PARTISAN REVIEW
est indications of the central imbalance in Faulkner's art-the kind of
monster who effaces the actuality of others by imposing on them
his
own. By apologizing for or denying their animality, he not only mis–
understands the Snopeses but dehumanizes them too. It is this mis–
understanding and dehumanization that Ratliff tries to withstand, insis–
ting that Flem's motives will not
be
understood if they are sociologized,
that his desire for respectability is simply another form of his desire
for power, that his success is a result of having beaten the Jefferson–
ians at their own game, a game few of them admit they play.
Out of
this
contention a third and broader understanding begins
to take shape, through which we begin to make out the connections
between the success of Flem, the impotence of Stevens, and the de–
struction of Eula and de Spain. Charles Mallison, educated by Ratliff
and Stevens but uninvolved with the Snopeses, expresses it, and it is,
it seems to me, one of the most explicit and critical statements Faulkner
has made about his culture. It is a negative judgment, a judgment of
failure upon a culture being devastated from within by its own values–
values it has always had, even in its palmiest days when there were
giants in the Southern earth. It is a judgment that is rigorous and self–
denying:
... ours a town established and decreed by people neither Catholics nor
Protestants nor even atheists but incorrigible nonconformists, noncon–
formists not just to everybody else but to each other in mutual accord;
a nonconformism defended and preserved by descendants whose an–
cestors hadn't quitted home and security for a wilderness in which to
find freedom of thought as they claimed and oh yes, believed, but to
find freedom in which to be incorrigible and unreconstructible Baptists
and Methodists; not to escape from tyranny as they claimed and be–
lieved, but to establish one.
There
is
no other living American novelist who can write with this
authority, the authority of truth lived with for a lifetime. The tyranny
which the passage describes and which the novel enacts generates
both the fatal, desperate passions of the Eulas and de Spains, and the
meanness of spirit against which they batter themselves and which
finally, meanly, extirpates them as it tends to extirpate most impulses
toward sensibility, vitality and style. It is utterly appropriate that a
Snopes lihould come to power in this culture; he is no harbinger of
something new and alien, something out of the North, or part of the
"coastal spew of Europe," but the fulfillment of a tradition, its native,
purified, stripped-down product. Once again Faulkner has cut the
ground out from under his apologists, for this too, he is telling us,
be-
