Decaying Spaces:Faulkner's Gothic and the Construction of the National Real1 Lisa Klarr In his 1929 novel Sartoris (later renamed Flags in the Dust), William Faulkner introduces his readers to Yoknapatawpha, the apocryphal analogue to Oxford, Mississippi. Caught between a feudal past and a modern, industrial future, Yoknapatawpha acts as a cipher for the geopolitical status of the region during this historical era. The South is "post-structural" in that where there was once structure, a closed system, a kind of perceptible totality, there is now fragmentation: the vestiges of a past still intruding upon the present. For Faulkner, the force of decay is felt most palpably through encounters with ruinous plantation houses—large grandiose buildings, the beacons of prosperity for their time—in utter disrepair. Since built space materializes the binary oppositions that give a culture its structure, the decay of this space likewise hybridizes those cultural contradictions. Previously, the South enforced the slave system through a series of spatial codes. The Big House ordered plantation life, establishing inclusive and exclusive domains: the inside/outside of the house determining house/field status; the front door/back door a site of intense socialization, as we witness in the primal scene of Absalom, Absalom! when a young Thomas Sutpen is denied entry into the front door by an enslaved house servant. To say that a culture is in decay is to indicate that all of its physical-conceptual aspects—spatial components (house, farm, plantation), relational systems (slavery, feudalism, patriarchy), collective imaginaries (myth, story, [End Page 407] narrative)—are losing cohesion. They are being divested of their structuring power.2 Like many of Faulkner's works, Flags in the Dust is replete with spaces in decay. In an otherwise unremarkable moment, Young Sartoris passes in front of a barn, the doors of which "sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of rusty wire" (133). There is no indication as to why this building is in disrepair; it could simply be that the ravages of nature have compromised its structure. But "decay" is hardly ever neutral for Faulkner; instead, it tends to signify the inscription of a historical event coded as "natural." We learn that the Sartorises are one of many families being supplanted by mechanization: "[t]here was a hitching-post there, which old Bayard retained with a testy disregard of industrial progress" (5). In this text, the movement between obsolescence and decay is historical to natural; modernity judges the traditional farmer to be obsolete, and, without maintenance, the farm rapidly decays. Since many of the sites of ruin in Faulkner have historical antecedents—the barn reflects the shift to industrialized farming; Sutpen's Hundred is the result of numerous historical lapses (the most significant occurring during the Civil War)—the servant Simon's lament over the "gent'mun's proper equipage goin' ter rack en ruin in de barn" (112) illustrates how the process of mourning becomes intellectual, a recognition that the shifting of productive energies away from southern materialities causes these spaces to lapse. As the spatial codes of the culture give way to the natural forces of rust and decay, they open up new sites of occupation and trespass. Sanctuary, for example, is partially set in the Old Frenchman place. The ruinous house becomes the scene of a brutal rape, an act of "unnatural" sexual transgression with a corncob. In the first description we receive of the house, before we know the source of the narration, Faulkner gives us a sense of historical passage: "The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees. It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman place, built before the Civil War" (8). The house is a "landmark," a monument to the antebellum South. It is possible that it is in decay because of the Civil War, but unlike the [End Page 408] decaying railroad tracks in The Unvanquished, this is less a reflection on the glories of the past and more of a meditation on the sterile nature of the present, a sterility underscored by Popeye's own impotence. In Temple's first...