FAULKNER AND CONTEMPORARIES
107
this style that he creates the plodding, patient, modest, indestructible
vitality of his Dilseys and Lena Groves, his perfect images. They
owe their perfection to his love of them, and of the principle of life which
they embody: their goodness is their profound submissiveness. Whatever
you may think of this as a principle (I myself don't like it), it is neces–
sary to concede the depth to which Faulkner carries it in his character–
izations. (At times it virtually takes him out of American literature and
into the nineteenth-century literary and political legend of the Rus–
sian peasant.) So also with his villains, the Popeyes and Jasons and Joe
Christmases, whose
villainy is
a denial of
this principle.
The worst thing
he can
find
to say about them
is depthless.
They are the stiff-necked,
the cheap, the mechanical, the cheats of life,
which
they think they can
escape by refusing the rituals of yielding which the good folk perform
daily. In this love and
in this
hatred, there is no one more open than
Faulkner. He is unashamedly touching and simple, and he would
certainly be a homiletic
writer,
were it not for the fact that he is pointing
up no trite morality. There is no morality at all in his sense of char–
acter; he constructs a good and
evil
without it, by-passing morality in
his immediate feeling for life.
In illustration of this style, I present one of its best moments, a pas–
sage from
Th e Wild Palms
in the counterpointed narrative, "Old Man,"
which describes the Mississippi in flood:
It
was as
if
the water itself were in three strata, separate and distinct,
the bland and
unhurried
surface ... screening as though by vicious cal–
culation the rush and fury of the flood itself, and beneath this in turn
the original stream, trickle, murmuring along in the opposite direction,
following undisturbed and unaware its appointed course....
This
is
not only a
description
of flood; it is so excellent an analysis of
nature that it contains also a schematism of human character structure,
one which he has followed
in
all his work. Most likely Faulkner
is
un–
aware that this scheme corresponds exactly to that of Freud and R eich;
as he may also be unaware of the original Lao-Tse who saw in water
the symbol of the T ao. In Faulkner, also, but purely as instinct, the
Tao and the Teh-the way of nature and of human character-are one.
This
is
the element of greatness in
his
work.
In his other style,
which
dominates his writing, Faulkner constructs
his legend of the South. It is here that all his famous traits are found:
the rhetoric, the difficult, involved sentences, gratuitous and exaggerated,
the tangle of meanings and motives. So little is left of the touching
simplicity and openness, it is hard to believe that the same man writes
in both styles. But neither is long present without the other, and even
