Professor Bruce Gans
One of the most common misconceptions students and faculty who do not read the Great Books have is that because these works were written in the past—often in the very distant past, they therefore cannot be relevant to understanding life today. Only by studying current events, such people believe, can they attain this. The truth is, however, that Great Books are far more relevant than the countless instant analysis of current and ephemeral events that compose practically every English course textbook. The Great Books present for our consideration the most fundamental and eternal problems of human existence and accompany them with the deepest insights into human nature.
A friend of mine who is a Professor of Social Work once remarked to me, “You will never become a psychoanalyst by reading Ann Landers every day; you have to study the scientific principles upon which all individual cases can best be treated.” Similarly, the Great Books provide the tools to meditate on human life’s first principles. Doing this heightens your understanding of your own soul, deepens your knowledge of the souls of others, and broadens immeasurably your grasp upon the nature of the human condition. Proof of this is found in a small section of one Great Book which displays monstrous human behavior; The Hamlet is the greatest novel of one of the world’s greatest authors, William Faulkner.
The range of the eternal predicaments of the human condition in The Hamlet is wide and presented with so high a caliber of courage and originality and poetry that it is rivaled by only the very greatest books. The Hamlet is set around 1890 in a backwoods corner of Mississippi, sparsely populated by largely illiterate, horrifically poor dirt farmers.
The first lesson Faulkner has for us concerning monstrousness pertains to this condition. The distribution of monstrousness and decency is as various as it is among people we know. A life lived in poverty in The Hamlet is neither recommended for its intrinsic satisfactions or its value as a builder of character, and it brings out a heroic stoicism in a few and misanthropy in others.
But Faulkner permeates the entire book with the emphatically implicit evidence that poverty is not the transcendent fact and inalterable force that shapes a person’s moral life and character and fate. A person is judged by the book’s other characters, and by William Faulkner, as being praise or blameworthy, not by the degree of one’s economic impoverishment, but by the degree of one’s capacity for honor and dishonor, by the degree of one’s respect for human dignity or its disregard, by one’s self respect or its absence; in sum, by one’s character. This is an immensely profound insight into the human condition. It is indispensable in any attempt to understand accurately human conduct—monstrous and otherwise.
Faulkner is telling us that the root cause of a monstrous act is not some abstract force, not some sequence of social or economic or military events whose effects are so irresistible that they morally absolve a person from his own behavior and its direct and immediate consequences upon other human beings. Rather, the root cause of the monstrous is located directly within the person who commits the monstrous act and what is and what isn’t found in his own heart.
This is part of the truth Faulkner was trying to communicate in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech by asserting his belief that “man will not merely survive; he will prevail.” He was saying that each human being is the possessor of a character, a moral character, through which he can transcend the sum produced by the social and economic and political factors in his life. And, because of this, every human being has the freedom, not to be rich or famous or comely (which are, in the end, inessential things) but to live a triumphant life through the redemptive employment of decency and by making the regular effort to base actions upon first figuring out what is ethically right.
By writing about a variety of monstrous people in The Hamlet, Faulkner shows indisputably that a major element of a monstrous person is that he has neither the character to feel, nor the intellect to realize that any other person outside of himself possesses, or has a right to possess, a life that is as precious to its owner and those who love him.
There are several monsters in The Hamlet, but the one most pertinent is a lousy and dirt poor farmer, Mink Snopes. Mink owns a calf who wanders off his small property—with Mink’s knowledge—to feed on the maintained and more prosperous farm owned by a man of unyielding integrity, Jack Huston. Huston returns the delinquent young bull to Mink and asks him to keep it off his land. Mink tells Huston, however, he owes him nothing because Huston was negligent in not constructing a fence to keep Mink’s bull out. Mink then continues this policy because it is cheaper to have Huston feed him. Huston appears to let the matter drop and Mink’s young bull spends the fall and winter quartered on Huston’s farm.
The next summer, however, when Mink decides to retrieve his now grown and fattened bull, Huston refuses to return it without a fee to cover his expenses, and Mink only desists when Huston points his gun at him. Here, Faulkner makes a second point about the true nature of a monstrous person. Only superior forces of violence and the willingness to use them will deter a monstrous person because such a man has no conscience. More precisely, a monstrous person is unable to see any reason to feel guilty for anything he does to anyone else. He has a sense of right and wrong, Faulkner shows us, but it is not based on any objective criteria of what is fair. It is not based on a man inferring how he ought to treat another person based on how he, himself, would expect to be treated.
Faulkner makes plain that the monstrous person possesses a sense of right and wrong that equates “right” what he wants and “wrong” what frustrates him or thwarts him. The monstrous person experiences his own grotesque and malicious moral code as its opposite—the embodiment and the expression of his own moral infallibility, and he experiences it with fanatical self-righteousness. Mink, the monstrous man, is certain it is literally impossible for him to do anything wrong to anyone. The astounding corollary to this is that Mink, in effect, considers himself the only person in the world who can be the victim of an intolerable injury.
Mink genuinely believes Jack Huston inflicted upon him an injustice that cries out to heaven by not permitting Mink to cheat Huston out of the expenses of raising one of Mink’s livestock. He believes it because the monstrous man’s concept of justice is a thing he constructs to justify anything he wants. He fabricates this using the materials of his own wishes and needs and delusions and lies that he welds together to prevent any whiff of reality from seeping in, in the form of contradictory facts and rationality.
Great Books authors like Plato, Locke and Kant devoted their lives to discovering principles of justice that would come as close as possible to being perfectly objective and fair to all people at all times and places. The monstrous man, however, can be known by the infallible sign of being emotionally immune to, and usually pig ignorant of, the irresistible rightness of their methods and goals. Mink Snopes takes Jack Huston to court to get his bull returned for nothing. To Mink’s outrage, the court rules against him. Earlier, Mink had backed down from a fair fight with Huston after the latter had offered to set his own pistol down, equidistant from them both, to let the one who could first reach it shoot the other. Instead, Mink waits for Jack Huston in concealment in the dead of night and murders him with a shotgun.
The murder is very disturbing because of its appalling pointlessness and because it is so ridiculous and painful a depriving of an incredibly more decent person of his own life.
Having directed our vision into the recesses of the monstrous psyche, Faulkner then illuminates for us a wider and enormously disturbing ethical vista. For we now learn that, for Mink, the experience of murdering a man is no more than an aggravating chore and his only regret is that he cannot, for practical considerations, leave a signed note that reads, “This is what happens to the man who impounds the cattle of Mink Snopes.” And here is a further central insight Faulkner has into the monstrous. For in the act of murder, Mink crosses the outermost borders of his moral narcissism into the larger world whose moral fabric he has not only violated but raped.
The invisible moral forces of the universe respond by setting into motion complications that Mink was too self-centered and stupid to anticipate, two key characteristics of the monstrous person. The reader sees the complications mobilized into being with an inevitability of a metaphysical law. But, to Mink, the complications seem to proliferate for no reason, out of thin air, into a suffocating swarm.
It begins when Mink returns home, where his wife unexpectedly senses he has murdered Huston and runs off to town with their children, hastening in part because Mink slaps her around, bruising her face. When she gets there, out of connubial loyalty she tells everyone—before they knew enough to ask—that Mink didn’t kill Huston. She begins hard selling her alibi for Mink before anyone knew Huston had been shot. By professing Mink’s innocence to a crime no one has accused him of, it becomes clear to everyone that Mink murdered Jack Huston, as surely as if they were waiting behind the log while he pulled the trigger.
Back at his shack, Mink begins to hear Huston’s dog in the woods, sitting next to where Mink had hidden the corpse, howling in a grief that can be heard for miles and miles like a homing device. When Mink returns to move the corpse and kill the dog, the dog attacks him, shrugging off Mink’s gunshots and ax blows. When Mink gets home, he finds his cousin there who informs him that the sheriff has found Mink’s murder weapon. This cousin, after he learns Mink did not rob Huston of the fifty dollars Huston always carries with him, then insists on clinging to Mink until Mink agrees to take him to the corpse so he can get a cut of the fifty dollars. Mink, ultimately, is forced to assault his cousin to get away.
In short, Mink’s personal monstrousness is magnified by the larger monstrousness of the people who surround him: none of whom have in the field of their consciousness one particle of remorse or shame or even mere animal dread at the thought of the act of murder. No, there is nothing in their minds to be troubled by other than profiting from the murder of an innocent man and helping the murderer to get away with it.
After Mink is arrested, he sits unrepentant in jail, getting highly distressed only when he learns that the African American prisoners were fed before him. Part of the mental equipment of the monstrous man, Faulkner thereby suggests, is bigotry, which is to say, a hatred of whole groups of people he does not know on the basis of race. Mink is unconcerned in jail, however, because he expects the larger powers in his town, in the person of his cousin, Flem Snopes, will leap to his defense and deviously fix his trial and get him off. When this does not happen, Mink is just as enraged at the injustice being sentenced to the penitentiary for murdering a man, as he was when he was ordered to pay Huston for feeding Mink’s bull. The way Mink the monstrous man sees it, the world has again let him down, and he is again its martyred victim.
And so, Faulkner here sharply disagrees with the French maxim that to understand all is to forgive all. There are people so monstrous that to understand all is to condemn with a greater understanding of justice.
In closing, I would like to offer a bit of solace from this Great Books author which is also one last proof that reading the Great Books can communicate truths that will better prepare you to understand and perhaps even anticipate the course of contemporary events. I t is a rule of thumb we are now seeing played out on a daily basis in the newspapers and which Faulkner places on the lips of Mink Snopes. It is the existence of the eternal and living moral principle that when you premeditatively kill one innocent person, you will learn to your discomfort what Mink found out to his own, when he reflected, “I thought that when you killed a man, that finished it. But it don’t. It just starts then.”