Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

War and Modernism in A Fable

95 War and Modernism in A Fable Modern European sculpture and painting appear prominently in two scenes in A Fable. The sculpture appears in an intricately staged setting for the old general’s interview with the three women, his son the corporal’s sisters and wife, who have come to Allied Headquarters at Chaulnesmont to ask him to spare their kinsman’s life. The interview takes place in a sparsely-furnished ante-room in which sit a table, a chair behind it, and a bench against the opposite wall. On the ends of the table perch two bronzes, “a delicate and furious horse poised weightless and epicene on one leg, and a savage and slumbrous head not cast, molded but cut by hand out of the amalgam by Gaudier-Brzeska” (928). The old general has just come from a roundtable discussion with other Allied generals about the Christcorporal who has masterminded the mutiny whereby an entire battalion of French soldiers has refused to charge the enemy as ordered. The mutiny has caused the Allied officers to confer with a German general about how to get the war re-started with a minimum of damage to civilization—that is, of course, to the civilization of the wealthy and powerful upper classes of the nations at war with each other. As the runner says, with perhaps a nod toward Jean Renoir’s great 1937 film, La Grande Illusion, all of the generals “speak the same language, no matter what War and Modernism in A Fable 96 clumsy isolated national tongues they were compelled by circumstance to do it in” (961): some things are more important than war. Prior to the German general’s entrance, the lesser Allied generals offer personal testimony as to the several forms and names under which the corporal has appeared on and around the battlefields, the various miraculous acts he has performed, the ways in which he has died and been buried, and the legends his activities have created throughout the trenches; the discussion the old general is about to have with the corporal’s three kinswomen will cover more mundane but equally important facts about the corporal’s actual birth, life, and participation in the war. The painting appears during the “horsethief” episode, before the New Orleans lawyer begins a long-planned speech defending the old Negro handler and the cockney groomsman against the crowd that wants to free the thieves and squirrel them safely out of town to where they will be safe from prosecution for stealing the astonishing, legendmaking race-winning three-legged horse. The lawyer, pausing a moment before speaking to reflect on his position in the world, remembers a picture he owns, a painting, no copy but proved genuine and coveted, for which he had paid more than he liked to remember even though it had been validated by experts before he bought it and revalidated twice since and for which he had been twice offered half again what he had paid for it, and which he had not liked then and still didn’t and was not even certain he knew what it meant, but which was his own now and so he didn’t even have to pretend that he liked it, which—so he believed then, with more truth than any save himself knew—he affirmed to have bought for the sole purpose of not having to pretend that he liked it; one evening, alone in his study . . . suddenly he found himself looking at no static rectangle of disturbing Mediterranean blues and saffrons and ochres, nor even at the signboard affirming like a trumpet-blast the inevictable establishment in coeval space of the sum of his past. . . . (835–36) The lawyer would seem to have bought himself a Cézanne, perhaps a Braque or a Derain, but almost certainly a Fauviste painting or one of War and Modernism in A Fable 97 the Vorticist school. Thomas L. McHaney thinks there’s reason to believe that the lawyer miraculously owns one of Cézanne’s Chateau Noir canvases. Indeed, all five in the Chateau Noir series fit Faulkner’s description of the lawyer’s infuriating and disconcerting possession. Chateau Noir also has other intriguing resonances with Faulkner’s work: one reasonable translation of the French is “Dark House,” a working title for two of his most famous novels, which each time he rejected in favor of Light in August...