Continuity through Imagery: The Dust of Yoknapatawpha.

摘要

The most innovative of Faulkner's contributions to American literature is the creation of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner called it his "apocryphal county," and gave it a geographic location based on the real Lafayette County and a history that spanned from the arrival of the first white settlers at the end of the 18th Century to the time contemporary with Faulkner's death in 1962. In the middle of that time is the Civil War, a period of violent upheaval that remains at the center of Faulkner's fiction. It casts a shadow on all that comes after it, regardless of any actual connection to it through family lineage or historical knowledge on the part of the characters in his stories and novels. Faulkner uses particular recurring images, especially the image of dust, as a way to connect his narratives from the various points in their history to the downfall of the South in the Civil War. Through his use of dust, a profound level of intertextuality in the Yoknapatawpha works connects major themes, such as the origins and development of racism and the effect of industrialization on the moral code of the Old South.