The Hamlet
The Hamlet is a novel by the American writer William Faulkner , first published in 1940 by Random House . A German translation is entitled Das Dorf . It is the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, which he did not complete until 1957 and 1959 with the two final novels The Town and The Mansion (Das Haus) .
Emergence
Faulkner had already dealt with the fictional Snopes clan at a very early stage in his literary career. At the turn of the year 1926/1927 he had already started on his first novel, which bore the working title Father Abraham . However, he stopped working on the manuscript after about 18,000 words. He then wrote different versions of the novella that finally appeared in 1931 as Spotted Horses . At first Faulkner did not succeed in getting literary magazines interested in the story. Over the next few years Faulkner wrote the novels Sartoris , The Sound and the Fury , As I Lay Dying , Sanctuary and Light in August , but Faulkner never abandoned the Snopes family entirely. He had family members appear in many of the novels and short stories created at the time. He wrote a wealth of Snopes stories . Some of these texts were eventually used for the Snopes novels by integrating them into the text of the novel in a slightly modified form. With The Hound , he even worked a story in The Hamlet , which in its original version was not a story about the Snopes clan.
In the early autumn of 1938, Faulkner finally devoted himself entirely to the material he had collected on the Snopes family. At this point in time he was planning to make a trilogy out of the material . The first part should be called The Peasants , the follow-up works Rus In Urbe and Illium Falling . The titles of all works were changed to The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion in the course of the work .
Faulkner began work on a prologue, which he eventually did not include in the novel. He published the finished text under the title Barn Burning as a stand-alone short story, which was published in Harper's Magazine in June 1939. The novel The Hamlet was published on April 1, 1940.
content
The novel The Hamlet is the first work in the three-part series about the Snopes family. The other two novels are The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). There are many short stories about the Snopes family from Faulkner's hand, which were often integrated into the romance texts; In the case of The Hound, this also applied to stories that were not originally Snopes stories, but were rewritten for integration into the novel so that they fit again.
The Hamlet is about the establishment of the Snopes family in the Frenchman's Bend settlement and how they gradually gain control of the village (English Hamlet ). It all starts when Abner Ab Snopes shows up one day and leases land from the Varners. Ab Snopes was accused of arson twice (see the short story Barn Burning ), but was not proven on both occasions. Even here the snopes begin to exert a considerable influence. At first, the Varner son Jody Snopes wanted to let work on the leased land, but did not pay him off as punishment for the arson after the work was done. When he learns of the second incident, however, he tries everything to calm Snopes down, and even hires his Flem in his store. Flem will eventually marry precocious and pregnant daughter Eula Varner, as a result of which the Snopes married into the most influential family at Frenchman's Bend. This is in turn in Snopes' debt, since he saves the family honor by not allowing Eula's baby to be born fatherless.
In the course of history, the Snopes change from poor farm workers to influential personalities who are also associated with dangers for local residents. In the last part of the novel ( The Peasants , dtsch. Die Bauern , as the novel was originally supposed to be called) disputes arise over horses sold; When these ominous incidents are to be processed legally, it seems clear that the Snopes have a direct influence on judges and verdicts. The fight against them seems hopeless; In the last chapter, the Snopes finally set off for the next largest city, the capital of Yoknapatawpha County , Jefferson. The story goes on.
While working on the novel, Faulkner integrated entire short stories into the text of the novel, as mentioned above. Four short stories had previously appeared in well-known magazines. The most famous of these stories is Spotted Horses , which, like Fool About A Horse , was published in Scribner's Magazine in the early 1930s. The Hound appeared in Harper's Magazine and Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard in the Saturday Evening Post
The Hamlet is a typical Faulkner novel that stylistically the Gothic - subgenre Southern Gothic can be awarded. Faulkner integrates macabre, curious, black-humored scenes into otherwise realistic settings in order to depict the morality and society of the American southern states . Like in the third book of the novel ( The Long Summer ), where in the first chapter the Snopes descendant Ike is possessed by a cow and repeatedly kidnapped her from the owner's farm and steals food for her, although she could eat.
Structure of the novel
The novel is divided into four books, all of which are somewhat the same length.
- Book one: Flem
- Book two: Eula
- Book three: The Long Summer
- Book Four: The Peasants
The individual books are then again subdivided into nameless chapters.
filming
The 1958 feature film The Long, Hot Summer (distributed in Germany as The Long Hot Summer ) is loosely based on three of Faulkner's stories, mainly on material from this book. The title is also borrowed from the third part of The Hamlet . The leading roles were played by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward , directed by Martin Ritt , who a year later also directed a loose adaptation of The Sound and the Fury . In Germany, this film was released as the Curse of the South .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ William Faulkner: The Hamlet. Vintage International, New York 1991, ISBN 0-679-73653-0 , Editor's Note, p. 407.
- ^ William Faulkner: The Hamlet. Vintage International, New York 1991, ISBN 0-679-73653-0 , p. 408.
- ^ William Faulkner: The Hamlet. Vintage International, New York 1991, ISBN 0-679-73653-0 , in the front cover