Class, Character, and 'Croppers: Faulkner's Snopeses and the Plight of the Sharecropper

MATTHEW LESSIG Class, Character, and 'Croppers: Faulkner's Snopeses and the Plight of the Sharecropper DDRESSiNG the "recent aberrations of critical discourse" in .Faulkner studies, Daniel Hoffman appeals for a criticism ofhistory and memory, arguing that "a writer such as Faulkner can be comprehended only by readers possessing a sympathetic historical imagination to complement his own" (xiv). Faulkner found one such group of readers in the New Critics, who, as Lawrence Schwartz has shown, promoted Faulkner's literary fortunes in the post-war marketplace, both commercial and academic. Many of the founding figures of the New Criticism were, of course, conservative Southerners, some of whom— such as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, George Marion O'Donnell, and Cleanth Brooks—had participated in the Agrarian politics of the 1930s. Schwartz convincingly describes the ideological as well as the personal continuity between the pre-war Agrarians and the post-war cultural politics of the New Critics. Where the Agrarians railed against Northern "industrialism," "believ[ing] in a social hierarchy and a cultural aristocracy, and dismiss[ing] social reforms that stressed equality or egalitarianism" (74), the New Critics practiced a "literary elitism [as] their way of protecting art from the disorder of the modern industrial world" (75). In their turn, these New Critics nee Agrarians found in Faulkner's Snopes clan an embodiment of the social forces they felt were menacing the traditional Southern order, setting the tone for a generation of critical interpretations of the Snopes fictions. These critics interpreted Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 8oMatthew Lessig the Snopeses in general, and Flem Snopes in particular, as a moral evil variously rendered as "the commercial ethos," "the principle of exploitation ," "avarice married to pure animality," mass culture, or reason without passion, a grotesque New South version of Eliot's dissociation of sensibility.1 Cleanth Brooks, for example, reads the Snopeses as "embittered and numbed" poor whites whose violent and rapacious natures are products of their individual characters and their roles within Faulkner 's larger explorations of human loyalty and honor (10). For Brooks, Flem Snopes represents "naked aggression and undiluted acquisitiveness ," marking the negative pole of The Hamlet's implied "definition of man" (190). As recently as t98o, Lyall Powers defined Snopesism as "the worst sort of human evil, the threat of redneckism in its most blatantly dreadful form" (145). While a handful of critics did argue that the larger community of Frenchman's Bend was as complicitly acquisitive as the Snopeses or that they taught Flem his dirty tricks, the majority saw a traditional, homogeneous Southern community beset by an invading tribe of mostly conscienceless poor whites.2 Whether they viewed the Snopeses as the menacing agents of social change or merely as its "catalysts," none questioned the historical or ideological implications of burdening poor-white tenant farmers with the responsibility for the modernization of the South. Tenants and sharecroppers, like the Snopeses, represented ready villains for Agrarians and New Critics alike. The Southern rural poor figured prominently in the 1930s' liberal and radical pantheon of the American exploited. Championed by New Deal progressives, Southern liberals and the Communist and Socialist parties, sharecroppers were heroes of the very social reforms resisted by the Agrarians and of the social realism reviled by the New Critics. In recent years, Faulkner's works have found a rather different if no less sympathetic historical imagination. Critics informed by the very post-structuralist and Marxist "aberrations" bemoaned by Hoffman have analyzed Faulkner's Snopes fictions for their treatment of the emerging market economy in the post-bellum South and their representations of class in the new Southern social order.3 Both Richard Moreland and Mauri Skinfill read The Hamlet in relation to Faulkner's earlier treatment of Southern class relations in Absalom, Absalom! According to Moreland , in The Hamlet Faulkner revisits and revises—through the characters of Ab, Mink and Flem Snopes—the young, poor-white Thomas Class, Character, and 'Croppers81 Sutpen's "primal scene" of social exclusion at the door of a wealthy planter's home. In The Hamlet Faulkner experiments with humor as a form of social critique and as an...