Читать книгу Faulkner from Within - William H. Rueckert - Страница 11
Оглавление1 Faulkner Discovers His Native Territory
Flags in the Dust (1926-1927; published 1973)
Faulkner was certainly much more correct in his response to Flags in the Dust than were the many editors who rejected his third novel. He knew what he had discovered, even if they had not, and, retrospectively, we now realize just how right he was. What he had discovered was what he was destined to create: Yoknapatawpha and its people; or, as he so nicely labeled it, his “own little postage stamp of native soil”—the territory his imagination would create, create in, and be nourished by all the rest of his life. In addition, he also discovered the narrative mode and novelistic structure that were to characterize all the rest of his novels. Flags in the Dust, for example, develops (unfolds) by shifting from one character to another throughout the novel until the story Faulkner wishes to tell about all those characters is finished. The principal characters whose stories Faulkner tells here are old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Belle, young Bayard, Byron Snopes, and Horace Benbow. Along the way, and usually through these or other characters, other stories are told, chiefly those of Colonel John Sartoris (old Bayard’s father, Aunt Jenny’s brother), young John Sartoris (young Bayard’s twin), the Snopes, the MacCallums, young Bayard’s first wife and child, the Negro couple young Bayard stays with after old Bayard dies of a heart attack during the last of his car accidents, old Will Falls, and Dr. Peabody. In telling these multiple individual stories by means of the technical device of interweaving (so common to Romances), Faulkner tells an overall story.
This is the way, for example, that The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! are narrated. The overall story is full of violent contrasts between characters (here, for example, Horace Benbow and young Bayard, the old and the young, Narcissa and Belle) and similarities that are not always immediately obvious—here for example, all those who may be described, at the end, by applying the title to them. Flags in the dust is an image of defeat, of the flags carried into battle that have fallen into the dust because those who carried them were killed or wounded, or because the flags were taken down and thrown in the dust and others raised in victory in their place. Those who are defeated in this novel are Colonel John Sartoris, his brother Bayard, old Bayard’s son (John), young Bayard’s twin (John), young Bayard himself, old Bayard, Simon, Byron Snopes, and, in a very different way, poor futile helpless Horace Benbow and Harry Mitchell. Only the women survive and triumph in this novel, and there are only a few of them: Aunt Jenny, who survives all of the Sartoris males except Benbow Sartoris, the last; Narcissa, who manages to survive her doomed, guilt-ridden, destructive husband; and Belle, who survives in her narcotic sensuality.
When Ben Wasson cut this novel and made it into Sartoris, he really destroyed Faulkner’s original intent and masked the true nature of Faulkner’s genius, which, among other things, was for great narrative originality (as we see in The Sound and the Fury, which Faulkner was writing even as Wasson was cutting Flags in the Dust) and plenitude. It was often Faulkner’s habit to let his characters tell their own stories (or, as he said, to listen to what they were telling him and write it down as fast as he could) or, in a variation of this, to let his characters tell someone else’s story (as in Absalom, Absalom!) or, in still another variation, to let his characters tell their own story as well as someone else’s (as in The Sound and the Fury where the brothers tell Caddy’s story; or, as in As I Lay Dying, where the Bundrens and others tell their own and Addie’s story). Every telling, then, is biased by the nature of the character telling the story (his/her own, or someone else’s) or by the limited third-person point of view Faulkner often uses, and there is always more than one narrative going on at a time.
Reading Flags in the Dust long after one has read all the rest of Faulkner, which is what I did, provides one with a real revelation into how suddenly Faulkner discovered what he was to be about the rest of his life as a novelist. As Douglas Day points out, almost everything that was to concern Faulkner later is in Flags in the Dust—except the Indians. (FD x) Though it is not yet named here, Yoknapatawpha County as Faulkner was to draw it for us in 1936 is all here, as are the different kinds of characters he was to people it with. There are the Snopes, the country folk, such as the MacCallums and Suratt (later, Ratliff); there are the blacks, both comical, semi-comical, and serious (as in the Negro family Bayard stays with over Christmas); there are the old Folks (Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, old Will Falls, Dr. Peabody), treated both comically and seriously; there is the great southern family (the Sartorises); there is the Civil War, there are the obsessed (Byron Snopes and young Bayard); the doomed and destructive (the Sartoris twins); the tormented (young Bayard); there are the finely drawn women, who survive; there are the educated and useless (Horace Benbow, Faulkner’s first lawyer, later made more useful and somewhat less foolish in Gavin Stevens); there is the grand conception of the place (both Jefferson and the surrounding country); there is the land and the hunting; there are the new machines (the cars here, and later the planes) that destroy; there is Dr. Peabody; there is the obsession with the past, especially the Civil War; there is the family that tends to run out in the male line (we never do hear much of Benbow Sartoris later on); there is Frenchman’s Bend and Will Varner and the abjectness of both the poor whites and blacks; there is Flem Snopes, who was to preoccupy Faulkner for many years after he first conceived him; there is the interest in incest (Narcissa and Horace); the corruption of sensuality (Belle and Horace); the self lost in words and futile idealism (Horace); the violation of ontological virginity (the intrusion of young Bayard into Narcissa’s life); and of course there was the interest in violence and victimization, present in Faulkner’s novels from his very first one on; and more, much more. A definitive catalogue is neither necessary nor useful.
But also of equal importance with the discovery of this native territory and its inhabitants (with many more to be added in the novels that followed) was Faulkner’s discovery of how to deal with, how to present, this material and the rich teaming life that his extraordinary imagination was creating. Writing Flags in the Dust certainly made the writing of The Sound and the Fury possible. I mean by this that Faulkner discovered in Flags in the Dust how to put a whole complex and diverse novel together by locating his narrative centers in a series of characters. Carried to an extreme, this produces the inside narrations (the tours de force) of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!; and the multi-stranded narrative structure of Light in August where we go from Lena to Byron to Hightower to Joe Christmas to Joanna Burden to Hines (and others), over and over again, as the novel progresses, carrying each strand of the overall narrative up to a certain point, dropping it, switching to another, carrying it forward (or backward, as in Joe Christmas’s and Hightower’s case), and so forth on through to the end of the novel where Lena and Byron join up in the conjunction of strands that completes the story, ending this tragic tale of violence and destruction, as it began, with gentle comedy.
In Flags in the Dust these narrative centers are, in the order in which we first encounter them:
1. Old Bayard and old man Falls, and through the two of them, Colonel John Sartoris. Old Bayard is returned to and followed through the events that occur in the present, from the return of young Bayard from the war, to his death in Bayard’s car in 1919. Old Man Falls returns occasionally during the course of the novel, usually for comic scenes, but is never a major narrative center.
2. Simon, and through Simon, other blacks such as Elnora, Isom, and Caspey. Simon is always treated comically when he is returned to, and is followed to his death near the end of the novel when he is killed for his foolish old man’s philandering. Like his white counterpart, old Bayard, Simon is seen in a variety of relationships to other Sartorises and other blacks.
3. Aunt Jenny, who is the oldest Sartoris in the novel, and is one of only three significant women in the novel. Like old Bayard, she is returned to often and followed right through to the end of the novel, where she visits the graves of all the dead Sartoris males; to the very last page, in fact, where she comments ironically on the future of the last male Sartoris. She functions as one of the main narrative centers of the novel.
4. Narcissa Benbow, who is the first of the developing characters. Old Bayard and Aunt Jenny are static and are simply portrayed in the course of the novel. Narcissa actually develops and changes and is put into three very complex relationships: with her brother Horace, with Bayard, whom she marries, and with Byron Snopes. She is also in a contrasting relationship to Aunt Jenny and Belle. She is one of Faulkner’s more fully developed females and is an interesting and complex character in her own right.
5. Belle, who is the third and last major female character. She is important, but is never developed in the way that Narcissa is, and often functions as a kind of recessed character who influences and seduces Horace. She is a direct contrast to Narcissa. Like Narcissa, she is followed right through to the end of the novel, after she has divorced Harry and married Horace and moved to another town with him.
6. Young Bayard, whose return from the war starts the action in the present and whose death in 1920 in an airplane crash, on the same day that his son, Benbow Sartoris is born, helps bring the novel to an end. The novel does go on after his death, but not for long—long enough to get him home and buried, to have the son christened with some name other than the two recurrent Sartoris ones (John and Bayard), and to show us the women surviving. Bayard is certainly the central character in this novel, or, if not that, the first among equals. Maybe it would be best to call him the centering character, just as Caddy and Addie, Joe Christmas, Temple and Thomas Sutpen are centering characters in their novels. He is returned to often, in a great variety of moods and actions. Through him, we learn of his twin, shot down in the War. Through young Bayard, the car (almost a character in this novel, just as planes are in Pylon), is introduced, and through the car, speed, power, violence, and death.
7. Many minor characters are introduced and function, briefly, as narrative centers: Dr. Peabody, Suratt, the MacCallums, Belle’s sister, Joan, and others. All of Faulkner’s novels are rich in the number and diversity of their characters.
8. Byron Snopes, old Bayard’s bookkeeper, who is obsessed with Narcissa and writes her all those letters she foolishly keeps and rereads and that are finally stolen by Byron and used in Sanctuary to blackmail Narcissa. Byron is returned to often and followed until his story is completed when, driven even crazier by Narcissa’s marriage to Bayard, he steals back his letters, leaves a last one, robs the bank, tries to seduce his fiancé, and flees the territory.
9. Horace Benbow is the last major narrative center, and the character Ben Wasson mostly cut out of Sartoris. He is introduced early in conversations between other characters but does not appear in the novel until relatively late (FD, 145). Like Bayard, he is returning from the war, not as a combatant, but as a worker for the YMCA. Just as Belle and Narcissa are contrasted, so also are Bayard and Horace—the man of violent action, tormented and doomed, who finds only a brief reprieve from his torment and doom with Narcissa; and the man of ideas, a person of “wild, fantastic futility,” a lawyer with no real practice, a glass blower who makes beautiful vases, oddly, a brilliant eccentric tennis player. Horace finally succumbs to the sensuality of Belle and is reduced to carrying the smelly dripping shrimp from the station to his home each week. Horace is very carefully portrayed by Faulkner and is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Like Narcissa and Bayard, he is a developing character rather than one who, like old Bayard, is simply portrayed and remains static. He is defeated as surely as Bayard is, but in a very different way.
The last section devoted to him in the novel (FD 339-47) after he has had his strange brief affair with Belle’s sister and has married Belle and moved away to another town, is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the novel and one that most clearly delivers the many different applications of the title to the characters in the novel. It is a section which, in typical Faulknerian fashion, comes after the masterful sequence which narrates what Bayard did after old Bayard dies in the car accident (FD 301-38). The two contrasting males, both so completely defeated, are brought together in this juxtaposition that reveals so much about how Faulkner worked as a novelist, showing us at the same time his great stylistic range, the verbal virtuosity, if you will, that was to characterize all of his work.
The narration by progression from one main character to another could be charted very precisely in the novel, as precisely, in fact, as the more obvious reuse of this technique by Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, where each shift is indicated for us by the name of the character. Furthermore, a careful study of the structure of the novel shows that, though Faulkner did in fact move the narrative forward by switching from narrative center to narrative center, he carefully blocked out the overall material of the novel into nine major units and it is this division into larger units that reveals the major concerns of the novel to us. Flags in the Dust was a much better made novel than the many editors who rejected it ever perceived it to be. Unit I—or all of the early part of the novel from pages 3 to 104—is really mainly concerned with the Old People and the blacks: that is, with old Bayard, old man Falls, Aunt Jenny, Simon and the other Sartoris blacks, and Dr. Peabody. Though the Old People and the blacks and their generally comic goings on are the main focus, Faulkner introduces, but does not develop, three of the other characters who will dominate the rest of the novel and give it its more serious concerns: Narcissa, Bayard, and Byron Snopes. It is Bayard’s return from the war that really starts the action of the novel in the present, just as it is his death that ends it. Parallel to this is the return of Horace and his marriage to Belle.
Unit II of the novel—pages 105 to 144—is primarily concerned with young Bayard and is a consecutive narrative which begins when he nearly scares Simon to death in the car, then goes into town and gets drunk with Rafe MacCallum, rides the wild stallion and has his accident, is taken back to town to have his head bandaged, but instead of going home, continues his drunken activities with Suratt and Hub, and later still, with Mitch, another drinking companion, and some Negro musicians, going around Jefferson serenading all of the single women in town, including Narcissa, and is finally put in jail for the night by the marshal. Up to this point in the novel, we have really known very little about young Bayard. We know him to be violent and somewhat sadistic (as with the episode in the car with Simon), we know him to be tormented and guilt-ridden—especially over the death of his brother. It is in Unit II that we see that there is more to young Bayard than this, and it is here, also, because of an interlude in the middle of the Unit devoted to Narcissa, that we get a clear foreshadowing of what will be the major focus of Unit IV—young Bayard and Narcissa.
Unit III—pages 145 to 199—is entirely devoted to Horace Benbow, to his relationship to his sister Narcissa, and to his relationship to Belle and the Mitchells. Horace is obviously the major male contrast to Bayard. Both return from the war, the one as a pilot, the other as a YMCA non-combatant. One is a tormented doomed man of action, the other is a troubled (not tormented) man of words. Both enter into relationships with women in the course of the novel, Horace with Belle, young Bayard with Narcissa, and both are defeated by the end of the novel, one by the woman and one by himself. Everything about these two male characters is contrasted in the novel, even the style in which their various Units is written, and the way in which each is defeated. Bayard returns and buys a racing car. Horace returns and takes up glass blowing. Horace returns seeking the “meaning of peace,” knowing probably that he won’t find it—especially when he leaves Narcissa for Belle—and Bayard returns, apparently seeking something that he missed or failed to achieve in the war: honor, a glorious death, victory in combat, something that would have satisfied his violent nature. Like every part of this novel, Unit III is very carefully constructed and masterfully written in a style that is appropriate to it. The focus is on Horace throughout, though we do get brilliant brief characterizations of Narcissa, the nature of her relationship to Horace, of Belle, and of vulgar Harry Mitchell. The Unit is filled with literary quotations and allusions, as would be appropriate to this Horatian character, and mostly depicts the slow, passive, apparently helpless succumbing of Horace to Belle’s sensuality. By the end of the Unit, Horace has abandoned his beloved and serene Narcissa for Belle, even though he knows it will not be a good marriage and that Belle will get fat and lose the very characteristics that attract him to her. Units II and III are probably the best examples in the novel of how Faulkner organizes his material in terms of narrative centers and limits the point of view and style to that narrative center—here Bayard, in Unit II, and Horace in Unit III. They are also fine examples of the violent contrast—in selves and style and material—that characterize this and so many other Faulkner novels.
Unit IV—pages 190 to 283—is primarily devoted to the relationship between Bayard and Narcissa. However, like Unit I, it makes use of multiple narrative centers and in this way finishes up most of the comical business having to do with old Bayard’s wen and brings the Byron Snopes-Narcissa part of the novel to its conclusion. What initiates and organizes the Unit is first of all another of Bayard’s accidents, this time the near fatal one where he turns over in the creek and is saved by the two Negroes. It is during his long convalescence with his broken ribs that the strange courtship between Narcissa and Bayard takes place. Almost against their wills, they fall in love (insofar as Bayard can fall in love), marry, and have what appears to be a happy tranquil relationship for a short period of time. This Unit ends, appropriately enough, with a conversation between Narcissa and Aunt Jenny about how Bayard has changed, but not changed, about how he does not really love anybody, even the baby Narcissa is carrying, and about how his driving of the car will never change. They know, as we know, and as Faulkner points out to us, that this period with Narcissa is nothing but an interlude, a delay in the inevitable progress of Bayard toward his appointed violent end.
Unit V—pages 283 to 299—follows the pattern already established and still to be repeated once more near the end of the novel, by taking us from Bayard and Narcissa to Horace. The focus is on Horace as he waits for Belle to get her divorce in Reno. Horace and Narcissa have their last meeting, and in his usual ironic and brutally accurate way, Horace summarizes the futility of his life and his helplessness to do anything about it. He knows what sort of a future he will have with Belle and tells Narcissa about it. Their day together over, she returns to Bayard and the Sartoris household. The second part of this Unit is devoted to the strange brief affair between Joan, Belle’s sister, and Horace. She has come to Jefferson, she says, to find out what he is like, and in a manner similar to his relationship to Belle, he succumbs to her aggressive sexuality until she leaves as abruptly and as mysteriously as she appeared. It is a puzzling episode because Joan is a kind of female Bayard whose violence and aggressiveness take a purely sexual form. Perhaps she is a purer embodiment of the motive that is intrinsic to Belle, and yet another example for us of Horace’s helpless passivity.
Unit VI—pages 299 to 338—return us to Bayard and begins very abruptly with yet another car accident. In an attempt to avoid another car on the muddy fall roads, Bayard is forced to drive off the road and down a steep bank near the graveyard—appropriately enough. It is during the descent that old Bayard has his heart attack and dies—just as Dr. Peabody and others said he would. From this point on to the end of the Unit, the focus is exclusively on Bayard. Faulkner does not have to tell us what Bayard’s response to the death of his grandfather is: we know it is in the same category as his response to the death of his twin brother and of his first wife and son. It adds more guilt and greater torment. When we see Bayard next, in this masterfully done Unit of the novel, he is riding his horse Perry to the MacCallums. He has begun his long flight, his futile attempt to escape his destiny, that will last until his death on June 20 in Dayton, Ohio six months later. It is December, and near Christmas. He goes to the MacCallums, who do not know of old Bayard’s death, and stays with this wonderful country family of non-destructive males long enough to hunt a bit and sort out what he will do. The stay with the MacCallums is unusual because we see none of the violence and destructiveness we know to be part of Bayard’s character. It is a peaceful, tranquil time, but clearly just another interlude, another delay in his relentless progress toward his inevitable doom. The MacCallums are clearly meant to be seen as a contrast to the Sartoris family, not just socially, but because the males do not have destruction bred into their genes—even those, who, like Bayard, have been to the war. When Bayard leaves, the day before Christmas, he has decided on flight and heads for the nearest train station. On his way there we have the wonderfully done scene with the impoverished Negro family, including the Christmas meal they share with him. There is no comedy here. In fact, it is one of the few times in the novel that Faulkner does not treat the blacks comically. The Unit ends when Bayard gets to the train station. Everything in this Unit is masterfully understated; though we know of Bayard’s anguish, it is never mentioned, and is always dealt with in terms of his futile attempts to escape it.
Unit VII—pp. 339-347—returns us to Horace and once again juxtaposes masterfully done episodes involving these two opposing but similarly defeated males. Horace’s story is finished off here. It is, somewhat ironically, spring. Horace is now married to Belle and has begun his “new” life with her by moving to another nearby town. Little Belle is with them. Horace is writing Narcissa a letter when the Unit begins; much of the Unit consists of Horace’s ironic meditation upon his fate (futility, defeat) and what he takes to be the fate of mankind. Just as Bayard’s last Units (VI and VIII) consist mostly of actions, so Horace’s consist mostly of thoughts with an occasional ironic action. After he finishes his letter, which ends with the ironic “Belle sends love, O Serene,” Horace goes off to mail it and pick up the shrimp that are shipped in once a week for Belle’s delectation. Our last image of Horace is of him walking home with the dripping box of shrimp. “C. S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., LL.D., C.S.” (345)—he thinks to himself as he lugs the shrimp home, stopping now and then to change hands. His ironic mediation on the fate of man continues and the Unit ends as he approaches his house, with Belle, red hair piled up on her head, still in a negligee, watching his approach suspiciously from the window, full of anger and frustration and “sullen discontent” at her present situation. It’s a great section. “She had ghosts in her bed” Horace says as he mounts the steps to his house.
Unit VIII—pages 347 to 358—takes us back, first indirectly (through postcards and telegrams), to Bayard in his flight across country, to Mexico, to Rio, back to San Francisco, then to Chicago and Dayton. In Chicago, we encounter him again, directly, in the fury and violence of his despair and torment. He is in a bar in Chicago and so potentially violent that he scares even the girl he is with. It is in this same bar that we also see the defeated Harry Mitchell—a rather neat touch on Faulkner’s part. The last we see of Bayard is when, testing a defective experimental plane, he crashes when the wings come off. It is June 20, 1920. Bayard’s story is finished and his tormented life has come to an end. What he could not accomplish in the war, or in his car, he finally accomplishes here, dying, as his twin did, in an airplane.
Unit IX—pages 361 to 370—is devoted to the Sartoris women, the survivors. Coincidentally, we are told that Simon has been killed philandering, which also brings his story to an end. The only story that begins here at the end is that of Benbow Sartoris, born the day his father was killed. But it is a story that is never completed by Faulkner. It is the women, the survivors, he is interested in here. We follow Aunt Jenny first. With her usual good sense and fortitude, after yet another death of yet another Sartoris male, she takes to her bed to recover her equilibrium. After she has done this, she visits the graveyards—both black and white—and the graves of all the dead Sartorises, as well as that of Simon. It gives us a nice symbolic image of one main concern of this novel. (Horace has also gone into his own graveyard with Belle.) We now switch to Narcissa, who has just had her son christened Benbow Sartoris hoping, we assume, that by avoiding John and Bayard she can somehow help him avoid the fate of all the previous Sartoris males. The novel began with old Bayard and old man Falls and the heroic legends of the Sartoris males and Confederate generals. We end here with the last three adult Sartoris males all dead (John, Bayard, old Bayard) and with the other significant male in the novel, Horace, defeated (if not dead). At the very end, we have Aunt Jenny, who has survived all these dead males, and Narcissa, who has the last Sartoris male we ever hear anything about. Everything is really brought to a conclusion here. Bayard has come and gone, into and out of Narcissa’s life; into and out of life itself. Narcissa returns to her “serenity” with her son, not really sorry Bayard is gone. Aunt Jenny, indomitable as ever, carries on and leaves us, at the very end, with an appropriate wry, ironic comment on Sartoris males—fools and scoundrels all, she says, whatever their first names.
By the end of this novel, you certainly have to wonder what the two families portrayed here—the Sartorises and the Benbows—have come to, and why. One can see two ideals, two sets of values operating in these families that Faulkner is going to come back to again and again: the heroic ideal of the Sartorises which always manifests itself in and must realize itself in action; and the intellectual, idealistic, word-centered ideal of Horace Benbow, which manifests in itself and realizes itself in inaction, in an inability to resolve certain kinds of contradictions, in passivity, in an excessive verbalization of life itself. We see this with great clarity in Mr. Compson and Quentin (in both of his novels) and later, in Hightower. I suppose we also see it in Darl, who certainly perceives the contradictions but cannot resolve them. And, of course, we see many variations of the action characters in Faulkner, some, like Bayard, driven to destruction, as Joe Christmas and Thomas Sutpen are, some just driven to action, as Jewel is. Jason is the ironic man of action in The Sound and the Fury. Caddy is the woman of action in that novel, driven, as Bayard is, but in a much different way and by very different motives.
True to its title, Flags in the Dust takes two families and shows how each, by a very different route, arrives at defeat in the male line. Bayard is no worse than Horace and, in the end, though dead, is no more self–destructive than Horace with his passive slide into death in life. Bayard’s death and defeat are simply more dramatic, more sensational. Faulkner certainly knew what he was doing when he paired these two polarized male characters, putting different causes of destruction and defeat (non-generative being) in each of them and then, in the course of the novel, following each to his appointed end. Horace has no more chance of avoiding defeat than Bayard does; whether defeat comes at the hands of a woman or a defective airplane really makes little difference here. Bayard is dead at the end of the novel and Faulkner gives Horace another chance in Sanctuary, only to defeat him once again in an even more terrible and conclusive way in that novel.
What Faulkner achieved by organizing this novel as he did was to combine the linear movement of the narrative, which, in this novel, tends to move steadily forward in time with only occasional flashbacks, with a kind of clustering effect around each of the main characters or ontological centers: old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Bayard, Belle, Horace, Byron Snopes. With the exception of Byron Snopes, these main characters are all in a variety of relationships to each other and come together periodically in the course of the novel. One way to understand what Faulkner is doing in this novel is to diagram the clusters for each of the main characters by indicating the significant relations for each in the novel. Byron Snopes only has two significant relations, and those are with Narcissa and Virgil, his letter writer. Horace really only has two significant relationships, and those are with his sister Narcissa and with Belle. There are minor relationships with Harry Mitchell, the husband he compromises, with Joan, Belle’s sister, and his father, Will Benbow (long dead). Narcissa has many more relationships: with Belle, her rival, with Aunt Jenny, with Byron Snopes, with Aunt Jenny and old Bayard, and of course with Bayard. Old Bayard probably has the most: with old Will Falls, with Dr. Peabody; with Aunt Jenny; with Simon; with Bayard, his grandson; with the other household blacks; with his father, Colonel Sartoris; with John, his other grandson. Aunt Jenny is like old Bayard, but has a much more involved relationship with Narcissa. Like old Bayard, she is one of the connectors between the past and the present. Bayard, like Narcissa, has a whole series of very complex relationships: to his dead brother, whose death he blames himself for; to his dead first wife and son, whose deaths he also blames himself for; to old Bayard, whose death is in fact his fault and hence another source of guilt for him, another part of his doom and torment; to the MacCallums, with whom he hunts and whom he identifies with his twin, John; to Suratt and Hub; to Simon and Isom, through the car; to Aunt Jenny, naturally, who, with old Bayard, raised him; and of course to Narcissa, who brought him a brief reprieve from his torment, a reprieve that is depicted in wonderful scenes of quiet domesticity, hunting, and farming—even including a dinner which Horace attends; and finally with his car which, accident by accident, marks his progress toward his appointed end when he deliberately tests what is clearly a defectively designed plane and crashes when the wings come off.
Ontologically, Bayard, Narcissa, Horace, and, perhaps, Belle, are the most interesting characters in a novel literally swarming with wonderfully depicted characters—including even the most minor ones, like the specialist who is to remove old Bayard’s wen, only to have it fall off on the appointed day just as old man Falls said it would after he treated it with his salve; or Dr. Alford and Dr. Peabody (and his son); Caspey; Hub and Suratt; the girl Horace plays tennis with; Joan, Belle’s sister; the Negro family Bayard spends Christmas with; the strange intense people in the bar with Bayard in Chicago; Harry Mitchell, defeated also by Belle, as we see him in the same Chicago bar; the various MacCallums (Buddy, Henry, Virginius, Rafe), the two blacks who rescue Bayard from his overturned sunken car; the cafe owner; old man Falls; Aunt Sally; even characters we never meet directly, like Colonel Sartoris and young John Sartoris.
The genius of a novelist, like that of a playwright, expresses itself in the creation of characters and, additionally, in a novelist, in telling stories. This novel is full of wonderful stories: in fact, it begins with one about Colonel Sartoris and the Yankees, as told (shouted) by old man Falls, and, overall, tells part of the story of the Sartoris family (to be told more fully, later, in The Unvanquished) and most of the story of the Benbow family, more of which will be told later in Sanctuary, especially the part having to do with Horace, as he tries, with his usual futility, to escape his useless and demeaning life with Belle, the voluptuary, and the part having to do with Narcissa’s helping to defeat her brother’s efforts to do something good and useful in his life. Whatever this novel is about is contained in the stories of these two families and in the wonderful comedy that Faulkner always made a part of his novels.
Bayard’s tragic story is told in the context of old Bayard, Aunt Jenny and the Sartoris family history in general. The Sartoris family history is primarily a history of Sartoris males (all named John or Bayard) who die violently. As old Bayard says, he is the only Sartoris male to live past fifty. Colonel John Sartoris was shot on the streets of Jefferson in 1873 when he has fifty. His brother Bayard was killed in the Civil War in 1862 at twenty-four. Old Bayard’s son dies in 1901 of yellow fever at an early age. One of his sons, John (Bayard’s twin), is killed in 1918 at age twenty-five when he is shot down by the Germans in World War I. Old Bayard dies in 1919 of a heart attack in Bayard’s car at age seventy. Bayard dies in 1920 when he crashes, test piloting a defective plane, at age twenty-seven. The only surviving Sartoris is Benbow Sartoris, born the day his father dies, about whom we really know nothing.
Bayard and his twin, John, seem to have been born with some self-destructive impulse in their genes, some impulse or code of values which required them to always be testing themselves, to always do the wild, often violent, and dangerous thing, even the foolhardy thing. John must certainly have known that he had no chance at all against German planes which could fly higher and faster than his plane; Bayard certainly knew that driving as he did put him always at risk, just as riding the nearly wild stallion, or flying a defective experimental plane did. They are romantic self-destructive selves and seem to share in Faulkner’s idea of the kind of heroic self he always identified with the Confederate Army. But there is more going on with Bayard than this. We do not really know enough about Bayard (or John) to say with any precision exactly what they were before they went off to the war. We know only that they did wild, crazy things, at home and away at college; that they were passionately devoted to each other; that, as he does later, Bayard found some satisfaction and apparent temporary repose in his love for his first wife. What we really know about Bayard dates from the death of his brother, a traumatic event to which he returns over and over again and for which he blames himself. It seems to be the primary source of his torment and the event the effects of which he only escapes from momentarily with Narcissa. Before Narcissa, Bayard not only punishes and threatens himself but victimizes others, usually with the car. If he only put himself at risk, as he does when he crashes in the plane, that would be one thing; but he is always endangering others by his actions, in a classic scapegoating pattern of action. It is never a question in this novel of whether Bayard will kill himself, but only when, and who else, before he dies in one of his accidents. It is the death of his grandfather, in yet another car accident, that seals his doom and precipitates the final sequence of actions that result in his death. What we have in Bayard is the first of Faulkner’s driven, tormented, guilt-ridden, doomed selves, one who is both destructive and destroyed, apparently because it is in the nature of his character to be this way and because some set of values he commits himself to causes him to act in this way.
Narcissa is the very opposite of Bayard, having led a serene, quiet, secluded, symbolically incestuous, life with her beloved brother Horace. Into this serene and quiet life comes Bayard, her antithesis, and, in spite of herself, Narcissa is roused to passion and falls in love with Bayard. It is a brief happy conjunction for both of them when it finally occurs, and an event that occurs over and over again in Faulkner’s later novels, most interestingly, probably in The Wild Palms. Narcissa experiences something she would never have known without Bayard: passionate love—always a good thing in Faulkner; and Bayard, for a brief period of time, is free of his torments and reprieved from his doom. Exactly who is at fault and how the accident in which old Bayard dies comes about is never really made clear; what is clear, is that in Bayard’s case, in the case of most Sartoris males, fate is fate and Bayard will take his guilt-laden self into non-being and end his torment in the only way available to him. He tries flight, alcohol and sex first, but none of these work. As in the case of Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson, only death will do the job.
Narcissa is described in this way at the end of the novel:
All of Narcissa’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry. (FD 368)
This passage nicely sums up the paradoxes or perhaps the complexities of loving and living with someone like Bayard—a sort of time bomb set to go off at some unknown time in the future. Even if one loved him passionately, as Narcissa most certainly did, it would be a relief to have him dead, and she does after all have their son.
If Bayard is the explosive violence that not only threatens him but everyone around him (Simon, Isom, Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, Narcissa, and anyone he happens to meet on the road in his car), Horace Benbow is the very opposite, just as Belle is the opposite of Narcissa. Just as Bayard abruptly breaks into Narcissa’s life, Belle, always described as a narcotic, even a kind of poisonous flower, slowly, surely insinuates her sensual, sexual self into Horace’s life and takes him over until his essentially passive, nearly useless life is further reduced to serving her needs. As Narcissa correctly says, Belle is “dirty” and Horace smells of her. Why Belle wants Horace is never quite clear. But Horace as a character is quite clear and clearly a forceful contrast to Bayard. Both Bayard and Horace are useless, the one because he is so tormented and destructive and the other because he is so passive and incapable of any kind of useful social action. Bayard is always described as doomed; Horace is always described as futile, as the embodiment of knowledge that cannot or does not want to act, as a self that has no ambition beyond making beautiful useless glass vases, as a lawyer whose whole practice is tending to the wills and minor legal affairs of the rich, as a male who, until the advent of Belle, was content with a symbolic incestuous relationship with his sister. Faulkner tells us that Horace was lost in words, (Bayard, we are told, never read any book); that he believed too much in words, that, in a sense, he was seduced by words just, as, later, he was seduced by Belle (and briefly, by her sister). If Bayard is overdefined, Horace is underdefined, and both are defeated. The only difference in their defeats is a matter of degree: Bayard is dead; Horace is dead to the world outside of his house. By the end of Sanctuary, when Faulkner returns to this pitiful ineffectual character, he is as good as dead.
Narcissa survives both Horace and Bayard; she even survives the odd titillations of Byron Snopes’s letters which, in a nice symbolic touch by Faulkner, she keeps in her lingerie drawer. She survives, just as Aunt Jenny has survived the deaths of all the male Sartorises and the violence that has characterized the lives of all the males except old Bayard who, we later learn in The Unvanquished, denies the gun and the code of honor that goes with it. Neither of these women is destroyed, nor are they destroyers. It is Belle who is the destructive woman, along with her sister, and it is their sexuality that is seductive and destructive. If Belle is defeated, it is only ironically because Horace does not have as much money as she needs to satisfy her self-centered desires (sexual and otherwise) and she might better have stayed with Harry. It is the Sartoris women who survive to recognize the fact that flags in the dust is an image for men, especially the Sartoris men who are, as Aunt Jenny says, scoundrels and fools. (FD 370)
The defeated in this novel are all men: old Bayard, Simon, Bayard, John, Horace, Harry Mitchell; Byron Snopes; and the causes of their defeat vary: passively losing one’s self in the sensuality of women; some source of torment intrinsic to the self that leads to suicidal actions; philandering; a bad heart stressed beyond its limits by fright; or an ontological need to take risks.
But defeat is only a part of this novel, and to focus on it to the exclusion of the other elements that make up the novel is to misrepresent (mis-chart) the native territory Faulkner discovered in writing this novel and to misunderstand why it was that Faulkner was so excited by what he had created and so convinced, as he says in his letter to Liveright, that it was the “damdest best book” he would see that year, and that it was perfectly entitled. (Selected Letters, 47; Letter of 16 October 1927). Such a mis-emphasis would cause us to ignore the undefeated, to ignore the rich and varied life that flourishes everywhere in Yoknapatawpha apart from the defeated, and, especially, to ignore the comedy that everywhere militates against defeat, that says no to defeat and tragedy everywhere, here, and throughout Faulkner. The MacCallums are not defeated, even those who, like Bayard, have been to the war; the blacks as a group, always so full of life and laughter in Faulkner, are never defeated; and some, like the poor couple Bayard spends Christmas with, have a dignity and fortitude Faulkner always admired; Aunt Jenny, old Bayard before his heart attack, old man Falls, Dr. Peabody—the old folks in this novel and everywhere in Faulkner—are not defeated and are always full of life and value; and the comedy, the wonderful Faulknerian laughter, enlivens this novel with its double vision everywhere.
Faulkner had a very dialectical mind and imagination. He never saw things singly and had the ability to see around corners to the other side of things. There is no Faulkner novel without its comic voice: even the relentlessly destructive and grim As I Lay Dying is relieved of some of this grimness by the comic account of how Jewel got his horse and by its ironic, comic ending; and in the midst of the rot and corruption of Sanctuary we find, not only the comic story of the Snopes boys and the whorehouse, but the always comic behavior of its Madame and her friends; and in the anguished account of the Compsons, we have in Quentin’s section the story of the little girl who follows Quentin around, yet another comic negro, and Quentin’s foolish friends; and later, in Jason’s section, the always half comical Jason; and in Part 4, the comic account of Jason’s futile pursuit of Quentin II. One can go through all of the novels in this way and find that there was never a subject so serious—even in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s most “tragic” novel—that it could suppress this other, comic voice: shrill Shreve in the cold room at Harvard, baiting Quentin, inventing the missing parts of Sutpen’s story; Sutpen’s “niggers” tracking the fleeing French Architect; Harry Willbourne writing stories for True Confessions; all the half-crazed miners who can’t speak English at the mining camp; and maybe, most perfectly, the serio-comic tall tale of the Tall Convict set into an alternating and clearly dialectical relationship to the passionate tragic love story of Charlotte and Harry.
The insistent, recurrent comic voice is everywhere evident in Flags in the Dust and works against the tense account of Bayard’s tormented, violent life and the futility of Horace’s life (Faulkner’s account of Horace is always somewhat tinged with comedy.). Even in that part of the novel devoted to this brief doomed life, Faulkner inserts the wonderful comic account of Bayard and his drunken crew driving around serenading all of the single women in Jefferson—among them Narcissa; and in the account of Horace’s life we have the sad but comic image of the dripping smelly shrimp. Some of the comedy is at the expense of the blacks, especially the males, since Faulkner seldom used black females as a source of or occasion for comedy; some of it is generated by old Bayard, old man Falls, and Aunt Jenny, especially in the various encounters between these old folks and the doctors in the novel—Dr. Peabody, Dr. Alford, the specialist, and old Will Falls, the folk doctor. Another major source of comedy is the many encounters between whites and blacks in the Sartoris household, especially since it gives Faulkner a chance to write his masterful, usually comic, black dialect. Always good at social comedy, Faulkner treats all of the gatherings at the Mitchell household ironically and comically—whether it is a ladies party, a tennis gathering, or a birthday party for Little Belle. Even Faulkner’s treatment of the obsessed, love-sick Byron Snopes has comedy in the person of Virgil, his copyist, and the way in which Virgil cons Byron into buying him off with presents. The effect of all this comedy in all of its different forms is to break up or provide relief from the interrelated serious stories that unfold in the course of the novel: Bayard’s story from his return to his death; the Bayard-Narcissa story; Narcissa’s story; the Horace-Narcissa story; the Narcissa-Byron Snopes story; Horace’s story from his return to his marriage to Belle; and finally, the Horace-Belle Mitchell story. Or, in much simpler terms, the Bayard, Narcissa, and Horace stories, since it is these three, and the two families, that are the central concern of the novel.
When we have finished this novel and reread it a few times, we have, as usual from an experience with a Faulkner novel, a head full of memorable characters (with their stories) who stay with us more or less indefinitely. Faulkner said that his characters were always talking to him in his head and that he only wrote down their stories. In a sense, Faulkner has recreated that experience in our heads and we are left with a head full of Faulkner characters telling us their stories; often their stories continue in other novels, as with Flem Snopes, Dr. Peabody, Horace, Narcissa, Miss Jenny, and old Bayard; often, similar kinds of characters occur in later novels, as with Bayard; and of course, the same place, Yoknapatawpha, is returned to again and again until we come to know it and its inhabitants as well as our own native territory, and can call up most of its inhabitants at will and remember, in great detail, most of the hundreds of stories Faulkner told about them. What is amazing about Flags in the Dust is that so much of what was to come is in it in some form. I do not mean to suggest, as is sometimes done with early works, that all of Faulkner is here or implicit in this novel: it isn’t, and one could make a long list of what is to come that is not here because it has not been imagined yet. But the place has been imagined and described, along with some of its characters; and the different voices (the tragic, the comic, the narrative) have spoken out; and a recurrent narrative technique, later much refined and perfected by Faulkner, has been developed. Faulkner had a long and incredible creative journey to make after this novel; it would last thirty-five years and would produce seventeen more novels, a great many stories (forty-two, alone, in the Collected Stories, nine-hundred pages of them) and overall, an imaginative vision and a fictional world of great power and fecundity—probably the most remarkable creative achievement of any modern American fiction writer. Only Hemingway, perhaps, can rival him, but he does not really have either the power or complexity of Faulkner, nor did he write as many great works.
Faulkner’s discovery of his native territory and of the extent or quality of his own native talent probably account for his own great excitement at having written Flags in the Dust. The leap into greatness that occurred when he conceived and wrote The Sound and the Fury—a novel he ironically thought no one would ever publish—is less of a mystery after one has studied Flags in the Dust—or what we might think of as the novel Ben Wasson edited Faulkner’s genius and intention out of to produce Sartoris. We should also remember that Ben Wasson did this with Faulkner’s approval because Faulkner himself either wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. When Wasson tried to do the same kinds of things to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner undid them all and insisted that the novel be published as he wrote it. By The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner was sure of his own talent, the rightness of what he did, even the need for the extreme technical difficulty and virtuosity of The Sound and the Fury. That is, Faulkner knew that his genius was greater than the easy going, easy reading manner and subject matter of Flags in the Dust. Like all geniuses, he soon discovered the true nature of his genius and he knew, as all of them know, that his genius must out, no matter what form it took. The Sound and the Fury is the first authentic expression of this genius.
