ABSTRACT
For in William Faulkner there is no such conversion as Hemingway and Dos Passos acquaint us with, no effort however imperfect at the integration of artist and society, or indeed of artist and modem life itself With Faulkner the descending spiral of isolation, rebellion, and denial, the heritage of American negation, reaches its final emphasis. With him, we make our last study of the influence of the nineteentwenties, forming, lasting over, and wholly conditioning the artist of the 'thirties. If the writing on the wall has already changed, each generation reading anew the chronicle of its origins and midwife to its own destiny, this one novelist stands and defies the vanishing script, like the Hightower ofLightinAugust, hearing still the thunder ofmartial hooves upon a cloud of phantom dust. The causesof this in Faulkner's work form an interesting sequence. Here is in some respects the history of a dissipated talent, but the history of the dissipation becomes as remarkable as the talent. So let us make our little pilgrimage to Jefferson, Mississippi(ascertain respectable scholars are wont to visit Hardy's Wessex or the Lake district of the English romantics), though here we shall hardly glimpse a rugged yeomanry, thatched cottages, musing shepherds, pastoral games. The Faulknerian countryside has its own customs nevertheless-deep southern region of Baptists and brothels,
of attic secrets, land of shadows and swamps alike in its interior and outward scene, presided over by its twin Furies, the odd conjunction in the Faulknerian epic of the Negro and the Female. Coming to Jefferson, Mississippi, we touch the capital of this world, which reaches backward in time to the origins of southern culture, forward to the horrid prophecies of its extinction; and ranges down in social strata from the Sartoris nobility to the new commercial aristocracy of the Snopeses; down to the last extremes of the modern dispossessed: the poor-white Bundrens of As I Lay Dying, the criminal Popeye of Sanctuary, the negro Christmas turned brute again by the society which had raised him from the animal. And even in these extremes and others -its overdone idiocy, its agglomeration ofperverts and fanatics, all the excesses of disease, its labored anguish and fabricated horrors-the Faulknerian geography is often quite compelling, memorable, ifhardly to the Wessex tourist, quite respectable. It is certain that William Faulkner not merely represents, but is the deep South as no other American novelist may quite claim to be. And whatever the sequence we shall trace here, it is certain that Faulkner remains in a double sense the unreconstructed rebel; living as he does in two pasts-that of his own youth, and in the other youth, tropical, cultivated, evanescent, of the South itsel£
[Geismar surveys Faulkner's novels up through The Hamlet, which 'ends with the rise to power ofFlem Snopes who cheats the inhabitants of Jefferson into believing there is buried treasure on Plem's acres. Worthless land, and worthless people. Thus Faulkner fills the pages of his latest novel with the folklore of imbeciles.']
What is curious, however, is the tone in which this last account is rendered. The sense of tragedy in The Sound andthe Fury, or that of disgust which lies behind the morbid action of Sanctuary and the inversions of Light in August, these have been succeeded by a sense of comedy, even gaiety, in The Hamlet. Faulkner seemsnow to accept the antics of his provincial morons, to enjoy the chronicle of their lowgrade behavior; he submerges himself in their clownish degradation. And in one sense why should he not? If the Snopesesare all the writer can discover in the modern world, the descendants of the gangling and giggling Wash Jones, if they now tread omnipotently the southern acres where Sutpen had his vision of dynasty, they are after all the victims and not the victors, they are the blind vessels of the final wrath. For in the Faulknerian mythology, the Wash Jones of Absalom,
Absalom! will himself be superseded by another sort of Sutpen, the illegitimate Sutpen from the colored branch, the Jim Bond ofthe novel, the final type of brutish negro idiot:
So we see, just as Faulkner was punishing the northern woman in Light in August, now he threatens the entire western hemisphere with the rape of the Negro. And what better images, after all, could the artist have found to express his discontent-this great hatred of the entire complex ofmodern northern industrial society-than the Negro and the Female? The emancipated negro who to the southern writer is the cause of the destruction of all he held dear. And now showing this negro as Joe Christmas, as Jim Bond, as the inhuman criminal, the degenerate who will dominate the civilization which freed him, Faulkner proclaims at once his anger and his revenge upon those who have destroyed his home. What more appropriate symbol than the woman, who to the southern writer is the particular treasured image of the bygone, cavalier society he is lamenting and lost in: the southern Lady, elevated and sacrosanct, the central figure of the southern age of chivalry, of those gallant agrarian knights who, very much like Quixote, went forth in 1861 to perish in combat with the dynamo. How shall the artist better show the universal debasement of modern times than to turn the pure Lady into the contemporary Female, now wanton, graceless, and degraded? The woman is both the homemaker (this new home in which the southern artist feelshimself the exile) and the original source of life itself (this new life against which all of Faulkner's work is the incessant protest). How shall the artist more aptly convey his total protest than to portray the Female source of life as itself inherently vicious? And as the last step in his sequence of
discontent, Faulkner mates the Female with the Negro, the savage as Faulkner feels for whom the southern Lady was sacrificed, and spawns out of his modem union the colored degenerate who is to reign supreme, the moronic emperor of the future.
