Reading Faulkner: Intruder in the Dust

The novel begins...

I first started reading Faulkner in the 1980's. There was a long stretch of about 25 years or so where I didn't touch him at all. But, beginning with The Unvanquished, the past several summers I've returned to his remarkable works. I've written multiple essays out of that return, mostly pertaining to Absalom! Absalom! and As I Lay Dying.

Somehow, I never read Intruder in the Dust. I knew its reputation. They made a movie out of it which I’ve never seen. It has been quoted or referenced here and there in my wanderings. So this summer I finally fixed that little omission. Summertime is the best time to read Faulkner. For me, katydids sounding lazily in my woods sets the proper tone.

It is a book I wrestled with, like I often wrestle with Faulkner. Not as complicated as attempting The Sound and Fury for the first time, but it took some focus to get into the stream of consciousness style. I was wrestling with it too much to enjoy it at first, trying to figure out what the hell all these wandering passages of prose were actually saying. There was a story about a murder in there, and a boy’s childhood, but it felt piecemeal, almost incidental. And yet it contained prose so good it muted most of my disorientation and pulled me in.

The plot itself (once I got into it) is straightforward enough. Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, is accused of murdering Vinson Gowrie, a white man. He is found near the dead body with a pistol. A mob starts gathering in Jefferson, Mississippi and everyone in town already knows how this is supposed to end. Charles Mallison, sixteen, gets pulled in when Lucas tells him the bullet in Gowrie's body didn't come from his pistol. The unlikely pairing of Charles, his black friend Aleck Sander, and Miss Habersham, a 70-year-old who happens to have access to a pick-up, set out to dig up the grave to check, since the sheriff is away on other business.

It turns out the body in the coffin is not Gowrie. It is someone else that has also been murdered. This is where the novel becomes a full-fledged mystery. There is an arrest and the threat of a lynching keeps things urgent. Faulkner spends far more time inside memory, sensation, family history, roads, weather, the Civil War, the peculiar texture of a Southern day.

When Charles, Aleck Sander, and Miss Habersham discover someone buried another body, they quickly rebury it, and go tell Sheriff Hampton. By the time Hampton's party returns to the grave site, someone has dug the grave up again, taken the body previously discovered, and reburied an empty coffin.

It plays sort of like a Three Stooges routine with a grave for a prop. Dig it up, wrong man, fill it back in, go get the sheriff, come back, dig it up again, nobody home. Eudora Welty noticed the humor in this book when it came out in 1948, and once you're looking for it, the sequence is playing for a laugh as much as for suspense, dread and farce running side by side down the same shovel.

But the plot, as mysterious and suspenseful as it is, is not the point of reading the novel. Faulkner keeps demoting objective fact and promoting conscious experience. Arrest, grave robbery, a lynch mob, exoneration, they show up almost as data points, asides to all the other things Faulkner expertly articulates in exquisite prose. A smell, a past, a place, expands for pages. The reader has to pick out the murder mystery here and there, a detail at a time.

The mystery is secondary to becoming a study in how narration can bury facts with poetry. I don't just mean stream of consciousness. Faulkner buries plot information inside sentences so beautiful you don't realize that you've been told anything at all. Which is why I had to start my reading over after a few pages initially. Refocus. Faulkner was expecting me to keep up.

A great example comes near the end of the novel. Charles’s Uncle Gavin is looking out the window at the Saturday morning crowd in the Square. That small physical gesture becomes the excuse for the entire narration to leave the room, follow Gavin's glance down into the Square itself, and keep going, past Gavin, into the noise and the traffic and the town's whole nervous system on a Saturday morning. There is no formal hand-off. No "he thought." The narration just walks out the window with him. Nevertheless, there's a suicide, over and done with, not present, sitting in there.

Inside that run-on sentence, and I mean literally inside it, without so much as a period to catch your breath, Faulkner reports that Crawford Gowrie has killed himself in his cell with a smuggled pistol, that Miss Habersham is home mending stockings, that Aleck Sander is in the crowd on the Square in a loud shirt. You could read the whole passage about the heat, hustle and dust of the day and simply miss the importance that someone died during the sentence.

And the sentence doesn't end, it runs on for a couple more pages past that, still accumulating clause on clause, cars still creeping around the square, before it ever lets you go. That is a structure you get lost inside, the same way the reader is lost, the same way the whole town seems determined never to let itself sit in one second of silence.

Most of the novel is that way, which can be frustrating on a first read. But there is far too much pleasure in reading the prose to let up. Like most Faulkner novels, you have to take it as it comes. Faulkner is testing whether you were sufficiently attentive to the music to also catch the news.

A tense moment by the grave.

It gets stranger than the way the plot is parsed out, though. The point of view itself drifts. Charles is the central consciousness for most of the book, but the narrator is also third person, sometimes, and the perspective shifts without warning. The "he" at the beginning of a given long sentence is not necessarily the "he" of the rest of it. Faulkner treats minds as observation points rather than fixed cameras. Sometimes it's Charles. Sometimes Gavin or Hampton or Lucas. Sometimes it is something closer to the town's own collective awareness of itself, belonging to no one in particular.

Even though he is the narrator-in-chief, the boy is rarely addressed by name, which is a small mystery unto itself. I checked my kindle edition. The boy's nickname, "Chick", shows up exactly eight times. "Charles" is referenced nine. The narration keeps him at a small formal distance, Charles, sometimes Chick, is more often just "the boy," or simply "he." Faulkner has a reason for each reference, usually a social rather than internal context.

That larger thing is the real subject of the book, I think. The characters live outwardly on the surface of things while carrying something deeper underneath. Nobody experiences much emotion. The word "hate" does not appear anywhere in the text, for example. Lucas barely shows us any interior at all. Hampton stays controlled. Miss Habersham simply acts. Charles moves through fear and pride and obligation without much display. But the prose itself is soaked in feeling, nostalgia, memory, bitterness, pleasure, all of it migrated out of the characters and into the world around them.

Lucas is the man whose life is supposedly the center of the story, the first character mentioned, and Faulkner gives us almost nothing of what he actually thinks and feels. We have no particular reason to care about him, other than he is supposedly wrongly accused. He is proud, stubborn, difficult, and he refuses the role everyone in town has assigned him. His dignity also keeps him distant.

Faulkner devotes almost shocking attention to the physical fact of blackness at points in this book, including a passage describing the supposed "smell of a Negro" that is bodily and intimate in a way none of his other racial writing does that I've read. The narrative voice itself participates and, thereby, the reader too.

Which complicates the easy version of this novel, the one where it's simply about racism, a dial that's either on or off. Faulkner gives you a spectrum instead. The Gowries sit at the violent end, race tied to land, poverty, pride, family, and a willingness to kill over it. Gavin sits in the middle, racial theories running out of him constantly, dated and patronizing even while he opposes the lynching and wants the law to work.

Hampton runs on habit rather than theory. He lives comfortably inside the racial language of the town and still arrests, protects, and clears Lucas by evidence alone, never letting the language touch how he does the job. And Miss Habersham sits almost off the scale entirely. Faulkner never opens her mind up enough to say what she believes about race in general. She doesn’t say. All we see is that in this one situation she treats Lucas and Aleck without the condescension everyone around her seems to require as a matter of course.

That range, violent to theorized to habitual to something close to absent, might be the most complete portrait of Southern racism Faulkner ever built into a single book. It refuses to let you locate the sickness in a villain and leave the rest of the town clean. The mob is that whole spectrum's loudest expression, and it runs entirely on a story the town has already agreed to believe before Crawford's name ever comes up, a black man killed a white man. Once the truth comes out, that story has nothing left to stand on. It isn't a racial crime at all. A white man murdered both his brother and another white man. The mob doesn't get talked down or overpowered. It just sort of evaporates since the truth doesn't fit its script.

Stream of consciousness example with a fact of the plot somewhere inside.

From the beginning, Miss Habersham believes Lucas is innocent. Fine. Why does that send the old woman with no history as a crusader (that we know of) out to a cemetery at midnight with two teenagers to dig up a grave? The answer the novel gives is Molly, Lucas's wife, nursed alongside Miss Habersham as children, close to family in the old Southern household sense. Once she knows the situation, she doesn't ponder her next move. She reacts almost domestically. Someone tied to her own past is in danger, and she acts.

Her entrance is funny too, though it doesn't read that way the first time through. Charles and Aleck's original plan is modest, ride out to the cemetery on Highboy, boy and horse, dig secretly in the dark. Then Miss Habersham turns up with her truck, and the whole operation reorganizes itself around her on the spot. She just appears, like the Marines landing, a sudden storm of directed action, and two teenagers with a horse find themselves with transportation, an adult, and a chain of command.

We get told about the bond with Molly and almost immediately she's driving toward a grave. The motivation is structurally present and emotionally underwritten, which is oddly consistent with a book that will spend a page on the texture of a given night and two sentences on why an old woman commits a felony by digging up the grave of a hasty funeral. You have to cut Faulkner some slack on the convenience of his story line.

Charles and Aleck Sander (a Faulkner joke for “Alexander”) are a version of the same problem. They move easily together, argue, have fun, dig up a grave side by side. There is real friendship there. There is also real inequality, and Charles doesn't fully see it because he doesn't have to. A white boy caught trespassing in a cemetery at night is in trouble. A black boy caught digging up a murdered white man's grave in Gowrie country is something else entirely.

Hampton deserves more credit than a plot summary gives him. He may be the most level-headed person in the entire book. When old man Gowrie cocks a gun on him at the grave, Hampton doesn't raise his voice. He just keeps doing the next necessary thing. Faulkner gives him almost no interior life, the same treatment he gives Miss Habersham, and for the same reason. Both of them are judged entirely by what they do. They get to something resembling decency by different roads, Hampton through office and procedure, Miss Habersham through old loyalty and personal history, and Faulkner trusts you to see those roads can end up in the same place.

None of the principal characters get to be clean heroes. Charles acts because Lucas draws him in and because of an old debt. Four years prior Lucas pulled him out of an icy creek when he could have drowned. Miss Habersham acts out of old loyalty. Hampton acts because it's his job. Aleck acts despite carrying more risk than anyone else in the truck. Even Lucas won't play the part that would make his own rescue easier. Faulkner doesn't seem interested in saints. Everyone just muddles through the moral landscape.

Intruder in the Dust surprised me in many ways. It is a real page-turner in a couple of places. The suspense of Charles and Aleck digging up the grave at midnight is a classic Gothic situation, made even more so by the passage of a mysterious rider they hope does not notice them. The same location turns comic over the course of the novel, six diggings of the same grave in all, two of them on the page.

Vinson is murdered on Saturday night and hastily buried on Sunday. Makes me wonder if the white trash family knew what happened and just wanted the body disposed of. Keep it among the family. Regardless, someone digs him up almost immediately, before Faulkner tells us who, and replaces him with a second murdered man nobody yet knows is dead.

The boys and Miss Habersham do their own digging next, find the wrong body, and rebury it once Charles confirms it isn't the man Lucas supposedly killed. Before the sheriff's party can get back out there, the killer (outside the story) digs a third time and hauls the wrong body off again, leaving an empty coffin behind. Then the sheriff gets a real moment of tension when old man Gowrie cocks a gun on him, on Gavin, and on the two prisoners the sheriff brought along to dig, insisting his own sons do the work instead.

Meanwhile a mob is growing in town outside the jail, and the jailer has already said he won't stand in their way, no more than he's paid, and it being a black murderer and all.

Finally, mentioned only in passing, the original body is returned to the grave. That's basically the story, and it's funny, all this digging about a grave. But it's also suspenseful and confrontational. That combination is what suddenly transforms this stretch of the novel into a gripping murder mystery. What the hell is going to happen next with this grave?

But, as interesting and entertaining and worthwhile as all this is, it is not the real reason to read Intruder in the Dust. That reason is the prose atmosphere Faulkner creates weaving in and out of Chick's consciousness and memory.

Once I stopped trying to read the novel for plot and perspective and started reading for what Faulkner was actually doing with his elongated stream of consciousness, the same wandering passages that initially disoriented me this first read became the reason to keep going. The novel could be seen as a 245-page prose poem so much of it is just meandering thematic eloquence that is a special beauty all its own, even when it is depicting ugliness.

It is a magnificent frustration. Don't fight the prose for information. Everything you need to know is there, somewhere, usually in due course. The novel is actually a quick read once you get into it, drifting becomes richness. You get to sit inside the poem instead of mining it for news. Most novels lose their pull once the plot is spent. This one gains something back.

The mystery gets solved. The mixed up world Faulkner depicts so well endures.

Intruder in the Dust came out in 1948, Faulkner's first novel after eight years of silence. Reviewers expected it to draw attention as a test of Southern feeling on race as much as for the writing itself. It became his bestselling book to that point.

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. The citation credited his whole body of work, Absalom! Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, decades of incredible writing. Though not singled out, Intruder in the Dust rose once more to the standard so distinctive of Faulkner, and that alone made the Prize feel like an inevitability the committee needed to reckon with. I highly recommend it...in katydid season.