Much of the recent work on the DY side
has been about those things that the scholars who have read
a lot of Faulkner find useful.
But I'd like to spend a bit of time
demonstrating how those same features could be useful
to, for example, a teacher who only has time to give students
a single Faulkner story, such as "Dry September."
You can access the primary map for "Dry September" on the DY
site here.
You'll find the cover for "Dry September" on the bookshelf
on the main site page, which I've surrounded in red.
When you click on that link, you'll
find the site map, which is stuffed with information
about the story's characters, events, and locations,
and which offers a lot of ways to put
those pieces in conversation with one another.
You'll also find wonderful secondary materials, including
manuscript images and related audio clips
from Faulkner's stint at the University of Virginia.
But as I think about these scholarly riches,
I also think of one of my recurring
nightmares as a teacher--
that a student will come to me after reading a story like "Dry
September" and say, "We talked about the story in class,
but I don't see any mention of lynching anywhere
in the story."
In today's world, much of the way people
build meaning is by skimming for key terms
rather than for propositions or arguments, much less
nuance or euphemism.
In many of his stories, Faulkner does not
offer the legal term lynching that triggers
recognition in a modern reader.
And his texts elude the modern text search function
on which both students and indeed researchers
have come to rely.
The term lynch does not appear anywhere
in the story "Dry September."
Compare that with Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children
also published in the 1930s, in which lynching
is named repeatedly, bursting out of characters' mouths
with alarming frequency as they name the threat that shapes
their actions at every turn.
Since the term "lynch" does not appear anywhere
in Faulkner's "Dry September," how
might we address both problems raised by that absence?
The students need to see where the story points
to lynching without resorting to a dreaded plot summary,
and also the further question-- why
doesn't Faulkner just say it?
Here I think we have a chance to show students
where and how scholars build interpretive work using
the keywords that have been created by the DY team
and that you can access at the top of the DY home page
under Search and Events.
To show a student where Faulkner's characters discuss
what they're doing without using the term lynching,
you can flip back a few pages in the story.
But you can also see where the DY team has
flagged lynching as a focus.
Those of you who are familiar with the Library of Congress
subject headings will laugh.
Yes, this is something of a high tech return to search options
that are cultivated by people with expertise in this area.
For our students, however, such an idea is a novelty.
Their university's default for their library
is probably a Google-like search bar.
But a library is not a bad comparison for what DY offers.
DY keywords help cultivate, direct,
and organize the interests of its users
rather than offer shortcuts or replacements for Faulkner.
If you select "Dry September" from the text list
under the search function and put "lynch"
in the keyword search, you'll find three places
where the team has flagged lynching as a subject.
Though lynching as a theme permeates the text,
we want to teach students where and how such themes emerge.
Here, the DY database points us back to three specific moments
in the text marked by the page numbers and the first few words
of the event on that page.
Breaking it down into more manageable pieces,
the site yet still forces readers to go back to the text.
If we look up the three moments indicated
by the search results, we get these references to lynching.
When we put these articulations of their action
alongside one another, we see the blatant obfuscation
of the characters' true actions--
we're just going to talk to them a little, that's all--
expressed by men who had earlier dismissed any need for talk.
Then the violence is ritualized--
it can't be done here.
And finally, the narrative circles back to the event
after it occurs, confirming the lynching
through the absence of the man, one of Faulkner's many math
games.
There's great critical work on this story,
but I'm focusing primarily on the way
that readers may encounter this text for the first time
and then the means by which we can return to it,
looking again, building a case for a new understanding
of where and how lynching emerges within the narrative
even if we establish a textual foundation for the subject
of lynching in the story.
Now that we've done that, from these three instances,
we still have to grapple with the sliding references
by the characters and the silence
of the narrator on this front.
Why doesn't he just say it explicitly?
We would search in vain for the term lynching in this text.
But after helping students see where
the characters and the narrator glance off the subject,
we might then productively investigate
how Faulkner's indirect language redirects our attention
from the act of lynching to the development of the lynch mob
itself.
Even if you only read "Dry September" with your students,
you could draw on the DY site and its wealth of keywords
to develop a more robust body of evidence
about the kind of language that Faulkner's characters use
for lynching, adding to the three places highlighted
in "Dry September."
We return to the Search page and leave the text option blank so
that it will search all the text in our database.
You will get a lengthy list of places
where our editors have highlighted
lynching within his fictions.
Rather than think of it as an exhaustive list,
consider instead that it's where lynching
rose to the surface of the reading,
where a seemingly ever present threat of lynching newly
shapes action or feeling in a given scene.
Your results page will get lengthy, something like this.
If you or your students, however,
hunt up some of these references within the books themselves,
we'll get something of a linguistic history of lynching
and Faulkner.
Here are a few of the references I chased down.
In "Pantaloon in Black," the short story,
there is the complete elision of the event.
After it was over, it didn't take long.
They found the prisoner on the following day.
In the novel Sanctuary, we see the self-justification
and an explicit link between rape
and the burning alive of a man and the preservation
of white women.
In Light in August, Faulkner lingers on the mood--
excitement-- before telling us that it's a lynching so
that the social role of the event
is clear no matter what our horror as readers.
And then in Intruder in the Dust,
we see the anticipation of a lynching that
will attempt to reduce Lucas Beauchamp to a category
that the white characters can stand.
Although I am as a teacher generally perfectly
happy to simply lock my students in a room
with a book, any text, Digital Yoknapatawpha
offers me tools that help me better show my students where
major issues appear, how and why scholars weigh
the evidence of a given text, and how an author like Faulkner
redirects our attention from the horror
of the event to the cultivation of a mob
mentality within a community.
On the DY site, we already have several resources
mapping out intertextual relations
between A Rose for Emily, As I Lay
Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom Absalom!, and more.
There are a lot of ways the site is
fruitful for both effective teaching of a single text
and for pointing beyond that text to Faulkner's
work as a whole and life in Mississippi
and elsewhere outside his fiction.