William Faulkner - Unvanquished

In The Unvanquished William Faulkner drew on his family's history for more than events. That it gave him real understanding of how Bayard felt when he became "the" Sartoris at the death of his father is suggested by a state­ment Faulkner made in 1955 while visiting Japan. To a

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question about family responsibility in Mississippi he re­plied, "We have to be clannish just like the people in the Scottish highlands, each springing to defend his own blood whether it be right or wrong." He went on to say that a family usually has an hereditary head, "the oldest son of the oldest son and each looked upon as chief by his own particular clan." He concluded that this is "because only & comparatively short time ago we were invaded by our own people—speaking in our own language, which is always a pretty savage sort of warfare."

Having chosen that warfare as the exciting backdrop for The Unvanquished, Faulkner writes of it well. By the time of the fall of Vicksburg, when the novel begins, the Confed­erate defeats at Shuoh and Corinth had opened northern Mississippi to the Federal armies. The confusion which per­mitted Granny Millard, Ringo, Bayard, and Ab Snopes to carry on their fantastic "mule business" was real enough; for the border region of north Mississippi, as Brown puts it, was "overrun by both the Union and Confederate armies but controlled by neither."

For artistic purposes Faulkner somewhat alters the tim­ing of the events of the War, and in Chapter VI he places Reconstruction much closer to the surrender at Appomattox than it was in reality. But he catches the essence of the confused conflict over north Mississippi in addition to pre­senting the collapse of the Confederate hope for victory. As Meriwether has pointed out while noting its historical discrepancies, The Unvanquished is not primarily about the Civil War; so objection to the spacing of the military events in the novel serves little purpose, especially when the spac­ing gives shape and force to the drama of Bayard's growth to real manhood.

The day is past when readers considered it Faulkner's chief function to explain his section of the South and the detail of its history. They now recognize him to be artist instead of sociologist or regional historian. By setting not only The Unvanquished but many of his other works in the part of our country which he knows best, he is not so much recording the life of that particular region as making it a base from which he examines, in book after book, significant aspects of man's life in general.

Faulkner's feeling about man's endurance and courage,

THE UNVANQUISHED

virtues he implicitly gave to the young Southerner Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished, appears explicitly in the ad­dress he wrote 'To the Youth of Japan," when they—half a world away from Yoknapatawpha—were suffering the aftermath of another war, another defeat. Having mentioned the people of the South in the Civil War and then' par­ticular troubles during Reconstruction, William Faulkner went on to speak of man in general and to add that in his opinion art has one high purpose—which surely we may conclude that The Unvanquished serves: "I believe our country is even stronger because of that old anguish since that very anguish taught us compassion for other peoples whom war has injured. I mention it only to explain and show that Americans from my part of America at least can understand the feeling of the Japanese young people of today that the future oilers . . . nothing but hopelessness, with nothing ... to hold to or believe in. Because the young people of my country during those ten years must have said in their turn: 'What shall we do now? . . .'

"I would like to think that there was someone there at that time too ... to reassure them that man is tough, that nothing, nothing—war, grief, hopelessness, despair—can last as long as man himself can last; that man himself will prevail over all his anguishes, provided he will make the effort to ... to seek not for a mere crutch to lean on, but to stand erect on his own feet by believing in hope and in his own toughness and endurance.

"I believe that is the only reason for art. . . . That art is the strongest and most durable force man has invented or discovered with which to record the history of his in­vincible durability and courage beneath disaster, and to postulate the validity of his hope."

—carvel collins Massachusetts Institute of Technology

AMBUSCADE

m»ehind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a -trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even, in miniature that ponderable though passive recalci-, trance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment. To Ringo and me it lived, if only because of the fact that the sunimpacted ground drank water faster than we could fetch it from the well, the very setting of the stage for conflict a prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leak­ing bucket between wellhouse and battlefield, the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time, before we could en­gender between us and hold intact the pattern of re-capitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between us and fact and doom. This afternoon it seemed as if we would never get it filled, wet enough, since there had not even been dew in three weeks. But at last it was damp enough, damp-colored enough at least, and we could begin. We

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THE UNVANQUISHED

were just about to begin. Then suddenly Loosh was standing there, watching us. He was Joby's son and Ringo's uncle; he stood there (we did not know where he had come from; we had not seen him appear, emerge) in the fierce dull early afternoon sunlight, bareheaded, his head slanted a little, tilted a little yet firm and not askew, like a cannonball (which it resembled) bedded hurriedly and carelessly in concrete, his eyes a little red at the inner corners as Negroes' eyes get when they have been drinking, looking down at what Ringo and I called Vicksburg. Then I saw Philadelphy, his wife, over at the woodpile, stooped, with an armful of wood al­ready gathered into the crook of her elbow, watching Loosh's back.

"What's that?" Loosh said.

"Vicksburg," I said.

Loosh laughed. He stood there laughing, not loud, looking at the chips.

"Come on here, Loosh," Philadelphy said from the woodpile. There was something curious in her voice too —urgent, perhaps frightened. "If you wants any supper, you better tote me some wood." But I didn't know which, urgency or fright; I didn't have time to wonder or speculate, because suddenly Loosh stooped before Ringo or I could have moved, and with his hand he swept the chips flat.

"There's your Vicksburg," he said.

"Loosh!" Philadelphy said. But Loosh squatted, look­ing at me with that expression on his face. I was just twelve then; I didn't know triumph; I didn't even know the word.

"And I tell you nother un you ain't know," he said. "Corinth."

"Corinth?" I said. Philadelphy had dropped the wood and she was coming fast toward us. "That's in Missis­sippi too. That's not far. I've been there."

"Far don't matter," Loosh said. Now he sounded as if he were about to chant, to sing; squatting there with the fierce dull sun on his iron skull and the flattening slant of his nose, he was not looking at me or Ringo either; it was as if his red-cornered eyes had reversed in his skull and it was the blank flat obverses of the