The Sartoris War

Abstract

[Joby] and Granny were like that; they were like a man and a mare, a blooded mare, which takes just exactly so much from the man and the man knows the mare will take just so much and the man knows that when that point is reached, just what is going to happen. Then it does happen: the mare kicks him, not viciously but just enough.… That’s how Joby and Granny were and Granny always beat him, not bad: just exactly enough, like now.… (p.51)²

This man-mare relation represents nothing less than proof of what the fallen South can still manage to achieve by way of an equitable society, despite slavery. It contains, with precision, just enough freedom and authority to sensitise and validate the tie between master and servant, which the narrator seeks to show regulated life tolerably because it had the sanction of instinct, because it was maintained without outside interference and because it resists the abstract thinking of a later age—indeed, resists any direct statement, to be approached through the language of imaginative analogy and with the articulation of a child.

[Perhaps the most decisive force] in the creation of the aristocrat is absence of private life. To live always in the presence of family and family servants subtly changes the most average of beings. Formality becomes a condition of survival. … Moreover, to represent one’s family first and oneself second in all social intercourse confers a special impersonal character on human manners and actions. … The impersonal social code which permits a formal expression of inward emotion makes it quite pointless for people to interpret one another constantly, as they do in most ‘realistic’ novels. There is thus in the Southern novel a vacuum where we might expect introspection. … The stress falls entirely on slight human gestures, external events which are obliquely slanted to flash light or shade on character.¹