‘Man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures.’
A Fable, or as I like to call it, World War J‘Man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures.’
A Fable, or as I like to call it, World War Jesus, is William Faulkner’s re-telling of the Passion of Christ set in the trenches of the first World War. Winner of both the 1955 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, this book is rather opaque and obfuscating, even for Faulkner, while written in his signature, robust style of lengthy sentences constructed with dense prose and frequent use of the word ‘irascible’. Yet it is a worthwhile journey that examines humans as flawed yet enduring beings capable of war and horrors but also love and grace. This anti-war novel, inspired in part by the false armistice of 1918, delivers a testament to humanity as a reimagined Jesus demonstrates the power of one’s voice against the mechanism of power and war and how immortality as a myth or fable allows our message to live on.
‘All you can kill is man's meat. You can't kill his voice.’
Faulkner’s anti-war parable reconstructs the bones of the Easter story from the Bible and reconfigures it with a French corporal named Stefan as he and his twelve followers orders 3,000 troops to refuse to participate in a charge from the trenches. The German army, realizing it takes two sides to fight a war, also cease firing and the war grinds to a halt. While Faulkner shows the human spirit in an act of peace, he also looks at those who profit and retain power through violence, and a side-story threaded through the novel follows a young pilot escorting a German general behind Allied lines in order to meet about getting the war up and running again.
This is not Faulkner’s first foray into an Easter novel, with The Sound and the Fury full of Easter influences, but here it is much more overt and intended as a re-telling. We have Polchek, who betrays the soldier Jesus and commits suicide from guilt, two different Marys, Marthe and Marya, who figure into the story along with the pretty blatant 12 apostles in the trenches. There is an interesting angle with the General being the God figure of the novel, allowing war to occur because it is his duty. ‘It wasn’t we who invented war…It was war which created us,’ Faulkner writes, showing how the act of soldiering and having war as a vocation perpetuates war. Since war must go on we see Stefan become the martyr, with an execution between two criminals and a mysterious disappearance from his burial. In a late scene involving a tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the death of the General, we are treated to another layer of the Jesus, Son of God idea.
The General argues that humans will endure because and in spite of folly and pride, that people will make war, survive and carry on to make another. That it is the way of things. This parallels Faulkner’s own Nobel Prize speech in 1949, though in it Faulkner reveals his true beliefs that people endure because of compassion and sacrifice:
’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 poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.’
Several aspects of the Prize speech make it into the novel, which is interesting to see Faulkner comment upon it. It is also interesting to read Faulkner set outside the usual stomping grounds of Yoknapatawpha, though we do find descendants of familiar family names appear as American soldiers in the final scene of the novel.
‘War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. ’
While not his strongest (though highly awarded), and arguably one of his more difficult to follow with the intentionally obfuscating plot, A Fable is still a fantastic read from good ole Bill Faulkner.
3.75/5
‘War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.’...more
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