The Town (Text Key 229)

The origins of The Town, Faulkner's seventeenth novel, can be traced to an unfinished novel early in his career called "Father Abraham" (1926-27). That story finds Flem Snopes a banker in Jefferson, having left the rural enclave of Frenchman's Bend. For the rest of his career, Faulkner thought about Snopeses. He had the idea for a trilogy about the family by the fall of 1938, when he described the project in a letter to his editor Robert Haas. However, he did not produce the first volume until 1940 (The Hamlet), and it wasn't until fifteen years later that he took up work on The Town, publishing it on 1 May 1957. His working title for the novel was "Rus in Urbe," Latin for "country in the city," which underscores the apparently ceaseless "influx" of Snopeses into Jefferson. He made an early decision to include the episodes from two previously published short stories, "Centaur in Brass" (1932) and "Mule in the Yard" (1934), revising them according to the new thematic demands of the novel. One of those demands was the representation of the reactions of "the town" to Snopeses in their midst. Faulkner lodged those reactions mainly in his three first-person narrators: young Charles (Chick) Mallison; his maternal uncle, Gavin Stevens; and the sewing machine salesman V.K. Ratliff. In addition to monitoring individual Snopeses, these narrators act as repositories for the stories of people who interact with Flem Snopes and his family. Noel Polk issued the corrected text of The Town in 1999 (Library of America), and Vintage International issued that version in paperback in September 2011; our representation of the novel is based on that edition.

Dating the Story: Dates in this novel are both exactly rendered and frustratingly vague and slippery. For example, Eula's gravestone records her life span as 1889-1927, but only gives the years. In Chapter 24 Gavin says she died "just a week from [Linda's] birthday (376), and in Chapter 16 Chick tells Ratliff that Linda's birthday is "the twelfth of April" (271). Gavin's phrase typically implies a week before a birthday; however, in Chapter 19 Chick meets Eula in the Square on one of the days that Jefferson's school is closed "in the middle of April" (316), which would only be possible if Gavin meant the week after Linda's birthday. In any case, we have chosen that reading. Similarly, Chick claims that he was "just twelve" when Eula died (353), but other events put Chick's birthday in 1913, during the year after the scandalous Cotillion Club ball at Christmas 1912 - which would make him 13 or 14 in 1927. In determining the chronology for our representation, we kept to a plan that is occasionally at odds with textual details but allows us to create a chronological sequence that adheres to the vast majority of the novel's references to time and is itself consistent. Something like Chick's claim to have been "just twelve" in 1927 is therefore plausible as just that, a claim rather than narrative fact. Another problematic element in Chick's narration specifically is the fact that he narrates many episodes that he either didn't witness because he wasn't born yet (as in the novel's first sentence, for example) or didn't understand fully at the time. The references that he makes to the times that he was "old enough" to understand certain things - like the affair between Manfred de Spain and Eula Varner Snopes (318) - we have dated as 1930-1932, when Chick would have been seventeen to nineteen instead of "just twelve." We use the same 2-year period as the date for the passages in Gavin's chapters which directly address his readers as "you."