Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities by John N. Duvall

Author:John N. Duvall [Duvall, John N.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: -
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

5

Paternity in Pylon: “Some Little Sign?”

No, my characters, luckily for me, name themselves. I never have to hunt for their names. Suddenly they tell me who they are.…When he doesn’t name himself, I never do. I have written about characters whose names I never did know. Because they didn’t tell me. There was one in Pylon, for instance, he was the central character in the book, he never did tell me who he was.

—William Faulkner, in Lion in the Garden

It would not be inappropriate to say of Pylon that it “offers an exemplary challenge to the critic since it…sums up the nineteenth-century tradition of the novel [authority and transmission as played out through fathers and sons]…while subverting it, working this subversion in a manner that reaffirms a traditional set of problems for the novel while disallowing its traditional solution” (P. Brooks, 286). This elegantly formed assertion about Absalom, Absalom! finds no counterpart in the criticism on Pylon, perhaps because this novel about barnstorming exists in a shameful position. Often labeled Faulkner’s worst mature work, Faulkner himself seems to disparage the novel’s genesis: “I wrote that book because I’d gotten in trouble with Absalom, Absalom! and I had to get away from it for a while so I thought a good way to get away from it was to write another book, so I wrote Pylon” (Gwynn and Blotner, 36).1

Faulkner fashions his eighth novel around his memories of an air show at New Orleans’ Shushan Airport during dedication ceremonies in February 1934. Set outside Yoknapatawpha County, Pylon encompasses two significant narratives. It is, on the one hand, the story of a small group of barnstormers—a pilot, a parachute jumper, the woman both men love, her son, and an alcoholic mechanic—and their hand-to-mouth existence during a four-day air show that, like the airport dedication Faulkner had attended, occurs in February of 1934 and celebrates the opening of Feinman Airport in New Valois, Franciana. During the final race of the air show, the pilot, Roger Shumann, is killed when his plane, experimentally modified for greater speed, breaks apart. He dies trying to provide money to keep the group together—to support a son who might not be his and a child not yet born who he knows is not his. Pylon is at the same time the story of a newspaper reporter’s attempt to understand the barnstormers and of his infatuation with the woman whom the two barnstormers love.

Non-Yoknapatawpha, atypical, secondary, and supplemental, Pylon nevertheless highlights the recurring pattern in Faulkner’s fiction of the 1930s—unions of men and women at the margins of the community—that we have seen in Sanctuary, Light in August, and The Wild Palms. Although Pylon’s setting is the city rather than the country, three of the four adult members of the novel’s alternative community are refugees from agrarian communities: Roger Shumann hails from Ohio; Laverne, from Iowa; and Jiggs is “staying away from” Kansas (P, 12). Of all the “deviant” formations in the texts of William Faulkner, Pylon’s sexual threesome—Laverne

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