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have the impulse to discover the condition in which that achievement
is again possible. We find that impulse in Faulkner's effort to come at
Ratliff and the Snopeses again, as we find the contradicting impulse in
his continued attachment to the obscuring sensibility of Gavin Stevens.
In his sense of the motives of Flem Snopes, for instance, Ratliff is sharply
distinguished from Stevens. For Ratliff, Flem and the Snopeses are pri–
marily
objects,
animals (rabbits, snakes, rats, ants are his metaphors
for them), which are to be understood as phenomena of nature. Their
intense spirituality, their passion and rapacity, are a direct animal
response to the values of money and power which control society.
Their spirituality is depraved just because their response to society, their
instinctive understanding of power, is so untrammeled and precise, so un–
fettered by the hypocrisies of form and manner with which society dis–
guises from itself the facts of its life. Some Snopeses, like Mink, the
murderer, and Ab, the old man, are destroyed by their uncontrollable
animality. Others, like Ike, the idiot, and like Eck, the good-natured
fool, are destroyed because they aren't sufficiently endowed with the
Snopes passion and shrewdness for survival. Still others, like Byron,
like
I.
O.'s son Montgomery Ward, and like
I.
O. himself, expose their
rapacity too nakedly and are driven out of society. One Snopes, Wall–
street Panic, even turns his passionate endowment against Snopesery, be–
comes a mortal enemy of Flem and dedicates himself to a fanatic honesty.
Only Flem has made the perfect adjustment: he sees how much of the
Snopes is hidden in almost everyone, in the men who possess money
and power and in the men who do not, and it is upon their secret charge
of resentment, avarice and aggressiveness that he works. He is suc–
cessful because he understands society so completely and because he is
willing to submit himself to the terms that it enjoins.
As Gavin Stevens contemplates him, however, Flem Snopes under–
goes a transformation; he becomes part of that viscous ooze of rhetoric
which flows from Stevens' mind like sap from a wounded tree. He
ceases to be an object and becomes primarily a consciousness. Nothing
could be more fatal to his integrity as a Snopes. He is "humanized" by
Stevens; his motives are understood as almost unexceptionable-they be–
come the motives which move Everyman. Stevens even begins to pity
Fiem when he considers his origins in underprivilege and his plight as
cuckold. The Old Heidelbergian's rubric reads
nihil humanum alienum
est,
and under his spell Fiem and Eula become articulate and begin to
speak
in
those orotund cadences with which Stevens-and Faulkner when
he is Stevens-inflates all reality and makes everything in it a duplication
of himself. Stevens is a true solipsist-here is, I think, one of the clear-
