The narrators and the narrated : the thematic design of the Snopes trilogy
著者（英） Noboru Yamashita
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 32
page range 77‑95
year 1986‑03‑10
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000016532
THE NARRATORS AND THE NARRATED:
THE THEMATIC DESIGN OF THE SNOPES TRILOGY
NOBORU Y AMASHIT A
I
The original conception of the Snopes story by William Faulkner (1897-1962) is seen in "Father Abraham," which Faulkner started in 1926 and abandoned by early 1927. "Father Abraham" includes a draft of the
"Spotted Horses" episode, which later became a chapter of the first volume of the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, 1940; The Town, 1957; The Mansion, 1959). In
"Father Abraham" Faulkner sketched Flem Snopes's presidency in the bank of
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efferson and also implied Flem's wife's adultery with Colonel Winword in the opening scene.l Although he did not complete the Snopes story at this time, Faulker kept some of the Snopes characters always in his mind and sporadically let them appear in his short stories and novels. When Faulkner turned once again to the Snopes story, he planned to write a trilogy:according to his letter to Robert Haas on December 15, 1938, Faulkner designed the Snopes story as a trilogy under the working titles of The Peasants (the first volume), Rus in Urbe(the second volume), and Ilium Falling (the third volume).2 Much later, in 1957, at a class conference at the University of Virginia, he insisted that he had been writing a chronicle.3
The trilogy, designed as a chronicle, contains and retells many of Faulkner's previous stories. Some stories were revised or retold to become the episodes or chapters of each volume of the trilogy. The Hamlet, which consists of four books, shows such examples. Five stories were retold in or revised and worked into the volume: "Barn Burning" (1939) was retold in
(77J
Chapter 1 of Book One; "Fool About a Horse" (1936) was revised into Section 2 of Chapter 2 of Book One; "The Hound" (1931) into Sectioh 2 of Chapter 2 of Book Three; "Spotted Horses" (1931) into Chapter 1 of Book Four; and "Lizards in the Jamshyd's Courtyard" (1932) into Section 2 of Chapter 3 of Book One and Chapter 2 of Book Four.
The other volumes of the trilogy also involve this process. The Town includes two revised stories: "Centaur in Brass" (1932) in Chapter 1, and
"Mule in the Yard" (1934) in Chapter 164 The Mansion contains two revised stories: "By the People" (1955) in Chapter 13, and "Hog Pawn" (1954) in Chapter 145. Because the trilogy has an episodic structure, it does not illustrate Flem's rise to power so directly as Absalom, Absalom! (1936) does Thomas Sutpen's. In order to connect these episodes and link them together into one story-line, Faulkner used a number of narrators. This device caused a side-effect: the trilogy thereby became the narrators' tales.
In time frame the Snopes trilogy covers almost the first half of the twentieth century (The Hamlet, 1889-1908; The Town, 1908-1927; The Mansion, 1927-1946). This is the period of "the Changing South," the pre-eminent characteristics of which were rapid industrialization and modernization. In this time of radical change, the old traditionalism of the South faced a collapse. As a result of industrialization and modernization, democratization brought the rise of blacks and poor-whites and the declin'e of aristocrats. The social change and crisis bred a flowering of literature in the South: the Southern Renaissance. Richard King defines the movement as the rise of Southern self-consciousness:
I see in this period an emerging self-consciousness in Southern culture .... Increasingly, in those years, the Southern tradition was not only raised to awareness, it was also progressively demystified and rejected6 Faulkner could not help being strongly conscious of this movement and
79 directed his efforts to the reassessment of the Southern tradition. As a result, one of his greatest achievements is the demystification "of the tradition. He attempted to portray the nature of individuals: blacks, Indians, poor-whites, planters-men and women. The destruction of stereotypes in Faulkner's depiction of characters resulted from this effort.
As Sylvia J enkins Cook says, F aulkner's depiction of poor-whites is his greatest accomplishment.7 Faulkner's treatment of the poor-white motif coincides with the rise of the redneck in the twentieth century. In the 1940s he pursued the black-white relationship in such works as Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948); after this period Faulkner's fictional concern was focused on the upheaval of the poor-white class8 His completion of the Snopes trilogy is one of his greatest accomplishments in the 1950s. The time was not only the age of social change but also an era of fundamentalism and conservatism such as McCarthyism. These social currents inevitably affected the scheme of the trilogy.
According to Joseph Blotner's biography of Faulkner, in the spring of 1934, Faulkner's friend Phil Stone wrote about Faulkner's idea of the Snopes story:
It is this social and political upheaval that is the dominant theme of Faulkner's saga of the Snopes family ... which work, if ever completed, may become his greatest and possibly the grandest book of humor America has yet seen.9
The Hamlet was created as such a volume of humor, but The Town and The Mansion were not so humorous as Stone predicted here. Four years after Stone's allusion to the Snopes story, Faulkner himself talked about the design of the trilogy. Faulkrter's orginal scheme expresses a more extensive and faster "eating up of J efferson" by Flem compared with the completed worklO It goes like this:
[Snopeses] corrupt the local government with crooked politics, buy up all the colonial homes and tear them down and chop up the lots into subdivisions.ll
In the original plan Flem's destructive power was intended to be stronger and total. But for some reason his power as a destroyer was weakened in the second and the third volumes, and two new elements were added to the trilogy. One was the use of Mink Snopes as Flem's foil, and the other was the employment of three narrators-V. K. Ratliff, Gavin Stevens, and Chick Mallison.12
The first volume, The Hamlet, was published in 1940. After its publication, Faulkner was engaged in writing other novels, especially A Fable (1954).
Because of his financial problems, he needed to work as a filmscript writer in Hollywood. For these and other reasons it took him seventeen years to publish the second volume. During this time, Faulkner completed five other books: Go Down, Moses; Intruder in the Dust, Knight! s Gambit (1949); 13 Requiem for a Nun (1951); 14 and A Fable. In this period Faulkner seems to have gained new ideas for the trilogy. Most of the aforementioned "novels" have episodic structures, and Gavin Stevens appears as a major character in three of the books and as a minor figure in another. The emergence of GavinStevens as a major character is a clue to understanding the change of theme and technique in the second and the third volumes.
A biographical factor that may have affected the idea of the trilogy is Faulkner's relationship with women. Judith Bryant Wittenberg says that Faulkner's relationships with Estelle (his wife), Meta Carpenter, Joan Williams, and Jean Stein strongly influenced his ideas of love in the trilogy.
She insists that his experiences of failure in relationships with those women
"exemplif[y] Faulkner's negative vision of the possibilities for love.,,15 These experiences in Faulkner's life seem to be reflected especially in Gavin
and his relationship with female characters. Gavin's relationships with women is crucial to the plot of the trilogy, because women stand for the earthy actuality of life.
In the period of the publication of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, the wider social situation around Faulkner was also changing rapidly. In the United States, race problems were rampant, and the world saw the upheaval of the poor-whites; internationally there was World War II (1940-1945), then the Cold War. The world became more modernized and "materialistic."
The war and developing democracy liberated the people; blacks and poor-whites gained more power. Faulkner was deeply involved in aspects of this social upheaval. These various social developments influenced the design and progress of the trilogy.
II
The central character in the trilogy is Flem Snopes; his life, from rise to power to final death, forms one of the main plotlines of the trilogy. Flem's greed is often contrasted with his wife's and some others' love. Flem is finally killed by his cousin Mink. Strikingly, many prominent scholars agree on the themes of the trilogy: "money (power), love (sex), and revenge (death)."16
On the theme of mo~ey (or power or greed or respectability), Flem Snopes appears as the protagonist. Flem and the "Snopes industry" exploit the people of Frenchman's Bend and the town of
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efferson. His direct exploitation is described in The Hamlet, but in The Town and The Mansion his manipulation becomes more indirect. Flem's usurpation is modernized and systematized. A shrewd and cunning exploiter, he abuses even his kin and family members. He takes advantage of his right as a protector of Ike Snopes, he escapes from Mink's trial, and he uses his wife's adultery to attain his position. But his motivation may not be very original.17 He learns a lot fromothers.
In The Hamlet Flem's imitation of Will Varner is apparent. His necktie is the copy of Varner's. In the last section of Book One, he is described as a counterpart of Will: "It was Snopes who did what Varner had never even permitted his son to do ... " (H, 88).18 and "It was Flem Snopes that was setting in the flour barrel [of Will]" (H, 91). In Book Two, as the men of the hamlet notice, Flem's actions resemble Will's: "Snopes jerked his head at them exactly as Will Varner himself did it . . . " (H, 144).
In The Town Flem becomes the apprentice of Manfred de Spain. Manfred offers Flem a bank position.in exchange for his love affair with Flem's wife.
Manfred, who leads the town of
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efferson to a new era of modernization, is welcomed by the younger generation. He succeeds Sartoris as bank president and nominates Flem as vice-president. During this apprenticeship in the bank under Manfred's presidency, Flem learns not only a modernized way of exploitation, such as the system of a bank, but also the importance of respectability. Later, in The Mansion, Ratliff explains why and how Flem needed money and respectability:Because Colonel Sartoris had been born into money and respectability too, and Manfred de Spain had been born into respectability at least even if he had made a heap of the money since. But he, Flem Snopes, had had to earn both of them, snatch and tear and scrabble both of them outen the hard enduring resisting rock you might say, not jest with bare hands but jest one bare hand since he had to keep the other bare single hand fending off while he tore and scrabbled with the first one. (M, 153)19
When Flem became vice-president of the bank, he bought a car and a new house and furnished it as a vice-president's. When he became president and lived in Manfred's mansion, he improved it and made it the grandest in
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efferson. Moreover, he bought a black car and hired a driver and servants ashis predecessors had. Ratliff explains Flem's motive:
So the house the folks owning the money would see Manfred de Spain walk into ever evening after he locked the money up and went home, wouldn't be enough for Flem Snopes. The house ... would have to be the physical symbol of all them generations of respectability and aristocracy . . . . (M, 153)
This process may prove that Flem is not to be harshly blamed. Some scholars endorse the normality and ubiquity of Snopesism.2o They claim that Snopes is not always a villain and Snopesism is prevalent in the moden world. They are right: the modern world is full of Snopeses. But F aulkner refuses to accept Snopesism. In the trilogy Faulkner deals with the problem of excessive materialism as embodied in Flem's life. By using Flem Snopes, F aulkner describes the ultimate form of materialism in a person, whose purpose of life is to possess money and power and respectability. In such a person, possession is the purpose of life, and life is thus closed to all other values. Flem lives in a grand mans-ion, but his life is empty. He is depicted as follows:
setting in another swivel chair like the one in the bank, with his feet propped against the side of the fireplace; not reading, not doing nothing:
jest setting with his hat on, chewing the same little mouth-sized chunk of air . . . . (M, 155)
His wife commits suicide, he has no friends, and he does nothing. Even his cousin Montgomery Ward Snopes sarcastically mentions Flem's ironic situation:
When he had nothing, he could afford to chew tobacco; when he had a little, he could afford to chew gum; when he found out he could be rich provided he just didn't die beforehand, he couldn't afford to chew anything . .. (M, 66)
Thus the extreme materialistic life IS vam, and it is meant to be seen as self-destructive.
The theme of love is contrasted with the theme of money and expressed as a conflict between female and male principles. The love theme is conveyed by Flem's wife and her daughter-Eula and Linda. Eula is gifted with an extraordinary force of sexuality. She is portrayed as an incarnation of love and sex. This woman seems blessed with more love and sexuality than any other woman; therefore, no one can match her. More than a couple of men are required to balance her powers; Hoake McCarron, Manfred de Spain, Flem Snopes, and Gavin Stevens. But all of these male characters lack some ability, so as individuals they cannot be a match for her.
The same can be said of Linda. She does not show as much sexuality as her mother does. Instead, she is given what appears as a male-principle of bravery. So even though she met a reckless young suitor as her mother did, she had no sexual relationship with this young man. She even rejected him in order to save her mentor, Gavin. She gets married to Barton Kohl, a Jewish communist sculptor, who is an idealist and artist. But her marriage is destroyed by Barton's death in the war. She was educated and set free by Gavin and she loves him, but her love is not requited by Gavin. Gavin is a man who tries to escape from the actuality of life. Both of these male characters associated with Linda lack some capacity to love; she seems doomed to fail in marriage.
Thus neither Eula's love nor Linda's love is fulfilled. This negative vision of the possibility of love may be related to F aulkner's private experiences with women, as suggested in Wittenberg's study. This failure of love can also derive from a broader cultural background. Modern materialism causes the split of value judgments and transfiguration of the human spirit. Men's power is closely associated with money, women's love with sexuality. Sometimes men are monsters of money, women of sex. This monstrousness abides in the
modern world. In such a world, love often faces unfulfillment; and this failure of love causes a kind of vindication of other human values.
Linda and Mink are related to the theme of revenge. As
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ames Gray Watson points out, their lives are juxtaposed: "Her thirty-eight years of life as Flem's nominal daughter coincide chronologically with the thirty-eight years of Mink's imprisonment, both having begun in 1908 and ended in 1946. . . . ,,21 Mink is depicted as a typical poor-white and remains such throughout his life. A man of fierce conviction and pride, he refuses to give any consideration to financial profit. He is diametrically opposed to Flem about money. He is poor through his whole life, but he is not spiritually poor, especially in his later years. In the third volume he is described as a man of passion and endurance, a man of pride and honesty, a man with convictions of justice. Even when he was robbed of his money trying to buy a pistol for his revenge and then found a gun in Goodhay's house, he never stole it and thought, "No. I aint never stole. I aint never come to that and I w~nt never" (M, 274). He sounds like a saint. Faulkner needed to characterize Mink as such.
If Mink is a mere thief and murderer, Mink's revenge would be only a personal matter. But the Snopes conflict of revenge is not just a private vindication: Faulkner intended to make it the just punishment of excessive materialism.
Linda's revenge is a vindication of love. Her revenge occurs in two ways.
One is her revenge on Flem for her mother's sake. It is love's retribution against greed for money and impotence of love. The other is her revenge on her fate and Gavin. She tries to avenge her doom and love for Gavin with respect to the release of Mink. She has vindicating reason in her stifled marriage and ideals, and her unrequited love for Gavin.
III
The Snopes trilogy IS based on an episodic structure. In one way, its
episodic elements are caused by the process of novel-making. In another way, they are related to the theme of the trilogy. The rise of modernism and materialism causes the decline of traditionalism; and, in that crisis, the individuals and society are confused and fragmented. People tend to lose the sense of wholeness and to feel split into pieces. The same can be said of . fictional techniques. In modern novels, the plot often falls into episodes.
This episodic structure causes the absence of a center in fiction, and calls for narrators to give unity to the story.
The main characters of the trilogy are Flem Snopes, Eula Varner Snbpes, Mink Snopes, Linda Snopes, and other lesser Snopeses. Beside them, such characters of the old families as Will Varner, Bayard Sartoris, Manfred de Spain, and
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ason Compson appear in several crucial episodes of the trilogy.The narrators-V. K. Ratliff, Gavin Stevens, and Chick Mallison-are more than narrators. They are narrator-actors.
The first volume, The Hamlet, is quite episodic in its structure, but its point of view is consistently objective. In that objective viewpoint, Ratliff narrates his own experiences and gives interpretations of each episode concerning the Snopeses and the people of Frenchman's Bend. In this way, The Hamlet is not innovative in its narrative strategy. Rather it is akin to the traditional Southwestern humor yarn. The rural setting of the story gives a hint of the reason: the time of the story is about the turn of this century, and the village is not yet very much spoiled by the dangers of modernism and materialism.
The narrative structure of The Town radically differs from The Hamlet.
Since The Mansion is a sequel to The Town, the fundametal strategy is similar. However, as the last volume of the trilogy, The Mansion gives a kind of conclusion for the Snopes story. Hence it is an elaborate mixture of the two previous volumes in terms of technique and theme. The center of the story, Flem Snopes, is less often on the stage of action in the last two volumes. Instead, one of the narrators-Gavin Stevens-meddles with Eula
Snopes and Manfred de Spain and Linda Snopes. Warren Beck explains this double plot: "Most importantly, the Flem- Mink confrontation and the Linda-Gavin-Eula involvement are not plot and subplot but the plot paralleling, with essential thematic reciprocations .... ,,22 Thus the plot of Gavin's story, including Ratliff and Chick, is as important as Flem's.
Gavin Stevens is not only a narrator; he is a main actor in the.second and third volumes. He is committed to fight against the Snopeses. Such a critic as Michael Millgate stresses the importance of Stevens's role in The Town and The Mansion. He says, "In The Town the avowed, and enthusiastic, opponerit of Flem Snopes is Gavin Stevens," and "The core of the book [The Mansion]
is supplied by Stevens' continuing ... relationship with Linda."23 As Ratliff observes, Gavin's basic character is described as follows:
Lawyer being not only in the middle of the entire monetary and sepulchrial crisis but all around ever part of it too, like one of them frantic water bugs skating and rushing immune and unwettable on top of a stagnant pond CM, 147).
Here Gavin's immunity is hinted at. Another narrator, Chick, describes the essential nature of Gavin's behavior as "all he wants is just to meddle and change" CM, 196). Later Chick explains it precisely: "His Uncle Gavin always said he was not really interested in truth nor justice: that all he wanted was first to know, to find' out, whether the answer was any of his business or not ... " CM, 343). Gavin is just curious. He himself explains the motive for his meddling as a tactic for his strategy in the fight against the Snopeses:
"Say a herd of tigers suddenly appears in Yoknapatawpha County;
wouldn't it be a heap better to have them shut up in a mule-pen where we could at least watch them, keep up with them, even if you do lose a arm or a leg ever time you get within ten feet of the wire, than to have them
roaming and strolling loose all over ere where in the entire county? No, we got them now; they're oum now .... So it's for us to cope, to resist; us to endure, and (if we can) survive." (T, 102)
His seemingly bizarre behavior is based on this belief. In fact, he is quixotic;
his idea is romantic and idealistic, and he tries to evade actuality as is seen in his behavior toward women. His problem is to escape the actuality, as Ratliff mentions at least three times (T, 152, 177, 296).
Gavin interferes with the Snopeses, and conversely he sometimes assists the Snopeses; but his personal immunity always saves him from a disaster.
But even Gavin cannot remain "immune and unwettable" till the end. He has to live in an actual world where finally everyone must try to cope with actuality. In the trilogy, women represent actuality. Gavin's ultimate relation with women and actuality is expressed in the form of marriage. Ratliff predicts that "if somebody jest marries him, maybe the rest of us will be safe"
(M, 204). Everybody seems to be safe when Gavin finally marries Melisandre Backus. But Gavin's life-long meddling does not end until his battle against the Snopes tribe is settled. Linda, whose mind he partly formed, makes him an accomplice in the release of Mink and the murder of Flem. Gavin's words near the end of the trilogy after his final meddling (Flem's death), sound pathetic and fatalistic. He says: "There aren't morals .... People just do the best they can" CM, 429). Thus quixotic, romantic, and idealistic Gavin became old, realistic, and fatalistic at last.
The position of Chick Mallison as one of the narrators resembles that of Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! At the beginning of The Town, Chick declares that what he narrates is from the common knowledge of the community. He says: "So when I say 'we' and 'we thought' what I mean is Jefferson and what Jefferson thought" (T, 3)24 In The Mansion he recalls his situation:
89 He didn't know whether he actually remembered Linda's mother as his uncle and Ratliff obviously did, or not. But he had to listen to both of them often enough and long enough to know that he surely did know all they remembered . . . . (M, 359)
If this recollection is compared with the situation of Quentin, the similarity is obvious. The Sutpen story that Quentin hears and speaks of is what
"Quentin already knew. It was a part of his twenty years' heritage of breathing the same air and hearing .. a part of the town' s-
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efferson' s- eighty years' heritage of the same air .... ,,25 AsJ
oseph Arpad insists, this is"the"legend-making process itself.,,26 In other words, The Town is likewise
"the story of Chick's initiation into Yoknapatawpha mysteries, of the gradual unfolding in his mind of the full meaning of incidents he has known almost from boyhood."27 Chick narrates about half of the chapters of The Town (ten of twenty-four chapters); and at the same time, he learns from Ratliff about Gavin's erratic nature. In The Mansion Chick becomes an adult and assesses his feeling toward Gavin: "Maybe I was wrong sometimes to trust and follow him but I never was wrong to love him" (M, 230-231). Thus Chick's attitude is slightly different from his mentor, Gavin: Chick remains as an observer in the trilogy.
Ratliff is a narrator-actor throughout the trilogy. He is a contemporary of Eula and Flem and Mink from the first volume. An old acquaintance of Ab Snopes, the Father of the Snopeses, Ratliff is the first challenger against Flem and also a constant Snopes-watcher. As Chick calls him, he is a "rural bucolic grassroots philosopher and Cincinnatus" (M, 356). Originally, he is from the poor-white class as Flem Snopes is. In the history of
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efferson given in Requiem for a Nun, Ratliff's ancestor is described as a "son of a long pure line of Anglo-Saxon mountain people and-destined-father of an equally long and pure line of white trash tenant farmers .... ,,28 But Ratliff himself, in the trilogy, is an example of the virtue of the independentyeoman. In a class conference at the University of Virginia, F aulkner praises RatEff:
I would say that the one that is least troubled by change was the sewing-machine agent Ratliff. That he had accepted a change in culture, a change in environment, and he has suffered no anguish, no grief from it. ... Ratliff will take what's now and do the best he can with it because he is-possesses what you might call a moral, spiritual eupepsia, that his digestion is good, all right, nothing alarms him.29
Ratliff is originally from the same poor-white class as Flem and Mink in terms of sociological classification, but he is neither a Flem nor a Mink.
Flem rises to be a petite bourgeois entrepreneur, and Mink remains as a poor-white tenant farmer throughout his life. Ratliff is an independent yeoman trader. Even though he is in a way modernistic, selling sewing machines and electric appliances and driving an automobile, he is not very materialistic. He challenges Flem's greed in a goat deal, supports the idiot Ike Snopes's love for Houston's cow, helps Mink's wife and children after Mink's arrest, and collaborates with Wall (a good Snopes) in the wholesale business. In the second and the third volumes, the role of challenger is replaced by Gavin, and Ratliff becomes the narrator, who makes close comments on Gavin's erroneous interpretations of Flem's motives. He is also an informant of Snopeslore for Chick. Finally, near the end of the story, Ratliff again emerges as an actor, succeeding in eliminating the Snopes politician Clarence. He is also involved in the release of Mink and thus, indirectly, the murder of Flem. But he is not so despairing as Gavin. From the beginning to the end Ratliff is realistic.
Important about Ratliff are his name and roots. As indicated above, Ratliff has been considered as Anglo-Saxon; but in the second volume his roots are suddenly changed and revealed as Russian. The change is connected with a theme of the trilogy. The era of the trilogy is the time of radical social
91 change. Besides modernism and materialism, it is the time of war and conservatism. The Town and The Mansion were written in the era of McCarthyism and the Cold War. As Chick says, the town of Jefferson was founded by Anglo-Saxon Baptists or Methodists or Episcopalians; and it is essentially a community of whites. This white religioils community prides itself on its homogeneity. As a result, such a community is intolerant of outsiders. Blacks, Catholics, Finns, Chinese, Jews, Russians, communists, and even rednecks are considered as pariahs in such a community. In a sense, such an intelligent person as Gavin is mentally an outsider. The murder of Flem by Mink represents the self-destructive fate of materialism in a cultural sense. It also reflects the exclusiveness of the community, and this may fit F aulkner' s intention that gets rid of a redneck invader from the town.
IV
The decline and downfall of the aristocrats are seen in Faulkner's pursuit of the theme from the late 1920s to 1940s: the Sartorises in Sartoris (1929), the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the Sutpens in Absalom, Absalom!, the McCaslins in Go Down, Moses. The stories of these aristocrats are also retold in the trilogy in contrast to the rise of the redneck Snopeses.
De Spain's fall is contrasted with Flem's rise. Aristocrats descend;
conversely, blacks and poor-whites ascend. Traditionalism and morality are replaced by modernism and materialism. The rise of poor-whites causes a social crisis and confusion in the South. To Faulkner, this crisis and confusion appeared doubled. The only hope, in Faulkner's assessment, seems to be the human values of the yeoman Ratliff. The grim solution of the battle against the Snopeses seems to be Faulkner's bitter conclusion; the self-destructive nature of Snopesism is the only hope for the modern world.
Notes
1 William Faulkner, Father Abraham, ed. by James B. Meriwether (New York:
Random House, 1983); p. 13.
2 Joseph Blotner (ed.), Selected Letters of .William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 107. Faulkner writes: "I am working at the Snopes book. It will be in three books, whether big enough to be three separate volumes I dont know yet, though I think it will." The present title of each volume is suggested in his letter to Sax Commins in October; 1939. See 115.
3 Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959), p. 107. He says:
It [The Town] was not a novel. I think anything that can't be told in one standardized book is not a novel. ... This is really a chronicle that seemed to me amusing enough or true enough to be put down no matter what rules of integrity it had to violate, so in that sense it's not a novel, it's a chronicle.
4 A short story, "The Waifs" (The Saturday Evening Post, May 4, 1957), is sometimes discussed as one of the revised stories, but it is an excerpt from The
Town, the publication date of which is May 1, 1957.
5 As for the revisions of short stories into novels, see Edward M. Holmes, Faulkner's Twice- Told Tales: His Re-use of His Material (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton & Co., 1966), pp. 18-72; Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (Lincoln and London: University Press of Nebraska, 1978), pp.
180-187, 236; Joanne V. Creighton, William Faulkner's Craft of Revision: The Snopes Trilogy, "The Un vanquished" and "Go Down, Moses" (Detroit: W ayne State University Press, 1977), pp. 18-72; Joseph Blotner (ed.), Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 684-690, 697; etc.
6 Richard King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 8.
7 Sylvia J enkins Cook, From Tabacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), pp. 39-63.
8 The 1950s was the era of the most significant blacks' fight against segregation.
At this time Faulkner often spoke about "race relations" in public, and was attacked both by blacks and whites. Especially by whites he was accused as a
"niggerlover." He suffered from the bigotry of white people, and this experience seems to be related to his efforts in the analysis of the psychology of white people and community.
9 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (one-volume edition; New York: Ran- dom House, 1984), p. 33l.
10 Joseph Blotner (ed.), Selected Letters of William Faulkner, pp. 107-109. One element deleted from this plot is the marriage of Flem's youngest brother (Sarty in
"Barn Burning") and his pseudo-daughter (Linda in The Town and The Mansion).
11 Ibid, pp. 107-108. This original intention was later expressed as a minimized episode of an unpublished story, "Hog Pawn" (1954), in Chapter 14 of The Mansion.
12 Until Chapter 7 of The Town, Chick is not yet born. But he narrates his chapters on the basis of his knowledge from his cousin Gowan Stevens. This confusing device comes from the consideration of Chick's year of birth. According to Eileen Gregory, "Faulkner's Typescript of The Town," Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (Summer 1973),361-386, this is one of the major revisions in the volume. As for Gowan's function she explains that "Gowan seems to function primarily as another imaginative filter in the transmission to Charles of stories and attitudes from Ratliff, Gavin, and the town itself" (p. 369).
13 Knight's Gambit is a collection of six short stories in its form, but if its thematic unity and integration are taken into consideration, it is more than a mere collection: it is akin to a novel. See Jerome F. Klinkowitz, "The Thematic Unity of Knights Gambit," Critique, 11 (1969), pp. 81-100; and Montgomery Dunlop,
"William F aulkner's Knight's Gambit and Gavin Stevens," Mississippi Quarterly, 23 (Summer 1970), pp. 223-239.
14 Requiem for a Nun contains some drama portions in it, but considerable parts of the book are descriptions of the "history" of Jefferson and Mississippi. It is rather a novel with elements of drama. It is generally regarded as his fifteenth novel. See the backflap of the Vintage edition.
15 Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography (Lin- coln and London: University Press of Nebraska, 1979), p. 187.
16 Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), pp. 167-208, stresses money and power, violence
and death, sex and love; Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 167-243, love and honor;
Michael Millgate, pp. 180-202, 235-252, greed and love; John Longley, Jr., The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkners Heroes (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1963), pp. 37-49, 63-78, 150-164, money and love and death;
Elizabeth M. Kerr, William Faulkner's Gothic Domains (Port Washington, New York, and London: Kennikat Press, 1979), pp. 184-219, love and money and revenge; etc.
17 Raymond]. Wilson III, "Imitative Flem Snopes and Faulkner's Causal Sequence in The Town," Twentieth Century Literature, 26 (Winter 1980), pp.
432-444. In this article Wilson proves Flem's imitative nature and gives a new interpretation of some episodes.
18 William Faulkner, The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1964). Page references are from this text. (cited as lI)
19 William Faulkner, The Mansion (New York: Random House, 1959). Page references are from this text. (cited as M')
20 Joseph Gold, "The Normality of Snopesism: Universal Themes in Faulkner's The Hamlet," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 3 (Winter 1962), pp.
25-34; Noel Polk, "Idealism in The Mansion," in Michel Gresset and Patrick Samway, S. ]. (eds.), Faulkner and Idealism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), pp. 112-126.
21 James Gray Watson, The Snopes Dilemma: Faulkner's Trilogy (Coral Gables:
Uliliversity of Miami Press, 1968), p. 191.
22 Warren Beck, Man in Motion: Faulkner's Trilogy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 29.
23 MiIlgate, pp. 238, 245.
24 William Faulkner, The Town (New York: Random House, 1957). Page references are from this text. (cited as 1)
25 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 11.
26 Joseph]. Arpad, "William Faulkner's Legendary Novels: The Snopes Trilogy,"
Mississippi Quarterly, 22 (Summer 1969), 215.
27 Stephen L. Mooney, "Faulkner's The Town: A Question of Voices," Mississippi Quarterly, 13 (Summer 1960), 121.
95 28 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 37.
29 Gwynn and Blotner, p. 253,
