Nate Briggs's Blog - Posts Tagged "faulkner"

Visions in Small Places

“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all....” - Fitzgerald

As our culture slides into its post-literate phase, the names of writers left behind will inevitably grow longer: authors of "difficult" books vehemently debated in graduate seminar...but nowhere else. Even Shakespeare gets farther and farther behind in the rear view mirror, for reasons explained in an essay of mine: https://medium.com/@T…/shakespeare-fu...

When a woman told William Faulker that she’d read “The Bear” three times, and still didn’t know what it was about, Faulkner replied: “Then you should probably read it again....” — and that’s why I’m sure he'll be among the most easily dismissed of the difficult writers of the late 20th Century.

I don't agree with him that readers should serve an apprenticeship of comprehension.

But where we do meet (and shake hands) is the idea — summarized by Fitzgerald, above — that maybe it can be best to write about what’s close to you. Looking at one particular place long and hard...for a long time.

The American Nation is now divided along several major fault lines. But one of the least discussed is the gulf between Urban and Rural. New York is vastly overrepresented in our current media, and Middle America vastly underrepresented.

For most of his work, Faulkner used the people, the landscape, and the history of northern Mississippi in a place he invented: Yoknapatawpha County. Terminally rural. A place in the middle of nowhere, you might say. Unworthy of attention, according to majority opinion.

But, the longer he looked at it, the more interesting it got.

A strong sense of place gives fiction a useful depth: the “universe in a grain of sand”. John Cheever hardly ever strayed from Long Island, and Garrison Keillor has been living off Lake Wobegone for decades.

Why not the Great Plains, I thought? There is no poet laureate for the modern Bible Belt — that peculiar slice of nowhere. And so this series of posts will be introducing the not-quite-lost town of Elsinore — where you can pull off the Interstate if you want to (but most people don't want to) — where the weather is pretty awful about 300 days of the year — where the smart ones have left to make their fortunes, and the loyal ones stayed behind — where nothing much seems to happen and yet, where the whole human landscape is on display as much as anywhere else.

As usual, stay tuned....
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Published on October 11, 2016 09:07 Tags: concept, faulkner, fiction, rural, urban