Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: A Place in the American South

Abstract

ATTEMPTS to interpret William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County as an entity with symbolic geographical meaning are varied. They range from that of the student in freshman English class, who upon encountering Faulkner for the first time must struggle to find any, to that of Gabriel Vahanian, who has termed Faulkner's world a historical map of the Christian tradition and a spiritual geography of Christendom.' One interpretation of geographical symbolism of Faulkner's county is paramount that Yoknapatawpha is really microcosm of the American South.2 But much evidence refutes the idea that Faulkner looked upon and presented Yoknapatawpha as the South in miniature and, rather, supports the contention that he regarded his county as place within the South. Outstanding among the evidences that Yoknapatawpha is not the South in miniature are the geographical parallels between the real Lafayette County and Oxford, Mississippi, and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson.' In Reivers and in Big Woods, Faulkner tells us that the locations of Sutpen's one-hundred-square-mile plantation and the wilderness where young Ike McCaslin, Boon Hogganbeck, and Lion hunted the bear, Old Ben, have disappeared beneath the waters of lake, thirty feet below the surface of government-built flood-control reservoir whose bottom[is] rising gradually and inexorably each year on another layer of beer cans and bottle tops and lost bass plugs.4 There is somewhat of sense of awe to look across Sardis Reservoir on the Tallahatchie River in northern Lafayette County and contemplate that in Faulkner's mind here once existed fictional places, that Sutpen's Hundred occupied much of the expanse, that the hulks of dead cypress jutting above the water are all that remain of the wilderness, and that Old Ben was slain at spot somewhere near the center of the north bank. The large-scale geography of Yoknapatawpha County is essentially the largescale geography of Lafayette County. Here, however, I do not wish to attempt to refute the notion that Yoknapatawpha is the South in miniature by scrutinizing the geographical parallels between Yoknapatawpha and Lafayette counties. Rather, I wish to demonstrate that Yoknapatawpha is place within the South by examining