BOOKS
TIME FROZEN
A FABLE. By Willillm Fllulkner. Rllndom Ho'use. $4.75.
Mr. William Faulkner has been working on this novel-if
that is what it is-for the last nine years and it is, appropriately, a work
of ambitious theme and dimension. It has the diffused moral glow of
affirmation that writers of talent seem bound to hanker after sooner or
later. In nearly all his novels he has been the regionalist and one of
those who lay down the foundations of a culture. He has been called,
in this respect, bardic, a worker in legend and saga and although he
has been a good deal compared with Hawthorne in American litera–
ture, he will suggest to an English critic an even greater resemblance
to Scott. But there has always been an alien irritant in his talent: the
contact with Europe through the Europeanized Eliot and through
Joyce in literature, and through the First World War in life. The last
has occasionally been explicit, as in
Soldiers Payor
in one or two
short stories-"Turn About" is one of the best stories he has ever
written. Europe is explicit also in
A Fable.
Mr. Faulkner has always turned his subjects into history: that is '
to say the story has stopped, Fate has had its say, the thing is settled
before it begins ; we go back over it as it rots down in the compost of
time. Mr. Faulkner has no sense of what things may become, instead
he has the myth-maker's sense of the different ways in which experi–
ence is repetitive and over. In
A
Fable
he moves from the native past
of1 Yoknapatawpha to history on a larger scale. He goes to the Europe
of 1916 which, as we know, so profoundly affected the writers of his
generation. Old Kaspar sits in the sun and tells us he does not know
what the war was about except that, in the end, people began to feel
it must be the last war of all. Mr. Faulkner has always loved the land;
he has always hated mechanical civilization and the castrated man it
is thought to produce ; but like Crane and Hemingway before him he
is romantically curious about military
vir,tu
and ritual. The clash of
rifle butts as the guard changes, the sounding of the
Last Post,
the
pulling down of the flag, the self-mutilations of hierarchy and com–
mand, the privileged speeding of cars to headquarters, and so on,
have an almost religious connotation for him and are certainly marked
by rhetoric and nostalgia. Mr. Faulkner is far from the same sort of
