William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha

by Thomas S. Hines

Overview

The world of William Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines's imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses the impact of the built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how the architecture of the writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects the actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighboring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both color and black-and-white, beautifully complement the text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure. Much has been written on the role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and the built environment—the opposite of nature—have been virtually ignored. Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines the writer's use of architectural modes—primitive, classical, gothic, and modern—to demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating the power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called "the comedy and tragedy of being alive." Hines's gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.

Author Biography: Thomas S. Hines is Professor of History and of Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many published works are Burnham ofChicago: Architect and Planner (1974) and Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (1982). A recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and NEH fellowships, he was elected in 1994 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520328808
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/22/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	35 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

"THE PURLIEUS OF ELEGANCE"

The Development of Faulkner's Architectural Consciousness

He was born William Cuthbert Falkner on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, east of Oxford, where his father was working for the family-owned railroad, founded by his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, for whom he was named. In the 1920s, for reasons that have never become entirely clear, the second William added a "u" to the family surname. Soon after his birth, the family moved back to Ripley, the ancestral home, northeast of Oxford, where they lived for four years, and then in 1902, when William was five, they moved permanently to Oxford (Fig. 1). After moving through Oxford's public schools, he briefly attended the University of Mississippi and there, to his friend and classmate Ben Wasson, he indicated his already well-formed interest in the observation and criticism of architecture. "More than once," Wasson recalled, "Faulkner pointed out to me the 'bastard qualities' of the [Ole Miss] buildings and said that the Lyceum Building was the best on the campus" (Fig. 2). With its good overall Greek quality, Faulkner declared, it possessed purity and serenity. In this vein, Faulkner must also have admired the Palladian elegance of the nearby Barnard Observatory (1859; Fig. 3).(1)

Faulkner then left Oxford and ventured out, first to Canada during World War 1, then briefly to New Orleans in the early 19205, and then in 1925 to Europe, where he had a traditional Wanderjahr with his friend, the architect William Spratling. Spratling had been commissioned to do sketches of various European buildingsfor publication in Architectural Forum, and Faulkner was with him on many of those expeditions, observing the buildings and the drawings in progress. The trip abroad affected him greatly and would show up in his work the rest of his life.(2)

From Milan, for example, he sent his mother a postcard describing the Piazza del Duomo in words that he would later use, almost verbatim, in the long story "Elmer" (Fig. 4). It was an early example of Faulkner's talent for interpreting architectural mood and detail: They sat drinking beer within the shadow of the cathedral, gazing upward among its mute and musical flanks from which long-bodied, doglike gargoyles strained yapping in a soundless, gleeful derision, where niched were mitred cardinals like Assyrian kings and lean martyrs pierced dying in eternal ecstasy and young unhelmeted knights staring into space.(3)

Faulkner's memories of Paris would also find their way into several stories and especially into the poignant last pages of Sanctuary, where he demonstrated his consciousness of the city's physical and cultural landscape, as his doomed heroine, Temple Drake, sat pondering her stained Mississippi past: It had been a gray day, a gray summer, a gray year. On the street old men wore overcoats, and in the Luxembourg Gardens ... the women sat knitting in shawls and even the men playing croquet played in coats and capes, and in the sad gloom of the chestnut trees the dry click of balls, the random shouts of children, had that quality of autumn, gallant and evanescent and forlorn. From beyond the circle with its spurious Greek balustrade, clotted with movement filled with a gray light of the same color and texture as the water which the fountain played into the pool, came a steady crash of music.(4)

Upon returning to America, Faulkner lived a while longer in New Orleans, where he was especially influenced by the older writer Sherwood Anderson, then living in the French Quarter. In his second novel, Mosquitoes, a satire on the habitues of his and Anderson's circle, the young writer composed occasionally resonant sentences that predicted the Faulkner to come, especially in his keen attention to architecture: Outside the window, New Orleans, the vieux carre, brooded in a faintly tarnished languor, like an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways (Fig. 5). In a related passage, a character peered across Jackson Square, across stenciled palms and Andrew Jackson in childish effigy bestriding the terrific, arrested plunge of his curly, balanced horse, toward the long ... Pontalba building and three spires of the cathedral graduated by perspective, pure and slumberous beneath the decadent languor of August and evening (Fig. 6).(5)

Much later in his career, though earlier in Yoknapatawpha's history, Faulkner trenchantly contrasted the mid-nineteenth-century sophistication of urbane New Orleans with that of neighboring backwoods Mississippi, when in Absalom, Absalom! young Henry Sutpen visits the city with his University of Mississippi classmate, Charles Bon, his soul mate, half-brother, and probable lover. In densely erotic and seductive prose, which confirmed a decade's progression in his art, Faulkner evoked the way that the exotic Charles took the innocent and negative plate of Henry's provincial soul and intellect and exposed it by slow degrees to this esoteric milieu, building gradually toward the picture which he desired it to retain, accept. I can see him corrupting Henry gradually into the purlieus of elegance, with no foreword, no warning, the postulation to come after the fact, exposing Henry slowly to the surface aspect—the architecture a little curious, a little femininely flamboyant and therefore to Henry opulent, sensuous, sinful; the inference of great and easy wealth measured by steamboat loads in place of a tedious inching of sweating human figures across cotton fields; the flash and glitter of myriad carriage wheels, in which women, enthroned and immobile and passing rapidly across the vision, appeared like painted portraits beside men in linen a little finer and diamonds a little brighter and in broadcloth a little trimmer and with hats raked a little more above faces a little more darkly swaggering than any Henry had ever seen before...(6)

Anderson recognized Faulkner's talent, but he doubted that the city was his metier. "You're a country boy," he told him, and "all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from" (Plate 1, Fig. 7). And long after that, Faulkner indeed realized that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal, I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top (Fig. 8).(7)

With his third novel, Sartoris, Faulkner half-consciously began his Yoknapatawpha chronicle. One of the most vivid areas in which he sublimated the actual into apocryphal in that novel and throughout the saga was in the realm of architecture, landscape, and material culture. Indeed, in his long oeuvre, his treatment of architecture encompassed six large categories: folk vernacular, neoclassical, neo-Gothic, High Victorian, and modernist, as well as the related art of public sculpture. In those categories, Faulkner used architecture to help him center and focus his narrative, to evoke mood and ambience, to demarcate caste and class, and to delineate character.

YOU ARE NOT I
A Portrait of Paul Bowles

---

By MILLICENT DILLON

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Millicent Dillon. All rights reserved.
TAILER

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Acknowledgments	xi
Preface	xii
Introduction: "Time and Its Furniture"	1
One "The Purlieus of Elegance":
The Development of Faulkner's Architectural Consciousness	6
Two "A Just and Holy Cause":
The Public Sculpture of Yoknapatawpha	16
Three "Of Secret and Violent Blood":
The Indian Mounds of Yoknapatawpha	21
Four "Alien Yet Inviolably Durable":
The Folk Architecture of Yoknapatawpha	24
Five "The Aspirations and the Hopes":
The Greek Revival of Yoknapatawpha	45
Six "Immolated Sticks and Stones":
The Gothic Revival and Its Kindred Modes	75
Seven "A Kind of Majesty":
The Postbellum Architecture of Victorian Yoknapatawpha	88
Eight "Spacious, Suave, Sonorous, and Monastic":
The Modernist Architecture of Yoknapatawpha	103
NineConclusion: "Each in Its Ordered Place"	122
Appendix: A Letter to My Son	128
Notes	148
Selected Bibliography	153
Illustration Credits	157
Index	158