Immersion and Enchantment in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County

Yoknapatawpha County, the creative world of William Faulkner’s fiction, is home to hundreds of distinct characters, dozens of unique locations, and a rich history that emerged out of Faulkner’s imagination over the course of his thirty years as a published author. To properly explore the contours of Faulkner’s fictional universe, one would need considerable time—perhaps fifteen or sixteen weeks—to read eight of his finest Yoknapatawpha novels. This is exactly the context of a seminar on Faulkner taught by Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia: to read eight Faulkner novels beginning with Flags in the Dust, his earliest Yoknapatawpha fiction, and ending with Intruder in the Dust, a novel that Railton and other Faulkner scholars consider to be the last creatively interesting Yoknapatawpha novel Faulkner wrote. As a student in this seminar, I immersed myself in this fictional world with full recognition of its difficulty; Railton often joked that our goal in the end would be to have climbed “Mt. Faulkner,” gesturing toward the formidable stack of books we were to read.

While I knew this would be a trying experiment on my time and concentration, my ability to focus and endure faced its greatest challenge while I was reading Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s sixth Yoknapatawpha fiction, but also his most sprawling and ambitious account of both the history of his fictional county and the history of the American South. Equally hailed as a masterpiece as much as it is impossible to finish, my experience of reading Absalom was dually challenging and immersive, painstaking and rewarding. I fully identify with what Marie-Laure Ryan describes as immersion in a “textual world”: “Both fictional and nonfictional mimetic texts invite the reader to imagine a world, and to imagine it as a physical, autonomous reality furnished with palpable objects and populated by flesh and blood individuals” (92). But my experience of reading Absalom directly conflicts with Ryan’s re-presentation of an argument put forth by Victor Nell: “For a reader to be caught up in a story, the textual world must be accessible through effortless concentration . . . immersion is hampered by difficult materials because ‘consciousness is a processing bottleneck, and it is the already comprehended messages . . . that fully engage the receiver’s conscious attention’” (96). Ryan appears to qualify this claim by favoring the immersive powers of revisiting a familiar text over embracing the process of “struggle and discovery”: “How many of us, after finally turning the last page of a difficult novel, compulsively return to the first page with the exhilarating thought that deciphering is over and the fun can now begin?” (97) Ryan finally exposes her affinities with Nell’s argument when she adopts it as the first criterion in her “four degrees of absorption”: “Concentration. The type of attention devoted to difficult, nonimmersive works. In this mode, the textual world—if the text projects any—offers so much resistance that the reader remains highly vulnerable to the distracting stimuli of external reality” (98).

I reject Nell’s claim that concentrating on a text is prohibitive of immersion, and I would like to push back against Ryan’s ambivalent stance toward the immersive powers of difficult fiction. My experience of reading Absalom affirms the notion that powering through challenging work can be immensely rewarding, especially when the impact of having read the text is repercussive rather than immediate: the most striking moments of Absalom for me were only realized after having completed the work; each moment spent dwelling on the question that ends the novel—why do you hate the South?—magnifies in strength the more I dwell on it, and this holds true for other moments in the novel as well. Although Absalom is by all means a demanding text, it is no less enthralling and immersive than a work of popular fiction. I argue that its strengths as an immersive text are heightened by the context of studying Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in a prolonged, academic setting with a leading Faulkner scholar.

Close reading, the careful and critical interpretation of texts, is essential practice for understanding and wrestling with Faulkner’s creative universe. Two of our assignments in the course required close readings of selections from Faulkner’s work, and Railton emphasized that our mission was to interrogate the text and parse out its latent meanings. Rita Felski, in her book Uses of Literature, writes that “the scrupulous attentiveness to stylistic and narrative detail” entailed by close reading “is often seen . . . as what people have in mind when they hold forth the merits of reading literature ‘as literature’” (52). Reading Absalom nearly always required slow and deliberate absorption of the words on the page; the text itself often occupied the entire page, sparing only one paragraph break or line of dialogue every few pages. Yet the formidable appearance of the printed word quickly began to expel a powerful—what Felski would call “enchanting”—effect on me: “Enchantment is characterized by a state of intense involvement, a sense of being so entirely caught up in an aesthetic object that nothing else seems to matter . . . Wrapped up in the details of a novel . . . you feel yourself enclosed in a bubble of absorbed attention that is utterly distinct from the hit-and-miss qualities of everyday perception” (54); one could easily argue that this novel can only be read while enchanted.

Such an experience overlaps strongly with Ryan’s third criterion for absorption in a text: “Entrancement. The nonreflexive reading pleasure of the reader so completely caught up in a textual world that she loses sight of anything external to it, including the aesthetic quality of the author’s performance or the truth value of the textual statements” (98). Yet Felski criticizes Ryan’s interpretation of entrancement for her failure to account for the appeal of a writer’s style: “What such an argument overlooks is the possibility of an emotional, even erotic cathexis onto the sounds and surfaces of words”; “Readers prone to such infatuations . . . are likely to be drawn to idiosyncratic, edgy, even flamboyant examples of language use (63). Felski’s rejoinder is all the more appropriate for an exploration of Faulkner’s work, as his narrative experimentation and use of language in Absalom is certainly idiosyncratic and flamboyant, and his narrative project—retelling the story of the destruction of the South as the destruction of a family headed by a demon from hell—is by all accounts edgy.

Ryan holds one further tenet of immersion in addition to her four criteria for absorption: “The minimal form of [immersion] is built into language and the cognitive mechanisms of the mind; we cannot avoid it; but the richer forms depend on the resonance in the reader’s mind of the aesthetic features of the text: plot, narrative presentation, images, and style” (96). Faulkner’s work in Absalom excels in all of these fields, particularly in the complexity of the narrative and the unique stream-of-consciousness prose style that informs Faulkner’s reputation as a modernist. Absalom begins in Mississippi, the summer of 1910, with nineteen-year-old Quentin Compson being told the story of Thomas Sutpen—the town’s most notorious patriarch whose family self-immolates over four generations—by Rosa Coldfield, the sister of Sutpen’s wife Ellen who was herself briefly engaged to Sutpen. We learn early on that Henry Sutpen, Rosa’s nephew, killed the man—Charles Bon—to whom his sister Judith was engaged on the day before their wedding: “the son who widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride” (Faulkner 11); the central question here is not what happens to Bon but why he was killed. This absence of understanding is what propels the first five chapters of the novel and motivates Coldfield and Jason Compson, Quentin’s father, to share Sutpen’s story with him. The remainder of the novel takes place at Harvard, the winter of 1910, and features Quentin retelling Sutpen’s story to his roommate Shreve. As a Canadian, Shreve serves as an interlocutor for all the simple yet taboo questions that surround the postbellum South: “Tell 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 174). Enduring the struggle of making sense of the story in this complicated novel is difficult enough for Quentin and his roommate Shreve, but the greatest pain is felt by the reader. Anticipating the difficulties of understanding the narrative, however, Faulkner included three auxiliary pieces to accompany the novel: a chronology of events; a genealogy of characters in the novel; and a map of Yoknapatawpha that includes not only the geography of the fictional county but also the locations and events of various other Yoknapatawpha fictions. No matter how complex Absalom’s narrative may be, Faulkner’s efforts to bring the details of his fictional world to fruition—to create Yoknapatawpha in the most immersive terms as possible—satisfy all of Ryan’s terms for a fictional world: “connected set of objects and individuals; habitable environment; reasonably intelligible totality for external observers; field of activity for its members” (91).

The most striking component of Absalom are the reverberations of the story I felt after having finished. While Absalom demanded long hours of intense concentration, its immersive powers are rooted in the repercussions of its most literary moments. Absalom concludes with Quentin in crisis over his knowledge of the story of Thomas Sutpen, which is in turn the story and the curse of the South: “’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!” (378). When I consider what this story is about—the destruction of a family as the destruction of the South—and how Quentin is coming to terms with this story as a young man from the South, in his first year in college, I see tremendous resonance in my own life as a young man from the South finishing my last year at the University of Virginia. For this reason, the last words of the novel contain a personal resonance with me: how do I come to terms with the racist history of the South? How do I come to terms with the recent racial terror that occurred in Charlottesville in 2017? Reading Absalom in the twenty-first century is all the more resonant when I think of how I am still making sense of the story of the South, just as Quentin is still trying to make sense of the story of Thomas Sutpen. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fiction—challenging as it may be—is as powerful and immersive as any popular fiction; it unveils to me a vision of the present that was made accessible through a vision of the past. The ability for Absalom to reveal such insights is no coincidence: it is the power of a master storyteller using the magic of the printed word to enchant and immerse me in a fictional world not entirely different from the world I live in today.