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The Hamlet (1940)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

M. Thomas Inge
Affiliation:
Randolph-Macon College, Virginia
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Summary

Sally Harrison. “New Faulkner Novel.” Brooklyn Citizen, March 29, 1940.

William Faulkner has gone back to his old writing-ground, Yoknapatawpha County, to come to grips with the common man. The glamorous in-love-with-death Sartorises, the beautiful and damned Sutpens of pre-war vintage, are gone from the earth, leaving the rock-bottom humanity of a sharecropper community. Even the negro-characters in The Hamlet are incidental. Here a southerner has ceased to blame the negro for the ills of the South (either blame or fear), just as in The Wild Palms, a man ceased from “blaming the woman.” The hamlet is a group of common people who are in for it all right, but who cooperate raucously at their own undoing.

The story takes up at the turn of the generation, so to speak, when the shift of power out of the hands of the aristocrats had been consummated. A canny trader, old Will Varner, worked, financed and mulcted the hamlet. Most likely, everyone felt, he and his son after him would keep on gathering in the lands and the pennies of the citizenry in an iron process nothing could change. Or so it appeared, until Flem Snopes came to clerk in the Varner company-store, across the village street from the Varner gin scales.

The Hamlet is a cacophony of vicious, dirty laughs that punctuate his rise to power and explain how it could happen that a dehumanized underdog could gull a citizenry and spread his unseemly tribe like a stealthy fungus over an entire farming area. Only Ratliff, the enlightened sewing- machine salesman (and an occasional done-in wife or widow that didn't count) ever added anger or resolve to the general amusement.

Type
Chapter
Information
William Faulkner
The Contemporary Reviews
, pp. 207 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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  • The Hamlet (1940)
  • Edited by M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College, Virginia
  • Book: William Faulkner
  • Online publication: 07 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519314.019
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  • The Hamlet (1940)
  • Edited by M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College, Virginia
  • Book: William Faulkner
  • Online publication: 07 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519314.019
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Hamlet (1940)
  • Edited by M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College, Virginia
  • Book: William Faulkner
  • Online publication: 07 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519314.019
Available formats
×