"In Another Country": Faulkner's A Fable

"IN ANOTHER COUNTRY": FAULKNER'S A FABLE Doreen Fowler* Although the setting of A Fable is ostensibly France during the years of World War I, William Faulkner seems to have rejected this unambiguous designation of the time and place of his novel. In a letter to Robert Haas written in 1947, Faulkner explains that, for him, the locale of A Fable is "fabulous" and "imaginary."1 As if to underscore this mythic foreign setting, the phrase "in another country" echoes like a refrain throughout the novel. While the phrase crops up frequently in A Fable, its most conspicuous incarnation is as a fragment of a literary quotation twice invoked by the runner. This repeated quotation, which the runner chants like an incantation, has mystified commentators since the allusion does not appear to have any obvious connection to its immediate context .2 However, the runner's literary excerpt is not an empty rhetorical flourish in that the quotation is demonstrably relevant to the large issues that Faulkner's novel explores. A Fable, as its decorative crosses attest, is a religious allegory, and the "in another country" allusion, in combination with other allusions in Faulkner's text, addresses the central subject of all religious writing, the problem of human evil. On two distinct occasions in A Fable, the runner summons to mind a literary quotation. The quoted lines first appear in the spring of 1918. The runner has heard the corporal's message of peace and hope, but nothing has changed—the slaughter proceeds apace; the spring offensive has begun, and the runner, now "in an actual platoon, part of a rearguard ," is "too busy remembering how to walk backward to think" and so is using in place of the harassing ordeal of thought a fragment out of the old time before he had become incapable of believing, out of Oxford probably (he could even see the page) though now it seemed much younger than that, too young to have endured this far at all: lo, I have committed fornication. But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.3 The runner's "fragment" seems to be totally irrelevant; as one critic puts it, "there is no meaning here that the runner could be looking for, nor *Doreen Fowler is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi . Her publications include Faulkner's Changing Vision: From Outrage to Affirmation as well as articles in American Literature, Journal ofModern Literature, Critique, Studies in the Novel, Faulkner Journal, and the Arizona Quarterly. She is currently working on a book on Faulkner. 44Doreen Fowler are there any similarities of theme or parallel characters that Faulkner could be calling to our attention."4 And yet the apparently meaningless fragment is invoked a second time, calling attention to the quotation as well as calling into question its alleged insignificance. The allusion appears in the text again shortly after the temporary armistice brought about by the corporal and his men, just as the runner has discovered the elaborate subterfuge that permitted a German general to land safely in enemy territory where he and the Allied high command can together devise a strategy to counter the corporal's peace initiative. Even while the runner is witnessing a work crew stealthily removing blank shells from the guns which had "fired" on the German general's plane, he is searching for something which he had lost, mislaid, for the moment, though when he thought that he had put the digit of his recollection on it at last, it was wrong, flowing rapid and smooth through his mind, but wrong: In Christ is death at end in Adam that began:— true, but the wrong one: not the wrong truth but the wrong moment for it, the wrong one needed and desired; clearing his mind again and making the attempt again, yet there it was again: In Christ is death at end in Adam that—still true, still wrong, still comfortless; and then, before he had thought his mind was clear again, the right one was there, smooth and intact and instantaneous, seeming to have been there for a whole minute while he was still fretting its loss...