~3b
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
the reader feels that this doesn't sound quite like Ratliff, he has
come upon one of the major issues in Faulkner's literary development.
The Ratliff of
The Hamlet
is one of Faulkner's most admirable creations,
a subtle, ironic sensibility, a disinterested intelligence through which the
problems of a corrupt yet civilized society in the process of being infil–
trated by Snopeses-not foreigners, but home-bred products of that
corruption-are voiced. It is largely through Ratliff that
The Hamlet
achieves a poise and control unequaled by any other of Faulkner's works.
He was to Faulkner what Marlow was to Conrad, and when we say that
we again recognize the distinction of Faulkner's accomplishment in
The Hamlet.
Itinerant sewing-machine agent, carrier of news, repository
of local history, Ratliff, who has known the Snopeses from boyhood and
can even sympathize with their predicament, wages a long-drawn-out
campaign against them. He represents the novelist's conviction that if
civilization and sanity are to be preserved they must be fought for con–
stantly, even if one has to fight with one hand tied behind his back,
since to beat the Snopeses by their own methods would be to forfeit the
values one wishes to defend. Ratliff appears in
The Town
in a more lim–
ited and constrained way. He is one of three characters who tell the story,
and his part is the smallest, amounting to only 30 of the novel's 370
pages. This reduction of Ratliff's role is partly a result of the shift in
time and place of the novel. Weare to understand that he does not
possess in Jefferson the decisive knowledge that he and no one else
possessed in Frenchman's Bend.
Because of this, two other characters take over the bulk of the nar–
ration; Gavin Stevens and Charles Mallison are the Jeffersonians, and
we are meant to see them as inheriting in some degree Ratliffs insight
into the Snopes character and activity. Each of them is supposed to per–
sonify a successive generation with a particular awareness: Ratliff,
born shortly after the Civil War; Stevens, Faulkner's own age, born near
the end of the century; Mallison, Stevens' nephew, born around the
time of the First World War. I say "supposed" because Faulkner's in–
tention here is not fulfilled, is in fact overridden by the persistent failure
of Gavin Stevens as character, intelligence and moralist: that part of the
novel in which he is the dominant figure-the working out of the Flem–
Eula-de Spain triangle-is absurdly sluggish, involuted and opaque.
Although whenever he is juxtaposed to Ratliff, Stevens seems silly
and in a sense impotent,
l
Faulkner is still too involved with
him
1 Faulkner suggests that impotence only in the most literary and
high–
falutin manner: "... now only the afternoon remained: the interminable time
until a few minutes after half past three filled with a thousand indecisions
