The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Faulkner · a novel in four books · Random House, 1940 · scored as a novel on its own, the first of the Snopes trilogy, on Faulkner’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and nothing quoted from it
Mode
Comic novel of a hamlet and its trades; tall tale, pastoral, murder story, legal comedy and fable in one book, held by one man’s rise
Mythos
The earth goddess sold to the one man impotent to her; the devil who outbargains the Prince of hell; the pastoral eclogue of a love that wants nothing back; wronged pride out of tragedy; a plague of locusts or rats
Phase
Some years, from Flem’s arrival as Varner’s clerk to his departure for Jefferson, told in the order of the four books, the dates never pinned
Presentation
Fiction; four named books, each in numbered chapters, in the third person throughout, with long stretches carried by Ratliff’s talk and by the talk on the gallery of Varner’s store
Register
From Ratliff’s vernacular, dry, exact and funny, to a long elevated sentence that rises from a store gallery to Homeric extravagance; farce, idyll, dread and legal comedy
Scale
One hamlet and its country: a store, a cotton gin, a schoolhouse, a justice’s court, a ruined plantation; the Varners, the Armstids, the Houstons and the Snopes clan in all its grades
Governing Proposition
Flem Snopes comes to Frenchman’s Bend as the clerk in Varner’s store and leaves it on the road to Jefferson, and in four books the hamlet’s goods pass into his hands: the store, the girl, the land, the community’s money. Beside him the book sets the loves that cannot be bought, Ike Snopes’s for a cow, Houston’s for his dead wife, Mink’s mad pride, Mrs Armstid’s five dollars, and lets each be ground under or taken for spectacle. The wager of the novel is that a community whose life runs on trading, half sport and half survival, has no defence against a man for whom trading is everything, and that the comic tale of the store gallery can carry that judgment to its end.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins and ends with one man on the move. Flem Snopes enters Frenchman’s Bend, a settlement in the southeast of Yoknapatawpha County, as the clerk in Varner’s store, and he leaves it, at the end of the fourth book, on the road to Jefferson. Between, every book removes something from the hamlet’s old order to him: the store, the girl, the land, the community’s money. He is not cleverer than the men he beats. He wants nothing but the gain, and so nothing shames him, tempts him or outlasts him.
Random House published the novel in 1940, in four books, “Flem”, “Eula”, “The Long Summer” and “The Peasants”, each in numbered chapters. It is the first novel of the Snopes trilogy, which The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) carry on; it is scored here as a novel on its own, and the later volumes neither credit nor charge it. Faulkner made it in part from stories already printed in magazines, among them “Spotted Horses”, “Fool About a Horse”, “The Hound” and “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard”, and reworked them into the novel. The reworking is part of the one work, and its joins are weighed, not excused.
The first book belongs to the trades, and to Ratliff, whose talk carries long stretches of the novel: dry, exact and funny, the hamlet’s own intelligence. Some of its tales, the goat deal between Ratliff and Flem among them, the book could spare. What it could not spare is Ratliff’s fable of Flem in hell, outbargaining the Prince for his own soul. The fable is not ornament. It is the hamlet’s account of what has come among it, and the only one the book gives, for Flem is never entered from inside: he is known by report, as the gallery of the store tells him.
Movement II
The second book turns to Eula, and the prose changes its scale for her. At the schoolhouse, on the bench, she is rendered as a mythic fertility the sentences cannot hold in proportion: the earth goddess set down in a crossroads hamlet. The book makes her load-bearing, not decorative. The whole economy of male desire in Frenchman’s Bend turns on her, and the men of the place circle her as they circle a trade.
Labove’s ruin follows from the schoolhouse. His chapters are a novella of their own, the clearest join in the book, and a reader can ask what they add beyond their own force. They keep their place as the first full measure of what Eula is to the men who want her, and of what wanting her costs; but the book could stand with less of them, and that is charged where it belongs, against the novel’s necessity and its form.
Eula is pregnant, and she is married to Flem: sold to the one man who is impotent to her. It is the second thing he takes, and the book’s sharpest transaction, because here its myth and its economy are one act. Without Eula, Flem would have nothing to buy. With her, the goddess the hamlet desired passes to the man who wants nothing but the gain.
Movement III
The third book is the book of the loves that cannot be bought, and it opens on the strangest of them: Ike Snopes and the cow, in the dawn. The prose is pushed to its most extravagant, deliberately overwrought, a pastoral eclogue in Yoknapatawpha dress, grotesque and beautiful at once and meant to be both. It is the one love in the book that wants nothing back, and the high style is turned on it in full.
Then the book sets beside it Lump, charging admission to watch. The love that wants nothing is made a spectacle for money, and the juxtaposition is the argument of the whole novel in small. Whether the excess of the Ike prose is wholly controlled is the one place the book’s craft is fairly questioned; that it is deliberate is not in doubt, and the parody in it is part of what it means.
Beside Ike stands Mink, and Mink kills Houston. Houston’s love is for his dead wife; Mink’s is his own mad pride, the pride of a wronged man out of tragedy, kept to particulars as small as a pound fee. The dread of the book is here, in Mink’s nights with the corpse and Houston’s hound. The two stories are set side by side under a theme more than joined by a plot, and the theme holds them: each love is ground under, and the hamlet watches.
Movement IV
The fourth book brings the Texas ponies to Frenchman’s Bend, and the hamlet’s whole commerce of wits and horses, half sport and half survival, comes to the auction. The auction is a set piece of timing. Then the horses are loosed, through the moonlit lane and through Mrs Littlejohn’s house: the comic sublime, and the book’s farce at its highest.
The farce turns cold. Mrs Armstid comes to Flem for her five dollars, and is given a sack of candy for the children. Her money is one of the loves that cannot be bought, a poor woman’s hold on what little she has, and the book shows it taken as everything else has been. The scene is small, and it is the book’s disclosure in a single exchange.
The Armstid suit follows, before the justice of the peace: a perfectly managed comic scene that turns cold in its turn. The law looks for an owner of the wrong done by a Texan’s ponies to a poor man and can find none. That is the community’s defence against Flem, tried at law and found empty: a trading people has no instrument for a man who only trades.
Movement V
The Old Frenchman place is the ruin of an older plantation order, and the last fleecing happens there: a treasure salted in its ground. Without the horses there would be no community left to fleece; the scheme needs the peasants the fourth book has made of them. Ratliff, the hamlet’s intelligence, the teller through whom so much of the book has passed, is beaten by Flem in the end.
The last image is Armstid digging alone in the dark of the Old Frenchman place while Flem’s wagon passes toward Jefferson. The road goes on; the man stays in his hole. The comic tale of the store gallery has carried its judgment to its end, and the ending is not comic. Everything the hamlet had to trade has passed along that road.
The book is lesser than Faulkner’s novels of 1929 to 1936, and it knows a different thing. It does not break the novel’s form; it takes an old American comic form, the tale of the trade, and makes it hold a whole small world and its undoing. Its joins show. Its law holds across them: everything in Frenchman’s Bend can be exchanged except the few things that cannot, and those are ground under by the man who exchanges everything.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder here than on Faulkner’s tightest novels, because the book was built in part from stories and the joins show. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the Labove chapters are a novella of their own; the goat deal between Ratliff and Flem and some of the trading tales of “Flem” could go with little loss; and “The Long Summer” sets Ike’s pastoral and Mink’s killing side by side under a theme, loves bought and unbought, more than under a plot. The spine holds, and the large pieces are each required by the argument: without Eula, Flem has nothing to buy; without the horses, the treasure scheme has no community to fleece.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a community whose life runs on trading, a commerce of wits and horses half sport and half survival, has no defence against a man for whom trading is everything and nothing else exists. Flem is not cleverer than Ratliff; he wants nothing but the gain, and so he cannot be shamed, tempted or outlasted. Beside him stand the loves that cannot be bought, Ike’s for the cow, Houston’s for his dead wife, Mink’s mad pride, Mrs Armstid’s five dollars, each ground under, mocked or made a spectacle. The trial is exact: the law can see no owner of a wrong done by a Texan’s ponies to a poor man. Held off the top because Flem’s emptiness is shown as a force more than understood as a condition.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The book rises often, and in more registers than any other Faulkner novel: the comic sublime of the spotted horses loosed through the lane and through Mrs Littlejohn’s house in the moonlight; the extravagant, deliberately overwrought pastoral of Ike and the cow, grotesque and beautiful at once and meant to be both; Eula at the schoolhouse, a mythic fertility the prose cannot hold in proportion; the dread of Mink’s nights with the corpse and Houston’s hound; and Armstid digging alone in the dark while the road goes on to Jefferson. Held under the top band because the comic frame keeps much of the book at a level by design, and because the height of the Ike prose is in part parody, which a reader may not grant.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Eula is the earth goddess set down in a crossroads hamlet, and the book makes her load-bearing: the whole economy of male desire in Frenchman’s Bend turns on her, and she is sold to the one man who is impotent to her. Flem is made the devil in Ratliff’s fable of Flem in hell, outbargaining the Prince for his own soul, and the fable is not ornament but the book’s own account of what he is. Ike’s love is a pastoral eclogue in Yoknapatawpha dress, Mink a figure of wronged pride out of tragedy, the Snopeses a plague of locusts or rats. The particulars stay particular: a pound fee, a five-dollar bill, a Texas pony. Held under 9.0 because the devil and the goddess are slightly schematic.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The turn is real. The old Southwestern humour of horse-trades and tall tales, the sketch writers of Georgia and Tennessee before the Civil War and Twain after them, is lifted into the long modernist sentence and made to carry tragedy and myth. Inside Faulkner’s own work it is a swerve as well, from the radical forms of 1929 to 1936 toward an apparently looser, episodic, comic book, and the stake was real: a turn from difficulty to tale-telling risked being read as decline. Held a tenth under the gate because the departure is in voice and mixture more than in the structure of the novel, and the wager is placed on a tradition, the frontier tale, that Faulkner had already proved in the stories the book grew from.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The form is the tale told on the gallery: episodes, each a trade, passed from mouth to mouth, often through Ratliff, who is the community’s intelligence and is beaten by Flem in the end. Change it to a continuous dramatic plot and the book loses what it knows: that Flem is known only by report, as a thing the hamlet tells stories about and cannot see into. The division into four books maps an argument: Flem, Eula, the loves of the long summer, and the peasants as victims. What holds the axis down is that some joins remain the joins of stories: chapters that introduce again what was told before, and episodes, the goats among them, whose form is the anecdote’s rather than the novel’s.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence, not promise: eighty-six years of reading, and the book keeps yielding. On Flem as a figure of capital; on the economy of exchange and the making of Eula into a commodity; on Ratliff’s defeat; on the comic and the tragic as one register; on what the trilogy does to it. The Ike chapters in particular have been argued at length, as parody, as the book’s purest love, or as both. Held in the middle of the upper band because the criticism is less deep than that on The Sound and the Fury, Light in August or Absalom, Absalom!, and because readers more often come to the book through the trilogy or through “Spotted Horses” than as an object of its own.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the American and English-language novel of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is high: the book fuses the American comic tale with high modernist prose, so that a horse auction can carry a judgment on an economy, and a tradition of the store and the trade becomes a vehicle for tragedy and myth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the name Snopes entered American speech as a common noun for a kind of rising, shameless acquisitor, evidence that the book’s figure passed into use, which few novels achieve; but the novel redirected the form less than Faulkner’s experiments of 1929 to 1936, which changed the novel in several languages. Together they hold the axis a tenth under the gate.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over eighty-six years. Form: the text survives whole as published, and has been in print without break, in the Library of America and in the Vintage edition, taught and translated. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the matter is a crossroads hamlet and its trades, and the voice is timeless in its vernacular. Presence is the charge. The book is read less widely than the four great novels of 1929 to 1936, and more often in the academy and through the trilogy than on its own, and that holds it a tenth under the usual figure for its span. Lower would treat an unbroken, taught book in print as neglected.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Faulkner at full command of two instruments at once: Ratliff’s vernacular, dry, exact and funny, and the long elevated sentence of the narration, which can rise from a store gallery to Homeric extravagance in one paragraph. The auction is a set piece of timing; the Armstid trial is a perfectly managed comic scene that turns cold. The case against a higher mark lies in two places. The Ike chapters push the high style to deliberate excess, and whether the excess is wholly controlled is the one place the craft is fairly questioned; and the joins of the reworked stories leave some introductions repeated. Neither seriously dents a book made at this level, and the making is load-bearing at the auction and the trial.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the cow pastoral in its lyric excess and Mink’s killing of Houston, with the hound howling in the woods; or the comedy of the horse auction and Eula’s mythic stillness. One law governs them, the law of exchange set against what cannot be exchanged, and the range it covers is wide: farce, idyll, murder, legal comedy, fable. The law holds. Charged a step on two counts: where a story’s own frame survives into the novel its tone sits apart, and Flem, whom the book never enters, stands a little apart from the depth it gives Mink and Ike.
Score: 8.5 / 10
A whole small society. Its economy: the store, the cotton gin, credit, the trade in land and stock. Its law: the justice of the peace and the trial. Its families: the Varners, the Armstids, the Houstons, the Snopes clan in all its grades. Sex and marriage, madness and idiocy, the animal world, the land itself, and the ruin of an older plantation order in the Old Frenchman place. One movement holds these orders together rather than listing them: the passage of the hamlet’s goods into Flem’s hands. What it does not hold is history at large, or the sacred except as fable; the frame is a hamlet, and the book is the hamlet’s whole world rather than the South’s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8. Two instruments at full command, Ratliff’s vernacular and a sentence that rises from a store gallery to extravagance; a text whole and in print without break for eighty-six years; a disclosure that a trading community has no defence against a man who wants only the gain; and a goddess and a devil made load-bearing in a crossroads hamlet.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0: the spine holds and the large pieces are required, but the book was built in part from stories and the joins show, in the Labove chapters, the goat deal and a third book held together by a theme more than a plot. Next above it, The Swerve, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: a real turn placed on a tradition already proved, a form that remains in places the anecdote’s, and a fusion of comic tale and modernist prose that redirected the novel less than Faulkner’s earlier experiments.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall short of it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. The aggregate would hold the work below the summit in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, published by Random House, New York, in 1940, the first novel of the Snopes trilogy. It is scored as the novel as published, in four books, “Flem”, “Eula”, “The Long Summer” and “The Peasants”, each in numbered chapters, and as a novel on its own: The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) are context and are neither credited nor charged. The magazine stories from which Faulkner made part of the book, among them “Spotted Horses”, “Fool About a Horse”, “The Hound” and “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard”, are scored only as reworked into the novel. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and nothing is quoted from the novel. Twain and the sketch writers of Georgia and Tennessee are named as the tradition the book draws on, and Faulkner’s other novels as the measure of his reach; neither is part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the years the story spans, the length in pages, the proportion of the book carried by Ratliff’s talk, which stories were written for the novel and cut from it, the novel’s first reviews, its later revision for the trilogy, and the record of its influence on later Southern fiction, are not given. Citations are by book.