Faulkner's "Red Leaves": The Deciduation of Nature

FAULKNER'S "RED LEAVES": THE DECIDUATION OF NATURE Edmond L. Volpe* Published in October of 1930 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Red Leaves" is one of the first stories by Wilbam Faulkner to appear in a national magazine. It is also one of his greatest stories. A brilliantly told tale of terror, throbbing with historical and cultural irony and with macabre humor, "Red Leaves" provides as profound a reading experience as is possiblewithintheshortstory form. Faulkner's carefully controlled narrative pace and his tonal modulations carry the unsuspecting reader from fascinated amusement with an alien, primitive culture to a terrifying confrontation with his own inevitable doom. Throughout his career, Faulkner's creativity was sparked by his historical imagination , and this tale about the original inhabitants of Northern Mississippi, the Chickasaw Indians, is a remarkable display, by a still unrecognized short story writer, of inventiveness and narrative skill. Combining the talents of story-teller and poet, Faulkner uses allusion, image patterns, symbolism, tonal and thematic contrasts to transform a tale told with photographic realism into a vision of the inexorable, brutal pattern of nature which decrees that every living thing, including thehumanbeing, must die. The story is structured upon a burial ritual. The tradition of the Indian tribe requires that at the death of a chief, his dog, horse, and personal slave be buried alive withhim.1 Thesignificance of this ritual to the overall meaning of the story Faulkner himself revealed whenhe was asked about the tide "Red Leaves": Well, that was probably symbolism. The red leaves referred to the Indian. Itwas thedeciduationofNaturewhichnoonecould stopthat had suffocated, smothered, destroyed the Negro. Thatthered leaves had nothing against him when they suffocated him and destroyed him. They had nothing against him, they probably liked him, but it was normal deciduation which the red leaves, whether they regretted it or not, had nothing more to say in.2 "The author of A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner, as well as numerous essays on Faulkner and other American authors, Edmond L. Volpe is now President of Richmond College of the City University of New York. He is currently working on a book on Faulkner's short fiction. 122Edmond L. Volpe Theburialritual decrees that the Negro slave, who is unnamed, must die, just as the law of nature decrees that Fall and Spring follow Summer and Winter. Man is a part of nature, and in the immutable pattern of natural existence, all living things live by feeding upon one another, and all living things must die. Consciousness creates the tragedy of human existence. The human being is the only living organism that has the power to contemplate its own extinction. In "Red Leaves" Faulkner portrays, with vivid realism, the existential terror of a man confronting his own mortality, moving from the abstract understanding that he is destined to die to total recognition of his extinction. It is a nightmarish story because Faulkner offers no catharsis. The Negro remains unreconciled to his death. Faulkner can offer no catharsis because as this story and other early works show, the idea of death evoked in him a feeling of horror, and that feeling he successfully conveyed and evoked in his art. Not until a decade later, with the publication of "The Old People" (1940) and "The Bear" (1942), does a Faulkner hero, Ike McCaslin, learn to accept dying as inevitable in the natural pattern of existence. Before Ike can acknowledge that the human being is inextricable from that pattern, he must transcend the codes and values of his white heritage which isolate him from the natural world. Though Faulkner had not yet developed his philosophy of acceptance when he wrote "Red Leaves," he has perceived that white civilization isolates man from the world of nature, and he portrays the white man as a corrupting influence on the attitudes and values of the primitive Indians. The major symbol of that corruption is the introduction of slavery into the lives of the Chickasaws. The Chickasaws have no use for slaves, and they resent the effort they must spend finding enough work to keep the slaves busy. The white man's justification for enslaving Blacks is satirized by the Indians' acceptance of the...