THE STRUCTURE and MEANING of WILLIAM FAULKNER's a Fable
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THE STRUCTURE AND MEANING OF WILLIAM FAULKNER'S A Fable By PHILIP EDWARD PASTORE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1969 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 3 1262 08552 6548 For my son Philip who in a sense wrote this ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge the great debt I owe to the chair- man of my supervisory committee, Professor Harry R. Warfel, whose infinite store of patience was matched by his critical perception once my recalcitrant muse finally decided to act. His great good will, kindness, and enthusiasm for this project shall always serve as a reminder to me that the pursuit of scholarship need not be a drudgery. 1 also wish to thank the other members of my comiriittee. Dr. Gordon E. Bigelow and Dr. Harry W. Paul, for giving their time and knowledge to my consideration. My pai'ents and my wife, whose faith, unlike mj' own, never wavered, deserve my love and thanks. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I A • REVIEW OF THE CRITICISM . 8 II THE "DEEP STRUCTURAL DIALECTIC" 41 III A RADICAL POTENTIAL: THE CORPORAL . 119 IV THE LARGER PATTERN 171 V CONCLUSION 26 3 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 iv . e INTRODUCTION 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 un- doubtedly most disposed to heap praise upon him for the slimmest of reasons. A Fabl 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 in- fluential 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 tlioir obvious disap- pointment, 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 William Faulkner, A Fable (New York, 1954). Further references to this work wiJl be by page numbers incorporated in the t ext . e 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. It is readily admitted that the novel was among Faulkner's most ambitious undertakings, as one dissenting critic called it, "a heroical- 2 ly 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 F abl 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 in general as all part of the loose "saga" of Yoknapatawpha or not, is bolstered by the interlocking of events and char- acters throughout many of the major novels and stories. "Charles Rolo, "Reader's Choice," Th e Atlantic . CXCIV (September , 1954) , 79 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. This paper will not dispute any claims made for the greatness of the novels and stories which appeared in that creative span between The Sound and the Fury and Intruder in the Dus t (19 29-1948). Questioned will be the other side of this attitude, one which states tlat somehow his powers diminished when he attempted to write abfjul events or characters outside the Mississippi country, that liis in t el J ec tual grasp was inade- quate to express complexities demanding statement in substance or form to whicl). the Yoknapatawpha setting was not amenable. Although A F able is among this less currently approved group of novels, it is P- o t to be degraded m. e ! e 1 3? for t h i fs r e zson . A F Opinion varies widely concerning the "form" of a tale , whether it is an allegory or a thesis-novel or an attempt to construct a mytliology. The functions of the characters are seen in multitudinous relations, and thematic interpretations transcribe nn arc that is majestic in its scope. Although th.e variety of opinion in this regard may serve as testament to the novel's jichness, the general opinion is that it at- tests to the confused fornj and substance of A Fable. The 1 most pervasive attitude regarding the novel is that it is primarily an intellectual failure, i 1 -concei ved and ill- made. Faulkner has been accused of many offenses against taste and t rad i t i on-- the 1 e ss- than-i 1 lus t r i ous 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 ex- tremely complex literary structures ( Absalom. Absalom lor The S o u ii d 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. The "agony and sweat'" he admittedly poui'ed into writing A Fable rules out carelessness as a cause. Also, the very enormity of its appar'snt 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 criticical appraisal. Only a writer of very great talent, and a writer with a sublime deafness to the cautions of his craft, could have brought . e . together so striking an ensemble of mistakes as Faulkner has in A Fabl e Howe's adjectives almost seem to belie the very claims he makes A Fabl 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 thein. 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, /v but equally probably not to be as simple in outline or depth. The search for meaning on the level of struct uie, thei-efore, requires another pattern. The- reoccurcnce of the r,ymbol of the Cross likewise does not necessarily relate the events of the novel to cJie Cliristian story. One of tlie chronological frames tl)rough which the story progresses is indeed Holy week, but only in a limited degree does the sequence of events re- late to the final events i r. the e a r t: ii 1 y 1 i I e of Jesus. One of the reasons I began my study was owing to the Irving Howe, W illiam Fou lkner: A Critical St udy (New York, 1962), p. 268. fact that no critic had offered what seemed to me a unified explanation of the entire action itself, one which put the many seemingly disconnected episodes into a whole frame whereby some consistent meaning could be extracted without noticeably distorting the novel. No one had adequately ex- plained A Fable' s structure or the rationale behind the structure. Two little-known critics have come very close, and will be considered in Chapter I, but they, too, in some ways have only added to the complexity instead of reducing it Faulkner wanted to say something about man's condition and only partially could governmental forms, religious creeds, or military organization supply a plot outline adequate to his purpose. It is quite possible that he found in the phi- losopher Henri Bergson, whose influence in America during Faulkner's young manhood was immense, a pattern of thought which harmonized with the novelist's idealism. in the con- cept of the ^l_a,n._vital, with its associated concepts of the opposition of intellect and intuition, of the closed society and the open society, and static and dynamic religion, as set ^"""^^ The ^" Two Sources of Morality and Reliprjon, may lie the basis for the unifying structure. The following study analyzes the shape and content of Faulkner's novel to dem- onstrate the parallels with Bergson's thought.