William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was a Mississippi born novelist, who was a quiet and private man who once observed, It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from society. Known for his distinctive voice and his evocative depictions of life in the American South, Nobel laureate William Faulkner is recognized as one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.

The myth of Yoknapatawpha

Yoknapatawpha is a fictional place created by William Faulkner, his intact world of the North- Central Mississippi as the setting of his novels. Most of Faulkners body of work is set primarily in the mythological county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. Of the nineteen novels, only five are set elsewhere, and even these sometimes touch its borders. Yoknapatawpha actually corresponds to the actual Lafayette County, though differing in some details. Yoknapatawpha has given its name to a cycle of interconnected major novels and some minor works set there, beginning with SARTORIS (1929) and continuing through The SOUND AND THE FURY (1929), AS I LAY DYING (1930), LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932), ABSALOM, ABSALOM! (1936), The HAMLET (1940), GO DOWN, MOSES (1942), The TOWN (1957), The MANSION (1959), and The REIVERS (1962). In response to a question about his fictional county, during a class session at the UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA where he was writer in residence, Faulkner mentioned that Yoknapatawpha is a Chickasaw Indian word meaning water runs slow through flat land. But the term, a combination of two Chickasaw wordsYaakni and patafa means land or earth that has been ripped or cut open for disemboweling. Faulkner first identifies Yoknapatawpha County by name in As I Lay Dying Yoknapatawpha is a self-contained world of rich bottomlands, broad cotton fields, eroded hills, and pine barrens peopled by Chickasaw Indians and African-American slaves, plantation masters, defeated Confederates, indomitable spinsters, and poor, white hill farmers. Charlatans, thieves, and rascals jostle with honest, hard-working folk. In time, the Yoknapatawpha saga spans roughly 170 years. It starts from the establishment of a Chickasaw agency and trading post on the future site of Jefferson, Mississippi, before 1800, and extends to 1961. In content, it deals with the Native American tradition, early exploration and settlement, the rise of the plantation system, the Civil War, the emancipation of slaves and Reconstruction, the decline of the planter aristocracy, and the machine and commercial culture of the modern erathe transformation of the Compson Mile of the 1830s into the Eula Acres subdivision of the decade following World War II.

Faulkner developed the grand design of Yoknapatawpha over 30 years. He sketched the outlines of his legendary place in Sartoris, his third novel. In Absalom, Absalom! The novelist drew a map of his fictional county, signing himself William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor. He prepared a second map for the Viking Presss The PORTABLE FAULKNER (1946). The Absalom sketch gives Yoknapatawpha County an area of 2,400 square miles, with a population of 6,298 whites and 9,313 Negroes. The fictional county is more than three times larger than Lafayette County, with only two-thirds of Lafayettes population; nor did the real place ever have a black majority. The TALLAHATCHIE RIVER forms the northern boundary of Faulkners Yoknapatawpha; the YOCONA RIVER delimits the county on the south. There are no formal eastern or western boundaries. According to the critic MALCOLM COWLEY, writing in the Saturday Review in April 1946, Faulkner performed a labour of imagination that has not been equalled in our time, and a double labour: first, to invent a Mississippi county that was like a mythical kingdom, but was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha stand as a parable or legend of all the Deep South. The Yoknapatawpha chronicles present a whole society and its history. Cumulatively they build up a mythology by which that society and its culture may be interpreted, a mythology covering the history of the county and of the chief families and the lives of individual heroes and heroines. There have been widely varied attempts for interpreting the apocryphal county. Gabriel Vahanian termed Faulkner's world "a historical map of the Christian tradition" and "a spiritual geography of Christendom. There is a widely accepted interpretation that Faulkners Yoknapatawpha is a social microcosm of the American South. Malcolm Cowley and Elizabeth. M. Kerr supported this notion. Phillip C. Muehrcke and Juliana 0. Muehrcke, wrote in Geographical Review that "Faulkner created his county to contain the essence of Mississippi and of the South." Charles. S. Aiken, Professor of Geography in University of Tennessee holds that Faulkner regarded his county as a place within the South and not as South in miniature. The novelist once called his imaginary Mississippi County a kind of keystone of the universe. If it were taken away, he went on to say, The universe itself would collapse. Faulkner did not deviate from the usual account of the Southern social structure as it existed before the Civil War in his Yoknapatawpha novels, which depicted a tripartite division. There were Negro slaves, wealthy plantation owners and poorer whites. Though the other two factions dominate Faulkners fiction, much of his Yoknapatawpha novels presented the poorer whites. Most of them lived by small farming and they were represented as being in general a shiftless and illiterate group of people. The majority of them were Southern Protestants. Faulkner presented Southern Protestantism not only as a baleful force but as a stable religion which has its own power and dignity. A common denominator of the poor whites throughout these novels is that they are indeed poor. The South as a whole was wretchedly poor, upper classes as well as lower classes, right on from the Civil War period to the Second World War period. Even the so-called

aristocracy, according to Faulkners picture, had little wealth. The Compsons, for example, in 1909, had to sell land in order to afford Quentins Harvard education. Cleanth Brooks points out that the early career of William Faulkner was essentially that of a young romantic Southern boy, whose imagination was filled with tales of knights and damsels, with landscapes of fauns and nymphs dancing to pastoral music. However, the pedestrian realism of some of the American authors- especially T. S. Eliot- grated on his early romantic sensibility. Faulkners invention of the Yoknapatawpha County was crucial to his writing career. His mythical county provided him with a social context in which what was healthiest in his romanticism could live in fruitful tension with his realistic and detailed knowledge of the men and manners of his own land. On one hand, his imaginary nymphs and fauns could take on flesh and blood in Yoknapatawpha. On the other hand, the realistic, earthly life of Yoknapatawpha could be invested with an aura of imagination, a mythic quality to what would otherwise have proved to be drab. So, it could be said that Yoknapatawpha saved the novelists losing himself in a baseless dream world, by making a medium of both realism and romanticism. The creation of Yoknapatawpha County implies a dualism central to the works of William Faulkner. Yoknapatawpha, Faulkners fictional reconstruction of the American South and the land of his birth, expresses his dramatization of what he understood as reality. This involved an awareness of the distinction of a modern society, reified in its history and institutions from an older order of myth and tradition. The creation of Yoknapatawpha was a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. This dualism of order and disorder, art and reality creates the dual perspective of Faulkners fiction which views experience as at once meaningless and significant. This dichotomy helps to define the basic premises of Faulkners fictional world by identifying the conflict between the autonomy of the artist and his immersion in history; his power to create an imaginary world free from the constraints of reality and the spatial and temporal coordinates that bind him to that reality. India has its own counterpart of Yoknapatawpha in the form of R. K. Narayans Malgudi, a literary microcosm of India. Malgudi, the fictitious town in which all of Narayans stories are set, has often been described as the quintessential Indian small-town. Situated on the banks of the Sarayu and surrounded by the Memphi hills, Malgudi has bee compared over the years by various critics to Gabriel Garcia Marquezs Macondo and Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County and Thomas Hardys Wessex. As is also the case of Faulkners novels, we can find a progression in Narayans novels from earlier works in which he is exploring his fictional world, to middle works in which he is addressing his major themes, to later works in which he expresses a spiritual vision. Other versions of Yoknapatawpha also exist, the major among which is Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oes own Yoknapatawpha which he created out of his homeland. Faulkners mythic Yoknapatawpha has become a permanent feature of the worlds literary geography, a suffering, defeated place, a haunt of grotesque and villainous

Snopeses and Sutpens, with a troubled heritage of slavery and war. But it is an enduring and timeless place too, peopled with ordinary men and women such as Dilsey Gibson, V. K. Ratliff, and Isaac (Ike) McCaslin who rise to heroic stature and in whom hope has not died.