IIOOKS
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personally to admit that Stevens never was and never could be that
fountainhead of moral enlightenment and of a gallant, embattled tradi–
tion which in the crisis of his culture and therefore of his art Faulkner
'needs to portray. In
The Town
Stevens is the same windbag he has
always been, and his character continues to reveal what one can only
call the coarseness and vulgarity of moral tone that have been so ruinous
in Faulkner's more recent writing. "Harvard M.A. and a Ph. D. from
Heidelberg and his hair beginning to turn white even at just twenty–
five," Stevens is the most transparent of lay figures; he embodies an
undisguised personal wish. It is he who goes along with what Leslie
Fiedler has termed the frozen and ossified grandiloquence of Faulkner's
later style--and it is he who wrote the speech Faulkner delivered at
Stockholm.
In
The Town,
however, Stevens is put to an additional use. Since
his is the mind and the rhetoric with which Faulkner feels the strongest
affinity, it is largely through him that we get a glimpse of Ratliff-his
ruminative, melodramatic consciousness is the complicated filter through
which Ratliffs clear intellect is allowed to trickle. Mallison, a decent and
perspicacious young man, affords an even further rarification of this de–
vice; he is less obfuscating than his uncle, but further removed from
the events of the narrative, and often we reach Ratliff only through
Mallison, who has gotten to him through Stevens. This extreme refine–
ment in point of view is inherently undramatic and indicates how ex–
iguous Faulkner's direct grasp on experience can become. Yet it indicates
·too how insistently he feels the necessity of re-establishing that grasp,
and how strenuously he labors toward it.
At moments
The Town
does somehow get to Ratliff, and thus to
Snopes, and whenever it does we seem to have come upon life and in–
telligence again, for in
The Town
Ratliff spends a good part of his time
retelling the stories that made up
The Hamlet ..
They
are not, however,
quite the same stories. The order of narration and even the facts are
different. "Spotted Horses" is related for what must be the third or
fourth time now, but as a compressed and anecdotal aside to another
larger story. The story of Eula Varner and McCarron is retold with
interesting variations. In the first version she gives up her virginity on
the front porch after she and McCarron have ieturned from being
which each fierce succeeding harassment would revise. . . . And I was in time
but just in time." The echo of Prufrock is clear enough, and a case for its
relevance might even be made. It is a comment, however, on Faulkner's. sense
of Stevena that he has to resort to literature itself to attain the very frailest
impersonality or irony in his relation to him.
