Abstract
Writing to Harold Ober in December of 1947 about the manuscript of A Fable, Faulkner asserted: ‘There is nothing wrong with the book as it will be, only it may be 50 years before the world can stop to read it’.1 During the long course of the composition of A Fable it must at times have seemed to Faulkner that it would take him almost that long just to write the novel: he worked intermittently on it for over ten years, from the fall of 1943 to the spring of 1954.2
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Notes
Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories 1944–1962 (New York: Viking, 1966) p. 105. Although Faulkner referred to the work as ‘a fable’ almost from its inception, Blotner dates the actual choice of the title much later than does Cowley. See Blotner, Biography, p. 1470.
For a detailed study of early reviews and articles, see Schendler, ‘William Faulkner’s A Fable’, Diss. Northwestern University 1956, pp. 1–39. See also Straumann, ‘An American Interpretation of Existence: Faulkner’s A Fable’, in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960) pp. 349–72.
Millgate, ‘Faulkner on the Literature of the First World War’, Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (1973) 392. It is also possible that Faulkner may have chosen World War I as a setting in order to respond to Hemingway’s use of that same setting in A Farewell to Arms, the work which Faulkner had more specifically addressed in The Wild Palms.
Although Faulkner undoubtedly had other contexts in mind in the use of this quotation, the runner must perforce be making reference to The Jew of Malta. For a discussion of the multiple layers of this allusion in A Fable, see Phyllis Bartlett, ‘Other Countries, Other Wenches’ Modern Fiction Studies, 3 (1958) 348–9, and Richard P. Adams, Faulkner: Myth and Motion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 11.
See also Kathryn Chittick, ‘“Telling It Again and Again”’: Notes on a Horsethief’, Mississippi Quarterly, 32 (1979) 426, 428; and Butter-worth, pp. 54–5.
William Faulkner Manuscripts 20: ‘A Fable’. Introduced and arranged by Michael Millgate, I (New York and London: Garland, 1986) pp. xiii–xiv.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) p. 35.
Letters, p. 314. William Rossky asserts that The Reivers shares affinities with The Tempest; see his ‘Faulkner’s Tempest’ in William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1973) pp. 358–69.
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© 1990 Gary Harrington
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Harrington, G. (1990). A Fable. In: Faulkner’s Fables of Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10837-4_6
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