An Intertextual Reading of William Faulkner’s “Victory”

Abstract

William Faulkner’s World War I story “Victory” has been ignored by critics. When it has been noticed, it has most often been judged negatively. Edmund Volpe calls it “the weakest story” (170) of the World War I tales in “The Wasteland” section of Faulkner’s Collected Stories. “Victory” was originally published in the collection These Thirteen in 1931, and the available records regarding its composition suggest it was written in the late 1920s. It is the story of Alec Gray, a Scotsman who eagerly enlists in the war, finds success on the battlefield, and then experiences a series of setbacks after the war leaving him destitute and homeless. Gray’s refusal to return to his home and to his family profession of shipbuilding is tied to his burning ambition to improve his class standing. His taste of upper-class life as an officer proves too compelling for him to consider a return to his humble roots. Even while selling matches and begging for spare change on the streets, Gray still dresses like a gentleman, maintains his waxed mustache, and employs a decorative walking stick.Volpe speaks for many critics when he claims that the story was weakened when Faulkner removed a large portion of it to publish separately under the title “Crevasse,” which Volpe considers the best of the World War I tales: Had Faulkner left in “Crevasse,” there would have been good and convincing evidence that Captain Gray had under-gone a horrifying experience … that made him a psychological cripple…. An unappeasable hunger for social status is hardly a credible vehicle to dramatize the malaise of a war-induced trauma…. The problem, I believe, is that Faulkner is mixing up his wars. The postwar trauma of lost social status and poverty belongs to the post-Civil War South, not post-World War I Europe (172). The idea that Faulkner conflating the two wars is interesting but need not be regarded as a flaw or weakness. Rather, it suggests that the story is a commentary on war in general, not just one conflict. It also indicates how the issue of class was preeminent for Faulkner even as he writes about the horrors of war.Indeed, “Victory” might best be read as dealing primarily with the failures of conflict, and Faulkner shows the terrible toll of war on the individual. The disconnect between Gray’s war experiences and his obsession with social class that Volpe rejects as unmotivated may in fact reflect a lack of rational explanation pointing to a disturbing and unexplainable emotional construct beneath the surface, a common response to World War by the “lost generation.” But Faulkner also stresses the persistent idea that wartime exploits and heroism can be an avenue for improving a social position in the world, a meritocratic place where actions count more than family, name, or identity.In “Crevasse,” the psychological trauma that Volpe and others find missing from “Victory” is in full force. The action centers on a nameless group of soldiers navigating through a wasteland of a battlefield when the ground collapses beneath them, sending them plummeting into an underground cave. Half the men are killed, while the others slowly rescue themselves, emerging from the earth in an ironic rebirth into war. While this material may have made for a more convincing psychological portrait of Gray’s trauma as part of the early version of the narrative, most critics feel that “Crevasse” is stronger as a standalone tale of battleground horror. There has also been critical attention focused on the gender anxiety in “Victory” evident in the soldiers’ death and rebirth in the womb-like crater of the earth.This negative, even damning, portrayal of feminine sexuality is repeated in another World War I story, “All the Dead Pilots.” That title refers to the spiritual and emotional deadness of a group of pilots trying to survive nonetheless, it has a humorous slant with a farce of a love triangle at its center that has lead those critics to complain about the war being reduced to window dressing for a quarrel between romantic rivals. Johnny Sartoris loses out to his rival, Spoomer, an officer who has no flying experience and achieved his rank through family connections. Again a family’s class position outweighs performance in wartime, a direct parallel to Gray’s experiences in “Victory.” Sartoris is emasculated by repeatedly being rejected by women in favor of a soldier with no combat experience. This connects with Gray’s loss of manhood as he tumbles from war hero to a pauper unable to support himself yet too proud to return home.The intertwined issues of gender and class during war find a different resonance in Faulkner’s Civil War-novel The Unvanquished, most of which was written five or six years after “Victory.” In that novel, Drusilla, Ringo, and Granny find new opportunities for independence and financial gain as rigid hierarchies of gender and race are temporarily suspended in wartime. Drusilla proves her mettle by dressing as a man and riding into battle, while Granny and Ringo undertake an elaborate forgery scheme to by claiming and reselling confiscated property to the Union army. Thriving in the role of head of household while John Sartoris is away at war, Granny competes with lower-class male rivals who also seek wartime profits. For all three characters in The Unvanquished, the war provides an opportunity to improve social standing, but the gains are only temporary. Granny is murdered, Ringo must return to his subservient racial role, and Drusilla capitulates to the reimposition of prewar gender roles by the women of Jefferson who blindly cling to tradition and the status quo.Alec Gray encounters a similar temporary freedom in “Victory,” yet he cannot accept a return to prewar conditions. His burning desire to break free permanently from his inherited class position links him with two of Faulkner’s best-known characters, Thomas Sutpen and Flem Snopes. Volpe cleverly connects Gray to Sutpen through a scene in which Gray as a traveling salesman is sent to the side entrance of a house only to be turned away by a servant, mirroring the primal scene in Absalom in which Sutpen feels the shame of his class standing and begins his grand design for revenge (172). Perhaps surprisingly, Alec Gray resembles Sutpen in terms of ruthlessness as well. This taciturn son of a Scottish shipbuilder’s first moment of class consciousness and shame comes when he is sentenced to seven months in a penal battalion by his sergeant-major for not shaving and for insubordination. Gray repeatedly refuses to say “sir” to an officer, refusing to accept the fact that he is below others in the hierarchy. Upon his return to his old platoon after completing his sentence, Gray uses the chaos of battle to coldly and brutally murder the sergeant-major with a bayonet. Gray’s subsequent daring and heroism in the battle earn him a medal and the chance to train as an officer. His father’s reaction to this news, however, is a letter castigating his son for trying to rise above his station. He suggests that “that way lies vainglory and pride. The pride and vainglory of going for an officer. Never miscall your birth, Alec. You are not a gentleman. You are a Scottish shipwright” (447–48).Gray’s ruthless determination makes him like a different version of Sutpen or perhaps a distant cousin of those ever-multiplying, ever-striving Snopeses. Like Sutpen and Flem Snopes, Gray knows to acquire all the trappings of the class to which he aspires to belong, to dress the part, that is, but he similarly fails to be accepted in the way he desires. The action opens a few years after the war with Gray returning to visit the battlefields, and the narrator’s focus is on the link between outward appearance and class from the opening lines. The French citizens who see him in the train station assume he is a British lord, “remarking his sober, correct suit, [and] his correct stick correctly carried” (431). The repetition of the word “correct” suggests a Gatsby-esque attention to the trappings of class, the performance aspect, which Gray achieves with his manner, his clothes, and his perfectly waxed moustache (commented on many times by the narrator). For Gray, his rise to the officer ranks gives him the illusion that a concomitant rise in civilian society is possible, a dream he stubbornly clings to despite repeated rejections after the war.His tenacity and doggedness are not unlike Flem Snopes, Faulkner’s class climber par excellence, and the two also share an understanding of the importance of dressing the part. On his only trip home after the war, Gray’s father does not recognize his son at first due to his now white hair (apparently from the shock of war), his waxed moustache, and his “city clothing” in lieu of his military dress (453). While his father thinks he is being modest by not wearing his uniform, his refusal is in reality related to his insistence that he has a job arranged for him in England by his officer friends. That is, he is desperate to see his new, higher class standing not as a residual effect of his military promotion but as a permanent elevation earned through his wartime service, a new existence into which he is reborn through the trauma of the war. His father rightly intuits that the new clothes signal an attempt to cast off his former identity and heritage, telling Alec “the proper uniform for a Gray is an overall and a hammer” (454). But Alec will hear nothing of returning home, and he goes to London, living in “the proper quarter with … his waxed moustaches, his sober correct clothes, and his stick carried in a manner inimitable, at once jaunty and unobtrusive” (455).Alec rejects the overalls of his station in favor of clothing more appropriate for the ruling class. Flem Snopes, in The Hamlet, similarly distances himself from the farmers on the porch of Varner’s Store in his rise through the ranks of Jefferson, from the son of a sharecropper to the president of a bank. Babak Elahi’s study, The Fabric of American Literary Realism, asserts the growing importance of fashion in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature in relation to class consciousness: “American literary realists looked to and depicted clothing as the screen on which hopes and anxieties [about social mobility] could effectively be projected” (5). Sylvia Jenkins Cook notes that in multiple Faulkner texts “seemingly class-and caste-bound people successfully display their social mobility in their garments” (9). Flem arrives for work in a brand new, hand-made white shirt, and he immediately and convincingly inhabits his new role of clerk. Soon after he appears in church wearing a black bow tie (just the second in the whole county, after Will Varner) and it is compared to a punctuation mark, a sign of his intention and ambition to overtake only other man with a tie. First, though, it is Varner’s son, Jody, whom Flem must surpass, and his tie and white shirt “gave him Jody Varner’s look of ceremonial heterodoxy raised to its tenth power” (64).The farmers on the store porch, Jody, and Ratliff are all noted as wearing the same outfit day after day, never changing their clothes nor their position in the world. In fact, virtually no characters other than Flem ever change clothes, despite their garments being frequently mentioned throughout the novel. Sandra M. Gilbert notes that clothing traditionally had fixed meanings tied to one’s social roles: “Until the middle or late nineteenth century most people wore what were essentially uniforms: garments denoting the one form or single shape to which each individual’s life was confined by birth, by circumstance, by custom, by decree” (196). Both Flem and Alec Gray are attempting to break free of the confines of the class in which they were born, and both use clothing as both a statement of intent to move up as well as a vital component that makes that move possible: dressing for the job they want, not the one they have.In “Victory” Faulkner is working out this connection between clothing and class mobility that later becomes an extremely important aspect of Flem’s rise through the ranks of Jefferson. The Snopes proliferation, of course, cannot be stopped, with Flem’s ascent emblematic of the larger spread of Snopesism throughout Yoknapatawpha County. Gray’s rise, by contrast, is only temporary, a byproduct of the war, and his ultimate failure is surely due, at least partly, to the generational disillusonment in the aftermath of World War I. Yet, there is more than the loss of faith engendered by the war at work in the story. It functions as a dry run, a rehearsal of the burning class ambitions crystallized in Thomas Sutpen and Flem Snopes. The themes of gender and sexuality so prominent in Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay and repeated in “All the Dead Pilots” are completely absent in “Victory.” Gray shows a similar ruthlessness as Sutpen and Snopes during the war, but his quick flameout to joblessness and poverty is also related to the conflict. Sutpen and Snopes play a long game, beginning their rise near the bottom of the social order and climbing the rungs through a variety of ethically questionable means. While Gray’s rapid descent might be attributed to Faulkner commenting on the relative rigidity of the British class system in relation to the American, more important is the fact that Gray’s ascent comes through battlefield exploits, within the closed society of the military. He then attempts to shift his new rank into civilian society but finds that he is not credited in the civilian arena for his military achievements. It is, in fact, another failure of war: men who served their country in desperate times have no skills to transfer to the post-war world and the promise of improving one’s lot in life turns instead into homelessness, destitution, and debasement, the final insult of a horrific war.The numerous veterans seen begging on the streets in “Victory” suggest that these men have been left behind in an old world, unfit for a new modern one. Flem’s stacks of identical white shirts and his “patented necktie” that is “made for him by the gross” (64) suggest machine-made, modern clothing, as opposed to the hand-made, home-spun goods of the past, which most of his fellow Frenchman’s Bend residents still use. He is emblematic of the machine-made, mass-produced, profit-driven future. Gray’s stodgy old uniform of the upper class may have been proper and de rigueur before the war, but his much-commented upon waxed moustache and white hair mark him as a relic in modern London. When he is recognized at the end by a now-prosperous war buddy, it is significant that the friend and fellow former soldier has just come from a fashionable tailor and is walking the streets of London to show off his fashionable “new clothes” (463). It is perhaps little wonder that Gray is mistaken by villagers for the father of a World War I soldier when he revisits the battlefields where he saw action, all of them assuming he is much older than he actually is, another Faulkner character stuck in the past.In this sense, Gray is not unlike Southerners in the aftermath of World War I, including the author himself. As David Davis details in World War I and Southern Modernism, the war is the beginning of modernity and modernism in the South. Prior to the war, “modernity was a foreign element” while the war itself, Davis says, “brought the region into contact with modernity before the region actually modernized” (20, 25). Thus, the sense that Gray has been left behind and is unable to find a place in the modern world expresses an anxiety common in the post-war South. While Faulkner himself never saw combat, he could at least identify with the experiences of having left the South for the war, encountering urban and foreign cultures, and returning home to feel unsettled and outcast, derided by those in Oxford as Count No Count. Struggling to hold a job while constructing a persona of a injured war veteran walking the streets in his fancy store-bought uniform, Faulkner surely identifies with Gray’s plight in “Victory.”An episode within “Victory” provides an apt metaphor for the experiences of Gray and many other veterans. As he joins a group of homeless veterans under a bridge, one of them tells a tale by the firelight. The man was blinded during the war, and his fiancée visits him in the hospital and for eight days, he gently touches the scar on her wrist that she got before the war. On the eighth day, the woman confesses that she is a nurse the fiancée convinced to take her place while she went to meet another man. The blind vet admits he had known the whole time since the nurse’s fake scar was on the wrong wrist. This sad tale captures Gray’s situation perfectly. Gray, too, has been fooled and deluded by an alluring, seductive presence, the dream of a higher class position. Like the fiancée in the tale, reality is a cruel mistress, and yet both men are willingly deluded to a large extent, finding their blindness more comforting than facing the harsh light of truth. Faulkner, himself, had been jilted by a woman and seemed to have no real prospects for professional and financial success at the time he wrote “Victory.” Channeling his personal misfortunes and many of the thematic preoccupations of his fictional corpus into this early story lays the groundwork for characters and themes that become iconic parts of Faulkner’s legacy.