About Characters by Locations in Events Graphing

With this program you can quantify and explore the relationship between Characters and Locations in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. The algorithm behind these graphs counts each time a Character is Present at a specific Location, providing a metric by which you can judge, for example, a Location's relative prominence in a text, or the way different kinds of Characters may be associated with different Locations. All these Capital Letters are necessary because, of course, the program relies on our project's definitions: for instance, groups of people are entered into our database as a Character, no matter how many people are in the group. In the graph below, which is filtered to display the Black Characters in "A Rose for Emily," the "1" who appears at the Drugstore is the "Negro delivery boy" who takes Emily the arsenic she has bought from the druggist, while the "1" at the Courthouse and Square represents the multi-person "Negro paving crew" who pave Jefferson's sidewalks under the command of Homer Barron. In addition, in order to measure the overall textual prominence of each Location, the algorithm treats each appearance of a Character as a new "1": the 7 black Characters who appear at the Grierson House are in fact all Tobe, Emily's Negro servant, who appears in 7 different Events that take place at her home. It is also important to note that the algorithm only counts "Present" Characters -  Characters who are at a Location in person - and not Characters who are only "Mentioned" in an Event, and only displays the Locations that are (to use more of our project's coding terminology) the "Site of an Event," and not those that are "Only Mentioned in Text."

To get an idea of what this way of re-conceptualizing a fiction can reveal about the nature of Faulkner's imaginary world, let's look at four different displays of the Characters and Locations in Flags in the Dust. This first graph shows the first 27 Locations on the list of the 71 total Locations that are Sites of Events in the novel. The totals for each Location include Individuals and Groups, and men and women of the 4 different races that are included in the text (White, Black, MixedBlackWhite and Indian). In the course of the novel, 311 Characters appear - and often re-appear - at the Sartoris Plantation, making it by far the most prominent place in this earliest representation of Yoknapatawpha, at least according to this calculation. Though numerically the Benbow House and the McCallum|MacCallum Place are less significant, both are also properties belonging to white families that have been in the county for generations. (Another programmatic definition to keep in mind: Locations are referred to on these graphs by their "Cumulative" names: the family is called MacCallum in Flags, but Faulkner changes the spelling of their name in later texts.) Although the algorithm's results are only one way to calculate significance, the numbers here call attention to the status of traditional racial and familial hierarchies to the organization of the narrative - and presumably to the vision of the world it re-presents.

You can use the various filters to pursue this idea further. Below are the top 10 Locations displayed after selecting the Race=White filter. While the aggregate numbers have decreased, it's striking to note how similar this list is to the previous one. All but one of the total top 10 Locations are present (gone is Road North from Jefferson), and the first 5 Locations occupy the same rank on both graphs.

By the way, all 71 of the Event Locations in the narrative appear on the complete list returned with "White" as the racial filter, suggesting how full is the access to the novel's world conferred by whiteness. On the other hand, only 28 of the 71 Locations appear on the graph generated by using the filter Race=Black, and the top 10 of the Locations where Black Characters are ever Present reveals a number of significant differences from the previous 2 graphs. That "Road North" occupies second place, and 3 new Locations make the list. The elements in this comparison don't interpret themselves, but they can provide useful launching points for a closer examination of the way space is racialized in the novel. For example, the presence of Black Characters at the Bank might mean many different things. If you follow up this cue by using (say) Digital Yoknapatawpha's text map of the novel to see which Black Characters are Present at the Bank, you'll discover that 1 ("Dr" Jones) is the janitor, 1 (Unnamed Negro Delivery Boy) is another delivery person, and the remaining 2 are both Simon Strother, the servant who drives Old Bayard Sartoris to and from the Bank in a horse-drawn carriage, but never gets inside the building. As a part of the economic structure of this society, the Jefferson bank is clearly another property, like the Sartoris, Benbow and McCallum places, categorized as "white."

Probably the best way to use one of these graphs is as a starting point for further analysis. For example, the prominence of the Road North on the previous graph might suggest mobility is characteristic of the county's Negro population, but if you look at the episodes with this setting, the fact that many of them involve the white Bayard Sartoris using his car to terrify Negroes traveling in wagons complicates that idea. Similarly, the graph below complicates the novel's representation of the White population. This graph uses the Family filter to display all the Locations where the Snopeses appear in the novel. Flags, of course, was the first Yoknapatawpha fiction Faulkner published, but he wrote it after putting aside a partially-written novel (with the working title "Father Abraham") about the ascendance of the Snopes family in the modern world. In Flags, White Characters make a total of 895 appearances, but only 40 of them are by members of the Snopes family - Byron Snopes accounts for 27 of them - and only 3 of the Locations the Snopeses appear at are on those top 10 lists above. Byron Snopes is an employee at the Sartoris Bank, and an uninvited, in fact criminal trespasser at the Benbow House. Faulkner does not banish the Snopes entirely from his world after setting "Father Abraham" aside, but as this graph reveals, he severely constricts their place in it. (And after Byron robs the Bank, he banishes himself from Yoknapatawpha.)

Other filters can help you explore other aspects of Yoknapatawpha. For example, using the Gender filter reveals that Males are present at 70 of the 71 Locations in Flags - Females, at 43. And again, if you dig deeper into the pattern, it turns out that the single Location on the Female list that isn't on the Male one is the "Jefferson Cemetery Monuments." The Event in this instance depicts Jenny Du Pre looking up at the tall marble monument of her dead brother, Colonel John - which hardly counts as a feminine space! In other texts the distinction between Male and Female Locations looks even more significant. Compare, for example, the two graphs of the short story "Dry September" below. The first uses the filter Gender=Male, and the second, =Female. "Dry September" is one of the texts where the men and women of Yoknapatawpha seem to occupy almost entirely distinct spheres.

By the way, if you select the third Gender option (Multi Gender Group), you'll see that "Dry September" does depict men at the movies, but exclusively as halves of couples. I'll end with this reminder that there are multiple ways to use this program to quantify and display the fictions. Race and Gender are the fields that have so far struck me as delivering the most useful results, but that's no reason not to try all the possibilities that intrigue you.

    Citing this resource:
Stephen Railton, "About Characters by Location Graphs." Digital Yoknapatawpha, University of Virginia, http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/characters-graph.html (Date added to project: 2021)