Unit VII—pp. 339-347—returns us to Horace and once again juxtaposes masterfully done episodes involving these two opposing but similarly defeated males. Horace’s story is finished off here. It is, somewhat ironically, spring. Horace is now married to Belle and has begun his “new” life with her by moving to another nearby town. Little Belle is with them. Horace is writing Narcissa a letter when the Unit begins; much of the Unit consists of Horace’s ironic meditation upon his fate (futility, defeat) and what he takes to be the fate of mankind. Just as Bayard’s last Units (VI and VIII) consist mostly of actions, so Horace’s consist mostly of thoughts with an occasional ironic action. After he finishes his letter, which ends with the ironic “Belle sends love, O Serene,” Horace goes off to mail it and pick up the shrimp that are shipped in once a week for Belle’s delectation. Our last image of Horace is of him walking home with the dripping box of shrimp. “C. S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., LL.D., C.S.” (345)—he thinks to himself as he lugs the shrimp home, stopping now and then to change hands. His ironic mediation on the fate of man continues and the Unit ends as he approaches his house, with Belle, red hair piled up on her head, still in a negligee, watching his approach suspiciously from the window, full of anger and frustration and “sullen discontent” at her present situation. It’s a great section. “She had ghosts in her bed” Horace says as he mounts the steps to his house.
Unit VIII—pages 347 to 358—takes us back, first indirectly (through postcards and telegrams), to Bayard in his flight across country, to Mexico, to Rio, back to San Francisco, then to Chicago and Dayton. In Chicago, we encounter him again, directly, in the fury and violence of his despair and torment. He is in a bar in Chicago and so potentially violent that he scares even the girl he is with. It is in this same bar that we also see the defeated Harry Mitchell—a rather neat touch on Faulkner’s part. The last we see of Bayard is when, testing a defective experimental plane, he crashes when the wings come off. It is June 20, 1920. Bayard’s story is finished and his tormented life has come to an end. What he could not accomplish in the war, or in his car, he finally accomplishes here, dying, as his twin did, in an airplane.
Unit IX—pages 361 to 370—is devoted to the Sartoris women, the survivors. Coincidentally, we are told that Simon has been killed philandering, which also brings his story to an end. The only story that begins here at the end is that of Benbow Sartoris, born the day his father was killed. But it is a story that is never completed by Faulkner. It is the women, the survivors, he is interested in here. We follow Aunt Jenny first. With her usual good sense and fortitude, after yet another death of yet another Sartoris male, she takes to her bed to recover her equilibrium. After she has done this, she visits the graveyards—both black and white—and the graves of all the dead Sartorises, as well as that of Simon. It gives us a nice symbolic image of one main concern of this novel. (Horace has also gone into his own graveyard with Belle.) We now switch to Narcissa, who has just had her son christened Benbow Sartoris hoping, we assume, that by avoiding John and Bayard she can somehow help him avoid the fate of all the previous Sartoris males. The novel began with old Bayard and old man Falls and the heroic legends of the Sartoris males and Confederate generals. We end here with the last three adult Sartoris males all dead (John, Bayard, old Bayard) and with the other significant male in the novel, Horace, defeated (if not dead). At the very end, we have Aunt Jenny, who has survived all these dead males, and Narcissa, who has the last Sartoris male we ever hear anything about. Everything is really brought to a conclusion here. Bayard has come and gone, into and out of Narcissa’s life; into and out of life itself. Narcissa returns to her “serenity” with her son, not really sorry Bayard is gone. Aunt Jenny, indomitable as ever, carries on and leaves us, at the very end, with an appropriate wry, ironic comment on Sartoris males—fools and scoundrels all, she says, whatever their first names.
By the end of this novel, you certainly have to wonder what the two families portrayed here—the Sartorises and the Benbows—have come to, and why. One can see two ideals, two sets of values operating in these families that Faulkner is going to come back to again and again: the heroic ideal of the Sartorises which always manifests itself in and must realize itself in action; and the intellectual, idealistic, word-centered ideal of Horace Benbow, which manifests in itself and realizes itself in inaction, in an inability to resolve certain kinds of contradictions, in passivity, in an excessive verbalization of life itself. We see this with great clarity in Mr. Compson and Quentin (in both of his novels) and later, in Hightower. I suppose we also see it in Darl, who certainly perceives the contradictions but cannot resolve them. And, of course, we see many variations of the action characters in Faulkner, some, like Bayard, driven to destruction, as Joe Christmas and Thomas Sutpen are, some just driven to action, as Jewel is. Jason is the ironic man of action in The Sound and the Fury. Caddy is the woman of action in that novel, driven, as Bayard is, but in a much different way and by very different motives.
True to its title, Flags in the Dust takes two families and shows how each, by a very different route, arrives at defeat in the male line. Bayard is no worse than Horace and, in the end, though dead, is no more self–destructive than Horace with his passive slide into death in life. Bayard’s death and defeat are simply more dramatic, more sensational. Faulkner certainly knew what he was doing when he paired these two polarized male characters, putting different causes of destruction and defeat (non-generative being) in each of them and then, in the course of the novel, following each to his appointed end. Horace has no more chance of avoiding defeat than Bayard does; whether defeat comes at the hands of a woman or a defective airplane really makes little difference here. Bayard is dead at the end of the novel and Faulkner gives Horace another chance in Sanctuary, only to defeat him once again in an even more terrible and conclusive way in that novel.
What Faulkner achieved by organizing this novel as he did was to combine the linear movement of the narrative, which, in this novel, tends to move steadily forward in time with only occasional flashbacks, with a kind of clustering effect around each of the main characters or ontological centers: old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Bayard, Belle, Horace, Byron Snopes. With the exception of Byron Snopes, these main characters are all in a variety of relationships to each other and come together periodically in the course of the novel. One way to understand what Faulkner is doing in this novel is to diagram the clusters for each of the main characters by indicating the significant relations for each in the novel. Byron Snopes only has two significant relations, and those are with Narcissa and Virgil, his letter writer. Horace really only has two significant relationships, and those are with his sister Narcissa and with Belle. There are minor relationships with Harry Mitchell, the husband he compromises, with Joan, Belle’s sister, and his father, Will Benbow (long dead). Narcissa has many more relationships: with Belle, her rival, with Aunt Jenny, with Byron Snopes, with Aunt Jenny and old Bayard, and of course with Bayard. Old Bayard probably has the most: with old Will Falls, with Dr. Peabody; with Aunt Jenny; with Simon; with Bayard, his grandson; with the other household blacks; with his father, Colonel Sartoris; with John, his other grandson. Aunt Jenny is like old Bayard, but has a much more involved relationship with Narcissa. Like old Bayard, she is one of the connectors between the past and the present. Bayard, like Narcissa, has a whole series of very complex relationships: to his dead brother, whose death he blames himself for; to his dead first wife and son, whose deaths he also blames himself for; to old Bayard, whose death is in fact his fault and hence another source of guilt for him, another part of his doom and torment; to the MacCallums, with whom he hunts and whom he identifies with his twin, John; to Suratt and Hub; to Simon and Isom, through the car; to Aunt Jenny, naturally, who, with old Bayard, raised him; and of course to Narcissa, who brought him a brief reprieve from his torment, a reprieve that is depicted in wonderful scenes of quiet domesticity, hunting, and farming—even including a dinner which Horace attends; and finally with his car which, accident by accident, marks his progress toward his appointed end when he deliberately tests what is clearly a defectively designed plane and crashes when the wings come off.
Ontologically, Bayard, Narcissa, Horace, and, perhaps, Belle, are the most interesting