Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/alh/ajr052
ISSN1468-4365
Autores Tópico(s)Aeolian processes and effects
ResumoThat day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather. Floods play a conspicuous role in two of William Faulkner's novels: As I Lay Dying (1930) and Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939). In the 1940s, Faulkner would continue writing about the Big River and its floodplain, and humanity's attempt to outthink it—his tone becoming increasingly and irascibly elegiac—in the final story of Go Down, Moses (1942), “Delta Autumn,” in which the protagonist describes the Delta as “This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations” (347). What Ike McCaslin refers to here is a complex of anthropogenic changes such as wetlands drainage, cotton monoculture, massive deforestation by the timber industry, and the building of ever-higher levees to manage the Mississippi and its tributaries by straightening and containing their courses. The year 1954 would find Faulkner once again contemplating the Mississippi watershed. In a Holiday article on his home state, he described the periodic flooding that was made worse by these human practices, remarking how, during floods, the “Old Man” paid “none of the dykes any heed at all” as he “gather[ed] water all the way from Montana to Pennsylvania … and roll[ed] it down the artificial gut of his victims' puny and baseless hoping” (“Mississippi” 45).
Referência(s)