Customer Reviews

The Hamlet

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Faulkner assembled much of THE HAMLET from short stories, where his themes were courtship, lust, love, and obsession or where the average person succumbs to greed or foolishness and is victimized in business.

Take the subject of love. In THE HAMLET, Faulkner examines obsessive and unrequited love through his characters Labove (an achiever obsessed with untouchable beauty) and Ike Snopes (a retarded man in love with a cow); ambivalent love through the experience of Mink Snopes (a vicious murder) and Jack Houston (a guilty widower); and loveless marriage through the lives of Eula Varner and Mrs. Armstid, who are at the top and bottom of social hierarchy. Each of these characters is unique and fully realized. Yet each suffers from cruel variations of a single force.

Not to be a pedant: But Robert Penn Warren described THE HAMLET as: "...a sequence of contrasting or paralleling stories" where Faulkner's "...movement was not linear but spiral, passing over the same point again and again, but at different altitudes." This is exactly right.

At the same time, THE HAMLET is about Faulkner's writing. Here's one quick example, with this great author writing about the weather. "It was a gray day, of the color and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation." Great isn't it?

Even so, I was surprised by one aspect of THE HAMLET. It is: terrible things happen to all the characters. This even includes Flem Snopes who is a winner in the male world of business but surely locked in a loveless marriage. Yet despite their cruel fates, Faulkner's amazing characters persevere. As he said when accepting his Nobel: "When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged, ...there will still be one more sound: ...a puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this...." READ THIS GREAT BOOK

Although I have been a Faulkner fan practically since birth, I put off reading the Snopes trilogy for years because, I suppose, it seemed inconceivable that Faulkner could write more than a small number of books as gripping and involved as "The Sound and the Fury" or "Light in August" or "Absalom, Absalom"; in other words, I delayed reading the back volumes of his oeuvre, as it were, in order to stave off disappointment, to delay the moment at which I would have to admit that Faulkner, even Faulkner, could not be great all of the time. After all, who could expect such Biblical grandeur and keen insight from yet another book covering the same Mississippi turf? But Faulkner is nothing if not surprising: his prose here is just as innovative and finely-tuned as in his better-known work, and the chapters -- many of them published separately as short stories, such as the famed "Spotted Horses" -- are individual gems which, when added up and interconnected, form a satisfyingly complex and interdependent whole. Faulkner is the very greatest, the writer who almost single-handedly raised American literature to the level of myth; who saw most clearly the meaning of roots and background in the shaping of human lives; who understood most incisively how such stories could grip and lash the imagination, and the consciousness, of a receptive reader. I plan to read the next installments of this trilogy post-haste, without regard to potential disappointment: I trust him now to take the story to new heights.

Dickens with the DT's. Comic scenes are laced with violence and passion. Drawling horse traders, "dumb like a fox," seek to outdo each other, with farcical results. A shotgun blast cuts short a life we had come to find fascinating, and we're jolted. The images are laid on top of each other like thick paint on a canvas. Somehow, Faulkner makes it possible for us to hear and see and smell it all at once. This is not so much a book as an enchantment, a spell.

I'm not sure how exactly to say this without sounding closed-minded and elitist, so I'll apologize right off the bat for that. But I'm not sure the people who disparage this novel on this website quite "get it," and I think part of the reason might be that most of those people aren't from the South. This is an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern story, told in an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern way. That's just how things work down here, and I realize it's not that way in Hoboken (which is fine too). It's also a very rural setting, so that may turn some people off or lead to some misunderstanding.
Having said that, this book is a major Faulkner work, meaning it's great, not merely good. It's his most explicit critique of capitalism and his most explicit commentary on love in all its forms, and it's a very funny one at that -- again, it's from a Southern angle, though; if you've lived in an industrial rather than rural society your whole life, it may not appeal to you as much. Like most Faulkner, you have to settle into the prose and the pace.
The characters The Hamlet introduces are among Faulkner's most memorable: the rapacious Flem, the wonderful Ratliff, the oddly moving (trust me) Ike, etc. Faulkner has been accused of exploiting his poor whites in this novel, but I think his surprisingly sympathetic treatment of Mink in the trilogy counters this charge pretty well.
I've read everything Faulkner's ever written at least once (two to four times, for his major works), and this is my favorite. If you think Anse is funny in As I Lay Dying, or Virgil and Fonzio in Sanctuary, you'd probably really enjoy this book. It's the only time you'll ever hear a teenage girl rebuff her schoolteacher's inappropriate sexual advance with the command, "Stop pawing me. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane." Priceless.

The Hamlet is about the beginning of the rise of the Snopes clan. But what you get out of it, what is more lasting than the stories of a pack of low-down people clawing and cheating and killing their way across Yoknapatawpha County -- which are devastating, and funny, and weird enough in themselves to earn this novel the highest praise -- is the sensation of immersion into William Faulkner's fictional reality. It is a universe in which the characters do things that people do, but as you are reading you get the feeling you might be dreaming. Something is just off, and that strangeness serves as a giant light beam on the human soul. No one has concocted a stage and players like this, with such deep insight, and beautiful poetic prose, and humor, since Shakespeare maybe. Read The Hamlet slowly, read sentences twice sometimes, don't hurry, and you will be utterly, irreversibly hooked.

Itinerant sewing machine salesman V.K. Ratliff matches wits with hard-headed businessman Flem Snopes and his ubiquitous relatives in this smoothly interwoven series of tales from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The Snopes Saga continues with The Town and The Mansion, but neither of these books are nearly as sardonically humorous, and this first volume ends neatly enough that the unimpressed reader can stop right there. But most readers will be captivated by Faulkner's yarns of the horse-trading, deal-making, penny-pinching folk who inhabit Frenchman's Bend.

Faulkner uses these stories to reflect how the naiveté of the Old South allowed it to fall victim to a species of social infestation somewhere around the turn of the century. Flem Snopes is not exactly the hero of this book; he is mean, miserly, graceless, and unprincipled, but he does have a distinct knack for making money, and his inexorable rise seems to indicate that he is by some standards the smartest man in the village. Of course Faulkner can't help but try to show us how much the glory of the Old South gets lost in the process: courtesy, honor, common decency, and public responsibility. Snopes doesn't care who get hurt, so long as he comes out ahead in the deal.

Faulkner's often difficult prose is easier to follow in this novel than in some of his others, and absent the bizarre experiments with point of view that he's noted for, most readers should find this book sometimes rambling and long-winded, but not incomprehensible. As an example of folksy Southern humor, this one is more seriously pointed than his nostalgic reminiscence The Reivers, but not as grimly dark as his black comedy As I Lay Dying, and really shouldn't be missed. As is always the case with Faulkner, the women-folk may consider themselves excused.

* You've ever cohabited with a cow
* you possess a goddesslike ability to enslave men's bodies and despoil their minds-while having no more mind yourself than a butternut squash
* you possess a demonlike ability to enslave others to your pecuniary will; simply by standing and staring and chewing (somewhat like a cow, hmm), empires fall at your feet and rich men offer you their daughters.
* you went to Harvard and Heidelberg and never let anyone forget it, as you habitually discourse two to five feet over the heads of your fellow rustics, dropping arcane literary references like so many spent matches and indulging in frequent and byzantine explanations of why, in your life, you have done nothing much.

If this sounds normal and mundane to you, you will munch on "The Hamlet" as if it were so many pork rinds. If, as is more likely, you start reading and feel yourself tempted to groan and declaim, "What is it about Faulkner anyway? What IS this overwritten bleep? When will he quit showing off already?" consider this: extremism in the defense of style is not a sin. It isn't. Really.

Although Faulkner's writings inspired not just imitators but an entire genre, one dumbed-down and vulgarized in our dumb, vulgar age but still very much alive, "The Hamlet" and its sisters in the Snopes trilogy are neither literary spinach, to be choked down for their mental megavitamins, nor an egregious example of mass hysteria among mid-century literary critics. They are the genuine item, the Ur-fiction of the modern rural South. They are showcases for stunning verbal acrobatics, breathtaking panoplies of their natural and historical worlds, and cunningly worked plot entanglements. Underneath the, well, the bombast and the previously-referenced look-Ma-I'm-writing tropes, there are stories that will carry you, in the pleasant Southern connotation of "escort", through all the clinging-viney sentences that overhang those murky streams of variegated consciousness, to a cool river of pure reader satisfaction.

Reading "The Hamlet" is a chore, and not for everyone. Persevering and curious readers, however, will continue to recognize in Faulkner an absolute transcendant virtuoso stylist in a league with Joyce and Conrad. Nabokov has more grace and less pomposity; postmoderns like Pynchon do everything that Faulkner did while making fun of it at the same time; but neither would be read today, if they hadn't read Faulkner first.

The Hamlet is an episodic, sometimes uneven novel of jealosy, avarice , and poverty. Some of Faulkner's best characters including Flem and Eula Snopes (Varner), Ratliff the cagy sewing machine salesman, an Houston, the luckless cow-owner. All in all good stuff not as difficult to read as some of Bill's stuff.
Unfortunately the trilogy goes downhill from here, it was many years before he wrote The Town. The Mansion I thought was a stronger book. Give The Hamlet a try, some vintage Faulkner here.

Terrific prose about a modern day Tchichikov (a la Gogol) called Snopes and how he brow beats his way into the small village of Frenchmen's Bend. The movie "The Long Hot Summer" with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, was loosely based on this book. Check it out.

two general themes run thru this classic faulkner legend (the 1st book of a trilogy--the second of which was written 25 years later)--business and love. by tracing the arrival of the snopes family to frenchman's bend, mississippi, faulkner looks at these interactions thru different eyes and experiences. he does so in a humorous and yet enlightening way.

flem snopes comes to town and weasels his way into the varner family business eventually pushing the son aside and marrying the daughter, eula. throughout the tale more and more of his relatives arrive and become part of the takeover of all of the town's "enterprises" but are clearly expendable to flem. flem succeeds by being a shrewd but honest business man who uses people's greed to his advantage. his adversary in the story is sewing machine salesman v k ratliff who tries to beat flem, but usually fails.

the love stories include the relationships of all the characters except ratliff who has no other. one includes the idiot relative of flem who falls in love with a cow.

the story does not really have a defined plot, but is a series of stories all of which deal with one of these themes.

the brilliance of the tale again becomes faulkner's way of telling it. it is told in chronological order with only a few flashbacks. the fascinating part is that although the main character is flem snopes, he and his wife eula are the only two characters of whom we never really see inside of. they are just external characters who we are told about, but are never really seen doing anything. we see the result of their actions, but never the acts. we have no idea what is going on in their heads.

this is the genius of faulkner which can be seen in all of his classic novels. its not just the story, but the way it is told.

the hamlet is good faulkner, not great faulkner. those stories are "absalom absalom", "the sound and the fury", "the light in august" and "as i lay dying". but good faulkner is better than almost all authors. this book is a good way to dip your toes into the water to wet your appetite for some of the greatest american fiction there is.