War and Temporality: Walter Benjamin’s Redemptive Allegory and William Faulkner’s A Fable

Document Type

Article

Authors

Tiao Wang, Harbin Institute of Technology (China)Follow

Author Biography

Tiao Wang (王 ), PhD, is a professor of English language and literature in the School of International Studies, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin (Heilongjiang Province), China, where she focuses on American studies. She has published twenty-three articles in Chinese and English. Her book, Modernistic Poetics in China: Consumerist Economics and Chinese Literary Modernism (coauthored with Ronald Schleifer) appeared in 2022.

Abstract

Faulkner’s 1954 novel, A Fable, stands out from his body of work as an allegorical narrative that addresses universal themes outside of any local (e.g., the American South a generation after the Civil War) context. This essay more fully integrates A Fable into Faulkner’s body of work by examining how this novel takes up allegory not to “transcend” time by means of abstract—“conceptual”—universals but rather to delineate a worldly future. Such a “future,” as Sartre notes, is absent from Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels. The essay analyzes the allegory of A Fable in relation to Walter Benjamin’s rethinking of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, works that both focus on a war-torn world. The essay argues that A Fable is not, unlike much of Faulkner’s work, haunted by the past—including the brutal history of chattel slavery and racism—but rather by the future, which can be conceived as constituted by worldly action rather than an ideal state of affairs. It further addresses the articulation of racism in Faulkner’s work in relation to Benjamin’s sense of the “redemptive” possibilities/potentialities of allegory.

Recommended Citation

Wang, Tiao (2023) "War and Temporality: Walter Benjamin’s Redemptive Allegory and William Faulkner’s A Fable," Criticism: Vol. 65: Iss. 4, Article 4.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol65/iss4/4