348
PARTISAN REVIEW
white man) under exclusion of another (his black cousin) results in
tension and guilt, and this is the famous "curse" of the South. But
not only of the South. Already in
Go Down, Moses
allusion is made
to the rapacity of the westward expansion, and the plantation is made
symbol of exploitation on world-historic scale: " .... on down through
the tedious and shabby chronicle of His chosen sprung from Abra–
ham, and of the sons of them who dispossessed Abraham, and of the
five hundred years during which half the known world and all it
contained was chattel to one city as this plantation and all the life
it contained was chattel and revokeless thrall to this commissary store
and those ledgers yonder. . . "The plantation and its system sym–
bolizes Roman imperialism.
III
It seems that Faulkner's work invites interpretations in
terms of various anti-theses. The
Fable,
as we have seen, makes a basic
division between the meek of the earth and the ambitious, rapacious
but creative ones, who participate in the works of civilization. Many
critics who have dealt with Faulkner have tried to explain his entire
writings by tracing in them a pair of anti-theses : traditionalism
against anti-traditionalism, the Sartoris world against the Snopes
world, sickness against primitivism,s humanism against animalism, etc.
Sensitive critics have, of course, been aware that none of these schol–
astic schemes can really encompass Faulkner's turbulent imagination.
Nevertheless, the conception of Faulkner as a traditionalist, who
hates and castigates the "anti-traditional" forces, represented chiefly
by the Snopeses, prevails in most discussions of his work. It is along
this line that some of the best and most influential essays on Faulkner
have been written: as G. M. O 'Donnell's "F.aulkner's Mythology,"
from which Malcolm Cowley took off in his introduction to the
Portable Faulkner.
Robert Penn Warren, in turn, somewhat more
cautiously, continued Cowley's thoughts.
4
But O 'Donnell had been
the first to run into difficulties and miss the point when he interpreted
Light in August
in accordance with this theory.
3 M. Backman, "Sickness and Primitivism,"
Accent,
Winter 1954.
4 All three essays reprinted in
William Faulkner. Two Decades of Criticism,
ed.
by
F.
J.
Hoffman and O. W. Vickery (1951).
