438
PARTISAN REVIEW
ambushed by the country bucks, and after her father has set McCar–
ron's broken arm. As Ratliff recounts the story in
The Town,
they fall
upon each other "on the still-hot field of the triumph; right there on
the ground in the middle of the dark because somebody had to hold
that skeered horse, with the horse standing over them and her likely
having to help hold him up too off of that broke arm." The murder of
Houston by Mink Snopes is retold with the details of time and place
slightly different from those in
The Hamle t.
In fact the whole treat–
ment of time, of dating the events in the narrative, becomes a part
of our response to the novel; on the evidence of both
The Hamlet
and
The Town
it is possible, for example, to locate "Spotted Horses"
in 1891, in 1900, or in 1908.
Someone is bound to say that these repetitions are compulsive and a
sign of Faulkner's waning invention; that the discrepancies of detail are
a sign of his forgetfulness and carelessness as an artist; and that it is
pedantry to pause over them or view them in other ways. This might be
true, but for me these variations and recurrences reveal something worth
noting about Faulkner and his art: he is moving back in the direction
of his singular genius. The analogy I should like to make in this regard
is to the post-Homeric fragments; in those almost entirely lost cyclic
poems the stories of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
were recreated and
amplified with the same character of variation that one finds in
The
Town
and in parts of Faulkner's other works. As one reads about them
one gets a renewed sense of how one of the primal powers of literature
is to raise mythology to the level of history, to treat the material of the
imagination as if it were indistinguishable from the actuality it invades
and transcribes. Faulkner is the only contemporary American writer who
has a faculty for this; perhaps he is the only modem writer who has
it at all. The stories he wrote over twenty-five years ago have become
part of the given; he takes a past which he has created himself and deals
with it as received reality. It is "out there," independent of his min–
istrations, waiting for him to record and recreate rather than invent.
And as the degree of Faulkner's conviction about the historicity of his
imagination seems positive, so, too, does the degree of his conviction
about the authenticity and necessity of society, and the degree to which
he seems able to represent concretely the deterioration in American life
of those institutions and values which allow for the cultivation of the
imagination and the spirit.
To have achieved this is to have achieved classical status. In
The
Town,
however, we do not have the major achievement so much as we
