WILDERNESS AND CIVILIZATION
341
the
Fable,
is juxtaposed in his great passive act of refusing to fight.
He is a representative of the mass of unambitious, silent people, who
have no stake in any of it, and only "endure." Christ in Faulkner's
vision is the "mere meek heir to earth," who, "with his humility and
pity and sacrifice," has not even converted the world to Christianity;
"It was pagan and bloody Rome that did it"; and his modern re–
incarnation, the Corporal, is one of Faulkner's tragic heroes who, as
Malraux has said, stand up against the irremediable and are crushed
by it. He does not save anybody. He is the hero in his role as op–
ponent of civilization.
So far it seems that readers and reviewers of
A Fable
have been
saved from the shock of recognizing the ferocity of Faulkner's vision
because they have approached it with the traditional interpretation
of the Bible, adapting the novel to it. The truth is that it is absolute
heresy. The same shock is due to all who adhere to the idea of civil–
ization as the accumulated result of the best human efforts, which
is perhaps somewhat in danger of becoming corrupted or of exercis–
ing a corrupting influence on innocent virtue. But Faulkner's view
is a far cry from Rousseau's petulant argument that civilization cor–
rupts virtue and morals; it is a wholesale indictment of civilization
as rapacious, seeing its best fruits precisely a sublimation of this, its
innermost nature.
This is not a new turn of thought in Faulkner's work. It has
been latent in it for a long time, at first more as a feeling than a
formulated thought, but already clearly emerging in
Go Down,
Moses.
Moreover, there is a latent hostility, a deep-seated suspicion of
civilization which has been present, if submerged, in American litera–
ture since its early times. It can be found in many of its writers–
flippantly in Mark Twain, who lets Huck say in the end: "But I
reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because
Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can't
stand it"-although it has never been conceived and articulated so
radically. But in one form or another it has given to American real–
ism from Crane and Dreiser to Hemingway its characteristic blunt–
ness and the vigor of absolute, if undefined, conviction.
The first American proponent of this feeling was James Feni–
more Cooper, although in this as in other things he never quite recog–
nized the full implication of what he was saying. It is, of course,
