Thomas S. Hines is Professor of History and of Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many published works are Burnham of Chicago: 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.

William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha

By Thomas Hines

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Thomas Hines
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520202937
Introduction
"Time and its Furniture"

In Faulkner's second novel, Mosquitoes , a character leaned nearer to see the paper. It was a single sheet of a Sunday magazine section: a depressing looking article in small print about Romanesque architecture. . . . "Are you interested in architecture?" she asked intensely. . . . "So many people waste their time over things like architecture and such. It's much better to be a part of life, don't you think . . . than to make your life barren through dedicating it to an improbable and ungrateful posterity. Don't you think so?" "I hadn't thought about it." Pete said cautiously .1

Yet Faulkner clearly had thought about it. He believed that the art of architecture—like the art of literature—was indeed a "part of life" and did contribute to the culture and civilization of a not "ungrateful posterity." Architecture was important to Faulkner personally. He had an eye and a feeling for the form, function, and meaning of buildings in his actual surroundings, and he used those elements of his Mississippi environment as the models for the architecture of his invented world: the town of "Jefferson" and the county of "Yoknapatawpha." He gave five of his novels titles with architectural implications: Sanctuary, Pylon, The Hamlet, The Mansion , and The Town . The original, discarded title of both Light in August and Absalom, Absalom ! was Dark House . Many of his stories have architecturally suggestive titles and themes, and architects appear as characters and symbols throughout the work.

Faulkner's fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty once insisted that "place has a more lasting identity than we have . . . fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the cross-roads of circumstance." And of all the masters in the history of literature, Faulk-

ner was one of the greatest in his ability to see, to evoke, to explicate, to use the details and the essences of the physical environment. In his sense of place, of genius loci, he was equalled, in the English-speaking world, only by Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Henry James. "It sometimes seems to me," observed Malcolm Cowley of Yoknapatawpha in The Portable Faulkner , "that every house or hovel has been described in one of Faulkner's novels." 2

Much has been said and written on the ubiquity of nature in Faulkner's work—the woods, the bear, the natural landscape—but relatively little has been done on Faulkner's equally great interest in the built environment, the opposite of nature, as symbol and metaphor of larger issues, attitudes, and moods. There is, in fact, throughout Faulkner criticism a puzzling imbalance between the attention given to nature and that given to architecture. This is unfortunate, since "novelistic architecture," according to critic William Ruzicka, "has much to say about the way that characters view the world they inhabit, the effect of the fictive environment upon those who live within it, the image and significance of a fictive place, and the meaning of dwelling there." 3

Historian Joel Williamson recognized that "Faulkner early evolved a symbology in which buildings stood for artificial, man-made institutions and the 'outdoors' stood for the natural order. In his stories, doors and door frames, windows and window frames became especially important. His characters were forever looking in or looking out, crawling in or crawling out of windows. They passed in and out of doors, faced closed doors and locked doors, and plunged through, paused, rested, or sat in doorways. Very often to go into a house or building was to attempt to enter the modern world and deal with it on its own terms, to go out was to abandon that effort and seek salvation in nature. Stairs, porches, chimneys, and attics also had easily understood meanings." 4 Yet it could also be argued that nature in Faulkner often represents not order but rather its opposite, and that to escape nature's wild and scary chaos, one could sometimes find shelter and comfort only in architecture and the built environment, which in fact seem to stand for order, sanity, and serenity. On another level, instead of representing the "modern world," architecture, particularly older buildings, could seem in Faulkner's cosmos to be a protective retreat from the stressful demands of modern life.

While cultural and architectural historians have done reasonable justice to the certified monuments and the great urban centers, they have had more trouble getting at the essence of the small, rural, parochial places. Perhaps Faulkner and other writers of what is called "fiction" can, through their particular kind of imaginative probing, help to locate and explicate the sense and meaning, the smell and ambience of the more elusive, more anonymous architectures of the "Jeffersons" of the world.

The historian Hayden White has made useful observations on the problems of literary classification and overclassification. Historians, he acknowledges, are concerned primarily with events that were at some point observable or perceivable and which can be assigned to a specific time and place, whereas "imaginative" writers—poets, playwrights, and especially novelists—are concerned with those kinds of events as well as imagined or invented ones. White insists that "viewed simply as verbal artifacts, histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another . . . unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of 'reality." The novelist may present his notion of this reality indirectly, that is to say, by figurative techniques, rather than directly, which is to say, by registering a series of propositions which are supposed to correspond point by point to some extratextual domain of occurrence or happening, as the historian claims to do. But the image of reality which the novelist thus constructs is meant to correspond in its general outline to some domain of human experience which is no less 'real' than that referred to by the historian. It is not then a matter of conflict between two kinds of truth," White concludes, between the historian's truth of correspondence and the novelist's truth of coherence. "Every history must meet standards of coherence no less than those of correspondence if it is to pass as a plausible account of 'the way things really were.'" A similar duality is suggested in the title, and the text, of an article by the psychoanalyst and historian Erik Erikson: "Psychological Reality and Historical Actuality."5

Still, Faulkner's Chick Mallison, in Knight's Gambit , may have been speaking for the author himself in his obvious partiality to the truth-telling prerogatives of fiction. It was, he asserted, only in literature that the paradoxical . . . anecdotes in the history of a human heart can be juxtaposed and annealed by art into verisimilitude and credibility . Speaking in the voice of another alter ego, Faulkner confirmed this sentiment by insisting that poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it .6

Whatever the relative significance of nature and architecture in Faulkner's world, the element that most pervaded his cosmos and his consciousness, that both linked and differentiated nature and architecture, was the crucial element of time, or of what physicist Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity called "the fourth dimension." Faulkner's obsession with time was in fact the quality that most linked him with history and which, in turn, has most attracted historians to his work. While history has been

called the most eclectic of disciplines, substantively and methodologically exploiting whatever seems to provide that necessary quotient of coherence and correspondence, the medium, the essence, the sine qua non of historical enquiry, the element that distinguishes it from all other disciplines, is its commitment to the primacy of time and its attributes: sequence, precedence, and consequence.

Critic Elizabeth Kerr has observed that philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of time, which Faulkner acknowledged as applicable to his own, underlay the novelist's fusion of past and present and "prevented him from conceiving of different periods as discrete units. The tendency of the South to live in the past and to be preoccupied with family and tradition may have predisposed Faulkner to feel that no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is ."7

As compared, moreover, with the Bergsonian insistence on the undifferentiated flux of time, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space linked time with space in a manner with which Faulkner should have felt an even greater affinity. As an auxiliary branch of psychoanalysis Bachelard coined and defined the term "topoanalysis" as "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being's stability—a being who does not want to melt away and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to 'suspend' its flight. In its countless alveoli, space contains compressed time. That is what space is for." And in a related sentiment from Sartoris , Faulkner had Narcissa Benbow muse upon the prematurely shortened life of young John Sartoris, killed in a plane crash. He had, she thought, not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it . As one of Faulkner's more pregnant phrases, time and its furniture held prescient implications for the relationship in his world of time and architecture. 8

Furniture itself also intrigued Faulkner as a poignant reminder of complex historical currents. Patricia Brown Young, for example, the daughter of his close Oxford friends Ross and Maggie Brown, still slept in the four-poster bed in which her great-great-grandmother, Minerva Hynes Cook, had died from the gunshot wound inflicted by a Union soldier, who had invaded her home near Vicksburg on April 3, 1865. A large bullet hole in the bed's headboard silently testified to the violent event. In 1954, Faulkner made a point of taking a visiting northern friend out in the country to the Youngs' house to show him the bed. Pointing to the bullet hole, he remarked to the visitor: This is why the war will never be over. This happened to this girl's family .9

As opposed to the relative atemporality of nature, architecture and its accoutrements possessed for Faulkner the qualities of both temporality and timelessness. On the one hand, architecture was drenched with time; on the other, it transcended time. Indeed, for a writer as obsessed with time as Faulkner—the passage of time, the loss of time, the crisscross of time, the presence of the past in the present—architecture offered (if not a stopping of time or prolongation of time) at least a way of carrying through time, of projecting over time, a very tangible part of the past. As with other symbols that critics have found in his work, Faulkner's use of architectural symbols was partly conscious and partly an indirect by-product of other intentions as he told his story and said what he had to say.

Faulkner, of course, was an architect of books, not of buildings, and he appreciated the fact that literature and architecture were different art forms in their tangible relationship both to "psychological reality" and to "historical actuality." Nevertheless, he saw and used architecture as the tangible past, the visible past, the tangible document of time suspended and continued. Buildings, he knew, were designed, constructed, observed, and used by particular people in particular times and places, but he also knew that, if preserved and cared for, they could outlast the generations that brought them into being, the generations for whom they stood as monuments and markers of identity.

Continues...
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