William Faulkner's humor in selected stories; its significance to the oral interpreter
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Authors Emerick, Annette Paula, 1922-
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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/318850 WILLIAM FAULKNER'S HUMOR IN SELECTED STORIES ITS SIGNIFICANCE TO THE ORAL INTERPRETER
by ,
Annette Paula Emerick
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF SPEECH
In Partial Fulfillm ent of the Requirements For the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
1961 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in The University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable with out special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quo tation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in their judgment the pro posed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
SIGNED;
APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR
This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:
Professor of Speech ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author desires to thank, first of all, her advisor
Alethea Smith Mattingly, Ph. D., Professor of Speech, for the
inspiration and guidance which made possible the development
of this thesis. Gratitude is also expressed to Klonda Lynn,
Ph. D ., Head of the Department of Speech, for her encourage ment and criticism during the processes of w ritin g and re v i
sion. Both George F. Sparks, Ph. D,, Associate Professor of
Speech, and Jack H. Howe, Ph. D ., Associate Professor of
Speech, contributed their cordial interest and critical com
ments. invaluable to the completion of this study were the
amendments and advice of Carl H. Ketcham, Ph. D ., Associate
Professor of English.
For her care and diligence in the preparation of the
manuscript, Mrs. Jean E. Ferber deserves praise. Finally,
loving thanks are owed to Master Jason D. Emerick, who learned
self-reliance while his mother learned Faulkner. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ...... vi
Chapter
I. BACKGROUND ...... 1
Faulkner the Man ...... 1 Faulkner the W riter...... 11 Faulkner the Innovator ...... 16 Conclusion ...... 21
II. FAULKNER THE HUMORIST...... 23
Kinds of Humor in Faulkner's Writing ..... 24 Comic Theories Applicable to Faulkner's Humor...... 27 Faulkner's Morality...... 35 Faulkner's Irony ...... 38 Concl us ion ...... 40
111. "OLD MAN"...... 43
P l o t ...... 47 Theme...... 49 Character...... 50 Language ...... 56 Suggestions for the OralInterpreter ..... 60 Conclusion ...... 68
IV. "SPOTTED HORSES" ...... 71
Plot ...... 71 Theme...... 75 Language...... 77 Character...... 79 Suggestions for the Oral Interpreter . . . . . 83 Concl us i o n ...... 87
V. "WAS"...... 89
Theme. 89 Plot and Language...... 90 Character...... 97 Suggestions for the OralIn te r p r e te r...... 99 Conclusion ...... 102 iv Chapter Page
VI. CONCLUSION ...... 105
Faulkner's Humor Examined...... 105 Three Stories Analyzed ...... 110 Further Research Indicated ...... 112 Faulkner and the Oral Interpreter...... 113
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . , ...... 116
v INTRODUCTION
Ever since William C. Faulkner received the 1950 Nobel
Prize for Literature, the European consensus has decreed him
to be “the foremost living American author; today many American
critics are inclined to agree in this judgment.Prominent
Faulkner critics Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery
quote Robert Penn Warren's evaluation of the magnitude of the
novelist's literary influence: "The study of Faulkner is the
most challenging single task in contemporary American lit e r a
ture for criticism to undertake. Here is a novelist who, in
mass of work, in scope of m aterial, in range of e ffec t, in
reportor ial accuracy and symbolic subtlety, in philosophical weight can be put beside the masters of our own past lit e r a
ture.
Understandably., c ritic s are prim arily concerned with
Faulkner's full-length novels, since they constitute the bulk
of his twenty-seven volumes of published■ - works. 2 Deserved
praise, however, is always accorded to his talent for relating
short episodes, as when William Van O'Connor, in estimating
IT Donald Heiney, Recent American Literatu re (Great Neck, New York, 1959)> p. 208'.
2. Frederick J . Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, eds., William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism (East Lansing, 1954), p.100. :
3. Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E, Foster, William Faulkner: A Critical Appraisal (Norman, Oklahoma, 1951), ~ p. 180. ~ v i Faulkner's entire contribution to the art of fiction, distin guishes this la tte r talent by asserting that “none of his contemporaries who are acclaimed as short-story writers has either his intensity or range.Such imaginative character istics as "intensity" and "range" are doubly provocative to an oral interpreter of literature, who is always searching for material thus qualified and, therefore, suited to the art of re-creation before an audience. This study is concerned, generally, with William Faulkner's role as a story-teller, and, specifically, with his humor as manifested in three of his stories.
The purpose to which this investigation is dedicated is a three-fold one: (1) to isolate the humor peculiar to
Faulkner by evaluating him as a man, a writer, an innovator, and a humorist, (2) to analyze three selected stories for their respective manifestations of his sense of humor, and (3) to expose the inherent meanings and attitudes within the stories which will enable the oral interpreter to convey more fully to his listeners the humorous Intent of the author.
Chapter ! begins the attempt to define the abstraction
“William Faulkner's Humor" by establishing him in the mind of the reader of this thesis, first, as a man, through selected and appropriate biographical data; second, as a highly indi vidual is tic w rite r, as lite ra ry criticism unanimously maintains;
Zfl Wi 11 iam Van O'Connor, Will iam Fau 1 kner (Minneapolis, 1959), p. 37.
v i i and th ird , as an innovator, through references to his plots and character, p a rticu larly to his Yoknapatawpha Saga.
: Chapter 1i enlarges the scope of the search for the definition of Faulkner's humor by analyzing him as a humorist.
From representative literary critics come varied opinions as to the type and function of Faulkner's humor; yet it is recog nized as an integral force in his writing. The chapter inves tigates (1) the kinds of humor apparent in Faulkner's works,
(2) the conventional theories of comedy applicable to his style, and (3) his comic morality, including (4) the implica tions of his use of irony. The concluding remarks differenti ate between the conventional and the unconventional humorous elements used by Faulkner, often in combination with near tragedy, as exemplified subsequently in the three selected stories.
No effort has been made in this thesis to present either a complete history of comic theory of a detailed biog raphy of William Faulkner; the historical-biographical material included is subordinate to the major purpose of this study: the analysis of Faulkner's sense of humor for the particular 5 edification of the oral interpreter. The success of the first two chapters in accomplishing more complete identification with the 11 inner man68 must of necessity lie within one's subjective judgment. It is hoped, however, that by the end of Chapter II
5l For personalized biographical account, see: William Van O' Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minneapolis, 1954). a sense of rapport with the humanity of Faulkner will have been fostered, for, as one w riter expressed himself, "William
Faulkner's is a complex personality. Literary analysis alone
is not su fficien t to an understanding of his work.
Chapters 1 I 1 through V contain synopses and analyses of the three stories: (1) "Old Man," a river-adventure from
The WiId Palms (New York, 1939); (2) the outstanding "Spotted
Horses,11 from The Hamlet (New York, 1940); and (3) "Was," from
Go Down, Moses (New York, 1942). All three are versions taken d irectly from the novels, which forms, judging by Malcolm
Cowley's opinion of the longer version of "Spotted Horses," are far superior to the condensed stories used for magazine publication.7 Each story is analyzed for the presence of four comic e ffe c ts : plot, language, character, and theme or total comment, but not necessarily In that order. At the end of each of these analyses of Faulkner's specific uses of humor, suggestions for the oral in terpreter's performance of the material are offered, stressing (1) the meanings and attitudes
inherent in the literature; (2) the degree of characterization and empathy required by the comic overtones of the writing
its e lf; and (3) the problem of the necessary aesthetic distance.
Andrew F Roll e, ed., "William Faulkner: An Inter-discipiinary Examination," Mississippi Quarterly, XI, iv (Fa11 1958), 158.
7. Malcolm Cowley, e d ., The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1959), p. 366. Since this study is oriented to the art of Interpre
tation , an explication of the term is in order. In their
recently published book entitled Interpretation; Writer,
Reader, Audience, Alethea Smith Mattingly, Professor of
Interpretation at the University of Arizona, and Wilma H.
Grimes of the University of Washington state that "interpre
tation may be defined as the full revelation of whatever expe
rience is inherent in the literature."^ Interpretation is an ally of education, as it furthers language skills and self development; it is "a doing that rests on a foundation of
knowing. Its practice requires intimate knowledge of litera
ture; active participation with the literary artist in the creation of patterns of language; and cultural id en tification
leading to improved personal and group morale,As a form of communication, "interpretation combines the ‘ doing1 with 10 social stimulation" in the oral interpreter's sharing of
the literature with his audience. Finally, as an art, inter
pretation "is a key to literature and a means for finding aesthetic fulfillm ent....an organization of experience with
identifiable form and a measure of originality....a source of 11 pleasure in informal and formal situations."
81 Wilma H.Grimes and Alethea Smith Mattingly, Interpretation: W riter, Reader, Audience (San Francisco, 1961), p. 9. '
9. Grimes and Mattingly, p. 6.
10. Grimes and Mattingly, p. 6.
11. Grimes and Mattingly, p. 11.
x Two terms Inseparable from the art of Interpretation
are ^empathy" and "aesthetic distance.n For the former term.
Grimes and Mattingly provide a dictionary def in it ion--stthe
"imaginative projection of one's own consciousness into
another being""--and further specify that “empathy involves
motor mimicry," Upon empathy-a feel inq into a character or
situation--depends the aesthetic effect of literature. "It
enables us to interpret the express ive movements of another 12 and leads to understanding and appreciation." The second
term, aesthetic distance, is "a degree of disinterestedness" maintained throughout the interpretation performance by both
the interpreter and the audience. Although the interpreter must perform with feeling and create an illusion, he "should
never give an illusion so strong as to make himself and others
forget the experience is one of art, not life. A balance of
empathy and aesthetic distance characterizes an artistic
12 interpretation performance." J ,
Finally, Chapter VI summarizes the significance of
Faulkner's humor as an important aid to the oral interpreter
in first understanding and appreciating, and then performing,
the meaningful stories, so representative of th eir author's
unique gen ius.
TT. Grimes and Mattingly, pp. 306-7»
13. Grimes and Mattingly, pp. 317-18. CHAPTER I
BACKGROUND
"How much does the best biography really tell us of a man?...Has the man ever lived who has really revealed himself?11^
At best only a partial revelation can be derived from the b rie f account of Faulkner's lif e presented in this chapter; yet we can hope for some insight into his sense of humor, so apparent within his w ritings, through the consideration of his past activities and associations, which establish him so decidedly as a unique individual. Following the biographical details, some general appraisals of his creative efforts by several representative critics will be discussed within the framework of his development from man to w rite r. As an inno vator, Faulkner's major achievement is the creation of the
Yoknapatawpha Saga; along with an explanation of this imagina tive feat are offered, as the chapter progresses, some critical comments upon it, as well as on the style and diction peculiar to Faulkner's writing.
Faulkner the Man
On September 25, 1897, in the small town of New Albany,
Mississippi, there was born to Maud and Murray Falkner, the
HT Harry Golden, "On 1 y in Amer i ca, 61 The Arizona Daily S ta r, April 24, 1961, Sec. B, p. 10.
1 2 first of four sons; the infant was named after his great- grandfather, Colonel W illiam Cuthbert Falkner, C iv il War hero, pioneer railroad-bui1der, and novelist. (The colonel’s novel The White Rose of Memphis, later reissued by Coley Taylor
in 1953» sold 160,000 copies and ran through th irty -fiv e edi- 3 t ions.)
William Faulkner’s father, Murray C. Falkner, soon moved his family the distance of thirty-five miles from New
Albany to Oxford,^ where he was employed as treasurer of the state university (later renamed the University of Mississippi).
In Faulkner’s lifetime the family was an aristocratic one, with su fficien t worldly means, but no longer the possessors of the outstanding wealth of the earlier days.
After his junior year, William did not return to high school because of a progressively heightening indifference to formal learning. World War 1 had attracted his youthful atten tion, but his short stature disqualified him from our Army Air
Corps; he enlisted, therefore, in the Royal Flying Corps in
Canada in 1918, taking his training in Toronto. Before he could be commissioned, the war ended, and he was injured, not as a battle hero, but as a daredevil pilot in a flying cele bration of the Armistice.
2% A p rin te r’ s error added the 61uif on the t i t l e page of The Marble Faun in 1924. See: O’ Connor, p. 3.
3. Robert Cough1 an, The Private World of William Faulkner (New York, 1954), p. 35. See Chapter II for excellent history of Colonel Falkner. 4. For interesting details precipitating move, see: Goughian, pp. 40-41. 3
Upon his return to Oxford, he completed one year‘ s'
work at the University, failing an English course and thereby
ending forever his formal education* For a while he was the
postmaster of the University station, but the mail became so
mixed up, with a tremendous backlog lying in a corner undeliv
ered because Faulkner preferred to read, that he was forced
to retire as a civil servant.^
It was here in Oxford, a little town without even a z public library, that Faulkner began to write. As a mischie
vous boy, he had always maintained that he would be a w riter
like his great-grandfather, and now he began to write poetry.
The townspeople were amused by his unorthodox occupation,
especially coupled, as it was, with his eccentric appearance;
he had a natural 1y aristocratic bearing, but would appear in
the town square ragged and barefoot, seemingly unaware of the
glances and taunts of his neighbors.
It is significant that Faulkner yearned to be a poet
' and that he turned to fiction only to subsidize his poetry-
writing; his love of poetry greatly influenced the syntax and
imagery of his prose. His greatest source of encouragement,
both moral and fin an cial, was a hometown lawyer, Phil Stone,
who prompted Faulkner to leave Oxford and go to New York City.
. There W illiam shared an apartment with Stark Young, formerly
"" 5. Harry R. W arfel, American Novelists of Today (New York, 1951), pp. 142-145.
6. For history of Oxford, see: Ward L. Miner, The World of W illiam Faulkner (Durham, North Carolina, 1952), p. 12. 4 a Mississippi an, who found his new tenant a job in Scribner's
Bookstore, then managed by a friend, Elizabeth Pral1. There
Faulkner wrote many stories when he should have been selling books, and fin a lly saw in print his fir s t work, a book of his poems, entitled The Marble Faun (New York, 1924), unfortunately not a success. William returned to Oxford.
In 1925 Faulkner went to New Orleans* where his former association with Elizabeth Pral1 paid him rich dividends.
Leaving her managerial duties at Scribner-s, she had married
Sherwood Anderson, and, meeting Faulkner quite by accident on a New Orleans street one day, she took him home with her to meet her husband. The two w riters, one established and the other aspiring to become so, shared many hours of walking, talking, and social imbibing. When Anderson 1 earned that his friend was w riting a book, he made a bargain with him; he would have his own publisher publish the manuscript for
Faulkner, provided that he (Anderson] did not have to read it!^
Thus it happened that Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay
(New York, 1926), appeared in p rin t shortly a fte r completion.
Once again returning to Oxford, Faulkner was forced to resort to odd jobs in order to support his writing, at one time tending the furnace at the University. In 1925 he made a b rie f trip to Europe, where he walked among the b a ttle fie ld s and burial grounds of the war in which he regretted that he had taken so l i t t l e part.
T Malcolm Cowley, e d ., Writers at Work; The 'Paris Review1 Interviews (New York, 1958),p. 135. 5
In 1929, afte r The Sound and the Fury (New York, 1929) had been published and indifferently received, he, neverthe less, married Estelle Oldham, a divorcee who had returned to her long-established Oxford family with her son and daughter.^
It was only after his marriage that Faulkner could afford at last to engage in full-time writing, as Estelle's small income from her former husband supplemented his own meager royalties.
It was at this time that "Faulkner made a point, for a while, of carrying a cane and wearing spats, serving notice on
Oxfordians of the role he had chosen for himself."^ He pre sented a strange picture, appearing at times with a Vandyke beard and a cane, at other instances barefoot with a monocle, / much to the enjoyment of the habitues of the town square.
"What the town did not see was that beneath the poses was an
ironical mind trying to understand itself as well as the com munity."^ As a result of his behavior, he earned himself the 11 dubious title of "Count-No-Count,"
At last, Sanctuary (New York, 193V) brought the
Faulkners financial success, W illiam 's sole purpose in w riting
it. The following years were easier ones, although personal sorrow came with the death in infancy of th eir f ir s t child, a
"31 For Estel le's background, see: Cough!an, p. 76.
9. Hyatt H, Waggoner, W illiam Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (Lexington, Kentucky, 1959), P* 34.
10. O'Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 19.
11. Miner, p. 212. 6 daughter named Alabama (after an aunt). Fortunately, they were later to have another little daughter, J ill, whose coming made them a family of five. William had been able to purchase one of the original old mansions on the outskirts of Oxford, which he was restoring as a hobby while watching his children grow. His mother, "Miss Maud," lived in the old family-home on the main street of town, where "Billy," as she still called him, would v is it her every day. This serenity did not last, however, due to the ebb of Faulkner's success. By 1946, when
Malcolm Cowley revived the public interest in Faulkner's writing by publishing The Portable Faulkner, all of the let ter's nineteen volumes were out of print.
This b rie f look at the author's background perhaps can do l i t t l e more at this point than make one curious about the
Faulkner of more recent days. Robert Goughian, upon whom this study relies so heavily, provides an excellent picture of the man:
William Faulkner is a small, wiry man with closely cropped iron-gray hair; ah upswept mus tache of a darker color; a thin, high-bridged aquiline nose; heavy-lidded and deeply set brown eyes in which melancholy, calculation and humor variously are reflected; and a face tanned and webbed, especially near the eyes, with the creases and lines and tiny tracings of advancing middle age and the erosion of many days spent in the open in all weathers. He is entirely self-possessed, with a manner easy, courteous, speculative, and deadly. He is a quiet man; yet when he is at ease, with his short legs outstretched and a blackened pipe in his thin Tips, and perhaps a drink at his elbow, he is lik e a somnolent cat who s t i l l in the wink of an eye could k ill a mouse. Faulkner does not look or act 1 ike what he is. He acts 1 ike a farmer who had studied Plato and looks like a 7
river gambler. In the way he 1ook§ there is some thing old-fashioned, even a r c h a i c .*2
Unfortunately, William Faulkner has suffered for years
from periodic alcoholic interludes, causing him at times to be
hospitalized for timely, life-saving injections. As one under
standing writer explains his predicament, ^he is not an alco
holic, but perhaps more accurately an alcoholic refugee, self- 1 , pursued." J Within Faulkner, who likes to wear old clothes and is seldom without his fam iliar pipe, there is something
seemingly unresolved which belies his usually relaxed exterior.
Until his drinking became a severe problem to him, he was for many years scoutmaster for the Oxford troop of Boy Scouts.
"He likes children (and old people and Negroes and Indians and animals).One Negro woman whom he dearly loved was Aunt
Caroline, an old family retainer "inherited" by him and
Estelle. When she died, she was "laid out" in the parlor of
the Faulkner home, where William himself delivered her funeral
s e r m o n . The fly -le a f of Go Down, Moses (New York, 1 Ski)
reads:
12. Cough Ian, p. 21.
13. Coughlan, p. 25.
14. Campbell and Foster, p. 19.
15. Coughlan, p. 103. 8
To Mammy
CAROLINE BARR
Mississippi 1840-1940
Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love.16
When he writes his novels and stories at his neatly ordered desk, Faulkner types rapidly for a hal f-houi— as rap idly as he is able to manage the machine; then he rests and relaxes before returning to another half-hour's race with words. As his major recreation in Oxford, he participates in
The Hunt, the annual ritual in the fall of the year. During its long treks and pitched camps, he takes the notes which have made him the outstanding nature writer of his wilderness 17 sequences. '
After Sanctuary in 1931, Faulkner answered the summons of Hollywood, purely for financial reasons. During his sev eral visits to the film capital, he worked on the scenarios of three of his own works: Sanctuary, which became The Story of Tempie Drake, starring Joan Crawford; Turnabout, a short war-story; and Intruder in the Dust, filmed in Oxford in 1949; in addition to these, he collaborated on other films, mainly for Producer Howard Hawks. Hollywood abounds with Faulkner stories, among the funniest of which is the one told about
T51 Campbel 1 and Foster, pp. 144-145.
17<■ Coughlan, pp. 96-101. 9
finding him sitting in his car in front of the studio one
day. In a trailer attached to the car was a mare in an
advanced state of pregnancy. Upon being asked where he was
going, he stated emphatically that he was going home to
Oxford. !t I don't want any mare of mine to throw a foal in
C alifo rn ia ." And home to Oxford he went, mare and a l l . ^
With his movie money, Faulkner purchased a farm,
located about sixteen miles north of Oxford; it hardly sup
ports the tenant who operates it, but Faulkner likes to believe that his property has made him self-supporting and able to continue his writing.^
On November 10, 1950, E stelle ran outside to where
her husband was liming a fie ld to te ll him that he was to go
to Stockholm to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on
December 10th. William celebrated briefly with his wife and daughter and the Negro helpers, then went back to finish
liming the field. He had remonstrated about making the trip
to accept his prize in person, but later changed his mind,
believing that Jill was old enough to see and enjoy Paris on
the way home. A few days la te r, he went on The Hunt, imbibed
a trifle too heavily, took to his bed with a steady shift of
relatives to sit with him (as with any ill person), and was
sober just in time to board the plane with his daughter.
After the publicity which followed his superb acceptance
18. Coughlan, p. 111.
19. Miner, p. 178. 10
speech, ^ Oxford final 1y realized that William was rather well
thought-of in foreign parts; although the city fathers refused
to a lte r the slogan painted on the water tower to "Home of
Old Miss and W illiam Faulkner," as was suggested by a more
progressive c itizen , they did consent to have a fis h -fry in
his honor upon his return.
In recent years Faulkner has no longer kept himself
in his customary seclusion; he has appeared on the television-
show "Omnibus," and has spoken before the Farm Bureau and at
Jill's high-school graduation. The Fable (New York, 1953) ' was actually completed in New York in his publisher's o ffice ;
shortly after that, Faulkner left for Europe to write scripts,
O 1 once again in collaboration with his friend, Howard Hawks.
About his own fame, Faulkner says l i t t l e . He did,
upon one occasion, speak up sufficiently to tell an effusive
New York publisher that 161 only sign books for my friends."
Concerning lite ra ry people, he says, "They're the dullest
people in the world. I haven't read any of th e ir books and
I don't want to talk about mine, so that leaves us nothing to
O p talk about." Faulkner claims that art is little concerned with environment, that the best job he ever had offered to
him was that of being landlord in a brothel--quiet all day
and, if desired, diversion available in the evening! "My
~ 2Q~. Goughian, pp. 135“ 137. The en tire text of the speech is reprinted.
21. Cough 1 an, pp. 138-141.
22. Coughlan, p. 120. own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a l i t t l e w h i s k e y . "^3
Perhaps those who have trouble understanding either the man or his works, despite the existence o f various in te r pretations of both, can p ro fit by the answer which Faulkner gave to an interviewer who remarked that there were people who could not understand his [fa u 1kner' s] w riting, even after read ing it over two or three times. The gentleman requested a sug gestion as to what to do in such a case. Faulkner answered 24 simply: "Read it four times."
From this b rie f account of William Faulkner's lif e it is appropriate that we now turn to the consideration of the impact of his writings upon the opinions of the critics.
Faulkner the W riter
"A goodly number o f...fash io n able reviewers And c ritic s would be embarrassed today to have their criticism s of Faulkner* made in the middle thirties, resurrected from a merciful obliv ion."^ After the publication of Sanctuary, the good people of Oxford had th eir copies wrapped before venturing out from the bookseller's into the street. From about 1936 on, however, the interpretation of Faulkner's writing became more sympa th etic with the appearance of the perceptive essays of George
Marion O'Donnell, Conrad Aiken, Warren Beck, Delmore Schwartz,
23% CowleyV Writers at Work, pp. 124-125.
24. Cowley, Writers at Work, p. 134.
25. Campbell and Foster, p. 4. 12
and Robert Penn Warren. Finally, as has been mentioned pre viously, Malcolm Cowley decisively altered the public's opin
ion of Faulkner when he "revived" him in a Portable edition
in 1SkS .^ It is significant, though, that, almost on the eve of Faulkner's acceptance of the Nobel Prize, he was s till being maligned in his own home-state. Major Frederick Sul lens,
.editor of the Jackson Daily News, wrote in the North Mississippi
Herald (Water Valley, Mississippi, November 23? 1950) that
"he [Faulkner] is a propagandist of degradation and properly belongs in the privy school of lit e r a t u r e ." ^ This acid com ment came from one of M ississippi's leading spokesmen of pop ular opinion.
Among the less stringent critics whose interest in
Faulkner was generated after 1936, the usual emphasis was placed either upon his extreme eroticism and sadism or else upon his preoccupation with the results of Southern decadence.
Concerning Faulkner's te rro ris tic tendencies, Donald Heiney, comparing Faulkner with Hemingway, explains that "while
Hemingway's cult of violence is uninhibited, almost innocent,
Faulkner's is twisted and melancholy; his mood resembles that 28 of Baudelaire or Poe." Harry R. Warfel further pursues the
la tte r comparison, asserting that "somewhat lik e ...P o e , Mr.
Faulkner pictures men and women whose minds have become
251 Cough1 an, p. 125.
27. Campbell and Foster, p. 3.
28. Heiney, p. 4. 13 unbalanced, and he emphasizes incidents which arouse te rro r, 09 horror, and grotesque humor." To return to Heiney, we find that he further limits Faulkner when he states that the let te r's "mission is to preside over the spiritual death of the old South and to study the forces Which are preparing its new 30 awakening." This is the typical literary generalization common 1y attached to Faulkner's works, limiting, according to
W illiam Van O'Connor, the author to his "Southern Myth or
‘ legend of the South'" and the c r it ic to the single, obvious , • . 31 emphasis.
O'Connor stresses three major periods in the evolution of Faulkner the writer. The early period (Soldier's Pay,
Mosqu ? toes, and some of the TheseThi rteen stories) is char acterized by writing reminiscent of latenineteenth century literature: "Keats 1 an rhetoric modified by Tennyson into something more wan, abstract, more hopelessly sad, a divine despair; . . . Swinburne's eroticism, that is more of sound, color, and mist than of flesh; and the arty elegance of . . . language, and an ennui . . ." in the second period, the one
in which O'Connor states that Faulkner "found himself" as a writer, there are "stories of terrifying violence, exacerbated humor, and grim dignity.Waggoner corroborates this opinion
W. W arfel, p. 143.
30. Heiney, p. 209.
31. O'Connor, Tangled F ire , p. ix.
32. O' Connor, Tangled F ire , pp. 160-163. 14
of the earlier stories when he writes that they "give expres
sion to the sense of outrage, the horror at the unbearable
quality of an experience that must yet be b o r n e . "33 Heiney
refers to Sartor is and the early stories of this second period as "naturalistic regionalism, slightly influenced by the style o f Sherwood Anderson and demonstrating as well a personal l y r i cal qual ity which was to become more prominent . . . t,34 This observation reminds us of Faulkner's original ambition to become a poet and of his close association with Anderson dur
ing the early throes of his first novel.
The th ird period of Faulkner’ s development, cited by
O’Connor, produced The Hamlet, fu ll of sardonic humor over the defeat of the a ris to c ra tic South, and Go Down, Hoses, in which
"hope for the human condition" is expressed in "some of
Faulkner's most brilliant and sustained rhetoric," Heiney, who makes more of an e ffo rt to classify because of the encyclo
pedic nature of his book, says that Faulkner in this stage
"is sometimes considered an agrarian naturalist in the manner of Erskine Caldwell; actually he is more meaningful and pro
found, as well as more a r tis tic a lly o rig in a l, than any of the
American naturalists with the possible exception of Hemingway."35
From this entire critical discussion of the writer, it can be
noted that any attempts to place Faulkner in a single category
33. Waggoner, p. 196.
34. Heiney, p. 209.
35. Heiney, p. 208. 15 of fiction writing seem to lead only to expanded descriptions and comparisons which te s tify to his in dividuality as a l i t e r ary art ist.
TO classify Faulkner's so-called "technique" of hand ling a narrative is equally difficult. Hoffman and Vickery cite the authority of Robert Penn Warren, who states that
Faulkner employs three narrative devices: (1) the impersonal method of Sanctuary with its tight plot and “objective pres entation of character"; (2) the dramatic "subjective refer ence of character" in As 1 Lay Dying and The Sound and the
Fury, in which the author does not intrude, but "each char acter unfolds in his own language or flow of being . . and (3) the episodic quality of "Was" and the two stories of
The Wild Pal ms--the "sense of a voice" presenting the narra tiv e . Even so, however, Warren goes on to stress that "the thematic rather than the narrative emphasis is the basic p rin c ip le ."-^ , In agreement with Warren is Conrad Aiken, d is tinguished poet and critic, who writes that "like the great predecessor whom at least in this regard he so oddly resembles,
Hr. Faulkner could say with Henry James that it is practically impossible to make any real distinction between theme and form."37 Faulkner himself pointed out his own primary inter est in theme when he told Jean Stein early in 1956 that
' 3"6• Robert Penn Warren, "William Faulkner," The New Repub 1ic , (August 12, 19^6), 176-180. Reprinted in Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 93™99. 37. Conrad Aiken, "William Faulkner: The Novel as Form," The A tlantic Monthly (November 1939), pp. 650-654. Reprinted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 143. 16
"the thesis I'm always hammering at: that man is indestruct
ible because of his simple w ill to freedom" was the essence of h is wr i t i ng . ^
The many literary attempts to define Faulkner's style are briefly summarized by Robert Goughian, who concurs in the critical opinion that "Faulkner's style and content have been the.subject of endless scholarly analysis. The best as well as the shortest analysis may well be that contained in an interchange between him and his cousin Sally Hurry Williams.
She asked, 'B ill, when you write those things, are you drink- QQ ing?1 and he answered, 'Not always.'"
Faulkner the Innovator
"With any writer there exists a subtle relationship between the world from which he derives his being and suste nance and the world he creates in his im agination."^ While
Faulkner loitered in the town square of Oxford, moodily taking in all that was going on, seemingly oblivious to the comings- and-goings in the heart of the community, he was assimilating the raw material for his future innovations on the art of prose creation. Malcolm Cowley in his introduction to The Portable
Faulkner wr i tes: "There in Oxford, Faulkner performed a labor of imagination that has not been equaled in our time, and a double labor: first, to invent a Mississippi county that was
3B1 C ow ley]Writers at Work, p. 126.
39. Cough 1 an, p. 125.
40. Miner, p. 15. 17 lik e a mythical kingdom, but was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha
County stand as a parable or legend o f a ll the Deep South.
Faulkner himself offered an explanation of the birth of his
"kingdom8*:
Beginning with Sartor ? s I discovered that my own l i t t l e postage stamp of native soil was worth w riting about and that I would never liv e long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time too. The fact that I have moved my characters around in time successfully, at least in my own estimation, proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was, only is.42
Faulkner's statement concerning time, an innovation in itself, is referred to by Alfred Kazin as "Faulkner's insistence on embracing a ll ac tu a lity in the moment . . .
Faulkner's creation of the town of Jefferson in
Yoknapatawpha County, modeled a fte r h is own Oxford in Lafayette
County [accent on second syllable] has been compared by both
Cowley and Coughlan to Balzac's Corned?e Humaine. Both w riters note, however, that there is a difference: whereas Balzac
CT" Cowley, p. 1.
42. Cowley, Writers at Work, p. 141.
43. Alfred Kazin, "Faulkner's Vision of Human Integrity," The Harvard Advocate, 135 (November 1951), 8-9. Referred to in Waggoner, p. 195. 18 wrote an inspired series of incidents, Faulkner created cycles, dominated by three fami1ies--the Sartorises, the Compsons, and the Snopeses--al1 rooted sooner or later in the soil of
Yoknapatawpha County, “as if each new book was a chord or segment of a total situation always existing in the author's mind.11 in Faulkner's unique case, the stories are sequels to the novels, and v ice versa.^ Whereas Balzac's is an inter weaving of related scenes, "Faulkner's work is . . . a col 1 age, an assembling of many diverse and often seemingly unrelated elements, put together by intuition as well as deliberate intent, until almost by accident the separate parts have merged into a meaningful unity. . . . It has been a method eclectic, pragmatic, intensely private, and essentially p o e t i c . "^5 ( | t is interesting to note the mention of "poetic" or "ly ric a l" in Faulkner criticism.)
For a better understanding of Faulkner's writing,
Ward L. Miner insists that the reader must be cognizant of three stages of meaning: (1) the actual history of Oxford and
Lafayette County; (2) the history of Yoknapatawpha County as
"reflected and implied" in the novels and stories; and (3) the actual fiction itself. Miner believes that the creation of
Yoknapatawpha is merely a background for Faulkner's genius, that he w rites, not about it, but from it. "The creation and
44. Cowlev. Portable, pp. 6-7
45. Cough 1 an, pp. 80-81. use jTtalics>mine| of such a Saga is one of the great imagi- hc native feats of the twentieth century novel.11
George Marion O'Donnell, quoted in Hoffman and Vickery calls Faulkner 81 an original craftsman, making his own solu tions to his problems of form, often blundering, but occasion ally striking upon an effect that no amount of studious crafts manship could achieve."^ Also commenting upon form as almost an intangible with Faulkner, Waggoner writes that "structure in Faulkner's works is the product of a created, not an assumed, truth. But the creation is undertaken for the pur pose of discovery, and the building blocks used in the created structure are given. . . . Yoknapatawpha has served him well, permitting him to record and create at once.
Critics find the characters of Faulkner's novels and stories anything but stereotyped. William Van O' Connor com pares Faulkner with Shakespeare in this respect: "Faulkner's world is like a Shakespearean play: rich in characters who exist vividly not only in relation to a central set of char a c te r s b u t a ls o in t h e i r own terms.Heiney makes the fur ther comment that "although Faulkner creates the same char acters over and over, he seldom repeats his stories; he finds
46. Miner, p. 11$. Miner gives an excellent history of Lafayette County.
47. Hoffman and Vickery, p. 62. Reprint of O'Donnell essay.
48. Waggoner, p. 261.
49. O' Connor, Tanqled F? re, p. 152. 20
a new situation, plot, or structure for each n o v e l . "50 j 0 accomplish this, to involve the established characters suc cessfully in a multiplicity of situations, each with its attendant goal, requires imaginative planning, and masterful handling. Miner contributes to the discussion of the charac ters the astute comment that “as symbols the characters, and even more important the actions of the characters, exist not only as literary symbols for the structure of the entity of each book or short story, but they exist as symbols of the strands in the en tire Yoknapatawpha S a g a . "51
In the use of language, as well as in plot and char acter, Faulkner is an individual. 0‘Connor refers to Faulkner1s prose as his "own ch aracteristic idiom, ta u t, connotative, richly rhetorical, and hypnotic.Consistently these qual itie s make themselves fe lt in Faulkner's w riting: the ta u t ness in his scenes of conflict, the connotation of his wealth of images, the full rhetoric of his dialogue and exposition, and the hypnotism of the total e ffe c t. The Oxford (England) scholar, W il1iam Lindsay Renwick, in discussing comicepic in prose, refers to a prose style which "plants us firm ly down
. . . in the ordinary w orld.Faulkner's prose "plants us
" 50l Heihey, p. 210.
51. Miner, p. 126.
52. O' C onnor, T a n g le d F i r e , p. 161.
53. William Lindsay Renwick, "Comic Epic in Prose," Essays and Studies, XXXI I (Oxford, 1946), 40-43. 21
firm ly down” in his own world, which, however, is far removed
from the "ordinary."
Conclusion
In the writing of William Faulkner, theme takes preced ence in importance and emphasis over narrative. Because of the universality of the author's favorite theme, or total com ment --man 1s w ill to freedom and fu lfillm e n t of individual
responsibi1ity--Faulkner cannot be limited to being merely a wr iter of the "Southern Myth,61 bemoaning the decay of the
South.
Appraising Faulkner as a writer. O' Connor stresses his
three periods: (1) a prose reminiscent of the nineteenth century, (2) naturalistic regionalism, and (3) agrarian natu
ralism with new hope for mankind. Examining his style, Robert
Penn Warren discovered in Faulkner's works three narrative techniques: (1) the impersonal or objective, (2) the dramatic or subjective-reference, and (3) the episodic or ""sense of a vo ice," comparable to third-person-omniscient.
As an innovator, Faulkner created the Yoknapatawpha
Saga, of which he is self-admittedly the God, giving life to
its people and moving them about in family cycles in a new con cept of T ime--""al 1 actual ity in a m o m e n t.M in e r suggests
that, in order to understand Faulkner, one must become aware of three separate stages of meaning: (1) the actual history of Yoknapatawpha County (Lafayette County, in r e a lity ),
(2) the history as reflected in the stories, and (3) the 22
fiction itself. An interesting concept is that Faulkner writes from the Saga he created, not about it.
Regarding the plots of Faulkner's stories and novels,
Waggoner comments that form is an intangible; as for the
characters, and their actions as well, they are symbols with
abstract meanings related to the theme. Finally, the prose
style of Faulkner is unique and varied, with both rhythm and
tension and a realism that "plants us firm ly down" in what
ever world he desires us to enter.
Highly individualistic in personality, with a style which defies classification, immersed in subject-matter rooted
in the land that nurtured him and his ancestors before him,
W illiam Faulkner could hardly be expected to harbor a conven
tionalized sense of humor. CHAPTER M
FAULKNER THE HUMORIST
As early as 1926, in an introduction written for
William Sprat lin g's Sherwood Anderson and Other Creoles (New
York, 1926), William Faulkner expressed a w ell-defined opinion on the place of humor in literature: “We have one priceless universal t r a it , we Americans. That tr a it is our humor. What 1 a pity it is that it is not more prevalent in our a rt," Mary
Cooper Robb, in her estimation of Faulkner's contribution to the American novel, comments that "c ritic s have noticed that
Faulkner is humorous but, to their minds, dubiously so.
The truth of her observation is corroborated by the dearth of significant research into the depth of the w rite r's use of humor throughout his novels and stories. Robb goes on to
insist that "it is important to notice humor in his work, how ever, since it has a forceful part to play in the development of his idea of the truths of the human heart. His characters never set out to be funny. In subsequent chapters, the
1. From John Arthos, "Ritual and Humor in the Writing of William Faulkner," Accent (Autumn 1948), pp. 17“30. Reprinted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 106.
2. Mary Cooper Robb, W illiam Faulkner: An Estimate of His Contribution to the American Novel (Pittsburgh, 1957), p. 29.
3. Robb, p. 31.
23 24 significance of this statement regarding character will be investigated.
Kinds of Humor in Faulkner's Writing
Ward L. Miner states that there are two influences noticeable in Faulkner's works: (1) his disillusioned romanti cism, and (2) the impact of the “tall tales'® of early South western humor. Explaining "the 'tall tale' tradition of the fro n tie r," W illi am Van O’ Connor says that "in idiom the ta ll tale is invariably folksy and ungrammatical, and the manner of narration includes both understatement and wild exaggeration."^
For fu lle r comprehension of Faulkner's use of fro n tier humor, one must become aware of the underlying fo lk comedy, o rig in a lly in the medieval or fo lk -ta le pattern, but now cloaked in the technique of a modern writer.^ Malcolm Cowley recognizes this same characteristic when he states that in the author's later books "there is a quality not exactly new to Faulknei— it had appeared already in passages of Sartor is and Sanctuary- - but now much stronger and no longer overshadowed by violence and horror. It is a sort of homely and sober-sided frontier humor that is seldom achieved in contemporary w riting (except by Erskine Caldwell, another Southerner)."^, O'Connor also noted that Faulkner's interest in the tall tale was evidently
41 O'Connor, William Faulkner, p. 33=
5= Miner, pp. 117-122.
6. Cowley, Portable, pp. 21-22. 25 not a new one, as that narrative style had been f ir s t employed by Faulkner in Mosqu i toes in 1927.^
Since Mark Twain can be validly designated the great est American proponent of fro n tier humor, it would be a simple maneuver to rank Faulkner somewhere in the same general cate gory. However, Robert Penn Warren insists that there is a difference between the humor of Mark Twain and that of William
Faulkner. "Humor in Faulkner's work is never exploited for its own sake. It is regularly used as an index, as a.lead, to other effects. . . . His humor is but one perspective on the material and it is never a final perspective."^ Campbell and
Foster also specify a major difference between Mark Twain and
Faulkner, asserting that in Mark Twain there is "steady prog ress from boisterous, good-natured humor in his early work to b itte r s a tiric a l humor and cosmic pessimism in his later work; in Faulkner this gamut may be run within the same passage when the dramatic situation has become intense enough.Thus we see that a simple comparison between Mark Twain and Faulkner is not possible, that the latter writer's use of humor has within it a complexity requiring more exacting analysis.
Recognizing that "humor appears as an influential norm in all of his major works except Absalom, Absalom!," Campbell and Foster acknowledge the presence not only of the "native
J~. O' Connor, Tangled Fire, p. 22.
8. Quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 93.
9. Campbell and Foster, p. 160. 26
Southern humor,11 but also of what they term "surrealistic" humoi— harsh, mocking, and sadistic. The latter arises from the combination of two extremely different categories, such as Faulkner's idiot-cow infatuation. This latter type func tions within Faulkner's fiction not only in a structural way by adding to the plot, but also in an atmospheric capacity by diffusing the tragedy. The surrealistic humor adds a perverse quality, an irony that is cruel, making even slapstick situa tions grim with tragic foreboding, and releasing affective ele ments which arouse contradictory emotions.^ A humor made negative by the presence of perversity--a distorted humoi— is elaborated upon by Robert Penn Warren: “The distortions of humor and the distortions of horror in Faulkner's work are closely akin and frequently, in a given instance, can scarcely be disentangled."^ John Arthos defends Faulkner's unique sort of comi-tragedy, maintaining that "to obscure humor is not to kill it, and in much of Faulkner's writing one sees the con- 12 tinuing struggle for comedy."
In addition to the frontier and surrealistic humor, there is an indication within Faulkner's writing of what Robert
Penn Warren terms "Dickensian" humor, with its loquacious, polite satire of the social scene present in both dialogue and character, as in the "three madams" party-scene in Sanctuary.
"" 10. Campbell and Foster, p. 36.
11. Quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 93.
12. Quoted in Hoffman and Vickery, p. 107. 27
He also refers to a ^subdued humor, sometimes shading into
pathos, in the treatment of some of the Negro characters and 1 2 in their dialogue.61 J From this discussion of Faulkner as a
humorist, it is apparent that, just as it was impossible to
classify him as a writer, it is unfeasible to attempt to con
tain in a simple definition the humorous sense he reveals in
his writing. Mary Cooper Robb thoughtfully analyzes the
importance of Faulkner's sense of humor:
The humor does not lie in the words themselves, but in the characters and the situations in which they are involved.14 ,
There is a propriety, a lack of exaggeration in Faulkner's use of humor that many readers find significant to.their, full understanding of the characters and th eir stories. it adds a dimen sion and helps to clarify what the same charac ters may do in a more serious situation.'5
Comic Theory Applicable to Faulkner's Humor
After appraising comic theory it is evident that most
theorists are concerned with the phenomenon of laughter rather
than with the essence of humor; the emphasis is placed upon
our reaction to the ludicrous. In considering the humor of
W illiam Faulkner, one must be w illin g to begin with the pre mise that laughter is not always the ultim ate reaction to
humor. AHardyce Hi coll concurs in this opinion, stating in
The Theory of Drama that "humour is not the same as the
13. Hoffman and Vickery, p. 93.
14. Robb, p. 29.
15. Robb, p. 32. 28 ludicrous,* humour in some of its forms barely makes us smile.
Back in 1751 Samuel Johnson suggested that "definitions are hazardous" in explaining comedy;^ nevertheless, the neces sity of understanding the medium prompts writers to make a continual effort, as Willard Smith did in The Nature of Comedy:
Far from being an hereditary endowment or the common property of humanity, a sense of humor is the rare fru it of the cultivation of laughter in the individual. It implies . . . a philosophy of life , a mental habit of viewing things as units, with a reflectiveness detached from self. Laugh ter begins as utter egoism; the baby's lips curve into a smile because its stomach is replete with food. Laughter ends in humor, with a negation of self or, rather, an escape from the point of view of self. . . . The Laughter of humor is essen tia lly sympathetic. It is a laughter freed from superiority. The humorist, is that fortunate indi vidual, who by self-cultivation and by the devel opment of his individuality, has substituted for the group laughter of social judgments and the personal laughter of self-esteem, a gentler laugh ter that springs from objective reflection upon the life-process as a whole. . . . Humor makes no ironclad categories of jest and earnest. It sees potentialities of sympathetic laughter in the,, human conduct of all people. . , . And as humor comes late into the life of a ripened individual, so it came late into the life of the world; it is a creation of our modern civilization which has had time and energy le ft over from the processes of living, to,devote to reflection and an emergence from self.
ilC A1 1 ardyce N icol 1 , The Theory of Drama (New York, 1931), p. 198.
17. Samuel Johnson, "The D iffic u lty of Defining Comedy," The Rambler, III (1794), 112; reprinted in John J. Enck, Elizabeth T. Porter, and Alvin Whitley, eds., The Comic in Theory & Practice (New York, I960), p. 10.
18. W illard Smith, The Nature of Comedy (Boston, 1930), pp. 144-5. ' 29
The significan t line in the above passage is: "Humor makes
no ironclad categories of jest and earnest." Especially in
the works of Faulkner is it important to keep this observation
in mind.
Even in the days before Plato and Aristotle, who agreed that the source of the ridiculous was nature's deform- jtie s --th e slighter ones, not p a rticu larly harmful to others-- the emotion of laughter was regarded as a mixed pleasure,
"used as a means of understanding serious things, as Socrates used it, or as a weapon against vice and folly.Thus we see that even in these early times there was some association made between comedy and human vices, and laughter was occa sioned by the imperfect--a paradox, as "we derive pleasure 20 from what might lo gically cause displeasure." Croce in the
Aesthetic maintained that comedy afforded a "very slight dis pleasure" involving "characteristics which are applicable, not only to the comic, but to every sp iritual process. . . . And who will ever determine logically the dividing line between
the comic and the non-comic, between smiles and laughter, between smiling and gravity; who will cut into clearly divided 21 parts that ever-varying continuity into which life melts?"
f9. Mary Amelia Grant, The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable (Madison, Wisconsin, 132% T, ppT 24-5.
20. Samuel Swayze Seward^ The Paradox of the Ludicrous (Stanford, California, 1930), p. 2.
21. Lane Copper, An A ristotelian Theory of Comedy (Oxford, 1924), p. 79. 30
In De Oratore Cicero stated:
There Is no kind of wit, In which severe and serious things may not be derived from the sub ject. . . . And the objects that are most easily played upon are those that deserve neither great detestation nor the greatest compassion, v . » Hence it happens that the whole subject of the ridiculous lies in the moral vices of men who are neither beloved nor miserable, nor deserving to be dragged to punishment for th eir c r i m e s . 22
And Q uintilian sums up the argument by saying that "laughter is not habitually produced by a single cause; for not merely witty and agreeable utterances and actions are laughed at, but stupid, angry, and timid ones as well, and hence the ludi crous has no fixed origin. . . »r,^3 Thus we see that the ancients might not have been dismayed, as many modern c ritic s have seemed to be, at Faulkner's use of humor intermingled with vice and tragedy.
William Hazlltt wrote: "Man is the only animal that > ; laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be." The theory of the incongruous can certain!y be a p p lie d to the creations of Faulkner, bringing to light what Hazlitt chooses to call the "truth of absurdity to
itself. . . Henry Fielding provides incongruity with a
22l Cooper, p. 88.
23. Cooper, p. 93-
24. Enck, Forter, and Whitley, p. 16.
25. Enck, p: 20. 31 strong ally when he advocates that “the only source of the oz: true Ridiculous . . . is affectation.11 As w ill be shown in the analyses of the stories, Faulkner relies upon these two theories in the humorous presentation of both plot and char acter, as well as upon the “automat ism11 concept of Bergson and the “superiority11 theory of Baudelaire. Bergson believed that man is most comic when his natural mannerisms or sponta neous reactions make him machine-like, while Baudelaire main tained that a highly amused individual feels within himself a realization of his own superiority and of man's triumph over nature.
According to Lane Cooper, George Meredith's Essay on
Comedy and the Uses of the Comic S pirit “ renders an undoubted service in laying stress upon the emotional or mental effect of a comedy as the criterion by which the comedy is to be
j u d g e d . what Meredith calls “the humour of the mind" is described by him as the sort of laughter that is:
. . . of the order of the smile, finely tem pered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its com mon aspect is one of unsolicitous observation. . . . Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hood winked, given to run riot in idolatries, d rift ing into vanities, congregating in absurdities,
W. Enck, p. 8.
27. Lane Cooper, ed., An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (New York, 1918), p. 18. ~ 32
planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their pro fessions, and violate the unwritten but per ceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fa ir ju stice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individuality, or in the bulk”-the S p irit overhead w ill look humanely malign and cast an oblique lig h t on them, followed by volleys of silvery laugh te r. That is the Comic S p i r i t . 28
The humor of William Faulkner seems to be this deeper kind of judgment upon his characters of Yoknapatawpha County.
He has created their human shortcomings and embroiled them
in situations of impasse, always with a watchful eye and the knowledge that they are but human beings in a struggle with
lif e . Stephen Leacock calls this kind of humor one on a
"higher plane"--
This is seen when the contrasts and incon gruities and m isfits upon which humor rests are those of life itself. . . . In retrospect all our little activities are but as nothing, all that we do has in it a touch of the pathetic, and even our sins and wickedness and crime are easily pardoned in the realization of their futility. , . . In this divine retrospect humor and pathos become one, and the eyes of laughter brim with t e a r s . 29
Faulkner's villains and victims seem to walk in such a "divine
retrospect.u Max Eastman, too, feels that even the unpleas
antness in some humor is not derisive, but close to pain and,
therefore, in need of comic release.
Our lives in a ll departments consist so largely of the cultivation of insubstantial
281 Enek, Forter, and Whitley, pp. 36-7.
29, Stephen Leacock, Humor; its Theory and Technique (New Y o rk , 1935), pp. 124-5. 33
pretenses and amenities, the feeding of thin glamours--of posturing and pretending, some times honorably, sometimes with self-contempt-- that almost any perfectly candid speech about anything contains an element of release. Every thing that we deeply know and are has need of the play-1icense to get out at times and get a breath of a ir.30
Concerning this release or " r e lie f11 afforded by the e ffec tive employment of humor, Wilma H. Grimes, in relating the "mirth experience" to public speaking, adds, in addition, the fact that "the practice of modern humorists suggests that the attitude of superiority . . . should be preserved" in the 31 audience (or in the reader, as the case may be). In reading
Faulkner's works, it is essential to maintain su fficien t supe
riority to enable one to judge both characters and situations against some standard of human behavior, for, as Seward claims,
"humor is.. . critical activity. It imposes a certain order 32 on the world, and discriminates the relative value of things."
The "superiority theory" must be modified for an appreciation of true humor. The reader of Faulkner must not be alienated
from empathic understanding; yet he must achieve the aesthetic distance essential to critical judgment. (The terms "empathy" and "aesthetic distance" w ill be discussed under Suggestions
for the Oral Interpreter in Chapter III.)
30l Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York, 1937), p. 272. '
31. Wilma H. Grimes, "The Mirth Experience in Public Address," Speech Monographs, XXII, 5 (November, 1955), 250.
32. Seward, p. 140. ! 34
Before leaving the discussion of comic theory, the
idea of “Black Bile," cited by Campbell and Foster in their treatment of s u rre a lis tic humor, should be mentioned. Black
Bile is the name for a sadistic type of humor called "the
laughter of the unconscious-~a disagreeable, cruel l a u g h t e r , "^3
comparable to Robert Penn Warren's term "distorted h u m o r . "^4
Many readers would be inclined, perhaps, to label much, or maybe a ll , of Faulkner's humor as this la tte r type. However, upon closer observation, and after repeated readings, this does not appear to be a valid q u alificatio n . Even the cruelty of FIem Snopes in The Hamlet does not seem to be designed for sadistic purposes. (More w ill be said about Black Bile in the criticism of "Spotted Horses.")
Although sadism is a term to be avoided in seeking to understand William Faulkner's humor, it cannot be denied that much of his humor is p ain fu l. Max Eastman offers an explana
tion for this seeming paradox: "Humor is a final emotion lik e breaking out into tears. A thing gets so bad and you feel so
terrible that at last you go to pieces and it's funny. Laugh
ter does just what tears do for y o u . "35 ne stresses that,
taken objectively, the humorous and the painful are one and
the same. S im ilarly, Lord Byron wrote: " If 1 laugh at any
33. Campbel1 and Foster, p. 95; paraphrased from Herbert Muller, "Surrealism, A Dissenting Opinion," in New Directions, 1940, ed. by James Laughlin.
34. Supra, p. 26.
35- Eastman, p. 343. 35 mortal thing, *T i s that I may not weep.11 And, in what seems a fittin g close to this discussion, Mark Twain, to whom
Faulkner is so often compared, said that "everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor its e lf is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in h e a v e n . "^6
Faulkner's Morality
The paradoxical seriousness of Faulkner's comedy, as discussed above, is perceived by Hyatt H. Waggoner, who senses an "ultimate vision and sensibility" within Faulkner's humor which fuses the comic stories with the tragic ones— "an aware ness of man's situation as precarious."
Man's pretensions and his fo lly are amusing not so much because he offends against manners and mores and good sense as because he ignores or mis conceives his position in nature. Man's societies are always passing away . . . but the truths of his relation to ultimate reality remain constant. When he is ignorant of, or misconceives, these truths the result is tragic or comic, depending on our mood.
Waggoner sums up his analysis with the provocative statement that "Faulkner's comedy, even with a ll his sharp awareness of social realities, is not in the last analysis social comedy but religious comedy."^7 This brings us to a consideration of the deeper implications within Faulkner's humor— a depth which cannot be ignored in the search for an estimate of Faulkner's sense of the humorous.
Brooks and Warren, in Understanding Fiction (New York, ig43), insist that "if the story is to be justified, there must
3FI Eastrnan, pp. 330-1. 37. Waggoner, p. 211. 36
be what may be called a moral significance, a meaning in moral qq terms--not merely psychological terms." Miner calls Faulkner
"a moralist lamenting the moral breakdown he finds, in much
the same manner that Jeremiah laments the moral breakdown of
I s r a e l ^"39 thus agreeing with Waggoner's d e fin itio n of
Faulkner's comedy as being religious in nature. Pursuing his
thesis, Miner feels that Faulkner is not so much the recorder of the history of his Yoknapatawpha County as he is the c r it ic of that history, that he is “constanti.y seeking new vantage
points from which to judge it. And, of course, the moment
one proceeds to judge, standards are implied. Miner has ana
lyzed what he believds to be Faulkner's standards, finding
them to be, not p o litic a l, social, or economic, but moral.
Whether William Faulkner is a Christian has been con
sidered by critics a moot question. At least two writers,
William Van O'Connor and Irving Howe, suggest that Faulkner, while not an orthodox Christian, finds his beliefs within the
framework of Christian doctrine.Faulkner himself seems to
have settled the question: No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individ ual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants him to be, if he followed his nature
FBI Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Warren, p. 410.
39. Miner, p. 143.
40. Miner, pp. 131-2.
41. O'Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 53. Also see: Irving Howe, Faulkner: A C ritica l Study [New York, 1952), p. 103. 37
only. Whatever its symbol--cross or crescent or whatever--that symbol is man1s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various alle gories are the charts against which he measures himself and 1 earns to know what he is. It can not teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of h o p e . ^2
It is significan t that an important source of imagery for
Faulkner has been the Bible, particularly in The Sound and the
Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August.
Since Faulkner has often been a misunderstood w riter, it is gratifying that some of the leading critics of his works do recognize a core of positivism within both his personal and literary nature. 01 Connor boldly states his position:
There is, 1 believe, a center in Faulkner that is constant, a faith in man as a being capable of selflessness, endurance, love, and honor. These virtues transcend class and are to be found in different places and at d if ferent periods. Opportunism and extreme s e lf- righteousness, which he appears to despise almost equally, are the counterparts of the virtues; if they seem to be more common in the present than in the past, certainly they are not absent from the past, and it is pos sible that the righteousness that gives rise to persecution was even more common in the past.44
Thus O'Connor not only perceives Faulkner's inherent belief in man but also supports the author/s criticism of man's vices.
42. Cowley, Writers at Work, p. 132.
43. Miner, p: 137.
44. O'Connor, Tangled F ire , p. x i . 38
Miner also understands Faulkner's "positive answer to his own negative despair" when he states that to Faulkner man's high est goal is individual responsibility.^ Man's need to ful fill his own sense of responsibility is directly involved with his love of the land, his need for strong roots, and his loy alty to his own particular locality.^ Cough 1 an extends this
idea by asserting that "the land itself, the living earth, is hero, God, and protagonist in Faulkner's work as a whole.
Cowley notes that Nathaniel Hawthorne fe lt much the same way about New England as Faulkner feels about the South; the moral hQ fables of their respective regions live in their hearts.
Faulkner's discovery of the universality which lies within provincialism has led him to employ his creativity in strength ening the moral truths-- freedom, responsibility, loyalty--by which men set their highest standards. That Faulkner's people often fa ll short of these moral standards does not negate their existence.
Faulkner's Irony
Closely allied to Faulkner's underlying morality is his use of irony in driving home to his readers the discrep ancies between re a lity and the ideal. Faulkner uses irony in his w riting in the sense in which Max Eastman defines the
45. Miner, p. 153.
46. Miner, p. 146.
47. Cough 1 an, p. 91.
48. Cowley, Portable, p. 23. 39 word: rrSly and gradual humor of apprehending the understated.”
Eastman differentiates between irony and humorous sarcasm, stressing the ironic quality of understatement--meaning more than what is actually said. On the other hand, there is the irony of fate, when circumstances contrive to work themselves out in a manner both inappropriate and contrary to the normal expectations.^ jn his erudite treatment of irony in The Dry
Mock, Alan Reynolds Thompson establishes the difference between irony and comedy: "Irony involves the contrast of comedy but not the playfulness; its effect is the emotional discord we feel when something is both funny and painful. Without the discord a situation ironic in form is not ironic in effect.
. . . Hence . . . only those situations are considered ironic
which both hurt and amuse at one and the same t i m e . "50
Faulkner's irony, both verbal and situational, has this dis cordant effect upon the emotions, and only the cognizance of the author's ironic attitude w ill save the readers from over empathizing and being overwhelmed by what seems to many merely sheer terroristic tragedy. It is the awareness of the irony which lessens the identification with character and situation, thereby preserving aesthetic distance and turning the paradox of humor-tragedy into a "poignant" feeling.^ John Arthos,
Eastm an, pp. 204-209.
50. Alan Reynolds Thompson, The Dry Mock (Berkeley, California, 1948), p. 11.
51. Calvin King Quayle, Humor in Tragedy (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dept, of Drama, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1958), p. 45. 40
quoted by Hoffman and Vickery, sums up Faulkner's ironic
message:
As it is, each long work , . » is a mixture of fine or wild rhetoric and religiously passionate investigations into the meaning of things, together with the brightest kind of comic comment. The passionate seeker after truth is the dominant per sonality in every work. But occasionally the comic w riter holds his ground, at one time to mock, at another to illuminate the story with something more lik e reason than religion. Then the horrible stories seem like jokes, or even like comedies.52
As a fitting example of both understatement and comic pathos,
a statement made by Faulkner in an interview seems to be the
essence of his brand of irony: "You know that if I were re in
carnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him
or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered
or in danger, and he can eat a n y t h i n g . "53
Conclus ion
Although W illiam Faulkner has stated that humor, is our
most valuable American t r a it , and humor underlies most of his writing, some critics think him dubiously comic.
Since his techniques of humor range from the irony of
disillusioned romanticism to the understatement and exaggera
tion of the "tall tales," it is impossible to classify his
sense of humor. He d iffe rs from Twain in his a b ility to com
press the gamut of emotion into a Scene or a lin e, as the case
may be. Robert Penn Warren, and also Campbell and Foster,
52. Hoffman and Vickery, p. 118.
53. Cowley, Writers at Work, p. 129. 41 accuse him of employing a harsh, surrealistic, tedistorted11 humor at times. In other instances, there is in his writing a Dickensian "polite satire."
Most significant are the combined statements of Warren and Robb that Faulkner's humor is not exploited for its own sake, that his characters do not deliberately start out to be comic; instead they help to develop the universal truths.
Practically any of the prominent theories of comedy could be modified to apply to Faulkner's works: the ancients' connection of vice and displeasure to comedy; H azlitt's theory of incongruity; Fielding's affectation as the main source of the ludicrous; Meredith's humor of the mind; Baudelaire's con cept of superiority; Leacock's"divine retrospect"; Eastman1s
"Black Bile." However, it is well to remember that "comedy is so rich and various that it is trivial to classify it descrip tively as Aristotle, Freud, and Bergson do. The point is to probe its depths, not to chop it into portions."^
It is true that much of Faulkner's humor is painful, but then many humorists agree that.the painful and the humorous are, if not one and the same, then at least closely related.
Several critics feel that Faulkner's humor is, in the main, religious, that he deplores the moral breakdown occasioned by man's being out of tune with nature, and that he is the ju d i cial c ritic of the Yoknapatawpha Saga. Faulkner's own view.of.
54. AlbertSpaulding Cook, The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean (Cambridge, Massachusetts! 1949), p. 31. 42
C hristianity is a broad one; his chief stress is upon man1s individual duty in this life. O'Connor finds within Faulkner's later works a "core of positivism"--a belief in man and his need for individual responsibility, which is rooted in his love of the land.
Closely allied to his morality is Faulkner's irony, which hurts and amuses at the same time, causing an emotional impact of poignancy. in his w ritin g, Faulkner employs irony of situation, language, and character. Regarding the last,
John Arthos calls Faulkner's fictional characters "seekers after truth," testifying to the morality and the universality of the author's themes and action.
in Chapters 1 and II of this study, Faulkner has been presented as man, writer, innovator, and, finally, as humorist.
William Faulkner is a man honored throughout the world--quiet and moody, yet with an earthy sense of humor; a fflic te d by a thirst born of some ravaging, inner unrest; blessed with a talent which he spends upon his own self-created world, look ing down upon it with both the love and wrath of a beneficent father, smiling ironically.
As Irving Howe suggests, "of all the literary modes, humor is notoriously the most indifferent to critical inspec tion, and in the end there is little to do but point and appreciate."55 The following three chapters will endeavor to do this.
55. Howe, p. 185. CHAPTER I I I
“OLD MAN"
William Faulkner's humor is elusive and varied because it is so closely interwoven with the often-trag i c themes of his stories. For example, in "That Evening Sun, 11 from These
Thirteen (New York, 1931)> the terror and suffering of Negro
Nancy Mannigoe's in tu itiv e knowledge that her husband is going to kill her is a moral challenge for the white Compson family, 1 ' ■ . ■ i testing their reactions to imminent death. The presence of humor in such a situation seems incongruous; yet Faulkner te lls the tense story from the standpoint of the Compson children.
Their naive interpolations serve to heighten the helplessness of Nancy's predicament in a manner that straight narrative, no matter how e ffe c tiv e , could not accomplish. Humor is suc cessfully coupled with "human, frustratio n, white and black,
- ■ 9 at the bleakest point of hopelessness and despair."
In Sanctuary (New York, 1931), "the least profound and the most sensational of Faulkner's novels," written, by
Faulkner's own admission, solely for the purpose of making money,^ the tw e n ty -fifth chapter is a complete story e n title d
1. Howe, p. 193.
2. O' Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 68.
3. Supra, p. 5°
43 4 4
"Uncle Bud and the Three Madams." The gangster Red's funeral
in a speakeasy, based on an actual one held in a Memphis foad- 4 house, is h ilariously macabre; the humor is as garish and outspoken as the setting and the time (1929) demand. in the
latter half of the story Miss Reba (a character based on a famous Memphis madam) entertains two other women who share her professional status. They imbibe their beer and gin with stately decorum and are properly horrified when the precocious boy "Uncle Bud" filches their drinks to the point of becoming drunken and ill. Incongruity, affectation, and Dickensian satire make this story humorous and distasteful in a single emotional impact, as Faulkner exposes the evils of an age when the Southern landed aristocracy is giving way to Northern mechanization.
A third illustration of Faulkner's skill in relating the devices of humor to his theme is "Raid," the "tall tale" from The Unvanquished (New York, 1938), the novel about the
Sartor is dynasty in the South during the C ivil War. Granny
Rosa M illard takes her young grandson Bayard and his Negro pal
Ringo with her to retrieve the family silver from the Yankee soldiers. In those trying days of struggling to stay alive, her "borrowed" horses are in re a lity confiscated ones, and her
lies force her to kneel in prayer for forgiveness. Granny is a pious woman, trying to hold fast to the moral code of the
Sartor is cl an--indeed, the moral code of all the aristocratic
4. Miner, pp. 107-8. 45
fami1ies-^but the major incident in the story--when the Yankee
commanders give her most of the contraband accumulated on
th eir march--marks the beginning of her decline. The humor of
the misunderstanding is subtle, yet has the exaggerated quality
of a family legend which has improved in the te llin g over the
y e a r s . 5 The relationship between Bayard and Ringo is reminis
cent of that between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
John Arthos expressed the opinion th at "to obscure
humor is not to kill it, and in much of Faulkner's writing one
sees the continuing struggle for comedy. in The Wild Palms
(where one story is a joke about a convict who returns to jail
in order to escape a woman) the humor almost controlled the
troubled excitement that elsewhere supports his romanticism."^
The tale referred to is the title-story of this chapter, "Old
Man," referring to the Mississippi River. The success of
Faulkner in this e ffo rt is attested to by George Marion
O' Donne11;
. . . the story of the nameless convict is an heroic legend; . . . it must be counted as one of Mr. Faulkner's d e fin ite achievements. Moreover, it has a quality of gusty humor (a sense of the outrageously grotesque heroic, related to the humor of the "tall tales" in folk literature) which is rare in Mr. Faulkner's work but which is always impress ive when it appears. It is to be found in some of the scenes of Sanctuary, notably in the gangster funeral and in the drunken "afternoon tea" of the middle-aged har lots at Miss Reba's house. It shows up in some of the short stories--"Spotted Horses," for
5. Waggoner, p. 173.
6. Hoffman and Vickery. Two Decades, p. 107. 46
example. And it appears in the scenes of the convict's alligator hunting in The Wild Palms. However, this quality does not destroy, but serves rather to strengthen, the heroic legend as a whole./
The Wild Palms (New York, 1939) contains two stories:
"The Wild Palms" and "Old Man"; the stories are presented in alternating chapters and are related thematically rather than from the viewpoint of plot. In the former narrative, a wife gives up her husband and two children to run away with her lover, a young interne who sacrifices his career to this unfor tunate alliance. Because of their poverty, she insists that he perform upon her an abortion which k ills her. Ultim ately, he prefers a life of imprisonment to taking the cyanide pill brought to him by the dead woman's compassionate husband. The title signifies the conflict between the lovers and nature, love being conquered by the decay of its fleshly manifestation.
In the words of the woman: ". . , love and suffering are the same thing and . . . the value of love and suffering is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated y o u r s e l f . S h e paid for love with her life, and he with the penalty of a fifty-year prison sentence.
(This b rie f synopsis is presented only for an understanding of the second story, the major concern of this chapter.)
7. George Mar ion O'Donnell, "Faulkner's Mythology," The Kenyon Review (Summer 1939), pp. 285-99; reprinted in Hoffman and Vickery, Two Decades, p. 81.
8. O'Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 108. 47
Plot
The hero of H01d Man,61 Hthe tall convict, with the blue outraged eyes of Faulkner protagonists, is one of the most admirable figures Faulkner has created."9 From the prison farm at Parchman, Mississippi, he and other prisoners are recruited to help in rescue operations during the great flood of 1927, when twenty thousand square miles of Mississippi were under water for six weeks or more. On a rescue mission with another convict, to find a woman on a rise and a man on a cot- tonhouse roof, the rowboat supposedly overturns, and the ta ll convict is reported drowned by the surviving prisoner. How ever, the ta ll convict regains the s k iff, rescues the pregnant woman from a tree, and together they are swept into the current of the flood-swollen Mississippi River. They are refused help from the passengers of a dilapidated house-boat, and, because of the convict's stripes, are shot at from the docks of a town where they try to land. Finally, the baby is born on an Indian mound infested with water-moccasins. A ship with Red Cross refugees from the Cajun country of Louisiana picks them up, boat and a ll , and lands them again in unfam iliar te rrito ry , from which they once again disembark. Singlehandedly, the convict hauls the skiff up, over, and down the sixty-foot expanse of the levee. Here they find a rotting cabin on stilts, belonging to the little French alii gator-hunter, where they all live together in the one sparsely furnished room. The tall
" 9! O'Cortnor, p. 105. 48 convict 1 earns to hunt the creatures which, before, he had never even imagined in existence. When the cabin and adjacent area have to be evacuated because of the dynamiting of the levee,the convict with the woman and child are taken to a town in a government launch, the s k iff being towed behind.
After escaping through a window from the Armory, where they have been fed and cared for, they proceed on th e ir way, the convict finding work in the cane-fields, in a saw-mi11, and on a cotton-farm. Paying a man in a motor-1aunch to tow the boat back to the bank where he had f ir s t climbed down into the s k iff a month and three weeks ago, he comes back, bringing the boat which does not belong to him, the prison clothes which he has preserved carefully, and the woman he had been sent out to find. Because he had been declared dead, he is re-sentenced for "attempted escape,11 adding an additional ten years to the remainder of his fifteen -year sentence. After the burden of the woman, and later of the child, and the sweeping torrent of the river, he welcomes the security of his prison.
Because the plot by its e lf is not necessarily a humor ous one, the synopsis being divorced from the necessary e le ments of theme, character, and singular diction, the action w ill be related to these subsequent topics. However, it should be noted that Faulkner uses the third-person-omniscient point- of-view with an interesting relation to time. The story is told from the vantage point of an unidentified narrator who knows the innermost thoughts and reactions of the characters in the story, mainly those of the tall convict. The narrator switches back in time to the events leading up to the main action, the river adventure; then, during the journey, the nar rator pushes time forward to show the convict relating the account of the en tire episode, including his return with the woman and the boat, to his fellow-convicts back at Parchman.
At the end of the story, the narrator once again reverts to the past, to the pre-prison days when the tall convict had a
“sweetheart.11 The elasticity of Faulkner's use of time gives the story a unique quality of urgency at the same instant that the remembered “yarn" is being relived. The stream-of- consciousness technique enables Faulkner to give continuity to the story and to expand the simple responses of the convict
into language that has within it the rhythm and magnitude of the overflowing River.
Theme
Whereas the theme of “The Wild Palms" is 1ove-versus- nature, that of “Old Man" is society-versus-nature. The con vict does his duty, but he refuses to become personally
involved in the social implications of the responsibility
imposed upon him. "He does his duty to society and to the woman, but his only effort is to have done with it, get rid of his terrible responsibility, and get back to the prison."^
These two stories stand apart from the saga of
Yoknapatawpha County and the South; they are studies in human freedom and man's search and reaction to it. “ In 'The Wild
To! Waggoner, p. 133. 50
Palms,1 a man sacrificed everything for freedom and love, and lost them both; in ‘Old Man,1 the convict sacrificed every thing to escape from freedom and love and return to the woman- - 11 ■ , less security of the state prison farm.64 Both stories of the Wild Palms seem to say: "The balance between man, nature, and society, between reason and emotion, between an excess of order and chaos, is a precarious one, but it alone ensures man's freedom and d ig n ity .11 ^ ^
C h a ra c te r
The plot of "Old Man" does not begin to take on comic proportions until the character of the tall convict has been established. Just as Ben Jonson desired English comedy to be realistic in method, with simplified plot so that the focus of interest would be upon c h a r a c t e r , Faulkner somehow suppressed the sweeping power of the river into subservience to the con v ic t's ch aracteristic, lim ited, emotional response to the action into which he has been involuntarily swept. The con vic t is ensnared by his dearth of worldly knowledge, and the comedy of his circumstances lies in the fact that he employs no introspection, but simply accepts each situation as it arises, adapting to it as well as he is able.^ It is on his
11. Cowley, Portable, p. 540.
12. Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of Faulkner (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1959)» p« 1615% “ ”
13- W illard Smith, p. 27.
, 14. Vickery, p» 162. 51
reactions (mental or emotional gestures) that the attention is
focused, Henri Bergson postulates that “as soon as our atten
tion is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are in the realm
of com edy.Bergson would probably have related the con vict's rigidity of response to the “obstinacy of rnind"^ of the
Bergson automatism theory of comedy. The convict shows “a,
growing callousness to social life . Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his f e llo w - b e in g s .7
The naivete of the convict (now twenty-five) immedi ately sets the mood (atmosphere) and the tone (author's a t t i
tude) of the story. At the age of nineteen he had attempted a train -robb ery--in 1921i
He had laid his plans in advance, he had f o l lowed his printed (and false) authority to the letter; he had saved the paper-backs for two years, reading and rereading them, memorizing them, com paring and weighing story and method against story and method, taking the good from each and d is carding the dross as his workable plan emerged, keeping his mind open to make the subtle last- minute changes, without haste and without impa tience, as the newer pamphlets appeared on th eir appointed days, as a conscientious dressmaker makes the subtle alterations in a court presenta tion costume as the newer bulletins appear. And then when the day came, he did not even have a chance to go thVough the coaches and co llect the watches and the rings, the brooches and the hidden money-belts, because he had been captured as soon as he entered the express car where the safe and
15. Henri Louis Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York, 1913), p. 144.
16. Bergson, p. 184.
17. Bergson, p. 134. 52
the gold would be. He had shot no one because the pistol which they took away from him was not that kind of a pistol although it was loaded; later he admitted to the District Attorney that he had got it, as well as the dark lantern in which a candle burned and the black handkerchief to wear over the face, by peddling among his pinehill neighr. bors subscriptions to the Detectives* Gazette.
And now he lay in his pr i son-bunk, his blue eyes "outraged81 at the thought of how he had been defrauded through the mails, and "he cursed in a harsh steady unrepetitive stream, not at the living men who had put him where he was but at what he did not even know were pen-names. . . ." Later, on the refugee- boat, when the convict tells the doctor that he has been imprisoned for robbing a tr a in , the doctor replies,
161 Say that again.1 The convict said it again.
‘Well? Go on. You don't say that in the year 1927 and ju st stop, man.'"
The simpl icity of the would-be train-robber and
Faulkner's mock-heroic attitu d e toward him creates a comic effect with undertones of pathos. One smiles without derision and shakes the head slowly, as over the plight of a child.
The convict's reaction to the woman he rescued from the tree- top somewhat broadens the smile.
. . . He . . . warped the s k iff on beneath the limb and held it and now he watched her move, gather herself heavily and carefully to descend-- that heaviness which was not painful but ju st excruciatingly c a re fu l, that profound and almost lethargic awkwardness which added nothing to the
" TB7 A11 quotations from "Did Man" are from Cowley, Portable Faulkner, pp. 541-650. 53
sum of that f ir s t aghast amazement which had served already for the catafalque of invincible dream since even in durance he had continued (and even with the old a v id ity, even though they had caused his down fa 11) to consume the impos sible pulp-printed fables carefully censored and as carefully smuggled into the penitentiary; and who to say what Helen, what 1iyjng Garbo^ he had not dreamed of rescuing from what craggy pinnacle or dragoned keep when he and his companion embarked in the s k iff. He watched her, he made no further effort to help her beyond holding the skiff sav agely steady while she lowered herself from the limb--the entire body, the deformed swell of belly bulging the calico, suspended by its arms, think ing, And this is what i get. This, out of a ll the female meat that walks, is what I have to be caught in a runaway boat w ith .
Even the convict's code of ethics, although noble, is comic in its intensity. "He wanted so l i t t l e . He wanted nothing for himself. He just wanted to get rid of the woman, the belly, and he was trying to do that in the right way, not for himself, but for her. He could have put her back into another tree at any time--"
The reaction of the convict to his first alligator- hunt with the little rotten-toothed Cajun deepens the respect for the paradoxical adaptability of the tall, rigidly consis tent man; yet, at times one is not quite sure whether he is brave, stupid, or simply resigned to what he must do. Despite the danger of the situation, the comic simplicity of the man's reactions cannot be denied, especially when he sat in the pirogue
. . . looking at the scaled motionless shape, thinking not. It looks dangerous but It looks big, thinking. Well, maybe a mule standing in a lot : looks big to a man that never walked up to one with a halter before, thinking. Only if he could 54
just te ll me what to do it would save tim e, the pirogue drawing nearer now, creeping now, with ho ripple now even, and it seemed to him that he could even hear his companion's held breath, and he taking the knife from the other's hand now and not even thinking this since it was too fast, a flash; it was not a surrender, not a resignation, it was too calm, it was a part of him, he had drunk it with his mother's milk and lived with it all his 1ife: After all a man can't only do what he has to do, with what he has to do w ith , with what he has learned, to the best of his judg ment. And 8 reckon a hog is s t i l l a hog, no mat ter what it looks like. So here goes, sitting still for an instant longer until the bow of the pirogue grounded lighter than the falling of a leaf and stepped out of it and paused ju s t for one instant while the words It does look big stood for ju st a second, unemphat i c and t r iv ia l, somewhere where some fragment of his attention could see them and vanished, and stooped strad dling, the knife driving even as he grasped the near foreleg, this all in the same instant when the lashing tail struck him a terrific blow upon the back.
Because the deed had to be done, the a llig a to r was slain,
“and now s ittin g beside the profound up-bellied carcass, his head again between his knees in the old attitu d e while his own x ;; ' blood freshened the other which drenched him, thinking, it's my durn nose again," we leave our uncomplicated warrior.
During the following days, the fame of his valor spread among the other Cajun hunters, and each morning he would "find w a it
ing for him lik e the matador his aficionados the small clump of constant and deferential pirogues, . . ."
At one point the tall convict came as close to intro spection as he was capable of, thinking, first, of his home and, then, of the security of the prison barracks.
But most of a ll , his own character (“Two years ago they had offered to make a trusty of him. He would no longer need to plow or feed stock, he would only 55
follow those who did with a loaded gun, but he declined. 111 reckon I'll stick to plowing," he said, absolutely without humor. "I done already tried to use a gun one time too many."), his good name, his responsibility not only toward those who were responsible toward him but to himself, his own honor in the doing of what was asked of him, his pride in being able to do it, no matter what it was.
Faulkner insists that the ethical simplicity of the convict is absolutely humorless, precisely the paradoxical reason for the latter's being an object of pathetic humor.
The unique integrity of Faulkner's hero is summed up in his little speech upon finally surrendering to a deputy s h e riff who could not get his gun free from his shoulder- holster. “All right. . . . Yonder's your boat, and here's the woman. But I never did find that bastard oh the cottonhouse.“
After saving the woman, delivering her child, slaying a lli gators, and struggling against the strength of the River, he was reporting the semi-failure of his mission. Again Faulkner can be compared to Ben Jonson, who “from the outset . . . h it upon the basis of what remains the sine qua non for comedy: in human beings the invincibly consistent is ridiculous. . . .
Because comic characters must be a single self, they reveal an incorrect notion of themselves or of the places they inhabit, or of both. . . . A man, nakedly himself and serving no cause except his own ego's, is . . . comic. . . . The convict's
Jonsonian "humour" is his avid desire to rid himself of the
19. John J. Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth (Madison, Wisconsin, 1957), p 82. 56 responsibility of the woman and the skiff and to return to his
"freedom" in prison.
Language
W illiam Faulkner's language in "Old Man" gives rise to humorous connotation through the co-mingling of imagery and irony. For example, in the firs t quotation cited under 20 Character, Faulkner compares the convict's formulation of plans for the train robbery to "the subtle alterations" made in a cou rt-presentat ion costume by a "conscientious dress maker." The visual image of a fussy, little lady, in a pro fusion of straight pins, poring oyer her pattern books and fashion magazines, makes doubly humorous the picture of the ta ll, taciturn youth leafing through his paper-back crime file .
It is ironical that his carefully laid plans not only failed completely in providing for him the hero role he coveted, but caused his subsequent loss of freedom, which later gave him a legitimate heroic adventure incomprehensible to his lim ited nature. Faulkner's reference to the convict's cursing “at what he did not even know were pen-names" provides the visual image of the pulp-wri ters--perhaps a housewife tapping out sensationalism while babies nap, a bookkeeper contrasting his machine-oriented days with a thrill-oriented hobby, or a pro fessional with overflowing ashtray clinically disguising hack neyed plots into fresh trauma. Ironically, these unknowns were responsible for the convict's loss of his physical freedom
20% Supra, p. 51. 57 and, even more ironically, for the fulfillment of his peculiar emotional freedom from social involvement.
Faulkner's description of the short, plump convict contains a visually descriptive, yet comic, image of a worm:
"Almost hairless, he was quite white. He looked like something exposed to light by turning over rotting logs or planks. . . „"
A flood is a terrifying phenomenon; yet Faulkner man ages to make even the scenes of devastation painfully humorous:
The truck passed a Negro cabin. The water was up to the window 1 edges. A woman clutching two children squatted on the ridgepole, a man and a halfgrown youth, standing waist-deep, were hoist ing a squealing pig onto the slanting roof of a barn, on the ridgepole of which sat a row of chickens and a turkey. Near the barn was a hay stack on which a cow stood tied by a rope to the center pole and bawling steadily; a yelling Negro boy on a saddlel ess mule which he flogged stead ily, his legs clutching the mule's barrel and his body leaned to the drag of a rope attached to a second mule, approached the haystack, splashing and floundering. The woman on the housetop began to shriek at the passing truck . . .
Faulkner has the truck "crawl" out of the water and the con victs seated on the platform " lik e buzzards on a fence." The animal imagery seems to ridicule the human antics of s e lf- preservation.
The conversations of the lawmen, the supposedly wiser ones in charge of the rescue-operations, are humorously teasing satire, as is this dialogue between the deputy and the Warden:
"All rig h t," the deputy said. "And lis te n , chief. He wasn't a bad fellow and maybe he never had no business in that boat. . . . Listen. Sup pose I write on his discharge. Drowned while trying to save lives in the great flood of nine teen twenty-seven, and send it down for the 58
Governor to sign it. It w ill be something nice for his folks to have, to hang on the wall when neighbors come in or something. Maybe they w ill even give his folks a cash bonus because after all they sent him to the Farm to raise cotton, not to fool around in a boat in a flo o d .11
uA'l 1 r ig h t,11 the Warden said. 111111 see about it . The main thing is to get his name o ff the books as dead before some p o litic ia n trie s to collect his food allowance.11
Faulkner's verbal irony is delightful in the passage describing the convict1s f ir s t impression of the woman's advancedpregnancy and his disillusionment over being marooned with her in the flood instead of with a "Helen11 or a"living
Garbo."21
Cowley has commented that Faulkner's language "gives
the same impression of the power and legendary sweep of the
River" as does Mark Twain's in Huckleberry F i n n . 22 However, there is subtle humor in Faulkner's use of visceral imagery
in the action of the fiver. It is combined with the irony of
the convict's not being aware of where the River is taking him.
Later, his simple realization of a great truth of nature, hid den in his own farming imagery, is presented with humor beneath
the pathos.
Some time about midnight, accompanied by a r o l1ing cannonade of thunder and 1ightning lik e a battery going into action, as though some forty hours' const i pat ion [ita lic s mine] of the e le ments, the firmament its e lf, were discharging in clapping and glaring salute to the ultimate acqui escence to desperate and furious motion, and still
21. Supra, pp. 52-3.
22. Cowley, Portable, p. 540. 59
leading Its charging welter of dead cows and mules and outhouses, and cabins and hencoops, the skiff passed Vicksburg. The convict didn't know i t .
But he didn't see Vicksburg . . . the skiff made one long bounding lunge as the convict's native state, in a final paroxysm, requrqitated him onto the wild bosom of the Father of Waters.
He did not know he was now upon the River . . . if he had suspected for one second that the wild and lim itless expanse on which he now found him self Was a river, consciousness would simply have refused; he would have fainted.
That was when it occurred to him that its pres ent condition was no phenomenon of a decade, but that the intervening years during which it consented to bear upon its placid and sleepy bosom the fra il mechanicals of man's clumsy con triving was the phenomenon and this the norm and the River was now doing what it liked to do, had waited patiently the ten years in order to do, as a mule w ill work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.
At one point the waves are described as making 61 a faint hissing sighing, almost a chuckl ing, sound,,e as if, perhaps, the River were enjoying the chagrin of the humorless man struggling upon
i t s c r e s t .
Because the convict was subject to nose-bleeds, the ship's doctor suggested that the tall man was "hemophilic."
Here the plump convict unknowingly began a humorous play on words, defining the term as "a calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time." Another convict insisted that the word meant
"a calf or a colt that ain't neither one." The plump one, avoiding his friend's gaze, finally spoke again: "You let him call you that?" 60
It Is interesting that the language of the ta ll con v ic t changes somewhat during the course of the story. At first he is relatively inarticulate; then gradually he begins to express himself more fully, until finally he is able to tell his story. However, the power of the narrative remains in the language of Faulkner, who transposes what must have been mere simple coherency on the part of the convict into the flowing diction symbolic of the sweeping, current of the River. •
That the convict could te ll his ta le at a ll symbolizes the slow emergence of society itself through its power of language;^ the convict, however, can become articulate only within the
"freedom16 of the prison, restricted by the broader society he rejects.
Suggestions for the Oral interpreter
The oral interpreter of "Old Man" should remember, above a ll , that the story is in the nature of a legend, or
" ta ll ta le ." The opening 1 in e --t$0nce . . . there were two convicts . . ."--establishes its narrative style. The story launches into a description of the tall convict that must be read with an underlying note of humor, apparent in the reader's voice and facial expression; however, at no time is the reader's attitu d e to be one of rid icule. Respect for the ta ll convict must be maintained, as he is not a dunce, only a man severely handicapped by his lack of education and expe rience. On the other hand, a contrast in the reader's attitude
23^ Vickery, The Novels, p. 160. 61 may be employed in the description of the second convict.
Since he is described by Faulkner in the terms of a slug, low and crawling and repulsive, the reader may express an under lying revulsion and absence of respect through the use of bodily contraction, withdrawal, and a lack of warmth in voice and facial expression.
In Part II, the portion of the story describing the mobilization of the convicts for the rescue operations should be read with deep compassion for their misery, being chained together for hours in the rain. An increase in bodily tension w ill help to depict their discomfort, suggesting their hunched- over efforts to fend off the elements. An important, minor climax in this scene is the tall convict1s firs t meeting with th e R iv e r .
Then the ta lle r convict became conscious of another sound. He did not begin to hear it all at once, he suddenly became aware that he had been hearing it all the time, a sound so much beyond all his experience and his powers of assimilation that up to this point he had been as oblivious Of it as an ant or a flea might be of the sound of the avalanche on which it rides; he had been travelling upon water since early afternoon and for seven years now he had run his plow and harrow and planter within the very shadow of the levee on which he now stood, but this profound deep whisper which came from the further side of it he did not at once recognize. He stopped. . . . “What1s that?” the convict said. A Negro man squatting before the nearest fire answered him: “Dat's him. D at1 s de Ole Man.11
In the final pages of Part II, the reader should endeavor to express the contrast between the fla t voice of the plump convict recounting the drowning of his friend, and 62 the m atte r-o f-fac t, comic remarks of the Warden and his deputy. Here the reader can add to the comic effect of the dialogue by suggesting the characters of the gruff Warden; the empty-voiced, plump convict; the eager, sympathetic deputy, and the “fellow on the cottonhouse," full of trembling, out raged fear. The scene concludes on a serious note, however, with the deputy's bit of philosophizing about the freedom achieved by the supposedly drowned convict--an ironical remark, for it soon becomes apparent, as the story unfolds, that the tall convict is shackled by the river and his own sense of responsibility.
Before continuing with an analysis of Part ill, the oral interpreter should be reminded of the significance of point-of-view in exposing the humor of this story. In the third-person-omniscient description and non-dramatized narra tion, Faulkner combines the powerful flow of his language with the tone of irony. With irony, as with all forms of humor, two principles of delivery must be employed: (1) an a ttitu d e of sharing, and (2) skillful timing.When an ironic comment of the author must be made clear to the listeners, the reader must be d irect, le ttin g his own awareness of the humor make its impact upon the understanding of the audience through his eye-contact and facial expression. Humor can be appreciated by a lone participant, but it reaches its zenith when shared.
2 J T . From a lecture in Speech 245, Advanced Oral Interpretation, by Dr. Alethea Smith Mattingly. / 63
T iming> on the other hand, is the sole responsibility of the perceptive interpreter; it is a subtle and d ifficu lt skill which is acquired and perfected through practice and experi ence. Timing is dependent upon the provocative use of pause and inflection, combined with an ability to perceive and appre ciate humor in all its myriad manifestations, both in litera ture and in life. Toward the end of the story, there is a humorous passage when the ta ll convict reminisces over his home-town sweetheart:
He had had a sweetheart. That is, he had gone to church singings and picnics with her--a girl a year or so younger than he, short-1 egged, with ripe breasts and a heavy mouth and dull eyes like ripe muscadines, who owned a baking-powder can almost full of ear-rings and brooches and rings bought (or presented at suggestion) from ten-cent s to r e s .
. . . In the third mopth of his incarceration she came to see him. She wore ear-rings and a bracelet or so which he had never seen before and it never became quite clear how she had got that far from home, and she cried violently for the firs t three minutes, though presently (and without his ever knowing either exactly how they had got separated or how she had made the acquaintance) he saw her in animated conversation with one of the guards. But she kissed him before she left that evening and said she would return the firs t chance she got, clinging to him, sweating a little , smelling of scent and soft young female flesh, slightly p n e u m a tic .
The passage can be read with a minimum of comic effect, or it can be delivered in the following manner:
He had had a sweetheart. That is, he had gone to ch u rch s in g in g s and jj^pausejf p ic n ic s w it h h e r - - a girl a year or so younger than he, short-legged with ripe breasts and a heavy mouth and dull eyes fpausej like ripe muscadines, who owned a baking- powder can almost fu l1 of ear-rings and brooches 64
and rings bought fjowf (or presented at fpausef sug gestion) from ten-cent stores *
. . . In the third month of his incarceration she came to see him. She wore ear-rings and a bracelet, or so fpausej which he had never seen before |pause| and it never became quite clear how she had got that far from home [pause] , and she cried violently [pause] for the firs t three minutes, though pres ently (and without his ever knowing either exactly how they had got separated or how she had made the acquaintance) he saw her in animated conversation with one of the guards. (Pause) But she kissed him before she le ft that evening and said she would return the firs t chance she got, clinging to him, Cf 1 atjf sweating a l i t t l e , [poet i <3 smelling of scent and soft young female flesh (pause) , fla t) s lig h tly pneumatic.
The use of timing and nuance can bring to life the briefly sum marized history of this comic 16 sweet heart.11
When the third-person-omniscient deserts description and summary for the more immediate stream-of-consciousness account of the convict's experiences and reactions, the thoughts and actions of the tall man can be given slight vocal and bodily characterization by the reader. The challenge to the reader's skill is the successful coupling of the limited responses of the protagonist with the flowing prose of the author. Of course, in the dramatized narrative, the reader can bring all of the characters to a more vivid existence through the use of specifically devised mannerisms of body and speech, with a suggestion of dialect where indicated by
F a u lk n e r.
The oral interpreter should be reminded that, although he must empathize with the convict to portray the dramatic 65
intensity of the scenes, he must exercise sufficient restraint to prevent the listeners from empathizing to the point of exces sive sympathy for the plight of the man. Were the audience aroused to extreme pathos, the comic effect of the irony would be lost. For this reason, it is imperative that aesthetic distance be carefully maintained in the oral presentation of
“ Old Han.11
Part III contains the important action of the story; the rescue of the woman, their violent entry into the River, their rejection by the houseboat and the townspeople, and the birth of the child. Here the oral interpreter has ample oppor tunity for violence, suspense, and contrast in Faulkner's char acteristically long sentences, the complex syntax of which makes essential a perceptive command of the author's meaning.
The desperation of the convict “to find a fla t stationary sur face in time for the child to be born on it" must be apparent until the climax when the child is born.
Part IV begins with perhaps the finest bit of irony in th e s t o r y :
When th e woman asked him i f he had a k n if e , standing there in the streaming bedtieking gar ments which had got him shot at, the second time by a machine gun, on the two occasions when he had seen any human life after leaving the levee four days ago, the convict fe lt exactly as he had in the fleeing skiff when the woman suggested that they had better hurry. He felt the same outra geous affronting of a condition purely-moral, the same raging impotence to find any answer to it . . .
It is here that Faulkner uses Biblical imagery, calling the quarter-acre mound "th a t.earthen Ark out of Genesis." The 66 oral interpreter must establish for the audience the quiet desolation of their little island, as they lingered there to give the mother and child some respite from the waters. When the convict discovered the loss of the single oar, he “squatted not in dismay but in that frantic and astonished outrage of a man who, having just escaped a falling safe, is struck by the following two-ounce paper weight which was s ittin g on it . . . “
The ordeal of charring a log into a semblance of a paddle is read in a low key, in contrast to the violence of the onslaught of the snakes„
The characterization of the convict is accomplished mostly through non-dramatized narrative; however, on the refugee-boat is the doctor, whose educated g a rru lity provides a fine foil for the short, pointed remarks of the convict.
In the Cajun a l1igator-hunter1s cabin, the convict
immediately had the woman wash the stains from his prison clothes, which he then bundled up and hid behind a ra fte r.
Faulkner suggests that because she, too, was a woman of the land she could understand the convict's compulsion to spare the clothes which had been provided for him by the prison authorities. Her knowledge did not stem from “the rapport of the wedded," Faulkner adds, as a preface to an interesting digression concerning marriage. In the manner of an “aside,11 the oral interpreter can bring variety to the reading by bring
ing to life every image within this parenthetical opinion of the author. 67
(The old married: you have seen them, the electroplate reproductions, the thousand identi cal coupled faces with only a collarless stud or a fichu out of Louisa Alcdtt to denote the sex, looking in pairs like the winning braces of dogs after a field tria l, out from among the packed columns of disaster and alarm and base less assurance and hope and incredible insensi tiv ity and insulation from tomorrow, propped by a thousand morning sugar bowls or coffee urns; or singly, rocking on porches or sitting in the sun beneath the tobacco-stained porticoes of a thousand county court-houses, as though with the death of the other having inherited a sort of rejuvenescence, immortality; relict, they take a new lease on breath and seem to live forever, as though that flesh which the old ceremony or ritual had morally purified and made legally one had actually become so with long tedious habit and he or she who entered the ground first took all of it with him or her, leaving only the old permanent enduring bone, free and tramelless.)
This satire, again, is teasing, not bitter. Here, and also in
Faulkner's most highly ironic comment, it is essential that
the interpreter maintain sufficient aesthetic distance to
establish the universality of the circumstances. “The old married," whoever and wherever they are; the tall convict, who could be any man of sim ilar lim itations caught in a fast- moving current; the woman, any helpless creature dependent
upon a chance rescuer; the child, born on an Indian mound
because life and nature have their order even in chaos-- they
all need the oral interpreter's ability to look upon them with
a detached, critical eye, even while becoming involved in the
t e l l i n g .
The remainder of Part IV is the return trip, climaxed
by the convict's humorous understatement of the accomplishment 68 of his duty concerning the woman and the boat. Faulkner's
favorite theme--man1s pursuit of the fulfillment of his indi vidual res p o n s ib ility --Is prominent within the course of the story. The tension relaxed, Part V returns the convict to his
interested audience of prisoners, who are concerned only with the physical problems of the adventure, and, added to their bawdy humor, is the mock-heroic episode of the tall convict's unrequited love, which helps the interpreter to re-establish the nta l1-tale" effect before concluding the reading.
Conclus ion
Coupled with serious, often-tragic themes, Faulkner's humor arises from Hazlitt's incongruity, Fielding's affecta tion, the tradition of the "tall tale," a mock-heroic irony, teasing sa tire, and a clever use of imagery. Humor and pathos together create a powerful, emotional impact, preventing the reactions of both ridicule and derision.
In "Old Man," verbal and dramatic irony, as well as
irony of character, combine to illustrate the theme of society- versus-nature, exemplified by the convict who sacrifices all to escape from freedom and love, performing his duty to society without becoming personally involved. Although an admirable character for his singlemindedness and courage, the convict is
limited by his lack of worldly experience. Because he is
incapable of introspection and is, therefore, rigidly consis tent in character, he is a pathetically comic figure. Like
Proust and Joyce,^5 Faulkner investigates his character's
25. Irving Mai in, William Faulkner: An Interpretation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pi T1 69 psychological condition through a streara-of-consciousness technique that allows the soaring, highly descriptive language of Faulkner to expand the lim ited mental and emotional response of the convict.
The language of Faulkner's humor exposes several of the tra its found in the works of Ben Johnson: an asymmetry caused by a word-order that is disturbed by unusual emphasis, delayed subjects, and tension between the rhythm of the prose and its grammatical lo g ic .26 On the other hand, there is a pleasing balance between the sweeping description of the events on the River and the irony of the convict’s limited perception of his great adventure. However, his slowly growing a rtic u la tion seems to symbolize the emergence of society through the medium of its speech.
The significant challenge to the oral interpreter is the complexity of meaning in the several parts of the story.
It is important to find the contrasts, the irony, and the imagery which Faulkner employs to keep his themes an integral part of character and action. The characterizations essential to the interspersed dialogues should arise from what the author has to say in the narrative about the various characters.
Important to the oral interpreter of humor, and espe cially of irony, are, first, the attitude of sharing, and, second, the skillful use of timing. Furthermore, enough aes thetic distance should be maintained so that the interpreter
" ~ 26. Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960), p . 697 70 himself can appreciate and expand the author's ironic comment, and so that the audience will not empathize to the extent of
losing the humorous effect. CHAPTER IV
"SPOTTED HORSES"
The shorter version of "Spotted Horses" fir s t appeared
as a magazine story in Scr ibner1s in June, 1931; however, the
detail in the later version, part of The Hamlet (New.York,
191*0), is more b r illia n t , according to O'Connor.^ The
Unvanquished (New York, 1938) began "the decay of the old
Sartor is order as it is corrupted by Snopesism. . . . The
Hamlet completes the p r o c e s s . |t is a humorous novel, heavy with sa tire, with its setting at the crossroads v illa g e of
Frenchman's Bend in Yoknapatawpha County. An integrated series
of character sketches, the novel is divided into four parts,
the last of which is en titled "The Peasants" and contains the
story with which this chapter is concerned. Malcolm Cowley
calls "Spotted Horses" the "funniest American story since
Mark Twai n„
Plot
Flem Snopes had appeared in Frenchman's Bend about
thirty years or so following the Civil War. He had found the
TI O' Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 176.
2. Waggoner, p. 183.
3. Cowley, Portable, p. 366.
71 72 town dominated by the Varners, who owned the general store.
After Working as a clerk there, FIem bought the local smithy, thereby gaining his foothold in the little town. After making a deal with Varner to marry his embarrassingly pregnant daughter
Eula, FIem takes her with him to Texas, giving the townfolk some respite from his conniving presence. “Spotted Horses11 begins with Flem's return from Texas.
Just before sundown FIem Snopes1 “ci rcus“ is spotted by the loungers on the porch of the Varner store. The covered wagon, along with Snopes and a cold-eyed Texan named Buck Hipps, has a tra ilin g string of calico ponies lashed together with barbed wire. From the moment the men lay eyes upon the w ild eyed bunch of horseflesh, they are aware of some trickery; yet they cannot seem to avoid being cheated of th eir hard-earned cash. Although Flem never admits that the ponies are his, the men suspect the truth of the matter, but s t i l l they follow to watch the Texan cut the wild horses loose with wire-cutters in
Mrs. Littlejohn's lot, with the wary assistance of Eck Snopes, the good-natured blacksmith, by far the best of the Snopes clan.
After supper, the sewing-machine salesman, a man called
Rati iff, laughs at the men scornfully, predicting that they will buy the horses and later regret their foolishness. And the next morning the wagons begin to assemble, bringing the men to stand and stare while the Texan and Eck drive the horses into the barn to be fed. When the horses are fed corn instead of hay, they explode through the side of the barn, 73 right over Eck1s son Wall street without harming him. Munching g ingersnaps constantly, the Texan seeks to begin the auction.
When no one w ill start the bid, he manages to co llar One of the wild brutes for a second or two before it sends him fly
ing. All the while the men are watching these dubious antics,
Mrs. L ittlejohn is going about her daily chores, keeping one eye on the lot but never lettin g the ridiculous goings-on keep her from her work.
When the Texan offers Eck a free horse if the latter will bid on a second one, the blacksmith reluctantly makes an offer. Just then poor, poverty-crazed Henry Armstid drives up
in his dilapidated wagon with his long-suffering wife; he spends her last five dollars on a horse he cannot even approach with a rope. FIem Snopes is on the scene when the previously calloused Texan gets a sudden change of heart, gives Mrs.
Armstid back the money, and te lls her to take her irrational husband home. Henry refuses to go, gives the money to Snopes, and, of course, FIem pockets it. Just before tw ilig h t there remain only three horses, in exchange for which FIem gives the cowboy a buggy for his return tr ip to Texas. The men are well aware that th eir money w ill be handed over to FIem on the way
into town.
When the men try to rope th eir horses, the entire herd breaks loose, and the men are chasing them all over the country side. The horse given to Eck dashes into Mrs. L ittle jo h n 's house, causing R a tliff to jump out of a window; the lady of the house breaks her washboard over the creature's head, and 74 it once again gallops over the invincible Wall street on its way out. On the bridge, the animal gallops over, Mr. Tul 1 1 s mules, making them kick out of the wagon traces and drag Tull face down for no l i t t l e distance. When the horses broke but,
Henry Armstid was badly h u rt. A day later, Eck and Wall street cornered th eir g ift horse, and, in trying to escape, the animal broke its neck.
When Mrs. Armstid comes to the store to ask FIem for the five dollars, which the Texan promised her would be refunded to her, Snopes says that the Texan took a ll the money with him; he gives her a nickel's worth of candy for her bare foot children.
Two court actions arise from the incidents of the auction night: Mrs. Armstid sues FIem Snopes for her money, and Mrs. Tull wants damages from Eck Snopes. FIem refuses to appear; Mrs. Armstid loses her case because no one can prove that Flem owned the horses. Mrs. Tull is awarded the carcass of the g ift horse; Eck did not really own it because there had been no bill of sale. The wrath of Mrs. Tull is so ter rible that the. old Justice quickly and desperately adjourns his open-air court.
From the above account, it can be observed that the plot of "Spotted Horses" gives rise to incongruities of.all kinds--physical, mental , situational, behavioristic, and verbal ,’ the five sources of laughter according to Allardyce Nicoll.^
4. N ico ll, pp. 200-207. 75
Moreover, the " ta ll tale" sa tis fie s the requirements of John
J . Enck's c rite ria for comic truth: " fo llie s based on contem porary foibles, characters reduced to simplified drives, a neatly turned conclusion, and clarity throughout.A s will be demonstrated in this chapter, Faulkner's story seems to possess more than its share of the essentials of effective humor.
Although the humor of the story is interspersed with some grim circumstances, "as long as the disagreeableness of the consequences of a sudden disaster is kept out of sight by the immediate oddity of the circumstances, and the absurdity or unaccountableness of a foolish action is the most striking thing in it, the ludicrous prevails over the pathetic. . . .
Appropriate to this plot are the words of Max Eastman: "Suc cess is fun, but fa ilu re funny.
Theme
"Distinctly American in idiom and observation, heavily sprinkled with the salt of folk humor, the book releases its 8 theme with an ease that is a sign of true seriousness."'
Irving Howe's preceding statement concerning the entire novel may be applied just as appropriately to the single story.
O'Connor points out the novel's participation "in the ancient
5l Enck, p. 247.
6. Enck, Porter, and Whitley, p. 16.
7. Seward, p. 94.
8. Howe, p. 184. 76
tradition of man satirizing his own weaknesses.This atti
tude is apparent in the story, as the men realize their own weakness even as they are succumbing to the treachery of the
horse trader. However, behind the s a tire is a more serious
theme: the beginning of the commercialization of the South by Northern interests.^ Ward L. Miner labels The Hamlet a
"bitter, sardonic comedy,“ stressing as its theme the failure of the aristocrats of the Old South to provide any standards of values, leaving the way open for anyone "who applies him
self unremittingly to the pursuit of money and the power that
its control signifies" to become a success. “Shrewdness and
cleverness are now the ultimate standards of value, hot stand- 1 | ards based upon man's humaneness and humanity." Expanding
this theme, O'Connor adds that "those among the Snopeses who
are exploiters (not all of them are) do not develop their
talent until they are in the twentieth-century world.Flem
Snopes symbolizes the culmination of our economy; his s e lf-
interest is not even tempered by pity for Mrs. Armstid. All
of the people of Frenchman's Bend are being put to the te s t;
they must make a choice between personal and economic motives.
Eck is torn between his concern for his l i t t l e son Wall street
and his desire for a gift horse. Henry Armstid can no longer
~ Sk O' Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 124.
10. Heiney, p. 219.
11. Miner, pp. 81-2.
12. O'Connor, Tangled F ire , p. x i . 77 choose because he has lost both reason and conscience; his b ru ta lity focuses attention upon the pitifulness of his wife.
The Texan cannot remain impersonal in the sight of Henry's loss of self-co n tro l, and he breaks the rule of non-interference in a horse-trading deal. The entire experience signifies the separation of economic ethics from personal ones. ^When the pony rushed into the hallway of Mrs. Littlejohn's home, the chaos is symbolic of "the insane violence of a madly unjust world.
Language
Comedy has always sought, and profited from, idiomatic language as a delight in its e lf. . . . The moment , . . that we move any distance into the sphere of c ritic a l comedy, the language begins to draw attention not merely to its own agility and gusto, but to its own absurdity. Telltale quirks of diction, tag ends of phrase, bits and pieces of expletive associated with recognizable social attitudes, begin to spring to the surface, and as these multiply, we find ourselves in the world that is peculiarly Jonson's, that of lin guistic sat ire. 15
The above passage can also be applied to Faulkner's w riting in
"Spotted Horses,"6 since "the talk of the novel is superb-- richly idiomatic, virile, brimming with high humor. For example, when the Texan mounts the wagon to take the horses
Tin Vickery, The Novels, pp. 168-73.
14. O' Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 122.
15. Barish, pp. 274-77.
16. Howe, p. 184. 78 to Mrs. Littlejohn1s lot, he says, "Get up, you transmogrified hallucinations of Job and Jezeb el.11^
Faulkner's use of imagery in this story is a blend of the lyrical and the ironic. He uses a lyrical background, against which he presents both humor and violence. Using both
imagery and irony in a structural way— "to create atmosphere through a p a th e tic-fallacy coloring of the natural background"-- he relates the human world to the cosmic creation through the rhythm of his language. in many instances, the chaos of both worlds is in e v id e n c e , a s in the following passage:
The moon was almost fu ll then. When supper was over and they had gathered again along the veranda, the alteration was hardly one of visibility even. It was merely a translation from the lapidary- dimensional of day to the treacherous and s ilv e r receptivity in which the horses huddled in mazy camouflage, or singly or in pairs rushed, flu id , phantom, and unceasing, to huddle again in mirage- , lik e clumps from which came high, abrupt squeals and the vicious thudding of hooves.
And, when R a tliff laughed at the men, "a bird, a shadow, fle e t and dark and sw ift, curved across the moonlight, upward into the pear tree and began to sing: a mockingbird." The humor of the lyrical language is subtle irony.
In two instances Faulkner uses the word "lambence" to describe the moonlight: first, when Ratliff joins the men and predicts their folly, and, second, when Ratliff is escorting
Varner to Henry Armstid's bedside after the escape of the horses.
17. ATT quotations from the story are from Cowley, Portable Faulkner, pp. 367-439.
18. Campbell and Foster, pp. 14-27. 79
'"You folks a in 't going to buy them things sho enough, are y o u ? " Nobody answered. They sat on the steps, th eir backs against the veranda posts, or on the railing itself. Only Ratliff and Quick sat in chairs, so that to them the others were black silhouettes against the dreaming 1ambence of the moonlight beyond the veranda.
Then they began to hear Henry's respirations from the house: "Ah. Ah. Ah." and they ceased abruptly, as if they had not been aware of th eir closeness to it. Varner walked on in front, lean, shambling, yet moving quite rapidly, though his head was still slanted with listening as the faint, urgent, indomitable cries murmured in the s ilver 1ambence, sourceless, at times almost musi cal, like fading bell-notes; again there was a brief rapid thunder of hooves on wooden planking.
The word nlambence61 means "fl ickering," but it also has re fe r ence to w it and humor, as well as to moonlight. Perhaps it is more than coincidence that Faulkner employed this particular noun twice in the story. The word could be express ive of the tone, or author's attitude toward the subject-matter with its flickers of high comedy among scenes of pathos, all part of a serious theme.
Character
Stephen Leacock wrote that "to analyze is often to destroy. . . . And so perhaps a funny ' character‘ broken apart and analyzed is like a broken toy; it won't go together again."* ^
Therefore, humor in character w ill simply be pointed but in
Faulkner's description and action. Character is a strong force
in "Spotted Horses," as the story is almost lik e a Jonsonian comedy of "humours." Since FIem Snopes, although he does not
19- Leacock, p. 106. 80 say much, is the motivating force behind the entire episode, his character will be analyzed, surprisingly, for humor. It is said that “a man with 1 it t le sense of charity who worked in the Oxford bank became the germ of Flem Snopes, the s p irit 90 of personal aggrandizement and meanness." After such a description, one might deny the presence of any humor in Flem; however, “when a person is isolated in comedy he is nearly always a type, a representative of what are the permanent o 1 classes of mankind.1,6 ■ Therefore, even an individual with a revolting name and a negative character may retain the humor ous characteristics of his type. The fact that Flem is so con sisten tly non-committal is humorous; he w ill not say if he owned the horses, and he refuses to go to court. His crown ing hypocrisy in presenting Mrs. Armstid with five-cents' worth of candy after cheating her out of five dollars is grimly humorous also. And the irony of the situation is that he
“gets away with i t . “
The character of the Texan is r ife with humor, from his ever-present hunger for gingersnaps to his lying build-up of the attributes of the “good, gentle ponies.“ Despite
Faulkner's use of the adjective “cold“ in describing the Texan, the latter exhibits a sense of humor in his own right. Even 22 “ lying is a Species of wit and humour.“ Legitimate humor
20. O' Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 15.
21. N ico ll, p. 179-
22. Enck, Forter, and Whitley, p. 19. 81 occasionally finds a place in his talk before he is finished with the auction; however, later, when he sees the fancy buggy he says: "Only I ought to have a powder puff or at least a mandolin to ride it w ith." Bergson wrote, in a d efin itio n applicable to the Texan, that "any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person, when it is the moral side that is co n cern ed .T h e constant munching of the cookies directs attention to the cowboy's incongruous appe tite ; the combination of the gun and the g ingersnaps is lu d i crous. The cookies seem to be symbolic, also, of the greed for profit in the sale of the worthless animals. After the
Texan gives Mrs. Armstid her money, he crushes his cookie to powder and hands the box to Wall street.
George Meredith claimed that "poverty is never rid ic u lous to Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency."2^ There is a rather painful humor in Henry Armstid's frenzy to "pay cash" for a wild horse. The elusive humor of this scene is not the "Black B ile ," the cruel, sadistic, unconscious scoffing at a fo o l--th e harsh humor of which Faulkner has been accused.
As in the tragedy of Oedipus, we see the ironic trick of fate, but we are pained by the "joke.
23 Bergson, p. 50.
24. Enck, Porter, and Whitley, p. 35.
25. Quayle, p. 45. 82
The finest “character 1 zation16 in the story is that of the horses themselves. When Albert Spaulding Cook comments that “beasts as characters in comedy are suprabestial; they represent the social ego-involvements of human beings,he could surely include the “beasts” of Faulkner’s story.
Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which th eir mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy, motionless, and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves. The men stood at a respectful d is tance, looking at them.
The nearest one was standing on three legs now. It appeared to be asleep. its eyelid drooped over the cerulean eye; its head was shaped like an ironing- board. Without even raising the eyelid it flicked its head, the yellow teeth cropped. For an instant it and the man appeared to be inextricable in one v iolence.
He vanished, broad hat, flapping vest, wire-cutters and a ll , into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of long teeth and wild eyes and slashing feet, from which presently the horses began to burst one by one like partridges flushing, each wearing a necklace of barbed wire.
They whipped and whirled about the lot lik e dizzy fish in a bowl. I t had seemed lik e a big lot until now, but now the very idea that a ll that fury and motion should be transpiring inside any one fence was something to be repudiated with contempt, lik e a mirror tric k .
The men in the story gather in “clumps,” staring back at the horses, and, when one buys, they a ll make th e ir bids, herd like. In its inane way, the human herd is as foolish as the animal one.
2"6. Cook, p. 47. 83
The character of Ratliff was a favorite of Faulkner.
The level-headed man was a fittin g opponent of Flem and the
crooked schemes, although later on, in the novel, he succumbs
to the same greed that envelopes a ll of Frenchman's Bend.
Ratliff in his mocking way tells the men the truth; they listen and agree, but fa ll prey to Snopes ju st the same. It is sym bolic that whenever Ratliff sardonically attacks the folly of the men, a mockingbird sings. Ratliff seems to be the voice of chastisement, presenting the author's attitude, and the comic courtroom scene with its loopholes in the laws seems to be evidence that Faulkner is not indulgent over the follies of mankind, but is warning against the triumph of s te rile le g a lity over humanitarian concern.
Suggestions for the Oral Interpreter
The opening lines of the story demand e ffec tive vis u a l
ization of the approach of the "circus," along with the squint
ing effo rts accompanying the men's comments. " It's Flem
Snopes.11 This revelation must be l ifted, and the character of
Flem must be established in his utterance of the one word
"Gentlemen." The oral interpreter can accomplish this through
facial expression, posture, and the use of an "expressive"
pause.
Humor must be read into the description of the ponies
to provide a contrast with the "cold" Texan in charge of them.
The fact that he tells lies must be established through the
use of an evasiveness shown by the reader's shifting eyes 84 during his praise of the animals. Also, his explanation of the gash on the left side of his head must be delivered as obviously untrue. Whenever he tangles with the ponies, he must be maintaining his "front11 despite his breathless fatigue.
The oral interpreter should make every encounter dangerous and exciting through the use of bodily tension, increased vocal rate and volume, and contrasts in p itch -lev el.
Throughout this story there is an alternation of ten sion and relaxation. L ittle Wall street Eck is a relaxing agent, as is Mrs. L ittle jo h n , carrying on with her chores throughout the turmoil in the lot. Also, the lyrical passages break up the action, adding to the atmosphere a note of "treach ery" and "camouflage," symbolic of the deceit being perpetrated by FIem and the Texan. Often repeated is the image of "hys terical fish," describing the antics of the ponies; such phrases should be pointed--given emphasis through the use of a preceding pause, special in flection , or stress.
The men's discussion of the ethics of Flem Snopes is an important scene. The interpreter should work out a dis tinguishing characteristic for each of the voices and make use of separate character-angles for each speaker.
"So this here is the Snopes circus, is it?" one of the newcomers said. He glanced at the faces, then he went to the end of the row and stood beside the blacksmith and the l i t t l e boy. "Are them Flem's horses?" he said to the black smith. "Eck don't know who them horses belong to any more than we do," one of the others said. "He knows that Flem come here on the same wagon 35
with them, because he saw him. But th at's all.” .. “And a ll he w ill know," a second said. "His own kin will be the last man in the world to find out anything about Flem Snopes1 bus iness." "No," the first said. "He wouldn't even be th a t. The f ir s t man Flem would te ll his business to would be the man that was le ft after the last man died. Flem Snopes don't even te ll himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with himself in a empty house in the dark of the moon." "That's a fact," a third said. "Flem would trim Eck or any other of his kin 1 quick as he would us. Ain't that right, Eck?" " I don't know," Eck said.
One of the funniest scenes in the story is the feeding of the horses, when the cowboy says, "Get yourself astick-” there's a bunch of wagon stakes aginst the fence yonder--and when one of them trie s to rush you, bust him over the head so he will understand what you mean." The interpreter throughout this scene must capture the contrast between the violent ten sion in the lot and the relaxed Mrs. Littlejohn accomplishing the mechanics of her household. She "looks" and "watches" without any reaction. The Texan's sense of humor becomes apparent here.
"Get in there, you banjo-faced jack rabbits. Don't hurry them, now. Let them take their time, Hii Get in there. What do you think that barn is--a law court maybe? Or maybe a church and somebody is going to take up a collection on you?"
The entire herd rushed into the long open hallway and brought up against the further wall with a hollow, thunderous sound lik e that of a collapsing mine-shaft. "Seems to have held all right," the Texan said. 86
The men at the door heard the dry ra ttlin g of the corn-pel1ets into the trough, a sound broken by a single snort of amazed horror. A plank cracked with a loud report; before their eyes the depths of the hallway dissolved in loud fury, and while they stared over the doors, unable yet to begin to move, the en tire interior exploded into mad tossing shapes lik e a downrush of flames.
u ! misdoubted that damn shell corn a ll along," the Texan said. “But at least they have seen what it looks like. They can't claim they ain't got nothing out of this t r i p . “
The interpreter should note that Faulkner in his third-person- omniscient narrative style projects himself even into the minds of the horses--“amazed horror.“
Another humorous episode occurs when the Texan, in order to get the bidding started, demonstrates the “gentle ness" of the animals.
The earth became thunderous; dust arose, out of which the animals began to burst lik e flushed quail and into which, with that apparently unflag ging faith in his own invulnerability, the Texan rushed. For an instant the watchers could see them in the dust--the pony backed into the angle of the fence and the stable, the man facing it, reaching toward his hip. Then the beast rushed at him in a sort of fatal and hopeless despera tion and he struck it between the eyes with the p isto l-b u tt and fe lled it and leaped onto its prone head.
Note that in the middle of all this excitement, Mrs. Littlejohn
is in the yard again, watching. The Texan's “pitch" to the watching men is hilarious:
"Look him over, boys." . . . “Look him over quick. Them shoulders and--" He had relaxed for an instant apparently. The animal exploded again; again for ah instant the Texan was free of the earth, though he was still talking: “--and legs you whoa I ' l l tear your face right 87
look him over quick boys worth fifteen dollars of let me get a holt of who'll make me a bid whoa you blare-eyed jack rabbit, whoa!" . . . Then the broad clay-colored hat soared deliberately out ward; an instant later the Texan followed it, though s t i l l on his feet, and the pony shot free in mad, stag lik e bounds.
These scenes must be read by the interpreter with the most profound appreciation of a ll the wonderful Western humor and excitement, so that the deep pathos of the Armstid scenes does not completely destroy, later, the frenzied humor of the ponies' escape. The climax of the story lies in the antics of the g ift horse inside Mrs. L ittle jo h n 's house and out on the bridge--the essence of chaos. The court scene, with an effective characterization of the little, old Justice, is an episode fu ll of country humor.
Cone1 us ion
William Faulkner's "Spotted Horses" is an ideal selec tion for oral presentation because of its variety of action, language, and characters. The plot in its e lf begins and ends in humor, from the sighting of the "circus" to the adjournment of the open-air court. Although both theme and tone are s e ri ous, and a few scenes ‘are heavy with pathos, there is ample opportunity for fun in the antics of the wild horses and the civilized men coveting a bargain-basement gain. Because the language is lyrical and ironic, as well as being idiomatic, there is a wide range of vocal expression possible in a
"cutting" from the story. The characters of men and horses a lik e can be suggested with variety, contrast, and dramatic impact. 88
As there are many scenes with dialogue and also much non-dramat i zed narration demanding visualization and response to imagery, most of the story seemingly requires a "closed situation" with no direct eye-contact with the listeners. It
is imperative, therefore, that the interpreter find lines in the story which can be delivered directly to the audience, to add variety to the reading. Of utmost important, also, is the reader's sensitivity to the contrasts between tension and relaxation, humor and pathos, lyric and irony. Within the action, moreover, there is an abundance of auditory imagery; the reader must help the audience to hear the hoof-beats, the crashes, and the mockingbird through the use of facial expres sion and bodily tension.
"Spotted Horses" is fu ll of incongruities: physical, the ponies' mismatched eyes; mental, the men knowingly lettin g themselves be cheated; situ atio n al, horses that can neither be fed nor caught; behavioristic, horse-trading and g i ngersnaps; and verbal, lyricism and idiom. At the end of the story,
iro n ically, it is the innocent parties--M rs. Armstid and the
Tulls--who suffer the consequences of the transaction between the deceivers and the deceived, the greedy ones. CHAPTER V
"WAS"
When Go Down, Hoses (New York, 1942) was published,
some c ritic s noted a change in Faulkner's w ritin g . O'Connor,
in particular, wrote: "In place of the sense of doom, of
tragic in e v ita b ilitie s , or of an Old Testament harshness, one
finds a sense of hopefulness, a promise of sal vat ion. " ^ Of
\ the volume of related short stories, the only humorous one is
"Was," which in a comic tone examines the heritage of the
past--"the good old days"--as the title implies.
Theme
Each individual story of Go Down, Hoses has for its
basic structure a ritual hunt, which sheds light upon some
aspect of the personal or social relationship between the
Negroes and the white people. "The significance of the ritual
of the hunt is determined by the nature of the hunted as well
as of the h u n t e r s . The plantation world is in its decline;
yet the game of slavery continues between master and slave.
Olga W. Vickery calls the hunt in "Was" a "wild game of hide-
and-seek.
FI O' Connor, Tangled F ire , p. 125.
2. Vickery, p. 126.
3V Vickery, p. 125.
„ 90
In the early days of Yoknapatawpha County, the f ir s t
white settlers had cheated the Chickasaws out of their land
and had planted cotton there. When the HcCaslin plantation
was inherited by the two bachelors, Uncle Buck (Theophilus)
and Uncle Buddy (Amodeus), they b u ilt with th eir own hands a
cabin to liv e in because they refused to p ro fit in any way from
slavery, retreating from the society which exploited it. This was the moral code that Faulkner admired in the old aristocrats
of the South-'-the code that was perverted and finally lost by
later generations. S t i l l , as Malcolm Cowley points out, the
Negroes are "an element of stability11 in the white man's world,
through their very presence helping to indicate the moral sig
nificance of the white man's history.^ The nine-year-old boy,
Carothers McCaslin Edmonds, raised by his grandmother, who was
the sister of the two uncles, is being exposed to the planta
tion world, and in the story the point-of-view is that of the
boy.
Plot and Language
Because the humor of this story lies within the rela
tionship between the plot and the image of the ritual hunt, it
is more feasible to treat plot and language together rather
than separately. The opening paragraph of "Was" immediately
establishes this relationship.
When Cass Edmonds and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey's Turlhad run again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and f
Wl Cowley, Portable, p. 442. 91
bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs' room and they heard them run through the dogs' room into his and Uncle Buck's room, then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy's room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy's room into the kitchen again and this time it sounded lik e the whole kitchen chimney had come down and Uncle Buddy bellowing like a steamboat blowing, and this time the fox and the dogs and five of six sticks of firewood all came out of the kitchen together with Uncle Buddy in the middle of them h ittin g at everything in.sight with another stick. it was a good race.5
Hyatt H. Waggoner makes an interesting observation about the preceding paragraphs "The fact that this humor is not ' p u re ,1 not free of relevance to Faulkner's serious themes, despite
its air of the uproarious tall tale, is first suggested by the rhetoric and punctuation of the opening section. The 'sen tences' that neither begin nor end suggest the presentness of the past, the on-going quality of time.Thus, theme, as well as action, is also irretrievably bound up with the
language.
After the fox is put back into his crate under the bed and the dogs restored to sanity, Uncle Buck and Cass set out to catch their Negro slave.
Because they knew exactly where Tomey's Turl had gone, he went there every time he could slip o ff, which was about twice a year. He was head ing for Hr. Hubert Beauchamp's place just over the edge of the. next county, that Mr. Hubert's
5. All quotations from the story are taken from Cowley, Portable Faulkner, pp. 105-129.
6. Waggoner, p. 199. 92
sister. Hiss Sophonsiba (Hr. Hubert was a bachelor too, lik e Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy) was s t i l l trying to make people call Warwick a fte r the place in England that she said Hr. Hubert was probably the true earl of only he never even had enough pride, not to mention energy, to take the trouble to establish his just rights. Tomey's Turl would go there to hang around Hr. Hubert's girt Tennie, until somebody came and got him. They couldn't keep him at home by buying Tennie from Hr. Hubert because Uncle Buck said he and Uncle Buddy had so many niggers already that they could hardly walk around on th eir own land for them, and they couldn't sell Tomey's Turl to Hr. Hubert because Hr. Hubert said he not only wouldn't buy Tomey's Turl, he wouldn't have that damn white half-HcCaslin on his place even as a free g if t , not even i f Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him. And if somebody didn't go and get Tomey's Turl right away, Hr. Hubert would fetch him back himself, bringing Hiss Sophonsiba, and they would stay for a week or longer, Hiss Sophons iba living in Uncle Buddy's room and Uncle Buddy moved clean out of the house, sleeping in one of the cabins in the quarters where the niggers used to live in his great-grandfather's time until his great grandfather died and Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy moved all the niggers into the big house which his great-grandfather had not had time to finish, and not even doing the cooking while they were there and not even coming to the house any more except to s it on the front gallery a fte r supper, s ittin g in the darkness between Hr. Hubert and Uncle Buck until afte r a while even Hr. Hubert would give up te llin g how many more head of nig gers and acres of land he would add to what he would give Hiss Sophons iba when she married, and go to bed.
The length of the last sentence in the preceding passage is not only an enhancement o f the humor of the content, but it provides a summary of the background and basic plot of the story.
Sixty year old Uncle Buck mounts his horse on the run while Cass scrambles onto the pony. Soon they catch sight of
Tomey's Turl on Jake the mule about a mile ahead. 93
Uncle Buck flung his arm out and back, reining in, crouched on the big horse, his l i t t l e round head and his gnarled neck thrust forward lik e a cootef1s. "Stole away!" he whispered. "You stay back where he won't see you and flush. I ' l l c irc le him through the woods and we w ill bay him at the creek fo rd .“
All the way through the story the language continues in the jargon of the hunt, paralleling the chase of the fox by the dogs in the opening paragraph. Cass continues the on-the-spot account: "But Tomey's Turl saw him. He [Cass] closed in too fast; maybe he was afraid he wouldn't be there in time to see him when he treed. It was the best race he had ever seen."
Cass invariably ends his observations with the "race" motif.
When they arrive at Mr. Hubert's, that gentleman is soaking his feet in the springhouse, drinking a toddy. When
Uncle Buck and Cass are greeted by Miss Sophonsiba, it is quite apparent that she has designs on "Theophi1 us," as she calis him.
After dinner, Cass finds Tomey's Turl outside, watch ing the house.
"They're taking a nap now," he said. "But never mind that; they're going to put the dogs on you when they get up." "Hah," Tomey's Turl said. "And nem you mind that neither. I got protection now. All I needs to do is to keep Old Buck from ketching me unto I gets the word." "What word?" he said. "Word from who? Is Mr. Hubert going to buy you from Uncle Buck?" "Huh," Tomey's Turl said again. "I got more protection than whut Mr. Hubert got even." He rose to his feet. "I gonter te ll you something to remember: anytime you wants to g it something done, from hoeing out a crop to getting married, ju st get the womenfolks to working at it. Then a ll you needs to do is set down and w ait. You member th a t." 9 4
It is clear now that Miss Sophonsiba has arranged the hunt to get Uncle Buck into closer proximity to her debatable charms.
Later, a fte r th eir naps, when Mr. Hubert and Uncle
Buck set the dogs on the trail of Tomey's Tur1, they find Jake the mule tied to some bushes with a supply of oats nearby.
Just^before sundown they find the eleven dogs shut up in a cottonhouse two miles away. That night, when they surround
Jennie’s cabin, Tomey's Turl runs out so fast that he over turns Uncle Buck, breaking the b o ttle of whiskey in the le t ter's back pocket, saved for the "capture."
Unfortunately, when Uncle Buck and Cass stumble into
Mr. Hubert's dark house to go to bed, they wander into the wrong bedroom, and Uncle Buck ro lls into bed next to--Miss
Sophonsiba!
Uncle Buck looked at Mr. Hubert. He batted his eyes fast again. . . . "Wait," he said. "Be reasonable. Say I did walk into a lady's bed room, even Miss Sophons ib a 's ; say, just for the sake of the argument, there wasn't no other lady in the world but her and so I walked into hers and trie d to get in bed with her, would I have took a nine-year-old boy with me?" "Reasonable is ju st what I'm being," Mr. Hubert said. "You come into bear-country of your own free will and accord. All right; you were a grown man and you knew it was bear-country and you knew the way back out lik e you knew the way in and you had your chance to take it. But no. You had to crawl into the den and lay down by the bear. And whether you did or didn't know the bear was in it don't make any difference. . . . After all, I'd lik e a l i t t l e peace and quiet and freedom myself, now I got a chance for it . Yes, s ir. She's got you, ' F i1 us, and you know it. You run a hard race and you run a good one, but you skun the hen-house one time too many."
Here is a reference to the third race--another parallel--that of Uncle Buck being pursued by the lady. 95
that afternoon Uncle Buck and Mr. Hubert had made a bet of five hundred dollars that Tomey's Turl would be caught
in Jennie1s cabin. Of Course, he has been found there, but not caught, so Mr. Hubert lost the bet. Now he wants to play
Buck a hand of draw poker. “The lowest hand wins Sibbey and buys the niggers." Uncle Buck draws the lowest hand, and that
is when he sends Cass for Uncle Buddy's help.
When Uncle Buddy and Cass arrive back at Mr. Hubert's in the wagon, Uncle Buck is hiding in the woods. Uncle Buddy and Mr. Hubert s it down to s e ttle matters oyer another card game.
He batted his eyes twice at Uncle Buddy. “Buck McCaslin against the land and niggers you have heard me promise as Sophonsiba's dowry on the day she marries. If I beat you, 'Filus marries Sibbey without any dowry. If you beat me, you get 'Filus. But I still get the three hundred dollars 'Filus owes me for Jennie. Is that correct?" “That's correct," Uncle Buddy said.
This time the game is stud poker, and they need someone to deal. Cass being too young, Mr. Hubert instructs him to “go to the back door and holler. Bring the first creature that answers, animal mule or human, that can deal ten cards.“
“Neither of them even looked up when he and Tomey's
Turl entered." Outside of the circle of light made by the lamp, Tomey's Turl deals the cards that are settling his future--and Uncle Buck's.
" I ' l l bet you them two niggers," Uncle Buddy said.
“Against what?" Mr. Hubert said. 96
“Against the three hundred dollars Theophi1 us owes you for Tennie, and the three hundred you and Theophilus agreed on for Tomey1s Tur1 ,“ Uncle Buddy said.
“We'll check up for a minute. If I win, you take Sibbey without dowry and the two niggers, and I don't owe 'Filus anything. If you win--" "--Theophilus is free. And you owe him the three hundred dollars for Tomey's T u rl," Uncle Buddy said. "That's just if I call you," Mr. Hubert said. "If I don't call you, 'Filus won't owe me nothing and I won't owe 'Filus nothing, unless I take that nigger which 1 have been trying to explain to you and him both for years that 1 won't have on my place. . . . So what it comes down to is, I either got to give a nigger away, or risk buy ing one that you done already admitted you can't keep at home."
0 o o o--e o o o d - o o o O e o o o '^d'o o o, o » o
Mr. Hubert sat there without looking at anything at a ll , his fingers beating a tattoo, slow and steady and not very loud, on the table. "H'm," he said. "And you need a trey and there a in 't but four of them and i already got three. And you just shuffled. And I cut afterward. And if 1 call you, i will have to buy that nigger. Who dealt these cards, Amodeus?"
and Mr. Hubert sat there, holding the lamp-shade and looking at Tomey's Turl. Then he t ilt e d the shade back down and took up his cards and turned them face-down and pushed them toward the middle of the table. "I pass, Amodeus," he said.
When Uncle Buck, Uncle Buddy, Cass, Tennie, and Tomey's
Turl arrive home, they find the dogs after the fox again. "So they ju st made one run, across the front gallery and around the house and they could hear the fox's claws when he went scrabbling up the lean-pole, onto the roof--a fine race while it lasted, but the tree was too quick." 97
The humor of the plot, couched as it is in the lan
guage of the chase, lies in Faulkner^s "treatment of the
absurd as though it were normal, with the consequent rearrange ment of our perspective on n o r m a l i t y . "7 |t becomes perfectly normal to keep a crated fox in one room and a pack of dogs in another, and to make a day of sport out of the projective cap ture of a slave who runs away regularly, then hangs around the backyard, waiting for things to be "settled." The action is highly exaggerated in terms that deny any tendency toward pathos or romance; yet beneath the absurdity is a genuinely
fond relationship between master and slave, and the "sparring" of Uncle Buck and Miss Sophonsiba does eventually lead to their marriage. The humor of the traditional "tall tale" is followed by classic understatement: "It was a good race.
Character
Miss Sophonsiba is undoubtedly the most humorous of
Faulkner’s characters in "Was." Her ridiculous pretentiousness and e a g e r n e s s for romance are but distortions of the rather squalid re a lity which she shares with Mr. Hubert,
But at last a hand began waving a handkerchief or something white through the broken place in an upstairs shutter. They went to the house, cross ing the back gallery, Mr. Hubert warning them again, as he always did, to watch out for the rot ted floor-board he hadn’ t got around to having fixed yet. Then they stood in the hall, until presently there was a jangling and swishing noise and they began to smell the perfume, arid Miss Sophonsiba came down the s ta irs . Her hair was
7. Waggoner, p. 200.
8. Waggoner, p. 200. 98
roached under a 1 ace cap; she had on her Sunday dress and beads and a red ribbon around her throat and a little nigger girl carrying her fan and he stood quietly a step behind Uncle Buck, watching her lips until they opened and he could see the roan tooth. He had never known anyone before with a roan tooth and he remem bered how one time his grandmother and his father were talking about Uncle Buddy and Uncle Buck and his grandmother said that Miss Sophonsiba had matured into a fine-looking woman once. Maybe she had. He didn't know. He wasn't but nine.
When Miss Sophonsiba says "Welcome to Warwick," one is reminded of Henry Fielding's statement that "the only source of the true ridiculous . . .is affectation."^ Poor Miss Sophonsiba's poses are those born of vanity; she is not being deceitful, merely ostentatious. When Uncle Buck "drags his foot" in a courtly show of manners, his actions mask his true feelings about her overtures of hospitality.
The characters of the two uncles are similar, in that they both are terse, brusque men, set apart from the world by their own brand of s tric t m orality, yet well aware of what is going on around them. Of the two brothers, Uncle Buddy is the most astute, inasmuch as he can read quickly between the 1ines of Cass' hurried explanation of what has transpired at Mr.
Hubert's. Also, he was worried when Uncle Buck first started on the man-hunt, and he warned young Cass to keep an eye on
Buck; this signifies that Uncle Buddy is more cognizant of
"womanly wiles" and "defenseless manhood" than is his brother.
In the hilarious poker game, Uncle Buddy proves his mettle,
9. Enck, Porter, and Whitley, p. 8. 99 ’ outwitt ing his neighborly host, stymieing Hiss Sophons iba1s matrimonial ambitions, and permanently uniting Jennie and
Tomey's T u rl. (Later, Uncle Buddy served in V irginia under
Colonel John Sartor is during the C ivil War. Uncle Buck fin a lly married Miss Sophonsiba, and th eir son Isaac McCaslin grows up to be the ascetic hunter, clinging to the traditional code of honor, about whom the novel Go Down, Hoses is chiefly concerned.)
The humor of Faulkner's story is not dependent upon character as much as upon the action and its narration by the boy Cass. Mr. Hubert is shrewd, and Tomey's Turl is wise, but it is the candid observations of the boy's limited understanding that demonstrate the ironic twists of the plot. The image of the hunt and the nafvete^of the boy, plus the intimation of
Miss Sophons iba' s collusion with Tomey's Turl, provide the humor of the story, taking precedence over the character deline ation of any, or all, of the participants.
Suggestions for the Oral Interpreter
The fir s t two paragraphs of "Was" begin with the words
"When Cass Edmonds and Uncle Buck ran . . ." The point-of- view of the account of the in itia l chase of the fox by the dogs is that of an impersonal narratoi— third-person-objective.
However, when the background m aterial--the expos it ion--is being narrated, the point-of-view seems to shift to third-person- limited; the story is then told from the viewpoint of the nine-year-old Cass, even though Cass is referred to as "he."
For this reason, the oral interpreter must read the entire 100 story with the enthusiasm, candor, and naivete of a young boy.
As an example, the following lines are doubly humorous when read with the earnestness of a child's explanation:
Only, for a while Tomey's Turl didn't seem to be at Mr. Hubert's either. The boy was still sit ting on the gatepost, blowing the horn--there was no gate there; just two posts and a nigger boy about his size s ittin g on one of them, blowing a fox-horn; this was what Miss Sophonsiba was s t ill reminding people was named Warwick even when they had already known for a long time that's what she aimed to have it called, until when they wouldn't call it Warwick she wouldn't even seem to know what they were talking about and it would sound as if she and Mr. Hubert owned two separate planta tions covering the same area of ground, one on top of the other. Mr. Hubert was sitting in the spring- house with his boots o ff and his feet in the water, drinking a toddy.
The interpreter can show the youth of the boy by employing a wide-eyed, serious facial expression; a forward, rather wide stance; and little nods of the head, punctuating the "factual" reporting.
When Gass is supposed to be recounting the words of another character, the oral interpreter can have the boy slightly characterize the lines:
Mr. Hubert hadn't even got done taking his shoes o ff again and inviting Uncle Buck to take his o ff, when Miss Sophons iba came out the door carrying a tray with another toddy on it. "Damn it, Sibbey," Mr. Hubert said. "He's just et. He don't want to drink that now." But Miss Sophons iba didn't seem to hear him at a ll.
When the boy is impersonating Mr. Hubert in the preceding pas sage, the youthful contrast can be made more apparent by deliv- ering the "Mr. Hubert said" directly to the audience and making it more deliberate than usual. 101
As it is important to emphasize Faulkner's hunt image, the scenes of the man-hunt should be read with great excite ment , with a contrasting lu ll when Tomey's Turl is never caught.
On the other hand, at the end of Part 8, when Cass and Uncle
Buck inadvertently feel th eir way through the dark into Hiss
Sophohsiba1s room, a ll of the small boy's trepidation should be expressed in the reader's voice. The lady's scream is the turning point in the story.
Part 11 begins with Cass te llin g Uncle Buddy a ll about the happenings at Mr. Hubert's, including the first poker game in which Uncle Buck won the undesired lady. When the oral interpreter reads the description of the second poker game-- the decisive one between Uncle Buddy and Mr. Hubert--he must convey the tense, v ita l atmosphere, using a tone fille d with the awe and wonderment of the immature mind not quite under standing the goings-on of grown-ups. When Tomey's Turl is dealing the cards, the interpreter, as Cass, must not be aware of the irony of the situation. When the boy says "the hand dealt," he says it only with the fascination of watching in the circle of light the forbidden game which he is privileged to see. When Mr. Hubert discovers that the dealer is Tomey's
Turl, when he pushes back his cards and delivers the climactic
"8 pass," the humor will be heightened for the audience by the boy-narrator1s very innocence of the significance of the pro ceed i ngs.
Part Il8--the denouement--is the arrival at home, with the continuance of the fox-dogs chase. Here again, as in the 102 beginning paragraphs, the point-of-view, with the exception of the first line, seems to shift back to the impersonal, objec tiv e narrator. The last two speeches--a short, bombastic dialogue between the uncles--can be fully characterized as a fitting close to a very funny “tall tale.11
Because the interpreter must consistently maintain for the body of the story a relatively “unknowing" viewpoint, he must compensate for this lack of insight by reading with excep tional c la rity , vocal variety, and meaningful emphasis. Con trasts in pace must be employed, although even in the chase scenes care must be exercised Vest the subtle shifts of the action become incoherent. The important consideration through out the performance of Paulknerrs “ta ll ta le “ is that the oral interpreter enjoy every minute of the te llin g , right along with his listeners. The point-of-view of “Was" is a difficult one, it is true, but the use of the impersonal “he" instead of the first-person “ 11“ will aid the reader in maintaining suf ficient aesthetic distance to enable himself to enjoy the story's antics even while participating in them. This a tti tude of the oral interpreter is a subtle and elusive accom plishment which will determine the ultimate quality of his performance.
Conclus i on .
In Faulkner's story “Was," which examines in a humorous tone the relationship between the Negroes and the white people, the basic structure is the ritu a l hunt. Uncle Buck and Uncle 103
Buddy, adhering to the trad itio nal moral code of honor, w ith draw from a society which profits from the slavery of their darker fellowmen. In this story Uncle Buck's hunt for Tomey's
Turl, the habitual runaway lover, makes a game of the master- slave relationship, which in re a lity is based upon fondness and loyalty. Being introduced to plantation life, in its last days, is nine-year-old Cass, through whose eyes the "game" is given perspective.
The serious theme, the hunt imagery of the action, the long sentences signifying the continuity of Time, together with the device of exaggeration followed by understatement--al1 combine in emphasizing the parallelism of the three chases:
(1) the fox and the dogs, (2) the master and the slave, and
(3) the maiden lady and the bachelor. The intrigue lies in
Miss Sophonsiba's scheming with Tomey's Turl, under her "pro te ctio n ," not to get caught too readily. As for the irony of the situation, it reaches its climax In the classic poker game, with Tomey's Turl dealing up everyone's future--Unde Buck's,
Miss Sophonsiba's, Mr. Hubert's, Tennie's, as well as his own.
The humor of the plot and the language enhancing it lies in the treatment of absurdity asif it were normality.
In the exaggerated language, mainly fox-and-hounds jargon, the p o s s ib ilitie s of pathos (in the inherent kindness and loyalty of the master-slave relationship) and romance (in the reversed courtship of Buck by Sibbey) are eliminated; any complexities of feeling are erased by the understatement: "It was a good race." 104
Although Miss Sophonsiba’ s affectations are highly comic, the humor of Faulkner's story is not as dependent upon character as it is upon the action and its narration by the boy Cass. The naiVete of the boy-narrator provides the humorous contrast to the strange adult actions and gives special promi nence to the ironic twists of the plot. The oral interpreter must maintain the effectiveness of the third-person-limited viewpoint through the employment of c la rity , vocal variety, contrasts in rate, and the accomplishment of su ffic ien t aes thetic distance to enable him to enjoy the droll situation even while giving the audience the illusion of first-hand participa tion. ' CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
As stated in the "Introduction,11 the purpose of this study is threefold: (1) to examine Faulkner's unique sense of humor; (2) to analyze three of his stories for humor in plot, character, and language, as well as for th eir basic themes; and (3) to relate sense and tone, character izat ion, and aesthetic distance, all of which are inherent in the stories, to the re-creative art of the oral interpreter of
1iterature.
Faulkner's Humor Examined
In Chapter I, "Background," the search for Faulkner's sense of humor was in itia te d by considering him, fir s t , as the Man; second, as the Writer; and, third, as the Innovator.
The man William Faulkner is a paradoxical genius: a literary a rtis t who fa iled English, then spurned formal education; a one-time ja n ito r with a passion for poetry; an aristocrat with bare toes and ta tte r s ; a family man with an unquenchable th irs t; a Hollywood scenarist homeward bound with a pregnant mare; a reserved, withdrawing man with an earthy sense of irony bely ing his seeming non-involvement with his fellowmen. In his
Nobel-prize acceptance speech, as well as in his evolving themes, Faulkner cements his relationship with humanity by his
105 106 dedication to man's w ill toward a freedom achieved only by
individual integrity and responsibility. His ironic humor arises from his contemplation of man's struggle to accomplish personal fulfillment, and the discrepancy between man's inter pretation of his goal and freedom its e lf.
As the Writer, William Faulkner defies classification.
Evolving from a Keatsian romantic style to a more stark natu r a lis tic regionalism to an agrarian natural ism with hopeful overtones, Faulkner has employed various narrative techniques: the impersonal-objective, the dramatic-subjective, and the episodic-omniscient. However, the important principle to remember concerning Faulkner the Writer is that his major emphasis is invariably thematic rather than narrative. Since his significance as a writer extends far beyond the telling of the Southern Myth, his primary theme o f freedom takes preced ence over the narrative devices. Faulkner's humor is the exposition of the extent to which man's struggle for freedom falls short of its goal.
Faulkner the Innovator made his outstanding contribu tion to literary tradition when he created the Yoknapatawpha
Saga, based in part upon the personal history of his own fore bears in Lafayette County, M ississippi. Writing from the Saga rather than about it, he has developed cycles of interrelated stories and novels peopled with symbolic characters motivated
into symbolic actions, all enveloped in a concept of Time which seems to fuse past, present, and future. Faulkner's 107 form appears to remain intangible; his characters, symbolic; and his language, a soaring prose style which, nevertheless, binds his readers to the "re a lity " of his unique imagination.
The Yoknapatawpha Saga gives greater scope to Faulkner's humor by providing continuity for the freedom struggle, and a frame of reference for the various levels of achievement or fa ilu re .
The f ir s t chapter of this study accomplishes the ac tiv a tion of interest in Faulkner's humor by presenting him (1) as a unique individual with a personal sense of humor, (2) as a versatile writer with an idealistic theme of freedom as the touchstone for his humorous comment on lif e , and (3) as the creator of a special setting for his awareness of the humor inherent in man's struggle.
Chapter II, "Faulkner the Humorist," discusses (1) the kinds of humor in Faulkner's writing, (2) the comic theories applicable to his humor, (3) h i s morality, and (4) his irony.
Although some c ritic s have been wary of dubbing Faulkner a truly humorous writer, there are evidences of a variety of humor within his writings. Influenced by a romanticism dis illusioned by social, p o litic a l, and economic changes, as well as by the "ta ll tale" tradition of frontier humor, Faulkner creates a comic effect by alternating gross exaggeration with simple understatement, as in the story "Was." Differing from
Mark Twain, Faulkner avoids the exploitation of humor for its own sake; yet, lik e Dickens, he employs an iron ically courteous satire arising from his characters and their circumstances, as 108
in "Uncle Bud and the Three Madams." Although accused by some
noted critics of perpetuating a cruel, negative, distorted,
s u rre a lis tic humor which delights in the torments men must
undergo, Faulkner seems rather to demonstrate a lucid, ironic
insight, surveying with understanding (though not with to le r
ance) the fr a ilt ie s of men.
William Faulkner appreciates a sense of humor as being
our most valuable American trait; it is not, therefore, sur
prising that a variety of humorous effects are found within
his own writing. Several of the comic theories, both tradi
tional and modern, can be applied to the various manifestations
of humor within W illiam Faulkner's work--as examples, the
ancients1 linking of comedy to vice and displeasure; Hazlitt's
incongruity and Fielding's affectation theories; Meredith's
"humor of the mind61 and Leacock's "divine retrospect"; Eastman's
comic release; Baudelaire's spectator-superiority theory;
Bergson's mechanistic concept; and the "Black Bile" laughter
at harsh surrealistic incongruities. Classification of
Faulkner's humor, deep and varied as it is, is difficult to
accomplish because his characters are never exclusively laugh
able. Prim arily they are human beings seeking some semblance
of truth; in doing so, they may be humorous, as is the ta ll
convict in "Old Man," struggling to be dutiful in his restricted
freedom. Often Faulkner's humor is, at the same time, painful
and pathetic because his perception of man's experience as the 109
common source of sorrow and humor enables him to present laugh
ter and tears in fiction as they are in life--intermingled.
Faulkner's theme of freedom reflects a certain morality
evident in the tone (author's attitude) of the writings derived
from the Yoknapatawpha Saga. As au th o r-c ritic he judges his
created characters as human beings out of tune with nature and
therefore suffering a moral breakdown. His judgments seem to
imply moral standards based upon his own broad view of
Christianity, to him meaning "individual duty.16 This basic morality is paradoxically disguised and revealed by Faulkner's pervading irony, which often wounds and amuses concurrently, giving a feeling of poignancy even to the hilarity of "Spotted
Horses." Seeing the irony in lif e , he can inject into the story the discrepancy between appearance and reality, expecta tion and disappointment, common sense and greed. The broadly
religious overtones of the irony seem to convert the humor into a vehicle for goading man into perpetuating his desire for moral regeneration. Because Faulkner the Man can feel the moral significance of his fellowmen's struggle for fulfillment,
Faulkner the Humorist can see the ironies of l i f e which stymie their efforts. So often these situations are painfully humor ous because the thwarting of men's goals is basically tragic.
Chapter 11 proposes that when Faulkner the W riter became Faulkner the Innovator, creating a Yoknapatawpha world to manipulate, he achieved his moralistic irony to expose the
realities of men's plight in the real world, thereby universal
izing his theme. Within the stories there is a core of ironic 110
humor which cannot be denied; it demands recognition before
any true interpretation can be achieved. Faulkner's ironic
humor does not consistently provoke laughter, but, when under
stood, it always reveals a moral truth.
Three Stories Analyzed
Chapter H I , “Old Man,“ presents an example of
Faulkner's mock-heroic, “ta l1-tale“ treatment of a serious
theme--society-versus-nature. In this story the tall convict
escapes from freedom and love, doing his duty to the society
that restricts him, but refusing to become personally involved.
His is an admirable character, although seriously limited by
his almost unbelievable dearth of worldly knowledge. Lacking
introspective power, he cannot evaluate his experiences on the
swelling River; therefore, his rigid,consistency transforms
him into a humorous figure. Faulkner combines humor and pathos
in the responses of the convict, at the same time satirizing
the authoritative elements of society, which should be far
superior to the man they restrict. Faulkner's irony in “Old
Man" lies in the convict's choice between the “ freedom" of
the River and that of the prison.
Chapter IV, "Spotted Horses," analyzes a story which
has an abundance o f humor in plot, language, and character,
as well as an ironic theme. While the theme is basically seri-
ous--the helpless South being dominated by Northern commercial
interests--it has ironic overtones, inasmuch as greed contrib
utes heavily to Southern passivity. In language both lyrical 111 and idiomatic, as well as ironic, Faulkner sets forth a plot f ille d with greedy men huddled lik e horses and wild horses huddled like men. A further irony, at the end of the story the innocent suffer while the greedy ones are spared. “Spotted
Horses1*., is-fil led with contrasts, incongruities, violence, and pathos. Faulkner has achieved an alternation of tension and relaxation that permits the assimilation of the contrasting elements while emphasizing the basic irony of man's weakness awaiting the exploitation of its own vulnerability.
In Chapter V, “Was," the heritage of the past is explored by Faulkner in a frankly comic tone. The basic struc ture of the ritual hunt, exemplified in three races (fox-dogs, master-slave, and 1ady-bachelor), sheds enlightenment on the relationship between Negroes and w hitefolk. The irony of the story lies in the "protection" of runaway Tomey's Turl by the scheming, romantic Sophonsiba, and in the classic poker game in which Tomey's Turl anonymously deals out his own future as well as that of his white patrons. In the ironic twists of the plot, couched in phrases of alternating exaggeration and understatement, absurdity is treated by Faulkner as normality.
Even the point-of-view is tinged with irony; the adult arti fices are seen through the innocent eyes of a nine-year-old boy. The ro llickin g pace of this story and its "happy ending" are evidences of Faulkner's growing optimism toward the human condition. 112
Further Research indicated
This study, restricted as it is to the preceding three of Faulkner's stories, merely confirms for the student of
Interpretation the existence of Faulkner's perceptive sense of humor. For further graduate study, the longer works could be examined for irony as well as for other types of comic effect; perhaps some pattern of occurrence could be determined throughout the less re s tric tiv e length of the novel form. As imagery is always of prime interest to the interpreter,
Faulkner's morality could be examined in the lig h t of an impor tant source of his imagery, the Bible. in addition, as a clue to delivery, some relationship might be established between his style of writing and that of the Old Testament. Structur ally and thematically The Sound and the Fury is similar to
E lio t's "The Waste Land"; an extensive comparison would be both challenging and enlightening to the graduate interpreter.
In a further search for meaning, Faulkner's variety of characters perhaps could be classified according to moral impact, or his animals according to symbolic purpose. More over, for the student majoring in speech, his dialects and dialogues would bear careful scrutiny, as would the lyrical passages. A study based upon Faulkner's use of time, perhaps in relation to ironical effect or theme, might prove to be an exposition of further symbolic significance of plot or cyclical relationship, which would influence the editing of Faulkner's 1.13 works for oral presentation. Within the fiction of such a unique author as Faulkner is unlimited opportunity for research for the graduate student of Interpretation.
Faulkner and the Oral interpreter
Within the province of the field of Interpretation lies the occasion to acquaint audiences with lite ra ry works of merit. As has been mentioned, William Faulkner is consid ered by European c ritic a l standards to be America's greatest living writer. Certainly the presentation of his works to
American audiences, often less appreciative of his genius despite his Nobel Prize, should be an obligation of the oral interpreter. Neither the complexities of his meanings nor the length of his sentences should exclude Faulkner from lis ts of preferred literature for oral presentation.
From the analyses of the three stories chosen for this study, it should be apparent that the oral interpreter of
Faulkner must consider carefully (1) the meanings and attitudes inherent in the material, (2) the character izat ion suggested by the writing itself, and (3) the aesthetic distance demanded by the re-creative art of Interpretation.
Faulkner's meanings can be determined by relating very carefully his plots to his themes. For example, in "01d Man" the meaning cannot be lim ited to the convict's river escapade; it is imperative that the oral interpreter in his own extempo raneous introduction let the audience know that Faulkner is concerned with the freedoms of nature versus those of society. 114
On the other hand, the attitude of the author (or tone) must be ascertained by the oral interpreter by considering the mutual relationships of theme, plot, and point-of-v?ew. As an illu s tra tio n , in "Was" the theme is a "game" of slavery based on underlying loyalty and affection; the plot betrays no true violence or enmity; and the point-of-view is that of a young boy's unjaundiced eye. The author's attitude, then, can be safely said to be one of optimism, kindness, and good humor, as is the case in this story.
The characterization of Faulkner's people in "Spotted
HorSes" (as in any piece of lite ra tu re ) should be derived from description provided by the author, the speeches of the char acter himself, and the dialogue of other characters about the person in question. In Faulkner's fiction with its basic irony and other elements of more obvious comic effect, the oral interpreter cannot afford to characterize to the extent of empathizing too strongly with the fictio nal person; other wise, the humor w ill often be superseded by pathos. Closely connected with this concept of restrained character i zat ion demanded by Faulkner's irony is the essential care in main taining aesthetic distance. Should the oral interpreter make the error of over-empathizing with the tall convict, for example, he (the oral reader) would destroy the 111 usion--the proper aesthetic distance--which literature substitutes for re a lity . 115
In re-creating successfully before an audience the
ironic power of Faulkner's fiction, the oral interpreter must be in command of the sense, tone, and characterizations
intended by the author; he must control the aesthetic distance for his own sake and for that of the audience's legitimate response. The humor of Faulkner must f ir s t be understood and appreciated by the interpreter, then presented to the audience with precise yet relaxed timing and the generous attitude of sharing with the listeners the reader's discovery. When humor
is perceived, the eyes brighten; the lips form a half-smile; the reader's awareness reaches out to quicken the audience's perception of the universality of the ironic comment under
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Books
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Cook, Albert Spaulding. The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean: A Philosophy of Comedy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.
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0 1 Connor, William Van. W illiam Paulkner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959.
Palmer, John. Comedy. London: Martin Seeker (no date).
Renwick, W illiam Lindsay. Comic Epic in Prose. (In Essays and Studies, XXXII (1946); collected by Basil Willey.) "Oxford, 1947.
Robb, Mary Cooper. William Faulkner: An Estimate of his Contribution to the American Novel. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1957.
Sawyer, Newell Wheeler. The Comedy of Manners from Sheridan to Maugham. Phi1adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931.
Seward, Samuel Swayze. The Paradox of the Ludicrous. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1930.
Smith, W illard. The Nature of Comedy. Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc., 1930.
Thompson, Alan Reynolds. The Dry Mock. Berkeley: University of C alifornia Press! 194oT~
Thurston, Jarvis, et al. Short Fiction Criticism: A Checklist of Interpretation since 1925 of Stories and Novelettes (American, B ritish , Continental) 1800-1958. Denver, Colorado: Alan Swallow, I960.
Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of W illiam Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959.
W arfel, Harry R. American Novelists of Today. New York: American Book Company, 1951.
Articles and Periodicals
Golden, Harry. "Only in America." The Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), April 24, 1961.
Grimes, Wilma H. "A Theory of Humor for Public Address." Speech Monographs, XXII. No. 3 (August 1955), 217-226.
-_____ . "The Mirth Experience in Public Address." Speech Monographs, XXII, No. 5 (November 1955), 243-255. 119
Kazin, Alfred. “Faulkner's Vision of Human Integrity." The Harvard Advocate, No. 135 (November 1951), 8-9, 28-33.
Rolle, Andrew F., ed. "William Faulkner: An Inter-disciplinary Examination." Mississippi Quarterly, XI, iv (Fall 1958), 155-159.
Unpublished Material
Quayle, Calvin King. “ Humor in Tragedy." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Drama, University of Minnesota, 1958.
Scott, William Anthony. “William Faulkner: A Study of His Development as a N ovelist." Unpublished Master's thesis, Department of English, University of Arizona, 1950. '