Flem Snopes’s Rise: Faulkner’s Art of Misjudgment
Spoilers: Major events and the ending of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion are discussed below.
Near the end of The Hamlet, Ratliff postpones a thought he can already finish. Something has clicked into place, and he knows that this time it is right. Then his inward voice interrupts the discovery: “Only I don’t want to look at it, hear it.” Supper offers a reprieve, followed by another night of digging, another patch of ground to try.
The man hesitating is one of Frenchman’s Bend’s shrewdest. A traveling sewing-machine salesman, Ratliff has acquired his authority through familiarity with the people around him; he is alert to vanity, fraud, and the pleasures of a well-told story. His involvement in Flem Snopes’s treasure scheme therefore troubles any comfortable division between the clever predator and his gullible victims. We hear a shrewd man bargaining with his own suspicion.
Across The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, Flem climbs from rural trade into Jefferson’s banking and property. The changes in his standing are accompanied by changes in the voices that describe him. Third-person narration moves close to Ratliff’s embarrassment; Gavin Stevens, Charles Mallison, and Ratliff offer competing explanations of the businessman; later, even his death becomes the subject of an argument whose participants have too much at stake to speak dispassionately. Flem’s ascent gains its peculiar force from this entanglement. The people interpreting him are people he can bargain with, deceive, or use.
Ratliff’s Extra Night
Ratliff, Bookwright, and Armstid have bought the Old Frenchman place after finding money there. Their excitement inflates the price of Flem’s land. Once the sale is complete, further digging preserves the prospect of wealth and postpones the humiliation already gathering around them.
Ratliff’s inward speech keeps furnishing reasons to continue. Faulkner lets a practical sequence—finish the food, eat, take up the shovel—occupy the time in which he could examine his suspicion. The comedy is spot on: a man capable of catching the deception can still find something sensible to do before admitting that he has been deceived. His competence supplies the delay with plausible errands.
As the nights pass, the physical labor becomes harder to separate from this evasion. Fatigue ought to send the men home; their expenditure of effort gives them another reason to stay. The prose keeps us near their aching bodies and depleted food, making the promised fortune increasingly expensive before the trick is fully disclosed. We have enough evidence to distrust the enterprise, but Ratliff’s hesitation asks more of us than the pleasure of guessing the ending. It invites us to linger inside the wish that the suspicion might still be wrong.
The eventual examination of the coins is almost brisk. Their dates destroy the legend of buried Civil War money. A fact that fits in the palm of a hand overturns days of labor and anticipation. Against that brevity, the preceding delay acquires its full proportion: the evidence was easier to inspect than the disappointment was to endure.
Ratliff can finally relinquish the fantasy. Armstid continues digging. The same exposure produces sharply unequal consequences. Ratliff has surrendered his share in a Jefferson restaurant, Armstid has mortgaged his farm, and Flem leaves their different degrees of desperation behind him. The bargain has already transferred the property it was designed to obtain.
The Bank and the New Hat
In The Town, speculation becomes a public occupation. Chapter Eight belongs to Gavin Stevens, the lawyer whose moral indignation and personal attachments so often complicate his judgment. His narrative follows Flem’s progress through the bank as a series of observations that keep provoking fresh explanations: the man stands in the lobby, adopts a broad black hat, moves behind the grille, and studies the bookkeeping.
Each adjustment seems to promise a final diagnosis. Some observers imagine that Flem is learning to rob the bank. Ratliff counters that crude theft would insult his reverence for money and cleverness. Through their exchanges, the narration juxtaposes Flem’s patient study of the institution with the spectators’ attempts to classify its new officer.
Gavin’s use of the communal pronoun draws the town into his conjectures. His narrative slides between what people see, what they hear, and what they infer, lending a collective confidence to propositions that remain vulnerable to Ratliff’s interruption. The corrections make an entertaining conversation, but they leave a more awkward question in their wake: how much of this apparent knowledge consists of the pleasure of having an explanation?
Gavin’s sentence about the new hat makes that pleasure audible. It follows the interlocking circumstances behind Flem’s vice-presidency through death, embezzlement, and the preservation of the bank’s good name. Successive instances of “as a result of which” promise a substantial conclusion. The sentence finally deposits this accumulation of circumstance in the replacement of Flem’s checked cap by his new hat.
The disproportion lets us feel how inadequately appearances register the transfer of power. Gavin can describe the hat at once; the combination of interests that made Flem a bank officer takes a far more elaborate sentence. Respectability has a simple costume and a tangled history. The narrator’s amusement briefly restores his superiority over the wearer, even as his own syntax traces the institution’s accommodation of him.
That superiority deserves scrutiny. In a hostile contemporary review of The Town, Norman Podhoretz challenged the distance between the novel’s extravagant denunciations of the Snopeses and the conduct it dramatizes. His argument gives us a welcomed test for Gavin’s indignation. Social disdain can magnify a judgment whose speaker also has reasons to preserve the old hierarchy.
The bank passage withstands that test through its particulars. Money has been stolen under the established management, and concern for the institution’s name helps secure Flem’s promotion. The respectable order provides opportunities for the man it treats as an intruder. His acquisition of banking skills also gives him practical competence that the spectators’ ridicule repeatedly obscures. Ratliff’s corrections puncture their caricature; but, as we can see, they do not make Flem harmless.
Jason Celebrates Too Soon
With the sale of the Compson property in The Mansion, the gap between confidence and advantage becomes a contest between two practiced bargainers. Jason Compson anticipates an airfield on the land. He believes he can exploit Flem’s appetite for prestige, and after the sale he enjoys the prospect of having outmaneuvered a notoriously shrewd buyer.
We receive this transaction through Charles Mallison’s report of his uncle Gavin’s reconstruction. The sale reaches us through two voices, and the passage repeatedly marks where conjecture begins. Gavin supplies imagined calculations; qualifications interrupt his version; Jason’s supposed victory acquires a provisional quality even before its commercial weakness becomes evident.
“Or so Jason thought” gives one such interruption its hushed force. A few words draw a boundary around the triumph, allowing Jason to enjoy it inside a narrative that has already begun to withdraw its endorsement. Faulkner can therefore sustain the comedy of his boasting and prepare its reversal in the same movement. We hear Jason’s conviction through someone else’s reservation.
The land will serve housing rather than the airfield Jason has imagined. In Gavin’s reconstruction, Flem has looked beyond the war toward an expanding population and the ground on which its houses must stand. This episode gives the comparison between the two men a concrete scale: Jason calculates against a speculative government project; Flem’s advantage rests on a longer horizon of demand.
The narration preserves the uncertainty surrounding Flem’s private calculations. What can be traced is the transaction and the alteration in its apparent winner. Faulkner makes the later prospect revise the earlier conversation, so that Jason’s boasts gradually become evidence against his estimate of the buyer.
Owen Robinson’s study of the trilogy emphasizes the involvement of Flem’s interpreters in the events they describe. Following that observation into these bargains, we can see interpretation acquire consequences well beyond conversation. Ratliff risks an asset on his reading of the treasure; Jason fixes a price according to his reading of Flem. Their explanations help them act, and action gives their errors something to cost.
The Explanation Gavin Cannot Accept
Faulkner begins the part of The Mansion called “Flem” with Mink trying to reach Memphis after prison. His shortage of money and his body’s demands take precedence over the banker’s affairs. The title promises one cousin; the narrative follows the other, whose long grievance will interrupt the career we have been tracking.
At the shooting, we remain close to Mink’s agitation: the gun, the failed discharge, the attempt again. Flem’s stillness gives the scene its terrible strangeness. We can watch his body and the small motions of his jaw; his motive remains beyond our access. Linda, Eula’s daughter whom Flem raised as his own, subsequently directs Mink toward the exit. Her assistance is narrated. The extent of her prior design becomes a separate question.
Ratliff presses that question in the final conversation with Gavin. Could Linda have anticipated what Mink would do? Could Flem himself have known? Ratliff’s speculative explanation turns upon a childhood game in which each player must take his turn at receiving a blow. Its force lies partly in the ordinary familiarity of the comparison: it proposes a rule under which even Flem’s apparent passivity might have a terrible coherence.
Gavin has spent years investing his affection and protective hopes in Linda. As Ratliff elaborates his theory, the lawyer’s replies become commands to drive on, to stop speaking, to leave the possibility alone. His distress culminates in the appeal: “Don’t you see I cannot?” Faulkner allows the reason for resistance to become audible in the resistance itself. Gavin is pleading for the preservation of a cherished person as he has conceived her.
The parallel with Ratliff’s extra night of digging is severe, though the loss at stake has changed. Ratliff postponed admitting a financial defeat; Gavin recoils from a possible betrayal of his faith in Linda. And so, Faulkner gives each man time to approach an unwelcome thought, retreat from it, and speak from that retreat. We can dispute Ratliff’s reconstruction, still hearing how much Gavin would lose by accepting it.
For the family connections and the changing cast across all three novels, consult the Snopes trilogy character map.
Sources and Further Reading
William Faulkner, The Hamlet, Chatto & Windus, 1940: Book Four, Chapter Two. Quotations follow this British edition.
William Faulkner, The Town, Vintage, 1961: Chapter Eight, narrated by Gavin Stevens.
William Faulkner, The Mansion, Chatto & Windus, 1961: Chapter Twelve; the Compson property episode in Chapter Fourteen; and Chapters Seventeen–Eighteen.
Owen Robinson, “Interested Parties and Theorems to Prove: Narrative and Identity in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy”, The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003), 58–73.
Norman Podhoretz, “Snopesishness and Faulknerishness”, The New Yorker, June 1, 1957.
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