Yoknapatawpha County Research Articles

Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County

Sharon Desmond Paradiso Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County I n Absalom, Absalom! Quentin Compson’s epiphany that Clytie “owns the terror” (295) is a white conceptualization: to white (and terrified) Quen­ tin, Clytie embodies the fears of race-mixture that characterize any white supremacist society, certainly the pre-Civil Rights-era South. Quentin, though one ofthe most confused and tortured individuals in Yoknapatawpha, is, up until this point, at least sure of one thing: he is sure of his race. He knows he is white, and he knows—or thinks he knows—how to negotiate the racial codes of his culture, even if he is less sure about the gender codes, the sexuality codes, the honor codes, and all the rest. But confronted with the fact of Clyde’s mixed racial heritage, Quentin’s last bulwark against the complete fragmentation of his identity comes under ideological siege: if Clytie can ex­ ist as half-black, half-white, what meaning can there be in Quentin’s white­ ness? If “nature” itself can allow such an ideologically “wrong” admixture to be, to exist, to live, to breathe, and to function, then the entire ideology becomes suspect, giving rise to “terror” in those who espouse and benefit from the ideology. And further, if this embodiment lends power (it is something Clytie “owns”; it is, somehow, property, and property, in a capitalist society, is power), then the fear becomes very deep indeed—nothing less than the entire world, specifically, in this case, Quentin’s world, is at stake. As Rosa Coldfield puts it, one might as well “watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too” (112). Though Rosa seems to scoff at the notion that such an event would ever be possible, Quentin begins to understand that because of Clytie and others like her, perhaps that fall is at hand—and what is more, per­ haps it should be. And if it were to happen, what would Quentin be left with? Without caste, there could be no whiteness, and without whiteness, Quen­ tin, and others like him, would have no self. Clytie’s existence thus terrorizes Quentin’s whiteness; the “terror” that Clytie “owns” is a white terror, a white’s terror, of becoming not white. But if Clytie were to speak about terrorizing whiteness (which, of course she does not—cannot), she would likely hold a different view. For Clytie, as for most if not all of Yoknapatawpha’s Negroes, terrorizing whiteness is not something to do-, it is something one experiences. It is a noun, not a verb. Acts and ideas of terror pervade the history of white domination of non­ whites in the South; indeed, slavery itself is a terrorist institution. Terror is, in many ways, the mechanism by which whiteness both asserts and enforces its power. 23 24 Sharon Desmond Paradiso Terrorizing Whiteness By terror here, I am referring not only to those groups and individuals who practiced (and in some instances still practice) acts of violence and in­ timidation against persons of color: the Ku Klux Kian, the Night Riders, the various lynch mobs, Governor George Wallace, etc. Rather, in this context, ter­ ror encompasses the entire legal and social structure that creates, enables, and perpetuates a system of white supremacy, even beyond the Jim Crow era; it is a system of repression that at once defines a code of behavior for the Other and denies the experience of the Other under that code. As bell hooks notes, To name that whiteness in the black imagination is often a representation of terror: one must face a palimpsest of written histories that erase and deny, that reinvent the past to make the present vision of racial harmony and pluralism more plausible. (172) Terrorizing whiteness, then, becomes not only the active process of terrifying violence, but as well the passive process ofterrifying erasure, in which the black experience is whitened into universality, i.e., whiteness. It is interesting, then, to look at Faulkner’s black characters from the per­ spective ofthis terror—not simply to determine how they do or do not respond to it (though that is certainly worthwhile), but more to understand the ways...

Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker

B o o k R e v i e w s Alice M unro: W riting Her Lives. By Robert Thacker. Toronto: Douglas Gibson/McClelland and Stewart, 2005. 603 pages, Can$39.99. Reviewed by D oug Werden West Texas A&M University, Canyon Robert Thacker’s biography of Alice Munro is the manifestation of a passion for Munro’s stories that captivated Thacker for more than thirty years. In read­ ing the book, it becomes difficult to determine what is most impressive: the fact that Thacker undertook the challenge of producing the biography of a living author or that he wrote such a thoroughly researched and beautiful account of her life as to give us what will surely become the authoritative literary biog­ raphy of Munro. As exemplified in the best biographies, Thacker’s gracious prose moves between archival sources and interviews so well that you are left appreciating the depth of research as well as the craft. Because Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, has explored the personal side of her mother in the memoir Lives ofMothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Anne Langton. INTERIOR OF JO H N 'S HOUSE [LOOKING SOUTH], 1837. Graphite on cream wove paper. 18cm x 23.5 cm. Archives of Ontario. b o o k R e v ie w s 4 3 7 Munro (2001), Thacker focuses on Munro’s writing and publishing life, relying on the author’s archived papers, her correspondence, and local newspapers. In particular, he includes important information about the writers who encour­ aged her, agents who guided her, and editors who shaped her books. Although he read early drafts of many stories to prepare the biography, Thacker does not burden the reader with details of revision but summarizes key author/editor interchanges in order to illuminate the ways these conversations impacted Munro’s work. Given that his focus is on her professional life, Thacker resists the temptation to research or speculate about her private decisions. He briefly mentions Munro’s marital problems and fights at home but does not examine them closely. When he discusses her divorce in 1973, he does so in order to explain her motivation for moving from Victoria, British Columbia, to south­ ern Ontario, focusing on her relationship to place rather than to her husband. As many know, Munro spent twenty-three years (1949-1973) living in Vancouver and Victoria, where she published her first two books as well as many of her short stories. Thacker suggests place matters deeply to Munro and informs much of her prose. She says of her short fiction, “When I first started writing, setting meant more to me than people. This was really what I was writ­ ing about. ... I was just overwhelmed by a place” (158). Thacker’s attention to geography reveals her effort to consciously construct fictional places, resulting in settings that rival William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in their depth and complexity and bring rural and small-town Ontario to life. Munro is often quoted as saying that in her fiction “there is always a start­ ing point in reality” (529). However, Thacker avoids heavy-handed biographi­ cal interpretations, preferring to suggest possibilities and explore potential influences. He does not offer authoritative readings as much as provide scholars with new contexts for rereading Munro’s stories. The biography celebrates the intersection of Munro’s life and writings without making tired claims of reading her life through her fiction or reading her fiction through her life. While Thacker’s biography is intended for scholars exploring the nuances of her work, it is so well written that the non-scholar can easily gain insight into Munro’s work. A t a time when the short story gamers less and less of the public’s attention, Thacker’s work reminds us of the importance of the genre in defining who we are and how we live and the contribition Munro has made to both sides of the border and beyond. ...

Exhausted Voices: The Inevitable Impoverishment of Faulkner's "Garrulous and Facile" Language

Exhausted Voices:The Inevitable Impoverishment of Faulkner's “Garrulous and Facile” Language H. Collin Messer "Done sold my Benjamin," the old Negress said. "Sold him in Egypt." She began to sway faintly back and forth in the chair. "I telephoned Mr. Edmonds," Stevens said. "He will have everything ready when you get there." "Roth Edmonds sold him," the old Negress said. "Sold my Benjamin." —William Faulkner, "Go Down, Moses" What does the dialogue of Faulkner's characters ultimately accomplish in his narratives? Yoknapatawpha County is home to a host of voices, black and white, male and female, that murmur incessantly. The town of Jefferson itself often seems to speak in a collective voice. In the midst of so much talk, however, do people ever really listen to each other? The conversations between even Faulkner's most prolific interlocutors (Mr. Compson and Quentin, for example) certainly leave us with little sense that they really understand one another any better as a result of their dialogue. We as readers may understand them better through poring over their verbal exchange (which we are given in written form), but they are not so privileged. Stephen Ross says that in Faulkner's works "voice and writing are in constant tension . . . [for] the tools of writing can be used to generate voices, and . . . the voices of fiction constantly lead us back to the written nature of literature" (3, 236). Faulkner plausibly uses dialogue to communicate meaning in his own [End Page 1] "conversation" with his readers—that is, the larger narrative of the novel—but what hope or sense is there in the dialogical world of his characters? If fathers and sons struggle to share spoken meaning in Faulkner's stories, what hope is there for dialogue in Yoknapatawpha across even wider gulfs, particularly when the characters and their roles are so powerfully circumscribed by history and culture? In two of his later works, Go Down, Moses (1942) and Requiem for a Nun (1951), Faulkner ably faces the challenge of writing meaningful dialogue. In pursuit of what Thadious Davis describes as his larger narrative goal of "illuminating the conjoining of blacks and whites," Faulkner resists the urge to require more of his many speakers than they can believably accomplish through their conversations (242). This is not to say that Faulkner does not take risks as the characters in these stories converse, but rather that he seems always to be probing the depths of the possibilities of their dialogue. Thus he actually risks much in an effort to identify and illustrate the point at which dialogue reaches its terminus, so to speak—the point at which the voices must necessarily stop, because the characters have exhausted the limits of their ability to comprehend and convey experience through spoken language. In Faulkner's "Negro" (1983), Davis recognizes Faulkner's determination to grapple in Go Down, Moses with the nature and meaning of dialogue among members of a community that seems forever on the verge of fragmentation. At the close of her largely positive discussion of Faulkner's treatment of race in the final chapter of the novel, which is also entitled "Go Down, Moses,"1 Davis concludes that the best he can hope for is an armistice of sorts between groups who are at once alienated from and yet inextricably bound to one another. "Conflict," Davis says, "is a pervasive condition" in Yoknapatawpha (243). Coming at the end of a novel in which Faulkner perhaps for the first time humanizes his black characters without idealizing them, "Go Down, Moses" constitutes for Davis an "uneasy truce." She deems it "a recognition that the individuals of the community cannot strip themselves of their collective guilt or interdependency but they can act according to the old verities of the human heart" (243, emphasis mine). The characters in "Go Down, Moses" arguably do act according to Faulkner's old verities of "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" (Essays, Speeches and Public Letters 120). Near the beginning of the story, for example, Mollie Beauchamp, an "old Negress," acts simply out of love and necessity in walking seventeen miles to Jefferson in the July heat to tell white county...

Faulkner and the Ecology of the South

Review: Faulkner and the Ecology of the South Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (Eds.) Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller San Francisco, USA Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (Eds.). Faulkner and the Ecology of the South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 173 pp. ISBN: 1- 57806-782-0. $45.00 (trade cloth). Alkaline paper. From the 30th Annual Mississippi University Faulkner Conference (2003): Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, the editors have collected a group of papers focusing on the social ecology of William Faulkner's (1897-1962) oeuvre. Explored in ten essays is much of Faulkner's canon, which mostly centered on the documentaries depiction of the imagined southern Yoknapatawpha County and its residents. The authors explore Faulkner’s literary depiction of nature, a depiction that includes people in its ecological web. Ecology here is not solely about natural sciences or preservation, but is more broadly defined to include civilization and its denizens. In the introduction Joseph Urgo writes: By ecology we do not exclude the natural world, though what we have in mind is more akin to the idea of a human ecology, the interaction of humans with their environment--made and found, communities as well as habitats. (p. ix) This use of the word ecology expands upon the strict definition of Nature, which is sometimes assumed to exclude human culture. Faulkner, who died before Earth Day, never used the term ecology, and by environment he meant social ecology: human beings in conflict with their nature, their character, their souls, with others, or with their environment. Nature was sometimes part of his exploration of place, and one can find passages in which characters interact with and appreciate the natural world. As the contributors contend, humankind often plays a negative role in the ecology of Yoknapatawpha County. They bring with them a selfish genetic drive, which has caused devastation to land, community, civilization, and psyche. The drive to commit violence to others or the environment is equated with an ecological Darwinian imperative. Here one finds the rationale behind the religious right’s interest in contesting Darwinism, which in Yoknapatawpha County justifies and explains violence, crime, selfishness, and competition. Faulkner described the Snopes of his famous Snopes family trilogy (Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion): like an influx of snakes or varmints from the woods.” Religious teachings offer a

“A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness

Faulkner Journal John N. Duvall “A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness D espite the assertions of many racist characters in Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner’s fiction repeatedly illustrates that race is not a simple matter of essence or biology but is always mediated by performance. Faulkner particularly makes visible an opening between racial and cultural identity through certain reflections on the construct “nigger.” During his year at Harvard, Quentin Compson comes to realize that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior” (SF 86). In Go Down, Moses, we see a trickster Lucas Beauchamp who, when the need arises, can manipulate threats from the white world by becoming “not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable,” who masks his intelligence “in [an] aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell” (58). But if Faulkner opens a space between black performance and racial essence through the depiction of certain African American characters, he is equally aware that not all Caucasians are fully white in a South that wishes to absolutize all racial difference. What I wish to emphasize is the performativity of whiteness in Faulkner, deriving from his figurative use of two distinct but not unrelated theater traditions: not simply American blackface minstrelsy but an older European whiteface minstrelsy as well. The result is a fictional world in which one sees, by turns, a dizzying variety of masking: whites in blackface, blacks in blackface, whites in whiteface, and blacks in whiteface. Clearly, such multiple performative possibilities serve to unhinge the Southern binary that would oppose whiteness to “the Negro.” My thinking in this essay is indebted to Toni Morrison’s work on the Af­ ricanist presence (as well as the use of figurative blackness) in texts by canonical white American novelists and to Susan Gubar’s work on “racechange,” forms of racial metamorphosis in art, which she sees emerging in the twentieth century as a “crucial trope of high and low, elite and popular culture, one that allowed artists from widely divergent ideological backgrounds to meditate on racial privilege and privation as well as on the disequilibrium of race” (5). Despite drawing on Morrison and Gubar, I do see limitations to their projects inas­ much as they always identify white writers’ engagements with blackness as a problem or a failure. Morrison typically identifies a failure in aesthetic de­ sign, while Gubar sees the failure more in ethical terms. For Gubar, in the last instance, every white appropriation of blackness can only be a net loss in the 106 The Faulkner Journal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 107 search for a more ethical understanding of race.1 And of course Morrison and Gubar are correct: there are aesthetic and ethical shortcomings to be identified in a white writer’s appropriation of blackness. But they may be only half right, because there is also something potentially productive in such appropriations. In Faulkner’s case, there are in-between characters—Caucasians who instantiate blackness in ways that complicate the Southern racial binarism. These pre­ sumptively white characters come to embody black culture, where “black” is not exactly race any longer, but (because it is the South) it is not exactly not race either. I make this last assertion following E. Patrick Johnson’s interrogation of what is at stake in, to invoke his book’s title, “appropriating blackness.” Black­ ness, as Johnson casts it, is not a racial essence but always involves performance. The questions he asks are germane to this essay: What happens when “blackness” is embodied? What are the cultural, social, and po­ litical consequences ofthat embodiment in a racist society? What is at stake when race or blackness is theorized discursively, and the material reality of the “black” subject is occluded? Indeed, what happens in those moments when blackness takes on corpo­ reality? Or, alternatively, how are the stakes changed when a “white” body performs blackness? (2) For Johnson, “‘blackness’ does not belong to any one individual or group. Rather, individuals or groups appropriate this complex and nuanced racial sig­ nifier in order to circumscribe its boundaries or to exclude other individuals or groups” (2-3). Johnson is fully...

The Ideology of Autonomy: Form and Function in As I Lay Dying

Faulkner Journal Ted Atkinson The Ideology of Autonomy: Form and Function in As I Lay Dying I n the early sections of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Cash Bundren remains in the background urgently working to construct his mother’s coffin in time for her passing and, subsequently, for the family’s burial march across Yoknapatawpha County.1 Despite the imminent deadline— or perhaps because of it—the final product is a testament to the precise execu­ tion of design that Cash deeply values as a result of his strong work ethic and dedication to craftsmanship. But completion also brings a moment of truth for the carpenter: the time when production gives way to reception and the object enters into the traffic of the world. In this regard, Cash’s project serves as a metaphor for the production of the novel itself, establishing Faulkner’s con­ cern with form and function as a means of exploring relations between art and social reality and, in turn, of laying bare the ideological dimensions of artistic autonomy—a fundamental principle of modernist aesthetics under consider­ able stress at the time of the novel’s production. Significantly, Faulkner began work on As I Lay Dying against the back­ drop of a national crisis—the stock market crash of 1929. Joseph Blotner highlights this contextual frame when describing the genesis of what would become Faulkner’s fifth published novel: “On October 25, 1929, the day after panic broke out on Wall Street, [Faulkner] took one of these [onion] sheets, unscrewed the cap from his fountain pen, and wrote at the top in blue ink, ‘As I Lay Dying.’ Then he underlined it twice and wrote the date in the upper right-hand corner” (1: 633). Faulkner’s composition process unfolded in the immediate aftermath of this signal event, providing now a precise historical and cultural frame of reference for examining how his treatment of autonomy responds ideologically to a severe blow delivered to the intertwined bodies of late capitalism and literary modernism. The market crash hit with sudden and considerable force, sending debil­ itating shock waves across the spectrum of American society. As T. H. Wat­ kins observes, the crash was so devastating because “the failure of the greatest speculative fever in American history profoundly weakened confidence in the* !I presented an initial version of this essay during a panel called “Faulkner and the 1930s,” sponsored by the William Faulkner Society at the 2004 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. I wish to thank the Society for the chance to test some of the ideas contained herein and to receive feedback from other Faulkner schol­ ars. In particular, I want to acknowledge a debt to John T. Matthews, the panel respondent, for constructive comments that led me to think about the ideological implications of autonomy in As I Lay Dying and, con­ sequently, to reconfigure my approach in a fundamental way. 15 16 Ted Atkinson The Ideology ofAutonomy basic soundness ... of one of the nation’s economic foundations” (75). It was an outcome that Faulkner, a writer branded by detractors and defenders alike as indifferent to current events in pursuit of aesthetic perfection, had already predicted via Jason Compson in the third section of The Sound and the Fury. “The market will be unstable, with a general downward tendency,” Jason fires off in an angry telegram to a broker. “Market just on point of blowing its head off” (SF 244). Whether or not the crash was a result of suicidal tendencies, it posed a serious threat to material well-being and feelings of national stability. Responses to the crisis registered in many sectors, including the cultural forma­ tion of literary modernism—a movement long marked by concern about the modern marketplace and mass culture. The abrupt economic downturn that engendered a loss of faith in fundamental American economic principles and social institutions prompted authors to reevaluate the concept of autonomy in defining relations between literature and social reality.2 Placing As I Lay Dying in this context shows Faulkner’s hand in this cultural work, as he responds to the prevailing condition of post-crash anxiety and, in so doing, undermines the claim to artistic...

Media, Ideology, and the Role of Literature in Pylon

Taylor Hagood Media, Ideology, and the Role of Literature in Pylon D espite the great variety of style and theme in William Faulkner’s oeuvre, his novel Pylon remains strangely unclassifiable, bizarre, mysterious, different.1 It broods in the very heart of his canon and seems as aloof, unapproachable, and recalcitrant as its author in his most introverted moods. Although undeniably an aberration, Pylon is impor­ tant in the ways in which it resembles Faulkner’s other works even as it differs from them. For while the novel neither examines the history of the United States South nor focuses on the intersections of the past and the present or even hints at the existence of Yoknapatawpha County, it nevertheless shares one important thing with Faulkner’s other mature novels: it traces and inter­ rogates the origins and appropriations of narrative. lust as Absalom, Absalom! chronicles the development of narratives and exposes the ideologies inherent in them, so Pylon focuses on the ways the actions of a group of barnstormers will be narrated and how the narratives that develop reflect and promote ide­ ology. But where Absalom, Absalom! primarily focuses on oral narrative, Pylon investigates the ways that media create and empower narratives for capitalist culture and its consumers. In so doing, Pylon raises questions not only about media but also about the role of literature itself in a world filled with media. Faulkner’s concern in the novel, and the dilemma that arises, is that of whether or not literature—which purports to be a form of expression that might ques­ tion and subvert the values of a dominant ideology—can actually escape the values of capitalistic ideology and the hegemonic forces that empower it. The functions of media and their connections to ideology have been the topic of much critical discussion.* 2 Through images, words, sounds, and other elements, media serve and promote ideologies and their value systems by natu­ ralizing them. As Bill Nichols writes, ideology “uses the fabrication of images and the processes of representation to persuade us that how things are is how they ought to be and that the place provided for us is the place we ought to have” (l).3 This creation of the sense of how things “ought to be” results from a maneuver in which media as representation usurp the material they allegedly 'I would like to thank Kevin Railey and Joseph R. Urgo for offering insightful comments and asking important questions regarding material in this essay. ’See Compaine and Gomery, Jansen, Nichols, and Thompson. ’Daniel R. Nicholson also uses this phrase “the way things ought to be” when describing the ways advertising helps create hegemony (175). 107 108 Taylor Hagood Media, Ideology, and the Role ofLiterature in Pylon represent in what Jean Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal.” In his essay, “Simula­ cra and Simulations,” Baudrillard discusses what he sees in the late 1970s as an “age of simulation,” the space of which “is no longer that of the real, nor of truth . . . [and which] begins with a liquidation of all referentials” (167). This “age” is unusual because whereas “representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as simulacrum” (170). Therefore, simulation “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (166). The representa­ tion thus precedes the real, or, as Baudrillard puts it, the situation is one of “precession of simulacra” (166). And media stand as the prime contributors to this hyperreality, at least in the United States: Mary Cross points out, for example, that advertising “has become our culture’s primary visual reference” (Introduction xii). The result ofhyperreality’s usurpation ofmaterial reality through media is that the ideologies that media both reflect and promote assume the status ofna­ ture. Where material (what Baudrillard would regard as the “real”) may exist as an empirical presence devoid of meaning and thus awaiting ideology to place it within a matrix of signification, the hyperreal would negate material altogether and can emerge already ensconced within an ideological framework, already endowed with meaning and significance...

Hot Bodies and "Barbaric Tropics": The U.S. South and New World Natures

As American Studies, founded at Harvard and not coincidentally grounded in New England paradigms, melds into a New World Studies boasting multiple points of origin but grounded increasingly in models derived from the Caribbean, scholarly attention is, to quote the title of Houston Baker's latest book, turning south again. After all, it is not Cambridge but Oxford, translated into the seat of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, that Gabriel García Márquez has depicted as having figurative "banks on the Caribbean Sea" (52-53). As he, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, V.S. Naipaul, and Edouard Glissant have variously noted, the U.S. South is tied tightly to postplantation cultures throughout the New World, and, with appropriate qualification, throughout much of the Third World or global south. This observation is not new among historians; Stanley Elkins' Slavery put the U.S. South in hemispheric context forty years ago, and Fuentes and Naipaul, at least, seem to have been influenced by C. Vann Woodward's contemporaneous arguments about southern typicality: Fuentes directly, and Naipaul through the poetry of James Applewhite. U.S. literary critics have been, in contrast, slow to follow the historians' lead, but almost overnight that situation has changed dramatically. A number of recent critical works remind us that the regions share a history of colonial plantations, race slavery, race mixing, vibrant African cultural survival, disappeared [End Page 104] bodies, a predilection for the baroque (as Alejo Carpentier defines it), poverty, state-sponsored right-wing terrorism, insular communities, creole nativism, and what Woodward famously called "the experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction" (Burden 190). 1 The nascent critical exploration of such commonalities is not about repositioning the U.S. South simply and predictably within a fashionable "margin" such as, for example, the "nuestra América" of José Martí. Rather, if as Ella Shohat has argued, postcolonial theory is better understood as "post-First/Third Worlds theory" (134), then the U.S. South—simultaneously center and margin, colonizer and colonized, global north and global south, essentialist and hybrid—represents a crucial locus for the development of such theory. For nearly two centuries it has shimmered—sublimely, seductively, uncannily—as both Self and Other not only before the narcissistic gaze of the imperial London or Boston metropole but also before the global-southern gaze of what Srinivas Aravamudan has recently called the tropicopolitan. As Fuentes once put it to a North American audience, Sinclair Lewis "is yours, and as such, interesting and important to us. William Faulkner is both yours and ours, and as such, essential to us" (qtd in Cohn 2).

“Liable to be anything”: The Creation of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August

Joe Christmas, the central figure of William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), is in many ways the archetypal character of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, largely because his engagement with so many regional and theoretical archetypes undermines the authority of any one of them while displaying dramatically their cumulative effect as a multiform, created life. Such is the complexity of his presence and role in Light in August and Yoknapatawpha, that he suggests himself strongly as a means of considering the personal manifestations of the county's sprawling network of readings and writings as a theoretical mass. Indeed, for one of the most apparent characters in Faulkner's work, in terms of the strength of his actions and their results, he is phenomenally hard to pin down; this, indeed, is at the root of many of his problems and the problems of those who try to define him. To an extreme extent, Christmas forces us to see creative activity on every level of the fictive process: Faulkner and his reader, Joe himself and the numerous interpreters he has in the novel, and, crucially, in the encounters and tensions between them. As such, he is a pertinent means of comprehending the analogous nature of the writing and reading to be found within Yoknapatawpha with that of the series of novels in which the county is sited. In attempting to understand Joe Christmas, therefore, we must abandon any hope of discovering any singular or defining answers, and engage with him on the dialogic terms he demands.

Faulkner and the politics of reading

With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicised interpretations on our understanding of achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon, Zender's searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism. Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. Politics of Incest challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of use of the incest motif, and Faulkner's Privacy defends the novelist's difficulty or reticence as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic Barn Burning critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity. The elegiac final chapter, Where is Yoknapatawpha County? draws on a comparison with John Updike's Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams's The Wintering to explore disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that stylistic withdrawal attempts to transform into his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to beauty will surely please, in the author's words, those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure. The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.

Rethinking the Social Role of the Militia: Community-Building in Antebellum Kentucky

IN REQUIEM FOR A NUN (1951) WILLIAM FAULKNER PERFORMS SOME literary backtracking when he introduces the earliest inhabitants of his fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, and explains the origin of the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse. His story, set in the 1830s, opens with the capture of a gang of ruffians: [A] gang--three or four--of Natchez Trace bandits ... [was] captured by chance by an incidental band of civilian militia and brought in to the Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the militia band being part of a general muster at Jefferson two days before for a Fourth-of-July barbecue, which by the second day had been refined by hardy elimination into one drunken brawling which rendered even the hardiest survivors vulnerable enough to be ejected from the settlement by the civilian residents[.] The story continues as Jefferson's residents struggle to find a suitable place to secure the miscreants, but of greater import for this study is the brief appearance of the local militia company. Faulkner's portrayal of the volunteer soldiers conforms to popular perceptions of the early national militia. Incompetent at best, dangerous at worst, militiamen usually appear in the historical narrative as buffoons who drank too much, poked each other with cornstalk weapons, and inevitably shot their commander in the backside with a rusty, antiquated musket. Caricatures of the overaccoutred captain and his clownish part-time charges are familiar to even casual scholars of the new republic. (1) Yet even in Faulkner's amusingly inept company of Yoknapatawpha more-or-less citizen-soldiers, there are hints of something more at work. The militia had mustered in preparation for the upcoming July Fourth celebration, an occasion that throughout the nation traditionally attracted in uniform. Militiamen frequently organized the day's activities, made patriotic speeches at the afternoon barbecue, and concluded the evening among their neighbors and friends with a long series of toasts. The Jefferson company also deemed it their duty to forego further entertainment and capture the wandering felons, upholding another responsibility generally ascribed to citizen-soldiers--the maintenance of civil order. The militiamen's appearance in Faulkner's tale bears one additional similarity to the traditional understanding of the militia's place in the early nineteenth century: it is peripheral and fleeting. Beyond stereotypes, little is known of the ways the militia affected American communities in the early republic. In his study of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Malcolm J. Rohrbough hints at the social influence of the militia, noting that musters were the largest gathering of people communities witnessed, where men would gather in small groups to play at politics, swap horses, engage in rough and tumble, debate the leading questions of the day (the price of land and crops), or simply exchange news. The actual breadth and diversity of militia activity suggest that a reassessment of its role in the early nineteenth century is in order. (2) The following pages attempt to demonstrate the social significance of citizen-soldiers to the evolution of Kentucky society from 1790 to 1850. Kentucky provides a number of conducive ingredients for this type of study. Most important is the timing of the state' s settlement and growth. Explored and settled in the 1770s and 1780s, the former Virginia county became a state in 1792 and entered the nineteenth century as one of the union's newest members. In the span of one generation, outposts like Fort Boonesborough and Bryant's Station gave way to burgeoning cities: Louisville pulled river trade off the Ohio, and Lexington became known as the Athens of the West, a center of social, political, and economic activity. This pattern of progress permits the examination of Kentucky's development from a scattering of frontier settlements to a mature network of thriving communities just sixty years later. …

Reading William Kennedy (review)

In Reading William Kennedy, Michael Patrick Gillespie adds to a small but growing body of literary criticism of contemporary novelist William Kennedy, the Albany-born writer made famous by his 1983 novel, Ironweed, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Kennedy's place in contemporary American fiction has been most firmly established by his "Albany cycle," a collection of independent but integrated novels centered around his hometown of Albany, New York. As Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha County, Kennedy creates an extended fictionalized history for his Albany, and he weaves his interconnecting plots and recurring characters—most famously, his street tough and politically savvy Irishmen—throughout seven novels, including the recently released Roscoe.

William Faulkner A to Z: the essential reference to his life and work

William Faulkner is remembered for novels and short stories that explore the intricate culture and tragic legacy of the American South. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, Faulkner created works - As I Lay Dying; Sound and The Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; Bear and many others - that are read and studied throughout the world. This book is a complete reference to his life, writings, and characters, as well as the people, events and ideas that influenced him as a person and a writer. More than 1500 cross-referenced entries include: synopses of Faulkner's fiction, poetry and non-fiction, with information on background, critical reception, and adaptions; descriptions of characters in his fiction; details of his friends, family, colleagues, and critics; places, real and fictional, important to Faulkner's life and literary development, from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi to Hollywood; and ideas and events that influenced his life and works, including race, time, the Civil War, and World War I.

William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha.

The world of Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines' imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses impact of built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how architecture of writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighbouring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both colour and black-and-white, beautifully complement text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure. Much has been written on role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and built environment - opposite of nature - have been virtually ignored.Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines writer's use of architectural modes - primitive, classical, gothic, and modern - to demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called the comedy and tragedy of being alive. Hines' gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.

Yoknapatawpha: Images and Voices

PHOTO ESSAY ìfoknapatawpha Images and Voices by George G. Stewart The Yoknapatawpha County ofWilliam Faulkner's major fiction, from Sartoris (Flags in the Dust) (1929) to Go Down, Moses (1942), is a dark world haunted by the past—particularly by the legacy of slavery— and paralyzed by obsession, violence, revenge, and defeat. Although interlaced with humor and acts ofcourage and sacrifice, it is essentially a tragic vision. When we read these novels and stories, the characters still convey vividly the timeless "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself"; but the models for these characters are dead, and the rural society they composed has changed significantly and, in several instances, ironically. Consequently, to be faithful to Faulkner's dark vision of a South before 1943, a photographer cannot usually mirror that world in the current north Mississippi social scene. Although after more than fifty years a local resident may appear on the streets ofnow cosmopolitan Oxford and seem to be stepping from the pages of the author's fiction, those remarkable occasions are rare. But there were monuments, locales, architecture, and landmarks in or near Lafayette and Tippah Counties that were definite or tangible images for Yoknapatawpha . Several ofthose still evocative objects and places have survived commercial progress, boosterism, historic preservation, and the ravages of time. The street runs on ahead, where the square opens and the monument stands before the courthouse. We mount again while the heads turn with that expression which we know; save Jewel. He does not get on, even though the wagon has started again. "Get in,Jewel," I say. . . . But he does not get in. Instead he sets his foot on the turning hub ofthe rear wheel, one hand grasping the stanchion, and with the hub turning smoothly under his sole he lifts the other foot and squats there, staring straight ahead, motionless, lean, wooden-backed, as though carved From As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Copyright ¡yp and renewed ipjS by William Faulkner. Reprinted bypermission ofRandom House, Inc. the courthouse centennial and serene above the town From Requiem tor a Nun by William Faulkner. Copyright iyyo, iyri by William Faulkner. Reprintedbypermission ofRandom House, Inc. 32 OEORQE Q. STEWART the thick, slow, black, unsunned streams almost without current, which once each year ceased to flow at all and then reversed, spreading, drowning the rich land and subsiding again, leaving it still richer. "'Delta Autumn"from Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner. Copyright 1942 by William Faulkner. Reprinted bypermission ofRandom House, Inc. Yoknapatawpha: Images and Voices 3 3 He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a litde in that gesture ofhaughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran and beyond it to the blue changeless hills From Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner. Copyright 1929 and renewed 19J7 h William Faulkner. Copyright ifj) by Random House, Inc. Reprinted bypermission of Random House, Inc. 34 QEORQE Q. STEWART "Never you mind," Dilsey said. "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin." . . . They reached the gate and entered. Immediately Ben began to whimper again, and for a while all of them looked up the drive at the square, paintless house with its rotting portico. From The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Copyright iy2y and renewed i^sy by William Faulkner. Reprinted bypermission ofRandom House, Inc. Yoknapatawpha: Images and Voices 3 5 he returned and I watched him clean the derringer and reload it and we learned that the dead man was almost a neighbor, a hill man . . . and we never to know if the man actually intended to rob Father or not because Father had shot too quick From The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. Copyright 1934, 19)% 19)6, 19)8 and renewed 1962, 196] by William Faulkner and 1964, 1966 by Fstelle Faulkner andfillFaulknerSummers. Reprinted bypermission ofRandom House, Inc. 36 QEORQE Q. STEWART a deep ditch which was a town landmark. The tops of...

Gossip and history: Nakagami, Faulkner, García Márquez

Abstract The writings of William Faulkner had been introduced to Japan before the war, then became popularized during the 1950s. While some Japanese writers read Faulkner as an exemplar of European Modernism and others, such as Oe Kenzaburō, might interpret his works as essentially American, it would be Nakagami Kenji's insight that Faulkner was fundamentally a writer of the South and that the South is a most mobile region. Nakagami attributed to his reading of Faulkner the discovery of gossip as a form of narration, one well suited to portray his particular reworking of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: the burakumin community of the roji alleyways. His reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez provided triangulation for the narrative project of depicting a culture of defeat. Nakagami's seemingly contradictory wager ‐ to out‐Faulkner Faulkner in the creation of a demonic patriarch at the centre of a peripheral, excluded community ‐ generated the figures of Akiyuki and his father Hamamura Ryūzō. Their confrontatio...

Phil Stone of Oxford: a vicarious life

An account of the influence on William Faulkner of his friendship with Phil Stone, who, in the first decades of their friendship, served as mentor, muse, patron, editor, agent and publicist to the writer and was one of his first biographers. Susan Snell suggests that Stone was one of Faulkner's principal character studies, and from his life came the raw material out of which Faulkner constructed an important part of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner also appropriated Stone's personality and profession to mirror, and sometimes to mask, his own insecurities. In Stone, Faulkner saw the Old South confronting 20th-century crucibles - the rapacious white lower classes, the Great Depression, and the first stirrings of the civil rights and women's movements. It is the story of a talented, complex man, bred for power in the declining era of southern patriarchy, who became mentally unstable in his final years.

The Yoknapatawpha Chronicle of Gavin Stevens.

Combining literary criticism and fiction, Crane assumes the narrative voice of one of William Faulkner's most omnipresent characters, county attorney Gavin Stevens, and interprets events in terms of their significance for the history of Yoknapatawpha county and thus for the entire canon of Faulkner's work. Thorough indexing and cross-referencing enables the reader to trace any character or series of events.

Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor

242 Western American Literature laconic westerner, they make a few words count, offering a wealth of sugges­ tions for further reading. Mary Austin’s poetically moving “The Walking Woman,” Ann Ahlswede’s realistic and yet hopeful “The Promise of the Fruit,” and Muller’s wry “Sweet Cactus Wine” are worth the book’s price. Certainly this is an excellent overview of women’s fictional views of the fron­ tier experience. MARY S. WEINKAUF Dakota Wesleyan University The Roll Away Saloon: Cowboy Tales of the Arizona Strip. By Rowland W. Rider, as told to Deidre Murray Paulsen. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985. 114 pages, $9.95 paper.) Western historians who accept Walter Prescott Webb’s ideas on the importance of the end of the open range in the 1880’s recognize that there were open areas in the West much later than that. Rider’sbook is evidence of this fact, thus fitting in with other books such as Dane Coolidge’s Texas Cow­ boys (1937), Arizona Cowboys (1938), and Old California Cowboys (1939). Rider’s range was the Arizona Strip, which lies along the border between Arizona and Utah, west of today’s Glen Canyon Dam and Marble Canyon. This territory was unfenced, as barbed wire had not yet reached the area. The Roll Away Saloon which traveled up and down this vast range was designed to escape the attentions of the Relief Society (the women’s organization of the Mormon church). Its owners would roll the saloon across the state line, away from its attackers. These stories present a picture unified by the storyteller’s retrospection— his memory of a land out of step with the industrial revolution, which he later supported as an engineer. Rider knew Butch Cassidy, Zane Grey, Theodore Roosevelt, and other famous people, but they are the least important aspects of Rider’s narrative. Cowboys are his focus. ORLAN SAWEY South Boston, Virginia Lake Wobegon Days. By Garrison Keillor. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. 337 pages, $17.95.) Although the quirky Minnesota surveyors failed to include it in the official state survey, Lake Wobegon can be located on an appropriate map. Look well north of Yoknapatawpha County, east of Tilbury Town and Winesburg, north of Spoon River somewhere between Gopher Prairie and Zenith, not far from the Yellow Brick Road. Here you will find the Norwegian bachelor Reviews 243 farmers, the Nordic Lutherans, the German Catholics, and the nineteen Sanctified Brethren who make up the population (942), plus the establish­ ments and landmarks around which their lives revolve : the Sons of Knute Lodge, Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, the Chatterbox Cafe, the Sidetrack Tap, the Co-op grain elevator, the Prairie Home Cemetery, the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian. Life here is lived deliberately. The town motto is “Sumus quod sumus” (We are what we are). Pretension has no place in the local scale of values: “Left to our own devices, we Wobegonians go straight for the small potatoes. Majestic doesn’t appeal to us; we like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.” Wobegonians are anti-hype. They eschew the neighboring shopping malls and supermarkets to shop at home, in, for example, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where “if you can’t find it, you can probably get along without it.” Capitalism has been kept to scale in Lake Wobegon. The motto at Bob’sBank is “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” The pace of life is tied to the seasons; the agrarian rhythms come from nature. As literary proprietor and curator of nostalgia, Keillor lingers lovingly over the memories, reflections, and imaginative constructs that make up his world—and reflect the full range of human experience. Here is God’s plenty once again. These casual but vividly rendered tales prove that we all grew up separately together and that the experience was funny, sad, and usually more profound than we knew. Returning to these experiences through Keillor’s masterful narrative helps us to learn what we might have missed the first time around. M. GILBERT PORTER University of Missouri-Columbia All’s Normal Here: A Charles Bukowski Primer. Edited by Loss Pequeno Glazier. (Fremont...

The Toponymy of Middle–Earth

Place-names are more than a device to let us conveniently refer to locations; they are also a technique for binding us and the land together. land was ours, said Robert Frost, we were the land's. Before we can belong to a place, before we can have the sense of home and of fitting in, we must know the place so intimately that we have a first-name speaking acquaintance with it. To pass through a place without knowing or using its name is truly to be a stranger in a strange land. Thus the study of place-names, .to which Edward Ehrensperger devoted so much of his attention and which he fostered with loving care, is no mere academic exercise nor simply a hobby for underemployed country rectors. It is rather an effort to help us understand how we come to be the land's, how we belong. The bonds of place-names are in space and in time and in the psyches of those who belong to the land. As places in the real world must be named so that we can be a part of their reality, so must places in fictional worlds. Mainstream fiction characteristically is set in real places to increase the sense of verisimilitude that is the aim of such fiction. And even when the setting is not an actual place, it is intended to fit in as closely as possible with real-world features, in both topography and toponymy. A knowledge of place-names and a detailed vision of the physical features of the place are mutually reinforcing ways of coming to belong to it. Thomas Hardy's Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and Sinclair Lewis's Zenith are not places in the real world, but they certainly might be. We know approximately where they are, and we know exactly what they are like.