Faulkner's Geographies

By Jay Watson and Ann J. Abadie

The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkner's literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his “apocryphal” county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner's artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner's Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkner's writings.

Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkner's imagination of north Mississippi's geography; the emergence of “micro-Souths” as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkner's fiction; the enlistment of the author's work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner's Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation; the unique intersection of regional and metropolitan geographies that Faulkner encountered as a novice writer immersed in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement; and the circulation of Caribbean and “Black South” spaces and itineraries through Faulkner's masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom!

By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkner's Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jun 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496802286

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Local Places/Modern Spaces: The Crossroads Local in Faulkner

BARBARA LADD

Faulkner’s relationships with geography were complex. Depending on whom you ask, he is or is not a Southern writer. He once wrote that I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and dont have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.¹ Although he wrote very perceptively about the South, few would call him a regionalist, because that is a minoritizing term in US literary history, and very few would call Faulkner a minor writer. This is not so much the case in Latin America, where regionalism carries different associations and stronger political inflections, but here in the United States regionalist writing, at least until fairly recently, has been largely understood to be limited, bounded, descriptive of life within a distinct region—sometimes a matter of local color composed, in the words of Carl Van Doren (who was obviously thinking of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regionalism) of skimpy moods analyzed with a delicate competence of touch and leading to what he famously called a revolt from the village in the writing of men like Sinclair Lewis.² Of course, there is no one regionalism. In addition to the local color of which Van Doren was writing, there is the work of the Southwestern humorists of the 1830s through the 1850s, which no one would describe as possessing anything resembling a delicate competence of touch. Mississippi was certainly at the very center of the old Southwest, and there have been numerous discussions of the influence of Southwestern humor on Faulkner’s work, a lot of them focusing on The Hamlet.³ Also of relevance to Faulkner, and less often acknowledged, is the regionalism of those twentieth-century writers of the long 1930s, broadly aligned with movements in architecture and art led by Frank Lloyd Wright and Grant Wood, the latter of whom published a manifesto of sorts entitled, in a jab at Van Doren, Revolt against the City. There are still other regionalisms as well. It is tempting to speculate that there is, at present, something akin to the local color of the late nineteenth century in what we might call a global local color project, and it might be interesting to compare the regionalist publishing agenda of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to that of contemporary publishing in the area of global fiction, but this is not my purpose here.⁴

In any event, most academics within the US academy understand Southern literature (which, of course, Faulkner is assumed to transcend) as a regionalist form, although I have heard that contested by those who say that the US South—unlike the Northeast, Midwest, or West—has produced a major literature distinct from mainstream American literature and is therefore something other than regional. Personally, I would rather tackle the matter from the other side and say that American literature is so varied that to speak of a mainstream confuses more than it clarifies. More to the point, the predominance of regionalism as paradigm for the recognition of the importance of place in US literary studies has sometimes distorted, more than it has clarified, the nature and the significance of place in US imaginative writing, because what regionalism does, given its history in the United States, is to subordinate the engagement with place to other, more privileged, discourses like literary nationalism, class, gender, urbanity, or cosmopolitanism. Seeing regionalisms in terms of resistance does not change that