Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music by Tim Ryan

Abstract

Tim Ryan, Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner's Fiction and Southern Roots Music. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2015. $45, hardback. Tim Ryan's compelling new study of southern roots music and Faulkner's fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in hearing call-and-response between Faulkner's modernist narratives and music of Mississippi Delta. Building on a small core of essays by Faulknerians, music critics, and blues writers, Ryan skillfully deepens our knowledge of importance of country blues and musicians in Faulkner's work. Eschewing traditional models of comparison such as documentary or historical evidence (apparently Faulkner never met these bluesmen and they never read his novels), Ryan nonetheless proceeds with what Daniel Schwarz has called a configuration, a type of comparative work that believes art created in same time period, and across disciplines, tends to share similar intellectual and aesthetic influences and techniques. Ryan asserts that playing biographical detective is limiting and has blocked interpretive scholarship of Faulkner-Delta Blues connection for too long. In unfolding of his study, Ryan makes a strong case for exploring this culturally thick literary-musical relationship and shows us what we have been missing. The first book-length work of its kind, Yoknapatawpha Blues provides a nuanced, insightful look at cultural, aesthetic, and political connections between Faulkner and southern roots music. Along way, Ryan revises many previously held assumptions and offers surprising new readings of layered relationship of Faulkner and Delta blues. Ryan is working double-time in this book--constructing his interdisciplinary argument and putting it to test by using a combination of methodological approaches. Employing elements of cultural studies, new historicism, identity studies, close reading, and amphitextual studies, Ryan demonstrates how Faulkner's work is informed by same literary, social, political, and musical conversations of period as musicians. Using amphitextual models, a field that reads text all sides and believes in text's meaning as inherently laced with intratextual, intertextual, contextual, and metatextual strands (26), Ryan roams freely, from popular culture to haute literature, from folkways to New South media, from songs to novels. But Ryan's focus is narrow, using only six songs by canonical Blues singer-songwriters (Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Bukka White, and Lead Belly) and a handful of Faulkner texts (the novella Old Man, short story That Evening Sun, and passages from Sanctuary, The Mansion, and The Reivers). Where such a limited focus could be seen as legitimizing rarity of blues in Faulkner's work--and thus, its lack of importance--Ryan's brilliant close readings, accessible style, and compelling storytelling serve to heighten fascination. Ryan consistently points out how smallest detail, if seen (or heard?) correctly, can lead to a stream of bold and surprising insights. More than often and in more than one way, Ryan makes his points. Both Faulkner (1897-1962) and early twentieth-century blues have an intrinsic connection, he says, because they emerged from a single locale, grew up alongside each other, achieved recognition together, and declined almost simultaneously (36). But Faulkner and recorded blues share more than substantial historical and thematic similarities, Ryan says. They also negotiate between traditional/parochial and experimental/cosmopolitan in their designs, techniques, and structures (22). Both literary and musical worlds also share concerns with regional and experiential consciousness of area's natural and societal problems: the flooding of Mississippi, relationships between paternalist white planters and black sharecroppers, male sexual impotence, incarceration at Parchman Farm, and racial violence, as well as effects of boll weevil upon southern agriculture (22). …