Carolyn Porter - William Faulkner-Oxford University Press, Inc. (2007)

William Faulkner
Lives and Legacies
Larzer ZiV
Mark Twain
David S. Reynolds
Walt Whitman
Edwin S. Gaustad
Roger Williams
Benjamin Franklin
Gale E. Christianson
Isaac Newton
Paul Addison
Winston Churchill
G. Edward White
Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.
Craig Raine
T. S. Eliot
Carolyn Porter
William Faulkner
William Faulkner
Carolyn Porter
1
2007
3
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Copyright ß 2007 by Carolyn Porter
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Porter, Carolyn, 1946–
William Faulkner/Carolyn Porter.
p. cm.—(Lives and legacies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–531049–8
1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.
2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography.
I. Title.
PS3511.A86Z946387 2007
813’.52—dc22
[B]
2006039181
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my guys, Charlie and George
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Contents
One
Youth and Apprenticeship:
The Sound and the Fury 1
Two
The Major Phase, Part 1:
As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August 55
Three
Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses 104
Four
Snopes and Beyond: The Hamlet 163
A Final Note to New Readers: Bibliography 187
Abbreviations 192
Notes 193
Index 197
vii
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One
Youth and Apprenticeship:

The Sound and the Fury
The Long Beginning
Faulkner’s life was all about stories—making them up,

making them over, even making them true. As a child in Oxford,
Mississippi, he was a famous storyteller, often spinning tales
with more verisimilitude than veracity. He was also an ardent
listener, as he had learned to be from listening to family stories
told by his grandfather, his aunts and uncles, his neighbors,
stories that were themselves often more made-up than not.
Meanwhile, people began to tell stories about Faulkner as
well, especially as he grew up and became a writer. Once he
acquired a reputation as a novelist, he came to enjoy provoking
stories about himself and his past as well as telling them himself.
Between the tales he told of himself and those told about him,
his biographers have thus had rich treasures to draw upon in
their eVort to tell Faulkner’s own story. Although they’ve done
an admirable job of sorting truth from Wction, they have also
1
demonstrated that to understand Faulkner at all, one must take
the stories at least as seriously as the so-called facts.
Consider for example the story Faulkner told when requested
to provide an author’s proWle for Forum, which was to publish
‘‘A Rose for Emily,’’ the Wrst short story for which he was
actually paid, in its April 1930 issue.
Born male and single at early age in Mississippi. Quit school
after Wve years in seventh grade. Got job in Grandfather’s bank
and learned medicinal value of his liquor. Grandfather thought
janitor did it. Hard on janitor. War came. Liked British uniform.
Got commission R.F.C. pilot. Crashed. Cost British gov’t
L2000. Was still pilot. Crashed. Cost British gov’t L2000.
Quit. Cost British gov’t $83.40. King said, ‘‘Well done.’’
Returned to Mississippi. Family got job: postmaster. Resigned
by mutual agreement on part of two inspectors; accused of
throwing all incoming mail into garbage can. How disposed of
out-going mail never proved. Inspectors foiled. Had $700.
Went to Europe. Met man named Sherwood Anderson. Said,
‘‘Why not write novels? Maybe won’t have to work.’’ Did.
Soldier’s Pay. Did. Mosquitoes. Did. The Sound and the Fury.
Did Sanctuary, out next year. Now Xying again. Age 32. Own
and operate own typewriter.1
From the outset, it is clear that Faulkner is making fun of the

implicit biographical form he has been asked to Wll out. What
follows is to be understood, therefore, as designed more to
amuse than to inform. Faulkner was intensely devoted to his
privacy and rarely provided straight answers to biographical
questions. Instead, he took the opportunity to continue the
fabrication of his life story, a creative project he had begun
in earnest during his military stint. If we look at this
2 YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP

mini-autobiography in the context of the knowable facts, we can
readily identify some major omissions and distortions. For
example, Faulkner quit school, Wnally, in the eleventh grade,
as soon as football season ended, but he had been a star student
in grammar school, skipping the second grade because of his
obvious intelligence. His commission was in the Canadian
Royal Air Force (CRAF), not the British Royal Flying Corps
(BRFC), and the war ended before he completed training in
Canada. His friend Phil Stone, not his family, actually secured
the postmaster’s job for him, although had he not been a
Falkner (as the family name was spelled), he probably wouldn’t
have been able to get it. He did go to Europe, but before that he
met Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans. Faulkner arrived
there in January 1925 intending to go to Europe, but he
found Anderson and the community of writers and artists
associated with the literary journal, The Double Dealer, so
engaging that he stayed on for six months, producing his Wrst
serious batch of prose and writing his Wrst novel, Soldier’s Pay
(1926). Finally, he omits from his list of novels in print or in
press Sartoris, a revision of his Wrst Yoknapatawpha novel,
published just the year before, in 1929.
Some of these facts matter more than others in our under-
standing of who Faulkner was, but to see how they matter, we
need to approach the story Faulkner is telling here Wrst as a
story. That story is far more revealing than any corrected
version of it could be.
Here is one way of reading this story. Faulkner portrays
himself as failing at each task he assumes; he gets drunk rather
than fulWll his duties in his grandfather’s bank, he crashes an
airplane twice, he can’t deliver the mail properly. So, thanks to
THE SOUND AND THE FURY 3

Sherwood Anderson’s model, and perhaps his advice, Faulkner
takes up novel writing as an alternative to having ‘‘to work.’’ This,
he proudly announces, turns out to be something he can do.
Look! He’s done it again and again. He lists his works (getting in
a plug for his novels), and adds that he is ‘‘Xying again,’’ signaling
his recuperative powers, or perhaps his persistent foolhardiness.
That he is now his own boss is underscored by his Wnal claim to
‘‘own and operate own typewriter.’’ Read this way, the piece is a
kind of ironic Horatio Alger story, a story of success based not on
working hard and seizing opportunity but on escaping real work
by becoming a novelist. Faulkner is making fun of himself and his
artistic ambitions. Once we notice the ironic distance opened up
between the narrator and the protagonist of this abbreviated
story, however, we realize that the narrator represents a persona
quite distinct from that of his bumbling character. Indeed, the
narrator is using this character partly to mask, and partly to
reveal, himself. He is a cryptic ironist displaying his wit while
eluding our eVorts to pin him down. If we focus on the behavior
of this Wgure, the storyteller, we begin to gain a perspective on
Faulkner himself that is inaccessible to us from a simply corrected
version. We need the facts, of course, but we need them less to
correct the story than to interpret it, to see what it reveals as well
as what it is hiding.
The storyteller makes his character the butt of an ongoing
joke, as we’ve seen. But he is not without mercy. Indeed, he
takes a bemused attitude toward his protagonist, both exposing
and protecting him as he rolls along. In the postmaster story, the
narrator seems insistent that Faulkner was not Wred from his job
as postmaster. He doesn’t deny the claim that he threw ‘‘all
incoming mail in the garbage,’’ but notes that how he ‘‘disposed

of outgoing mail’’ was ‘‘never proved.’’ (How could it be?) The
inspectors were thus ‘‘foiled.’’ They couldn’t nail him after all,
and thus ‘‘by mutual agreement’’ (between themselves or be-
tween them and Faulkner?), he was allowed to resign. In an
ostensible eVort to protect his disgraced protagonist, the narra-
tor exposes the probable Wring he is so obviously covering up.
Now in fact, Faulkner was not Wred from the postmaster job,
although he clearly deserved to be. In the course of his nearly
three years as postmaster, he became infamous for failing to deal
responsibly with either the outgoing or the incoming mail. He
opened and closed the post oYce at his own whim, discarded
what he saw as junk mail, read incoming journals that interested
him before slotting them into post oYce boxes, and used the
back room for poker with his friends. Finally complaints
reached the U.S. Post OYce, which sent an inspector to inves-
tigate. Not because he was ‘‘foiled’’ but out of respect for his
family’s prominence in Oxford, the inspector allowed him to
resign. In a much quoted line, Faulkner remarked, ‘‘You know,
all my life I probably will be at the beck and call of somebody
who’s got money, but never again will I be at the beck and call of
every son-of-a-bitch who’s got two cents for a stamp.’’2 Faulk-
ner, then, is after all partly telling the truth when he says he
resigned rather than being Wred. He virtually admits that he had
failed to do his job, at least with the ‘‘incoming mail.’’ But the
story doesn’t sound at all like the truth. It sounds like he is
covering up being Wred by distracting us with an ostentatiously
tall tale of how he outwitted the post oYce inspectors. (He even
cleared $700, it seems.) The bits and pieces of truth never
cohere but are eVectively swallowed up in the tall tale. We
know we’re being lied to. We’ve known that since the opening

sentence, ‘‘Born male and single at early age in Mississippi.’’
What we don’t know is where, if anywhere, the truth lies.
The storyteller is not only having fun with his protagonist as
well as his reader, he’s also begging the entire question of what
may be true, what not, mocking the very promise of the bio-
graphical proWle he is using.
Faulkner the writer was actually a fairly scrupulous worker;
when he went to Hollywood, for example, he wrote reams of
prose, believing that he should deliver something in exchange
for being paid, even though it turned out that most of it proved
useless for Wlmmaking. So we can surmise that he felt some
shame about his postmaster performance and thus perhaps
found it a minor relief to confess his sins while submerging
them within his tall tale. Of far more importance to him was his
alleged participation in World War I. Accordingly, the story he
tells about his role in the war provides a more dramatic example
of the storyteller’s strategy of evasion and revelation. ‘‘War
came. Liked British uniform,’’ he begins this episode of his
life. Again, he tells an extravagant story that simultaneously
hides and reveals.
The facts, in brief and so far as they are knowable, are these.
When the United States entered the war, Faulkner began to
consider signing up, but he wanted a commission. In particular,
he wanted one in the Air Force, saturated as his imagination was
with stories of Xying aces whose exploits he followed even
before the war began. He told his family that he had applied
for a position in the American Air Force but was turned away
for being too short and frail. Meanwhile, Estelle Oldham, the
love of his life, became engaged to another man, and his desire
to get away from Oxford grew urgent. He went to visit his

friend Phil Stone in New Haven, Connecticut, and there they
conspired—with the aid of a group of British students and
ex-soldiers—to pass themselves oV as British so as to join the
Canadian military. Stone eventually took a diVerent path, but
Faulkner persisted. Claiming to be a British citizen, with forged
papers to show that he had been born in the county of Middlesex
and a forged letter from one Reverend Mr. Edward Twimberly-
Thorndyke testifying to his credentials as an upstanding young
Englishman, Faulkner presented himself at the British recruiting
oYce in New York City. As David Minter aptly puts it in his
biography of Faulkner, ‘‘Whether bemused, fooled, or desperate
for recruits, England’s representatives accepted her adoptive
son’’ (Minter, 31). In short, the ruse worked, at least insofar
as it enabled Faulkner to enter Canadian RAF training near
Toronto on July 9, 1918. By all accounts he proved an avid
and capable cadet, but the war ended before he could complete
his training. Indeed, as far as the records show, he never reached
the stage of actually Xying a plane. Yet upon his return to Oxford
in November 1918, he wore the uniform of the RFC (the more
prestigious British corps), walked with a limp and a cane, and
claimed he had suVered an injury being shot down over France
that had required the insertion of a steel plate in his head. His
British mask had worked, so why not adopt the injured veteran’s
mask? It is noteworthy that he now used the name Faulkner
rather than Falkner, having added the ‘‘u’’ on the same fraudu-
lent forms he submitted when he joined the RAF.
Faulkner was eventually to put aside the uniform and give up
on the limp (which some said he occasionally forgot to per-
form), Wnding other poses to assume—the poet, the dandy, the
bohemian, for example—but he never entirely quit telling the

story of his plane crash, although it varied considerably. In his
biography of Faulkner, Joseph Blotner rehearses some of the
more hilarious versions. My personal favorite is the one in
which Faulkner claimed to have fallen ‘‘uninjured through a
thatched roof and land [ed] . . . in the soup tureen of a peasant
family’s Sunday dinner.’’3 The version he oVers up in his 1930
Forum proWle, however, is more telling.
Here, Faulkner says that he Xew planes in the war as a pilot
but doesn’t explicitly insist that he got to France, although he
certainly implies that he crashed under wartime circumstances.
That assumed, he tells another tall tale. The protagonist here has
no real desire to Wght for Wilsonian principles, he just likes the
uniform, and the British one at that. He proves a disaster as a
pilot, twice crashing his plane. He is a shallow, vainglorious, and
incompetent buVoon. Little wonder that the British are glad to
see him go; when he says ‘‘well done,’’ the king is expressing
relief at his departure, not gratitude for his service. But here
again, even as he is poking fun at his protagonist, the storyteller is
at once revealing and obscuring the truth. The plane crash story
is blown up and punctured at the same time; he crashed not just
once, but twice, but then what matters is the cost of the planes.
The planes are worth £2,000 apiece, compared with Faulkner,
whose departure costs the British government only $83.40. The
war itself is reduced to a matter of money. The young man who
went oV to Canada for training in the summer of 1918, full of
enthusiasm for his anticipated glory has now and long since
recognized the decisive gap between dreams of heroism and
the experience of war, a theme on which he will write some of
his greatest Wction. The account he gives here of the war has in its
way just as sharp a critical edge as Hemingway’s in In Our Time.

But unlike Hemingway, Faulkner missed the war, and he is
inadvertently admitting it here. He makes, after all, no claim to
aerial combat. His planes crashed, but there is no account of him
as the pilot in France surviving the crashes. It is as if he weren’t
there. And of course, he wasn’t. He is distancing himself from his
own lies about what he did in the war, but renewing them at the
same time. Indeed he knew he had lied, but he couldn’t give up
on the story, since for him the story had become in some
fundamental sense, true. How did this come about?
When Faulkner came home to Oxford decked out in the

uniform of an RFC Lieutenant, he was in one sense masking
his failures and losses. He had not been to France, he had not
fought in combat, he had not married Estelle, and although he
had been writing poetry for years now, he had published
nothing. In his uniform he commanded a certain respect, at
least for a while. His tales of battle also drew attention and
admiration. He had, after all, always told a good story, and he
had real whoppers to tell now. It was quite a performance while
it lasted. His imagination had been so engaged by the stories he
heard from and about soldiers, as well as by his own training—
learning airplanes, war tactics, and military discipline—that
the tales he told about his experiences essentially became his
experiences. Faulkner’s Wrst piece of published Wction, ‘‘Land-
ing in Luck,’’ appeared in the University of Mississippi campus
newspaper the following year. It tells the story of a young cadet
in training whose close call with a fatal landing echoes many of
the stories Faulkner told about his own training Xights in
Canada.4 In one sense, Faulkner is relying on autobiography
for his material, as do many young writers, but in another sense

he has already projected on the screen of his memory an
alternative and imagined autobiography. What he actually
‘‘did in the war,’’ in other words, is increasingly irrecuperable,
replaced by the memories he has sustained and embellished in
telling and re-telling his war stories. ‘‘Landing in Luck’’ howev-
er enables him to step back from and ironize his tall tales, in this
instance to reveal his protagonist as a terriWed and incompetent
pilot, who is nonetheless ready to take credit for his sheer luck.
Young Thompson basks in the reputation he acquires as a result
of his miraculously ‘‘lucky’’ landing. As in the 1930 proWle,
adopting the stance of the storyteller provides Faulkner with
a kind of amnesty from the charges of failure that haunted him,
a temporary immunity that allows him to speak freely, indeed
to tell the truth. As we shall see, adopting the storyteller’s
persona would eventually prove crucial to Faulkner’s practice
as a novelist, enabling him to hide himself far more successfully
than he does in ‘‘Landing in Luck’’ while elaborating Wctions
through which his imagination could break down and reinvent
narrative form itself.
‘‘Landing in Luck’’ appeared in The Mississipian, the local
university paper, in 1919. Faulkner did not return to serious
prose writing until January 1925, when he arrived in New
Orleans and began his Wrst novel, Soldier’s Pay, initially titled
‘‘Mayday,’’ which was published in 1926. A dark portrait of the
return home of a wounded war veteran, the novel is based on
Faulkner’s experiences with and among soldiers and cadets in
Toronto. It is as if his memories, and the changes wrought on
them by his imagination, had been put on hold for seven years.
Soldier’s Pay is not a great novel, but it is a moving one, and it
served to usher Faulkner into his long delayed vocation as a

novelist. The question is why the delay? The short answer is
that he was writing poetry, largely bad poetry. A fuller answer
requires us to follow some of the other stories told about and by
Faulkner.
From the time he was nine years old, William Faulkner would
respond to the perennially annoying adult question, ‘‘What do
you want to be when you grow up?’’ by saying ‘‘I want to be a
writer like my great-granddaddy’’ (Blotner, 23). There is a certain
irony implicit in this no doubt pleasing espousal of a strong family
tie and a gentlemanly profession. For although Faulkner’s great-
grandfather had indeed written several books, one of which had
even sold well, his large and resonant reputation was by no means
primarily that of a writer. A self-made man, civil war colonel, and
gilded age railroad magnate, William Clarke Falkner led an active,
controversial, and regularly violent life. He was, in fact, shot dead
by his erstwhile business partner, on the main street of Ripley,
Mississippi, eight years before his great-grandson and namesake
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897. As Faulkner was to
remark many years after being nine, ‘‘People at Ripley talk of him
as if he were still alive, up in the hills someplace, and might come
in at any time.’’5 William Clarke Falkner was to become the
source and model of several major Wgures in Faulkner’s Wction,
but his great-grandson’s identiWcation with him as a ‘‘writer’’ is
both disingenuous and revealing.
At nine, William Faulkner was already straddling the
contradiction in his nature between the aspiring artist and the
muscular man of action his great-grandfather had actually been.
By identifying with him as a ‘‘writer,’’ Faulkner could perhaps
hold onto both ideals. As he neared adolescence, it became

harder. The conXict grew deeper and manifested itself more
dramatically as a struggle between Faulkner’s creative drive and
his need to establish his masculine credentials. There was
something feminine about being an artist, as his family and his
culture had always taught him. He had learned to draw early,
nurtured in this as in all his artistic aspirations by his mother,
who was herself a Wne watercolorist. It was she who had
encouraged his reading and applauded his eVorts to write
poetry. His father, by contrast, never understood his son’s
interest in art and literature. Faulkner’s immediate family com-
posed itself into a structure that fostered in him an internal
conXict of outsized proportions.
Faulkner was the oldest of the four boys born to Murry
C. Falkner and his wife, the former Leila Butler Swift. The
Wrst three arrived in relatively quick succession: William Cuth-
bert Falkner, called Billy, on September 25, 1897; Murry
Charles Falkner, called Jack, on June 26, 1899; and John
Wesley Thompson Falkner III, called Johncy, on September
24, 1901. The fourth, Dean Swift Falkner was born on August
15, 1907, almost six years after Johncy. These data reXect a
good deal about the family in which Faulkner grew up. First, the
six-year gap between the third and fourth sons reXects a feature
of Maud and Murry’s marriage that was well recognized by their
neighbors and kin; they were not a happy couple. Although
Dean became the darling of the family, it is improbable that he
was planned. Faulkner certainly knew that his mother was not
fond of his father. On her deathbed, Maud would ask her son
Billy whether he thought she would have to encounter her
husband in heaven. When he said ‘‘No, not if you don’t want
to,’’ she replied, ‘‘That’s good. I never did like him.’’6 Faulkner

followed suit. His father was for him a strange and alien Wgure
from early on, a man who neither understood nor supported his
wife’s relentless pursuit of an education for her sons. Although
respected as a Falkner, Murry was not a success in Oxford. His
Wrst love was his grandfather’s railroad, and when his father
J.W.T. Falkner sold it and thereby eliminated his chances of
rising to the head of it, he never fully recovered a sense of
purpose. He made a living, Wrst in a livery stable and Wnally as
treasurer of the University of Mississippi, largely thanks to the
inXuence of his father. (At one point Murry tried to persuade his
wife to move to Texas, where he could become a cowboy.
Maud declined the proposal.)
Faulkner’s primary bond was with his mother. For one thing,
he was her Wrst child—always a fateful position for a boy,
especially for one whose father soon aligned himself with his
younger brothers. Also, Billy was the only son who physically
favored his mother rather than his father, and the only one not
to grow up tall, as his father, and the Falkner men in general,
had. (Faulkner’s full-grown height was just under 5 ft. 6 in.) To
use Freudian shorthand, Faulkner’s particular Oedipal project
was markedly exacerbated by the strength of his bond with his
mother and the distance separating them both from his father,
not to mention his father’s career failures. Little wonder that
Faulkner cast his mythically enlarged great-grandfather in the
role of the father. His own father posed little threat to his
primacy as his mother’s favorite, but of course his father also
provided no ideal model, either to emulate or to Wght. That
Faulkner himself came to understand his father in this light is
suggested by a story he later told about him. Sitting on the front
porch with him after dinner one night, his father tried to open a

line of communication with his now grown son by remarking
that he’d heard that Faulkner had begun to smoke. Faulkner
assented, having taken up pipe smoking. His father oVered him
a cigar, which Faulkner accepted, and then broke in half. He put
one half in his pocket and stuVed his pipe with the other half.
His father never oVered him tobacco again, as he liked to say in
concluding this story (Blotner, 52).
While Murry Falkner was a Wgure of weakness in his Wrst
son’s eyes, his wife Maud was the opposite. On her kitchen wall
hung a sign saying ‘‘Never explain. Never complain’’ (a Victori-
an maxim traceable to the British prime minister, Benjamin
Disraeli).7 However disappointed she was in her husband and
her marriage, she was determined to raise her sons according to
her own lights, her oldest son in particular. For example, having
observed that Billy was not going to be as tall as her younger
boys, Maud bought him a kind of corset (a canvas vest that laced
up in the back and held the shoulders back) at age thirteen and
forced him to wear it for almost two years so that he would stand
as straight and upright as possible, as his great-grandfather was
reputed to have done. (She apparently succeeded; many would
notice Faulker’s markedly erect posture throughout his life)
(Minter, 15; Blotner, 140). Faulkner neither explained nor
complained, apparently, even though the brace precluded his
playing baseball, among other athletic endeavors he enjoyed. In
this story, it is hard to decide what is more disturbing—a mother
intent upon squeezing her son upright or a son willing to be so
constricted. His cousin, Sally Murry, a partial model for the
adventurous little girl Caddy Compson, was similarly cursed at
this time, but she so despised the corset that she got her friends
to untie it. Although he dutifully wore the corset, Faulkner

began to rebel in other ways. He would skip school frequently,
wandering in the woods and reading instead. He was known for
sitting for hours sometimes in front of his grandfather’s bank,
just watching and listening to people. He was, in short, with-
drawing into himself, silently rebelling against the restrictions
imposed by his mother and his small town life, but meanwhile
nourishing an intense meditative engagement with poetry. After
discarding the corset, he would return to sports, eventually
quarterbacking his high school football team, but by then he
had split his interior life oV from his social one. This split would
become Wxed in his life for years to come, indeed stalemating his
identity within a paralyzing duality. In public he would act out
masculine roles, as athlete, prankster, hard drinker. In private,
he was caught up in romantic fantasy, lyric excess, and dark
dreams of self-destruction. This private self found expression in
poetry and a sustaining validation in two key friendships.
The Wrst and more important friendship was with Estelle Old-
ham, a childhood sweetheart who had grown into a popular and
beautiful teenager. More than a year older than Faulkner, Estelle
became the center of a hive of attentive suitors from early adoles-
cence. Yet she and Faulkner remained close, even when she went
out with others. He could talk to her about poetry and ideas and
she responded with interest and understanding. Theirs was a
romantic bond, but something else as well—a shared imaginative
life. He wrote poetry for her, as well as recited it to her. David
Minter, who has provided the most telling account of this rela-
tionship, describes Faulkner’s ‘‘deepest sense of his relationship to
Estelle’’ as ‘‘a highly romantic version of a great and star-crossed
yet compelling love’’ (Minter, 28). When Estelle began to receive
serious proposals, the relationship entered crisis. Her family

refused Faulkner’s candidacy as a husband, on the quite reason-
able grounds that he had no income and no prospects, unlike the
man they preferred, Cornell Franklin, who had a law degree from
the University of Mississippi, or ‘‘Ole Miss,’’ as it was called, and a
good job in Honolulu. Franklin had courted Estelle while in
college and exacted her promise to marry him. She had not really
felt committed to him, she was to claim, but she nevertheless
married him on April 18, 1918. Her story bears an uncanny
resemblance to the story of Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzger-
ald’s The Great Gatsby. Daisy is in love with Gatsby, but he has no
money or future. She marries Tom Buchanan even though she
doesn’t love him. The night before the wedding, she is in tears for
hours, insisting that she can’t marry Tom because she is in love
with Gatsby. She loses the string of pearls Tom has given her as a
wedding gift. On the night before her wedding, Estelle is up all
night in tears, so hysterical that her aunt oVers to call the wedding
oV. Estelle has lost her engagement ring. In both cases, the jewelry
is found and the wedding goes forward, despite the bride’s
condition, but also because she refuses to back out.
It is diYcult to overestimate the impact of this loss on
Faulkner’s fragile identity. His ‘‘ world went to pieces,’’ as his
brother would later put it (Blotner, 56). His immediate recourse
was the other friend with whom he shared some of his private
thoughts, Phil Stone. Faulkner left Oxford on March 30, 1918,
for New Haven, where his friend and mentor Phil Stone was
Wnishing his Yale law degree. Stone had for several years been
reading Faulkner’s poetry and encouraging his creative eVorts.
With two B.A.’s, one from Ole Miss and one from Yale, Stone
saw himself as a crucial intellectual resource for Faulkner,
providing him with the latest modernist poetry and spending

long hours talking literature with him. Stone was to serve as one
source for the lawyer Gavin Stevens, a character in the Snopes
novels who loves to talk abstractly and at length. But he was
never fully to reconcile himself to the fact that he had not wholly
created Faulkner as an artist. Which is not to say that he wasn’t
an important inXuence. And during these years, he was espe-
cially useful as someone who recognized Faulkner’s talent.
Except for Estelle and to a degree, his mother, Phil Stone was
the only person in Oxford who did, and Stone’s education gave
him both the literary sophistication and the social authority to
make that recognition signiWcant. Stone invited Faulkner to join
him in New Haven so as to withdraw and recuperate from the
crisis generated by Estelle’s impending wedding. And, as we
have seen, it was Stone who conspired with and assisted Faul-
kner in his campaign to join the RAF, making the needed social
connections and sharing with him an informal course in how to
sound like an upper-class Englishman.
Upon Faulkner’s return from Canada, Stone and he resumed
their friendship. Stone again encouraged Faulkner’s poetic
endeavors and eventually helped to get his Wrst volume of
poetry, The Marble Faun, published in 1924. Stone’s interest
played its part in Faulkner’s persisting loyalty to poetry, but
what primarily stimulated Faulkner’s poetic output was Estelle,
who began to come home for family visits in June 1919. She
arrived with her Wrst child Victoria, nicknamed ‘‘Cho-Cho,’’
and stayed through September, and thus was present when
Faulkner’s Wrst published poem, ‘‘L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,’’
appeared in The New Republic in August, 1919. Estelle would
return, eventually with Cho-Cho and her son Malcolm, several
times in the course of the 1920s, but almost always without her

husband. As her marriage gradually broke apart, she saw a lot of
Faulkner, who continued writing poetry primarily for her, but also
in the hope of publishing again. During these years he did publish
his work in The Mississippian, but he never again found a national
audience for his poetry. In retrospect, it is not hard to see why.
Here is part VIII of Vision in Spring, a poetic sequence that
Faulkner bound and presented to Estelle in 1921:
Pierrot, sitting chill on a wall in darkness,

Feeling the sharp cold stone stinging his palms,
Seeing the darkness freeze from roof to roof
between the houses;—
Stirs, and clasps his arms.
Stars swing back across the empty street,
And ghostly faces are blown like stars across his heart.
Now that the city grows black and chill and empty,—
Who am I, thinks Pierrot, who am I
To stretch my soul out rigid across the sky?8
The echo of Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ is

unmistakable. Faulkner has immersed himself in French sym-
bolist poetry, as well as in T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Conrad
Aiken, and other contemporary poets. He is trapped by the
poetic structures that he’s been studying so carefully. He is
also trapped by the aestheticism of late nineteenth-century
decadents. His persona, Pierrot, like his counterpart in the
earlier ‘‘The Marble Faun,’’ remains paralyzed, doomed to
passive observation and active dreaming. As the faun puts it,
Why am I sad? I?
Why am I not content? The sky

Warms me and yet I cannot break
My marble bonds.9
Faulkner is struggling to articulate his deepest feelings, of

longing and despair, of potential rapture and anticipated
death, but he is bound tightly within the limitations of poetic
form itself. The result is a self-portrait composed of heavily
derivative language and constrained within an obsessively
narcissistic focus. Although often erotic, his poems always
portray the Pierrot Wgure as frozen, unable to join the world
of the sexually alive. What power they have comes from the
sense of lyrical excess they are designed to repress.
In the fall of 1919, Faulkner signed up for some courses at
the university, but proved interested only in studying French.
(He made a ‘‘D’’ in English.) He published some poems and
reviews in the campus journals and drawings in the campus
yearbook, but otherwise he was not deeply engaged with college
life. Much as he had stayed on one extra fall in order to play
football in high school, he now stayed on at college primarily to
publish his work and to work with a theatrically oriented group
of students for whom he wrote a verse play, ‘‘Marionnettes.’’
Interestingly, he agreed to join a fraternity, SAE, but only
because his father and grandfather had been members. He
was still straddling the gap between the masculine world of
his paternal lineage and the feminizing world of art. And a
signiWcant part of his male identiWcation was fueled by drinking
to excess, a habit for which he gained a reputation during these
years, particularly in Clarksdale and Memphis, where he would
go, often with Phil Stone, to escape Oxford. The two built
friendships with various poker players, liquor smugglers, and

prostitutes, providing Faulkner with both rich material for his
later Wction and the opportunity to enact a masculinity still
very much under threat. By the fall of 1920, Faulkner had
abandoned his brief career as a student and was spending
more and more time on such excursions; sometimes he would
simply disappear alone, no one knowing where he’d gone. Back
in town, now largely out of uniform, he often dressed like a
dandy. Because of his apparent arrogance and his largely jobless
state, he was known Wrst as ‘‘the Count,’’ and then as ‘‘Count
No’ Count.’’ In private, Faulkner was still reading widely,
writing his carefully wrought but self-absorbed poetry, and
wrung with failure and self-doubt; but publicly, he seemed to
take himself a good deal more seriously than most people in
Oxford thought he deserved.
His friends were worried about him. When his fellow Oxford
writer Stark Young invited him to come to New York City for a
while, and when Phil Stone encouraged the idea, Faulkner
accepted. He spent part of the fall of 1921 revisiting New
Haven and the rest working in a bookstore in New York and
living in Greenwich Village. He wrote a couple of short stories,
and at least one poem, ‘‘Two Puppets in a Fifth Avenue
Window,’’ (Blotner, 107) but it was clear to his family that he
was drifting. Phil Stone once again came to the rescue, arran-
ging for Faulkner to be appointed postmaster of the university
substation in Oxford. Although Faulkner adamantly refused the
oVer twice, he Wnally agreed, reluctantly returning to take up his
new position in December 1921.
As we have seen, Faulkner’s three-year tenure as a postmaster
was not a success, but it proved advantageous to him in two
ways. He drew a salary of $1,500.00 per year so he didn’t have

to Wnd odd jobs in order to live, and he spent much of his time
in the post oYce writing, as many customers would complain
after failing to distract him in order to get their mail. Although it
would seem improbable, he also became a scoutmaster during
these years, taking the town’s boys out for camping trips on
which he would teach them woodcraft and tell them ghost
stories around the campWre. But not so improbable after all,
because Faulkner was always open to children in ways he never
could be with their elders. Beneath his various poses, he was a
deeply shy person. So he was actually good at this job, one that
aVorded him a space for relaxation as well as masculine bond-
ing. But his sojourn as leader of the Boy Scouts was cut short
when the townspeople decided he was drinking too heavily to
be a scoutmaster. Meanwhile he found other ways to reinforce
his masculine identity, whether by spreading rumors of an
illegitimate child or by mastering the game of golf in the local
‘‘golf pasture’’ (Minter, 47). His artistic career, however,
seemed blocked. He continued to Wnd a publishing venue
only in the local campus paper, except for the publication,
prophetically enough as we shall see, of one of the poems
from ‘‘Vision in Spring’’ in the June 1922 issue of The
Double Dealer, a New Orleans literary journal (Blotner, 113).
Without abandoning poetry, however, he was beginning to turn
toward prose. In The Mississipian, he published several pieces
of literary criticism as well as a short, plotless sketch,
‘‘The Hill,’’ in which his lyric excess is at least partly channeled
through a character, nameless though he remains.10 And accord-
ing to his brother John, Faulkner was sending pieces to maga-
zines, pieces most likely to have been Wction. Once upon
receiving the usual rejection, he announced to his mother,

‘‘This one is back from the Saturday Evening Post, but the day
will come when they’ll be glad to buy anything I write, and these
too, without changing a word’’ (Blotner, I, 378). Once freed
from the post oYce job in late 1924, Faulkner grew increasingly
restless, planning a trip to Europe as soon as The Marble Faun
was published. As the publication process dragged on, a friend
suggested to Faulkner that he take a trip to New Orleans. Thus it
was that he met Sherwood Anderson for the Wrst time. Anderson
was married to Elizabeth Prall, the woman who had hired and
worked with Faulkner in the New York bookshop. Although shy
and disinclined to take advantage of his friendship with Eliza-
beth, in October Faulkner Wnally showed up at the Anderson
apartment on Jackson Square, the heart of the Vieux Carre. It is
not clear how long Faulkner spent in New Orleans, but it is clear
that he and Anderson immediately hit it oV. Faulkner was a deep
admirer of Anderson’s work and found the man in person
thoroughly engaging. They spent evenings walking around the
Vieux Carre, talking literature and life, drinking, and on at least
one occasion visiting a former madam. Anderson apparently
wrote up the story of this incident within a matter of days.
‘‘A Meeting South,’’ which depicts ‘‘a little Southern man,’’
a wounded soldier, telling his story to a retired prostitute, arrived
at his publisher’s address in New York on November 12
(Blotner, 123). When he left town, some time in late October,
Faulkner had a standing invitation at the Andersons’.
Faulkner Wnally received his copy of The Marble Faun on
December 19. Phil Stone had written a preface and was manically
pushing the book both locally and beyond. Against the backdrop
of Stone’s almost madcap publicity drive, Faulkner appears
rather cool and calm. Pleased with the book’s publication, he

nonetheless understood it for what it was—work long since done.
Staying through the Christmas holidays, in part to spend time
with Estelle and her children who were again home for a visit,
Faulkner left town as soon as he could, ostensibly for Europe.
Arriving in New Orleans in January 1925, Faulkner may not
himself have been surprised when he quickly decided to stay on
for a while rather than Wnd an outward bound ship. Sherwood
Anderson was out of town, not to return for two months, but his
wife Elizabeth welcomed Faulkner enthusiastically, putting him
up until March when he found an apartment of his own. Like
Anderson and his wife, Faulkner found New Orleans a congenial
city, not least because it harbored a colony of active and convivial
artists and writers, many of them centered around the journal,
The Double Dealer. For the Wrst time, Faulkner was living among
people whose interests and ambitions he shared. Playing the
wounded soldier again, as well as the Bohemian poet, he found
a responsive audience for his war stories and a sophisticated
appreciation for his talent. And of course, unlike Oxford,
New Orleans believed in pleasure. Although he was planning
another volume of poetry, he almost immediately began writing
and publishing sketches for both The Double Dealer and the
New Orleans Times-Picayune. And by late February, he had
begun a novel which he completed by the middle of May.
How do we account for this fateful change of direction?
In retrospect, of course, it might seem more appropriate to
ask why he devoted so many years to poetry than why he took
up Wction as he approached his twenty-eighth birthday. But
that approach would not do justice to the seriousness of
Faulkner’s poetic project. Poetry was for the young Faulkner
both a discipline and a calling, representing the purest form of

art. Years later he told Jean Stein, ‘‘I am a failed poet. Maybe
every novelist wants to write poetry Wrst, Wnds he can’t, and then
tries the short story, which is the next most demanding form after
poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel
writing.’’11 Speaking as a Nobel Laureate for Wction, Faulkner
may perhaps be accused of false modesty. But in fact, his is more
a confession, since ‘‘Wnds he can’t’’ is the pivot on which this
particular tale turns. Faulkner never changed his conviction that
as an art form, poetry was superior to narrative. What he had
begun to realize even before meeting Anderson was that he
would never achieve the order of success to which he aspired if
he kept on writing poetry. Faulkner was more fundamentally
devoted to success than he was to poetry. And he was well aware
of it. Once when he and Phil Stone were talking, Stone criticized
Amy Lowell and her cohort by saying that ‘‘they always had one
eye on the ball and the other on the grandstand.’’ Faulkner
replied that his ‘‘personal trouble as a poet seemed to be that
he had one eye on the ball and the other eye on Babe Ruth’’
(Blotner, 71). Behind his various masks and beneath his layers of
self-doubt, Faulkner saw himself not just as a writer, but a great
writer. What he lacked, and what his poetry had proven unable
to command, was recognition. Phil Stone had recognized his
gifts but saw him Wrst and last as a poet. What Sherwood
Anderson recognized was a storyteller. ‘‘You’ve got too much
talent,’’ he told Faulkner. ‘‘You can do it too easy, in too many
diVerent ways. If you’re not careful, you’ll never write anything’’
(Blotner, 135).
What in part prompted this remark on Anderson’s part was
the story of Al Jackson. On their afternoon walks and over their
evening drinks in New Orleans, Faulkner and Anderson had

begun to make up this story together, eventually sending each
other letters in which each took the story further, invented more
characters, enriching the fable through dialogue. Al Jackson, as
Faulkner later summed him up, was ‘‘a descendant of Andrew
Jackson, left in [a] . . . Louisiana swamp after the battle of
Chalmette, no longer half-horse half-alligator, but now half-
man half-sheep and presently half-shark’’ (Blotner, 134). Shar-
ing an understanding of southwestern humor, Anderson and
Faulkner competed to see who could make more outlandish
the story of the Jackson family and their gradual regression
from man to Wsh. Although neither won the game, Faulkner
realized he could play it, and with a worthy opponent. As
David Minter aptly puts it, ‘‘As a writer, [Anderson] was
accomplished enough to be impressive, yet Xawed enough not
to seem overwhelming—a combination that made him an almost
perfect master’’ (Minter, 51). Anderson’s recognition, then,
proved critical in regenerating Faulkner’s self-conWdence as a
writer, and their joint production of the Al Jackson stories
provided a model he was to use in shaping narratives for years
to come—conversation itself. As he apprenticed himself to
Wction over the coming years, he frequently framed stories
within a two-person dialogue. In Absalom, Absalom! he was to
structure an entire novel around several key conversations.
With Anderson as model and interlocutor, Faulkner now
enjoyed a new experience in his life as a writer: he was actually
being read, not to mention being paid for his work.
For the Wrst time, he had readers, both those who subscribed
to the local Times-Picayune and those of a more intellectual bent
who read and supported The Double Dealer. Among the authors
published in this journal were Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Ezra

Pound, Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, and of course
Sherwood Anderson. The magazine’s editors were clearly in
touch with the current modernist writers both at home and
abroad, and the culture they created and inhabited in the
Vieux Carre was by no means provincial.
Faulkner went into high gear in this setting. He wrote furi-
ously every day, producing prose with a steady intensity he had
never achieved as a poet. Between January and September
1925, some twenty prose pieces of his appeared in the two
New Orleans publications. Having an audience he could imag-
ine himself addressing without fear of ridicule, he entered into
an imaginary conversation with a real community. Further, the
prose sketches he produced began to enable him to write about
something besides himself. Engaged in describing various New
Orleans ‘‘characters,’’ he began to imagine dialogues with them.
Gradually they began to have dialogues with each other, as in
‘‘The Liar,’’ a story that depicts the kind of storefront tale
swapping Faulkner would later exploit so brilliantly in The
Hamlet.12 Most important, Faulkner could remain hidden,
protected by the storyteller’s persona he was learning to
adopt. The ‘‘I’’ of his lyric poetry began to be displaced by
newly discovered voices through which he could speak more
freely, voices that no longer sounded like Prufrock. As he
moved on with his prose experiments that spring, Faulkner
returned to his war ‘‘experience’’ as the basis for his Wrst
novel, Soldier’s Pay. The stories he had told about himself, he
now translated into a Wctional world where Julian Lowe is a
returning cadet who looks upon the world ‘‘with a yellow and
disgruntled eye’’ because ‘‘they had stopped the war on him.’’13
But if Lowe to some degree represents Faulkner, he is nevertheless

distinct from another character, Donald Mahon, who also
resembles Faulkner. An oYcer who has returned from the
battlefront maimed and terminally wounded in both mind and
spirit, Mahon enacts the role of the wounded airman Faulkner
had made up for himself. Splitting and doubling himself into
these two Wgures, Faulkner stands back to watch. In short,
narrative prose was facilitating distance, and a certain safety,
allowing his imagination to roam more freely and without threat
of exposure even as he explored his darkest fears.
But William Faulkner, novelist, by no means sprang full
blown into life that spring. In a piece published in The Double
Dealer for April 1925, ‘‘Verse Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage,’’
Faulkner ostentatiously bids farewell to poetry, attributing his
adolescent interest in poetry Wrst to ‘‘the purpose of furthering
various philanderings in which I was engaged,’’ and ‘‘secondly,
to complete a youthful gesture I was then making of being
‘diVerent’ in a small town’’ (EPP, 115). Once sidetracked by
the seductions of Swinburne, he has now recovered his literary
senses, turning to the tradition of Shakespeare, Spenser, the
Elizabethans, Keats, and Shelley, Wnding there ‘‘the spiritual
beauty which the moderns strive vainly for with trickery, and yet
beneath it one knows are entrails; masculinity’’ (EPP, 117). But
even as he distances himself from his poetic past, he remains
devoted to the ideal of poetry, hoping for a ‘‘Keats in embryo, . . .
someone who can write something beautiful and passionate and
sad instead of saddening’’ (EPP, 118). And in the same issue of
the magazine, he publishes a poem, ‘‘The Faun,’’ another
version of the faun as the Wgure of the desiring male whose
‘‘panting puzzled heart is wrung and blind’’ (EPP, 119). Even
as he posed as a cynic looking back with pity on his youthful

amours, Faulkner was in fact still writing poetry for a woman.
At least this time it was a diVerent one.
In New Orleans, Faulkner had met Helen Baird, a young
woman slight of form like Estelle, but more worldly, skeptical,
and rambunctious of spirit. In the early summer of 1925, he
spent his time with Helen on the beach in Pascagoula, Missis-
sippi, even though Estelle was still in Oxford and already
considering a divorce. Over the course of the next year, Faul-
kner pursued and fell in love with Helen, and, true to form,
began writing poems for her. Just as he had hand lettered and
hand bound ‘‘Vision in Spring’’ for Estelle, he would hand
letter and hand bind a little volume of sonnets called ‘‘Helen:
A Courtship.’’ In January 1926, he presented her with another
handmade book, ‘‘Mayday.’’ This one, notably, was a medieval
allegory about the knight, Sir Galwyn of Arthgyl, who is on a
vain romantic quest that ends in his death. Faulkner proposed
marriage to Helen, but she turned him down. Although she was
fond of him as an eccentric bohemian and shared his interest in
literature, Helen did not take him seriously as a suitor. She
would later advise a friend against reading Mosquitoes, the novel
Faulkner dedicated to her, calling it ‘‘no good’’ (Minter, 60). In
1927 she married a lawyer. Again thwarted in love, Faulkner
again wrote poems about his unfulWlled desires, oVering them in
tribute to a woman who had rejected him. But at the same time
he played out the familiar role of failed lover, he was gaining
distance on that performance, indeed on all his masks and
poses, in his Wction.
In Mosquitoes (1927), the novel he tentatively began while in
Europe and took up seriously in June 1926, the character
Dawson Fairchild—a novelist based largely on Sherwood

Anderson—remarks that a writer is ‘‘always writing it for some
woman, that he fondly believes he’s stealing a march on some
brute bigger or richer or handsomer than he is; I believe that
every word a writing man writes is put down with the ultimate
intention of impressing some woman that probably don’t care
anything at all for literature, as is the nature of women’’ (Blotner,
I, 512). In ‘‘Verse Old and Nascent,’’ Faulkner had made fun of
the young poet who sought to woo his love with poetry. Now he
gives the idea full expression, laying it out for scrutiny even as
he disavows responsibility for it. Dawson Fairchild is a loveable
windbag, on occasion capable of genuine insight but also liable
to contradict himself repeatedly as he talks on and on about art,
women, the limits of formal education, and the deWciencies of
modern youth. Faulkner makes him a mouthpiece for a variety
of speculations, especially as here about the artist’s primary
drives. At another point in one of Fairchild’s breathless mono-
logues, he tries to Wnd terms for explaining what he calls the
writer’s ‘‘perversion’’:
There is a kind of spider or something. The female is the larger,

and when the male goes to her he goes to death: she devours
him during the act of conception. And that’s man: a kind of
voraciousness that makes an artist stand beside himself with a
notebook in his hand always, putting down all the charming
things that ever happen to him, killing them for the sake of some
problematical something he might or might never use.14
Because Fairchild has been identiWed early as capable of wild

ideas as well as tall tales, he can say pretty much anything he
wants. As character, he is endowed with a freedom to speak
with an imaginative largesse that Faulkner as narrator cannot

indulge if he is to be credible. So he sets up the narrator as a
kind of listener, following Conrad’s example if not yet nearing
his achievement. By relocating his anxieties about art from a
threatened and defensive ‘‘I’’ to a garrulous and uncensored
‘‘he,’’ Faulkner releases his imagination from its moorings in
self-absorption, enabling it to spew forth all sorts of confused
and contradictory notions that had been pent up.
As he worked at his new trade of Wction, Faulkner found that
it unleashed his observations as well as his experiences, making
more of both directly accessible to his imagination. He came to
see that he had always been standing ‘‘beside himself,’’ taking
down notes in a mental ‘‘notebook’’ just as he had always
sketched things as he walked around town or in the woods.
(Like many novelists, Faulkner had a prodigious memory. He
could, for example, recite virtually any passage from Shake-
speare and the Bible on demand.) But he also struggled with his
new stance, as the Dawson Fairchild passage reveals. The artist
may have magical powers, but he is alienated from life, and
potentially dangerous to himself and others. Furthermore, Faul-
kner had to learn how to write Wction that would live up to his
ambitions. Both Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes are rich in prom-
ise, but neither is an accomplished novel—which is to say that
Faulkner was still learning how to control his newly untethered
imagination. To that end, he needed to put in some practice at
his new trade, but he also needed to get out of his own way and
give the one standing ‘‘beside himself ’’ his head. His six months
in Europe helped him to do both.
Although Phil Stone had written letters of introduction for
his young protégé to notable writers such as Joyce and Yeats,
Faulkner never used them, no doubt knowing that Stone knew

none of them himself. Stone had encouraged Faulkner to go to
Europe on the theory that he would be discovered as a poet
there, much as Robert Frost had been in England. But Faul-
kner had a diVerent project in mind. After landing in Genoa,
he and his travel companion Bill Spratling went on a walking
tour in the Italian countryside for a couple of weeks and then
split up. Faulkner headed for Paris, where he would live for the
next two and one-half months on the Rue Servandoni, across
the street from the Luxembourg Gardens. Although he may
have gone once to a restaurant frequented by Joyce in the hope
of sighting the great man, Faulkner otherwise kept to himself,
never having acquired ‘‘the café habit,’’ as he described it to
his mother:
(Everyone else in France spends the evening sitting in cafes

playing cards or listening to music.) Especially the poets. They
sit from 6 to 12 o’clock in rows smoking cigarettes in the cafes,
like pigeons on the roof of a barn.15
Faulkner continued his now Wxed habit of writing in the

‘‘forenoon’’ as he called it, walking around town in the after-
noon, and dining frugally in a cheap restaurant in the evening.
His bohemian pose was limited to making a pilgrimage to Père
Lachaise to visit Oscar Wilde’s tomb and to growing a beard.
His favorite afternoon pastime was watching the little boys and
old men sail their toy sailboats on the pool in the Luxembourg
Gardens. But what he mainly did was work on two novels.
One of these he would publish as Mosquitoes. The other,
called ‘‘Elmer,’’ he would never publish. As we have noted,
Mosquitoes reveals the turmoil of ideas and possibilities opened
up by Faulkner’s turn to Wction but eVectively objectiWes them

in characters who embody various versions of the artist. They
are gathered on a boat, cruising around Lake Pontchartrain,
mostly talking, mostly about art and sex. Among the minor oV-
stage characters is one Faulkner, a ‘‘funny man’’ who ‘‘said he
was a liar by profession and he made good money at it.’’ In
Hitchcockian fashion, Faulkner puts in a cameo appearance as a
shabbily dressed and sunburned stranger who is ‘‘crazy. Not
dangerous: just crazy’’ (Mosquitoes, 145). In ‘‘Elmer,’’ by con-
trast, Faulkner tells the story of a young artist, an aspiring
painter named Elmer Hodge, but can get no distance on him,
no relief from sharing his trials. Even though Elmer is physically
Faulkner’s opposite—tall and gangly—he is trapped by the same
conXicts that had so haunted Faulkner—between art and life,
between a woman and his career, between male and female
sexual identities. Much is revealed about Elmer’s interior strug-
gles, indeed too much. A sign, perhaps, of Faulkner’s Wnal
frustration with the manuscript is his representation of Elmer
using one of his watercolors as toilet paper.16 He wrote his
mother that he had put the Mosquitoes manuscript aside
because ‘‘I dont think I am quite old enough to write it as it
should be written—dont know quite enough about people’’
(Blotner, 162). The problem with ‘‘Elmer,’’ by contrast seems
to have been that he knew, or was learning, too much about
himself, more than he was willing to admit or able to process.
What little ironic distance he could summon up proved insuY-
cient either to free or to protect him from the Wgure he was
drawing in Elmer. He would later say that he never published
‘‘Elmer’’ because it was ‘‘funny, but not funny enough.’’ In fact,
as Joseph Blotner has noted, ‘‘there was little that was very
funny about Elmer’’ (Blotner, 165).

Abandoning ‘‘Elmer,’’ Faulkner focused his attention on
short stories, writing his mother glowing even if mildly ironic
accounts of his progress. In late October 1925 he reported,
‘‘I’m writing a story now—the best one yet, as usual,’’ and
several days later he again bragged, ‘‘I have just Wnished the
4th best short story in the world—the other 3 being the ones
I wrote previous to it’’ (TOH, 200, 202). By this time, Faulkner’s
novel, Soldier’s Pay, had been accepted for publication and he
was anxious to get home. He planned to sell his short stories
and get back to work on Mosquitoes. On one front, he suc-
ceeded; Soldier’s Pay was published in February 1926, and
Mosquitoes appeared in April of 1927. But on the other, he
met with steady rejection. Faulkner would not sell a short story
until Forum accepted ‘‘A Rose for Emily’’ in 1930. In the face of
his disappointment, however, he wrote a third novel that he
knew was a crucial breakthrough. Flags in the Dust called forth
the old tales and talking of his youth and suddenly opened wide
for him the gates to his own imagined world. As he worked
away at it, during the summer of 1927, Faulkner grew genuinely
excited. In July he wrote his editor Horace Liveright, ‘‘the new
novel is coming Wne. It is much better than that other stuV.
I believe that at last I have learned to control the stuV and Wx it
on something like rational truth’’ (SL, 37). In October Faulkner
sent oV the manuscript, writing Liveright, ‘‘At last and certainly,
as El Orens’ sheik said, I have written THE book, of which
those other things were but foals. I believe it is the damdest
book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher’’ (SL, 38).
Ready for a vacation, Faulkner also asked for some advance
money, as he was planning ‘‘an expedition with a lady friend for
purposes of biological research’’ (Blotner, I, 557). Whoever it

was that Faulkner was going to celebrate with—and we’ve never
found out who it was—he was thoroughly exhilarated by his
new novel. Why he was so thrilled is not hard to understand.
For the Wrst time, Faulkner had populated a novel with Wgures
drawn from his family history and his local environment. The
stories he had grown up hearing now made their way into his
text through the voices of an ‘‘Old Bayard’’ Sartoris and an Aunt
Jenny Du Pre, behind and beyond whom hovers the long dead
but ever-present Old Colonel John Sartoris, based on the
revered William Clarke Falkner.
The patriarch, John Sartoris, survives the death of his brother
Bayard in the civil war, returns to build his railroad, and dies in
a duel with his business partner. His great grandson, Bayard
survives the death of his brother John in World War I, then
comes home to JeVerson in guilt and despair. Meanwhile, a host
of subplots proliferate. Another homecoming warrior is Horace
Benbow. He’s never seen battle, but he has developed an
obsession with glassblowing; he brings home an elaborate
glassblowing apparatus from Italy. Horace has a sister, Narcissa,
with whom he is in love. Narcissa loves him too, but is a cold
and proper lady, and so marries Bayard Sartoris. That is, before
Bayard manages to kill his grandfather the banker by driving his
new car into a ditch and before Bayard manages to kill himself
going up in an airplane as untrustworthy as the one his brother
John died in over France. Confused yet? But there’s more.
A smarmy young man named Byron Snopes is writing secret
and pornographic letters to Narcissa, who carefully keeps them
in her underwear drawer, this against the advice of Bayard’s
Great-Aunt Jenny, a voice of reason and as well as of humor in
the novel. There is also a black family that harbors an ambitious

and discontented son who wants to revolt against his parents’
loyalty to the Sartoris family. I could go on. The problem is that’s
exactly what Faulkner did.
We have noticed Faulkner’s discovery that Wction allowed
him some ironic distance on himself. When he had only one
character to work with, as in ‘‘Elmer,’’ that distance too easily
collapsed. By splitting and doubling himself into two charac-
ters, as he did in Soldier’s Pay, he was able to get suYcient
purchase on his experience to represent it. In Mosquitoes, by
splitting the narrator oV as a listener from the characters who
speak, he was able to indulge his thoughts without exposing his
Xank. In Flags in the Dust, however, these strategies of splitting
and doubling proliferate at a dizzying pace. Characters materi-
alize apace, some out of the thin air of memory, multiplying
stories and generating other characters. Little wonder, then, that
when Faulkner’s friend and agent Ben Wasson tried to edit the
manuscript, he complained that there were six novels there.
Rather than taking control, as he called it, Faulkner seems rather
to have been taken control of—by the onrush of Wgures and
stories now unloosed to wander at will around his imagination.
He had discovered his subject, the invented world to which
he was to give the name Yoknapatawpha County, but it was too
large, too rich, and ultimately too disturbing, to bring into
focus yet.
Of course, Faulkner himself didn’t see it this way. He was
both baZed and severely wounded when Liveright turned the
novel down cold. Two years later he described his reaction:
I was shocked: my Wrst emotion was blind protest, then I

became objective for an instant, like a parent who is told that

its child is a thief or an idiot or a leper; for a dreadful moment
I contemplated it with consternation and despair, then like
the parent I hid my own eyes in the fury of denial. I clung
stubbornly to my illusion. (Blotner, I, 560)
Although he tried to revise the novel, he found that to cut it up and

paste it together again was impossible. It was his child, and he
‘‘clung’’ to the ‘‘illusion’’ that it was whole and well. He did allow
Ben Wasson to edit it and so the novel was Wnally published as
Sartoris in 1928. But meanwhile the ambitious trajectory he had
imagined starting with Flags in the Dust was blocked.
Just how much was blocked becomes evident when we
realize that he had already written several stories in which he
had imagined events and characters that were to take him a
lifetime to develop fully. ‘‘Father Abraham,’’ for example, writ-
ten sometime late in 1926, just before he turned to ‘‘Flags,’’
already constructs the characters of Flem Snopes, Uncle Billy
Varner, and the precursor to RatliV, all of whom would return
to life in The Hamlet (1940). It also tells the story of the Texas
horsetrader, later retold in ‘‘Spotted Horses,’’ itself later incorpo-
rated into The Hamlet. ‘‘Evangeline,’’ written in the same
period, already tells a version of the story of Charles Bon and
Judith Sutpen, later to form the core of Absalom, Absalom!
(1936). Perhaps even more important, Faulkner had composed,
in addition to ‘‘Evangeline,’’ three other stories built on the
conversation of a reporter named Don and his interlocutor, ‘‘I.’’
‘‘Mistral,’’ ‘‘Snow,’’ and ‘‘The Big Shot,’’ as Estella Schonberg
Wrst pointed out, are each early experiments with the dialogue
between Quentin and Shreve that occupies the Wnal four chap-
ters of Absalom, Absalom!17 In that novel, where Quentin

Compson splits into two Quentins, and then into Quentin
and Shreve, and Wnally into four Wgures, Quentin/Henry and
Shreve/Charles, the promise of the split and doubled Sartoris
brothers would come to fruition. But all of this was put on hold
in the fall of 1928.
Still the most incisive account of what happened to and for
Faulkner that fall is David Minter’s, which goes something like
this: Faulkner has apprenticed himself Wrst as a poet, then as a
Wction writer, only to Wnd himself a minor regional poet turned
a minor regional novelist. He is now thirty years old, and having
written three novels, he is reduced to day labor as a painter to
make ends meet. Estelle, his childhood sweetheart, has divorced
her husband and returned to Oxford with her two children.
She awaits the Wnalization of her divorce and his proposal of
marriage. Stuck in a psychological and professional limbo, he
continues to write short stories, among them three of particular
importance about a group of children named Compson: ‘‘A
Justice,’’ ‘‘When That Evening Sun Go Down,’’ and ‘‘Twi-
light.’’ The last of these would become The Sound and the
Fury, the result of a treacherous psychological regression that
ironically enabled a radical formal innovation. ‘‘One day,’’ he
said, ‘‘I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher’s
addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write.’’ As
Minter puts it, ‘‘If writing for himself implied freedom to
recover more personal materials, writing without concern for
publisher’s addresses implied freedom to become more experi-
mental’’ (Minter, 94). The results of this experiment were
to stun Faulkner himself. Upon completing it he gave the
typescript to Ben Wasson, saying ‘‘Read this, Bud. It’s a real
son of a bitch’’ (Minter, 105). When he tried to edit the book for

publication, Wasson was himself stunned. His eVorts to impose
clarity through additions and punctuation elicited a blunt
response from his friend Faulkner: ‘‘Don’t make any more
additions to the script, bud. I know you mean well, but so do
I. I eVaced the 2 or 3 you made’’ (SL, 45).
The leap made between Flags in the Dust and The Sound and
the Fury, both published in 1929, remains stunning. If Flags in
the Dust marked a Balzacian moment, opening up an inWnite
social and historical array of narrative possibilities, The Sound
and the Fury marks a Flaubertian moment, revealing a Faulkner
who was Wnding the means for controlling the virtually unlimit-
ed resources of language he now discovered were available
to him. In a sense, The Sound and the Fury is the site of the
struggle Faulkner mounts to cope with the Xood of imaginative
energy released by his turn back into his most private and
painful memories. The regression into childhood funds an
explosion of passion, which in turn requires an accelerated
experimentation with, and mastery over, narrative technique.
In Flags, Faulkner had basically lined up a disparate set of
stories, turning now to one, now to another, and linking them
loosely around family tales and the failed heroics of war. Now he
found, indeed was forced to Wnd, a means of telling one story,
but one that outstripped the limits of the Wctional forms he had
been using. His imagination now required a new form of
narrative. There is no question that the discovery marked by
Flags in the Dust of his own invented world, ‘‘William Faulkner,
Sole Owner and Proprietor,’’ was a major one, enabling the
Balzacian plenty to come. But it is equally if not more important
to recognize that without the formal experimentation displayed
in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s achievement as a

novelist would certainly have been diVerent and probably less
consequential.
The Sound and the Fury
Although on Wrst reading The Sound and the Fury seems far
more chaotic than Flags in the Dust, it is in fact an exquisitely
composed and virtually perfect work. ‘‘I worked so hard at that
book,’’ Faulkner would later remark, ‘‘that I doubt if there’s
anything in it that didn’t belong there’’ (Minter, 104). Soon after
completing it, he told Ben Wasson that he had ‘‘worked on
it . . . like a poem almost.’’18 His favorite and most often repeat-
ed account of the novel centered on having ‘‘no plan at all,’’ but
simply beginning to write, and Wnding himself caught up in
imagining the world of Benjy Compson and his two brothers,
and most centrally, a sister named Caddy (S&F, 227). He liked
to say that he had fallen in love with Caddy, that he ‘‘loved her
so much that [he] couldn’t decide to give her life just for the
duration of a short story. She deserved more than that’’ (S&F,
422). Thus he decided to retell the story, Wrst through Quen-
tin’s perspective, then through Jason’s, and Wnally, as he some-
times put it, through Faulkner’s. Compelling though this love
story is, it cannot wholly disguise the fact that Faulkner did
indeed develop a plan, that at some point, probably upon
completing the Wrst section, he had begun to write with publi-
cation squarely in mind. The Benjy section, he realized, could
not make sense on its own as a short story. But if it was not
to be a short story, what was it to become? Faulkner knew
that secreted within it was the larger story of the Compson
family itself, and so he sought a way of telling that larger story

through further experiments with point of view. This decision
led to even more innovative consequences. He may well have
begun the Benjy section with no plan and no hope, but by the
time he had drafted it he had large plans and even larger hopes.
The opening section of the novel, in fact, is not a story at all,
but a pastiche of moments as experienced by Benjy at various
points in his life. There is no plot, no beginning or ending.
Instead, a dense array of images is established, centered around
Benjy’s anguished loss of his sister. The principle of compo-
sition, then, is more poetic than narrative, and perhaps more
pictorial than either, especially if we include cubist painting as
a reference point. For through Benjy’s consciousness we are
shown various scenes and events as if time did not exist. That is,
some purely arbitrary sight or word triggers a shift in Benjy’s
mind from present to past to present, much as a cubist painting
moves us from one point of view to another without ever
providing a Wxed vantage point outside the frame. The eVect
is a vivid but puzzling sensorium.
Consider the opening page of the novel. The title, ‘‘April
Seventh, 1928’’ seems to situate us in a secure chronological
time frame, but the scene is at once crisp and dizzying.
Through the fence, between the curling Xower spaces, I could

see them hitting. They were coming toward where the Xag was
and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by
the Xower tree. They took the Xag out, and they were hitting.
Then they put the Xag back and they went to the table, and he
hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the
fence. Luster came away from the Xower tree and we went along
the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked
through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

‘‘Here, caddie.’’ He hit. They went away across the pasture.
I held to the fence and watched them going away.
‘‘Listen at you, now.’’ Luster said. ‘‘Aint you something, thirty
three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way
to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you
going to help me Wnd that quarter so I can go the show
tonight? . . .
We went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where
our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster’s on the
fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.
‘‘Wait a minute.’’ Luster said. ‘‘You snagged on that nail again.
Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.’’
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. (S&F, 3)
We are instantly thrust into a world of sights and sounds and

events, but they are apparently uninXected by any interpretive
signiWcance. We are presented with bits and pieces, but it is left
up to us how to compose them into some coherent picture.
Think of it as a kind of game, a poker game. Let us Wrst bet that
the speaker here is a little boy. His speech is simple and linear.
Let us be especially clever and say that he is watching a golf
game, since people are ‘‘hitting’’ and calling out ‘‘caddie.’’ Who
Luster is remains uncertain, but we know that he is looking for a
lost quarter. Then we become confused. The speaker is not a
little boy, but a thirty-three-year-old man who is having his
birthday today. If he is taller than Luster, how old is Luster?
And what is the still nameless speaker moaning about? We are
introduced suddenly to ‘‘Caddy,’’ which may help us to line
up ‘‘caddie’’ and ‘‘Caddy,’’ the homophony that eventually
accounts for Benjy’s moaning, but meanwhile, where are we?

Snagged by a nail on the fence, Benjy’s mind is catapulted back
to a memory of Caddy freeing him from the same nail on the
same fence. Since this memory is printed in italics, we bet that
we’re now in a diVerent time frame, one in which, lo and
behold, Benjy actually is a little boy. Maybe we’re not willing
to raise the bet, but we’re not yet willing to fold our cards either.
The poker metaphor, I think, helps us to see how central to
Faulkner’s strategy is his anticipation of the reader’s responses to
his prose. He invites us to speculate in order to Wgure out what is
happening, responding to our guesses with further bits and pieces
of information. Once we learn how to read in this fashion, of
course, we are caught up in more than a game. By compelling us to
assemble a picture of the world as experienced by Benjy, Faulkner
teaches us a new way of reading narrative, and thus creates a new
kind of narrative. Benjy’s section is not, strictly speaking, a stream
of consciousness because Benjy’s mind does not move like a
stream, at least not a smooth running one. It moves in jerks, stalls
at certain sights and sounds, resumes speed in response to others.
By learning what provokes various responses in Benjy, we Wnd
out what constitutes his world as well as who and what he is. But
in the process of composing a coherent picture, we are not
just assembling information, we are acquiring and practicing
the skills required to respond fruitfully to Faulkner’s inversion
of plot development, to what I will call the counterintuitive form of
narrative pull he invents in this novel.
Sartre was the Wrst to point out that the The Sound and the
Fury has no future. ‘‘Everything,’’ he says, ‘‘has already hap-
pened’’ (S&F, 267). Sartre was interested in the determinist
implications of Faulkner’s technique, but I am more concerned
with the eVect of the technique itself. As readers, we are pulled

forward through this novel not by the conventional desire to
Wnd out what happens next, but by the perversely powerful
need to understand why this is happening now. The novel’s
present consists, in other words, of events conceived not as acts
with as-yet-undetermined future consequences, but as conse-
quences already determined by as-yet-unrevealed previous
events. This is what I mean by the narrative pull created by
inverting the reader’s normal relationship to plot. The Benjy
section initiates us as readers of what seems a perverse narrative
because it refuses to reward our conventional expectations as
readers. We must learn to read diVerently, looking for answers
to a diVerent order of questions. We ask not what will this event
lead to, but what is this event, what events in the past led to it
and why? As we are led forward in search of answers to these
questions, we Wnd ourselves sucked into a Wctional world before
we can get our bearings in it. It is a kind of seduction Faulkner
works, evoking both resistance and capitulation.
The Benjy section initiates this process, and in some ways
epitomizes it, for Benjy is a Wgure of compelling sensitivity and
pathos who irresistibly draws us into his experience even as he
reveals its unbearability. As we read further in his section, it
becomes clear that no matter how large his shadow, Benjy is
eternally a little boy, and one whose only connection in or to the
world is with and through his older sister Caddy, who is
missing. Drawn on in our need to understand what is happening
to Benjy and why, we are also drawn to him by an empathy
generated by his exquisitely attuned senses and secured by our
inability to stand outside his perspective. In an early scene,
Benjy clings to a cold gate, awaiting Caddy’s homecoming
from school on the day before Christmas:

‘‘Hello, Benjy.’’ Caddy said. She opened the gate and came in
and stooped down. Caddy smelled like leaves. ‘‘Did you come
to meet me,’’ she said. ‘‘Did you come to meet Caddy. What did
you let him get his hands so cold for, Versh.’’ ‘‘I told him to
keep them in his pockets,’’ Versh said. ‘‘Holding onto that ahun
gate.’’
‘‘Did you come to meet Caddy,’’ she said, rubbing my hands.
‘‘What is it. What are you trying to tell Caddy.’’ Caddy smelled
like trees and like when she says we were asleep. (S&F, 4–5)
Except when he can reinhabit such memories of Caddy, and

sometimes because he cannot escape from them, Benjy is in
pain, continual and fundamentally irremediable pain. That pain
is the more acute since Benjy cannot speak, he can only howl.
For much of his section, we know he is howling, but not
because that howl is itself represented on the page. Rather, we
know it because others are telling him to hush, trying to make
him hush, and the pressure of his felt pain is thereby height-
ened, sometimes to excruciating levels.
When, for example, Caddy comes home smelling of perfume
rather than the usual ‘‘trees,’’ Benjy’s wail is so loud and awful
that the reader wants to hurry Caddy up as she goes to the
bathroom to wash it oV. As Faulkner was later to say of him,
‘‘He no longer had Caddy; being an idiot he was not even aware
that Caddy was missing. He knew only that something was
wrong, which left a vacuum in which he grieved. He tried to
Wll that vacuum’’ (S&F, 233).
While we are thus drawn into Benjy’s world, of course, we
are picking up pieces of the puzzle that the novel as a whole will
invite us to assemble. We learn that his world is populated not
only by his siblings and his parents, but also by a black family

headed by Dilsey and her husband Roskus. But even as we learn
to identify some characters, others are blurred. For example,
Quentin is Benjy’s older brother, and yet another Quentin
appears at certain points, one who is female. Later we will realize
that this is Caddy’s daughter, named after her suicidal uncle. But
there is no way to know this the Wrst time we read section one.
We have to read on, assuming that mysteries will be resolved in
later sections. So there is an element of suspense at work here, as
there must be in any narrative. But here the suspense is resolved
not by the plot’s resolution, but by the reader’s ability to see the
gaps and Wll them in when it becomes possible. On a second
reading, we know there are two Quentins from the outset, and so
we are in eVect reading a slightly diVerent book. This time
around, we know, roughly at least, what is happening and what
has happened in the past. But we are still engaged in composing
and recomposing a picture, and the picture never remains the
same, from section to section or from reading to reading.
Consider the next, Quentin Compson section. Here Quentin
relates the events of his life on its last day, as he prepares to
commit suicide by drowning himself in the Charles River in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. The date is June 10, 1910, a long
jump back in time from April 7, 1928, the present of section
one. As his mind unravels before us, memories intrude that
enable us to get a better purchase on some events only Xeetingly
reported in section one. Caddy’s wedding, for example, came to
us amid the confusion of a Benjy made drunk by Dilsey’s son
T.P. in the Wrst section. Now Quentin’s memory of the wedding
situates Benjy’s drunken memory within a more inclusive frame-
work, but at the same time reconWgures the event in accord with
Quentin’s trauma instead of Benjy’s.

Then she was across the porch I couldn’t hear her heels then in the
moonlight like a cloud, the Xoating shadow of the veil running
across the grass, into the bellowing. She ran out of her
dress, clutching her bridal, running into the bellowing where
T.P. in the dew Whooey Sasprilluh Benjy under the box bel-
lowing. (S&F, 52)
We now can better position and comprehend Benjy’s expe-

rience of the wedding, but we’re faced with Wguring out the far
more complex reaction of Quentin to it. So, as with the Benjy
section, we are reading in at least two registers. One is that of
the puzzle, trying to Wx in our mind what is happening in the
present in relation to what has happened in the past. In this
register, the reader is a kind of detective in search of clues that
will enable him to Xush out and then Xesh in the central events
of the story. The other is that of the competition, say, the poker
game, the ongoing eVort to sustain one’s defenses against the
force of a voice that is sucking us into a world we can neither
resist nor understand. The more we read, the more we are
invested, and thus the more urgent is our need to keep reading,
but also, the more dangerous our risk of losing all control or
understanding.
Faulkner once described his method as a novelist by saying,
There’s always a moment in experience—a thought—an

incident—that’s there. Then all I do is work up to that moment.
I Wgure what must have happened before to lead people to that
particular moment, and I work away from it, Wnding out how
people act after the moment. (S&F, 373)
For Quentin Compson, such an ‘‘incident’’ is the discovery

that his sister has lost her virginity while he remains himself a

virgin. From this follows his frantic and failed eVort to
avenge her honor by shooting her lover Dalton Ames and his
equally frantic and failed eVort to have sex with her himself. He
ultimately imagines himself telling his father that he and Caddy
have committed incest, so as to make it, somehow, retroactively
true. Faulkner ‘‘works up to’’ this moment, exploring the failure
of the Compson parents to provide the love and care they
should, and thereby leaving Dilsey and Caddy with the respon-
sibilities of both fathering and mothering. But simultaneously,
he works away from it, tracking Quentin’s unrelentingly self-
destructive course, as well as the breakdown of the Compson
family at large.
That breakdown is further inXected in the Wnal two sections
of the novel. Jason Compson, the speaker in the third section,
provides a kind of dark comic relief to the intensities of the Wrst
two. ‘‘Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say,’’ he begins (S&F,
113). Like his brothers, he is both symptom and victim of a
deeply fractured family, but unlike them, he squarely blames his
sister for his own failures. Her husband, Herbert Head, an
Indiana banker, was to have given Jason a job in his bank.
When Herbert divorces Caddy on discovering that she is preg-
nant, he also withdraws the job oVer. Accordingly, Jason can
spend the rest of his life acting out his revenge on his sister,
largely by mistreating her daughter Quentin, but also by stealing
the money Caddy sends to support her. Relocating us in the
present of April 6, 1928, the Jason section clariWes a good deal,
largely because Jason is so plainspoken and unreXective. But the
price we pay for clariWcation is a high one: we have to spend a
good deal of time listening to Jason, who is certainly among the
most repugnant Wgures in all literature. We may for a while

enjoy the relief of hearing some one speak colloquially, but
sooner or later we realize that he seems to be talking to himself
all the time. Although Faulkner was ironically to call him the
‘‘Wrst sane Compson since before Culloden,’’ Jason emerges as a
virtual madman, so charged with anger and resentment is he
(S&F, 212). If grief and empathy bonded us with Benjy, and
despair and confusion descend on us with Quentin, a kind of
moral nausea sets in with Jason, and nowhere more keenly than
when he is funny. Here is Jason confronting Luster and Benjy in
the same setting in which we’ve seen them in section one:
‘‘Take him on round to the back,’’ I says. ‘‘What the hell makes
you want to keep him around here where people can see him?’’ I
made them go on, before he got started bellowing good. It’s bad
enough on Sundays, with that dam Weld full of people that
haven’t got a side show and six niggers to feed, knocking a
dam oversize mothball around. He’s going to keep on running
up and down that fence and bellowing every time they come in
sight until the Wrst thing I know they’re going to begin charging
me golf dues, then Mother and Dilsey’ll have to get a couple of
china door knobs and a walking stick and work it out, unless
I play at night with a lantern. (S&F, 117–118)
Jason distances himself from the scene he confronts by cozying

up to us and making fun of it, but the more he does so, the more
we want to shove him away. It is a distinct pleasure when Jason
is foiled by Caddy’s daughter Quentin in the novel’s Wnal
section, but meanwhile it is a sharp relief just getting beyond
the sound of his voice.
Reinforcing that relief is the calm serenity with which a third
person narrator begins section four: ‘‘The day dawned bleak

and chill’’ (S&F, 165). Often referred to as the ‘‘Dilsey’’ section,
because Dilsey plays such a central role in its action, the Wnal
part of the novel is actually narrated by an authoritative, not to
mention eloquent, voice. Entitled April 8, 1928, the fourth
section of the novel is set on the Easter Sunday following the
April 6th of Jason’s section and the April 7th of Benjy’s. The
story unfolds in a simple, straightforward time sequence, begin-
ning with Dilsey’s early morning emergence and continuing
through the family’s discovery that Quentin has run away with
one of the circus men and stolen Jason’s hoarded money,
through the black church service to which Dilsey takes Benjy.
That service itself serves as the epiphany of the section as well as
the novel, taking us into the community of black residents as
they listen to an Easter sermon. The Christian symbolism of the
Passion Week is foregrounded in the church service, and Dil-
sey’s visionary insight is expressed in and because of her faith.
When she says she has seen the Wrst and the last, the beginning
and the ending, she speaks with the authority of Revelation in
her understanding of both the Compson family history and
God’s plan of salvation, even though the two do not match up.
In one sense, we are provided with what Frank Kermode has
called a ‘‘sense of an ending,’’ the crucial closure to a narrative
that retrospectively provides order and coherence.19 For
Kermode, as for Faulkner here, the Christian story is the mythic
model for all Western narrative. Christ is born into the human
world in medias res and thereby is the tragic protagonist of a
world-changing story. This story redeems all history, providing
human life with meaning and value; in dividing BC from AD, it
punctuates time, ordering it into myth. Dilsey’s grasp of such an
order is both authentic and fully articulated in the Wnal section

of the novel. But at the same time, this order is recast as at best
inaccessible and at worst irrelevant to the human lives it osten-
sibly shelters and redeems. Modernist irony returns with a
vengeance as Faulkner describes the church. As Dilsey and
Benjy approach it, the ‘‘weathered church lifted its crazy steeple
like a painted church, and the whole scene was as Xat and
without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ulti-
mate edge of the Xat earth, against the windy sunlight of space
and April and a midmorning Wlled with bells’’ (S&F, 182).
Whatever order and meaning has been found, it is both fragile
and artiWcially produced. The novel’s ending only reiterates this
ironic viewpoint when it portrays Benjy as howling in protest
because the carriage he’s riding in has turned in the wrong
direction around the town square. Once the carriage is turned
in the right direction, Benjy hushes, ‘‘his eyes . . . empty and
blue and serene again as cornice and façade Xowed smoothly
once more from left to right, post and tree, window and door-
way and signboard each in its ordered place’’ (S&F, 199). The
value of order itself is under suspicion if all it amounts to is
an arbitrary sequence. Indeed, the title of the novel already
suggests the possibility that any story, any narrative that weaves
a meaningful pattern is in the end arbitrary, a ‘‘tale told by
an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing’’ (Macbeth,
5, 5, 25–27).
In one of his many accounts of writing The Sound and the
Fury, Faulkner used an unusual locution as he reiterated his
familar litany: ‘‘So I wrote Quentin’s and Jason’s sections, trying
to clarify Benjy’s. But I saw that I was merely temporizing; That
I should have to get completely out of the book.’’ Actually,
Faulkner didn’t really want ‘‘to get completely out of the book’’

(S&F, 231). He ‘‘realized that there would be compensations,
that in a sense [he] could then give a Wnal turn to the screw and
extract some ultimate distillation.’’ Nevertheless, ‘‘it took [him]
better than a month to take pen and write The day dawned bleak
and chill’’ because Wnishing the book would mean losing touch
with ‘‘perhaps the only thing in literature that would move
[him] very much: Caddy climbing the pear tree’’ (S&F, 227).
In fact, there is a sense in which Faulkner never fully ‘‘got out
of ’’ The Sound and the Fury. For one thing, until the end of his
life, he clearly never tired of repeating the story of its compo-
sition. More revealing for our purposes is the fact that he was
ready and eager almost sixteen years later to add another
section, called ‘‘Appendix/Compson, 1699–1945,’’ for Mal-
colm Cowley’s The Viking Portable Faulkner in 1946.
As the dating in its title indicates, the Appendix is actually
a combination sequel and prequel, organized as a roughly
chronological series of names, by no means all of them Comp-
son. Before getting to the characters with whom we are familiar,
for example, the Appendix treats one Ikkemotubbe, ‘‘a dispos-
sessed American king’’ who sold his land and led his Chickasaw
tribe west to Oklahoma, as well as Andrew Jackson, ‘‘a great
white father with a sword’’ (S&F, 203–204). Prompted at
least in part by Cowley’s aim in his anthology to foreground
Yoknapatawpha County as the unifying framework for his ca-
reer, Faulkner resituated the Compson story against the back-
drop of the larger social history he had begun to imagine in
Sartoris, and subsequently written into life in Light in August,
Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, among other novels
and stories he had published between 1929 and 1946. He was
thoroughly excited at the results of his labor. Called upon for a

short synopsis, he sent Cowley the longer manuscript, saying,
‘‘I should have done this when I wrote the book. Then the
whole thing would have fallen into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle
when the magician’s wand touched it.’’20 A few years later he
made the same point about the Appendix in recommending its
publication at the beginning of a new edition of The Sound and
the Fury, telling his editor at Random House that ‘‘it is the key
to the whole book, and after reading it, the 4 sections as they
stand now fall into clarity and place’’ (SL, 203). Actually, as
generations of readers have discovered, the Appendix is by no
means such a ‘‘key.’’ A fascinating piece of writing, and a
provocative gloss on the novel proper, it actually distorts it by
superimposing on it a vast genealogical past that the novel as
written in no way requires.
Which is not to say that Faulkner meant to mislead Cowley.
For Faulkner, composing the Appendix clearly did make the
novel’s pieces fall into their proper place in the ‘‘puzzle.’’ It’s
just that the puzzle in question is no longer primarily the one
proVered by The Sound and the Fury, but more importantly, the
puzzle of his whole career, the Balzacian invention of a world.
Cowley has been criticized on occasion for overemphasizing the
importance of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner’s much celebrated
‘‘cosmos of [his] own,’’ thereby initiating a tendency to under-
estimate the value of works not set there.21 But Cowley deserves
a good deal of credit, and not only for republishing Faulkner’s
work when it was largely out of print. By inviting Faulkner to
see himself as ‘‘Sole Owner and Proprieter’’ of a whole imagined
world rather than simply a typewriter, Cowley aVorded him a
renewed and much needed venue for recognizing himself as an
author (S&F, 216–217). So much is clear from a passage later in

the same letter, where Faulkner says of the Appendix, ‘‘I think
this is all right, it took me about a week to get Hollywood out of
my lungs, but I am still writing all right, I believe’’ (FCF, 37).
Since he had been in and out of Hollywood for the past ten
years and had not published a novel since 1942, it was no small
relief that he was ‘‘still writing.’’ He closed by asking Cowley to
tell him what he thinks of the Appendix. ‘‘I think it is really
pretty good,’’ Faulkner admits, ‘‘to stand as it is, as a piece
without implications’’ (FCF, 37).
Faulkner’s enthusiasm here, I am suggesting, is partly the
eVect of re-seeing his work as all of a piece, as an ongoing
Balzacian act of invention. Cowley’s insistent focus on this
unifying perspective enabled Faulkner to remember and review
his invented world as a whole thing, one perhaps even still
under construction. But his excitement is more immediately
grounded in his success at reentering his favorite novel, the
one he had tried to ‘‘get completely out of.’’ This experience
generated a ‘‘piece without implications,’’ one that could ‘‘stand
as it is’’ because it proved he could still write with passion. In
this respect it is, I think, no accident that the longest and most
dramatically developed section in the Appendix concerns
Caddy.
In writing the Appendix, Faulkner was making another at-
tempt at what he claimed always to be doing, ‘‘trying to put it all
between one Cap and one period,’’ even though he admitted, ‘‘I
don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in
a new way’’ (FCF, 14). But lest the Appendix confuse us, it is
well to recall that he was already practicing this art form in The
Sound and the Fury. Here, he tried four times to put it all
between one Cap and one period, and as he liked to say,

‘‘failed’’ each time. But in the process he broke new ground
both for himself as writer and for the novel as form. In the next
decade, he would not only populate his invented world with a
host of characters from all social ranks, but he would enlarge the
creative possibilities of the novel as decisively as had Conrad
and Joyce before him.

Two

As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary,
and Light in August
On June 20, 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham.

He would soon turn thirty-two and Estelle was thirty-three
years old. Recently divorced, Estelle brought two children,
aged Wve and ten, to the marriage, along with her own anxieties
and misgivings. Judging from what his biographers have
reported, Faulkner was deeply ambivalent about this decision,
and Estelle was suYciently distraught while on her honeymoon
that summer that she attempted suicide. The marriage was
always to be a diYcult one, intermittently a disaster, not least
because both were alcoholics. But Faulkner’s bond with Estelle
was clearly a profound one, and his love for her children
strengthened that bond, as did the birth of their daughter, Jill,
on June 24, 1933. (Their Wrst child, Alabama, was born prema-
turely on January 11, 1931, and died at the age of nine days, an
event whose traumatic impact on both was severe.) Much has
been written about Faulkner’s troubled marriage, especially
55
about how it could have lasted the rest of his life, given the
torment it brought to both husband and wife. In my view, we
are not likely ever to answer this question. In Faulkner’s view, it
would be none of our business anyway. What we can say, I
think, is that in part what sustained the marriage was Faulkner’s
social identiWcation as a father, and not only as Jill’s.
Faulkner’s own father died before Jill was born, and from that
day, August 7, 1932, Faulkner assumed responsibility for a
good many members of his continually extending family. In
addition to his mother and her two black servants, Estelle and
her two children, he was eventually to support his brother
Dean’s wife when Dean was killed in a plane crash in 1935,
as well as the daughter born of that marriage two months
after Dean’s death. As the oldest son, Faulkner apparently
never doubted that he was destined to inherit the role of
patriarch. Although Cornell Franklin provided some economic
support for Estelle’s children, Faulkner had now to make a
real living. He was eventually to bear a large economic
burden as head of the Falkner family. In carrying that burden,
however, Faulkner was fulWlling what he understood to be a
distinctively masculine responsibility. In marrying Estelle, buy-
ing an old plantation house he renamed Rowan Oak, and
becoming Jill’s father, he was again building on the model of
his great-grandfather, not only as writer now, but as a patriarch
in his own right.
That model, of course, by no means precluded ‘‘philander-
ing,’’ a male family tradition which, like drinking, Faulkner did
his part to keep up. Within a few years of Jill’s birth, he began an
aVair with Meta Carpenter, whom he met while working for
Howard Hawks in Hollywood in 1935. Although she married
56 THE MAJOR PHASE, PART 1

someone else, their relationship persisted in various forms for
Wfteen years. Faulkner could not bring himself Wnally to leave
his wife for Meta, saying that Estelle would take Jill away from
him if he did. He might or might not have been fully truthful in
this claim, but he was certainly choosing not to marry again and
not to abandon his position as father. Remaining married to
Estelle ironically secured a certain familiar kind of male free-
dom. Faulkner liked to see himself as a man who pursued
women, and he liked it even more when they began to respond
positively, as they did far more often as he became more
successful and secure, not to mention handsome. He was still
pursuing them after Jill had grown up and left home in the
1950s. But he was also still the family patriarch.
It is against this biographical backdrop, then, that I want to
focus on the years in which Faulkner produced his greatest
work, 1929–1942. Now resolved to be a novelist, Faulkner
was faced with a new conXict. On the one hand, he was a father
with a growing Wnancial responsibility to a large family. On the
other, he was a writer with a growing reputation among critics
as an important modern novelist. His problem, in other words,
was how to continue in the path opened to him by the writing of
The Sound and the Fury and at the same time maintain his
increasingly weighty role as head of the family. Over the next
Wfteen years, he would try to solve this problem both by selling
short stories and by spending a good part of his time in
Hollywood, where at least during the 1930s he could command
a good salary. But throughout this period, the conXicting
demands of writing the novels he sought to write and fulWlling
his obligations to his family required of him an almost superhu-
man exercise of will and determination.
AS I LAY DYING, SANCTUARY AND LIGHT IN AUGUST 57

The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929,
and received mixed notices. Some reviewers chimed in with a
general complaint about the diYculties of modern Wction
in general, grouping Faulkner with Joyce and Woolf as unnec-
essarily obfuscatory. But to be criticized as one of this company
was of course automatically to be elevated to the domain of
serious literature. Others, such as Henry Nash Smith, recog-
nized originality in the novel and saw it as the harbinger of a
great career in the making. ‘‘No matter how universal the
standard, there are certain pages in this novel which are very
near great literature,’’ Smith said, and went on to compare
Faulkner’s genius to that of Chaucer.1 Gratifying though this
recognition was, it did not change the fact that the novel did not
sell well. But neither his new publisher, Hal Smith, nor Faulk-
ner had expected good sales. After all, Sartoris, published ten
months earlier in January 1929, had met with limited success
both critically and Wnancially. So Faulkner was prepared with
another ploy. In the spring months of 1929, as The Sound and
the Fury was being copyedited, he wrote a new novel in the
hope of making money. It was called Sanctuary.
As with The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner would comment
repeatedly on this novel, although with a distinctly diVerent
slant. ‘‘I made a thorough and methodical study of everything
on the list of best-sellers. When I thought I knew what the
public wanted, I decided to give them a little more than they
had been getting; stronger and rawer—more brutal. Guts and
genitals’’ (Blotner, 233–234). The key event of the novel is the
rape of a young co-ed, Temple Drake, by an impotent though
lethal gangster named Popeye, who uses a corncob in place of a
phallus, and then takes Temple to a Memphis brothel where he

matches her up with a gambler named Red so as to play the
voyeur, moaning as he watches the two of them copulate from
the end of her bed. When she read it, Estelle complained, ‘‘It’s
horrible.’’ ‘‘It’s meant to be,’’ Faulkner replied. ‘‘It will sell.’’
His publisher, however, at Wrst disagreed. According to Faul-
kner, Hal Smith said, ‘‘Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d
both be in jail’’ (Blotner, 239). The novel remained on hold
until after Faulkner had written and published As I Lay Dying in
1930, but was indeed published in 1931, albeit with substantial
revisions which Faulkner insisted on and paid for, saying that he
could not allow the novel to appear in its original form.
Sanctuary has received especially keen critical scrutiny as a
result of its birth in sin and its rebirth in glory. Noel Polk, who
restored and published the earlier, unrevised version of the
novel in 1981 has persuasively demonstrated that whatever
Faulkner’s motives, the original manuscript displays his usual
careful craftsmanship and thus should not be regarded as a
slipshod potboiler. Along with other distinguished Faulkner
critics, especially Michael Millgate and Joseph Blotner, Polk
treats Faulkner’s sardonic account of the novel’s sordid Wnancial
motives as ‘‘misleading.’’2 In his introduction to a 1932 Ran-
dom House reprinting of the novel Faulkner began by calling
the novel ‘‘a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to
make money,’’ but still concluded by saying, ‘‘I hope you will
buy it and tell your friends and I hope they will buy it too.’’3
Certainly Polk is right to see Faulkner distancing himself from
the novel and its audience so as to underscore his aesthetic
integrity. He explains that he has revised the novel so as ‘‘to
make out of it something which would not shame The Sound
and the Fury and As I Lay Dying’’ (Sanctuary, 324). What Polk

also helps us to recognize, however, is that just because Faulkner
had set out to make money with the novel doesn’t mean he would
have been careless in writing it. Nor was his Wnancial motive
necessarily suspended by his scrupulous revisions. As it turned
out, his prediction was right; the novel did indeed sell. And as he
knew all too well, it sold primarily because it was sensationally
horrifying. (In Oxford, people bought the novel at the local
drugstore, although they insisted on having it wrapped in
brown paper so as to hide their deed.) As both Polk and Millgate
have made clear, Faulkner’s revisions tightened and improved
the novel, but they did not downplay its graphic treatment of sex,
murder, and brutality. On the contrary, the Wnal version of the
novel foregrounds and intensiWes these elements.4
Sanctuary, as André Malraux was to say in later years,
represents ‘‘the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective
story’’ (Blotner, 276). Faulkner was quite familiar with the
gangster and detective Wction of his era, and he used that
knowledge to rich eVect in Sanctuary. Like Dashiell Hammett,
whose work he admired, Faulkner portrayed a sordid and
violent underworld, but instead of sending in a Continental
Op or a Sam Spade to combat the forces of evil, Faulkner sent
Horace Benbow, the glassblowing, impotent, and incestuous
aesthete he had imported from Flags in the Dust. Horace is both
detective and lawyer, but his idealized devotion to justice
renders him incapable of facing up to what Hammett’s detec-
tives always have to recognize eventually—not only the deep
and constitutive corruption of the world but also their complic-
ity in it. Set in the present, Sanctuary’s events take place in
JeVerson, Memphis, and Frenchman’s Bend, all to become
familiar sites in Faulkner’s Wction. But the novel is distinctive

in its nihilistic vision, obsessively focused on the dark and
sinister world lurking just beneath the hypocritical bourgeois
surfaces of society, whether urban or rural.
Critics were quick to see its debt to the hard-boiled school of
Wction as well as to the anti-idealist or ‘‘naturalist’’ tradition from
Theodore Dreiser to Erskine Caldwell. Recognizing Faulkner’s
talent, they recoiled at the ‘‘ghastly details of human depravity’’
on which he dwelled (Inge, 59). In an inXuential review, Henry
Seidel Canby aligned Faulkner with ‘‘the sadistic school’’ of
literature, calling him ‘‘cruel with a cool and interested cruelty,’’
and harboring a ‘‘hatred that is neither passionate nor the result
of thwarting, but calm, reasoned, and complete’’ (Inge, 56).
Although misleading as an account of Faulkner’s later Wction,
Canby’s response highlights what is distinctive about Sanctu-
ary, its success at using language with exquisite sensitivity and
grace to create scenes and characters of irremediable ugliness
and misery. One can’t dismiss it as pulp Wction; it is too
brilliantly written. A Werce and cold portrayal of human deprav-
ity and injustice, the novel is as chiseled in its formal execution
as it is devastating in its social critique. But one can’t comfort-
ably situate it within the constellation of Faulkner’s greatest
Wction because it is indeed sadistic, and primarily toward its
readers, whom Faulkner seems to have regarded—as his 1932
Introduction suggests—with anger and contempt. It is not only
a question of exposing the hypocrisy of the townspeople, who
are all too ready to lie and lynch in order not to face the truth.
It is almost as if Faulkner regarded his readers as sharing the
townspeople’s attitudes and were out to rub our faces in the dirt.
In a sense, we are positioned to be shocked, as is Temple Drake,
confronted with a relentless barrage of threat and disgust.

For example, Wnding herself alone at Frenchman’s Bend, thrust
suddenly into a world of bootleggers, gangsters, and idiots,
Temple is terriWed and conWdes in Ruby, an ex-prostitute and
common-law wife of Lee Goodwin, the boss of the moonshine
business. ‘‘I’m not afraid,’’ Temple said. ‘‘Things like that don’t
happen. Do they? They’re just like other people. You’re just
like other people. With a little baby.’’ Ruby replies with con-
tempt, ‘‘Like what people?’’ (Sanctuary, 56). A hard-bitten and
brutalized woman, Ruby looks on with condescension and
contempt as Temple runs frantically in and out of the house,
provoking the very sexual danger she fears. As mother and
child, Ruby and her baby resemble a grotesque pietà, a kind
of wretched expressionist parody of the sentimental picture
Temple tries to project. Ruby’s baby is kept in a cardboard
box beside the stove. When periodically it awakens, ‘‘its lead-
colored eyelids show . . . a thin line of eyeball’’ (Sanctuary, 56).
Any illusions we may harbor about the sacred bonds of family
are shattered, and it is the almost physical sensation of the
shattering that the novel strives to eVect in its reader.
Even those reviews that expressed shock at Sanctuary
praised its author for his narrative mastery. Calling the story
‘‘too much of an evil thing,’’ for example, one reviewer never-
theless described Faulkner himself as ‘‘the most gifted novelist
writing in the United States’’ (Inge, 53). Thanks to the novel’s
success, a collection of short stories, These Thirteen, was pub-
lished in the fall of 1931, and Faulkner was soon lionized in
New York City and Charlottesville, Viriginia, where he met and
mingled with the literary celebrities of the day. Although, thanks
to the demands of restoring his new house, Rowan Oak, he was
still in debt, Faulkner was at last in demand.

It is important to note, however, that the critical esteem
Faulkner now commanded was due at least as much to As I
Lay Dying as to Sanctuary. Certainly As I Lay Dying, published
ahead of Sanctuary in 1930, is a more ambitious work and
indisputably one of his Wnest, as Faulkner himself knew. He said
of it, ‘‘Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by
which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again’’
(Minter, 117). He was fond of describing the novel as a ‘‘tour de
force. I took this family and subjected them to the two greatest
catastrophes which man can suVer—Xood and Wre, that’s all’’5
(87). He also liked to point out that unlike The Sound and the
Fury, As I Lay Dying was entirely premeditated. This time he
had a plan. ‘‘I knew,’’ he said, ‘‘when I put down the Wrst word
what the last word of that would be. . . . I wrote [it] in about six
weeks without changing any of it’’ (University, 207). As usual,
Faulkner’s tale here is not entirely accurate. He did not write the
novel in six weeks, but he did write it with amazing dispatch,
beginning on October 29, 1929, and completing the revised
typescript by January 12, 1930 (Minter, 120). And although he
did make revisions, he made remarkably few, given how radical
the novel’s narrative procedures are. Some readers believe it his
greatest novel. Certainly it represents another astonishing leap
forward in Faulkner’s ongoing experiments with form.
Like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying focuses on a
family, but the Bundrens diVer appreciably from the Compsons.
Anse and his wife Addie Bundren are tenant farmers living forty
miles from JeVerson in the rural backwaters of what is for the
Wrst time identiWed by name as Yoknapatawpha County. They
have four sons and a daughter, children whose names signal the
country origins distinguishing them from the Compsons: Cash,

Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman. The central event in
the novel is Addie Bundren’s death, which initiates the family’s
journey to JeVerson where she has asked to be buried. In the
course of this trip, we learn the history of the Bundrens’
marriage, including Addie’s adulterous aVair with the Reverend
WhitWeld, of which Jewel is the fruit. We learn that Dewey Dell
has become pregnant shortly before her mother’s death. But the
conXicts and anxieties that both split and bond the Bundrens
stem from no socially consequent past. In other words, there is
no extended family history to be addressed, as in the Appendix
to The Sound and the Fury. Rather, as the Bundrens make
their way by mule-driven wagon toward JeVerson, they gradu-
ally encounter cars and other signs of townspeople, stretching
the novel’s focus to incorporate town and country and to
document the diVerences between them. Although similarly
insular in its primary concern with a nuclear family, As I Lay
Dying stretches its reach to map a larger geographical social
terrain than does The Sound and the Fury.
Further, there is a fundamental diVerence between the ways
in which the two novels tell their stories. The Sound and the
Fury is, in one sense, a technically simpler book to read than As
I Lay Dying. In its original form, without the Appendix, The
Sound and the Fury asks the reader to inhabit four successive
points of view in order to compose the story of the Compson
family. The Wnal section is crucial to this enterprise, as it
provides a detached, omniscient perspective from which we
can assemble the pieces of the story retrospectively. That
stance—outside the book, so to speak—allows us to integrate
what we have seen from a single, detached viewpoint. As I Lay
Dying is conceptually more complex. It consists not in four

sections, each with its own distinctive point of view, but rather
in Wfty-nine monologues spoken by Wfteen diVerent characters.
Instead of a gradually emerging group of characters set against a
gradually emerging background, we have a Weld of interacting
Wgures recurrently emerging out of a Xux. Never allowed to
settle for long into any character’s consciousness, frustrated in
our endeavor to form an image of more than passing instants, we
are less confronted with the world of the novel than pulled
through it along with the Bundrens. Because there is no de-
tached much less omniscient narrator, we are at the mercy of the
individual viewpoints in our eVort to get some purchase on what
is happening. This makes for a radically diVerent reading expe-
rience. Faulkner is now using multiple perspective to present
events not just as seen by diVerent characters but as themselves
constituted by subjects and objects interacting in a Xux presided
over by no third person perspective at all.
To make matters even more formidable, the controlling time
frame of the novel is a continuous present. Already in motion as
we join it, the story told here begins the day before Addie
Bundren dies and closes ten days later with the Bundrens’
departure from JeVerson, having Wnally buried a rotting corpse
in the cemetery there. Within this time period, however, events
by no means unfold in precise chronological order. There are
many Xashbacks within the monologues, and Addie’s death
itself is not a punctual event but one experienced continually
by various characters before it is fully accomplished—indeed, in
order for it to be fully accomplished. As Dr. Peabody puts it,
‘‘When I was young, I believed death to be a phenomenon of
the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—
and that of the minds of the ones who suVer bereavement.’’6

As represented in this novel, however, death concerns both the
body and the mind, and in particular the contradictions atten-
dant upon human beings having both. As Eric Sundquist has
shown, the problem presented by the mother’s death is that for
her sons especially she is both there and not there; her body
remains, her self is missing.7 That contradiction is reXected
formally in the fact that Addie herself speaks after her death
has apparently occurred. Thus, the novel’s title, As I Lay Dying,
oVers a critical clue to its peculiar form. Addie’s death is less an
event than it is a process, a ‘‘phenomenon’’ the experience of
which requires everyone in the family to Wnd some resolution.
The title quotes from Book XI of the Odyssey, where
Agamemnon tells Odysseus the story of his own death at the
hands of his wife Clytemnestra. As Faulkner recited the speech,
Agamemnon says, ‘‘As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s
eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades’’
(Blotner, 248–249). Like Agamemnon, Addie Bundren speaks
from a kind of netherworld, beyond death but not yet wholly
beyond reach. The Homeric allusion does not suggest the kind
of allegorical parallels that Joyce exploited in Ulysses but instead
invites us to focus on the act of dying as it is happening, and as a
social, a psychological, and a physical process. It also under-
scores the importance of funeral rituals as a means of suturing
the wound in life that death inXicts on both the dead and the
living. Clytemnestra stands condemned not only for killing her
husband but for refusing to close his eyes in peace, to aVord him
the respect he deserves. Addie Bundren, on the contrary, is
treated to an elaborate funeral procession, but one which is by
no means emblematic of respect. As she lies dying, she watches
her eldest son Cash through the window as he builds her coYn.

Once dead, her body is laid in that coYn with her head at its
foot, so that her wedding gown can spread out at the coYn’s
head. Her youngest son bores two holes through the coYn into
her head, in order for her to breathe. Her coYn is almost lost as
the wagon it rides in is overturned and the mules that pull it are
drowned crossing a Xooded river. Buzzards increase in number
and proximity as her body gives oV a growing stench in the
course of a six-day journey. She is almost burned in a barn,
when her second son Darl sets it on Wre. And within hours of
her Wnal burial in JeVerson, she has been replaced by a new
‘‘Mrs. Bundren.’’
The extended and grotesque funeral procession, then, is a
travesty of bereavement, carried out by Anse Bundren on the
grounds that he promised Addie he would take her to JeVerson
to be buried, but driven by his desire to secure a new set of teeth
and a new wife. Dewey Dell is equally committed to this
mockery of faithful memorialization because she is pregnant
and seeks an abortion, which she hopes somehow to get in
town. Vardaman, too young to understand what has happened,
and thus the locus of some of the novel’s most bizarre and
moving moments, is promised a sight of the electric train he
once saw in a storefront window at Christmas. As it turns out,
he has to make do with bananas, the other desirable object
unavailable except in town. But while the social convention of
the funeral is rendered a farce, the journey through which that
convention is fulWlled becomes an epic of mourning. Whatever
their individual aims or interests, each member of the Bundren
family must perform the work of mourning. In Freud’s phrasing,
they must disconnect from the lost object and regain a sense of
individual wholeness. The family as well must change and adapt

in order to compensate for its lost center; its members must
struggle with each other and the natural world around them in
order to reestablish both their individual identities and their
family relations. The novel both represents and enacts this
process, embodying a powerful and moving drama in the
course of which fundamental questions are brought into play,
questions about life and death, mind and body, word and deed,
mine and yours.
The structuring of the novel as a set of monologues signals
the alienation of each character, underscoring the thematic issue
of connection and disconnection. Although dialogues are repre-
sented within some of the monologues, the novel itself exists
exclusively in monologue form, a form that is private by nature.
When Vardaman says, ‘‘My mother is a Wsh,’’ he is not speaking
to anyone except himself. The sense of isolation within which
people can and often do live their lives is heightened by the
separate monologues in which the characters are represented.
This strategy has important consequences for us as well.
The reader experiences each character in two ways: Wrst, from
within, as he or she thinks aloud, and second, during other
monologues, from outside, as he or she is seen, commented
upon, or addressed by, another character. But we never experi-
ence any character as we would from the vantage point of a third
person omniscient narrative—that is, from both within and
without at the same time. One might argue that even in conven-
tional narratives this is the case, since even an omniscient
narrator can’t be in two places at once, thus normally taking
us inside a character’s thoughts and experiences for a while, and
then shifting to an external perspective or to another character’s
mind. But in such conventional narratives, we at least have the

illusion of being both within and without in the course of
the novel. In As I Lay Dying, this illusion is denied us. In
Middlemarch, for example, we are invited to roam freely
between characters’ thoughts and the world they inhabit,
while in Faulkner’s novel, we are reminded with each new
monologue of the gap between character and character, as
well as between character and world. The ‘‘between’’ is fore-
grounded as a problem, a gap that must be Wlled in. The world,
both natural and social, in a sense springs into being with each
monologue, and vanishes beneath it as it ends. It is up to us to
relate character to character and characters to the world they
share, much as it is up to each character to connect himself or
herself to other selves, and to both natural and social worlds.
Darl, Addie’s mad and clairvoyant son, provides the most
dramatic example of this struggle. Darl lies awake ‘‘in a strange
room,’’ trying to assure himself that he will still exist even after
he goes to sleep. It takes him a long paragraph of careful and
circular reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that he does exist:
‘‘I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange
room. And so, if I am not emptied yet, I am is’’ (AILD, 80–81).
Crucial to Darl’s Wnal, though of course temporary, success here
is the sound of the rain, which he imagines ‘‘shaping the wagon
that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and
sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours
either, lie on our wagon though it does.’’ For all the elaborate
convolutions of is and was, are and are not, once Darl proves to
himself that the wagon is real, he is able to argue his way to the
needed conclusion that he is real as well. For Darl, unlike
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the question is not whether to be or
not to be; it is whether you are in the Wrst place.

Like Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren invites us to speculate
on Faulkner’s own anxieties as an adolescent. Certainly he
experienced severe moments of existential self-doubt well into
his twenties, as his poetry amply demonstrates. But we need to
be careful in our assessment of such similarities. Faulkner by
now had achieved a critical distance on such psychic threats.
Similarly, we could ‘‘explain’’ Darl’s situation by drawing on
theoretical models such as psychoanalysis. Emotionally rejected
by his mother, we could say, he has been psychologically
unhinged all his life; his mother’s death only calls up and
exacerbates this condition.
But any such psychoanalytical ‘‘explanation’’ of Darl’s con-
dition remains largely marginal to what makes him such a
powerful Wgure in this novel, his constant need to bring himself
into the world and the world into being by connecting them.
Much as Benjy’s retarded mind enabled Faulkner to present the
world of The Sound and the Fury in a particular way—as made
up of images and sensations left unplotted by any maturation
process—Darl’s brilliant madness makes him the site of an
ongoing struggle to make himself and his world cohere. Always
uncertain of his own being, he is compelled to reach out and
connect with the world through a vividly sensory imagination in
order to know that he ‘‘is.’’ In thus reaching out, he imagines, as
here, scenes he cannot actually see. His family complains that
his ‘‘eyes’’ are always ‘‘full of the land,’’ and so they are, since he
is forced into clairvoyance by his need to connect (AILD,
27). Darl’s clairvoyance also, of course, proves essential to
Faulkner’s narrative strategy as it enables him to represent
scenes from the vantage point of someone not present at them
but in charge of a rich interpretive Wlter, thereby substituting for

the missing omniscient narrator. Without Darl, the novel would
have to depend too heavily on Xashbacks, impeding the sense of
relentless forward motion it sustains.
Without Darl, further, we would have little insight into his
brothers Jewel and Cash, both of whom act a good deal more
than they speak. The one monologue Jewel delivers makes clear
that he is in a rage at his family for the way in which it is treating
his dying mother, especially Cash, ‘‘hammering and sawing on
that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him.’’ Jewel certainly
has a point; there is something perverse about Cash’s perfor-
mance for his mother, as if he were saying ‘‘See what a good one
I am making for you’’ (AILD, 14). But Cash is actually trying to
show respect for his mother, just as Jewel and Darl do, each in
his own strange fashion.
An obsessively careful and much admired carpenter in his
local region, Cash mourns his mother’s death in the only way he
can—by building her a perfect coYn. In one of his few mono-
logues, Cash explains in thirteen numbered sentences why he
made the coYn ‘‘on the bevel,’’ beginning with ‘‘1. There is
more surface for the nails to grip,’’ and ending with, ‘‘13. It
makes a neater job’’ (AILD, 82–83). In his own way, the sane
and calm Cash is as committed to rationality as the mad Darl is,
and as dependent on the material world for a sense of his and its
reality. But Cash thinks and works within a precise and narrow
framework, relying on a basically literal-minded reading of
the world. For example, as Jewel reports, when Cash was a
little boy, Addie one day said that ‘‘if she had some fertilizer
she would try to raise some Xowers,’’ whereupon Cash ‘‘taken
the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung’’
(AILD, 14). He has broken a leg falling oV a church steeple

while repairing it and can tell people exactly how far he fell,
‘‘twenty-eight foot, four and a half inches, about’’ (AILD, 90).
Once it is clear to him that Addie is dying, Cash is wholly
focused on the box he is building for her, holding up each plank
for her approval before nailing it down. His single-mindedness
is at once laudable and outrageous. No wonder Jewel cries,
‘‘Good God, do you want to see her in it?’’ (AILD, 14). But
what Jewel can’t recognize is the loving concern Cash has
invested in this beautifully constructed box. Vernon Tull, a
neighbor, can’t see it either, but he can admire Cash’s devotion
to his craft. After Vardaman has drilled two holes in the coYn
top, Cash carves plugs for them, ‘‘one at a time, the wood wet
and hard to work.’’ As Vernon notes, he ‘‘could cut up a tin can
and hide the holes and nobody wouldn’t know the diVerence’’
(AILD, 87). Cash has found in craftsmanship a way of being in
the world, and it provides his only means of relating to that
world. Its limits are clear; Cash, for example, rationalizes send-
ing Darl to the asylum in Jackson on the grounds that in burning
down Gillespie’s barn, he destroyed property. On the other
hand, Cash’s limits do not preclude his stoic capacity for
suVering or his touching aVection for the music he hears on
the ‘‘graphophone.’’ Nor do they keep him from understanding
why Darl burned the barn, even if he can’t Wnally approve of it.
‘‘Of course it was Jewel’s horse was traded to get her that nigh to
town,’’ he reasons in his instrumental way, and therefore ‘‘in a
sense it was the value of his horse Darl tried to burn up.’’ But he
also questions the correctness of what his reason tells him:
‘‘when Darl seen that it looked like one of us would have to
do something, I can almost believe he done right in a way’’
(AILD, 233).

It is this capacity for doubt, for questioning even the grounds
of one’s own judgment, that Jewel lacks. Jewel apparently lives
in a constant state of outrage, almost bringing on a Wght with
people on the road as they enter JeVerson, ready to leap on Darl
as soon as the family has decided he must be evicted to Jackson.
Since puberty, his horse has provided his only viable means of
connecting with his world. One of the wild herd of ponies
brought into Yoknapatawpha by a Texas horse trader in the
story ‘‘Spotted Horses,’’ Jewel’s horse remains nameless and
essentially wild, aVording him a worthy opponent and comrade
in the physical battle that is his life. Incapable of calm, much less
contemplation, Jewel actually resembles his horse in being only
barely under control most of the time. Jewel is particularly
hostile to Darl because Darl taunts him with questions like
‘‘Do you know she is going to die, Jewel?’’ and ironic jabs like
‘‘It’s not your horse that’s dead, Jewel’’ (AILD, 39, 94).
As Faulkner was to conWrm, Jewel doesn’t necessarily know
that he is not Anse’s son (University, 109). But Darl knows
and thus realizes why Jewel is his mother’s favorite, making his
own sense of alienation the more unbearable. But Jewel’s anger
at Darl stems from the same source as his anger at the world, the
sense of violation he feels from everything that stands outside
and thereby threatens his bond Wrst with his mother, and then
with his horse. Clinging violently to his invaded but still precious
privacy, Jewel turns his ‘‘wooden’’ back to the world, Xinging out
nothing but curses, ‘‘Goddamn you,’’ ‘‘Pick up, goddamn your
thick-nosed soul to hell, pick up’’ (AILD, 95, 97).
Dewey Dell is hostile to Darl, as she too feels her privacy
violated by his clairvoyance. But in her case, there is something
to hide—her pregnant condition. What Darl knows about Jewel

may or may not be actually known to Jewel, but Dewey Dell
certainly knows she is pregnant, ‘‘because God gave women a
sign when something has happened bad’’ (AILD, 58). Knowing
that Darl knows ‘‘without the words,’’ Dewey Dell feels exposed
and naked in his eyes, making her terror all the more acute
(AILD, 27). But she would like to have Darl’s capacity for
wordless communication with Dr. Peabody. ‘‘He could Wx it
all right, if he just would. And he don’t even know it. He could
do everything for me if he just knowed it’’ (AILD, 63).
To Dr. Peabody, Dewey Dell is a daughter to be comforted
and a cook to provide him with food; to Dewey Dell, Dr.
Peabody is a potential source of salvation, if he only knew.
The split between interior and exterior, between characters’
private experience and their public aVect is particularly dramat-
ic here. In so Wercely focusing on what the doctor could do for
her, Dewey Dell exacerbates her own isolation. ‘‘It’s because
I am alone,’’ she says. ‘‘If I could just feel it, it would be diVerent
because I would not be alone.’’ But immediately she recognizes
the paradox of her situation: ‘‘But if I were not alone, everybody
would know it’’ (AILD, 58–59). If she could feel the baby inside
her, she would have company, as it were. But if she could feel
the baby inside her, her pregnancy would be showing, and thus
her privacy would be violated by other people’s knowing. ‘‘I feel
my body, my bones and Xesh beginning to open and part upon
the alone and the process of coming unalone is terrible,’’ she
says (AILD, 61–62). Losing a mother at the same time that she
is becoming one, Dewey Dell feels an abject need to connect, to
communicate with someone who could help her, and an equally
abject loneliness in the face of her body’s naturally determined
fate. Darl’s knowledge is not a comfort but a threat; he might

reveal what he knows. ‘‘Are you going to tell Pa are you going to
kill him?’’ she silently asks him (AILD, 27). So she has no one
with whom to share either her grief or her fear. ‘‘I feel like a wet
seed wild in the hot blind earth,’’ she says (AILD, 64). Cash and
Darl, as we have seen, depend upon sensory and physical reality
for their sense of being in the world, but they do not face the
threat to individual integrity posed by a body that is growing
something on its own, blindly indiVerent to the will or
consciousness of the self it houses. Dewey Dell, then, literally
embodies the state of alienation between self and world that her
brothers experience each in his own distinctive way at the loss
of their mother. But none of the men in the novel
can understand Dewey Dell’s situation. Only Addie could
understand it and Addie is dead.
But we can better understand Dewey Dell because of what
Addie explains about motherhood in her single monologue. After
she gives birth to her Wrst child, Cash, Addie says, ‘‘I knew that
motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word
for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether
there was a word for it or not.’’ Becoming a mother, indeed,
founds Addie’s most important discovery in the course of a
long and diYcult life, ‘‘that words are no good; that words don’t
ever Wt even what they are trying to say at’’ (AILD, 171–172).
The gap between words and deeds is the novel’s central and
most inclusive version of the problem its form enunciates—how
to connect with others and the larger world and yet remain a
self. It is noteworthy that Faulkner ascribes the wisdom to
phrase the issue in its most philosophically sophisticated form
to a woman. Addie’s words assume a privileged status in part, of
course, because she is dead—even though she does not yet have

a grave to speak ‘‘from beyond.’’ But her authority stems more
fundamentally from her status as a woman and a mother, and
one who sees well beneath the social structure in which she has
lived. Faulkner here provides a portrait of female strength and
integrity that calls into question the charge of misogyny that his
work can so readily invite. Always drawn both toward and away
from women, Faulkner here creates one worthy of our respect, if
also of our fear. For Addie is a frightening Wgure, in not only
deed but word. Alarmingly articulate, even given her back-
ground as a schoolteacher, Addie delivers a brilliant and telling
account of what it means to be an individual subject and the
family’s most essential member at the same time.
When she meets Anse Bundren, Addie is alone in the world.
All her family are dead and buried in JeVerson, where she
apparently was born. We know nothing about them, except
that her father was a sardonic pessimist, telling her that ‘‘the
reason for living is to get ready to stay dead a long time’’ (AILD,
169). Addie treats this sentence almost as if it were a sentence in
the legal sense, a penance she must pay out, or perhaps a kind of
curse that she must try to lift by disproving it. On the face of it,
the sentence is baZing. Even if one were to accept the claim,
how would one ‘‘get ready to stay dead,’’ exactly? This is not
after all a simple call to pleasure, not a carpe diem. By giving
death a temporal measure, the sentence implies a kind of gothic
horror, as if one were sentenced not merely to life in prison with
no possibility of parole, but to an eternity of still life, nature
morte. An Edgar Allan Poe would appreciate this line, as it
seems to attribute eternal consciousness to a corpse in a box.
As Addie interprets it, however, the sentence provokes a
desire to connect directly to life while it is there. She looks

forward to whipping the schoolchildren because then at least in
the child’s ‘‘secret and selWsh life,’’ she would have ‘‘marked’’
their blood with her own’’ (AILD, 170). Despite his ungainly
appearance and uncouth behavior, Addie marries Anse in the
hope of making a connection, but childbirth only makes a
temporary diVerence. It is not that Addie doesn’t love Cash
but rather that her experience has left her again alone, and has
taught her that there is no fundamental connection between
words and actual deeds, actual physical living. Nor is there a
real connection between people, who have ‘‘to use one another
by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam,
swinging and twisting and never touching’’ (AILD, 172). Only
by repudiating the word, as it were, by having a secret aVair with
the minister, the man most empowered by words in her culture,
does Addie Wnd a way of connecting herself to someone outside
herself. But the connection is not Wnally with WhitWeld, but
with Jewel. With his birth ‘‘the wild blood boiled away and the
sound of it ceased. Then there was only the milk, warm and
calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence, getting ready to clean
my house’’ (AILD, 176). In part, ‘‘cleaning’’ her house means
compensating Anse for any possible loss she may have caused
him. She bears Anse two more children, Dewey Dell, ‘‘to
negative Jewel,’’ and Vardaman, ‘‘to replace the child I had
robbed him of ’’ (AILD, 176). But she also means that she has
discovered how to get ready to die. She has come to agree with
her father’s claim, but, as she puts it, ‘‘he could not have known
what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything
about cleaning up the house afterward’’ (AILD, 175–176).
To understand Addie’s point here, it is useful to recall
Dr. Peabody’s remark about death: ‘‘The nihilists say it is the

end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no
more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or
a town’’ (AILD, 44). ‘‘Cleaning up the house afterward’’ brings
to bear a similar homely and domestic viewpoint on death but
understands it from the woman’s position within the house,
so to speak, rather than from Dr. Peabody’s ironic distance.
Cleaning up the house entails paying oV debts, folding and
giving away linens, making sure not to leave behind anything
a new ‘‘tenant’’ might Wnd burdensome. It means understanding
that the world will still be there for others, and especially your
family, to cope with, even though you will be gone. It means
knowing you will be gone, which entails knowing that you are,
as well as have, a body, and that your relation to the world
depends upon that body. She can get ready to die, clean her
house, because in bearing children whose blood is not just hers,
but the earth’s as well, she has connected herself to the ‘‘words
that are deeds,’’ rather than the words like motherhood ‘‘that are
just gaps in people’s lack’’ (AILD, 174)—which is not to say that
she has escaped or transcended the world of words. ‘‘Cleaning
up the house’’ acknowledges that world and its demands. And
the promise Addie exacts from Anse to bury her in JeVerson
underscores her clear understanding that words can be power-
ful, no matter how much they may fail to Wt what they are trying
to ‘‘say at.’’
The promise Anse makes to Addie is a telling example of the
gap between words and deeds, actually. Addie regards this
promise as a means of getting revenge on Anse for his failures
as a husband. But Anse’s insistence on fulWlling the promise is
transparently motivated by his desire to get a set of teeth, at a
minimum, a new Mrs. Bundren, at a maximum. He takes the

‘‘word’’ he has given and uses it for his own selWsh purposes.
On the other hand, the trials and tribulations he must survive in
order to meet those purposes are suYciently gruesome that we
might argue that Addie does get her revenge, that word and
deed do, ironically, match up. The problem with this view,
however, is that it is not Anse who suVers, but his family and
neighbors. Anse complains often and loudly of his various
burdens, but his complaints only serve to underscore and
reinforce his power. As Darl notes, ‘‘There is no sweat stain
on [Anse’s] shirt.’’ ‘‘He was sick once from working in the sun
when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he
ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it’’ (AILD, 17).
Among the most contemptible characters in Faulkner’s
Wction, Anse Wgures forth a vicious satire on fatherhood, much
as Addie serves to de-sentimentalize the mother. If her character
cuts through the false postures of motherhood that Cora Tull
embodies, Anse’s character reveals that fatherhood itself is a
kind of imposture. Consider that he does no real work. He
depends on his children, his neighbors, and the good Lord to
take care of him. Although a well-known leech, Anse never
misses an opportunity to insist that he and his would not be
‘‘beholden’’ to anyone. He refuses, for example, all oVers of
food and shelter made along the road to JeVerson, insisting that
he and his children will sleep outside or in the barn. What is
important to understand about Anse is that he is not actually a
hypocrite. Darl is right when he says, ‘‘I suppose he believes it.’’
In voicing the position of a self-suYcient yeoman farmer, Anse
believes what he says. In that belief he is aided and abetted by
those around him, who have helped him out so long and so
often that they don’t know how not to do it. Thus is Anse

sustained in his self-regard, even as he is exposed as dependent
on others. Thus aYrmed from all sides as what he believes
himself to be—an independent and authoritative father—he sees
himself accordingly. Anse is always in charge, defying all
suggestions that perhaps he ought to bury Addie nearby,
given the obstacles to be confronted in taking her to JeVerson.
From the novel’s outset we see him ordering his family around
very eVectively, and in the end, thanks to the sacriWce of Jewel’s
horse, Dewey Dell’s money, and Cash’s broken leg, Anse gets
everything he wants.
Anse is certainly powerful, but his power is revealed as an
imposture, a sustained Wction of authority in which all collude.
His paternal authority, in other words, is in eVect constituted
by a collective Wction on which he depends and in which, of
course, he believes. His family and friends support Anse in
thinking of himself as the father (one always aligned with The
Father), even though he is a living contradiction of what a
father is supposed to be. His power is real, but grounded
in a cultural delusion. Meanwhile, the positive aspects of
the father’s role—productive agent, protective presence,
aVectionate supporter—are wholly absent. It seems that as he
moved decisively into the role of husband and father himself,
Faulkner delivered a radical analysis of the family structure
itself.
In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner had represented a
family in which a weak and cynical father and a monstrously
self-absorbed mother leave their children to grow up in terrible
need of authentic and loving parents. In As I Lay Dying, we
are no longer presented simply with good or bad fathers
and mothers but with questions more fundamental. What is a

mother? What is a father? What is a family? Further, although
the novel aVords a certain kind of realistic vision of the rural
South in the late 1920s, it does so by formal means that raise the
stakes enormously on how much a novel can do, demanding
that we consider Addie, for example, not only as an individual
character in a story but also as the site of the struggle entailed in
being a person as well as a mother, alone and unalone. Further,
in foregrounding the gap between words and deeds, the novel
brings directly to the surface the issue of language already at
work in The Sound and the Fury. The possibility that words
relate only arbitrarily to their meaning, and thus that our speech
is ‘‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’’ becomes in As I
Lay Dying a central hypothesis, one tested explicitly in Addie
Bundren’s eVorts to connect word with deed. In focusing so
centrally on the gap between language and reality, the novel
calls into question its own validity; after all, the book is made up
of words. How are we to regard the relationship between its
words and the world it represents?
This issue is particularly foregrounded by the most radical
feature of Faulkner’s experimental procedure in this novel, his
eVort to represent the interior experience of semi-literate peas-
ants. A good deal of modernist literature was devoted to
Wnding ways of representing what had hitherto been considered
unrepresentable. Joyce, for example, invented the stream of
consciousness technique so as to make available, to re-present,
the chaotic interior lives we lead, lives that would otherwise
remain silent and opaque, and Woolf stretched the possibilities
of this technique so as to enrich and expand our understanding
of consciousness itself. Faulkner learned from Joyce and Woolf
both, but he took the question in a new direction: how do

you represent the interiority of people whose socially and
economically impoverished lives limit their language to a re-
gional and rural idiom? One can be constrained by such an
idiom and still think profoundly, but if the novel remained
within the limits of what is sayable for most of its characters, it
would not be able to represent the experiences of Vardaman,
Dewey Dell, Addie, and especially Darl.
In part, Faulkner uses the same ploy he had used in The
Sound and the Fury with Benjy. Benjy’s retarded mental condi-
tion enables us to see the Compson world from a kind of
privileged viewpoint, one undistorted by self-consciousness
and closely in touch with the sensual experience of the physical
environment. Darl’s madness does similar work, extending our
focus across space and time and bringing to bear an exquisite
attention to physical detail. But Benjy’s unmediated responses
confer on the world that comes into view through his conscious-
ness an indisputable reality; he has no ability or need to inter-
pret, he just reacts, and so we have no reason to doubt him.
(Understanding him is another question.) By contrast, Darl’s
madness inevitably calls into question the relation between his
words and the things they are trying to ‘‘say at.’’ It is not so
much that we don’t roughly accept Darl’s account of, say, the
moment of his mother’s death, a scene from which he is absent.
(What choice do we have?) It is rather that the language he
speaks could not be spoken by a character socially situated as he
is. We might accept that language as uniquely the product of
Darl’s madness, but Faulkner is not content to leave it at that.
Other characters speak in similarly lyric ways. Here, for exam-
ple is Vardaman as he encounters Jewel’s horse immediately
following his mother’s death:

It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity,
into an unrelated scattering of components—snuYngs and
stampings; smells of cooling Xesh and ammoniac hair; an illu-
sion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones
within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is diVerent
from my is (AILD, 56).
The principle of verisimilitude is not just questioned but

obliterated here, as Faulkner deploys in eVect an epic simile to
represent Vardaman’s vision of the horse. But to what end?
Faulkner is deliberately dramatizing the gap between words and
experience in the conventional realist sense, but in the interest
of a more radically committed realism. Words seem to us
inadequate most often when our experience is so extreme that
‘‘words cannot describe it.’’ At such moments, we particularly
feel the need for Wgurative language, even to approximate what
we feel. ‘‘It was like X,’’ we say, summoning up a description
that draws on analogy, whether to memory or to fantasy. The
experience of a seven-year-old in losing his mother is certainly
extreme. How to do justice to it then? We need external
observation, and Faulkner provides it in abundance. For exam-
ple, Darl tells us, ‘‘From behind Pa’s leg Vardaman peers, his
mouth full open all color draining from his face into his mouth,
as though he has by some means Xeshed his own teeth in
himself, sucking’’ (AILD, 49). Thanks to Darl, we know that
Vardaman is in shock, but Vardaman himself must be enabled
to express it if we are to experience its power and its pain.
Such pain, Faulkner is insisting, is not limited to the lives of
those educated to express it. On every class level, culture
provides us with plenty of tired clichés to defend against
death as well as life, as Addie eloquently reminds us. Her

husband Anse, for example, thinks, as he speaks, in a wholly
clichéd religious vocabulary. But Vardaman has no seamless
religious myth within which to wrap himself in his encounter
with his mother’s departure. Confronted with the prospect of
his mother being shut up inside a box, he recalls once being
shut up inside the barn crib, where he ‘‘couldn’t breathe
because the rat was breathing up all the air’’ (AILD, 66).
Consequently, he drills holes in the coYn so his mother can
breathe. On the other hand, since his mother is obviously not
there, in some profound sense, Vardaman opines that she has
become a Wsh, and hopes that she has escaped the coYn and
swum into the river when the wagon turns over in it. Literal
thinking here is also magical thinking. Given Vardaman’s imag-
inative powers and the desperation that fuels them, his descrip-
tion of the horse seems not so improbable after all. He may lack
the vocabulary invoked here, but he does not lack a grasp of
what he is experiencing—an ‘‘is diVerent from my is,’’ a body
that is alien to his. The brilliant metaphorical description here is
born of terror and signals an unjustly accelerated introduction
to being separate and alone.
Such language, then, serves both to illustrate and extend
Addie’s point about the inadequacy of conventional language.
Like ‘‘motherhood,’’ the language of grief has long since become
a ‘‘gap to Wll a lack,’’ blocking what it should open up, a
connection between word and deed. The novel’s perverse ver-
sion of the Bundrens’ funeral procession itself opens up the
aching void between the ossiWed social rituals of mourning and
the actual experience of loss they are supposed to inform with
meaning. If the novel is to reopen the circuit between word
and deed, it must outstrip the limits of verisimilitude, itself an

artiWcial convention designed to simulate, rather than re-present,
the real. Accordingly, when we Wnd Darl, Vardaman, and Dewey
Dell speaking in extravagently Wgurative language, what we would
ordinarily call ‘‘raw’’ experience assumes the form of words that
are, almost, deeds. Indeed, in voicing these characters’ emotional
and psychic distress, the novel is engaged in the struggle that
Addie describes—the struggle to make words into deeds.
Like his fellow modernists, Faulkner was trying to reinvent
the novel, and like the greatest of them, he sought help from the
Greek epic. In this case, he seems to have found a particularly
rich resource in The Odyssey. When Odysseus summons forth
the dead for conversation in Book XI, many of them have been
dead ‘‘a long time,’’ but thanks to the ritual he carries out, he
can enable them to speak to him. The ritual makes possible
communication between the son and the mother, the living and
the dead, much as the epic convention of the nekuia, the visiting
of the dead, enables Homer to represent that communication
and the human bonds it both reveals and secures. In As I Lay
Dying, Faulkner uses another ritual designed to relate the living
to the dead, the funeral, to portray the gap between what
it should make possible and what it actually reveals—the
alienation not only of the living from the dead but of the living
from the living as well. Formally, in both its multiple mono-
logues and in the range of voices and idioms it summons forth,
the novel seeks to cross the gaps it represents.
In 1957, a student at the University of Virginia asked Faulkner

about the similarities between As I Lay Dying and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, both of which tell the story of a
minister’s adulterous relation to a woman. Hester Prynne’s

illegitimate child is named Pearl, Addie Bundren’s is named
Jewel, and the Reverend WhitWeld’s name seems a deliberate
play on the Reverend Dimmesdale’s. Faulkner’s response is
among his most telling, and deserves full quotation:
No, a writer don’t have to consciously parallel because he robs
and steals from everything he ever wrote or read or saw. I was
simply writing a tour de force and as every writer does, I took
whatever I needed wherever I could Wnd it, without any com-
punction and with no sense of violating any ethics or hurting
anyone’s feelings because any writer feels that anyone after him
is perfectly welcome to take any trick he has learned or any plot
that he has used. Of course we don’t know just who Hawthorne
took his from. Which he probably did because there are so few
plots to write about. (University, 115)
A whole theory of literature is implied here, one in which the
artist’s originality is ironically aYrmed in the very act of brag-
ging that as an artist, he belongs to a company of thieves.
Faulkner was keenly aware of how thoroughly enmeshed his
imagination was with literature from the Greeks to the Roman-
tics. (He carried a one-volume Shakespeare around with him
and read Don Quixote once a year.) As a novelist, however, he
enjoyed the company of his predecessors rather than fearing any
dependency on them. In leaving poetry behind, that is, he had
discarded, or at least deferred, the ‘‘anxiety of inXuence,’’ as
Harold Bloom has designated the modern writer’s oedipal
struggle with his literary fathers.8 It is possible that Faulkner
saw the parallels between his characters’ situation and that of
Hawthorne’s emerging only in the course of composition and
decided it would be entertaining to allude to Dimmesdale and
Pearl, oVering his reader a kind of amusing inside joke.

As for plots, meanwhile, Faulkner knew them to be, formally
speaking, limited in both number and potential. In his next
novel, he exhibits a certain impatience with such limits by piling
plot upon plot.
It would take a long literary survey to identify the sources
from which Faulkner might have robbed his plots for Light in
August, his next novel, but of more interest is how many of them
there are. There is the story of Joe Christmas. There is the story
of Lena Grove, of Gail Hightower, of Byron Bunch and Joanna
Burden, just to name the leading Wgures in the novel’s capacious
drama. As he expands the scope of his Wction from the family to
the town, Faulkner persists in his ongoing experimentation with
narrative. Here, our disorientation derives less from the use of
multiple perspectives than from the multiplicity of plot lines.
Each story necessitates another, until plot lines seem to spread
out indeWnitely. As he did in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner refuses
us a single, Wxed perspective, but not by placing us in several
minds successively; rather, he moves us from one place and
time to another as the narrator focuses his attention on one
character’s story only to turn away to another’s, as if he too were
trying to keep up with the stories he’s trying to tell.
The novel’s opening three chapters both illustrate and initiate
this process. At the end of the Wrst chapter, Faulkner turns from
Lena, now in sight of JeVerson, to Byron Bunch’s memories of
Joe Christmas’s arrival in JeVerson in the second chapter. Not
until we are several pages into the chapter do we meet Brown,
the man whom we would expect the author to introduce in the
next episode of a book which, so far, seems to be centrally
concerned with Lena Grove. So while confusion between
Bunch and Burch leads Lena to expect Burch to be at the mill

when she arrives, the reader, for the same reason, expects a
comic plot to develop. Instead, we are introduced to a new
character, Joe Christmas, whose story seems utterly irrelevant.
By virtue of his name and his ominous aVect, however, Joe
Christmas cannot be a minor character, so we adjust our expec-
tations to encompass the possibility of tragedy, only to meet in
the third chapter still another character, Gail Hightower, whose
relationship to Lena and Christmas must now be established
somehow. From the outset, in short, the novel disrupts any
expectations of a single or uniWed plot structure.
The opening pages of Light in August locate us in a world in
motion, drawing us not, as in The Sound and the Fury, into a
present scene whose meaning is Xeshed out fully once we learn
its relationship to the past, but rather into a moving present
capable of leading us virtually anywhere. Lena Grove’s quest to
Wnd the father of her unborn child, precisely by virtue of its
apparent hopelessness, promises to carry us on an endless
journey. The novel that proceeds from this beginning makes
good on this promise; its plots proliferate at an alarming rate.
But while forcing us to attend to the question of what will
happen next in a present always moving forward, Faulkner
also meets the demand that grows more urgent as this present
grows more complex, the demand to Wll in the history of the
characters whose actions we witness. Our need as readers to
explain present events by reference to their history, therefore,
coexists—by no means peacefully—with our need to keep up
with them as they pull us forward into an indeterminate future.
The narrative pulls us, in other words, in two directions at once,
forward into the future and backward into the past. According-
ly, as the novel moves forward through the three weeks that

constitute its present, it must also move backward into the past
to Wll in the stories of its proliferating characters.
The opening chapter deploys a brilliant mechanism for
moving the reader into the ongoing motion of the novel. As
Lena sits beside the road watching Armstid’s wagon approach,
Faulkner describes the scene in terms of a contradiction
between what she sees and what she hears.
The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and
ungreased wood and metal is slow and terriWc: a series of dry
sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still
pinewiney silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules
plod in a steady and unXagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not
seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle
distance forever and forever, so inWnitesimal is its progress.9
What Faulkner produces here is the impression of constant

motion. The wagon’s sound signals its motion, ‘‘slow and
terriWc,’’ while its appearance is static, ‘‘suspended . . . forever
and forever.’’ He is appealing to our predisposition to view
immobility as a sign of permanence, but complicating our
responses by attributing that permanence to motion itself. The
wagon is moving, but ‘‘does not seem to progress,’’ and Lena’s
own relation to time is similar.
she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate
wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and
limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without
progress across an urn (LIA, 7).
Faulkner’s invocation of Keats’s Grecian urn underscores

Lena’s pastoral habitation of the natural, procreative realm
from which, as we will learn, Joe Christmas is alienated and

Gail Hightower has Xed. But Lena also inhabits and represents a
world in steady motion, time moving inexorably onward. ‘‘My
my,’’ she remarks, ‘‘a body does get around’’ (LIA, 30).
Even so young and uncomplex a character as Lena has a past,
which must be adduced for us to understand her. The novel’s
second paragraph, thus, begins a roughly three-page Xashback
providing the story of where she has come from and why. When
she thinks ‘‘I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been
since I was twelve years old,’’ it is as if the narrator hears her, and
steps in to explain. ‘‘She had never been to Doane’s Mill until
after her father and mother died’’ (LIA, 3). The story is quickly
told, and it is a bleak one. Lena lost both her parents at twelve,
and moved to Doane’s Mill to live with her much older brother
and his habitually pregnant wife. She eventually began crawling
out the window of her lean-to room to meet Lucas Burch, who
disappeared as soon as he learned she was pregnant. She has
been walking for four weeks in quest of him, hitching rides on
wagons from country folk who have never heard of Lucas Burch
but are unwilling to discourage her. Once this background is
Wlled in, we return to Lena sitting on the road, and time moves
forward again. But it is important to note that Faulkner has
enfolded into this short Xashback a remarkable paragraph in
which the history of Doane’s Mill itself is presented.
The narrator draws back from the immediate past to position
himself as if he were omniscient, at least insofar as he is
endowed with the ability to see the future as well as the past.
The lumber mill ‘‘had been there seven years and in seven years
more it would destroy all the timber within its reach.’’ Then
most of the machinery and the men who ‘‘existed because of and
for it’’ would gradually disappear, leaving a ‘‘stumppocked

scene of profound and peaceful desolation’’ (LIA, 4–5). It is as if
a camera had Wlmed a fourteen-year sequence, which we are
seeing projected in fast-forward mode. But the projectionist
here is by no means neutral in his aims. The destruction
wrought by the lumber industry, its ruthless exploitation of
both men and nature, is recounted in vivid detail. The simple
Xashback designed to provide us with Lena’s life story so far
doubles as a vehicle for situating that story within a dramatically
larger one, Wlling out a picture of the socioeconomic world from
which all the Lenas and the Burches have emerged.
This strategy is writ large in the novel as a whole. As the
novel’s present Xows on into an indeterminate future, we move
simultaneously farther and farther into the past until, with
Hightower’s reveries in Chapter 20, we reach a point before
the civil war. The novel appropriates larger and larger chunks of
time into a structure that is constantly struggling to enfold them
within a uniWed vision. The novel not only operates on this
principle but calls attention to it by deliberately, as it were,
biting oV more than it seems able to chew. As time moves on
and plots multiply and crosshatch with each other, the novel
sets itself an enormous task of assimilation; as the structure
expands to encompass a lengthening history within an ordered
whole, that order is continually revealing itself as inadequate to
the larger demands for meaning posed by the continuously
moving present. Thus the tension keeps mounting between
time’s ceaseless motion and the need to impose a structure
large enough to give that motion meaning. Hightower’s vision
oVers the novel’s Wnal and most ambitious eVort to achieve a
redemptive understanding of the human community as it has
been dramatized in the novel’s interlocking plots, but it does not

cohere. Faulkner further emphasizes the inadequacy of any
redeeming vision by ending the novel as he does, not with
Hightower, but with Lena.
It is as if a whole new story is about to begin. A new
character, the furniture salesman, is introduced to relate to his
wife the story of Byron and Lena as they leave JeVerson for an
unknown future. The story he tells is basically a humorous one,
mildly making fun of Byron for his subordination to Lena, and
thus provides a kind of comic relief to the horrifying drama
we have just witnessed. Having entered the novel with Lena, we
exit it with her as well. But Lena’s story acts not only as bracket
but also as ellipsis; it encloses and relieves the tragedy of Joe
Christmas, but it also extends and ampliWes its intensity. Lena is
in many obvious ways an admirable character, and the story of
her rescue by Byron is heartening in its revelation of his strength
and her simple faith in the power of nature. But it is worth
recalling that the single time her story overlaps directly with that
of Joe Christmas, she is thrown into confusion. When Mrs.
Hines wants to name her child Joe, Lena gets ‘‘mixed up.’’
‘‘I don’t like to get mixed up,’’ Lena says, insisting that she has
not named the child yet (LIA, 410). Lena’s resistance to getting
mixed up here is signiWcant in several ways, but among them is
that it underscores the fundamental boundary dividing her
world from Joe’s. She knows her child will need a name, and
not only a Wrst one, but she eVectively asserts the right to choose
it. Given her situation, Lena has remarkable power, but the
deWnitive distance she maintains from Joe’s world signals the
limits of her story as a resource for redeeming his. Her story
provides, in other words, a way of getting ‘‘out of the novel,’’
but it insistently fails to meet the need for closure it ostensibly

fulWlls. That need is rendered acute by the novel’s central
story—that of Joe Christmas. Before turning to it, we need to
stand back for a moment to recognize the radical nature of
Faulkner’s experiment here.
The novel enacts a struggle for form, one that will unify its
plots and thereby endow human time with meaning. As always,
Faulkner was trying to put it all ‘‘between one Cap and one
period’’ (FCF, 14). But his narrative strategy in this novel
moves beyond that of his earlier work not only in formal
terms, but in its dramatic, sometimes explosive expansion into
the social and political dimensions of Yoknapatawpha. As we
have seen with Lena in Chapter 1, the pressure to backtrack and
give a character a past leads the narrator to expand his focus,
providing a social context for that character’s experience.
We soon learn that the more complex the character, the more
of a history we need, and thus the more of a context. So when Joe
Christmas takes center stage, the narrator devotes eight chapters
to the task that took four pages with Lena Grove. Like Lena’s
story, Joe’s is bleak, but unlike Lena’s it is profoundly tragic,
and in the course of telling it, as he did with Lena, the narrator
takes us not only into Joe’s personal experience but into the
social, religious, and racialized world that forms it.
The story of Joe Christmas as it unfolds from Chapters
5 through 12 virtually constitutes a novel within a novel, a
bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s education and growth
to maturity make him an alien to all the worlds through which
he moves. At each site of his progress from infant to grown man,
his alienation is reconWrmed, spurring on the gathering threat
his existence poses to the world and the world poses to his
survival, the threat that is Wnally realized in his murder of Joanna

Burden and the town’s lynching of him. At the core of this
threat is Joe’s racial identity, or rather, his lack of one. Called
‘‘nigger’’ as a child at the orphanage, he has no way of under-
standing that label until the dietitian uses it in upbraiding him
when she Wnds him hiding in her closet. Wrongly assuming Joe
has understood the sexual act taking place beyond the closet
curtain, the dietitian Wrst tries to bribe him to keep him from
telling on her. Joe fails to understand the bribe, leading the
dietitian to conclude that he plans to tell what happened.
She then maneuvers his removal from the orphanage by con-
vincing the matron that he is black. Thus for Joe, the ‘‘woman-
smelling’’ closet is tied to the word ‘‘nigger,’’ an identiWcation of
race and sex that will Wnally issue in the novel’s most telling
verbal invention, ‘‘womanshenegro’’ (LIA, 120,121). Eventual-
ly, Joe is adopted by the McEacherns, who know nothing of his
past. But by that time, at age Wve, Joe already knows his shameful
secret—as he later puts it, he has ‘‘some nigger blood’’ in him, a
belief already bound up with his fear of women (LIA, 196). Joe
develops an obsessively masculine identity enacted through
his stoic and Wnally violent deWance of his father, but more
fundamentally grounded in his rejection of his mother, ‘‘the
woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed
to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did
the hard and ruthless justice of men’’ (LIA, 168–169).
When Joe shows up in JeVerson at the age of thirty-three, he
has fully internalized the opposition between black and white,
so that his identity is secured precisely by that opposition,
although the security it aVords is fragile at best, explosive at
worst. When he sleeps with white prostitutes whom he lacks the
money to pay, he announces afterward that he is black and they

kick him out in a rage. He has learned how to manipulate the
society’s racism, one might say. But when he tries this tactic in a
more northern city, the prostitute is unphased. ‘‘What about
it?’’ she says. ‘‘You look all right’’ (LIA, 225). Joe beats her
almost to death. He cannot tolerate the possibility that the racial
line might not matter, as in that case he has no identity at all.
He tricks white men into calling him black ‘‘in order to Wght
them,’’ and in turn, when Negroes call him white, he Wghts them
(LIA, 225). What is constant is Joe’s antagonistic relation to
both black and white. If he chooses one over the other, he
cannot survive the threat to his singular identity, founded as it is
in deWance of both black and white. Joe carries within himself, as
a physical as well as a cultural burden, the fundamental racism
of his society.
It is important to understand that for the racist culture on
display here, ‘‘black versus white’’ is not just a distinction
between two kinds of people. It is what some cultural theorists
call a binary opposition. That is, each term means the negation
of the other: black means not white; white means not black.
As Joe Christmas’s physical appearance indicates, these terms
do not necessarily refer to skin color per se. As it functions
socially in the world of Faulkner’s novel, this opposition is most
fully expressed as white man versus ‘‘nigger.’’ When the
marshal, for example, hears Lucas Burch call Joe Christmas a
‘‘nigger,’’ he replies, ‘‘You better be careful what you are saying,
if it is a white man you are talking about . . . . I don’t care if he is
a murderer or not’’ (LIA, 98). The virulence of basic racial
opposition here outstrips the force of almost all other distinc-
tions, including murderer/not murderer. When the southerner
Quentin Compson decides that ‘‘nigger is not a person so much

as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reXection of the
white people he lives among,’’ he is implicitly acknowledging
the interdependency of the two terms (S&F, 55). His perspective
is indisputably racist, but he has at least gotten beyond the
lawyer Gavin Stevens in Light in August, for whom ‘‘nigger’’
has taken on the reiWed status accorded it by the language of
‘‘blood.’’ He undertakes to explain Joe Christmas’s erratic be-
havior by reference to the ‘‘black blood which snatched up the
pistol and the white blood which would not let him Wre it’’ (LIA,
449). The townspeople as well resort to the idiom of blood: ‘‘He
don’t look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been
the nigger blood in him,’’ one man says. (LIA, 349). The same
man later admits that he is stumped by Joe: ‘‘He never acted like
either a nigger or a white man. . . . That was what made the folks
so mad’’ (LIA, 350). The opposition is, as it has been from the
novel’s outset, exposed as wholly irrational. But if Joe is neither a
‘‘nigger’’ nor a ‘‘white man,’’ what is he? In this culture, he has
no place to be, save in combat with the opposition that consti-
tutes him. Faulkner explodes the ‘‘blood’’ myth by which the
tragic mulatto Wgure in American literary and cultural history is
trapped: the idea that people of mixed racial descent are part
black, part white, and forced therefore to choose whether or
not to ‘‘pass.’’ Whichever choice they make, they reaYrm the
binary opposition that condemns them to the choice in the Wrst
place. Joe Christmas refuses to make that choice; he refuses to
‘‘pass’’ on a sustained basis, and he refuses to live as a ‘‘nigger,’’
not least because he has been brought up not only as white but
as a racist.
Joe’s life also centers on the line dividing male from female,
another binary opposition of incalculable force in this novel.

As with the race line that constitutes and divides him at once,
the gender line deWnes him as an arch-masculine Wgure, terriWed
at any encroachment by the slippery and unpredictable behav-
ior of women, from the dietitian to Bobbie, and Wnally even to
Joanna, once she has quit behaving like a man and started
praying over him. Joe has been well-schooled in what it
means to be ‘‘a man,’’ an identity at once fully embodied by
McEachern and thoroughly inXicted on Joe as he grows up.
The depth of this ingrained masculine identity is conWrmed
when he listens to Joanna tell the story of her grandfather and
her brother being killed by Colonel Sartoris. He asks her why
her father didn’t kill Sartoris in revenge, and Joanna responds,
‘‘You would have. Wouldn’t you?’’ ‘‘‘Yes,’ he said at once,
immediately.’’ When Joanna speculates that it was ‘‘because of
his French blood’’ that her father didn’t kill Sartoris, Joe replies,
‘‘Don’t even Frenchmen get mad when a man kills his father and
his son on the same day?’’ (LIA, 245–254).
Joe’s alignment with a masculine code of blood revenge may
seem odd, given his own lack of a family line like that of the
Burdens, not to mention his own violent relations with his
father. But his attitude reXects his deep absorption into the
ideologies demanded by the gender system and on display
throughout the novel. We have noted Faulkner’s own struggles
with masculine codes of identity, and here we Wnd him explor-
ing their sources and consequences with a ferocity hitherto
unseen in his work. What he Wnds is that the gender system
dictates that men act, and act violently, not just when necessary
but whenever possible. As an extreme example of the society’s
model of masculinity, Joe’s attitudes and behavior reveal
violence as the core of male identity. The novel is replete with

scenes and stories of men’s addiction to violence. In this respect
it is crucial for Byron Bunch to Wght Lucas Burch, even though
he knows he will lose, because otherwise he will not have the
male credentials to become Lena’s husband. What is the reason,
if any, for this masculine need for violence? Joe’s story oVers
one explanation of its source.
When Joe tries to lose his virginity, going out with his friends
for a prearranged rural assignation with a young black girl, Joe’s
fear of women is fused and confused with his self-identiWcation
as Negro. Filled with a ‘‘terrible haste’’ and remembering
‘‘toothpaste,’’ Joe looks down upon the girl and sees himself;
he seems ‘‘to look down into a black well,’’ at the bottom of
which are ‘‘two glints like reXections of black stars’’ (LIA, 156).
Reenacted in racial terms, this portrayal of Narcissus, which
Faulkner had repeatedly written about during his poetic appren-
ticeship, reveals Joe’s deep identiWcation with the black as
woman, the woman as black. The sexual desire she provokes
instantly turns to rage at the threat that connection with her
inspires. Viciously attacking her, Joe enacts his Wrst, but deter-
mining and lifelong, rebellion against the ‘‘womanshenegro,’’
who is basically himself in female form. His internalized racial
self-hatred Wnds an external target in the same female body
designated as the object of his heterosexual desire. The racial
issue enables Faulkner to represent the terror of women as a
major source of male violence. Faulkner does not set Joe apart as
a deviant, but uses the outcast—as he does throughout this
novel—to reveal the core of the cultural systems on which the
society depends for its coherence, as well as its incoherence.
Race and gender systems are so intertwined in the culture
into which Joe is initiated that they cannot be fully disentangled,

but it is important to recognize the force with which the novel
addresses gender and sexuality as major cultural predicates for
imposing and enforcing power relations just as Wercely as the
racial system does. In this culture, women suVer, smell out sin if
they’re good and indulge in it if they’re not, and connive in
secrecy against their male husbands and fathers. The imper-
viousness with which Lena Grove—a walking outrage to the
good women—negotiates her way through and around the
strictures of marriage and legitimacy only serves to highlight
the dehumanizing eVects of those strictures. The cost to women
of the Protestant culture’s repression of female sexuality is made
painfully evident in Joanna Burden’s brief escape from it. In
addition to dramatizing the depth of the southern white
woman’s sexual repression—by means of describing graphically
what happens when that repression is lifted—Faulkner’s
account of the Joe/Joanna episode underscores the major role
played by religion in sustaining racist norms. The sexual poli-
tics of southern racism are clear enough. Joanna whispers
‘‘Negro, negro negro’’ as she makes love to Joe, seduced by
the very image that haunts the southern white men who fear the
black man’s sexual power (LIA, 260). But at least as important
to the larger vision of race hatred that the novel anatomizes is
the religious faith on which that race hatred feeds. Although the
racism that Faulkner is so virulently attacking in this novel is
clearly the central object of its thematic focus, we cannot
properly appreciate that attack without understanding religion’s
role as the major agent and resource of racial hatred in the
culture under scrutiny.
Thus, Gail Hightower’s story becomes crucial, even if at the
outset it seems far oV center. Through Hightower, we get a

privileged picture of the church, privileged by virtue of his
being an outcast from it. In Hightower’s Wnal reverie, the church
is described as a failure not because of the ‘‘outward groping of
those within it nor the inward groping of those without,’’ but
because of the ‘‘professionals who control it and who have
removed the bells from its steeples.’’ Having eVectively castrated
the church’s power to provide any meaningful order for time’s
onward movement, the professionals have left only the steeples,
‘‘endless without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed
not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat and doom’’
(LIA, 487). What Hightower’s vision reveals is that the people
of JeVerson form a community devoted not to fostering life, the
‘‘treble shouts of generations,’’ but rather to death, an attitude
demonstrated by that ‘‘Protestant music’’ with its ‘‘quality stern
and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as
immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding
it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death
were the boon’’ (LIA, 367).
Light in August is an angry novel, angry at the people who
succumb to the comforts of hatred and the titillations of vio-
lence. In the opening pages of Chapter 13 we return to the
scene of Joanna’s death and the descent upon her house of the
townspeople: they ‘‘knew, believed, and hoped that she had
been ravished too: at least once before her throat was cut and at
least once afterward’’ (LIA, 288). They immediately begin ‘‘to
canvass about for someone to crucify’’ (LIA, 289). As for Percy
Grimm, the self-appointed agent of their vengeance, Faulkner
was later to brag that he had ‘‘created a Nazi before Hitler
did.’’10 As the novel unfolds, the expanding social and historical
terrain it opens up breeds ever new opportunities for outrage

and despair. The narrator’s anger and contempt sometimes
threatens to disrupt the novel’s rhythmic Xashes between
present and past. In Chapter 13, for example, his tirade
continues beyond a description of the scene to an indictment
of the people’s refusal ‘‘to forgive her and let her be dead
in peace and quiet’’ because their violent fantasies of rape
and murder ‘‘made nice believing’’ (LIA, 289). The narrator’s
rage extends the passage from shopkeepers to lawyers,
doctors, women. You realize at a certain point that he could
go on and on, so infuriated is he at the spiritual poverty
informing the hunger for violence at the heart of the society he
is portraying.
Such outbursts erupt frequently in this novel, testing again its
capacity formally to contain the rhetorical energies unleashed by
Faulkner’s ambitious eVort to take on the social world in full
force. They also signal the odd position of the novel’s narrator.
On the one hand, he seems to occupy the omniscient narrator’s
stance; as we have noticed, he can move in for close-ups and out
for panoramic views, collapsing or expanding time and space at
will. On the other hand, his knowledge is limited to some
extent, since he so often indicates that he is guessing. When
Joe pursues Bobbie, he begins to steal money from his mother’s
hiding place. ‘‘It is very possible,’’ the narrator tells us, ‘‘that the
woman did not suggest it to him, never mentioned money to
him.’’ Indeed, ‘‘it is possible that he did not even know that he
was paying with money for pleasure’’ (LIA, 191). The narrator
here prominently displays the limits of his own knowledge, not
only as to what Joe knows or doesn’t know but also as to what
Bobbie did or didn’t do. How does the narrator know all that he
seems to, and yet have to speculate about even the speciWc

events of the plot whose story he is telling? The answer, I think,
is that Faulkner wants to mark the boundaries within which
even an omniscient narrator operates. Faulkner must have the
services of an omniscient narrator to address the immense
breadth and depth of the social space of this novel, but that
narrator himself must be understood as searching out the diVer-
ent plot lines as they unfold, imagining one while refusing to
give up on an alternate one, as here. He comments at one point
that ‘‘man knows so little about his fellows’’ (LIA, 47–48). In a
novel where what people think they know is often just as
suspect as what they believe, the narrator must remind us
from time to time that what he knows—despite its magni-
tude—is not certain or secure. One might put the same point
more directly by saying that Faulkner is tipping his hand,
showing us that he is making up this story, and in the process
making choices while imagining others. As in his earlier ironic
self-description for Forum, the storyteller is marking both his
distance and his vulnerability.
Light in August was a critical turning point in Faulkner’s
writing career. Not only did he address the issue of race directly
for the Wrst time, but he turned decisively toward the broad-
based representation of social structures and practices that
would occupy him for the rest of his career. The works that
had brought him forward into critical acclaim, The Sound and
the Fury and As I Lay Dying, are by no means cut oV from social
reality, but they approach it from a more insulated, psychologi-
cally focused, and formally self-referential vantage point than
that at work in Light in August. One mark of this shift is the
move from a single, nuclear family as the focalizing subject of
the story to an array of families, both present and past, set

within a densely textured culture whose central axis is the town
of JeVerson at the heart of the county called Yoknapatawpha.
Families continue to play a dominant role in Faulkner’s ongoing
representation of this rich social terrain, but they now come
with, and are often overcome by, genealogies.

Three

Absalom, Absalom! and Go
Down, Moses
Once Light in August was completed, Faulkner found

himself in Wnancial trouble again. He had received virtually no
royalties from Sanctuary, since Hal Smith’s Xedgling publishing
Wrm went bankrupt. His short story sales were slim and largely
unremunerative, and so he accepted an oVer from Hollywood,
arriving in Culver City, California, at the MGM studios on May
7, 1932. He had a six-week contract at $500.00 a week. It would
prove to be the Wrst of many, eventually fairly regular, trips to
Hollywood over the next decade, as Faulkner struggled to make
enough money to support his family, restore Rowan Oak, and
meet his often expensive tastes, not to mention Estelle’s.
The stories about Faulkner in Hollywood are legion, but in
some ways the best come from this Wrst visit. Here are two.
When Faulkner arrived at Sam Marx’s oYce late that
Saturday in May, he asked to be assigned either to Mickey
Mouse movies, or to newsreels, ‘‘the only pictures I like,’’
104
he explained (Minter, 139). Mickey Mouse movies, Marx
explained, were made by the Walt Disney Studio, not MGM.
In any case, Faulkner had already been assigned to a Wlm to be
called Flesh, featuring Wallace Beery, who had recently scored a
hit with The Champ. Faulkner was sent oV to watch the latter
Wlm but asked the projectionist to stop it almost immediately, as
it was obvious how the story was going to come out. Faulkner
then disappeared for ten days, allegedly to Death Valley but
certainly into some alcohol-induced haze.
The second story concerns Howard Hawks and Clark Gable.
After going nowhere with the various assignments at MGM,
Faulkner had been sought out by Howard Hawks to write the
screenplay for a story of his own, ‘‘Turn About,’’ a project that
proved a success. It was made into the Wlm Today We Live,
starring Joan Crawford. Hawks and Faulkner became good
friends; indeed, in the course of his years in Hollywood, most
of Faulkner’s best work would be done with Hawks, who shared
his values as well as his interest in drinking and hunting. It was
while on a hunting trip with Hawks and some of his friends,
including Clark Gable, that Faulkner delivered a punch line
that became famous. Faulkner and Hawks were talking about
books, as they drove out of town that day, and Gable, not much
of a reader, shyly asked after a while, ‘‘Mr. Faulkner, what do
you think somebody should read if he wants to read the best
modern books?’’ Faulkner replied with a list of names: ‘‘Ernest
Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and
myself.’’ ‘‘Oh,’’ Gable said, ‘‘Do you write?’’ ‘‘Yes, Mr. Gable,’’
Faulkner replied, ‘‘What do you do?’’ (Blotner, 310).
Though notoriously shy and silent, obviously Faulkner could
participate with wit and bite when moved to do so. He made
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! AND GO DOWN, MOSES 105

several friends in Hollywood, and although he never liked it, he
wrote a lot and meanwhile learned a good deal about scripts and
moviemaking there. To what extent this experience taught him
anything he didn’t already know about composing a narrative is
hard to determine; he had already clearly learned things from
watching Wlms, amply demonstrated by his use of Xashbacks and
zooming in and out in Light in August. We do know that Hawks
liked to have Faulkner on the set, to patch up scenes and rewrite
awkward dialogue when necessary, tasks he was good at and
apparently enjoyed performing, especially when working with
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Becall on the set of The Big Sleep.
But most of the time when Faulkner was in Hollywood over
the next decade and more, he wanted to be back in Oxford.
Typically, he would leave as soon as he had made enough money
to last a while, returning when he ran out. Throughout these
years, he kept hoping to sell enough short stories not to have to
return to California, but he could never achieve that goal.
In the summer and fall of 1932, Faulkner was not only having
trouble learning the screenwriting business, but he was also
having trouble writing his own Wction. Partly, of course, this
lapse was caused by having to spend time writing for the screen,
but partly it was the fatigue bound to follow the period of
prodigious productivity through which he had just come. In
four years he had published four novels: The Sound and the
Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August, in
addition to several short stories. The following year found
him looking after Estelle, pregnant with Jill and in frail condi-
tion, and writing a few short stories while still working long
distance on another project with Hawks. Although he sold the
Wlm rights to Sanctuary, and therefore was solvent for a while,

Faulkner found himself unable to produce. The birth of Jill in
June 1933 raised spirits and renewed hopes for his marriage,
but Faulkner was growing despondent about his career. In
October 1933, he wrote Hal Smith, ‘‘It has been almost
16 months since I have written anything original.’’1 Shortly
thereafter, however, he sold a new story, ‘‘A Bear Hunt,’’ to
the Saturday Evening Post, and the following February 1934,
he began to work on a new manuscript that would become
Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner wrote his publisher that he hoped to complete the
novel by the following fall. In the end it took him more than
two-and-one-half years to write Absalom, Absalom! But unlike
the previous two years, this was a period of almost miraculous
productivity in Faulkner’s career as a writer. While at work on
the novel, he published a collection of short stories, Dr. Martino
and Other Stories, another novel, Pylon, as well as writing most
of the stories that would make up The Unvanquished, published
in 1939. During the same period, he also worked on at least
four Wlm scripts, Sutter’s Gold, The Road to Glory, Banjo on My
Knee, and Gunga Din. What impeded his progress on Absalom,
Absalom! was in part the immensity of the narrative challenge it
posed and in part the intensity of the personal demands he
faced during these years. Among the latter, certainly the most
signiWcant was his younger brother Dean’s death, in an airplane
Faulkner had given him, in November 1935. As for the former,
the manuscript evidence conWrms what Faulkner reported
when he set the novel aside in August 1934 after months of
work—that he had a ‘‘mass of stuV ’’ but no satisfactory way
of putting it together yet (SL, 84). He turned to Pylon, a story
of the barnstorming Xiers he had come to know since learning

to Xy and helping set his brother Dean up in business as a
pilot in northern Mississippi. Once Pylon was published in
February 1935, Faulkner turned again to Absalom, Absalom!
whose structural problems he was now able to solve, thanks,
in part perhaps, to the fundamental distance from Absalom,
Absalom! that its modern and urban subject provided. When he
Wnished the manuscript in January 1936, he was in Hollywood.
He gave it to a fellow screenwriter to read, saying, ‘‘I think it’s the
best novel yet written by an American’’ (Blotner, 364). One
could certainly argue that he was right.
With Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner returns to his great-grandfather’s
legend, but with a critical edge that was lacking in Sartoris.
The nostalgia for the lost world of the heroic fathers, already
debunked in Light in August in Hightower’s Wnal realization
that his ancestor’s heroic deed was nothing more than a chicken
coop raid, is now forsworn for a thoroughgoing interrogation
of southern patriarchy, both its foundations and its legacy. On
the side, so to speak, Faulkner was writing stories for The Saturday
Evening Post which would eventually constitute The Unvan-
quished (1939), where the old Bayard Sartoris of his earlier novel
returns as a little boy living with his grandmother and his best friend
Ringo, a black child with whom he is growing up on the Sartoris
plantation. Perhaps this alternate exercise in relating the adventures
of Bayard and Ringo helped siphon oV any residual romanticism
Faulkner may have harbored about the Old South, currently in
vogue thanks to the publication of Gone with the Wind (1936). In
any case, the world of Absalom, Absalom! bears very little resem-
blance to that of The Unvanquished. Originally called ‘‘Dark
House,’’ the novel opens and closes in the dark, and its vision is
entirely tragic.

As in the novels we have already discussed, Absalom, Absa-
lom! can seem to its Wrst-time reader perversely designed to keep
the story from getting itself told. Faulkner provides a Chro-
nology, a Genealogy, and a map of Yoknapatawpha County, but
while helpful, these additions by no means answer the key
questions raised in the text itself. Who was Thomas Sutpen?
Where did he come from? Why did he build his house and
plantation? Why did his son Henry kill Charles Bon, Judith’s
suitor? What happened to Henry? Why is Rosa ColdWeld in a
rage at Sutpen? It is crucial to recognize, if we are to appreciate
this novel, that we are not alone in asking these and other
questions. The characters are trying to answer them as well.
That’s why they are engaged in conversations with each other.
In fact, the novel is built largely of conversations, three of
which are dominant—the conversations between Quentin and
Rosa, between Quentin and his father, and between Quentin
and Shreve. Each conversation can be seen as producing a
version of the Sutpen story. The Wrst and in some ways simplest
version is Rosa’s. In her eyes, Sutpen is a demon, a man who
came from nowhere, descended on the town, took her sister in
marriage and spawned two demon children. He forbade his
daughter’s marriage to Charles Bon for no reason, set Henry to
kill Bon for no reason, and then committed the ultimate crime in
proposing to her that they breed, and if the child turned out to
be male, he would marry her. He is, indeed, the devil incarnate,
smelling of sulfur, and it is because of him that the South lost the
war, since only then could he be punished. Rosa’s account
raises more questions than it answers, to put it mildly, but it
serves admirably to Wx Sutpen in our minds as larger than life.
The second version is Mr. Compson’s. Classically educated and

cynically inclined, he explains that Sutpen repudiated his
daughter’s marriage to Bon because Bon had an octoroon
mistress in New Orleans. Henry, according to this account,
cannot tolerate the bigamy he sees coming with Bon’s marriage
to Judith and kills Bon to prevent it. Identifying with Bon as a
sophisticated and cosmopolitan Wgure, Mr. Compson brings
him alive but cannot even persuade himself that he has
explained Henry’s murder of Bon. As he says to Quentin,
‘‘It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. . . . They are
there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical
formula . . . you bring them together in the proportions called
for, but nothing happens.’’2 Cued in part by Mr. Compson’s
interest in the love triangle between Judith, Henry, and
Bon, Quentin and Shreve then come up with the third and
Wnal version of the story, casting Bon and Henry as half-
brothers and thereby explaining not only Henry’s murder of
Bon, but Sutpen’s motives for denying his suit as well. If Bon is
understood to be Sutpen’s oldest son, born in Haiti of a wife
Sutpen later discovers is part black, then his arrival at Sutpen’s
door as Judith’s suitor threatens not just incest, which Henry is
willing to tolerate, but miscegenation, which he is not. Thus
for Shreve and Quentin, the story’s climax is reached in the
conversation they imagine between Henry and Bon: ‘‘You
are my brother,’’ Henry says. ‘‘No, I’m not,’’ Bon replies,
‘‘I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. Unless
you stop me, Henry’’ (AA, 286). The third and Wnal version of
the story is by far the most powerful and convincing, and it is
clearly expected to outstrip, incorporate, and supersede the Wrst
two—this even though it is the furthest removed in time and the
least connected to any empirical evidence.

Although it is useful to identify these three versions of the
story, it is also misleading to read the novel primarily by
reference to them. To do so is to approach Absalom, Absalom!
as if it were structured on the same principles as The Sound and
the Fury. As we have seen, Faulkner was already concerned in
his earlier work with his reader and the means by which that
reader could be led forward into the past; but in Absalom,
Absalom! he brings that reader into the dialogue more urgently,
compelling him or her to participate directly in the novel’s
central form of activity—storytelling. In conventional terms,
we could say that the reader becomes a narrator, and because
the major line of action in the novel’s present consists in
narration, the reader is threatened with becoming a character.
But it is more accurate, I think, to say that the novel is itself a
set of voices in dialogue with the reader, who, like Quentin
Compson, struggles in vain to secure a detached position from
which to assemble a chaotic and inexplicable set of events so as
to put the story and all it implies behind him.
Quentin Compson comes to us as an auditor who is forced to
listen to Rosa ColdWeld, to his father, to his roommate, but who
struggles to resist a narrative pull that threatens to engulf him. In
the novel’s opening chapter, he defends against Rosa’s insistent
voice by retreating from its sound to a visual register in which he
can try to maintain some sense of separation from the events
being described. ‘‘Her voice would not cease it would just
vanish,’’ as Quentin watches a kind of freeze frame in
which Sutpen ‘‘abrupt[s] . . . the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be
Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light’’ (AA, 4). In this
‘‘soundless’’ vision even God’s words have become objects,
seen and not heard. Quentin visualizes the ghosts here, much

as Hightower did, looking through his window at the imagined
scene of his Grandfather’s heroic charge, but with the opposite
intent. Hightower is trying to return to the past in order to
escape the present, while Quentin is trying to escape the past so
as to enter the present. Quentin later tells Shreve, ‘‘I am older at
twenty than a lot of people who have died’’ (AA, 301). He is,
then, ‘‘two separate Quentins,’’ one so absorbed by the stories
of the past that he is virtually a ghost, the other struggling to live
anew as a young man on the cusp of adulthood—always a key
moment for Faulkner. The Quentin whose ‘‘very body [is] an
empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names’’ wants to
shut his ears, but even when ‘‘listening would renege and
hearing sense self-confound,’’ he remains trapped in the past,
‘‘too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having
to be one for all that’’ (AA, 4). Ironically, it is only when he
engages in conversation, participates with Shreve in the ‘‘happy
marriage of speaking and hearing,’’ that Quentin gains the
chance to free himself of the past (AA, 253). Remaining silent
has only refueled the memories that make of him a ‘‘barracks, a
commonwealth’’ rather than a single and autonomous person
(AA, 7). Once the ‘‘two separate Quentins’’ converse and col-
lude in telling the story, they not only uncover a bitter truth but
enable a connection between past and present that recognizes
rather than denies history.
Drawn forth and compelled to participate in the conversa-
tion, the reader resembles Shreve as well as Quentin. By the
time Shreve appears on the scene in Chapter 6, it is important to
realize, we already know the major events of Sutpen’s life after
his arrival in JeVerson. Indeed, by the end of Chapter 1 the
whole story has virtually been put on record, although we don’t

know how to make sense of it. So when Shreve opens the
discussion with his recital of what he’s heard and his questions
about what it means, the story is actually being repeated. We are
in a position like Quentin’s in Chapter 1 in the sense that we’ve
heard it all already; what is said almost seems to strike ‘‘the
resonant strings of remembering,’’ as it did for Quentin (AA,
172). As a student of mine once remarked, reading Absalom,
Absalom! is like life itself: once you’re old enough to Wgure out
what is going on, you’re already partly responsible for it.
As readers, once we have some grip on the main features of
the story, we are partly responsible for it because we’ve partic-
ipated in constructing it. Faulkner systematically implicates us
in the storytelling from the outset.
How does this strategy work? We can observe it in miniature
if we look at the scene in Chapter 2 when Sutpen arrives in
JeVerson. A posse rides out to confront him, and he is described
as follows: ‘‘He was riding the roan horse, in the frock coat and
the beaver hat which they knew and with his legs wrapped in a
piece of tarpaulin; he had a portmanteau on his pommel and he
was carrying a small woven basket on his arm’’ (AA, 34).
As Sutpen arrives at the Holston House, we are reminded
again that he is still carrying ‘‘the portmanteau and the basket.’’
What do they contain? We are not just invited to ask this
question but teased with it. When Sutpen emerges from the
hotel, we, along with the posse, learn the answer to one ques-
tion, at least. ‘‘He wore a new hat now, and a new broadcloth
coat, so they knew what the portmanteau had contained.’’ So do
we. But another question emerges when we are told ‘‘they even
knew now what the basket had contained . . . though doubtless
at the time it merely puzzled them more than ever’’ (AA, 35).

Now, irritatingly enough, the townspeople know something we
don’t—what was in the basket. Our suspense about this ques-
tion is not relieved until the end of the next paragraph, when
Sutpen Wnally reaches Mr. ColdWeld’s front steps, ‘‘carrying his
newspaper cornucopia of Xowers’’ (AA, 36). The sequencing of
revelations here creates a serial suspense that keeps us going,
through prose in which much else is said about Sutpen, creating
a narrative pull that is fueled Wrst by the need to Wnd out what
was in the two containers, and then by the need to understand
what their contents signal as to Sutpen’s intentions.
There are two kinds of gaps in knowledge put in counter-
pointed play here. There is the gap between what the towns-
people know and what we know. Then there is the gap between
knowing the ‘‘facts’’ and understanding what they mean;
even when they see the Xowers, the posse doesn’t ‘‘get it,’’ so
preoccupied are they with their suspicions that Sutpen is a thief
and murderer of some ill-deWned sort. But having learned the
contents of the portmanteau, we are likely already to understand
what Sutpen is up to here—a marriage proposal for which he
must dress up. If we make this inference, the revelation about
the Xowers serves as conWrmation rather than revelation and
also provides Wnal relief from a long and highly ornate sentence.
Here, in microcosm, is an essential feature of Faulkner’s narra-
tive strategy in the novel as a whole. On the one hand, he
withholds information, leading us to read on in the hope of
gaining it, and on the other hand, he possesses us of information
that we don’t know how to interpret or understand. Like the
posse, for example, we may know something but fail to have the
appropriate context for understanding it; indeed, we may be
wholly misled by assumptions that turn out to be partial or

groundless. No sooner is one question answered than another
arises, and only in retrospect do certain pieces of information
assume signiWcance.
The structure of suspense building in this scene can serve as a
synecdoche for the larger and far more complex narrative strat-
egy on which the novel itself depends. The passage illustrates
how Faulkner involves the reader at the most intimate and
fundamental level in sharing the burden of storytelling. One
may be ahead of or behind the game in anticipating the meaning
of an event, but one is never allowed a secure vantage point from
which it is possible to stand outside the picture and compose it
except in the most provisional sense. For example, in Chapter 1
we wonder, as do other characters, why Rosa has summoned
Quentin and what Rosa wants Quentin to do. Her suspicion that
there is ‘‘something in that house’’ is not enunciated until the end
of Chapter 5, and the Wrst account of Quentin’s journey with
Rosa to Sutpen’s Hundred only appears in Chapter 6 (AA, 140).
The answer to our question, in other words, is delayed for four
chapters. Even when we get that answer, it comes in the form of
yet another question: if someone is ‘‘living . . . hidden’’ in that
house, who is it? For the answer to this second question, we
must wait until Chapter 9, when Quentin Wnally recalls his
encounter with Henry Sutpen. Again, we pick up enough infor-
mation along the way to anticipate this outcome, that Bon is
Henry’s part-black half-brother, information that can only have
come, in any deWnitive sense, from Henry. By the time the scene
between Henry and Quentin is presented, we have a large
investment in the crucial piece of information we have assumed
Quentin received from him. We’ve heard the entire story of
Sutpen’s youth, his Wrst marriage in Haiti, why he came to

Mississippi to start over, and why he compelled Henry to kill
Bon. Thanks to Shreve’s questions, we know what Quentin
knows, and thanks to the brilliant retelling of the story enacted
by Quentin and Shreve, we think we understand it. Both of the
gaps have been crossed, but now a third one yawns before us,
that between what we know and understand, on the one hand,
and actual veriWcation of the information presupposed by
our knowledge and understanding. The conversation recorded
between Quenin and Henry reveals only that it is Henry
speaking. No conWrmation of his relation to Bon is forthcoming.
And you are ------?

Henry Sutpen.
And you have been here -------?
Four Years.
And you came home -------?
To die. Yes.
To die?
Yes. To die.
And you have been here -------?
Four Years.
And you are -------?
Henry Sutpen (AA, 298).
This conversation not only denies us any conWrming testimony

but its self-mirroring form seems deliberately to rebuV our
desire for veriWcation.
This third gap has, of course, always been there. When

Mr. Compson, for example, relates to Quentin what he knows
of the Sutpen saga, he heavily sprinkles his account with dis-
claimers such as ‘‘doubtless,’’ or ‘‘I suppose.’’ He is fully aware

that even the letter he shows Quentin cannot provide hard
evidence for his account. It has neither a speciWed addressee
nor a signature, and only the story of Judith’s giving it to
Quentin’s grandmother as testimony to its authenticity. Quentin
and Shreve freely imagine much of the tale they tell, including
making up characters like the lawyer who works for Eulalia Bon,
since they need him to explain Bon’s otherwise inexplicable
appearance in Mississippi. If we focus primarily on this third
gap, as critics so often have, it is easy to regard the novel as
essentially a self-reXexive modernist exercise, demonstrating
how all meaning is Wnally Wctional. But as Light in August
should serve to remind us, just because people make things
up doesn’t keep those things from having real consequences. If
Wctions can regress into collective myths that make for ‘‘good
believing’’ among racists, Wction making can also provoke imag-
inative engagements with the socially given, cutting through
layers of ideologies to reveal their betrayal of human possibility.
As a southerner, Faulkner was particularly well situated to
understand how Wctions could construct and misconstruct his-
tory in the interests of a particular viewpoint, and he was
certainly fully in touch with the modernist realization that we
live within frameworks constructed and reconstructed with
words. But in Absalom, Absalom! he was concerned with more
than demonstrating the South’s delusions, and more than
rehearsing the modernist’s sometimes complacently ironic
stance, although Rosa and Mr. Compson, respectively, accom-
plish these ends. He was devoted to developing a narrative
strategy that compels us to participate in telling the story in
order to make us realize, and take responsibility for, the fact that
we live inside of history, not behind some window looking out

at it, like Hightower. Much as Hightower is drawn forth into
life, however brieXy, by Byron Bunch’s eVorts, the reader is
drawn forth into history understood as the ‘‘stream of event,’’
a stream that includes language, ‘‘that meagre and fragile
thread . . . by which the little surface corners and edges of
men’s secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant
now and then’’ (AA, 202). In the course of their intense imagi-
ning, Quentin and Shreve are thus ‘‘joined,’’ if only brieXy, in the
‘‘happy marriage of speaking and hearing’’ (AA, 253). Further,
when they are ‘‘joined’’ by Henry and Charles, becoming
Quentin/Henry and Shreve/Bon, the line dividing them from
the story they are telling dissolves, merging the narrators
they are with the characters they are imagining within one
‘‘stream of event’’ (AA, 127).
What compelled this radical formal invention, the most am-
bitious and complex of Faulkner’s career, was the Wgure of
Thomas Sutpen, a man whose history and fate oVered the
prospect not only of continuing the eVort begun in Light in
August to address the devastating impact of racial division on his
society, but also of deepening the focus so as to address the
interaction of race, class, and gender, and broadening his canvas
so as to encompass America. At the height of his powers as a
writer, Faulkner could now take full advantage of the critical
distance he had established on the South. Having invented
his county, he was now able to situate it in relation to America
and its past.
Thomas Sutpen’s story, once it is fully told, is actually
several stories in one. One of these is the story of the southern
slaveholding planter, emblem of the South itself, brought down
by its own hubris and inhumanity. Another is the story of the

fall of the house of Agamemnon, killed in part because he has
sacriWced his own daughter in the interest of his design for
warmaking. Another is the story of King David, retold with an
emphasis on the father’s loss of his son Absalom who has slept
with his sister. Another is the story of the boy Sutpen, who
suVers such an aVront to his identity as white, male, and equal
that he sets out to emulate precisely the man who has insulted
him, thereby stepping into the central role in the American
Dream. Unlike Joe Christmas, the character of Thomas Sutpen
refers us to many symbolic frameworks, not just one. It is
therefore impossible to account for his career from any single
perspective, but it is just as impossible to do justice to all of
the perspectives the novel and its storytellers bring to bear.
I want, then, to suggest only a few of the many ways of
understanding Sutpen.
To begin with, if we are to understand Sutpen at all, we must
appreciate his ‘‘innocence,’’ as Grandfather Compson calls it.
He is the bearer of tragic innocence, of course. As Faulkner
said, ‘‘The Greeks destroyed him, the old Greek concept of
tragedy’’ (University, 35). That is, like Oedipus, Sutpen is
innocent in the sense of being ignorant; he does not and cannot
know that his every step takes him closer to his fated destiny.
Each eVort he makes to achieve his design leads to its undoing.
But Faulkner builds on the Greek concept of tragic innocence,
making of Sutpen’s innocence a crucial register of the social
structures he is forced to combat. Sutpen never loses his
innocence, but his life purpose is deWned at the moment he
discovers it.
Having ‘‘fallen’’ into the domain of large plantations in
Tidewater, Virginia, with his family, Sutpen confronts a world

that bears no resemblance to his Appalachian birthplace. Where
he has grown up, ‘‘the land belonged to anybody and everybody
and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence
oV a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy’’ (AA, 179).
Only such a crazy man would try to take and keep more than he
needs. If a man possesses something of value, like a Wne riXe, it
would never occur to him to think or say ‘‘because I own this
riXe, my arms and legs and blood and bones are superior to yours
except as the victorious outcome of a Wght with riXes’’ (AA, 185).
Like Locke’s vision of the state of nature, the primitive culture
from which Sutpen comes is radically simple. If some people
have more than others, it is only because they are ‘‘lucky.’’ No
one seeks to own more than he and his family need, and no
one looks down on anyone else except the Indians, ‘‘and you
only looked down at them over your riXe sights’’ (AA, 179).
The Tidewater, on the other hand, is ‘‘a country all divided and
Wxed and neat with a people living on it all divided and Wxed
and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and
what they happened to own’’ (AA, 179). In this world there is a
diVerence ‘‘not only between white men and black ones,’’ but
also ‘‘between white men and white men not to be measured by
lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could
drink then get up and walk out of the room’’ (AA, 183).
The young Thomas Sutpen regards this new world with
curiosity and awe, but not envy. It is not until he is sent up to
the big white house with a message from his father and turned
away from the front door by the black butler that he confronts
the fact that he has no place in it. Having observed the planter in
his scuppernong arbor, Sutpen looks forward to seeing the
inside of the house, ‘‘never for one moment thinking but what

the man would be pleased to show him’’ (AA, 185–186). Having
come in the ‘‘good faith of business, which he had believed all
men accepted,’’ Sutpen is suddenly faced with what he and his
family actually are in the eyes of the planter: ‘‘cattle, creatures
heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without
hope or purpose for them’’ (AA, 190). When he returns home,
this is precisely how he sees his sister, ‘‘broad in the beam as a
cow, the very labor she was doing brutish and stupidly out of all
proportion to its reward’’ (AA, 191). But the worst is yet to
come. His father doesn’t even bother to ask whether he has
delivered the message. Nor, apparently, has the planter sent
anyone down to Wnd out why his father had failed to do the
work for which the message was, Sutpen surmises, probably an
excuse. ‘‘He never even gave me a chance to say it and Pap
never asked me if I told him or not and so he cant even know
that Pap sent him any message and so whether he got it or
not can’t even matter, not even to Pap.’’ It is at this moment
that the ‘‘explosion’’ happens, ‘‘a bright glare that vanished and
left nothing, no ashes or refuse, just a limitless Xat plain with
the severe shape of his intact innocence rising from it like a
monument’’ (AA, 192). Sutpen at once faces and violently
repudiates his impotence, an impotence whose discovery
immediately produces the phallic monument in which it is at
once enshrined and disavowed.
It is now his ‘‘innocence instructing him,’’ explaining that to
‘‘combat them’’ he will need to acquire what they have; ‘‘you got
to have land and niggers and a Wne house to combat them
with.’’ Seeking an adequate form for revenge, the voice of his
innocence becomes his conscience, the arbiter and guide who
dictate what he must do if he is to ‘‘combat them’’ (AA, 192).

Thus is the design born, in the mind of a boy of fourteen
or so, roughly, the age of Huckleberry Finn. As he later
tells Grandfather Compson, ‘‘I had a design. To accomplish
it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a
family—incidentally, of course, a wife’’ (AA, 212). By family,
of course, he means not just children, but a son, the bearer of his
name into the future.
We can now make a few observations about Sutpen’s
innocence. For one thing, it consists in his retention of the
belief in the rule of physical force, the rule he learned as a
child on the frontier. Some men may be stronger than others, or
luckier, say, but their power over other men can only be proven
as a result of combat. Thus Sutpen will ritually stage wrestling
matches with his slaves, as if needing to conWrm his superiority
to them through actual, physical Wghts. He Wrst seizes power in
Haiti, of course, by violently putting down a slave rebellion.
Sutpen’s physical courage wins him a citation for valor from Lee
himself; even Rosa acknowledges that he was brave. As he tells
General Compson, ‘‘He believed that all necessary was courage
and shrewdness and the one he knew he had and the other he
believed he could learn if it were to be taught’’ (AA, 197).
Sutpen’s ‘‘shrewdness,’’ however eVective in enabling him to
acquire land and wealth when he comes to JeVerson, is marked
by a certain simplicity. As he tells his story in Chapter 7,
Grandfather Compson listens in amazement to his meticulous
justiWcation for abandoning his Wrst wife and their child, hearing
‘‘that innocence again, that innocence which believed that the
ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake
and once you had measured them and balanced them and
mixed them and put them into the oven it was all Wnished and

nothing but pie or cake could come out’’ (AA, 211–212). (Even
cooking requires more imagination than this, as the case of Cora
Tull illustrates.) Because he has been so careful in following the
recipe dictated by his design, its failure must, he believes,
be due to some ‘‘mistake’’ he has made, a ‘‘mistake which he
could not discover himself and which he came to grandfather,’’
Quentin says, ‘‘not to excuse but just to review the facts for an
impartial . . . mind to examine and Wnd and point out to him’’
(AA, 215). If he can identify the mistake, Sutpen believes, he can
‘‘still combat’’ it (AA, 215). General Compson wails at him and
at the ‘‘purblind innocence’’ that persuades him that he could
do such violence to his wife and child without fear of retribution
(AA, 213).
In both its alignment with the frontier rule of violence and its
faith in the kind of legalistic reasoning that enables him to
escape his contract with his Wrst father-in-law due to the alleged
deceit of which he was a victim, Sutpen’s innocence is deeply
rooted in American history, from the violent expulsion of the
Indians through the ‘‘good faith of business’’ required to build
a capitalist economy. But more fundamentally American is
Sutpen’s quest to prove, as the Declaration of Independence
puts it, that ‘‘all men are created equal,’’ or, as Faulkner said in
describing Sutpen to the students at Virginia, ‘‘that man, if he is
man, cannot be inferior to another man through artiWcial stan-
dards or circumstances’’ (University, 35). In Sutpen’s terms,
some people are ‘‘spawned rich . . . and some not,’’ but that is a
matter of ‘‘luck,’’ not superiority. His design is aimed at proving
that any boy, whatever ‘‘nameless stranger,’’ ‘‘would never again
need to stand on the outside of a white door and knock at it,’’
because future generations would have ‘‘been riven forever free

from brutehood’’ by Sutpen’s successful combat in their name
(AA, 210).
Yet clearly, in his eVort to vindicate the principle of social
equality, Sutpen reconstitutes the very class structure he set out
to oppose. His design dictates that in order to prove that any
little boy can live in the big white house, he must acquire the
house itself and all that goes with it, and in so doing, he rises
above and Wnally refuses recognition to the man who mirrors
Sutpen’s own origins—Wash Jones. In denying Jones the social
recognition he Wnally demands, Sutpen brings his own life to a
violent end, and provokes Jones himself to suicide and the
massacre of his oVspring. Jones, who has accepted being denied
entrance even to Sutpen’s back door, now faces the fact that
Sutpen himself had once faced the planter’s front door, that
he is precisely the insigniWcant creature for which Sutpen’s
slaves have always taken him. ‘‘Better if his kind and mine too
had never drawn the breath of life on this earth,’’ he thinks,
than to live without the respect owed by free men to one another
(AA, 233).
The question here, as with every other outcome of Sutpen’s
design, is how he can be so blind in the face of the responses his
actions are likely to provoke. The answer lies in that innocence,
long embedded in the design out of which it Wrst emerges.
As we have noticed, the boy Sutpen has no way of understand-
ing why the planter behaves as he does, or why the butler
behaves as he does, and he never understands it. Instead, he
sets out to emulate what he sees, to mimic the man who ‘‘spent
most of the afternoon . . . in a barrel stave hammock between
two trees, with his shoes oV and a nigger . . . who did nothing
else but fan him and bring him drinks’’ (AA, 184). In what

amounts to a lifelong performance, he sets out to acquire what
the owner has acquired, the symbols of his superiority. His eye
is forever after on the combat he thereby sees himself engaged
in, to prove that he is the planter’s equal. But the design
itself simply mirrors the Tidewater planter’s achieved social
eminence, thereby reXecting the society over which the planter
presides, but never comprehending the conXicts and contradic-
tions inherent in that society. Sutpen’s career in pursuit of his
design, then, can serve to expose these contradictions to us for
the same reason they remain utterly obscure to Sutpen himself;
he has no capacity to see them because they are frozen within
the image he sets out to emulate. Thus, his design is aimed at
proving that all men are worthy of recognition as free and equal,
but it works out to reveal and indeed to reconWrm that they are
not. By the same token, the design compels Sutpen to found a
dynasty, but it also compels him to repudiate his own son.
Because the contradictions inhere in the design itself, Sutpen
cannot see them and searches always for the ‘‘mistake’’ he has
made in following the recipe. The peculiar power of such a
character lies in its capacity to confront American society with
its own image, speciWcally to expose two social contradictions:
(1) the one between the claim to social equality and the denial in
practice of that claim because of both race and class, and (2) the
one between the claims of paternalism to foster the welfare of
the family and the actual drive of patriarchy to pass on the
father’s name.
The novel is, of course, focused on the South, but it is a
South that is rooted in the larger history of America. Certainly,
Faulkner wanted to explode what he called the ‘‘makebelieve
region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds’’ (S&F, 229),

but in this novel he wanted to do more than that. Just as his
narrative strategy enabled him to reveal the romantic compul-
sions and guilt-ridden denials that fed the ‘‘makebelieve’’ visions
of the Old South, his construction of Sutpen enabled him to
represent the South as emerging from within American history,
and providing a particularly salient vantage point from which to
see its contradictions. Thus, Sutpen’s character radically under-
mines the nostalgic picture of the southern white planter whose
paternalistic ideology ostensibly redeemed him from the sin of
slave owning, but it does so by revealing that the would-be
aristocratic planter Wgure was actually only a successful capital-
ist entrepreneur. Claiming that he was a benevolent father
Wgure, the southern planter both before and after the civil war
took pride in representing a clear moral alternative to the ‘‘wage-
slavery’’ he saw in the North. In fact, he was daily extracting
forced labor from his slaves, but he claimed to think of them as
his children, the irony being, of course, that they often were his
children, as Sutpen’s case serves to emphasize. It is signiWcant
as well that Sutpen’s primitive accumulation of capital takes
place in Haiti, pointing to the larger scope of the economic
forces that generated the development of slave labor in
the Americas. Another indication of the scope of Faulkner’s
‘‘design’’ is the choice of a Canadian, Shreve McCannon, rather
than a northerner, as Quentin’s interlocutor. So while Sutpen’s
design mirrors the world of the southern planter before the civil
war, that world itself is as much American as it is southern. If we
focus in particular on Sutpen’s origins in—as Shreve insists that
Quentin acknowledge—what was not even yet West Virginia,
his background aligns him with the American frontier, as well as
with a state that did not secede from the union.

As we have seen in the case of Wash Jones, Sutpen’s design
dictates that he deny recognition to the poor white, whose social
origins he shares. But this is not the most harrowing of the
contradictions exposed by Sutpen’s campaign to prove that all
men are created equal. The most devastating contradiction that
emerges is between American freedom and American slavery.
As Edmund Morgan long ago demonstrated, it was the labor of
slaves that produced the tobacco on which ‘‘the position of the
United States depended not only in 1776 but during the span of
a long lifetime thereafter.’’3 ‘‘King Tobacco Diplomacy’’ was to
be followed by King Cotton, whose economic signiWcance
Faulkner was to underscore in Go Down, Moses, describing
cotton as ‘‘cable-strong to bind for life them who made the
cotton to the land their sweat fell on.’’4 Not only economically
but also politically, white freedom was forged by the denial of
black freedom, a fact whose social consequences are registered
in Wash Jones’s tenuous hold on his social identity as a free
man. The racial diVerence ‘‘between white men and black men’’
enables the denial of the class diVerence between white men and
white men, but only up to a certain point. When Sutpen
repudiates responsibility for Milly, Jones’s grand daughter, it
is because she has borne a girl, not a boy. ‘‘Well, Milly,’’ Sutpen
says, ‘‘too bad you’re not a mare too. Then I could give you a
decent stall in the stable,’’ like the one in which his mare,
Penelope, has just borne a ‘‘damned Wne colt’’ (AA, 229).
Although he hardly seems suited to the role, Wash Jones acts
out the role of a father, killing Sutpen in order to avenge the insult
to his newborn great-granddaughter. When Sutpen repudiates
Charles Bon because (he thinks) he is black, not white, Sutpen
is also, ironically enough, acting in the name of fatherhood.

Neither a girl nor a black can bear the name of the father, and
therefore neither can be ‘‘adjunctive’’ to Sutpen’s design.
The second contradiction exposed by Sutpen’s design, then,
concerns race and gender, and emerges as the result of the
design’s replication of a dynastic patriarchy. A student at Vir-
ginia made so bold as to ask Faulkner whether Sutpen ever
acknowledged Clytie as his daughter. Faulkner patiently replied
that ‘‘it would not have mattered’’ whether he did so, since she
was ‘‘female,’’ and Sutpen would ‘‘have to have a male descen-
dant’’ if he was going to create a ‘‘dukedom’’ (University, 272).
Sutpen, Faulkner elsewhere noted, wanted to ‘‘establish a
dynasty,’’ to ‘‘make himself a king and raise a line of princes’’
(University, 98). The novel makes clear that the father, to be a
father, must pass on the name of the father to a son, who in turn
can pass it on to ‘‘the Wne grandsons and great-grandsons
springing as far as eye could reach’’ (AA, 218). As Grandfather
Compson says, at the time Sutpen abandoned Charles and his
mother Eulalia, he ‘‘would not permit the child, since it was a
boy, to bear either his name or that of its maternal grandfather,’’
and yet neither would he ‘‘do the customary and provide a
quick husband for the discarded woman and so give his son an
authentic name’’ (AA, 214). Charles is barred not only from
bearing Sutpen’s name but from bearing any paternal name
because he is the bearer of so-called black blood. Why should
this be so important? The matrilineal rule of slavery dictates that
the child must follow the ‘‘condition’’ of the mother. Accord-
ingly, the black mother, in becoming a mother, erases, blots out,
the name of the father, thereby reducing all of her sons to the
status of ‘‘boys,’’ that is, men legally incapable of becoming
fathers. As Shreve phrases it, as the black son of a white father,

Charles Bon inevitably ‘‘inherited what he was from his mother
and only what he could never have been from his father’’
(AA, 174). The racial discourse of ‘‘blood’’ that a black son
introduces into the dynastic line Sutpen aims to found leads to a
serial catastrophe that not only dooms Sutpen’s design, but also
lays bare the social structure of patriarchy.
The roles to which women are assigned in the novel testify to
the subordination dictated by patriarchal rule. As Deborah
Clarke has shown, Sutpen’s infamous ‘‘proposal’’ to Rosa in
eVect blurts out what woman’s primary function under patri-
archy actually is, ‘‘to become a womb to bring forth male
children.’’5 By rejecting Sutpen, Rosa turns down the one
escape she is oVered from being an aging spinster. Yet her
exclusion from the role of wife and mother has made her into
a formidable agent of revenge, as she speaks for, and acts on
behalf of, Ellen ColdWeld as well as Eulalia Bon, and even Milly
Jones—the mothers who failed to meet Sutpen’s genealogical
demands. Further, her exclusion from any sexual experience
turns her into ‘‘all polymath love’s androgynous advocate’’ in
Chapter 5, where she gives voice to a passion that her culture
denies to women, unless they occupy the role of octoroon
mistress (AA, 117). Rosa may be dismissed as deranged, but
she is after all ‘‘a character cold, implacable, and even ruthless,’’
much like Sutpen himself (AA, 6).
A full picture of the novel’s intricate treatment of both gender
and race relations would take a chapter to itself, at the least.
What seems to me crucial in understanding Faulkner’s
approach to these issues is the plight of Charles Bon and
Henry Sutpen, as their dilemma illustrates the critical feature
of fatherhood as experienced from the son’s perspective—the

need for recognition. Over and against the abstract and instru-
mental version of patriarchy embedded in Sutpen’s design,
there is the all too personal and compelling experience of the
sons and brothers trapped in combat with each other as a result
of Sutpen’s refusal to recognize Bon as his son. From the son’s
standpoint as represented by Bon, the passing on of the father’s
name is merely a legal marker for what actually matters—that his
father recognize him. As Quentin and Shreve imagine him, Bon
is perfectly willing to withdraw and disappear if Sutpen will
only give him a sign of recognition. When he challenges Henry
to try and stop him from marrying Judith, Charles is insisting,
even unto death, that he be recognized. In a sense, when Henry
kills him, Bon is Wnally recognized, yet he is recognized not as
Sutpen’s son but as ‘‘the nigger who’s going to sleep with
[Henry’s] sister’’ (AA, 286). In forcing the issue, Bon is wreak-
ing his own revenge for his father’s refusal to recognize him,
making Henry into a murderer and leaving Judith a ‘‘widow’’
before she can become a ‘‘bride.’’
Recognition is a central issue in this novel. Indeed, it is fair to
say that the novel as a whole is organized around a series of
scenes in which recognition is demanded and denied: Sutpen
turned away from the big white house by the black butler; Wash
Jones turned away from the back door by the black Clytie; Rosa
confronted by Clytie at the foot of the stairs; Quentin paralyzed
at the memory of passing the door into Henry’s room; Henry
stopping Bon at the front gate to their father’s house. Not
surprisingly, then, thresholds, doors and gates, serve repeatedly
as the site of violent and sometimes lethal confrontation. Henry,
for example, waits until they reach the gatepost of Sutpen’s
Hundred before turning on Bon. Then when Henry comes to

the door alone, the encounter between brother and sister is
described as a physical struggle: ‘‘speaking to one another in
short brief staccato sentences like slaps, as if they stood breast to
breast striking one another in turn, neither making any attempt
to guard against the blows: Now you cant marry him. Why cant
I marry him? Because he’s dead. Dead? Yes, I killed him’’
(AA, 139–140). Recognition, it seems, cannot take place except
through some form of violent physical contact, as the crucial
scene between Rosa and Clytie indicates.
When Rosa arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred in response to Wash
Jones’s announcement that Henry has shot Bon, she enters the
front hall calling for Judith. But instead she is met by Clytie, a
‘‘furious yet absolutely rocklike and immobile antagonism’’ who
says to her ‘‘Don’t you go up there, Rosa’’ (AA, 110–111). Rosa
is shocked at Clytie’s use of her Christian name, a familiarity
that constitutes a kind of insult between black slave and white
lady. But even as she reacts aloud with the proper indignation—
‘‘Rosa? . . . To me? To my face?’’ (AA, 111)—Rosa actually sees
past this oVense. It is no excuse that Clytie had called her Rosa
as a child, just as she had called Judith and Henry by their Wrst
names and still does. In fact it is because Clytie recognizes her as
a force to be contended with, a person to be opposed, that Rosa
realizes that ‘‘she did me more grace and respect than anyone
else I knew,’’ since ‘‘from the instant I had entered that door, to
her of all who knew me I was no child.’’ While acting out the
appropriate racist response, Rosa experiences a kind of recog-
nition shockingly new to her, someone whom ‘‘everyone else’’
still sees, at nineteen, ‘‘as a child.’’ Then, in the second stage of
the traumatic encounter, Clytie puts out her hand to stop Rosa,
who is ‘‘stop[ped] dead’’ by ‘‘that black arresting and untimorous

hand on my white woman’s Xesh’’ (AA, 111) Again, Rosa
responds aloud according to code: ‘‘Take your hand oV me,
nigger!’’ But silently she registers a connection with Clytie and
ends up silently calling Clytie ‘‘sister,’’ acknowledging that she
and Clytie are ‘‘twinsistered to the fell darkness which had
produced her’’ (AA, 112). When Judith calls Clytie oV, the
moment closes and Rosa returns to her unrecognized status as
child; Judith won’t even let her into the room where Bon’s body
lies. But the scene reveals the deep human need for connection
that drives the demand for recognition itself.
In Absalom, Absalom!, recognition is restricted (or legitimized)
by class, race, and gender, generating a cultural system that
denies the physical connections on which any human commu-
nity depends. Sutpen’s design reiWes that system, and its colos-
sal failure exposes the fault lines in the social structure it tries to
replicate. But the need for connection that Sutpen’s design
ignores is abundantly addressed in the novel’s narrative form,
where an ongoing conversation serves not only to connect the
people talking, but to connect them with people long dead. In
this respect, Judith’s gesture in passing on Bon’s letter to Mrs.
Compson is at least as signiWcant as its contents: ‘‘you are born
at the same time with a lot of other people, . . . all trying to make
a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own
pattern into the rug.’’ Finally, you die, and someone puts up a
tombstone with ‘‘scratches on it,’’ and so ‘‘it doesn’t matter’’
after all. But then, she says, ‘‘maybe if you could go to someone,
the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap
of paper—something, anything, . . . it would be something just
because it would have happened, be remembered even if only
from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another’’

(AA, 100–101). Judith responds, we could put it, to impo-
tence—the failure to make an impression which led her father
to conceive his design, as well as to bring home two blocks of
marble to mark his and his wife’s grave—with the simple physi-
cal act of passing something on to someone. Judith’s contrast
with her father is further emphasized by the fact that the letter
itself embodies the same principle as the act of passing it on;
it is a message passed on from ‘‘one mind to another’’ and
in particular, passed from brother to sister, reconnecting the
blood relation Sutpen had denied, many years after he himself
had failed to pass on a message. Bon’s letter, as well as Judith’s
act, manifest physically the principle of connection at work in all
the novel’s conversations. All the speaking and hearing, domi-
nated though it may be by a single narrative voice, represents an
ongoing social act of the imagination. Although it cannot found
a dynasty, it can create a community of sorts.
Faulkner published two more novels after Absalom, Absalom!

that were to join it as among his Wnest: The Hamlet (1940) and
Go Down, Moses (1942). Both of these novels were written in
roughly the same fashion as was The Unvanquished, by revising
and stitching together short stories, most of which Faulkner had
already composed. Because it is thematically tied so closely to
Absalom, Absalom!, I want to address Go Down Moses Wrst. The
Hamlet would become the Wrst, and indisputably the best, of the
Snopes Trilogy, to be completed in the 1950s with The Town
and The Mansion. Since ‘‘Snopes,’’ as Faulkner sometimes
called the trilogy itself, stems from works written as early as the
1920s and represents a fundamentally distinct, and comic,
thread in Faulkner’s career, I shall return to it in the next chapter.

Here, before turning to Go Down, Moses, it seems appropriate to
note that Faulkner’s imagination was by no means limited to
Yoknapatawpha. Like his long sentences, the ‘‘little postage
stamp of native soil’’ that Faulkner invented is often taken
to deWne the ‘‘Faulknerian’’ for us. But Faulkner wrote short
sentences too, perhaps most memorably ‘‘My mother is a Wsh.’’
And he wrote stories and novels, not to mention screenplays,
that were not set in Yoknapatawpha. Two of these, Pylon
(1935) and The Wild Palms (1939), whose working title, If
I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem, has been restored by its editor Noel
Polk, were written during the years between Absalom, Absalom!
and both The Hamlet and Go Down Moses, and have sometimes
been underestimated at least in part because they don’t Wt into
the Yoknapatawpha scheme of things. Yet both are important
novels whose brilliance would show up more clearly were they
not chronologically Xanked by the clear genius of the three
major novels written during the same period.
Pylon is the less ambitious of the two, written at forced draft
in the last two months of 1934 when Faulkner was stumped as
to how to proceed with Absalom, Absalom!, which he had begun
in February. Based on his recent experience with the barn-
storming Xiers he had met when taking Xying lessons (at last),
Pylon focuses on a strangely composed family—Roger Shumann
and his wife Laverne, Jiggs the mechanic, a parachute jumper
named Holmes who travels and performs with them, and
Laverne’s son Jack, whose father may be Shumann or may be
Holmes. ‘‘Who’s your old man today, kid?’’ Jiggs asks Jack
repeatedly, knowing the question will immediately provoke
the boy’s Wghting stance.6 The issue of fatherhood, in short,
never entirely disappears from Faulkner’s mind, here underscoring

the absence of a traditional father Wgure. Set in ‘‘New Valois,’’ a
not even disguised version of New Orleans, the novel portrays
the lives of modern nomads, adventurers who have chosen to
Xy, both literally and Wguratively, rather than to settle anywhere.
Unbound to any conventional homes or commitments, they
travel the countryside competing in airplane shows and putting
on demonstrations. Virtually an antithesis to the well known
‘‘Faulknerian’’ scene of gothic sins and visceral horrors, Pylon
takes on the urban and the modern, portraying it as both soulless
and frantically heroic. The barnstormers’ world is opened to
view through the eyes of the nameless ‘‘Reporter,’’ who wants to
write them up for the newspaper and becomes enthralled both
by Laverne and by the world she and her men inhabit, if that
term can be used. As if charged by the Mardi Gras setting, the
prose style assumes a manic, sometimes outlandish, aspect:
‘‘Overhead, beyond the palmtufts, the overcast sky reXected
that interdict and lightglared canyon now adrift with serpentine
and confetti, through which the Xoats, bearing grimacing and
antic mimes dwarfed chalkwhite and forlorn and contemplated
by static curbmass of amazed confettifaces, passed as though
through steady rain’’ (P, 53). Ernest Hemingway, although
stylistically Faulkner’s opposite, apparently liked the novel, but
he did not represent the majority view of the critics.
More successful, both critically and commercially was The
Wild Palms, which appeared in the same month, January 1939,
that Faulkner’s picture graced the cover of Time magazine.
Maurice Coindreau had begun translating Faulkner’s Wction
into French, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters had
invited Faulkner to become a member. Critics responded more
favorably to ‘‘Old Man,’’ the half of the novel that dealt with a

convict caught up in the great Xood of 1927, than to the other
half entitled ‘‘The Wild Palms,’’ which dealt with a love aVair
between a young medical student and a married woman with
two children. Most were puzzled at the question of how to
relate the one to the other. The question has never been fully
answered. What we do know is that Faulkner wrote them as
they were Wnally published, moving from one story to the other.
The convict’s story, later anthologized on its own, provides a
powerful account of a Xood and what it feels like to Wnd oneself
in the middle of one. The constitutive irony of the story is that
the convict, who ends up having to save a pregnant woman,
bring her child into the world, and support her by killing
alligators for a while, is ready and eager to return to the entirely
masculine safety of the prison, once he is ‘‘rescued.’’ The story
of Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne directly coun-
terpoints that of the ‘‘tall convict’’ by tracing an intense sexual
intimacy from its beginning through the death of Charlotte,
thanks to a botched abortion performed, unwillingly, by
Harry. Like the convict, Harry is in prison at the story’s end,
but unlike the convict, whose Wnal line is ‘‘Women. Shit,’’
Harry rejects suicide in order to keep alive his memory of
Charlotte: ‘‘Between grief and nothing, I’ll take grief,’’ he says.7
The Wild Palms sold better than any previous novel of
Faulkner’s, including Sanctuary, more than a thousand copies a
week by March. The critics remained puzzled, but recognized the
power of his writing even if they couldn’t fathom the point of its
complexity. The Time article both acknowledged and forwarded
a reputation that was by now too noteworthy to ignore. The Wild
Palms was Faulkner’s eleventh novel, and in both Europe and
South America, he was being read in translation by sophisticated

and attentive critics and writers. Meanwhile, in Oxford he had
acquired thirty-Wve acres of land adjacent to Rowan Oak. Using
the proceeds from the sale of the screen rights to The Unvan-
quished, he had also bought what he named ‘‘GreenWeld Farm’’
outside town and set his brother up as its manager. Although
Johncy wanted to raise cattle, as their father would certainly have
advised, Faulkner insisted that they raise mules—his favorite
animal. He had suVered deep pain over the recent loss of Meta
Carpenter to another man, pain to which ‘‘The Wild Palms’’ story
was in many ways a response. (Meta would come back into his life
from time to time, but their aVair was over.) Despite this anguish,
he was in a sense at the peak of his powers. He immediately began
putting together and revising the stories that he would later
compose into the novel The Hamlet, upon whose publication he
would immediately begin weaving together Go Down, Moses in the
same fashion. But in both cases, he was working against a strong
headwind that would hit him squarely by July 1942, when he
returned to Hollywood on a seven-year contract with Warner
Brothers. For most of the 1940s, Faulkner would struggle against
the demands of Hollywood in order to maintain his devotion to
meeting the demands of his own imagination.
Go Down, Moses in some ways seems to follow quite logically

the strategies of Absalom,Absalom! In both novels, the reader is
called on to make vital connections in order to Wnd the sense of
the narrative. One could even argue that there is a kind of
surrogate reader in each novel. Ike McCaslin is a reader in
part four of ‘‘The Bear,’’ poring over ledgers to Wnd the truth,
much as Quentin is represented as sitting at a table with ‘‘his
hands lying on either side of the open textbook on which the

letter rested’’ (AA, 176). Or perhaps Shreve is the more apt
surrogate for the reader, as he brings to the conversation an
outsider’s questions and scrutiny. But no sooner do we see
these possible analogies than they reveal themselves as limited.
If the basic vehicle of narration in Absalom, Absalom! is conver-
sation, in Go Down, Moses the story unfolds across several
registers, from the incantatory voice that describes and reiterates
Ike’s initiation into the ‘‘big woods,’’ to the third-person
narrator who aligns our perspective with that of Lucas in
‘‘The Fire and the Hearth,’’ or with Gavin Stevens’s in ‘‘Go
Down, Moses.’’ There are indeed conversations here, but they
do not link to each other in the fashion of Absalom, Absalom! Ike
and his cousin Cass talk back and forth but their speech enacts a
developing discord rather than ‘‘the happy marriage of speaking
and hearing’’ momentarily celebrated by Quentin and Shreve in
Chapter 8 (AA, 253). If Charles Bon’s letter embodies what he
calls an ‘‘apt commentary on the times and augur of the future,’’
composed as it is of the French watermarked stationery of the
Old South and the stove polish of the New North, the ledger Ike
scrutinizes reaches well beyond such whimsical and ironic
prophecy (AA, 102). The ledger is a ‘‘chronicle which was a
whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded
was the entire South,’’ tracing as it does the path of ‘‘cotton—the
two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-
strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land
their sweat fell on’’ (GDM, 281). What in Absalom, Absalom!
was the ‘‘meager and fragile thread’’ of language here becomes
the ‘‘cable-strong’’ thread of cotton production—the ‘‘slow
trickle of molasses and meal and meat’’ outward from the
commissary which returns ‘‘each fall as cotton’’ (GDM, 281).

Struggling to encompass not just the history, but the prehistory
of slavery, Go Down, Moses is a more ambitious and more
troubled work than Absalom, Absalom!
Consider the diVerence between Thomas Sutpen and
Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. To Rosa, Quentin, and
Mr. Compson at least, Thomas Sutpen seems an anomaly.
That is, his behavior is peculiar, not to the South, like its
‘‘peculiar institution,’’ but peculiar precisely because it does
not conform to the image they share of the patriarchal southern
planter. What makes Sutpen not just peculiar but unintelligi-
ble, in General Compson’s view, is his refusal to ‘‘do the
customary’’ by Wnding a suitable husband for the wife he has
rejected, thereby providing a name for the son he has dis-
owned (AA, 214). By contrast, in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner
begins with an all-too-typical southern planter, L.Q.C. McCa-
slin. This white, male patriarch fully embodies the Southern
Planter, at least a Mississippi version of him. Born in Carolina
before the American revolution, McCaslin arrives in the back-
country of Mississippi two generations earlier than Sutpen,
with an abundance of slaves and the title to a large plantation
he has bought from the Natives. Like Sutpen, he goes to New
Orleans—perpetual source of exotic mulatto women, appar-
ently—but not to investigate a black son’s identity. Rather, he
goes there to purchase a woman, Eunice, whom he clearly
already knows. When she bears his child, Lucius provides
Eunice with a husband, Thucydus, so as to cover his misce-
genous activities in the conventional way. It is only when he
sleeps with his own daughter that Lucius McCaslin seems to
have seen himself as perhaps violating some code or other.
Accordingly, he leaves $1,000.00 in his will to Tomasina’s

child, Tomy’s Turl, a sum that Buck and Buddy triple in their
allotment to Tomy’s Turl’s three living children. So both
incest and miscegenation—the twin horrors that Henry Sutpen
struggles for four years to ward oV—have not only actually
occurred, but the facts are known to Lucius’s sons, Buck and
Buddy, who both feel the need to compensate somehow for
their father’s sins. In this novel, it is not a set of facts unveiled
but still warded oV, but the unremitting guilt to which such
facts lead that Ike confronts when he reads and Wnally deci-
phers the ledgers. The fact of miscegenation is apparently
disputed by no one, least of all L.Q.C. McCaslin. The fact of
incest is inferred from Eunice’s suicide, which Buck and
Buddy may dispute, but which more than conWrms their
suspicion that their father impregnated his own daughter,
their half-sister. As for Ike, the only dispute he has is with
his cousin Cass, who must be told about Ike’s chosen method
for atoning for the McCaslin family’s treatment of its black
members. Consequently, Go Down, Moses is driven less by
suspense than by the need to confront and atone for the sins of
the past, sins that are still being committed in the present.
Go Down, Moses (1942) is made up of seven short stories,
some revised from earlier versions, which join each other in
pursuit of a solution to the impasse created by slavery, both its
history and its heritage. Scene and vehicle of both is the genealo-
gy of a family surnamed McCaslin, in which there are three sets of
descendants. The Wrst of these is the white patriarchal line
that begins with Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (1772–
1837) whose son Theophilus, known as Uncle Buck, marries
Sophonsiba Beauchamp; from this union one son is born, Isaac
McCaslin (b. 1867), who marks the end of this line of descent, as

he has no children. The second line, descending by the ‘‘distaV ’’
or female side of the family stems from the patriarch McCaslin’s
daughter who marries one Isaac Edmonds. From this line des-
cends Carothers McCaslin Edmonds (b. 1850), called Cass, who
has a son named Zack Edmonds (b. 1873), who in turn has a
son named Roth Edmunds (b. 1898). The third line descends
from the patriarch, but through unions with slave women. Old
Carothers sleeps with a slave named Eunice, bringing forth a
daughter, Tomasina. Then he sleeps with that daughter
Tomasina, to bring forth a boy named Terrel, called ‘‘Tomey’s
Turl.’’ The slave line of descent bears eventually the name
Beauchamp because Terrel marries Tennie Beauchamp, as a
result of the events recorded in the opening story, ‘‘Was.’’ Among
Terrel and Tennie’s many children is Lucas Beachamp (b. 1874),
who marries Molly Worsham, and the story of this old couple
dominates ‘‘The Fire and the Hearth.’’
So there are three branches to this family, but only two that
have a potential genealogical future: the white Edmonds, de-
scended from the female side of McCaslin, and the black
Beauchamps, descended from the male side of McCaslin, (but
notably bearing the name of the mother, Tennie Beauchamp).
Ike McCaslin repudiates his inheritance, leaving it to his
Edmonds cousins, and adopts an alternative paternity by bond-
ing with Sam Fathers and dedicating himself to the masculine
world of the hunt and the wilderness. Sam himself has a
mixed heritage, as is indicated by his full name, Sam Had-
Two-Fathers. Sam’s biological father was an Indian chief,
Ikkemotubbe, but his mother was a black slave. He has two
fathers because Ikkemotubbe sold him and his parents to
L.G.C. McCaslin. Like Ike, Sam has no children, Wnding in

the woods and the rituals of the hunt a stronger source for
identity and value than any available in the town or on a farm.
It is useful to lay out these family lines because the novel itself
exhibits no visible sense of responsibility for tracing them. On
the contrary, it seems dedicated to mixing them up. Consider
the opening sentence of ‘‘Was.’’
Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike’, past seventy and nearer eighty than
he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half
a county and father to no one
this was not something participated in or even seen by himself,
but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s
father’s sister and so descended by the distaV, yet notwithstand-
ing the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which
some had thought then and some still thought should have been
Isaac’s, since his was the name in which the title to the land had
Wrst been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the
descendants of his father’s slaves still bore in the land. But Isaac
was not one of these (GDM, 3)
Although broken into paragraphs, the sentence itself persists

without punctuation until the following page and the close of
this, section one of the story:
Not something he had participated in or even remembered except

from the hearing, the listening, come to him through and from his
cousin McCaslin born in 1850 and sixteen years his senior and
hence, his own father being near seventy when Isaac, an only
child, was born, rather his brother than his cousin and rather his
father than either, out of the old time, the old days. (GDM, 4)
As in Absalom, Absalom! an enormous amount of information is

stuVed into these opening pages of the novel, including the key

fact that Ike has repudiated his birthright. We are also reminded of
the Doane’s Mill Xashback in Light in August, for here again a
large number of years are summarized in a brief, but powerful
swipe of the brush, in this case ranging back before Ike’s birth and
the seventy or more years of his lifetime. But this opening brings
with it an almost perverse countercurrent; ostensibly providing us
with an expository account of Ike McCaslin and his family rela-
tions, in fact the passage deliberately scrambles those relations into
an indecipherable array. By the time we reach the Wnal lines, we
have been led through a maze of genealogical terms. Although
‘‘father to no one,’’ Ike does, of necessity, have a father, but he is
referred to here only in passing when McCaslin Edmonds is
characterized as ‘‘grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister.’’ The thrust
of the passage is to substitute uncles for fathers. Just as Ike has
become ‘‘Uncle Ike,’’ his biological father is called Uncle Buck, a
man who, as we will soon learn, is arduous in his eVorts to remain
single and not become a father. It is as if Ike’s displacement from
fatherhood to unclehood opens a maelstrom of almost inscrutable
relations that we can’t yet map. Having repressed the father, the
passage goes in search of a surrogate father and Wnds one in Cass,
who is, technically speaking, Ike’s second cousin. What makes the
passage so gnarled, then, is the rhetorical energy with which it
displaces and tries to deny fatherhood. Ike comes to us as
‘‘uncle to half a county and father to no one,’’ and thus is situated
from the outset in resistance to the genealogy by which he is
surrounded and will never actually escape. Meanwhile, the usual
genealogical track from father to son has been diverted, leaving
both positions empty.
The story to follow takes place before Ike’s birth, and
in a sense, explains it, since his parents, Buck McCaslin and

Sophonsiba Beauchamp are almost brought together by the
events of the story. (An earlier version of this story was called
‘‘Almost,’’ underscoring the narrow escape Buck makes here,
and only temporarily, from Sophonsiba’s hunt for a husband.)
But more important, the story provides a keynote to the novel’s
primary concern with race. Indeed, it is hard to resist the
suspicion that every time Cass says ‘‘It was a good race,’’
there is a pun intended (GDM, 5). The comic scene of the
dogs chasing the fox through the house is repeated at the story’s
end, underscoring the story’s basic plot device—people hunting
people as if they were animals. Most obviously, Uncle Buck
must hunt down Tomey’s Turl, apparently a semi-annual ritual
initiated by Tomey’s Turl whenever he can get away to see his
loved one, Tennie, over at the Beauchamp place. But engaging
in this race for his slave puts Uncle Buck in ‘‘bear country,’’ as
Hubert Beachamp phrases it (GDM, 21). His sister, Sophonsiba,
wants to marry Uncle Buck, and so is on the hunt as well.
When he stumbles into her bed, he is trapped, at least until
Uncle Buddy comes and frees him in a card game. The various
comic ironies of the story are focalized by Tomey’s Turl’s being
all too present, and yet brilliantly elusive. He succeeds admira-
bly in winning the day, taking Tennie home with him, thanks to
being the dealer in the poker game on which his fate as well as
Uncle Buck’s depends. Playing a classic trickster, Tomy’s Turl
exploits the internecine plots and counterplots of the whites to
achieve his own romantic goal, introducing us to the black
family whose past and future are to become the major focal
points of the novel’s plot.
The story aligns the hunt theme with the issues raised by race
and slavery. Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy, in an apparent eVort

to disavow their father’s role as slave owner, have moved the
slaves out of the cabins and into the big house, while Buck and
Buddy live in a small cabin they have built nearby. Every night
Buck and Buddy send the slaves into the big house and lock
the front door, leaving the back door open for them to roam the
county, until, as we learn later in ‘‘The Bear,’’ ‘‘there was in the
land a sort of folk-tale: of the countryside all night long full of
skulking McCaslin slaves dodging the moonlit roads and the
Patrol-riders to visit other plantations’’ (GDM, 251). No doubt
this nightly dispersal of McCaslin slaves had something to do
with Tennie Beauchamp’s falling in love with Tomy’s Turl in
the Wrst place, but it also underscores the ritualistic nature of the
games played by blacks and whites both, as part of the mutual
performance of the races before as well as after emancipation.
When Tomy’s Turl begins running away from the McCaslin
plantation, he initiates his own form of ritual, one that exploits
the white men’s addiction to the hunt, and Wnally succeeds in
forcing the McCaslin brothers to ‘‘buy’’ Tennie, thanks to the
poker game that Tomy’s Turl manipulates in ‘‘Was,’’ set in
1859. In each of the stories devoted to the black family, a ritual
is disrupted or reconWgured, but ‘‘Was’’ is the only one in
which a black man Wnally succeeds. In ‘‘Pantaloon in Black’’
and ‘‘Go Down, Moses,’’ the black man dies. Here, although he
succeeds in his quest, the black Tomy’s Turl is nonetheless cast
in the role of an animal to be hunted down, even though he is
Buck and Buddy’s half-brother. Although they are essentially
comic Wgures (their real names are Theophilus and Amodeus),
their story introduces us to the fundamental guilt that comes
with being a McCaslin and a slave owner, the guilt from which
Ike will try desperately to free himself.

Ike’s own story is not taken up again until the fourth chapter
of the novel, ‘‘The Old People.’’ It is the story, again, of a boy
becoming a man, but one that moves in the opposite direction
from that of Thomas Sutpen. Born into a patriarchal dynasty,
Ike repudiates it in the name of the hunter’s life. (Imagine an
only son of the Planter who turns the young Thomas Sutpen
away deciding to go up to Appalachia and learn how to be a
mountain man.) In ‘‘The Old People,’’ ‘‘The Bear,’’ and ‘‘Delta
Autumn,’’ Ike’s story unfolds in repercussive versions, but
basically moves from his initiation into the wilderness through
his repudiation of his birthright to the chilling exposure of his
Wnal inability to shed his racist beliefs. Confronted with the
fact that Roth Edmonds has conceived a child by one of the
descendants of McCaslin slaves, Ike calls her a ‘‘nigger’’(GDM,
344). When asked what he thought of Ike in later years,
Faulkner replied, ‘‘Well, I think a man ought to do more than
just repudiate’’ (University, 189). The heart of Ike’s story, as of
the novel, is ‘‘The Bear,’’ to which we will turn shortly. But
Wrst, we need to bring into focus the opposing Wgure of Lucas
Beauchamp.
Juxtaposed against Ike’s story is that of the blacks, chieXy
Lucas and Molly Beauchamp. ‘‘The Fire and the Hearth’’ tells
us not only the story of Lucas but also of the Edmonds, the
‘‘distaV ’’ side of the McCaslin family that has inherited the land
Ike repudiated. Lucas has changed his name from that of his
forebear, Lucius Quentus Carothers McCaslin, shortening
Lucius to Lucas; like Faulkner he derives his central sense of
identity and power from his paternal ancestor. If Ike has learned
to be a man through the blood rituals of the hunt, Lucas has
become a man due to the blood ties he maintains with the man

who was, at once, though unbeknownst to him, his grandfather
and his great-grandfather, as if a special concentration of pater-
nal blood had been vouchsafed him. He proves his manhood by
challenging Zack Edmonds to a potentially lethal Wght after
Molly has spent six months in Zack’s house taking care of his
motherless child. As a ‘‘man-made’’ McCaslin, Lucas confronts
Zack across the very bed he suspects him of using with Molly
and shoots the pistol. Because it misWres, no one is hurt, but
Lucas has prevailed (GDM, 52). ‘‘So I reckon I aint got old
Carothers’ blood for nothing, after all,’’ Lucas thinks. In the eyes
of Roth Edmonds, Lucas becomes a transcendental Wgure of
fatherhood: ‘‘He’s more like old Carothers than all the rest of us
put together, including old Carothers’’ (GDM, 114). In the eyes
of his wife Molly, however, Lucas at the age of sixty-seven risks
not only becoming a fool but also losing his soul. When he sets
out to Wnd the buried confederate gold that all southern children
were taught to believe lay hidden somewhere, he risks every-
thing in a willful quest for wealth, even though he already has
more money than he will ever have time to spend. What saves
him from his own folly is his wife Molly’s threat to divorce him
unless he turns over the divining machine he uses to search for
the gold.
In direct contrast to Ike, who tries to free himself of the guilt
attached to his patrimony by repudiating it, Lucas invokes that
very patrimony as grounds for the superiority he both feels and
enacts in his social dealings with the ‘‘distaV ’’ Edmonds line.
He never addresses Zack Edmonds as Mister, and when it
comes to Zack’s son, he ‘‘did not even bother to remember
not to call him mister,’’ but ‘‘called him Mr. Edmonds and
Mister Carothers or Carothers or Roth or son or spoke to him

in a group of younger negroes, lumping them all together as
‘you boys’ (GDM, 113). Lucas unfailingly asserts his authority
as a man and father, and Faulkner goes to considerable rhetor-
ical expense in according him mystical status as such; as Roth
sees Lucas, ‘‘He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all
the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers
and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, faceless, even
nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and
complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all
blood black white yellow or red, including his own (GDM,
114–115). Displacing fatherhood from the white to the black
family, Faulkner apotheosizes the patriarchal ideal, using the
discourse of blood itself here to reconstitute the father in terms
that aim both to eliminate the need for women (’’who fathered
himself, intact and complete’’) and to exorcise racial diVerence
altogether. The fantasy at work: maleness trumps race. In real life,
however, Molly can trump Lucas. When Roth tries to persuade
Lucas to give up on the gold, Lucas stands his ground. But when
Molly refuses to withdraw her demand for a divorce, Lucas Wnally
submits, and the court scene in which he appears to stop the
divorce makes us keenly aware of the racist contempt of the white
men who dominate his world, no matter how proud he may be.
It is also worth noting that Lucas has already been outwitted
by his daughter Nat, who has basically extorted a wedding and a
house from her father. As Tomey’s Turl tells young Cass in
‘‘Was,’’ ‘‘anytime you wants to git something done, from hoeing
out a crop to getting married, just get the women folks to
working at it. Then all you needs to do is set down and wait.
You member that’’ (GDM, 13). As in ‘‘Was,’’ there is a comic
side to ‘‘The Fire and the Hearth.’’ Lucas is as canny as his

daughter at certain things, managing, for example, to rent the
machine to the man selling it, and to resuscitate his moon-
shining business beneath the noses of the sheriV and Edmonds
both. And of course the story as a whole celebrates the essential
values signaled by its title, the values of home as opposed to
wealth. But lest the potential sentimentality of this theme linger,
Faulkner immediately hurls ‘‘Pantaloon in Black’’ at us.
‘‘Pantaloon in Black’’ is often identiWed as a story that doesn’t
quite Wt into the scheme of the novel. Rider, the central charac-
ter, is neither a McCaslin nor a Beauchamp, and his story seems
discrete. However, Rider and his wife Mannie follow the exam-
ple of Lucas and Molly, building ‘‘a Wre on the hearth on their
wedding night,’’ and Mannie’s death opens an abyss of grief in
Rider that enables us to recognize the force of the kind of love
that makes Lucas bound to Molly in the end (GDM, 134). Read
as a counterpoint and sequel to ‘‘The Fire and the Hearth,’’
‘‘Pantaloon in Black’’ reiterates the theme of love in the stark
mode of grief. In so doing, further, it provides the novel’s most
direct and powerful response to the question of love that Ike will
pose in section four of ‘‘The Bear’’ when he Wnds that the
patriarch, L.Q.C. McCaslin, having slept with his own black
daughter, leaves a thousand-dollar legacy to her son, Tomey’s
Turl: ‘‘So I reckon that was cheaper than saying My son to a
nigger. . . . Even if My Son wasn’t but just two words. But there
must have been love (GDM, 258). Like Quentin and Shreve as
they become Henry and Bon, Ike is driven to Wnd love some-
where in the history he reads oV the plantation ledgers, but he
can only Wnd grief, and when he Wnds it, he cannot really
imagine it. Envisioning Eunice’s suicide, ‘‘on that Christmas
day six months before her daughter’s and her lover’s . . . child

was born,’’ Ike imagines her as ‘‘solitary, inXexible, grieXess,
ceremonial, in formal and succinct repudiation of grief and
despair who had already had to repudiate belief and hope’’
(GDM, 259). ‘‘Pantaloon in Black’’ imagines that grief, and
thus both locates and authenticates the love that it presupposes.
Understood in these terms, the story works as a startlingly
brilliant prism, reXecting what is at stake not only in Ike’s failed
quest, but in Faulkner’s as well, for Go Down Moses itself exacts
a quest to overcome racism that is doomed from the start. If we
take some time to understand this story, then, it will help us to
see the starkly tragic racial impasse at the novel’s heart.
‘‘Pantaloon’’ refers to a stock Wgure in the Commedia
dell’Arte tradition, typically a pretentious buVoon who is always
being duped. ‘‘Pantaloon in Black’’ recasts this Wgure in the
context of the American blackface minstrel tradition, but with a
deeply ironic twist. In minstrel and vaudeville tradition the
pantaloon Wgure becomes the stereotypical ‘‘KingWsh,’’ of
Amos and Andy, an older black man whose self-importance is
always undermined, making him the butt of the joke and simul-
taneously reaYrming the racist view that he is a fool. The
deputy who tells his wife the story of Rider’s capture and
lynching in part two of the story shares this view, describing
Rider’s behavior as beastlike, so wild and inexplicable is it. But
the deputy himself is reduced to a kind of vaudeville character in
the process; certainly he is an object of ridicule in his wife’s
eyes. ‘‘Now you take this one today,’’ he begins, but she cuts
him oV with the quick stage joke, ‘‘I wish you would’’
(GDM, 150). He perseveres, however, because he’s got a tale to
tell, a tall tale. It’s about a man whose behavior is so outrageous
that it can’t be explained save by an appeal to the most fundamental

racist stereotype, that of a beast, one amongst a ‘‘herd of wild
buValoes’’ (GDM, 150). The deputy is not interested in the
story of the lynching itself; that is literally a foregone conclusion,
since the omniscient narrator has reported it in the opening
sentence of part two. He is interested in Rider’s astonishing
behavior, and he makes a good story out of it, no matter how
dismissive his wife may be. In order to assess that story, howev-
er, we must situate it in relation to the quite diVerent story told
in part one.
Pitted against the deputy’s story is the narrator’s. In a sense,
Faulkner is telling a tall tale as well, but one rooted in black folk
legend rather than the minstrel tradition. At ‘‘over six feet’’ and
‘‘better than 200 pounds,’’ Rider is a reincarnation of the
legendary ex-slave John Henry, the ‘‘steel-driving man’’ who
proved himself stronger than a steam drill but died as a result of
the battle. Rider’s Wnal performance at the lumber mill consists
in single-handedly lifting a huge log oV the truck bed and
heaving it ‘‘spinning, crashing and thundering down the in-
cline’’ (GDM, 142). But if Rider has the lineaments of a legend-
ary hero, he is nevertheless intensely human. This is after all no
tall tale. Not even Henry James could have put us so intimately
inside the consciousness of a character. From start to Wnish of
part one, the world comes to us exclusively through Rider’s
experience of it as the scene of unbearable loss.
When he walks home after his wife’s funeral, we are wrapped
inside of him as he steps into the lane:
It was empty at this hour of Sunday evening . . . the pale,

powder-light, powder-dry dust of August from which the long
week’s marks of hoof and wheel had been blotted by the strolling

and unhurried Sunday shoes, with somewhere beneath them,
vanished but not gone, Wxed and held in the annealing dust,
the narrow splay-toed prints of his wife’s bare feet where on
Saturday afternoons she would walk to the commissary to buy
their next week’s supplies while he took his bath; himself, his
own prints, setting the period now as he strode on, moving
almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body
breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the
objects—post and tree and Weld and house and hill—her eyes had
lost. (GDM, 133; emphasis added)
This remarkable passage, I hope, may serve to illustrate how

Faulkner creates and sustains an intimacy between the reader
and Rider which compels us to imagine that we are sharing, as
Faulkner so often liked to put it, the very air that he breathes.
Though here the primary medium is dust. The Wrst sentence,
even when abbreviated, as here, seems long, but it is actually a
miracle of economy once we appreciate the distance it covers.
Focusing on the dust-laden street, Faulkner peels back its
layered surfaces. Beneath the shoeprints of the Sunday shoes lie
the hoof and wheel tracks of the wagons and horses, and
beneath these lie the ‘‘vanished but not gone’’ prints of Mannie’s
‘‘splay-toed’’ feet, left as she walked over this road to the
commissary every Saturday. By means of a series of subordinate
clauses marked by ‘‘which, ‘‘with,’’ where,’’ and ‘‘while,’’ the
sentence takes us back into the time when Mannie was alive, not
just a yesterday, but a habitual time punctuated by Saturday
afternoons. The serial metaphor of prints, from wheel marks to
shoes to bare feet, works to bring into palpable form the
presence of what is palpably missing. For Rider, Mannie’s
bare feet have left marks that can’t be seen, but nevertheless

are ‘‘Wxed and held in the annealing dust.’’ A memory of six
months of Saturday afternoons is conjured up out of the dust.
Then, in the second sentence, we return to the present, by
reference to Rider’s own prints, the metaphor turned now to
become a marker of pace and speed, as the sentence uses
gerunds to mark his steady movement, ‘‘setting the period,’’
‘‘moving,’’ ‘‘breasting the air.’’ Finally Mannie is conjured up
again, Wrst through the image of the ‘‘air her body had vacated,’’
and then through the objects she can no longer see. The entire
description is focused by Mannie’s absence, and yet makes her
almost as alive for us as she once was for Rider.8
In every moment of the story as told by the omniscient
narrator of part one, Rider’s experience of grief is represented
with the same sustained intensity of focus we see at work in this
passage. A sense of doom has settled over the story well before
Rider arrives at the dice game announcing ‘‘Ah’m snakebit and
bound to die’’ (GDM, 147). Although we may be surprised that
he has a razor, we are not surprised at what he does with it,
given what we have witnessed him experience over the previous
day and a half. Nor, I would argue, do we judge him for killing
Birdsong, the white night-watchman with the crooked dice. It is
not only a question of justice, but also of fate.
Given part one, then, the deputy’s opening claim that
‘‘niggers’’ lack ‘‘the normal human feelings and sentiments of
human beings,’’ is particularly stupid (GDM, 150). It is also
jarring. The shift from tragedy to farce is too extreme. In telling
his story about Rider, the deputy does bring into view the whole
social structure of lynching, enabling us to focus our outrage at
his blindness on the white culture that demands and supports it.
But there remains an asymmetry between the story of grief

and the story of racist violence and stupidity. The one leaves us
with an unassailable knowledge of Rider’s humanity, the other
with the display of an ironclad social faith in his bestiality.
For example, when Rider ‘‘grabs holt of that steel-barred door
and rips it out of the wall, bricks, hinges, and all,’’ bedlam
ensues. We know why Rider cannot bear to be locked up; his
breathing and need for air are a leitmotif of part one. But here,
he is seen by the deputy as an animal bayed. As Rider hurls
members of the chain gang across the room, ‘‘every now and
then a nigger would come Xying out and go sailing through the
air across the room, spraddled out like a Xying squirrel and with
his eyes sticking out like car headlights’’ (GDM, 154). We are
reminded of the description in ‘‘Was’’ of the fox tearing around
the house, as well as of Boon, sitting beneath a tree shooting
at the squirrels, both scenes of wild animals entrapped and
driven mad.
I am not suggesting that the two parts of the story don’t Wt
together; it is after all Rider’s story from start to Wnish, and his
behavior remains consistent throughout. I am saying rather that
in this case, Faulkner gives us all the knowledge required to
understand the tragedy of Rider’s life, and then juxtaposes that
against all the knowledge required to see that he will never be
recognized as human by the white men around him. And I am
suggesting, further, that the novel as a whole is invested
in almost a life-against-death struggle to overcome the contra-
diction posed by these two kinds of knowledge. At heart, what
is needed, as so often in Faulkner’s work, is recognition. Recall
the young Sutpen at the planter’s door, or the serial ordeal of
Joe Christmas, or the plight of Lucas Beauchamp in the white
man’s courtroom: each is denied his claim to matter as a human

being. When as a young husband Lucas challenges Zack
Edmonds, he thinks ‘‘How to God . . . can a black man ask a
white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even
if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he
wont?’’(GDM, 58). What Lucas fully understands is that despite
the careful terms on which he is working out his status in
relation to the white man’s world, he will never be recognized
for the man he knows himself to be.
The same quest is at work in the story of Ike McCaslin. Ike
sets out to emulate Christ in somehow redeeming the world. By
bringing the dynasty to a close, repudiating his heritage, Ike—
named after Abraham’s son Isaac, to whom God promised His
covenant—undertakes to initiate, even if only as a symbol, a new
world in which race will no longer divide man from man. But
Ike fails, his moral relapse marked by a failure of recognition of
another as human. As the woman of ‘‘Delta Autumn’’ whom he
calls ‘‘nigger’’ says, ‘‘Old man, have you lived so long and
forgotten so much that you don’t remember anything you ever
knew or felt or even heard about love?’’ (346).
While he pursues the stories of Ike and Lucas in a quest
(which sometimes becomes hysterical, as in some parts of
Chapter 4 of ‘‘The Bear’’) to overcome the irresolvable conXicts
their stories pose, Faulkner broadens the canvas from culture to
nature, from history to myth, as if searching for a ground
for resolution untainted, so to speak, by the sins of man. It is
the novel’s constitutive irony that he Wnds that ground in the
wilderness, where live not metaphorical beasts but real ones.
The only story written fresh for this novel, ‘‘The Bear,’’ forces
the racial impasse that the novel is always confronting back to a
place and time before the fall, and therefore the scene of a

possible new beginning. Although it turns out to tell the story of
an ending instead, ‘‘The Bear’’ is a masterpiece.
There are two ways to approach ‘‘The Bear.’’ The Wrst is
to read sections one, two, three, and Wve as a potentially
free-standing novella, focused on a young boy’s growth into
manhood as a hunter, and the memory of the ‘‘big woods’’ as
they once were before man destroyed them. The second way to
read the story is straight through, including section four, in
which case it is linked directly to Ike’s repudiation of his
heritage and is central to the novel as a whole. Section four,
the longest section in ‘‘The Bear,’’ brings Ike directly into
argument with his cousin Cass, and into contact with his grand-
father’s history of incest and miscegenation. He has, in eVect,
two conversations—one with Cass and one with the commissary
ledgers in which the McCaslin history resides. At twenty-one,
he argues that Sam Fathers has set him ‘‘free’’ so that he may
step out of the family genealogy into an alternative one, one in
which Sam has replaced Cass as his surrogate father. Readers
have always been split in their responses to this section of
the story, some Wnding it the most profound and critical part
of the novel, others seeing it as strained and overwritten. In my
view, its being strained does not preclude its being profound.
Its rhetorical intensity only underscores how much is at stake
for Faulkner in his eVort to Wnd a way beyond the racial
impasse: how to recognize the blood ties between races with
allegedly disparate ‘‘blood.’’
The hunt for ‘‘Old Ben’’ derives in part from southwestern
legends and tall tales of great hunters like Davy Crockett and the
protagonist of Thomas Bang Thorpe’s story, ‘‘The Big Bear of
Arkansas,’’ one Jim Doggett. Published in 1854, Thorpe’s story

is already lamenting the loss of the wilderness to the encroach-
ments of civilization, so when Faulkner takes up this theme in
‘‘The Bear,’’ he is in a sense renewing the recital, in its south-
western humor version, of America’s oldest story—the loss of
innocence. Beyond these sources and resources, there looms, of
course Melville’s Moby-Dick. Against such a backdrop, what is
marked about Faulkner’s approach to the hunt story is that the
bear himself, and not the hunter, is the story’s protagonist and
hero. Its major characters are described in the opening para-
graph: ‘‘There was a man and a dog too this time. Two beasts,
counting old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon
Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran
in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it
and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless
and incorruptible’’ (GDM, 183). The ‘‘two men’’ then are both
of mixed blood; Sam is a mixture of native American, black,
and white blood, and Boon is ‘‘white,’’ but also part Chicasaw
(on his mother’s side). Lion is a mongrel, but like Sam and Old
Ben, he is nevertheless ‘‘taintless and incorruptible.’’ Faulkner
introduces the discourse of blood in order to eliminate and
transcend it. The tale is ‘‘of the men, not white nor black nor
red but men, hunters’’ (184). As with Lucas Beauchamp, whom
he had tried to apotheosize into a domain beyond racial
division, Faulkner here invokes the primitive blood rituals of
the hunt as dictating ‘‘ancient and immitigable rules’’ that
enforce a moral economy of masculine virtue operating beyond
and beneath those of either town or country, city or plantation
(GDM, 184). In this domain, it is the bear who has a name,
while men remain ‘‘myriad and nameless even to one another’’
(GDM, 185). Maleness, once more, trumps race, and also

gender. The storytelling of the hunters takes place around a Wre,
but it needs no hearth. What matters is that ‘‘there was always a
bottle present,’’ and ‘‘only hunters,’’ ‘‘not women, not boys and
children’’ drank the ‘‘brown liquor’’ in it (GDM, 184).
Ike is initiated into this sacred realm of the hunt in a series of
moments, each with its own resonant power. The hunt for Old
Ben becomes itself legendary, as men from far and near gather
each year to witness the annual attempt to beat him. But almost
from the outset, there is a dread built into the story. We know
that they will ultimately kill the bear, but we also know that once
they do, the hunt is over, the wilderness is doomed; the poten-
tialities of the rite of passage story are already embedded in a
nostalgic regret. The story of Ike’s apprenticeship to the ‘‘big
woods’’ is irresistible, but part of what makes it so is that we
know that it is doomed. That is, our identiWcation with Ike’s
phantasmagorical journey to the heart of the mythic past, his
ability to hail, as Sam does, the deer as ‘‘grandfather,’’ is enabled
by the realization already established before ‘‘The Bear’’ begins,
that the pure and untainted hunt has long since been displaced
and usurped by the impure and tainted hunt depicted in ‘‘Was.’’
When in section Wve of ‘‘The Bear,’’ Ike hails, not the Bear, but
the snake as ‘‘Grandfather,’’ the fall into a world of sin from
which he has been Xeeing, is all too clear (GDM, 314).
How, then, do we understand the relationship between the
three hunting stories at the center of Go Down, Moses, which
focus on Ike, and the three stories surrounding them, which
center on the Beauchamps and other black members of the
community, all of them introduced by ‘‘Was,’’ a story that aligns
itself with both Ike and Tomy’s Turl’s son, Lucas Beauchamp?
One way of responding to this question is to focus on section

four of ‘‘The Bear’’ as the axis of the novel, the moment when
the crossing of blood lines is acknowledged as Ike reads
the family history as recorded in the plantation ledger. This
moment leads to Ike’s decisive renunciation, and his ensuing
quest to atone for his family’s crimes against the black race.
It also validates for him his earlier choice of Sam Fathers as a
surrogate father with more weight than Cass. His argument with
Cass in this chapter, then, dramatizes his renunciation of one
surrogate father for another, his alignment with Sam’s heritage
as hunter over and against his patrimony as the sole white male
heir to the McCaslin property.
Ike is in eVect trying to substitute one genealogy for another,
to install himself in a line that leads through Sam Fathers to
some autochthonous and purely male mythical source of power
that resides in the relationship to nature made possible by the
hunt. But Sam’s line is by no means pure, much less purely
masculine. There is Ikkemotubbe, Sam’s biological father, and
there is the black slave to whom Ikkemotubbe assigns the role of
father and husband before selling the couple along with
their son Sam to L.Q.C. McCaslin. In thus substituting a
black father for himself, Ikkemotubbe performs the same fateful
act that L.Q.C. McCaslin will perform when he provides Eunice
with a black slave husband after impregnating her with Toma-
sina. Sam is a model for Ike in the sense that he embodies all
three ‘‘blood’’ lines—white, black, and Native American—but
has transcended and eVaced the black/white distinction in his
lifelong devotion to the wilderness as site of the hunt, thereby
aligning himself Wrst and last with the pure paternal Indian
chief. But even Sam is ‘‘betrayed,’’ in what is perhaps the
most tortured passage in the novel, ‘‘not . . . by the black blood

and not willfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all
the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves
but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it’’ (GDM,
162). Sam may have ‘‘had two fathers,’’ an inversion of Lucas
who has two fathers in one, but Sam cannot become a father
without passing on the ‘‘blood’’ of his black mother. Thus he is
‘‘himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquish-
ment and the mausoleum of his defeat’’ (GDM, 162). Sam’s life
enacts a ritual embrace of the wilderness, and his death signals
the disappearance of that wilderness, already announced in the
Wnal killing of the Bear. In trying to follow Sam’s example, then,
Ike only ends up revealing its limits as a strategy for facing the
future. Ike sets out to emulate Sam’s model with a devotion not
unlike that with which Thomas Sutpen sets out to emulate the
Planter in Absalom, Absalom! But here that devotion demands
that he not only step out of, rather than replicate, the genealogy
dictated by the white patriarchy, but also become an uncle and
widower, rather than a father. In other words, Ike excludes
himself not only from ownership of the land but from the
responsibilities entailed by family membership. Although he
succeeds in never becoming a father, he fails at escaping the
sins of his fathers, as his moral collapse in ‘‘Delta Autumn’’
brutally reveals.
What other genealogies, then, arise as alternatives to the
white patriarchal one that Ike tries so ardently and Wnally fails
to disavow? There are two other lines, as we’ve seen. One is
the ‘‘distaV ’’ line descended from Ike’s aunt, in a family named
Edmonds, and Wnally represented by Roth Edmonds. The other
is the Beauchamp line, descended from L.Q.C. McCaslin, but
signiWcantly enough, lacking the McCaslin name. Although

Lucas Beachamp has struggled with great energy to make good
on his McCaslin father’s paternal force, it is his wife, Molly, not
Lucas, who prevails. And it is the black female genealogy,
Wnally, that prevails in the novel as a whole. This genealogy
stretches back to Eunice, who commits suicide when she rea-
lizes that her daughter Tomasina has become pregnant by
L.Q.C. McCaslin, Tomasina’s own father. Tomasina
herself dies in childbirth, leaving a son, to be called ‘‘Tomy’s
Turl’’—a name that suggests the matrilineal line has overtaken
the patrilineal. Further, when Tomy’s Turl marries Tennie
Beauchamp, it is his wife’s name that the children take, that is,
Beauchamp, not McCaslin. Although a Worsham, Molly Beau-
champ carries forward the force of the same matrilineal geneal-
ogy, commanding the participation as well as the money of the
white community to bury her grandson in Go Down, Moses.
Most signiWcant here is the unnamed woman in ‘‘Delta
Autumn,’’ whose son by Roth Edmonds rejoins the ‘‘distaV ’’
with the Beauchamp line. The woman’s namelessness, as well as
that of her child, underscores the erasure of any paternal name.
A descendant of the Beauchamps whose child once again
crosses racial lines, the woman rejects Ike’s racist response
with a devastating indictment of his moral blindness. Time
and again, from Eunice’s tragic suicide to Molly’s obstinate
faith that the earth should not be violated for gold, to Nat’s
clever manipulations of her father, to the Delta Autumn
woman’s courage, it is the black female line that traces the line
of fortitude. But the racial impasse itself remains in place.
Faulkner dedicated the novel to Caroline Barr, the black
woman who had raised him and his brothers. Both the novel
and the dedication pay tribute to the enduring strength of black

women, but neither can overcome the hard fact of racism that
the novel tries so desperately to dissolve. Lucas Beauchamp’s
aspirations remain not only unfulWlled, but impossible, and
Ike’s guilt remains not only unatoned but compounded. Faul-
kner would try again to address the issue of race, both in
Intruder in the Dust and in public statements during the civil
rights movement, but he would never again portray the racial
dilemma with the force and complexity he brought to bear in Go
Down, Moses.

Four
Snopes and Beyond:

The Hamlet
The Comic Gambit
After completing The Wild Palms but before beginning

Go Down, Moses, Faulkner returned to material he had been
developing from the outset of his career as a novelist—the tales
of Snopeses. Headed by Flem, a sinister and sociopathic entre-
preneur who rises from dirt farmer to bank president in the
course of the three novels devoted to the family, the Snopeses
are more a tribe than a family. They spread their proliWc
oVspring across the county steadily as Flem brings in one cousin
and then another to work at the enterprises he just as steadily
takes over, from the store, the schoolhouse, and the blacksmith
shop in Frenchman’s Bend to the restaurant and Wnally the bank
in JeVerson. Faulkner had been telling Snopes stories for many
years, beginning apparently with Phil Stone, but continuing
whenever and wherever the spirit moved him. In New York
and elsewhere, Faulkner enjoyed spinning yarns about the
163
Snopeses, and he did so with such eVectiveness that some of his
listeners, unaware of the tall tale traditions of the old Southwest,
believed the Snopeses were real people. The earliest instance
we know of in which Faulkner wrote about the Snopeses is
represented by the unWnished twenty-four-page manuscript
‘‘Father Abraham,’’ composed sometime in 1926 or 1927, and
published Wnally in 1983, thanks to the editorial work of James
B. Meriwether.1 ‘‘Father Abraham’’ introduces Flem at the peak
of his success in JeVerson, but then quickly moves back to tell of
one of his most famous adventures, the auctioning oV to his
neighbors of a band of wild horses from Texas. The story was
later published as ‘‘Spotted Horses’’ (1931) and then still later
incorporated into The Hamlet (1940). In the course of the
1930s, Faulkner tried Wtfully to begin a novel he called
‘‘The Peasants,’’ and published four additional Snopes stories:
‘‘Centaur in Brass’’ (1932), ‘‘Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard’’
(1932), ‘‘Mule in the Yard’’ (1935), and ‘‘Fool about a Horse’’
(1936). The Snopes clan was, in other words, much on his
mind. It was also fully incorporated into his vision of Yoknapa-
tawpha county even before he wrote The Hamlet. As James
G. Watson has pointed out, the map Faulkner drew for the
1936 volume, Absalom, Absalom! includes ‘‘Varner’s store,
where Flem Snopes got his start’’ as well as other details
indicating that Faulkner was well in charge of a story he had
not yet developed into a novel.2
In retrospect, it is not surprising that it took Faulkner years to
arrive at a point where he felt he could deal with the Snopes
material. It was, for one thing, enormous in scope and potential,
addressing the social and economic history of Yoknapatawpha
from the 1880s through the 1950s in the end. It was also for him
164 SNOPES AND BEYOND

a contemporary history, getting under way during the 1890s, the
decade in which he was born. When he returned to the Snopeses
in the 1950s to write The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959),
he would bring the story up to the present time. Snopes, as the
trilogy brought out after his death would be called, constituted
a kind of ongoing chronicle of his place and time, and thus
addressed events and observations always still to come. Most
important, I think, the stories centered on the Snopeses trace
a line of narrative that is fundamentally distinct from those
pursued in Faulkner’s earlier family-centered novels. With
the Snopeses, he was following the rise, not the decline, of a
family, and his vantage point was distinctly comic rather than
tragic. Like his protagonist, V. K. RatliV, Faulkner had been en-
gaged in what he called Snopes watching all his life, and he had
an overabundance of material. But only after the achievements
of the 1930s did he feel suYciently in control of his medium
to do justice to his observations. The Hamlet looks back on many
of the tragic conXicts of the novels from The Sound and the Fury
through Absalom, Absalom! but with a keenly sardonic eye for the
funny, the grotesque, and even the human. It is as if this deep
vein of humor had been running under the surface all the while
but was only now available for mining. The Hamlet is among
Faulkner’s Wnest novels, a point that sometimes gets lost when
it is addressed as one of the three novels making up the Snopes
trilogy. The other two novels, written over Wfteen years later,
cannot compare with their predecessor, written at the peak of
Faulkner’s powers as a writer.
Critics in recent years have disputed whether Faulkner’s later
work represents as serious a decline as has been commonly
thought.3 I am in sympathy with this view, but only up to a
THE HAMLET 165

certain point. My own reading of the later novels, beginning
with Intruder in the Dust (1948), leads me to see them as by
and large less impressive than those published between 1929
and 1942. I would argue that although he kept working at
formal innovation, Faulkner did not again achieve the kind of
sustained brilliance represented by the works of his major
phase. Indeed, I think he himself was continually disappointed
by his work in his later years. Among the most moving state-
ments of this disappointment is Faulkner’s remark to a visitor
who found him in his study one day in May of 1950: ‘‘You
know,’’ Faulkner said, ‘‘there were a lot of days when I sat and
looked out this window and knew I was workin’. Now I sit and
look out this window and know I ain’t workin’’’ (Blotner, 518).
Yet Faulkner never stopped writing, and in every novel he
produced until the end of his life, one can Wnd long and
recurrent stretches of brilliant prose. (I am reminded of a
comment that the cultural critic Greil Marcus once made in
conversation about the later RCA recordings of Elvis Presley,
noting that even on the least distinguished album, there was
always at least one cut that showed Elvis’s enormous talent
coming through once more. I realize the comparison seems
strangely incommensurate, but take heart from the fact that
Elvis Presley was, like Faulkner, from Mississippi.) The novels
do not always hang together structurally, and they can become
rhetorically repetitive, but even in the most ambitious, and thus
the most disappointing of them, A Fable (1954), one can start
reading at random anywhere in the book and Wnd a rhythm and
resonance to admire and enjoy. Writing A Fable absorbed much
of Faulkner’s working energies during these years, which is one
reason why it took him so long to get back to Wnishing Snopes.

A Fable is a broad allegorical reworking of Christ’s passion as
replayed in the World War I story of the unknown soldier.
A wonder of abstraction, apparently the novel proved at least as
diYcult to write as it later proved to read; Faulkner spent over
ten years on it. Keeping track of this elaborate story was so
diYcult that he made a kind of story board on his study wall,
with the days of the week as headings. (The story goes that he
had to reconstruct this chart when his wife inadvertently had it
painted over one day.) Although A Fable has its defenders, it has
never attracted either the readership or the critical acclaim of his
earlier Wction. As David Minter has shown, Faulkner was in part
moved to write this long-winded allegory by his deep concern
over World War II, which he saw coming, tried to Wght in, and
followed closely, as his stepson and his nephew were on the
battlefront. The war seems to have disinterred his oldest, and
youngest, fears and anxieties, generating a remarkable, and in
some ways heroic, eVort to write the ultimate paciWst novel. The
explosion of the atom bomb, which he focused intensively on in
his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, only furthered and deepened
Faulkner’s sense of despair at what human beings could, had,
and might, do to each other. In that speech, he urged mankind
to aspire to victory over his own basest instincts. As always
bedfuddling his critics, Faulkner seemed to speak out as a
humanist while writing as a misanthrope.
The Hamlet, however, helps us to appreciate that Faulkner
was capable of both humanist hope and skeptical despair;
the comic mode of the novel enabled him to exercise both
perspectives at once. The result is a kind of tour de force.
Faulkner liked to describe As I Lay Dying as a tour de force, a
term which, for him I think, meant a demonstration of ultimate
THE HAMLET 167

talent with no visible eVort exposed (University, 87). And As
I Lay Dying certainly proved to be one. But The Hamlet is yet
another version of the same triumph, this time perpetrated with
an abandon and gusto not hitherto seen on this scale in any of
his work. With As I Lay Dying, Faulkner in eVect said, ‘‘You
want a perfect modernist novel? Here it is.’’ With The Hamlet,
he said, ‘‘You want an American Balzac? Here I am.’’ ‘‘The
Peasants,’’ Faulkner’s working title for the novel for many years,
came directly from Balzac, as did Faulkner’s inspiration for
turning the excesses of his prose and his imagination to rich
social and comic purpose.
The Hamlet is a far more deliberately composed novel than
Go Down, Moses, driven as the latter is by questions without
answers, dilemmas without resolutions. Although both are
made up of earlier stories, The Hamlet falls into coherent, if
not immediately obvious, shape, whereas Go Down, Moses
records a mounting and irresolvable ethical struggle. In The
Hamlet, the outcome is clear from the beginning. You know
that your side is likely to lose, but in the meantime, you can sit
back and enjoy the game. Despite its many moments of horror
and sadness, the novel is Rabelaisian in both spirit and scope.
The Hamlet unfolds in four ‘‘books,’’ each forming a cohesive
narrative unit of its own. ‘‘Book One: Flem’’ introduces us to
Frenchman’s Bend, ‘‘a section of rich river-bottom country
lying twenty miles southeast of JeVerson’’ named after the
supposedly French plantation owner who built and once lived
in the now rotted house called ‘‘the Old Frenchman place.’’4
Unlike Sutpen, who ‘‘abrupt[s]’’ upon the scene in JeVerson,
Flem Snopes quietly insinuates himself into the region’s central
economic and political organization, at the outset owned and

operated by Will Varner. ‘‘Chief man of the country,’’ Will
Varner is ‘‘a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian,’’ but he is primarily
the owner of every enterprise in the village from the store to the
cotton-gin’’ (H, 6). ‘‘Flem’’ as a book relates the story of how
Flem Snopes gradually and relentlessly works his way into
power as Will Varner’s employee, then partner, predictably
displacing Varner’s son Jody, a process that fascinates the
villagers through whose commentary we follow Flem’s sinister
rise. Central to this storytelling process is V. K. RatliV, a sewing
machine salesman who passes through town periodically, each
time learning more of, but also relaying tales about, the Snop-
eses. It is RatliV who Wlls in the background in Book One by
telling two stories about Flem’s father Ab Snopes, whom RatliV
knew as a boy. The Wrst concerns Ab’s alleged barn burning,
and the second moves further into the past, explaining how Ab
became ‘‘soured’’ in the course of losing a horse trade with the
outlander from Texas, Pat Stamper (H, 31). By the end of Book
One, an entire world is in place, Flem’s upward mobility is in
view, and the ground has been prepared for a potentially
endless outpouring of stories. Although Flem’s rise constitutes
the central action tying this to the next three ‘‘books’’ making up
the novel, the stories themselves range well beyond Flem, in
part because he brings so many other Snopeses to town, but
in part because the world that has been established is so rich
that it can sustain a theoretically endless process of storytelling.
Most of the stories to come concern money or sex or both.
In ‘‘Book Two: Eula,’’ it is sex that predominates, thanks to
the Wgure of Eula, Will Varner’s daughter. ‘‘Not yet thirteen
years old,’’ Eula’s ‘‘entire appearance suggested some symbol-
ogy out of the old Dionysic times—honey in sunlight and
THE HAMLET 169

bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated
vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof ’’ (H, 105).
As such a passage suggests, Eula aVords Faulkner ample oppor-
tunity for rhetorical enthusiasm; he makes of her a kind of
immortal but still Xeshed sex goddess, one whose comic dimen-
sion emerges as a result of the fact that ‘‘she did nothing’’
(H,107). We might describe Eula as a Lena Grove who doesn’t
walk, who indeed lacks any apparent drive, even for sex. She
sits, whether in chairs or in back of her brother Jody on his
horse or on the seat of the family surry, ‘‘emanating that outra-
geous quality of being, existing, actually on the outside of the
garments she wore and not only being unable to help it but not
even caring’’ (H, 113). The more inXated Faulkner’s descrip-
tions, the more plausible they become in light of the hysterical
behavior of the two men obsessed with Eula: her brother, and
the schoolteacher, Labove. Jody, acutely aware of and anxious
over his sister’s erotic irresistibility, insists that she attend
school in the vain hope that education will alter her behavior,
but he must get her there and back every day, since she refuses
to walk. He hates the ride because Eula can’t help ‘‘emanating’’
wherever she is, and he knows always that her enticing thigh
hangs forth as she rides. Labove, a young man with a large
future ahead of him, is waylaid by falling hopelessly in love
with Eula. Although he has worked as a schoolteacher and
played football to earn his tuition through college, he cannot
make himself leave Frenchman’s Bend even when he has his
law degree, so infatuated is he with Eula. He doesn’t want to
marry her; he just wants ‘‘her one time as a man with a gangrened
hand or foot thirsts after the axe-stroke which will leave him
comparatively whole again’’ (H, 131). When he makes his move,

Wnally, she literally knocks him down, an encounter from which
she emerges ‘‘not even disheveled’’ (H, 135). Labove’s ultimate
shame, however, only comes when he discovers that his sexual
advance has not meant enough to her for her to tell her brother
about it. Like Sutpen when he realizes that his father doesn’t care
whether he delivered the message or not, Labove is crushed with
humiliation when he goes to confront Jody and Wnds that he is
unaware of the incident. Labove leaves town instantly and
forever.
When Eula does Wnally lose her virginity, four diVerent
young men leave for Texas. Only one of them is responsible
for her pregnancy, but all want to leave the impression that he
was the one she chose. The situation that is centrally traumatic
in The Sound and the Fury—Caddy Compson’s illicit sex and
pregnancy—is here treated in ribald fashion. Will Varner refuses
to be alarmed at his daughter’s circumstances. She is, after all,
his sixteenth child, and furthermore, he is not surprised. ‘‘What
did you expect—that she would spend the rest of her life
just running water through it?’’ (H, 160). He promptly and
eYciently provides her with Flem Snopes as a husband, a
bargain from which Flem emerges not only with a wife but
with ownership of the Old Frenchman’s Place as well. Thus
by the end of Book Two, Flem has displaced Jody not only in
business but in the family as well. Son-in-law to Will Varner, he
takes Eula oV to Texas so she can discreetly have the child
which is not his. But he will return.
‘‘Book Three: The Long Summer’’ weaves together stories of
sex and money, both now displaced into new venues where
violence erupts. The mentally disabled Ike H-Mope Snopes
falls in love with a cow. It may or not be the cow that the
THE HAMLET 171

widower, Jack Houston, has been feeding for the last year. This
cow belongs, at least in theory, to Mink Snopes, he of the single
eyebrow, who has let his yearling wander across the borders of
his tenant farm to eat in Houston’s pasture. When Mink tries to
reclaim his cow, Houston refuses. Mink takes Houston to court,
legally assisted by his proverb-quoting schoolteacher cousin
I. O. Snopes; Mink loses, and is instructed that he must pay
Houston three dollars pasturage before reclaiming his property.
Mink instead kills Houston. Meanwhile, Ike Snopes has had a
long and delicious lyric interlude with his love object, the cow.
After he discovers that Lump Snopes is running a voyeur
exhibition of Ike having sex with the cow, RatliV puts a stop
to the show, calling on WhitWeld, the minister we know from
As I Lay Dying, to advise a solution to bestiality. The cow is
slaughtered, the meat fed to Ike in the belief that it will cure him
of his bestial tendencies. Eck Snopes, the blacksmith, provides
Ike with a toy cow to compensate. The end of Book Three Wnds
Mink waiting in jail, hoping his cousin Flem will return from
Texas and manipulate his liberation from a murder sentence.
We know better.
A summary such as this one can only serve to set in relief the
preposterously fertile imagination unleashed in this novel, and
yet, even more preposterously, kept always under control. If we
think back to Faulkner’s Wrst Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the
Dust, the marked mastery displayed by contrast in The Hamlet
is clear. As Ben Wasson complained, Flags in the Dust was at
least ‘‘about six novels’’ and thus deWed his editorial eVort to
refocus it as a single text (Blotner, 223). The Hamlet orches-
trates a host of stories and characters into a thematically
integrated suite. In part, what enables Faulkner to accomplish

such formal coherence is the narrative spine provided by the
rise of Flem Snopes, but what enables the novel’s inventive
scope is the genre of the tall tale. Each story outstrips the last in
its stylistic as well as its thematic daring, in accord with the basic
drive of the tall tale—to spin the story out as far as it will go and
thereby to win the kind of competition in which Faulkner had
indulged with Sherwood Anderson years earlier. Thus, for
example, one might think the portrayal of Eula sets the limit
for lush romantic prose, but then one comes to Ike’s beloved
cow, ‘‘the Xowing immemorial female’’ whose movement Ike
experiences as ‘‘the slow planting and the plopping suck of each
deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist
loud with its hymeneal choristers’’ (H, 183). Or again, one
might think that the story about Ab Snopes’s valiant but
doomed horse-trading adventure deWnes an extreme; after all
Ab ends up, after several swaps in each of which he loses
ground, with a milk-separator but no cow to provide the milk.
But the next time a Texas horse trader appears, the tale gets
even taller. In the ‘‘Spotted Horses’’ episode in ‘‘Book Four:
The Peasants,’’ virtually the entire male population of French-
man’s Bend gives into the irresistible appeal of buying horses so
wild they cannot be caught. The novel propels itself forward, in
other words, not only by tracking Flem, but more importantly
by indulging ever more aggressively in what Mark Twain liked
to call telling ‘‘stretchers.’’ Indeed, Flem’s mysterious doings
fuel the tale-telling process. To keep up with Flem Snopes, in
other words, one must stretch the imagination to hitherto
unexpected heights.
It is thus appropriate that RatliV, the storyteller par excellence,
pits himself in a competition with Flem Snopes, a man who
THE HAMLET 173

rarely speaks but whose acts have increasingly serious conse-
quences. Flem’s conversational style is marked by brief, cryptic
statements punctuated by choicely focused spits. He chews
tobacco constantly but says almost nothing. As one of the
townspeople puts it, ‘‘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’’ (H, 309). RatliV, by
contrast, Wnds it diYcult to stop talking, especially at those
moments when he has just learned about the latest Snopes
activity. But like Addie Bundren, RatliV knows how words go
straight up in the air while doing goes terribly along the earth.
He tries to take action, Wrst attempting to beat Flem in a
complicated trade involving goats, then, more eVectively,
stopping the display of Ike’s sexual performances with his
cow. But in the end, of course, Flem gets the better of him.
Among the Wnest stories in the novel is the spotted horses
story that begins ‘‘Book Four: The Peasants.’’ Although the
story marks the return of Flem from Texas, he vanishes from
sight almost as soon as he appears, playing his usual role as a
behind-the-scenes manipulator whose business no one knows.
In this instance, Flem has arrived with a herd of wild horses to
auction oV, but it is not Flem, but Buck Hipps, a Texas horse
trader, who does the auctioning. Flem thereby maintains his
distance and can later disclaim any ownership of the horses,
although it is clear from the outset that he will proWt from the
sale. The story, whose Wrst telling goes back as we have seen to
the start of Faulkner’s career as a novelist, provides a kind of
capstone and summary version of the tall tales preceding it in
The Hamlet. It both tops them and stretches itself out to the
maximum degree of nerve and time, revisiting and incorporating

many of the novel’s themes. More concerned with money than
with sex, the spotted horses story nevertheless encapsulates
both the resistance and the capitulation of women in the culture
of Frenchman’s Bend. More fundamentally, it illustrates the
logical conclusion to which the novel’s economic story leads:
desire can be stimulated for commodities in virtually exact
proportion to their uselessness, indeed even to their danger.
The men who are sucked into buying these wild horses
(one of which we have already seen in action as Jewel’s horse
in As I Lay Dying), are poor. Most of them are tenant farmers
working Will Varner’s, or increasingly, Flem Snopes’s land. But
among them is Eck Snopes, Flem’s cousin and now the local
blacksmith, adumbrating the locally outrageous fact that Flem is
willing to betray his own blood in the pursuit of money. In part
the story’s remarkable power comes from the sense of sheer
inevitability that it instills early and often; these men are
doomed. But it is the wives who pay, and whose children’s
interests and livelihood are put at risk and lost in the men’s
rabid bargaining. Flem’s rapaciousness is nowhere else in the
novel so vividly represented as here, where he is largely absent
from the scene. Even his accomplice, the Texan Buck Hipps,
proves unable to live up to Flem’s standards of greed and
inhumanity. But what makes the story live is not its moral; it
is those horses.
Introduced as ‘‘a considerable string of obviously alive
objects which in the levelling sun resembled vari-sized and
-colored tatters torn at random from large bill boards—circus
posters, say—attached to the rear of the wagon and inherent
with its own separate and collective motion, like the tail of a
kite,’’ the herd of horses becomes, at least for a while, the central
THE HAMLET 175

player in the story (H, 299). Bound together by barbed-wire,
they Wrst move as one: ‘‘calico-coated, small-bodied, with
delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes
rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy motionless and
alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves’’
(H, 300). Once detached from each other, the horses race
back and forth within the fenced lot like the wild animals they
indeed are, while Buck moves among them at great risk to life
and limb, demonstrating that one might possibly survive own-
ing one of them, but notably failing to demonstrate that one
might actually catch one of them.
Ugly and misshapen (one of their heads resembles an ‘‘iron-
ing board’’), the horses embody the wild and untethered mas-
culine power the poor farmers lack and seek (H, 302). The
deadly but uncertain threat they pose to family is repeatedly
enacted as Eck’s son stands in their way, and yet miraculously
survives each time. The graver dimension of this threat is
realized in Henry Armstid’s insistence on spending the Wve
dollars his wife has saved on one of the horses. Mrs. Armstid
has carefully stored up nickels and dimes, hoping to buy her
children shoes for the winter. She has earned this money
weaving saleable items, after dark, using thread given her by
women in the town. Mrs. Armstid’s frantic eVort to recoup the
Wve dollars her husband has so willfully spent catalyzes the
entire novel’s attention to the condition of poverty in which
most of Frenchman Bend’s citizens live.
The focus in The Hamlet on shoes, or rather their lack, as a
signiWer of class is remarkable, recalling the young Thomas
Sutpen’s fascination with the fact that the planter has shoes he
doesn’t even bother to wear. Labove, for example, comes to

Will Varner’s attention as a possible schoolteacher largely
because of the gym shoes Varner notices Labove’s family wear-
ing. Labove, trying to calculate the cash value of a football
victory, decides that each victory adds up to one pair of shoes
and therefore steals the pre-ordered football shoes from the
football team’s lockers and sends them, pair by pair each time
his team wins, home to his family. Flem Snopes is characterized,
among other regular features of his attire, by his soft-spoken
tennis shoes. Hoake McCarron, the privileged class despoiler of
Eula’s virginity, wears ‘‘the Wrst riding boots’’ anyone in French-
man’s Bend has ever seen (H, 151).
Set over and against the poor farmers is the exploitative
economic development that Will Varner no less than Flem
Snopes represents. The most fundamental class lines drawn in
this novel are between Varner and Snopes, on the one hand,
and the dirt farmers and common folk on the other. For many
years, Faulkner was misunderstood as pitting the old Aristocrat-
ic South against the rednecks, but The Hamlet demonstrates
clearly that his understanding of history was far more sophisti-
cated than this view recognized.
For one thing, at the novel’s outset Will Varner is already
exercising the same credit mechanisms that Flem Snopes
will perfect. Representing the generation that resumed planter
control of the South after Reconstruction, Varner is well
regarded as among the so-called Redeemers of the South. The
only time Will Varner appears to get upset with Flem Snopes is
when Snopes refuses to extend credit to his tenant farmers.
Either Flem has not yet learned the beneWts of the credit system,
at this point, or more likely, he already aspires to compete with
Will Varner as the county’s chief lender. Either way, the system
THE HAMLET 177

is in place when Flem appears to take it over. RatliV can look
back with nostalgia on the apparent innocence of the barter
system that Ab Snopes played a part in twenty years earlier, but
RatliV is involved with, and Wnally outdone by, a system in
which the miraculous Xow of capital has little evident relation-
ship to either labor or productivity. When Mrs. Armstid makes
her plea to recoup her money, she says that she could identify
each and every coin and bill she had saved. No doubt she could.
But she Wnds herself in a world where money has become
wholly abstract. That world may soon be dominated by Snopes,
but Varner has long since helped establish it.
The Wnal story in the novel, wherein RatliV is outwitted by
Snopes, has often caused worry among Faulknerians. How can
RatliV, the canny opponent of Snopes for the entire novel, be so
simpleminded as to be taken in by the oldest scheme on the
books? Flem buries coins on the Old Frenchman’s Place, enticing
RatliV, along with the crazy Henry Armstid and the not so crazy
Bookwright, to buy the property so as to dig up the confederate
gold they believe they have discovered. RatliV’s fall is especially
disturbing, since he has just proved himself apparently immune to
Snopes by seeing through the spotted horses ruse from its
very outset. The story may test our credulity as readers, but
then one has to stop and ask, what story so far has not? And
what else can bring an end to the potentially endless tale-telling?
More seriously, Snopes’s victory over RatliV not only closes out
the competition between them but signals the inevitable rise of the
cash nexus as the central locus of power in the novel’s world.
Indeed, we have not suYciently addressed the distinctively
dark side of this tale. While RatliV rambles on, and we Wnd
ourselves serially amazed at the graphic depiction of both sex

and violence, the tragic dimensions of the story signaled by
Mrs. Armstid’s plight remain to haunt us. Houston’s tale is a
signal instance. Racing in retreat from the ‘‘female principle’’ all
his life, Houston Wnally succumbs to his love for Lucy, only to
lose her as a result of his own stallion’s attack. This is, of course,
yet another tall tale, in the sense that a more aggresively Freud-
ian story is hard to imagine. The ‘‘male principle’’ is enacted
almost cinematically by Houston’s deadly horse, not to mention
his powerful hound. His own murder at the hands of Mink
leaves him not merely dead but a decaying hump of meat, falling
apart even as Mink tries to hide it by stuYng the corpse down
the womb of a rotted tree trunk. Given the Freudian symbolism,
it seems redundant that one of his arms has come oV. Mink’s
own fear and terror achieve a kind of epic grandeur in the face of
Houston’s unwieldy corpse. Such a story reveals what all tall
tales traditionally served both to acknowledge and repress—the
material, physical, and horriWc fact of physical terror, endured
again and again in the face of insuperable doubt and threat. By
stretching the truth, the old tale-tellers of the Southwest bucked
themselves up and fought back their fears. The tall tale enabled
Faulkner to push, and extend, the limits of his imagination, both
in relation to terror and to hope. RatliV may lose, in the end, but
his cause remains articulate. Against the backdrop of Flem’s
ruthlessness, the Snopes family eventually comes into view as
sympathetic. Eck Snopes and his son are already objects of
aVection for the reader of The Hamlet, and by the time of The
Mansion, even Mink the murderer will command our respect
as he returns from prison, to avenge Flem’s denial of him.
It is noteworthy that Faulkner’s full-scale comedy leaves the
issue of race largely behind. Putting distance between himself
THE HAMLET 179

and the central tragic subject of his work, he stabilizes the
storyteller’s role in V. K. RatliV. Years earlier, he had found in
the storyteller a Wgure of freedom from the restrictions of poetic
form, and RatliV aVords him a kind of narrative leisure in which
to play out that freedom. But RatliV ’s downfall at the end
reminds us that even the most intelligent observer and the
most adept tale-teller can be a fool—if not about a horse, then
about buried gold.
The Hamlet is among Faulkner’s greatest literary achieve-
ments, and certainly his comic masterpiece. It is fair to say
that no novel by Faulkner is wholly without moments of
humor, but in The Hamlet he gave himself full comic license
of an order nowhere else to be found in his work. Further, in
returning to his earliest Snopes stories, Faulkner resecured his
command over what he had now come to regard as his ‘‘own
little postage stamp of native soil.’’ The map of Yoknapatawpha
County he drew up for Absalom, Absalom!, ‘‘William Faulkner,
Sole Owner and Proprietor,’’ he republished in a slightly
revised form in The Viking Portable Faulkner, the volume that
was to bring to a close the period of his neglect by both critics
and the public.
The Public Years
What, then, do we make of Faulkner’s life in its Wnal quarter-

century? With the publication of The Portable Faulkner in
1946, his fortunes began to turn. Thanks to a partly serendipi-
tous, partly conspiratorial eVort on the part of critics and
publishers in the late forties, Faulkner was Wnally recognized
for what he was, the United States’ greatest twentieth-century

novelist to date. As if to Wll out the picture he and his new
admirers had jointly constructed of him and his ‘‘postage stamp
of native soil,’’ Faulkner revisited Yoknapatawpha in Intruder
in the Dust (1948) and Requiem For a Nun (1951), and also in
collections of short stories such as Knight’s Gambit (1949),
Collected Stories (1950), and Big Woods (1955). He won the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, and became a public Wgure, a
role not always amenable to his temperament, not to mention
his drinking habits. No longer dismissible as ‘‘Count No
‘Count’’ to his neighbors, he soon drew their disdain on
political grounds.
As the Wfties proceeded, Faulkner became a U.S. State
Department attaché, traveling abroad repeatedly to represent
the virtues of democracy and the American way, meanwhile
courting various ladies on the side. But the Wfties also brought
the civil rights movement, and Faulkner began to speak up. He
made a series of public statements whose ambiguity has long
been recognized. On the one hand, he Wrmly supported African
Americans in their quest for social equality. On the other hand,
out of his fear at what white racists were capable of, he advised
blacks to ‘‘go slow, now.’’ Accordingly, he managed to alienate
both his hometown racists and the liberal establishment along
with the leaders of the civil rights movement by insisting on civil
rights for blacks even after announcing that he would, in the end,
stand with Mississippi against the Union. (He later disavowed
the last claim, made when he was drinking and apparently
‘‘channeling’’ Robert E. Lee.)5 Although Faulkner was passion-
ate about the moral and social imperative of integration, he was
obviously still haunted by the same racial conXicts that had
undermined populism and given rise to the Jim Crow South
THE HAMLET 181

in the early twentieth century. His Wctional treatment of blacks
over the course of his career—and especially its growing sophis-
tication from Dilsey to Lucas and Molly Beauchamp—provides
a more reliable picture of his vexed concern with race and his
deep struggle to come to terms with it than do his public
statements in the Wfties and early sixties.
As in his youth, Faulkner still found respite and relief in
making up stories about himself. He liked to say he was just
a farmer, provoking the famous David Levine caricature of
Faulkner in overalls. Except for his encounters with students
at the University of Virginia, where he was a writer in residence
from 1957 to 1958, Faulkner usually found silence to be his
best recourse in the face of his fame. At Virginia, although he
occasionally got his own books confused, and often ducked
innocent if daring questions from the students by talking on
and on until he got around to a convenient moment for ellipsis,
he nevertheless delivered intriguing and indispensable informa-
tion about his view of his life and art. Faulkner in the University
has thus become one of the richest resources available for
Faulkner’s readers. Faulkner’s fondness for children carried
over into his patience with students, for whom he clearly
had more respect than he did for reporters. Since his one
child, Jill, now lived in Charlottesville with her husband and
sons, Faulkner and his wife Estelle spent much of their time here,
and it was in Charlottesville that he wrote most of his last novel,
The Reivers (1962). Although not in the same class as The
Hamlet, The Reivers reprises Yoknapatawpha and its Snopeses,
drawing in as well many other characters from his earlier Wction.
A delight to read, The Reivers constitutes a nostaligic, comic
coda to the many-volumned Yoknapatawpha saga. In a sense,

The Reivers is Faulkner’s version of ‘‘The Tempest,’’ a romance
that refuses despair even as it reveals the grounds for it.
Faulkner was back in Oxford when he died on July 6, 1962.
Although his death was technically due to a heart attack, his
physical condition had been fragile for several years. In addition
to the damage he had done by years of drinking, Faulkner had
suVered several falls from horses over the years, leaving broken
bones and other only partially healed internal injuries that
caused him chronic pain. (He of course refused to quit riding
horses.) During the Wnal weeks of his life he refused medication
for his pain, resorting to alcohol instead. But he was recovering
from his drinking when he was taken to the hospital because of
his pain. Asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, Faulkner
replied, ‘‘I want to go home.’’
By the time of his ‘‘rescue’’ from oblivion by Malcolm Cowley

and others in 1946, only Sanctuary, of all Faulkner’s novels,
remained in print. However one assesses the reasons for the
dramatic rise in Faulkner’s reputation after 1946, there can be no
doubt about its thoroughgoing success. Irving Howe’s William
Faulkner: A Critical Study appeared in 1952, and by the mid-
sixties, Cleanth Brooks, Olga Vickery, and Michael Millgate
had each produced landmark critical treatments. In 1963, only
a year after his death, William Faulkner: Three Decades of
Criticism appeared, gathering most of the important early essays
on Faulkner in order to meet the increasing demand among
students reading him in both high school and college. Faulkner’s
canonization was secure by this time, but our understanding
of his work had only begun. In the seventies, Faulkner
criticism was immeasurably enriched by several new books.
THE HAMLET 183

Among them, surely the most important was Joseph Blotner’s
monumental William Faulkner: A Biography, published in
1974. Another landmark during this period was John T. Irwin’s
Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative
Reading of Faulkner (1975), a book that opened Faulkner’s
work not only to a psychoanalytic perspective but to other
forms of ‘‘speculative reading,’’ greatly enlarging the critical
vocabulary of Faulkner criticism. Donald Kartiganer’s A Fragile
Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels (1979)
extended the reach of formal analysis that Conrad Aiken, most
notably, had introduced in 1951. David L. Minter’s biography,
William Faulkner: His Life and Work (1980) continues to serve
as the most acute and perceptive study of Faulkner’s relationship
to his work. In the years since, a host of Wrst-rate critics
have extended the range and depth of our understanding of
Faulkner’s work. Among the most important of these are
Andre Bleikastan, Phil Weinstein, John T. Matthews, and Eric
Sundquist, each of whom has provided new and regenerative
grounds for studying Faulkner’s work. In recent years, more
attention has been paid to the deep issues of race in his work
and, as mentioned before, to the ‘‘later’’ Faulkner, especially as
his work relates to class. The impact of Hollywood on Faulkner,
as well as what he learned from working there, has also become a
fresh issue, as has his representation of and relationships with
women, on which Deborah Clarke and Judith Sensibar have been
particularly stimulating. Faulkner scholarship and criticism
continue to Xourish as new readers Wnd new readings in what
seems to any reader, at Wrst blush, to be an inexhaustible text.
If new readers Wnd themselves overwhelmed by Faulkner,
they are in good company. And I don’t necessarily mean that of

critics. Consider Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, or any of the other
southern writers who had to compete with his legacy in their
eVorts to represent the South: they too found themselves Wrst
daunted and then enthralled. Or Richard Baldwin, Ralph Ellison,
and Toni Morrison, each of whom found both inspiration
and challenge in Faulkner’s work. Cormac McCarthy has, most
recently in No Country for Old Men (2005), made of the American
Southwest a social and cultural world of its own, in some ways
more horriWc than Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, but no
less resonant in its Balzacian ambition to map a time and place
whose history resonates well beyond the borders of Texas,
Arizona, and New Mexico. Latin American writers of the
‘‘Boom’’ have made it clear how important to them was Faulkner’s
imaginary county, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose
Nobel Prize speech is a direct response to Faulkner’s. Why does
Faulkner live on so powerfully, both in the works of his literary
heirs and in the lives of readers today? After all, Oprah Winfrey
declared ‘‘A Summer of Faulkner’’ in 2005, putting three of his
most formidable novels on her Book Club list. As one commenta-
tor J. M. Tyree put it, ‘‘This announcement amounted to nothing
less than a sneak attack on the whole idea of beach reading.’’ He
goes on to applaud Oprah’s injection of ‘‘the perpetually relevant
tonic of faith in ordinary people’’ into a cynical Wction market. The
declining sales of Wction today conWrms the self-justifying belief
on the part of publishers that readers don’t want serious Wction.
Mass market publishers thus pander ‘‘to a dumber-than-thou
audience they help perpetuate, while at the same time lording it
over popular culture with snarky reviews.’’6
Tyree is onto something important in yoking together a ‘‘faith
in ordinary people’’ and the capacity of those same people to
THE HAMLET 185

meet the challenge of Faulkner’s Wction. One is reminded of the
longstanding question of how we are to understand, say, Darl’s
and Addie Bundren’s Wercely sophisticated language in As I Lay
Dying, given their humble station in life. By breaking the rules of
verisimilitude, Faulkner is here forcing us to imagine some of the
Bundrens, at least, as people with rich, if forlorn, imaginative
lives. Perhaps one reason Faulkner’s legacy is so profound is that
his radical experiments in language were grounded in the radical
faith that common people are capable of becoming common
readers in Virginia Woolf’s fulsome sense of that term. And
even more radically, perhaps, he believed that those readers
who think of themselves as socially superior by virtue of their
privileged status can be compelled to realize their self-delusion.
Certainly, to read Faulkner with care is to learn how to see
through social pretensions of every kind, particularly those that
oVer refuge from moral and imaginative honesty. Faulkner may
have clung romantically to the ‘‘might have been’’ of his
failed military career, but he also turned it to powerful use in
constructing the searing Wgure of Percy Grimm, a young man
who has never recovered from missing the war and thereby
become a fascist. What Faulkner here demonstrates is also
what his work provokes—a kind of moral intelligence that
works tirelessly to suspect as fraudulent anything that makes
‘‘good believing’’ as it is called in Light in August, but also, and
in the process, celebrates the redeeming uses to which the
imagination can, and perhaps must, be put.

A Final Note to New
Readers: Bibliography
Those just beginning their reading of Faulkner have

much pleasure in sight. Faulkner’s own advice was to begin
with The Unvanquished, a novel made up of short stories
published in the mid-1930s and relatively easy of access.
Which is not to say easy of understanding. Which is, further,
to say that wherever you begin reading Faulkner, you must be
willing to delay certain forms of gratiWcation for a little while. As
I tell my students always, and occasionally have to remind
myself, get used to not knowing exactly what’s going on.
Understanding will come, but the pleasure of confusion comes
Wrst. The language itself should be your Wrst seduction. Try, for
experimental purposes at least, the opening pages of Absalom,
Absalom! Imagine yourself in Quentin’s place, trying to ignore
Miss ColdWeld’s conversation, but falling back inevitably upon
the vision of Sutpen, who ‘‘abrupts . . . upon a scene peaceful
and decorous as a school prize water-color’’ (AA, 4). Try to
187
place yourself in that (always imaginary) situation of childhood,
watching ‘‘Cinderella’’ or ‘‘Peter Pan.’’ Enchanted.
Once seduced, plot your course, but keep it Xexible. Wherever
you have started, start over. Begin with the Collected Stories. Read
around. Don’t be bound by the categories. Then take oV. ‘‘That
Evening Sun,’’ for example, will lead you to The Sound and the
Fury, and vice versa. Whatever you understand of this novel,
leave it on hold. (You are never obliged to Wnish a Faulkner novel;
you can always circle back to it.) Next try As I Lay Dying. The
Bundrens will astound and amaze, not to mention horrify, you.
But you should now stipulate, even if you’re not convinced yet,
that they are in fact human. From here, there are several options
open. Since it is set roughly during the same historical period as
As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet might be a logical next move. Or you
can just proceed chronologically, through Sanctuary, Light in
August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Another choice
is to read at random. For not necessarily Yoknapatawpha stories,
try The Wild Palms, Pylon, Knight’s Gambit—a collection of
stories having to do with detective work. Another is to select
out the hunting stories: Go Down, Moses, or ‘‘The Bear,’’ by itself
(leaving out Section 4 for now), Big Woods. Another is to focus on
short stories alone, beginning with ‘‘A Rose for Emily,’’ ‘‘An
Odor of Verbena,’’ or ‘‘Barn Burning.’’
From time to time, you may wish for some guidance.
Faulkner criticism is, alas, as apparently limitless as Faulkner’s
imagined world. A brief and painfully edited list of some of the
many critical sources that you might Wnd useful is provided
below. If you want to read about any particular story or novel,
or just learn more about Faulkner himself, the best place to start
your search is ‘‘William Faulkner on the Web,’’ where you will
188 A FINAL NOTE TO NEW READERS

Wnd a well organized set of references and explanatory devices,
including a ‘‘hypertext’’ version of The Sound and the Fury.
Should you become an addict, I highly recommend attending
the annual Faulkner Conference at the University of Mississippi,
located in Oxford, Mississippi, itself, normally held the last
week in July every year. Although scholars attend and give
talks, the conference is, true to Faulkner’s vision, a favorite of
his common readers, both native and international.
Critical Bibliography
biography
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House,
1974.
——. Faulkner: A Biography. 1 vol. ed. New York: Random House, 1984.
Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980, 1997.
Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
faulkner writings and documents

Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters. Edited by James B. Meriwether. New
York: Random House, 1966.
‘‘Father Abraham.’’ Edited by James B. Meriwether. New York: Random
House, 1983.
Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia,
1957–58. Edited by Frederick L. Gywnn and Joseph Blotner. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1978.
Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962. Edited
by James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1980.
Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Edited by Joseph Blotner. New York:
Random House, 1977.
Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to his Mother and Father,
1918–1925. Edited by James G. Watson. New York: Norton, 2000.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry. Edited by Carvel Collins. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1962.
William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches. Edited by Carvel Collins. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958.
faulkner’s novels (in order of composition)

Soldier’s Pay, 1926
Mosquitoes, 1927
Flags in the Dust (edited by Douglas Day, New York: Random House, 1973;
originally published in abridged version, Sartoris, 1929.)
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
Sanctuary, 1931
As I Lay Dying, 1930
Light in August, 1932
Pylon, 1935
Absalom, Absalom!, 1936
The Unvanquished, 1938
The Wild Palms (1939; original title restored, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, ed.
Noel Polk, New York: Vintage, 1995)
The Hamlet, 1940
Go Down, Moses, 1942
Intruder in the Dust, 1948
Requiem for a Nun, 1951
A Fable, 1954
The Town, 1957
The Mansion, 1959
The Reivers, 1962
selected criticism
Bleikastan, Andre. The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound
and the Fury to Light in August. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963.
Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. Jackson, University
Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Fowler, Doreen. Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Godden, Richard. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long
Revolution. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
190 A FINAL NOTE TO NEW READERS

Hamblin, Robert W., and Charles A. Peek, eds. A William Faulkner Ency-
clopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.
HoVman, Frederick J., and Olga W. Vickery, eds. William Faulkner: Three
Decades of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963.
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. (1952.) 4th ed. Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 1991.
Kartiganer, Donald M. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in
Faulkner’s Novels. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.
Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative
Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
King, Richard H. A Southern Renaisssance: The Cultural Reawakening of the
American South, 1930–1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Matthews, John T. The Play of Faulkner’s Language. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1982.
Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner, 1966. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Mortimer, Gail L. Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss: A Study in Perception and
Meaning. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
Polk, Noel, ed. New Essays on The Sound and the Fury. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
——. Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Sundquist, Eric. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983.
Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation.
Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.
Volpe, Edmond L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1964.
Warren, Robert Penn, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Faulkner: A
Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Weinstein, Philip. Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Zender, Karl F. The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and
the Modern World. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 191
Abbreviations
AA William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! New York: Ran-

dom House, 1986.
AILD William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. New York: Random
House, 1985.
FCF The Faulkner-Cowley File. Edited by Malcolm Cowley.
New York: Viking, 1966.
GDM William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses. New York: Random
House, 1990.
H William Faulkner, The Hamlet. New York: Random
House, 1991.
LIA William Faulkner, Light in August. New York: Random
House, 1985.
S&F William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. Edited by
David L. Minter. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1994.
Blotner Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner: His Life and Work. 1
vol. ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Blotner, I, II Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vol. ed.
New York: Random House, 1974.
EPP William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry. Edited by
Carvel Collins. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.
University Faulkner in the University. Edited by Frederick Gwynn
and Joseph Blotner. New York: Random House, 1965.
Minter David L. Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
NOS William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches. Edited by Carvel
Collins. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958.
SL The Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Edited by
Joseph Blotner. New York: Random House, 1977.
TOH Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to His
Mother and Father, 1918–1925. Edited by James G.
Watson. New York: Norton, 2000.
192
Notes
chapter one
1. Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York:
Random House, 1977), 47. All future citations are in the text as SL.
2. Minter, David L., William Faulkner: His Life and Work (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 44; all future citations are in the
text.
3. Blotner, Joseph, William Faulkner: A Biography (1-vol. ed.) ( Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 64; all future citations are in the
text.
4. ‘‘Landing in Luck’’ was later published in Carvel Collins, ed., William
Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 42–50.
All future citations are in the text as EPP.
5. Robert Cantwell, ‘‘The Faulkners: Recollections of a Gifted Family,’’ in
Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga Vickery, eds., William Faulkner: Three
Decades of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 51–66.
6. Blotner, Joseph, William Faulkner: A Biography (2-vol. ed.) (New
York: Random House, 1974), 2: 761–762; all future citations are in
the text.
7. I wish to thank Louise Mozingo for pointing out the source of Maud
Faulkner’s wisdom, Margaretta Lovell for many crucial corrections, and
the American Studies Group at Berkeley in general for their invaluable
responses to my work.
8. William Faulkner, Vision in Spring, ed. Judith L. Sensibar (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1984), 25.
9. Quoted in Judith Sensibar, The Origins of Faulkner’s Art (Austin:
10. Cf. ‘‘The Hill’’ in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1962), 90–92.
11. ‘‘William Faulkner: An Interview with Jean Stein,’’ in Three Decades of
Criticism, 68.
193
12. For ‘‘The Liar,’’ see William Faulkner: New Orleans Sketches, ed. Carvel
Collins (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 169–184; all
future citations are in the text as NOS.
13. William Faulkner, Soldier’s Pay (New York: Liveright, 1996), 3.
14. Willliam Faulkner, Mosquitoes (New York: Liveright, 1997), 320.
15. Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to His Mother and Father,
1918–1925, ed. James G. Watson (New York: Norton, 2000), 203. All
future citations are in the text as TOH.
16. Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York:
Random House, 1979), 641.
17. See Estella Schoenberg, Old Tales and Talking ( Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1977).
18. Quoted by John T. Matthews, ‘‘The Discovery of Loss in ‘The Sound and
the Fury,’ ’’ The Sound and the Fury, ed. David L. Minter (New York:
Norton Critical Edition, 1994), 370; all future citations are in the text as S&F.
19. The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
20. See Malcolm Cowley, ed., The Faulkner-Cowley File (New York: Viking
Press, 1966), 36; this is an especially useful collection of letters as
it includes both sides of the correspondence between Faulkner and
Cowley. All future citations are in the text as FCF.
21. Faulkner’s full statement is worth putting on record here. ‘‘Beginning
with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil
was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to
exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have
complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It
opened up a gold mine of other peoples, so I created a cosmos of my
own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in
time too.’’ See ‘‘Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel,’’ in James B.
Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews
with William Faulkner, 1926–1962 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1980), 255.
chapter two
1. Smith, ‘‘Three Southern Novels,’’ in M. Thomas Inge, ed., William
Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 33. Future citations in the text as Inge.
2. William Faulkner, Sanctuary: The Original Text, ed. Noel Polk
(New York: Random House: 1981), 321.
3. William Faulkner, Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage,
1985), 321, 324; all future citations are in the text as Sanctuary.
194 NOTES TO PAGES 26–59

4. See Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York:
Random House, 1965).
5. Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner
(New York: Vintage, 1965), 87; all citations are to this text as University.
6. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage, 1985),43–44; all
citations are to this text, marked AILD.
7. See Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983).
8. Cf. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973).
9. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1985), 8; all
citations are in the text as LIA.
10. Quoted in Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided, 93.
chapter three
1. Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York:
Random House, 1977), 75; future citations in the text as SL.
2. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986), 80.
Future citations are in the text as AA.
3. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York:
Norton, 1975), 5.
4. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 245; all
future citations are in the text as GDM.
5. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner ( Jackson: University of Mis-
sissippi Press, 2006), 124.
6. William Faulkner, Pylon (New York: Vintage, 1987), 20.
7. William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (New York: Vintage,
1995), 287, 273.
8. I am indebted to my student, Mary Knighton, for first calling my
attention to the richness of this passage.
chapter four
1. William Faulkner, Father Abraham, ed. James B. Meriwether (New
York: Random House, 1983).
2. Watson, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance (Austin:
3. On this issue, see especially Noel Polk, Children of the Dark House: Text
and Context in Faulkner ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1996), esp. 242–272.
NOTES TO PAGES 59–164 195

4. William Faulkner, The Hamlet (New York: Vintage, 1991), 3. All future
citations are in the text as H.
5. For an adept account of this episode see J. M. Tyree, ‘‘As I Lay Reading,’’
The Nation (August 1–2, 2005): 36–39.
6. Tyree, 39.
196 NOTES TO PAGES 165–185

Index
Anderson, Sherwood, 2, 4, Faulkner, William, works by:

22–26 Absalom, Absalom!, 25, 36, 51,
107–33, 137–40, 160, 165,
Baird, Helen, 28 187, 188; ‘‘The Bear,’’ 188;
Balzac, Honoré de, 38, 168, 185 ‘‘A Bear Hunt,’’ 107; As I Lay
Bloom, Harold, 86 Dying, 59, 63–86, 102,
167–68, 172, 175, 186, 188;
Canby, Henry Seidel, 61 ‘‘The Big Shot,’’ 36; Big
Carpenter, Meta, 56–57, 137 Woods, 181, 188; ‘‘Centaur in
Clarke, Deborah, 129 Brass,’’ 164; Collected Stories,
Cowley, Malcolm, 51–53, 183 188; Dr. Martino and Other
Stories, 107; ‘‘Elmer,’’ 31–33;
Don Quixote, 86 ‘‘Evangeline,’’ 36; A Fable,
Double Dealer, The, 3, 21, 166–67; ‘‘Father Abraham,’’
23–25, 27 36, 164; ‘‘The Faun,’’ 27;
Flags in the Dust, 33–36, 38,
Falkner, Murry C., and family, 60, 172; ‘‘Fool About a
12–15; 56–57 Horse,’’ 164; Go Down,
Falkner, William Clarke, 11, 13, Moses, 51, 127, 133, 134,
34, 56, 108 137–62, 168, 188; The
Faulkner, Estelle Oldham, 6, 9, Hamlet, 26, 36, 133, 164–80,
15–16, 17–18, 37, 55–57, 182, 188; ‘‘Helen: A
104, 106 Courtship,’’ 28; ‘‘The Hill,’’
Faulkner, Jill, 55–57, 107, 182 21; Intruder in the Dust, 162,
197
Faulkner, William, (Contd.) Puppets in a Fifth Avenue
166, 181; ‘‘A Justice,’’ 37; Window,’’ 20; The
Knight’s Gambit, 188; Unvanquished, 107, 108, 133,
‘‘Landing in Luck,’’ 9–10; 187; ‘‘Verse Old and Nascent:
‘‘L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,’’ A Pilgrimage,’’ 27, 29; Vision
17; ‘‘The Liar,’’ 26; Light in in Spring, 18, 28; ‘‘When
August, 51, 87–103, 106, 108, That Evening Sun Go Down,’’
143, 186, 188; ‘‘Lizards in 37; The Wild Palms, 134–37,
Jamshyd’s Courtyard,’’ 164; 163, 188
The Mansion, 133, 165, 179; Freud, Sigmund, 13–14, 67, 70,
The Marble Faun, 18–19, 22; 179
‘‘Marionnettes,’’ 19;
‘‘Mayday,’’ 28; ‘‘Mistral,’’ 36; Gable, Clark, 105
Mosquitoes, 2, 28–33; ‘‘Mule Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 185
in the Yard,’’ 164; Pylon, Gone with the Wind, 108
107–8, 134–35, 188; The
Reivers, 182–83; Requiem for Hammett, Dashiell, 60
a Nun, 181; ‘‘A Rose for Hawks, Howard, 56, 105–6
Emily,’’ 2, 33; Sanctuary, 2, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 85–86
58–63, 104, 183, 188; Hemingway, Ernest, 8–9, 135
Sartoris, 3, 51, 58, 108; Hollywood, 6, 56, 104–6, 137
‘‘Snow,’’ 36; Soldier’s Pay, 2,
3, 10, 26–27, 30, 33; The Keats, John, 89
Sound and the Fury, 2, 37–54, Kermode, Frank, 49
57, 58, 63, 64, 70, 80–82, 88,
102, 106, 111, 165, 171, 188, Malraux, André, 60
189; ‘‘Spotted Horses,’’ 36, Marcus, Greil, 166
164, 173; ‘‘That Evening McCarthy, Cormac, 185
Sun,’’ 188; These Thirteen, Middlemarch, 69
62; The Town, 133, 165; Moby-Dick, 157
‘‘Twilight,’’ 37; ‘‘Two Morgan, Edmund, 127
198 INDEX
Odyssey, The, 66, 85 Stone, Phil, 7, 16–17, 19–20,
22, 30, 163
Poe, Edgar Allen, 76
Polk, Noel, 59–60, 196 Thorpe, Thomas Bang, 156–57
Tyree, J. M., 185
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 42
Saturday Evening Post, 22, 107, Wasson, Ben, 35, 37–38,
108 39, 172
Shakespeare, William, 27, 50, Winfrey, Oprah, 185
69, 86
Smith, Henry Nash, 58 Young, Stark, 20
INDEX 199

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William Faulkner

Lives and Legacies

A Final Note to New Readers: Bibliography 187

Youth and Apprenticeship:

The Long Beginning

Faulkner’s life was all about stories—making them up,

From the outset, it is clear that Faulkner is making fun of the

2 YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP

THE SOUND AND THE FURY 3

4 YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP

THE SOUND AND THE FURY 5

6 YOUTH AND APPRENTICESHIP

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When Faulkner came home to Oxford decked out in the

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Pierrot, sitting chill on a wall in darkness,

The echo of Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ is

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Faulkner is struggling to articulate his deepest feelings, of

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There is a kind of spider or something. The female is the larger,

Because Fairchild has been identiWed early as capable of wild

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(Everyone else in France spends the evening sitting in cafes

Faulkner continued his now Wxed habit of writing in the

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I was shocked: my Wrst emotion was blind protest, then I

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Although he tried to revise the novel, he found that to cut it up and

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The Sound and the Fury

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Through the fence, between the curling Xower spaces, I could

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We are instantly thrust into a world of sights and sounds and

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