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PARTISAN REVIEW
means in that exalted passage after Joe Christmas's immolation:
... when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave
a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then
Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife.
"Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell," he said. But the
man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open
and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a
shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them
with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face,
body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the
slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed
to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body
like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the
man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They
are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid
and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever
children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will
be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threat–
ful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.
Joe Christmas has attained the stillness that will finally allow
us to see him. Of sufferings alone is he made, and in this sense, and
in this sense alone, is he a figure whose condition is so total that he
reminds us of Christ in the sense of Christ's integrality. That tortured
and would-be Christian philosopher, Simone Weil, understood this
when she found in
malheur,
affliction, that it could become so much
in itself that she felt riven to the universe by bonds of pain. The arch–
victim may not be a "martyr," as students of modern totalitarianism
have noticed, but there is a kind of suffering in our time which is
so extreme that it becomes an integral
fact
of the human condition.
Father Zossima bowed down to Dmitri Karamazov because of all
the affliction he would undergo. So marvelous is Faulkner's com–
passion, he can visualize in the man who was nothing but a victim,
the shadow thrown from the Cross of Christ, who was nothing, as
it were, but Himself. Men are men because events are always "too
much" for them; Joe Christmas became one with his life in that
extreme moment when even he had no longer to search out the past.
The figure on the Cross is the most tremendous interventive symbol
in history; the castrated man on the floor has only one free power
in his life-to stop running at last and to f.ace his murderer. Faulkner
