Faulkner, Truth, and the Artist\u27s Directive: A Reading of A Fable .

The old general in A Fable embodies the resolution of questions about the relation of art and life that Faulkner evoked in his invention of Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury and pursued in a series of subsequent characterizations. This artist-figure motif discloses Faulkner\u27s implication of the relation in the modern crisis of faith. Faulkner images in narrative fiction what Nietzsche asserts in discourse, namely, the need for a reversal of the Platonic valuation of eternal truth (ideality) over art. The characterization of Quentin shows the potentially terrible consequences of man\u27s propensity for mythopoeic invention, as Quentin\u27s unconscious remythologizing of Christian mythos results in the nihilism it seeks to overcome. In A Fable, several characters repeat the paradigm of artist-figures who attempt through mythopoeia to override ontological conditions and establish ideal projections. The old general, by contrast, recognizes the open-- aestheticist --condition of existence, predicated on man\u27s physiology, which entails the universality of perspectivism and makes valuation essential to the well-being of man\u27s existence. Aware of both the mythic proportions of his public image and the need of his culture for a sustaining grand illusion, the old general consciously develops a legend of himself that satisfies this need through a reaccentuation of Christian mythos. In this action he suggests Heidegger\u27s reinterpretation of Nietzsche\u27s reversal, a reading that postulates the strife between closure and disclosure as the inherent existential operation whereby art allows truth to happen. The dissertation includes four chapters: (1) The Textual Case for Faulkner\u27s Aestheticism ; (2) Remythology and Spoilation: The Mythopoeic Utterances of Faulkner\u27s Failed Artist-Figures ; (3) Strife, Structure, the Dissemination of Voices and the Destruction of Truth in A Fable ; (4) The Artist\u27s Directive: Remythologizing the Kerygma in A Fable.