Faulkner's South

Georgia Review
Faulkner's South: A Northern Interpretation

Author(s): Granville Hicks
Source: The Georgia Review, Vol. 5, No. 3 (FALL - 1951), pp. 269-284
Published by: Georgia Review
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Faulkner's South
A Northern Interpretation
By Granville Hicks
IF that
thatwethethewritings
ever writings
of William
had any
Faulkner
of William
belongdoubts,
to the there
worldFaulkner
and not is the belong Nobel to Prize the world to remind and not us
to a single nation, much less to a particular region of that nation. For
that matter, much recent criticism of Faulkner's work, by offering
allegorical interpretations of his novels, has emphasized the universal
almost to the exclusion of the regional. And if this kind of exegesis
sometimes becomes ridiculous, it is in its basic assumptions closer to
the truth than the talk about provincial limitations that once was so
familiar.
Yet Faulkner is in an important sense a Southern writer, not merely
in literary but also in biographical terms, not only because he has writ-
ten almost exclusively about the South but also because all but a small
part of his life has been spent there. His fidelity to his native region is,
indeed, almost unparalleled in contemporary literary history. Born in
New Albany, Mississippi, he has lived since early childhood in nearby
Oxford, with relatively brief periods in Europe, New York, New Or-
leans, and Hollywood. While his contemporaries have been living abroad
or moving restlessly about the face of the globe, he has thrust his roots
deeper and deeper into native soil. He has chosen to be a Southerner,
and he has found in the South material for everything he has written
except a few short stories and portions of two or three novels.
It is, therefore, as legitimate as anything can be to regard Faulkner
as an interpreter of the South and to ask what his South is like and what
he thinks about it. Such questions, of course, have often been asked,
but when one looks at the answers, one finds astonishing disagreements.
In The American Mind, Henry Steele Commager speaks of William
Faulkner's "convulsive rejection of the plantation system." Maxwell
Geismar, on the other hand, calls Faulkner an "unreconstructed rebel"
in Writers in Crisis, arguing that he can write with sympathy only of
the plantation owners and their descendants. And these two motifs run
through much of the criticism of Faulkner: he hates the South, says
[ 269]
270 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
one man; he is in love with the South, says

his sentimental, nostalgic picture of it. The
pect, lies between these extremes, but wher
In trying to understand Faulkner's South
all that he has limited himself not merely to
lar Southern area. Much of the action of h
takes place in a small Georgia town. Mosqu
and near New Orleans- called New Valois in the latter. New Orleans
and its vicinity figure again in one of the two parts of The Wild Palms,
though the action also moves into the North and West. Otherwise all
his novels, as well as a majority of his short stories, are laid in a section
of northern Mississippi that he calls Yoknapatawpha County.
To say that Faulkner has written chiefly about a few hundred square
miles in Mississippi is not to deny that he is interested in the South as
a whole and in its characteristic problems, any more than calling him
a Southern writer denies his significance for the entire literate world.
But as he approaches the fundamental problems of the nature and des-
tiny of man by way of the South, so he approaches the South by way
of Yoknapatawpha County. He has chosen to explore thoroughly a
small area of human life and to create, in fabulous detail, a social micro-
cosm. A small city named Jefferson was the scene of his third and fourth
novels, Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury, both published in 1929.
Since then, Jefferson and the surrounding country have provided the
setting, as I have said, of almost everything he has written.
No one has ever doubted that Jefferson resembles Oxford, Missis-
sippi, where Faulkner lives. Oxford, it is true, has an independent exist-
ence in some of the novels, being located some distance to the north
of Jefferson, but that is merely Faulkner's way of saying that Jefferson
is not to be exactly identified, as of course it isn't, with any particular
spot on the map. Jefferson is a city created by William Faulkner, but
it is probably at least as closely related to Oxford, as, let us say, Haw-
thorne's Salem was to the real Salem.
Jefferson is the county seat of Yoknapatawpha County,* as Oxford
is the county seat of Lafayette County. Northern Mississippi, it must
be remembered, is not the Old South, and Lafayette County, which
was settled in the middle 183 o's, after the removal of the Chickasaws,
was frontier only twenty-five years before the beginning of the Civil
•Faulkner first named the county in As I Lay Dying (1930). A Lafayette County
river, called the Yockana or Yacona on modern maps, is on some older maps la-
beled the Yoknapatawpha.
faulkner's south 271
War. Settlement was rapid, however, and the
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, author of Georgi
dent of the University of Mississippi, wrot
Quintus Lamar, that it was a "farmer's paradi
had left Georgia in debt eight years earlier wer
good land, however, was showing signs of exh
war, and the poor land, back in the hills, was
it was when the farmers of The Hamlet and A
with it. Both historically and geographically th
mon with western Alabama and southern Tenn
the Delta, and its cultural capital was and is Me
Although Yoknapatawpha seems to have been s
than Lafayette, its topography is much the sam
One of Faulkner's recent stories, "A Name for
earliest days of Jefferson, when it was "a stor
boose, a half-dozen log cabins set in the midd
main which Ikkemotubbe, old Issetibbeha's succ
white man." This is the background for the Y
this wilderness domain came various men to m
work out their destinies. Of these various men,
of importance for the saga: Jason Lycurgus C
Carothers McCaslin, Thomas Sutpen, and John
I have listed them in the order of their arri
County, not in the order of their appearance
John Sartoris was the first to be created, tho
with only as a potent memory. Sartoris (1929
of young Bayard Sartoris, a great-grandson of
to Jefferson after serving as an aviator in Wo
twin brother, another John, was killed. The n
restlessness, his sense of guilt, and his search for
develops, however, against a background of f
the past is almost as important as the present
minded of the great-grandfather, Colonel Sart
in the Civil War. His sister, Aunt Jenny, wh
generations of Sartoris men and at the end of
•Faulkner not only takes liberties with the history o
bother to be perfectly consistent. Absalom , Absalom! s
churches, six stores, a courthouse, etc., in 1833, two yea
ed. The account of early Jefferson in "The Compsons"
in " A Name for the City" ( Harper's , Oct., 1950) is clos
therefore quite irreconcilable with the description in
on a fifth, not only perpetuates the virtu

keeps alive the legend of Colonel John and hi
er, the first Bayard, who was slain in a Civil
and no military significance.
It has often been assumed that Sartoris is
contrasting the heroism of the Civil War g
tuality of the young men of today. Actuall
it clear that young John and young Bayar
their great-grandfather and his brother. T
destructive in precisely the same way. No
young Bayard comes to a bad end because t
to the Sartoris virtues than the past. Faulkne
that the Sartorises have declined in Jefferson
ish, unscrupulous families as the Snopeses
power, but that is not the source of youn
he has no desire to be a plantation owner,
president, or a statesman. As a matter of fact
he most wants, a war to fight in, and if t
get himself killed, that has nothing to do wit
tion-owning class in the South.
The question of the Sartorises is interesting
vious similarities between Colonel John Sar
grandfather, Colonel William Falkner [
Colonel Falkner fought in the Mexican Wa
in the Civil War, resigned his command aft
sas, and subsequently raised a cavalry regim
Forrest. He, too, was a railroad builder,
political opponent. Of course the paralle
Colonel Falkner did not come from South Carolina but was born in
Missouri of parents from Tennessee; and Colonel Sartoris has none of
the literary gifts of Colonel Falkner, author of a popular novel, The
White Rose of Memphis, and other books. But it is certain that Faulk-
ner had his own family in mind when he wrote Sartoris.
The resemblances between the Sartorises and the Falkners are all the
more interesting when one turns to the second book that Faulkner
wrote about the Sartoris family, The Unvanquished* He is concerned
in this book with events of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and
'Published in 1938. However, three of the stories that compose the volume were
published in the Saturday Evening Post four years earlier.
Colonel Sartoris becomes a principal character.
the point of view of the colonel's son- the old
here a boy in his early teens- and as seen thro
is indeed a glamorous figure. It is not Colone
dominates the book but his fragile and heroic
Millard. In Sartoris Aunt Jenny says:
Men can't stand anything. Can't even stand

worry and no responsibility and no limit to al
think about wanting to do. Do you think a
day and month after month in a cabin miles a
spend the time between casualty lists tearing up
curtains and table linen to make lint, and watch
meat dwindle away, and using pine knots for l
any candles and no candle sticks to put 'em in
ing in nigger cabins while drunken Yankee
house your great-great-grandfather built and
born in. Don't talk to me about men suffering
And this is the theme of The Unvanquished- t

enced by women and children. The exploits o
courage and gallantry Faulkner obviously has
are there, but they are in the background, while
a different and less bloodthirsty and more res
At the very end of The Unvanquished, after
and her death avenged, Colonel Sartoris and
young man of twenty-odd, step to the front
text can be found in Sartoris, where an old m
soldiers, is recalling the events that led to his
colonel killed a couple of carpet-baggers, and
another man, and he says, "When a feller has
'most always has to keep on killin' 'em. And w
dead hisself." As the incident is worked ove
even more emphasis is placed on the worthin
and his dissatisfaction with the means he has
tries to repudiate violence, his repudiation .is e
Bayard to make the ultimate heroic gesture,
father's slayer.
We shall see how significant it is that Faulk
the Sartorises on this particular note of abnega
deed in which physical and moral courage are s
we must resume our chronological examination

purely a literary" study, we should want to
The Sound, and the Fury, which appeared in
for this remains one of the greatest of Faulkne
of the highest originality, difficult to read bec
vations and its stylistic virtuosity but wond
understanding of Faulkner's South, however
Sartoris, and what must chiefly be said about i
misinterpreted.
I mentioned Jason Lycurgus Compson as on
Yoknapatawpha County: it is with his descen
the Fury deals. The Compsons are not an att
may be described as a talkative and alcoholic
egotistical, self-pitying hypochondriac. Of
an idiot from birth, one is sexually immoral
Only the fourth can be considered normal by
he is one of the meanest, most despicable cha
ated. When one adds that the family's fortu
a Compson grandfather was a general in th
may easily jump to the conclusion that the n
decay, and that is just what the majority of cr
Beyond any question, The Sound and the Fury
a portrayal of a group of maladjusted and un
closer examination, one cannot find much in
peculiarly Southern. The Compsons, to be su
and proud family, and now they have none of
pride is wearing thin, but family decay, as an a
strates, is not limited to the South, nor does Fa
it, except perhaps in the most casual way, in
tory. So far as its fundamental themes are
the Fury is one of the least Southern of Fau
changes, chiefly the elimination of the Neg
fectly well be laid in New England,* or in an
try in which families have lived long enough
♦But not by William Faulkner. The Cambridge, Mass., he describes in portray-

ing Quentin Compson's Harvard experiences must seem to any New Englander
fantastically remote from reality. Incidentally, I must point out that I could not
speak in any but the most hypothetical way of eliminating the Negro servants,
for they contribute one of the most essential and one of the finest elements of
the novel.
be in any narrow sense a regional novel because
with some of the deepest and most nearly uni
Once Faulkner has created a group of charact
his imagination and often in his writings. Que
as narrator in several short stories; both Quen
in Absalom, Absalom !; and General Compson
Go Down, Moses. In 1946, when Malcolm
Portable Faulkner, he asked the author to wr
plain an extract from The Sound and the Fur
by furnishing a dozen pages on the history of
after the events described in that novel. "Th
which has also been reprinted in the Modern
Sound and the Fury, is an extraordinary docum
interesting things about it is the suggestion
two or three exceptions, were from the begin
Even the Confederate general was a failure:
'62 and failed again, though not so badly,
the first mortgage on the still intact square
phasis, one wonders, if it is not to refute those
Faulkner was contrasting the failures of the p
of the past?
Unlike The Sound and the Fury, the novel t
of the pioneers, Absalom, Absalom! is in larg
specifically Southern problems. This concern
sized by the narrative method, for many of
emerge as Quentin Compson describes them,
vard roommate, Shreve McCannon, a Canadia
at one point, as he and Quentin are trying to
and why, "the South is fine, isn't it. It's bett
it. It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. No wond
now and then, isn't it." And at the end, in m
to Quentin: "Now I want you to tell me just
you hate the South?"
"I don't hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at
don't hate it," he said. I don't hate it he though
the iron New England dark; I don't. 1 don't
hate it.
Briefly summarized, Absalom, Absalom! tel

made his mysterious appearance in Yoknap
how he and his bizarre crew of slaves cleared the la
himself a great mansion, and how he attempted to e
In the course of the novel we learn why he has don
child of poor whites, born in West Virginia, he wen
and family to the tidewater; there he was snubbed b
of the plantation owner for whom his father worke
out of his passion for revenge, was born his determ
land and slaves and a fine house of his own. Close t
sign in the West Indies, but balked in his desire to f
made a second start in Yoknapatawpha, and the mann
tion is the novel's theme.
The Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! is a doo
heroes of Greek tragedy are doomed, and, like Aga
not only in himself but in his seed. Not at all the d
suppose him at the beginning of the novel, he is a b
his own lights, an honorable one. But he is doomed
capable of love: his wives and children are, like the
but means to an end. And the end, Faulkner is sa
enough. Thus the book becomes, by implication,
plantation ideal, since it is that to which Sutpen as
and slaves, to build a fine house, to establish a dynasty-
We can begin to see how inaccurate it is either to
ner's "convulsive rejection of the plantation system"
as an "unreconstructed rebel." To those who rega
mentalist it must be pointed out that he has shown
that favorite theme of nostalgic Southerners- the gr
bellum days. Not, I feel sure, that Faulkner would de
great plantations before the war had its gracious aspe
gestions of this in the background of Sartoris, The
Absalom, Absalom! But he is more interested in the
the plantations were established than in the ease that w
wards,* and he is acutely conscious of the foundation
of human beings and of physical nature- on which
rested.
♦In this, of course, be is true to the experience of northern Mississippi, which,

as I have said, was wilderness only a quarter of a century before the Civil War
began. In Sartoria Aunt Jenny speaks - in a fit of pique, to be sure - of the "Mis-
sissippi country people . . . clod-hoppers . . . red-neck brigands," contrasting the
Yoknapatawpha plantation owners with the South Carolina gentry among whom
she spent her girlhood. And in Absalom, Absalom ! much is made of the inferiority
of Yoknapatawpha manners to the culture of New Orleans.
In his attitude towards the Civil War, on th
closely approximates what I believe to be the
the South. He has frequently portrayed the d
past- for instance, in the character of the Rev.
in August- but it should not be assumed on th
lieves the past should be forgotten. Gavin Ste
Dust says to his nephew: "For every Southern
not once but whenever he wants it, there is th
not yet two o'clock on that afternoon in 1863
struggle of the Confederacy should be remem
the Confederate defeat should be lamented, see
and proper. No one could place a higher value o
and he particularly admires courage expended
As for the justice of the cause itself, Faulkner
with most causes, the issues were mixed: like
erners today, he would not defend slavery as s
that the South was right, and is right, in its insi
problems.
When we come to that urgent question of th
in the South, we find that Faulkner's attitude
ing. To a Northern reader it seemed that in hi
took the caste system for granted. In Sartoris the
the social inferiors of the whites; they are inf
in some instances- as in the scene in which ol
money Simon has stolen- they seem comic ster
shared in what a Northerner regards as Souther
prevent him from portraying individual Negro
and insight. Dilsey is not only the finest char
the Fury- which, after all, was published in th
but one of the finest in all Faulkner's novels.
It was in Light in August that he first presente

lem, and here, as so often in later novels, he
Negro who has white blood. (The ironic possibi
end that Joe Christmas has nothing but whit
novel ends with a peculiarly brutal lynching,
that Faulkner does not make the appeal to mo
the stock in trade of so many writers on Negro
purpose is to explore such relationships and to r
cently does- the emotional tensions they develop. It
problem, but it is not a problem novel.
The problem, however, continued to nag at Faulkne
as an inevitable literary theme for a Southern novelist
issue. At the outset I mentioned his four pioneer f
already commented upon the Sartorises, the Comps
Now we come to the McCaslins, for it is in developin
Faulkner, over a period of some fifteen years, has c
the question of the Negro. The McCaslins appear
characters in The Unvanquished , and they seem to
the express purpose of permitting Faulkner to say so
only slavery and the Negro but economics in general
There was more to Uncle Buck and Buddy than just

at poker] . Father said they were ahead of their time
only possessed, but put into practice, ideas about soci
that maybe fifty years after they were both dead p
name for. These ideas were about land. They belie
not belong to people but that people belonged to l
earth would permit them to live on and out of it
long as they behaved and that if they did not behave
shake them off just like a dog getting rid of fleas. Th
of a system of bookkeeping which must have been ev
than their betting score against one another, by whic
were to be freed, not given freedom, but earning it,
money from Uncle Buck and Buddy, but in work fro
Only there were others besides niggers. . . . These we
ers, the people whom the niggers called 'white tra
owned no slaves and some of whom even lived worse than the slaves
on the big plantations. It was another side of Uncle Buck's and Buddy's
ideas about men and land, which Father said people didn't have a name
for yet, by which Uncle Buck and Buddy had persuaded the white
men to pool their little patches of poor hill land along with the niggers
and the McCaslin plantation, promising them in return nobody knew
exactly what, except that their women and children did have shoes,
which not all of them had had before, and a lot of them even went to
school. Anyway, they (the white men, the trash) looked on Uncle
Buck and Buddy like Deity Himself.
Although Uncle Buck plays a fairly important part in The Unvan-

quished , these fantastic McCaslin twins and their ideas were not to be
♦"Retreat," the story from which this quotation is taken, appeared in the Sat-
urday Evening Post for October 13, 1934. Since much of what Faulkner was to say
later is outlined here, the date is important.
developed until the appearance of the stories
Moses (1943). In "Was," one of Faulkner's f
are seen primarily as poker players, and, alth
and let their slaves live in the big house, ther
here of a carefully formulated system such a
age from The Unvanquished I have just quote
ideas there outlined is left to another char
begotten son, Ike McCasIin. Ike is mentioned
book as a man "who owned no property and n
earth was no man's but all men's, as light and
Thus the theme is announced that is to be ta
in the volume, perhaps the greatest story Fa
Bear." This is a magnificent hunting story; i
comparable in force, if not in scope, to Moby
and for our purposes most significantly, an
great renunciation. Ike's grandfather, Buck a
Lucius Quintus Carothers McCasIin, who c
County from the Carolinas and established a larg
from Jefferson. Buck and Buddy both rema
were well along in years, when Buck was capt
champ, and both died while Ike was still a chi
he refused to take the land he had inherited but turned it over to a
cousin, Carothers McCasIin Edmonds.
In "The Bear" and a closely related story, "The Old People," Faulk-
ner tells how Ike's character was formed by his hunting experiences and
particularly by his association with Sam Fathers, son of a Chickasaw
chief and a Negro slave, the high priest, one might say, of that wor-
ship of nature into which Ike is initiated. "The Bear" also tells of Ike's
discoveries in the ledgers kept by Buck and Buddy: the revelation that
his grandfather, old Carothers McCasIin, had begotten a child upon a
slave, Eunice, and then, eighteen years later had got that child with
child, whereupon Eunice had drowned herself. And it tells how Buck
and Buddy and then Ike himself had tried to find the descendants of this
second child, Tomey 's Terrei, and give them a share of the inheritance.
But it was not merely because the McCasIin plantation had been created
by slaves, slaves towards whom he felt a double sense of shame, that
Ike renounced it. "I can't repudiate it," he says to Cass Edmonds:
It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father's and Uncle

Buddy's to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather's
28o THE GEORGIA REVIEW
to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudi

Ikkemotubbe's to sell to Grandfather for b
tion. Because it was never Ikkemotubbe's fa
Ikkemotubbe to sell to Grandfather or any
when Ikkemotubbe discovered, realized, that
on that instant it ceased ever to have been h
to father, and the man who bought it boug
He believes, as Buck and Buddy did in Th

doesn't belong to people, but people to land
in human beings, then, that he objects to
and it is perhaps not really ownership as
exploitation, which may take the form eit
sale for money. His abnegation, like Bayar
tion of a moral principle. What this mean
story, "Delta Autumn," which describes Ik
hunting trip. He and his companions have
to find hunting- we have seen the beginnin
forests in "The Bear"- and he feels that he and the wilderness will die
together. There comes to him a young woman whom Roth Edmonds
(Cass Edmonds' grandson) has deserted after she has borne his child,
and it turns out that she is descended from Tomey's Terrei. Ike thinks:
This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in
two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute
every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in
jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires' mansions on Lakeshore
Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers
crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows
man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage
and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan
and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say
which is which nor cares. . . . No wonder the ruined woods I used to
know don't cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have
destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.
Exploitation, surely, is not a problem peculiar to the South, nor does

Faulkner believe that it is. He knows that he has got out beyond the
mere question of slavery, beyond such matters as a cotton economy,
even beyond the basic issue of private property. He is asking himself
and us what attitude men should take towards the world in which they
find themselves. He has no doubt that the "conquest of nature," of
which modern, industrial, scientific man boasts, must in the end turn
into defeat. So far as I can see, Faulk

itself, but he deeply distrusts the
society seems to breed. There was
industrial revolution, and it is agri
to deal with, but he sees that indus
scope of exploitation, and he wond
his doubts are shared by more people
At the same time he does not neg
lem, and this is the theme of ano
Moses, especially a long story calle
cerned wtih Roth Edmonds, now t
tion, and Lucas Beauchamp, who is
account of the struggle between th
McCaslin, the one white and the othe
comic but more that is intensely s
cas' wife and played with their so
of racial consciousness.* The relat
then, of the greatest complexity. A
Ike McCaslin, Roth nevertheless is
bility, and he bears the white man
Lucas Beauchamp, of course, is th
the Dust (1948), and his behavior i
is what we would expect from the
The calm, intractable old man, wi
his fierce code of honor, his abiding
ably awaits the lynch mob. It is th
he almost says in words, to save h
be theirs rather than his. And Fau
see that Lucas is right but makes
in just this way.
The stratagems by which an indo
boys, one white and one Negro, sav
story, and Intruder in the Dust is
thus far written. For the purposes o
♦Faulkner has often portrayed the intimacy of a white boy and a Negro. Cf.
Bayard and Ringo in The Unvanquished, Chick and Aleck Sander in Intruder in
the Dust . In "The Fire and the Hearth" the moment when seven-year-old Roth
realizes that there is a difference between him and Henry, the child of Lucas and
Mollie, has a peculiar poignancy. "I ain't shamed of nobody," Henry says peace*
fully. "Not even me." "So," Faulkner says of Roth, "he entered his heritage. He
ate its bitter fruit."
not only because of the character of Lucas

rulity of Gavin Stevens,* who helps to sav
to his nephew about the significance of th
siderable length, not only that Southern w
the blacks but also that they must learn from
ity to wait and endure and survive." At t
whites must resist any attempt of the North
tion that is no solution- in order to defen
or beliefs or even our way of life, but simpl
are wise, he says, whites and blacks will stan
Thus they will become strong, and will
whole.
In a sense the whites and the blacks stand t
Dust : Miss Habersham, Gavin Stevens,
them descendants of old plantation families,
champ. But here they stand together, not
the people who make up the lynch mob,
Four, "on little patches which wouldn't m
or fifty pounds of lint cotton an acre eve
for a mule to pull a plow across."
Although I have said nothing about them
play a large part in the Yoknapatawpha sa
critics have pointed out, is sometimes an
example, the Snopeses, as introduced in Sarto
... a seemingly inexhaustible family which

been moving to town in driblets from a
Frenchman's Bend. Flem, the first Snopes, h
day behind the counter of a small restauran
by country folk. With this foothold and
brought his blood and legal kin household
individual, into town, and established th
money. Flem himself was presently manager
plant, and for the following few years he
the municipal government; and three year
fane astonishment and unconcealed annoya
•Stevens has figured in a number of short stories, going back to 1932. These
have been collected in Knight's Gambit (1949). Faulkner has expressed surprise
that the opinions of Stevens were assumed to be his opinions, and one does have
to remember that Stevens is, first and foremost, a character in a novel. Yet there
would be no point in giving so much space to his ideas if they were not supposed
to be important in one way or another. I am willing to grant that Stevens indulges
in an extravagance that has to be discounted, but it seems clear that his ideas are
at least ideas that Fäulkner wants to throw into circulation.
dent of the Sartoris bank. . . . The older resid
sonian homes and genteel stores and offices, lo
at first. But this has long since become somet
These Snopeses, these barbarians, unscrupulo

into positions of power, ousting the plantati
scendants, figured in several short stories Faulk
and then in 1940 he published a whole volum
not to their conquest of Jefferson but to the
Frenchman's Bend. For the Snopeses, and part
nothing much can be said. Flem is as mean a
gets a lot more fun out of his meanness. V. K
chine agent whose encounters with Flem ma
Hamlet, believes that even Flem must have hi
be something too low even for him, but he neve
Some critics have assumed that Faulkner intend
sent the poorer whites in the South, and have th
he hates this entire class. Actually, however
poor whites are Snopeses. Gavin Stevens find
the people of Beat Four, even as he is resisting
man's Bend people in The Hamlet have their
remember, too, the Bundrens in As 1 Lay Dy
incompetent in the practical affairs of life, but
by water and fire to do what they believe to be
the McCallums, who appear in many novels a
on: they are more prosperous than the Bund
old man and his six sons lead the hard, primit
are always admirable, and when Faulkner
wanted to give a picture of human dignity,
about the McCallums.
There is nothing Faulkner values more highly than human dignity,
and in his view it is not limited to any class or race, to either sex or to
any age. It is to be found in John Sartoris and Isaac McCaslin, in Lucas
Beauchamp and Dilsey, in Granny Millard and Miss Habersham, in
Bayard and Ringo and Chick and Aleck Sander, in Buddy McCallum
and Addie Bundren, in Ikkemotubbe and Sam Fathers. We have been
told for twenty years that Faulkner writes about criminals and degen-
erates, idiots and wastrels, rapists and nymphomaniacs- and so he does.
But anyone who supposed that Faulkner saw nothing in humanity but
violence and vice must have been astounded by the speech he made
accepting the Nobel Prize. "I believe," he said, "that man

endure; he will prevail." And he told the young w
room in his workshop "for anything but the old ver
the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any s
and doomed- love and honor and pity and pride and
sacrifice."
Thus Faulkner drove home the lesson that just as h
writer about vice and violence, so he is, as I said at
than a Southern writer. He dares talk, as few people
universal truths, proclaiming that it is universality
And it is universality, or at any rate something of b
significance, that he has achieved. But he has achieve
South. What he knows of the human heart he learned in the South.
And in rendering what he knows he has given a picture of the South.
It is a picture, I suppose, that has caused more than one Southerner to
flinch, but it contains much good as well as much evil, and we can be-
gin to see now that the good predominates.
In his reminiscences In the Brush, the Reverend Hamilton W. Pierson

describes a Southern Baptist Negro preacher who was endeavoring to
explain to his congregation the superiority of predestination over the free-
will doctrine of the Methodists: "De Methodiss, my bruddren, is like de
grasshopper- hoppin', all de time hoppin'- hop into heaven, hop out, hop
into heaven, hop out. But, my bruddren, de Baptiss, when he get to heaven,
he's dar! De Baptiss is like de 'possum. Hunter get after him, he climb
de tree; he shake de limb, one foot gone; he shake de limb, anudder foot
gone; he shake de limb, ebbery foot gone; but think you, my bruddren,
' possum fall? You know, my bruddren- you cotch too many- you know
'possum hang on by de tail, and de berry debbil can't shake him off!"

Faulkner's South

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Georgia Review

Faulkner's South: A Northern Interpretation

one man; he is in love with the South, says

on a fifth, not only perpetuates the virtu

Men can't stand anything. Can't even stand

And this is the theme of The Unvanquished- t

we must resume our chronological examination

♦But not by William Faulkner. The Cambridge, Mass., he describes in portray-

Briefly summarized, Absalom, Absalom! tel

♦In this, of course, be is true to the experience of northern Mississippi, which,

It was in Light in August that he first presente

There was more to Uncle Buck and Buddy than just

Although Uncle Buck plays a fairly important part in The Unvan-

It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father's and Uncle

to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudi

He believes, as Buck and Buddy did in Th

Exploitation, surely, is not a problem peculiar to the South, nor does

into defeat. So far as I can see, Faulk

not only because of the character of Lucas

... a seemingly inexhaustible family which

These Snopeses, these barbarians, unscrupulo

accepting the Nobel Prize. "I believe," he said, "that man

In his reminiscences In the Brush, the Reverend Hamilton W. Pierson

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