Word: yoknapatawphaed
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Canards have so persisted that many untraveled Americans might be surprised to learn that millions of Southerners hate grits and could not quote the King James if threatened with hellfire. Scholars often fail to see that actual Mississippi is related to Yoknapatawpha County only as the tones of the musical scales are related to the symphonies of Beethoven. Even the grating H.L. Mencken did not manage to cut through the spoon bread. After a smart assessment of the Sahara of the beauxarts, Mencken paused to mourn the passing of a more "cultured" South that existed only in legend...
With his fictional Colombian town of Macondo, Garcia Márquez created a Latin American Yoknapatawpha in which grubby fact and mythological fantasy mingled into what can loosely be called magic realism. His new novel is a more circumscribed, grimmer and more obscure work. Its setting-mainly the presidential palace of a nameless South American country-shows a little less Faulkner and a little more Kafka. The Castle, with a high temperature-humidity index, comes to mind...
...great art was possible-even likely-from such material, not much in fact resulted, at least until the 1920s when William Faulkner began cultivating Yoknapatawpha County, the patch of "rich deep black alluvial soil" that was alike his invention and his home. Suddenly, a whole generation of Southerners saw the ground beneath their feet for what it could be: a foothold on the universe. Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, early Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor-for close to 40 years, the line of inspired Southern writers seemed inexhaustible. Critics...
...American flavor to O'Hara's fictional world. His best writing deals with his roots--the section of northeastern Pennsylvania called "The Region," where anthracite coal is mined. But in all fairness, O'Hara's evocation of life in Latenengo County cannot match up to Faulkner's treatment of Yoknapatawpha County or Hemingway's States-based fiction about the Florida Keys...
...surprisingly, one of the major influences on contemporary U.S. fiction. But the Latin appetite for the big bite has in recent years produced one unquestionable masterpiece: in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez completely and gloriously occupied his mythical territory of Macondo, a tropical Yoknapatawpha...