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Barn Burning (1938)

• William Faulkner

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William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• Greatest American Southern writer, won the Nobel
  Prize for Literature, 1950
• A master of modernist experimentation in the
  novel, related to his obsession with time
• stream of consciousness, temporal shifts, and
  multiple voices
• Some major novels The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  4 narrators, As I Lay Dying (1930) 15
  narrators, Absalom! Absalom! (1936)

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(No Transcript)
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Colonel William Clark Falkner (1826-89)

• Faulkners great-grandfather
• Civil War Veteran
• Politician
• Popular Romantic Novelist (The White Rose of
  Memphis, 1881)
• Died of gunshot wound from former business partner

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William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• Born William Falkner, 25 Sept. 1897, New Albany,
  Mississippi
• 1918 joins Canadian Royal Air Force
• 1919-20 U of Mississippi
• 1921 U of Mississippi Post Office

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Faulkner Early Publications

• 1924 The Marble Faun (poems)
• 1925 travels in Europe
• 1927 Mosquitoes
• 1928 Sartoris

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Faulkner Major Phase

• 1929 The Sound and the Fury
• 1930 As I Lay Dying
• 1931 Sanctuary
• 1932 Light in August
• 1935 Pylon
• 1936 Absalom, Absalom!

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Faulkner in Hollywood 1930s
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Faulkner Later Fiction

• 1938 The Unvanquished
• Barn Burning
• 1940 The Hamlet
• 1942 Go Down, Moses
• 1948 Intruder in the Dust

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Faulkners Critical Reputation

• Better regarded in Europe than in U.S.
• Then 1946 The Portable Faulkner
• 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature

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Faulkner, after the Nobel

• 1954 A Fable (Pulitzer Prize)
• 1957 The Town
• 1959 The Mansion
• 1962 The Reivers

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William Faulkner (1897-1962)

• His great theme is the influence of the past on
  the present
• Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun (1951), says
  The past is never dead. Its not even past.
• To me, Faulkner remarked, no man is himself,
  he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing
  really as was because the past is. It is a part
  of every man, every woman, and every moment. All
  of his and her ancestry, background, is all a
  part of himself and herself at any moment.

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Yoknapatawpha County

• Faulkners apocryphal county, patterned on his
  native Lafayette County.
• The county seat, Jefferson, resembles Faulkners
  hometown of Oxford in many particularsbut
  without Oxfords University of Mississippi campus
  
• Faulkner said Yoknapatawpha means Water flows
  slow through the flatland.

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Yoknapatawpha County

• 2,400 square miles
• the population, 6,298 whites and 9,313 Negroes,
  for a total of 15,611

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from Nobel Acceptance Speech

• I believe that man will not merely endure he
  will prevail. He is immortal, not because he
  alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
  but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of
  compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The
  poets, the writers, duty is to write about
  these things. It is his privilege to help man
  endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of
  the courage and honor and hope and pride and
  compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been
  the glory of his past.

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Question

• Is Faulkners vision in his fiction as positive
  and uplifting as the vision expressed in this
  Nobel lecture? Or is his fiction more ambivalent?

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Barn Burning

• a story of the Snopeses, a poor white family who
  appear in a number of Faulkners narratives of
  fictional Yoknapatawpha County
• Setting Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, about
  30 years after the Civil War (1861-65), thus, in
  the 1890s

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Barn Burning the film, 1980

• Part of The American Short Story Collection
• Starring Tommy Lee Jones as Abner Snopes
• Featuring Faulkners nephew Jimmy Faulkner as
  Major de Spain

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Barn Burning Family Conflict

• The father, Abner, avenges himself on more
  socially established whites by burning their
  barns and carrying out lesser acts of mischief
• The younger son, named Colonel Sartoris (Sarty)
  Snopes, 10 years old, struggles to revolt against
  his father
• Colonel Sartoris a Confederate Army officer and
  leading citizen of Jefferson, Mississippi (higher
  class and perhaps higher morality)

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Barn Burning Family Conflict

• Sarty struggles between family allegiance and
  external standards of justice
• Abner hits him and tells him to learn to stick
  to your own blood or you aint going to have any
  blood to stick to you (1793, last para.).
• Later, twenty years later, he was to tell
  himself, "If I had said they wanted only truth,
  justice, he would have hit me again (1793, last
  para.)

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Barn Burning Family Conflict

• Opening Scene (1790-92) makeshift courtroom in
  general store
• Sarty feels the old fierce pull of blood (1791,
  1st para.) his fathers enemy is his enemy too
• However, he also feels grief and despair
  because he must tell a lie for his father
• But when another boy calls Abner a Barn Burner,
  Sarty attacks the boy (1792, middle)

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Abner Motivation

• Does Abner have an understandable motivation?
• Abners predicament he falls into the cracks of
  Southern society he is not a member of the white
  aristocracy nor the the black servant class
• See visit to de Spain mansion (1796, middle)
  Thats sweat, he tells Sarty. Nigger sweat
  (1796, top)
• Question Does the history of slavery in the
  South undercut or taint its ideals of truth and
  justice?

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Abner Motivation

• During Civil War, Abner did not fight for either
  side. Instead he stole horses from both sides.
  See 1802 (3rd para.) his father had gone to
  that war a private in the fine old European
  sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the
  authority of and giving fidelity to no man or
  army or flag, going to war . . .for booty--it
  meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it
  were enemy booty or his own.

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Abner Motivation

• In any case, Abner is persuasive. See 1793 (1st
  main para.) There was something about his
  wolflike independence and even courage, when the
  advantage was at least neutral, which impressed
  strangers, as if they got from his latent
  ravening ferocity not so much a sense of
  dependability as a feeling that his ferocious
  conviction in the rightness of his own actions
  would be of advantage to all whose interest lay
  with his.

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Symbols Fire

• As a barn burner, Abner is associated with fire
• See 1793 (2nd main para.) the element of fire
  spoke to some deep mainspring of his fathers
  being
• Fire as force of civilization and destruction
• See 1800 (2nd full para.) taking the familys
  lantern oil to burn de Spains barn

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Symbols Rug

• The destruction of the rug is symbolic of Abners
  larger rebellion against society
• See 1795 He dirties the rug with his stiff foot
  injured during the war (1792) his rebellion has
  long history
• He never looked at it, he never once looked down
  at the rugwillfully disregarding his
  destructiveness (1795).

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Symbols Rug

• See bottom 1796-top 1797 After he cleans the
  rug, his foot tracks are replaced by long,
  water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic
  course of lilliputian mowing machine
  (1797)suggesting his rebellion is small and not
  very effective

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Symbols Cheese

• Cheese is a peculiar symbol, associated with the
  power of family allegiance over external justice
  in the 2 court scenes
• See opening of story The store in which the
  Justice of the Peaces court was sitting smelled
  of cheese (1790).
• See 1800, top Abner buys cheese from courtroom
  store and shares it with his sons

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Modernism

• Faulkner portrays this story of conflict through
  a modernist aesthetic, through experimentation
  with
• Consciousness
• Time
• Space

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Modernism Consciousness

• Using italics, Faulkner portrays the limited and
  often conflicted internal thoughts of the boy
  Sarty
• See, for example, 1791-92

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Modernism Time

• The narrator jumps backward and forward in time,
  and suspends time
• Abners wartime activities are repeatedly
  mentioned
• prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity (bottom
  1791-92)
• The family carries an old clock stopped at 214
  of a dead and forgotten day and time (1792)
• Abners handling of the mules anticipates
  descendants handling of motor car (1792, last
  para.)
• Narrators speculates how Sarty might have
  thought if he were older (1793, 2nd main para.)

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Modernism Space

• Faulkner portrays reality through geometric,
  two-dimensional shapes
• the father is repeatedly described as a flat
  shape, without . . . depth, depthless, as if
  cut from tin (1793, 1795).
• the fathers crude, flat shape contrasts with
  the serene columned backdrop of the de Spain
  mansion, with its associations of peace, joy, and
  dignity (1794-95).

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Faulkners Rowan Oak, Oxford, Miss.
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Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910
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The Ending

• Sarty assumes that his father is dead. Can we be
  sure?
• Sarty concludes that his father was brave, but
  the narrator protests (1802)
• Sarty ultimately prepares to enter the dark
  woods (1803), in some ways a typically American
  ending, reminiscent of Irvings Rip Van Winkle
  and Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn.