The city specter: William Faulkner and the threat of urban encroachment.

Moffitt, Anne Hirsch

Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.... It opened up a gold mine of other peoples, so I created a cosmos of my own.

--William Faulkner, "The Art of Fiction XII" (52)

This famous quotation from William Faulkner's 1956 interview with Jean Stein for the Paris Review sets forth a spatial model for Yoknapatawpha County that is both insular and grandiose. By proclaiming his region's self-containment in a postage stamp, the writer, like a few of his most memorable characters and several of his most fervent advocates, appears to promote the idea of Northern Mississippi as a singular place cordoned off from the world, detached from the rising century's preoccupation with city life and the social upheavals that went along with it. (1) This particular spatial interpretation is one that attracted many of Faulkner's Agrarian critics, who expressly sought a "valorization of rural life" that by the strength of its merit would condemn the metropolis outright--a doubly bound aim that Susan Willis, in her essay, "Aesthetics of the Rural Slum," describes as the textbook definition of antimodernization (84). Using Cleanth Brooks as her example of a New Critic who was limited by this kind of agrarian ideology, Willis describes how this sequestration of the rural from the urban is problematic because it leaves the rural as "nothing more than the city's binary opposite" (85).

Far from existing in true isolation, however, the integral strength and poetic effect of Yoknapatawpha's rural insularity is, in fact, founded in its prevalent and increasingly open confrontations with the modern metropolis's emergent paradigms. (2) Faulkner's successful presentation of "modern" consciousness in rural subjects engages northern Mississippi not as an alternative universe, sequestered from time, but as a conjunction of the rural in dialectic with the urban from which Faulkner could dramatize the modes of resistance and accommodation to modernity that his characters inevitably undertake. In other words, instead of merely seeing the rural South as a counter narrative to Northern industrialization, as the Agrarians prefer, Yoknapatawpha should be considered as a critical representation of how we might more fully imagine the development of early-twentieth-century urbanism in the United States. Faulkner's "rural" writing demonstrates that modernity is not something that purely, or even figuratively, happened in the city and to the rural; it emerged when these ideologically bound geographies sought and/or were forced to confront one another.

In spite of the habitual sleepiness of Jefferson, many of the ecological disturbances to the cosmos are evidence of what Philip Weinstein classifies as "vintage early twentieth-century modernism"--the effects of the "too-fast" (cars, airplanes, industrial modernization, and moral expediency) waging assault on the "too-slow" (traditional modes of transportation, production, and social relations [21]). Citing tragic speed enthusiasts Bayard Sartoris and Temple Drake and perpetual stragglers Benjy and Quentin Compson, Weinstein places Yoknapatawpha's residents among the rarified pantheon of high modernist--velocity-troubled--protagonists. Within such a configuration, Faulkner's country folk sit remarkably comfortably alongside more cosmopolitan figures such as Prufrock, Dalloway, and Dedalus.

Yet, if it is Faulkner's concern with the variable pace of time that identifies him as part of a canonized literary movement, what sets him apart is the vigorous attention he pays to the repercussions of modernism on the too-slow side of the equation. What does it mean for a slow-moving region to confront an infectious national need for speed? Leigh Anne Duck, in her book, The Nation's Region, sees this confrontation as a modernist emanation of the gothic. She differentiates this from the traditional eighteenth-century modes of the genre by pointing out that, instead of the typical psychosocial horrors being contained in "distinct chronotopes," "modernist texts represent gothic emergences--sudden perceptions of haunted or shifting time, spectral or vertiginous space--within a recognizable, even mimetic, social space" (151). Indeed, this characterization suits the atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha quite well.

In the representation of these "gothic emergences," Faulkner's perspicuity of the social and cultural losers in the twentieth century--the Compsons, Sutpens, and McCaslins among them--is sharpened, not overshadowed, by the glare of the metropolis. As Jeff Allred's aptly titled chapter "Moving Violations" asserts, it is those "who are fixed in place, relatively speaking" who "make the contours of the strange new world of modernity visible by contrast" (105). As such, we come to understand that Faulkner did not invest in speed for speed's sake, as might be said of other rural natives gone modern like Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan; instead, he concentrated on the latent effects of a community's sacrifice for speed as well as the (often insufficient) resistance mounted against it. The introduction of paved sidewalks, electric street lamps, and movie theaters asserts a new modern configuration on Jefferson; concrete and electrical wiring form a grid to make permanent the once malleable spatial organization of the town, while further assimilating the region to the rest of the country. In light of Allred's and Duck's assertions, these changes threaten, but also satisfyingly dramatize the regionally specific way Yoknapatawphans live and their psychical relationship to space and time, particularly with regard to how or even whether their collective memory will be preserved.

Naturally, there are no bustling metropolises in Yoknapatawpha. An actual city, if it appears at all in Faulkner's fiction, is often only an outpost or a transitory plot point. (3) Instead, in the heart of Faulkner's rural series, from The Sound and the Fury to Go Down, Moses, the too-fast urban ethos of convenience and opportunism infiltrates the county in the form of a specter whose offensive strategy is multifaceted and whose hegemonic sense of authority derives from, not one city in particular, but the overwhelming sense that an urban agenda of modernization has the rural surrounded. (4) Georg Simmel, in his famous essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," describes the nature of the city's reach to extend well beyond its physical borders as its "most significant aspect," the effect of which "reacts upon [the city] and gives to it life, weight, importance and responsibility"(17). While Simmel's depiction of this city specter demonstrates how the metropolis gains nourishment for itself, Faulkner considers this process from the opposite perspective of the habitus that is being consumed. (5) From within Yoknapatawpha, the city specter looms in the interstices of these narratives, a ghostly shadow deploying variable emissaries who threaten to be more transformative to the community than Emancipation ever was.

As this article will show, my interest in the city specter is not in the more obvious ways that it appears to bring the South to its knees, but in the subtler, more ambivalent ways that the city's rural residence confuses our habituation to a linear conception of modernization with all but predetermined winners and losers. This spectral effect is apparent in the way Faulkner's city does not quash but disrupts the myth of the South's tragic fall in much of Faulkner's work, with the chapter "Delta Autumn" from Go Down, Moses as one of the most telling and surprising narratives of this unrelenting rural/urban pas de deux. The city specter haunts Yoknapatawpha by seeking to change not only its modes of everyday life, but also the region's contextualization in both space and time. The rural region's languid guise of timelessness and limitless space is interrupted and overtaken by a new sense of immediacy to preserve and defend--another example of the too-slow confronting the too-fast. As the illusion of regional self-containment progressively erodes in the South throughout the century, the rural habitus acquires a reactionary stance that hardly appears an adequate counter to the spatially and temporally co-optative forces of urban modernization. (6) And yet, it is not the outcome for the South that truly motivates these texts, but the intrigue and mystery of the confrontation itself.

II

The popular short story, "A Rose for Emily" is an appropriate place to begin defining Faulkner's city specter, not only because it is written relatively early in his career, but also because structurally the story tracks a predictable trajectory of the Northern carpetbagger who seduces the Southern maiden, threatening not just the honor of the family, but also the constitution of the region. What begins as a cross-class, North-South love story turns into a murder mystery when the town discovers that their living "monument," Emily Grierson, has murdered Homer Barron, a Yankee foreman who had arrived in Jefferson to pave the sidewalks one summer (119). As one of the city's emissaries from the North, Homer had courted both Emily and the town with modern conveniences and aesthetic improvements. In the narrative, Homer manages to disarm the community with his warm gregarious nature until the progressive changes he brought with him, technological and social, were irrevocably assimilated into the environment: before Homer disappears for good, Faulkner establishes that "the streets had been finished some time since," thereby establishing the permanent trace on the land that Homer leaves behind (127).

In this way, Homer is a symbol of the mechanized classless future for which neither Emily nor the town is quite ready. Although in one sense this crime of passion might be understood as only another example of the South's characteristically hot-blooded constitution (in opposition to the cold restraint of the North), it is also, conversely, a targeted attempt to halt what Faulkner describes in Requiem for a Nun as the trademark "fever" and "delirium" of the city "forever seething with motion and motion with progress" (476). And yet, perhaps Emily's revenge on Homer is neither fully due to her Southern sensitivities nor her overactive defenses, but equally (and paradoxically) its very circumstances, the murder of her Yankee lover, is evidence that the fever and delirium that Homer brought with him from the North had, in a sense, taken residency in the town long before his remains are discovered. In this sense, Homer, though thwarted by Emily in life with an easy dose of arsenic, haunts Jefferson as a ghost of the future. He is not merely a reminder of the lost war, but a harbinger of the city-born structural and social changes that will certainly be more difficult to ward off than his actual person, even if the community manages to sustain some will to resist the persuasive seductions of modernization.

While Faulkner's perennial hick party crashers, the Snopeses, take advantage of the region's underestimation of them, the city, like the spectral presence of Homer, hones in on the weaknesses of the denigrated social system. The city specter promises uncertain illusory rewards (sophistication, culture, and, most alluringly, the ease of prosperity), while delivering very certain palpable losses. Compellingly, though they are not worldly enough to know they are boarding in a brothel, it is Virgil Snopes and Fonzo in Sanctuary who appear most sensitive to this double-edged call of the city: "They could hear the city, evocative and strange, imminent and remote; threat and promise both" (194). As the Snopeses disrupt hierarchies of power from within, the city's indeterminate penetration, exerting pressure from without, agitates and enables the primary twin infrastructural threats to the New South: land exploitation and social upheaval. As much as any speeding train, plane, or automobile, these menaces, exacerbated by the metropolis, mark the temporal immediacy of Faulkner's environmental concerns.

Moreover, though significant diffusion of the Snopeses into Jefferson does not occur until relatively late in the Yoknapatawpha series, the urban specter is there at the start, its weakening and destabilizing effect opening opportunities for the Snopeses' later power grab. In The Sound and the Fury, the city figuration of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not only accommodates and abets Quentin Compson's suicide through sustained dispassionate complicity with Quentin's own sense of trapped self-alienation, but also long before that moment, infiltrates Jefferson by forcing the sale of the Compson pasture. Demoting this land "fit to breed princes, statesmen and generals and bishops" into a golf course and using the proceeds to pay for Quentin's doomed Harvard education dramatizes the diminishing returns the region suffers when its residents attempt to reinvest in their future (333).

For Rosa Coldfied in Absalom, Absalom! Northern cities have drained the South of its regenerative prerogative and its own distinct cultural discourse. These losses come to a head when Rosa imagines Quentin marrying a woman in the North, presumably to start a family there. Rosa believes it would be for this wife and their connubial life in the North that Quentin might be motivated to publish her story in a magazine. Capitulating that "Northern people have already seen to it that there is little left in the South for a young man," she submits herself to the idea that if the story is to survive, it will be through Northern modes of production (and reproduction) that, at that time, monopolize the documentation and circulation of ideas (5). In this way, the revenge she seeks against Sutpen (which is also a displaced revenge act against her father) by narrating his story is both abetted by and sacrificed to the Northeast industrial urban complex. (7)

Even Rosa's willingness to sacrifice her story, both enabling its preservation and securing its regional displacement, is not enough to achieve her ends. Her aims encounter a dead end at Quentin's suicide--notwithstanding the metatextual resolution that Rosa's wish is achieved eventually through Faulkner's success publishing the book. Conversely, even if we embrace the metatextual resolution, we are impelled by John T. Irwin's interpretation of doubling and incest to see more clearly how the publishing of the novel--inevitably in the North--mirrors and, to a large extent, reenacts Quentin's river suicide: "For writing a book, creating a work of art, is not so much an alternative to suicide as a kind of alternative suicide: writing as an act of autoerotic self-destruction" (162). In this way, the dislocation of the book from Faulkner in the South to publishing houses and audiences in the North enacts Quentin's premature death as a necessary condition for the story to be realized. (8)

If Rosa's "pragmatic" approach to getting her story reproduced relies obliquely on Quentin's capacity to reproduce it in an urban setting, Anse takes an equally pragmatic, resource-oriented approach to achieving his reproductive goals at the end of As I Lay Dying. Though the promise to bury his wife in Jefferson initiates the voyage, and his desire for new teeth sustains his monomaniacal focus to get there, access to the comparatively dynamic material culture of Jefferson provides Anse with another, even greater, economic opportunity: a new wife. The achievement of this hidden agenda, not only brings one more laborer to the farm, but also (seemingly miraculously) reestablishes Anse's reproductive viability. And yet, as with Rosa and Quentin, this viability exacts an essential piece of who they are: as Patrick O'Donnell observes, the Bundrens will pay for their new start with Darl's sanity (84). Because his eyes are "full of the land" and cannot suppress their agitation as the caravan moves closer to town, "the limning of [Darl's] eccentricity [becomes] a necessary part of the process that brings the roads to the Bundrens and the Bundrens to Jefferson" (AILD 36; O'Donnell 91). Their regional singularity is sacrificed as they adopt nationally endorsed behavioral norms (i.e., consumerism). Representative of the less visible macroeconomic currents at play, these "goods," material and otherwise, that the Bundrens find and sacrifice in Jefferson mark a historical transition in American life that Kevin Railey pinpoints as "the historical turning point where urban, town interests were coming to outweigh rural, country ones" (91). (9) Railey shows that the Bundrens (with the exception of Addie and Darl) instinctually recognize the social barriers of yeomanry: "Being in the country and identifying with country ways meant isolation and separation--virtual nonexistence"(89). To become citizens engaged in this new "liberal ethos," the family not only adopts middle class values of consumerism (in spite of their actual poverty), prioritizing the town over the country, but also is impelled literally to move in that direction: toward Jefferson.

While the search for material offerings and services in As I Lay Dying makes modern consumers out of the Bundrens, the city specter in Light in August does not merely convert new adherents, but also wages significant havoc on Yoknapatawpha's class-normative relationships. For most of the novel, the city specter is not oblique, but named: the city of Memphis gives a physical shape to the interruption of moral liberalism in town life that the city inevitably symbolizes. Memphis is where brothel owners, Max and Mame, find Bobbie Allen, the prostitute, before bringing her to Mississippi to set up shop; it is also the place to which they return when Joe Christmas's murder of McEachern threatens to thrust them into the public gaze. Memphis is where the men from the planing mill go to gamble "now and then" and where "now and then" the wife of Jefferson's Reverend Gail Hightower would "slip off ... and have a good time"(41, 59). The intermittency of this "now and then," like the modern innovations in "A Rose for Emily" that happened not all at once but over the course of a generation, provides a cloak of innocuousness that covers over systemic cracks that are being aggravated beneath the surface of Jefferson's seeming timelessness. Though for a time treatment at a sanatorium appears to reform her ways, it is not long before Hightower's wife escapes to the city one last time--the Sunday morning paper "telling how she had jumped or fallen from a hotel window"(67). Indeed, most everything associated with scandal in Light in August (with the exception of Joanna Burden's murder) can be located or traced back to Memphis. Even before Christmas had ever been there, Max refers to him as "The Beale Street playboy," preemptively associating him with an urban nightlife he has yet to experience. Although this name is clearly meant in jest along with Max's other moniker for Christmas, "Romeo," the joke ironically becomes apt as Christmas, on the run after the murder, acquires fluency in the carnal nightlife of several North American urban centers (213).

In spite of the ignominious affair of the Reverend's wife, the townspeople, particularly the "old ladies and some of the old men" seem willing to attribute her murder/suicide to another "now and then" Memphis casualty, were it not for Hightower's insistence on remaining in Jefferson and the intrusion of newspaper reporters and photographers from Memphis looking to uncover more fuel for this scandalous fire (68). The residents sense instinctively that these "foreign" reporters seek to expose the private transgressions of not one individual, but the entire community. With the probing light of flashing camera bulbs, these city emissaries threaten to hold up a mirror on the community of Jefferson into which the citizens definitely do not wish to gaze. The invasive presence of these intruders makes it much trickier for the townspeople to deny their connection to the woman's tragic downfall. Jefferson willingly withstands the occasional moral failings of its inhabitants so long as the evidence of these weaknesses remains outside the town limits and the men who transgress these limits continue to reliably show up to work on Monday in "clean overalls" with the appearance, at least, of pentinence, "waiting quietly until the whistle blew and then going quietly to work, as though there were still something of sabbath in the overlingering air" (41). This is why the townspeople want so intently for Hightower to leave them. He, like the reporters, is a reminder of their own proximity to the scandal. It is not something that solely happened elsewhere, as they would like to believe; it happened in Jefferson too.

Unlike Max, Mame, and Bobbie, Christmas doesn't seek refuge in Memphis, the established shelter for sinners. Instead, Faulkner writes, "he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.... And always, sooner or later, the street ran through cities, through an identical and wellnigh interchangeable section of cities without remembered names"(223-24). Christmas's urban experience is characterized by his serial encounters with prostitutes--thus the cities in question here not only accommodate moral corruption, but also multiply and disperse it. It is in these cities that Christmas first engages with his own racial ambiguity--first using it to get out of paying prostitutes and then when he is far enough north that that strategy no longer works, he tries to find peace by flipping his racial identification to live as a black man and deny his whiteness. But all he finds is more turmoil: "And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial" (226). It is here in the interchangeable urban spaces that Christmas's personal shame transforms into an explosive unappeasable self-loathing, incubating the kernels of rage that will culminate in the murder of Joanna Burden in Jefferson. Spectral in their lack of specificity, back alley blending with back alley, these cities aggravate, instead of appease, Christmas's racial confusion.

Finally, in Go Down, Moses, the rural ecological cycle runs full course from fertility and regeneration in "Was" to exhaustion and stagnancy in "Delta Autumn." In "Was," the city is absent and the cosmos appears intact. Its high comic mode, replete with chase scene, drunken negotiations, and farcical matchmaking, leads to the satisfying comedic ending of a double marriage between Tomey's Turl and Tennie Beauchamp, and Sophonsiba Beauchamp and Theophilus "Uncle Buck" McCaslin. In line with the mode's directives, both of these matches will result in progeny.

Every sequence to follow "Was" informs and is informed by this opening country escapade. While the darker truth behind "Was," as revealed in "The Bear," shatters the illusion that Buck and Buddy lived in a simpler more harmonious time, the playful light-hearted register of the tale appears more and more precious, in contrast to Go Down, Moses's subsequent episodes. Ending the novel in Faulkner's present day or thereabouts, the "proper" McCaslin lineage is threatened with extinction and the region is no longer as rural nor as isolated as it was.

In "Delta Autumn" (set in 1941), the specter of the city has effectively engulfed the county, heralding an end to this period of Southern rural insulation and exceptionalism in both the region and Faulkner's writing. It is testimony, eulogy, and burial to a lost rural way of life. As the spectral city closes in, the story offers a glimpse of the future that is hopeful for the still young and vibrant multiracial nation, but is incommensurable to Yoknapatawpha as it once was and had aspired still to be. While much of literary modernism addresses the alienation of the individual, vis-a-vis the larger systemic processes that are engendered and embodied in the modern metropolis, the incommensurability of the rural speaks to a condition of social and cultural estrangement that is more expansive, and yet apparently more easily overlooked, than the solitary modern man. Although we might be tempted to read this losing battle with regret and a certain sense of hopelessness, pity was not an emotion in which Faulkner held much currency. This incommensurability is not only about failing to adapt and/or preserve, but also about forcing the narrative of the twentieth century to recognize the incongruity of the social and cultural shifts that were underway at this time. Faulkner's writing insists that the reader note the social and ecological repercussions of these changes before losing sight of an ideological conflict that was worth remembering.

The following textual analysis examines the ghostly presence of the urban "specter" in "Delta Autumn," which, as the root of the word from the Latin term specere meaning "to look, see" implies, reveals itself through visible foretokens of change ("Specter"). These changes impress, not on individuals or the community, but on the land itself that is personified through the perspective of its embattled sympathizer, Ike McCaslin. This specter threatens the ecological hegemony of the habitus by opening the region to extralocal social and commercial interests. In doing so, it aligns rural Mississippi closer to the rest of the nation, sacrificing, as with the Bundrens, the exceptional modes of region that, for Faulkner, had been his literary wellspring for over a decade. While Faulkner is often lauded for his material interest in small-scale affronts to rural life at the behest of "progress," this analysis considers the broader conspiratorial effect of these microdisturbances, all of which, particularly in "Delta Autumn," coalesce into a more forceful intervention by the metropolis in Faulkner's work than is often readily acknowledged. As Allred identifies the fixity of Yoknapatawpha as the attribute to illuminate modernity by contrast, so, conversely, does the encroachment of the spectral metropolis make visible this critical moment of self-reckoning and introspection for the rural South.

III

A perhaps unlikely place to look for Faulkner's sense of the urban, "Delta Autumn" is set firmly in the depleted Mississippi wilderness. In demographic and geographic terms, the location evades both the urban and the rural through its seclusion from human settlement and society; yet, this story manages to elicit the threat of the urban to the rural in spite of its dislocation from these sites. Though natural resources are indubitably at stake, it is the loss of the privileged rural relationship to the wilderness and what that loss entails in social terms that most concerns Ike McCaslin. The traditions and rituals of the Mississippi wilderness, the way its usage is regulated and its nature and meaning defined, has remained the privilege and provenance of the white male rural population for generations. This is what stands to be lost above and beyond the sacrifice of trees to the lumberyard. In the end, it is the strength of Ike's conservative rural social paradigm that will be tested, not the resilience of nature.

"Delta Autumn" was first drafted after a hunting trip where Faulkner fell ill and was found in his tent by his Uncle Bud Miller "unconscious and ashen." They believed he had suffered a "kidney seizure" or "perforated ulcer" and were lucky to find a motor boat to evacuate him from the site, for the doctor in Oxford felt "a few more hours would have been too late" (Blotner 424). This actual near-death experience looms in the icy air of this fictional sequence where Faulkner draws further and more explicit parallels between himself, Ike McCaslin (who was originally to be a minor character in Go Down, Moses), and the delta. Faulkner appropriates this mythical place here more forcefully than ever before "as a personal symbol for" what Michael Grimwood characterizes as "both his and the world's fatigue" (93). If the "fever" and "delirium" from Requiem for a Nun describes what Faulkner saw as the relentless motion of progress encroaching on Jefferson, "Delta Autumn" shows the underbelly of the exploitative mechanisms that drain the wilderness of its resources to fuel these city engines--an unregenerative version of the city's dependence on the country for agricultural production and natural resources. As the urban population skyrockets, conversely depopulating the countryside, a phenomenon darkly described by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles as "the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery," the parasitic demands of the city reach farther and farther beyond its borders (366).

The chapter opens with Uncle Ike on his annual November hunting trip, this year with the sons and grandsons of the men with whom he used to hunt as a boy and younger man. As he has for the past few years, he wonders en route whether this expedition into the wild will be his last--a concern that the chapter's title intimates in advance: "Now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther and farther to drive, the territory in which game still existed drawing yearly inward as his life was drawing inward" (320). Like most modern "advancements" in Faulkner, the highways create a paradoxical effect on the community: it is now easier to get places faster, but one must travel farther to get there.

Furthermore, the asphalt opens access to extraregional actors, who inevitably disrupt the ecology, testing the durability of its insularly derived codes and conventions. Here, one might imagine Ike finding comical agreement with Anse Bundren whose suspicion of roads and the social/ecological disruption they signal is elevated by his pseudo-Christian formulation (which mirrors Ike's linguistic retrenchment in Sam Fathers's language of nature spirituality): "And so He [God] never aimed for folks to live on a road.... He aimed for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn" (AILD 36). (10) While accessibility to more land signals growth and nourishment for the American metropolis, it is the forest's demise, and this early sentence in "Delta Autumn" sets up both the wilderness and Ike as hunted objects; the roads pursue them, both circling inward in ever tighter curves like a falcon preparing to dive for its prey. Though one might blame both Ike's and the wilderness's passivity for their own undoing, their non-response to environmental changes and rear-window stewardship of their resources only becomes suffocating when pressed upon by this encroaching outside world. (11)

Before these highways were paved, the wilderness of Ike's childhood had maintained an apparent, if momentary, equilibrium with its proximate community, Jefferson. Within that equilibrium, the illusion of wilderness as a timeless place held sway, though the very nature of his hunting mentor, Sam Fathers, half-Native American and half-African American, should have clued him in to the fallacy of this impression. Ike reflects in "The Bear," the chapter that precedes "Delta Autumn," on the railroads that should have alerted him to the space-altering habits of time, though he and the other hunters failed to heed the signs:

   [The railroad] had been harmless then. They would hear the passing
   log-train sometimes from the camp; sometimes, because nobody
   bothered to listen for it or not.... [I]ts shrill peanut-parcher
   whistle flung for one petty moment and absorbed by the brooding and
   inattentive wilderness without even an echo.... [The train was]
   carrying to no destination or purpose sticks which left nowhere any
   scar or stump as the child's toy loads and transports and unloads
   its dead sand and rushes back for more, ... yet this time it was as
   though the train ... had brought with it into the doomed wilderness
   even before the actual axe the shadow and portent of the new mill
   not even finished yet and the rails and ties which were not even
   laid. (305-06)

What once seemed like an insouciant child's game now carries the very characteristics ("shadow and portent") of a haunting. (12) Carrying out the orders of its extraregional overseers, the trains' potential harm is couched in the economic reality that their profitability is measured by what they take out of the region, not by what they bring in. Mark T. Decker illustrates how at first the railway system was disjointed and inefficient, because uncooperative state-by-state ownership resisted unfettered passage across borders, but that eventually "changes ... did take place and [were] directly related to the South's incorporation into that vast network of power and control that is the American economy" (482).

Seemingly taking a lesson from his experience with the railroad, in "Delta Autumn," Ike is suspicious of all potential interlopers (living or material), who threaten the perpetuation of traditional separations: keeping wilderness apart from civilization, South from North, and black from white. Ike chastises his young hunting companions for the processed canned meat they bring to the campsite saying, "Eat it all up. I dont want a piece of town meat in camp after breakfast tomorrow" (328). The younger men, however, don't endow the campsite with the same sanctity, and they chide Ike for what they see as an irrational fervor for and adherence to the older traditions. For this younger generation, facility trumps the bother of keeping these old separations in place. The contamination of the wilderness with the canned meat, innocuous to the others, but condemnatory to Ike, is further evidence of the encroaching and normalizing powers of what Decker characterizes as the "network of commerce that will bring the metropolis into the rural South and the rural South into the metropolis, blending them together into an indistinct whole" (482). This threat of homogenization is the nightmare that Ike foresees. (13)

In what feels like a natural sympathy in the face of their shared plight, Ike, in "Delta Autumn," conflates his own life and destiny with that of the wilderness on scales of both time and space. When travelling to the site, Ike remembers his youth, when both land and body were still robust:

   the land had retreated not in minutes from the last spread of
   gravel but in years, decades, back toward what it had been when he
   first knew it: the road they now followed once more the ancient
   pathway of bear and deer ... in place of ruthless mile-wide
   parallelograms wrought by ditching and dyking machinery. (325)

The smooth rhythm of this sentence complements the imagery, retreating backward into a lulling cadence that reflects Ike's own nostalgia and sympathy for the retreating landscape. (This backward movement mirrors the novel's own constant referrals back to "Was" that Ike and the reader rely upon for understanding how things got to be the way they are.) The smooth rhythm continues until the rigid geometry of "parallelograms" imposes its artificial symmetries on the fields, disrupting the reverie with the mechanistic rhythm of a harsh "tch" and "k" in "ditching and dyking."

From here, Ike draws out the explicit association that his life, hitched to the fate of nature herself, longs to be unrestricted from the ravaging limitations of time and space:

   Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of [the
   wilderness], arrest at least that much of what people called
   progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its
   ultimate fate. It was because there was just exactly enough of it.
   He seemed to see the two of them--himself and the wilderness--as
   coevals, his own span as a hunter, a woodsman, not contemporary
   with his first breath but transmitted to him, assumed by him
   gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from that old Major de Spain
   and that old Sam Fathers who had taught him to hunt, the two spans
   running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a
   dimension free of both time and space. (337)

Apart from its strong overtone as a death wish, this desire for freedom culminates with Ike's rejection of living in time and space--a conviction that stunts his ability to grow, change, and modernize. While Ike's repudiation of his inheritance is most often interpreted as a rejection of the unspeakable past, it manifests itself also as a repudiation of the future that leaves him in a state of generational limbo marked by his status as "uncle to half a county and father to no one" ("Was," GDM 3). His desire to be "free of both time and space" reads as a desire to acquit himself of the ecological liabilities (psychically linked to his genealogical liabilities) that haunt him and have only become more unavoidable over time. Faced with the canned meat or his wife's desire for a family of their own or his visitor's recrimination that Roth was stunted by Ike's abdication, Ike simply chooses to look the other way.

Decker describes Ike's paradisiacal vision of the wilderness and himself as a "self-contained state." And while the concept of containment seems antithetical to the freedom Ike envisions for himself and his wilderness, Decker's sense that Ike's ideal is connected to his desire for an antigenerational autonomy resonates here (473). The prose that follows further fills in Ike's extemporal fantasy with "tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns" ("Delta Autumn," GDM 337-38), an immortal landscape that Richard Godden identifies as a "Keatsian frieze" (4). This lyrical genealogy to "Ode on a Grecian Urn" elucidates Ike's contention that containment is emancipatory. According to Godden, "the vessels in question [the urn and the wilderness] are crackable euphemisms for a clutch of maidenheads" that dramatize Ike's paradoxical urge to preserve what is already lost to him--his virginity and his forest (4). In the face of the seemingly irrepressible biological patterns of procreation and bequeathal, an imagined self-containment (reimagined virginity) permits Ike to avert his eyes from the progressive erosion of his rural tradition and the evermore insistent confrontations with realigning social conditions.

If highways and railroads represent the material threats that cities impose on the wilderness and Ike, tentacles of an urban world that will no longer be held at bay, the social matter, too, in the form of miscegenation and incest, which Ike has spent a lifetime avoiding, will now come knocking at his tent flap. A young mulatta whom Ike mistakes at first for white has travelled to the site to confront Roth Edmonds, who is at once distant cousin to both Ike and the woman and the father of the baby boy she holds in her arms. Though blood kin, the woman too is a specter of the urban. She is an outsider from the frontier city, Indianapolis--a place that would not and did not instill in her the moral values of separation that Ike understands as the only way to hold on to meaning and value in his world. Little had Ike realized that the hallowed hunting ground, its timelessness and placelessness with which he identifies so strongly, had already been ruptured the previous autumn, for it was on the previous year's hunting trip that Roth and this woman first met secretly and fell in love.

For Ike, the inviolability of the wilderness and its demand that one relinquish the postures and accoutrements of modern life to experience it is absolute. He learned this, as a boy in "The Bear," when it is only after he abandons his gun and puts down his watch and compass that he gets a glimpse of Old Ben, the patriarchal bear of the forest. From this point forward, Ike's deportment in the woods is one of committed ascetic renunciation, a capitulation to the acknowledged spiritual superiority of the natural world and its incommensurate relationship to civilization.

That Roth would even glance twice at a woman while on a hunting trip illustrates the paradigmatic shift that has occurred across the generations. The wilderness for Roth does not demand a higher moral bearing. He eats "town meat" hunts with a shotgun instead of a rifle, and hunts does of both the two- and four-legged variety, as his puckish friend, Will Legate, merrily ribs. Similar to the Snopeses, who are known to both ignore and exploit social convention for the quick and easy profits of economic and personal expediency, Roth does not recognize separate geographically derived codes of behavior as Ike does. His world, in contrast, is morally undifferentiated, and therefore the low cowardly behavior that is tolerated on the plantation and in town because of Roth's elevated social status and wealth (which wouldn't even be his without Ike's repudiation), to him, seems equally appropriate in the woods. His singular worldview reflects Ike's dystopic vision of the future where the "racially mixed geography" as evidenced by Roth's willful miscegenation, "represents a spreading socioeconomic contamination that will eventually overwhelm the stable boundaries of his utopian Mississippi hunting grounds and the regionally distinct culture of privilege that participation in the hunts represents"(Decker 473). Upon realizing that his woman visitor is part black, Ike's utter lack of preparedness for this moment is underscored by his reflexive rejection of the situation: "Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now!" (344). The italics serve not only to emphasize Ike's surprise and disbelief, but also the extreme resistance he feels against what he already knows to be true. (14)

In a strangely exaggerated attempt to tie the bleak future of the delta to the ailments of the city, Ike bemoans what he now sees as America's shared fate:

   This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two
   generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every
   night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow
   cars to Chicago to live in millionaires' mansions on Lakeshore
   Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers
   crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and
   grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and
   mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African
   and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has
   time to say which one is which nor cares. (347)

The contamination of the region that Ike envisions, the eventual dissolution of all forms of social boundaries, is instigated, exacerbated, and perpetuated by accessibility to the metropolis. The new social practice of "commuting" complements the stripping and undoing sense of the "de-" prefixed past participles that precede it (deswamped, denuded, derivered) with its sense of rootlessness. (15) The fragmentation of modern life, the fracturing of one's identity to accommodate both rural and city living, flies in the face of a rural privilege that promotes an authentic and ordered relationship to space and interpersonal relationships. Moreover, the relatively neutral definition of the word "commute" in modern usage shades derogatively in the context of this passage, where it breaks down former geographic barriers to commerce that had previously preserved regional exceptionalism. Under the influence of its original Latin root, commutare, which means "to change altogether, [or] alter wholly," the term more fully expresses its role here as a catalyst for social reorganization ("Commute"). As such, the nameless young mother takes on the emblematic role of the commuter, perforce cycling to the city then to the rural and presumably back again, demonstrating acutely the repercussions, in Ike's imagination, of unrestrained circulation.

In the act of commuting, social chaos accelerates and Chicago collapses into Jefferson. Within Ike's vision, Chicago, the mecca of the Great Migration that transformed African American culture from provincial to urban after World War I, illustrates new economic opportunities and social transformations that do not expiate or even distance the South from its past. Richard Moreland points out, to the contrary, that these imagined Lakeshore Drive mansion-owning black men "confirm Ike's worst fears, or rather his most simplistically ironic predictions, of a directly imitative, repetitive revenge in blackface of white wrongs" (187). These fast-moving men are the manifestation of a double threat, urban blackness, that is not subject to the geographical or psychological restraints long upheld by traditional Southern aristocratic modes of order and containment. In Ike's imaginative visualization of this brave new world, he applies the "shadow and portent" of the city that he learned to recognize in the train cars to the broader exploitation of man and nature, which though staged in the country is, as Raymond Williams notes, "realised and concentrated in the city" (48).

Where Ike and his generation of Mississippi hunters failed to instill their protectionist rural virtues of "blood and soil" in the younger generation, Roth and his peers have been imprinted instead by the predatory values of capitalism, which (as represented by the stereotypically opportunistic commuters in the citation) turns a blind eye to poaching practices like shooting does as long as one doesn't get caught (Williams 36).

As he had maneuvered to pay off the former slaves his family had wronged without acknowledging the familial tie that made the payment necessary, Ike attempts to pay off the woman with money Roth left in an envelope specifically for this purpose. She is clearly disappointed that the envelope contains only money, and Ike tries to assuage her. He convinces her to keep the money and gives her the horn that General Compson left him in his will, the only object worthy of inheritance he has to give. Though this gesture initially signals that Ike recognizes this baby as the McCaslin heir apparent, this sense of family reconciliation is upended by the following advice he offers:

Marry: a man in your own race. That's the only salvation for you--for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait. Marry a black man. You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him.... Then you will forget all this, forget it ever happened, that he ever existed. (346)

This elucidatory passage to a large extent forecloses the debate as to whether Ike's repudiation of his inheritance was enlightened and forward-looking or simply reactionary. Though he personally has never been able to forget any of his family's miscegenated past, this is his advice to her: to lead a life, similar to his own, of denial and repudiation. In other words, he demands she maintain the color line even despite its obvious dissolution.

In The Ghosts of Modernity, Jean-Michel Rabate establishes a central metaphor for his analysis of the modern age of literature: the writer as specter. He defines this relationship by the characteristic that the writer's "own past returns whenever he imagines that he can predict, arrange, or control the future" (3). Ike, in "Delta Autumn," is a variation of this theme. Though Ike is no writer--ever since he read the entries in his father and uncle's store register that narrated the acquisition of slaves and the crimes of miscegenation and incest committed by his grandfather, he has refused both returning to the past and predicting the future--he is confronted similarly by the unacknowledged excesses of time, "what has not been processed, accommodated, incorporated into the self by mourning" (Rabate xvi). These excesses of time, in "Delta Autumn," materialize in the doubly mixed, doubly incestuous child, whose "obscured face," Godden remarks, "points two ways, to a ruinous interethnic past reborn and to intimations of a future interethnic amity barely born" (20).

While Ike prefers the apparent timelessness of the wilderness, the future that he intentionally had never sought finds him, and ironically, its vehicle is a spectral form of the past from which he had long since averted his eyes. Irwin characterizes Ike's reaction to the child as "less that something has ended than that something has started all over again ... Uncle Ike had tried to free himself and his family from just such a generative affront that would continue to bind white and black together in an endless cycle of guilt and retribution" (60). Confronted with this failed effort, Ike makes a last rhetorical move to convince the girl to cut ties with everything that has happened: if he could only make her forget, he too could return to his determined state of oblivion.

She responds to his grotesque suggestion by saying, "Old man ... have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?" (346). This response, finally, lays out the real consequence of denying both time and space as Ike has done. The problem with holding "Was" as a model for how the South should be, is that "Was" never truly was, and loving that version of the South is as good as loving a fading dream. Not only can it never be recaptured, but the nostalgia Ike feels for this past time occludes him from it further by persuading him of a romantic place that never existed. While his backward-looking rural vision ably dislocated him from his present, it did not permit him to remain inside the past.

Conversely, as Moreland notes, the woman's claim to love suggests that her return to Yoknapatawpha "does not necessarily justify Ike's own worst fears about his own and Roth's cursed tradition"; within this possibility "might also be a space for revisionary change" that undoes the need for "the untranslatable impasse either between the races or between the domestic and the social" that Ike continues ineffectively to try to maintain (186). Thus, the woman's urban ethos trumps the rural because it places loving something real (her child and Roth) and forward-looking (the possibility of making Roth into a man, where Ike has failed him) above loving a loss. (16) The Old South, here, as embodied by Ike, is dying out because it refuses the real replenishment available to it. Instead, Ike sends the woman and baby McCaslin heir back North to build their future and returns to mulling over his and his delta's demise at the hands of the "commuters."

Through changes in land usage, infrastructure development, and demographic turnover, Faulkner's writing depicts the ironically destructive flipside of Williams's characterization in The Country and the City of agriculture and other forms of rural production invisibly enabling city life. The city as unseen specter forces changes upon the community, which are registered not by increased dynamism and vibrancy as the conventional literary trope of the city might suggest, but by degradation, fatigue, loss, and death. Paradoxically, as the city overrides what would be the future of the rural, it collaborates with the ghosts of the past by reinvigorating the unresolved excesses of slavery and racism. In this way, Faulkner expresses the disempowerment his community experiences through the presence of the immaterial city that increasingly tests the perseverance of their way of life. Thus, instead of simply eulogizing these losses, Faulkner preserves the silent violence of this process in "Delta Autumn" by valorizing the complexity and confusion of the rural/urban conflict in the South particular to these fading rural lives at this moment of their engulfment. In doing so, the author preserves the betwixt-and-betweenness of a momentary national condition that the rest of the rapidly modernizing country--like Ike--seems in a hurry to move beyond and abandon to the less complicated annals of a folkloric pastoral nostalgia.

Princeton University

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(1) Faulkner's earliest enthusiasts included many of the writers and critics of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Arguing for a return to the antebellum provincialism of the Old South in the manifesto, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, the Agrarians were openly hostile toward all forms of Northern industrialism that were emerging from the cities into the farmlands after World War I. Notably, this hostility entailed a resistance of any argument that Faulkner's writing addresses issues of urbanism beyond its use as a negative example for the valorization of American rurality. While the Agrarians, like Faulkner, were heavily invested in the consciousness of "the past in the present," Faulkner does not fit the Agrarians' mold, for neither he nor his work acquiesces to their ideology that the aristocratic mythology of the South should be defended and reinstated in American living memory (Tate 272). For more, see Lawrence Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation and Robert Jackson's Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture.

(2) In "As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age," John T. Matthews employs Michael O'Brien's delineation of modernism as a sensibility "not necessarily sympathetic" but "in dialectic with modernization" (O'Brien xvii). Matthews effectively adopts this definition to interpret the rampant consumerism in As I Lay Dying as part of the ongoing modernist crisis in Yoknapatawpha County. This exercise of modernism as revealed through social commodification and commercial exchanges, however, is not merely revelatory, but also part of an even greater, ongoing spatial dialectic--country and town, town and Memphis, South and North.

(3) See Willis's "Aesthetics of the Rural Slum: Contradictions and Dependency in 'The Bear'" for analysis of the semiperipheral dependency of the rural on the urban.

(4) Even though it does not wholly transpire in the rural South, the "urban" events of The Sound and the Fury, most notably Quentin's suicide, are not only integrated as part of Faulkner's mythology of the region, but also inhabit the rural as a conspicuous shadow that defines everything else that occurs in Yoknapatawpha, including its past.

(5) "Habitus" is a term developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe a set of conditions, living habits, and/or cultural exposures that structures a community and contributes to a sense of self. Characterized by a degree of both fixity and flux, the habitus is a mediated space that embodies both social institutions and individuals acting within and among cultural and behavioral norms. This comprehensive definition comes from ideas Bourdieu put forward in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and The Logic of Practice (1990).

(6) The Vanderbilt Agrarians would argue that it is not merely this fictional community standing up against the inexorable forces of modernization, but also Faulkner himself that is taking this reactionary stance. Faulkner, however, was clearly more taken with dramatizing lost causes than with taking them up as personal mantles. This is a critical difference between Faulkner and Ike McCaslin. When Ike finds the ledgers of his father and uncle's slave transactions, he does not tell anyone, but commits himself to a life of repudiation and resistance to change, whereas, when Faulkner purportedly uncovered actual ledgers that are believed to be the basis for Ike's fictional ones, his instinct appears to have been quite the opposite. They became a source of inspiration. For more on this discovery, see Patricia Cohen's article "Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered."

(7) See John T. Irwin's Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner for more on the cycles and displacement of revenge in Absalom, Absalom!

(8) In his article, "Shortened Stories: Faulkner and the Market," Matthews examines Faulkner's ambivalence about the publishing industry more fully as a paradox between the writer's resentment of the commercial restraints placed on him and his unabashed desire to take full fiduciary advantage of the marketplace. Matthews's argument shows how Faulkner's short stories demonstrate both the vulgarities of commodification and consumption and the otherwise unlikely opportunities for empowerment that the market allows social underdogs such as African Americans in "Centaur in Brass," women in "Mule in the Yard," and, by implication, Faulkner himself, the struggling artist. Matthews points out that although Faulkner claimed he was only able to write The Sound and the Fury after he had shut himself off from the influence of the publishers he had previously been courting with Sartoris, the novel itself arises out of a projected short story, the most marketable form of writing for the author at that time. Not only this, but in the style and form of The Sound and the Fury, we find "the traces of violent separation" that Matthews identifies as characteristic of Faulkner's short stories, which were often extracted from larger projects (34).

(9) Railey, in "As I Lay Dying and Light in August: The Social Realities of Liberalism," examines these emergent "town interests" with regard to the way that material objects had become both tools for and symbols of social mobility. The older paternalistic social order founded on rootedness and the stability of one's lineage has been replaced by capitalist modes of mobility and active circulation. For more, see Matthews's "As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age" and O'Donnell's "Between the Family and the State."

(10) O'Donnell analyzes this passage about the road to illustrate the transformation that occurs when the Bundrens, Anse in particular, set out on their odyssey to Jefferson and their private desires become commodities. As Anse sees it, the road has transformed their "heretofore private, 'natural' existence (however fallacious that notion may actually be) into a public life, subject to civic laws and duties, as is the road itself" (90). For O'Donnell, the Bundrens are nomads not only because they are travelling in a caravan, but also because every encounter they have along the way reaffirms their outcast status. In the end, they sacrifice the nomadic when they sacrifice Darl to the state in exchange for various objects of social integration--teeth, a gramophone, and a new wife. Unlike Anse, Ike McCaslin should be an unlikely outcast; and yet, these roads that force him farther and farther away from his old childhood hunting grounds bring social and institutional changes that alienate Ike from the cultural landscape that he and those of his social pedigree at one time defined and enforced. In this way, if As I Lay Dying is a narrative that progresses from private isolation to social integration, Go Down, Moses tracks the reverse course for Ike as his resistance to change becomes more and more eccentric relative to the world around him.

(11) In 1954, the same year that Faulkner published "Mississippi" in Holiday magazine, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a plan to accelerate the development of the national interstate highway system, a project which would be enacted two years later as the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, thereby making cities more accessible than ever before. Likewise for rural communities, the presence of emergent urban centers became evermore unavoidable. The rural, which had been the prevailing condition of the American landscape and had defined, for well over a century, the images of fortitude and self-determination that Americans adopted in the cities and exported all over the world, now found itself with more and more frequency being defined from without. Along these lines, Raymond Williams notes this new development of the twentieth century as one that "is almost an inverse proportion ... between the relative importance of the working rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas" (248).

(12) In the chapter "Faulkner and the Haunted Plantation" from The Nation's Region, Duck traces the development of Faulkner's gothic modernism by showing how individual and collective subjectivities experience hauntings that controvert the demands of linear time progression. Doing so, she effectively demonstrates how "Faulkner's use of gothic tropes," in works through Go Down, Moses, "challenged monolithic and spatializing constructions of local time, exposing the temporal multiplicity that shaped both metropolis and hinterland" (172). Yet, concentrating her interest on the entanglements of the past and the present, Duck neglects moments like this one where the future too exerts its capacity to haunt the present. Here, with regard to Faulkner's interest in temporal multiplicity, I reexert the presence of the future, which I seek to associate with the metropolis. Though less conspicuous than the ghosts of the past, the future (in the guise of "shadow and portent") provides critical emphasis to the dramatic limnality of Ike's historical moment.

(13) While critics and scholars like Blotner have noted biographical and attitudinal similarities between Ike and Faulkner, such as a common anxiety regarding the changing Southern ecology, this issue of town meat and keeping separations sacred may be an expository moment where Faulkner creates critical space between Ike and himself--a distance that becomes most prominent in Ike's later encounter with Roth's lover and child. Although it can be difficult to parse definitively Faulkner's criticisms of Ike from his sympathies, Gary Harrington reminds us that before the age of town meat that Ike so vehemently loathes a "man shot a doe or a fawn as quickly as he did a buck" ("Delta Autumn," GDM 319). Within the context of "Delta Autumn," this wasteful low-minded practice undercuts the perceived unassailability of Ike's moral superiority and makes Ike's criticism of Roth's hunting ethos, or lack thereof, "more than just a bit hypocritical" (Harrington 522). Likewise, while Ike, in part 5 of "The Bear," unironically idealizes a past hunting trip when "Walter Ewell had shot a six-point buck from this same moving caboose," longing (304), as Harrington describes, "for the days when such random killing was not only possible but laudable," it is unlikely that Faulkner, from his privileged historical vantage point, is equally unaware of the irony embedded in Ike's contradictory moral convictions (519).

(14) There is noteworthy resonance here with the dystopian future that Shreve McCannon suggests at the end of Absalom, Absalom!--a world of Jim Bonds that will stand in mockery of Thomas Sutpen's ruthless social ambitions: "and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings" (302). Offering a counter to Quentin's melodramatic despair, Shreve's taunting reminds the reader of the humor and foolishness of Quentin's overblown racial anxiety. The same can be said of Ike McCaslin. Though we may sympathize with Ike, commiserating over his lost world that often seems nobler than our own, this dystopic vision creates readerly distance, which allows us to go beyond experiencing his sadness and anger to see the ridiculousness of Ike's zero-sum imagination.

(15) The visibility and traceability of commuters were elements that established commuting as the first statistical subject the US Bureau of the Census adopted to track changes in nonmetropolitan counties. The data collected provided the initial index measuring "susceptibility to external metropolitan influence" (Morrison 5).

(16) See Godden's essay, "Bear, Man, and Black: Hunting the Hidden in Faulkner's Big Woods," where he discusses Ike's "cognitive commitment to loss" (6).