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Reconstructing Class in Faulkner's Late Novels: The Hamlet and the Discovery of Capital

A significant conceptual shift takes place between Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet that in 1940 inaugurates the Snopes trilogy, a shift represented in part by the marked preeminence of class as a category through which Faulkner increasingly interprets American social relations. If, as Eric Sundquist has suggested, the question of race takes on a central position in Faulkner's vision in the 1930s, The Hamlet, which suspends that question in favor of a critical study of class identities, arguably represents a new narrative phase in Faulkner's thematics.(1) The chronology of Faulkner's conceptual realignment, however, is more extensive than the four-year interlude between novels would suggest. To begin with, Faulkner first formulated the idea for the Snopes novel not four, but fourteen years earlier, in 1926: Father Abraham, the notably awkward prototype for The Hamlet's wild pony episode, would first be revised into "Spotted Horses," a short story, in 1931 before finding its last and most successful incarnation as the concluding section of the late novel. Though unfinished, and sometimes painfully crude, Father Abraham anticipates in microcosm Flem Snopes' entire entrepreneurial career, a narrative it would take Faulkner the length of the Snopes trilogy to record: as it recalls an instance of Flem's early profiteering, it has already imagined Flem's rise to the presidency of the Bank of Jefferson, a development Faulkner didn't fully bring to pass until much later in The Mansion, the last of the Snopes novels, written in 1959. The figure of class transcendence which Flem represents in the late novels, in any case, was not a new one, and as Father Abraham reveals, even its most powerful incarnation as Absalom's Thomas Sutpen was not the first: "He is a living example of the astonishing byblows of man's utopian dreams actually functioning," Faulkner writes in Father Abraham. "In this case the dream is Democracy."(2) Faulkner thus defines the premise of the figure later at the center of the Snopes trilogy, a figure that would appear in the course of Faulkner's career once as Sutpen's fatally innocent class avenger before resurfacing ultimately as Flem's ruthless capitalist. It's perhaps not surprising, then, given Faulkner's constantly shifting but consistently recurring representatives of class mobility, that in The Hamlet, which moves chronologically from Absalom's Civil War period to the early twentieth century, the vestiges of that earlier world are not only immediately evident but still potent. The Hamlet opens on a scene that casually though uncannily recalls the final scene of Absalom, and that recapitulates to a great extent the narrative of Thomas Sutpen's life. The novel begins by describing "a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which--the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades--were still known as the Old Frenchman's place" and which "had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them."(3) The similarities between the Old Frenchman's place and Sutpen's Hundred are striking, and although as the scene unfolds the plantations become distinct, the circumstances of their creation remain virtually identical. Like Sutpen, it is a foreigner who "wrested from the jungle and tamed as a monument" the plantation for the sake of a dynastic line, yet whose patronym "those who came after him in battered wagons and on muleback" "could not even read" (p. 4). "His dream and his pride," like Sutpen's, fail to produce a dynastic posterity, his legacy enduring only in local folktales and in the ruined house "which his heirs-at-large had been pulling down and chopping up . . . for thirty years now for firewood" (p. 3). The Old Frenchman's place even rehearses the immolated fate of Sutpen's Hundred, except it is an immolation drawn out slowly and less conspicuously over time. …