SOURCE: Bassett, John E. “A Fable: Faulkner's Revision of Filial Conflict.” Renascence 40, no. 1 (fall 1987): 15-29.

[In the following essay, Bassett examines the role of A Fable in Faulkner's canon.]

A Fable is a troublesome work. Written over a ten-year period, it is essential to understanding Faulkner's intellectual and artistic identity after 1940; but it inspires less interest and commentary than his other big novels. Partly due to its being outside the Yoknapatawpha saga that so involves critics with particular novels and with the relationships between novels, such neglect is also due to internal problems limiting its appeal. In 1966 Michael Millgate wrote that in this “sluggish” work, “Faulkner's writing is … denuded of much of that verbal and metaphorical richness, poetic in quality, vigorous in movement, which marks alike the dialogue and the continuous prose of his novels of the ‘thirties’ and early ‘forties’” (232). Cleanth Brooks has more recently defined the novel's weakness as an uncertainty of mode, not so much a failure of theme or “what” the book means but indecision over “how” it is supposed to mean. Ostensibly an allegory of sorts, Brooks argues, A Fable shifts between realism, allegory, and fable without clear signals to the reader of changing relationships between episodes and their thematic significance (235-50).

Both criticisms are valid, even though over the years Heinrich Straumann, Keen Butterworth, and others have skillfully defended the novel. Arguments for taste rarely persuade anyone but the writer, and it is unlikely more will read A Fable in the 1990s than did in the 1970s. It does, however, reveal patterns and motifs and conflicts from other novels transformed in new ways as they are moved out of Yoknapatawpha County. In a sense elaborate defenses of A Fable are attempts to re-center it in the canon, to explain its similarities to and relationships with the major novels, whose worth is established. Such defenses thereby justify the career as an even larger, more inclusive whole, and Faulkner as a writer able to work in yet another mode, one whose greatness did not flag in the twilight of his life.

Such arguments are not my concern here, though they do reflect the continuing problematic of the late Faulkner—prolific but not as profound, a writer whose difficult style seems at times to obfuscate otherwise clear meanings rather than enrich complex situations. In the late novels he begins to sentimentalize conflicts as he had not earlier. Between The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! deep personal concerns were interwoven with a social fabric and with consideration of the significance of verbal fictions themselves. Faulkner's next two novels signaled changes in his career. The Wild Palms is as pessimistic as Absalom, Absalom!; and if grief over the end of his affair with Meta Carpenter and over the nature of his home life lies behind the novel, the pessimism was a personal statement. In two concluding scenes prison doors clang shut on men whose main action has been a thrust for freedom; but in spite of the determinism in the book's images and structure, Faulkner insists that the characters' fortunes are also a product of free will and a chosen resignation. Harry chooses imprisonment over death, grief over nothingness, suffering over suicide. His sexual fantasy exploded, he will not die like Quentin. Nor will he become schizophrenic like Darl, or furiously chase his own death like Joe Christmas. Like a Sartrean character he accepts his closed world, although with a less clear notion of possibilities for engagement within that world. In all its bleakness, the novel implies—more confidently than The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, or Absalom, Absalom!—the existence of an order within which man can make choices and endure. Endurance in the face of grief becomes the explicit Faulknerian theme.

The Unvanquished goes in a different direction. It not only suggests the possibility of choice and will, but of progress, triumph over one's personal and social past, and hope. Although the book is a collection of magazine stories, it does represent one dimension of Faulkner's mind in the mid-1930s, especially when set next to Absalom, Absalom! Like Absalom it deals with the end of the old order but not as tragedy. The South and the Civil War are still romantic in the first tales, and brutal in the middle tales. The final story makes the South progressive. No longer is Faulkner's vision apocalyptic; no longer does he radically probe dislocations in his own world. The Unvanquished is an apology and a moral statement. It is not an agrarian defense of the values of the Old South from the perspective of the 1930s, for the novel repudiates the code of John Sartoris and replaces it with that of his son; but it does vindicate the South from the perspective of 1860. The derringdo of Colonel John is admirable, even in flight. The murder of carpetbaggers helping blacks to vote is not condoned, but rendered less significant than the romantic adventures of Drusilla and Sartoris. The relationship between little Bayard and his black pal is sincere and anticipates the relationship between Chick Mallison and Aleck Sander in Intruder in the Dust. Intruder and The Unvanquished, a decade apart, dramatize changes in the order of the South and the education of a young man in that age of change. Both optimistically assert the South's capacity to change, to learn, to reduce man's cruelty to man. Intruder [Intruder in the Dust] achieves some of its complexity from a tension between the voices of Gavin Stevens and Chick. The Unvanquished, in its simple narration by one sympathetic character, achieves its only similar tension between present and past, and the resolution of that is facile, hardly introduced until already resolved.

Significantly Faulkner chooses as his promising youth the same cantankerous Bayard Sartoris who ten years earlier in Sartoris fought such changes as the automobile and modern medicine and seems identified with a dead past. Faulkner is not, it seems, by this allusion undercutting his ostensible meaning in The Unvanquished; but neither is he unaware of the connection. Bayard's namesake and grandson, of course, is the alienated melancholic of Sartoris who cannot adjust to his own world and furiously moves toward his own death. He is of a piece with Quentin Compson. Bayard in The Unvanquished, though literally the grandfather as a younger person, is in other ways a rewriting of the grandson. Both grow up in wars that alter their world. One becomes self-destructive; the other not only eschews violence but reshapes his world in so doing. He becomes an embarrassment to the Drusillas of the South, perhaps, but the novel implies that the future is not with them.

Not only does Bayard survive and prevail but he does so over the father. It is rare in Faulkner's fiction when the recurring pattern of weak fathers, betraying fathers, absent fathers, and family conflict culminates in successful assertion by the son. But Bayard is also the first of a new kind of youth in Faulkner's fiction, a group that includes Bayard, the corporal, Chick, and Lucius, and replaces as it overlaps the Bayard-Quentin-Isaac group. The new young man, of course, is created by an older Faulkner, one whose most profound inner conflicts are not so likely to be embodied in a youth. The surface particulars of these youth, in fact, are often borrowed from younger relatives and friends of the period, and Faulkner's own self seems more deeply embedded in a Gavin Stevens. So although the young are paradigmatic structurally with the earlier youth they are less troubled and they are more sentimentalized.

Faulkner does not suddenly become an optimistic and sentimental writer. The Unvanquished is composed perhaps as a relief from the experience of writing Absalom. The Wild Palms is bleak enough. The Hamlet is hardly encouraging about stopping Snopesism and Go Down, Moses despite Ike's idealism is not promising about the future. The Hamlet, however, does suggest a set of values in opposition to Snopesism and thereby affirms a natural and moral order that can exist and a version of history at least unfavorable to the class represented by Snopes. Go Down, Moses does privilege certain kinds of traditions, rituals, and conventions that not only order life but can provide a means for change. By the time Intruder justifies a gradualism in racial progress it fits into a social/historical model that Faulkner is developing but that was not so apparent in the early novels.

A Fable is the book Faulkner begins a year and a half after completing Go Down, Moses. Certain contextual factors are significant. The novel was conceived at a time of great personal pessimism. Secondly, the war itself, and America's involvement, helped determine the choice of subject matter—which is that other war, the time of a traumatic period in Faulkner's personal life. Faulkner's own failure to be a participant in the war and the sense of personal loss he attached to the war years are relevant, as is also his own sense of being a tired, aging writer. The novel itself began as a shorter story and then grew as he elaborated its implications. The seminal image was the corporal leading a mutiny in the trenches. But A Fable also seems to have been more planned, thematically, than his earlier novels. Despite Butterworth's contention to the contrary the abstract issues seem to direct the growth of the book more than character and story and situation do. The Christian parallels were as original to the novel's conception as the corporal's act.

Perhaps the model of Joyce lay behind Faulkner's plan. Joyce had a great impact on Faulkner in the 1920s, and his use of the Homeric framework in Ulysses may have set an example for Faulkner's decision to employ the myth of the cross. But whereas Joyce's novel is full of meanings requiring no connection to the story of Odysseus, Faulkner's fable cannot be divorced from the story of Jesus (See Ziolkowski, and Brooks 414-16). The parallels and associations are asserted and re-asserted throughout. Faulkner did not intend for the book to be read consistently in an allegorical or analogical way; but then few allegories work by means of systematic allusions to an older story. Parodies do, but A Fable is not really a parody or burlesque. Nor does it develop by means of systematic conflict between signifiers that represent ideological or moral abstractions. Abstractions are mystified not analyzed. The Christ story offers a cultural shorthand that encourages the reader to globalize the act of rebellion at the center of the text; and to Faulkner it is a means to universalize a series of thematic statements about man and men, grief and endurance, idealism and rapacity, war and peace.

There are inconsistencies, however, in the ways a reader is guided to respond to the Christian framework and to individual episodes. These result from changes in Faulkner's conception of his book over the many years during which he wrote it, as well as from basic limitations in Faulkner's vision and handling of social themes.

Faulkner originally conceived the story in 1943 as a movie script in Hollywood, with the assistance of William Bacher and Henry Hathaway. Seeing it also as a possible short story, he wrote to Harold Ober: “It is a fable, an indictment of war perhaps, and for that reason may not be acceptable now” (Blotner, 178). It originated in the planned mutiny borrowed from Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel Paths of Glory and also in a systematic association of a series of events with the story of Jesus “through the Three Temptations, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection” (179). Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and the story of “The Unknown Soldier” were also influential (Meriwether, 178).

The earliest version, therefore, includes an anti-war theme, with Christian-humanistic parallels, drafted during World War II and during a difficult period in Faulkner's personal life. He was, however, unable to bring the work to closure; and as he developed it into a novel he took the story in a different direction. By then, however, the war had been won, prosperity had returned, his own life had settled somewhat; and during the final years of composition he was even a famous and successful Nobel Prize winner, one whose public speeches came from the same cloth as portions of the large novel.

In later years Faulkner did say that A Fable is not a pacifist novel; and despite numerous explications to the contrary one must conclude he was sincere and in certain ways correct. The final vision of the novel is markedly more conservative than its origins and of a piece with Intruder in the Dust, composed about the same time. It is similar to Go Down, Moses in its critical depiction of a certain kind of radical idealism, set against an institutional realism. Removed from the representational world close to Faulkner himself, however, it does not probe the relationships of real people to their world. It does not explore the kinds of restrictions and limitations found in the world of Lucas Beauchamp and Rider, or the process of grappling with an unjust society as Ike McCaslin does, no matter how ineffectually. The issues are givens; and if the characters in A Fable do at times take on vividness, they are still stripped of environments, motivations, influences, and credible relationships. This might not be a weakness in allegory or parable, where systematic analysis governs textual conflict; it is in A Fable, however, where signs have no consistent code within which they signify.

In A Fable the corporal's act of rebellion does not come from reading commissary ledgers or from fear at facing change or a too complicated reality. It does not grow out of political education or directly out of an act against the father, whom he does not know until the end. It is simply a given—a platoon carefully plans and implements a stoppage of the war, like Hawthorne opening a tale with one of his “what if's” and then tracing the consequences. But the consequences in A Fable are not psychological; they are tactical, political, and social. Faulkner essentially begins by announcing, topically, “Let us consider war,” as in Intruder he in a sense said, “Let us consider racial injustice.” This period of his career is marked by a conscious decision to open up unaskable questions. In the novels between The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner had confronted previously unapproachable matters, personal and internal. But in A Fable, for example, there was a more conscious decision to face social issues on the part of a writer politically and ideologically unsophisticated, and a corresponding retreat to conservatism and self-justification.

The failure of intellect beneath the novel emerges most clearly in Faulkner's handling of “Man” and men, or persons, or the mass. It is a commonplace of Faulkner criticism that he valued individuals, distrusted and disliked men in a mass or a mob or a government. What better way to establish him in a tradition going back to Twain and Emerson! It is another commonplace that his Calvinistic view of human nature, linking him to Hawthorne and Melville among others, divorces him from the current of romantic individualism and, consequently, the doomed and estranged individuals of his world. In his major novels the tragic and pathetic and comic and foolish ambitions and drives of “man” are embodied in characters—Sutpen, Compson, McCaslin, Hightower—through a sympathetic bonding with the author no matter how ironic their presentation. But in A Fable all of that yields to a mystified abstraction “Man,” the subject of disquisitions by the old General, Mama Bidet, and others, but never more than a straw man allowing Faulkner to play Billy Budd with the theme of world war.

Although war, like the corporal's rebellion, seems to be a given in the book, Faulkner does provide a cynical scenario of an international officer class propagating and perpetuating warfare for interests neither nationalistic nor patriotic. Faulkner does not literally explain war in this way, but the general message is repeated often so as to clarify Faulkner's purpose. The scenes of the generals at Chaulnesmont, the murder of Gragnon, the conversations between the Old General and both the corporal and the Quartermaster General—all reinforce the suggestion of a self-interested extra-national military controlling and manipulating warfare with utter disregard for persons. Nor is there reason to discount the German general's assertion that ‘It's the politicians, the civilian imbeciles who compel us every generation to have to rectify the blunders of their damned international horsetrading—’ (303). He is the most coldly vicious and cruel of all, but introduced by Faulkner not only for the narrative purpose of dramatizing international collusion but also for the thematic purpose of hyperbolizing the anti-war thrust of the book. The other generals quiet him not because of his brusque arrogance but because he nakedly articulates the truth of their own behavior and also implies that they may not have total control over the starting and stopping of wars. He must be made to apologize: ‘I forgot myself for a moment. You will please to pardon it’ (303). By the time he has finished assaulting the British and Americans for being such amateur soldiers he is ready for “formal ratification” of the agreement. But, of course, the more sophisticated, wily Old General can deny the need or even creation of any such pact:

“What agreement?” the old general said. “Do we need an agreement? Has anyone missed one?—The port is with you, General,” he said to Briton. “Fill and pass.”

(309)

The generals did not originate war any more than millionaires originated capitalism. War “created us,” as Bidet says (54). This war was due more to the board chairmen

and the others still who outnumbered even these: the politicians, the lobbyists, the owners and publishers of newspapers and the ordained ministers of churches … which control by coercion or cajolery man's morals and actions and all his mass-value for affirmation or negation. …

(232)

The generals simply “preside” over the ritual and establish the protocol for executing man's folly.

If man were to eliminate the one word “Fatherland” from his vocabulary, says Mama Bidet (54), he would destroy not the cause of wars but the basis for the sentimental enlistment of millions of persons in wars. What is threatened by the corporal's action, in which no officers or NCO's have been allowed to participate, is the generals' power to govern war once it has started. The stoppage of war is not a problem, but the possibility that people may learn their ability to stop war is dangerous.

This is the primary thrust of the novel—a situational conflict as one-sided and transparent as that of the most ingenuous proletarian novel: an insensitive oppressor class which acts for its own self-aggrandizement and uses the working class as a functionary to make attacks, for example, that must fail and in which they must be destroyed. They are abstractions, functions, but then so are the generals themselves.

Such a story would be bleak but simplistic. In developing it later Faulkner did not elaborate on the dialectic of idealism and the real world; rather he shifted the conflict and blurred the issues. First, he provided backgrounds and sketches for a series of major and minor characters, though not always clearly relevant to their function in the main narrative. Second, he composed a series of dialogues between spokesmen of the status quo or the establishment and characters whose motivations, whether narcissistic or altruistic, are in conflict with the goals of the generals. Third, he added suicidal actions that ensue from such oppositions. Fourth, he interpolated the story of the three-legged racehorse. Fifth, he mystified the concept “Man” and the opposed concept of the mass or crowd. Consequently he patronized the rebellion that was the genesis of the story. Significant actions of people are framed in an opposition between Man and men. “Man” is then objectified so that his eternal, global, enduring qualities can be described in opposition to frail, imperfect, venal real men as observed in masses and crowds. What is then valued, paradoxically, is what is abstract and impersonal; what is reduced are flesh and blood individual persons.

The confusion reflects a similar confusion in one strand of Southern thought manifested in the Fugitive-Agrarian-Formalist tradition. The enemy is a northern-industrialist-scientific-unionized-institutional system, which machine-like, replaces the organically related community of individuals with an impersonal machine. But to oppose it one cannot offer an Emersonian individual or a Puritan democracy, those New England programs. Rather, what is offered is a kind of feudal hierarchy in which persons are defined by roles, by classes, by functions, and in which an intellectual or aesthetic elite determines taste and preserves a set of abstract values. In A Fable Faulkner presents the hierarchy satirically; but finally the generals' dominance is left unchecked and unreversed. The maimed runner's futile gesture at the end, and the old spirit's recognition of its significance, are maudlin.

By the end every symbolic person and action set against the establishment, except the corporal, has been undermined. Faulkner has equivocated on the corporal so that only his martyrdom has meaning and those to whom it has meaning have little if any impact. The dialogue between him and the Old General is hardly that, hardly a dialectic between the ideal and the real, for the General articulates all the arguments, positions all the characters, determines the rules and therefore the outcome. Finally it is his paternalistic vision that governs the outcome of the novel: Man in his folly, greed and endurance will prevail, but he will always be controlled by men such as the general. Regardless of the somber tone, Christian parallels, and cosmic images, the scene smacks too much of a piqued father beseeching his wayward son to come home to the family business or else be disowned. Not only can the corporal be openly acknowledged as the son—as Charles Bon was not—but he can have half the power and his own life to boot.

So it is “Man” that will prevail, not persons. Persons are treated in two ways. They are depersonalized masses or mobs presented with the same contempt Mark Twain displayed in satirizing the lynch mob cringing in the shadow of Colonel Sherburn. They are mobs moving “like a cast of spent flotsam,” or “a herd of western cattle” (Fable, 132) or an ocean wave. They scream ignorantly for the corporal's head. They pay homage on parade to the dead Field Marshal, mouthing all the patriotic conventions, oblivious to the truth about war. They are a blind, undirected force. Secondly, in a series of individuals, men's attempts to achieve something in opposition to the practical expediency and power politics of the generals are dismissed or even ridiculed. There is General Gragnon who might be described as Horatio Alger in a French uniform. An orphan, he devotes his life to the military and its codes. His naive faith is in the army itself and he will not be disabused of his ideal. His cynical friend and corps commander Lallemont tries to proselytize him into the institutional church of the officer class, in which neither victory nor glory nor personal record is as important as unified military control of man's “seething spiritless mass” (30). Mama Bidet, another orphan made god, reminds Gragnon that the death of three or four thousand men is insignificant, that success is not victory, that “we” is not France. Signals to the reader are mixed at this point, since Gragnon, the putative butcher of his rebels, is the naif against unsympathetic critics. In one sense, though, Gragnon is paired with David Levine—who joins the war out of noble patriotic idealism, not for narcissistic glory; who is mama's boy, not an orphan; who takes his own life when he learns blank ammunition was fired at German planes (whereas Gragnon forces himself into a position where his life must be taken).

Levine, Faulkner said, was one of the trinity of conscience in the book, the others being the Quartermaster General and the Runner (Gwynn, 62):

The one that said, This is dreadful, terrible, and I won't face it even at the cost of my life—that was the British aviator. The Old General who said, This is terrible but we can bear it. The third one, the battalion Runner who said, This is dreadful, I won't stand it, I'll do something about it.

So much for conscience. Levine is as youthfully naive as Cadet Lowe in Soldiers' Pay. The Quartermaster General is that young Norman who worshipped his classmate at St. Cyr as the golden boy who would one day save France. His life seems lived in the pursuit of the false Messiah, unless one accepts the Old General's view of mankind, in which case the Quartermaster General is another case of arrested development. The runner certainly presents an example of misinterpreting the sign, for in emulating the corporal's mutiny that restored his faith in mankind he leads hundreds of men to a meaningless death. All three may be variations on the theme of Ike McCaslin, but none provides a serious opposition in the book's dialectic to the generals, as unsympathetic as they may be.

Such opposition is found only in the corporal. He is not myopic like Levine, not the hero-worshipper like the Norman, not the impulsive alienated romantic like the Runner. Nor is he prone to the self-centered obsessions of the sentry and Gragnon. He is a shrewd organizational planner who not only orchestrates an international mutiny but maintains its secrecy. He does not respect people, but is a good judge of men and situations. He enters his cause with no foolish ideals or goals, but understands what can and cannot be achieved through mutiny. Each in Faulkner's trinity of conscience falls far short of him in one way or another. Unlike the sentry, who says “we” for the first time only in a ridiculously suicidal attachment to the Runner's mutiny, the corporal has begun his course as one of a group. When tempted to betray them, as Polchek had betrayed him, his response is “There are still ten” (352), as if the group itself not the ideal motivates him. Unlike Gragnon he cares not about the personal record, the individual glory or shame. All of the sub-plots, that is, are stories of obviously flawed individuals, even types that seem created and developed to examine the weaknesses in real-life variations on the mystified, somewhat unreal corporal. Unlike those characters, who are given concrete recognizable pasts and even motivations, the corporal is kept on a separate plane. The schematic parallels with Jesus are Faulkner's primary means of doing that, along with the tendency of others to connect him with Christ. There is also Captain Middleton's confusion of him with Brzewski, the Pennsylvania coal miner who died of the flu, and another confusion of him with Boggan, the Briton who died at Mons in 1914 (276-79).

The separate plan of the corporal is achieved primarily through absences. He is never on stage during the action, except as an undifferentiated member of the gang of thirteen. He is present only in dialogues with the general and the priest. He is given very little background. Although the circumstances of his birth are described by Marthe and Mary, nothing therein contributes to his consciousness or personality. Education, values, personal relationships—none of these are clarified as they are for the Runner or Gragnon or Levine. The corporal is mystified, as Flem Snopes is in The Hamlet, because he is absent. Finally, there is the scene with the priest, his father's lackey, whose reaction to the corporal is as impulsive and wrongheaded as that of the Runner. He kills himself with a bayonet wound in the side, not from loss of faith but in his own furious attempt to imitate the death of Christ. Like the Runner, the priest thinks that mimetic action, iconic repetition of the model, fulfills meaning. The potential significance of the corporal's mutiny, however, lies not in its replication by other individuals and regiments in other situations and wars throughout time, but rather in its syntagmatic effect on a war at a particular time. It is this, not man's eternal belief in making such attempts, that the generals must eliminate.

In the end this is what Faulkner himself does and thereby changes the course of the novel. He cannot or will not explore the ramifications of the situation he has originally established. At least the frames he builds around that situation prevent it from expanding in certain directions. The original conflict is not—as the Old General, Faulkner, and most critics assert—between the “esoteric realm” and “mundane earth” (348). It is between a subversive international group of enlisted men and a powerful international group of generals; between forces of war and forces against war; between one class and another. The story is bleak because it leads to death and failure of the mutiny to have any real impact; the good guys lose. It is almost a conventional proletarian novel without a Marxist view of history. Except in what the soldiers oppose, there is no simplistic idealism behind their rebellion, only unified opposition to their exploitation as functionaries in a war neither originally in their interest nor now being fought in their interest. No attention is even paid to their ideals, only to their procedures in gaining widespread support.

In the expanded novel, the central class conflict is blurred by the addition of all the subplots and personal sketches. The corporal, by means of his scarce presence, becomes more mystified—even when present he says almost nothing—as all those other characters are presented. As a consequence of deploying in Quartermaster General, Levine, the Runner, and others, Faulkner shifts the conflict to one between an impractical, esoteric, short-sighted idealism and practical power politics, the perspective of the Old General. The debate between father and son, therefore, is not a debate but a monologue by the father against not what the corporal represents but what all of those other characters represent. In the last account the Old General, like Gavin Stevens, can articulate the final vision of a novel even as he is presented ironically. The corporal, instead of signifying a material alternative to the warfare state, now has performed a symbolic action. He is allowed a symbolic triumph because it is no longer a material threat. By implying that the Runner's gesture at the parade, the corporal's reinterment, Pyotr's return to the prison, and so forth, all signify the human spirit, man's endurance even in his folly, Faulkner strips the corporal of the defeat of the original story and grants him a victory of sorts as he articulates a very conservative position.

Why? Partly because of Faulkner's changed condition when writing the novel; partly because his original tale ran counter to his basic political assumptions and ideology; partly because the original story was naively simplistic in its conflict, and he adopted his usual strategy of multiple perspectives or intersecting narratives to explore theme. In A Fable, however, the multiple perspectives do not unfold the complexity and ambiguity of a central situation, rather they replace and undermine that central situation. Finally, the paternal-filial dimension of the conflict is important. Butterworth argues that the father-son relationship between the Old General and the corporal seems less important than what they stand for thematically; that it is tacked on to elaborate the Christian analogy in which the General can be both God and Satan, the corporal both the son and the “spirit of man,” and to allow Faulkner to chant his own “square deific.” The recurrence of that pattern of familial conflict and paternal betrayal, however, so crucial to Faulkner's early fiction and so tied up with memories from the Great War, is noteworthy. The attempt to stop war—death—by a young man who has lost both parents and is raised by a sister (with a retarded sibling nearby), recalls Quentin Compson's attempt to stop time, change, birth and death. The mother has died rather than actually betraying or failing as mother, and the father is not a weak alcoholic but a powerful man. Having deserted the family years before, he now stands ready to approve the son's death. The tone and underlying theme of his conversation with the son are reminiscent of the conversations between Mr. Compson and his eldest son, as well as those between Cass Edmonds and Ike McCaslin—practical avuncular advice to the apocalyptically misled son. In a series of novels Faulkner wrote after the death of his own father in 1932 the role of the father, and father-son conflict, radically change as the aging Faulkner identifies more closely with father-figures than with son-figures. Absalom, Absalom! is the first novel with a strong father and it foregrounds the issue of paternal betrayal more than sibling conflict. It includes, however, the violent death of the father as a culmination of a series of betrayals, and complements As I Lay Dying, which ends with burial of the mother. Each terminates, thereby, that central early theme of parental betrayal. In The Unvanquished, written along with Absalom, the son supplants the father, not so much through direct conflict as through succession of values. Yet by refusing to avenge the father's death Bayard, in the codes of his world, has also repudiated the father. It is the only Faulkner novel in which the conflict is resolved comically and is transitional in Faulkner's career (afterwards parental relationships are different). Faulkner, of course, was literally a father by then, rather than primarily a son, and if Jill presented fewer problems to him psychologically in the 1940s than his own parents had long before, it is still not surprising that the novels after 1940 depend somewhat on both experiences.

In part they reflect a defensive reaction against parental involvement. Ike McCaslin has three fathers—one dead, another dying, a third turned into his own heir. Conversely, by deliberate decision, he is never a father but “uncle to half a county and father to none.” Faulkner's most fully developed character in the late novels is Gavin Stevens, and although in Knight's Gambit he marries a widow and accepts two step-children, he is basically a bachelor, avuncular and celibate. The uncle-nephew relationship with Chick and the quasi-uncle-niece relationship with Linda are safer than fatherhood. That may lead to having an irresponsible and selfish wife cause the death of your child, as in Requiem for a Nun, or to the death of the purported father as in The Mansion, or to the sadness of the father whose son has killed a brother as in Intruder in the Dust, or to rebellion of the son against the betraying father, as in both Absalom and A Fable. As in Absalom the deserted son—again a strange foreigner—appears demanding his due. As in Absalom he is killed on authority of the father, and in accordance with the fundamental codes and rules of the order and power structure which the father represents. In Absalom, however, the order collapses and its errors are laid bare. In A Fable, the order's errors are bared, but the power structure continues. The alienated artist of Absalom, agonizing at the loss of his world and community, has been replaced by the acquiescent artist, part of the establishment itself. He accepts the necessary evils of the world, patronizingly mystifying a spirit of man to combat them, and centering in his big novel abstract and sterile conflicts between ideal and real, man and men, rather than socially contextualized conflicts of interesting fictional characters in a fictive world that is sympathetically bound to the author himself. Similarly the alienated son has been replaced by the father, mortal but securely in control—not immune to the spiritual and moral challenges of the rebellious son but safely ensconced in his authority and his authorial position. Like Faulkner's own triumph as Nobel Prize winner, the General's triumph is a victory of language, of rhetoric, of verbal fictions—those, however, that have ceased being fictions and have become myths for which men kill and die. Faulkner himself, however, retreats to this defensive posture in which his psychological conflicts become comfortable if unresolved tensions between unattainable but nice symbolic goals of the rebellious son, and practical if unpleasant realities controlled by the successful father. The pattern of change in the resolution of psychological conflicts is homologous with that in the resolution of social conflicts in Faulkner's fiction.

Works Cited

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978.

Butterworth, Keen. “A Critical and Textual Study of William Faulkner's A Fable.” Diss. South Carolina, 1970.

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Ziolkowski, Theodore. Fictional Transformations of Jesus. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.