self into non-being and end his torment in the only way available to him. He tries flight, alcohol and sex first, but none of these work. As in the case of Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson, only death will do the job.
Narcissa is described in this way at the end of the novel:
All of Narcissa’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry. (FD 368)
This passage nicely sums up the paradoxes or perhaps the complexities of loving and living with someone like Bayard—a sort of time bomb set to go off at some unknown time in the future. Even if one loved him passionately, as Narcissa most certainly did, it would be a relief to have him dead, and she does after all have their son.
If Bayard is the explosive violence that not only threatens him but everyone around him (Simon, Isom, Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, Narcissa, and anyone he happens to meet on the road in his car), Horace Benbow is the very opposite, just as Belle is the opposite of Narcissa. Just as Bayard abruptly breaks into Narcissa’s life, Belle, always described as a narcotic, even a kind of poisonous flower, slowly, surely insinuates her sensual, sexual self into Horace’s life and takes him over until his essentially passive, nearly useless life is further reduced to serving her needs. As Narcissa correctly says, Belle is “dirty” and Horace smells of her. Why Belle wants Horace is never quite clear. But Horace as a character is quite clear and clearly a forceful contrast to Bayard. Both Bayard and Horace are useless, the one because he is so tormented and destructive and the other because he is so passive and incapable of any kind of useful social action. Bayard is always described as doomed; Horace is always described as futile, as the embodiment of knowledge that cannot or does not want to act, as a self that has no ambition beyond making beautiful useless glass vases, as a lawyer whose whole practice is tending to the wills and minor legal affairs of the rich, as a male who, until the advent of Belle, was content with a symbolic incestuous relationship with his sister. Faulkner tells us that Horace was lost in words, (Bayard, we are told, never read any book); that he believed too much in words, that, in a sense, he was seduced by words just, as, later, he was seduced by Belle (and briefly, by her sister). If Bayard is overdefined, Horace is underdefined, and both are defeated. The only difference in their defeats is a matter of degree: Bayard is dead; Horace is dead to the world outside of his house. By the end of Sanctuary, when Faulkner returns to this pitiful ineffectual character, he is as good as dead.
Narcissa survives both Horace and Bayard; she even survives the odd titillations of Byron Snopes’s letters which, in a nice symbolic touch by Faulkner, she keeps in her lingerie drawer. She survives, just as Aunt Jenny has survived the deaths of all the male Sartorises and the violence that has characterized the lives of all the males except old Bayard who, we later learn in The Unvanquished, denies the gun and the code of honor that goes with it. Neither of these women is destroyed, nor are they destroyers. It is Belle who is the destructive woman, along with her sister, and it is their sexuality that is seductive and destructive. If Belle is defeated, it is only ironically because Horace does not have as much money as she needs to satisfy her self-centered desires (sexual and otherwise) and she might better have stayed with Harry. It is the Sartoris women who survive to recognize the fact that flags in the dust is an image for men, especially the Sartoris men who are, as Aunt Jenny says, scoundrels and fools. (FD 370)
The defeated in this novel are all men: old Bayard, Simon, Bayard, John, Horace, Harry Mitchell; Byron Snopes; and the causes of their defeat vary: passively losing one’s self in the sensuality of women; some source of torment intrinsic to the self that leads to suicidal actions; philandering; a bad heart stressed beyond its limits by fright; or an ontological need to take risks.
But defeat is only a part of this novel, and to focus on it to the exclusion of the other elements that make up the novel is to misrepresent (mis-chart) the native territory Faulkner discovered in writing this novel and to misunderstand why it was that Faulkner was so excited by what he had created and so convinced, as he says in his letter to Liveright, that it was the “damdest best book” he would see that year, and that it was perfectly entitled. (Selected Letters, 47; Letter of 16 October 1927). Such a mis-emphasis would cause us to ignore the undefeated, to ignore the rich and varied life that flourishes everywhere in Yoknapatawpha apart from the defeated, and, especially, to ignore the comedy that everywhere militates against defeat, that says no to defeat and tragedy everywhere, here, and throughout Faulkner. The MacCallums are not defeated, even those who, like Bayard, have been to the war; the blacks as a group, always so full of life and laughter in Faulkner, are never defeated; and some, like the poor couple Bayard spends Christmas with, have a dignity and fortitude Faulkner always admired; Aunt Jenny, old Bayard before his heart attack, old man Falls, Dr. Peabody—the old folks in this novel and everywhere in Faulkner—are not defeated and are always full of life and value; and the comedy, the wonderful Faulknerian laughter, enlivens this novel with its double vision everywhere.
Faulkner had a very dialectical mind and imagination. He never saw things singly and had the ability to see around corners to the other side of things. There is no Faulkner novel without its comic voice: even the relentlessly destructive and grim As I Lay Dying is relieved of some of this grimness by the comic account of how Jewel got his horse and by its ironic, comic ending; and in the midst of the rot and corruption of Sanctuary we find, not only the comic story of the Snopes boys and the whorehouse, but the always comic behavior of its Madame and her friends; and in the anguished account of the Compsons, we have in Quentin’s section the story of the little girl who follows Quentin around, yet another comic negro, and Quentin’s foolish friends; and later, in Jason’s section, the always half comical Jason; and in Part 4, the comic account of Jason’s futile pursuit of Quentin II. One can go through all of the novels in this way and find that there was never a subject so serious—even in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s most “tragic” novel—that it could suppress this other, comic voice: shrill Shreve in the cold room at Harvard, baiting Quentin, inventing the missing parts of Sutpen’s story; Sutpen’s “niggers” tracking the fleeing French Architect; Harry Willbourne writing stories for True Confessions; all the half-crazed miners who can’t speak English at the mining camp; and maybe, most perfectly, the serio-comic tall tale of the Tall Convict set into an alternating and clearly dialectical relationship to the passionate tragic love story of Charlotte and Harry.
The insistent, recurrent comic voice is everywhere evident in Flags in the Dust and works against the tense account of Bayard’s tormented, violent life and the futility of Horace’s life (Faulkner’s account of Horace is always somewhat tinged with comedy.). Even in that part of the novel devoted to this brief doomed life, Faulkner inserts the wonderful comic account of Bayard and his drunken crew driving around serenading all of the single women in Jefferson—among them Narcissa; and in the account of Horace’s life we have the sad but comic image of the dripping smelly shrimp. Some of the comedy is at the expense of the blacks, especially the males, since Faulkner seldom used black females as a source of or occasion for comedy; some of it is generated by old Bayard, old man Falls, and Aunt Jenny, especially in the various encounters between these old folks and the doctors in the novel—Dr. Peabody, Dr. Alford, the specialist, and old Will Falls, the folk doctor. Another major source of comedy is the many encounters between whites and blacks in the Sartoris household, especially since it gives Faulkner a chance to write his masterful, usually comic, black dialect. Always good at social comedy, Faulkner treats all of the gatherings at the Mitchell household ironically and comically—whether it is a ladies party, a tennis gathering, or a birthday party for Little Belle. Even Faulkner’s treatment of the obsessed, love-sick Byron Snopes has comedy in the person of Virgil, his copyist, and the way in which Virgil cons Byron into buying him off with presents. The effect of all this comedy in all of its different
