B006JHRY9S EBOK

by Philip Weinstein

  Then one morning he turned from the crude blackboard and saw a face eight years old and a body of fourteen with the female shape of twenty, which on the instant of crossing the threshold brought into the bleak, ill-lighted, poorly heated room dedicated to the harsh functioning of Protestant primary education a moist blast of spring’s liquorish corruption. (HAM 835)

  He is instantly felled. Try as he might, he cannot expunge her erotic scent from his skin and glands. Soon he begins to hunger for the encounter—any encounter—that will end this sexual torture: “And he did not want her as a wife, he just wanted her one time as a man with a gangrened hand or foot thirsts after the axe-stroke which will leave him comparatively whole again” (839).

  As with Harry and Charlotte, there is neither intimacy here nor desire for it. Labove wants to penetrate Eula so powerfully—once will be enough—that he might manage to expel her from his bodily system. The passage glosses only his lust. It would be irresponsible to claim that Faulkner’s sexual feelings for Meta were the same, though the following letter to her vibrates with a kindred erotic force: “I weigh 129 pounds and I want to put it all on you and as much in you as I can can can can must must will will shall” (ALG 264). Both passages bespeak male sexual besottedness: he must have her. But where If I Forget Thee traveled uncertainly into the territory of erotic consummation, The Hamlet remains safely (in this instance) on the near side of coition. It thus finds its way into the comic dimensions of Labove’s frustration.

  As luck would have it—but there is no luck in Faulkner’s novels, only fate—she re-enters the schoolroom just as he has his nose buried in the seat those Olympian buttocks have recently vacated. Seeing him there, she says (sublimely), “What are you doing down there?” (HAM 841). This launches him. As during the football games he had earlier played with sufficient brutality to garner a college scholarship, he now closes in on his prey: “He caught her, hard, the two bodies hurling together violently because she had not even moved to avoid him, let alone to begin resisting yet” (842). Slowly she gathers herself together, then they wrestle: “‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Fight it. Fight it. That’s what it is: a man and a woman fighting each other. The hating. To kill, only to do it in such a way that the other will have to know forever afterward he or she is dead’” (842). How much biographical conviction speaks in this quietly terrifying passage? How much male puritanical disgust caused by eruption of carnal desire—desire that it is the everlasting fault of the female to have awakened? An entire culture’s unthinking misogyny can here be glimpsed: the abiding anger men feel toward women for arousing them, stripping them of their self-control and undermining their idealized image of themselves.

  Labove is ecstatic in this career-destroying moment of encounter: “He held her loosely, still smiling, whispering his jumble of fragmentary Greek and Latin verse and American-Mississippi obscenity” (HAM 842). She manages to free an arm, elbows him under the chin, strikes him hard in the face. Stunned, he goes down. Standing over him, neither panting nor disheveled, she speaks the novel’s most hilarious line: “Stop pawing me, you old headless horseman Ichabod Crane” (842–3). With those words—the epitaph awaiting every aging male teacher of English who has dreamed of bedding one of his nubile female students—Labove sinks into defeat and oblivion. Material that—thanks to its erotic unmanageability—had no choice in If I Forgot Thee but to head toward disaster and the abortion knife here ends in comic resolution.

  Jack Houston—like Labove, memorable for his private anguish—serves to focus the next narrative of fatal passion. Biographical echoes abound. Like Faulkner and Estelle, Houston and his wife Lucy Pate “had known one another all of their lives” (HAM 922), and like Faulkner, Houston had tried to flee “the immemorial trap” (922). Suggestively recalling his creator, Houston realizes he must escape this woman. “He was … possessed of that strong lust, not for life … but for that fetterless immobility called freedom” (922). He first sought to escape her by failing his grade, then (though the brightest student in the class) she did likewise. At this sign of her determination, he panics: “It was a feud, a gage, wordless, uncapitulating, between that unflagging will [hers] … for the married state, and that furious and as unbending one [his] for solitariness and freedom” (924).

  He flees, “not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them” (HAM 927). He lives for a time in El Paso, hundreds of miles away, bedding down for ten years with another woman, but cannot escape Lucy’s long-range spell. Finally, putting his head in the noose, he returns home, self-compelled. They marry. (She has been waiting the entire time.) However—in an untypically overt piece of symbolism—he buys her a stallion as wedding present, as if “that blood and bone and muscles represented that … bitless masculinity which he had relinquished” (931). The stallion soon kicks her to death—an event whose reverberation forever after stalks Houston. Dead, she remains—like Man-nie for Rider—inejectably inside him. He lies at nights on his narrow cot, “rigid, indomitable, and panting. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he thinks to himself. ‘I dont know why. I wont ever know why. But You cant beat me. I am strong as You are. You cant beat me’” (933).

  At this precise moment in the text—when the biographical echoes seem strongest—Houston meets his death: “He was still alive when he left the saddle” (HAM 933). In a magnificent further paragraph, Faulkner writes Houston’s last moments of consciousness. It is Mink Snopes who has shot him, and Houston silently struggles to handle the unbearable pain:

  It [the pain] roared down and raised him, tossed and spun. But it would not wait for him. It would not wait to hurl him into the void, so he cried, “Quick! Hurry!” looking up out of the red roar, into the face which with his own was wedded and twinned forever now by the explosion of that ten-gauge shell—the dead who would carry the living into the ground with him; the living who must bear about the repudiating earth with him forever, the deathless slain—then, as the slanted barrels did not move: “God damn it, couldn’t you even borrow two shells, you fumbling ragged—” and put the world away. His eyes, still open to the lost sun, glazed over with a sudden well and run of moisture which flowed down the alien and unremembering cheeks too, already drying, with a newness as of actual tears. (HAM 934)

  A minor figure in The Hamlet, Houston takes on depth and pathos through his haunting memories and mesmerizing death. It is in more ways than one a posthumous portrait. Faulkner enters Houston by having him retrospectively grasp the compulsions that have dominated his life—looking back and seeing how he could live neither with nor without Lucy Pate. Because Houston’s death occurs at just this moment, it resonates as a dying man’s recognitions. It is as though Faulkner could narrate the ordeal of an indestructible and all-destroying sexual bond only through the lens of a double murder: first the wife’s, then the husband’s. Next to the cadaver of Charlotte and the incarcerated Harry who “accidentally” killed her, we might place the murdered Houstons. There are no accidents in Faulkner. What happens is what must, according to the logic of his characters’ being. Labove played out in a comic mode what unfolds here as disaster: men and women obsessed with each other are doomed to suffer for it, to die for it. The relationships are unforgivable. Or, looking back at his own fatal marriage—or at his doomed affair with Meta?—Faulkner seems unable to narrate such obsessions in a forgiving mood. It is as though he can enter them narratively only by way of envisaging both partners’ punishment and extinction. Finally, the relationship that follows the suffocating heterosexual one is strangely homosocial. Mink and Houston have become forever bonded by their violent embrace. Without skipping a beat—these are the most compelling sequences in The Hamlet—Faulkner moves to the ordeal of Mink Snopes.

  Mink’s marital experience darkly intersects with Faulkner’s. “Almost a half a head shorter” (HAM 937) and meaner than his wife (both of these details arguably biographical), Mink often threatens her, even hits her full in the face. He believes
he has his reasons, inasmuch as he had first met her—been taken by her—at a timber camp deep in the woods, where she was the experienced one and he the virgin: “He had been bred by generations to believe invincibly that to every man, whatever his past actions, whatever depths he might have reached, there was reserved one virgin, at least for him to marry; one maidenhead, if only for him to deflower and destroy” (953). It was not to happen. Imperious—she has her take of all the men in the camp—she summons him: “He entered not the hot and quenchless bed of a barren and lecherous woman, but the fierce simple cave of a lioness—a tumescence which surrendered nothing and asked no quarter, and which made a monogamist of him forever, as opium and homicide do of those they once accept” (954).

  Sexual congress figures here as a madness, like opium or homicide. Like Eula’s penetration of Labove’s being with the scent of her sexuality, this woman has gotten inside Mink: a “tumescence” has arisen between them that he can despise but cannot escape. Despise it he does: raised (like all Southern males of his time, including Faulkner perhaps) to believe that a virgin has been reserved even for him, he daily experiences humiliation. He cannot approach her without being “surrounded by the loud soundless invisible shades of the nameless and numberless men” there before him—“the cuckolding shades which had become a part of his past too” (HAM 938). Quentin Compson in Absalom has long moved readers by his awareness of himself as no longer an individual but a crystallization of his region, “a barracks, a commonwealth.” Mink’s plight is oddly similar. The body of his woman is multiply occupied. In every act of intercourse, her previous men—still in her—mock him for his belated “scratching” of what they had earlier “scratched” to their hearts’ content.

  It is not so much that Faulkner constantly replays the sordid dimensions of his marriage to a divorced woman, but rather that its sordidness does not go down, go away. Faulkner gets done with nothing. Time—in the sense of gradual, healthy oblivion—seems not to exist for him. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (RN 535) he has Gavin Stevens magisterially declare in Requiem for a Nun. This conviction about time is easier to pronounce than to live with. “Hemophilic”: Faulkner remained unprepared throughout his life—suffering rather than mastering what happened to him—because his resources for quarantining experience were inadequate. It was as though, figuratively, his inner “passages” were subject to leakages—leakages that would produce inner hemorrhaging. Is it any wonder that in his fiction the range of intricately channeled, bodily engagements with the world—drinking, eating, smelling, touching, fornicating, vomiting—emerges as though too hot, electrically charged, headed for trouble? It is in this sense—rather than through any retrospective grasp that might come later—that Faulkner is a diagnostic writer. Like the canary taken down deep into the mine, he possessed senses keen enough to scent the coming disaster just before it struck. To scent it, not to ward it off or escape.

  Powerful as Mink’s troubled relation with his wife is, the scenes subsequent to the murder of Houston are even stronger. Mink kills Houston because he feels insulted by Houston going to court to make him pay for damage done by his bull on Houston’s land. The reasoning is dubious, and Faulkner spends no time bolstering or undermining it. He focuses on the murder’s aftermath. During forty pages as stark as Macbeth’s experience after murdering Duncan, Mink finds that—like his creator more generally—he cannot get done with his deed. “I thought that when you killed a man, that finished it, he told himself. But it dont. It just starts then” (HAM 958). One remembers Macbeth staring at the ghost of Banquo and muttering: “the time has been / That when the brains were out, the man would die.”

  Faulkner begins by juxtaposing Mink’s ominous silence against an unwanted Snopes cousin’s ceaseless chatter (he wants to exploit the murder by finding and rifling the dead man’s wallet). Mink has no interest in profit; his concerns are more fundamental, beginning with disposing of the body. Then, thanks to the “pitch blackness” in which his attempt to do so occurs, as well as to Houston’s wounded dog that—in inconsolable grief—stays near the body and attacks Mink whenever he approaches it, Mink begins to lose all forward motion. A number of daytime activities in The Hamlet reference the full moon of fertility—a folkloric belief buttressing communal continuity over time—but no moon shines during these death-haunted pages. No time seems to pass either. Here is Mink awaiting the dog’s attack:

  Then the dog’s voice stopped, again in mid-howl; again for an instant he saw the two yellow points of eyes before the gun-muzzle blotted them. In the glare of the explosion he saw the whole animal sharp in relief, leaping. He saw the charge strike and hurl it backward into the loud welter of following darkness … with the gun still at his shoulder he crouched, holding his breath and glaring into the sightless dark while the tremendous silence which had been broken three nights ago when the first cry of the hound reached him and which had never once been restored, annealed, even while he slept, roared down about him and, still roaring, began to stiffen and set like cement, not only in his hearing but in his lungs, his breathing, inside and without him too, solidifying from tree-trunk to tree-trunk, among which the shattered echoes of the shot died away in strangling murmurs. (HAM 946)

  Time and space have congealed, become arrested: he is over and over repeating the unfinished murder. Nightmarishly, he cannot relocate the dead body in the “pitch blackness.” When he finds it, he cannot dislodge it from the hollow tree trunk into which he earlier hurled it. In trying to do so, he nearly falls in himself, too deep to climb out. Meanwhile—Poe-like—the dog, though wounded repeatedly, will not die. The stuck corpse Mink is struggling to retrieve suddenly comes free, and as he carries it (half again his size) into the coming dawn, he discovers that one of its limbs is missing. He rushes back in a panic to the tree stump to find the telltale limb, tries to ward off again the still ferocious dog, and is at last arrested. Mink’s final attempt at freedom involves leaping from the surrey that is carting him off to jail, hoping to brake it somehow with his foot, but instead catching his neck in the surrey’s stanchion. As the surrey continues to move, “something struck him a terrific blow at the base of his neck and…became … a pressure, rational furious with deadly intent” (HAM 972). He briefly passes out. Once in jail, surrounded by black prisoners and barely able to make his damaged throat utter words, he croaks: “‘I was all right … until it [Houston’s body] started coming to pieces. I could have handled that dog.’” “‘Hush, white man,’ the Negro said. ‘Hush. Dont be telling us no truck like that.’” As the jail food gets passed around, Mink reflects (these are his last thoughts): “Are they going to feed them niggers before they do a white man?” (973–4).

  The sequence captures hypnotically the experience of man alone and stumbling, caught beyond control in the mire of his own doings. Mink is perpetually unprepared, yet determined to persevere. Faulkner seems to have known since the early 1930s that Mink would make a final appearance. His obsessive journey—after thirty-seven years in Parchman prison—to find and kill his cousin Flem would provide The Mansion’s most compelling vignette. Unrepentant, incorrigible, going down, Mink—like Labove and Houston—gives us a measure of The Hamlet’s obsessive concerns. Ratliff’s shrewd imperturbability makes him uniquely appealing among Faulkner’s cast of characters. But if we want to take the temperature of Faulkner’s imagination, we turn to the outraged, unvanquished Mink Snopes.

  The Hamlet most echoes If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by way of its investment in the madness of human bondage. We might conclude by considering the vignette in the novel that literalizes such madness: the idiot Ike Snopes’s infatuation with a cow. Told in a pastoral and overheated Latinate vocabulary, this love affair reconnects with Faulkner’s earlier, supremely moving Benjy Compson. But The Hamlet’s idiot hardly resembles the earlier novel’s idiot. Benjy served largely as a lens on the stumblings of the Compson family (he had little “plot” himself). By contrast, Faulkner grants Ike his own project, allows h
im to celebrate an ecstatic union with his beloved: “So he leaves the crib … breathing in the reek, the odor of cows and mares as the successful lover does that of a room full of women, his the victor’s drowsing rapport with all anonymous faceless female flesh capable of love walking the female earth” (HAM 898).

  Sanctuary: a stay against confusion, a sheltered space permitting self-fulfillment. Is idiocy the requisite mental stance for any male lover who might actually manage to enjoy his woman’s “anonymous faceless” fertile body? Labove, Houston, and Mink—each afflicted with normal consciousness—come to grief on entering this identity-shattering arena of erotic encounter with the beloved. But idiot Ike is freed from normal thought and social custom, unaware of his beloved’s difference, unashamed of his body’s animal propensities: “They eat from the basket together. He has eaten feed before—hulls and meal, and oats and raw corn and silage and pig-swill … things which the weary long record of shibboleth and superstition had taught his upright kind to call filth” (HAM 899–900). Filth: the uncleanness connected with on-the-ground animal ingestion and love-making, as well as with menstruation. “Periodic filth between two moons balanced,” so the horrified Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury imagined female sexuality. “Woman-filth,” so the enraged Doc Hines in Light in August screamed. The reality of sexual congress and the liquid-filled foulness of the female womb within which it must occur: apart from idiot Ike, Faulkner’s dreamy males tend to encounter this bodily realm as dizzying, scandalous, ungraced by spirit.

  One remembers a related passage from “Wild Palms”: “how the four-legged animal gains all its information through smelling and seeing and hearing and distrusts all else while the two-legged one believes only what it reads” (HAM 566–7). The animal, lodged in its body and trusting its senses, is at ease—as the human never can be—with the orientation the senses provide. Aiming higher, “upright” humans repudiate sensory orientation, yet they lack instinctual resources that might guide a trajectory more worthy of the spirit. Thus humans depend—grievously—for orientation and procedure on the faulty reading matter (the defective maps) provided by culture. Is this one of the reasons Faulkner so immerses his reader in the sense-directed movement of his culturally deprived, spatially disoriented characters—Benjy, Joe Christmas, the overwhelmed convict, Mink in the dark, Ike on the move? Unconcerned with disembodied realms like truth or goodness, the body stays on the ground; it neither lies nor errs. For his part, Ike experiences his mental blankness as bacchanalian plenitude: nothing in the career of his body can make him vomit. Even being showered by his beloved cow’s copious defecation fails to disturb his epithalamion. For him, the unbridgeable difference between human and animal does not exist.