SOURCE: Monroe, Barbara. “Reading Faulknerian Comedy: Humor and Honor in The Hamlet.” Southern Quarterly 26, no. 4 (summer 1988): 33-56.

[In the following essay, Monroe contends that the characters in The Hamlet employ humor as a way to ward off modern capitalism and maintain their honor.]

Many studies have shown that Faulkner's comic achievement owes much to nineteenth-century frontier humor.¹ In stressing the historical influences, however, scholars have often overlooked the social and political functions of Faulkner's humor within its cultural context, the New South of the early twentieth century.² Both regional-specific and gender-marked, Faulknerian humor is honor-bound, for it both serves and services a residual honor-shame culture. In The Hamlet, we see a prelegalistic, agrarian community in initial conflict with modern legality and the capitalist ethic of individual acquisitiveness. The characters deploy humor as a kind of rearguard action to contain creeping Snopesism and to maintain their honor. The Snopeses, in turn, parody honorable conduct by emulating their detractors. Paradoxically, the characters' allegiance to honor and humor empowers their enemies to exploit them and to undermine the efficacy of the honor-shame system. At the same time, reading Faulknerian comedy is also honor-bound: jokes, like bids for honor, are ultimately evaluated by an audience; only readers can laugh, not texts. Although Faulkner wrote within a male frontier-humor tradition about males engaged in bids for honor through their humor, female readers may also find occasion to laugh. Thus the text is encoded with alternative readings that accommodate both male and female readers. These readings both endorse and criticize the role of honor and humor in conserving the status quo.³

The southern code of honor at play in The Hamlet is “inseparable from hierarchy and entitlement” (Wyatt-Brown 4). Although the social paradigm appears strictly hierarchical, the system is also reciprocal. The most honored person—the Greek hero, the Renaissance prince, the southern gentleman—serves as a kind of fountainhead of recognition, radiating out and downward, each social degree receiving less and less status according to its distance from the head. Each step in turn seeks to emulate honorable displays of the positions above. The pyramidal structure of this social arrangement ostensibly pays honor to the figure at the top, but this man in turn requires acknowledgment from below to authenticate his position at the top. This circuit of mutuality tends to destabilize a potentially oppressive system.

The system's potential for mobility, therefore, requires daily maintenance of personal status. Daily enactment and dramatization that require recognition and acknowledgment, however, jeopardize the very status such performances seek to maintain. The honorable man must daily risk his honor in order to gain it. The final arbiter of honor to be paid is the communal audience, for whom dramatic bids for honor are played. This consensual power of recognition, this public evaluation, comes from below, radiating upward, thereby empowering the man at the top (Wadlington 56).

Honor certainly reifies hierarchy, but this hierarchy is dynamic, one that thrives on the impermanence of personal status. Wyatt-Brown explains the code at work in the Old South:

Ambivalence was inseparable from honor: … For honor to thrive there must be room to jockey for position—an invitation to rebelliousness, though it might be duly suppressed. Were it otherwise, honor could not survive. It cannot exist under absolute despotism because the tyrant assumes all honor, leaving none for others. And too much groveling, obsequiousness, and slavishness demeans [sic] not only the subjects but also the object of such unmanly worship. … Likewise, if there had been a rankless democracy in the Old South, honor would soon have become irrelevant, its ubiquity cheapening its value. Between these two poles, then, there was a gray area of ambiguity and potential explosiveness that accompanied the bestowal and receipt of deference and honor. …

(364-65)

This “gray area” is disambiguated by the honorable man's audience, who decides whether the honorable man has overstepped the acceptable margins of hauteur into the arena of affront and outrage. The public sector, like the honorable man, may also display “insultability,” converting the man's bid for honor into shame. But shaming is also “potentially dangerous to the group deriving its identity from the previously honored figure” (Wadlington 57). The public may then decide to accept the insult as a form of empowerment that acknowledges their relationship to the honorable man, enabling them to feel, in Kenneth Burke's words, “‘vicariously heroic’” (qtd. in Wadlington 55). Insult is convertible to compliment (Wadlington 60).

Further, in a world of honor, there is no private sector strictly beyond the purview of the public eye. Personal status is inseparable from human identity and inner worth. Human identity becomes strictly performative, externally visible, “physically demonstrable” (Wyatt-Brown 33). Appearance is ascribed, but also may be achieved to a certain degree. Physical stature is a “signal of divine favor” (Wyatt-Brown 48), but posture, oratory and physical gesture are acquired virtues that can spotlight inner merit as well (Wyatt-Brown 47). Singled out for distinction and reputation is the man who is “an eloquent orator, enchanting storyteller, or witty raconteur” (Wyatt-Brown 47). Conversely, silence can be a powerful rhetorical weapon, for the insult is implicit: the other person is beneath notice, unworthy of reply, inferior in status.⁴

Silence and poker-faced reticence are performances of nonchalance or effortlessness, first codified by Castiglione as sprezzatura (Whigham 93). This coolness could be read as disdain, both a defensive and offensive posture that refuses to engage in combat on grounds that the challenger is beneath the honorable man's contempt. Or the honorable man may acknowledge the challenger's insult and engage in a contest of dueling wits. But, as the southernism goes, the first one to start shouting loses, for he has lost his sprezzatura. Counterpoised to this value of coolness is the high evaluation of hotness of temper, or “insultability,” as mentioned earlier. “One does not slight with impunity” the man of honor (Wadlington 52). Violence, competitiveness and aggressiveness are endemic to the forensics of daily living in such a society as methods of both maintaining honor and amending shame (Wyatt-Brown 366; Wadlington 56).

I have isolated a few of the salient features of honorable conduct, especially in the antebellum south. These ethical rules of honor-shame still held sway in the New South of the twentieth-century, only slowly giving way to a dispensation of conscience-guilt (Grimwood 78 passim). These rules, however, are features of male honor. For women, honor meant simply reticence, restraint, subjugation and forebearance (Wyatt-Brown 234-35); shame meant barrenness, kinlessness, promiscuity and spinsterhood (Wyatt-Brown 236-38). Nonetheless, women were feared and even hated because they held the power to shame their men through sexual misconduct and to unman their men through negative evaluation of male performances in war, in polite society and in the bedroom—impotence became the greatest humiliation of all (Wyatt-Brown 52, 172, 290).

These tenets legislate much of the action of the male characters in The Hamlet. Emulative rivalry is their raison d'etre. Jody Varner wears a soiled shirt and baggy trousers with studied casualness, “a costume at once ceremonial and negligee” (11). When Flem takes his job as clerk at the store, he assumes the same costume personalized by his own cap and machine-made black tie, “which gave him Jody Varner's look of ceremonial heterodoxy raised to its tenth power” (66). After Flem “passes” Jody in the community's eyes, he proceeds to out-emulate Will Varner, “mounting the steps and jerking his head at the men on the gallery exactly as Will Varner himself would do, and enter the store, from which presently the sound of his voice would come, speaking with matter-of-fact succinctness to the bull-goaded bafflement of the man [Jody] who once had been his employer and who still seemed not to know just exactly what had happened to him” (102). At the annual accounting at the cotton gin, “parrot-taught” Flem sits next to Will, who never even allowed Jody to assist previously (69). After Flem passes Will (acquiring the Frenchman's place, the prestigious Varner buggy, two tickets to Texas, and three-hundred dollars in exchange for marrying the pregnant Eula), his cousin Lump assumes the position of clerk at the store, “the new clerk exactly like the old one but a little smaller … as if they had both been cut with the same die” (183). Hierarchy remains in place, but emulative rivalry keeps personal status fluid, keeps people “passing” others. For every one of those who “come up” (as Flem orders his horses in the last line of the book), there are those who must come down.

The male characters enact the honorable ideal of sprezzatura with certain southern flourishes, such as spitting and whittling. Will Varner is so nonchalant that he keeps his hat on during sex with his mistress (161). In arguments, the one who remains cool at least saves face. While Major De Spain is “cussing a blue streak” about his ruined rug, Ab “says nothing” and continues to tend to his horse, business as usual (18). When Ratliff and Flem face off in the last business deal of the book, the sale of the Old Frenchman place, Ratliff waits for Flem to get to town, “leaning against a gallery post, indolent and easy, as if he had not ever even heard of haste” (402). During the actual bargaining, the two “didn't look at one another” (405). Flem, of course, is the most nonchalant character in the book and, not coincidentally, the one who comes out on top in the end. He always operates through indirection, through other people, such as the Texan,⁵ or by giving oblique answers to direct questions (26-27), or by not acknowledging the presence or the words of other people (64; 337; 417). When he does speak, his voice is “matter-of-fact, succinct” (69). Most often, his response is to keep chewing without missing a beat or to spit (25), a traditional debasing gesture (Bakhtin 148). Flem's effortlessness is clearly studied and performative; it is always clearly in view: “[Jody] watched [Flem] raise his arm and with his other hand pick something infinitesimal from the sleeve with infinitesimal care” (27). His award-winning performance, however, is his refusal to acknowledge the lawsuits against him over the spotted horses episode, when his nonchalance even outrages the judge: “Flem Snopes flatly refused to recognise the existence of the suit against himself, stating once and without heat and first turning his head slightly aside to spit, ‘They wasn't none of my horses,’ then fell to whittling again while the baffled and helpless bailiff stood before the tilted chair with the papers he was trying to serve” (367; my italics).

Faulkner's descriptive technique also seems to confirm the honor ethos that human identity is a social, public construct. The human-made status of personal definition is implied by the many metonymic descriptions that assume a person is his clothing. Flem is frequently reduced to just a white shirt, a machine-made tie, a “constant jaw” (66; 68; 96; 101; 171; 309). Ratliff thinks of what Will had to do “to get that patented necktie out his store and out of his house” (179). Later, as he acquires more status, he also acquires more props: the straw suitcase, a plaid cap. By the end of the novel, Flem is that white shirt for Bookwright: just one sighting of a white shirt digging in the dark provides ocular proof that “it's Flem” all right (390). Faulkner uses this technique throughout the novel for other characters as well. In several instances, he explicitly draws attention to the theatrical nature of these props. Jody's soiled shirt and rumpled trousers are “a costume” (11). He sells his worn-out suits to Negro families, “so that on almost any Sunday night one whole one or some part of one of his old suits could be met—and promptly recognized—walking the summer roads” (7-8). I. O. dresses as if for the stage: he wears a paper dickey and cuffs attached to his coat sleeves in place of a shirt and glass frames with no lenses (229). Mrs. Armstid is always just a gray garment “hanging in rigid, almost formal folds like drapery in bronze” (360). Faulkner's description of the anonymous townspeople in group formation also suggests what is important in this fictional world. In the courtroom scene, the Tull girls are just heads that move in unison (373). The faces and heads are the parts in evidence in the last scene also: “Then the heads along the ruined fence turned as though to follow [Flem's] look” (420). These heads and faces that watch and look are emblematic of the social evaluation of the various characters' performances. Thus the forensics of enactment and critical reception so important to an honor-shame society are inscribed insistently in the novel through the frequent use of metonymic description. For in this cultural theatre, “the play, the show, is the thing itself” (Wadlington 53). Theatricality becomes self-referential; the signifier is the signified.

In fact, such descriptions are so pervasive that they lean toward the parodic. Although the characters clearly live by the honor code, Faulkner deploys parody and burlesque to subvert and criticize that code as an efficacious strategy for living in the modern world. Since the characters are clearly a “passel of shiftless men” (36), their plays for honor have something of the same effect as Don Quixote's playing chivalry. In the Ike episode, the cow parodies the modesty of southern womanhood, when Ike receives “the violent relaxing of her fear-constricted bowels” (198), after which she scrambles away “in a blind paroxysm of shame, to escape not him alone but the very scene of the outragement of privacy where she had been sprung suddenly upon and without warning from the dark and betrayed and outraged by her own treacherous biological inheritance, he following again, speaking to her, trying to tell her how this violent violation of her maiden's delicacy is no shame” (198-99). Flem Snopes's “squat” and “froglike” appearance and rhetorical silences mock the impressive, divine stature of southern orators, just as his impotence (only hinted at in this book) would be the ultimate shame of a true man of honor. I. O., dressed in his paper dickey and lensless glasses, “burlesqued ratiocination and firmness and even made a sort of crass roman holiday of rationalised curiosity” (229). The platitudinous I. O., “already (or still) talking” (72), also carnivalizes the high evaluation of eloquence in official southern culture. It is also I. O. who worries about the family name: “A man cant have his good name drug in the alleys. The Snopes name has done held its head up too long in this country to have no such reproaches against it like stock-diddling” (230). Like any honorable man, he is mainly concerned with reputation in a futile attempt to clinch the argument with Eck about paying for Ike's cow:

“I don't want fifteen dollars worth of beef,” [Eck said].

“It ain't the beef and the hide. That's just a circumstance. It's the moral value we are going to get out of it,” [I. O. said].

“How do I need fifteen dollars worth of moral value when all you need is a dollar and eighty cents?”

“The Snopes name. Cant you understand that? That aint never been aspersed yet by no living man. That's got to be kept as a marble monument for your children to grow up under.”

(234)

But it is through the women characters that Faulkner most often sends up this male ethos, as I will discuss later at length. First, we need to locate the role of humor in honor cultures and explore how humor circulates along the same conduits of power.

“[L]aughter is always the laughter of a group,” according to Bergson (64). “To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one” (65). As a socializing process, joking serves two functions: “to define and maintain group relationships and to act as a deterrent against outsiders” (Boskin 10). “‘[L]aughter forms a bond’ but … it ‘simultaneously draws a line’ as well. Both functions reinforce each other” (Boskin 5). These two functions are produced in two types of joking situations: “the symmetrical situation, in which the persons involved are equals …, and the asymmetrical context, in which only one party is permitted to tease or make fun of others, reflecting a superior-subordinate relationship” (Boskin 10). Like honor, then, humor moves within and across hierarchy, rearranging the relative status of persons, even if just momentarily, declassifying hierarchy even as it realigns it. Humor can subvert an asymmetrical human relationship into a symmetrical one, and vice versa, repositioning the joker to a higher point in the hierarchy at the expense of the person who serves as the butt of the joke. Bids for laughter—group acknowledgment—become inseparable from bids for honor. A failed joke can shame its joker. As with bids for honor, the decisive evaluation rests with a joke's audience.

In an honor-shame culture, laughter is an “affective communication” (Levine 4), even a matter of life and death, for to lose face, to suffer ridicule publicly in such a culture, is to suffer a social death (Levine 6).⁶ Faulkner's characters in The Hamlet are not pictured as laughing to themselves. For them, laughter is a social response to a social situation; as Bergson states, “Laughter appears in need of an echo” (64). In The Hamlet, Faulkner not only describes the circumstances of a joke's delivery but also frequently records how a joke's hearers respond—with guffaws or silence. These nonverbal communications—the performative execution and the audience's reception of a joke—are all important to an honor-shame culture.

Humor, then, can be used to maintain, pique or repair honor, competing with other honor-accruing means. Historically, the primal value of violence and revenge in honor-shame cultures gradually became civilized and diverted by the legal system and dueling rapier wits.⁷ In The Hamlet the three strategies for honor-repair—violence, legality and humor—consistently collide. In these collisions, the text demonstrates, legality and humor save lives, but only humor saves face.

Gary Stonum has pointed out that the honor society of Beat Four could be divided into those who participate in the male myth of honor and those that do not (168). The humorless men resort to violence when they are outraged; the other men use humor as a culturally sanctioned form of aggression—a transformation in the code that mitigates its disruptive, violent bent that tends to destabilize civilized society.⁸ Flem does not fall into either category for he uses honor to achieve profit, the reverse motivation of most of the other men in the book. In dealing with Pat Stamper, Ab “just wanted to recover that eight dollars' worth of the honor and pride of Yoknapatawpha County horse-trading, doing it not for profit but for honor” (41). Pat Stamper is a horse-trader “for the pleasure of beating a worthy opponent as much as for gain” (34). Ratliff, too, likes his job “for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit” (77).⁹

The humorless men use violence, or threaten to use violence, to vindicate their shame. Hoake McCarron calls out his rivals by name and “cursed them in a pleasant, drawling, conversational voice and dared any two of them to meet him down the road. They could see the pistol hanging in his hand against his flank” (156). Labove is ready to die defending his honor but “felt rage and outrage” when he mistakenly suspects that Jody has sent everyone away, denying Labove a public audition for reclaiming his honor (143). At an early stage of the argument between Mink and Houston, “they cursed each other, hard and brief and without emphasis, like blows or pistol-shots” (103). At one point, the two consider dueling—placing a pistol on a post and racing for it—but apparently Will Varner stops the proceedings and makes them agree to go to court (180-81). Although the court settles the case to the public's satisfaction, Mink's sense of honor is still not satisfied, for a man of honor is not slighted with impunity. He would like to label Houston's body with a placard (not just a note): “This is what happens to the men who impound Mink Snopes's cattle” (251). He feels that the forces of legality and public opinion are conspiring “to frustrate and outrage his rights as man and his feelings as a sentient creature” (251). Unlike his cousin Lump, Mink does not even think of killing Houston for his money (268). He decides to return to the hidden body in an attempt to recover any money Houston may have had on his person at the time of murder, only after he refuses to accept his wife's offer of aid, presumably to fend off being shamed by a woman. After many frustrating attempts to return to the body, Mink thinks, “It's like just about everything was in cahoots against one man killing another” (289). All of these humorless characters ultimately lose their honor (except Houston, who loses his life), all expelled from the community in symbolic charivaris.

Violence and humor as two alternative methods of honor-repair are held up for examination in at least one scene in the book. Faulkner plays the scene for laughs, notably at the expense of the violent alternative. When the family discovers Eula is pregnant, Will and Jody react quite differently, one with humor and the other with violence. Jody is outraged and out for vengeance for the damage done to the family name. True to cavalier form, he orders his horse saddled, but he must wrestle with his father for the family pistol. His dashing exit brought to an inglorious halt, Jody cries.

“Maybe you dont give a damn about your name, but I do. I got to hold my head up before folks even if you aint.”

“Hah,” Varner said. “I aint noticed you having any trouble holding it up. You have just about already got to where you cant get it far enough down to lace your own shoes.”

(163-64)

Jody declares that he will find all three suspects to bring the right one to justice, but he is not even allowed to finish his vow. Will's interruption reduces the mortal affront done to the family honor to just a matter of “tomcatting” and “diddling”: “What for? Just out of curiosity to find out for certain just which of them was and wasn't diddling her?” (164). Will then tells him to “cool off” and “go fishing”: “If this family needs any head-holding-up done, I'll tend to it myself.” Will exits with jest: “Hell and damnation, all this hullabaloo and uproar because one confounded running bitch finally foxed herself. What did you expect—that she would spend the rest of her life just running water through it?” (164-65). Will then proceeds to save the family honor in terms of a business deal with Flem.

Ratliff's story of Ab Snopes could also be taken as an object lesson in the shameful consequences of losing one's sense of humor. We see Ab after he has lost his humor and honor, who now treats animals with “senseless savageness” and “absolutely needless violence” (55), his voice “rusty,” “lifeless” and “dead” (8-9). But Ratliff knew him before and knows how he first “soured” and then “just went plumb curdled” (37). In his bid to vindicate “the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of horse-trading in Yoknapatawpha County” (39), he is resoundingly defeated by Pat Stamper. Shamed but with his nonchalance and humor apparently still intact, Ab returns home to face his wife. Only when his wife parades his shame by transacting business in public with Stamper in order to buy her milk separator is Ab ultimately “separated” from his sense of humor, curdled to the core. But when she first returns with the separator and runs borrowed milk through it a third time, Ab is still able to save face with his then-young companion Ratliff with heatless, humorous jest, as Ratliff recounts their conversation years later:

“There it goes again,” Ab says. “Don't forget that other gallon tomorrow.”

“No sir,” I says. We listened to it. Because he wasn't curdled then.

“It looks like she is fixing to get a heap of pleasure and satisfaction outen it,” he says.

(53)

Ratliff's story ends there. The next the reader hears of Ab Snopes, he is a barn-burner and a humorless man who has lost his bond with other men.

Legality also toes up with humor as another alternative method of honor-repair. Again, we see the Snopeses expropriate another public form, as Stonum points out in regard to Flem's use of respectability, “for purposes that subvert the social relations they are supposed to embody and the values they are supposed to guarantee” (180). Flem first uses legality to usurp the “honor system” of payment at the general store (62), even making Will Varner pay. Ratliff humorously fantasizes that Flem, “his mouth full of law,” could beat even the Prince in hell, swapping his soul “in good faith and honor,” but coming to redeem it, “like the law says” (171). In the spotted horses episode, when Flem refuses to acknowledge the lawsuit against him, he cannot legally be charged with contempt until it is proven he owns the horses (371). The potential insult to the court, however, converts to his own honor, for, as Lump chortles, “You can't beat him” (356; 363). Thus Flem even out-laws the law. Cora Tull also tries to recover the family honor by taking her complaint of injury and insult to the courts to redress. Tull has lost face almost literally in the accident on the bridge, and he is at risk of losing face once again in the public forum of the courtroom when he tries to calm down his raging wife, who is quick to reply: “Don't you say hush to me! You'll let Eck Snopes or Flem Snopes or that whole Varner tribe snatch you out of the wagon and beat you half to death against a wooden bridge. But when it comes to suing them for your just rights and a punishment, oh no. Because that wouldn't be neighborly. What's neighborly got to do with you lying flat on your back in the middle of planting time while we pick splinters out of your face?” (375). The Tulls lose their case, the outcome of which tends to reverse faith in the legal system as an efficacious honor-repair mechanism. Thus being “neighborly”—“good ol' boyism”—remains the only game in town. Although Flem has confiscated both honor and legality as effective weapons, he never exploits the rich possibilities of male humor in his rise to power, even though Freeman tries to joke with him in the end (417), because he refuses to acknowledge the mutual status of other men. Humor remains the male community's last stronghold against Snopesism.

Good ol' boyism, a rich interplay of humor and honor, governs the conventions of everyday conversation between the male characters. This word-slinging and ritualistic joking serve both to assert one man's authority at another's expense and to establish male community.¹⁰ These conversations, which range from storytelling to business dealing, thinly veil their competitive, often insulting, potentially hostile tone. But humor takes the starch out of these exchanges, as in the Virginian's famous pronouncement, “When you call me that, smile.” After Tull relays the information that the Snopeses have a barn-burning past, he protests that he “aint repeating nothing.” Varner quips, “I wouldn't. … A man dont want to get the name of a idle gossip” (11). Irony and understatement make this insult to Tull's masculinity allowable, who is really just his wife's “eldest daughter” anyway, the narrator informs the reader (10). Later, Jody Varner tells his father that he must go through with his proposed contract, to which Will offers, “Then you can point out to him which house to burn too. Or are you going to leave that to him?” Jody replies lamely, “Sho. … We'll discuss that too.” (12). “Sho” can be translated as “touché,” for the word punctuates conversation throughout the book, marking off points conceded in these exchanges. The dueling function of humor is specifically evoked in the same passage: “[N]ow all levity was gone from his voice, all poste and riposte of humor's light whimsy, tierce quarto and prime” (12).

Ratliff's version of the confrontation between Ab and De Spain, after Ab has burned down De Spain's barn, is also overwrought with humorous barbs. In Ratliff's recreation of the scene, Ab's and De Spain's last oral exchange is marked with understatement, an apt tool for a man of honor displaying his sprezzatura: “It looks like me and you aint going to get along together,” Ab says, “so I reckon we better quit trying before we have a misunderstanding over something. I'm moving this morning.” De Spain responds, “What about your contract?” Ab closes the conversation laconically, “I done cancelled it” (18). In one of their many conversations, Bookwright warns Ratliff in what could be taken as insulting terms that he is no match for Flem:

“I believe I would think of something if I lived there,” Ratliff said.

“Yes,” Bookwright said. … “And wind up with one of them bow ties in place of your buckboard and team. You'd have room to wear it.”

(81)

“Or maybe them tennis shoes,” Bookwright said. “He aint wore them in a year now—No,” he said. “If I was you I would go out there nekkid in the first place. Then you wont notice the cold coming back.”

(82)

In the course of this same conversation, Ratliff makes a few well-placed ripostes to the counterman, who needs to be reminded to keep the coffee warm-ups coming. “This here cup seems to have a draft in it. … May be you better warm it up a little. It might freeze and bust, and I would have to pay for the cup too.” (81)

The novel also dramatizes the failure of humor to gloss over the potentially hostile interaction between men, most especially in dealings with Flem, but also with other characters such as the Texan, Buck Hipps. The jokes about his vest that run through the horse auction scene serve to establish the Texan, the outsider, as the Other to the male community's We. As butt of their jokes, he fails to dominate the gathered group and bend its members to his will. For Hipp's first sale's pitch, he tries to handle one of the horses. “See? All you got to do is handle them a little and work hell out of them for a couple of days.” A horse “slashes at his back, severing his vest from collar to hem down the back. …” “‘Sho now,’ Quick said. ‘But suppose a man dont happen to own a vest’” (312). But the hierarchy turns over in this scene:

“Come up, boys,” the Texan said. “You're just in time to buy a good gentle horse cheap.”

“How about that one that cut your vest off last night?” a voice said. This time three or four guffawed. The Texan looked toward the sound, bleak and unwinking.

“What about it?” he said. The laughter, if it had been laughter, ceased.

(326)

By exposing the hostile intent of the challenger's humor, the Texan refuses to play the butt and gains the crowd's respect. After this scene, the Texan clearly controls the men, who fall into line and buy the horses.

Humor can also cut too close to the bone, hitting a violent nerve, as when Lump says,

“If Flem had knowed how quick you fellows was going to snap them horses up, he'd a probably brought some tigers,” he said. “Monkeys too.”

“So they was Flem's horses,” Ratliff said. The laughter stopped. The other three had open knives in their hands, with which they had been trimming idly at chips and slivers of wood. Now they sat absorbed in the delicate and almost tedious movements of the knife-blades.

(354)

The early gentle humor gradually heats up in the course of the narrative, as the stakes get higher and Flem keeps winning. In the horse auction scene, Ratliff's remarks cut deeper, just short of drawing blood.

“Maybe if Ratliff would leave here tonight, they wouldn't make him buy one of them ponies tomorrow,” a third said.

“That's a fact,” Ratliff said. “A fellow can dodge a Snopes if he just starts lively enough. In fact, I dont believe he would have to pass more than two folks before he would have another victim intervened betwixt them.”

(316)

After the auction and trial, Ratliff comes dangerously close to losing his humor, as Stonum discusses at length (177-80). Again, his conversation partner is Bookwright and the exchange is conducted in the spirit of good humor; but it ends in a decidedly bitter note: “I never made them Snopeses and I never made the folks that cant wait to bare their backsides to them. I could do more, but I wont. I wont, I tell you!” (367) Although arguably Ratliff has not lost his humor, he has lost his nonchalance, which renders him vulnerable to losing face on this cultural stage.

Even though others also have momentary lapses in their senses of humor, they still continue to laugh, though “without mirth” (367). Humor may be lost, but the appearance of good humor is maintained for the sake of honor. This value is enacted by Jody in the first episode of the book. He takes the news of the barn-burning Snopes in stride, assuming the posture of good humor but only laughing through his teeth: “‘Well well well,’ he said, bulging, slightly apoplectic. ‘And now, out of all the men in this country, I got to pick him to make a rent contract with.’ He began to laugh. That is, he began to say ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.’ rapidly, but just from the teeth, the lungs; no higher, nothing of it in the eyes” (21). Jody laughs “fiercely, with no mirth” when he dares to challenge his father's method of handling the pregnant Eula affair (162). Odum Bookwright, Henry Armstid, Buck Hipps, the men at the auction and Ratliff all have been known to laugh without mirth (390; 326), like the father of Hoake McCarron, who met his angry father-in-law after eloping with his daughter with “his fine teeth exposed though the rest of his face took no part in the smile” (153). Mirthless laughter is a strategy for defusing the situation, at once surrendering the upper hand and extending the hand in a bid for male bonding.¹¹

But mirthless laughter parodied with voiced sarcasm reverses this intention back into a threatening challenge, the “Hah” that several characters use throughout the book, most suggestively by the women: “‘Hah,’ Mrs. Tull said. She said it exactly as Bookwright would have. ‘Dangerous. Ask Vernon Tull. Ask Henry Armstid if them things was pets. … Hah,’ Mrs. Tull said again” (376), after the judge has asked her to be quiet. Female characters consistently challenge male honor in their actions or in their words. Mink's wife laughs at him “harshly, without mirth” (84; 253). She is also described as “masculine” and as a “confident lord of a harem” (272), who refuses his direct orders (84). Eula presents the most obvious reversal of “the myth of male dominance” inscribed in the code, as Stonum discusses (170-71). Mrs. Varner is angry that she has been disturbed while trying to take a nap, apparently unconcerned that the family honor is at stake (163). Mrs. Snopes threatens Ab with a skillet, while he backs off with, “Now Vynie, now Vynie. I always was a fool about a good horse and you know it and aint a bit of use in your jawing about it” (35). Later Mrs. Snopes says to herself, “Horse-trader! Setting there bragging and lying to a passel of shiftless men with the weeds and morning glories climbing so thick in cotton and corn I am afraid to tote his dinner down to him for fear of snakes” (36). Mrs. Littlejohn most often assails the male community directly, using humor as her weapon. As she stands over Henry Armstid's bloodless face after he has been brought in from the corral, she attacks. “‘I'll declare,’ she said. ‘You men. … Go outside. See if you cant find something else to play with that will kill some more of you’” (348). Later when she and Mrs. Armstid are discussing the possibility of recovering Mrs. Armstid's five dollars, Mrs. Armstid says, “‘Maybe I better go and talk to Henry.’ ‘I would,’ Mrs. Littlejohn says. … ‘Then Henry can buy another five-dollar horse with it. Maybe he'll buy one next time that will out and out kill him. If I just thought he would, I'd give him back that money, myself’” (360). Women characters are often portrayed as pitted against men and their honor, as is Cora Tull, “a strong, … slightly dumpy woman with an expression of grim and seething outrage … directed not at any Snopes or at any other man in particular but at all men, all males …” (370). Cued by such female responses, a female reader may chortle to see these male characters get their comeuppances. The narrative voice, as joker to the book's readership, at times seems to invite the female reader to feel superior to this “passel of shiftless men.”

But it is essential to note that these scenes are played for laughs, a fact that destabilizes the butt of the joke. For example, Ratliff's report of the conversation between Mrs. Armstid and Mrs. Littlejohn is to a male audience, is complete with background noises, and mocks the very real anger Mrs. Littlejohn must have felt: “Then I just heard the dishes. They would have two pans, both washing. … Mrs. Littlejohn never said nothing. It sounded like she was throwing dishes at one another. … And I be dog if it didn't sound exactly like she had two plates in her hands, beating them together like these here brass bucket-lids in a band. … And then it sounded just like Mrs. Littlejohn taken up the dishes and pans and all and throwed the whole business at the cookstove—” (360). Mrs. Littlejohn, the narrator reports, keeps coming out of the hotel, holding a coldly logical female eye on the proceedings in the lot during the horse auction while she continues with her chores (320-32). But her potentially shaming female gaze becomes part of the narrator's joke when Eck's runaway horse takes her by surprise, and she splits her washboard over its head (346). She becomes part of the joke pattern, the innocent bystander who first serves as a measure of incongruity and then becomes swept away by insane events. Even aloof Eula is cut down to earth when she is forced to marry the squat, impotent, “froglike” Flem (169). Similarly, Cora Tull's day in court showcases female anger—and female humor to vent that anger. But just when she appears to have made her point and won her case, she unwittingly undoes her cause, disclosing to the judge that Eck was given the horse but never had legal possession of it. The joke pattern is clearly a case of the-woman-who-didn't-know-when-to-shut-up. We are consistently shown a female critique of male honor, which in turn is subverted by male humor delivered by male jokers, Ratliff or the narrative voice.

The narrative voice does not always portray these female challenges to male honor in a humorous tone, however. Eula's marriage fills Ratliff with very real regret. And when Lucy Pate apparently decides that she will make sure Houston passes to the next grade in school, Houston can see that “the ancient worn glove of biological differentiation had been flung and raised” (239). Lucy proves to be a worthy opponent, Houston consistently underestimating “female ruthlessness” (240) until he finally has to leave town in a futile attempt to escape her. But, again, it is difficult to stabilize the narrative voice, for the tone is too serious to be taken absolutely seriously, at least for these early courtship scenes. Later, when Houston returns, marries Lucy, and Lucy is killed, Houston's very real grief reestablishes the serious tone as authentic.

Authentic also are the economic losses sustained by the victims in the novel. Readers of The Hamlet when it was first published in 1940, who were still living through the Great Depression, would recognize that grinding poverty is no laughing matter (cf. Grimwood 117). Ab, as a sharecropper in a subsistence economy, probably never recovers financially from losing his cow and mule and Beasley's horse, a fact that Ratliff glosses over (cf. Stonum 169). The narrative voice invites us to laugh off Eck's loss too, as Jody does when he finds out Eck's “free” horse has broken its neck: “Varner, looking down at him, began to laugh steadily and harshly, sucking his teeth” (365). But the narrative is much more ambiguous about the Armstids' disaster. When Henry literally beats Mrs. Armstid away during the auction, her passivity invites the reader's sympathy, at least a female reader's sympathy (337).¹² Even the Texan cannot resist her genuine pleas for her money. Her pleas evoke even more grief in the courtroom, when she explains what she had to do to get that five dollars, that she would know her five dollars anywhere (372-73). When Henry is carried into Mrs. Littlejohn's bedroom after breaking his leg, the narrator records his screams of pain right after scenes of the other men laughing, as if to remind the reader how expensive humor can be: “‘Don't ask me,’ Ratliff said. ‘I cant even get nowhere in time to buy a cheap horse.’ Two or three guffawed this time. Then they began to hear Henry's respirations from the house: ‘Ah. Ah. Ah.’ and they ceased abruptly, as if they had not been aware of their closeness to it” (351). It is unlikely many readers will laugh in triumph with Lump when Flem refuses to return Mrs. Armstid's money, but rather patronizes her with “a little sweetening for the chaps” (362). And no one is laughing in the last scene of the book: Henry, wasted with impotence and fury, has broken his leg a second time and has mortgaged his farm, “including the buildings and tools and livestock and about two miles of three-strand wire fence” (405). As he digs for gold not there, “the people watched him in a silence so complete that they could hear the dry whisper of his panting breath” (420).

This modulated tonality is central to understanding The Hamlet, according to Grimwood. This divided voice reflects Faulkner's deep ambivalence for his material, a society in transition (Grimwood 145). Originally, Faulkner envisioned the trilogy as a satire on redneck ascendency, but “ambiguous sympathy … complicated his vision and diluted his satire” (Grimwood 166). Grimwood argues convincingly that “the Faulkner trilogy expresses deep-seated anxieties about the egalitarian forces at work in the South during the first half of the twentieth century” (163). He also shows how the narrative framework, borrowed from southwestern humor, sets up a “dialogue” between “folk culture and official culture,” allowing for “partisan expression by either side” (169). Ratliff provides a “folk perspective on the Snopeses, just as the omniscient narrative voice provides a genteel perspective on them”:

In effect, Snopesism is condemned both from above, by the aristocracy it threatens, and from below, by the peasantry it exploits. Through Faulkner's manipulation, both ends of the social hierarchy combine to form a stylistic alliance—Lynn's cordon sanitaire—that is united by victimization against any movement across the hierarchy. Though the novel's parliament of voices reaches a conservative consensus, however, it remains unable to enforce that consensus. The Hamlet is a series of narrative frames (frames within frames, sometimes) in a variety of styles, each one contrived as a new perspective on, and as a new entrapment of, the yahooism it encloses, and each one broken open by its contact with the other styles with which it must contend.

(Grimwood 173)

Grimwood's analysis is convincing and compelling but incomplete, for his reading centers on cognitive and epistemological issues, excluding the affective and performative (cf. Wadlington 26-27; 36-38). If we see reading as performance, we will see that the bivocality of The Hamlet not only reveals Faulkner's ambivalence toward his material, but also invites the reader to perform a variety of roles. These roles include those of the joke paradigm, with all the empowering and disabling possibilities these roles entail: as joker, as audience, as butt. Further, if we genderize our monolithic ideal reader, we will see that a woman reader may be laughing for different reasons. Men can laugh at these male characters in the spirit of mutual status; women can laugh in the spirit of Otherness. If we also factor in class and race, the tonality of the text becomes multivocal indeed. Humor, like honor, relies and thrives on this kind of fluid reversibility.

So reversible are the dynamics of a humorous situation that Faulkner exposes the oppressive possibilities of humor but uses humor to do so, thereby reversing the political implications of his critique. The narrative voice, then, both serves and subverts any call to arms, conservative or otherwise. Consistently Ratliff warns the citizens of Frenchman's Bend that they are being exploited:

“Flem has grazed up the store and he has grazed up the blacksmith shop and now he is starting in on the school. That just leaves Will's house. Of course, after that he will have to fall back on you folks, but that house will keep him occupied for a while because Will—”

“Hah!” Bookwright said shortly.

(80)

After Ratliff hears of Bookwright's story about the black man who borrowed five dollars from Flem and pays him a nickel every Saturday for interest, he quips, “‘Well well well. … So he's working the top and the bottom both at the same time.’” Then, without humor, he chastens, “‘Aint none of you folks out there done nothing about it?’” (81). Later, when Ratliff loses his patience with the docility of the townspeople at the pasturage trial, Bookwright asks him what is wrong with him. “‘Why, nothing,’ Ratliff said. ‘What could be wrong with nothing nowhere nohow in this here best of all possible worlds?’” (185). He then tells the bawdy story, too strained to be humorous, of the woman who pays for her lard on credit and in sex too, and then asks how much for the sardines. The moral of Ratliff's story is lost on his male listeners, however, for they leave before he is finished when Lump tells them “‘it's time’” to catch the next show starring Ike and his lady love (186-88). Thus the narrative voice, by subverting Ratliff's role as joker, undermines his moral as well. When the Texas horses come to town, Ratliff repeatedly warns his fellows, in insulting, humorous terms, that they are going to be taken in by the scam (316-18). Afterwards, his I-told-you-so is a bitter denunciation of the victims who “bare their backsides” to the Snopeses (367). Ratliff also uses humor to reprimand Will Varner (and readers) who would brush aside with jest the community's losses in the horse scam:

“They are going to come out even on them things, after all,” Varner said. “They'll get the money back in exercise and relaxation. You take a man that aint got no other relaxation all year long except dodging mule-dung up and down a field furrow. And a night like this one, when a man aint old enough yet to lay still and sleep, and yet he aint young enough anymore to be tomcatting in and out of other folks' back windows, something like this is good for him. …”

“That's one way to look at it, I reckon,” Ratliff said. “In fact, it might be considerable comfort to Bookwright and Quick and Freeman and Eck Snopes and them other new horse-owners if that side of it could be brought to their attention, because the chances are aint none of them thought to look at it in that light yet. …”

(352)

Such passages indict the male community for laughing all the way to the poorhouse (cf. Stonum 185).

But most of the passages are themselves humorous, thereby implicating the laughing reader in Ratliff's critique. In the final sting of the book, the narrator solicits the reader's complicity in watching Ratliff take the fall, inviting the reader to take a superior stance to Ratliff, to share in the joke for which Ratliff will be the butt. When Ratliff first sees Eustace Grimm, the narrator allows the reader a rare glimpse into Ratliff's private thoughts: “[A]s soon as he recognised Grimm, something in him had clicked, though it would be three days before he would know what it was” (400). If the reader does not hear the click, the narrator plays it again a few pages later, adding another clue that Ratliff is deluded: “And Eustace Grimm—again his mind clicked; still it would be three days before he would know what had clicked, because now he believed he did know, that he saw the pattern complete …” (402). The next hint is louder still: “[S]omething had clicked in his mind again. It might have been while he was asleep, he didn't know. But he knew that this time it was right. Only I don't want to look at it, hear it, he thought …” (412). The reader knows the joke is coming, just not when and where and how. In other passages, written in serious tone, the narrative voice comments directly on the nature of “true slavery” and the mutually capacitating bond between the master and slave. Houston had always “proffered slavedom” to the women in his life—his mother and his mistress. But “[w]hat he did not comprehend was that until now he had not known what true slavery was—that single constant despotic undeviating will of the enslaved not only for possession, complete assimilation, but to coerce and reshape the enslaver into the seemliness of his victimization” (237). The implication is clear: the citizens of Frenchman's Bend have chosen their own masters. Even Ratliff knows something is amiss before he allows Flem to scalp him for the Old Frenchman place, “only I don't want to look at it, hear it, he thought …” (412).

On the other hand, Faulkner strikes this serious note to endorse the therapeutic, recuperative power of humor as well. After Ratliff finds out that Flem is Ike's guardian, he thinks to himself, “Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they aint brave enough to try to cure” (99). Laughter is a forgetting (cf. Stonum 175). Houston discovers that his “grim icy rage had given way to an even more familiar sardonic humor, a little clumsy and heavy-footed perhaps, but indomitable and unconquerable above even the ruthless grief” (216). In the last section, the narrator again returns to his humorous mode. The peasants may have been chasing their horses for two days, but by nine o'clock on the second morning, the men—including Ratliff—have once again resumed their positions on the gallery of the store, whittling and swapping punchlines about the town's misadventure, rescripting their disasters into guffaws (353). In the last sting of the book, when Ratliff and Bookwright realize that they have been taken in, they immediately fend off defeatism with competitive jest. Speaking of the coins Flem used as bait, Ratliff says,

“Bet you one of them I beat you.”

“1901,” Bookwright said. “I even got one that was made last year. You beat me.”

“I beat you,” Ratliff said.

(414)

Defiant humor is shown as a male community stance, a strategy by which they cut their losses and save their honor by flaunting their sense of humor. “Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious,” Freud has written, making visible the ego's rejection of the reality principle by asserting that a person can afford to live by the pleasure principle (163), a kind of southern version of a potlatch (cf. Stonum 167). It publicizes “the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego's invulnerability” (Freud 162). Thus the humorous attitude intimately partakes of the honor code, cavalier at any cost. Similarly, readers familiar with poverty might welcome the chance to laugh at economic ruin, laughter as extravagant as a Busby Berkeley movie, so popular in the thirties. As a literary form, humor may or may not serve up a gain in pleasure for the fictional characters, but the humorous narrative certainly intends to yield pleasure for its “non-participating onlooker,” the reader or the listener (Freud 161). The narrative may intend such pleasure, but the final evaluation of that intention lies with its readers. Humor, like honor, is always risky business.

In our final evaluation of The Hamlet, then, we must keep in mind that it is above all a comic novel. The comic frame, as a mode of production of meaning and value for readers, is designed to enact a dialectic process, the experience and performance of which can offer ameliorative possibilities. As Kenneth Burke explains,

A comic frame of motives, as here conceived, would not only avoid the sentimental denial of materialistic factors in human acts. It would also avoid the cynical brutality that comes when such sensitivity is outraged, as it must be outraged by the acts of others or by the needs that practical exigencies place upon us.

The comic frame, in making a man the student of himself, makes it possible for him to “transcend” occasions when he has been tricked or cheated, since he can readily put such discouragements in his “assets” column, under the head of “experience.” Thus we “win” by subtly changing the rules of the game—

In sum, the comic frame should enable people to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its ultimate would not be passiveness, but maximum consciousness.

(170-71)

Notes

1. For the most influential work on nineteenth-century humor generally, see Blair. For Faulkner's debt to that tradition, see especially Wheeler, McHaney, Jacobs and Inge.

2. A major exception to this claim is Michael Grimwood's chapter on The Hamlet (135-86), which I found valuable in developing my discussion of the political consequences of The Hamlet later in this paper.

3. I need to acknowledge Warwick Wadlington for my title, which plays off the title of his Reading Faulknerian Tragedy, and for the theoretical orientation of this study, reading performance as empowerment. See especially his chapters “Reading and Performance: Reproduction and Persons” and “Faulkner and the Tragic Potentials of Honor and Shame.”

4. “Keeping cool, keeping distant as others challenge you or make demands upon you, is a strategy for keeping the upper hand,” explains Sattel. “What better way is there to exercise power than to make it appear that all one's behavior seems to be the result of unemotional rationality. Being impersonal and inexpressive lends to one's decisions and position an apparent autonomy and ‘rightness’” (120; italics his). Mitchell makes the same point (68).

5. Stonum's point is well-taken here: Flem “works through intermediaries like Buck Hipps, Lump Snopes and Eustace Grimm, thus denying the affirmations of relatedness and mutual status which the ritual is supposed to constitute” (173).

6. Levine also points out that Greenland Eskimos “duel” with laughter. Participants ridicule each other with insults. “The duelist who wins the most laughter from the audience is the victor. The loser is profoundly humiliated, often going into exile” (6).

7. Queen Elizabeth I sought to divert this vigilante bent in the honor code by establishing legal precedents for handling the disputes of honorable men and by stripping the nobles of their standing personal armies. Also, rapier wits became sharper in this period. See Whigham and Stone. Mitchell's thesis is that “[q]uick wits are prized over quick draws” in The Virginian. For an extensive annotative bibliography of “Verbal Dueling and Ritualistic Joking” based on linguistic studies, see Thorne, et al. (296-97).

8. Levine points out that a society that represses aggression tends to appreciate humor more (5).

9. I think Stonum overstates the case: “Although the object is to win, profit is not as important as honor. … A man gains simply for participating in the ritual; he need not come out on top. Ab Snopes's prestige is heightened just because he dares to challenge the legendary Pat Stamper” (167).

10. Stonum emphasizes the mutuality of these exchanges, overlooking the implicit power also at stake: In swapping stories and trading material goods, “every man … is assumed to be autonomous, worthy, and in possession of an essential dignity. The affection and mutual respect of such free and independent men for one another is apparent in their goodnatured banter and the witty stratagems of sharp dealing” (168).

11. One humor theory, developed on the Darwin-Spenser model, speculates that laughter, as “a primitive display of fangs,” was developed as a survival technique to ward off aggressors on the ground while swinging from the trees. Simon mentions this as an example of humor theory that is “too often just silly” (210).

12. In their introduction, Flynn and Schweickart give two examples of empirical reading reactions to the short story “Spotted Horses.” “Both students are critical of Flem Snopes, and both refer to Mrs. Armstid and to the people who allow Snopes to take advantage of them. The two students provide decidedly different emphasis, however. … One concentrates on the ignorance of the townspeople; they are lazy and pass meaningless time. The other is ‘outraged’ and ‘saddened’ by the reaction of the townspeople to Snopes. The first response was written by a male, the second by a female” (x-xi).

Works Cited

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