“Barn Burning” (1938)

William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) Greatest American Southern writer, won the

Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950 A master of modernist experimentation in the

novel, related to his obsession with time stream of consciousness, temporal shifts,

and multiple voices Some major novels: The Sound and the Fury

(1929) [4 narrators], As I Lay Dying (1930) [15 narrators], Absalom! Absalom! (1936)

Colonel William Clark Falkner (1826-89) Faulkner’s great-

grandfather Civil War Veteran Politician Popular Romantic

Novelist (The White Rose of Memphis, 1881)

Died of gunshot wound from former business partner

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Born William Falkner, 25 Sept. 1897, New Albany, Mississippi

1918: joins Canadian Royal Air Force

1919-20 U of Mississippi

1921: U of Mississippi Post Office

Faulkner: Early Publications

1924: The Marble Faun (poems)

1925: travels in Europe 1927: Mosquitoes 1928: Sartoris

Faulkner: Major Phase

1929: The Sound and the Fury

1930 As I Lay Dying 1931: Sanctuary 1932: Light in August 1935: Pylon 1936: Absalom,

Absalom!

Faulkner in Hollywood: 1930s

Faulkner: Later Fiction

1938: The Unvanquished;

“Barn Burning” 1940: The Hamlet 1942: Go Down,

Moses 1948: Intruder in the

Dust

Faulkner’s Critical Reputation

Better regarded in Europe than in U.S.

Then: 1946: The Portable Faulkner

1950: Nobel Prize for Literature

Faulkner, after the Nobel

1954: A Fable (Pulitzer Prize)

1957: The Town 1959: The Mansion 1962: The Reivers

William Faulkner (1897-1962) His great theme is the influence of the past on the

present Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun (1951), says:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” “[T]o me,” Faulkner remarked, “no man is himself,

he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment.”

Yoknapatawpha County

Faulkner’s apocryphal county, patterned on his native Lafayette County.

The county seat, Jefferson, resembles Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford in many particulars—but without Oxford’s University of Mississippi campus

Faulkner said Yoknapatawpha means “Water flows slow through the flatland.”

Yoknapatawpha County

2,400 square miles; the population, 6,298

whites and 9,313 Negroes, for a total of 15,611

from Nobel Acceptance Speech I believe that man will not merely endure: he will

prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

Question

Is Faulkner’s vision in his fiction as positive and uplifting as the vision expressed in this Nobel lecture? Or is his fiction more ambivalent?

“Barn Burning”

a story of the Snopeses, a poor white family who appear in a number of Faulkner’s narratives of fictional Yoknapatawpha County

Setting: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, about 30 years after the Civil War (1861-65), thus, in the 1890s

“Barn Burning”: the film, 1980 Part of The American

Short Story Collection Starring Tommy Lee

Jones as Abner Snopes

Featuring Faulkner’s nephew Jimmy Faulkner as Major de Spain

“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict The father, Abner, avenges himself on more

socially established whites by burning their barns and carrying out lesser acts of mischief

The younger son, named Colonel Sartoris (Sarty) Snopes, 10 years old, struggles to revolt against his father Colonel Sartoris: a Confederate Army officer and

leading citizen of Jefferson, Mississippi (higher class and [perhaps] higher morality)

“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict Sarty struggles between family allegiance

and external standards of justice Abner hits him and tells him “to learn to stick

to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you” (1793, last para.).

Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, "If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again“ (1793, last para.)

“Barn Burning”: Family Conflict Opening Scene (1790-92): makeshift

courtroom in general store Sarty feels “the old fierce pull of blood” (1791,

1st para.); his father’s enemy is his enemy too However, he also feels “grief and despair”

because he must tell a lie for his father But when another boy calls Abner a “Barn

Burner,” Sarty attacks the boy (1792, middle)

Abner: Motivation Does Abner have an understandable

motivation? Abner’s predicament: he falls into the cracks

of Southern society: he is not a member of the white aristocracy nor the the black servant class See visit to de Spain mansion (1796, middle):

“That’s sweat,” he tells Sarty. “Nigger sweat” (1796, top)

Question: Does the history of slavery in the South undercut or taint its ideals of “truth” and “justice”?

Abner: Motivation

During Civil War, Abner did not fight for either side. Instead he stole horses from both sides. See 1802 (3rd para.): “his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war . . .for booty--it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.”

Abner: Motivation

In any case, Abner is persuasive. See 1793 (1st main para.): “There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage, when the advantage was at least neutral, which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.”

Symbols: Fire

As a barn burner, Abner is associated with fire

See 1793 (2nd main para.): “the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being”

Fire as force of civilization and destruction See 1800 (2nd full para.): taking the family’s

lantern oil to burn de Spain’s barn

Symbols: Rug

The destruction of the rug is symbolic of Abner’s larger rebellion against society

See 1795: He dirties the rug with his stiff foot injured during the war (1792): his rebellion has long history

He “never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug”—willfully disregarding his destructiveness (1795).

Symbols: Rug

See bottom 1796-top 1797: After he “cleans” the rug, his foot tracks are replaced by “long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of lilliputian mowing machine” (1797)—suggesting his rebellion is small and not very effective

Symbols: Cheese

Cheese is a peculiar symbol, associated with the power of family allegiance over external justice in the 2 court scenes

See opening of story: “The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese” (1790).

See 1800, top: Abner buys cheese from “courtroom” store and shares it with his sons

Modernism

Faulkner portrays this story of conflict through a modernist aesthetic, through experimentation with Consciousness Time Space

Modernism: Consciousness

Using italics, Faulkner portrays the limited and often conflicted internal thoughts of the boy Sarty See, for example, 1791-92

Modernism: Time

The narrator jumps backward and forward in time, and suspends time: Abner’s wartime activities are repeatedly mentioned “prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity” (bottom 1791-92) The family carries an old clock stopped at 2:14 “of a dead

and forgotten day and time” (1792) Abner’s handling of the mules anticipates descendants

handling of motor car (1792, last para.) Narrators speculates how Sarty “might have” thought if he

were older (1793, 2nd main para.)

Modernism: Space

Faulkner portrays reality through geometric, two-dimensional shapes the father is repeatedly described as a “flat”

shape, “without . . . depth,” “depthless,” as if cut from tin (1793, 1795).

the father’s crude, flat shape contrasts with “the serene columned backdrop” of the de Spain mansion, with its associations of peace, joy, and dignity (1794-95).

Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, Oxford, Miss.

Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

The Ending

Sarty assumes that his father is dead. Can we be sure?

Sarty concludes that his father “was brave,” but the narrator protests (1802)

Sarty ultimately prepares to enter “the dark woods” (1803), in some ways a typically American ending, reminiscent of Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.