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

Style, Spring, 1995 by Smadar Shiffman

THE INDISPENSABLE DUALITY OF FANATICISM

Faulkner's male heroes are frequently fanatics. Even those protagonists appearing to be the exception to the rule are, in fact, variations on this fanaticism. Although each display of fanaticism usually stems from a different underlying cause, common to them all is a relentless adherence to an idea, value, or conviction. This adherence is the primary characteristic of the fanatical hero; it is his forte as well as his Achilles' heel. The source of their success as well as their destruction, the effect of this adherence on other fictional characters, as on the reader, is the simultaneous arousal of admiration and contempt or irony, The Bakhtinian Romantic hero would appear to be predominant among Faulkner's fanatic heroes, and yet adhering to an idea is only one aspect of their overall makeup. The other aspect entails these protagonists' being unable to break away from the need to adhere to some cause, and this need, it seems to me, is inherent in their very individual determinateness, which relates them to the classical hero as well. Thus, as noted earlier in this paper, both types of character construction are at all times in dynamic dialogue.

In "An Odour of Verbena," the story concluding The Unvanquished, young Bayard Sartoris, nephew of the original Bayard, is faced with an insoluble dilemma. He is called upon to choose between revenging his father's murder by killing the murderer, something he is most reluctant to do, or waiving the prerogative and being considered a coward by his family and friends, for they would surely perceive any other course of action as indicating cowardice. Yet Bayard, the only male protagonist in Faulkner's entire oeuvre to reach old age neither bitter nor sterile, manages to sidestep the situation, enacting, in fact, a third alternative. Entering the murderer's office unarmed, he allows himself to be shot at twice; the incident finally ends with no casualties. In theory, Bayard need not have taken a chance at all; he could have heeded his aunt's assurance, voiced following his own admission that he wants to be thought well of and wants her to respect him. Jenny Du Pres nee Sartoris replies: "I do. Even if you spend the day hidden in the stable loft, I still do" (167). Indeed, had Bayard settled for her respect, there most probably would be no story to speak of. More specifically, it is Bayard's keen sense of duty and family obligation that evidently compels him to confront the contradiction between "thou shalt not kill" and "thou shall avenge the killing of thy father" with yet another oxymoron: i.e., exposing himself to the very danger that he is in fact equally loathe to face so as to avoid further bloodshed.

In other words, it is his social allegiance to the very idea of the clan that binds him inextricably to an oxymoronic situation. His radical conduct appears to be motivated by an idea whose pursuit is imperative to the protagonist; from the reader' s perspective, however, this seemingly inviolable idea is no more than a social or familial convention, The protagonist's perception of this familial norm as a sacred duty strikes the reader as a form of fanaticism. The perceptual disparity between the Faulknerian protagonist's insistence on idealizing or holding sacred the commonplace and the trivial, a romantic principle par excellence, and the reader's own view of the same commonplace and trivial (objects, persons, events, and ideas) as rather unimpressively ordinary is frequently a precondition for the oxymoron that inevitably leads to fanatical or radical conduct.