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Content A STUDY OP HUMOR IN THE FICTION
OP WILLIAM FAULKNER
by
Herman Oland Wilson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1956
UMI Number: DP23011
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Ph. 0 E SC W7¥&
T h is d issertatio n, w ritte n by
Herman _ _ 01 an c l _ _ Wi 1 § PH....
u n d e r the d ire c tio n o f ..Yl2.£ruidance C o m m itte e ,
and a p p ro v e d by a ll its m em bers, has been p re
sented to and accepted by the F a c u lty o f the
G ra d u a te S chool, in p a r tia l fu lfillm e n t o f the
require m en ts f o r the degree o f
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
„ ( 7 iW, ) i s - s -
Dateid................................
Guidance Committee
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION: FAULKNER’S REPUTATION AS
A HUMORIST ..............................
Part One: The Paradox of Humor and
Violence ......... ...................
Part Two: Faulkner’s Relation to Native
American Humor ......... .............
Part Three: Faulkner and His World . .
II. HUMOR IN THE EARLY NOVELS AND STORIES . .
III. THE POT BOILER AND ITS SEQUEL . .........
Part One: Sanctuary ...............
Part Two: Requiem for a Nun ...........
IV. PATTERNS OF FAMILY LIFE . ...............
Part One: The Sound and the Fury . . .
Part Two: As I Lay Dying ........
Part Three: Light in August ...........
V. THE CHANGING SOCIAL ORDER ...............
Part One: Absalom, Absalomi ......
Part Two: The Unvanquished ...........
Part Three: The Hamlet ...............
PAGE
23
52
71
111
111
137
151
151
176
198
230
230
253
264
iv
CHAPTER PAGE
VI. STORIES WITH AN URBAN SETTING...... 301
Part One: Pylon.................. 301 j
Part Two: The Wild P a l m s ........ 314
Part Three: Prom Collected Stories . . 329 I
VII. STORIES RELATING TO FARM AND VILLAGE LIFE 345 1
Part One: Go Down, Moses ....... 345
Part Two: Intruder in the Dust .... 371
Part Three: The Old M a n 386 j
Part Four: From The Collected Stories . 400 |
VIII. LATER STORIES OF EUROPE AND WORLD WAR I . 414-
Part One: From The Collected Stories . 414
Part Two: A Fable.................. . . 433
IX. THE FUNCTION OF FAULKNER'S HUMOR.... 454
Summary and Conclusion ................. 454
BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................... 48l
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: FAULKNER'S REPUTATION
AS A HUMORIST
Part One: The Paradox of Humor and Violence
In the twenty-five years between the publishing of
his first book (1924) and the winning of the Nobel Prize
for Literature (1949)* William Faulkner won both a na
tional and an international reputation as one of America’s
foremost writers of fiction. Recognition and reward came
only after a long and lonely struggle, a career of writing
distinguished mainly by apathy of the general public and
hostility on the part of many critics. Even after dis
cerning critics began to recognize and applaud the genius
of Faulkner, his works were still largely neglected. As
late as 1944 Malcolm Cowley, one of the first important
critics to defend Faulkner, wrote:
It is time to make a plea for the work of William
Faulkner. More than that of any other living
American author it has been misinterpreted by the
critics and, in recent years, neglected by the
public at large. Of his seventeen published
books--which include eleven novels, two volumes
of poetry and four collections of stories--not
one has had a sale in the trade edition of as
much as 20,000 copies. Almost all are now out
of print; and there is only one novel--of course
2
it would be Sanctuary--that continues to be
mildly popular in the Modern Library Edition.
Booksellers as a class are not enthusiastic
about his work. Librarians tend to distrust
it.l
i <
, The reasons for public apathy are not hard to find. "The I
1 strange genius from Mississippi seemed often to violate
preconceived standards of taste, or capriciously to dis-
2
regard sober warnings from his critics." When he frankly
stated (in his "Preface" to the 1932 Modern Library edi-
! tion of Sanctuary) that "to me it was a cheap idea, be- |
; cause it was deliberately conceived to make money," he ,
; confirmed the suspicions of many critics that he was
! i
| seeking to exploit sensationalism and horror for commer- :
I cial success. In the same "Preface" he confessed that !
I he "speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe
to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right
answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine
3
and wrote it in about three weeks . . .". Thus Faulkner
brought upon himself the charge of moral irresponsibility
1
"William Faulkner's Human Comedy," New York Times
Book Review, October 29* 19^* p.
2
Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, editors,
William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism (East Lansing,
Michigan, 1951J, p. 1.
3
Sanctuary (New York, 1931* Introduction copyright
1932), p. vi.
3
and the abuse of his literary powers for cheap success.
This marked the beginning, Hoffman says, "of the most
4
persistent of all types of Faulkner criticism." The same
authority goes on to say that early critics of Faulkner's
work belonged largely to two persuasions--the "humanist"
or the "leftist" tradition--but both groups were disap
pointed in Faulkner because he seemed to ignore the sense
of responsibility and of moral discretion incumbent upon
a serious writer. His work did not have "spiritual
resonance"; it exploited obscenity and horror for their
own sake or as a "cheap idea"; he did not wish for a
"better world" but hated the present and brooded over the
collapse of the past; he was abnormally fond of morons,
idiots, perverts, and nymphomaniacs. He was, in short,
the leading member of a "cult of cruelty" school of mod
ern writing. Alan R. Thompson's essay "The Cult of
5
Cruelty" first stated the terms of this line of criticism
and accused Faulkner, among others, of exploiting horror
and evil for their own sake, not for aesthetic effects.
The criticism of the 1930's belonged, by and large,
4
Hoffman and Vickery, p. 2.
5
The Bookman, Vol. 74 (January-February, 1932),
pp. 477-W:
to this school. It was harsh and often hostile. Granville
j Hicks, for example, said that Faulkner "seeks for symbols
! :
of despair," and his characters are found originally in j
| "textbooks of pathology." He added: ;
His themes are suffering and violence. Death is '
central in all but one of his seven novels. . . .
Faulkner's men and women are, with few exceptions
twisted shapes in the chaotic wreckage of a world.^
And again:
The ordinary affairs of this life are not enough
for Faulkner; even the misery and disease born of
! generations of poverty and ignorance are not ade-
; quate themes for the expression of his horror and
disgust. Nothing but crime and insanity will
| satisfy him (p. 266). i
i I
%
This review set the tone for many that were to follow in j
j
the thirties and on into the present. !
j
Besides the objections raised about the obscenity,
i
lust, violence, and horror in Faulkner's subject matter,
j
I the novels were damned for their involved rhetoric, tumid !
i ;
language, and complexity of form/ These charges of a j
deliberate perversity of style and narrative technique
have been made so often (even in very recent reviews) that
7
they need not be repeated here. Reviews which stressed
fi
The Great Tradition (New York, 1933)j P* 265*
7
See, for example: Edith Hamilton's "Faulkner:
! Sorcerer or Slave," Saturday Review of Literature, July
12, 1952, and Maxwell Geismar's "A Rapt and Tumid Power,"
Saturday Review of Literature, July 12, 1952.
5
the difficulties of understanding his language or the
complex forms of his novels further limited the number of
his readers. Faulkner thus became (as he still is to
great numbers of readers) a "myth" and an "enigma." These
difficulties are summed up in the words of Leslie Fiedler:
It has taken me ten years of wary reading to dis
tinguish the actual writer of The Sound and the
Fury from a synthetic Faulkner compounded of sub-
Marxian stereotypes . . . and I am aware that there
is yet another elaborate and chaotic Erskine Caldwell,
revealing a world of barnyard sex and violence through
a fog of highbrow rhetoric. The grain of regrettable
truth in both these views is lost in their misleading
emphasis; and equally confusing are the less hysteri
cal partial glimpses which make Faulkner primarily
a historian of Southern culture, or a canny techni
cian whose evocations of terror are secondary to
Jamesian experiments with "point of view."°
Unfavorable reviewers continued to attack both
the author and his works until the publication in 1939
of George Marion O'Donnell's "Faulkner's Mythology"
(Kenyon Review, Summer, 1939), one of the first attempts
to see Faulkner's work as a consistent whole (pp. 9-10)*
O'Donnell insisted that Faulkner is essentially a "tradi
tional moralist, in the best sense," and not an apostle
of immorality, determinism, and nihilism. This essay
marked a turning point in the history of Faulkner criti
cism. O'Donnell's thesis that Faulkner was a "traditional
man in a modern world" who observed and recorded "the
As quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 1.
conflict between traditionalism and the anti-traditional i
modern world in which it is immersed" gave not only a new
direction to the criticism, but a basis for the under
standing of the writer's aims, a basis which had previous- ■
ly been sadly lacking. Individuals are seen not as iso
lated and pathetic derelicts or rebels, but as represents- j
i
i
tives of the "traditional" (Sartoris) man or "anti-tradi- j
tional" (Snopes) man in a world that has forsaken old and
i
established traditions. The struggles, then, are moral, !
r
and the punishments or rewards follow moral patterns. j
Following the trail blazed by O'Donnell, Malcolm
Cowley in 19^6 edited and published the Viking Portable
Faulkner, with a critical "Introduction" that shed much
new light on Faulkner's writing and called attention to
misinterpretations as well as neglected elements in the
work of the Mississippian. Cowley called attention to
Faulkner's world--north Mississippi--and described in de
tail the mythical county and county seat--Yoknapatawpha
and Jefferson--which figure so prominently in most of
Faulkner's novels and many of his best stories. He traced
briefly Faulkner's education and unguided reading in Keats,
Balzac, Flaubert, Swinburne, Mallarme, Wilde, Housman,
Joyce, Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings, and— to
a degree— Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos
(p. 2). Themes and plots, as well as characters and
their significance in the over-all pattern of the novels,
t
j l
are discussed by Cowley, who further called attention to I
!
Faulkner's love of the land, his "delight in the weather,"j
his .feeling for the close ties of family life, and his J
i
I innate sense of humor. Concerning the latter, Cowley I
! I
j wrote: J
; i
j In his later books, which have attracted so little
j attention that they seem to have gone unread, there
J is a quality not exactly new to Faulkner--it had 1
appeared already in passages of Sartoris and j
j Sanctuary— but now much stronger’and no longer j
I overshadowed by violence and horror. It is a sort ]
j of homely and sober-sided frontier humor that is j
j seldom achieved in contemporary writing (except by ;
Erskine Caldwell, another Southerner). . . . In a j
curious way Faulkner combines two of the principal j
; traditions in American letters: the tradition of ;
j psychological horror, often close to symbolism, j
j that begins with Charles Brockden Brown, our first j
j professional novelist, and extends through Poe, I
Melville, Henry James (in his later stories), j
Stephen Crane, and Hemingway; and the other tra- ,
j dition of frontier humor and realism, beginning j
I with Augustus Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes and j
, having Mark Twain as its best example (pp. 21-22). i
i ■ ;
j This comment serves two purposes: it places Faulkner in ;
i
i relation to two dominant influences in American literature
and calls attention to his humor--so often overlooked by |
j
critics who seem fascinated by the more unpleasant aspects;
I
of his work. I
s
As early as 1926 Faulkner had commented on the im- !
portance of humor in American life: I
We have one priceless trait, we Americans. That
trait is our humor. What a pity it is not more
prevalent in our art'. This characteristic alone,
being national and indigenous, could by concen
trating our emotional forces inward upon themselves,
do for us what England's insularity did for English
art during the reign of Elizabeth. One trouble
with us American artists is that we take our art
and ourselves too seriously. And perhaps seeing
ourselves in the eyes of our fellow artists, will
enable those who have strayed to establish anew
a sound contact with the fountainhead of our
American life.9
At the time this essay was written (1926) Faulkner had
published only one novel, Soldiers' Pay, the story of the
homecoming of a badly wounded young soldier, Donald Mahon
whose fiancee breaks off the engagement and marries a
worthless local boy. There is bitterness and disillusion
ment in this novel of "the lost generation"; but there is
also the salt of humor and satire. Besides the risque
jokes of returning soldiers, there are satirical.pictures
of local people--mostly typed--and some attempts at
sophisticated talk. It is worth noting that in his first
novel, Faulkner leavened his work with humor.
In 1927 he published his second novel, Mosquitoes,
filled with "arty" characters who talk much but do little
But this novel, set in New Orleans and filled with
Q
Quoted by John Arthos, "Ritual and Humor in the
Writing of William Faulkner," Accent, 9 (August 19^8), 18
sophisticated dialogue, exploited not only satire, but
also the tall tale. The two tall tales about sheep in
the Louisiana swamps that mated with alligators, and about
the "fisherd" (a dull-witted young man employed to round
up and brand fish) who gradually changes to a shark— these
two tales are both elaborate and entertaining, though of
course not so deft as later tall tales, such as the horse-
swapping yarns of The Hamlet. In Mosquitoes there are
also anecdotes, told principally by Dawson Fairchild, a
figure who resembles Faulkner's friend Sherwood Anderson,
that add a humorous interest. Reviewing this novel in
1927 Conrad Aiken, one of the few early critics to praise
Faulkner's talent, said:
Mr. Faulkner has a sense of character; he has a
sense of style; and for his new novel, "Mosquitoes,"
he has found an amusing and more or less original
setting.
When Paul Romaine wrote the Preface to Salmagundi
(a series of early New Orleans newspaper essays and poems
by Faulkner), dated 1931> he called attention to his
sense of humor.
This is not the propitious moment for my own
analysis of the man and his work; suffice to say
I am happy to know an American writer who has a
magnificent sense of humor (that no one has
bothered to criticize one way or another) combined
The New York Evening Post (June 11, 1927), p. 7*
with an unusual sensitiveness to the major and minor j
tragedies of life; one who is not afraid to laugh :
from his guts or to turn the same inside out that we >
may reflect on those phases of life that our stupid
ity or idolatry bids us close our eyes to. This the 1
man can do with a technical excellence that remains
impregnable against the peckings of tame or wild
geese.11 j
Much later, another critic, Harrison Smith, reviewing
Faulkner's Collected Stories (1950), declared:
There is robust humor in Faulkner's work, mostly s
in his backwoods or hunting stories, which has yet *
to be pointed out to future readers, who may shrink ;
from the legend that he is concerned only with
cruelty and horror.12
More recently, in a generally unsympathetic review of i
Requiem for a Nun (1951)* Herbert Poster says:
In the narrative sequences which interlard the
play, his self-contrived restraints yield to a
lyrical splendor of language and affectionate
folk humor rare in American literature.3-3
Thus, gradually, discerning critics called attention
to qualities in Faulkner's work which had at first been
overlooked or ignored--his capacity for sympathy (or, to
use his own word, "compassion"), his concern for truth and
justice, and his characteristic humor. Readers had been
William Faulkner, Salmagundi (Milwaukee, 1932),
p. 8.
12
Saturday Review of Literature (November 25* 1950)*
pp. 20-21.
3-3
"Faulkner's Folly," American Mercury (December
1951)* P. 3.3.2.
11
so accustomed to horror and violence in his works that
humor was generally unnoticed or, if recognized, consid
ered only incidental. Faulkner’s reputation for "cruelty"
and sensationalism, a reputation which reviewers and
critics helped to establish and disseminate, blinded many
readers to the humane aspects of his work. Romaine's
comment which called attention to Faulkner's blending of
the tragic and comic seems to have made little if any im
pression on either readers or critics. Even now, nearly
thirty years after the appearance of Faulkner's first
novel, many critics still echo the early harsh judgments
and fail to see the artist's serious purpose or the place
of humor in his work. A clue to this purpose is found in
the publisher's blurb on the dust jacket of Faulkner's
first novel--"a story so moving and so intense, so blended
of humor and insight and pity that the thesis is lost
sight of until long after the book is reluctantly closed."
The point is well made: the work blends humor with in
sight and pity; the humor, that is to say, has a schematic
purpose in the novel.
Since the publication of Faulkner's memorable ac
ceptance speech when he received the Nobel Prize for
literature, critics and general readers have endeavored
to re-evaluate his work in the light of his expressed aims.
, This speech, delivered at Stockholm, Sweden, December 10,
i
! 1950* asserted what some already knew— that Faulkner was
i
a dedicated writer whose life-long interests had been
"the human spirit" and "the old verities and truths of
[
' the heart." He called his work "a life's work in the agony
i and sweat of the human spirit" and in the same breath dis-
I avowed any personal and pecuniary aim: "not for glory
j and least of all for profit." Perhaps this thrust was
I
; to still forever the ghost that had haunted him isince
the ill-advised preface to Sanctuary, when he had said
| that that work was deliberately conceived to shock readers
| and to make money. Writing which is not "ephemeral and
;doomed," he said, must deal with the old universal truths--
"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and
sacrifice"--and such writing can come only from "anguish
and travail." Those writers who forget "the problems of
the human heart in conflict with itself" are writing "not
of the heart but of the glands." The speech ended on an
•optimistic note: man will not only endure; "he will pre
vail" because he has a soul and is immortal. Emphasizing
once more the spirit "capable of compassion and sacrifice
and endurance," Faulkner concluded with a kind of charge
to the dedicated artist:
The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about
these things. It is his privilege to help man
13
endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of
the courage and honor and hope and pride and com
passion and pity and sacrifice which have been the
glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely
be the record of man, it can be one of the props,
the pillars to help him endure and prevail.14 :
The task of the writer, Faulkner believes, is not merely
to record the struggles and triumphs of men, but also to
encourage and inspire. In the "Foreword" he wrote in '
f
November, 1953* for The Faulkner Reader, the same thought j
is reiterated and expanded:
To uplift man's heart; the same for all of us: ;
for the ones who are trying to be artists; the !
ones who are trying to write simple entertainment,
the ones who write to shock, and the ones who are
simply escaping themselves and their own private
anguishes.
Some of us don't know that this is what we are
writing for. Some of us will know it and deny it,
lest we be accused and self-convicted and condemned
of sentimentality, which people nowadays for some
reason are ashamed to be tainted with; some of
us seem to have curious ideas of just where the
heart is located, confusing it with other and
baser glands and organs and activities. But we
all write for this one purpose (p. x).
S'
All writers have one aim, Faulkner declares: "to uplift
man's heart"; and his own practice seems to show that pre
senting the comical or humorous aspects of life is one of *
the most effective ways of accomplishing this purpose.
William Faulkner, The Faulkner Reader (New York,
1929* 1954), p. 4.
14
In his autobiographical preface Faulkner speaks
of his early reading, his love of aeroplanes and motor
cycles, and his involvement, from 1923 onward, in writing
books. Once more he states that he wrote "not for any
exterior or ulterior purpose," but because of an inner
compulsion, a "demon which drove him." It is quite pos
sible that in the passing of three decades and in the
achievement of world-wide acclaim as a writer, Faulkner
forgot the anxieties and disappointments he had felt as a
young, unknown writer. In this "Foreword," at least, he
speaks of writing as being his "doom" or "fate" and re
marks that he wrote "the books for the sake of writing
books," though at the same time he hoped that readers
"would find them true and honest and even perhaps moving."
How are we to reconcile the assured, confident statements
of this declaration with the defensive, impatient utter
ances of the Sanctuary "Preface"? Possibly the answer is
that both are correct: the 1932 "preface" expressed the
author's wounded pride and disappointment because the
public had not recognized the quality of his work (Sanctu
ary was deliberately planned to shock readers into aware
ness of Faulkner's talent), and the "Foreword" written in
1953 from the eminence of success and world-wide recogni
tion minimized personal motives and called attention to
15
the creative drive present in all artists.
When Faulkner classified writers according to their
aims (some to create art forms, some to give simple enter
tainment, some to shock, and others to escape "themselves
and their own private anguishes"), he seemed to be con- j
fessing his own practice. Critics have found evidence, j
both in the works and in the circumstances surrounding
i
them, for classifying most of Faulkner's novels and !
stories according to one or more of these types. What '
i
must not be lost sight of is that, though the motives
for writing were varied and complex, all had one under-
[
lying purpose, "to uplift man's heart." The writer's own
immortality comes, Faulkner asserts, from his sharing
with other men the knowledge that "at least we are not
vegetables because the heart and gl.ands capable of par
taking in this excitement are not those of vegetables, ;
and'will, must, endure" (p. xi). j
As to the moral intent of the novelist, Faulkner j
* !
says: "This does not mean that we are trying to change ;
man, improve him, though this is the hope--maybe even the
t
intention--of some of us" (p. x). Ever since the appear- !
i
I
ance of Sanctuary Faulkner has often been referred to as !
a moralist. In his stories, novels, and speeches he
(
proves that he is not only a close observer of human life,j
16
in all its changing moods and manifestations, but that he
is a judge or critic as well. Faulkner makes clear that
he admires certain human qualities (for example, breadth
or tolerance, sympathy, personal integrity and independence',
and a sense of responsibility); on the other hand, he de
plores— and often satirizes--certain human follies and s
failings (for example, hypocrisy and all shams, bigotry, ;
tyranny, faithlessness, and greed). In his fiction he :
has presented human nature in all the complex and rich ;
variety of actual life, so that the vices, virtues,
follies, lusts,and heroisms of men are seen not as ab
stractions but as moving human dramas. One modern critic
remarks:
As a writer of fiction, he has taken his subjects
and themes where he could find them: among the
country people, barn-storming pilots, the negroes,
sailors, an Italian priest, a local barber. That
he has made scenes from the Civil War and parts of
southern life live so luminously that certain
readers think of him as a historian is a compli
ment to his genius for creating a sense of life.
The capacity to create a sense of life in great
variety is extremely rare, and Faulkner's having
it is a most important element in his position
and stature as a writer.^5
Though the moral judgments are usually left to the reader,
Faulkner shows by various means (such as rewards and
William Van O'Connor, The Tangled Fire of William
Faulkner (Minneapolis, 195^)» p. 164".
punishments meted out to the characters and by the com
ments of spokesmen in the fiction) those attitudes and
actions which he strongly approves or disapproves. In
stead of writing sermons he has written satires, and in
his tales he has shown human nobility or depravity in the
garb of actual life.
As already suggested, a part of Faulkner's method
is to employ humor as a means toward his projected ends.
Most of it is so natural in its setting (the dialect and
drolleries of Negroes and poor whites or the caustic com
ments of men about one another) that it may easily go un
noticed. In other situations (as when a character is
relating a tall tale, satirizing some human foibie, or
describing something in comic terms) the intent may be
more apparent but still quite natural. Even in those long
passages in which the author is gibing directly at human
nature, indulging in irony, or blending the tragic with
the comic, one can accept the humor as a normal and effec
tive device for achieving a given end. This use of humor
as a means rather than an end in itself (that is, a joke
or story told merely for its comic value) distinguishes
Faulkner from the traditional humorist. Mark Twain, Josh
Billings, and Bill Nye, for example, related anecdotes
and stories primarily for their value as entertainment;
18
such stories had humor apart from the context or charac
terization involved. The humor in Faulkner's works serves
many purposes (to be studied -later) but it is seldom ex-
I •
ploited for its own sake.
In a recent analysis of Faulkner's works, Harry M.
Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, of the University of Oklahoma,
state:
Another major element of Faulkner's art is his
humor. It is extremely important in accounting
for the -unique effect of his fiction, and humor
appears as an influential norm in all his major
work's except Absalom, Absalom 1 Little systematic
j analysis of his humor has been made; yet a knowl-
| edge of it--or at least a feel for it— is indis-
| pensable for any reasonably complete reading of
| Faulkner's w o r k .16
|
| There is, apparently, a need for a s'tudy of the range,
I
| variety, and uses of humor in the novels and stories of
^ Faulkner. Such a study ought to throw light on the tech
niques as well as the aims of Faulkner and provide a
basis for a fuller understanding and appreciation of
both the author and his unique contributions to fiction.
THE AIMS OF THIS STUDY
The Introduction has attempted to show that humor
has been considered not only an element in the work of
16
William Faulkner: A Critical Appraisal (Norman,
Oklahoma, 1951)* P*
William Faulkner (though elusive and often overlooked),
but that, as recent critics point out, it is an "influen- |
j
tial norm" in nearly all his longer works. This conten- j
tion has no value, however, without support. The first ;
aim of this dissertation will be to show that humor is an !
integral part of the major novels and stories of Faulkner,
from first to last. The evidence will be drawn from the
works themselves, supported at times with statements from >
recognized critics.
Second, this investigation will analyze the various
kinds of humor in Faulkner to indicate both the variety j
j
and the complexity of the comic sense in his work. Some j
critical analyses have been made which show that Faulkner j
i
combines two important traditions of humor— the robust, .
often coarse, frontier humor of the Southwest and the more
complex and cruel "surrealistic" humor, with Freudian over
tones. But these two strains alone do not comprehend all
the varieties and shadings of the comic, ranging from
genial laughter and a wry smile to the bitter, misanthropic
humor reminiscent of Dean Swift. The richness of Faulkner's
humor is suggested by a statement of Robert Penn Warren
in his comment on Cowley's "Introduction" to The Portable
Faulkner:
20
One of the most important remarks in Cowley's
introduction is that concerning humor. There is,
especially in the later books, "a sort of homely
and sober-sided frontier humor that is seldom
achieved in contemporary writing." . . . But there
are other strains which might be distinguished
and investigated. For example, there is a kind
of Dickensian humor. . . . There is a subdued
humor, sometimes shading into pathos . . . and there
is irony. . . .17
Besides analyzing the various kinds of humor this study
endeavors to place Faulkner in relation to other writers
and their possible influence on him.
Third, an important part of this task will be to
trace the development of certain types of humor in '
Faulkner's work. In this Introduction the use of the j
tall tale and satire has ■ been pointed out as typical of
the early novels. Do these types persist, and do they
become more or less frequent? Does dialect humor charac- j
• \
I
terize all or only some of the novels? Do the later works
display more skill in the handling of humor than the early
works? And— it may be asked--is there a typical kind of
Faulknerian humor?
i
Fourth, the various uses of humor in the novels |
and stories will be studied. If, as some critics state, |
i
"humor is never exploited for its own sake" in the work of J
17 !
Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 92-93-
21
Faulkner, what purposes does it serve? There appear to
be several distinct uses of humor: first, in a structural
sense, to provide relief when the reader is about to be
overwhelmed by horror or pathos; second, in an atmospheric
sense, to provide the proper tone for the telling of the
story or for some action; third, to sharpen and make
realistic some bits of conversation and character delinea
tion; fourth, to give added complexity or depth to a scene
or situation. This analysis will involve a study of
| Faulkner's methodology.
j Finally, in scope and thoroughness this investiga-
|
! tion will seek to go beyond the previous studies made of
i
j Faulkner’s humor. The principal works dealing specifical-
!
• ly with this theme are: John Arthos' essay, "Ritual and
! Humor in the Writing of William Faulkner"; Carvel Collins'
essay, "Faulkner and Certain Earlier Southern Fiction";
: Bettye Field's unpublished master's thesis (Vanderbilt
University, 1952), "William Faulkner and the Humor of the
: Old Southwest!1; and. a chapter entitled "Humor" in Campbell
l and Foster's William Faulkner. Besides these studies
there are incidental references in a number of longer
' critical works on Faulkner, such as William Van O'Connor's
The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner and Irving Howe's
■ William Faulkner: A Critical Study. Except for the
thesis, which shows Faulkner's relationship to earlier !
frontier humorists and particularly to Mark Twain, these
studies or incidental discussions are very brief and in
conclusive. Miss Field's study emphasizes only one
strain of humor in Faulkner's work and repeats certain
broad generalizations without critical examination (for
example, she states, as earlier critics did, that
Absalom, Absalomi is devoid of humor). No work known to
this writer has attempted to analyze or classify the
humor of Faulkner in any full or systematic manner, nor
has anyone previously attempted to trace its manifesta
tions through all of his fiction. When humor was noted
I
by many critics, it was often treated as irrelevant or
unimportant, and thus lightly dismissed. The present
study will seek to show that humor is an important element
in the life as well as in the fiction of William Faulkner,
and that it is, indeed, a key to his strange, complex,
often contradictory personality. This study will, it is
hoped, reveal an aspect of Faulkner's life and work which
has been underestimated— his "magnificent sense of humor"--
and thus serve to present a truer picture of his genius.
23
Part Two: Faulkner's Relation to
Native American Humor
Humor is so much a part of the American character
and national culture that its existence is often taken for
granted. It is assumed, like freedom of religion or free
speech, to be a part of our national heritage. A brief
survey of either American history or literature will show,
however, that in Colonial America (especially in the areas
where Puritanism held sway) humor was not a major charac
teristic. Benjamin Franklin was one of the first Ameri
cans to emphasize humor in native politics and literature.
His Poor Richard's Almanacs, as well as his letters and
the delightful Autobiography, combined humor and common
! sense to help form the national character as well as
f
; taste.
t
From early days American humorists have laid great
stress on common sense; Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Peter
Finley Dunne, and Will Rogers (to name a few examples)
have all followed this tradition. Common sense may be
defined simply as an attempt to see things^as they are,
without emotion, prejudice, or illusions. The Encyclopedia
Britannica, in a comment on national types of humor, de
clares :
Most distinctive of all is American humor, the
name given to the peculiar vein of humor which
has been characteristic of the literature of the
United States and which has constituted one of
its eminent features. It may be said to consist
principally of a peculiar and distinctive point
of view, a willingness ta-J3£.e,.^ are,
a detachment from traditional reverences and
conventional beliefs.1
This clear-eyed and unemotional approach to problems has
made Americans impatient with theories, long-winded dis
cussions, "red-tape," and hesitant action. The "common
sense" approach has given rise to political cartoons, ‘
columns of humor in newspapers and magazines, and such ;
popular humorists as Dunne, Bill Nye, and Will Rogers. j
*
Humor is said to arise from two contradictory j
i
sources. ^Men laugh because of self-satisfaction, that is, I
a feeling of superiority, and a sensation of pleasure; or ’
they may laugh because there is no other way to face the
sadness or gloom around them. According to Thomas L.
2
Masson, Dickens and Lincoln represent the latter type. 1
Because they were very sensitive persons, "intense indi-
I
vidualists," he says, and were surrounded by extremely j
dark, depressing human problems, they found an outlet in !
j
humor. To keep from being overwhelmed by gloom, they j
1
"Humour," Vol. XI (19^7 edition), p. 885.
2
Our American Humorists (New York, 1931)> P- 1*
25
laughed in the face of suffering and defeat. Perhaps
much of the humor of modern literature derives from this
source. Man sometimes laughs at his own weakness or help
lessness ; this is .his answer to a fate he cannot avert
or change.
From early colonial days until fairly recent times
America has had an ever-expanding frontier. Tennessee,
Kentucky, western Pennsylvania were at one time the
frontier; as waves of migration continued through the
nineteenth century, the frontier moved farther and farther
westward until the Pacific Ocean was reached. Along the
frontier, whether in Kentucky, Texas, or the Far West, a
hardy type grew up— the frontiersman, who loved the open
spaces, the rugged life, strong drink, and good stories. j
The rough pioneer scoffed at the hardships of life and
made jokes about his difficulties or poverty and the
harshness of nature or thinness of the soil. As Constance
Rourke says in her excellent study of the development of
American humor:
Horror, terror, death, were written large in the
life of the rivers and forests. Yet the backwoods
man kept a comic oblivious tone; he seemed to pos
sess "a certain jollity of mind, pickled in a
scorn of fortune."3
3
American Humor (New York, 1931)> P* 37*
26
The backwoodsman, whatever his other qualities, was
articulate. He boasted, ranted, or "roared" like a wild
animal, and called himself a cross between a horse and
alligator, a flying whale, a bear with a sore head, a
"ring-tailed roarer." He was a tornado, a piece of fly
ing granite, an earthquake on the loose. His rhetoric
was as brisk and uninhibited as his pleasures. In Life
on the Mississippi Mark Twain gives a fair sample of the
frontiersman's roaring:
"Whoo-oop] I'm the old original iron-jawed,
brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from
the wilds of Arkansawl Look at me! I'm the man
they call Sudden Death and General Desolation]
Sired by a hurricane, darn'd by an earthquake,
half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to
the smallpox on the mother's side! Look at me]
I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whisky
for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a
bushel of rattlesnakes when I'm ailing. I split
the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I
squench the thunder when I speak] Whoo-oop]
Stand back and give me room according to my
strength] Blood's my natural drink, and the
wails of the dying is music to my ears. Cast
your eyes on me gentlemen] and lay low and hold ^
your breath, for I'm 'bout to turn myself loose]"
This spirited monologue was the prelude to a fight, arid
the "roarer's" adversary replied with a still longer and
fiercer harangue in which he urged:
"Contemplate me through leather--donJ_t use the
naked eye] I’m the man with a petrified heart
(New York, 1874), p. 21.
and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of Isolated
communities is the pastime of my idle moments,
the destruction of nationalities the serious busi
ness of my life! The boundless vastness of the
great American desert is my inclosed property,
and I bury my dead on my own premises! . . .
Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the Pet
Child of Calamity's a-coming!" (p. 22).
The high spirits, the bombast, and the wild
exaggeration of these speeches are typical of another
frontier tradition— the tall tale. After stressing the
American emphasis on common sense, Edward Seaver observes:
At the same time something related--though on the
surface, the opposite of sense, common or uncommon-- |
also made its appearance. This was the tall story j
about legendary American characters. In a less
literate nation and era, these might have evolved
into folk legend of the nature of the Greek
and Norse myths. In America they became the ex
pression, in self-satirizing banter, of the
boastful pride of a people conscious of great
achievements.5
The chief characteristics of the tall tale are the vivid
imagination displayed, the preposterous exaggerations, :
the mingling of actual events and realistic details with
impossible stories--to give the whole an appearance of
truth, and the matter-of-fact manner in which it was re-
I
lated. The teller delighted in making his yarn plausible I
and entertaining, and he lied for the fun of it. One of I
the writers of the 18301s thus describes Ovid Bolus, a
Pageant of American Humor (Cleveland, 19*1-8), p. 21.
28
typical yarnspinner:
Bolus was a natural liar, just as some horses are
natural pacers, and some dogs natural setters.
What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible
promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love
of art. His genius and his performances were free
from the vulgar alloy of interest and temptation.
Accordingly he did not labor a lie: he lied with
a relish: he lied with a coming appetite, growing
with what it fed on: he lied from the delight of
invention and the charm of fictitious narrative.
. . . The truth was too small for him.6
\
The inventors of tall tales, like Bolus, found the truth
too cramped for them, and vied with one another in invent-
. ing remarkable plots and coining picturesque phrases.
i Nothing common or trite would do. ■
j 1
; Significantly, the subject matter of these dis- j
S . I
j courses was almost unlimited. They dealt with all phases !
i - t
of frontier life, the untamed country, hunting exploits,
I animal lore, court trials, weddings, lynchings, fights or ;
v i
"gougings," and anything else that might excite the teller
' or his auditors. Walter Blair says:
]
The stories ranged all the way from wild fantasy
to fairly straightforward accounts of everyday
happenings. . . . They lied about the astonishing
fertility of the soil, about encounters with huge ,
beasts, as Jim Doggett did in "The Big Bear of j
Arkansas." Almost as often, in some parts of the j
country, they imaginatively exaggerated the poverty
of the soil, telling of land so poor that birds
flying across it had to carry rations, so poor that
if a buyer couldn't read he was likely to learn to
his sorrow that the seller had got rid of two
^As quoted in Rourke, p. 68.
2 9 ,
7
sections instead of the one contracted for.
Another notable characteristic of the tall tale is
that, in the words of Seaver, "its heroes are not kings
and chieftains, but plain working people whose greatness
is their work feats" (p. 21). Among these national heroes
• are Davy Crockett, the hunter; Mike Pink, the flat-boatman;
old Stormalong, the whaler; Paul Bunyan, the logger; John
Henry, the "steel drivin' man"; Pecos Bill, the cowboy;
Casey Jones, the railroad man; and various others.
Countless stories clustered around these demi-gods of the
»
i
j frontier, from 1820 until the period ended about 1900. i
! ■ !
j These mythical characters became the subject of stories
and ballads, many of which were written down and appeared
in newspapers, magazines, and later in books,
j The printed stories were of course influenced by
the forms of the oral tales. The comic element entered
when the impossible was fused with realistic details and
actual settings to make the stories seem plausible.
Another element which helped to make them believable was j
the use of dialect. Sometimes the character of the teller ;
and his avowed reasons for relating the story would also
7
The Literature of the United States, ed. Walter
Blair et al (New York, 19^9), one volume edition, p. 7^5*
help to make the story acceptable.
After the opening of the Jacksonian era* Seaver
observes, American culture cut loose from English models.
America became conscious of her vast size, uniqueness,
and native institutions; and newspapers cultivated readers■
and gave them homespun American stories and humor. Two
schools of humor arose, he states: (1) the Down East or
Yankee humor, represented by Seba Smith, and (2) "humor
of the pioneer Southwest which was more extravagant and
leaned to the tall tale" (p. 22). The humor of this
period consisted mainly of common sense sayings (which j
*
i
. continued the vogue of Franklin and the crackerbox phi-
i losophers) and "the humor of conscious, tongue-in-cheek
j mythmaking" (p. 23).
i
J
Literature of a slightly different sort sprang up
in the more settled communities behind the frontier. It
( was produced by writers who had some education and a de-
, sire to write in the genteel tradition about local
"characters" and "eccentrics," or who, like A. B. Long-
street, in his popular Georgia Scenes, wrote to supply an
eye-witness account of a thriving society that was being
passed over by historians. Still others wrote from a
desire to entertain their fellows. The storytellers were
often circuit riders (preachers like Longstreet, or judges),
31
traveling salesmen (known then as "drummers"), and news
paper correspondents. These men had an eye for odd names
and personal peculiarities, an ear for slang and salty '
epithets, and a sense of the incongruous, which is the
basis of humor. In Georgia Scenes are found many examples
of name humor (Mr. Peleg Q. C. Stone, Monsieur Snotborg,
Ransy Sniffle, Madame Piggisqueaki, Mrs. Mushy, Hardy
i
Slow), comic dialect, slang, practical jokes, rustic j
sports (including a one-man wrestling bout), and a
"gouging" in which the fighters strove to gouge out each
. other's eyes, and other rural entertainment, including a j
| "Ball." |
| i
| Some of the other writers who belong to the old j
I Southwest, a sprawling area extending from Tennessee
down through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Arkansas, and Texas, may be mentioned briefly. One of
i
these was William T. Porter, a transplanted Yankee and
I
former publisher of the popular New York Spirit of the
Times, who in 1846 published The Big Bear of Arkansaw,
the first printed collection of stories by Southern •
8 i
writers. This collection proved to be highly popular,
according to Miss Jennette Tandy, and it was soon followed ■
8
Jennette Tandy, The Crackerbox Philosophers in
American Humor and Satire (New York, 1926)> P» 7l«
by many imitators.
Thomas Bangs Thorpe, best known for his collection
of tales, The Hive of the Bee Hunter (1854), wrote prin
cipally of Indians and wild animals. His best stories
are about bear hunts. Another writer who preserved in
teresting records of a lawless era was Joseph G. Baldwin,
who published in 1853 a series of lively frontier sketches
known as The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi. The
pages of Baldwin abound in court trials (many of them
1 farces), anecdotes about lawyers and courts, practical j
f ‘ t
1 1 .
’ jokes, and occasional duels. Though there is little art *
I I
I in his narrative technique, there is wit and interesting j
■ I
| incident. His work is of interest because many of his ef- ;
i f
fects suggest Faulkner's frontier humor. j
Johnson J. Hooper, author of The Adventures of
i
1 Captain Simon Suggs, introduced in Suggs the unscrupulous
; and scheming opportunist whose motto was, "It is good to
be shifty in a new country." Suggs used flattery, cajol-
*
ery, and every ruse in his bag to trick unwary people in
i the sparsely settled communities. Although no specific j
connection can be shown between Suggs, "the shifty man," ;
I
and Flem Snopes, there is a family resemblance-. W. T.
Thompson's volumes, Major Jones's Courtship (1840), Major
Jones's Chronicles of Pineville (1843)> and Major Jones's
Sketches of Travel (1848), introduced a rough, honest,
blundering man who lacks the coarseness and moral obtuse
ness of "Capting" Suggs (pp. 90-93)* A hero of a differ
ent type was Sut Lovingood, the first fully developed
character of the bad boy, the imaginative creation of
George W. Harris. Sut's escapades were usually coarse,
rowdy, and often cruel--reminding one of the sort of
humor practiced by the "Katzenjammer Kids." It is possi
ble that Sut has some kinship with Huck Finn and Tom
Sawyer.
In summing up this period Dr. Tandy points out:
(1) humor in the old South was abundant, (2) it was ap
preciated abroad as well as at home, (3) it prepared the
way for later and more famous writers, including Joel
Chandler Harris and Mark Twain, (4) it "originated the
bad boy and the Southern poor white," (5) it avoided stock
*
characters, (6) it abounded in a great variety of scenes
and personalities, and (7) it created some distinctive
characters and language (p. 95)*
Something of the richness and variety of Southern
humor is suggested in the admirable anthology, Humor of
the Old Deep South, edited by Arthur Palmer Hudson. In
the introduction the editor states, correctly, I think,
that oral transmission alone has kept alive many of the
best anecdotes of the old days.
For the kinds of stories they told are, with due
allowances for "literary" finish, exactly the kinds
of stories one can hear today on the "front galleries
of farmhouses all over the South--stories by men
who never heard, and whose grandpappies perhaps
never heard of Longstreet or Hooper, for the stories
of these writers never made /sic/ the grade readers
of the South, and they are in few public libraries.
I sometimes think that the best stories told in the
South--certainly the best told in Mississippi and
Alabama until these recent years of Stark Young and
the latterly humorous William Faulkner and the
marvellous Howell Vines--have never been written
down, and perhaps never will be.9
The stories of native humor, as well as uncounted
tales about Indians, the Civil War, and the exploits of
early settlers and "flush times in Mississippi," were a
part of Faulkner's heritage from his earliest days. He
heard them from members of the family or Negro servants
(some of them ex-slaves), from schoolteachers and politi
cians, traveling salesmen (like his own sewing-machine
agent, Ratliff), and the groups of "casuals" who are
found in many of his tales sitting around the courthouse
swapping yarns or on the verandas of the smal1-town hotels.
Carvel Collins says:
So whether or not he has borrowed from the books
of Longstreet and the other old Southwestern
humorists, he has been exposed to the remains of
the experiences to which they were exposed; and
his fiction contains much that has the flavor of
the older works.10
It should be remembered that Longstreet served as presi
dent of the University of Mississippi at Oxford (Faulkner's
lifetime home) from 1849 to 1856, and his Georgia Scenes
would be well known there. Baldwin had lived in Mississip
pi also, and his Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi
was available in the libraries of those states.
Still another source for anecdotes and robust
country humor was the newspapers of the South which, in
addition to columns devoted to humor, often printed
anonymous contributions of subscribers. Hudson's collec
tion of humorous material has many examples of this pro
lific newspaper "art," including selections from the
Oxford and Holly Springs, Mississippi, papers. It is !
thus relatively easy to find parallels or possible models
for some of Faulkner's tales in the works of established
Southern humorists and in the columns of the local country |
papers. The tracing of sources, however, is not the !
province of this study, but rather the identifying of ;
Faulkner's work with established literary traditions. ;
Hudson states:
10
"Faulkner and Certain Earlier Southern Fiction,"
College English, Vol. 16 (November 1954), p. 94.
36,
One type of this humor, the tall tale, indubitably
derives from the Ned Brace and Sut Lovengood / s i c /
families (out of popular tradition), which inter
married with Tom Owen the Bee Hunter's and the
numerous clan of the Spirit of the Times. Tom
Thorpe is the acknowledged father of what Mr.
Bernard De Voto has called the Big Bear School of
American Humor (pp. 17-18).
: This type of humor is employed by Faulkner especially in
I
! his hunting stories (such as "The Bear" and "A Bear Hunt")
i and in several of his novels, particularly Mosquitoes, The j
: Hamlet, and The Old Man. The Spirit of the Times, referred
I :
to above, contains some choice hunting tales, and so do i
; the stories of Jim Doggett, Davy Crockett, and T. B. j
t i
; i
I Thorpe. j
| After the Civil War two types of humor developed. j
j One type depended heavily on expression, that is, on j
|
I language, sentence structure, and peculiar spelling to i
;
; achieve comic effects♦ The other type merged with local
color to produce a literature in which sectional differ-
: ences, local peculiarities, and dialect were often used
; for realistic or humorous effect. The New England area |
was represented in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, the
l
■ South in the works of G. W. Harris, Joel Chandler Harris i
, and others, and the Far West in the tales of Bret Harte
and Mark Twain. In Mark Twain's yarns the rhythms of 1
■ the Negroes and uneducated whites, the folk dialects, and
the oratorical style typical of his era provide a homely
37;
i
sort of humor. "Jim Baker's Blue Jay Yarn" is a classic
I
illustration of the tall tale, the jumping frog yarn ;
illustrates the blending of the tall tale and local color,
i
and Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer combine the dialect,
situation humor, and some of the extravagant tall tales
of typical frontier humor. Although Mark Twain for a time
used some of the deliberate misspellings characteristic of 1
Josh Billings and Artemus Ward, he had the good judgment i
to forsake this kind of labored humor and emphasize actionj
character traits, and a more natural diction. He per
fected an ingenious method for telling a story which re
sulted in economy of words, plausibility, and unexpected
surprises. His method is set forth in the brief study ;
I
"How to Tell a Story." I
!
(
For a number of years critics have recognized
Faulkner's indebtedness to Southwestern frontier humor. i
Writing in 19^ Malcolm Cowley said:
And his recent books, which have been neglected
by the critics, have a new quality seldom asso- ;
dated with Faulkner. Besides the psychological
depth and the somber violence of his earlier
novels, we now find a wild and robust type of
humor. The first story of "Go Down, Moses," one
of the two long stories in "Wild Palms" and sev
eral episodes in "The Hamlet," especially the one j
that deals with the herd of spotted horses--all «
these and other incidents belong to a tradition i
that goes back to the early Davy Crockett almanacs
38,
and early volumes of humorous sketches.
This strain of frontier humor reached its culmination,
according to Bettye Field, in the works of Mark Twain.
<
She adds:
i
From Twain's death in 1910 until the publication
of The Hamlet, American letters made little use
of their humorous tradition. . . . Although not
a humorist in the sense that Mark Twain was,
Faulkner in all his works since the publication
: of Sartoris (with the exception of Absalom,
j Absalomi J has used this frontier humor as an
| integral part of his art.12
' A recent article (mentioned already) by Professor Carvel
Collins, "Faulkner and Certain Earlier Southern Fiction,"
points out that Faulkner's humor resembles that of
"humorists of the Old Southwest" in three important ele-
! !
I ments: in the use of "J(l)’especially flamboyant humor,
i I
1 (2) violence, and, (3) folklore" (p. 9*0* ’ 1
; It is safe to say that, beginning with the somewhat .
t
crude, boisterous, and unorganized frontier humor, I
: Faulkner has gradually groped his way to a more sophisti- !
• cated, complex, and philosophical humor, which is some
times droll or quizzical, sometimes harsh and cruel,
sometimes blended with pathos, and at other times mocking
^ t
^William Faulkner's Human Comedy" (New York Times
Book Review, October 29, 1944), p. 4.
; 12
! "William Faulkner and Humor of the Old Southwest" i
(M.A. Thesis, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee,
1952),. p. v.
39:
and almost despairing. His works do not reveal any regu
lar progression or deliberate choice of types of humor;
instead they reveal, generally, a mixture of many kinds,
with the tall tale dominating in some (The Old Man and-
Notes on a Horsethief), satire in others (Pylon, The Wild
Palms, and Mosquitoes), and tragicomedy in such workscas
The Sound and the Eyrr-y and^As'I-Lay Dying.
! Although no neat and rigid classification can be
; made of Faulkner's humor, for the sake of study and
analysis I have grouped the various types of humor in
. five categories, as follows:
I. Frontier Humor
A. Boisterous practical jokes and horseplay
B. Comic situations
C. Anecdotes or yarns
D. Tall tales i
E. Folklore
II. Humor related to language
A. Dialect (Negro and "poor white" especially) I
B. Name Humor 1
C. Puns and word-play
D. Wit, repartee
E. Caricature
F. Exaggeration and understatement
G. Irony and sarcasm
H. Longer passages of satire
III. Surrealistic Humor (atrabilious or grim humor)
A. Violation of accepted codes and standards
B. Mingling of the horrible and the comic
C. Influence of Freudian psychology
40
IV. Tragicomedy
A. Intentional joining of the tragic and comic
B. Harsh or cruel scenes modified by humor
C. Complex emotional response
V. Character Humor
A. All attributes of character (physical,
psychological) involved: "Pa" Bundren,
"Granny" Millard
B. Situation and language humor often involved
This outline gives some idea of the variety and
complexity of Faulkner's humor, which ranges from simple
word play (wit, puns, repartee) to the long and elaborate
. passages of surrealistic humor and extended satires. Such
a table, of course, involves some overlapping; exaggera-
• tion, understatement, puns, and caricature, for example,
are all listed under "Humor related to language," though. 1
: each of these may be found— along with other name humor,
irony and other types — in the category of "Frontier humor*. "
The justification for the separate groupings is that the
second category, "Humor related to language," is generally ;
i
brief and incidental, whereas the types in "Frontier humor"
are more fully developed (tall tales, situations, practi
cal jokes, etc.) and do not generally depend upon manipula
tion of words, as wit, ^satire, puns, and the briefer
humorous types do. The final category, "Character humor,'"
though it Inay involve several of the preceding types--
language humor and comic situations, for example--empha-
I
sizes an Individual character; such humor is an artistic
blending of language, situation, atmosphere, and the at
tributes and eccentricities of real or imagined characters.:
This is perhaps the highest attainment of the comic
writer's art, and only a master like Moliere, Dickens,
Mark Twain, or Faulkner can create such unforgettable
characters. """ —— — - - ~
C jU
A brief discussion of the five types of humor in
Faulkner may help to show his indebtedness to the earlier
Southwest humorists and the ways in which he has gone
beyond them. As pointed out earlier, the old frontier
humor often consisted of wild and boisterous action; George
/ ■
W. Harris' tale "How Daddy Lovingood Played Hoss" is full
of this kind of cruel comedy, with little interest except
the incongruous action. In various short stories (for
example, "Mule in the Yard" and "Shingles for the Lord,"
as well as in some of the wild escapades following the
horse auction in The Hamlet), Faulkner improves on this
type of humor. He also employs situation humor frequently,
just as the early humorists had done, but with psychologi
cal and social implications not found in their work. The
term "anecdote" as here used means" a brief incident or
event, usually outside the main narrative stream, and told
as a rule because it has interest of its own. Public
speakers and lawyers, in the old frontier humor, most
often tell illustrative or comic anecdotes; in Faulkner,
however, any one of the story tellers, or the author him
self, may relate the anecdote. Gavin Stevens, a lawyer,
and Ratliff, the traveling agent, are often the yarn-
spinners in Faulkner. The tall tale, one of the most
popular forms of early frontier humor, is popular also
with Faulkner. The tale may range from the rather self-
conscious beginnings in Mosquitoes to the long, involved,
and fantastic story of the convict's experience-with the
flood in The Old Man, and the even more preposterous tale,
Notes on a Horsethief, which Faulkner also worked into
his latest and most pretentious opus, A Fable. His liking
for the tall tale is thus deep-rooted and far-reaching.
Humor in the second classification, "Humor related
to language," is, as already suggested, apt to be inci
dental and peripheral. This is not to say that it does
not have a direct relation to both narrative and back
ground; but, as a rule, it is on the surface and apparent
to even casual readers. Here are listed dialect, a very
important element in most of the stories and novels with
a Southern setting; name humor, sometimes ironic, mock
/
heroic, or grimly realistic; puns and other plays on words,
less common in Faulkner; and wit and repartee, caricature *
Irony and sarcasm. Exaggeration, one of the favorite de
vices of Faulkner, and Its opposite, understatement, used
most effectively In Light In August and The Old Man, are
included in this section because they grow directly out
of his interest in the comic possibilities of language.
Here too is listed satire, which, in the main, depends
upon sharp observation and trenchant use of language to
expose and discredit vice or folly. Satire is obviously
a more complex kind of humor than the early tales and
situation humor of frontier days. Edwin Seaver says of
satire:
Our contemporary American humor is sophisticated
and cosmopolitan. But disillusionment has not led
to misanthropy. Our humor is not without social
conscience or a heart. . . . It has arrived at a
maturity that deserves the title of satire.13
The same writer speaks of the influence of Freud and the
new psychology upon modern satirists. In Faulkner, satire
is so abundant that it almost deserves a special category.
It reveals some of his strongest biases on subjects as
varied as economics, politics and politicians, medicine,
religion, urban life, war, and love-making.
The third classification, “Surrealistic humor," is
related to the Freudian psychology mentioned above. It
2
13
Pageant of American Humor, p. 361.
differs markedly from the folksy or rustic humor of
frontier life. As far back as 1945 Malcolm Cowley had
touched upon this type of psychological humor, but it
remained for Campbell and Poster, in 1951> to state its
terms clearly and precisely. First, they gave a tentative
definition of "humor" and then the marks of "surrealistic"
humor:
We may say, provisionally, that the essence of
humor lies in its incongruity, which arises when
a person mentally juxtaposes two experiential
contexts and notes an inconsistency and dispro
portion between them. The resulting experience
will not always be what we call humor; yet when
humor occurs it always begins with such disparity.
From this point the two go on to say that humor may be
genial and kind or harsh and sadistic. Applying their
principles to Faulkner, they add:
Of greater importance is a more unusual kind of
humor, associated with numerous elements of the
subconscious in Faulkner's work, that may be
described as "surrealistic," a type of atra
bilious humor which differs qualitatively from
traditional native Southern $iumor (p. 96) .
Thus two distinct strains of humor are discerned in
Faulkner's novels--traditional frontier humor and "sur
realistic," or splenetic, humor, associated with black
bile. "Surrealistic" humor involves:
14
William Faulkner: A Critical Appraisal, pp.
94-95*
/
'45
1. Alienation of sensation--meaning a startling
juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous images,
a deliberate defiance of familiar or logical asso
ciations that' leads to the viewpoint Kenneth Burke
calls "perspective by incongruity." To some extent
this perspective operates in all humor; it inter
ests the surrealists when the incongruity arises
from the yoking of two radically different cate
gories.
2. Black Bile— supposedly the laughter of the
unconscious--a disagreeable, cruel laughter.
! Distortions and grimaces of extreme pain are
; funny. Black bile evidences the power of the
: id which has no regard for the humanitarian dic-
; tates society thrusts upon the ego. Black Bile
is sadistic (p. 96).
This insight, in my judgment, is a very important one,
helping to explain much that has been rejected or misunder
stood in Faulkner's work. Previously many critics, includ
ing some who are sympathetic, have turned away in frustra- •
tion or disgust from such scenes as the idiot Snopes-cow
t
affair in The Hamlet. After pointing out that this type
of humor is very old (being found in "such bitter ironists
as Donne,- Swift, Melville, and Kafka"), they find several ,
instances of it in Faulkner, as, for example, the funeral ;
of the gangster Red in Sanctuary (to be discussed in its
place).
"Tragicomedy," the fourth general type, must grow
out of and depend upon the context, just as surrealistic
humor does. Like the latter, it is also a blending of
opposites, in which the tragic mood alternates with the
46
comic. The plight of the impoverished, dull-witted
Bundren family as they make their way through flood, fire,
and uncounted hardships to the family burial ground to
deposit the decaying corpse of "Ma" Bundren is replete
with both tragedy and comedy. Tragedy occurs first in
the drowning of the team and overturning of the coffin in
the flooded stream, then in the accident in which Cash
breaks his leg, and later in the scene in which Dari goes
crazy and is caught and sent to the asylum. At the end
when "Pa" gets his store-bought teeth and brings back
the little "duck-like" woman he has met in borrowing a
shovel to bury his first wife, a woman that he introduces
to his astonished family as "Mrs. Bundren," then, and
not till then, does comedy win over its grim adversary.
Other stories, such as the latter part of The Sound and
the Fury, and the Lena Grove sections of Light in August,
also use tragicomedy dramatically.
The final classification has been designated
"Character humor." As already noted, this type of humor
depends upon a total impression in which individual eccen
tricities, language, and situation all combine to produce
a sense of comedy. "The highest range of humor," declares
the Encyclopedia Britannica, "is that which turns on the
depiction of character," such as in Don Quixote, Falstaff,
47
15
Mr. Pickwick, Tartarin, and Huckleberry Finn. To this
list of humorous characters may be added, though some
critics might insist on a lower level, Faulkner's "Pa"
Bundren, "Granny" Millard, "Old Man" Fall, Dr. Peabody,
and the nameless convict of The Old Man. Each of these
is a distinct personality, with physical and mental
qualities of his own and striking turns of speech. Each
character has certain universal qualities that raise him
above the level of stock characters: "Pa," for all his
shiftlessness, has his indomitable pride; "Old Man" Fall,
even in the poor house, is keen enough to outwit a doctor
and the tall convict has a stoicism and sense of duty
that make him a minor hero.
Regarding Faulkner's relation to the older humor
ists, Bettye Field remarks:
When Faulkner desired to write truthfully about
the Southern folk, the "poor whites," he naturally
turned to the idiom used by his predecessors for
this same purpose. This humor of folk tradition
is employed for both tragic and comic representa
tion of human experience. Never used for its own
sake, except in a few short stories, but always
as a new perspective to his material, Faulkner
has used this Southwestern humor as a basic ele
ment in all his best novels.16
15
"Humour," Vol. XI (194-7 edition), p. 885.
William Faulkner and Humor of Old Southwest,
p. vi.
48
Miss Field lists some of the salient types of frontier
humor as exaggeration, understatement, surprise, serious
treatment of trivial matters and light-hearted treatment
of serious matters, comic inversion of values, misspell
ings, misquotations of well-known works, and caricature
(p. 16). She finds that Mark Twain employed nearly all
the conventions of frontier humor, and then--as stated
earlier--asserts that Faulkner is Twain's modern succes
sor. This observation is important, for it places
Faulkner in the stream of native American humor and re
lates him to our greatest humorist.
Another writer, Shields Mcllwaine, states that
Faulkner has "done much to return our humor to strong
17
native channels.” He says further:
Historically considered, the loudly condemned
American sadism of Faulkner and Caldwell, as it
applies to poor-whites, is merely a revival of
the emphasis upon degradation, employed by
Longstreet and a few others for humor, by the
abolitionists for propaganda. Now it is used
by these Southerners for fictional effects, both
humorous and tragic (p. 220).
Mcllwaine points out that the emphasis upon sex, especial
ly for comic purposes, is not an invention of Faulkner
and Caldwell: "This 'careless love' of the trash has
been neither invented nor newly found; it has been
^The Southern Poor White (Norman, Oklahoma, 1939)*
p. 226.
rediscovered" (p. 222).
This survey of Faulkner's humor has shown that it
owes much to the robust and earthy frontier humor of an
earlier day, but it is broadened and complicated by the
disillusionment of the post-war period and by the influ
ence of Freudian psychology. Generally, Faulkner employs
frontier humor for pleasant and relaxed moods, and though
there may be boisterous action and sometimes cruelty or
pain, there is usually no display of anger or contempt
in these passages. On the other hand, humor dependent
upon language--especially the repartee, irony, and satire— ;
often has an acerbic quality; it looks, not with pleasure,
but with disdain on man's lusts and follies. In this type,
as well as in surrealistic and some of the tragicomic ;
scenes, the author laughs at man's stupidity, animality,
and foolish pretensions, but the laughter is harsh and
bitter. Many of the comments and situations show Faulkner's
scorn for certain narrow or mean characteristics of men
and groups, politicians and religious bigots, for example;
and the wit or satire of these passages is acrimonious.
This sardonic tone seems typical of the man; many of
Faulkner’s recorded remarks show that he has frequently
offended others by his belittling or acid comments. His
quarrel with the United States government while he was
50
postmaster at the small postoffice at the University of
Mississippi (,to be discussed later),is well known. His
estrangement from Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him
to become a novelist, resulted from the manner in which
Faulkner poked fun at Anderson's style in "Sherwood
Anderson and Other Famous Creoles." Many other incidents
mentioned in Robert Coughlan's biographical study, The
Private World of William Faulkner, show him to be a
brooding and critical observer of men--personally sensi
tive and proud, and often severe in his judgments.
It is undoubtedly true that the humor of the novels
and stories reflects Faulkner's own nature, which is some
times droll and whimsical, sometimes bitter and unhappy.
Humor in his hands is a two-edged weapon; with his genial
humor he approves certain characters or actions, and with
the harsh or satiric humor he lashes at man's folly and
stupidity. In general terms we may say that the pleasant
humor is reserved for the "good" characters, that is,
those of whom Faulkner approves ("Aunt Jenny," "Old Man"
Fall, "Granny" Millard) and the severe and sardonic humor
is turned against the villains (Flem Snopes, Calvin
McEachern, Jason Compson). The Negroes, as a rule, and
the better class of Southern whites are given situations
and dialogue that produce agreeable laughter, but the
sharpers, hypocrites, and many species of human vultures
are whipped by,his satire or cut down by ridicule. Inci
dental humor may be used for various effects in Faulkner's
work, but the cumulative effect of his humor shows rather
clearly his personal and moral judgments.
52
Part Three: Faulkner and His World
Any interpretation of William Faulkner's work must
take into account his family background, early life and
education, reading, and other influences upon the writer.
The facts of his early life may be summarized briefly.
William, the first-born son of Murry and Maud Butler
Falkner, was born on September 25, 1897, at New Albany,
Union County, about 35 miles from Oxford, Mississippi,
the descendant of an old and once influential family.
The Falkner family (William was later to add the
"u") had been a leading power in Mississippi, its
men having settled the land, fought the great war,
and then tried to salvage something from the rub
ble of defeat. In the vicinity of Oxford . . .
Colonel William Falkner, the novelist's great
grandfather, became something of a legendary hero,
his name surviving him by several decades. A vet
eran of the Mexican War, he served as head of a
Confederate regiment during the early days of the
Civil War.l
Great-grandfather William became a legend in the family,
and even in the history of Mississippi. Imperious and
strong-willed, he led his regiment until, at its annual
election of officers, he was displaced. Returned home,
he formed a guerrilla band to harass Union armies that
“ ^Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study
(New York, 1951), pp. 8-9.
53
were ravaging the South. After the war he turned his
talents to new enterprises: building a railroad and
writing romances. The work by which he is best remem
bered is the highly romantic The White Rose of Memphis,
which in thirty years sold over 150,000 copies; it was
reissued in 1952 (p. 9)* The Old colonel died in 1889,
at the hands of Colonel R. J. Thurmond, a former business
partner, in a manner paralleling that of John Sartoris,
the character in The Unvanquished, Sartoris, and many
other stories based upon the legendary colonel. Robert
Coughlan writes:
It is all there, colored and modeled, naturally,
in the interests of fiction and magnified to heroic
proportions, so that Colonel Sartoris becomes the
quintessence of his time and class, yet perhaps
no more magnified in fiction than in the Falkner
family. A friend of the family has observed,
"The Falkner men are always the heroes and the
Falkner women the heroines of their own stories."
Colonel Falkner had been dead eight years when
his great-grandson and namesake was born. He had
been long since enshrined as a household deity,
and the books and stories show how he was among
the strongest influences of William Faulkner's
life.2
The writer's father, Murry, seems to have lacked the fire
and drive of the old colonel. He dropped out of his class
at the University of Mississippi, worked briefly at vari
ous odd jobs, and then became a conductor on the family
i
2
"The Private World of William Faulkner," Life,
September 28, 1953^ P* 130.
54
railroad. He was a conductor when William was born.
Later he went into the livery business, for about ten
: years, and after that the hardware business. "Finally
in 1918 he was appointed secretary and business manager j
at Ole Miss," Coughlan writes, "and held that job until I
i !
i
his death" (p. 134). Though he was a kind man with some
• good qualities, he did not have the spirited and forceful
: personality that his f©rebears had possessed, and the j
l conditions under which he and his family lived differed
i i
; markedly from the physical and social milieu of the old j
; |
i colonel. This change in family status, Faulkner could '
' i
j see, was not unusual, and it was perhaps "part of a j
) 1
j larger socio-historical event. To a considerable extent !
S i
his books seem to be an attempt to grope through to an
explanation of this event" (p. 134). •
William grew up in the quiet, small-town atmos
phere of Oxford, and almost in the shadow of the state
university. He attended the university high school,
where he showed greatest interest in English, but was not
a distinguished student. He played quarterback on the
football team, and in a game against the school’s arch
rival received a broken nose. One of his most recent
critics says:
In the tenth grade, after irregular attendance
for two or three years, he left school and Grand-
55
father Falkner gave him a place in the bank. ,
Details of his brief career there have to be in- S
ferred as best one can from Faulkner's own el- !
liptical account: "Quit school and went to work J
S in Grandfather's bank. Learned the medicinal j
| value of his liquor. Grandfather thought it j
was the janitor. Hard on the janitor. . . j
j
At the age of sixteen William enrolled at the uni- j
versity as a special student. There he was especially
drawn to the poetry of Swinburne, which, he said, "com-
4
pletely satisfied me and filled my inner life." When
i
the United States entered World War I, he left the univer
sity and sought to enlist, but was underweight. However,
through the intervention of friends, he was admitted to
the Canadian Royal Flying Corps, and went to Ontario as
• a cadet. He became an honorary second lieutenant on
I
December 22, 1918* the date of demobilization, and re- j
C -
j linquished his commission on the following day. Soon he |
*
I
! was back home, without having served in the war or gone
i
overseas. The story that he actually fought in France !
and was wounded is only a legend (p. 18). Back in Oxford
he re-entered the university, again as a special student,
in September, 1919*
3
William Van O'Connor, The Tangled Fire of William
Faulkner, p. 4.
4
Howe, p. 10.
5
O'Connor, p. 18.
56
During two semesters he studied English, receiv
ing a D and an F; Spanish, two B's; and French,
two A1s. In November 1920 he withdrew (p. 19)-
Because of his indolent ways, careless dress, and swag
gering air he came to be known locally as "Count No
Count," an eccentric and "Character." Of his education
Malcolm Cowley states:
He had less of a formal education than any other '
good writer of his time, except Hart Crane--even
less than Hemingway, who never went to college,
but who learned to speak three foreign languages
and studied writing in Paris from the best masters.
Faulkner taught himself, largely, as he says, by
undirected and uncorrelated reading.
Cowley lists as Faulkner's reading the following authors:
Keats, Balzac, Flaubert, Swinburne, Mallarme, Wilde,
Housman, Joyce, Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings,
Hemingway, Dos Passos, Scott Fitzgerald.
After dropping out of the university, Faulkner
tried several odd jobs but stayed with none of them. He
was restless, moody, and unsettled. At the invitation
of his friend Stark Young, Faulkner visited New York and
shared Young's small, cramped apartment. Faulkner's ac
count of his brief, unhappy sojourn in New York is both
laconic and humorous:
I moved in on Young. He had just one bedroom so
^"Introduction," The Portable Faulkner, p. 2.
57
I slept on an antique Italian sofa in his front
room. It was too short. I didn't learn until
three years later that Young lived in mortal terror
that I would push the arm off that antique sofa
while I slept. Stayed with Young until he sug
gested I get something better to do. He helped
me to get a place at Lord and Taylor's. I worked
in the book department until I got fired. Think
I was a little careless about making change or
something. Then I came on home.7
Young gives an account of this visit, substantially the
same as Faulkner's, but adds that he introduced Faulkner
to Miss Prall, manager of the bookshop, at Lord and
Taylor's. Miss Prall later married Sherwood Anderson
and went to live with him in New Orleans (pp. 19-20).
Back in Oxford, Faulkner did odd jobs around the
campus. Again, through a family friend, he got a job—
as postmaster at the university. Soon he became a legend
at "Ole Miss." According to O'Connor:
He was a founder of the Bluebird Insurance Com
pany, which insured students against failing grades.
The size of the premium, according to an adver
tisement run in the Mississippian, the campus
weekly, was arrived at by considering the ex
perience and knowledge of the professor and the
size of the class, then dividing both by the
student's ignorance. Because of the high premiums
charged for most English courses, several younger
members of the department retaliated with a huge
bold-faced advertisement in the next issue which
offered for sale stock in the Midnight Oil Company
and printed testimonial letters including one from
7
O'Connor, p. 19.
58
"Count Wilhelm Von Faulkner, Marquis de Lafayette
(County), Post-master General (Retired)" (p. 20).
Soon he was retired. He spent too much of his time,
apparently, reading novels or scribbling verse. Coughlan
; says:
1 The mail piled up, the hours of opening and
closing grew vague, the records became confused
or lost, the customers' complaints were met with
silence or abuse while Faulkner drank, wrote
poetry and took long walks.8
■ The note which he is said to have written as his letter
i
j of resignation is worth quoting:
i As long as I live under the capitalistic system
I I expect to have my life influenced by the de-
j mands of monied people. But I will be damned
j if I propose to be at the beck and call of every
j itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest
j in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resigna
tion.9
After his dismissal as postmaster Faulkner decided
to go to Europe by way of New Orleans. There he met
Sherwood Anderson, already well known as a writer, and
came under the influence of that gifted story-teller.
Although O'Connor says that the two men were quite unlike
in temperament and quarreled frequently, Faulkner learned
much from the older man and was undoubtedly influenced by
"The Man Behind the Faulkner Myth," Life, October
5i 1953, P. 61.
9
O'Connor, pp. 20-21.
59
him in the choice of a writing career and in developing
his skill as a narrator. In The Atlantic Monthly (June,
1953) in an article entitled "Sherwood Anderson.* An
Appreciation," by William Faulkner, the foreword states:
In 1924 William Faulkner was a young man who had
written some poetry but no fiction. With the
money he had saved while working as Postmaster
at the University of Mississippi he had gone to
New Orleans, and there he met Sherwood Anderson,
the author of Winesburg, Ohio, who was then at
the height of his success. Anderson had a germinal
effect on Faulkner, and it was the example he set •
as a dedicated artist that started Faulkner writing
novels--novels which would eventually lead to the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 19^9*1(^
In this article Faulkner describes the plodding,
painstaking efforts of Anderson to perfect his style.
He worked ceaselessly at his art, and Faulkner adds:
He hated glibness; if it were quick, he believed
it was false too. He told me once: "You've got
too much talent. You can do it too easy, in too
many different ways. If you're not careful,
you'll never write anything" (p. 28).
One thing that Faulkner learned from Anderson was to
polish and refine a yarn. The two of them worked together
on an anecdote. When Faulkner had finished his assignment
he took it to Anderson, who asked: "Does it satisfy
you?" Admitting that it didn't, the young writer worked
on it three days more and then presented it again. When
he was asked the same question again, he answered, "No
sir, but it's the best I know how to do" (p. 29).
Perhaps the most important lesson Faulkner learned
from the older artist was that a writer must write about
what he knows firsthand.
You had only to remember what you were. "You have
to have somewhere to start from: there you begin
to learn," he told me. "It don't matter where it
was, just so you remember it and aint ashamed of
it. Because one place to start from is just as
important as any other. You're a country boy; all
you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi
where you started from. But that's all right too.
It's America too; pull it out, as little and unknown
as it is, and the whole thing will collapse, like
when you prize a brick out of a wall'.’ (p. 29).
Thus from Anderson, Faulkner learned not only the meaning
of dedication to the writer's craft, but the necessity
for writing out of one's own experience and about one's
own country. Anderson encouraged him, he says, to "keep
on moving around and listening and looking and learning.
That's why ignorant unschooled fellows like you and me
not only have a chance to write, they must write" (p. 29).
Faulkner estranged his friend by writing a parody
of Anderson's style for William Spratling's book Sherwood
Anderson and Other Creoles.^ O'Connor says:
The volume itself is a good-humored, kidding
view of the writers and artists in the French quarter.
11
O'Connor, p. 22.
61
The final illustration is of Spratling and Faulkner
sitting at a table painting and writing and drink
ing. On the wall are a shotgun and a sign reading
"Viva Art." Beneath Faulkner's chair are three
gallon jugs of corn liquor (p. 23).
Faulkner's view of Anderson, as quoted by O'Connor, is
amusing: "He's dependable, you can trust him to take the
children to Sunday School safely. But he's got a glossy
coat and a little sporting blood" (p. 24). The character
of the writer Dawson Fairchild in Mosquitoes, Faulkner's
12
second novel, is said to be based on Anderson. The
figure, though presented sympathetically, is not done with
admiration.
Through Anderson's influence, Faulkner was intro
duced to the editors of the New Orleans Double Dealer and
wrote a number of sketches for it. Anderson also "helped
him get a job on the Times Picayune," O'Connor says, "for
which he wrote a series of impressionistic feature ar
ticles, 'Mirrors of Chartres Street'" (p. 25). It was
Anderson, too, who suggested that Faulkner try his hand
at a novel, Soldiers' Pay, written in six weeks and pub
lished in 1926. According to Irving Howe:
Anderson, who had a remarkable gift for divining
talent, suggested to Faulkner that he try his hand
at a novel. Years later Faulkner would recall that
12
This is the view of O'Connor, Howe, and others,.
62
when he saw how comfortable life was for Anderson
(which suggests he was not yet in the habit of
seeing very deeply) he decided that writing might
be a pleasant way to earn a living. Six weeks
later he came to Mrs. Anderson with.the manuscript
of a novel which Anderson agreed to recommend to
his publisher provided he would not have to read
it first.13
This is a pretty story but, as Howe suggests, we
must bear in mind the fact that both writers were fond of
fabricating tall tales, as some of the stories related
in Mosquitoes show very well. At any rate, Anderson
helped to launch Faulkner as a writer and, as we have
seen, Faulkner acknowledged his debt to his friend. The
dedication of Sartoris, "To Sherwood Anderson, through
whose kindness I was first published," suggests that
Faulkner appreciated both the influence and the help of
the older man.
In New Orleans Faulkner wrote his first two novels,
Soldiers * Pay and Mosquitoes, which are said to be "far
more interesting as biographical evidence than as works
14
of art." The first is the story of a World War I
soldier, Donald Mahon, badly wounded and disfigured by
a terrible facial scar, who comes home to find that his
13
William Faulkner, pp. 12-13.
!4
Howe, p. 14.
63
world has completely changed. His fiancee, who cannot
bear to look on his face, breaks the engagement and gives
herself to a worthless local boy. The novel expresses
the disillusionment characteristic of "the lost genera-
.
tion." "Mosquitoes is the result of Faulkner's brush with i
............. j
j
the New Orleans intelligentsia, particularly the group
that published the little magazine, The Double Dealer"
(p. 14). Critics are almost unanimous in pronouncing
Mosquitoes his poorest novel. It has very little plot or
movement, and the characters are mostly wooden caricatures
or stereotypes. The conversation, apparently modeled
after the sophisticated language of Aldous Huxley, is
generally shallow and dull. Howe declares, "Faulkner has !
almost none of Huxley's talent for the novel of ideas, j
either for sustained intellectualizing or for playing off j
idea against idea" (p. 14). :
J
Since neither of his novels sold very well, Faulkner
returned to his home at Oxford and took a job as night
superintendent at a power plant. There, between 11 p.m.
and 4 a.m., during the night-time lull, with an overturned
wheelbarrow as his desk, he wrote the novels that were to
bring him fame and financial security. His "period of
apprenticeship," as O'Connor calls this phase, was closing,
and he stood at the threshold of a distinguished career.
The facts given in this brief survey of the early
"background of a writer" should help one to understand,
to some degree, the forces that have shaped the mind and
the work of William Faulkner. The man himself is most
interesting, a study in paradoxes and contradictions.
Robert Coughlan thus summarizes his impressions of the
man:
All of this can be observed or is a matter of
record. Where the continuum breaks is in the char
acter and personality of William Faulkner himself.
He prefers to be an enigma and one can believe
that he will always remain one, even to himself,
for his inconsistencies go beyond artistic license
or mere eccentricity. He is not a split personal
ity but rather a fragmented one, loosely held.to
gether by some strong inner force, the pieces often
askew and sometimes painfully in friction. It is
to ease these pains, one can guess, that he es
capes periodically and sometimes for periods of
weeks into alcoholism, until his drinking has
become legendary in the town and in his profes
sion, and hospitalization and injections have on
occasion been necessary to save his life. After
one of these episodes he returns for a relatively
long period of calm sobriety: he is not an alco
holic but perhaps more accurately an alcoholic
refugee, self-pursued.
The war within can be seen in many aspects. He
is thoughtful of others and oblivious of others;
he is kind and he is cruel; he is courtly and he
is cold; he is a philosopher at large who has no
integrated philosophy; he loves the South and
feels revulsion for the South; he is a self-
effacing but vain man who longed for recognition
and rebuffed it when it came: a man of integrity
who has contributed to a false legend about him
self. Of much more serious importance, he is a
great writer and a bad writer. His best work
65
ranks with the best in the world, and his worst
ranks, if not with the worst, then with the
merely mediocre, with the potboilers and self-
conscious effusions of experimental art--"flag-
pole sitting," as he had called it--which he
(or one part of him) scorns.15
Physically he is small (just above five feet tall),
with dark, piercing eyes, iron-gray hair, and a small dark
mustache. Here is the description written in 1938 by
Robert Cantwell, who was preparing a magazine article on
Faulkner:
Walks with quick short steps, very erect, head
slightly thrown back. Gives an impression of
slightly military self-conscious bearing. Also
quite short. Extremely thin lips concealed by
his mustache. Very sharp eyes, dark. Wavy hair,
now graying, gray in back. Pleasant, but not
easy in his manner.16
Sherwood Anderson, in his memoirs, gives his first
impressions of Faulkner:
I first saw Bill Faulkner when he came to my
apartment in New Orleans. You will remember the
story of Abraham Lincoln's meeting with the
Southern commissioners, on the boat, on the
Potomac in 1864. The Southern commissioners had
come to try to negotiate some sort of peace and
among them was the Vice-President of the Confed
eracy, Alexander Stephens. He was such a small
man and wore a huge overcoat. "Did you ever see
so much shuck for so little nubbin?" Lincoln said
to a friend.
15
"The Private World of William Faulkner," p. 127.
l6„
The Faulkners: Recollections of a Gifted
Family," New World Writing (New York, 1952), p. 301.
66
I thought of the story when I first saw Faulkner.
He also had on a big overcoat, it being winter,
and it bulged strangely, so much that at first
glance I thought he must be in some queer way
deformed. He told me he intended to stay for
some time in New Orleans and asked if in the mean
time, while he was looking for a place, he could
leave some .of his things with me. His "things"
consisted of some six or eight half gallon jars
of moon liquor he had brought with him from the
country and that were stowed in the pockets of
the big coat.17
Many writers have tried in vain to understand the
mind and personality of Faulkner. His ambivalence toward
the South has often been noted: he seems alternately to
love and to hate it, to condemn it and to defend it. So
also his attitude toward marriage and sex is baffling and
contradictory. Usually it is the raw, unlovely aspects
of sex that he treats in his novels, with very few scenes
or situations that could be called normal, much less ro
mantic. Edith Hamilton says that Faulkner despises and
rejects women. "No one adjective or two can describe
them. I confess his attitude to them puzzles me. I know
nothing like it in literature outside of the fThe Golden
18
Bough.' She sees Faulkner's attitudes warped by a
strong Calvinistic religion which stressed ideas of pre-
17
Quoted in O'Connor, pp. 21-22.
l8„
Faulkner: Sorcerer or Slave? Saturday Review
of Literature (July 12, 1952), p. 9*
destination and doom, suffering and despair, and which ;
banished love and beauty. Essentially, in her view,
Faulkner is a bizarre product of Puritanism: "He is to
the very depths a Puritan, a violently twisted Puritan,
a perverted Puritan, and that means something very strange'
i indeed" (p. 10). Miss Hamilton's thesis that Faulkner is
in revolt against many of the harsh, cruel theories of an :
| iron-clad theology gives a plausible explanation to the I
I
conflict exhibited both in the man and in his works. The !
I
warfare within is projected into the characters and plots j
i
| of the novels.
S , |
j Another critic, reviewing Requiem for a Nun (1951) /)
j i
| which he calls "Faulkner's Folly," says that "Faulkner is |
i a lost man" who employs a "violent and tortured symbolism"
i !
at the same time that he uses "striking and even vulgar
subject matter" in an effort to reach a wider audience.
"There is a kind of sullen Puritanic strain in Faulkner
which compels him to view cl'arity, charm and easy persua-
19
siveness with suspicion and hostility." Although it is
the quality of his writing of which this critic complains,
it is interesting that he traces the root trouble to a
"sullen Puritanic strain."
19
Herbert Poster, "Faulkner's Folly," American
Mercury (December 1951)> p. 111.
68
J Faulkner's attitude toward religion (as described
jin William Van O'Connor's essay "Protestantism in
'Yoknapatawpha County") shows a bitter hatred of all kinds
1 of shams, self-righteousness, and easy optimism. Organized
|religion and Protestant preachers fare badly in most of
I his fiction, and the cruelties and prejudices of some of
ihis religious characters are handled with Swiftian irony.
|In most of the novels and stories God is not referred to
jin traditional terms but is more often called "the Player,"
i
"the Joker," "the old primal faithless manipulator,"
;"the cosmic joker," and other terms that suggest an un-
|
tbelieving or contemptuous attitude.
! The passion, the fury, the anger of Faulkner have
been noted by many critics, and even the casual reader of
his novels is soon aware of the powerful torrents of feel
ing which sweep through the stories with the rush of
mighty rivers. Sometimes the reader is carried along so
rapidly by the surge of these emotions that he fails to
jsee the play of wit or satire on the surface or the flash
iof humor, like lightning, in the background. But humor
i
I
'is as characteristic of Faulkner as his preoccupation
with the abnormalities of human psychology or his love
of justice and hatred of hypocrisy. In nearly all his
*
inovels and stories, from first to last, the Comic Spirit
‘ " " 6 9|
is present--perhaps hovering in the background, ready to
i
break forth unexpectedly; sometimes occupying the center
of the foreground; but more often standing aside, as a 1
i
Greek chorus, to jibe at the actors or laugh sardonically I
' at the meanness or vanity or cruelty of the players.
I
It is difficult to understand how such a writer as i
i
J
' H. L. Mencken could refer to "the humorless South," or ;
1
: how a modern critic (Halford E. Luccock), comparing ;
i
, Faulkner's work with Caldwell's, could say, "There is an
20 !
absence of humor; it is more straight sodden stuff." ,
i
; The most obvious explanation of Luccock's biased judgment j
i i
seems to be that he deplored Faulkner's subject matter j
i
and wrote when the tide was running strong against
Faulkner. He saw Faulkner as an escapist who, instead
| of embracing romanticism with its pleasant unrealities,
! turned instead to horror and violence. ■
i :
< The myth of a grim and humorless Faulkner persists.
When the present writer's topic was announced recently
to a group of teachers, there were smiles of shocked dis-
I
i
may from some which seemed to say, "Whati Digging for
humor in Faulkner? The man must be a dreamer--or an in-
j ventori" Such opinions have frequently been expressed
i j
j 20 !
' American Mirror (New York, 19^0), p. 69* j
70 ,
by my friends in conversation. Any interpretation of
Faulkner, however, which fails to take into account his
humor (whether it is genial and kindly or dark and bitter) t
is partial and misleading, for humor is as much a part of j
I
the man and his method as the Southern dialect is. "Part
and parcel of Faulkner's world are two things: Faulkner's .
disillusioned romanticism and the impact of early South-
21
i west humor with its tall tales upon his world."
In a summary statement Robert Penn Warren has
i !
: s aid:
i At the age of fifty-three William Faulkner has |
| written nineteen books which for range of effect, j
I philosophical weight, originality of style, vari- j
ety of characterization, humor and tragic inten- j
sity are without equal in ouh time.22 j
In a survey conducted by Edwin Seaver among 600
| contemporary American writers, the opinion of Katherine
j Anne Porter is striking. "William Faulkner," said she,
"has the deepest and most serious humor In this country
23
. at present."
21
Ward L. Miner, The World of William Faulkner
(Durham, N. C., 1952), p. 7* ,
22
William Faulkner and His South (Monograph, Univer-I
sity of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1951)* p. 1. 1
23
. Pageant of American Humor, p. 17*
CHAPTER TWO-
HUMOR IN THE EARLY NOVELS AND STORIES .
The circumstances under which Faulkner's first
novel, Soldiers' Pay, was written have been mentioned
arl-ready. Sherwood Anderson is said to have suggested to
Faulkner the idea of writing a novel, and (so the story
goes) Faulkner acted on the suggestion and six weeks
later brought In his manuscript. Anderson is said to
have recommended it to his publisher, Horace Liveright,
*
without troubling to read it. Although this story may
be partly apocryphal, it is true that Anderson was re
sponsible for getting the work published. Soldiers' Pay
was brought out by Liveright In 1926, according to Daniel,
1
in an issue of 25OO copies. This novel was also the
first work of Faulkner's to be printed in England.
The book is a disillusioned treatment of soldiers
returning from war, and though it is the First World War
rather than the Second, the problems and attitudes pre
sented in the book have a timelessness that give the work
1
Robert W. Daniel, ’ A Catalogue of xthe Writings of
William Faulkner (Yale University, 1942).
relevance for any age. Although the basic situations are
not humorous, there are many passages of incidental humor.
In the opening chapter we see Donald Mahon, badly wounded,
a young pilot in the British Air Force, returning to his
home in Georgia. His father, an Episcopal clergyman of
broad views, and his fiancee, Cecily Saunders, a local
i
girl, believing that Donald has been killed, are not pre-
I
pared for his return and are shocked by his mutilated
face and dying condition. On the train to Georgia the
!
wounded man was cared for by Margaret Powers, a young
I
war widow, and an enlisted man, Joe Gilligan, who stay j
with Donald to care for him after he is back in the fam
ily home. Cecily soon breaks her engagement to Donald;
but Mrs. Powers, believing that her love and care may
i
possibly restore the dying man, marries him in an effort j
to save his life and also atone for her guilt feeling
in not missing the husband to whom she was married for
so short a time. After Donald's death, Margaret Powers
Mahon refuses to marry Gilligan, whom she loves, because '
"All the men that marry me die" within a year. "I'm too
young to bury three husbands," she says. At the end,
Margaret leaves, and Cecily marries a local "jelly bean"
to whom she had already given herself. Gilligan and j
i
Rev. Mahon are outside a Negro church '
73
. . . listening, seeing the shabby church become
beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad.
Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned
land inevitable with tomorrow and sweat, with sex
and death and damnation; and they turned townward
under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes.2 :
Patriotism, dreams, and love seem to have no meaning in
a world of selfishness and sure defeat. The title thus
is symbolic and satiric.
/
This novel, several critics say, is more auto
biographical than any other, though the second novel,
Mosquitoes, has something of this quality also. One of
Faulkner's early critics, A.-.Wigf-all Green*, says:
\
This novel /Soldiers' Pay/" , published in 1926,
j is the most autobiographic of Faulkner's works;
it contains philosophic disenchantment without
sordidness. The death of Donald, the young
aviato.r, who is Faulkner, is a bit of masterly
description. Because Faulkner gave his heart
unstintingly, as one can do only to one's first
novel or to one's first-born, this is in many
respects his best novel.3
: On this point Howe remarks:
Both of Faulkner's early novels, Soldiers' Pay
and Mosquitoes, are far more interesting as bio
graphical evidence than as works of art. . . .
As the title suggests, the novel can be read as
a fantasy of self-pity written by a man whose
life has been disordered by the war or for whom
1 2
William Faulkner, Soldiers' Pay (New York, 1926),
P. 319- '
3
Quoted in Hoffman, Two Decades of Criticism,
p. 42.
/
74 !
the war has revealed the disorder of his life.
Like Hemingway’s early novels, Soldiers1 Pay an
nounces the discovery of a generation that has
been sold, that it is lost.4
The novel is interesting in several other respects.
It centers (like so many of his other novels) on an event
that is past; it brings in a ghost (or as Arthos says, a
*5
: "half ghost") as its central figure; it has an air of
: disillusioned, almost despairing, realism; it exploits for
the first time "the great image that was to dominate so
many of his stories, the voiceless pain of an idiot" (p.
: 105); it touches many scenes with the magic of poetry;
!
i it broaches many favorite subjects of the author, for ex-
1 ample, airplanes and pilots, frustrated women (here Emmy),
i .
■ sex and death; and though the tone is tragic, there are
I ' ^
imany touches of humor. Regarding humor and its place in
I
!the novel, Arthos states:
!/
i
1 And yet in Soldiers' Pay . . . there are passages
of a most delightfully humorous kind, and the plot
itself has a wry quality. . . . It is difficult
to preserve humor when the writer considers his
work a kind of Passion Week. The strain of in
venting rituals and the peculiarly modern diffi
culties in the way of consecration obscure the
perceptions which need to be so finely adjusted
4
William Faulkner, p. 14.
I ^"Ritual and Humor in the Writing of William
Faulkner," quoted in Two Decades of Criticism, p. 110.
75
in/comedy; But to obscure humor is not to kill
it, and /in much of Faulkner's writing one sees
the continuing struggle for comedy (pp. 106-7).
The humor of this novel falls into several cate
gories: the stories and jokes of ex-soldiers— barracks
room humor; the dialect and illiteracies of the Negroes
and poor whites; and brief essays or asides by the author.
: There is an absence of frontier humor and of the higher
type of "character" humor.
: Most of the humor of this work is brief and inci
dental and belongs, very largely, to the second category ;
i (i.e., humor related to language): risque jokes, irony, j
i
■ repartee, dialect, and satire. In the early part of the \
i j
| story the returning soldiers make jokes on several favor-
!
i I
| ite subjects--liquor and its effects, sex and marriage, !
j and their own shortcomings. Here are a few* typical ex-
j amples:
1 "Why sure, General--or should I of said Lootenant?
Excuse me, madam. I got gassed doing K.P. and my
sight ain't been the same since" (p. 8).
"Sure," agreed the other. "She /^moonshine liquor/7 , i
I won't hurt you though. I done tried it. My dog j
i won't drink none of it of course, but then he got I
bad ways-hanging around Brigade H.Q." (p. 9)* I
In another exchange one of the men says, "Why poor soldier,i
i
all alone in no man's land and no matches. Aint war hell? :
I ask you" (p. 9)* One of the chapters opens with this
little sketch:
Achilles--What preparation would you make for a
cross-country flight, Cadet?
Mercury— Empty your bladder and fill your petrol
tank, Sir.
Achilles--Carry on, Cadet (p. 46).
Sometimes the humor is grim or surrealistic, as in this
reference to the badly mutilated Lt. Mahon:
"Say, how many soldiers has he got there?"
"About one and a half, bub."
"How can you have one and.a half soldiers if they
are live ones?"
"Ask the war department. They know how to do it"
(pp. 10T-2).
So many of the jokes turn on attitudes toward
women that a few must be cited.
He made no reply and she continued: "Don't you
believe in marriage?"
"Yes, as long as there are no women in it" (p. 76)
Another in the same vein:
"Don't never marry a woman, Emmy," her father,
Maudlin and affectionate, advised her. "If I had
it all to do over again I'd take a man every time"
(p. 120).
Jones, always chasing women, tells this incident:
Offended, he became impersonal. "'Course you are
entitled to your own opinion, I know I aint bold
like the man in that story. You remember? Ac
costed a woman on the street and her husband was
with her and knocked him down. When he got up, .
77
brushing himself off, a man says, ’For heaven's
sake, friend, do you do that often?' and the bird
says: 'Sure. Of course I get knocked down oc
casionally, but you'd be surprised.' I guess he
just charged the beating to overhead/' he finished
with his old sardonic humor (pp.. 304-5).
Another variation of this kind of humor— a combina
tion of rustic wit and dialeet--is this description of
the town's reception of a returned aviator:
(One of them airy-plane fellers.)
(S'what I say: if the Lord had intended folks
to fly around in the air he'd 'a' give em wings.)
(Well, he's been closter to the Lord'n you'll ever
git.)
(Closter'n that feller'll ever git, anyway. <
Guffaws.) This speaker was probably a Baptist !
! (P. HI). S
i
Though the passage is rather crude and self-conscious, it
illustrates an early attempt to use the backwoods dialect
which Faulkner later used so effectively in the Yoknapa-
: tawpha novels and stories, and it reveals his attitude
i i
toward the Baptists, who are often singled.out for ridi- !
i
1 - * ;
1 cule. Two other samples of dialect in this novel are
realistic enough: "Take keer of yourself" (p. 312), and
the Negro's remark, "You may be fas', but you can't las',
| cause yo' mommer go' slow you down" (p. 313). The latter '
I
; instance .reproduces perfectly the rhythms of Negro wit
and the characteristic dropping of final consonants (ex- !
eept in "can't," which is emphatic). Nevertheless, the i
78
start is auspicious.
Another variation of language humor, recalling the
type so common in American letters at the end of the
nineteenth century, is the erratic spelling in the let-,
ters of the half-literate ex-soldier, Julian Lowe. The
letters are written to Margaret Powers, whom he is court
ing, and are filled with childish spelling and the gram
mar of a nine-year old. For example:
Well, give my reguards to Giligan tell him not
to break his arm crooking it until I get back.
I will love you all ways (p. 103).
And ..another:
Its boreing all these girls how they go on over
a flying man if you ever -experienced it isn't it.
There was a couple of janes on the train I met .
. . they gave me the eye . . . and they might of
been society girls. Anyway I got there phone
numbers . . . (p. 153)*
One of his most revealing letters has to do with his own
maturity and sophistication:
I told mother last night and of coarse she thinks
we are too young. But I explained to her how
times have changed since the war how the war makes
you older than they used to. I see fellows my
age that did not serve specially flying which is
an education in itself and they seem like kids to
me because at last I found the woman I want and
my kid days are over. After knowing so many women
to found you so far away when I did not expect it
. . . (p. 277).
Lowe's letters serve to make clear his shallowness and
selfishness, and contrast sharply with the self-sacrifice
79
of Margaret, who stays on at Donald's home to care for
the dying man. Clearly, Lowe loves no one but himself,
and the naive self-revelation in his letters is a good
joke.
In Soldiers' Pay Faulkner also writes some rather
trenchant satire. One of the small-town characters whose
portrait is tinged with acid is Mrs. Worthington (the name
is significant, too).
Mrs. Worthington ate too much and suffered from
gout and a flouted will. So her church connection
was rather trying to the minister and his flock.
But she had money— that panacea for all ills of
the flesh and spirit. She believed in rights for
women, as long as women would let her dictate
what was right for them (p. 187).
! Two minor religious characters are satirized:
i
A chaplain appears who, to indicate that the
soldiers love him because he is one of them,
achieves innuendoes about home and mother and
j fornication (p. 189).
! The other passage concerns the minister called in to
conduct the funeral for Dr. Mahon's son.
The Baptist minister, a young dervish in a white
lawn tie, being most available, came and did his
duty and went away. He was young and fearfully
conscientious and kindhearted; upright and pas
sionately desirous of doing good: so much so
that he was a bore. But he had soldiered after
his fashion and he liked and respected Dr. Mahon,
refusing to believe that simply because Dr.
Mahon was Episcopal he was going to hell as soon
as he died (p. 278).
80
Some of the descriptive passages display tolerant
satire, as does this one of small-town casuals:
In front of the post office the rector was the
center of an interested circle when Mr. Saunders
saw him. The gathering was representative, em
bracing the professions with a liberal leavening
of those inevitable casuals, cravatless, overalled
or unoveralled, who seem to suffer no compulsions
whatever, which anything from a captured still
to a negro with an epileptic fit or a mouth organ
attracts to itself like atoms to a magnet, in any
small southern town--or northern or western town,
probably (p. 111).
In such descriptions Faulkner was perfectly at home, as
many later novels and stories prove, but it is interesting
that he qualifies his remark about towns outside of the
South. Another topic which often attracted him was the
!
fancied resemblance of Negroes and mules.
Monotonous wagons drawn by long-eared beasts
crawled past. Negroes humped with sleep, por
tentous upon each wagon and in the wagon bed
itself sat other negroes upon chairs: a pagan
catafalque under the afternoon. Rigid, as though
carved in Egypt ten thousand years ago. Slow
dust rising veiled their passing, like Time; the
necks of the mules limber as rubber hose swayed
their heads from side to side, looking behind them
always. But the mules were asleep also. "Ketch
me sleep, he kill me. But I got mule blood in
me: when he sleep, I sleep; when he wake, I wake"
(p. 151).
Here is an approach to realism, though the rhetoric is
possibly too poetic or self-conscious for realism.
The description of the family portraits in the
rector's house suggests another picture in a later novel:
81
"the principal strain of kinship appeared to be some sort
of stomach trouble. Or perhaps they were portraits of the
Ancient Mariner at different ages before he wore out his
albatross." The same kind of satire is found in the pic
ture of the old wedded couple in The Old Man ("you have
seen them, the electroplate reproductions, the thousand
identical coupled faces with only a collarless stud or a
fichu out of Louisa Alcott to denote the sex, looking in
pairs like the winning braces of dogs after a field
trial . . .") (p. 98)• Here the humor is bilious.
In his astringent comments on.sex and the mores of
the postwar period, Faulkner gives evidence of a later
| preoccupation. There is witty sarcasm in the remark,
"This was the day of the Boy, male and female," but there
is more feeling in his comment about 1919:
. . . the day of the Boy, of him who had been too
young for soldiering. For two years he had had
a dry time of it. Of course, girls had used him
during the scarcity of men, but always in such a
detached impersonal manner. Like committing
fornication with a beautiful woman who chews gum
steadily all the while. 0 Uniform, 0 Vanity (p.
188).
Caricature is employed in the description of Jones, who
is said to resemble a satyr more than he does a man:
Jones a fat Mirandola in a chaste Platonic
nympholepsy, a religio-sentimental orgy in gray
tweed, shaping an insincere, fleeting articula
tion of damp clay to an old imperishable desire,
building himself- a papier mache Virgin . . . (p. 225).
82
Even "companionate marriage" (recalling Judge Ben Lindsey
of Denver) is suggested by Margaret to Gilligan, who has
traditional morals.
"Joe, come with me."
"To a minister?" he asked with resurgent hope.
"No, just as we are. Then when we get fed up all
we need to do is wish each other luck and go our
ways." He stared at her, shocked. "Damn your
Presbyterian soul, Joe. Now you think I’m a
bad woman" (p. 307)*
There is an ironic mixing of the symbols of sex and death
in a passage describing the house servant Emmy’s contempla
tion of Donald's death. This theme is developed more
fully in the opening of the final chapter, which has to
; do with the burial of the young soldier. ;
i I
I ?
j Sex and death: the front door and the back door
of the world. How indissolubly are they associated
! in us I In youth they lift us out of the flesh,
in old age they reduce us again to flesh; one to
i fatten us, the other to flay us, for the worm.
| When are sexual compulsions more readily answered
! than in war or famine or flood or fire?
J
(The procession moved slowly across the square.
Country people, in town to trade, turned to
stare vacuously, merchant and doctor and lawyer
come to door and window to look; the city fathers,
drowsing in the courtyard, having successfully
circumvented sex, having reached the point where
death would look after them instead of they after
death, waked and looked and slept again) (pp.
259-60).
In general, there is more genial satire and humor
in this novel than in some later ones; say Light in August
or Requiem for a Nun. Soldiers1 Pay belongs, indubitably,
83
to the disillusioned postwar years. It is, as O'Connor
says, "determinedly world-weary and sophisticated," but
it shows real talent for a first effort.^ The critical
reception was*“on the^whore^favorable. To quote—from
O' Connor-again:
!
The Mew York Times said a "deft hand" had woven
a "narrative of mixed and frustrated emotions,"
the Baltimore Sun predicted it would still be read
when most of the year's books "are meditating
dustily on inaccessible shelves," and Louis
Kronenberger found it a "rich compound of imagina
tion, observation and experience" (p. 30).
Another critic, summarizing the reviews, says, in part:
The English reviews are largely patronizing:
Mr. Faulkner has talent, is fortunately young
and may outgrow the faults so obvious in this
j tale. One English reviewer went to the opposite
! extreme (The New Statesman, June 28, 1930) and
considered Faulkner superior to both Lawrence and
Hemingway: "I can remember no first novel of
such magnificent achievement in the last thirty
years." In reviews both of this and of the next
, novel (Mosquitoes) there are several discerning
references to Faulkner's imitativeness of style,
to the "echoes" from late-nineteenth-century
poetry
The setting for Mosquitoes is New Orleans in the
1920's. The plot Is very thin; there is hardly enough
; action to deserve the name of plot, but there is endless
talk on every kind of subject. Mrs. Maurier, a wealthy
and socially-ambitious widow,"gathers, with the help of
her frank teen-aged niece Patricia, a number of artists
6
Two Decades of Criticism, p. 19*
84
and writers to share a cruise on her yacht. The crowd
includes Dawson Fairchild, a suave, successful novelist;
a Mr. Gordon, a young sculptor from the Latin quarter; a
Jew named Julius, witty, shrewd, cynical; Mr. Taliaferro,
a would-be Bohemian whose clumsy attempts at seduction
end in failure and frustration; an Englishman who thinks
(from reading the advertisements) that all Americans are
constipated; a young poet "nurturing a reputation for
cleverness"; and two young lovers that Patricia invited
along just for the ride. Except for a breakdown which
ends the cruise and the sudden elopement of Patricia with
the steward, and her being bitten so severely by mosqui
toes that they must return to the yacht, there is constant
dull talk by the vacationers, who seem weary of life and
of one another. Boredom and frustration are the key words
in a reading of this novel, which most critics say was
influenced, by Aldous Huxley.
Faulkner has almost none of Huxley's talent for
the novel of ideas, either for sustained intel-
lectualizing or for playing off idea against idea.
Like Gordon, the sculptor, who wanted to escape
from the yachting party, Faulkner does not seem
happy with his subject; he seems to be throwing
off whatever it means’or represents to him by
satirizing its frustrations and castigating it's
blase and sophisticated posings. Despite occa
sional claims to the contrary, it is not true
that he is an able satirist of sophistication.'
/
7 .
0 ' Connor, -p.
Frederick Hoffman says of the novel:
Mosquitoes deservedly received severe criticism
and short shrift. A New Republic reyiew (July 20,
1927) pointed out its second-rate satiric "clever
ness" and its "labored sophistication."8
Another critic, Irving Howe, explains this unsuccessful
novel as "essentially a symptom of the unacknowledged
envy felt by a provincial measuring himself against those
9
he takes to be cosmopolitan intellectuals."
This novel is notable for its use of the tall tale,
which, as we have seen, was™ typical of frontier humor.
The tall tale was sometimes the product of folk lore and
>
passed into the oral literature of the country, but some j
!
yarns were the invention of imaginative writers, as, for j
example, T. B. Thorpe, A. B. Longstreet, and Mark Twain.
When Faulkner was living iri New Orleans, he and Sherwood
Anderson, his first literary mentor, worked together on
some outlandish tall tales (as related earlier). In the
novel- Mosquitoes the character Dawson Fairchild seems to
be Sherwood Anderson, and it is he who tells the first
of the tall tales in Faulkner’s fiction. O'Connor says
that these tales were the ones which the two artists had
10
worked up together in New Orleans. The first story
8
Two Decades of Criticism, p. 19*
^William Faulkner, p. 14.
10P. 31.
86
concerns a "fish ranch" conducted by A1 Jackson in "the
wide open spaces of the Gulf of Mexico." Fairchild tells
the story in a calm, matter-of-fact manner: a young man
who "had just graduated from reform school" is sent by
his father to become a "fisherd" at .Jackson's ranch.
"He hadn't shown any aptitude for anything else,
you see, and his old man knew it didn't take
much intelligence to herd a fish. His sister..."
"But, I say," Major Ayers interrupted, "why do
they herd their fish?"
"They round 'em up and brand 'em, you see, A1
Jackson brands..."
"Brand 'em?"
"Sure: marks 'em so he can tell his fish from
ordinary wild fish--mavericks, they call 'em.
And how he owns nearly all the fish-in the world;
a fish millionaire, 'even if he is fish-poor t^ight
now. Wherever you see a marked fish, it's 'one of
A1 Jackson's."
"Marks his fish, eh?"
"Sure: notches their tails."
"Mr. Fairchild," Mrs. Maurier said.
"But our fish at home have*notched tails," Major
Ayers objected.
"Well, they are Jackson fish that have strayed
off the range, then".-(pp.._87-88).
This story has .the typical marks of the tall tale: it is
a preposterous fabrication supported by realistic details,
and told in a matter-of-fact manner. It combines ideas
and terminology of several backgrounds. The term "fisherd"
87
is a writer's creation based on such accepted terms as I
"shepherd" and "cowherd." The idea of a ranch, of brand-
I
ing, and of strays is taken, of course, from western cat
tle ranges. The rancher who is "fish-poor" is a brother
in spirit to the farmer who is "land-poor" or the rancher
who is "cattle-poor." And the manner of telling the
story--a sober-faced, factual account of apparently true
events— is in the best tradition.
! A second, and more elaborate "fish story" is later
told by Fairchild about the same character, A1 Jackson,
who "claims to be a lineal descendant of Old Hickory," a
I
; man with the Southerner's traditional family pride but J
1 i
without much money or love for work. With money inherited :
* - ;
by his wife from "an old aristocratic Tennessee moonshining
family," A1 buys sheep and decides to raise wool in "a few
hundred acres of Tchufuncta river swamp."
"But his sheep started right in to get themselves
drowned, so he made lifebelts for 'em out of some !
small wooden kegs that had been part of the heritage
from that Tennessee uncle, so that when the sheep
strayed into deep water they would float until the
current worked them back to land again. This
worked all right, but still his sheep kept on dis-
appearing--the ewes and lambs did, that is. Then
he found that the alligators were^r" I
To stop the depredations of the alligators, Jackson fitted I
I
j
all the ewes and lambs with "imitation rams' horns out of j
wood" and reduced his losses to a negligible minimum. ^
“ 88
After a time the sheep learned to like the water and
began to swim and dive. In fact, they chose to remain
in the water and would not even come out to eat.
Finally another shearing time came around. Old
Man Jackson tried to catch one of them, but the
sheep' could swim faster than he and his boys could
row. So they finally had to borrow a motor boat.
And when they tired one of those sheep down and
caught it and took it out of the water, they found
that only the top of its back had any wool on it.
The rest of its body was scaled like a fish. And
when they finally caught one of the spring lambs
on an alligator hook, they found that i'ts tail had
broadened out and flattened like a beaver's, and
that it had no legs at all. They didn't hardly
know what it was, at first.
T
; Fairchild spins the story out to considerable length. He j
i !
i tells how the sheep became such fast swimmers that after
i a while it was impossible to catch them even with a motor-
1 boat. But now and then one would be caught "on a trotline
of shark hooks baited with ears of corn." Finally, one \
j of Al's boys made an agreement with the old man to get
t
| one half of all the sheep he could catch. So Claude would
strip off his clothes and go in the water to grapple for
them.
"Sure: run one down and hem him up under the bank j
and drag him with his bare hands. That was Claude,
all over. And then they found that this year's !
lambs didn't have any wool on 'em at all, and that
its flesh was the best eating in Louisiana; being
partly cornfed that way giving it a good flavor, 1
you see. So that's where old man Jackson quit the !
sheep business and went to fish ranching on a j
large scale."
89 ,
I
The old man sold the sheep-fish to New Orleans markets and
soon began to get rich. The new adventure changed Claude,;
too, who had formerly been drinking and gambling and <
chasing the girls. He began to spend more and more time
in the water, emerging only to eat and sleep. The family
noticed changes in the color of his skin and a stiffness
in his knees. Finally, Claude quit coming home at all,
' preferring to stay in the water. Then the old man began
to find pieces of half-devoured sheep floating in the
i
bayous, and supposed that alligators were eating them ;
!
; again. ;
! j
| "And then, right behind the alligator he saw j
I Claude. Claude’s eyes had kind of shifted around j
! to the side of his head and his mouth had spread j
I back a good way, and his teeth had got longer. j
And then old man Jackson knew what had scared i
| that alligator. But that was the last they ever I
i saw of Claude. Pretty soon after that, though,
there was a shark scare at the bathing beaches
along the -Gulf coast. It seemed to be a lone
shark that kept annoying women bathers, especially
blondes; and they knew it was Claude Jackson.
1 He was always hell after blondes" (pp. 277-281).
, Here the tall tale has picked up other extravagant ele- ■
I
ments. The metamorphosis of sheep into a cross between
i
j alligators and sheep and of a man into a shark suggests
primitive folk lore. The tale is the product of a very
| fertile imagination. But there is also a suggestion of
: an underlying sexual interest, not only in the crossing of
species of animals but more especially in the mating of
90
the man with sharks. A comical twist is given to the end ;
of the story by the mention that Claude in his new role is
still following his old habits— pursuing blondes. The
tale is really a tour de force, told by Fairchild to an
amused and appreciative audience who"asked him to go on
and add other adventures. ’ 'Some other time," he promised.
This story has been given in detail because it il
lustrates Faulkner's early interest in the tall tale as a
literary device (even though this tale is crude and un
convincing) and further shows his concern, even in such
unpromising situations, with sex and its unconventional
j
i outlets. The humor is coarse and cruel, but this was often
' 1
i
■ true of frontier humor. The tales told by Fairchild to !
i *
| the little group on the yacht have no integral place in j
the novel, but neither, for that matter, have the long
discussions of education, religion, social life, and sex.
i . t
t :
Faulkner uses satire freely in this novel, though !
i
generally it is not effective. His Mr. Hooper, the
Rotarian, joiner, "do-gooder," appears to be an imitation
of some of Sinclair Lewis’ caricatures. More telling are
!
the attacks Dawson Fairchild makes on life and teaching i
in a small, religious college he attended. :
l
It was a kind of funny college I went to. A de- i
nominational college, you know, where they turned j
out preachers. I was working in a mowing-machinery
91
factory in Indiana,,, and the owner of the factory
was a trustee of this college. He was a sancti
monious old fellow with a beard like a goat, and
every year he offered a half scholarship to be
competed for by young men working for him. You
won it, you know, and he found you a job near the
college to pay your board, but not enough to do
anything else--to keep you from fleshly tempta
tions, you know--and he had a monthly report on
your progress sent to him. And I won it that
year (p. 115).
Fairchild goes on to relate:
T
But I kind of got interested in learning things:
I learned in spite of the instructors we had.
They were a bunch of broken-down preachers: head
full of dogma and intolerance and a belly full
of big meaningless words. English literature
course whittled Shakespeare down because he wrote
about whores without pointing a moral, and one
instructor always insisted that the head devil
j in Paradise Lost was an inspired portrait of
: Darwin, and they wouldn’t toucli Byron with a
ten foot pole, and Swinburne wks reduced to his
mot'her and his old standby, the ocean. And I
guess they/d have cut this out had they worn
one piece" bathing suits in those days (p. 116).
This description of a denominational college evinces the
same scorn noted earlier in the treatment of religion.
Intolerance and narrow-mindedness are, to Faulkner, among
the deadliest of sins. The humor of this passage is thus
diluted by the harshness of the strictures.
Fairchild turns from an account of the college
’ courses to a yarn about a college fraternity— "And I joined
| '
' a fraternity, too, almost." In a casual manner he tells
of his working his way through college, with never enough
j time or money to enjoy the good times that his college !
r
friends did. A tall, knowing fellow agreed to get Fair
child into a fraternity--for a price. It would cost
twenty-five dollars, which of course the struggling stu
dent didn’t have. But he managed to get more work at the ,
college power plant, where he worked on the night shift, '
and eventually had saved nearly enough for the initia- |
i tion. The rest he borrowed from the manager on the pre
text of paying a dental bill, and gave it to the big
fraternity brother, who instructed Fairchild to meet him j
the next night behind the library. That was late in j
' November, after a football victory, and the students in J
the dormitories were having a hilarious time. Behind the
library Fairchild waited— and walked— while the wind blew ,
colder and colder, until a blizzard came and finally drove
him back to the power plant--late. The next day Fairchild
learned that the man who had offered to get him into the
i
fraternity was not even a student, and was never seen
there again. "But I nearly joined one though." There is
: perverse humor in this situation, but it is tinged with
sadness and pathos.
i
In addition to tall tales and satire, the novel is
; filled with sexual imagery and anecdotes, such as a yarn
told by Major Ayers about Gretna Green, and by Fairchild
about his boyish curiosity. When he was a boy, the novel
ist says, visiting in the country, the members of the
family and their guests all had to use the same outdoor
toilet, which had one side for men and one for the women.
One day he followed a pretty young girl to the outhouse,
and poked his head down through the opening on his side.
What he saw on the opposite side was the bright pretty
face and yellow curls of the sweet young girli The reader
is caught off guard by this unexpected ending, which cor
responds to the "punch line" of the ordinary joke.
The novel begins weakly with the ineffectual Mr. '
Taliaferro (born Tarver) remarking daintily, "The sex in- !
stinct is quite strong in me." At the end he is still 1
vainly pursuing women. Sexual talk and imagery abound in
this slow-moving novel. In one place, Faulkner observes
that women are "merely articulated genital organs," and
in another he refers to Freud, probably indicating his
reading at the time (p. 2*1-8).
i
Faulkner's self-portrait is an attempt at humor ■
that misses fire. He has a girl describe a writer (ob- j
I
viously Faulkner) whose name she can't recall; "... he ;
was such a funny kind of man," she says, and then gives
a sample of his wit.
94
"He said I had the best digestion he ever saw,
and he said if the straps of my dress was to
break I'd devastate the country. He said he was
a liar by profession, and he made good money at
it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it
paid out. I think he was crazy. Not dangerous:
just crazy" (p. 145).
The social satire in Mosquitoes is overdrawn and sometimes
vindictive; the writer does not seem any more at home with
his subjects than the artist did on the yacht. Some of
the symbolism has a strained and contrived quality that
makes it unconvincing. When the novel sold poorly,
Liveright, the publisher, who had signed Faulkner for a
i f
i
three-book contract, decided he had made a mistake and
i |
> i canceled it. I
i
Faulkner evidently realized that this was not the
type of writing for which he was best suited, for he now
turned to local scenes and subjective materials. The
next novel, Sartoris, is significant as being the first
of the Yoknapatawpha series and for introducing many
characters that appear in later novels and stories.
Irving Howe says of it:
A group of static set-pieces rather than a com
pact narrative, Sartoris reads^ like a notebook
strewn with bits and pieces xfor a Viovel still un
written, as if Faulkner cared only about hurrying
11
''Robert Coughlan, The Private World,of William
Faulkner (New York, 1953-54), p. 73.
95
It all onto paper. Several of tlie Yoknapatawpha
social groups are summarily introduced: the ebbing
patriciate in the Sartorises, the independent
farmers in the MacCallums, and then, secondarily,
the Snopeses and the Negroes. Though the Yokna
patawpha world is not yet seen distinctly, the
feelings it will elicit lie about in loose pro
fusion, often in excess of what the book itself
requires.12
The chief characters of this novel, which belongs ' ■
to the post-World War I period, are: "Old Bayard" i
Sartoris, a gentleman of the old aristocracy, strong- J
willed, hard-headed, "bearded and hawklike"— modeled afterj
Faulkner's great grandfather, who was a legend in the
family; a sister of the Sartorises, Miss Jenny Du Pre,
two years a wife and seven years a widow at thirty--
a slender woman with a delicate replica of the
Sartoris nose and that expression of indomitable
and utter weariness which all Southern women had
learned to wear,
a sharp-tongued, shrewd, unsentimental woman; young
Bayard, back from the War, embittered because he did not
die a glamorous death like his twin brother John, killed
in an air duel, restless, melancholy, hard-drinking,
i
roughly resembling Faulkner; and three or four Negroes j
who resemble, in most respects, the personal slaves of j
the pre-Civil War period. The most individualized of ;
these is Simon, servant, friend, and protector of Old :
12P. 28.
Bayard, a good-natured, officious, lusty old Negro who
apes his betters and jokes freely with them. He is the
, old-time "white man's Negro," a far cry from the type of
; Lucas' Beauchamp, the protagonist of Intruder in the Dust.
| Elnora, the. mulatto family servant, is a daughter of Simon.
• In uncomplaining faithful service and devotion to the
family she anticipates Dilsey, the Negro who held together
the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury. Isom, a
trifling, lazy, worthless Negro boy, and Caspey, the big-
; talking, self-important "emancipated" Negro (a returned
< soldier), are types rather than distinct personages.
| Among the minor characters are several that are
interesting in their own right. One of these is "old man
Fall," a resident of the county poor farm, who, in spite
■ of all Miss Jenny and the family doctor can do, treats
and cures a wen on the face of Old Bayard. Dr. Peabody,
who reappears in As I Lay Dying, is a huge, hulking man
who "weighs 310 pounds and has a digestive tract like a
horse." Young Dr. Alford, a newcomer in Jefferson, is
drawn satirically and with some venom. He represents,
apparently, the "new" doctor--impersonal, progressive,
conceited, grasping. Suratt, a traveling salesman, re
appears in The Hamlet and various stories as the sewing
machine agent, later named Ratliff, a knowing, talkative,
likable man. Byron Snopes, a bookkeeper, and Flem Snopes,
a vice-president in the Sartoris bank, reappear in the ;
‘ Snopes saga. .In a later story Byron Snopes steals the ;
i
| obscene letters he had written Narcissa Benbow in
I
Sartoris, and Flem's double-dealing as manager of the city
i
! power plant is told in the story "Centaur in Brass."
Horace Benbow, the brother of Narcissa, is interested in
a married woman, Belle Mitchell. When we meet him later
; in Sanctuary he has been married to Belle for ten years,
j The aviator Comyn is brought into some of the later war
stories.
!
Sartoris has several kinds of humor: tall tales--
the Civil War yarns of Colonel Sartoris and the World War
exploits of the big-mouthed Negro Caspey; satire— in the
descriptions of Dr. Alford and his efficiency, Mrs.
Marders, who sat "with her slack chins In a raised teacup,"
little Belle’s piano recital, and the country man's con-
i tempt of the city; dialect humor, as in such words as
I
"peart," "passel," "quoil" (quarrel), "whuppin," "skeer,"
"resert" for assert, "pore man," and so on, and Negro
antics; the sardonic wit of Miss Jenny and the country wit
of Houston, the tavern keeper, and his cronies; situation
( humor, such as that presented in the dogs crossbred to a
1 fox that might, therefore, "refuse to run they own grand-
daddy," and the plight of old Simon, entrusted with
church funds, who is found to have spent all the money
for the favors of some of the colored "sistern." Besides,
there are incidental essays like the celebrated passage
on the mule.
Round and round the mule went, setting its narrow,
deerlike feet delicately down in the hissing cane-
pith,, its neck bobbing limber as a section of
rubber hose in the collar, with its trace-galled
flanks and flopping, lifeless ears and its half
closed eyes drowsing venomously behind pale lids,
apparently asleep with the monotony of its own
motion. Some Homer of thfg'*"cotton fields should
sing the saga of the mule. . . . Father and mother
he does not resemble, sons and daughters he will
never have; vindictive and patient (it is a known
fact that he will labor ten years willingly and
patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking
you once) / a statement Faulkner repeated almost
in the same language in The Old Man , solitary
but without pride, self-sufficient but without
vanity; his voice is his own derision. . . .
Alive, he is haled through the world, an object
of general derision; unwept, unhonored, and un
sung, he bleaches his awkward and accusing bones
among rusting cans on lonely hillsides while his
flesh soars unawares against the blue in the
craws of buzzards.13
This tour de force is reminiscent of Josh Billings1
"Essa .on the Muel," which^ppeared • in i860. Faulkner ’s
piece is longer, more elaborate,, and philosophical, but
some of the ideas are the same as Billings’. It is rather
significant that this somewhat lyrical description of,the
13
William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York, 1 9 2 9 ) , pp.
278-9.
/
99
patient mule is not pertinent to the story, but seems to
be inserted for its own sake. As Faulkner developed more
skill in the use of humor it became more natural and better
integrated in the stories.
i
Thus we may say that the humor, as well as many of j
the characters point to later developments. The humor is,
for the most part, genial and kindly. Even the irony and
satire lack the bitterness found in some of the later
portraits and scenes. The Negroes are generally, with
one important exception, treated with humorous condescen-
!
sion, and their language and antics provide some comic j
|
relief from young Bayard's headlong flight toward danger j
and death.
Some of Faulkner's stories belong to this early
period, though many of them remained unpublished until
after the success of Sanctuary had opened the way to
popular success. These Thirteen (published in 1931) con
tains several stories inspired by World War I and
Faulkner's visit to Europe in 1925* The War stories,
later included under the title "The Wasteland" in his
Collected Stories (1951), are: "Crevasse," "Ad Astra,"
"All the Dead Pilots," and "Victory." Stories with a
Mississippi setting are: "That Evening Sun," "Dry
September," "A Rose for Emily," "Hair," and two stories
100
about Indians, "A Justice" and "Red Leaves." The remain
ing three--"Mistral," "Divorce," and "Careassonne"--have
European settings, though only "Divorce" has any story
interest. Some of these stories have little or no humor;
in others the humor is ironic or grim, with little or no
gaiety.
We may first dismiss those stories in which the•
element of humor is negligible or non-existent, and then
point out briefly the types of wit or humor found in the
remaining stories. "Crevasse," "Ad Astra," "Mistral,"
and "Carcassonne" are of interest for their mood or set
ting more than for action or humor. There are flashes of
humor in "All the Dead Pilots," a somewhat shapeless
story of the competition between John Sartoris and his
commanding officer for the affection of a young French
girl, known familiarly as Kit (short for Kitchener,
British marshal of World War I) because she had so many
soldiers. Bawdy and suggestive humor occurs at times,
and drollery such as the sergeant's forbidding his dog to
eat the army mess. Though there is horse-play and some
heroics, the mood is heavy. "The atmosphere of 'All the
Dead Pilots' is similar to the atmosphere created by such
plays as What Price Glory? and Journey's End.
14-
O'Connor, p. 67*
101
"Victory" is a grimly ironic tale of a young upright
, Scot whose war experience makes him a killer. During an
engagement in France he kills the officer who had humili-
! j
| ated him in training but goes on to win a medal for his ;
gallantry. Returning home, he mingles with the upper 1
!
; class, to whom he was introduced by virtue of being an
officer, but finds himself unemployed, rejected, disil
lusioned, and finally reduced to selling matches on a
• street corner and living like a beggar. About the only
! i
! !
j glimmer of humor in this tale is found in the letters ex-
i ;
I I
i changed between the Scot soldier and his family. The j
j j
i heaviness of the irony throughout makes the story op- I
i ;
pressive.
Of the stories having a Mississippi setting, "Dry
September" and "That Evening Sun" are too heavily weighted
with anger and pathos to allow for humor. The former is
a study of racial tensions, blind fury, and sadism in the
lynching of a Negro suspected of raping a middle-aged
white spinster. The story is realistic and shocking in
its revelation of intolerance and injustice. The second
story, "That Evening Sun," is filled with foreboding and
pathos, as Nancy Mannigoe, a Negro servant, knows that
after nightfall her husband is coming to kill her. The
feelings of guilt, frustration, and despair are here dealt
102
with in a tragic and moving manner.
"A Rose for Emily," possibly Faulkner’s best-known
short story, is notable not only for its excellent charac
terization but for its subtlety and grim humor. Miss
Emily is an anachronism in the modern city of Jefferson;
by surviving most of her own generation she lived on to
dismay the younger men who tried to run the city govern
ment and collect taxes. Her routing the men sent to col
lect her taxes prepares the way for her later defiance of
the officials who cannot account for the noisome odor
about her place. There is a kind of dark and bitter humor
in the picture of the men stealthily spreading lime about
her premises at night. The master stroke in this care
fully written story is Miss Emily's demanding and getting
"rat poison" without complying with the law. Not until
the macabre ending do we realize that the rat poison was
for her wayward lover, Homer Barron. The psychological
twist as well as the surprise in the final scene is sug
gestive of Poe. Interpretation aside, the story is in
tensely interesting as a story, and the ironic humor grows
out of both character and situation.
The story "Hair" is not, according to O'Connor,
"a very good ^aulkner/7 story, but it is interesting as
15
the first in which his subject is a countryman." It is
15P. 68.
103
the story of a quiet, sober, hard-working barber known
as "Hawkshaw," who takes a fatherly interest in a poor
girl and watches her grow to womanhood and then get into
trouble with some no-account local boy. But despite her
family's worthlessness and the girl's sullied reputation,
the barber pays off the mortgage on the family place in
Alabama (after the death of the girl's parents) and then
marries the girl. The story is told in dialect with sub
dued but sympathetic humor.
Two other stories have to do with early days in
Mississippi and the relations of Choctaw Indians and
Negroes. In "A Justice" a twelve-year-old boy, Quentin
Compson, heard without comprehending the story of the
paternity of Sara Fathers, an Indian, whose tribal name
was Had-Two-Fathers. (Incidentally, this idea of unset
tled paternity is used also in the story of the child
fathered by one of the two men who claimed Laverne in
Pylon.) What the boy did not understand was the elaborate
efforts of Ikkemotubbe, the chief, to keep Crayfishford,
a Negro, away from the wife of a slave, who was Sam's
mother.
"Red Leaves" concerns the problems of the Indians,
who, aping the white man, kept Negro slaves that they
neither wanted nor needed. The age-old relation of the
104
Indians to the soil and the forests was disrupted by the
introduction of slavery. In this story the chieftain has
I
; died and his Negro body servant, doomed to be buried with .
! !
i him, makes a spirited and furious attempt to escape througH
j i
! the swamps, but finally is caught and brought back. This j
story, like others in this collection, is too somber for
humor. It seems to imply that slavery brought a curse not
only to the whites, but also to the Indians and perhaps
even to the land.
s
; t
! The reviews of These Thirteen were respectful but !
| ~ : *
I generally non-committal. One reviewer said, "The book is !
' j
| uneven in quality but it is nevertheless extraordinary
„l6 •
' stuff. Granville Hicks, one of the more caustic
critics, said it was not very helpful in "estimating his
^/Faulkner'
seemed to see this work as a promise of something better
to come.
Idyll in the Desert, published in 1931> also be
longs to Faulkner's period of apprenticeship. The setting
is a desert town in Arizona, the time presumably the
1920's. The plot, more sentimental than most of his, is
about a woman who forsakes her husband and family to go to
The American Mercury (January 1932), p. 24.
17
Books (September 27, 1931)*
_ 17
s/ place in our literature." Critical opinion
105
the desert to nurse back to health a lover who is ten'
years younger than she. In two years he recovers his
health and leaves the woman, who now has tuberculosis.
The woman stays on ten years longer, waiting for his re
turn, while an old mail carrier, conniving with the
woman's former husband, brings her money and looks after
her needs. Finally, the husband arranges to have her
moved to a hospital in Los Angeles. On the train the
dying woman recognizes the run-away lover and his bride,
who still has rice in her hair; but the man does not even
notice the gaunt woman, who is dead before the train
reaches California. The story is saved from mawkishness
by the friendly, talkative, humorous old mail-rider,
Lucas Crump, who is given to tall tales and a dialect that
suggests Ratliff, Faulkner's later narrator. Near the
beginning of the story Lucas tells a hunting yarn that is
reminiscent of the tall tales of Davy Crockett or more
particularly of an anonymous story called "Great 'Pop-Gun'
Practice" which was published in the Oxford, Mississippi,
•j O
Intelligencer. Later, Lucas is telling about a Mexican
revolution that started one evening about sundown. But
the heavy cloud of dust stirred up by the revolution had
18
Arthur Palmer Hudson, ed., Humor of the Old Deep
South (New York, 1936), pp. 330-31.
106
i
begun about ten o'clock that morning. Asked how the dust
I got up before the revolution, the old man said:
i
; "Sure. But things happen so fast down there in
i Mexico that that dust started rising the night
| before to get out of the way of--"
: "Don't tell me about that," I said.1^
!
j Near the end of the story, serving as a relief to the grim
i
j narration of the woman's disappointment and approaching
I
! death, the old man tells another yarn to illustrate how
J out-of-the-way the place is. His language is filled with
| double negatives, mispronunciations, faulty grammar, and
| such dialecticisms as "a-tall," "throwed," "nekkid," and
j "pitchure."
|
j Interesting also as an anticipation of some of
Faulkner's later harsh satire on man's preoccupation with
' civilized gadgets is this early touch:
j "I know folks right now that would hold up a train
bound for heaven while they telephoned back home
for the cook to run and bring them something
which, not ever having had any use for at home,
they had done forgot. They could live in a house
! on earth with it for ten years without even know-
; ing where it was, but just try to get them to
start to heaven without taking it along" (p. 8).
Contrasted with his best stories this piece is
amateurish--in plot, characterization, and technique. Its
I humor is worth noting for two reasons mainly: it makes
i9
Idyll in the Desert (New York, 1931)# P* 6*
107
effective use of the tall tale as the early novels did;
and it anticipates many of the greater narratives in its
use of dialect, satire, and the off-hand method of story
telling. The humor belongs to the frontier tradition.
Miss Zilphia Gant, a short story published as a I
single volume-by the Texas Book Club (1932), is a study
j
of abnormal family relations and their effect upon a j
i
young, sensitive girl. Jim Gant, her father, is a buyer
of horses and mules who makes periodic trips to Memphis
to sell his stock. On one of these trips he runs off with
a woman from a tavern and sends his half-witted boy helper
to inform Mrs. Gant he would not be coming back. Mrs.
Gant leaves her two-year-old daughter Zilphia.. with a
neighbor while she takes a pistol and goes to "those !
equivocal purlieus of Memphis" to hunt down her husband
and his mistress. After this experience she hates and
i
distrusts all men, and for twenty-three years she and her :
daughter live alone in the cramped room which is her i
dressmaking shop. After Mrs. Gant finds Zilphia and a
boy lying together one day in a horseblanket in the woods,
i
she meets the girl every day at school and never lets her
out of sight again. The mother examines the girl's body
I
each month, after she had found her with the boy, and for
f
twelve years the pale, lonely girl watches life go by [
108
from her window. Mrs. Gant becomes thin and hard as a
man, and implacable in her hatred. Once Faulkner men
tions her "cold and implacable paranoia," one of the few
j times that he has used technical language in describing
I mental derangement.
j When a tramp painter comes to town and engages to
i
| paint the shop, Mrs. Gant vacates it, and in the eight
j days she is out becomes ill from idleness and has to go
; to bed. Zilphia escapes from her room, goes to the shop
and meets the painter, whom she has seen in her disordered
dreams. After they are married, she insists on returning
to see her sick mother, who meets her at the door with a
shotgun and drives off the husband. Then the mother sits
J for three days, sweating constantly, to guard the door,
i On the third day the painter leaves town, and that night
i
| Mrs. Gant dies.
■ Zilphia waits six months for her husband's return.
i
|When he does not return she begins to write.letters to
i
|"agony columns" and to read all the wedding notices in
I
!local papers, substituting his name and hers for those of
j
i the bride and groom. Finally she comes across his name
|one day in the marriage column, and employs a detective to
1 learn his whereabouts and follow every move he makes.
|Then, in imagination she enters the body of the man and
109
the wife, seeking fulfillment for her deepest longings.
After a time she learns that the wife is expectant, then
through the detective hears that the man has been acci
dentally killed and the wife has died in child-birth.
She closes her shop and leaves town for three years.
When she returns she tells of a secret marriage and the
sudden death of her husband, and she has a little daughter
on whom she lavishes affection.
The mood of this story is grim, and the characters
are more like types than individuals. It contains humor
of the sardonic type, but little that is robust and good-
natured. The story is principally interesting because it j
i
bears some striking resemblances to "A Rose for Emily," i
I
though it lacks the finished quality of the latter. It j
i
bears the stamp of immature genius. ;
i
The early novels and stories of Faulkner reveal i
i
a strong predisposition toward humor. Beginning with the [
i
rather crude Jokes and satire of Soldiers1 Pay, Faulkner (
i
went on to social satire and the tall tale in Mosquitoes,
and advanced to more congenial subjects and more natural
i
i
humor in Sartoris, with its Mississippi setting and more
lifelike characters. In the latter novel Negro dialect, j
situation humor, and passages of sharp sarcasm give the
story added interest. Some of the short stories in
' ‘ 110
These Thirteen employ dialect, droll anecdotes, repartee,
and comic situations for humor. Those that lack humor
are generally "mood" stories or rather grim, depressing
accounts of uncontrolled passion, such as "Dry September"
or "That Evening Sun."
| CHAPTER THREE
|
i
| THE POT BOILER AND ITS SEQUEL
; Part One: Sanctuary 1
| |
i
i
| By 193G William Faulkner had written five novels, i
j including two of his greatest (The Sound and the Fury and !
1 As I Lay Dying), but he was still virtually unknown out-
j side his home town of Oxford, where he was lightly re- j
i !
j garded as a writer. The Wilson Library Bulletin, in j
I February, 1930> ran a brief biographical sketch of j
1
j Faulkner in which it described him as a strong-minded j
| young man, who despised New York City and preferred to ■
live in his native Oxford. It announced without any fan- !
: 1 f
t fare that his next book would be Sanctuary. !
f j
; This novel about Mississippi moonshiners, city ,
1
< gangsters, violence and lust, was a turning point in \
i I
, Faulkner's career. With this "horrific tale" he stormed ,
! the bastions of the publishers and aroused both critics
| and the reading public. For the first time he had gained
j what he sought— widespread attention. Even Hollywood ,
; ^0'Connor, p. 55*
112 j
i
I became interested in the obscure Mississippi writer.
| |
| Prom this time forward, for many years at least, Faulkner
i was generally identified as the author of Sanctuary, his
i I
first popular success. Although the lurid plot, with its j
I violence and sensationalism, overshadows the humor, this i
I '
| novel has more humor than one might suspect. !
The facts concerning the publication of Sanctuary
are presented in the "Introduction" which Faulkner wrote
i
i for the Modern Library edition of the novel in 1932. It
| was in this "Introduction" that he called the book "a I
i
cheap idea . . . deliberately conceived to make money,"
which, as we have pointed out, brought down the wrath of
j
the critics. In explaining the sensational plot he says: !
i I
I took a little time out and speculated what a
person in Mississippi would believe to be current ;
trends, chose what I thought was the right answer |
and invented the most horrific tale I could j
imagine and wrote it in about three weeks and
. sent it to Smith, who had done The Sound and the
i Fury, and who wrote me immediatelyT , v Good God,
; I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail."2
i 1
| He put this work aside and wrote, while working on j
! the night shift at the power plant in Oxford, As I Lay j
I j
i Dying, which he sent to Smith, his publisher. After pub- j
| ~ »
] lishing As I Lay Dying, Smith returned the galleys of !
Sanctuary, advising Faulkner to rewrite it. :
William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Introduction, p. vi.
i
Then I saw that it was so terrible that there were
but two things to do; tear it up and rewrite it.
I I thought again, "It might sell; maybe 10,000 of
' them will buy It." So I tore the galleys down
j and rewrote the book (p. viii).
He adds, then, that he had to pay for the privi
lege of rewriting his book, hoping it "would not shame
j Thg Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much and
j I made a fair job . . ." (p. viii). Sanctuary, quite
j apart from its lurid plot and sensationalism, is a power-
i
! ful novel, evincing careful planning and expert crafts-
i
! manship. The latter qualities, however, were overshad-
j
I owed by the emphasis upon sex, violence, and crime.
The sordid and shocking details of the bizarre rape of a
college girl, Temple Drake, by an impotent city gangster,
: Popeye, and her subsequent life in a Memphis brothel,
, where she is further violated by Red, a sexual surrogate
1 of Popeye's— of the murder of Red, and the eventual exe-
■ eution of Popeye for a murder he did not commits— all
i
; these lurid details caught the fancy of readers— and of
! Hollywood--and catapulted Faulkner into fame, or notoriety.
j
I The screen rights of Sanctuary were bought by Paramount,
( ------------
i
| which released it as a movie entitled "The Story of
i
i - „
I Temple Drake," with Miriam Hopkins as Temple and Jack
I
; LaRue as Popeye. The movie made certain changes in the
114 !
; story and softened the more brutal and sordid parts of >
i 3 i
; the plot. Having gained the attention of Hollywood, ,
‘ i
; Faulkner has lived in the screen capital briefly on sev-
i
! eral occasions, while writing scripts or supervising the
I ' !
! filming of one of his novels. Some of his impressions i
! of that never-never land are found in such stories as
i
i "Artist at Home" and "Golden Land," stories filled with
: satire and tinged with cynicism. 1
i
i
As stated earlier, the publication of Sanctuary I
brought immediate, though generally outraged, notices
from the critics. Henry Seidel Canby, under the title,
"The Cult of Cruelty," wrote a review of Sanctuary for the
1
; front page of the Saturday Review of Literature in which |
! i
; he called the novel "a prime example of American sadism": i
J He is distinguished above others in the cruel
| school by a firm grasp upon personality and his !
I ability to enrich the flow of time with pertinent j
j incident. . . . I believe that sadism, if not !
anti-romance, has reached its American peak.4
! ’ f
1 A later critic added: !
I |
| One of the New Humanists, Alan Reynolds Thompson, i
analyzed the cult of cruelty for the Bookman in j
even more sober terms than those of Mr. Canby.
Parlor Freudians found in it a topographical map 1
j
! 3
J O’Connor, p. 56. (I well remember seeing this
! picture in the spring of 1933 near the scenes depicted in
the story.)
i 4
I The Saturday Review of Literature, May 21, 1931,
I P- 673. . . . . . .... ... .............
of ids, egos, and less easily mentioned entities. j
j Corey Ford, the satirist, devoted a section to it J
j in In the Worst Possible Taste (with a drawing by i
Covarrubias of Faulkner as a popeyed boy in shorts •
standing in a bin full of corncobs). Another !
; caricature, "Mr. Faulkner is Visited by the Muse," j
| a dream of monsters, enormous axes, and so on,
appeared shortly in the Bookman. A pamphlet, i
: Pseudo-realists, by "Junius Junior" was devoted j
J exclusively to Sanctuary.5
i A few quotations from early reviews, before Faulkner
t
i
! had won critical acclaim, will illustrate the mixed recep-
; tion this controversial novel received:
! Mr. Faulkner has a bitter talent, and it is not
j likely that at anyone's bidding he will turn it
| to a more optimistic bent than his mood warrants.
| So there is no use quarreling on the score of his
j subject matter. That he has a tremendous talent
j is undeniable. His portraiture is something to
| marvel at.6
Another writer called it a "work of unquestionable power,
; possibly of genius." Others commented on its originality,
t
its "sadism," and its excellent portraiture. Most critics ;
j
who noticed the novel commented on its various merits or j
I i
demerits and recognized the undeniable power of its rela- i
i
; tively unknown creator. !
; !
Later, The Saturday Review of Literature published 1
. a study entitled "The Literature of Horror," a "Series of |
Articles Interpreting Contemporary Novels in the Light of :
i i
i j
^O'Connor, p. 56.
1 6 1
I M. C. Dawson, Books, February 15, 1931> P* 3*
116
Psychoanalysis," by Lawrence S. Kubie, M.D., with an
Introductory essay by Henry S. Canby. This series, which
began in October, 193 ^ > has a full-length article by Dr.
Kubie in which Temple Drake, Popeye, and other leading
characters of Sanctuary are psychoanalyzed and seen to
be suffering from various physical and psychical traumas;
Popeye, for example, is treated as a symbol of impotence.
Herschel Brickell, a staff writer for North
American Review, visited Mississippi in 1932, the year
after the publication of Sanctuary, and found the novel
to be a topic of conversation there, as elsewhere. His
opinion is interesting:
There is a sorry moral to be drawn from this:
six good and important novels by Faulkner went
unread by the general public until after he had
written Sanctuary. The Landseaper /from Brickell's
column, "The Literary Landscape^/7 found the Younger
Generation reading this novel with but little
appreciation of its amazing strength: the Older
Generation with only a few exceptions voiced its
stern disapproval of Faulkner and all his ways.7
Brickell went on to say that Faulkner, "iconoclast that
he is, will never kneel in the romantic temple," and he
predicted, quite accurately, that Faulkner would eventual
ly win over his own state--"outside recognition will take
„8
care of this matter.
7April, ,1932, p. 376.
8P. 376.
117
Sanctuary became a popular success not only in j
... - ...................................... j
America, but in Europe as well. "It was published," j
I
l
O’Connor says, "in three English editions, and it was J
i
translated into French in 1933 and into Spanish in 193^*" j
(p. 56). For years Faulkner's reputation abroad was I
higher than it was at home.
To turn now to a consideration of humor in this
novel, one must observe that--as in a great part of
}
Faulkner's work— the tragic and comic are blended. Only
rarely can the critic find a story, or even an incident,
that is primarily one or the other. Anyone who has read
1
Sanctuary at all thoughtfully must have noticed that humori
i
in some form often breaks through the atmosphere of gloom j
f
and violence. But the novel as a whole is garish and j
!
grotesque, not comic. j
i
~ »
This is the story of an underworld in Memphis and j
the neighboring country, created by the favored as ,
well as the depressed classes. The chief figure, !
Popeye, is the product of a criminal environment j
and poverty, and toward the end of the book he is
rather prosaically treated as a case study. He 1
may be considered to be congenitally deformed, '
though it is clear that Faulkner means us to recog
nize that a certain kind of corrupt society spawned,
brought up, and favored him.9 j
l
In his analysis of this novel, Irving Howe speaks j
of the element of shock (and of the incidental humor): !
9 1
John Arthos, as quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, !
p. 116. '
118
Many great writers have enjoyed crass and violent
effects, and without hesitation assaulted delicacy.
In its own lesser way Sanctuary depends on this
power to shock; apart from some comic diversion,
it drives brutally toward two climaxes, the vio
lation of Temple and her later account of it to
Benbow. No matter what complaint is proposed
about their use in the novel, these moments of
shock are necessary to Its organizing scheme;
and the notion that Sanctuary merely offers in
expensive thrills, a notion for which Faulkner
himself is partly responsible, deserves short
shrift. 10'
/
Both Howe and Arthos agree that Sanctuary is funda
mentally moral in purpose, and Arthos quotes a phrase
from Malraux in which some of the minor characters in
Sanctuary are called "presque eomique." Arthos then
says:
The phrase recurs, "presque coraique." But Just
as respect transformed the horrible absurdities
of As I Lay Dying, so hatred In Sanctuary ruth-
lessly vivifies the emptiness of the immoral.
The hatred is the hatred of a man who sees his
society'clearly, and that clarity, like objec
tivity, is almost comic. Viewed' comically,
there is no need to blame the evil in these
characters upon the past.11
Two dominant strains of humor are found in this
novel: the robust, earthy humor of the frontier, and
the more complicated and cruel "surrealistic" humor.
Along with these are lesser types, such as that dependent
10
William Faulkner, p. 143.
i:LPp. 117-18.
119j
on language— dialect, irony, wit., and satire; and passagesj
i
I
of tragicomedy- Frontier humor, which often depended on j
situation, especially the confusion of country people when
confronted by new experiences in the city, is represented
at length (the account fills Chapter XXI) by the adven- j
tures of two raw country youths from Mississippi who find |
life in the "big city" (Memphis) not only confusing but
exciting. Their adventures are episodic and not really j
pertinent to the main action of the story. They have gone
to Memphis to study barbering, but their eventual educa- j
!
tion includes other phases of city life. Looking for j
cheap lodgings they happen upon a large house which they
take to be a hotel.
"Let's try that un," Fonzo said.
"That ain't no hotel. Where's ere.sign?" '
"Why ain't it?" Fonzo said. "'Course it is."
"Who ever heard of anybody just living in a three ,
storey house?"12 j
The lattice at the doorway confuses them (they take
I
it to be the "privy") and they go around to the other side,:
only to find that it was hemmed in by a row of automobile
salesrooms. Finally they get up nerve enough to go to the j
door and ring. Miss Reba answers the bell.
"Got ere extra room?" Fonzo said. i
12 ‘
William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York, 1931)> i
p. 229. !
Miss Reba looked at them, at their new hats and j
suitcases. !
"Who sent you here?" she said. |
"Didn't nobody. We just picked it out." j
Miss Reba looked at him. "Them hotels is too highi" j
Miss Reba breathed harshly. "What you boys doing?" |
"We come hyer on business," Fonzo said. "We aim to ,
stay a good spell."
"If it aint too high," Virgil said . . .
"Why, I reckon so," she said after a while. She
looked at them. "I can let you have a room, but
! I'll have to charge you extra whenever you do
j business in it. I got my living to make like
| everybody else" (pp. 231-2).
J The boys are established in a room at the top and •
in the back of the house. In the hall they pass a woman j
i
in a kimono, rocked a little to their young foundations j
!
by the trail of scent which she left." Fonzo said, "That
was another one. She's got two daughters" (p. 232).
Lying awake in their strange bed that night they hear not
only the unaccustomed noises of the city but other sounds: ,
!
Beneath the window he could hear a voice, a j
woman's, then a man's; they blended, murmured; !
a door closed. Someone came up the stairs in i
swishing garments, on the swift hard heels of <
1 a woman . . . ;
"She's got a big family, I reckon," Virgil said ;
I . . . (p. 233). !
The innocence of the boys is almost too much. Even j
after Miss Reba tells them she must use their room one
; day,; during a convention in the city, and they later find j
! a woman's undergarment under the washstand, one of them !
j
says, "I see. She's a dress-maker"i Thus the farce is !
; heightened. i
I !
; The climax is reached, however, when the two boys |
I 1
s I
. sneak out of the house to go visit a brothel in the neigh- |
i I
' borhood, and returning late are met by Miss Reba, who they i
> I
| fear will throw them out if she learns what they have j
i been doing. "Well, well," she said, "you boys been out J
i
mighty late tonight."
"Yessum," Fonzo said, prodding Virgil toward the
| stairs. "We been to prayermeeting" (p. 236). For more ;
j than two weeks the green country boys lived in the brothel,
I thinking it to be a hotel, while they paid surreptitious
i
| visits to another establishment. This humor belongs to th^
! i
j strain of early frontier humor; it is broad, robust, and j
I amusingly ironic. |
Another example of situation humor, in a sense the !
I
i
reverse of the plight of the country boys, involves Temple,;
i who has grown up in town and is ignorant of country ways. !
In the moonshiner's shack where she has passed the night
I Temple says to Ruby Goodwin, the woman of the house,
i |
I "You haven't got a bathroon, have you?" !
1 ‘ i
"What?" the woman said. She looked at Temple !
across her shoulder while Temple stared at her* • c 1 j
! with that grimace of cringing and placative as-
! surance. From a shelf the woman took a mail- j
order catalogue and tore out a few leaves and ;
handed them to Temple. "You'll have to go to
the barn, like we do" (pp. 107-8). i
| 122
i This situation has two of the important elements of
i
humor: first, the ignorance of the town girl about the
facts of life in the country, which makes her question
I
j seem ridiculous; second, the element of surprise, as
i
| Ruby hands Temple some torn pages from a big catalogue
i
! and steers her toward the barn. This incident and the
experiences of the two youths in Memphis have as a cora-
t
; nion denominator, besides the ignorance of those involved,
i
the humorous treatment of risque subjects. Yet both
situations have many parallels in the frontier humor of
earlier days.
t
| Language is used throughout Sanctuary to achieve
i
j many different effects. Dialect, word play, wit, irony,
j and satire are fairly abundant. The dialect is repre-
! sented by the speech of Tommy (Tawmmy, as his companions
i
| called him); the two youths, Fonzo and Virgil; and the
! ignorant, despicable "Senator Cla'ence" Snopes. Here is
Tommy's description of Popeye.
"I be a dog if he aint the skeerie'st durn white
man I ever see," Tommy said. "Here he was cornin'
up the path to the porch and that ere dog come
out from under the house and went up and sniffed
at his heels, like ere dog will, and I be dog if
he didn't flinch off like it was a moccasin and
him barefoot, and whupped out that little arter-
matic pistol and shot it dead as a doornail.
I be durn if he didn't" (p. 21).
I 123
j A little later Tommy is talking of Lee Goodwin's
J business, moonshining:
I "That's where the money is," Tommy said. "Aint
no money in these here piddlin little quarts and !
half-a-gallons. Lee just does that for a-commo-
dation, to .pick up a extry dollar or two. It's
in making a run and getting shut of it quick,
where the money is" (p. 23).
One expects a hill-billy in North Mississippi to talk as
Tommy does. No satire is intended. Instead, his speech
, makes the characterization more lifelike and complete.
But in the account of Senator "Cla'ence" Snopes, in
Chapter XIX, the dialect is used to make the ignorant
i »
! and immoral senator contemptible: i
{
"May I set down?" he said, already shoving at
. Horace's knee with his leg . . . "Yes, sir. j
J I'm always glad to see any of the boys, any time. |
| . . . "'Course you aint in my county no longer, I
i but what I say a man's friends is his friends, j
whichever way they vote. Because a friend is a :
I friend, and whether he can do anything for me i
i or not ..." (p. 209). 1
j !
j This is the only Snopes who appears in this novel, J
but he has all the disgusting qualities that Faulkner at
tributes to the whole tribe; he is greedy, ignorant, in
tolerant (Clarence hates "niggers" and "jews"), ready
to do anything for a dishonest dollar. Faulkner uses
several methods to characterize him: his conversation or
language, his action, direct description--or a combination
of these, as in this paragraph:
124
Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive
voice. There emerged gradually a picture of
stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid
and petty ends, conducted principally in hotel
rooms into which bellboys whisked with bulging
Jackets upon discreet flicks of skirts in swift
closet doors. "Anytime you’re in town," he said.
"I always like to show the boys around. Ask any
body in town; they'll tell you if it's there,
Cla'ence Snopes*11 know where it is. You got a
pretty tough case up home there, what I hear"
(p. 211).
The picture of "Senator Snopes," who typifies the cheap
and opportunistic Southern politician, is satirical as
well as realistic. Faulkner shows unmistakably that he
despises Snopes and his entire class— men without property
principles, or even intelligence— parasites.
The description of the country throngs gathered
in the courthouse square in Oxford (Jefferson) on Saturday
is filled with a tolerant cynicism.
The adjacent alleys were choked with tethered
wagons, the teams reversed and nuzzling gnawed
corn-ears over the tail-boards. The square was
lined two-deep with ranked cars, while the owners
of them and of the wagons thronged in slow over
alls and khaki, in mail-order scarves and para
sols, in and out of the stores, soiling the pave
ment with fruit- and peanut-hulls. Slow as sheep
they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the
passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of
those in urban shirts and collars with the large,
mild inscrutability of cattle or of gods, func
tioning outside of time, having left time lying
upon the slow and imponderable land green with
corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon (p. 132).
This passage suggests what he wrote about small-
| town "casuals” in Soldiers' Pay, and it has the vividness
» of authenticity. Just below this paragraph Faulkner !
, i
i ‘
j gives vent to one of his hates, the senseless noise and !
I i
! i
; confusion of city life:
j
' The sunny air was filled with competitive radios
and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music-
i stores. Before these doors a throng stood all day,
listening. The pieces which moved them were ;
ballads simple in melody and theme, of bereave- !
j ment and retribution and repentance metallically
I sung, blurred, emphasized by static or needle-
disembodied voices blaring from imitation wood j
j cabinets or pebble-grain hornmouths above the rapt !
; faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the j
j imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, and sad (p. 133)- j
( {
|
In a later novel, Requiem for a Nun, he describes, s
I
in much sharper terms, the crowding, the cheap, monoto- j
i nous houses, and the incessant noise of urban life. The j
; * 1
mass-produced products of our culture--whether "mail
order" clothes, "jerry-built" houses, or minds shaped by !
< *
newspaper propaganda--all arouse his disgust. Sometimes, j
as in the quotation here, his satire is mixed with nos- I
, > i
! talgia, but at other times it fairly bristles with anger
j i
and impatience. ~ !
I
! Protestantism, as represented in Jefferson, is |
' also an object of satire. Horace Benbow is the only per- ;
I
! son in the town who is willing to help Lee Goodwin,
! falsely charged with the murder which Popeye had committed;'
126
and the "good women" of this Christian community force
| Ruby Goodwin, his common-law wife, and her sick child to
leave Benbow's house and later the hotel. In speaking
i
! of Goodwin, Benbow gives his opinion of the righteous-
i ness of his fellow-townsmen:
i ■ !
; "After he surrendered, they hunted around until !
they found the still. They knew what he was
doing, but they waited until he was down. Then
they all jumped on him. The good customers, that
had been buying whiskey from him and drinking all
that he could give them free and maybe trying to
make love to his wife behind his back. You should
hear them down town. This morning the Baptist
minister took him for a text. Not only as a
murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the
free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of
Yoknapatawpha County. I gathered that his idea
was that Goodwin and the woman should both be
burned as a sole example to that child; the child
to be reared and taught the English language for
the sole end of being taught that it was begot i
in sin by two people who suffered by fire for
! having begot it. Good God, can a man, a civilised i
man, seriously ..."
I "They're just Baptists," Miss Jenny said (pp. 150-1).
I Although this arraignment of religion is put into
the mouth of Benbow, defense counsel for Goodwin, It is
j undoubtedly Faulkner speaking. As in many other places,
it is the Baptists whom he pillories for their self-
righteousness and lack of human sympathy. The meddling
■ women, who are determined to keep their town "pure" by
driving Ruby Goodwin and her child out of it, are the
subjects of Faulkner's scorn. His sympathy is clearly
............................................................................................ " " ' 127!
j i
i with the despised Ruby and her child. i
I
The contemptible politician, Senator Snopes, whose
religion is blatant self-interest, boasts:
i
! "I'm an American. . . .1 don't brag about it,
j because I was born one. And I been a decent j
j Baptist all my life, too. Oh, I aint no preacher j
| and I aint no old maid; I been around with the j
• boys now and then, but I reckon I aint no worse
j than lots of folks that pretends to sing loud in
j church. But the lowest, cheapest thing on this :
j earth aint a nigger: ’ it's a jew. We need laws 1
j against them. Drastic laws" (p. 319)*
In this paragraph Faulkner castigates--in one person—
the self-serving politician and the intolerant religionist.
No reader, not even the most casual, can escape the hot
breath of Faulkner's anger here. In the figure of the
| |
| fat, red-necked "Senator Snopes" we see a powerful satire j
[ !
, directed against those narrow-minded and ambitious men
i *
who have often dominated Southern politics and made it a
; national disgrace. Cheap politicians are satirized in j
| several of Faulkner's novels.
|
The laughter directed against Snopes and his kind |
is a guttural, harsh laughter (the cynic showing his j
: teeth). A radically different sort of humor, a droll and j
i i
I playful banter, is found in such passages as the follow- !
| ing, in which Horace Benbow discusses Little Belle's boy i
i i
| friend: :
i
"So this morning— no; that was four days ago;
i it was Thursday she got home from school and this ,
128
is Tuesday--I said, 'Honey, if you found him on i
| the train, he probably belongs to the railroad j
; company. You cant take him from the railroad :
company; that's against the law, like the in
sulators on the poles’" (p. 14).
Horace goes on, telling of his chiding Little Belle,
the foster-daughter for whom he has a vague, disconcerting
passion. Finally he says:
i "'But on the train, honey,' I said. 'If he'd
i walked into your room in a hotel, I'd just kill !
! him. But on the train, I'm disgusted. Let's
| send him along and start all over again'."
r !
| "'You're a fine one to talk about finding things
I on the train I You're a fine one! Shrimp.' Shrimp J '" *
I (P. 15). I
! - i
| The sharp rejoinder of Little Belle becomes much \
\ * ‘
i <
! clearer when we learn more about Horace's marriage to •
Little Belle's mother. He had taken her from another man,
and lived to regret his bargain. One of his wife's pas
sions was shrimp, which he had to pick up at the railroad
station each week and take home.
"Did you do that every day?"
"No. Just Friday. But I have done it for ten
years, since we were married. And I still don't
like to smell shrimp. But I wouldn't mind carry
ing it home so much. I could stand that. It's
because the package drips. All the way home it
drips and drips, until after a while I follow
myself to the station and stand aside and watch
Horace Benbow take that box off the train and
start home with it, changing hands every hundred
steps, and I following him thinking Here lies
Horace Benbow in a fading series of small stinking
spots on a Mississippi sidewalk" (p. 19)*
129
This vignette of Benbow reveals a man who has lost
all self-respect, who hates the sight and smell of shrimp
(always afterward associated with his wife), and who
cringes before the daughter's epithet— Shrimp! The humor
here is sardonic as well as droll. The man who bows to
uxorial caprice and hauls a box of shrimp home each Friday
cannot escape the connotative power of the term "shrimp"
or the constant "drip, drip" of the package. Again, the
anecdote is not incidental. It clearly characterizes the.
weak and ineffectual Benbow and makes him a butt of Jokes.
The suggestive employment of "shrimp" and "drip" show
something also of the method of Faulkner, who reveals
character in subtle as well as obvious ways.
Another example of waggish humor is found in the
remark of Clarence Snopes to his cousin, whom he is in- !
troducing to the pleasures of a Negro bordello:
Through an open door they saw a room filled with ,
coffee-colored women in bright dresses, with ornate
hair and golden smiles. ;
i
"Them's niggers," Virgil said. i
"'Course they're niggers," Clarence said. "But
see this?" he waved a banknote in his cousin's
face. "This stuff is color-blind" (p. 239). !
i
The cab-driver at Kinston is described by Faulkner ;
. ... j
as a man who had once been well-to-do but who had "lost ,
his property through greed and gullibility," and in a worn!
j Prince Albert coat now drove a large car, "telling the J
I drummers how he used to lead Kinston society; now he |
i
i drove it" (p. 356). Thus, to the ordinary pun the author ;
i
! added reversal of situation. The character is unimportant,!
but the method of depicting his condition, and his pride, j
I
’ is interesting. !
|
i This novel has its quota of jokes and sardonic ,
i •
i comment about marriage and the sexes. Benbow philosophizes!
| about marriage:
"When you marry your own wife, you start off from
scratch . . . maybe scratching. When you marry
somebody else's wife, you start off maybe ten years
behind, from somebody else's scratch and scratching"
(p. 17).
Ruby Goodwin, who has been listening unseen, sums up very
well as she says, "The fool, the poor fool."
; Miss Jenny, the ninety-year-old aunt of Horace, j
| who had first appeared in Sartoris, gives her impression ;
|
; of the younger generation:
| "I'm beginning to believe all this I hear, about
; how young folks learn all the things in order to i
I get married, that we had to get married in order i
j to learn" (p. 15*0 • I
i
*
! This speech is admirably suited to the old lady, who is . j
! !
! shrewd, sardonic, and always tart. i
I
! In the brothel where Temple was kept in Memphis !
! !
; she was lying one evening "thinking about half-past-ten- j
I oclock, the hour for dressing for a dance," and the scenes ,
, 131;
i and companions of her dormitory days pass through her
i
j mind. The girls dressing for a dance are .
I looking at one another, comparing, talking whether
I you could do more damage if you could just walk
; out on the dance floor like you were now. Some
I wouldn't, mostly ones with short legs. Some of
; them were all right, hut they just wouldn't. j
| They wouldn't say why. The worst one of all said i
i boys thought all girls were ugly except when they \
were dressed. She said the Snake had been seeing
i Eve for several days and never noticed her until
Adam made her put on a fig leaf (p. l8l).
Here, as elsewhere, the sensitivity of Faulkner to the
i
physical and his ambivalence toward it are worth noting,
even though the reference to the Snake and Eve gives the
passage a wry humor. It should be noted, too, that
I Temple's mind as well as her body, has been corrupted--a
!
: process that began in college long before her experience
, i
; in Memphis.
i
The attitude of Miss Reba, the mistress of the
house where Temple is kept, is amusing. When Horace 1
; visits Temple in her room to learn all he can about the I
I
I murder of Tommy, Temple throws back the cover and rises j
' \
, in bed and Miss Reba tells her, "Lie down and cover up i
I
' your nekkidness. . . ." (p. 256). This is. humor with a !
1
sly twist. Perhaps Faulkner means to reveal Miss Reba's I
j I
j dual attitude toward morality. As madam she had one I
j I
I attitude, as woman, another. In many situations Faulkner
! pokes fun at the folly of hypocrisy.
1
132 ;
1 A radically different kind of humor is that found
l
| in the funeral scene of the gangster Red. As noted brief- ,
| ly in Chapter One of this study, Campbell and Foster,
J using modern psychological techniques, describe this
j ,
; scene as "surrealistic humor.1 1 The essential elements, \
' ■ j
perhaps, should be restated. '
i
! Of greater importance /than traditional Southern
humor/ is a more unusual kind of humor, associated ;
I with the numerous elements of the subconscious in
I Faulkner's work, that may be described as "sur-
j realistic," a type of atrabilious humor which j
differs qualitatively from traditional native i
Southern humor~l'3 I
i
The essential quality of this splenetic humor is its de-
i
j fiance of ordinary associations and its yoking together
j of "radically different categories." This distortion of
}
j reality produces a sadistic or cruel laughter, supposed
to arise from the subconscious,
j The funeral scene of Red is chosen as an excellent
j example of surrealistic humor, "a macabre parody of a
i conventional funeral." The minimum ingredients of a sur-
i j
j realistic humor situation are:
i
i
1. Some object, belief, or custom, reverenced
by convention (authority). j
2. Some incongruity yoked to the above which !
violates the reverence. j
3. The psychic state resulting when the subject j
apprehends and reacts to the above situation.
Sadism (Black Bile) enters in to the extent to
, i*.-A3Wj_-Qiam Faulkner, p. 95* —----- ----
i which the violence is seriously meant by the
instigator (pp. 97-98)*
In the funeral scene nearly everything is the re- j
i • j
| verse of what is customary. Instead of a church, a j
I i
i speak-easy Is used for the funeral. Instead of ushers,
Negro waiters in black shirts and white jackets move i
j ' I
, among the "mourners," serving drinks. The mourners are 1
| Red's gambling pals and women from the bordellos,
{ "matronly figures resembling housewives on a Sunday after-;
! „ i
noon excursion, a local bootlegger, who— in place of a
preacher— eulogizes Red and encourages everybody to drink
| freely. Instead of an organ or choir music, a dance
| orchestra plays jazz— "Red wouldn't like it solemn."
i
i Most of the crowd Is far more interested in the free
!
drinks than in paying respect to the deceased. In the !
. ensuing melee the proprietor "appeared in the door, his
i . i
i
face harried, waving his arms 'come on, folks,' he shouted,
I
'let's finish the musical program. It's costing us i
| money'" (p. 296).
j Then, trying to get order, ,.he shouts, "Don't you
! I
! realize there's a bier in that room?" The expression ^
; "bier" offends Gene, the bootlegger, who cries, "Is any- I
1 body here trying to insult me by " (p. 297). Soon a
drunken brawl begins and the place Is turned into a
134,
i madhouse. The bullet-headed bouncer floors several men,
! but in the fight they knock over the coffin, which comes ;
; !
: open. "The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and ]
• j
j came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath" (p. j
i
I i
i 299). Because the reader feels something subhuman, he '
! experiences a kind of grim and horror-struck fascination.
| The details which follow are shocking (an example of the
i 1
| sadism of Black Bile): j
J When they raised the corpse the wreath came too, j
attached to him by a hidden end of a wire driven
into his cheek. He had worn a cap which, tumbling
off, exposed a small blue hole in the center of
I his forehead. It had been neatly plugged with j
; wax and was painted, but the wax had been jarred J
| out and lost (p. 299)* >
1
I
j The normal man's sensibilities are outraged, not only by
i
the ugly and incongruous scenes at the funeral, but by
1 the absence of ordinary decency: quietness, reverence, j
: and a respect for the dead. Here human nature is shown !
I in the raw, with swilling, fighting, and a rough-house
1
I taking the place of an orderly and traditional funeral.
i ,
! The humor of the situation is bitter and melancholy. j
I i
j The same chapter contains the scene of the three J
I madams who hold a wake in Miss Reba's parlor— a scene
! which Robert Penn Warren has called "Dickensian." Besides !
t • t
i
1 the three middle-aged women, each individualized, there '
! 1
j are several small, snarling dogs that continually snap at 1
' 135
Uncle Bud, the "small bullet-headed boy of five or six,"
who belongs to one of the madams. He is further described
as having "freckles like splotches of huge summer rain on
a sidewalk" (p. 302), and an inordinate appetite for
beer.
The conversation among the women turns to the
funeral of Red:
The fat woman began to cry again.
"He looked so sweeti" she wailed.
"We all got to suffer it," Miss Reba said.
"Well, may it be a long day," lifting her tankard.
They drank, bowing formally to one another. The
fat woman dried her eyes; the two guests wiped
their lips with prim decorum. The thin one coughed
delicately aside, behind her hand. "Such good beer,"
she said.
"Aint it?" the fat one said. "I always say it's
the greatest pleasure I have to call on Miss Reba"
(p. 302).
While they guzzle beer and talk on about the funeral
and about Popeye and his relations to Red and Temple, Uncle
Bud is in the room listening. To preserve his innocence
as long as possible they send him from the room while they
discuss the lurid details of Red's visits with Temple.
Then someone hears Uncle Bud.
Peet came up the hall; they could hear Minnie's
voice in adjuration. The door opened. She entered,
holding Uncle Bud erect by one hand. Limp-kneed
he dangled, his face fixed in an expression of
136
glassy idiocy. "Miss Reba," Minnie said, "This
boy done broke in the icebox and drunk a whole
I bottle of beer. You boy.*" she said, shaking him,
i "stan upi" Limply he dangled, his face rigid in
a slobbering grin. Then upon it came an expres
sion of concern, consternation; Minnie swung him
sharply away from her as he began to vomit (p.
312).
j
1 This episode is a fitting climax to the orgy of drinking
| at the funeral and in Miss Reba's parlor. Both scenes
j are filled with ironic events, but perhaps none is more
i
i striking than the efforts of the women to keep Uncle Bud
out of-earshot while they talk of Red's visits to the
brothel. The show of sentiment for Red is really an ex
cuse to drink, "because they are all tore up," and the
| real interest of the visitors is to learn all that led
i
I
| up to the murder.
‘ In summary it may be said that Sanctuary employs
i
j two strains of humor freely: the frontier type, and
; atrabilious humor. Besides much incidental humor, there
■ are two purple patches--the funeral scene, with its wild
I
I disorder, and the wake held by the three madams, who
i
: drown their sorrows in beer. The second scene provides
i a further.satiric thrust at human folly and weakness:
i the madams retire from the uproar of the funeral to dis-
: cuss the secrets of-Red's affair with Temple, but at the
I
; same time they try to "protect" Uncle Bud by keeping him
i 137
i from the beer and out of earshot of their ribald conversa
tion. No matter how depraved human nature may be,
Faulkner seems to say, it will always pay lip service to
s traditional morality. The scene involved here complements
| the irony and bitterness of the funeral scene, and the
J .
three old women are grimly suggestive of vultures. Be-
! sides the dominant types of humor already mentioned, there
i
j is considerable humor related to language (dialect, puns,
I wit, satire, and so forth). Some of it is playful or
droll, but much of it is grim and grotesque. Usually the
humor has a structural or atmospheric function, and it
also reveals the prejudices of Faulkner.
i
I
j
; Part Two: Requiem for a Nun
Although Requiem for a Nun was published exactly
, two decades after Sanctuary (that is, in 1951)* and is a
sequel to the ’ ’ potboiler," it does not fit any of the
'earlier categories of Faulkner’s fiction. In form it is
a play in three acts interlarded with long introductory
essays on the courthouse, the state capital (Jackson),
!
and the jail at Jefferson, the three principal scenes of
j action. It is closely related to Sanctuary only in its
i
scenes and leading characters.
138
The story concerns the "redemption" of Temple
Drake, who, eight years after her involvement with Popeye
and Red in a Memphis brothel, marries Gowan Stevens and
tries to live a respectable life. She employs as maid
and confidante Nancy Mannigoe, a former prostitute and
dope fiend (whose murder is told in chilling detail in
the earlier novel, The Sound and the Pury). Nancy is
brought back, or "resurrected," for her part in Requiem
for a Nun. A brother of Red (Temple’s lover in Sanctuary,
killed by members of Popeye's gang) discovers letters ad
dressed by Temple to Red and comes to Jefferson to black
mail her. Temple, still restless and troubled in her
role of the virtuous housewife, is attracted by the ruth
less brother of Red and prepares to take her and Gowan's
baby and leave with the young man. To prevent this,
Nancy kills the baby, in the belief, apparently, that
Temple's marriage and honor can be saved only with this
sacrifice. The play has to do with the efforts of Temple
and Gavin Stevens, lawyer uncle of her husband Gowan, to
save Nancy's life. But the story is as unconvincing and
unreal as are the characters. Most readers will probably
agree with O'Connor's verdict about the horror of the
child's murder:
The reader never gets beyond the horror of this
violence. The act is monstrous--and thereafter
139
all the talk, toy Gavin and Gowan Stevens and the
governor of Mississippi, about morality seems in
tentionally ironical. I1 *
The morality of the book is just as questionable
as Nancy's reiterated advice to Temple to believe, though
she cannot tell her what to believe. The theme--stated
in a few words— is that suffering is the penalty for sin,
but as Temple points out, why should an innocent child die
for Temple's shame? And how can Nancy's death (exacted
by the state for the child's murder) either expiate the
wrong or ease the conscience of Temple? Temple, the real
wrongdoer, the cause of all the violence and horror of
Sanctuary and of the baby's death in this work, goes free.
Her efforts to atone for her crimes— by interceding for
Nancy's life--are not only futile but al'most fatuous.
One closes the book with the feeling that Nancy has suc
ceeded (at least for the time being) in keeping Temple's
home intact but not in redeeming Temple. And, after all
the speeches and moralizing, one still wonders: What does
it mean? Critics do not agree as to whether the "nun"
is Temple or Nancy.
The most eloquent and entertaining sections of
Requiem for a Nun are the three prose introductions: in
l2 *P. 158.
; """..........'... ' i4o |
; Act One "The Courthouse" (A Name for the City), in Act '
j
i
j Two "The Golden Dome" (Beginning Was the Word), and in
| Act Three "The Jail" (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish— ).
i In these long historical essays (the three comprise more
I , I
| than one-third of the book) the narrator, Faulkner, re-
1 views the history of Jefferson from its meager beginnings '
I in the early nineteenth century down to 1950* with par-
I ' l
! ticular emphasis on the origins of the jail, the town >
i •
| square, and the courthouse. The section entitled "The
, Golden Dome" relates some of the history of the state
j
j capital and other institutions at Jackson, Mississippi.
I
| The style of these prose pieces is something of a cross
j
I between the tall tale and part-true, part-imaginary his-
( tory. In general they are hyperbolic, satirical, repeti- i
I
! tive, and highly stylized. Faulkner is sometimes the
! I
| amused, sometimes the outraged, commentator; but these '
i i
| sections are vivid, detailed, and evocative. Most (or |
|
| more accurately, nearly all) of the humor of the book is
I
; found in these three nostalgic essays. The sentences run t
for pages, each paragraph beginning with a capital and j
' ending with a semicolon, suggesting the unbroken link be- |
1 tween the past and the present. A sense of continuity is ^
!
i thus secured.
: The names of the characters in these pages are
141
familiar to the readers of Faulkner's novels, for most
of the important names are here— beginning with Andrew
Jackson and the Indians on down the line of the Sutpens,
Greniers, Compsons, Sartorises, Redmonds, Peabodys,
Habershams, and the ancestor of the inimitable raconteur,
Ratliff, whose name was originally spelled Ratcliffe.
The stories associated with these names are often sketched
briefly, as, for example, Sutpen's tragedy and the comi
cal treatment of his captive French architect. Some of
the men and women in these pages are caricatured— a good
example being the thin, wiry, indomitable mail rider,
Pettigrew, described at length in the Courthouse section—
a "little scrawny childsized man, solitary unarmed im
pregnable and. unalarmed" (p. 36), or, again: "Pettigrew,
ubiquitous, everywhere, not helping search himself and
never in anyone's way, but always present, inscrutable,
saturnine, missing nothing. . ." (p. 19)* The little
mail rider is pictured as the embodiment of personal valor
and wisdom. Perhaps more obvious examples of caricature
are the Indians presented in the first and final essays:
the grave dark men dressed in their Sunday clothes
except for the trousers, pants, which they carried
rolled neatly under their arms or perhaps tied by
the two legs around their necks like capes or
rather hussars1 dolmans where they forded the
creek, squatting or lounging along the shade,
courteous, interested, and reposed (even old
Mahataha herself, the matriarch, barefoot in a
purple gown and a plumed hat, sitting in a gilt
brocade empire chair in a wagon behind two mules,
under a silver-handled Paris parasol held by a
female slave child . . .) (pp. 30-31).
; This is the last of the Indian rulers, the woman whose X
1
signed away the last of the Mississippi land to the white '
intruders; in the Jail section she is described more
fully, as
the inscrutable ageless wrinkled face, the fat
shapeless body dressed in the castoff garments
of a French Queen, which on her looked like the
j Sunday costume of the madam of a rich Natchez i
i or New Orleans brothel, sitting in the battered j
wagon inside a squatting ring of her household |
■ troops . . . grotesque and regal, bizarre and
moribund, like obsolescence’s self riding off
j the stage its own obsolete catafalque . . . (p. 217).
' t
I The descriptions, like many of the actions, are exaggerated
[ j
! --in the tradition of the tall tale. They are sometimes 1
i • ;
\
! repeated, almost word for word, from earlier stories or j
novels, as this passage about Jackson, which changes j
hardly a word from the original in the Preface of The J
Sound and the Fury:
the old duellist, the brawling lean fierce mangy
durable old lion who set the well-being of the
Nation above the White House, and the health of
his new political party above either, and above
them all set, not his wife's honor, but the prin
ciple that honor must be defended whether it was
or not since, defended, it was, whether or not . . .
(p. 107).
143
This typically Faulknerian passage, with its overtones
: of sardonic humor, illustrates the artist's pride in his
» , 1
; own creation, which he did not hesitate to repeat, just
j |
j as he repeats certain words again and again. j
i The humor of Requiem for a Nun belongs to the I
| _ !
I Southwestern frontier type. There are tall tales, anec- !
I ■ ;
dotes, comical situations, satire, reversals, and other
kinds of whimsy or drollery. The tall tale is best ex
emplified in section one, "The Courthouse," in which some
i militia men capture several desperadoes and bring them to
■ I
. <
Jefferson to be jailed. After . being given drugged
' whiskey, they are dumped into the log and mud-chinked
jail. Since some of the settlers wanted to lynch the
bandits, it was necessary to find a steel lock for the
jail door (always bolted with a wooden arm, like a stable,
I
to hold the local "amateurs"), as Faulkner says: "they
didn't need the lock to protect the settlement from the
bandits, but to protect the bandits from the settlement"
(p. 13)--a good example of his use of the reversal. The
only metal lock available in the territory was a fifteen-
pound giant with a key nearly as long as a bayonet, which
belonged to Alec Holston, the tavernkeeper. It had been
brought on horseback from Nashville, three hundred miles
away, and was a prized, though useless, possession of old
144
Mr. Holston. Finally he was persuaded to lend It to the
I government to secure the prisoners overnight. The next
; day the Jail was found with one whole wall, the door and
i
| lock, and the bandits missing! The drunken militia men
\ J
I still lay sprawled on the ground inside the jail. But
i
; all efforts of the whites and Indians to locate the lock
were unavailing. This raised a serious problem: who
would pay Holston for his lock, or how could the govern-
!ment be charged for it? Many different proposals were
!
;made, including the suggestion that the men raise fifteen
5
|dollars among themselves to pay Holston, but this idea
i .
:was discarded when someone said that he might charge by
i
'the pound (fifteen pounds times the three hundred miles
to Nashville, or 4500 pounds). It was Rateliffe who saved
the day with his suggestion to "put it on the Book," not
,a ledger, "but the ledger," the old Indian affairs book:
the crawling tedious list of calico and gunpowder,
I whiskey and salt and snuff and denim pants and
I osseous candy drawn from Ratcliffe’s shelves . . .
| (P- 21).
This brilliant move was soon upset, however, by Holston*s
obstinacy. He wanted, not money, but his own lock back,
and failing that, another lock made to order which would
cost about fifty dollars. Then arose the question of how
to charge this expenditure in the Indian accounts.
■ Pettigrew, sole representative of the United States, would
i not agree to any tampering with the books. "Hell,”
| Compson said, "Everybody knows what's wrong with him.
|
j It's ethics. He's a damned moralist" (p. 26). The men
found a way eventually to appease Pettigrew and list the
I
: fifty dollars paid to Holston as spent for axle grease;
they agreed to name the town Jefferson— for Thomas Jeffer
son Pettigrew. Thus, as a result of the jailbreak the
| town acquired a courthouse and a name, the name made
I
!
j famous in Faulkner's novels.
j
j The anecdote is represented in these essays by the
: account of Sutpen's building his manor house under the
direction of a French architect that he watched all day,
kept manacled to a slave at night, and once chased with
I
his dogs when the little Frenchman made an abortive es-
! cape--a scene taken from Absalom, Absalomi One anecdote
. told in detail is about a girl who scratched her name on
^ the window glass of the town jail on the day before the
j town entered the War, a story Faulkner tells in several
other places. There are tales also about the Sartorises
and the Redmonds.
Situation humor is common in these narratives, as
■ illustrated already in the story of the men who not only
tore down one wall of the jail but carted off the six-foot
146
door and its massive lock. The comedy is heightened,
i too, by the fact that they escaped on three horses be- ;
| longing to the group who wanted to lynch them. Another j
|
j comical situation involves the efforts of the townsmen
j to placate old Holston and to persuade Pettigrew to i
authorize the charges to the United States government.
One of the most striking types of humor in these
chapters is Faulkner's satire. It plays upon many of his ‘
favorite subjects, none of them new, perhaps: government
I agencies, government interference, eheap politicians and j
j appointees, the early settlers, white injustice to the i
' Indians, Jefferson's (and the nation's) mania for speed
i
* and worship of so-called "progress.” Near the beginning
of the first section he says that his little Mississippi
hamlet would become a town suddenly without having been
a village.
One day in about a hundred years it would wake
frantically from its communal slumber into a rash
of Rotary and Lion Clubs and Chambers of Commerce
and City Beautifuls: a furious beating of hollow
drums toward nowhere, but merely to sound louder
than the next little human clotting to its north
or south or east or west, dubbing itself city . . .
and defending the expedient by padding its census
rolls— a fever, a delirium in which it would con
found forever seething with motion and motion with
progress (p. 4).
This sharp note persists in the essays. Later he enumer
ates some of the specific changes taking place in
Jefferson: new paved roads, daily ice delivery, screened
| houses, then automobiles ("thirty then fifty then a
j hundred horses under a tin bonnet no bigger than a wash-
| tub: which from the first explosion would have to be eon-
! trolled by police"— p. 241), new public buildings, im-
i
proved lighting, and the "blessings" of radio:
the last of silence too: the county's hollow
inverted air one resonant boom and ululance of
radio: and thus no more Yoknapatawpha's air
nor even Mason and Dixon's air, but America's:
j the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of
I female vocalists, the babbling pressure to buy and
| buy and still buy arriving more instantaneous
i than light, two thousand miles from Mew York and
I Los Angeles. . . (p. 244).
I t
| Some of the "progress" Faulkner undoubtedly approved of,
j but the invasion of personal rights and the dehumanizing
! of man in urban centers he deplored. Some of his pro
tests are barbed and bitter, others have a gentle sarcasm
' or impatient tolerance*
Faulkner belongs to the Jeffersonian school of
democracy: he resents the intrusions of government into
: state and local affairs. Some of his most trenchant
satire (in this and other works) is directed against
1 paternalism and government regulations. He ridicules the
agencies popular during the 1930's-~"the A.A.A. and C.G.C.
in the county, and W.P.A. ('and XYZ and etc.'--p. 242),"
government sinecures, and political plums. All of these
interventions, he held, weakened personal independence
148
and pride and made men less free and strong. One of the
patronage jobs for which Faulkner held little or no re
spect was that of the town jailer—
i
i perquisite not for work or capacility for work,
j but for political fidelity and the numerality
j of votable kin by blood or marriage--a jailor or
! turnkey, himself someone's cousin and with enough
! other cousins and inlaws of his own to have as-
I sured the election of sheriff or chancery— or
eircuit-clerk--a failed farmer who was not at
all the victim of his time, but on the contrary,
was its master, since his inherited and ines
capable incapacity to support his family by his
j own efforts had matched him with an era and a
| land where government was founded on the working
j premise of being primarily an asylum for inepti-
I tude and indigence, for the private business
’ failures among your or your wife's kin whom
I otherwise you yourself would have to support. . .
| (p. 228).
* The very volume of words devoted to this topic proves it
to be a tender point with Faulkner. It could be classi-
* i
fied, of course, as mere political propaganda except that
it is not in the proper medium for that purpose, and it
has spirit; ordinary "gripes," whether military;, political
i
I
* or personal, have no power to move us, but strong feelings
joined to powerful language can move men either to mirth
or anger. Perhaps in Faulkner the mirth and anger meet.
Though his words have a sting they may also evoke a wry
smile. Their rhetoric is reminiscent of the old-time
political spellbinder.
149
Faulkner's leisurely manner and droll wit are well
represented in the passage (in "The Jail") devoted to the
Confederate monument, too long to quote in full, from
which the following is excerpted:
apparently neither the U.D.C. ladies who insti
gated and bought the monument, nor the architect
who designed it nor the masons who erected it,
had noticed that the marble eyes under the shad
ing marble palm stared not toward the north and
the enemy, but toward the south, toward (if any
thing) his own rear— looking perhaps, the wits
said (could say now, with the war thirty-five
years past and you could even joke about it--
except the women, the ladies, the unsurrendered,
the irreconcilable, who even after another thirty-
five years would still get up and stalk out of
picture houses showing Gone With the Wind), for
reinforcements; or perhaps not a combat soldier
at all, but a provost marshal's man looking for
deserters, or perhaps himself for a safe place
to run to. . . (p. 240).
Faulkner had the gift to see the incongruities and
follies in all levels of life and the articulateness to
express his amusement or disgust or anger in whimsical
or shocking prose. Yet, as a rule, even in his bitterest
outbursts there is a smile playing around his lips or
eyes— it may be an indulgent, a sympathetic, or a mocking
smile, but it at least saves his work from despair.
The main body of Requiem for a Nun is unlike any
of his other works--it can be called experimental, perhaps
not a happy experiment— but the three pseudo-historical
essays are genuinely entertaining and true Faulkner. One
150
i
feels that he loves his land, even with all its faults,
its blind prejudices and injustices, and that he is
t *
seeking in this work for a basis for faith and hope. j
As stated earlier, the play and its characters j
!
I are wholly unconvincing, and the message, for Faulkner I
seems to be trying to give one, is certainly not clear
or impressive. The one redeeming quality, so far as this
i critic is concerned, is the dry humor of the long prose
passages. In these Faulkner seems far more at home than !
i i
J in the trial scenes, where Temple mouths sentiments that ]
f
i \
• never seem appropriate and Nancy keeps urging Temple to j
| j
i believe. The prose sections are readable for themselves <
alone; the first one— "A Name for the City"--is included
in The Faulkner Reader. The humor which gives these essays
their appeal is largely frontier humor— extravagant, anec
dotal, and rhetorical. But there is another important
element, satire, which is typical of Faulkner's works
deriding modern civilization. As Jefferson grows up from
: a small outpost on the frontier to a bustling town, it
typifies the modern craze for speed, "progress," and
mechanical gadgets. Thus to the older forms of frontier
humor Faulkner added touches of satire and ironic comment.
Critics who have overlooked the humor in Requiem find the
work dark and depressing.
CHAPTER FOUR
| PATTERNS OF FAMILY LIFE
i
j Part One: The Sound and the Fury
The reputation of Faulkner as an artist rests
largely on his achievement in the mid years of his life--
The Sound and the Fury (1929)* As I Lay Dying (1930)*
; Sanctuary (1931)* and Light in August (1932). If he had i
! written no other novels, it seems clear from the critical i
! acclaim of these four, he still would be reckoned one of
the great writers of this generation. In both subject
matter and technique they represent a major stride for
ward:
The Sound and the Fury is the work of a major
writer. With its appearance it became clear that
Faulkner was a committed artist, now writing in
the tradition of the modern novel to which Henry
James, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox
Ford, and James Joyce had contributed.!
This book apparently challenged him more than any
other he had written, for he says:
I had just written my guts into The Sound and the
Fury though I was not aware until the book was pub-
llshed that I had done so, because I had done it
1
O'Connor, The Tangled Fire, p. 37.
152
2
for pleasure.
It must have been a keen disappointment to Faulkner to
have this book rejected by Harcourt Brace, publishers of
Sartoris (1929). He made arrangements, however, to have
the book published by an English firm, Jonathan Cape, and
it appeared in 1929* His next three books were also pub
lished by Cape.
The Sound and the Fury is made up of four sections,
the first presented in the stream-of-consciousness mono
logue of the idiot Benjy; the second section employs the
same method to reveal the warped mind of the young Quentin
Compson, who tries to believe that he has committed in
cest with his sister Caddy and who breaks under the
weight of his assumed guilt and commits suicide; the third
details the conniving and thieving of Jason Compson, a
brother, who robs Caddy of money intended for her daughter
and the final section, which is devoted to no one charac
ter, shows the working out of the family's doom, told for
the most part from an objective and omniscient point of
view.
This book is notable for its theme (the decay and
degeneracy of an old, once-aristocratic Southern family,
O
William Faulkner, "Introduction," Sanctuary (New
York, 1931 * Introduction Copyright 1932), p. vi.
153
the Corapsons) and for its highly complicated structure,
discussion of which does not fall within the province of
this study. It belongs with Sartoris and other novels ,
which followed, as part of the saga of Yoknapatawpha I
j County--Faulkner1s mythical county in Northern Mississippii
! j
In common with the other novels having this setting, The
: Sound and the Fury presents a picture of economic and
moral disorder of the South and reflects faithfully the
j mores and language of its people--the decadent aristoc-
i
| racy (represented by the Sartorises and Gompsons), the
I 1
i landless, cunning, opportunistic poor whites (the Snopes i
\ . i
clan), and the ubiquitous Negroes. According to Irving |
: Howe:
The Sound and the Fury records the fall of a
house, the death of a society. Here, as nowhere
else in his work, Faulkner regards Yoknapatawpha
from a historical perspective; it exists for him
as an emblem of a larger world beyond, and its
death is the acting-out of the disorder of our
time. But he remains in and of this local place,
his feeling toward Yoknapatawpha a fluid mixture
of affection and disgust. The material is seen
from the position which in times of social decay
is most useful to a writer; that simultaneous
involvement with and estrangement from the home
land which makes possible both a tragic and an
ironic response (pp. 37-38).
Howe goes on to say that the squalor and suffering
of the Compsons is typical, not of Just the "Southern
patriciate in extremis," but of our modern civilization,
and "to confine the meaning of their story to a segment
154
of Southern life is sheer provincialism" (p. 38). He
sees the Compson family as suffering from the modern
idolatry of money and a want of true affection and in-
tegrity--a disease common to our age. Although all the
characters move in a world somewhat different from our
own, we recognize it easily and see something of our
selves in these distorted and unhappy figures. Only the
Negroes seem normal and uncorrupted. All the Compsons
have a moral taint that leads to defeat or utter ruin.
"In part," says O'Connor, "the story is about the
loss of innocence." Then he explains:
Faulkner said the story "began with the impression
of a little girl playing in a branch and getting
her panties wet. This idea was attractive to me,
and from it grew the novel." The childhood of the
Compson children, although with the usual scuffles
and worries and with the symbolic act of Caddy's
staining her buttocks in the mud, is a period of
natural innocence. To her young and idiot brother
Benjy, Caddy always "smells like trees." But
after her seduction by Dalton Ames and her cal
culated marriage to Sydney Herbert Head, the
northern banker, Benjy can't "smell trees any
more." The children enter the adult world (p. 38).
In brief, the story tells of Caddy's giving her
self to Dalton Ames and of her brother Quentin's efforts
to make her sin a significant and tragic act by telling
their father that Quentin has committed incest with her.
Only in this way, Quentin believes, can the family honor
be saved, though it means sacrificing himself, for his
155
ideas of honor, guilt, and expiation are a strange and
confused mixture of romanticism, Calvinism, and eroticism.
| Concerning the theme of this work John Arthos writes:
j The central subject of their thought is the se-
i duction of a young girl and its consequences,
| but the chief interest of the book lies in the
description of her brother’s attitude toward the
catastrophe. He is extremely fond of her, and
her situation thrusts upon him a burden of re
sponsibility he accepts as a man who has been
brought up in pride of family and delicacy of
character. He comes to believe his own love
has failed her, and in something like adolescent
j self-torment he th'inks his guilt is equivalent
to the betrayal itself. He extends his torment
; to the point where it is as if he himself had
| betrayed her through incest. This straining
| for guilt places such a burden upon his con
sciousness that he is unequal to it, and finally
• he kills himself.3
i
Does this sort of problem have any meaning or seem
credible? Arthos continues:
The problem appears ridiculous (the comic
writer turning in his sleep), but it is not in
trinsically so. If the brother's concern is
justified, as it certainly is, we are tempted
to mock him because he is only flirting with
despair. As his father tells him (they have
been talking of death): "You seem to regard
it merely as an experience that will whiten your
hair overnight so to. speak without altering your
appearance at all." The brother tries to under
stand what sin is, but he cannot; and yet he
thinks he must assume his sister's guilt. His
confusion drives him mad. He wants to believe
in original sin, he wants to make himself into a
symbol of it, and he finds himself unable to
"Ritual and Humor in the Writing of William
, Faulkner," as quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 107•
156
through some defect of insight and understanding.
Accordingly, the plot of the novel is resolved
through an explicit demonstration of the meaning
lessness of an historic doctrine. A generous
man, dedicated to something without meaning, finds
1 his end in absurdity and madness. The absurdity
' is obvious, but not obvious enough to be presented
! comically. The author's sympathy prevents the
1 detachment necessary for comedy, and even the
meaning of the calamity is blurred. No meaning
ful comment is offered to present a larger view
than Quentin Compson's own, no more than is found
in a poem called "Visions in Spring," where the
author speaks of himself as one
Who toiled through corridors of harsh laughter,
Who sought for light in dark reserves of pain,
i . . . (pp. 107-8).
i
j This quotation, though long, is given because it
I brings to the foreground the tragic involvement that is
central to the story, and because it offers a fuller
treatment of the relation of Quentin's erratic behavior
to the idea of comedy than any other comment I have seen.
Even this partial and incomplete summary of the plot
should make clear that the book is tragic rather than
comic. Of the important characters, one (Benjy) is an
idiot; one is a chronic, self-centered invalid (Mrs.
Compson); her husband is a weak and incompetent man;
Caddy is an immoral woman whose daughter Quentin (named
for her uncle) is described as "a bitch"; one of the
Compsons is the pathetic college student, Quentin, who
commits suicide; and the last male survivor is Jason, the
representative of nearly all that is bad in modern man--
157
. crass self-interest, amorality, cynicism, intolerable
prejudice. With such a cast and with the pall of gloom j
, hanging over the melancholy house of Compson, there is ;
i I
little chance for lighthearted comedy. j
l
j
Nevertheless there are more examples of humor than i
. one might-suspect. In a first reading they are likely to
be overlooked or passed by lightly because of the tragic
atmosphere, the problems of unraveling time sequence
: (especially in the long section devoted to the idiot's
I i
| interior monologue), and the difficulties of mastering :
f i
the novel's unusual techniques. Dialect humor is abundant,
\ '
: drollery is rather common, there are several instances of ‘
i
' irony (one of them outstanding), bits of satire dropped
occasionally, and considerable sardonic humor— especially
in the earthy and bitter remarks of Jason. Women, sex,
and death come in, as usual in Faulkner's work, for
cryptic comment.
This novel, like the one which followed it, As I
Lay Dying, is filled with Southern dialect, which Faulkner
, uses masterfully. In The Sound and the Fury it is the
Negroes and the Compson children that make up, misuse, or
mispronounce the words; in As I Lay Dying the entire
Bundren family and most of the other characters-»all of
the lower social strata— use the half-literate language
158
of Negroes and poor whites. On examination, many of the
dialect terms are found to be approximations for words |
|
imperfectly understood, as "ricklick" for ‘ 'recollect," I
I
and "tereekly" for "directly"; others are slurrings or j
minor modifications, as "skeer" for "scare," "tech" for I
"touch," "ahun" for "iron."
Here are some typical examples from the language
of the Negroes and children of the Compson household:
"You know what I'll do. I'll skin your rinktum"
(p. 89). ;
"She sulling again, is she," Roskus said (p. 90). i
"I don't ricklick seeing you around here before," !
Luster said (p. 68). j
"I skeered I going to holler," T. P. said. "Git
on the box and see if they started" (p. 57)*
"You're a skizzard," Jason said. He began to cry.*^
"You're a knobnot," Caddy said (p. 55)*
"I heard a squinch owl that night," T. P. said
(p. 48).
"I told you they was company," Versh said (p. 43).
"I'll confer to your wishes, my boy" (Roskus)
(p. 119).
These examples exhibit several types of dialect: (l)
the highly imaginative inventions of children, as "skizzard"
and "knobnot," (2) dialectal mispronunciations, as "sulling"
for "sulking," "squinch owl" for "screech owl," and the
euphemistic "rinktum" for "rectum," (3) the common misuse
159
of words (malapropisms), as "confer1 1 for "defer." This
use of dialect adds color and humor to the speech. j
At Easter the Negroes were to have a visiting
preacher at their church, a Reverend Shegog. A sample
i
I
conversation is as follows: J
Prony wore a dress of bright blue silk and a
flowered hat.
"You got six weeks1 work right dar on yo back,"
Dilsey said.
"What you gwine do ef hit rain?"
i . i
j "Git wet, I reckon," Prony said. "I ain't never !
! stopped no rain yit." j
j i
i "Mammy always talkln bout hit gwine rain," Luster j
said.
"Ef I don't worry bout y'all, I don't know who is,"
Dilsey said. "Come on, we already late."
"Rev'un Shegog gwine preach today," Prony said.
"Is?" Dilsey said. "Who him?"
"He fum Saint Looey," Prony said. "Dat big preacher."
i
[ "Huh," Dilsey said, "Whut dey needs is a man kin put
; de fear of God into dese here triflin young niggers."
"Rev'un Shegog gwine preach today," Prony said.
"So dey tells" (pp. 305-6).
The Negroes of the Compson household share the super
stitions of their race. One of them--Roskus--says several
times, "They aint no luck on this place." He attributes
the family's bad luck to the fact that the idiot's name
was changed from Maury (the name of Mrs. Compson's
160
brother) to Benjy.
"That's what I tell you," Roskus said. "They aint
no luck going be on no place where one of their own
chillens1 name aint never spoke" (p. 50).
; Later, as they talk of the name change,-folklore is
brought in:
Versh said, Your name Benjamin now. You know how
come your name Benjamin now. They making a blue-
gum out of you. Mammy say in old time your granpa
changed nigger’s name, and he turn preacher, and
when they look at him, he bluegum too. Didn't
use to be bluegum, neither. And when family woman
look him in the eye in the. full of the moon, chile
born bluegum. And one evening, when they was
about a dozen bluegum chillen running round the
place, he never came home. Possum hunters found
him in the woods, et clean. And you know who et
him. Them bluegum chillen did (pp. 87-88).
This is the way the Negro children accounted for Benjy's
lunacy. Negro dialect and folklore are thus blended, and
attention is focused on the plight of Benjy and the doom
of the Compson family.
Droll humor is fairly abundant in this novel.
1 Dilsey had said to the children, "You'll know in the
Lawd's own time."
"When is the Lawd's own time, Dilsey." Caddy said.
"It's Sunday." Quentin said. "Don't you know any
thing" (p. 44).
In the same section, which is told from the viewpoint of
the idiot Benjy, now 33 years old, we read:
"I can't take you home bellering like you is."
l6l
T. P. said, ’ ’ You was bad enough before you got
that bullfrog voice. Come on."
"Now." T. P. said. "Beller your head off if you
want to. You got the whole night and a twenty
acre pasture to beller in" (p. 5*0 ♦
One of Benjy's keepers is Luster, a fourteen-year-
old Negro, who tries to amuse the idiot and keep him
quiet. They are looking for a lost quarter when this
conversation occurs:
"Come on here, mulehead," he said. "Come on here
and watch them knocking that ball. Here. Here
something you can play with along with that
jimson weed." Luster picked it up and gave it to
me. It was bright.
"Where1d you get that?" He said . . .
"Pound it under this here bush." Luster said.
"I thought for a minute it was that quarter I
lost."
"Agnes Mabel Becky," he said. He looked toward
the house (p. 69)*
In a conversation with Jason Compson, one of the
Negroes makes a shrewd observation. When Jason calls him
a fool, the Negro replies, "Well, I don't spute dat
neither. Ef dat uz a crime, all ehaingangs wouldn't be
black" (p. 249). In the same vein Luster compares him
self to the erratic Compsons and says, "Dese is funny
folks. Glad I ain't none of em" (p. 292).
The examples cited here help to accentuate the
162
differences between the normal life and outlook of the
Negroes and the abnormalities of the Compson family. The
Negroes, though socially inferior, are nevertheless more
rational and happy than the Compsons with all their pride
/
and superiority.
"What's a funeral." Jason said.
"Didn't mammy tell you not to tell them." Versh
said.
"Where they moans." Prony said. "They moaned two
days on Sis Beulah Clay."
"Oh." Caddy said. "That's niggers. White folks
don't have funerals."
"I like to know why not." Prony said. "White folks
dies too. Your grandmammy dead as any nigger can
get, I reckon" (p. 52).
Although the Negroes provide some of this humor, it is
Jason, the greedy, embittered, sardonic Compson who is
most scornful and bitter. He refers to his niece Caddy
in this language: "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I
say. I says you're lucky if her playing out of school is
all that worries you." He speaks of his brother Benjy
in this monologue:
I haven't got much pride, I can't afford it with
a kitchen full of niggers to feed and robbing
the state asylum of its star freshman. Blood,
I says, governors and generals. It's a damn good
thing we never had any kings and presidents; we'd
163
all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies
(p. 247).
In another place he refers to Benjy (who has been cas
trated) as "the great American Gelding."
Jason's attitude toward money is revealed in an
anecdote he tells:
There's a man right here in Jefferson made a lot
of money selling rotten goods to niggers, lived
in a room over the store about the size of a
pigpen, and did his own cooking. About four or
five years ago he was taken sick. Scared the
hell out of him so that when he was up again he
joined the church and bought himself a Chinese
missionary, five thousand dollars a year. I
often think how mad he'll be if he was to die
and find out there's not any heaven, when he
thinks about that five thousand a year. Like
I say, he'd better go on and die now and save
money (p. 212).
The last remark here is typical. Since the ailing mer
chant loves money so well, Jason says he ought to die
before he spends it all on his high-priced missionary.
On either account his view of men, though rather low, is
wryly humorous.
Another monologue reveals the low opinion he holds
of his niece and her affairs:
Like I say, let her lay out all day and all night
with everything in town that wears pants, what do
I care. I don't owe anything to anybody that has
no more consideration for me, that wouldn't be a
damn bit above planting that ford there and making
me spend a whole afternoon and Earl taking her
164
back there and showing her the books just because
he’s too damn virtuous for this world. I says
you'll have one hell of a time in heaven, without
anybody's business to meddle in only don't you
| ever let me catch you at it I says, I close my j
| eyes to it because of your grandmother but just j
you let me catch you doing it one time on this j
! place, where my mother lives. These damn little !
slick-haired squirts, thinking they are raising
so much hell, I'll show them something about hell
I says, and you too. I'll make him think that
damn red tie is the latch string to hell, if he
thinks he can run the woods with my niece (pp.
258-9).
As O'Connor observes, ’ ’the vicious, ironic cynicism
' of Jason Compson is everywhere evident in his language, j
I i
j whether spoken or thought” (p. 44). His opinion of women j
I I
| is, of course, not flattering. His niece Quentin is the I
' subject of this description:
. . . so I stood there and watched her go on
past, with her face painted up like a damn clown's
and her hair all gummed and twisted and a dress
that if a woman had come out doors even on Gayoso
or Beale street when I was a young fellow with no
more than that to cover her legs and behind, she'd
been thrown in jail. I'll be damned if they don't
dress like they was trying to make every man they
passed on the street want to reach out and clap
his hand on it. . . . Like I say, you can't do
anything with a woman like that, if she's got it
in her. If it's in her blood, you can't do any
thing with her (pp. 249-50).
But women are not the only persons scorned and
despised by Jason. He hates Jews and churchmen, success
ful gamblers, and small-town gossips. After delivering
a diatribe against the eastern interests that make
165
fortunes off the small cotton farmer, Jason says:
"No offense," I says. "I give every man his due,
regardless of religion or anything else. I have
nothing against jews as an individual," I says.
"It's just the race. You'll admit they produce
nothing. They follow the pioneers into a new
country and sell them clothes" (p. 209).
Even the Methodist minister in Jefferson comes in for a
share of abuse because he had protected the pigeons that
lived in the courthouse belfry.
I reckon Parson Walthall was getting a belly full
of them now. You'd have thought we were shooting
people, with him making speeches and even holding
onto a man's gun when they came over. Talking
about peace on earth good will toward all and not
a sparrow can fall to earth. But what does he
care how thick they get, he hasn't got anything
to do; what does he care what time it is. He
pays no taxes, he doesn't have to see his money
going every year to have the courthouse clock
cleaned to where it'll run. They had to pay a
man forty-five dollars to clean it. I counted
over a hundred half-hatched pigeons on the ground.
You'd think they'd have sense enough to leave
town. It's a good thing I don't have any more
ties than pigeons, I'll say that (p. 264).
Jason is one of the most sharply drawn characters
in the novel. He is frankly self-centered, amoral, preju4
diced, and cynical. His mannerisms and sardonic remarks
do much more than any comments by the author to reveal his
nature. We see a man who is worldly, shrewd, hard, ready
to believe the worst about his fellow men. We learn by
degrees of his speculating on cotton futures (a practice
which he condemns in the Jews), of his keeping a common
166
whore (while condemning Quentin's affairs with local
boys), and of his mishandling his own sister's money.
It is the latter act that leads to the most ironic scene
in the novel, described at some length in the Appendix,
where the details are made clearer than in the novel.
Caddy, Jason's sister, had a daughter Quentin
who at seventeen, on the one thousand eight
hundred ninetyfifth anniversary of the day be
fore the resurrection of Our Lord, swung herself
by a rainpipe from the window of the room in
which her uncle had locked her at noon, to the
locked window of his own locked and empty bed
room and broke a pane and entered the window
and with the uncle's firepoker burst open the
locked bureau drawer and took the money (it was
not $2840.50 either, it was almost seven thousand
dollars) and this was Jason's rage, the red un
bearable fury which on that night and at inter
vals recurring with little or no diminishment
for the next five years, made him seriously be
lieve would at some unwarned instant destroy
him . . . that although he had been robbed not
of a mere petty three thousand dollars but of
almost seven thousand he couldn't even tell any
body; because he had been robbed of seven thou
sand dollars instead of just three he could never
receive justification— he did not want sympathy—
from other men unlucky enough to have one bitch
for a sister and another for a niece, he couldn't
even go to the police; because he had lost four
thousand dollars which did not belong to him he
couldn't even recover the three thousand which
did since those four thousand dollars were not
only the legal property of his niece as a part
of the money supplied for her support and main
tenance by her mother over the last sixteen years,
they did not exist at all, having been officially
recorded as expended and consumed in the annual
reports he submitted to the district Chancellor,
as required of him as guardian and trustee by
his bondsmen; so that he had been robbed not only
167
of his thievings but his savings too, and by his
own victim. . .
In the novel itself the rage of Jason on finding himself
robbed of his life's savings is equalled only by his im
potence. The reader has the satisfaction of seeing the
trickster tricked and undone: "and this not only by his
own victim but by a child who did it in one blow, without
c ,
premeditation or plan."^
Jason's attempt to force the sheriff to act and
his own crazed efforts to find his niece and the pitchman
from the circus, with whom she had run off, are the most
humorous parts of this novel. This humor, however, is
not pleasant or gay; it is ironic and vindictive, with
little of mirth in it, but considerable justice. One
may be amused somewhat by the sight of Jason storming
into the pullman car in Mottstown, where the circus is
stopping, and trying to force the first man he meets to
tell him where "they" are. The dark little man first
tries to evade the mad Jason, then after Jason seizes him,
he tries to break away and kill the madman with a hatchet.
In running from the "hatchet man" Jason falls and strikes
his head against a rail and thinks that somehow the man
4
"Appendix," The Sound and the Fury, pp. 19-20.
5
"Appendix,” p. 21.
with the hatchet had struck him and that he will bleed
to death.
The owner of the circus advises Jason to leave
j before that "little wasp" kills him. But Jason still
; thinks of all the money stolen from him and is hard to
; persuade. When the man asks, "You her brother?" Jason
denies that he is related to the woman in question, and
he refuses even to talk about the theft. The retribution
he receives is so thorough and so ironic that he is com-
]
| pletely non-plussed. The experience of Jason seems to
I ■
! bear out the assertion of one of Faulkner's critics who
[
j said that we are constantly seeing in Faulkner's novels
• that men reap what they sow. The triumph of Quentin oYer
Jason is too bitter for comedy, but it does satisfy one's
sense of what is fitting. Men like to see the cheater
' cheated or the plotter caught in his own meshes.
Does The Sound and the Fury have any "character"
humor? Jason approaches this type, but is too cynical
and embittered to fit it. One good example, although a
minor actor in this drama, is the old Negro named Deacon
who met the trains at Harvard. His dress, behavior, and
speech all contribute to the comic aspect of his character.
That was the Deacon, all over. Talk about your
natural psychologists. They said he hadn't missed
a train in forty years, and that he could pick out
169
a Southerner with one glance. He never missed,
I and once he heard you speak, he could name your
J state. He had a regular uniform he met trains
i in, a sort of Uncle Tom's cabin outfit, patches ;
! and all (p. 116). j
i i
j The old Negro, "ubiquitous and garrulous," changed his \
! j
1 uniforms to suit the occasions, at times wearing
a cast-off Brooks suit and a hat with a Princeton
club. I forget which band that someone had given
him and which he was pleasantly and unshakably
convinced was a part of Abe Lincoln's military
sash" .(p. 116).
j
t I
SDeacon's fondness for parades made him join first one and !
I I
S then another: j
\ !
"I don't care nothing about that sort of thing, j
| you understand, but the boys likes to have me ;
with them, the vet'runs does. Ladies wants all i
the old vet'runs to turnout, you know. So I
has to oblige them."
"And on that Wop holiday too," I said. "You were
obliging the W.C.T.U. then, I reckon."
"That? I was doing that for my son-in-law. He
aims to get a job on the city forces, Street cleaner.
I tell him all he wants is a broom to sleep on.
You saw me, did you?" (p. 117)•
Deacon, or Roskus, is described as "pompous, spurious,
not quite gross." He talked a great deal, patronized the
young blades who came to Harvard, and made the most of any
situation. One legend which he cultivated was that he
had attended the divinity school.
7
170
And when he came to understand what it meant he
was so taken with it that he began to retail the
story himself, until at last he must come to be
lieve he really had. Anyway he related long
pointless anecdotes of his undergraduate days,
speaking familiarly of dead and departed profes
sors by their first names, usually incorrect ones
(p. 117).
This hypocrisy on the part of the old man led Faulkner to
say in one of his infrequent moral observations:
But he had been guide mentor and friend to un
numbered crops of innocent and lonely freshmen,
and I suppose that with all his petty chicanery
and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s
nostrils than any other (p. 117).
The "Appendix," really a commentary on the action
and the characters of the story, contains some clever
characterizations, transcribed here as fully as possible
in the original language, though the sentences are too
long and involved to quote in full. The droll descrip
tions and acerbic comment are typical of Faulkner's pene
trating wit and somewhat jaundiced view of life. The
principal figures are the following:
Ikkemotubbe:
A dispossessed American king called "l'Homme"
(and sometimes "de l'Homme") . . . who thus trans
lated the "chickasaw title meaning "The Man" . . .
and anglicised it to "Doom."
Jackson:
A Great White Father with a sword. (An old duel
list, a brawling lean fierce mangy durable imper
ishable old lion who set the wellbeing of the
171
nation above the White House and the health of
his new political party above either and above
them all set not his wife's honor but the prin
ciple that honor must be defended whether it
was or not because defended it was whether or
not.) Who patented sealed and countersigned
the grant with his own hand in his gold teepee
in Wassi Town ....
The Compsons: Quentin Maclachan:
Fled to Carolina from Culloden Moor with a
claymore and tartan he wore by day and slept
under by night, and little else.
Charles Stuart:
Attainted and proscribed by name and grade in
his British regiment. Left for dead in a Georgia
swamp by his own retreating army and then by the
advancing American one, both of which were wrong.
He still had the claymore even when on his home
made wooden leg he finally overtook his father
and son four years later at Harrodsburg, Kentucky,
just in time to bury the father and enter upon a
long period of being a split personality while
trying to be the school teacher which he believed
he wanted to be, until he gave up at last and be
came the gambler he actually was and which no
Compson seemed to realize they all were provided
the gambit was desperate and the odds long enough.
Jason Lycurgus:
Who, driven perhaps by the compulsion of the
flamboyant name given him by the sardonic embit
tered woodenlegged indomitable father who perhaps
still believed with his heart that what he wanted
to be was a classicist school teacher, / v i h o traded
a small race horse to old Ikkemotubbe1s men for a
square mile of rich bottom land in the old Natchez
Trace, thus beginning a dynasty in Mississippi
which came to be known as Compson's Domain/.
Quentin III:
Who loved not his sister’s body but some concept
of Compson honor precariously and (he knew well)
only temporarily supported by the minute fragile
membrane of her maidenhead* . . . Who loved not
the idea of incest which he would not commit, but
some presbyterian concept of its eternal punish
ment: he, not God, eould by that means cast
himself and his sister both into hell, where he
could guard her forever and keep her forevermore
intact amid the eternal fires. But who loved
death above all, who loved only death . . . as
a lover loves and deliberately refrains from the
willing friendly tender incredible body of his
beloved. . . . Committed suicide in Cambridge
Massachusetts, June 1910, two months after his
sister’s wedding, waiting first to complete the
current academic year and so get the full value
of his paid-in-advance tuition. . . .
Candace (Caddy):
Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without
either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother
despite him, loved not only him but loved in him
that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless
judge of what he considered the family's honor
and its doom. . . . / S h e knew that her brother
valued above all7 not her but the virginity of
which she was custodian and on which she placed
no value whatever: the frail physical stricture
which to her was no more than a hangnail would
have been. Knew the brother loved death best of
all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in
the calculation and deliberation of her marriage
did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock.
Was two months pregnant with another man's child
which regardless of what its sex would be she
had already named Quentin after the brother whom
they both (she and the brother) knew was already
the same as dead, when she married (1910) ....
/~ K ? te v another marriage and divorce/ vanished in
Paris with the German occupation, 19^0. . . .
173
Jason IV:
The first sane Compson since before Culloden and
(a childless bachelor) hence the last. Logical
rational contained and even a philosopher in the
old stoic tradition. . . . Who not only fended
off and held his own with Compsons but completed
and held his own with the Snopeses who took over
the little town following the turn of the century
as the Compsons and Sartorises and their ilk
faded from it . . committed his idiot younger
brother to the state and vacated the old house,
first chopping up the vast oncesplendid rooms
into what he called apartments and selling the
whole thing to a countryman who opened a board
inghouse in it . . . who . . . following his
dipsomaniac father's death . . . assumed the
entire burden of the rotting family in the rotting
house . . . f f i e it was who robbed his niece of
the money sent by the mother for the girl's care
and was eventually robbed by the niece of the
entire hoard. Eventually he was free of the
entire burdensome family, including the Negroes^/
"In 1865>" he would say, "Abe Lincoln freed the
niggers from the Compsons. In 1933 » Jason
Compson freed the Compsons from the niggers."
Benjamin:
Born Maury, after his mother's only brother . . .
was rechristened Benjamin by his brother Quentin
(Benjamin, our lastborn, sold into Egypt). Who
loved three things: the pasture that was sold
to pay for Candace's wedding and to send Quentin
to Harvard, his sister Candace, firelight. . . .
Gelded 1913* Committed to the State Asylum,
Jackson 1933* Lost nothing then either because,
as with his sister, he remembered not the pasture
but only its loss, and firelight was still the
same bright shape of sleep.
Quentin:
The last. Candace's daughter. Fatherless nine
months before her birth, nameless at birth and
already doomed to be unwed from the instant the
174
dividing egg determined its sex. /At seventeen
she broke into Jason's room and robbed him of
the money he had cheated her of since birth,
money that he had no way of claiming and no
means of recovering. After robbing Jason, Quentin
vanished with the circus pitchman//
And that was all. These others /T. P., Frony,
Luster, Dilse/7 were not Compsons. They were
black.
Dilsey:
They endured (pp. 3-22, the "Appendix").
In this long genealogical roll the rise and fall of
the Compson clan is recorded. This running account makes
clear the decadence of the family and the contrast between
the Negroes and the Compsons; it was the Negroes who
"endured." From this account the reader learns the dom
inant characteristics of, each of the Compsons and gains a
clearer insight into their motives and.behavior. But the
"Appendix" serves also to illustrate the sardonic and
satiric humor of Faulkner, who in the dual role of creator
and commentator holds up to ridicule the false pride, ex
cesses, and folly of the unhappy Compsons. The perversity
of human nature especially attracts Faulkner and excites
a kind of lugubrious humor: this may be seen in the de
scription of Andrew Jackson,' in astringent comments on
the Compsons (he "was the last Compson who would not fail
at everything he touched save longevity or suicide"), and
175
in the struggles of the little librarian in Jefferson,
Melissa Meek, "a mousesized and -colored women who had
never married, who had passed through the schools with
Candace Compson and then spent the rest of her life trying
to keep Forever Amber in its orderly overlapping avatars
and Jurgen and Tom Jones out of the hands of the high-
school juniors and seniors" even though the
matrons, wives of the bankers and doctors and
lawyers, some of whom had also been in that old
highschool class . . . came and went in the
afternoons with copies of the Forever Ambers
and the volumes of Thorne Smith carefully wrapped
from view in sheets of Memphis and Jackson news
papers. . . . (p. 11).
The temptations and hypocrisies of men and women seem
always to fascinate Faulkner; and the unending struggle
between the carnal nature and the desire for respectability
as seen in many varied situations, provides him abundant
material for satire. Thus this commentary on the Compsons
and the other persons in The Sound and the Fury has con
siderably more humor, for its length, than the novel it
self, where the atmosphere of gloom and decay preclude
more than brief touches of comedy.
176
Part Two: As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying, the novel which Faulkner says he
wrote "in six weeks, without changing a word" while work
ing on the night shift at the power plant in his home
town of Oxford, Mississippi, is acclaimed by critics as
one of his greatest works. In one of the important early
studies of Faulkner’s fiction, George M. O'Donnell says:
Fundamentally, As I Lay Dying is a legend; and
the procession of ragged, depraved hillmen, car
rying Addie Bundren's body through water and
through fire to the cemetery in Jefferson, while
people flee from the smell and buzzards circle
overhead— this progress is not unlike that of
the medieval soul toward redemption.1
The story may be called a legend because its characters
and situations are too exaggerated to seem lifelike. In
a sense it also resembles the medieval tale of a soul's
progress toward redemption, for Anse Bundren must carry
out a promise made to his dying wife before he can have
any rest or peace of mind.
As the story begins, Gash Bundren is fashioning
a casket for his dying mother, and from time to time he
holds up his handiwork to get her approval. Anse, the
toothless and shiftless husband and father, promises his
1
As quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 5^-55•
177
| wife on her deathbed that he will take her body to her
family cemetery at Jefferson, thirty miles away. This
obligation provides the motivation for the heroic and in
credible hardships and misadventures which the family en-
| dures in carrying out the promise. Of this work A. W.
Green wrote in 1932:
I
i As I Lay Dying, published in 1930 and dedicated
to Hal Smith, one of Faulkner's publishers, borders
on the grotesque. The building at home of a casket
before the death of the one to repose in it (a
device used by George Eliot in Adam Bede), the
sinking of the casket in a swollen stream, and its
carriage, with buzzards hovering over it, to the
cemetery for burial while Cash, with a broken leg,
lies on top of it, and Dari, his brother suddenly
becomes insane, as well as the difficulties of
Dewey Dell, the deflowered girl, are evidences of
genius gone wild. Dari is finally sent to Jackson,
a euphemism which only the Mississippian knowing
of the two asylums in that city can understand.
Anse Bundren, lazy but religious, like many north
Mississippi farmers, seems to be taken from life.
. . . Faulkner uses an interesting method in this
novel, in that the chapter heading is the name of
the character whose thoughts are recorded within
that chapter. Vardanian, who likens the corpse
of his mother to a dead fish which he had just
dissected, reveals Faulkner's keen knowledge of
child psychology. This work is unique among
Faulkner's novels in that, having begun as a
tragedy, it ends as a comedy.2
Another critic, John Arthos, observes that "the
subject of the novel is kinship," and explains:
The people are "poor whites," with all the strength
and tenacity that permit them to survive in spite
Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 43-44.
178
of their pride and ignorance. Their unquestioning
observance of the mother's request could only have
been maintained by a primitive sense of blood-
loyalty. The problems that face them are ele
mentary- -making a coffin, obtaining horses to
draw the wagon, finding a place to cross the river
when bridge after bridge has been washed out. No
obstacle can prevent the burial, nor is there any
thing in their characters to weaken or even ques
tion their purpose. For them the burial according
to the wish of the dead person is an enjoinder
having all the authority of whatever has granted
them existence in the first place.3
When, after unbelievable trials and sufferings, the
family succeeds in fulfilling its obligation, Anse feels
free to purchase some store teeth (with money taken from
Dewey Dell) and to court and marry, before returning home,
the woman who lent him a shovel to bury the decaying
corpse. In this story, perhaps more than in any other,
Faulkner has mingled tragedy and comedy, the coarse and
shocking with tenderness and pathos. Only among the most
primitive people, isolated from ordinary life and bound by
a strong sense of family ties, could such a story ever
occur. But the characters in As I Lay Dying are simple-
minded, uncomplicated countrymen who have a Job to do and
who cannot be swerved from it till it is done.
William Van O'Connor sees the story as symbolic,
not actual.
3
Hoffman and Vickery, p. 115*
179
As I Lay Dying is Jatnesian also in the sense that
it does not respect the naturalists' doctrine of
faithfulness to historical and social actualities,
to documenting a people and a place. The symbolic,
stylized journey of Gulliver's Travels or Rime of
the Ancient Mariner is beyond our fact-clogged
! twentieth-century imaginations— but As I Lay Dying
is closer to either of them than it would be to a
| sociological account of dirt farmers in Lafayette
| County, Mississippi. The journey with Addie
Bundren's coffin is absurd.^
i
A short summary of all the horrors and hardships
. of the funeral journey is sufficient to show that the plot
i is not only unrealistic, but unbelievable. In a sense it
is a grotesque and shocking tall tale, with the characters,
situations, and action all drawn to some subhuman or super
human standard. The one unifying force in all the action
is the sense of family obligation to its dead. Addie
Bundren, about whom the whole story revolves, seeks to
find meaning in life by involvement of her life with
others: "We live, she believes, by violating our aloneness.
Words like love and sin, which signify the violations, are
often abused, used meaninglessly." She feels too, that
those really involved do not heed words, and only those in
volved find any meaning in life. And O'Connor adds:
The nightmarish funeral procession from the
Bundren farm to Jefferson, brought about by
Addie's grim design to involve Anse at least to
the degree of fulfilling a promise, is of course
4
The Tangled Fire, p. 45.
the central action (p. 47).
Whether the novel is symbolic or not (critics dis
agree on this point), it is one of the most readable
Faulkner has written. Time sequences are natural, the
action is progressive, and the language--except for occa
sional literary patches--is the speech of ignorant South
ern poor whites. There are many planes of interest— the
macabre action, suggestive of Gothic romances; the keen,
often comic, characterizations; the rude, illiterate lan
guage of the country people contrasted with the occasional
passages of florid rhetoric; and the device, especially
interesting to critics, of naming the chapters for the
person whose language or stream of thought is given in
that section.
Characterization is unquestionably one of the chief
distinctions of this novel. Addie Bundren is probably
the most complex person, with her involvement with Anse,
the preacher Whitfield, and her several children. But
tall, gaunt, toothless Anse ("Pa") Bundren is, in my judg
ment, one of the great comic creations of Faulkner. In
physique, shambling gait, mannerisms, and speech he is a
distinctive and unique "character." This fact is empha
sized by the amount of attention given to him in the novel.
In a number of striking figures, Faulkner presents the
uncouth and clumsy farmer— figures that bring out his
awkwardness, oddness, and stupidity.
He looms tall above us as we squat; he looks
like a figure carved clumsily from tough wood
by a drunken caricaturist (pp. 457-8 }F.
Sitting on the wagon in his Sunday pants, mumbling
his mouth. Looking like a uncurried horse dressed
up: I don't know (p. 242).
I noticed how he was beginning to hump— a tall
man and young--so that he looked already like a
tall bird hunched in the cold weather, on the
wagon seat (p. 462). / A n s e as a young suitor^
Three times Faulkner compares him to a bird (’ ’a tall
hunched bird," "an old tall bird," and "a silhouette par
taking of that owl-like quality of awry-feathered, dis
gruntled outrage") and twice he likens the old man to
other animals--an "uncurrled horse" and "a failing steer."
Physically and mentally the man resembles a neglected
animal. In a sense Faulkner seems to throw the blame on
heredity, or perhaps even on God, when he says that "he
looks like a figure carved clumsily . . . by a drunken
caricaturist." Thus the reader, from the first, is made
aware of Anse's peculiarities and his fitness for comedy.
The gaunt, bony face of Anse is made more hollow-
looking by the fact that for fifteen years he has had no
teeth. Because of this his mouth is sunken and he is
always "mumbling his mouth," one of his most characteristic
movements. Generally he had a short stubble of beard
covering his face, and he was careless of his clothes,
which hung loose upon his frame. His movements were slow
and awkward, as befitted a shiftless man.
But his speech, no less than his appearance,
characterizes Anse. Frequently he says, "I am a misfor-
tunate man," and the expression, "I don't begrudge her
it"--referring to the hardships of Addie's funeral journey
becomes almost a refrain. Poor as he is, he has the
Southerner's fierce pride and he rejects offers of help
with the apology, "We wouldn't be beholden, but I thank
you kindly" (p. 419)* He is religious in a superstitious
manner, accepting whatever comes as from the Lord, and
reasoning: "I am chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth,
so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He don't take
some curious ways to show it, seems like" (p. 415). Again
thinking of his misfortunes, he says:
I have done things but neither better nor worse
than them that pretend otherlike, and I know Old
Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow
that falls (p. 36JO *
"7M
The intention of Faulkner in characterizing Anse
as comic is shown by the comments put into the mouths of
others. For example, just before Addie's death some of
the neighbors are discussing Anse's plight:
"I don't know what he'll do," Cora says, "I just
don' t know. " f 5
183
"Poor Anse," I say. "She kept him at work for
thirty-odd years. I reckon she is tired."
"And I reckon she * 11 be behind him for thirty
years more," Kate says. "Or if it ain't her
he'll get another one before cotton picking"
(p. 361).
This conversation gives an insight into Anse's shiftless
ways and a prophecy of his behavior after Addie's death.
Later, Tull says of Anse:
"Because the only burden Anse Bundren's ever had
is himself. And when folks talks him low, I
think to myself he ain't that less of a man or
he couldn't a bore himself this long" (pp. 390-91)*
Old Dr. Peabody, the family physician, another comical
creation, says of Anse:
"Too bad the Lord made the mistake of giving trees
roots and giving the Anse Bundrens He makes feet
and legs. If He'd just swapped them, there wouldn't
ever be a worry about this country being deforested
some day. Or any other country" (p. 367)*
When Cash broke his leg in trying to rescue the
wagon carrying his mother's body across the flooded river,
Anse made a cast for it out of cement, which he stirred
in an old dirty can. When Peabody is finally called and
sees what has happened, he says:
"I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner
patch him up like a damn mule, but I be damned
if the man that'd let Anse Bundren treat him with
raw cement ain't got more spare legs than I have"
(p. 515).
Later the old doctor explodes:
"Concrete," I said. "God Amighty, why didn't
Anse carry you to the nearest sawmill and stick
your leg in the saw? That would have cured it.
Then you all could have stuck his head into the
saw and cured a whole family. . . . Where is Anse,
anyway? What's he up to now?" (p. 516).
Referring to Anse's borrowing a spade to bury his wife,
Peabody remarks:
"Of course he'd have to borrow a spade to bury
his wife with. Unless he could borrow a hole
in the ground. Too bad you all didn't put him
in it too" (p. 516).
After all the horrors of the nine-day journey with
the putrescent corpse, Anse stopped at a small house near
the cemetery to borrow a spade and stayed quite a long
time. After the burial, the wagon carrying all the Bundren
family stopped again-at the same house, and Anse insisted
on going personally to return the two borrowed shovels.
Then the family and Pa went into town, where Pa got a
shave and some tonic for his hair. The next morning,
ready to return home, they saw Pa "coming along with that
kind of daresome and hangdog look all at once like when
he's been up to something he knows Ma ain't going to like"
(p. 531)- They noticed then that he had bought a set of
teeth,
and then we see her behind him, carrying the other
grip— a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up,
with them kind of hard-looking pop eyes like she
was daring ere a man to say nothing (p. 531).
185
Pa, with a kind of hangdog expression, says, "Meet Mrs.
Bundren."
This ending outrages many critics, who feel that
all the sympathy evoked through the sacrifice and suffer
ing of the Bundrens is here shattered by grotesque comedy
or farce. But such a judgment seems to overlook the fact
that Anse was completely in character in buying a set of
teeth and taking a wife as soon as he had fulfilled his
obligation to Addie--to bury her according to her wish.
To read moral implications into his action seems beside
the point. He acts only from instinct.
When Addie died, Pa simply remarked: "She taken
and left us," and a little later he said to Dewey Dell,
"I reckon you better get supper on" (p. 37^)* It was
time to eat. And as he stands later looking down on the
bed, where the dead wife lies: "Pa breathes with a quiet,
rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums. 'God’s
will be done," he says. 'Now I can get them teeth'" (p.
375). We are prepared, therefore, for the strange con
clusion.
Other characters that show a certain amount of
humor are Dr. Peabody and Cora Tull. Peabody is a huge
man, slow-moving, sardonic, clear-headed. One of the
Bundren boys says, "He has pusselgutted himself eating
186
; cold greens," and Peabody says of himself, "Me, walk up,
weighing two hundred and twenty-five pounds?" (p. 367).
Then the old doctor muses:
I'll be damned if I can see why I don't quit. A
man seventy years old, weighing two hundred odd
pounds, being hauled up and down a damn mountain
on a rope. I reckon its because I must reach the
fifty-thousand dollar mark of dead accounts on my
books before I can quit. "What the hell does your
wife mean," I say, "taking sick on top of a durn
mountain?".(p. 368).
This is the same country doctor whom we meet in
Sartoris, though in that novel he is said to weigh "310
pounds and have a digestive tract like a horse." Like
Anse, he is lazy and fond of eating, but he differs in
■ being quick-witted and able to read the minds of the
country folk he serves unselfishly. He is presented sym
pathetically.
Cora is the typical talkative woman. In the first
chapter in which she is introduced she talks on and on
about her chickens, her baking, and some very fine cakes
that had been ordered— and refused--by a town lady.
I could have used the money real well. But it's
not like they cost me anything except the baking.
I can tell him that anybody is likely to make a
miscue, but it's not all of them can get out of
it without loss, I can tell him. It's not every
body can eat their mistakes, I can tell him (p.
3^3) •
/
Her husband too has elements of humor in him. Speaking of
Addie's reward he says:
187
"She has hern," I say. "Wherever she went, she
has her reward in feeing free of Anse Bundren"
(p. 404).
■ Tull says of women:
Cora’s right when she says all he needs is a wife
to straighten him out. And when I think about
that, I think if nothing but being married will
help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless. But I reckon
Cora's right when she says the reason the Lord
had to create women is because man don't know
his own good when he sees it (p. 389).
And he concludes his comments on God and women by saying:
I reckon she's right. I reckon if there's ere
a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all
over to and go away and rest, it would be Cora.
And I reckon she would make a few changes, no
matter how He was running it. And I reckon they
would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have
to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on
and make like we did (p. 391).
There are other characters who occasionally add to the
comic interest, but these four are the principal ones.
Several situations have an element of humor but
often there is more bitterness or pathos. In a rather
lengthy episode members of the family find that Jewel is
not sleeping in his bed at night. After plowing in the
field all day, he would eat supper, pretend to go to bed,
and then disappear. Cash had his own idea about what
Jewel was doing.
"Yes," I said. "But why the lantern? And every
night, too. No wonder he's losing flesh. Are
you going to say anything to him?"
188
"Won't do any good," Cash said.
"What he’s doing now won't do him any good, either."
"I know. But he'll have to learn that himself.
Give him time to realize that it'll save, that
there'll be just as much more tomorrow, and he'll
be all right. I wouldn't tell anybody, I reckon"
(p. 430).
1 Jewel's night wandering continued for months, with Cash
1
and Dari continuing to speculate about who the woman was.
Finally, Cash decided to find out. He followed Jewel one
night and learned the answer. But he would not tell.
Now and then I would catch him watching Jewel
with a queer look, like having found out where
Jewel went and what he was doing had given him
something to really think about at last. But
; it was not a worried look; it was the kind of
look I would sea -on him when I would find him
doing some of Jewel's work around the house, work
that pa thought Jewel was doing and that ma
thought Dewey Dell was doing (p. 432).
Jewel and Cash kept the secret. One morning Jewel
was not at home when the family looked for him, and Cash
was especially concerned.
Then we saw him. He came up along the ditch
and then turned straight across the field, riding
the horse. Its mane and tail were going, as
though in motion they were carrying out the
splotchy pattern of its coat; he looked like
he was riding on a big pinwheel, barebacked,
with a rope bridle, and no hat on his head. It
was a descendant of those Texas ponies Flem
Snopes brought here twenty years ago and auc
tioned off for two dollars a head. . . (p. 433)*
189
After the long and elaborate building up of this incident,
we learn that Jewel had been breaking new land by lantern
light for months to pay for this spotted pony. Admittedly,
the reversal here is one of relief rather than of laughter.
But if surprise is one of the chief elements of the comic
situation, this anecdote qualifies.
Another event, this one in the life of Dewey Dell,
may be classified as surrealistic humor. Dewey is preg
nant and greatly worried about over condition. The man
responsible has given her ten dollars to get something at
a drug store (the same situation is used in The Wild Palms,
except that it is the man who is seeking). Dewey welcomes
the opportunity to go on the wagon with the corpse to
Jefferson, where she hopes to get something for her condi
tion. Moseley, the druggist, refuses to do anything for
her; instead, he tells her to take the money and marry
Lafe. But the girl returns later when the , druggist is
out, at dinner time, and there are only two young men
there. One of them listens to her story and decides to
pose as a doctor.
"Ah," I says. "Have you got female troubles or
do you want female troubles? If so, you came to
the right doctor." Them country people. . . .
"No," she says.
"No which?" I says.
190
"I ain't had it," she.says. "That's it." She
looked at me. "I got the money," she says (p.
518) .
In the ensuing conversation the smart-aleck young assist-
' ant learns all he can about the girl and then offers to
prescribe.
"Of course you realize that I could be put in
the penitentiary for doing what you want," I says.
"I would lose my licence and then I'd have to go
to work. You realize v£hat?"
When she protests that she has only ten dollars to pay
for his service, he sees his opening.
She looks at me. She don't even blink. "What do
you want, then?"
"You guess three times and then I'll show you,"
I says.
She don't even blink her eyes. "I got to do
something," she says. She looks behind her and
around, then she looks toward the front. "Gimme
the medicine first," she says (pp. 521-2).
Then he gives her some concoction he found in a bottle
and tells her to take it.
"Hit smells like turpentine," she says.
"Sure," I says. "That's just the beginning of
the treatment. You come back at ten o'clock to
night and I'll give you the rest of it and per
form the operation."
"Operation?" she says.
"It won't hurt you. You've had the same operation
before. Ever hear about the hair of the dog?"
(p. 522).
191
Although the ignorance and credulity of Dewey Dell
are beyond our belief, the situation reflects a perverse
sort of humor growing out of human depravity. The girl,
in desperation, is willing to take any kind of ’ 'medicine"
and be seduced in order to escape detection. And the
so-called "doctor" is willing to prey upon the girl's
fears and hopes in order to have his way with her. There
is consummate irony in the situation. The plight of the
girl arouses the reader's pity or sense of outrage; the
i
machinations of the slick-haired, smooth-talking young
"doctor" arouse anger and disgust.
This incident may be called "surrealistic" because,
in the words of Campbell and Foster, there is "alienation
of sensation," that is, "a deliberate defiance of familiar
and logical associations." A patient goes to a doctor for
help; but in this situation the girl trusts herself to a
druggist's apprentice who takes her money and betrays her.
Instead of relieving her distress, he compounds the injury.
In the second place, there is present "Black Bile--supposed-
ly the laughter of the unconscious--a disagreeable, cruel
laughter," sadistic and harsh. The utter irresponsibility
of the man, his evil triumph and gloating, and the naive
simplicity of the country girl and her subsequent dis
illusionment evoke the "cruel laughter" of the subcon-
scious. The opinion of Ward L. Miner is apropos here:
The novel is a folk comedy embodying tragedy,
despair and futility. These overtones are those
particularly appropriate to Southwest folk humor,
which has been noted for its violence and cruelty.
Faulkner has applied modern subjective techniques
to the violent material of the regional folklore.5
Two other examples in this novel of atrabilious
humor may be cited briefly. The first has to do with Pa's
treatment for Cash's broken leg, which the bungling father
wrapped in a concrete cast. For days Cash lies on a
quilt on his mother’s casket as the wagon bumps along
toward the cemetery. As they paused one night the follow
ing conversation took place:
And then Cash was still awake. He turned his
head from side to side, with sweat on his face.
"Do you want some more water on it, Cash?" Dewey
Dell said.
Cash's leg and foot turned black. We held the
lamp and looked at Cash's foot and leg where it
was black.
"You foot looks like a nigger's foot, Cash,"
I said.
"I reckon we'll have to bust it off," Pa said.
"What in the tarnation you put it on there for?"
Mr. Gillespie said.
"I thought it would steady it some," Pa said.
"I just aimed to help him."
They got the flatiron and the hammer (p. 502).
The World of William Faulkner, p. 116.
The details which follow give a vivid impression of
Cash's suffering and the unbelievable stupidity of Pa
Bundren, which, as noted earlier, was satirized by Dr.
Peabody.
The other incident of sardonic humor concerns
Dari, the son who goes mad on the long, horrible funeral
journey and burns the barn where the wagon and corpse are
left overnight. Jewel realizes that Dari must be sent to
the asylum at Jackson, and so he says:
"You want to fix him now?"
"Fix him?" pa said.
"Catch him and tie him up," Jewel said. "Goddam
it, do you want to wait until he sets fire to the
goddam team and wagon?"
But there wasn't no use in that. "There ain't
no use in that." I said. "We can wait till she
is underground." A fellow that's going to spend
the rest of his life locked up, he ought to be
let to have what pleasure he can before he goes
(p. 509).
There is a lugubrious sort of humor in Cash's wanting his
brother to be able to witness the burial of their mother
before he is sent to the asylum because he ought to "have
what pleasure he can before he goes." The humor here
comes from the reversal of ordinary values. To Jewel,
and presumably to Dari, the journey to the cemetery is
a change from everyday monotony, and therefore pleasur
able .
The scene which follows is shocking in its brutal
realism, as Pa and Jewel "throwed Dari down and held him
lying on his back," as they would throw and tie a calf,
and Dewey Dell attacking him "like a wild cat" (p. 514).
When Dari was subdued and told he would be better off
"down there"--at Jackson:
"Better," he said. He began to laugh again.
"Better," he said. He could hardly say it for
laughing. He sat on the ground and us watching
him, laughing and laughing. It was bad. It
was bad so. I be durn if I could see anything
to laugh at (p. 514).
This is the final calamity in the long string of horrors
that began with Addle's death. Dari becomes the family
"sacrifice," the expiation for all the outrages and in
dignities they have had to suffer.
Not far removed from the "dark laughter" of such
passages is the humor which plays in the language of
Faulkner as he touches the subject of sex. Describing
Dewey Dell {who in several respects anticipates Eula, the
country goddess of sex, in The Hamlet), Faulkner says:
She sets the basket into the wagon and climbs
in, her leg coming long from beneath her tight
ening dress; that lever which moves the world;
one of that caliper which measures the length
and breadth of life (pp. 410-11).
Later, after the wagon on which most of the family has
been riding is swept away and overturned by the river
current, Dewey Dell is thus described:
195
Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for
the dead eyes of the three men those mammalian
ludicrosities which are the horizons and valleys
of the earth (p. 458).
1 In both these passages imagery is very important.
! In the first a woman's leg is called the "lever which
moves the world"— a reference to sexual love as one of
| the most powerful drives in human nature, and then "that
; caliper which measures the length and breadth of life"--
in a sense the cause of life as well as a measure of the
fullness thereof. In the second quotation, the pregnant
figure of Dewey Dell is rounded, suggesting a hill, and
her ripe breasts stand out as twin hillocks on the horizon,
with a valley between, and in between the breasts and
swollen midsection another valley. These peaks and
valleys are, by a process of abstraction, made to repre
sent the highs and lows of human pleasure.
In their study of Faulkner's humor, Campbell and
Foster observe that "As I Lay Dying utilizes both sur
realistic and frontier humor . . . and the initial scene
has the macabre air of a medieval Dance of Death paint-
6
ing." Critics may differ, however, with the verdict of
Irving Howe:
William Faulkner, p. 107.
196
Of all Faulkner's novels, As I Lay Dying is the
warmest, the kindliest and most affectionate.
The notion that Faulkner is a misanthrope wallow
ing in horrors is possible only to those who have
not read the book or have read it with willful
obtuseness. In no other work is he so receptive
to people, so ready to take and love them, to
hear them out and record their turns of idioms,
their melodies of speech (p. 4l4).
This novel, as Faulkner himself realized, is one
I
' of his finest, not only for its technical skill, but for
its powerful characterizations, its expert handling of
dialect, and its blending of pathos and humor. In the
many trials and sufferings of the Bundren family, brought
on by their own stupidity and blundering but also by their
devotion to the ideal of family solidarity, we see human
nature revealed In all its incongruous aspects— the sub
lime and the absurd, the serious and the trivial, the
tragic and the comic. In a sense the Bundren family Is
man or mankind, and their long train of hardships and suf
ferings is the journey called life. As I Lay Dying has
been called "an American epic, which blends farce with
tragedy." This Is a fitting description of the Bundren
pilgrimage, for though there is considerable cruelty and
suffering, there is always a redeeming sense of humor.
The language of the half-literate Mississippians, the
droll comments of Anse's neighbors, and many of the inci
dents of the novel are unforgettable. The reader will
probably remember the eccentricities of Pa Bundren and
such incidents as his borrowing of the shovel long after
the horrors of the funeral journey are forgotten. The
wry humor of the Southern "poor whites" has seldom, if
ever, been presented more faithfully than in this novel.
198
Part Three: Light In August
The fourth major novel which came from the pen of
Faulkner between 1929 and the close of 1932 was Light in
August, which was published by Harrison Smith and Robert
' Haas in October, 1932. It belongs, like the other im
portant novels, to the South (specifically to Yoknapataw-
pha County and Jefferson), its characters are predominant
ly poor whites (with one or two exceptions), and the
protagonist— Joe Christmas--is a white man tortured by
. the obsession(which is never proved) that he is tainted
i
by Negro blood. The time seems to be the nineteen-twenties.
Light in August is a powerful novel centering on
three groups of characters: (l) Lena Grove, Lucas Burch,
and Byron Bunch, (2) Gail Hightower, and (3) Joe Christmas
and>Joanna Burden. The first and final parts of the novel,
in which Lena Grove is the center of attention, might be
called a country idyll, with earthy and robust humor. The
~ greater part of the novel, however, which revolves about
Joe Christmas and the unfrocked minister, Gail Hightower,
are starkly realistic and tragic. Running through the
whole novel are suggestions of a deep and inexplicable
mystery, or fate, and symbols of the tragedy and futility
of life. Undoubtedly, the novel has an allegorical as
well as a surface meaning; but what is pertinent to this
study is the juxtaposition (and sometimes fusion) of the
comic and tragic— as noted already in such works as As I
Lay Dying and Sanctuary. Another very important consid
eration is the treatment of the Calvinist influence upon
several major characters in the novel, and the ironic
handling of the Protestant mores--a theme rather fully
explored by William Van O'Connor (The Tangled Fire of
William Faulkner), which will be noticed in our study of
individual characters in this novel.
The story begins with Lena Grove, a country girl
eight months pregnant, setting out from Alabama across
the country to find Lucas Burch, who fathered the child
and left her soon after learning of her condition. She
has only her few scant belongings tied in a bundle,
thirty-five cents in cash, and unbounded faith, as she
begins the long journey, riding in wagons from one village
to another along the road to Mississippi, and sleeping in
strang’ e homes wherever night overtakes her. She is a calm,
untroubled, naive country girl, good-humored, healthy,
and optimistic. Along the road she keeps Inquiring about
the man who deserted her and finally hears rumors that a
man fitting the description works at a planing mill in
200
Jefferson.
After traveling uncounted miles and getting rides
in dozens of farm wagons she finally reaches her destina-
, tion, and remarks: "My, my; here I aint been on the road
!
f
; but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already. My, my.
A body does get around." She goes immediately to the
mill, where she tells her story to Byron Bunch, a plain,
easy-going, conscientious man who reveals, inadvertently,
that Burch is working at the same place under the name of
Brown. Byron takes a proprietary interest in the girl
and arranges with his landlady to give Lena the room he
has been occupying— so that she'll be near a woman, since
her time is clearly near at hand.
Here the second part of the story begins. Joe
Christmas, a white man who believes he has some Negro
blood in him, and Brown have given up their jobs at the
mill and gone to selling bootleg liquor. They live in a
small shack near the old ancestral house of Miss Joanna
Burden, a descendant of stern Calvinist abolitionists
from New England who settled in Jefferson after the Civil
War. Christmas has been living on intimate terms with the
emotionally starved Miss Burden (another Rose Grierson),
who becomes thoroughly corrupted and unbalanced by the
conflict between her erotic impulses and puritanical
background. After passing through various physical and
I emotional changes, she eventually tries to reform and
educate Christmas, who rebels at this treatment and
slashes her throat and then, to destroy the evidence, sets
! the house on fire. Brown, in a drunken stupor, is found
. by a passerby in the burning house, barring the way to
| the upstairs room, where the body of the woman is found.
; Brown escapes for the time being, to turn up later blaming
Christmas for the murder and making frantic efforts to
collect the $1000 reward offered by a relative of Miss
Burden for the conviction of the murderer,
i Christmas escapes into the woods and hides out for
K
more than a week. Meanwhile Byron conceals from Lena the
fact that the man she is seeking is not only a bootlegger
but a possible accomplice in the murder. Byron visits
his good friend, the ex-preacher Gail Hightower, to ex
plain his problem and seek advice. Hightower immediately
discerns the interest of Byron in Lena, and--in accordance
with his old code— advises him to have nothing to do with
the deflowered girl. But Byron has already involved him
self by arranging for her temporary stay in his boarding
house, and in spite of Hightower's advice he moves the
expectant mother to the small house so lately vacated by
Christmas and Brown. Byron puts up a tent for himself
202
nearby, so that he can offer assistance when the baby is
born. Because he fails to get a doctor in time, he pre
vails on Hightower to act as midwife at the child's birth.
In several long flashbacks the early life and
adolescence of Joe Christmas are revealed: his life in
two orphanages, first a white and then a Negro institu
tion, his adoption by a hard and tyrannical old man, Simon
McEachern, and his wife, Joe's bitter life with this
couple until at eighteen he becomes involved with a
waitress-prostitute, rebels at McEachern's treatment of
him, beats the old man unconscious with a chair and starts
out along the tortuous road that is to bring him finally
to Jefferson and the crime that makes him a fugitive. In
this part of the narrative the prejudices, hatreds, and
injustices that "condition" Christmas and bring him to the
final catastrophe are clearly set forth. We learn of
his fanatical grandfather, Eupheus Hines, a caricature
of all that is bigoted and hateful in a narrow-minded
concept of religion, of Joe's distrust of pious men (such
as the terrible McEachern) and women who try to pity him,
and of his mind tormented by the idea that he has Negro
blood. When Christmas is captured in Mottstown and
taken back to Jefferson for trial, he escapes and takes
203
|refuge in the home of the Reverend Hightower, where a
l
posse, led by a Nazi-like deputy named Percy Grimm, shoots
jhim to death and then castrates him.
Byron manages to have Brown taken out to his old
!house, where, unknown to him, Lena and the child are wait-
, ing. But Brown outwits his guard, climbs out a back
iwindow, and takes to the open road once more. The scene
!in which Brown encounters an old Negro woman and tries to
i
:arrange for a messenger to take his note to the sheriff,
explaining how and where the $1000 reward is to be paid,
iis one of the most comical in the novel. Byron follows
| Brown and fights him before Brown hops a freight and
leaves for good.
The final chapter, which contains some of the best
humor of the entire story, is told by a traveling furni
ture salesman (a good forerunner of Ratliff, the narrator
of The Hamlet)j it tells of Lena and her child on the road
again, picking up rides with strangers, but accompanied
now by the quiet, blundering Byron, who tries during the
night to make love to Lena. The story ends, as it began,
with broad comedy, but the greater part is dark and
tragic.
The novel’s title is significant. Richard Chase
' says of it:
204
The phrase "light in August" has at least two
meanings. As Mr. Malcolm Cowley informs us in
his Portable Faulkner, the phrase means "light"
as opposed to "heavy" and refers to a pregnant
woman who will give birth in August. And it
also means "light" as opposed to "dark"--an
affirmation of life and human spirit.1
; May there not also be a suggestion that a "light," or
; comic, ending is intended by the phrase?
The familiar types of humor are found in this novel
(dialect, name humor, rustic wit and wisdom, situation
humor, irony, satire, and understatement); it is mainly
i
the subjects, or butts, of his satire and sardonic wit
that change--the matter and manner undergo little change.
The countrymen, for example, talk in the same brogue and
about the same sort of things that they did in As I Lay
Dying or Sartoris. Name humor is the same in all fiction;
it is the fitness or incongruity of the name' that makes it
significant. And though the objects of Faulkner's satire
may change from one novel to another, there are certain
norms: a hatred of narrowness and bigotry, of self-
righteousness and hypocrisy, and of pompous and venal
officials. The situations also begin to take on, after
a time, a kind of family likeness, just as one learns to
^"The Stone and the Crucifixion: Faulkner's Light
in August," Hoffman and Vickery, p. 205.
recognize not only the subjects but also the techniques
of a modern cartoonist, say a Vip or a Thurber. The
situations often have to do with weddings (or the lack of
5
them), with a clever individual caught in his own trap,
or the perverse and often reckless behavior of men and
animals.
Name humor is abundant in this novel. O’Connor
remarks:
The irony of the name of Joe Christmas is noted
by every reader of Light in August. (And it is
equally obvious that other names in the novel
have their appropriateness also: Gail Hightower,
Percy Grimm, Calvin Burden, Bobbie /^Barbara/7
Allen, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, and Eupheus
Hines (p. 73).
Besides these names, which have special appropriate
ness, are the names of the Yoknapatawpha series, Preacher
Bredenberry, Simon ^/Legree7 MeEachern, and the storekeeper
named Dollar. Faulkner uses names denoting important
characteristics, as Grimm for the implacable and stern mar
shal who destroys Christmas, and Calvin as a Christian name
for the iron-ribbed and unbending Mr. Burden, a thorough
going Calvinist; suggestive names like Simon for the "rock-
like" and inhuman McEachern, and Bobbie or Barbara Allen
for the prostitute whom Christmas makes love to. Hightower
is a lonely, isolated figure, a man of high ambitions but
weak-willed and tragic— a man whom life has passed by.
< 4
206’
Dialect and characterization are inextricably
linked together. The language of Lena and Byron fits
them; that is, it helps to create the illusion of reality
and to fill out the picture. She is patient, hopeful,
. easily satisfied— ready to make the best of any situation.
i
Both her manner and her language bring out these qualities.
I
I At the opening of the story Lena thinks, "I have come from
! Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking.
|
A fur piece." Then her manner of life is described in a
few carefully chosen details:
six or eight times a year she went to town on
Saturday, in the wagon, in a mail-order dress
1 and her bare feet flat in the wagon bed and
her shoes wrapped in a piece of paper beside
her on the seat.2
After the death of her parents, Lena went to live with her
brother McKinley and his wife, who "for almost half of
every year . . . was either lying in or recovering."
During this time Lena had the care of all the children.
Later she said, "I reckon that's why I got one so quick
myself" (p. 3)*
Lena lived in a leanto room at the back of the
house. It had a window which could be opened and closed
noiselessly. "She had not opened it'a dozen times before
2
William Faulkner, Light in August, The Modern
Readers Series (New York, 1932), p. T~.
207
i she discovered that she should not have opened it at all.
She said to herself, 'That's just my luck'" (p. 3)*
When the hard-bitten brother learned of her condition and
reviled her, she decided to leave home in pursuit of her
seducer.
Two weeks later she climbed again through the
window. It was a little difficult, this time.
"If it had been this hard to do before, I reckon
I wouldn't be doing it now," she thought (p. 4).
Besides her simplicity and trustfulness, there is
also her fidelity to the worthless Lucas Burch:
"Like as not, he already sent the word and it
got lost on the way. It's a right far piece from
here to Alabama even, and I aint to Jefferson yet.
I told him I would not expect him to write, being
as he aint any hand for letters. 'You just send
me your mouthword when you are ready for me,' I
told him. 'I'll be waiting,' It worried me a
little at first, after he left, because my name
wasn't Burch yet and my brother and his folks not
knowing Lucas as well as I knew him. How could
they?" Into her face there comes slowly an ex
pression of soft and bright surprise, as if she
had just thought of something which she had not
even been aware that she did not know (p. 17)*
In his use of such compounds as "mouthword" for
"word of mouth" Faulkner reveals his intimate knowledge
of.Southern dialect. Any Southerner recognizes the term
as authentic, and is able to cite many more. In the same
conversation Lena says:
But after a while I reckon I just got too busy
getting this chap up to his time to worry about
what my name was or what folks thought. But me
208
and Lucas dont need no word promises between us.
It was something unexpected come up, or he even
sent the word and it got lost. So one day I
just decided to up and not wait any longer (p. 17)*
Three expressions here make this almost a literal
transcription of unlettered Southern speech: (1) the
dialectal use of "chap" for child or baby ("little one"
or "un" and "least un" are variants), (2) the expletive
use of "it": "it was something . . . come up," and (3)
the irregular use of "up" as a verb: "to up and not
wait." A few other characteristic expressions of Lena
may be noted: (l) "I et polite," she thinks (p. 23),
"It was right kind, anyway . . . I had hopened to see
her myself, but ..." (p. 20), "and a box of sardines"
which she calls "sour-deens" (p. 25). A manner of life
is revealed in her words with one of the wagoners, whom
she offers sardines and crackers:
"I wouldn't care for none," he says.
"I'd take it kind for you to share."
"I wouldn't care to. You go ahead and eat"
(p. 25).
Other persons in the novel talk in the same vein.
They are the poor whites she meets on the road, the Negroes,
and Byron and Brown (Burch), who belong to the same social
stratum. Characteristic of all is the mixing of the
tenses, the confusion of pronoun cases, regular use of
double negatives, and the use of coined or uncommon words.
The language of the rustics in Faulkner's stories
generally is sardonic and sharp, piercing subterfuge and
pretensions. When Christmas applied for a job at the
planing mill, he was dressed in blue serge pants and a
white shirt (city clothes), causing the foreman to ask
of the superintendent:
"Is he going to do it in them clothes?"
"That's his business," the superintendent said.
"I'm not hiring his clothes" (p. 28).
The foreman announced that the new man's name
was Christmas. "His name is what?" one said.
"Christmas."
"Is he a foreigner?"
"Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?"
the foreman said.
"I never heard of nobody a'tall named it," the
other said (p. 29).
Two of the millmen are discussing Lucas Burch, who has
also found a job at the mill:
"Yes," Mooney said. "He puts me in mind of a
horse. Not a mean horse. Just a worthless horse.
Looks fine in the pasture, but it's always down
in the spring bottom when anybody comes to the
gate with a bridle. Runs fast, all right, but
it's always got a sore hoof when hitching-up
time comes."
"But I reckon maybe the mares like him," Byron
said.
"Sho," Mooney said. "I don't reckon he'd do even
a mare any permanent harm" (p. 33).
210
In another instance the men are talking about Brown's
new job--supplying the town moonshine liquor.
"Brown is what you might call a public servant.
Christmas used to make them come way out to the
woods back of Miss Burden's place, at night; now
Brown brings it right into town for them. I hear
tell how if you just know the pass word, you can
buy a pint of whiskey out of his shirt front in
any alley on a Saturday night."
"What's the password?" another said.
"Six bits," (pp. 38-39).
Soon Brown quit his job at the mill and began to
live off his new job.
The next morning he did not appear. "His address
from now on will be the barbership," one said.
"Or that alley just behind it," another said (p. 40).
The astringent quality of Faulkner's wit is well
represented by the comments of Doc Hines' fellow townsmen
(Hines is the crazed religious fanatic who tries to lynch
his own grandson, Christmas):
Then he would talk about Memphis, the city, in a
vague and splendid way, as though all his life
he had been incumbent there of some important
though nameless municipal office. "Sure," the
men in Mottstown said behind his back; "he was
railroad superintendent there. Standing in the
middle of the street crossing with a red flag
every time a train passed," or "He's a big news
paperman. Gathers up the papers from under the
park benches" (pp. 324-5).
These examples are typical of the rustic wit and
humor which Faulkner frequently works into his novels.
These sallies of the untutored gentry are notable for
their sharp perception of truth, which penetrates all
sham, and for their acid quality.
As usual, this novel has its quota of remarks
about women. Armstid, a dirt farmer who gives Lena a
ride and offers to keep her overnight, is musing about
the attitude of women toward their fallen sisters:
But that’s the woman of it. Her own self the
first one to cut the ground out from under a
sister woman, she'll walk the public country
herself without shame because she ' knows that
folks, menfolks, will take care of her. She
don't care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn't
any woman that got her into what she don't even
call trouble. Yes sir. You just let one of
them get married or get into trouble without
being married, and right then and there is where
she secedes from the woman race and species and
spends the balance of her life trying to get
joined up with the man race. That's why they
dip snuff and smoke and want to vote (p. 12).
In his own voice Faulkner condemns one of the vices of
good women, meddling in other people's business. Mrs.
Hightower found some favor, belatedly, in the eyes of
her husband's congregation:
She attended church and prayer meeting regularly,
and the ladies called upon her and she called
upon them, sitting quiet and humble, even in her
own house, while they told her how to run it and
what to wear and what to make her husband eat
(p. 60).
Gradually the women even forgave Mrs. Hightower
for her mysterious trips to Memphis, about which many
212
rumors flew,
though none ever put it into words, spoke it
aloud, since the town believed that good women
dont forget things easily, good or bad, lest
✓ the taste and savor of forgiveness die from the
palate of conscience. Because the town believed
the ladies knew the truth, since it believed that
: bad women can be fooled by badness, since they
have to spend some of their time not being sus
picious. But that no good woman can be fooled
by it because, by being good herself, she does
not need to worry anymore about hers or anybody
else's goodness; hence she has plenty of time
to smell out sin (p. 61).
Two things are notable about this attack on women.
For one thing, they are sraall-town women, who know and
peddle all the gossip; second, they are ’ ’good" women,
i that is, religious women, who (Faulkner seems to believe)
like to make themselves the moral censors and custodians
of the community. It was the "good women” of Jefferson
who, in Sanctuary, forced Ruby Goodwin to leave Benbow's
house and later the hotel and take refuge in the city
jail. In the story "Uncle Willy” some self-righteous
church women close up the store and forcibly try to cure
the old druggist of his dope addiction. The right of
every man (and woman) to live his own life in his own way
is one of Faulkner's most oft-reiterated themes.
"There have been good women who were martyrs
to brutes, in their cups and such. But what
woman, good or bad ever suffered from any brute
as much as men have suffered from good women”
(p. 299).
213
All the women in Light in August (except possibly
the not-too-bright Lena) are tainted in some way. Even
from the kindly, well-meaning wife of the fanatical
McEachern, Christmas learned something of deceit.
It was the woman who, with a woman's affinity
and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint
taint of evil about the most trivial and inno
cent actions. Behind a loose board in the wall
of his attic room she had hidden a small hoard
of money in a tin can (pp. 157-8).
The waitress, Bobbie, whom the seventeen-year old
Christmas wants to seduce, is a small, hard-faced, gaunt
woman, a prostitute, and well past thirty. The pathetic
efforts of the boy to get the woman's attention, and
later, when he was alone with her, to make love to her--
are wryly amusing. When she tells him she is sick, he
does not understand and tries to get her to take some
medicine.
Later, after he has had another date with her,
he bought her "a stale and fly-specked box of candy from
a man who had won it for ten cents on a punching board.1 1
That was all he gave her for her favors, though she had
to lie about him to the man she worked for. One night
she failed to keep the rendezvous they had planned, and
he went to her place and was shocked to find that she had
visitors, that a man was with her in her room. For the
214
first time he was aware that she was not his alone. Prom
Bobbie, Christmas received his sexual education and was
introduced to the ways of the world.
Max, the man for whom Bobbie works, despises the
country boy who comes courting her. He refers to
Christmas as “John Jacob Astor from the cowshed" and
then reproaches her for being "a setup for hayseeds,"
and says, "Maybe I'd better start giving away grub too"
(p. 180). When she protests that "maybe I like him,"
Max scoffs at her, '^She says maybe she likes him best.
It's Romeo and Juliet. For sweet Jesus I " Then with con
summate irony he adds, "Max Confrey presenting Miss Bobbie
Allen, the youth's companion." What he could not under
stand or tolerate was her free intercourse with Christmas:
"Coming all the way down here from Memphis, bringing it
all the way down here to give it away" (p. l8l).
Throughout their relationship the contrast between
Joe's innocence and Max's sophisticated self-interest is
as sharp as between Joe's amateur bungling as a lover and
Bobbie's "professionalism." The situation is thoroughly
ironic.
Joe was still living at the McEachern place when
he began his clandestine visits to the restaurant where
Bobble worked. He would let himself down from the attic
room by a rope he kept concealed and then recllmb the rope
before daybreak. One night old Mr. McEachern was not
asleep; he quietly saddled his mule and followed Joe to
a country dance, where Joe and Bobbie were dancing. To
McEachern this was the door to hell, and as he strode
across the floor in anger the couples fled in terror
before him. Approaching the woman in Joe's arms he
thundered, "Away, Jezebel!" And as the music ceased,
fading into the peaceful moonlit night, he cried, "Away,
harlot." After Joe has quieted the old man by crashing
a chair on his head, Bobbie cries in high dudgeon, "Calling
me a harlot!" She is outraged by such a description.
Here, as elsewhere, the women of pleasure in Faulkner's
novels are scandalized if their vocations are referred to
in public. To Faulkner such situations provide a chance
for laughing at human delusions.
Years later Joe is living on the property of Miss
Burden, a spinster, and visiting her each night. But his
roommate, Brown, does not know of Joe's doings, and,
seeing Joe dressed to go out, he remarks:
"Well, I reckon from that you're going on private
business," He watched Christmas. "This here's
a cold night to be laying around on the wet
ground without nothing under you but a thin gal"
(p. 258).
The term "business" takes on a special meaning in
Faulkner (as the term "service" does in Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath); it is generally used to denote sexual
play— another example of his irony. The speech quoted
above also suggests Brown's attitude toward women, and
reminds one of the nurse's remarks to Juliet. Indeed,
the ribaldry and jesting of Faulkner have much in common
with Shakespearean humor.
This novel recounts a wedding scene that also af
fords some opportunities for mirth. Joanna Burden is
telling Christmas about her family, the grandfather Calvin
Burden (a caricature of the intolerant New England reli
gious fanatic, who hated Catholics, slaveholders, and
Democrats, but loved his corn whiskey) who used to say to
his children, "Let them all go to their own benighted
hell, but I'll beat the loving God into the four of you
as long as I can raise ray arm" (p. 230). His son,
Nathaniel, ran away from home at the age of fourteen and
was gone for sixteen years. Twice the family heard from
him by "word-of-mouth messenger." When Nathaniel returned
in a buckboard, with a wife and son, the old man was seen
tugging at his waist as though he might be drawing a
pistol:
217
But he was merely dragging from about his waist
with his single hand a leather strap, and flour
ishing it he now thrust and shoved through the
shrill and bird-like hovering of the women.
"I'll learn you yetJ" he roared. "I'll learn you
to run away I" The strap fell twice across
Nathaniel's shoulders. It fell twice before
the two men locked.
It was in play, in a sense: a kind of deadly
play and smiling seriousness; the play of two
lions that might or might not leave marks (p. 232).
After Nathaniel introduces his wife and twelve-
year-old son, Calvin, he announces, "We come home to get
married." Nathaniel had been living among Catholics, in
old Mexico, and would not consent to be married by a
priest because "I wasn't going to have any Burden born
a heathen" (p. 233)* He had kept trying to find a min
ister, but was never successful. So he had finally come
home to be married.
Calvin and the grandfather were killed in a dis
pute with a Colonel Sartoris during the troubled Recon
struction days, and were buried in a secret place at
night, because they were "foreigners, enemies" in the
South. When Calvin's mother died, the old man decided
to send back home--to New Hampshire— for another wife.
He wrote to a cousin:
I am fifty years old. I have all she will ever
need. Send me a good woman for a wife. I don't
care who she is, just so she is a good house
keeper and is at least thirty-five years old"
(pp. 236-7).
218
The wedding took place on the day the bride arrived.
"That was quick marrying, for him," Miss Burden says.
"The other time it took him over twelve years to get
married. ..." Then she tells in fine detail all the
circumstances of the wedding; of the gown made of flour
sacks, and a veil made from mosquito netting that covered
a picture in the local saloon, of young Calvin's hiding
out to escape being ringbearer (he was twelve years old),
of the groom resplendent in his carved Spanish boots and
hair "slicked with Bear's grease." When the time came for
the grandfather to give the bride away, he had been im-
i
bibing too freely, and he launched into an abolitionist
tirade:
He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any
man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and
Moses and the children of Israel were the same,
and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had
to be spilled in order that the black race might
cross into the Promised Land-(p. 238).
This is Joanna Burden's account of the wedding of her
father and mother. The two had never seen each other,
and the lady might be called "a mail-order bride." Nearly
all the details of the wedding are incongruous: the bride's
gown and veil, the groom's bear grease, and the drunken
speech of the grandfather. There is humor but no hilarity
in the scene.
219 !
Much of the humor in this novel grows out of un
usual situations or the peculiarities of the characters,
such as the welcome given Nathaniel in the account just
cited, and the wedding of the Burdens. The behavior of
Brown, when he learns of the reward money offered for the
capture of the murderer of Miss Burden, is quite amusing.
Brown believes that all the law enforcement officers are
conniving to keep him from getting the reward, and he
sets up such a racket in jail that he is taken out, day
after day, handcuffed, and allowed to run with the blood
hounds. In his extreme eagerness he talks of nothing but
the money, and, as Byron tells it:
"He hadn't slept none in some time, and they
said how he was trying to outrun the dogs so
the sheriff finally threatened to handcuff him
to a deputy to keep him back so the dogs could
smell something beside him. He needed a shave
already when they locked him up Saturday night,
and he needed one bad by now. I reckon he must
have looked more like a murderer than even
Christmas. And he was cussing Christmas now,
like Christmas was done hid out for meanness,
to spite him and keep him from getting that
thousand dollars" (pp. 286-7).
The irony of this passage is delightful. Brown is so
greedy for the reward that he tries to outrun the dogs,
and then he thinks that Christmas is just hiding out "for
meanness." Although such passages serve to show how
destitute Brown was of any principle, they are entertaining
220
because of their exaggeration of his greedy self-interest.
1 A later scene Involving Brown's meeting with Lena
(whom he had deserted back in Alabama) is also good com-
-edy. Brown has not heard anything about her being in
i
; Jefferson, but Byron (who knows the full story) has ar
ranged to have Brown taken to the little house where Lena
t
. and her new-born baby are. Brown hesitates to leave the
jail, under any pretext, until he is told that he is
going "to get his reward." At the scene of the late fire
and murder, Brown hangs back, but is finally pushed into
the cabin where Lena is, while the deputy sits down on
the doorstep to wait.
Lena on the cot watched the white scar beside
his mouth vanish completely, as if the ebb of
blood behind it had snatched the scar in passing
like a rag from a clothesline. She did not
speak at all. She just lay there, propped on
the pillows, watching him with her sober eyes
in which there was nothing at all--joy, surprise,
reproach, love--while over his face passed shock,
astonishment, outrage, and then downright terror
. . . while ceaselessly here and there about the
empty room went his harried and desperate eyes.
She watched him, held them by will, and drove them
up to meet her own. "Well, well," he said.
"Well, well, well. It's Lena" (p. 406).
The stammering continues. He tries to make up first
one lie and then another, while her eyes are fixed on him.
He is like a cornered animal, fearful, alert, ready to
fight or run.
221
"Come over here," she said. "Come on. I aint
going to let him bite you." When he moved he
approached on tiptoe. . . .
"Well, well," he said. "So there it is, sho
enough."
"Yes," she said. "Will you set down?" . . .
Again he cursed, soundless, badgered, furious.
Them bastards. Them bastards (p. 407).
When Lena mentions that there is a preacher nearby, Brown
says, "That's fine," but the voice left nothing behind,
"not even a definitely stated thought in the ear or the
belief." Lena tries to make conversation, but the eyes
and mind of Brown are working constantly, and he gives
evasive answers. After a while he has worked around to a
window in the back, and he says, almost in a whisper:
"It's a man outside. In front, waiting for me."
Then he was gone, through the window, without a
sound, in a single motion almost like a long
snake. Prom beyond the window she heard a single
faint sound as he began to run (p. 409).
The entire scene is conceived as comedy. The quiet,
calm, trusting Lena is set off against the rootless,
shifty Brown, who has always fled from responsibility.
The imagery used in describing him is nearly all animalis
tic; he is first compared to a locust, that lives on the
land till it is denuded and then moves on; then to a
horse, "not a mean, but a worthless horse"; then to a
cornered animal; and finally, as he slips out of the hands
222
of the deputy, to a "long snake." The appropriateness v
of these figures is immediately clear.
Both Lena and Brown are humorous--but in opposite
senses. She is patient, trusting, always cheerful; and
; he is the opportunist par excellence, ready to use anybody
or anything for personal ends. Concerning the portrait
of Lena, Howe says:
Beyond a doubt Lena is the most harmoniously
drawn character in the book, reflecting one of
Faulkner's benign moods: a relaxed, whimsical
affection for simple life. In writing about
her he never strains, as with Hightower, or be
comes feverishly troubled, as with Christmas.3
Other situations also receive humorous treatment.
One of these is the scene in which bloodhounds are brought
from a neighboring town to be put on the trail of the
murderer. The antics of dogs seem to amuse Faulkner,
probably because they so often suggest the irrationality
of men. One can almost sense his enjoyment as he wrote
about the "two gaunt and cringing phantoms whose droop-
eared and mild faces gazed about at the weary, pale faces
of the men. ..." Just at sunrise the eager dogs were
taken to the place where the crime had been committed.
Snuffing loudly and as one beast they took a
course, dragging the man who held the leashes.
They ran side by side for a hundred yards, where
3
P. 150.
223
they stopped and began to dig furiously into the
earth and exposed a pit where someone had buried
recently emptied food tins. They dragged the dogs
away by main strength. They dragged them some dis
tance from the cabin and made another cast. For
a short time the dogs moiled, whimpering, then
they set off again, full-tongued, drooling, and
dragged and carried the running and cursing men
at top speed back to the cabin, where feet planted
and with backflung heads and backrolled eyeballs,
they bayed the empty doorway with the passionate
abandon of two baritones singing Italian opera
(p. 280).
This scene follows close after the brutal and shocking
murder and serves to release the tension which has reached
a high pitch. And the bafflement of the dogs merely ac
centuates the perplexity and confusion of the men. We
laugh at the dogs because they dramatize so well the
frantic and futile efforts of the men to track down the
murderer.
The situation that is spelled out most fully is
the final scene, in which Lena and Byron leave Jefferson
to hitchhike to a new home— they don't know where. The
story is told by a traveling furniture dealer, home after
a trip down into Mississippi, to his wife after they have
gone to bed. In explaining the man's interest in the
story Faulkner says:
Perhaps the reason why he found it interesting
and felt that he could make it interesting in the
retelling is that he and his wife were not old
224
either, besides his having been away from home.
. . . for more than a week (p. 468).
In a leisurely fashion, and with many sly sugges
tions, he tells of the young couple and the baby he picked
; up on the road. Naturally he assumed that they were mar
ried, until the night they camped. The driver offered
to take them to a hotel, but they demurred and offered
to sleep beside the truck or anywhere. On the back of
the truck was a small "truck house" which the driver used
for sleeping in at night. Seeing their plight he offered
them the use of it, and Byron gladly aecepted--for Lena.
! Then the driver began to observe Byron, how strained and
unnatural he was, "like it was something that he would die
before he would even think about doing it if he hadn't
just tried everything else until he was desperate" (p.
471). The wife interrupted to ask what it was he aimed
to do, and the husband said, "you wait till I come to
that part. Maybe I'll show you, too." The wife does not
understand the difficulties of Byron until the husband
explains that Byron and Lena were not married. He tells
of the preparations they made for putting the woman and
child in the truck and of his and Byron's building a camp
fire and sleeping on the ground. In the night he hears
' Byron get up, but he pretends to be asleep and so overhears
225
the conversation between Byron and the girl. Prom this he
learns about what has gone before and of Byron’s desire
to marry her.
Then I got a little worried. I wasn't worried
about him doing her any harm she didn't want done
to her. In fact, I was pulling for the little
cuss. That was it. I couldn’t decide what I
had better do when she would begin to holler.
I knew that she would holler, and if I jumped
up and run to the truck, it would scare him off,
and if I didn’t come running, he would know that
I was awake and watching him all the time, and
he'd be scared off faster than ever. But I ought
not to worried. I ought to have known from that
first look I'd taken at her and at him" (p. 476).
Here his wife cuts in with a sarcastic remark:
"I reckon the reason you knew you never had to
worry was that you had already found out just
what she would do in a case like that * . ." (p.
476).
The husband relates in full detail the bungling efforts
of Byron to make love and of his being put off by Lena,
who said, "You go and lay down now, and get some sleep.
We got another fur piece to go tomorrow" (p. 477)* So
disgusted was the narrator that he said to his wife, "Well
I was downright ashamed to look at him, to let him know
any human man had seen and heard what happened. I be dog
if I didn't want to find the hole and crawl into it with
him" (p. 477).
The story does not end there. Byron struck out
through the woods and had not come back by morning. After
226
! the driver and Lena had eaten breakfast and she had
packed her things and "even swept the truck out with a
sweet gum branch" and put everything in order, they took
to the road again, with the driver thinking, "It isn't
any wonder you get along. When they up and run away on
you, you just pick up whatever they left and go on" (p.
j
478). As they neared the Tennessee line the driver began
to worry:
"Here I was with a strange woman and a baby too,
expecting every car that come up from behind and
passed us to be full of husbands and wives too,
let along sheriffs" (p. 478).
Meanwhile Lena sat in the back of the truck, nursing
; the baby and "looking out like she hadn't ever seen country
roads and trees and fields and telephone poles--before in
her life." At a turn in the road the driver slowed down
to pick up another passenger:
Standing there, face and no face, like he had
done desperated himself up for the last time, to
take the last chance, and that now he knew he
wouldn't ever have to desperate himself again
(p. 479).
As Byron sheepishly greeted Lena, who was not even
surprised, he said, "I done come too far now. I be dog
if I'm going to quit now." To this the girl replied, in
her characteristic way, "Aint nobody ever said for you to
quit" (p. 479)* With Byron by her side and the baby, "that
had been eating breakfast now for about ten miles, like
one of these dining cars on the train," they arrived at
a town in Tennessee. The story ends as the driver an
nounces this, and Lena says with mild surprise:
"My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint
been coming from Alabama but two months, and now
it's already Tennessee" (p. 480).
The ending of Light in August is pure folk comedy,
light-hearted, simple, amusing. It has elements that sug
gest Chaucer's broad and earthy humor, to which are added
the dialect and mannerisms of the characters. Faulkner
cleverly chose the traveling furniture dealer to serve as
narrator, thus providing a natural as well as effective
means of presenting Lena's story. The setting also
(husband and wife lying in bed, and the wife interrupting
now and then) is perfect for the occasion. After all the
bitterness and horror which Byron and Lena have witnessed,
but now left behind, this comes like a migration to a new
promised land. In the medieval sense this is a comedy,
for it ends happily, with a wedding (we presume) in the
offing.
The remark of Lena at the close of chapter one,
and again at the end of the book, "My, my. A body does
get aroundl" is a classic example of understatement.
Faulkner does not often use this type of humor (which is
228
generally regarded as more typically British than American)
but he can use it very effectively. In some of his short
stories, and in The Old Man, understatement adds both
humor and vividness to characterization.
Light in August has more satire than most Faulkner
novels (in the grim portraits of McEachern, "Doc" Hines,
and the Burdens), but the satire is too harsh and serious
to be considered as humor. All of these characters ex
hibit a religious fanaticism that is beyond belief. Of
the meaning of the novel, O'Connor makes this penetrating
statement:
Few or none of the reviewers recognized that this
novel at center is a probing into the terrible
excesses of the Calvinist spirit. If one does
not perceive that the Calvinist spirit is the
central issue in Light in August, the novel will
of necessity seem confused in theme (pp. 72-3)-
A close reading of the novel bears out this observa
tion. Occasionally the behavior of one of the characters
named above may verge on the humorous (as almost any excess
may appear at times), but the hardness and inhumanity of a
McEachern or a Hines is more shocking than amusing--more
fit for tragedy than comedy. The language chosen by
Faulkner to depict the tyranny and vindictiveness of these
men shows, beyond doubt, that his intent was to condemn,
not merely to ridicule, the irrational excesses.
The novel Is also a commentary on the various types
of family life presented: the severity and harshness of
the Hines and McEachern families, which made them hard
and fanatical; the repressions and strangeness of the
Burden family, resulting in Joanna's frustrations and
final doom; the irresponsibility of Lucas Burch, who
flees from Lena and all domestic entanglements. The only
couple in the novel who seem to have a normal relationship
and a chance for happiness are Lena and Byron. Their re
lationship is simple, natural, and decent, uncomplicated
by taboos, stern creeds, or past events.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CHANGING SOCIAL ORDER
Part One: Absalom, Absalom1
One of the most ambitious novels published by
.Faulkner in the fruitful decade of the 1930's was Absalom,
' vAbsalomI , which appeared in 1936. The Random House edition
provides in the appendix a Chronology of all the principal
events of the novel, a Genealogy which explains all the
relationships of the important characters, and the map
Faulkner prepared for The Portable Faulkner, with the
legend "Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi,
William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor"— a map showing
the sites of important events of this and other novels set
in Yoknapatawpha County. These helps are of great value
in unraveling the tangled skeins of the story.
The story is told by Quentin Compson, a young
-Southerner at Harvard^in 1909 to his roommate, Shreve
McCannon, a Canadian, who has asked Quentin to tell him
about the South— why people live there, what they do, what
they stand for. "You can't understand It. You would have
to be born there," Quentin says. Nevertheless he relates
231
the long and involved story of Thomas Sutpen.
A man who so far as anyone . . . knew either had
no past at all or did not dare reveal it--a man
who rode into town out of nowhere with a horse
and two pistols and a herd of wild beasts (negroes)
that he had hunted down singlehanded because he
was stronger in fear than even they were in what
ever heathen place he had fled from. . . .1
To Quentin the legendary story of Sutpen is sym
bolic of the rise and fall of the South, with its economy
; and aristocracy built upon slave-labor and cursed by the
problems arising from the presence of the Negroes. Sutpen
as a young mountain boy was turned away from the front
door of a plantation house by a liveried Negro; insulted
and hurt, he vowed that he would someday own a plantation
; with a great house, lands, and Negro slaves. At the age
of twenty-five, unknown and friendless, he suddenly ap
peared in Jefferson (as described above) with a wagon load
of wild Negroes who spoke a strange language, and a captive
~ French architect^ to bargain with the Indians for one hun
dred square miles of river-bottom land and to build an
imposing plantation house in the center of "Sutpen’s
Hundred."
To accomplish his life’s ambition--or "design," as
he called it--Sutpen needed wealth, lands, slaves, a fam
ily, and respectability. Thus, he bent all his efforts to
^William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York,
1936), p. 145.
232
achieving these ends and chose always the most direct
course. In pursuing his ends he brought tragedy not only
to himself but also to all those whose lives touched his.
. The plot, briefly summarized by O'Connor, is as follows:
Absalom, Absalomi, in part a story of miscegenation,
is southern. But the ultimate point of the story
is suggested by the title. Thomas Sutpen as a
young man trying to make his fortune in the West
Indies puts away his first wife and their son,
Charles, because he discovers she has negro blood.
By a second marriage back in Mississippi, where
he is attempting to establish a great plantation
(Sutpen's Hundred), he has two children, Henry and
Judith. Through the stratagem of the first wife,
Charles, his relationship still secret, enters
into the lives of his half-brother and half-sister,
^ becoming a close friend of Henry and the fiance
of Judith. Charles uses the engagement as a means
of reaching his father, and he would be satisfied
to leave Sutpen's Hundred forever if Thomas Sutpen
would acknowledge him, give him some sign of af
fection or sympathy. But Sutpen refuses, and
Charles, who then insists on marrying Judith, is
killed by Henry (p. 95)*
• As in Light in August, the supposed taint of Negro
blood is the cause of endless suffering, bloodshed, and
final tragedy. Just as Joe Christmas could not escape the
"doom” of his Negro blood and could not find acceptance
with either race, so Charles Bon is cursed by his taint of
Negro ancestry and is rejected first by his father, Sutpen,
and then by his half-brother, Henry, not because of the
incest involved in Charles' proposed marriage to Judith,
but because Charles is part Negro. Again, like Christmas,
233
Charles took a Negro mistress, an octoroon, and begot
on her the imbecile son, Jim Bon (later known as Bond),
who is the sole male survivor of Sutpen. The irony of
the failure of Sutpen's grand design is thus complete.
The tragedy of Sutpen's family is in large measure
the tragedy of the Old South, built upon slavery and de
stroyed by it. The so-called "innocence" of Sutpen, em
phasized by Faulkner, is an ignorance of the consequences
of his own actions. Sutpen failed to realize that he
could not recompense his first wife for her rejection
merely by a payment of money. He also failed to foresee
the tragic consequences of his failure to recognize Charles
as a son, and the involvement of Charles with Judith.
The Sutpen men, naturally, fought for the Confed
erate cause, Henry and Charles sharing the hardships and
privations together. It was not until, the War over, the
two sons were at the gate of the old plantation, with
Charles insisting that he would marry Judith, that Henry
shot him. When Sutpen came home he found Charles slain,
his daughter widowed before her marriage, his legitimate
son a murderer and fugitive, his place in ruins, and his
slaves gone. But he resolutely and ruthlessly set out
again to rebuild his fortunes and get another son. To
this end he proposed to his dead wife's sister, Miss Rosa
Coldfield, that they have a child and if it were a son,
✓
he would then marry her. When this proposition was indig
nantly refused, Sutpen, now in his sixties, seduced the
teen-age daughter of his white hired man, Wash Jones;
when the issue of this affair turned out to be a girl and
Sutpen refused to do anything for the girl he had ruined,
Wash killed him with a scythe. At the end of the story
Henry comes home to die, the old house is burned by Clytie
a Negro daughter of Sutpen, and only the idiot Jim Bond
survives. "As with the Compson family, an idiot is left,
a gibbering commentary on the disintegration of an older
order."2
When Quentin has finished this long and harrowing
tale of Sutpen's madness and the fall of his house, Shreve
McCannon says: "Now I want you to tell me just one thing
more. Why do you hate the South?" Unforgettable is the
anguished reply of Quentin:
"I don't hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at
once, immediately; "I don't hate it," he said.
I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold
air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don11i
I don't hate it. 1 don't hate it! [pT 2 j 8 ).
This novel, like most of Faulkner's, might be con
sidered a justification of the Biblical text that "he that
soweth the wind shall reap the whirlwind." In the pursuit
2
O'Connor, p. 96.
of his monomania Sutpen is indifferent to human beings,
and ruthlessly tramples on those who oppose him. In the
end his schemes all fail and he himself is destroyed.
Critics were generally severe in their judgments
of Absalom, Absalomi They disliked not only the gloomy,
or ’ ’ Gothic,” story but also the structure (more involved
than most) and the nervous, high-pitched style, which
suggested the tensions and frustrations of Miss Rosa
Coldfield, who had told most of the tale to Quentin. The
novel was the subject of one of Clifton Padiman's most
witty parodies in the New Yorker, and other reviewers were
perplexed or angered by the difficulties of the style.
Of this novel Bernard De Voto wrote: "Mr. Faulkner's new
3
fantasia is familiar to us in everything but style."
He then compares Absalom, Absalomi with As I Lay Dying
and Light in August and discovers an "identity in theme."
Further he says:
That theme is hardly reducible to words, and
certainly has not been reduced to words by Mr.
Faulkner. It is beyond the boundary of explana
tion; some undimensional identity of fear and
lust in which a man is both black and white, yet
neither, loathing both, rushing to embrace both
with some super-Tolstoian ecstasy of abasement,
fulfillment, and expiation (p. 4).
Calling this novel "clearly diabolism," De Voto bitterly
3
"Witchcraft in Mississippi," The Saturday Review
of Literature, October 31* 1936, p. 3*
assails both style and subject matter--"a supersaturated
solution of pity and despair" in which the characters are
grossly exaggerated, distorted, and diabolical. We cannot
dismiss them as lunatics, he argues, unless we are ready
to say that all the population of north Mississippi is
crazy. Mr. De Voto believes that Faulkner must be
"exploring the primitive violence of the unconscious
mind" (p. 14). In concluding, he says:
Meanwhile the talerfc for serious fiction shown
in "Sartoris" and the rich comic intelligence
grudgingly displayed from time to time, especially
in "Sanctuary," have been allowed to atrophy from
disuse and have been covered deep by a tide of
sensibility (p. 14).
Time has corrected many of the injustices of early
harsh reviews, and Absalom, AbsalomI, though still consid
ered to be formidable in style and gloomy in its plot, is
ranked as one of Faulkner's major novels. The idea still
persists, however, that this work is singularly lacking
in humor. It is true that it does not have the easy-going
humor of the early novels or the boisterous and earthy
humor of The Hamlet, but it still has occasional gleams of
wit and some anecdotes that add a light touch. Irony,
exaggeration, word-play, dialect, sardonic comment, and
situation humor are all present, though in a first reading
of the novel they are likely to be overlooked because the
reader is wrestling with time sequences and the involutions
237
! of sentence structure.
Thomas Sutpen came into the wilds of North
Mississippi in 1833 with his Negroes and French architect
1 to build a plantation house. When the great house was
I finished it was completely bare, until Sutpen went down
the river and eventually came back, mysteriously, with a
load of furniture. His next move was to find a wife to
grace his country mansion. Again, Sutpen moved with grim
determination:
So that when he entered the Methodist Church that
Sunday morning in his ironed coat, where were men
as well as women who believed that they had only
to look around the congregation in order to an
ticipate the direction his feet would take him,
until they became aware that he had apparently
marked down Miss Coldfield's father with the same
cold and ruthless deliberation with which he prob
ably marked down the French architect. They
watched in shocked amazement while he laid de
liberate siege to the one man with whom he could
have nothing in common, least of all, money--a
man who obviously could do nothing under the sun
for him save give him credit at a little cross
roads store or cast a vote for him if he should
ever seek ordination as a Methodist minister--a
Methodist steward, a merchant of modest position
and circumstances but who already had a wife and
family of his own, let alone a dependent mother
and sister, to support out of the proceeds of a
business which he brought to Jefferson ten years
ago in a single wagon— a man with a name for
absolute and undeviating and even Puritan up
rightness in a country and time of lawless
opportunity, who neither drank nor gambled nor
even hunted. In their surprise they forgot that
Mr. Coldfield had a marriageable daughter (pp.
42-3) .
238
There is a dry, sardonic humor in the telling of this
episode, in the incongruity of Sutpen's appeal to old
Mr. Coldfield for any kind of help, and in the unexpected
turn at the end. Sutpen's imperious manner and mysterious
journeys down the rivo?made him an object of suspicion
and hatred in the town. When the time for the wedding
came, the little church was almost deserted, though crowds
of people were gathered outside in the darkness and rain.
The bride was in tears.
It was the wedding which caused the tears: not
marrying Sutpen. Whatever tears that were for
that . . . came later. It was not intended to
be a big wedding. That is, Mr. Coldfield seems
not to have intended it to be. You will notice
that most divorces occur with women who were
married by tobacco-chewing j.p.'s in country
courthouses or by ministers waked after mid
night, with their suspenders showing beneath
their coattails and no collar on and a wife or
spinster sister in curl papers for witness. So
id it too much to believe that these women come
to long for divorce from a sense not of incom
pleteness but of actual frustration and betrayal?
That regardless of the breathing evidence of
children and all else, they still have in their
minds the image of themselves walking to music
and turning heads, in all the symbolical trap
pings and circumstances of ceremonial surrender
to that which they no longer possess? And why
not, since to them the actual and authentic
surrender can only be (and has been) a ceremony
like the breaking of a banknote to buy a ticket
for the train (p. 49)*
This long digression is put in the mouth of Miss
Rosa Coldfield, sister of the bride, and is interesting
as an example of Faulkner's preoccupation with marriage
and its physical aspects. The comment about J. p.'s and
"ministers waked after midnight" is typical of his inter
est in the incongruous. Another sardonic reference to
marriage is made in this comment about the thinking of
the bride's aunt:
Or maybe women are less complex than that and
to them any wedding is better than no wedding
and- a big wedding with a villain preferable to
a small one with a saint (p. 52).
Later in the novel there is an account of Sutpen's
family moving overland from Virginia to a new home. One
of the single girls gives birth to a child, and before
the long Journey ends is having another one. As Quentin
tells the story:-
So he knew neither where he had come from nor
where he was nor why. He was Just there, sur
rounded by the faces, almost all the faces he had
ever known (though the number of them was decreas
ing, thinning out, despite the efforts of the
unmarried sister who pretty soon, so he told
Grandfather, and still without any wedding had
another baby. . . . (p. 227).
This unnamed girl is a minor character, but her
plight is that of various other women in the novels--
Dewey Dell, Lena Grove, and Charlotte Rittenmeyer, to
name a few. The humor of the situation cited here is
that the number of travelers is "thinning out" despite
the regular additions made by the still unmarried girl.
Sexual imagery is employed in several places in the
240
| novel, a rather long example being found in the language
of Quentin (pp. 312-13) as he talks of Henry and Charles
at the University recognizing in themselves a family like
ness, and later a brief comparison— "the earth and the
: nights still a little cold and the hard tight buds like
1 young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees" (p. 323)»
: which is followed by a longer, philosophical reverie on
the evanescence of fleshly love. It should be remembered
that Quentin, who tells the story of Charles' love for
Judith, his half-sister, is the Quentin who later (in
The Sound and the Fury) commits suicide because of his
imagined incest with Caddy.
"And who to say if it wasn't maybe the possibility
of incest, because who (without a sister: I don't
know about the others) has been in love and not
discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly
encounter; who has not had to realize that when
the brief all is done you must retreat from both
love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and
refuse— the hats and pants and shoes which you drag
through the world— and retreat since the gods con
done and practice these and the dreamy immeasurable
coupling which floats oblivious above the trammel
ing and harried instant, the was-not: is: was:
is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless
elephants and whales. . • " (pp. 323-4).
Physical love--the psychopathology of sex--has a
strange fascination for Faulkner that seems equalled only
by his sense of the revolting aspects of the physical--
"the retreat," the self-consciousness, the sense of
24l
animalism. The aberrations of sexual love (in which his
stories abound) generally picture "love" as lust or self-
gratification, with romance and spirituality ruled out.
Very few of the characters depicted in the novels seem
capable of unselfish love; instead, they seek to exploit
one another for personal advantage.
Thomas Sutpen, for example, thinks of women only
as means' to an end— the establishing of a family to carry
on his name.. His first marriage (which he repudiated as
soon as he learned that his wife had some Negro blood)
was planned primarily to advance his economic and social
position. After the grim struggle to get a foothold in
Mississippi, to build a great house and furnish it, he
needed a woman to complete his grand design. Love did
not enter into his reckoning. What was important to him
was to find a marriageable white woman with a good repu
tation who would bear him a son. Thus the marriage to
Ellen Coldfield was purely a marriage of convenience.
When his plans were frustrated by the turn of
events (Henry's murder of Charles and Henry's flight),
Sutpen set out to rebuild his ruined plantation and to
beget another son: hence his coldblooded proposal to
Miss Rosa Coldfield. When she indignantly rejected his
suggestion--which was more akin to animal breeding than
to marriage--he turned, as a last resort, to Milly, to
use her body for his desperate purpose. It was when he
treated her, after she had given birth to a girl, with
less consideration than he would have given a prized mare,
that Wash Jones slew him. Women meant nothing to him ex
cept as they could further his plans.
The treatment of love and marriage is of course
satiric. Faulkner seems to be saying that such marriages
as Sutpen's to Ellen Coldfield and his liaison with Milly
can bring only bitterness and defeat. However, Sutpen's
efforts to clothe his acts with respectability, as in
the church wedding scene, exhibit an ironic humor. Love
and tenderness were not important to him, but a public
wedding in the grand tradition was.
Satire occurs in other situations also. One of
these is Faulkner's own ironic picture of the Southern
gentlemen who, because of their social rank, were made
officers. He describes, in a number of incidents, the
recklessness, the false pride, and the incompetence of
such men:
. . . generals who should not have been generals,
who were generals not through training in con
temporary methods or aptitude for learning them,
but by the divine right to say "Go there" conferred
upon them by an absolute caste system; or because
the generals of it never lived long enough to learn
how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles,
243
since they were already so obsolete as Richard or
Roland or duGuesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks
lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and
thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges
but no grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip
three separate armies in as many days and then tear
down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their
own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful
of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a
million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on
the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed
with his wife and be shot to death . . . (pp. 345-6).
In the most serious discussions the twisted smile
or sardonic aspersions of Faulkner are found. The passage
here focuses on the foolhardiness and unpreparedness of
these Southern aristocrats in their role as officers.
Many of them seemed to think of the War as a kind of
medieval tournament, with a lovely woman as the prize.
The romantic notions of the officers give Faulkner a
chance for sharp satire.
Another kind of humor related to the war years is
found in two rather lengthy anecdotes. One of them is re
counted in a letter from Charles Bon to Judith Sutpen
written on
. . . a sheet of notepaper with, as you can see,
the best of French watermarks dated seventy years
ago, salvaged (stolen if you will) from the gutted
mansion of a ruined aristocrat; and written upon
in the best of stove polish manufactured not twelve
years ago in a New England factory. Yes. Stove
polish. We captured it: a story in itself.
Imagine us, an assortment of homogeneous scare
crows, I wont say hungry because to a woman, lady
244
or female either, below Mason's and Dixon's,^in
this year of grace 1865* that word would be sheer
redundancy, like saying that we were breathing.
. . . And imagine us, the scarecrows with one of
those plans of scarecrow desperation . . . bringing
it off with a great deal of elan, not to say noise;
imagine, I say, the prey and the prize, the ten
plump defenseless sutlers' wagons, the scarecrows
tumbling out box after beautiful box after beautiful
box stenciled each with that U. and that S. which
for four years now has been to us the symbol of
the spoils which belong to the vanquished, of the
loaves and the fishes . . .; and the scarecrows
clawing at the boxes with stones and bayonets and
even with bare hands and opening them at last and
finding — What? Stove polish. Gallons and gallons
and gallons of the best stove polish, not a box of
it a year old yet and doubtless still trying to
overtake General Sherman with some belated amended
field order requiring him to polish the stove
before firing the house. How we laughed (pp.
129-30).
This situation is one of the most graphic in the
book, focussing attention as it does on the plight of
the Southern armies and yet, in the tongue-in-cheek
style of the narrator, treating the incident as comical.
Faulkner wisely gave the story to a university man, a
participant in the action, whose language is said to be
"gentle sardonic whimsical and incurably pessimistic
a description which might well apply to Faulkner. The
many ironies of the incident are climaxed by the reference
to Sherman (still hated in the South) who presumably had
orders to "polish the stove before firing the house'-i
The second anecdote is also based on incongruities.
245
It relates the "impossible" feat of Sutpen's ordering
from Italy and smuggling past the strict blockade the
two fine granite tombstones with his name and his wife's
name, birthdate, and date of death carved in them. He
i
had had the temerity to have his rank, Colonel, cut into
his stone, even though at that time the Southern army
had a custom of electing regimental officers each year,
: and there was a strong possibility that he "might be a
second lieutenant or even a private" by the time the
stone should be quarried and delivered to him in Virginia.
It seemed to Quentin that he could actually see
them: the ragged and starving troops without
shoes, the gaunt powder-blackened faces looking
backward over tattered shoulders, the glaring
eyes in which burned some indomitable desperation
of undefeat watching that dark interdict ocean
across which a grim lightless solitary ship fled
within its hold two thousand pounds--space con
taining not bullets, not even something to eat,
but that bombastic and inert carven rock which
for the next year was to be a part of the regi
ment, to follow it into Pennsylvania and to be
present at Gettysburg, moving behind the regi
ment in a wagon driven by the demon's body ser
vant through swamp and plain and mountain pass,
the regiment moving no faster than the wagon
could, with starved gaunt men and gaunt spent
horses knee deep in icy mud or snow, sweating
and cursing it through bog and morass like a
piece of artillery, speaking of the two stones
as "Colonel" and "Mrs. Colonel"; then through
the Cumberland mountains, traveling at night to
dodge Yankee patrols, and into Mississippi in
the late fall of '64 . . . (pp. 189-90).
The humor here Is grim and ironic, but remarkably
vivid. The incongruity of carting a massive tombstone
all over the South in wartime, and under the most trying
conditions, when the men were hungry, gaunt, and harried,
is most striking. The incident illustrates, in a sort of
shocking tragicomedy, the vanity, self-interest, and
impracticality of Sutpen, one of the Confederate officers.
The implication is clear: how could the South hope to
win when its officers were more interested in monuments
for themselves than in food for their troops?
Humor of another sort, dialect, is not so abundant
In this novel as in many of the others, but it is repre
sented in the language of the Negroes and Wash Jones,
the lazy, improvident, hard-drinking handyman on Sutpen's
estate. He is characterized by his first speech, when he
tells Rosa Coldfield of the death of Charles Bon: "Air
you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come on out yon.
Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him
dead as a beef" (p. 133)- In another place Jones is ad
dressing Sutpen after the War: "Well, Kernel, they kilt
us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?" (p. 184).
This bravado is typical not only of Wash but also of his
class--the proud poor whites. In the scene in which Jones
\
kills the "Kernel" he is thinking to himself:
247
Wash Jones has fixed old Sutpen at last. It
taken him twenty years to do it, but he has got
a holt of old Sutpen at last where Sutpen will
either have to tear meat or squeal (p. 287).
Other expressions of his in the typical deep South idiom
are "fit" for fight, "brung," "kilt," "drug" (dragged),
"k;.aint," "tech," and "helt." One of the Negroes, Luster,
says, typically, "Yawl come on and less go home . . .
aint no more hunting today" (p. 213). Faulkner's use of
the native idiom is sure and effective, making the charac
ters seem more real because of the touches of humor.
Two characters of the second rank in Absalom,
Absalomi are tragicomic figures. One of these is Sutpen's
captive French architect, who is introduced as "a small,
alertly resigned man with a grim, harried Latin face, in
a frockcoat and a flowered waistcoat and a hat" which he
wore constantly, day after day, for two years while over
seeing the naked Negroes as they cut timber and made
bricks in the steaming Mississippi swamp. Toward the end
of the story the little Frenchman made a break for freedom,
leaping from tree to tree like a flying squirrel. Quentin
tells the story as he had heard it from his grandfather:
That was how Sutpen said it. He and grandfather
were sitting on a log now because the dogs had
faulted. That is, they had treed--a tree from
which he (the architect) could not have escaped
yet which he had undoubtedly mounted because they
248
found the sapling pole with his suspenders still
knotted about one end of it that he had used to
climb the tree, though at first they could not
understand why the suspenders, and it was three
hours before they comprehended that the architect
had used architecture, physics, to elude them
. . . he had chosen that tree and hauled that
pole up after him and calculated stress and
distance that trajectory and had crossed a gap
to the next nearest tree that a flying squirrel
could not have crossed and traveled from there on
from tree to tree for almost half a mile before
he put foot on the ground again (pp. 238-9)*
In later scenes we have the dogs returning to the
tree on which the suspenders hung, baying wildly and re
fusing to come away--a scene recalling the confusion of
the bloodhounds in Light in August. These two themes--
flight and pursuit--are common in Faulkner's novels and
are often treated comically (as, for example, Jason's
frantic pursuit of his niece Quentin and the circus man).
The architect finally was run to ground by the dogs and
was about to be eaten alive:
Grandfather said how maybe the niggers believed
that by fleeing the architect had voluntarily
surrendered his status as interdict meat, had
voluntarily offered the gambit by fleeing,
which the niggers had accepted by chasing him
and won by catching him, and that now they would
be allowed to cook and eat him, both victors and
vanquished accepting this in the spirit of sport
and sportsmanship and no rancor or hard feelings
on either side (p. 250).
The wild, tattered, outraged little Frenchman, who
fights like a cornered wildcat against niggers and dogs
249
: alike and who, when rescued, makes a long speech in
I
f
French, but so vehement and so rapid that even a Frenchman
would not have caught all of it, is a masterpiece of
tragicomic characterization. A brief quotation will
i
give some of the flavor of it:
. . . and he took the bottle in one of his little
dirty coon-like hands and raised the other hand
and even fumbled about his head for a second be
fore he remembered that the hat was gone, then
flung the hand up in a gesture that Grandfather
said you simply could not describe, that seemed
to gather all misfortune and defeat that the human
race ever suffered into a little pinch in his
fingers like dust and fling it backward over his
head . . . (pp. 257-8).
The spirit and indomitable will of the harried architect
in his fight against men and dogs elicits the admiration
of Faulkner who, though picturing the comic aspects of
the struggle, is clearly on the side of the Frenchman.
The other character presented in a tragicomic
light is old Mr. Coldfield, Sutpen's father-in-law. He
is a symbol of ironic protest, a Southerner who hated
slavery and, before the War, made "calm, logical" speeches
against slave-holding. But after the War began he locked
himself in his store, refusing to sell to any military
men or even to their families.
He refused to permit his sister to come back
home to live while her horse-trader husband was
in the army, he would not allow Miss Rosa to
look out the window at passing soldiers. . . .
250
He spent the day, the neighbors said, behind one
of the slightly opened blinds like a picquet on
post, armed not with a musket but with the big
family Bible . . . until a detachment of troops
would pass: whereupon he would open the Bible
and declaim in a harsh loud voice even above
the sound of the tramping feet, the passages of
the old violent vindictive mysticism which he had
already marked as the actual picquet would have
ranged his row of cartridges along the window
sill (pp. 81-2).
When his store was broken into one night and
looted, "doubtless by a company of strange troops bivou
acked on the edge of town and doubtless abetted, if only
vocally, by his own fellow citizens," the old man climbed
to the attic with a hammer and handful of nails, nailed
the door shut and threw the hammer out the window. Hence
forth he had to be fed until his death by his daughter,
who passed food and water up to him by means of rope and
pulley attached to the attic window. The erratic behavior
of the deranged old man is too pathetic to be laughable,
though the situation has ridiculous aspects. The tendency
to laugh at the old man's foolish conduct is repressed
because the situation is too grim--and too permanent.
If his boarding himself up had been only a temporary pro
test, and he had come out to go hunting, say, the result
would have been comic. But because the poor, deluded
man continues to believe his wild fancies, he becomes a
tragicomic creature, evoking, in the main, sympathy.
From the evidence cited in this study of Absalom,
Absalom1 we seem justified in concluding that, in spite
of what critics have said, the novel does have a leavening
of humor. Quite naturally, the humor is colored by the
sombreness of the theme and the diabolical nature of the
protagonist, Sutpen. It may be described, in general
terms, as sardonic or harsh, or to use a phrase applied
to Quentin, the narrator, “sullen bemusement." The
language, like the story itself, is sometimes strained,
exaggerated, and grotesque. Some of the humor belongs to
the frontier type (the anecdotes, for example), some to
the language category (dialect and satire), and two situ
ations may be called tragicomedy. There is no single
character that may be called comic. The humor in this
novel is not prominent or plentiful, and because the long,
involved tale is told in a kind of breathless rush, one
can easily overlook the occasional light touches and comic
relief. A single reading would undoubtedly lead one to
say that the novel is lacking in characteristic Faulknerian
humor. But after a second reading one is more likely to
agree with Herschel Brickell:
The book is no light novel by any stretch' of
the imagination, but it has more than a little
of Faulkner's humor, which is rare and precious,
and it shows he can be tender when he likes.
Absalom, Absalomi, like the Biblical story from
which the title is taken, is tragic. Since the novel
admittedly sets out to give some explanation of the plight
of the postwar South, with its poverty, suffering, and
defeat (the story of Sutpen's rise and fall is of course
symbolic of the South's empire built upon slavery and the
consequent decay and collapse of the old order), the
situations are more tragic than comic. There is often
irony in the events that seem to conspire to defeat
Sutpen at every turn, but the irony is usually bitter.
When Faulkner writes of the racial problems that have
plagued the South, and of miscegenation and its fearful
consequences, the theme is too heavy, too fraught with
sorrow and shame (especially for a sensitive Southern
writer) to allow for much levity or good-natured humor.
4
North American Review, Vol. XVII (December 1932),
p. 571.
Part Two: The Unvanquished
The novel which followed Absalom, Absalomi was
The Unvanquished, published by Random House in 193^• It
was made up of a series of short stories previously pub
lished in various magazines, with only one story, the
final one, "Odor of Verbena," written especially for this
volume. In the main, the stories romanticize the exploits
of the Sartoris family in the Civil War and immediately
thereafter, but some scenes of the postwar suffering in
the South are grimly realistic, and at the end of the
novel there is a serious questioning of the values and
theatrical poses of the old order.
O'Connor's comment about the significance of the
novel is worth quoting in full:
Sartoris there are scenes in which the dashing
Bayard, an ancestor who fought with Jeb Stuart,
is gallant and courageous and headlong. But there
is no attempt to probe the moral center of his
actions, or indeed of the old order itself. Al
though there is this at least curious exchange
between Grandfather Bayard Sartoris (who is the
boy Bayard in The Unvanquished) and a Civil War
veteran: "Old Bayard shook the ash from his cigar.
'Well,' he said, 'what the devil were you folks
fighting about, anyway?' 'Bayard,' old man Falls
answered, 'be damned ef I ever did know'." Nor
does The Unvanquished, until the final story, do
much probing into the values in the old order.
It has little to do, incidentally, with the ante
bellum world— its setting is Northern Mississippi
toward the War's close and later (p. 101).
254
The early Incidents concern two boys, a white
named Bayard and a Negro named Ringo, who fight their
own war against the Yankees and "protect" Bayard's Grandma
Millard from the enemy. She is a prim, pious, shrewd old
lady who outwits the Yankees, gets possession of many of
their horses and mules and manages to make a profitable
' business of reselling them to the Union army. She is
■ later killed by Grumby, a bushwhacking companion of Ab
Snopes, whom Bayard and Ringo hunt down and destroy.
One of the stories, "Skirmish at Sartoris," tells
of the wedding of John Sartoris and Drusilla, a beautiful
; and brave girl who, dressed as a man, had followed him
and fought at his side all over the South. Although their
relationship had been perfectly chaste, local opinion re
quired them to be married to preserve the girl's respecta
bility. The wedding was halted temporarily to allow
Sartoris to drive out some carpetbaggers and stop some
Negroes from voting.
After allowing, in true gallant fashion, two
male Burdens (their story is told by Joanna in
Light in August) to shoot at him first, Sartoris
kills them. Sartoris, of course, disenfranchises
the Negro--but this is not considered even briefly.
The action is turned sharply back to Aunt Louisa's
shocked surprise that anything should have post
poned her daughter Drusilla1s becoming an honor
able woman. . . . Sartoris seems a cardboard
"hero," moving inside a stereotyped, thoughtless
action (pp. 101-2).
255
In the final story, "Odor of Verbena," Bayard,
now a grown young man, looks rather critically at the
actions of his father and the Southern rebels. Drusilla
suggests that John Sartoris behaves as a true Southerner
should: "There are not many dreams in the world, but
there are a lot of human lives." To her, the dreams
count more than the lives. But Bayard believes that his
father is too ready to kill and too much influenced by
dreams of heroism. Sartoris' conscience troubled him
because of the men he had killed and when he became in
volved in a dispute with a former partner (the Falkner
family story again), he allowed himself to be killed rather
than take the other man's life.
The code of honor required Bayard to avenge his
father's death, and though he shrank from the thought of
killing, he realized that only by challenging Redlaw,
his father's killer, could he maintain the respect of
his family and friends. Sartoris' friends gathered around
him with that "curious vulture-like formality which South
ern men assume in such situations." To prove to himself
that he was not afraid to face Redlaw, he went alone into
the office to confront the armed man who had killed his
father, but neither man attempted to shoot the other.
The cause of honor had been served, and now Redlaw
immediately left the town and Bayard could hold his head
up in the presence of his father's companions. "Bayard
has a margin of admiration for the dream which his father
had lived, but he knows that it invited arrogance,
theatricality, heroics, violence, and even murder." He
learns, too, that Drusilla is shallow, selfish, and dis
loyal to the memory of her husband. The old order is
seen to be filled with theatrics and staginess, with very
little that was sound and enduring.
Turning from the story itself to a consideration
of the humor, one finds not only a good variety but a
considerable quantity. Much of it is related to the
frontier type, but there are also good examples of irony,
sarcasm, droll wit, name humor, dialect, and character
humor. There are many comic situations in The Unvanquished
For example, Granny Millard reads to the two boys from a
large book--the only one available--a cookbook. Later,
the old lady hides the two boys under the voluminous folds
of her dress to keep them from being found by a Yankee
officer whose horse they have shot. She twice washes the
mouths of the boys with soap because they have said for
bidden words. There is humor also in the fact that she
confesses lying about the number of horses she has stolen,
though she has gone on dealing in them. She is ready to
257
lie in any emergency -and then repent at a more convenient
1 time.
The most elaborate situation involves her deals
with the Yankees. With a letter from a Union officer
ordering the army to restore certain animals in reparation
for some taken from her, she makes a regular business of
raiding their stock and then reselling the horses back to
the army. Her ability wins the admiration, not only of
Ab Snopes, but of the Union officer who finally catches
up with her. Ab Snopes says of her:
"You're a good un," he said. "Yessum. You got
my respect. John Sartoris himself can't tech
you. He hells all over the country day and night
with a hundred armed men, and it's all he can do
to keep them in crowbait to ride on. And you set
here in this cabin, without nothing but a handful
of durn printed letterheads, and you got to build
a bigger pen to hold the stock you aint got no
market yet to sell. How many head of mules have
you sold back to the Yankees?"
• _
"A hundred and five," Granny said.^
When the Union officer finally tracked her down and dis
covered the field full of mules, he saw clearly that she
had burned off the U. S. brand from their flanks.
"And I guess you will call those scars left-
handed trace.gallsi" the lieutenant said. "You
have been using cast-off band-saw bands for
traces, hey? I'd rather engage Forrest's whole
^William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York,
1934), p. 139-
258
brigade every morning for six months than spend
the same length of time trying to protect United
States property from defenseless Southern women
and niggers and children. DefenselessJ God help
the north if Davis and Lee had ever thought of
the idea of forming a brigade of grandmothers
and nigger orphans, and invading us with iti"
he hollered, shaking the letters at Granny (pp.
163-64).
The glorification of Granny Millard is part of the myth
of the Southern woman's resistance to the aggressor; it
is also a variation of the tall tale, which Faulkner
adapts to many purposes. Her deeds are not only heroic,
but too big for belief. She becomes a symbol for the re
sourcefulness, courage, and invincibility of the South
in its death struggle. And her qualities are brought
into sharp focus by the admiring or exasperated men about
her. The officer questioning her about her double-dealing
goes on to say:
"Listen. I know you don't have to tell me, and
you know I can't make you. I ask it only out of
pure respect. Respect? Envy. Won't you tell
me?" (p. 164).
By such devices Faulkner makes her deeds more credible,
and the humor of the situation adds both interest and
vitality.
Sarcasm is rather abundant in this novel. The Union
colonel who had Just been shot at by the two boys says to
Granny, hiding them under her skirt:
259
"So you have no grandchildren. What a pity in a
place like this which two boys would enjoy--sports,
fishing, game to shoot at, perhaps the most ex
citing game of all, and none the less so far being,
possibly, a little rare near this house. And with
a gun— a very dependable weapon, I see. Though I
understand that this weapon does not belong to you.
Which is just as well. Because if it were your
weapon--which it is not— and you had two grandsons,
or say a grandson and a negro playfellow--which
you have not— and if this were the first time--
which it is not-.-someone next time might be
seriously hurt" (pp* 36-37)*
On another level Drusilla uses sarcasm to dramatize
the difference between the old way of life, in ante
bellum days, and the life after the War.
"Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You
lived in the same house your father was born in,
and your father's sons and daughters had the sons
and daughters of the same Negro slaves to nurse
and to coddle; and then you grew up and you fell
in love with your acceptable young man, and in
time you would marry him, in your mother's wedding
gown, perhaps, and with the same silver for pres
ents she had received; and then you settled down
for evermore. . . . Stupid, you see. But now you
can see for yourself how it is; it's fine now;
you don't have to worry about the house and the
silver, because they got burned up and carried
away; and you don't have to worry about the
Negroes, because they tramp the roads all night
waiting for a chance to drown in homemade Jordan.
. . . Now and then say, 'Thank God for nothing'"
(pp. 114-15).
Drusilla's bitterness is partly personal, partly the
outcry of a people whose way of life was brought to a
sudden and shocking end. The disruption of her way of
life was typical of what was happening throughout the
260
South, and her fine irony is the only defense left her.
The Negroes in The Unvanquished are more or less
stereotypes. Those who remain at home and help the family
in the difficult years are pictured as faithful, kindly
and contented, and often humorous. The Negroes who fled
are described as troublesome or demented, and are usually
shown in droves heading for "Jordan" and freedom. One
; of the comic characters is Ringo, the companion of the
. young Bayard. One of his habits is using profanity, which
. Granny treats by washing his mouth with soap. Ringo re-
. marked on one occasion (speaking of the brisk business in
mules), "We done damn well." Granny washed his mouth out
with soap, as she had done before. Later Ringo said, "I
still says we done damn well." When he stole a buggy from
the Yankees, he referred to the act as "borrowing," and
when asked one time how he was feeling he replied, "I
manages to stand hit."
The dialect of the Negroes and the two poor whites
(Snopes and Grumby) gives the novel a distinct flavor.
Their language, though illiterate, is vigorous and pic
turesque. Some of their mispronunciations are: "whup,"
"parisawl," "nemmine," "lemme," "tech," "kilt," "a-tall,"
"tromped"; some variants for verbs are: "I done et,"
"got shet of," "misdoubted," "we captived," "Tennessee
gaunted him"; and such provincialisms as "It was a crowd
of them," "ever side of me," "that ere," "I reckon,"
"aren't I?" and "you all" or "yawl." Dialect seems to be
used most freely in those stories which Faulkner published
first in magazines, possibly because the humor and color
of such expressions have a wide popular appeal. The
stories collected in The Unvanquished, in The Hamlet, and
in Go Down, Moses, not to mention the broad selection
found in The Collected Stories, would seem to bear out
this generalization.
Name humor is fairly common in this novel also.
Some of the Negro names are Joby, Philadelphy, Louvinia,
Jingus, and Flurella. Besides these were found two
mouth-filling names for preachers--The Reverend Ptolemy
Thorndyke, M. A. (Edinburgh), F.R.S.S., author of a
"History of Werewolf Men in England, Ireland and Scotland
and Including Wales," and Brother Fortinbride, a country
minister. The name Snopes appears (it is discussed else
where) and also the significant name Burden, identifying
forebears of Joanna Burden of Light in August.
Perhaps the most fully developed humor of The Un-
vanquished is the full-length portrait of Granny Millard,
whose exploits have been mentioned already. She is one
of Faulkner's delightful old ladies— Miss "Jenny" DuPre
and "Aunt" Molly are others--who have sharp minds and
ready tongues. Granny Millard, as a. central figure, is
not only a defender of Southern tradition and honor but
also an effective forayer. Although she used soap to
disinfect the mouths of the boys for cursing, she used
the same words; and though she stole mules to resell to
the army, she would go to church afterward to confess
and pray.
One of her chief characteristics was her endless
vitality. She was always in motion, and never daunted by
difficulties. Ringo states his opinion of her in comic
language:
"And don't yawl worry about Granny. She 'cide
what she want and then she kneel down and tell
God what she aim to do, and then git up and do
hit, and them that don't like hit can git outen
the way or git trompled" (pp. 105-6).
The Yankee officer who made the wry comment about the de
fenseless Southern women felt very much as Ringo did:
"You know hit aint no Yankee gonter bother her if he know
hit" (p. 70). Thus friend and enemy alike learned to
respect the shrewd, hard-bargaining, strong-willed little
old womhn. Perhaps Faulkner had her chiefly in mind when
he named the novel The Unvanquished.
The novel is unconvincing as a bit of historical
fiction and offers no new treatment of the Reconstruction
263
days or postwar problems of the South. O'Connor remarks:
The Unvanquished begins as a picture-book story
of the glorious heroism of a people at war but
ends with the recognition that heroics, in the
words of Aunt Jenny, are "for small boys or fool
young women." The reader wonders whether the
concluding story was present to Faulkner's mind
throughout the writing of the earlier stories or
whether the need for it was borne in upon him as
he studied what he had written (pp. 102-3).
By and large, the book is backward-looking and nostalgic,
and suggests that Faulkner, though attracted by the
chivalry and surface glitter of the pre-war culture,
nevertheless felt compelled to show its failure and col- I
lapse. I
The greater part of the novel treats the War and
the problems of the whites with a kind of patriotic humor j
"pickled in scorn." The feats attributed to "Granny" !
Millard belong to the tradition of the oral tall tale, !
and the exploits of the country boys (Ringo, the colored
boy, and Bayard, his loyal white companion), fit into the
Huck Finn and Negro Jim pattern. The novel has consider- l
able dialect and situation humor, a moderate amount of
irony, and character humor in the person of "Granny"
i
Millard. She is one of Faulkner's lovable old ladies, j
fearless,.indomitable, shrewd, and sharp-tongued. i
264
PART Three: The Hamlet
In several of the early Yoknapatawpha novels the
name of Snopes appears. Ab Snopes is a horse thief in
The Unvanquished, Clarence Snopes is a cheap politician
in Sanctuary, and Byron Snopes has a minor position in
the Jefferson bank in Sartoris. In The Hamlet, published
by Random House in 1940, the Snopes saga is told in its
fullness. Several of the stories which make up this
loose, episodic novel were first published as short
stories in Scribner1s, Harper1s, and The Saturday Evening
Post.
The Hamlet is named for the little settlement
known as Frenchman's Bend near the Yoknapatawpha River in
the southeast part of the county (as shown in Faulkner's
map of his mythical county, first prepared for The
Portable Faulkner). The place is described in the opening
chapter as the remnants of a once great and prosperous pre-
Civil War plantation, with its once splendid mansion, now
a shell of a house and the gardens and fields weed-choked
and neglected. Will Varner and his family own the old
place and the nearby country store, as well as the fields
now tilled by pioneer stock from the Atlantic seaboard,
though originally from England, Scotland, and Wales, men
265
who bore such names as
Turpin and Haley and Whittington, McCallum and
Murray . . . Riddup and Armistid and Doshey
which could have come from nowhere since cer
tainly no man would deliberately select one of
them for his own.l
The descendants of the early settlers (who came "with
flintlock rifles and dogs and children and home-made
whiskey stills and Protestant psalm-books" which they
could not even read) are described as "Protestants and
Democrats and prolific" (p. 5).
Will Varner was not only "the largest landholder
and best supervisor in one county," but a Justice of the
Peace and election commissioner who was considered a
fountainhead of legal advice, a man of many talents:
"a farmer, usurer, and veterinarian," father of sixteen
children, owner of the local blacksmith shop and every
thing else of value in the community. In the novel
Faulkner uses the expository method freely in characteriz
ing not only Will Varner and his family but various other
personages too. Once the story is launched, however, he
uses narration, conversation, and action to reveal the
lives and motives of the Varners and their neighbors.
An example of Faulkner's dry wit in describing Varner is
William Faulkner, The Hamlet (New York, 195O),
p. 4.
this characteristic quotation: "Judge Benbow of Jefferson
once said of him that a milder mannered man never bled a
mule or stuffed a ballot box" (p. 5)*
The greater part of the story is told by a good-
natured, talkative sewing machine agent named Ratliff,
who is known and liked by Negroes and whites alike
throughout northern Mississippi, and who has a manner
all his own in retailing gossip or stories about his
fellow countrymen. Faulkner introduces him as a "Pleas
ant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable" re
tailer of yarns, recipes, and news of weddings, funerals,
and local happenings. "He spoke," says Faulkner, "in a
pleasant, lazy, equable voice which you did not discern
at once to be even more shrewd than humorous" (p. 14).
In the droll manner of a backwoods philosopher Ratliff
talks in the idiom of the Southerner, his speech careless
and illiterate, but enlivened by wit and many homely
figures. Faulkner tells us that he usually talked with
out laughing, and "in a tone of absolutely creamlike
innocence" (p. 16). He is clearly one of Faulkner's
favorite creations, and it is Ratliff's masterful story
telling technique that makes The Hamlet probably the most
humorous of all Faulkner's novels. Ratliff sets the tone
for the entire novel-— a relaxed, whimsical, anecdotal kind
267
of talk, with keen and comic observations on human nature.
In brief, the story concerns the gradual sucking
dry of Frenchman's Bend by Flem Snopes and his worthless
clan. Little by little they dispossess the Varners, take
over the land, the store, and the women, and— after
nothing of value is left--like a horde of hungry insects,
they move on to new fields. The Snopeses multiply like
flies: at first there is only Ab Snopes (ex-horse thief
and barn-burner) with his two bovine daughters, his
lumpish wife and son Flem; one son, Sarty (his real name
is "Colonel Sartoris") has run away because the father
had burned the barn of a landlord. But after Ab led the
way to Frenchman's Bend, other Snopeses appeared like
rabbits on the scene. The list includes Mink, and I.O.,
Isaac or Ike the idiot, Lump or Launcelot, Eck, Wallstreet
Panic, and St. Elmo.
The names given to the Snopes tribe are obviously
intended as caricatures. The surname Snopes seems to be
an invention of Faulkner's, the letters "sn" suggesting
many unpleasant sounds and associations, as "snail,"
"snake," "snarl," " sneak," "sneer," "snide," "snob,"
"snort," "snoop," and even the ugly word "snot." The
sound"ope" suggests, first of all, "dope" and possibly
such terms as "mope," "slope," and "bloke." Whatever the
origin of the name Snopes, it is wonderfully effective
in evoking unpleasant sensations. The name given the
most repulsive member of the clan, Flem, is especially
offensive. As suggested by Campbell; and Foster, this is
the phonetic spelling of the word "phlegm," defined as
"the thick mucus secreted in the respiratory passages and
discharged by coughing." The word also suggests sluggish
ness and apathy.
According to Campbell and Foster, Phil Stone (to
whom The Hamlet is dedicated) and Faulkner worked up the
Snopes saga together, using local types and anecdotes.
They say that three new characters were planned for later
works: "Dollar Watch" Snopes, "Montgomery Ward" Snopes,
2
and "Admiral Dewey" Snopes, to be known as "Ad."
The name humor is further complicated by the
introduction of animal nicknames, suggesting
Aesopian animal characteristics, and grandiose
Christian names negated by the incongruous
nicknames (p. 105).
The animality of the Snopes family is suggested
by the language used to describe them: Flem is compared
to a chipmunk, I.0. to a weasel, Ike to a bear; one of
them is named Mink (a murderer), and the whole tribe is
compared to rodents, a term suggesting rats. That this
was the intention is shown by the way in which St. Elmo
^William Faulkner, p. 103.
269
is described. In Varner's store he is discovered eating
candy out of one of the cases, "a hulking, bear-shaped
figure." Varner drove him from the store.
The boy crossed the gallery and descended the
steps, the tight overalls undulant and reluctant
across his flabby thighs. Before he reached the
ground, his hand rose from his pocket to his
mouth; again his ears moved faintly to the motion
of chewing.
"He's worse than a rat, aint he?" the clerk said.
"Rat, hell," Varner said, breathing harshly,
"he’s worse than a goat. First thing I know
he'll graze on back and work through that lace
leather and them ham-strings and lap-links and
ring-bolts and eat you and me clean out the back
door. And then be damned if I wouldn't be afraid
to turn my back for fear he would cross the road
and start in on the gin and blacksmith shop. Now
you mind what I say. If I catch him hanging
around here one more time, I'm going to set a
bear-trap for him" (p. 364).
Later Varner says, "By God, I've done everything but put
out poison for him."
Some of the other names in The Hamlet are evidently
chosen for their suggestive qualities. The farmers have
such names as Armstid, Tull, Littlejohn, and Bookwright.
The country school-teacher who is fascinated by the
village beauty, Eula Varner, is named Labove, a name
suggestive of Frenchmen and love. But the rustic fellow
who finally wins the country girl whom all the men and
boys have been following like a pack of dogs is named
270
Hoake McCarroni The connotation here ("hokum" and
"carrion") seems obvious.
As noted earlier, The Hamlet is more thoroughly
humorous than any of Faulkner's other works. It contains
many variations of Southern frontier humor, including, as
Campbell and Foster observe, "the tall tale, dialectal
variations, hyperbole, understatement, obscenity, Aesopian
animal humor, trick situations, and so on" (p. 102).
Besides these types the novel contains a sort of Faustian
fantasy (the'scene in which Flem visits the Prince of
Darkness and bests him), many situations in which boister
ous horseplay or practical jokes are employed, folklore
and rustic humor, and an extended example of "surrealistic"
humor.
Two notable examples of the tall tale are found in
this novel. The first one is told by Ratliff to explain
why Ab Snopes, who prided himself on his knowledge of
horseflesh, has turned sour or "plumb curdled." The story
tells of Ab's encounter with a notorious trader named Pat
Stamper, who invariably beat other men in horse trades.
Ratliff spins the yarn out to great length, with many de
tails that sharpen both the situation and the principals
involved. In brief, the tale concerns a worthless nag
that Snopes succeeded in trading to Stamper for a pair of
271
mules that at first sight appeared to be all right but
which were too weak and sick to get out of town. In
desperation Snopes went back to Stamper and demanded to
, have his horse back. Stamper protested that he hadn't
wanted the horse and had "done got shut of it." But when
Snopes insisted on getting rid of the mules, even if he
had to pay some cash, Stamper offered him another horse,
one about the same size as the one Ab had traded earlier,
except that it was of a darker color and much fatter.
After considerable parleying, the trade was made, and the
new horse was hitched to the wagon. As Ab drove away,
Stamper said, "Sho, now. That horse will surprise you"
(p. 49) sH The reader suspects that this is a double en
tendre, but Ab is drinking too heavily to note the impli
cation.
On the way home a rain storm comes up and the
horse begins to change color. As Ratliff tells the story:
"The horse!" I hollered. "He's changing color!"
He was sober then. We was both outen the wagon
then and Ab's eyes popping and a bay horse standing
in the traces where he had went to sleep looking
at a black one. He put his hand out like he
couldn't believe it was even a horse and touched
it at a spot where the reins must every now and
then just barely touch it and just about where
his weight had come down on it when he was trying
to ride it at Stamper's, and next I knowed that
horse was plunging and swurging. I dodged just
as it slammed into the wall behind me; I could
even feel the wind in my hair. Then there was a
27.2
sound like a nail jabbed into a bicycle tire.
It went whishhhhhhh and then the rest of that
shiny black horse we had got from Pat Stamper
vanished. I don't mean me and Ab was standing
there with just the mule left. We had a horse
too. Only it was the same horse we had left
home with that morning and that we had swapped
Beasley Kemp the sorghum mill and the straight
stock for two weeks ago. We even got our fish
hook back (Ab had inserted this in the horse's
back to make it more active), with the barb still
bent where Ab had bent it and the nigger had
just moved it a little. But it wasn't till next
morning that Ab found the bicycle pump valve
under its hide just inside the nigh foreshoulder—
the one place in the world where a man might own
a horse for twenty years and never think to look
at it (pp. 49-50).
They discovered that Stamper not only painted the
horse but inflated its skin, like a rubber balloon, to
trade the same horse back to AbT’ Although this yarn is
longer and more hyperbolic than "The Hoss Swap" written
by A. B. Longstreet, the two horse-trading stories have
much in common. In Longstreet's tale a man named "Yallow
Blossom," the "best man at a hoss swap that ever trod
shoe leather," trades a horse named Bullet to a man named
Peter Ketch. Ketch asks ten dollars "boot" for his horse,
but finally agrees to take three. Blossom says, "Now,
I'm a man that, when he makes a bad trade, makes the most
of it until he can make a better. I'm for no rues and
afterclaps." Ketch replies that this is his way of deal
ing, too. Blossom then pulls a blanket off Bullet's back,
273
laying bare a large sore. He is so pleased with himself
that he dances a jig and remarks that he's "jist a leetle
the best man at a horse-swap that ever catched a coon."
Ketch's son, nettled by this remark, vindicates his father
by retorting that the horse Blossom has traded for is
3
both blind and deaf.
O'Connor, who notes the similarity between the two
stories, states:
A. B. Longstreet was president of the University
of Mississippi from 1849 to 1856. It is obvious
that Faulkner knows his Georgia Scenes, as would ^
almost any literate southerner of his generation.
Faulkner's tale is more literary and more complicated than
Longstreet's and it gains from being told in dialect by
Ratliff, an eyewitness; in both stories, however, the
sharper is taken in.
One of the most entertaining chapters of The Hamlet
is Chapter One of Book Four, "The Peasants," which appeared
originally as a short story entitled "Spotted Horses" in
Scribner's Magazine in June, 1931* This story, being com
plete in itself and typical of Faulkner's most animated
and humorous writing, has appeared in many anthologies.
The story tells how Flem Snopes and a Texas cowboy brought
^Walter Blair, Native American Humor, pp. 54-58.
4
The Tangled Fire, p. 176, footnote 5*
274
into Frenchman’s Bend a herd of wild Texas ponies which
they tried to sell to the farmers for whatever the men
would pay. The story is filled with fast action, violence,
drollery, and understatement. The cowboy, named Buck,
tries to convince the farmers that the ponies are gentle
and nearly gets killed in the act. When some of the
farmers attempt to corral the wild ponies, they stampede
and spread havoc through the whole countryside.
The story serves to sharpen the character of Flem,
the arch opportunist, who, as one man says, "dont even
tell himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in
bed with himself in a empty house in the dark of the
moon," and it adds another figure, the Texas cowpuncher,
to the roll of comic characters. Ratliff is not only
one of the villagers involved in the story; he is also
a commentator on the action. He and the countrymen make
many shrewd comments about the untamed horses, the Texan's
battle with them, and Flem's tightfistedness. Besides
the rustic wit and repartee, the story has many humorous
situations also. Of all Faulkner's tall tales this one
abounds most in hearty and genial humor.
Some of the furious action of the wild horses re
sults in injuries to Henry Armstid and Tull and legal
complications for Flem, the reputed owner of the horses.
275
In one of the wild melees a horse breaks out of the
corral and into the Littlejohn house.
Eck and the boy run up onto the veranda. A lamp
sat on a table just inside the door. In its
mellow light they saw the horse fill the long
hallway like a pinwheel, gaudy, furious and
thunderous. A little further down the hall there
was a varnished yellow melodeon. The horse
crashed into it; it produced a single note, almost
a chord, in bass, resonant and grave, of deep and
somber astonishment; the horse with its monstrous
and antic shadow whirled again and vanished through
another door. It was a bedroom; Ratliff, in his
underclothes and one sock and with the other sock
in his hand and his back to the door, was leaning
out the open window facing the lane, the lot. He
looked back over his shoulder. For an instant he
and the horse glared at one another. Then he
sprang through the window as the horse backed
out of the room and into the hall again and saw
Eck and the little boy just entering the front
door, Eck still carrying the rope. It whirled
again and rushed on down the hall and onto the
back porch just as Mrs. Littlejohn, carrying an
armful of clothes from the line and the washboard,
mounted the steps.
"Get out of here, you son of a bitch," she said.
She struck with the washboard; it divided neatly
on the long mad face and the horse whirled and
rushed back up the hall, where Eck and the boy
now stood (pp. 3^5-6).
When the horse is finally driven out of the house
it plunges madly down the road and tries to run between
two somnolent mules pulling Tull's wagon, with Tull and
his wife on the seat and their four daughters sitting in
splint chairs behind them. The pony's wild leap between
the mules sets in motion a series of violent and uproarious
actions in which Tull is thrown out of the wagon and
dragged along the bridge, the women are all overturned
in their chairs, and the mules, suddenly come to life,
break away and run madly after the fleeing pony. Eck and
his boy follow with a bridle, hoping to catch the runaway
horse.
As Ratliff is telling later of his encounter with
the horse in the house, he says:
"Maybe there wasn’t but one of them things in
Mrs. Littlejohn's house that night, like Eck
says. But it was the biggest drove of just one
horse I ever seen" (p. 353)*
One of the listeners asks, "I wonder how many Ratliffs
that horse thought he saw." "I don't know," Ratliff said,
"but if he saw just half as many of me as I saw of him,
he was sholy surrounded" (p. 353)* This is typical country
humor.
Armstid and Tull brought suit against Flem for the
damage done by the wild horses, but Flem refused to claim
ownership of them. Though he and the Texan had brought
them into the village and disposed of them (the Texan
traded some of them--uncaught--for an old buggy and horse
and headed north), Flem calmly disclaimed any responsibil
ity for the horses, and no one had any papers or other
evidence to submit. The trial before a-local justice is
a kind of comedy of errors, with the outcome of course
inevitable: Flem Snopes is cleared, to the dismay and
disgust of all his neighbors, who sum up the situation
by saying, "You just can't beat himi" The chapter, aside
from its diverting anecdotes and humor, brings into
sharper focus the grasping nature and eel-like quality
of Flem.
Parallels for some of the situations and action
in "Spotted Horses" may be found in earlier American
humor. A piece entitled "A Very Friendly Horse," by
James M. Bailey, tells of a mean and violent yellow horse
that would bite or kick at anybody or anything within
reach.^ This terror of the neighborhood may possibly
have suggested some ideas to Faulkner. Another story
which exploits a wild and boisterous situation is "Parson
Bullen's Lizards," by G. ¥. Harris, a "Sut Lovingood" yarn
of the 18501s told in Southern dialect. O'Connor suggests
that another tall tale from G. W. Harris' work, Sut
Lovingood's Yarns, may have influenced the scene of the
horse in the house.
Sut tells how, to even the score with the Burns
family for not inviting him in to dinner, he put
a basket over the head of Sock, the Burns' bull,
then stood clear while the bull, maddened by bee
5
Blair, pp. 318-20.
stings, went lunging through the back door into
the house where the Burns family was dining (p.
123).
The pandemonium created by the trapped bull is similar to
that caused by the wild pony in the house. No direct bor
rowing is suggested; rather, it is a similarity of theme
and treatment that is worth noting.
On another level, that of sexual interest, Faulkner
■ t
introduces Eula Varner, youngest daughter of the wealthi
est man in Frenchman's Bend, and a veritable country god
dess of sex and fertility. In the book devoted to her
she is pictured as an Amazonian beauty, lazy, indifferent
to men yet attracting men as a ripe, burst pear attracts
flies:
. . . her appearance suggested some symbology out
of the old Dionysic times--honey in sunlight and
bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the
crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapa
cious trampling goathoof (p. 107).
Her brother Jody does his best to get Eula to at
tend school, in which she has no interest at all, though
the teacher--a man named Labove--and all the men along
the road take a lively interest in her. Wherever she goes,
men's eyes follow her, and after a while the Varner house
is swarming with men and young rakes from all over the
county. For awhile Jody takes her to school on the horse
behind him.
279
He had a vision of himself transporting not only
across the village's horizon but across the em
bracing proscenium of the entire inhabited world
like the sun itself, a kaleidoscope convolution
of mammalian ellipses (p. 113)*
This typical Faulkner passage exhibits what has been
called "language of a surrealistic quality:"
i first, alienation of sensation, derived from
projecting the curves of Eula's breasts and
buttocks geometrically abstracted, into an in
finite series on a cosmic plane . . .; and
second, what Herbert Read calls a "desirable
automotism"--in writing, this is a situation
where the writer merely sets down what his pre-
conscious thrusts forward into his conscious
ness . 6
In the characterization of Eula we find elements
.of both frontier humor and modern surrealism. The many
epithets applied to the physical attractions of Eula sug
gest the hyperbole of Southern folk humor. The impression
made by Eula on the new schoolteacher, a young man still
in college, is thus stated:
Then one morning he returned from the crude black
board and saw a face eight years old and a body
of fourteen with the female shape of twenty,
which on the instant of crossing the threshold
brought into the bleak, ill-lighted, poorly-
heated room dedicated to the harsh functioning
of Protestant primary education a moist blast of
spring's liquorish corruption, a pagan triumphal
prostration before the supreme primal uterus (p.
129).
6
Campbell and Foster, p. 101.
280
Here, realism is blended with surrealism. In
other places Faulkner calls her "the drowsing maidenhead
symbol's self (p. 130)? "supremely unchaste and inviol
able; the queen, the matrix" (p. 131)? "Venus" (p. 135)?
"one blind seed of the spendthrift Olympian ejaculation"
(p. 169)* An interesting parallel for Eula is found in
a work written in 1853 hy N. P. Willis, "Miss Albina
McLush," a satirical essay about a fat, placid, sleepy-
eyed girl whose "lips and chin swelling into a ripe and
7
tempting pout like the cleft of a bursted apricot." Both:
1
Albina and Eula rarely walk. They prefer to sit or sleep.;
Albina is compared to a "Marble Hebe," a Dido and Juno.
She took no interest in anything about her, but her supreme
indolence was irresistible to men. Just as Eula rebuffed
the schoolteacher who made advances to her, Albina, with
out troubling to look at a gentleman who addressed her,
turned to a servant and requested her;. "with a yawn of
desperate ennui, to knock that fellow downi" (p. 201).
The two charmers are alike in their laziness, their
voluptuousness and appeal for men, and their unconcern
for their admirers. The earlier work is more blatantly
satirical, but Faulkner's treatment of Eula seems clearly
to be done with tongue in cheek.
7
Blair, p. 200.
281
After awhile the inevitable happens. Jody has
given Eula faithful protection for years, but eventually
he is completely outnumbered and outwitted. The teacher,
Labove, tried to force Eula one day in the school house,
but she quietly beat him off and knocked him sprawling.
Other young men overran the school or parlor whenever
Eula attended a party, but she paid no attention to them.
Finally a young blade from out of town, Hoake McCarron,
saw her one day and soon began to arrange trysts in the
woods with her. Within three months Eula was pregnant,
and McCarron and two other men who had vainly paid her
court had fled ("By fleeing too, they put in a final and
despairing bid for the guilt they had not compassed, the
glorious shame to the ruin they did not do') (p. 160).
The father was the last to learn of Eula’s condition,
. . . this man who cheerfully and robustly and
undeviatingly declined to accept any such theory
as female chastity other than a myth to hoodwink
young husbands with just as some men decline to
believe in free tariff or the efficacy of prayer;
who, as it was well known, had spent and was
still spending no inconsiderable part of his time
proving to himself his own contention, who at the
present moment was engaged in a liaison with the
middle-fortyish wife of one of his own tenants
(p. 161).
When the father, mother, and Jody visited Eula in
her room, not able to eat and not caring to move about,
Jody furiously questioned- Eula as to who did it but the
282
old man merely asked, "All right, what's happened
This imperturbable attitude so outraged Jody that he could
hardly contain himself. In hot anger he left the room and,
armed with an old pistol, started out to hunt the seducer.
Mrs. Varner's attitude is the most interesting:
"Hold him till I get a stick of stove wood," she
gasped. "I'll fix him. I'll fix both of them.
Turning up pregnant and yelling and cursing here
in the house when I am trying to take a napi"
(p. 163).
It is not Eula's predicament but her own interrupted nap
that Mrs. Varner cares aboutJ This robust and earthy
humor may appropriately be called Rabelaisian.
/The Varner family now faces a social problem, with
r
a pregnant, unmarried daughter. Flem Snopes, at this time
a clerlj at the Varner store, saw his opportunity and took
it. He was willing to take Eula— for a price. His terms,
as disclosed later, were a considerable sum of money for
a honeymoon in Texas, a deed to the Old Frenchman place--
and a wedding license, paid for by Varner. Although Eula
had known Flem since he first came to the community and
took a job in her father's store and then a room in his
house, she^always treated him with cold contempt. In her
present situation, however, she did as she was told.
With Flem's cheap straw suitcase and a '"battered tele
scope bag which Mr. and Mrs. Varner had made their
283
honeymoon to St. Louis with and which all travelling
Varners had used since," they left for the honeymoon
shortly after the ceremony. The bargain that Flem drove
is typical of his greedy, unprincipled nature. He is
opportunism incarnate, always ready to advance himself
through the weakness or mistakes of others.
Shortly after the description of the hasty wedding
and leave-taking, there occurs a fantasy in which Flem is
seen arguing with an agent of the Prince of Darkness.
Flem has come to redeem his soul, given in pledge for a
note, and the demons cannot find it.[
"We done looked everywhere. It wasn't no big
one to begin with nowhow, and we was specially
careful in handling it. We sealed it up in a
asbestos matchbox and put the box in a separate
compartment to itself. But when we opened the
compartment, it was gone. The matchbox was
there and the seal wasn't broke. But there wasn't
nothing in the matchbox but a little kind of
dried up smear under one edge" (pp. 171-2).
The Prince tries to deal with Flem, to placate
*
him, or at least get rid of him. But Flem is adamant.
He has made a bargain and : is determined that the Devil
keep his end of it. Flem quotes the law and refuses to
be shunted aside. The Prince offers him "the gratifica
tions," but Flem has all he wants ("for a man that only
chews, any spittoon will do"); then he tries "the vani
ties," but Flem has brought his own. The Prince is hard
284
put, and keeps retreating.
And now for a while there aint a sound in that
magnificent kingly hall hung about with the proud
battle-torn smokes of the old martyrs but the
sound of frying and faint constant screams of
authentic Christians. But the Prince was the
same stock and blood his pa was. In a flash
the sybaritic indolence and the sneers was gone;
it might have been the old Prince hisself that
stood there. "Bring him to me," he says.
"Then leave us."
So they brought him in and went away and closed
the door. His clothes was still smoking a little,
though soon he had done brushed most of it off.
He come up to the Throne, chewing, toting the
straw suitcase.
"Well?" the Prince says.
He turned his head and spit, the spit frying off
the floor quick in a little ball of smoke. "I
come about that soul," he says.
"So they tell me," the Prince says. "But you have
no soul. "
"Is that my fault?" he says.
"Is it mine?" the Prince says. "Do you think I
created you?"
"Then who did?" he says. And he had the Prince
there and the Prince knowed it (p. 174).
At the end of the argument the Prince is not only defeated
but completely undone:
"Take ParadiseJ" the Prince screams. "Take it!
Take itJ" And the wind roars up and the dark
roars down and the Prince scrabbling across the
floor, clawing and scrabbling at that locked door,
screaming . . . (p. 175)*
285
With remarkable skill Faulkner shows that even the
Devil himself cannot cope with Flem. The passage is not
only keenly satirical (with its references to the Chris
tians, the problem of evil, and the question of who is
responsible for the soul-less Flem), but is also highly
imaginative and artistic. "Is this Faust or Huck Finn?
It sounds like a little of both," according to Campbell
8
and Foster. Probably this flight of fancy is indebted
to both. The language, of course, is the same Southern
mixture as the rest of the book.
Various types of comedy are found in The Hamlet.
One found in abundance is the brief anecdote with a com id-
or satiric twist. Two examples will illustrate the type.
Mrs. Ab Snopes had a new milk separator, one of the few
new things she ever owned. When she got it back after Ab
had used it as part payment in his disastrous horse trade,
she kept it humming, although she had only one gallon of
milk to put through it. Each time Ab and Ratliff approach
ed the house they heard the whine of the separator.
"I reckon if she want it to run through more
than once, it will.run through more than once"
. . . so we come on back and set on the fence.
And sho enough, we could hear the separator start
up again. It sounded strong as ever, like it
could make the milk fly, like it didn't give a
8
P. 106.
286
whoop whether that milk had been separated once
or a hundred times. "There it goes again," Ab
says. . . . "It looks like she is fixing to get
a heap of pleasure and satisfaction outen it,"
he says (p. 53).
. Here the humor borders on pathos as we contemplate the
childlike satisfaction of the country woman who has never
owned any modern conveniences and who treats the new in-
. strument as a toy.
Another minor character (or caricature) is that of
the schoolteacher Labove's great-grandmother, a simple-
minded old woman who loved new-fangled clothes. When
Labove was playing football at - the University of Missis
sippi he got hold of six pairs of football shoes, which
he sent to his folks in the hills.
So they all used them indiscriminately, anyone
who found a pair available, like umbrellas, four
pair of them that is, Labove explained. The old
lady (she was the elder Labove's grandmother)
had fastened upon the first pair to emerge from
the box and would let no one else wear them at
all. She seemed to like the sound the cleats
made on the floor when she sat in a chair and
rocked (p. 117)*
Besides the shoes which all took turns wearing,
there was also a football sweater which he had sent home.
They had also given the son a sweater with a big
red M on the front of it. The great-grandmother
had taken that too, though it was much too big
for her. She would wear it on Sundays, winter
and summer, sitting beside him on the seat of the
churchward wagon on the bright days, the crimson
287
accolade of the color of courage and fortitude
gallant in the sun, or on the bad days, sprawled
and quiet but still crimson, still brave, across
her shrunken chest and stomach as she sat in her
chair and rocked and sucked the dead little pipe
(p. 118).
Such vignettes are unforgettable. By the careful
choice of details and the invention of incongruous situa
tions, Faulkner produces a picture both vivid and comical.
The over-all intention here is to provide background for
the naive, hardworking country boy who financed his edu
cation by carrying an oblong ball across white stripes
on a field.
The prolific Snopes family is generally caricatured.
An example of a minor character so treated is the school
teacher I.O., distinguished by his ill-fitting clothes
J
and his continuous chatter, most of it made of tags of
proverbs and sayings. He is thus introduced:
It contained another stranger--a frail man none
of whose garments seemed to belong to him, with
a talkative weasel's face--who halted the buggy,
shouting at the horse as if they were a good-
sized field apart, and got out of the buggy and
came into the shop, already (or still) talking
(p. 72).
As an example of his jumbled and meaningless speech,
Faulkner gives a fair sample. It concerns a new Snopes
who is taking over the blacksmith shop.
288
He came out again, still talking. "Well, gentlemen,
off with the old and on with the new. Competition
is the life of trade, and though a chain aint no
stronger than its weakest link, I don't think
you'll find the boy yonder no weak reed to have
to lean on once he catches onto it. It's the old
shop, the old stand; it's just a new broom in it
and maybe you can't teach a new dog old tricks
but you can teach a new willing one anything.
Just give him time; a penny on the waters pays
interest when the tide turns. Well, well; all
pleasure and no work, as the fellow says, might
make Jack so sharp he might cut his self. I bid
you good morning, gentlemen" (p. 7*0-
Ratliff, whose function is that of commentator
as well as narrator, had experienced difficulty in placing
the newcomer when he first saw him in front of the black
smith shop. The man simply did not fit into the pattern.
But teaching the school. I just hadn't imagined
that yet. But that's it, of course. He has found
the one and only place in the world or Frenchman's
Bend either where he can not only use them proverbs
of hisn all day long but he will be paid fi>r doing
it (p. 80).
Such a caricature reminds one of some of Dickens's
characters, made memorable by physical or social peculi
arities and by characteristic expressions. The language
of the schoolteacher suggests also a Snopes version of
Poor Richard.
The language of the countrymen in The Hamlet (the
Varners, Tulls, Bookwrights and others) is notable in two
respects: its homely and crude dialect and its dry,
sardonic, penetrating wit. The half-literate dialect
289
abounds in almost every page, which a few examples may
! serve to illustrate: "that ere hay goes fast" (p. 20),
"it's a fellow to see him" (p. 20), "he druv off" (p. 20),
"never nothing else taken all of a sudden on fire" (p.
21), "'I chew up a nickel now and then until all the sup-
tion is out of it'" (a reference to cigars, p. 27), "when
. He give me a eye for horseflesh He give me a little judg
ment and gumption with it" (Ab Snopes before meeting
Stamper, p. 35) > "worrieder and worriedet'1 (p. 38),
"curioser" (p. 89), "overhalls" (p. 62), "suicide packs"
(p. 45). This novel, dealing almost exclusively with the
half-literate poor whites of Mississippi, presents a
richly varied language, including many provincialisms,
illiteracies, archaisms (like "holp"), old country dia
lect (like "gumption," originally Scottish), and mala-
propisms (like "packs" for "pacts"). A droll effect is
created by the many dialectal variations.
The rustic wit of the citizens of Frenchman's Bend
can be sampled in a few quotations. When Varner suggests
to Ab Snopes that unless Ab changes his ways he may soon
find he has no other place to go, Ab remarks drily,
"There's a right smart of country" (p. 26). Ratliff tells
of Ab's preparation for a meal: "Ab taken his shoes off
on the gallery to cool his feet for dinner" (p. 27). When
290
Tull and Bookwright stop at a restaurant, after driving
cattle all day, Tull orders steak, but Bookwright asks
for ham and eggs, explaining, "I been watching the drip
ping sterns of steaks for two days now" (p. 78). In
discussing the amorality of the Snopes clan one of the
men says, "There's some things even a Snopes wont do,
I dont know just exactly what they are, but they's some
somewhere" (p. 305)* The wit of Faulkner's country men
is generally acid. They see through the actions of one
another and make comments that lay bare the greed,
cowardice, or weakness behind the glib talk or false
front.
Ratliff is one of the shrewdest men presented in
this novel. His level-headed, sane commentary adds spice
and humor to the entire story. But in the end he, too,
has become one of Flem's victims, taken in by rumors
which Flem has revived of gold buried on the old French
man's place. Though some critics have suggested that
this is not consonant with the character given Ratliff,
it is in reality a master stroke in Faulkner's character
ization, for it shows how effectively Flem has deceived
even the wisest men and profited by their mistakes. At
the end, Ratliff admits that he was duped by the tales
and by the actual discovery of some gold coins planted by
291
Flem, but poor Henry Armstid Is still frantically digging
without let-up when the story ends. The evil triumph of
Flem is complete.
Although this novel has considerable sexual imagery
(especially in the chapter entitled "Eula") and a number of
passages dealing in a sardonic vein with marriage, the
most striking episode is the scene in which the idiot
Snopes makes love to a cow. This scene is filled with
poetic language and suggestive figures:
He would lie amid the waking instant of earth's
teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of
water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before
his,face in black, fixed curves, along each para
bola of which the marching drops held in minute
magnification the dawn's rosy miniatures, smelling
and even tasting the rich, slow, warm, barnreek
milk-reek, the flowing immemorial female, heaving
the slow planting and plopping of each deliberate
cloven mudspreading hoof, invisible still in the
mist loud with its hymeneal choristers (p. 189)*
Ike, the idiot, tries to approach the cow in the
pasture, but she eludes him and he pursues her through a
stream, falling full length in the water, then climbing
out on the far side and continuing the chase. The cow's
owner, Houston, comes with his horse and dog to drive the
cow home and drive the idiot away. But the next day Ike
is out in the pasture again, waiting for the cow. In a
scene filled with violent action, the idiot chases the cow
through a grass fire, falls in a ravine and receives "the
292
; violent relaxing of her fear-constricted bowels." The
! entire episode is shocking and brutal. Campbell and
Poster say. of this scene:
Here, too, the element of the scatological--
often used by the surrealist--provides a further
sadistic irony. Prom the incongruities of this
scene, perspectives open on romantic love, the
ironic possibilities of romantic language, in
sanity, and man's dignity (p. 99)•
The scene is too long, too detailed, and over-
j
written. Much of the language, though intentionally
ironic, lacks restraint and good taste, as, for example,
this passage describing the idiot's search for the
; stabled cow:
. . . descending as though he were listening,
breathing in the reek, the odor of cows and
mares as the successful lover does that of a
room full of women, his the victor's drowsing
rapport with all the anonymous faceless female
flesh capable of love walking the female earth
(p. 207).
Or consider such a purple passage as this:
Roofed by the woven canopy of blind annealing
grass-roots and the roots of trees, dark in the
blind dark of time's silt and rich refuse--the
constant and unslumbering anonymous wormglut and
the inextricable known bones— Troy's Helen and
the nymphs and snoring mitred bishops, the
saviors and the victims and the kings--it wakes,
up-seeping, attritive in uncountable creeping
channels: first, root; then frond by frond,
from whose escaping tips like gas it rises and
disseminates and stains the sleep-fast earth
with drowsy insect-murmur . . . melodious with
the winged and jeweled throats, it upward bursts
and fills night's globed negation with jonquil
thunder (p. 207).
Such writing seems entirely out of proportion to the sub-
ject--and to the simple, expository style of the rest of
the novel.
The incident of the idiot boy's love of the cow,
O'Connor says, was a tale of rural sodomy told by a local
politician to some of his constituents (p. 120), but in
Faulkner's hands it is spun out at length, invested with
perverse humor, and used as further damning evidence
against the Snopes family, who charge a fee for spectators
to see the idiot's unnatural act. As an example of
"surrealistic" humor, this episode is perhaps more shock- i
t
ing than the funeral scene in Sanctuary. Just as one
deals grotesquely with death, the other deals monstrously
with perverted love. In the idiot-cow affair, anti
romance reaches its climax. The trappings and the language
of love are not only incongruous but revolting. Of this
scene Malcolm Cowley, one of Faulkner's most astute
critics, wrote: "The story must have shocked the author
himself, for he doesn't quite know how to handle it."^
It is Ratliff who puts a stop to the disgraceful
spectacle by suggesting that I. 0. (the schoolteacher
Snopes) may lose his job unless the family acts. Lump
9
"William Faulkner Revisited," Saturday Review of
Literature, April 14, 1945* p. 14.
(who has been profiting from the affair) calls a confer
ence at the blacksmith shop to decide on a course of
action. Preacher Whitfield proposes that the cow be
killed and a piece of the meat given to the idiot to eat,
so that henceforth Ike will chase only "human women."
Ratliff tells them that the cow will cost sixteen dollars
and eighty cents and that the Snopes family must raise
the money. In the scene that follows there is consider
able sly humor, as I. 0. argues that each should pay ac
cording to the number in the family. Eck, the black
smith, says he has three children and another on the
way. I. 0. then reasons:
"So I reckon the only way to figure it is to
divide it according to who will get the most
benefits from .curing him. You got yourself
and four children to consider. That will be
five to one. So that I-will pay the one-eighty
and Eck pays the fifteen because five goes into
fifteen three times and three times five is
fifteen dollars. And Eck can have the hide and
the rest of the beef" (pp. 233-i 0 •
When Eck protests that this doesn't seem right to him and
that he does not want "fifteen dollars worth of beef,"
I. 0. tries another tack. He says that Eck should pay
this money to protect the Snopes name.
"Cant you understand that. That aint never
been aspersed yet by no living man. That's
got to be kept pure as a marble monument for
your children to grow under" (p. 23*0 •
Several months later, when Ratliff stopped at Mrs.
Littlejohn's place and entered the barn he saw the patheti
figure of Ike sitting in one of the empty stalls. "Upon
the overalled knees Ratliff saw the battered wooden effigy
of a cOw such as children receive on Christmas" (p. 305)*
In a conversation with Eck, Ratliff learned that Eck had
finally had to pay twenty dollars for the cow, with no
help from I. 0. or the other Snopeses, and "another two
bits for that ere toy one." Eck then explained:
"Yes. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe
anytime he would happen to start thinking,
that ere toy one would give him something to
think about" (p. 306).
John Arthos makes an interesting observation: "Only in
The Hamlet, I think, in the characterization of Ratliff
and in the incident of the toy cow, do comedy and its
,,10
lovely reasoning win out.
This novel is more comic and light-hearted, in my
judgment, than any other Faulkner has written. There is
less violence and terror, on the one hand (two murders are
committed, but they are not central in the story), and
on the other hand, there are more shrewd and comic char
acterizations, more rustic wit and engaging dialect, more
of the boisterous and earthy frontier humor than most of
10Hoffman and Vickery, p. 107.
his tales contain. The characterization of Ratliff is
one of Faulkner's major achievements: here for the first
time we have a rational, witty, calm, and observant com
mentator, matching wits with the men around him, and
throwing light on the significant events and persons in
the novel. He provides a perspective for all the unfold
ing action. Flem Snopes is also a masterful creation--
self-seeking, amoral, thoroughly opportunistic--a leech
or parasite who stands as a symbol for Snopesism, which
to Faulkner represents nearly all that is evil in the
South, and in society. Eula Varner is an arresting, but
not a credible figure. She is a mythical goddess of sex
and fertility— a rural, pagan Cleopatra--who by her at
tractiveness sets off more sharply the revolting qualities
of Flem Snopes. Besides these principal figures, the
novel has an imposing array of minor characters— the pro
lific Snopes clan, the Tulls and Bookwrights, the Varners,
the country schoolmaster Labove and his kin--nearly all
presented in a comic or satiric light.
The Hamlet has also a great variety of humor: some
of Faulkner's greatest tall tales, a delightful fantasy,
comic situations, dialect and name fun, extravagant fig
ures of speech, and examples of surrealistic humor. The
typical "battle of the sexes" appears in this novel, as
well as sardonic remarks on marriage and religion, but
these passages have less venom and more geniality than
usual in his work. All things considered, this is
Faulkner's most entertaining and comic novel to date.
In the three novels just surveyed (Absalom,
Absalom 1, The Unvanquished, and The Hamlet) the changing
economic and social order of the South is presented
through fiction. The story of Thomas Sutpen was told by
Quentin Compson to explain to his northern roommate the
complex life of the South and Quentin's ambivalence toward
it. As we have seen, it is a story of a man coming as a
stranger into the virgin, thinly-populated state of
Mississippi, hacking a plantation and a mansion out of
the wilderness, and attempting to beget a male heir to
carry on his name and perpetuate a "dynasty"— an attempt
doomed from the start and ending in tragedy for Sutpen
and all whose lives were intertwined with his. After the
death of all the principals in the story, the sprawling
plantation house itself is burned to the ground, reducing
the place once more to a semi-wilderness and leaving the
idiot Jim Bond (a mulatto descendant of Sutpen's first son)
gibbering in the shadows. Sutpen's grand "design," which
for Quentin symbolizes the rise and fall of the South,
thus fails because of Sutpen's ruthless disregard of human
298
rights and, at least partially, because the land has been
cursed by slavery. This novel comes first in the present
study of the social order because it belongs to the period
I
of slavery and the Civil War. The tragedy of Absalom,
Absalomi, although centered in one family, is in a sense
the tragedy of the whole South.
The Unvanquished belongs also to the War years and
the early postwar era. Even though it is a more typical
Civil War novel, with its scenes of Southern heroism
and the difficulties of Reconstruction days, it does not
describe any golden age of the past or suggest that the
old life was immeasurably superior to the new. It de
picts, with realism and a degree of humor, the struggles
of the Sartoris family to survive in those trying times.
There are no pictures of a wealthy and aristocratic plan
tation life (such as in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the
Wind) ruined by the war and contrasted with general pov
erty and the decay of civilization. Some of the unrest
and troubles of the postwar years are reflected in the
migrations of the ex-slaves, the coming of the carpet
baggers, and the rise of a class of shiftless and unprin
cipled men-^-here represented by Ab Snopes and Grumby,
horse-thieves. The novel records some of the epic changes
brought about by the end of the war, the emancipation of
the slaves, and the efforts of the South to solve its
economic problems. But, as in the story of Sutpen's life,
the attention has been focused on one family in the time
of crisis and adjustment, and not on a panoramic view.
The widespread changes effected by the collapse of one
way of life and the beginning of a new are suggested
rather than explicitly stated.
In The Hamlet the changes are more dramatic. The
crumbling of the old ante-bellum civilization is presented
symbolically in the dilapidated prewar mansion and the
weed-choked yard of the old Frenchman's place, now in
the hands of a shrewd and enterprising "redneck" family,
the Varners. At the beginning of the story Will Varner
and his family own everything of value in the village,
but after Ab Snopes moves into Frenchman's Bend, Varner
loses first one and then another enterprise to the schem
ing and unscrupulous Snopes clan. The Ab Snopes who leads
the way and prepares for the coming of so many of his
worthless relatives is the same man who appeared in The
Unvanquished, thus giving the two novels a thread of con
tinuity. Although Will Varner and his family are not
notable for honesty or principle, they appear to be decent
and almost lovable in comparison to Flem Snopes and his
kind. Snopesism is shown to be rampant and heartless
self-aggrandizement, an opportunism that balks at nothing.
As 0'Connor says:
The Snopeses are invincible liars and thieves
because they recognize almost none of the rules
of decency or fair play. They cheat each other,
the Varners, the whole community, even the shrewd
Ratliff. And they do it so impersonally, so im
perturbably that their victims are left stupe
fied or in helpless and abject rage (p. 118).
They represent the upstart "rednecks" who moved into the
South and exploited every opportunity to make money or
get a personal advantage. All that is detestable in
modern (meaning twentieth century) life is summed up in
Snopesism. It is greedy,- rapacious, inhuman commercial
ism; and Faulkner has given these hateful qualities per
sonification in Flem Snopes and his tribe. At the end of
the novel, having taken everything of any value in the
Bend, Flem is moving into the city. Thus Faulkner chron
icles an era of unrestrained exploitation in which the
older families are gradually dispossessed by political
and economic opportunists. Perhaps the symbols are
meant to be applied not only to the South, but to our
whole national life.
CHAPTER SIX
STORIES WITH AN URBAN SETTING
Part One: Pylon
Two stories published in Dr. Martino and Other
Stories (193*0 > "Death Drag" and "Honor," seem to be the
germ of Pylon (1935)• "Death Drag" recounts the misad
ventures of a barn-storming team of stunt aviators, who
give dangerous exhibitions in small towns in order to eke
out a living. In their decrepit, unlicensed plane they
keep just one jump ahead of the law--and of death. "Honor,
a story of two flyers who love the same woman, is appar
ently the source of Pylon, in which a woman is shared by
two flyers.
The action of Pylon occurs at New Valois, or New
Orleans, during a five-day Mardi Gras in which the com
munity is dedicating a new airport. The principals of
the story are four stunt flyers, a woman named Laverne,
and a ghostly reporter who becomes interested in these
nomads and gives them everything he has or can borrow.
The action of the novel moves in two directions--back
into the earlier years of the group, and into the dis-
ordered life of the pathetic, sentimental reporter. The
time is one year after the government legalized the sale
of liquor, that is, in the days of the New Deal and the
depression.
By means of flashbacks we learn that Roger Shumann,
son of a midwestern country doctor, has given up the study
of medicine to travel with a flying circus, in company
with Jack Holmes, a parachute jumper, and Jiggs, their
mechanic. On one of his tours Roger meets Laverne, who
has been living a sordid life with her sister and carrying
on a cheap affair with the sister's husband. Laverne
leaves home with Roger but after a while falls in love
with Jack and thereafter divides her affections between
the two men, sleeping first with one and then the other.
When she finds that she is to have a child, the two men
decide to determine by rolling dice which one shall be
the legal father of the baby. Although Shumann won the
toss, the child was given the ambiguous name of Jack
("Little Dempsey") Shumann. The "family" continue as
before, the two men taking turns going to bed with
Laverne. Their lives are a monotonous series of cheap
hotels, hurried meals, constant moves from place to place,
economic struggles, and the tension of air meets. At New
Valois, during their sixth year together, Roger enters a
race and flies dangerously close to the pylons in order
4
to win second prize money to pay for Laverne's second
confinement. When he crashed this plane, the reporter,
who has become interested in Laverne, helps him to get
another patched-up plane, which the authorities permit
Roger to fly, even though they know it is not licensed
and is unfit to fly. In this race the plane falls apart
and Shumann is killed when it crashes into a lake near
the airfield. Laverne takes the child to Roger's parents,
an embittered old couple, and then returns to Jack--to
continue the only life she knows.
The story begins and ends in tragedy; in the first
chapter the death of one of the flyers dedicating the air
port is reported, and at the close "The Scavengers" have
still not found the body of Shumann in the debris of the
lake. The tone of the novel is heavy, and the five days
of action at New Valois are filled with violence and
death, longing and despair, and greed and lust. Hardly
a person in the book can be described as decent and normal
and the comments about various classes and professions
(airport officials, Jews, shop-keepers, pawnbrokers, under
takers, newspaper men, and many others) are cynical and
misanthropic. City life in general is shown to be sordid,
rapacious, degraded, and most of the persons--regardless
of position— have only one interest, a greedy self-
interest. In such a setting humor has a difficult time.
It occasionally breaks through briefly, but more often
it is a mocking grimace or cynical aside.
The style of Pylon is, for Faulkner, relatively
uncomplicated, with few overlong or over-elaborate
sentences (such as are found abundantly in Absalom,
Absaloml and some later works). One of the peculiarities
is the use of compounded words (of which there are hun
dreds), such as "gearwhine," "neartweed," "hatangle,"
"cockpitrim," "golfclubheads," "batcreatures," "tinsel-
dung," "imitationleather." The only apparent gain is
novelty, but often the strange looking words slow down
both reading and comprehension: they are what Frank Colby
has called "stop lights." There are occasional long,
involved comparisons, often with sexual symbolism, that
give the story a self-conscious, unrealistic tone. In its
mood of pessimism and its emphasis upon the degrading as
pects of life this novel is more naturalistic than realis
tic .
Neither the characters nor the story can be be
lieved fully. Some of the characters are obviously carica'
tures, and the story verges upon fantasy. The phantom
reporter resembles a wraith from the cemetery more than he
305
does a living newspaperman; he is characterized as "a dis
solute and eager skeleton," "an apparition," "a shadow,"
"a scarecrow in a winter field," ageless, sexless, unat
tached, and wholly ineffectual. Of him, William O'Connor
i says:
Presumably the reporter in Pylon, who is re
ferred to as a J. Alfred Prufrock, is a repre
sentative of the old order, neither cautious nor
politic certainly but obtuse, deferential, and
glad to be of use. He belongs to T. S. Eliot's
wasteland dramatis personae. He sees the urban
world as even harsher than Eliot's character
sees it, smells of cooking, sawdust restaurants,
and men in shirt sleeves leaning out of windows.
He sees it as screaming headlines, mad speed,
and close to a dehumanized existence with crea
tures who will soon be "incapable of suffering,
wombed and born complete and instantaneous,
cunning and intricate and deadly, from out some
blind iron batcave of the earth's prime founda
tion." The setting is a "wasteland" world, but
the parallels with Prufrock are not many.l
The other characters in Pylon are almost as hard
to accept as the shadowy reporter. Hagood, the reporter's
employer, is a movie stereotype, gruff, hard-talking,
hard-driving, but essentially soft-hearted and paternalis
tic. Against his better judgment he keeps the reporter
on and advances him money, even when he is reasonably
sure he will never get it back. Laverne is another one
of Faulkner's female sex symbols. In one scene she cannot
1
Tangled Fire, pp. 91-92.
306
j wait until evening to satisfy her sexual drive, but
climbs into the cockpit and makes love to Shumann in the
air, and then floating down in a parachute, with her
dress over her head, arouses the passions of the whole
community at a county fair. Even the phlegmatic reporter
i was attracted to her, though she showed not the slightest
: interest in him. Roger and Jack seem more like parts of
i a plane or a mechanism than living creatures. There is
; very little said to make them seem alive and human. Jiggs
is a comical, though not a realistic character, in his
tight-fitting clothes, with short, springy legs, a muscle-
bound body, and a love of motors and speed. The unreality
of Jiggs is made clear by Faulkner's own expression— "the
cartoon comedy centaur" (p. 270), whose legs and movement
suggested a horse. He is the butt of jokes and the low
comedian.
The wit and humor of Pylon belong, by and large,
, to the category of satire: human folly, government regula
tions, city-life, and various sharp vocations are held up
to ridicule. Human behavior (man's vice, folly, stupidity,
self-interest) is the subject of many gibes or incidents.
The novel opens, for example, with a scene in which Jiggs
is bargaining in a store for an expensive pair of riding
boots, which he cannot afford. After considerable talk he
agrees to pay ten per cent down to get the store to hold
them until six o'clock the next day, when he expects to
be able to pay for them. Without even trying them on,
he makes the down payment and has the boots set back for
him. In later scenes Jiggs is shown suffering from the
undersize boots and struggling manfully to get them off
his swollen feet. After wearing them twice, and getting
the toe of one stepped on, he tries to remove the signs
of wear and polish the boots enough to return them as
unused. He tries cleaning, waxing, sandpapering, and
polishing, but his heroic efforts are unavailing. The
helpful reporter suggests that what he really needs to
give them a proper shine is a foxtail.
"Listen. That magazine with the pictures of
what you wish you could get your white American
servants to wear so you could think they were
English butlers, and what if you wore yourself
maybe the horse would think he was in England
too unless the fox happened to run under a bill
board or something . . . About how a fox's tail
is the only . . . . "2
But, on reflection, the reporter decides that it is a
horse's bone--a shin bone— that is needed. Whereupon
they rent a.car (on borrowed money) and visit the city
dump to find a horse's shinbone. There, amidst all kinds
of debris and junk, they collect over thirty pounds of
2William Faulkner, Pylon (New York, 1935)> P* 266.
assorted bones--parts of horses, mules, a big dog (mis
taken for a colt), and the forearm of a piece of statuary.
Back at the apartment Jiggs renews his labors, but the
leather becomes soft and lifeless. When he returns to
the place where he ha^ purchased the boots he finds it
closed (he had forgotten the day was Sunday) and in
desperation takes the boots to a pawnbroker, who gives
him only five dollars for them. The stupidity of Jiggs
is emphasized no more by this satire than is the greed
of shopkeepers who, like spiders, catch the unwary.
The relations of the sexes— a favorite theme with
Faulkner--are animalistic, with no hint of idealism. The
early life of Laverne is shown to be sordid, with her
sister's husband taking advantage of Laverne's ignorance
and desire for excitement. The wronged wife has no re
course except jealousy and hate. The means of settling
the paternity of her first child by rolling dice has al
ready been alluded to. The two men who share her bed--
Roger and Jack— seem to feel no jealousy whatever. After
the incident when Laverne jumped from the plane in the
tangled dress and parachute harness, the police had to
protect her from several sex-crazed men, including one
young police officer. When Roger later died in the plane
crash and one of the observers said, "What do you suppose
309
his wife was thinking about?" one of the casuals replied
drily, "That’s easy . . . She was thinking, 'Thank God
I carry a spare'." Such humor is sardonic and mocking—
intended, no doubt, to show the self-interest which the
common man attaches to all motives. It may indicate, as
well, the writer's feeling that even in the face of
tragedy men continue to thihk first of their own interests
and biological urges.
The harsh treatment of so many classes of men—
reporters, city officials, pawnbrokers, undertakers, to
name a few— suggests a deepseated melancholy and pessimism.
The city is filled with human parasites, who are only
one remove from Jungle animals. The Negro maid, for ex
ample, who came to clean the reporter's room found the
reporter lying in a drunken stupor at the door and robbed
him of all his money except a dollar or two and then threw
the suspicion on others. One of the casuals at the air
port, discussing the death of Shumann, says:
"It dont take money especially to live; it's
only when you die that you or somebody has got
to have something put away in the sock. A man
can eat and sleep and keep the purity squad off
of him for six months on what the undertaker
will make you believe you can't possibly be
planted for a cent less and preserve your self-
respect" (p. 291).
310
Thus even death does not end one's struggle against the
predators--or vultures. Human decency and generosity are
almost banished from the earth, we are led to believe.
The one striking exception in this novel, the spectral
reporter, who gives up his lodgings to the flyers and
sleeps in the street, who spends all he has on them and
every dollar he can get from his employer, is so muddled
and soft-headed that his behavior is psychotic. Besides,
he was interested in the flying "family" because they were
a variation from the norm, and he was also attracted by
Laverne's pronounced sexuality. He says of this family:
"They aint human, you see. No ties; no place
where you were born and have to go back to it
now and then even if it's just only to hate the
damn place good and comfortable for a day or two.
Prom coast to coast and Canada in summer and
Mexico in winter, with one suitcase and the same
canopener because three can live on one canopener
as easy as one or twelve" (p. 46).
This idea of the necessity of having a home, of putting
one's roots down, is fundamental in Faulkner's thinking.
Like the reporter, he believes that those who have no
home ties or strong family ties are not only unfortunate
but not quite human. The characters who are rootless
(Joe Christmas and Lucas Burch, for example) come to no
good end.
Was Faulkner endeavoring in Pylon to create a new
folklore of speed, with characters that are either more or
311
less than human? This may have been his purpose, as the
s
-following quotation strongly suggests:
"Because they aint human like us; they couldn't
turn those pylons like they do if they had human
blood and senses and they wouldn't dare to if
they had human brains. Burn them like this one
tonight and they don't even holler in the fire;
crash one and it aint even human blood when you
: haul them out: it's cylinder oil the same as in
the crankcase" (p. 45).
i O'Connor states that in a review Faulkner wrote of Test
Pilot, by Jimmy Collins, "Faulkner made fairly explicit
what he was probably trying, with small success, to do in
Pylon," and he quotes from the review as follows:
I had hoped to find a kind of embryo, a still
formless forerunner or symptom of a folklore
of speed, the high speed of today which I be
lieve stands a good deal nearer to the end of
the limit which human beings and materials were
capable of when men first dug iron, than to the
beginning of those limits as they stood ten or
twelve years ago when men first began to go
really fast. . . . Perhaps they will continue
to create a kind of species or race, as they
used to create and nurture races of singers and
eunuchs. . . . But it was not of this folklore „
I was thinking . . . ^ut/ of the speed itself.-*
In the review, as well as in the novel, he seems to be un
certain about the theme, and it lacks definition. If, as
seems apparent, he was endeavoring in Pylon to create a
new race of men, divorced from ordinary human existence,
the effort fails. The idea that speed would change the
3
As quoted in The Tangled Fire, p. 91*
312
life of mortals seems rather fantastic too.
As suggested already, in the comments on marriage,
the old prejudices and whipping-boys remain. For example,
the noise and inanities of radio are ridiculed here as
elsewhere. The long arm of the federal government is
also exposed to attack. A Jew named Feinman is talking
about the government's right to license planes:
"Let me get this straight. You're a government
agent. All right. We have had our crops regi
mented and our fisheries regimented and even
our money in the bank regimented. All right.
I still dont know how they did it but they did,
and so we are used to that. If he was trying
to make his living out of the ground and
Washington came in and regimented him, all
right. . . . But do you mean to tell me that
Washington can come in and regiment a man that's
to make his living out of the air? Is there a
crop reduction in the air too?" {pp. 223-^).
There is no evidence here that Faulkner holds any anti-
semi tic views, as some critics have charged. Feinman
is promoting the air show and is therefore eager to have
Shumann fly, even though the plane is unfit to fly. In
protesting against government interference, Feinman is
expressing his own irritation and at the same time voicing
one of Faulkner's strong antipathies. In speeches and
articles Faulkner has made clear that he despises regi
mentation and government encroachment on what he considers
to be either state or personal rights. He expresses the
313
same attitude, though more obliquely, in the stories and
novels. Weeks, usually a perceptive critic, could write
of Pylon:
The assets of this novel are its tough good
humor, its dialogue of indisputable realism,
descriptive passages which at best have power
and brilliance, and a current of feeling that
at times runs strong and unsullied.^
Where is the good humor, tough or tender? And
what feeling, except that of despairing cynicism, runs
strong and unsullied? It is likely that most readers of
Faulkner will find this a disappointing work, lacking
that "power and brilliance" which his great novels have
possessed. By almost any test— inventiveness, character
ization, ability to sustain interest, humor--this work is
uninspired. In my judgment, it is one of the few by
Faulkner that does not reward a second reading.
The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 155 (June 1935)* P* 16.
314
Part Two: The Wild Palms
The short novel, The Wild Palms, published origi
nally with The Old Man, does not belong to the Yoknapataw-
pha saga. Like Mosquitoes and Pylon, it has a New Orleans
setting, though the action begins in a small resort town
on the Mississippi coast and, like The Old Man, ends in
the state penitentiary at Parchman.
The story concerns Charlotte Rittenmeyer, who,
tired of the humdrum, conventional role of a wife and
, mother, forsakes her husband, Francis, and their two
: daughters, to live with a young doctor, Harry Wilbourne,
who leaves the hospital two months before completing his
internship and getting his medical degree. Both Harry
and Charlotte believe that social conventions and re
spectability destroy love, and to test their theory they
give up everything for their life together. The price
they pay is high: Charlotte gives up a home and children
and a kind (but unloved) husband, and Harry, after years
of struggle and self-denial, gives up his chances for a
medical career. Their life together is a losing battle
against poverty, insecurity, and the trammels of society.
They move from place to place, living from hand to mouth,
in Chicago, Wisconsin, Utah, San Antonio, and back again
315
in New Orleans. In Utah, Charlotte becomes pregnant
and, because of her unwillingness to impose poverty on a
child, insists that Wilbourne perform an abortion. He
fails at this, as he had failed at everything else, and,
as a result of his bungling, Charlotte pays with her life
and he is sentenced to fifty years at hard labor on a
charge of manslaughter. Before the trial, Francis
Rittenmeyer offers Wilbourne a chance to escape, but he
refuses, and' later— in the jail--he gives Wilbourne a
cyanide tablet to end his own life, but again the prisoner
refuses, preferring to cling to the frail, suffering flesh
because
. . . it is the old meat after all, no matter how
old. Because if memory exists outside of the
flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what
it remembers so when she became not then half of
memory became not and if I become not then all
of remembering will cease to be.--Yes, he thought,
between grief and nothing I will take grief (p. 156).
The theme of this dark drama seems to be that any devia
tion from the rules must be paid in heavy penalties:
suffering, despair, and death. It is two against society,
but society wins and the rebels must pay. Some of
Faulkner's old obsessions are reiterated: his stu$y of
lust and its effects, his antipathies toward religion and
formal education, his attacks on women and pulp writers,
and his mood of- pessimistic misanthropy.
316
As this brief outline of the story would suggest,
humor is not prominent in this work. When it appears it
is often dark, bitter, drained of all pleasure, like a
grimace concealing great pain. What little laughter
there is is usually like that of Charlotte bleeding from
the attempted abortion: "!0h damn bloody bloody--* she
began to laugh; it was hard laughing and not loud, like
retching or coughing" (p. 15)»--or like that of one of
the men: "He laughed, that is with his teeth. His eyes
did not laugh ..." (p. 58)* The life of men and women
in crowded cities is pictured as devoid of pleasure, con
ventionalized, and dehumanized; and the saleswomen exhibit
"fixed regimented grimaces" (p. 68).
The women in this novel have no nobility or even
good bourgeois morals. The heroine, Charlotte, has two
chief loves--"bitching and making things." Dissatisfied
with the day-to-day routine of keeping house for her hus
band and two girls, she gave up security and respectabil
ity to live a precarious life with Wilbourne "for love."
Prom the first he recognizes her "intuitive and infallible
skill in the practical affairs of love"
. . . that instinctive proficiency in and rapport
for the mechanics of cohabitation even of innocent
and unpractised women--that serene confidence in
their amorous destinies like that of birds in
their wings . . . (p. 33)*
Both Charlotte and Wilbourne believe that respectability
is the cardinal sin, and they are willing to make great
personal sacrifices to live in their own untrammeled way,
flouting all conventions. In Chicago, where Charlotte
found work in a department store, they were becoming
settled and respectable, like other couples, until
Wilbourne ended this brief experience by taking a danger
ous and ill-paid job with a mining company in Utah. There
they become acquainted with the manager and his wife, Mr.
and Mrs. Buckner. When Mrs. Buckner said that her name
was Billie, Charlotte remarked, "It's a perfect whore's
name, isn't it?" The manager's wife sensed immediately
that the newcomers were not married. (Earlier in this
novel Faulkner had said that one can "smell" a husband
anywhere.) Then Mrs. Buckner confided: "'Me and Buck
wasn't married for a while either. But we are now all
right.' Her voice was not triumphant, it was smug" (p.
85)• Later she urged Charlotte to "make him marry you.
It's better that way. Especially when you get jammed"
(p. 85). She was then one month pregnant. Buckner later
prevailed on Wilbourne to perform an abortion on Mrs.
Buckner. Against his conscience and better judgment he
also tried to abort Charlotte's baby, but was foredoomed
to failure.
318
The third woman in the novel, the wife of the
doctor who operates on Charlotte after the attempted
abortion, is a severe, self-righteous woman, middle-aged
and unattractive,
. . . her shadow also monstrous, gorgonlike from
the rigid paper-wrapped twists of gray hair above
the high-necked night-dress which also looked
gray, as if every garment she owned had partaken
of that grim iron-color of her implacable and
invincible morality, which . . . was almost
omniscient (p. 9)*
She knows intuitively that Wilbourne and Charlotte are
not married and when she prepares some gumbo for the
suffering woman it was an "uncompromising Christian deed
performed not with sincerity or pity but through duty"
(p. 6).
Thus the score of the women is pretty low:
Charlotte forsakes husband and children to live in adultery
and in rebellion against society; Mrs. Buckner has no
sense of responsibility toward her unborn child; and the
doctor's wife is a hard, cynical, unhappy woman. Charlotte
admits freely her love of "bitching," Mrs. Buckner does
not trust any man, and the doctor's wife performs her
Christian deeds with a "grim and vindictive and maso
chistic pleasure," while she endeavors to keep her cabins
"respectable."
Religion, too, suffers from the same relentless
319
melancholy: the doctor is "the provincial protestant,
the Baptist born" (p. 6) who rents summer cottages at the
beach
murmurous with the ghosts of a thousand rented
days and nights to which he (though not his wife)
had closed his eyes, insisting only that there
be always an odd number in any mixed party which
stayed there overnight unless the couple were
strangers formally professing to be man and wife,
as now, even though he knew better . . . (p. 13)*
Later Faulkner calls the doctor a "puritan" who
believed he was too old for this, too old to be
awakened at midnight and dragged, haled, unwarned
and still dull with sleep, into this, this bright
wild passion which had somehow passed him up when
he had been young enough, worthy enough . . . (p.
122) .
The moral persons in the novel are presented in an un
favorable light, except for Charlotte's husband, Ritten-
meyer ("Rat," as she calls him), a Catholic, who will not
give her a divorce but keeps in touch with her to see
that she wants for nothing, and in the end pays for her
operation and offers Wilbourne the chance to escape or
to commit suicide. Throughout, Rittenmeyer is presented
as a man of honor, decency, and generosity.
Love and marriage, perennial themes, come in for
some characteristic sardonic humor. Wilbourne, before his
experience with Charlotte, is told by one of his knowing
fellow interns how to take a hotel room with a woman:
320
"Just take a bag with a couple of bricks wrapped
up in a towel so they won't rattle, and walk in.
I wouldn't pick the Saint Charles or the Roosevelt,
of course. Take one of the smaller ones, not too
small, of course. . . . And be sure to carry a
coat with you. Raincoat. . (p. 26).
After his first meeting with Charlotte
. . . he mused indeed on that efficiency of women
in the mechanics, the domiciling, of cohabitation.
Not thrift, not husbandry, something far beyond
that . . . (p. 39).
With little money and no foresight, Wilbourne depends
upon her judgment, her shrewdness. "You live in sin; you
cant live on it," she tells him.
One of their friends banteringly urges Wilbourne
to forget the wronged Rittenmeyer:
"Damn him. You dont owe him anything. Didn't you
take his wife off his hands for him? Yah, you're
a hell of a guy. You haven't even got the.courage
of your fornications, have you?" (p. 5*0*
The writing is sometimes facetious, more often sardonic,
and sometimes downright bad, as in this description of
Wilbourne's attitude:
. . . it was the mausoleum of love, it was the
stinking Catafalque of the dead corpse borne be
tween the olfactoryless walking shapes of the
immortal unsentient demanding meat (p. 82).
The mood of this novel is drearily pessimistic.
Life is hard at best:
You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with
the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and
321
generation; you get out of step once, falter
once, and you are trampled to death (p. 33).
In the cities, especially, life is a burden, with its
raucous noises, interminable movement, and its destruction
of privacy and individuality. This theme, common in
Faulkner, is here played at high pitch. Everything has
been corrupted by greed, and even Christmas is called
the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie, the season
when with shining fable Heaven and Nature, in
accord for once, edict and postulate us all
husbands and fathers under our skins, when before
an altar in the shape of a goldplated cattle-
trough man may with impunity prostrate himself
in an orgy of unbridled sentimental obeisance
to the fairy tale which conquered the Western
world, when for seven days the rich get richer
and the poor get poorer in amnesty . . . (p. 76).
This sounds more like propaganda than an ordinary man's
protest against commercializing a Christian holiday. And
there is a suggestion of the communistic attitude toward
God in Wilbourne1s pessimism:
the doomed worm blind to all passion and dead to .
all hope and not even knowing it, oblivious and
unaware in the face of all darkness, all unknown,
the underlying All-Derisive biding to blast him
(p. 77).
Life has no place for love any more, Wilbourne says, just
as it has no room for Christ:
There is no place for it in the world today, not
even in Utah. We have eliminated it. It took
us a long time, but man is resourceful and limit
less in inventing too, and so we have got rid of
322
love at last just as we have got rid of Christ
(p. 80).
The love lamented here is not Christian love (in spite of
the mention of Christ), nor is it married love; Wilbourne
means "free love," such as he and Charlotte tried--in
defiance of all conventions. The tragic outcome of their
experience would seem to prove that his own contention
("there is no place for it in the world today") was
eminently right. The tone of most of the novel is cynical
and despairing.
In Chicago the couple had a writer friend named
McCord, who often met them at a bar in the evenings. After
Wilbourne lost his job as a hospital orderly, he and
Charlotte took from the ice-box two chops meant for sup
per and went out to meet McCord and "to find a dog,"
With McCord and other friends at the bar, Charlotte pre
tends to be gay, though she knows their money is nearly
gone.
"Yes it's all right. It's fine," She was not
speaking to him. "We've got forty-eight dollars
too much; just think of that. Even the Armours
haven't got forty-eight dollars too much. Drink
up, ye armourous sons. Keep up with the dog"
(P* 51).
Her pun calls forth an even worse one from the gloomy
McCord: "Yah. Set, ye armourous sons in a sea of heming-
waves." His sally is followed by a description of the
party, including the invisible dog (perhaps a forerunner
of "Harvey") and a hoary bit of humor based on a strained
reading of a Biblical story:
They had not eaten yet though they had lost two
members of the party, they were six in the cab,
sitting on each other's knees while Charlotte
carried the chops (they had lost the paper now)
and McCord held the invisible dog; it was named
Moreover now, from the Bible, the poor man's
table (p. 51)*
The passage referred to (the story of the Rich Man and
Lazarus) is:
There was a certain rich man, which was clothed
in purp'le and fine linen, and fared sumptuously
every day.
And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus,
which was laid at his gate, full of sores,
And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell
from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs
came and licked his sores. Luke 16:19-21. A.V.
The whimsy involving the dog continues until they find a
house in the suburbs having a metal figure of a dog,
. . . the cast iron Saint Bernard with its com
posite face of the emperor Franz Joseph and a
Maine banker in the year 1859- Charlotte placed
the chops'upon the iron pediment, between the
iron feet . . . (p. 52).
This is apparently her way of soliciting a change of
fortune. The humor, however, is lame.
Faulkner invests the scene of Wilbourne's plight,
after discovering Charlotte's pregnancy, with a kind of
324
sardonic comedy. Wilbourne was long past the usual age
before he had any experience with wotnen— a fact that con
tinually frustrated him. In his troubled state he is
thinking/ "weighing a thousand expedients":
A kind of pillj he thought--this a trained doctor:
whores use them, they are supposed to work, they
must work, something must; it cant be this diffi
cult, this much of a price, and not believing it,
knowing that he would never be able to make him
self believe it, thinking, And this is the price
of twenty-six years, the two thousand dollars I
stretched over four of them by not smoking, by
keeping my virginity until it damn near spoiled
on me, the dollar and two dollars a week or a
month my sister could not afford to send: that
I should have deprived myself of all hope forever
of anesthesia from either pills or pamphlets.
And now everythingelse is completely out (p. 106).
In his desperation he thinks, "with harsh and terrible
sardonicism," "I will set up as a professional abortion
ist" (p. 107). This is the grimace that hides the pain of
his failure and frustration.
In San Antonio, Wilbourne goes on a wild goose
chase for some of the pills he has heard about. A taxi
driver directed him to a bawdy-house where he might get
such medicine. The matron welcomed him, especially after
he offered to buy her beer (as the driver had suggested)
and she chatted intimately about her girls:
"Well, some of the sweetest friendships I have
ever seen was made in one night or even after one
session between two folks that never seen one
325
another an hour ago. I got American girls here
or Spanish (strangers like Spanish girls, once,
anyway. It's the influence of the moving pic
tures, I always say) and one little Eyetalian
that just— " (p. 109).
In a moment the maid entered with two tankards of beer,
apparently kept ready just behind the curtain. When
Wilbourne brokenly admitted that he was not seeking a
girl but some medicine, the matron became indignant— with
him and with the taxi driver. Presently a bouncer ap
peared--1 ^ biggish man, fairly young, bulging his clothes
a little11— who gave Wilbourne "a hot, embracing almost
loverlike glare" and said, "Thatim?" Cursing Wilbourne,
he threw him out of doors and joyously hit him in the
face: "The brute will have to hit me once, Wilbourne
thought. Or he will burst, suffocate" (pp. 110-11).
If this can be called humor, it is of the frontier
type: hard, sardonic, and cruel. It is the old situation
in which a countryman is played for a fool in the city
(as the two country boys were in Sanctuary), but the situ
ation evokes sympathy as well as derision. Wilbourne's
forlorn attempt to get some medicine to produce an abor
tion is a masculine version of the tale in which Dewey
Dell also tried and failed. But the man's ignorance
(since he is much older and more sophisticated than Dewey
Dell) is more ridiculous. Even after failing at the
326
brothel, he continued to seek the pills. Finally a drug
store clerk sold him a box containing five "objects
which might have been coffee beans" and advised him to
give the girl two of them with liquor and then dance.
Charlotte obediently
V
took all five of them, they went out and got two
pints of whiskey and found at last a dance hall
full of cheap colored bulbs and khaki uniforms
and rentable partners or hostesses (p. 111).
They tried to dance, but Wilbourne could not dance any
better than he could practice medicine. By eleven o'clock
Charlotte was sick, and when she came from the wash room
he said, "You lost the pills too."
"Two of them. I was afraid of that so I used
the basin and washed them off and took them again.
Where's the bottle?" (p. 112).
The scene is too charged emotionally to be comical; it
is like a cruel practical joke which causes even the
spectators to suffer. From this night on, both Wilbourne
and Charlotte were as desperate as cornered animals; in
this state he finally agreed to try to perform the abor
tion. His ill-fated attempt calls forth from the deputy
who arrested him a bawdy joke about using a knife;
Wilbourne's own explanation for his failure was:
I loved her. A miser would probably bungle- the
blowing of his own safe too. Should have called
in a professional, a cracksman who didn't care,
didn't love the very iron flanks that held The
money (p. 135)-
327
The arresting officer (a man with "the indelible
mark of ten thousand Southern deputy sheriffs," with "the
sadist's eyes" and an air of "pre-absolved brutality")
has a bitter wit. He cannot remember Wilbourne's name,
but calls him at different times Wilson, Webster, Watson,
and finally Morrison. This blundering serves a little to
lighten the tension and cover the confusion of Wilbourne.
By its contrast it may also make the tragedy more stark
and terrible.
The blending of humor and pathos is not so success
ful in this novel as in some of Faulkner's better works,
say As I Lay Dying or Light in August. What humor there
is in The Wild Palms does not seem fresh, spontaneous, or
natural. It appears to be synthetic or forced, like the
"fixed grimaces of the saleswomen," and is charged with
too much pessimism and cynicism. In its subject matter,
too, it lacks originality, playing on the same old themes
of unhappy marriage, women's peculiarities, man's inepti
tude, and wornout prejudices against urban life, conform
ity, Southern religion and the Power or Fate ("the All-
Derisive") that treats men as "blind worms." The writing,
likewise, is not representative of Faulkner's genius.
The Wild Palms is more naturalistic than usual, and there
is less poetry and fine rhetoric. Sometimes, indeed,
328
Faulkner exhibits unforgivably bad taste. Though the
moral of the story seems clear enough, it is not likely
that the story was written simply to prove that the wages
of sin is death! And it lacks the finished technique
and fine characterizations that distinguish Faulkner's
great works. In most respects it is a third- or fourth-
rate novel.
329
Part Three: From Collected Stories
In the forty-two short stories published in
Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Random House,
1950) all sorts of characters, settings, and types of
fiction are represented. The appearance of this rather
bulky book (it is nearly 900 pages long) was another
milestone in the career of Faulkner. Critics divided,
as usual, over the quality of some of the stories, but
nearly all agreed that the work showed brilliance or even
genius. A reviewer in The Atlantic Monthly said: "These
- Collected Stories certainly strengthen the case of those
critics who have steadily maintained that Faulkner is the
greatest living American writer. A writer for the
Saturday Review commented:
William Faulkner is beginning to emerge rather
clearly as the most considerable twentieth-
century American writer of short fiction; the
present volume is a publishing event of real
significance.2
Other critics called attention to the great variety of
material presented in these stories and to the unevenness
of their quality. A review in the San Francisco Chronicle
^The Atlantic Monthly,(October 1950)* P» 90.
2
William Peden, Saturday Review of Literature
(August 26, 1950), p. 12.
330
began: "The most striking aspect of the collection is
the tremendous variety, not only in subject matter and
3
narrative type, but in quality." The stories are loosely
gathered together under six headings, namely, "The
Country," "The Village," "The Wilderness" (Indian stories),
"The Wasteland" (European or war stories), "The Middle
Ground," and "Beyond."
If, as many critics insist, these works represent
both the best and worst in Faulkner's writings, they also
I
exhibit practically every facet of his humor. To quote
one other critic:
In the Collected Stories, Faulkner's blazing
skill and lazy improvisations, his rich humor and
corny folksiness, his deep sense of tragedy and
tasteless gothic excesses are all brought together.
. . . The final impression left by Faulkner's work
is that he is a writer of incomparable talents,
who has used and misused those talents superbly
and recklessly.^
These stories include practically all variations found in
frontier humor: hyperbole, the tall tale, boisterous and
i
wild action, harsh practical jokes, and comic situations. .
i
Besides, there are puns, reversals, name humor, irony, j
i
understatement, anecdotes, dialect, and satire. Certain •
i
The San Francisco Chronicle (August 20, 1950)>
p. 18.
4
Time (August 28, 1950), p. 79*
stories have touches of surrealistic humor and "gothic
excesses," and others blend tragic and comic elements,
with more or less success. In the vast array of charac
ters are found individuals who are principally satiric,
heroic, tragic, comical, or--in many cases--a compound of
many qualities. Significantly, however, humor plays a
part in the characterizations or plots of the great major
ity of the stories. Not more than six or eight of the
forty-two may be said to be lacking in some type of humor;
these are generally tragic tales in which the author’s
mood or the intent of the story does not allow for play
fulness or warmth. For example, "Barn Burning," a grim
story about the worthless Ab Snopes who strikes at his
landlord by burning his barn, has no place for lightness
or fun; neither has "Dry September," a furious study of
race relations resulting in a lynching; and "Elly," an
other "problem" story dealing with the perennial theme of
intermarriage between Negroes and whites, is too grimly
earnest for humor. Some of the "Wasteland" stories, such
as the ironic "Victory," have very little if any humor.
Most of the stories about the South (with the exception
of the few which touch on the sore spots of race relations)
and the tales about the Indians and poor whites abound in
humor. The ways of city people, including writers,
332
merchants, promoters, and Hollywood types, receive rather
rough treatment. In these stories, as in most of his fic
tion, Faulkner employs, humor to approve (the simple life
of farmers, with its hard work and independence) and to
satirize or condemn (the greed, self-centeredness, and
moral irresponsibility of certain types, especially the
parasites spawned in big cities). Thus, as a rule, the
humor is more than incidental, for it is charged with
moral judgment and serves as a means to an end.
The stories in this volume that depict city life
or city dwellers reinforce the views set forth in earlier
works, such generalizations as that too much money or
leisure corrupts men, or, again, that opportunists will
sell anything, even their souls, for money. Just as in
other stories, Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago are pre
sented as harboring all kinds of vice and social evils,
so in these stories New York and Hollywood are shown to
be breeding places of crime and corruption. In an earlier
story of a country boy's inability to adjust to the pace
of city life, "Go Down, Moses," Faulkner suggested that
society probably more than the individual himself was to
blame for the youth's crime and execution. In this volume,
"Pennsylvania Station" tells of another boy who, first in
Chicago and later in Florida, gets into trouble, kills a
333
policeman, takes everything his mother has saved (money
eked out by scrubbing office floors and paid on a casket
for herself) and then makes a grand gesture by sending
(he does not come) an expensive wreath to his mother's
funeral. In this story, told by a pathetic old man who
has no home or money to a younger "bum" in the same situa
tion, the setting is the Pennsylvania Railroad station in
New York, where they have taken refuge from the extreme
cold, until driven out by a ticket agent. The two scrub
women, one of them the mother of Danny, the young criminal,
and sister of the old man who tells the story, and the
other a neighbor of hers, are presented as tragicomic
figures. Their poverty, hard work, and bitter life evoke
our sympathy; but the mother's dealings with old man
Pinchski, who sells her a cheap casket which she pays on
for years, as well as her credulity and bland faith in
her son call forth mixed emotions. This story of the
hopes, defeats, and heartache of New York's poor has
qualities suggestive of 0. Henry's tales of the big city.
Much of the power of this story lies in the sly humor of
situation and language; the old man, like the ancient
mariner, must tell his tale, and the young man cannot
choose but hear. Their self-satirizing comments are both
revealing and comical.
334
The story "Artist at Horne," though not strictly
urban, is about a writer who went to live in New York
but, after publishing a novel, settled in the Valley of
Virginia, where "now and then New York came to visit him."
The story satirizes artists in general, including the
soft-hearted and generous Roger Howes, who cannot refuse
free board and lodging to the motley assortment of paint
ers and writers who come to enjoy week-ends or longer
stays at his pleasant country retreat. Sometimes they
come unannounced, almost penniless, and with only one
extra shirt or pair of socks. Such a visitor is John
Blair, a poet, who walks in one day bearing in his hand
the telegram he had sent collect to Howes announcing his
coming, but which Howes had not been in town to pick up.
Blair moves in upon the couple and makes himself at home
I
with their food, clothing, and servants. When Howes
tells his wife she must accept the man's peculiarities
because he is a poet, she says:
"Then I suppose he will refuse to leave the
bathroom at all. I suppose you'll have to carry
a tray to him in the tub three times a day.
Why do you feel compelled to lodge and feed
these people? Can't you see they consider you
an easy mark? That they eat your food and wear
your clothes and consider us hopelessly bourgeois
for having enough food for other people to eat,
and a little soft-brained for giving it away? c
And now this one, in a sky-blue dressing-sacque."
^Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York,
.1950), P. 631.
335
Howes' wife learns later that her husband had in
vited the poet to come, in the hope of helping him to
get on his feet and to get a book published. In the en
suing weeks Blair disrupts the routine of everybody in
the house, becomes infatuated with Pinkie, the Negro
cook, and then makes love to his hostess and by adroit
suggestions makes her feel sorry for him. When the hus
band finds him one evening embracing Mrs. Howes in the
garden, Blair freely admits what he has done and then
announces grandly that he can no longer accept the hos
pitality of Howes' home. After a few harsh words to the
poet, Howes insists that Blair must go in and go to bed,
that the man is not well, after all, and that they can
settle things later. But Blair, after talking to Mrs.
Howes, leaves that night and she locks herself in her
room. Howes then returns to his typewriter, long
neglected, and "by daylight he was sounding like forty
hens in a sheet-iron corncrib, and the written sheets on
the desk were piling up . . ."
After the estrangement between husband and wife,
Howes has to sleep on a cot on the sleeping porch. After
several days.Mrs. Howes receives a letter from the poet,
still in the neighborhood, asking her to meet him. But
the husband, still working hard at his typewriter, tries
336
to persuade her to forget Blair. In the darkness and
rain she sees Blair out in the yard and tries unsuccess
fully to get him to come in.
And here we are again: the bald husband, the
rural plute, and this dashing blade, this home-
wrecking poet. Both gentlemen, being artists:
the one that doesn't want the other to get wet;
the other whose conscience won't let him wreck
the house from inside. Here we are, with Roger
trying to hold one of these green silk, female
umbrellas over himself and the poet too, jerking
at the poet's arm.
"You damned fool! Come in the house!" (p. 642).
In the Gaston-Alphonse scene which follows the two men
try vainly to persuade each other, Howes to get Blair
in out of the rain, and Blair to get Howes to go back in--
Blair disappears into the darkness, only to reappear a
little later, and Howes again runs out into the rain,
pursuing shadows. "Maybe he was going to try again to
make the poet take the umbrella. So maybe he didn't know
as much about poets as he thought he did." The poet
leaves, but three days later sends Mrs. Howes a second
letter and a poem written on a menu card from a restaurant
in the village. Then Howes finishes the manuscript he
has been working on:
And what was it he had been writing? Him, and
Anne, and the poet. Word for word, between the
waiting spells to find out what to -write down next,
with a few changes here and there, of course, be
cause live people do not make good copy, the most
337
interesting copy being gossip, since it mostly is
not true (p. 644).
The satire in this story is of the bantering kind.
It pokes fun at the whole tribe of artists--sentimental,
softheaded, impractical.
Sometimes when a man thinks about making poets and
artists and such pay taxes which they say indi
cates that a man is free, twenty-one, and capable
of taking care of himself in close competition,
it seems like they are obtaining money under false
pretenses (p. 645).
The characters and situations are exaggerated enough to
make 1 l good copy," and the comedy of the two men entreating
each other in the rain is highly amusing. Faulkner was
describing a class of men he knew well (some of the lines
describing Roger Howes appear to be a self-portrait), and
it is possible that some of the situations involving indi
gent artists may also be partly autobiographical. But
the humor is genial and indulgent.
An urban story which contrasts markedly with this
is "Golden Land," a satire which savagely attacks the com
mercialism and degeneracy of a middle-class family caught
in a web of easy money and soft living in California.
Ira Ewing, son of a hard-working and honorable midwestern
farm family, ran away from home at fourteen and tramped
up and down the west coast before settling in Los Angeles
in the real estate business. By native shrewdness and
moral obtuseness he built a very profitable business,
moved into a hundred-thousand dollar house in Beverly
Hills, and spent money freely on women and drinking
parties. His business and social life estranged him
from his wife, a carpenter's daughter who never shared
his social ambitions, and his two children--April Lalear
Samantha, a bit player in the movies, and Voyd, a weakling
whom the father calls a "feeb," Mrs. Ewing is bitter
toward her husband, not only because of his treatment of
her, but because his way of life has made their children
as unprincipled and parasitical as he is. At the begin
ning of the story the father is shown suffering from too
much liquor and night life; his wife and son live in the
same house with him but hate and fear him, and the
daughter's name and pictures are splashed all over the
front page of the metropolitan tabloid papers: APRIL
LALEAR BARES ORGY SECRETS. A later headline connects the
girl with a "prominent local family": "Admits Real Name
is Samantha Ewing, Daughter of Ira Ewing, Local Realtor"
(p. 711).
The story subsequently shows that Ewing not only
capitalized upon the wide publicity given to his daughter's
illicit amours, but arranged to have his picture made at
the trial, with the caption beneath: IRA EWING, PRESIDENT
339
OP EWING REALTY CO., ... WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, BEVERLY HILLS,
and ordered a thousand extra copies to be printed at his
expense to be mailed to real estate clients "all up and
down the Coast and as far East as Reno." To his mistress,
a middle-aged woman with whom he lived a great part of the
time, he said concerning his daughter, "I can't under
stand itJ After all the advantages that . . . after all
I tried to do for them--" (p. TIT)* Thus Ewing becomes
a type of the modern business man who lives for two things
only--the pursuit of money and of selfish pleasure. He is
basically a Snopes, greedy, materialistic, and utterly
unprincipled. The scene in which I. 0. Snopes charges
the villagers for a view of his idiot son making love to
a cow is no more shocking than the manner in which Ira
Ewing played up his daughter's wild orgies to help him
sell real estate. The setting of the Snopes depravity
was a backwoods village in Mississippi, among people not
noted for their brightness? the setting of the Ewing
scandal was the movie capital of the world.
The sardonic power of the story may be suggested
by the irony of the title--"Golden Land"--and by two
descriptions of noted places in California, one of them
a cemetery in Glendale:
340
a barren foothill combed and curried'into a
cypress -and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage
set and topped by an electric sign in red bulbs
which, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared
in broad sourceless ruby as though just beyond
the crest lay not heaven but hell (p. 711)*
The other scene (perhaps "Muscle Beach") is thus described:
Steadily between them and the water, and as far
up and down the beach as they could see, the
bathers passed--young people, young men in trunks,
and young girls in little more, with bronzed, un
selfconscious bodies. Lying so, they seemed to
him to walk along the rim of the world as though
they and their kind alone inhabited it . . . pre
cursors of a new race not yet seen on the earth:
of men and women without age, beautiful as gods
and goddesses, and with the minds of infants (p.
721).
Behind the facade of respectability, good business, and
easy living, Faulkner shows that commercialism, greed,
and decadence have destroyed the old moral fiber and pro
duced a degenerate race. The names of Ewing's children
are appropriately ironic--Voyd (vacant, useless, without
force) and Lalear (suggestive of weakness and leering);
the wife, more a symbol of futile protest than a person
ality, is not named. Ewing's old mother makes this com
ment about her son:
"You make money too easy. This whole country
is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right
for them that have been born here for generations;
I don't know about that. But not for us" (p.
724).
341
Faulkner's reputed dislike for California may have
influenced some of the writing here: for example, the
satirical passages suggest Bruce Bliven's essay "Roses
in January, Morons in June." At the end of "Golden Land,"
Faulkner says:
It was still high, still afternoon; the mountains
stood serene and drab against it; the city, the
land, lay sprawled and myriad beneath it--the land,
the earth which spawned a thousand new faiths,
nostrums and cures each year but no disease to
even disprove them on--beneath the golden days
unmarred by rain or weather, the changeless monot
onous beautiful days without end countless out of
the halcyon past and endless into the halcyon
future (pp. 725-6).
The monotony of unbroken sunshine is matched, he suggests,
only by the fecundity of the people in inventing new cults
and nostrums. The mood of /this story is harsh and the
satire is biting.
Another story, rather formless and fantastic, that
makes fun of social pretensions and casts a man as a
"farn" (faun) is "Black Music." One of the principals is
Mrs. Carleton Van Dyming, who "used to be Miss Mathilda
Lumpkin of Poughkeepsie," a woman .of extravagant taste
who bought a country place and began remodeling it to re
semble an old Roman villa. (The story is classed as
urban because it began in the city and involved city
people.)
342
"But she would stand there, with them other rich
Park Avenue folks, showing them how here would be
the community house built to look like the Coliseum
and the community garage yonder made to look like
it was a Acropolis, and how the grape vine would
be grubbed up entire and the hillside terraced to
make a outdoors theatre where they could act in
one another's plays; and how the meadow would be
a lake with one of them Roman barges towed back
and forth on it by a gas engine, with mattresses
and things for them to lay down on while they et"
(p. 807).
To halt his wife's scheme of turning the valley into a
Roman village, Mr. Van Dyming used desperate measures.
He employed a friend, the man who relates the story, to go
down to the estate when Mrs. Van Dyming was entertaining
and play the part of a faun. The story is an elaborate
practical joke involving the weak-minded dupe (who, after
some imbibing, strips to play his part), the impression
able Mrs. Van Dyming, and a dangerous bull. As the news
papers headlined the story:
MANIAC AT LARGE IN VIRGINIA MOUNTAINS
Prominent New York Society Woman
Attacked in Own Garden
Mrs. Carlton Van Dyming of New York and Newport
Attacked by Half Nude Madman and Maddened Bull
in Garden of Her Summer Lodge. Maniac Escapes.
Mrs. Van Dyming Prostrate (pp. 814-15).
The newspaper article gives a graphic first-hand account
of Mrs. Van Dyming's narrow escape from the "maniac" and
her husband's prize bull. A later news item tells of the
disappearance of the madman and of Mrs. Van Dyming's
abandonment of her plans for the country home. This
story, though it is more complicated psychologically, has
many parallels to the Sut Lovingood escapades--with its
wild action and crude humor. It is interesting as an ex
ample of an old form being used as a vehicle of modern
satire. Faulkner manages to give the story some plausi
bility by having the half-literate man who acted as the
dupe tell the story to another man. In addition to the
satire against social climbing and ridiculous pretensions,
there is also some sharp comment on women. After the
prankster has been paid off and has left the country,
his wife collects his insurance (since he is assumed to
be dead), marries a younger man, and moves into a Park
Avenue apartment.
One conclusion seems fairly clear from the novels
and stories having an urban setting; it is that Faulkner
believes that city life seems to bring out the worst
rather than the best in the human species. If the city
does not corrupt, it at least provides a. suitable climate
and seedbed for all kinds of evil— grasping and ruthless
commercialism, all kinds of human exploitation and cor
ruption. Besides all the moral turpitude found in the
cities, Faulkner objects also to the dehumanizing influ
ences in them, and to the crowds, the incessant noise,
and the shabby culture. He seems to accept the old saying,
"God made the country, man made the town," for rarely if
ever in his works does the city produce beauty, character,
or a happy life. The humor that he finds among city folk
appears to be strained, acrid, and often forced. Thus,
as a rule, it is represented in satire or sharp comment
(such as the remarks at the end of "Golden Land"). The
whimsy and drollery characteristic of the more unsophis
ticated country folk are not often found in the stories
of urban life. Instead, the follies, excesses, and
callousness of city people(as they appear to Faulkner)
are held up to ridicule.
CHAPTER SEVEN
STORIES RELATING TO FARM AND VILLAGE LIFE
Part One: Go Down, Moses
An important group of Faulkner's novels and stories
may be discussed together because of their rural settings
and the similarities of their leading characters. To this
group belong The Old Man, Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the
Dust, and a number of the Collected Stories, most of them
set in Mississippi. Negroes or part-Negroes play prominent
parts in most of these novels and stories which, moreover,
contain some of Faulkner's finest characterizations: the
"tall convict" of The Old Man, Lucas and Molly Beauchamp
of Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust, and some of
the "tall men" of the rural tales. The humor in this
group of stories is generally more kindly, relaxed, and
good-natured than the humor found in novels of city life.
Faulkner (who likes to be considered a gentleman farmer)
seems, as a rule, to prefer country people and to give
them, in his fiction, more of the qualities of decency,
fairness, independence, and courage. The one important
346
exception to this principle is the white man's treatment
of the Negroes.
The volume of short and long stories entitled
Go Down, Moses was published by Random House, New York,
in 1942, although some of the stories had appeared first
in magazines. The collection is dedicated to "Mammy,
Caroline Barr" (1840-1940) "who was born in slavery and
who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calcu
lation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable
devotion and love." The stories are loosely tied together
by their subject matter, the injustice of the whites to
the Negroes and the relations of man to the wilderness.
Isaac or Ike McCaslin is prominent in "The Old People,"
"The Bear," and "Delta Autumn"; and two stories, "The
Fire and the Hearth" and "Go Down Moses," deal with the
life of Lucas Beauchamp, the proud Negro descendant of
old Carothers McCaslin, the white slaveholder and grand
father of Isaac. This is the same Lucas involved in the
later novel, Intruder in the Dust.
The first story, "Was," deals in humorous fashion
with the forebears of Isaac McCaslin, now an old and child
less widower. Isaac's father, Uncle Buck (Theophilus), was
one of two identical twins (the other was Uncle Bud,
Amoedus) of Carothers McCaslin. The twins own a Negro
slave named Tomey's Turl, who regularly--about twice a
year--broke away from their place to visit a slave wench
named Tennie at a plantation owned by Mr. Hubert Beauchamp
in the adjoining county. Each time the Negro ran off,
the brothers knew where to find him, and they would go
after him and bring him home. Mr. Beauchamp tried to
persuade the twins to buy the Negro girl but they refused
because they had more slaves than they could use, and
they tried to sell Tomey's Turl to Mr. Hubert, but
he not only wouldn't buy Tomey's Turl, he
wouldn't even have that damn white half-McCaslin
on his place even as a free gift, not even if
Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board
and keep for him.l
Mr. Beauchamp had an aging spinster sister, Miss
Sophonsiba, whom he was trying to marry to the woman-shy
Uncle Buddy. By various means, such as increasing her
dowry of land and slaves, he had tried to make the match
attractive, but to no avail. In her own way she tried to
be winsome, with loads of earrings and beads and perfume,
but the twins kept out of her way.
As the story develops, two themes run concurrently,
the hunt for Tomey's Turl (much like a foxhunt, with
horses and dogs) and the efforts of Miss Sophonsiba to
trap one of the twins. The hunt'becomes hilarious when
the Negro corrals the dogs sent out to catch him and pens
1William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York 19^2),
p. 6.
348
them all in the cottonhouse. The chase is more like a
sport than a manhunt, with the Negro enjoying it as much
as the white men. Mr. Beauchamp and Uncle Buck start
an argument over when and how Tomey's Turl will be cap
tured: the former says that the runaway can be caught
without any trouble at Tennie1s cabin about midnight.
Uncle Buck swears that neither he nor the Negro will be
near Tennie's cabin at midnight; they will be at home.
So each man bets five hundred dollars that he is right,
and the chase continues.
Some slapstick comedy occurs when the white men,
discouraged after losing all trace of the Negro in the
woods, return to Beauchamp's house in the dark and the
little fyce dog with them flushes Tomey's Turl out of one
of the cabins, and he runs over Uncle Buck, knocking him
to the ground. In his back pocket Uncle Buck was carry
ing a bottle of whiskey, and when he feels the liquid
running over his leg he refuses to move until they find
out whether it is just whiskey, or whiskey and blood. In
disgust Uncle Buck remarks, "I godfrey, what a night."
Since the Negro was gone again, the men decided to post
pone the chase until the next day.
In the dark Uncle Buck climbed the stairs, found
a room with the door open, entered, undressed, and climbed
349
into bed. "That was when Miss Sophonsiba sat up on the
other side of Uncle Buck and gave the first scream." As
he told the story later to Uncle Buddy, he said, Mr.
Hubert came down the hall with a candle and in his night
shirt, and said,
"Well, 'Filus. She's got you at last."
"It was an accident," Uncle Buck said. "I swear
to Godfrey "
"Hah," Mr. Hubert said. "Don't tell me. Tell
her that" (pp. 21-22).
The two men are able to reach an understanding, but Miss
Sophonsiba is not so reasonable. As Mr. Hubert explained,
"You come into bear-country of your own free will
and accord. All right; you were a grown man and
you knew it was bear-country and you knew the way
back out like you knew the way in and you had
your chance to take it. But no. You had to
crawl into the den and lay down by the bear. And
whether you did or didn't know the bear was in it
dont make any difference. . . . After all, I'd
like a little peace and quiet and freedom myself,
now I got a chance for it. Yes sir. She's got
you, 'Filus, and you know it" (pp. 22-23).
Uncle Buck, in desperation, recalls the bet he had made
with Mr. Hubert. When Hubert says,
"I thought you said you found him in Tennie's
cabin," Uncle Buck replies, "I did. What you
bet me was I would catch him there. If there had
been ten of me standing in front of that door,
we wouldn't have caught him" (p. 23).
Mr. Hubert sees a chance not only to get his sister off
his hands but to settle the problem of the runaway slave.
350
"Five hundred dollars against Sibbey. And we'll
settle this nigger business once and for all too.
If you win, you buy Tennie; if I win, I buy that
boy of yours. The price will be the same for each
one: three hundred dollars."
"Win?" Uncle Buck said. "The one that wins buys
the niggers?"
"Wins Sibbey, damn itJ" Mr. Hubert said. "What
the hell else are we setting up till midnight
arguing about? The lowest hand wins Sibbey and
buys the niggers" (p. 2k).
Uncle Buck tries to settle matters by buying the girl and
calling off "the. rest of this foolishness," but Mr.
Hubert will not hear to this. In the ensuing game Mr.
Hubert drew three kings and two fives, and said, "By God,
Buck McCaslin, you have met your match at last." The
next night, however, the play continues, with Uncle Buddy,
a sharp one at cards, taking the place of his twin. Uncle
Buddy shuffled, Mi(s) Hubert cut, but a third hand, Tomey's
Turl, unnoticed by Mr. Hubert, did the dealing. Of course,
Uncle Buddy won. But the game does not end there. Uncle
Buddy proposes a new bet: he bets the two Negroes against
the three hundred dollars Uncle Buck owes Mr. Hubert.
They check up and agree: if Mr. Hubert wins, Uncle Buck
takes Sibbey without dowry and the two Negroes, but If
Uncle Buddy wins, then Uncle Buck is to be free, and Mr.
Hubert must pay three hundred dollars for Tomey's Turl.
351
On the next play, Mr. Hubert finds himself beaten, and
asks, "Who dealt these cards?" but fortunately for Uncle
Buck, he does not wait for an answer.
At the end we see the twins and the Negro girl
riding home in the wagon, while Tomey's Turl rides on
ahead. In another story we are told that Uncle Buddy
won Tennie from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859* Thus
Faulkner presents the lighter side of slavery and indulges
in some humor about the old maid who wants a man and the
two elderly brothers who want only peace and freedom.
The story contains not only situation humor (the bedroom
scene and the gambling for high stakes, for example) but
also comic characterization, as seen in the mannerisms of
Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy and Miss Sophonsiba, and some
boisterous high jinks in the way Tomey's Turl penned up
the dogs sent to chase him and in the impromptu fox chase
in the McCaslin house when a fox they have in a box breaks
out and runs amuck with the dogs all over the place. "Was"
is one of the relatively few stories in which one feels
that humor was Faulkner's main intention, though even here
the announced purpose was to give an account of Ike
McCaslin's ancestors.
The second story, "The Fire and the Hearth," is
much longer (over one hundred pages) and though it has a
352
considerable amount of humor, it deals in a serious manner
with problems arising from slavery and miscegenation.
One may say that it attempts to present both sides of
the picture--the light and the dark. Lucas Beauchamp, a
descendant of Tomey's Turl and Tennie, is the part-white
grandson of old Carothers McCaslin, who has inherited the
pride and independence of both races. Lucas' wife, Molly,
a very small, aged, and dried-up old Negro, is drawn from
Faulkner's own Mammy, to whom the book is dedicated. She
and Lucas are both presented sympathetically.
Much of the comedy of this story revolves around
Lucas' moonshining activities, his frantic search for some
buried money, and his besting a slick city salesman who
tries to sell him a three-hundred dollar divining machine.
Lucas is shrewd, calculating, and sardonic, in contrast
to his shiftless, gullible, not-too-bright future son-in-
law, George Wilkins. In Chapter One Lucas carefully con
ceals his own moonshine still and exposes one that George
Wilkins has set up in competition to him, hoping to get
George out of the way. While hiding his still in an old
Indian burial mound, he finds the gold coin which .set in
motion a chain of events. After that, he can think of
nothing but buried treasure, and night after night he
spends digging and sifting for the money he believes to
353
be buried in the field.
Meanwhile, Lucas informs Roth Edmonds, the land
lord, that George Wilkins is making whiskey on Edmond's
place and storing it under the floor of George's cabin.
Edmonds immediately gets word to the sheriff, and the
next morning a raid is made on the place. But the still
which Lucas had carefully hidden is.-found in his own yard,
and on his perch are rows of fruit jars and jugs filled
with the pale liquor. Lucas realizes then that his own
/
daughter, sensing his plans, has spied on him and helped
; George to move the still and the other evidence to the
house so as to involve Lucas and perhaps save George.
The sheriff finds two stills and arrests both men. The
daughter says that Lucas has been making and selling
whiskey on the place for twenty years. When a commis
sioner reminds the sheriff that the girl cannot be made
to testify against her father, he replies that George
can do this, since he is not related to Lucas. The plan
is to have George testify against Lucas, and the girl to
testify against George. There is a good deal of humor
in the language and behavior of George, and in Lucas'
softened attitude toward George, as he says to his own
daughter, Nat, "My mind done changed. I'm going to let
you.and George get married." The girl then makes her own
terms about all that George will have to do before she
will move into his ramshackle house. At the trial * when
Nat is called, the judge asks her whether she is Lucas'
daughter.
"Yassuh," Nat said in her high, sweet, chanting
soprano. "I'm name Nat. Nat Wilkins, George
Wilkins' wife. There the paper fer hit in yo
hand."
"I see it is," the judge said. "It's dated last
October. "f
"Yes sir, Judge," George said. "We been had it
since I sold my cotton last fall. We uz married
then, only she wont come to live in my house
unto Mister Lu -- I mean I gots a stove and the
porch fixed and a well dug" (p. 74).
The judge then orders the stills to be destroyed, the
whiskey dumped, and his office cleared--since there are
no legal witnesses against either offender.
Chapter Two is a battle of wits between Lucas and
a young white salesman over a gold-finding machine. Lucas
tries unsuccessfully to borrow three hundred dollars from
Edmonds for the machine; he will not touch his own money
in the bank. He tries to bargain with the salesman: let
the salesman furnish the machine, Lucas will show him where
to use it, and they will divide the loot evenly. But the
salesman scoffs at this proposition. Next Lucas suggests
trading a mule for the machine, and the white man becomes
interested at once. After the deal is made, it develops
that the mule belongs to Edmonds, not to Lucas, thus
creating more complications. After spending all one
night in the bottoms hunting for gold, the salesman
agrees to rent Lucas the machine the next night for
twenty-five dollars. Lucas then sends George to town
during the day to draw out fifty dollars--in silver--which
he buries in an orchard and which that evening, with the
help of the salesman and the machine, he discovers! The
salesman reminds Lucas that the machine is still in his,
the salesman's, possession. Lucas counters that he has
bought it and given the. man "a billy sale for it," but
the saleman tells him to take the worthless paper and
tear it up. Because Lucas has pretended to have a paper
marked with the locations of buried treasure, the sales
man wants to become a partner in the business and agrees
to return the bill of sale for the mule and to sign over
a bill of sale for the finding machine. Lucas has to
give up the money he had planted, but he manages to get
back the mule and to get possession of the machine. As
it turns out, Lucas has rented the machine to the drummer
for twenty-five dollars a night, staying up himself all
night to be sure he gets the machine back. But the third
night the stranger does not show up, and Lucas says, "So
I reckon he's done gone back wherever it was he come from."
This section of the story is a good example of the tables
being turned on a sharper, a common theme in frontier
humor.
Chapter Three reveals how completely Lucas was cap
tured by finding the thousand-dollar gold coin and hearing
tales of money found on the land. Every night he is out
with his machine digging in the bottoms. Finally his
wife can stand it no longer and comes to Roth Edmonds to
tell him she wants a divorce--that Lucas "done went crazy.
Edmonds suggests that the way for her to cure Lucas would
be to take the machine and go out herself to hunt treasure
Lucas also visits Edmonds and reports that his wife
"wants a voce," and asks what it will cost him.
"I see," Edmonds said. "if you got to pay for it,
she can't have one. Well, this is one thing you
aint going to swangdangle anybody out of. You
aint buying or selling a gold-finding machine
either now, old man. She dont want any mule"
(p. 119).
Here occurs one of the many marriage jokes in Faulkner's
pages. Lucas asks why Edmonds can't declare them "voced
like you done Oscar and that yellow slut he fotched out
here from Memphis last summer," and Edmonds says, "Because
they were not married very hard." He tries to reason
Lucas out of. the divorce, and Lucas agrees that it is
not his, but his wife's idea. Finally Lucas agrees to
357
give the machine to George, the son-in-law, but Molly
protests that Nat, the girl, now expecting, will be
neglected and the farm work will suffer, Just as Lucas'
work had suffered before. When Edmonds gets home that
evening and turns his mare out to pasture, he says, "I
wish to hell either me or Lucas Beauchamp was a horse.
Or a mule" (p. 123).
The next day Lucas does not bring the machine as
he has promised, and later one of Edmonds' grooms comes
in, reporting that Aunt Molly Beauchamp is missing and
the Negroes have been looking all night for her. There
is tenderness in the description that follows: the find
ing of the little, exhausted old woman, nearly dead,
lying on the machine in the brush. Edmonds orders the
men to carry the machine, as he picks up the withered
old woman.
"Both of you tote it. Hope it finds something
between here and the house. Because if those
needles ever move on my place afterward, neither
of you will be looking at them. I'm going to
see about the divorce," he said to Lucas. "Before
she kills herself. Before you and that machine
kill her between you" (p. 125)*
The story moves quickly to the climax. Lucas and Molly
go with Edmonds to the city to make their statements in
court and get the divorce. Lucas still is proud, unbend
ing, impenetrable. But as the judge is ready to give his
358
ruling, Lucas says, "We dont want no voce. I done
changed my mind." After some questioning, the judge,
satisfied, says to the clerk, "Strike this off the docket,
Mr. Hulett" (p. 129). Edmonds is almost carrying the old
woman as they leave the office, and he helps her into his
car. Then Lucas says, "Wait a minute," and he is gone.
Erect, proud, dignified, he crosses the square and soon
returns, "carrying a small sack--obviously candy, a
nickel's worth," which he puts into Molly's hand. "Here,"
he says, "You aint got no teeth left but you can still
gum it" (pp. 129-30).
This story has a number of interests, particularly
the relations of Negroes and whites in modern days, and
it has more tenderness and pathos than most Faulkner
tales, but with all the complexities of feeling, there
is a generous amount of kindly humor. The humor is a
part of the texture, deriving both from the plot and from
the characters. Lucas and Molly took such a hold on
Faulkner's imagination that he brought them over into a
longer work probing the same problems and filled with the
same wry humor, Intruder in the Dust.
The third story in this volume, "Pantaloon in
Black," is a grim tale of a young Negro who, after losing
his wife, gets roaring drunk and kills a white scoundrel
359
who for years had been cheating the Negroes at dice.
Like "That Evening Sun" and "Dry September," it is a
study of racial tensions and raw emotions. This story
has no humor except for' some interesting Negro dialect.
The title seems to be an ironic use of the term "panta
loon," originally a stock character of Italian comedy, a
thin, emaciated old man, here applied to a burly and
tragic Negro "actor."
The fourth story, "The Old People," concerns the
Initiation of twelve-year-old Ike McCaslin into the
ritual of the hunt and the sacramental attitude of the
"old people," true hunters, toward the land, the game.
This story, which immediately precedes "The Bear," de
velops the wilderness theme and introduces the signifi
cant character Sam Fathers, son of a Negro slave and
Ikkemotubbe, known as Doom, a Chickasaw chief. Sam has
relinquished civilized life to return to the woods and
recapture the spirit of the wilderness. In the hunting
season he is joined by Major de Spain, General Compson,
McCaslin Edmonds, Walter Ewell, and Boon Hogganbeck, who
is also part Indian.
There is very little humor in this.story, probably
because of its serious reminiscences "about those old
times and those dead and vanished men of another race"
360
(p. 171) and because of its symbolic treatment of the
wilderness theme. There is a little fun in the conversa
tion of two of the hunters, who have seen two different
deer.
"I've seen your deer,” Walter said. "I was in
here last Monday. He aint nothing but a yearling."
"A yearling?" Boon said. He was panting from the
walking. His face still looked a little wild.
"If the one I saw was any yearling, I'm still in
kindergarden."
"Then I must have seen a rabbit," Walter said.
"I always heard you quit school two years before
the first grade" (p. 180).
This sort of humor, which relies on belittlement, is
typical of country people and is very common among
Faulkner's country folk.
"The Bear" is too long and complicated to be
classed as a true short story. Although it tells of the
hunting and eventual killing of a great bear, the story
moves back and forth into the past and reveals many
events in the life of Ike McCaslin and his slave-holding
forebears. William Van O'Connor says of this story:
The first version of "The Bear," much simpler
than the revised version, is the story of the
young Ike's initiation as a hunter and his grow
ing awareness of what is to be learned from the
wilderness, symbolized by the bear, Old Ben.
His two mentors are Sam Fathers and his own father
(in the revised version the mentor is his cousin
McCaslin Edmonds, sixteen years his senior and
361
the joint heir with Ike of the McCaslin farm).
Old Ben is an epitome, an apotheosis of the old
wild life known to the Chickasaws before men
hacked away at the forests and before they sold
a part of these to Jason Lycurgus Compson or
anyone else. Nature should be free and abundant.
No one has the right to own or sell it. Sam
tells Ike that Old Ben won't allow himself to
be seen until, without a gun and without giving
in to his fear, Ike learns to relinquish'himself
to the wilderness. This the boy does learn, even
to giving up his watch and compass (p. 127).
From Sam and others Ike learns a great deal of
lore about the bear. Sam tells him that Old Ben is "the
head bear. He's the man," and that the bear is indiffer-
, ent to men, dogs, and guns. Besides, Sam says, "He's
smart," smarter than the dogs and hunters who have pursued,
him for years. The account of the fabulous bear— its
size, fearlessness, and cunning--suggests the tall tale
of the Southwest, but so convincing is the writing that
one accepts all the statements as factual.
Alone, unarmed, and deep in the wilderness Ike saw
the bear.
It did not emerge, appear: it was just there,
immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's
hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it
but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimen-
sionless against the dappled obscurity, looking
at him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade
without haste, walking for an instant into the
sun's full glare and out of it, and stopped again
and looked back at him across one shoulder. Then
it was gone. It didn't walk into the woods. It
362
faded, sank back into the wilderness without
motion as he had watched a fish, a huge old
bass, sink back into the dark depths of its
pool and vanish without even any movements of
its fins (p. 209).
The second part of the story is about Lion, a huge
wild dog of mixed.breed that Boon, the Indian, trapped
l and tamed. Lion has the size, the courage, and the physi
cal stamina to hunt down Old Ben. Many details are given
to show how strong and fearless Lion is and to qualify him
as a fit antagonist for the great bear. When Major de
Spain's colt was found slain and partially eaten, the men
had various ideas about what had killed it. Some said it
was a panther, others said a wolf, a Negro suggested
"Maybe it was a hant," but later they learned that it was
a dog, or, as Sam said, "The dog."
"The dog?" Major de Spain said.
"That's gonter hold Old Ben."
"Dog the devil," Major de Spain said, "I'd rather
have Old Ben himself in my pack than that brute.
Shoot him" (p. 217).
The taming and training of Lion was a long and laborious
process, which Boon accepted with joy. The men watched
when
Boon touched Lion's head and knelt beside him,
feeling the bones and muscles, the power. It
was as if Lion were a woma,n--or perhaps Boon
was the woman. That was more like it--the big,
363
grave, sleepy-seeming dog which, as Sam Fathers
said, cared about no man and no thing . . . (p.
220).
There is ironic humor in the scene in which the hunters
.go to wake Boon and find him sleeping in a tight, airless
room in his wet hunting clothes, with the dog lying there
i
ibeside him.
"Damn it, Boon," McCaslin said. "Get that dog
out of here. He's got to run Old Ben tomorrow
morning. How in hell do you expect him to smell
anything fainter than a skunk after breathing
you all night?" (p. 221).
In other respects, too, Boon is a comical character.
His features were so ugly that he frightened strangers, and
his simple, childlike manner amused his friends. On one
occasion Boon and Lion cornered the bear and Boon, from a
distance of twenty-five feet, fired five shots which all
missed.
This time Boon didn't even curse. He stood in
the door, muddy, spent, his huge gargoyle's
face tragic and still amazed. "I missed him,"
he said. "I was in twenty-five feet of him and
I missed him five times."
"Never mind," Major de Spain said. "It was a
damned fine race. And we drew blood. Next year
we'll let General Compson or Walter ride Katie,
and we'll get him."
Then McCaslin said, "Where is Lion, Boon?"
"I left him at Sam's," Boon said. He was already
turning away. "I aint fit to sleep with him" (pp.
225-6).
364
This comic inversion of values (a man not being fit to
! sleep with a dog) is typical of Faulkner's wry humor.
It is found in many situations in many kinds of stories.
"The Bear" contains comic incidents, dialect humor,
' illiterate spelling (in the ledgers kept by Old Man
McCaslin), and hyperbole. An example of a comic incident,
not directly related to the story, is this one illustrat
ing Boon's use of a gun.
He had never hit anything bigger than a squirrel
that anybody ever knew, except the negro woman
that day when he was shooting at the negro man.
He was a big negro and not ten feet away.but Boon
shot five times with the pistol he had borrowed
from Major de Spain's negro coachman and the negro
he was shooting at outed with a dollar-and-a-half
mail-order pistol and would have burned Boon down
with it only it never went off, it just went
snicksnicksnicksnicksnick five times and Boon still
blasting away and he broke a plate-glass window
that cost McCaslin forty-five dollars and hit a
negro woman who happened to be passing in the leg
only Major de Spain paid for that; he and McCaslin
cut cards, the plate glass window against the
negro woman's leg (pp. 235-6).
The humor here arises from the fact that Boon,
a hunter, cannot even hit a big man just a few feet away,
though in his wild shooting he breaks an expensive plate-
glass window and hits a woman who happened to be passing.
This is the humor of belittlement, and it rests upon the
reader's unconscious feeling of superiority. Other inci
dents involve Boon's drinking, his frightening appearance,
and his talk about the need of education. One of the
liveliest anecdotes in this tale has to do with one of
the wild Texas ponies Flem Snopes had auctioned off in
Frenchman's Bend, a pony that Boon had tried to tame.
Section Three of the story relates the bear hunt,
a powerful account of Boon's and Lion's bravery against
the ferocious bear, in which Boon kills the bear with a
long knife in hand-to-hand combat in which he was badly
hurt and Lion mortally wounded. This part of the story
is filled with heroic action, pathos, and tenderness.
Of its meaning, O'Connor says that Old Ben represents
the wilderness, "the mystery of man's nature and origins
beneath the forms of civilization, and man's proper rela
tionship ■ with the wilderness teaches him liberty, courage,
pride, and humility" (p. 129)-
Section Four (a long and philosophical account of
the McCaslins and their descendants and the twin curses
of slavery and miscegenation) has no organic relation to
the story of "The Bear." In it young McCaslin, now twenty
one, visits his grandfather's plantation and learns from
the old ledgers kept there something of the hardships and
heartbreak of the people, white and black, engendered by
lusty old McCaslin. This section might be called a dis
quisition on slavery and its accompanying evils. With all
its gloominess there is a touch of humor, however, which
is discussed in a later chapter, "How Faulkner Uses
Humor." Because of the injustices done to the Negroes
Ike refuses to inherit the property, and in the end he
retires to a little cottage and becomes a carpenter,
perhaps in imitation of Christ. Many long passages are
devoted to the two themes of this complex and not wholly
coherent story: the right relationship of man to nature,
and the injustice of the whites to the Negroes.
The latter theme is pursued in the next story,
"Delta Autumn," in which Ike, now an old man past eighty,
is confronted by an example of racial injustice involving
his cousin Roth Edmonds. Roth has repeated the wrong of
his grandfather, McCaslin Edmonds, and begotten a child
of a mulatto granddaughter of James Buchanan, whose
parents had been slaves of Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy.
As a hunting crew composed of Uncle Ike, Roth, Will
Legate, and others enters the Bottom, one of the men
teases Roth.
"But he's got a doe in here: Of course a old man
like Uncle Ike cant be interested in no doe, not
one that walks on two legs--when she's standing
up, that is. Pretty light-colored, too. The one
he was after them nights last fall when he said
he was coon-hunting, Uncle Ike" (p. 337)*
Edmonds is presented here, as in the story "The
Fire and the Hearth," as a sensitive, brooding, and
cynical man. When some of the men talk hopefully of
stopping future Hitlers, Roth asks: "How? By singing
God Bless America in bars at midnight and wearing dime-
store flags in our lapels?" (p. 338)- He makes caustic
remarks about government controls, the public dole, and
the lack of patriotism, and in response to a statement
about does and fawns says, "Haven't you discovered in--
how many years more than seventy is it?--that women and
children are one thing there’s never any scarcity of?"
(p- 339)* In the camp he gives an envelope to one of
the men and tells him to say "No" to anyone coming to
look for him. It is clear that the envelope contains
bank notes, and the men suspect, rightly, that they are
intended to buy off a woman.
After Edmonds is gone a young, light-colored Negro
woman comes inquiring for him and carrying a blanket-
swaddled bundle on one arm. Uncle Ike learns that the
baby is Edmonds's and that the girl with whom he has lived
several weeks will not be satisfied with cash. When she
suggests marriage, Ike himself is horrified. "Maybe in
a thousand or two thousand years in America, but not nowl
Not nowi" It is the old story of injustice and racial
discrimination. As a token of his goodwill and to lessen
the sting of her rejection, Ike gives her for the child
368
Roth's old silver-bound hunting horn that had once been
General Compson's. As the Negro girl leaves she asks
Ike:
"Old man, have you lived so long and forgotten
so much that you don't remember anything you
ever knew or felt or even heard about love?"
(p. 363).
The giving of the old hunting horn to the outraged woman
is highly ironic. In the story there is a strong outcry
against what man has done to the rich delta land.
This Delta. This land which man has deswamped
and denuded and derivered in two generations so
that white men can own plantations and commute
every night to Memphis and black men own planta
tions and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to
live in millionaires' mansions on Lakeshore Drive,
where white men rent farms and live like niggers
and niggers crop on shares and live like animals,
where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the
very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mort
gage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth,
Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed
and spawn together until no man has time to say
which one is which nor cares. . . . No wonder the
ruined woods I used to know don't cry for retri
bution! he thought: The people who have destroyed
it will accomplish its revenge (p. 264).
The tone throughout is pessimistic: man is ruining
through greed and waste the bounties provided by nature,
and nature accomplishes her revenge through drought, flood,
and the loss of all game. Ike has been protesting the
killing of does, arguing that soon there will be neither
does nor bucks, but at the story's end he learns that the
only deer kllled--and that by Roth--is a doe. In this
symbolic act the greed and ruthlessness of man is made
clear, just as man's injustice was epitomized in Roth's
treatment of the Negro girl. The title itself is symbolic
the delta country has passed its prime and now entered
the long gray "autumn."
The final story, "Go Down, Moses," gives its title
to the volume. This tragic tale of a "bad son of a bad
father" has pathos and an understanding of the "Negro
problem," but hardly a glint of humor. It concerns a
Mississippi Negro boy who comes from a bad background,
emigrates to Chicago and there kills a policeman and pays
for his crime by electrocution at the Illinois state
prison. Through the efforts of his aged grandmother, a
Miss Worsham, the editor of the Jefferson paper, and
lawyer Stevens, money is raised to bring the body back to
Mississippi for burial. The Negro's family blames Roth
Edmonds for selling their boy: "Roth Edmonds sold my
Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharoah got him--" (p.
271). Gavin Stevens, the country lawyer prominent in so
many Faulkner stories, takes an interest in the family,
learns all the details about the boy's crime, and then,
as stated, helps to bring the body home to give it decent
burial. A very interesting comment occurs in a note by
370 '
O'Connor, who tells of a visit by Dan Brennan to Faulkner's
Oxford home.
After putting some final touches on "Go Down,
Moses" Faulkner told Brennan he much admired
the title, and together they went outside where
Faulkner read the story to Jill. Asked whether
she liked it, Jill replied, "Daddy, it is too
sad." Faulkner told Brennan the story or the
idea for it occurred to him after he had seen
a coffin with an Oxford address resting in the
local depot (p. 175: footnote).
Most critics, I think, will agree with Jill.
371
Part Two: Intruder In the Dust
After the prolific output of the 1930's, Faulkner pub
lished only three works in the 1940's: Go Down, Moses
(19^2), Intruder in the Dust (19^8)* and Knight1s Gambit,
a collection of detective stories, in 19^9* Thus, in
quantity and quality too, as O'Connor says, "Faulkner's
fiction had a decided falling off."’ * " In the extremely
productive decade ending with 19^0 Faulkner had probably
exhausted most of his material and his energies.
Intruder in the Dust belongs to the Yoknapatawpha
cycle, with most of the action taking place in and near
Jefferson. The setting and most of the characters are
familiar: the courthouse and square, the old and odorif
erous city jail, the roads leading in from the country
and nearby towns— all have been described in earlier
novels. Gavin Stevens, the lawyer, had appeared in
Sanctuary (he is also the shrewd lawyer-detective in the
Knight1s Gambit stories), Charles Mallison (Chick),
Junior, is his nephew, and the principal character, Lucas
Beauchamp, the old intractable Negro, is the same proud
and difficult part-McCaslin who first appeared in Go Down,
^The Tangled Fire, p. 135-
372
Moses. Miss Habersham, a spinster in her seventies, is
descended from one of the original settlers of Jefferson.
The casuals and countrymen ("rednecks") and the sheriff
and his constables are like those found in other Faulkner
stories.
The story begins with a murder. Lucas Beauchamp
has been arrested and brought to the city jail in Jeffer
son as the suspected murderer of a white man, Vinson
Gowrie. The circumstantial evidence against the Negro
is so strong that the whole town believes he is guilty.
Lodged in the jail, Lucas sends for Stevens to represent
him, but Stevens refuses to defend a man who has--to all
appearances--shot another man in the back. Because he is
too proud to ask Stevens for favors or to talk about the
manner in which Gowrie was killed, Lucas leaves the im
pression that he is guilty. It is Stevens' twelve-year-
old nephew, Chick Mallison, who (after going to the jail
with his uncle, and later returning alone to take Lucas
some tobacco he had asked for) learns that it was not
Lucas' gun that killed Gowrie. For years Chick had felt
obligated to the old Negro because Lucas had once given
him lodging and food— when Chick and Aleck Sander, his
Negro friend, had gone rabbit-hunting on Lucas' farm and
Chick had fallen into the creek. Lucas would not accept
373
Chick's money for the food or lodging. This small inci
dent had made the boy uncomfortable in the old Negro's
presence ever since; and, though he had tried in various
ways to pay for the Negro's kindness, Lucas had "always
beat him." For this reason Chick agrees to undertake the
dangerous assignment of digging up Vinson Gowrie's body
in order to have experts check the bullet wound and de
termine that Lucas1 gun was not the one used in the
murder. This was the Negro's only hope of saving himself
from imminent lynching by the Gowrie clan and their out
raged neighbors in "Beat Four," a precinct of the county.
Chick and Aleck Sanders, accompanied by Miss
Habersham, an old friend of Lucas, go that Same night to
the country cemetery where the Gowries bury (but at the
foot of the hill they hide while someone on a horse or
mule comes down the hill carrying a burden ahead of his
saddle). When the two boys open the grave they find, not
Gowrie's body, but that of Jake Montgomery, whom Miss
Habersham recognizes as "a shoestring timber buyer." They
hurry back to town to inform Lawyer Stevens and the sher
iff, who go out to investigate for themselves. When they
re-open the grave they find that in the night it has been
robbed--Montgomery's body is also missing. Putting to
gether clues furnished by the two boys and Miss Habersham,
the sheriff finds the body of Gowrie burled in quicksand
in a branch at the foot of the hill, and near to it,
barely covered with earth, the body of Montgomery. Vinson
had been killed by his brother Crawford because Vinson
had learned (through Lucas) that Crawford was stealing
Vinson's timber and selling it to Jake Montgomery. By a
clever ruse Crawford managed to throw suspicion on Lucas,
who, according to the plan, should have been murdered
immediately when he was found with a gun from which one
shot had been fired, standing over the body of Vinson
Gowrie. When Jake dug up the body of Vinson (intending
probably to use it for blackmail, since he knew of
Crawford's thefts and knew also that Lucas did not kill
Vinson) someone watching in the cemetery (undoubtedly
Crawford) killed Jake and put his body in Vinson's grave
and then buried Vinson's corpse in the quicksand.
Crawford's strategy was foiled by the unexpected visit of
Miss Habersham and the two teen-age boys, who uncovered
Jake's body in Vinson's grave. Thus, to cover his crime,
Crawford had to open the grave once more and dispose of
Montgomery's body. This is why the sheriff found the
grave empty and the body of Montgomery in a very shallow
place near the stream. Crawford's plan misfired when
Lucas was not lynched as soon as the body of Vinson was
found, late Saturday afternoon, and the subsequent events
proved the Innocence of Lucas.
Intruder In the Dust can be read as a detective
story (it has all the qualities), a modern Huck Finn and
Nigger Jim story, or .a serious discussion of Negro-white
relations in the present-day South. The plot itself is
apparently only a framework for an extended polemic on
the corruption engendered by slavery and kept alive by
white injustice, the subjugation of the Negro, and the re
sort to violence (such as lynching) to "keep the Negro in
his place." This novel deals more fully and more forth
rightly with these problems than any other Faulkner has
written--and for this reason it is one of his most contro
versial. Two opposing views are given in Hoffman and
Vickery’s important work, William Faulkner: Two Decades
of Criticism. Whatever one’s views about the sectional
thesis argued in Intruder in the Dust (that is, "the negro
is the South's problem and we don't want any help or even
advice, thank you, from the North"), one cannot escape
the conclusion that there are too many speeches and too
much sentimentalizing of a racial problem— the Negro is
referred to, for example, as Sambo. For the first time
Faulkner is on the defensive; he does not merely explore
a social evil, as he does in other novels (say, the
376
treatment of the Negro in Light in August) but he argues,
exhorts, and preaches. Some of the passages, like the
following, come perilously close to propaganda:
. . . to defend not Lucas nor even the union of
the United States from the outlanders North East
and West who with the highest of motives and in
tentions (let us say) are essaying to divide it
at a time when no people dare risk division by
using federal laws and federal police to abolish
Lucas' shameful condition . . . yet /the South/
would not hesitate to repulse with force . . .
the outlander who came down here with force to
intervene or punish him, you say (with sneer)
you must know Sambo well to arrogate to yourself
such calm assumption of his passivity and I reply
I dont know him at all and in my opinion no white
man does but I know the Southern white man not
only the nine hundred and ninety-nine but that
other one too / t h e instigator of mobs/ because
he is our own too and more than that, that one
other does not exist only in the South, you will
see allied not North and East and West and Sambo
against a handful of white men in the South but
a paper alliance of theorists and fanatics and
private and personal avengers plus a number of
• others under the assumption of enough physical
miles to afford a principle against and possibly
even outnumbered a concorded South which has drawn
recruits whether it would or net from your own back-
areas, not just your hinterland but the fine
cities of your cultural pride your Chicagoes and
Detroits and Los Angeleses and wherever else live
ignorant people who fear the color of any skin
or shape of nose save their own and who will
grasp this opportunity to vent on Sambo the whole
sum of their ancestral horror and scorn and fear
of Indian and Chinese and Mexican and Carib and
Jew . . . (pp. 215-16).
Such passages as this not only interrupt the action and
turn aside interest from the story, but suggest an extrane
ous purpose which, in the judgment of many critics, mars
377
this novel.
Turning from this brief summary of the novel to
the more genial subject of humor, we find a fair amount
of wit, drollery, comic situation, humorous dialect and
anecdotes, and typical Faulknerian satire. Most of the
important characters have a comic side--or at least a
touch of humor in their make-up: Gavin Stevens is shrewd,
sardonic, often droll; Miss Habersham, the dried-up,
elderly spinster, wears mail-order dresses, on the bosom
of which she has attached a small gold watch in a hunting
case, and her shoes and g3oves are custom-made and costly;
the sheriff is a countryman, who talks in a drawl, but
has an eye for. the ludicrous in men and situations;
Lucas is an intractable old Negro who insists on asserting
his equality by "paying his way"--the final scene in the
novel being a delightful bit of comedy when Lucas goes to
Lawyer Stevens' office to pay for his counsel's services,
and settles, finally, for two dollars (one fourth of it
in pennies). Aleck Sanders, the Negro boy who accompanies
Chick on the grave-robbing expedition, has the Negro's
usual superstitions and ready wit.. When Chick first pro
posed that Aleck help him, Aleck said:
"Me? Go out there and dig that dead white man up?"
"Lucas is going to pay you;)" he said. "He told me
that even before he told me what it was."
378
Aleck.Sander laughed, without mirth or scorn or
anything else . . . "I aint rich," he said. "I
dont need money" (p. 86).
Because Aleck alone was able to see the mule coming down
the hill bearing some burden in the dark, the sheriff
referred to him as the detective "that can see in the
dark."
There is a wry humor in the remark of Lucas, wait
ing in his jail cell for an expected assault by a murder
ous mob, who says to Chick as the boy leaves on his
grave robbing mission: "I'll try to wait!" (p. 73)-
Humor of this type is characteristic of the common folk
in this and other Faulkner novels. A countryman gives
this account of a "speakeasy" run by Jake Montgomery:
"Used to run a place he called a restaurant just
across the Tennessee line out of Memphis, though
I never heard of nobody trying to buy nothing
that had to be chewed in it, until a man went
and got killed in it one night two--three years
ago" (p. 115)*
This same sort of banter, which covers the crucial point
under a sly remark, is noticed in the language of the
rustics addressed to Sheriff Hampton:
"Aint you heard about that new lynch law the
Yankees passed? The folks that lynches the nigger
is supposed to dig the grave?" (p. 139)*
Such humor usually turns on a comic inversion of
values. One of its best examples in this novel is the
scene in which Will Legate, a farmer and hunter, is hired
to guard Lucas against any mob attacks. Legate sat
leaning against the wall near the jail entrance reading
the Sunday comics from a Memphis newspaper, with his
i
double-barreled shotgun leaning nearby. When the jailer
complained that one guard with "just that one britch-
loader" would never stop the Gowries and Beat Four,
Legate replied that the jailer would be there with his
pistol to help.
"Me?" the jailer cried. "Me get in the way of
them Gowries and Ingrums for seventy-five dollars
a month? Just for one nigger? And if you aint
a fool, you wont neither."
"Oh I got to," Legate said in his easy pleasant
voice. "I got to resist. Mr. Hampton's paying
me five dollars for itJ" (p. 53)*
The Negro's life is not the consideration; Legate must
fight and risk being killed because the sheriff is paying
him five dollars for professional servicesi The incon
gruity of the scene sharpens the contrast: Legate reads
the comics and takes his ease while a mob is about to
gather in the streets around the jail. Later that day
Miss Habersham replaces Legate at the jail door, where
she sits prim and unconcerned, darning socks. Like
Legate, she is there to stop a murderous mob, and in like
manner her nonchalance belies the seriousness of the game
she is playing. Thus Faulkner adds the element of comedy
380
to some of the grimmest situations in his novels.
Intruder in the Dust has considerable satire, and
though it differs in tone from the bitter scorn of The
Wild Palms, say, in subject matter and treatment, it is
typical of Faulkner. The jailer's self-interest and
nepotism reflect what Faulkner has said many times about
public officials; their herd-like qualities, ruled by
passion and unreason, show man at his lowest level; the
milling crowds in town on a Saturday or holiday interest
and disgust the novelist; the blatant, unceasing din of
the city marks the so-called progress of man:
. . . the motion and the noise, the radios and
the automobiles--the jukeboxes in the drugstore
and the poolhall and the cafe and the bellowing
amplifiers on the outside walls not only of the
record-and-sheetmusic store but the army-and-navy
supply store and both feed stores and (that they
might falter) somebody standing on a bench in the
courthouse yard making a speech into another one
with a muzzle like a siege gun bolted to the top
of an automobile . . . so that nowhere inside
the town's uttermost ultimate corporate rim should
man woman or child citizen or guest or stranger
be threatened with one second of silence. . .
(pp. 237-8).
Faulkner's attitude toward close-packed, tract-built
houses, each one like the other, is also expressed with
feeling. His hatred of regimentation and conformity
shows through nearly all he has written or spoken, and
such words as "anonymous" and "lockstep" reveal a deep-
381
seated aversion to certain aspects of modern life that
; amounts to a passion.
This novel has very little to say of women and sex
(there are sententious comments scattered here and there,
such as "motherhood doesn't seem to have any pigment in
its skin": p. 123), "but in one striking passage he sat-
i
; irizes the American's love of automobiles and redefines
; our sexual drive:
The American really loves nothing but his auto
mobile: not his wife his child nor his country
nor even his bank-account first (in fact he
doesn't really love that bank-account nearly as
much as foreigners like to think because he
spends almost any or all of it for almost any
thing provided it is valueless enough) but his
motorcar. Because the automobile has become
our national sex symbol. We cannot really enjoy
anything unless we can go up an alley for it.
Yet our whole background and raising and train
ing forbids the subrosa and surreptitious. So
we have to divorce our wife today in order to
remove from our mistress the odium of mistress
in order to divorce our wife tomorrow in order
to remove from our mistress and so on. As a
result of which the American woman has become
cold and undersexed; she has projected her libido
onto the automobile not only because its glitter
and gadgets and mobility pander to her vanity and
incapacity (because of the dress decreed upon
her by the national retailers association) to
walk but because it will not maul her and tousle
her, get her all sweaty and disarranged.' (pp.
238-9).
This paragraph concludes with several sexual symbols, en
forcing the idea of man's transfer of affection from his
wife to his automobile: "... spending all Sunday morn-
ing washing and polishing and waxing it because in doing
that he is tcaressing the body of the woman who has long
since denied him her bed" (p. 239)* To this speech, put
into the mouth of Gavin Stevens, the nephew replies,
"That's not true." Then Gavin imparts another bit of
worldly wisdom:
"I am fifty-plus years old," his uncle said.
"I spent the middle fifteen of them fumbling
beneath skirts. My experience was that few of
them were interested in love or sex either.
They wanted to be married" (pp. 239-40).
The boy replies, "I still dont believe it." This debate
between youth (naivete) and age (sophistication) has no
place structurally in the story; it may be called the
author's commentary on American life, and it has his
characteristic dour outlook.
In this novel anecdotes are used, as elsewhere,
to point a comparison or characterize one of the partici
pants. Chick Mallison recalls an incident in which he
had been chosen to play on the high school football team,
and tells how his mother was afraid for him to risk it and
how in shame and anger he had blurted out, "Is it the
team's fault that I'm the only child you've got?" After
a long scene he persuades her to let him play, and at the
game she becomes the most frenzied and fanatic rooter
the team has (pp. 123-4). This illustration is intended
to show the unpredictableness of women. Another anecdote
characterizes Sheriff Hope Hampton who, harried by a
woman who had had a feud with a neighboring woman and ac
cused this woman's husband of making moonshine liquor,
finally looked up the man's still and found a Negro
there, who made the sheriff comfortable by providing a
pillow and a quilt for him and fetching him fresh water
from the branch. Everything was cordial and most friend
ly, as if the sheriff were a welcome guest. Such glimpses
of human nature reveal a side of Faulkner that might
easily be overlooked because of his reputation for the
bizarre and shocking. Both tolerance and tenderness are
often displayed in his characterizations of common men
and women. And those whom he likes he usually invests
with humor, a fact in itself revealing.
Although Intruder in the Dust begins with a murder
and builds up suspense for the expected lynching and sus
tains the suspense almost to the end, there is a marked
relaxation of tension and a change of mood in the final
scenes. Lucas is till a willful old Negro, difficult and
unbending, but there is comedy in his insisting that Mr.
Stevens say how much Lucas owes. When, after some light
banter, Stevens charges him two dollars for a fountain
pen whose point he had ruined and Lucas paid in small
change, the old Negro still stood there.
"Now what?" his uncle said. "What are you waiting
, for now?"
"My receipt," Lucas said (p. 247).
The "light" ending of Intruder in the Dust seems
appropriate to the situation, and therefore effective.
By a series of bold, though bizarre, maneuvers the old
Negro is shown to be innocent and the guilty ones are
trapped. The "escape" of the intended victim affords the
reader a sense of relief and satisfaction, and this mood
prepares the way for the light-hearted final scene. In
Sanctuary a man is lynched for a crime he did not commit,
and the novel ends on a dark, despairing note. In con-
trast, the averting of the threatened lynching in
Intruder gives Faulkner an opportunity to display a tol
erant and genial humor. It releases the pent-up emotions
and turns them into restrained laughter as the old Negro
insists on the receipt for the payment of his two-dollar
legal feeJ
This is not one of Faulkner's major novels. It
lacks the scope and technique of such great works as The
Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and it does not
have the power of Light in August (though it deals with
a similar theme), nor the intensity and grand style of
Absalom, Absalomi It has, however, some unforgettable
scenes and several memorable characters, as well as a
deft handling of suspense and mood. As noted earlier,
it is marred principally by its sectional thesis and the
uncalled-for speeches of Gavin Stevens. They break into
the story and detract from it. One feels, too, that moral
issues are not given due consideration: Lucas is saved,
not by an aroused community which foresees a grave mis
carriage of justice, but by a queer old lady who took
the responsibility of a man and by a teen-age boy who
was trying to get rid of a sense of guilt in his relations
with an old Negro who had once befriended him. The church
es of Jefferson are mentioned in passing, but they appar
ently have no power in influencing the life of the people.
So what turned out to be a good detective story, with a
happy ending--at least for the suspect--could very well
have ended as bleakly and tragically as the story of Joe
Christmas. No change occurs in the attitudes of the
whites toward the Negroes, who still live in fear and
subjection. The humor in Intruder in the Dust is one of
the novel's chief attractions, but it is subdued and
quiet. Even the satire is less raucous and harsh than
in many of the novels. This is a book one can read, en
joy, and remember pleasantly.
386
Part Three: The Old Man
The twin novelettes, The Old Man and The Wild Palms,
were .originally published as a single work under the title
i
■ The Wild Palms, with the chapters alternating. There is
no connection between the two stories, the first one about
the Mississippi River ("The Old Man") during the great
flood of 19271 and the second about a disastrous love af
fair involving a young doctor and a woman who forsakes
husband and family to live with him in rebellion against
society. "In The Wild Palms," wrote Malcolm Cowley in 1
The Portable Faulkner, "a man sacrifices everything for
freedom and love, and lost them both; in The Old Man, the
convict sacrificed everything to escape from freedom and
love and return to the womanless security of the state
prison farm." In both stories woman is a mysterious,
brooding force.
The Old Man is a story of nature on a rampage and
of one man's struggle against it and the social forces
which he understands no better than he does the fury of
the flood. The tall, lean convict is one of hundreds of
prisoners taken from the state prison farm at Parchman,
Mississippi, and put to work sandbagging the levees. When
the flood-waters break over the levee, he and another
387
prisoner are put in a rowboat (though neither knows how
to row) and told to pick up a woman in a tree and a man
atop a cottonhouse.
When the boat is caught in the swirling waters
and overturned, the second convict manages to escape
into a tree. He believes that his companion is drowned,
and reports this to the prison authorities who enter an
official record of the convict's death. Meantime the
tall convict rights the boat and goes on to rescue the
woman, eight months pregnant. Together they are carried
out upon the bosom of the river and up and down the raging
stream, and twice the convict is shot at when he tries to
surrender. On an Indian burial mound, infested with
snakes and rats, the convict assists at the birth of the
woman's baby, and once more they take to the river. In
the swamp country of Louisiana the convict becomes the
partner of a non-English-speaking Cajun in killing alli
gators for their skins. Although they cannot communicate
by words, they agree to work together and share the same
small dingy shack, with the woman and her baby. The con
vict uses a long knife instead of a gun to kill the alli
gators, and thus wins the admiration of the astonished
Cajun. But when the lowlands are about to be flooded by
dynamiting the levees, the convict and his charges are
forced to begin their odyssey again. Gradually he works
his way back up the river in the hope of surrendering
himself and his boat and returning to the monastic se
curity of the prison. Once more his life is threatened
when, still in convict stripes, he offers to surrender to
a deputy sheriff. After weary months of struggling
against the swollen river and all kinds of obstacles,
and weeks after he had received the order, he finally
returns the boat with the humorless remark: "Yonder1s
your boat, and here's the woman. But I never did find
that bastard on the cottonhouse."
Essentially, this is a modern variation of the
tall tale. The stage or setting is the vast lower
Mississippi valley, turned into a seething maelstrom by
the yellow waters of the Big Muddy. The quiet, self-
effacing hero is the tall convict who, through a sense
of pride and responsibility, saves himself and the woman
and returns to the prison where, to cover their own polit
ical skullduggery, the officials add ten years more to
his sentence. The elements of the tall tale are seen in
his single-handed fight against the raging waters with
a crude' piece of wood for an oar, his acting as "midwife"
at the birth of the child, and especially in his tackling
the huge alligators with only a knife as weapon. The
389
emphasis upon the vastness of the scene is significant:
I
He could believe it now--the tremendous reach,
yellow and sleepy in the afternoon— >("Because
it's too big," he told them soberly. "Aint no
flood in the world big enough to make it do
more than stand a little higher so it can look
back and see just where a flea is, just exactly
where to scratch. It's the little ones, the
piddling little creeks that run backward one day
and forward the next and come busting down on
a man full of dead mules and hen houses.")--and
the steamboat moving up this now (like a ant
crossing a plate, the convict thought, sitting
beside the woman on the upturned skiff, the
baby nursing again, apparently looking too out
across the water where, a mile away on either
hand, the twin lines of levee resembled parallel
unbroken floating thread) . .
Added to the ordeals that he and the woman endured in
* their long journey up and down the river were deep sunburn
i
(and later running sores), rats and snakes on the tiny
island, and government men with rifles. Through all
these trials the convict holds grimly to his determination
to get back to the prison and report. And to the amaze
ment of his fellow convicts he confides, in a matter-of-
fact manner, that he has had no carnal relations with the
woman with whom he had lived constantly for weeks.
Satire figures prominently in this story. Three
of Faulkner's favorite subjects come in for abuse: venal
politicians, the ways of women, and "the cosmic joker."
Besides these, he slaps at the writers of pulp stories,
1
The Old Man (New York, 1939), P- 88.
and--less viciously--at arrogant doctors. Self-serving
politicians are ridiculed in the second and final chapter.
When the tall convict is reported to have drowned, the
warden at the penitentiary says, "The main thing is to get
his name off the books as dead before some politician tries
to collect his food allowance" (p. 3*0* In the final'
chapter the warden and an emissary from the governor try
to figure out what to do with the convict--officially de
clared dead--who returns to confound the prison officials.
They agree that the convict should be free, but they are
afraid to act because he was returned to prison by Deputy
Buckworth, who has many kinsmen and thus controls many
votes. Finally they settle justice in their own way:
"All right." The emissary opened the papers
and uncapped a pen and began to write. "Attempted
escape from the Penitentiary, ten years' additional
sentence," he said. "Deputy Warden Buckworth
transferred to Highway Patrol. Call it for mer
itorious sehvice even if you want to. It won't
matter now. Done?"
"Done," the Warden said (p. 131) •
Both the Warden and his deputy are shown to be spineless
men, ready to make any compromise to keep things quiet
and keep their jobs.
The war of the sexes (a theme common to many of
Faulkner's novels) finds a strange and violent setting
in‘The Old Man. A sex-starved man, now only twenty-six
391
after nine years in prison, finds himself living in a tiny
boat with a young but pregnant woman. He had been dream
ing of women:
And who to say what Helen, what‘living Garbo, he
had not dreamed of rescuing from what craggy pin
nacle or dragoned keep when he and his companion
embarked in the skiff. He watched her, he made
no further effort to help her beyond holding the
s'kiff savagely steady while she lowered herself
from the limb--the entire body, the deformed
swell of the belly bulging the calico, suspended
by its arms, thinking, And this is what I get.
This, out of all the female meat that walks, is
what I have to be caught in a runaway boat with
(pp. 41-42).
In vain the convict tries by sheer will to forget the
swollen and misshaped body of the woman cast adrift with
him:
. . . his only other crying urgency was to re
frain from looking at the woman who, as vision,
the incontrovertible and apparently inescapable
presence of his passenger, returned with dawn,
had ceased to be a human being and . . . had
become instead one single inert monstrous sen
tient womb from which, he.now believed, if he
would only-turn his gaze away, would disappear,
and if he could only keep his gaze from pausing
again at the spot it occupied, would not return
(pp. 55-56).
The figure here is interesting: the nameless woman be
came, to him, not a woman but a "monstrous womb," not an
object of love but of loathing. Nowhere is she presented
as attractive; in fact, the very opposite is true. She
was the albatross hung about his neck, perhaps to teach
392
him patience, endurance, and self-denial. He knew al-
i
: ready the virtues of humility and compassion.
In one of the longest sentences of this novel
: (running to a page and a half) Faulkner indulges in some
| sardonic humor on marriage, a part of which follows:
|
. . . since she doubtless knew what his reason
j was, not from that rapport of the wedded eon-
i ferred upon her by the two weeks during which
they had jointly suffered all the crises emo
tional social economic and even moral which do
not always occur even in the ordinary fifty
married years (the old married: you have seen
them, the electroplate reproductions, the thousand
identical coupled faces with only a collarless
stud or a fichu out of Louisa Alcott to denote
the sex, looking in pairs like the winning braces
of dogs after a field trial, out from among the
1 packed columns of disaster and alarm and baseless
assurance and hope and incredible insensitivity
and insulation from tomorrow propped by a thousand
morning sugar bowls or coffee urns; or singly,
rocking on porches or sitting in the sun beneath
the tobacco-stained porticoes of a thousand
county courthouses, as though with the death of
the other having inherited a sort of rejuvenes
cence, immortality; relict, they take a new
lease on breath and seem to live forever, as
though that flesh which the old ceremony or
ritual had morally purified and made legally
one had actually become so with long tedious
habit and he or she who 'entered the ground first
took all of it with him or her, leaving only
the old permanent enduring bone, free and tram-
melless)--not because of this but because she
too had stemmed at some point from the same dim
hill-bred Abraham (pp. 98-99)*
This passage, with its half-page parenthesis, is typical
of Faulkner's wry wit and his mixed attitude toward mar
riage. The function of this passage is to emphasize the
393
rapport between the man and woman thrown together by cir
cumstance but achieving an understanding and harmony
rarely found in married life. Humor adds to the interest
and the contrast.
The novel ends with the tall convict’s account of
his first relations with a woman after the long ordeal in
the boat, an incident that recalls his adolescent affair
with a country girl:
. . . a girl a year or so younger than he,
short-legged, with ripe breasts and a heavy
mouth and dull eyes like ripe muscadines, who
owned a ''baking-powder can almost full of ear
rings and brooches and rings bought (or pre
sented at suggestion) from ten-cent stores
(p. 139).
When the convict had been imprisoned for his unsuccessful
attempt at train robbery, the girl visited him once
(adorned with some new jewelry he had never seen before)
and "cried violently for the first three minutes" though
somehow she soon got separated from him and was seen "in
animated conversation with one of the prison guards."
Before leaving, however, she kissed him and promised to
return; he continued to write to her, and after seven
months received an answer:
It was a postcard, a colored lithograph of a
Birmingham hotel, a childish X inked heavily
across one window, the heavy writing on the
reverse slanted and primer-like too: This is
394
\
where were honnymonning at. Your friend (Mrs)
Vernon Waldrip (p. 140).
In the security of his cell (back at the state peniten
tiary) the tall convict sums up all his feelings in one
word--"Women— !" The fickleness of "Mrs. Waldrip" is set
off sharply against the unflagging devotion of the con
vict to his unwanted charge. Is there an implication
here that men are more steadfast and loyal than women?
In this novel, yes, but in Light in August it is the
woman who is faithful and trusting and the man who runs
from responsibility. To be frank, however, it is women
in the novels of Faulkner who appear more often to be
selfish, unpredictable, and unworthy of trust--as has
been noted many times.
Satire is also directed against deity, called in
this novel the "Joker" and "the old primal faithless
manipulator of all the lust and folly and injustice."
This, at least, was the convict's attitude toward the
power of fate threatening his life. When, for the third
time, the harassed convict attempts to surrender and to-
return to the security of prison life, Faulkner says of
him:
Once he accepted, twice he even forgave, but three
times he simply declined to believe, particularly
when he was at last persuaded to realize that this
395
third time was to be instigated not by the blind
potency of volume and motion, but by human hands:
that now the cosmic joker, foiled twice, had
stooped in its vindictive concentration to the
employing of dynamite (p. 109).
A little later, again in the narrator's words, occurs
the expression "blind and risible motion." These terms
of Faulkner's recall Thomas Hardy's "Crass Casualty" and
"purblind Doomsters," and in both writers we see sensi
tive men recoiling from what appears to be, at best,
blind bungling or, at worst, perverse and arbitrary in
justice. This Force is described by Faulkner as blind,
powerful, and risible (i.e., enjoying the "practical jokes"
played upon hapless human pawns). This Power (Fate or God,
it is never clear which) is not only harsh but vindictive,
a force that crushes man and laughs at his helpless strug
gles. One critic, Vincent F. Hopper, advances the theory
that, like Dante and Milton, Faulkner creates a hell but,
unlike the great poets, no compensating "paradiso"; and
because of his Inability to believe in either a future
earthly paradise or a spiritual other-worldly heaven, he
is driven to pessimism and even despair.
His romanticism and despair are given body in
the rebelliousness of so many of his characters
against an omnipotent but shadowy enemy, whose
power is ultimately as meaningless as their
rebellion.
Although the satire against the unseen Power is
hardly comical, the fate of the unfortunate convict--
caught with the helpless woman on the flooded Mississippi
and unable to return her to her home or to get back to
his own bunk in the penitentiary--has a perverse humor.
And there is something comical about the poor devil's
being shot at every time he tries to surrender; this is
the fact that drives him almost to madness and calls forth
his gibes at the blind, unseen "joker."
In this novel, as well as in The Wild Palms,
Faulkner attacks the irresponsible pulp writers. In
Chapter One of The Old Man the convict (who has been con
victed of attempted train robbery, an act based upon a
carefu-l reading of "the paper novels--the Diamond Dicks
and Jesse Jameses and such") has a burning hatred for the
glib, fraudulent writers whose stories he had accepted so
completely:
So now from time to time (he had ample leisure
for it) he mused with that raging impotence, be
cause there was something he could not tell them
at the trial . . . so he cursed in a harsh steady
unrepetitive stream, not at the living men who
had put him where he was but at what he did not
even know were pen-names, did not even know were
not actual men but merely the designations of
shades who had written about shades . . . (p. 7 ).
2
"Faulkner's Paradise Lost," Virginia Quarterly
Review (June 1 9 ^ 7 ) , p* 406.
397
The humor of the situation is that the gullible country
boy (like the aging Don Quixote) took all too seriously
the cheap stories he fed upon:
. . . he had followed his printed (and false)
authority to the letter; he had saved the paper
backs for years, reading and re-reading them,
memorising them, comparing and weighing story
and method against story and method, taking the
good from each and discarding the dross as his
workable plan emerged . . . (p. 6).
The gullibility of the boy is further emphasized by the
incongruous details of the actual hold-up:
He shot no one because the pistol which they/took
away from him was not that kind of pistol although
it was loaded; later he admitted to the District
Attorney that he had got it, as well as the dark
lantern in which a candle burned and the black
handkerchief to wear over the face, by peddling
among his pinehill neighbors subscriptions to
the Detectives1 Gazette (p. 7)»
The Old Man has its share of unsophisticated rustic
humor--in the speech of the two convicts and the hill-
woman, who says, for example, after being rescued from
the flood and given some clean clothes for herself and
the child, when the social worker suggests bathing the
baby:
"Yessum. He might holler some, he aint never
been bathed before. But he's a good baby" (p.
122) .
The following conversation occurs when a doctor examines
the convict after his long struggle with the River:
398
"Good man," the mild man said. "Plenty of life
in the old carcass yet, eh? Anyone ever suggest
you were hemophilic?" "What?" the plump convict
said. "Hemophilic?"- "You know what that means?"
The tall convict had his cigarette going now,
his body Jackknifed backward into the coffin-like
space between the upper and lower bunks, lean,
clean, motionless, the blue smoke wreathing across
his lean dark aquiline shaven face. "That's a
calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time."
"No, it aint," a third convict said. "It's a calf
or a colt that aint neither one" (pp. 85-6).
The convicts, like most of the men in Faulkner's novels,
miss no chance to make or enjoy a Joke based on some hint
of sex. Besides this kind of simple word play, there is
the bitter Joke about the mule (repeated from an earlier
novel)--"a mule 'will work for you ten years for the
privilege of kicking you once" (p. 53)*
The humor of this novel is largely of the frontier
type, though with a liberal sprinkling of satire. As al
ready stated, it is essentially a tall tale, with the
convict drawn in heroic proportions in his battle against
the River, snakes and alligators, deputies ready to
shoot him on sight, and the blind but powerful "old
Manipulator." In his attempts to rob a train "by the
book" and in his later struggles to get rid of the woman
and the boat, the convict is a tragicomic figure who
elicits sympathy as well as ridicule. From first to last,
the lonely convict--one of Faulkner's "tall men" from the
399
| hill country--is an unforgettable character. He is made
of durable stuff: courage., resourcefulness, self-
forgetfulness, patience, and dependability. He is one of
the relatively few men in Faulkner's company who may be
said to have a "soul."
This novel is, by general consent, far more inter
esting and effective than its companion--The Wild Palms,
i Its theme and characters seem more congenial to Faulkner,
I
and the graphic descriptions of the Mississippi on a
rampage give this novel a sense of life and power. Aside
from the satire (which is generally not bitter) the tone
! is one of tolerant amusement. One feels that Faulkner
thoroughly enjoyed telling this story, which has a comic
ending— in contrast to the tragic and bitter close of
The Wild Palms.
Part Pour: from The Collected Stories
Among the varied stories that make up the forty-two
»
in Collected Stories there are several which belong to
the rural type. Of the six included in Section I, "The
Country/' four are humorous; the other two, "Barn Burn
ing," a grim story about the worthless Ab Snopes, and
"Shall Not Perish," a patriotic story of the first two
' men from Yoknapatawpha County to die in World War II, are
too .serious for the light touch.
The rural yarn "Shingles for the Lord," which one
critic calls a "cheerless attempt at regional humor," be-
1 longs to the frontier type. It contains a comical situa-
! tion, name humor, satire, and thick Southern dialect. The
I situation involves a group of country men who have agreed
i
'■ to meet and split shingles to re-roof the church. One of
I
i them, Pap, the father of the boy who tells the story,
i
| arrives late and is told, in WPA terms, that he is six
‘ work units behind the others. One of the workers agrees
|
' to do the extra work for him, however, if Pap will pay
him with a mongrel hunting dog Pap has. This brings on
other complications because Pap has only a half interest
in the dog, and Homer, who is getting the dog, demands a
bill of sale from Tull, who owns the other half of the dog
| Pap has already made plans to get Tull's Interest by
! taking Tull's place in tearing off the old shingles.
"What?" I said. "What? you swapped him your half
of Tull's dog for that half a day's work tomorrow.
Now what?"
; "Yes," Pap said. "Only before that I had already
I swapped Tull a half a day's work pulling off them
J old shingles tomorrow, for Tull's half of that
: dog" (p. 37).
I Pap decides, however, to get the job done the same day
i by pulling off the shingles that night. This idea works
fairly well until he happens to drop the lantern to the
floor o£ the church, starting a blaze that in a short
I time destroys the old wooden building. Pap and the boy
I
| manage to get down and run for the water barrel.
1 And I believe we would have put it out. Pap
turned and squatted against the barrel and got
a holt of it over his shoulder and stood up with
that barrel that was almost full and run around
the corner and up the steps of the church and
hooked his toe on the top step and come down
with the barrel on top of him and knocking him
out cold as a wedge (p. 39)*
Besides getting knocked out and suffering a bad cut on
his head, Pap has the added humiliation of being called
, an "arsonist" by Whitfield, the preacher, who also orders
him not to touch the new building, which the other men
would begin to erect the next day, "until you have proved
to us that you are to be trusted again with the powers
and capacities of a man."
402
Drenched with water, bruised and humiliated, the
old man goes home to refresh himself with his snuff and
hot toddy.
"I Godfrey, if him and all of them put together
think they can keep me from working on my own
church like any other man, he better be a good
man to try it." He taken another sip of the
toddy. Then he taken a long one. "Arsonist,"
he said. "Work units. Dog units. And now
arsonist. I Godfrey, what a dayi" (p. 43).
Obviously, the humor of this tale is coarse and physical.
It has much in common with the flamboyant humor of a Sut
Lovingood yarn. But in addition to the indignities
suffered by Pap, and the involvements of the dog trade,
there is some satire--most of it directed toward Preacher
Whitfield and his brand of religion. This is the same
backwoods preacher who carried on a long affair with
Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying. He is shown to be severe
ungenerous in judging people, and tyrannical. He orders
the men about as if he were a plantation owner and they
were share-croppers working for him:
. . . standing there with his hat on, too, like
he had strove too long to save what hadn't ought
to been created in the first place, from the
damnation it didn't even want to escape, to
bother to need to take his hat off in any pres
ence (pp. 40-4-1).
The thinly veiled contempt for Whitfield is seen also in
the remarks about the baptismal robe he used, which be
came a kind of fetish to the boys of the community,
403
because to a boy of ten it wasn't jest a cloth
garment or even a iron armor; it was the old strong
Archangel Michael his self; that had fit and strove
and conquered sin for so long that it finally had
the same contempt for the human beings that re
turned always to sin as hogs and dogs done that
the old strong archangel his self must have had
(p. 40).
Though the language is that of a country boy, the opinion
about the "backsliding" Christians is clearly Faulkner's.
He could see little or no difference between the baptized
people and their unrepentant neighbors. The dialect of
this piece seems to require no comment. It is the ig
norant, racy, ungrammatical speech of the Southern poor
whites. The verbs, except by an occasional accident, are
all wrong, and such dialect expressions as "atall," "ary,"
"yourn," "a holt of" and many more are typical.
The adjective "tall" in the next tale, "The Tall
Men," seems to be used in its archaic sense of comely or
excellent; certainly it is used approvingly. The story
concerns the two sons of Lee McCallum, a farmer from the
hill country, who refused to sign for the draft because
i
the country was not at war. As the story opens, a local
deputy marshal is taking a government draft inspector
out to arrest the two evaders. The marshal, a local man,
understands the hill people, since he is one of them, and
does not share the inspector's low opinion of the country
! 404 |
men. One of the McCallum sons, Buddy, was abed with a
severe leg injury, and the doctor was there to treat it. i
i
The inspector wanted to serve his warrants and hurry back I
j to catch his train, but the old marshal would not be hur-
i
j ried. He stayed on to help with the amputation and then ;
! the burial of Buddy's leg, by lantern light, in the
; family burial plot. Little by little the inspector j
i
! learned of the pride, courage, independence, and strong \
i will of the McCallum men.
! I
; By means of flashbacks and the conversation of the ;
j marshal and the elder McCallum the history of the McCallums
| ?
| is brought out. Anse had been an early settler in j
t I
Mississippi, had fought in the Civil War, and then had j
| built the log house that his family now lived in. Buddy j
had fought in the first World War and won two medals for
valor, though he never talked about them. Then he had
■ come home and settled down to farming, changing from cot
ton to cattle when cotton did not pay, studying for a
while at the agriculture college, and rejecting all
proffered help from the government. This refusal to ac
cept government aid--and with it all kinds of regulations--
is made much of; it is one of Faulkner's staple ideas.
Strong opinions about the "AAA and WPA and a dozen other
three-letter reasons for a man not to work" are put into
405
the mouth of the marshal, Faulkner's alter ego. The old
i man says to the inspector: j
I
"Take yourself, now," he said in that same kindly <
! tone, chatty and easy; "you mean all right. You ,
j just went and got yourself fogged up with rules j
j and regulations. That's our trouble. We done ;
s invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules j
I and recipes that we can't see anything else; if :
! what we see can't be fitted to an alphabet or a
rule, we are lost. We have come to be like crit
ters doctor folks might have created in labora-
; tories, that have learned how to slip off their
! bones and guts and still live, still be kept
alive indefinite and forever maybe even without
even knowing the bones and guts are gone. We
! have slipped our backbone; we have about decided |
I a man don't need a backbone any more; to have one \
; is old-fashioned. But the groove where the back- :
| bone used to be is still there, and the backbone !
| has been kept alive, too, and someday we're going j
to slip back onto it. I don't know just when nor j
just how much of a wrench it will take to teach ;
us, but someday" (p. 59)* i
i
j This long passage is notable both for its social criti- !
cism, expressed kindly though clearly, and for its opti
mism. It expresses the thought of many of Faulkner's
speeches. Man, he asserts, must re-learn many of the old ;
values, as the marshal says:
"Yes sir. We done forgot about folks. Life has
done got cheap, and life ain't cheap. Life's a
pretty durn valuable thing. I don't mean just
getting along from one WPA relief check to the
next one, but honor and pride and discipline that
make a man worth preserving, make him of any value"
(p. 60).
The speaker, the town marshal, represents the pioneer
spirit which Faulkner admires, and the government inspector
‘406
symbolizes bureaucratic power, interference, and needless
regulation. The old marshal is presented as kindly, wise,
and philosophical, and his speech has the twang of the
hill country. Like Ratliff, he is talkative and humorous.
Another story with a country setting is "A Bear
Hunt," in which Ratliff, Faulkner's favorite narrator,
spins a yarn about Luke Provine and the practical joke
which his hunting companions played on him. In requital
for a boyhood prank in which Luke and two other youths
burned the celluloid collars off some negroes at a picnic,
Luke--now middle-aged and suffering from a severe case of
hiccups--is sent late at night to an old Indian mound to
be cured by John Basket, one of the ancient Indians.
Provine's hiccups were so severe that he could get no rest
and no one near could sleep; besides, his friends in the
hunting camp swore that he was scaring off all the game.
They compared his hiccups to a variety of noisemakers:
"So here he was, going three times to the minute, like
one of these here clock bombs . . ." (p. 68); "How do you
expect me to walk up on a bear or even hear the dogs when
they strike? I might as well be riding a motorcycle" (p.
68); and "So Luke gets up and kind of staggers away again,
kind of dying away like he was run by one of these hyer
one-cylinder gasoline engines, only a durn sight more
407
often and regular" (p. 69)* Some compared him to a
haybaler and to a loud-speaker in a well, and Luke, who
had tried everything anybody suggested, said:
I done tried ever'thing I knowed and ever'thing
anybody else told me to. I done held my breath
and drunk water until I feel just like one of
these hyer big automobile tahrs they advertise
with ..." (p. 71)*
By these exaggerated comparisons and the conversa
tion of the hunters, Luke's plight is made pitiful. When
some of the men suggest, as a last resort, that Luke pay
a visit to the old Indian to be treated, he readily
agrees. The hunters decide to send word by Ash, an aged
Negro involved in Luke's boyhood pranks, to have the
Indians give him a good scare. By telling the Indians
that the white man (Luke) who is coming into their camp
is a revenue agent, Ash gets the Indians sufficiently
stirred up. Ratliff describes Luke's appearance after
the encounter:
Hit sounded like a drove of wild horses coming
up that road, and we hadn't no more than turned
towards the door, a-asking one another what in
tarnation hit could be, with Major just saying,
"What in the name of " when hit come across
the porch like a harrycane and down the hall,
and the door busted open and there Luke was. He
never had no gun and lantrun then, and his clothes
was nigh tore clean offen him, and his face looked
wild as ere a man in the Jackson a-sylum. But
the main thing I noticed was that he wasn't hic-
cuping now. And this time, too, he was nigh
crying (p. 75)-
408;
Luke tells how the Indians caught him and tied him onto j
!
a pile of wood and brought out the fire to burn him alive,j
I
i
and how at the last moment he "busted loose and run." :
i
When Ratliff mentioned that Luke had at least cured his
hiccups,
Well, sir, he stood there for a full minute.
His eyes had done gone blank, and he stood there .
with his head cocked a little, listening to his ■
own insides. I reckon hit was the first time j
he had took time to find out that they was gone.
He stood there right still for a full minute ’
while that ere kind of shocked astonishment !
came onto his face. Then he jumped on me. j
I was setting in my chair, and I be dog if for j
a minute I didn't think the roof had done fell \
in (p. 76). |
s
Ratliff and others give a spirited account of the way I
i
Luke "swurged" all over him like a barn falling down. j
■
This story resembles many of the tales of frontier life,
with its rough, physical action, its flamboyant language,
I
and its rustic humor. The coarseness and violence sug- ;
j
gest some of the Sut Lovingood yarns, but the mood of i
t
the story and the heightened style are pure Faulkner.
Touches of satire show that, even in a simple un
complicated narrative, Faulkner did not overlook man's
follies. When he speaks of the Indians he says:
"He'd be glad to do that much for a white man, !
too, them pore aboriginees would, because the
white folks have been so good to them--not only
letting them keep that ere hump of dirt that
don't nobody want noways, but letting them use
i 409
i
i
* names like ourn and selling them flour and sugar
; and farm tools at no more than a fair profit above J
I what they would cost a white man. I hyear tell j
how pretty soon they are even going to start let- ;
i ting them come to town once a week" (pp. 71-72).
j In all sorts of stories, therefore, Faulkner shows his
i 1
] awareness of injustice and inequality, a sense of shame ;
I ;
j or anger at what "man has made of man." He does not pro-
! I
[ pose solutions to the social problems, except indirectly, i
! i
; as in the comments of the old marshal about the need for ~ :
i
j
personal integrity and independence. As a rule, he is |
!
content to point out the shortcomings of our economic or j
\
social systems or to ridicule the things he dislikes. 1
S ' i
* it -
l Two Soldiers is a story about two brothers, one j
I i
| of them about twenty years old and the other nine, who !
!
i learn via a neighbor1 s. radio of the Japanese attack on j
Pearl Harbor. When Pete, the older one, enlists, the
younger boy, narrator of the story, decides that he must
go tooj and he says, "You'll whup the big uns and I'll
whup the little uns." Pete explains that the younger boy
can not go, but he counters: "I'll chop the wood and tote
the water for you-all then! You got to have wood and '
water" (p. 83). The younger boy is a mixture of ignor-.
ance, courage, and indomitable will. After his brother
leaves, the boy hikes twenty-odd miles to Jefferson and
there talks the authorities into putting him on a bus for 1
4lO|
Memphis, though he has only a "shikepoke egg" to swap for
a ticket! He bullies his way with adults. When a woman j
i
in Jefferson pays the bus driver a dollar to take the j
boy to Memphis, the driver says: "Wellum, . . . I just j
|
don't know what the regulations would be. Likely I will j
be fired for not crating him and marking the crate
Poison" (p. 92). The boy has many of the qualities of ,
0. Henry's "Red Chief." At Memphis he upsets everybody
he meets in the army recruiting office, demanding to know
where Pete is and to be sent there. When told to get out j
of there, he replies: 1
?
"Durn that ... . You tell me where Pete--" I be I
dog if he couldn't move faster than the bus feller j
even. He never come over the table, he come around j
it, he was on me almost before I knowed it, so j
that I jest had time to jump back and whup out j
my pocket knife and snap it open and hit one lick, j
and he hollered and jumped back and grabbed one :
hand with the other and stood there cussing and
hollering (p. 94).
Two soldiers pounce on him and hold him until a man wear- j
ing a "britching strop over one shoulder" comes in to in- ;
vestigate the trouble, takes the enfant terrible and goes
in search of Pete. The boy explains to his older brother
that he just had to see him and go with him, and it takes
some firm persuading to convince the boy he would have to ,
go back to the farm. In the city the boy encounters many
things new to him, including an elevator, which frightens i
411;
| him. Finally he is driven back to the farm place at
Frenchman's Bend by a uniformed soldier in a staff car.
"Two Soldiers," little more than an extended inci- ;
|
dentj nevertheless has some dry humor and serious thought.!
f
1
| The family in this story, as well as the. two soldiers, !
I
are made of sturdy material. Faulkner seems to be saying:'
This is the kind of people who make America great--and i
: i
; free. They are simple, hard-working, independent farm |
j folk--as ready to fight for their country as they were
i ' . *
; to work out their own salvation on the poor soil of north s
! it j
; Mississippi. The unnamed minor hero is a lineal descend- ;
( i
ant of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and one of a number of j
* / I
such boys created in Faulkner's stories and novels. The \
I
humor of the story revolves around the toughness of the j
! nine-year old and his many conflicts with adult authority.1
The story which follows, "Shall Not Perish," con- ■
1
; tinues the patriotic vein and recounts the death of Pete,
i •
first casualty in the war from Yoknapatawpha County, and
i i
of Major de Spain's son. For the most part, this is a ;
serious story, with more pathos than most of Faulkner's,
but it has one serio-comic interlude. This concerns
Grandpap, a very ancient soldier who had fought in the
Civil War and continued to talk and dream constantly of
his fighting days. Often he would start out of his sleep
412
shouting, "Look outi Look outi Here they cornel" After
preparing the reader, the story goes on to tell of the
time when the old man's daughter decided to take him to
a Saturday afternoon matinee.
It was a continued picture, a Western, it seemed
to me that it had been running every Saturday
afternoon for years. Pete and Father and I would
go in to town every Saturday to see it, and some
times Mother would go too. . . . Then one Satur
day Mother decided to take Grandpap. He sat be
tween her and me, already asleep again, so old
now that he didn't even have to snore, until the
time came that you could have set a watch by
every Saturday afternoon: when the horses all
came plunging down the cliff and whirled around
and came boiling up the gully until in just one
more jump they would come clean; out of the screen
and go galloping among the little faces turned
up to them like corn shucks scattered across a
lot. Then Grandpap waked up. For about five
seconds he sat perfectly still. I could even
feel him setting still, he sat so still so hard.
Then he said, "Cavalry]" Then he was on his feet.
"Forresti" he said. "Bedford ForrestJ Get out
of herel Get out of the way]" Clawing and
scrabbling from one seat to the next one . . .
into the aisle with us trying to follow and catch
him, and up the aisle toward the door still holler
ing, "Forresti Forresti Here he comesi Get out
of the way]" and outside at last, with half the
show behind us and Grandpap blinking and trembling
at the light and Pete propped against the wall
like he was be.ing sick, laughing, and father
shaking Grandpap's arm and saying, "You old fool I
You old fooli" until Mother made him stop. . . .
"Go get him a bottle of beer," she said (pp. 112-3).
This picture of the old man living in his memories is
both tragic and comic. He is a kind of relic left from
an earlier age--obsolete, anachronistic. But he repre
sents the old virtues of courage, endurance, faith in
413
mankind.
Near the end of this story Faulkner tells of a
woman who left money for building an art museum in
Jefferson,
. . . built for nothing else except to hold the
pictures she picked out to put in it— pictures
from all over the United States, painted by people
who loved what they had seen or where they had
been born or lived long enough to want to paint
pictures of it so that other people could see it
too; pictures of men and women and children, and
the houses and streets and cities and the woods
and fields and streams where they worked or lived
or pleasured . . . (p. 110).
This description of the pictures of many types of people
and places applies very well to Faulkner's own gallery.
In the stories and novels he has produced dozens of un
forgettable pictures— of men, women, children— and of the
cities, hamlets, and farms where they lived. One feels
that he admires many of these people, especially the
types which he associates with the soil and farm life.
They are his people.
j
I
CHAPTER EIGHT
LATER STORIES OF EUROPE AND WORLD WAR I
J Part One: From The Collected Stories
j The fourth section of the Collected Stories. "The
» ■■■•■ .
Wasteland," contains five World War I stories. In tone
most of these are grim and ironic; they belong to the
disillusioned postwar period, and reflect the attitudes
: of "the lost generation." The first three stories--"Ad
: Astra," "Victory," and "Crevasse"--have only incidental
j humor (the latter has practically none); but the remain-
' ing two--"Turnabout" and "All the Dead Pilots"--have a
, fair amount of bawdy, droll, or sardonic humor.
|
! "As Astra" describes the tensions, frustrations,
• and emptiness of a small group of men at the end of the
i
, War: two or three Americans, two Irishmen, a captured
German prisoner, and an Indian "subadar." All except
the Indian take refuge in drink and unrestrained talk.
Faulkner describes their condition as follows:
But after twelve years I think of us as bugs
in the surface of the water, isolant and aimless
and unflagging. Not on the surface; in it, within
415
that line of demarcation not air and not water,
sometimes submerged, sometimes not. . . . Out of
nothing we howled, unwitting the storm which we
had escaped and the foreign strand which we
could not escape; that in the interval between
two surges of the swell we died who have been
too young to have ever lived (p. 408).
This figure gives the mood of the story. The soldiers
are as aimless as the water bugs--and as lost as they
in a storm.
The sardonic tone of this story can be illustrated
with a few quotations. Bland says of the man from India:
"He can attend their schools among the gentle-
born, the bleach-skinned, but he cannot hold
their commission, because gentility is a matter
of color and not lineage or behavior" (p.'409).
To this the subadar replies:
"Fighting is more important than truth . . . so
we must restrict the prestige and privileges of
it to the few so that it will not lose popularity
with the many who have to die" (p. 409).
When this stfange assortment of men stops in a French inn,
their entrance upsets the crowd of revelers there, and
the waiter especially,
. . . an old man in a dirty apron--falling back
before us, slack-jawed, with an expression of
outraged unbelief, like an atheist confronted
with either Christ or the devil (p. 411).
A macabre bit of humor occurs in the speech of Bland, as
he talks of the German captive.
416
"I once thought about taking one home to my wife,"
Bland said. "So I could prove to her that I have
only been to a war. But I never could find a good
one. A whole one, I mean" (p. 412).
The conversation of the men ranges over the usual
topics of soldiers: women, foreign lands and customs,
home and family, and their capacities for drinking and
holding liquor. They ridicule one another and belittle
one another's homeland. At the end they talk of their
destiny, each one wondering what his will be.
"What is your destiny except to be dead? It is
unfortunate that your generation had to be the
one. It is unfortunate that for the better part
of your days you will walk the earth a spirit.
But that was your destiny" (p. 428).
The irony of this story is brought into bold relief by
the fact that the allied soldiers fight the French patrons
and owners of the inn because the soldiers had brought in
and harbored the German on the night the country was cele
brating its victory--the night of November 11, 1918.
The men cannot understand the war, their allies, or even
themselves. Thus begins the uneasy peace.
"Victory" is another brutally ironic war tale.
This story of a Scottish lad who goes,to war, suffers
from its inhuman and apparently senseless regimentation,
kills his own officer at the front, wins a decoration from
the British sovereign, becomes a "gentleman" and finally
417
I
a beggar, is tragic in its intensity. The ugliness and
! horror of war are brought into sharp focus by showing how
l
i it ruined the life of one man.
Alex Gray came from an old and respected line of
} Scottish shipbuilders on the River Glyde--a sober, God-
|
I fearing family. Although his family was divided about
I
I
i his joining the British army, the father, old Alec, en-
I
j couraged his son to go. So young Alec went to enlist,
descending the hill on a weekday in his Sunday clothes,
1 with a New Testament and a loaf of homebaked bread tied
f
j in a handkerchief" (p. 442). In his terse, infrequent
Letters home Alec would answer the family Is questions and
send greetings to all. One of the sardonic references to
I
! the Scriptures (albeit to the Old Testament, not the New)
!
is his letter: "I am well. Yes I still have the Book
(not telling them that his platoon was using it to light
tobacco with and that they were now well beyond Lamenta-
I
tions)" (p. 444). The letters home concealed more than
; they told, for they rarely told of what was happening
to him or within him. But army life was changing him
completely.
At one of his company's reviews Gray was singled
out by the sergeant major for failure to shave. When
I asked why he had not shaved, Gray replied: "A dinna
shave, sir-r."
"You don't shave?"
"A am nae auld enough tae shave." ]
"Siri" the sergeant-major thunders (p. 439)* |
!
j When Gray was later called out of ranks to explain why J
j ' i
■ s s
j he did not shave, his calm, reiterated reply so angered 1
^ the sergeant-major that he cited Gray for insubordination «
and sent him to the penal battalion. This harshness made ;
Gray a killer at heart, and when the opportunity came
! f
! Jater, during an attack at the front, he drove his bayonet,
into the throat of the sergeant-major and then clubbed I
him in the face with the butt of the gun.
j Gray was one of the four survivors of the night i
j raid, and, according to his citation, j
i i
I . . . following the disablement of the Officer j
! and the death of all the N.C.O.'s, took command of j
the situation and . . . held a foothold in the ;
enemy's front line until a supporting attack ar- j
rived and consolidated the position (p. 446). j
• When he wrote home and referred to his ribbon, conferred j
by the Queen, and his chance to go to a school for officers,
his.old father objected and warned him of:
your bit ribbon . . . for that way lies vainglory
and pride, the pride and vainglory of going for
an officer. Never miscall your birth, Alec. You
are not a gentleman. You are a Scottish ship
wright (pp. 447-8).
A little later, Gray (now a subaltern captain) reviewed
i
1 a troop of soldiers in the place of the regular captain. i
....... " 419
Twice he stopped to order soldiers out for minor infrac
tions. For example, he says:
"What is your name?
"010801 McLan, sir-r."
"Replacement?"
Replacement, sir-r."
The captain moves on. "Take his name Sergeant.
Rifle's filthy."
The change had already begun. Now an officer, Gray was
as hard and unfeeling as his commander had been. The
incident dramatizes a common human weakness: Gray humil
iates a soldier in the same fashion as he had been humil-
iated--an act for which Gray had killed a man.
As an officer Gray won another citation for valor,
and after the war ended tried to live as a gentleman in
London. For a time he lived well, but when hard times
came he was reduced to selling books from door to door and
was sometimes driven out of yards. Still he kept up ap
pearances, and continued to dress as a gentleman. When
he had no money left he began to live with some tramps
under a stone bridge, huddled around a fire in winter.
At night he bathed in the icy water of the river and
pressed his shabby suit with hot stones. At the last he
is seen standing on a street corner, still erect, his
clothes freshly pressed, his moustaches carefully twisted
420
to a point--an old man selling penny boxes of matches.
/
When a former officer from his regiment, since become a
prosperous Canadian wheat farmer, recognizes Gray and
tries to talk to him, Gray curses the man and turns again j
I
to the passing crowd, calling, "Matches] Matches, sir!" I
The story is naturalistic. The mood is bitter '
and almost impassioned. Gray becomes a symbol of the j
I
thousands of lives uprooted and ruined by the war. His \
pride, maintained to the last, becomes ridiculous in his j
circumstances. He was one of the doomed men— and he knew j
it. I
|
There are a few incidents in this darkly ironic j
i
story that have a touch of humor. One of them concerns !
I
\
a blind man in a hospital who is in love with a girl. He j
I
could always tell her by a scar on the wrist, for which 1
!
he was partly responsible. When his friends wrote to his j
girl to ask her to visit him in the hospital, she came to I
see him and took him to the cinemas:
"Her voice sounded different,'but then everything
sounded different since. But I could tell by the
scar. We would sit and hold hands, and I could
touch the bit of scar inside her left wrist" (p.
460).
After taking him to the movies and leaving him, because
the lights hurt her eyes, she would, at his insistence,
visit him in his room. Finally, after eight nights, the
j visits ended.
1 We were sitting there, with the other hand in
ray hand, and me touching the scar now and then.
! Then all of. a sudden she had jerked away. I could
. hear her standing up. "Listen," she says. "This I
I can't, go on any longer. You will have to know !
! sometime," she says. And I says, "I dont want to |
! know but one thing. What is your name?" She told j
I me her name; one of the nurses (p. 46l). J
i
i She had been taking the place of the other girl who had
"been buggering off with another fellow," but she had not
i
fooled the blind man with the little patch on her wrist--
for it was on the wrong one. Our emotions are mixed as
we read such a passage: sympathy, anger, surprise, and
laughter are evoked simultaneously. It is interesting
that in this, war story Faulkner's moods are much like
|,those in his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, and, as in that |
| j
; work so in this, most women are self-centered and ruthlessJ,
The next story, "Crevasse," has a wartime setting
and describes the loss of a party of men in an avalanche.
1 |
Since it has no humor, it need not be included here.
"Turnabout," which was made into a moving picture,
is a story of rivalry between two branches of military
service. A very young British sailor is found sleeping
in a busy street outside a cafe near the waterfront. Be
cause he is drunk, alone, and helpless, two Americans
become interested in getting him to his ship. But a
policeman explains that he-can't go to his ship because
422
it has been put under the wharf for the night and will
have to stay there till the next morning. One of the men
then explains that it is a fast motor launch.
"Oh," the captain said. "I thought those boats
were ship commanders' launches. You mean to tell
me-they use officers just to--"
"I don't know," the lieutenant said, "Maybe they
use them to fetch hot water from one ship to an
other. Or buns. Or maybe to go back and forth
fast when they forget napkins or something" (p.
477).
It turns out that the young British officer is using the
street for his billet and refuses to budge to let a convoy
through to the wharf. No one knows where the sailors are
supposed to sleep.
Some of the men at a waterfront bar notice the age
of the sailors--about seventeen or eighteen--and remark,
"You mean there's a male marine auxiliary to the Waaes?
Good Lord, I sure made a mistake when I enlisted. But
this war never was advertised right" (p. 48l). After a
drink or two the sailor begins talking about his and his
commander's daytime occupation in the fast launch:
"Whenever we sight smoke and I have the glass, he sheers
away. Keeps the ship hull down all the while- No beaver
then. Had me two down a fortnight yesterday" (pp. 482-3).
The sailor then explains that any ship sighted with basket
masts counts as a beaver. So the two men make a game of
423
it. The Americans, unable to refrain from sarcasm, ask:
"Has yours and Ronnie's boat got a yellow stern?" "'A
yellow stern?1 ' the English boy said. He had quit smiling,
but his face was still pleasant" (p. 483). Realizing
that the English boy does not understand the remark,
they pass it off. Out of the chaffing there comes an in
vitation. One of the Americans, a flyer, invites the
English boy to fly with him the next morning over the
continent. "I'll show him some war, anyway," Boghrd
says. "His people have been in it three years now, and
he seems to take it like a sophomore in town for the big
game" (p. 484). The first two sections of the story sug
gest that the Americans are bearing the brunt of the war,
while the English look on or make a game of it.
The story reaches its climax, and brings about
mutual respect between the rival services, when the two
men share each other's wartime assignments: the British
sailor marvels at the American's courage and skill when
he goes along as an observer on the American's bombing
mission, and the American flier in turn gets a new re
spect for the men who pilot the little torpedo boats
after he goes on a mission with his British friends. The
British "youngster" proves to have remarkable courage and
skill, and the American shows also that he is not lacking
424
in these qualities. This is a modern version of the old
folk tale in which the man despised and laughed at his
wife's easy life until he traded places with her for a
day. The story gains realism from the many references to
parts of the plane, guns, topography, targets, et cetera,
and from the spirited rivalry between the fliers and the
navy men.
This rivalry produces a great deal of sharp repar
tee and bantering comment. The Americans, still under
the delusion that the launches were pleasure craft, talk
about going sailing and taking along a guitar. One of
them, as a practical joke, sends the captain of the little
boat a package, fortunately intercepted.
It contained some objects and a scrawled note.
The objects were a new yellow silk sofa cushion
and a Japanese parasol, obviously borrowed, and
a comb and a roll of toilet paper. The note said:
Couldn't find a camera anywhere and Collier
wouldn't let me have his mandolin. But maybe
Ronnie can play on the comb. Mac (p. 494).
When the American accompanies Ronnie and the "boy" on one
of the "pleasure" cruises, he learns not only how small,
crowded, and uncomfortable the craft is as it races
through the waves but also how dangerous the assignments
are: they are on their way into the Kiel harbor to at
tack German vessels tied up there under the protection
of huge shore batteries. The casualness of the sailors
contrasts sharply with the excitement and fear of the |
flier. On the way home from the near-fatal mission, the
sailors play again the old game of "Beaver."
To show his respect for the young Englishman who
!
has taken him on this adventure into unpublicized naval i
i
warfare, the American orders a case of the finest Scotch ;
and directs that it be delivered by a responsible man.
"This is for a child," Bogard said, indicating
the package. "You'll find him in the street of
the Twelve Hours, somewhere near the Cafe Twelve
Hours. He'll be in the gutter. You'll know him.
A child about six feet long. Any English M.P.
will show him to you. If he is asleep, don't
wake him. Just sit there and wait until he wakes
up. Tell him it is from Captain Bogard" (p. 508)*
This story is more light-hearted and good-humored than
most of Faulkner's war fiction. Both characters and j
events are romanticized--enough to make a first-rate, j
j
entertaining story; but the solid qualities Faulkner ad- !
mired are made quite clear: courage, a high disdain for !
I
danger, pride in one's own vocation, and respect for that I
I
t
of others. ]
I
"All the Dead Pilots" is a nostalgic war story, set'
j
in France near the war's end, and told in the first personi
I
The principals are a flier named Spoomer, related to some j
i
of the high army brass, and already a captain with a !
I
Mons Star, a D.S.O., and in command of "a pursuit squadront
i
of single seaters"; Sartoris, an American from a little |
426
town in north Mississippi (this is Faulkner's projection
of himself again); a French tart named Kit (Kitchener,
"because she had such a mob of soldiers")i and the nar
rator, a mail censor at Wing Headquarters getting used to
a wooden leg. The girl was supposed to be Sartoris',
until Spoomer cut in.
Spoomer had a huge and intelligent dog which seemed
always to know when Spoomer was leaving the aerodrome to
go into the city. If he went to other places in line of
%
duty, the dog stayed at home, but anytime the flier left
for Amiens the dog followed. The dog becomes a comic
figure in the story because it preferred the kitchen
refuse from the enlisted men's mess, rather than the
officers', and the master would drag it away by the
scruff of the neck, saying, "You mustn't eat that stuff;
that's for soldiers." Some of the men remarked that
"save for Spoomer's wing and his Mons Star and his D.S.O.,
he and the dog looked alike" (p. 518)*
The rivalry between Spoomer and Sartoris, the
commander and one of his greenest cubs, soon became "the
object of general interest . . . and even betting among
the enlisted element of the whole sector of French and
British troops" (p. 516). Because of difference in rank,
Spoomer would give Sartoris some duty to keep him at the
...... ' ” "" 427
base while he would visit Kit. Sartoris determined to
break up these assignations but realized fully the ob
stacles he faced.
"Me knowing that he was up there, and them knowing
I knew that if I busted in and dragged him out
and bashed his head off, I'd not only be cashiered,
I'd be clinked for life for having infringed the
articles of alliance by invading foreign property
without warrant or something" (pp. 519-20).
Sartoris had to find some way, outside of assault and
battery, to get rid of his antagonist. Later one of the
men said of him:
"You said before that you would run him clean
out of the sky. You didn't do that; you did
better: you have run him clean off the continent
of Europe" (p. 521).
The climax of the story comes when Sartoris, dis
obeying orders, followed the dog into town one day to
the estaminet, or pub, where Kit worked. He found an
old French woman sitting at the bottom of a stair guard
ing the way to the rooms beyond. In a room at the head
of the stairs he found a khaki cap with the crest of the
Flying Corps, and when he broke into a second room, a
bedroom, a girl screamed and fled. Nearby he observed
a huge wardrobe, with both doors closed. On a chair lay
a pair of slacks, neatly folded, a tunic with military
insignia, and an ordnance belt. Sartoris picked up the
garments and made his way back past the old woman and
, . - -..... - 4 2 g
I
j into the bar, where he was challenged by a French corporal
J
| A fight ensued in which Sartoris lost some teeth but suc-
! ceeded in beating the corporal into insensibility and
! escaping with the bundle of clothes.
|
| The next day the men at the aerodrome saw the
i
I final act in this comic opera:
|
i . . . when an ox cart turned onto the aerodrome
! and stopped, with, sitting on a wire cage con
taining chickens, Spoomer in a woman's skirt
and a knitted shawl. The next day Spoomer re
turned to England (p. 527)*
Some of the men remarked that the dog would like that,
anyway, because the food would be better. When someone
reminded Sartoris that he had run Spoomer off the conti
nent of Europe, he replied:
; "Yes. I sure have to laugh. He's got to go
j back to England, where all the men are gone.
: All those women, and not a man between fourteen
I and eighty to help him. I have to laugh" (p.
| 528) .
Humor which is suggestive or bawdy crops up several
times in this story. In addition to the situation in
which Spoomer was caught, a practical "joke" involving
sex, there is the comment about the old French woman
sitting on the steps, "Like she might have dressed up to
get ready to be sacked and ravaged" (p. 525)* The remark,
though made in jest, indicates the author's concern with
t
i
I sex, and his low opinion of women. The same prejudice is
... 429
shown in the remarks about Spoomer among the women of
wartime England. A letter from his great-aunt Jenny
(Mrs. Virginia du Pre) to Sartoris said: "... let
those foreign women alone. I lived through a war myself
and I know how women act in war, even with Yankees. And
a good-for-nothing hellion like you ..." (p. 531)* She,
too, has a pretty low opinion of women.
This story, like Soldiers1 Pay, satirizes the ig
norance of enlisted men and officers. Some of the letters
of John Sartoris are characterized by what the narrator
called "transparent and honorable lies to mothers and
sweethearts, in the script and spelling of schoolboys."
But the letter of a major to Sartoris' family telling of
John's death and burial is almost as illiterate. In the
postscript the major wrote:
He was buried in the cemetary just north of Saint
Vaast since we hope it will not be shelled again
since we hope it will be over soon by our padre
since there were just two camels and seven E.A.
and so it was on our side by that time (p. 530).
Faulkner takes a certain satisfaction, apparently, in
showing the ignorance and weakness of officers or other
men in authority. In this tale it is Spoomer, the com
mander, who gets run out of France, and in "Victory" the
officers are depicted as sadistic and despicable.
430
"Mistral" is a story of intrigue with an Italian
setting, an interesting example of a "mood" story, but
devoid of humor.
"Divorce in Naples" is more typically Faulkner's
; in subject matter and treatment. It tells in rather bold
I detail of the sexual initiation of a young, inexperienced
i
j American sailor in an Italian city. Much is made of
I
! Carl's innocence, which had been jealously guarded during
! three years in the maritime service, by his friend George,
t
the cook, who shared Carl’s cabin. They were inseparable
until that night in Naples when the men went ashore for
j
| drink and women's company. In a bar five sailors and
I
f
I three Italian women were drinking and talking, the men in
I
i •
1 English, the women in Italian, and one of the men spoke
, to George, the big beetle-browed cook, about Carl: "'Why
did you bring him here, then?* the bosun said. 'Yes,'
Monckton said. 'I sure wouldn't bring my wife to a place
like this'" (p. 877). George's reply was a stream of pro-
!
| fanity. The women, likewise, recognized Carl's purity,
; and said as they contemplated him "with musing secret
1 looks, 'Einnocente'." After the drinking the party broke
up, leaving George and his woman and Carl together.
i
j Later in the evening, when George left them briefly
J at the inn, he returned to find them gone. At first he
431
could not believe It, but when he did he tried to leave
: the place without paying, in order to find Carl in time
! and take him back to the ship. In the melee that fol-
I lowed, George dropped some coins on the floor and tried
|
• to kick away the patrons scrambling for them and step on
| the coins. He was arrested and thrown in a dungeon.
i
I It was not until they reached the Prefecture,
where there was an interpreter, that he learned
that he was a political prisoner, having insulted
the king's majesty by placing foot on the king's
effigy on a coin (p. 885)-
In the jail, George said, "they taken my belt and necktie
and the strings out of my shoes." In the dark room he
found only a wooden bench running all the way around the
walls, the only place for sleeping, and a wooden barrel
i
|
in the middle of the floor, whose purpose he recognized j
1
i by the odor. :
! I
: When George managed the next day to send a note to j
1 '
, his ship and to get bailed out, he found that Carl had not j
! returned to the ship. He went to the cabin and packed
i i
j Carl's things into an old leather bag and threw it out on '
1
; the deck. When Carl returned to the ship, after three
i
I days, he avoided George and worked feverishly polishing
1 . j
; brass. After the ship left Naples, however, the men saw j
| that there had been a reconciliation: George and Carl
I were together again, dancing to an old broken record of
432 .
George's. j
The final episode, in which Carl reveals his ig- i
norance and brooding fear ("Maybe I got her into trouble")
is bawdy and coarse. It reveals, as so many other stories
do, Faulkner's preoccupation with the sexual act, here
treated as comical. After learning that women like to j
receive gifts from men, Carl asks George to do him a j
favor when they get back to the United States:
"Sure," George said. "Spit it out."
"When we get to Galveston, I want you to buy
me a suit of these pink silk teddybears that
ladies use. A little bigger than I'd wear,
see?" (p. 893)-
The story could have been set in almost any port
city. The reason for the choice of an Italian city seems
to be that the language barrier adds to the complications,
and thus to the humor, of the plot. A remark by the bosun :
shows further why Faulkner chose a European setting: "Well,
a man can't keep on going ashore anywhere, let alon :
Europe, all his life without getting ravaged now and then" !
(p. 886). This is the sort of reversal or unexpected j
twist that is typical of Faulkner's sense of humor. I
^33
Part Two: A Fable
| Faulkner's long-awaited magnum opus, A Fable, on
I which he had worked for more than nine years, was pub-
i I
. I
lished in the summer of 195^* This long novel, with its ;
| large cast of characters, its strange parallels between
the Passion Week of Christ and the last weeks of World !
War I, although a controversial book which had some- very j
; I
; unfavorable reviews, was for months a best seller. Some
j
critics hailed it as a magnificent book and others called
it a magnificent failure. Frank disappointment was ex
pressed by some reviewers who had expected this work--
because of the time and care devoted to it--to be j
* 1
i I
i Faulkner's masterpiece. They found the situations of j
I the novel incredible and the characters implausible; |
; i
others found the symbolisn of A Fable too elaborate and ;
; j
too weighted with a message which is never made quite |
; clear. Horace Reynolds, for example, after commenting on j
i !
J the excellence of the descriptions and the word-magic J
S '
I
i of the book, declares: I
I
t
But in the opinion of this reviewer, it does |
not rank with Faulkner's best work, such master- I
pieces as "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the j
Fury," ( and "The Bear." Here the homiletics get
434
in the way of the drama; the game of the symbolism
becomes too much an end in itself.1
The Time Magazine review of this novel, entitled
"Faulkner's Passion Play," comments on "the agony and
sweat" that went into the writing of this long work, "a
major effort by a great writer," and pays tribute to
Faulkner's imaginative powers, his determined optimism
| (paralleling the concluding remarks of the Nobel speech),
| and the ingenious parallels to the Passion Week of Christ,
I
but concludes:
| The Christ-corporal dies, the Passion Week is
] played out. Faulkner has paralleled the greatest
j story in man's experience, but he has failed to
| use it to philosophic or dramatic advantage. His
| labyrinthine asides (including a fine story about
i a great horse and the devout thieves who raced
1 it) will incline the most intense Faulkner fan
! to wonder if the distinguished Mississippian
i hasn't mistaken the bayous of living for the
river of life. Above all, Faulkner has failed
to differentiate between a pointless war and a
i needful one. The general makes his final point,
and when he does, he takes man--and Faulkner—
i right back to where A Fable started: "Man and his
folly . . . will prevail."2
t
i During the nine years that Faulkner was working on ’
, A Fable (from December, 19^ to November, 1953), he took
■ time out to write Intruder in the Dust and Notes on a
J Horsethief (1950) and Requiem for a Nun (1951)* This
1
. The Christian Science Monitor (August 5, 1954),
j P • 11 • p
L- _______Time - Magazine (August 2, 1954),-p.. -76. ---
435
fact accounts, it would seem, for some of the characters,
scenes, and ideas that occur in both the minor works and
the longer novel. A Negro named Beauchamp is introduced
into A Fable and (as in Intruder) he is referred to as
"Sambo." The account of the fabulous race horse (Notes
on a Horse Thief, a work of limited circulation) is re
told in its entirety in A Fable, though the tortuous
sentence structure and flamboyant rhetoric of the original
have been reduced to a more readable style. There seems !
to be no reason for repeating this tale (it takes forty
pages in A Fable) except that Faulkner liked it and
wanted to give it a wider circulation. It has no bearing
on the plot of the novel. The tendency to moralize, to
preach, to offer a quasi-religious message (noted in I
1
Intruder and more especially in Requiem) is more striking
i
in A Fable. The mantle of seer or vates which Faulkner, ;
j
now nearing sixty, adopts in these works does not fit him j
very well, and the message is often confused, unclear^
or even contradictory. In Requiem the will to believe is J
very strong, but Faulkner never makes clear what one Is
i
to believe. In Intruder, the outlanders are told to leaveJ
the Negro problem to the South (no other section can j
i
understand the Negro and his complex problems), but no j
solution except patient waiting is suggested. As several '
436
critics have pointed out, the logic in A Fable cannot be
accepted (the relationship of the corporal to his father,
for example: is the father— in his role as tempter- God
or the Devil?), and furthermore there appears to be a
basic contradiction between the logic of the novel and
its feeling.
The plot may be summarized as follows. In the
i
last year of the war, 1918, a French infantry regiment of
General Gragnon's division is ordered to attack the German
line. At a given signal the men and officers climb from
j
their trenches, but the men mutiny and refuse to attack.
General Gragnon, an old-line officer dedicated to military
principle, appeals to the commander-in-chief to have the
entire regiment executed. Meanwhile a lull in the fight-
j
ing occurs all along the western front. The Germans seem !
I
i
to know of the French mutiny, but they fail to take ad- ;
vantage of it. On both sides of the far-flung battle J
lines only token artillery fire continues, and during
this unexpected armistice a German general flies over
!
and lands behind Allied lines to discuss with the military !
and civil leaders some way of keeping the war going. The
generals, statesmen, and munitions makers on both sides '
i
realize that the hatred for war and longing for peace j
I
must be ruthlessly put down. The spirit of brotherhood--
: the fraternizing of Germans and Allied soldiers at the j
i
! front--must be halted at all costs. ,
i I
I The man responsible for the crisis is a quiet,
|
! obscure French corporal who, by his teaching of non-
i
j violence, has won a following of twelve disciples. The
; j
| corporal, a shadowy figure resembling Christ in general. j
| outline, roams with his men up and down the western front
| I
I teaching the doctrine of universal brotherhood. They seem 1
I even to have crossed no-man's land to sow the seed among
i
I the enemy troops. After the mutiny the corporal is ar-
i
j rested, tried, and convicted. On orders from the com-
i
! mander, he is taken from the prison to a meeting with the j
I •
j French marshal, who turns out to be the father of the 11-
i
’ legitimate corporal. In a strange and powerful scene
i
: the marshal tries to get the corporal to denounce his mad 1
: i
i act, but the corporal steadfastly refuses. The old gen- I
! I
eral (he is a tempter who resembles Satan in this scene)
I
• then offers the condemned man a chance to escape, which ■
i i
' of course he refuses. The corporal argues that his little
t
; band of followers would still be true to his teachings,
t '
j not knowing that one of them, playing the part of Judas, j
; has already betrayed him. The corporal is then taken !
i back to the prison, where he eats a last meal with his
men (the Last Supper) before going to his death with two 1
”... ' ...... ~. 438-
thieves. At one point one of the disciples, a man named
Pietro (Peter) denies the corporal. Certain women, play
ing the part of Christ's friends, do their utmost to save
the corporal's life, but in vain. After the execution,
in which many parallels to the crucifixion occur, the
corporal's family bury the body in a hillside grave, which
V
is later opened by a rolling barrage of artillery. The
family look in vain for the body. Thus Faulkner follows
the events of the Passion Week all the way to the opened
grave. Later events, by still more startling coincidence,
immortalize the corporal when his body is unknowingly
chosen to be given the place of honor as France's Unknown
Soldier.
The novel, in typical Faulkner fashion, does not
advance in a straight line or chronological order. By
i
means of flashbacks, conversations, and other devices the
story of the corporal and his family is gradually revealed.!
The resemblances to the Christ-story are too pat and un- i
convincing (the corporal, for example, was also born in |
i
a stable), and the characterization is so devoid of life
as to be only a symbol. The movements and motives of the
corporal are not sufficiently explained. As a result, the
novel has little relation to life, and the characters are
only marionettes that dance as they are manipulated. t
439
The meaning, or multiple meanings, of this highly
imaginative work may safely be left to the critics. The
concern here is whether this novel has any humor, and, if
so, how it affects the work. One of the critics quoted
earlier, Horace Reynolds, calls attention to its "oblique
3
humor, skillful symbolism, tragic irony." One may say,
without equivocation, that the novel has humor--not a
great deal in proportion to its length, and not all of it
pleasant humor, but enough at least to continue a practice
begun with his first novel and kept down to this last.
Three distinct types of humor may be found: (1)
the tall tale, (2) humor dependent on language--wit, name
humor, irony, satire, and (3) macabre or surrealistic
humor. The tall tale is represented by the long digres
sion in which one of the characters tells the story of
the marvelous race horse.
In this story a great three-year-old horse that
once belonged to an Argentine "hide-and-wheat prince,"
was bought by an American oil baron and brought to the
United States. The horse and its English groom were an
unbeatable combination because of the rapport between the
two. Together they broke records in two hemispheres.
3
Christian Science Monitor (August 5* 195^) . > P* H*
When the horse was being moved from New Orleans to its
I
new home, the train was wrecked as it broke through a
trestle in a Louisiana swamp. Twenty-two months later, !
i
the story is related, the English groom is seen as both !
I
a Baptist and a Mason "and one of the most skillful j
t
manipulators of or players at dice." During sixteen of j
I
those months five separate agencies--the federal govern- I
ment, the successive state police forces, the railway j
and insurance companies, and the oil baron's own private
investigators--pursued them all over the country. When
the railroad car plunged into the Bayou, guards were
sent to look for the valuable horse, but the groom and
his Negro helper had removed the horse to a tiny island
i
where they kept it hidden for three months. The groom j
i
went out secretly at night, suffering all kinds of hard- j
|
ships, to get food and other necessities. j
The company of four (horse, Englishman, an old |
I
Negro preacher, and a twelve-year-old Negro boy, the :
jockey) emerged from hiding and began to win races in
first one city and then another. By betting at unheard- (
of odds up to 100 to 1, the groom and old preacher were
making loads of money with their three-legged horse (the
j
other leg had been broken in the wreck). The wiry !
little Negro boy rode the horse without saddle, with only
' 441,
i
bellyband and surcingle to hold on to. After each race, ‘
they would collect their winnings and move on to fresh
fields, keeping always about two jumps ahead of the !
police and federal authorities. After a time the fame
of the foursome was becoming a legend.
The style of this tall tale is interesting and
appropriate:
The horse would be running, once more at that
incredible, that unbelievable, speed (and at the !
incredible and unbelievable odds, too; by report ;
and rumor the two men--the aged negro man of
God, and the foul-mouthed white one.to whom to
grant the status of man was merely to accept
Darkness' emissary in the stead of its actual
prince and master--had won tens of thousands
of dollars) as if their mundane progress across
America were too slow to register on the eye,
and only during those incredible moments against
a white rail did the horse and the three adjunc
tive human beings become visible.^
One word--"incredible"--stands out in this passage, but
the entire piece has the quality of being heightened
(or stretched) grotesquely.
The oil baron continued to pursue and be outwitted
in his search for the fugitives. With all his money and
hired agents, he was no match for the quick-witted groom
and old preacher. Some of the baron's men quit the game
i
in shame and disgust. Finally the old man and the boy
4
William Faulkner, A Fable (New York, 1950* 1954),
p. 158.
442
were recognized and arrested by a jailer and taken to
j court for a trial. The judge ordered the defendant to
j be freed, and a lawyer told the Negro to get out of town,
that people in that town did not like "rich niggers."
»
The old man then testified that he was "a witness for
God and man," but he accepted the verdict, and took to
the road once more.
What is the point of the story? Apparently it has
none except that it is a yarn involving two of Faulkner's
favorite subjects--horses and Negroes. It is interesting,
too, that the groom, after his large winnings, should be
invited to become a Mason; and that the old Negro, with
his frock tails filled with money, was both a gambler and
a "man of God." The irony in both cases is comical.
Something of the same type of incongruity appears
in the malicious description of the high military "brass":
1 They were all there: the commanders of the two
i other armies, with their heavy moustaches already
j shaped to E o o n 1s spoon, richly luxuriant from the
; daily ritual of soup; the English chief of staff
I who could have looked no more indomitably and
j rigidly youthful if the corset had been laced in
full view.on the outside of his tunic, with his
, bright ribbons and wisps of brass and scarlet
tabs and his white hair and moustache and his
; . blue eyes the color of icy war /sic/; and the
American colonel with the face oT a Boston shipping
magnate (which indeed he was, or at least the en
tailed scion of one)--or rather, an eighteenth
century face; the face of that predecessor or
forefather who at twenty-five had retired rich
from the quarter deck of a Middle Passage slaver, i
and at thirty had his name illuminated in colored
glass above his Beacon hill pew," (pp. 31-32) .
j
1 Pretension or hypocrisy is noted in both these figures,
one man trying to hide the size of his girth, and the
' other trying to hide the source of his wealth, slaving.
i
Like so many portraits of Yankees, this one is tinged j
I '
with acid. j
j In the same vein, Faulkner describes a French j
' soldier of the poorer class who rose to a captaincy and j
finally a position at the Ecole Militaire, a man who kept
peasant ways and was dominated by his ambitious wife. '
serving man is pictured as
. . . apparently the same soldier (or at least
one as large) but certainly the same shirt eight i
years later when Bidet was a colonel with enough !
pay to keep a horse too, waiting on table with ■
a white apron now over the collarless shirt . . .
the same heavy boots under the apron bringing
amid viands the smell of stable manure now, the
same giant thumb in the bowls of soup (p. 50).
i
other such portrait, of a division commander, reveals ;
i
officer's ignorance. When he mentioned that he i
|
! planned to retire to some Pacific island after the war,
| a subordinate said, "Like Gauguin." When the officer i
i !
! ,
i wanted to know who Gauguin was, and was told that he was j
1 a painter, "'This is another place,* the division commander;
said immediately. 'There won't be enough people on this
his
His
One
the
" 444
one to need their houses painted1" (p. 53)* Such descrip-
i
tions have elements of both snobbery and comedy. In them
. the laughter is at the expense of a person considered in- ,
ferior.
Faulkner attaches significance to trivial matters; :
a man's dress may mean more than his language. Consider
i his comment on evening clothes:
i ;
i The jug and bowl were gone and the old general '
sat once more flanked by his two confreres behind
the bare table, though among them now was a fourth i
figure as incongruous and paradoxical as a magpie
in a bowl of goldfish--a bearded civilian sitting
between the generalissimo and the American in that
black-and white costume which to the Anglo-Saxon
is the formal regalia for .eating or seduction or
other diversions of the dark, and to the Continental
European and South American the rigid uniform for
partitioning other governments or overthrowing
his own (p. 271).
Such a passage, presumably meant to be jocular, shows
nevertheless a rather low opinion of mankind: the Anglo-
Saxon is interested in "seduction or other diversions of
the dark"; the Europeans and Latin Americans are inter
ested in carving up neighboring states or leading a re- :
bellion. There is wit in the remark, but it is not :
1
; pleasant.
| Soldiers in Faulkner's fiction are always sardonic s
and sharp, ridiculing, belittling themselves or their :
superiors.. Even the twelve followers of the corporal
(who correspond to Christ's twelve apostles) make fun of
445
their situation during their imprisonment. At the table
. one of the men asks for a grace before the meal, but no
one is prepared to say it.
"Does anybody know one?" the Corporal said.
Again they looked at one another. Then one
said to the fourth one: "You've been to school.
Say one."
j "Maybe he went too fast and passed it," another
; said.
' "Say it then," the Corporal said to the fourth
one. The other said rapidly: "Benedictus.
Benedicte. Benedictissimus. Will that do?"
"Yes, yes," the Midian said. They began to eat
now.
During the meal the subject turned to defecation, a sub
ject of interest to Dean Swift and modern naturalistic
writers. A brief quotation will show the sort of perverse
' wit characterizing the conversation:
"The manure of traitors," the fourth said. He
had the dreamy and furious face of a martyr.
j "In that case wouldn't the maize, the bean, the
, potato grow upside down, or anyway hide its own
i head even if it couldn't bury it?" the second said.
i
I
, "Stop it," the Corporal said.
The soldiers in most of Faulkner's stories are interested,
as a rule, in liquor, fornication, hell~raising--in that
, order--and are generally world-weary and disillusioned.
■ Their language is typically unrestrained and mildly
I cynical.
An incident involving a small detachment of !
soldiers sent out to find an unidentified whole corpse i
i
to be placed in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier has a !
kind of macabre humor. The men, drinking freely, go
poking through a common grave where thousands of bodies
had been dumped after a battle. After considerable I
i
searching they find one body still intact, though putres
cent, and start to return to their headquarters. But they;
]
are met by a peasant woman who has come seeking the body
of her son Theodule, killed in battle there, and who is
convinced that the corpse the soldiers have is without
doubt her son. Finally they yield to the old lady, who
happily accepts the corpse from them and takes it home for=
burial. They are faced then with the task of finding }
I
another body to take to Paris, but their problem is solved)
eventually without the necessity for exploring the grave J
again when a stranger offers them a suitable body--for a ,
price. This is, of course, the body of the corporal who
had led the mutiny. After haggling for a time over the j
price, the soldiers come to terms with the stranger and •
leave triumphantly for Paris. This sequence of events, j
(
which takes about fifteen pages in the novel, illustrates !
Faulkner's use of the gruesome, and forbidding to produce
grotesque and comic effects. The mother in this episode
447
is presented in a tragicomic light, and the soldiers,
bargaining for a putrid corpse, are objects of pity and
derision. The mood is complex, evoking a number of con
tradictory emotions.
Name humor is found in A Fable in at least two
places. In one of these Faulkner expresses a personal
opinion about the Scottish people:
. . . All of whom he had ever known were named
Evans or Morgan except the two or three named
Deuteronomy or Conventicle out of the Old Testa-
ment--that morose and musical people who knew
dark things by simply breathing . r . so that
when they emerged from their fens and fastnesses
into the rational world where men still tried to
forget their sombre beginnings, they permitted
themselves to be designated by the jealous and
awesome nouns out of the old fierce Hebraic
annals in which they as no other people seemed
at home . . . (p. 96).
Such mouth-filling and odd names as Deuteronomy and
Conventic'le are amusing and give a comic effect in most
settings, just as the name Ichabod does in Irving's tale.
A second example of this type of name fun is seen in the.
name taken by the old Negro preacher from America who
represents Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes a la France de
Tout le Monde. Explaining that his name had been Sutter-
field, he says, "'But I changed it to make it easier for
the folks. From the association.' 'Oh. Tout le Monde.'
'Yes, Tooleyman'" (p. 150)* In the first case the names
were given by the family, for pious reasons, perhaps; in
the second, the name was adopted by the old Negro in honor
of the association he represented, and both his spelling
and pronunciation of it are typically unlearned. When
we smile at the old man's new name, it is a smile of con
descension. He is, in a sense, the modern Everyman.
A Fable has its share of satire, and on the peren
nial subjects. City life, modern civilization, generals
and war, and man's love of speed are some of the targets.
The description of Paris is typical Faulkner: masculine,
sardonic, suggestive.
. . . who had only to reach majority in order to
inherit that matchless of all catastrophes: the
privilege of exhausting his life~-or if necessary,
shortening it--by the matchless means of all:
being young, male, unmarried, an aristocrat,
wealthy, secure by right of birth, in Paris: that
city which was the world too, since of all cities
it was supreme, dreamed after and adored by all
men . . . (pp. 2^7-8).
Paris is a mistress, an ideal, a micro cosmos. The con-
notative power of this passage is very strong, and running
through it is the suggestion of its weakening or sapping
the strength of men.
In many of his later works Faulkner has railed
against the machine age and its dehumanizing effects on
man. The passages, though often sarcastic and highly
critical, have a kind of wry humor, somewhat like that of
449
an old farmer cursing the automobile. Henry Ford and the
inventor of radio share honors in this ironic blast:
. . . in Detroit today an old-time bicycle racer
destined to be one of the world's giants, his very
surname an adjectival noun in the world's mouth,
who had already put half a continent on wheels
by families, and in twenty-five more would have
half a hemisphere on wheels individually, and in
a thousand would have already effaced the legs
from a species just as that long-ago and doubtless
at the time not-even-noticed twitch of Cosmos
drained the seas into continents and effaced the
gills from their fish. But that was not yet;
that would be peace, and to attain that, the
silence must be conquered too: the silence in
which man had space to think and in consequence
act on what he believed he thought or thought
he believed . . . (p. 187)-
i
Part of the method here is exaggeration, a deliberate ef- !
fort to make the conquest of man by machines appear more
shocking. After a time, the prophet says, man will have
lost not just the use of his legs, but the legs them
selves. His thought, of course, is not new. Emerson
had said almost precisely the same thing ("Man has in
vented a carriage and lost the use of his legs"); what
is new is the tone and the powerful irony.
The same theme, though at a higher pitch, is given
in the intemperate language of the old general, who sees
man as finally doomed to live and die in his metal shell,
or automobile. The passage is too long to quote in full
(it runs to several pageb) but a few excerpts will indi
cate its satiric power. Man, he says, will survive,
450
since he has something in him, something more durable
than his vices; he will even outlast "his enslavement to
the demonic progeny of his own mechanical curiosity."
He has put wheels under everything: his patio, terrace,
veranda, and in time he will move everything he needs,
including "his own private climate . . . stove, bathroom,
bed clothing, kitchen, and all into his automobile" and
the word "home" will disappear from the language. Then all
the earth will be leveled out, making one great "demoun-
tained disrivered expanse of concrete paving protuberance-
less by tree or bush or house or anything" that might
interfere with visibility. When the earth has been fully
prepared, then the new race will emerge,
. . . man in his terrapin myriads enclosed clothes-
less from birth in his individual wheeled and
glovelike envelope, with pipes and hoses leading
upward from underground reservoirs to charge him
with one composite squirt which at one mutual in
stant will fuel his mobility, pander hi's lusts,
sate his appetites and fire his dreams . . . (p.
353).
The old race of human beings has now given way to the
mechanical terrapins, which move constantly, stopping
only long enough to get the vital squirt that will suf
fice both the motor and the sub-human life within the shell.
Finally, when the machine runs down, the life will die
"at last at the click of an automatic circuit-breaker on
451
a speedometer dial, and long since freed of bone and
organ and gut, leaving nothing for communal scavenging
but a rusting and odorless shell ..." (p. 353)*
Clearly, the satire here is deeply felt. The
voice may be that of the old general, but the thoughts,
and the flamboyant rhetoric, are clearly Faulkner's. Is
there humor in these diatribes? Perhaps that depends
somewhat on the individual taste; but if incongruity is
one of the chief elements of humor, then the passages
have a sort of humor. It may be bilious, but the con
cepts (man turned into a hard-topped terrapin and sur
viving by a "composite squirt" sent up by underground
tubes)--these concepts are amusing because they are so
fantastic and the language is so extravagant.
The general moves easily from this view of life a
thousand years hence to war in coming millenniums. Man
will for a time go on making bigger tanks, he declares,
with greater firepower and building faster and more
formidable planes, which he thinks he controls, but which
have conquered him.
It will be his own frankenstein which roasts
him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed,
wrenches loose his still-living entrails in the
j ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop.
452
After awhile the machines will have shaken man loose and
will have become completely independent of him, self-
perpetuating and more demoniac than man himself ever was.
Finally, in an armageddon of the skies, the last of the
mechanical monsters will fight the last battle,
. . . the final two of them engaged in the last
gigantic wrestling against the final and dying
sky robbed even of darkness and filled with the
inflectionless uproar of the two mechanical
voices bellowing at each other polysyllabic and
verbless patriotic nonsense (p. 254).
This scene, too, has a kind of bitter humor. The giant
war machines have inherited man's vices: they fight each
other and bellow "patriotic- nonsense"J It is a world
gone mad, the ultimate result of the mechanization that
began in our time and got out of hand. But even after all
this, man survives (the word "endures" is a key word in
Faulkner) and at the end there will be ". . . his puny and
inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning; and
there too after the last ding dong of doom has rung and
died there will still be one sound more: his voice . . .
(p* 35*0* The end of this passage so closely parallels
the final paragraph of the Nobel Speech that one feels
it is Faulkner's creed. Man, for all his folly, will
outlast even his own frankensteins. Somehow he will
muddle through.
453
A Fable is many things: a story with at least
two levels of interest, a legend, and a passion play.
As already suggested, it has become one of the most con
troversial books of the mid-century. It has undeniable
power and some magnificent scenes. It has also some of
Faulkner's typical humor, more restrained and indirect
than usual, but recognizable as his--in both subject
matter and style. Modern man gets his usual rough treat
ment and a kindly word at the end. This novel continues
and expands a type of humor that has characterized
Faulkner's writing from the first-~the tall tale; and
other types, such as that dependent on language(wit, name
humor, irony) as well as surrealism and satire.
CHAPTER NINE
THE FUNCTION OF FAULKNER’S HUMOR
Summary, and Conclusion
As noted earlier in this study, humor plays upon
the surface or in the background of nearly every important
work of Faulkner. Even such a "Gothic" novel as Absalom,
i
Absalom! and such lurid tales as The Wild Palms and Pylon
exhibit a wry or grim humor; and, though the stories and
j
novels often emphasize the bizarre, sensational, and - '
shocking, there is--in nearly all of them--a leavening
of humor. Early criticism usually called attention to
the naturalism of "cruelty" of Faulkner's fiction and 1
overlooked or minimized the comic. Yet, as Faulkner
himself suggested, as early as 1926, humor is character
istic of most Americans and is a "priceless" quality.
His own practice as an author shows that Faulkner has a
keen sense of comic values; as a highly sensitive and
1
imaginative writer he has been quick to perceive what is
j
incongruous or ludicrous in persons and situations and to j
455
make the most of these eccentricities. Thus almost any
given situation has, for him, some aspect of ridiculous
ness: it may be whimsical or gay, sardonic or bitter,
suggestive or even bawdy. Significantly, the term
"humorless" in the novels is a term of derogation sug
gesting crabbedness, incompleteness, and a lack of human
ness. In Ratliff (the homespun, countrified story-teller)
and Gavin Stevens (the educated and sophisticated racon
teur > who charms with his wit or utters sardonic epigrams)
we see Faulkner's idealized version of himself. Like
Ratliff, he can tell a story in the manner and language
of a shrewd countryman or, in polite society and dressed
in a dinner jacket, he can be the urbane, worldly-wise
and slightly cynical Stevens. These two favorite charac- j
|
ters are alter egos for Faulkner, and the common denom- j
i
inator in both is their sly, knowing humor. Each in his j
I
own way looks at the human scene and laughs at the follies '
and frustrations of men.
\
In their significant study of Faulkner’s craft as
a fiction writer, Campbell and Foster point out two im
portant uses of humor:
We may say, then, that humor functions generally
in two fashions in Faulkner's works. First, in
a structural sense--that is, it may contribute an •
additional conflict to the plot or it may serve
to balance other conflicts in the plot; and second,
456
in an atmospheric sense--that is, it gives in
the case of frontier humor, a softness, a bear
ableness, or a more diffused focus to a scene
which otherwise might be starkly tragic, melo
dramatic, or over-emotional. Surrealistic humor,
on the other hand tends to create an atmosphere
of whim, perversity, caustic irony, or Swiftian
bitterness, adding a darker undercurrent to a
scene which might be sheer slapstick on the
surface. It does this by evoking multiple or
contradictory emotions simultaneously, thus
cancelling out a portion of the cathexis attach
ing to separate emotions--a process similar to
Eliot's use of multiple ironies in his poems and
presumably a step toward psychological realism
in the sense that it tends to render the com
plexity of an experience. It is, in other words,
Faulkner's version of the "guarded style."1
In Light in August, for example, Lena Grove's calm,
untroubled search for the run-away husband is set off
against the- passion and turmoil in which Joe Christmas
and Gail Hightower are -involved. Instead of Lena being
i
an object of pity, she becomes a unifying force and tower j
of strength to Brown, the companion of Burch, and to |
I
Hightower, the well-meaning but weak ex-preacher. Lena's ■
i
placid acceptance of every circumstance (Burch's leaving '
!
her after her pregnancy, her long trip across Alabama and
Mississippi in search of the wayward lover, and the birth
of her child among strangers) offers a comic contrast to
the harried behavior of Burch and the violence and passion
^William Faulkner, p. 109*
^57
of Joe Christmas' conduct. Her calm, easy-going ways set
off in sharp contrast the frantic action of Burch and the
self-conscious efforts of Byron to make love to her.
Structurally, comedy is used here as a balance wheel.
Surrealistic humor has also a structural value,
as in the famous "love affair" of the idiot Snopes and
the cow in The Hamlet. The "love" of the boy for the
animal is shocking enough, but the father who charges for
a view of this unnatural act shows how depraved man may
become.
Sardonic Dean Swift never made a more pitiless
thrust at the greed of the human race. The black
bile underlying this whole sequence structurally
builds up and underlines the major facet of the
Snopes character--their overwhelming greed.
Other examples of surrealistic humor, add Campbell and
Poster, also "blend with equal facility into the total !
j
j
framework of the story" and are not exploited merely for )
"shock" material (p. 111). This is seen to be true in 1
(
such grim tales as "Miss Zilphia Gant" and "A Rose for
Emily" in which the surrealistic or atrabilious humor gives
an added dimension to the character and a grotesque qual
ity to the plot. Emily used "rat poison" to dispatch her
wayward lover and then slept with his corpse in her mar-
2 !
Campbell and Foster, p. 111. I
riage bed. The town’s authorities, aroused by reports
of the noisome odor on Miss Emily's place, came snooping
around at night scattering lime; they were afraid to face
Miss Emily because "you can't accuse a lady to her face
of smelling bad." All of her actions are consistent with
her character, which is heightened by the humor. The
plot itself depends heavily upon the sardonic or sur
realistic humor.
Another very important function of humor is to
create or sustain an atmosphere suited to the author's
purpose--"to give en emotional ambivalence to a scene—
the guarded style," in the phrase of Campbell and Foster
(p. 111). One of Faulkner's own characters used humor in
this manner--the "protective coloring of levity behind
3
which the youthful shame of being moved hid itself."
Thus deep or overpowering emotions of grief, disappoint
ment, or despair are concealed or given vent through an
other channel. One of the best examples of humor used
for this purpose is found in Section Four of "The Bear"
in which Ike McCaslin, now twenty-one, learns through
reading the old family ledgers of the incest and mis-
i cegenation of his grandfather, Carothers McCaslin. The
3
Absalom, Absaloml, p. 280.
459
grievous wrongs are introduced casually (a page from the
old ledger is reproduced in which the problem of a worth
less slave is commented on by the twin brothers,
Theophilus and Amodeus) before the entry recording the
death, by drowning, of one of the slave women. Gradually
iKe learns that she took her own life because his grand
father had fathered her child (a girl) and then had a
child by his own daughter. The facts are presented baldly
and without explanation or apology in the cramped hand of
the old man and the later entries of his twin sons. Thus
the wrongs committed by his grandfather not only brought
death to one of his slaves and made Ike a kinsman of the
Negroes now living on the property, but--according to his
view--brought a curse to the land, this patrimony. The
manner in which he learns of the old wrongs, however,
prevents a sudden or overwhelming despair. This "emotional!
ambivalence" may soften the impact for some readers, but i
for others it may, by its very casualness, make the shock j
more intense. Humor is thus seen to be a complicated,
rather than a simple, emotion as Faulkner handles it.
Rarely, if ever, does he use humor merely to be amusing;
s
instead, it functions usually as music in the background j
of a drama, heightening the emotional climax, softening j
i
the starkness of the brutal scenes, or enlivening a j
i
460
characterization.
It is in his characterizations that humor most
often comes to the surface. Faulkner generally follows
the accepted method of presenting characters: first, a
brief overall description by the omniscient author, then
some action or dialogue by the character which further
reveals his nature, and finally the comments and reactions
of other characters involved with the subject. After
Faulkner has fairly launched a character in the narrative,
he withdraws and holds direct description to a minimum.
By his own words and behavior the character becomes self-
revealing, although the significant aspects of his nature
(whether laziness, greediness, or other qualities) may be
underscored by the comments and byplay of the other char
acters. Anse, or Pa, for example, one of the chief comic
’
figures in As I Lay Dying, is first described by one of !
j
his sons, then introduced into the action, and thereafter !
I
I characterized by his own peculiar expressions and behavior]
i
as well as by the wry comments of the author and the other
characters. In his shabby appearance, his shuffling gait,
his awkwardness and. laziness, and especially in his char
acteristic colloquialisms ("I don't begrudge her it," |
"I am a misfortunate man," and "I wouldn't be beholden to
nobody"), Anse is presented as a comical character. He
_ _ _ - - 461
is not only simple-minded but shiftless, a representative
of those ineffectual Southerners whom the Negroes call
"pore white trash." Anse is described in such figures as
"His eyes look like pieces of burnt-out cinder fixed in
his face, looking out over the land"--figures attribut
able to the author; in such references as "Poor Anse.
She kept him at work for thirty-odd years. I reckon she
is tired"; and in the revealing opinions of his neighbors,
one of whom says of him, "Because the only burden Anse
Bundren ever had is himself." When Anse is considering
all the hardships he has experienced in taking his wife's
body to the family burial plot, he says: "I am chosen of
the Lord, for who He loveth so doeth He chastiseth. But
I be durn if He don't take some curious ways to show it,
seems like." His language is a mixture of Biblical phrases
and Mississippi dialect, often with an apologetic turn
at the end. Throughout most of the novel Anse or "Pa" |
is generally presented in a comical light;, and in the j
final scene, when Pa borrows from a widow on the road two
shovels to dig the grave for his dead wife, and on return
ing the shovels brings back the little "ducklike woman"
and says to his astonished family, "Meet Mrs. Bundren,"
it is evident that comedy has been the writer's chief
intention.
_ . _ 462
I
Another example of humor in the treatment of a
major character may be seen in Lena Grove, who is on the
road in pursuit of her vagrant lover when we first meet
her, in Light in August. Lena had learned to open a
window in the lean-to room she occupied at her brother's
pi ace and, as she says, she climbed through it once too
often. She makes light of her own condition, and she ac
cepts whatever comes with the calm resignation of a child.
Though she was eight months pregnant when she set out,
hitch-hiking, to try to find Lucas Burch, she £iad no fears
of dangers on the road or of the dim future. Her language
shows her simple faith and naivete. She is by nature good
at heart, generous and trusting, and wherever she goes
she is treated accordingly. Her cheerful disposition also
makes her welcome in all sorts of homes. As shown in an
earlier chapter, most of the "light" in Light in August !
radiates from Lena's calm and joyous personality. Her j
I
delightful understatement, "My, my, how a body does get 1
around. Here we been on the road just eight weeks and
we're in Tennessee already," softens the tragedy and
violence that she and Byron had left behind. The final
episode in the novel--Byron's blundering attempt to make i
i
love to Lena--provides comic relief after the brutal
murder of Christmas, just as her presence in Jefferson I
463
set off in bold relief the characters of Burch and
Christmas.
Many other characters may be cited as examples of
Faulkner's use of humor in characterization: the tall
convict in The Old Man, Ratliff in The Hamlet, "old man"
Fall in Sartoris, Granny Millard in The Unvanquished, and
Molly Beauchamp in the story "The Fire and the Hearth,"
to name a few. The humor may be incidental, but it usual
ly points out some important characteristic--the patient
endurance of the old convict, the sly wit and shrewdness
of Ratliff, the indomitable will of Granny Millard, and
woman's sagacity in Molly Beauchamp. Humor adds another
dimension to all these characters, giving depth and a
sense of reality. It adds greatly to the interest, as
well.
Negroes and whites, rich and poor alike, are pre
sented as butts of jokes or subjects of satire. As |
brought out earlier, the professions (law, medicine, the
ministry, the court) are often ridiculed by Faulkner or
some of his spokesmen, and the pretensions of the rich
or aristocratic, as well as the follies, lusts, and quar
rels of mankind, are held up to laughter or scorn.
i
In narration Faulkner also employs humor often to ;
achieve certain ends. Here the method may be direct, when I
i
464
he is speaking in his own right, or indirect, when he is
narrating through one of his many fictional characters.
The direct method permits the addition of comment by the
author, asides or direct observations, and humorous
situations; in other words, statements made about the
action, or revealing situations. Examples can be found
in almost all the novels or stories. At one point,
Faulkner says of Quentin Compson:
Committed suicide in Cambridge Massachusetts,
June 1910j two months after his sister's wedding,
waiting first to complete the current academic
year and so get the full value of his paid-in-
advance tuition.
Another example of Faulkner's comment on action is this
from The Old Man:
He stood at the bar and heard a judge, (who looked
down at him as if the District Attorney actually
had turned over a rotten plank with his toe and
exposed him) sentence him to a hundred and ninety-
nine years at the State Farm. Thus he had ample
leisure too; they tried to teach him to plow and
had failed, they had put him in the blacksmith
shop and the foreman trusty himself had asked to
have him removed.
The sardonic reference to the convict's leisure
and his failure to learn any kind of trade or skill shows
Faulkner's way of working humor into a narrative. His
fast-moving style is well illustrated by the opening of
the story "Spotted Horses," one of his best stories:
465
A little while before sundown the men lounging
about the gallery of the store saw, coming up the
road from the south, a covered wagon drawn by
mules and followed by a considerable string of
obviously alive objects which in the levelling
sun resembled vari-sized and- colored tatters
torn at random from large billboards— circus
posters, say--attached to the rear of the wagon
and inherent with its own separate and collective
motion, like the tail of a kite.
With this brief bit of description and narration Faulkner
leads into the hilarious story of Flem Snopes and the
horse auction. Most of the fun in this story derives
from the efforts of Flem and the Texas cowboy to convince
the farmers that the wild ponies are gentle. The irony
of the situation is that the ponies will not cooperate.
"Them's good, gentle ponies," the stranger said.
"Watch now." ,He put the carton back into his pocket
and approached the horses, his hand extended. The
nearest one was standing on three legs now. It
appeared to be asleep. Its eyelid drooped over
the cerulean eye; its head was shaped like an iron-
ingboard. Without even raising the eyelid it
flicked its head, the yellow teeth cropped. For
an instant it and the man appeared to be inextric
able in one violence. Then they became motionless,
the stranger's high heels dug into the earth, one
hand gripping the animal's nostrils, holding the
horse's head wrenched half around while it breathed
in hoarse, smothered groans. "See?" the stranger
said in a panting voice, the veins standing white
and rigid in his neck and along his jaw. "See?
All you got to do is handle them a little and work
hell out of them for a couple of days. Now look
out. Give me room back there." They gave back
a little. The stranger gathered himself and then
sprang away. As he did so, a/second horse slashed
at his back, severing his vest from collar to hem
down the back exactly as the trick swordsman
severs a floating veil with one stroke.
466
"Sho now/' Quick said. "But suppose a man dont
happen to own a vest."
This passage illustrates Faulkner's method: the violent
action and hair-breadth escape of the.cowboy belie all
his talk about the gentleness of the horses, the brief
descriptive phrases make the scene vivid, and the comment
of Quick sums up the attitude of the onlookers.
The indirect method of narration, on the other
hand, affords Faulkner more opportunities for exploiting
the humor of character and situation. A tale that depends
on dialect for some of its effect may be put in the mouth
of a Negro, a small-town barber, or such an accomplished
raconteur as Ratliff. The tall tales are all assigned
to good story-tellers: Dawson Fairchild in Mosquitoes;
Lucas Crump, the mailrider, in Idyll in the Desert; and
Ratliff in The Hamlet. By their manner as well as by
their language they enhance the telling and make the
stories more credible. A good anecdote or bawdy story
is likewise given to suitable characters, and repartee
and clever dialogue are employed extensively for charac
terization, narration, and humor. The final chapter of
Light in August gains much of its comedy from the manner
in which it is related, the traveling salesman telling
his wife in bed about the young couple he had picked up
467
on the road. Such devices as hyperbole, parody, and under
statement naturally gain much of their effectiveness from
the fact that they are attributed to participants in the
action. Often the point of a Joke or a sarcastic remark
depends upon the known character of the speaker. When a
man in prison speaks of being "expelled from the peniten
tiary," there is humor in the suggestion. The "fisherd"
in Mosquitoes had Just graduated from reform school when
he got the Job herding fish. Boon, the big, illiterate,
coarse-featured Indian in "The Bear" will not think of I
i
letting Ike miss school: j
"You're damn right you're going back to school," I
Boon said. . . . "Where in hell do you expect to J
get without education? Where would Cass be? I
Where in hell would I toe if I hadn't never went j
to school?"4 |
The language is amusing because we say, unconsciously, j
!
"Look who's talking.1" These incongruities based upon
character, situation, or peculiarities of language are j
used by Faulkner to add humorous interest and verisimili
tude .
i
In description also the note of levity, irony, or i
I
humorous detachment is often apparent. For example, some !
of the figures have a picturesque or comic significance. !
i
In The Old Man many such figures are found, such as:
i
4 * ;
Go Down, Moses, p. 250. ■
The second convict was short and plump. Almost
hairless, he was quite white. He looked like
something exposed to light by turning over rotting
logs or planks . . . (p. 8).
Less comic but more suggestive of noise and sudden action
is this quotation from the same source:
Some time about midnight, accompanied by a rolling
cannonade of thunder and lightning like a battery
going into action, as though some forty hours'
constipation of the elements, the firmament itself,
were discharging in clapping and glaring salute j
to the ultimate acquiescence to desperate and j
furious motion, and still leading its charging i
welter of dead cows and mules and outhouses and !
cabins and hencoops, the skiff passed Vicksburg
. . . (p. 50).
The rotting cabin in the swamp in which the convict lived
with a Cajun is thus described:
The house, the cabin a little larger than a
horse-box . . . rising on ten-foot stilts slender
as spiders1 legs like a shabby and death-stricken
(and probably poisonous) wading creature which
had got that far into the flat waste and died j
with nothing nowhere in reach or sight to lie j
down upon . . . (p. 96). i
i
! The common habit of characterizing the inanimate by use
of human feelings or behavior is typical of Faulkner. ’
i
Thus he thinks of the Mississippi River ("The Old Man") j
1 as going on a "debauch," and he sees the rough levees 1
I
as "faces wrinkled as though in a frozen and aghast j
i
amazement" (p. 123), and he calls the lines on the levees '
i 1
"shallow and empty cracks like deprecatory and senile
I
grins" (p. 138). The rough, irregular features of the
469
land suggest to Faulkner faces of old and ugly people.
The mood of such passages is, of course, ironic--a mood
appropriate to the action in The Old Man. In the same way
the comic and grotesque figures of speech in As I Lay
Dying, The Hamlet, and some of the short stories emphasize
certain aspects of the action and heighten the irony or
comedy. Humor is thus worked into the texture of the
tales and Into the atmosphere.
Humor is so much a part of Faulkner's writing that
the stories which lack humor stand out from all the others I
As pointed out earlier, all the novels (including even
the "Gothic" Absalom, Absaloml) contain humor of one kind
or another. Most of them have an abundance of humor.
Some of the short stories, however, are lacking in this
respect. A study of those stories which have little or noJ
i
]
humor reveals that frequently the grimness of the action i
i
|
minimizes or precludes humor. In the Collected Stories j
only nine of the more than forty may be said to have no
humor, and three of these are mood stories which have a
foreign setting. The first story in the collection,
i
"Barn Burning," is a grim story about the worthless Abner
Snopes (a character who appears later in The Hamlet) who,
after trouble with his landlord, burns the landlord's barn|
i
and escapes in the night. Snopes' son, Sartoris, outraged I
at his father's action, leaves home for good. The mood
of the story seems too heavy for humor, and, if it had
been used, would possibly have weakened the impact of
the story. Another tale which has no humor is "Dry
September," a study of the race problem in Mississippi.
In this story a wild rumor circulates that a middle-aged
white woman has been raped by a Negro, and the suspect is
seized and taken out of town and lynched. Again, the at
mosphere is too charged with emotion to permit the levity
I
of humor. (A similar story in Go Down, Moses likewise j
treats the race problem with grim seriousness.) The story
entitled "That Evening Sun" depicts in graphic language
the loneliness, futility, and fear of a Negro woman who
knows that after dark her husband is coming to kill her.
The mood built up in this horror story is reminiscent of
some of Poe's, and any suggestion of humor would have
I
been as out of place here as in such a story as "The j
i
Tell-Tale Heart." Some of the World War I stories of !
The Collected Stories are also devoid of humor, though
others, such as "Turnabout," have several kinds of humor.
As would be expected, the subject matter, no less than |
i
the dominant purpose or mood, determines whether humor ]
l
should be employed. The compression necessary in a short ;
story and the importance of maintaining a single mood may,j
471!
therefore, rule out humor. The few stories in Faulkner !
which have no play of wit, comic language, or other evi-
I
I
dences of humor are those in which the seriousness of j
I
the subject compels serious treatment. j
!
Significant also is the role assigned to the Negroes
in Faulkner's novels and short stories. With the excep
tions noted, Negroes are generally treated as comic char
acters. The notable exceptions are Dilsey, the one uni
fying force in The Sound and the Fury, a woman who has
character, dignity, and a fine sense of loyalty; Joe 1
!
Christmas, the protagonist of Light in August, a man j
haunted by fear and driven by furious passions; and Lucas j
1
\
Beauchamp, the proud, unbending, independent old Negro of !
<
Intruder in the Dust. In most situations these characters I
are too heroic or too somber to be treated as comic. The !
i
conclusion of Intruder in the Dust is light-hearted, how- ;
ever, as old Lucas, true to his nature, insists on paying j
i
Gavin Stevens for his legal services, even though the sum j
he offers is made up of nickels, dimes, and pennies--a j
total of two dollars--and, then, as a comic climax, the j
I
old Negro demands a receipt. It is interesting to note •
i
that Faulkner does not treat Lucas as a humorous character!
until after the charge of murder against Lucas has been !
cleared, and the tensions of the plot have all been
472
released. In ordinary roles, however, the Negroes are
usually presented as carefree, jovial, and ready to enjoy
a laugh. Their language and behavior often provide a note
of comedy in Faulkner's stories, but the Negroes are
treated as individuals, not as a class, and they are
never made to appear comic merely because of their color
or social position.
Certain aspects of life, whether among Negroes or
whites, seem to evoke humor in Faulkner. One of these Is
love-making. "Centaur in Brass" is a story that makes
fun of the "tomcatting" of both races, but particularly
of the worthless Fl-em Snopes. The affairs of Lena Grove, j
I
j
in Light in August, are treated comically, and so are the 1
I
love scenes involving Eula Varner in The Hamlet. Illicit ;
sexual relations are almost invariably made the grist of
comedy in Faulkner except when the affairs involve the j
break-up of marriages and grave social consequences (as j
i
in The Wild Palms, where Charlotte Rittenmeyer leaves her
husband and family to live "in sin" with Wilbourne, and
in Requiem for a Nun, in which Temple's affair with a
i
blackmailer leads to the murder of her child). One of j
' *
I
the marks of Faulkner's fiction about the Southern poor |
whites, according to Shields Mcllwaine, is "The emphasis i
5
upon sex, especially in comedy." Faulkner and Erskine
Caldwell are merely following a well-established traditions
Mcllwaine says, in treating sex as material for comedy. j
But a more important feature / t h a n cruelty_7 of the ;
Southern naturalists1 preoccupation with the animal j
nature of the poor-whites is their emphasis upon i
sex, especially for comic purposes. But, again, :
as with bestiality and violence, this "careless !
love" of the trash has been neither invented nor '
newly found; it has been rediscovered (p. 222).
This writer traces such comedy back to Governor Byrd,
Joseph B. Coff, J. R. Gilmore, Alice French, and "the j
Kelley-Roberts-Oreen school" (p. 222). In summing up this
point, Mcllwaine states that the poor whites
. . . regard sex as irresistible. With them it
is not a question of shall and shall not, but
of when and how. Accepting the urgent necessity
of sex, they are tolerant of others' philandering;
oblivious of the inhibitions of more squeamish
people, they, like the folk of the ages of Chaucer
and Charles II, can enjoy the game of sex without
self-consciousness (p. 225).
One may fairly say that Faulkner uses humor repeat- ,
edly in his characterizations (whether major or minor) to 1
achieve realism, contrast, incongruity, and even grotesque-
»
i
ness. In his narrative techniques, whether direct or in- i
direct, and in his descriptions (particularly in imagery) |
he uses humor for tone, realism, and interest; and in many {
The Southern Poor White (Norman, Oklahoma, 1939), i
p. 220.
x I
474 |
works for structural as well as atmospheric functions. j
Most of his stories and novels, with the few exceptions i
noted, have a generous salting of his characteristic wit
and humor. This dry wit or sharp humor is as characteris
tic of his work as the rhetoric and the bold, original, j
often startling figures of speech. Much of his humor, as
this study has shown, has its roots in the frontier humor J
of the nineteenth century, but it has been modified, in ;
both subject matter and technique, by modern psychoanalysis.
Though parallels can be found in earlier works for many of
his tall tales, anecdotes, rustic wit and horseplay, the
material is transmuted in his hands and is given distinc
tive expression by his treatment of it.
Certain conclusions regarding Faulkner as an artist <
and thinker are revealed by this study. Almost every j
reader must be convinced, if he has read more than one j
or two Faulkner novels, that here is a man who has ob-
l
served life closely (albeit in a limited area) and has |
i
been moved powerfully by what he has seen. One is im
pressed by the breadth or scope as well as by the close- I
i
ness of his observation of the human scene. Various j
critics have compared Faulkner's novels with those of :
Balzac, and Faulkner's long list of "living" characteriza
tions bears comparison with the comedie humaine. :
: - - - - - 475(
i I
; The reader is convinced, also, that Faulkner has !
j heen kee'niy sensitive to the tragedy and comedy of life |
‘ I
; on many levels--to the unexpressed pain of an idiot, the j
i
I anger and frustration of a convict trying to surrender
i
; and get back to the routine and security of prison life,
! the monomania of a man determined to establish a house
1 :
!
: and "dynasty" in spite of fate, the overreaching greed of
! the despicable Snopes family, the problems of a pregnant
girl traveling alone across several states in pursuit of
I
{
j her no-account'lover, the efforts of two boys and an old
i
woman to rescue a Negro from prison and the vengeance of
a Mississippi mob. In the lives of scores of characters,
good and bad, sinning or sinned against, he shows a keen
; I
1 awareness of both the tragic and the comic possibilities i
of life. Often the two elements are mixed and inextric
ably linked together, as in the treatment of the Bundren
family or of Lena Grove, to cite well-known examples. ,
In most of the novels, as this study has shown, Faulkner t
i has found many occasions to laugh either with or at the
1 characters.
i y The point has been made before, but it bears re-
; peating,,that humor may serve opposite purposes in the j
! novels and stories. By genial, robust, or good-natured
! I
humor Faulkner approves certain characters or situations
476
(this is often true of the simple farm folk, as in the
! story, "The Tall Men," or of a naive, good-hearted person
i
I like Lena Grove); while on the other hand, by ironic,
harsh, or surrealistic humor he attacks or ridicules those
I
| persons or qualities he despises (the lawyer Snopes in
i
i
1 Sanctuary, for example, the reformers in the story "Uncle
I '
' Willy," and the hateful Jason Compson in The Sound and the
I
| Fury). Sardonic humor or biting satire, directed especial
I
! ly against certain classes or institutions, proves that
i
j Faulkner, in the phrase of Paul Romaine, has not been
i
| afraid "to laugh from his guts" at those elements in
I
I society that he despises. His strong prejudices often
i
| color his handling of a subject, and more often than not
: humor is the clue to what he likes or dislikes. Thus,
!
! he satirizes the morbid curiosity of crowds, the noise
; and confusion of city life, the modern American's love of
! gadgets, automobiles, and so-called "progress." By a
I
i gentle humor he shows his approbation of the independent,
j upright, non-conforming man or woman who goes his own way,
| accepts life and human nature, and cultivates tolerance
j and compassion. The greedy, self-righteous, and meddling
| individuals receive the harshest treatment in his fiction,
i
i the laugh that scorns and belittles.
| Humor appears to be a constant element in the work
477'
j of Faulkner, an Integral part of his view of life. As an
acute observer and recorder of man's behavior, Faulkner j
ridicules the irrationality, the blind selfishness and j
i
I lust, and the hypocrisy and posings of mankind. Often J
i
he seems to laugh in order not to weep. The droll wit !
! |
or sarcastic humor may hide suffering, anger, or other j
l
powerful emotions. The humor may thus be a mask behind
which the overwrought sensibilities of the writer are
l i
hidden. It is sometimes his antidote for despair.
Faulkner's own weaknesses (for example, his lifelong
drinking) have made him sympathetic and charitable toward
| weak and troubled men. Suffering of any kind evokes his
! I
| pity, Just as arrogance and injustice arouse his anger.
j
! it is noteworthy that Faulkner treats vice and depravity
i
(such as drinking, gambling, adultery) as subjects for
i
i
! indulgent humor--here man is merely making a fool or j
( I
J
| spectacle of himself; but he condemns outright anti-sociali
i conduct (such as crimes against persons, venality of !
i |
j public officials, and gross injustice) or else lashes at I
j , / j
! these abuses with his sharpest satire. Apparently he has !
i ;
! a kindly feeling for the man who drinks or gambles too j
! 1
! much, and he presents such persons as harmless eccentrics ‘
j
and the butt of Jokes; but his harshest laughter is turnedi
j
1 against those who violate public trust or who, like Flem I
^78
Snopes, climb to power by crushing other'men. Faulkner's
humor touches many situations, subtly evoking the reader's
sympathy for certain kinds of behavior or arousing his
disgust for and disapproval of such conduct as Faulkner
dislikes.
\
The evidence produced in this study of humor shows
that Faulkner's attitudes are often inconsistent and con
tradictory. For example, he writes about the South in
such a way as to give readers the impression that the
region is filled with lunatics, murderers, rapists,
lynchers, sexual degenerates, and all sorts of human
freaks; at the same time, he defends the South and pro
fesses a strong attachment for the land and its people.
He seems to be attracted and at the same time repelled
by sexual love. It is most often presented in either a
comical or disgusting manner. In the same way marriage
is made the butt of many coarse jokes and ironies; his
attitude toward women is complicated or even perverted.
The ambivalence of his attitudes toward the South and
towards sex is made manifest, b.ut not explained, by his
writing. The point here is that ihumor is one5 of the means
by which these divergent attitudes find expression.
Perhaps the best explanation for these seeming contradic
tions is that given by Robert Coughlan, quoted earlier:
I He prefers to be an enigma and one can believe '
that he will always1 remain one, even to himself, j
for his inconsistencies pass artistic license. i
His is not a split personality but rather a j
fragmented one, loosely held together by some ■
strong inner force, the pieces often askew and ;
sometimes painfully in friction. . . . The war J
within can be seen in many aspects.' He is
I thoughtful of others and oblivious of others; !
he is kind and he is cruel; he is courtly, and
J h‘ e is cold; he is /a philosopher at large who has i
I no integrated philosophy; he loves the South and
| feels revulsion for the South; he is a self- !
| effacing but vain man who longed for recognition
: and rebuffed it when it came; a man of integrity
| who has contributed to a false legend about him- 1
j self. Of more serious importance, he is a, great
j writer, and a bad writer.6
|
I These discordant elements in his personality are shown
!
J in the treatment of such topics as women, marriage, the
!
| Negro problem, and physical love. His humor is a key not
i
■ only to his strange, moody, often contradictory personal- •
! ity, but also to his sense of values. With it he may j
I exhibit a pleasant, robust enjoyment of life or situations ;
: I
: he has created in his fiction; or, on the other hand, he !
I
- may use it to ridicule, belittle, or deride those kinds j
; of men, religion, or politics that he despises. His i
• humor, as this study has shown, has a moral function. |
; !
: Frequently the reader is made to feel - that the humor in j
I many of the anecdotes, situations, and dialogues may be !
; i
i called "dark laughter," a kind of unpleasant and bitter
i ' '
The Private World of William Faulkner, pp. 24-25. :
48o:
laughter which only partially conceals the grimace of
anger or pain behind the comic mask.
I
!
! BIBLIO GR APH Y
t
BIBLIOGRAPHY ;
I
A. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES !
I
1
Daniel, Robert W. A Catalogue of the Writings of |
William Faulkner. New Haven j 19^21
i
Faulkner Studies. Vol. I; Denver, 19^2; Vol. II, !
Minneapolis, 1953*
Hoffman, Frederick J., and Olga W. Vickery. Two Decades :
of Criticism. East Lansing, Michigan, 1951*
I
Miner, Ward L. The World of William Faulkner. Durham, j
North Carolina, 1952*
Perry, Bradley T., "A Selected Bibliography of Critical
Works on William Faulkner," University of Kansas
City Review, 18:159-l6i +, Winter, 1951*
Spiller, Robert E., Willard Thorp, et al. Literary
History of the United States. ~ 2 vols., New York,
19^8.
Starke, Aubrey. An American Comedy: An Introduction
to a Bibliography of William Faulkner. Colophon, ;
V, Part19, 193^. ‘
i
B. WORKS BY FAULKNER* ' '
Soldiers1 Pay. New York, 1926. j
Mosquitoes. New York, 1927- !
Sartoris. New York, 1929* !
i
The Sound and the Fury. New York, 1929- ;
* The basic sources for this study have been the novels i
and short stories of William Faulkner. These works 1
■ are here listed in chronological order. :
4
......... >83
As I Lay Dying. New York, 1930.
Sanctuary. New York, 1931*
These Thirteen. New York, 1931*
x Idyll In the Desert. New York, 1931*
x Salmagundi. Milwaukee, 1932.
x Miss Zilphia Gant. Dallas, 1932.
Light in August. New York, 1932.
Doctor Martino and Other Stories. New York, 1934.
Pylon. New York, 1935*
Absalom, Absalom 1 New York, 1936.
The Unvanquished. New York, 1938*
The Wild Palms. New York, 1939*
The Hamlet. New York, 1940.
Go Down, Moses, and Other Stories. New York, 1942.
Intruder in the Dust. New York, 1948.
Knight's Gambit. New York, 1949*
Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York, 1950.
x Notes on a Horsethief. Greenville, Mississippi, 1950.
Requiem for a Nun. New York, 1951*
Mirrors of Chartres Street. Minneapolis, 1953*
A Fable. New York, 1954.
“ 484
C. ARTICLES AND SPEECHES BY FAULKNER
I
"Duty to be Free," The Freeman, January 26, 1953* j
"Faith or Fear," Atlantic, 192:53-55., August 1953*
"Man's Responsibility to His Fellow Man," Vital Speeches,
18:728-30, September 15, 1952. I
"Nobel Prize Speech," Saturday Review of Literature, 34: >
February 3, 1951 ;~Titne, 58:29, November 20., 50.
"Sherwood Anderson: An Appreciation," Atlantic, 191:
27-29, June 1953*
Aswell, James R. Native American Humor. New York, 1947*
Baldwin, Joseph G. The Flush Times of Alabama and
Mississippi. Americus, Georgia, 1908.
Blair, Walter. Native American Humor. Cincinnati, 1937*
' ' I
, "The Popularity of Nineteenth-Century American
Humorists," in H. H. Carter and Frank Davidson, eds.
A Reader for Writers, pp. 259-278. Boston, 194-7*
Boatright, Mody C. Folk Laughter on the American ,
Frontier. New York, 1949*
Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. W. P. j
Trent. New York, 1921. !
Clough, Ben C., ed. The American Imagination at Work:
Tall Tales and Folk Tales. New York, 1947*
Field, Bettye. "William Faulkner and the Humor of the
Old Southwest." Unpublished master's thesis,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 1952.
Hudson, Arthur P., ed. The Humor of the Old Deep South.
New York, 1936.
D. AMERICAN HUMOR
485!
i
•"Humour," Encyclopedia Britannica. 16th ed., 19^7* '
Longstreet, A. B. Georgia Scenes. New York, 1842. I
Mabie, Hamilton S. Essays in Literary Interpretation. j
New York, 1 9 3 8 . j
Major, Mabel, Rebecca W. West and T. M. Pearce. ;
Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with I
Bibliography. Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1938. j
!
Rourke, Constance. American Humor. New York, 1931* .
"Satire," Encyclopedia Britannica. 9th ed., 1886. j
Seaver, Edwin, ed. Pageant of American Humor. I
Cleveland, 19^8. j
i
Smith, Willard. The Nature of Comedy. Boston, 1930.
Tandy, Jennette. The Crackerbox Philosophers in
American Humor and Satire. New York, 1925*
1
Watterson, Henry. Oddities in Southern Life and j
Character. Boston, 1882.
Wilder, Marshall P. The People I've Smiled With. New
York, 1889 . !
, ed. The Wit and Humor of America. 10 vols. j
New York, 19O 7 , 1 9 1 1 • !
E. GENERAL CRITICISM
Beatty, Richmond C., and Floyd C. Watkins. The Litera- !
ture of the South. Chicago, 1952. ;
I
Boas, George. Romanticism in America. Baltimore, 1938.;
Boynton, Percy H. Literature and American Life. Chicago,
19^0.
I
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Writer in America. New York,
1 9 5 3 . i
I
I
486
Burgum, Edwin B. The Novel and the World's Dilemma.
| New York, 1947*
j Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton ,
I Rouge, Louisiana, 1941. .
* i
| Cowley, Malcolm. The Literary Situation. New York, !
i 195^* I
I ]
| Hatcher, Harlan. Creating the Modern American Novel. i
i New York, 1935* !
Hicks, Granville. The Great Tradition: An Interpreta
tion of American Literature Since the Civil War.
Rev. ed. New York, 1935*
Hoffman, P. J. Freudianism and the Literary Mind. j
Baton Rouge"} Louisiana, 194'5. j
The Modern Novel in America: .1900-1950. j
CEicagol 1951• j
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of !
Modern AmerTcan Prose Literature. New York, 1 9 4 2 . j
Lewis, Wyndham. Men Without Art. London, 1934. j
I i
Mcllwaine, Shields. The Southern Poor White. Norman,
' Oklahoma, 1939*
O'Connor, William Van. Forms of Modern Fiction. '
' Minneapolis, 1949*
; Paine, Gregory. Southern Prose Writers. New York, 1947* ;
I 1
: Parks, Edd W. Segments of Southern Thought. Athens, i
; Georgia, 1938* I
i I
i Prescott, Orville. In My Opinion: An Inquiry into the' |
Contemporary Novel. New York, 1952* !
Richardson, Charles F. American Literature, 1607-1885. ;
I New York, 1892.
<
Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel. New York, 1940.
487
i Wagenknecht, Edward. Cavalcade of the American Novel.
New York, 1952.
i Williams, Bobbye. "A Study of the Negro Character in
| the Short Story in the United States, 1920-1950."
I Unpublished master's thesis, University of Southern
; California, Los Angeles, 1953*
F. CRITICISM OF FAULKNER
Beach, Joseph Warren. American Fiction, 1920-1940.
j New York, 1941.
Butterworth, John Raymond. "A Psychoanalytical Consid-
' eration of the Abnormal Characters in the Novels
of William Faulkner." Unpublished master's thesis,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles,
; 1937.
! ?
; Campbell, Henry Modean, and Ruel E. Foster. William
Faulkner: A Critical Appraisal. Norman, Oklahoma,
; 1951.
i
Coughlan, Robert. The Private World of William Faulkner.1
7 New York, 1954. '
; Geismar, Maxwell. Writers in Crisis. Boston, 1942.
: / '
• . / ' Hoffman, Frederick J. , and Olga W. Vickery. William j
Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism. East Lansing, '
Michigan, 1951*
i Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study.
' New York, 1951*
; 1
; Miner, Ward L. The World of William Faulkner. Durham, j
North Carolina, l95^» I
/ O'Connor, William Van. The Tangled Fire of William j
I Faulkner. Minneapolis, 1954. !
i i
1
Rubin, Louis D., Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs. Southern 1
Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South. j
; Baltimore, 1953*
' 488
Warren, Robert Penn. William Faulkner and His South.
University of Virginia Monograph, March 13, 1951-
G. CRITICAL ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
Aiken, Conrad. "William Faulkner: The Novel as Form,"
Atlantic, 164:650, November 1939-
Arthos, John. "Ritual and Humor in the Writing of
William Faulkner," Accent, 9:17-30, Autumn 1948.
Benet, Stephen Vincent. "Flem Snopes and His Kin,"
Saturday Review of Literature, 21:7, April 6, 1940.
Y' ?-------------------------------
Breit, Harvey. "Faulkner After Eight Years: A Novel
of Murder and Morality," New York Times Book Review,
p. 4, September 26, 1948.
"William Faulkner," Atlantic, 188:53-56,
October 1951*
Brickell, Herschel. "The Literary Landscape," North
American Review, 233:376-7, April 1932.
Buttitta, Anthony. "William Faulkner: That Writin1 Man
of Oxford," Saturday Review of Literature, 18:6-8,
May 21, 1938.
Canby, Henry Seidel. "The School of Cruelty," Saturday !
Review of Literature, 7:673-4, March 21, 1931•
Campbell, Harry M. "Experiment and Achievement: As I
Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury," The Sewanee
Review, 51:305-320, Spring 1943*
"Faulkner's Sanctuary," Explicator, IV: item
5T, June 1946.
"Structural Devices in the Works of Faulkner,"
Perspective, 111:209-226, Autumn 1950.
Cantwell, Robert. "Faulkner's Thirteen Stories," The
New Republic, 68:271, October 21,. 1931•
}
j Collins, Carvel. "Faulkner and Certain Earlier Southern
Fiction," College English, 16:92-97* November 1954.
; Cowley, Malcolm. "Poe in Mississippi," The New•Republic,
| 8§:22, November 4, 1936.
i
I . "Go Down to Faulkner's Land," The New Republic,
| lU6:900, June 29, 1942.
! ^
"William Faulkner's Human Comedy," New York
i Times Book Review, October 29, 1944, p. 43!
i . "William Faulkner Revisited," Saturday Review
I of Literature, 28:13-16, April 14, 1945•
; . "Introduction," The Portable Faulkner. New
i York, 1946.
I Coughlan, Robert. "The Private World of William Faulkner,]"
j Life, 35:118-136, September 28, 1953; 35:55-68, |
i October 3, 1953*
j Cushing, Edward. "A Collection of Studies," Saturday
| Review of Literature, 8:201, October 17, 1931*
Dawson, M. C. "Sanctuary," New York Herald Tribune,
February 15, 1931 * P* 3*
De Voto, Bernard. "Witchcraft in Mississippi," Saturday
Review of Literature, 15:3-4, October 31* 1936.
. "Faulkner's South," Saturday Review of Litera
ture , 17:5, February 18, 1938.
| Fadiman, Clifton. "The World of William Faulkner," The
j Nation, 132:422-3, April 15, 1931.
■ Gordon, Caroline. "Mr. Faulkner's Southern Saga," New
| York Times Book Review, April 5> 1946, pp. 1, 4-5."
I Green, A. Wigfall. "William Faulkner at Home," The
i Sewanee Review, 40:294-306, Summer 1932.
I
! Gregory, Horace. "New Tales by William Faulkner," New
York Times Book Review, May 10, 1942, p. 4.
; Gregory, Horace. "In the Haunted, Heroic Land of ,
I Faulkner's Imagination," New York Herald Tribune, I
j August 20, 1950* PP* lj 12.
j Hamilton, Edith. "Sorcerer or Slave," Saturday Review
J of Literature 35:8^10, July 12, 1952. (Discussion
I in issues of August 2 and August 9, 1952.) !
I !
i J !
I Hicks, Granville, "The Past and Future of William j
I Faulkner,1 1 The Bookman, 74:17-24, September 1931*
I '
I Hirshleifer, Phyllis. "As Whirlwinds in the South:
' Light in August," Perspective, 11:225-38, Summer ;
i 1 9 ^ 9 - j
i
1 Hopper, Vincent F. "Faulkner's Paradise Lost," Virginia ;
Quarterly Review, 23:405-20, Summer 1947* j
i
Howe, Irving. "The South and Current Literature," The
American Mercury, 67:494-503, October 1948.
i
j Kazin, Alfred. "Faulkner: The Rhetoric and the Agony," j
j Virginia Quarterly Review, 18:389-402, Summer 1942. i
I i
j Kohler, Dayton. "William Faulkner and the Social j
! Conscience," College English, 11:119-27, December I
; 1949.
1
Kronenberg, Louis. "The World of William Faulkner," !
The Nation, 150:481-2, April 13, 1940.
Kubie, Lawrence S. "William Faulkner's Sanctuary: An
| Analysis," Saturday Review of Literature, IT:218,
224-6, October 20, 1934.
Lytle, Andrew. "Regeneration for the Man," The Sewanee 1
; Review, 57:120-7, Winter 1949- “ j
! Malraux, Andre. "Preface a Sanctuaire de William
| Faulkner," La Nouvelle Revue francaise, 41:744-
747, Nov ember- ' '193 3. " !
j McCole, Camille J. "The Nightmare Literature of William I
Faulkner," The Catholic World, 141:576-83, August ;
. 1935> (
491
Peden, William. "Sartoris, Snopes and Everyman/'
Saturday Review of Literature, 33:12, August 26,
1950.
Poster, Herbert. "Faulkner's Folly," The American
Mercury, 72:106-112, December 1951*
Rabi. "Faulkner et la g^nlration de l'exil," Esprit,
19:47-65, January 1951.
Rascoe, Burton. "Faulkner's New York Critics," The
American Mercury, 50:243-7, June 1940.
Reynolds, Horace. "Review of Faulkner's A Fable,"
Christian Science Monitor, August 5, 1954, p. 11.
Rose, William. "Book Reviews," San Francisco Chronicle,
August 20, 1950.
Rugoff, Milton. "Out of Faulkner's Bog," New York
Herald Tribune, March 31 > 1940, p. 4.
"The Magic of William Faulkner," New York
Herald Tribune, May 17, 1942, p. 2.
Starke, Aubrey. "An American Comedy: An Introduction
to a Bibliography of William Faulkner," Colophon,
V, part 19, 1934.
Stone, Geoffrey. "Light in August," The Bookman, 75:
736-8, November 1932.
Stone, Phil. "William Faulkner and His Neighbors,"
Saturday Review of Literature, 25:12, September 19,
1942.
Strauss, Harold. "Mr. Faulkner's New Novel Strikes a
Fresh Vein," New York Times Book Review, March 24,
1935, P. 2.
Thompson, Alan R. "The Cult of Cruelty," The Bookman,
74:477-87, January-February 1932.
Van Doren, Mark. "Pylon," New York Herald Tribune
(Books), March 24, 1935, P* 3*
492
Warren, Robert Penn. "The Snopes World," Kenyon Review,
3:253-7, Spring 1941.
"Cowley's Faulkner,'" The New Republic, 115:
• 176-80, August 12, 1946; continued 115:234-7,
August 26, 1946.
West, Ray B. "Atmosphere and Theme in Faulkner's
'A Rose for Emily'," Perspective, 2:239-45,
Summer 1949*
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University of Southern Califorai**

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