William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (Southern Literary Studies)

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L ite r a r y C r itici s m

QTTTTTTO P { P { P { P { P { P { P { P { P { P { P { qtttttto “This is a smart book—lively, engaging, and chal-

Faulkner’s work in an entirely new context, and in so doing provides new readings of three of his

most important novels: The Hamlet, Absalom,

Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Each page is

studded with insights small and large that renew

each book in surprising ways. I’ve learned a lot from this book, and I can’t often say that.” — Noel Polk ,

author of Children of the Dark House:

Text and Context in Faulkner and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly

David H. Evans is an associate professor of American literature at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His work has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Cambridge Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, and elsewhere.

L o u i s i a n a S tat e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s B at o n R o u g e 7 0 8 0 8

Southern Literary Studies

Fred Hobson, Series Editor

B at o n R o u g e 7 0 8 0 8

www.lsu.edu/lsupress

Printed in U.S.A. Jacket design by Michelle A. Neustrom

EvansJACKET.indd 1

© 2008 Louisiana State University Press

L o u i s i a n a S tat e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition

lenging—that does a lot to reposition William

Evans

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arbitrary status of racial identity in Go Down, Moses, in a way that is strikingly similar to James’s criticism of the concept of identity in general. Finally, Evans reads The Hamlet, a work that is often used to support the idea that Faulkner is opposed to modernity, as a depiction of a distinctly pragmatic and modern world. With its creative coupling of James’s philosophy and Faulkner’s art, Evans’s lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.

ISBN 978-0-8071-3315-6

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Southern Literary Studies Fred Hobson, Series Editor

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William

Fau l k n e r,

William James, and the

A m e r i ca n P r ag m at i c

Tradition David H. Evans

L o u i s i a n a S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y P r ess

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B at o n R o u g e


Published by Louisiana State University Press Copyright © 2008 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom Typeface: ITC Century Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, David H., 1956– William Faulkner, William James, and the American pragmatic tradition / David H. Evans. p. cm. — (Southern literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8071-3315-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Criticism and interpretation. 2. James, William, 1842-1910. 3. Pragmatism in literature. 4. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. PS3511.A86Z78245 2007 813'.52—dc22 2007040301

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. � �

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To Pat sine qua non

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: His Veracity as a Liar

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1. Make Believe: The Confidence Man as Protopragmatist

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2. Truth as “Veri-fication”: William James and the Transaction of Confidence

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3. Retailing Truth: Making Community in The Hamlet

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4. Making History: Pragmatic Historiography and Absalom, Absalom!

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5. A Great Story: Pathfinding and Providence in Go Down, Moses

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Conclusion: A Future for Faulkner

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Writers are wont to affect a perverse pride in the loneliness of their occupation, but it is an open secret that, as Emerson reminds us, every book is a quotation. Certainly this one owes its existence to the intellectual generosity of many people. First recognition must go to Dick Poirier, who, in the course of a conversation with an anxious graduate student too many years ago, suggested, “Why don’t you think about Faulkner?” and whose inspiration, patience, and unfailing critical intelligence helped guide the initial version of this project to a successful conclusion. I am also grateful to Myra Jehlen and George Levine for their responses to the manuscript, both their encouragement and the rigor with which they challenged my (many) weaker ideas. Larry Buell, Len Deipeveen, Bruce Greenfield, and Jim Livingston deserve thanks for reading and responding to parts of the manuscript. Finally, conversations with Robert Abboud, Pat Cesarini, James Albrecht, Richard Geha, and many other friends and colleagues helped to herd my all-too-feline thoughts into a semblance of coherence. At various points in the completion of this book I have depended on the kindness of institutions, in particular the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary, where I was able to spend a postdoctoral year thanks to financial support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the University of Mississippi and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, sponsors of the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at which a portion of the manuscript was presented; and the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. I would also like to thank my careful proofreader, Lynn Mills, my conscientious editor, John Easterly, and my meticulous copy editor, Marie Blanchard. My first and last debt is to Pat, who endured. Parts of chapters 3 and 4 have appeared previously in Mississippi Quarterly and Faulkner and the Natural World respectively; I am grateful for permission to reproduce them here.

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Introduction His Veracity as a Liar

He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it paid out. William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

Truth was a topic about which William Faulkner was often inclined to be expansive, especially when speaking on behalf of the writer, humanity, or the American State Department. His pronouncement to a gathering of Philippine teachers is typical of many of his late, public reflections on literature’s obligations: “The writer’s responsibility is to tell the truth—to tell the truth in such a way that it will be memorable, that people will read it, will remember it because it was told in some memorable way.”1 To be sure, the duty to “truth” is not to be confused with the naturalist’s crude obsession with “facts”: “Fact is not too important and can be altered by law, by circumstance, by too many qualities, economics, temperature”; truth, on the contrary, occupies a position beyond the vicissitudes of time, whence it exercises a transcendent influence: “truth is the constant thing, it is what man knows is right and that when he violates it, it troubles him.”2 It is somewhat disconcerting, therefore, to discover that one of Faulkner’s very earliest literary productions, and the first to adumbrate what will become the concerns and materials of his major phase, is a short sketch entitled “The Liar.” “The Liar” was one of a number of brief stories and vignettes that Faulkner wrote for the Times-Picayune while living in New Orleans in 1925. But while most are disposable pieces, examples of local New Orleans color, “The Liar” stands out as a tale with a future, indeed as the first tentative step into what will become Faulkner’s characteristic literary territory. The setting is the porch of a country store, where a group of southern poor whites are gathered listening as one of their number with a well-deserved reputation for improbable tales begins spinning yarns. We have here the seeds of Yoknapatawpha, 1


and specifically of the matter of the Snopes, that will compel Faulkner’s imagination until almost the end of his career. Will Gibson’s store will become Will Varner’s; the storyteller’s name, Ek, will reappear with Eck Snopes; and the scrap of a tale he begins, about a horse that “run right through old Mis’ Harmon’s house,” will develop into first the core of the unpublished 1926 manuscript Father Abraham and then “Spotted Horses,” before achieving its final form as a part of The Hamlet.3 Indeed, “The Liar” has something of the quality of a Snopes trilogy in miniature, beginning with the arrival of a silent stranger and ending with a gunshot. As the newcomer reaches the store, Ek is just beginning another tale, this one concerning “something cur’ous that reely happened.”4 The previous day, he says, he had gone off into the hill country to help the sheriff make contact with a suspicious backwoods farmer. While approaching the cabin alone from behind, he witnesses an extraordinary scene. A rendezvous between the farmer’s wife and a mysterious stranger is interrupted by the farmer himself; a fight ensues. The stranger stuns his opponent with a rail post, dumps the body “like a sack of meal into one of them narrow sink holes,” and drops a rattlesnake in with it. Suddenly, as Ek brings his story to an end, the stranger on the porch pulls out a pistol, fires at him, and dashes off to jump aboard a train just then rushing past. But the epilogue is what gives the story its special interest. When chided by his audience for telling “the truth for once in his life. . . . right in front of the feller that did it,” Ek protests, “I tell you that it was a lie, ever last word of it. I wasn’t nowhere near Mitchell yest’day.” After such clear verification, none of his listeners gives the slightest credence to his “obstinacy,” and Ek is left sourly reflecting that “his veracity as a liar was gone forever.” What should we make of this little store-porch parable, whose subject is nothing if not the problematic relation of truth and lies, stories and reality? From one point of view, it is indeed picayune, an aw-shucks anecdote as thin as the paper it appears on, and hardly worth the attention of the serious literary critic. At the same time, despite its dismissive irony—or partly by means of it—Ek’s yarn offers a possible view of a rather different notion of truth than “the constant thing.” For its veracity derives not from any correspondence to an external reality, a reality which in this case is by definition undiscoverable, unavailable to Ek’s forever ec-static position, but rather from its effects. It is only because the stranger believes that Ek had in fact witnessed the events he describes that he assumes the role of the murderer; it is only because the audience 2

His Veracity as a Liar

witnesses the stranger behaving as a murderer that they are convinced of the truth of the events Ek describes. And the reader is also a witness, in this text constituted by third-party observations—a witness to the creation of truth by belief, in which Ek is only a participant. In other words, the story becomes true in the course of a temporally developing process, one of whose causative elements is, paradoxically enough, the prior belief of the observers. I put the matter in this way to suggest that “The Liar” can be read as a small-scale version of a philosophical revolution that transformed the intellectual landscape of America, and indeed the world, in the early twentieth century. It was a revolution that centered on a new conception of truth which was the crucial element of the constellation of ideas and projects that was given the name of pragmatism. Ek’s discomposure has its parallel in the experience of a number of philosophers and intellectuals who found the implications of pragmatism’s diddling with the clear line between truth and falsehood profoundly disturbing. Ek’s “veracity as a liar” depended upon the certainty that no story he ever told could ever be mistaken for truth, which in turn required a stable separation of reality and representation, both secure in their own parallel and temporally fixed positions. What he discovers, in effect, is the possibility of viewing truth, as William James argues in Pragmatism, as something fluid, something that is “made . . . in the course of experience” and which cannot be kept independent from the teller’s own active participation. Or as James puts it: “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”5 My juxtaposition of Ek and William James will probably discomfit the reader as much as it would Ek himself (though probably not James), and understandably so: nothing is more antipathetic to one who adopts the persona of the store-porch storyteller—whether Ek or Faulkner—than the claim that there are serious philosophical issues at play in his yarn. But it will be my claim in what follows that Faulkner’s writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and a cultural force in the early twentieth century, the American cultural traditions it developed from, the epistemological questions it addressed, and the philosophical and social debates in which it participated. A justification of the claim that there is a vital affinity between pragmatic ideas and the fiction of Faulkner requires a more precise definition 3


of what is meant by pragmatism. This immediately raises a field of problems, since by definition, pragmatism is a philosophy that resists definition, insisting that its meaning resides in its use and not its principles. James, attempting to explain the idea of a philosophy without a philosophy— one that “has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method”—characteristically resorted to metaphor, comparing pragmatism to a “corridor in a hotel”: “Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.”6 Philosophy, then, not as taking up residence in the House of Being but as a temporary reservation in the hotel of becoming. Any proposed definition, to be true to its subject, must be necessarily provisional, partial, and dependent on the purposes it is intended to serve, as well as prepared to renounce the ambition to assume the unifying perspective of epistemological transcendence. With this in mind, then, for the purposes of this study I see the critical component of pragmatism in what James calls its new “conception of truth.”7 My invocation of James here is intentional, in spite of the fact that, in one overly familiar genealogy of pragmatism, he has been allotted the role of the vanishing mediator between the intellectual rigor of Charles Saunders Peirce and the social engagement of John Dewey. The current reconsideration of the role of pragmatism in American cultural history has resulted in a reassessment of the truly radical nature of James’s thought and its influence on a variety of thinkers, writers, and artists.8 For it is James’s articulation of pragmatism which at once represents a more thoroughgoing critique of the model of truth as discovery than Peirce was willing to entertain, as well as registering the connections between the pragmatic conception of the world and contemporary social and economic transformations, connections which Dewey would subsequently elaborate in more detail. In this regard, Michael Weinstein’s assessment that “the most significant breach in American classical philosophy” falls between Peirce’s “intellectualism” and James’s willingness to place in question the traditional notion of objective truth seems to get it about right.9 The core of James’s challenge to traditional notions of truth as discovery or representation lies in his re-imagination of the relation of mind and world, of knower and known.10 “Throughout the history of philoso4


phy,” he complains, “the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities.”11 This discontinuity—what James describes as an “epistemological chasm”12—is in effect at once the meta- of metaphysics and the theater of theory, the division that puts the mind above and beyond the world, making possible its transcendent apprehension, but only by recourse to a gap-clearing intellectual “salto mortale” whose desperate heroism is, for James, but a cheerful face covering a deep philosophical despair. To this “saltatory” model of cognition James proposes an “ambulatory” one, according to which mind and world are not separate entities occupying different ontological planes, but the endpoints of a continuous process unfolding in a single register, the space of “experience”: “Now the most general way of contrasting my view of knowledge with the popular view (which is also the view of most epistemologists) is to call my view ambulatory. . . . My own account of this relation is ambulatory through and through. I say that we know an object by means of any idea, whenever we ambulate towards the object under the impulse which the idea communicates. . . . Cognition, whenever we take it concretely, means determinate ‘ambulation,’ through intermediaries, from a terminus a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad quem.”13 One might rewrite this binary in literary terms. The saltatory model of cognition relies on the kind of sudden substitutive displacement that has traditionally been associated with metaphor.14 The ambulatory model, on the other hand, involves something that is more accurately described as a narrative, a continuous progress from a beginning to a conclusion. James in fact repeatedly envisages cognition as a sort of journey, as in his most extended description of the “truth-process” in “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” an example that offers at once an illustration and a genealogy of truth itself: “If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. . . . Following our mental image of a house along the cowpath, we actually come to see the house; we get the image’s full verification. Such simply and fully verified leadings are certainly the originals and prototypes of the truth-process” (James’s emphasis).15 In calling James’s version of cognition narratival, I mean something more than the familiar contention that stories can be a form of knowledge, or more than is intended by pragmatism’s most influential contemporary champion, Richard Rorty, when he urges upon philosophers the “adoption of an untheoretical, narrative style” in the presentation of 5


their arguments.16 For James, narrative inheres in the very structure of knowing, and the cognitive process is constituted, like Aristotle’s proper plot, by a middle, as well as a beginning and an end. This is, in fact, one of the key sources of James’s discontent with the saltatory “copy-view” of truth—its apocalyptic substitution of ends for beginnings, which Northrop Frye describes as the “radical” or “anagogic” form of metaphor, “A is B,”17 and its concomitant neglect for the middle in its haste to attain the desired consummation. Or to put it another way, the traditional model elides the diachrony of the knowledge process in favor of a philosophical myth of abstract and pure synchronicity. For James, however, one can no more elide the “middle” in the actual world of experience than Bunyan’s Christian could dispense with his journey, with all its obstacles, perplexities, and vicissitudes, and leap up to his God in a single hurdle of faith. Indeed at times his description of cognition sounds like an epistemological Pilgrim’s Progress in which the questing hero undertakes a journey toward the desired object along “a path . . . strown with possibilities of frustration or encouragement, and offering some sort of terminal satisfaction or contradiction.” And just as in Bunyan’s allegory, the end is nothing without the journey. In both cases it is the middle passage of the quest itself that makes for truth: “The mediating pathway which the environment supplies is the very essence of the pragmatist’s explanation.”18 Two elements of the conception of the cognitive process as narrative deserve special emphasis here: its fundamental temporality and the role of action. Knowledge takes place in time; the instantaneity which would allow unmediated superposition of idea and object implied by the correspondence theory is an intellectualist fantasy. For both are located in an ever-changing universe in transition, and they themselves, like everything else, are irreducibly transitional entities: “The passing moment is the only thing that ever concretely was or shall be. . . . [T]he minimal pulse of experience . . . taken as object, is change of feeling, and taken as content, is feeling of change.”19 James’s description of the correspondence model, on the other hand, is repeatedly couched in terms of stasis or stagnation: “But the great assumption of the intellectualists [i.e., those holding to the “copy-view”] is that truth means essentially a static inert relation. When you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter. You’re in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in sta6


ble equilibrium.” From a pragmatic perspective, however, every stopping point is provisional and revisional, including the final one, which is always simultaneously the conclusion of one chapter and beginning of another, opening up immediately onto new possibilities or demands. The famous pragmatic criterion of satisfaction is therefore somewhat misleadingly phrased, insofar as it suggests fulfillment or satiation; what satisfies, rather, is what prepares and inspires one for further progress: “Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, on which we can rest. We don’t lie back on them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.”20 The second aspect of pragmatism’s conception of truth, its inherently active nature, is fundamentally connected to its temporality. Pragmatism, of course, is the philosophy of action, as its very name announces. But this can be interpreted in different ways. For Peirce, for example, the possible consequence in action of an idea comprises the pragmatic meaning of that idea, but those actions are logically exterior to the idea and its relation to the notional reality to which it refers.21 The truth of the idea is not affected by action, only defined by it. In James’s narratival conception, on the other hand, action is constitutive of the truth-process itself; the journey from idea to object is already an action, and that action can have very definite effects on the object. This is a crucial distinction, for it leads to some of the most controversial of James’s contentions, in particular his unwavering conviction of the decisive, and legitimate, role of personal interest in the determination of what will count as true for the individual. This is the point at which the Nietzschean (and Darwinian) affinities of James’s thought become most evident, and it is likewise the point at which it becomes least palatable for those for whom the defense of subjectivism represents something more like an intellectual suicide bomb than a serious philosophical position, insofar as it puts in question the possibility of the nineteenth century’s most cherished scientific and ethical ideal, the goal of transcending the self for the sake of disinterested inquiry.22 But it was a principle over which James would entertain no compromise. One might say that it was the first instigation of his interest in philosophy. One of his very first essays, “Quelques Considérations sur la methode subjective” (1878), was dedicated to the proposition that “one has the right to reject a theory confirmed by a very considerable number of objective facts, solely because it does not correspond to our personal preferences,”23 and this principle would continue to animate his thought in all of its various incarnations. 7


A related, and equally disturbing, element of James’s commitment to an active epistemology was the claim that the subject’s beliefs and attitudes might play a role not just in determining what would count as true, but in effecting what was, in fact, true. Once again, this position is present in an explicit and unambiguous form at the beginning of James’s philosophical career; long before the much better known declarations in The Will to Believe and Pragmatism, he had already argued in “Quelques Considérations” that there exist “situations where belief creates its own verification.”24 If anything, this position seemed to present an even more serious threat to the notion of objective truth, since by suggesting that belief can give rise to its own object, it blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction, between being convinced and being duped, and indeed implies that “truth” is nothing else than the most successful of competing fictions. James’s critics did not hesitate to draw the conclusion that, if this is so, then supposedly rational intellectual debate cannot finally be distinguished from something like a confidence game, from which there was no possibility of appeal to a neutral arbitrator. In short, the veracity of the liar was placed in doubt. This issue, as well as its relation to a broader concern in American culture, is one I will be investigating in more detail later. For now it is sufficient to note that James did not quail before the prospect of a universe in which fact is the temporary and provisional designation of the most convincing of fictions, and in which an openness to deception is the condition of any knowledge at all: “For my part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world.”25 A last aspect of the pragmatic redefinition of truth needs to be emphasized. James’s insistence on the subjective component of knowledge sometimes led to accusations of solipsism, just as contemporary versions of pragmatism have been criticized for what has been seen as their failure to offer a secure passage from the individual to the social. In fact, James’s account of the active role of belief in the creation of its object already contains the answer to this objection, insofar as that account applies to the creation of community as well. As he argues in “The Will to Believe”: “A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned.”26 A pragmatic community thus 8


comes into existence by the willingness of its members to believe that it already exists, in an act of mutual projection that succeeds in realizing its own expectations. In a real sense, every community is, to use Benedict Anderson’s famous formulation, an “imagined community.”27 As such, community conceived in pragmatic terms is a necessary fiction, a symbolic structure of shared interpretations, vocabularies, language games, and narratives which are accepted by its members. It is a symbolic structure that can ultimately be neither verified nor refuted, since the only source of its legitimation is the conviction with which it is supported. It is, therefore, a deeply ambiguous vision of society, to the extent that it offers no way to distinguish between good and bad, or true and false, descriptions—no way, for example, to distinguish between the authentic general will and the successful propaganda disseminated by particular groups or individuals. Such a conception, to be sure, will not appease those who demand a more “true” community, in which descriptions might be judged according to their objective validity, and which would offer a guarantee against the seduction of ideology and rhetoric—those who, like Jürgen Habermas, will be satisfied by nothing less than a community based on “the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another.” But for James, such guarantees are neither possible nor, fortunately, necessary. To approach Faulkner from a philosophical direction might easily seem like a counterintuitive, if not downright dubious enterprise, given his fondness for wearing the mask of the guileless countryman until he could no longer easily remove it, and his stubborn rejection of the notion that his writings engage philosophical issues in any fashion. But this pose needs to be treated with a certain degree of suspicion: as several recent studies have reminded us, “William Faulkner” was the most frequently revised of any of Faulkner’s recurring characters,28 and it would be as dangerous to make assumptions about the limits of his philosophical interests as to take at face value his claim that he learned everything he knew about Freud from playing poker. It is at least worth noting that one of the few philosophers in whom he did acknowledge an interest was Henri Bergson, in whose ideas James apprehended so thorough a compatibility with his own that he declared in a letter to the younger philosopher, “I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks.”29 (Bergson, in turn, wrote a laudatory introduction to the French translation of Pragmatism in 1911.) But it would be misguided to couch the issue in terms of an intellectual discipleship, 9


or to argue that Faulkner was in any way applying Jamesian theories, in the way that, according to one reading, Gertrude Stein was attempting to do in certain of her more experimental texts. On the contrary, and paradoxically, their philosophical affinities are suggested most powerfully by their common resistance to theory and discomfort with anything resembling an intellectual system. James never tired of stressing pragmatism’s “anti-intellectualist tendencies” and the importance of the “reinstatement of the vague”; Faulkner, more disarmingly, claimed to know nothing “about rational and logical processes of thought at all.” 30 For both, practice took precedence over precept, means over models, versatility over virtue. A suggestive convergence makes itself felt even in the metaphors they favored for describing their ideas and methods. For James, philosophy was a kind of building project, and the problem with traditional systems was that they resembled the products of a neoclassical academy that had lost any contact with the real world of experience: The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.31 Faulkner, for his part, was fond of describing himself as a kind of bricoleur-cum-gothic carpenter, comparing the writing of novels to the efforts of a man to build a henhouse in a hurricane, the results of which were unlikely to resemble a “marble temple shining on a hill,” or to put it in more Faulknerian idiom, a big house with “colyums.” The choice of figures drawn from the world of architecture, with its inherent privileging of space over time, is significant, since it points to perhaps the most important affinity between the two writers, their shared conviction of the fundamentally temporal and transitional condition of human experience, of the inescapable fact that, as the title of a crucial section of The Principles of Psychology announces, “Thought Is in Constant Change.” This was, at one level, simply a fact of existence, 10


too long obscured by the dominance exercised by the noble dream of stable ideas and immutable objects over both psychology and philosophy. But it was also, for James, a kind of moral issue, to the extent that the centuries-long prejudice in favor of being over becoming, and against the mobile and transitional, seemed to represent a prejudice against life itself, so that his descriptions of the movements of consciousness, at times, seem possessed by an unwonted fervor expressive of the mortal stakes involved: “The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life. We realize that life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled.”32 Time, it is fair to say, was a subject that obsessed Faulkner, and the most difficult and distinctive features of his prose are the result of his struggle to register with some degree of accuracy the complexity that an irreducibly time-bound consciousness, entangled with memory and anticipation, “always off its balance,” implies. No less than for James, the temporality of existence, and the ceaselessly transitional condition that it imposes, are the terms that distinguish life from its alternative. “Life,” he once declared in words that might have been an echo of James’s own phrasing, “is in constant flux and in constant change.” In turn, that temporal and transitional condition is fundamental to whatever ethical function the deed of writing may claim. For it is the task of the writer to “catch this fluidity which is human life” and to awake in the reader the difficult recognition “that change must alter, must happen, and change is going to alter what was. That no matter how fine anything seems, it can’t endure, because once it stops, abandons motion, it is dead.”33 Faulkner’s remarks are reminders of a tradition to which both he and James belong, whose most important representative is Ralph Waldo Emerson. The profound connections between Emerson and James have begun to be recognized, belatedly.34 Emerson is not a figure who usually makes an appearance in the gallery of Faulkner’s antecedents, but it is difficult not to see the similarity between his comments and typically Emersonian exclamations, such as the declaration in “Circles” that “nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. . . . No truth [can be] so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” or this celebrated passage from “Self-Reliance”: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of re11


pose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state. . . . This one fact all the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputations to shame, confounds the saint with rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”35 It would be an impoverishing exaggeration to turn so complex and ambiguous a writer as Faulkner into a simple representative of Emersonian optimism (just as it is to do the same with Emerson himself), but it is equally wrong, as well as more common, to neglect the important connections between them. I will be looking in more depth at those convergences later, but for now it is sufficient to note that, despite what is sometimes identified as Faulkner’s nostalgia, the past as it appears in his novels is almost invariably presented in the form of a process of ongoing degradation, its moral stability a dubious and delusive mirage, and that while his writings are full of saints and rogues, of would-be Jesuses and supposed Judases, there comes a point where it is hard to distinguish between the two, and each is shoved equally aside by the inevitable flow of time and history. “Life,” he told an interviewer in an Emersonian mood, “is not interested in good or evil. . . . Life is motion and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which are ambition, power, pleasure.”36 Faulkner’s commitment to “constant change” finds expression not only in his public utterances but in his writing practice as well, at both microscopic and macroscopic levels. The most notorious and recognizable feature of his style, the endless sentence, can be seen as itself an effort to find a syntactic equivalent for the ceaselessly transitional nature of experience by postponing the definitive termination of the period as long—by means of its proleptic excursions, its analeptic revisions, its delays and relays, modifications, corrections, and seemingly interminable divagations—as possible. Conrad Aiken argued, in an astute 1939 article, that the obsessive qualifications and fractal complexities of the Faulknerian sentence, its “obstacles,” “obtrusions,” “confusions and ambiguous interpolations,” had “one express purpose; and that purpose is simply to keep the form—and the idea—fluid and unfinished, still in motion, as it were, and unknown, until the dropping into place of the very last syllable.”37 With unwonted perspicacity, Clifton Fadiman called Faulkner’s innovation a “Life-sentence,” the pun capturing at once its open-endedness and its link to the restless motility that for the novelist was the very definition of life.38 It is here that the oft invoked comparison with Hemingway seems most illuminating, for nothing could be more 12


antithetical in either style or intention to the latter’s pursuit of the “one true sentence” than Faulkner’s tireless evasions of a “truth” that would finally terminate the restless flux and reflux of language.39 Whether or not he was consciously aware of it, Faulkner’s deferred period offers an implicit challenge to a long tradition according to which the closure of the sentence serves as the privileged metaphor for the transcendence of time into eternity.40 The individual words unfold in sequence, but with the grammatical conclusion their integrating pattern becomes evident, and the materiality of the letter is instantaneously translated into an apocalyptic blaze of meaning. It is to this tradition that James alludes when, analyzing the post-Hegelian adaptation of the Christian schema that was the dominant philosophical position of his time, he asserts that “the great transcendental metaphor has always been . . . a grammatical sentence,” and it is the consequence of its atemporal location that “the absolute mind thinks the whole sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause, a word, a syllable, or a letter.”41 By endlessly deferring the moment of integration into a whole, by extending itself until the coherent syntactic pattern linking beginning and end, origin and telos disappears behind the spectacle of contending elements, the effect of the Faulknerian sentence is to resist the moment of transcendence and confine the reader to the level of temporal immanence. The same dedication to deferral is equally evident in the larger structures of Faulkner’s writing. More than that of any of his contemporaries, Faulkner’s oeuvre grew by a perpetual process of tireless revising and revisioning, retelling and reworking. Character, episodes, entire stories reappear with varying degrees of alteration in new and different forms as the intricate Yoknapatawpha complex develops. No account is ever settled, even after publication; each is liable to mutate into unpredictable forms, with unexpected and frequently radically transformed meanings. Faulkner’s “craft of revision” has, of course, been a recurrent focus for literary analysis, but it would be a reductive mistake, I think, to regard it solely in terms of narrative technique or compositional habit. Rather it needs to be understood as essentially connected to fundamental elements of Faulkner’s sense of the temporal nature of experience. Late in his life, Faulkner had an exemplary exchange with his Random House editor Alfred Erskine over revisions to the manuscript of The Mansion trilogy. Erskine had objected to discrepancies between the final installment of the Snopes trilogy and earlier volumes, and Faulkner initially agreed to make the required adjustments to the text. But on further con13


sideration he began to have misgivings about the undertaking, and to feel that Erskine’s recommendations were somehow at odds with something essential about both his writing and his view of life. Finally, he decided to print The Mansion as it was, discrepancies and all, but including a preface that declared, “Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life’s work is a part of a living literature, and since ‘living’ is motion, and ‘motion’ is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is un-motion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle.”42 As he approached the end of his career, this brief note articulates a principle that had animated it from the beginning, and in light of which must be understood his lifelong obsession with changing, altering, and revising. No version could ever be considered final or definitive; the text itself exists in a perpetual state of ongoing motion and flux. In this regard, Faulkner’s “cosmos of my own” brings to mind James’s characterization of the opposition between the rationalist and the pragmatic visions of “the structure of the universe” in terms of contrasting editorial principles: whereas the rationalist sees “a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio, or édition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own way,” for the pragmatist there is “only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work.”43 Or as Faulkner himself declared, referring to the discrepancies between the original text of The Sound and the Fury and the appendix he composed for The Portable Faulkner, “[they] prove that to me the book is still alive after 15 years, and being alive is growing, changing . . . it is the book itself that is inconsistent; not the appendix.”44 The second crucial affinity between James and Faulkner has to do with the conception of truth that is operative in the latter’s writings, which I would argue is far closer to a pragmatic one than the traditional model of truth as representation or revelation. This may seem a good deal more contentious a proposal than my arguments for Faulkner’s commitment to time and transition. To begin with, there is the long critical tradition that, responding naturally enough to the apparent obsession with secrecy and concealment in his narratives, would see the problem of discovery as close to the thematic center of Faulkner’s complex cosmos. Already in 1939, Conrad Aiken was stressing what he called the “elaborate method of deliberately withheld meaning, of progressive and 14


partial and delayed disclosure, which so often gives the characteristic shape to the novels themselves” ([Aiken’s emphasis).45 It is this sense of the centrality of secrecy to whatever Faulkner’s writing may seem to be about that inspired the early and frequent comparisons of the novels to grotesquely hypertrophied detective stories, driven forward through the verbal labyrinth of their own anfractuosities by the propulsive need to solve the mystery of, say, the Sutpen family tree, or the racial identity of Joe Christmas.46 To invoke again an architectural metaphor, readers have typically approached the Faulknerian novel as if it were less like a chicken coop than a “Dark House,” gothic and portentous, whose shadowy interior conceals some horrible but irresistibly alluring secret behind a long-locked door. A more sophisticated version of that response underlies a good deal of Faulkner criticism. Not unnaturally, given that the landscape of Yoknapatawpha is scattered with more buried mothers and oppressive fathers, incestuous fantasies, and familial skeletons than any fictional territory since that of Poe, psychoanalytic readings, of either a Freudian or Lacanian persuasion, have been a frequent temptation.47 Such interpretations have much to tell us about the traumas and tensions that transect the novels, but at the same time, as with psychoanalytic readings of Poe, they often leave the impression that the critic is less a detached observer than one more participant in the narrative, reproducing the same obsession with unspeakable secrets that drives the characters themselves.48 To this extent, psychoanalytic readings do not so much unmask the hidden motivations of the characters as they imitate and validate the latter’s quite explicit pretense to want to get to the truth of the matter, to tell the real and definitive story. A somewhat different response is represented by the various commentators who would see Faulkner as an essentially “realist” author, even one more comfortably seated at the same table with George Eliot and Balzac than with Joyce and Proust, a writer whose primary purpose was the exploration and analysis of a particular social and historical milieu.49 The earliest scholarly analyses of Faulkner’s writings tended in this direction, though couched in the vocabulary of myth rather than ideology. The most influential example of such an approach was that of Malcolm Cowley, who in The Portable Faulkner at once placed Faulkner’s work on the cultural center stage and, in his introduction, offered an equally portable and unifying explication, according to which the central subject was “the myth or legend of the South,” conceived as 15


the “struggle between the clan of Sartoris and the unscrupulous tribe of Snopes.”50 (Faulkner himself was more skeptical about this unifying critical construction, objecting in a letter to Cowley, “I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me . . . life is . . . the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.”)51 Concomitant with Faulkner’s postwar critical translation from regional writer to world author, punctuated by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1950, there was a tendency to take the myth and let the South go. Cleanth Brooks discerned in Faulkner’s oeuvre a mythic structure no longer defined by a struggle between rival Souths, old and new, but between the traditional values of an organic community still in touch with nature and the mechanical and materialistic ethos of modernity. In his reading of Absalom, Absalom! for example, Sutpen’s ruthlessness is not simply the symbol of the fatal flaw responsible for the fall of the Old South, but the representative of the “innocence of modern man . . . which flourishes particularly in a secularized society.”52 The myth remains the same, though Faulkner is now the epic poet not simply of the declension of Dixie, but of the tragic rise of the modern world of instrumental reason. Brooks stands to much subsequent criticism in a relation much like that of Old Carrothers McCaslin to his descendants—at once an object of ritualized rejection and, in certain ways, the foundation and pattern of new revisionary projects.53 If Brooks’s sympathetic view of the traditional community held little appeal for many critics in the closing decades of the twentieth century, his desire to unearth a relevant social analysis from Faulkner’s writings continued in various new forms, although the vocabulary of myth was replaced by that of ideology, and the vision of an integrated society was transformed into one riven by conflict and contradiction, repression and division.54 As Philip M. Weinstein puts it, describing the essays in the second part of The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, “they go beyond New Critical procedures in their insistent focus on ‘the world in the texts,’ especially the larger problematics of race, gender, and subject formation.”55 The resultant readings have been diverse and valuable, and frequently sympathetic (if sometimes condescending) to Faulkner. Indeed, by claiming to discover in the progress of the endlessly self-reconstructing southerner the traces of a proto-postmodernist, they have provided a means of redeeming a notoriously private novelist, for an age in which “modernist” irony has become politically suspect, by converting him into the literary 16


equivalent of a virtuous heathen, and assuring that he has continued to be the most discussed American writer of the twentieth century.56 The final ironic turn to this process is a reinstatement of Brooks’s insistence that Faulkner’s abiding concern is the nature of the good community—a community defined now, however, in terms of subalterity rather than tradition, and diversity rather than shared values. The difficulty, as I see it, with such approaches is that, despite their specific orientation, they share a commitment to what could be called the ideology of the secret and the discovery of the truth, although now that truth is, as often as not, concealed from Faulkner himself as much as from his characters.57 Their desire to determine a single dominant story beneath or beyond the tangle of the textual surface is at odds with what seems most distinctive about Faulkner’s own writing, the sheer multiplicity of the stories, representations, interpretations, and discourses that constitute the fabric of his world. To put it another way, they have the effect of establishing a metanarrative, or better, a hyponarrative that will subsume the variously overlapping and intersecting, echoing and shifting narratives of the text, resolving the complex interplay of their multiple exposures into a clear and distinct image, and replacing their insistent plurality with an imperial allegory reminiscent of Thomas Sutpen’s grand design—discarding anything that does not seem to fit as somehow incomplete. This effect is evident even in so brilliant and subtle an interpretation as that of Eric Sundquist, who in order to demonstrate that racial conflict constitutes the central story that Faulkner only gradually realized he was trying to tell, must classify The Sound and the Fury, a work where traces of that conflict are relatively marginal, as at best a “superior novel,” flawed by the absence of “the mind of ‘the South,’” which is “the only one [my emphasis] that fully explains Quentin’s incestuous fascination with Caddy’s purity and the novel’s strange obsession with her.”58 Thus every story becomes one story, refracted through the variously distorting panes of the characters’ flawed and limited consciousnesses. But there is a further problem. By fixing a hermeneutic gaze on the single true story underlying and finally explaining the multiple partial tales on the textual surface, such interpretive approaches tend to neglect the active and temporal nature of those tales. Faulkner’s universe is made up of fictions which are themselves constantly being made up before our very eyes, intersecting, overlapping, continuing, contesting, and revising one another in a process which has neither direction nor 17


end, and whose purpose is not so much the finished product as it is the activity itself. The claim to have discovered the hyponarrative, however, threatens to bring that process to a stop, by stepping outside the flow of time in order to discern a unifying synoptic pattern. Even when the revisional character of Faulkner’s writing is taken seriously, as it is by Richard Moreland, it is all too often seen as an effort to move away from a less adequate and toward a more conclusive version. Moreland’s Faulkner and Modernism is perhaps the most meticulous and thoughtful analysis of the role of revision in Faulkner, but I would differ from his insightful discussion on the issue of the purposiveness of his revisionary practice. Moreland’s reading presupposes a kind of whiggish interpretation of the shape of Faulkner’s career, as a spiral which “passes again and again by the same point but at different levels of integration and complexity.”59 Successive “revisionary repetitions” invariably represent progress in the direction of critical insight and ideological demystification—in the direction of truth, in short. Such an interpretation implies that an ideal point of culmination is at least conceivable (even if not realizable)—a point where the series of textual revisions could end in a finally adequate moral and social vision. I would argue, on the contrary, that Faulkner’s fiction serves to problematize the notion of progress toward an ideal goal, which would by definition bring the process to an end. Finally, one last aspect of Faulkner’s various versions and revisions that needs to be emphasized is their highly interested nature and the agon of interpretation in which they are engaged. The act of telling in Faulkner is always a telling act, one which is intended to have real effects by profiting the teller, specifically by the creation of a compelling belief. This is obvious enough in the many instances of deception and chicanery, the instances of “the science and pastime of skullduggery,” that punctuate the novels. But in a larger sense the whole fabric of the texts can be said to consist in the contending versions of events offered by different narrators, each in its own way organizing the world in a way that satisfies his or her personal needs and desires. Faulkner came close to admitting this when he observed that “every time any character gets into a book, no matter how minor, he’s actually telling his biography— that’s all anyone ever does, tells his own biography, talking about himself, in a thousand different terms, but himself.”60 In this regard, there seems to be something seriously misleading about Sundquist’s suggestion that “Benjy is Faulkner’s ideal narrator,” in whose mind, as in a “vac18


uum,” different voices “hang suspended” and isolated.61 On the contrary, Faulkner’s richest works, like Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, are less like verbal mosaics than rhetorical battlefields, in which virtually every character is fiercely concerned to present a narrative that will displace its competitors, gain the assent of its audience, and become the authorized version. For all these reasons, a pragmatic perspective would seem to offer the most effective approach to a description of the distinctive energies and engagements of the Faulknerian text. For James, regarding the world pragmatically led naturally to thinking of it in terms of narratives. “Things tell a story,” he argued in Pragmatism: “Their parts hang together so as to work out a climax. They play into each other’s hands expressively. Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose presided over a chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a middle, and a finish. . . . The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds.”62 This already sounds disarmingly like a description of the textual cosmos of Yoknapatawpha, but even more the point is James’s rejection of the analytic ambition to discover a single and conclusive plot: “It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is easy to see the world’s history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each crosssection of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder.” 63 From the viewpoint of pragmatism, the hermeneutic desire to penetrate the multifarious surface in pursuit of “one story” is a denial of the pluralism of the text. As well, such a desire ignores the temporality of storytelling. Accounts in Faulkner are never settled and finished, but constantly in the making. The supposition of an encompassing truth which the individual characters’ versions misrepresent or distort in their various ways seems, therefore, to offer a much less useful analogue than James’s pragmatic conception of cognition as an endless process involving the transformation of both subject and object. “Truth,” says James, “is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”64 The character who is Faulkner’s quintessential storyteller, and often regarded as the closest thing to an authorial surrogate, V. K. Ratliff, is a figure 19


constantly on the move physically and verbally. Faulkner punningly describes him as “retailing from house to house the news of his four counties,”65 but all Faulkner’s narrators are both “retalers” and “retailers,” revising and refashioning their fictions for new circumstances and purposes. All of them, to borrow the vocabulary of Richard Rorty, are engaged in an activity of redescription or recontextualization, “reweaving a web of beliefs,”66 just as Ratliff, the peripatetic sewing-machine agent, is perpetually restitching the fabric of his well-tailored tales. But the argument for the relevance of pragmatism will not be complete without also considering the agonistic nature of Faulkner’s world. For Faulkner, as for James, interest is the fundamental purpose and criterion of belief. Utility, rather than some notion of abstract correspondence, is the very definition of what will count as truth. And that utility must be measured first of all in terms of personal advantage. James’s conclusion that “we pragmatists show that those for whom the belief that [some particular thing] exists works satisfactorily will always call it true”67 applies with especial validity to the contending narrators of Yoknapatawpha, each eager to propagate “partial stories,” versions of the truth that serve very particular personal needs. It is useful here to supplement James’s remarks on the interested nature of belief with Richard Rorty’s arguments concerning the ultimately self-serving purpose of all accounts. According to Rorty, every symbolic structure by which the world of experience is organized—every description, vocabulary, or narrative—is essentially an “idiosyncratic fantasy,” the external projection of an internal psychic geometry of fixations and desires. Indeed, it cannot be anything but, insofar as the “distinctively human, as opposed to animal, portion of each human life [is] the use for symbolic purposes of every particular person, object, situation, event and word encountered in later life.” When such descriptions come into conflict, the persuasive victory of one over another, the successful conversion of an individual “fantasy” motivated ultimately by personal interest into a generally accepted description, is the “coincidence of a private obsession with a public need,” and not the discovery of a hitherto unrecognized truth.68 Rorty’s explanation of social consensus as the success of a Bloomian strong poet in propagating a rhetorically powerful, but always personal, misreading has been as controversial in our day as James’s assertion of the primacy of individual interest was in his own.69 And for largely the same reasons—both, by stressing the personal utility of beliefs and rejecting the notion of an objective reality that might serve as the ulti20


mate arbiter among them, undermine the “rightness,” both cognitive and moral, of any collective accord. As one critic complains, “The distinction between rational and irrational persuasion, between reason and power, breaks down in [Rorty’s] account.” For those who “need . . . the sense that epistemic goodness and ethical goodness are at least as much discovered as made, that they transcend the peculiarities of our practices and regulate to an important degree the adjusting of those practices to what is epistemically or ethically the case,” such a breakdown is a disturbing prospect indeed.70 My concern here, however, is not to make the case for the positions of either Rorty or James as analyses of the social world in general, but rather to argue that they provide a strikingly apposite description of the world of Yoknapatawpha. The struggle for narrative supremacy is the warp and woof of Faulkner’s novels. Characters do not simply offer alternate stories; their contradictory accounts are bids to assume the position of the dominant interpreter of their community, to become the sole owner and proprietor of a world whose substance is interpretation. Ratliff, Rosa Coldfield, Ike McCaslin, and the rest of Faulkner’s forceful narrators are, in effect, versions of Rorty’s poet, each striving to present his or her own story in so convincing a manner that it will become the accepted narrative of the community, since the community is defined precisely by those who accept that narrative. A community conceived as the product of narrative persuasion is a rather different one from either the cotton belt gemeinschaft imagined by Brooks or the oppositional social orders envisaged by his critics.71 It is one which is based neither on transcendent authority nor on foundational principles; instead it is the contingent product of discursive performance and shifting belief. It would be easy, in the wake of narratives like those of Rorty, to characterize it as a distinctly postmodern idea, the somewhat artificial projection of contemporary theoretical notions on a historical reality that is in many ways still premodern. But I would argue that, in fact, there is a long tradition in America of conceiving of community as a discursive entity, a structure of words, stories, and successfully propagated interpretations. Indeed, the United States itself can be considered the largest and most enduring example of such an “imagined community,” its existence the effect of a speech act of which it purports to be the cause, a declarative performance that depends for its success upon the ready credulity of its audience. The tradition I have in mind here is that of the confidence man.72 The confidence artist occupies a position of peculiar importance in Ameri21


can culture; while trickster figures are standard elements in the imaginative repertoire of every human society, the confidence man has a claim to be considered an American invention. The term itself was coined in America to identify a particular swindler in the late 1840s. Appropriately enough, however, the “actual” confidence man appeared only after his fictional version had been invented and given its definitive textual form in the writings of certain of the Southwest Humorists, in the decade before, as though he himself were a product of the strange inverted logic upon which the success of his own operations would depend. The confidence man shares certain characteristics with tricksters everywhere; like them he is one of the “lords of in-between,”73 whose natural habitat is the boundary he is perpetually violating, and it is no accident that in the United States his first literary incarnation should be a product of the frontier. Above all, the trickster is the embodiment of ambiguity both in terms of his identity and in terms of his effects. In the first place, he is a tireless shape shifter, and his existential instability is obliquely recalled by any number of American literary swindlers, from the prototypical con man Simon Suggs—whose motto is “It is good to be shifty in a new country”—to Flannery O’Connor’s parabolic grifter Tom T. Shiftlet. The result, in the case of the true trickster, is not simply a temporary deception, eventually resolved, but a destabilizing of the border between truth and falsehood that reanimates the original vagueness and uncertainty that all such borders and definitions attempt to control.74 While there has been no lack of attempts to root this ambiguity of identity in universal human conditions, either deriving it from the survival of a primitive “undifferentiated human consciousness” or explaining it in terms of a beneficial reevaluation of cultural norms,75 it is clear that it can be suggestively related to many of the specific characteristics of American society. Ambiguity, as Daniel Boorstin observes, was the native quality of the landscape of the New World itself: “American life . . . was distinguished by its lack of clear boundaries. The continent was covered by penumbras, between the known and the unknown, between fact and myth, between present and future, between native and alien, between good and evil.”76 The economic, geographic, and social motility that has defined European life in America from its beginnings means, in effect, that everyone is more or less a stranger, to be judged not by family ancestry or class origins but by the inherent uncertainties of present performance and future possibility.77 Such a condition is inevitably two-faced; the democratic promise of self-realization offered by the ideal of the self-made man is 22


constantly shadowed by the anxiety aroused by the prospect of a society populated by literally made-up identities, constantly on the make, double-dealing counterfeits whose hypocrisy “threatened to dissolve the ties of mutual confidence binding men together.”78 Second, and perhaps more important, the trickster is ambiguous in his effects. From one point of view, the trickster is a cynical and selfinterested manipulator, concerned only to further his own ends at the expense of others, the evident enemy of society as such. But at the same time, as students of folklore have repeatedly noted, he serves a positive function as well. The trickster, by violating the established rules of society, creates the conditions for the invention of new and ultimately beneficial rules. He embodies, as Warwick Wadlington puts it, “on the one hand, a force of treacherous disorder that outrages and disrupts, and on the other hand, an unanticipated, usually unintentional benevolence in which trickery is at the expense of inimical forces and for the benefit of mankind.”79 “At one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator,” observes Paul Radin, the trickster “possesses no values, moral or social . . . yet through his actions all values come into being.”80 Mythology invariably assigns to the trickster a transitional and originary function: Prometheus, the proto-trickster, is both the swindler of divinity and the creator of humanity, responsible for the introduction of previously unpredicted innovations. But the mention of Prometheus reminds us that it is not sufficient to describe the trickster as a source of novelties. In a real sense he is the source of novelty itself, who by disrupting the stable order of the prevailing cosmos makes transformation possible. Prometheus’s creation of human beings does not simply reproduce the divine order, but alters it by slipping a new element—the dimension of time—into the eternal system of heaven, and his fateful gifts of fire and meat ensure that mortals will have a history different from that of the gods, because they alone will, in fact, have a history. In the postmythological world, tricksters can serve a similar function. Whatever their conscious and self-interested purposes, their cynical manipulation of social rules has the effect of reinserting them into the contingency of time and history, recalling the conventional and arbitrary nature of their origins and offering the possibility of their revision. In effect, the trickster is culture’s insatiable ironist, forever exposing its unstable underpinnings, tirelessly reminding us that society is not a system of immutable principles but a temporary and transient discursive entity, a structure of words, stories, and successfully propagated interpretations.81 Like 23


Emerson’s “circular philosopher,” the trickster may say that his purpose is to “unsettle all things.”82 While tricksters from every culture occupy a similarly ambivalent position with relation to society, it can be argued that they serve a special role in America. Like all tricksters, the confidence man is of course a swindler, a cheat, and a parasite on the community whose values of trust and charity he lives by abusing. And like all tricksters, he fulfills a positive function as well. But in the case of the confidence man there is a distinctive difference. In traditional cultures, the trickster serves to transform social structures, going to work on their arthritic joints, exposing their worn-out and disabling conventions, opening the way for their renovation and rejuvenation.83 But the New World is defined precisely by the lack of such structures, by the absence and pressing necessity of imagined communities. This situation gives rise to a logical conundrum with practical consequences. The existence of a new society is dependent upon conventions, but conventions can come only from a previously existing society. How, then, is it possible for community to come into existence? It is his ability to solve this conundrum, I would propose, that is the distinguishing feature of the American trickster, the confidence man, and which explains his peculiar importance in the American context: he creates an imagined community out of a group of individuals by generating the belief that is necessary for the constitution of that community, the belief that the community already exists. My purpose here, however, is not simply to reiterate the crucial function of the confidence man in the American imagination, his status as a “covert cultural hero,” an insight which has been developed from different perspectives by a number of cultural and literary historians.84 Instead, I want to advance the argument that the confidence man can also be read as a prototypical embodiment of pragmatism’s conception of truth. In the first place, the con man has a fundamental connection to narrative, and his artistry consists in the articulation of a tale. But the confidence transaction involves more than the simple representation of a dubious state of affairs. It is itself narratival in structure, beginning with a pretext, proceeding through the present scene of persuasion, and projecting a future in which the complete process will fulfill itself. Temporality is thus a necessary dimension of the con game: futurity is its enabling assumption, and without the postulation of a goal, it loses, as it were, its point. The con man, we say, has a “line,” which, like James’s description of the truth-process, is in effect a journey, “from a terminus 24


a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad quem.” But for the con man, as for James, every end is only provisionary; his constitutive shiftiness means that he is in a perpetual state of passing—passing for, but also passing from and to. Any apparent ending is as open-ended as the conclusion of Melville’s The Confidence-Man: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” To come to a halt is to risk entrapment, and the con artist’s “power,” as Emerson, a contemporary of Simon Suggs and the original confidence man, phrases it, “ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state.” He is, therefore, a permanent “tramp and vagrant,” his condition a suggestive echo of James’s description of the always unfinished universe of pragmatism.85 Another aspect of the confidence man that suggests his protopragmatic status is the role of the subject in the confidence game. W. C. Fields’s celebrated axiom contains an abbreviated theory of epistemology; the dishonesty of the cheatable man consists in his unconscious conviction that desire can play a part in the determination of reality, and that, to recall James, “the world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands.” Swindler and mark enter into a conspiracy, whose enabling assumption is that the boundary between the pleasure and reality principles is neither fixed nor firm. Part of the offense offered by the confidence man, especially in the nineteenth century, is no doubt the result of the threat that this conspiracy represented to the integrity of objectivity, and its affront to both the scientific principle that the subjective was invariably the source of willful distortion and the ethical conviction that indulgence of the self was the sign of moral weakness. As we shall see later, it is not a coincidence that antipragmatists would apply the same vocabulary to anathematize James’s philosophical shortcomings as Victorian moralists did to condemn the confidence man. Finally, and paradoxically, the confidence man offers an anticipation of James’s pragmatically conceived community. Paradoxically, because the con artist is typically seen as a parasite on society, its exploiter and corrupter, the enemy of every human order. Rufus Clarke, for example, in Lectures on the Formation of Character, Temptations, and Mission of Young Men, described him as an “outcast of society” with “no sympathies or feelings in common with the rest of mankind.”86 But such a response misses the full complexity of the confidence game, which inevitably involves the creation of a society at the same time as its exploitation. The first words of the “original confidence man,” “Do you have 25


confidence in me?” in effect hypothesize an imagined community of two, which will be realized when the other responds positively by a willing projection of belief, creating a community whose “existence as a fact,” in James’s words, “is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned.” Nor should the community of confidence be dismissed as an illegitimate parody of a “true community” grounded on real shared interests and transparent communication; instead, it is closer to the archetype of community, exposing all too clearly the fictional and unverifiable element in every human association. The confidential transaction reminds us that communities emerge in history, and that the moment of emergence is always ambiguous, since the founder must act outside of the values he creates. It is the success of the confidence man’s persuasive power, not abstract ethical principles, that will determine whether he will be regarded as a petty swindler or the father of his country.87 If arguing that the confidence man is a prototype of pragmatism is one purpose of my discussion here, the other is to recall Faulkner’s long-term fascination with the figure. His interest in the writings of the Southwest Humorists has been well established, and it leaves its traces throughout his work.88 The tall tale is an important hypotext, to borrow Gérard Genette’s term, for Faulkner’s work for several reasons. The principle of excess that governs both his ever-expanding narratives and his verbal enormities is clearly cognate to the “dizzying exaggeration” that defines the tall tale,89 and both grow out of an oral culture in which competitive hyperbole and rumbustious macrologia are fundamental elements. But more is involved here than a distinctive style of verbal humor. The tall tale’s comedy derives from a condition of epistemological fuzziness. Not simply a lie, it lives on and constantly violates the frontier between truth and falsehood, the credible and the fantastic, and the art of telling involves an unsettling of the audience’s ability to tell the difference. As Mark Twain famously observed in “How to Tell a Story”: “The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”90 One of the things that Faulkner found in the tall tale was a native and local literary form that was already, long before the theoretical investigations of American modernist thought, putting into question the notion of representation. This blurring of truth and falsehood reaches its culmination with the figure of the confidence man, and variations on the con artist appear repeatedly in Faulkner’s writings, ranging from fairly overt ex26


amples like Flem Snopes or Joel Flint, to more complicated versions like Thomas Sutpen and even Ike McCaslin. The other thing that he would have found in this sort of storytelling was a critique of the concept of the “true community,” so dear to Brooks and his followers. As I have argued, the confidence man creates community, but does so in such a way as to undercut the claim that its norms and values were ever anything but convenient fictions, inextricably interwoven with personal interest, its apparent consensus the product of endless struggles for social power and influence. One might expect that such an interpretation would have a powerful resonance for Faulkner, whose family history vividly illustrated the ruthless struggles and perpetual uncertainty that underlay the supposed stability of the southern order. His own great-grandfather had risen from humble beginnings to a position of wealth and significance in the years after the Civil War;91 within two generations, the Faulkners were just one more middle-class Oxford family with a technicolored past. More than one commentator has registered the suspicion that Faulkner’s own life and literary ambitions were overdetermined by the desire to emulate his grandfather’s achievements. But Faulkner’s road to prominence and position in his society would be based upon his understanding of the fictionality of that society, and his recognition that his influential ancestor was in his own way as much a confidence artist as Simon Suggs or Thomas Sutpen. Faulkner’s enduring success was to make the mechanisms by which communities are imagined into the substance of his own creative oeuvre, and by an ingenious dialectical reversal, to replace the depressed northern Mississippi amphitheater where he had been allotted the role of Count No’count, with an imagined community, a cosmos of his own, of which he could be, forever, “sole owner and proprietor.” The confidence man can thus be seen as a kind of buried genealogical connection between pragmatism and Faulkner, constituting a secret familial relation of the sort that so often serves as the “final revelation” in his own narratives. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I am not proposing that the con man is in any sense the “solution to the mystery” of the elective affiliation between the writings of Faulkner and pragmatic thought—for that matter, I do not think that the supposed discovery of the secret really fulfills that function in the novels, in spite of appearances. But the figure and its ambiguous significance in American culture provide one of the most suggestive strands of the network that is the common intellectual context which gave birth to America’s most 27


original philosophy and its greatest twentieth-century novelist. The past, as Faulkner liked to say, is never past, and considering the emergence and problematic role of the American swindler can do much to refine our understanding of both the energizing promise and the irreducible ambiguity which inhabit the writings of both. A possible and quite natural objection arises at this point: if pragmatism offers such a compelling context for the reconsideration of Faulkner, then why has the connection been for so long overlooked? There are several historical reasons for this neglect, which can be divided into the sociocultural and aesthetic. The former have to do with the sustained assaults directed at pragmatism during the years of the Second World War, assaults continued and intensified in the postwar years and the fifties. Antifoundationalism is never a disposition that recommends itself to intellectual establishments in times of national anxiety, and in the uncertain years of the mid-century, pragmatism’s rejection of transcendental values came to be seen as something close to intellectual treason. In almost all areas of thought, a sometimes uneasy pairing of faith in eternal moral absolutes and commitment to the disinterested pursuit of objective truth came to be seen as the fundamental principles that distinguished a free world from its totalitarian antagonists, first Nazi and then Communist. The cause of pragmatism was not helped by the fact that John Dewey and his close friend and philosophical sympathizer Charles Beard came out against American intervention in the European conflagration, and an array of scandalized adversaries from across the political spectrum had no hesitation in making a damning equation between pragmatism and moral relativism, and between moral relativism and a suicidal failure of will. It was Faulkner’s curious fate that his rediscovery after a period of neglect and his confirmation in the American literary pantheon—a critical narrative roughly bounded by the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 and the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950—took place right in the middle of this process of philosophical reconfiguration. I will be looking at some episodes in this particular history in more detail later, but I want here to briefly consider the other factor that militated against the appreciation of Faulkner’s pragmatic affiliations. Of the various possible ways of telling the story of modernism, the one which has proven to be perhaps the most enduringly popular is in terms of discovery, according to which the defining characteristics of the modernist project are a conception of the world in terms of surfaces and depths, 28


and a hermeneutic desire to penetrate the deceptive crust of appearances and conventions on the way to an authentic revelation. Sanford Schwartz offers one of the more direct articulations of this theme, describing the modernist “matrix” as dominated by “the tendency to pose a sharp opposition between conscious ‘surfaces’ and unconscious ‘depths,’” a disposition he traces through thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, F. H. Bradley, and Nietzsche.92 It is a similar metaphorics of profundity that inspires Michael Bell’s more recent claim that the “X ray remains a suggestive image of Modernism” with its “double awareness” of the world of ordinary experience and the deeper order that lies on the other side. Nor was it an idea exclusive to the intellectual and artistic avant-garde; thematic variations can be traced through the culture at large, as Jackson Lears has admirably demonstrated in Fables of Abundance, noting, for example, that in 1919, the year Sherwood Anderson announced in Winesburg, Ohio his intention “to see beneath the surface of lives,” the Camel cigarette company proclaimed that “Camels are made for men who think for themselves. . . . They look deeper than the surface.”93 Not surprisingly, this was an explanation of their historical role that was very appealing to modernist artists themselves, since it allotted to art a function that was serious and significant, at a time when the regnant materialism of industrialized societies rendered traditional invocations of spiritual values pretty much philosophically dead on arrival. T. S. Eliot, in his 1932–33 Norton Lectures, celebrated poetry’s ability to “make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate.”94 Indeed, the surface/depth paradigm could lend to the formalistic experiments of the moderns some of the prestige and importance of the contemporaneous scientific revolution, whose equally rebarbative difficulties were readily accepted by the public when “uncovering reality” seemed to be at issue. Ezra Pound, for example, did not hesitate to equate the two enterprises: “The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science. . . . The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man.” 95 The “science” most relevant for such a justification of modernism’s peculiarities was of course the new psychology, and in particular the Freudian model of the psyche, which was built on the premise that anything that really mattered was by definition buried, and that true knowledge inevitably took the form of calling spirits from the vasty deep. Confronting skeptics still not convinced that modernism’s incoherent artifacts were more 29


than elaborate and self-serving jokes, artists often resorted to an argument that did make sense to a public for whom the notion that unusually complex procedures were necessary to penetrate the opaque surface of things was by now conventional wisdom.96 The strenuous hermeneutics of difficult knowledge were only one rhetorical arrow in the quiver of the champions of artistic novelty during the period of high modernism; by the late 1940s and 1950s it had become the foundation of what Fredric Jameson calls the “ideology of the modern.”97 With Abstract Expressionism serving in many ways as the model, and anxieties over the threat apparently posed by the popular culture industry to “serious” art providing much of the polemical energy, the varied motives of modernism came to be narrowed to a single purpose, the pursuit of authenticity.98 But even more important in the American context was what Michael Leja has described as “Modern Man discourse.”99 By Modern Man discourse, Leja means a certain way of articulating a particular conception of the structure of the contemporary self that, while developing throughout the first part of the twentieth century, reached its full height and cultural influence in the postwar years. A baggy amalgam of popularized depth psychology and reductive anthropological theories, reinforced by the spectacle of reborn savagery in the form of the rise of Fascism and the unprecedented barbarity of the Second World War, Modern Man discourse was an attempt to come to terms with the recent demonstration of civilization’s astonishing fragility, while finding hope for humanity in the painful lessons learned from that very experience. One such lesson, widely propagated by intellectuals and popularizers alike, was that “modern man” was not a simple transparent entity; rather he was to be understood, in a formula that found general acceptance, as a profoundly divided being, consisting of a thin crust of convention and reason covering a dark abyss of inchoate instinct, irrationality, and potential violence. Philip Wylie’s version, in his 1942 best seller Generation of Vipers, is typical: “What an individual can do in a mob shows many things. It shows that we live, always, side by side with our brute ancestors, and . . . that everything we call civilization, religion, enlightenment, modernity, knowledge, and hope is as thin as a one-molecule oil scum over the deep abyss of our instinctual nature.”100 Whether that abyss was figured in terms of a residual primitivism still brooding beneath the veneer of civilized man, threatening to break out at any moment, or in terms of a dim psychic interior, a secret 30


unconscious, buried but active under layers of careful repression, the task before contemporary humanity was to unearth and confront that hidden truth in order to construct a more authentic personal life and a more realistic social order. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued in one of the most influential texts of Modern Man discourse, The Vital Center, what was necessary above all was a recognition of “the dark and subterranean forces in human nature,” a recognition notably lacking in the “soft and shallow conception of human nature” espoused by “Doughface progressivism.”101 In an anxious age, threatened by the atomic bomb above and the moral chaos within, any hope of the future lay in the knowledge of the truths that lay below the surface, and it was especially the duty and privilege of the modern artist to uncover those truths for a public whose very survival depended on his success.102 Such, then, was the cultural context in which the postwar champions of Faulkner found themselves when they began the work of reviving the novelist’s reputation, and it is not surprising that the arguments, vocabulary, and conceptual metaphors drew heavily on the intellectual and rhetorical resources provided by the now dominant Modern Man discourse. Indeed, certain elements of that discourse might seem readymade to deal with the initial critical challenge, the need to revise the prewar image of Faulkner. For critics of the thirties, especially those writing from the left, Faulkner’s fondness for shadowy psychotics and passionate primitives had frequently been cited as evidence of his social irresponsibility, a demonstration of his status as a self-indulgent purveyor of gothic grotesqueries and neurotic perversions, a twentieth-century Poe who cloaked his “reptilian art” in layers of impenetrable prose. 103 From the perspective of the postwar period, however, it was precisely such a focus on the “depths” of human behavior that made him a social analyst of extraordinary acuity and contemporary importance. Thus Malcolm Cowley, in the introduction to The Portable Faulkner, neatly inverts the common critique of Sanctuary as a “mere accumulation of pointless horrors,” arguing that, on the contrary, it is “an example of the Freudian method turned backward, being full of sexual nightmares that are in reality social symbols.”104 Robert Penn Warren, in his influential essay of 1946, eschews the language of psychoanalysis, and his version of the predicament of modern man is at the farthest possible remove from Wylie’s hysterical rhetoric of a molecule-thin film of civility covering a pit of bestial passions. Indeed, for Warren it is progress, in the form of “abstraction and mechanism” that is the danger, threatening to submerge 31


the traditional and instinctive world of the past, the only kind of world in which a fully human life is possible. But what is crucial is that that world is defined in terms of “truth”: “Within the traditional order was a notion of truth; even if man in the flow of things did not succeed in realizing that truth.”105 Some of Warren’s remarks elsewhere suggest to what extent the metaphorics of surface and depth structured his interpretation. What Faulkner offered, especially to southerners growing up in the first half of the century, were “truths about the South and their own Southern experience that had been lying speechless in their experience.” His novels “told you that there was, if you looked a second time, an intense, tormented, and brutal, but dignified and sometimes noble, reality beyond whatever façade certain people tried to hypnotize you into seeing . . . an unidentified tension and smoldering rage beneath the surface of Southern life. What, in other words, the fiction of Faulkner gave was release into life, into the sense of a grand and disturbing meaningfulness beneath the crust of life, into a moral reality beneath the crust of history.”106 “Buried truth” thus came to be the dominant trope in the critical redefinition of Faulkner. His novels, no longer decadent exercises in literary gothicism, became significant moral and social texts containing urgent lessons for modern man. As well as moralizing what, to prewar critics, was his pathological fascination with degeneracy, this rereading had another advantage insofar as it aided in translating Faulkner’s regional subject into a universal one, with relevance for the contemporary world as a whole. This is in fact one of the primary themes of Warren’s 1946 essay, which insisted that Faulkner’s “legend” was “not merely a legend of the South but also a legend of our general plight and problem. The modern world is in moral confusion.”107 Warren’s claim might be said to be part of a larger postwar reinterpretation of the “Deep” South as something like the American unconscious, or at least the privileged repository of moral truths that had been forgotten by contemporary American culture. On a related front, Warren’s friend C. Vann Woodward’s celebrated 1953 essay “The Irony of Southern History” makes a similar claim for the special relevance of the South’s distinctive experience to American politics, domestic and international, in the period of the Cold War.108 In the face of this growing critical interest, Faulkner himself began to reconceive his own literary career in the vocabulary offered by his increasingly visible champions, and to describe his own vocation as a writer in terms that echoed their insistence on the profound and universal ethical goals of his work. Whereas in 1944 he was content to de32


scribe his oeuvre as based on the conviction that life is “the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere,” he was now rapidly giving it a new gloss, one which stressed its deep moral concerns. As Richard Brodhead observes, “he got good at discussing his work in the way his new admirers were discussing it,”109 a process whose culmination is the Nobel Prize speech, with its ringing phrases in defense of the “eternal verities and truths of the human heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Part of that oration’s extraordinary reception derived from its success in recapitulating many of the features of the now dominant Modern Man rhetoric; beginning with the blunt recognition that the contemporary condition is one of unprecedented anxiety, it proceeds to find hope in the courage which derives from a recovery of the truth that has been “forgotten” by contemporaries, a truth that will allow us to “endure and prevail” despite the threats of the moment. 110 But a document which indicates perhaps that Faulkner was somewhat skeptical of the new ethical reading of fiction is the novel Intruder in the Dust, written between January and April of 1948, roughly at the midpoint of the upward journey from the publication of The Portable Faulkner and the award of the Nobel Prize. Intruder, as almost every commentator complains, is already half way to being a speech; its ungainly body is constantly bursting open from the force of a pontification trying to get out. When Gavin Stevens finally gets the opportunity to make his lengthy peroration, its message sounds suspiciously like the one Warren had argued that Faulkner had been propagating from the beginning. At one level, of course, Stevens’s argument that segregation will never be ended by the enforcement of federal law but only by the will of the white south has to do only with the question of racial integration, but at a broader one it is a version of Warren’s defense of the superiority of a traditional world (Stevens’s term is “homogeneous”) to the mechanical civilization of “rootless ephemeral cities with factory and foundry and municipal paychecks,” whose culture is one of depthless surfaces, a “glittering edifice of publicity foundationed on nothing like a cardhouse over an abyss” (155).111 And like Warren (and in a rather different way Woodward), Stevens implies that the irony of southern history has given it privileged knowledge of realities that the modernized North ignores at its peril: “Only a few of us know that only from homogeneity comes anything of a people or for a people of durable or lasting value—the literature, the art, the science, that 33


minimum of government and police which is the meaning of freedom and liberty, and perhaps most valuable of all a national character worth anything in a crisis—that crisis we shall face someday when we meet an enemy with as many men as we have and as much material as we have and—who knows?—who can even brag and boast as we brag and boast” (154). The problem of the North turns out to be the same one repeatedly diagnosed by Modern Man theorists: fragmentation, psychic and social. Stevens’s solution is based upon a reaffirmation of “homogeneity,” so that the class divisions represented by the ostensible opposition of the intellectual Heidelberg-educated lawyer and the primitives of Beat Four can finally dissolve in a mutual recognition of their shared membership in “one unalterable durable impregnable one: one people one heart one land” (210). Stevens’s speech found a pretty hostile reception, at the time of publication and since, but as Noel Polk has convincingly argued, simply identifying Stevens as the mouthpiece for Faulkner’s own opinions would be a serious misreading. The fatuousness of Stevens’s windy abstractions is highlighted all too clearly by the ineffectiveness of his actions; while his nephew Chick undertakes the risky mission of demonstrating Lucas’s innocence, Stevens is “more interested in talking than in doing,”112 and replaces the flesh-and-blood individual with high-minded generalizations about “the ones named Sambo.” In this sense, the novel might be interpreted as, in part, Faulkner’s own restive response to the critical embrace of champions like Warren and the particular ethical discourse by which they sought to define the meaning of his work. The revaluation of Faulkner is one of the great success stories of American literary criticism in the twentieth century, perhaps second only to the rediscovery of Melville in the 1920s. It managed to relocate his writings at the center of some of the most urgent cultural and social debates of the postwar years, at the same time as opening the critical equivalent of a new ecological niche, making space for the explosion of close formal analyses of his style and narrative techniques that ensued through the fifties and sixties. One thing, however, it did not make space for was any consideration of the relations of Faulkner and pragmatism. In the Modern Man framework, with its dependence on the surface/depth model, pragmatism’s conception of truth was reduced to a parody; its critique of the opposition of surface and depth as a remnant of metaphysical modes of thinking was translated into a vision of the world as all surface, a willful and naive ignorance of the intractably irra34


tional profundities of human existence, a philosophy that was superficial in every sense. From this perspective, to read Faulkner from a pragmatic angle would seem to violate the very spirit of his work, insofar as that spirit had been defined by his postwar admirers and authorized by his own reconstruction of the meaning of his years of labor. The career of literary and cultural theory in the latter half of the twentieth century has been a complex and often convoluted one. In the case of American studies, it has required a long and undeniably exhilarating detour by way of Continental philosophy to arrive once more, at the end of the twentieth century, at the critique of the notion of truth as discovery that had been so productive an idea at its beginning. The present resurgence of pragmatism reminds us forcibly of Emerson’s rueful observation that “our own rejected thoughts . . . come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”113 One of the most promising and provocative consequences of that resurgence has been the opportunity to return to the texts of the major American modernists with a renewed awareness of the pragmatic context in which they lived, thought, and wrote. In what follows I hope to demonstrate that a consideration of the pragmatic tradition can renovate our appreciation of the greatest American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. A word about the organization of this study is no doubt in order here. My first chapter undertakes to treat seriously the proposal that one of the neglected strands in the complicated genealogy of pragmatism descends from the figure of the confidence man as he emerges in the antebellum writing of the Southwest school, and argue that he needs to be understood as a protopragmatist. The case is best supported, I think, not by broad generalizations but by close analysis of how the American literary con artist actually operates. My purpose here is twofold. First, I want to show that the confidential transaction is not a simple deception but a practical demonstration of the way in which, as James will later contend, “belief creates its own verification.” Second, I want to develop the claim that it is not adequate to define the con man as a parasite on the community in which he works; instead, he is simultaneously creator and exploiter of that community, and it is ultimately impossible to separate those two functions. The next chapter takes up Jamesian pragmatism directly, and especially the implications of its narratival conception of truth, the issue on which James broke definitively with his predecessor Peirce. Readings of James over the years have tended to smooth off the sharp edges and to 35


downplay just how radical a challenge his notion of “veri-fication” represents to both the philosophical tradition and conventional notions of truth and objectivity—a challenge that was clear, however, to the early critics who were the first to realize the unsettling similarity between the process of engendering truth and the mechanics of the confidence game. A question of method arises here, however, since it would seem to violate the spirit of James’s own thought to treat his writings as standard philosophical texts, to be mined for their ideational content. My preference, therefore, is to treat them as narratives themselves, rhetorical performances that take place in time. James’s texts enact what can no longer properly be called their “message,” and they veri-fy themselves in the process of gaining the reader’s consent. In this sense, James’s early critics were correct—his arguments are often bad when judged by the criteria of traditional philosophical debate—but the lesson to be drawn is the need to approach them with an eye to their metaphors and movements, rather than to their meaning in a conventional sense. The next chapter turns to Faulkner, and to The Hamlet. This may seem a rather anachronistic and arbitrary maneuver, but in fact there are grounds for arguing that the matter of the novel, which had its beginnings in the unpublished 1926 tale Father Abraham, is contemporaneous with Faulkner’s earliest forays into fiction, and that his concern with the story of the Snopes subtended his career. The Hamlet has long occupied a privileged place in interpretations of Faulkner’s oeuvre; for early critics, like Warren and Brooks, it constituted a kind of miniaturized, timelapse version of the supersession of the South’s traditional community by the rapacious, mechanical force of modernization. I find it impossible not to regard the novel as equally exemplary, though for rather different reasons, to the extent that it offers Faulkner’s most developed image of a world constituted throughout by transactions of confidence. Community here is not so much what Brooks describes as a “circumambient atmos phere”114 in which “the science and pastime of skullduggery” is practiced, as it is the product and result of those two-faced operations. More vividly than any other Faulkner novel, The Hamlet depicts the agon of language, the contest of “strong poets” to propagate the vocabularies and metaphors which will make and remake their societies. Sooner or later, any discussion of Faulkner must confront the question of history, and it is here that the project of a pragmatic reading meets what is likely to seem its greatest challenge. For pragmatism, historical events offer a paradigmatic demonstration of the inadequacy 36


of representational epistemologies, since by definition they allow of no empirical verification (the “stream of time,” James observes, “can be remounted only verbally”115), and their truth can therefore only be a function of the consequences of any particular interpretation and the interests that it serves in the present. But surely, if there is one thing upon which all of Faulkner’s readers can agree it is that Faulkner is a novelist obsessed by history. To be sure, interpretations of Faulkner’s conception of history have their own history. Whereas earlier admirers saw a complex sympathy for an “old order” which, for all its self-evident failings, at least “cherished the concept of justice” that can offer some point of resistance against the molestations of modernism,116 more recent critics pretty uniformly locate Faulkner’s virtue in his discernment of the repressions and contradictions of that order, the cracks through which the viscous residue of old atrocities seeps into view in the present. What both share, however, is the assumption that Faulkner’s purpose is to reveal the truth of the past, stripped of the veils of prejudice and ideology. My argument will therefore be obliged to meet this challenge, and to do so I look at Faulkner’s most elaborate historical novel, Absalom, Absalom! In contrast to the large majority of readings, which see it as fundamentally concerned with the burden of the past, a historical whodunit (or better a whatthehellgotdunanyway), seeking to uncover the traumatic cause whose spectral effects continue to haunt the house of the present, I will propose that what the novel stages is a conflict of historical discourses which can never be ultimately resolved. Each narrator offers an interested description, invariably designed to underline his or her privileged access to the truth of the past. Pragmatically, however, the notion of such a truth is not only misguided but simultaneously an exercise of power and a form of self-entrapment, to the extent that it supposes, as James says, that “the whole world tells one story,” a supposition that is “another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his own risk.”117 The real irony of southern history is that the concept of history itself can become a disabling burden when it forgets that history is the product of the present. Finally, chapter 5 takes up the much debated question of race in Faulkner. Faulkner’s torturous struggles to resolve his attitudes toward the racial problem are well known, and it is safe to say that his struggles were more successful than the forced and disappointing resolution he reached with his intervention in the integration debate in the fifties. In his most powerful fictional treatments of the problem, such as Go Down, 37


Moses, he fared better, and he was able to do so because it is in those works that the fictionality of the concept of “race” itself becomes evident. Faulkner’s ultimate recognition of the conventional and arbitrary status of the idea of racial identity in fact displays a striking convergence with pragmatism’s criticism of identity in general. For James, the concept of an identity persisting through time was an artifact of idealist philosophy, the notional precipitate of an inability to accept the temporality of experience, with the mutation, contingency, and adulteration that temporality implies. In a late essay he argues the impossibility of maintaining a “straight line of sameness” because of what he calls “the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness,” whose effect is to ensure that “all the old identities at last give out.”118 Go Down, Moses, I propose, needs to be read as an extended meditation on such lines of sameness—above all the color line, the “problem of the Twentieth Century,” as W. E. B. Du Bois famously described it, but also blood lines, property lines, and story lines.

38

recto

1

Make Believe The Confidence Man as Protopragmatist

The truth was too small for him. Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi

On July 8, 1849, the New York Herald reported the arrest of a local miscreant who had recently gained some notoriety on the basis of his novel mode of operation: “He would go up to a perfect stranger, in the street, and being a man of genteel appearance, would easily command an interview. Upon this interview he would say, after some little conversation, ‘have you the confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow’; the stranger, at this novel request, supposing him to be some old acquaintance, not at the moment recollected, allows him to take the watch, thus placing ‘confidence’ in the honesty of the stranger, who walks off laughing, and the other, supposing it to be a joke, allows him to do so.” Not much to be said in defense, one might suppose, of William Thompson, aka “the Confidence Man”; his method seems ingeniously sordid—theft compounded and redoubled by its cynical exploitation of its own victim, making him an accessory in his own plucking. And yet a writer in the Merchant’s Ledger found something positive, and even inspiring, about the affair: “That one poor swindler, like the one under arrest, should have been able to drive so considerable a trade on an appeal to so simple a quality as the confidence of man in man, shows that all virtue and humanity of nature is not entirely extinct in the nineteenth century. It is a good thing, and speaks well for human nature, that at this late day, in spite of all the hardening of civilization and all the warning of newspapers, men can be swindled.”1 From the moment of his first entrance into the popular imagination under his familiar name, the confidence man was a radically ambiguous figure who inspired deeply ambivalent responses. If, on the one hand, he was clearly an exploiter of his fellow man, on the other, it was just possible that he could also be seen as serving a rather useful social func39


tion. Indeed, his function might be the foundation of society itself, an intimation that can be read between the lines of the Herald article. In a city of strangers, the appeal of the confidence man is that he gives rise to a human bond. His confident greeting inspires an equally confident response, the faith that this is indeed an old acquaintance, and this confidential transaction almost immediately succeeds in creating a community where there was none before. To reduce this contract to a simple deception is to miss something important about it: the confidence man does not falsify something that already exists so much as he provides the conditions for its fabrication. In return for such a heroic act of creation, the payment of a used timepiece seems small indeed. I am going to be arguing in this chapter that the crucial importance of the figure of the confidence man is his capacity for creating community. In the context of America, where the absence of social institutions and conventions handed down through the generations seemed, at least in the mind of its literally bewildered European inhabitants, to offer the promise or threat of a return to the state of nature, the con man acquired an especially vital, if deeply ambiguous, role. Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes This World, has brilliantly explored the originary function of tricksters as the “creators of culture,” who have helped shape this world so as to make it a hospitable place for human habitation.”2 But if in traditional cultures the trickster characteristically works on the arthritic joints of a social system that threatens to become paralyzed by its own conventions,3 in America the task that falls to the confidence artist is to articulate those joints in the first place. By inspiring an extension of belief supported by no prior foundations, which is then answered by a corresponding extension of belief, which elicits another response— ad infinitum—the confidence man brings into being a community that becomes its own evidence, and whose existence is the direct result of the fact that it is believed to exist. In the transaction of confidence, in other words, belief creates its own object. At the same time, the confidence man cannot help but arouse anxiety, to the extent that he uncovers the uncomfortable fact that all societies, insofar as they are, to use Benedict Anderson’s useful phrase, “imagined communities,” have something in common with confidence games. A society as such can never be seen; its existence can only be presupposed, and only after that presupposition can the practices, behaviors, and conventions that constitute the life of the community be realized. Nor can the motivations of its members ever be made transparent, for there is no 40

The Confidence man as protopragmatist

way of finally verifying the authenticity of the participants in the social exchange.4 Indeed, to demand such a demonstration of authenticity before entering into the communal game would be to preclude the possibility of community as such. The con artist blurs the boundaries between honest and fraudulent transactions, between real and imaginary societies, and in doing so raises the question of whether the distinction has, ultimately, either meaning or use. The confidence man therefore needs to be seen, I would claim, as the embodiment of a serious philosophical problematic. He is the pioneer of an epistemological frontier, putting into practice the protopragmatic doctrine that truths are made, not found—made in the course of a performance that becomes the only ground they will ever have. Unconsciously, and yet with supreme self-consciousness, he is operating under the principle that will become the crucial germ of William James’s formulation of pragmatism—the contention that belief gives rise to the reality to which it refers. It is no accident that the confidence man is an American invention, since America itself is the greatest example of an imagined community, an entity “invented,” as Edmundo O’Gorman put it, even before its discovery, and a nation that originally came into being by means of a speech act—a “declaration” that preceded its own referent—and which extended and consolidated itself throughout the nineteenth century by repeated projections of a destiny so vigorously asserted to be manifest that it finally became so. Both con man and country, that is, literally talk themselves into being. The American experience highlighted in a particularly vivid way the fact that social “reality” is ultimately a supreme fiction actualized through a shared will to believe. In this sense, America, the “nation of futurity,” is history’s largest confidence game, continuously wagering an uncertain present against the confidently expected prospect of its own existence. But before the confidence man appeared in the flesh, he had appropriately enough already been invented in literature. Already, in the vigorous writings of a group of authors who were part of what is generally referred to as the Southwest Humor school, he had found an imaginative embodiment that explored both the philosophical and political implications of the transaction of confidence. In this chapter I want to examine the most interesting versions of the confidence man produced by those writers, Johnson Jones Hooper’s Simon Suggs, and Joseph Glover Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus and Simon Suggs Jr. 41


I Central to any discussion of the significance of the figure of the confidence man to American thought must be Johnson Jones Hooper and his powerful imaginative creation Simon Suggs. Hooper was one of the constellation of Southwest Humorists collected and promoted by the energetic William T. Porter, editor of the New York based Spirit of the Times, a popular sporting and humorous weekly. Hooper’s tales were already appearing in the small Alabama newspaper he edited when Porter discovered him in 1843 and began eagerly soliciting his stories, declaring, “This Hooper is a clever man, and we must enlist him among the correspondents of The Spirit of the Times.”5 It was Porter’s enthusiastic encouragement that led to his first putting together a book of sketches based on the Simon Suggs character. It is important to note that, although Hooper is normally grouped with the so-called Southwest Humorists—a generic definition to which Porter himself helped to give coherence with his popular collections, The Big Bear of Arkansas (1845) and The Quarter Race in Kentucky (1846)—his significance should not be limited by his regional identification. The Spirit of the Times was printed in New York and had a national audience, and the Simon Suggs stories had a remarkable popularity throughout the country, going through three editions in ten months.6 Literary historians have often identified the confidence man, and the tall tale tradition in which he makes his initial appearance, as products of “frontier zones—which characteristically included Indian wars, slavedealing, herrenvolk racial solidarity, endemic violence, economic instability, fluidity, humbuggery, and speculative fantasy.”7 But it would be a mistake to see Suggs as merely a freakish phenomenon of the frontier. If Suggs’s fictional world is a landscape populated by hard-shell preachers, scrabbling farmers, displaced Indians, and shiftless poor whites, the readers who eagerly consumed Hooper’s tales represented a rather different segment of society: economically successful, intellectually sophisticated, and geographically diverse. “The works of the Southwestern Humorists,” Stephen Railton reminds us, “were not written to be read around campfires or on board rafts. They were written to be read in the dens, the clubs, or the barbershops where their national male audience, the gentlemen on Porter’s subscription list, were to be found.”8 At the same time, if these readers were highly conscious of belonging to a social elite, they were equally sensitive to the recency of their status, and 42

the confidence man as protopragmatist

to the fact that their own rise was the result of the instability and fluidity of the social conditions of the nation of futurity that they inhabited. That instability and fluidity suggests a qualification of perhaps the most influential reading of the works of the Southwest school, that of Kenneth Lynn. Building on the fact that many of the authors, including Hooper, were aligned with the southern Whigs, and disdained the rowdy democracy of the Jacksonian era, Lynn argues that the politics of the Southwest tale are clearly and unproblematically conservative, and legi ble in its very form. The characteristic structural feature of the tale, the framing of the main story, whose protagonist is an uncouth bumpkin, by a gentlemanly narrator, becomes, for Lynn, a narratological “cordon sanitaire” that serves to contain the threat of democracy and to reaffirm the natural superiority of the cultivated classes that constituted its readership.9 But however convincing that analysis may be in the case of such hyperbolically degraded characters as George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood, the confidence man, whose very essence consists in his ability to disrupt borders, assume new identities, and to disrupt apparently clear social distinctions, raises more serious problems. Indeed, it is easy to feel a sneaking admiration on the part of Hooper for his shifty crea tion, whose rhetorical energy and capacity for ingenious improvisation reduce the other characters by comparison. The career of the author, who lost his chance to attend university due to his father’s financial failure, and who had to scramble to make his fortune by his wits and facility with language, as a newspaper editor, lawyer, and sometime writer, has Suggsian elements—as his readers, who repeatedly identified Hooper with his protagonist, perhaps recognized. In any event, it seems inadequate to reduce Suggs to the status of a political caricature; on the contrary, his widespread popularity suggests that he spoke to some important, if covert, concerns of Americans as a whole, and that his repeated demonstrations of the contingency of community, of the instability of shared vocabularies, and of the creation of society by the unsupported fabrications of confidence, gave a fictional embodiment to the obscure sense of his fellow citizens that the true locus of their own nation was the collective imagination. The frontiers that Suggs negotiates are less geographical than they are virtual—the frontiers between belief and reality, between self and community, between present and future. Simon Suggs is the first fully realized confidence man, a figure who does not periodically engage in tricks and hoaxes but who is through and through defined by his manipulation of appearance. In fact, the 43


opposition of appearance and reality loses its pertinence, since the reality of Simon is to be an operator of image. He is in the truest sense the self-made man of Jacksonian ideology, or more accurately, a man constantly engaged in self-making, in transition between identities, always on the move lest he be caught in the fixity of a simple definition. His motto, “It is good to be shifty in a new country,” is itself shifty, demanding (at least) a double reading: it authorizes his career of deception and duplicity, but it also imposes an ethic of perpetual motion, translation both physical, across the open tabula rasa of the Southwest, and existential, from one incarnation to another. He lives out in the most literal way Emerson’s contemporaneous dictum that “we live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”10 But Hooper does not present Simon as simply a marginal curiosity; on the contrary, his series of sketches is consciously modeled on contemporaneous presidential campaign biographies, specifically those of Andrew Jackson; the narrator in fact cites the written lives of Jackson, Van Buren, Clay, and Polk as justifications for his own project.11 Such faithful imitation of the form of the standard biography—with a sketch of the candidate’s youth, accounts of military and political exploits, statement of philosophy, and printed portrait—of course serves to satirize the project of recounting the life of so ragged and disreputable a swindler as Suggs, but it equally has the effect of suggesting an equivalence in means and ends between Suggs and the central figures of the American political life. Simon’s first venture into deception is already a sophisticated one, not so much for the mechanics of his swindle as for its political and philosophical resonances. Seventeen-year-old Simon is gambling at cards with his friend Bill, instead of working, when his father, Jedediah, “an old ‘hard shell’ Baptist preacher,” unexpectedly appears on the scene. The father’s reaction is swift and ominous, biblical both in its references and its wrath: “Soho! youngsters!—you in the fence corner, and the crap in the grass; what saith the Scriptur,’ Simon? ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard,’ and so forth and so on. What in the round creation of the yeath have you and that nigger been a-doin’?”12 Simon at first attempts to conceal the evidence, but Jedediah’s relentless interrogation finally forces a confession, and the two boys are led off to the mulberry tree, the ordained place of punishment. Simon has, however, literally and metaphorically, some cards left to play. First he dismisses the utility of his father’s impending “correction”: “I’m gwine to play cards as long as I live. When 44


I go off to myself, I’m gwine to make my living by it. So what’s the use of beating me about it?” (21). When Jedediah attempts to supplement his religious censure of gambling with a practical argument, contending that “them that plays cards always loses their money,” Simon’s reply is instantaneous and logically devastating: “Who wins it all then, daddy?” At this point, by shifting the terms of the encounter from religious judgment to eristic contention, Simon has already laid the foundation for his eventual triumph; Jedediah makes one more attempt to invoke divine authority: “‘Well, it’s no use to argify about the matter,’ said old Jed’diah; ‘What saith the Scriptur’? “He that begetteth a fool, doeth it to his sorrow.” Hence, Simon, you’re a poor misubble fool—so cross your hands!” But Simon now draws in a competing secular authority, Bob Smith, the local store keeper, according to whom young Simon is already a match for even the big-city professional gamblers in Augusta. This jab is precisely what is needed to arouse a competitive response from his father, whose one trip to Augusta is the foundation of a considerable sense of personal authority and superiority over his untravelled neighbors: “Bob Smith says, does he? And who’s Bob Smith? Much does Bob Smith know about Augusty! he’s been thar, I reckon! . . . Oh, yes, Bob Smith knows all about it! I don’t know nothin’ about it! I a’n’t never been to Augusty—I couldn’t find the road thar, I reckon—ha! ha. Bob— Smi-th!” (23). Simon is able to use his father’s indignation and sense of threatened authority to draw him into a contest in which he agrees to stake a horse against a bag of silver, the outcome depending on Simon’s cutting his deck of cards at a jack. The key to Simon’s strategy lies not simply in inducing Jedediah to play cards, in spite of his earlier vociferous condemnations of gambling, but in effecting a linguistic shift. When Simon’s use of the term “bet” evokes a predictably violent response, he immediately redefines the transaction as one of “gift”: “Daddy,” said our hero, “ef you’ll bet me—” “What!” thundered old Mr. Suggs. “Bet, did you say?” and he came down with a scorer across Simon’s shoulders—“me, Jed’diah Suggs, that’s been in the Lord’s sarvice these twenty years—me bet, you nasty, sassy, triflin’ ugly—” “I didn’t go to say that daddy; that warn’t what I meant, adzactly. I went to say that ef you’d let me off from this here maulin’ you owe me, and give me ‘Bunch,’ ef I cut Jack; I’d give you all this here silver, ef I didn’t—that’s all. To be sure, I allers knowed you wouldn’t bet.” (24) 45


Jedediah’s confidence confirms Simon’s description; if there is no possibility of losing, then there is indeed no question of a game of chance, and Simon’s clearly predestined loss offers the tempting prospect of a profit for a servant of God and a profitable lesson for a sinner: “‘It sartinly can’t be nothin’ but givin’ no way it kin be twisted,’ he murmured to himself. ‘I know he can’t do it, so there’s no resk. What makes bettin’? The resk. It’s all a one-sided business, and I’ll jist let him give me all his money, and that’ll put all his wild sportin’ notions out of his head’” (25). Jedediah’s analysis is at once completely accurate and entirely misguided; after he shuffles the cards, and, responding to an inspiration that can only have come from “the devil,” removes all the picture cards to the bottom of the deck, Simon, with a flick of his wrist, has no difficulty producing a jack, six cards from the top. Jedediah is suitably astonished by a feat which he had already decreed to be “agin nater,” but acknowledges defeat, requiring only that the sole spectator to his humiliation, his elder son Ben, bear witness to Mrs. Suggs that his surrender of “Bunch” was a free gift. But Simon is not content with this; he now imposes a redescription of the transaction in the discourse of theology, appropriating his Calvinist father’s own doctrine of predestination, as well as his elliptical style of scriptural invocation: “Oh, shuh! Ben,” remarked Simon, “I wouldn’t run on that way; daddy couldn’t help it, it was predestinated—‘whom he hath, he will,’ you know”; and the rascal pulled down the under lid of his left eye at his brother. Then addressing his father, he asked, “Warn’t it, daddy?” “To be sure—to be sure—all fixed aforehand,” was old Mr. Suggs’ reply. “Didn’t I tell you so, Ben?” said Simon—“I knowed it was all fixed aforehand”; and he laughed until he was purple in the face. “What’s in ye? What are ye laughin’ about?” asked the old man wrothily. “Oh, it’s so funny that it could all a’ been fixed aforehand!” said Simon, and laughed louder than before. (29) If I have examined this vignette at some length, it is because there is a good deal more going on in this foundational episode than is at first evident, or even self-evident. The oedipal dimensions of this skirmish are clear enough, but if this is a struggle for paternal power, it is a struggle of a strangely passive sort. What is striking is the absence of any suggestion of violence; the action is entirely verbal, and the overthrow of the father 46


is realized by his tranquil acquiescence to a new system of signifiers. The transaction into which Simon tempts his father is not so much a game of cards as of words—a language game, in fact. By replacing the language of “betting” with the language of “giving,” and redescribing the devil’s diversion in terms of the free movements of grace, Simon has effected just the kind of substitution of vocabularies that Richard Rorty argues is the real content of all political change. Simon, in effect, engages his father as an unconscious participant in a ventriloquistic performance, a daddy-dummy uttering words of Simon’s own choosing. The suggestion that there is a serious political issue involved in Simon’s picayune prestidigitations may seem oversubtle, but it appears less so if this oedipal skirmish is considered in relation to the metaphors that had become the primary means of analyzing the emergence and justifying the existence of America as a sovereign nation. For it was in terms of an oedipal confrontation, a clash between parent and child, that the conflict between Britain and the colonies was repeatedly described, as both sides attempted to define the precise limits of legitimate paternal-monarchical authority.13 The metaphor did not disappear with the end of the Revolution. We will see that later Joseph Glover Baldwin, in his continuation of Suggs, “Simon Suggs, Jr., Esq.: A Legal Biography” (1853) invokes it when he stages a card game between Simon and his son, which he compares to a confrontation between “young America” and old Europe. The possibility of reading Simon’s declaration of independence as a replay of America’s primal scene, however, raises some potentially disturbing questions. America, it could be said, was founded on the double imperative of telling the truth: both the possibility of clearly discerning, for the first time in history, the fundamental and proper principles for political order and civil government and the necessity of disseminating those principles in an adequately transparent language. This double injunction to tell the truth is recurrent in debates concerning the foundation and definition of the American polity. Jonathan Mayhew, in 1750, asserted that the proper relations between governed and government were to found in “the eternal laws of truth, wisdom and equity, and the everlasting tables of right reason—tables that cannot be repealed, or thrown down and broken like those of Moses.”14 Those principles would find their most famous expression in the opening of the Declaration of Independence, which at once discerns and declares the self-evident truths upon which all political legitimacy must rest. For this reason, it was vital that the act of founding be presented as one of uncovering rather than 47


creating; the founders were simply clarifying a truth that was already there, rather than making something new. As Jefferson insisted, the object of the Declaration was “not to find out new principles, nor new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.”15 Thus “common sense” would guarantee the consensus of the community and its convergence on a set of foundational truths that lay beyond the distortions of prejudice and the manipulations of self-interest. Hooper’s revision of the foundational moment places in some doubt Jefferson’s claims to be doing nothing more than putting forward the “common sense of the subject,” to be finding rather than making, by reminding us of the curiously paradoxical nature of the very act of declaring independence, and of any attempt to legitimate the fundamental reconstitution of a political community. A declaration of independence can, after all, only be authoritative if it is made by a legitimate body, but unless that body is already independent its declarations have no legal authority. In the eye of the law, a dependent body has no more right to assert its sovereignty than does an individual citizen. A declaration of independence, then, is always either impossible or unnecessary: impossible if the declaring entity is not already independent, and unnecessary if it is. The consequence is that “defining independence is as much a rhetorical problem as a political one,”16 and the Declaration solves this problem by what one might describe as a kind of grammatical sleight of hand, by which independence is brought into being, but brought into being as if it were already in existence. An act of creation, that is, is presented as if it were an act of revealing. Thus the crucial moment in the Declaration takes the form of a curious piece of double talk or what Jacques Derrida has described as an “indispensable hypocrisy” (“hypocrisie indispensable”),17 which functions simultaneously in two grammatical registers, the indicative and the subjunctive: “We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America . . . solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” The freedom and independence of the united colonies are things made (“ought to be”), but they are presented as things that are found (“are”). Just as Simon wins his freedom by uncovering the jack that he has previously placed within the deck, the declarers “uncover” the facts that they themselves have buried, and the treasonous act of rebellion becomes the revelation of already existing sovereignty. 48


The rhetorical strategies of the Declaration reveal still another striking parallel with Simon’s maneuver. One of the acutest difficulties faced by the Founders in creating a new political community was the inherent conflict of interests among those who were to be subsumed by it, and their natural resistance to handing over power to any one part of the community that claimed to represent it and to speak for the whole. 18 What made the issue particularly troublesome was the fact that the American political community affirmed as its fundamental value the principle of equality, a principle which by definition put in question the legitimacy of any overt differential in political power and preeminence. Michael Warner describes the predicament succinctly: “While the statesman’s task is to embody legitimate power, the task of republicanism was to remove legitimacy from the hands of persons.”19 It was this democratic dilemma that Benjamin Franklin encountered when he undertook to found Philadelphia’s first subscription library: “The Objections, & Reluctances I met with in Soliciting the Subscriptions, made me soon feel the Impropriety of presenting one’s self as the Proposer of any useful Project that might be suppos’d to raise one’s Reputation in the smallest degree above that of one’s Neighbors, when one has need of their Assistance to accomplish that Project.”20 His solution, which took the form of a strategy of rigorous de-author ization (“I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading”), anticipates that of the Declaration, which likewise seeks, as it were, to throw its voice so that it appears to come from a position beyond all personal interest and to emerge from the mouth of its communal audience, the “We” that announces and is announced by the opening word. Steven Connor has shrewdly characterized this shifty maneuver as a kind of “political ventriloquy,” by which “the Declaration of 1776 gives a voice, or performs the giving of a voice, to a nation that cannot speak in its own voice.”21 Like Simon, who ventriloquizes his father by placing his own words in Jedediah’s mouth, forcing him to acquiesce in the justice of his own supersession, the declarers, the most powerful men of their time, propagate a vocabulary that simultaneously affirms the equality of all men and confirms their own political preeminence as the invisible propagators of that vocabulary. Franklin’s trenchant conclusion lays bare the animating principle at the heart of Simon’s and the Declaration’s method: “The present little Sacrifice of your Vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”22 49


In this context, Simon’s final appropriation of his preacher father’s language of predestination seems especially appropriate. The immediate target of Simon’s mockery may be Jedediah’s naively rigid Calvinism, but the implicit range of his irony extends considerably further. Much of the force of the rhetorical justification of the Revolution derived from the way in which it absorbed and adapted what Sacvan Bercovitch has described as the Puritan “typology of mission,” the elaborate hermeneutical structure according to which the rise of America was the fulfillment of a divine intention that determined the shape and meaning of human history.23 For Bercovitch, the particular rhetorical strategies of the Founders are less important than the way their revision of the providential project was reworked by subsequent geographers of the “American way.” One of the most important of those reworkings was that of Hooper’s contemporary, George Bancroft, in his massive History of the United States of America, which appeared serially between 1832 and 1850, and which rapidly established itself as the most preeminent interpretation of American history. One of the keys to the authority of Bancroft’s achievement was his success in giving definitive form to the providential reading of America’s national narrative. Bancroft, argues Bercovitch, “identifies the American Revolution as the link between . . . the two quintessential moments in the story of America—the twin legends of the country’s founding fathers—the Great Migration and the War of Independence. . . . Revolution functions here as a vehicle of providence.”24 Stories of predestination are unfailingly convincing to history’s winners; Simon’s mirth at the thought that his triumph, like America’s, was “all fixed aforehand” reminds us of the discomfiting condition that every retelling of the past is invariably the product of present interests, the demonstration of a useful thesis, not the neutral record of self-interpreting facts. If Simon’s opening gambit is in some sense a (counter) allegory of America’s political foundation, his earliest independent adventures bear no small resemblance to its social and demographic expansion. Hooper’s narrative takes the form of a rhythm of detail and vagueness; clear, brightly lit scenes of precisely recorded dialogue alternate with long blank spaces. After his departure from home, Simon moves into a region of obscurity where “we lose all trace—at least all authentic trace—of him, for the next twenty years” (32). His possible temporary locations are themselves related through several layers of obscuring transmission: “Some have heard that he went thence to Augusta; others aver that in their opinion, he traveled away down into the low country whar they 50


call sop, gravy; again some say that a man very much like him was seen traveling in the Cherokee country” (33). The cumulative effect is to turn Suggs into the embodiment of what Daniel Boorstin defines as the “homo Americanus more easily identified by his mobility that than by his habitat” who “[dominated] the scene between the American Revolution and the Civil War.”25 Or even better, Suggs’s life and whereabouts, sunk in “doubt, uncertainty and vague speculation” (33) resemble a metaphor for the misty contours of the opening continent itself, whose “great resource,” as Boorstin suggests, was precisely this “vagueness,” even the vagueness of the physical geography of the land itself.26 Suggs’s first recorded transaction, in fact, will involve an exploitation of the vagueness of that physical geography. The scene is set in 1833 in Alabama during the land rush ensuing after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, when “a perfect mania for entering government lands prevailed through the country” (35). Suggs, “in the hope finding prey,” has located at a public house on the main road to the land office in Montgomery, where he chances to overhear a speculator discussing his plans to register a particular tract ideally situated for a set of mills. The next morning Suggs overtakes the land seeker, Jones, on the road, and engages him in a conversation, first remarking on the evident fatigue of Jones’s horse, then hinting at the urgent nature of his own business in Montgomery. James opines that Suggs himself must be on his way to enter land, and forces a gradual admission from his taciturn companion that he is after a tract in the same area as Jones. In evident panic, Jones exclaims “that he thought it likely they were both going to enter the same piece of land.” Suggs, after his interlocutor has supplied the coordinates which he “never can remember,” can only agree that this appears to be the case. The now appalled Jones enters into an increasingly desperate attempt to buy Suggs off, finally succeeding with an offer of $150 and the exchange of his horse for Suggs’s much inferior article. The sketch ends with Suggs congratulating himself on his own self-restraint in not pushing on to Montgomery by a shortcut and entering the tract under a false name, for “What’s a man without his integreety?” If the first story suggested, as I have argued, a critique of the political and religious foundations of America insofar as these rest on an implicit epistemological faith in the possibility of telling the truth, Suggs’s first mature undertaking carries his operation onto a different kind of ground, onto, in fact, ground itself. Real estate swindles are, to be sure, part of the confidence artist’s stock-in-trade; for the trickster, whose natural 51


habitat is the open road, the intermediate space of transition, there is always something absurd about the notion of landed property. But in diddling with geography of the new nation, Suggs is touching on one of the foundational elements of American identity. As a succession of students of American culture, from Perry Miller through Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Sacvan Bercovitch, Myra Jehlen, and Howard Horwitz, have in various ways emphasized, the physical landscape of the New World has been required to play a peculiarly important role in the process of national self-definition. Not content to see national political and cultural values as the contingent products of history, Americans have repeatedly striven to root them in “the continent’s physical reality,” generating an “ideal-material fusion”27 which becomes the ultimate foundation and demonstration of America’s unique identity, and producing what we might call the lie of the land. As the chapter’s disingenuously simple title, “Simon Speculates,” suggests, then, Suggs’s entry into real estate dealing may have far-reaching philosophical implications. The first story undermined the ideal grounds of America’s political principles; the second unearths and places in question any possible foundation in the special reality of a unique American incarnation. For there seems to be nothing less real than this real estate. The material landscape serves less as the grounding of a set of ideas than as an idea; it is itself the product and projection of the discourse spun around it. To Jones, the land’s value exists not in itself but in its projected future as the site of a “set of mills.” To Suggs, of course, it has even less reality; his knowledge of it is entirely secondhand, and he does not even possess the geographic coordinates, but he projects, on the basis of Jones’s projection, both a more detailed description and a yet more flourishing future: “The land I’m after is a d—d little, no-account quarter section, that nobody would have but me; it’s poor and piney, but it’s got a snug little shoal on it, with twenty or twenty-five foot fall, and maybe they’ll want to build a little town at Dodd’s some of these days, and I mought sell ’em the lumber” (39). The lie of the land thus unfolds under the eyes of the interlocutors; fiction builds upon fiction, and the ground inspissates and condenses as its discursive construction is elaborated. The land does not, and perhaps cannot, ever appear in the story, which takes place entirely in the interstitial space of the road. With perfect consistency Suggs, when he has brought the land into existence, and sold it to Jones, forbears to push on to the land office and take possession of the land itself; for he more 52


than anyone knows that “ownership” is a fiction, maintained by fictions, including the fiction of property by which the land was snatched from its Creek inhabitants in the first place. The way in which discourse seems to produce its own grounds, however, is only one specific instance, although a particularly telling one, of the operation of “speculation.” For speculation, as Suggs practices it, is precisely that activity which produces something out of nothing. Earlier in the story the narrator observes that to the “uninitiated, it may seem odd that a man without a dollar should be a land speculator,” proceeding to explain that Suggs’s talent lay exactly in his ability to speculate successfully without the natural foundation upon which such speculation should theoretically rest: “As for those branches of business requiring actual pecuniary outlay, he regarded them as only fit to be pursued by purse-proud block-heads. Any fool, he reasoned, could speculate if he had money. But to buy, to sell, to make profits, without a cent in one’s pocket—this required judgment, discretion, ingenuity—in short, genius!” (35). Suggs thus belongs to, and is indeed one of the most self-conscious representatives of, a long line of American thinkers who recognized in absence and deprivation an opportunity for construction, who detect in nothingness the ideal material for infinite development. From this point on, the scale of Suggs’s operations will steadily grow, and he will move into positions of greater social authority, finally being elected captain of the militia and, effectively, military dictator of a small settlement. At each stage, his function demonstrates the same ambiguity, as he both enables and abuses the societies that come into being around him. Perhaps the most revealing episode of communal construction takes place in chapter 5, in which Suggs visits a gambling den. The scene, in spite of its glitter, is a rather cold and unsocial one: players are gathered around tables, silent and entirely absorbed in their games, indifferent to anything around them. Suggs’s attempt at a cheerful greeting is met with indifference: There was very little noise, no loud swearing, but very deep playing. As Simon entered, he made his rustic bow, and in an easy, familiar way, saluted the company with “Good evenin’ gentlemen!” No one seemed inclined to acknowledge, on behalf of the company, their pleasure at seeing Captain Suggs. Indeed, nobody appeared to notice him at all after the first half second. The Captain, 53


therefore, repeated his salutation: “I say, good evenin,’ gentlemen!” Notwithstanding the emphasis with which the words were respoken, there was only a slight laugh from some of the company, and the Captain began to feel a little awkward standing up before so many strangers. (55–56) This cold reception begins to warm up, however, when Suggs has an identity projected onto him; one of the gamblers recognizes him as his uncle General Witherspoon, a wealthy hog driver expected from Kentucky, and as the identification is diffused throughout the crowd, there is a “very considerable improvement in the way of politeness, on the part of all present” (57). The sudden rise in the value of Suggs’s social stock is paralleled and reinforced by his success at the card table, which peaks when he accumulates a pile of $1,500. Suggs reaches a kind of climax here that recalls and significantly recasts his first transaction with his father. As in the first case, Suggs’s gambling triumph is immediately followed by a scene of paternal negotiation, although it is now Suggs who occupies the position of the father, the figure of authority and the authorizing figure. Witherspoon’s nephew approaches, asking, “Don’t you know me, uncle?” (59). Suggs will be the one to authorize his nephew’s identity, which he is prepared to do only after a rigorous ordeal of questions, while the company crowds around in rapt attention and admiration for Suggs’s wit and shrewd interrogation. “Don’t know me uncle. Why, I’m James Peyton, your sister’s son. She has been expecting you for several days”; said the much-humbled nephew of the hog driver. “All very well, Mr. Jeemes Peyton, but as this little world of ourn is tolloble d—d full of rascally impostors; and gentlemen of my—that is to say—you see—persons that have got somethin,’ is apt to be tuk in, it stands a man in hand to be a leetle perticler. So jist answer me a strait forrard question or two,” said the Captain, subjecting Mr. Peyton to a test, which if applied to himself, would have blown him skyhigh. (59–60) Finally, the examination successfully passed, Suggs tearfully embraces and publicly recognizes his nephew. Thus the first half of the story has a conventionally comic plot, culminating in a scene of familial recognition that is a synecdoche for the emergence of the new community. As in 54


the traditional comic plot, the climax comes when “a new society [crystallizes] around the hero,” a crystallization made possible by a sudden revelation of identity, “the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio.”28 And as the comedy traditionally ends with a ritual banquet that seals the new society, so Suggs’s drama will involve a feast of oysters and champagne. It would be too facile to regard Suggs’s actions here as merely beneficent. The plot of the community’s creation quickly turns into Suggs’s plot to exploit it: he loses his winnings as rapidly as he had accumulated them, borrowing to cover his rising debts against his supposititious hogs, and finally slipping out the door before the now imminent arrival of the actual General Witherspoon. But his contribution is real and indispensable. By inducing the gamblers to extend “credit,” he has created a community out of a group of disconnected individuals; from this perspective his parting words—“if I forgit you, I’ll be d—d if you’ll ever forgit me!”— seem less a taunt than a legitimate claim on a society’s memory by one who must be regarded as its true founder. In the next three chapters Suggs will obtain a more substantial, central social position. Indeed this will be, as the narrator informs us, “the most important period in the history of our hero—his assumption of military command” (82). The events are set in 1836, during an uprising of the Alabama Creek Indians. Reports of some murders have given rise to a general panic, and Suggs, well aware of the minimal nature of the real danger, is happy to be elected military governor of the small settlement in which he is residing. This is a significant turning point. First, because Suggs is now pursuing not the appearance of power in order to make money, but power itself. Second, up to this point, all of Suggs’s operations have been mimetic; all have depended upon his portraying a figure, like General Witherspoon, who never appeared in the story as such but who was always required as a background, an original of which Suggs was but a copy, an assumed reality in whose shadow Suggs’s fiction could unfold itself. Now that background fades away, or better, becomes identical with the foreground; Suggs’s performance imitates nothing except itself. He is elected to office and fulfills his public functions as Simon Suggs; he becomes his own original. And if his performance is now fully “legitimate,” those larger background structures of legitimacy that Suggs up to now has been imitating can have in turn no more real foundation than Suggs’s performance; they are revealed as only larger structures of fiction and extended confidence, as larger dramas or come dies of assumed identity and shifty representation. 55


The book, with its opening allusions to political campaign biographies, has been in some sense pushing toward this episode from the beginning. Suggs here comes closest to Jackson, and his political career can be read as a highly condensed parody of the general’s most celebrated exploits.29 At the first level, this is a reflection of Hooper’s personal partisanship and Whiggish anti-Jacksonism, but the target ultimately is not simply Jackson’s popularity but the mechanisms of popularity as such. In Suggs’s America, statesmen are neither born nor made, but constructed, by the manipulation of representations, and this is as true of Jackson the politician as it is of Suggs the swindler. The more Suggs resembles Jackson, the more Jackson, and any figure of political authority, any “representative,” resembles Suggs. Chapter 7 begins with a reference to Amos Kendall, newspaperman and Jackson’s tireless promoter and author of an unfinished biography of the great man published in 1843–44: “Would that thy pen, O! Kendall, were ours! Then should thy hero and ours—the nation’s Jackson and the country’s Suggs—go down to posterity, equal in fame and honors, as in deeds!” (82). The whole of the opening borrows freely and ironically from the hollow political bloviations typical of the era. In this atmosphere of fictional and rhetorical performance, Suggs is indeed “in his element” (85), and when the alarmed settlers congregate at the local store, it is natural that he offer himself as leader, since he understands better than anyone to what extent leadership means manipulative rhetorical performance. His speech to the crowd is a political campaign in miniature. Whereas in his previous adventures others projected a role for him, now he defines one for himself—but once again it is the community which makes the identification: “Gentlemen,” said he impressively, “this here is a critercle time; the wild savage of the forest are beginnin’ of a bloody, hostile war, which they’re not a-goin’ to spar nither age nor sek—not even to the women and children! . . . We ought to form a company right away, and make some man capting that aint afeard to fight . . . some sober, stiddy feller”—here he sipped a little from the tumbler—“that’s a good hand to manage women and keep ’em from hollerin . . .” Having thus spoken, Suggs drank off the rest of the whiskey, threw himself into a military attitude, and awaited a reply. “Suggs is the man,” shouted twenty voices. (87)

56


If this description seems absurdly at variance with the habits and character of Suggs, there is a sense in which he is indeed the man, and his particular talent for creating a community of extended confidence is precisely what is called for. Even while Hooper, a Whig by party and temperament, certainly intends to ridicule and condemn this manipulative and autocratic Jacksonian figure, the logic of his own insights carries his story beyond approval or condemnation. As the most confident player in the democratic game of confidence, Suggs/Jackson naturally rises to the top, the most masterful manipulator of the fictions of politics.30 II To move from Hooper to Joseph Glover Baldwin and The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853) is to make a qualitative transition in literary sophistication and cultural self-consciousness, the textual equivalent of passing through a door connecting a dirt-floored frontier doggery and a plushly appointed hotel saloon. Baldwin is today a less known figure—one commentator calls him “the most neglected and . . . most underrated of the major antebellum Southern humorists”31—but in its time Flush Times was widely read and admired by, among others, Hooper himself and Abraham Lincoln.32 Considered by some the best of the southern humorists, it is not unfair to see him as a climax of the tradition. In particular, Baldwin’s use of the confidence man is highly sophisticated, and suggests that the problematic implications of the exchange of credit are not simply created by individual tricksters but are present in the very forms of symbolic exchange by which all communication takes place. With Hooper, the confidence man problematized the foundational verities of American social life and the basis of the self-evident transparency on which the American community claimed to rest. Suggs exposes those assumptions as fictions whose ontological and moral status must remain forever uncertain, and he turns communication into a transaction of credit which can never be reduced to a transparent conversation. But it is always Suggs’s own fictional ingenuity and persuasive force that creates that uncertainty. In Baldwin’s unassuming but self-conscious formal manipulations, the transaction of confidence becomes the basis of literary and cultural exchange in general. In particular, Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus suggests that literary experience is finally no different in its mechanics

57


from a confidence game, while his Simon Suggs Jr. suggests that, in the modern world, personal identity itself turns into a foundationless fiction, an endlessly reproducible image in a system of public exchange. At the broadest level, we can say that Baldwin’s confidence men point in the direction of a dematerialization of the world and its replacement by a universe of facsimiles whose only ground is their communal popular acceptance. Baldwin was himself a man of considerable cultivation. A lawyer who left Virginia to make his fortune on the Alabama frontier, he eventually rose, after a further displacement west, to the position of associate justice on the Supreme Court of California, where he was to be highly influential in laying the judicial foundations of the new state,33 until he retired in 1862 to devote his full energies to writing. Unlike many of the Southwest Humorists with whom he is inevitably grouped, he had serious literary ambitions. The immediate and wide success of Flush Times led him to reflect, “I am beginning to think that I stand a chance of being enrolled among the writers of the land; and that possibly my work will live long to be thrown up to my children.”34 Particularly gratifying was the fact that “the notices of the book do not speak of it as a Suggs-like affair,” and that it had been praised for its “gentlemanly scholarship and elevated taste and vigorous thought.”35 If most of the Southwest Humorists wrote fiction with their left hands, Baldwin saw his worldly success as the precondition for the pursuit of his artistic aspirations. After his arrival in California in 1854, he wrote home to his wife that his immediate goal was to make enough money to ensure his family’s comfort, after which “I shall then be free to devote myself to literature, with a view of making a reputation which ‘men will not willingly let die.’ I think I can put myself on the roll of American authors somewhat above the names which are counted distinguished.”36 These long-term ambitions were not to be realized. Baldwin died in 1864, at forty-nine, just as he was preparing to commit his full energies to writing, and leaving The Flush Times of California, regarded by his California colleagues as his unrealized masterwork, in a fragmentary state. Already in his most popular book, however, this literary impulse makes itself felt, and when the theme of confidence is fused with the stylistic self-consciousness that characterizes The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi the result is something new and noteworthy. Earlier critics frequently felt the weight of Baldwin’s highly wrought style as a defect that interfered with the vigor and vitality of his frontier materi58


als. Walter Blair, for example, complains that his “style [is] at times too leisurely, too polished, for an account of the brisk frontier and its rough inhabitants,”37 while for Kenneth Lynn, Baldwin’s limitation is that “the vernacular is seldom allowed to muddy. . . . the incontestable gentlemanliness” of the prose.38 But this response is the consequence of a critical story according to which the Southwest writers are important primarily as precursors to Mark Twain, who will finally liberate the authentic vigor of the natural voice in the triumphantly unliterary language of Huck Finn. Such a narrative, in which “the future and ultimate power of Southwestern humor” is defined as consisting in “discovering through dialect the direct experience of the frontier,”39 must inevitably cast Baldwin as a throwback, whose literary artifice merely delays the predestined outcome. If, on the other hand, we avoid a single evolutionary narrative, our assessment of the position of Baldwin may change. In particular, if we focus on the line of confidence, which would make Melville’s radically indirect and stylized, self-consciously literary The Confidence-Man a more central text than Huckleberry Finn, Baldwin’s stylistic densities represent an important development. In Baldwin the very opposition between frame and story, gentleman and yokel, is problematized; the confidence men that Baldwin writes about become more literary, and at the same time the narrator, who manipulates the devices of language and rhetoric with such self-referential virtuosity, comes to seem ever less distinguishable, in the method and motivation of his verbal performances, from his subject. Indeed, the possibility of opposing the indirect and the direct, the artificiality of rhetoric and the authenticity of voice, comes to seem questionable, and the self-consciousness of Baldwin’s prose style finally puts in question the distinction of the representation and what is represented. Baldwin, like his confidence men, moves the reader into a world of representations, in which the static opposition of truth and falsehood is replaced by a motile mesh of interconnected images. The first of Baldwin’s confidence artists appears in the sketch that opens Flush Times, “Ovid Bolus, Esq., Attorney at Law and Solicitor in Chancery. A Fragment,” which opens thus: And what history of that halcyon period, ranging from the year of Grace, 1835, to 1837; that golden era, when shinplasters were the sole currency; when bank-bills were “as thick as Autumn leaves in Vallambrosa,” and credit was a franchise,—what history of those times 59


would be complete, that left out the name of Ovid Bolus? As well write the biography of Prince Hal, and forbear all mention of Falstaff. In law phrase, the thing would be a “deed without a name,” and void; a most unpardonable casus omissus.40 The first thing to observe about this beginning is that it has no beginning; we are offered a text which, from the first word, undercuts any illusion that we are being addressed by a gentlemanly narrator typical of the talltale genre, or that the author is to be identified in any simple way with the voice of the text. This story apparently comes from nowhere, floating autonomously into the reader’s view, and the genteel narrator has been refined almost away, until he survives only in the studied elegance and fussy erudition of his language. Baldwin thus lays bare something essential and easily overlooked about the form of the Southwest tale—the gentlemanly narrator exists in language, not in reality. He is as much an artifice created by the rhythms and references of his discourse as are the shifty fictions generated by the swindler he attempts to contain. The whole passage, in fact, is a pastiche, less a literary production than a reproduction of literature, that foregrounds the conventions of form and style in the most self-conscious fashion. The humor derives from the buffoonery of the frontier rustic as seen from the superior cultural viewpoint of the Addisonian narrator, but equally from the absurdity of the studiedly borrowed discourse applied to such foreign material. It is as much parody as satire, and depends for its effect at once upon the risibility of the yokel’s antics and the visibility of the sophisticate’s language. Baldwin’s ridiculously self-conscious rhetoric, whose artificiality is so extreme as to become a self-parody, puts in serious question the equation of narrator and author which is the first assumption of Kenneth Lynn and others who see the Southwest tale as a defense of genteel superiority. It is, then, no accident that in Baldwin’s literary reflection on literature, his very literary confidence man is called Ovid Bolus. This conjunction of the Latinate and the vernacular is of course in itself absurd, a microcosmic version of the collision of the refined and the vulgar which is the standard matter of the Southwest tale. But more important is the specific reference to Ovid—a poet who was himself the most selfconscious of literary parodists. Ovid was not only a writer of consummate artistic self-awareness; his neoteric, allusive poetics rest on the conviction that the proper subject of literature is literature. More than 60


that of any other classical author, his work is based upon the systematic rewriting of prior texts and writers, especially Virgil, and to read it properly requires the recognition of its allusions, appropriations, and revisions. And as commentators have noted, his recoveries and reworkings, whether of mythic narrative or of Virgil, serve not only to undercut the gravitas of their models, to reduce their epic portentousness and plangent cosmic resonance to all too human comedies of confusion and chagrin; they also displace them from their positions of canonical authority, turn them into just one more version, and remind us of their status as literature and of their essential textual factitiousness,41 If, for example, Virgil aspired to offer a foundational narrative that would at once justify the Roman national mission and construct the ethical ideal of pietas and self-sacrifice to civic duty that underwrote that mission, Ovid’s allusive rewriting of the Aeneid in books XIII and XIV of the Metamorphoses questions both that moral and political vision and the epic’s claim to be anything more than another literary exercise. This is Ovid Bolus’s function as well: he is a virtuoso of the virtual, a master manipulator of fabrications. His confidence game, as Baldwin presents it, is an artistic performance in essence and a business transaction only secondarily. Baldwin’s sketch, in fact, follows the traditional format of the artist’s biography: the life is followed by criticism; a character portrait and series of anecdotal vignettes are complemented by an extended analysis of the excellencies of Bolus’s style and technique in some typical performances as a “Ly-ric artist” (10). Bolus is compared to Burke for “excogitat[ing] the more solid parts of his great speeches and [leaving] unprepared only the illustrations and fancy-work” (11); his exquisite ability to lend naturalness to his narration by pausing to correct a name or date, until a “stranger hearing him, would have feared the marring of a good story by too fastidious a conscientiousness in the narrator” (12), is singled out for comment; Bolus’s self-control is unfailingly admirable: “he never squandered his lies profusely: thinking, with the poet, that ‘bounteous, not prodigal, is Nature’s hand,’ he kept the golden mean between penuriousness and prodigality” (12); he had, finally, that talent so praiseworthy in practitioners of his craft, the forbearance to sacrifice the gratification of acknowledged authorship, for “Dickens and Bulwer can do as much lying, for money too, as they choose, and no one blame them, any more than they would blame a lawyer regularly fee’d to do it; but let any man, gifted with the same genius, try his hand at it, not deliberately and in writing, but merely orally, and ugly names are given 61


him, and he is proscribed! Bolus heroically suppressed exultation over the victories his lies achieved” (13). Bolus thus represents a sophistication and purification of the fictionalizing impulse present in Simon Suggs. Whereas the latter was motivated by a teleological concern for the benefits to be gained through the confidential transaction he set in motion, Bolus’s fictions are purposive but without purpose, and he puts into practice on the American frontier the same aesthetic that Poe was propounding almost simultaneously in “The Poetic Principle.”42 Baldwin’s narrator explains, Some men are liars from interest; not because they have no regard for truth, but because they have less regard for it than gain: some are liars from vanity, because they would rather be well thought of by others, than have reason for thinking well of themselves: some are liars from a sort of necessity which overbears, by the weight of temptation, the sense of virtue: some are enticed away by the beguilements of pleasure, or seduced by evil example and education. Bolus was none of these: he belonged to a higher department of the fine arts, and to a higher class of this sort of Belles-Lettres. . . . What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art. (2) Bolus approaches a condition of disinterestedness and self-transcendence. He tells fictions not for his own advantage, material or otherwise; rather he exists for the sake of his fiction: “He was an Egotist, but a magnificent one: he was not a liar because he was an egotist, but an egotist because a liar. He usually made himself the hero of the romantic exploits and adventures he narrated; but this was not so much to exalt himself as because it was more convenient to his art” (4). Bolus, that is, exists as an epiphenomenon of his own ceaseless verbal and narrative activity, a shifting character function with a labile multiplicity of arguments whose value is entirely dependent on the necessities of its fictional context. This “egotism,” which ultimately becomes indistinguishable from egolessness, cannot help but recall that of the great contemporaneous American Egotist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and if Baldwin is writing a conscious ironic imitation of the conventions of the cultivated English style, it is impossible not to read many passages as equally self-conscious parodies of Emersonian utterances. When Baldwin praises Bolus for “how well he asserted the Spiritual over the Material” (3) the swindler begins to show a distinct resemblance to Emerson’s Transcendentalist, for whom “mind 62


is the reality, of which men and all other natures are only subjective reflections.”43 The end of “Experience” asserts hopefully that the world exists to transform genius into practical power;44 Bolus has already found out the secret: “How he delighted to turn an abstract idea into concrete cash—to make a few blots of ink, representing a little thought, turn out a labor-saving machine, and bring into his pocket money which many days of hard exhausting labor would not procure! . . . There was something sublime in the idea—this elevating the spirit of man to its true and primeval dominion over things of sense and grosser matter” (3–4). And while Emerson, in “History,” feels obliged to argue with some vigor in order to convince his audience of the instability of the line between fact and fiction, that “no anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing already into fiction,”45 Bolus has already recognized the precariousness of that hierarchy: “He had long torn down the partition wall between his imagination and his memory. He had long ceased to distinguish between the impressions made upon his mind by what came from it, and what came to it: all ideas were facts to him” (3). Equally suggestive is Bolus’s attitude toward property. The opposition between material ownership and imaginative possession, and the desire to replace the former with the latter, is a recurrent theme in Emerson’s writing, found as early as the opening pages of Nature: “The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”46 In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson commends the attitude of the idealist who “does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being.”47 Bolus’s applied Transcendentalism displays a similar commitment to visionary possession: “He bought goods and chattels, lands and tenements, like other men; but he got them under a state of poetic illusion, and paid for them in an imaginary way. Even the titles he gave were not of the earthly sort—they were sometimes clouded. He gave notes, too,—how well I know it!—like other men; he paid them like himself” (3). From one point of view, of course, such as that of Melville, who in the character of Mark Winsome of The Confidence-Man would ruthlessly 63


mock Emerson’s egotistical sublimity as self-serving mystification, Bolus is a simple swindler whose serene indifference to mine and thine is nothing more than philosophical justification for theft. But from a different perspective, Bolus can be seen as fulfilling one of the traditional trickster’s fundamental cultural functions, which is to destabilize the conventional distributions of property and power—to ask, where does ownership come from? Bolus, like other improper appropriators of others’ property, reminds us that “ideas about property and theft depend on a set of assumptions about how the world is divided up. Trickster’s lies and thefts challenge those premises and in so doing reveal their artifice and suggest alternatives.”48 In his affront to what Melville will elsewhere call the “doctrine of assumptions,” Bolus perhaps resembles Mark Winsome less than he does another of Melville’s characters: Bartleby the scrivener.49 The uncertainty of Baldwin’s attitude toward Bolus is reinforced by the fact that what he satirizes at the level of content is, at the level of form, to stand for someone else the basis of his own technique. By this I mean more than that, as William Lenz observes, Baldwin, like Bolus, is “a maker of aesthetic fictions”;50 far more interesting is that Baldwin’s style functions in the same way that Bolus’s does, demanding of the reader a certain unsupported extension of trust that is not that different from the credulity that underwrites the success of the confidence game. So it is no accident that Baldwin’s favored literary device is the allusion. Consider the opening paragraph. The historical setting of the story, the flush times of wildcat land speculation on the western frontier in the mid-1830s, is no sooner introduced than it is translated by an ironic invocation of the Hesiodic myth of the Age of Gold; this is immediately succeeded by a (faulty) quotation from Paradise Lost; the next lines begin an ongoing series of allusions to Shakespeare, and especially to Falstaff and Prince Hal; finally the paragraph concludes with a transition into the formal language of the law books. This passage is especially dense, but it is only the introduction to a short sketch which is thick with literary allusions, unidentified quotations, pieces of imported discourse, and cursory references to well-known contemporary characters and events, until it becomes almost literally a mosaic of citations. Particularly significant is the allusion to Milton, which invokes the passage in book I of Paradise Lost where Satan calls up his prostrate followers: Natheless he so endured, till on the beach Of that inflamed sea, he stood and called

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His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades High overarched imbower. . . . (ll. 299–304) Milton’s image here is not merely an extended simile; it is itself an allusion, which invokes a series of similar comparisons of the dead to leaves that extends back through Tasso, Dante, Virgil, and ultimately to Homer.51 In effect this parable of the leaves may be said to be the privileged epic simile, which is resurrected by every succeeding selfconscious work of epic ambitions to mark itself as a work in that tradition, establish its genealogy, and at once to acknowledge its dead ancestors and to demand recognition as their legitimate successor. To some extent, of course, this is true of every epic convention that provides a space for recollection and imitation, but what gives this simile its arguably privileged status, one might suggest, is its own tenor in its first appearance in The Iliad, where Glaukos, responding to Diomedes’ challenge to declare his genealogy, uses it to describe the endless cycle of the generations: High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation? As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies.52 This may be said to be the primal scene of allusion, a scene reactivated and reenacted in every subsequent epic, when, in a moment of self-recognition, it acknowledges its dependent status as a descendant and ancestor in a perpetual cycle of literary generation and regeneration. Thus Baldwin’s reference is by no means casual; if his sketch of the shifty Ovid’s metamorphoses has not the remotest epic aspiration, it signals clearly and immediately that its understanding the literary text as revision of its predecessors is as self-conscious as that of the great poets of the tradition. Baldwin’s somewhat obsessive fixation on the technique of allusion in this context of chicanery and deception points, however, to something else, since it hints that the dynamics of readerly exchange are in crucial ways no different from the unfunded extension of credit that supports

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the confidence man’s transaction as it creates the object of its always speculative reference. Allusion is a part pointing toward an always absent whole which may never be anything but an illusion. (According to the OED, allusion could mean “illusion” into the seventeenth century.) In this sense Baldwin’s sketch is allusive throughout, full of such absent wholes: Bolus’s name itself is an allusion, reminding us of the absent whole, the “Holus” that is assumed but unavailable; likewise the sketch, subtitled “A Fragment,” points to the larger context in which it would take on its full meaning. A sense of omission haunts the opening passage, down to its closing words, which express a fear that “the thing” might turn out to be a “casus omissus.” The game of allusion, like the game of confidence, requires on the part of the reader a willingness to acquiesce in elision, to accept what “goes without saying.” And the reader is all the more ready to accredit the text’s claims on a hidden reserve of (literary) capital, because to demand payment of the alluder’s debt, to ask for the source and significance of the allusion, would be to expose the reader’s own literary poverty, his own ignorance or stupidity. The allusion thus selects its own society; like William Thompson, as described in the New York Herald, the allusion presumes upon an acquaintance that may be an illusion in order to further a familiarity and create a community of recognition. As the con man is certified by his audience’s own desperate concern to be certified by him, so every act of reading an allusion is subsidized in part by the reader’s fear of failing the test of the text, of not living up to the author’s expectation.53 If for Samuel Johnson the classical quotation was the parole of the armed camp of the educated, more generally allusion serves as a password, which admits members into an enviable community.54 But the existence of that community, it must be added, requires that the credentials of its members are never examined too closely. Baldwin’s literary self-consciousness informs a later tale, “Simon Suggs, Jr., Esq.: A Legal Biography,” in a still more direct way, since here the text as a whole is a kind of extended allusion, and the reader’s response depends on the recognition of Baldwin’s recycling of Hooper’s prior creation, and of his conscious creation of a tradition in which he assumes a filial position. Suggs Jr. will repeat his father’s career with a difference: if Suggs Sr. reflects, to some degree, the tensions and paradoxes of America’s foundational moment, his son, while no less a national representative (he is born on July 4, 1810), comes into a world where political, social, and especially legal institutions are well estab66


lished, and his success is determined by how well he functions within them. Suggs Sr. brought into being the same community on which he was a parasite; Suggs Jr., a more sophisticated if less heroic operator, appropriates all the correct credentials of legitimacy and rises through a cursus honorum from a humble Arkansas law practice to a position of power and prestige in Washington. Suggs Jr. is a copy of Suggs Sr., a more polished and less spontaneous, more “regular” version: asked for his photograph, he directs the inquirer to his “father’s picter on Jonce Hooper’s book . . . but dress it up gentele in store close” (86). If Suggs Sr. dwells entirely in the vale of self-making, Baldwin stresses that his son is “not quite, either in a literal or metaphorical sense, a self-made man” (88). His early career consists largely of reenactments of various episodes out of his father’s biography, the most deliberately staged of which is a card game between Suggs Jr. and Sr., which reproduces that between Suggs Sr. and his father. Suggs Jr., to be sure, triumphs, and displaces his father by mysteriously producing a jack at the crucial moment, but the very fact that his own act of self-definition takes the form of the most slavish of imitations indicates something rather curious. Suggs Jr.’s success is dependent upon his sacrifice of identity, of any claim to originality; he asserts his selfhood by giving it up. If Suggs Sr. was a skillful manipulator of images, his son’s accomplishment is to become an image. As an independent entrepreneur he shows little of his father’s rough improvisational knack; his early career as a small-time gambler and racetrack bettor is rather undistinguished, and comes to an end when he is outsmarted by one of his own marks. But his representational aptitude appears early, and “such was the proficiency he made in the polite accomplishments of the day, and such the reputation he acquired in all those arts which win success in legal practice, when thereto energetically applied, that many sagacious men predicted that the law would yet elevate Simon to a prominent place in the public view” (94). Having acquired a law license in a poker game, he has it “amended” (“which amendment, was ingeniously effected by a careful erasure of the name of that gentleman, and the insertion of his own in the place of it” [97]), and settles down to the scrupulous pursuit of his chosen vocation. To be a lawyer, of course, is to be a representative, to surrender one’s own identity and take the place of someone else.55 And Suggs Jr. is supremely suited for this role. One of his first legal accomplishments is 67


to substitute himself for his landlady’s husband, inducing the hitherto happy woman to file for divorce, after which he first has her property conveyed to himself and then marries her, “by which means he secured himself from those distracting cares which beset the young legal practitioner, who stands in immediate need of the wherewithal” (98). His particular talent is stirring the legal economy into action, setting in motion the mechanism of litigious exchange: “The whole community felt the effects of his activity. Long dormant claims came to light; and rights, of the very existence of which, suitors were not before aware, were brought into practical assertion. From restlessness and inactivity, the population became excited, inquisitive and intelligent, as to the laws of their country; and the ruinous effects of servile acquiescence in wrong and oppression, were averted” (98). By “tact and address,” Suggs Jr., now “Colonel Suggs,” is able to provoke a boom cycle of litigational inflation, which “opposed such obstacles to the enforcement of the criminal law in that part of the country” that finally the state of Arkansas “naturally felt anxious to engage his services on its behalf” (102). Colonel Suggs Jr., the interchangeable token, functions as well as district solicitor as he had as defense counsel: “The business of the State now flourished beyond all precedent. Indictments multiplied: and though many of them were not tried—the solicitor discovering, after the finding of them, as he honestly confessed to the court, that the evidence would not support them: yet, the Colonel could well say, with an eminent English barrister, that if he tried fewer cases in court, he settled more cases out of court that any other counsel” (102). Finally, Suggs obtains an appointment as an Indian agent, which moves him to the center of the political system, Washington, where he “may be seen every winter . . . faithfully and laboriously engaged with members of Congress and in the departments” (102–3). If Suggs Jr.’s social success is the direct result of his skill in turning himself into an image, it is because an image is what his society is looking for. To make this point, Baldwin ingeniously revises the frame structure of the Southwest tale, replacing the gentlemanly narrator with an editor who writes a letter to Suggs, soliciting his life story as part of a “monthly periodical for the purpose of supplying a desideratum in American Literature, namely, the commemoration and perpetuation of the names, characters, and personal and professional traits of American lawyers and jurists” (83). Each sketch is to be accompanied by an engraving made from what Suggs refers to as a “doggerrytype” supplied by the subject. As subsequent letters reveal, the editor’s project is itself 68


an elaborate confidence game; each subject is “expected” to contribute $150 for the preparation of the engravings, a revelation which draws an indignant response from Suggs. This great American publishing project is more than a mild literary joke on Baldwin’s part. Its historical prototype is, I would suggest, Mathew Brady’s celebrated 1850 undertaking The Gallery of Illustrious Americans. This was to be a collection of lithographs made from Brady’s portraits of eminent Americans—former presidents, senators, generals, and other celebrities—each accompanied by a biographical sketch and issued in monthly installments to subscribers. Public reaction was widespread and remarkable. “We cannot too highly recommend this superb work to the patronage of every patriotic American—it should be found in every society, town, and state of the Union,” declared the Philadelphia American Courier. The Journal of Commerce proclaimed that “the grouping together of the most distinguished men of the Nation into a Gallery like this, and at a period like this, is not only a noble and patriotic design, but it will furnish a monument of art and patriot ism for coming times.”56 In part, this general conviction of the political utility of the project—its ownership was repeatedly represented as a patriotic duty—arose from the common view of the moral effects and social benefits to be derived from the technology of photography. Those moral effects were intimately connected with what was imagined to be the photograph’s ability to penetrate and reproduce the authentic character of its subject and to preserve and publish that character, making its exemplary influence available to the public at large. As a writer in the Daguerreian Journal argued in 1851: “Years spent in coquetry and caprice, in folly and frivolity, the entire abandonment to self-worship, and the entire neglect of mental culture, cannot pass without leaving an unlovely record on the face, and a background of embittered feeling, which no artistic power can render attractive. Stereotyped then, are the motives of the past.”57 Almost simultaneously, Nathaniel Hawthorne was characterizing photography’s quasi-magical power to reproduce the truth in similar terms in The House of the Seven Gables, where Holgrave the daguerreotypist explains to Phoebe: “There is a wonderful insight in heaven’s broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture on, even could he detect it.”58 This unique revelatory capacity of the daguerreotype afforded it an almost official role of legitimation. As Alan Trachtenberg puts it, 69


“In a world where money transactions, the marketplace, and competitive individualism encourage the currency of false images (similar to inflated paper money), the daguerreotype portrait provides a corrective. It offers true coin against false, sincere and faithful images against falseseeming.”59 But if the photograph, on the one hand, seems to offer at last “true coin,” it simultaneously reveals that coin to be nothing other than a representation, an arbitrary signifier whose value derives solely from how widely it will pass, what it will be taken for. Even as the photograph was being praised for its rendering of inner character,60 the photographers themselves were becoming increasingly aware of how techniques of posing and composition could affect the final result.61 Indeed, Brady’s own reputation was based not on his skill as a photographer—he never operated the camera or developed the pictures—but on his talents as a “stylist or designer of the portrait, posing his subjects and talking to them to coax the appropriate dignified expression, then telling the operator when to make the exposure.”62 In a similar vein, Baldwin’s editor pointedly reminds Suggs that “the daguerreotype had better be taken with reference to the engraving to accompany the memoir—the hair combed or brushed from the brow, so as to show a high forehead—the expression meditative—a book in the hand, &c.” (86). But a more serious paradox is contained in the very notion of the mechanical reproduction of the true image, the industrialization of the authentic, which Baldwin’s sketch is perhaps one of the earliest American texts to register. For the multiplication of the image, which begins in the desire to diffuse the presence of the original, necessarily ends by displacing the authentic status of the original itself. If this sounds like the anachronistic backward projection of the concerns of a cultural moment obsessed with the implications of new media technologies, consider Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s meditations on the stereoscope: “Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mold on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or tear it up, if you please.”63 The circumference of the image can be everywhere only on the condition that its center is nowhere. The consequence of the photograph is then not that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between reality and appearance, but that the distinction is no longer meaningful. The mass-produced image, as Baldwin’s editor shrewdly 70


intuits, creates its own value; the representation, as it were, produces its own truth. The proposed gallery of illustrious lawyers cannot be a fraud, because it is precisely the circulation of the biographies which will make them illustrious. As the editor profoundly observes, it is “impossible to acquire in our profession a false or fraudulent reputation” (84). If reputation means what passes, then what he really means is that in the modern world, falsity and fraudulence cease to be significant categories. That Suggs Jr. should achieve his greatest success as a lawyer is not surprising: law is really the dominant motif of Flush Times. With chapters like “My First Appearance at the Bar,” “The Bench and the Bar,” “The Bar of the South-West,” and “A Hung Court” alternating with characters of real and fictitious legal personalities, Baldwin’s collection is a kind of law book, and a late product of the “now forgotten configuration of law and letters that dominated American literary aspirations from the Revolution to the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.”64 Writing in 1853, however, Baldwin is already at the end of that tradition, and one way to read the instabilities of a figure like Suggs Jr., at once outlaw and legal insider, lawyer and swindler, is as a reflection of the anxieties aroused by the shift in the definition of the social function of the legal practitioner and more generally in the conception of law. From the days of the early republic, law was generally understood as deriving its legitimacy from its correspondence to an external idea of justice, whether natural or, in its more deistic extension, divine.65 By mid-century a transformation had occurred; law was increasingly regarded less as a reflection of moral ideals and more as a structure of humanly determined definitions and prescriptions, deriving its validity from internally coherent decisions. It was a shift from what we may characterize as a paradigmatic conception to a pragmatic one: “Philosophically,” claims Robert A. Ferguson, “the shift from general principles to textbook law created a very different sense of the subject. It dictated a relative stress on positive or manmade law over natural law. The early lawyer searched for a declaration derived from common usage and consistent with nature. His successor, the reader of case reports, thought in terms of the specific commands that society had placed upon itself.”66 The pragmatic conception of law abandoned the ambition to approximate an external archetype, with the consequence that, as Morton J. Horwitz argues in The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860, by 1850 “law, once conceived of as protective, regulative, paternalistic and, above all, a paramount expression of the moral sense of the community, had come to be thought of as facilita71


tive of individual desires and as simply reflective of the existing organization of economic and political power.”67 Suggs Jr., like the new positivistic, professionalized men of law, is successful because he conceives of law as a matter of operating procedural mechanisms so as to produce a desired result. As with them, both his vision and his learning are rigidly circumscribed, and his reputation derives from his achievement “in a most effective branch of practice—one that he shrewdly perceived was too much neglected by the profession— the branch of preparing cases out of court for trial” (97)—thus avoiding the trial, the ceremonial public demonstration of the convergence of transcendental justice and political authority.68 Suggs Jr.’s success is the product of his ability to maneuver among the procedures and technicalities of the legal system and to exploit “all the arts and contrivances by which public justice is circumvented” (100). He stands in implicit opposition to Baldwin’s legal heroes, the old-fashioned generalists who appear regularly throughout Flush Times, and his depiction of Suggs as an unscrupulous fraud reflects the generalist’s disdain for a concept of law that was becoming more specialized, more professional, and more indifferent to claims of moral or divine authority. Baldwin’s tone is genial and self-assured—Suggs is too much a zany caricature to represent a serious challenge to the majestic edifice of jurisprudence—but through his satire one can discern the outlines of the future of American legal philosophy and of American thought in general. Over the next half of the century, a reconstruction of legal thinking in America will take place, reaching its climax with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—like Suggs Jr., the son of a famous father who would outdo his parent. It would be Holmes who definitively deprived the law of its ethical foundations, attacking directly the “confusion between moral and legal ideas,” declaring that “the substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient.”69 And it would be Holmes, as Louis Menand has reminded us, who would be a central member of the group of thinkers who began to develop the philosophy that William James would be the first to announce to the world under the name of “Pragmatism.”70

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2

Truth as “Veri-fication” William James and the Transaction of Confidence

I fornicate with that unclean thing, my adversaries may think, whereas your genuine truth-lover must discourse in huxleyan heroics, and feel as if truth, to be real truth, ought to bring eventual messages of death to all our satisfactions. William James, “A Word More about Truth”

The most interesting and original implications of a new idea are often perceived with the greatest clarity by its outraged antagonists. The reaction to the “radical reconstruction of philosophy”1 that emerged as William James gradually reformed and placed his individual stamp on C. S. Peirce’s pragmatism is a striking example. As often as it was dealt with as one legitimate contending philosophical position among others, what Richard Rorty has called “the chief glory of our country’s intellectual tradition”2 was treated as an offense to the very protocols of serious philosophical discussion, a structure of logical confusions and sophistries wrapped in delusively seductive verbiage, and an affront to the ethical duty of intellectual authenticity—even, at the limit, a hoax or swindle that threatened to debase the value of human thought. As sympathetic and sophisticated a critic as James’s former student Dickinson Miller was moved to declare of James’s most popular, if still implicit, application of pragmatic notions that “‘The Will to Believe’ is the will to deceive—to deceive one’s self; and the deception, which begins at home, may be expected in due course to pass on to others.”3 At the other end of the rhetorical scale, there is the less temperate but not atypical response of one Albert Schinz, who in Anti-Pragmatism (1909) announces bluntly that “‘Pragmatism’ is only a new term to designate ‘Opportunism’ in philosophy”: “We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading sophistry. . . . Popular science, popular art, popular theology—only one thing

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was lacking—popular philosophy.” Schinz’s verdict is more hygienic than dialectical: “There are theories which, for the sake of our philosophic probity, we ought not to tolerate. Pragmatism is one of these. It ought to be smothered in its cradle”;4 but his concern for the corruptingly antiphilosophical consequences of pragmatism is telling. It was, then, the critics of pragmatism, particularly in its Jamesian formulation, who first registered the intuition that there was a compelling and disturbing resemblance between the philosophical doctrine and the fundamental mechanics of the confidence game. What the two share is an unsettling willingness to question the status of objective truth and to intimate that reality can be better understood as the product of subjective belief than as its cause. In my discussion of the confidence man as an American literary type, I have argued that he is not simply a perverter of the truth but its creator as well, an inspirer of confidence and of a consensus of faith without which there would be no truth in the first place. The confidence man exposes the unavoidably subjective foundations of what passes for reality, precisely because he knows reality is what passes. The tacit philosophical premise of Simon Suggs is that there is no difference between a state of affairs existing and behaving as if it exists. In this sense, there has existed a long, if somewhat disreputable, antirepresentational tradition in American thought. It is in the context of this tradition, more evident perhaps in the persistent fascination with the machinations of the confidence man than in philosophical writing proper, that I want to situate James. One way to talk about pragmatism is to say that it makes explicit and draws the consequences of a conception of truth that had always been subliminally operative in America, an American truth that crosses the borders of both correspondence and coherence. Pragmatism has, to be sure, often been described as a characteristically American philosophy, usually because it supposedly reflects a peculiarly national orientation toward practical results, a “sort of bobtailed scheme of thought, excellently fitted for the man in the street, who naturally hates theory and wants cash returns immediately.”5 Claims of this sort easily fade into a mist of generalization, but if pragmatism does have a specifically American intellectual genealogy, it might better be described in terms of its rejection of what James will call the “copy-view” of truth, the “popular notion . . . that a true idea must copy its reality.”6 In calling this the “popular notion” James is being somewhat less than ingenuous; in effect, Western thought since Plato has been dominated 74

william james and the Transaction of confidence

by the assumption that truth is defined in terms of correspondence, the accurate representation of reality by the idea—“the adequation of the thing and the idea [adaequatio rei et intellectus],” as Thomas Aquinas authoritatively expressed it. Such an assumption takes for granted that the world is divided into objective and subjective parts, and that the task of thought is to bring the ideational elements of the subjective part into perfect alignment with the factual elements of the objective part, realizing, as James will put it, “an inert static relation” which is the aim and fulfillment of our “thinking destiny.”7 Against the massive weight of this tradition, James undertakes “to overhaul the very idea of truth,”8 proposing a new definition of truth as an event rather than a relation, a process rather than a result, the process of “veri-fication,”9 in which the “subjective” and “objective” parts of experience stand not as reflecting elements in an immobile and atemporal structure of correspondence but as points in a continuum and moments in a journey unfolding in time. I suggested earlier that this amounts to a redefinition of truth in terms of narrative, and in subsequent chapters I will be considering the possibilities suggested by this redefinition for a reading of one of the most narrative-obsessed of American writers. But now I want to look at the genesis of James’s pragmatic conception of truth in a sequence of writings from his earliest forays into philosophy to his best known and most influential essay, “The Will to Believe.” I focus on these essays for several reasons. In the first place, they show most clearly the genesis of Jamesian pragmatism, not only as an intellectual response to the dominant public scientific doctrines of his time but also, I will argue, as a personal solution to an oppressive family situation which seemed a reflection of the same paralyzing force that James saw in those doctrines. As well, it is in those essays that James deals most suggestively with the ambiguous relation of subjective faith and objective reality and develops the provocative argument that belief is actually capable of creating its own objects. Principal among those objects is community, and by the time he writes “The Will to Believe,” James will be proposing that the very social foundations of human life that seem to ground and define our existence as individuals are in fact the products of private speculation and unsupported individual extensions of confidence. But to treat these essays as purely philosophical arguments, as structures of logically connected propositions whose purpose is to lay bare a necessary truth, would be to violate James’s own insistence on the processive and tem75


poral nature of all cognition. Just as truth in general involves a kind of narrative, so these writings must be read as narrative in their structure, as verbal journeys from “a terminus a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad quem,”10 as dramatic performances which achieve their goals by winning the confidence of the reader. In other words, I want to take seriously Rebecca West’s remark that James wrote “philosophy as though it were fiction.”11 Both those who condemn the literary qualities of James’s style, his verbal extravagances and unsystematic discussions, his metaphoric shiftiness and his fondness for digressive fabulation, as examples of carelessness or lack of rigor, and those who praise his writings for their vividness and energy, the verbal art with which he conveys his ideas, are in a crucial way missing the point; James’s formal strategies need to be seen not as merely external or decorative but as an integral part of his message. I will be endeavoring, therefore, to read James’s writings as themselves examples of veri-fication, or to put it another way, as games of confidence. James’s earliest extended treatment of the role of personal belief in knowledge is the topic of one of his two earliest substantial articles, “Quelques Considérations sur la methode subjective,” written in French and published in Critique Philosophique, a journal edited by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, in 1878.12 It is a curious performance. The beginning of James’s public career was long overdue; he was already in his mid-thirties and had expended much of his adult life in hesitations and vacillations over his choice of profession. Now at last he was going into publication, entering the public sphere of impersonal professional discourse. And yet the very first words of that public document introduce us abruptly into the most private regions of James’s psyche: “Depuis longtemps, déjà, quand des idées noires, pessimisme, fatalisme, etc., me viennent obséder, j’ai l’habitude de m’en débarrasser par un raisonnement fort simple, et tellement d’accord avec les principes de la philosophie à laquelle votre revue est consacrée, que je m’étonne presque de ne l’avoir pas encore rencontré totidem verbis dans quelqu’un de vos cahiers hebdomadaire.”13 The disconcertingly casual reference to “des idées noires, pessimisme, fatalisme, etc.” is easily recognizable as an oblique allusion to the prolonged period of recurrent depression and mental and physical distress that afflicted James in his late twenties and early thirties, sometimes so severe as to lead him to contemplate suicide.14 Most typically, his depression took the form of a sense of paralysis of the will; a characteristic entry in his diary from this period says 76


that the outer world “seems to be void or evil, my will is palsied. The difficulty: ‘to act without hope,’ must be solved.”15 The climactic expression of this paralysis is the well-known “panic fear” episode, presented in disguised form in The Varieties of Religious Experience: Whilst in the state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressingroom in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially.16 At the same time, he gave his sense of moral paralysis a metaphysical formulation and foundation which fixed the blame not on personal shortcomings but on the deterministic picture of the universe that nineteenthcentury science was championing. In 1869, he wrote to his friend Thomas W. Ward, “I’m swamped in an empirical philosophy—I feel that we are Nature through and through, and that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as a result of physical laws.”17 That James identified his personal difficulties with philosophical dilemmas should not be taken to indicate that the latter were the origins of the former, nor that philosophical ideas were what finally enabled him to emerge from his depression. This has, however, been the dominant interpretation, ever since it was definitively formulated by Ralph Barton Perry, who diagnosed James’s problem as originating in the “lack of a philosophy to live by” and declared that his crisis “could be relieved only by a philosophical insight.”18 The crucial “philosophical insight” was for Perry provided by James’s reading of Charles Renouvier’s philosophical writings, the prime evidence for the importance of which is provided by James’s famous diary entry for April 30, 1870: “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second 77


Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’— need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”19 But the problems with this interpretation have become increasingly evident. Howard M. Feinstein and others have demonstrated that Perry’s dating of the “panic fear” episode to the winter of 1869–70 is wholly arbitrary,20 and that there is little evidence that the discovery of Renouvier had the transformative effect that James suggested: he had made periodic attempts to convince himself of the reality of free will before 1870, and he continued to be subject to recurrent episodes of depression and neurasthenia for the remainder of his life. Perry’s formulation, and for that matter James’s as well, seems to derive primarily from a desire to provide a satisfying fictional form to James’s emotional development, rather than an accurate account of his lifelong tendency to depression. A more likely explanation, at least in part, of the origins of William’s problems was the peculiar family dynamics of the James household, in particular the overbearing influence of Henry James Sr. on the direction of his eldest son’s life and vocational decisions.21 Typically, Henry Sr.’s influence was felt in the form of obstruction of his son’s desires; at the outbreak of the Civil War, for example, Henry boasted of having managed to restrain his older sons from enlisting.22 Later, he would be influential in directing William away from art and into scientific pursuits for which he felt unqualified and unenthusiastic. What made Henry’s pressure particularly frustrating was its vagueness, which often left William feeling suspended in a state of irresolvable uncertainty and psychic paralysis, of the sort that finds expression, for example, in a letter of 1860: “What I wanted to ask you for at Mrs. Livermore’s were the reasons why I should not be an ‘artist.’ I could not fully make out from your talk there what were exactly the causes of your disappointment at my late resolve, what your view of the nature of art was, that the idea of my devoting myself to it should be so repugnant to you.”23 To put the matter in slightly different terms, one might say that the primary effect of Henry’s influence was to block the narrative of William’s life, leaving him paralyzed in a condition of suspended animation. It is important to locate “Quelques Considérations sur la méthode subjective,” James’s first treatment of the relation of the subjective will and the external world, of “préférences intérieures” (“interior preferences”) 78


and “faits objectifs” (“objective facts”) in this personal context. For the most striking thing about the essay is that it is written in French. In one of James’s two earliest public literary appearances, he creates a new identity, writing, as it were, as a Frenchman. Not only that, but he writes for and to Renouvier, with whom he had been conducting an extensive correspondence since 1872 and who has been called “the greatest individual influence upon the development of James’s thought.” 24 In effect, Renouvier becomes a substitute or spiritual father who championed the reality and efficacy of free will, the “self-governing resistance of ego to the world,” to replace the father who was only too clearly identified with the constricting determinism of physical science. Renouvier, in return, attached an approving note to the published article, praising in particular the “cachet de personnalité” (“stamp of personality”) that the author displayed. The linguistic translation is simultaneously an autobiographical one as well, a family romance enacted by way of language, and the fact that when James published the account of his traumatic encounter with the epileptic patient in the McLean Asylum in The Varieties of Religious Experience he ascribed it to an anonymous French correspondent, suggests that translation into French continued to represent for James a means of transformation of identity as well.25 The essay thus becomes not simply an argument for the subjective method, for the thesis that “on est en droit de repousser une théorie confirmée par un nombre très-considérable de faits objectifs, uniquement parce qu’elle ne repond point a nos préférences intérieures”(23, “one has the right to reject a theory confirmed by a very considerably number of objective facts, solely because it does not correspond to our interior preferences”), but a performative enactment of the doctrine as well. James’s own essay—in a way that will become characteristic of his writings—is a demonstration of the power of subjective will, of “cachet de personnalité,” to alter external conditions, transforming the narrator’s identity and replacing a father who had become a force of constriction with one who promised a universe of pluralistic indeterminacy. Already in his earliest publication, James goes public in disguise, as a self-made man. The move away from English is important for the intellectual, as well as the personal, context. For the philosophical target of the essay is the doctrine of objectivism of the English school, specifically as represented by such writers as T. H. Huxley and W. K. Clifford. Huxley is cited in the text of “Quelques Considérations”;26 Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief” had been published in Contemporary Review in January 1877.27 79


James criticizes both Huxley and Clifford by name in both “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” and, most famously, in “The Will to Believe.” It is not too much to say that Huxley and Clifford were the implied antagonists of all James’s early philosophical writings, the powerful inimical forces against which he was unceasingly struggling. What Huxley and Clifford represented was the contention that there was no place for subjectivity in epistemology, for belief influenced by desire, and that the pursuit of truth required the most rigorous suppression of individual inclination and personal bias, indeed ideally of the self as such. George Levine formulates the fundamental presuppositions of the late-nineteenth-century philosophy of science succinctly: “Truth is determined only insofar as the personal is transcended. One cannot trust personal experience since it is so pervasively informed not only by the limits of its own perspectives, but by the distortions created by desire.”28 This philosophical position had become, by the time of James’s article, an ideology in the truest sense, insofar as the set of ideas that it championed quickly extended beyond specific scientific or even philosophical applications to become an ethics and a vision of the right way of life. The value of self-suppression was not limited to its practical utility as an observational technique; it was simultaneously a moral ideal that elevated selflessness and the bitter but salutary truths that remained after the explosion of egotistical illusions, an ideal that would be the central message for example of any number of Victorian intellectuals. Huxley and Clifford thus embodied the very frustration that James observed in his father, expressed at once as a moral duty and an intellectual imperative. What made the situation worse was that the elder James was not simply a dominating father: he was a public intellectual force in his own right, and while his theological concerns might seem far removed from the interests of the Huxleys and Cliffords, his idiosyncratic doctrine, which was based on the notion that the Fall was identical with the emergence of individualism and that salvation could come only by way of merging the self into the collective, bears a distinct resemblance to the dogma of self-effacement preached by the philosophers of science and their intellectual followers. The latter would only too readily agree that redemption could come only by what the elder James described as “moral suicide, or inward death to self in all its forms.”29 It was against this epistemo-ethical orthodoxy that James undertook his defense of the proposition that one has the right to reject a theory supported by “faits objectifs” solely because of our “préférences inté80


rieures.” From the beginning, he recognizes that the question has been defined as a moral question as much as an intellectual one; the subjective method, the introduction of “nos sentiments intimes et nos desirs” into the determination of truth, he describes as “le péché originel de la science” (23) in the eyes of most scientists.30 At the outset, the range of James’s critique purports to be severely limited. He excludes those facts whose “vérité existe en dehors de mon action et se détermine avec certitude indépendamment de tout ce que je peux désirer ou craindre”(24, “truth exists outside my action and is determined with certitude independently of anything that I can desire or fear”). But as his argument proceeds, such facts will come to seem increasingly insignificant, and the realm of those facts affected by what we desire and fear will become ever wider. In particular, it will prove to include the “fact” of the moral interpretation of the world, the very morality to which Huxley and Clifford appeal in their advocacy of the ideology of objectivism. James thus implicitly exposes the circularity of the antisubjectivist argument, which is founded on an “ethics of belief,” a moral interpretation of the world that he shows to be irreducibly subjective. The argument advances by defining the category of self-verifying beliefs, and the identification of “des cas où une croyance crée sa propre vérification”(24, “cases where a belief creates its own verification”— James’s italics). Characteristically, what he proceeds to offer is not an abstract logical demonstration but a narrative. Imagine, James suggests, I am making an Alpine ascent, in the course of which I find myself in a “mauvais pas don’t je ne peux sortir que par un saut hardi et dangereux, et ce saut, je voudrais le pouvoir faire, mais j’ignore, faute d’expérience, si j’en aurai la force”(24, “a tricky situation from which I cannot escape except by a bold and dangerous leap which I would like to be able to make, but due to my lack of experience, I do not know whether I will have the strength”). The story, evidently, can take two possible directions: in one “je crois ce que je désire; ma confiance me donne des forces et rend possible ce qui, sans elle, ne l’eut peut-être pas été. Je franchis donc l’espace et me voilà hors de danger”(24, “I believe what I desire; my confidence gives me the strength and makes possible what, without it, would not have been. I leap the distance and put myself out of danger”). Alternatively, should he doubt his powers, forming his belief on the basis of evidence rather than desire, “alors je balance, j’hésite, et tant et tant qu’à la fin, affaibli et tremblant, réduit a prendre un élan de pur désespoir, je manque mon coup et je tombe dans l’abîme” (24, “I waver, I hesi81


tate, and so much so that finally, weak and trembling, reduced to making a spring of pure despair, my effort fails and I tumble into the abyss”). James’s conclusion is that the belief produces its referent, and indeed does not simply produce it after its demonstration, but can even be said, in a sense, to have done so before: “c’est alors seulement qu’elle devient vraie, mais alors on peut dire aussi qu’elle était vraie” (24, “thus it only becomes true, but one can also say that it was true”—James’s italics). To believe that one can make the jump means that that is already the case; to believe the contrary equally means that the contrary is so. James uses the term “vérification” to describe this transaction, and it is clear that the word is taking on more than its usual denotation of “proof’; already we can glimpse the beginnings of his redefinition of truth as what he will, in his full development of pragmatism’s conception of truth, call an “event” that “happens to an idea.”31 Both the one who believes and the one who doubts will find that they have made a reality which corresponds to their expectations. This little vignette clearly had a powerful imaginative hold on James, who would reproduce it twice more in later essays, and it is hard not to read it in symbolic terms—just as what gives rise to the thesis of the essay in the first place is a condition of spiritual despair, so the situation of epistemology in general seems to be implicitly a rather desperate one. If for Huxley and Clifford the paradigm of the subject confronting the world is implicitly the scientist in his laboratory, conducting carefully regulated experiments and controlling the threat of subjective prejudice, for James it is someone clinging to the side of a mountain, unable either to ascend or descend to firm ground, staring into an abyss, and with no other hope than his own capacity to convince himself of his ability to leap across it. It is a tableau darkened by the shadows of the death that must be the inevitable result of a failure to believe, and it suggests that James sensed that there was something inimical to life in the grim prescriptions of the philosophers of knowledge of his time, that for them, ultimately, the “ideal condition—beyond desire, beyond prejudice, beyond earthly limitations—was death.”32 Having established the principle of verification, of the active role of belief in the engendering of its object, James proceeds to argue its applicability to “plusieurs de ces questions universelles, qui sont les problèmes de la philosophie” (25, “many of those universal questions which are the problems of philosophy”). The first question he addresses is that of pessimism versus optimism. While the actual measure of misery in the 82


world may be a constant, James argues, the active contributions of an individual resulting from a pessimistic or optimistic interpretation are themselves sufficient to alter the total character of that world, and hence to verify that interpretation. Again, belief produces its object: “comment exclure de la connaissance du fait la méthode subjective, alors que cette méthode est le propre instrument de la production du fait” (27, “how can we exclude the subjective method from the knowledge of fact, when that method is the very means of producing the fact”). But James’s final example is more significant, since it does not simply contradict the objectivist contentions of Huxley and Clifford but implicitly undercuts their very coherence, effectively dismantling the foundations of their position. James asks whether the nature of the world is ultimately moral, and concludes, in by now familiar fashion, that it is “essentiellement ambigu” (“essentially ambiguous”) and it is the actions of the interpreting subject that will give it “la détermination ultime qui la fera ou rentrer dans un système moral ou se réduire à un système de faits bruts” (29, “the ultimate determination either as a moral system or as a system of brute facts”). Subjective preferences, then, will determine the existence of morality and whether moral imperatives have any meaning. But to the extent that Huxley and Clifford asserted the duty of objectivism as not simply a prudential measure but as a moral imperative, James’s argument finally implies that objectivism itself rests on a subjective basis. Reverting to the language of entangled ethical prescription and psychic paralysis in which he began his essay, James concludes that he has demonstrated that the subjective method is not simply the procedure “qualifié de honteux par un étrange abus de l’esprit soi-disant scientifique. Il faut passer outre à cette espèce de proscription, à ce veto ridicule qui, si nous voulions nous conformer, paralyserait deux de nos plus essentielles facultés” (30, “described as shameful by a strange abuse of the so-called scientific spirit. We must get beyond this type of proscription, this ridiculous veto which, if we were to conform to it, would paralyze two of our most essential faculties”). James’s critique of the objectivity and unbiased nature of the scientific enterprise in his earliest writings parallels, and indeed in many ways anticipates, that which Nietzsche was developing at around the same time. It is possible to cite remarks by the latter that read like a précis of the argument advanced in “Quelques Considérations.”33 Nietzsche’s analysis of the will to truth would ultimately lead him to the conclusion that it was rooted in the expression of the will to power, and that 83


the passion for objectivity was finally the last ruse of the assertion of subjectivity. The most extended treatment of this theme is found in the first section of Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” which, instead of mounting one more philosophical argument, asks what motivates the desire to make philosophical arguments in the first place, what in us really wants “truth.” After undercutting the ideology of objectivism, this is the direction that James moves as well, in his next philosophical writings, the pair of essays entitled “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879) and “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” (written 1879, published 1882).34 Both “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Beyond Good and Evil signal their calculated perversity and transvaluative ambitions in their deliberately paradoxical titles, which propose the possibility of passing through ultimate values, rational or ethical, and discovering them to be unconscious sublimations of the very impulses they imagine themselves to have transcended—that they are the diseases to which they propose to be the cures. Like “The Sentiment of Rationality,” Beyond Good and Evil opens with a series of questions (“a rendezvous . . . of questions and question marks,” Nietzsche calls it). James’s version of Nietzsche’s percussive parade of questions—“What in us really wants ‘truth’? . . . Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? Even ignorance?”35—is: “What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform? And why do they philosophize at all?”36 The universal response, with which James is quite prepared to agree, is that one philosophizes to obtain a more “rational conception” of the world. But this fairly commonplace and unobjectionable premise becomes for James the threshold to a considerably more radical and unsettling conclusion, for rationality, he continues, has no objective meaning, only a subjective one: the philosopher “will recognize [a conception’s] rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him,” in particular the marks of “ease, peace, and rest.” James’s language here suggests stasis, but as he elaborates the sentiment of rationality, it is clear that ease, peace, and rest are to be found only in movement or, in his favored term, “fluency”: “when the movement is inhibited or when the thought meets with difficulties, we experience a distress which yields to an opposite feeling of pleasure as fast as the obstacle is overcome. . . . As soon, in short, as we are enabled to think of a thing with perfect fluency, that thing seems to us rational” (33). Nor do the subjective consequences of philosophy have any ontological privilege over those provided by other means. James compares the advantage 84


of one philosophical system over another to the superiority of “traveling by railroad to riding in a springless cart,” and proposes that “purely theoretic processes may provide the same mental peace” as does custom, or more strikingly, men’s “thoughtless incurious acceptance of whatever happens to harmonize with their subjective ends.” This last point is crucial, for “subjective ends” are, James argues, the fundamental explanation for the acceptance of philosophical conceptions: “What is a conception? It is a teleological instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing which for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing. . . . The right conception for the philosopher depends then on his interests.” The preeminent philosophical interest is the reduction of the “manifold in thought to simple form,” or “finding that a chaos of facts is at bottom the expression of a single underlying fact” (35). James devotes the central part of his essay to a discussion of how this interest is articulated in various philosophical systems, and of the ratios of its interactions and compromises with its “sister passion”: “the passion for distinguishing . . . the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole” (37).37 Finally, after making criticisms of every existing philosophical explanation of the world, he proposes that even if we were to achieve “a Metaphysics in which clearness and unity at last join friendly hands [satisfying] if no other need, at least the need of rationality” (57), such a theoretical system would solve none of the problems intended, since “the ground of rationality,” James asserts disconcertingly, is itself irrational. Beside every postulated ultimate “datum” the mind will inevitably posit an “other” which remains outside our theoretical explanations, so that the “bottom of Being is left logically opaque to us” (58–59), leaving us in a condition of permanent insecurity: “The reductive [i.e., “the further considera tions which may supervene and make relative or derationalize a mass of thought”] of absolute knowledge is the constant potentiality of doubt, the notion that the next thought may always correct the present one— resulting in the notion that a noumenal world is there mocking the one we think we know. Whatever we think, some reductive seems in strict theoretic legitimacy always imminently hovering over our thought ready to blight it. Doubleness dismissed at the front door re-enters in the rear and spoils the rationality of the simple datum we flattered ourselves we had attained” (60). If, as James puts it elsewhere, our desire for ration ality is a craving to “feel at home” in the world, this conclusion, that philosophical endeavors seem inherently powerless to exorcize the 85


unheimlich Doppelgänger of doubt from the house of reason, is a disturbing point of arrival indeed. “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” proposes to advance on the rather dismaying conclusion of “The Sentiment of Rationality,” which, the later essay says, finally demonstrated “the failure of the purely logical function in philosophizing”38 by proposing a different criterion for deciding “between the conflicting claims to authority of the different systems to which [philosophical] activity gives birth” (58). As in “Quelques Considérations,” James’s dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy is couched in metaphors of paralysis and suspension: “Ever there is something which at the last moment brings the theoretic movement to a stand-still. . . . [I]f thought is not to stand forever pointing at the universe in a maze of helpless wonder, its movement must be diverted from the issueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation. . . . A conception of the world which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been checked, blocked, and inhibited in the purely contemplative path, will pro tanto make the world seem rational again” (58–59). If the attempt to achieve a supremely adequate and objective description of the world must end inevitably in self-contradiction and frustration, the solution, James proposes, is to select among different possible descriptions on the basis of their different subjective consequences, in particular how they contribute to the individual’s “practical needs,” how one description “may awaken the active impulses or satisfy other aesthetic demands far better than the other” (59). After asserting the common adequacy of a number of internally consistent explanatory systems in the physical sciences, he asks, “Why may it not be the same with universal fact? Why may there not be entirely different points of view for surveying the world, within each of which all data harmonize and which the observer may therefore either choose as mutually exclusive or simply cumulate upon each other?” (59). By making the arbiter between competing systems “the aesthetic constitution of our practical nature” (59), James displaces the whole epistemological issue of representational truth (as well as exorcizes the uncanny doubleness that has haunted the house of philosophy by, we may say, going outside). A description of the world, then, is to be judged in terms of how well it satisfies human desires, both individual and collective, and in particular to what degree it contributes to our power: “For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers” (64). And as “Quelques Considérations” 86


had already argued, power is inseparable from faith and confidence, because such confidence contributes to creating the reality to which it refers. The latter part of the essay is in fact a translation and expansion of the French paper, beginning with an assault on the familiar antagonists, Huxley and Clifford. But James’s argument has itself by now gained confidence, and goes further. Not only does he affirm that subjective faith autonomous of evidence is not the “guilt” or “sin” that Clifford describes it as being in “The Ethics of Belief”; subjective faith lies inevitably at the heart of every scientific project, in two ways. First, the evidence is already preformed by the preferences and beliefs of the observer. Unavoidably, “like every human being of the slightest mental originality, [the thinker] is particularly sensitive to evidence that bears in one direction. It is utterly hopeless to try to exorcize such sensitiveness by calling it the disturbing subjective factor, and branding it as the root of all evil. ‘Subjective’ be it called! And ‘disturbing’ to those whom it foils!” (72). Second, it is the thinker’s interest which motivates his endeavor in the first place. The thinker, pace Huxley and Clifford, has always been pursuing “practical needs”: “Intellect, will, taste, and passion cooperate just as they do in practical affairs, and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. . . . It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination” (72). Indeed, Huxley’s and Clifford’s own critiques of subjectivity are motivated by subjective interests: “What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not the professor with his learning, but the human personality which is ready to go in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances” (72–73). To think that scientific method offers a privileged access to the truth or that it represents an inherently superior mode of discovering the objective structure of the outside world is misguided; science, James suggests, anticipating the terminology of Wittgenstein and Lyotard, is a system of conventions and rules, autonomous and self-contained: “The rules of the scientific game, burdens of proof, presumptions, experimenta crucis, complete inductions, and the like, are only binding on those who enter that game” (73). But as in “Quelques Considérations,” James moves beyond this constructivist position to defend the claim that belief gives rise to its own reality. His argument thus goes further than the qualified anti-realism of a more recent critic of science’s claims to tell the truth like Bas van Frassen, 87


who attempts to distinguish between acceptance and belief, and argues that, “as far as the enterprise of science is concerned, belief in the truth of its theories is supererogatory.”39 For James, on the contrary, belief is an indispensable element in the creation of the referent of that belief, in the transaction of verification: “For again and again success depends on energy of act, energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail, and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right—which faith thus verifies itself. . . . Wherever the facts to be formulated contain [a personal contribution] we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we desire. The belief creates its verification. The thought becomes literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought” (79–80). The appearance of the paternal metaphor here is worth pausing over. I have already suggested that “Quelques Considérations” is in some sense a struggle over paternity, an attempt to reverse and revise genealogy by fathering himself a new father. Here the philosophical and psychological narratives become still more entangled: the subjective thought reverses its condition of derivative dependence on the objective fact, becoming, in a sense, that fact’s origin. The source of James’s allusion also seems almost embarrassingly suggestive: “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought” are the words that King Henry addresses to his son in Henry IV Part II, after he awakes on his deathbed to find Prince Hal has carried off the crown, anticipating, and perhaps contributing to, the fact that will become actual at the end of the play.40 I have also suggested that paternal constraint was associated in the earlier essay with the English empirical philosophers. A sense of private agon with those thinkers seems to infuse and energize the impassioned conclusion of the essay, which becomes strikingly personal in tone and language: “By what right shall they [the “Popular Science professors”] close in upon me and steadily negate the deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in eternal and insoluble doubt?” (85). James retains the metaphor of paralysis when the personal turns into the collective, in his hortatory close: “Thousands of innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls. All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away” (86). The entrapping effects of the “network of shallow negations” quickly become still more tangible when, a few sentences later, James hopes that “in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, I 88


have gnawed a few of the strings of sophistical net that has been binding down [the human heart’s] lion strength” (86). Ending on a note of enthusiastic exhortation, James’s essay takes on increasingly religious overtones: the “ultimate philosophy” must not “divide heresy from orthodoxy by too sharp a line”; it must offer, beyond quasi-theological “propositions to be subscribed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus,41 another realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and indulge its own faith at its own risks” (86). But it is not just that his language is religious, nor that the legitimacy of religious faith is a part of his subject. As well, the very form of the two essays, “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879) and “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” borrows and transforms a religious paradigm, which is slightly obscured when they are combined into a single piece. The paradigm is that of the spiritual conversion narrative. Not, indeed, that the conversion of any individual is at issue here, even that of James; rather what the narrative of the essays depicts is the conversion of philosophy itself, from the purely theoretical and logical quest for rationality which ends in doubt and baffled frustration to an active and open-ended project premised on the freedom to pursue subjective hopes, and from a barren and static representational conception of truth to one which will eventually be identified as pragmatic. This is no mere metaphor. James, as pointed out, repeatedly describes the quest of philosophy, the pursuit of greater rationality, in terms of a transition from “arrest, impediment or resistance” toward “plenary freedom to energize either in the way of motion or thought”; he speaks of “perfect fluency,” of “perfectly unimpeded mental function.”42 A passage from the first paragraph of “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” omitted in the 1897 version of “The Sentiment of Rationality,” expresses it most clearly: “Rationality means nothing more but the consciousness of the perfectly free, fluent, unimpeded movement of thought. Facile rotation, easy transition are its only laws. Perplexity, doubt, mystery only occur when these are violated” (58). This transition from “arrest” to “plenary freedom” corresponds closely to the pattern of the Puritan conversion narrative. As John Owen King observes, the conversion story typically involves a struggle against a threat of confinement and immobilization. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, begins with Christian immobile in his chamber, and his progress begins at the House of the Interpreter, where the last thing he sees is a man sitting in an iron cage, who declares, “I am now a man of despair, and am shut up in it, as in this iron 89


cage. I cannot get out; oh now I cannot get out.”43 (Bunyan, of course, was himself under “arrest” when he wrote the book.) The emergence from this condition, as it was conceived by the English Puritans, was not simply a moment of sudden revelation, but was a process extended over time, forming what Edmund S. Morgan calls a “morphology of conversion,” or what King describes as “an unwinding narrative. . . . the story of a journey up to, through, and then beyond the possible point of rebirth.”44 While different theologians divided this narrative into different numbers of stages, all morphologies of conversion were characterized by a two-part structure, consisting of a period of “preparation,” in which the individual came to recognize his state of sin, and the attempt to remedy it by outward means, concluding finally in a state of legal fear, a reali zation of the inability to absolve oneself of guilt and the onset of doubt and despair over the imminence of God’s just punishment, followed by a period of gradually increasing faith and grace, of recognition that only Christ can redeem, ending finally in the true freedom of glorification.45 “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879) suggestively recalls the period of preparation, and incorporates the metaphors of that stage of the soul’s progress. The attempt to attain the freedom of rationality by purely theoretical means corresponds to the effort to achieve salvation by outward, legal means. As the latter ends in frustration, doubt, and despair—a situation allegorized in The Pilgrim’s Progress by Doubting Castle, where the Giant Despair confines Christian in a dungeon—so the former, after constructing the most perfect philosophical system imaginable, falls prey to “the constant potentiality of doubt” (60), leaving it imprisoned in “the cul de sac of its contemplation” (64). We might add that the metaphor of wilderness which typically represents the soul’s place at this stage46 also finds its counterpart in James’s descriptions of the futility of theoretical speculation: the philosophical system is at once “an empirical sand-heap” and an “empty and abstract barrenness” (55); the “visitor” to the “region” of philosophic speculation quickly retreats from “the gray monotony of her problems and the insipid spaciousness of her results” (56).47 In The Pilgrim’s Progress, imprisonment in Doubting Castle is the last of Christian’s entrapments, from which he escapes when he remembers that he has a key that will open any lock; attempting to stop them, the Giant himself suffers one of his recurrent fits of paralysis.48 The Celestial City is now in sight, and the pilgrim is able to move freely toward his journey’s end. “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” opens by proposing to move beyond the “stand-still,” to escape from the “issueless chan90


nel of purely theoretic contemplation,” by espousing “a conception of the world which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been checked, blocked, and inhibited in the purely contemplative path” (58–59).49 In effect, the theme of James’s essay might be summarized by Christian’s words as he prepares to abandon Doubting Castle: “What a fool, quoth he, am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon when I may as well walk at liberty.”50 This is the stage where, as King says, “one comes to understand that in combat one relies upon faith and upon faith alone,”51 or as James says, one understands that “success depends upon energy of act, energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail, and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right—which faith thus verifies itself” (79). The essay tells the story of the second half of the journey of the conversion and redemption of philosophy, its liberation from its bondage to a representational commandment that can never be satisfied, a debt to nature that can never be paid, by its conversion from a static doctrine of truth as correspondence to an active conception of “truth” as made, something “verified,” as a matter of consequences and effects. That conversion involves both a justification by faith and a justification of faith, to borrow the terms James will use in “The Will to Believe”; to extend the implications of the religious metaphorics I have stressed in my reading of the essay we might say that it constitutes a reformation that undertakes to reject the authority of the philosophical clerisy represented by Huxley and Clifford that would anathematize unsupported subjective faith as heretical “guilt” and “sin.”52 (James would later compare pragmatism to the Protestant Reformation.)53 Needless to say, the conversion of philosophy that James aims for is not a conversion to Christianity, and the freedom he desires is not a freedom in Christ. The faith he seeks to legitimate is not a faith in God but a faith in faith, confidence in the power of confidence to create its own grounds, and for which God is only a metaphor. “The Will to Believe” has the curious distinction of being the most celebrated and the most vituperated of James’s essays, and the two reactions are really interdependent and inevitable. If the “Sentiment of Rationality” essays take the form of a conversion narrative, it would be appropriate if they were followed by a sermon which undertook to apply the lessons to be derived from that story. It is in fact as “something like a sermon” that James describes “The Will to Believe”: “I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on justification by faith to be read to you,”54 and it is worth considering this remark as more than a casual 91


association. In part, James is explicitly assuming the pastoral role that, as Bruce Kuklick has pointed out, is implicit in the public position of academics in late-nineteenth-century America.55 But James’s definition of his talk as a sermon has a further significance that will become evident in time. If, however, James begins by invoking the sermon form, his lecture quickly departs from anything resembling that traditional and carefully defined genre. In fact, the essay is distinctly odd in form, and seems repeatedly to frustrate attempts to discern a single direction or consistent structure, least of all that of a rigorous philosophical argument, to such an extent that exasperated commentators have been led to describe it as “a congeries of egregious errors”56 and “an unwitting compendium of common fallacies and a manual of self-deception.”57 Even what James is attempting to prove is somewhat uncertain. Ostensibly, the explicit topic concerns “our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters,” but in fact the range of the argument irresistibly overflows these bounds, and he effectively addresses the role of belief in general, so that widely divergent assessments of what James is actually arguing have been possible.58 If the indefinite focus of the essay were not enough to imperil its intellectual value, the development of the argument, likewise, is disconcertingly digressive. The essay is a curious mixture of false beginnings, circumlocutions, deferrals, repetitions, and divagations. It is difficult to say when the argument actually begins: fully half (sections I through VII) is devoted to what James identifies as introduction; meanwhile, the thesis is repeated three times, at the beginning, in IV, and VIII, each time with slight variations. Even when, in section VIII, he promises to “go straight at our question” (25), as Wernham points out, “That promise is hardly kept, or kept only minimally. Section VIII repeats the claims made in sections II, III, and IV, but immediately turns aside to allay imagined suspicions.”59 Wernham finally concludes that anything resembling an argument for a thesis is to be found only in sections IV and X. Judged by the prescriptions of traditional philosophical analysis, then, “The Will to Believe,” with its apparent aimlessness and haphazard, wandering structure, seems sadly inadequate indeed. If we think, however, of the essay as an attempt to overhaul the very nature of philosophical discourse, as James will later undertake to “overhaul the very idea of truth,” then it may succeed in its own terms. “The Will to Believe” is a narrative, but a rather different sort of narrative from the conversion narrative of the “Sentiment of Rationality” essays. It is, 92


I would argue, the kind of narrative that is most often associated—and this is appropriate for a text whose purpose is to blur the traditional boundary between true and false—the trickster. As Lewis Hyde notes, the trickster is by nature a vagrant, who “wanders around aimlessly [Hyde’s emphasis],” sometimes even “los[ing] his bearing altogether” (39). The narrative of such wanderings will not be a straight line, whose conclusion is the predictable and logical consequence of its beginning; rather it will take the episodic and circuitous form of the picaresque tale, rambling from topic to topic, backtracking and digressing. Like the picaro, ranging about the margins of social respectability, always under suspicion by legitimate authority, James’s argument skirts the borders of intellectual legitimacy, looking shifty and questionable, disingenuously abusing the laws of civilized discourse, and making claims on the reader’s credulity without the collateral to cover his debt. As much as its dubious thesis, the picaresque, aimless, and wandering form of “The Will to Believe” has affronted readers looking for rigid structure, those “beings that are anything but aimless, beings that are situated in space by their nature,” against the background of whom, Hyde notes, the trickster’s traveling is typically set.60 For them, it will inevitably appear as “tramp and vagrant,” as James will later say the pragmatist’s vision of the world does to rationalists.61 This wandering, border-crossing form, however, is the only one that is consistent with James’s project, which is to blur the traditional line between truth and belief, objectivity and subjectivity, perception and desire, and necessity and chance. The purpose of the essay is to (re)situate “truth” in time and in its human context to argue that it is not an instantaneous photographic transcription of reality that allows one to step out of the flow of time and the limitations of personal desire, but a complicated temporal process involving passion and persuasion, contingency and creation, expedience and hope. “The Will to Believe,” in turn, must succeed not by unveiling the lesson of the master on the demonstrator’s stage, but by performing its claim that faith can affect reality, verifying itself by winning his listeners’ and readers’ consent, their willingness to believe in the willing nature of belief. Not just a plea for the legitimacy of confidence, the essay is itself a transaction of confidence, whose success depends on its ability to inspire faith; it is a promissory note that can be redeemed only by the voluntary acquiescence of its audience. It is in this sense that it is, as the subtitle of James’s book says, an “essay in popular philosophy”—“popular” not because it is a vulgar simplification for the 93


limited understanding of amateurs, but because its validity is rooted in its persuasive power, on its “popularity.” Broadly, “The Will to Believe” is shaped by the same transition from stasis to mobility that we have seen in earlier texts, a transition which for James always seemed to take an Oedipal form, as a confrontation between James-father and James-son. This essay in fact begins with an anecdote from Leslie Stephen’s biography of his brother Fitzjames (i.e., son of James). Fitzjames, as a schoolboy, is being submitted to a dogmatic and rigid theological interrogation by an intimidating adult who seems to know all the answers, and to whom he seems capable of responding only with a paralyzed silence. The first part covers what is by now fairly welltrodden ground for James. Though his announced concern will be with the legitimacy of “a believing attitude in religious matters,” in fact he is soon defending the claim that all truths are founded on volition and subjective will: “Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives” (19). But what distinguishes “The Will to Believe” is its treatment of a new topic which had hitherto received little attention from James: the relation of belief and community. In earlier essays, the creative power of confidence was treated as an individual affair—the mountaineer hanging by his fingers is the very paradigm of isolation—and James has frequently enough been scolded for his “unacceptable” subjectivism.62 Section IX addresses a different situation, an intersubjective social situation, made up of “personal relations, states of mind between one man and another”: “Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence . . . ten to one your liking never comes. . . . The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence” (28). James provides other examples: “How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him”; “Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live 94


hypotheses. . . . His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.” At such moments of Dale Carnegie hucksterism we seem to be very far indeed from the important questions of religious belief with which the essay began, as well as any serious concern with philosophical rigor. But the point here concerns not so much any particular belief as the claim that society and community as such are constituted by originary foundationless acts of confidence, unwarranted extensions of belief for which no prior evidence can ever be available. As Emerson proposes in “Experience”: “Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.” Society, for James, has no more ontological ground, no more “reality,” than does God; each is constituted by an act of passional faith that gives rise, by a dialectic of reciprocal response, to a speculative society: “A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition. . . . There are, then, cases in which a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming” (29). All communities are thus imagined communities.63 James’s claim that he is pointing merely to a few special cases in which faith creates the fact is, then, disingenuous: all knowledge, to the extent that it is necessarily linguistic, is rooted in a “social organism,” and insofar as the latter is constituted as a structure of intersubjective extensions of reciprocal confidence, all knowledge is dependent on such acts of faith. Religious belief serves as a synecdoche for all belief. In an easily mocked passage James compares the spiritual situation of man to that of a clubbable chap in a “company of gentlemen,” who if he “made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,—so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance” (31). The comparison may seem less “trivial,” to use James’s own term, if we think of its point as not so much that God, like everyone else, appreciates a bit of respect, but rather that even the most immedi95


ate intersubjective relations are based on a leap of faith into an abyss as profound as that separating the human and the divine, that the closest are as far from us as God, and that the most casual word that falls from our mouths is a prayer sent out into space. If for Henry Sr. society was the redeemed form of man, for William it was the temporal form of God, a fabrication brought into being by faith, demanding the same act of perpetual creation by confidence as that by which some theologians have proposed the world is maintained in being. The conception of the social organism that James offers here helps explain why the essay has been so widely greeted with deep suspicion or intemperate dismissal. If any community is constituted entirely by the confidence each member has in the other, there is no objective standard by which to determine the authenticity of each member: each member is what he can persuade the others that he is. Society, for James, is not a dialectic that merges subjects in a spiral of ever increasing transparency and greater certainty; it is an always uncertain circle of structure of belief built upon belief, whose legitimation is a terminus ad quem projected into an indefinite future. Every such extension of belief represents an unmitigated risk of being deceived, in which, to borrow James’s words, it is necessary to “incur the awful risk of believing lies,” and to “be ready to be duped many times . . . rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true” (24–25). There is nothing outside the originary act of confidence on which that faith can be grounded, and there is no longer any meaning to a distinction between the authentic and the fraudulent. Put in such a way, James’s conception of community makes explicit what is implicit in the mechanics of the confidence game. Like the confidence man, he blurs the distinction between the real and the believed, by making the real the creation of belief, the authentic the product of confidence. James argues that every community is created the way Simon Suggs creates his, by inducing an extension of faith, and that no society has any more stable or true foundation. But the corollary, which the critics of “The Will to Believe” are so loath to accept, is that every society may be nothing more than a con game, that every consensus can be equally easily read as a situation of deception, manipulation, and exploitation. One commentator, for example, registers some distress that “if truth depends on what human beings accept as true, given the nature of their experiences and purposes, there seems no guarantee that such “truth” will not be fortuitous or arbitrary.”64 For like the confidence

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man’s, the pragmatist’s claims are neither true nor false—they can become either depending on the degree of belief they inspire. Bringing the con man into the picture also helps explain the peculiarities—to some readers, the exasperating peculiarities—of James’s style. Beginning with C. S. Peirce, who objected that The Will to Believe volume, dedicated to him, “was a very exaggerated utterance, such as injures a serious man very much,”65 commentators have complained about James’s insufficient concern with clarity in his writings, and in “The Will to Believe” in particular.66 Such complaints reflect a traditional commitment to clarity and distinctness as the ultimate philosophical ideals. What they miss, however, is James’s suspicion of those ideals as representing a falsification and impoverishment of experience. From James’s perspective, lack of clarity and vagueness were not necessarily problems; indeed, in many ways they could be seen as solutions. James’s vagueness can be seen not as an intellectual shortcoming but as a deliberate literary strategy and a way of resisting the illusion created by artificially distinct terms and concepts. Etymologically, “vague” comes from the Latin vagus, or “wandering”; this both connects with the picaresque structure of “The Will to Believe” and reminds us that, for James, what makes something vague is not simply the observer’s inability to focus but the fact that it is in motion—the blur is the result of an attempt to depict both a moving object and the fact that it is moving. Vagueness is the form of a world that is constantly becoming. Already in The Principles of Psychology James argued that the attempt to reduce mental processes to a succession of distinct moments was a distortion of the fundamentally temporal and transitional nature of consciousness: “It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.”67 Vagueness is not an inferior or preliminary version of clarity but a “truer” description of how we actually think and speak about, or act in, the world, a world in which things are vague, indistinct from one another, in which “thing” itself is an abstraction, the imposition of an artificial division on an undivided flux.68 With this in mind, one can see even the most egregiously nebulous passages in “The Will to Believe” as part of an intentional textual strategy, an attempt to avoid the fixity of a specious precision. Take for example James’s definition of “the religious hypothesis” itself. “Religion,” writes James, “says essentially two things”: first, that “the best things are

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the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word,” and second, that “we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true” (29–30). It is hard not to sympathize at this point with Walter Kaufmann’s intemperate complaint: “What does it mean to say that ‘the best things are the more eternal things’? ‘Best’ is vague and ‘more eternal’ comes close to being nonsense: either something is eternal or it is not. To add that the best things are ‘the overlapping things’ and ‘throw the last stone, so to speak’ only adds further mystification.”69 But what Kaufmann and other critics of James’s lack of terminological precision miss is that the vagueness of a word like best is deliberate, that a phrase like more eternal functions more like what James in The Principles of Psychology calls a “sign of direction”70 than like a rigid designator, and that to speak of “the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word” may be best read as an attempt to suggest the inadequacy of any final definition of the “divine,” and to put in motion a process of signification by way of a metaphoric series made possible by the “overlapping” and ambulatory vagueness of its elements. James’s lack of precision here is deliberate. To attempt to define the ultimate objects of faith would be to fall prey to the seduction of a final vocabulary that James analyzes in “What Pragmatism Means”: “You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. . . . So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.”71 Vagueness thus becomes for James a way of avoiding the paralyzing temptation to believe that one can “possess the universe itself”; it sets free and puts in motion, making “each word” appear “less as a solution . . . than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed” (James’s emphasis).72 In this sense, James is assuming the role of the trickster in relation to language; like the trickster, he “takes the web of signification itself as the site of his operations” in order to make its terms “seem contingent and open to revision.”73 There is still another virtue in vagueness which becomes evident 98


when we remember that it is also one of the central resources of the confidence man, whose success depends on his ability to remain uncertain and ambiguous enough to flow into the mold of whatever shape is required. It is the indistinctness of his own outline that allows his interlocutor to define it at will, and his audience to find in him and his ambiguous words the lineaments of their own gratified desire. The vocabulary that the confidence man offers is always a vague one, because it must open up space for the play of individual interpretation; it is a common language and shared terminology which does not insist upon uniformity of meaning. When Simon Suggs, for example, replaces the term bet with the term gift, he is making a move in the direction of greater ambiguity, since both he and his father will interpret the specifics of this act of giving in rather different ways; but the common vocabulary ensures that both will consent to the legitimacy of the transaction between them. In similar fashion, James redefines religious belief in the direction of vagueness, so as to retain its emotional and practical value for individual human lives, while abandoning the dogmatic and doctrinal elements that created conflict rather than community, and which had become increasingly discordant with the intellectual climate of modernity. Thus vagueness provides a linguistic means of managing a political problem: how to reconcile the divergence of idiosyncratic desires with the unity required by any society that can claim to be one. A rhetoric that avoids the rigidity of clear definitions is the appropriate one for the creation of a plural and open community, since the space of the vague allows for private difference within public identity, and a language that accepts, and even welcomes, ambiguity permits the voice of a community to be univocal and polyphonic at the same time. In this sense, literalism may be said to be the enemy of liberalism. From the point of view of the rigorous political philosopher or moralist, this solution may well appear to be merely hypocrisy and self-delusion, a fraudulent consensus papering over the fault lines of fundamentally opposed interests. But from another perspective, the rhetoric of vagueness is what makes a democratic community possible. This is, I would argue, the real relevance of James’s description of his lecture as “something like a sermon,” for the sermon is the preeminent literary form for creating a community of belief, of making a social organism out of individual subjects. Whatever the particular doctrinal content of any sermon, its first and underlying function, especially in its distinctly American version, is to reconfirm a community of believers.74 99


And the very act of addressing an audience, of generating a consensus by inciting a willing extension of belief toward the speaker, creates the community which is the sermon’s own referent. The sermon is thus always performative or illocutionary: it enacts its own content and brings into being what it is talking about. At the same time, this self-creating and self-authorizing power of the sermon made it an inherently ambiguous form, one that was vulnerable to exploitation by religious imposters whose rhetorical ability became their own legitimation, an ever-present danger that gave rise to a fascination with fraudulent preachers in the American imagination from Cotton Mather to Flannery O’Connor. There have been many who, recoiling from James’s unwillingness to provide any firmer foundation for truth than the belief of a willing audience, would include him among their number; but for James, it is only by accepting that necessity of vague and ambiguous foundation that we have the hope “delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom,” and to “bring about the intellectual republic” (33). At its conclusion, “The Will to Believe” circles back to its opening, returning to the figure of Fitzjames Stephen. But if, at his earlier appearance, Stephen had cut a rather pathetic figure, silent and passive, here he speaks loudly and clearly in his own voice. For the finale of his essay James quotes a lengthy passage from Stephen’s book, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: “In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. . . . We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes” (33). This closing gesture is more complicated than it might at first seem, since its significance lies in its form even more than in its content. Concluding a speech with an inspiring quotation is a common enough rhetorical device, but the very deed of quoting seems especially relevant here, insofar as it raises in concentrated form the ambiguities about trust and community that have been the concerns of the essay throughout. For every quotation is itself a miniature act of community creation in which two individuals meet together in the shared space of a common utterance. Fitzjames’s language is indistinguishable from James’s own; even its metaphors—the “leap in the dark,” the “mountain pass”—recall the scenario of the desperate mountaineer that so haunted 100


James’s imagination. The coalescence of James’s voice and Fitzjames’s words is, in this sense, a synecdoche of the sermon’s attempt to create a collective assent. At the same time, of course, the quotation, like all quotations, might also be understood as an appropriation of another’s words that translates them into a new context and forces upon them a meaning they did not intend—an act of ventriloquy that, like those of Simon Suggs, turns the other into a dummy who sounds a script that has been written for him. Who, after all, speaks in a quotation—the original author, or the belated quoter who has succeeded in making it convey his own message? The confident man who speaks here may also be a confidence man, and the voice that issues this ringing call to resolution in the face of “whirling snow and blinding mist” may, in the end, be engaged in a dexterous snow job. There is, ultimately, no way of making the distinction with certainty, since community can be neither asserted nor demonstrated, but only realized by “act[ing] for the best, hop[ing] for the best, and tak[ing] what comes.”

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3

Retailing Truth Making Community in The Hamlet

“The Will to Believe” concludes with a bracing and unsettled vision of the human condition: standing on “a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths that may be deceptive.” It seems a long way from here to the drowsy bottomland and honeysuckle-heavy atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha County. In the museum of the popular imagination, William James and William Faulkner occupy spaces separated by, to use one of James’s own favored figures, a very long corridor indeed. In particular, they have come to stand for diametrically opposed responses to the broad range of social and cultural shifts that are grouped under the inclusive rubric of modernism. James often seemed to both disciples and critics to be giving philosophical form to the forces of modernization, especially in its American version; his fondness for the metaphor of “cash-value” could all too easily be taken as an endorsement of the “tough-minded” replacement of traditional moral and cultural values with purely utilitarian aims. As well, James’s stress on the inescapably temporal and transitional nature of experience, and his orientation toward future results rather than past origins, can without much difficulty be made to sound very congruent to the capitalist system’s endless pursuit of novelty at the expense of last year’s models. Modernity’s malcontents, on the other hand, especially adherents of T. S. Eliot’s pessimistic narrative of grand cultural declension, often thought they recognized an unproblematic ally in Faulkner, who shared their idealistic vision of a premodern agrarian order, and who furthermore had demonstrated the consistency not to abandon it for a large European metropolis. Certainly they could find some support for this interpretation in Faulkner himself, who made no secret of his disdain for the New South (“a land of Immigrants who are rebuilding the towns and cities into replicas of towns and cities in Kansas and Iowa and Illinois”1) and who displayed a resistance to novelty so dogged as to spurn even so seemingly benign a specimen of modern technology as air-conditioning. For critics such as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who would 102

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become perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the received image of Faulkner, the novelist was a preeminent analyst of the price of the modern and a nostalgic champion of the values of a precapitalist world against the molestations of merely instrumental reason.2 Equally important, Faulkner was that surprising quantity, an American with a sense of history, who instead of embracing the Emersonian ideal of having no past at his back, seemed to carry the burden of all the past on his back, its full tragic weight of outrage, guilt, and defeat. The result of these assessments of James and Faulkner is a vivid and convenient opposition, but it is one which is highly reductive and which finally impoverishes our understanding of both writers. Defining James as a simple and somewhat simple-minded celebrator of all things modern was a useful tactic for the “Young Intellectuals” of the 1910s and 20s, like Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, and Harold Stearns, in their campaign against what they saw as an increasingly one-dimensional, materialistic society, but it was never more than a caricature.3 For James, not every future was desirable, and certainly not the future as envisaged by the industrial capitalists or the Rooseveltian globalist-imperialists whose overseas adventures he denounced so bitterly. But if the future is not necessarily good, it is necessary; ceaseless change is the consequence of our irreducibly temporal condition. Neither atemporal transcendental principles nor the benign values of the past can guarantee that such change will be anything but ambiguous and uncertain, but Jamesian pragmatism does assert that the results will be the consequence of our decisions and actions, and that we are not denied the right to hope. If pragmatism, according to one cliché, rejects the “tragic sense of life,” it is because it recognizes that both tragedy and comedy are human creations. It is no less reductive to classify Faulkner’s view of the modern world as pessimistic than it is to describe James’s as optimistic. History for Faulkner, as I will argue in more detail later, has no inherent or determined shape—the patterns that are read out of it are already silently written into it by its interpreters. While he often expressed his dismay with the present, he consistently resisted alignment with ideological critics like the Southern Agrarians; the novelist who declared that “man stinks the same stink no matter where in time” had few illusions that the past represented some superior dispensation. All apparent orders are the temporary products of an ongoing process of transition, competition, and reconstruction. Faulkner’s strongest works do not so much offer an 103


artificial and reductive opposition between an ideal aristocratic past and a vulgar commercial present, as they undertake an analysis of the artificiality of all such oppositions, of reinserting static historical constructions into the flux of history itself. As much as James, Faulkner was convinced that we cannot escape from the flow of time, since temporality is what constitutes both us and the world of our experience. The conservative critics of modernity hoped to fix its problems by turning to the values of an idealized past, but in Faulkner’s novels, the figures, like Quentin Compson or Gail Hightower, who are most fixated on, and transfixed by, the past are objects of pity rather than admiration, let alone emulation. Their misguided attempts to step outside of time in order to impose upon the ever changing drift of history a pattern drawn from the archive of the cultural imaginary results in a personal paralysis that is all too reminiscent of the catatonic condition of the patient of James’s panic fear episode, “moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human.” For those wishing to assimilate Faulkner to the canonical modernist model of cultural decline, the central textual exhibit is The Hamlet. In terms of the strict chronology of publication, of course, the novel is a late one, appearing near the conclusion of what is generally considered Faulkner’s major phase. But in a sense The Hamlet is Faulkner’s earliest work as well—since its outlines are discernible in the 1925 sketch “The Liar” and still more clearly in the unfinished manuscript Father Abraham of 1925–26—and it constitutes a kind of virtual novel on which he worked throughout his career. It was, therefore, possible for George Marion O’Donnell to identify the essential structure of “Faulkner’s mythology” in terms of an opposition between the Snopeses and their antagonists in 1939, one year before the appearance of the novel devoted to the irresistible rise of Flem and his rednecked brethren: “[Faulkner’s] novels are, primarily, a series of related myths (or aspects of a single myth) built around the conflict between traditionalism and the antitraditional modern world in which it is immersed. . . . [I]n the spiritual geography of Mr. Faulkner’s work there are two worlds: the Sartoris world and the Snopeses world.”4 O’Donnell presented the opposition between Snopes and anti-Snopes as a “universal conflict”;5 with the publication of The Hamlet that conflict acquired a specific historical context, the decades around the turn of the century which most historians identify as the crucial period of transition to economic and social modernity. Thus, when Malcolm Cowley adapted O’Donnell’s thesis for his own 104

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explanation of Faulkner’s “myth or legend of the South” in the introduction to The Portable Faulkner, the historical dimension became explicit: the Snopes world is that of “mechanized civilization” and “finance capitalism,” and the new order that they usher in is the contemporary landscape of “moral confusion and social decay.”6 This definition of the historical function of the Snopeses is made still more clearly by Robert Penn Warren, for whom they are the embodiment of “the forces of ‘modernism,’” the representatives not just of the New South but of the “modern world,” which Warren, showing little concern for originality, likewise characterizes as a terrain of “moral confusion,” a world composed almost entirely by its lacks—“of discipline, of sanction, of community of values, of a sense of mission.”7 This cascade of negatives is withering but somewhat vague, and it is easy to feel the old order is characterized less by any particular set of values than by value as such. It would be the virtue of Cleanth Brooks’s massively influential interpretation to provide at least the appearance of a more concrete analysis of the meaning of the Yoknapatawpha myth, and to produce an interpretive narrative that would cast a shadow over the critical reading and popular image of Faulkner for decades. For Brooks, the crucial element of the traditional order is the “true community” that constitutes it, and it is this community that is threatened by Flem, the “appetitive man, modern style.”8 Critics approaching The Hamlet have thus for a long time had a powerful interpretive framework according to which the central concern of the book is a fundamental antithesis of wordviews that opposes the traditional values of Frenchmen’s Bend to the unprincipled ruthlessness of the Snopeses. Ironically, however, while the Cowley-Warren-Brooks consensus deplored the Snopeses for their inclination to abstraction, the readings it promoted of The Hamlet themselves typically relied on the replacement of the novel’s complex narrative profusion with a simple structure of antagonisms, the abstraction of what one critic calls the “over-all concept” from the “narrative’s factual intricacies.”9 The problem is, however, that when one turns back to the “factual intricacies,” it often becomes rather hard to maintain in focus the clear distinction between the activities of the Snopeses and their theoretical antagonists. Sharp practice, ceaseless barter, and tireless pursuit of economic advantage define the world of Yoknapatawpha long before the arrival of the hungry strangers, even if Flem will prove the most skillful player of a game whose rules he did not invent. It is difficult to maintain with much conviction the ethical superiority of the reign of Will Varner, “that tall lean choleric old 105


brigand [who lived by] the strictest of simple moral standards: that whatever Will Varner decided to do was right, and anybody in the way had damned well better beware,”10 over that of the Snopeses who displace him. Ratliff himself, “the countrified Saint George,”11 is as implicated as anyone in this cosmos of cunning, and he enters into “the science and pastime of skullduggery,” with particular gusto, “for the pleasure of shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit” (91, 75).12 It is this equivocal equalization of Snopes and anti-Snopes that leads to readings like that of John T. Matthews, who sees Flem less as an alien invader who subverts the practices of the true community of The Hamlet than as a figure who serves to expose the artificiality that had inhered in those practices all along. Flem’s relentless adoption and exploitation of the community’s own principles by applying them with rigorous consistency finally reveals that “the centers of meaning in the community are strictly arbitrary; they lack contact with the origins of authority or truth.”13 For Matthews, the result is that the setting of The Hamlet becomes a Frenchman’s Bend with a vengeance; Jacques Derrida is now the patron saint of Yoknapatawpha County, conceived as an open field for the unlimited disinterested play of signifiers, which produces “sense and coherence by organizing conventions of exchange, opportunities for intimacy, and various economies of lack and substitution.”14 What I want to argue is something slightly different: the universe of The Hamlet is not a world of disinterested play but a world of highly interested and competing descriptions. Such descriptions are all intended to effect something, and their truth is a function of the utility that results from the belief or confidence they inspire. Truth thus does not simply cease to be an issue in the ceaseless exchange of self-consciously baseless fictions; on the contrary, the question of who will be the author of what becomes the commonly received truth, whose version will not simply endure but prevail, is a matter of vital importance. In this sense, the more appropriate philosopher to invoke is not Jacques Derrida but William James. What distinguishes James from Derrida, in the first place, is the former’s emphasis on the teleological basis of all epistemological activity and the primordial role of selective interest. The mind, according to James, is “an essentially teleological mechanism”: “I mean by this that the conceiving and theorizing faculty—the mind’s middle department— functions exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our 106

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emotional and practical subjectivity altogether” (James’s italics).15 Pure disinterested play, then, is an abstract and hardly meaningful concept. An emphasis on the originary and irreducible role of personal interest in all human activity seems much more appropriate to the world of The Hamlet, a world constituted throughout by confidence games, indefatigable calculation, and the endless pursuit of ways to outmaneuver one’s partner, even if the pleasure often derives more from the thrill of maneuver than from the gain that signifies success. In other regards as well, the inhabitants of Frenchman’s Bend exhibit certain implicit pragmatic tendencies. Little as they are conscious of it, they display in their behavior an adherence to James’s narratival conception of truth rather than to the notion of correspondence. To tell the truth involves more than a simple and accurate description of reality; inevitably, it is a matter of articulating a story. For James, knowledge always means “determinate ‘ambulation,’ through intermediaries, from a terminus a quo to, or towards, a terminus ad quem”; the “mediating pathway” is not just an incidental and ultimately disposable means but the “very essence of the pragmatist’s explanation.”16 The narrative “pathways” are what constitute our cognitive traffic with the world: knowledge “is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time.”17 The world of The Hamlet is likewise constituted by “relations,” in an inevitably double sense. To know the truth is to know the relation between apparently disparate facts, events, people; to tell the truth is to relate that relation in all its concrete particularity.18 Asked why Ab Snopes is “soured,” Ratliff responds with a horse-trading story that takes up a whole section of the first book. In a real sense, narrative is the fabric of Frenchman’s Bend, and the network of such stories comprises its everevolving texture and text, linking its multifarious parts in a complex and open-ended web. To speak, however, of this narratival condition in the language of myth, as some critics have been tempted to do,19 is to make a crucial error. Myth is a narrative that has been removed from time, a timeless and unchanging pattern that has no author and admits of no accident, whose apparently diachronic development is an illusion produced by the projection of an eternal order onto the fallen landscape of the secular. The stories that comprise The Hamlet, on the contrary, are particular processes that “unroll themselves in time.” They are put in motion and into circulation by specific individuals with personal interests, and they are made up at will and revised as needed. To read The Hamlet in terms of 107


myth is the equivalent of what James describes as the rationalist attempt to reconstruct the single true “edition” of the universe, the ultimate story, the “real one, the infinite folio, or édition de luxe, eternally complete” which lies behind the confusion of “false readings.” The novel, however, constantly frustrates such attempts to step out of time, and the world it depicts resembles much more closely the pragmatist “edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking [or, we might say, narrating] beings are at work.”20 To put this in a vocabulary appropriate to the novel’s own cosmos of commerce, myth is wholesale narrative, stored in a transcendental warehouse; stories are retail—tales tailored to a context, specific to a purpose, adapted to circumstance and audience. And the successful characters are those who are not transfixed by “the absolutely static relation of ‘correspondence,’” but who pursue “a rich and active commerce . . . between particular thoughts . . . and the great universe of other experiences in which they play their parts and have their uses.”21 The most successful of those characters, at least until the arrival of the Snopeses, is clearly V. K. Ratliff. The source of Ratliff’s preeminence in his community is his mastery of narrative. Faulkner, in a potent pun,22 describes Ratliff’s occupation as “retailing”: “He sold perhaps three machines a year, the rest of the time trading in land and livestock and second-hand farming tools and musical instruments or anything else which the owner did not want badly enough, retailing from house to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity of a newspaper and carrying personal messages from mouth to mouth about weddings and funerals and the preserving of vegetables and fruit with the reliability of a postal service” (14–15). (I will resist the temptation to develop the ironic potentials in the reference to the “reliability of a postal service” by an author once described as “the damnedest postmaster the world has ever seen.”) “Retailing,” for Ratliff, is always “retaling,” the making and selling of a story. It is also “relating,” and the stories or relations that he tells make connections; they trace the hidden routes that lead from person to person, from one situation to another, from beginning to end. (Thus it makes perfect sense that Ratliff’s final defeat by Flem is made possible by his missing a relation at a crucial moment: the fact that Eustace Grimm’s mother was Ab Snopes’s youngest sister [399]). In every sense, no one else knows his way around as well as Ratliff; he knows all the passages and tracks—physical, social, genealogical, and historical— that link together the places, people, and events that compose the net108

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work of Frenchman’s Bend. Just as he knows the roads—“there was little anybody could have told him about the back roads and lanes of that or any of the other country he traveled” (373)—so he knows the tracks that lead from person to person. His narratives, in fact, are roads that enable him to get where he wants; like James’s notion of agreement, each can be described as “a leading that is worth while.”23 He seems, as someone remarks rather ironically, to know “everything about folks in this country” (399), but it might be more accurate to say that Ratliff gives rise to the community in the very act of telling stories about it, generating a social world whose substance is as much narrative and linguistic as it is material. In this regard, he is already the “chief man of the country,” the richest person in Frenchman’s Bend, but his wealth is not assessed in terms of monetary accumulation, which if anything represents a problem—after one overly successful sales trip he finds himself in trouble, “shut away from his native state [pun intended, surely] by a golden barrier, a wall of neatly accumulating minted coins” (61). His real capital is the store of story, the descriptive scrip that he has forged and put into circulation himself. Ratliff has sometimes been described as an artist;24 it is more accurate to borrow Rorty’s terminology, and to say that he aspires to the condition of a “strong poet,” whose personal versions of truth will pass into circulation as the common knowledge of the community. The point of Ratliff’s retaling, however, as the participial form suggests, lies less in the finished product than in the activity itself. Throughout The Hamlet, his greatest resource is his mobility—at once his capacity for bodily movement and his discursive shiftiness, his sense of the provisional and revisional character of his stories and relations.25 Physically he is a man constantly on the move, of no fixed abode. Will Varner at one point finds nothing surprising in Ratliff’s claim to have traveled seventy-eight miles “since yesterday” (28). He moves for the sake of movement: “He was put into motion not by the compulsion of food, earning it. . . . He was moved by his itinerary” (60). Like the traditional trickster and the confidence man, he is a wanderer, and his natural habitat is the road that he travels in his buckboard. As shifty as Simon Suggs, he dwells in the “tramp and vagrant world” of the Jamesian pragmatist. Ratliff displays a similar commitment to mobility in his attitude toward language and narrative. Even in small-scale performances, his wit is devoted to putting words into motion, making them shift, shuffle, and shimmy until his audience is left bewildered, as in this dizzying fantasia 109


on Snopesian themes: “‘Sholy,’ Ratliff said. ‘Big ears have little pitchers, the world beats a track to the rich man’s hog-pen but it aint every family has a new lawyer, let alone a prophet. Waste not want not, except that a full waist don’t need no prophet to prophesy a profit and just whose’” (179). Tellingly, he describes speech as a flow: “You fellows don’t know how good a man’s voice feels running betwixt his teeth” (88). All Ratliff’s stories are a kind of motion, and they are told in the interest of motion. His story about Ab’s barn-burning, for example, tells how Ab moves from a position of inferiority relative to De Spain to one of superiority, precisely by destroying property and regaining mobility—Ab concludes the confrontation by declaring to the exasperated landowner, “I’m moving this morning” (19). At the same time, the telling of the story vindicates mobility over property, to the extent that Ratliff’s purpose is to assert his own superiority over Jody, the man of property. In fact the telling of the tale replicates its content: just as Ab uses his mobility to undercut De Spain’s power by making the latter’s fixed property a weakness rather than a strength, so Ratliff manipulates and disconcerts Jody, exploiting his desire to possess an objective truth, constantly leading him into fixed positions, into assumptions and impetuous objectifications of the reality of Ratliff’s tale, which Ratliff then abandons and moves away from: “Hell fire!” Varner cried. “Do you mean he set fire to another one? even after they caught him, he set fire to another one?” “Well,” the man in the buckboard said, “I don’t know as I would go on record as saying he set ere a one of them afire.” (14) . . . “To the barn?” Varner cried. “You mean they went right straight and—” “No no. That was later. The barn came later.” (16)

“And so he burnt it,” Varner said. “Well well well.” “I don’t know as I would put it just that way,” Ratliff repeated. (18)

“So Ab turned and went stomping out on that stiff foot and went back—” “And burnt the tenant house,” Varner said. “No no. I aint saying he might not have looked back at it with a certain regret, as the fellow says, when he druv off. But never nothing else taken all of a sudden on fire. Not then, that is. I don’t—” (20) He constantly shifts and revises, resisting a single definitive version, retaling and re-tailoring his stories for a particular audience and for particular effects. Ratliff’s shifty attitude toward language and accounts has one 110

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ancestor in the thought of Emerson, James’s most important intellectual influence.26 In “The Poet,” Emerson writes that “all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”27 Faulkner does not inform us whether Ratliff is a reader of Emerson, but it is clear that he would endorse his description of language’s virtues. In fact, the most striking and memorable physical object associated with him, “a sheet-iron box the size and shape of a dog kennel and painted to resemble a house” attached to the rear of his buckboard (14), sounds for all the world like an attempt to literalize Emerson’s metaphors— Ratliff has actually made his house “vehicular and transitive”!28 If the language of myth is inadequate to the thoroughly secular and shifty world of The Hamlet, the Brooksian notion that its real subject is “true community” seems equally problematic. For Brooks, that community has a kind of existence independent of and prior to any of its members, and is the ground in which the fundamental values that give shape and meaning to their lives are rooted: “at once the field for man’s action and the norm by which his action is judged and regulated.”29 But on close inspection the community of Frenchman’s Bend looks less like Brook’s timeless gemeinschaft than a shifting fabrication, constantly created and re-created by the restless energies of its inhabitants. The description of Frenchman’s Bend in the opening paragraphs should place in some question the argument that the Snopeses really represent the invasion of a stable and “true community” by an amoral alien force. On the contrary, the history of the hamlet looks less like an enduring tradition than a series of abrupt and radical displacements and alterations. The Old Frenchman place was hacked out of the primordial jungle, only to be destroyed in the Civil War; after that both the land and the house are physically divided, torn apart: the first “parcelled out now into small shiftless mortgaged farms,” which pass into the hands of the Jefferson banks, while the house is dismantled by the “heirs-at-large,” until finally the whole moves under Will Varner’s control (3–4). Literally, the community’s grounds are always up for grabs. The hamlet itself is a kind of imaginative and linguistic construct, its boundaries existing now “only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk’s office in the county courthouse in Jefferson” (3), its eponymous founder but a fable agreed upon: He had quite possibly been a foreigner, though not necessarily French, since to the people who had come after him and had almost obliterated all trace of his sojourn, anyone speaking the tongue with a foreign flavor 111


or whose appearance or even occupation was strange, would have been a Frenchman regardless of what nationality he might affirm. . . . But now nobody knew what he had actually been” (4). At the foundation of the community lies not so much a historical personage or verifiable event as “legend,” or even “tale”: “Even his name was forgotten, his pride but a legend about the land he had wrested from the jungle and tamed as a monument to that appellation . . . his dream and his pride now dust with the lost dust of his anonymous bones, his legend but the stubborn tale of money he buried somewhere about the place when Grant overran the country on his way to Vicksburg” (4). The community of Frenchman’s Bend is a system of such legends and tales, fables allowing of no objective verification. Each member’s participation in that society depends upon what Faulkner himself calls a “will to believe” in an imagined community, a readiness to enter into the game of confidence in the stories that constitute it. Frenchman’s Bend is an incessantly active marketplace of stories, legends, myths, convictions, and beliefs—a marketplace of discourse, in short. James’s description of the operations of such a communal marketplace, with its commercial metaphors, seems extraordinarily apt to the social ontogeny of Frenchman’s Bend: “All thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. All truth thus gets verbally built out, stored up, and made available for everyone.”30 In other words, the community depicted in The Hamlet is best described as a pragmatic community, constituted by the kind of baseless and unverifiable projections of confidence by individuals that, for James, are the basis of “a social organism of any sort whatever.”31 What allows for the fabrication of such a social organism is “the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned,” the willingness of its members to “incur the awful risk of believing lies,”32 even in the full knowledge of their fictional status. The novel offers repeated examples of this process of community fabrication. Frenchman’s Bend has been described as “noncentered,”33 but it would be more accurate to say that it is constantly producing itself around new centers. One of the striking structural features of The Hamlet is the recurrence of what we may call scenes of concentration, where we are presented with a vision of the formation of community, as individuals assemble around an empty space that is filled by their own projection. Until the arrival of the Snopeses, it had clearly been Ratliff’s role to occupy the center of attention and to populate this space with 112

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the products of his imaginative energies. But after Flem takes his place as a clerk in Varner’s store, there are hints that Ratliff’s position is no longer secure, and that the fascination exerted by Flem’s astounding innovations (“the presence of a hired white clerk in the store of a man still able to walk and with intellect still sound enough to make money mistakes at least in his own favor, was as unheard of as the presence of a hired white woman in one of their own kitchens” [31]) is beginning to effect a shift in the community’s center of attention. Much of the power of Flem, as I will discuss in more detail later, derives from his apparent emptiness, the pure negativity that he seems to embody, which pulls the fascinated speculation of others toward him like matter into a black hole. As Baldwin says of Ovid Bolus, “his very silence is a lie.”34 Already shortly after his arrival, the men begin gathering concentrically and staring at the “dark front of Varner’s store,” which Faulkner compares to the empty space where some powerfully significant but invisible event has taken place: the “cold embers of a lynching” or “the propped ladder and open window of an elopement” (31). Ratliff immediately reasserts his own traditional place at the community’s center by obligingly filling this “dark front” with the story of Ab’s souring, but the subterranean sounds that indicate the beginning of a seismic social shift are clearly audible. Flem, however, is not the only focus of collective concentration, and Snopes-watching is only one among a variety of concentric activities which rise to the community. It is Eula Varner, at least for a while, who provides the most powerful center, or—to use the word that Faulkner invents to turn her into the personification of centrality, as though being the center were not a function but an identity—the “centrice.” Like the Snopeses, she is defined by negation and represents a gap in the social body. She is “not a living integer of her contemporary scene”; instead she inhabits a “vacuum” (105).35 She is not so much a character as an empty function of abstract desirability, as her name suggests: a target onto which are projected a succession of cultural allusions and stereotypes: “her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic time—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard trampling goat-hoof” (105); to Labove she “postulated that ungirdled quality of the very goddesses in . . . Homer and Thucydides” (129), and he foresees her future marriage “out of the books again” as a coupling of Vulcan and Venus (131); even eating a potato on the school steps, she is like “one of the unchaste and perhaps 113


anonymously pregnant immortals eating bread of Paradise on a sunwise slope of Olympus” (136). But all of these allusions merely indicate that she is essentially a “vacuum,” an empty and abstract geometric figure: “a kaleidoscopic convolution of mammalian ellipses” (111). It is this emptiness that makes her the center of a succession of communities that are fabricated in her vicinity. The first of these is the grouping of teenagers that gathers around her in her fourteenth year: “They formed a group, close, homogeneous, and loud, of which she was the serene and usually steadily and constantly eating axis, center” (141). The same pattern is repeated the next year, although the composition of the concentration has changed, youths giving way to men, whose “trace-galled mules would doze along the Varner fence while their riders sat on the veranda. . . . among them the girl, the centrice here too” (145–46). The following year the elements have once more been altered, but the pattern remains the same: “By the third summer the trace-galled mules had given way to the trotting horses and the buggies” (146) owned by slightly older and economically independent suitors. These various Eula-centric communities have little to do with the “real” young woman of flesh and blood. She is an inhabitant of the collective imagination, and her “mammalian ellipses” really exist in a hyperspace of communal desire. They are all founded on a happily shared fiction, what Faulkner himself will call “a single will to believe” (164). Around the circle of suitors is the larger circle of Frenchman’s Bend, whose inhabitants are constantly watching the drama, waiting for its denouement. This last summer brings the narrative that has focused the community’s interest for three years to its climax with Eula’s deflowering. What is striking, however, is not only that we never get direct access to this scene, but that its primary function seems to be fictional. The youths who precipitate the event, by attacking Eula and McCarron as they are out driving one night, are themselves motivated by the concern to sustain a fiction as by jealousy: “[They] rose in embattled concert to defend that in which apparently they and the brother both had no belief, even though they themselves had failed signally to disprove it, as knights before them have probably done” (151).36 The skirmish remains obscure, and “[n]obody ever knew exactly what happened” (153). Even more so is the event itself, which remains secret until three months later, when all three suitors light out for Texas—McCarron motivated by fear, but the other two for the sake of sustaining the fiction of their own potential participation in the story: “By fleeing too, they put in a final and despair114

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ing bid for the guilt they had not compassed, the glorious shame of the ruin they did not do” (156).37 Both Eula, the “centrice,” and the central event in the story that builds itself around her, thus exist only as imagined, the projections of a community which in turn is fabricated by and founded on that communal fabrication into which each of its members is willing to enter. Eula exists for the sake of the community that assembles itself by watching her and telling her story. In one extraordinary sentence, which needs to be quoted in full, Faulkner describes the entire process of this imaginary institution of a society: If [Ratliff] had lived in Frenchman’s Bend itself that spring and summer, he would have known no more—a little lost village, nameless, without grace, forsaken, yet which wombed once by chance and accident one blind seed of the spendthrift Olympian ejaculation and did not even know it, without tumescence conceived, and bore—one bright brief summer, concentric, during which three fairly well-horsed buggies stood in steady rotation along a picket fence or spun along adjacent roads between the homes and the crossroads stores and the schoolhouses and churches where people gathered for pleasure or at least for escape, and then overnight and simultaneously were seen no more; then eccentric: buggies gone, vanished—a lean, loose-jointed, cotton-socked, shrewd, ruthless old man, the splendid girl with her beautiful masklike face, the froglike creature which barely reached her shoulder, cashing a check, buying a license, taking a train—a word, a single will to believe [my emphasis] born of envy and old deathless regret, murmured from cabin to cabin above the washing pots and the sewing, from wagon to horseman in roads and lanes or from rider to halted plow in field furrows; the word, the dream and wish of all male under sun capable of harm—the young who only dreamed yet of the ruins they were still incapable of; the sick and the maimed sweating in sleepless beds, impotent for the harm they willed to do; the old, now-glandless earth-creeping, the very buds and blossoms, the garlands of whose yellowed triumphs had long fallen into the profitless dust, embalmed now and no more dead to the living world if they were sealed in buried vaults, behind the impregnable matronly calico of others’ grandchildren’s grandmothers—the word, with its implications of lost triumphs and defeats of unimaginable splendor—and which best: to have had that word, that dream and 115


hope for future, or to have had need to flee that word and dream, for past. (164–65) This remarkable sentence, which seems to be attempting to sum up once and for all the meaning of Eula, winds up revealing her to be a fabrication of confidence, a “will to believe” whose function, as it is “murmured from cabin to cabin above the washing pots and the sewing, from wagon to horseman in roads and lanes or from rider to halted plow in field furrows,” is to weave together a community out of symbolic exchange. Discarding any pretense of normal progression, the sentence itself replicates the movement of concentration that it describes, first focusing in on the centrice, “the splendid girl with her beautiful masklike face” (itself placed in the center between the descriptions of Varner and Flem), and then spreading out into the network of intersubjective transactions for which the “splendid girl” is only the pretext, finally dispersing in “implications of lost triumphs and unimaginable defeats,” “dream,” and “hope.” The illusion of Eula’s objective reality is dissolved in the very movement of the sentence that strives to convey it. The story of Eula provides the most developed example of the fabrication of community, but it is only one in a series. For the remainder of the novel, it will be Flem who will be the creator of the concentrations, and hence author of the community they create, though he will remain as invisible as he has always done in his manipulations. The horse auction is the most dramatic example, which gathers the men together in terms that recall earlier and later concentrations: “There were three more wagons in the lane now and there were twenty or more men at the fence when the Texan, followed by his three assistants and the little boy, passed through the gate. . . . When the Texan, picking his teeth with a splintered kitchen match, emerged from the house twenty minutes later, the tethered wagons and riding horses and mules extended from the lot gate to Varner’s store, and there were more than fifty men now standing watching him quietly” (314). Later the concentric pattern is repeated when the local population gathers at the trial held in the aftermath of the spotted ponies disaster, as “the wagons, the buggies, and the saddled horses and mules . . . converge upon Whiteleaf store” until there are “two dozen wagons, the teams reversed and eased of harness and tied to the rear wheels in order to pass the day, and twice that many saddled animals already standing about the locust grove beside the store” (356). The novel concludes with another scene of concentration, one which

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serves to confirm Flem’s semi-official status as the new master of the community, certified by his successfully duping Ratliff and his two associates into purchasing the Old Frenchman place on the basis of the “stubborn tale” of buried treasure. Ratliff and Bookwright are quickly disillusioned, but the half-crazed Armstid continues to tear up the land with an obsessed fury, day and night, indifferent to secrecy, until he becomes a local sensation. Once again, we witness a community in formation as the audience gathers round: “after the first ones had seen him and gone home with the news of it, they began to come in by wagon and on horseand mule-back from as far away as ten and fifteen miles, men, women, and children, octogenarian and suckling . . . to sit in the wagons and stand along the fence with the decorum of a formal reception, the rapt interest of a crowd watching a magician at a fair” (403–4). The real magician is of course Flem, who has by now “passed” Ratliff as he did Jody earlier (66, 92, 162). Not only has he outwitted Ratliff, he replaces him as the communal center of interest, the one whose performances now attract everyone’s attention and whose fabrications compel everyone’s admiration . Flem has in effect replaced Ratliff’s arena, the Varner crossroads store, with his own, the Old Frenchman place, turning that into the new crossroads. (The old road leading to it, “which until two weeks ago had been marked only by the hooves of Varner’s fat white horse for more than twenty years” is “no longer a fading and almost healed scar. It was rutted now,” marked by “the countless overlapping prints of rims and iron shoes” [403].) Flem, of course, like the best magicians, remains invisible, as he had at the horse auction, which was also clearly a performance, compared repeatedly to a circus; as in his earlier trades with Jody and Ratliff, his superiority as a performer resides in the fact that he is the author, and not the actor, in the dramas that he mounts. As I argued earlier, Flem is not merely presenting a show, but retailing a version of the truth. When he gathers the farmers and their families around Armstid, he both fabricates a community and engages their belief in a communal fabrication, that he is the legitimate successor to Will Varner as “chief man of the country.” In other words, Flem is the legitimate authority precisely to the extent that he is the author of his legitimacy. His success in both these endeavors is made clear shortly afterwards in a passage following Flem’s latest coup that seems deliberately to recall the description of the way in which Eula had once woven the community together in a network of collective fascination and verbal exchange:

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In the hot summer mornings, squatting with slow tobacco or snuffsticks on the gallery of Varner’s store, or at quiet crossroads about the land in the long slant of afternoon, they talked about it, wagon to wagon, wagon to rider, rider to rider or from wagon or rider to one waiting beside a mailbox or a gate. . . . “That Flem Snopes.” “That’s a fact. Wouldn’t no other man have done it.” “Couldn’t no other man have done it. Anybody might have fooled Henry Armstid. But couldn’t nobody but Flem Snopes have fooled Ratliff.” (405) The mixture of suspicion and complicity in the final exchange manifests the ambivalent and duplicitous status of this, as of every imagined society; as in the case of Simon Suggs, it is impossible to say whether Flem is to be regarded as the exploiter or the founder of the community which he creates, since like any confidence man, or strong poet, he is both at the same time. But if the community of Frenchman’s Bend is contingent and shifty, constantly remaking itself, it must also be emphasized that every succeeding order is a succession of ownership, a shift of power that takes the form of a violent appropriation. The “first master . . . hewed” his holding out of the original jungle; after “Grant overran the country on his way to Vicksburg,” the land is taken over by poor farmers, another invading army whose occupation is characterized by violence and expropriation: “Federal officers went into the country and vanished. Some garment which the missing man had worn might be seen—a felt hat, a broadcloth coat, a pair of city shoes or even his pistol—on a child or an old man or a woman” (5); even the house itself falls to those who have “been pulling down and chopping up—walnut newel posts, and stair spindles, oak floors which fifty years later would have been almost priceless, the very clapboards themselves—for thirty years now for firewood”(4). Indeed, it is tempting to see “Will Varner” as not simply the latest in a series of otherwise anonymous expropriators, but as the allegorical incarnation of the successive wills that constitute the restless motor of history, under a thin varnish or veneer of legality. It is not quite right, however, to describe the technical legitimacy of Varner’s authority as superficial, a verbal descriptive superstructure that covers a base of material force; Varner’s authority is his description, the vocabulary and system of beliefs that he succeeds in passing into circulation. He 118

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has defined the rules of the language game that will determine truth in Frenchman’s Bend, so that he is able to direct the community by determining its beliefs, not directly, by legal prescription, but by “advice” and “suggestion”: he is “the fountainhead if not of law at least of advice and suggestion to a countryside which would have repudiated the term constituency if they had ever heard it, which came to him, not in the attitude of What must I do but What do you think you think you would like for me to do if you was able to make me do it” (5–6). Faulkner locates Varner’s influence neither in legitimacy nor in the exercise of force but in the persuasive power of his language and in his ability to induce the community to accept a vocabulary which is indistinguishable from a system of belief: “it was considered, to put it mildly, bad luck for a man of the neighborhood to do his trading or gin his cotton or grind his meal or shoe his stock anywhere else” (6). Put in this way, the social mechanisms of Frenchman’s Bend resemble those that Richard Rorty proposes determine consensual community in general. Influence, for Rorty, is exercised by the propagation of a vocabulary; Varner is one of “the founders and the transformers of society, the acknowledged legislators of . . . language and thus of . . . morality”; he is one of those who “happen to find words to fit their fantasies, metaphors which happened to answer to the vaguely felt needs of the rest of society.”38 Will’s authority is thus double: he is at once sole owner and proprietor, as well as author of the vocabulary that legitimates his own preeminence, that makes his ownership proper. To the extent that the plot of The Hamlet can be described as an extended battle of “wills,” a struggle over authority between the claimants to Varner’s position, it can also be described as a struggle over the authorship of a language. This struggle has traditionally been read as something of a moral allegory, with the Snopeses assigned the role of the unscrupulous disturbers of a benign social order, but in fact the projects of all the players, Snopes and non-Snopes alike, are highly ambivalent. To see the Snopeses as essentially different in their self-interested motivation is to accept a version of them projected by others, primarily Ratliff. Varner, Ratliff, and Flem are all inventors and propagators of vocabularies, language games, and thus particular versions of what will pass as truth. These vocabularies are inevitably determined by their own interests, not by an abstract ethical commitment; if almost every reader has found Ratliff’s to be the most seductive, and is willing to have faith in his particular version, this is a sign of his persuasive power, not of his moral authority. It is, I will 119


argue, precisely when Ratliff allows himself to forget the fact that truth is made by intersubjective transactions of confidence, and is not to be discovered in the objective world, that he goes down to defeat. It is not surprising that readers should find Ratliff persuasive; he is the character who is given the most opportunity to engage overtly in brilliant epideictic performances, which compel the reader’s suspension of disbelief as effectively as they do that of his immediate audience. Ratliff is above all a salesman; his aim is to turn his definition of his truth into a community possession, to retail it as widely as possible—even if the ultimate reward be not, as in fact for Ratliff it is not, measured in material gain but in imaginative mastery. As a salesman he is, we are told, “affable, bland, anecdotal and apparently unhurried as ever but . . . not to be denied” (61), and the final phrase is as applicable to his insistence on the acceptance of the veracity of his tale as to his persistence in settling accounts. In the one instance that we actually see him making a sale, to Mink Snopes, the transaction is based not so much on shrewd dealing as on passing a frank fiction. Joseph Gold quite justly describes his business as the “selling of sewing machines to people who are barely able to support their immediate needs on the cotton which the land almost reluctantly yields.”39 It is Flem whom Brooks identifies with the mystifications of Madison Avenue, claiming that he induces people “to buy what they do not want and cannot afford and will not be able to use,”40 but his description really applies more accurately to Ratliff. Considered strictly in terms of self-interestedness, then, it is rather misleading to draw a bright line between Ratliff and Flem, between heroes and villains, or traditionalists and moderns. It is the parallels that are most striking. Both are the sons of sharecroppers who flee the land for business. Both, I would argue, aspire ultimately to the position of authority represented by Varner. The whole of The Hamlet can be read as a three-way fraternal struggle, between Ratliff, Flem, and Jody, to become the authentic heir of Varner’s authority, to occupy the position of “the chief man of the country,” a position for which the symbolic marker is possession of the Old Frenchman place. (Ratliff’s final mistake is to take the symbol for the reality.) And to be the authentic heir means to demonstrate sufficient persuasive power, the ability to generate and retail versions of the truth that gain the widest acceptance. It is the biological son who loses out most quickly. Jody’s scheme to cheat Ab out of his crop by exploiting the barn burning tale he hears from Tull is less a way to clear a little extra profit than it is a demonstra120

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tion to his father that he is his legitimate successor in shrewdness. His description of his plan over the dinner table turns into a dramatic performance, a little play in which Jody performs both parts for Will’s benefit: “And he makes his crop and the landlord sells it all regular and has the cash waiting and the fellow comes in to get his share and the landlord says, ‘What’s this I heard about you and that barn?’ That’s all. ‘What’s this I just heard about you and that barn?’ . . . What will he say? What can he say except ‘All right. What do you aim to do?’” (12–13). Jody’s critical weakness, however, is his inflexibility; just as he dresses in unchanging black and white, exuding an “air not funereal exactly but ceremonial” (8), so he hobbles and immobilizes himself with static names and fixed ideas which impose a monochrome pattern on his world. So fixated is he by the image of his certain triumph over the Snopeses that he steps right outside of time: “Hell fire, we wont even need to do that; I’ll just let him find a couple of rotten shingles with a match laid across them on his doorstep the morning after he finishes laying-by and he’ll know it’s all up then and aint nothing left for him but to move on.” . . . They stared at one another. To one of them it was already done, accomplished: he could actually see it; when he spoke it was out of a time still six months in the future yet: “Hell fire, he’ll have to! He cant fight it! He don’t dare!” (13). In the event, Jody’s rigid certainties collapse before Flem’s unwillingness to assume a fixed position. Flem is hardly present in his exchange with Jody; when Jody asks, “You’re Flem, aint you? I’m Varner,” he responds noncommittally, “That so?” (24), and through the rest of the dialogue he is described simply as “the other.” Jody winds up performing a script written by his interlocutor, who remains virtually silent, while Jody in effect outbargains himself, offering Flem an ever increasing series of bribes, including his own place in the store, and requiring nothing in return except the phantasmatic appeasement of his own phantasms: “All right,” he said. “Next fall. When he has made his crop.” He had never been certain just when the other had been looking at him and when not, but now he watched the other raise his arm and with his other hand pick something infinitesimal from the sleeve with infinitesimal care. Once more Varner expelled his breath through his nose. This time it was a sigh. “All right,” he said. “Next week then. You’ll give 121


me that long, wont you? But you got to guarantee it.” The other spat. “Guarantee what?” he said. (26) In this tripolar Oedipal struggle, Jody’s premature defeat before the contest has fairly begun is duly signified by a final confrontation with his father, in which his unreadiness to assume the role of “the chief man of the country” is made manifest by his humiliating infantilization: “Jody came in last night, late. I knowed it as soon as I saw him. It was exactly like when he was a boy and had done something he knowed I was going to find out about tomorrow and so he would figure he better tell me first himself” (29). Ratliff’s mask of nonchalant independence should not obscure his own filial relation and ambitions with regard to Will Varner. Ratliff, we are told, is “a good deal nearer [Varner’s] son in spirit and intellect and physical appearance than any of his own get” (174), and at times addresses him as “Uncle Will” (28). Flem systematically turns himself into an imitation of Jody, but between Jody and Ratliff there is an uncanny and natural likeness: “you could see the resemblance between them—a resemblance intangible, indefinite, not in figure, speech, dress, intelligence; certainly not in morals. Yet it was there” (352). Repeatedly, Ratliff intimates a special bond between himself and Will, a spiritual filiation expressed as much in his own discursive indirection as in what he says: “Out with it,” Varner said. “What do you think about it?” “You mean what I really think?” “What in damnation do you think I am talking about?” “I think the same as you do,” Ratliff said quietly. “That there aint but two men I know can risk fooling with them folks. And just one of them is named Varner and his front name aint Jody.” “And who’s the other one?” Varner said. “That aint been proved yet neither,” Ratliff said pleasantly. (30–31) Ratliff thus establishes Varner as the ultimate audience for his contests of skill with Flem, as he had been for Jody’s abortive bout. An equally important audience for Ratliff, however, is the community of Frenchman’s Bend in general, over which he enjoys, until the arrival of Flem, an unquestioned position of preeminence and power. Like Ek in “The Liar,” Ratliff is the center of attention for his social circle, who look to his elaborate verbal performances as their prime source of enter122

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tainment.41 An early example of how Ratliff’s narrative expertise serves as the legitimation of his claims to authority can be found in the first extended story he tells, the tale of Ab’s abortive horse trade. Ratliff offers up a Just So story, tracing Ab’s “sourness” back to its source, in his humiliation by the master trader Pat Stamper, and providing a reassuring explanation for the mysterious figure who has been obsessing the community by constructing a series of narrative connections. But I would argue that his motivations are deeper than might first appear. Ratliff’s meticulous manipulation of his audience, his careful management of his stock of knowledge to control their submissive interest, is evident from the beginning: after declaring gnomically that “Old man Ab aint naturally mean. He’s just soured,” he waits patiently while his bait works on his listeners’ curiosity: “For a moment nobody spoke. They sat or squatted along the veranda, invisible to one another. It was almost full dark, the departed sun a pale greenish stain in the northwestern sky. . . . ‘How soured?’ one said after a while” (31–32). Ratliff’s story is an archetypal trading tale. One probable source is A. B. Longstreet’s “The Horse Swap” in Georgia Scenes, which itself draws on a long tradition of folk tales about shrewd horse trading.42 But in this context it becomes more than an amusing story. It serves as the model for all the contests of wit that will punctuate The Hamlet, and above all those between Ratliff and Flem. Pat Stamper, like Flem, is an outsider who, as Ratliff’s story suggests, constitutes a threat to the community, in particular by introducing money into the traditional barter economy. Ab’s trading match, according to Ratliff, thus represents not simply a private affair but a battle in which the moral fate of the community at large is at stake, and Ab Snopes is the self-appointed champion whose native wit is the frail dike that offers the only hope of safety. Thus, as Ratliff presents it, Ab comes to town with “the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of horse-trading in Yoknapatawpha County depending on him to vindicate it” (38), only to be decisively outmaneuvered by Stamper. Ratliff’s tale serves both to establish the importance of the trading game for the health of the community and to underline that the community’s representative must be a figure of matchless shrewdness—a figure, in short, rather like Ratliff himself. (It is no accident that Flem, in the spotted ponies episode, will prove himself an even more successful horse trader than the legendary Stamper.) Ratliff’s most elaborate plot, the almost self-parodically complicated goat-and-sewing machine trade that takes up an entire section of book 123


1, undoubtedly has a similarly ulterior motive. Whereas Jody’s blackmail scheme had been aimed simply at maximizing monetary gain, Ratliff’s plan is an intricate contrivance whose complexity is its own end. When Ratliff sells a sewing machine to Mink, he receives two notes signed by Flem along with Mink’s veiled threat to burn down Flem’s barn if he does not honor them; there is no financial reason for Ratliff to undertake a far more complicated scheme by inducing Flem to purchase the goats Ratliff has contracted to sell. Ratliff’s only motivation is a demonstration of superior cunning to an implied audience, by tempting Flem to attempt a maneuver that Ratliff will defeat, and inciting an artificial rivalry solely for the purpose of a symbolic victory. Ratliff’s coup is purely theatrical, not economic; in his final confrontation with Flem he plays out a scene that will climax with the only moment in the trilogy in which Flem is brought to an astonished halt—his jaw stops moving—though he suffers no financial loss. Flem has his own deus ex machina—the sudden appearance of his brother Ike, an Isaac who serves like a sacrifice to check the cycle of fraternal violence—and the contest ends in a draw, to be replayed at a later date. Ratliff’s final message to Varner, “Just tell him Ratliff says it aint been proved yet neither” (97) confirms that Will had been the intended audience all along. Ratliff’s efforts to establish himself as Will’s rightful heir, however, prove ineffectual; it is Flem who finally shows himself to be the proper successor, and whose inevitable rise is “the usurpation of an heirship” (98), in the course of which he becomes Will’s daily companion as he makes his rounds inspecting his various properties, and finally the occupier of his flour barrel throne. Like that of Ratliff, Flem’s success is made possible by the propagation of a version of the truth, a communal myth. Long before he attains a position of financial dominance, Flem becomes the center of attention in Frenchman’s Bend; in this regard he has already displaced both Jody and Ratliff from the point of his sudden arrival. Ratliff’s centrality was a function of his role as purveyor of news; Flem is news, the perpetually new itself. In every sense, Flem is a figure of all-consuming interest.43 His power and the attention he attracts are directly connected. In effect, the revolution he effects in Frenchman’s Bend is one of description; he changes what will count as social legitimacy, the proper organization of the community. Both Will Varner and his heir apparent, Ratliff, justified their authority on the basis of a myth of natural aristocracy. Their dominance rests on their superior shrewdness, their greater intelligence—their difference from the rest of 124

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the community. Flem’s power on the contrary depends on the communal acceptance of a different myth, a myth of equality—on the image of in-difference. Flem makes no claims to natural superiority; in fact he seems to have no nature, no individual qualities at all. His presence is absence, and like all the Snopeses, he is to some extent a pure principle of negativity, a negativity announced openly smack in the middle of their name: S-nope-s—like the “predatory nose” (predatory no’s?) stuck in the middle of Flem’s face as a “frantic and desperate warning” (57). Repeatedly, he is described physically in terms of malleability. His face is “as blank as a pan of uncooked dough” (24); his body is “thick squat soft” (57) and “shapeless” (67). It is precisely this malleability, this in-difference that allows him to so quickly flow into the mold of whatever spaces he desires to fill, and to become a perfect replica of the Varners even as he is displacing them. He begins to wear a tie, like Will, which “against the expanse of white shirt . . . gave him Jody Varner’s look of ceremonial heterodoxy raised to its tenth power” (64). Faulkner compares him at one point to a “parrot-taught headman in an African outpost” (67), and soon he is “mounting the steps [of the store] and jerking his head at the men on the gallery exactly as Will Varner himself would do” (98). Later, this replicative quality appears to extend to the Snopes clan in general: when Lump becomes the new Snopes clerk in Varner’s store, Ratliff reflects that he is “exactly like the old one but a little smaller, a little compacter, as if they had both been cut with the same die” (177). If the elder Varner is the embodiment of pure will, Flem takes the process of abstraction still further, becoming a simulacrum of will, an embodiment of embodiment. Flem’s lack of positive qualities means, among other things, that he can take on any properties the observer imagines. The curiously jerky, discontinuous ontological status of the Snopeses suggests that they have their real being as Berkeleian entities whose existence is inseparable from their perception. Jody sees Flem for the first time as a momentary face in a window; as he returns home, thinking about how to neutralize Ab’s barn burning threat, Flem suddenly rematerializes on the road in front of him, as if he were the objectification of Jody’s own train of thought: “One moment the road had been empty, the next moment the man stood there beside it, at the edge of a small copse—the same cloth cap, the same rhythmically chewing jaw materialized apparently out of nothing and almost abreast of the horse, with an air of the complete and almost accidental which Varner was to remember and speculate about 125


only later” (24). As if to emphasize Flem’s purely phenomenal status, Jody remarks that the vision was an entirely private one, subject to no external verification: “Hell fire,” he said. “He was standing just exactly where couldn’t nobody see him from the house” (26). Like that of Simon Suggs, Flem’s real skill lies not in the identity that he projects but in the lack of resistance he offers to the identity projected onto him. In the exchange with Jody, for example, Jody imagines both the threat and its neutralization, while Flem affirms nothing: “‘Guarantee what?’ he said” (26). Ratliff’s calculations produce a much more complex structure of self-reflective projections and meta-projections: “I had to trade not only on what I think he knows about me, but on what he must figure I know about him, as conditioned and restricted by that year of sickness and abstinence from the science and pastime of skulduggery” (91). His eventual problems with the Old Frenchman place arise from the same weakness for projection: “There’s something there. I’ve always knowed it. Just like Will Varner knows there is something there. If there wasn’t he would never have bought it. . . . And I knowed it for sho when Flem Snopes took it. When he had Will Varner just where he wanted him, and then he sold out to Will by taking that old house and them ten acres that wouldn’t hardly raise goats” (371–72). Like Jody, Ratliff will wind up doing Flem’s bargaining for him, approaching him for a deal, constructing a dialogue in his head (“Ratliff might have said, Then you don’t want to sell it; Snopes would have answered, I’ll sell anything” [392]), and finally accepting Flem’s initial offer. Flem’s advance is effected by constant withdrawal: the more he effaces himself (his face is repeatedly described as blank or empty), the more prominent a figure he becomes, and the more he disappears, the more he appears to be present everywhere. His increasing power depends on the degree to which others feel they can put themselves in his place. This is clearly so in the case of his specific transactions with Jody and Ratliff, where his silence induces them to defeat themselves. After the spotted horses auction, Lump taunts the inhabitants of Frenchman’s Bend with what had indeed been their own confident conviction, a conviction that Flem has done more than anyone to promote: “Likely you done already read Flem’s mind” (342). The principle of identification, however, operates in a larger sense. Flem succeeds to the extent that he promotes the myth of equality and interchangeability, and that he succeeds in at once propagating and embodying the myth of the common. By the end of The Hamlet it is hard not to feel that the men of Frenchman’s 126

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Bend are taking a certain vicarious pleasure in Flem’s success, particularly over a figure as convinced of his own superiority as Ratliff, so ready to offer guidance that, as one of them says, there seemed to be something wrong when “Ratliff wasn’t there to give nobody advice” (331). By effacing any particular identity, Flem allows the community to identify with his rise, so that the legitimacy of his increasing domination is based on the implicit contention that he is no different from anyone else, that he is interchangeable, literally a common man. He is a self-made man, whose raw materials are undistinguished and indistinguishable. Interchangeability defines the Snopeses: Lump is an “encore,” “echo,” or “forgery” of Flem (218–19), even taking over Flem’s emblematic gray cap (358); Eck’s son is “identical save for size” (358); Ratliff himself is unable to “keep the names straight” (355). Flem embodies the American vocabulary of egalitarianism, which legitimates any degree of difference in economic or political power on the condition that the possessor make no claim to difference of identity. Like Ratliff, then, he is tirelessly engaged in retailing a consensus, a version of the truth and a set of beliefs, even though he rarely speaks a word and never expresses an opinion. Both aspire to be the representative men of their community, but whereas for Ratliff this means to be its champion, the best and brightest, for Flem it means to be the least distinct—“inextricable from, anonymous with all.” Flem’s exemplary cultural role becomes clearer if we set him beside the figure that is surely his ultimate prototype, Benjamin Franklin, who is Flem’s paternal progenitor in a more real sense than Ab can ever claim. Keeping in mind that the work that would eventually become The Hamlet had its beginning in an abortive manuscript entitled Father Abraham, it is interesting to observe that one of the most widely read of Franklin’s writings, “The Way to Wealth”—that compact summary of advice for the prudent and ambitious businessman—was also known as “Father Abraham’s Speech.” The setting of the speech, like that of so much of The Hamlet, is “a Vendue of Merchant Goods,”44 and the address itself, which consists largely of a series of maxims, bears a striking resemblance to the characteristic utterances of I. O. Snopes—whose name, however, ironically reverses their prudential moral, since most are directed against the evils of indebtedness.45 The key insight that links Franklin and Flem is their recognition of the necessity, in a democratic society, of what I have described earlier as a strategy of de-authorization. “The Way to Wealth” is itself a striking example of that strategy, consist127


ing as it does of a complicated series of indirections: the speech, printed as a preface to the 1758 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac, is supposedly written down by Richard Saunders, who is transcribing the words of Father Abraham, who in turn is quoting Poor Richard’s own maxims, drawn from previous numbers of the Almanac—the whole pseudonymous circuit of course bypassing “Benjamin Franklin” entirely. This circuitousness is only a particularly intricate instance of a technique of selfeffacement that informed all of Franklin’s intellectual and public life, by which personal influence and power may be maximized by minimizing personality. The method, as I have noted in chapter 1, amounted to a kind of ventriloquism. The successful ventriloquist must, of course, remain silent at crucial moments, and as Robert A. Ferguson has noted, silence was for Franklin a key strategy for avoiding dispute and opposition, and for achieving his own ends. Silence is the second on Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues; Silence Dogood was his first pseudonym; silence was his highly effective response in “the worst moment in the political figure’s long career,” when brought before the Privy Council in 1774 on charges of having illegally published Governor Hutchinson’s letters.46 “The purpose of silence,” argues Ferguson, “is to control difference.”47 By remaining silent, Franklin effaces any appearance of difference between himself and his audience, and promotes the fiction that his own voice is indistinguishable from that of the collective will. Flem’s strategic deployment of silence, his “phlegm” in the face of interlocutors and interrogators, bears a distinct resemblance to Franklin’s taciturn tactics. Like Franklin, he avoids presenting himself as the author of any scheme. To Bookwright’s inquiries about the ownership of a new herd of cattle, his only response is “They’re in Varner’s pasture” (68). He refuses to the end to acknowledge any association with the pony auction, telling the frustrated bailiff who is trying to serve him papers, “They wasn’t none of my horses” (355). But this does not make him any less the promoter of a set of beliefs, in particular the belief in nondifference, that are the foundation of the consensus that guarantees his dominance. Franklin’s silence is, of course, only apparent; his lips hardly move, but his voice is heard distinctly, issuing from one of his many pseudonyms or one of the fictional “Publick-spirited Gentlemen” or one of his anonymous associations. Flem’s incessant lower jaw, “moving steadily and rhythmically with a curious sidewise thrust” (21), marks him, like Franklin, as just one in a line of manipulative ventriloquists in American literature.48 Flem seems to say nothing 128

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because his voice emerges clearly from his interlocutors’ own mouths. But the strangely unfixable nature of Flem’s identity also needs to be considered in the context of the particular historical period depicted by the novel. The Hamlet, in its own way, is as much a historical novel as any of Faulkner’s more overt experiments in the form, and readers have found it difficult not to see the sudden appearance of the Snopeses in Frenchman’s Bend in the closing years of the nineteenth century as, at some level, an allegory of modernization and its social and cultural consequences.49 But one might go further and suggest that the event of the Snopeses corresponds very closely to a specific transitional moment in the American political economy—the rise of the corporation as the domi nant organizational form in the marketplace. Corporations had gradually become more common through the nineteenth century, but by all accounts the “decisive moment,” as James Livingston puts it, in the “transition [from proprietary to corporate capitalism] came between 1889 and 1909,”50 during which two decades the structure of American industry and commerce was fundamentally reorganized as individually controlled businesses were replaced by ever larger and more integrated companies; by 1904, over two-fifths of American manufactures were produced by three hundred companies. The financial benefits of this consolidation— economies of scale, compounded capitalization, and suppression of competition—were clear enough, but equally evident to contemporary observers were the philosophical implications that the corporate form seemed to project. What defined the corporation as an organization was its breaking of the relationship of proprietorship from the function of administration; while ownership is divided among an increasingly diffuse and invisible body of shareholders, the actual direction of business is handled by a professionalized group of managers who are themselves employees of the corporation. Insofar as property had traditionally been described in terms of the owner’s exclusive power over the owned, the corporation required a reconceptualization of the “traditional logic of property,” indeed a conception of “power without property.”51 The intellectual implications of this transformation go further, to the extent that the model of the corporation posed an implicit alternative, and perhaps even challenge to the traditional logic of personhood, constituted by the unity of an individual identity and an inalienable capacity for selfdetermination. The corporation, the “dominant institution of the modern world,” offered a concrete instance of the rupture of that unity, the separation of identity and agency, and suggested the possibility that their 129


apparently indissoluble connection of the natural person had never been more than a philosophical fiction in the first place. The rise of the corporation thus implied a radical reassessment of the meaning of self- and personhood, insofar as it presented itself as a new collective entity which had a kind of existence and agency, a “personality,” legally independent of the individuals who theoretically constituted it. The result was “a flood of writing on the subject of ‘corporate personality’ in Germany, France, England, and America near the turn of the century,”52 as thinkers scrambled to define exactly what the nature of the new organization was, and whether it was to be regarded as a legal fiction or a real entity. The result of this energetic theorizing was the general acceptance of the notion that a corporation was not simply a contractual partnership between a number of shareholders, but represented a being in its own right, “distinct from the sum of its parts,” whose personality was “not a mere fiction or metaphor” but “a reality as indisputable as that very material subject of rights and duties—the natural person.”53 But there was a curious consequence: as the corporate personality became more substantial, the “natural person” became less so, insofar as the very notion of personhood appeared to be a fluid and conventional category. This was the conclusion that John Dewey drew in an essay that came to be seen as a definitive treatment of the corporate personality question. For Dewey, “what we really need to do is overhaul the doctrine of personality” as such, and to reconceive personhood as a matter of juridical definition rather than ontological status: if the corporation is as “real” as the individual, it is because the individual is as “fictitious” as the corporation.54 I have made this excursus into economic and legal history in order to advance the claim that there is a close correlation between the emergence of the corporate form and pragmatism’s reconstruction of the subject. For at the same time that theorists were, by their arguments over the nature of corporate identity, destabilizing the legal difference between natural persons and artificial constructions, James was proposing that the ontologically primary self should be regarded as nothing more than a philosophical delusion. In the seminal essay of 1904 “Does Consciousness Exist?” he mounts an attack on the Kantian transcendental ego, declaring “consciousness” to be “the name of a nonentity [with] no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.” There is no personal and substantial 130

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self that lies behind or underneath experience, outside of time and stable in its identity; rather, all that can be said to exist are particular experiences, linked with one another to form different narrative sequences, so that “a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, [plays] the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of ‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective ‘content.’”55 The individual self, therefore, is ultimately a matter of how particular experiences are grouped and defined, and its unity is the effect of function rather than essence. Put in this way, pragmatism’s person looks very much like a corporate personality—an artificial entity constituted by convention.56 And where the traditional self had been conceived in terms of ownership, its inalienable self-possession,57 in the Jamesian self, relations of proprietorship have given way to the modalities of management, its unity the result of the way it works. One reason that Flem Snopes seems such a problematic individual is that he is not much like an individual at all. In fact, it could be argued, he is really a kind of corporation, and his arrival in Frenchman’s Bend is in many ways equivalent to the historical “passage of American society from the proprietary competitive stage to the corporate-administered stage of capitalism.”58 By this I mean to say something more, and more specific, than that he represents something like “the commercial spirit in its purity.”59 The revolution he brings about is, in effect, a managerial revolution, and he single-handedly creates a new class—that of the executive. To the countryfolk, his peculiar position in Varner’s store is an innovation of epochal proportions, “since the presence of a hired white clerk in the store of a man still able to walk and with intellect still sound . . . was as unheard of as the presence of a white woman in one of their own kitchens” (31). Like the new class of managers who were the characteristic structural element of the emerging corporation, Flem is theoretically dependent upon the proprietor, but in practice is an increasingly independent professional.60 With his displacement of Jody, the natural heir, he effectively transforms the store from a family business into something fundamentally different. When Will pays a visit at the end of Flem’s first week of employment, he is discomfited to find that payment is demanded for “his” tobacco; the store has been, as it were, incorporated in his absence.61 At a later stage in Flem’s financial progress, the spotted ponies episode, he exchanges the position of agent for that of owner, but he con131


tinues to operate according to the structural logic of the corporation. This is clearly the culmination of the various trades in horses and other livestock that have punctuated the novel. But there is a crucial difference: where previous trades had served as an assertion of selfhood, of personal prowess in the competitive theater of the marketplace, Flem here succeeds by assiduous self-effacement and by relentlessly distancing himself from the financial transaction, which is carried out by the eminently professional agent, Buck Hipps. The whole of the tale, its humor and its bitterness, revolves around the separation of “management” and “ownership,” to the point where the latter has become effectively moot: “They wasn’t none of my horses” (355). This separation, as Daniel Boorstin has observed, meant that property assumed “a new mystery, a new unintelligibility,”62 a sense of which is distinctly audible in the Justice’s exasperated cry during the case of Armstid vs. Snopes: “Does anybody here know for sho who them horses belonged to? Anybody?” (359). The climax of the affair, the escape of the ponies and their headlong flight across the countryside, is less like the personal triumph of one individual over another that caps the standard horse-swap yarn than it is like a general and impersonal calamity on the order of a financial crash—a sudden and catastrophic collapse of a “stock” market, at the center of which stands the silent but stubbornly iconic figure of Eck Snopes’s son, Wallstreet Panic. “Snopes” is thus a rather anomalous entity—the very name somewhere between a patronymic and a standard brand, or a patronymic on its way to becoming a standard brand. Sometimes apparently denoting Flem in particular, sometimes the clan as a whole, it really designates a kind of collective being in which all individuals are subsumed, and it is significant that even Ratliff is forced to admit at one point that he has trouble in keeping their individual names straight. Although nominally a familial unit, Snopes has none of the generational depth and accumulated historical density that is the essence of the typical Faulknerian family. Indeed, there seems to be some question about the Snopeses’ capacity to generate at all. Flem is childless, and in The Town will be revealed to be impotent; I. O. seems to acquire children by some process of accumulation entirely foreign to the laws of biology (293, 352). Instead, they, or it, spread out horizontally, producing something strongly reminiscent of what Alfred D. Chandler describes as the newly emerging “multidivisional” pattern of corporate organization.63 Each Snopes, on arrival, takes over some economic sector: Flem assumes control of 132

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the store, Eck the blacksmith’s shop, I. O., the school. So standardized is the management of these divisions that when Lump replaces Flem as clerk, he not only occupies the latter’s position but becomes a complete replica, another company man in a gray cloth cap (177). Flem, in other words, seems less a corporeal person than a corporate personality. The very features that, from one point of view, can appear the indices of a moral lack—his shiftiness, his opaque superficiality, and his seeming ability simultaneously to be everywhere and nowhere—from another perspective indicate that we are dealing with a completely new concept of selfhood, to which traditional categories are no longer adequate. A different way to put this would be to say we are dealing with personality as reconceived from a pragmatic angle. But the association of the Snopeses with the corporation does not exhaust the relevant historical contexts. The other great economic controversy in American political life contemporaneous with the emergence of pragmatism was the “money question,” the debate over whether the United States should switch from the gold standard to one based on bimetallism. At a deeper level, however, it was also a conflict between different conceptions of what the function of money was. For the populists, money was a medium of exchange, enabling a direct and natural balance between commodities. The problem was that the supply of money did not adequately correspond to the quantity of goods in the marketplace, a problem that could be solved by putting into circulation a second metal of natural value, silver. Their opponents, on the other hand, conceived of money principally in the form of invested capital or savings, in other words as the expectation or promise of future return. It was precisely the rarity of gold that allowed it to serve as the theoretical foundation for what was in practice an ever expanding credit economy, involving the circulation of financial engagements to pay in the future, but which corresponded to no actual material commodities in the present.64 Putting the matter this way makes clear the parallel between the money question and contemporaneous debates over epistemology. By identifying the current economic crisis as a disjunction between money and commodities, and demanding that the balance be put right by ensuring that the supply of money matched the amount of goods that were actually being produced, the populists betrayed a commitment to what James described as the “copy-view,” the notion that ideas derive their meaning by correspondence to their objects. The economic crisis was fundamentally a crisis of representation. 133


These issues are not foreign to The Hamlet. The social turmoil that accompanies the arrival of the Snopeses is in some sense a version of the conflict between the opposing conceptions of money I have just been discussing, and of the transition from one to the other. At the beginning of the book, Frenchman’s Bend appears to represent the populist ideal of an economy: there is an active market characterized by incessant, even obsessive trading, but it is a market in which there is an immediate correspondence between goods and what is exchanged for them. A participant may win or lose in the transaction, but there is never any uncertainty as to who the winner is: it is always possible to make direct reference to the commodities in question, which are as tangible as Old Man Anse Holland’s wore-out sorghum mill. So perfect is the system of correspondence that money, the medium of exchange, is hardly necessary. There is a moment in Ratliff’s early story about Ab Snopes’s venture into horse-trading, however, that intimates the threat represented by the idea of money, a threat which will soon be actualized: “When a man swaps horse for horse, that’s one thing and let the devil protect him if the devil can. But when cash money starts changing hands, that’s something else. And for a stranger to come in and start that cash money to changing and jumping from one fellow to another, it’s like when a burglar breaks into your house and flings your things ever which way even if he don’t take nothing” (38). The problem with money is that it replaces static correspondence with an uncontrollable process of circulation by “changing and jumping from one fellow to another” with a seeming autonomy. It thus creates a chaos worse than criminal, since by “fling[ing] your things ever which way,” it makes it impossible to tell whether any exchange is ever in balance. Such an epistemological confusion is far more disturbing than mere theft, which is, after all, only the inversion of correspondence. It is no accident that the arrival of the Snopeses is coincident with the introduction of money into Frenchman’s Bend, and its conversion to a credit economy. Flem’s earliest independent enterprises are ventures into money lending, and he will later issue a kind of money of his own, in the form of the promissory notes he puts into circulation. Flem is not just the source of money. He and his relatives bear an uncanny resemblance to money itself. Just as “cash money,” in Ratliff’s words, is always “jumping and changing,” so instability characterizes the family as a whole: during Mink’s childhood alone, for example, they have passed through “a dozen different sorry and ill-made rented cabins as his father had moved from farm to farm” (261). I. O. seems to exist only as a 134

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vaguely incarnated principle of delirious activity, “a furious already dissipating concentration of energy vanishing the instant after the intention took shape” (71), whose very facial features are in a “constant state of flux” (222), like the things flung “ever which way” of Ratliff’s prescient metaphor. But it is Flem who is the most mobile of them all. The entire novel is really structured by his transitions, physical and social, from his abrupt arrival in the static-state universe, Frenchman’s Bend, through his rapid rise up the local economic hierarchy, to his laconic departure for Jefferson as the novel concludes. Flem is repeatedly described as having “passed” Jody, and the term is clearly significant. Flem’s identity is constituted by passing—passing from place to place and passing for what he is expected eventually to become. Flem “passes” like money, and his compelling centrality in Frenchman’s Bend derives from his ability to inspire others to “speculate” uncontrollably, like Jody in the passage cited above, on what he is and, more important, on what he will do, on his future. Such speculations become the common coin of the community, traded in every verbal transaction, and increasing Flem’s market value every time. Flem’s association with money therefore represents something entirely other than a personal moral failing like simple greed. What he suggests, rather, is a different conception of personality and selfhood which is constituted not by reference to some static atemporal worth, beyond the vicissitudes of subjective evaluation, but by temporality and futurity, by a process of “passing.” Ratliff in fact suggests as much at one point when he turns “Snopes” into a verb, “to snopes” (179). It seems appropriate to call this a pragmatic conception of selfhood, especially when we recall the connection James himself made between circulation of beliefs and that of banknotes. It is precisely the currency of currency, its capacity to pass for and pass among, that enables it to serve as the privileged metaphoric model of a reconceptualized identity, a pragmatic self the foundation of whose existence is its own passing. It is important to emphasize that nothing I have argued thus far should be thought of as a defense of Flem. Still less should it be seen as a critique of pragmatism, any more than the representation of Ratliff is to be regarded as a vindication of the pragmatic personality. Moral evaluation seems out of place, to the extent that it presupposes the autonomous and atemporal subject that Ratliff and Flem, in different ways, put in question. The insistent parallelism between the two traders indicates that the pragmatic personality will never fit into ethical categories, but 135


invariably winds up, like Flem himself, in two places at once, imposing upon the observer a necessarily double perspective. In fact, this doubling of perspectives is one way of describing what happened to the image of pragmatism in the discourse of the culture at large, in a series of highprofile debates that extended from the last years of the First World War through the beginning of the Second, at the time Faulkner was writing The Hamlet. Randolph Bourne may be said to have fired the first salvo of the controversy with his attack on John Dewey in his famous 1917 article “Twilight of the Idols,” in which he traced the origins of what he saw as the latter’s tragically misguided support for America’s entry into the war back to a disturbing flaw in the very nature of pragmatism, specifically the way its definition of truth in terms of means seemed to rule out the possibility of privileging any particular ends over others. The most general assault was mounted by Lewis Mumford in The Golden Day (1926), which for the first time identified in James the ultimate source of pragmatism’s fatal “lack of a world view,” its congenital preference for indeterminacy and action over fixed fundamental principles. The intellectual heirs of James did not let this critique go unanswered; John Dewey responded publicly and vigorously to these charges, proclaiming that Mumford was shaping James “to a pattern which inverts his whole spirit and thought.”65 If the first critics of pragmatism, the camp of the “Young Intellectuals,” came from the left of the political spectrum, the next wave emerged from a position farther to the right. In 1934, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the energetic and charismatic young president of the University of Chicago, eager to begin a reformation of the system of higher education in America, launched his campaign by identifying as the chief agent of decay what he called the spirit of “anti-intellectualism,” which is to say pragmatism, whose refusal to acknowledge the authority of objective and eternal verities lay at the root of the contemporary malaise, and whose chief representatives were the by now usual suspects, James and Dewey.66 Two years later, in his widely read The Higher Education in America, he expanded his critique to a comprehensive diagnosis of the ills of modern pedagogy and outlined his proposed remedy—the restoration of “metaphysics, the science of first principles,” to its rightful place at the core of the curriculum. It remained, however, for Hutchins’s friend and ally in the cause of educational reconstruction, Mortimer Adler, to take the controversy to a new level in a melodramatic address delivered at a national conference on “Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their 136

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Relation to the Democratic Way of Life” in September of 1940. If for Hutchins pragmatism represented a decline into unprincipled utilitarianism, Adler was willing to go further, declaring that the pragmatic and naturalistic orientation of the intelligentsia represented a clear and present political danger of the first order: “Without the truths of philosophy and religion, Democracy has no rational justification.”67 Adler did not hesitate to draw the conclusion that pragmatism represented a threat of the same sort as the rise of fascism, and was in fact a more insidious variation.68 Accusations of fascism come and go; Dewey had already in his reply to Hutchins succumbed to the temptation to reach for his rhetorical revolver, delicately suggesting that it was Hutchins’s position which was “akin to the distrust of freedom and the consequent appeal to some fixed authority that is now overrunning the world.”69 In other ways, however, the shadow cast by Hutchins’s quarrel with pragmatism would prove to be a longer one; it was for the purpose of countering its pernicious influence, among other things, that Hutchins had developed the idea of a curriculum organized around the study of a core of central and enduringly valuable texts, and thus formulated the terms and slogans of a debate that has yet to play itself out. The notion of a generalist course devoted to the reading of classics had been the brainchild of Adler’s teacher John Erskine at Columbia; in 1929 Adler suggested the concept to Hutchins as a way of resisting the overspecialization of the modern university, and the strange academic career of the Great Books was under way.70 The war against pragmatism, by 1940, was thus being waged in two ways: first, in a frontal assault on its “nihilism,” and second in the form of a defense of an alternate conception of truth as timeless and objective, and of the theory that the best mode of uncovering that truth was through contact with a select body of privileged books. This theory had become sufficiently institutionalized that Adler was able to offer a simplified version for home use in How to Read a Book, which topped the best-seller lists for 1940. But while the primer makes a virtue of its simplicity, it is possible to detect two not obviously compatible models of reading, expressed in different metaphors, running through the text. On the one hand, there is the model of reading as revelation, as the uncovering or unearthing of a preexistent meaning: “There is often more plan in a great book than meets the eye. The surface can be deceiving. You must look beneath to discover the real structure”; “The reader tries to uncover the skeleton the book conceals”; “We can expect a good writer to do 137


his best to reach us through the barrier language inevitably sets up, but we cannot expect him to do it all. . . . We, as readers, must try to tunnel through from our side.”71 On the other, reading is repeatedly described as a kind of business deal, an exchange of property negotiated between reader and author: “Coming to terms is nearly the last stage in any successful business negotiation. . . . But in the reading of a book, coming to terms is the first stage of interpretation. Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place.”72 The disinterested revelation of objective truths, it seems, is from the beginning inseparable from a merchandising operation—another retaling that is always already retailing. Throughout the period Faulkner was composing the stories that would become The Hamlet, then, pragmatism was at the center of ferocious public debates in which the stake, in the eyes of the contestants at least, was the very fate of democracy in America. It was a debate that was as unresolvable as it was inevitable, to the extent that it was less a conflict between supporters and opponents than it was a projection of pragmatism’s own internal ambiguity. Its rejection of the authority of any atemporal and transcendent moral principle guaranteed that, from the perspective of the latter, pragmatism could always be construed as either liberation or irresponsibility, either creativity or cynicism, precisely because neither category is relevant. It seems no accident, therefore, that Faulkner’s most pragmatic characters, Ratliff and Flem, form a divided but indivisible unity, which constantly elicits and consistently escapes from moral definition. Even as we can hardly resist the desire to make ethical discriminations between the two, Ratliff refuses to allow us to do so, insisting that he is no “better” than the Snopeses. Thus, when a separation is at last effected between Ratliff and Flem, it is not based on any difference that can be described in ethical terms. Instead, I would argue that the episode is best understood as Ratliff’s abandonment of his pragmatic principles at a critical moment, and that his fault is not so much a moral as it is an epistemological one. The final confrontation brings us back to the place where the novel began, the Old Frenchman place, and to the question of whose property it will finally be. But what is more significant than the outcome is the manner of the transaction. That Flem should succeed in inducing Ratliff to purchase the worthless property by his quaintly transparent ruse has generally been seen as a symptom of the canny sewing-machine salesman’s moral

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failure; for once an eruption of naked avarice clouds his judgment, and the game is lost.73 But it would be a mistake to think that property is really what is at issue. This episode, involving selling and digging, retailing and revealing— needs to be understood as a scene of reading which stages the metaphors of How to Read a Book in order to upend them. The challenge Ratliff confronts, and fails—as the name of his partner all too overtly hints—is how to read a Book(w)right. What Ratliff forgets is that the Old Frenchman place always had its primary purpose as a sign, not as a piece of real estate; it is the symbol of power and influence in the community, which is the true object of the three-way struggle between Ratliff, Flem, and the luckless Jody. His mistake could be described as a fault of literalization, insofar as he begins to take what is only a symbol for a thing of value in itself. Indeed, he “had never for one moment believed it had no value” (174). His error is the same one that Emerson diagnoses in “The Poet”: “Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional [and] all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.”74 The difference between the poet and the mystic is the difference between mobility and property, or between language conceived of as a way of getting from one place to another, and language conceived of as a means of representing the truth. In other words, it is the difference between the pragmatic theory of truth and the correspondence theory, and it is but one more indication of the fundamental connection between Emerson and James that the latter repeatedly invokes the same metaphorics to define that difference. In “What Pragmatism Means,” for example, he declares that “any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other . . . is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.”75 The anti-pragmatists, on the other hand, imagine truth as a matter of property, indeed as a “stagnant property inherent in [the idea],”76 combining stasis and ownership in one snug cognitive conjunction: “When you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter. You’re in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally. . . . Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.”77 These same metaphors organize The Hamlet, a novel

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obsessed with mobility and ownership, with riding and “stagnant property,” with horses and houses. As we have seen, Ratliff’s great resource has always been his ability to remain in motion, and his resistance to fixity and stasis entails a rejection of property. As a salesman, his success depends on the speed with which he can dispossess himself of things, the rapidity with which he can put them into circulation. Even capital can represent a threat, if we take seriously his joke that his pocketbook had to be surgically removed to restore him to health and mobility, “the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will” (75). Yet here, for once, he descends from the buckboard and invests in real estate. It seems inadequate to explain so massive and sudden a collapse in the face of temptation as a matter of simple greed. Ratliff, I would argue, is seduced less by the prospect of wealth than by the promise of the stability of truth, or more precisely truth as stability. In purchasing the Old Frenchman place he is attempting to acquire not real estate but reality, and in so doing he exchanges his vehicular simulacrum of a house for a stationary homestead. Recalling Emerson, we might say that his “organ of language” has become so “excess[ive]” as to interfere with his mobility. The master re-taler, so ironically conscious of the tailored and factitious character of all tales, finally succumbs to the conviction that the property in question is the objective location of actual value, and Ratliff winds up buying “the stubborn tale of the money [the Frenchman] buried about the place when Grant overran the country on his way to Vicksburg”(4): “There’s something there. I’ve always knowed it” (371). The treasure that Ratliff expects to find thus needs to be read as an allegory of his own expectations; what he hopes to uncover is not so much treasure as it is truth, a stable, objective truth calibrated in a coinage more secure than promissory notes on the future. His descent into the earth literalizes the metaphor of “dis-covery” which is the ultimate ground of non-pragmatic notions of truth. And as the logic of the trope of currency in the novel might by now permit us to anticipate, what he expects to discover is not money, whose value is merely conventional, but something of intrinsic worth: “‘Suppose it aint nothing but Confederate money,’ Bookwright said. ‘All right,’ Ratliff said. ‘What do you reckon that old Frenchman did with all the money he had before there was any such thing as Confederate money? Besides, a good deal of it was probably silver spoons and jewelry’” (378). And so, at what is in every sense the moment of truth, Ratliff exposes himself as a hard money man, a sil140

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verite who believes in the inherently valuable nature of certain natural substances. If his great resource had been his ability to traffic in notes drawn on futurity, as in his earlier, and more successful, transaction with Flem, that he should now be looking for things of value in themselves is a disturbing symptom of submission to traditional patterns of thought. The brief exchange between Bookwright and Ratliff condenses an entire philosophical history according to which money was the privileged figure for the representational theory of truth.78 As money represents the ultimately valuable substance it stands for, so the idea represents the real thing, and when either becomes detached, it is as specious as a Confederate note, signifying nothing. “Metaphysics,” says James in “What Pragmatism Means,” “has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest,” a quest after what amounts to the words designating the final truths of the universe, whose discovery will allow the seeker to “rest.” “But,” he continues, “if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look upon any such word as closing your quest. . . . Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”79 The quest that leads Ratliff into the enchanted garden of the Old Frenchman place, however, is marked by foreboding signs of paralysis. It is suspiciously suggestive that his ally in the endeavor should be Henry Armstid, the most rigid and inflexible character, both mentally and physically, in the novel. His very name suggests a stiff limb, an onomastic prophecy that seems to be fulfilled when his leg is broken, so that he has to drag it through the final chapters “stiffly,” as Faulkner repeatedly puts it (370, 374). Armstid’s stiffness is a kind of rigor mortis, and as he progresses toward mechanical insensibility, it becomes clear that the hole he is digging is really his own grave: “[Bookwright] could now see Armstid waist-deep in the ground as if he had been cut in two at the hips, the dead torso, not even knowing it was dead, laboring on in measured stoop and recover like a metronome as Armstid dug himself back into that earth which had produced him to be its born and fated thrall forever until he died” (399). The longer one considers it, Ratliff’s pursuit of stable value, of truth that will abide, looks disturbingly like a will to paralysis whose ultimate realization is death. And his expectations appear to find their reward. What the seekers find seems to be at the farthest remove from an empty convention: the hard fact of hard money, “bulging canvas bags solid and unmistakable” (385). They have dug deeper than “the science and pastime of skullduggery” (91), the shifty shell-game of bluffs and impostures that constitutes 141


the surface action of most of the novel; for once, then, their spades turn at something real. But “reality ‘independent’ of human thinking,” as James observes in “Pragmatism and Humanism,” is “a thing very hard to find”: “We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption. If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has already been faked” (119–20). The contents of the solid canvas bags turn out not to be real valuables but merely current coin, still in circulation. Thus Ratliff falls to the temptation of “real” estate, receiving his comeuppance from a competitor who appropriates his signature phrase (“Come up, rabbits,” [55]) in the last line of the novel—“‘Come up,’ he said.” (406)—at the very moment he assumes the former’s characteristic position on the buckboard. But Ratliff’s dispossession is also a recovery. No sooner does he comprehend his fall than he reascends to the surface, his return to life signaled by a resumption of the Homeric contests that constitute his vitality80: He laid his last coin down and sat back on his heels until Bookwright had finished. “1891,” he said. “1901,” Bookwright said, “I even got one that was made last year. You beat me.” “I beat you,” Ratliff said. He took up the two coins and they put the money back into the bags. They didn’t hide them. (400) Ratliff ends on the surface, treating his discovery not as the embodiment of true value but as tokens in a game in which what counts is not what the coins represent but the superficial and conventional inscription of a number, as both he and his money go back into circulation.

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4

Making History Pragmatic Historiography and Absalom, Absalom!

There’s no such thing as past either. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

By common critical consent, the sense of the past haunted Faulkner like an inexorable spirit. No writer was more historically conscious, more concerned with “something quite rare in American literature: a deep sense of the burdens and grandeur of history.”1 “It is hard to think of an author whose own imagination is as deeply implicated in historical fact, or the appearance of historical fact, as is Faulkner’s.”2 His novels are “drenched in history,” writes one critic;3 another, that he “was obsessed by history.”4 These increasingly violent metaphors make explicit what is implied by the very notion of the “burden of the past,” a burden which imposes a Herculean task of passively under-standing a world weighing on one’s head and back, constantly threatening to crush one beneath its objective immensity. Brooks’s image of drenching suggests a novelist drowned and swept away by the irresistible flood waters of historical inevitability, while to be “obsessed” is, literally, to be besieged— surrounded and under constant attack. History, that is, comes from the outside, like a powerful flood or an invading army, a massive external force to which the feeble individual can only react or respond, withstand or understand. Such a conception has long defined the critical image of Faulkner. The effect of such readings is to make Faulkner the quintessential embodiment of a southern literature that is defined, as against a naively optimistic northern tradition, by its “sense of the presence of the past, and with it, and through it, a personal access to a tragic vision”5—its consciousness of history as a burden and limitation on the present. To suggest that Faulkner should be understood in the context of pragmatism will require qualifying this reading, and arguing that his attitude toward history is not dominated by a tragic consciousness of the limitations 143


imposed by the unalterable truths of the past, or by a pious sense of responsibility to discover and understand history’s dark secrets. Instead I will argue that his novels embody a pragmatic historiography, which stresses the freedom and power of the present to use the past, which recognizes that the past, in fact, has always been the creation of the present. The individual does not stand under the burden of history; the individual is, and should recognize itself to be, that history’s origin. I will be making this argument by way of a reading of Faulkner’s most complex treatment of the question of history, Absalom, Absalom! But first I want to discuss pragmatism’s conception of history, beginning with its origins in Emerson and then focusing on James’s remarks on the meaning of historical knowledge. Emerson’s “History” occupies what should be a rather important position —it is the first essay of his first collection—but it has rarely received the close attention afforded to some of his other works.6 Part of the reason may be the oracular opening sentence, “There is one mind common to all individual men,”7 which immediately suggests that the essay will belong among the expressions of Emerson’s more Transcendental moods, and that its primary focus is the eternal and unchanging Oversoul that lies behind the illusory surface of historical phenomena, a “common mind” or cosmic consciousness which merges personal identity into universal wisdom. But two sentences later Emerson is offering something rather different: “He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate” (237). Emerson’s transition rides on the implicit semantic duplicity in the word common; before the reader is fully aware of it, the abstract philosophical category is translated into an open tract of real estate set aside for general usufruct. Whereas the first sentence of “History” implies the disappearance of the individual self into an ontologically primary common mind, the later one suggests that the common mind exists only for the sake of that self, for its use as it assumes all the personae in the drama of history: “What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand” (237). The first target of “History” is then the conception of history as a limitation on the individual or a burden on the present. But insofar as such a limitation or burden is inherent in the very notion of “the past,” what Emerson will later call in a genial pun “the preposterous There or Then,” must itself be called into question. In an age that increasingly looked to 144

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history for a definition of the essence of human being, Emerson’s argument is not without audacity. The very title of the essay is ironic, a rhetorical bait-and-switch like that which constitutes so many of Emerson’s works. “History” is really about the unreality of the conventional conception of “history.” Historical figures and events are not the real components of an ideal dimension which we approach through the mediation of the written record. Rather, history is the collection of images or impersonations available for the embodying of our own present concerns: “We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. . . . The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” (238–39). To read actively means not to look for how it actually was but to construct a history that refers to and gives potential to the present. The value of such a history resides not in any representational adequacy but in its contribution to the possibilities of current action. The true location of history is therefore the present. “There or Then,” taken literally, is “pre-posterous”—it treats what comes after as what comes before, imagining that the projection of the present is that present’s predecessor. But to say that history exists only in the present is a poor external way of speaking if it suggests that it resides there as an entity or an idea. History has meaning only insofar as it is put to use in the creation of possible futures: “The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction” (240). This passage is usually read as an attack on the distinction between realistic representation and imaginative creation, or in more contemporary terms, as a recognition of the inevitably constructed nature of veridical discourse, and that Emerson is arguing that “annals” are only “poems” that deny their fabricated status. But a careful reading suggests his point is slightly different. The difference between fact and fiction is that fact is static, while fiction is in motion. A fact, as its etymology suggests, is a “factum,” something done, while fiction is originally a process of doing, and only secondarily an illusory product of that process. The “solid angularity of facts” immediately calls to mind a machinery of immobilization and limitation—anchors, cables, fences—which is already 145


implied by the very notion of the “past” and of its correct representation. To think of history as fiction does not mean, for Emerson, to think of it as an image whose truth value has been bracketed, but to think of it as something in motion, as a process which never comes to a stop but is always extended into the future—as a passing which never becomes a passed/past. The wording is vital: Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and early Rome are not now fictions; they are “passing” into fiction, because fiction is the process of that passing. The fictions of the past, if they are to be put in motion, must be used, and it is the “use” made of the narrations of history that counts, not their representational value, as Emerson emphasizes once again by way of a crucial but easily missed pun. The narrations are “signal,” that is, they deal with the notable events of history, but they are first and foremost signs of direction, pointing to a future, as is made clear a few sentences later: “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?” Like constellations, historical facts are fabricated figures, subjectively organized for purposes situational and navigational.8 To say that history is fiction, then, is to say that it exists in its uses (and abuses) for life. Hence the most quoted—and misunderstood—section of “History”: “We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know” (240). As Emerson’s phrasing hints, the use of the facts of history in private experience cannot be clearly demarcated from their creation. To “come up with” suggests invention or fabrication as much as discovery, and “verify” in this context seems to take on the active sense of James’s notion of “veri-fication,” the active making of truth.9 One way to read the famous declaration that “there is properly no history; only biography” is not as an assertion that a natural correspondence exists between the story of civilization and the life cycle of the individual, but as a claim that the putting together of a history is only a part of the putting together of a life, and that to allow the “objective” histories of others to impose definitions and limitations on one’s own life is, properly, something closer to a preposterous logical confusion than to a moral error. Such an emphasis on the freedom of the individual’s use of history implies nothing if not considerable impiety toward the past, and Emerson’s 146

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example of historical work suggests that he is willing to take that freedom and that impiety very far: “All inquiry into antiquity . . . is the desire to do away with this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself” (241). Emerson’s example is not casual. Giovanni Battista Belzoni was, even in his own time, hardly the model of the conscientious archeologist. A former circus strong man, Belzoni gained celebrity for sensational excavations of Egyptian sites, which consisted essentially of smashing open temples and tombs, running roughshod over the less valuable artifacts, and carrying off the most spectacular items for sale to European museums. As one historian remarks, his methods entailed “more destruction than discovery. Whatever knowledge was incidentally acquired was more than negated by the damage done.”10 Emerson can hardly be suggesting that such “discoveries” represent the “true Egypt,” or any truth whatsoever. What Belzoni found, rather, was the reflected image of his own “monstrous work” of rapacious destruction and radical reconstruction—his own combination of showy grandiosity and brutal violence. Emerson’s seriously proposing Belzoni as his model of the right way to approach history is a characteristic instance of his willingness to back up his arguments with what, to a nervous reader, can only too easily look like their refutations. Acknowledging that history is nothing other than its uses entails accepting a radically relativistic attitude. The scholarly archaeologist or morally responsible historian, in other words, is only a Belzoni who is anxious to deny the violence of his own excavations and the self-interested nature of his interpretations as he detaches the elements of the past and puts them together in his own intellectual museum. History, for Emerson, is simply a text, and, as Barbara Packer has observed, “self-reliance is to him first of all what it was to his Protestant ancestors: the liberty to interpret texts according to the Spirit.”11 The reference to Belzoni is also connected with the final aspect of Emerson’s conception of history that needs to be considered. The metaphor that ultimately underlies Emerson’s conception of history is that of the theater or masquerade. The similarities between the model of the self that is celebrated in all of Emerson’s essays—mobile and mutable, constantly in transition, constructing itself in and through its “acts”—and other contemporaneous American versions of the shifty, metamorphic, and performing self—the Jacksonian self-made man, the jack-of-all147


trades, the pioneer, the confidence man—has been noted before.12 Melville shrewdly recognized the theatrical dimension of the Emersonian self’s restless masquerades, its constant taking on and discarding of new roles, beneath which the actor remains forever unknown, when he made a version of Emerson one of the central characters in his most theatrical novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade,13 reading Olympian impersonality as Infernal impersonation. This theatrical vision of the self is intimately related to the conception of history offered in “History.” The individual approaches the figures, events, and episodes of history as possibilities of identification and personae with which to experiment. Thus Emerson’s description of the reading of history is couched in terms of “becoming”: “We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner” (238). His instructions on historical understanding suggest an actor’s preparation for a role, a kind of proto-Method technique: “So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More. . . . We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like” (240–41). Emerson’s favored metaphor for the past and its artifacts is the “mask”: “Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, ‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself’”; “Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature”; “All the fictions of the Middle Ages explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve” (238, 242, 253). To see history under the aspect of the mask is to see it as essentially theatrical, as a costume drama in the truest and most positive sense—a wardrobe of outfits and personae for the self to assume and abandon at will—and Emerson’s final vision of history is as a fantastic costume, a wardrobe in itself, willfully and idiosyncratically put together out of heterogeneous pieces of pagan legend, sacred story, and secular history: “History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and experiences;—his own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest” (255). The past, then, is a masque of masks. Fortuitously, mask bears a curi148

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ous resemblance to the medieval Latin word mascus, meaning “specter” or “ghost”; while no direct etymological link has been demonstrated, as the OED remarks, “it is difficult to believe” that “masque,” the French original of “mask,” is unconnected with the Latin term. But it is not necessary to rely on philological speculations to recognize the link between the ghost and the theatrical mask or persona. The mask is the spectral presence of the absent, the walking apparition of one who is not there, the inanimate uncannily brought to life—in this sense all masks are death masks. This connection should not lead to a mystification of the theater so much as to a demystification of death, or more accurately of the belief that the dead must haunt us like a ghostly external reality, a nightmarish burden weighing upon the brains of the living and determining our future. To recognize that the specter is only a mask that the self puts on to figure forth its own interests and desires is to recognize that it is not an external force but the self haunting itself, returning to itself as a reve nant, wearing the mask of difference. In some sense, history has always been conceived on the model of the ghost story, as Michelet’s famous metaphor of resurrection suggests; one way of describing what Emerson is doing in “History” is to say that he is demystifying the ghost story of history, exposing the ghosts of the past as masked images of our present interests and purposes. As in so many other regards, Emerson’s thought seems to lie behind the conception of the ontological status and the existential functions of history which will be developed by James. James has not normally been regarded as a philosopher of history, and it is not uncommon for commentators to criticize him precisely for his neglect of the past, his failure to achieve an adequate historical consciousness. The implication is that James’s pragmatism does not have a conception of history, but only a gaping hole where such a conception should be, indicative of an inability even to recognize the fact of his own neglect. But a closer reading indicates that James did not simply ignore history; his critique of representational thought in general applies equally to thinking about history, as he would eventually make clear in detail in two brief late essays. Descriptions of the past, like all other descriptions, must be understood as teleological projects aimed at the satisfaction of individual need and interest. In his earliest consideration of historic truth, in the 1904 essay “Humanism and Truth,” James argues that “the common-sense notion of permanent beings” existing in a past continuous with the present and future is ultimately the result of our desire to form an explanatory “system which it is obviously advantageous to us 149


to get into a stable and consistent shape”: “Tho our discovery of [any conceptual object] may only date from now, we unhesitatingly say that it not only is, but was there, if by so saying, the past appears more connected consistently with what we feel the present to be. This is historic truth. Moses wrote the Pentateuch, we think, because if he didn’t, all our religious habits would have to be undone. Julius Caesar was real, or we can never listen to history again. . . . In all this, it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting on another so as to yield the most satisfactory state of mind.”14 What is most clear in this endorsement of the reality of the past is its highly conditional nature; we are justified in any beliefs about history not because of the self-evidence of memory or because of the metaphysical guarantee of temporal continuity, but because those beliefs are necessitated by certain feelings, states of mind, and activities in the present—or, as James argues in the next paragraph, “at each and every concrete moment, truth for each man is what that man troweth at that moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself.”15 The wish to leave our religious habits intact guarantees that Moses wrote the Pentateuch; if our attitude toward those habits were different, so would our opinions about Moses. Similarly, it is our belief in the general reliability of our historical accounts which guarantees the existence of Julius Caesar, not vice versa. In short, it is the purposes of the present, the wish for “the most satisfactory state of mind,” that gives rise to whatever reality the past can lay claim to. Even though James devoted little extended attention to the topic of history as such, knowledge of the past in fact offers a somewhat privileged example of the meaning of “pragmatism’s conception of truth,” since “with the past, tho we suppose ourselves to know it truly, we have no practical relations at all.”16 In “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” in fact, right after rejecting the copy-view of knowledge, James offers the case of historical truth, since it is perhaps the most indisputable instance in which the object of an idea is necessarily and forever unavailable: “The overwhelming majority of our true ideas admit of no direct or face-to-face verification—those of past history, for example, as of Cain and Abel. The stream of time can be remounted only verbally, or verified indirectly by the present prolongations or effects of what the past harbored. Yet if they agree with these verbalities and effects, we can know that our ideas of the past are true. As true as past time itself was, so true was Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian monsters, all in their proper dates and settings. That past time itself was, is guaranteed by 150

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its coherence with everything that’s present. True as the present is, the past was also.”17 James’s tone here sounds reassuring about the likelihood of general agreement on what will count as historical fact, but his slyly offhand insinuation of Cain and Abel into a position of historicity equal to that of Julius Caesar registers his awareness of how contingent an affair such agreement is. In fact, the status of all these truths seems deeply questionable. A few pages earlier James was arguing that “our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But all this points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever”; here he admits quite frankly that “direct face-to-face verifications” of history are simply impossible. The concluding “guarantee” that the present offers for the very existence of the past is equally ambiguous, since one of the central arguments of the essay is that present truth can only be decided in the future, in the workings and consequences of particular ideas or descriptions for our “practical interests or personal reasons,”18 and that “truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”19 The implication of the final sentence is therefore not so much that the past is no less true than the present, but that it is no more so—that it also is “only the expedient in our way of thinking.”20 In the following essay in Pragmatism, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” James takes up a specific example of historical truth in the course of arguing that “what we say about reality . . . depends on the perspective into which we throw it”: “We read the same facts differently. ‘Waterloo,’ with the same fixed details, spells a ‘victory’ for an englishman; for a frenchman it spells a ‘defeat.’ So, for an optimist philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.” 21 What is particularly important about this passage is that James for the first time makes explicit what was already latent in his earlier reference to Cain and Abel, and for that matter to antediluvian monsters: the truth of the past may not be only a hypothetical problem, but an actual disagreement between actual individuals. James’s most extended discussion of history is to be found in the two short essays “The Existence of Julius Caesar” and “A Dialogue.”22 In the first, the example of historical description serves again to emphasize the epistemological dilemmas raised by correspondence theory. Given the necessary absence of the referent of a statement like “Caesar really existed,” what guarantees success of the reference, the correlation of 151


statement and fact? “To fill out the complete measure of what the epithet ‘true’ may ideally mean, my thought ought to bear a fully determinate and unambiguous ‘one-to-one relation’ to its own particular object. In the ultra-simple universe imagined the reference is uncertified. Were there two Caesars we shouldn’t know which was meant.”23 The pragmatic solution is that the statement’s truth consists not in its reference, but in its workings and effects—or more precisely, in the convergence of the effects of the statement and the effects of the fact: “Caesar had, and my statement has, effects; and if these effects in any way run together, a concrete medium and bottom is provided for the determinate cognitive relation, which, as pure actio in distans, seemed to float too vaguely and unintelligibly.”24 The seemingly paradoxical upshot of this argument is that the truth of a statement about historical events or figures is determined by nothing in the past, but rather by the consequences of that statement in the present and the future—or, as James’s exasperated antagonist complains, “Caesar’s existence, a truth already 2000 years old, [depends] for its truth on [something] about to happen now,” and the acknowledgment of that truth is “made true by the acknowledgment’s own effects.”25 The final essay in The Meaning of Truth is a short piece called “A Dialogue,” which invokes once more the question of knowledge of the past, this time of “antediluvian planetary history,” in order to refute the notion that truth is independent of any particular, or even possible, knower. The anti-pragmatist asserts the claim of “common sense” that such truth does exist, as a “sort of mental equivalent for [the facts], their epistemological function, their value in noetic terms.”26 James’s stand-in attacks the mysterious “status of this so-called truth, hanging as it does between earth and heaven, between reality and knowledge, grounded in reality, yet numerically additional to it, and at the same time antecedent to any knower’s opinion and entirely independent thereof,” a truth which in the absence of possible knowers “would not only be non-existent, it would be unimaginable, inconceivable.”27 But this “so-called truth” is not simply a metaphysical red herring; it seems to represent an actual danger. At one highly interesting moment in the dialogue the pragmatist exclaims that it is a “sort of spiritual double or ghost of [the facts], apparently!” He then proceeds to co-opt his antagonist’s vocabulary, retaining the possibility of “truth” but redefining it in pragmatist fashion, to mean what the knower must believe in order to be brought “into satisfactory rela-

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tions” with the fact. The truth of unknown prehistory, then, like that of recorded history, exists in the present and the future. I have been surveying James’s discussions of the past to try to demonstrate that he did not simply ignore history, but that he refused to assign it an ontological status outside of or independent of the personal needs and interests of the individual in the present. His comments on history essentially extend what he says, for example, in “Professor Hébert on Pragmatism” on realities in general: “Realities in themselves can be there for anyone, whether pragmatist or anti-pragmatist, only by being believed; they are believed only by their notions appearing true; and their notions appear true only because they work satisfactorily.”28 History, in other words, does not constitute an ultimate horizon or background to the self. The principle of veri-fication applies as much to the truths of the past as to any others; the human past, like the world in general, “stands really malleable” to the energetic and desiring will, because the real location of the past is the future, in the effects of present action. The continuity between the philosophy of history presented by Emerson and that which can be assembled from James’s writings is compelling. James’s careful study of his predecessor is well known, and his personal copies of Emerson’s works in the Widener Library at Harvard are extensively underlined, annotated, and indexed.29 One of the things that James’s annotations make clear is his sympathetic response to Emerson’s rejection of the notion that the past should be an antecedent limitation on the individual. He listed approvingly numerous references to passages in the latter’s essays under the titles “the present tense,” “now,” and “to-day.” Even more suggestive is another index heading, “the I creates its own history.”30 Emerson presented his thoughts on history in the form of moral exhortation, while James offered his arguments as resolutions to epistemological dilemmas, but what they share is the conviction that the past was not to be seen as a burden, as something external and intractable to the will and desires of the individual, but as both a projection and a project of the self. Their motivations lay above all in a rejection of any conception of history that curtailed such action and creativity, that held the threat, for Emerson, of containment and passivity, and for James, of stasis and paralysis. For both, that meant seeing in history not something alien and different, but the return of the self under the mask of the other. And for both, that meant a change in how one conceives of knowledge of history; the truth of the past is not

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something to be discovered, recognized, exposed, or even understood, but to be used, and created in that use. Emerson’s reference to the “use we make of the signal narrations of history” points forward to James’s declaration, immediately after his discussion of “true ideas” of past history in “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” that truth is a “leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important”;31 as for Emerson, the truth of descriptions of the past lies not in accuracy, but in their use as signals, signs of direction. Finally, there is one more thing that connects Emerson’s and James’s conceptions of history. I have argued that Emerson’s essay can be read, at one level, as an attempt to demystify the ghost story of history, to expose the attitude of submission to the burden of the past as an acceptance of the power of the mighty (un)dead, of their living-on as something more than the phantasmatic masks of the interests of the present. Emerson, in effect, was suggesting that history had hitherto been conceived of as a gothic novel, in which an all-powerful father holds a child enthralled and imprisoned in a state of terrified paralysis. I now want to propose that such a reading of the essentially gothic structure of traditional philosophy as a whole is what underlies James’s critique of correspondence epistemologies and, by extension, his attack on conventional thinking about the nature of historical truth. Once again, it is suggestive to locate James’s philosophical development in its familial context. It has been frequently observed that gothic themes and obsessions play a peculiarly central role in the American literary and intellectual imagination, but nowhere do gothic structures seem more literalized than in the household which produced William, Henry, and Alice James. Henry James Sr. exerted a massively oppressive and constricting influence on his children’s lives, in spite, and even because, of his overt benevolence. The result was a peculiar and problematic familial pattern, characterized by an overbearing paternal figure and children passive and constrained, sometimes to the point of paralysis— all gathered together in a “dark house” which proved difficult to escape.32 The pattern is recognizable: it is that of the gothic novel, with its powerful father keeping a weak protagonist imprisoned in a condition of enervating fear—trapped in that “anxiety with no possibility of escape” which Mario Praz defined as the “main theme of the Gothic tales.”33 It was as a gothic tale, I would suggest, that William, Henry, and Alice James ultimately, if unconsciously, understood and constructed their familial experience, each in a different mode. Henry Jr. would become 154

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himself a writer of gothic fictions which often have strikingly autobiographical elements. Alice wrote, as it were, gothic tales on the text of her own body, suffering from a succession of disabling illnesses, with no apparent physical explanation, that kept her as effectively imprisoned in her father’s house as any heroine of Walpole or Radcliffe.34 But William may represent the most interesting case, since he both read his own life through the patterns and figures of the gothic and, I suggest, used them as a basis for his creative rewriting of the metaphors of contemporary philosophy. Like Alice, if to a more moderate degree, William lived out the trials of a gothic protagonist—in the years of his early adulthood he felt condemned to inactivity by debilitating physical disorders and an intractable sense of paralysis of the will. I have argued in a previous chapter that these symptoms, like those of his siblings, were intimately connected to his relation to a father who seemed impossible to satisfy—to a past to which it was impossible to respond adequately, which imposed an unbearable burden. Such a failure to under-stand the past is literally the origin of the gothic—the very first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, opens with a scene in which a son is crushed beneath a gigantic helmet, too large for any human to bear—“dashed to pieces and almost buried beneath it.”35 One of William’s complaints, it is worth noting, was a recurrent sore back, with no apparent physical explanation—a problem he shared with his brother Henry, whose own condition he once referred to as “dorsal insanity.”36 An even more striking example of William’s reading of his own life through the frames provided by the gothic novel is the panic fear episode of 1870. The gothic features of his description of the image of the epileptic patient are powerful enough: imagining himself in the dark confines of an asylum, he sees a “black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic. . . . like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human.” This passage could have been lifted directly out of a gothic description of a demonic figure or monster; in fact a possible source might be Victor Frankenstein’s description of his creation in chapter 5 of Frankenstein. After laboring all night to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” he finally sees “the dull yellow eye of the creature open. . . . His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black. . . . No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.”37 The enervated re155


sponses of Frankenstein and James are similar: the former “passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness,”38 while for James “it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear.” Finally, as every reader notices, Frankenstein and his creature are really doubles; James, for his part, explicitly recognizes his identification with his creature: “This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially.”39 But the gothic provided not only the frame through which James read his own life but the metaphorics by whose means he de- and re-constructed philosophy as well. I have already argued that James’s pragmatic emphasis on the active power of the individual will and its conception of truth as something made, not corresponded to, is connected to his fear of a paralysis that was, at one level, associated with the constricting consequences of a powerful paternal influence. I now want to refine that claim by arguing that his intellectual innovations should be seen as a rewriting of philosophical concepts in tropes and archetypes specifically drawn from the gothic. His early defense of the subjective method and the legitimacy of the will to believe needs to be read in terms of a reaction against what he interpreted as the castle of doubt in which the dominant philosophers of his time sought to imprison the mind, and the images that structure his thought come directly out of the gothic. At the climactic conclusion of “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” which also becomes the end of “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1897), for example, he protests against the philosophers who would “close in upon me and steadily negate the deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command that I shall stir neither hand nor foot,” and he decries the fact that “thousands of innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.” The philosophical position against which he is arguing is conceived, in gothic terms, as an oppressive and constricting paternal force, whose image of truth and reality is only another name for what is effectively imprisonment, and against which he desperately desired a redefinition of truth in terms of action, freedom, and the future. The rhetoric of his own essays suggests that, for James, the correspondence theory of knowledge, the “copy-view,” with its claim that we are limited to properly representing the real, was only 156

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too clearly another version of a system that required that the son copy or re-produce the father, that the present re-present the past. A “static” epistemology based on representation thus amounted to incarceration in the exitless house of truth. If the gothic provides the structure and figures by which James rewrote philosophy, his attitude toward history becomes particularly significant. For the theme of the gothic was not simply the oppression of child by parent, but of the present by a past that refused to die. The notion of history is fundamental to the gothic novel, which made “the past an essential subject of fiction for the first time.”40 More specifically, its subject is the weight of the past—literally so in the case of The Castle of Otranto, whose giant helmet symbolizes the only slightly less material influence of Manfred, and behind him of a family curse that ultimately directs the plot. In later examples, that weight will be defined as the enduring oppression of a feudal past, from which the bourgeois protagonist struggles to be free. But the characteristic feature of the gothic is the ineluctable suspicion that “the past, even dead, especially dead, could continue to work harm”41—that history, in short, was indeed a ghost story, a spectral dimension populated by beings exercising an oppressive and irresistible influence. James’s critique of the past as something other than the projection of the present, as a real external pressure in its own right, is therefore of a piece with his resistance to any philosophy that would posit reality as something standing over against the self. Such an image is not simply a supernumerary theoretical entity but a positive threat, a potential source of terror and paralysis. It would seem to be no accident, then, when the “Pragmatist” in “A Dialogue” describes his opponent’s definition of historical truth as representing “a sort of spiritual double or ghost.”42 James wants to demystify the past by exposing those phantoms as our own projections; like Emerson he wants to turn the mascus of There and Then into the masca of Here and Now, to expose the specters of history as having been, all along, our own impersonations. Whether or not Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s greatest novel, it seems clear that it is his greatest historical novel, and most readers have agreed that it represents “an exploration of unprecedented depth and scope into the meaning of history.”43 The burden of history in the novel is normally construed as one of understanding, a work of knowing to which the reader is bound, by the compelling complexity of the novel’s own 157


technical construction, fully as much as are the successive narrators. Comparisons to the detective story have been common from the beginning.44 But Absalom, Absalom! is not just a detective story; it is really a locked-room detective story, a form which, as John T. Irwin has suggested, presents us “with a physical embodiment, a concrete spatialization” of the “mechanism of logical inclusion/exclusion.”45 To read the novel is to engage in the quest that frames the story, leading from the enclosed room where Rosa Coldfield imposes her mission on Quentin to the even more enclosed room at Sutpen’s Hundred where he confronts the ghostlike remnant that is Henry Sutpen, a quest which takes the form of an extended series of questions, proceeding from Quentin’s irritated expostulation in the opening pages, “But why tell me about it?” (7)46 to his equally exasperated nonanswer that closes the book. The novel seems to be obsessed with the “truth of history,” although precisely what that phrase is taken to denote may vary. The first and simplest truth involves just what the actual facts of Thomas Sutpen’s mysterious story are—an issue which, given the inconsistencies and ellipses in the accounts that are offered, has generated a considerable amount of contention.47 The next truth would be that of the history of the South (or in a later variant, of the history of America), for which Sutpen’s biography is only a synecdoche.48 Finally, that truth may be the truth of history as an inescapable dimension of human existence in general, and the necessity, for both Quentin and the reader, of recognizing and submitting to that fact.49 Not unnaturally for a book which highlights the modalities of its narration as much as it does the meaning of its narrative, a great deal of attention has also been devoted to the issue of historical interpretation as such, and to how the various narrators reconstruct the past, rather than to the accuracy of that reconstruction.50 For some, that reconstruction proves to be successful, as the novel proceeds through a sequence of progressively more adequate and meaningful narrations toward a consummation symbolized in the figure of “marriage,” in particular what the narrator describes as “that happy marriage of speaking and hearing” apparently achieved by Shreve and Quentin, “wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other. . . . in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false” (253). For others, the reconstruction will fail, and in fact the inevitability of that failure has been read as the very theme of the novel.51 158

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As I hope this far-from-complete review has begun to indicate, the critical record suggests widespread agreement with Peter Brooks’s claim that “Absalom, Absalom! seems to pose with acute force problems in the epistemology of narrative.”52 There seems to be no epistemological position, or variation on a position, that someone has not seen as the novel’s ultimate “philosophy of knowledge.” The truly disturbing thing, however, is not the inadequacy of any of these particular theses, but rather the fact that there appears to be no very good reason for preferring one over another. Like the novel itself, the critical debate gives the impression that it could go on forever, without ever moving beyond the confines of the room in which it began. What I want to argue, on the contrary, is that the novel is not really about “problems in the epistemology of narrative,” problems in the epistemology of history, or problems in epistemology at all. It is not about the discovery of the truth of history, or about the discovery of the impossibility of that discovery; it is not about the comparative value of rational, imaginative, or communal historiographical interpretation. Rather, the best way to understand Absalom, Absalom! is as an example of an “evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy”;53 more precisely, its fundamental philosophical orientation is pragmatic. What appears as a quest is really better understood as a performance, or rather a series of performances, as each in the succession of narrators appears on stage and raises the curtain on a drama which consists of the gradual raising of curtains, pressing toward the promise of a final revelation. Each narrator mounts a melodrama dominated by what could be called the ideology of the secret, the overpowering sense of the immense significance of something hidden, concealed, or absent. Put in the crudest and simplest fashion, my argument is that there is no secret to the story of Thomas Sutpen, or to Absalom, Absalom!: what there is instead is the illusion of a secret manipulated by successive narrators, each of whom uses that illusion to advance his or her interests, to maintain his or her centrality, by means of privileged personal access to that secret. In particular, the secret they are controlling is the secret of history. Virtually without exception, readings of Absalom, Absalom! assume that the novel is centrally concerned with uncovering the truth of the past, recognizing, responding to, or taking responsibility for it in some way. It is the past that will explain the present to itself, insofar as it is the location of the tremendous and usually traumatic events or scenes whose unconscious immensity impends upon the current moment and whose con159


tinuing reverberations determine the directions of the future. There is a parallel between this notion of history and psychoanalytic assumptions about the structure of personal biography; the connecting element is the idea of repression of memory, the notion that whatever is most important and most true is, almost by definition, concealed, and that the task of the interpreter is to heal the sick by exposing that concealment and by telling, at long last, the truth. The meaning of the novel then becomes Quentin’s need to cure himself by confronting and coming to terms with that traumatic historical event, understanding and accepting the burden it imposes, whether the event be identified with Sutpen’s rise,54 slavery, or the southern system, or perhaps “human frailty and evil” in general.55 It is important for my argument to emphasize the parallel between this notion of history—with its definition of the task of the historian as the uncovering of the hidden, buried, or repressed past, as being true and adequate to history—and the notion of truth as a matter of corresponding to or being adequate to reality. The idea of historical consciousness, like the idea of epistemological objectivity, has generally been treated as simultaneously an intellectual and a moral imperative. As William James recognized that the injunction to expunge the willful distortions of subjective desire from epistemology was ultimately an ethical demand, so the injunction to uncover the truth of the past is equally presented in terms of duty. The common element is the sense of responsibility to what is external to one’s self, whether the ground of reality or the burden of the past. In the same way that the idea is not independent but must refer back to the thing, so the present must refer back to the past. What I want to argue is that Absalom, Absalom! does not refer to the past, and that the narrators are not engaged in uncovering history but in constructing versions that serve their own present needs and interests. They recognize, like Emerson, that all historical accounts are subjective creations and have meaning only insofar as they are used—that they refer to the future, not to the past; likewise all historical figures are impersonations that one can adopt, characters that one can identify with insofar as that identification contributes to one’s own life. And they recognize, like James, that an obsession with uncovering the truth of the past is another form of the paralysis imposed by the “copy-view.” To begin with, the history that all the narrators are focused on, the story of Thomas Sutpen, is above all a story of impersonation, a story which is itself about making up a story. It is not only the narrators who are telling a story that may have “no ‘objective’ existence”;56 Sutpen him160

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self is the first narrator of his own life, and in fact his life is one long narrative impersonation. Indeed, the figure who “came out of nowhere and without warning” (5), who “rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his land no one knew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out of nothing” (7) bears a distinct resemblance to another self-made man who bursts suddenly onto the southwestern frontier— Simon Suggs. Both men, for example, begin their careers in the (then) Southwest—Suggs in Alabama, Sutpen in neighboring Mississippi—in the same year, 1833, after an extended and deeply obscure period of wandering, sometime during which a marriage appears to have taken place. Suggs’s whereabouts and activities in this time are submerged in “doubt, uncertainty, and vague speculation,” for “the Captain chooses to be silent on the subject, and it does not become his friends to press him with questions”;57 Sutpen arrives in Jefferson as a man “without any past that he cared to discuss” (11). Both Captain Suggs and Colonel Sutpen rise from intentionally obscure beginnings to social authority and military rank. Like Suggs, Sutpen is an expert at making something out of nothing; repeatedly he is described as a man who comes from “nowhere” (5, 10, 13) and who calls up an estate and an identity out of nothing (4, 7): “Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light” (4). This packed sentence, bringing together card sharp and Cosmocrator, boldly points to the operation of divine creation ex nihilo that links the enterprises of Sutpen and Suggs—Sutpen’s project has something in common with that of God, but only to the extent that God’s has something in common with that of Simon Suggs. And as the description of Sutpen’s act of creation reminds us, he, like Suggs (and like God, perhaps) is a relentless gambler, literally and metaphorically.58 Finally, both are defined above all by the shifty theatricality of their identities. Brooks at one point describes Thomas Sutpen as an “imaginative construct,”59 but we need to remember that it is Sutpen who is the most important constructor. No less than Suggs, Sutpen is always playing a role; even at his first appearance in Jefferson, his beard already resembles a “disguise” (24).60 To Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson suggests, his face looks like “the mask in Greek tragedy interchangeable not only from scene 161


to scene but from actor to actor” (49). Later he is repeatedly described as “acting [a] role”: “He accomplished this—got his plantation to running smoothly . . . within ten years of the wedding, and now he acted his role too—a role of arrogant ease and leisure which, as the leisure and ease put flesh on him, became a little pompous . . . though . . . while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony—the stage manager, call him what you will—was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shapes of the next one” (56–57). What General Compson refers to as Sutpen’s “pristine aptitude for platform drama” (198) turns his own life into a theatrical performance, so that he can recount his biography as though he were “just telling a story about something a man named Thomas Sutpen had experienced” (199); Haiti seems to him “a theatre for violence and injustice and bloodshed” and his adventures during the slave revolt “a spectacle, something to be watched because he might not have a chance to see such again” (202, 201). Shreve quickly recognizes the inherent theatricality of Sutpen’s story, declaring that “[the South is] better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better that Ben Hur, isn’t it” (176), and imagining Wash Jones addressing Sutpen like “the voice of the faithful grave-digger who opened the play and would close it, coming out of the wings like Shakespeare’s very self” (225). But the important thing is not the possibility of an identification of Sutpen with a particular literary character,61 but the recognition that Sutpen needs to be read in the tradition of the literary confidence man. Like the latter, Sutpen is not merely making his fortune but making himself at the same time, calling himself into existence by a gesture of pure confidence, a will to believe that simultaneously brings into being a corresponding community to reflect his self-representation. As Rosa Coldfield observes, “He sought the guarantee of reputable men to barricade him from the other and later strangers who might come seeking him in turn, and Jefferson gave him that” (9). By marrying into the poor but reputable Coldfield family, he enters into the mutually supporting system of confidence that composes his community, because “all he would need would be Ellen’s and our father’s names on a wedding license (or on any other patent of respectability) that people could look at and read just as he would have wanted our father’s (or any other reputable man’s) signature on a note of hand because our father knew who his father was in Tennessee and who his grandfather had been in Virginia and our neighbors and the people we lived among knew that we knew and we knew that they 162

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would have believed us about who and where we came from even if we had lied” (11). Sutpen’s relentless pursuit of “respectability” is reminiscent of that of another Faulknerian impersonator, Flem Snopes, whose journey to the center of his social world is a kind of divinely comic parody of the former’s tragic ascent.62 Sutpen thus needs to be seen as a confidence man, the first in the line of narrators of his own life,63 making it up as he goes along, and like his successors he is acutely aware of the fictional status of his own construction, as well as of the crucial complicity of his audience in the viability of that construction. His mansion is first and foremost a metaphor of his own constructive enterprise, a facade or stage setting for his performance. The elaborate exterior of the house turns it into a southern mansion out of a musty melodrama or plantation novel, “surrounded by its formal gardens and promenades, its slave quarters and stables and smokehouses” (29), but for three years after its construction it stands unfurnished and empty, a “shell of a house” (31).64 The opposition of exterior and interior is what is crucial here; Sutpen is not constructing a house so much as he is constructing that very distinction. What compels Sutpen’s imagination is not what the house contains, the content of wealth, power, and privilege, but the desperate desire simply to be included, to be inside the (white) door and the confines of the house, as he struggles to articulate to General Compson: “the boy-symbol at the door wasn’t it because the boy-symbol was just the figment of the amazed and desperate child . . . now he would take that boy in where he would never again need to stand on the outside of a white door and knock at it; and not at all for the mere shelter but so that that boy, that whatever nameless stranger, could shut that door himself forever behind him on all that he had ever known” (210). The recurrent description of Sutpen’s project as his “design,” in fact, seems to carry some of the original sense of the Latin root, designare—to mark or trace out space, as for a city or temple. But the distinction between inside and outside is also the distinction between the visible and the concealed, the known and unknown, and by erecting the wall that makes that distinction Sutpen is also making a space of darkness, concealment, and secrecy. Sutpen is not the only one to appreciate the secretive quality of houses; Rosa at one point speaks of “the lost irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses, all enclosed walls erected by human hands, not for shelter, not for warmth, but to hide from the world’s curious looking and seeing the dark turnings 163


which the ancient young delusions of pride and hope and ambition (ay, and love too) take” (109–10). I will have more to say about how all the narrators are less interested in discovering secrets than in building secrecy; for now it is sufficient to note that Sutpen is once again the model for his own historians. Secrecy is not simply, as Sutpen would put it, “adjunctive,” but somehow seems to be of the very essence of his design of darkness, as Rosa Coldfield shrewdly intuits when she repeatedly describes his enterprise in terms of concealment: [Sutpen was] a man who fled here and hid, concealed himself behind respectability, behind that hundred miles of land which he took from a tribe of ignorant Indians, nobody knows how, and a house the size of a courthouse where he lived for three years without a window or door or bedstead in it and still called it Sutpen’s Hundred as if it had been a King’s grant in unbroken perpetuity from his great grandfather—a home, position: a wife and family which, being necessary to concealment, he accepted along with the rest of respectability as he would have accepted the necessary discomfort and even pain of the briers and thorns in a thicket if the thicket could have given him the protection he sought. (10–11) This last passage also points to another essential aspect of Sutpen’s design: the structure that he builds in the present has, as a necessary dimension, a past. He “called it Sutpen’s Hundred as if it had been a King’s grant in unbroken perpetuity from his great grandfather.” This is the final and most important way in which Sutpen represents the first in a succession of narrators: he also is engaged in an activity of making history, making a past that will serve particular interests in the present. To produce the desired effects on most of the community, a combination of mystery and grandiosity appears to serve his purpose. Already an astute aristocrat, Sutpen leaves his origins in obscurity while behaving as though his position and property were the gifts of “unbroken perpetuity.” However, with another “aristocrat,” General Compson, he is ready to share class secrets, and to present quite another image of his past in the tale he tells in chapter 7. This story, describing his rebuff by the “monkey-dressed nigger butler” who bars his entry into the plantation house where his father has sent him with a message—the critical event which sets him on his career of self-advancement—concentrates on Sutpen’s discovery of the sheer conventionality of social authority, the shocking revelation that “the ones who owned the objects not only could look down on the 164

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ones that didn’t, but could be supported in the down-looking not only by the others who owned objects too but by the very ones that were looked down upon that didn’t own objects and knew they never would” (179). General Compson, it would appear, is receptive to the political realism of this account, as well as to the story of Sutpen’s determination in the pursuit of his goal—his own grandfather had, after all, arrived in Jefferson in 1811 with, like Sutpen, “a pair of fine pistols and one meagre saddlebag,” according to the appendix in The Sound and the Fury. He is also, no doubt, flattered to be let into Sutpen’s secrets; it is repeatedly emphasized that General Compson has exclusive knowledge about Sutpen that sets him apart from his bewildered neighbors—about, for example, “that secret end which General Compson claimed to have known but which the town and the county comprehended dimly or not at all” (29). Sutpen’s tale has generally been taken at face value—treated, in fact, as a rare island of simple objectivity in a novel which is for the most part a sea tossed by countervailing tempests of subjective perspective.65 But looked at closely, Sutpen’s version of his personal history appears anything but casually constructed or indifferent to its effects. It seems hardly incidental, for example, that his tale begins with the story of a poor white’s coming to realize how his kind is seen by the rich man “as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them” (190); it moves on to the young Sutpen’s vengeful fantasies of shooting the rich man, and proceeds through an account of how Sutpen’s courage and energy saves another rich man from the wrath of his economic inferiors during the revolt in Haiti. At any rate, General Compson seems to conclude that it is better to have Sutpen inside the house shooting out than outside shooting in. It is he who, soon afterwards, becomes the chief facilitator of Sutpen’s rise, lending him cotton seed, offering him money to complete his mansion, attending the wedding shunned by the rest of Jefferson. Sutpen’s continuation of his biography, in General Compson’s office in 1864, takes the story up to the birth of Charles, and Sutpen’s repudiation of his first wife, but despite its apparent frankness it is strangely lacking in candor. His tale circles endlessly around the central and all important “fact” which seems necessarily fatal to his project, but he displays a rather willful insistence on not explaining just what that fact is.66 It would have been a rather simple matter for Sutpen to have clarified the issue at this point: it would not be unfair to say that the great secret, the dark mystery which will demand the attention and compel the energies 165


of all of the would-be explicators of the meaning of Sutpen’s life is to a large extent the product of his own deliberate and systematic mystification. This great “fact” will, of course, direct the unfolding of the novel; it is the black hole whose irresistible gravitational pull holds together all the narratives and toward which they all blindly spiral. Like that of Flem Snopes, Sutpen’s strategic silences exert an extraordinary fascination. His conscious withholding of his secret, at the same time that he is constantly pointing to its overwhelming importance, suggests that he is well aware of the power afforded by exclusive access to a fact whose significance everyone else is convinced of—the power of being in the know about something that everyone desires to be in on—a secret others are willing to spend their lives puzzling over or indeed defining their lives in terms of. Sutpen’s “fact,” in short, bears a striking resemblance to his design, to the extent that they are both projects of constructing an inside and an outside—dark houses—and of ensuring that he will always occupy the position of insider. Sutpen’s “fact” is another construction which only succeeds as long as it maintains a wall of secrecy. So much, indeed, is suggested by the primal ambiguity of Sutpen’s term “fact”: on the one hand, a fact is something autonomous, simply there; on the other, it is a “factum,” something made (and no fact is more factitious than a fact of race—a fact made by definition and drawing a line or building a wall that separates light from dark). Sutpen builds his secret fact because he needs it, and needs it as a secret. Sutpen’s mastery of mystery, his deliberate withholding of a secret to which he is ceaselessly directing his audience’s attention, anticipates the central technique of the other narrators, who will all use the systematic delay of revelation as a means of controlling their interlocutors’ attention and response.67 But in this they resemble one another no more than they do their author, whose own literary technique likewise depended on an “elaborate method of deliberately withheld meaning, of progressive and partial and delayed disclosure.” For all, it is the secrecy of the secret—sustaining the belief in others that there is a secret—which is vital. It seems somewhat beside the point, therefore, to object to readings of the novel that argue that “Quentin knows the full truth about Charles Bon all the time he and Shreve are having their passionate and absorbing conversation” because this “would not only make Quentin a hypocrite of psychotic proportions, but maneuvers Faulkner into the position of deceiving his reader for no good purpose.”68 In fact, deceiving an audience is what Absalom, Absalom! at every level, is all about. 166

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It can be argued, then, that the very secret that in one sense ensures the failure of Sutpen’s design is also the thing that ensures its success. Perhaps the assumption that Sutpen’s project does fail needs to be questioned; if his ultimate aim is to enter the house, to move from the outside to the inside, to place himself at the center rather than the margins of society and history, he succeeds to the full extent of his ambition. He succeeds in a way he could not have by the simple accumulation of wealth, and it is his secret mistake which enables him to do so, since it is that which makes him the central fixation of all of the narrators, who are obsessed by the need to understand him and to understand themselves by way of him. And one may say that his success has been reconfirmed by every subsequent commentator on the novel for whom the meaning of Sutpen’s life and his secret has been, in one sense or another, the meaning of the South as a whole, for whom Sutpen’s sin is the sin of the South, America, or Western history. Sutpen, in effect, succeeds in making himself the ultimate insider, whose life becomes the very symbol, the inner truth of a society to which he had once been an insignificant outsider “without hope or purpose.” Sutpen’s design is therefore not distinct from the narration of his design, and his ultimate project is not so much the amassing of a fortune— “[g]etting richer and richer” (209)—or the founding of a dynasty (unless perhaps a dynasty of narrators), but the creating of a communal image of truth which assigns to Thomas Sutpen the position of centrality—the forging of history as the story of a man named Thomas Sutpen. In effect, Sutpen is another version of Rorty’s strong poet who sees her “life, or the life of [her] community, as a dramatic narrative” and “who can say of the relevant portion of the past, ‘Thus I willed it,’ because she has found a way to describe that past which the past never knew. . . . The hope of such a poet is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which impressed all her own behavings, bear her impress.”69 Ironically enough, it is the community of readers, and especially those who are most critical of Sutpen’s ambition, who contribute most to its success, by accepting his claim to be the holder of the dark secret which is the master key to the meaning of history. The four narrators proper—Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve —all in their own ways attempt to replicate Sutpen’s design and pragmatic performance. Each attempts to convince the listener that the story has a secret meaning, and to establish himself or herself as the master of 167


that secret. Typically, the various narrators’ tales have been understood as flawed attempts to get at the real facts, attempts which fail because of the limitations of subjectivity.70 But the individual differences should not be allowed to obscure their far more important common interest in advancing the notion that there is a meaning to Sutpen’s tale, to which each claims a privileged personal access and over which each implies a special authority; while each may be advertising a different brand, all are ultimately advertising the same product. All are allies in a common hermeneutical front. My claim is that Faulkner is a dissenter from this front, that he points to the interested nature of the hermeneutic desire as such, with its aspiration and claim to get inside. If he is close to any of the narrators, it is in fact the usually dismissed Shreve, the antifoundational skeptic for whom every proffered final vocabulary is one more set of metaphors, the outsider who is reconciled to the necessity of remaining outside. The first, and in some ways the most influential, promoter of the notion that there is a secret meaning to the Sutpen saga is Rosa Coldfield. Rosa is originator of the novel, not only in the trivial sense that she is the first narrator, but because it is her desire that sets in motion the process of telling that sweeps Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve into its course. Quentin’s declaration, “It’s because she wants it told” (5) is applicable to the novel as a whole, and it is she who imposes its overarching form as a movement beginning in the Coldfield house and ending in Sutpen’s Hundred, in the confrontation with the remains of Henry Sutpen. The book opens with her demand one “dead September afternoon” in 1909 and ends with its satisfaction later that evening, and all the other stories that compose the novel are ultimately enclosed within and subordinated to the arc of her quest. That the novel takes the shape of a movement out of one house and into another, a movement in, is thus the product of Rosa’s desire. Rosa had always been obsessed by the wish to gain access to Sutpen’s Hundred and to become in some sense mistress of the house, an obsession expressed most clearly in the resentment legible in her compulsive insistence on her own marginality and exclusion, beginning with her childhood, in which, she says, “instead of accomplishing the processional and measured milestones of the normal childhood’s time I lurked, unapprehended as though, shod with the very damp and velvet of the womb, I displaced no air, gave off no betraying sound, from one closed forbidden door to the next and so acquired all I knew of that light and space in which people moved and breathed as I (that same child) 168

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might have gained conception of the sun from seeing it through a piece of smoky glass” (116). Rosa is the eternal-bridesmaid, belated (“I was born too late” [15]), displaced, and deprived of a husband first by her sister and then by her niece, her erotic energies diverted into a hothouse of exfoliated fantasies over lost loves. But if Rosa never succeeds to the place, as she declares in a moment of revealing denial, in “my sister’s bed to which (so they will tell you) I aspired” (107), she does achieve her desired move into the house.71 Michael Millgate makes a suggestive parallel between Absalom, Absalom! and Jane Eyre,72 but one similarity that he does not sufficiently develop is the way in which Rosa, like Jane, is ultimately successful in carrying out the sentimental heroine’s plot, effecting a translation from the margin to the center, from the position of servant to that of mistress of the house. Rosa’s move takes place in three stages: literally, she moves into Sutpen’s Hundred after the murder of Bon, later she breaks into the house and its Jane Eyre–like secrets at the climax of the novel, and most important, she becomes the authoritative mistress of the epic of the House of Sutpen.73 Like Brontë’s resolute heroine, she refuses the compromise position of concubine, rejecting anything less than complete authority, and just as the blind Rochester’s fate is ultimately delivered into Jane’s hands, so Rosa finally takes possession of the story of the fallen Sutpen.74 She goes as far as she can in making herself central, and making the story of Sutpen a story about herself. But more significant than the role that she assigns to herself in it is the way of thinking about the Sutpen story that she promotes, which will be adopted by the other narrators and finally by almost all readers of the novel. For it is Rosa who is most responsible for establishing the notion that the novel is to be approached as a detective story, aimed at uncovering a secret. It is she who most powerfully and explicitly advances the notion that “[t]here’s something in that house” (140) and that the purpose of Absalom, Absalom! is to discover what it is. And this, I would argue, is the reason for her insistent invocation of the gothic, which finally succeeds in extending its influence to the novel as a whole. The importance of the gothic in Absalom, Absalom! and in particular in those parts of it where Rosa is speaking, is obvious to every reader.75 As the first critic, Rosa knowledgeably assembles all the standard elements of the gothic romance—the demonic villain, the persecuted maiden, and the haunted castle—and puts together what remains for the rest of the novel the most powerful and memorable interpretive frame169


work, however much Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve may qualify and rationalize it. Sutpen becomes a “metamorphosis of Satan,”76 as he is a near homonym of him: he is a “demon” (6), a “fiend blackguard and devil” (10), an “ogre or djinn” (16), and finally, as Rosa’s elaboration of gothic conventions becomes more complete, “a walking shadow . . . the light-blinded bat-like image of his own torment cast by the fierce demoniac lantern up from beneath the earth’s crust” (139). The second inevitable gothic convention is the heroine who is “by definition passive,” imprisoned and petrified by fear of her demonic victimizer, suspended in a state of “self-hypnosis, paralysis, and disintegration of identity.”77 The role is allotted first to Ellen, rapt, raped, and enthralled with a full charge of fairy-tale embellishment: “vanished into the stronghold of an ogre or a djinn . . . to return through a dispensation of one day only, to the world which she had quitted” (16) until finally it is realized in a more mundane way, when she retires “to the darkened room which she was not to quit until she died two years later” (62). Then Rosa adopts it herself, becoming the second passive victim of Sutpen’s irresistible demonic force. Rosa’s description of her “courtship” combines a fantasy of entranced willessness and the fulfillment of her wish to replace finally the sister who displaced her: “I claim no brief, no pity, who did not answer ‘I will’ not because I was not asked, because there was no place, no niche, no interval for reply. . . . No, no brief, no pity, who did not even move, who sat beneath that hard oblivious childhood ogre’s hand and heard him speak to Judith now . . . and listened to his voice as Ellen must have listened to her own spirit’s April thirty years ago” (132–33). In both cases the most important element is the image of paralysis, the immobilizing suspension imposed upon the heroine. Ellen, for example, is described as having “vanished not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard’s and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world, held there not in durance but in a kind of jeering suspension” (47). And there is, as this passage indicates, a connection between this paralysis and the final, and for Absalom, Absalom! the most important, component of the system of the gothic romance, the enclosed and imprisoning space.78 That space is the space of paralysis as such, of “anxiety with no possibility of escape”; in Absalom, Absalom! it is represented, of course, by the structure that dominates the novel— Sutpen’s “grim and castlelike” mansion (29), which like the traditional 170

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gothic space, is really the emanation of its master, the material embodiment of his immobilizing power, as becomes clear when Rosa refers to “the house which he had built, which some suppuration of himself had created about him as the sweat of his body might have created, produced some (even if invisible) cocoon-like and complementary shell in which Ellen had had to live and die a stranger, in which Henry and Judith would have to be victims and prisoners, or die” (111). My point is not, however, to repeat observations about Rosa’s “demonizing” imagination or the gothic elements that structure both her account and, through it, the novel as a whole. More important is the question of why Faulkner invokes the gothic so insistently. What I want to propose is that the gothic serves in Absalom, Absalom! as a way of addressing certain epistemological issues. The gothic, in fact, contains a specific epistemology; it is the purest literary expression of a particular theory of knowledge, one based upon the notion of truth as something waiting out there, buried or concealed perhaps—or even repressed, awaiting discovery by the restless mind. The secret is not simply an incidental component of the gothic form, but essential to it—the ideology of the gothic is the ideology of the secret.79 “All Gothic fantasies are mysteries: Who is the real heir to Otranto? What lies behind the hanging in Udolpho? Who, or what, causes the strange apparitions in The Italian? Is Silas Ruthyn trying to murder his niece? Who is Edward Hyde? Why is the beautiful Miss Lucy Wenstra sick and dying?”80 To be a gothic heroine (or hero) it is not enough to be a victim; one must be victimized by hidden truth and the demand that one discover it, petrified and trembling before the veil which one is nonetheless irresistibly driven to remove. This epistemological demand, that one confront and correspond to the real, is the true gothic imprisonment, for which haunted castle and sneering villain are merely conventional allegories. It is, therefore, no accident that the gothic has so often been seen as the direct precursor of the detective story.81 Both are structured by the overwhelming importance and enduring influence of a secret sin, and both are organized around a central character on whom is imposed a mission of discovery. William Patrick Day observes that “the heroine often occupies the place in the Gothic narrative that the detective takes in the detective story”; however, his attempt to distinguish between them by arguing that “unlike the Gothic heroine, though, the detective’s [sic] is not submissive or passive but analytic” is more problematic.82 In fact, the detective’s “analytic” propensities seem inherently connected to a state 171


of passivity and physical paralysis, as the history of the detective story, with its incessant variations on the theme of immobility, suggests—from Poe’s languid and oscitant Dupin through Sherlock Holmes with his periodic opium trances, and Nero Wolfe, paralyzed by his own corpulence, to Borges’s and Bioy-Casares’s Don Isidro Parodi, who solves his cases from a prison cell.83 It is a cliché that the detective is a double of the murderer, but I would suggest that the evidence of his direct descent from the paralytic gothic heroine betrays his real double: the murdered victim, whose inert body provides the model that the detective reflects. The death that the detective is trying to solve is always his own, the death of the self that is inextricable from the activity of detection.84 It seems no accident that the author of the most famous American gothic tales is also conventionally identified as the originator of the detective story: both are founded on the motif of premature burial. The detective, of course, is less often associated with the gothic heroine than with the scientist: Dupin is an amateur mathematician, Holmes keeps a laboratory in his rooms—but more important is the fact that both live off the nineteenth-century image of the scientific mind, relentless in its investigative rigor and commitment to objectivity, its readiness to uncover truths which can only be unpleasant. It is probably fair to say that Freud made his dubious enterprise appear more scientific by his repeated invocations of the fictional Holmes. It seems relevant therefore to recall George Levine’s argument that, for nineteenth-century science and philosophy, “The ideals of objectivity and disinterest are constructed out of a fundamental distrust of the personal and, by implication, of life itself,” so that what was required was “the preliminary moral act of selfannihilation,” or self-murder: “the ideal condition—beyond desire, beyond prejudice, beyond earthly limitations—was death.”85 This detour into the analytic detective story will, I hope, support my claim concerning the relation of the gothic heroine and the detective and my argument that the gothic can be said to be fundamentally involved with epistemological issues. The gothic novel offers, perhaps, the earliest literary expression of what will become a widespread nineteenthcentury assumption that knowledge of the truth implied the suppression of subjectivity and the self. In the gothic, that suppression normally took the form of paralysis and immobilization. If, then, James constructed his theory of truth as a gothic romance, this was possible only because the gothic romance was already a kind of theory of truth. The gothic story of the tyranny of the powerful father over the paralyzed child is the allegory 172

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of truth as correspondence, insofar as one perceives that conception, as James did, in terms of the tyranny of the real over the self: the real is prior to the self, awaiting discovery; the self must be passive and static in relation to the real; the only way the self could be adequate to the real is by destroying itself and its individual desires. The self must copy the real, as the son must copy the father. What James perceived was that the doctrine of overcoming the self in the interests of the truth was a mystification which could easily become a way that one self could more effectively dominate another, a perception to which his own experience with a father who preached “moral suicide, or inward death to self in all its forms,” at the same time as he exerted an overwhelming and selfinterested influence on his children’s lives, no doubt contributed. Rosa, by reading Sutpen’s history as a gothic tale, imposes on her audience—first Quentin and then the reader of the novel—the notion that there is something to be discovered, that “[t]here’s something in that house. . . . Something living in it. Hidden in it” (140). Thus she is obsessed with barriers, blockages, enclosures, and obstructions of all kinds, since every barrier implies something hidden, and to interpret the world as a series of closed doors is to assume that there is something behind them.86 Her childhood “consisted of a Cassandra-like listening beyond closed doors” (47; cf. 52, 57) and lurking “from one closed forbidden door to the next” (116), imagining what goes on behind them. Her description of her first arrival at Sutpen’s Hundred after Bon’s murder, in her perfervid monologue in chapter 5, takes the form of a successful penetration (“the open door’s serene rectangle which I had broken” [110]) followed by an obstruction in the form of Clytie’s hand: “Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. Possibly even then my body did stop, since I seemed to be aware of it thrusting blindly against the solid yet impenetrable weight (she not owner; instrument; I still say that) of that will to bar me from the stairs. . . . [M]y entire being seemed to run at blind tilt into something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at the black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh” (111). Finally Judith stops her at the very threshold of her room, “a woman standing calmly in a gingham dress before a closed door which she would not allow me to enter” (120). But a closed door is really as good as an open one; Rosa, in fact, in the headlong confession that this chapter constitutes, admits that it is the closed door that creates the secret, that it is the desperate desire to penetrate that gives rise to its own ob173


ject when she speaks of Clytie’s blocking body as itself having “created postulated and shaped in the empty air between us that which I believed I had come to find (nay, which I must find, else breathing and standing there, I would have denied that I was ever born)” (110). The concluding climax of the novel finds Rosa once more confronting the closed door of Sutpen’s Hundred, urgent to penetrate (“‘Break it,’ she whispered. ‘It will be locked, nailed. You have the hatchet. Break it.’” [293]) and to discover what she is already convinced will be there, because she herself has already “created postulated and shaped” it. Rosa’s role as a gothic heroine who projects the secret she discovers, who forces open doors to find what she wants as much as fears to find, and what she knows will be there because she has made it, may have its source in some tales of Henry James. “The Jolly Corner,” for example, displays some curious similarities to Absalom, Absalom! Like Rosa, though in a more literal fashion, Spencer Brydon is attempting to take possession of a house, penetrating it in order to establish his right to it.87 The houses, both described as houses of the dead (the Jolly Corner is like “an Egyptian tomb”;88 Sutpen’s Hundred is an “inviolate and rotten mausoleum” [280]) are indeed haunted, but haunted by specters that are in fact aspects of the ghost hunters themselves. Most strikingly, both Rosa and Brydon are obsessed by their confrontations with closed doors: as Rosa on her first entry into Sutpen’s Hundred crosses a series of thresholds, finally to be stopped at the closed door behind which is the corpse of Bon, so Brydon, on the climactic night of pursuit of his own ghost, proceeds through a series of doorways until, in the last room, he halts in front of a closed door behind which he is certain something waits concealed. Connections between Absalom, Absalom! and “The Turn of the Screw” are equally suggestive.89 James’s tale, like the novel, is not so much a gothic as self-conscious assemblage of gothic conventions. The governess in “The Turn of the Screw” sets out, like Rosa, on what she anticipates will be the standardized sentimental heroine’s ascent, from the position of subordinate to that of wife of the master and mistress of the manor, but she has read enough novels to know that her plot requires the presence of a dark mystery to be discovered. “Was there a ‘secret’ at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?”90 Of course there will be one, as there was in the two novels to which she alludes, precisely because the heroine requires that there be one—her success depends upon her special ac174

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cess to a truth, an ugly secret that will undermine the current holder of authority and pass it over to her. Where “The Turn of the Screw” merely alludes to Jane Eyre, Absalom, Absalom! actually seems to contain “an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement,” someone in the attic, but the parallel suggests that in both cases the mystery is really as much a requirement of initial assumptions as it is a discovery. Rosa’s world is defined by enclosure. When we first see her it is in “a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for fortythree years” (3), so that it seems “as if there were prisoned in it like in a tomb all the suspiration of slow heat-laden time” (6) during that period. As with the gothic heroine, enclosure and paralysis are closely connected: she sits “bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet” (3). Rosa resembles a “crucified child” (4); she is “amazed” and trapped in “impotent yet indomitable frustration” (3). Characteristically, she describes the effect on her of Bon’s murder in a passage that makes clear the association of incarceration and immobilization: “[There are] occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die” (122). Finally, there is one more relevant aspect of the gothic which needs to be considered. The gothic not only contains an epistemology, it contains, more specifically, an epistemology of historical knowledge. The secret that is the basis of the gothic is a secret about the past. As Fiedler observes, “behind the gothic lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.”91 More specifically, the gothic represents history as a conflict between an oppressive past and a present struggling to free itself. One way of describing the imprisonment undergone by the protagonist, then, is imprisonment of the present by the past—the present is forced to conform or correspond or be true to the will of the past, the child to the will of the father. But if the gothic can also be read as being about epistemology, then one form of that imprisonment by the past is the very notion of the importance of obtaining a true image of the past, of discovering and confronting the real facts of history, to the extent that that notion re175


quires self-submission, the sacrifice of a past that might be of use to the present. History in the gothic is always a nightmare, not just because it is the repository of horrible and guilty secrets, but because, as in a nightmare, we find ourselves unable to move, paralyzed under the weight of a picture to which we must submit. I have been focusing on Rosa as a promoter of the doctrine of the secret, but Mr. Compson is no less a champion of a hidden truth in the Sutpen story, although in a rather more sophisticated way. Rosa’s world picture is founded on the promise of access to a truth that is, for the moment, concealed; Mr. Compson is committed to a truth that is forever lost in tantalizing inaccessibility. Rosa is an outsider who desperately desires to enter the house of the truth, to rupture the wall that keeps her virginal, shut out from the central spaces of the story. Mr. Compson, on the other hand, celebrates a kind of perpetual cognitio interruptus— excluded, he turns exclusion into a universal existential and epistemological condition, by the subtle recognition of which he ascends to a form of superior negative knowledge. But the fact that he gives up on the possibility of attaining an adequate representation of the truth does not mean that he turns away from the concept of truth as representation; on the contrary, by focusing on the gap between the real and its representation, he reinforces the notion that holds knowing to be constituted by such gaps, or in Jamesian terms, to “consist in a salto mortale across an ‘epistemological chasm.’” Hesitating on the brink of that chasm, Mr. Compson is committed to an interminable hermeneutics of indecidability, but he is committed to hermeneutics all the same. Mr. Compson is as obsessed with the mysteries and secrets of the past and the Sutpen story as Rosa, but while she is as impatient to break through to the heart of the matter as she finally will be to break into Sutpen’s Hundred, Mr. Compson is addicted instead to the fascinating pleasures of endless speculation and interminable analysis. Typically, his deliberations take the form of a proliferating series of conjectural alternatives, each more intricate and super-subtle than the last. For example: “It was because Bon not only loved Judith after his fashion but he loved Henry too and I believe in a deeper sense than merely after his fashion. Perhaps in his fatalism he loved Henry the better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object was the youth: —this cerebral Don Juan who, reversing the order, had learned to love what he had injured; perhaps it was even more than Judith or Henry either: perhaps the 176

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life, the existence, which they represented” (85–86). As one “perhaps” follows another, it becomes clear that for Mr. Compson the pleasures of merely speculating far surpass those of reaching a conclusion. The general consensus that Mr. Compson’s telling of the Sutpen tale is in some way related to his own defeatism and enervation is no doubt basically correct, but what should be stressed is how this is embodied in a theory of truth and interpretation. Mr. Compson, coming after a series of vigorous and successful ancestors, the grandson of “the last Compson who would not fail at everything he touched save longevity or suicide,”92 is a permanent outsider, condemned to look in or back to something from which he is forever excluded. While most of the sites of narration in the novel are distinctly interior spaces—Rosa’s “dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers” (3), Quentin and Shreve’s “tomblike room” (276)—Mr. Compson’s story is literally that of an outsider: he and Quentin are sitting on the veranda in front of the house, in the liminal space of the twilight. He views the Sutpen story across insuperable barriers, the most important being the unbridgeable chasm of time and history. Mr. Compson is dominated by his sense of belatedness, which makes these figures from the past appear in the simple shapes and gigantic proportions of Homeric heroes: “we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable” (80). In his nostalgic imagination they live and move unself-consciously, on the far side of a fall into psychic fragmentation: “victims of a different circumstance, simpler and therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore more heroic too, not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled, author and victim too of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements” (71). A whole theory of history is contained in his claim that man, once more, is becoming a “nocturnal animal” (71). At first blush Mr. Compson appears to have read too much literature, but on longer acquaintance one begins to suspect that he has read too much literary theory. Viewing the matter of Sutpen as a kind of anonymous primary epic, enacted in illo tempore, populated by childlike figures whose largeness is indistinguishable from their simplicity, 177


he is setting up a recognizable literary opposition: the naive against the sentimental, the original against the secondary, the spontaneous against the self-conscious, the primitive and natural against the cultured and artificial. And it is an opposition whose other term is represented by Mr. Compson precisely because he is the one who is able to articulate the difference. As Schiller puts it in Naive and Sentimental Poetry, what Mr. Compson loves “is not these objects, it is an idea represented by them. . . . the tacitly creative life, the serene spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own laws, the eternal unity with themselves,”93 but his apparent admiration for the noble wholeness of the actors in Sutpen’s epic drama is premised on the necessity of his being an outsider, of never fully crossing the distance that separates him from them. “They are what we were,” says Schiller, “they are what we should once again become” (Schiller’s emphasis)”—but by the same token they are what we can never be. John T. Matthews rightly points to the affinity of Mr. Compson for Charles Bon, for it is Bon within the story who approaches most closely to the former’s own sensibility and elected position, outside of it.94 Bon, in Mr. Compson’s imagination, also adopts a speculative posture, “a little behind and above”: Bon “seems to have withdrawn into a mere spectator, passive, a little sardonic, and completely enigmatic. He seems to hover, shadowy, almost substanceless, a little behind and above all the other straightforward and logical even though (to him) incomprehensible ultimatums and affirmations and defiances and challenges and repudiations, with an air of sardonic and indolent detachment like that of a youthful Roman consul making the Grand Tour of his day among the barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered” (74). Significantly, he presents the difference between Bon and the Sutpen tribe in temporal terms; Bon, like Mr. Compson himself, is a later, even belated figure, both drawn by the simplicity of these primitive specimens and forever separated by a chasm of time and self-consciousness: he regards the impassioned histrionics of the Sutpens as “a fetich-ridden moral blundering which did not deserve to be called thinking, which he contemplated with the detached attentiveness of a scientist watching the muscles in an anesthetized frog;—watching, contemplating them from behind that barrier of sophistication in comparison with which Henry and Sutpen were troglodytes” (74). The key word here is “barrier”; what Mr. Compson identifies with is Bon’s exclusion, the fact that he is doomed always to be turned away from the closed door of the house and to wander in exile. He might 178

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be speaking of himself when he describes Bon as condemned to haunt the margins, a “mental and spiritual orphan whose fate it apparently was to exist in some limbo halfway between where his corporeality was and his mentality and moral equipment desired to be” (98). But for Mr. Compson the real limbo is not physical or social but epistemological, and his sense of exclusion expresses itself in the form of a conviction of the inaccessibility of the space of truth. Confronting the central mystery of the Sutpen drama, why Henry murdered Bon, after speculating ineffectually about Henry’s horror at the prospect of bigamy, he finally concludes: “It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know. . . . Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula . . . you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens” (80). Two things are noteworthy about this metahistorical reflection: first, that Mr. Compson is quite self-conscious about the futility of all his hermeneutic endeavors to penetrate the heart of the mystery, and second, that this has no effect on his desire to continue wandering in hermeneutic limbo, to “re-read.” Each invariable failure to make something happen seems only to confirm the assumption that there is something to happen; it does not affect the interpreter’s readiness to bring the elements together yet again, interminably. The endlessly repeated failure to reach the truth is the strongest confirmation of that truth’s existence. Evidently, for Mr. Compson, there is no place like limbo, epistemological and existential. His lament for the lost primitive vigor and undivided self-sufficiency, “integer for integer,” of his ancestors is, however, like all such laments, inherently disingenuous. The loss is always outweighed by the gain of consciousness of loss. As Schiller says, “In them, then, we see eternally that which escapes us, but for which we are challenged to strive, and which, even if we never attain to it, we may still hope to approach in endless progress. In ourselves we observe an advantage which they lack, and in which they can either never participate at all (as in the case of the irrational) or only insofar as they proceed our path (as with childhood).”95 The failure to penetrate the truth becomes such an advantage when it produces consciousness of the inevitability of that failure, insight into blindness as the universal condition of mind. By turning ex179


clusion from the truth into the truth of exclusion, Mr. Compson moves from the margin to the center, as the most disillusioned analyst of that exclusion, “a little behind and above.” Mr. Compson’s narrative is often described, in contrast to Rosa’s gothic novel, as an antique tragedy;96 it might be more accurate to identify it as an example of a different genre—literary criticism. His responses to events are typically mediated by literary allusions or patterns: re-creating the visit of Judith, Bon’s wife, and his child to Bon’s grave, he suggests it resembled a scene by Oscar Wilde; his frequent imposition of the categories of classical dramatic theory on the trajectory of Sutpen’s career and references to “fate, destiny, retribution, irony—the stage manager, call him what you will” (57) indicate that he thinks by way of literary categories. In general, one could say that he approaches the Sutpen story as literature, a document to be analyzed by way of the apparatus and instruments of textual criticism: at one point he even proposes, as it were, a textual emendation of a faulty allusion, suggesting, like Bentley correcting Milton, “I have always liked to believe that [Sutpen] intended to name [Clytie] Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read” (48). Mr. Compson has suffered a good deal of abuse from critics for his passivity and apparent resentment of those whose creative energy he envies, but some of that disapproval may be motivated by how much he resembles a literary critic himself. His judicious deliberations on the possible motivations of different characters sometimes sound as if they might have come from a critical essay on the novel. Certainly his conclusions about Sutpen are very similar to those that other readers have drawn. It is he who first defines Sutpen as morally “uncomplex,” innocent of the intricacies of conscience, and when Cleanth Brooks determines that Sutpen displays the “innocence of modern man” his reading comes very close to Mr. Compson’s. Likewise, the hermeneutic quandary at which he finally arrives—“It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know”—seems to anticipate some of the most sophisticated readings of the novel as a whole. But what makes Mr. Compson most like a literary critic is his sense of his own secondariness and belatedness. He is a man of text, for whom all experience is inevitably mediated by writing, in the most general sense. Not incidentally, it is the written texts of the Sutpen story and the prob180

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lems of reading to which they give rise that seem most to stimulate his imagination. To react to the tale means, for him, to “exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature. . . . the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense.” To interpret is to read, or rather read again: “you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing”; when the effort finally fails, you are left with “just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves” (80). His portion of the narration drives inevitably toward an actual text, Bon’s letter to Judith, finally produced at the end of chapter 4, and his whole monologue could be regarded as an editor’s introduction and extended commentary on this particular document. Mr. Compson’s textual orientation is one more aspect of his excluded situation; his limbo is a wilderness of signs—“just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves”—pointing toward a place he will never enter. That is, he subscribes to the proposition that “sign and meaning can never coincide,” which according to Paul de Man means that literature is “the only form of language free from the fallacy of unmediated expression.”97 De Man continues, in a passage that seems peculiarly relevant to Mr. Compson: “But one hesitates to use terms such as nostalgia or desire to designate this kind of consciousness, for all nostalgia or desire is desire of something or for someone; here, the consciousness does not result from the absence of something, but consists in the presence of a nothingness. Poetic language names this void with ever-renewed understanding and . . . never tires of naming it again. This persistent naming is what we call literature.”98 Mr. Compson’s tedious re-reading, his bringing together the elements of his story over and again, with the inevitable and expected result that “nothing happens,” his repeated discovery of the “presence of a nothingness,” is his way of persistently naming the void that separates him from the truth with ever-renewed understanding, endlessly pointing to the gap between sign and meaning, endlessly repeating the failure of representation, which, however, only reinforces the idea of representation. The figure that dominates Mr. Compson’s concept of reading is aporia. It is his rhetorical version of the motif of “closed door” that dominates Absalom, Absalom!; aporia in fact comes from the Greek for closed door. Shut out as he is by a “barrier of sophistication,” Mr. Compson becomes a virtuoso of aporetic rhetoric. “Aporia,” John Smith tells us, in The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d (1657), “is a figure whereby 181


the Speaker sheweth that he doubteth, either where to begin for the multitude of matters, or what to do or say in some strange or ambiguous thing.” This might be a description of Mr. Compson’s characteristic style of speculation, reviewing one possibility after another, and finally concluding that “we are not supposed to know.” It seems clear that when Quentin and Shreve take over the Sutpen story, something significantly different happens to the nature and intention of the narration. However, whether this “final narrative thrust,” in Arnold Weinstein’s vivid description, represents an attempt at a deeper penetration of the truth, whether a successful “probing [of] the under-tissues of the past,”99 or an “overpass to love,” propelled by the urgencies of desire and effected by the vital imagination, which opens “the closed past, closed doors, and closed minds” to a poetically true “vision of the past, a vision rich in knowledge for the present,”100 is somewhat more questionable. Cleanth Brooks claims that the “second half of the book may be called an attempt at an interpretation”;101 what I would argue, on the contrary, is that what Quentin and Shreve are doing can best be described in dramatic terms. They are self-consciously mounting a theatrical performance of history. In this sense, their response bears a striking resemblance to that which Emerson champions as the right way to read history. It is Shreve who most energetically enters into the theatrical nature of their joint enterprise. “Let me play a while now,” he exclaims (224), and “playing” here certainly involves the sense of “play-acting.” Shreve’s language is full of theatrical metaphors: at one especially excited moment he declares, “Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it? It’s better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it” (176). Later, he storyboards the scene of Sutpen’s homecoming with directorial care: “Now, Wash. Him (the demon) standing there with the horse, the saddled charger, the sheathed sabre, the gray waiting to be laid peaceful among the moths and all lost save dishonor: then the voice of the faithful grave-digger who opened the play and would close it, coming out of the wings like Shakespeare’s very self: ‘Well, Kernel, they mought have whupped us but they aint kilt us yit, air they?’” (224–25). Faulkner likewise borrows the imagery of the stage, referring to Bon as if he were an actor responding to Shreve’s “cue” (275). These theatrical metaphors are reminiscent of Emerson’s conception of historiography as masquerade, and in fact the best way to describe the approach of both Shreve and Quentin to history in their section of 182

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the narration is as an impersonation.102 It does not seem quite adequate to describe their project simply as one of imaginative reconstruction of history; rather, it calls to mind Emerson’s injunction that “we as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner.” Repeatedly, Faulkner speaks of Shreve and Quentin as not simply recounting their historical narrative, but as actually becoming the subjects of their tale: “So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas Eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry” (267; cf. also 275–76, 280). Faulkner’s description of this process of identification at times seems almost to echo Emerson’s language. Compare, for example, Emerson’s claim that “all inquiry into antiquity . . . is the desire to do away with this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now,” with this account of how Shreve and Quentin do away with “there and then” so that the figures of their tale “live again to the mind, or are now”: “But that [i.e., the fact that the last meeting of Bon and Judith had taken place at night, and in the winter] did not matter because it had been so long ago. It did not matter to them (Quentin and Shreve) anyway, who could without moving . . . be already clattering over the frozen ruts of that December night and that Christmas dawn . . . not two of them there and then either but four of them riding the two horses through the iron darkness and that not mattering either: what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed . . .” (236–37). Shreve and Quentin’s historiographical approach begins to look very much like an attempt to apply Emerson’s central dictum that “all history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.”103 In their telling, “the solid angularity of facts” gives way. The distinction between the fact and imagination ceases to have much significance; as the narrator puts it, their story is “probably true enough” (268). What allows a story to be “true enough” is its use, and what counts here is the use that Shreve and Quentin make of their signal narration of history—what present and future consequences and possibilities it offers. There is nothing new in the observation that in telling the Sutpen story each narrator is also telling his or her own story, although this has typically been regarded as a problem, a symptom of subjective and psychic limitations that those narrators are unable to surmount. To look at those narrations from the perspective of Emerson’s principle that “the 183


student is to . . . esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” suggests instead that such a use of history is both inevitable and constructive, and most constructive when its inevitability is recognized. It is the struggle for just such a recognition, I would argue, that the confabulative enterprise of Shreve and Quentin which comprises the latter part of the novel makes its own topic. Their conversation does not simply provide an example of reading history actively rather than passively; its content is a reading of the Sutpen story as itself a conflict between the passive and the active, between the misconceived project of taking on the burden of a past to be understood, and the alternative route of conceiving of history as a product and project of the future. The identification of Quentin and Shreve with Henry and Bon respectively is crucial, but its significance needs to be reconsidered. What is it, in fact, that Quentin identifies with in Henry? Usually, the decisive factor is taken to be Henry’s apparent fascination with the idea of incest, which, it is argued, must resonate with the incestuous obsessions of the Quentin we know from The Sound and the Fury.104 I propose, on the contrary, that what Quentin sees in Henry is someone who is forced to stand under the weight of a past which he does not want, who is finally compelled to accept as his own a task that comes to him from without, more specifically which is imposed upon him by his father. What needs explanation about Henry’s murder of Bon is not why he does it, but why he does it—that is, why Sutpen himself does not do it, since it is ultimately Sutpen’s own design that is placed in jeopardy by Bon. 105 And Bon poses a threat to that design not really by the threat of miscegenation he poses—in fact, Bon’s black blood would have made any such marriage simply invalid—but because of what he represents—a mistake, an unforeseeable error, like a slip of the pen while making a plan or a design, which produces a deviation, a divergent line if continued long enough.106 Bon stands for the arbitrary, the random, the uncontrolled and unpredictable, the irreducible element of chance that dooms every design from the beginning. It is this element of chance that Sutpen simply cannot understand, which he therefore translates into an unnoticed “mistake”: “that mistake which he could not discover himself and which he came to Grandfather, not to excuse but just to review the facts for an impartial . . . mind to examine and find and point out to him” (215). What counts, in fact, is not whether or not Bon is black, which remains forever uncertain, but the inescapable possibility that he might be (if he could be surely defined as either black or white, it would be possible 184

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to identify the mistake, to avoid it). Bon is a deviation from the strictly vertical line of descent that Sutpen had planned; in this sense, he corresponds rather precisely to the element of chance as the ancient atomists like Epicurus or Lucretius understood it, an unpredictable clinamen.107 To attempt to reassert control over his design requires that Sutpen erase that line, by eliminating Bon. When Henry kills Bon, then, he is not acting out a repression of incest or fear of miscegenation so much as he is performing as his father’s surrogate and dedicating his own life to murder for the sake of carrying out his father’s will. There is a familiar literary character who finds himself precisely in this position, burdened by a past he did not choose and confronted by a task, imposed by his father, which paralyzes his will. The character is, of course, Hamlet, and it is no accident that Quentin imagines Henry, after he has carried out the killing which has been, in effect, demanded by Sutpen, as Hamlet: “that gaunt tragic dramatic self-hypnotized youthful face like the tragedian in a college play, an academic Hamlet waked from some trancement of the curtain’s falling and blundering across the dusty stage from which the rest of the cast had departed last commencement” (142). As Hamlet Jr. carries out the project of Hamlet Sr., or as Hamlet Sr. comes back to life through Hamlet Jr., so Henry must correct Sutpen’s mistake.108 Such a sacrifice of the son to correct the mistake in a father’s plan—a mistake which is inevitable insofar as it amounts to the element of the unpredictable inherent in every project—may remind us of the comparison of Sutpen with God the Creator that begins the novel. It may also remind us of another son who struggled long with the demand that he sacrifice himself for the success of his father’s project: William James, dedicating himself to an unsympathetic scientific career in order to further the diffusion of his father’s theological ideas. What Henry’s willingness to become his own father’s ghost represents is a particular attitude toward history. Henry regards the past as a reality to which he must be responsible, a burden which he must submit to, a truth to which he must correspond. The child who copies a parent is the symbol of a present that sees itself as responsible and obliged to be true to a (paternal) past that is not its own creation. It is a conception which Emerson and James argued was inherently static, passive, and paralyzing—deathly—to the extent that it denies the powers of the self. It is therefore no accident that our last vision of Henry is as an inert near “corpse” lying immobile on his bed, imprisoned in the house of the father, the house of history. Ironically, Henry is indeed living out his 185


father’s design—he is forever inside, which was from the beginning the goal of Sutpen. Sutpen’s son has been taken “in where he would never again need to stand on the outside of a white door”; he has “shut that door himself forever behind him on all that he had ever known” (210). But to describe Henry as “living out” his father’s plan is rather inappropriate, since his life has become indistinguishable from death. Death is the leitmotif in his exchange with Quentin: “And you came home—? To die. Yes. To die? Yes. To die” (298). Pace Cleanth Brooks, this does not mean that in his twilight years Henry finally found “the claims of locality and family . . . too strong” to resist,109 but that life in the house of the paternal past is already, by definition, death. It is Henry’s self-inflicted death that Quentin identifies with, both his physical death, which he will reenact less than a year after his confrontation with Henry, and the symbolic death that both incur by conceiving of the past as a burden to which they must respond, rather than something they are free to create. When Henry kills Bon, he is killing himself, because Henry is here sacrificing his own independent life and will in order to become an extension of his father and a copy of his father’s will. Quentin is also unable to free himself of a sense of responsibility to history, of a conception of history as something to be responsible to. For this reason the event in the Sutpen story that is most important to him is the moment when Henry kills Bon, the moment which paralyzes Quentin— “which he still was unable to pass” (142). Significantly, he identifies with Henry here by way of the figure of Hamlet (142), whose relevance we have already seen. But the most memorable representation of the identification of Quentin and Henry is the curious mirrorlike dialogue that takes place between them in their climactic confrontation: And you are—? Henry Sutpen. And you have been here—? Four years. And you came home—? To die. Yes. To die? Yes. To die. And you have been here—? Four years. And you are—? Henry Sutpen. (298) 186

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At the heart of this near palindromic exchange is a passage which is so perfect in its specular structure—“To die. Yes / To die? / Yes. To die.”— that it is difficult to tell who is speaking what words.110 Henry becomes Quentin’s double. The scene is Faulkner’s version of William James’s asylum experience, as well as of the scene that I have argued lies behind that, Victor Frankenstein’s confrontation with his creature. The description of Henry’s “wasted yellow face with closed, almost transparent eyelids on the pillow, the wasted hands crossed on the breast as if he were already a corpse” (298) is strikingly similar to both James’s “black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic. . . . moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human” as well as to Frankenstein’s “lifeless thing” with his “dull yellow eye” whose “yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath.” What is important is that in each case the “lifeless thing” is the double of the observer, his own image seen in the form of death. If Quentin’s identification with Henry has generally and rightly been recognized as crucial, the identification of Shreve with Bon has received much less attention. In fact, treating Shreve with a certain dismissive condescension is a long and honored tradition. In this book of outsiders, Shreve is one who remains outside, who has never been regarded by critics as much more than a shallow foil for Quentin’s passionate psychomachia. Cleanth Brooks, for example, calls him a “liberal,” a term which for Brooks has mainly pejorative connotations: he described Shreve as someone “who is basically rational, skeptical, without any special concern for history, and pretty well emancipated from the ties of family, race, or section.”111 For Noel Polk, the problem is one of nationality, which, it seems, fatally handicaps his capacity for imaginative sympathy: “Shreve is, of course, a Canadian, an outsider with no experience of the South . . . who nevertheless presumes to sum up the South’s problems in a clever rhetorical flourish.”112 Irwin, by making both Henry and Bon projections of Quentin, goes even further, effectively erasing Shreve as even a contributing element in the novel’s unfolding, in spite of (what Brooks calls) the “curious” fact that any reading will show that it is Shreve who “does most of the imaginative work.”113 Most commentators would seem to agree that Shreve’s position is inherently inferior to Quentin’s, that there is something that “Quentin as a Southerner has that Shreve does not have.”114 To the extent that these descriptions are at all accurate, they underscore Shreve’s resemblance to Bon, likewise an outsider “without back187


ground or past or childhood” (74), likewise skeptical about history and prejudices based on family, race, and section—as it turns out, with good reason. Shreve’s parodic caricature of Sutpen—“this Faustus, this demon, this Beelzebub” (145)—and his story bespeak a suspicious irony, an uncertainty as to whether that legend and the southern history of which it is an allegory is really a farce or a bloody horror story, an uncertainty which parallels Bon’s equally uneasy view of the “incomprehensible ultimatums and affirmations and defiances and challenges and repudiations” by means of which the Sutpens enact their melodrama, “benighted in a brawling and childish and quite deadly mud-castle household in a miasmic and spirit-ridden forest” (74). It is Bon’s assessment which, to his own cost, proves to be the most discerning, and if nothing else, the logic of the comparison which pairs Quentin with Henry and Shreve with Bon suggests that Shreve is the most clear-sighted and sophisticated of the pair. It is Bon who is described as the “mentor” in his relationship with Henry, disabusing the latter of his provincial prejudices about marriage customs, for example. Shreve’s relation to Quentin, I would argue, is likewise one of mentor ship, even spiritual mentor ship. Terence Doody has pointed out that Shreve performs as something like a father confessor to Quentin in the latter part of the novel;115 he does not note that that function seems to be inscribed into his very name—“Shreve” suggests the archaic term “to shrive,” while “McCannon” contains suggestions of “canon.” It is worth remembering that he will eventually become a healer in a literal sense: the last sentence of the appendix informs us that he is “now a practising surgeon” in Edmonton. It is surely no accident that, in one of his last revisions of the Sutpen story, he corrects Mr. Compson’s account, claiming that it was Bon who saved the wounded Henry: “Bon that found Henry at last and stooped to pick him up and Henry fought back, struggled, saying, ‘Let be! Let me die!’” (275). That is, he imagines Bon struggling to save the unwilling Henry, just as he is struggling to save an equally unwilling Quentin.116 There are grounds, then, for ascribing to Shreve a more positive role, and for arguing that, as in the case of Bon, his outsider status, which is the cause of what Cleanth Brooks diagnoses as his lack of “a sense of the presence of the past”117 is more an advantage than a limitation, and offers a sort of immunity to the debilitating disease of a certain kind of historical consciousness. Whatever Quentin has that Shreve does not, in other words, it may be the wrong thing, something to be cured rather 188

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than celebrated. It amounts to a preposterous view of history as something that precedes the present, something to be understood, something that haunts or burdens the self—and in the next few sentences Brooks invokes C. Vann Woodward’s The Burden of Southern History to elucidate Quentin’s “personal access to a tragic vision.” Quentin, however, does not accept Shreve’s proposed cure, for he is too committed to his “personal access” to the meaning of history, even at the price of an enforced passivity, a murdering of the self that in a few months will become only too real. “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there” (289), he declares, and so rejects the alliance offered by Shreve, the implicit suggestion that one forget about trying to understand the truth of the past and concentrate on making the truth of the future—as decisively and fatally as Henry finally rejects the alliance offered by Bon that would free the children from the design of the father. Not incidentally, that alliance takes the form of brother-sister, and for that matter, brother-brother incest. As Faulkner makes clear, what the potential Bon-Judith marriage represents for Henry is both a vicarious marriage to his own sister and a vicarious marriage to the man he will later discover to be his own half-brother. Irwin, who devotes the most attention to the meaning of incest in Absalom, Absalom! interprets Henry’s attraction to Judith as a displacement of an Oedipal desire which makes him a repetition of his father and so a furtherer of Sutpen’s design. But it is possible to see brother-sister incest as meaning something entirely different from son-mother incest and as representing an alliance of children which is an alternative to, rather than a version of, the Oedipal situation—a horizontal connection rather than a vertical extension. The reflections of Deleuze and Guattari on the significance of brother-sister “schizo-incest” seem highly pertinent here: Psychoanalysis, because it understands nothing, has always confused two sorts of incest: the sister is presented as a substitute for the mother. . . . [Schizo-incest] is opposed in numerous ways to a neurotic Oedipal incest. The Oedipal incest occurs, or imagines that it occurs, or is interpreted as if it occurs, as an incest with the mother, who is a territoriality, a reterritorialization. Schizo-incest takes place with the sister, who is not a substitute for the mother, but who is on the other side of the class struggle, the side of maids and whores, the incest of deterritorialization. Oedipal incest corresponds to the paranoiac transcendental law that prohibits it, and it works to transgress that

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law, directly if it can bear to do so, symbolically for want of anything better: demented father . . . abusive mother; neurotic son—before becoming paranoiac in turn and before everything starts up again in the familial-conjugal triangle—since in fact such transgression is nothing but a simple means of reproduction. Schizo-incest corresponds, in contrast, to the immanent schizo-law and forms a line of escape instead of a circular reproduction, a progression instead of a transgression (problems with the sister are certainly better than problems with the mother as schizophrenics well know).118 Henry, it is apparent, is also erotically attracted to Bon (as Bon is to him), the half-brother he assiduously copies; Deleuze and Guattari go on to claim that “schizo-incest is not complete without another element—a sort of homosexual effusion. There again, in opposition to an Oedipal homosexuality, this is a homosexuality of doubles, of brothers or bureaucrats.”119 Quentin’s relation to Shreve parallels that of Henry and Bon in this regard as well: at one point Shreve and Quentin look at one another “not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself” (240). Quentin’s words, “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there”— meaning, would have to be insider—take the form of an exclusion, a shutting of the door on Shreve in order to maintain the belief in the possibility of a personal access to history’s meaning, which repeats Henry’s ultimate exclusion of Bon: “Don’t you pass the shadow of this post, this branch, Charles” (106). And it is also a declaration of divorce, a breaking of what had earlier been described as a “happy marriage of speaking and hearing”—which repeats Henry’s “divorce” of Bon—a divorce in which, it is needless to say, Quentin gets the house. Both Quentin and Bon thus finally choose to ally themselves with the father and the knowable past rather than the children and the unpredictable future. In both cases, that choice takes the form of negation and limitation, literally a submission to the father’s no. Henry hears “all the voices of his heredity and training [saying] No. No. You cannot. You must not. You shall not” (273–74), voices which, as he confronts Bon at the gate, have become his own: “—You shall not! he says.—You shall not!” (286); Quentin’s final words, which likewise represent a choice of the hereditary land of the fathers over the common exile of brothers, are equally negative: “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” (303). The rejection of the brother is also a rejection of contingency. I have already argued that what Bon really represents is the element of 190

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chance, a deviant line of descent that escapes control. He is not only “Charles Good”—he is the good as such, to the extent that it is only such a clinamen that gives “birth to the worlds and the things they contain,” and creates the unforeseeable new. All luck is, in this sense, good luck; “Charles Bon” is perhaps “bonne chance.”120 But it can only be good on the condition that one can never know it is going to be good, any more than one can ever know whether Bon is black or white. Chance is that part that always falls outside of calculation and whose future one can never predict. Shreve acutely recognizes that leftover part of the Sutpen story, and accepts, with both (self-directed) irony and good humor, the indeterminacy of its future: So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry, and Charles Bon’s mother and Charles Bon’s grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. . . . Which is all right, it’s fine; it clears the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and burn them, except for one thing. . . . You’ve got one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you cant catch him and you don’t even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you’ve got him there still. . . . And so do you want to know what I think? . . . I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread towards the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. (302) This difficult-to-read but crucial passage is sometimes seen as an example of Shreve’s flippancy or even of an implicit racism,121 but it deserves to be taken more seriously. Shreve is not here “warning of the possibility of a doom which may yet be avoided,”122 but rather accepting, even affirming, the fact that such a “doom” can never be avoided, to the extent that chance, deviation, and uncertainty of descent undermine every “design” from the beginning. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Shreve’s suggestion is a vision of despair; indeed such a reading itself betrays a belief in design, the deterministic assumption, founded in the perspective of the present order, that Jim Bond represents a “degenerate” specimen who can only produce a line of further degeneracy. Shreve, on the contrary, displays a more subtle comprehension of the 191


radical contingency of life on earth, an acute understanding that history does not progress in straight lines, and that it is the invariably deviant and despised variation, the unavoidable mistake, which marks the beginning of the future. Shreve’s remarks should remind us, in other words, that Sutpen’s design is only a local version of the Doctrine of Design, the hopeful notion that the descent of life had, at some level, a meaningful order that was secure against the intrusions of contingency. It was, of course, Darwin’s great contribution to have finally displaced this doctrine, and to have argued that the details of history, “whether good or bad, [must be] left to the working out of what we may call chance.”123 James, for one, recognized clearly the implications of Darwin’s argument for “the question of design in nature,” and his interpretation of evolution is strikingly contemporary in emphasis, stressing accident rather law: “Darwin opened our mind to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth ‘fit’ results if only they have time to add themselves together.”124 Or, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, the most significant consequence of evolutionism is the notion that “the modern order is largely the product of contingency.”125 Shreve’s prediction, then, can be read as an affirmation of contingency, an affirmation at once ironic and exhilarating. His final position sounds, in fact, very like that of James, who also recognized that there is always something left “outside and unincluded” in the design: “The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something—call it “fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will”—is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers. . . . ‘the same returns not, save to bring the different’ [quoting B. P. Blood].”126 That something is “still wrong and other and outside and unincluded,” or what James will elsewhere refer to as the “fatally continuous infiltration of otherness,” means that miscegenation is present from the beginning because every beginning is miscegenation and the discomfort Shreve’s prediction promotes among so many well-thinking readers is the discomfort of accepting chance as the ultimate element in existence, and so of accepting the ultimately fabulous futility of all human designs, whether intellectual, social, or moral—of recognizing the contingency, the randomness, the chaotic mixing and uncontrollable deviation which is life, and deciding to call it good.

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5

A Great Story Pathfinding and Providence in Go Down, Moses

I When James first publicly announced pragmatism to the world, in his 1898 speech before the Philosophical Union of the University of California, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” he began by invoking a familiar figure in the American imagination: the pathfinder. “Philosophers,” he declared, “are after all like poets. They are pathfinders.” The comparison at first seems conventional enough. It is not uncommon to imagine the thinker as a heroic discoverer of what James later calls “the centre in truth’s forest,” or the privileged spot from which a synoptic vision of the pattern of the whole is finally available. But as the passage proceeds, James tropes on this familiar metaphor, revising its meaning in a way that parallels the revision of the conception of truth that is the larger aim of his essay: The words and thoughts of the philosophers are not exactly the words and thoughts of the poets—worse luck. But both alike have the same function. They are, if I may use a simile, so many spots, or blazes,—blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience. They give you somewhere to go from. They give you a direction and a place to reach. They do not give you the integral forest with all its sunlit glories and its moonlit witcheries and wonders. Ferny dells, and mossy waterfalls, and secret magic nooks escape you, owned only by the wild things to whom the region is a home. Happy they without the need of blazes! But to us the blazes give a sort of ownership. We can now use the forest, wend across it with companions, and enjoy its quality. It is no longer a place merely to get lost in and never return. The poet’s words and the philosopher’s phrases thus are helps of the most genuine sort, giving to all of us hereafter the freedom of the trails they made.1 The philosophical pathfinder, that is to say, is literally a finder of paths, or more accurately a marker of trails, of connections and routes that 193


lead from place to place, that serve particular local purposes and enable one to negotiate the “trackless forest of human experience” (408) without ever leading to a point outside, above, or beyond that forest. The pragmatic thinker does not give us a vision of the complete pattern, “the integral forest with all its sunlit glories and its moonlit witcheries and wonders” (408). Rather he offers only “blazes,” signs of trails that allow us to get around in the forest, “to use the forest, wend across it with companions, and enjoy its quality” (408). (It is worth stressing the materiality of the metaphor here: it is the “blazes”—the phrases, words, and figures themselves—that count, not any meaning that might be associated with them.) The implication of James’s metaphor is a radical de-transcendentalizing of the mission of philosophy; instead of looking for truth, philosophy must recognize its “marking and fixing function” (408) of making connections, pathways that prove useful for particular purposes. James tropes the function of the thinker downward, as it were, away from the high ground of theoretical speculation and vision that would offer “the integral forest” (408) and into a world of pure experience and activity. We might say that his criticism of traditional philosophy is that it does not see the trees for the forest. The “truths” of the pragmatic woodsman, on the other hand, are no longer to be measured by how they correspond to the fundamental structure of reality, but by how they are useful in particular contexts, how they lead to results, and how they enable us to keep on the move. A second element of James’s revision of the philosophical project needs to be noted here, however—the radically contingent nature of the pathfinders’ achievements, the “thin and spotty and half-casual character of their operations” (409). Just as the pathfinder never has access to the whole of reality, so he never has control over the meaning and consequences of his own activity. To the extent that this trail-blazing always takes place in time, no one can know why one makes one trail rather than another, foresee where any particular trail will lead, or predict which trails will come to be accepted as “true.” The authentic pragmatist must regard all his achievements and convictions with a profound irony: “No one like the pathfinder himself feels the immensity of the forest, or knows the accidentality of his own trails” (409). Only from a position outside of time could that accidentality be overcome. To underline his point, James refers to the man who, from an American perspective, was the greatest pathfinder of them all, Columbus. (It is no doubt rele 194

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vant, for the full appreciation of this allusion, that the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery had, within recent memory, been commemorated with great fanfare.) But James’s Columbus is not the heroic voyager, overcoming all odds and finally vindicated by the triumphant realization of his vision. Rather his discovery is an unforeseen accident: “Columbus, dreaming of the ancient East, is stopped by poor pristine simple America, and gets no farther on that day” (409). In effect, Columbus’s landfall represents the failure to do what he thought he was doing; only from the wholly unpredictable perspective of the triumphant New World does that failure come to be defined as a discovery, a stage in an inevitable progress rather than the disappointment of the dream of centuries. Already in his initial presentation of pragmatism, then, James stresses what will be an essential theme in that doctrine, the element of the radical contingency of any perspective. That contingency has two aspects. In the first place, every perspective is made contingent and limited by the fact that it belongs to one person. To Columbus, whose purpose is to find a passage to the Indies, an intervening continent can only represent a catastrophe. This is an aspect of the contingency of perspective that James discusses at greatest length in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” which argues that “neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any single observer.”2 One of James’s favorite ways of expressing this idea is in terms of a narrative metaphor: The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace at points, but we can not unify them completely in our minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. . . . It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk. It is easy to see the world’s history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder. . . . The world appears as something more epic than dramatic.3 The second aspect of contingency is created by the fact that every perspective is located in time, and can never transcend that location to a position from which the future could be foreseen and the pattern of the whole comprehended. It is impossible, in other words, for Colum195


bus to predict the unfolding of a history organized by America’s rise to dominance, resulting in a perspective from which his encounter with the New World seems like a necessary stage in an inevitable process. I have already discussed James’s assertion late in his life that “the centre of my whole Anschauung” was the conviction that “novelty is real,” his belief that “from the point of view of what is already given, what comes may have to be treated as a matter of chance.” For James, this conviction is a consequence of taking seriously the pragmatic insistence on the impossibility of transcending one’s situation and of assuming what would amount to a position outside of time, since for the pluralist pragmatist “time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history.”4 The aspiration to achieve a philosophical vision which would surmount its own contingency is the desire to move from the instability and limitation of the present to the position of the unchanging, the aspiration that James describes, in “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism,” as the “ruling tradition in philosophy . . . the platonic and aristotelian belief that fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one and unalterable.”5 However, to the extent that the “essence of life is its continuously changing character,”6 such an aspiration must be forever futile. What distinguishes pragmatism from the rationalist philosophies it desires to replace is its recognition of the inescapably temporal character of reality, which means that at no point is the world ever finished. Rationalism wants to believe that “reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future.”7 There will never be a point, in other words, at which the story is finished and its meaning finally clear, an idea that James conveys in a slightly altered version of his literary metaphor: “On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places. . . . On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio, or édition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own way.”8 A universe “unfinished, with doors and windows open to possibilities uncontrollable in advance”9 will always have the look of a disorderly universe, as if the supreme architect had studied with Frank Gehry, because it will always sooner or later exceed the definitions applied to it by going in unforeseen directions.10 If the rationalist philosopher devises “economical and orderly conceptions” which are “aesthetically pure and 196

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definite,” as well as “clean and intellectual by way of inner structure,” the world of the pragmatic pluralist “offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair, without sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility.”11 The philosophy that James opposes is characterized by its clean lines and “sweeping outline,” its clear division of inside and outside, and elsewhere he develops more completely the implicit architectural connotations of his trope, describing “the world of concrete personal experiences” in terms recalling the wildness of nature itself, “multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed,” while the structure built by the rationalist philosopher is “a kind of marble temple” or “a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present.”12 The inside/outside opposition is even clearer in James’s later contrast of the “noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy” with “the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth.”13 The controlling image in this metaphoric complex is that of the line, straight and clear, marking boundaries and outlines. The rationalist pro ject depends on the possibility of such lines. When James says that “refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies,” he is invoking first of all the social connotations of “refinement”—mocking the intellectualists as painfully self-conscious aspirants to philosophical gentility— but he is also recalling the fine linguistic line that links “re-finement” to “de-finition,” to “con-finement,” to “finish.” From a pragmatic point of view, such lines are fantasies; in the real world, lines inevitably become entangled, confused, muddled, so that it becomes impossible to tell the inside from the outside or to distinguish one line from another. James’s most extended meditation on the fate of the line is in the short essay “On the Notion of Reality As Changing,” appended to A Pluralistic Universe, where he considers the consequences of the contingent and hence unpredictable nature of the universe for the possibility of maintaining a “straight line”: “It is hard to trace a straight line of sameness, causation, or whatever it may be, through a series of [concrete] objects without swerving into some ‘respect’ where the relation, as pursued originally, no longer holds: the objects have so many ‘aspects’ that we are constantly deflected from our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we are following something different from what we started with.”14 A line extended in real time unavoidably moves into “many new dimensions,” so that “instead of a straight line, it now follows a zigzag; 197


and to keep it straight, one must do violence to its spontaneous development.” What looks like the indefinite continuation of the same turns out on closer examination to be the constant procession of difference: “In the world of real operations every line of sameness actually started and followed up would eventually give out, and cease to be traceable any farther. Sames of the same, in such a world, will not always (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the same as one another, for in such a world there is no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents.”15 The impossibility of following a straight line ultimately undermines the notion of identity: “All the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every rut,” resulting in the paradox of “an identity that won’t keep except so far as it keeps failing, that won’t transfer.”16 Finally, James considers the implications of the “fatally continuous infiltration of otherness” for the prospect of historical knowledge, and the possibility of ever achieving a vision of the course of human history that would render the pattern of the whole comprehensible and foreseeable: “A friend of mine has an idea . . . which illustrates the impossibility of tracing the same line through reality. . . . He thinks that nothing more is needed to make history ‘scientific’ than to get the content of any two epochs . . . accurately defined, then accurately to define the direction of the change that led from the one epoch to the other, and finally to prolong the line of that direction into the future. So prolonging the line, he thinks, we ought to be able to define the actual state of things at any future date we please.”17 The “friend” James is referring to here is Henry Adams, who throughout his professional life as a historian had been obsessed with the attempt to find a pattern in history, a form that would unify the myriad of seemingly diverse and unrelated events and offer the elements of a law that would describe the past and predict the future. It was just such a unification of history’s many stories into one that was seen as the precondition for the achievement that had long been the dream of nineteenth-century historians, the realization of a historiography that could legitimately claim the dignity of a science. As William M. Sloane, chairman of the history department at Columbia University, declared in the opening article of the first issue of the American Historical Review, “the doctrine of the unity of history”—what Robert F. Berkhofer has described as a “Great Story”18—allowed “scientific methods” introduced into a discipline hitherto regarded as merely a branch of “prose literature,” and it made possible both the “presentation of facts in 198

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an external world” and “reliable deductions from them.”19 As one might expect, Adams expressed the same yearning “to reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws which govern the material world” with considerably more literary flair. In “The Tendency of History,” he conveyed that yearning in a metaphor, a metaphor which, curiously, employs another version of James’s figure of the pathfinder: As the great writers of our time have touched one by one the separate fragments of admitted law by which society betrays its character as a subject for science, not one of them can have failed to feel an instant’s hope that he might find the secret which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one self-evident, harmonious, and complete system. . . . Scores of times he must have dropped his pen to think how one short step, one sudden inspiration, would show all human knowledge; how, in these thickset forests of history, one corner turned, one faint trail struck, would bring him on the highroad of science. Every professor who has tried to teach the doubtful facts which we now call history must have felt that sooner or later he or another would put order in the chaos and bright light into darkness.20 Although Adams’s trope resembles that of James, its implications are diametrically opposed. Where James’s pathfinder recognizes that his pathways are made rather than discovered, and eschews the vaulting ambition of achieving a synoptic vision of “the integral forest,” that of Adams longs for the magical “sudden inspiration” that would take him out of “the thickset forests of history” and onto the waiting “highroad of science.” The implications of ascension must be given their full weight here: science’s “high” road leads upward, out of the tangle of time and the confusion of contingency, conducting one to the elevation from which history’s true and unifying story can be clearly discerned. Raised to this good eminence, the historical visionary would enjoy not merely the satisfaction of definitive knowledge of past and future, but, enshrined in the pantheon of human deities, the promise of at least symbolic redemption from death itself. Concludes Adams: “No teacher with a spark of imagination or with an idea of scientific method can have helped dreaming of the immortality that would be achieved by the man who should successfully apply Darwin’s method to the facts of human history.”21 For James, such an impatient aspiration is a fantastic conception of history that, as it were, does not have time for time, and in its desire to ascend to a place above the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the secu199


lar, betrays all too clearly its continuity with the dream of imitating the redemptive resurrection of Christ. But to strive to evade mortality by stepping outside of time, however much it may resemble the privilege of divinity, is to attempt to outwit death by assuming a condition that is ultimately indistinguishable from it. Living in the “trackless forest of human experience” requires instead that we recognize that “truth’s fulness is elusive,” and accept that “pretty surely death will overtake [us] ere the promise is fulfilled” (408). II Of all geometric figures, a line, by its very nature, is the most ambiguous, perhaps even contradictory. Connecting places, it divides spaces; offering a pathway for movement, it creates boundaries; giving rise to definitions, it lays down limits. Lines have direction, as one would say in French, a sens: in this sense, lines literally make sense. Coming at the end of the line of what is generally acknowledged to be his great novels, Go Down, Moses is Faulkner’s book of lines. In it he investigates the meaning and reality of lines of various sorts: family lines, blood lines, plot lines, and perhaps above all, what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called the “problem of the twentieth century,” the color line. Such lines structure the worlds of the characters in the novel, giving meaning to their lives to such an extent that it would not be inappropriate to call them life lines. The book contains a physical direction in its title, and one could say that everyone in it orients his life by way of lines that point where to go and indicate in what direction freedom lies. But lines also pose a danger. The novel’s title reminds us that God’s command to Moses was also ambiguous, perhaps even contradictory. Moses is directed to go down in order to go up, to enter slavery in order to reach freedom, and to risk death in order to achieve eternal life. As much as a command, it is a challenge to distinguish between freedom and slavery, life and death, and it is a challenge because they are often difficult to tell apart. It will be my argument that the important characters in Go Down, Moses sooner or later must also confront that challenge. In terms of the novel’s own metaphors, they confront the temptation to discover one line that is more true, more real than any of its competitors, a line that will never fail or swerve, and which offers the prospect of unifying the multiple narratives that compose the world into a single story with a universal meaning. To exploit the polysemy of the 200

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French language again, one might say that they are challenged by the temptation to discover a sens unique. Part of the attraction exerted by that line is that it appears to offer the “highroad” to freedom, even the most absolute freedom, by carrying one out of this world, beyond the ultimate limits of time and death. But the temptation, if yielded to, has potentially disastrous consequences. Go Down, Moses also offers a special challenge to the reader. The difficulties that it poses are not obvious at first; its language and sentences, with rare exceptions, present none of the opacities and complexities that define the more notoriously rebarbative Faulknerian texts. The problem is better described as a structural one, and the question that has bothered readers from the beginning is the very basic one of whether or not this book is in fact a novel, or rather a somewhat arbitrarily connected series of stories. Faulkner himself had difficulty making up his mind on this point. At the University of Mississippi in 1947, for example, he told a class, “It is simply a collection of short stories.”22 To his editor Robert K. Haas, however, he wrote in 1949 that “Moses is indeed a novel. . . . Indeed, if you will permit me to say so at this late date, nobody but Random House seemed to labor under the impression that go down, moses should be titled ‘and other stories.’”23 Repeatedly, critics have felt obliged to reconcile this contradiction and have offered various and ingenious ways of demonstrating the fundamental unity of the book. One way to do this is by recourse to genealogy, most graphically by drawing a plot of the McCaslin family tree.24 In general, of course, the family tree performs an extremely important social function. It guarantees legitimate relations of status and property by bringing together, as its very name suggests, the biological and the social, the natural and the conventional; it guarantees the legitimacy of established relations of status, property, and power. As investigations of the complexity of such relations, Faulkner’s narratives are inevitably investigations of family trees, and drawing the lines that compose those trees often seems to be the equivalent of making an X-ray, giving a structuralist diagram of a novel’s joints and processes, a plot of the plot. But in the case of the McCaslins, the diagram produces little gain in clarity. Rather than a clear line of descent, an orderly and hierarchical depiction of biological and social legitimacy, the McCaslin tree looks more like a tangled bush, or even a forest. Social and biological lines are at odds with one another: socially, Zack Edmonds is old Carothers’s heir, while Lucas Beauchamp is his legitimate biological descendant. Bloodlines give out unexpectedly, and property swerves: 201


Ike, representing the legitimate male lineage, has no children, and his estate jumps to the “woman-made” Edmonds line. Even the gradually spreading arboreal shape is subverted when Roth McCaslin has a child by the unnamed woman of “Delta Autumn,” herself a descendant of old Carothers’s “shadow family,” so that the branches of the tree cross with themselves, producing a tangled circle. The individual narratives that compose Go Down, Moses offer their own particular challenges to the reader in search of the satisfying clarity of a shapely plot. The initial story, “Was,” sounds many of the motifs that will return throughout the book. It is, to begin with, a plot that consists almost entirely of plotting: Tomey’s Turl plotting against Buck and Buddy; Sophonsiba and Hubert plotting against Buck; Buddy and Tomey’s Turl plotting against Hubert. The result is a multistoried trickster tale, but one which seems in constant danger of toppling, since it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between trickster and butt, because they reverse positions incessantly. Equally important, it is the first story in which the image of hunting makes an appearance, an image which will recur insistently in subsequent tales, becoming, it has been argued, one of the most emphatic unifying elements of the book. It is worth pausing over this conjunction. Faulkner’s linking of plotting and hunting can easily seem merely arbitrary, but I would suggest that he is pointing to a subterranean connection between the two activities. There is, in fact, a striking structural similarity between narrative and hunting. Each begins with a lack. Each takes the form of a pursuit of a desired object that will fill that lack—the quarry in the case of hunting, the knowledge whose discovery will finally offer meaning in the case of narrative. Each follows a linear and continuous path, requiring of hunter and interpreter that they read the available signs properly, distinguishing between the true line and false leads that go nowhere. And each, when properly and successfully pursued, culminates in a moment of climactic discovery, when the goal of the quest is finally caught and converted into an object of physical or intellectual consumption—when one, as we say, “gets it.” One might go so far as to speculate that the prehistoric experience of hunting is the template upon which our conception of narrative, our seemingly natural feel for what makes a successful story, has been formed in the structures of the mind. In this sense, all stories are hunting stories. In a curious moment in book 4 of The Republic, Plato seems to have intuited a connection between hunting and the greatest story of all, the search for truth.25 “The pursuit of truth,” George Steiner observes, “is predatory.”26 202

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We might also be reminded of another kind of predation. The trickster or con man, as we are accustomed to say, “preys” upon his victim. Lewis Hyde, drawing upon folklore and myth, notes that there is an insistent connection between the trickster figure and stories of hunting. Loki invents the fishnet; Coyote makes the first fish trap; Raven, in the folktales of the Pacific Northwest, contrives the first fishhook. The predator maintains his position relative to the prey not merely by superior strength but by cunning and intelligence, the ability to determine what direction the prey will take in its attempt to escape. Hyde cites Harry Jerison’s study Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence, which demonstrates that throughout the course of evolutionary history predators have always maintained a substantial superiority in relative intelligence, as measured by the ratio of brain size to body mass. Concludes Hyde, “In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.”27 For both tricksters and predators —and especially human predators, who enjoy no physical superiority over their prey—intelligence is necessary, because a successful hunt inevitably involves both foresight and manipulation of the prey’s instinct to flight, as for example, in Buck’s plan to trap Tomey’s Turl: “You stay back where he won’t see you and flush. I’ll circle through the woods and we will take him at the creek ford.”28 Both hunting and trickery thus succeed by creating a narrative in which the victim becomes an ambiguously willing character, whose acts of apparent free will have been scripted in advance, so that he never feels so free as when he is following directions. From the perspective of the hunted, every event must appear to be the product of chance; from that of the hunter, the intentional pattern of the whole is clear. The plot of the trickster and the hunter, the net that they weave around their marks, is always also a plot line. It does not seem entirely accidental, therefore, that “Was” is a story that entangles hunting and plotting. The connection is established by the opening episode, the riotous fox chase that reduces the household to chaos: “this time it sounded like the whole kitchen chimney had come down and Uncle Buddy bellowing like a steamboat and this time the fox and the dogs and five or six sticks of firewood all came out of the kitchen together with Uncle Buddy in the middle of them hitting at everything in sight with another stick” (4–5). The violence is only apparent, however; as Cass’s discriminating summation—“It was a good race” (5)—indicates, this is a track meet that has been run many times before, and 203


its outcome is never in any doubt. The fox is not game so much as he is game for the game of a timelessly repeated comic plot. The fox chase is, of course, our signal that the hunt that will dominate the story, Buck’s pursuit of Tomey’s Turl, is to be regarded with some degree of irony. This also has been repeated many times, and its end is contained in its beginning. Tomey’s Turl knows that his hunt for Tennie will be successful, and Buck knows that his for Tomey’s Turl will be equally so. Both know that any success will be only temporary, and that the race will be restaged at regular intervals. But Tomey’s Turl knows something that Buck does not, that these subplots are part of a larger plot that he has been composing for some time, whose conclusion is intended to be a marriage between Buck and Sophonsiba, which will entail as a consequence his own marriage to Tennie. So much, at least, is suggested by the way in which he “leads” Buck—going slowly enough to allow himself to be seen three miles from the Beauchamp plantation, then racing his mule just fast enough to outrun Buck’s stallion and ensure that Buck will be forced to stop over with Hubert and Sophonsiba. Tomey’s Turl, that is, has been hunting Buck, and the sounding of the dinner horn after he has descended to rest his exhausted horse, like the mort that signals the killing of a deer, suggests that the first stage of that hunt has been successful. Most of the knockabout comedy of “Was” has to do with Buck and Hubert’s attempts to catch Tomey’s Turl, but it is clear that these raucous antics are essentially a physical allegory for the quieter battle of wits that is going on within the Beauchamp house. In fact, their primary purpose is that of delaying. As much as Tomey’s Turl wants to make time with Tennie, he needs to make time for his larger plot to unfold. He understands, at the beginning of the book, what few male characters are aware of by the end: in spite of the fact that the most visible protagonists are men, the world of Go Down, Moses, like that of Shakespeare’s comedies, is in a fundamental way directed by women. “I gonter tell you something to remember,” he says to Cass, “anytime you wants to git something done, from hoeing out a crop to getting married, just get the womenfolks to working at it. Then all you needs to do is to set down and wait” (13). Unobtrusively, the women in the book—Tennie, Sophonsiba, Nat, Molly—usually get what they want, because what they want represents the possibility of a future: marriage, sexuality, and progeneration. Their plots are the plots of life, even though they remind us that a part of life is the acceptance of its mortal limit. Throughout his works, Faulkner associates sexuality with mortality, and the male characters who em204

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brace celibacy, like Buddy, Buck (for a while), and eventually Ike, do so because, I would suggest, they are attempting to dodge death. But the cost of avoiding death turns out to be avoiding life. The rhetorical figure that dominates “Was” is inversion; its language is the prose of Actaeon. Buck’s status as implicit quarry is legible in his very name, and even as he prepares to catch Tomey’s Turl, he is already being converted into the catch. Having finally imagined that he has cornered the slave in Tennie’s cabin, he stands at the front door ready to take him into custody: “Uncle Buck said he never even saw the door open; that the fyce just screamed once and ran between his legs and then Tomey’s Turl ran right clean over him. He never even bobbled; he knocked Uncle Buck down and then caught him before he fell without even stooping, snatched him up under one arm, still running, and carried him along for about ten feet, saying, ‘Look out of here, old Buck. Look out of here, old Buck,’ before he threw him away and went on” (18). Buck lies as if wounded, unwilling to move until he knows that the liquid he feels soaking his backside is “just whisky and not blood” (18). In the larger plot, Sophonsiba begins to prey upon him as soon as he enters the Beauchamp house. Hubert compares her at one point to a bear (21), and while her flirtatious exchange with Buck seems awkward enough (“something about Uncle Buck was a bee sipping from flower to flower and not staying long anywhere” [11]), as Cass watches her “roancolored tooth flick and glint between her lips” (11) it is as if she is already feasting on Buck’s bloody carcass. Blood and death seem to be associated with her; when she sends the red ribbon to Buck, he receives it “like it was a little water moccasin” (15). Buck attempts to catch Tomey’s Turl by trapping him as he is “going to earth”: “We’ll cut back to the house and head him before he can den” (17). In a rather more successful application of Buck’s own strategy, Hubert and Sophonsiba lay their own trap to “head” him as he tries to “den.” Entering the first unlocked door he can locate in the dark, he sheds his clothes and climbs into bed: “That was when Miss Sophonsiba sat up on the other side of Uncle Buck and gave the first scream” (20). John Matthews suggests that this should be read as a “parody of courtship and consummation,”29 but it is equally a parody of the cry which signals the death that consummates the hunt, the “mort o’ th’ deer” upon which Shakespeare pregnantly puns in The Winter’s Tale. This bedroom farce does not, of course, bring things to a definitive conclusion; in the final part of the story, Buck and Hubert replace gamboling with gambling, specifically poker. The shift from a hunt to a card 205


game is not as great a displacement as it might seem. Both hunting and poker involve a blurring of the line between chance and design. As the hunter strives to anticipate the prey’s maneuvers, turning them into the predictable elements of a predetermined plan, so the cardsharp thrives by making the accidental seem intentional, or more dubiously, the intentional seem accidental. Consider Simon Suggs’s hilarity at his father’s consoling reflection that the outcome of their game “was all fixed aforehand,” or the classic exchange between that consummate confidence artist, W. C. Fields, and an eager mark, from My Little Chickadee: “‘Is this a game of chance?’ ‘Not the way I play it, no.’” Just how much Buck’s loss to Hubert is a result of luck remains unclear; Faulkner never explains how the latter knows the cards that Buck is looking for: “Well? Did you help them threes?” (23). It is rather more certain that the follow-up match between Hubert and Buddy is “all fixed aforehand.” Buddy’s delicate sense of proprieties forbids him to allow Cass to deal; his chance substitute turns out to be, as Hubert notices after the cards have been dealt, none other than Tomey’s Turl; and Hubert realizes that there can be only one outcome—Tomey’s Turl has manifestly got game. He releases Buck from his sister’s eager claws, and everyone is “right back where all this foolishness started from” (27). The accuracy of Hubert’s analysis is confirmed by the final section of the story, which circles around to repeat the opening, as the brothers return home at daybreak, to find the fox is being chased by the dogs. The script of their lives remains almost unaltered: “‘What in damn’s hell do you mean,’ Uncle Buddy said, ‘casting that damn thing with all the dogs right in the same room?’ ‘Damn the fox,’ Uncle Buck said” (29; cf. 5). Almost unchanged: Buck’s final line—“It seems to me I’ve been away from home a whole damn month.” (29)—suggests that his adventure has been the equivalent of a trip into time itself, from which both are happy to have escaped. The McCaslin plantation, for the twins, seems to be a place removed from time, history, and mortality, in which they dwell like the unchanging gods to which their given names allude. Their lives are an endless cycle of unvarying rhythms in which there is neither growth nor decay. (Ike will later observe that their handwriting resembles that of a “perfectly normal ten-year-old boy” [252].) Buddy in particular seems semidivine in his freedom from fleshly temptations: he neither drinks nor is he “woman-weak” (25) like Buck. Faulkner describes him, as he waits to begin his poker game with Hubert, as though he were something resembling a pagan idol, “his hands in his lap, all one gray color like a gray 206

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rock or a stump with moss on it, that still, with his round white head like Uncle Buck’s but he didn’t blink like Uncle Buck” (25). Buddy’s apparent ability to predestine the outcome of the game is of a piece with his seeming superiority to chance and uncertainty, as is his fear of any kind of sexual connection which might introduce the uncontrollable and unpredictable into his existence. Interestingly, Faulkner characterizes this fear as an anxiety lest he be diverted from “a straight line.” Buddy, we are told, will not take the “chance” of wearing a necktie, since “even in a section like theirs, ladies were so damn seldom thank God that a man could ride for days in a straight line without having to dodge a single one” (7). But this godlike autonomy and omniscience comes at a cost. Buck is the less free of the two; the necktie that he wears, unlike his brother, indicates all too clearly that he is tied by the neck in spite of himself, like a rebellious slave, to the unpredictable things of this world. But it is those ties that make him, as Hubert puts it, “seem human” (25), and it is their absence that makes his brother’s dream of a life free of chance and uncertainty finally appear to be no life for human beings. Lucas Beauchamp, the chief protagonist of the succeeding tale, “The Fire and the Hearth,” is not celibate; indeed, his marriage and its meaning can be said to be the chief concern of the three chapters that compose the tale. But he does aspire to be a master plotter. The opening of the tale drops us right into the middle of a tricky scheme: “First, in order to take care of George Wilkins once and for all, he had to hide his own still” (33). Lucas’s plan is, in many ways, a recapitulation of the pursuit of Tomey’s Turl that began “Was.” His ostensible purpose is to put an end to the threat of the unwanted attention that George’s attempt to establish a rival moonshining business will bring to his own operations, but his strategy bears clear and disturbing resemblances to Buck’s attempt to catch his escaped slave. Like Buck, he wants to trap and deprive his prey of his freedom, locking him up in prison, the state penal farm at Parchman, where he will be turned into a slave in everything but name, “plowing and chopping and cutting cotton which was not his own” (33–34). And just as Buck’s hunt for Tomey’s Turl is a plot against marriage that periodically interrupts and delays the union of Turl and Tennie, so one of the agreeable side effects of Lucas’s plan is the definitive conclusion it will bring to the mortifying prospect of having “a fool for a son-in-law” (35). There is, however, a sense in which Lucas’s plotting is motivated less by the desire for any particular outcome than it is by the way his plots reinforce his conception of himself as a masterful controller of events. He 207


takes an evident pleasure in writing the scripts that others will unconsciously follow. Already, we are told, he has “planned the very phrases, dialogue, in which, after the first matter was attended to, he would inform Edmonds that he had decided to quit farming, was old enough to retire, and for Edmonds to allot his land to someone else to finish the crop” (42). His will reigns supreme, while that of others is subordinated and reduced, as George’s own name, Wilkins, hints. Lucas does not merely devise his plot; he admires his own ingenuity and workmanship, envisioning his plan as a beautifully efficient mechanism that inspires an almost aesthetic response: “Then he would approach Edmonds and speak his word and it would be like dropping the nickel into the slot machine and pulling the lever: all he would have to do then would be just to watch it” (36). With mechanical precision, the future will unfold according to Lucas’s provident meticulousness, while he observes the progress of his magnificent design like an indifferent deity. One thing that Lucas’s vision does not have room to accommodate, in spite of his unconsciously ironic fondness for the metaphor of the slot machine, is the unpredictable operation of chance. Yet it is precisely chance that intervenes and changes the direction of the story at this point. Digging a cavity in the Indian mound in which to secrete his still, he inadvertently causes a sudden collapse of the earth, in the course of which he is struck in the face by a shard of earthenware, which “crumbled again and deposited in his palm, as though it had been handed to him, a single coin” (38). In effect, the earth is literalizing the implications of Lucas’s slot machine figure, capriciously spitting forth money into his open hands. Lucas’s response to this event is complex; on the one hand, it seems to trigger an ebullition of avarice, setting “his mind boiling with all the images of buried money he had ever listened to or heard of” (38). At the same time, as in the case of Ratliff’s sudden desire to possess the treasure of the Old Frenchman’s place, it is too simple to reduce Lucas’s motivation to a wholly uncharacteristic attack of greed. We are insistently reminded, after all, that he has “more money in the bank now than he would ever spend” (34). For Lucas, as for Ratliff, the money represents more than mere wealth, or at least wealth of a more than pecuniary sort. To understand what it does represent, it is necessary to consider the most important fact about Lucas, his relationship with the great patriarch of the McCaslin clan, old Carothers. Lucas likes to present himself to the world as entirely self-possessed, and even self-begotten, as his act of self-baptism indicates. He does not 208

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refuse to be called Lucius, his given name; “he simply eliminated that word from the name; not denying, declining the name itself, because he used three quarters of it, making it no longer the white man’s but his own, by himself composed, himself selfprogenitive and nominate, by himself ancestored, as, for all the old ledgers recorded to the contrary, old Carothers himself was” (269). His proud sense of autonomy rests on a foundation of unshakeable certainty about what is his own, even when mere legality does not recognize his inalienable claim to, for example, “his own field, though he never owned it nor wanted to nor even needed to” (35). Above all, he claims to own himself and his actions, ignoring the advice that his nominal superior Roth Edmonds vainly attempts to give him, in fact “ignoring not only the advice but even the very voice which gave it, as though the other had not spoken even” (36). But this self-possession is, on closer inspection, somewhat specious, to the extent that its solvency is maintained by a secret subvention from the past. Lucas is in fact obsessed by the past, which to him, like Mr. Compson, represents a manifestly superior dispensation—“the old days, the old time, and better men than these” (44)—and it is part of his conviction of his own superior worth that he is the last surviving link with that taller age, himself “the oldest living McCaslin descendant still living on the hereditary land, who actually remembered old Buck and Buddy in the living flesh” (39). Above all towers the semimythic figure of old Carothers, the totemic ancestor who is ever present in Lucas’s imagination, and it is Lucas’s descent through the legitimating male line from this powerful and empowering demigod that gives him the patent of genealogical nobility in comparison with which his merely racial subordination seems contemptibly trivial. I would argue, therefore, that it is not as simple lucre but as the shining tangible symbol of Lucas’s privileged connection with the “better men” of the past that he values the gold coin which he finds in his palm, “as though it had been handed to him.” The money, he is suddenly certain, has been buried almost a hundred years before by Buck and Buddy, the only other true, patrilineal descendants of old Carothers, and to alienate even a part of it would constitute a sin against the jealous line of the blood. After briefly toying with the idea of sharing his find with George as a sort of “libation to Chance and Fortune,” Lucas hastily rejects it as an act that would in effect legitimize “an interloper without forbears . . . whose very name was unknown in the country twenty-five years ago,” and he invokes in passing the shameful instance of “old Isaac who . . . had turned apostate to his name and lineage by weakly relinquishing the 209


land which was rightfully his” (39). By asserting his exclusive claim to the treasure that has been laid up for him, Lucas asserts his birthright; the gold is his spiritual link to his godlike ancestor, allowing him to partake in his transcendental condition, giving him “one blinding glimpse of the absolute” (39) that will set him free of secular constraints.30 The progress of Lucas’s plot is interrupted by two things: first, the unexpected discovery that his daughter Nat has been observing his operation, and second, as he is playing out his little dialogue with Roth, by an equally unintended intrusion of the past—his memory of the time when Zack disrupted his own marriage as effectively as he is hoping to disrupt that of George Wilkins. The episode of Lucas and Zack changes the tonality of “The Fire and the Hearth,” injecting an element of emotional seriousness into what has been up to this point something of a tall tale, but its concerns are of a piece with the story as a whole. Zack’s apparent appropriation of Molly is, at one level, a racial affront to Lucas, but even more important, it is an affront to his sense of himself as the one who always has events in his control. Lucas interprets Molly’s six-month sojourn in Zack’s house as a sexual dispossession, and most critics have followed him in this, but Zack’s expression of astonishment at Lucas’s construction of the situation seems entirely sincere: “‘Well by God,’ he said quietly. ‘So that’s what you think. What kind of a man do you think I am? What kind of a man do you call yourself?’” (46). Lucas reads the event entirely in terms of a masculine struggle between himself and Zack over the possession of a woman; what he never considers is Molly’s will, the possibility that she felt a greater duty, temporarily, to the newborn child than to her husband. Throughout, what seems to be uppermost in Lucas’s mind is the appearance of powerlessness that his situation presents: “It would be like I had done said to the whole world that he never sent her back because I told him to but he gave her back to me because he was tired of her” (48, italics omitted). When his hope that Molly’s return with Zack’s child will create a similar contest over a dispossessed object is frustrated by the father’s apparent indifference, Lucas is forced to proceed to a more direct confrontation, slipping into Zack’s bedroom in the night. For Lucas, his open razor to the contrary, it is clear that the battle is more symbolic than physical. In Hegelian terms, it is a struggle for recognition, in which Lucas is attempting to make Zack acknowledge his mastery by demonstrating his willingness to die rather than submit: “You tried to beat me. And you wont never, not even when I am hanging dead from the limb this time tomorrow with the coal oil still burning, 210

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you wont never” (52). That their confrontation finally takes the form of a wrestling match over the possession of a pistol is significant. A pistol is after all a machine—indeed a slot machine—and we have already seen examples of Lucas’s tendency to associate his ability to determine the course of events with mechanical metaphors. Indeed, he takes the time to ensure that there will be no accidents, breaking the pistol’s breech to guarantee “that a live cartridge would come beneath the hammer regardless of the direction the cylinder rotated” (55). But though Lucas may have subdued Zack, chance is not to be so easily controlled; he pulls the trigger at point-blank range, only to hear the “light, dry, incredibly loud click of the miss-fire” (56).31 There is a potential lesson in this turn of events, but it is one which Lucas only partly and unconsciously absorbs. The misfire achieves a seemingly impossible resolution: Lucas has been able to demonstrate his contempt for death without having to pay the price, and without spilling the blood “of the woman-kin that couldn’t fend for herself” (55). He prefers to interpret his miraculous redemption, however, not as the wholly unforeseeable result of chance, but the divine intercession of his patriarchal paraclete: “Old Carothers, he thought. I needed him and he come and spoke for me” (57). Yet as the fable ends, it becomes clear that he has gained something. Lucas recognizes that life extends beyond the narrow confines of his personal struggle with Zack, and that Molly and the children she is caring for have claims to their own life stories. “I reckon you better put your time on them,” he tells her as she leaves to take the babies back to the McCaslin house, “Since that’s what you started out to do” (57). Still more important, he accepts, and makes his peace with, the inevitable limitations of his knowledge, his ability to discern the true plots of the world. As Molly walks away, he reflects, “Women. I wont never know. I don’t want to” (58, italics omitted). As we shall see later, it is that limitation that the other major protagonist of the novel, Ike McCaslin, will have much more difficulty accepting. When we return to the present after this interlude, Lucas’s plot to entrap George Wilkins seems to be proceeding as Lucas had foreseen, so well that he can return home resting in the certainty that “it was all over, done” (59). It has, of course, barely begun; what had escaped Lucas’s attention as he went about his preparations the night before, the presence of his daughter Nat, who herself escapes, “the quarry fleeing like a deer across a field” (40), introduces an almost invisible element of the unpredictable that will frustrate the mechanical working out his plan. Nat, 211


“small, thin as a lath, young” (71), is hardly noticeable, but she is sufficient to create the unforeseeable deviation that will divert Lucas’s plan from its intended end. She embodies the tiny detail that has the capacity, sooner or later, to negate the greatest of plots, as the name her father has given her, Nat/Not, ironically suggests. And so it is her plot (“It uz mostly Nat’s” [66]) in which Lucas finally becomes a willing participant; after he awakes to find George’s still in his front yard, and his gallery arrayed with “an assortment of fruit jars and stoneware jugs” full of moonshine (61), the realization of the marriage of Nat with George becomes his only hope of escape from the very penitential slavery he had planned for that “jimber-jawed clown” (40). The next two chapters of “The Fire and the Hearth” are best regarded as a single unit, or the same story composed in two different styles, comic and potentially tragic. At the beginning of chapter 2, Lucas has had the experience but only imperfectly grasped its meaning: he is still obsessed with the great past, and with his attempt to gain access to it. But things have taken a still more suspicious turn. In the first place, Lucas appears less like the shrewd and dignified figure of the first chapter, and more like the stereotypically furtive and credulous darky of plantation myth. His mastery seems to have slipped away, and he has assumed the degraded demeanor of the slave. Second, his mechanical metaphors of the first chapter have materialized, in the form of the “divining machine,” “complex and efficient-looking with its bright cryptic dials and gleaming knobs” (126), that promises infallible perspicacity, the ability to see through the layers of earth and the veils of time. The divining machine, that is, with a handle “at each end” (79), divines in two directions simultaneously—it discovers its object, but it also turns its operator into a prosthetic god, divine in his power to escape the limitations of mortal humanity—a literal deus ex machina. It is this desire to be a prophet, rather than merely to make a profit, that finally seduces Lucas, as it had done that other canny operator, V. K. Ratliff, years before. And like Ratliff, Lucas, in his obsession with obtaining possession of this magical machine, loses possession of himself, and becomes entangled in the drummer’s transparently crude swindle. All his life, he had prided himself on working for all he obtained. Now, he is looking for something for nothing, first trying to borrow the price of the machine from Edmonds, and when that fails, stealing his mule. All his flexible guile seems to have deserted him, and at the crisis of the second chapter he finds himself captured, as if in a photograph: when Edmonds finds 212

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him with George, the Indian mound frames them “like a photographer’s backdrop” against which the “two arrested figures” (84) are as immobilized as Ratliff at the end of The Hamlet. All, to be sure, is not lost. This is a comedy, and Lucas miraculously recovers enough of his former shiftiness to send the plot into reverse, sowing money for the drummer to find, and inducing him to rent the expropriated machine back from its new owner. Temporarily, at least, he understands the principle that “discoveries” are made, not found. At the beginning of section 3, however, it is clear that his fixation has not been cured, as Molly approaches Edmonds to seek a divorce. Once again, as at the beginning of “The Fire and the Hearth,” Lucas is engaged in a plot whose ultimate consequence is the frustration of marriage: his nightly hunting expeditions after buried money separate George from Nat far more effectively than his earlier scheme did, and they are threatening to bring about the destruction of his own domestic order. In effect, the celibate isolation toward which his schemes are bringing him is not their unfortunate byproduct but a necessary condition for the realization of his ambition. More clearly than anyone else in the story, Molly understands the true magnitude of that ambition: when Edmonds expresses surprise that what she fears most is that he may find the money, she explains, “Because God say, ‘What’s rendered to My earth, it belong to Me unto I resurrect it’” (99). To assume God’s power to “resurrect” the no longer dead past would put one in a position to defy mortality and to rise above the constraints of time, and in a real sense this is Lucas’s ultimate aspiration. To those around him, Lucas already seems immortal. Not “only the oldest man but the oldest living person on the Edmonds plantation” (36), he is nevertheless “impervious to time” (112, 114), and his face “at sixty-seven actually looked younger than [Edmonds] at fortythree” (114). To Edmonds, Lucas’s death hardly seems within the scope of imagination: he is sure that the old man will never pay his debts “for the good and simple reason that Lucas would not only outlive the present Edmonds as he had outlived the two preceding him, but would probably outlast the very ledgers which held his account” (113). Like Dorian Gray, he retains his youthful vigor while those around him succumb to degeneration and decay. Though Molly is “actually younger than Lucas,” she looks “much older, incredibly old” (97). What Lucas despises, and fears, in death is that it is the ultimate loss of control. Death is the greatest insult, the humiliation of discovering that one is only a minor character in plots that will continue to unfold with213


out one’s presence, plots greater than one can ever imagine, let alone direct. In this sense all deaths are accidental; they mark the point at which chance, in the form of the unpredictable and uncontrollable failure of the merely physical body, intrudes into the “line of sameness” of an individual life and makes it “give out, and cease to be traceable any farther.” It is immortality that Lucas is hunting in the creek bottom every night. Yet it is an immortality that, from the perspective of time and change, looks very much like death. When Molly tells Edmonds that she wants a divorce, she is only recognizing that Lucas has already divorced himself from the temporal world and the community of mortals that belong to it. What frightens her is the prospect that Lucas’s “sickness” may not be confined to him, but may propagate itself, infecting her son-in-law and destroying her daughter’s marriage as well. Her “cure,” as so often in Go Down, Moses, takes the form of a reversal. Appropriating the machine herself, she reenacts Lucas’s ambition so as to dramatize its implications and consequences. The next day she is found, stretched out as if dead, “lying on her face in the mud, the once immaculate apron and the clean faded skirts stained and torn, one hand still grasping the handle of the divining-machine as she had fallen with it” (121). Molly’s death may be only a dramatic tableau, but it awakens Lucas to a sense of the infinite value of the finite, and reminds him perhaps of that rather more human and conjugal form of divinity which belongs to “that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives [when] they had touched and became as God when he voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be” (104).32 Molly’s spectacle of death, followed by an apparent resurrection (“She was not dead” [121]) is comparable to Hermione’s performance in The Winter’s Tale, and has a similar redemptive effect: Lucas decides that Molly is worth more to him than the machine, with all its divining power. Standing before the Chancellor, he announces, “We don’t want no voce . . . I done changed my mind” (124). Matthews suggests, I think correctly, that “voce” needs be heard as a variation on “voice”; the voice that Lucas is renouncing here is the voice of his personal divinity, the great immortal ancestor old Carothers, who “spoke” for Lucas, he decided, when the pistol misfired. If Lucas’s interpretation, as I argued earlier, was a symptom of his unwillingness to accept the reality of chance, his turning away from that “voce” signifies a change of mind indeed, and an assent to the contingency of mortality. His directions to Edmonds at the end of the story make clear the association between abandoning 214

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the machine and accepting the limits on life: “I don’t never want to see it again. Man has got three score and ten years on this earth, the Book says. . . . I am near to the end of my three score and ten, and I reckon to find that money aint for me” (126–27). I want to defer consideration of “Pantaloon in Black” for the moment, and move on to the wilderness trilogy composed of “The Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn,” which has always been felt to be the heart of Go Down, Moses, the part that gives coherence and thematic unity to the whole. A small library of writings has been devoted to the figure who dominates it, Ike McCaslin, who has been subjected to an exhausting array of wildly divergent assessments, but whose centrality few readers would wish to contest. Ike’s varied critical career has been even more uncertain than Faulkner’s own. The defining act of his life, the renunciation of his patrimony, once seen as an authentic ritual of atonement by an ethical exemplar who succeeds in transcending the cruel conventions of his society—R. W. B. Lewis’s “hero in the new world”—is now more likely to be condemned as the self-mystifying gesture of a willful innocent.33 Critics who see Ike’s “heroism” as seriously flawed or misguided are not, I think, wrong, but I do believe that they have been mistaken about what constitutes the precise source of Ike’s limitations. In Ike we have another version of that celebrated figure that James selected in order to introduce pragmatism to his American audience: the pathfinder. Ike, in fact, seems to be the beau ideal of the forest ranger and hunter incarnate: already by thirteen he is “a better woodsman than most grown men with more [experience]. There was no territory within twenty-five miles of the camp that he did not know—bayou, ridge, landmark trees and path; he could have led anyone direct to any spot in it and brought him back. He knew game trails that even Sam Fathers had never seen” (201). Ike’s forest adventures provide most of the substantial action of the trilogy in Go Down, Moses and virtually all of it in the version of the stories published as The Big Woods, which omits the commissary dialogue between Ike and his cousin Cass. Nevertheless, it is clear that for Ike, as well as for James’s philosophical woodsman, pathfinding is an activity metaphoric as well as physical. Ike’s special connection to nature represents a certain way of relating to the world in general, to the “trackless forest of human experience,” but it is a way which is very different from that of the Jamesian pragmatist. The latter makes artificial paths in an otherwise chaotic wilderness by “marking and fixing,” by leaving “blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees.” He 215


is always conscious of the “accidentality of his own trails,” and of the fact that they do not reflect the fundamental structure or meaning of the forest. Their “truth” lies in their utility, and their utility is dependent on their being structures of marks, which allows them to be passed on to others: “Happy they without the need of blazes! But to us the blazes give a sort of ownership. We can now use the forest, wend across it with companions, and enjoy its quality. It is no longer a place merely to get lost in and never return.” Ike, on the contrary, is a pathfinder who wants to live without the need of blazes. He does not wish to mark the woods, but to immerse himself in them, to become “forever one with the wilderness” (171). He passes through the forest “without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar” (194). In “The Old People,” his hunting party proceeds on horseback through the “unmarked afternoon,” and later, on foot, “unpathed through the markless afternoon” (173). On Ike’s first hunt, the wagon in which he and Sam ride travels through the forest like a vessel in a fluid, leaving no signs of their path: “the wilderness closed behind his entrance as it had opened momentarily to accept him, opening before his advancement as it closed behind his progress, no fixed path the wagon followed but a channel non-existent ten yards ahead of it and ceasing to exist ten yards after it had passed” (187). Later, when Ike and Sam go looking for Old Ben, they follow “no path, no trail even that [Ike] could discern” (191). The stand to which he is assigned the next morning is described as having “the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark or scar” (194).34 Successful pathfinding, for Ike, seems to involve less marking and fixing than a studious concern to avoid leaving any trace, fading into the timeless and undifferentiated unity of the wilderness. This process of effacement reaches a climax in the events leading up to Ike’s epiphanic vision of Old Ben. First Ike finds the place where he had seen the marks of the bear the previous fall, the marks now fading with a peculiar rapidity: “On the third day he even found the gutted log where he had first seen the print. It was almost completely crumbled now, healing with unbelievable speed, a passionate and almost visible relinquishment, back into the earth from which the tree had grown” (197). (“Relinquishment” is a key term here, which Faulkner seems to associate with the erasure of the mark of the human will.35) As Ike is reflecting on Sam’s advice that he will be granted a vision of the bear only if he leaves behind his gun, the technological device with which, as it were, the marksman makes 216

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his mark on nature, the hunting camp begins to look to him like a kind of mark, “scratched punily and evanescently at the wilderness,” itself “fad[ing] in the dusk, back into the immemorial darkness of the woods” (197). Having “relinquished” the gun, Ike, standing in the “markless wilderness,” then finds he must also “relinquish” his compass and watch, the two instruments by which space and time are in a more direct sense marked (199). The forest thus becomes for Ike “a place to get lost in,” and as he wanders around, trying to relocate himself, he finds “no trace nor mark anywhere of his feet or any feet” (199–200). Even Old Ben participates in this process of the disappearing trace: as soon as Ike notices his “crooked print,” it is already filling with water so that “the sides of the print began to dissolve away” (200). When Ike is finally granted his epiphany, it is of a creature already disappearing, leaving no more residual sign of its passage than a fish in water: “It didn’t walk into the woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its pool and vanish without even any movement of its fins” (200–201). Ike’s abandonment of his watch connotes all too symbolically another aspect of the nature of his wilderness condition. Entering the forest, Ike steps out of the temporal order, and transcends the unpredictable vicissitudes of chance and change. He seems in fact to see things retrospectively, assuming a perspective that is reflected in the narrative’s own tendency to avoid presenting events as they happen, and to offer them as though they were always already complete. Ike’s approach might be described as a version of what James calls the “conceptual method,” which “supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective and post mortem.”36 A good example is Ike’s killing of his first deer at the beginning of “The Old People.” The action moves by a series of jumps without transition, so that nothing ever happens, but always appears “already accomplished.” From the entirely negative initial situation (“At first there was nothing” [157]) one moves to the point where the deer has already appeared (“Then the buck was there. He did not come into sight; he was just there” [157]) and finally, to a perspective after the shot: “The boy did not remember that shot at all. He would live to be eighty . . . but he would never hear that shot nor remember even the shock of the gun-butt. . . . He was running. Then he was standing over the buck where it lay on the wet earth still in the attitude of speed and not looking at all dead” (158). This is almost a small allegory of Ike’s approach to 217


the world—though it may remain in the “attitude of speed,” his view is always “retrospective and post mortem.”37 If for James “what really exists is not things made but things in the making,”38 for Ike everything appears already complete. Typically, “The Bear” opens by assuming an accomplished past, a series of repetitions of which the present action will be one more instance: “There was a man and a dog too this time” (183). Faulkner’s syntactic intricacies also serve to create the impression that every event in Ike’s life can only become meaningful when it is seen from a point where it will be a stage in a concluded process. The description of Ike’s first entrance into the forest, for example, requires the parenthetical insertion of the perspective of completion: “the surrey itself seemed to have ceased to move (this too to be completed later, years later, after he had grown to a man and had seen the sea) as a solitary small boat hangs in lonely immobility, merely tossed up and down, in the infinite waste of the ocean” (187). In Ike’s mind, the great bear hunt does not unfold as an uncertain and contingent activity developing in time, but seems to take place in an atemporal space. The woods themselves seem to Ike already a place removed from temporality, prior to a fall into history: they are without beginning— “older than any recorded document”—or end: “They did not change, and timeless, would not anymore than would. . . . summer, and fall, and snow, and wet and saprife spring in their ordered immortal sequence, the deathless and immemorial phases” (308–11). The object of the hunt, Old Ben, is no less timeless and immortal, “not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life” (185). He is, Faulkner says, “absolved of mortality” (186)—a curious phrase that recalls Lucas’s hope that his “glimpse of the absolute” will somehow free him from the inevitability of death. As well, Ben, like a fur-flanked Falstaff, is not only immortal in himself, but the cause that immortality is in other beings: when Ike thinks of him, it seems that he can see “the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it” (195). The hunt itself is equally removed from the accidental plane of time and becoming. It seems to correspond to an eternal ideal pattern that lies outside of the muddled and confused world of contingency. As every reader has noticed, the hunt feels less like an adventure whose outcome is uncertain than it does like a time-honored ritual, the “yearly pageantrite of the old bear’s furious immortality” (186). Even the prey appears to 218

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participate with equal solemnity in this ceremony “of the men . . . and the dogs and the bear and deer . . . ordered and compelled by the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules” (184). The game, too, plays “the best game of all” (184). It resembles a play or auto sacramental, whose shape is as predestined as the trajectory of any other drama, in which man and bear, like Eliot’s boar-hound and boar, pursue their pattern as before, but are reconciled among the stars. Taking part in his first hunt, Ike finds that already “even his motions were familiar to him, foreknown” (188). This sense of acting out a timeless script becomes ever stronger as the climax of the hunt approaches. Ike feels that he “had already inherited . . . without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot” (185). When the year arrives in which Old Ben is at last to be killed, “When even he don’t want it to last any longer” (204), this likewise seems like the inevitable and predictable conclusion of a timeless dramatic pattern: “It seemed to him that there was a fatality in it. It seemed to him that something, he didn’t know what, was beginning, had already begun. It was like the last act on a set stage” (216). Ike, in effect, sees the bear from the perspective of its death (as well as that of Sam Fathers, Lion, and the wilderness), a perspective which is already “post-mortem.”39 The sudden swerve that the narrative of “The Bear” takes after the death of Old Ben has made it one of the glories and riddles of American literature. Faulkner himself acknowledged the extravagant status of chapter 4, and advised those who wanted to read a short story to “skip that when you come to it.”40 As Ben looms, a “shaggy tremendous shape. . . . too big for the very country which was its constricting scope” (185), so chapter 4 bursts the confines of the story it interrupts, the “dangling clause”41 of Ike’s life. And the history of criticism, at this late date, has come to resemble the “yearly pageant-rite” of the hunters, as successive interpreters have attempted to capture its meaning. Almost invariably, the assumption animating such tireless efforts is the conviction that there is a crucial connection between Ike’s experiences in the forest and the discoveries that he makes while reading the old ledger books in the commissary store. While assessments of the adequacy of his response have varied widely, generations of commentators have by and large agreed that Ike’s special relation to the wilderness has something to do with his capacity to discern the precise dimensions of the crimes of his grandfather, which none before him, it seems, have been able to recognize so clearly. In an early version of this argument, R. W. B. Lewis, for 219


example, claims that “we appreciate the harmony of the parts [i.e., Ike’s hunting adventures and the revelations about his family history] when we begin to describe the two different moments in ancient formula: the birth into virtue and the vision of evil. For only a person adequately baptized is capable of having the vision at all; and only the grace bestowed at the baptism enables the initiate to withstand the evil when it is encountered. The action in Section Four is made possible by the experience preceding it: the ritual in the wilderness contains the decision in the commissary.”42 The intuition that chapter 4 is vitally linked to the rest of “The Bear” is no doubt justified, although “harmony” may not be the most appropriate way to describe that relation. The connection, I would argue, is not to be explained by the fact that Ike’s wilderness education has allowed him finally to interpret truly the mysterious and unspeakable secret that leaves its traces in the ledger books’ fragmentary entries. What links the scene of hunting in the forest and the scene of reading in the commissary store is that, in each case, Ike approaches his task as though it were already complete. Hunting and reading are closely similar activities, in the sense that they both involve the pursuit of an object by way of its signs; the hunters, for example, “read the tracks” left by the creature who carried off Major de Spain’s colt and by the two horses (205). Ike’s reading of the ledgers in his sixteenth year bears a curious resemblance to the ritualized hunt. Like the latter, it is a repeated activity: “It was neither the first time he had been alone in the commissary nor the first time he had taken down the old ledgers familiar on their shelf above the desk ever since he could remember” (256). On the fateful night, he is haunted by a peculiar sense of predetermination. As his “motions were familiar to him, foreknown” (188), so that here the outcome seems “foreknown” as well: “He knew what he was going to find before he found it” (257). The reading itself becomes a semi-magical ceremony which he appears to attend without agency, and the “old frail pages seemed to turn of their own accord” (259). The discovery that Ike makes while scanning those pages—the act of incest between his grandfather and a slave girl—becomes the central moment in the trajectory of his own life, just as it is inevitably the crucial event for any interpretation of the meaning of “The Bear,” and Go Down, Moses as a whole. What is striking, however, is just how meager, how “thin and spotty and half-casual,” the evidence upon which he bases his “discovery” really is—the suicide of one slave and unexplained 220

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bequests to three others. Ike’s fabrication is plausible enough, as the implicit concurrence of generations of readers attests.43 Yet it remains a fabrication. Nevertheless, Ike is absolutely convinced that he has made a discovery and penetrated the scanty record to reality itself. Just as, in the forest, the man-made marks fade away to allow Ike to achieve an immediate identification with the wilderness, and in particular to give him his ecstatic vision of the bear, so the marks on the ledger pages disappear (they are described as “scrawled in fading ink” [250] and as “fading pages” [285]) until Ike believes that he sees the truth in a hallucinatory spectacle. When Ike comes to his dramatic conclusion about his grandfather, it is in the form of a vision: “he seemed to see [Eunice] actually walking into the icy creek” (259),—just as, years before, he looked up from the fading print of Old Ben to see the bear before him. The parallel is enhanced by the similar ways in which Old Ben and Eunice are described: the ancient bear is “solitary, indomitable, and alone” (186), while in Ike’s vision Eunice is “solitary, inflexible, griefless, ceremonial” (259).44 From a pragmatic perspective, all reconstructions of the past are fabrications for the purposes of the present and the future. What particular purpose Ike’s discovery could serve begins to become evident in his conversation with his cousin Cass five years later, as he attempts to explain his decision to repudiate his inheritance. For what Ike is really uncovering is not just a gothic secret about his grandfather—indeed, the gothic secret par excellence, father-daughter incest—but the real meaning of southern history. As the records of trade in the ledger books are “the chronicle of a whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded was the entire South” (280), so old Carothers’s outrage is a miniaturized representation of the historical crime which, multiplied and compounded, was the system of slavery. But the ambition of Ike’s insight extends still further, and his grandfather’s sin becomes the key that unlocks the hidden pattern of history itself. In his long conversation with Cass, Ike outlines his “Great Story,” the metanarrative that “not only orders the past and interprets the present but also predicts the future.”45 Brooks calls his Great Story “curious,”46 but it is in fact a very familiar narrative, indeed a version of what Perry Miller called America’s first distinctive genre: it is Ike’s own personal variation on the American Jeremiad. Like the traditional jeremiad, it tells a tale of perpetual declension and falling off. In the beginning, God created the earth and man to hold dominion over it, until for his sins the latter was dispossessed of his estate and suffered the fullness of the divine wrath. Ike’s version is slightly 221


idiosyncratic to the extent that the original sin is evidently the concept of private property, and violation of the “communal anonymity of brotherhood” (246), but in its essentials it corresponds to the template of the providential course of history that was so congenial to American Puritans. Congenial in large part because, according to Sacvan Bercovitch’s influential revision of Miller, the American Jeremiad, unlike its European predecessor, has ultimately an optimistic message: “In their case, [the Puritans] believed, God’s punishments were corrective, not destructive. Here, as nowhere else, His vengeance was a sign of love, a father’s rod used to improve the errant child. In short, their punishments confirmed their promise” (Bercovitch’s emphasis).47 Thus for Ike, as for the Puritans, history is a repeated demonstration of the chosenness of the chosen people, beginning with the discovery of America (“He used a simple egg to discover to them a new world where a nation of people could be founded in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to another” [247]). Ike, however, with the privilege of a latecomer, can see the failure of the Puritan hopes because the land is “already tainted” by the idea of ownership that the white man brought with him, an idea which reached its grotesquely logical conclusion in the ownership of human beings, and according the unvarying rhythm of the jeremiad, punishment, in the form of the Civil War and defeat, is meted out, since “[a]pparently they can learn nothing save through suffering, remember nothing save when underlined in blood” (273, italics omitted). But this too has been foreseen as a stage in the foreordained cosmic drama; in Ike’s reading, God has inflicted pain and suffering upon southerners precisely because they are his chosen, because they continue to be the privileged agents of his providential plan, and even this affliction is “corrective, not destructive”: “So he turned once more to this land which He still intended to save because He had done so much for it. . . . to these people He was still committed to because they were his creations” (273). Finally, then, the course of history leads, through sin and suffering, upward toward redemption and a redeemer, a redeemer whom God has elected as surely as he had elected his chosen people. “Maybe,” Ike declares, “He chose Grandfather out of all of them. . . . [M]aybe He had foreseen already the descendants Grandfather would have, maybe he saw already in Grandfather the seed progenitive of the three generations He saw it would take to set at least some of His lowly people free” (248). It should come as no surprise at this point that the chosen redeemer, in Ike’s interpretation, is none other than Ike himself—“Chosen,” 222

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as Cass says, with no demurral from Ike, “out of all your time by Him as you say Buck and Buddy were from theirs” (286). It would not be incorrect, therefore, to say that Ike needs his grandfather’s crime. He needs it because his discovery of a truth so long concealed from others serves as the confirmation of his elect status, just as coincidence of the discovery of America with the Reformation of the English church, according to Puritan writers, demonstrated that God had kept the New World concealed until it could be occupied by his chosen people.48 And he needs it because only the identification of a monstrous ancestral crime can give him the opportunity for repudiation that he craves, and allow him to assume the godlike soteriological role to which he aspires. Isaac, the “child of promise” as St. Paul calls his biblical namesake,49 leaves no uncertainty about his “emulation of the Nazarene” (295). His Great Story is plotted to provide himself with a similarly redemptive role, and his sacrifice, like that of his model, will serve, at least symbolically, to cancel the debt incurred by his grandfather’s original sin, and to terminate the vicious cycle of abuse and exploitation. If Ike aspires to divinity through his sacrifice, however, he has already assumed it in his claim to have perceived the pattern of history. To see history as “providential” means, of course, literally to see it as foreseen and foreseeable, from a position outside of any context limited by the epistemological confines of temporality. We have already had indications that Ike, like Lucas, is curiously “impervious to time”; “born into his father’s old age [he] became steadily younger and younger until . . . he had acquired something of a young boy’s high and selfless innocence” (103). In effect, he sees history without time, and his vision is of a piece with his conception of the hunt and his approach to the reading of the ledgers. In each case, to recall James’s terms, he “supposes life to have already accomplished itself,” and sees both past and future as predestined, free from contingency and certain in its outcome. Like James’s rationalistic philosopher, he ascribes “to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure,” dissatisfied with the possibility that it might be “a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility.” Ironically, although in Ike’s mind man’s greatest transgression seems to be the taming and ordering of the wilderness by the imposition of an artificial pattern of ownership that reduces it to “mathematical squares of rank cotton” (337), Ike himself seems to prefer what James would call the “noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy” to the “great un223


pent and unstayed wilderness of truth.” He presents his rejection of his ancestral plantation as the result of his reading of history, but on closer inspection it looks rather more like another symptom of his desire to see the world in terms of straight lines. The plantation is nothing if not “a turbid, muddled, and gothic sort of affair,” immensely complicated both physically and morally in its “mazed and intricate entirety—the land, the fields and what they represented in terms of cotton ginned and sold, the men and women whom they fed and clothed . . . the machinery and mules and gear with which they raised it and their cost and upkeep and replacement—that whole edifice intricate and complex and founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery” (285). Characteristically, Ike does not merely reject the plantation; he replaces it with another structure, the tidy bungalow, no doubt “clean . . . in the way of inner structure,” that he builds for himself and his wife. James’s metaphor of the book, his comparison of the rationalist universe to an “infinite folio, or édition de luxe, eternally complete” which is the real pattern behind the “various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated” seems particularly relevant here. Ike conceives of all of his activities as a sort of reading, aimed at identifying the most authoritative edition. His hunt for Old Ben is, as I have already pointed out, a kind of pursuit through signs or “prints,” and Ben is spoken of as though he were the authentic edition—the “head bear”—of which the other little bears are inferior copies. Ike’s investigation into his family history literally takes the form of an exercise of reading, and the interpretation of the ledger books is juxtaposed to the problem of reading the Bible, where the problem of identifying the authoritative edition is indeed critical. At one point he interrupts his conversation with Cass in the commissary store to affirm the possibility of making such an identification, and of making what amounts to the editorial decision of distinguishing the “édition de luxe” from the “various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated”: “There are some things He said in the Book and some things reported of Him that He did not say. And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows” (249). Characteristically, Ike’s hermeneutic is retrospective: “The heart already knows.” It is a question of distinguishing God’s simple, indeed “too simple,” meaning from the “complexity of passion and lust and hate and fear” (249). Ike applies much the same 224

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hermeneutical principle to his reading of the text of history as he does to that of the Bible. One thing that there is no room for in Ike’s plot is the action of chance. Cass at one point during their conversation attempts to shake his cousin’s imperturbable confidence, pointing out the role of contingency in the outcome of even the most decisive event in Ike’s story, the Civil War, citing the long list of accidents and mischances that contributed to the defeat of the South—the death of Turner Ashby in a skirmish, the capture of the Confederate battle plan before Sharpsburg, the fatal shooting of Stonewall Jackson, the absence of J. E. B. Stuart at Gettysburg. Ike’s response—“How else have made them fight?” (274)—is logically irrelevant, but it demonstrates that he is determined to exclude nothing from his Great Story, and to include nothing which does not have a meaning. The religious terminology in which Ike conveys his conviction of history’s unity could not be further from Henry Adams’s language of science, but they are united in their effort to “find the secret which would [produce] one self-evident, harmonious, and complete system.” But where, for Adams, that secret was as yet a noble dream and seductively imminent possibility, Ike, pathfinder extraordinaire, believes that he has struck on the “one faint path” which leads out of the “thickset forests of history,” and to a point where past and future spread beneath his ranging gaze like a map of the promised land. Ike’s ambition can therefore be described in narrative terms. Repelled by the notion that the world may consist of “partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times,” he insists instead that “the whole world tells one story.” It is no accident that the reading of the Bible serves as the paradigm for his reading of history, since the desire to see the Bible as a unified story has always been one of the central motives of biblical interpretation. As Northrop Frye argues, “what the word ‘Bible’ itself primarily means is ta biblia, the little books. Perhaps, then, there is no such entity as ‘the Bible,’ and what is called ‘the Bible’ may be only a confused and inconsistent jumble of badly established texts.”50 The effort to read a single plot line out of that miscellaneous collection of narratives, the claim that they “all form chapters of one supreme purpose and inclusive story” has been, in effect, the foundational act of every religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The most influential of such efforts was that of Jesus, whose success in reading the whole of the Old Testament as a unified body of foreshadowings or as a single plot whose climax is his own appearance can be defined as the single 225


greatest example of literary criticism in Western history. Readers have sometimes expressed confusion about how Ike’s imitation of the savior is, in fact, intended to save anyone. When Faulkner tells us that Ike consciously takes the Nazarene as his role model, I would argue that the significance of the choice has less to do with his aspirations to moral perfection or redemptive mission than with his conviction that he occupies the position of the master reader of the unitary Great Story of the world. Ike’s insistence on a single story is nowhere more evident than in his encounter with Fonsiba and her husband in Arkansas. The confrontation is particularly interesting because, in many ways, Fonsiba’s husband seems like a slightly altered version of Ike, and their exchange resembles a miniaturized replication of the conversation in the commissary, with Ike cast in Cass’s role. As the latter had been dismayed by his cousin’s passivity and abandonment of his social duties, so it is now Ike who is disturbed by Fonsiba’s husband’s evident lack of interest in playing the part of the responsible landowner. In a strange way, the description of the farm, in its “roadless and even pathless waste of unfenced fallow and wilderness jungle” (265), ironically recalls Ike’s own forest ideal. Ike contemptuously makes arrangements for financial support for Fonsiba, but we already know from “The Fire and the Hearth” that he himself will eventually be supported by a monthly subvention from the Edmonds family. And, of course, Ike’s claim, “I am free” (285), directly echoes the earlier declaration of Fonsiba: “I’m free” (268). All of this makes the violence of Ike’s response to the indolence of Fonsiba’s husband both surprising and revealing. For the latter is also a reader of the Bible, and like Ike insists that the world tells one story as well, but his story is one that assigns the starring role to himself: “The curse you whites brought into this land has been lifted. It has been voided and discharged. We are seeing a new era, an era dedicated, as our founders intended it, to freedom, liberty and equality for all, to which this country will be the new Canaan” (266–67). For Ike there can be no question of alternative or competing narratives, and he urges the man to share his vision and “see” the selfevidence of his story: “‘Don’t you see?’ he cried. ‘Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted. Then your people’s turn will come because we have forfeited ours. But not now. Not yet. Don’t you see?’” (266). 226

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Ike’s desire to produce a unified narrative of history has its counterpart in the form of Go Down, Moses as a whole. The recurrent question of whether it is a novel at all, or could be more accurately regarded as a collection of miscellaneous stories, may be signaled by the biblical allusion of the book’s title. Like the Bible, Go Down, Moses is a heterogeneous assemblage that insistently raises the issue of its own coherence. The most influential way of integrating the Bible has been the typological method of reading every significant narrative incident as an allegorical reenactment of a single event; not incidentally, the “primary and model form [of redemption in the Bible] is the deliverance from Egypt,” so that, as Frye suggests, “we may say that mythically the Exodus is the only thing that really happens in the Old Testament.”51 In other words, if the Bible had a name, it might be Go Down, Moses (or perhaps, Go Down, Moses and Other Stories). One might argue, then, that Faulkner’s title alludes not only to the paradigm of deliverance in which many have sought the unifying principle of the book,52 but to the very desire to seek such unifying principles, and to discern a single unified story line. The spiritual to which the title most directly refers, for that matter, with its superimposition of ancient Egypt on the antebellum American South, is itself one of the best-known examples of the powerful appeal of the idea that the world tells one story. If there is a centripetal force in the book, it is not because it naturally coheres around and climaxes with the figure of Isaac McCaslin, but because Ike himself attempts to integrate all the diverse story lines into a single plot that begins with the sins of the grandfather, proceeds through a period of tribulation, and culminates with the predestined appearance of Ike, whose act of atonement will complete the story.53 That narrative line drastically edits and distorts the other stories of Go Down, Moses in the act of assimilating them. The image of plantation life presented in “Was,” for example, could hardly be more different from the gothic melodrama that it represents for Ike. Whereas for Ike the only actors in the plantation story are the aristocrats, the demonic Old Carothers and his well-meaning but largely impotent children, the world of “Was” includes shrewd and resourceful slaves who have managed to carve out a sphere of relative freedom in an oppressive system, and who even succeed, Figarolike, in directing the action toward their desired ends. Lucas is equally independent, and so far is he from sharing Ike’s moral vision of a land “cursed” by human exploitation though at last redeemed by an act of sacrifice that, in “The Fire and the Hearth,” he can only re227


gard Ike as having been outmaneuvered by Cass, and of “having turned apostate to his name and lineage by weakly relinquishing the land which was rightfully his to live in town on the charity of his great-nephew” (39). Old Carothers, for Lucas, is not the gruesome Moloch that compels Ike’s appalled imagination, but a totemic spirit of potency whom he uses for his own purposes, and as a reserve of strength in confrontations with whites. Lucas has much in common with Ike, and like him is tempted by the seductions of transcendence, but in striking contrast to Ike he recognizes the costs of such an ambition, and finally rejects the divining lure of absolute knowledge—“I wont never know. I don’t want to” (58). The story immediately preceding the wilderness trilogy, “Pantaloon in Black,” poses the most blatant challenge to Ike’s attempt to see varied incidents that make up the history of the South as “chapters of one supreme purpose and inclusive story.” Attempts to find ways to incorporate it into the McCaslin saga at best confirm its sullen resistance to assimilation. Yet this should not be surprising, since resistance to either assimilation or comprehension is in many ways the theme of the story. Whereas “The Bear” climaxes with a scene of spectacularly successful reading, “Pantaloon in Black” is punctuated by images of blocked understanding and senseless disorder that cannot be read, beginning with the grave in the opening paragraph, “marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read” (131–32). The central character, “one who was called Rider and was Rider” (147), is a splendid physical specimen, who has been a figure of mastery throughout his life, a “rider” of things and people (“the men he worked with and the bright dark nameless women he had taken in course . . . began to call him Rider” [146]), as well as events, until his confrontation with the contingency of mortality, in the form of his wife’s sudden death, undermines his strength and self-control. Ike assimilates his personal discovery into a providentially emplotted history; Mannie’s too human death54 discloses to Rider a universe that tells no story that makes moral sense (“‘What faith and trust?’ he said. ‘Whut Mannie ever done ter Him? Whut He wanter come messin wid me and—” [140]) and whose central symbol is a dice game. Rider refuses assimilation or comprehension, turning away from friends and family and rejecting his aunt’s attempts at religious consolation, breaking out of the frames by which others attempt to accommodate his grief just as he tears the “steel barred door” of his jail cell out of the wall and “walks 228

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out of the cell toting the door over his head like it was a gauze windowscreen” (153). His warning—“Jest don’t lock me up” (152)—is delivered to the sheriff arresting him, but it is really addressed to the world. His final isolation, however, is confirmed by the sadly obtuse plot by which the deputy attempts to “lock [him] up” in the final pages of the story. 55 The individual stories of Go Down, Moses, by themselves, thus seem to do little to confirm Ike’s vision of a meaningful pattern and a single story. Not incidentally, the narrative line that Ike discerns is also a genealogical line; the fact that Ike represents the last stage in the story begun by old Carothers is indissociable from the fact that he is also (in his reading) the last linear descendant. When Cleanth Brooks suggests the book might be called The McCaslins he seems to be subscribing to Ike’s view. For one of the things Ike’s reading requires is a rejection of the possibility of other narrative lines. I have already mentioned his response to Fonsiba’s husband’s story, which threatens to make Ike’s sacrifice irrele vant. More generally, Ike’s story necessitates the dismissal of the other lines of descent from Old Carothers as insignificant. Where Ike’s insistence on the unity of his narrative becomes most problematic is in the last tale in the wilderness trilogy, “Delta Autumn.” Ike himself, by this point, appears to be close to the end of the line; his acuity and imaginative vitality are both failing, and he attends the coded conversation about Roth’s amorous intrigues with serene incomprehension. His response to historical crisis takes the form of complacent bromides— “I aint noticed this country being short of defenders yet, when it needed them” (322)—and Roth’s brutal question, “where have you been all the time you were dead?” (329), is indiscreet, but not illegitimate. The scene which for almost every reader is the most shocking demonstration of Ike’s apparent moral decay is of course the exchange with Roth’s unnamed black mistress and her child, and especially the blunt ejaculation caused by his sudden realization of her race—“You’re a nigger!” (344). His advice to her is equally dismaying: “Go back North. Marry: a man in your own race. That’s the only salvation for you—for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait. Marry a black man” (346). But to describe Ike’s response simply in terms of residual racism would not be so much wrong as inadequate. On the contrary, I would argue that what really disturbs him, in this unexpected coupling, is the possibility of a muddling of genealogical lines that would inevitably be a confusion of narrative lines, a mixing and crossing that places all certainty of direction in doubt. 229


The specter of racial mixture represented by Roth’s mistress raises the possibility that genealogical lineage may be unforeseeable and subject to unpredictable changes of course so that we may be “deflected from our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we are following something different from what we started with.” James, as noted earlier, goes on to observe that the inescapability of such random deflections, of “the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness,” undercuts “all the old identities,” and it is the concern aroused in Ike by his sudden confrontation with the precariousness of those identities that gives rise to his hysterical apocalyptic vision of a world in a death spiral of disorder: This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has de swamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares. (347, italics omitted) What this passage suggests is that Ike’s distress at the visible sign of the confusion of lines that is carried into his tent does not, as sometimes argued, represent a failure of his wilderness education, but is directly connected to his despair at the breakdown of the barrier separating wilderness and civilization. His horror at the way all the old genealogical identities cross and merge—“Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares”—is the counterpart of his distress at the way denatured nature, “deswamped and denuded and derivered,” promiscuously exchanges identity with the city, where “cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks.” The structure of Ike’s imagination is dominated by “lines of sameness.” James, it will be recalled, referred disparagingly to Henry Adams’s fancy of escaping the contingency of time and catching hold of the truth of history by tracing a line connecting events in the past, and then “prolonging the line” into the future. As Ike read the plantation ledgers, struggling to impose a definitive interpretation on the fragmentary record, 230

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the lines of entries took on a strangely material reality, turning into “two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong” (245, 281) and later into a “frail and iron thread strong as truth” which joins him to the past (286). The metaphor is ambiguous; Ike seems to be asserting his freedom from these threads, but it is in fact he who has created them, constructing the secret crime of his grandfather and spinning out a theory of history that requires such a crime precisely so that Ike can declare his freedom from it. Ike’s grand vision in “Delta Autumn” of the eternal hunt is another version of the same figure, and certainly the most elaborate: “He seemed to see the two of them—himself and the wilderness—exactly as coevals . . . the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space . . . the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns” (337–38). This magnificent panorama, one more in the series of Ike’s hallucinatory visions, is closely related to the image of the Grecian urn, which likewise figures the hunt as a circular image of eternity, the “mad pursuit” frozen into immortal attitudes. Hunter and hunted are parallel lines of sameness, prolonged from the past into the future, whose providential infinity and everlasting immortality is predicated on the condition that they never cross. When, therefore, on the morning after this glimpse into a world removed from contingency, “from both time and space,” Ike is confronted by just such a crossing, the unforeseen and unforeseeable intersection of the white and black McCaslin bloodlines, of Roth and the nameless woman, of hunter and “doe,” his shock and hysterical dismay express more than an affront to a residual sense of superiority. His outrage has less to do with race, that is, than it does with a sudden and shattering encounter with the necessity of accident, a necessity which means that no story is ever finished, no path ever safe from “the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness,” no perspective ever adequate to command “the great unpent and unstayed wilderness” of human history. Brooks, venturing an editorial opinion, suggests that Faulkner might have been “well-advised” to end his book with “Delta Autumn”;56 needless to say, the author felt otherwise. Such an act of radical textual excision would no doubt have produced a more shapely and “sweeping outline” with fewer perplexing extrusions and deviations, but it is pre231


cisely the cost of such excisions that is the theme of the collection as a whole, and the subject of “Go Down, Moses” is what Ike’s sublime vision in “Delta Autumn” leaves out—death. Butch Beauchamp’s life and death represent what does not fit into Ike’s Great Story, in particular the intricacy of an intractable racial problem that continues to trouble American history, in the face of which mere acts of atonement are hollow gestures. The story mocks the attempt to reduce the meaning of Butch’s life to a clear and simple account in its opening paragraphs. A census taker, questioning him in his jail cell before his execution, tries to reduce his life to the sum of his name, age, occupation, and relatives, but the real story of Butch is the history of the South in all its tortuous and tortured complexity. When the story shifts south, Gavin Stevens has assumed the census taker’s interrogatory role, subjecting Mollie Beauchamp to a series of questions, before he agrees to locate her grandchild. The rest of “Go Down, Moses” will be seen through Stevens’s eyes, and Butch’s story will be the one that Stevens puts together. The limits of Stevens’s perspicacity, however, especially in racial matters, are evident early; though he has known Hamp Worsham all his life, for example, he has no idea he had a sister (354). His imagination is equally constrained, and Mollie’s scriptural metaphors—“Roth Edmonds sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt. Pharaoh got him” (353)—leave him merely confused. The plot of Butch’s story, as he constructs it, is a sordid tale of crime and violence, the result apparently of an incurable genetic predisposition: “something in him from the father who begot and deserted him and was now in the State Penitentiary for manslaughter—some seed not only violent but dangerous and bad” (355). What Stevens leaves out of his account is the larger history that brought Butch to where he is, the history of poverty, misery, and broken family that proceeds him, and the history of exploitation and incomprehension that has defined the relation of the races in the South since long before his birth, histories that frequently issue in a rage feeding deliriously on the hearts that generate it. His depiction of Butch’s arrest—“cursing through his broken mouth, his teeth fixed into something like furious laughter through the blood” (354)—picks up the imagery of predation that has permeated the book, recalling perhaps Sophonsiba’s roan-colored tooth, but a closer look would make it clear that Butch is consuming himself. At one point, thinking over Mollie’s metaphor, Stevens trembles on the verge of the realization that Butch’s case has something to do with a rejection of responsibility on the part of 232

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Roth Edmonds, Butch’s landlord and kinsman: “Now he comprehended what the old Negress had meant. He remembered now that it was Edmonds who had caught the boy breaking into his commissary story and had ordered him off the place and had forbidden him ever to return. And not the sheriff, the police, he thought. Something broader, quicker in scope” (355, Faulkner’s italics and ellipsis). Nothing follows. Stevens seems about to articulate some sense of the labyrinthine web of antagonism and interdependence, fear and misunderstanding, that constitutes the racial heritage of the South, but his language stumbles, becomes vague and obscure, and finally trails off into silence. Stevens’s momentary insight does not last. While he does attempt to do his duty for Mollie and Miss Worsham, he is acting out of a sense of public service rather than personal understanding, and his jocular description of his motives to the editor of the county newspaper to whom he resorts for information is more truthful than he would be comfortable acknowledging: “I just hope, for her sake as well as that of those of the great public whom I represent, that his present trouble is very bad and maybe final too” (356). The lawyer persuades the editor to assist him in his campaign to collect money to cover Mollie’s funeral expenses, but he seems to feel that his chief act of charity is to keep Butch’s story out of the paper and away from public notice. By the end of the day, any trace of the morning’s imperfect revelation has dissipated; when he stops by Miss Worsham’s house to give Mollie the news of his success, she, lost in her biblical allegories, does not even notice him: “‘Roth Edmunds sold him,’ the old Negress said. She swayed back and forth in the chair. ‘Sold my Benjamin’” (362). Forgetting his earlier insight, the lawyer now hears only the delusions of a confused old woman, and attempts to clear the matter up by an appeal to the facts: “‘No,’ Stevens said. ‘No he didn’t, Aunt Mollie. It wasn’t Mr. Edmonds. Mr. Edmonds didn’t—’” (362). Stevens’s incomprehension is by now near total; despite his rational, self-possessed persona and language, it is clear that even he feels the inadequacy of his public literalism against the authority of Mollie’s personal grief, and senses that her relentless allegory is expressing the “something broader” that he was unsuccessfully attempting to articulate to himself—expressing it so urgently and obsessively that it seems to drive the very air out of the small room, and he is overcome by a panicky need to escape. The next day, at the funeral, personal pain has been silenced, and everyone has reverted to their predictable public roles—“the high-headed 233


erect white woman, the old Negress, the designated paladin of justice and truth and right, the Heidelberg Ph.D.” (364) As the two white men break off from the rest of the funeral party, the editor gives Stevens one last opportunity to exercise his talent for complacent misinterpretation by supplying one more puzzling bit of behavior on Mollie’s part, her demand that he print all the details of Butch’s sordid fate: “I wants hit all in the paper. All of hit” (365). To Stevens, this is just another example of Mollie’s perverse indifference to the facts, and her preference for the emotional comforts of timeless ritual: “now that it’s all over and done and finished, she doesn’t care how he died. She just wanted him home, but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through town behind it in a car” (365, italics omitted). Stevens could hardly be more wrong; it is precisely because it is not all over and done and finished that she insists on the editor’s printing “all of hit”—all the wretched circumstances that went into the making of Butch’s fate, and by extension, all the complexity, interrelations, and ambiguity of the collective tales of the South, and all, as her language maybe hints, of the violence of a history in which the hits keep coming. Or to put it another way, what she is resisting is the desire of Stevens and the editor to “edit” those stories down to a single and simple narrative of individual depravity, the too predictable tale of one more “dead nigger” (360), the “bad son of a bad father” (357). Stevens and his friend can thus be seen as the last in a series of would-be editors who aspire to produce from the immense tangled skein of interdependence and indebtedness, long anger and painful love, confusion and despair, and forgiveness and grief and hope that constitutes the world of Go Down, Moses, a clean-lined and well-edited narrative, indeed an “édition de luxe” that would at last offer a meaningful whole. As the very form of the book announces, however, in the resistance it offers to every attempt to reduce it to a single great story, their efforts are doomed to failure; a “line of sameness,” that is, can only be realized by an act of deliberate interpretive force, by doing “violence,” like that for example done to Rider and Butch, “to its spontaneous development.” Not even the obituary demanded by Mollie can contain “all of hit,” all the pullulating labyrinth of swerving narratives that constitutes the texture of Faulkner’s fabulous domain, the partial stories that run together, decussating and diverging, mutually interlacing, responding to, resisting, and revising one another. Only a book could even hope to make a beginning—a novel, say, or perhaps a collection of stories. 234

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Conclusion A Future for Faulkner

In his sensitive, often moving meditation on Faulkner and his writings, the poet Edouard Glissant remarks on the unpredictable moments when a sense of the whole of the novelist’s prodigious fictional world seems to arise before the reader like an intricate hallucination: “At the turning of a note, and the end of a short story, or in a speech in the middle of a novel . . . the whole ensemble of his work stands before you as though erected by an architect who constructed a monument around a secret to be known, pointing it out and hiding it all at the same time.”1 Though rarely stated with such eloquence, this is a view of the meaning of Faulkner’s creative achievement that has dominated our received versions of the novelist. The precise definition of the secret has differed, as critical winds have blown from the direction of psychoanalysis, history, class, or race, but the consensus that the secret is there, somewhere, leaving its traces in the obscure complexity of the prose, has been an inevitable foundation for the monumentalization of the great author, and the principle by which the enduring significance of his writing has been guaranteed. But it may be time to ask, adapting Herman Melville’s reflections in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whether “perhaps, after all, there is no secret.” Perhaps, Melville continues, “the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason’s mighty secret, so terrible to all children, [which] turns out at last to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron,—nothing more.”2 To look at Faulkner from a pragmatic perspective would mean taking less seriously the haunted monument, and spectral gothic secret it encrypts, and rather more seriously, perhaps, the triangle, the mallet, and the apron. It would mean remembering that when Faulkner spoke of his novels he preferred the language of carpentry and chicken coops to that of eternal monuments, and that he described them not as vehicles for hidden or repressed truths but as jury-built fabricated constructions for which “the message,” whether “Christ symbolism” or “the injustice of society,” are only “one of the craftsman’s tools,” “good for the particular corner I was going to turn in my chicken-house.”3 Depriving his novels 235


of their dark secrets will not deprive them of their genius or grandeur, but it will involve looking for it in a different place. That is, we may come to admire Faulkner less for the portentous gothic gloom that has fascinated, Medusa-like, generations of readers, the sense of claustral psychic spaces, the weight of inherited guilt, and the inescapable burden of the past, than for the way his work celebrates the unfinished openness of human life and the possibility of fabricating new futures.4 William James, public-minded, ebullient, and credulously optimistic, and William Faulkner, intensely private, reserved, and skeptically ironic, seem in many ways distant souls, but the philosopher who declared that the universe was “unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work,” and the writer who said “What’s wrong with the world is, it’s not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put its final signature on it and say, ‘It is finished. We made it, and it works,’”5 share something fundamental. Giving more attention to what they share, and rethinking the novelist’s achievement from a pragmatic standpoint, is one way we can assure a future for Faulkner, and a Faulkner for the future.

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Notes

Introduction: His Veracity as a Liar 1. William Faulkner, The Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 201. 2. Faulkner, Lion in the Garden, 145. 3. James B. Meriwether’s description of Father Abraham as “the inception of a work that altogether spans nearly the whole of Faulkner’s career as a writer of fiction” thus applies even more accurately to “The Liar.” See Meriwether’s introduction to Father Abraham (New York: Random House, 1983). It is worth noting that in the prefatory note to The Mansion, Faulkner refers to that novel as “the final chapter of, and summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925.” 4. William Faulkner, New Orleans Sketches, ed. Carvel Collins (New York: Random House, 1968), 94. Subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 5. William James, Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 97. 6. James, Pragmatism, 32. 7. In the preface to The Meaning of Truth, James would himself assert that “the pivotal part of my book named Pragmatism is its account of the relation called ‘truth’ which may obtain between an idea (opinion, belief, statement, or what not) and its object.” The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (1909; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 3. 8. See, for example, Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992); Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994); James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995); Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell UP, 1997). 9. Michael A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy As a Moral Quest (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982), 70. Weinstein continues: “James became—particularly for Peirce, Royce, and John Dewey—the scandal of American life-philosophy, because his thought seemed to trifle with the philosophical vocation of loyalty to objective truth” (70). Richard Rorty similarly sees James as the true starting point of pragmatism: “[Peirce’s] contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James. Peirce himself remained the most Kantian of thinkers—the most convinced that philosophy gave us an all-embracing ahistorical con-

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text in which every other species of discourse could be assigned its proper place and rank.” Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982), 161. 10. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976), 27. 11. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 27. 12. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 33. 13. James, Meaning of Truth, 79–81. 14. On the definition of metaphor as displacement, see Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977), studies 1 and 2, and David H. Evans, “Guiding Metaphors: Robert Frost and the Rhetoric of Jamesian Pragmatism,” Arizona Quarterly 57 (2001): 72. 15. James, Pragmatism, 99. 16. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), 79. 17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959), 124. 18. James, Meaning of Truth, 95. 19. William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1978), 77. 20. James, Pragmatism, 32. 21. E.g., in an unpublished fragment from about 1904, responding to and attempting to distinguish his own position from that of James, he says: “The word pragmatism was invented to express a certain maxim of logic. . . . The method prescribed in the maxim is to trace out in the imagination the conceivable practical consequences,—that is, the consequences for deliberate, self-controlled conduct,—of the affirmation or denial of the concept; and the assertion of the maxim is that herein lies the whole of the purport of the word, the entire concept.” Rpt. in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Random House, 1997), 56. 22. See George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002). 23. James, Essays in Philosophy, 23, my translation. The original reads: “on est en droit de repousser une théorie confirmée par un nombre très-considérable de faits objectifs, uniquement parce qu’elle ne repond point a nos préférences intérieures” (23). 24. James, Essays in Philosophy, 24, my translation. The original reads: “des cas ou une croyance cree sa propre verification” (24). 25. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979), 25. 26. James, The Will to Believe, 29. 27. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 28. Lothar Honighausen, Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997); James G. Watson, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance (Austin: U of Texas P, 2000). 29. In a 1952 interview with Loïc Bouvard, Faulkner claimed to “agree pretty much 238


with Bergson’s theory of the fluidity of time” and listed among his influences Flaubert, Balzac, and “Bergson, obviously.” Lion in the Garden, 70, 72. James’s remark comes from a letter to Bergson printed in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 2:619. Curiously, Flaubert makes an unexpected appearance in James’s comments as well: “In finishing [L’Evolution Créatice] I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing Madame Bovary” (618). Much work has been done exploring the possible influence of Bergson on Faulkner, e.g., Darrel Abel, “Frozen Movement in Light in August,” Boston University Studies in English 3 (1957): 32–44; Walter Jacob Slatoff, Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1960); Estella Schoenberg, Old Tales and Talking: Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” and Related Works (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1977); Daniel G. Ford, “Faulkner’s Sense of Was,” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 10.1 (1984): 45–56; Mick Gidley, “The Later Faulkner, Bergson, and God,” Mississippi Quarterly 37.3 (1984): 377–83; Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1985). 30. James, Pragmatism 32; William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981), 246; Faulkner, Lion in the Garden, 108. 31. James, Pragmatism, 18. 32. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1977), 128. 33. William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1959), 190, 239, 277. 34. See especially Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987), and Poetry and Pragmatism. 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 271. 36. Faulkner, Lion in the Garden, 252–53. 37. Conrad Aiken, “William Faulkner: The Novel As Form,” in William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1973), 136–37. 38. Clifton Fadiman, Party of One: Selected Writings (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1955), 113. 39. Faulkner typically phrased his criticisms of Hemingway in terms of the latter’s unwillingness or inability to change or move, once he had achieved a successful style, e.g.: “Occasionally there would be one like Hemingway, who through instinct or through good preceptors learned that he could do better by holding to a supple, undeviable style, and he trained himself not to be a stylist but to tell what moved him in that method which his preceptors said, ‘This is a good method.’ He has stuck to that” (Lion in the Garden, 107). 40. In Book 4 of Confessions, for example, Augustine compares the transience of temporal things to the role of the individual words of a sentence: “This is the law they obey. That is all you have appointed for them, because they are parts of a whole. Not all the parts exist at once, but some must come while others go, and in this way together they make up the whole of which they are parts. Our speech follows the same rule, using sounds to signify a meaning. For a sentence is not complete until each word, once its syl239


lables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.” Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 80. Kenneth Burke develops this parallel at greater length: “The relation between the sentence as a sequence of ‘transitory’ syllables and the sentence as a ‘fixed’ unit of meaning provides the makings for a formal distinction that can serve to suggest an ontological distinction between time and eternity.” The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1961), 143. 41. James, Pluralistic Universe, 87. 42. Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974), 1720–35. 43. James, Pragmatism, 124. 44. William Faulkner, letter to Malcolm Cowley (February 18, 1946), in The FaulknerCowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1966), 90. 45. Aiken, “William Faulkner: The Novel As Form,” 136. 46. André Malraux, for example, described Sanctuary as “the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story.” “A Preface for Faulkner’s Sanctuary,” La Nouvelle Revue Française (1933): 747, rpt. in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966), 274. See C. Hugh Holman, “Absalom, Absalom!: The Historian As Detective,” Sewanee Review 79 (1971): 542–53. 47. E.g., Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966); John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975); Lee Jenkins, Faulkner and Black-White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach (New York: Columbia UP, 1981); André Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981); Mary Arensberg and Sara E. Schyfter, “Hairoglyphics in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’: Reading the Primal Trace,” Boundary 2 15.1–2 (1986): 123–34; David M. Toomey, “A Jungian Reading of Light in August’s ‘Christmas Sections,’” Southern Quarterly 28.2 (1990): 43–57; Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner and Psychology (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994); Yuan Yuan, “The Lacanian Subject and Grotesque Desires: Between Oedipal Violation and Narcissistic Closure,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 56.1 (1996): 35–47; Noel Polk, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996); Doreen Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997). 48. One might speculate that such a temptation has something to do with the perverse fascination of the gothic form itself. Poe, at any rate, seems to have thought so, and it is possible to read that most hoary of spine tinglers, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as being already a kind of metagothic, whose real subject is a diagnosis of the attraction of frightful tales, at whose climax we find ourselves reading our own act of reading. As the narrator reads the story of “The Mad Trist,” he is himself, as it were, drawn bodily into the narrative, consumed by the text that he thinks he is consuming, while the events in the House begin to echo and reproduce those of the tale he is reading aloud. It is this ability to incorporate the reader into its own narrative that, perhaps, constitutes the true uncanniness of the gothic text. Or for a more contemporary version, consider Julio Cortázar’s “Continuidad de los Parques.” 49. Myra Jehlen, for example, argues that “closer in this respect [i.e., his “assumption 240


that events and situations do attain an objective significance in the communal effect”] to nineteenth-century realism than to his own more skeptical time, Faulkner wants to arrive at truth.” Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (New York: Columbia UP, 1976), 1. 50. Malcolm Cowley, Introduction, The Portable Faulkner, by William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1946), 14–15. 51. William Faulkner, letter to Malcolm Cowley, [early November 1944], The Faulkner-Cowley File, 15. 52. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 297. 53. See, for example, Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South; Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1981); Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983); James A. Snead, Figures of Division: William Faulkner’s Major Novels (New York: Methuen, 1986); John N. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple : Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990); Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994); Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997). An author cannot and should not, of course, dictate his own critical destiny, but it is worth remembering what Faulkner himself said about the social and political significance of his work: “If one begins to write about the injustice of society, then one becomes a polemicist or a propagandist. The fiction writer is not that, he will use the injustice of society, the inhumanity of people, as a—as any other tool in telling a story, which is about people, not about the injustice or inhumanity of people but of people” (Faulkner in the University, 177). 54. Myra Jehlen, for example, describes her reading as “directly opposed” to that of Brooks (20n). Whereas for Brooks, the “very disorders [of Faulkner’s world] are eloquent of the possibilities of order” (Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 368, cited by Jehlen, 20n), we may say that, for Jehlen, every order raises the suspicion of a repression of disorder; every positive representation of a southern community suggests a failure “to distinguish between myth and history” (51). As is generally the case, the effect of such reversals is to reinforce the common assumptions that make them possible. 55. Philip W. Weinstein, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 1–2. 56. For Faulkner as postmodernist, see Richard C. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990), as well as his “Faulkner and Modernism,” in Weinstein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, 17–30; Patrick O’Donnell, “Faulkner and Postmodernism,” in Weinstein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, 31–50; John N. Duvall and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner and Postmodernism (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002). 57. Cheryl Lester, for example, describes The Sound and the Fury as a novel that “both flees the material and ideological conditions of its production and seeks to disclose them.” “Racial Awareness and Arrested Development: The Sound and the Fury and the Great Migration (1915–1928),” in Weinstein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, 124. 241


58. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided, 4, 9. Cf. Wesley and Barbara Ann Morris: “The Sound and the Fury only grudgingly gives way to the master theme of Faulkner’s most moving narrations: the South. It distorts and digresses from the powerful thematics of race, class, and gender which become central to Faulkner’s career for the next two decades.” Reading Faulkner (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 82. 59. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 4. Moreland is quoting Sartre here. 60. Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, 275. 61. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided, 14–15. 62. James, Pragmatism, 70–71. 63. James, Pragmatism, 71. 64. James, Pragmatism, 104. 65. William Faulkner, The Hamlet: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1990), 15. 66. Rorty, Objectivity, 101. 67. James, Meaning of Truth, 147. 68. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 36. 69. See for example the articles collected in Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1995). 70. Frank B. Farrell, “Rorty and Antirealism,” in Saatkamp, Rorty and Pragmatism, 169, 185. 71. For a similar sense of community as constituted by discourse, see Scott Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999), who offers as a “new definition of community”: “a social group that . . . coheres by means of norms, codes, and manners that produce a simulated, or at least symbolically constituted, social reality” (3). My only objection is Romine’s use of the term “simulated,” with its implication, despite the somewhat misleading qualification, that there might be some more authentic unsimulated community. 72. My use of the masculine here is deliberate. While folklore, literature, and history contain many examples of duplicitous women, the “standard trickster,” considered as a figure defined entirely by his metamorphic and manipulative nature, is almost invariably male. See Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 335–43. This is especially the case with the confidence man in American literature. But see Kathleen De Grave, Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The Confidence Woman in Nineteenth-Century America (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995). 73. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 6. 74. See Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 70–80. 75. For an example of the first, see C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure,” in Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 195–211. Hyde’s book is an extended defense of the latter position. 76. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), 222. 77. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Pained Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 31. 242


78. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Pained Women, 34. 79. Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), 15. 80. Radin, The Trickster, ix. 81. My discussion of the complexity of the trickster’s relation to society is much indebted to Hyde. 82. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 412. 83. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 252–58. 84. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931); Richard Boyd Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and “The Absurd” in American Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971); Susan Kuhlmann, Knave, Fool, and Genius: The Confidence Man As He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1973); Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature; Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1982); William E. Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times: The Confidence Man As a Literary Convention (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985). 85. James, Pragmatism, 125. 86. Reverend Rufus W. Clarke, Lectures on the Formation of Character, Temptations, and Mission of Young Men (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1853), 134–36. Quoted in Halttunen, 25. 87. My hint that there is a parallel to be found between the confidence man and the founders of the American nation is intentional and will be developed in more depth later. 88. See, e.g., Ward L. Miner, The World of William Faulkner (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1952); William Van O’Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1954); Cecil D. Eby, “Faulkner and the Southwestern Humorists,” Shenandoah 11 (1959): 13–21; M. Thomas Inge, “William Faulkner and George Washington Harris: In the Tradition of Southwestern Humor,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 7 (1962): 47–59; Thomas W. Cooley Jr., “Faulkner Draws the Long Bow,” Twentieth-Century Literature 16 (1970): 268–77; and Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism. 89. The phrase is Daniel G. Hoffman’s, in Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1961), 23. 90. Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 4. 91. According to Joel Williamson, by 1889 Colonel Faulkner “was about to attempt entry into the ranks of what some would call the ‘Robber Barons’—the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Guggenheims of the turn-of-the-century decades.” If successful, he might have climaxed his career “with wealth of national scope, with a seat in the United States Senate if he so chose, and with real place and power in what was about to become imperial America on a global scale.” We shall never know; in November of that year he was shot dead by a former business associate. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 56. 92. I part company, however, with Schwartz when he attempts to locate James among the champions of such an opposition. While it is true that in The Principles of 243


Psychology he is still thinking in dualist terms, by the time he delivered his 1894 address to the American Psychological Association, “The Knowing of Things Together,” he had rejected the dualistic opposition of subject and object, on which the opposition of appearance and reality, surface and depth, depends. 93. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 347. 94. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 155. 95. Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1954), 42. 96. Leonard Diepeveen provides an insightful discussion of this strategy in The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. chap. 3. 97. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 161. 98. Lionel Trilling offers a classic discussion of the emergence of the concept of authenticity and ascent to preeminence in the high and late modernist periods in Sincerity and Authenticity (New York: Oxford UP, 1972). 99. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993). 100. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 20th ed. (New York: Rinehart, 1955), 110. 101. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, 2nd ed. (London: André Deutsch, 1970), 39–40. 102. Consider, for example, Barnett Newman’s 1944 declaration of purpose: “In short, modernism brought the artist back to first principles. It taught that art is an expression of thought, of important truths, not of sentimental and artificial ‘beauty.’” Quoted in Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 250. 103. Lawrence H. Schwartz provides a good review of such responses in Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Literary Modernism (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1988), chap. 1. See also O. B. Emerson, Faulkner’s Early Literary Reputation in America (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984). The phrase “reptilian art” comes from Harry Hartwick, The Foreground of American Fiction (New York: American Book Co., 1934), 166. 104. Malcolm Cowley, Introduction, The Portable Faulkner (New York: Viking, 1946), 15. 105. Robert Penn Warren, “Cowley’s Faulkner,” New Republic 115 (August 12, 1946): 177. 106. Robert Penn Warren, “Faulkner: Past and Future,” in Warren, ed., Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1–2. 107. Warren, “Cowley’s Faulkner,” 177. 108. Woodward nowhere mentions Faulkner, but the degree to which his version of the “lessons” of southern history has influenced interpretations of the latter may be judged by the fact that the Norton Critical Edition of The Sound and the Fury gives his article the first place in the “Backgrounds and Contexts” section. The title of Woodward’s essay, of course, alludes to the celebrated book The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr, a major contributor to Modern Man discourse; Leja describes his earlier book The Nature and Destiny of Modern Man as “in some respects a quintessential Modern Man text” (Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 240). 244


109. Richard H. Brodhead, “Introduction: Faulkner and the Logic of Remaking,” in Faulkner: New Perspectives, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1983), 19. See also Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 183. 110. Compare, for example, Arthur Schlesinger’s declarations, similar in sentiment and tone, in The Vital Center, published the same year as Faulkner’s remarks: “Western man in the middle of the twentieth century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety” (1); “Our democracy has still to generate a living emotional content, deep enough to rally its members to battle for freedom—not just self-preservation” (245). 111. Polk, Children of the Dark House, 219–33. 112. Polk, Children of the Dark House, 222. 113. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 259. 114. Brooks, The Yoknapatawpha Country, 52. 115. James, Pragmatism, 103. 116. Robert Penn Warren, Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1958), 66. 117. James, Pragmatism, 71. 118. James, A Pluralistic Universe, 399. 1. Make Believe: The Confidence Man as Protopragmatist 1. Quoted in the Literary World (New York), August 18, 1849: 133. 2. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 8. 3. The “joint” metaphor is Hyde’s, who draws on the etymological connections of “art,” “artifice,” and “articulation” to develop the idea that tricksters are “artus-workers, joint-workers,” and “joint-disturbers” who renew their societies by “changing the manner in which nature, community, and spirit are joined to one another.” Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 254–57. 4. To put this another way, taking the confidence game as the model of social relations would require questioning the possibility of what Jürgen Habermas has defined as an “ideal speech situation,” in which participants can attain “an agreement that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another . . . based on recognition of the corresponding validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness and rightness.” Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon P, 1974), 3. 5. W. Stanley Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1952), 45–61. 6. Hoole records responses from as far away as St. Louis (Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, 61). 7. Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 166. 8. Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), 92. 9. Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 64. 245


10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 478. 11. See Robert Hopkins, “Simon Suggs: A Burlesque Campaign Biography,” American Quarterly 15 (1963): 459–63. 12. Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845; Nashville: J. S. Saunders and Co., 1993), 15. All subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 13. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982). See also Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), esp. 145–68. 14. Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Nonresistance to the Higher Powers, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, ed. Bernard Bailyn, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1965), 242. 15. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee (May 8, 1825), in Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1501. The most thorough discussion of Jefferson’s commitment to telling the truth, and an argument for the critical importance of Thomas Reid’s conception of common sense for Jefferson’s thought, is to be found in Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), esp. chap. 12. 16. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1993), 3. See also Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), chap. 1. 17. Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: L’enseignment de Nietzsche et la Poltique du Nom Propre (Paris: Galilée, 1984), 27. 18. “The Founders lead a deeply divided people in the Revolution and after. Their assumed task is to extract consensus at all costs, and they write with a paradoxical brand of creativity in mind—a creativity of agreement.” Robert A. Ferguson, “‘We Hold These Truths’: Strategies of Control in the Literature of the Founders,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986), 6. 19. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990), 73. 20. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1380–81. 21. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 232. 22. Franklin, Writings, 1381. 23. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale UP, 1975); The American Jeremiad (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1978); and The Rites of Assent (New York: Routledge, 1993). 24. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 174. 25. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vintage, 1965), 49. 246


26. “A great resource of America was vagueness. American uncertainties, products of ignorance and progress, were producers of optimism and energy. Although few acknowledged it, in the era between the Revolution and the Civil War this vagueness was a source of American strength. Americans were already distinguished less by what they clearly knew or definitely believed than by their grand and fluid hopes. If other nations had been held together by common certainties, Americans were being united by a common vagueness and a common effervescence” (Boorstin, National Experience, 219). 27. Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986), 9, 11. 28. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), 163. 29. For example, as Jackson first achieved fame campaigning against the Creek Indians along the Tallapoosa Valley in Alabama in 1813–14, so an uprising by the same group in the same area twenty-three years later is the opportunity for Suggs to take command; Suggs’s imposition of martial law and mock court martial of the widow Haycock in chapter 8 is reminiscent of Jackson’s similarly high-handed legal measures in New Orleans in 1814; Jackson’s first great military success, the defeat of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, followed by the expropriation of twenty-three million acres of Indian land, is reproduced as farce in chapter 9 when a “friendly” Indian ball game at which Suggs’s militia are spectators turns into a confused skirmish, in the course of which Suggs manages to make off with the wagers on the outcome. 30. Cf. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: “If trickster is a this-world, vernacular figure, if he is the low and the common, perhaps he moves more to the center in democracy, where the ‘common’ may periodically upset and reshape power” (216n). 31. Mary Ann Wimsatt, “Baldwin’s Patrician Humor,” Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 6 (1983): 43. 32. “Abe and I grew very pleasant and spent an hour together in the White House very cosily. He was very kind and affable and knew all about me and more about Flush Times (which seems to be one of his classics) than I knew myself. He says he is always quoting me when he gets facetious (probably to restore gravity to his guest.” Letter to John Brooks Felton, November 1, 1863. Quoted in Eugene Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin: Humorist or Moralist?” in The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 185–86. 33. Some estimation of Baldwin’s judicial accomplishments and the esteem in which he was held by his fellow judges can be found in Current-Garcia, who claims that Baldwin “contributed more than any of his colleagues to clarifying the system of laws” in California at a time when the judiciary basis of the new territory was extraordinarily confused, and his opinions were described after his death in 1864 by his colleagues as “monumental” (Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” 172, 181). 34. Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” 176. 35. Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” 176, 177. 36. Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” 179. 37. Walter Blair, Native American Humor, 1800–1900 (New York: American Book Company, 1937), 79. 38. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 119. 247


39. James M. Cox, “Humor of the Old Southwest,” in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1973), 108. 40. Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853; New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 1. All subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 41. See, e.g., Brooks Otis, Ovid As an Epic Poet (London: Cambridge UP, 1966), and Charles Segal, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Greek Myth in Augustan Rome,” Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 171–94. 42. “It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. . . . but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.” Edgar Allan Poe, Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Robert L. Hough (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965), 38. 43. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 195. 44. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 492. 45. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 240. 46. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 9. 47. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 195. 48. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 72. 49. Herman Melville, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd (New York: Library of America, 1984), 660. Melville soon makes clear that the fundamental assumption is the assumption of ownership, when the exasperated narrator explodes: “What earthy right do you have to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?” 50. William Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times: The Confidence Man As a Literary Convention (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985), 101. 51. See, e.g., Maurice Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1963), 240–41. The relevant passages are The Iliad, vi, 146 ff., Aeneid, vi, 309–10, Inferno, iii, 112–14, La Gerusamemme Liberata, ix, 66, 5–6. 52. The Iliad, vi, 145–50, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951). 53. This anxiety comes out clearly, for example, in nineteenth-century dictionaries of allusions, like Ebeneezer Brewer’s The Reader’s Handbook to Famous Names in Fiction (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899), 1:vi: “Who has not asked what such and such a book is about? and who would not be glad to have his question answered correctly in a few words? When the title of a play is mentioned, who has not felt a desire to know who was the author of it?—for it seems a universal practice to allude to the title of dramas without stating the author.” Quoted in Susan Stewart, “The Pickpocket: A Study in Tradition and Allusion,” MLN 95 (1980): 1147. 54. Stewart, “The Pickpocket,” 1147–54. 55. In another story, “My First Appearance at the Bar,” another successful attorney is praised for his mimetic skills: “He personated the client just as a great actor identifies himself with the character he represents on the stage.” Baldwin, The Flush Times, 18. 248


56. Barbara McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity,” in Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 57. 57. Y.T.S., “Life in the Daguerreotype. No. II. The Operating Room,” Daguerreian Journal 2 (1851): 374. Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, “Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword,” in Sandweiss, Photography in Nineteenth-Century America. See also Trachtenberg’s discussion in Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), esp. 27 ff. 58. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 91. 59. Trachtenberg, “Photography,” 36. 60. The uncertain status of the concept of “character” in mid-nineteenth-century America is discussed by Karen Halttunen in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1982), 40 ff., who points out the ambiguity built into the term as then used. On the one hand, it denoted the true nature of the individual, one’s “inner spiritual being”; on the other, it meant publicly circulating reputation, one’s “external standing before other men” (50). 61. Both McCandless (“The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity,” 55) and Trachtenberg (Reading American Photographs, 26 ff.) discuss the growing concern among photographers with the management of “expression” in their portraits, and the developing literature devoted to the topic. 62. McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity,” 54. 63. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 80. 64. Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984), 5. 65. A typical expression is found in “Eminent British Lawyers: A Review,” American Quarterly Review (1832): “Of the learned professions, nay of all the sciences, it [the law] may well put in a claim for even the highest rank. What indeed, can be more noble than the aim of that science which is to direct the actions of mankind, and whose foundations rest upon the will of the great ruler of the universe.” Quoted in Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture, 25. 66. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture, 200. 67. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1977), 253. 68. “In republican society generally, the courtroom speech of both attorney and judge quickly became one of what Clifford Geertz has called ‘the active centers of social order’—a point within a culture where leading ideas come together with leading institutions and where a governing elite uses the set of symbolic forms involved to express the fact that it is in truth governing” (Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture, 23). 69. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law,” The Collected Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, vol. 3 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 391, 115. 70. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001). 249


2. Truth as “Veri-fication”: William James and the Transaction of Confidence 1. The phrase is that of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany: State U of New York P, 1990). 2. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982), 160. 3. Dickinson S. Miller, “‘The Will to Believe’ and the Duty to Doubt,” International Journal of Ethics 9 (1898–99): 173. 4. Albert Schinz, Anti-Pragmatism: An Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1909), xv–xvi. 5. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (1909; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 101. 6. William James, Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 96. 7. James, Pragmatism, 96. 8. James, Pragmatism, 94. 9. James, Pragmatism, 97. 10. James, Meaning of Truth, 81. 11. Rebecca West, Henry James (New York: Holt, 1916), 11. 12. The other article published in 1878 was “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 13. “For quite some time now, whenever I become obsessed with dark thoughts, pessimism, fatalism, etc., I have been in the habit of relieving myself of them by a process of reasoning that is very simple, and so much in accord with the principles of the philosophy to which your journal is dedicated, that I am almost surprised not to have yet encountered it totidem verbis in some one of your weekly issues” (my trans.). William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1978), 23. Subsequent references and translations will be given parenthetically in the text. 14. Useful discussions of James’s crisis can be found in Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1967); Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984); Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986); and George Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990). 15. Quoted in James William Anderson, “‘The Worst Kind of Melancholy’: William James in 1869,” A William James Renaissance: Four Essays by Young Scholars, a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin 30 (1982): 374. The entry is undated but probably comes from December 1869. The subject of the first clause is conjectural, since the preceding diary pages have been torn out. 16. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985), 134. 17. William James, letter to Thomas W. Ward (March 1869), in The Selected Letters of William James, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 80. 18. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 1:322–23.

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19. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:323. 20. The most extensive discussion of the question of the date of the “panic fear” and its relation to the “Renouvier episode” is that of Louis Menand, in American Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 3–30. 21. See, e.g., Cushing Strout, “William James and the Twice-Born Sick Soul,” Daedelus 97 (1968): 1062–82; Feinstein, Becoming William James. 22. See Strout, “William James and the Twice-Born Sick Soul,” 1065. 23. Selected Letters, 8. William was not the only one of the James children to feel the paralyzing effects of their father’s overt benevolence. In a well-known passage in Notes of a Son and Brother, Henry James Jr. reflected that his father’s demand that they maintain an openness toward and an equal interest in everything, lest they cut themselves off from “any suggestion of an alternative,” had the paradoxical effect of discouraging them from developing a real and concrete interest in anything: “What we were to do instead was just be something, something unconnected with specific doing, something free and uncommitted, something finer in short than being that, whatever it was, might consist of.” Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Charles Scribner, 1914), 50–51. 24. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:655. 25. It may be considered significant as well that James first revealed that the account was autobiographical to the man who was translating the work into French. 26. James quotes Huxley to the effect that “Croire parce qu’on voudrait croire serait preuve de la derniere immoralité” (“Quelque Considérations,” 25), which is a loose translation of a remark of Huxley’s in “The Influence upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief,” Nineteenth Century 1 (April 1877): 539: “My only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depth of immorality.” 27. It is uncertain whether James was familiar with Clifford’s essay in 1878, although James C. S. Wernham (James’s Will-to-Believe Doctrine: A Heretical View [Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1987], 17–18) thinks it unlikely. But James clearly had read it by 1879, since he reviewed Clifford’s Lectures and Essays, which contained “The Ethics of Belief,” in the Nation, 29 (November 6, 1879). In “The Will to Believe,” he quotes a lengthy passage from the essay, including Clifford’s central contention: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” 28. George Levine, “Dying to Know,” The Victorian Newsletter 79 (1991): 2. Levine develops and complicates his argument in Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002). 29. Henry James Sr., The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, ed. William James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 216. 30. James’s biblical metaphors resonate with Levine’s claim that “the very form of scientific self-description and apologetics was the form of religion” (“Dying to Know,” 1). 31. James, Pragmatism, 97.

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32. Levine, “Dying to Know,” 1. Earlier in his essay, James says that contemporary philosophers of science demand that “l’homme qui cherche la verite” must “faire de sa conscience de savant une sorte de feuille blanche et de surface morte” (“the man who seeks truth” must “make of his scientific consciousness a sort of blank page and dead surface”). “Quelques Considérations,” 23–24. 33. Eg., “To win back for the man of knowledge the right to great affects! after selfeffacement and the cult of ‘objectivity’ have created a false order in this sphere, too. Error reached its peak when Schopenhauer taught: the only way to the ‘true,’ to knowledge, lies precisely in getting free from affects, from will; the intellect liberated from will cannot but see the true, real essence of things.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 329. 34. The two essays were combined to form the much better known essay under the title “The Sentiment of Rationality,” first published in 1897 in The Will to Believe. “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” itself incorporates most of “Quelques Considérations.” But it is useful to talk about the essays in their original form to underline to what extent the theme of verification directed James’s thinking from the beginning and was not a late product of his philosophical development. 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 9. 36. James, Essays in Philosophy, 32. All subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 37. James’s argument itself threatens to lose both simplicity and clarity for a period here; as John J. McDermott says, “it is not always clear what he is doing, for at this point he has no distinctive metaphysics of his own.” John J. McDermott, introduction, Essays in Philosophy, xvii. This section was dropped when the essay was recast for the 1897 version. 38. William James, “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” Princeton Review 2 (1882): 58. All subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 39. Bas C. van Frassen, “Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science,” in Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, ed. Paul Churchland and Clifford A. Hooker (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), 247. 40. Fortuitously, Henry Sr. died six months after the Princeton Review finally, following long delay, published “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” But the continuing weight of paternal approval is evident in William’s words immediately after his father’s death: “It is singular how I’m learning every day now how the thought of his comment on my experiences has hitherto formed an integral part of my daily consciousness, without my having realized it at all. I interrupt myself incessantly now in the old habit of imagining what he will say when I tell him this or that thing I have seen or heard.” Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 1:142. Cotkin has an interesting discussion of the figure of Hamlet as an intertext for James’s autobiographical self-interpretation; in many ways Prince Hal, with his delayed adoption of a vocation, his Oedipal anxieties, and his sense of the necessity of self-creation by way of fiction, seems equally relevant. Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher, chap. 3. 41.”Everywhere, always, and by everyone.” James is quoting here the famous formula of the theologian Vincent of Lerins, which became the Catholic Church’s standard 252


criterion for distinguishing acceptable interpretations of scripture from inadmissible heterodoxy. 42. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), 33, 33, 64. 43. John Owen King III, The Iron of Melancholy: Structures of Spiritual Conversion in America from the Puritan Conscience to Victorian Neurosis (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1983). 44. King, The Iron of Melancholy, 29. Morgan’s discussion is found in Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York UP, 1963), 66–73. 45. King, The Iron of Melancholy, 29 ff. 46. King, The Iron of Melancholy, 17–18. 47. It is tempting to compare James’s slightly extravagant remark, toward the end of “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), that at “moments of energetic living, we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding” (62–63) (which also recalls the language of his determination to “abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grübelei in which my nature takes most delight” in the diary note of April 30, 1870), to the obsessive metaphors of filth and excrement used by Puritan writers to describe man’s unregenerate condition. See King, The Iron of Melancholy, and Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale UP, 1975), chap. 1. 48. “I have a key in my bosom called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle. Then said Hopeful, That’s good news; good brother, pluck it out of thy bosom and try. Then Christian pulled it out of his bosom and began to try at the dungeon door, whose bolt (as he turned the key) gave back, and the door flew open with ease, and Christian and Hopeful both came out. Then he went to the outward door that leads into the castle yard and with his key opened the door also. After he went to the iron gate, for that must needs be opened too; but the lock went damnable hard, yet the key did open it.” John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 156. James employs the same metaphors at the end of “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” to defend the legitimacy of belief without evidence: “The world may in fact be likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral or unmoral, will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze. The positivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions regarding it, condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the ‘evidence’ which they wait for, can never come into our hands so long as we are passive. But nature has put into our hands two keys, by which we may test the lock. If we try the moral key and it fits, it is a moral lock. If we try the unmoral key and it fits, it is an unmoral lock” (84–85). 49. In “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1897) “checked, blocked, and inhibited” becomes merely “blocked”; characteristically, the intensity that the earlier version shares with the spiritual autobiography is muted in the later revision. 50. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 156. 51. King, The Iron of Melancholy, 30. 52. Huxley, Clifford, and Henry Sr. can all be read as versions of Bunyan’s figure of paralysis, the Giant Despair. 53. William James, letter to Henry James (May 4, 1907), in Selected Letters, 235. 54. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy 253


(1897; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979), 13. All subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 55. “Adopting an almost ministerial function among the cultured of their society—in the style of Emerson or their Victorian predecessors—Royce and James lectured to a wide audience on moral and religious problems.” Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), xxiii. Cotkin offers an extended discussion of how James, as a “public philosopher,” “occupied the cultural station of the minister without necessarily surrendering his philosophical concerns and conclusions” (William James: Public Philosopher, 14). See also King, The Iron of Melancholy, 142 ff. 56. G. Nakhnikian, An Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 286. 57. Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 86. 58. Marcus G. Singer, in “The Pragmatic Use of Language and the Will to Believe,” American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 24–34, argues that “from a logical point of view” the religious question is “only a theological red herring,” and that the real issue is “the pragmatic use of language.” William James Earle claims that, though the essay is “generally given a limited religious interpretation, [it] is, in fact, not primarily a defense of religious belief” and that “James was making a general statement in support of the method of empirical science, with special emphasis upon the initially unwarranted character of every scientific hypothesis.” “William James,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), 245. Wern ham, on the other hand, insists that “James’s topic was faith, religious belief” (James’s Will-to-Believe Doctrine, 6). As William Joseph Gavin observes, “the scope of ‘The Will to Believe’ is still in question, however, since James sometimes speaks as if it applies only in specific areas, like religions and morals, and sometimes speaks as if it is the criteria—namely, “forced,” “living,” and “momentous” options—that are the determining characteristics.” William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992), 12. 59. Wernham, James’s Will-to-Believe Doctrine, 34. 60. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 41. 61. James, Pragmatism, 125. 62. For example, Ellen Kappy Suckiel, The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1982), 12. 63. I am, of course, again invoking the terminology of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 64. Suckiel, The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James, 12. 65. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2:438. 66. For example, Kaufmann calls the essay “slipshod” (Critique of Religion and Philosophy, 37); Suckiel complains that James “did not involve himself in the full, painstaking articulation of his own considered positions, or in clarifying or making explicit the ways in which various aspects of his philosophy relate and support one another as parts of a systematic whole” (The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James, ix). 254


67. James, Principles of Psychology, 246. 68. For discussions of James’s defense of vagueness, see Charlene Haddock Seig fried, “Vagueness and the Adequacy of Concepts,” Philosophy Today 26 (Winter 1982): 357–67; Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992); William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992). 69. Kaufmann, The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James, 84–85. 70. “The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever. . . . These bare images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. . . . The blank verbal scheme of the logical movement gives us the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it, quite as well as does a rational sentence awakening definite imaginations by its words” (James, Principles of Psychology, 244–45). 71. James, Pragmatism, 31–32. 72. James, Pragmatism, 32. 73. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 75. Hyde’s further comments make the parallel between the trickster and the Jamesian pragmatist still more suggestive: “For those epi-predators [i.e., tricksters] who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with ‘no way’ trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool that those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them” (Trickster Makes This World, 75). 74. “In New England, the sermon was far more that a literary form. It was an institution, perhaps the characteristic institution of Puritanism here. It was the ritual application of theology to community-building and to the tasks and trials of everyday life. It was not, as it was inevitably in England, a mere sectarian utterance of a part of the community. It was actually the orthodox manifesto and self-criticism of the community as a whole, a kind of reiterated declaration of independence, a continual rediscovery of purposes.” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958), 12. 3. Retailing Truth: Making Community in The Hamlet 1. William Faulkner, “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” Mississippi Quarterly 26 (1973): 411. 2. E.g., “[Faulkner’s] hatred of the “modernism”—and we must quote the word to give it his special meaning—arises because he sees it as the enemy of the human, as abstraction, as mechanism, as irresponsible power, as the cipher on the ledger or the curve on a graph.” Robert Penn Warren, “William Faulkner,” in Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner ([East Lansing]: Michigan State UP, 1973), 108. 3. James Livingston offers a thoughtful critique of the “Young Intellectuals’” critique, and an analysis of their misunderstanding of James, in Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994), 225–55. 255


4. George Marion O’Donnell, “Faulkner’s Mythology,” in Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Wagner, 83–84. 5. O’Donnell, “Faulkner’s Mythology,” 84. 6. Malcolm Cowley, Introduction, The Portable Faulkner, by William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1946), 14–15. 7. Warren, “William Faulkner,” 98–99. 8. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 368, and William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), xii. 9. Warren Beck, Man in Motion: Faulkner’s Trilogy (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1961), 12. For Beck, that concept consists in the “recurrent conflict between ruthless aggression and a principled resistance” (10). Olga Vickery, for example, contends that The Hamlet is a series of “successive tales of barter and stories of love,” the latter dealing with what is “necessary and eternal,” while the former concern what is merely “contingent and historical.” The Novels of William Faulkner, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1964), 167. Similarly, for James Gray Watson, “the basis for structural and thematic unity” in the Snopes novels is “principled opposition to amoral aggression.” The Snopes Dilemma: Faulkner’s Trilogy (Coral Gables, Fla.: U of Miami P, 1968), 12. 10. William Faulkner, The Town (New York: Random House, 1957), 276. 11. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 174. 12. All references are to William Faulkner, The Hamlet: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1990). 13. John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982), 163. Matthews is, to be sure, not the first to argue that Flem is not the community’s opposite but its demonically dedicated reflection. See also Joseph Gold, in “The ‘Normality’ of Snopesism: Universal Themes in Faulkner’s The Hamlet,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3 (1962): 25–34; Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1959); and Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner. 14. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language, 163. 15. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979), 94–95. 16. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (1909; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 81, 95. 17. James, Meaning of Truth, 63. 18. Ratliff’s final defeat by Flem is made possible by his missing a relation at a crucial moment: the fact that Eustace Grimm’s mother was Ab Snopes’s youngest sister. The Hamlet, 399. 19. Brooks, for example, refers to the novel’s “‘mythic’ atmosphere” (Yoknapatawpha Country, 170). See also Donald M. Kartiganer, The Fragile Web: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979), 110. 20. William James, Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 124. 21. James, Pragmatism, 39. 22. Particularly frequent in The Hamlet, puns might be thought of as the linguistic 256


equivalent of the semiotic duplicity that characterizes so much of the activity of the characters in this novel. The Hamlet is a novel dominated by the figure of the crossroads, the place where different trajectories, physical and linguistic, intersect; it is no accident that, as Viola Hopkins remarks, “the core, in the community and the novel, is Varner’s crossroads store.” “William Faulkner’s The Hamlet: A Study in Meaning and Form,” Accent 15 (1955): 127. The structure of the pun is the same, as the French term calembour, which may derive from carrefour, “crossroads,” suggests. My own punning attempt to connect “store” and “story” would therefore seem to be authorized by the text. 23. James, Pragmatism, 98. James’s emphasis. 24. Joseph Trimmer, “V. K. Ratliff: A Portrait of the Artist in Motion,” Modern Fiction Studies 20 (1975): 451–67. 25. Faulkner would later describe Ratliff as “in favor of change, because it’s motion.” William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1959), 253. 26. The crucial influence of Emerson on James’s thought, and in particular of the former’s emphasis on “transition,” is one of the themes of Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992). See also Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989). 27. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 463. 28. As well as, perhaps, the first mobile home in the South. 29. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 69. 30. James, Pragmatism, 102. 31. James, The Will to Believe, 29. 32. James, The Will to Believe, 29, 24. 33. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language, 164. 34. Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853; New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 5. 35. Labove will come to think of her as “not a goal but just a place to reach, as the man fleeing a holocaust runs not for a prize but to escape destruction” (129). 36. Jody’s belief in Eula’s unchastity has as little support in reality: “for five or six years now [he] had actually been supported upright and intact in breathing life by an idea which had not even grown through the stage of suspicion at all but had sprung fullblown as a conviction only the more violent for the fact that the most unremitting effort had never been able to prove it” (139). 37. The suitors’ actions have already been anticipated by Labove, who like them sees that what counts is not the event but the communal belief about the event. After his unsuccessful assault on Eula, he actually looks forward to being shot by Jody in front of witnesses: “That will be proof, he cried silently. Proof in the eyes and beliefs of living men that that happened which did not. Which will be better than nothing, even though I am not here to know men believe it. Which will be fixed in the beliefs of living men forever and ever ineradicable, since one of the two alone who know different will be dead” (137). 38. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 61. 257


39. Gold, “The ‘Normality’ of Snopesism,” 28. 40. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 185. 41. There are curious parallels in Faulkner’s descriptions of Ek and Ratliff. Ek, for example, is compared to a “depraved priest” (93), Ratliff to “a lay brother in a twelfthcentury monastery” (47). 42. On the tradition of horse trade stories, see Daniel Hoffman, Faulkner’s Country Matters: Fable and Folklore in Yoknapatawpha (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989), 82–84. 43. Flem’s increasing dominance in Frenchman’s Bend is repeatedly described in terms of “consumption”: “Flem has grazed up the store and he has grazed up the blacksmith’s shop and now he is starting in on the school” (77). 44. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1295. 45. I. O.’s verbal habits are not simply a comic parody of Poor Richard. He can be said to make explicit what is implied in the latter’s maxim-ization of language. To turn discourse into maxims is to commodify language, to convert it into objects that can be circulated or exchanged for money, and the ultimate purpose of “The Way to Wealth” was of course the selling of language. There is a similarity between maxims and money, especially paper money: both are “texts” which are not intended to be read but passed along (Franklin, of course, was also an issuer of money). The meaning of every maxim is its absence of meaning; to stop to think about it would be as crazy as to try to interpret what the “author” of a dollar bill was trying to say, instead of passing it on. The nonsense that I. O. speaks thus comes not from his mindlessness but from the non-sense that is inherent in the maxim itself. I will develop some of the further connections of the Snopeses and money later. 46. Robert A. Ferguson, “‘We Hold These Truths’: Strategies of Control in the Literature of the Founders,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986), 10–11. 47. Ferguson, “‘We Hold These Truths,’” 11. 48. I am thinking, for example, of Carwin, the “biloquist” villain in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Westerveld, in The Blithedale Romance, and Dr. Tarrant (as well as Olive Chancellor, perhaps) in The Bostonians. 49. E.g., Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 185; Myra Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (New York: Columbia UP, 1976), 139–40; Richard C. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990), 144 ff; Jon Smith, “Faulkner, Galsworthy, and the Bourgeois Apocalypse,” Faulkner Journal 13.1–2 (1997–98): 133–47. 50. Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy, 176. 51. Adolf Augustus Berle and Gardiner Coit Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 333; Adolf Augustus Berle, Power without Property: A New Development in American Political Economy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959). 52. Morton J. Horwitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,” West Virginia Law Review 88.2 (1985): 179. 53. W. Jethro Brown, “The Personality of the Corporation and the State,” Law Quarterly Review 21 (1905): 366, 368, 370. 258


54. John Dewey, “The Historical Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” Yale Law Journal 35.6 (1926): 658. 55. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976), 3–4, 9–10. 56. My discussion here has been much influenced by the argument of Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy, esp. 172–84. 57. On this point, see especially C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford UP, 1962). 58. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890– 1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge UP, 1988), 33. 59. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 182. 60. See Alfred Dupont Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977), 9–10. 61. Will’s dilemma might be compared to that of real capitalists who found themselves disoriented by the development of corporate law, such as the plaintiff in the case of Button v. Hoffman, who lost his suit when the court ruled that “the owner of all the capital stock of a company does not own its property.” See Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 197. 62. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 416. 63. “In this type of organization, a general office plans, coordinates, and appraises the work of a number of operating divisions and allocates to them the necessary personnel, facilities, funds and other resources. The executives in charge of these divisions, in turn, have under their command most of the functions necessary for handling one major line of products or set of services over a wide geographic area, and each of these executives is responsible for the financial results of his division and for its success in the marketplace.” Alfred Dupont Chandler, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1990), 2. 64. For discussion of this, see Bruce Palmer, “Man over Money”: The Southern Popu list Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980), chap. 1; James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1986), 91 ff.; and Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy, chap. 8. 65. John Dewey, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence,” rpt. in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), 50. For perspectives on the extended debate between Mumford and Dewey, see Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990), 220–28, and Robert Westbrook, “Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, and the ‘Pragmatic Acquiescence,’” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha Hughes (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), 301–22. 66. According to Mortimer Adler, Hutchins referred to James and Dewey by name as “the leading anti-intellectuals of our time” in one of the speeches that were the basis for The Higher Learning in America. Presumably this identification was an extemporaneous interpolation, since it does not appear in the surviving text of the speech. Harry S. 259


Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston: Little, 1989), 157. 67. Mortimer Jerome Adler, “God and the Professors,” rpt. in Kennedy, ed., Pragmatism and American Culture, 75. Like Hutchins, Adler avoided the word pragmatism, preferring to describe the object of his attack as positivism. But in an article published the same year in Harper’s he diagnoses the problem as “corrupt pragmatic liberalism” and identifies it as the same “kind denounced by Lewis Mumford.” Quoted in Kennedy, ed., Pragmatism and American Culture, vii. 68. “Democracy has much more to fear from the mentality of its teachers than from the nihilism of Hitler. It is the same nihilism in both cases, but Hitler’s is more honest and consistent, less blurred by subtleties and queasy qualifications, and hence less dangerous” (“God and the Professors,” 72). For more detailed accounts of the HutchinsAdler offensive, and Dewey’s response, see Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths, chaps. 15 and 16; John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), 391–94; and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 276–83. 69. John Dewey, “President Hutchins’ Proposals to Remake Higher Education,” rpt. in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, ed. Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, vol. 2 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961), 952. 70. See James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), chap. 3; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 162–67; Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992), chap. 4, esp. 186–92. 71. Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), 181, 188. 72. Adler, How to Read, 185–86. 73. E.g., T. Y. Greet, “The Theme and Structure of Faulkner’s The Hamlet,” PMLA 72 (1957): 775–90; Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, 3rd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975), 251; Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner, 175; Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1966), 199; Hoffman, Faulkner’s Country Matters, 105. 74. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 463. 75. James, Pragmatism, 34. 76. James, Pragmatism, 97. 77. James, Pragmatism, 96. 78. See Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtis Gage (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), and The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtis Gage (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994). As Goux points out, the association of precious metal with “truth” has been particularly tenacious in the American imagination: “The simultaneously metaphysical and political implications of money severed from the gold standard have continuously been on the agenda perhaps nowhere more than at the heart of the Western monetary system, in the United States” (Coiners, 133). For a more general discussion of the gold/money–truth/representation parallel, see, for example, 260


Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 207–72. In the “Language” section of Nature, Emerson argues that when “duplicity and falsehood take the place of simplicity and truth . . . old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.” 79. James, Pragmatism, 31–32. 80. I am thinking here of Nietzsche’s analysis, in “Homer’s Contest,” of the agonistic ethic that “spurs men to activity: not the activity of fights of annihilation but to the activity of fights which are contests,” whose purpose is not victory but their own perpetual recommencement. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 35. 4. Making History: Pragmatic Historiography and Absalom, Absalom! 1. Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, 3rd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975), 3. 2. Daniel Hoffman, “History as Myth, Myth as History, in Faulkner’s Fiction,” in American Letters and the Historical Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Lewis P. Simpson, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Daniel Mark Fogel (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987), 237. 3. Cleanth Brooks, On the Prejudices, Predilections, and Firm Beliefs of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987), 149. 4. Myra Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (New York: Columbia UP, 1976), 1. 5. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 314. 6. Among the few extended discussions of “History” are William Bysshe Stein, “Emerson’s ‘History’: The Rhetoric of Cosmic Consciousness,” ESQ 18 (1972): 199–206; David Hoch, “‘History’ As Art; ‘Art’ As History,” ESQ 18 (1972): 288–93; Robert D. Richardson Jr., “Emerson on History,” in Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect, Harvard English Studies 10, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), 49–64; Olaf Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Power: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 83–91; Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992), 106–11. On Emerson’s views on history more generally, see A. Robert Caponigri, “Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History,” New England Quarterly 18 (1945): 368–90; Philip L. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History (New York: Columbia UP, 1961); Gustaaf Van Cromphout, “Emerson and the Dialectics of History,” PMLA 91 (1976): 54–65. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 237. Subsequent references will be indicated in the text. 8. James will later employ the same image to make much the same point: “We carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.” William James, Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 122. 261


9. I am indebted to James Albrecht for the suggestion that there is a connection between Emerson’s “verifying” and James’s “veri-fication,” as well as for other observations concerning “History.” 10. C. W. Ceram, Gods, Graves, and Scholars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 118. 11. B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1982), 7. 12. E.g., Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 157–66. 13. On the connections between The Confidence-Man and theater see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986), 195–203. 14. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (1909; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1975), 54. 15. James, The Meaning of Truth, 54. 16. James, The Meaning of Truth, 53. 17. James, Pragmatism, 103. 18. James, Pragmatism, 109. 19. James, Pragmatism, 104. 20. James, Pragmatism, 106. 21. James, Pragmatism, 118. 22. Both printed in The Meaning of Truth. 23. James, The Meaning of Truth, 120. 24. James, The Meaning of Truth, 121. 25. James, The Meaning of Truth, 121. 26. James, The Meaning of Truth, 156. 27. James, The Meaning of Truth, 157. 28. James, The Meaning of Truth, 131. 29. Frederic I. Carpenter, “William James and Emerson,” in On Emerson: The Best from American Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1988), 43–61. 30. Carpenter, “William James and Emerson,” 50, 53. 31. James, Pragmatism, 103. 32. William would not move permanently out of his father’s house until his marriage in 1878 at the age of thirty-six, and even afterwards he entertained plans of building a house on his father’s property. Alice lived with her father and mother until their deaths in 1882. 33. Mario Praz, “Introductory Essay,” Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 20. 34. A diary entry from the late 1880s suggests to what extent she had completely adopted the role, and the language, of the persecuted maiden: “As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles taking some one of their myriad forms such as throwing myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table, it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, 262


and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too.” Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964), 149. 35. Actually the whole plot of The Castle of Otranto is relevant here. The death of the son, Conrad, at the beginning of the novel frustrates his father Manfred’s aim to perpetuate his family line; since Manfred’s goal had really been to reproduce himself, his next step, attempting to marry his son’s intended bride, is perfectly natural. The real logic of the story, as Judith Wilt points out, is that “the son must die so that the old man may live.” Ghosts of the Gothic: Austin, Eliot, and Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 29. Henry James Sr.’s efforts to direct William into an unsympathetic scientific career seem likewise to have been motivated largely by a desire for self-perpetuation. As James William Anderson puts it, “The elder James did not advocate this career because he thought it suited his son’s abilities or because he expected his son to find it fulfilling. Rather, Henry James, Sr., had a more personal aim: he was distressed that his theological ideas had received so little attention, and he hoped that his son, as a respected scientist and a defender of those ideas, would be in a position to gain a hearing for them.” Anderson, “‘The Worst Kind of Melancholy’: William James in 1869,” A William James Renaissance: Four Essays by Young Scholars, a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin 30 (1982): 372. Not incidentally, Henry Sr., like Manfred in Otranto, also selected his son’s bride. 36. In a letter of September 1867, James comes close to expressing satisfaction that his back is actually manifesting its weakness: “I don’t know whether you have heard or not that I found myself last November, almost without perceptible exciting cause, in possession of that delightful disease in my back, which has so long made Harry so interesting. It is evidently a family peculiarity.” The Selected Letters of William James, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 28. Elsewhere, in a letter of January 1869, he relates his back complaint explicitly to an inability to meet the responsibilities and expectations imposed on him and to a collapse into physical and mental prostration: “I have discovered that I must not only drop all exercise, but also mental labor, as it immediately tells on my back. I have consequently made up my mind to lose at least a year now in vegetating and doing nothing but survive” (Selected Letters, 78). Anderson notes that James was interested by the fact that his brother had been helped by a “lifting cure” (“‘The Worst Kind of Melancholy,’” 370). 37. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Fairclough, 318–19. 38. Shelley, Frankenstein, 319–20. 39. William Patrick Day’s remarks on the psychology of the gothic protagonist seem very relevant to James’s description of his panic fear experience: “The state of enthrallment encompasses and explains the sadomasochistic actions of the Gothic protagonist and explains the underlying causes for the fragmentation and doubling of the self. Enthrallment to the possibilities and terrors of the Gothic world becomes a type of selfhypnosis; as the protagonist watches pleasure and terror metamorphose into a single experience, he responds by a similar, but inverted, transformation. The self, which had been one, becomes two. Unable to resolve the paradox of the unity of fear and desire, the self seeks to escape its paralysis through division, attempting to obtain the capacity to act by reestablishing the division between fear and desire, self and Other, terror and pleasure. But this division only deepens the paralytic self-hypnosis, and the fragmenta263


tion of the self destroys the identity it was meant to preserve.” In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), 26. 40. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), 118. 41. Fiedler, Love and Death, 112. 42. James, The Meaning of Truth, 156. 43. Ilse Dusoir Lind, “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA 70 (1955): 887. 44. E.g., Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 311; C. Hugh Holman, “Absalom, Absalom!: The Historian As Detective,” Sewanee Review 79 (1979): 542–53; Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1981), 241; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 294. It may be worth remembering that Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles defined “the creation of narrative” as the essence of the detective’s activity. 45. John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 181. 46. All references are to Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text, ed. Noel Polk (New York: Vintage Books, 1987). Italics, except when necessary for clarity, have been omitted. 47. See, e.g., Floyd C. Watkins, “What Happens in Absalom, Absalom!” Modern Fiction Studies 13 (1967): 79–87; Cleanth Brooks, “On Absalom, Absalom!” Mosaic 7 (1973): 159–83, and “The Narrative Structure of Absalom, Absalom!” Georgia Review 29 (Summer 1975); Hershel Parker, “What Quentin Saw ‘Out There,’” Mississippi Quarterly 27 (1974): 323–26; Myra Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (New York: Columbia UP, 1976), 51–73; Susan Resneck Parr, “The Fourteenth Image of the Blackbird: Another Look at Truth in Absalom, Absalom!” Arizona Quarterly 35 (1979): 153–64. 48. For representative statements of the “Sutpen as symbol of the South” position, see Walter Sullivan, “The Tragic Design of Absalom, Absalom!” South Atlantic Quarterly 50 (1951): 552–66; Lyall H. Powers, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Comedy (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1980); Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982). See also the critics noted by Hyatt H. Waggoner in “The Historical Novel and the Southern Past: The Case of Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Literary Journal 2 (1970): 70–71. For the argument that the novel really concerns the history of America or of the modern world in general, see Gavin F. Davenport, The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1970); Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983); and James A. Snead, Figures of Division: William Faulkner’s Major Novels (New York: Methuen, 1986), chap. 5. 49. See Gary Lee Stonum, Faulkner’s Career: An Internal Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 123–52; also Porter and Carl R. Rollyson, Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984). 50. Michael Millgate, “‘The Firmament of Man’s History’: Faulkner’s Treatment of the Past,” Mississippi Quarterly 25 (1972): 27–28. See also Waggoner, “The Historical Novel and the Southern Past,” 143–69; Davenport, The Myth of Southern History, 115–27; 264


Harry B. Henderson, Versions of the Past: The Historical Imagination in American Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1974), 254–69; John Middleton, “Shreve McCannon and Sutpen’s Legacy,” Southern Review 10 (1974): 115–24; Richard Forrer, “Absalom, Absalom!: Story-telling as a Mode of Transcendence,” Southern Literary Journal 9 (1976): 22–46; Claudia Brodsky, “The Working of Narrative in Absalom, Absalom!” Amerikastudien 23 (1978): 240–59; John E. Bassett, Vision and Revisions: Essays on Faulkner (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill P, 1989), 125–44. 51. For readings that stress the success of the enterprise of narrative interpretation in the novel, see David L. Minter, The Interpreted Design As a Structural Principle in American Prose (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969); Arnold Weinstein, Vision and Response in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974); and John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982). Those who argue for failure include Walter J. Slatoff, The Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1960); James Guetti, The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967); Peter Brooks and J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Relativisms: Point of View and Indeterminacy in the Novel Absalom, Absalom!” in Relativism in the Arts, ed. Betty Jean Craige (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983), 148–70. 52. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 286. 53. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 5. 54. E.g., Rollyson argues that Quentin attempts to “reject the intolerable bond between himself and Rosa Coldfield which has been created by his family’s role in helping to establish Sutpen in Jefferson” (Uses of the Past, 38). 55. “Quentin’s alternatives are either to adopt the artificial perspectives of those around him and to live according to a false model of history or to handle the realization that human frailty and evil are just as much a part of history as strength or love.” Susan Swartzlander, “‘That Meager and Fragile Thread’: The Artist As Historian in Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Studies 25 (1986): 119. 56. Lind, “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!” 275. 57. Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845; Nashville: J. S. Saunders and Co., 1993), 33. 58. E.g.: “[Sutpen’s] was that cold alert fury of the gambler who knows that he may lose anyway but that with a second’s flagging of the fierce constant will he is sure to: and who keeps suspense from ever quite crystalising by sheer fierce manipulation of the cards or dice until the ducts and glands of luck begin to flow again” (129–30); Rosa and Sutpen’s daughters watch “the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder” (148–49); telling his story to General Compson, he drops a detail “into the telling as you might flick the joker out of a pack of fresh cards without being able to remember later whether you had removed the joker or not” (203); when Charles appears, he describes himself as being “forced to play my last trump card” (220). 59. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 309. 60. This is not a casual comparison; later Henry (via Quentin and Shreve) will speculate that Sutpen’s beard is indeed intended to be a mask: “Maybe he even thought, won265


dered if perhaps that was not why the beard, if maybe the other had not hidden behind that beard against this very day, and if so why?” (257). This beard, throughout the novel, appears as a kind of autonomous object with an independent existence; Quentin at one point describes Sutpen sitting in his grandfather’s office, “with money to rattle in his pocket and his beard at its prime too: beard body and intellect at that peak which all the different parts that make a man reach” (193). 61. An equally suggestive parallel might be made between Sutpen and Ovid Bolus, who, like the former, recounts a tale of an adventure on a Caribbean island, in this case Cuba, where he stayed as the guest of one Don Carlos y Cubanos, a wealthy planter “whose life he had saved from a mob in Louisville, at the imminent risk of his own.” Bolus’s story is like a parody of Sutpen’s—or rather Sutpen’s might be Bolus’s tale rewritten as tragedy. Don Carlos has a sister, with whom Bolus quickly contracts a relation more than intimate, but since Donna Isabella cannot marry a Protestant, and Bolus refuses to convert, he was, he claims, forced to abandon her, in spite of her now evident condition: “in liquid tones, broken by grief, she implored him to relent,—reminded him of her love, of her trust in him, and of the consequences—now not much longer to be concealed—of that love and trust (‘though I protest,’ Bolus would say, ‘I don’t know what she meant exactly by that.’).” Sutpen, of course, had been informed by his Haitian planter patron that the daughter he was to marry, and to repudiate after she became pregnant, was part Spanish. Bolus has as little trouble appeasing his conscience over his “putting aside” of his Caribbean wife (and child) as does Sutpen: “And wiping his eyes, he drowned the wasting sorrow in a long draught of the poteen; and, being much refreshed, was able to carry the burden on a little further,—videlicet, to the next lie.” Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853; New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 12–13. 62. Cleanth Brooks also notes a similarity of Flem and Sutpen, but does not recognize the latter as a confidence man (Yoknapatawpha Country, 307). I have already spoken about the linkages of Flem and Benjamin Franklin, the most celebrated American propagator of the notion of life as a series of roles and of what Gary Lindberg terms the “model sel.” Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 73–89. There are suggestive parallels between Franklin and Sutpen as well. The former’s system of incessant self-correction and his regimen of moral schedules might well be the original of Sutpen’s “design,” while Sutpen’s predisposition for analyzing his situation in terms of a “mistake” strongly resembles the printer’s habit, in the Autobiography, of speaking of his own missteps on life’s path as “errata” that might be corrected in the final edition of his life. 63. The form of the tales told by the other narrators also repeats that of Sutpen’s in its stress on secrecy and long delay of revelation. 64. The resonances of Sutpen’s stage-house and Faulkner’s own domestic arrangements are remarkably suggestive, and deserve much more attention than I can give them here. In 1930 Faulkner purchased his first house, the old Shegog Place, a large pillared antebellum structure in sad condition, on whose rebuilding and repair Faulkner himself worked for a number of years: mornings were devoted to writing, and afternoons to the house. But while he labored on the exterior of the house, now renamed Rowan Oak, the interior, as visitors remarked, remained almost as sparsely furnished as Sutpen’s “naked” 266


rooms. Without much exaggeration, it could be said that Faulkner too “lived in the spartan shell of the largest edifice in the county.” For Faulkner, as for Sutpen, the important thing was the distinction of outside and inside—of light and dark. “Dark House” was the initial title for Absalom, Absalom! as it had been for Light in August. What a house represented for Faulkner was not the warm space of domesticity but cool darkness created by the shell. (The name “Rowan Oak” itself points to the marking of a boundary of interior and exterior: Faulkner took it from The Golden Bough, which discusses the tradition of attaching a branch of rowan-tree over a door to keep out witches’ curses.) As many have noted, this extravagant investment of energy and money (Faulkner ordered special hand-hammered locks for the doors, for example) by a man who had more important uses for both seems clearly to represent an attempt to re-create the fallen grandeur of his family’s past. Constructing his house, Faulkner was also constructing history. At the same time, he was constructing a story about a group of people who were constructing a history—about a man who was constructing a house which also involved and represented the construction of a history. One part of Rowan Oak that Faulkner completely rebuilt was the foundation. 65. E.g.: “Free not only from the particular biases of Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson, Sutpen’s version is free of distortion itself, and this makes it unique in the novel. . . . [I]t never occurs to him to try to distort his story in order to persuade General Compson or anyone else of his own justification.” Donald M. Kartiganer, The Fragile Web: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979), 88. For Rollyson, “Sutpen’s speech . . . is a genuine piece of historical evidence” (Uses of the Past, 42). 66. One of the few things that does seem to be clear, in this novel of proliferating uncertainties, is that Sutpen never does explain this “fact” to General Compson. E.g.: “‘Your old man,’ Shreve said. ‘When your grandfather was telling this to him, he didn’t know any more what your grandfather was talking about than your grandfather knew what the demon was talking about when the demon told it to him, did he?’” (220). Almost universally, this fact is taken to be the mixed blood of his wife, and hence of his son—“the dark secret that underlay the Sutpen tragedy” (Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 317); but in spite of the amount of critical energy that has been expended on this point, nothing in the novel demonstrates that this conclusion is ever anything more than Quentin’s, and the reader’s, speculation. Nothing in the novel, that is, ever makes the secret anything other than a secret—so successful a secret that most readers finish the book with the conviction that somehow, somewhere, it has become something else. 67. One particularly clear example out of many is this piece of dialogue involving Quentin and Shreve: “Wait,” Shreve said. “You mean that he got the son he wanted, after all that trouble, and then turned right around and—” “Yes. Sitting in Grandfather’s office that afternoon, with his head kind of flung back a little, explaining to Grandfather like he might have been explaining arithmetic to Henry back in the fourth grade: ‘You see, all I wanted was just a son. Which seems to me, when I look about at my contemporary scene, no exorbitant gift from nature or circumstance to demand—’” 267


“Will you wait?” Shreve said. “—that with the son he went to all that trouble to get lying right there behind him in the cabin, he would have to taunt the grandfather into killing first him and then the child too?” “—What?” Quentin said. “It wasn’t a son. It was a girl.” “Oh,” Shreve said. “—Come on. Let’s get out of this damn icebox and go to bed.” (234) 68. Kartiganer, The Fragile Web, 99. 69. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 29. 70. E.g., Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner, rev. ed.(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1964): “The characters themselves are engaged in the frustrating attempt to capture truth and then to communicate it. . . . All the narrators are sincerely trying to be truthful. . . . Yet it is plain that the result of their efforts is not the truth about Sutpen but three quite distinct legends which reveal as much about the narrators as about Sutpen” (86–87). 71. At the climax of the novel, when she and Quentin are finally about to enter the mansion, she asserts her proprietorial claims almost in as many words: “It belonged to Ellen. I am her sister, her only living heir” (294). 72. Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1966), 162–63. 73. Rosa comes close to admitting her ambitions, when she speaks of Clytie’s barring her entry to Judith’s room after the murder of Bon, “saying ‘Yes, Rosa?’ calmly into the midstride of my running which (I know it now) had begun five years ago” (120). 74. Mr. Compson, for one, has no illusions about the strength of Rosa’s desire for authority: “Then he said, ‘Do you want to know the real reason why she chose you? . . . It’s because she will need someone to go with her—a man, a gentleman, yet one still young enough to do what she wants, do it the way she wants it done’” (8). 75. See Fiedler, Love and Death, 394–98, 443–45; Lind, “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!” 283; Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner, 87–89; Lynn Gartrell Levins, “The Four Narrative Perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA 85 (1970): 35–47; Max Putzel, “What Is Gothic about Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Literary Journal 4 (1971): 3–19; François Pitavy, “The Gothicism of Absalom, Absalom! Rosa Coldfield Revisited,” in “A Cosmos of My Own”: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1980, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1981), 199–226; Cheryl B. Torsney, “The Vampire Motif in Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Review 20 (1984): 562–69. 76. The expression is that of Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Meridian Books, 1960). 77. Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, 27. 78. For convenience, I will cite Judith Wilt’s compact summary of the “major characteristics of Gothic space”: “First, the space is unpredictably various, full of hidden ascents and descents, sudden turnings, unexpected subspaces, alcoves, and inner rooms, above all, of long, tortuous, imperfectly understood, half-visible approaches to the center of suspense. And second, all the spaces are charged with the essence of power: the 268


empty passages crackey with the presence of the Gothic antihero, the great old one . . . dead or alive, human or nonhuman, whose field of force, whose in a sense mystical body, this is” (Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic, 10). This passage stands as an equally good description of how Rosa would like Absalom, Absalom! to be read, and of how, in turn, most readers have read it. 79. Early examples of gothic fiction, precisely because they are so unselfconscious about their own premises, are often particularly useful illustrations of the epistemology of the gothic and its foundation on the assumption of the secret. Consider for instance the emphatic titles of Francis Lathom’s The Impenetrable Secret. Find It Out! (London, 1805) and Mrs. Meeke’s There Is a Secret! Find It Out! (London, 1808). 80. Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, 50. 81. See Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, 50–59. 82. Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, 55. 83. Interestingly, at the University of Virginia Faulkner claimed that Intruder in the Dust began with an idea to write a detective story involving “a man in jail just about to be hung [who] would have to be his own detective.” William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1959), 142. On the theme of the sedentary detective, see Irwin, Mystery to a Solution, 306. Faulkner has his own specifically southern variant on the sedentary detective, Gavin Stevens, the man of words rather than deeds, tireless rhetorician and bombastic pontificator, but wholly passive and unable to act in private (and especially erotic) life. 84. Borges provides the most masterful development of this notion in his story “Death and the Compass,” in which the crime the detective is trying to solve turns out to be his own murder. But Faulkner anticipates him in this, since one way of describing Absalom, Absalom! is as a detective story in which Quentin is looking for the cause of his own suicide, which has, in a fairly literal sense, already taken place. 85. George Levine, “Dying to Know,” Victorian Newsletter 79 (1991): 2, 1. 86. The image of the closed door, the figure of blockage, is central to Absalom, Absalom! and is clearly related to the novel’s primal scene, Sutpen’s “boy-symbol” standing “outside the barred door” (190) of the plantation house. The importance of this image has been observed before (e.g., Weinstein, Vision and Response in Modern Fiction, 150 ff., and Bassett, Vision and Revisions, 138), but I don’t think its epistemological implications have ever been properly analyzed. Weinstein, for example, contends that an “overpass to love” is necessary to find what is hidden behind these doors; but this begs the question of whether there is in fact anything there at all. 87. No accident this—Walter Benn Michaels observes that “haunted-house stories . . . usually involve some form of anxiety about ownership.” Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 89. 88. Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1948), 734. 89. Faulkner claimed to have read James “without much pleasure . . . except The Turn of the Screw, which was a very fine tour de force” (Faulkner in the University, 16). 90. Henry James, Ghostly Tales, 457. 91. Fiedler, Love and Death, 118. 269


92. William Faulkner, appendix to The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1946), 408. 93. Friedrich Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 84–85. 94. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language, 139 ff. 95. Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, 85–86. 96. E.g., Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner, 89 ff.; Levins, “The Four Narrative Perspectives.” 97. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. rev. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 17. 98. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 18. “Literature” here also means “criticism,” since “the difference between them [is] delusive.” De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), x. 99. Howe, William Faulkner, 224. 100. Weinstein, Vision and Response in Modern Fiction, 151. 101. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 310. 102. Given the connection between “mask” and “mascus,” or “ghost,” it seems highly suggestive that it is as “ghosts” that the historical figures of the Sutpen story are repeatedly referred to, as in the description of Quentin as “a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts” (7). 103. In fact, in remarks at the University of Virginia about Quentin’s narration in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner offers a formulation strikingly reminiscent of Emerson’s: “But then, every time any character gets into a book, no matter how minor, he’s actually telling his biography—that’s all anyone ever does, he tells his own biography, talking about himself, in a thousand different terms, but himself” (Faulkner in the University, 275). 104. Richard Poirier, in “‘Strange Gods’ in Jefferson, Mississippi: Analysis of Absalom, Absalom!” in William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1951), 217–43, may be the first to have made this point. See also Lind, “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!”: “Aroused by the question of incest which the Bon-Henry-Judith relationship poses, Quentin shapes the story in the terms of his own vicarious incest wishes and creates the doomed Henry as an image of himself” (277); Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner: Quentin “like Henry Sutpen, is obsessed with the idea of incest and with his own responsibility for his sister” (92); Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language: “Through Henry, Quentin comes to terms with probated incest, with the spoken or written declaration of longing for one’s sister” (147). John T. Irwin’s argument relies on a more complicated conception of Quentin’s incestuous desire and the identifications it motivates, in which he “identifies with both Henry, the brother as protector, and Bon, the brother as seducer.” John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975), 28. But this reading requires Irwin to give rather short shrift to Shreve, who is, after all, explicitly identified with Bon. 105. It is possible to argue, and some have done so (e.g., Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 116 ff.), that Sutpen’s exclusion of Bon is a part of his plan, even its primary goal, to the extent that it is a reversal of and revenge for—a cancellation of—the rejection at 270


the white door that originally started Sutpen on his career. The fact that it is not Sutpen himself who carries out the exclusion still requires explanation, however. 106. Sutpen’s dynastic design inevitably takes the form of straight lines, as in his vision of shutting the door “forever behind him on all that he had ever known, and look[ing] ahead along the still undivulged light rays in which his descendants . . . waited to be born” (210). Earlier, the sudden conception of his project is rendered in terms suggestive of something like the Washington Monument: “It was like that, he said, like an explosion—a bright glare that vanished and left nothing, no ashes nor refuse: just a limitless flat plain with the severe shape of his intact innocence rising from it like a monument” (192). 107. “In the course of their fall in the void, atoms are driven by a supplementary deviation, by the parenklisis or clinamen that, impelling an initial divergency, produce the ‘concentration of material (systrophè) thus giving birth to the worlds and things they contain’ (J. and M. Bollack, H. Wissmann, La Lettre d’Epicure, p. 182.3). The clinamen diverges from simple verticality, doing so, according to Lucretius, ‘at an indeterminate moment’ and ‘in indeterminate places.’ . . . This deviation alone can change the course of an imperturbable destination and an inflexible order.” Jacques Derrida, “My Chances / Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith, M.D., and William Kerrigan, Ph.D. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 7. 108. Another suggestive parallel might be Wotan’s attempt to correct his mistake through his son Siegmund in Wagner’s Ring. As Wotan tries to maintain the legitimacy of his own design (and the foundations of his castle) by having his son commit the crime which is necessary to his own survival, so Sutpen demands that his son do the deed that he cannot. In both cases the maneuver is doomed to failure to the extent that the son is only ever the father’s surrogate. 109. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 320. 110. The effect bears comparison to that of certain stories of Julio Cortázar, like “The Distances” or “Axlotol,” in which two characters, in a moment of face-to-face confrontation, find their identities have suddenly been exchanged. 111. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 313. 112. Noel Polk, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996), 233. Kartiganer likewise fingers the sad misfortune of national origin: “Shreve confronts an absence, something about love of land and heritage and community which, as a Canadian, he feels is no longer a living part of his character [my emphasis]” (The Fragile Web, 96). 113. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 313. 114. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 314. 115. Terence Doody, “Shreve McCannon and the Confessions of Absalom, Absalom!” Studies in the Novel 6 (1974): 454–69. 116. It is an open question whether Shreve is Quentin’s superior in age, as Bon is Henry’s—in the text of Absalom, Absalom! Shreve is described as younger than Quentin, but in the appendix their respective birth dates are given as 1890 and 1891. It may be significant that in The Sound and the Fury Shreve is called Quentin’s “husband.” 117. Cleanth Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 314. 271


118. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 66–67. 119. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 68. 120. “This amounts to a pleonastic expression: to have luck is to have good luck” (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 6). 121. E.g., “Shreve is speculating in a rather grandiose and sophomoric fashion” (Rollyson, Uses of the Past, 65); “The lines may be read as a reflection of Faulkner’s own racism [but they] characterize Shreve, not Faulkner” (Kartiganer, The Fragile Web, 104; Polk calls Shreve’s comment a “flip and callous parting shot” (Children of the Dark House, 233). 122. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner, 100. 123. Letter to Asa Gray, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 290. George Levine elaborates on the radical implications of this position: “Against the powerful cultural bias that ‘chance’ cannot be operating in the natural world, Darwin was moving toward a notion of the random. His insistence on law imperfectly disguised the fact that he was talking about stochastic processes and come to recognize at least indirectly that the random and the unpredictable . . . was essential for life. . . . Chance and the random become the great creative forces in Darwin’s theory. . . . [T]o imagine a system in which disorder, dysteleology, and mindlessness are constitutive, and, indeed, the source of all value, is to turn the Western tradition, with its faith that all value inheres in order, design, and intelligence, on its head.” George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988), 92–94. 124. William James, Pragmatism, 57. A good example of the clarity of James’s understanding of Darwinian evolution is his critique of the argument of one of the leading naturalists of the late nineteenth century, Nathan Southgate Shaler, that evidence for divine design could be found in the improbability of the descent of man. James points out the speciousness in this argument, since any survivors will always detect design in the particular route that led to their success, and there is in any event no way of calculating probability of events known only after the fact: “The world has come about but once, the witness is there after the fact and simply approves. . . . Where only one fact is in question, there is no relation of ‘probability’ at all. . . . I think, therefore, that the excellence we have reached and now approve may be due to no general design, but merely to a succession of the short designs we actually know of, taking advantage of opportunity, and adding themselves together from point to point.” Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 320. 125. Gould, Wonderful Life, 288. 126. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979), 6. 5. A Great Story: Pathfinding and Providence in Go Down, Moses 1. William James, Appendix 1, Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 257–58. Subsequent references will be indicated by page number in the text. 272


2. William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983), 149. 3. James, Pragmatism, 70–71. In Some Problems of Philosophy, he returns to the figure: “The world is full of partial purposes, of partial stories. That they all form chapters of one supreme purpose and inclusive story is the monistic conjecture. They seem, meanwhile, simply to run alongside each other—either irrelevantly, or, where they interfere, leading to mutual frustrations,—so the appearance of things is invincibly pluralistic from this purposive point of view.” William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (1911; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979), 69. 4. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1977), 28. 5. James, Pluralistic Universe, 106. 6. James, Pluralistic Universe, 113. 7. James, Pragmatism, 123. 8. James, Pragmatism, 123–24. Elsewhere James develops the implications of this literary trope further, making the difference between the rationalist and the pragmatist outlooks the difference between being a reader of the “cosmic novel” and being one of its characters. James, Pluralistic Universe, 27. 9. James, Some Problems, 141. 10. The resistance of reality to mental abstraction was a constant theme in James’s thought. In the Principles of Psychology, for example, he describes the “conceptual scheme” as “a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world’s contents. Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insignificant to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived . . . it is subjected to the sieve’s network.” The Principles of Psychology (1890; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1981), 455. Twenty years later, in Some Problems of Philosophy, he was still stressing the claim that “the conceptual scheme, consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely. The one is no full measure of the other, essential features of the flux escaping whenever we put concepts in its place” (Some Problems, 81). 11. James, Pluralistic Universe, 26. 12. James, Pragmatism, 17–18. James’s use of the term “temple” emphasizes the inside/outside opposition, since etymologically it derives from the practice of marking out and defining a particular space or templum. 13. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (1909; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975), 49. 14. James, Pluralistic Universe, 151. 15. James, Pluralistic Universe, 152. 16. James, Pluralistic Universe, 153–54. 17. James, Pluralistic Universe, 154. 18. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History As Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995). 19. William M. Sloane, “History and Democracy,” American Historical Review 1 (October 1895): 2. 20. Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 127. 273


21. Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 127. 22. William Faulkner, The Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), 54. 23. William Faulkner to Robert K. Haas (January 26, 1949), Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House, 1977), 284–85. 24. For example, the version in Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), 448. 25. Now then, Glaucon, is the time for us like huntsmen to surround the covert and keep close watch that justice may not slip through and get away from us and vanish from our sight. . . . And truly, said I, it appears to be an inaccessible place, lying deep in the shadows. It is certainly a dark covert, not easy to beat up. But all the same, on we must go. Yes, on. And I caught a view and gave a halloo and said, Glaucon, I think we have found its trail and I don’t think it will get away from us. (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961], 674.) 26. George Steiner, “Has Truth a Future,” in From Creation to Chaos: Classic Writings in Science, ed. Bernard Dixon (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 186. 27. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 20. 28. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, the Corrected Text, ed. Noel Polk (New York: Vintage, 1990), 8. Subsequent citations will be indicated parenthetically. 29. John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982), 224. 30. Etymologically, absolute means that which is set free. 31. It is worth noting that Faulkner’s great-grandfather, William C. Falkner, had his life spared when, in the course of a struggle over a pistol with one Robert Hindman, the gun misfired three times. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 20. 32. To forestall possible objections, I should note that Faulkner is speaking of the marriage of Isaac. This will, of course, later prove to be a very problematic union, but I do not think that this moving tribute to connubial grace is intended to be at all ironic. 33. See, for example, Richard C. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990), 175 ff. 34. In this regard, Ike comes close to being the opposite of the writer as conceived by Faulkner, who was fond of describing writing as marking or “scratching,” e.g.: “But probably that’s what he wants, that really the writer doesn’t want success, that he knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall—Kilroy was here—that somebody a hundred, a thousand years later will see.” Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1959), 61.

274


35. See Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1966), 78. 36. James, Pluralistic Universe, 109. 37. If, for Ike, hunting is a kind of conceptualizing, James describes conceptualizing as if it were really a transposed form of hunting, in which one “brings down” a live and leaping reality: “What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. . . . Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buts and bourgeons, changes and creates. . . . Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results” (Pluralistic Universe, 117–18; James’s emphasis). 38. James, Pluralistic Universe, 116. 39. Faulkner compares the bear, erect with Lion and Boon hanging from his body, to “a piece of statuary” (231). This association of the hunt with a static work of art is developed in greater length in Cass’s use of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to explain to Ike why he did not shoot Old Ben on his first encounter (283). Keats’s poem on a (funerary?) urn is, of course, the locus classicus for the conception of the artwork as “post-mortem.” The motif of an urn which imposes a timeless artistic form on the wilderness appears also in Wallace Stevens’s revision of Keats, “Anecdote of the Jar” (“The wilderness rose up to meet it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild”), where the “postmortem” aspect of the jar (“The jar was gray and bare”) is also emphasized. If, as Frank Lentricchia has argued, Stevens’s jar is a version of James’s “marble temple” (Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988], 113), Faulkner’s Grecian urn looks very much like another. Faulkner undercuts the urn’s status as an icon of timelessness by doubling it with a second symbolic vessel which at first blush seems rather similar, the quasi-sacramental silver cup filled with gold coins, like some fabulous magical object, that Hubert Beauchamp seals in a burlap bag against Ike’s twenty-first birthday. The cup, however, seems to mock the urn’s intimations of immortality, since while the urn is eternal and unchanging, the cup is an allegory of mutability, as the gold coins are gradually exchanged for slips of paper, the cup is replaced by a tin coffee pot, and finally the whole changes shape in the fire. But the almost formless mass continues to signify temporality, since the pieces of paper are promissory notes to be paid in the future. 40. Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, 273. 41. Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, 273. 42. R. W. B. Lewis, “The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear,’” Kenyon Review 13 (1951): 650. For similar formulations, see, for instance, Wiley Lee Umphlett, The Sporting Myth and the American Experience: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell UP, 1975), 59–60: “Ike’s [life in the woods] is an experience in self-discovery that enables him to transcend the illusion of the past and to examine himself in the light of what really happened, thus compelling him to look squarely at the issues and make a moral decision. . . . Each confrontation with Old Ben during Ike’s youth becomes another crucial step toward his ‘essential encounter,’ cul-

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notes to page 221

minating as it does with the renunciation of his heritage at the age of twenty-one for a simpler life unencumbered by the evils of a social order.” Also see Susan V. Donaldson, “Isaac McCaslin and the Possibilities of Vision,” Southern Review 22 (1986): 47: “Having known vision and true brotherhood in the Edenic wilderness presided over by Sam Fathers, Ike recognizes southern life on the land for what it is—a rigid hierarchy of pain and exploitation.” 43. Until recently, few commentators have taken seriously the fact that Faulkner deliberately avoids confirming Ike’s speculation. But see Carol Ann Clancey Harter, “The Diaphoric Structure and Unity of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Binghamton, 1970). Leland H. Cox records that James B. Meriwether, in a personal letter of July 2, 1981, makes a similar observation: “There is no proof of old Carothers’s incest (i.e. that he is the father of Tomasina); Isaac believes that, but he also believes that Eunice was a virgin when old [Carothers] (he thinks) had her. That is, Ike needs to believe such dramatic stuff. He might be right; he might not.” Quoted in William Faulkner: Biographical and Reference Guide, ed. Leland H. Cox (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1982), 244. For more-developed exceptions, see David H. Evans, “Taking the Place of Nature: ‘The Bear’ and the Incarnation of America,” in Faulkner and the Natural World, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999), 179–97, and Richard Godden and Noel Polk, “Reading the Ledgers,” Mississippi Quarterly 55 (2002): 301–59. Godden and Polk’s long article deserves a response. They argue, as I do, that Ike’s “discovery” of his grandfather’s incest is in fact a construction devised “according to his own needs” (301). As an alternative construction, they suggest that the real secret story told by the commissary ledgers is one of a sexual ménage à quatre involving Buck, Buddy, the polymorphically perverse Percival Brownlee, and an unconsenting mule. To their credit, Godden and Polk acknowledge that their interpretation is “but a reading,” a speculation based on profoundly inadequate evidence. My own dissent has less to do with the content of this interpretation than with its form. Replacing Ike’s stereotypically gothic “discovery” of father-daughter incest with their own homoerotic one may update the nature of the unspeakable transgression, but it maintains in place the ideology of the secret—the conviction that the past has some hidden message for us, even if it is ultimately inaccessible. 44. Ike’s predisposition for hallucinatory re-creation is evident elsewhere in the novel, for example in “The Old People,” where Sam’s tales about the ancestral past have such an effect on him that “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” (165). Even before his “discovery,” Ike feels he is seeing through the ledger records to some reality beyond: “it would seem to the boy that he could actually see the black man, the slave whom his white owner had forever manumitted by the very act from which the black man could never be free so long as memory lasted, entering the commissary, asking permission perhaps of the white man’s son to see the ledger-page which he could not even read” (255). Faulkner later remarks about Ike’s memories of the Reconstruction period that “the boy even at almost eighty would never be able to 276


distinguish certainly between what he had seen and what had been told him” (278)—in fact this seems characteristic of Ike’s thinking in general. 45. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 42. 46. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 263. 47. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978), 8. 48. Cotton Mather, for example, argued that “the overruling providence of the great God is to be acknowledged, as well in the concealing of America for so long a time, as in the discovering of it, when the fulness of time was come for the discovery . . . nor should it pass without remark, that the three most memorable things, which have born a very great aspect upon humane affairs, did, near the same time . . . arise unto the world: the first was the resurrection of literature; the second was the opening of America; the third was the Reformation of Religion.” Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New England, ed. and abridged by Raymond J. Cunningham (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 15. 49. Gal. 4.28. 50. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982), xii. 51. Frye, Great Code, 171. 52. E.g., Lawrance Thompson, William Faulkner: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 81–98. 53. Susan V. Donaldson, in “Contending Narratives: Go Down, Moses and the Short Story Cycle,” in Faulkner and the Short Story, ed. Evan Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990), 128–48, makes a similar claim that the book is a “site of struggle between the seven individual stories and that all-encompassing and all-binding ‘master narrative’ of the McCaslins” (129). Where I part company with her reading is over her contention that L. C. Q. McCaslin is builder of that “master-narrative” from which Ike struggles to free himself by his repudiation. This seems to me to get things backwards: it is, after all, Ike who is the chief storyteller in Go Down, Moses, while all we know of Old Carothers comes from the differing images others construct of him. 54. Her name perhaps recalls Little Father Time’s suicide note in Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too menny.” 55. Noel Polk makes a persuasive case that the deputy is making a sincere, if futile, effort to understand a black man whose actions don’t fit his racist assumptions; if this is correct, it only confirms the resistance of Rider’s “separate story” to becoming part of a single inclusive narrative. Noel Polk, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996), 239–40. 56. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, 275. Conclusion: A Future for Faulkner 1. Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 5. 2. Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (April 16[?] 1851), The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale UP, 1960), 125. 277


3. William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1959), 239, 117, 177, 68. 4. As an excellent example of a such a critical approach, I would point to Joseph R. Urgo’s essay “Where Was That Bird: Thinking America through Faulkner,” which argues for a need to think of Faulkner’s writing in terms of a “flight from the representational in favor of the performative.” Faulkner and America (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001), 98–115. 5. William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), 135.

278

index

Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), 16, 19, 37, 144, 269n84; affinity of Colonel Compson for Charles Bon, 178–79; burden of history in, 157; Charles Bon as symbol of the arbitrary in, 184–85, 271n107; closed door (aporia) motif in, 173–74, 181–82, 186, 269n86, 271n106; Colonel Compson character in, 162, 163, 164–65, 170; Colonel Compson and hidden truth in, 176–77; Colonel Compson and the telling of Sutpen tale, 177–78; Colonel Compson’s narrative as literary criticism, 180–81; connections of to “The Turn of the Screw,” 174–75; and the Doctrine of Design, 192; Ellen as character in, 170; as an “evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy,” 159; exclusion from the truth in, 179–80; gambling and the act of creation in, 161, 265n58; Henry Sutpen as character in, 158, 168, 171, 185–86; Henry Sutpen as a Hamlet figure in, 185, 186, 271n108; and Henry Sutpen as Quentin’s double, 187; and the image of paralysis in, 170–71; importance of the gothic in, 169–76; incest in, 189–90, 270n104; Judith character in, 171, 189, 191; as a locked-room detective story, 158; modalities of narration in, 158; multiple narrators of the Sutpen story in, 167–68, 183–84, 268n70; murder of Charles Bon in, 185, 186; original title of, 266–67n64; and the process of identification in, 183–85; Quentin as character in, 158, 160, 161, 167, 168, 170, 177, 186–89, 265nn54–55, 270nn103–4; Quentin and Shreve’s narrative of the

Sutpen story, 182–83, 267–68n67; racial makeup of Charles Bon in, 184–85; relationship of Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen in, 190–91; Rosa Coldfield as character in, 158, 162, 163–64, 268n74; Rosa Coldfield and Sutpen’s Hundred, 168–69, 268n71, 268n73; and the secret of history, 159–60; and the secretive quality of houses, 163–64; Shreve as character in, 162, 167–68, 170, 177, 187–89, 191–92, 271n112, 271n116, 272n121; and the sin of the South, 167; theatrical metaphors in, 182–83, 270n102; Thomas Sutpen as character in, 158, 160–61, 266nn61–62, 270–71n105, 271n106; Thomas Sutpen as an “imaginative construct,” 161–62, 265–66n60; Thomas Sutpen and the tradition of the confidence man, 162–63; Thomas Sutpen’s biography of himself in, 165–66, 267n65; Thomas Sutpen’s mansion in, 163, 266–67n64; Thomas Sutpen’s withholding a secret “fact” in, 165–67, 267n66; and the “truth of history,” 158 Abstract Expressionism, 30 Adams, Henry, 198, 199, 225, 230 Adler, Mortimer, 136–37, 259–60n66, 260n67 Aeneid (Ovid), 61 Aiken, Conrad, 12; on “deliberately withheld meaning,”14–15 allusion, 65–66, 248n53 America, 47–48; physical landscape and national self-definition of, 51–52; and the principle of equality, 49; and vagueness, 51, 247n26 279

index

American Historical Review, 198 American Revolution, the, and the “typology of mission,” 50 American studies, 35 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 40 Anderson, James William, 263n35 Anderson, Sherwood, 29 “Anecdote of the Jar” (Stevens), 275n39 antifoundationalism, 28 “anti-intellectualism,” 10, 136, 197, 259–60n66 Anti-Pragmatism (Schinz), 73–74 Aquinas, Thomas, 75 Aristotle, 6 arts, the, 29 Augustine, on the transience of temporal things, 239–40n40 authenticity, 30, 41, 245n4

Boorstin, Daniel, 22, 51, 132 Bourne, Randolph, 136 Bradley, F. H., 29 Brady, Mathew, 69, 70 Brooks, Cleanth, 16, 17, 21, 27, 36, 102–3, 120, 180, 186, 187, 229, 241n54, 266n62 Brooks, Peter, 159, 161 Brooks, Van Wyck, 103 Bunyan, John, 90 Calvinism, 50 Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, The (ed. Weinstein), 16 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 155, 157, 263n35 Chandler, Alfred D., 132, 259n60 character, in mid-nineteenth-century America, 70, 249n60 “Circles” (Emerson), 11 Clifford, W. K., 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 91, 251n27 clinamen, 185, 271n107 cognition: ambulatory, 5; and fundamental temporality, 6–7; narratival, 5–6; and the role of action, 6; saltatory, 5, 6 Columbus, Christopher, 194–96 community, 8–9, 16, 17, 25–26, 36, 242n71; and allusion, 66; and belief, 94–96; concept of “true community,” 27; imagined, 9, 24, 27, 40–41; as the product of narrative persuasion, 21. See also Suggs, Simon, and the plot of community creation confidence man (trickster), 8, 22–27, 35, 39, 57, 96–97, 242n72, 247n30; ambivalence of to society, 23–24; as an American invention, 41; and authenticity, 41, 245n4; and the creation of community, 25–26, 40; as a “creator of culture,” 40; cultural function of, 64; as the embodiment of pragmatism’s conception of truth, 24–25, 26; and the “joints” of the American social system, 40, 245n3; parallel between confidence men and the founding fathers, 26, 47–50, 243n87,

Baldwin, Joseph Glover, 39, 41, 47, 57, 64, 71, 72, 247n32; critics of his writing style, 58–59; and allusion in his work, 65–66 Beck, Warren, 256n9 belief, 41, 88, 92, 93; active role of in engendering its object, 82–83; “ethics of,” 81; relation of to community, 94–96 Bell, Michael, 29 Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 147 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 50, 222 Bergson, Henri, 9, 29; and the theory of time’s fluidity, 238–39n29 “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” (W. James), 196 Berkhofer, Robert F., 198–99 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 84 Bible, the, 226–27 Big Bear of Arkansas, The (Porter), 42 Blair, Walter, 59 Blood, B. P., 192 Bolus, Ovid, 57, 59–60, 64, 113, 266n61; disinterestedness of, 62; personality and style of, 61–62; and the reference to Ovid in his name, 60–61; selftranscendence of, 62–63 280

index

246n18; “power” of, 25; and pragmatism, 74; predatory nature of, 203; as the product of “frontier zones,” 42; and real estate swindles, 51; relation of to society, 23–24, 243n81; vagrant nature of, 93; vagueness in language of, 98– 99. See also Suggs, Simon; Suggs, Simon, Jr. Confidence Men and Painted Women (Halttunen), 249n60 Confidence-Man, The (Melville), 25, 59, 63–64, 148 Connor, Steven, 49 consciousness, 11, 181; historical, 160 contingency: aspects of, 195–96; of time, 230 conversion stories/narratives, 89–91 corporations, 129–30; and corporate organization, 132, 259n63 Cotkin, George, 252n40, 253n55 Cowley, Malcolm, 15–16, 31, 104–5 Critique Philosophique, 76

Earle, William James, 254n58 Eliot, T. S., 29, 102 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11–12, 24, 63, 64, 111, 139, 140, 153, 182, 183–84, 260–61n78 epistemology, 25; and the distortions of subjective desire, 160; “epistemological chasm,” 5; of historical knowledge, 174–76; of narrative, 159 Erskine, Alfred, 13–14 Erskine, John, 137 Essays in Philosophy (W. James), 238n23, 250n13 “Ethics of Belief, The” (Clifford), 79–80, 87, 251n27 Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (Jerison), 203 evolutionary theory, 192, 272n124; and the predator/prey relationship, 203 “Existence of Julius Caesar, The” (W. James), 151–52 Fables of Abundance (Lears), 29 facts, 145–46 Fadiman, Clifton, 12 faith, 90, 95; justification, 91 “faits objectifs” (“objective facts”), 79, 80 Falkner, William C., 274n31 “Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 240n48 fascism, 137 Father Abraham (Faulkner), 2, 36, 104, 127, 237n3 Faulkner, William, 1, 102; and the act of telling in his work, 18–19; agreement of with Bergson’s theory of time, 238–39n29; as an American with a sense of history, 103–4, 143–44; as the champion of a premodern world, 102–3; commitment of to “constant change,” 12–13; and his “craft of revision,” 13–14, 18; creative achievement of, 235; criticism of Hemingway, 239n39; disdain for the New South, 102; domestic arrangements of, 266–67n64; family

Darwin, Charles, 192; and the idea of the random, 272n123 Day, William Patrick, 171, 263–64n39 de Man, Paul, 181 “Death and the Compass” (Borges), 269n84 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 47–48; and “political ventriloquy,” 49; purpose of, 48 Deleuze, Gilles, 189–90 democracy, 137, 260n68 Derrida, Jacques, 48, 106; distinction of from William James, 106–7 Dewey, John, 4; on the corporate personality, 130; criticism of, 136; response of to critics, 136, 137 “Dialogue, A” (W. James), 152–53, 157 “Does Consciousness Exist?” (Dewey), 130–31 Donaldson, Susan V., 277n53 doubleness, 85 Du Bois, W. E. B., 38, 200 281

index

Faulkner, William (continued) history of, 27, 243n91; hatred of modernism, 255n2; interest of in the Southwestern Humorists, 26; on interest as the criterion of belief, 20; “mythology” of, 104–5; and the Nobel Prize for Literature, 28, 33; obsession of with history, 37; philosophical beliefs of, 9–10; and pragmatism, 27–29, 34–35, 235–36; as a proto-postmodernist, 16–17; and race, 37–38; sentence structure of his writing, 12–13. See also Faulkner criticism Faulkner and Modernism (Moreland), 18 Faulkner criticism, 15–19, 240–41n49, 241nn53–54; “buried truth” and the critical redefinition of Faulkner, 32; psychoanalytic readings of Faulkner, 15–16; success of the revaluation of Faulkner, 34–35 Ferguson, Robert A., 71, 128, 246n18 fiction, 145, 146 Fields, W. C., 206 Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, The (Baldwin), 57, 266n61; law as the dominant theme of, 71, 72; success of, 58 Flush Times of California, The (Baldwin), 58 “Fragment, A” (Baldwin), 66 fragmentation, 34 Frankenstein (Shelley), 155 Franklin, Benjamin, 49, 266n62; as a prototype for Clem Snopes, 127–28; self-effacement of, 128; silence as a key strategy of, 128–29 Frassen, Bas van, 87–88 free will, 79; and illusion, 78 Frye, Northrop, 6

Go Down Moses (Faulkner), 19, 37–38; “The Bear” story in, 219–29; as a book of lines (blood lines, color lines, ledger lines, plot lines, straight lines), 38, 200–201, 207, 214, 224, 227, 229–31, 234; Buck character in, 204, 205, 206, 207; Buddy as character in, 206–7; Butch Beauchamp’s death in, 232, 234; Cass as character in, 225; and the Civil War, 222, 225; comedy in the “Was” story, 204, 205; confrontation of Ike and Fonsiba in, 226; “Delta Autumn” story in, 229–34; Eunice as character in, 221; “The Fire and the Hearth” story in, 207–13, 227–28; gambling in the “Was” story, 205–6; Gavin Stevens as character in, 232–34; genealogical lineage in, 229–30; George Wilkins character in, 207, 208, 212, 213; hermeneutics of Ike in, 224–25; Hubert as character in, 206, 207; hunting and reading motif in “The Bear” story, 220; Ike McCaslin as character in, 211, 274n32, 275–76n42, 274n34; Ike’s connection to nature and pathfinding, 215–18; Ike’s imitation of Jesus, 225–26; Ike’s predisposition for hallucinatory re-creation, 276–77n44; Ike’s rejection of his ancestral plantation, 221, 224; Ike’s vision of the eternal hunt, 231; incest of Ike’s grandfather in, 220–21, 223, 276n43; inversion in, 205, 214; lack of temporality in the bear hunt, 218–19; Lucas Beauchamp as character in, 207–8, 227–28; and the McCaslin family tree, 201–2; metanarrative of the “Great Story” in, 221–22, 223, 225–27, 277n53; Molly character in, 210, 211, 213, 232, 234; narrative shift in “The Bear” story, 219–220; Nat as character in, 210, 212, 213; obsession of Lucas Beauchamp with the divining machine, 212–13; obsession of Lucas Beauchamp with the past, 209–10; Old Ben in, 218, 275n39, 275–76n42; Old Carothers as character in, 208–9, 227,

Gallery of Illustrious Americans, The (Brady), 69 Gavin, William Joseph, 254n58 Geertz, Clifford, 249n68 Genette, Gérard, 26 Glissant, Edouard, 235 282

index

228, 277n53; “The Old People” story in, 215–19; “Pantaloon in Black” story in, 228–29; racial issues in, 229–30, 232–33; recurring motifs of as introduced in the “Was” story, 202, 203–4; relationship of Lucas Beauchamp and Old Carothers, 208–9, 228; Rider as character in, 228–29, 277n55; role of chance in, 208, 214, 224; role of women in, 204–5; Roth Edmonds as character in, 209, 210, 213, 232, 233; Sophonsiba as character in, 204, 205, 232; structural (narrative) difficulty of, 201, 227, 234, 277n53; struggle between Lucas Beauchamp and Zack, 210–11; theme of southern history in, 221–25; themes of death (mortality) and divinity in, 213–15, 218, 223; themes of plotting and hunting (predation) in, 202, 203–4, 206, 207–8, 211–12, 232, 275n37; Tomey’s Turl in, 202, 204, 205, 206; and the urn as a symbol of timelessness, 275n39; wilderness trilogy of, 215–34 passim; Zack Edmonds as character in, 201, 210–11, 213 God, 95, 161, 200, 222, 224, 277n48 Godden, Richard, 276n43 gold standard, the, 133 Golden Day, The (Mumford), 136 gothic, 240n48; epistemology of, 171, 172, 175; gothic novels, 154–55, 172–73, 269n79; gothic novels, as precursors to detective novels, 171–72, 269nn83–84; “Gothic space,” 170, 268–69n78; and the psychology of the gothic protagonist, 263–64n39. See also Absalom, Absalom, importance of the gothic in; James, William, influence of the gothic on Gould, Stephen Jay, 192, 272n124 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 260–61n78 grace, 90 Guattari, Felix, 189–90 guilt, 87, 90, 91

Hamlet, The (Faulkner), 2, 36, 213; Ab Snopes as character in, 107, 108, 110, 123, 134; ambivalence of the characters in, 119–20; authority of Ratliff in, 122–23, 124–25; authority of Will Varner in, 118–19, 124–25; Bookwright as character in, 117, 128, 141; concentration and community in, 116–17; critical reaction to, 105–6, 256n9; “disinterested play” in, 106–7; Eck Snopes as character in, 2, 122, 132, 133, 258n41; equalization of the Snopes and antiSnopes forces in, 106; Eula Varner as the “centrice,” 113–14, 115, 257n36; Eula Varner and the formation of community, 113–16; “factual intricacies” of, 105; Flem Snopes as character in, 105, 106, 113, 116–18, 123, 124, 125–26, 131–32, 132–33, 135–36, 138, 256n13, 258n43; Flem’s inducement of Ratliff to purchase worthless property, 139–42; fraternal struggle in, 120–22; Frenchman’s Bend and community in, 111–13, 116, 117; Henry Armstid as character in, 117, 118, 141; historical function of the Snopeses in, 104–5; as an historical novel, 129; Ike Snopes as character in, 124; importance of the crossroads in, 117, 256–57n22; I. O. Snopes as character in, 132, 133, 258n45; Jody as character in, 120–22, 135, 257n36; Jody’s perception of Flem in, 125–26; Joseph Gold as character in, 120; Labove as character in, 257n37; Labove’s description of Eula Varner in, 113–14, 257n35; McCarron as character in, 114; Mink Snopes as character in, 120, 124; mobility of Flem in, 135; mobility of Ratliff in, 109–10, 140, 257n25; money/value and the concept of truth in, 140–41; myth and narrative in, 107–8; and opposing conceptions of money in, 134–35; Pat Stamper as character in, 123; and the principle of identification in, 126–27; pursuit of economic advantage by the

Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 245n4 Halttunen, Karen, 249n60 283

index

House of Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 69 How to Read a Book (Adler), 137–38, 139 “How to Tell a Story” (Twain), 26 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 59 human experience, 10–11 “Humanism and Truth” (W. James), 149–50 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 136, 137, 259–60n66 Huxley, T. H., 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 91, 251n26 Hyde, Lewis, 40, 93, 203, 245n3, 255n73 hypotext, 26

Hamlet, The (continued) Snopeses in, 105–6; Ratliff as character in, 19–20, 106, 107, 108–11, 113, 117, 119–20, 122, 127, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140–42, 212, 256n18; Ratliff’s elaborate plot in, 123–24; retailing activities of Ratliff in, 108–9; and the rise of corporations in America, 129–30, 133; similarity of Flem Snopes to Benjamin Franklin, 128–29; the Snopes clan as an anomalous entity, 132–33; spotted ponies episode in, 131–32; trading tale of Ratliff in, 123; “true community” as the subject of, 111; use of puns in, 108, 256–57n22; Will Varner character in, 105–6, 118–19, 122, 124–25, 126; Will Varner’s dilemma in, 131, 259n61; as a world of competing descriptions, 106–7 Harris, George Washington, 43 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 69 Hemingway, Ernest, 12–13, 239n39 Henry IV Part II (Shakespeare), 88 Higher Education in America, The (Hutchins), 136 historiography, as a masquerade, 182–83 history, 19, 103–4, 160; as fiction, 146; freedom of the individual’s use of, 146–47; historical accounts as subjective creations, 150–51, 160; knowledge of, 153–54; as a limitation on the individual, 144–45; location of in the present, 145; objective, 146; and the possibility of current action, 145; as a scientific discipline, 198–200 “History” (Emerson), 63, 144–48; and history as a gothic novel, 154; and the metaphor of the mask, 148–49 History of the United States of America (Bancroft), 50 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 70, 72 “Homer’s Contest” (Nietzsche), 261n80 homogeneity, 34 Hooper, Johnson Jones, 41, 43, 57 “Horse Swap, The” (Longstreet), 123

“ideal speech situation,” 245n4 “idiosyncratic fantasy,” 20 Iliad (Homer), 65 incest: Oedipal incest, 189–90; schizoincest, 189, 190 Indian Removal Act (1830), 51 individualism, 80 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 33–34, 269n83 Irony of American History, The (Niebuhr), 244n108 “Irony of Southern History, The” (Woodward), 32, 244n108 Irwin, John T., 158, 189, 270n104 Jackson, Andrew, 44, 56, 247n29 James, Alice, 154, 155, 262–63n34 James, Henry, Jr., 154–55, 174, 251n23 James, Henry, Sr., 78, 96, 154, 252n40, 263n35 James, William, 3, 24, 25, 36, 38, 72, 96, 102, 103, 139, 146, 160, 192, 223, 251n26, 252n37; as an anti-intellectual, 259–60n66; as a celebrator of all things modern, 103; challenge of to conceived ideas of truth, 4–5, 194; commitment of to active epistemology, 7–8; on community, 25–26; and the “copy-view,” 6, 133,

284

index

150, 160; critique of representational thought, 149; critique of traditional philosophy, 194, 196–97; and Darwinian evolution, 272n124; on the death of his father, 252n40; and the definition of pragmatism, 4; depression of, 76–77, 250n13; dissatisfaction of with traditional philosophy, 86; family dynamics of the James household, 78, 94, 154–55, 251n23, 252n40, 262n32; on the futility of theoretical speculation, 90; on history, 151–54; influence of the gothic on, 154–57, 172–73; on knowledge, 107; on the line, 197–98; and the metaphor of the book, 224; on metaphysics, 141; on the mind as a “teleological mechanism,” 106–7; moral paralysis of, 77; narrative in his work, 81; on novelty, 196; on otherness and historical knowledge, 198–99, 230; and the “panic fear” episode (1870), 77, 78, 104, 155–56; on the past and the present, 149–50; peculiar literary style of, 76, 97–98; on philosophy, 10, 89; physical ailments of, 155, 263n36; as a public philosopher, 92, 254n55; on the rationalist and pragmatic versions of the universe, 14, 108; on realities, 153; religious nature of his philosophy, 89–92, 254n58; and “signs of direction,” 98, 255n70; on stories/ narratives, 19; on the transcendental metaphor, 13; vagueness in his work, 97–99 Jameson, Fredric, 30 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 169 Jefferson, Thomas, 48, 246n15 Jehlen, Myra, 240–41n49, 241n54 Jesus Christ, 90, 200, 225–26 Johnson, Samuel, 66 “Jolly Corner, The” (H. James), 174 Julius Caesar, 150–51, 151–52

King, John Owen, 89 “Knowing of Things Together, The” (W. James), 243–44n92 knowledge, 6, 85, 107; correspondence theory of, 156–57; of fact, 83; hermeneutics of, 30; historical, 153–54, 175–76, 198; linguistic, 95; role of personal belief in, 76; stories as a form of, 5; subjective component of, 8 Kuklick, Bruce, 92, 254n55 language, 36, 255n73; and political change, 47; of predestination, 50 law, 71–72, 249n65, 249n68 Lectures on the Formation of Character, Temptations, and Mission of Young Men (Clarke), 25 Leja, Michael, 30 Lenz, William, 64 Levine, George, 80, 172, 251n30, 252n32, 272n123 Lewis, R. W. B., 215, 219–20, 275–76n42 “Liar, The” (Faulkner), 1–3, 104, 122 liberalism, 99 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (Stephen), 100–101 Lincoln, Abraham, 57, 247n32 Lindberg, Gary, 266n62 literalism, 99 literary experience, 57–58 Longstreet, A. B., 123 Lynn, Kenneth, 43, 59 Lyotard, Jean-François, 87 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 238–39n29 Malraux, André, 240n46 Mansion, The (Faulkner), 13–14 masks, 148–49; death masks, 149 materialism, 29 Mather, Cotton, 100, 277n48 Matthews, John T., 106, 178, 205, 214, 256n13 Mayhew, Jonathan, 47 McDermott, John J., 252n37

Kaufmann, Walter, 98, 254n66 Kendall, Amos, 56

285

index

Melville, Herman, 25, 34, 59, 63–64, 148, 248n49; on the “Problem of the Universe,” 235 Menand, Louis, 72 Meriwether, James B., 237n3 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 61 metaphysics, 4, 85, 136, 141 Miller, Dickinson, 73 Miller, Perry, 221, 222 Milton, John, 64–65 “Modern Man discourse,” 30–31, 33, 34, 244n108 modernism, 28–30, 37, 102, 105, 244n102, 255n2; and the “ideology of the modern,” 30; and the “modernist matrix,” 29, 243–44n92; and the pursuit of authenticity, 30, 244n98 modernity, 16, 30, 99; conservative critics of, 104 moral relativism, 28 morality, 83 Morgan, Edmund S., 90 mortality, 200; and sexuality, 204–5 Moses, 200 Mumford, Lewis, 103, 136 “My First Appearance at the Bar” (Baldwin), 248n55 Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d, The (Smith), 181–82

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 83–84, 252n33 North, the, 34 novels: detective, 171–72; gothic, 154–55, 172–73 Novels of William Faulkner, The (Vickery), 268n70 objectivism, 81, 83, 84 objectivity, 25, 84, 93, 172; critique of, 83 O’Connor, Flannery, 22, 100 O’Donnell, George Marion, 104 oedipal confrontations, 46–47 O’Gorman, Joseph, 41 “On the Notion of Reality as Changing” (W. James), 197–98 “On the Prejudices of Philosophers” (Nietzsche), 84 optimism, 12, 82–83, 103 Ovid, 60, 65 Paradise Lost (Milton), 64–65 Peirce, Charles Saunders, 4, 73, 97, 237–38n9, 238n21 Perry, Ralph Barton, 77, 78 pessimism, 82–83, 103 philosophers, 84, 85; as pathfinders, 193–95, 199; of science, 252n32 “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” (W. James), 193 philosophy, 4, 11, 87, 172, 237–38n9, 275n37; Continental, 35; critique of rationalism, 194, 196–97; of history, 153; idealist, 38; “popular,” 93–94; “radical reconstruction” of, 73; redemption of, 91; of science, 80; subjective consequences of, 84–85; success of, 86; “ultimate,” 89 photography, 69–71, 249n61; and the industrialization of the authentic (massproduced images), 70–71 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 89–90; Doubting Castle episode of, 90–91, 253n48 Plato, 74, 202 Pluralistic Universe, A (W. James), 197–98

Naive and Sentimental Poetry (Schiller), 178 narrative(s), 20, 81, 90; foundational, 61; conversion, 89–91; epistemology of, 159; hyponarrative, 17; metanarrative, 17; myth as, 107–8; narrative metaphor, 195; narrative persuasion and community, 21; struggle for narrative supremacy in Faulkner’s novels, 21 Nature (Emerson), 63 Nature and Destiny of Modern Man, The (Niebuhr), 244 New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1 New South, the, 102, 105 Newman, Barnett, 244n102 286

index

Poe, Edgar Allan, 15, 31, 62, 240n48, 248n42 “Poet, The” (Emerson), 111, 139 “Poetic Principle, The” (Poe), 62 poetry, 29, 248n42 poets, 193 Polk, Noel, 34, 187, 276n43, 277n55 Poor Richard’s Almanac (Franklin), 128 Portable Faulkner, The, 14, 15, 28, 31, 105 Porter, William T., 42 Pound, Ezra, 29 power, 11–12, 21; political, 49 pragmatism, 3, 19, 41, 72, 73, 103, 133, 149, 195, 237–38n9, 238n21; “anti-intellectualist tendencies” of, 10, 259–60n66, 197; as a characteristically American philosophy, 74; and the “conception of truth,” 4; contention of that belief gives rise to reality, 41; and the criterion of satisfaction, 7; critical assaults on, 28, 73–74, 136–38, 260n67; definition of, 3–4; and historical events, 36–37; distinction of from rational philosophy, 196; and historical events, 36–37; and moral relativism, 28; and narrative metaphor, 195; “nihilism” of, 137; and the pragmatic community, 8–9; and the radical contingency of any perspective, 195–96; and the reconstruction of the subject, 130–31; resurgence of, 35. See also Faulkner, William, and pragmatism Pragmatism (W. James), 3, 8, 9, 19, 151, 237n7 “Pragmatism and Humanism” (W. James), 151 “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” (W. James), 5, 150–51, 154 Praz, Maria, 154 predestination, 50 Principles of Psychology, The (James), 10–11, 97, 98, 243–44n92 “Professor Hébert on Pragmatism” (W. James), 153 Prometheus, 23 Protestant Reformation, 91

psychoanalysis, 15, 189 psychology, 11, 30 Puritans (American), 222, 223, 253n47 Quarter Race in Kentucky, The (Porter), 42 “Quelques Considérations sur la methode subjective” (W. James), 7, 8, 76, 78–79, 80–83; on power, 86–87; on the subjective will, 79; as a struggle over paternity, 88 Radin, Paul, 23 Railton, Stephen, 42 “Rationality, Activity, and Faith” (W. James), 84, 86, 89, 156, 252n34, 252n40, 253nn48–49 rationality, 85, 86, 89; attaining the freedom of through theological means, 90; “rational conception” of the world, 84; sentiment of, 84 Reader’s Handbook to Famous Names in Fiction, The (Brewer), 248n53 reality: resistance of to mental abstraction, 273n10; temporal character of, 196 reason, 21 “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (W. James), 80 Renouvier, Charles, 76, 77–78, 79 Republic, The (Plato), 202, 274n35 republicanism, 49 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 143 Rorty, Richard, 5, 20, 47, 73, 109, 167; on Charles Peirce and pragmatism, 237–38n9; on social consensus, 20–21, 119 Royce, Josiah, 254n55 salvation, 80 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 31, 240n46 Schiller, Friedrich, 178, 179 Schinz, Albert, 73–74 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 31, 245n110 Schwartz, Sanford, 29, 243–44n92 287

index

science, 29, 172; claims of to the truth, 87–88. See also history, as a scientific discipline “Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life” (1940 conference), 136–37 scientific method, 87 segregation, 33 self, the, 147–48; overcoming of in the interests of the truth, 173; self-realization, 22–23; and the value of self-suppression, 80 “Self-Reliance” (Emerson), 11–12 “Sentiment of Rationality, The” (W. James), 84–85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 156, 252n34, 253n47 sermons, function of, 99–100, 255n74 Shakespeare, William, 204, 205 “signs of direction,” 98, 255n70 “Simon Suggs, Jr., Esq.: A Legal Biography” (Baldwin), 47, 66–69 sin, 87, 90, 91 Singer, Marcus G., 254n58 Sloane, William M., 198 society, as social organism, 23, 95–96 Some Problems of Philosophy (W. James), 273n3, 273n10 soul, the, 12 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 14, 17, 165, 184, 241n57, 242n58 South, the, 32, 33–34, 244n108; the “Deep South,” 32 Southern Agrarians, 103 Southwest Humorist school, 22, 26, 41, 42–43, 58, 59 Spirit of the Times, The, 42 “Spotted Horses” (Faulkner), 2 Stearns, Harold, 103 Stein, Gertrude, 10 Steiner, George, 202 Stephen, Fitzjames, 94, 100–101 Stephen, Leslie, 94 stereoscope, 70 Stevens, Wallace, 275n39 Stewart, Susan, 248n53

stories/storytelling: structure of the Southwest tale, 43; tall tales, 26–27, 42; temporality of, 19–20; and the ways of telling a story, 28–29 subjectivity/subjectivism, 7, 25, 93, 94; critiques of, 87; place of in epistemology, 80; subjective ends, 85; subjective faith, 87; subjective method, 81, 83; subjective preferences, 83; suppression of, 172 Suggs, Simon, 42, 43–44, 74, 99, 101, 161; career of as parody of Andrew Jackson’s exploits, 56; and gambling, 44–47, 53–54; and land speculation, 53; and the metaphor of American sovereignty, 47; obscurity of his location, 50–51; and the plot of community creation, 55, 56–57; scale of his operations, 53 Suggs, Simon, Jr., 58, 70, 71, 247n29; compared to Simon Suggs Sr., 67; effect of his legal activities on the community and the state, 67–68; as an image, 67, 68–69 Sundquist, Eric, 17–18 temporality, 24, 38; and cognition, 6–7; and storytelling, 19–20; temporal character of reality, 196 “Tendency of History, The” (Adams), 199 Thompson, William, 39, 66 Thought and Character of William James, The (Perry), 252n40 time, 11 Town, The (Faulkner), 132 transcendence, 13, 239–40n40 Transcendentalism (American), 62–63 “Transcendentalist, The” (Emerson), 63 Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860, The (Horwitz), 71–72 trickster. See confidence man (trickster) Trickster Makes This World (Hyde), 40, 242n72, 255n73 Trilling, Lionel, 244n98 truth, 1, 11, 13, 32, 35, 41, 51, 80, 89, 93, 120, 200; as an active event (as some288

index

thing made) rather than a relation, 19, 75, 91, 156; association of with precious metal, 141, 260–61n78; and “copy-view,” 6, 133, 150, 160; defined in terms of correspondence, 74–75, 160, 173; and equilibrium, 139; “eternal laws” of, 47; historical, 151–54; “marking and fixing” of, 194; narratival conception of, 35–36; objective, 4, 237n7, 237–38n9; pragmatic conception of, 4, 8–9, 82; pursuit of as predatory, 202–3; representational, 86; and utility, 20; and the will to truth, 83, 156. See also confidence man (trickster), as the embodiment of pragmatism’s conception of truth “Turn of the Screw, The” (H. James), 174–75 Twain, Mark, 26, 59 “Twilight of the Idols” (Bourne), 136

Warren, Robert Penn, 31–32, 33, 36, 102–3, 105 Watson, James Gray, 256n9 “Way to Wealth, The” (Franklin), 127 Weinstein, Arnold, 182 Weinstein, Michael, 4, 237–38n9 Wernham, James, 92 West, Rebecca, 76 “What Pragmatism Means” (W. James), 98, 139, 141 “Where Was That Bird?” (Urgo), 278n4 Wilderness and the City, The (M. Weinstein), 237–38n9 “Will to Believe, The” (James), 8, 73, 75, 80, 91–92, 251n27, 252n34; lack of clarity in, 97, 254n66; as a narrative, 92–93; odd structure of, 92, 93; and the relation of belief and community, 94–96; on the “religious hypothesis,” 97–99; transition from stasis to mobility in, 94. See also Stephen, Fitzjames will to power, 83 will to truth, 83 Williamson, Joel, 243n91 Wilt, Judith, 268–69n78 Winesburg, Ohio (S. Anderson), 29 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 205 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 87 Woodward, C. Vann, 32, 33, 189, 244n108 world, the: conception of, 86; rational conception of, 84 Wylie, Philip, 30

vagueness, 51, 97–99, 247n26 Varieties of Religious Experience, The (James), 77, 79, 251n25 ventriloquism, 128; “political ventriloquy,” 49 verification, 82–83, 95; “face-to-face” 151; “veri-fication,” 3, 36, 75, 146, 153 Vickery, Olga, 256n9, 268n70 Vincent of Lerins, 252–53n41 Virgil, 61 Vital Center, The (Schlesinger), 31, 245n110 Wadlington, Warwick, 23 Ward, Thomas W., 77 Warner, Michael, 49

Yoknapatawpha County, 1, 13, 19, 105 “Young Intellectuals,” 103, 1

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William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (Southern Literary Studies)

William Faulkner and Southern History

William Faulkner

William Faulkner: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

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Wittgenstein and William James

Collected Stories of William Faulkner

Collected Stories of William Faulkner

Collected Stories of William Faulkner

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William James in Russian Culture

Rhizosphere: Gilles Deleuze and the 'Minor' American Writing of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (Southern Literary Studies)

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