FAULKNER’S CRITICS HAVE NOT liked The Unvanquished. Seeing the book only as “a group of stories” without essential unity except that given it by its closeness to “the romancing of popular Southern fiction,” they have found it of slight consequence, “the least serious” of Faulkner’s works.1 What they take to be its presentation of “the Southern myth” without criticism makes them uneasy; only in the last story of the book does Faulkner seem even to his most sympathetic critics to have moved beyond “slick magazine stereotypes.”
But it may be not that the book lacks unity but that we have failed to see the unity, not that it presents the Southern past uncritically but that we have failed to identify the criticism, not that it is weakly romantic and heroic but that we have failed to see the function of the romantic and heroic in a unified work. The minority report that follows will argue that The Unvanquished deserves to be called a “novel” as much as The Hamlet does, that it develops a serious theme throughout, not just in its last story, and that it has been seriously misunderstood and consequently undervalued.2
SOME OF Faulkner’s critics seem happy only when he is most critical of the Southern past: they like “An Odor of Verbena,” which shows young Bayard Sartoris becoming critical.3 But the point of Bayard’s criticism of the code rests upon a perception of what that code is and what value it has. For Bayard’s criticism was more a reinterpretation leading to a reaffirmation than it was a flat rejection. The young Bayard who became the old banker of Sartoris did not reject the South, the past, or the Southern past. He modified a code to bring it into better relationship with living conditions. By so doing he effectively, for himself at least, preserved it.
The Unvanquished begins as a record, taking the form of objective memory, a reliving without criticism or interpretation, with only a sense of urgency, of poignance, imparted by the fact that all this is remembered, a reliving of a boy’s experiences as he grows up during and just after the Civil War. What he discovers when he is grown up, a student in college—that there is something false about the heroics of Drusilla, for instance—is not read back into the memories of earlier, boyhood experiences. It could not be without falsifying the character of the boy, destroying the very innocence of his experiences which is the necessary basis for the book’s theme. It could of course have been done in a different book, with a critically mature reflector as narrator, but it could not have been done from within the mind and experience of young Bayard in any other way but this. To complain that there are different points of view in The Unvanquished, and that the point of view of the early stories is uncritical, is rather like complaining that in Hemingway’s In Our Time there is a difference between the points of view of “Indian Camp” and that of “Big Two-Hearted River,” the first presenting Nick as a child, the last as a young man returning to the home country with his memories.
Like In Our Time, The Unvanquished gives us a boy’s discovery of his world, and his reaction to it and criticism of it. Nick Addams discovers chiefly violence and chaos and death and a failure of courage and of meaning, except insofar as he himself can learn how to impose or create meaning. Bayard discovers a unified conception of man and a code of action, a conception and a code that can be criticized just because they are coherent and meaningful even if, ultimately, partially unacceptable. The code puts a high value on personal honor, on integrity, especially on courage; it breeds violence, but not uncontrolled or merely meaningless violence. As Drusilla says to Bayard, “There are worse things than being killed.” Where Nick Addams finds no code, unless hypocrisy be called a code, and seeks to make one for himself, Bayard grows up with one that is at first merely experienced and later criticized.
Bayard as a small boy lives with the code without recognizing it as a code, seeing his father as the embodiment of heroism and accepting and depending upon the courage and integrity and unflinching sense of duty of Granny, Rosa Millard. In her the code is presented as functional, though finally corrupted. Then he stands off and looks at the code in operation, recognizing it as a standard embodied in the actions of both his father and Drusilla, a standard which is implicitly criticized by the act of mere recognition: it is not inevitable, but a possible way of acting. Finally, he dissociates himself from the decadence of the code—Drusilla handing him the pistols—but only to be true to its reinterpreted essence in a way that Drusilla’s uncritical theatricality is not. Walking into Redmond’s office unarmed, he at once proves his courage—the value most prized by the code of Drusilla—and his sense of reality, his awareness of new times and conditions and of the demands of other values.
With the help of Miss Jenny, Bayard has come to see that the courage so highly prized by the old code would not always stand up under close inspection. Like the daring of the blockade runners Miss Jenny tells him about, it often depended on there being “no bloody moon.” Bayard wants to exhibit a courage that can stand the light of greater awareness and broader and deeper sympathies. He does what he thinks is called for by such a conception of courage and thus keeps the old code, fructified by new insight, alive. The early stories in the book do not indicate Faulkner’s “acceptance” of the romance of the old South, nor does the last story indicate his rejection. The book is not so simple, either way.
In a sort of shorthand notation, we may say that the general thematic movement in the stories is from a presentation of the code in its functional integrity (Granny confronting the Union officer while hiding the boys) to a presentation of the beginning of its corruption (Granny moving from stealing the mules of the enemy to trying to steal the horses of Grumby) to a presentation of its extravagant and unintelligent application (Drusilla on the steps in a yellow gown with the light behind her) to a critical disengagement of its meaning from its forms (Bayard going to Redmond). Granny Millard personified, at first, the best in the code. Drusilla caricatures and corrupts it by her very insistence on preserving its forms without criticism. Bayard, disenchanted, purifies it. We could not very well understand “An Odor of Verbena” without understanding in some degree all that is recalled to Bayard by the fragrance that becomes for him so powerful a stimulus to memory, so poignant a natural sign; and neither Drusilla’s undoubted courage nor her violation of the code in her invitation to Bayard to adultery with his father’s wife would be understandable in their full significance without the earlier stories.
Naturally, then, the early stories have about them a kind of romantic air. They are told not only from within the mind of a boy but in terms of what Bayard once calls “a boy’s affinity for smoke and fury and thunder and speed.” In them, Bayard still identifies the code with the image of his idolized father. Some of them, notably “Raid,” have something of the character of “tall tales”—or perhaps of a family legend retold many times and exaggerated in the telling. They sometimes carry an air of fiction, of make-believe, that is usually rare in Faulkner, even when more bizarre or improbable things are being related than are pictured here. But unless we insist on a realistic tone everywhere, regardless of what is going on formally and thematically, we shall not jump to the conclusion that these early stories are inferior because “romantic.”
A part of their meaning is contributed by this “romantic”—or, perhaps better, idyllic—atmosphere. These are memories of the long-ago, old glamorous times before reason and criticism did their work. Perhaps the code—with its conception of an unfragmented, undissipated man—was once adequate, perhaps not. Bayard cannot know, for by the time he was called upon to act responsibly in its terms and found it necessary to act differently from the way Drusilla and Wyatt expected, he could not be sure whether Drusilla and Wyatt were adequate interpreters of the old code. But though he cannot be sure that he is right, he increasingly suspects that the glamour is based on injustice, the heroism mixed and sometimes primitive, the romance the result of distance and a child’s perspective. Just to what extent these corrosive suspicions are justified is precisely what Bayard cannot discover: he knows now that actually his father was a small man, and that he once seemed heroically large, but just how far to push this discovery he does not know. He only knows that he too wants to be true to the personal values his elders proclaimed, whether they exemplified them adequately or not.
It may be, Bayard suspects, that in the old days, as Quentin’s father speculated in Absalom, men were victims, as we are, of circumstance but a circumstance
simpler and therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore more heroic too, not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled . . .
But if so, if there was some reality behind Bayard’s childhood impression of their simplicity of outline and their heroic size, he cannot now be sure. He knows that Rosa Millard was always courageous, but also knows that her courage was finally directed to a questionable end, that she was corrupted in her dealings with Ab Snopes. He knows that she met her death courageously, but he also knows that the action which precipitated it lacks the justification that had formerly applied—that the mules she was stealing were stolen from the enemy, and that anyway she was giving most of them away. Actions are not justified by daring alone.
Again, in the bloody personal feud of “Vendee,” Bayard and Ringo display their loyalty and their courage and win the admiration of the spokesmen for the old order, but when, a few years later, Ringo joins with the others in urging similar violently direct action, Bayard does not answer. He does not simply repudiate nor does he simply reaffirm the past. He goes his own way, satisfies his own conscience, summoning all his courage to repudiate violence without dishonor. And we note that Ringo misinterprets the past in his effort to prompt Bayard to what he thinks is right action: “We could bushwhack him,” he said. “Like we done Grumby that day.” But they did not bushwhack Grumby, Grumby’s men bushwhacked, ambushed, them; so that Ringo’s memory of this episode is like Bayard’s childhood memory of his father: father was not large, the boys not quite so heroic—or fortunate—as Ringo remembers them. The “romantic” atmosphere of the early stories in The Unvanquished is clearly functional. It expresses a part of the meaning.
“AMBUSCADE” introduces all the themes that are to be developed, even the criticism of the code that is the subject of “An Odor of Verbena.” The story opens with Bayard and Ringo re-enacting the battle of Vicksburg. Their childish model of the city and river, made with chips and scratched in the dust, “lived” for them in their play. It lives for us, too, in this magnificently vivid evocation of a child’s innocent awareness of things vaguely portentous but not understood:
it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment.
Their miniature Vicksburg is an artifact, laboriously constructed and laboriously maintained (the dry earth drinking up the water with which they made their river as fast as they could carry it) which has no less reality to them because the real battle of Vicksburg has already been lost by the South. Loosh, sullen with drink and with what he knows of the defeat of Vicksburg, sweeps the chips aside. “‘There’s your Vicksburg,’ he said.” But Loosh is not thinking of “their” Vicksburg at all, but of the real Vicksburg, lost, fallen, before its model was even created for the purposes of their sham battle, their reenactment, by which
we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of recapitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom.
Through the reenactment of their childish game, the art of their play, they have “stopped” time for a moment (“the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time”) and held Vicksburg up to view as something having a form and meaning that they are able to grasp. They are, for the moment, artists; Loosh, the literalist. Their art interprets and makes available, but does not quite reproduce, “the real thing.” The “romantic” air of The Unvanquished is not unconnected with this opening scene of the mimic battle that is like “a shield between ourselves and reality.” Bayard later comes consciously to wonder what the reality is that is so ambiguously hidden and revealed by the imaginative act.
He knows later, after these early experiences have become fused in memory, that only gradually did he discover that father was not actually large (“He was not big; it was just the things he did, that we knew he was doing . . .”) and that his ability to give the impression of heroic stature rested upon his power to command (“Father was everywhere . . . standing still and saying ‘Do this or that’ to the ones who are doing . . .”). The implication here is clear enough, though never made explicit—it could not be without distortion of Bayard’s experience: the system which made it possible for father to seem to possess heroic proportions was a caste system with the injustices that such a system entails. All the references to the subtle caste line drawn between Bayard and Ringo, who was, according to father, “more intelligent” than Bayard and who was the initiator in many of their activities, have this same effect. The childish sense of companionship and equality, like their mimic battle, was partly a make-believe, valuable but not perfectly in harmony with the facts. This matter, too, like the question of father’s size, gives us some insight into the functional character of the “romanticism” of the book.
The last sentence of the story defines all this. Bayard and Ringo have rinsed and spit the last of the soapsuds after having had to wash out their mouths with soap for telling a lie—a punishment imposed by Granny, who was so inflexible in her demand for truth yet who was soon to make a fine art of systematic lying—and they look at the cloud bank in the north which Ringo takes to be literally and Bayard symbolically the mountains of Tennessee where they supposed that father was fighting. “But it”—the cloud bank, the illusion it represented, the sense of meaning; and also the last bubble made by the rinsing—“But it was gone now—the suds, the glassy weightless iridescent bubbles; even the taste of it.” The bubbles, the cloud bank resembling mountains, the sham battle—all are gone now except as held in memory through a deliberate effort to recapture them, to hold them up above the rush of time and the destructiveness of Loosh. “Romanticism” as conscious as this is not self-deception but an effort at definition.
The uneasy relation between fact and value in our memories of the past is a theme introduced in the first story and developed in the later ones in the history of Granny’s fall. She is very punctilious in keeping to the code she lives by, but she loses the meaning as she preserves the forms. She will not let Bayard drive the “borrowed” horses and she kneels to pray for forgiveness for the lies she has to tell; but it becomes harder and harder to conceive of the horses and mules as “borrowed” or confiscated as a justifiable act of war, or of the lies as necessary. When, against the advice of Bayard and Ringo, she listens to Ab Snopes with his scheme for recouping a part of the family losses, she loses her integrity. She meets her death bravely, but the death is unnecessary and meaningless: the courage is now all that is left, existing in isolation from other values, a proximate value become final. The life of the code died with Rosa Millard. Afterwards there is Drusilla. In her the courage is undiminished, but the principles the courage should serve are even more obscure than they became with Granny.
The decay of the code into empty formalism is convincing enough, but the positive value before the decay set in is not so clear or convincing. The old order created a code of personal relations in which loyalty and courage were conspicious virtues and a sense of personal honor an indefinable superstructure, but the whole thing rested on narrow, perhaps deliberately narrowed, sympathies. “Vendee,” in which Ringo and Bayard avenge Granny’s death in a prolonged demonstration of their loyalty, courage, and sense of family “honor,” ends in an act of barbarous mutilation that defines for us well enough the weakness of the old code but not its strength. “Aint I told you he is John Sartoris’ boy?” Uncle Buck asks triumphantly, and we may feel, yes, and Granny’s too, culturally if not by physical inheritance.
For Granny is not as attractive as, apparently, she was meant to be. Unless the code had a wider and deeper purpose than a defense of Sartoris “honor” and privilege in a world in which most people were not fortunate enough to be Sartorises, it can hardly recommend itself to us seriously as something in the loss of which there is genuine pathos. The old code is not presented, here or elsewhere in Faulkner, as a religious, more specifically as a Christian, code. The old order he “defends”—or presents with both negative judgment and a feeling of sympathy—seems more feudal than Christian, more conspicuously related to caste than to the two great commandments.
Granny is presented as religious, a devout Episcopalian, faithful in her observances. But there are two ways to take this aspect of the characterization of her. Either the empty formalism of her religious habit, the utter gap between her religious words and acts on the one hand and her deeds and even her intentions on the other, is a part of the intended meaning in the portrait, in which case the old code was empty even before her fall from virtue; or this formalism of hers is not a part of the intended meaning, and she is supposed to appear to us as a person whose religious belief and experience at first is fruitfully expressed in her life but later becomes “dead” faith.
Though we might suspect from some of Faulkner’s other works, “The Bear” for instance, that we ought to choose the first of these alternatives as more typically Faulknerian, I can find no evidence here for such a reading. Granny seems intended to be wholly admirable before she succumbs to Snopesism. But if so, the portrait of Granny is partly spoiled for us by the influence of that side of Faulkner which, especially in the works of the middle and later thirties, speaks sometimes in very ambivalent accents about historic Christianity. When Granny takes the boys to the empty church to pray, the form is Christian but the spirit and intention are something else, an expression of her “indomitable” spirit perhaps but certainly not of any really felt or understood Christian piety. There is nothing of repentance or humility in her “confession.” She argues with God subtly, proving to Him that her opening statement, “I have sinned,” does not really mean what it says. “I defy You,” she says, thus proving herself a true Sartoris but hardly a Christian. But it is not at all clear that this is the effect intended. Bayard remembers her as consistently devout, and nothing that he later discovers as he matures qualifies this description. Yet as we see her through him, we can only judge that at best, before any corruption set in, her religion consisted of a rigid, more pharisaical than Christian, moral code, which she can neither adhere to nor interpret and modify, and a set of devotional habits apparently empty of inner meaning. When we think of this aspect of Granny, we feel that we hardly need Drusilla to demonstrate the emptiness of the code. If in Drusilla the code becomes theatrical, in Granny it had already become divorced from either a broad or a deep sense of reality.
But this defect, though it is probably serious enough to prevent our ever comparing The Unvanquished with Faulkner’s greatest things, still seems to me quite insufficient to destroy a work of such power and beauty. After all, the central theme does not undertake so much a defense of the old order as an evocation leading to a criticism. Faulkner has protected himself cunningly against any demand that he justify the felt sympathy for the order and the code: he has presented the glamour and the heroism through the mind of a child, and made even that child, as he matures, aware of the thin line between heroism and heroics. This is a very different strategy from that which he employed in the ending of Sartoris, though the feeling for the past, or at least the Sartoris past, is similar. Perhaps we should dismiss as irrelevant the suspicion that, on the evidence here before us, the Sartoris dream was not so very different in essentials from Sutpen’s design—not different enough at least to justify the extreme difference in attitude toward them.
To press any further with this sort of objection, demanding as it were that Faulkner make more plausible to us what is felt here and elsewhere in his work as the glamour of the Sartorises, would be to ask for a different book from the one he has written in The Unvanquished. The form of the work effectively cuts off the possibility of critical speculation, except that which the form itself motivates and directs. When Bayard, at the death of his father, becomes “the Sartoris,” he is expected to carry on the code, unchanged. Whether he will do so, and if so, how he will do it, are the questions in the minds of Wyatt and Drusilla and Ringo and the others, and they take us in the direction of the central theme. Will Bayard have the courage to not kill, yet to acquit himself well, as the Sartorises defined well, honorably, courageously? He thinks, in his crisis, “Who lives by the sword shall die by it just as Granny would have thought” (but not acted) ; and also
how if there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, Thou shalt not kill must be it. . .
For Bayard in his situation, expected by everyone apparently except Aunt Jenny to kill the man who had killed his father, this is perhaps dramatically right, granting a combined skepticism and religious ignorance that may safely be assumed for all Sartorises except ancient aunts and legendary great-grandmothers. But it may be noted in passing that only for a primitive and violent people would this be “it,” the one thing meaningful and valid in “the Book.” It is not surprising, in view of so simplistic a theology, that though Bayard noted the discrepancy between Granny’s moral principles and her actions, he was not aware of any discrepancy between form and meaning in her worship. In several of his best works Faulkner has presented the religious issues that are central in the crisis of our time with full, magnificently definitive embodiment. It is no reflection on the achievement of these works to note that the artist sometimes works better than the man knows. In The Unvanquished there is a hint of that peculiar combination of theological muddle and ignorance that may be detected in A Fable.
Meanwhile, however obscure the connections between the limited Sartoris code and any larger scheme of meaning, the immediate problem before Bayard is clear enough. Is he to carry on in the old expected way, symbolized by the vengeance he and Ringo took on Grumby, or to deepen the meaning of the code, make it more truly itself by denying it where it is out of harmony with its own inner meaning—to realize it by breaking with it? The difference between the Sartoris dream and the Sutpen dream is essential if Bayard is to reinterpret the code truly. Bayard and Drusilla’s talk of the difference between Sartoris and Sutpen gives Bayard the clue he needs. John Sartoris, it seems, had a somewhat broader area of social concern than Sutpen; his “good” was not so exclusively his own. His dream centered on preserving the system which put and kept the Sartorises on the top of the heap, but he was not wholly unconcerned with the cost to others of Sartoris well-being. He may have been “immoral” but he was not “amoral”: his dream was qualified by his acceptance of the old moral code as he understood it. Sutpen’s dream was qualified by no code at all except his “private morality,” which was more primitive and inadequate and self-centered than John Sartoris’.
In resisting the pressures to “remember Grumby,” then, Bayard is proving that his loyalty to the code is as real as Drusilla’s, and his understanding of its essence more acute than hers. He takes the action which indicates at once his growth in moral awareness and his loyalty to the older, pre-Sutpen, ideal. He acts responsibly, on principle, having counted the possible cost but also acknowledging the incalculable. Though his action out of context may seem theatrical or even stereotyped, it is it seems to me a more convincing embodiment of the value everywhere imputed to the Sartoris way in Faulkner’s books than anything we ever see Granny do. The Sartorises at their best rose in crises to morally responsible action.
But the moral theme is not the only one in the book, despite its centrality and its function as the unifying theme that binds all the stories together. A moral code, any code, is like art in that it imposes a pattern on the otherwise formless—or elicits a pattern from it. Any code is “artificial,” something made and followed by choice, not existing “in nature.” A part of the meaning of The Unvanquished is that the Sartoris moral code, like the mimic battle of the boys in the opening, momentarily arrests the rush of time to doom—arrests it long enough for human choice to be exercised. Yet, though it is an instrument of control, it is not beyond time, not timeless. Loosh comes and destroys Bayard’s artifact. The art and the code which partially and momentarily arrest the flow of events must not falsify. When a code or an art becomes too artificial, it becomes an instrument of the very death it is its proper function to inhibit.
THE HAMLET contrasts sharply with The Unvanquished in mood, tone, manner, and the type of people dealt with; it complements it in theme. Thematically, the two should always be considered together, for they make together one statement. The Unvanquished pictures the beginning of the decay of the old Sartoris order as it is corrupted by Snopesism. The fact that Snopes was foreshadowed by Sutpen, a man ahead of his time in the development toward what Faulkner identifies as modernism, and the fact that the distinction between Sutpen and Sartoris was not so sharp as Drusilla wanted Bayard to think, remain merely qualifications of the central moral theme of The Unvanquished. Granny’s loss of purity of motive in her conniving with Ab Snopes represents the beginning of the end of the old order.
The Hamlet completes the process. Flem Snopes, Ab’s son, now takes over and proves more effective than his father in the work of corruption. He demoralizes not one indomitable old woman in time of crisis but a whole community, until in the end, when he has exhausted the community’s possibilities for exploitation, even Ratliff, reflector become participant, is digging for gold in a frenzy of avarice. Then Flem moves on to larger opportunities in Jefferson. For an understanding of the “world” Faulkner has created, the structure of meaning and value in Yoknapatawpha, The Unvanquished and The Hamlet are equally indispensable keys.4 In them both the viable tradition and all that threatens it in the present are traced in the past. In Yoknapatawpha there is very little that is new under the sun.
But in everything but theme, the two books complement each other by contrast. The Unvanquished is more single in purpose, tone, and vision, to be sure, so that any contrast of it with the richer and looser work must fail to be neat and decisive; but a contrast is possible, nevertheless. While The Unvanquished is romantic in incident and mood, The Hamlet is predominantly realistic—and sometimes extravagant. The Unvanquished is nostalgic-sympathetic, The Hamlet (again predominantly) humorous-satirical. The Unvanquished pictures a period somewhat more distant in time than The Hamlet, but in it the past comes very close and the aesthetic distance is often as slight as it can be, without the collapse of judgment; in The Hamlet, except in the Houston and Ike Snopes episodes, the aesthetic distance is greater. Finally, as I have already suggested, The Hamlet has more variety, ranging from the savage satire of the picture of Flem Snopes to the delicate lyricism of the treatment of his cousin Ike, from the Melvillean irony and despair of the Houston story to the tall tale in the tradition of Western humor of the spotted horses section. There is I think a sufficient unity in The Hamlet’s richness, but it is not so pronounced as the unity of The Unvanquished, despite the common characterization of that work as “a group of stories.”
The unity that The Hamlet has, which is certainly enough to make it proper to call it a novel, is a product less of its presentation of the stories of related characters in a single community than of its treatment of the nature and effects of Snopesism. Snopesism is avarice married to pure animality. Flem is moved only by greed, and Eula, his wife, is moved by nothing at all except the processes of her own organic chemistry. Flem is a clod whose constantly chewing jaw deceptively suggests the ruminant animals, but he is brought at least partially within the human orbit, within range of negative moral judgment at any rate, by his ability to sin—to connive and scheme to lay hands on everything of any monetary value in Frenchman’s Bend. Eula in contrast is a mere eruption, a beautiful, passive eruption, of animal process; so passively beautiful indeed as to seem more vegetable than animal. She is not only incapable of sin, she is incapable even of desire; she is safe with Labove because she cannot even imagine the possibility of danger.
Flem himself is broad, squat, soft, with his predatoriness built upon a bovine base; very different from his cousin Mink, with his fierce, “indomitable” face. Flem could never be driven to murder. He is at once too shrewd and too soft, soft not in pity but in adaptability. When he marries Eula he is reinforcing that side of him which is merely animal; in his human attribute he neither wants nor needs any reinforcement and will tolerate no rival. He defrauds other Snopeses as placidly as he defrauds the rest of Frenchman’s Bend. He will find Eula a useful adjunct.
The analysis of Snopesism in The Hamlet is Faulkner’s most effective attack on modern popular culture. It is quaintly amusing only if we assume that Snopeses live only in Yoknapatawpha. If we take it without defensive cutting of the lines of relevance, we shall find it as savage as any satire in Mark Twain, and probably on the whole more effective. Flem Snopes is a Horatio Alger hero, rising by shrewd attention to business from rags to riches. He parodies the American dream, caricatures the American success myth. He has ambition, go-ahead, gumption, a head for figures: everything deemed necessary for success in the Ben Franklin-Dale Carnegie popular philosophy. He is cautious, discreet, self-controlled, soft-spoken. He never loses his temper, is never driven to self-forgetful rashness or violence by any lust, passion, need. He keeps his eye on the main chance and looks out for number one. He is rewarded by riches, as Franklin’s Poor Richard had prophesied.
His cousin, I. O. Snopes, makes Flem’s significance as the paradigm of the ideal self-made man clearer than it might otherwise be. The jumbled proverbs I.O. quotes are mostly out of Poor Richard—and before they were polished by Poor Richard they were in the popular mind. Snopesism is prudential morality rendered down to purity, presented in its essence. Flem is a combination of the mythical Yankee pedlar and Poor Richard, with the latter’s unthinking, foundationless benevolence worn away, with only the calculation of expediency in the interest of self left.
Flem measures all things by a single, simple standard that involves no metaphysical nonsense, no unknowns. Though he has no “friends” in the sense of the word in which friendship has moral connotations, he has an apparently inexhaustible supply of “friends,” most of whom are related to him at least by marriage, ready to serve his purposes in each new scheme. He is always able to “win friends and influence people” when there is need to. Flem never fails, because as I. O. Snopes reminds us, God helps those who help themselves. Flem goes early to bed, and no man ever caught him napping. He has hitched his wagon to a star and knows that the word can’t is not in the dictionary. “Just give him time,” as I. O. says; “a penny on the waters pays interest when the flood turns.” For Flem, as for Poor Richard, time is money.
I. O.’s proverbs take the words of the Judeo-Christian religious vision and give them practical, down-to-earth meaning by suggesting that morality after all pays, is not visionary. Snopesism as Faulkner presents it did not arise full-grown in Yoknapatawpha in the late nineteenth century. It has a distinguished ancestry, including the secularization of Christian morality of the eighteenth century, with its resultant shopkeeper’s ethics. Snopesism could be documented by reference to Defoe (Robinson Crusoe as the first self-made man) and Richardson (for Pamela chastity is an asset because she knows how to make it pay), as well as Franklin. Snopesism is democratic opportunism with everything vestigial cut away.
Not all the Snopeses of course illustrate the nature of Snopesism. Many of them do not get ahead at all. They lack initiative, drive, intelligence, or self-control. Eck, the blacksmith, is stupid; he can be used not only by Flem but even by I. O. (He is also the only Snopes in the book who ever expresses pity for anyone, even another Snopes: he gives the idiot Snopes a toy cow, stating as his reason simply “I felt sorry for him.”). I. O. is ineffectual, scattered and without concentration: he does not rise in the world. Ike, the idiot who is in love with a cow, is the only Snopes, so far as we know, capable of love: he will not get ahead either. Mink is a murderer, stupid enough, as his cousin tells him, to get caught. The Snopeses are a varied clan, united chiefly by their admiration for and dependence upon Flem. He is the successful one, the one who made good.
THE PORTRAITS of Ike the idiot and Mink the murderer deserve special attention. Except for Eck, these two are the only Snopeses sympathetically drawn; and Eck closely approaches Ike in stupidity. He is not smart enough to achieve even Lump’s or I. O.’s degree of Snopesism. The book invites us to identify ourselves only with those Snopeses who are sub-humanly “innocent” or violently lost. Thus, with the exception again of Eck, the only two sympathetic Snopeses are those guilty of sodomy and murder, two offenses that have not lost their significance in the popular mind.
Ike’s romantic idyll with the cow has been widely appreciated. The episode is controlled by pity, yet done for the most part without overt sentimentality. In its invitation to us to see value in “one of the least of these,” in the lost and rejected, the episode is consistent with a Christian interpretation of life which the narrative voice of this section explicitly rejects. Over and beyond its intrinsic beauty, the episode justifies itself in the scheme of the novel by its presentation of just those values—gentleness, love, devotion—the lack of which makes Snopesism the evil it is; and by its locating of those values precisely where a smarter Snopes would never think to look.
The richly lyrical, almost euphuistic prose of the section is in general finely controlled and expressive. Whatever the world may think of sodomy, this is not depravity but love, with love’s gentle concern and self-forgetfulness. Flem Snopes, who if he does anything at all that pan-Snopesism would call wrong, is smart enough not to be caught, who is only a “shrewd operator,” is seen as the quintessence of evil. In Ratliff’s fantasy he is capable of routing the devil himself from his throne. But the two Snopeses, Ike and Mink, who are guilty of what even the Snopeses condemn, are seen as creatures deserving our sympathy. Ike’s story is an effective part of The Hamlet’s violent attack on success worship, on “business ethics” and popular philosophy, on all that Snopesism means to Faulkner.
In the portait of Mink there seems to me a certain sentimentality, less conspicuous in the version in The Hamlet than in the original story, published as “The Hound,” but still evident.5 Mink is seen as a “victim” but “indomitable,” and therefore somehow attractive. He is a fierce little Ahab, rebelling against the injustice of the gods, unwilling to bend even in defeat. In the original story he is pictured more definitely as the product of his economic situation than in the revised version, but even here he is never shown as in any degree responsible for his actions. The question arises, of course, why Flem can be held responsible, if Mink cannot; for Flem rose from poverty as extreme as Mink’s and had, presumably, as few satisfactions—until he began to rise in the world. The answer is not in the book.
Mink feels that everyone and everything is against him, and the way his story is told suggests that we should assent. As in the portraits of Popeye and Joe Christmas, an examination of the man’s background leads to a denial of the possibility of moral judgment, even a judgment in which condemnation of the action would not preclude charity for the actor. Mink emerges as a cold-blooded murderer, a man for whom murder was not an exceptional departure from his normal behavior but quite in character, thoroughly to be expected. Yet we are, I think, invited somehow not only to sympathize with him but to admire him. There is the same sort of ambivalence or obscurity here that we found in the portrait of the aviators in Pylon: we are all victims, and Mink has the grace to be an indomitable victim, thinking of his situation
not in remorse for the deed he had done, because he neither required nor desired absolution for that [Perhaps he didn’t “desire” it, but what would it mean to say that he didn’t “require” it either?] . . . and not snarling, because he never snarled; but just cold, indomitable, and intractable.
Attractive, in short, as Ahab was attractive to Melville and Manfred to Byron, a sort of Yoknapatawpha Prometheus in his rebellion against the gods, unpromethean only in his contempt for mankind:
Perhaps he was seeking [as he went toward the sea] only the proffer of this illimitable space and irremediable forgetting along the edge of which the contemptible teeming of his own earth-kind timidly seethed and recoiled . . .
Faulkner’s special power and his occasional special weakness spring in part from his ability—sometimes his compulsion—wholly to adopt the point of view, even to the errors and confusions, of his characters, rationalizing their behavior with their own rationalizations, swamping judgment in a flood of sympathy. Mink and Houston, his victim, are presented in similar terms and with apparently equal degrees of sympathy. There is an Emersonian streak in Faulkner which makes the difference between the “red slayer” and the slain seem unimportant. Brahma, or something, wipes out such petty finite distinctions, so that at times everything seems equal to everything else. If this can be called mysticism, it is a type of mysticism in which a writer of fiction cannot afford to indulge too often.
The presentation of Mink’s marriage adds to the sentimentality of the whole episode. His wife is a harder and tougher Ruby Lamar of Sanctuary. She brags of the variety of her sexual experience, which fits her to judge Mink’s virility. “I’ve had a hundred men, but I never had a wasp before. That stuff comes out of you is rank poison. It’s too hot.” Mink beats her unmercifully without provocation and she loves him all the more for it. Against every obstacle she is true to her wasp with the deadly sting, even to the extent of sleeping with one of the Varners to earn ten dollars—an act oddly presented as self-sacrificial despite her happy memories of the hundred men she once summoned repeatedly even in midafternoon to her room. It sometimes appears that when Faulkner is writing in this vein only prostitutes or the pathological are capable of making loving and faithful wives. One of the curious links between Mink and Houston is that Houston too had for ten years or so lived with a prostitute: naturally, she made him an ideal commonlaw wife. The girl in Pylon was created out of the same set of attitudes, and Charlotte in The Wild Palms and the wife in Idyll in the Desert. The imphcation here, like that sometimes apparent in Hemingway’s treatment of his heroines, is sentimental. (Not that a prostitute could not, might not, make a loving and faithful wife, but that in fact prostitutes usually don’t, and to imply that they always do, just because of their “training,” is to be sentimental in the Bret Harte manner, positing the invariable heart of gold beneath the rough surface.) From one point of view, the portrait of Mink’s wife is another instance of Faulkner’s sympathy for the lost and outcast, but to suggest that only the qualities of personality or experience that make for prostitution fit one for monogamy is not really compassionate but only unreasonable.
The scene in which Mink rejects as tainted money the ten dollars his wife tries to give him, preferring to face the consequences of his murder rather than accept it, is done entirely in terms of the sentimental clichés of tough modernism; and it is incredible, or credible only in other terms than those in which it is presented. Here we have the fine proud gesture of the indomitable little man striking the woman he loves because he loves her, rejecting the proffered help because he has that pride that Faulkner has so often listed as one of the indispensable virtues. If we are not prepared to recognize the anti-rational quality of the scene as presented, it is because Faulkner has bewitched us by the imagistic brilliance and emotional power of his writing in the whole Mink Snopes episode, effectively cutting off both critical judgment and the irrelevant response.
HOUSTON IS a larger, nobler, still more sympathetic Ahab, in rebellion against “the prime maniacal Risibility” who killed his wife after only three months of marriage. The God who would permit such things to be has earned his contempt and awakened a savage pride and fury, a violent despair almost indistinguishable from Mink’s. This is what sets both of them apart from lesser men contentedly and timidly breeding along the shore: great souls seek “illimitable space” in which to exercise their fury and their grief. The portrait here is purely Melvillean, and not because of any accidental similarity of land-sea imagery, with the contemptible safety-mongers hugging the teeming land while great-souled Ahabs plunge into the depths. What theologians have distinguished as “the problem of pain”—or the problem created by the existence of natural evil in a world made by a good God—dominates the writing as much here as in Moby Dick.
It is not surprising that Faulkner wholly identifies himself with Houston. We have seen him identify before with less attractive and less Faulknerian characters. But it is revealing that the attitudes expressed and implied in the treatment of Houston, which are at once Houston’s own and the narrator’s, since there is no distinction here, are the same as those expressed by the narrator of the Ike Snopes episode. Though it might be said that the attitudes in the Houston episode, even where they are not explicitly assigned to Houston, are created by imaginative assimilation to Houston’s point of view, the same cannot be said of the treatment of Ike. Ike has no point of view, no capacity to create a philosophy out of his despair. The voice here is not in any sense his.
Ike is another Melvillean character. He is little Pip, driven insane by his direct confrontation with the reality of the depths. The eyes are vacant, like Pip’s, because of what they have seen, which is more than man can bear:
the eyes which at some instant, some second once, had opened upon, been vouchsafed a glimpse of, the Gorgon-face of that primal injustice which man was not intended to look at face to face and had been blasted empty and clean forever of any thought . . .
This striking parallel reveals an interesting similarity between the sensibilities of Melville and Faulkner. “Melville’s quarrel with God” is not more evident in Moby Dick than Faulkner’s is in The Hamlet. It is in the distinct voice of the narrator that we get such a passage as this:
Roofed by the woven canopy of blind annealing grassroots and the roots of trees, dark in the blind dark of time’s silt and rich refuse—the constant and unslumbering anonymous worm-glut and the inextricable known bones—Troy’s Helen and the nymphs and the snoring mitred bishops, the saviors and the victims and the kings—it wakes, up-seeping . . .
The “it” is dawn, the first light. The light comes from below, from the earth, as in the fantasy of Hightower, who had lost the Church and the Faith. The sensibility and attitudes that shaped this image produced the explanation of Ike’s idiocy. Really “authentic” Christians, the same voice tells us elsewhere in The Hamlet, would have to be in hell if historic Christian doctrine were true.
I have drawn attention to the parallel with Melville. There is also one, less noticeable, with Mark Twain. Several passages in The Hamlet as well as the quality of the sensibility in general suggest the great passage in Huckleberry Finn in which Huck refuses to pray a lie: better that he should be damned, if there is any damnation, than that he should betray his friend. “The weary long record of shibboleth and superstition” is a phrase Mark Twain could have written—and very nearly did, again and again—but here it is the language of the objective narrator in the Ike Snopes section. The point of view implied by this interpretation of history produces the judgment that Ike the idiot has everything, or is learning everything, as he cares for the cow, except the qualities that characterize the MacEacherns and Doc Hineses and Flems and Baptist committees: Ike,
who has only lust and greed and bloodthirst and a moral conscience to keep him awake at night, yet to acquire.
The implied definition of conscience here is precisely that of Mark Twain. This is anti-rational primitivism: by which I do not mean to imply that certain kinds of religion have not in fact often so exacerbated the conscience as to drive men to neuroticism and violence. But if Ike is “clean” of thought, if conscience is only a goad to madness and crime, if Ike has everything except the vices, then not only faith but reason must go. The snoring bishops and the dead saviors, on the one hand, and Flem Snopes, on the other, are not “clean” of contaminations: the saviors presumably had faith, and Flem is gifted in a kind of prudential reason. Robinson Jeffers at one time pictured the world this way. Irving Babbitt would have traced some of the implications of The Hamlet back to “Rousseau and romanticism.”
The religious ambivalence in Faulkner, which has sometimes strengthened his finest work, providing a tension which became neither confusion nor sentimentality, seems to me to have become deeper and more excruciating by the time of The Hamlet. The resulting conflict must qualify our admiration for this richly imaginative, at times intensely moving and at other times very funny, picaresque folk novel. The book belongs still, I think, among the great works of the American literary imagination, but it cannot carry us along with it without reservation as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying did. And some of the implications in it are ominous for Faulkner’s future work. Ratliff is a sane and attractive man, one of Faulkner’s finest reflectors, as has been said, but Ratliff is not always in control. Another voice, which we cannot possibly identify as his, speaks too, and speaks with “savage contempt and pity for all blind flesh capable of hope and grief.” The savage pity created Ike, the savage contempt created Flem. A mind not wholly overwhelmed by either pity or contempt, a mind not yet savage with despair, produced the greater works, and the characters in them who are neither idiotic personifications of good nor intelligent personifications of evil. The Hamlet, despite its great virtuousity, suffers from a lack of the balance that informs the earlier greater works and keeps the agony of despair and grief from being intolerable and destructive.