THE SNOPES BALANCE:1940 AND 1957
HOFFMAN, FREDERICK J.
The Snopes Balance: 1940 and 1957 by FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN FHIS new novel, The Town (Random House), William Faulkner .returns to a world he has not looked into since 1940. It is difficult to define...
...The narrators are also the principal antagonists of the spirit of Snopesism...
...It wasn't necessary in Frenchman's Bend...
...But Flem is the pure essence of Snopesism...
...they team up with Ratliff to continue the Snopes story in The Town...
...otherwise the tribe increases out of all reason and power to account for it...
...One new study has appeared ii| this quarter, Irving Malin's Willian^ Faulkner: An Interpretation (Stan: ford University Press...
...Fragments of the Snopes drama appear here and there, in Sartoris (1929), Faulkner's first novel in the Yoknapatawpha series...
...Such novels as Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), and A Fable (1954) testify in one way or another to Faulkner's wish to become a spokesman, an allegorist, overtly a moralist dramatizing and even ritualizing the human scene...
...should be...
...a year...
...Two of Faulkner's "new men" (realizations of the new Faulkner moral sense) are Gavin Stevens and Chick Mallison...
...He is too concerned to have his people symbolize something other than themselves before they have had the chance properly to become themselves— which is perhaps to say that he has found Snopesism a far less rewarding theme than it was for him in The Hamlet...
...The "good" is noticeable in Frenchman's Bend, but it is mixed with human frailties and compulsions that make conquest of the "evil" difficult...
...All three serve in the combined roles of sleuths, gossips, moralizers, tower-watchers...
...At the end of The Hamlet, Flem and his tribe leave Frenchman's Bend, move on to "the town," Jefferson, to continue their work of despoliation...
...in their presences they com municated what they "meant" with out too overtly meaning what the...
...In the work Faulkner has published since 1940, he chooses to force issues that earlier he was satisfied to reveal indirectly, to subordinate to the human complexity that underlay their being issues...
...This means that the Snopes story of The Town is a melange of comic strip and editorial...
...For decency is a composite of pure "good" feeling and weaknesses which prevent us from being over-simplified saints or fools...
...it is in Jefferson...
...They are specially designated heroes, alert both to the comedy (and farce) of human ambitions and follies and to the necessary qualities of redeeming affirmation...
...his strength comes from an animal force translated into the skills needed to cheat, cajole, deceive his fellows...
...and above all, the spirit of fertility and renewal, symbolized most remarkably in the person of Eula Varner, whose sexual attractiveness and receptiveness exceed all such qualities in mythical portrayals of the earth goddess...
...taken full advantage of their oppor tunities...
...The Town is crowded witl rhetorical feelings (Mallison's, Rat1 liff's, Stevens') over what human act...
...Their central figure, Flem, is impotent, impotence being an expected parallel of their successive violations of nature...
...Faulkner has become a "distinguished man," a Nobel prize winner, writer in residence, and honored guest at commencement exercises...
...Snopeses who populated The Hamlet now spread abroad in The Town...
...In the end, Ratliff is also a victim of the Snopeses, as he must be if Faulkner's meaning is to be preserved...
...in a hilarious scene in a Memphis brothel {Sanctuary, 1931...
...But it seems that respectability is the new instrument of Flem's advance...
...At the same time tW behavior of Snopeses continues, al...
...Ratliff is no savior...
...This is no popular historical abstraction of good versus evil...
...and distrust...
...We need a criticism that respects the separate integrities of Faulkner's works while it perceives and lucidly presents the several patterns they follow...
...This is a half-truth, if it is any kind of truth at all...
...Malin's book does neither of these...
...The marriage of Flem and Eula is a contractual irony in the narrative of Snopesism versus nature...
...The Snopeses have a history, and a place in Faulkner's grand view of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi...
...Faulkner has become rhetorically anxious...
...They are all on the way to becoming public symbols...
...His antagonists (and victims) in The Hamlet are the tenant farmer, the small trader and dealer, the smalltime owner and village politician...
...Cunning beyond belief, unscrupulous, Ifttirely without moral discretion, he exists outside all codes governing all social classes...
...he merely exploits her...
...The reasons for th§ are obvious...
...She does not marry him in any real sense...
...This statement perhaps summarizes Malin's object ive (as it suggests his limits) as wtfl as any other: "In Faulkner's mytl Where are two behavioral principles continually at battle with each other —flexibility (good) and rigidity (evil...
...Much intelligent suggestive, illuminating work, however, has been done by other students of Faulkner...
...One feels strongly the need to protest against this type of operation, which is burdened to the point of futility by jargon, assumption, and extra-literary point of view...
...If Flem is beyond good, he is beyond evil...
...The Snopeses must begin their climb where they have begun their lives...
...they engage in farcically ironic "deals" and schemes...
...Because he lives according to no code, anyone who lives in terms of one (however imperfect he or the code may be) is liable as victim...
...These men are all on the lower rungs of the ladder...
...Eventually this at' tempt to introduce Faulkner will ghjp way to a more complex and a moflr detailed kind of study, combining analysis of the fiction with attention' to patterns and themes...
...But in this novel they are presented differently...
...By comparison, The Town often seems a drudging precis of its predecessor, done from the perspective^ too many years and too many pun honors...
...But generally the lines are well drawn in The Hamlet: the Snopeses destroy, loot, trick, exploit, in scenes of incredibly intricate, often comical, dealing and maneuvering...
...Apparently in the concluding Snopes novel (to be called The Mansion) it will give a new dimension to the Snopes force, which will then be called power—political, economic power...
...Most of the books on him an "introductions," essays in themati* definition...
...In that earlier novel, the lines were drawn so remarkably well (and Faulkner was so freshly aware of them) that one could be aware simultaneously of the comedy, pathos, and anger which animate that novel...
...It violates all logic of expectation...
...Taking him out of the milieu to which he seemed perversely well adapted and removing him to a setting that is superficially sophisticated and "respectable," Faulkner has had to change his quality...
...It is difficult to define that world exactly...
...Unlike the Hebrews he believes that rigidity frequently wins...
...They are impotent in the sense of being sterilely concerned to avoid commitments to life, to subordinate life to personal advantage...
...This is the phenomenon with which Faulkner sets up one of the terms of his scene...
...Mallison, Stevens, and Ratliff—who too often sound alike, though Stevens is most editorially obtuse—stumble about in a tangle of natural curiosity, incredulity, "concern," and alarm...
...Faulkner is therefore, "fair game" for critics, and they have...
...Flem's behavior is now strangely unlike that of The Hamlet...
...The major antagonist-victim of the Snopeses is nature itself: the landscape of Frenchman's Bend, portrayed in a series of vivid analogies to the human narrative...
...work appear at the rate of about tw...
...The opponents of Snopesism are ineffectual because they are divided...
...Most of all, he has become aware of himself as witness to a complex human comedy and tragedy...
...Ratliff moves in and out of The Hamlet...
...symbolically attest or aver or ve hemently assert...
...They are first seen in the Civil War, as "bushwackers," noncommittally engaged in stealing and dealing behind and between army lines (The Unvan-quished, 1938...
...of these, Irving Howe'* William Faulkner (1951) and William Van O'Connor's The Tangled Fire o) William Faulkner (1954) are perhaps the most useful...
...most in the manner of comic inter...
...in retrospect, in As iLay Dying (1930...
...It is hard t< describe its author's intentions, but if he may be said to be at all cleai about them, they suggest an attempt to psychoanalyze Faulkner's heroer" and through such an approach to fine thematic policies...
...she merely accompanies him and views him with contempt (she calls him "that man...
...V. K. Ratliff, one of Faulkner's most attractive figures, is an itinerant salesman, a shrewd revival of the Yankee trader, who deals in sewing machines and in the stuff of the human comedy...
...The shock of seeing Flem "concerned" over public opinion, getting rid of the more obviously disreputable members of the tribe, thinking of "tasteful" home furnishings and decor, must surely be upsetting to the reader of The Hamlet...
...Partly this impression *jj caused by Faulkner's difference in pi pose...
...The comedy continues...
...Some Snopeses behave like non-Snopeses...
...There is some crossing of lines...
...In The Hamlet the charactel were what they were, with the neaji sary addition of fallibility and con tumacy and irrational desire to thel natures...
...they despise and defile it...
...Vigor has departed...
...Stevens himself is at least once reduced to the level of a ridiculous, white-haired avuncular guardian of the decencies...
...Eula Varner Snopes, in The Hamlet a woman given to little talk and less movement, becomes as garrulous and articulate as Stevens himself...
...But The Hamlet '& the first full length study of Snopesism in all its vigorous but inglorious and destructive energy...
...But some seventeen years have elapsed since the publication of the earlier book...
...Faulkner's novels are noi only "difficult" in their texture bud complex in the interrelationships ol, theme, character, and social reference^ they suggest...
...from this extraordinary vantage point, he can avail himself of the squeamishness of the one and of the impulsiveness and incaution of the other...
...he merely reacts to the advances made by Snopeses with a more than customarily strong shock and aversion...
...one or two of them prove the rule of Snopesism by behaving in an un-Snopeslike manner...
...Faulkner is too shrewd a chronicler of human mores not to provide them...
...Whatever is threatened or promised in The Town's version of Snopesism, the experience of reading the novel is a strangely disappointing one...
...The second step in the Snopes rise seems to require respectability, or the appearance of it...
...in addition, the space devonl' to him in the critical reviews aijff journals is very large, exceeded amoQr the moderns only by that given Eliol Joyce, and Yeats...
...Generally speaking, Flem's strongest opponents are a blend of folk sensibility and a rationally governed moral view...
...in its place we have a nervoife energy stimulated by both anxie...
...he is absent much of the time, but his returns to Frenchman's Bend signalize the crucial turns of the story's progress...
...Superficially it is dominated by the Snopes tribe, a proliferating, plundering, amoral, and scrupulously canny lot, whom Faulkner chose to represent a special form of villainy...
...In his first full display of Snopeses, The Hamlet, he generalized from particular instances and set up a type of human aberration, Snopesism or Snopesishness...
...The consequence of Malin's approach is that Faulkner's novels are so badly cut up and rearranged to fit a priori dispositions toward them that none of them survives in any kind of recognizable or useful context...
...The principal deficiency of The Town seems to me to lie in its failure to give its characters status as persons...
...The modern history of the Snopeses begins properly with Flem Snopes, who starts his career (now, in The Town, considerably advanced) in the general store pmed by Will Varner, in a tiny set-ftement called Frenchman's Bend, hem is obviously the great symbolic type-hero of the Snopes world...
...ludes, to "entertain," while Snopesisn* is itself being considered at the leve' of the moral editorial...
...They are "against nature...
...They are animal-like in their drives, cleverly skillful in their exploitation of means and opportunities...
...those who work the land and cuss it but respect it also...
...The Snopes story is seen in terms of his folk wisdom...
...Partly because he has sat for too many "official portraits," he now sees his world more narrowly, and more self-consciously, as though he must editorialize about it...
...So much for the first full-dress review of the Snopes world...
...Critical introductions to Faulknefpr...
...some men who do not bear the Snopes name act as though they want to lay claim to it...
...It is as though he now feels that no human representation of human good or evil can any longer adequately serve him...
...Flem Snopes does not violate Eula...
...it is not unreasonable to hope that something more nearly corresponding to a "definitive" study is not too far away...
Vol. 21 • September 1957 • No. 9
