This Is the End Of Flem Snopes
HOFFMAN, FREDERICK J.
This Is the End Of Flem Snopes Frederick J. Hoffman My review of William Faulkner's recent novel, The Mansion (Random House), may best begin with a quotation from another book, Faulkner in the...
...I think it necessary to underscore this fact because there is a strong tendency in criticism to make Faulkner a theologian, a doctrinal exegete, and a man of extraordinary intellectual skill...
...The end of Flem Snopes's career comes at the conclusion of one of the most fascinating of all Faulkner's skillful portrayals of violent behavior...
...With the job comes the challenge-to provide the kind of dedicated and ethical leadership that will make the American labor movement the creative social force it seeks to be...
...In fact, Flem Snopes is proved to be only a minor rogue, whose practice of evil is definitely circumscribed—not by the lack of social opportunity, but by a failure of imagination...
...The Hamlet (1940) offered us the first full-scale portrayal of the tribe...
...There is too much of the kind of informed digression that is so conspicuous in all of his recent Yoknapatawpha stories...
...Vardaman's fish (As I Lay Dying) "parallels Christ killed and ritualistically eaten and drunk to prevent the death of the believer...
...Faulkner abhors respectability far more than any other social vice...
...To put the matter fairly, Faulkner has himself encouraged the critics, in his elaborate allegory-parallel of the Christian tradition, A Fable (1954), and in other statements that superficially appear to make him a modern prophet...
...Faulkner: "The Snopeses will destroy themselves . . ." This is what they do in the third and last of the Yoknapatawpha series, which Faulkner has called simply Snopes...
...whatever he seems to be doing here turns out to be a defensive action, an attempt to hold what he has gained...
...All of the other Jefferson characters are here too: Gavin Stevens, Charles Mallison, V. K. Ratliff, Linde Snopes, even her father, Hoake McCarron—who reappears after a long absence from the scene...
...The one-year course combines classroom and field work...
...The truth as it now appears is that not only is the field of his success limited but he is himself a man of distinct limitations...
...Each year, we have heard from your readers in response to our appeal for dedicated young men and women to work in the labor movement...
...That is, nobody seems to be brave enough anymore to be an out-and-out blackguard or rascal . . . sooner or later he's got to be respectable, and that finishes it...
...We want those who will enjoy the sting of challenge...
...I can only cite one or two of Waggoner's judgments in support of my view...
...this form of destruction suggests that within the mechanism of evil is contained the means of its own collapse...
...Which is to say that Faulkner has set a limit to one of his more notoriously extravagant characterizations...
...after which Flem, the master scoundrel of all modern literature, moved into Jefferson, where we followed his adventures in The Town (1957...
...Your readers, especially those under the age of 35, have been a source of talent, inspiration and raw material for us during the last few years...
...The novel as a whole "not only reenacts the Eucharist, it is in-carnational in its very form...
...But then we are not looking for young people who want the easy plush life...
...The opportunity arrives after a 38-year stretch in prison...
...that event, brilliantly described in The Hamlet, is here reviewed...
...as "sole owner and proprietor" of the county, he needs to tell us the latest gossip and to let us know just where and when we are in its history...
...This brief sketch is a quite inadequate means of suggesting the rich substance of The Mansion...
...The best corrective is a reading of Faulkner himself and, to follow that, perhaps a look at Olga Vickery's new book, The Novels of William Faulkner (Louisiana University Press...
...But, in addition, in The Mansion he defines the terms of this limit...
...The details of their participation in the saga will interest only the most devoted of tourists in Faulkner's world...
...Here a significant change occurred: having achieved a "horizontal" conquest of the Yoknapatawpha terrain and its business affairs, in Jefferson Flem progressed vertically, up the ladder toward "respectability...
...Looking back upon his earlier career, we expected somehow that he would go on forever, that there was no limit to his conquests...
...To these, we open the doors of the Institute...
...One of the season's Faulkner items makes this question of interpretation important: Hyatt Waggoner's William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (University of Kentucky Press...
...We are convinced that in every generation there is a segment of young people who would like to play a courageous and active role in changing the shape of things, and we are therefore renewing our invitation to a career that others-in this decade-have found a rewarding way of life...
...WILLIAM AAcCANN, who edited "Ambrose Bierce's America," reviews paperbacks regularly for The Progressive...
...FREDERICK HOFFMAN is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin...
...there is a strong temptation to accept them as great illuminations, especially since he often demonstrates a fine skill of moderate interpretation...
...With an obsessive patience and determination, he plans his revenge...
...As he said, in another of his University of Virginia sessions, ". . . the rapacious people—if they're not careful—they are seduced away and decide that what they've got to have is respectability, which destroys one, almost anybody...
...and anyone who reads it in terms of its very shrewd moral analysis of family relationships will be spared the necessity, apparent in such a statement, to escape the humor and the horror of As I Lay Dying and to transcend its very common and simple ground of observation...
...More surprising, Flem almost ceases acting in this third book...
...While some continue at this mission as their first and enduring love, others branch out to take on responsibilities as business agents, local union managers, educational and political directors, area supervisors, time study experts, etc...
...Waggoner's insights are half-truths...
...There is nothing soft or cushy about any of these jobs...
...Question: "Are the Snopeses really taking over Jefferson, and is there any group that might hold them out...
...There is hardly space in this review to do Waggoner justice—or for that matter, Faulkner, who needs above all to be protected from this kind of criticism...
...He is a serious critic, with a considerable talent which he often forcibly misdirects toward "significant" irrelevancy...
...140 of its graduates now hold union office in the ILGWU...
...Mink Snopes, a lean, even a frail man, had murdered his neighbor, Houston...
...Consider what this means to any reader of the trilogy...
...The Training Institute is now in its tenth year...
...Virtually all started as organizers-to learn the labor movement at the grass roots...
...Mink gradually makes his way back to Jefferson, his sole purpose to rid the world of Flem...
...SUSAN BRADY is a member of the editorial staff of a national magazine...
...He is essentially an earthy, practical, un-complex "humanist," the type of person who can say that he much prefers the Old to the New Testament because the Old is "about people" and the New "about ideas...
...Most important to any reader of Faulkner is the sustaining evidence this novel provides concerning his moral point of view...
...Faulkner seems to have caught his second breath in this book...
...Of Dilsey (The Sound and the Fury): "It may not be utterly fanciful to see her as becoming, finally, a kind of foster-mother of Christ, the enabling agent of a revelation at once spiritual and aesthetic...
...The International Ladies* Garment Workers' Union conducts its own "West Point," to prepare young men and women for careers in labor leadership...
...Since Faulkner is neither theologian nor philosopher, but occasionally pretends to be both, the chances of confusion are irresistible...
...These observations, and many like them, help us to understand the manner of Flem Snopes's death described in The Mansion...
...Those who complete the course are assigned to a full-time job with the union...
...Because of his love of pseudo-profundity, however, he is especially susceptible to Waggoner's kind of exhortatory and dogmatic discrimination...
...Despite all of the misleading rhetoric and symbolism in Faulkner's recent work, he is basically a simple kind of "folk moralist" who can say that "the Snopeses will destroy themselves" and can with the sharpest sensitivity to what that means in a human situation develop the narrative context in which it will be proved...
...T. K. QUINN was formerly vice president of General Electric...
...He expects that Flem will help to "spring him," but Flem stays away (it is not in his nature or to his advantage for a Snopes to help another Snopes) and Mink is sent off to the prison farm at Parchman, Mississippi...
...THE REVIEWERS WILLIAM L. NEUMANN, formerly director of the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, is a professor of history at Goucher College...
...He has reached the outermost limit of achievement, is president of the bank and lives in the "mansion" vacated by his dispossessed predecessor...
...This Is the End Of Flem Snopes Frederick J. Hoffman My review of William Faulkner's recent novel, The Mansion (Random House), may best begin with a quotation from another book, Faulkner in the University (University of Virginia Press...
...it descended upon the tiny community of Frenchman's Bend, and took it over gradually but inexorably...
...It is nothing of the sort...
...Yet The Mansion benefits enormously from the fact that he has finally decided upon a terminus of the Flem Snopes story...
...Briefly, and at the risk of my being unfair, Waggoner feels above all the necessity to study Faulkner from a point of view that is halfway theologInternational Ladies' Garment Workers' Union David Dubinsky, President Memo to: Morris H. Rubin, Editor, The Progressive From: Gus Tyler, Director ILGWU Training Institute Subject: A CAREER WITH A CHALLENGE...
...Not that there isn't much in this book that is precise and valuable, but Waggoner's major concerns tend to get in the way of Faulkner's...
...Write before April 15: ILGWU Training Institute, 1710 Broadway, New York 19, N. Y. ical, halfway philosophical...
...Those who are seeing it for the first time will be puzzled by many of the references to its past, and much amused by Faulkner's unfailing talent for presenting the humor of its several situations...
...It is necessary that a Snopes destroy a Snopes...
...The narrative is not well paced, and much gets in the way of the telling...
Vol. 24 • March 1960 • No. 3
