[In the following essay, Matthews examines Pylon for evidence of greater complexity than Faulkner credited the novel with.]

“It's not the money” / “It was the money”

Readers of Pylon have grown used to accepting Faulkner's legend about the circumstances of its composition and its significance to him. Caught in the toils of confronting the central questions of southern history and identity as he drafted Absalom, Absalom!, arrested by the technical tension between shifting perspectives and narrative coherence, Faulkner confesses his need to find release in simpler work. In Pylon, he says, he concentrated on characters who, unlike Sutpen and his tortured descendants, “had escaped the compulsion of accepting a past and a future[;] … they had no past.” Faulkner “had to get away” from Absalom by writing about barnstorming aviators, who had “no place … in the culture, in the economy” (Gwynn and Blotner, 36). By then treating the narrative through a single focalization (the reporter), Pylon seeks to reduce effort, subject, and effect. Did this “holiday” clear Faulkner's head because his topic and approach were so purely different from Absalom's, as he implies? Or might Pylon not have forced Faulkner to realize one of the main empowering principles of his greatest novel: that all individuals are radically conditioned by the historical and material realities of their eras, and that no writer can afford to believe his characters have no places in their cultures or economies.

Faulkner's insistence that the flyers are historically and socially anomalous accords with the reporter's dreamy view of these homeless gladiators of the air. In his efforts both to appreciate the flyers and also to facilitate their passage through New Valois, the reporter emphasizes their differences from the rest of the human race. Describing the improbable lives of Roger Shumann, his wife, Laverne, and Jack Holmes to his editor, the reporter marvels at their inconceivable freedom, at their unearthly exploits:

and then the other guy, the parachute guy, dropping in, falling the couple or three miles with his sack of flour before pulling the ripcord. They aint human, you see. No ties; no place where you were born and have to go back to it now and then even if it's just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two. … Because they dont need money; it aint money they are after anymore than it's glory because the glory cant only last until the next race and so maybe it aint even until tomorrow. And they dont need money except only now and then when they come in contact with the human race like in a hotel to sleep or eat now and then.

(805-806)¹

Neither money nor places of their own; neither jack nor homes: Faulkner lets the name of the parachute jumper squint at the reporter's sentimental idealization of the aviators' freedom.

The more the reporter insists on the flyers' otherworldliness, of course, the more we may wonder what such denial defends against. The reporter works tirelessly to shelter the aviators from the degradations of wage earning and class conflict. They are not, he contends, like “a gang of men hired to go down into a mine,” who would surely strike if one day “the bigbellied guys that own the mine would tell them that everybody's pay had been cut two and a half percent … to print a notice how the elevator or something had fell on one of them the night before” (890). In the reporter's eyes, the flyers “submit” to the race organizers' tariff on their prize pool because money is less important to them than the exhilaration of flight.

Because he wants to champion the aviators' defiance of economic and social determinants, the reporter refuses to see their deep indebtedness to those who hold money and power. The flyers talk of virtually nothing but money, yet the reporter is so busy denying its importance to them that he never hears what they say. Pylon begins with a vivid account of Jiggs's effort to buy new boots. The narrative records the profound commodification of desire represented by the mechanic's fancy.² His eyes gorge on the boots in the store window, displayed as seductively as those in “the posed countrylife photographs in the magazine advertisements” (779)—the real source, we suspect, of Jiggs's longing, and perhaps the real destination of his gaze. But whatever bourgeois dream of gentrification his boots may betoken (and their purchase both stimulates and deflects that deeper desire to rise), Jiggs can plot his acquisition only in terms of the money he has and the money he will make. The opening pages disclose—in grotesque slow-motion—the relation between wages, credit, labor, and time upon which the aviators' world is inescapably founded. Like his fellow workers, Jiggs wholly depends on others for his means of survival. Though they are nomadic, the aviators are little different from the miners the reporter contrasts them to; the clerk in the store sniffs the stink of an “incorrigible insolvency” (780) on Jiggs.

The question of whether insolvency was indeed incorrigible was being confronted by both Faulkner (in his sharpening crisis in personal finances in 1933 and 1934) and by the country at large (in the renewed doubt about the efficacy of Roosevelt's New Deal).³ Given these superimposed preoccupations with economy, it is all the more significant that Pylon should need to establish its concern with money against the grain of the reporter's attitude. The reporter's contact with the aviators immediately adds to his expenses; he volunteers food, liquor, transportation, even cash advances against their prize winnings; and he obsessively justifies to his editor every penny he spends on their behalf. Yet he dismisses their indebtedness to him as nothing. The appearance of the aviators endangers the reporter's unexamined accommodation of economic injustice. He insists on his availability so emphatically that they borrow to the point of theft from him, a discovery that provokes in the reporter a renewed effort to deny that money might be the issue. If only Laverne will acknowledge to him that they took his cash as he lay asleep outside his own doorway, then the reporter's faith in an ethics beyond economics will remain unshaken. The reporter's hostship lets him seize the provision of money from the aviators and take it on himself, as if he chooses to degrade himself in order to keep them free. This relation involves an arrangement of mutual benefit and injury between the host and his guests. As Holmes observes, “maybe you never sent for us to come here, and maybe we never asked you to move in on us” (952).

That each party has moved in on the other to establish a parasitical relation may also suggest that the failure of communication between them involves a special kind of suppression or denial. Michel Serres has elaborated the coincidence between several senses of “parasite,” a word which in French also denotes static: noisy interference. The reporter cannot hear the involvement of the aviators in questions of money because his own involvement requires and furnishes that interference. If he were not so deafened, the reporter would notice that the flyers share Jiggs's concentration on earnings. To them the prize winnings are a payday, to be converted instantly into life's necessities and scant pleasures.

The harsh constraints of the aviators' lives are summarized by Jiggs when he hears of a fellow pilot's fatal crash: “Burn to death on Thursday night or starve to death on Friday morning” (813). Shumann's unexpected victory in an early race means just one thing to the mechanic: “Yair, we're jake now. We can eat and sleep again tonight” (798). Why must Shumann place? “Jesus, he better had come in on somebody's money or we'd a all set up in the depot tonight with our bellies thinking our throats was cut” (796). The aviators constantly calculate money against risk as the quotient of their livelihoods: Shumann, for example, considers army pursuit planes “oversouped,” liable “to kill you if you dont watch them. I wouldn't want to do that for two-fifty-six a month” (880).

Pylon gestures toward the money motive because the novel cannot contradict the reporter openly until the end. One of the gestures in its repertoire is punning, in which language can be made to point to one meaning while mouthing another. Pylon plays on the slang term for money—“jack”—so extensively that it forms a subliminal insistence on money's importance. There are the repeated references to getting and spending “jack,” including the reporter's closing words to his editor, “and when you come bring some jack because I am on a credit” (992). Both objects and characters take on its name. From a jackstaff, the Hotel Terrebone displays a placard designating it as headquarters of the Aeronautical Association (814); Jiggs searches for his bootjack; death becomes “the old blackjack” (807). Jiggs calls the anonymous busdriver “Jack” (801); the child Jack is named in part for Jack Holmes; Jiggs jokes with him about his fatherlessness, prompting a flurry of fists and the reporter's joke about another Jack, Dempsey; and after Shumann's death Jiggs throws in his lot with Art Jackson.⁴ On the eve of Shumann's race in the plane that will kill him, he discovers Laverne already in bed, waiting naked for him with the child beside her. The tangled relation of passion, loyalty, risk, and money seems summarized in Shumann's laconic and perhaps innocent question as he enters the bed: “Want to move Jack to the middle?” (907).

At this point we might conclude that the struggle of interpretation in Pylon pits the reporter's sentimental idealization against a more realistic analysis. In one view, the aviators burn with the splendor of freedom, flight, fraternity, and honor; in another, they are workers struggling to maintain themselves against the exhaustions of southern history and economy. This interpretive contest might conclude with a colleague's contradiction of the reporter: “‘And dont kid yourself,’ the first said. ‘It was the money. Those guys like money as well as you and me’” (976). This reporter goes on to predict correctly Laverne's decision to return her son to Shumann's parents; he sees that the economic motive must outweigh whatever sentiment is involved. Does this simple reversal of the reporter's position satisfactorily disclose the “truth” to be recovered from below the reporter's discourse of suppression? Can the novel—by finally articulating and at last acknowledging a contradictory view—come into possession of its own meaning?

If we grant that Pylon's narrative furnishes more information about the aviators' situation than the reporter is willing to accommodate in his interpretive romance, then we must as well doubt that simply reversing his denials will correct all distortions. In both cases the reporter's account determines the range and terminology of the questions. Instead, I want to pursue registers of meaning that elude the reporter's control. The reporter's purposeful blindness to historical context—which frees him to concentrate on the aviators' perceived transcendence of historical embeddedness—is a blindness that the novel does not entirely share.

Deliberately between the lines, Faulkner invites us to consider the aviators' appearance at Mardi Gras as an event with historical, economic, and social significance—a significance that insinuates the revolutionary potential of the thirties. This potential for social transformation is not a subject often associated with Faulkner's fiction, and we shall have to admit the extent to which the reporter's will to trivialize the subversive energy of the economically oppressed is related to Faulkner's fear of that energy.⁵ Whether it is or is not the money becomes a binary bracket that wards off a more profound question. The flyers neither transcend nor wholly accept their lot as wage earners; rather, they represent—however fleetingly—the very derangement of the order that prevails over them. The visualization of economic reversal, social equality, bodily indulgence, and collective intimacy is the essential thrust of the carnivalesque, and it is presented in Pylon as a thrust that may have to be reckoned with and not merely denied.

THE CARNIVAL

The thirties also stimulated one of the richest considerations of the carnival we have, Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World.⁶ Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais celebrates the revolutionary freedom of the carnivalesque and extols Rabelais's achievement in transmuting its street forms into novelistic ones. By concentrating on the power of the people to challenge all official truth through their practice of the carnival, Bakhtin also suggests the structural opposition in any society between the upper and lower strata, between authorized and unauthorized truth, between the designed work of reform and the heedless play of revolution. In the carnival, everything is at risk.

The sense of real risk, of pandemic jeopardy and unforeseeable transformation, agitates the period in which Faulkner is writing Pylon (and in which Bakhtin is writing Rabelais). The newspaper headlines reproduced in Pylon alone—cryptic and confused as they are—point to the desperation of the oppressed in the United States and abroad: “Farmers Refuse Bankers Deny Strikers Demand President's Yacht” (826). Amplified by the accounts that actually appeared in the New Orleans newspapers of early 1934, when the opening of the Shushan Airport was being covered by Faulkner's reporter friend, Hermann Deutsch, these stories chronicle the continued anguish of the unemployed worldwide, the hopes of socialistic reform, protests against fascism, and the rise of Hitler.⁷

Pylon rides on an interplay between this sense of imminent historical transformation and the celebration of the Mardi Gras carnival. The sober struggles of workers around the world to emancipate themselves may seem the very inverse of the narcotic revelry of carnival parades and air shows. Yet Bakhtin argues that the carnival—especially in its medieval roots—carries the threat of popular revolt and the promise of social betterment. Rather than sublimating and defusing such subversive impulses, the carnival actually stimulates them, in Bakhtin's view, and gives them material reality—for however brief a spell. The essential components of the carnivalesque include: (1) a charged sense in individuals of themselves as “the people,” (2) the practice of parody and reversal, (3) an appreciation of the discrepancies between the upper and lower orders of society, (4) masked challenges to official truth, (5) exaltation of the body through its purposeful degradation, (6) celebration of physical renewal and reproduction, and (7) the fleeting materialization of utopian possibilities such as luxury, leisure, freedom, and equality.

Even the mention of these components will, I hope, resonate with the issues I have been emphasizing in Pylon. When the narrator describes Jiggs's rapturous face before the store window as having “hot brown eyes [that] seemed to snap and glare like a boy's approaching for the first time the aerial wheels and stars and serpents of a nighttime carnival” (779), I think we are meant to keep in mind a context often ignored by the reporter. In the novel, as in the events Faulkner witnessed in New Orleans in February 1934, Mardi Gras and the air spectacle constitute a single phenomenon. The “aerial wheels” are the “nighttime carnival,” and Faulkner embodies the carnival mentality in the aviators and their fellow “revelers.” Yet as I go on to interpret Faulkner's use of the carnivalesque in Pylon, I will observe that its original spirit appears deformed, though deformed in instructive ways. Ultimately we shall notice the strain of translating a medieval folk spectacle into the New Orleans of Roosevelt and Huey Long through the idiom of Joyce's and Eliot's high modernism.

LAUGHTER

To Bakhtin's ears, the sound of the carnival is the sound of laughter. Laughter shakes what is established and shifts thoughts to its overthrow: “medieval laughter … is the social consciousness of all the people. Man … in the carnival crowd … comes into contact with other bodies of varying age and social caste. He is aware of being a member of a continually growing and renewed people. This is why festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts” (92). “Carnival laughter” possesses a “complex nature” in that it is, “first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives” (11-12). Bakhtin honors the purely corrosive, unbinding forms of laughter in the carnival: the parodies of church liturgy and ritual; the bawdy, playful language of the marketplace; the sport of mock imprecation and naked hucksterism.

Faulkner acknowledges the force of such carnival laughter in Pylon even as he refuses to give it space sufficient to its ends. The overwrought surface of the novel teems with grotesquerie. “Laughing Boy in fit at Woishndon Poik!” calls a newsboy (Laughing Boy in fifth at Washington Park). Here language grows deformed in the mouth of the people. The dialect pronunciation produces an accidental but significant pun: the hawker's cry conjures up a laughter that might cause fits—uncontrollable social eruptions. The newsboy possesses “a new face, young, ageless, the teeth gaped raggedly as though he had found them one by one over a period of years about the streets” (813). This description conflates literary conceit and economic analysis: it looks as if the child has scavenged in the streets for his teeth, yet such a worker is no more than a scavenger unprovided for. In such subsidiary moments the novel expresses its subversive laughter. The newsboy's face holds the promise of “ageless” youth, and—like a laughing fit—holds the possibility of a new order to succeed the old.

Festive laughter, Bakhtin asserts, derides the powers that oppress. The mouthpiece for this kind of utterance is Jiggs. His own continuous punning and sarcasm eat away at the reporter's romantic interpretation of events, at the kind of incomprehension that masks the exploitation of the aviators. In the following exchange the reporter rails about the race organizers, who may be found at the hotel, paying at once for both lodging and sexual services:

“Yair,” the reporter cried, “they'll be here. Here's where to find guys that dont aim to sleep at the hotel. Yair; tiered identical cubicles of one thousand rented sleepings. And if you just got jack enough to last out the night you dont even have to go to bed.”

“Did what?” Jiggs said, already working over toward the wall beside the entrance. “Oh. Teared Q pickles. Yair; teared Q pickles of one thousand rented cunts if you got the jack too. I got the Q pickle all right. I got enough Q pickle for one thousand. And if I just had the jack too it wouldn't be teared.”

(814)

One must admit that Jiggs's response verges on unintelligibility, but it is the sort of wild unintelligibility that suggests semantic terrorism. The reporter simply envies those who have the cash to buy sex, but Jiggs's resentment exposes a more fundamental question begged by the reporter: his pun evokes both the stubborn misery of poverty (“teared”) and the social stratification responsible for his plight (pushing the reporter's “tiered” to its metaphorical consequence). The potency of Jiggs's puns arises from the verbal violence they can perform. (Indeed, his other comment about his Q pickle being enough for a thousand cunts threatens the sexual and financial order that favors the Feinmans of this world.) Puns puncture the semantic precision of language, subverting univocal sense in the same way political subversion attacks authority.

Jiggs's laughter often ridicules his oppressors and defenders at the same time, suggesting their complicity. Explaining the meeting called to announce the cut in the prize purse, Jiggs mocks the reporter's belief that it's not the money: “‘Contestants' meeting. To strike, see? … Sure. For more jack. It aint the money: it's the principle of the thing. Jesus, what do we need with money?’ Jiggs began to laugh again on that harsh note which stopped just as it became laughter and started before it was mirth” (875). This laughter cuts with the ambivalence of carnival laughter; it derides and triumphs at the same time.

Pylon allows for the performance of popular humor. Throughout the novel the aviators and revelers appear as comedians: Jiggs and the reporter resemble “the tall and the short man of the orthodox and unfailing comic team” (812); the reporter holds the flyers “immobile in a tableau reminiscent (save for his hat) of the cartoon pictures of city anarchists” (829); the barnstormers are said to disappear wherever “mules and vaudeville acts go” (975).⁸ The carnival charges such humor with revolutionary potential.

DEATH, DESECRATION, REGENERATION

The carnival's celebration of the “contradictory world of becoming” (Bakhtin, 149) pays ambivalent tribute to carnal reproduction. Superimposed on the carnival's association with the lower orders of society is its association with the lower stratum of the body. Bakhtin describes the gestures and language of debasement characteristic of the carnival: they “are based on a literal debasement in terms of the topography of the body, that is, a reference to the bodily lower stratum, the zone of the genital organs. This signifies destruction, a grave for the one who is debased. But such debasing gestures and expressions are ambivalent, since the lower stratum is not only a bodily grave but also the area of the genital organs, the fertilizing and generating stratum. Therefore, in the images of urine and excrement is preserved the essential link with birth, fertility, renewal, welfare” (148). The imagery of desecration—of digestive and excremental befoulment—materializes the world and insists on the potency of all that is natural and carnal. Pylon presents a special case of Faulknerian scatology. The sexual, reproductive, and excremental become one, for instance, in Laverne's spectacular first parachute jump. Returning to the cockpit from the wing of Shumann's plane, Laverne straddles her pilot-lover. Roger realizes she is wearing nothing under her dress: “[s]he told him later that the reason was that she was afraid that from fear she might soil one of the few undergarments which she now possessed” (908). The modest seduction concluded, Laverne leaps overboard, settling to earth under the parachute, a vision of promise so naked that at least one onlooker falls into profoundest self-distraction. We should not be surprised that she is degraded in this same act; on the ground, “she now lay dressed from the waist down in dirt and parachute straps and stockings” (909). Roger refers to his startled erection as “the perennially undefeated, the victorious … the bereaved, the upthrust, the stalk: the annealed rapacious heartshaped crimson bud” (909). This description is a little less clinical than symbolic, and I suggest that its context is the grotesque exaltation of the phallus in carnival.

The same conflation of burial and resurrection—of both agricultural and coital sorts—may be seen in the reporter's gloss on the ménage à trois. Shumann and Holmes must lie in bed with Laverne so: “‘two farmers' boys, at least one from Ohio anyway she told me. And the ground they plow from Iowa; yair, two farmers' boys downbanked; yair, two buried pylons in the one Iowadrowsing womandrowsing pylondrowsing’” (849). Here the implanted pylon becomes the upthrust phallus, the buried plow, the triumphant “stalk.” These images underpin the unified process of degradation, interment, and rebirth associated with the carnival.⁹

That life arises from the foulness of death is the miracle of the carnival. “Folk culture organized the inferno according to its own fashion, opposing sterile eternity by pregnant and birth-giving death; preserving the past by giving birth to a new, better future,” Bakhtin notes. “If the Christian hell devalued earth and drew men away from it, the carnivalesque hell affirmed earth and its lower stratum as the fertile womb, where death meets birth and a new life springs forth. This is why the images of the material bodily lower stratum pervade the carnivalized underworld” (395). Lazarus figures this function in the medieval pageant, and it is no accident that Jiggs constantly refers to the cadaverous reporter by that name (797). Though he refuses to acknowledge its possibilities, moreover, the reporter does once approach the fundamental fusion of death and life achieved by the carnival, “confusing both the living and the dead without concern now, with profound conviction of the complete unimportance of either or of the confusion itself” (955).

Earlier the reporter has verged on the metamorphic possibility of the spectacle. Sickened by his deprivation and fatigue, he feels “the hot corrupted coffee gathering inside him like a big heavy bird beginning to fly as he plunged out the door and struck a lamppost and clinging to it surrendered as life, sense, all, seemed to burst out of his mouth as though his entire body were trying in one fierce orgasm to turn itself wrong-sideout” (849). This is the stress of a new perception struggling toward birth, a perception represented in the carnival by grotesque imagery of the body's reversibility. In the carnival such reversal appears in “curses” that take the body and “burn it, hurl it to the ground, cripple the legs, cause diarrhea, and gripping; in other words, they turn the body inside out” (Bakhtin, 166).

In his unnatural height and thinness the reporter evokes the grotesque body of the carnival, a body that represents the prospect of the individual's merger with others through the transcendence of its limits. The carnival shows the body opening itself outward through “copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation” (Bakhtin, 26). The reporter serves as host to the activities of “grotesque” physicality that he does not actually practice himself. Through them, the lower stratum insists on the recognition normally withheld by the official truth of reason, repression, sublimation, and individuality.

SUBVERSION, UTOPIA

On the eve of a Second World War, the dominant ideologies of the West were hardly threatened by folk carnivals. But the 1934 Mardi Gras in New Orleans must have represented to Faulkner's eyes an image for popular revolution and a suspension of the verities. During a time of continuing national and international crises, stymied by personal dilemmas in money and love, Faulkner explores in Pylon the complex relation between order and reform, power and resistance, stability and discontentment, entitlement and exclusion.

Those who possess power in New Valois remain concealed in Pylon. The signal of this situation is Colonel Feinman's absentee authority in the meeting with the aviators. Though the flyers are promised his appearance, Feinman exercises his right to summon and dismiss his employees, to rob them of their time, to make them deal with his representative rather than his person. Feinman's power increases according to this untouchability. The aviators glimpse his photograph, notice his name and initials all over the airport, and sense enviously his command of luxury (particularly women), but not until Matt Ord threatens to ground the plane Shumann wants to race does Feinman himself actually intervene. Feinman steps in to defend the integrity of capitalist entrepreneurialism: “‘Aint we promised these folks out there—’ he made a jerking sweep with the cigar—‘a series of races? Aint they paying their money in here to see them? And aint it the more airplanes they will have to look at the better they will think they got for the money? … Now, let's settle this business’” (929-30). Feinman wants to insure that there are no slips between production, advertisement, and consumption. Indeed, when Burnham crashes early in the races and his name must be deleted from the published program of subsequent events, the aviators are told that the “committee representing the business men of New Valois who have sponsored this meet and offered you the opportunity to win these cash prizes … feel that they are advertising something they cant produce” (879). In the tumultuous, irregular marketplace of the carnival, this kind of instability must be avoided at all costs. Any break in the smooth operation of the economic system may provide a point of puzzlement or dissent. The enfranchised protect their interests: the reporter and Jiggs drive through suburban New Valois on the way to the dump, hardly noticing that “even the sunlight seemed different, where it filtered among the ordered liveoaks and fell suavely upon parked expanses and vistas beyond which the homes of the rich oblivious and secure presided above clipped lawns and terraces, with a quality of having itself been passed by appointment through a walled gate by a watchman” (959).

At least part of the reason Feinman and the other members of the “committee” guard themselves so carefully involves the volatility of the working class in 1934. Against even his own sympathies, as Quentin's aghast disbelief reflects, Faulkner was well advanced toward an understanding of the sins of capitalism as he sorted out the economic and moral issues of slavery in Absalom, Absalom!¹⁰ In Pylon, the relative invisibility of those in power does not prevent the central question of their legitimacy from being raised. To the extent that a tiered economy and society depend on the violence of exploitation and oppression—certainly one of the truths Absalom comes to see—to that extent the carnival mentality represents trouble. Bakhtin notes that “[t]he serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation” (90). The announcer of the air races attempts to mediate the conflict between worker and management, but he must occupy an impossible no-man's-land between parties that are quietly at war with each other: “the very slightness of the distance between him and the table postulated a gap more unbridgable even than that between the table and the second group” (877). Distracted by Laverne's departure, the reporter stands holding a wad of bills given him by Holmes for the return of Shumann's body; the warning to him should remind us of the violence of getting and keeping money: “‘Better put that stuff into your pocket, doc,’ the soldier said. ‘Some of these guys will be cutting your wrist off’” (954).

One strategy of the upper class is to concede a little to save a lot. Hagood, for example, feeds the reporter just enough money to secure him. Hagood's clothing and car, “which unmistakably represented money” (833; and cf. 834), link him to the authority of wealth. When Hagood agrees to lend the reporter more money for the flyers, Jiggs allegorizes the terms of the relation:

“Write on my back if you want to, mister,” [Jiggs] said, turning and stooping, presenting a broad skintight expanse of soiled shirt, apparently as hard as a section of concrete, to Hagood.

“And get the hell kicked out of me and serve me right,” Hagood thought viciously. He spread the blank on Jiggs' back and wrote the check.

(961)

For a moment, Jiggs becomes the very stuff airports are made of, and adopts the very posture of the South's beast of burden.

Official culture retains its power throughout the New Valoisian Mardi Gras, even though we can occasionally glimpse openings for challenges to it. The organizers of the 1934 New Orleans carnival saw in the dedication of the Shushan Airport a chance to add novel thrills to the usual festivities. The air circus crowned a Mardi Gras that was to be the biggest and best in years. In an editorial appearing the day of the pageant, the Times-Picayune pointed out the historical significance of that year's Mardi Gras:

The 1934 Carnival is the first in many years that has been free from certain hampering influences. The observance was suspended when America went into the World war, and scarcely was the war ended before prohibition came to cast a blight upon merriment. More recently the shadow of increasing economic trouble dampened all spirits and checked even the most determined efforts to be entirely gay, if only for a period of a few days. The war is long gone, prohibition has ceased and industrial problems are being solved. … Those of us who refuse to believe in Santa Claus have to admit that the day has certain intangible values, certain qualities that help us get over the hump of existence.

(Feb. 12, p. 6)

Official interpretations of the carnival, like this one, emphasize the merely cathartic benefits of the celebration; through temporary release and indulgence, the carnival sublimates and pacifies discontentment.

The carnival as staged in New Orleans in the thirties nervously protected the social status quo. The main activities were parades during the day and society balls at night. Although the carnival pretended to disguise—however briefly—the distinctions between classes and races, the arrangements actually reinscribed those divisions. Negroes paraded separately, for instance, “King Zulu” leading his “dusky” subjects costumed as African savages (Times-Picayune, Feb. 8, 1934, Mardi Gras supplement, p. 26). Masks could not be worn after sunset, and at this point even superficial egalitarianism dissolved; the balls were by invitation only and were thick with debutantes and the city's elite.

Against this official culture the carnival ought to protest. Yet that its force has become vestigial, domesticated by the very institutions it was meant to subvert, does not mean it has vanished. Faulkner identifies real threats in the carnival performers—particularly the aviators. Their form of relation strikes all of the novel's observers as scandalous, and strikes some of them as appealing too. The reporter's colleagues, for example, puzzle over the ménage à trois practiced by Laverne, Shumann, and Holmes. They wonder if Laverne is intimate with both men simultaneously, and cannot fathom the pilot's attitude: “But how about the fact that Shumann knew it too? Some of these mechanics that have known them for some time say they dont even know who the kid belongs to” (974). Jiggs's joke about the boy's paternity—“Who's your old man today, kid?” (787)—points to a radically alternate social order, one in which the bonds of fatherhood, ownership, and family are seriously revised. Laverne herself starts the joke after deciding on the boy's name by a roll of the dice; it is as if she wants to memorialize her nonconformism.¹¹

Laverne's promiscuity protests the patriarchal authority of the nuclear family—the kind of family run by her brother-in-law. Faulkner associates the stability of such a unit with economic power: Laverne's brother-in-law profits from her dependence, since she cannot imagine being anything but a kept mistress or a neglected wife. That she comes to expect greater autonomy may be seen in her style of dress; her emphatic transvestism—those coveralls, walking shoes, and men's undershorts—converts practical necessity into social sign. Her cross-over signals a world of overturned gender roles, and evokes the association in Bakhtin between transvestism and revolution: “Men are transvested as women and vice versa, costumes are turned inside out, and outer garments replace underwear” (410). The reporters catch this note of self-reliance in Laverne, even though they think it's just risqué. Wondering what Laverne must have been thinking while Roger hung in the air before plunging to his death, one suggests she must have said to herself, “Thank God I carry a spare” (974). Holmes is a spare husband, but the joke's ambiguity also allows for references to both the phallus itself and to her child. In other words, Laverne has become custodian of the object of power; losing Shumann reconstitutes the authority she has sought to exercise from the moment she left her sister's and threw in with a barnstormer. Living with a kind of husband has settled her toward the bourgeois standards she's fled; at one point she even complains about not having a home like the Matt Ords' to which they can return Monday after Monday after Monday (887). Shumann's death forces Laverne once more to confront the economic realities of her life, to threaten the system with the “unnatural” solution of placing her son in sounder circumstances, and to expose to the reader's eyes the determination of the proletariat to escape the prisons designed for them.

The force of the carnival to unsettle economic and social structures will prevent this last formulation, I hope, from seeming too extreme. Barnstormers in Faulkner's fiction invariably appear as morally disruptive, from the curious ménage in “Honor” to the defiantly unlicensed clowns in “Death Drag.” It is no wonder that Shumann should discover that his efforts to spring Laverne from the “dingy cadaver of the law” in one town should earn him the suspicion that he is spreading “criminal insinuations against the town's civil structure” (910).

The events of Pylon become more portentous in their indirect but sure reference to national and local politics. Faulkner could never have hoped to conceal Shushan Airport in New Orleans, Louisiana, behind Feinman Airport in New Valois, Franciana. He says as much in admitting that readers might recognize the originals through their thin disguises.¹² Since Abraham L. Shushan was Huey Long's chairman of the Levee Board, we might wonder exactly how the economic and political issues of the novel are inflected by the Long phenomenon, the enabling pretext of the novel's events. It is widely known that Faulkner modeled the novel's anonymous reporter on his friend, Hermann B. Deutsch, a writer for the New Orleans Item-Tribune. Deutsch wrote a number of by-line stories on the air show at Shushan Airport in 1934, and Faulkner's accounts incontestably reflect Deutsch's.

It is perhaps not as widely known that Deutsch also published a number of articles in national periodicals on the rise of Huey Long. The Shushan/Feinman airport rises out of the waste-filled shores of Lake Pontchartrain as a monument to the Kingfish's reign. Like the reporter in Pylon, Deutsch shows himself oblivious to the profound questions raised by Long's popularity, avoiding them through the sardonic bemusement of his journalism. In an article for the New Republic called “Huey Long of Louisiana,” for example, Deutsch recounts Long's capture of the governorship. Though he acknowledges Long's ambition, Deutsch lets Long's imperial style distract him from the popular demand for reform that empowered the Kingfish's flight: “how these drought-stricken farmers brought themselves to vote for the expenditure of five and a half million dollars for the building of a new state house remains a mystery to this day” (350). Deutsch sees Long as nothing but a buffoon playing to the vulgar masses, but he misses what the reporter in Pylon misses: irreverence is the first step in the serious performance of revolution.

Whether greeting official visitors in his bathrobe or trying to relieve himself between the legs of a predecessor at a crowded urinal, clown Long possessed a singular talent for inciting laughter that was deeply derisive of power and wealth.¹³ Long's ability to convert derision into votes sustained his career. Long threatened serious economic reform both in his warfare with big business, especially the oil companies like Standard that had controlled Louisiana, and in his plan to redistribute personal wealth. The reversal of official order shoots through his slogan, “Every Man a King, No Man Wears a Crown.” For all his demagoguery, Long must be given credit for understanding that the maldistribution of wealth was a central impediment to economic recovery. In agitating the oppressed, Long was willing to risk reform that was not orderly—at least in his rhetoric: “I tell you that if in any country I live in … I should see my children starving and my wife starving, its laws against robbing and against stealing and against bootlegging would not amount to any more to me than they would to any other man when it came to a matter of facing the time of starvation” (quoted in Brinkley, 44).

Long's nature was to be, or at least to seem, utterly uncontrollable. The sense of risk and revolution that he represented inevitably informs the conflict between the entitled and the oppressed in Pylon. When the air family steals the reporter's money, we can register the vibrations of the act all the way through the economic scale—down to the black maid, who picks the leavings, and up at least to Standard Oil, which posts the prize money so that Feinman can sell tickets so that Hagood can sell papers so that the reporter can borrow from the profits and open his pockets. The reporter in Pylon seeks to tone down the more subversive implications of the aviators' behavior. They do end up confessing to their crime, reaffirming a private code of ethics among thieves, and finally resigning themselves to domination by Feinman's will. This consoles the reporter, but it does not eradicate the novel's glimpse of lawless revolt.

The corporate sponsors of the air races firmly control the event. The pilots accept the cut in prize money in quarters that look like “a board room in a bank” (876). The local newspapers covering the dedication of the Shushan Airport ran several pictures of oil company officials posing with the winning pilots; these groupings underscore the forced cooperation of employee with employer. The more natural antagonism of the parties emerges not only in Faulkner's mild version of the pilots' near strike, but also in an incident upon which it is apparently based.¹⁴ The Pan American Air Races had been plagued during Mardi Gras week by bad weather, and so the schedule of events had been extended several days. One gathers that many of the pilots had planned to move on to their next engagements, or to return to family between meets, but had agreed to stay in the hopes that all the races could be held. A week late, a few races still had not come off, and the pilots, growing restive, insisted that the one major remaining prize be split among the scheduled contestants. The organizers refused to dispense the prize unless the race took place. Finally the winds slackened the next day and Jimmy Wedell headed the list of those who competed and shared the ＄1,400 prize. At issue must have been contrary views of what the money constituted: was it wages or prize money? Feinman (like the actual organizers) wants to call it prize money and keep it under the control of its dispensers. The pilots, of course, see it as compensation for their time and labor, due them regardless of what the elements actually allow. The aviators' will to broach a hostile confrontation with their sponsors deepens the embeddedness of Pylon in the economic and social conflicts of its times.

THE AUTOGRAPH OF VIOLENCE

One kind of violence in Pylon involves the conflict of classes. This is the sort of conflict indicated by framing the novel's master question as whether it is or is not “the money”; the sort to be seized on by reductive Marxian analysis; the sort to emerge from comparing Pylon with proletarian novels of the thirties. But a novel as tonally complex, linguistically tortured, and helplessly unpolemical as Pylon, releases other kinds of violence from its central contradictions. The power of Faulkner's writing characteristically draws on the internal incoherence of the social, historical, and economic structures that condition the lives of his protagonists. The violence of these incoherencies frequently appears in the register of the narration, as well; the characters who are in positions to perceive such contradictions typically sheer away from the horror. This is one point of contact between the reporter and better-known Faulknerian protagonists like Horace Benbow, Gail Hightower, Quentin Compson, Ratliff, and Ike McCaslin, all of whom stare finally with empty eyes at the enormities of their heritage.

In my reading, Pylon revolves around the axis of declaring or suppressing, avowing or disavowing, the material reality of the South in the thirties. The reporter bears the marks of his interposition between the superficial conflicts of his world. When he tries to mix in with the flyers' “utopian” sexual arrangements, Holmes draws the line by slugging him. Next day the reporter sports a “bluish autograph of violence like tattooing upon his diplomacolored flesh” (914). But this is the kind of autograph that fades, that slips back into the gap between cause and sign. Later, after the reporter and Shumann have signed a promissory note for Ord's plane, a hearing must determine whether their signatures are valid. We are reminded that writing always leaves the province of the person proper. Even an autograph, the most intimate token of selfhood, is still open to avowal or disavowal. From this standpoint I think we can appreciate much more fully the phenomenal disembodiment of voice in Pylon.¹⁵ It is not only that speech and writing—particularly in their impersonally technologized forms—are sundered from the body; this condition of language, even in its emphatically modern cast, figures in the specific suppression of the economic and political questions raised by Pylon.

With Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! the reporter shares the sense of having seen too much and been blasted into solitude. The reporter has flirted with some of the enticements of the carnival, but any chance for real change subsides under the pressure of the official culture. Once Shumann is dead and Laverne has told her host to get lost, the reporter can listen to a colleague's advice to turn away: “Yair. I could vomit too. But what the hell? He aint our brother” (938-39). By the novel's end, the reporter denies anything but the sublimative function of the carnival: the masses disperse, the celebrants go “home now, knowing that they have got almost a whole year before they will have to get drunk and celebrate the fact that they will have more than eleven months before they will have to wear masks and get drunk and blow horns again” (968). The reporter's indifference to misery remains intact: the newspaper headlines wash over him, seeming nothing to him but “the identical from day to day—the bankers the farmers the strikers, the foolish the unlucky and the merely criminal” (917-18). By blocking out the clamor of this strife, the reporter countenances the status quo. He resigns his fortunes and his friends' to an incorrigible universal law: “Four hours ago they were out and I was in, and now it's turned around exactly backward. It's like there was a kind of cosmic rule for poverty like there is for water level, like there has to be a certain weight of bums on park benches or in railroad waitingrooms waiting for morning to come or the world will tilt up and spill all of us wild and shrieking and grabbing like so many shooting stars, off into nothing” (847).

In these passages Faulkner wants us to see the dynamic of avowal and disavowal at work in all writing. Literature worthy of the name for Faulkner must be writing that measures the ideological stakes of insight and blindness. This question empowers Absalom, Absalom!, the novel whose composition encases Pylon, and which struggles in kind over evading and acknowledging history. It is no accident that the language of one novel should well up in the other. The reporter, like a character in Mr. Compson's saga (or like his misfortunate son), sees himself as “the nebulous and quiet ragtag and bobend of touching and breath and experience without visible scars, the waiting incurious unbreathing and without impatience” (968).¹⁶ By this point the scars—those autographs of violence—are no longer visible. The reporter has been carried on the tide of the carnival, but by its conclusion he falls back into isolation from the mass: taking a cab to the airport, he has “the sense of being suspended in a small airtight glass box clinging by two puny fingers of light in the silent and rushing immensity of space.” Like Prufrock or the despairing Macbeth, the reporter looks into “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure” (970).

On this note of self-parody (who has reserved greater import for the word endure?), Faulkner leaves his meditation on the carnival. Bakhtin observes that one of the signs of the degeneration of the folk carnival is its transformation into literary equivalents. The carnival's truly ambivalent, universal laughter decays into the reduced versions of literary parody or irony. Pylon's peculiar resurrection of Joyce and Eliot at this point in Faulkner's career I attribute to the carnival material, which inevitably drives a modernist like Faulkner to the storehouse of literary parody.¹⁷ Faulkner draws on the most potent forms of parody in his literary heritage, on Joyce's efforts to resuscitate the common imagination through a polylogic music, and on Eliot's early shorings of the fragments against ruin. These traces of the carnival spirit in literary parody are not adequate, however, to make a place for the activation of revolution. The carnival appears in Pylon as the image of lost possibilities for self-awareness, connection, and gaiety. Or as Jiggs puts it, and the narrator comments: “‘So this is Moddy Graw. Why aint I where I have been all my life.’” But the reporter continued to glare down at him in bright amazement (813).

Notes

1. Page numbers cited parenthetically in the text refer to works in the Works Cited section at the end of this essay; quotations from Pylon are taken from the Library of America edition of Faulkner's novels. Citations of works from his Collected Stories are abbreviated CS.

2. Torchiana demonstrates the aviators' domination by the force of “finance capitalism” (297), arguing that they act self-sacrificially and heroically to resist the prevailing system of economic exploitation. Torchiana emphasizes the economic issues too often ignored in criticism of the novel (and of Faulkner in general). I depart from his reading by trying to understand how the reporter's kind of admiration actually smothers the potential for systemic change the novel almost glimpses; Torchiana follows the reporter—“the sensitive observer of the novel” (301)—in celebrating the flyers' alleged “disdain for money as such and their quixotic devotion to flying” (299).

3. See Blotner (324-26) on the details of Faulkner's mounting responsibilities after his father's death.

4. In two short stories also about barnstormers, “Death Drag” and “Honor,” we find one pilot named Jock, another named Jack, and a driver called Jake.

5. Pearce identifies this potential for change in the novel as a vision of the apocalypse, “a minor but powerful current in the literature of the thirties” (131). My aim is to show how the dread of such decentering has ideological implications, and that Faulkner sees how the oppressed hardly share the fear.

6. Since Bakhtin's work encountered official opposition in the Soviet Union, Rabelais and His World remained unpublished until the mid-sixties, when his thinking began to be taken up in the West as well.

7. The papers sympathetically tell the story of various workers' movements—from the coal miners' effort to negotiate a thirty-hour week to the New York City taxi drivers' strike against a Tammany Hall fare tariff. The National Recovery Administration is touted in a New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial as the “greatest legal instrument from the standpoint of human welfare since the emancipation proclamation” (Jan. 18, 1934, 24). A special series of articles in the New Orleans Item-Tribune by Ralph W. Page defends a strike by California cotton pickers, and denies that they are actually communists: “In Southern California they had just been shooting and jailing ‘communist’ strikers and agitators. But California's definition of a communist, anarchist and enemy of government is any workman who would strike for more pay. The strike was conducted by cotton pickers. Some called themselves communists. What they asked was more than 60¢ a hundred for picking cotton. Even a Negro can do this much, in Georgia, without offense” (Feb. 6, 1934, 5). Both dailies report the bloody riots by workers in Paris and Austria, the latter over the perceived softening of the aristocratic government to Nazi overtures. The Item-Tribune explicitly endorses Vienna's socialist reform: “There has been nothing wild or extreme about their measures. They have carried on much as progressive administrations in some American cities do, but more intelligently” (Feb. 16, 1934).

8. Faulkner refers to the vaudeville qualities of the barnstormers in “Death Drag” and to the flying circus in “Honor” (CS, 187, 559).

9. Other scatological references seem less gratuitous as a result of this nexus. Shumann's annoyance at Jiggs's drinking produces this insult: “‘One drink, huh?’ Shumann said. ‘There's a slop jar back there; why not get it and empty the jug into it and take a good bath?’” (115). Excrement and maternity coincide in the editor's grotesque comparison of the reporter's mother to “a canvas conceived in and executed out of that fine innocence of sleep and open bowels capable of crowning the rich foul unchaste earth with rosy cloud where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim” (92-93).

10. Porter discusses Sutpen's design from the standpoint of slavery as an instrument of capitalism, and Sundquist emphasizes Faulkner's struggle in the thirties to acknowledge the economic and moral investment of the South in the ideology of racial separation.

11. Faulkner also uses a ménage à trois in “Honor,” focusing on the attitudes of two pilots toward the woman who is wife to one and lover to the other.

12. Blotner (328-42) establishes the main resemblances between factual and fictional material in Pylon. More than many of his works, this novel drew on real acquaintances of Faulkner, like Vernon Omlie and Jimmy Wedell, and on their experiences in barnstorming events. There were several mishaps at the Pan American games marking the inauguration of the Shushan International Airport during Mardi Gras of 1934; those Faulkner either witnessed or heard about after his arrival on February 15 are described partially in Millgate (138-49).

13. See Brinkley, especially 8-81.

14. See the account in the Times-Picayune, Feb. 20, 1934, 3.

15. Bleikasten brilliantly illuminates the problematics of signification, and Gresset the power of the silent gaze in the novel. Pitavy studies the gap of desire across which écriture seeks to move while admitting its own impossibility.

16. The narrator of Absalom, Absalom! describes Quentin and Shreve creating characters “out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking” (303).

17. On the allusions to T. S. Eliot, see Millgate (esp. 144).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bleikasten, André. “Pylon, ou l'enfer des signes.” Etudes Anglaises 29 (1976): 437-47.

Blotner, Joseph L. Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1984.

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Random House, 1982.

Deutsch, Hermann. “Huey Long of Louisiana.” New Republic, Nov. 11, 1931.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Random House, 1936.

———. Collected Stories. New York: Random House, 1950.

———. Novels 1930-1935. New York: Library of America, 1985.

Gresset, Michel. “Théorème.” Recherches anglaises et americaines 9 (1976): 73-94.

Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959.

Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1966.

Pearce, Richard. “Pylon, Awake and Sing! and the Apocalyptic Imagination of the 30's.” Criticism 13 (Spring 1971): 131-41.

Pitavy, François. “Le reporter: Tentation et dérision de l'écriture.” Recherches anglaises et americaines 9 (1976): 95-108.

Porter, Carolyn. Seeing and Being. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Sundquist, Eric J. The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Torchiana, Donald T. “Faulkner's Pylon and the Structure of Modernity.” Modern Fiction Studies 3 (Winter 1957-58): 291-308.