William Faulkner’s writing is dense and powerful; reading his stream-of-consciousness prose is like wading waist-deep in a roaring river. I have never seen punctuation—especially the em dash—as poetically employed as it is in Absalom, Absalom!, which I am not alone in considering his greatest work. The themes of Faulkner are the typical assortment that most Southern writers tend to employ: the power of race as a concept, visceral internal conflict, bitter nostalgia, the thick blood ties of the family, etc. In this brief essay, I want to focus on particularity, morality, and conflict. I recently read Faulkner’s short story, “Barn Burning,” which reminded me of a philosophical dialectic that I have found interesting: the correspondence between Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss. I don’t really know what this essay will accomplish, besides penetrating a dusty philosophical debate using fiction, but perhaps it will at least be entertaining.

“Barn Burning” is a story about the conflict between the particular and the moral. In Faulkner, the sense of place, the particularity of community and culture, is always at center stage. Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional setting of most of Faulkner’s work that mimics Lafayette County in Mississippi, is a dense stew of characters, histories, and relational ties. When a reader dives into the “apocryphal county,” a tangled web of particularity engulfs him. In Absalom, Absalom!, for example, the novel’s plot is summed up in the first part on a single page, with a meager handful of sentences, but the details that give the events meaning are known by the characters, and it is up to the reader to sort out exactly why Henry Sutpen kills Charles Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred.

In “Barn Burning,” the form of the story enlivens the content. Faulkner litters the story with small, somewhat insignificant details about the past. Sarty’s father, Abner, during the Civil War, fought for neither the Confederacy nor the Union, but was instead a “Malbrouk” who was nothing but an egoistic horse thief. Sarty takes time to remember an old saddle that the Snopes family used to own. While chopping wood, young Sarty muses about the axe his family saved enough money to buy him for Christmas. Furthermore, the narrator is named after Colonel Sartoris, who is a character that appears or is referenced in many of Faulkner’s novels, and is well known by the residents of Yoknapatawpha County, like, in this story, the Justice. These details, a simple reader might think, complicate the story or detract from the broader point. Fortunately, Faulkner is cleverer than such a shallow reading would entail. The details provided are small particularities, they are unique to the circumstances that the characters find themselves in. These particularities are specifically about past events that further flesh out the Snopes family.

The central conflict of the short story is the conflict between blood and morality. In Southern fiction, blood is a powerful, deterministic concept that is highly motivating for any kind of agent. The most obvious example is the kind of essentialist writing about race that populates the Southern corpus. Again, on a shallow reading, Faulkner is just a racist who buys into and perpetuates a fully deterministic, nature-over-nurture ideology. Of course, this is the naïve reading. Faulkner is fully aware of the constructed nature of race, and Light in August’s most interesting character, Joe Christmas, is a stellar example of the social perception of one-drop corruption leading to the actualization of racist narratives. “Barn Burning” does not involve the racial aspect of blood, but, instead, the familial. The purpose of all those particular details I mentioned earlier add a visceral element to the familial ties that tangle Sarty. The imperative of blood is so deeply important to the short story that it occurs in the second gargantuan sentence. It also appears later, near the emotional heart of the story, which more than sums up—probably better than I have—the point of particularity.

“Then he was moving, running, outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it came to him.

(What a beautiful, unabashedly Faulknerian, sentence!)

This quote also captures the importance of particularity preached by conservative and communitarian philosophers: the unchosen status of particular ties. In this case, Sartoris realizes that he has a special kind of commitment to his family that he never freely picked for himself. This is a decidedly Southern theme; just think of one of the most memorable chapters of Huckleberry Finn: the eternal blood feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. The Grangerfords must defeat the Shepherdsons because they are Grangerfords, and the Shepherdsons must slaughter the Grangerfords because they are Shepherdsons. The families are necessarily enemies.

The idea that there is a political order that individuals are born into has its most clear articulation in the philosophy of Carl Schmitt. Carl Schmitt, make no mistake, was not a great guy, as evidenced by his nickname as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich.” Despite the repugnance of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism and position in the Nazi Party, Schmitt’s political and philosophical work remains an object of fascination for many, even those on the left—the most famous treatment being Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer.

Schmitt’s main articulation of “the political” takes place in The Concept of the Political, and I will briefly explain Schmitt’s reasoning here. The central argument is a kind of transcendental argument that examines the necessary conditions for the possibility of a state that works from analogy. There are autonomous domains that make up the current culture: the moral, the economic, the aesthetic, and the political. As autonomous domains, these categories are independent from each other, but can inform each other. Each category is a dichotomy; the moral is a distinction between good and evil, the economic a distinction between the profitable and the unprofitable, the aesthetic is a distinction between beauty and ugliness, and the political is a distinction between friend and enemy. “Friend” does not get much of an explanation, but the “enemy” labels that which has the “real possibility of physical killing” (33). When individuals are born, they are necessarily born into certain political circumstances; one is a part of a certain group that has enemies, those who would extinguish them. Buck Grangerford, born into a specific family, has a group of enemies that he has not chosen: the Shepherdsons.

In “Barn Burning,” like the Kentucky chapters of Huckleberry Finn, the family is the chief political unit. (In other Southern literature, and many of Faulkner’s other novels, like Absalom, Absalom! or Light in August, the foundational political unit is often racial.) This is so explicitly stated that I was quite surprised when I read the last sentence of the first paragraph of Faulkner’s story:

He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! Mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood…

The “ourn” here is the immediate establishment of the friend group, which, at this point, only includes the Snopes father, Abner. Once the Justice begins questioning Sarty, the use of “enemy” is repeated:

“The boy said nothing. Enemy! Enemy! He thought; for a moment he could not even see, could not see that the Justice’s face was kindly not discern that his voice was troubled…”

This sentence reaffirms the primary political unit of the family, but it also points towards the central conflict of the novel, and another key aspect of Schmitt’s explication of the political. As I mentioned before, the political is an autonomous domain, its independence from the moral or the aesthetic are what makes it unique; the friend/enemy distinction is specific to the political. However, Schmitt recognizes that other autonomous domains are in some way subservient or compatible with others. However, Schmitt is very explicit about the way that the friend/enemy distinction is and can be informed by the other domains. Features of some group that are moral or aesthetic can be used to justify that group’s status as enemy, and the group is never wrong in drawing the lines this way. Nevertheless, the political is still autonomous despite the possibility of conjunction. In the quote above, the political tie that Satry feels to the justice overrides the justice’s goodwill and good moral standing.

The beginning of “Barn Burning” sets up the key conflict of the story: the tie between blood and morality. Before diving into this issue however, I would like to mention one last connection the story has to Schmitt and to respond to a potential argument one could make against me. Said argument is that what is actually happening in the story is a moral conflict. Under this view, the family has a set of particular ties that impose duties upon other family members. Sarty’s decision is ultimately between two conflicting moral ties: those to his family and those to de Spain. This argument would liken the conflict in “Barn Burning” to that faced by Huckleberry Finn when he decides to tear up his letter to Miss Watson and, ultimately, “go to hell.” However, such an argument neglects the specifically political language that I’ve spent so much time outlining. The first point is that Sarty’s language is specifically political, the “ourn” and “enemy” and focus on blood as used in the quotes above. The second point is that though the political and the moral are autonomous domains, they can inform each other. It might be the case that Sarty does view his ties to his family in a moral way, but these moral ties only flesh out that of the political. The point here is that the identification of a moral duty to the father does not negate the possibility of there also being a political relationship; these are not mutually exclusive. (It should also be interesting to note that the language used in describing the actions of Abner make him out to be an automaton. When he tracks mud on de Spain’s carpet or hits Sarty, these actions are bereft of emotion, seemingly stripping Abner of moral accountability.)

Instead of a conflict between two different moral codes, the conflict of the story is the relationship between the political and the moral. One of the most penetrating commenters of Schmitt’s Concept, Leo Strauss, analyzes this kind of conflict. Strauss, in his roundabout close reading of Schmitt, thinks that Schmitt’s underlying critique of liberalism fails. (I have not been using the Schmittian categories to refer to liberalism or the possibility of a state in general, but that is the primary concern of Schmitt in Concept.) Strauss argues that Schmitt has not given true reasons for accepting the political. Sure, it might exist, but why should the political be given any kind of normative weight—why should people act on political proclivities? This is especially odd since Schmitt even acknowledges the possibility of a unified world-state where there are no enemies. Such an outcome is not ruled out as a possibility in Concept. (Strauss does a bit more work here than I’m doing, and there’s a bit more argument, but this is the general gist of it.) We tend to think that morality has more force than other considerations, like those of the economic, aesthetic, or even the political. Why should one go to war if liberal peace is indeed possible and required by morality? According to Strauss, Schmitt has assumed that there is a certain kind of life lived by acting on the reasons given by the political that would be better than that of humanitarian pacifism. Strauss says the following:

“Whereas in the case of Hobbes the natural and thus innocent ‘evil’ is emphasized so that it can be combated, Schmitt speaks with an unmistakable sympathy of the evil that is not to be understood morally. This sympathy, however, is nothing other than the admiration of political power…” (115)

Later in his notes, Strauss explains that Schmitt is writing a polemic against a “a world without seriousness” (116). What Schmitt assumes is that the negation of the political would somehow be undesirable. Instead, Schmitt privileges the autonomous domain of the political over that of the moral or the aesthetic. It is this “affirmation of the political” that Strauss questions, as political scientist Heinrich Meier claims.

Anyway, that’s probably enough digging into the debate between Strauss and Schmitt. In “Barn Burning,” Sarty decision rings of Strauss: he chooses the moral over the political. Nevertheless, there is something deeply troubling at the end of the story. After warning de Spain, Sarty still looks for his father, running through the woods alone. He falls asleep, and wakes up stiff, thinking that walking will cure him of the cold. The narrator’s focus is only on the present conditions of Sarty—their immediacy—and the future is ignored in favor of the boy’s current condition. Sarty has betrayed his family, the base political unit of the story, and is a lost child alone, cold, and hungry in the woods. The last sentence is “he did not look back,” which resounds with loneliness and defeat rather than hopeful, individualistic vigor. Strauss might be right that Schmitt glorifies the political as pure animal domination, but the renunciation of the political is more than giving up war.

Bibliography:

Click to access Schmitt_1996_-_Concept_of_the_Political.pdf

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/

Click to access statham.pdf

Click to access ECM_PRO_060041.pdf