As Old as Man Himself

In William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks, now Gray Professor of Rhetoric at Yale, gives us, after long years of study and reflection, the first thoroughgoing critical examination Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels have ever received from one who can speak from intimate but dispassionate knowledge of their milieu; and the resulting volume, complete with notes often as valuable as the text and with a helpful index of Faulkner characters and genealogical charts of some of their more complicated relationships, is not only a milestone in Faulkner studies but a triumph to crown all others in Mr. Brooks’ long history of distinguished achievement.

In his first chapter, “Faulkner the Provincial,” he sets about laying the two principal ghosts—and there have been some several—which have heretofore haunted Faulkner criticism: the ghost of sociologizing and the ghost of symbol-mongering. True to the best precepts of the New Criticism, he sees “the central critical task” as an obligation “to determine and evaluate the meaning of the work in the fullness of its depth and amplitude.” But the New Criticism has never contended that works of art exist in a vacuum, and such examinations of the novels’ themes and structures must be made with “some knowledge of how life is actually lived and has been lived in Mississippi.”

RD

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Robert Drake

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In William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks, now Gray Professor of Rhetoric at Yale, gives us, after long years of study and reflection, the first thoroughgoing critical examination Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels have ever received from one who can speak from intimate but dispassionate knowledge of their milieu; and the resulting volume, complete with notes often as valuable as the text and with a helpful index of Faulkner characters and genealogical charts of some of their more complicated relationships, is not only a milestone in Faulkner studies but a triumph to crown all others in Mr. Brooks’ long history of distinguished achievement.

In his first chapter, “Faulkner the Provincial,” he sets about laying the two principal ghosts—and there have been some several—which have heretofore haunted Faulkner criticism: the ghost of sociologizing and the ghost of symbol-mongering. True to the best precepts of the New Criticism, he sees “the central critical task” as an obligation “to determine and evaluate the meaning of the work in the fullness of its depth and amplitude.” But the New Criticism has never contended that works of art exist in a vacuum, and such examinations of the novels’ themes and structures must be made with “some knowledge of how life is actually lived and has been lived in Mississippi.”