Harry first meets Charlotte at a party she and her husband are giving (and to which he has not been invited). A page later, she has grabbed him by the arm, “ruthless and firm, drawing him after her” (IIF 520). Within the next two pages they have spoken, casually but portentously. Then, a page later—he has gone home and a couple of days later returned to the Rittenmeyers’ for dinner—she says it all: “What to—Do they call you Harry? What to do about it, Harry?” (523). A few hours together at most, but the die is cast, their Liebestod is launched. From this point on, unsmiling and lecturing him as needed, Charlotte directs the lovers’ moves. This involves systematically destroying all moorings, refusing all compromise, cutting all cords. Grasping his hair, striking his body, “rous[ing] him to listen with a hard wrestling movement” (557), hammering his belly, jabbing him with her “hard and painful elbow,” Charlotte conducts her lover undeviatingly into the fatal conflagration (“grave-wound, womb-grave, it’s all one”) that is their erotic union. Apparently, he needs to be directed. For her part, she knows from the beginning that it must be tragic: “love and suffering are the same thing and … the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself” (526).
“Do they call you Harry?” His name does not matter, just as no character in “Old Man” is granted a name. We are dealing with nameless liquids, not stable solids; only fixed entities have names that they fondly believe bestow reliable identity. The element in him to which she has all but chemically bonded is anonymous. If I Forget Thee reaches for the indescribable motions of “pitch darkness”—where the perquisites of identity lose their purchase, on the roiling water, in the heaving bed—and the awful release or inundation of liquid begins. “As though the clotting which is you had dissolved in the original, myriad motion”—so Faulkner described (in As I Lay Dying) this exposure to currents stronger than selfhood. But characters retained their names and identities in that novel—Darl and Jewel and Cash and Addie. With their names came both the richly textured turmoil of a family’s distress and the dark and abiding humor of siblings who have long lived in each other’s presence. Family drama and humor are absent from “Wild Palms” (there is dark humor aplenty in “Old Man,” albeit mainly at the convict’s expense).
Charlotte’s children are whisked out of the narrative after two brief mentions. When Harry reminds her of what she is about to abandon—her children—she replies, smoking, “I wasn’t thinking of them” (IIF 526). More brutal yet, Harry has earlier identified them (at the party) as “two not particularly remarkable children” (522): as though they might be more text-worthy—and to be parented rather than orphaned—if they had been more “remarkable.” It is a quietly callous narrative moment, and one wonders if Faulkner has not—in wish-fulfillment fashion—imaginatively reversed his own heartbreaking dilemma: either Jill or Meta. Here it is different: forget the children, head pell-mell toward the “womb-grave,” indict everything else as defection. “I told you once,” Charlotte lectures Harry late in the narrative, “it isn’t love that dies, it’s the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn’t deserve the chance any more to love” (643).
Love is figured as an appalling invasion. Not just that it is bound for destruction: Harry’s abortion knife will end Charlotte’s life as inevitably as the convict’s sharp tin can will cut the pregnant woman’s umbilical cord and let her baby live. More deranging than the fatal destination is the nightmarish journey. There is no foreplay here, no intimacy, no pleasure—no evidence that they even like being in each other’s company. The story insists on this searing condition as love, but it has equal title to be called torture. As in Requiem for a Nun later (1951), Faulkner is at his grimmest when he envisages erotic love. Scorched earth: there is no place they can stand, no place they can go, no activity other than intercourse they can engage in together. They have deliberately burned up possibility itself. Was this the underside of Faulkner’s doomed affair with Meta Carpenter? As though beneath her docility and charm, he found the iron of impossibility: they could not live in society, and they could not sustain a sanctuary outside it. Reduced thus, they had no choice but to consume each other—and then to swear solemnly not to forget the pain that went with consummation. “I know grief is the inevictable part of it, the thing that makes it cohere,” he had written her. In kindred fashion, ensconced in his prison cell and dedicated to the lifelong memory of what has been lost, Harry ends “Wild Palms” by claiming loyally, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief” (IIF 715). How powerfully this story testifies—more powerfully perhaps than Faulkner knows—to the destructiveness of illicit love, even as it insists that only illicit love is authentic.
It is well known that Faulkner had trouble writing this novel. His ingenious solution was to pursue each of the narratives until it petered out, and then to switch to the other until it, too, dried up, and then back again. Each story, divided into five subparts, is interwoven with the other; Faulkner’s novel remained faithful to its rhythm of conception. Critics ever since have wondered about the aesthetic logic of If I Forget Thee’s narrative structure. I argued earlier that, fundamentally, the two narratives rehearse the same explosive materials. They intersect as point and counterpoint in a common dance of carnivalesque disaster.
Yet Faulkner’s difficulty in completing this book may be as telling as any unifying pattern implicit in its structure. As with A Fable later, something stubbornly lodged in the writer’s imagination was reluctant to keep plunging into these materials. Does the fact that, by contrast, he was able to write As I Lay Dying in two months testify not only to the earlier Faulkner’s creative fecundity but also to his grasp on the familial and regional interrelationships that propel that novel to its conclusion? He sometimes described As I Lay Dying as a “tour de force”—a narrative in which he exposed his characters to fire and flood—but the phrase is even more apt for “Old Man.” Family and region have dropped away: the narrative pits a single man existentially against the elements. “Old Man” lives mainly in the convict’s beleaguered (but not otherwise interesting) head, as it attends to his endlessly violent encounters. Fabulous though “Old Man” be, it is—by comparison with As I Lay Dying—perhaps overwritten. It cannot vary its slew of operatic scenes of vertiginous assault. “Not again!” the reader thinks, when yet another catastrophe careens upon the convict (and starts the blood flowing again from his nose). “Not again!”—as in “not another disastrous encounter!”—hardly characterizes the reader’s response to the emotional trials of the Bundren family. Put otherwise, Faulkner’s entry into the Bundren family’s astonishing projections and identifications (“My mother is a fish”) has little counterpart in this nonrelational narrative of disasters grimly engaged and survived.
As for the difficulty in completing “Wild Palms,” the reasons may not be far to seek. Faulkner’s chaotic emotional life is perhaps too implicated in these erotic materials. It is not for nothing that he pictures a pen thrust through a wall, an invisible piece of paper, and pitch darkness. Something in the writer wants to withdraw that pen even as it wants to extend it further. Finally, adult intercourse is—without exception—traumatic territory in Faulkner’s imaginary. It is one thing for Benjy and Quentin to anguish over their beloved Caddy. Their distress is bathed in the softened light of balked desire, not the scorched-earth glare of orgasmic consummation. (Caddy’s sexual release is narratively off-stage; so is her daughter Quentin’s, at novel’s end.) “The man called Harry” and the woman named Charlotte enact their love affair on-stage. Not that this novel is Lawrentian in its narrative of intercourse—Faulkner has no interest in body parts or the moment-by-moment experience of coitus—but it remains dedicated to articulating his thinking about intercourse. Sexual release emerges as both devastating and sublime. It is as though Faulkner had to make fictionally coherent a realm of experience that remained for him beyond cohering.
A year later, at any rate, his fict
ion would return to Jefferson and Yokna-patawpha County—replete with that setting’s familiar space, linear time, and interrelated family histories. Rural humor, penetrating social analysis, and the texture of class relations would feature prominently in The Hamlet, making it one of his most admired—indeed, Balzacian—novels. (Readers who do not otherwise care for Faulkner often esteem The Hamlet.) But that novel would continue to explore, more briefly but no less forcefully than If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, the madness of love. It was 1940, after all, and Meta Carpenter was still raging in his blood.
“BREATHING IS A SIGHT-DRAFT DATED YESTERDAY”: THE HAMLET
Faulkner was in his early forties when he put this book together, largely out of stories already published. He had been meditating Snopes materials ever since 1925, and The Hamlet expertly taps a Yoknapatawpha County mastered into its narrative possibilities. Unlike a world composed of two lovers in “Wild Palms,” Frenchman’s Bend (a village near Jefferson) in The Hamlet sports a generous cast of characters and a capacious setting and history. Uncle Will Varner seems to have been running the place forever. The novel opens on a challenge to his hegemony: the arrival of the first Snopes at the community’s social and financial hub, Varner’s country store. The skeletal plot for the entire trilogy involves the Snopeses’ economic takeover of the region, beginning in the opening scene. Flem Snopes—the major Snopes, though flanked by his truculent father Ab and an unending slew of bizarrely named cousins and nephews—competes silently, systematically, and successfully with the Varners for power. By the time of The Mansion (1959), Flem will have made his way into Jefferson and attained wealth, power, and respectability.
Critics sometimes portray this as a struggle between the Old South of Compsons and Sartorises and the New South of Snopeses. Will Varner, the boss of Frenchman’s Bend, is no aristocratic master, however, but one of the boys—the most powerful, to be sure, but not a man descended from the plantation model. More, Faulkner does not heavily moralize the Varner/Snopes conflict. Varners are as likely as Snopeses to exploit their neighbors, but in more traditional ways. The moment when Flem, now the chief clerk of Varner’s store, makes Uncle Will pay for his plug of tobacco identifies the key change taking place. A traditional scene of exchange—where the players know each other, even realize, while being financially accommodated, that they are being exploited—is ceding to an abstract, contractual model. Even the boss must pay; the transaction goes down on the books. Flem fleeces his clientele on a scale hardly attempted by the Varners, but he does so legally.
Legal outmaneuvering functions as the lifeblood of The Hamlet. Its vignettes circulate around one-upmanship transactions—horse-trading, sheep-purchasing, the buying and selling of land. Totally lacking in personality, Flem would seem an unlikely protagonist, yet he remains (with Ratliff) the central figure of this trilogy it took Faulkner almost two decades to complete. Although the narrative refuses to access his consciousness—either Flem is unknowable or there is nothing inside to know—it shrewdly delineates his outer features:
He did not speak. If he ever looked at them individually, that one did not discern it—a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco, and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. (HAM 777)
“Predatory,” but otherwise blankly impenetrable (his age undisclosed, his mouth a closed seam), Flem is in a community but not of it, as he is in a family but not of it. His cousin Mink will ultimately put him to death for his lack of family piety. If we ask what in the characterologically impoverished Flem Snopes commands Faulkner’s attention, one trait emerges already. He is his own man, independent, unreachable, impregnable. He is a hardwired virgin—or better, a eunuch. Surely this is why, with extravagant irony, Faulkner chooses to marry off the luscious Eula Varner to emotionally barren Flem. Faulkner emphasizes the sheer waste of Eula’s Dionysian fecundity, the incapacity of contemporary rural society to rise to her erotic challenge.
Flem’s predatory impenetrability requires a balancing counterpart. Another impenetrable figure—as communal as Flem is a loner, as loquacious as Flem is silent, as playful as Flem is driven, but equally private at the core—shares center stage with him. The “pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable” (HAM 741) Ratliff functions as Faulkner’s Hermes:
He sold perhaps three [sewing] machines a year, the rest of the time trading in land and livestock and second-hand farming tools … retailing from house to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages from mouth to mouth about weddings and funerals…. He never forgot a name and he knew everyone, man mule and dog, within fifty miles. (741)
Such catholic interests point to Ratliff’s role as village custodian. He knows the region’s players, joins in their identity-defining rituals and activities. His commitment to “sewing” helps knit a group of individuals together into a community. Finally, he possesses a cardinal virtue necessary for taking on Snopesism: sexual immunity, a sutured heart. Faulkner emphasizes Ratliff’s “air of perpetual bachelorhood,” his “hearty celibacy as of a lay brother in a twelfth-century monastery—a gardener, a pruner of vines, say” (769).
Ratliff and Snopes serve as structural antipodes grounding the concerns of the trilogy. Their primacy tells us that these novels will return repeatedly to exploitative transactions and to the larger struggle between traditional and contemporary ways of doing business. Irrational excess is foreign to both men: Ratliff is there to spot and rein it in before it becomes dangerous, Snopes is there to fan it into action and exploit its consequences. These two figures preside over an ongoing drama that is economic at its center, moral and erotic at its margins. Moving forward in linear time, this drama accommodates traditional narrative techniques. The Balzacian cultural historian in Faulkner flourishes here.
But it is the irrational erotic energy lurking in the margins that fuels The Hamlet’s most memorable vignettes. A number of interrelated love stories establish this novel’s kinship with If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Through Eula Varner and the schoolteacher Labove, as well as a pair of harassed men—Jack Houston and Mink Snopes—transformed into mortal enemies, and finally the idiot Ike Snopes and his beloved cow, Faulkner narrates tormented private histories that give this otherwise sunny novel much of its somber power.
We have already glanced at Eula and noted the irony of her father’s bestowing her (as a tactical move) on the sexless Flem. An early description of Eula reveals the dimensions of such waste:
[H]er entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof. She seemed … to exist in a teeming vacuum in which her days followed one another as though behind sound-proof glass, where she seemed to listen in sullen bemusement, with a weary wisdom heired of all mammalian maturity, to the enlarging of her own organs. (HAM 817)
Eula is often paired with Caddy Compson and Dewey Dell Bundren—those other sexually intense young women—but this passage accesses her in a unique fashion. The woman delineated in this over-the-top description will never escape her narrator’s categorizing impetus, never be granted her own language for expressing her thought and feeling. The texture of Eula’s subjectivity is closed to articulation. She means only what the (male) narrative perspective emphatically sees her as meaning. Caught up thus, Eula remains imprisoned—throughout the trilogy—in mythological language that expresses male response to her fabulous body. Put otherwise, she tends to reduce to her organs. Her later love affair with Manfred de Spain (in The Town), like her subsequent suicide (in The Mansion), gets clear of such organ-emphasis, but this trajectory is likewise never narrated from her point of view. Rather, the idealistic and garrulous Gavi
n Stevens—of whom we have decidedly too much in the last two novels of the trilogy, and who remains both infatuated with her and incapable of acting on it—most often speaks Eula’s thoughts and feelings, from his own exalted perspective.
By contrast, The Hamlet effortlessly grants subjectivity to the schoolteacher Labove—some fifteen years older than Eula and obsessed with her:
a man … with straight black hair … and high Indian cheekbones … and the long nose of thought…. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary. A thousand years ago it would have been a monk’s, a militant fanatic who would have … passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant’s self-doubt battling … his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites. (HAM 827)
Labove’s inner orientation is before us—as a set of thoughts and convictions and appetites—as clearly as Eula’s outer body is before us, as a set of male-arousing organs. It is through Labove that The Hamlet reengages the erotic intensity of If I Forget Thee. He is the monkish man who lives for principle, the gaunt self-willed hermit intent on his ideal. In his name, we see prefigured his coming ordeal—both “bovine” and “above”—a man who would transcend the demands of his animal body. It is not to be.
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