Hanging your laundry out to dry describes not just the off-color yarns and country tales in The Hamlet by William Faulkner, but also the novel’s structure. The clothesline method, a story telling method where a single thread links together several separate stories, best describes the structure of this 1942 novel. Faulkner has a bevy of clothesline gossip to tell. He organizes his at once bawdy and endearing tales into ten chapters over four books all linked together by Flem Snope, the protagonist, and the town of Frenchman’s Bend, the hamlet. While Flem is the protagonist, introduced in the first of four books, he’s largely absent the last three quarters of the novel. Yet, his stealthy beguiling takeover of the hamlet, ties together these rich tales of poor down-on-their-luck rural folks in Faulkner’s famously fictional, Yankanapaphwa County
Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owing allegiance to neither, it had been the original grand site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which — the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades — were still known as the Old Frenchman place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county court house in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted the cane — cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.
Definite yet without boundaries, straddling literary traditions, The Hamlet begins with a description of the town, where most the action takes place, and the old gutted mansion, where we’ll return to at the end of this first book in the Snopes Trilogy. Faulkner introduces us to Flem Snopes, not right away though — first we read about the old master who hewed the jungle, then Varner the current master of the town, then Flem’s father who has brought his clan here after a barn burning incident further west in Mississippi, and finally standing just out of sight of his father - Flem. Like old farmers sitting in front of a country store, Faulkner likes to take his time telling the reader his stories.
The Snopes Family Tree
Flem Snopes is an up-and-comer, instead of farming; he works in Varner’s town store and then the cotton gin and blacksmith shop while loaning money and doing Varner’s books. Shortly he passes Varner’s son, Jody, in terms of power and wealth; eventually he passes the old man Will Varner himself. By the end of the second book he has Will Varner’s home, money, and daughter. Eula, the title of the second book and Varner’s last daughter, contrasts Flem’s industry with her utter idleness. Nonetheless Eula represents a full blooded, fertile Venus / Helen of Troy figure — she has many suitors. The third book, The Long Summer, is a collection of tales of the denizens of Frenchman’s Bend who run wild while Flem and Eula go to Texas on their honeymoon of sorts. Some of the third book’s tales include a Snopes (more Snopeses move in and infest the town as the book progress) falling in love with a cow and another Snopes shooting another denizen over the cow, but this Snopes is too poor to run away. Flem returns in Book Four, The Peasants, with two great cons — wild ponies he’s brought back from Texas and story of planted gold under the old mansion’s ruins, which he has taken ownership of from Varner.
Flem’s core character may be best described by the allegory at the end of the second book: he sold his sold to the devil, but then the devil couldn’t get his soul when it came time to hand it over — yes, Flem cheated the devil himself. And most of the action takes place without Flem in part because he’s secretive and doesn’t talk much:
The first man that Flem would tell his business to would be the man that was left after the last man died. Flem Snopes don’t even tell himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with himself in a empty house in the dark of the moon.
Teasingly, Faulkner gives much more insight and background into characters whom he kills off a page later than he does to Flem who will also be the protagonist in the second book in the trilogy. Flem is a mystery.
Faulkner inserts himself into the tragic-comedy through a character called V.K. Ratliff. Ratliff, an itinerant sewing machine merchant, brings a moral voice to this morally eroding hamlet. Ratliff collects and distributes news, wisdom, and questionable tales. He’s half friendly with the Snopes, but can be a rube too. In this passage, Ratfliff serves as Faulkner’s voice and he hones in on what this novel is truly about:
something that wasn’t even a people, that wasn’t nothing but something that don’t want nothing but to walk and feel the sun and wouldn’t know how to hurt no man even if it would and wouldn’t want to even if could, just like I would stand by and see you steal a meat-bone from a dog. I never made them Snopes and I never made the folks that can’t wait to bare their backsides to them. I could do more, but I won’t. I won’t. I tell you!
The Hot Cotton Of the Old South
As the two preceding excerpts demonstrate, Faulkner writes long, winding sentences, just like a some old men on bench in front the country store telling tales and whittling sticks. Yet, undoubtedly he has the gift of language. At times his vocabulary seems archaic (coevals, perambulator, disabuse) and I’m not sure if that’s because that’s the language of northern Mississippi in 1942 or at the turn of the century when the tales take place. Nevertheless, his word choice and pairing of opposites — frozen and hot; streaming and rigid — help beautifully paint a perfect picture in this passage:
It was now September. The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless — a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer.
Notice how the sentence length skillfully modulates and the passage crescendos at “concentration”.
Why You Should Read This
While The Hamlet, doesn’t receive the critical attention as other Faulkner works like The Sound and Fury, and As I Lay Dying, it’s relatively accessible and masterfully crafted, with beautiful sentences and moments of lucid clarity that provide truth amid the chaotic, sometimes incoherent actions of the denizens of Frenchman’s Bend. With its clothesline method and different points of narration, Faulkner keeps your attention throughout. Through the different sections you get a bevy of literary forms: the Southern gothic with the downfall of the Varners and rise of the Snopeses; the Victorian novel with Eula’s courtship; the puritanical tale of Labove which is reminiscent of the Scarlet Letter; stream of consciousness writing through the minds of the lesser and mentally unstable Snopeses; allegory with Flem’s deal with devil; a western with Houston’s tale and showdown; a mystery of the hidden treasure, and tall tales of horse trading and some practical jokes.
The Hamlet should receive your critical attention because of its literary styles, narration changes, and structure. It’s should read because of its relative accessibility, fascinating tales, and rich characters. It’s a must read because this is not some dirge or lament about the old way or a rundown town or the poor and the beaten down too impoverished to throw off their shackles, no, it’s like Ratliff says — it’s something that just wants to walk in the sun. That something is in all of us and this novel subtly taps into that — subtly like Flem Snopes passing the Varners.
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2016
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Top reviews from other countries
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in Australia on November 16, 2024
This is William Faulkner's classic novel
- castlefiendReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 29, 2017
Can anyone read Faulkner for enjoyment? Perhaps it means more to Americans than to ...
