Faulkner's Subliminal World

...The Mansion, I feel that we have little right to quibble over such matters...

...We are made aware, through his characters and his art, of the subterranean, unconditioned sources of our own capacity for love and hate...

...This is the surface, nameable content of The Mansion...

...This study in hate is told largely from the point of view of the omniscient author, with two shorter views described both by V. K. Ratliff, the detached, philosophic character of earlier novels, and then by Mink's distant relation, Montgomery Ward Snopes, a dealer in pornographic pictures...

...But with his new novel...

...This subliminal world is better caught, in isolation, in the long passage on Mink, lying out in the open farm country at night, after he has killed Flem: "It seemed to him he could feel the Mink Snopes that had had to spend so much of his life just having unnecessary bother and trouble, beginning to creep, seep, flow easy as sleeping: he could almost watch it, following all the little grass blades and tiny roots, the little holes the worms made, down and down into the ground already full of the folks that had the trouble but were free now, so that it was just the ground and the dirt that had to bother and worry and anguish with the passions and hopes and skeers, the justice and the injustice and the griefs, leaving the folks themselves easy now, all mixed and jumbled up comfortable and easy so wouldn't nobody even know or even care who was which any more, himself among them, equal to any, good as any, brave as any, being inextricable from, anonymous with all of them...

...In The Mansion, then, through Faulkner's very great skill, we are "overcome" by our sense of a subliminal world of feeling...

...People just do the best they can" and in Ratliff's reply, "The pore sons of bitches...

...This new novel, once again, gives us the uncommon, exhausting and deeply rewarding pleasure of letting go our surface identity...

...We do not recognize a mood...

...Its importance, it seems to me, has to do with the kind of knowledge or understanding of its characters which Faulkner gives us, and with the unimpeded flow of his stylized, suggestive prose which makes this knowledge available to us...

...But our comfortable, homey identities as individuals reside in the fact that we fall in love and make love, that we hate and make hate, at the conventional surface of our 20th century existence...

...In The Mansion, we commune with Faulkner over the emotional stuff lying deeply within us...

...I wish to assert quite bluntly, however, that in reading The Mansion I have been in the presence of the best in Faulkner—that is to say, in the presence of magnificent writing...

...It is concerned with Freud's intertwined polarities of love and hate and Catullus' Odi et amo, as they have thrived among the Snopeses and their more sensitive townsfolk in Faulkner's Jefferson...

...No American writer of fiction other than Faulkner has so consistently made available to us (sometimes with incredible skill, sometimes with a turgidity that makes us wince) a perception of the deep, tidal currents of unclassifiable love and hate, the great hidden links of common human nature...

...It is easy enough, to be sure, to react with irritation to the lack of a firm, "novelistic" structure in Faulkner, whether the work be the early Light in August or the more recent Requiem for a Nun...

...It is the kind of knowledge of a Mink Snopes and, to a lesser extent, of a Linda McCarron Snopes, which involves the reader with these characters at the level of the deep, tentacular roots of his own being...

...It is presented by Ratliff, by Gavin Stevens (Jefferson's lawyer, in love first with Eula and then with her daughter Linda), and by Charles Mallison, Steven's nephew, a Harvard-educated, World War II veteran, self-intoxicated by the lustful thoughts Linda generates in him...

...And yet, we are apparently too close to him to feel wholly comfortable in exploring in public our sense of his very great stature as a writer...

...It may be that Faulkner will, finally, be judged as the great American novelist "manque...

...But it is below this surface that the novel truly functions...

...Indeed, it has recently seemed much more tempting to critics to indulge their carping faculties at his expense and to let themselves go in chiding his failure to be 100 per cent genius...

...This is communicated to us below the level of our conditioned lives, where each of us has heat, secular business identities and definable moral identities...

...This section of the novel deals with Linda's search for love and for personal identity...

...we are overcome by it...

...Linda McCarron and her mother, Eula Snopes, likewise function in the novel (though a shade less successfully, I think) to make us aware of our personal liability to the fascinations and the terrors of love and lust which float beneath our everyday surface identifications of love as institutionalized romance, courtship and marriage...

...It is also no doubt true that we cannot and would not wish to escape for long, even with the best of Faulkner, from our plain, everyday, conditioned feelings and perceptions, set easily in motion by the phrases and the dogmas of our culture...

...Author, "The Love-Game Comedy" FAULKNER IS THE one living, functioning American novelist who, during the past quarter century, has produced a sustained body of work of a very high order, with an identifiable tone and style that is itself a special creation...

...As Richard Rovere has put it, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Faulkner's Light in August: "When we respond to [Faulkner] at all, we do not so much observe experience as undergo it...

...The Mansion, as a novel, is the third and last of the trilogy of connected episodes in the lives of the Snopeses, begun in The Hamlet (1940) and continued in The Town (1957...

...It is pure pleasure to resist his sometimes insistent moralizing (as in "The Bear," or A Fable) and his occasional glides into mere rhetoric...

...We gratify as we read what John Crowe Ransom has called "a perceptual impulse [which] exhibits the minimum of reason...

...But it is difficult to isolate passages from this novel which, torn from context, would exemplify its submerged continent...

...We may have an occasional Tillich-like existential intimation of something deeper...

...Mink Snopes is somehow recognizable as Lear's "unaccommodated man," the "poor, bare, forked animal" in all of us, existing in his hatred...

...For the length of time it takes to read the novel, we are plunged, if only momentarily, into the almost inscrutable pool of feeling that lurks below all our superficial and incessant questing for satisfaction and happiness...

...This portion of the novel is concerned with Linda's marriage to a Greenwich Village sculptor, his death in the Spanish Civil War, her return to Jefferson to engage in social work among Negroes, and, finally, her arranging Mink's pardon so that he might avenge her mother's suicide on Flem...

...Hence my final praise of The Mansion is that in it Faulkner reasserts those elements of perception which have always been his greatest strength...

...as Maxwell Geismar thinks...

...A secondary narrative focus of The Mansion is concerned with Linda McCarron Snopes, the illegitimate daughter of Flem Snopes's wife Eula (the Helen of Troy or the Venus symbol to the novel's town of Jefferson, Mississippi...

...It is faintly suggested, perhaps, in Gavin Stevens comment on the Snopeses and on humanity in general: "There aren't any morals...

...Then, because his cousin Flem Snopes, a bank president and the leading member of this avaricious family of emotional idiots, had refused to help him beat his jail sentence, Mink serves 38 years at hard labor in the state penitentiary to earn the pardon which will free him long enough to kill Flem...

...Its main narrative focus is on Mink Snopes, a wretched, half-literate share-cropper member of Faulkner's tribe of Cain, who first murders the wealthy plantation owner, Jack Houston—ostensibly in a protracted quarrel over the pasturing of a cow, actually in retaliation against Houston's ineradicable contempt...