著者

田中 久男

出版者

中・四国アメリカ文学会

雑誌

中・四国アメリカ文学研究 (ISSN:03880176)

巻号頁・発行日

no.28, pp.21-31, 1992-06-01

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Landing in Luck (1919), William Faulkner's first short story, is rendered so humorously that he seems to have been far less affected by World War I than his contemporaries, Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Hemingway. Yet, if we pay attention to the fact that "The Lilacs," Soldiers' Pay, and the return of Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust are all set in the spring of 1919, the year following the armistice, we know the author himself was well aware of "the post-war malaise and sense of paralysis." Therefore, we must read Soldiers' Pay, his first novel, as a work of one of the "wastelanders."Donald Mahon, a maimed war hero, returns to Georgia in April, the month which reminds us of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The month, far from promising regeneration, turns out to be the cruellest one not only for the returning soldier but for the people around him—his father, the Reverend Mahon, his fiancee, Cecily Saunders, and his previous girl friend, Emmy. Donald, who lives in "nothingness" just like Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, is used as a mirror, "a moral touchstone" by which the community of Charlestown may be judged. If he is one of those who have taken "soldiers' pay," Margaret and Gilligan, who take him home, also share, more or less, the nihilism and disillusionment of those post-war years. Margaret, suffering from the sense of infidelity toward her late three-day husband, masochistically seeks both atonement and punishment in her affection for and marriage to Donald, her husband's surrogate; homeless and rootless, Gilligan seems unable to find any firm meaning to his life.More than any other character, the Reverend is spiritually "half dead"with his unstable faith in God, the spiritual disability which may be the cause for his strange lack of reference to Easter. Januarius Jones, a fellow of Latin in college, pursues the women around Donald and therefore is intended to be a parody of the sexless and amnesiac Donald who, like the marble faun, is bound in passive, impersonal observation.It is true that some modernistic experiments are attempted in this novel: the use of rather simple forms of interior monologue, the voices of the town, and the letters addressed by Julian Lowe, a young cadet, to Margaret, letters which change from a passionate note to a cold brief message. Their introduction in the course of the story effectively conveys the sense of the inexorable passage of time, as well as the temporariness and waste of love.In spite of these artistic devices, Soldiers' Pay still lacks the Southern milieu, inner and outer, which becomes obvious in Flags in the Dust (completed in 1927), because the author was not deeply aware of the important function of the milieu to present characters with their background. So, there are unnecessary ambiguities, such as Januarius's insipient relation with the Reverend, or Gilligan's intention to remain in the town after his separation from Margaret. To grow maturer as a writer, Faulkner needs what T. S. Eliot calls "the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year," though Faulkner calls himself "a failed poet."