INTRUDER IN THE DUST (247 pp.)—William Faulkner—Random House ($3).
Yocknapatawpha County, bound by the Tallahatchie and Yocknapatawpha Rivers in northern Mississippi, is one of the most remarkable landscapes created by the American imagination. Notably similar to
Lafayette County, where William Faulkner lives, it has become, in the novels of this most powerful of present-day American novelists, a symbolic place suggesting the diseased condition of the South and the entire modern world. In fiercely Gothic melodramas Faulkner has spun out his cobwebby legend of the South. Intruder in the Dust is the latest installment of that legend.
Creatures of Decay. Faulkner's view of the South has no trace of magnolia-and-old-plantation romanticism; it is tough and realistic, even if sometimes debatable. From novel to novel, weaving backward and forward in patterns of time as intricate as his twining sentences, Faulkner has developed his picture of a society devastated by war—a society that was both honorable and doomed by an inherent guilt. In his view the South was right in insisting on its sovereignty but cursed by the shame of slavery. It had to fight and was doomed to lose.
In the ruins of the war, Faulkner shows the mean-spirited and hard-driving Snopeses, poor whites who absorbed the cheap commercialism of the carpetbaggers, rising to economic and social power by defeating the Sartoris clan, impotent aristocrats talking about the code of chivalry but unable to bring it to life. Faulkner is especially adept at portraying the creatures of the decayed South: Gowan Stevens, a gentleman of the old school, who learned to drink in a Virginia college but not to overcome his cowardice; Flem Snopes, who would not hesitate to stamp on every living creature to satisfy his greed; and the famous Popeye, a ghastly symbol of machine-age amorality, with the "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." Against this background, the violent elements in Faulkner's novels—rape, castration, lynching, bestiality—are symbols of moral confusion and social decay.
In the scheme of Faulkner's work, Intruder in the Dust is a key novel, his one book that offers a sign of hope that the South may yet extricate itself from the swamps of hatred and violence. Though not so structurally daring as The Sound and the Fury, nor so eloquent as Light in August, nor so sensational as Sanctuary, Faulkner's latest book is a better told and more firmly bound story than any of these..
The Self-Possessed. Two main characters dominate the novel. One is Charles Mallison, a 16-year-old boy who, in the scheme of the book, represents innocence and freshness, the potentiality of Southern white manhood unspoiled by ancient hatreds. Counterposed to Charles is Lucas Beauchamp, an old Negro farmer with some white blood in his veins, who lives in solitary dignity on a patch of land bequeathed by a white ancestor. Lucas Beauchamp is one of the most magnificent and majestic characters in all American fiction. "Solitary, kinless and intractable, apparently not only without friends even in his own race but proud of it," he suggests the reserve and strength of a people inured to suffering and unshakable in its self-possession.