Ursula Brumm
WILDERNESS AND CIVILIZATIO N:
A NOTE ON WILLIAM FA ULKNER
Among the many analogues to the Bible in William Faulk–
ner's last book
A Fable
is one to the well-known words of I Corin–
thians 13: 8 "Charity never faileth" :
Rapacity does not fail, else man must deny he breathes. Not rapa–
city: its whole vast glorious history repudiates that. It does not, cannot,
must not fail. Not just one family in one nation privileged to soar comet–
like into splendid zenith through and because of it, not just one nation
among all the nations selected as heir to that vast splendid heritage;
not just France, but all governments and nations which ever rose and
endured long enough to leave their mark as such, had sprung from it
and in and upon and by means of it became forever fixed in the amaze–
ment of man's present and the glory of his past; civilization itself is its
password and Christianity its masterpiece; Chartres and the Sistine
Chapel, the pyramids and the rock-wombed powder-magazines under
the Gates of Hercules its altars and monuments, Michelangelo and Phi–
dias and Newton and Ericsson and Archimedes and Krupp its priests
and popes and bishops; the long dea thless roster of its glory- Caesar
and the Barcas and the two Macedonians, our own Bonaparte and the
great Russian and the giants who strode nimbused in red hair like fire
across the Aurora Borealis, and all the lesser nameless who were not
heroes but, glorious in anonymity, at least served the destiny of heroes–
the generals and admirals, the corporals and ra tings of glory, the batmen
and orderlies of reknown, and the chairmen of boards and the presi–
dents of federations, the doctors and lawyers and educators and church–
men who after nineteen centuries have rescued the son of heaven from
oblivion and translated him from mere meek heir to earth to chairman
of its board of trade . .. it is in and from rapacity that he [man] gets,
holds, his immortality. . . (p. 259
f.) .
This is, indeed, the focal point of
A Fable,
summing up in a
sweeping rhetorical passage the whole history of human effort and
achievement and finding it all rooted in rapacity: trade, government,
war, art, Christianity, all of civilization.
It
is against this tremendous
edifice of human endeavor that the Corporal, the Christ figure of
