In the scrum of our recent politics, a debate emerged over the last several weeks about whether protests and protesters should be “civil.” The debate brought a civil rights imaginary back into public view once again. Thomas Sugrue wrote a needed corrective to the impression that the civil rights movement was “civil” in the way some political pundits recently insisted it was, calling civility “White America’s Age-Old, Misguided Obsession.” (I would add this: it’s telling activists tended to use the word “freedom” for their own movement and not “civil rights.”) The whole debate recalled for me an influential book I read years ago on the subject, William Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1980). In that book, among the first and still very best local histories of the movement, Chafe showed how the language of “civility” most often meant intransigence among white authorities in Greensboro, North Carolina when black protesters demanded justice, especially once the sit-ins began in 1960. Chafe traced the “civility” phenomenon back much earlier. Greensboro’s image, its “aura of middle-class respectability” had been built upon “a pattern of pervasive discrimination based upon race” beginning in the era of disfranchisement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[1]
Considering cultural and intellectual history, the phenomenon of “civility” also resonated in the plantation myths working their way into white Southern identity in the decades following the Civil War. It’s surely age-old in this sense. So this recent debate also revived for me some thinking about William Faulkner’s minor novels, this time The Unvanquished (1938). I’ve been working on this one for a while now. The Unvanquished suggests to me a deeper conceptual context within the (U.S.) Southern imaginary for the civility debate, again in the conceptual territory of a plantation fable, which Faulkner uses and complicates in some surprising ways.
A Living Map
Faulkner’s story starts as picaresque. It gets deadly serious as events transpire. The novel begins this way: “Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map.” The scene emerging from there involves two boys, Ringo, black—a slave owned by John Sartoris—and Bayard, white—the son of John Sartoris. The setting is Mississippi amidst the American Civil War somewhere around the time of the battle of Vicksburg (the summer of 1863). The boys are playing war–Yankees versus Confederates, General Grant versus General Pemberton. The “living map” is their rough outline of the battle of Vicksburg summoned up from the dirt. The two are having a tough time of it. Faulkner explains:
Although Vickburg was just handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (the river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment. To Ringo and me it lived, if only because of the fact that the sunimpacted ground drank water faster than we could fetch it from the well, the very setting of the stage for conflict a prolonged and wellnigh hopeless ordeal in which we ran, panting and interminable, with the leaking bucket between wellhouse and battlefield, the two of us needing first to join forces and spend ourselves against a common enemy, time, before we could engender between us and hold intact the pattern of recapitulant mimic furious victory like a cloth, a shield between ourselves and reality, between fact and doom (3-4).
Faulkner reduces the futility of the Southern cause in the Civil War to the comic image of two boys feverishly running back and forth carrying a leaky bucket from a water well. It recalls the novelist Henry James’ comment, ruminating on the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond Virginia four decades after the war, that “I recognized something more than the melancholy of a lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been gained.”[2]
The opening scene in the novel moves beyond comic elegy for the Southern Lost Cause, becoming tragi-comic because the futility Faulkner describes deals with something much more stable and constant, namely the ways the land, “that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography” being much older, resists the boys’ efforts in miniature, but also scarcely listens to the reports of grownup men’s artillery. (This is reminiscent of walking around Antietam today. It’s surprising how homely and rural it is. It makes it hard to imagine the immense slaughter that took place there one hundred and fifty years ago, while at the same time making that slaughter only too present.)
In this novel and others, Faulkner evokes a wider, more complex history with very simple tools—here a child’s game in the dirt played by two boys who, it seems, have yet to fall entirely under the social strictures of masterdom and slavery: Bayard and Ringo, friends. Everyday things, sticks and mud, are a “living map” as Bayard Sartoris describes it, and the map encompasses larger schemes and spaces of human activity. Bayard, the narrator of the story, who inhabits the thoughts of his former self from the remove of adulthood, makes the plans of grownups seem awfully pinched and ephemeral, and yet, from the perspective of the child, at the same time grand and far away. For example, Bayard tells us later that his father John, Ringo’s master,
was not big, yet somehow he looked even smaller on the horse than off him, because Jupiter [the father’s horse] was big and when you thought of Father you thought of him as being big too and so when you thought of Father being on Jupiter it was as if you said, ‘Together they will be too big and you won’t believe it and so it wasn’t’ (10).
One feature of maturity is the awareness of a larger world outside of one’s own intimate relations. For Bayard, the reality of his father’s size, a mature comparison, bumps up against a larger, fantastic field of action—the Civil War–that John accesses astride his horse: “Together they will be too big.” Likewise, in the novel the relationship between the the dislocations brought on by the war, which makes up its larger, grand historical context, and the tenor of civility and honor intersect in the small, day to day interactions between people in relatively limited situations and spaces. Faulkner collapses the events of war and Reconstruction into what might be called a family romance involving the Sartorises, their kin, and the people they enslaved. How did the collapse of order during the Civil War affect antebellum Southern patterns of civility and honor?
Away from the battlefield during wartime, the trust civility requires can quickly yield to deception because there is no guarantee the law will be administered regularly and consistently, if at all. In The Unvanquished, trust is a tricky proposition, deceptions become treachery, and treachery in turn tragedy, which inevitably leads to violence as the Southern code of honor remains constant in the breach created by the chaos of war.[3] In Faulkner’s imagining, as society stabilizes and changes in the aftermath of war, the individual is then left to either continue the cycle of violence or end it. A person must, as the father John Sartoris puts it much later in the novel, do some moral housecleaning.
Loosh, one of John Sartoris’ slaves, eventually interrupts the boys at their game, asking them about their living map. The pile of sticks, Bayard tells him, is Vicksburg. Loosh, his eyes red with drink, flattens the pile. “There’s your Vicksburg” he says contemptuously. Loosh clearly knows something the boys don’t. The Western front is lost, and Vicksburg has fallen to the Yankees. Ringo, listening to the news, stands stunned, so much that Bayard has to goad him back into their game, throwing dust in the air and exclaiming “I’m General Pemberton!” This occasions in Bayard a reflection on the rules of their game playing:
‘All right!’ I cried. ‘I’ll be Grant this time, then. You can be General Pemberton.’ Because it was that urgent, since negroes knew. The arrangement was that I would be General Pemberton twice in succession and Ringo would be Grant, then I would have to be Grant once so Ringo could be General Pemberton or he wouldn’t play anymore. But now it was urgent even though Ringo was a nigger too, because Ringo and I had been born the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny ‘Granny’ just like I did, until maybe he wasn’t a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane (7).
Bayard’s conception of fairness here has everything to do with his relationship with Ringo, a slave and yet his friend. The wrenching part of this is that the two boys inhabit a unique moment in the life of children in the Old South—the time before adolescence when black boys and white boys could be playmates and companions, before the rules of masterdom and slavery became rigid and actively policed. Bayard’s admission that he must play fair with Ringo highlights the tragedy of that space in time—he grasps that Ringo is a member of a despised race who should naturally oppose the Confederate cause: “it was that urgent since negroes knew,” like the adult slave Loosh presumably, who doesn’t hide his contempt for the Confederates, celebrating their loss at Vicksburg.
Instead, Bayard would preserve his friendship with Ringo, “two feathers riding above a hurricane,” the “hurricane” being the Civil War and Reconstruction, which, from the benefit of hindsight, Bayard knows will destroy this moment in time when the two boys could be friends and therefore subject to standards of fairness in the way Bayard the child understands such things. Fairness for Bayard and Ringo means Ringo should have the chance to play the role of his own subjugator in a child’s game of war. Put another way, it means Ringo should have the chance to play at being the white master class with Bayard. Bayard’s admission that he and Ringo were neither black nor white—“the two of us neither”—however much wishful thinking on the part of a boy destined for masterdom in the Old South, nonetheless would be far less likely sentiment in the aftermath of the war and Reconstruction, when racial prejudices hardened, arguably becoming more systematic in their expression than in antebellum years.[4]
Bayard believes he is being civil to Ringo, if we define civility here as the limits people place on their individual liberty in the interests of living with one another comfortably. He makes an allowance, letting Ringo play the Confederate General Pemberton in an effort to stave off what “negroes knew,” a kind of knowledge of the outside world that, if understood completely, would destroy the fragile world they share with one another. This kindness, with its touching moral intensity, can only exist if Ringo continues to side with Bayard, with childhood, and thus the Confederacy, rather than with Loosh, adulthood, his people, their earned resentments and urge to be free of slavery. The irony is exquisite and horrible. Ringo, it seems, has a tough choice on his hands. The reader doesn’t know Ringo’s mind, only the threat posed to his thinking by Loosh. For the moment, he decides in favor of childhood play and fantasy, and the two boys throw dust in the air until “invisible” to one another, shouting “Kill the bastuds! Kill them! Kill them!” (The “bastuds” here are Yankees.) And, in a complicating reversal troubling Bayard’s whiteness, Granny, shouts for them, interrupting their play, settling the dust, “leaving us now” Bayard relates, “visible to one another, dust-colored ourselves to the eyes” (7).[5]
Bayard’s naivete comes because he thinks his personal relationship with Ringo can overcome the events and the structures of power everywhere around him. The complexity in Faulkner’s tale comes because Bayard—and probably Ringo—understand those events and structures at the same time. They can’t be disentangled. Their efforts at civility in this context are childhood fantasy, and they have the dawning apprehension this is so. They choose their childhood game of war over the war going on around them. I’ll continue with this line of thinking next time out.
[1] William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford, 1980), 16.
[2] Henry James, The American Scene (Horizon, 1967[1907]), 394.
[3] On Southern honor, see Bertram Wyatt Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford, 2007 [1982]).
[4] The classic here is George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate over Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Harper, Row, 1971).
[5] Emphasis mine.
8 Thoughts on this Post
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Your earlier post(s) on Intruders in the Dust prompted me to think about reading that novel. But I ended up reading The Unvanquished instead (or, to be more precise, about two-thirds of it — got sidetracked onto other things). Since I haven’t finished the book, I suppose I shouldn’t comment too much, but one thing I’d add on the Bayard-Ringo friendship is that Bayard seems not only to like but, at least in some ways, to respect Ringo: a couple of times Bayard comments that his father thought Ringo was the smarter of the two of them, and Bayard does not disagree with that.
Most of the chapters of The Unvanquished were originally short(ish) stories, published in the 1930s mostly in The Saturday Evening Post. How the audience and the time of writing affected the substance I’m not sure, but if there is criticism of the Old South (and of slavery) here, it seems to me (again, based on the first two-thirds or so of the book) to be largely implicit, existing between the lines rather than jumping out at the reader. This may have to do with Faulkner’s own politics (for lack of a better word), with his making Bayard a first-person narrator, with the venue of publication and audience, or maybe a combination of all of these. But whether “civility” is presented here as a childish fantasy that cannot survive an adult understanding of the “structures of power” of both the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, or whether the somewhat detached narrative tone serves rather to obfuscate, hide, and/or airbrush, at least to some extent, those structures of power, would seem to be in the eye of the beholder (or the ear of the reader).
Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Faulkner for not writing an overtly political novel or an anticipation of the civil rights movement — quite obviously, that’s not what his fiction was or is about — but it does seem to me less than obvious that his view is as critical, as concerned with unmasking, as your word “fantasy” suggests here. Now maybe if I finish the last third of the book, my view will change — I don’t know.
Yes, Bayard definitely knows Ringo as his best friend, which I thought I had made clear. And yes, Bayard acknowledges later on that Ringo had more smarts, especially when the mule chicanery takes place later on in the novel with Granny and the Yankee encampment. It seems to me that this is enough of a criticism of the Old South. I can’t imagine a member of the plantation elite admitting an enslaved person more intelligent than he is. Yet there are plenty more. Faulkner is subtle, so there are lots of moments where he tweaks the classic plantation narrative. He grew up with these stories. The first is at the very beginning, which I point out, namely the comic image of Confederate exploits reduced to the image of two boys running back and forth from water well with a leaky bucket. This is far from the myth of a noble lost cause of honorable cavaliers and so on. The boys love a developing myth like certain boys loved playing army games, but Faulkner sets the scene a bit differently. The picaresque reduces it. Genre is important.
That doesn’t overcook my interpretation. So I’ll have to push back against you a bit there. I think it’s clear that Faulkner is far more complex and subtle than writers who foisted up the plantation myth earlier on. He riffs on it and complicates it over and over again in his novels. Whether this is a critique of the “Old South” is more difficult, insofar as Faulkner is very much aware of the fables and myths about that era. He’s mining the myths to comic effect and then tragic outcome.
Another, which I’ll get into later on, is the classic trope in that plantation myth, of loyal enslaved people hiding the family silver from the marauding Yankees. Quite the opposite happens in the novel. There’s quite a bit of worry over what will happen with the family silver with the white family not around. So the critique Faulkner plays with in the novel has to do with the Southern white imaginary, in place by the 1930s, again, what has been called the plantation myth. This is what I was getting at here.
Also, I don’t think I suggested that Faulkner hid structures of power. He showed them with the devices in the novel. We may not know what Ringo thinks, but we know what Bayard thinks. He made the local and the national, the specific and the general only too plain. This was my point. He demonstrated very clearly how this particularly interpersonal relationship could not be disentangled from those structures. The upshot is that I think you’ve misread me and Faulkner, but it could be my fault. I should be more explicit I guess.
Faulkner’s own politics are very tricky, but it would be a grave mistake to paint him with too broad a brush. I should add that I don’t mean to suggest any teleological conclusions here, that somehow this novel from the 1930s leads to the 1960s. Rather, Faulkner understood, I think, how civility might have worked between a white boy and and enslaved black boy in the antebellum South (we can only guess) and at the same time he made that work to tweak and complicate the plantation myths of so many in the age of “Gone with the Wind.”
Anyhow, once again, Louis, you’ve made me think harder about my words. I really appreciate the comment.
Pete,
Thanks for the reply. It’s rather late here, so I’ll have to be briefer than I otherwise might.
First, I agree he’s complicating/tweaking the plantation myth. Like a huge number of people, I’ve seen the movie Gone with the Wind (though not read the Margaret Mitchell novel). Obviously, The Unvanquished is completely different.
You write: “I don’t think I suggested that Faulkner hid structures of power.” I never said that you suggested that Faulkner hid structures of power. I suggested that the tone of the narrative might have that effect (quoting from my comment):
“But whether “civility” is presented here as a childish fantasy that cannot survive an adult understanding of the “structures of power” of both the antebellum and Jim Crow eras [which is what I took, rightly or wrongly, to be your take, in part, on the book], or whether the somewhat detached narrative tone serves rather to obfuscate, hide, and/or airbrush, at least to some extent, those structures of power [which was my suggestion, not yours], would seem to be in the eye of the beholder (or the ear of the reader).”
I’m sorry if that passage was not v. clear, but I think a fair re-reading will show that I never suggested you thought F. hid structures of power.
p.s. For the record, I’m not a historian, not an Americanist, not from the South or an expert on Southern history, not a literary scholar or literary critic, not a novelist, and I believe the only Faulkner I’ve read is two-thirds of this book and a bit of The Sound and the Fury. So if I’ve misread Faulkner, it wouldn’t be a gigantic surprise. And no, you don’t have to be more explicit in your blog posts. You should write your posts exactly how you want to write them. (I had a blog for about eight years, and IMO that’s about eighty to ninety percent of the point of blogging: bloggers should write their posts exactly as they want to, period.)
Peter–There’s a concept related to civility that used to be evoked when talking about Southern honor and related matters as historical realities, but also in Faulkner’s fiction. I refer of course to chivalry, the alleged code of feeling and behavior(i.e. ideology) that held together the medieval aristocratic order in Europe and then migrated to the New World where it became the code which the upper class South used to justify itself to itself and to the outside world. It was anti-egalitarian, devoted to preserving racial and social hierarchy, and given to celebrations of violence in its name. Thus, the world of The Unvanquished is about how that ideology of chivalry, of which interpersonal civility is a necessary part, was coming under intense pressure and headed for destruction during the (Civil) War. Put another way, modernity is both a blessing and a curse in Faulkner’s world. It helped destroy that lost chivalric order, which was,however, built on chattel slavery.
Yes, that’s right, thanks for that addition. An honor killing is that the center of the story and civility is tied to it. I mean to get into this next time out, when the boys go out after Ab Snopes–a certain kind of civility requires violence, “the proof and the expiation” as Bayard’s uncle puts it. It’s interesting even later on that Drusilla and Ringo are the carriers of that chivalric tradition since they’re unconventional by the lights of any plantation legend. There are also interesting things going on with the image of the railroad in the book, a pretty clear metaphor for modernity. (There’s a machine in the garden deal going on.) I’ll dig into this a little more too.
Peter–Just a methological addition. I think your use of Faulkner to discuss historical events and to illuminate the workings of socio-cultural entities, e.g. civility, answers the question someone raised in the discussion of Andy Seal’s blog on the novel of ideas back in the spring. In fact, Faulkner is almost a primary source for southern historians: he’s certainly the place to start. For example where historians ANALYZE the ways race has worked, had its impact, in southern history, writers like Faulkner or Wright REPRESENT those same things. I almost want to say that they ENACT the history of the region in certain of its central aspects at certain historical moments.
Great post, looking forward to the rest of this series.
Thinking more about your piece here. The character of Nurse Ratched speaks well to the conversation too. Especially if we consider recent calls for civility tend to come from those who can be categorized as Arendt’s banal evil-doers.