and shows how each, by a very different route, arrives at defeat in the male line. Bayard is no worse than Horace and, in the end, though dead, is no more self–destructive than Horace with his passive slide into death in life. Bayard’s death and defeat are simply more dramatic, more sensational. Faulkner certainly knew what he was doing when he paired these two polarized male characters, putting different causes of destruction and defeat (non-generative being) in each of them and then, in the course of the novel, following each to his appointed end. Horace has no more chance of avoiding defeat than Bayard does; whether defeat comes at the hands of a woman or a defective airplane really makes little difference here. Bayard is dead at the end of the novel and Faulkner gives Horace another chance in Sanctuary, only to defeat him once again in an even more terrible and conclusive way in that novel.
What Faulkner achieved by organizing this novel as he did was to combine the linear movement of the narrative, which, in this novel, tends to move steadily forward in time with only occasional flashbacks, with a kind of clustering effect around each of the main characters or ontological centers: old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Bayard, Belle, Horace, Byron Snopes. With the exception of Byron Snopes, these main characters are all in a variety of relationships to each other and come together periodically in the course of the novel. One way to understand what Faulkner is doing in this novel is to diagram the clusters for each of the main characters by indicating the significant relations for each in the novel. Byron Snopes only has two significant relations, and those are with Narcissa and Virgil, his letter writer. Horace really only has two significant relationships, and those are with his sister Narcissa and with Belle. There are minor relationships with Harry Mitchell, the husband he compromises, with Joan, Belle’s sister, and his father, Will Benbow (long dead). Narcissa has many more relationships: with Belle, her rival, with Aunt Jenny, with Byron Snopes, with Aunt Jenny and old Bayard, and of course with Bayard. Old Bayard probably has the most: with old Will Falls, with Dr. Peabody; with Aunt Jenny; with Simon; with Bayard, his grandson; with the other household blacks; with his father, Colonel Sartoris; with John, his other grandson. Aunt Jenny is like old Bayard, but has a much more involved relationship with Narcissa. Like old Bayard, she is one of the connectors between the past and the present. Bayard, like Narcissa, has a whole series of very complex relationships: to his dead brother, whose death he blames himself for; to his dead first wife and son, whose deaths he also blames himself for; to old Bayard, whose death is in fact his fault and hence another source of guilt for him, another part of his doom and torment; to the MacCallums, with whom he hunts and whom he identifies with his twin, John; to Suratt and Hub; to Simon and Isom, through the car; to Aunt Jenny, naturally, who, with old Bayard, raised him; and of course to Narcissa, who brought him a brief reprieve from his torment, a reprieve that is depicted in wonderful scenes of quiet domesticity, hunting, and farming—even including a dinner which Horace attends; and finally with his car which, accident by accident, marks his progress toward his appointed end when he deliberately tests what is clearly a defectively designed plane and crashes when the wings come off.
Ontologically, Bayard, Narcissa, Horace, and, perhaps, Belle, are the most interesting characters in a novel literally swarming with wonderfully depicted characters—including even the most minor ones, like the specialist who is to remove old Bayard’s wen, only to have it fall off on the appointed day just as old man Falls said it would after he treated it with his salve; or Dr. Alford and Dr. Peabody (and his son); Caspey; Hub and Suratt; the girl Horace plays tennis with; Joan, Belle’s sister; the Negro family Bayard spends Christmas with; the strange intense people in the bar with Bayard in Chicago; Harry Mitchell, defeated also by Belle, as we see him in the same Chicago bar; the various MacCallums (Buddy, Henry, Virginius, Rafe), the two blacks who rescue Bayard from his overturned sunken car; the cafe owner; old man Falls; Aunt Sally; even characters we never meet directly, like Colonel Sartoris and young John Sartoris.
The genius of a novelist, like that of a playwright, expresses itself in the creation of characters and, additionally, in a novelist, in telling stories. This novel is full of wonderful stories: in fact, it begins with one about Colonel Sartoris and the Yankees, as told (shouted) by old man Falls, and, overall, tells part of the story of the Sartoris family (to be told more fully, later, in The Unvanquished) and most of the story of the Benbow family, more of which will be told later in Sanctuary, especially the part having to do with Horace, as he tries, with his usual futility, to escape his useless and demeaning life with Belle, the voluptuary, and the part having to do with Narcissa’s helping to defeat her brother’s efforts to do something good and useful in his life. Whatever this novel is about is contained in the stories of these two families and in the wonderful comedy that Faulkner always made a part of his novels.
Bayard’s tragic story is told in the context of old Bayard, Aunt Jenny and the Sartoris family history in general. The Sartoris family history is primarily a history of Sartoris males (all named John or Bayard) who die violently. As old Bayard says, he is the only Sartoris male to live past fifty. Colonel John Sartoris was shot on the streets of Jefferson in 1873 when he has fifty. His brother Bayard was killed in the Civil War in 1862 at twenty-four. Old Bayard’s son dies in 1901 of yellow fever at an early age. One of his sons, John (Bayard’s twin), is killed in 1918 at age twenty-five when he is shot down by the Germans in World War I. Old Bayard dies in 1919 of a heart attack in Bayard’s car at age seventy. Bayard dies in 1920 when he crashes, test piloting a defective plane, at age twenty-seven. The only surviving Sartoris is Benbow Sartoris, born the day his father dies, about whom we really know nothing.
Bayard and his twin, John, seem to have been born with some self-destructive impulse in their genes, some impulse or code of values which required them to always be testing themselves, to always do the wild, often violent, and dangerous thing, even the foolhardy thing. John must certainly have known that he had no chance at all against German planes which could fly higher and faster than his plane; Bayard certainly knew that driving as he did put him always at risk, just as riding the nearly wild stallion, or flying a defective experimental plane did. They are romantic self-destructive selves and seem to share in Faulkner’s idea of the kind of heroic self he always identified with the Confederate Army. But there is more going on with Bayard than this. We do not really know enough about Bayard (or John) to say with any precision exactly what they were before they went off to the war. We know only that they did wild, crazy things, at home and away at college; that they were passionately devoted to each other; that, as he does later, Bayard found some satisfaction and apparent temporary repose in his love for his first wife. What we really know about Bayard dates from the death of his brother, a traumatic event to which he returns over and over again and for which he blames himself. It seems to be the primary source of his torment and the event the effects of which he only escapes from momentarily with Narcissa. Before Narcissa, Bayard not only punishes and threatens himself but victimizes others, usually with the car. If he only put himself at risk, as he does when he crashes in the plane, that would be one thing; but he is always endangering others by his actions, in a classic scapegoating pattern of action. It is never a question in this novel of whether Bayard will kill himself, but only when, and who else, before he dies in one of his accidents. It is the death of his grandfather, in yet another car accident, that seals his doom and precipitates the final sequence of actions that result in his death. What we have in Bayard is the first of Faulkner’s driven, tormented, guilt-ridden, doomed selves, one who is both destructive and destroyed, apparently because it is in the nature of his character to be this way and because some set of values he commits himself to causes him to act in this way.
Narcissa is the very opposite of Bayard, having led a serene, quiet, secluded, symbolically incestuous, life with her beloved brother Horace. Into this serene and quiet life comes Bayard, her antithesis, and, in spite of herself, Narcissa is roused to passion and falls in love with Bayard. It is a brief happy conjunction for both of them when it finally occurs, and an event that occurs over and over again in Faulkner’s later novels, most interestingly, probably in The Wild Palms. Narcissa experiences something she would never have known without Bayard: passionate love—always a good thing in Faulkner; and Bayard, for a brief period of time, is free of his torments and reprieved from his doom. Exactly who is at fault and how the accident in which old Bayard dies comes about is never really made clear; what is clear, is that in Bayard’s case, in the case
