William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape by Charles S. Aiken (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Charles S. Aiken. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009, 283 pp., 90 black-and-white maps, tables, drawings, and illustrations, hardcover, $34.95, ISBN 978-0820332192 By his death in 1962, William Faulkner had used his series of groundbreaking short stories and novels to construct an extraordinary and well-developed fictional landscape from a seemingly ordinary place. The most famous Southern literary landscape ofthe twentieth century, Yoknapatawpha County and its county seat, Jefferson, was loosely modeled on the land that Faulkner described as his "own little postage stamp of native soil," his home in Oxford, Mississippi (Faulkner quoted in Aiken, p. 24). Faulkner labeled it "a cosmos ofmy own," (Faulkner quoted in Aiken, p. 24). Charles S. Aiken revisits this terrain in William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape. ARRIS 82 VoLUME 21 ~ 2010 Among the voluminous scholarly commentary on Faulkner's work, a number of authors have turned particular attention to the geography of this specific place. Calvin S. Brown, for example, in an article in PMLA: Publications ofthe Modern Language Association ofAmerica in 1962, surveyed the landscape that served as Faulkner's model, connecting dots between sites in the physical world and those in the realm of the author's fiction 1 • However, Aiken's study goes beyond merely mapping one set of geographic coordinates onto another. Using Faulkner's writings and interviews as well as the physical landscape as his primary evidence, Aiken approaches the study of the real and fictional topographies with the tools of a historical geographer, examining changes over time in both realms. Aiken's study is a double biography of Faulkner's two interconnected landscapes and the first to examine their historical geography. Exploring the act ofcreation, he takes keen interest in two processes: he catalogs Faulkner's various systems for "sublimating the actual into the apocryphal" and tracks the processes of change over time that mold and then remold the twinned landscapes (Faulkner quoted in Aiken, p. 24). As such, Aiken demonstrates convincingly that the development of the two locales is woven together and that one cannot be understood without the other. Aiken traces the unfolding development of Faulkner's paired, mutually interdependent realms in ten chapters. The first three explore the relationship between the real and the fictional landscapes. Here, Aiken introduces a key difference between the two, to which he returns in the conclusion: while the region Faulkner constructed in fiction is frozen in time, the physical environment that the author knew is rapidly vanishing. He probes the process by which the novelist converted the real into the fictive, and, drawing 1 Calvin S. Brown, "Faulkner's Geography and Topography," PMLA 77: 5 (December 1962), 652-659. on Faulkner's own comments, rejects the idea that Yoknapatawpha was a metaphor for the entire South. In the middle three chapters, he sketches the historical geography of the two counties from the time of the Old South, through the Civil War, and into the period of the New South. He thus places the stories Faulkner composed against the backdrop of local history and geography. In chapter seven, he pauses to demonstrate the merits of his approach by showing how a geographical perspective offers new insights into one of Faulkner's most complex stories, "The Bear." The last three chapters display the particular strength of Aiken's work, which is his analysis of changes to the landscape of Lafayette County in the time after the completion of the Yoknapatawpha saga and even beyond Faulkner's lifetime. Because his focus is the geography, Aiken's study is not bound temporally to the time periods of Faulkner's stories. Faulkner's own well-documented fascination with the connections between past and present is neatly summarized in his paradoxical and often-quoted aphorisms : "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Requiem for a Nun [1951], p. 92), echoes his earlier assertion, "Tomorrow is today" ("Red Leaves" [1930] in The Portable Faulkner [1946], p. 100). Given Faulkner's own interest in the resonance of the past in the present, Aiken's decision to push his analysis to examine additional reverberations beyond the time period in which...