Interested Parties and Theorems to Prove: Narrative and Identity in Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy

As readers of William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, we find ourselves considering both the life of Flem Snopes, and the comparable attempts of readers within the narratives to similarly interpret him, these interpretations having crucial effects on the respective positions of both Flem and Faulkner's reader with regard to the texts. Each of these books takes a different narrative approach. The Hamlet (1940) is delivered by an authorial voice, though it is one that is frequently inhabited by the eager contributions of others, most notably V. K. Ratliff. As ever with Faulkner's use of such a voice, its own position can never be taken for granted—it would be a mistake, for instance, to assume omniscience in any Faulkner narrative, however external the voice may seem. The Town (1957) apparently goes to the other extreme, being entirely constructed of the first-person accounts of Ratliff, Charles Mallison, and Gavin Stevens. These three also figure prominently in the narration of The Mansion (1959), but are joined here by an authorial voice in certain sections of the story—prominently those featuring two of Flem's most directly constructive (or, perhaps, destructive) observers, Mink and Linda Snopes, who themselves are never given narrative voices of their own. These general, novel-wide narrative set-ups each have very distinct effects on the material that they deal with, even before we consider subtleties within them.

It might almost be tempting, for instance, to liken the narrative basis of The Hamlet to that of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in that it is a story told by an authorial voice that is frequently invaded or even usurped by the voices of other narrators or characters. But we are prevented from doing so by the crucial point that, whereas Thomas Sutpen's interpreters in the earlier book work in terms of a historical and interpretive network that works through time at the business of constructing the story of a man from the past, Flem's readers are contemporaneous with him. They are not, like Quentin and Shreve, attempting to piece together a text from "the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking" (Absalom, Absalom! 303), but rather trying to understand and come to terms with a man they live and develop with, in whose story they can become involved at the level of action as well as interpretation. Whereas Quentin and Shreve create through narrative the circumstances in which the Sutpen drama can unfold, Gavin Stevens, for instance, can try through money and warning to prevent the murder of his long-time foe, Flem Snopes, thereby becoming an important part of the events described as well as of their description. This, as we shall see, is vital to the nature of the understanding and construction of Flem, as a text, that develops across the trilogy, and implies important questions about the closeness of a text to its readership.

In the early stages of The Hamlet, Ratliff takes over the narrative to tell the tall tale of Ab Snopes and Pat Stamper. After many pages of the story, we suddenly and briefly leave Ratliff's voice and swing out to see the scene of its telling:

"Sho now," Stamper says. "That horse will surprise you."

"And it did," Ratliff said. He laughed, for the first time, quietly, invisible to his hearers though they knew exactly how he would look at the moment as well as if they could see him, easy and relaxed in his chair, with his lean brown pleasant shrewd face, in his faded clean blue shirt, with that same air of perpetual bachelorhood which Jody Varner had, although there was no other resemblance between them and not much here, since in Varner it was a quality of shabby and fustian gallantry where in Ratliff it was that hearty celibacy as of a lay brother in a twelfth...