CHAPTER 9
FROM THE BEGINNING OF his career Faulkner has been less consistently great in the short story form than in the novel. His best stories are very fine, and there are enough of them to establish him as a major short story writer; but many of the stories are merely competent, and some are weak. Faulkner’s creative gifts seem not essentially those of the short story writer, just as they are not essentially those of the lyric poet—and this despite his own characterization of himself as a “failed poet”1 and the implicit and explicit “poetry” of his fictions. His imagination is expansive, and his feeling for words is a feeling for the totality of their emotional and imaginative impact. The epigrammatist and the writer whose natural form is the short story have in common the intellectual precision and discipline necessary for the bald statement so apt in its inclusions that we do not regret the absence of what it excludes. Faulkner’s typical gesture sweeps wide to try to include everything.
Yet his best short stories stand among the very greatest written in our time. Some of them, like “That Evening Sun” and “A Rose for Emily,” have been adequately praised and appreciated if not always sufficiently analyzed. But others, like “Dry September” and “Was,” deserve an attention they have not received. “The Bear” seems to me justly famous—though perhaps it should be considered a novelette rather than a long short story—but the less famous “Wash” and “Barn Burning” are also unsurpassed in their kind. Only the stories of the First World War and the stories of the supernatural seem to me to be generally no more than competent.
In both these last categories the imaginative vision tends to contract. In most of the war stories a feeling for the tragedy of the doomed young men is intense but relatively meaningless. “Ad Astra” is probably the best of the group, but even in it the profuse echoes of Eliot’s poetry and the Bible seem a little forced, as though the fusion of meaning and feeling had not really taken place. “Crevasse” pictures the war in terms of the circles of Dante’s Hell, but the Dantesque imagery seems more ingenious than meaningful. The rest are straightforward enough but full of cliches. In the stories of the supernatural in the section of Collected Stories called “Beyond,” the feeling for the transcendent aspects of experience, for the mysterious and uncontrolled and uncontrollable, is strong; but the stories usually lack the intellectual interest which, with such subjects, could only be theological.
In both groups of stories we miss that fullness and density of experience described by Alfred Kazin as Faulkner’s special quality, his ability to capture “so much of the simultaneous impact of human events”2 upon the consciousness of his characters. Faulkner has tended to write in stereotypes about the lost generation of the First World War, from the first chapter of Soldier’s Pay on. His feeling for something “beyond” the limits of ordinary experience is genuine and consistent and enriches much of his best work, but it seems to be rather inchoate, and to remain ordinarily at the level of minimal perception and feeling.
Yet if the stories of the explicitly supernatural are not among his best, they keep us reminded of an interest as important in the stories as in the novels. For when we consider all the short stories Faulkner has published, and not only the ones included in the misleadingly titled Collected Stories, we see that when they do not develop the vein of folk humor that has been a conspicuous thread in the fabric of the work from the beginning, they tend to express one of two dominant feelings. (When, as in “The Bear,” they approach the novel in length, they sometimes express both.) Most of the early stories give expression to the sense of outrage, the horror at the unbearable quality of an experience that must yet be borne. A good many of the later stories, in addition to those in “Beyond,” are dominated by a feeling for what we may call, with Philip Wheelwright,3 the threshold aspects of experience. Experience for Faulkner, more conspicuously perhaps than for most of us, is never limited and self-contained; it is an experience of being always on the threshold of something beyond. Past and future and the illimitable are all “beyond,” but for an analysis of Faulkner’s best work the past is especially important as stimulus and vehicle of the threshold experience.
2
“DRY SEPTEMBER” is typical in mood and theme of many of the early stories.4 Its account of the lynching of Will Mayes, who is innocent of the act imputed to him by the mob, inspires in us an almost unbearable sense of horror. Yet its violence and horror are not the end; the story is not sensational in the ordinary sense. The violence and horror are associated with judgment; they become ingredients in the beauty and meaning of the story.
In the largest sense, the story may be seen as a parable of what happens to man in the wasteland where, driven by an intolerable sense of insecurity and isolation, faced by an overwhelming threat, he turns to sadistic violence as a means of asserting his existence. The story develops the insight that sadism and a sense of insecurity are closely linked. Will Mayes is not the only victim in “Dry September,” though he is the only one who has our sympathy. Minnie Cooper, who started the story that he had raped her, is a victim of her sexual frustration, and the mob is a victim of the heat, the social climate, and its own need to assert itself.
Death is everywhere present in the story, from the title and the opening sentence—and not the death of Will Mayes only. “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass—the rumor, the story, whatever it was.” All the images here, the blood, the dryness, the fall, the fire, are suggestive of death. The very air is said to be “dead,” “vitiated,” motionless. The background of the violent action is an utter stillness: “The screen door crashed behind them reverberant in the dead air.” The death and the violence are linked by more than simple contrast: the connection is causal.
Minnie Cooper is threatened by advancing age, trapped by biology in a situation from which fantasy offers the only escape. She is “losing ground”; she wishes the rape, or the rumor of the rape, as proof that she is still sexually desirable, if only to a Negro. At thirty-eight or thirty-nine she no longer attracts the eyes of the men sitting along the sidewalk. Her fantasy is doubly pleasurable, first in itself and then as the cause of the notoriety that brought a resurgence of inspection as she walked before the men. It is Minnie’s fate to be raped only in wishful fantasy, to be beyond hope of inspiring even the desire to rape.
McLendon, the active leader of the lynching party, is a victim too. When we first see him, “poised on the balls of his feet, roving his gaze,” he is the very epitome of violent self-assertion. He has a “furious, rigid face,” in which the apparent contradiction of “furious” and “rigid” repeats the life-death, stillness-violence contrast of the larger image pattern. He does not move in a normal tempo; he whirls, slams, flings, strikes, tears, rips. But his violence, we come to see, is a measure of the depth of his insecurity. When he returns home after the lynching he strikes his wife, then rips off his shirt and flings it away, furiously seeking relief from the intolerable heat; then hunts furiously for it again to wipe the sweat from his body and stand panting against the dusty screen.
There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.
Like the river in the “Old Man” part of The Wild Palms, which expands in connotations until we see it as a symbol of the whole natural world in which man is precariously placed, the environment in “Dry September” is symbolic. McLendon is, though he does not know it, in flight. The only way he knows of awakening a sense that he is really alive in the midst of an almost overwhelming threat of death is to impose death. He is one with the insects attracted by the streetlights: the very heat and stillness of the air inspire him to more violent motion. “The barber went swiftly up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled, glared in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air.” McLendon is fighting death in the only way he knows.
“Rigid and violent”: the image is familiar. Yet there is no mere idiosyncrasy of style here. One way of asserting the story’s greatness is to say that everything in it combines to justify such phrases. The rigidity, we see by the story’s end, both creates and expresses the violence, and the violence creates and expresses the rigidity. So far from being a mere “stylistic device,” the juxtaposition of utter death and violent action which distinguishes the imagery of the story is the chief means by which the inner meaning is expressed. McLendon is tense with destructive violence just because he is so near to nothing at all; he is hardly able to breathe in the lifeless air. Minnie feels herself too gravely threatened to be concerned with the possible repercussions of her fantasy on Will Mayes. Only the mild and timid barber seems not to need to destroy someone to assert himself, and his kindness, like Horace Benbow’s, is ineffectual. The others need proof of the reality of their existence.
They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again.
“Dry September” is a uniquely valuable comment on a local social condition, a compressed exploration of the psychology of the lynch mob and of the racial situation in the South. But the comment it makes on the general situation of modern man is even more memorable. An age which has needed to invent the word genocide has reason to be interested in the implications of “Dry September.” Since the meaning is wholly implicit in a texture that conveys the most vivid sense of concrete reality, it is not easily exhausted. The story seems to me one of Faulkner’s finest.
3
“WAS” EXPLORES in comic mood something of the heritage “out of the old time, the old days.” The only humorous story in Go Down, Moses, it is nevertheless representative of a type that includes such notable stories as “Mule in the Yard” and “Shingles for the Lord” and that is also seen in many of the yarns that are woven together to make The Hamlet.
The fact that this humor is not “pure,” 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 “sentences” that neither begin nor end suggest the presentness of the past, the on-going quality of time. As Faulkner has recently said,5 he believes 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.” This tale out of the remote past is not going to be remote. The humor here will not be an end but a means, a part of a total strategy aimed at domesticating the exotic. As in Absalom, the fact that the tale is doubly filtered, that it is Ike McCaslin’s memory of his cousin McCaslin Edmonds’s memory, does not result in an increased aesthetic distance but in a controlled closeness. What “was” becomes what “is.”
But to plunge in this way into one of the thematic meanings of the story, though it may be necessary for an understanding of the implications of the title and the opening section, is to get far away from the actual story we encounter on first reading. Beginning with the second section the story becomes apparently a traditional tall tale. Its description of the dogs chasing the fox through the house and Uncle Buddy chasing both the fox and the dogs, with fox, dogs, Uncle Buddy, and the flying sticks of stovewood all caught in arrested motion, might almost have been written by Mark Twain. “Baker’s Bluejay Yarn” has the same exaggeration, the same treatment of the absurd as though it were normal, with the consequent rearrangement of our perspective on normality. And the paragraph describing the chase ends with another device of traditional folk humor that Mark Twain developed to perfection, extreme understatement following immediately after grotesque exaggeration: “It was a good race.”
Much of the rest of the tale may be appreciated on this level. The consistent use of hunting terms to describe human actions that we should expect to find either tragic or romantic is one of the most conspicuous humorous devices in the story. From the beginning, when the captive fox “treed behind the clock on the mantel,” to the end, when the runaway slave has been captured and brought home and the fox trees once again from the dogs, this time on the roof, the casual and anti-romantic diction keeps us aware of the presence of the absurd. The disparity here between the manner and the matter, between the diction and the story it conveys of slavery and courtship in the Old South, is one of the staples of traditional humor.
The situation itself, as it develops, is farcical. The moral problem of slavery is not so much ignored as denied by the perspective in which we see it here. This runaway slave must be captured as soon as possible because otherwise he will be returned by a neighbor who will bring with him a marriageable sister for a visit. He must be hunted with hounds to prevent not his escape but his return. And in the poker game, low hand wins: the loser “wins” Miss Sophonsiba. Winning and losing, slavery and freedom, are almost indistinguishable, and not simply because a conventionally “romantic” subject is treated anti-romantically.
All the clichés of romantic fiction of the ante-bellum South are present, but turned upside down. The plantation named “Warwick,” the dinner horn being blown by the slave boy, the planter drinking a toddy, the runaway slave: but the slave has no desire to escape, the boy blowing the horn is merely amusing himself, the planter with the toddy sits with his shoes off and his bare feet in the cool water of the springhouse, and the guests at Warwick must step carefully over a broken board in the floor of the porch. Miss Sophonsiba’s pretensions to grandeur and her ambitions for romance are seen against the reality which they distort. The broken shutter, the rotting porch, the gateless gatepost—these are symbolic items in the unromantic reality of the life portrayed. Uncle Buck, terribly aware of Miss Sophonsiba’s “roan tooth,” yet had the presence of mind to bow to the lady: “He and Uncle Buck dragged their foot.” The courtly manners belie his feeling and the situation. The traditional gestures of hospitality, of courtship, and of slavery are as thoroughly inverted as the famous poker game.
“Was” is not Faulkner’s last word on life in the Old South, but in its reduction of the stock heroic and the conventionally romantic to less not only than their traditional but even than life size it might well be kept in mind as a complement to The Unvanquished. It is a very funny story, and that is merit enough. But it also has some significant things to say about the human community as it is viewed in time. Time past here appears as not nearly so different from time present as we might have supposed. Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy still live and still continue their frantic and absurd efforts to escape from women.
4
ONE OF THE meanings of “The Old People” is that if we are to be redeemed from the futility of the well-meaning Quentins and Horace Benbows and the bitter frustration of the amoral Jasons, we have to be initiated into the mysteries by the old people as Ike McCaslin is initiated. What we discover when we have been initiated is not so easily stated, but what we become is made clear both abstractly and concretely in Faulkner—abstractly in his frequent catalogues of the old virtues he celebrates, concretely in redemptive characters like Ike.
Whether Ike McCaslin, childless, propertyless by choice, a carpenter, is convincing as a Christ symbol or even as a redemptive character is a question on which Faulkner’s readers have differed and are likely, I think, to go on differing. It is perhaps significant that we do not see him between his boyhood and his old age. Much in Faulkner’s work besides this suggests that he finds it easier to entertain the possibility of redemption from the horror than to imagine concretely what such redemption might be like. More to the point at the moment is the fact that he has written some of his very greatest stories about the need for and the experience of a kind of redemption conceived as dependent upon mingled lore and rite.
“The Bear” has been much discussed as an initiation story, but “The Old People,” which is simpler in structure and meaning, develops a part of the same theme. Its relation to “The Bear” is that of introduction to development: it defines the conditions in which the redemptive rite can take place and suggests some of the central aspects of a redemptive experience, but it does not, like the longer story, show us even the initial stages of redeemed action. It shows us, rather, what made it possible and necessary for Ike later in “The Bear,” after his ritual baptism, to “renounce the devil and all his works.”
The opening of the story takes us onto the thematic level immediately. “At first there was nothing. There was the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn. . . .” Whatever revelation is to come to us will come in the cold rain of late November. The light, later concentrated, “condensed,” will be gray and faint. The symbolic implication of the light in which Ike waits should be familiar to us from a good deal of modern literature. E. A. Robinson pictured himself waiting in the same half-light for a greater light, and Robert Frost’s poetry has in effect defined our age in autumnal images. It is in the late November that the disturbance of the spring comes to Ike. “The Old People” suggests, from this point of view, not Frost’s Masque of Reason but his Masque of Mercy.
At first there was nothing: “Then Sam Fathers standing just behind the boy . . .” The old people are just behind us, preparing us, waiting to initiate us if we are ready, as Ike was. Ike comes to terms with the past as Quentin never was able to for all his probing and his imagination. It is not simply that Ike listens to the voice of Sam Fathers recreating the past. It is not even that he listens so sympathetically that he comes to identify himself with the old people, though this is necessary as a preliminary to his initiation. He is first prepared by the voice and then initiated by the action of Sam Fathers, who is figuratively always just behind him, as he is literally behind him now.
Yet the voice is necessary, if only preliminary. The story starts just before the climax of the action; later it takes us back to Ike’s preparation, the talk.
And as he talked about those old times and those dead and vanished men of another race from either that the boy knew, gradually to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy’s present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening, the men who walked through them actually walking in breath and air and casting an actual shadow on the earth they had not quitted.
Ike’s coming to recognize, through the words of Sam Fathers, the continuity of time and of the human community in time, his awareness of the old events as “still happening,” is what has prepared him to see the deer. The idea here is similar to the Christian doctrine of the “communion of saints.” “Time is a fluid condition. . . .”
The buck appears suddenly, without warning or preparation except the preparation of Sam Fathers’ tutelage. “Then the buck was there. He did not come into sight; he was just there. . . .” The coming of the buck has the character of an epiphany. Though he comes in the gray November light, he seems himself to shed light, “looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not moving in it but disseminating it. . . .” This is what all Sam Fathers’ talk has been for, what it has prepared the boy for.
“‘Now,’ Sam Fathers said, ‘shoot quick, and slow.’” What the old people have to tell us, when we are in the presence of the deer, is a paradox, or even a mystery. “Shoot quick, and slow.” Only the prepared can follow both parts of the advice. The old man speaks in mysterious paradoxes; like Nancy with her reiterated “Believe” at the end of Requiem for a Nun, he cannot explain. The boy shoots without being able later to remember the shot. “He would live to be eighty . . . but he would never hear that shot nor remember even the shock of the gun-butt.” The killing of the deer is for Ike an experience transcendent, elusive, ineffable, a religious experience. Unlike the stories of Sam Fathers that have prepared him for it, this experience is indescribable. “He didn’t even remember what he did with the gun afterward. He was running.” Yet it is an experience, like the later hunting of the bear, that determines the direction of his whole life.
The symbolic parallel of the hunting experience with religious rite and mystery comes to its climax when Sam “stooped and dipped his hands in the hot smoking blood and wiped them back and forth across the boy’s face.” Ike has been “washed in the blood of the lamb,” to use the old Christian imagery, as well as in the blood of the deer. For the story contains enough parallels of Christian rite and doctrine to make perfectly clear the role of the deer as a substitute lamb even if we disregard what we learn later in “The Bear.” Which does not mean that the story is an allegory of Christian baptism or conversion. By itself, in isolation from “The Bear,” it can be read in several ways, perhaps most convincingly in terms of a kind of primitivism or nature mysticism. Ike is initiated into the mysteries of the wilderness, the mysteries known to the old people before the wilderness was tamed and its knowledge lost. When Sam Fathers was born
all his blood on both sides, except the little white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources.
The question that, as far as I can tell, cannot be answered with any certainty from a consideration of this story alone is whether the primitivism is being “used” or “expressed.” If it is a vehicle for an essentially Christian meaning, Sam Fathers is priest, the only kind of priest whose counsel could be effective for Ike in the gray November light. If it is the meaning, Sam Fathers, though he has priestly functions still, is ultimately Rousseau’s noble savage, knowing with his blood what we cannot know with our minds. Perhaps he is a little of both, a priest, but a priest of “Nature, and Nature’s God.” If we take him this way, it would not be the first suggestion in Faulkner’s work that his religious feeling is, paradoxically, at once Deistic and orthodox.
What cannot be questioned is that Ike’s hunting experience is essentially religious. Like Hemingway’s old fisherman, he loves “the life he spills.” Like the recipient of Christian baptism, he is initiated into the deer’s death as well as into his life. He learns to see nature sacramentally. The enormous buck he sees at the end of the story, the buck saluted by Sam Fathers as “Chief,” may not even exist so far as the public, incontrovertible evidence is concerned. Walter Ewell saw his tracks but did not credit them, did not know they were his. Walter is almost willing to believe “there was another buck here that I never even saw,” but he does not in fact believe it. Only Sam Fathers and Ike saw the grandfather of all deer.
Talking to his cousin McCaslin after the hunt Ike tries to describe his experience of the great buck. “You don’t believe it,” he says, “I know you don’t. . .” “Why not?” his cousin replies; “think of all that has happened here, on this earth.” He “believes” but his belief is involved and figurative, not Ike’s simple literal acceptance. He seems to feel that some kind of survival is possible—“. . . you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living . . . all that must be somewhere. . . .” But he has not actually seen the deer that Ike has seen; and to Ike he seems, even in his sympathetic agreement, to be explaining away the experience. “Suppose they don’t have substance, can’t cast a shadow,” he says.
To which there is only one reply that Ike can make. “‘But I saw it!’ the boy cried. ‘I saw him!’”
5
THE REVELATION gained by Isaac from the wilderness in “The Old People” under the tutelage of Sam Fathers is reaffirmed, completed, and set in a historical and social context in “The Bear.”6 In view of the profusion of religious symbols in both stories, it is probably not misleading to think of the two as a sort of Baptism and Confirmation: “The Bear” confirms Isaac’s membership in the “church” of nature and society.
Part IV of “The Bear” gives us Isaac’s discovery of the evil that made the purification rite necessary, makes explicit the content of the wisdom learned from the wilderness, and shows us something of the result of the boy’s attempting to live what he has learned. We become aware of a paradox: the ancient evil is the reason why there had to be a purification rite, but the rite itself was a precondition of the discovery of the evil. Isaac is ready now to discover that the land cannot be owned, that man’s proper role is defined in the concept of what the church calls “stewardship.” The terrible injustice of slavery was merely an extension of the self-assertiveness that resulted in the idea of absolute ownership of the land: from “owning” Nature to “owning” other people. Natural piety, a sense of the numinous, reverence are needed if the evils dramatized in the old ledgers are not to be perpetuated in new forms forever. Isaac learns that the earth is man’s not to exploit “But to hold . . . mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood.” Man was “dispossessed of Eden” when he first asserted his right to unconditional ownership. The land is now “cursed and tainted” by the compounded results of this original sin of self-assertion. Isaac must give up his patrimony.
He learns that man is permitted to “own” anything only “on condition of pity and humility and sufferance and endurance.” He must cultivate the old virtues, “honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love,” learning through suffering—“Apparently they can learn nothing save through suffering. . . .” He must learn to live in full and unrestricted community. What Ishmael discovered on a whaling ship in Moby Dick and Melville dramatized in the “monkey rope” scene, Isaac discovers in the wilderness and in the old ledgers: “no man is ever free.” His grandfather had been like Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! unable to say “My son to a nigger,” but Isaac will do what he can to break the pattern of inherited injustice: he will at least refuse to profit by it. He becomes a childless, propertyless carpenter, “not in mere static and hopeful emulation of the Nazarene . . . but. . . because if the Nazarene had found carpentering good for the life and ends He had assumed and elected to serve, it would be all right too for Isaac McCaslin. . . .” Though he does not accept the “fairy tale” with which “the Jew who came without protection” has “conquered” the earth, his is, in the full sense of the word, a religious renunciation. He is attempting in his way to fulfill both the Great Commandments, to love God and to love his neighbor, but the God he loves is purely immanent, not the God both immanent and transcendent of Christian orthodoxy. The theology of “The Bear” is a kind of “demythologized” and somewhat romantic Christianity. Whether its “heretical” or its “orthodox” aspects are the more important is a question on which its readers are likely to go on differing.
For the story does not seem to me to yield a completely consistent allegory. Its symbols are suggestive but not always clear in their implications when they are examined logically. It may well be that the imaginative and emotional richness of the story is gained at the expense of clarity. William Van O’Connor in his clear-headed and illuminating discussion of the story7 has pin-pointed some of the difficulties of an allegorical interpretation. Why, for instance, does Isaac not hate Lion, the instrument of the bear’s destruction? Going at the problem genetically, Mr. O’Connor finds that Faulkner had trouble unifying the material in the original, shorter version of “The Bear,” and “Lion,” the two stories he put together to make the final version of “The Bear.” Insofar as there is a difficulty of interpretation in connection with Lion, I suspect that Mr. O’Connor’s explanation is correct.
But there is another way of looking at the matter which I should like to suggest as at least possible. It involves cutting the lines of implication somewhere short of allegory. Isaac needn’t hate Lion, despite the fact that the dog foreshadows the railroad which later destroys the wilderness of which the bear is a kind of apotheosis, because the bear is not God. He is a natural symbol of the old wild times from which so much can be learned, but he is still a bear. Faulkner would have us read the story, I think, both—and at once—as “myth” and as “realism.” Isaac has learned what the old people have to teach, and the Way he learns is the only Way; but there are other methods of learning it. Though he is more at home in the wilderness than in the town, he need not hate what destroys the wilderness, neither Lion nor the railroad; what he must hate is evil. Lion is morally neutral, but Boon at the end of the story hammering on his gun and claiming the squirrels as his own is repeating the primal sin.
Whatever destroys community and stewardship over nature, in other words, is evil; but the use of nature in itself is not evil. The story leaves us not with an injunction to become propertyless carpenters but with a reminder that, while no course of human action is ideal, nevertheless every man aware of his heritage, as Isaac has become aware, must seek to realize his obligations as he can. Isaac’s Uncle McCaslin is quite persuasive in his argument that for Isaac to give up his patrimony is in effect to try to escape the burden of responsibility. Only the Tenderfoot Scout, as Faulkner has Gavin Stevens remind us in Intruder, sees simple solutions to complex moral problems. Old Ben may rightly be hunted, the wilderness will shrink, but man must maintain his rightful relationship to nature and other men. Lion may be, symbolically, modern civilization, for which Isaac has little taste, but he is not Evil, as the bear is not Good or God. If there is something snake-like about the logging railroad, it is because the logging operations partake of the character of exploitation. The story is not so much an allegory of Good and Evil as it is an exercise in double vision. The good and the evil are seen finally as inextricably mixed, just as the heroic and the antiheroic merge in the incident of Boon and the squirrels at the end. The heroism of the hunting epic and the sordid injustice of the old ledgers qualify each other: Isaac must know both if he is to come to terms with the past.
If we do not insist too much on a strictly allegorical reading, the story will seem to have sufficient unity and coherence. Symbolic “loose ends” in it there may well be, but the view of life that emerges from it seems to me neither incoherent nor properly to be characterized as romantic primitivism. Rather, it is a view at once ironic and tragic, but not defeatist, for it calls us to responsibility and community.
A much later hunting story, “Race at Morning,”8 suggests that some such reading as this approximates the one Faulkner intended. In the new story a boy of a later generation learns, even from a much shrunken wilderness, something of what Isaac had learned earlier. But his mentor tells him at the end that this way of learning the old virtues—which are still the necessary ones—is no longer good enough. “‘You’re going to school. . . . You must make something out of yourself.’”
“I am,” I said. “I’m doing it now. I’m going to be a hunter and a farmer like you.”
“No,” Mister Ernest said. “That ain’t enough any more. . . . Now just to belong to the farming business and the hunting business ain’t enough. You got to belong to the business of mankind.”
“Mankind?” I said.
“Yes,” Mister Ernest said. “So you’re going to school. Because you got to know why. You can belong to the farming and hunting business and you can learn the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong, and do right. And that used to be enough—just to do right. But not now. You got to know why it’s right and why it’s wrong and be able to tell folks that never had no chance to learn it. . . .
The “old truths of the heart,” in short, do not change, but our approach to them may have to change. Isaac McCaslin is not Christ, the bear not God. There are other ways of learning to “do right” than hunting the bear or the great buck. In “The Bear” as elsewhere in Faulkner the moral implications are clear and central, the theology somewhat ambiguous and usually peripheral. What some have taken to be Faulkner’s religious “orthodoxy” is a byproduct chiefly of his view of man, not of God.
6
THE TRAGIC mood predominates in the short stories as it does in the novels, finding two kinds of expression. In the earlier stories it appears as “the outrage of a potential believer,” to use a phrase applied primarily to Sanctuary by Carvel Collins.9 In the stories written from about the end of the thirties on, it appears primarily as the tragic burden of an obscure affirmation. The two expressions of the tragic vision are linked in many ways. They are, as Mr. Collins has also said, two sides of the same coin. “That Evening Sun” may be seen, now that we have the benefit of hindsight, to have prepared the way for “The Bear.” Ike McCaslin’s renunciation of his hereditary plantation was motivated not only by his recognition of the moral evil of slavery but by his feeling for the reality of death. He did not ponder the birth and death entries in the commissary ledgers without profit. What he learned from them complemented what he learned from Sam Fathers of the wilderness. Both lessons had the effect of destroying man’s pretensions, reducing him to his real size and power. From both the ledgers and the wilderness he learned to see man in a religious perspective.
The comic stories are linked to the tragic by the same ultimate vision and sensibility. Faulkner’s comedy, even with all his sharp awareness of social realities, is not in the last analysis social comedy but religious comedy. Like the comedy of Christopher Fry’s dramas, the comedy of “Was” and “Spotted Horses” and “Mule in the Yard” has as one of its integral elements an awareness of man’s situation as precarious. Man’s pretensions and his folly are amusing not so much because he offends against manners and mores and good sense as because he ignores or misconceives his position in nature. Man’s societies are always passing away, all of Faulkner’s work says, 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.
The humorous short stories and the tragic ones, then, express the same vision of life. The horror and astonishment with which Cash viewed the antics of man in As I Lay Dying are implicit in all the stories in Knight’s Gambit as well as in those like “The Old People” that attempt to suggest some sort of affirmation capable of preventing Darl’s madness and Quentin’s suicide. Perhaps the final impression we take from the short stories as a body of work is Faulkner’s constant identification of ultimate reality with the unconditioned and uncontrolled. When Ike and his party came out of the wilderness after the hunt, they would come suddenly to “a house, barns, fences, where the hand of man had clawed for an instant. . . Faulkner’s religious humanism, so often given overt expression when he editorializes, finds no frequent or powerful expression in the short stories. So far as the short stories are a valid clue, we may say that his creative imagination is energized by a tragic religious sense that sometimes issues in comic and sometimes in tragic stories but that always implies the threshold character of experience.