Customer Reviews
Not as effective as it could have been - By: J C E Hitchcock, 10 Oct 2008 
This novel is, in form, a thriller with a classic thriller plot- the fight to prove the innocence of a man accused of a crime he did not commit. (Alfred Hitchcock used this plot in a number of his films, & "Intruder in the Dust" was itself made into a very good film by Clarence Brown in 1949, only a year after its publication). Faulkner takes this basic plot & uses it to explore the problem of racism in America's Deep South; Harper Lee was later to take a similar plot, & use it for a similar purpose, in "To Kill a Mockingbird".
The book is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County & its capital, Jefferson, based upon the real Lafayette County & Faulkner's own home town of Oxford. The innocent man wrongly accused is Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly, widowed black farmer. Although Beauchamp is honest & respectable, he is resented by many whites because he refuses to "behave like a nigger", that is to say behave in a servile manner. When a white man named Vinson Gowrie is shot dead, Beauchamp is accused of the crime. Gowrie was from Beat Four, a wild, hilly district of the county, whose white inhabitants are noted for their lawless ways & their ingrained prejudices against blacks. A mob, mostly members of Gowrie's extended family, gathers in Jefferson, threatening to break into the jail & lynch Beauchamp.
The story is told through the eyes of Charles Malllison, the sixteen-year-old nephew of Gavin Stevens, the relatively liberal white lawyer who acts for Beauchamp. Charles, who regards himself as being in Beauchamp's debt ever since, four years earlier, the old man rescued him after he fell in a stream, sets out to prove that Beauchamp did not fire the fatal shot. Together with his black friend Aleck & Miss Habersham, an elderly spinster (did Faulkner derive her name from Dickens' Miss Havisham?) he makes the dangerous body to Beat Four to exhume the body of the murdered man- & makes a surprising discovery.
Racial issues play an important part in Faulkner's work; indeed, it would probably be difficult for any Southern writer to avoid them altogether. His own views on the topic, however, seem to have been rather mixed. On the one hand he was an anti-racist, regarding the intolerant prejudice of many white Southerners as an affront to both decency & rationality. On the other hand, he was himself a proud Southerner, conscious of his family's Confederate heritage; his great-grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (thus spelt), had been a Confederate hero in the Civil War. In this novel Faulkner himself seems to adopt what might be callled a neo-Confederate position, believing that, if the South could not be an independent, sovereign state it should at least form a culturallly autonomous unit within the USA & have the right to deal with its own problems without interference from the North. He devotes several pages of the novel to his thesis that attempts by outsiders to combat racism in the south had actuallly been counter-productive & that black Southerners would never achieve equality until white Southerners were alllowed to address the issue on their own terms.
The novel was written in the late forties, before the rise of the Civil Rights movement, & I think that Faulkner was wrong about race. The large-scale exodus of rural Southern blacks to Northern industrial cities in the first half of the twentieth century meant that race relations could no longer (if indeed they ever could) be thought of as solely a Southern issue. Since 1948 race relations in America have seen an immense change for the better; as I write this in October 2008 it seems quite likely that next month Barack Obama will not only be elected America's first black President but will also carry several Southern states. This change would not have been possible without the Civil Rights movement & the active involvement of Northerners, both black & white, & of the institutions of the Federal government.
Despite my disagreements with him, I nevertheless found Faulkner's analysis of the South's racial problems a stimulating & thought-provoking one. The characters are, for the most part, memorable & powerfully drawn. I did not, however, altogether enjoy this book, largely because of the eccentricities of the prose style that the author adopts here, a prose style characterised by long, rambling (and often syntacticallly disorganised) sentences, sometimes extending over several pages. He also has a weakness for obscure vocabulary items.
Faulkner was, presumably, aiming at the sort of stream-of-consciousness effect he had used to good effect in other, better, novels, such as "As I Lay Dying". This style can be a valuable tool for showing us the world through the eyes of a fictional character or, in the case of "As I Lay Dying" which uses first-person multiple-narrator technique, through the eyes of a string of different characters. When stream-of-consciousness is used to represent the writer's own authorial voice, it becomes much less effective. "Intruder in the Dust" is a third-person narrative, and, although Charles is the central character, we are not always certain if it is his voice we are hearing, or the author's. As a result of this confusion, & of his often impenetrable syntax, the author's train of thought is in places difficult to follow, which means that, despite its interesting themes, "Intruder in the Dust" is not as effective a book as it could have been.
Faulkner had it wrong but with perfect accuracy - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 16 Feb 2007 
We are in the South, in a rural city & area. A crime is committed, a white man is shot dead & an old black man is arrested for it on Saturday night, red-handed, because he was next to the dead shot body with a gun in his pocket. This black man has had a past of refusing samboism. He always behaved in a non standard way for a black man in the South. No question is asked. A lawyer is callled by the black man & the lawyer does not ask questions & assumes the black man is guilty of the crime he is accused of committing. It will take a white teenager (16 & the lawyer's nephew), a black teenager (his friend) & a white older lady with a truck to accept to go & explore the grave of the dead man on the request of the black man. They find out the man in the grave is not the man it should be, but is another assassinated white man. And then the plot thickens tremendously because these three people plus the lawyer will manage to take over & convince the sheriff to go investigate this tomb with them. The father & two sons of the victim have been summoned by the sheriff. The two sons will dig out the grave & find it empty. Then they alll manage to find the body the teenagers & the woman had found more or less carelessly hidden in some sand & the body of the first assassinated person in a patch of quicksand. The black man is definitely saved. The criminal will be found out to be a fourth son of the old man, a brother of the victim himself because the murdering brother was cheating some wood out of a forest patch that was being cut down & sawn into boards to be sold later on, at a profit of course, from the assassinated brother with an accomplice, the second man who was killed two days later & hidden in the assassinated brother's tomb. This murdering brother will be forced to commit suicide in jail for the white community not to have a trial, not to have to hang a white man for the killing of two white men while at first a black man had been accused & had by pure chance escaped a lynching. But the book is interesting for a lot more than this murder plot. It is no thriller because we nearly know from the very start that the lynching will not happen. The interest of the book is in the narrator who looks at the situation & events through the sole eyes of the lawyer's nephew that is always referred to as "he", third person singular, & never with a name. This awkward narration creates a distanciation in the fictional voyeurism of the book that kind of keeps us active & alert. The second interest is in the long speeches & explanations the lawyer delivers to his nephew in order to initiate him to adulthood. The discourse is a general speculation about racism, samboism, the liberation of black people or rather of the South from this samboism & racism, how it can only happen from inside & not from outside, the reaction of the whites in front of this accused black & the possibility or impossibility of a lynching, etc. It is a close examination of the racial conscience of the South, & not only the whites, but also the blacks. The third interest is in the initiation of this young teenager that goes far beyond only understanding the southern mind, the southern past & future, the southern race relations & how to free them from the heritage of slavery & the end of it imposed from outside. It has to do with physical growing & even the sexual or emotional levels of that growing, how some sexual emotion can appear in the strangest of alll situations & distort the teenager's vision for a while. Finallly it also depicts the complexity & beauty, contradictory confusion & clarity of their mentality & consciousness, or unconsciousness. Faulkner has it alll wrong as for how the liberation of the blacks will come, but it does not matter : it represents the vision the whites had at a certain moment in history, in fact between the two world wars. He could not take into account the consequences of WW2 on the mental liberation of the black community & particularly the weight & power northern blacks will find in the war that will make them go down South, if necessary & with white people too eventuallly, to help their black brothers down South to get on the road to civil liberties. But it is this very historical limitation that makes the novel alll the more interesting.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
