William Faulkner is an undisputed fact of our literature; Andrew Lytle is a neglected, little-understood figure, who is in some danger of suffering a total eclipse. (p. 35)

[Lytle] must be seen in the context of an important and recognizable literary tradition, while Faulkner is by contrast an isolated figure, working independently and without much knowledge of or interest in the endeavors of his contemporaries, who were paradoxically creating a context and an audience for his singular achievements. Those achievements make Faulkner a major though isolated writer; Lytle's work is that of a minor figure in a major tradition….

[In] terms of literary significance, of quality and value, Lytle stands up surprisingly well against the Goliath of Southern fiction. His position is not exactly that of a David, but just as David was able to accomplish a great deal with a few well-chosen stones, so Lytle has managed with little more than three books to project an imaginative vision that turns out to be even larger than Yoknapatawpha County. (p. 36)

In At the Moon's Inn, a "historical novel"…, which renders Hernando de Soto's New World expedition, Lytle comes dangerously close to allegory by making de Soto represent a heresy….

But it is precisely history that saves Lytle from this form of abstraction, and it is his spiritual or ecclesiastical point of view which allows him to work up a character who "means" as much as characters in an allegory mean and still write good fiction. According to Lytle's reading of history, de Soto did in fact embody a heretical pride of will that placed private, secular authority over that of the mystical authority of the Church, as embodied in its priests. He can therefore, with painstaking accuracy, depict a "flesh-and-blood" de Soto behaving in the way historians agree he behaved, and at the same time dramatize a momentous schism in the Christian community, the schism which has since been institutionalized as Protestantism.

Faulkner could never have written At the Moon's Inn because his imagination had greater authority for him than did history; but if he had, we would have to be content with seeing de Soto as an egomaniac, a sixteenth-century Sutpen or perhaps even a Snopes. Lytle, who believed that the imagination could and must work with the raw fragments of history and transform them into an imaginary whole which does no violence to any of its parts, could give us not only a heroic egomaniac but also a character of very large historical and ecclesiastical significance. (p. 37)

Faulkner's imaginative geography [does not] extend much out of Mississippi, not, at least, with much vitality. Lytle, on the other hand, brings to life the flavors of fifteenth-century Spain, the wilderness province of La Florida, the plains and mountains of the Peru of the Incas, and a Kentucky tobacco farm in the 1920s as vividly as he does the Cumberland region of Tennessee and some of its neighboring states in the generations before and after the Civil War. With both Faulkner and Lytle the particular dates and places of their fictions fall into a pattern which seems to project a larger, controlling myth, and in both cases this myth includes an interpretation of Southern history, though in Lytle's case the South is only part of the myth. (p. 38)

[It has been suggested] that Faulkner believed there was a basic flaw in southern character, a flaw that manifested itself most viciously in the social institution of slavery, most visibly in the commercialization of natural resources, and most simply in the ways people treated each other: the tendency to exploit. If this is so, then Faulkner saw in the fall of the South and its Sutpens the parallel execution of nemesis, a kind of social retributive justice for the violation of sacred things—the land and, more especially, the human spirit. (pp. 38-9)

In Lytle's myth of history, the South plays an opposite role. Instead of a guilty party whose defeat in the War was a rap on the knuckles from Divine Justice, the old South, including, apparently, its "peculiar institution," was the last vestige of Christendom, the Christian state which seems to most of us as mythical as Atlantis. For Lytle, however, Christendom was not only a historical reality flourishing during the High Middle Ages but also a desirable goal for modern society. The South's defeat, therefore, was merely another in the long line of defeats since the Renaissance of the sacred order, and perhaps the ultimate example in modern times of the triumph of the secular, materialistic, "Faustian" world view.

Of the two myths, Faulkner's is the easier to swallow, perhaps because it seems so transparently a fiction, but also because it is much more harmonious with liberal, humanistic values. It seems obvious that slavery is an evil, and, projecting that judgment into the past, I cannot conceive that it was ever anything else. It satisfies simple poetic justice to see the Civil War as punishment; it is a good deal harder to extricate ourselves from current and prevailing attitudes to imagine that what triumphed over all was not right but might, not quality but quantity.

This, however, is Lytle's belief…. (p. 39)

[There] are, among the smaller cast in Lytle's best novels, three characters who rival anything in Faulkner for complexity, fullness of rendition, and imaginative vitality. Nuño Tovar in At the Moon's Inn … [is] among the most complete characters in modern Southern fiction.

Nuño Tovar mans the post-of-observation throughout most of At the Moon's Inn, and his acute sensuousness makes him supremely suited to be the center of consciousness of that novel. Tovar is a perfect "register" for the impressions made by Stone Age America on the European conquistador. Through his senses we perceive the American wilderness as it must have seemed to fifteenth-century Spaniards…. (p. 40)

Tovar's experience in the wilderness produces a profound change in his consciousness…. Tovar finds himself increasingly out of sympathy with the attitudes and policies of de Soto, as the governor proceeds in his ruthless pursuit of gold. Moreover, Tovar becomes increasingly skeptical of the presumed moral and cultural superiority of Christian over savage, and while he never completely severs himself from de Soto and his Christianity, he does engage in a pagan marriage rite with a "child of the wilderness" and thereby binds himself to the culture he is dedicated to subjugate and convert. Some rather visionary experiences in the wilderness and some humiliating encounters with native warriors create an intense conflict in Tovar which is never quite resolved in the action of the novel, but which makes for extraordinary complexity of character. (pp. 40-1)

[Faulkner] is preeminently a teller, a spinner of tangled yarns, whose voice can be heard in everything he wrote. The hallmark of that voice is the long, loose sentence, chock-full of clause upon clause of qualification weaving a densely complex pattern of statement. The rhetoric of these sentences insists that nothing is simple, straightforward, declarative; that because of the casual and psychological relations between time past and time present, nothing simply is; that the present act or thought must be distinguished from other possible acts or thoughts, and yet related to them because it is one of the possible. Faulkner's awareness of a nearly overwhelming complexity and interconnectedness in human experience is manifest as an urgent convolution of style; his need to formulate that complexity in language is expressed in a breathless, driven, constantly qualifying voice which advances, retreats, digresses, reformulates, discards, reconsiders but never hesitates, as if to stop speaking were to stop existing, and as if silence were death.

Lytle's style, on the other hand, is much less distinctive because it is less personal. Dedicated to a kind of Joycean effacement of the artist in his art, and committed to the Jamesean craft of rendition in which everything must be shown and nothing told, Lytle is much less easy to identify by a particular style than is Faulkner. Each of his novels has its own style, carefully controlled to bring the subject vividly before the reader. If there is an outstanding characteristic of Lytle's style, it is probably its sensory appeal, achieved by a discriminating use of the images of sense experience, especially vision.

Vision is very important in At the Moon's Inn, where, as I have mentioned, one of the intentions is to make the reader see what it would have been like to be a conquistador in the wilds of Florida. The sheer wealth of sensory detail in that novel is almost overwhelming. But the language of At the Moon's Inn is what distinguishes it most sharply from Lytle's other novels and from anything Faulkner wrote…. It is a stately, elevated, formal yet fluid medium which allows Lytle to move from description to action to reverie while maintaining a tone of grandeur that is slightly archaic but not stilted. (pp. 43-4)

The most distinctively personal voice in Lytle's fiction appears in A Name for Evil, but the voice is not Lytle's; it is that of his first-person narrator-protagonist, Henry Brent, who, himself a novelist, has a highly self-conscious style all his own. Brent writes—the fiction is that he is writing A Name for Evil in order to discover what has happened to him—with the deliberateness of a chemist mixing reagents. He calls attention to himself by intruding into his narative with analysis, defense, justification; he develops his metaphors with a labored self-consciousness, at times rising to heights of rhetorical profundity worthy of a judge pronouncing a heavy sentence—all the while undercut by a vicious irony, since he is, from first to last, a very "obtuse" narrator. His prose is slow and cautious, quiet, heavily cadenced, almost reluctant, as if he senses that his own words will ultimately damn him yet is unable not to speak them…. It is a ghostly, haunted style, altogether suited to the gothic quality of the novel.

In The Velvet Horn, Lytle's style reaches for and attains heights of lyrical richness that is at times as dense as the prose of Absalom, Absalom! or James Agee's Death in the Family.

Unlike Faulkner's but like Agee's, Lytle's style is both precisely descriptive of the world of the senses and densely figurative; simile is as frequent as in a soliloquy by one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. The passages of highest lyrical intensity are usually those which render internal experience (i.e., reverie, memory, hallucination, vision). Jack Cropleigh, the center of consciousness of the novel, has a mind like Tovar's, acutely sensitive to the physical world; he also has an extraordinary well of unconscious memory, into which the point of view dips for some of the most vivid action of the novel.

The Velvet Horn has more variety of style and pace than either At the Moon's Inn or A Name for Evil. There are portions which are straightforward, rapid narrative; there are lengthy conversations in Tennessee mountain dialect that is as flawless as the Mississippi delta dialect in Faulkner. There are scenes of action so dramatically shaped that they could be staged. And throughout it all, through the careful use of allusive imagery, we are alerted to deeper implications of meaning than those which meet the eye. In fact, it is through the style of allusive image and action that Lytle achieves a completely harmonious blend between myth and fiction, a fusion which preserves the secular, human, and realistic texture of fiction and at the same time invests this texture with archetypal significance. (pp. 44-5)

In a sense, The Velvet Horn can be seen as an answer to A Fable [Faulkner's experiment with allegory and myth], as Lytle's attempt—and I think successful attempt—to expand the domain of fiction into areas previously occupied by myth or ritual, but without sacrificing the human texture and without resorting to the artificial construction of characters and plots designed to carry metaphysical weight. (p. 45)

[Somehow] in The Velvet Horn and in Jack Cropleigh's character, Lytle fused fictional character, mythic archetype, and a psychic and spiritual transformation. This, as I understand it, was the goal of his fiction. (p. 49)

Faulkner's effects are for the ear, and, while the oral tradition has its subtleties, those effects are by and large hyperbolic….

In Lytle's fiction there is surface action aplenty, but the first response to it by those accustomed to the hyperbolic mode is that it somehow lacks a point, or that, if this is all there is to it, it's not very interesting. It is only by the application of a constant and continuing pressure that Lytle's fictions begin to yield up their treasures. (p. 50)

Perhaps Lytle is a writer's writer. Many of those who have read and admired his work have also known him as a teacher of writing. These, at any rate, seemed to have possessed the faith necessary to persist in their efforts with Lytle's fiction, to give it the kind of attention it requires and, I believe, deserves. But any reader who can shift out of the high gear which serves so well the turnpike velocities of Faulkner's hyperbolic mode will find on the little-traveled back roads of Lytle's fiction a truly unique world of imagination. The going is slow, but the mood is contemplative, and the destination is a beauty all its own. (p. 51)

Robert V. Weston, "Faulkner and Lytle: Two Modes of Southern Fiction" (copyright, 1979, by Robert V. Weston), in The Southern Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, January, 1979, pp. 34-51.∗