The Hamlet (1940)

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.