The defeated in this novel are all men: old Bayard, Simon, Bayard, John, Horace, Harry Mitchell; Byron Snopes; and the causes of their defeat vary: passively losing one’s self in the sensuality of women; some source of torment intrinsic to the self that leads to suicidal actions; philandering; a bad heart stressed beyond its limits by fright; or an ontological need to take risks.
But defeat is only a part of this novel, and to focus on it to the exclusion of the other elements that make up the novel is to misrepresent (mis-chart) the native territory Faulkner discovered in writing this novel and to misunderstand why it was that Faulkner was so excited by what he had created and so convinced, as he says in his letter to Liveright, that it was the “damdest best book” he would see that year, and that it was perfectly entitled. (Selected Letters, 47; Letter of 16 October 1927). Such a mis-emphasis would cause us to ignore the undefeated, to ignore the rich and varied life that flourishes everywhere in Yoknapatawpha apart from the defeated, and, especially, to ignore the comedy that everywhere militates against defeat, that says no to defeat and tragedy everywhere, here, and throughout Faulkner. The MacCallums are not defeated, even those who, like Bayard, have been to the war; the blacks as a group, always so full of life and laughter in Faulkner, are never defeated; and some, like the poor couple Bayard spends Christmas with, have a dignity and fortitude Faulkner always admired; Aunt Jenny, old Bayard before his heart attack, old man Falls, Dr. Peabody—the old folks in this novel and everywhere in Faulkner—are not defeated and are always full of life and value; and the comedy, the wonderful Faulknerian laughter, enlivens this novel with its double vision everywhere.
Faulkner had a very dialectical mind and imagination. He never saw things singly and had the ability to see around corners to the other side of things. There is no Faulkner novel without its comic voice: even the relentlessly destructive and grim As I Lay Dying is relieved of some of this grimness by the comic account of how Jewel got his horse and by its ironic, comic ending; and in the midst of the rot and corruption of Sanctuary we find, not only the comic story of the Snopes boys and the whorehouse, but the always comic behavior of its Madame and her friends; and in the anguished account of the Compsons, we have in Quentin’s section the story of the little girl who follows Quentin around, yet another comic negro, and Quentin’s foolish friends; and later, in Jason’s section, the always half comical Jason; and in Part 4, the comic account of Jason’s futile pursuit of Quentin II. One can go through all of the novels in this way and find that there was never a subject so serious—even in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s most “tragic” novel—that it could suppress this other, comic voice: shrill Shreve in the cold room at Harvard, baiting Quentin, inventing the missing parts of Sutpen’s story; Sutpen’s “niggers” tracking the fleeing French Architect; Harry Willbourne writing stories for True Confessions; all the half-crazed miners who can’t speak English at the mining camp; and maybe, most perfectly, the serio-comic tall tale of the Tall Convict set into an alternating and clearly dialectical relationship to the passionate tragic love story of Charlotte and Harry.
The insistent, recurrent comic voice is everywhere evident in Flags in the Dust and works against the tense account of Bayard’s tormented, violent life and the futility of Horace’s life (Faulkner’s account of Horace is always somewhat tinged with comedy.). Even in that part of the novel devoted to this brief doomed life, Faulkner inserts the wonderful comic account of Bayard and his drunken crew driving around serenading all of the single women in Jefferson—among them Narcissa; and in the account of Horace’s life we have the sad but comic image of the dripping smelly shrimp. Some of the comedy is at the expense of the blacks, especially the males, since Faulkner seldom used black females as a source of or occasion for comedy; some of it is generated by old Bayard, old man Falls, and Aunt Jenny, especially in the various encounters between these old folks and the doctors in the novel—Dr. Peabody, Dr. Alford, the specialist, and old Will Falls, the folk doctor. Another major source of comedy is the many encounters between whites and blacks in the Sartoris household, especially since it gives Faulkner a chance to write his masterful, usually comic, black dialect. Always good at social comedy, Faulkner treats all of the gatherings at the Mitchell household ironically and comically—whether it is a ladies party, a tennis gathering, or a birthday party for Little Belle. Even Faulkner’s treatment of the obsessed, love-sick Byron Snopes has comedy in the person of Virgil, his copyist, and the way in which Virgil cons Byron into buying him off with presents. The effect of all this comedy in all of its different forms is to break up or provide relief from the interrelated serious stories that unfold in the course of the novel: Bayard’s story from his return to his death; the Bayard-Narcissa story; Narcissa’s story; the Horace-Narcissa story; the Narcissa-Byron Snopes story; Horace’s story from his return to his marriage to Belle; and finally, the Horace-Belle Mitchell story. Or, in much simpler terms, the Bayard, Narcissa, and Horace stories, since it is these three, and the two families, that are the central concern of the novel.
When we have finished this novel and reread it a few times, we have, as usual from an experience with a Faulkner novel, a head full of memorable characters (with their stories) who stay with us more or less indefinitely. Faulkner said that his characters were always talking to him in his head and that he only wrote down their stories. In a sense, Faulkner has recreated that experience in our heads and we are left with a head full of Faulkner characters telling us their stories; often their stories continue in other novels, as with Flem Snopes, Dr. Peabody, Horace, Narcissa, Miss Jenny, and old Bayard; often, similar kinds of characters occur in later novels, as with Bayard; and of course, the same place, Yoknapatawpha, is returned to again and again until we come to know it and its inhabitants as well as our own native territory, and can call up most of its inhabitants at will and remember, in great detail, most of the hundreds of stories Faulkner told about them. What is amazing about Flags in the Dust is that so much of what was to come is in it in some form. I do not mean to suggest, as is sometimes done with early works, that all of Faulkner is here or implicit in this novel: it isn’t, and one could make a long list of what is to come that is not here because it has not been imagined yet. But the place has been imagined and described, along with some of its characters; and the different voices (the tragic, the comic, the narrative) have spoken out; and a recurrent narrative technique, later much refined and perfected by Faulkner, has been developed. Faulkner had a long and incredible creative journey to make after this novel; it would last thirty-five years and would produce seventeen more novels, a great many stories (forty-two, alone, in the Collected Stories, nine-hundred pages of them) and overall, an imaginative vision and a fictional world of great power and fecundity—probably the most remarkable creative achievement of any modern American fiction writer. Only Hemingway, perhaps, can rival him, but he does not really have either the power or complexity of Faulkner, nor did he write as many great works.
Faulkner’s discovery of his native territory and of the extent or quality of his own native talent probably account for his own great excitement at having written Flags in the Dust. The leap into greatness that occurred when he conceived and wrote The Sound and the Fury—a novel he ironically thought no one would ever publish—is less of a mystery after one has studied Flags in the Dust—or what we might think of as the novel Ben Wasson edited Faulkner’s genius and intention out of to produce Sartoris. We should also remember that Ben Wasson did this with Faulkner’s approval because Faulkner himself either wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. When Wasson tried to do the same kinds of things to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner undid them all and insisted that the novel be published as he wrote it. By The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner was sure of his own talent, the rightness of what he did, even the need for the extreme technical difficulty and virtuosity of The Sound and the Fury. That is, Faulkner knew that his genius was greater than the easy going, easy reading manner and subject matter of Flags in the Dust. Like all geniuses, he soon discovered the true nature of his genius and he knew, as all of them know, that his genius must out, no matter what form it took. The