Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

The Town is entirely told by three voices: first by Charles Mallison, who was not yet born when half the events of the story took place and calls himself, in the second paragraph of the first chapter, the collective point of view of the town of Jefferson; by the highly educated (Harvard and Heidelberg) lawyer, Gavin Stevens, an indefatigable talker who can manage some stylish mouthfuls on his own; and by his friend Ratliff, a patient listener who has learned some wisdom. The three, taken together, tell the whole story and very gradually begin to sound more and more like each other as they influence each other. In The Mansion the original third-person narrator returns now to share the telling with the same three monologists from The Town.

Clearly, then, one of the things that the whole Snopes trilogy is “about” is story-telling, how stories come to be and come to us and how the sum and substance of them become our history; how history is made. In a larger sense the history of Yoknapatawpha County becomes, as Faulkner planned and hoped, by action, event, allusion, and echo, a version of the history of the world. In that sense the cumulative story of that one place is the story of every place.

The surface of these novels, this trilogy, is complex, often intricate. But the tale, itself, is passionately simple. It follows the almost uninterrupted rise of Flem Snopes, from poverty and obscurity to power, first in the county and later in the town where he manages also to acquire the patina of respectability, if not honor, peaking as a bank president and a deacon of the Baptist Church—a paradigm, then, of the American dream of upward mobility, except for the undeniable fact that each and every step of the way has been achieved by every conceivable kind and form of merciless double-dealing—from simple scams worked on the illusions of simple people (never forget that Ratliff, too, falls victim at the end of The Hamlet and learns a lot thereby) to overt acts of blackmail and extortion, larceny, grand and petty. Nothing is too small for the ruthless, greedy attention of Flem Snopes; and, until the very end of the trilogy he is secure in his shamelessness. Most of the swarming Snopes clan—though not all by any means; bear in mind the honorable and successful Wall Street Panic Snopes—are up to no good most of the time, fascinating and repulsive and often as funny as can be. But Flem is the master Snopes, identified like his aristocratic counterpart, Jason Compson, who has a significant cameo role, as a true son of Satan, a banal and evil man.

All by himself, Flem Snopes would be worth a trilogy or more, but the two women in his life (never mind how and why; read and find out), the fabulous Eula Varner Snopes, heir to Lillith and Helen of Troy, and her daughter, Linda, are equally remarkable creations, both doomed and tragic figures, though with a difference; the first raised to mysterious and mythical proportion, both biblical and classical, by all her beholders and a multitude of admirers; the latter more “real” to those close around her (thus to readers also).

The only two characters in the trilogy of whom we are not invited to share the inner experience of consciousness are Flem and Eula. Mysterious to others, they become the occasion for steady and unrelenting speculation. We know them only from their works and ways. They keep their secrets to the end. They remain always able to surprise us, and everyone else, fictional and real, for as loas they live. Nevertheless, we notice, suddenly and briefly, some special truths about the. In The Town we learn in one flashing moment, when Eula confronts her profoundly romantic admirer, Gavin Stevens, that, mythical creature or not, she can be coldly pragmatic and ruthlessly single-minded when she thinks she has to be. She is something more and different, in truth, than anyone had imagined her to be. Flem’s nefarious career, in all three novels, is so marked by success that we tend not to notice his few failures or the true source of his power over others. His powers work, like those of any confidence man, only by appealing to the greed of others. When as in the case in the first chapter of The Town, the two black men, Tom Tom and Tomey’s Turl, set against each other and sorely abused by Snopes, manage to get together, swallow their pride, and come to “complete federation,” Snopes is beaten. We know then that he is not invulnerable.