Romantic, radical, and ridiculous: Faulkner's hero as an oxymoron - author William Faulkner

Style, Spring, 1995 by Smadar Shiffman

On another level entirely, Bakhtin's notion of the sense of irony involved in the Romantic construction of the hero seems particularly apt in the case of the Faulknerian protagonist. Faulkner' s use of irony at once amplifies and problematizes what might be called his nineteenth-century sense of the hero as a "larger-than-life" textual construction. A case in point--that of Bayard Sartoris, one of Faulkner's most dashing heroes--exemplifies a particular type of oxymoronic protagonist in Faulkner's works, in which the "larger-than-life" dimension of the hero very ironically brings about his ensuing downfall. Sartoris's Bakhtinian Classical and Romantic dimensions appear here to be deliberately trivialized and undermined: his inherent individuality drives him to commit an act that is finally utterly unheroic, if not actually an act of supreme folly.

Bayard Sartoris, a near-legendary Civil-War hero, wistfully alluded to bv several characters throughout Faulkner's oeuvre, is made (by the author) to expire in a manner particularly unfitting for a hero. Carelessly returning to a Yankee camp after successfully raiding it with his comrades-in-arms, simply in order to collect some cans of anchovy, Sartoris's life comes to an unexpectedly unceremonious end. Until then his inherent courage and bravery had afforded him a successful war career, for which he commanded and received the respect of other characters in the fictional world, as well as that of the reader. However, it is Sartoris's very heroism that drives him to this ludicrous death. Dying in defense of one's country or in the name of lofty ideals traditionally commands admiration. Yet carelessly finding one's death while pilfering cans of anchovy from your enemy, directly after having successfully raided their camp and gotten away safely, cannot but arouse a measure of ridicule among those in the fictional world and in ourselves.

I believe that embedded in this range of problematized literary characters lies a Faulknerian manifesto of character and characterization, yet to be abstracted from the literary texts in which it is buried. Moreover, in regard to the ways in which it critically problematizes character as a textual category, Faulkner's oeuvre seems to have been overlooked, especially by his own critics. For most Faulknerians still adhere to traditional, nineteenth-century notions of character, which never really explore the category's social or textual validity. While the notions of the breakdown of character, "the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character" (Bradbury and McFarlane 27) or "the death of the subject" (Jameson 15), are prevalent in discussions of modernism and postmodernism, these notions are hardly made use of in Faulknerian discourse. Thus, for example, well-known Faulknerian critic Wesley Morris performs a radical reading of Faulkner's novels whereby characters located on the margins of society--i.e., women and blacks--are repositioned in its center. However, this admittedly unconventional reading is applied solely to the thematic level of Faulkner's works and continues to take for granted the very "existence" of characters, perceiving them as unconstructed and "natural." More specifically, despite his allegedly "dialogic" (following Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination) reading of Faulkner's novels, Morris fails to address the unity and coherence traditionally attributed to characters in Faulkner's texts (197-218). This appears to be the rule in other recent critiques of Faulkner's works (see, for example, Page, Pilkington, Duvall, and Pearce).