Word: yoknapatawphaed
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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...
...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...
Faulkner's detective-hero, Gavin Stevens, is a small-town Mississippi lawyer with gritty common sense and a shrewd insight into poor-white psychology that enables him to unravel his county's crimes. Up to a point he is both likeable and credible-a Yoknapatawpha County Sherlock Holmes-but Faulkner runs him to the ground by overloading him with unnecessary and undemonstrated learning ("a Harvard graduate . . . who could discuss Einstein with college professors") and with too much folksy moralizing...