B006JHRY9S EBOK (38 page)

Critics sometimes portray this as a struggle between the Old South of Compsons and Sartorises and the New South of Snopeses. Will Varner, the boss of Frenchman’s Bend, is no aristocratic master, however, but one of the boys—the most powerful, to be sure, but not a man descended from the plantation model. More, Faulkner does not heavily moralize the Varner/Snopes conflict. Varners are as likely as Snopeses to exploit their neighbors, but in more traditional ways. The moment when Flem, now the chief clerk
of Varner’s store, makes Uncle Will pay for his plug of tobacco identifies the key change taking place. A traditional scene of exchange—where the players know each other, even realize, while being financially accommodated, that they are being exploited—is ceding to an abstract, contractual model. Even the boss must pay; the transaction goes down on the books. Flem fleeces his clientele on a scale hardly attempted by the Varners, but he does so legally.

Legal outmaneuvering functions as the lifeblood of
The Hamlet
. Its vignettes circulate around one-upmanship transactions—horse-trading, sheep-purchasing, the buying and selling of land. Totally lacking in personality, Flem would seem an unlikely protagonist, yet he remains (with Ratliff) the central figure of this trilogy it took Faulkner almost two decades to complete. Although the narrative refuses to access his consciousness—either Flem is unknowable or there is nothing inside to know—it shrewdly delineates his outer features:

He did not speak. If he ever looked at them individually, that one did not discern it—a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco, and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. (HAM 777)

“Predatory,” but otherwise blankly impenetrable (his age undisclosed, his mouth a closed seam), Flem is in a community but not of it, as he is in a family but not of it. His cousin Mink will ultimately put him to death for his lack of family piety. If we ask what in the characterologically impoverished Flem Snopes commands Faulkner’s attention, one trait emerges already. He is his own man, independent, unreachable, impregnable. He is a hardwired virgin—or better, a eunuch. Surely this is why, with extravagant irony, Faulkner chooses to marry off the luscious Eula Varner to emotionally barren Flem. Faulkner emphasizes the sheer waste of Eula’s Dionysian fecundity, the incapacity of contemporary rural society to rise to her erotic challenge.

Flem’s predatory impenetrability requires a balancing counterpart. Another impenetrable figure—as communal as Flem is a loner, as loquacious as Flem is silent, as playful as Flem is driven, but equally private at the core—shares center stage with him. The “pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable” (HAM 741) Ratliff functions as Faulkner’s Hermes:

He sold perhaps three [sewing] machines a year, the rest of the time trading in land and livestock and second-hand farming tools … retailing from house
to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages from mouth to mouth about weddings and funerals…. He never forgot a name and he knew everyone, man mule and dog, within fifty miles. (741)

Such catholic interests point to Ratliff’s role as village custodian. He knows the region’s players, joins in their identity-defining rituals and activities. His commitment to “sewing” helps knit a group of individuals together into a community. Finally, he possesses a cardinal virtue necessary for taking on Snopesism: sexual immunity, a sutured heart. Faulkner emphasizes Ratliff’s “air of perpetual bachelorhood,” his “hearty celibacy as of a lay brother in a twelfth-century monastery—a gardener, a pruner of vines, say” (769).

Ratliff and Snopes serve as structural antipodes grounding the concerns of the trilogy. Their primacy tells us that these novels will return repeatedly to exploitative transactions and to the larger struggle between traditional and contemporary ways of doing business. Irrational excess is foreign to both men: Ratliff is there to spot and rein it in before it becomes dangerous, Snopes is there to fan it into action and exploit its consequences. These two figures preside over an ongoing drama that is economic at its center, moral and erotic at its margins. Moving forward in linear time, this drama accommodates traditional narrative techniques. The Balzacian cultural historian in Faulkner flourishes here.

But it is the irrational erotic energy lurking in the margins that fuels
The Hamlet
’s most memorable vignettes. A number of interrelated love stories establish this novel’s kinship with
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
. Through Eula Varner and the schoolteacher Labove, as well as a pair of harassed men—Jack Houston and Mink Snopes—transformed into mortal enemies, and finally the idiot Ike Snopes and his beloved cow, Faulkner narrates tormented private histories that give this otherwise sunny novel much of its somber power.

We have already glanced at Eula and noted the irony of her father’s bestowing her (as a tactical move) on the sexless Flem. An early description of Eula reveals the dimensions of such waste:

[H]er entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof. She seemed … to exist in a teeming vacuum in which her days followed one
another as though behind sound-proof glass, where she seemed to listen in sullen bemusement, with a weary wisdom heired of all mammalian maturity, to the enlarging of her own organs. (HAM 817)

Eula is often paired with Caddy Compson and Dewey Dell Bundren—those other sexually intense young women—but this passage accesses her in a unique fashion. The woman delineated in this over-the-top description will never escape her narrator’s categorizing impetus, never be granted her own language for expressing her thought and feeling. The texture of Eula’s subjectivity is closed to articulation. She means only what the (male) narrative perspective emphatically sees her as meaning. Caught up thus, Eula remains imprisoned—throughout the trilogy—in mythological language that expresses male response to her fabulous body. Put otherwise, she tends to reduce to her organs. Her later love affair with Manfred de Spain (in
The Town
), like her subsequent suicide (in
The Mansion
), gets clear of such organ-emphasis, but this trajectory is likewise never narrated from her point of view. Rather, the idealistic and garrulous Gavin Stevens—of whom we have decidedly too much in the last two novels of the trilogy, and who remains both infatuated with her and incapable of acting on it—most often speaks Eula’s thoughts and feelings, from his own exalted perspective.

By contrast,
The Hamlet
effortlessly grants subjectivity to the schoolteacher Labove—some fifteen years older than Eula and obsessed with her:

a man … with straight black hair … and high Indian cheekbones … and the long nose of thought…. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary. A thousand years ago it would have been a monk’s, a militant fanatic who would have … passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant’s self-doubt battling … his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites. (HAM 827)

Labove’s inner orientation is before us—as a set of thoughts and convictions and appetites—as clearly as Eula’s outer body is before us, as a set of male-arousing organs. It is through Labove that
The Hamlet
reengages the erotic intensity of
If I Forget Thee
. He is the monkish man who lives for principle, the gaunt self-willed hermit intent on his ideal. In his name, we see prefigured his coming ordeal—both “bovine” and “above”—a man who would transcend the demands of his animal body. It is not to be.

Then one morning he turned from the crude blackboard and saw a face eight years old and a body of fourteen with the female shape of twenty, which on the instant of crossing the threshold brought into the bleak, ill-lighted, poorly heated room dedicated to the harsh functioning of Protestant primary education a moist blast of spring’s liquorish corruption. (HAM 835)

He is instantly felled. Try as he might, he cannot expunge her erotic scent from his skin and glands. Soon he begins to hunger for the encounter—any encounter—that will end this sexual torture: “And he did not want her as a wife, he just wanted her one time as a man with a gangrened hand or foot thirsts after the axe-stroke which will leave him comparatively whole again” (839).

As with Harry and Charlotte, there is neither intimacy here nor desire for it. Labove wants to penetrate Eula so powerfully—once will be enough—that he might manage to expel her from his bodily system. The passage glosses only his lust. It would be irresponsible to claim that Faulkner’s sexual feelings for Meta were the same, though the following letter to her vibrates with a kindred erotic force: “I weigh 129 pounds and I want to put it all on you and as much in you as I can can can can must must will will shall” (ALG 264). Both passages bespeak male sexual besottedness: he must have her. But where
If I Forget Thee
traveled uncertainly into the territory of erotic consummation,
The Hamlet
remains safely (in this instance) on the near side of coition. It thus finds its way into the comic dimensions of Labove’s frustration.

As luck would have it—but there is no luck in Faulkner’s novels, only fate—she re-enters the schoolroom just as he has his nose buried in the seat those Olympian buttocks have recently vacated. Seeing him there, she says (sublimely), “What are you doing down there?” (HAM 841). This launches him. As during the football games he had earlier played with sufficient brutality to garner a college scholarship, he now closes in on his prey: “He caught her, hard, the two bodies hurling together violently because she had not even moved to avoid him, let alone to begin resisting yet” (842). Slowly she gathers herself together, then they wrestle: “‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Fight it. Fight it. That’s what it is: a man and a woman fighting each other. The hating. To kill, only to do it in such a way that the other will have to know forever afterward he or she is dead’” (842). How much biographical conviction speaks in this quietly terrifying passage? How much male puritanical disgust caused by eruption of carnal desire—desire that it is the everlasting fault of the female to have awakened? An entire culture’s unthinking
misogyny can here be glimpsed: the abiding anger men feel toward women for arousing them, stripping them of their self-control and undermining their idealized image of themselves.

Labove is ecstatic in this career-destroying moment of encounter: “He held her loosely, still smiling, whispering his jumble of fragmentary Greek and Latin verse and American-Mississippi obscenity” (HAM 842). She manages to free an arm, elbows him under the chin, strikes him hard in the face. Stunned, he goes down. Standing over him, neither panting nor disheveled, she speaks the novel’s most hilarious line: “Stop pawing me, you old headless horseman Ichabod Crane” (842–3). With those words—the epitaph awaiting every aging male teacher of English who has dreamed of bedding one of his nubile female students—Labove sinks into defeat and oblivion. Material that—thanks to its erotic unmanageability—had no choice in
If I Forgot Thee
but to head toward disaster and the abortion knife here ends in comic resolution.

Jack Houston—like Labove, memorable for his private anguish—serves to focus the next narrative of fatal passion. Biographical echoes abound. Like Faulkner and Estelle, Houston and his wife Lucy Pate “had known one another all of their lives” (HAM 922), and like Faulkner, Houston had tried to flee “the immemorial trap” (922). Suggestively recalling his creator, Houston realizes he must escape this woman. “He was … possessed of that strong lust, not for life … but for that fetterless immobility called freedom” (922). He first sought to escape her by failing his grade, then (though the brightest student in the class) she did likewise. At this sign of her determination, he panics: “It was a feud, a gage, wordless, uncapitulating, between that unflagging will [hers] … for the married state, and that furious and as unbending one [his] for solitariness and freedom” (924).

He flees, “not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them” (HAM 927). He lives for a time in El Paso, hundreds of miles away, bedding down for ten years with another woman, but cannot escape Lucy’s long-range spell. Finally, putting his head in the noose, he returns home, self-compelled. They marry. (She has been waiting the entire time.) However—in an untypically overt piece of symbolism—he buys her a stallion as wedding present, as if “that blood and bone and muscles represented that … bitless masculinity which he had relinquished” (931). The stallion soon kicks her to death—an event whose reverberation forever after stalks Houston. Dead, she remains—like Man-nie for Rider—inejectably inside him. He lies at nights on his narrow cot, “rigid, indomitable, and panting. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he thinks to himself.
‘I dont know why. I wont ever know why. But You cant beat me. I am strong as You are. You cant beat me’” (933).

At this precise moment in the text—when the biographical echoes seem strongest—Houston meets his death: “He was still alive when he left the saddle” (HAM 933). In a magnificent further paragraph, Faulkner writes Houston’s last moments of consciousness. It is Mink Snopes who has shot him, and Houston silently struggles to handle the unbearable pain:

It [the pain] roared down and raised him, tossed and spun. But it would not wait for him. It would not wait to hurl him into the void, so he cried, “Quick! Hurry!” looking up out of the red roar, into the face which with his own was wedded and twinned forever now by the explosion of that ten-gauge shell—the dead who would carry the living into the ground with him; the living who must bear about the repudiating earth with him forever, the deathless slain—then, as the slanted barrels did not move: “God damn it, couldn’t you even borrow two shells, you fumbling ragged—” and put the world away. His eyes, still open to the lost sun, glazed over with a sudden well and run of moisture which flowed down the alien and unremembering cheeks too, already drying, with a newness as of actual tears. (HAM 934)