Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Even so, Faulkner was perfectly consistent about his aims in the reconciliation of the Snopes material: that consistency should, in fact, work backward from the latest version. Thus a given detail in The Mansion can be taken as the authentic version, but by and large the factual details of the story need not match each other exactly. As he wrote to Albert Erskine: “What I am trying to say is, the essential truth of these people and their doings, is the thing; the facts are not too important.”

One of the deepest sources of Faulkner’s art and vision is to be found in his habitual conservation of literary material, a kind of routine recycling that allowed him (and his readers) to review and renew events, characters, places, and things—the whole experience of a story from a variety of different angles and points of view. A visionary writer by nature, he was also continually revising, in the context of new work as if freshly remembered, stories he had already told. He was thinking about the Snopes material in the early 1920s, and already by 1926, he was writing some versions of it. Because of the hypnotic impact and signature of his style (styles, plural, would be more accurate), it is easy to miss the wild variety of his work. As an ever-exploring craftsman Faulkner was relentlessly, extravagantly innovative. Among all of his novels no two are constructed in exactly the same manner or told in precisely the same way or from the same points of view. Each is a new artistic adventure, making new and sometimes surprising demands on the reader. (Faulkner is not, not even at his most complex, “hard” to read, but he insistently invites the reader to a deeper engagement in the experience of the story. To that extent he honors his readers, allowing them to bring as much as they can to the shared experience.) What relates each of the Yoknapatawpha novels, and especially the Snopes trilogy to each other, among other things, is his habit of returning to old stories and reclaiming them for a new look. He invites his reader to remember as well as to encounter events.

The Snopes trilogy, though its forward motion and action, events and plot are riddled with remembering, moves inexorably and chronologically ahead, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century rural world of Frenchman’s Bend in The Hamlet through the first quarter, and then some, of our century in the county seat of Jefferson in The Town, ending there in 1948 in The Mansion. We move from the timeless world of poor farmers and sharecroppers, the “Peasants,” a world not essentially different from the rural life of all recorded history, into our own times. The world that we know comes alive, comes to be before our eyes. The automobile replaces the mule and wagon. The Memphis airport—a hundred driving miles away, not the railroad—becomes the link to the larger, wider world. And yet the past, the world of The Hamlet vividly endures, linked by characters and by stories about them, stories they tell. The past persists and is forever modified by the memories and myths, the speculation and the insatiable curiosity of the central characters, some of whom are, appropriately, the chief tellers of the tale. The Hamlet, though it has many tales told in the quoted words of its chief characters—especially the wonderful V. K. Ratliff, itinerant salesman of sewing machines and the true custodian and preserver of the county’s history and news (which become history and legend soon enough)—has an overall, omniscient narrator possessed of a kind of collective voice, a master of many voices and moods. And points of view. There are virtuoso moments as, for example, in the first chapter of Book Three, “The Long Summer,” the narrator gently, even sympathetically inhabits the consciousness of Ike Snopes, the idiot in love with a cow, and even, for a moment, presents reality from the cow’s point of view. Mostly the narrator offers a collective point of view (not altogether unlike that of Ratliff) or limits his focus to a deeply sympathetic, yet utterly unsentimental version of the vision of a single character. Sometimes the narrator indulges himself and talks to us in rich mouthfuls of words, as if words were paint to be flung against his canvas. Sometimes this is for fun as when the fart of an old horse, in the opening sentence of Book Three, is described as “the rich sonorous organ-tone of its entrails.” But the same high style is used to enhance events ad to lift the ordinary to the level of the uncommon. See for yourself how Eula Varner is perceived and presented to us in Book Two.