...With _A Fable_, Faulkner's massive World War I novel, deferral moves beyond even the complexities of Southern memory. At its center is the moral act of soldiers bringing war to a halt by refusing to mount an attack. But that deferral, despite the three-day peace that descends on the front as a result, is also no more (and no less) than gesture designed to accomplish nothing, altering neither the inevitable resumption of war nor its enduring necessity. Gesture is the refrain of _A Fable_, appropriated by those who would continue the war--and the status quo it protects--as much as by those who stop it. Thus the particular engagement halted by the mutiny was itself purely gestural, an attack calculated to fail, the regiment to be sacrificed to an undisclosed military expediency. Moreover, the second mutiny of the novel, the one inspired by the model of the first, only succeeds in bringing to a climax, and terminating, the three days of peace.
Led by the Sentry, the Runner, and the Reverend Sutterfield, a British battalion climbs out of the trenches, and begins to run, weaponless, across the battlefield, towards a unit of German soldiers which has also emerged, unarmed:
[T]he two of them running toward each other now, empty-handed, approaching until he could see, distinguish the individual faces but still all one face, one expression, and then he knew suddenly that his too looked like that, all of them did: tentative, amazed, defenseless, and then he heard the voices too and knew that his was one also--a thin murmuring sound rising into the incredible silence like a chirping of lost birds, forlorn and defenseless too. (_Fable_ 321)
But the mutiny is doomed, the men of both forces merely running toward the artillery barrages that have already been launched from both sides: "[A]nd then he knew what the other thing was even before the frantic uprush of the rockets from behind the two wires, German and British too" (321).
Of the practical pointlessness of this second mutiny the runner at least is aware. The generals of both sides, anticipating the plan, have colluded to prevent it from spreading: "Then they will shoot at us, both of them, their side and ours too--put a barrage down on all of us. They'll have to. There wont be anything else for them to do" (313). Such is the gestural quality of the action of the whole novel: the hope of men "to have done with it, be finished with it, quit of it" (317); of the Corporal to overthrow the war culture over which the Old General, the Corporal's father, presides; or, for that matter, of the Old General to tempt his son away from his martyrdom--they are all acts whose meaning has nothing to do with their realization in the world, or even the expectation of it.
And yet _A Fable_ builds its theme of the irrelevant act into a vision of a potentiality that never subsides, that maintains the power of possibility even though completion is inconceivable. Faulkner accomplishes this by bringing together something of the magical quality that Symons identified in the French Symbolists--"that confidence in the eternal correspondences between the visible and the invisible universe" (203)--and the metaphysical mystery inherent in the Christian story he has chosen as the narrative core of the novel: the gesture that redeems even as it awaits fulfillment. In Karl Löwith's description of the event of Incarnation, "Invisibly, history has fundamentally changed; visibly, it is still the same...the time is already fulfilled and yet not consummated....[E]verything is 'already' what it is 'not yet'" (Löwith 188).
If _A Fable_ contains a tragic view opposite to that of the New Testament--the recognition that potential and actual redemption will never coincide--it also contains the hope implicit to the fact that they will never relax their tension: "[W]e are two articulations," the Old General says to the Corporal, "two inimical conditions...I champion of this mundane earth...you champion of an esoteric realm of man's baseless hopes and his infinite capacity--no: passion--for unfact" (Fable 347-48). Fact and gesture, father and son, law and mutiny, Symbolic and semiotic, "the intrinsic, dense wood of the trees" and "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves"--Faulkner balances them against each other, confirming an essential tension of his career, in this novel unwilling to advance them beyond a static equilibrium....
Donald M. Kartiganer, William Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies, teaches at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of _The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels_. He is co-editor of _Theories of American Literature_, as well as five volumes of papers from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. ***** -- Yoshie
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