I
have to say that probably my favorite writer of the modern era is WilliamFaulkner. He is a masterful storyteller,
possesses a deep understanding of human nature and psychology, is
breathtakingly innovative in form and style, and captures the sounds and
rhythms of American English, albeit in the southern style. I need to make a point to read at least a
story or two every year from his Collected Stories. So I’m going to go through them like I do
with Hemingway, starting now. Quotes are taken from the Collected Stories edition.
First
up may be his finest of his short stories, “Barn Burning.” You can also read the story online if you
wish too, at William Faulkner Books
site, which happens to include “Barn Burning” in its entirety, here.
Several
of Faulkner’s works center on groups of families in recurring works set in a
fictional county in northern Mississippi which is a stand in for his home
county. “Barn Burning” brings in the
Snopes family, and as Wikipedia entry says, this short story is a prequel to
the Snopes family trilogy of novels.
“Barn
Burning” is a story about a young boy, Sarty, trying to understand his Civil
War veteran and arsonist father, Abner Snopes, through the final events of
Abner’s life, the events that led him to be shot and killed. Here is the great opening paragraph:
The store in which the Justice
of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his
nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more:
from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid,
squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the
lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the
silver curve of fish-this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic
meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts
momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a
little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of
blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his
father and his father's enemy (our enemy
he thought in that despair; ourn! mine
and hisn both! He's my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of
them that is, because his father had said no word yet:
"But what proof have
you, Mr. Harris?"
It
is absolutely amazing how Faulkner can go from third person point of view and
shift to first on a dime. There is so
much packed in that little paragraph that I need to parse it almost sentence by
sentence. Mr. Harris is in court before
a judge accusing Abner of burning down his barn. We see the events through Sarty’s eyes. The boy smells cheese and fish, a sensation
that will be integrated into his memory and become associated with despair and
grief. That despair and grief is then
called “the old fierce pull of blood,” and so through memory of family is
memory of grief of which a blood bond enslaves the character. The story starts with in court
confrontational setting, Mr. Harris becomes the enemy, not for anything he did
to Sarty, but for being enemy of his father, dramatically characterized through
the boys parenthetical thoughts, “our
enemy he thought in that despair; ourn!
mine and hisn both! He's my father!”
Let
me provide the plot of the story briefly:
(1)
In court over the Harris barn burning.
The judge can’t find the evidence against Snopes but tells him to leave
town.
(2)
Snopes packs his family up, moves to a new shack as a tenant farmer under a
rich landlord.
(3)
On his way to the landlord’s mansion, Snopes steps in horse dung and
deliberately wipes his foot on the landlord’s carpet.
(4)
The carpet is brought to the Snopes shack to be cleaned, and out of spite
Snopes ruins the carpet and tosses it into the mansion parlor.
(5)
Snopes is back in court over the carpet and the judge rules he must pay for it.
(6)
In retaliation, Snopes burns down the landlord’s barn.
(7)
Snopes is killed at the scene of the barn burning.
What
we get is a portrait of Abner Snopes in the course of three or four days events
through the eyes of his son. So what is
it we learn of Abner Snopes?
He
was injured in the Civil War:
His father turned, and he
followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from
where a Confederate provost's man's musket ball had taken him in the heel on a
stolen horse thirty years ago, (p.5)
He
has a tenacious nature, perhaps even beyond tenacious to a relentlessness that bordered
on psychologically distorted mania:
There was something about
his wolflike independence and even courage, when the advantage was at least neutral,
which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not
so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in
the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest
lay with his. (p. 7)
And
then there is Abner’s fascination with fire:
The nights were still
cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and
cut into lengths-a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires
were his father's habit and custom always, even in freezing weather. Older, the
boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one; why should not a
man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his
blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned
everything in sight?
Then he might have gone a
step farther and thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze was the
living fruit of nights passed during those four years in the woods hiding from
all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called
them). And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element
of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father's being, as the element of
steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation
of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be
regarded with respect and used with discretion.
(p. 7-8)
And
when he’s fallen under a new landlord who owns an aristocratic looking mansion,
we see Abner rebelling against the servitude.
He says, “I reckon I'll have a word with the man that aims to begin
tomorrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months" (p. 9). “Owning me body and soul” is the language of
slaveholding, and he is clearly resisting what he sees as a violation to his
dignity. What we see is a nature who is
in constantly combative due to the class consciousness of the southern
culture. Abner is repeatedly belligerent
because he forever senses injustices to his honor. It is no coincidence that two critical scenes
in the story revolve around a justice’s decision. He may be above a slave, but now that slavery
has been abolished he is not even above that.
Inside
Abner is a combustible dysfunctionality.
He is pricked by his sense of lower class status to the point of
outrage, and fire is a perfect symbol for his outrage and belligerence. He retaliates through arson, as if that will
reset the power struggle that has belittled him. His being an arsonist is an outward
expression of his inner combustible dysfunctionality.
But
if arson is his outward expression, you would never sense it from his demeanor,
which is always on the surface in control.
After the first court scene, after Sarty had been cross examined and
everyone could sense that Sarty was going to contradict his father, Abner
confronts his son at dinner besides the campfire:
He merely ate his supper
beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father
called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless
limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his
father against the stars but without face or depth-a shape black, flat, and
bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had
not been made lot him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin:
"You were fixing to
tell them. You would have told him," He didn't answer. His father struck
him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat,
exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike
either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still
without heat or anger: "You're getting to be a man. You got to learn. You
got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to
stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would?
Don't you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I
had them beat? Eh?" Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself,
" If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me
again." But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there.
"Answer me," his father said.
"Yes," he
whispered. His father turned.
"Get on to bed.
We'll be there tomorrow." (p. 8)
“Without
heat” is a descriptor in many of the scenes for Abner’s actions. We can feel the intensity inside his breast,
but he is outwardly in control, without showing the heat of anger. That Abner repeatedly explodes “without heat”
reveals a psychopathic nature to his actions.
On
the way to the new landlord’s mansion, the son observes his father’s stride and
the apparently insignificant event that is at the root of his fate.
Watching him, the boy
remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held and saw the
stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had
stood in the drive and which his father could have avoided by a simple change
of stride. But it ebbed only for a moment, though he could not have thought
this into words either, walking on in the spell of the house, which he could
ever want but without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening
and jealous rage which unknown to him walked in the ironlike black coat before
him; Maybe he will feel it too, Maybe it will even change him now from what
maybe be couldn't help but be. (p. 10)
Abner
has stepped in horse feces and is stuck beneath his shoe. Could he have avoided the dung? It’s rather ambiguous if he noticed it. I don’t think we know. Also recall that Abner was shot in the foot
during the Civil War and since has “walked a little stiffly” (p.5). So his stride has been altered by the war,
and, like many veterans of wars, his nature has been altered by the war. So what was the genesis of his fate? His altered nature? His society that has placed him as equal to
slaves? The South’s loss in the Civil
War that has lowered the dignity of southerners and pride in one’s
culture? Faulkner weaves all the
elements together.
At
the landlord’s mansion, we don’t see an event that can be attributed to powers
beyond his control; we see a deliberate act of defiance.
His father had not spoken
again. He did not speak again. He did not even look at her. He just stood stiff
in the center of the rug, in his hat, the shaggy iron-gray brows twitching slightly
above the pebble-colored eyes as he appeared to examine the house with brief
deliberation. Then with the same deliberation he turned; the boy watched him
pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turning,
leaving a final long and fading smear.
(p, 12)
It
is that smear that leads to the court action forcing Abner to clean the carpet
and Abner’s retaliation which leads to his death. Finally because it is so well written I want
to conclude with the moment Abner moves out to burn the landlord’s barn. Father and two sons are in town where father
decides they need to eat.
But not at home.
Squatting beside his brother against the front wall, he watched his lather
emerge from the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and
divide it carefully and deliberately into three with his pocket knife and
produce crackers from the same sack. They all three squatted on the gallery and
ate, slowly, without talking; then in the store again, they drank from a tin
dipper tepid water 'Melling of the cedar bucket an(.] of living beech trees.
And still they did not go home. It was as a horse lot this time, a tall rail
fence upon and along which men stood and sat and out of which one by one horses
were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered back and forth along the
road while the slow swapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant
westward, they-the three of them-watching and listening, the older brother with
his Muddy eyes and his steady, inevitable tobacco, the father commenting now
and then on certain of the animals, to no one in particular.
It was after sundown when
they reached home. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the doorstep,
the boy watched the night fully accomplish, listening to the whippoorwills and
the frogs, when he heard his mother's voice: "Abner! No! No! 0h, God. 0h,
God. Abner!" and he rose, whirled, and saw the altered light through the
door where a candle stub now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his
father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque as though
dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence, emptying the
reservoir of the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from which it had
been filled, while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to
the other hand and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into
the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for balance, her mouth open and
in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice. Then
his father saw him standing in the door. "Go to the barn and get that can
of oil we were oiling the wagon with," he said. The boy did not move. Then
he could speak.
"What . . ." he
cried. "What are you
"Go get that
oil," his father said. "Go," (p.20-21)
Notice
how various motivic elements come back and coordinate: the cheese, the despair,
the family bonds, the combustible intensity while outwardly deliberate, and the
fire. This is truly one of the greatest
short stories in the American short story cannon.
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