NOT UNTIL The Sound and the Fury would Faulkner fully show what he could do when writing by the standard he had discovered and announced in Mosquitoes, but Sartoris achieves the ideal with intermittent brilliance. It is rich with scenes and characters only a major novelist could have created. Though most of the faults that marred Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes may be discovered here too, they have become mere interruptions, lapses. Sartoris is not, as a whole, a mature novel, but while he was writing it Faulkner attained his maturity.
Young Bayard Sartoris is our chief stumbling block, as Donald Mahon was in Soldier’s Pay. Like Mahon, he is inadequate as tragic hero. Intended meaning and achieved content come apart in him, as in Mahon. The portrayal of Bayard, unlike that of his prototype, emerges finally as a fine solid portrait of a neurotic young man, but like Mahon, Bayard is inadequate as the carrier of the theme. Only in the last third of the novel can we believe that his actions spring from the causes assigned to them. In Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury Faulkner achieved at least a more credible if not, for some readers, a wholly convincing solution to the problem of presenting the sensitive young man of the lost generation faced with the emptiness of life. In the creation of Quentin the psychological and philosophical perspectives seem to complement each other and not to be alternative and contradictory explanations of the despair. In the creation of Bayard, Faulkner failed.
He failed, that is, if we assume that Bayard is intended as a sympathetic character. If, instead, we take him as many young readers today seem to prefer to do, as a satirical portrait, we of course come out with a very different judgment of him. Richard C. Carpenter, for instance, has developed an interesting interpretation, based on parallels between the McCallum episode and The Inferno, of Bayard as a betrayer punished, like Dante’s Ugolino, by being imprisoned in ice, and of Sartoris as “in part an exploration of the Christian myth of sin, guilt, and redemption.”1 But though Bayard may very well be interpreted in the McCallum episode as guilt-ridden and suitably damned, it seems to me doubtful that this conception of him effectively controls the portrait in the novel as a whole. This is not to say that the parallels with The Inferno stressed by Mr. Carpenter are not genuine but that the novel finally lacks unity of conception.
The immediate reason for Bayard’s despair in the first two-thirds of the book seems to be grief for his brother John, killed in an aerial dogfight which Bayard witnessed and tried but was unable to prevent. But Bayard sees John’s death as a particular manifestation of the general doom. He grieves not just for John but for the Sartorises and for man. His violence is his way of forcing out of consciousness what he cannot allow himself to think about. Like Nick in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” he contrives ways to keep from thinking; when the contrivance fails, his thoughts are more than he can bear.
Then sowing time was over and it was summer, and he found himself with nothing to do. It was like coming dazed out of sleep, out of the warm sunny valleys where people lived into a region where cold peaks of savage despair stood bleakly above the lost valleys, among black and savage stars.
The image of the cold peaks close to the savage stars points as clearly to a kind of waste land as the sandy deserts do in Eliot’s poem; though it is significant that the context of the novelist’s image does not attribute the lifelessness to loss of faith, as does the poem, but to a discovery of unalterable truth. Sterility may be brought about, or remedied, by man; the waste land reflects a failure of man’s values. But dying stars suggest a cosmic drive toward death that man is not responsible for and cannot remedy.
The image points, that is, not toward Eliot but toward Dreiser,2 one of whose self-portraits pictures him sitting at his window handkerchief in hand wiping away the tears of pity for mankind lost in a world of nothing but matter in motion. The year Sartoris was published the British astrophysicist Sir James Jeans in his best-selling book The Mysterious Universe was explaining to the public the significance of dark stars: they gave evidence of a world running down to final darkness and death, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. The “black and savage stars” are Bayard’s special and master symbol. The image occurs later in the book without verbal change. But though it bears the stamp of 1929, it is, in another sense, traditional: Hawthorne understood this blackness, and Melville’s Ahab accused the gods of this savagery.
Bayard’s recognition of the truth about the world shapes his character and his reactions—or so at least I think we are intended to believe. As Narcissa looks at him lying on the bed in his cast after his accident, she realizes that
He was so utterly without affection for anything at all, so—so .. . hard . . . No, that’s not the word. But “cold” eluded her; she could comprehend hardness, but not coldness. . . .
She cannot comprehend his coldness because she does not fully understand the depth of his loss: she can understand his grief for John but she does not know the meaning Bayard sees in John’s doom. She is shut out of the region he inhabits by her unreflective faith in life. “He watched her with wide intent eyes in which terror lurked, and mad, cold fury, and despair.” Though the immediate occasion of the terror and despair here is a literal nightmare from which he has just awakened, in a sense all Bayard’s life, waking or sleeping, is a continuous nightmare. He is cold with the foreknowledge of the coldness of death. Like the sympathetic characters Hemingway was creating at the same time, as he voyages “alone in the bleak and barren regions of his despair,” he cuts with his own hand ties that he knows would otherwise be cut despite him, proving himself one of the initiated by the deliberate sacrifice of a part of his humanity.
She took his face between her palms and drew it down, but his lips were cold and upon them she tasted fatality and doom. . . . And they would lie so, holding to one another in the darkness and the temporary abeyance of his despair and the isolation of that doom he could not escape.
For brief intervals he finds forgetfulness with Narcissa—“Far above him now the peak among the black and savage stars, and about him the valleys of tranquillity and of peace”—but he can never forget for long what Narcissa knows only momentarily, after he has gone from her, as she looks with Miss Jenny at the miniature of John—then “she realized as she never had before the blind tragedy of human events.” Bayard seems meant as a character whose personal tragedy springs from his overwhelming consciousness of the human tragedy.
The content of Bayard’s awareness is like that which shapes the sensibility of the old waiter in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” though the two respond to their vision of nothingness differently at last. After his terrible first night at the McCallum farmhouse, alone beside the sleeping Buddy in the darkness and the cold that penetrated and embraced him (in “the season of dissolution and of death”), he knows how to value the next morning: “. . . now he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire, where light was, and warmth.” The McCallum episode draws much of its power from the extended and elaborate symbolism of light, warmth, and order in contrast with darkness, cold, and disorder. In this episode Bayard is acceptable as an initiated or “aware” character: we feel that he is facing the truth, as less perceptive characters are not.
But the reader has difficulty taking him this way, both before this and later. His reaction seems too extreme, his vision too obsessive and unqualified. He seems too sick a man to be a tragic hero. We are likely to think of him as a case of war nerves. We find his rationalization for getting drunk with Rafe McCallum unconvincing:
“I’ve been good too goddam long,” Bayard repeated harshly, watching McCallum fill the two glasses. “That’s the only thing Johnny was ever good for. Kept me from getting in a rut. Bloody rut, with a couple of old women nagging at me and nothing to do except scare niggers.”
During the first two-thirds of the book Bayard seems properly motivated only when he is very drunk. Then we can accept his emotions, accept even the inflated language of his thoughts:
His head was clear and cold; the whiskey he had drunk was completely dead. Or rather, it was as though his head were one Bayard who lay on a strange bed and whose alcohol-dulled nerves radiated like threads of ice through that body which he must drag forever about a bleak and barren world with him. . . . Nothing to be seen, and the long, long span of a man’s natural life.
The whole initial presentation of Bayard is lacking in the clarity and definition necessary to make him a solidly created character. Faulkner seems to have been of two minds about him. On the one hand we have Miss Jenny’s judgment, that he is a fool who is as well off dead as alive and whose destruction was the result of his pride and self-pity. On the other hand, we seem to be asked to accept him as glamorous, right, justified, an aware man among those only partially aware. The judgment, the objectivity, the irony in the portrait of him is intermittent. There is an ambivalence in the creation here which never rises to the level of intentional ambiguity. Young Bayard dates Sartoris as no other character does.
A good deal is made of the fact that young Bayard’s traits are not simply his own, that he is the last of a long line of such men, proud, rash, violent, doomed. But this broadening of his case to include all the male Sartorises is another embarrassment. The Sartorises are as closely identified with the writer as young Bayard is; and, as portrayed, they are unworthy of the writer’s sympathy and the reader is unable to share the identification. That the Sartorises are, in the essential features of the legend, the Faulkners, may help to explain the author’s lack of objectivity. But explaining the cause of a creative failure is not the same as analyzing its nature or effects. The fictional problem presented by the Sartorises in the book centers on the fact that the reader cannot feel for them what he is invited to feel, cannot see them as the creatures of inexpressible glamour and romance that they are supposed to be. Nothing that he has learned about them in the course of the novel has adequately prepared him to accept the final apostrophe to the name and the idea of the Sartorises:
The music went on in the dusk softly; the dusk was peopled with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things. And if they were just glamorous enough, there was sure to be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous. Pawns. But the Player, and the game He plays . . . He must have a name for his pawns, though. But perhaps Sartoris is the game itself—a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied. For there is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux.
Whenever the Sartoris idea is directly approached we get a tortured rhetoric that fails to communicate because of the very urgency of its effort. When the family doom is in the foreground, we sometimes seem to be reading not Sartoris but Soldier’s Pay.
The trouble is not that there are no critics of the Sartoris legend in the novel. The Jeb Stuart story early in the book burlesques the legend. Aunt Jenny deflates the Sartoris men frequently and effectively, and now and then the narrator, in passages not attributed to or meant to characterize any character, agrees with her judgment of them. But Miss Jenny’s sharpness gets its edge from the love behind it, and the non-dramatic negative judgments of the narrator are outnumbered and outweighed in emotional content by passages like the final one about the Player and the Pawns. When we hear about “the bitter struggling of [young Bayard’s] false and stubborn pride” we do not know what to make of it: false and stubborn pride are not in themselves glamorous or romantic, and false pride and a neurotic suicidal impulse are not the traditional connotations of the sound of the horns on the road to Roncevaux.
TO SAY so much may seem to grant the validity of the harshest negative judgments and I have said that I think these are mistaken. Theme and vehicle do fall apart in the book, and the finally achieved content is not much more than a sense of doom. Yet Sartoris has many elements of greatness for all that. Defying easy analysis or neat schematization, it retains its hold on our imaginations even while we grant its failure as a work of art.
Sartoris is memorable in just those elements which are fiction’s traditional province. Most of its people and most of its situations live. We sense its vitality immediately in the opening scene, and in the best parts of the novel we are already beyond the apprenticeship. Faulkner has been quoted as saying that in the midst of the composition of Sartoris he “discovered that writing is a mighty fine thing; it enabled you to make men stand on their hind legs and cast a long shadow.”3
All of the characters in Sartoris except young Bayard cast a long shadow, especially the old men and women. Old Bayard and Miss Jenny are certainly the most memorable of the main characters. But it reveals the extent of Faulkner’s growth since Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes that even the people we meet only briefly, like Dr. Peabody and Old Man Falls, are solidly created. Horace Benbow and Narcissa are unforgettable in their vitality and their poignance. Even in the section devoted to Bayard’s visit with the McCallums, where the emphasis is not so much on individuals as on the family and on a way of life, the people come through: Henry with his soft hands, Buddy with his medal. Snopes is perfect in a different way: seen from the outside, in terms only of his actions, he is a behavioristic portrait. His fictional greatness we are not likely to estimate accurately unless we recall how “villainous” he is, and how difficult, if not impossible, we find it today to believe in any “villain” in fiction—yet how convincing this one is.
From the opening sentences, when Old Man Falls comes for his regular visit with old Bayard, these people are alive. Even young Bayard is unable to spoil the episodes in which he appears. His getting drunk in town with Rafe McCallum is less impressive than his later adventures that afternoon and night with Suratt and Hub and later with Hub and Mitch. But this is because early in the day, when he is less drunk, he talks and thinks more of his doom, and the Sartoris glamour comes between us and the action. The Thanksgiving dinner is memorable Faulkner, and of course the visit to the McCallum place has been recognized as great by all the critics. Christmas in the Negro cabin is a scene not greatly excelled anywhere in Faulkner’s work.
One thing that distinguishes some of the best scenes of Sartoris from its weaker ones, and from the earlier works, is the presence of irony. We sense an aesthetic distance in the picture of old Bayard that we do not feel in the picture of his grandson, except in the last quarter of the novel. Sympathy, and even love, are apparent in the portraits of old Bayard and Miss Jenny, but not complete identification. The distinction to be made here is difficult to get at but real. In the portrait of Old Man Falls, for example, we note admiration and even a kind of idealization, as in the figure of old McCallum: these are “the old people,” the embodiment of a way of life for which there is an unexpressed but clearly felt nostalgia. But there is no trace of sentimentalizing in the portraits.
But of course the characters cannot be separated, even in our attempts to analyze them, from the scenes to which they give life and from which they get their own life. If we are to uncover the secret of their vitality we shall have to look directly at their actions. The writing in the best scenes of Sartoris seems to me distinguished by a special blend of solidity and luminosity. It is full of precise details accurately and fully reported without comment. Hub and Suratt squatted easily on their heels, but Bayard sat with his legs outstretched. Old Man Falls was not simply slow, deliberate in his actions: he picked laboriously and interminably at the knotted string around his parcel. This is the sort of “reporting” for which Hemingway was already becoming famous and which Flaubert had practiced long before.
And the details are functional, revealing, luminous with meaning. Old Man Falls’s tedious deliberation is related not only to his advanced age but to his attitude toward life. It does not simply reveal his character: in a sense it is his character. He strengthens the point when he tells why he refuses a ride to town: he has too little time left to hurry his pleasures. Or again, the deafness of Old Man Falls and old Bayard: they sat without hearing the noises of the bank, periodically shouting at each other, “two old men cemented by a common deafness to a dead period.” These details become symbolic. Functional parts of a total vision, they both express the vision and direct our emotional response to it. This aspect of the writing reminds us of what Fitzgerald had done in The Great Gatsby and what Anderson had done, without being able often to repeat, in a few of his finest stories. Only the best fiction has ever been marked by this degree of luminosity.
ONE WAY to define the special quality of Sartoris is to call it a very conventional novel that finally abandons every convention it draws upon. In breaking through the stereotypes of Southern romance and lost generation attitudes it achieves fragmentary greatness.
The central situation, for example, of the disillusioned soldier returning home from the First World War to fight the inner battles of the “lost generation” was a commonplace of the period. The convention was so strong that it dictated the style even of passages in which young Bayard is not on stage: “Early in December the rains set in and the year turned gray beneath the season of dissolution and of death.” The trouble with this is not that we wish to object to the meaning attached to the seasonal change but that the statement is too little prepared for, too explicit, and too obviously related to the loss suffered by the lost generation.
Or again, when young Bayard balances his sense of guilt against his sense of doom, alternately accusing himself and accusing a God in whom he cannot believe, the writing takes a too-familiar direction:
You . . . are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts. Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what, Whom, he did not know: You did it! You caused it all; you killed Johnny.
This fits in too neatly with “the black and savage stars,” parallels too closely the rebellious atheistic humanism of the twenties and of the nineteenth century. Byron, Swinburne, Melville, and Mark Twain had similarly accused God. The conversation at the end of the book between Dr. Peabody and his son in which the older man remarks that the soul cannot be found by dissection was conventional in 1929, when Joseph Wood Krutch published his popular, accurate, and symptomatic book The Modern Temper, with its chapter on the disillusion of the laboratory.
But there is nothing conventional about Bayard’s visit with the McCallums. With minor exceptions there is nothing conventional about any of Part Four. Young Bayard in this section ceases to be a literary stereotype and becomes a sick young man with whom we can at last sympathize.
There are other conventions illustrated in the earlier parts of the book just as decisively broken in Part Four. The portrayal of the Negroes is one of them. The convention demanded that the Negro be portrayed, as Quentin puts it in The Sound and the Fury, not as a person but as a “form of behavior.” There is no reason that I know of for considering the actions of Simon or Isom or of the Negro church deputation as necessarily exaggerated or untrue or even, perhaps, atypical; but the Negroes in question are presented not primarily as people but as forms of behavior, and somewhat stereotyped behavior at that. The whole attitude is epitomized on an early page in a narrator’s comment: “‘Chris’mus!’ Joby exclaimed, with the grave and simple pleasure of his race. . . .” We miss the humanity we always expect in Faulkner, the comprehensive sympathy, in the episode of the church committee come to collect the money Simon has spent: the scene has humor at the expense of compassion. The conventional attitude being uncritically adopted here shuts out compassion, except in certain permitted circumstances under definite conditions, channels it and renders it harmless to the convention. The Negro is childlike and amusing. The only use of the word nigger (except where it is fictionally significant for characterization) that I recall in all the works of Faulkner occurs in Sartoris, in the author’s own voice, in the middle of the magnificent little essay on the mule.
But when Bayard moves out to the McCallums’, he leaves behind him the Sartoris convention of the Negro. He seems to feel it perfectly natural when the McCallum Negro cook offers to shake hands with him in greeting, and he treats the Negro men on the place without condescension. “Forms of behavior” have become persons, certainly for the reader, perhaps for Bayard. There is not the slightest trace of the convention left by the time we get to Bayard’s Christmas day in the Negro cabin. The two Christmases, Joby’s and that of these people, are in the sharpest contrast. The change is from a convention uncritically followed to a convention broken by fresh vision and real creativity.
The same thing may be said of the evocation of the Sartoris way of life as contrasted with the McCallum episode. The former follows to a considerable extent the tradition of romantic local color, with nostalgia and idealization about equally blended. In view of old Bayard’s actual end and of what we have learned of the South in other Faulkner works we wonder about the adjectives peaceful and kind in the following passage, describing old Bayard and his favorite dog:
Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the meadows and fields and woods in their seasonal mutations; the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their lives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both.
Beginning with “while the descending evening,” the writing here becomes not only lifeless but positively bad. But with this we may compare the evocation of the McCallum way of life. The McCallum episode is a kind of idyll, but there is no trace of the conventional in it.
The same point may be illustrated by contrasting the descriptions of nature in the early and the later parts of the book. Faulkner in most of his work continues a long and valuable tradition of nature writing in American fiction, but in a number of passages early in Sartoris he writes in the borrowed romantic language of an uncriticized convention:
From her silver casement the moon looked down upon the valley dissolving in opaline tranquillity into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.
An impression of the serenity of nature as a backdrop for human anguish is often an effect achieved by the nature descriptions in Faulkner’s later works, but it is not achieved in this kind of language, dictated by this convention. It is achieved in Sartoris, too, but not until Bayard approaches the McCallum farm. Then we have one of the most powerful and effective nature descriptions to be found anywhere in Faulkner; and in it, significantly, Bayard comes alive without our being told anything of his agony or his doom:
Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him and in the low December sun their shadow fell long across the ridge and into the valley beyond, from which the high shrill yapping of the dogs came on the frosty, windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high-pitched hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air. Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound, as though the frost in the air had found voice; above them, against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. “There’ll be ice tonight,” he thought, watching them and thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grass about which water would shrink soon in fixed glossy ripples in the brittle darkness. Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as woodsmoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the sun that spread like a crimson egg broken on the ultimate hills. That meant weather: he snuffed the still, tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.
It is possible to find literary antecedents—in Eliot, chiefly—for the sunset imaged as congealed blood and a crimson egg, but if these images suggest that another convention has replaced the one echoed in the “silver casement” of the moon, at least it is a convention liberating in its effect here, suited to the needs of the fictional situation and of Faulkner’s deeper sensibility.4 Perhaps a writer can only break with one convention by adopting another, more adequate one. At any rate, the conventions that seem early in the book to be accepted uncritically are cast aside one by one before the end, and in that process the book comes to life and rises toward greatness.
IF SARTORIS fails in its aim at tragedy and convinces us finally only of sickness, the reason for its failure has something to do with the extreme difficulty of our believing in a tragic hero. Young Bayard could have been more skillfully presented, but no doubt we should have had trouble taking him even so. We tend today instinctively, without even being aware of the extent to which we are doing it, to psychologize, to explain away man’s choices of good and evil, his actions, his “character,” to use a word already beginning to sound archaic, by seeing them as mere results of hidden causes. The heroes of fiction in our culture are usually psychological victims.
It is not surprising then that young Bayard seems only partly tragic hero. He affects us chiefly as a neurotic whose “case” we feel might be easily explained and cured. Even if he were more consistently presented as tragic hero, would it be possible for us to believe in him? The image of man changes and believable pictures come to seem lifeless and false conventions. The image presented by classic tragedy and by high religion is not that which our culture presents to us.
The problem here, implicit in Sartoris only as a kind of ambivalence in the portrait of young Bayard, is explicit in The Sound and the Fury in Quentin Compson’s effort to believe in man by believing in the possibility of sin. In Sartoris two perspectives, one traditional, one contemporary, are at odds; each destroys the other, destroying therefore the possibility of any final meaning. In The Sound and the Fury several possible perspectives are presented and explored, including the traditional one that Bayard so unconvincingly embodies and that Quentin tries to believe in.