Popeye, Flem, and Sutpen: The Faulknerian Villain as Grotesque

POPEYE, FLEM, AND SUTPEN: THE FAULKNERIAN VILLAIN AS GROTESQUE Richard M. Cook* Readers of Faulkner have derived a variety of explanations to account for the fascinating and extraordinarily sinister nature of his villains. One of the most popular views of villainy in Faulkner is that of Cleanth Brooks who observes that "the characters with whom Faulkner expects his reader to be sympathetic are usually men who love nature and live in some kind of close rapport with it. On the other hand, nearly all of Faulkner's villains are men who are guilty of violating it."1 He cites Popeye, Flem, and Thomas Sutpen as examples of those who derive no enjoyment from nature and, in their actions, actively malign nature. Popeye spits in the spring; Flem is impotent, his senses "starved or dormant;" Sutpen, in turn, "has no deep natural affections. . . ."2 Edmund Volpe considers the villain in Faulkner often to be a victim of a "prescribed pattern of conduct," of an indoctrination into a concept. He thus "dissipates his energy and his life struggling with a concept, an abstraction."3 Another, somewhat more schematic, attempt to extrapolate the essentials of a Faulknerian villain is George Marion O'Donnell's "Faulkner's Mythology." O'Donnell explains Faulkner's world as a mythological conflict between the traditional forces of humanism and the anti-traditional forces of animalism or naturalism, represented respectively by Sartorises and Snopeses. According to O'Donnell, Popeye, Flem, and Sutpen each represents an alien and amoral power attempting to penetrate and eventually subvert the traditional and, relatively speaking, moral establishment: Yoknapatawpha County.4 All three views have validity. It would be difficult to deny that Flem, Popeye, and Sutpen exhibit hostility, at least indifference, to nature and the natural, adhere to a rigidly inhuman even mechanistic form of behavior, and pose as threats to traditional mores of the community. Faulkner, however, in discussing his works, not only shies away from talking about an evil principle behind the actions of his •Richard M. Cook is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His book on Carson McCullers will appear early in 1975 and he is currently at work on a critical biography of F. O. Matthiessen. 4 Richard M. Cook villains, but resists grouping them in the same category. Faulkner agrees that Sutpen and Snopes share a "callous attitude" towards people, but he is more interested in the differences between them: ". . . Sutpen had a grand design. Snopes' design was pretty base. . . ."5 Nor is Faulkner willing to consider even Popeye in terms of an evil principle, neither as Cowley's "compendium of all the hateful qualities that Faulkner assigns to finance capitalism,"6 nor as Irving Howe's synthetic allegory of "a pure apparition of evil" and "the slum lumpenproletariat."7 To Faulkner Popeye was a "lost human being."8 Faulkner's insistence on the individual qualities or defects of his villains, as well as his reluctance to align them with any specifically designated force of destruction, partly vindicates Volpe's claim that Faulkner's villains are warnings of the dangers inherent in reducing men to principles. However, this refusal to categorize, to make convenient generalizations about "evil" men, indicates that Faulkner was fully aware of the source of their strange power to fascinate and horrify, that it lies, in fact, in their profound and threatening incomprehensibility—in what can be called their "grotesqueness." Flem, Popeye, and Sutpen (and there are other candidates in Faulkner) belong to a long established tradition of baffling and frightening literary creations which Wolfgang Kayser, in the most definitive book on the subject, has called the tradition of the grotesque.9 Kayser considers the grotesque to be a literary category particularly helpful in analyzing various examples of German literature. But Kayser's observations and conclusions about the grotesque in German literature can be helpful to an understanding of the grotesque in American literature as well. They can, for example, indicate what these three Faulknerian villains have in common and from what source they derive their power to fascinate and terrify. Kayser's definition of the grotesque breaks into two parts: a consideration of the subject matter itself of...