Eleventh lecture for my students in English 104A, UC Santa Barbara, spring 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s12/index.html

1. Lecture 11: Into Yoknapatawpha County
English 104A
UC Santa Barbara
Spring 2012
7 May 2012
“There is no there there.”
— Gertrude Stein, American poet, on trying to revisit
her childhood home in Oakland

2. William Faulkner (1897-1962)
● Best known for his novels set
in the fictional Yoknapatawpha
County, including:
● The Sound and the Fury (1929)
● As I Lay Dying (1930)
● Sanctuary (1931)
● Light in August (1932)
● Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
● Nobel Prize for Literature (for
1949; awarded 1950)
● Pulitzer Prize (1954; 1962)
Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1954

3. Yoknapatawpha County
● Fictionalized version of
Lafayette County, Mississippi
● Capital of Jefferson is a
fictionalized version of Oxford,
Mississippi
● “Yoknapatawpha” was the
original name of the Yocona
river, which flows through
southern Lafayette County
● “Split land” or (WF’s definition)
“water flows slow through flat
land”
● Setting for 14 of Faulkner’s 19
novels

4. The Snopes Trilogy
● The Hamlet (1940)
● The Town (1957)
● The Mansion (1959)
● Follows the rise and fall of Flem Snopes, and
the attendant fortunes of the Snopes clan.
“they none of them seemed to bear any specific
kinship to one another; they were just
Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites are
just rats and termites.” (Gavin on p. 42; ch. 2)

5. “let us then give, relinquish Jefferson to
Snopeses, banker mayor aldermen church and
all, so that, in defending themselves from
Snopeses, Snopeses must of necessity defend
and shield us, their vassals and chattels, too.”
(Gavin, p. 45; ch. 2)
“No, we got them now; they’re ourn now; I don’t
know jest what Jefferson could a committed back
there whenever it was, to have won this
punishment, gained this right, earned this
privilege. But we did. So it’s for us to cope, to
resist; us to endure, and (if we can) to survive.”
(Ratliff, reporting Gavin’s words, on p. 108; ch. 6)

6. “We all said that, all us wits” (Gavin: 43, ch. 2)
“I wasn’t born yet so it was Cousin Gowan who
was there and big enough to see and
remember and tell me afterward when I was big
enough for it to make sense. […] ‘Us’ was
Grandfather and Mother and Father and Uncle
Gavin then. So this is what Gowan knew about
it until I got born and big enough to know about
it to. So when I say ‘we’ and ‘we thought’ what I
mean is Jefferson and what Jefferson thought.”
(Charles “Chick” Mallison on p. 3, ch. 1)

7. “Oh yes, we all said that, all us wits: we would not
have missed that chance. Not that we believed it or
even disbelieved it, but simply to defend the old
Colonel’s memory by being first say aloud among
ourselves what we believed the whole Snopes tribe
was long since chortling over to one another. […]
Not that we really believed that, of course.” (Gavin:
p. 42; ch. 2)
“By ‘we’ I mean me now.” (Chick Mallison, p. 117;
ch. 7)
“We’ve all bought Snopeses here, whether we
wanted to or not […] I don’t know why we bought
them. I mean, why we had to: what coin and when
and where we so recklessly and improvidently spent
that we had to have Snopeses too.” (Gavin, to Eula,
p. 101; ch. 5)

8. Please take out your copy of The
Town and turn to chapter 5
(probably p. 93 or p. 88)

9. Media Credits
The photo of William Faulkner comes from the Carl
Van Vechten Collection at the U.S. Library of
Congress, and copyright on this collection has
expired. Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Faulkner_
1954_(3)_(photo_by_Carl_van_Vechten).jpg
The map of Yoknapatawpha County is Faulkner’s own
and is included in the Noel Polk edition (and every
other edition I have seen) of Faulkner’s 1936 novel
Absalom, Absalom! Though it is still under copyright,
this map is a low-resolution copy unsuitable for
making quality reproductions, and is used for
purposes of teaching and scholarship.