In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

EIGHT Faulkner's Sons of the Fathers: How to Inherit the Past n Allen Tate's The Fathers, the characters are taken from a home and heritage that had seemed immune to rime and "scattered into the new life of the modern age where they cannot even find themselves" (TF, 5). The young protagonist who feels most keenly this disruption alternates between the examples of two father figures as he seeks to find himself. His actual father, like the past of which he is a part, has become too formal and too remote to touch him deeply: attractive in his idealism and innocence, still Major Buchan "could not allow anybody to be personal." Major Buchan cannot fathom or survive the present, and so Lacy follows George Posey into the modern age, not so much by conscious choice as in puzzled response to circumstance. George Posey is a man who typifiesthe present moment cut off from time. The South with its codes, its "elaborate rigamarole—his own forfeited heritage," can only tease him "like a nightmare in which the dreamer dreams a dream within a dream within another dream of something that he cannot name" (TF, 180). Lacy Buchan is too much an heir of his tradition not to be repelled by George's excessive,insensitive vitality, yet losing George as a model for dealing with the present throws him into a crisis of anguish that is temporarily resolved when he yields to the influence of the past, as it is projected not by his ineffectual father but by the vibrant image of his grandfather who appears in a kind of dream. What Lacy inherits from this dream of the past is the knowledge that there is a proper mode of 153 I 154 TheDream ofArcady vision that does not lose its relevance by its association with times that are gone. Grandfather Buchan can teach Lacy through an old fable, he can explain the motivations of George Posey by explainingJason and the golden fleece, so that what he explains most clearly is that a man's identity is not isolated in the present but is defined by its connections through time to all who have lived before. Grandfather Buchan asserts through the relevance of his vision the necessity of history as well as the unity and permanence of man's life in time. In another story by another Fugitive-Agrarian, Robert PermWarren 's "Blackberry Winter," another young man turns between two father figures at the critical moment when he is on the verge of discovering the true nature of time. The world of his actual fatherwas a quiet, changeless place where time, he thought, "is not a movement , aflowing,a wind then, but.. . rather, a kind of climate in which things are," a thing like a tree "which is alive and solid."1 It was aworld of childhood whose passing is symbolized in the story by the cold spell of weather in June and by a flooded river that people go down to the bridge to watch, since "it made something different from the run of days." And with the flood, into a boy's life which has been protected by a caring father and a stable home, comes a tramp, walking up the path "like a man who has come a long way and has a long way to go." The boy can discern "no place for him to have come from." Like George Posey of TheFathers, the tramp is a man without the identity that comes from place and people. He belongs to the sheer forward movement of time which, like a flood, pushes everything away from its established order. The boy's mother sets the tramp to work repairing the damage done by the flood, a job for which he is palpably unsuited, and when the father returns, the tramp is sent away. No great alteration has taken place in the boy's actual existence, yet the experience here recorded is the initiation into essential knowledge of life as change and disruption. The boy's father cannot permanently keep the tramp of time from the door, and it will be this out-of-place, cc unmemorable" representative of the alien future whom the boy means when he says, at the end of the story, 'That was what he said, for me not to follow him. But I did follow him, allthe years." 1. Robert Penn Warren, "Blackberry Winter," in The Circus in theAttic and Other Stones (New York...

Share