Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain’s memoir of his experience as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, is lively, humorous and anecdotal, and hardly qualifies as a misanthropic text. Yet it contains portents of things to come. Twain sardonically juxtaposes historian Francis Parkman’s great romance of ‘the mystery of [the] vast new world’ with a tight-lipped acknowledgement of Indian dispossession as approved by the king and ‘piously consecrated’ by the priest.49 He is withering about an authentically Southern boosterism, the grandiose hyperbole, appallingly bad taste and absurd pretentiousness to which he thought Southern romance led, particularly the sentimental Southern devotion to Sir Walter Scott, which he demolishes partly by means of a vast footnote stuffed with unsentimental Southern facts: feuds, vendettas, gunfights, public killings, often publicly approved (LM, pp. 236–8).
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) grew out of The Prince and the Pauper and Life on the Mississippi together. Its greatness lies in its obstinate and rigorous exclusion of all grandiosity, but the sheer clarity and resolute unpretentiousness of Huck’s demotic idiom also turns the novel into an incipiently misanthropic book that can only rescue itself through child’s play. Huck and the runaway slave Jim escape the unflagging violence of Huck’s father and Miss Watson’s unappealing blend of Christianity, respectability and racism, and embark on their journey downriver. Like Redburn’s, however, the journey downstream is less into the untrammelled freedom of the wilds than into sick knowledge. ‘Sick’ is a word to which Huck returns. There is a lot in his world to make him sick. The banks of the river are populated by ‘quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean folks’.50 Huck watches on helplessly, for example, as, with striking equanimity, two long-feuding aristocratic families wallow in yet another bloodbath, which for them is quite reconcilable with their puritanical Christianity and a belief in ‘brotherly love’ (HF, pp. 293, 297). He sees the novel’s eminence grise, Sherburn, coldly gun down the reckless but harmless old Boggs. With a touch of misanthropic genius, Twain both grants Sherburn an eloquent indictment of the average human being – critics have repeatedly taken it to be Twain’s own – and leaves Huck so nauseated by Sherburn that he has to sneak off to the circus to recover.
This is a world that will accept the trade in others (blacks) with, at best, two-faced furtiveness, at worst, unscrupulous zeal, but in either case without compunction. Its people speedily resort to enthusiastic lynching, yet are ‘greenhorns’ and ‘flatheads’ who easily fall victim to arrant con men (HF, p. 329). Here the worst can fleece the best, and one must flatter ‘low-down humbugs and frauds’ in order to survive (HF, pp. 305–6). Twain tries finally to lighten the gathering murk by bringing Tom Sawyer into the novel and having him draw Huck into an elaborate, Scott-influenced rigmarole whereby they ‘free’ Jim from slavery when he has in fact already been freed. But Tom is just playing games: this is Twain the novelist’s equivalent of Huck and the circus. It is a charming but patently inadequate response to the issues that his novel has broached. For the Huck who has started to feel ‘ashamed of the human race’, the necessary conclusion must be different: ‘I guess I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest’ (HF, pp. 338, 447, my italics). He ends by articulating the classic misanthropic dream of desert solitude, its bleakness mitigated only by its being cast in the captivating (and revocable) terms of a child.
As Twain grew older, his misanthropy threatened to become all-embracing. He founded the Damned Human Race Club. In ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’ (1899), he let loose a vindictive character with a grudge upon a supposedly incorruptible American township that has long boasted of its honesty and integrity, and gleefully watched it go rotten in his character’s hands. ‘Why, you simple creatures’, gloats the nemesis of Hadleyburg, ‘the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire’ (pp. 46–7).51 Hadleyburg is, in a sense, unworldly, but chiefly about itself, with disastrous consequences. Significantly, the final humiliation of the town takes place in front of a crowd including reporters, who will expose the unreality of Hadleyburg’s boosterism and its language to the American public at large.
In ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ (1916), like Melville, Twain finally turned to the Devil incarnate, surrendering the world to a beautiful if rather idiosyncratic Satan who runs the show with total indifference, recognizing that humans are altogether dispensable and replaceable, their sufferings both necessary and arbitrary, inconsequential. Satan never has ‘a kind word’ for the ‘paltry race’, and bridles at any attempt to confuse it with animals.52 Animals do not pretend to virtues they do not possess. This is ‘the monopoly of those [creatures] with the Moral Sense’ (MS, p. 78). The Moral Sense flatters human beings with a belief in their own superiority, because it allows them to choose, but in fact they almost always choose wrong: think for example of the average businessman or factory-owner, says Satan, who knows very well he should not exploit others, yet persists in doing so. Thus where animals sin innocently, man continually turns out badly, the failure of the Moral Sense degrading him ‘to the bottom layer of animated beings’ (ibid.). Satan bears this out by showing the narrator a pageant of human history from Cain and Abel through numberless wars, murders and massacres to an endless future steadily making progress in ‘the deadly effectiveness of … weapons of slaughter’ (MS, p. 106). No interruption of this history is possible, because the race is ‘made up of sheep … and follows the handful that makes the most noise’ (MS, p. 110). None of these truths will it face, because it dupes itself ‘from cradle to grave with shams and delusions’ (MS, p. 116).
But the work that is surely key to understanding Twain’s misanthropy and his later development is the earlier A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889). The younger Twain had sometimes waxed enthusiastic over American ideas of advancement, and this had helped keep his misanthropic inclinations in check. His Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, is a Northern progressive and a booster, a republican committed to democratic process, a capitalist, entrepreneur, meritocrat, believer in industrialism, consumerism, free trade, a free press, freedom of religious worship and the self-made man. All of this he readily talks up. By contrast, Arthur’s kingdom is clearly a composite of Twain’s favourite targets, a romantic but morally and materially backward South, a benighted old Europe, and a modern Europe still bedevilled by class distinctions, restrictive codes and obscurantism. It is a world of cruelty, gross inequality, slavery and superstition. When Hank finds himself in Camelot, he decides to give it a good, ‘uplifting’ blast of American modernity.53 Since he is shrewd, practical and scientifically and technologically adept, though he encounters resistance, he also makes headway.
However, at a crucial turning point, in order to ‘scour the country and familiarise [themselves] with the humbler life of the people’, he and Arthur disguise themselves as freemen (CY, p. 241). Alas, the experience of common humanity threatens to turn into one of universal braggadocio and pretension. The people keep on taking the wrong side, and can quickly turn into a vengeful mob. Worse still, in spite of all Hank’s efforts, ‘the magic of fol-de-rol’, superstition and mediocre forms of belief survive in them (CY, p. 363). Hank eventually arrives at a point at which he not only can declare a republic in Camelot but also backs the republic up with Gatling guns, mines and electrocution. Increasingly, the tables turn: he puts his own nobles in elite positions and consolidates his system through violence, even having his knights ‘remove’ (i.e. kill) those who won’t buy his products (CY, p. 365). He is not above suppressing the very freedom of speech he formerly claimed to value. Beneath Hank’s boosterism, a bit of him has always feared that ‘human muck’ is not transformable at all, and been half-inclined ‘to hang the whole human race and finish the farce’ (CY, p. 283). When the flower of Arthur’s knighthood rebels – supported, significantly, by the people – he and his henchmen massacre them. Ultimately, however, the victors also destroy themselves. Hank dies.
By this point, boosterism, humanity and
the American way have fallen through a hole in the middle of the novel. The prison-house of the past yields to a progressive historical logic, but that logic turns out to be implicitly catastrophic, in a manner quite beyond the understanding or control of the most dynamic historical agents. In this respect, it is hard not to think of A Connecticut Yankee as an extraordinary product of a gift too little appreciated at the current time, prophetic intuition. Once again, boosterism does not survive the test. ‘He is useless on top of the ground’, writes the whimsical eponymous hero of another of Twain’s late, dark novels, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), of man, ‘he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages’.54 The cynicism is rooted in revulsion from boosterism. Hence another of Wilson’s maxims parodically and pointedly declares that while ‘it was wonderful to discover America … it would have been more wonderful to miss it’ (PW, p. 147). Native Americans would doubtless have agreed with him.
Faulkner saw himself as writing in Twain’s wake: Twain was ‘the father of American literature’.55 Faulkner himself is often celebrated as in the first instance a modernist genius. In fact, he is a great dark saga-maker, a historian-poet of the deep South, chiefly the Mississippi he knew so intimately, above all, in its post-bellum decline. The South after the Civil War was a defeated, shell-shocked and profoundly demoralized culture. The war had been fought almost entirely on Southern soil; the fatality rate among Southern soldiers had been extremely high. The North had smashed the Southern economy – then the Northern project of ‘reconstruction’ failed. In any case, Southerners harboured a deep resentment of Northern intruders like the carpetbaggers intent, at least officially, on importing Northern ideas of modernity and progress. As for the freed slaves, the Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, segregation, continuing disenfranchisement and ‘white terror’ came close to making a mockery of the very ends for which the war had ostensibly been fought. The issue of race did not for a moment disappear. The South became a benighted, poverty-stricken backwater.
Faulkner’s world is haunted by a conviction that his South labours under a ‘fatality and curse’.56 It is chiefly composed of a degenerate elite that frequently pretends to an ‘odorous and omnipotent sanctity’,57 but is actually growing steadily weaker, more brittle and febrile with succeeding generations, and even, like the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, more abandoned and insane; recidivist, often whisky-sodden and casually violent white sharecroppers; and ignorant small townspeople infected with a peculiarly virulent, hypocritical and brutal strain of the puritan virus, given to ‘meddling’ (a favourite Faulknerian word) and, as their preposterous certainty of their own civic virtue boils over, banding together and taking the law into their own hands, as in Light in August. There are plenty of blacks in Faulkner’s fiction, too, but they seldom occupy the foreground, this mirroring the founding evil of the South, which, politically and culturally, reduced them to spectral presences in a cruelly damaged land.
Given such a configuration, that critics have repeatedly accused Faulkner of ‘misanthropy and despair’58 seems understandable enough. One of his most searing insights into social evil is the element of complicity it involves. Social evil drags everyone in; no one remains immune, not even those who would protest. ‘Dammit, say what you want to’, as Horace Benbow declares, not without self-awareness, in Sanctuary, ‘but there’s a corruption about even looking on evil, even by accident; you cannot haggle, traffic, with putrefaction’ (S, p. 103). This means that the holdout positions are always already emptied from within, that the good people clutch only empty husks. As Benbow himself recognizes when Lee Goodwin, the man he defends from a charge of murder, is not only unjustly found guilty but also subsequently lynched, his objection to Goodwin’s pessimism – ‘You’ve got the law, justice, civilization’ (S, p. 105) – is not worth beans. All one can hope for is a bitter peace: ‘Night is hard on old people’, [Benbow] said quietly, holding the receiver. ‘Summer nights are hard on them. Something should be done about it. A law’ (S, p. 239).
Thus boosterist Northern ideals get short shrift at Faulkner’s hands. Absalom, Absalom!, for instance, is a savage satire on the American Dream, the fantasy of the land of opportunity and the type of the self-made man transplanted to the South. Born into a poor white family in West Virginia, Thomas Sutpen thrusts, hacks and hews his way to affluence, ownership of a plantation and a mansion and the rank of colonel in the Confederate army. In his wake, he leaves a trail of devastation and abuse of anyone who is touched by his demented personal project, notably women and blacks. ‘Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything’ (AA, p. 38): the history of the Sutpen principle is one of ‘outrage’ (another favourite Faulknerian word). But Faulkner’s most astringent critique of the impact of Northern values on the South comes in the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion). The Snopes family crawls into the light of Yoknapatawpha County as an unprepossessing gang of sharecroppers, barn-burners and casual vandals. The clan grows steadily, revealing itself to be by turns malevolent, predatory, treacherous, intimidatory and lacking in scruple and sensibility. The dogged persistence and low cunning of the Snopeses have made for a ‘long tradition of slow and invincible rapacity’.59 This is above all the case with Flem Snopes, whose implacable rise is at the centre of the trilogy.
The Snopeses are, in a way, beyond good and evil. They spread and multiply like a cancerous growth, behaving ‘like colonies of rats and termites’, yet also forming a single organism, moving by ‘osmosis’ (T, pp. 37, 352). They invade Jefferson ‘like an influx of snakes or varmints from the woods’ (T, p. 440). But if they are a serious menace, it is because the opposition is so largely comprised ‘of little weak puny frightened men’ (T, p. 407). The South in its decadence can offer no significant weapons with which to resist them. They get what they want because the local people are passive, inert, stupid and manipulable. But they also ‘besmirch’ and ‘contaminate’ those with whom they come into contact (T, p. 380), undermining the gratifying certainty of moral superiority that their fellow townspeople might otherwise be inclined to feel. This process culminates in The Mansion, when Gavin Stevens, one of the few resisters, finally declares that ‘there aren’t any morals’ (M, p. 1044) and helps thug, murderer and long-term jailbird Mink Snopes to kill Flem.
As Faulkner presents matters, however, the parasitic growth that is Snopesism is inseparable from the slow but relentless incursion of Northern culture. The Snopeses, chiefly Flem, understand the moribundity of rural Southern culture and see that it is all too openly exposed to a bracing injection of Northern economics. They are obsessed with profit and consumption, consumers themselves who encourage the consumerism nascent in others. So contemptuous is Faulkner of this development that the Snopes family takes on a double function. When Faulkner describes the first car in Jefferson, Mr Buffaloe’s ‘stinking noisy little home-made self-propelled buggy’, as being for Jefferson’s youth ‘an augury, a promise of the destiny that would belong to the United States’ (T, p. 354), he is both having a joke at their expense and lampooning the grandiose Northern myths to which they are becoming subservient. The Snopeses are at once a loathsome nec plus ultra of Southern decay and a burlesque reductio ad absurdum of the Northern mentality. The names of some of the Snopes children – Wallstreet Panic Snopes, Montgomery Ward Snopes, Watkins Products Snopes – tell the tale. So, too, it is the hapless and incoherent I.O. Snopes who most explicitly parrots the boosterist gospel, squawking phrases like ‘Competition is the life of trade’ (H, p. 64).
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner presented himself as the champion of the ‘inexhaustible voice’ of a humanity capable of ‘compassion and sacrifice and endurance’, of ‘courage and honour and hope and pride’.60 But he was briefly surrendering to a particular form of moral boosterism, posing ‘as a humanist’ while actually having written ‘as a misanthrope’.61 In Faulkner’s imaginative world, the ‘inexhaustible’ virtues seem very largely the preserve of a vanished antebellum and wartime pa
st but, since he rarely writes about the past in itself, the virtues remain mythical, the stuff of legend, unreal. In any case, if they manifested themselves at all, it was in a generation Faulkner repeatedly refers to as doomed. Those characters in whom a fainter version of them survives are a flawed if well-intentioned few whose struggles to stave off disaster are all too likely to prove vain. As she contemplates Ruby Lamarr’s baby in Sanctuary, a Schopenhauerian-sounding Miss Reba gets closer to the mark than the Nobel Prize winner: ‘It better not been born at all … None of them had’ (S, p. 168). There is ‘a sickness somewhere at the prime foundation’ that no intervention can cure (AA, p. 137). The one virtue that Faulkner stressed in his speech that is also conspicuous in his writings is endurance: ‘Endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward – and then endure’ (AA, p. 119). He associates it chiefly with women and blacks.
If there is a major contemporary heir to Twain and Faulkner, it is Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is conceivably a version of ‘the true and living prophet of destruction’ Sheriff Bell refers to in No Country For Old Men.62 What Faulkner does for Mississippi, McCarthy has long been doing for the borderlands of Texas, Mexico and New Mexico. From Blood Meridian, which addresses the Wild West of the 1840s, to the Border Trilogy, which is concerned with an increasingly modern and democratic post-war West, to No Country for Old Men, which focuses on an almost contemporary West, to The Road, a phantasmagoric, post-Apocalyptic revision of Huckleberry Finn set in an America of the future, McCarthy mounts a ferocious assault on a range of America’s Enlightenment-rooted, positive understandings of itself, from its founding experiences and principles to its progressive modernity to its Manifest Destiny to its boundless future. What he everywhere reveals in doing so is an underside of immense stupidity, barbarity and desolation.
Misanthropy Page 26