Fable Attraction

(The Faulkner Project) A Fable by William Faulkner.  Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 665-1072.  ***

A Fable is an odd book in the Faulkner universe.  It’s the longest of his novels; it’s always sat there on the shelf looking imposing beside such shorter masterpieces as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.  It’s not the only book not set in Mississippi, but might be the only one not set in the American South, though it does pay a 100 page visit in the middle.  It has by far the longest period of composition; at the end he writes, “December 1944/Oxford—New York—Princeton/November 1953.”  He wrote most of his work, including the truly great novels, at a kind of white heat, while with this book he said he was writing more slowly, “weighing every word” (though there are sections where he didn’t weigh the words enough).

I would also guess that this is the only of his novels based on someone else’s idea.  He was in Hollywood when one of his fellow screenwriters suggested a screenplay in which the unknown soldier in World War I was Jesus Christ, come back to earth to give humanity one last chance.  As far as I know, the screenplay was never written.  But Faulkner was struck by the idea, and it stayed with him for years.

This is the Faulkner novel which I read most reluctantly, and which I was half-dreading the whole time I moved through his work.  I had read on various occasions that it was his major failure, though it won the Pulitzer Prize (the judges may just have been embarrassed that this man who had recently won the Nobel Prize had never won a Pulitzer).  It was said to be ponderous and to wander for long sections pointlessly.  I never saw any reason to pick it up, but if I was going to read all of Faulkner, I had to.  There were times in recent days when I was forcing myself to read it, just trying to get through.

Faulkner was not fundamentally a writer of ideas.  There are such creatures in the world, and some of them are excellent writers, but Faulkner was a writer of instinct and intuition, who worked from images, most famously that of Caddy up in the tree with her dirty drawers, looking in the window to see her grandmother’s funeral.  The whole of The Sound and the Fury expounds on that image.  And there’s not an idea in that whole book; it’s all story, like As I Lay Dying.  Absalom, Absalom! has some ideas, but they’re expressed by characters telling the story, and their function is to characterize the people, not convince the reader.

Faulkner’s great talent was to drop into the middle of some situation and make a story out of it, something as simple as “Spotted Horses,” where a bunch of country people are bilked out of their money by a fast-talking guy who sells them horses they can never tame.  Faulkner creates a whole world out of that simple story, and in a way it was the basis of what became a trilogy.  He had an incredibly inventive mind, to a fault; where he sometimes gets off track and by spinning out a story that isn’t a vital part of the larger narrative.  I felt that way about the Eula Varner story in The Hamlet.  It took us away from the Snopes family (though she eventually married into it).  But Faulkner couldn’t resist telling it.

Faulkner wasn’t a fabulist in the sense that this story requires.  He’s taking up an age-old story, one that is 2,000 years old and that recurs periodically through human history.  People who live in the spirit of Christ are often crucified, one way or another.  This is the kind of story that Hawthorne would have written well; he liked those tableau-like scenes, where some simple action was taking place and he would wring all the meaning from it.  In a way Hawthorne’s allegorical method is behind all of American literature, certainly through Melville and on into the twentieth century writers who were influenced by him, including Faulkner.  But in Faulkner those tableau-like scenes (like Caddy in the tree) were part of a larger story, and could seem almost incidental.  Faulkner didn’t wring them for meaning.

This wasn’t really Faulkner’s story; it was more like something he might have done for Hollywood, where he did plenty of serviceable work.  And though by the end—the last hundred pages or so, when the Christ figure actually appears—he does an amazing job of paralleling the age-old story, and putting it in a modern context, I’m wondering how many readers are still around.  We get bogged down in the early passages, especially the opening, and wonders where the hell we’re going.

That was especially true in one of the most successful sections of the novel, the story of some men stealing a three-legged racehorse and barnstorming racetracks all over the southeastern United States.  That section is like The Bear in Go Down, Moses; it could easily be printed by itself, and was probably my favorite single section of the book.  At the same time, you’re wondering what this has to do with a Christ story set in World War I, and the answer is, not much.

The other thing that is a bad sign—and this happens more and more in the later work—is when Faulkner begins to talk about the big ideas, the things he brought up in his famous Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”  All those things are what great literature is about, I agree.  But the whole thing is to show them happening and not mention them by name.  The young William Faulkner did that superbly.  The older man, for some reason, sometimes fell into the laziness of naming the emotions.  When he does that, we’re in trouble.  There are passages in this novel that actually echo, almost word for word, that speech.  I don’t know whether he wrote them before or after.  But either way, it’s Faulkner proselytizing, and that isn’t what he does best, or even particularly well.  I found these passages embarrassing.

All of this raises the subject of Faulkner and religion, a subject worthy of a whole book (which someone has probably written).  He is not an overtly religious writer, and there’s nowhere in his work, not even in this book, where you can pin down how he felt about religion.  He does begin each chapter with an image of a cross, and seems to know the Bible inside and out; he has the religious education that Southerners seem to inherit in their bones.  He’s obviously not conventionally religious (no one who reads the rest of his work would accuse him of that).  But in this book he expresses what I would call a religious view.  It’s notoriously easy to see ones own feelings in whatever you’re reading, and I may be doing that.  But I think expressing these feelings was the point of this book.

He seems to be saying that the conventional soldiers, the ones who were fighting in the trenches (this war that was notoriously brutal for the way it was fought) had no particular interest in fighting and had nothing against the men on the other side.  When someone addressed that feeling—the corporal in this book who represents Christ, or the spirit of Christ—they’re willing to go along with him and call the fighting off.   It’s the higher-ups, because of economic interest, or because of their own fame and self-image, who want the war to go on.  They’re willing to sacrifice the men, even to the point of executing those who want to stop fighting.

Faulkner expresses this view about a war that, when he was younger, he tried to enlist in.  He fortunately didn’t make it.  I assume his views changed through the years.  At least that’s the way I see A Fable.

As I’ve said before: this isn’t great, but it’s still Faulkner.

I look forward to getting back to Yoknapatawpha County.  In the face of some of these military men, the Snopes family looks exemplary.