CHAPTER ONE

THE WELL-WROUGHT URN

There is a story somewhere about an old Roman who kept at his bedside a
Tyrrhenian vase which he loved and the rim of which he wore slowly away with
kissing it.
William Faulkner, An Introduction to The Sound and The Fury1

On February 20, 1958 William Faulkner began his second term as writer in residence
at the University of Virginia by speaking to the members of Omicron Delta Kappa, Raven,
and Jefferson societies. These were the self-consciously elite of Mr. Jeffersons University,
and Faulkner approached them cautiously, expecting that they may not like what Im going
to say (Blotner, FU, 209; Railton, FVA, 145a). Insisting that he spoke in no official capacity
but as a Southerner, a private citizen, and friend of Virginia, Faulkner spoke of the
inevitability of the social change heralded by court-ordered integration of schools in the
South: another great regional confrontation, carrying with it our ridicule and shame, might
be avoided, he said, if you, the sons of Virginia, sons found and chosen worthy to be
trained to the old pattern in the University established by Mr. Jefferson to be not just a dead
monument to, but the enduring fountain of his principles of order within the human condition
and the relationship of man with man chose to lead the South toward orderly integration.
Faulkners apprehension was not disappointednearly an hour of politely contentious
reaction followed his nine-minute A Word to Virginians as the audience grilled him on
how he would have them lead the South in succumbing to Northern pressure to integrate
public schools. Within a year the public schools in Charlottesville and three other Virginia
districts were closed in the official massive resistance to federal pressure; one would not
reopen until the mid-1960s. Virginia, like the rest of the South, would endure the Civil Rights
revolution.
As a moment in the long history of the South, the evening was ephemeral, an easily
forgotten episode that (politely) passed and was of little consequence. Neither has
Faulkners appearance that night drawn more than passing attention in the biographies or
critical literaturethis despite the fact that A Word to Virginians is one of only two
instances in which Faulkner publicly invokes the name of Thomas Jefferson outside of a work

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1. Mississippi Quarterly (26.3, 1976): 410-415. The bibliography contains a list of abbreviations which
are used for the works of William Faulkner and reference works standard to Faulkner studies. The
initials WF and TJ will be used as appropriate for the proper names William Faulkner and
Thomas Jefferson.

The Well-Wrought Urn

of fiction. Joseph Blotner remembers that the talk demonstrated why the University
administration would not consider a more permanent position for Faulkner and recalls the
appearance as a stimulating evening that raised Faulkners spirits (FAB, 1685-88); Frederick
Karl merely follows the Blotner account and adds a summary of the evenings remarks (WF:
American Writer, 978-81); and Jay Parini sees a Faulkner who fails to transcend his time,
class, and racial origins (One Matchless Life, 398). To the contemporary reader/listener,
insipid racism so blandly expressed by Faulkner and his audience makes the entire
exchange rather surrealwitness at least one recent critic who decontextualizes Faulkners
flattery of the Jefferson Society in 1958 to bolster an ideological readings of whiteness in
Light in August2yet Faulkners position on this evening is the moderate one. His statement
and responses to questions sound tepid at best, little more that equivocation from the social
implications of his novels. Stephen Railton suggests that Faulkners words to the university
societies sound more like temporizing for his audience than exhortation (FVA, Writer in
Residence, n.p.); Blotner chronicles what he sees as Faulkners conservative shift in the
face of family and community pressure, continued Southern intransigence, increasing
violence, and the growing threat of federal intervention in Southern affairs. He reads these
words as a further hardening of Faulkners previously more liberal position (FAB, 1685).
Critics like Theresa Towner and Noel Polk are more generous in their judgment and, more
to the point, broadly analytical of Faulkners stance as novelist and public intellectual. If,
Towner argues, paternalism and racism are identifiable in Faulkners fiction and public
performances, these positions reside within a framework consistently critical of group-think,
the substitution of socially and culturally constructed group identity for individual identity
and self expression (Faulkner on the Color Line, 125ff). Noel Polk reads Faulkners public
statements about racial issues throughout his career as intricately bound to his increasing
anxiety regarding the loss of individual liberty:
the degree to which social, economic, and political phenomena seemed to be
conspiring to rob the individual of the capacity to act as an individual ... all of
these forces were causing, in Faulkners view, a standardization of life all
across the world and, particularly in America, an intolerable conformism that
threatened to swallow up the individual, to render the individual human being
invalid. (Dark House, 227)
Faulkners confusing statements regarding race and race relations, they argue, can best be
understood in the context of these other concerns, and understanding this complex set of
issues in Faulkners terms is key to reading Faulkners late fiction. I concur. Further, I argue
that an intense interest in the classically liberal articles of faithindividual liberty, self
reliance, the commonwealth antedate Faulkners emergence as a public intellectual; these
concerns may be read in his fiction as a powerful thematic engagement with the ideas of
Thomas Jefferson regarding individual liberty within a republic. In this sense, they constitute
Faulkners Jeffersonian critique of American and Southern history.
In 1926, when he wrote the fragment Father Abraham Faulkner named his
apocryphal town Jefferson, Mississippi, and identified it as the site of the astonishing

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2. See Carlyle Van Thompson, Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination.

The Well-Wrought Urn

byblows of mans utopian dreams actually functioning: in this case the dream is Democracy
(13).3 The emphasis here is on theoria and praxis (the utopian dream and the practical
application of the dream) and their unintended consequencesthe ideas and practices of a
more-or-less distant past acted upon through intervening time to effect a present condition.
Dream, practice, consequence: in Mississippi (metonym for the South which is itself
synecdoche for all humanity) man works out his freedom in a single, long duration, one long
is, Yoknapatawpha.
I read in all of the Yoknapatawpha cycle Faulkners dialogue with Thomas Jefferson,
the perceived author of the utopian dream.4 The conversation begins with Father
Abraham, extends through to The Reivers, and examines the practice of freedom in the
American South. Faulkner put down Father Abraham to work on Flags in the Dust, a novel
centered on the waning Southern aristocracy; these two texts, one unfinished the other
published only in severe redaction during his life, provided for Faulkner, as he told Jean
Stein in 1955, a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own. He continued,
The fact that I have moved my characters around in time successfully, at least in my own
estimation, proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition which has no existence
except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as wasonly
is. If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow (LG, 255).5
My present interest in Faulkners remarks to the University societies stems from its
rhetorical use of the situation and Jeffersons image as founder of the University of Virginia to
flatter his audience and goad them toward action. By assuming the voice of an other South,
Faulkner highlights and emphasizes a generative role for Virginia historically in the creation
of the South and appeals to his audience, naming them Jeffersons natural aristocrats and
calling them to take up that role again. The rhetorical structure of his remarks and responses
during the question-answer session suggest an understanding of Jeffersons thinking that
goes beyond merely a quick reading about the University or the Jefferson Society to prepare
for an evenings remarks. The doctrine of natural aristocracy to which Faulkner succinctly

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3. Let me simply state at this point that I find the argument that Jefferson, Mississippi was not really
named for Thomas Jefferson to be a very weak one. One might as easily argue that Madison,
Wisconson might really be named for Dolly Madisonalthough Dollywood springs to mind as an
alternativeAmerican haigeography simply will not be denied. To position oneself inside the text of
Requiem for a Nun or A Name for the City is to argue for a fiction within a fiction: it does little for
understanding and makes Pettigrews of us all.
4. (I)t fell the lot of one Southerner from Virginia to define America, writes C. Vann Woodward of
Jefferson, The definition he wrote in 1776 voiced aspirations that were rooted in his native region
before the nation was born (Burden of Southern History, 25). In 1874, another historian, Jefferson
biographer James Parton elevated Jefferson to metaphor, If Jefferson was wrong, American is wrong.
If Jefferson is right, America was right (quoted in Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 234).
5. A more pessimistic Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, life is a phenomena but not a novelty, the
same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where
in time (SL, 185). Note that in the Stein interview Faulkner refutes a Jeffersonian proposition: The
earth belongs to the living, Jefferson often asserts, to which Faulkner replies, If was existed there
would be no grief and sorrowJefferson would have every generation assume a tabula rasa, a blank
slate upon which to write its own history; for Faulkner, no generation is free from the actions of
previous generations, the slate is a palimpsest.

The Well-Wrought Urn

refers is a carefully conceived set of ideas about human nature, self-government, and the
practice of freedomall subjects that occupy Faulkners work as well. For Jefferson, the
continued existence of the republic is inextricably bound to the issues of public education
and the identification and training of natural aristocrats. The alternative is a republic
perverted to tyranny by a false aristocracy of the lucky few, those naturally superior
(Faulkner might have said lucky) individuals who, though barred from hereditary nobility
and untrained in their republican responsibilities, nevertheless prosper and assume roles of
social, economic, and political power.
Jefferson had lobbied for public education in Virginia on these grounds as early as
1778. In A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge he observes that experience
hath shewn [that] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations,
perverted it into tyranny (Political Writings, 44-46). Jeffersons remedy was two-fold. It was
necessary first to educate the general public who, armed with the cautionary tales of history,
would be capable of, and ready to exert their natural powers to defeat [ambitions]
purposes. Secondly, it was necessary to identify young men whom nature hath endowed
with genius and virtue ... without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or
circumstance and to render [them] by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to
guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens. Thus would an
educated, politically active electorate consent to be governed by a natural aristocracy
fostered at public expense. [I]t is better Jefferson argued, that such [young men] should
be sought for and educated at the common expense of all, than that the happiness of all
should be confided to the weak or wicked. The bill goes on to describe how local districts
(called hundreds) would be set up to administer public schools. Competitive
examinations would select promising students for advancement through classes of
diminishing size and expanded curriculum, and the most promising students advanced
eventually to a state university. In his sixth Annual Message to Congress (December, 1806)
Jefferson proposed the establishment of a national university which would supply those
sciences [unavailable in state universities which] contribute to the improvement of the
country, and to its preservation (Writings, 530). The last years of Jeffersons life were
occupied in large part with the foundation of the University of Virginia, the nations first
secular university where his charge to the school was to eschew the professions and
ministry and, instead, to train young leaders in practical affairs and public service.
At every level of this educational scheme, students would be taught, in addition to
basic language, math, and the applied sciences, practical morality and history. These last
two are the hinges of Jeffersons view of human nature and the practice of republican
government. Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them,
a moral instinct, in short The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he
intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social disposition, he wrote in
1814 (Writings, 1337). Practical moral education utilizes liberal education and the examples
of history to subdue the selfish propensities and enhance naturally occurring genius and
virtue at each of the many levels of social position within a graded republican society. The
education of each successive generation would, by degrees, elevate the level of moral
sensibility of the entire society; and, by fostering in the superior few deep ties of common

The Well-Wrought Urn

sentiment with their social and economic inferiors, a regime may develop natural aristocrats
along republican lineswhen this was accomplished, natural superiority could be trusted to
operate on a field of political equality.
Jefferson's political psychology and his proposed educational system are central
constituents in a concept of a government conceived to protect individuals in the free
exercise of individual, natural rights. The social matrix within which such a system would
operate was the small agrarian republic: active self-government and a republican
educational system in a nation of small agrarian republics, Jefferson argued, would preserve
both the people and the aristocrats uncorrupted by the social dependencies that naturally
develop in nations with centralized power structures, large cities, and large commercial and
manufacturing interests. Such a system revolved around the local hundred, a small, agrarian
republic, site of both school house and ballot box in Jefferson's Enlightenment dream: a
dream that casts man as the controller of his destiny, that posits individual liberty as the
basis of group identity, that holds human nature equally capable of virtue and vice but
assumes that mans virtues, his moral sensibilities, may be advanced through education and
active political participation.
Jefferson never treated these ideas systematically. Rather, they are the underlayment
of his single published work, Notes on the State of Virginia; they form the basis of proposed
legislation; they are the underlying assumptions in his efforts to build the University of
Virginia; and they find their broadest statement in his correspondence. Scattered through
volumes of public and private correspondence, the doctrine never seems to be far from his
thoughts, his faith is that a man would have to act as the land where he was born had
trained him to act (WF, LA, 587) and his hope that Virginians will be trained to act as a
republican citizens. This was Jeffersons vision of the best of all possible worldsnever fully
shared and, in fact, jealously guarded at the core of private identity, this doctrine is what I
will call Jeffersons well-wrought urn, the republican faith at the center of his public and
private careers.6
The phrase well-wrought urn typically refers to an aesthetic goal; in Faulkner
studies, invited by his numerous allusions and references to Keats poem Ode on a Grecian
Urn and to Henryk Sienkiewiczs 1895 novel Quo Vadis, the phrase is often applied to
Faulkners aesthetic. Alluding to Quo Vadis, Faulkner writes in his 1933 introduction to The
Sound and the Fury,
There is a story somewhere about an old Roman who kept at his bedside a
Tyrrhenian vase which he loved and the rim of which he wore slowly away
with kissing it. I had made myself a vase, but I suppose I knew all the time that
I could not live forever inside of it, that perhaps to have it so that I too could lie
in bed and look at it would be better; surely so when that day should come
when not only the ecstasy of writing would be gone, but the unreluctance and
the something worth saying too. Its fine to think that you will leave something

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6. See Jefferson, Writings, Letters, and The Political Writings; Gross, Thomas Jeffersons Scrapbooks;
Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson; Peterson, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue, The
Jefferson Image in the American Mind, and Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation; Yarbrough, American
Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People.

The Well-Wrought Urn

behind you when you die, but its better to have made something you can die
with. (415)
The image of an urn also lends itself well to the New Criticism; Cleanth Brooks uses the
phrase in the title of his 1947 textbook, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of
Poetry, a foundational text of the school. Brooks stresses close reading and attention to all of
the language of a poem in order to achieve an understanding of its self-contained meanings.
Form, he argues, is meaning, it resides in metaphors that communicate on levels from the
literal to the anagogical without direct recourse to knowledge (history, sociology,
biography) outside the text itself; the paradoxical language of metaphor creates an internal
structure in which the poet work[s] out various tensions by propositions, metaphors,
[and] symbols to achieve a resolution which, though not necessarily logical, is a
unification of attitudes or dispositions towards experience (207). In the two decades after
Faulkners Nobel Prize award, New Critics like Brooks, Olga Vickery, and David Minter
produced a number of valuable works of formal, textual criticism. When scholarly interest
shifted toward post-structuralism and cultural criticism, younger scholars decried the selfimposed limitations of this school, limits which, they argue, far from being apolitical, reflect
the social and political conservatism of the formalists. In 1979, Thomas McHaneys review of
Brooks Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond indicted the author and other New Critics for
finding Faulkners self-contained meaning in their own, extra-textual conservative social
thought. A decade later, Joseph Urgo rejects their search for unity in Faulkners work,
arguing that by refusing or failing to see the apocryphal nature of Faulkner's life and art, the
New Critics and many (indeed most) of the biographers and critics that follow, miss the
mark: they search for the sense of a singular, consistent character and personality, where
there exists, in fact, many Faulkners, multiple Faulkners ... a kind of revolving
personality; they misunderstand a body of work that is in its essence far more politically
challenging and politically radical ... than has yet been explicated in any systematic
fashion (Faulkners Apocrypha, 48, 4). And so, the move was on to find new meaning in
Faulkner through the application of social, political, linguistic, and philosophical thought
external to the novels. By 1992, Andr Bleikasten felt it necessary to castigate American
critics for over-dependence on critical theory and a tendency to read ideological stances
(their own or others) backwards into Faulkners text in ways that are not supported in those
texts (Faulkner and the New Ideologues, 4-7). In a fascinating move, Bleikasten falls back
on the New Critics creedthat specific moral problems in novels do not constitute
treatises on morality (Brooks, quoting Allen Tate, The Formalist Critics, 72) to make the
point that Faulkners finest novels are his fiercest, and they all refuse to serve ideological
certitudes of either camp (Bleikasten, 17-18). It appears that the critical pendulum may be
swinging toward some moderated position, for example, with the 2008 Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha Conference, Returns of the Text that urged approaches that balance
emphasis on Faulkners texts (the object of criticism) with the social, cultural, and political
ideas (which those texts can be seen to engage). Be this as it may, and finding meaning
where they will, most critics continue to recognize the urn as a central image in Faulkners
aesthetic sensibility. A few critics continue to look for meaning in Faulkner in historical
context.

The Well-Wrought Urn

Andr Bleikasten asserts that although the well-wrought urn may have been
Faulkners aesthetic ideal, his measure of success was the degree to which he failed to
achieve it (Ink of Melancholy, 356). I would suggest that Faulkner applied that same standard
of measure to the Souths attempts to achieve the well-wrought urn of Jeffersonian
republicanism. I cast Jeffersons core political and social philosophy in the easily
recognizable terms of Faulknerian aesthetics to highlight how Faulkners prose can be seen
to function as a critical re-assessment of the republican experiment that Jefferson saw at
work on the American landscape.
Mikhail Bakhtin posits mechanisms by which the novel engages other, external
discourses. The author achieves intertextual discourse in one of three ways: stylization,
parody, or the hidden polemic. In Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics Bakhtin describes these
methods: with stylization and parody, the more direct methods, an author quotes or
paraphrases the discourse of another in order to express his own ideas. The hidden
polemic, as the term implies, operates more covertly; previous discourse remains outside
the limits of an authors speech from where it acts upon, influences, and in one way or
another determines the authors discourse:
In the hidden polemic the authors discourse is directed toward its own
referential object, as is any other discourse, but at the same time every
statement about the object is constructed in such a way that, apart from its
referential meaning, a polemical blow is struck at the others discourse on the
same theme, at the others statement about the same object. A word, directed
toward its referential object, clashes with anothers word within the very object
itself. The others discourse is not itself reproduced, it is merely implied, but
the entire structure of speech would be completely different if there were not
this reaction to another persons implied words. (Problems of Dostoevskys
Poetics, 195, emphasis added )
Thus, although the earlier discourse is never mentioned, discourse in the novel may function
as both the consequence of the earlier discourse and its critique. Andr Bleikasten (quoting
Louis Althusser) suggests that such ideological engagement may be unconscious:
if ideology can be defined as the representation of the imaginary
relationship to real conditions of existence, the definition would need little
qualification to be applicable as well to the field of fantasy ... it seems
reasonable, then, to assume the combined operation in literary texts of two
modes of the unconscious, one individual and the other transindividual, one
shaped by the hazards of a mans life, the other by the accidents of history.
(For/Against an Ideological Reading, 42)
This is a particularly jargon-laden set of ideas, and although it carries the kernel of what I
want to consider, it does so only problematically and needs to be unpacked.
Bakhtin is concerned with intertextuality, the movement of ideas across time via
fictional discourse. He uses the word polemic to suggest (and, indeed his words directly
state) that polemic intertextuality is necessarily argumentativethis is to say, he
presupposes disagreement with or criticism of the original idea (and, of course, he is

The Well-Wrought Urn

headed toward Hegelian synthesis).7 The term hidden polemic implies that the author
consciously conceals this act of disagreement or criticism from an implied reader. On the
contrary, Bleikasten suggests that the act of intertextual engagement may be unconscious,
that what is hidden from the reader may well be hidden from the author as well. Moreover,
Bleikasten substitutes the equally theory-bound term ideology for hidden polemic and
follows Althussers fairly dense definition of ideology, the representation of the imaginary
relationship to real conditions of existence.
Now, let me work backwards to approach what I want to take from these erudite, but
dense, arguments. From Bleikastens re-cast of Althussers ideology, we can say that
ideology in fiction may be understood to be the representation of the authors underlying
assumptions about truth in the real world embedded into plot, character, setting, and
point of view in his fiction. What surprises me most about this statement is not its originality
but how closely it echos New Criticical theory: Carolyn Gordon and Alan Tate observe that
when the author begins to understand what it is in life that interests him most, he also
becomes aware of the techniques which enable him to create in language his fullest sense of
that interest [m]aterial and technique become in the end the same thing, the one
discovering the other. (House of Fiction, 623). Both ideas reflect Faulkners own observation
that by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use
whatever talent I might have to its absolute top (LG, 255).
Bleikastens second point, that the work of ideology in fiction might be unconscious,
underlies his study of early Faulkner (The Ink of Melancholy) and dramically modifies the
idea of the hidden polemic.8 Ideologythat set of ideas by which one defines realityhe
suggests, consists of two modes: individual experience, shaped by the hazards of a mans
life and the transindividual, the accidents of history. The two modes, the one conscious,
the other unconscious shape works of fiction as (recalling Gordon and Tate) the author
begins to understand what it is in life that interests him most. This is to say, what the author
believes about reality, both consciously and unconsciously, combine to determine how he
or she represents reality in imagined plot, character, setting, and point of view. Thus, I take
the idea that if ideology (or hidden polemic) resides in Faulkners work, its source is
Faulkners individual experience and the received culture of his region and nation as the
two converge in his writing. Further, I take such ideological response to be rarely
consciousas with the naming of Jefferson, Mississippiand more commonly the
sublimat[ion of] the actual into apocryphal. Thus, when Noel Polk writes about Faulkners
increasing anxiety about the social, economic, and political phenomena [that] seemed to
be conspiring to rob the individual of the capacity to act as an individual, I will argue, he
points to the source of authority in Faulkners fiction, the conscious and unconscious life

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7. See OED polemic, a controversial argument or discussion; argumentation against some opinion,
doctrine, etc, although usage may have softened somewhat in literary criticism, the connotation is
persistent. One concedes that the hard position of Bakhtin may be an artifact of translation,
nevertheless and since I can do no other, I take the English translation at face value.
8. Left unstated is the idea that a consciously hidden polemic rarely is hidden in fact, and that the
result is some variation on social realismat its best, Crime and Punishment, although Christ in
Concrete or Atlas Shrugged spring to mind as well.

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concerns that (returning to Gordon and Tate, yet again) enable him to create in language
his fullest sense of that interest material and technique become in the end the same thing,
the one discovering the other. And, thus, Bleikasten can further observe that:
it is not enough to know where the author stands in relation to his ideological
environment and to what extent he shares the assumptions of his class, what
really matters in the last resort are not his opinions and ideas, nor the
intentions with which he wrote his fiction, but rather the ways in which
ideology has crept into his texts, and how it worksor does not workin
them. (For/Against an Ideological Reading, 39)
The chapters following will examine the central metaphors of a number of Faulkners texts to
identify their effective ideology; whether these polemics are conscious ideology or artifacts
of the authors unconscious mind becomes moot. This is to say, I make no claims to know
what might have been the prejudices, predilections, or firm beliefs of William Faulkner.
Rather, I examine how his texts work, how the texts seem to engage that set of American
self-images and world views ensconced in Jeffersons words and remembered in Jeffersons
image as they are discovered by Faulkner in his writerly search for perspective.
This approach is in contrast to other critical work that seeks to examine Faulkners
conscious ideology, or what critics take to be a conscious ideology implied by his texts.
Myra Jehlens Class and Character in Faulkners South is a case in point. Seeking to establish
an American equivalent to the European Marxist model of literary criticisma model
internally cognizant of historical realityshe effectively reduces Faulkner texts to a single
point of view, that of a bourgeois intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century
commenting on historical and contemporary social class structures. Faulkner was obsessed
by history, she insists, and reads on the very surface of his texts a polemical engagement
with class structure and struggle (viii, 1, 3-7). In Jehlens reading, the obsessions of
characters become Faulkners obsessions; their thoughts, his thoughts; their heroes, his
heroes; their memories, his memories; their words, his words. By reading every point of
view as Faulkners point of view, Jehlen denies Faulkners remarkable empathic capacity, his
artistic command of point of view, and the function of irony in literature. And she sees only
confusion:
In principle he seems to have endorsed Jeffersonian values. Yet it is clear from
the preponderance of his major fiction of lords over peasants, that [Faulkner]
felt the lords were the crux of the matter, the ones upon whom everything
depended and foundered. The deference to a class whose way of life he
considered ethically unwholesome, and the inverse, his inability to identify
with the farmers, who, however abjectly, wore the yeomans mantle, largely
inspired the authors tragic vision of the South. (23)
Although she nods toward an engagement with Jefferson, nowhere does Jehlen define
Jeffersonian values (by which she implies her disappointed search for a proletarian
dialogue) and it becomes necessary for Jehlen to conclude that Faulkner is at best confused
and saddened, and at worse, defeated by the class struggle that she considers central to the
history that obsesses him:

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10

But the final encounter between Flem and Mink [in The Mansion] reveals the
opposing camps still held and no treaty in sight. As characters, Mink and Flem
are defined in different fictive universes. Flem emerges from the humorist
tradition to express Faulkners aristocratic fears, while he constructs Mink out
of an opposite impulse toward a kind of critical realism or, at any rate, a
critique of conventional attitudes. The two meet head-on and since neither has
been able to win a decisive victory in Faulkners mind, they destroy one
another, cancel each other out really, without achieving a resolution. Flems
defeat ... means nothing. Ratliff has learned that there arent any morals,
people just do the best they can ... the pore sons of bitches. Stevens is old
and tired, and, astonishingly, he declines to explain. (173-74)
The idea that Flem and Mink Snopes originate in different fictive universes belies Jehlens
prefacing assertion that Yoknapatawpha is a particular fictive totality, distinct in both its
structural and its more accidental features, and at the same time Faulkners projection of
another particular totality, the American South (viii cf. 174). One wonders whether it is
Stevens or Faulkner that declines to explain. In conflated readings they are one and the
same, of course.
Jehlen performs this same model-driven conflation in her savage critique of The
Unvanquished. Faulkner constructs this narrative on the complex interplay of time and point
of view that highlights the generational pressures that create Bayard Sartoris as a man. But
Jehlen will have none of it. Insisting that there is no way, I think, that one can read it
ironically; she believes that the novel dramatizes the limitation on [Faulkners] vision
which the John Sartoris logos imposed (49) and judges The Unvanquished to be
straightforward apology for the Cavalier Tradition. Limiting Faulkners language to this
single, fragile thread of socio-historical polemic locks Jehlens Faulkner forever under the
spell of the Cavalier Tradition, obsessed by a history of past failures: that meager and
fragile thread, Grandfather said, by which the little surface corners and edges of men's
secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into
the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the
last time and will not be heard then either (AA, 208). Thus do Faulkners characters argue
against further reduction of fragile languagewords that, at best, dont ever fit even what
they are trying to say at (AILD, 115).
In more recent criticism, Kevin Railey addresses Jeffersonian ideology directly; he
defines natural aristocracy as an ideal that joins ideas of equal rights and opportunities with
the belief in a naturally aristocratic character which would enable one to earn respect and
admiration through merit and achievement and sees this ideal as constitutive of Faulkners
authorial intention (Natural Aristocracy, 111-12). Although Railey credits Jefferson with the
phrase natural aristocracy his definition has its origins in the Gilded age, and its best
examples might be Horatio Alger or Cornelius Vanderbilt: it reflects the subtle shift of
American self-image that, in our literature, replaces Natty Bumppos drive for individual
freedom with George Babbitts boosterism. That is to say, Railey uses Jeffersons term as it
has been acted upon through more than a century of American history. Notable for its
absence in Raileys definition is Jeffersons insistence on education within a republican
system. Education acts to create the natural aristocrat from the raw materials of a republican

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society. Like Jehlen, Railey believes that Faulkner was obsessed with history and with his
place in history, (ix) and he too presents a Faulkner confused by competing ideologies
for Railey, paternalism and liberalism. He posits the natural aristocracy as Faulkners
ideological compromise between the alternatives of southern paternalism and
liberalism, both of which he leaves largely undefined.
Scholars of American history find earlier origins for Jeffersons (and, by extension
what only may have been Faulkners) ideas about natural aristocracy. Edmund Morgan
examines the central paradox of American history ... how a people could have developed
the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American
Revolution and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that
denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day (American Slavery, American
Freedom, 4-5). Morgan and Kathleen Brown (Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious
Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia) find in colonial Virginia the nexus
for ideas of the free and unfree in what Brown calls the paradigm shift that follows Bacons
Rebellion (1675-6). In Virginias de jure slave laws and administrative changes are located
new definitions of race, class, and gender. All were fundamentally unstable identity markers
in Elizabethan England that had become even more unstable in the New World; in the new
labor-defined social and political order, power and privilege devolve to white men (the
right to vote, bear arms, own property, discipline dependents) as the natural result of
their race and gender. And the relative success of laborrather, the labor that a white man
can muster within his dependent household (spouse, offspring, indentures, slaves)results
in property, the new natural marker of masculinity. Political, social, economic power
becomes the province of the white, male property holder whose position is the natural
result of his body and the bodies of those to whom he has access. Ira Berlin traces from this
nexus the formation of the slave society in the American South. The slave society is linked
with large-scale commodity production within an international market. With the discovery of
such a commodity, slaveholders capitalized production and monopolized resources to gain
economic ascendancy. With economic power comes political power, and slaveholders
marginalized all other social classes: enslaved populations grow while other forms of labor
decline and producers dependent on their own or other-than-slave labor are driven from
productive areaspoor whites fled Barbados after the sugar boom, small planters and
herdsmen abandoned the Carolina low country when rice became the dominant crop,
southern yeomen abandoned the Southern blackbelt for the hill country peripheral to the
cotton kingdom. In the slave society slavery stood at the center of economic production,
and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations: husband and
wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student ... from the most
intimate connections between men and women to the most public ones between ruler and
ruled, all relationships mimicked those of slavery (Many Thousands Gone, 8).
Emerging from that nexus also can be seen the yeoman class of free white property
holders whose economic output was not based in slavery. Jefferson scholars Peter Onuf and
Jean Yarborough suggest that understanding the role of this agrarian class in Jeffersons
thought is key to understanding the natural aristocracy doctrine and the practice of
republican self-government. These small holders are they who are created equal and

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endowed with unalienable rights, the class of potential natural aristocrats whose
education in republican principles will prevent the rise of a pseudo aristoi. Frank Owsley
and Steven Hahn examine the role of this class in Southern history. Jefferson biographer
Merrill Peterson observes that viewed abstractly, [Jeffersons republican ideology] was
founded on the ideas of the Enlightenment ... [but] had a traditional base in English law and
government [and] were virtual mirror images of emerging social and political realities
only dimly perceived before the birth of revolutionary consciousness (TJ & the New Nation,
92-93). This is to say, Raileys natural aristocrat is not Jeffersons, only may be Faulkners,
and certainly is a Jeffersonian ideal acted upon by intervening time.
In fairness to Raileys argument, one should note that his stated subject is neither
Faulkners fiction nor Jeffersons natural aristocracy doctrine. Rather, its goal is identifying
and historicizing Faulkners specific authorial ideology from a very particular theoretical
starting point (ix-xi). There seems to be, in fact, little difference between Raileys position
and Jehlens. Like Jehlen, Railey assumes that conscious authorial intent places social
polemic at the surface of every narrative, and he relies on the predictive value of neoMarxist interpretive theory to find it. Other criticsVickery and Mentor for example, and
more recently Polk and Goddensay a good deal that seems particularly contrary to
Raileys argument. They suggest that Faulkner consistently and persistently questions all
received assumptions. I will argue that Faulkners texts contain a critique of Jeffersons
natural aristocracy doctrine, a doctrine which relates to paternalism and liberalism not as a
compromise between the two (synthesis, as Railey implies) but more accurately as the
historical source of both. I have a good deal less interest in what Faulkner believed and a
good deal more interest in what is revealed when we read his texts through a very different
lens. That lens is fictional action within historical context, and it reveals not obsession with
history but engagement with the movement of ideasideas about individual liberty, self
reliance, republican citizenship, the commonwealththrough time. History becomes the
medium through which the republic invents and reinvents itself in historical time and,
apocryphally, in Faulkners fictive cosmos.
In the chapter immediately following, I read Faulkners short story A Name for the
City and its retelling as the first narrative section of Requiem for a Nun. Concentrating on
the several points of view from which this tall tale is told, I find a multi-faceted story that
parodies its historical context. The story that emerges seeths around that moment in time
when a second generation of Americans inherit the republic from its founders; barely
remembered and imprecisely understood history emphasizes the fragility of their utopian
dreams in this case the dream is Democracy (FA, 13).
In Chapter 3, I read The Unvanquished to discover its critique of a false aristocracy of
slaveholders. This self-serving practice of freedom for the slave master severely limits the
choices available to their chattels, certainly, but as well the women and children of their own
class, and every member of every other white class. When the pent-up tensions of the slave
society are released by war, the effect of this practice of freedom is ultimately both self
destructive and multi-generational in the scope of its destruction. Try as he might, the boy
Bayard of The Unvanquished fails to emerge from his fathers shadowBayard Sartoris is
doomed by family heritage and Southern history to become the old banker of Flags in the

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Dust. And, try as it might, the South fails to revise a practice of freedom that requires the
enslavement of one son to ensure the freedom of the other.
When the slave society evolves into a closed society, maintaining the illusion of
conformity requires a community hegemony so severe that no real freedom remains for
either race. In Light in August (Chapter 4) I read a community in media res, violently
enforcing its racial and sexual taboos by shaping the children who will (or will not) become
its members just as its planing mill shapes lumber. So sharp are the cutting edges of
hegemony in the closed society that its rejected children, the troubles of Jefferson, survive
only so long as they seem to conform. If hope remains for any member of this society, that
hope lies in the exercise of individual libertythe will to forget present and past hatreds
and taboos, to live in the present, and to look for the originals of human virtue not in group
identity but in individual virtue and vice.
Finally, in The Hamlet, I read Faulkners critique of Southern history that encapsulates
what Steven Hahn calls the larger meaning of the Civil War: the reduction of Jeffersons
natural aristocracy of yeoman farmers to the poor white trash of the South (The Roots of
Southern Populism, 111). A generation after the Civil War, yeoman farmers try to forget their
history. In this period of economic upheaval they claim, but have forgotten how to practice
freedom. Their forgetfulness and a wave of economic change hearld the rise of an economic
giant and a labor system that reduces yeoman farmers to tenant farmers, a race that is of
the land and yet rootless owing nothing to the soil, giving nothing to it and getting
nothing of it in return (FA, 19).
In a 1955 interview with Cynthia Grenier, Faulkner responded to a question about the
origins of his ideas, There is always a moment in experiencea thoughtan incident
thats there. Then all I do is work up to that moment. I figure what must have happened
before to lead people to that particular moment, and I work away from it, finding out how
people act after that moment (LG, 220). I carefully define present to be the moment of
narration of a particular text; not always the present of narrated time or of compositional
time, it is the moment of story-telling. That moment is structured from a particular vantage
point, a rhetorical register of character, not authorial, perception. Faulkner writes neither
narrative history nor simplistic allegorical polemic; rather, he tells a story from the point of
view of a character imagined for that purpose. To understand the story and derive meaning
from it is the task of the reader. Hugh Ruppersburg observes that Faulkner, like James Joyce,
place[s] a considerable burden on the reader [and] those who can meet the challenges of
his fiction find ample recompense for their efforts (Voice and Eye in Faulkners Fiction, 29).
If I bring something new to the challenge of reading Faulkner, it is a methodology that sifts
his fictive truth through the filter of historical reasoning, a synthesis that is itself
constructed of historical and fictive truths received through the work of other historians
and literary critics. In this sense the enterprise is neither fish nor fowlneither intellectual
history nor literary criticismalthough it partakes of both. I do not claim a definitive reading
of any Faulkner or Jefferson text, nor, in fact, would I suggest that such a definitive reading
exists, try as we do to find it. If our intellectual history teaches us nothing else, it should flatly
refute that either mans work is reducible to a single, definitive reading. Moreover, I freely
admit that I bring a good deal of that which is not clearly written in Faulkners texts to a

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discussion of them. If, as I claim, Faulkners narratives are constructed around central
metaphors which engage Jeffersonian ideas about the practice of freedom, and if (as I also
claim) the link between Faulknerian metaphor and Jeffersonian ideal is created by historical
context, then that engagement and those metaphors come into clear focus when one
examines and re-imagines the historical contextthis is to say, when the reader is at least
nearly as familiar with American and Southern history as Faulkner surely was.
In thus proceeding, I have tried to take to heart James B. Carothers warning about
the risks inherent in approaching the Faulkner canon from the basis of a single or
autonomous critical position: when [w]e assume that a writer of Faulkners stature is
essentially self-consistent, that his writings are all of a piece, and we assume that the
readers art is to discover the principles of this self-consistency in the repeated subjects,
themes, rhetorical strategies, or styles of the successive texts,that is to say, when one
finds meaning in Faulkner through an argument from designthen one runs the risk of
misreading or misunderstanding the design, or worse, of assuming a design where none
exists. Despite the fact that, as Carothers shows, Faulkner leads one toward such a position,
Faulkner also declines to be responsible for the kind of internal consistency that this
position leads the reader to expect. The problem, as Carothers sees it lies in the fact that
facts in one of Faulkners works rarely match neatly with facts of other works, and the
reader is left with the not inconsiderable task of deciding how to judge the work on a scale
that runs from a single, wholly integrated story to wholly autonomous works of fiction
(Faulkners Short Stories, 3-5). And, I would add a corollary: that the effective ideology in one
of Faulkners works does not unite neatly with the effective ideologies of other works, and
the reader is left with the not inconsiderable task of deciding how to judge the work on a
scale that runs from wholly in agreement with Jeffersons idealism to wholly in opposition to
it.
In the matter of narrative fact, I choose to embrace Faulkners textual inconsistencies,
bowing to the artists prerogative to use his materials as he sees fit and, perhaps more
importantly, viewing inconsistency as a function of verisimilitude. Taking into account all of
the Yoknapatawpha novels and stories, internal consistency would constitute a kind of
created aesthetic that only serves to emphasize the fictionality, the made or crafted nature of
Faulkners fictive universe. Indeed, this seems to have been Malcolm Cowleys goal in
arguing for consistency during the preparation of The Portable Faulkner and the motive of
Robert Haas and James Meriwether in their efforts to adjust dates in the Snopes trilogy a
decade later: to showcase Faulkners craft. To my mind, Faulkners urn is to be received as
we receive reality; we learn about our world piecemeal, from many viewpoints, in many
voices with many agendas (none of which are its creators) and in this inconsistency
negotiate our reality. The same can be argued for verisimilitude in Faulkners invented
universe, this cosmos seems real in large part because it is not consistent: recall, for
example, Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon, the two of them creating between
them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had
never existed at all anywhere (AA, 250).
In like fashion, if the Jeffersonian critique of Flags in the Dust were merely repeated in
The Hamlet or The Reivers, Faulkner would have shown little or no movement in relation to

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what I claim to be the thematic subject of his texts, a subject which itself shows considerable
movement in the American mind during this period. Addressing Snopes inconsistency in
particular (and, I believe, inconsistency in general) Faulkner tells us differently in his
prefatory note to The Mansion, the author has learned, he believes, more about the human
heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with
them that long time, he knows the characters of this chronicle better than he did then (331).
The inferential nature of the evidence I seek bespeaks its own hazards. Forrest
McDonald observes in his preface to Novus Ordo Seclorum, his intellectual history of the
Constitution, that the whole enterprise of intellectual history is judged by many to be
impressionistic and unverifiable attempts to know the thoughts of others. McDonald refutes
the notion; we think in the patterns of others routinely, and especially we do this in
academiawhat is involved is this: thinking takes place in symbolic codes or languages,
and we can learn to think in languages that are not native to us, whether these be Latin,
music, mathematics, legalese, or eighteenth-century English (x-xi ) or, I would add,
Faulknerian rhetoric.
Thomas Jefferson presents another unique set of problems for the modern reader, as
Peter Onuf explains:
The great lesson of the republican synthesis is that although Jefferson and
his contemporaries were the founders of the American political tradition and
the inventors of the first recognizably modern political partiesthey
thought, wrote, spoke, and acted in an entirely different world from ours. In
fact, the political and constitutional continuities between their time and ours
have been the greatest obstacles to understanding: because we still use them,
we think we know what all the words mean. But Jeffersons obsessive fears of
power and corruption and his notions of liberty, virtue, personal and
political independence, and equality were all embedded in a view of the
world astonishingly unfamiliar to modern readers. (85, emphasis added )
That I depend on the work of Jefferson scholars to approach the original context and intent of
his words and actions is necessary, since to achieve such expertise is time-consuming and
exhaustive. Moreover, it is beyond credulity to believe or assert that Faulkner might have
gained such expertise without leaving clear and undeniable evidence of his Jefferson
scholarship. No such evidence exists. Quite to the contrary, as Peter Nicolaisen is quick to
point out, Faulkner exhibited no more than a passing interest in the historical Jefferson
(WFs Dialogue with Thomas Jefferson, 64). Nevertheless, as a number of Faulkner
scholars have observed, it is always the safe bet to assume that Faulkner is familiar with the
idea in play. The idea in play is the practice of freedom, the always, already complex
interplay of individual liberty with life in society. The playing field is the space between
individualsthe commonwealthan arena that both separates and unites individuals in the
practice of freedom. Ideas about commonwealth and ideas about language begin to merge
in a dance of existence and representation; together, the two form a paradox at the center of
Jeffersons well-wrought urn and Faulkners, and that paradox surely continues to occupy
center stage in the (always, already) ongoing creation of our own individual and collective
identities.

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