Word: faulkner
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Sartoris v. Snopes. The other Faulkner world is the one he has made his own: mythical Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, a landscape haunted by an unsettled past and an unwanted future. The past survives in the memory of the old South, its code of courage and chivalry, its moral stain of slavery. The future is the creeping new world of Northern commerce and industry; in Faulkner's view, it promises to make life impersonal, mechanized and "depthless...
...Faulkner's instinctive sympathies are with the founders of the Sartoris clan, who tamed the country and fought in the Civil War. But he realizes that their way of life is dead forever, largely because they allowed it to be corrupted by slavery. Some of Faulkner's most viciously satirical passages are directed against the sickly remnants-the gentlemen who drink morning toddies while the floors beneath them are visibly rotting away. At the same time, he desperately hates the hard-souled, faceless Snopeses, whose only purpose in life is to accumulate money. In the present-day South...
North & South. This view of the South as an area trapped between Sartoris impotence and Snopes viciousness explains Faulkner's harshness and fury. He is a man possessed and tortured by his vision: too honest to deny it, too sensitive to tolerate it. The horrors of his books-the rapes and castrations, the incestuous romances and idiot flirtations with cows-fall into place, not as exhibits of sensationalism, but instead as images of the social and moral disease that he is constantly probing...
...taken as realistic reporting of Southern life, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga makes little sense. It is based on his lifelong devotion to the Mississippi scene, but it is no mere copy of that scene. Rather it is a grotesque, symbolic version, in which the dimensions of reality are wildly distorted to make them more vivid. Sometimes, his writing seems almost like a prolonged hallucination-a hallucination crowded with extraordinary characters and violent actions. Moreover, for any Northerner to believe that Faulkner's world is limited to the South would be complacent provincialism. When Faulkner describes his Yoknapatawpha County...
Often enough, in his furious haste to get things down on paper and his weakness for pyrotechnics, Faulkner trips over his own inventiveness. His tales of violence then become preposterous and cheap; his livid rhetoric creates a verbal log jam, with prepositions flying wild, clauses drifting crazily and parentheses multiplying like rabbits. But when he is really in command of his story (about half the time), Faulkner makes his rhetoric work for him, even when it is full of echoes of Ciceronian oratory and of overripe Elizabethan poetry...