Word: yoknapatawphaed
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...mythical island of Shakespeare's Tempest, the forces of human bestiality, which raged so freely in his earlier tragedies, are held peacefully in check by the benign white magic of Prospero. Now, in Yoknapatawpha County, an equally mythical but heretofore relentlessly dark and bloody portion of Mississippi, a similarly pacific sea change has taken place. Evil still exists there, but it makes no serious headway. No one is raped. No one is lynched. No one is murdered...
...engaging fellow. Like an old man gossiping on the back stoop, he delights in sentimental recollection, revels in his role as a teller of tall tales, at which only Mark Twain is his equal. Above all, Faulkner carries on the flagrant, 30-year love affair he has had with Yoknapatawpha County and its ornery, enduring and, until now, doom-ridden people...
...time is 1905, and the principal character in the story is a Winton Flyer, one of the first automobiles ever seen in Yoknapatawpha County. Its owner is old Lucius ("Boss") Priest, a member of the cadet branch of the county's first families (the Edmondses and McCaslins), but its proud chauffeur is Boon Hogganbeck, the childlike, "tough, faithful, brave and completely unreliable" part Indian who be came famous in The Bear for not being able to hit anything with a shotgun, rifle or weapon of any kind...
...back home in Jefferson again. In a series of outlandishly comic episodes, they have somehow lost the car and won it back, found a stolen horse and raced it, spent an innocent night in a Memphis bordello run by young Miss Reba, the madam who, some 25 years later (Yoknapatawpha time), was to figure in the downfall of Temple Drake in Sanctuary...
...disorder with a powerful, paradoxical image of salvation: the black earth-mother hanged on a flimsy white flibbertigibbet. But on the whole, Producer Richard (son of Darryl) Zanuck's attempt to clean up Faulkner for the family seems a bit like trying to smear the whole of Yoknapatawpha County with underarm deodorant. It might just possibly be done, but it sure does seem a peculiar thing...