532
PARTISAN REVIEW
Christmas was, ate her toothpaste and listened to the dietitian mak–
ing love. Hightower is guilty because his sickly, foolish nostalgia for
his grandfather's one day of glory made him unavailable to his own
wife, who committed suicide; Joanna Burden feels so guilty that she
has remained an alien in the Southern town in which she was born,
accepting her isolation as the price of her identification both with
her Abolitionist forebears, who were shot down in the South, and
with the Negroes, on whom a curse must have been laid. Even Doc
Hines and Percy Grimm murder in order to "clean" life of the stain
that Negroes have put on it, for as the Negroes were cursed by God,
so they have cursed life, and the maniac "saviors" of Southern racial
purity have to save their hallowed country from contagion. But just
as no one of them can really distinguish the hate they feel for others
from self-accusation, so no one can say with whom guilt began,
where the ultimate human crime was committed. The paths which
lead back to the human past are endless through the human brain,
and sitting at his study window after he has gained new self-respect
by delivering Lena's baby and by standing up to Percy Grimm, the
dying Hightower still ruminates, goes over and over the past, as "the
final copper light of afternoon fades" and "the world hangs in a
green suspension in color and texture like through colored glass."
The everlasting reverie begins again, but now the wheel of life that
brought Lena Grove to Jefferson begins to slow down, runs into
sand, "the rude, the vehicle, the power which propels it not yet
aware." These memories are endless, and the style in which they are
described is over-colored in a way that shows how static action often
becomes in Faulkner's work, how much it serves as the raw material
for reflection, which is why he can lavish so many Joycean compound
words on objects which do not seem to move of their own accord,
but to be rallying points in Faulkner's tortured concern with guilt.
Guilt is endless; in the labyrinths of the mind, there is turning,
but no deliverance. Like T. S. Eliot, Faulkner is a favorite today
because he takes
his
stand on human guilt; this is the side of our–
selves that we can recognize, and, curiously, stand by; for in this
alone, as we feel, is the possibility of our freedom. When men feel
so wretchedly small before their own past, they must be guilty. So
runs the legend. This is the argument behind Faulkner's novels: of
the God who made Yoknapatawpha County.
In
the beginning, life
