Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music by Tim Ryan (review)

Tim Ryan’s compelling new study of southern roots music and Faulkner’s fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in hearing the “call-and-response” between Faulkner’s modernist narratives and the music of the Mississippi Delta. Building on a small core of essays by Faulknerians, music critics, and blues writers, Ryan skillfully deepens our knowledge of the importance of country blues and musicians in Faulkner’s work. Eschewing traditional models of comparison such as documentary or historical evidence (apparently Faulkner never met these bluesmen and they never read his novels), Ryan nonetheless proceeds with what Daniel Schwarz has called a “configuration,” a type of comparative work that believes art created in the same time period, and across disciplines, tends to share similar intellectual and aesthetic influences and techniques. Ryan asserts that playing biographical detective is “too limiting” and has blocked interpretive scholarship of the Faulkner–Delta Blues connection for too long. In the unfolding of his study, Ryan makes a strong case for exploring this culturally thick literary-musical relationship and shows us what we have been missing. The first book-length work of its kind, Yoknapatawpha Blues provides a nuanced, insightful look at the cultural, aesthetic, and political connections between Faulkner and southern roots music. Along the way, Ryan revises many previously held assumptions and offers surprising new readings of the layered relationship of Faulkner and the Delta blues.

Ryan is working double-time in this book—constructing his interdisciplinary argument and putting it to the test by using a combination of methodological approaches. Employing elements of cultural studies, new historicism, identity studies, close reading, and amphitextual studies, Ryan demonstrates how Faulkner’s work is informed by the same literary, social, political, and musical conversations of the period as the musicians. Using amphitextual models, a field that reads the text “from all sides” and believes in the text’s meaning as inherently laced with “intratextual, intertextual, contextual, and metatextual” strands (26), Ryan roams freely, from popular culture to haute literature, from folkways to New South media, from songs to novels.

But Ryan’s focus is narrow, using only six songs by canonical Blues singer-songwriters (Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Bukka White, and Lead Belly) and a handful of Faulkner texts (the novella “Old Man,” the short story “That Evening Sun,” and passages from Sanctuary, The Mansion, and The Reivers). Where such a limited focus could be seen as legitimizing the rarity of the blues in Faulkner’s work—and thus, its lack of importance—Ryan’s brilliant close readings, accessible style, and compelling storytelling serve to heighten the fascination. Ryan consistently points out how the smallest detail, if seen (or heard?) correctly, can lead to a stream of bold and surprising insights.

More than often and in more than one way, Ryan makes his points. Both Faulkner (1897–1962) and early twentieth-century blues have an intrinsic connection, he says, because they “emerged from a single locale, grew up alongside each other, achieved recognition together, and declined almost simultaneously” (36). But Faulkner and the recorded blues share more than substantial historical and thematic similarities, Ryan says. They also “negotiate between the traditional/parochial and the experimental/cosmopolitan in their designs, techniques, and structures” (22). Both literary and musical worlds also share concerns with regional and experiential consciousness of the area’s natural and societal problems: “the flooding of the Mississippi, relationships between paternalist white planters and black sharecroppers, male sexual impotence, incarceration at Parchman Farm, and racial violence, as well as the effects of the boll weevil upon southern agriculture” (22).

Ryan opens with an intriguing storyline spun from an historical event: “In popular memory, the year 1929 is synonymous with disaster and ruin” (1). Gripping and slightly sinister from the get-go, Ryan places Faulkner and Charley Patton in parallel but connected worlds, pointing out that merely six months separate what were for both men the greatest leaps in their...