Chapter 1 - Murder in the House of Memory

Summary

This chapter provides a close reading of Faulkner’s first depiction of the plantation manor and argues that it provides the prototype for a spatial pattern that will be repeated so often and in so many variable forms as to constitute the foundational archetype of networked space and information flow throughout the whole of the Yoknapatawpha fiction. In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner visualizes a vertically-oriented spatial symbolism in which a violent ideology is embedded in the artifacts and aesthetic objects of the Sartoris planter network so that this ideology is capable of replicating its content in individuals who inhabit this space. This predicament is most fully realized in Colonel Sartoris’s statue, for while the man himself is dead, the ideological information of his mimetic print circulates through the financial and technological infrastructure of bank and rail, using the innovations of modernity to disseminate itself even while reinforcing the racial and class suppositions of the slave system that preceded it.