William Faulkner

We continue to trace the development and the pattern that the United States has engendered over the last three hundred years. And as you look around you can see for yourself that very few people are interested in the civilization of the United States. This is quite difficult because it is the crucial civilization of our time, and our time seems to be the crucial keystone to human history, and thus we are faced with the very essence of the problem. That the reason that our times are in jeopardy is that there is no one there at the center line where the architecture of the future could be built. The problem is not one of a lack of solution but rather of a failure to recognize that the solution in fact has been building for several hundred years and is now untended. The problem of our time is that there are no adults at the hearth to tend the center that would heal. And so the few that are still able to hear are still able to feel some intuitive curiosity must bear the burden and the brunt of this responsibility.

We have seen in this long year that with Benjamin Franklin the American tradition stepped outside of the European frame of reference. At Benjamin Franklin's time it was not so noticeable. There seemed to be plenty of enlightened salon personages in that age, but Franklin was extraordinarily unusual. He was like Socrates, not enlightened by what he knew, but enlightened by the challenge of what he might become were he to develop continuously. A variant on Socrates, who knew that he did not know, Franklin knew that he could know if he simply continued to learn. And so the American character is founded upon this unshakable sense that continuity, application, diligence will eventually - I think the term we used to use in this country - pay off. It will pay off.

Someone asked Frank Lloyd Wright once, would he do it differently? He said you mean live a different life? Not on your life, he said. That our work occupies the center line and if anyone is ever going to have a civilization of freedom for the individual person in terms of the fullest potential available for that person, they will have to come through this gate. So we'll just stay here and we'll maintain this gateway. We're somewhat in the same situation here tonight. We have seen in the last month that the early 20th century and mid-20th century found the United States culture coming to an apex in expressive capacity. That is, the writers, the poets of the United States brought to a culmination the modern sensibility of mind informing language to such labyrinthian proportions that the central significance of this very act began to transcend the mental structure and create a sense of presence which is almost religious, certainly spiritual, in its living application.

We saw with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot that trying to transpose the American back to Europe does not work. The famous phrase by Thomas Wolfe, “you cannot go home again.” A new home must be found, must be made. We saw with E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens how those poets who stayed here and worked with the American character, found very little appreciation at home. In fact, the development of American civilization has reached such a refined high apex, despite the stereotype, that it is all but invisible in our time. Central to this whole early and mid 20th century development is William Faulkner and it is Faulkner's voice that finally is able to delineate for us all the central issues. And the labyrinthian language structure that he uses is a necessary subterfuge to keep the language sacred so that the reductive tendencies of grammar, and advertising, and English teachers, and would be cultural dilettantes, cannot grind up the richness of the inscape and give us little short excerpts, for Faulkner's language is sinuous in the sense of a fairy tale image. It's almost like the secret presence of Faulkner's meaning is hidden by this great winding brier patch, this thorn rose, and that the sleeping princess of wisdom hidden by this thorny complication can only be approached through an almost mythic sense of humility to penetrate through despite the convolutions and present with care there our own experience to awaken the meaning that Faulkner has placed at the center of his work.

We're going to tonight look at just one work by Faulkner. We're going to look at the work by Faulkner that ended the whole era of American literature. A book called A Fable, and when it was published in the summer of 1954 it was the culmination of the entire American experience up to that point. There were ten reviews of the novel. Major reviews at the time. Three were somewhat favorable. The most intelligent of them by Carlos Baker who was chairman of the Princeton University English Department at that time. Almost no one heard or read the book. Almost everyone was put off by the labyrinth. And the reasons that people were put off by Faulkner proved prophetic because the last 30 years of American literature have been a dismal failure. A failure to hearken to the summons which had been sounded by A Fable, not only by its content, but by its surface convolutions, by the very form in which American poetry for Faulkner's prose is actually a poetic form. In fact, in the highest sense it is - to use the Greek term - a poiesis which means to create, to make, in the gerund, a making. A poiesis is an act that we make and thus the creation of the work is spontaneously engendered as we experience it and we must therefore bring someone to this work. If we bring a dulled anesthetized ego to Faulkner, his work falls flat. It becomes offensive. It will not let us in. If we bring cleverness and a looking for secret designs on analogous patterns, maps of some more erudite or esoteric meaning, Faulkner's convolution simply flabbergasts us and finally leave us, feeling that we have been built. He can't be great. He must be wasting our time. After all it must be excessive verbiage. Why did the man not just cut out half or two thirds and throw it away?

All of this is rather like not being able to appreciate Rembrandt because he doesn't have Matisse's palette. It's simply irrelevant. One must bring an enriched, lively self, a personage, to his work, and then it opens, then it flies, then it takes us to where American civilization awaits. Like an eagle seeing the modern age quite clearly. Like the eagle in Dante's Paradise. At Dante with his final guide of Bernard of Clairvaux. Only through the eye of the symbolic eagle could behold the face of the divine. American civilization has reached a very high spiritual sense of presence. Almost no one looking through it.

Our introduction to A Fable comes from his address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, December 10th, 1950 - thirty-five years ago. He had in fact been working on A Fable for nine years and at the end of A Fable, the very end, he includes a series of dates: “December, 1944; Oxford – New York – Princeton; November, 1953.” So, from 1944 to 1953 Faulkner worked on A Fable. These are extraordinary dates actually in the history of the world. They predate the atomic bombs by just a little while and they predate the hydrogen bomb by a remarkably similar time lag. And so, Faulkner's A Fable takes place between two giant steps of destructive capacity. One to have a twenty kiloton atomic bomb and one to have megatons of hydrogen bombs in just nine years. And so, Faulkner's working on A Fable bubbled up in him, and in two public speeches - he rarely gave public speeches - his true thoughts came out. And the first one was the Nobel Prize speech in Stockholm. Here's an excerpt from it.

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man.”

Now the last thirty years of American literature have seemed to be written from exactly that standpoint from the end of man. Faulkner's second speech which he gave just a few months before he finished A Fable. The book was almost completed in manuscript. He was just going over it again. And he traveled with his daughter Jill to the graduating class at Pine Manor Junior College, which is in Wellesley, Massachusetts and on June 8th, 1953, he gave the following address which I will excerpt out a few paragraphs for us. This is the quintessence of A Fable, the quintessence of his work.

“What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, ‘It is finished. We made it, and it works.’ Because only man can complete it. Not God, but man. It is man's high destiny and proof of his immortality too, [know] that his is the choice between ending the world, effacing it from the long annal of time and space, [or] completing it. This is not only his right, but his privilege too.”

“In the beginning, God created the earth. He created it completely furnished for man. Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth, by means of free will and the capacity for decision and the ability to learn by making mistakes and learning from them because he had a memory with which to remember and so learn from his errors, and so in time make his own peaceful destiny of the earth. It was not an experiment. God didn't merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew that man was competent for a soul because he was capable of saving that soul… himself.”

“To do it ourselves, as individuals, not because we have to merely in order to survive, but because we wish to, will to out of our heritage of free will and decision, the possession of which has given us the right to say how we shall live, and the long proof of our recorded immortality to remind us that we have the courage to elect that right and that course. The answer is very simple. I don't mean easy, but simple. It is so simple in fact that one's first reaction is something like this: ‘If that's all it takes, what will you get for it can't be very valuable, [or] very enduring.’ There is an anecdote about Tolstoy, I think it was, who said in the middle of a discussion on this subject: ‘All right, I'll start being good tomorrow – if you will too’. Which has wit, and had, as wit often does, truth in it – a profound truth in fact to all of them who are incapable of belief in man. But not to them who can and do believe in man. To them, it is only wit, [and] the despairing repudiation of man by a man exhausted into despair by his own anguish over man's condition.”

“It begins at home. We all know what ‘home’ means. Home is not necessarily a place fixed in geography. It can be moved, provided the old proven values which made it home and lacking which it cannot be home, are taken along too.” Notice he's not talking about a wood frame or a stucco or a trailer. He's talking about what makes a human being at home. And it's portable. It's transformable. It has values. “It does not necessarily mean or demand physical ease, least of all, never in fact, physical security for the spirit, for love and fidelity to have peace and security in which to love and be faithful, for the devotion and sacrifice. Home means not just today but tomorrow and tomorrow, and then again tomorrow and tomorrow. It means someone to offer the love and fidelity and respect to who is worthy of it, someone to be compatible with, whose dreams and hopes are your [hopes and dreams], who wants and will work and sacrifice also that the thing which the two of you have together shall last forever; someone whom you not only love but like too, which is more, since it will much outlast what when we [were] young we meant by love because without the liking and the respect, the love itself will not last.”

“If we accept [all] this to mean ‘home,’ we do not need to look further than home to find where we start to work, to begin to change, to begin to rid ourselves of the fear and the pressures which are making simple existence more and more uncertain and without dignity or peace or security, and which, to those who are incapable of believing in man, will in the end rid man of his problems by ridding him of himself.”

And this is Faulkner's central passage. That all of the cures for man offer surrogate experience which is not his own. That in order to blossom in his own experience to sense the presence of his own individuality he has to be able to experience his own life. And what is home is the prism by which that experience can be collected together and understood and that this is an eternal verity.

It's not subject to time; it's not subject to place. And so, A Fable, is the grand rainbow of all human values in our time challenged to the death. Put into the prism of a home. And the home that he chose was the archetypal home, the home which existed between two persons which seemed, to Faulkner more than any other home in the universe, to be the home of all homes. That was the family relationship between Jesus as a man and his father. And so, A Fable has all of the values of the modern world brought into collision and conflict reflected in this glass darkly. This prism of this experience of the home relationship.

Now externally, on the surface, A Fable is set in the First World War. Faulkner in several interviews pointed out he said there was no such thing as a Second World War. There's no such thing as a Third World war. There's only been one World war and it's been going on all this time. That it has never stopped, that there are just simply more virulent phases of it, but that all of this history from 1914 is of a single nightmare. And that this infectious nightmare continues to spread and send its corrosiveness deeper and deeper into man's character. And what is being leeched out of man is not his consciousness - that's being played with - but his character, his human-heartedness, his compassion, his ability to sense that he is home, and his correlative ability to sense that he's been orphaned. We don't know anymore that we're homeless, that we're out on the street, that we're in the gutters of history. We think because we have a ranch house and two cars and go shopping whenever we want to that we're all right. This is delusion. And so, A Fable begins with an image of the limbo of spiritual values which pervades increasingly the modern world. Here's how it begins.

“Long before the first bugles sounded from the barracks within the city and the cantonments surrounding it, most of the [people in the] city were already awake. [They] did not need to rise from the straw mattresses and thin pallet beds of their hive-dense tenements, because few of them save the children had ever lain down. Instead, they had huddled all night in one vast tongueless brotherhood of dread and anxiety, [and] the thin fires of braziers and meager hearths, until the night wore [away] at last and a new day of anxiety and dread had begun.”

This atmosphere of the threadbareness of life that all of the values have been combed out by processes of organization. That all of the nap of the fullness of life has been picked out by the clever and the powerful, and that what is left for human beings, en masse and en large, is just the threadbare worn-ness of it. A very dangerous situation has come up in the First World War and Faulkner has focused upon it. It came up in May of 18 after four long years of war. There was what the history books call a false armistice. For some unknown reason historically there was a lull in the fighting. No one planned it. No one initiated it. But for several long days almost a week there was a silence along the Western Front in May of 1918. And of course after a while through the power plays and machinations the killing resumed and went on. But Faulkner places A Fable in that hiatus. He says in fable style, and a fable is a morality story using animals to convey human values. The people of a fable are not human beings but they're the animals that we have become because of the pressures put upon us because of the organization stamped upon our lives that we have been reduced to animal nature - intelligent animals, clever animals, nevertheless. What has happened in A Fable is that Faulkner sees penetratingly what if this armistice had been in fact engendered not by a plan from the top but engendered by the personages from the bottom? Maybe someone. And so he develops a fable around this imaginative poiesis. What if there had been someone? Someone again who said, “all we need do is just not fight. If I don't try and kill you you're going to start to stop wanting to kill me. And once that realization begins to take hold the anxiety and dread and desperation which have been fueling us long beyond physical exhaustion will drop just enough for us to see that we're all bone tired. We're tired of killing each other and that we will stop. And as we stop others will notice that that's really what they have wanted to do more than anything else is stop killing each other and that that will spread.”

And it happens. But the difficulty is with the general staffs who wonder what is going on here. We're used to people failing to make charges. We're used to soldiers burning out coming out of the trenches, he says, even at one point that several of the senior generals who have been organizing the attacks in the front lines can tell by the movements of the first few steps out of the trenches how long they will last in the withering gunfire before cowardice and fear take over and they come back to the trenches. But they have never faced the situation where the men refuse to go. That it was not an act of cowardice but it was a mutiny. They will not fight. What has caused this? Who is the ringleader? What are their purposes? Are they challenging our authority? And worst of all Faulkner will bring out: will man discover the most terrible thing of all – that he need not obey us, that he is free to live without this violence without this killing.

“ ‘It was a whole regiment,’ the tall man said dreamily, in his murmurous, masculine, gentle, almost musing baritone. ‘All of it. [A whole regiment] at zero, nobody left the trench except the officers and a few N.C.O.’s. That's right, not?’ ‘And so?’ the sergeant said again. ‘Why didn't the [Germans the] boche attack?’ the tall man said. ‘When they saw that we were not coming over? that something had happened to the attack. The drum-fire was all right, and the rolling barrage too, only when it lifted and the moment came, [and] only the section leaders had climbed out of the trench, but that the men themselves were not coming? They must have seen that, not? When you have been facing another front only a thousand meters away for four years, you can see an attack fail to start, and probably [know] why. And you can't say it was because of the barrage; that's why you get out of the trench in the first place and charge: to get out from somebody's shelling – sometimes your own, not?’ The sergeant [only looked] at the tall man; he needed to do so no more since he could feel the others – the quiet, attentive, quietly-breathing faces, listening, missing nothing.”

“ ‘...at noon yesterday, our whole front stopped except for token artillery, one gun to a battery each ten thousand meters, and at fifteen hours the British and the Americans stopped too…” You see it was spreading. The peace was spreading. Like some inverted cancer of spiritual realization, it was spreading. “...by sundown yesterday there was no more gunfire in [all of] France except the token ones since they had to leave them for a little longer yet since all that silence, falling suddenly out of the sky on the human race after going on four years, [almost] destroyed it ––’.”

The realization that there was silence, that it was possible, that the melee, the pell-mellness, the compulsiveness of it stops. It's like the experience in prayer or in meditation where one turns off the static. That it isn't endemic. It isn't a necessary part of human nature. That some other quality precedes it, overshadows it, lies behind it, extends beyond it. The quality of peacefulness, of silence, of presence, the grandeur of the spirit. Faulkner writes that they grabbed hold of this regiment. They bound them up and they rushed them in and brought some of the representatives in to be interrogated. And the generals are thinking of executing all three thousand of them because this is very dangerous. Examples have got to be made.

“The lorries were right behind it. They were coming fast too, in close order and seemingly without end, since this was the whole regiment. But still there was no concerted, no definite, human sound yet, not even the crushing ejaculation of salute this time, but only the stir, the shift of movement in the crowd itself, pacing the first lorry in that silence which was still aghast and not quite believing, in which [the error,] the anguish and terror seemed to rise to each lorry as it approached, and enclose it as it passed.”

Notice Faulkner's language here. It's visually moving but it's visually moving in the sense almost that in Tai Chi they have cloud hands, where there's always something coming but one center is not moving, it's just the circulation from a standpoint of unmovingness of balance. And Faulkner's imagery is like this. Constantly coming before the writer and the reader who are companionable in seeking to come together into a single focus. And all of the events not only come by once or twice but many times the same events, a little bit different each time. And in fact the patterns of all the events seem to reoccur in A Fable and they come back again. You see it from a little different point and elements that one had noticed before, one now concentrates on and they become more detailed. And like the spiritual eye wherever it looks to see it sees more. And the longer it looks the more detail there is. Faulkner's writing style is spiritual, not psychological, not literary or literary in the ancient Chinese sense the literary art of carving dragons - the Wengen tradition. And so in A Fable, as one reads, as one goes into it, Faulkner builds and builds. And for us, coming into it from a profane world, from a secular mentality, we are immediately lost in the labyrinth of his works, of his images, of his words and the thorn roses begin to pick at us and in our impatience to have him say something straight we either close the book and put it down, or become disgusted or skip over some pages and then we find it's still the same thing. He's still doing it. Why is he doing this? Is he a bad writer? Is he a great writer and we're just bad readers? What is going on here?

But Faulkner has learned. Faulkner is a culmination of this long tradition - like Cummings, like Stevens. Like even those writers in South America who have learned the American tradition like Pablo Neruda never say anything directly. Put the obliques in. If someone is able to follow they will follow they will make the integration of all the oblique relations and make the integration into a quality of presence. If they need to follow rules then they are so brainwashed by authoritarian structures that they wouldn't be able to sense the real anyway. Let them pass by. It's this quality of discrimination that is necessary in order to experience what is there. Here's some more.

“It was open, like the others, indistinguishable from the others, except by its cargo.” This is one of the lorries this long line, so long we can't see the ends of it. And there's one that was indistinguishable from all this infinite line of lorries. Now this one we're going to see. “Because, where the others had been packed with standing men, this one carried only thirteen.” The cognizant eye, lorries packed with men. Here's one that isn't packed and has exactly thirteen in it. So the eye is going to look now, thirteen. “They were hatless and dirty and battle-stained too, they were manacled, chained to one another and to the lorry itself like wild beasts, so that at first glance they looked not merely like foreigners but like creatures of another race, another species; alien, bizarre, and strange, even though they wore on their collar-tabs the same regimental [numbers], to the rest of the regiment which had not only preceded them by that useless gap but which had even seemed to be fleeing from them, not only by their chains and isolation, but by the very expressions and attitudes too: where the faces in the other fleeing lorries had been dazed and spent, like those of men too long under ether, the faces of these thirteen were merely grave, attentive, watchful.”

The inner eye. Someone is watching us. Along with us, along with the author, along with ourselves as a reader. Positioned in A Fable from time to time and later on one realizes that these figures are always there, are eternal personages which occur to us at various junctures in reading A Fable. And one of those personages is a woman. And we notice her from time to time and now we're going to notice her. Then we'll take a break.

“This time, the commotion went almost unnoticed, not only because of the yelling and the uproar, but because the crowd itself was moving now. It was the young woman again, the one who had fainted. She was still gnawing at the bread when the last lorry came up. Then she ceased, and those nearest remembered later that she moved, [and] cried out, and tried to run, to break through the crowd and into the street as if to intercept or overtake the lorry. But by that time, they were all moving toward the street, even those whose backs she was clawing [at] and scrabbling and at whose faces she was trying to cry, say something through the mass of chewed bread in her mouth. So they stopped remembering her at all, and there remained only the man who had given her the bread, upon whose chest she was still hammering with the hand which still clutched the fragment of the morsel, while she tried to cry something at him through the wet mass in her mouth.”

“Then she began to spit the chewed bread at him, not deliberately, intentionally, but because there was not time to turn her head aside and void her mouth for speech, already screaming something at him through the spew and spray of mastication. But the man was already running too, wiping his face on his sleeve, vanishing into the crowd as it burst at last through the interlocked rifles and poured into the street. Still clutching what remained of the bread, she ran too. For a while, she even kept up with them, running and darting between and among them with an urgency apparently even greater than theirs, as the whole mass of them poured up the boulevard after the fleeing lorries. But presently the ones she had passed began to overtake her and turn and pass her; soon she was running in a fading remnant of dispersal, panting and stumbling, seeming to run now in spent and frantic retrograde to the whole city's motion, the whole world's, so that when she reached the Place de Ville at last, and stopped, all mankind seemed to have [been] drained away and vanished, bequeathing, relicting to her the broad, once-more empty boulevard and the Place and even, for that moment, the city and the earth itself; – a slight woman, not much more than a girl, who had been pretty once, and could be again, with sleep and something to eat and a little warm water and soap and a comb, and whatever it was out of her eyes, standing in the empty Place, wringing her hands.”

Well let's take a break.

While I was preparing for tonight's lecture I ran across in my files a manila portfolio that I hadn't looked at for a very long time. I had used Faulkner's A Fable in a course that I taught at UC Berkeley in 1969, and I was quite surprised to find in among all my class handouts and so forth the several handwritten pages from that time. There's a long digression in A Fable. It's the kind of digression that Faulkner is famous for. And it's the sort of digression that comes up from Southern American storytellers. If you're telling a real long convoluted story you've got to have a pause and you've got to be able to get the reader's attention or get the listener's attention back. And so Faulkner is a, loves digressions, because he's a storyteller. It's like Homer or Shakespeare or Cervantes. They're storytellers. They're not professional literary men, but they're storytellers. And so they take time out because they've just thought of the perfect thing to give you a little hiatus. There's a long section in A Fable. The prototype of it was published separately in a magazine - I believe it was the Atlantic Monthly, it might have been that, or Fortune - called Notes on a Horse Thief. It's a digression about a three legged horse that could not lose a race. Well the man who's associated with this three legged horse and this digression, is a Black minister, a Black reverend. That's very significant. It's significant for a man for whom convoluted language was a spiritual medium through which to discover a sense of presence behind the convolutions because this is just what the Black minister has perfected in his language. Have you ever heard a sermon?

I had some friends that in the early 60s made a film of a service in the Black Ephesian church in San Francisco - Holy Roller Church. But the kick off up to the spiritual healing was a sermon, but a sermon not done in Oxford style but done in Black American spiritual style. And it's the reiteration; it's the convolutions; it's the projecting out of the spirit. And he would ask, “Are you ready? You better be ready. You better be ready for the spirit. If you're not ready for the spirit. Then you're ready for the devil. You got to be ready for one or the other. If you're ready for the spirit the devil can't get you. But if you don't have that spiritual readiness he's already got you. And whatever he's got you with you can't hear the spirit. You only hear what he wants you to hear. Make yourself ready. Ready for that spirit. Hallelujah.”

Well Faulkner has that kind of a quality, only he does it in epic style, large, four hundred and some pages. So the Black Reverend in A Fable comes in the tenth of the nineteenth sections. If you look at A Fable close it has nineteen different sections in it. You don't have to think about esoteric Stonehenge lunar cycles or anything like that. It just has nineteen sections. It turned out that way. Like the time that he wrote As I Lay Dying - still a young man, I think he was about 30, and he’s working for the University of Mississippi. Oh not as a teacher. He was shoveling coal in the boiler all night and worked in the boiler room. And he wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks and never made a correction, sent it off to the publisher just as it was. And it was the pattern of the stoking of the boiler, the frantic shoveling from time to time and then the quietness of the way in which the thing would glow, and As I Lay Dying has that beautiful symphony of energy and warm spaciousness. Well A Fable has that, only in spades - real real real large. This Black reverend is named the Reverend Toby Sutterfield. Toby Sutterfield. And this Black minister is said to be an American who has just arrived at the front in 1916 via Paris looking for a thin wiry surly looking private who even to the runner's first glance seemed to have between his bowed legs and hands the shape of a horse. He's a man whose very nature gives us the sense that what is not there, what is invisible, is also present. And what's present to this man that we do see, invisibly, is the sense that he's on a, he's on a horse.

His arrival was soon after the battle known as the First Battle of the Somme, infamous for the first use of tanks in warfare. It was a crucial battle in which it was apparent to all military historians and observers, general staffs and so forth, that this ushered in a whole new era in destruction. It's like the first use of repeating carbines in the Civil War marked the end of all valor. If you can shoot your gun twenty or thirty times you don't have to be a good shot and it doesn't matter how much valor you have. Will. The tanks were even more so than that. These machines routed the Germans who were surprised that some nationality other than they could invent new machines of war. Faulkner means for us to understand the timely juncture of the Reverend Sutterfield with the initial Allied use of tanks as a turning point in the war and hence in modern history. The new machine from here on a reoccurring Frankenstein in world literature notably enough is placed in the hands of the allies not the Kaiser's troops and directly thereafter the Black minister appears in A Fable. He is event cued. The further mechanization of the war by the Europeans brings in this Afro-American presence. The Black Reverend is a member of an association - and if my French won't embarrass you, it doesn't embarrass me - the name of the association is Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes à la France de Tout le Monde (The Myriad Friends of France and All the World). Well it turns out that this association is a gambling outfit. They're in it to make the buck. And it's not unlike a game played by the banks and the loan companies and the business firms. And the game that they play is called credit. Well this association that the Reverend Toby Sutterfield heads doesn't like the game credit but they love the game. Horse racing because you can get a lot going on one thing and somebody's got to lose. Oh well sure somebody's got to win but you make sure enough lose you can pay off the winner and still be home free. It's a game. One takes ten francs at the beginning of the month for immediate satisfaction. You pay back six pence per day for thirty days. If you live through the month the six hundred percent interest you've paid is nothing next to the fact of being alive and well enough to celebrate by taking another ten francs. It's playing with life and death. It's playing with courage and ambition. And nothing helps a man stay alive more to know that he's going to make a big profit if he makes it through.

Well the repetition of this process with the single-mindedness of a Roman Catholic at his devotion expiating a penance provides a continuity for the war-fragmented life one is forced to live out. For even if a man freed himself of this vice what could he do with that liberty? He was still in the war. They're still going to kill you. This way. It's interesting. Faulkner puts it this way: “That liberty which he no longer had any use for because there was no more any place for it on the earth.” Man cannot prize his liberty if he can't use it. Where can you use it? Oh, you can spend credit, you can play credit anywhere. But you can't play liberty anywhere on this earth.

The playing of the gambling is like coming through the back door of the men to realize that that's all they have, that they don't really have any use for liberty even if they had it. And it's that quality of back door negative obverse realization that finally settles in on them. Why can't we have a place where we could use human liberty. What's wrong with that? Why do we not have it? We don't have it because those that plan for us don't want us to have it. Oh it's not just this side. It's all sides. Because everyone's planned for it. Doesn't matter what side or on sides where you are. You can be allies. You can be Germans, you can be neutral. Everybody's in the same situation. How are we going to have it then? We're going to have it because we're going to do it from here from where we are. That individuals are simply not going to play that game anymore. But in order to realize that they're not going to play that game anymore they'll have to have played this other game that the association has for a while, and that's going to help them to realize that just staying alive to stay alive to make money to stay alive that's not it. That can't be it.

So, there's a private, who's name is Harry, or sometimes they get to mispronouncing it and it comes out as mystery, or Mister Harry. He and the old Black reverend and his grandson - these two Blacks had been connected with this three legged horse. This horse never belonged to no man to be stole from. It was the world's horse. The champion. But now that's wrong too. It wasn't a champion. The things belong to it, not it belonging to things. It was the world's horse.

So, the story of the three legged horse reveals the Black Reverend in a clear role as a spiritual midwife to man's sense of rebirth. The only rebirth that he can have is the sense of clearing up the issue for himself of, “why can't I have a place, a space, a life in which liberty, in which freedom, in which love, in which pity, and compassion, and sacrifice are valuable and work if they are valuable only as abstract ideals? What the hell good are they? If you can't live those values in a life then they're meaningless.” Just being able to utter them as platitudes that's nothing. And it's even worse to desire them desperately, cleverly, frantically, intelligently through long suffering and underneath it all, be filled with the dread, the anxiety that even if you got it you couldn't live it. Even if you had them there's no place that you could do it. This kind of a quality, Faulkner is constantly bringing in in A Fable. And the whole quality of A Fable centers around the ability to let this sink in. Here's something from A Fable. The conversation. A man called the runner who takes this message that we can stop the fighting if we just don't fight. Let's, Let's just us not fight. Let's just not go out today. And if some others see us not going out today they won't go out today either. And it's that that has spread across the whole front. And the whole front to the sea is quiet. There's nobody shooting at anybody. And the runner has been one of these messengers taking us.

“ ‘Nah,’ the corporal said. ‘It was just one regiment. [The] fact is, they're putting one of the biggest shoots yet in jerry's support and communications along the whole front right this minute. Been at it ever since dawn –’. ‘But one regiment quit,’ the runner said. ‘One did.’ Now the corporal was not looking at him at all. ‘Have a wet,’ [said the corporal].” It's a drink. “ ‘Besides,’ the runner said gently, ‘you're wrong. The whole French front quit at noon.’ ‘But not ours,’ the corporal said. ‘Not yet,’ the runner said. ‘That may take a little time.’ The corporal was not looking at him. Now the corporal said nothing whatever. With a light, rapid gesture the runner touched one shoulder with the opposite hand. ‘There's nothing up [there] now,’ he said. ‘Have a wet,’ the corporal said, not looking at him.”

“And an hour later he was close enough to the lines to see the smoke-and-dust pall as well as hear the frantic uproar of the concentrated guns along the horizon; at three o'clock, though twelve miles away at another point, he heard the barrage ravel away into the spaced orderly harmless-seeming poppings as of salutes or signals, and it seemed to him that he could see the whole long line from the sea-beaches up the long slant of France to [that] old tired Europe's rooftree, squatted and crouched with filthy and noisome men who had forgot four years ago how to stand erect anymore, amazed and bewildered and unable to believe it either, forewarned and filled with hope though (he knew it now) they must have been; he thought, [and] said aloud almost: Yes, that's it. It's not that we didn't believe: It's that we couldn't, didn't know how anymore. That's the most terrible thing they have done to us. That's the most terrible.”

We don't know how to believe anymore. Because the quality of belief only occurs with clarity. Only with the clarity and the quiet presence of the spirit is the intangibility, the massive intangibility of faith and believing is able to occur. Not even to operate, it's not even like a mechanism. It's like a quality of presence that occurs. Or in the same way it's only with the quality of belief of knowing that you can and do and now are, believing in liberty, in oneself, in one's fellow man, in the reality of life, pity, and love, and compassion and sacrifice. It's only with that sustained that its complement, a quiet clarity of mind and spirit also comes into occurrence that the two have to be there together. To use a Faulkner syntax: They don't not never occur alone. You can't have one without the other together. But the limbo is that if you try to have them both together there's nothing to have because the quality of terrorized brutalized life which we have been forced to assume is real is delusionary and can't encompass life can't really see life can only respond to abstract signals which somebody plays for us through slogans or through appeals or through flashing images. Flash you a leg, or flash you a thousand dollar bill, or flash you a car. You can have anything you want as long as you play credit. That's no dance. And to participate in that is to participate in a flight from life. And that flight from life is a flight really from an intuition that one is dying, that living in that delusion is a death, it's only death there is. And the fight or flight syndrome comes in because war is the largest revulsion against the flight and so the fightness comes out. And so the violence, the killing, the bloodshed, the power, the authority, the organization is tied up in this fear of deathness. That's why it's there. That's why it's happening. We've known that for six thousand years. The trouble was it took us six thousand years to learn how to do it. For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together enough regiments and battalions that the enemy could. Or vice versa and hurl them at each other until one lot was destroyed and the one having nothing left to fight with the other could stop fighting. We were wrong because yesterday morning by simply declining to make an attack one single French regiment stopped the song. And nobody knew how to deal with the situation where the delusions didn't happen anymore. That everybody had been living the delusion so long that they forgot what life was like when it was real, when the spirit was there for real. And they were so bewildered and sent into a kind of a balky daze. Well, what are we going to do if nobody's going to fight? What are we going to do? What are we doing to have millions of men lined up in a long trench across the face of Europe and we've been here for four years; if we're not going to fight, what are we doing? And Faulkner leaves that question hanging, like ringing a bell. That's right, because the trench has been there all this while. It's been there for fifty or sixty years now and everybody's lined up ready to kill on two sides of that; ring that bell. What is happening? If we don't do that, then what is there to do? If there's going to be no nuclear war, no nuclear holocaust, what are we going to do? What are we then to do if we turn away from that whole complication, that whole delusion? We don't know. We haven't known for several generations now what it is to be real. Casualties; Cold War casualties.

Faulkner writes, “...the officer himself [was] already beginning to move when he spoke: ‘When you are relieved, go down your dugout and stay there.’ Then they were gone. The sentry began to turn back toward the aperture. Then he stopped. The runner was now standing on the duckboards below him; while they looked at [each] other the star-shell sniffed and traced its sneering arc and plopped into parachute, the faint glare washing over the runner’s lifted face then, even after the light itself had died, seeming to linger still on it as if the glow had not been refraction at all but water or perhaps grease; he spoke in a tense furious murmur not much louder than a whisper: ‘Do you see it now? Not for us to ask what nor why but just go down a hole in the ground and stay there until they decide what to do. No: just how to do it because they already know what. Of course they won't tell us. They wouldn't have told us anything at all if they hadn't had to, hadn't had to tell us something, tell the rest of you something before the ones of us who were drawn out yesterday for special couriers out of Corps would get back in tonight and tell you what we had heard. And even then, they told you just enough to keep you in the proper frame of mind so that, when they said Go down [in] the dugouts and stay there you would do it. And even I wouldn't have known any more in time if on the way back in tonight I hadn't blundered onto that lorry train.’ ”

And what he saw was that it was true. That three thousand men had refused to fight and because of that the whole front had become quiet. A hundred miles of trench had fallen into peace. And it wasn't just the three thousand men in the regiment but thirteen men had started it. And it made sense to that regiment. They hadn't talked to anybody above the level of corporal - privates and corporals. That's all they had talked to. And all they said was let's just not do it, we're tired, we're all tired, they're tired. And we have a runner who's going over to their side and they're understanding. Their leaders are not understanding. But the men like us are understanding we're just not going to fight anymore. So the problem becomes exacerbated. And finally the old general, the leader of the whole Allied armed forces, wants to see this man among the thirteen who has really spearheaded this. And it turns out precariously that this man the corporal is actually the son of this old general. That's why the son knows so much about strategy. He knows how to win because his father is the great general. He knows how to win. Not just how to bide time, not just how to gain the edge for the moment, but how to win. And the old general is really having a tough time with him. This is a quality of conversation that comes up in Faulkner. See if I can, I can do it.

“ ‘Sit down,’ the old general said. ‘No,’ the other said. ‘I was standing when I accepted this appointment. I can stand to divest myself of it.’ He thrust one big fleshless hand rapidly inside his tunic then out again, though once more he stood just holding the folded paper in it, looking down at the old general. ‘Because I didn't just believe in you. I loved you. I believed from that first moment when I saw you in that gate that day forty-seven years ago that you had been destined to save us. That you were chosen by destiny out of the paradox of your background, to be a paradox to your past in order to be free of human past [and] to be one out of all earth to be free of the compulsions of fear and weakness and doubt which render the rest of us incapable of what you were competent for; that you in your strength would even absolve us of our failure due to our weakness and fears. I don't mean the men out there tonight –’ this time the vast hand holding the folded paper made a single rapid clumsy gesture which indicated, seemed to shape somehow in the brilliant insulate room the whole scope of the murmurous and anguished darkness outside and even as far away as the lines themselves – the wire, the ditches dense and, for this time anyway, silent with dormant guns and amazed and incredulous men, waiting, alerted, confused and incredulous with hope ‘– they don't need you, they are capable of saving themselves, as three thousand of them proved four days ago. They only needed to be defended, protected from you. Not expected to be nor even hoped to be: just should have been except that we failed them. Not you this time, who did not even [know] what you would but what you must, since you are you. But I and my few kind, who had rank enough and authority and position enough, as if God Himself had put this warrant in my hand that day against this one three years later, until I failed them and Him and brought it back.’ His hand also jerked, [and] flicked, and tossed folded paper onto the desk in front of the bowl and jug and the still intact morsel, on either side of which the old general’s veined and mottled hands lay faintly curled at rest. ‘Back to you by hand, as I received it from you. I will have no more of it. I know: by my own token I am too late in returning what I should never have accepted to begin with because even at first I would have known myself incapable of coping with what it was going to entail, if I had only known then what that entailment was going to be. I am responsible. I am responsible, mine is the blame and solely mine; without me and this warrant which you gave me that day three years ago, you could not have done this. By this authority I could have prevented you then, and even afterward I could have stopped it.’ ‘...But then why shouldn't I be afraid of you, since you are afraid of man?’ ‘I am not afraid of man,’ the old general said. ‘Fear implies ignorance. [What] ignorance is not, you do not need to fear: only respect. I don't fear man's capacities, I merely respect them.’ ‘And use them’... ‘Beware of them,’ the old general said. ‘Which, fear them or not, you should. You someday will. Not I, of course. I'm an old man, finished; I had my chance and failed; who – what – wants or needs me further now?’ ”

“…‘He won't accept that life!’ the other cried. ‘If he does –’ and stopped, amazed, aghast, foreknowing and despaired while the gentle voice went on: ‘If he does, if he accepts his life, keeps his life, he will have abrogated his own gesture and martyrdom. If I gave him his life tonight, I myself could render null and void what you call the hope and the dream of his sacrifice. By destroying his life tomorrow morning, [and firing squad] I will establish forever that he didn't even live in vain, let alone die so. Now tell me who's afraid?’ ”

“…the other began to turn, slowly, a little jerkily, as though he were blind, turning on until he faced the small door again and stopping not as though he saw it but as if he had located its position and direction by some other and lesser and less exact sense, like smell, [and] the old general watching him until he had completely turned before he spoke: ‘You've forgotten your paper.’ ‘Of course,’ the other said. ‘So I have.’ He turned back, jerkily, blinking rapidly; his hand fumbled on the table top for a moment, then it found the folded paper and put it back inside the tunic, and he stood again, blinking rapidly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So I did.’ Then he turned again, a little stiffly still but moving almost quickly now, directly anyhow. and went on across the blanched rug, toward the door; at once it opened and the aide entered, carrying the door with him and already turning into rigid attention, holding it while the Quartermaster General walked toward it, a little stiffly and awkwardly, too big too gaunt too alien, then stopped and half-turned his head and said: ‘Goodbye.’ ”

“ ‘Goodbye,’ [said] the old general. The other went on, to the door now, almost into it, beginning to bow his head a little as though from long habit already too tall for most doors, stopping almost in the door now, his head still bowed a little even after he turned it not quite toward where the old general sat immobile and gaudy as a child's toy behind the untouched bowl and jug and the still uncrumbled bread. ‘And something else,’ the Quartermaster General said. ‘To say. Something else –’ ‘With God,’ the old general said. ‘Of course,’ the Quartermaster General said. ‘That was it. I almost said it.’ ”

They execute the leaders who had brought on this false peace. And by executing them they reestablish their control and authority And the war resumes and the delusion resumes. The old general and the corporal meet and have a conversation just before the execution. The old general comes and meets him directly.

“ ‘Don't be afraid,’ the corporal said. ‘There's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing worth it.’ For a moment the old general didn't seem to have heard the corporal at all, standing a head below the other's high mountain one, beneath the seemingly insuperable weight of the blue-and-scarlet hat cross-barred and dappled with gold braid and heavy golden leaves. Then he said, ‘Afraid? No no, it's not I but you who are afraid of man; not I but you who believe that nothing but a death can save him. I know better. I know that he has that in him which will enable him to outlast even his wars; that in him more durable than all his vices, even that last and most fearsome one; to outlast even this next avatar of his servitude which he now faces: his enslavement to the demonic progeny of his own mechanical curiosity, from which he will emancipate himself by that one ancient tried and true method by which slaves have always freed themselves: by inculcating their masters with the slaves’ own vices – [and] in this case the vice of war and that other one which is no vice at all but instead is the quality-mark and warrant of man's immortality: his invincible and deathless folly. He has already begun to put wheels under his patio his terrace and his front veranda; even at my age I may see the day when what was once his house has become a storage-place for his bed and stove and razor and spare clothing; you with your youth could (remember that bird) see the day when he will have invented his own private climate and moved it stove bathroom bed clothing kitchen and all into his automobile and what he once called home will have vanished from human lexicon: so that he won't dismount from his automobile at all because he won't need to: the entire earth one unbroken machined de-mountained dis-rivered expanse of concrete paving protuberanceless by tree or bush or house or anything [that] might constitute a corner or a threat to visibility, and man in his terrapin myriads enclosed clothesless from birth in his individual wheeled and glovelike envelope, with pipes and hoses leading upward from underground reservoirs to charge him with one composite squirt [at which] one mutual instant will fuel his mobility, pander his lusts, sate his appetites and fire his dreams; peripatetic, unceasing and long since no longer countable, to die at last at the click of an automatic circuit breaker on a speedometer dial, and, long since freed of bone and organ and gut, leaving nothing for communal scavenging but a rusting and odorless shell – the shell which he does not get out of because he does not need to but which presently for a time he will not emerge from because he does not dare because the shell will be his only protection from the hail-like iron refuse from his wars. Because by that time his wars will have dispossessed him by simple out-distance; his simple frail physique will [no longer be] able to keep up, [to] bear them, attend them, [to] be present. He will try of course and for a little while he will even hold his own; he will build tanks bigger and faster and more impervious and with more firepower than [ever] before, he will build aircraft [and Star Wars] bigger and faster capable of more load… more destruction than any yet; [and] for a little while he will accompany, direct, as he thinks control them, even after he has finally realized that it is not another frail and mortal dissident to his politics or his notions of national boundaries that he is contending with, but the very monster itself which he inhabits. It will not be someone firing bullets at him who for the moment doesn't like him. It will be his own frankenstein which roasts him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed, wrenches loose his still living entrails in the ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop. [Yes.] So he will not be able to go along with it at all… [he'll permit himself] the harmless delusion that he controls it [for a little while, but] then that will be gone too…”

And then Faulkner has the old general bring his long discourse, his long sermonizing tirade down to a close and the drama proceeds and the corporal is executed and the war resumes and the whole situation goes on. But what we are left with is a quality of presence that was there at the beginning, that nothing has happened, that what we have seen is like cloud hands passing before us, that this is an eternal moment that always goes on. It's like the Bhagavad Gita. The two sides are always lined up against each other. There's always a moment of presence before they clash. There's always in that space a dialogue between God and man. But man has to be an individual to participate in that dialogue. It doesn't matter what he says or what he thinks or what he believes, he's got to be present to himself in order to have that dialogue. He can't have that dialogue with divinity if he's other than what he is, if he's anywhere then where he really is, because it's only there at that focus that he can have that dialogue that he can get it straight. He can say whatever he wants to say; he can believe whatever he wants to believe, but only in that focus of the individual real is there a chance for him to learn what it really is all about. Other than the freneticness other than the compulsoryness? Other than the vengeance of it all? Other than the delusion. And so A Fable gives us very high water mark of American civilization, one which for thirty years now has not progressed one inch, one centimeter.

Well next week we will look at some more. But I think with Faulkner we rise to a crest which has just been left like the ringing of a bell untended since then.

Well thanks for bearing with an awful lot.