Literary Cartography and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha

Abstract

Literary Cartography and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte (bio) William Faulkner drew two maps of Yoknapatawpha County. The first, completed in 1936, was appended to the first edition of Absalom, Absalom! as a dual color fold out; the second he penned in 1945 to be included in The Portable Faulkner. Both maps were redrawn and polished by their respective publishers with Faulkner's hand lettering giving way to a more authoritative and easily readable product. The Portable Faulkner map was redrawn at Viking for publication in that volume the very next year, 1946. The 1936 map was professionally reproduced for the Modern Library edition of Absalom, Absalom! published in 1951 (Duvert 15n2; Railton and Reiger). As competing representations of fictive space, these literary maps offer rich interpretive insight not only into Yoknapatawpha and Faulkner's literary imagination, but also into the reconceptualization of place itself. Scholars from a range of disciplines have explored how these cartographic texts might shed light on Faulkner's oeuvre, on individual works, and on the nature and meaning of Yoknapatawpha. Joseph Urgo usefully characterizes approaches to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha as "aesthetic" or "materialist" (645). Urgo's own vision of Yoknapatawpha as reflecting characters' "inner lives" falls into the aesthetic camp, along with the work of critics such as Robert Hamblin who interprets the realistic, symbolic, and ironic layers of the maps (287). Material approaches offer more culturally and historically situated geographical insight. Investigations of this type range from geographer Robert Aiken's exploration of Lafayette/Yoknapatawpha corollaries in William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape1 to [End Page 175] the more wide-ranging Faulkner's Geographies in which individual essays explore specific spaces in Faulkner's fiction (such as the plantation) and specific places (such as New Orleans, New York, and the Caribbean). The ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha project at the University of Virginia, which has produced searchable digital maps of each of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha works, is an example of a materialist cartographic approach. To these categories, I would add a theoretical approach to geography in Faulkner, with critics such as Martin Kreiswirth, Barbara Ladd, and Jay Watson working in this vein by drawing on geographical theory to reconceptualize the local as, in geographer Michael Woods' words, "knitted together intersections of networks and flows that are never wholly fixed or contained at the local scale" (qtd. in Ladd 11).2 Of course, there can be overlap among these categories, but they help distinguish a critic's central context for the investigation of place, be it literary aesthetics, social and historical backgrounds, or theoretical frameworks.3 My approach synthesizes theoretical and materialist approaches to Faulkner's geographies, linking the work of geographers like Doreen Massey with a strict cartographic focus that would typically be considered materialist. Careful attention to Faulkner's maps and to fictional scenes of mapping in his works, taken alongside contemporary developments in cartographic theory, suggests a conception of space, place, cartography, and geography that is very much in keeping with contemporary theory: a complex vision of geography as intersectional, mobile, and enacted. However, such a geographical conception is not one that viewers traditionally associate with maps, which seem to communicate fixity and permanence. Cartographic theorist J. Brian Harley spent virtually his entire career working to improve "carto-literacy" such that "Maps cease to be understood primarily as inert records of morphological landscapes or passive reflections of the world of objects, but are regarded as refracted images contributing to dialogue in a socially constructed world" ("Maps" 53). Attention to Faulkner's literary cartographs in the context of their creation, signification, and reception—and within the complex relationship among author, fictional space, audience, and scholars—helps to overcome distortions that [End Page 176] have been imposed upon these texts. Ultimately, Faulkner's texts suggest that that the function of his maps is less to fix or orient than to reconfigure the relationship of time and place in a way that enables a more dynamic understanding of geographical signification. Such a conception has implications beyond Faulkner's literary project to how we read and negotiate the meaning and function of place in contemporary social and political life. As a literary cartographer, I am...