Faulkner’s Art of Telling It Again
This article discusses major turns in the Snopes trilogy, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, and Requiem for a Nun, as well as passages from As I Lay Dying and Go Down, Moses.
Jack Houston hears a shot.
Only then does it occur to him that he’d already been hit. On the ground he tries to make the pain start, as though he might save himself by getting it under way. He dies before a section break in The Hamlet takes us back to the man with the gun. Mink Snopes has pulled both triggers. The first shell failed. Its click seems so loud to him that he fails to hear the second shell go off. He sits behind a log and counts until he stops shaking.
The identity of the killer is settled in the first book. When Faulkner returns to Houston’s killing in the next two Snopes novels, the question is why Mink thought he had to do it that day.
What Mink thinks the court is for
Near the start of Chapter Four of The Town, Ratliff corrects a point of local history. Flem was preceded to Jefferson by Mink, who spent eight months in its jail. From Ratliff’s point of view, Mink picked the wrong time to shoot Houston. Flem was away and could not get him out of trouble. Ratliff guesses that Mink might have heard that his cousin would be back the next day. Then he wonders whether anything mattered to Mink by that point except getting Houston in his sights. He can give us the horse tearing away with an empty saddle. He keeps having to qualify the motive he attaches to it.
The Mansion opens at the trial. The judge asks Mink whether he killed Houston. Mink asks him to leave him alone and goes on looking for Flem at the back of the room. Only then does Faulkner take us through the months that brought Mink there. Mink first thinks he forgot, at the moment he fired, how long Flem would be away. “No, that was a lie.” Ratliff could guess at what Mink knew. Here Mink remembers knowing his cousin would be away, then blames Houston for making it impossible to wait. Getting close enough to hear that admission also means hearing how quickly Mink makes it into a complaint against the man he killed.
The chapter ends with the words Mink wishes he had time to say between pulling the trigger and the shot hitting Houston. He wants Houston to hear that he is dying over the extra dollar he demanded for the return of Mink’s cow. Earlier, Varner had offered Mink the dollar and even offered to bring the cow home. Mink goes back to the fence and works off the fee. He gets the cow back and goes after Houston all the same. Faulkner gives Mink the chance to state his grievance just before the next chapter puts him back in front of the judge. The judge asks for a plea. The speech we have just heard was meant for a dead man.
How much a voice can leave out
Mink needs a whole speech to distinguish the dollar from the work he’s already done. Cash Bundren uses a numbered list to explain why he beveled his mother’s coffin in As I Lay Dying. He begins with the nails, which have more surface to grip. The sixth entry is “Except.” The word gets its own number even though the thought runs over into the next entry. A list that can accommodate that hesitation can also put animal magnetism beside the facts about nails. By the time Cash gets to “It makes a neater job,” we’ve already watched him shelter his lantern with a raincoat and go back to the saw. We can respect the work without having to grant him every explanation for it.
The next chapter is Vardaman’s. “My mother is a fish.” The verb is does all the connecting. Earlier, Vardaman had asked Tull to remember the mark the fish left in the dirt and hurry back before the rain washed it away. Tull can confirm that a fish lay there. The sentence that follows Cash’s list omits even the witness who could confirm that much. A writer can lay out the steps a character might take to arrive at a thought, then decide how many belong in the sentence. Faulkner can give Vardaman five words because a different chapter has room for him to look for evidence.
Four years between two answers
In Chapter III of Absalom, Absalom!, the town learns that Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon rode out together after a Christmas quarrel. Years later Henry kills him. In Chapter IV, Mr. Compson considers the possibility that Bon’s relationship with a woman in New Orleans, with whom he has a child, prompted Sutpen to oppose Bon’s marriage to his daughter Judith. Henry sides with Bon at Christmas. If the relationship in New Orleans explains the killing, why did it send the two men out of the house together?
At Harvard, Shreve stops Quentin to ask how Mr. Compson could know more now than he seemed to know when he first told the story. Who told him? “I did.” The transmission has doubled back. When Shreve and Quentin put Henry in front of his father again in Chapter VIII, Henry has had years to live with the news that Bon is his half brother and is willing to let the marriage go ahead. “You said that before,” he says when Sutpen renews his objection. Then Sutpen tells Henry about Bon’s Black ancestry. The two prohibitions have to come separately. Otherwise there is no decision about incest for the racist prohibition to overturn.
That sequence accounts for the ride and the wait. It also leaves time for Bon, in the two young men’s reconstruction, to have wanted recognition from his father badly enough to give up Judith for it. The more clearly we can picture what Bon would have been prepared to lose, the easier it is to take his motive for something we know. Shreve’s interruption makes that certainty harder to sustain. We’ve already heard Quentin admit that a story attributed to his father could carry something he supplied himself.
The second entry in the ledger
In “The Bear,” Buddy writes in a plantation ledger that Eunice, an enslaved woman, drowned herself. His brother rejects the idea on racial grounds. Buddy dates a second entry and writes the same words. Ike McCaslin reads the repetition as an insistence and wonders what made Buddy so sure. He sets the date of Eunice’s death beside the birth of her grandson Turl and the money old Carothers left the boy. From the bequest and his own memory of Turl, Ike works back to a claim about two generations. He thinks Carothers fathered Turl with his own daughter. What Eunice was thinking when she walked into the creek belongs to Ike’s reconstruction. No entry records it.
The ledger is being remembered during a dispute about who should inherit the land. Cass could grant the accuracy of the record and still challenge the use Ike makes of it. For Cass, the work that went into clearing and holding the plantation helps justify passing it down. Ike questions whether his grandfather ever had the right to pass it down at all. When their argument ranges far from the commissary, there are stretches where that immediate decision grows hard to hear. The force of the argument is greatest while we can still see what hangs on it. Two men can read the same entry and come away with different obligations.
The man in the governor’s chair
In Sanctuary, the district attorney keeps stepping into Temple Drake’s line of sight as her gaze goes to the back of the courtroom. He points to Lee Goodwin and supplies most of the language of the accusation. Each time Temple starts to tell the jury what Tommy said, the prosecutor cuts her off with another question. She says Goodwin shot him. Years later, in Requiem for a Nun, she tells the governor that she saw the man who really did it, or at least his shadow. She has come to plead for Nancy Mannigoe, the nurse condemned for killing Temple’s infant daughter. Temple now has to tell what happened in Memphis after the shooting. Letters to her lover there have ended up with his brother, the man she was getting ready to run away with the night Nancy killed the child.
The first scene opens at Nancy’s sentencing. She waits until the judge asks God to have mercy on her soul, then answers, “Yes, Lord.” The bailiff calls for order. Faulkner’s stage directions put the governor’s office even higher on the stage than that courtroom. Temple calls it a witness stand, then asks how much this listener already knows. Later, as the lights go out in the office, Nancy’s lawyer, Gavin Stevens, is still talking. When they come up in another part of the stage, we’re in Temple’s dressing room on the night of the child’s death. We can now hear Nancy ask Temple what she thinks will happen to the baby if she takes her along.
The lights return to the office. Temple has her face in her arms. She speaks as though the governor were still behind the desk. The audience can see Gowan, her husband, in the chair. He hears Temple go back over what Nancy said at her sentencing. By the time Temple turns to look at the desk, the words she meant for a man who might save Nancy have reached the man she intended to leave. After Gowan leaves, Gavin will confirm that Nancy’s sentence stands. On his way out, Gowan picks up her gloves and bag from the governor’s desk. He calls them evidence.
FAQ
When has another telling earned its place?
Keep one thing fixed when you draft the return, such as the time two people left or the question a judge put to a defendant. Then see what the later account makes possible. It may explain a choice the first telling left hanging. It may reach a person who can refuse what the speaker is asking for. If you could give the reader the same result by adding a sentence to the first account, try that before asking for another scene.
How can I separate voices without leaning on dialect?
Give two people the same thing to explain and compare where each begins. One might give the rule, then make an exception, as Cash does. The other might offer the conclusion and leave the grounds for it in another scene. Read the sentences without their names or distinctive spellings. What each person leaves out should matter as much as how they sound.
Which passages should I study side by side?
Start at the end of section 1 and the beginning of section 2 in The Hamlet, Book Three, Chapter Two. Read through the change from Houston to Mink without pausing. Then read Ratliff’s opening in The Town, Chapter Four, and the first two chapters of The Mansion. Mark which details each telling can put before us and which it has to take on somebody’s word. For a change of listener you can see, read the first and third scenes of Act II in Requiem for a Nun, with the scene between them intact.
Sources and Further Reading
William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940), Book Three, Chapter Two, sections 1–2. Digital text. The Town, Vintage edition (1961), Chapter Four. Faded Page edition. The Mansion, Chatto & Windus edition (1961), “Mink,” Chapters One–Two. Faded Page edition.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Standard Ebooks digital edition, sections 13 and 15–19.
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, Random House first-printing text (1936), Faded Page digital edition, Chapters III–IV and VII–VIII.
William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in Go Down, Moses, digital text, Part IV, the commissary dispute and the entries for Eunice, Tomey, and Turl.
William Faulkner, Sanctuary, Random House text, Chapters XXVII–XXVIII. Faded Page edition. Requiem for a Nun, Vintage edition, Act I, Scene I, and Act II, Scenes I–III. Faded Page edition.
For the kinship Mink is counting on, see the Snopes trilogy character map.
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