fixed; and the apparently shackled man, the Corporal, is moving. This paradoxical relationship will widen and encompass all of the action of the novel as it progresses, for paradox is the main method by which action is resolved in A Fable.

“-Fear implies ignorance. Where ignorance is not, you do not need to fear: only respect. I don’t fear man’s capacities, I merely respect them. "

-And use them, - the Quartermaster General said.

-Beware of them, - the old general said” [14, p.329].

Here is an adequate explanation for the seemingly indifferent mannerisms of the Corporal. He is not indifferent he has, in a sense, won the world by going beyond the world. He has attained this state before the opening action of the novel, and Faulkner's initial presentation of him, “the face showing a comprehension, understanding, utterly free of compassion” [14, p.17] can, in this light, be seen as far more than mere indifference to his fate.

Events which occur as a result of the Corporal’s “presence” are the action of A Fable. Although he is not described energetically, the Corporal embodies dynamism in everything he does, as opposed to the essentially static character of his antagonist, the Marshall, who engenders much kinetic activity in the novel. Images of movement and stasis surround these two antagonists constantly and reinforce their essential characteristics.

The “capacities” referred to become more precisely defined moments later when the Quartermaster repeats the charge that the Marshall is afraid of man. The Marshall's respon.se is set clearly in terms of stasis and dynamism.

“I respected him [man] as an articulated creature capable of locomotion and vulnerable to self-interest” [14, p.331]

Although the Marshall refers here only to the dynamic quality of man, one must conclude that he is speaking from his opposite viewpoint in “respecting” this quality in man. The action (locomotion) is referred to here in potential terms, also. The fact that self-interest is inimical to the Marshall’s position would coincide neatly with Bergson’s claim that the intelligence must counter the very bent of intelligence (the ego) by intellectual means, which the Marshall does.

Another character who resembles the Marshall closely in his intellectual apparatus and attitudes toward man is the lawyer who seeks, and fails, to spellbind the crowd with rhetoric (“Ladies, gentlemen Democrats”) in the courthouse in the “horsethief” episode. The crowd ignores him and as it brushes past him, he notes “my first mistake was moving” [14, p.185]. Real action is inimical to those who rely on intellect alone and who are the manipulators in the closed society. The lawyer's long internal monologue is couched in slightly different terms, but his views on man are essentially the same as the Marshall's.

Thinking (the lawyer) how only when he is mounted on something ... is man vulnerable and familiar; he is terrible; thinking with amazement and humility and pride too, how no mere immobile mass of him . . . mounted on something which, not he but it was locomotive, but the mass of him, moving of itself in one direction toward an objective by means of his own frail clumsily jointed legs . . . threatful only in locomotion and dangerous only in silence [14, pp.186-187].

It is important to note here that the lawyer, although contemptuous in part, still has the feeling of amazement and pride when thinking of this aspect of man, an attitude which parallels the Marshall’s in the “Maundy Thursday” scene when he tells the Corporal “with pride” that man will prevail. The above passage tends to reach back to the introductory scene where the Corporal is introduced riding in the lorry, and to underscore the point that, although he is at that time vulnerable to the machinations of the military, the action which had precipitated all the later action (the mutiny) had already been accomplished . The Corporal has been able to set a mass of men in one direction simply through the power of his presence in better fashion than the military, which had consciously aimed at this end (witness the statement of l’Allemont, the corps commander, to Gragnon [14, p.52]) with its references to disciplinary training and rituals of honor and glory. One may also compare the actions of the civilian arm of the closed society, the crowd, in respect to meaningful action. Much has been written of how the crowd, mass man, is reduced to bestiality or complete passivity, as though Faulkner were attempting to demean man. As one negative critic put it, “You do not lift the heart of man by rubbing his face in the dirt”. But the crowd’s action, which is not really action at ail, can best be seen in the context of the civil arm of the closed society.

“…not that they had no plan when they came here, nor even that the motion which had served in lieu of plan, had been motion only so long as it had had room to move in, but that motion itself had betrayed them by bringing them here at all, not only in the measure of the time it had taken them to cover the kilometer and a half between the city and the compound, but in that of the time it would take them to retrace back to the city and the Place de Ville , which they comprehended now they should never have quitted in the first place, so that, no matter what speed they might make getting back to it, they would be too late” [14, p.131].

Allegory, to function as allegory, as H. R. Warfel has demonstrated, must function on at least three of four possible levels. The story must be a literal story; it must establish parallel relationships between it and the original story upon which it is based (if it is based on a story); it must establish parallel relationships between it and the institution which lies behind the original story; and it must establish a final universal or metaphysical level on which it may be read. I believe that analogical qualities in A Fable which resemble the Passion work primarily on the first and second level, but that it denies much of the third level which is necessary for allegory.

A Fable denies the institution, both in the action that is outside those parts which resemble the Passion directly, and, more importantly, by internal differences between those portions that do parallel the original Gospel stories, owing mainly to its treatment of those portions. In fact, the very parts that seem to offend most of the critics, the character of the Corporal, the “degrading” last supper scene, the barbed wire crown, the ironic resurrection, the final interment in the military monument and certain aspects of “character” of the Corporal, find their ethical and “theological” perspective, not in the codifications of institutionalized Christianity, which in A Fable is equated with “static religion”, but in “dynamic religion” as Bergson describes it. And therefore, A Fable is not a true allegory if one sees the Passion story in the sense that an allegory is supposed to bring us into contact with the ethical and moral teachings of an institution in order to further its teachings. In relation to the Passion one may say that A Fable merely utilizes a profound and meaningful story as background to add force to its own meanings.

3.3 Christian symbolism in A Fable

A Fable has aroused many unfavorable comments and only three searching attempts at an interpretation. None of the commentators saw a totally unified structure and consequently the meaning of the book has not been clarified by them. The title and the decorative symbol of the Cross have led most critics to stray into paths which Faulkner really did not enter. The novel is not a fable in the technical sense of that narrative form; rather it is a story, probably meant by the author to be as meaningful as any of Aesop’s writings, but equally probably not to be as simple in outline or depth. One of the chronological frames through which the story progresses is indeed Holy week, but only in a limited degree does the sequence of events relate to the final events in the earthly life of Jesus [21].

A sounder critic, Ursula Brumm, noted that A Fable was constructed around slightly different antitheses. The division between the meek of the earth and the rapacious but creative ones “who participate in the works of civilization” forms the essential conflict in the novel. Miss Brumm cites the long apostrophe to rapacity by the Quartermaster [8] as the focal point of A Fable and maintains that this passage, which is a parody of Paul’s message on “charity” in Corinthians 13:8, may be seen as the final indictment of civilization and all its works.

Faulkner, by equating Christianity with Civilization, has written a novel that is absolute heresy in Christian terms. The Corporal is the son of God or the founder of Christianity, but Christ the archetype of man suffering, and of those who expiate the guilt of civilization by renunciation of the power and the privilege.

Another thoughtful early criticism is Philip Blair Rice's review. Rice offers provocative and penetrating insights into the novel which unfortunately lead to the usual cul de sac rather than to a unified vision, because he seeks that vision using the wrong index to meaning. Rice, seeing A Fable as the most monumental task Faulkner had yet assumed, responded to it in like manner. It demands he states “a comparison with such awesomely mentionable names as Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Mann”. A Fable does not live up to expectations for Rice, and fails to even render its explicit message, which to him is that message contained in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Rice believes, as do most of the critics cited above, that Faulkner's failure is essentially an intellectual failure. He has failed to offer a coherent theology which to Rice is the implicit message of A Fable. Rice’s real problem with A Fable is the apparent ambiguity of the “theological” elements. This basic ambiguity is what engenders his criticism of the novel, and he directs his criticism toward theological rather than artistic considerations. For Rice, Faulkner’s religious commitment is vague, not orthodox, most likely “a non super naturalistic rendering of the Christian symbolism” which offers “no theodicy and no other-worldly beatitude”. What shocks Rice is that the words of the Nobel Prize acceptance speech “Man will prevail” are uttered by the Marshall instead of the Corporal. To Rice this assignment is a “breathtaking reversal”, since the Marshall must be a figure of evil (Caesar or Satan) according to the reading Rice imposes on the novel. He notes also that the Corporal’s entombment in the monument of the Unknown Soldier, although a sort of victory, is too heavily ironic to constitute a real victory for primitive Christianity, since the monument also glorifies nationalism. These and other inconsistencies lead Rice to the conclusion that three thematic resolutions of the implicit message of A Fable lie open to the reader [40].

3.4 The figure of Christ in the novel

The limited vision of critics appears to parallel those who demanded that the Corporal correspond to certain attributes they held to be necessary in portraying a “Christ-figure”. Their preconceptions were focused on characterization while the above named critics demand certain formal structural characteristics to be present (i.e., a fable should be allegorical and symbolic, a novel should be realistic and naturalistic), yet both groups resemble each other in their propensity to proscribe certain practices rather than analyze what these practices might attempt to accomplish in a given work.

One might well wonder, in the light of the conditions the “crucifixion” imposed upon the Runner, just what attitude he could assume in order to “prevail” in a manner pleasing to Mr. Stavrou, since to do other than what Faulkner has done would obviously be to falsify what the experience of history has taught us (i.e., the mutiny did not end the war - in fact the war itself did not end wars, nor have the ideals of Christianity prevailed or the crucifixion itself, even though much of the world is Christian).

One may make point in reference to the use of the Gospel stories. A Fable does not clearly offer an allegorical presentation of the Passion. Allegory does not generally make specific references to the institution behind the action represented, but allows the parallels to make the connection. Were this simply a modern allegory of the Passion, the obvious parallels of action would certainly have been sufficient to draw the resemblance, but Faulkner goes much beyond this. There are many references to the original Christ throughout the novel. The Runner states at one point, in his usual ironic fashion, that the Corporal’s job is more difficult than Christ’s was.

“His prototype had only man’s natural propensity for evil to con tend with: this one faces all the scarlet and brazen impregnability of general staffs” [34, p. 56].

The old porter in admonishing the Runner to go and see the mysterious 13 men who preach pacifism tells him:

“-Just go and look at him.

-Him? - the Runner said. -So it's just one now?

-Wasn't it just one before? - the old porter said” [14, p.67].

The priest, after having warned the Corporal to “beware whom you mock by reading your own mortal's pride into Him” [14, p.363] reflects before his suicide upon the mercy of Christ.

“He was nailed there and he will forgive me” [14, p.370]. Even during the “last supper” scene one of the Corporal’s men refers to Christ, “Christ assoil us” [14, p.337], punning on the word, since the prisoners are talking about their becoming manure to enrich the soil of France.

One can hardly be confused as to the Corporal’s role within the frame of an allegory. He clearly is not Christ. Whatever symbolic reflections accrue to him by the actions he imitates is something else again. If the novel is read as an account of the Second Coming, the problem arises of explaining other relationships, such as the connection between the Corporal and the Marshall. One might also easily concede that if A Fable is a novel about the Second Coming of Christ, one hardly needs to employ all of the cumbersome machinery of the combined Gospel stories, plus the whole framework of the war. But in A Fable Faulkner has obviously gone out of his way to evoke similar patterns, even to the extent of wrapping a barbed wire crown of thorns around the Corporal’s head and other such “excesses” of similarity.

Another point to consider is why the Second Coming, if it is that, should be destined to end so far below the first, especially after its author had made a speech in Stockholm four years earlier which was practically a testament to man. Certainly one must concede to Faulkner that lie was aware of the differences as well as the resemblances between his novel and the Passion story.

If we consider that the resemblance, even a close and obvious resemblance, between a new work and one which has already become established as a key, or even the core structure of an institution (be it a religious or national or whatever institution) - does not of itself demand that the new work under consideration adhere to the ethical, moral, or metaphysical beliefs of the institution which the original focused upon; our critical perspective need not be hamstrung by these considerations. Allegory, to function as allegory must function on at least three of four possible levels. The story must be a literal story; it must establish parallel relationships between it and the original story upon which it is based (if it is based on a story); it must establish parallel relationships between it and the institution which lies behind the original story; and it must establish a final universal or metaphysical level on which it may be read [11].

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