Sartoris, published in 1929 is not one of
Faulkner's major works, but it is of great significance
as a source-book for Faulkner's literary development.
Faulkner later referred to it as the first book which 'has
the germ of my apocrypha in it' implying that this book
sets the pattern for his future books and provides a key
to them. Sartoris is the work in which Faulkner
for the first time not only discovered and explored the
imaginative world that features in nearly all his works,
but also found his unique way of depicting it. Thus
although it is not yet the work of a mature writer, it
undoubtedly bears the mark of his growing assurance and
skill. After all there is only a year between the time of
its creation and the annus mirabilis when during a short
period Faulkner produced his masterpieces: The Sound
and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying. It is due
to the dazzling novelty and complexity of these works
that Sartoris has been largely overlooked by
Faulkner scholars.
The present article is a study of one of the major
problems that runs through all Faulkner's works: the
author's intense preoccupation with time as a central
theme of the novel and time as a means of narration. In Sartoris
Faulkner explores the effects of time on the characters,
while endeavouring to find a technique for rendering it.
'Past is never dead. It is not even past' - Faulkner
wrote this frequently cited phrase, a remarkable summing
up of his perception of time, a year after Sartoris,
but the concept first appears in this novel where the
pressure of the past affecting the psychology and
morality of individuals' actions is explored and
expressed in a variety of complex ways.
The novel already bears the mark of Faulkner's
characteristic use of different times, such as objective
time, subjective time (or even subjective times),
cyclical time, and frozen time. The objective time of the
novel comprises the period between the spring of 1919 and
the summer of 1920, i.e. a little over a year, which is
relatively short compared with the objective time of a
conventional novel, although not as radically innovative
as basing a plot structure on a single day, or several
days, a device used in a number of modernist novels by
Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner himself.
The objective time, or 'time present' of the novel is the
story of young Bayard Sartoris, a lost-generation hero,
whose disconnected actions are placed within the
historical and genealogical framework provided by the
lives and times of his immediate ancestors. Thus the past
of the hero is not only his own past but turns into a
timeless Sartoris legend. Later, in a speech at a
university, Faulkner formulated his point of view on this
question as follows:
A man's future is
inherited in that man . . . there is no such thing as
was. That time is; and if there is no such thing as
was, then there is no such thing as will be. That
time is not a fixed condition, time is in a way the
combined intelligences of all men who breathe at that
moment.
Thus the division
between the past and present seemed to Faulkner a
convenient illusion in our brains. To render their co-existence
Faulkner employed several techniques, such as stream-of-consciousness,
snapshots, and flashbacks. But in Sartoris he
does not yet go so far in experimenting with the novel
form as he does just a year later in The Sound and
the Fury, or in As I Lay Dying. The past in
Sartoris enters mostly in reminiscences, and the
novel on the whole retains a conventional, chronological
order. However, these reminiscences are so abundant and
the sense of the presence of the past is so palpable
throughout the book that at times it tends to overwhelm
the ostensible human action, or at least to cast over it
a certain air of unreality. At the very beginning of the
novel Will Falls brings with him the spirit of old John
Sartoris. Colonel Sartoris, though dead, is 'a far more
palpable presence than either of the two old men'.
Throughout the novel the reader is rarely aware of a pure
present, nor is a pure past very often exclusively given.
The particular time-perspective of Sartoris, the
fact that the events of the Civil War are recorded not as
they happened but as they are recalled after more than
fifty years, makes it possible for them to be recounted
endlessly until the facts are transformed into myths.
Miss Jenny Sartoris Du Pre, the widowed sister of the
earlier daredevils,
told the story so
many times that the tale grew richer and richer,
until what had been a harebrained prank of two
heedless and reckless boys became a gallant a finely
tragic focal point to which the history of the race
had been raised . . . by two angels . . . altering
the course of human events and purging the souls of
men.
It is not only Miss
Jenny's stories that are recounted numerous times.
Throughout the novel instead of the omniscient narrator
the story is told and retold as if from different points
of view. For example the episode when young Bayard with
his drunken friends is singing a serenade in front of
Narcissa's window is told three times: first as viewed by
Narcissa herself, then by an indifferent viewer and
finally by Flam Snopes. A year later the omniscient
narrator will altogether disappear from The Sound and
the Fury and As I Lay Dying and the whole
text will break up into a mosaic, but even in Sartoris
this technique arrests the progress of the plot by
turning a linear time-pattern into a cyclical one.
Sartoris establishes a pattern to two important
ways of reconstructing the past. One is the gradual,
painstaking reconstruction of the past by narrators who
are in the present (such as Miss Jenny's stories), and
the other is re-living of the past by means of an
involuntary memory that operates by associations. In
neither case do the characters or the author see the
present or the past as separate times. Real time for
Faulkner is the time of experience, it is not a
chronology but a continuous attempt to assess real values.
And although both means of reconstructing the past seem
such an attempt, the second or the involuntary memory
seems to be a more effective vehicle. It is only through
such a memory that the past becomes not a memory but a
present reality.
Faulkner uses several devices to make the past live on in
the novel. One of them is mentioning landmarks of the
past, such as the brick courthouse with stone arches, the
monument of the Confederate soldier, the railroad built
by Bayard's ancestors, Old Bayard's study at home, where
a chest of family relics is kept, containing mementoes of
the Colonel from the 1840s, such as his sword, and his
cavalry sabre.
On the structural level of the novel the prevalence of
the past is often realised by excluding present actions
from the text. What is the actual present of the novel
almost never unfolds before the reader: there is hardly
any progress in the heroes' actions, no development of
the plot structure as in the traditional novel. A great
deal of the present action of the novel is not directly
recounted but reflected in the minds and memories of
witnesses after they become past, that is, they spring to
existence only post factum.
As Jean-Paul Sartre put it in a brilliant essay published
eight or so years after Sartoris's publication,
which was the first favourable review of the novel and
remains one of the best:
Faulkner rarely
describes acts . . . they slip between our fingers.
Faulkner never speaks of Acts . . . He shows only
their results: an old man dead in his seat, a car
turned over in the river and two feet sticking out of
the water.
We understand that an
Act is to become a story in order to be told and retold,
as Miss Jenny does, until it becomes a myth belonging not
to the past or to the present but rather to no time at
all. It is noteworthy that at the end of the book Miss
Jenny stops telling stories about Jeb Stuart and gallant
Confederates, and the heroes of her stories become Young
Bayard and his brother Johnny killed in the First World
War. Their lives already belong to the past, so they will
be told and retold and turn into a timeless myth.
This is one of the reasons why nearly all Sartorises seek
death: a glorious death, for example in battle, in a duel,
or in a speeding car, 'to glare for a moment in the sky,
then die away.' [1, 358] This is why Colonel Sartoris 'had
but waited for that to release him of the clumsy
cluttering of bones and breath . . . to be evoked like a
genie or a deity.' [1, 44]
The railroad built by him, his adventures, and mementoes
such as his pipe haunt the living characters of the book.
The glory and splendour of the past, or rather, the myth,
turns into a burden for many of Faulkner's favourite
characters and young Bayard is the first among those who
relive the lives
of their ancestors. Instead of gathering memories for
their own age, they devote themselves to remembering
and so preserving legends of a past they have never
seen. [5, 233]
But it is not only
Bayard who is characterised by the tragic perception of
time; nearly all of Faulkner's characters face this
dilemma in some way. Old Bayard's tragedy, for example,
is the tragedy of a person born at the wrong time. He is
too young to be a hero of the Civil War in which his
father gloried, and too old for World War I in which his
grandsons participated.
Perhaps the most interesting innovation in time/space
modelling in the novel is the 'frozen moment'. The term
was first used by Jean-Paul Sartre, who claimed that in
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, time 'does
not progress and consists of separate, motionless, frozen
moments.' [2, 180] I accept the term, but with some
reservations. What I argue is that time manifestation in
Faulkner's novels is manifold and cannot be confined only
to frozen time. In his works frozen time and cyclical
time, objective time and subjective time (or even
subjective times) co-exist. The frozen moment is only one
aspect of this diversity. We think of it as an extreme
manifestation of relativity of subjective time.
The relativity of subjective time was familiar to the
traditional conventional novel, but modernism brought
about an essentially different modelling of the space/time
relationship. The former only stated the fact, whereas
the latter tends to express an arrested motion in time in
the literary text, creating an illusion of stasis and
thus turning it into aesthetic phenomenon.
Faulkner creates stasis by a number of artistic devices.
On the lexical level it is expressed by a cluster of
related images, words and phrases repeated time and again
and often gaining a symbolic value. for example
motionless, arrested, frozen, immobile, or suspended.
On the structural level it is accomplished by means of a
shift in the narrative structure: a linear narrative is
replaced by a fragmentary, highly associative narrative,
often rendered by an interior monologue, or stream-of-consciousness
technique. It is noteworthy that, unlike Joyce, Faulkner
never uses stream-of-consciousness throughout a whole
novel. It is one of the techniques, just as the 'frozen
moment' is one of the manifestations of time.
In Sartoris Faulkner successfully combined
elements of both the traditional, conventional novel and
of modernist literature. One example of the former is the
following episode from the first chapter of the book:
some Yankees looking for 'the rebel John Sartoris'
approach his house and ask the first man they meet there
(who is 'the rebel John Sartoris' himself) to show them
where he lives. John Sartoris pretends he needs to put on
his shoes and fetch a walking stick and walks to the back
yard determined to slip behind the barn and escape. These
few dramatic seconds, when he could feel the Yankee
looking right between his shoulder blades where the
bullet would hit, seem like a year to the Colonel.
That was the
hardest thing he ever done in his life . . . It
seemed like he had been walkin' a year without
getting' no closer and not darin' to look back. [3,
42]
In this example the
relativity of time perception is only declared. It is an
experience of the hero not of the reader. The reader is
only informed, told about it either by the author or by
the hero, or as in this case by a narrator Will Falls.
The experience is psychologically just, but it does not
have any aesthetic function
In contrast, in another episode towards the end of the
book, Faulkner for the first time in his career attempts
to express through the text arrested motion in time and
give an illusion of a 'frozen moment'. Here the reader is
not told that a character has lost the sense of
time, rather the feeling is conveyed through the text.
Faulkner remarks 'drop by drop the rain wore the night
away, wore time away, but it was so long, so damn long.'
[1, 274], but even without this remark it is quite
obvious. The interesting blending of an interior
monologue and an objective narrative used in this episode
in McCallum's hut where even minor details gain symbolic
significance, enables the author to create a sensation of
time-freezing. A sense of detachment from time and space
creates stasis, a moment of recognition of value and
meaning in this world of the sound and the fury.
Fr. Hoffman associates stasis with the vision of an
Edenic past [4, 24-27] and although this term doesn't
seem quite appropriate to Faulkner's World, the idea he
conveys is noteworthy. He views it as 'the state of
innocence' which antedates or ignores or avoids
experience, which is, one way or another, expressed as a
point of reference for a major journey of the American
personality from innocence to experience. I'd rather say
that stasis does represent 'the state of innocence'; not
the original nave innocence, but a higher kind which is
achieved not by ignoring or avoiding experience, but
through experience.
Sartoris establishes a pattern for yet another
important characteristic of Faulkner's works: even in his
radically experimental and innovative novels the
objective time is never absent and always functions as a
background to the novel, (e.g. 'Horace Benbow in his
clean, wretchedly fitted khaki . . . got off the two-thirty
train.') One can find a number of such examples in
Faulkner's works. He seems so persistent in it that one
starts to wonder whether it is perhaps yet another means
of stressing the time problem, showing the difference
between mechanical and subjective times. But even when
time is not mentioned throughout the book we are
constantly made aware of the movement of objective time,
of the changing of seasons from early spring when young
Bayard drives home, through summer and fall and winter
when he escapes to the simplicities of life with the
McCallums.
The objective time used as a background of the novel
represents the inevitable movement of the seasons with
their associated human activities, which possess an
almost ritualistic significance, evoking a paradoxical
sense of both the permanency of human life and experience
and the passing of the generations.
Thus Sartoris is Faulkner's first attempt to
blend the individual's past with the timeless, recurrent
pattern to create a myth. While T. S. Eliot, James Joyce,
and Ezra Pound stress the importance of impersonality and
mythmaking, and Proust and Virginia Woolf have a deep
sense of the importance of the individual, Faulkner
endeavours to combine these two approaches to the time
problem. By projecting individual experience onto the
timeless legend he transcends a sense of past and present
through symbol and myth.
Recurrent action that turns history into myth at the same
time leads to an experimental change in narrative form.
From Sartoris onwards technique and structure
gain significant purpose in all Faulkner's novels.
Sartoris does seem fragmented and some episodes
seem scattered and inadequately integrated within the
whole. But in spite of its shortcomings, it still remains
a much better novel than most critics allow. The lack of
form, apparent incoherence, and repetitions are in fact a
search for a new form, and search which was to be more
fully realised in Faulkner's later works.
[Edited by Ian
Mackean and Helen Jefferson-Brown]
References:
1. William Faulkner. Sartoris. Signet books. N.Y.
1953
2. Jean Paul Sartre. Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the
Fury. In: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. by J.
Hoffman and O. W. Vickery. Michigan State College Press.
1951
3. Jean Paul Sartre. Literary and Philosophical
Essays. Rider an Co. 1958
4. Fr. J. Hoffman. William Faulkner. Michigan
State College Press. 1965
5. O. W. Vickery. The Novels of William Faulkner. A
Critical Interpretation. Louisiana State University
Press. 1959
© Manana
Gelashvili, Associate Professor of the State University
of Tbilisi, Georgia, December 2005
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