Irving Howe 1954
Source: The Reporter, 14 September 1954. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Such books as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying gain their breadth of interest from Faulkner’s mastery in recording the modes and gestures of local behaviour; their larger meanings are always anchored in concrete incident and depend upon unforgettable images of human character.
During the past ten years, however, Faulkner has gradually been shaking himself loose from the inspired compulsions of his imaginary world. As his interest in the portraiture of individual character has lessened, he has turned to speculations about the nature of man - a dangerous subject for a writer who likes to dress up romantic platitudes about Honour, Courage and Endurance as philosophical universals. All too often Faulkner has come to rely upon the high-flown phrase instead of the precise description, and sometimes he has quite surrendered himself to the lure of high-falutin’ rhetoric.
His new novel A Fable [1] is a remarkable mixture of strength and weakness. Audacious in its choice of subject matter, which is nothing less than a vision of the Second Coming, A Fable is a difficult book. It is written not merely with Faulkner’s usual involuted time sequence but at a pitch of frenzy so unrelieved that one’s first, though not last, reaction is simple weariness. Nonetheless, anything coming from Faulkner’s pen merits respect and consideration; we do not have many like him.
A Regiment Has Had Enough: The setting is France, a few months before the end of the First World War. The troops are exhausted. At the front a corporal and his twelve men persuade their regiment to disobey an order to attack. For some time now this mutinous platoon has been spreading the secret word of peace not merely among the Allied troops but also, mysteriously, among the Germans; every private at the front knows of the corporal’s message, yet the officers are kept in almost total ignorance. Faulkner is extremely shrewd in observing the mute solidarity which binds enlisted men against their officers.
Once the regiment refuses to attack, the Germans in the facing trenches also drop their guns. In a few hours the front is quiet; the troops have made their own peace. Quickly the mutinous thirteen are thrown into prison, and the Allied and German staffs hold a hurried consultation, at which they decide that ordinary soldiers must not be allowed to conclude a war at their own will.
Meanwhile the French marshal who commands the Allied forces begins his investigation. In a remarkable conversation, this marshal - he combines elements of Foch, Pontius Pilate and the Grand Inquisitor - offers the corporal his freedom on condition he renounce his martyrdom, an offer which the corporal immediately rejects. Nor does the marshal really desire that the offer be accepted. Both men are driven by a sense of impersonal destiny, both feel that they are re-enacting a great drama. The corporal senses that the very principle of his existence requires a refusal of freedom, while the marshal knows that only if the corporal refuses can the principle for which he will be martyred receive its vindication.
A last supper is held in a jail cell; a Judas is revealed; a disciple named Piotr denies the corporal and later, weeping, falls before his feet; two women named Marthe and Marya wait patiently for the moment of agony; the corporal is thrust into a cell with two thieves and then shot between them.
This, in skeleton, is the main plot line of A Fable, and whenever Faulkner stays close to it he writes with grave economy and concentration. The brilliantly conceived Christ figure is an illiterate peasant who rarely speaks and then, happily, with none of the frenetic garrulousness that overcomes almost everyone else in the book. Faulkner has presented his Christ as a calm, strong, natural leader exerting his authority with placid self-command, a man entirely without dogma or theology or even visible religion and free from the vice of preaching - as Faulkner is not. Brought back in chains to face an inflamed mob, the corporal reveals ‘a face merely interested, attentive and calm, with something else in it which none of the others had: a comprehension, understanding, utterly free of compassion, as if he had already anticipated without censure or pity the uproar which rose and paced and followed the lorry as it sped on’. Perhaps the finest scene in the book is the last supper at which the dirty, ignorant, unexalted mutineers fumble for the words of a grace.
Unfortunately, Faulkner has not been content to stay with his simple story. Whether from rhetorical self-indulgence, a misconceived desire to render things profound, or a failure to grasp the requirements of the fable, he has chosen to weave several subplots into the book. These subplots vary from humorous byplay to rather cheap theatrical fireworks, and in their sum they seriously mar the book. Faulkner, it would seem, was unable to decide whether he was writing a novel or a bare fable, and the result is an incongruous mixture of the two genres, a splendidly written fable that is cluttered and fretted with structural complexities appropriate only to a novel.
The Willingness to Endure: But what is the deeper intention behind the book? Why has Faulkner abandoned his usual settings and turned to a re-enactment of Christ’s agony in the trenches of the First World War?
Though Faulkner could hardly have intended it, the book has a somewhat startling political significance. The idea of fraternisation, which only such extreme radicals as Karl Liebknecht were advocating in 1917 and 1918, is here implicitly accepted as the word of a new Christ. When Faulkner shows British and German artillery joining to shell soldiers who have begun to fraternise in No Man’s Land, one is reminded - no matter how odd the comparison may seem - of such radical war novelists as Henri Barbusse. Perhaps all that can legitimately be said on this score is that Faulkner’s vision of Christian fraternity is here so uncompromising as to bring him close to the traditional radical treatment of the First World War.
Far more important is Faulkner’s effort to make his fable into a statement of moral significance. I am not convinced that the book contains a fully coherent view of things, though its subject obviously allows the largest possibilities for philosophical implication. To the degree that such implication is actually present and not wished upon the novel by theologising literary critics, it surely comes to one of the most desperate and radically bleak visions of human experience that any novelist in our time has advanced. The very idea of a re-enactment is itself utterly desperate. To conceive of a Second Coming which is essentially a repetition of the original agony; to see the Christ figure again scorned by the crowds, again betrayed and deserted by his followers, again crushed by the state; and most terrible of all, to conceive of a Christ who knows he is doomed, who offers neither hope nor a belief in the idea of hope - all this, if not heresy or even blasphemy, implies a vision of despair that completely undercuts the assumptions of both our liberal culture and of Christianity itself. For Faulkner, Christ now seems to signify the Crucifixion without the Redemption; or perhaps it is that the Crucifixion has become a Redemption.
The central figures of A Fable see themselves as actors in a pre-arranged drama, what Faulkner calls a ‘pageant-rite’. It is the nature of a rite that it repeats its fundamental rhythms. So that despite its furious assaults of language, the book is fundamentally static, its fatalism of conception making it into a series of set pieces for an action already known and determined, an action without possibility for novelty or transcendence.
What remains? Only the gesture of resistance, the willingness to endure, the integrity of fearlessness. On one of the few times the corporal permits himself a moral generalisation it is simply to remark: ‘Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing worth it.’
Honour and Bravery? This ethic of resistance seems to be vastly impressive, and it would be still more impressive if it were not compromised by Faulkner’s fondness for swollen apostrophes to military derring-do. The conflict between a romantic celebration of honour and a mature reliance upon integrity has always troubled his work, but never in so damaging a way. Had he deliberately tried, Faulkner could have found no better way of exposing the essential triviality of all his talk about Honour and Bravery than by juxtaposing it to the rhythm of the Passion. Nor is there much evidence in A Fable that this contrast is deliberate or fully understood by him.
Finally, the problem of style. Whatever the justification for Faulkner’s serpentine sentences, tortured syntax and verbal barbarisms in his earlier books, I can see none for them here, where everything cries out for restraint, for quietness and relaxation and poise. But by now Faulkner has become intoxicated by his lust for language; he has become the victim of his grating screeching rhythms, which spin out mechanically whether there is need for them or not, and he employs such dead and ugly phrases as ‘moiling diastole of motes’ with an air of nonchalance more depressing than if it were bravado. Often, reading A Fable, we feel that Faulkner is presenting not an impression of what is happening, but a cascade of rumination about something that might, if we could only be sure, be happening behind the screen of his language. If he would only get out of his own way!
A Fable is likely to stimulate vast quantities of literary exegesis and solemn piety. (The publishers proclaim it as nothing less than a classic.) Efforts will be made to assimilate the book to Christian dogma, ingenuities expended in working up comparisons with the New Testament. Without wishing to deny that A Fable has pages and even sections that only a genius could have written, I would simply like to record the opinion, as a kind of anticipatory dissent, that seldom before in American literature, and perhaps only in the case of Melville, have we had so dramatic an example of a virtuoso undone by his virtuosity.
1. William Faulkner, A Fable, Random House, New York, 1954.