Faulkner, Balzac, and the word.

Horton, Merrill

An intellectual in William Faulkner's Mosquitoes praises Honor, de Balzac as a writer whom "translation cannot injure"--a more salient point than it might seem because the translations available to Faulkner were poorly done (Levin 166) and we don't know which he was exposed to first. In his youth he read an unknown number of his grandfather's Balzac books, and the oldest Comedie tome in his own library could have been one of these because he autographed it in his family's original "Falkner" spelling, which implies that he read it while comparatively young. The book belongs to the 1896 Centenary edition by Boston's Little, Brown and Company; I speculate that its companions were destroyed when Phil Stone's house burned in 1942, a year that marked a break in Faulkner's productivity. If the Young Colonel owned the Centenary, then we should admit the possibility of an even more intimate influence. Faulkner read his paternal grandfather's volumes prior to 1925 but he owned a 1925 Comedie volume (published by Black) that his father Murry signed twice but left undated, which suggests the book was a reacquisition or replacement. Murry died in August of 1932 and William signed the book in his surname's new spelling sometime the next year (Blotner, Faulkner 110, 160).

At his own death Faulkner held an incomplete Library Edition of the Gebbie Publishing Company's The Novels of Balzac (Philadelphia: 1897-99, consisting of Droll Stories and La Comedie humaine), which I cite here. (1) Perhaps he didn't inscribe the secondhand set because an earlier owner had done so. George Gordon Battle (1868-1949) (2) was a North Carolina native and University of Virginia alumnus who became prominent in Manhattan legal, political, and humanitarian circles; indeed, native New Yorker and future Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy was named for the Democrat. Unfortunately, we are reduced to speculating about why and how Faulkner acquired the books. A plausible answer to the first question is the Stone fire; if this was the case then it is reasonable to suppose that Battle's set was purchased as a replacement, and two possibilities suggest themselves for how and, more vaguely, when the sale or transfer occurred. Battle had a summer home in Virginia and was buried in Richmond (Hellman 21-25; Powell 110), so perhaps some of his holdings made their way onto the local market or even into the hands of Faulkner friend and Virginian collector Linton Massey. However, Faulkner didn't begin residing in Charlottesville until 1957, and textual evidence suggests that he didn't wait fifteen years before replacing his volumes. A somewhat better conjecture is that his publishers were acquainted with the Battles and facilitated the purchase, but this scenario strongly implies that Battle parted with his books prior to his death in 1949. Faulkner was still consulting (or remembering) the Centenary when revising the stories that became 1942's Go Down, Moses: when Uncle Buck genuflects to Miss Sophonsiba--he "dragged his foot" (10)--Faulkner was mining Little, Brown's "Cesar Birotteau," where a young man is "dragging his foot timidly because [his beloved] Cesarine was there" (126). (3)

An early exposure to Balzac's work could have predisposed Faulkner to the tutelage of Phil Stone, and perhaps helps to explain the young men's friendship. In a June 1, 1962, letter Stone told Richard P. Adams that "Balzac would probably have had more influence on [Faulkner] than anybody else" (Brodsky and Hamblin 304), but he might have said the same of himself. Stone had entered Yale in 1913, probably as a senior, and in the summer of 1914 or 1915 he began reading a Balzac translation, publisher unknown, that belonged to one of his brothers (Snell 75). Perhaps fire destroyed Stone's own Balzac volumes; the only one extant is The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau (New York: Macmillan, 1896) and we can't be certain that it belonged to his brother's set, but biographer Susan Snell says that Stone read Balzac only in English (62, cf. 119). (4) He became an enthusiast and "proselytized for the writer" (61, 74, 75), and a 1916 book by W.H. Wright focused his zeal by teaching him "to regard the proper reading of Balzac as a significant aesthetic test" (143, cf. 144). The Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and the Syntax of Aesthetics is a treatise that draws on Platonic Idealism, sometimes called rationalism and analysis; today's readers will find the book unexceptional but its chapter title "Sic Itur Ad Astra" catches the eye (261) and its mentions of the artist Corot (1796-1875) (5) remind us of Flags in the Dust's "reproduction of a Corot" (99). More notably, in touting Balzac as a touchstone Wright coins terms and adduces aesthetic principles familiar to Balzac's and Faulkner's readers: the true artist slowly creates "a microcosmos" and "in the fabrication of this cosmos the creator finds his exaltation" (24, 222). Stone would commend Wright's aesthetics to Malcolm Cowley in 1945 (Brodsky and Hamblin 31), but Snell, who had access to Stone's widow, believes that he shared them much earlier. Probably in 1922 Stone and Faulkner together read every Comedie volume and many aloud with their friend Bess Storer; once again, we can't certainly identify the edition(s) (6) but Snell says that "[a]t the conclusion of their Balzac seminar Faulkner and Bess Storer would have been prepared to stand an examination on The Creative Will" (75, 143, 144).

The 1930s inaugurated Stone's financial woes; it was then, probably, that the attorney wrote "How well I know it!" next to a Comedie passage that details Cesar Birotteau's troubles with creditors (49). He urged his wife to read Balzac during this period (Snell 75), and at mid-decade compared Stark Young's popular So Red the Rose to the work of Balzac, Fielding, and Thackeray, bluntly telling Young that his book lacked the vitality even of the Comedie's sedate "The Lily of the Valley." (7) Twenty-one years would elapse, however, before Stone revealed the scope of the Tourangeau's influence; on April 16, 1956, he told Clifton Fadiman: "The principal model I held up to Bill was Balzac although I realize that Balzac should now wear a new coat, but Bill did not follow this much" (Brodsky and Hamblin 192). We will puzzle over the attorney's choice of the present tense "realize" and over the final clause's ambiguity, but it would appear that Stone believed he and his friend colluded to revise the Frenchman. To be sure, some evidence seems to challenge this theory. Stone and his wife believed that The Hamlet's stock diddlin' was based on a Lafayette County story and "remarked with satisfaction on the appearance of Sir Isaac Snopes and his bovine lover in the manuscript Faulkner brought for Phil to read" (Snell 244). The evidence, however, is contradictory. Satisfaction wasn't what Stone expressed to Cowley; he said the episode revealed Faulkner's "complete lack of aesthetic taste," and didn't mention the local incident (Brodsky and Hamblin 29). It's possible that Stone never realized the cow material's connection to the Comedie's "A Passion in the Desert" where, as Roxandra Antoniadis observed in 1970, a soldier lives conjugally with a panther (Faulkner alludes to this in A Fable) and then kills her in a lover's quarrel (215). It also is possible, however, that his inconsistency articulated a moody ambivalence: Stone wanted to trumpet his role in his friend's success while remaining true to what probably were youthful promises to keep the faith. If Faulkner, for his part, felt any anxiety regarding his sources it eventually must have included suspicions that his friend would divulge them (which, obscurely, he did), and could account for the writer's non-committal response when Emily Stone asked if he intended to dedicate the latest Snopes novel to her husband.

William Faulkner's critical grasp of Balzac was initiated by Phil Stone, whose later attacks on Faulkner's work invoked Wright and Balzac. Stone had been a force behind his friend's first book, The Marble Faun, and as late as 1945 he praised Flags in the Dust's design, which, somewhat mysteriously, he said was implicit in the "glamorous fatality" phrase at novel's end (Brodsky and Hamblin 29). However, in April of 1942 (not long after receiving his copy of Go Down, Moses) he began complaining that some later novels were incoherent (21-25). Grumblings about Modernism weren't limited to Stone, of course, but three years later, to Cowley, the aesthetics tutor appreciatively wrote that Shakespeare and Balzac's styles are governed by their subject matter--and derided Faulkner's style as "mannerism" and the writer himself as lacking an aesthetic theory (29-31). Stone's letter also denied the accuracy of a Cowley essay that asserted an "interrelated pattern ... in [Faulkner's] later novels": the attorney said that the novels had no "general sense of design" but he approved his friend's short stories and agreeably implied that he saw patterns there (Cowley 13, cf. 14; Brodsky and Hamblin 31). An April 1956 letter to Fadiman likewise cited three Comedie novels as having organically varying styles and, by way of contrast, repeated the "no design" accusation against Faulkner (Brodsky and Hamblin 191). One year later, in a letter to James B. Meriwether, he again taxed his former protege's novels but not the stories with lack of Balzacian design (Brodsky and Hamblin 216; cf. Snell 144-45).

Balzac was prodigiously prolific; inevitably, some Comedie novels and stories are more polished than others but, unlike Stone, most readers today won't find that their translated stylistics differ markedly and neither did Faulkner, who admired the Frenchman's manner but characterized it as "writing with the stub of his pen." Nevertheless, Stone's critiques direct us to The Human Comedy's design, which Faulkner adopted.

Discussing Balzacian ontology, Roland Le Huenen and Paul Perron say of a man who they believed wrote, or helped Balzac to write, two introductions to the Comedie:

 [Felix] Davin's prefaces present the two-fold descriptive metaphor
 of a picture gallery designating Les Etudes de moeurs, and of a
 monument built stone by stone, the architectural pyramid of which
 simulates the successive staging of the Comedie humaine in its
 entirety. The Etudes de moeurs [the largest grouping of stories]
 thus form its base, the Etudes analytiques [the smallest] its apex,
 and the Etudes philosophiques its median transition. This
 schematization, [and other evidence] ... would suggest an idealized
 conception of knowledge moving from effects to causes, then to
 principles; that is, to the entirety of a form. (216; emphasis
 mine) (8)

W.H. Wright taught that the "vitalising source of all thought" is the "philosophic outlook" (191) and the Comedie's is Platonic Idealism and neo-Platonism, overlaid with earlier Greek thought as well as Swedenborgian Christianity, Newtonian physics, and French biological theory of the period. At the least, Phil Stone was capable of recognizing and explaining the work's ancient sources; his education included seven consecutive years of Greek language studies and two of college Latin (Snell 63, 54), some of which must have involved readings in the Platonism that not only helps to structure the Comedie but permeates Wright's book, which claims, for example, that "The generation of great ideas is analogous to the generation of great forms" (84). Form and content of an Aristotelian sort are exemplified in one of Balzac's borrowings from Walter Scott. The Comedie's "The Old Maid"--the novel that inspired Quentin Compson's suicide, portions of his sister's persona, Emily Grierson's tax remittance, and that contributed to the name New Valois--changes shape for a plot twist:

 M. DE VALOIS. 'So Monsieur le Vicomte is coming to settle here,
 people say.' M. DE TROISVILLE. 'Yes, monsieur. I have come to look
 for a house.' (Mlle. Cormon turns, cup in hand.) 'And I must have a
 large one'--(Mlle. Cormon offers the cup of coffee)--'to hold my
 family.' (The room grows dark before the old maid's eyes.). (27:
 115)

The Comedie's "Les Employes" displays the technique at far greater length (29: 318-34, 345-53, 371-72, 408-13, 417-23, 435-48). (9) Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and "Peter" likewise dramatize dialogue, as does Mosquitoes for its Comedie-inspired missing body theme (10) after the sculptor Gordon supposedly vanishes:

 Fairchild--But I saw him after we got back to the yacht. I know
 I did.

 Mark--No, he wasn't in the boat when we came back....

 Julius--That's so.... (MOS 237)

Thus, I suggest that Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun is Balzacian (not Modernist) technique extended to novel length.

In 1935 Phil Stone hinted at Idealism when, Snell tells us, he specified the emotional price composition exacted from his friend: "Stone would write Stark Young of [Faulkner's] inevitable depression following his incarnation of the ideal" (156). The remark presumes intimacy with the novelist's intentions but otherwise makes little sense without a Platonic context. Stone would have known that Plato posited a chasm between mutable matter and an eternal metaphysical Ideal; Plato, that is, was a dualist. Balzac was a monist: his Comedie's Etudes incrementally bridge the chasm via neo-Platonism, later Antiquity's conflating of Idealism into the imprisoning Cave, the Divided Line, and the Sun. Balzac calls the continuum the "degrees of existence by which man attains heaven," or the "earthly, the spiritual, and the divine" ("Seraphita" 21: 58, 148). Not unlike The Divine Comedy's Dante, The Human Comedy's pilgrim souls seek to escape the Cave and, impelled by memory and eros, traverse life on their way home to the Sun, the ideal world of the Forms (which Balzac associated with Plato's Prime Mover and Dante's Heaven). Such a scheme, on the face of it, would seem unlikely to appeal to Faulkner since, as Sartre correctly pointed out, God--which I take to mean any atmospheric sense of the divine--is absent from the Mississippian's work. Faulkner, however, retained Balzac's incremental intellectual staging, rendering it graphically thematic in These 13's numerically grouped contents, in the rubrics of Collected Stories' geographical and irregularly ascending ones, and in the Snopes trilogy's upwardly mobile titles--Stone's patterns, perhaps. The first two works conclude with the transcendent "Carcassonne" and the latter, which was dedicated to Stone, with another starry apotheosis-Mink Snopes's, itself based on the Comedie's Seraphita's. (11) When Seraphita dies, however, she returns to God, unlike Mink, since Balzac, unlike Faulkner, gives his universe a Creator.

The alpha and omega of the Comedie's microcosmos and its physics is Plato's Prime Mover. The label designates

 an ultimate cause of motion or change in the universe; it is an
 idea of fundamental importance in rational cosmology. In ancient
 philosophy the topic is most fully developed by Plato and
 Aristotle. Both maintain that the original cause of motion must
 possess mind. But Aristotle argues against Plato that the prime
 mover must be itself unmoved. (Honderich 719) (12)

Balzac's Christian Mover emanates "principles" that unfold to create materiality ("Louis Lambert" 21: 267) and one of these, The Word, is to the point here. Freely synthesizing disparate concepts, the Comedie updates the Prime Mover by blending pagan and Christian philosophy with Enlightenment science and religion: "Seraphita" proclaims that Newton's gravitation equations are "number endowed by the Word" (21: 149) and "Louis Lambert" equates The Word in the Gospel of John with the Stoics' Logos (their version of God), and probably with the earlier, divine Heraclitean Logos, as well, (13) which means that Balzac makes language an aspect of the Deity. This reveals the Comedie's grand goal of unifying idealism and empiricism, albeit at the latter's expense: "What," Seraphita asks, "if ... motion and number are generated by the Word?" (21: 107).

Faulkner rejects supernatural explanations of Creation but creating life (or motion) is his and Balzac's artistic imperative, and to that end the novelists subsume mythology's initializing language of Being. The Mississippian's comment that James Joyce was electrocuted by the divine fire is a Promethean evocation from the Comedie's "The Unknown Masterpiece": one painter tells another "many a spot in your picture has not been touched by the divine flame" (4: 228). Verses from Genesis inform the murky (apparently punning) finale to "Melmoth Reconciled": "if God hath brought all things to pass with a LET THERE BE, the FIAT is the secret matrix," and "Fiat lux!" (4: 329). (14) Similarly, Faulkner's Quentin Compson imagines that Thomas Sutpen conjured his plantation "like the oldentime Be Light" (AA 4) and The Hamlet's narrator terms Eula Varner "the matrix" (837) because she embodies eros, the source and center of human activity and knowledge.

Balzac schematizes The Word in a scholastic sermon in the Comedie's "The Exiles":

 As [the speaker] stated it, the divine Word nourishes the spiritual
 Word, the spiritual Word nourishes the living Word, the living Word
 nourishes the animal Word, the animal Word nourishes the vegetable
 Word, and the vegetable Word is the expression of the life of the
 barren Word. (17: 361-62)

In the monistic Comedie everything is connected because every word, written or spoken, every stammer, accent, pun, mispronunciation, punctuation, and tone of voice manifests The Word, which necessarily composes the Comedie. Logos theory was alien to Plato, but (again) Balzac was a synthesizer; The Word conforms to the Frenchman's neo-Platonic design by burrowing up or emanating from Its source in the past and changing shape on Its way back to Itself in the future (see "The Chouans" 2: 16 and "Albert Savaron" 6: 289). In "Ferragus," for instance, antiphonal choristers at a funeral create a "religious awe that rises from strophe to strophe ... to heaven" (28: 121, 122). Perhaps with Phil Stone's aid, Faulkner's The Hamlet translates the Greek phrase into "the mystery's choral strophe and antistrophe rising vertical among the leafed altars" (900)--which comically recalls the writer's 1925 definition of Katharsis as "a loved shape purged of dross" (qtd. in Collins 345) since The Hamlet's passage refers to Ike Snopes's love for his cow.

Balzac harmonized the disagreement between Plato and Aristotle: his Mover vibrates, so to speak, like a tuning fork, which means that his fiction's God is static and moving. Analogously, the living Word changes shape but, as Faulkner's Cass Edmonds says, truth never alters. This concept, along with Plato's (non-rigorous) etymologies in the Cratylus, informs Balzac's focus on language change (15) and puns. Droll Stories' "About the Monk Amador," for instance, playfully gives us "flagrant delectation" in order to suggest that the medieval period was sexually freewheeling and rightly so (33: 69); the Comedie's "Madame Firmiani" concocts "flagrant delictions of ubiquity" (8: 263), a purple phrase worthy of Faulkner, and "Cousin Betty" and Droll Stories' "The Reproach" provide the term's original shape, in flagrante delicto (23: 299; 32: 167), which Faulkner borrowed.

Readers soon realize that certain Comedie words belong to certain leitmotifs; the Comedie's leitmotifs are so numerous and entwined that, although Henry James pronounced them "multiplied almost to madness" (64), they methodically simulate Creation's variety. Faulkner followed suit with the many mots that he borrowed from the Comedie's English-speaking translators, such as "myriad," (16) words that signify the same leitmotifs as Balzac's. W.H. Wright taught Stone and Faulkner that "only the able literary craftsman who consciously and analytically traces every word and phrase and device ... can read Balzac, for instance ... with increasing pleasure" (284). We probably never will know what passed among Stone, Storer, and Faulkner as they discussed Balzac and Wright, but it is reasonable to hypothesize that Wright's admonition underlies the conceptual function--vague as this is--that Phil Stone assigned to Flags in the Dust's glamorous fatality expression: it represents a governing idea or aesthetic.

The marble faun yearns to exchange its static perfection for animal life, but if Phil Stone noticed that Faulkner continued The Marble Faun's motion vs. stasis idea, we have no record of it. Soldiers' Pay contrasts the moribund Donald Mahon to the activity his presence generates, and the contrast appears in Mosquitoes' art motif, particularly after the Nausikaa runs aground; Flags in the Dust's Bayard Sartoris is motivated by the desire to rejoin his deceased twin, his other half. The passive Benjy Compson is incapable of grasping the sound and fury surrounding him but is animated by his sister Caddy and the bright shapes of schoolgirls. As late as The Hamlet, Faulkner would emphasize the motion vs. stasis idea via Eula Varner, who is the matrix of a sexual frenzy, but the Grecian urn gives the idea its most memorable expression: Go Down, Moses' Ike McCaslin is mesmerized by the vase because it seems to promise an ageless eternal motion.

In late 1942, Hollywood screenwriter Jo Pagano complimented Faulkner's fiction, and Faulkner's reply complements Stone's remark about incarnating the ideal. Faulkner asked Pagano: "Have you noticed it's all done with reflections?" (Blotner, Faulkner 1134). This enigmatic question, I suggest, alludes to Plato's Theory of Correspondences, which held that material bodies are transient shadows of immutable divine ones and helped the philosopher to explain--today we might say defer--the conundrums of change and permanence that had occupied earlier thinkers; the divine bodies are the famous Ideas or Forms. (17) Balzac most typically embodies correspondence in his art and avatar leitmotifs, and in a trope that connects The Word to physical and intellectual reality. The Comedie's miser Gobseck boasts of paying merely "seven francs in the shape of taxes," i.e., the Idea of money; in "Modeste Mignon" war is "the form assumed by Napoleon's thoughts," and in "Ferragus" civilization takes "the shape of the municipal authorities of Paris" (7: 317; 10: 182; 28: 122). (18) That is, Balzac's words themselves are shapes, and Faulkner, too, links his to Idealism, ie., The Word. Again, it might seem that in rejecting the divine Faulkner necessarily would reject the Ideas but his work is pervaded by Balzac's shape metaphor. The French architect in Absalom, Absalom!, for example, must wait two years before receiving "any color or shape of pay" (26); Louise King of "Dr. Martino" identifies her good luck charm, a brass rabbit, as "'the shape of my being afraid'" (CS 574) and the landlord/doctor in The Wild Palms begins to discern "the shadowy indefinite shape of truth" regarding Charlotte Rittenmeyer and her lover (6).

What, then, differentiates the authors' shape metaphors? Faulkner revises Balzac by associating the Forms with the non-visual senses and also by translating shapes into verbs, thus privileging the Ideas' reflections or temporal manifestations by making them actual (or active, as V.K. Ratliff might say), without slighting the aesthetic; this applies to most and perhaps all of his leitmotifs. Motion is given form in Sanctuary, for example, by a bird's "shadow shaped with speed"; As I Lay Dying's Jewel Bundren shapes his horse when mounted, and when loading their mother's coffin onto a wagon, his half-brother Darl reports that "it begins to rush away ... evacuating atmosphere in which the sense of it is" (92). Ideas can even become audible, as when Darl hears "rain shaping the wagon" (AILD 76). The Comedie's avatar leitmotif inspired Faulkner's descriptions of people-as-shapes. For instance, Absalom, Absalom!'s impressionable young Rosa Coldfield may have thought Thomas Sutpen possessed "the stature and shape of a hero" (13), and later envisions Charles Bon as a "shape without even a face" (117) because she never sees him. But eros has a form that lingers: The Hamlet's Ratliff senses traces of the absent Eula Varner in "the air ... which had flowed over and shaped [her] abundance and munificence" (877). Nevertheless, Faulkner didn't abandon the visual; he uses the metaphor, for example, to formalize the invisible dimension of Time: Pylon materializes the "greatest and most inescapable enigma" as the "shape of a cheap metal disc," a watch, placed amidst newspaper headlines (832). In other words, Faulkner brings the shapes to earth or, as Snell reports, he incarnates the Ideal (156).

Faulkner rebels against Idealism in his earliest published appropriation of the Comedie's art leitmotif, The Marble Faun, but a later book offers clearer evidence of a purposively Platonic connection to the device: The Town's Gavin Stevens and his twin sister Maggie face a large window that reflects their ghostly forms, shapes that the narrator describes as "still ideas and still true" (199)--the Ideas of the masculine and feminine, which Faulkner's twins sometimes personify. The feminine occupies most of Faulkner's attention. Indeed, the primacy that this Ideal held for Stone's aesthetics student reveals itself in a phrase that he borrowed to idealize Caddy Compson: a mother in the Comedie's "The Maranas" pretends to love her younger son more than her bastard elder but her knowing husband demands, "Do you dare to tell me that Juan is not the darling of your heart?," and a favored child in Droll Stories' "Bertha the Penitent" is his mother's "heart's darling" (5: 278; 33: 91; see also the Comedie's "Honorine" 11: 334). For the most part, only when dealing with eros does Faulkner yield to his own insistent biology and to the Comedie's Platonism by approximating metaphysical transcendence.

The Comedie's "The Wild Ass' Skin" says that "The pure outlines of [a woman's] shape tell you that she comes from heaven" (1: 284), whence the finely-tuned Louis Lambert (in the story by that name) is catapulted while ecstatically anticipating his marriage; that is, his body remains on earth but his spirit dwells above, contemplating angels. Michel Gresset argues that the "desire of the Idea" leads Faulkner's Quentin Compson to elevate his sister's virginity to "the supreme reality of the Idea" and to commit suicide; Gresset sees virginity's purity and truth as, in a sense, the God of Faulkner's fiction (62-64) and implies that Compson can find these qualities only in the world of the Forms. There is a potent tension in Faulkner's work between the higher and lower motivations, sun and cave. Go Down, Moses' Ike McCaslin corroborates Gresset's observations about Compson when he says that a man and woman in love are God, but Ike is an arch-Romantic (like Quentin) who suppresses the swinish lust that so easily sways the protagonist of "Nympholepsy." Sanctuary makes a related point in the drunken Horace Benbow's fantasy of uniting with Temple Drake via orgasm. Faulknerian desire is symptomatic of imprisonment and, thus, a motive for escaping the cave, but it is more bestial than angelic. Recall the Comedie boy Juan, who is his mother's heart's darling; in an example of the Comedie's avatar leitmotif the mother, who is descended from hereditary prostitutes, named the child for herself, Juana-the name Faulkner chose for the woman Light in August's Calvin Burden marries upon leaving his monastery. That is, desire is more cave than sun-sometimes literally. A cavern is the object of David Hogganbeck and Ikkemotubbe's race for the hand of Herman Basket's sister in "A Courtship," and Howard Boyd of "The Brooch" realizes that he was attracted to a favorite book of his adolescence, Green Mansions, because of its cave symbol subtext. It may be ironic, then, that while desire provides transportation to the world of the Ideas, that world is strangely and silently asexual: the vaguely medieval fantasy scenes in Mosquitoes and Pylon, where people with oddly--colored skin live in a gravity--free world, are sensual but not particularly sexual visions of the Forms. Faulkner sometimes configures desire so that it is not, itself, an end but a vehicle to an alternative reality, an idealized world of escape, as suggested by a student of the otherworldly Rev. Hightower in Light in August:

 He has never seen the sea, and so he thinks. 'It is like the edge
 of nothing. Like once I passed it I would just ride right off into
 nothing. Where trees would look like and be called by something
 else except trees, and men would look like and be called by
 something else except folks. And Byron Bunch he wouldn't even have
 to be or not be Byron Bunch.' (401-02)

Humanity long has known the emotion of transcendence to be linked, in artists and others, to aesthetics, religion, and sexuality. Modern biologists speculate that the trait enhanced social cohesiveness through religion, but Plato considered it so dangerously misleading that he wanted to expel artists (and probably others) from his ideal Republic; he didn't foresee how susceptible his own work would become to the emotion. We may never learn whether or not Faulkner knew of Plato's proposal but I suggest that he aims at something comically parallel: bringing Balzac's shapes to Earth and trying to keep them there. We have seen that the Comedie's Louis Lambert serves as avatar for Faulkner's Donald Mahon--but Louis performs the same function, ironically, for Benjy Compson, a usually inert mass who is galvanized rather than mesmerized by the bright shapes of schoolgirls, which he tries to capture. Similarly, when Pylon's Laverne Schumann parachutes after having sex in an airplane, a policeman who will incarcerate her regards her as "the ultimate shape of his jaded desires fall[ing] upon him out of the sky" (909). In Faulkner's revision of the Comedie, animal motion supersedes static perfection.

Faulkner's version of The Word maintains an identity with the metaphysical only by its association with the sexual, and, thus, helps to explain some of the writer's thornier passages, such as the sadness over Eula Varner's removal to Texas, in The Hamlet; it becomes "a word ... murmured from cabin to cabin" (868) and The Word also becomes a question about young men who run away from home in order to pretend they raped her: "which best: to have that word, that dream and hope ... or to ... flee [them], for past" (853). Faulkner recognized that eros was biology, but part of this borrowed leitmotif 's humor springs from that fact that even Yoknapatawpha's lustful idiots approach it with some idealism, albeit with the saving grace of silence: like Benjy Compson, The Hamlet's Ike Snopes has been given "the wordless passions but not the specious words" (913). Faulkner's male weakness theme-the comedy of the male-relies to some extent on his outraged conviction that the bright shapes themselves are so grounded in reality that they are less likely than men to idealize anything, themselves least of all. Addie Bundren avers an oddly Derridean atheism when she says that love is like all words, "just a shape to fill a lack" ; the former schoolteacher prefers action to the "words ... that are just the gaps in peoples' lacks." Addie conflates The Word with the shape of desire when she contemptuously declines sex with her husband: "I would be I; I would let [Anse] be the shape and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word" (AILD 172, 174). There are exceptions to male weakness and they virtually always involve violence. Ironically (again), Anse Bundren is even less of an idealist than his wife: he kills Addie through overwork and children, but Light in August's Joe Christmas murders the high-minded Joanna Burden outright--perhaps out of pity--when she tries to divinize their liaison through prayer. Even a fantasy can grow stale; in one of Faulkner's darker comedies The Wild Palms's Harry Wilbourne employs murder to escape a relentlessly sexual existence.

Balzac and Faulkner agree that desire is one form of truth, but they disagree about a more recognizable form of The Word: the proverb. Truth for Balzac is embodied in analytical maxims written by Louis Lambert: for example, "Everything on earth exists solely by motion and number," "Motion is ... number in action," and "The Universe is the Unit in variety. Motion is the means; Number is the result. The end is the return of all things to the Unit, which is God" (21: 271-72). Lambert's axioms certainly don't sound like axioms but not so their lower-frequency incarnations: the Comedie's vast storehouse of proverbs, homilies, quotations, catch phrases, and cliches, which Faulkner borrowed. The proverbs combine motion and stasis in that they change form over time but preserve their core meanings. St. Augustine's "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," for example, appears in at least one novel, The Quest of the Absolute, and is paraphrased in "Letters of Two Brides" by a girl who learns that "in Paris one must be as the Parisians" (4: 193; 22: 288); (19) conversely, Faulkner's V.K. Ratliff reminds us that Jefferson, Mississippi, aint Rome. Faulkner's best known proverbs, I.O. Snopes's, were inspired by the fractured and punning ones in the Comedie's "A Start in Life" (Horton, "Balzacian Evolution" 59-60), but homilies and their like permeate his oeuvre. In one novel alone, the bestselling Intruder in the Dust, we encounter "vengeance is mine saith the lord thou shalt not kill" (38), "'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings and old ladies'" (105), "whistling through the cemetery," "where angels fear [to tread]" (191), "one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter" (194), "'no mere child of misfortune'" (222). "if this be surmise then make the most of it" (223), and "it aint none of my red wagon as the music box says" (239).

The usually astute Eric Auerbach didn't approve of the Comedie's "apothegms," and critics usually have ignored Faulkner's (excepting The Hamlet's). Auerbach thought Balzac's "far too generalized" and sometimes "not even witty" (104), and Faulkner's probably have seemed "corny," but these views miss the complexity of Balzac's design and the simplicity of Faulkner's revision. Despite the inevitability of language change Balzac's apothegms, et. al., incarnate The Word's truth, also known as Plato's Idea of the Good, or Virtue, which doesn't change. Readers are given oblique hints of this tightly-packed meaning when, for example, "The Duchesse de Langeais" says that Frenchmen are attracted to "incisive sayings that hold the greatest number of ideas," but "Letters of Two Brides" makes the neo-Platonic and Christian links explicit: "the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness," is love (28: 163; 22: 214; emphasis mine). (20) Faulkner's proverbs, to the contrary, are meant to be humorous, sarcastic, and even trite so as to strip The Word of divine likeness. The Sound and the Fury's scoundrel Maury Bascomb incongruously quotes the uplifting poetic phrases "the first water (21) and purest ray serene" and conspiratorially tells his nephew Jason "we will harvest our own vineyards, eh?" (SF 224). Jason himself--the only sane Compson--derisively refers to "Milk street and Honey avenue" (SF 222) and employs the hackneyed "no skin off my back"; he tells his mother, who belongs to the living dead leitmotif, that she would "get right up out of [her] grave" if he married (SF 247), and mockingly describes a minister's sermons as "Talking about peace on earth good will toward all and not a sparrow can fall to earth" (SF 247). Even a sermon that elicits something resembling katharsis--Rev. Shegog's "de resurrection en de light" (SF 297)--is inane from Faulkner's perspective, and Cora Tull's biblical platitudes (and poor math skills) make the same caustic point in As I Lay Dying.

Maury Bascomb and Jason Compson are among the several Faulkner characters who are lively refutations of virtue, a quality whose worth is questioned in other novels, as well. Absalom, Absalom!'s Rosa Coldfield points out that criminality "has faster rules than virtue" (134), and The Reivers claims that virtue "does not--possibly cannot--take care of its own as Non-virtue does" (52) and, thus, "who serves Virtue works alone" (143). But most Comedie characters seek and some achieve virtue. An altruistic laborer in "A Commission in Lunacy" becomes "the ideal of the virtue which rejoices in its own work" (3: 382; see also Droll Stories' "The Devil's Heir" 32: 87). "The Harlot's Progress" proclaims that "Lovers, like martyrs, feel a brotherhood in their sufferings" (25: 201) and "Ferragus" that "Love, like all other beings, has its own instinct of self-preservation" (28: 63); "Ursule Mirouet" tells us that "Lovers, like drunkards, have a Providence of their own" (8: 152), and M. Crevel of "Cousin Betty" says that "God takes care of the wretched" (23: 24). Faulkner makes the maxim ironic, often by giving it a clever sexual slant. Jason Compson says of his handicapped brother "God looks after Ben's kind" but He doesn't protect Benjy from Jason. "Divorce in Naples" tells us that "Despair, like Poverty, looks after its own," and apropos of Ike Snopes's love for his cow The Hamlet speculates, "there is perhaps something in passion too, as well as in poverty and innocence, which cares for its own" (910). Virtue and its antithesis sometimes have degrees, according to the Comedie's "The Red House" (4: 368), (22) and sometimes not. An expert on the subject, the criminal Vautrin of "Father Goriot," declares that virtue "either is or it is not"; a woman in "Honorine" writes, "In some natures love ... is, or it is not," and "A Marriage Settlement" claims that "You have [love], or you have it not" (7: 121; 11: 351; 27: 447). These either/or assertions inspired Faulkner's elliptically sardonic certainty about Rachel Jackson's virtue, in "Appendix: The Compsons": above everything, her husband Andrew sets "the principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not because defended it was whether or not." Motion, for Faulkner, creates The Word--not, as in Balzac, vice-versa.

There is much more to be said about Balzac, Faulkner, and The Word; for example, the Comedie phrase "give the lie," (23) which Faulkner prominently uses in Absalom, Absalom!, belongs to a darker variation on The Word. I close, however, by resurrecting the question of how to characterize Faulkner's oeuvre. Stone was present at the creation so it would seem unlikely that he was ignorant of The Marble Faun's purpose, but he never ventured beyond issues of style, design, and taste in explaining his unhappiness with his friend's later work. However, Harold Bloom's study of literary influence suggests an answer; Bloom has supplemented T.S. Eliot's remark about the subject with a phrase from Wallace Stevens: "Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves" (5). I believe that Faulkner synthesized Plato, Balzac, and Wright into a "coat" that was too "new" for his teacher. The synthesis took the irreverent form of comedy, in the modern sense, but shaped by Faulkner's masculine and strikingly original sensibility: the iconoclastic novelist was challenged less by his eminent predecessor than his own transcendent emotions. Comedy's medieval definition emphasized plays (or acts) that ended happily, and Dante Alighieri cited such finales when he explained his title The Divine Comedy (OED). Balzac fused the human and the divine, but also the medieval and the modern; Modeste Mignon, for instance, claims to be a "girl of lively imagination shut up in a turret ... [and] invents a way of opening her bars, springs out of window, climbs the park wall, and goes off to sport at her neighbor's. It is the eternal comedy!" (11: 89). Quite similarly, the mystified reporter in Faulkner's Pylon says of his work-in-progress: "It started out to be a tragedy.... [T]he Florentine and the wife crawl down the fire escape and ... the second Florentine's brother wont catch them until daylight and they will be asleep in the monk's bed in the monastery[.] But it went wrong.... It turned into a comedy, see?" Perhaps Stone thought his friend's later work lacked the high seriousness he seemed to find in the unfolding of Flags in the Dust's glamorous fatality phrase, which could mean that he did half the laughing only at the Snopeses, not at Faulkner's other revisions of Balzac.

(1) Unless otherwise stated. Volumes 19, 28, and both parts of 31 were missing from the thirty-three-volume set.

(2) Blotner, William Faulkner's Library-A Catalogue (91).

(3) The Gebbie translation reads, "dragging his feet, for he thought of Cesarine" (15: 108-09).

(4) Stone's Birotteau was purchased from his widow by William Boozer of Nashville, who graciously allowed me to examine it.

(5) Balzac mentioned 26, 27; compared to Zola 44-45; 96; discussion of Pere Goriot and Lucien de Rubempr, 101; 121; ability to create organic characters 152-53; 190, 198, 199, 206, 245, 284.

(6) Faulkner and Stone's 1896 ones are possibilities.

(7) Stone's message and Young's reply are dated February 7 and 20, respectively (Pilkington 581-82 and notes). Several times in his "Brief Sketch" of Balzac, the Gebbie editor James Saintsbury compares the same novelists (1: xxxiii, xxv).

(8) Davin may not have existed: Balzac enjoyed pseudonyms.

(9) For a related method see "Ursule Mirouet" (8: 88). The technique most fully belongs to Balzac and Faulkner's art leitmotifs.

(10) See Horton, "Quentin Compson's Suicide" (63-64).

(11) See Horton, "Balzacian Evolution" (74-75).

(12) Balzac, and Faulkner after him, sometimes employs prime mover as a lower case phrase. See "The Chouans" (2: 291), "The Country Parson" (6: 60), "Ursule Mirouet" (8: 214), and "Vautrin's Last Avatar" (26: 47).

(13) 21: 267; cf. 158-159. See also "Seraphita" (21: 115), and Allen (41).

(14) The puns are lost in translation.

(15) See, e.g., Droll Stories, "Concerning a Provost Who did not Recognize Things" (32: 285, 288).

(16) "The Wild Ass' Skin" contains "in myriads" and "myriad of sea-shells" (1: 16, 18), and in "The Chouans" we find "myriad colors" and "myriads of sparks" (2: 254, 353). "Christ in Flanders" has "Myriads of human creatures" (4: 274), and "The Country Parson" a "myriad gracious chance effects" (6: 243). "Albert Savaron" has a "myriad of darts" (6: 382) and "Ursule Mirouet" a "myriad of curls" (8: 255); "A Bachelor's Establishment" mentions "Myriads of traces" (10: 212) and "Modeste Mignon" a "myriad-colored birds" and "myriad jealousies" (11: 9, 245); a character in "Honorine" writhes beneath "myriad darts of despair" and flowers there have "myriad-colored petals" (11: 323, 338); "The Lily of the Valley" mentions "a myriad pin-pricks" (12: 255) and "Another Study of Woman" has "myriad subtle byways" (12: 305). "Beatrix" gives us "a myriad insects" and "myriads" of thoughts (16: 250, 278). "About Catherine de' Medici" mentions "myriads of beings" (17: 309) and "The Message" contains "Thoughts by the myriad" (17: 386). "The Exiles" and "Seraphita" mention "myriads of angels" (17: 371; 21: 151), while "Louis Lambert" bemoans the "myriad tyrannies of school-life" and "myriad whips of ridicule" and mentions "myriad artists" and God's "myriad creations" (21: 183, 227, 207, 234). "Letters of Two Brides" contains "myriad joy-bearing rays" (22: 284) and "The Harlot's Progress" a "myriad scars" (25, Pt. I: 31). "A Marriage Settlement" mentions "a myriad angry feelings" (27: 392). "Massimilla Doni" contains "myriad of memories," "myriad channels," and "myriads of spangles" (33: 295, 316, 350). A "myriad wrinkles" appears in "The Abb, Birotteau" (9: 131), "About Catherine de' Medici" (17: 297), "The Deputy for Arcis" (30, Pt.I: 103), and Faulkner's "Red Leaves" (CS 324). "Ferragus" gives us "myriad paws" and "myriad caprices" (28: 10, 60). "The Duchesse de Langeais" has "myriad fancies" and "myriad thoughts" (28: 147, 225), and "Maitre Cornelius" a "myriad fantastic effects" (28: 299). Droll Stories' "The Brother in Arms" delights us with a "myriad of wicked yet pleasant thoughts" (32: 136).

(17) This long-abandoned concept has made a comeback of late. Quantum physicists take quite seriously a theory that describes the universe as a hologram (Greene 481-85).

(18) For more examples see "The Quest of the Absolute" (4: 60), "Melmoth Reconciled" (4: 294), "Albert Savaron" (6: 398), "Facino Cane" (11: 388), "Letters of Two Brides" (22: 338), "The Collection of Antiquities" (27: 168, 200, 245), "Ferragus" (28: 36, 128), "Les Employes" (29: 399), and Droll Stories' "The Devil's Heir" (32: 73).

(19) See Horton, "Balzacian Evolution," for the source of Faulkner's "Caesar's wife" proverb (56).

(20) See also "Albert Savaron" (6: 401).

(21) See the Comedie's "Beatrix" (16: 327, 329), "Cousin Betty" (23: 364), "The Harlot's Progress" (25: 248), and "The Muse of the Department" (29: 45).

(22) See also "Cousin Betty" (23: 89) and "Cousin Pons" (24: 284).

(23) See "The Wild Ass' Skin" (1: 268), "The Quest of the Absolute" (4: 50), "Ursule Mirouet" (8: 4, 222), "Pierrette" (9: 98, 277), "A Bachelor's Establishment" (10: 5), "Honorine" (11: 315), "About Catherine de' Medici" (17: 225), "The Sceaux Ball" (21: 322), "Letters of Two Brides" (22: 252, 364), "Cousin Betty" (23: 352), "The Old Maid" (27: 140), "A Marriage Settlement" (27: 388, 390), "Ferragus" (28: 107), "The Duchesse de Langeais" (28: 271), "Gambara" (28: 416), "The Muse of the Department" (29: 42), "Les Employes" (29: 225), and "The Girl with Golden Eyes" (33: 287).

WORKS CITED

Antoniadis, Roxandra Iliaschenko. "The Human Comedies of Honore de Balzac and William Faulkner." Diss. U of Colorado, 1970.

Allen, Reginald E. Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle. New York: Free, 1966.

Auerbach, Eric. "Erich Auerbach on Balzac's Realism." Balzac. Ed. Michael Tilby. New York: Longman, 1995.

Balzac, Honore de. La Comedie Humaine of Honore de Balzac. Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau. Trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Boston: Little, 1899.

--. The Complete Novelettes of Honore de Balzac. In One Volume. New York: Black, 1925.

--. Droll Stories. Complete in One Volume. New York: Black, 1928.

--. The Novels of Balzac. 33 vols. Library Edition. Philadelphia: Gebbie, 1897-99.

--. The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau. Trans. Ellen Marriage. New York: Macmillan, 1896.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random, 1974.

--. William Faulkner's Library--A Catalogue. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1964.

Brodsky, Louis Daniel, and Robert W. Hamblin, eds. Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection. Vol. II: The Letters. 4 vols. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984.

Collins, Carvel. "A Fourth Book Review by Faulkner." Mississippi Quarterly 28 (1975): 339-46.

Cowley, Malcolm. "William Faulkner Revisited." The Saturday Review of Literature 14 April 1945: 13-16.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. The Corrected Text. New York: Random, 1987.

--. As I Lay Dying. 1930. The Corrected Text. New York: Random, 1987.

--. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random, 1950

--. Essays, Speeches & Public Letters. Ed. James B. Meriwether. New York: Random, 1966.

--. Flags in the Dust. Ed. Douglas Day. New York: Random, 1973.

--. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. 1942. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. The Hamlet. William Faulkner: Novels 1936-1940. New York: Library of America, 1990. 727-1075.

--. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. 1939. New York: Vintage International, 1995.

--. Intruder in the Dust. 1948. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

--. Light in August. 1932. The Corrected Text. New York: Random, 1987.

--. The Marble Faun. Boston: Four Seas, 1924.

--. Mosquitoes. New York: Liveright, 1955.

--. Pylon. 1935. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Library of America, 1985. 775-992.

--. The Reivers. 1962. William Faulkner: Novels 1957-1962. New York: Library of America, 1999. 471-664.

--. Sanctuary. 1931. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

--. Soldiers' Pay. New York: Boni, 1926.

--. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. These 13. New York: Cape, 1931.

--. The Town. 1957. William Faulkner: Novels 1957-1962. New York: Library of America, 1999. 1-326.

Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of the Cosmos. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Gresset, Michel. "The 'God' of Faulkner's Fiction." Faulkner and Idealism: Perspectives from Paris. Eds. Michel Gresset and Patrick Samway, S.J. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1983. 51-70.

Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner, Eds. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1959.

Hellman, Geoffrey. "Profile: Mr. Chairman." The New Yorker 11 March 1933: 21-25.

Honderich, Ted, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Horton, Merrill. "Balzacian Evolution and the Origin of the Snopeses." Southern Literary Journal 33.1(2000): 55-81.

--. "Quentin Compson's Suicide: A Source in Balzac." The Faulkner Journal 17.1 (2001): 59-67.

Le Huenen, Roland and Paul Perron. "Reflections on Balzacian Models of Representation." Critical Essays on Honore de Balzac. Ed. Martin Kanes. Critical Essays on World Literature. Robert Lecker, gen. ed. Boston: Hall, 1990. 212-20.

Levin, Harry. "Balzac." The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. 150-213.

James, Henry. "Henry James--the Synthesis of a Critical Admirer." Critical Essays on Honore de Balzac. Ed. Martin Kanes. Critical Essays on World Literature. Robert Lecker, gen. ed. Boston: Hall, 1990. 56-65.

Kanes, Martin. Introduction. Critical Essays on Honor, de Balzac. Ed. Martin Kanes. Critical Essays on World Literature. Robert Lecker, gen. ed. Boston: Hall, 1990. 1-21.

Levin, Harry. "Balzac." The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. 150-213.

Pilkington, John, ed. Stark Young: A Life in the Arts: Letters, 1900-1962. 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1975.

Powell, William S., ed. The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. Vol. 1. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979.

Pritchett, V.S. Balzac. NY: Knopf, 1973.

Snell, Susan. Phil Stone of Oxford: A Vicarious Life. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1991.

Tilby, Michael, ed. Balzac. New York: Longman, 1995.

Wright, Willard Huntington. The Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and the Syntax of Aesthetics. New York: Lane, 1916.

Merrill Horton

University of South Carolina