The genius of a novelist, like that of a playwright, expresses itself in the creation of characters and, additionally, in a novelist, in telling stories. This novel is full of wonderful stories: in fact, it begins with one about Colonel Sartoris and the Yankees, as told (shouted) by old man Falls, and, overall, tells part of the story of the Sartoris family (to be told more fully, later, in The Unvanquished) and most of the story of the Benbow family, more of which will be told later in Sanctuary, especially the part having to do with Horace, as he tries, with his usual futility, to escape his useless and demeaning life with Belle, the voluptuary, and the part having to do with Narcissa’s helping to defeat her brother’s efforts to do something good and useful in his life. Whatever this novel is about is contained in the stories of these two families and in the wonderful comedy that Faulkner always made a part of his novels.
Bayard’s tragic story is told in the context of old Bayard, Aunt Jenny and the Sartoris family history in general. The Sartoris family history is primarily a history of Sartoris males (all named John or Bayard) who die violently. As old Bayard says, he is the only Sartoris male to live past fifty. Colonel John Sartoris was shot on the streets of Jefferson in 1873 when he has fifty. His brother Bayard was killed in the Civil War in 1862 at twenty-four. Old Bayard’s son dies in 1901 of yellow fever at an early age. One of his sons, John (Bayard’s twin), is killed in 1918 at age twenty-five when he is shot down by the Germans in World War I. Old Bayard dies in 1919 of a heart attack in Bayard’s car at age seventy. Bayard dies in 1920 when he crashes, test piloting a defective plane, at age twenty-seven. The only surviving Sartoris is Benbow Sartoris, born the day his father dies, about whom we really know nothing.
Bayard and his twin, John, seem to have been born with some self-destructive impulse in their genes, some impulse or code of values which required them to always be testing themselves, to always do the wild, often violent, and dangerous thing, even the foolhardy thing. John must certainly have known that he had no chance at all against German planes which could fly higher and faster than his plane; Bayard certainly knew that driving as he did put him always at risk, just as riding the nearly wild stallion, or flying a defective experimental plane did. They are romantic self-destructive selves and seem to share in Faulkner’s idea of the kind of heroic self he always identified with the Confederate Army. But there is more going on with Bayard than this. We do not really know enough about Bayard (or John) to say with any precision exactly what they were before they went off to the war. We know only that they did wild, crazy things, at home and away at college; that they were passionately devoted to each other; that, as he does later, Bayard found some satisfaction and apparent temporary repose in his love for his first wife. What we really know about Bayard dates from the death of his brother, a traumatic event to which he returns over and over again and for which he blames himself. It seems to be the primary source of his torment and the event the effects of which he only escapes from momentarily with Narcissa. Before Narcissa, Bayard not only punishes and threatens himself but victimizes others, usually with the car. If he only put himself at risk, as he does when he crashes in the plane, that would be one thing; but he is always endangering others by his actions, in a classic scapegoating pattern of action. It is never a question in this novel of whether Bayard will kill himself, but only when, and who else, before he dies in one of his accidents. It is the death of his grandfather, in yet another car accident, that seals his doom and precipitates the final sequence of actions that result in his death. What we have in Bayard is the first of Faulkner’s driven, tormented, guilt-ridden, doomed selves, one who is both destructive and destroyed, apparently because it is in the nature of his character to be this way and because some set of values he commits himself to causes him to act in this way.
Narcissa is the very opposite of Bayard, having led a serene, quiet, secluded, symbolically incestuous, life with her beloved brother Horace. Into this serene and quiet life comes Bayard, her antithesis, and, in spite of herself, Narcissa is roused to passion and falls in love with Bayard. It is a brief happy conjunction for both of them when it finally occurs, and an event that occurs over and over again in Faulkner’s later novels, most interestingly, probably in The Wild Palms. Narcissa experiences something she would never have known without Bayard: passionate love—always a good thing in Faulkner; and Bayard, for a brief period of time, is free of his torments and reprieved from his doom. Exactly who is at fault and how the accident in which old Bayard dies comes about is never really made clear; what is clear, is that in Bayard’s case, in the case of most Sartoris males, fate is fate and Bayard will take his guilt-laden self into non-being and end his torment in the only way available to him. He tries flight, alcohol and sex first, but none of these work. As in the case of Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson, only death will do the job.
Narcissa is described in this way at the end of the novel:
All of Narcissa’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry. (FD 368)
This passage nicely sums up the paradoxes or perhaps the complexities of loving and living with someone like Bayard—a sort of time bomb set to go off at some unknown time in the future. Even if one loved him passionately, as Narcissa most certainly did, it would be a relief to have him dead, and she does after all have their son.
If Bayard is the explosive violence that not only threatens him but everyone around him (Simon, Isom, Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, Narcissa, and anyone he happens to meet on the road in his car), Horace Benbow is the very opposite, just as Belle is the opposite of Narcissa. Just as Bayard abruptly breaks into Narcissa’s life, Belle, always described as a narcotic, even a kind of poisonous flower, slowly, surely insinuates her sensual, sexual self into Horace’s life and takes him over until his essentially passive, nearly useless life is further reduced to serving her needs. As Narcissa correctly says, Belle is “dirty” and Horace smells of her. Why Belle wants Horace is never quite clear. But Horace as a character is quite clear and clearly a forceful contrast to Bayard. Both Bayard and Horace are useless, the one because he is so tormented and destructive and the other because he is so passive and incapable of any kind of useful social action. Bayard is always described as doomed; Horace is always described as futile, as the embodiment of knowledge that cannot or does not want to act, as a self that has no ambition beyond making beautiful useless glass vases, as a lawyer whose whole practice is tending to the wills and minor legal affairs of the rich, as a male who, until the advent of Belle, was content with a symbolic incestuous relationship with his sister. Faulkner tells us that Horace was lost in words, (Bayard, we are told, never read any book); that he believed too much in words, that, in a sense, he was seduced by words just, as, later, he was seduced by Belle (and briefly, by her sister). If Bayard is overdefined, Horace is underdefined, and both are defeated. The only difference in their defeats is a matter of degree: Bayard is dead; Horace is dead to the world outside of his house. By the end of Sanctuary, when Faulkner returns to this pitiful ineffectual character, he is as good as dead.
Narcissa survives both Horace and Bayard; she even survives the odd titillations of Byron Snopes’s letters which, in a nice symbolic touch by Faulkner, she keeps in her lingerie drawer. She survives, just as Aunt Jenny has survived the deaths of all the male Sartorises and the violence that has characterized the lives of all the males except old Bayard who,