Faulkner Passion Play

A FABLE (437 pp.)--William Faulkner --Random House ($4.75).

In his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, Novelist William Faulkner made much of the "agony and sweat" that went into his writing. He might, with equal pertinence, have dwelt on the agony and sweat that he requires of his readers. To his admirers, a new Faulkner novel is the event of the year. To the plain reader it is a tortuous chore which pays off only in random flashes of greatness, some of it so illuminating as to make the ill-lighted drudgery seem worthwhile. This week, after nine years of "anguish and travail," Faulkner unveils A Fable. It is a major effort by a great writer, one that few other writers would attempt. Even when it does not come off, a major Faulkner effort towers above many works that achieve their lesser ends. But unless his poor luck in the bookstores changes over night, A Fable is apt to be the most earnestly reviewed half-read book of 1954.

A Fable is well named. Just as Faulkner's South is deplored by most Southerners as a region only he has ever seen, so World War I becomes in A Fable a restless residue of the Faulknerian imagination. A volunteer in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1918, Faulkner did not get beyond flight training. In A Fable, however, he writes about air combat, the danger and boredom of infantry fighting, the deepest contemplations of generals, with a confidence that suggests he has experienced all of them simultaneously.

Christ as a Corporal. This is the fable: in the last year of the war, 1918, a French infantry regiment of General Gragnon's crack division is ordered to attack the German line. Officers and noncoms leap from the trench on signal, but the men mutiny and refuse to attack. Gragnon, a dedicated soldier and a good general, goes to the commander in chief and demands that the entire regiment be executed. But odd things have been happening all along the Western front. For one thing, the Germans seem to know about the mutiny in advance, yet fail to attack when the French quit. In fact, the Germans, the French, the Americans and the British, as though by tacit agreement, stop all fighting except for token, scattered artillery fire. In the midst of it all, a German general flies over to discuss the crisis with the Allied commanders, to see to it that the war of the generals, the statesmen and the profiteers goes on in spite of the stale mate and war sickness that have driven the common soldiers of all the armies into a sense of universal brotherhood and so to mutiny and ceasefire.

The sparkplug of Faulkner's mutiny is an illiterate French corporal, who is drawn in Christlike dimensions and has attracted to himself twelve disciples. The 13 roam the Allied front on leave, even, it is believed, cross no man's land to carry to the Germans the message of peace-on-earth. The corporal, the Christ-figure, is so vague, his powers so unexplained, as to be a symbol without point. But literal lack of point has never bothered Faulkner, nor has the smothering wrap of coincidence. The corporal turns out to be none other than the illegitimate son of the French marshal, generalissimo of all the Allied armies (and presumably, therefore, a Faulknerian Marshal Foch). And where was the Christ-corporal born? In a stable.

"I Believe . . ." Faulkner has stayed close to the Passion Week. The corporal is executed in the company of some thieves after he has refused his father's (God's?) offer to escape. Unknowingly, he has already been betrayed by a Judas among his disciples who, in an afterpiece to the fable, tries to free himself of the ownership and taint of the 30 pieces of silver. At one point the corporal is denied by one who is clearly meant to be Peter. When the corporal has been buried by his family, and a rolling artillery barrage blasts open his grave revealing only a splintered coffin, Faulkner has introduced his parallel for the Resurrection.

Faulkner seldom makes it easy for his readers.' What is he up to in A Fable? Basically, his effort to equate Christ's last week on earth with a crisis in man's fate seems commonplace. But Faulkner has never been commonplace, even at his most turgid, even when he has proved that obfuscation can be an art.

In A Fable, William Faulkner is hammering, hammering at one point, the point he made at Stockholm when he accepted the Nobel Prize: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

The Christ-corporal dies, the Passion Week is played out. Faulkner has paralleled the greatest story in man's experience, but he has failed to use it to philosophical or dramatic advantage. His labyrinthine asides (including a fine story about a great horse and the devout thieves who raced it) will incline even the most intense Faulkner fan to wonder if the distinguished Mississippian hasn't mistaken the bayous of living for the river of life. Above all, Faulkner has failed to differentiate between a pointless war and a needful one. The general makes his final point, and when he does, he takes man -- and Faulkner -- right back to where A Fable started: "... Man and his folly . . . will prevail."

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