French Symbolism as Both Inspiration and Downfall in Soldier's Pay

In reading Soldier’s Pay, I felt both moved and continually underwhelmed. Having read A Light in August and The Sound and the Fury, I know how incredible Faulkner’s writing can be, and Soldier’s Pay fell considerably short of these standards at times. As his first novel, this is quite understandable, and I do not hold Faulkner in any lesser regard: indeed, one of the things I find most fascinating about him is how appreciable the evolution of his craft is. Many authors seem to be regarded as born “geniuses” by critics and scholars, who find in every word of such masters evidence of an innate brilliance. Faulkner, on the other hand, actually began as a rather mediocre writer, and grew into a “capital-A” Author, in every sense of the word.

Our in-class discussion of Faulkner’s early attempts at poetry and his passion for the French Symbolists poets in particular provided a useful lens through which to view the first novel of Faulkner. In response to the stricture of classical French poetry, poets such as Rimbaud and Mallarme turned towards emotion and intuition to create their (sometimes illogical) conceits. Faulkner’s use of imagery, particularly in relation to the characters of the novel, follows the techniques of these poets quite conscientiously. His first description of Margaret Powers, for example, is actually quite striking: “She was dark…remarking her pallid distinction, her black hair, the red scar of her mouth, her slim dark dress.” These traits vividly and definitively acquaint us with the character of Margaret Powers, and as the novel progresses, she grows into her physical characteristics more and more. However, after the approximately fiftieth time her mouth is described as a “scar,” Margaret starts to become less and less real to us, and more like the figure of a portrait, forever trapped in her darkness, her black hair, and that red scar of a mouth. What first provided us with such a clear sense of who she was, where we were, and the atmosphere unfolding all around, begins to stand in the way of our understanding of Margaret as a character. The same is true for the “yellow, goat-eyed” Jones, the “big black rock” of a rector, and, of course, the forever fragile, bird-like Cecily. We know that these unique physical traits are supposed to act like a compass of the interior terrain of these characters, but instead they end up acting like roadblocks. What first makes them so exceptional only serves to trap the characters into a cardboard sameness by the end of the novel. I felt as if no time passed between first meeting Margaret on the train to Georgia, and seeing her leave on the train at the end.

However, Faulkner’s imaginativeness in first deriving these descriptions is very lovely, and no doubt these characters will remain imprinted rather deeply on my memory for quite some time. I see the seeds here of what would make him so great in his coming novels: his sense of place and atmosphere, both the regrettable and the heroic facets of human nature, and his knowledge of the past and its ever-presence.