IN THE MIDDLE FORTIES Faulkner’s work began to show a marked reversion toward one of the characteristics of his earliest novels. The voices of the characters began to have to compete with, even to give way to, the voice of the artist whose message was so important that he could no longer be wholly content with the indirection of fiction. It is not of course that the voices of the characters of the great novels were ever free of the evidences of their paternity. But as in a large family in which all the children bear a strong family resemblance but each is nevertheless unmistakably himself, with the unpredictable uniqueness of freedom and maturity and independence, the voices seemed to be the voices of people in a community. One of the most important differences between Soldier’s Pay and As I Lay Dying, as we have seen in Chapter 4, is the greater dramatic independence of the characters in the later novel.
But in the forties Gavin Stevens was created, with an outlook and specific opinions ordinarily very similar to those of his creator. When Stevens is not available, other voices take his place, do his job, which is essentially to supply a philosophic statement of the themes of the works themselves. To those who had watched this development for more than a decade, it was not very surprising that the old general in A Fable should not simply paraphrase but actually quote Faulkner, climaxing his temptation of his son by repeating parts of the Nobel Prize speech. It is as though Faulkner, having long wanted a platform and having got it at last, were determined to make the most of it, even if it became necessary to say the same things twice that they might not go unheeded.
Gavin Stevens is less obsessive and more philosophic than Quentin, and better educated than Ratliff, but to say that he is a less impressive fictional character is certainly to indulge in understatement. The voice of fin de siècle pessimism heard quoting the Rubaiyat and paraphrasing Swinburne in Soldier’s Pay and Sartoris has become the voice of an obscure mid-century tragic affirmation; but the change of emphasis in the message has not rendered it any less recognizable, less personal. The latter part of Faulkner’s career has been marked by three parallel developments: a new stress on the moral function of art, a gradual change of emphasis from despair to affirmation, and a tendency to make his themes explicit through the use of spokesman characters. All three developments point to a movement away from the influences under which he began his mature career, after his apprenticeship.
The new conception of the artist as having a duty to uplift and sustain mankind was first clearly announced in Stockholm in 1950 from the platform afforded by the reception of the Nobel Prize. Before that, in 1948, it was adumbrated by the role assigned to Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust. The increased hopefulness found expression in the Nobel Prize speech too, and is apparent in most of the works of the last dozen years, most notably in two short stories, “Race at Morning” and “Of the People.” The tendency to emphasize the message of hope by making it explicit may be seen in most of the work from Intruder on. Faulkner is clearly no longer content to create works marked by “form, solidity, color.”
THE TITLE of Intruder in the Dust is ambiguous with the old ambiguity of As I Lay Dying. Both a radical naturalism and a Biblical view of man are consistent with the implications of the phrase. Robinson Jeffers, for example, in his poems of the twenties and thirties, pictured man as an “intruder” in nature in the sense of a biological accident, an “unnatural,” temporary, incidental offshoot of the convolutions of the nebulae. On the other hand, the Bible and the Prayer Book caution man to remember that he is dust and will return to dust, that unless he be regenerated he lives only toward death.
Up to a point the body of the work keeps this ambiguity alive. At the beginning of Chapter X, for instance, Uncle Gavin, still talking, describes man as given definition in his eating, picturing him as eating his way into the substance, the body, of the world, so that he becomes the world and it becomes man. The parallel with the words of the Invocation in the service of Holy Communion sets up religious suggestions here that may seem to justify the neo-Christian interpretation of Faulkner’s meanings. But Stevens continues, becoming more and more explicit (that his meaning may not be misunderstood, presumably); and the ambiguity evaporates, the parallel with Holy Communion becoming more of an adornment than a part of the meaning, as Stevens restates an explicit, still obscure but not essentially ambiguous, theology:
eating... the proud vainglorious minuscule which he called his memory and his self and his I-Am into that vast teeming anonymous solidarity of the world from beneath which the ephemeral rock would cool and spin away to dust not even remarked and remembered ...
If Steven’s version of the central Christian rite is religious enough in its tone to inspire, perhaps deliberately incite, a religious interpretation, only its obscurity makes an interpretation in terms of historic Christian doctrine continue to seem possible. By eating man is united not with God but with nature. Perhaps one reason for the increasing insistence of the voice is that passages like this have been so often misinterpreted. Faulkner’s article of several years ago in Harper’s magazine on the right to privacy and related matters1 exhibits a tone in which anger is mingled with impatience of misunderstanding. He seems to feel an increasingly urgent need to make his meanings clear.
Even in the words of Stevens the ambiguity does not of course wholly disappear. Stevens is after all a created character, not Faulkner, and he usually speaks obscurely enough to be open to a variety of interpretations. He is both obscurely profound and profoundly obscure. But something of what he intends comes through his rhetoric clearly: his unalterable, sometimes angry, religious humanism, set sharply in contrast to the institutional forms of man’s ancient “delusion,” the “fairy tale that has conquered the whole Western world”; his insistence, against whom it is not clear, that man is “immortal” but that the “immortality” is racial, a survival not of the “I-Am” but of the species, or at least of life, even if on another planet; his conviction that man’s only salvation lies in responsible moral action in community, action guided, his creator has recently told us in accents indistinguishable from Stevens’s, by “the scientist and the humanitarian,”2 who must take over now that church and state have failed.
Enlightened responsible action in community: in this conviction of Stevens we are close to the explicit theme of Intruder, which poses the problem of the conditions under which morally significant and effective action can take place. Because this is so, Stevens’s lengthy discussions of the South’s case against the “outlanders” are not aesthetically irrelevant or unfunctional. Whatever its flaws may be, Intruder is not simply a tract against the Fair Employment Practices Commission. For the South is seen as an example of community—perhaps the only true one left in America—as contrasted with a mere aggregation of people. The South must solve its race problem by itself, “without help or interference or even (thank you) advice” from outlanders because only thus can the problem be solved in such a way as to benefit both parties to the guilt. Stevens tells his nephew that only the Tenderfoot Scout refuses to accept the full horror of the guilt; the Eagle Scout accepts the burden of his corporate sinfulness and goes on from there. The motto of the Tenderfoot is “Dont accept,” of the Eagle Scout, “Dont stop.”
According to Stevens such acceptance of mutual responsibility for moral action is likely to take place, or can take place, only in a homogeneous community, not among “a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money.” It follows that the extended attempt to define the South as community, as contrasted with North, East, and West as mass, is essential to the development of the theme. The view that finally emerges from Stevens’s monologues seems not very different from that expressed half a century before by Stephen Crane in “The Open Boat” and by Conrad in “The Secret Sharer” and elsewhere: a naturalistic moralism in which a sense of community is stimulated by a perception of the precariousness of man’s situation. Men, in this nineteenth century answer to naturalistic reductionism, are driven into community by the threat of the alien universe, the failure of the conventional life-saving stations, the emptiness or indifference of the tower like a giant. As they emerge dripping from the sea, they find that there is a halo around the heads of those on the beach who come with blankets and sympathy. The direction of Faulkner’s development is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in the contrast between this point of view and that of such an early story as “Dry September.”
A merely legislated, forced achievement of justice, then, would short-circuit the possibility of moral action by destroying the South’s existing homogeneity as a community. Regeneration cannot be legislated against the will of the unregenerate. Stevens is therefore justified, from the point of view of the novel’s theme, in concluding that Lucas needs defense from the regions that would “free” him as much as he does from the South itself:
I’m defending Sambo from the North and East and West—the outlanders who will fling him decades back not merely into injustice but into grief and agony and violence too by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight by police . . . I only say that the injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice.
There is nothing obscure about this central contention of Stevens’s, whatever we may think of its tact. But in a good deal of the talk that leads up to this there is an obscurity that cannot be explained as intentional ambiguity: a kind of obfuscation, whether intentional or not, a fuzziness in the use of words, sometimes what seems a deliberate attempt to exploit irrelevant and unearned connotations. There is an obscurity in Intruder that is different in kind from the ambiguity of The Sound and the Fury. One example will suffice.
Stevens is talking, at the moment, of man’s aspiration toward justice and other ideals. He finds man’s “pity and justice and conscience too” evidence for his “belief in more than the divinity of individual man,” or rather (after a long parenthesis) not this “but in the divinity of his continuity as Man . . . ,” etc. Now I submit that in the first phrase defining Stevens’s affirmation, the word “divinity” has been robbed of most of its semantic content, since clearly in the context of this book and in the larger context of Faulkner’s work, we cannot take seriously an Emersonian view of man and his “divinity”; and that is the only option open to us, since traditional Christianity, the “fairy-tale” of man’s “delusion,” has never asserted man’s divinity but on the contrary has repeatedly condemned any such notion as heresy.
It is possible of course that Stevens is equating Christianity with just this notion, despite the gap in his Oxford and Heidelberg education which such an equation would suggest. If so, this would not be the first indication in Faulkner’s works that he himself in some moods equates the Christian doctrine of man with a tender-minded optimistic “idealism” capable of denying the presence in the world and in man of that evil which his own tragic vision finds there. See for example the story “Leg,” in which a priest’s faith is destroyed when he has to face the fact that evil exists.
A “belief in more than the divinity of individual man” is obscure because, not knowing what a belief in the “divinity” of individual man could be (every man his own god?), we cannot very well imagine what a belief in more than this would be. But the stated “more,” when it comes, is even more obscure: “the divinity of his continuity as man.” We may guess, of course, that this points toward some such meaning as this: man’s very survival (“I decline to accept the end of man”) renders him, however obscurely, divine. Why it would not equally prove the divinity of atoms or molecules or whatever else may survive is not clear. But this interpretation, though tempting, would be wrong. The belief is not in the divinity of man at all but in “the divinity of his continuity”: continuity itself is said to be divine. If this has any meaning at all, it is certainly difficult to find out what it is. Both the point of view and the obscure way it is expressed remind us of the Nobel Prize speech of two years later.
Intruder in the Dust represents a falling-off in Faulkner’s power as a novelist, though I have argued that the long-winded religio-political speeches of Gavin Stevens are not intrusive or functionless but codify the theme that without them would be implicit anyway. It is a falling-off first of all because of the very need so to insist upon the theme: it becomes the Novel of Ideas, the Novel with a Message, too easily and quickly. The timeliness of the message does not help. It appeared in the context of election time, Harry Truman and the FEPC, revolt in the South and the threat of political secession or, worse, of moral outrage: “. . . you will force us . . . into alliance with them with whom we have no kinship whatever in defense of a principle which we ourselves begrieve and abhor . . (That is, we will push the Negro down still lower in the scale of human dignity and value, make him suffer still more, much as we hate to and much as we will thereby increase our own guilt, if you don’t stop urging us toward justice.) The political message of the book was so timely that it is not surprising that to many the novel seemed essentially a pamphlet announcing the candidacy of Strom Thurmond.
Without meaning to suggest an ideal of absolute “purity” for the arts, and certainly without meaning to imply that Faulkner would be a better writer if he were not so solidly a part of his native community, I should think it obvious that the kind of precise social relevance Intruder has weakens the book. Its temporal context makes its importance seem in some degree a matter of the correctness of its opinions. Yoknapatawpha’s anger over FEPC is an interesting fact in American social history. I think a rather strong case for Yoknapatawpha’s stand could be made, stronger indeed than the one Stevens makes, since his obscurantism makes even his clear ideas suspect. But it is clear enough that this sort of thing, this passionate abstract defense of a section’s political anger, is not the stuff of Faulkner’s greater works. Much of the writing is brilliant, especially in those numerous passages where consciousness is doubled and tripled in intensity and fullness as an event is experienced over and over (“He could see himself reaching the church . . .”) first in anticipation, then in deed, then in memory, then sometimes in all three in one multiple remembering of anticipating and doing and remembering. But all the brilliance of passage after passage in the book, or the beautiful solidity of Lucas as a character, cannot finally make it seem proper to put Intruder in the same category with Faulkner’s greatest novels, or even with Pylon or The Wild Palms or The Hamlet.
REQUIEM FOR A NUN was written apparently as a kind of relaxation from the major work in progress, A Fable, with which Faulkner was chiefly occupied from 1944 to 1953. Requiem is the sort of thing an artist of Faulkner’s kind does for the fun of it, and because it’s easy. A by-product of a rich imagination, it is casual, almost playful in its recapitulation of the major themes of the earlier works.
Formally, it is a daring experiment. (A Fable, in contrast, is safe—for Faulkner, and for our time, almost conventional.) One can imagine Faulkner saying to himself that he would try uniting in this work both of the two great styles of our time, his own and Hemingway’s; that he would really give the critics something to puzzle over and misunderstand this time, writing like himself and like the artistic opposite of himself, alternating a sensuous, lyric, evocative style in which character and plot disappear in an excruciating awareness of time and place, with a bare, direct, behavioristic style in which facts—words and actions—make their own poetry.
I said “One can imagine.” I do not pretend to have any “inside” knowledge of what was in Faulkner’s mind when he conceived Requiem for a Nun. But judging from the results, as well as from the several explicit references to Hemingway scattered through the work, we may at least say it is as though Faulkner had decided to show that he could outdo both himself and Hemingway in a little coda to Temple Drake’s story. The hallmark of Faulkner’s most characteristic style has always been his brooding lyrical intensity. In several of his greatest works the crucial problem for the critic is to decide how much of the stuff of traditional fiction is left after plot and character as we are accustomed to think of them have seemingly evaporated in the fluid nuances of a technique which attempts to capture the simultaneity of all experience. A lesser problem in The Sound and the Fury, this is a major problem in Absalom, Absalom! The remarkably dramatic vividness and concreteness of many characters and scenes in his best work, and the rich vein of folk humor, do not invalidate but only qualify the idea that Faulkner’s most typical and natural vein is lyric. From the closing scene of Soldier’s Pay to the opening scene of Absalom to the wonderful courthouse and state capitol and jail sections of Requiem, his imagination is most fully expressed in the passages of lyric evocation.
Hemingway, on the other hand, is of course famous for his “anti-poetic,” his bare, hard, muscular, deliberately insensitive, dramatic style. The technique of expression he has created depends upon using the most (one would have said) inexpressive words, evoking emotion by controlling, repressing, or denying the emotion and concentrating on the “fact.” Until a very few years ago at least one would have had no hesitation about saying that Hemingway’s style had had a greater influence than Faulkner’s, that it was in fact the typical style of our time. Certainly it has affected a whole generation of young writers, so that imitations or adaptations of it have long since sifted down from the little magazines and the first novels to the rich slicks and drug store fiction.
Faulkner has often shown himself concerned with the reputation and achievement of his great contemporary. If he has seen himself as closer to Thomas Wolfe, whose sensitivity and daring he has publicly praised, he has never been grudging in his praise of Hemingway’s accomplishment. The extended definition of woman’s nature in Requiem not by reference to “life” but explicitly in terms of Hemingway’s Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls is symptomatic, an overt expression of a preoccupation that must have contributed earlier to the conception of Pylon and The Wild Palms.
The dramatic sections of Requiem are almost a parody, by intention perhaps a distillation, of the dramatic style of modern fiction popularized and given quintessential expression in the work of Hemingway. Fiction stripped of everything except the words and actions of the characters, Faulkner seems to be saying, is this: the bare, inexpressive words, the fumbling with the cigarettes, the drinks poured and not drunk. Each act of the drama, on the other hand, begins with an expository evocation of time and place, an essay on the history of the setting—the courthouse, the statehouse, the jail. The two aspects of fiction, fiction as dramatic report and fiction as lyric poetry, both present in Faulkner’s own work of course but perhaps more clearly to be distinguished in modern fiction in the great contrast between Hemingway and Faulkner, have been split apart, distilled, then juxtaposed. This is something Faulkner had not tried before, an experiment that must have intrigued him by the very outrageousness of its daring.
The result is certainly interesting but not I should think for most readers wholly successful. If it demonstrates once again that Faulkner possesses in full measure that indispensable virtue of the great artist, courage, it does not prove that he can outdo Hemingway in Hemingway’s own province. The dramatic parts are bare without being especially suggestive in their concreteness. The lighting of the cigarettes, for example, is a piece of business that suggests Henry James’s attempt in his plays to control his imagination, force it to be content to find expression in the revealing word or gesture: an attempt which succeeded chiefly in eliminating most of what is most valuable in his fiction. When we think of the wonderful revelations achieved by the notations of behavior in Faulkner’s earlier works—by Flem’s chewing in The Hamlet for example or Jason’s putting his hands in his pockets in The Sound and the Fury—we may wonder what has happened here to make these gestures so inexpressive, so banal even, or at least, when they convey what they are supposed (presumably) to convey, so uneconomical. There is a good deal of what James called “weak specification” here. One or two cigarettes offered and refused or smoked furiously or simply handled would surely have suggested Temple’s nervousness and Gavin’s solicitude as well as several dozen; and similarly I should think with the drinks and the handkerchiefs.
The dramatic sections show us Faulkner writing at a level considerably lower than his best, exhibiting his ideas and themes (as when Stevens says “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) standing alone, isolated from the transforming power of his unique imagination. But the lyric sections exhibit him at very nearly his best. The prose poems devoted to the courthouse, the statehouse, and the jail are recapitulations of Yoknapatawpha history, much of it familiar from earlier works, which make that history explicitly microcosmic. Yoknapatawpha is not only a part of the world, with no discernible boundaries in time or space; in some sense it is the world. Geologic time and astronomic space are as tangibly present to the fully conscious mind as the logs within the walls of the Holston House, which some do not know are there, or the scratched name and date on the window of the jail. The communities of Jefferson and Jackson are at once exceedingly real spots on the earth and “events” hardly discernible in time. In this vision reality is seen as process—a process moving very fast or very slowly, depending on what aspect of it our imaginations seize. This is the ultimate setting against which Temple’s drama of good and evil is enacted.
The drama itself concentrates on the crisis of belief. Many readers for whom Faulkner’s religious preoccupation did not emerge clearly in the earlier works were surprised by what seemed to them a change of direction in Requiem. With the problem of belief now explicit, they felt they had discovered a new Faulkner, concerned with a Miltonic attempt to justify the ways of God to man. But the differences between this and the earlier works are chiefly formal. The splitting apart of behavior and imagination, which is the central fact about the technical experiment, forces the old themes into explicit statement.
At the center of Temple’s anguish there lies a belief not unlike Horace Benbow’s discovery of the “pattern” made by evil:
Which is another touché for somebody: God, maybe—if there is one. You see? That’s what’s so terrible. We don’t even need him. Simple evil is enough.
Temple is more fortunate than Sutpen, for she has Stevens as mentor. He brings her to a realization that she must accept her full guilt and not only forgive but, what is harder, ask to be forgiven.
And now I’ve got to say “I forgive you, sister” to the nigger who murdered my baby. No: it’s worse: I’ve even got to transpose it, turn it around. I’ve got to start off my new life being forgiven again. How can I say that? Tell me. How can I?
Stevens and Nancy together bring her to a point where she is willing to consider the idea discovered by Isaac a decade before in “The Bear,” that man’s redemption depends in some way upon suffering accepted freely to prevent suffering. (“Stevens: ‘The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering. Is that it?’ Nancy: ‘Yes, sir.’”) Nancy, if she could, would take Temple still further, to an acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior, to justification by faith through grace—“All you need, all you have to do, is just believe.”
Nancy goes straight to the heart of Apostolic preaching when she distinguishes between the didache and the kerygma and makes the didache dependent upon the kerygma: precisely the Pauline order, of course:
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. [The ethical maxims; Protestant modernism; ethical humanism] Women don’t. They don’t care what he said. They listens because of what he is. [That is, the unique Son of God, whose words therefore have the character of Revelation.]
But at the end Temple is still not sure that she has a soul, or that, if she has one, it is worth saving, or that God, if there is one, would trouble Himself to save it. “What kind of God is it that has to blackmail His customers with the whole world’s grief and ruin?” Nancy’s answer, though it exhibits the firmness of her simple faith, presumably is not such as could possibly convince Temple: “He dont want you to suffer. He dont like suffering neither. But he can’t help Himself. . . . He dont tell you not to sin, he just asks you not to. And he dont tell you to suffer. But he gives you the chance.” Though she compresses and foreshortens the theological explanation of historic doctrine, Nancy is actually surprisingly articulate in her outline of orthodox belief. Her statement of it connects her with Dilsey, who acted as a Christian but did not talk about the belief that made her so different from the Compsons.
The comparison of Nancy with Dilsey reminds us, though, of the degree to which Requiem is a lesser achievement than The Sound and the Fury. Like Dilsey, Nancy is a sympathetic character. Her words have power and authority because she is a redeemed character who has much to teach Temple, whether or not there is a part of her belief which cannot be accepted by more sophisticated minds. Yet we see very little of her before the climactic scene in the jail; we do not learn to trust her as we do Dilsey. We hear about her hymn-singing, and about Stevens’s willingness to join her in the singing; but she is more nearly a composite of all that we have learned to expect a Faulkner redemptive character to be than a convincing human being. We know the implications of nigger, whore, dopefiend, murderer: transposition of the world’s values, redemption through suffering for the lost and rejected. But we do not see her in action enough to understand why she felt driven to murder the child to prevent suffering. We suspect her of being a little mad.
What comes through with power in Requiem for a Nun is not a world created and sustained in all its immanent meaningfulness but a theme. It is a significant theme, significantly felt and expressed, but still a theme rather than a world. And this despite the “realism” of the dramatic sections. We remember Temple saying, as she leaves the jail, “Anyone to save it. Anyone who wants it. If there is none, I’m sunk. We all are. Doomed. Damned.” And Stevens replying, “Of course we are. Hasn’t He been telling us that for going on two thousand years?” And the question remains: Are we in fact then “Doomed. Damned”? Whether Christianity is more than a moral paradigm, an instructive myth which teaches that the only redemption comes through guilt acknowledged and suffering accepted, Requiem does not attempt to tell us. Nancy says yes, Temple recognizes her need to believe, Stevens is uncommitted but not unsympathetic. The long conflict between heart and head in Faulkner is left unresolved. Still, this is the book, instead of A Fable, on which Faulkner’s publishers should have lavished the decorative crosses.
IN A FABLE the preoccupation with religious issues which has been apparent in Faulkner’s work from the beginning breaks into systematic allegory. The novel was intended, it seems apparent, as Faulkner’s magnum opus, a definitive statement of the themes of a lifetime. Its meaning is so elaborately schematic, and its structure and texture so completely dominated by its abstract meaning, that it should perhaps not be thought of as a “novel”: the very word carries with it traditional expectations that A Fable does not, perhaps is not intended to, fulfill. The book is an intricate, multi-leveled, massively documented and sustained imaginative statement of Faulkner’s opinions on the possibility of salvation for man. It attempts to explain what Gavin Stevens has been saying obscurely for so long. To those who have followed Faulkner’s great career with sympathetic interest and admiration and concern, it is very unpalatable to admit that the widespread disappointment which the book aroused was justified.
The disappointment did not spring from any sense that the book failed to respond to the mood of the times. With isolated exceptions there was a general readiness to welcome it as a great work by a great writer. In the twenty-five year interval between The Sound and the Fury and A Fable, particularly in the last several years before A Fable, an immense public had discovered Faulkner. Reviewers were prepared to be overwhelmed, mystified, even shocked. What they were not prepared to be was bored. I doubt that any other Faulkner work has been put aside unfinished by so many readers of taste and adequate preparation—some of whom at least were Faulkner enthusiasts of long or recent standing.
Neither untimeliness nor insistence once more on themes long familiar can account for this reaction. Readers were prepared to be impressed by any Faulkner novel but especially by a work of this sort, exploiting myth and elaborating symbols, religious in tone without being committed to any religious orthodoxy, compounding Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Freud, and the Bollingen Series. A Fable is as timely as the issue of The Partisan Review that came out a few months after the novel with a “Self Portrait in Questions and Answers” of Ignazio Silone.3 To the question “What do you consider the most important date in world history?” Silone is said to have replied, “December 25 of the year 0”; and to a later question, “Have you confidence in man?” his answer is given as
I have confidence in the man who accepts suffering and transforms it into truth and moral courage. And so now I think that out of the terrible polar night of the Siberian slave labor camps, Someone may come who will restore sight to the blind.
The interview ends with the question, “Someone? Who?” and the reply “His name does not matter.” The very different backgrounds of Silone and Faulkner, the one a repentant Communist and the other a Southern conservative, have led them at last to remarkably parallel developments of opinion and attitude. The interview, like the book, is an indication of the climate of opinion in the mid-fifties. If A Fable disappoints us, then, it is not by a failure to express the mood and attitude and preoccupation of the present.
Nor does it represent any sharp change of direction in Faulkner’s own thinking. As long ago as the writing of the stories in Dr. Martino he had opened the story “Black Music” with a passage that foreshadowed A Fable more clearly than the image of the falling spire in Soldier’s Pay:
This is about Wilfred Midgleston, fortune’s favorite, chosen of the gods. For fifty-six years, a clotting of the old gutful compulsions and circumscriptions of clocks and bells, he met walking the walking image of a small, snuffy, nondescript man whom neither man nor woman had ever turned to look at twice, in the monotonous shopwindows of monotonous hard streets. Then his apotheosis soared glaring, and to him at least not brief, across the unfathomed sky above his lost earth like that of Elijah of old.
The old gutful compulsions, the lost earth, and Elijah: this is a vision compounded of the naturalistic discovery of the mechanisms of man and of his dreams, revealing both a sense of man’s utter loneliness in the “alien universe” and a sense of the degree to which he finds definition and hope only in religious myth. The tensions that characterize much of the best of Faulkner’s work spring from the outlook expressed in this description of an ordinary man; and the meaning of the allegory in A Fable, so far as I can make it out, springs from it too. The opinion that A Fable shows us a Faulkner who has decisively changed his mind seems to me not merely wrong in emphasis but quite mistaken. A Fable makes one doubt whether there has been any essential change in outlook from the earliest work to the latest.
“Out of Nazareth,” one of the first things Faulkner ever published, takes a direction that nothing in A Fable contradicts or even sharply qualifies. The sketch portrays a modern Jesus who is a fine young dreamer and idealist, sympathetically drawn, but doomed to failure. The old general in A Fable, an older Gavin Stevens, could be describing this poor idealistic young man when he addresses the Christ-figure of the novel: “You champion of an esoteric realm of man’s baseless hopes and his infinite capacity—no: passion—for unfact.” The sympathetic Christ-figure in “Out of Nazareth” carries around with him a copy of A Shropshire Lad. Another sketch of life in Chartres Street pictures the kingdom of God as revealed in the splinting of the stem of a broken flower loved by an idiot, thus foreshadowing not only one of the most moving scenes in The Sound and the Fury but the final impotence of the Christlike corporal in A Fable. Early and late, Faulkner’s Christ is like Melville’s: a deaf-mute in cream-colored clothes, a beautiful good young man with a stutter, a corporal going voluntarily to his death knowing himself forsaken and his mission a failure, going only because not to go would mean betrayal of the hopes of man.
In one significant sense A Fable is obscure without being ambiguous. Its title suggests not only its form—that of a fable, or morality, or allegory—but something of its underlying theme. The “fable” that is the subject here is identical with the “fairytale” that some thirty years earlier Faulkner had referred to, in “Mirrors of Chartres Street,” as having conquered the whole western world. The allegory of Holy Week is detailed and systematic. Beginning with an ironic Triumphal Entry, it proceeds through the major events of Holy Week with parallels too close to seem mere allusions. From the profuse trinitarian imagery of the opening scene, through the Last Supper to the death and “resurrection” of the Christlike corporal as the Unknown Soldier, the writing is overtly allegorical. The major figures of the Gospel story are here, recognizable by name or symbolic action if not by their characteristics—John the Baptist, Martha, Mary, Peter, Judas, St. Paul, Christ. Everything in the story is Biblical except the meaning. For the correspondences are at once close and twisted, obvious on the surface and obscure at a deeper level. The meanings that emerge from the Biblical framework would make the identifications seem ludicrous if it were not clear that this, like Robert Graves’s Nazarene Gospel Restored, is an interpretation of Scripture based on the supposition that historic Christianity was founded upon a hoax. It is as though Faulkner had set out to found, by rewriting the Gospel story, a sect humanistic in its ultimate theology but traditional, even orthodox, in its moral and psychological understanding of man. The process is almost the opposite of symbolic, as though Dilsey had been given Jason’s character and outlook and then labeled Mary and called a virgin. Not the real nature of the people and events here, but their arbitrary designations remind us of the people and events of the Gospel.
This seems an unprofitable matter to dwell upon: I shall give only one illustration. The supposedly Christlike corporal does not suggest the historic Jesus to me in the least. Not only is he a dim and shadowy figure about whom we know too little as a person and about whose expressly symbolic activities we know too much, he appears to be a young man without radiance or magnetism or eloquence or even, so far as we can really know, vision. Granted that in reading the Bible every man has a right to be his own interpreter, surely we may agree that the weight of history throws the burden of proof on anyone who would envision Jesus in so negative and colorless a way. Such an interpretation would not have seemed valid even to the spiritualizing “ethical Christianity” of the past. The corporal not only would not have been recognized as a type of Christ by Dante or Milton or Donne; he would not have been recognized by Matthew Arnold or Renan. Even Faulkner’s St. Paul figure, the runner, though quite un-Pauline in his naivete, is more satisfactory as a character. The runner’s last words on the corporal seem appropriate in a way we are not sure was intended. The sisters offer to show him the grave. “‘What for?’ he said. ‘He’s finished.’” In view of the way the Christ figure has been presented, one’s response to this is likely to be that he was “finished” before he ever began. Not his nature as we come to know it in the book but only his allegorical function makes the corporal seem in any way Christlike.
But even that is open to question. Jesus after all is recorded as having said that the peace he brought was not peace as the world knows it, and there has always been an important segment of Christian opinion which has held that wars and rumors of wars will continue until the end. At the very least we may say that there is no Biblical evidence that Jesus conceived his mission exclusively, or even primarily, in terms of stopping war. Faulkner’s Christ is likely to strike almost everyone as impoverished rather than ambiguous or luminant.
So far as I can understand them, I find the theological ideas in the book banal when they are not muddled or obscure. R. W. Flint has put the matter temperately. The book, he has said, “is everywhere vitiated by rampaging ideas, ideas divorced and disembodied, muddled and self-defeating.”4 Yet the effect of the realistic texture in which the Biblical allegory is embedded is to destroy the allegory. Reading the book, we have constantly to readjust our understanding as passages of vivid, but not meaningful, realism give way to Biblical echoes. A character is about to come alive for us, is almost created; but suddenly we are reminded that he is Peter or Judas or the Devil tempting Christ, and the likelikeness fades, the allegory seems questionable, and we find ourselves objecting that Peter or whoever was almost certainly not like this, would not have done or said this, looked like this. There are some scenes of heightened and powerful writing in the book, and a few more or less lifelike characters, but insofar as the events and people become lifelike, fictionally real, they cease to be credible allegorical types. What moves these people is never in the last analysis anything but the author’s opinions. The incarnation never takes place here, aesthetically or theologically. Fact and meaning do not blend and illuminate but destroy each other.
A Fable was presumably intended to leave open the possibility of some sort of hopeless hope—or at least to say that some such hope would in fact endure.5 Not, certainly, the Christian hope of Heaven suggested by the crosses so lavishly used in the book’s design: the final meaning here is clearly humanistic, obscurely naturalistic. When the shattered Runner at the end spits out blood and broken teeth to proclaim his confidence that he is never going to die, his meaning is a hidden one. But we may guess that the “immortality” he proclaims, like the survival in which Gavin Stevens affirms his, and Faulkner’s, faith in Intruder, is such as will be brought about by “the scientist and the humanitarian,” or perhaps even, as one of the mammoth slick magazines has recently opined, by the scientist alone.6
It is, perhaps, possible to argue that, since Faulkner has made it impossible to be certain that the body of the corporal was the one exhumed and placed in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, there is still a minimal ambiguity attaching to the central meaning. Perhaps there was a resurrection, not just an exhumation, even though probability seems to suggest otherwise. Perhaps so. At any rate, there still remains the belief in hope, the almost hopeless hope of “prevailing” through endurance, or because of endurance. But it seems to me that “prevailing” and “endurance” so conceived have very little meaning. This is pagan stoicism without spiritual or ethical content. It may be argued that the structure of the book does not finally and irrevocably deny the possibility of some sort of Christian faith.7 But I think we must insist, first, that if anything is clear about the book it is that the supernatural is in effect, though probably not in intention, ruled out. Finally, we should have to answer that it does not seem to matter very much: the meaning of whatever religious faith we can conceive to be asserted here is so impoverished that it does not appear an attractive, even if we can imagine it as a possible, option.
“I decline to accept the end of man,” Faulkner has said; and also, in a similar context, that he believes that
man is tough, that nothing, nothing—war, grief, hopelessness, despair—can last as long as man himself can last; that man himself will prevail over all his anguishes, provided he will make the effort to; make the effort to believe in man and in hope—to seek not for a mere crutch to lean on, but to stand erect on his own feet by believing in hope and in his own toughness and endurance.8
This was Faulkner speaking to the Japanese people not long after A Fable appeared. If the book’s achieved theme is not so much a firm belief in hope as an infirm hope that hope may, somehow, endure, I think the reason is that A Fable, despite its “rampaging ideas,” is also, partially and intermittently, a product of Faulkner’s deeper imagination. And his imagination has always been characterized by grief narrowly escaping despair. Despite its too conscious, its elaborately contrived, conception, A Fable is of the heart as well as of the head. The only parts of it that really live are of the heart.
IN THE HAMLET Snopes took over Frenchman’s Bend, in The Town he took over Jefferson, in the forthcoming The Mansion we are promised the spectacle of Snopesism triumphant in the state. By calling his latest book both The Town and “Volume Two” of Snopes, Faulkner has invited comparison of this work with The Hamlet and at the same time suggested that we should reserve judgment of this second part of the three-part novel until the whole thing is before us. But The Town suffers greatly in any comparison with The Hamlet, and any attempt to think of it as the second part of a unified work of which The Hamlet is the first part presents considerable difficulties.
The difficulties center in the conception of Snopesism, of the old order, and of the conflict between them. As far as Snopesism is concerned, we learn nothing essentially new about it in the new work, except Flem’s impotence, which is symbolically so appropriate that we ought to have guessed it from The Hamlet. But this is not the whole difficulty. In a sense we do learn something more about Snopesism—but what we learn does not so much develop as weaken and confuse the indictment of modernism made by The Hamlet. The real stumbling block to our reading this book as a continuation of The Hamlet is that, in terms of achieved content rather than repeated asseveration, Snopes has now become passive.
When Eula reveals Flem’s impotence to Gavin Stevens, she says
He’s—what’s the word?—impotent. He’s always been. Maybe that’s why, one of the reasons. You see? You’ve got to be careful or you’ll have to pity him.
This sudden revelation of Flem as victim more than evil-doer is the old Faulknerian change of perspective, from judgment of the deed to compassion for the doer.
In earlier works this reversal only (at most) threatened to destroy the work by deepening ambiguity to ambivalence, and at the same time strengthened the work, in another sense, by reminding us that the character in question was not just a symbol. But here it reinforces the abstractly symbolic interpretation of Snopes, encouraging us to do what we are already too strongly tempted to do. In Sanctuary we were reminded that Popeye, with his black rubber knobs for eyes and his stiff mechanical gestures, was not simply a symbol of evil modernism: he was an unhappy child. But in The Town we are invited to see the symbol of soulless modernism as properly to be pitied, not hated; invited easily, quickly, abruptly, with no dramatic embodiment of the new perspective. The result is that instead of coming suddenly to see Flem as a human being we begin to wonder what judgment of modernism is required of us.
Flem approached being an incarnation of pure evil in The Hamlet, and we may have speculated about why he was uniquely exempt from the otherwise universal Faulknerian rule of compassion. But the structure of that book did nothing to encourage any such speculation. Flem was something of an anomaly, to be sure, but there was a symbolic consistency in all that we saw and thought of him. We saw him act in “soulless” ways, doing things that were vividly credible; and we equated him, when we came to think about him and the book abstractly, with soulless modernism. But now we scarcely ever see him at all, and when we do he is not especially either hateful or vivid; yet we are asked to see him as victim. The familiar shift of perspective becomes ineffective here. There is no adequate fictional embodiment of the evil to make the pity difficult; nor is there any convincing presentation of the conditions that should inspire pity, there is only the surprise of the withheld information. The pity we are invited to feel looks more like sentimentality than like compassion set in a framework of clear moral judgment.
Paralleling the change of emphasis in the conception of Snopes is a change in the conception of the old order from which Snopes inherits. It is almost as though in The Town Faulkner were saying to his critics, particularly to the traditionalist critics, No, no! I was never so naive as to romanticize the old times, I never thought they were glamorous. The Town strikes one as protectively anti-romantic, acknowledging the romanticizing tendency only to repudiate it: “Because we all in our country, even half a century after, sentimentalize the heroes of our gallant lost irrevocable unreconstructible debacle,” and
Bayard Sartoris drove too fast for our country roads (the Jefferson ladies said because he was grieving so over the death in battle of his twin brother . . . ).
But of course, as we have seen, it was not just the Jefferson ladies who “romanticized” Bayard Sartoris, it was the total design of the book of which he was the center.
The faults of Sartoris are glaringly obvious today—to us and, it would seem, to Faulkner. One of them is a too immediate, and uncontrolled, identification with the old order, as in the final apostrophe to the Sartoris name. The fault in The Town, so far as the presentation of the old order is concerned, is just the opposite: not too much passionate identification but too little. Or rather, the tendency to identification is controlled by a protective irony which serves no aesthetic purpose—though it may serve a personal one—and actually undercuts the apparently intended theme. For if the old order does not somehow, after whatever necessary qualifications, stand for a superior way of life, then Snopes has no opponent and there is no conflict.
And that is very nearly the case. We hardly ever witness Snopes doing anything particularly outrageous. In fact, until very near the end we never even hear of his doing anything very shocking; rather, we hear of his receiving, passively, the favors showered on him by the representatives of the old order itself. Stevens and Ratliff debate endlessly what he will do next, but as far as we can tell for sure he seldom does anything at all. Mayor de Spain gives him the superintendency of the power plant, the vice-presidency of the bank, and finally the bank itself and his home. Gavin Stevens designs and executes the monument to Eula; and we are not convinced when Ratliff assures us that nevertheless “it was Flem’s monument.”
At one point Ratliff, speculating as usual on the triumph of Snopes, remarks on the lack of conflict: “No, not a contest. Not a contest with Flem Snopes anyway because it takes two to make a contest and Flem Snopes wasn’t the other one.” Rather, he thinks, it is as though Flem were playing a game of solitaire—against Jefferson. But Ratliff’s shrewdness is for once inadequate: for if it is true that Flem is passive, as Ratliff notes, it is equally true that “Jefferson” is compliant, even, at crucial moments, active against its own presumed interest. Whereas in earlier books representatives of the old order were often pictured as Prufrock characters, helpless to preserve values which they adequately appreciated and at least passively embodied, here there is no conflict at all. What, then, is the book about, what does it say?
Perhaps when we have the third part of Snopes the answers to these questions will be clearer. At the moment it seems truer to say not that The Town adds nothing to The Hamlet’s portrayal of the crisis of modernism but that it subtracts something. And its subtraction is not only abstract, from our sense of the issues involved—because the nature of the conflict has become unclear—but emotional and imaginative. The Town is a lesser work than The Hamlet in every way. Its humor is tamer, almost tired at times, especially when the material has been used before. Its compassion is less pure and less revealing—compassion for Eula, for whom one might quite easily feel sorry, rather than for Ike or Mink, for whom one’s natural feeling is disgust or contemptuous rejection. Its grief is less intense—not dramatically localized in a Houston, but spread over the broad view of things as seen from the hill above Jefferson.
In a key passage toward the end of the work Faulkner pictures Gavin Stevens looking down on Jefferson from this hill and seeing “all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day beneath” him. Stevens is more than ever a mask for Faulkner at this point. What he sees is, quite clearly, what Faulkner sees:
And you stand suzerain and solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral spangling . . . yourself detached as God Himself at this moment above the cradle of your nativity and of the men and women who made you, the record and chronicle of your native land proffered for your perusal . . . you to preside unanguished and immune above this miniature of man’s passions and hopes and disasters . . .
There is no distinction here between the voice of Stevens and the voice of Faulkner. In effect Faulkner is telling us what he feels as man and artist, and the final emphasis is on the achievement of a difficult detachment: “unanguished and immune.” But Faulkner in earlier and better works was not detached, not immune. The greatness of the best early works is certainly inseparable from the intensity of their passion, their grief, their attachment, an intensity always threatening to become excessive and unbearable but always just being controlled by technique. The immunity, the distance from the subject, the detachment so evident in The Town whether we look at the old order or at Flem, was bought at a high price.
Flashes of the old Faulkner are here, but only intermittently. The unresolved conflicts that we have noted over and over again in the earlier works have not been resolved, they have been put aside. The Town must have been easy to write, and it is easy to read. But it is not great Faulkner.