William Faulkner và cuộc thăm dò căn tính miền Nam nước Mỹ: Một hướng tiếp cận nhân học
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WILLIAM FAULKNERAND THE SEARCH FORAMERICAN
SOUTHERN IDENTITY:ANANTHROPOLOGICALAPPROACH
Ho Thi Van Anh*
Vinh University, 182 Le Duan, Vinh city, Nghe An province, Vietnam
Received 23 February 2021
Revised 14 April 2021; Accepted 30 May 2021
Abstract: The American South is the cultural root and archetype for the fictional world of
William Faulkner, a prominent author in modern world literature. The theme Faulkner and the South
has been studied exhaustively and elaborately, especially from historical and cultural perspectives.
However, the issue of Faulknerian Southern identity remains a gap in the current literature, so this study
sets out to address that gap. This paper is an anthropological approach to Faulkner, with two research
questions: how did Faulkner interpret American Southern identity? how should a set of keywords that
encapsulates Southern identity in Faulkner’s writing be established? Applying anthropological theory
of identity and the method of generalization and identification of cultural patterns, this study focuses on
the four outstanding novels in Faulkner’s legacy. These novels provide a picture of the Southern identity,
wrapped up in a set of keywords whose two main pillars are burden of the past and agrarianism. The
other traits - pride, nostagia, melancholy, complex, conservativeness, indomitability - intertwine and
promote each other, creating the very Faulknerian South.
Keywords: American literature, William Faulkner, American South, identity, anthropology
1. Introduction*
William Faulkner (1897-1962), an
intense psychological insight, and their
monumental characters – both good and evil
– occupy a unique place in modern
American and British fiction”. The town of
Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner grew
up and stayed most of his lifetime, was the
prototype for his mythic Yoknapatawpha
County. Faulkner is in love with the South,
the legendary Deep South, with its all
glorious yet tragic history and present-day
dilemmas. He is in an important sense a
Southern writer, both in literary and in
biographical terms.
American novelist and short-story writer, is
regarded as one of the greatest writers of the
20th century. His legacy, with such
masterpieces as The Sound and the Fury
(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in
August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
is deeply rooted in the cultural milieu and
historical tradition of the American South. In
the Nobel award ceremony speech, the
Swedish
Academy,
represented
by
Hellström (1950) stated that Faulkner
“created out the state of Mississippi one of
the landmarks of twentieth-century world
literature; novels which with their ever-
varying form, their ever-deeper and more
Faulkner and the South has been a
matter of interest to scholars over the
decades. Through the massive history of
Faulkner scholarship, the relation between
* Corresponding author.
Email address: [email protected]
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Faulkner and the South has been interpreted
from historical, geographical, biographical
and cultural, anthropological perspectives;
among which, historical criticism and
cultural studies appear to be the most
prominent approaches.
and the Apocryphal (Abadie & Harrington,
1977), Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha
(Abadie & Fowler, 1980), Faulkner in
Cultural Context (Abadie & Kartiganer,
1997). A similarly exhaustive and ongoing
source of essays concerned with Faulkner
and history can be found in Faulkner
Journal and Mississippi Quarterly’s annual
Faulkner number, which began production
in 1985 and 1984, currently under the co-
editorship of Luire and Towner and the
editorship of Atkinson respectively.
Historical criticism of Faulkner’s
writing emerged quite early, at the same time
when the Faulkner industry started in earnest
in the 1950s. An awareness of setting
Faulkner inside Southern history was
informed by O’Donnell (1939), who stated
that Faulkner’s greatest “principle is the
Southern social-economic-ethical tradition
which Mr. Faulkner possesses naturally, as a
part of his sensibility” (as cited in Peek &
Hamblin, 2004, p. 32). The historical reading
of Faulkner’s fictions was further argued by
Cowley (1946) whose introduction to
Viking’s The Portable Faulkner played an
important role in orienting Faulkner
scholarship. Faulkner was acknowledged for
his “first, to invent a Mississippi county that
was like a mythical kingdom, but was
complete and living in all its details; second,
to make his story of Yoknapatawpha County
stand as a parable or legend of all the Deep
South” (as cited in Peek & Hamblin, 2004,
p. 32). Since The Portable Faulkner,
Faulkner has been understood as a Southern
mythmaker, and the featured voice in the
Southern literary renaissance.
The above studies offer insights into
both sides of the spectrum: either praising
Faulkner as an accurate historian of the
South or revisiting and finding limitations in
his views and representations of history. Yet
alongside this array of historical criticism on
Faulkner, always runs a strong impulse to
seek and explicate the link between
historical roots and fiction, between the
“actual” and the “apocryphal”, and to
comment on Faulkner’s use of history in his
whole body of writing. In fact, Faulkner
studies in other disciplines afterwards for the
most part lean on historical premises, and
thus owe debts to historical criticism.
Another approach to the issue of
Faulkner and the South is to read his fiction
from a geographical perspective. While very
few studies of Faulkner’s works are
produced by geographers, the connection
between fictional Yoknapatawpha and the
geographical South has been considered
interdisciplinary. The outstanding analyses
of Faulkner’s geography are written by
Miner (1959), Buckley (1961), Brown
(1962). The geographer Aiken is an
important researcher in this field, with the
article “Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County:
Geographical Fact into Fiction” (1977) and
the book William Faulkner and the Southern
Landscape (2009). Like historical criticism,
this approach tends to examine the fact in his
fictions, figure out how the real South and
the fictional Yoknapatawpha blend and
become one.
The list of essays, books, and
projects reading Faulkner historically is
extensive. The most sustained investigation
in early criticism into the historical context
surrounding Faulkner is conducted by Doyle
(2001), a historian who spent nearly 20 years
researching Faulkner’s County: The
Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. The
annual conference, namely Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha, hosted by University of
Mississippi since 1974, offers several
volumes which are particularly concerned
with various aspects of historical criticism.
Those typical volumes include The South
and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Actual
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Emerging
comparatively
late,
anthropological approach could inherit
significant achievements from these trends,
especially those concerned with cultural and
social terms. However, while exploring
deeply Southern culture in Faulkner’s
writing, Faulkner scholarship has not
identified and “named” the so-called
“Southern identity” in Faulkner, and of
Faulkner.
cultural-studies criticism proves to be most
useful when applied to an author like
Faulkner. More importantly, cultural studies,
with its interdisciplinary essence, come
closer to anthropological terms and the
search for Southern identity in Faulkner’s
writing. Clean Brooks’s studies are among
the early writings focusing on Southern
culture in Faulkner’s novels. His books
2. Aim and Scope
including
William
Faulkner:
The
Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), William
Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and
Beyond (1978) state that one of the most
central aspects of Faulkner’s vision is
“community”, suggesting exploring cultural
layers in the Southern community.
Following that path, Faulknerian scholars
offer insights into specific Southern cultural
aspects, which contribute to shaping an
overview on Southern identity. For instance,
studies of Faulkner and racial issues
bloomed after the explosion of new literary
theories of race in the 1980s. Many major
Faulkner scholars are interested in the
various way that Faulkner represent race
relations in the fictions: Sundquist (1983),
Davis (1983), Weinstein (1992); Polk
(1996), Duvall (1997) (as cited in Hagood,
2017, pp. 61-62; Peek & Hamblin, 2004,
pp. 39-40). There is also a diverse array of
critics concerned with gender in Faulkner’s
writing: Radway (1982), Butler (1990),
Wilson (1991), Jones (2010) (as cited in
Peek & Hamblin, pp. 171-173). The
concerns with class, race, and gender
continue to be a topic of interest in
contemporary Faulkner studies. As Hagood
(2017) forecasted, future trends in Faulkner
scholarship would include the fields that
intersect with Southern cultural issues such
as indigenous studies, disability studies,
whiteness studies, nonhuman studies, and
queer studies.
The aim of this article is to examine
Southern identity in Faulkner’s writing. The
two raised questions are What shapes
Southern identity in Faulkner’s novels? and
What could the way Faulkner represents and
interprets his homeland’s identity tell us
about the writer himself – his cultural
sensibility and ideology? By answering
those questions, this paper also aims to
propose
encapsulates
Faulkner’s writing.
a
set of keywords which
Southern identities in
The texts chosen for this study were
the four following novels, which are
considered the greatest ones in Faulkner’s
legacy - The Sound and the Fury (1929), As
I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932),
and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
3. Theoretical Background
“Identity” came into use as a popular
social-science term in the 1950s (Gleason,
1983) and “entered the anthropological
lexicon in the 1960s and 1970s, in work
associated with the Manchester School and
influenced by the American sociological
traditions of symbolic interactionism and
social constructivism” (Barnard & Spencer,
2010, p. 368). Yet “the search for identity”
can be traced back a few decades ago, in
various terms namely “self” (Mead, 1934),
“ethnicity” (Kardiner & Linton, 1939),
“national character” (Fromm, 1941; Mead,
1942; Benedict, 1946). At first, “identity”
was used in reference to personality or
The studies mentioned above have
provided an exhaustive overview on
Faulkner and the South. Apparently, an
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individuality; then its usage expanded to
community levels: identity of a race, an
ethnic, a nation, a region or a group of
people.
and transformation through time and space.
The path of seeking Southern identity, thus,
requires considerations of the space-time
relations of the community.
There are two major approaches to
the essence of identity. Some scholars affirm
that identity is the inner, immutable element
of one’s own being while others see identity
as a cultural construct, which is shaped and
modified by interaction between the
individual and his culture. As Gleason
(1983) clarified, “The two approaches differ
most significantly on whether identity is to
be understood as something internal that
persists through change or as something
ascribed from without that changes
according to circumstances” (p. 918). These
two opposing opinions might lead to
different implementations of identity,
especially when it comes to the culture of a
community.
4. Methods
Cultural identity in literature can be
explored from the perspective of
psychological anthropology – a subfield of
anthropology where anthropology and
psychology intersect. This field focuses on
the close relationship between the individual
and his culture, and also affirms the unity
between psychology and culture. According
to psychoanalyst Erikson (1950), identity is
“a process ‘located’ in the core of the
individual and yet also in the core of his
communal culture,
a
process which
establishes, in fact, the identity of those two
identities” (as cited in Gleason, 1983, p. 914).
Devereux (1967), a psychiatrist, formulated
a view of culture as a projection of the
psyche and the psyche as the internalized
culture. Individual psyche, accordingly, is
the embodiment of community culture. The
pioneer of the Culture and Personality
school, Benedict (1934), holds the firm
belief that a culture can be seen as a
personality, and each phase of personality’s
maturity is governed by particular cultural
The former view, at the extreme
level, could contribute to the over-devotion
and abuse of identity. Identity politics, for
example, built on identity prejudice, fosters
the identification of communities based on
racial, ethnic, class and gender differences.
This delusion as well as prejudice acts as
catalysts for exceptionalism. Sen (2007)
warned, "the uniquely partitioned world is
much more divisive than the universe of
plural and diverse categories that shape the
world in which we live” (p. 22). Its
characteristics.
The
psychological
anthropological approach, in our opinion, is
consistent with Faulkner, whose literature
reflects a close relationship between
personal tragedy and the spirit of
community.
consequences,
including
discrimination,
intentionally
xenophobia,
racism,
gender
(either
are
or
constantly
unintentionally) hurting subalterns (the
indigenous, immigrants, women, people
with disabilities…).
In
anthropology
practice,
a
commonly-used method is to generalize and
identify a set of patterns, stereotypes, values
This paper, in the search for Southern
identity in Faulkner’s writing, is not
intended to promote differentiation, and
accordingly, is not seeking the isolated and
immutable cultural traits. Identity is seen as
a cultural construct in which the uniqueness,
persistence does not exclude the uncertainty
that encapsulates the identity of
a
community. The canons of psychological
anthropology worldwide, R. Benedict, M.
Mead, E. Sapir, following that path,
contributed greatly in building “national
character” models. They believe that
individuals express certain types and forms
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of psyche and personality, which can be
collected, interpreted and generalized into
“patterns” of a nation/ ethnic culture. In
Vietnam, ethno-psychological studies by
Nguyen (1963), Phan (1994), Tu (1997),
Dao (2000), Do (2005), Tran (2011),
Nguyen (2014), Tran (2016), Huyen
(2017)… joined that array of practice (as
cited in Pham, 2018).
According to Nguyen (2008), cultural
interaction is shown in many types. In this
case, the most prominent one is the intra-
cultural interaction across subcultures - the
interaction between the North and the South,
two partners in the same nation, both
penetrating American culture yet belonging
to different subcultures. Besides, there is
also an inter-cultural interaction between
different ethnic groups and races. Finally, a
trans-cultural interaction does exist when the
Northerners attempt to dominate the cultural
and economic space of the South. These
interactions lead to conflicts. These conflicts
become a test of communal identity.
Through reactions such as resistance, self-
defense, frustration, crisis, acceptance,
forgetting..., cultural traits are bold, honed,
or broken, fade, destroyed, which
restructures communal identity. Given that
contextual features, the search for Southern
identity in Faulkner’s writing would start
with examination of post-bellum Southern
psychological reactions. Two aspects are
investigated: the burden of the past,
embodied in collective memory, and
dilemmas in post-bellum context.
The task set out in this study, first of
all, is to interpret Faulkner’s representation
of American South. Faulkner describes the
South in the context of cultural class and
decline, with traumatic dilemmas on race,
kinship and gender. Analyzing the Southern
cultural aspects would parallel the intention
to seek and name the core values, the deep
roots of the whole community. The target of
this paper, therefore, is also to propose a set
of keywords, which encapsulates Southern
identities in Faulkner’s writing.
The keyword set of Southern identity
in Faulkner’s novels is built on the
theoretical framework mentioned above.
First, given the view of identity as a cultural
construct, this study does not expect a
collection of isolated, metaphysical, solid
identities. The identity keywords, instead,
consist of cultural traits that are both
distinctive and popular, sustainable and
flexible. Second, using the anthropological
method, the keyword set aims to connect and
explore cultural identities as a system. In the
cultural mosaic, the seemingly discrete, even
estranged, opposite features constantly
interlock, interdependent, promote each
other, flexibly and durably, all together
shaping the very Faulknerian South.
5.1. The South and the Collective Memory
Collective memory of the South in
Faulkner’s novels are woven from the
ancient heritage of the land and the post-
bellum trauma. Faulkner does not write
about the Civil War in the present tense; the
war appears as a ghost, a shadow, a remnant
of the past. The following seeks the answers
to the questions: Does the past play an
important role in the spiritual life of the
South? If so, why is the past such a burden
to the Southerners while the American are
usually known as the people of present and
future? And if the South is so deeply
attached to the past, what does the past mean
to them, what are the aesthetic and human
notions associated with the past? Following
that assumption, we examine Faulkner’s
novels and conclude that his South is a land
5. Results
When exploring the identity of the
South, Faulkner was interested in a historical
milestone: the American Civil War 1861-1865.
In this event, Southern culture exposed, and
even clashed with the culture of the North,
which can be called a “cultural interaction”.
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burdened with the past. The past, to the
Southerners, means the lost beauty; the
South, therefore, is a proud, nostalgic and
melancholy land. The past also means the
curse, the sins; the South, thus, is still the
unvanquished defeated, the one carrying the
victim – sinner complex.
With his interest in the cultural past
in the South, Faulkner has successfully
exploited the community memory embodied
in individual tragedy. In Faulkner literature,
history and the destiny of the community
sheds a shadow on each person's life. Each
individual tragedy comes from a trapped
state in community memory. Quentin, in The
Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!,
is the epitome of those who cannot escape
the haunting past. Born into a family of
decrepit Southern patriarchs, the young man
is reeling from his obsession with Dead
South. “He would seem to listen to two
separate Quentins now - the Quentin
Compson preparing for Harvard in the
South, the deep South dead since 1865 and
peopled with garrulous outraged baffled
ghosts... and the Quentin Compson who was
still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost,
but nevertheless having to be one for all that,
since he was born and bred in the deep
South...” (Faulkner, 1990, p. 5). He
desperately tried to hold on to the Old South
values. These old Southern values are
embodied in the image of a naïve and
innocent sister in the past, or the glorious
past of the family tree. Fearing that time
would flow, Quentin angrily smashed the
clock: “I tapped the crystal on the corner of
the dresser and caught the fragments of glass
in my hand and put them in the ashtray and
twisted the hands off and put them in the
tray” (Faulkner, 2000, pp. 67-68). For fear of
seeing his sister who was no longer a virgin,
Quentin committed suicide, in order to
preserve her innocence and innocence.
Remembering breeds suffering. Faulkner's
novel hauntingly portrays a particular kind
of mentality - one that exists in the past
tense.
5.1.1. The Past as the Burden
In Faulkner’s novels, the South is a
land burdened with the past. Faulkner seems
to choose an estranged vision, compared to
the common picture of American national
identity. As Woodward (2008) stated,
One of the simplest but most
consequential generalizations ever
made about national character was
Tocqueville’s that America was
“born free”. In many ways that is the
basic distinction between the history
of the United States and the history
of other great nations. (pp. 21-22)
Shaking off the wretched evils of
feudalism, the people in the New World
enjoy their experience of success and
victory, with a complacency implanted in
their mind. As Schlesinger (1943) said,
American character “is bottomed upon the
profound conviction that nothing in the world
is beyond its power to accomplish” (p. 244).
Living for present, living towards future,
therefore, are American national habits of
mind.
Southern heritage is distinctive.
Unlike American, the Southern history is
written by such long decades of frustration,
failure, and defeat. Being on the losing side
of the civil war, the South is haunted by the
past. The reality of defeat in economic,
social and political life all brings them to the
recollection of tragic legacy. The South’s
preoccupation is with loss, not with victory,
with the curse and sins, not the dream for
future. The past is an indispensable part of
Southern heritage. More accurately, it is a
burden for the South.
The memory burden is not only
manifested in the mentality in the past tense,
as in the case of Quentin mentioned above,
but also in the impact of community history
on the identity and destiny of individuals.
Every person in Faulkner's world was born
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carrying the legacies of the land with him:
ideology, racial prejudice, caste. Joanna in
Light in August is haunted by a curse of race.
She saw “the children coming forever and
ever in the world, white, with a black shadow
already falling upon them before they drew
breath” (Faulkner, 1990, p. 253). Joe
Christmas's fate, in the same work, is tied to
the fact that his racial identity is ambiguous.
With Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!,
the first shock of his life was when he
realized how being a poor white affects his
destiny, and he designed his life according to
a new class and race ideology.
defense and justification, they have turned
instead to the somber realities of hardship
and defeat and evil and “the problems of the
human heart in conflict with itself”. In so
doing they have brought to realization for the
first time the powerful literary potentials of
the South’s tragic experience and heritage”
(Woodward, 2008, p. 24).
Given the fact that the past is a
burden in the Southern United States,
Faulkner had his own conception of the
meaning of the past in the spirit of the
Southerners. Because the rememorizing of
the individual is a subjective act, selective,
subject to the community nature.
Anthropologists have paid attention
especially to the kind of selective forgetting
which they called ‘structural amnesia’. Thus
Laura Bohannan (1952) demonstrated how,
among the Tiv, only ancestors relevant to the
present situation were evoked from the past,
while others were forgotten. Subsequent
writers working in this tradition have
stressed how all narratives of the past have
to be understood in terms of the nature of the
society in which they are told and how such
factors as the construction of the person and
the nature of the kinship system affect such
stories (Dakhlia, 1990; Bloch, 1992; Kilani,
1992) (Barnard & Spencer, 2010, pp. 460-
461). In the Faulkner novels, the stories of
the past have their own mark: first, the past
is synonymous with lost beauty; second, the
past means the curse and sin.
It is no coincidence that a striking
feature in Faulkner's narrative world are the
families. Because the family line, with the
generational succession, is an embodiment
of the enduring community memory. In the
Faulkner, the Compson family in The Sound
and the Fury, the Sutpen family from
Absalom, Absalom!, the Sartoris and the
McCaslin from Go Down, Moses are all
glorious of the past, now shabby with
inability to adapt to the rapid changes of life
outside. The legacy of generations is
preserved in the hearts of descendants
(Quentin in The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom, Absalom!, Hightower, Joanna in
Light in August, Darl from As I Lay Dying)
or from the experience of witnesses, like
Dilsey, Rosa...
The sense of past burdens in
Southern culture has made Faulkner one of
the landmarks of Southern Renaissance
literature, something that “literature
conscious of the past in the present” (Tate,
1935, as cited in Woodward, 2008, p. 32).
Faulkner's major contribution was that he
did not cast a romantic or delusional view of
the South, but looked directly at its past
burdens, exploiting its presence in personal
tragedies. Hence, Faulkner's famous phrase,
“the problems of the human heart in conflict
with itself”, was cited as the dominant spirit
of Southern American Renaissance
literature: “Disdaining the polemics of
5.1.2. The Past as the Lost Beauty
She does not smell like tree.
(The Sound and the Fury)
To begin with, in the Southerners’
mindset, the past is equal to the lost beauty.
In American history, the South is seen as one
of the primitive cells of the United States.” It
is an insider and a witness to the glorious
past of a young, self-reliant, self-reliant
nation from nature gifts, human intellect and
bravery. It is a place to keep the charm of the
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United States from the beginning: the
promised land, the "American dream".
However, the civil war occurred and left
devastation and aftershocks. The beautiful,
rich past of the vast cotton fields has been
replaced by a poor and depleted land. Even
that land is now being encroached upon by
smoke, dust and bulldozer decks from
northern industry. Deep South is now just
Dead South, filled with pride, nostalgia, and
melancholy.
The Southerners knew the Old South
was dead, but the Old South among them
was a beauty, so they couldn't stop being
proud. Melancholy is always associated with
pride. The South, with a tradition of
attaching importance to Puritan values, has
now witnessed a decline in social morality.
The loss of virginity by Caddy, Addie's
illegitimate child, Anse's pairing with a new
woman right after his wife's mourning… are
all ugly and petty manifestations of present
life. Whether facing the ugliness, or creating
those ugly things, Faulkner's characters tend
to hold their own pride. This pride is well-
expressed in a sense of sustaining, whether
successful or hopeless, a dignified, noble
lifestyle. Mrs. Addie hid her adultery until
she died, the frail Anse always argued that she
had done her best, Joe Christmas's adoptive
father imposed harsh principles on him...
The concept of lost beauty is
reflected in the sense of the absence in
Southern life. What is present in the inner
life of the Southerners is the absence. The
Compson Brothers' inner monologues in The
Sound and the Fury are woven from
memories of a lost girl - Caddy. In As I Lay
Dying, the people in Addie's family, without
saying it out, shared a hidden understanding
of the family's past secrets. In Absalom,
Absalom!, the two students Quentin and
Shreve, throughout their conversation,
expressed a common concern about Thomas
Sutpen's failed plans. In Light in August, the
journey of Lena seeking the father for her
child seems to be endless.
Such
a
sense of nostalgia,
melancholy and pride leads to a common
behavior in the Faulkner world: encapsulate
and freeze beauty so that it becomes an
eternal, virgin, and impenetrable domain. In
The Sound and the Fury, there exists an
absent character. Caddy only appeared in the
soft but painful memories of those who
loved her. Pushing Caddy into an
inaccessible space, Faulkner seemed to
preserve and cherish the beauty of eternal
virginity. In Light in August, Lena was
looking for a father for the baby, but not a
specific Lucas Burch, as she said. Lena's
journey is iconic: the journey of desire to
connect with species. In the midst of
artificial civilization, where people tear, let
go, and destroy each other, Lena walks
calmly, serene, bringing in her life, birth, a
yearning for connection and harmony with
species. Therefore, the concept of beauty in
Faulkner novels often evokes primitive
senses of an old time when humanity did not
know civilization. Benjy's foolishness,
Vardaman's susceptibility, Lena's unmarried
pregnancy... all evoke such a pre-civilized
world.
The sense of the lost beauty makes
the South in Faulkner literature a proud yet
nostalgic, melancholy land. Most characters
are obsessed with melancholy. These are
supersensitive characters (Quentin, Darl),
mad characters (Benjy, Darl) and child
characters (Vardaman, Compson children).
(There are also characters that are somehow
“mixed” between these types of characters).
Sensitivity is common among these
characters. They can sense the loss
sensitively. For Benjy, that was when his
sister "did not smell like tree"; for Quentin,
when he constantly wanted to commit
suicide in water, like an unconsciousness
about washing his sister; for Vardaman, is
when the boy believes his mother is a fish,
and the fish has become dirty, sandy and
muddy.
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5.1.3. The Past as the Curse and Sins
lying there, murdered not by one white man,
but by the curse which God put on a whole
race before your grandfather and your
brother or me or you were ever thought of. A
race doomed and cursed to be forever and
ever a part of the white race’s doom and
curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom
and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your
mother’s. Yours, even though you are a
child. The curse of every white child that
was born and that ever will be born. None
can escape it. (Faulkner, 1990, p. 252)
Now I want you to tell me just one
thing more: Do you hate the South?
(Absalom, Absalom!)
The past, in the minds of the
Southerners, is both a sin and a curse. The
history of the South is also the history of
slavery and racism. That history is tied with
crimes, prejudices, aggressions and
jealousies. Those impulses were constantly
making a powerful impact on the postbellum
era. This makes Old South exist as a ghost or
a curse.
“His doom and his curse”. The doom
and curse cast a shadow on the lives of
people in the South, creating personal
tragedies. Joe Christmas's destiny is a prime
example of resistance to the curse of fate. As
a black white person, Christmas has the
complexities of both the stigmatist and the
stigmatist of his own skin. His crimes stem
from resentment not acknowledged by both
communities - black and white. He killed the
arrogant and arrogant stepfather, he was
outraged when the white girl had left him, he
took the black girl's name as a slut and cut
off the throat of the white lover who had
carried him, all out of guilt. almsgiving,
injury. He had a crazed desire to become true
black: he tries to blacken his inside, try to
blacken his inner world – his sense of sight,
his sense of tough, his sense of smell:
Faulkner's novels have many
characters with the same name. Faulkner
inherited the writing technique from Balzac,
with characters reappearing in a variety of
works. For example, the character Quentin
Compson appeared in six works: The Sound
and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Lion, The
Mansion, A Justice, That Evening Sun;
General Lee appeared in Absalom,
Absalom!, The Town, The Unvanquished,
Intruder in the Dust, Go Down, Moses, and
The Flags in the Dust. At times, the name is
repeated through generations in one lineage:
in The Sound and the Fury, the uncle's name
Quentin is given to his niece, Caddy's
daughter. This makes it seem as though the
world of Yoknapatawpha lives in the same
fate, a common curse. Or sometimes, the
character's name is reminiscent of other
characters in literature or history. For
example, looking at the genealogy of the
character Joanna Burden, the name Calvin is
reminiscent of John Calvin, with what he
said about original sin and predestination:
“Original sin, therefore, seems to be a
hereditary depravity and corruption of our
nature, diffused into all parts of the soul,
which first makes us to God's wrath ”(as
cited in Dimock, 2012). This predestined
thought finds its resonance in what his father
told Joanna, about the cause of his and her
brother's death:
At night he would lie in bed beside
her, sleepless, beginning to breathe
deep and hard. He would do it
deliberately, feeling, even watching,
his white chest arch deeper and
deeper within his ribcage, trying to
breathe into himself the dark odor,
the dark and inscrutable thinking and
being of negroes, with each
suspiration trying to expel from
himself the white blood and the
white thinking and being. And all the
while his nostrils at the odor which
he was trying to make his own would
Your grandfather and brother are
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whiten and tauten, his whole being
writhe and strain with physical
outrage and spiritual denial”.
(Faulkner, 1990, pp. 225-226)
history with love and pain.
5.2. The South and the Post-Bellum Dilemmas
5.2.1. Agrarian versus Industrial
The nature of the South gives this
land an outstanding advantage in agricultural
production, especially cotton. This created
the South's perceptible characteristic relative
to other parts of the United States: rich arable
agriculture (especially cotton) and black
agricultural labor in cotton plantations.
“Agrarianism and its values were the
essence of the Southern tradition and the test
of Southern loyalty” (Woodward, 2008, p. 8).
Though, his disdain for the color of
his skin made him constantly question his
lover, terrified to exaggerate all generosity
and interference. And finally, those crazy
self-deprecating obsessions pushed him into
barbaric acts of destruction.
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is, thus,
haunted land. They are victims. But, the
curse falls on them because they were
criminals in the past. Here, Faulkner
expresses a clear view: man must atone for
mistakes in the past. The pain is, the ones
who suffer the retribution are children (too
many children are killed, go mad), sensitive
and loving souls (often mad, thrown in by
their own families. madhouse). This payoff
is often seen, predicted, concluded from the
words of the bystanders - usually blacks
serving in white families like Dilsey, Rosa...
They are descendants, the direct heirs to the
legacy of slavery. Dilsey in The Sound and
the Fury says: “I seed de beginnin, en now I
see de endin” (Faulkner, 2000, p. 257). Mr.
Coldfield, in Absalom, Absalom! foresaw the
“day when the South would realize that it
was now paying the price for having erected
its economic edifice not on the rock of stern
morality but on the shifting sands of
opportunism and moral brigandage”
(Faulkner, 1990, p. 135). The South,
therefore, is a complex of victims -
criminals.
Faulkner's work is set in South
America after the Civil War. At this time,
before the colonization of the North
industrial, the economic dependence on
cotton which was the habit of the South
people was removed. The cotton plantation
economy went bankrupt completely along
with the Great Depression. The South faced
the irresistible invasion of an industrial
civilization from the North, an industry that
was unfamiliar and hostile to the mind of the
South. Urban migration, the emergence of
new livelihoods has become an inevitable
consequence. The clash between the
agricultural style and the industrial way of
life has caused the South economic, social
and ethical problems.
Agricultural identity in the life of the
Southerners is shown discreetly in the
relationship between people and land. As I
Lay Dying is an illuminating example of this.
The work exposes the human reality of poor
whites who struggle with their livelihoods.
Here are Tull's thoughts as he watches the
mules - animals associated with their
farming:
“‘Now I want you to tell me just one
thing more: Why do you hate the South?’. ‘I
don’t hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once,
immediately. ‘I don’t hate it,’ he said. I don’t
hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the
iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I
don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” (Faulkner,
1990, p. 195). Quentin's words somehow
echo Faulkner's heart. As a son in the South,
he exploited the dark side of motherland
When I looked back at my mule, it
was like he was one of these spy-
glasses, and I could look at him
standing there and see all the broad
land and my house sweated out of it
like it was the more the sweat, the
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broader the land. The more the
sweat, the tighter the house. (…)
Because it is your milk, sour or not.
Because you would rather have milk
that will sour than to have milk that
won’t, because you are a man.
(Faulkner, 1990, p.139)
environment, then we know that
terrible things are going to happen to
them.
Agricultural behavior was deeply
embedded in the cultural life of the South
people, becoming a community identity.
Therefore, the clash with industrial
civilization has brought about the fear of the
loss of identity. As Woodward (2008) points
It is difficult to distinguish between
Tull's point of view and that of the mule. In
other words, Tull identifies himself with the
mule, and this farmer sees himself like a
mule: the more he plows, the more
perspiring it is, the more stable the house
becomes, and the more women love him. It
is such a rustic and pragmatic way of
thinking of poor laborers. Manhood in
Faulkner is synonymous with hard work,
worrying about making a living for the
family.
out,
“the
threat
of
becoming
“indistinguishable”, of being submerged
under a national steamroller, has haunted the
mind of the South for a long time. Some have
seen it as a menace to regional identity and
the survival of a Southern heritage” (p. 8). In
fact, also according to Woodward (2008),
there has been "wavering" / displacement in
the heart of the South since the 1930s.
three decades later the slight
“wavering” in the Southern ranks
that disturbed the agrarians in 1930
would seem to have become a pell-
mell rout. (…). Whole regiments and
armies deserted “to join up behind
the common or American industrial
ideal”. In its pursuit of the American
Way and the American Standard of
Living the South was apparently
doing all in its power to become what
the agrarians had deplored as “only
an undistinguished replica of the
The fact that the peasant is separated
from the land, deprived of his livelihood is
implied in the image of the mule separated
from the ground. It is no coincidence that in
the journey to bring Mrs. Addie's funeral, the
first big obstacle is the flood season river.
Mules, the creatures with feet of clay, can
only be useful and survive when mounted on
the ground. And here's the tragedy: “They
roll up out of the water in succession, turning
completely over, their legs stiffly extended,
as when they had lost contact with the earth”
(Faulkner, 1990, p. 149). As Dimock (2012)
points out:
usual
industrial
community.
(Woodward, 2008, p. 9)
… when they [the poor white] left the
customary setting and they are stuck
trying to negotiate with a swollen
river, we know that the mules will
not survive in that kind of
transformed setting. In many ways –
a perfect analogy for the poor whites,
that they can do relatively well when
they’re left to their own devices,
when they’re allowed simply to stick
to their environment. But once
they’re taken out of their
The agricultural lifestyle is not only
manifested in livelihoods, in the
consciousness of the land, but also in a close,
familiar lifestyle in
a
"knowable
community". Raymond William said: “A
country community, most typically a village,
is an epitome of direct relationships: of face-
to-face contacts within which we can find
and value the substance of personal
relationships” (as cited in Dimock, 2012).
The emergence of industrial civilization in
the North, new livelihoods, new ways of
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doing business created a dual state in
society: the parallel existence of "knowable
community" and "unknowable community".
others through social prejudices. Clearly, in
this context, the essence of agriculture as a
community identity is being challenged,
shifted, and hybridized.
In
Light
in
August,
the
correspondence between the knowable
community and the unknowable community
is very clear. Revolving around Lena, the
central figure, is a community of good
people. The hope that echoes in Lena's
journey are the words of strangers,
unknown, and kind. Behind the four weeks,
the evocation of far is the peaceful corridor
paved with unflagging and tranquil faith and
peopled with kind and nameless faces and
voices.
5.2.2. Fate and the Indomitable
As mentioned above, the South of
America is a land of pride. Even though they
are defeated, their fate is cursed, they are
always "unvanquished". No matter how
cruel fate may have been, Faulkner's
character refused to give in. They will
persistently endure quietly until the end, like
a stubborn, insidious resistance.
Thomas Sutpen in Absalom,
Absalom! perhaps the most powerful
impression on fate-defying will. Originally a
poor white boy in the South, when he was a
child, he was scorned, not allowed to enter a
wealthy white family. That poor white boy,
when growing up, decided to implement a
"great design": creating a line of pure white
Sutpen family is as perfect as any other
contemporary aristocratic family! To insist
on this great design, Sutpen had to trade it:
divorce his first wife, discarded his son when
he learned that his wife was black, asking
Rosa to give birth to a son before marriage,
rejecting Milly when she gives birth to a
girl... Controlling the surrounding people
like moving the pieces, willing to destroy all
obstacles, sacrificing love, designing a
future for an entire family intentionally, all
reflect a reckless personal ambition, a daring
challenge of fate. In Sutpen, on the one hand,
we see the persistent, indomitable, spirit of
"defying destiny", but on the other hand, to
a certain extent, the perseverance, the
Lucas Burch. I don’t know. I don’t
know of anybody by that name
around here. This road? It goes to
Pocahontas. He might be there. It’s
possible. Here’s a wagon that’s
going a piece of the way. It will take
you that far. (Faulkner, 1990, p. 7)
At the end of the novel, it is no
coincidence that a furniture repairer and
dealer appears, continuing to add to the
anonymous, kind faces, accompanying Lena
and Byron. Meanwhile, the community
around Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower is
truly an unknowable community. Here is
everyone's reaction to Joanna's death,
expressionless, cruel: “‘My pappy says he
can remember how 50 years ago, folks said
it ought to be burned, with a little human fat
meat to start it good’. ‘Maybe your pappy
slipped up there and set it afire’, a third said.
They all laughed” (Faulkner, 1990, p. 49).
The strangeness of members is secretly
implied in collective prejudices. The pastor's
son, Joanna's death was immediately
rumored to be due to Hightower and
Christmas. The events in the work,
especially when it comes to crime, are often
narrated from the words of a stranger. The
narrated story is not from an omniscient
point of view, but the narration of a stranger,
someone who has never met, only knows
conservative
originating
from
the
community culture. Because after all,
Sutpen's great blueprint is built on racism
and caste discrimination, a legacy of
community.The "indomitable", indomitable
to the point of being stubborn, conservative
seems to have become an identity of the
Southerners. In fact, history recorded the South's
stubbornness on the issue of race and slavery.
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Since the last World War old racial
attitudes that appeared more venerable and
immovable than any other have exhibited a
flexibility that no one would have predicted.
One by one, in astonishingly rapid
succession, many landmarks of racial
discrimination and segregation have
disappeared, and old barriers have been
breached. Many remain, of course – perhaps
more than have been breached – and
distinctively Southern racial attitudes will
linger for a long time. Increasingly the South
is aware of its isolation in these attitudes,
however, and is in defense of the institutions
that embody them. They have fallen rapidly
into discredit and under condemnation from
the rest of the country and the rest of the
world” (Woodward, 2008, p. 11).
“Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it? It's better
than the theater, isn’t it? It's better than Ben
Hur, isn’t it? Now wonder you have to come
away now and then, isn’t it? ” (Faulkner,
1990, p. 115). Shreve's question, perhaps in
part, will be interpreted from this identity in
Southern culture - indomitable, courageous,
no matter how much pain it tasted and
carried so much sin. They endure. The mules
tried to hold their feet on the ground until
they were swept away by the flood.
Hightower, Joanna, chased away by the
community is still trying to cling to this land,
building himself a small house, even on the
edge of the city, even though it is a forgotten
place. Lena is still determined to find a father
for her child, although Lucas's name
gradually fades and becomes unreal. Tough,
courageous, indomitable, that is a quality of
the Southern essence.
However, in another aspect, the
stubbornness can be seen, on the positive
side, close to the indomitable, steadfast and
gritty personality. These traits are, in turn,
the root of the South's longevity. While
reading As I Lay Dying, readers must
inevitably be haunted by the sense of
existence. The attempt to arrange Mrs.
Addie's funeral at another town may be an
allegory of human struggle for survival. A
poor white family, ordinary people, who also
criticize, give up, resentment, and
melancholy, are also full of secrets. In the
midst of their livelihood, lowly attempts, for
them death is no longer the only
preoccupation. But the problem is, when
going through tribulation, between flood
water and fire, they are all steadfast, patient,
and stubborn. Life must go on - it seemed
like a tacit commitment among the people of
the Bundren. Tribulation, resentment, and
melancholy are burdens, but also an essential
part of survival.
5.2.3. Autonomy and Integration
Pride and conservative personality
pose a problem for the South in giving a
consistent response to choices: traditional or
future, autonomy or integration? The South
inevitably cannot be out of the
modernization trend of the US nation and the
world. There are heritages of the past that
must be abandoned. But the South is not easy
to openly accept external interference,
particularly the North. Self-determination or
interference, separation or integration are
still a problem in the spiritual life of the
South after the civil war. This issue is
interpreted discreetly and deeply by
Faulkner in his novels.
It is a self-evident truth that The
Sound and the Fury is like a nostalgia for the
past. But we often forget that the concern
about "tomorrow" is discreetly expressed
from the very title of the work. “The sound
and the fury” is adapted from the 5 episode
5 of Macbeth: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and
tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day
to day to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the
“The South. Jesus. No wonder you
folks all outlive yourselves by years and
years and years” (Faulkner, 1990, p. 194).
That is what Shreve said to Quentin, after
listening to ancient tales about the
Southerners, both tragedy and timeless.
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way to dusty death. It is a tale told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing” (Shakespeare, 1606, as cited in
Dimock, 2012). Jason is perhaps the
character that represents the struggle
between the present and the future of South
America most clearly in the work. Unlike his
two brothers, Quentin and Benjy, he has a
clear sense of adaptation to the future. But
with the beginning of gray hair. (…).
So he run back into the house and up
the stairs again and into the room and
jerked a cover off the bed and rolled
her onto it and caught up the corners
and swung it onto his back like a sack
of meal and carried it out of the house
and laid it down under a tree. And he
said that what he was scared of
happened. Because the cover fell
open and she was laying on her side
facing one way, and her head was
turned clean around like she was
looking behind her. (Faulkner, 1990,
pp. 91-92)
that adaptation still gives him
a
psychological, emotional burden. The
incompatibility between Jason and the
modern world was manifested in the
sensations. (Faulkner often transforms
cognitive ideas into sensations, senses).
Jason is very proud of owning a luxury car
(car - a mark of modern industrial society,
instead of a horse in the aristocratic society
of the nineteenth century). But the smell of
gasoline is always a burden to him.
The head almost left the neck, turned
to the back, the woman's body exuded a dark
sense of humor, a mixture of humor and
horror. Dimock (2012) finds an interesting
association of a back-facing head in Dante's
Divine Comedy. This is a description of
punishment for those in hell:
And now I reckon I’ll get home just
in time to take a nice long drive after
a basket of tomatoes or something
and then have to go back to town
smelling like a camphor factory so
my head won’t explode right on my
shoulders. I keep telling her there’s
not a damn thing in that aspirin
except flour and water for imaginary
invalids. I says you don’t know what
a headache is. I say you think I’d fool
with that dam car at all if it depended
on me” (Faulkner, 2000, pp. 202-203)
As I inclined my head still more, I
saw that each, amazingly, appeared
contorted between the chin and
where the chest begins. They had
their faces twisted toward the
haunches, and found it necessary to
walk backwards because they could
not see ahead of them. (Dante,1320,
as cited in Dimock, 2012)
In Dante's work, these people are
subjected to this penalty of turning around
because they were soothsayers while they
were alive. Foreseeing the future is a sin, and
must be punished. Dimock (2012) suggested
that this was “a fit punishment for social
reformers. Social reformers also claim to
have some kind of privileged relation to the
future, and they’re reforming the present
quite often because they have this vision
about the future”.
Arrogant and presumptuous, the
Southerners in Faulkner pour out all anger
and resentment on those who intervene in
their life, even when they are good
performers. Joanna Burden in Light in
August represents the victim of that anger.
Influenced by her ancestors, the Northern
abolitionists, Joanna, a white woman,
devoted her life to fighting for equal rights
of blacks. Yet this is the end of Joanna’s life:
She was lying on the floor. Her head
had been cut pretty near off; a lady
Faulkner built his characters on his
understanding of the real state of American
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society during the reconstruction period.
Many Northern reformers entered the South,
considered themselves social reformers,
reforming and educating former slaves, and
adjusting the society of the South after the
civil war. Due to some of that abuse and
corruption, the reformers ironed by the
locals in the South were carpetbaggers.
Obviously, the will to intervene and impose
it is not easy to succeed in a land that carries
pride, pride and conservatism. Infringement
on that land, whether with good intentions or
evil intentions, if not skillful enough,
inevitably suffers from anger and
punishment.
mixing in a voice honoring the epiphany of
the resurrection:
And the congregation seemed to
watch him with its own eyes while
the voice consumed him, until he was
nothing and they were nothing and
there was not even a voice but
instead their hearts were speaking to
one another in chanting measures
beyond the need for words, so that
when he came to rest against the
reading desk, his monkey face lifted
and his whole attitude, that of a
serene, tortured crucifix that
transcended its shabbiness and
insignificance and made it of no
moment, a long moaning expulsion
of breath rose from them, and a
woman’s single soprano – ‘Yes,
Jesus!’”. (Faulkner, 2000, 254)
Therefore, we will continue to
consider the reaction of the South to the
appearance of northern characters in
Faulkner. Take the Reverend Shegog in The
Sound and the Fury as an example. The
pastor was not from the local; he moved
from one city to another to a black church.
And this is the pastor's appearance from the
local people's eyes:
So, to become a part of the
community in the South, one must live up to
the depths of the cultural identity of the
community.
The visitor was undersized, in a
shabby alpaca coat. He had a
wizened black face like a small, aged
monkey… When the visitor rose to
speak he sounded like a white man.
His voice was level and cold. It
sounded too big to have come from
him and they listened at first through
curiosity, as they would have to a
monkey talking. They began to
watch him as they would a man on a
tight rope. (Faulkner, 2000, 253)
6. Conclusion
“Tell [me] about the South. What’s it
like there? What do they do there. Why do
they live there. Why do they live at all”
(Faulkner, 1990, p. 93). One winter night in
Harvard, Shreve, a roommate, asked
Quentin such questions, as they were both
engulfed in deep old tales about the history
of the South. “Why do they live there. Why
do they live at all”. The stories Quentin told
in particular, those written in Faulkner's
novels in general, are like the South's
responses to himself. Faulkner's novel, seen
from that point of view, is a journey of self-
awareness, a journey of finding one's own
cultural identity.
One can imagine
a
bit of
disappointment, a bit of curiosity, a bit of
sarcasm, a bit of skepticism in the way locals
observe the distant visitor. “Because he
sounds like a white man”, even a bit of racial
prejudice, separates the guest from the
community. Black sheep in the church only
began to accept the Shegog as a member of
their community when he raised his voice,
This article, through the exploration
of 4 novels The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay
Dying, Light in August and Absalom,
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26
Absalom! from the perspective of
psychological anthropology, has made an
attempt to envision the Southern identity in
it can be one of the props, the pillars to help
him endure and prevail”(Faulkner, 1950).
References
Faulkner
literature.
These
identity
Abadie, A. J., & Fowler, D. (Eds.) (1980). Fifty years
of Yoknapatawpha. University Press of
Mississippi.
characteristics are encapsulated in the
keyword set with two main pillars, burden of
the past and agrarianism. In the community
memory, the past is synonymous with lost
beauty, and also associated with sins and
curses. The South, carrying the burden of the
past, is a land full of pride, nostalgic,
melancholy, a victim-sinner complex. That
past burden, in turn, constantly hinders,
collides, causes dilemmas when the South
confronts reality. Therefore, the reality of
the South is full of dualism, ambivalence.
The pride and nostalgia of the past make this
land conservative, stubborn (conservative),
sometimes pathetic. But in another respect,
the very way that long-standing aristocracy
and pride give them inner strength, to
persevere, to indomitable, they are
unvanquished.
Abadie, A. J., & Harrington, E. (Eds.) (1977). The
South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The
actual and the apocryphal. University Press
of Mississippi.
Abadie, A. J., & Kartiganer, D. (Eds.) (1997)
Faulkner in cultural context. University
Press of Mississippi.
Aiken, C. (1977). Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county:
Geographical fact into fiction. Geographical
Review, 67(1),
1-21.
Aiken, C. (2009). Yoknapatawpha and the Southern
landscape. University of Georgia Press.
Atkinson, T. (Ed.). (2021). Mississippi Quarterly:
The Journal of Southern Cultures. Johns
Hopkins
University
Press.
Barnard, A., & Spencer, J. (Eds.) (2010). The
Routledge encyclopedia of social and
cultural anthropology (2nd ed.). Routledge.
After all, what Faulkner wants to aim
for, perhaps in human immortality, is
indomitable. He does not avoid the past and
the sin or the sorrow. Soberly exploring
deeply into the history and culture layers of
the community, he expected the people to
take responsibility. But, after all, these layers
of cultural sediments bring Faulkner, and our
readers, the belief in the longevity of the
South in particular, of the human in general.
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VNU JOURNAL OF FOREIGN STUDIES, VOL. 37, NO. 3 (2021)
28
WILLIAM FAULKNER VÀ CUỘC THĂM DÒ CĂN TÍNH
MIỀN NAM NƯỚC MỸ: MỘT HƯỚNG TIẾPCẬN NHÂN HỌC
Hồ Thị Vân Anh
Trường Đại học Vinh, 182 Lê Duẩn, thành phố Vinh, tỉnh Nghệ An, Việt Nam
Tóm tắt: Miền Nam nước Mỹ là cội rễ văn hoá và là nguyên mẫu cho thế giới hư cấu của
William Faulkner, một tên tuổi lớn của văn chương hiện đại. Chủ đề Faulkner và miền Nam đã được
nghiên cứu một cách dày dặn và công phu, đặc biệt là dưới góc nhìn lịch sử và văn hoá. Tuy vậy, chủ
đề căn tính miền Nam trong văn chương của ông vẫn còn những khoảng trống để ngỏ; nghiên cứu này
là cuộc thăm dò vào mảnh đất ấy. Bài viết này là một tiếp cận nhân học về Faulkner, xoay quanh câu
hỏi: Faulkner đã diễn giải căn tính miền Nam như thế nào? Liệu có thể xác lập một bộ từ khoá gói ghém
căn tính miền Nam mang phong cách Faulkner hay không? Áp dụng lí thuyết nhân học về căn tính và
phương pháp khái quát hoá, định danh các hình mẫu văn hoá, chúng tôi tập trung khảo sát bốn tiểu
thuyết đỉnh cao trong di sản Faulkner. Những tiểu thuyết này mang lại hình dung về những nét nổi bật
trong căn tính miền Nam nước Mỹ, gói trọn trong bộ từ khoá mà hai trụ cột chính là ám ảnh quá khứ và
cốt cách nông nghiệp. Những nét cá tính khác - kiêu hãnh, u sầu, hoài nhớ, mặc cảm, bảo thủ, bất khuất,
kiên cường… - cùng đan bện, thúc đẩy lẫn nhau, làm nên tấm căn cước miền Nam mang tên Faulkner.
Từ khoá: văn học Mỹ, William Faulkner, miền Nam nước Mỹ, căn tính, nhân học
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