BOOKS
53
Insofar as the critic makes significant statements about the technique
and medium of literature and about matters in fields plausibly related
to the production and appreciation of literature, we may view such state–
ments impersonally, finding them proved true or false by the evidence
at hand as in the case of empirical statements in any other realm. To
the extent that the critic's essay is the vehicle for the expression of atti–
tudes, values, interests which are never merely literary but consciously or
unconsciously part of a moral and political program, he can be granted
no exemption from the buffetings of that arena where moral and political
programs clash. And if the essays in this collection are indeed represen–
tative, some vigorous buffeting is in order.
JAMES BURNHAM
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
THE UNVANQUISHED.
By William Faulkner. Random House. $2.50.
It is a curious fact about William Faulkner that with every novel
he produces, his position in American letters becomes less easy to define.
In his early and most impressive novels he seemed to be performing a
service for our literature of which, ever since the time of Hawthorne,
it had stood greatly in need: with all their limitations, these books suc–
ceeded not only in recording various influences at work in our civiliza–
tion (in the South, these influences may be said to emerge in their
simplest and most significant forms), but in relating them to ideas of
human tragedy, in freeing them from their immediate and purely
physi~
cal manifestations. It should be noted, however, that the ideas behind
these novels were never actually made clear : one could never be certain
as to whether it was Mr. Faulkner's intention, in portraying these
depraved characters and horrific situations, to present us with his vision
of a lost and hopeless world--or whether he was merely interested in
sensationalism as an end in itself.
The Unvanquished
is a collection of tales which has the continuity
of a novel, and which is concerned with the effect upon a family of
Southern aristocrats of the closing months of the Civil War and its
disrupting aftermath. The family is the Sartoris family (to whose
descendants we were introduced in
Soldiero's Pay):
the valiant grand–
mother, fighting a single-handed and losing battle against a common
enemy; the father who, with a regiment composed mainly of untrained
fighters, conducts a kind of guerilla warfare behind the lines; Drusilla
Hawk, the father's mistress and later his second wife, who dons the
uniform of a Confederate soldier and joins her lover's troop; and Bayard
Sartoris-first seen as a boy, bewildered in the midst of startling events
but animated by the common principle of resisting the invader-and
later as a young man who goes to meet his father's murderer. The theme,
as implied in the title, would seem to be that of the South clinging
in the midst of desolation and defeat to all that is noblest in its heritage:
