CLAUDE PRUITT Independent Scholar Discovering the Timeline in Faulkner’s The Hamlet There’s always a moment in experience. . . . all I do is work up to that moment. I figure what must have happened before to lead people to that particular moment, and I work away from it, finding out how people act after that moment. —William Faulkner, Lion in the Garden. 220 THE ELEGIAC OPENING SCENE OF THE HAMLET. ESTABLISHES A TIME FRAME for the novel. In the forty years since the end of the Civil War, Will Varner has acquired most of the extensive land holding that had been the Old Frenchman place; he has established himself as the “chief man” in this “rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson.” The novel opens on a spring day in about 1905 when Ab Snopes limps into Varner’s store (731-35). This time frame is reinforced at various points throughout the first three books of the novel. In Book One, for example, Bookwright reckons that the “store and that gin had been running themselves at the same time for nigh forty years all right, just one fellow between them” (785); in Book Two, Mrs. Varner “did not practice [reading] much then and during the last forty years she had lost even that habit” (819); and in Book Three, when Ike Snopes runs across what had been the Old Frenchman place to rescue Houston’s cow, he crosses “old fields where not even a trace of furrow showed any more, gutted and gullied by forty years of rain and frost and heat into plateaus choked with rank sedge and briers” (889). Book Four, however, disrupts the temporal frame when the narrative voice dates the “news of Sumter [April, 1861]” at “thirty years ago” (1046). Thirty years after the start of the Civil War places this final chapter in 1891; moreover, Bookwright’s observation that “Ab Snopes first rented that place from the Varners five years ago” (1069) shifts the start of the storyline to the late 1880s. The time discrepancy is consistent throughout the final chapter.1 This chapter had been published originally as “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard.” The short story is set in the 1920s, some sixty years after the 1 “Dont you know folks have been looking for that money for thirty years,” Ratliff asks Bookwright (1051), and Bookwright speculates that buried cloth bags would not survive intact “After thirty years” (1069). 552 Claude Pruitt Civil War, and one of Faulkner’s tasks in revising and incorporating it into the final chapter of The Hamlet would have been to make time references consistent with the first three books of the novel.2 It appears that as he contemplated these changes, Faulkner reconsidered the entire timeline of The Hamlet. Transmitting the final chapter to Random House, Faulkner advised Saxe Commins that “Book Four happens in 1890, approximately. Hence Civil War ended 25 years ago. Have recollection of dating War somewhere in script as 40 years ago. Please watch for it. I will catch it in galley if you have not” (Selected Letters 115). It does not appear that Commins made any attempt to correct time discrepancies; a number of personal issues may have prevented Faulkner from the kind of close editing for time references that he intended; consequently, the temporal inconsistencies went forward into print.3 What is one to make of the timeline inconsistencies in The Hamlet.? More to the point, what would have been achieved had Faulkner followed through with his intention to shift the timeline back into the nineteenth century—would those fifteen years, approximately, make a difference in how one reads the novel? To many, perhaps most, readers and critics the answer is simply no. Many readers do not notice the discrepancy, and among those who do Faulkner’s proclivity to move events and characters in time at the service of story provides reason enough to discount a few fairly minor timeline issues. History and Faulkner, many critics have argued, mix at a level other than factual 2 The story opens, “For almost sixty years the road [to the Old Frenchman place] had beenunmarkedbywheelorhoof.”(Uncollected 135); the narratordescribesthetreasure hunt, “for sixty...