Volume 1, Number 10 · January 9, 1964
The Over-Wrought Urn
By Marvin Mudrick
William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country
by Cleanth Brooks
Yale, 500 pp., $8.50
After decades of the bowler-hat and furled-umbrella literit that made his academic reputation, Cleanth Brooks has reverted with a rebel whoop to the Confederacy. His Faulkner book is a Southern blend of vitriol, tart courtliness, regional piety, genealogies back to Adam, the stupefying trivia of life in a small town, and uninhibited hero-worship. It gives the hard back of a gloved hand to those Northerners who have presumed to elucidate Faulkner's home country; it turns about to congratulate fellow-Southerners on their perspicacity in similar but unpresumptuous attempts; with energetic sarcasm it defends Faulkner against charges of condescension toward Negroes, contempt for poor whites, romanticism, sensationalism, restrictive provincialism, symbol-mongering, imperfections of structure and technique; it is intransigently enthusiastic about novels—Sartoris and The Unvanquished, for instance—that even devotees of Faulkner have been content to set aside as poor or minor.
Review, 1855 words
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