Abstract
This chapter is the second to consider duty. “We should scarcely say,” avers Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics, “that it was virtuous—under ordinary circumstances—to pay one’s debts, or give one’s children a decent education, or keep one’s aged parents from starving, these being duties which most men perform” (219). As Jacques Derrida explains in On the Name, a moral duty connotes a rule that “is recurrent, structural, general, that is to say, each time singular and exemplary” (9). Such duties demand unprescribed responses; acts of reconciliation may be required; but personal calculations often forestall their execution. Parfitian advances in moral reckoning help this chapter to analyze the related struggles of the morally maturing Bayard Sartoris in William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938).
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Notes
- 1.
The Methods of Ethics supplies this chapter with all its quotations from Sidgwick.
- 2.
Joseph Blotner’s manifest of William Faulkner’s Library (22) lists a copy of Catton’s book.
- 3.
“So long, sucker” (159), explains Martin Shubik, expresses the defector’s cynical relief at his opponent’s naïve decision.
- 4.
In referring to the research of Albert Bigelow Paine, Joe B. Fulton traces Twain’s lifelong interest in Lecky’s volume. “According to Paine, Twain first read Lecky’s History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne in 1874, but,” adds Fulton, “he certainly reread the book many times in the years to come” (21).
- 5.
Reviewing Knight’s Gambit (1949) for the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times (13 November 1949), Shelby Foote regrets that Faulkner’s latest publication “has probably the lowest specific gravity of any book by this author since The Unvanquished, his thirteenth, or possibly even since Mosquitoes , his second” (18). Foote’s judgment of The Unvanquished exemplifies the critical attitude toward the novel. Even Barnard DeVoto’s early praise from February 1938, which commends Faulkner’s overall clarity, condemns the concluding episode. “An Odor of Verbena,” laments DeVoto, “employs the supersaturated lachrymatory gas under high pressure that is Mr. Faulkner’s most irritating medium” (5). Ironically, what DeVoto praises, rather than what he condemns, has elicited persistent critical misjudgment. As Daniel Hoffman summarizes in Faulkner’s Country Matters (1989), “The Unvanquished is among Faulkner’s most accessible books, since its straightforward narration has neither the warpings of time nor the complications of style characteristic of his denser fictions. Accordingly, among some of its author’s most devoted critics, this book has not enjoyed much respect” (35).
- 6.
Indeed, as late as September 1965, Vladimir Nabokov would rejoice in decrying “Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles” (57).
- 7.
Episodes one to three, “Ambuscade,” “Retreat,” and “Raid,” date to 1934. Episodes four and five, “Riposte in Tertio” (originally “The Unvanquished”) and “Vendée,” date to 1936. Episode six, “Skirmish at Sartoris” (originally “Drusilla”), dates to 1935. Episode seven, “An Odor of Verbena,” dates to 1938.
- 8.
Ringo could be John Sartoris’s son. “Ringo and I had been born in 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,” muses Bayard, “until maybe he wasn’t a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore” (323).
- 9.
Faulkner was historically accurate in delineating this gambit. “Ordinary citizens of Mississippi, Union policy initially dictated, were to be presumed loyal citizens of the United States,” explains Doyle. “Therefore, any property the U.S. Army confiscated from citizens could be reclaimed, or its value reimbursed, later” (210).
- 10.
“Sidgwick was unusually good at seeing the force of objections to his views,” writes Parfit in On What Matters . “After hearing Sidgwick defend a paper, William James remarked: ‘Sidgwick displayed that reflective candour that can at times be so irritating’” (1:xxxix).
- 11.
“Christians have been glad to appeal to the Self-interest Theory,” continues Parfit, “since on their assumptions S implies that knaves are fools. Similar remarks apply to Moslems, many Buddhists, and Hindus” (130).
- 12.
The first six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce are Principles of Philosophy (1931), Elements of Logic (1932), Exact Logic (1933), The Simplest Mathematics (1933), Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1934), and Scientific Metaphysics (1935). The remaining two volumes are Science and Philosophy (1958) and Reviews, Correspondence, and Bibliography (1958). Faulkner is unlikely to have read Peirce. The argument here simply suggests that the posthumous publication of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, starting in the 1930s, was proof of Peirce’s prescience; that Peirce and Faulkner, as published authors, were (in effect) contemporaries; and that Faulkner’s philosophical turn of mind was also prescient. On occasion, as Richard Godden implies in William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (2009), the philosophical approaches of Faulkner and Peirce do coincide. For, in describing Labove’s metaphoric conceptualization of Eula Varner in The Hamlet (1940), Godden turns to Peirce: “Eula, set within the mind’s eye of Labove’s metaphor, is both land and ‘parts,’ and as such she is, at the moment ‘he saw it,’ autochthony iconicized. Charles Saunders Peirce stressed that ‘icons stand for something because they resemble it’” (53).
- 13.
This imperative also answers both the question of canonical importance and the question of compositional form. In the first case, as Marjorie Pryse opines of “most commentators” on The Unvanquished, “the novel, or collection of stories, or whatever it is, is a small work” (343). In the second case, as Hans H. Skei writes in “William Faulkner’s Short Stories” (2007), “The Unvanquished is certainly not a mere collection of short stories, but the question is whether it should be called a short story cycle or a novel” (403). The present argument asserts that The Unvanquished is a significant novel.
- 14.
The mocking bird, which foregrounds its presence by singing throughout “An Odor of Verbena,” provides the accompanying aural signal: “it was the day song” (484). Drusilla’s “yellow ball gown” (468, 476, 478) provides the accompanying visual signal. The old moral formulations appear to be conspiring in their mockery of Bayard’s (supposed) cowardice.
- 15.
Benbow’s Missourian canvassers were “human beings,” Bayard tells Drusilla. “They were Northerners,” she replies, “foreigners who had no business here.” Were not their lives “worth anything?” he asks incredulously. Drusilla’s response is uncompromising: “No. Not anything” (471). Mention of supremacist groups occurs across Faulkner’s cannon: Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Mosquitoes (1927), and Light in August (1932) reference the K.K.K. (224, 444, and 451, respectively); and The Mansion (1959) references the “Silver Shirts” as well as the K.K.K. (476, 602).
- 16.
The aural and visual signals also mark this overhaul. In the first case, Bayard hears a “mockingbird singing in the magnolia,” but “the night song now, the drowsy moony one” (491). In the second case, Drusilla and her ball gown are gone: she has left. The colors of Jenny’s wisdom now overwrite Drusilla’s formerly taunting yellow: “There was no light in the drawing room except the last of the afterglow which came through the western window where Aunt Jenny’s colored glass was; I was about to go on up stairs when I saw her sitting there beside the window. She didn’t call me and I didn’t speak Drusilla’s name, I just went to the door and stood there. ‘She’s gone,’ Aunt Jenny said” (491–92).
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Wainwright, M. (2021). Duty (II): The Unvanquished. In: Faulkner’s Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68872-1_6
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