University:
University of Michigan
Course:
ENGLISH 473 | Topics in American Literature
Academic year:

2022
Views:

331

Pages:

18
Author:

J Clay

Chapter 2 The Suspended Lives of Narcissa, Horace, and Bayard: Keats and Flags in the Dust Originally completed by early 1927 though only published in its entirety in 1973, Flags in the Dust is Faulkner's first extended foray into the world of Yoknapatawpha County. In Flags in the Dust, he began "giving rein to his romantic imagination while he used the lore both of the South and his own family, employing the second, in a way, as emblematic of the first." In recreating his own "postage stamp of soil," Faulkner's preoccupation with the stasis of Keats's ode becomes a thematic frame for the oft-brutal landscape of Yoknapatawpha. The realist description of the rural South is contradictorily mixed with instances of romanticized stasis reminiscent of Keats's ode, as Brooks explains: "Faulkner... began as a romantic, and a romantic he remained to the end, though a reformed or foiled or chastened romantic." In this chapter, I will examine how Faulkner utilizes urn-like imagery to show two distinct (yet equally incapacitating) types of stasis: the undying past of the Sartoris family and the static idealities of both Horace and Narcissa. Horace Benbow, the lawyer given to poetic flights of "wild fantastic futility," is fixated upon the urn's ideals of Truth and Beauty (FD, 152). Horace's flights are characterized by a wish to escape his entrenched reality as his reveries take him "to the "ultimate roof of things, where unicorns filled the neighing air with galloping, or grazed or lay supine in latent and golden-hooved repose" (FD, 187). Horace cannot accept his own existence and aspires toward two impossible ideals: "[the first being] a world of stasis, where Beauty and Truth reign forever; [the second), a world of Nature where he may find contentment in oblivion." Horace's escapism can be partially explained as a reflex to the violence he (indirectly) experienced in the Great War at his non-combative position in the YMCA. When Narcissa picks Horace up at the train station, Horace perceives the peaceful stasis of his surroundings as if the town was deserted. "[...]a gracious and benign peace, steadfast as a windless afternoon in a world without motion or sound. Horace looked about him and drew a long breath." "Perhaps this is the reason for wars," he said. "The meaning of peace." Horace envisions "the meaning of peace" as a resistance to change as well as a form of beauty. Horace becomes an imperfect "Keatsian romantic" as he creates an impossible illusion of perfection instead of the mutable inconsistencies of reality (Hodgin, 647). Horace mythologizes his world, to the point that he effectively creates an urn-like "flowery tale" where his ideals detach him from reality (GU, 4). In his return from the war, Horace strives to achieve what he considers peace: "[o]ld unchanging days; unwinged, perhaps, but undisastrous, too." (ED, 156). Joan is not dependent on Horace and is not characterized like the other woman. Horace is awed and frightened by her aggressive nature. Horace cannot merge his ideal female form with any form of active sexuality. Horace chooses Belle not in spite of her dull and selfish tendencies, but because of them, as Horace deludes himself into believing that women cannot be both sensual and good. Because of his inability to comprehend the reality outside of his imagination, Horace condemns himself to the disastrous marriage with Belle, becoming one of Faulkner's "completely defeated characters" (MM, 13). Adams explicates Horace's desire for stasis as a form of self-destruction: They try to find something unchanging to stand on, motionless in the midst of change. But motion sweeps them on so relentlessly that their only escape is one or another kind of suicide. They are not vital spirits crushed by the inert weight of matter. On the contrary, they are desperate because a living world keeps forcing them into action in spite of their desire for security, peace, and stasis. They are crushed because they are trying not to move, and because, by Faulkner's logic, the only way to be motionless is to be dead. (MM, 12-13) While Narcissa and Horace are characterized by a stasis of serenity, peace, and transcendental beauty, Bayard Sartoris evokes an altogether dissimilar stasis in which reality is consumed by the past. Faulkner "separates the obsession with the past from the desire for stasis, affixing one characteristic to the Sartoris family and the other to Horace" (Korenman, 9). Diametrically opposed to Horace's and Narcissa's reverie of "slow-time" Bayard's stasis is a "brutal tale, without beginning, and crassly and uselessly violent," of a past he cannot come to terms with (FD, 238). Bayard is haunted by the death of his twin-brother, John, who died in combat during the Great War. The brothers, both fighter pilots, were engaged in combat when John's plane burst into flames "like the gay flapping of an orange pennon," and John was forced to jump out (FD, 315). Bayard recalls, "Then he thumbed his nose at me like he always was doing and flipped his hand at the Hun and kicked his machine out of the way and jumped" (FD, 239). The exact details of the incident are unclear but the result was that Bayard was not able to locate his brother after he jumped. After his brother's death, Bayard returns to the quiet, country life of his home outside of Jefferson where he blazes a path of self-destruction in his effort to cope with the traumatic experiences in the war. The devastating loss of his twin, coupled with his guilt at his perceived failure to rescue John, has reduced Bayard to a shell of "frozen despair" (FD, 275). The effigy of his brother leaping out of his plane dominates Bayard's thoughts as the painful event recurs continuously in his mind. Faulkner's construction of Bayard destabilizes the bliss of the lovers on the urn, "For ever panting, and for ever young," substituting their joyful anticipation for an unending torment that cannot subside (GU, 27). As a result, Bayard "seeks-death, a relief from the agonizing guilt he bears" (Hodgin, 651). Bayard's inner affliction seems to agitate even the scenery that Faulkner presents around him, as he seems innately linked to a bleak violence that seems to shroud his physical features." Bayard's stasis hardly contains any semblance of peace or repose. Yet, the purest moment of ataraxis in the narrative attached to Bayard is after he has suffered a head injury from being thrown from an unbroken stallion. He flees town and drinks moonshine with Hub and Suratt: The rising slope of ground behind them hid the barn and the house, and the three of them squatted in a small bowl of peacefulness remote from the world and its rumors, filled with the cool unceasing breathing of the spring and a seeping of sunlight among the elders and willows like a thinly diffused wine. On the surface of the spring the sky lay reflected, stippled with windless beech leaves. (FD, 125) It is striking that both Horace and Bayard's peaceful settings are typified by their distance from auditory "interference[s]," with Horace's dim sounds of a parade and Bayard's woods isolated from society's "rumors." In both scenes, the silence of civilization reveals a "more endear'd" sound of "no tone," that is replaced, in Bayard's case, by the sole "breathing of the spring" (GU, 14). Once again, we see Faulkner's evocation of peaceful stasis connected with a still body of water, in this instance reflecting a changeless sky. Faulkner slows the movement of the spring so it can reflect the dusk "seeping" amongst the windless trees. But the surface of tranquility is tinged with a latent aggression in the men's rebellious action of drinking despite the laws forbidding liquor, as well as Bayard's disregarded injury that lends an air of risk to the atmosphere as well. Bayard's

Klein Joseph Keats Urn and the Arrested Image of Faulkner-3

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