1. What about names? Cash Darl Jewel Dewey Dell Vardaman

2. James Kimble Vardaman (1861 - 1930) was a politician from Mississippi. Vardaman served as a Democrat in the state house of representatives from 1890 to 1896. After two failed attempts in 1895 and 1899, Vardaman won the governorship in 1903 and served one 4-year term (1904-1908), carrying farmers and people in the central part of the state who favored a populist agenda. He advocated a policy of racism against African-Americans, even to the point of supporting lynching in order to maintain his vision of white supremacy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Vard aman) Question: Considering the Bundrens (especially Vardaman himself) how might Faulkner’s use of this name be ironic?

3. William Faulkner (1897-1962) Nobel Prize for Literature 1950 American South: A microcosm for themes of time, the passions of the human heart, and the destruction of the wilderness (717). Faulkner was conflicted about his own (white) relationship to the Old South and the sins of the south (slavery and racism and miscegenation). Wrote about the Southern aristocracy and the working poor. Southern Gothic “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” --William Faulkner

4. Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi The fictional setting of many of Faulkner’s novels and stories. Based loosely on his own hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. “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, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other peoples, so I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time too.” From 1956 interview for the Paris Review,

5. Some Faulkner Novels: The Sound and the Fury (Benjy Compson, 1929) As I Lay Dying (1930) Light in August (1932) Absalom, Absalom (Thomas Sutpen, 1936) The Hamlet (1940, about the Snopes) Intruder in the Dust (1948) Requiem for a Nun (1951) The Reivers (1962, his last novel)

6. “Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can’t. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That’s why I rate that second — it’s because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There’s less room in it for trash.” Short Stories: “Barn Burning” (Snopes) “Two Soldiers” “A Rose for Emily” (the corruption of Southern aristocracy) “Dry September” (A “sacrificial” lynching that doesn’t bring rain) Novellas: “The Bear” (loss of the wild) “Was” (Ike McCaslin) “Go Down, Moses” “Spotted Horses” (Flem Snopes)

7. Cubism was a 20th century avant-gard art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism) Braque, Woman Playing Guitar

8. “The front, the conical façade with the square orifice of doorway broken only by the square squat shape of the coffin on the sawhorses like a cubistic bug, comes into relief” (Faulkner 219).

9. Picasso, Two versions of women playing a guitar

12. So, how is a Faulkner novel like a Cubist painting?