First, though, let’s help re-scramble our thoughts with the help of William Faulkner, whose prose interludes in his stage play ‘Requiem for a Nun’ rather elegantly sum up, in story form, what the last 30,000 words of theory have been trying to say.
In the course of our trip around North America, Chris and I passed through twenty-seven states, and noted as we did so that the civic buildings in each state capital tended to look the same. There’d be a columned portico at the entrance, flanked on either side by two classically-influenced wings housing the admin offices, and the whole thing would be surmounted by a dome, usually sheathed in copper or lead, sometimes gilded, often with a bell tower at its apex. Some were far grander than others (the one in Austin, Texas takes some beating, but you’d expect that), they were designed built at different periods in America’s history, but they still conformed to this basic design. I doubt the various legislatures got together and agreed on a single blueprint, so it’s almost as if this is what Americans conceived State Capitols Were Supposed To Look Like. Of course, they may have been influenced by the Congress building in Washington DC, (the dome of which was completed in 1863), but the fierce independence of the Southern states and their unwillingness to copy Yankee models of anything might well preclude that argument. Whatever the explanation, it’s an example of Myth in action, and it’s a process that Faulkner remarks on at the start of Act Two of ‘Requiem for a Nun’, which is subtitled ‘The Golden Dome’.
Mississippi’s State Capital is Jackson which, according to Faulkner, was founded for that very purpose and no other. It didn’t develop at the point of a river crossing or an estuary, a source of water, or alongside a main road. It was decreed to be the centre of the state’s bureaucracy and legislature. Full stop. No other reason.
Faulkner doesn’t describe the building of the Capitol (which, it has to be said, is one of the grander examples - Mississippi was once the second richest state in the Union; now it’s the poorest), it erupts out of the ground like a force of nature (“[T]he earth lurched, heaving darkward the long continental flank, dragging upward . . . this gilded crumb of man’s eternal aspiration, this golden dome preordained and impregnable, this miniscule foetus-glint tougher than ice and harder than freeze . . . “) The dome is an “Idea risen” from the depths of mankind’s subconscious thoughts concerning justice and authority. This is what those qualities look like. So the dome has to be large, imposing, “holding the eyes of all”. But it can’t just be big; it also has to embody the dream of civilization, so it has to be tall, graceful, aspirational, thrusting upwards into the sky, aiming at the heavens.
It’s the symbolic representation of a myth, a graphic depiction of something utterly abstract yet elemental. And it’s also, of course, a symbol of POWER and MONEY. The bigger your capitol, the better your state economy must be doing (which is rather ironic now, since Missisippi seems only to come top of league tables compiled about bad things, like poverty and obesity). It’s what Americans accurately, but not delicately, refer to as “swinging dick” syndrome.
Now contrast this with the courthouse and the jail at Jefferson, the administrative seat of Mississippi’s Lafayette County, and see how they were built - one being an offshoot of the other. Cue one of Faulkner’s best shaggy dog stories set in his (only slightly) fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County.
In the beginning was a shed built of logs when Jefferson was nothing but an insignificant settlement in the northern part of the state. It was used for a variety of purposes, one of which was a jail.
Then, the local militia caught some Natchez Trace bandits - maybe three or four, but the story soon exaggerated it to rather more than that figure. The settlement had never had proper prisoners before, only the odd drunk, so they’d never needed anything to secure the shed. And so, on capturing these particular desperadoes, who were wanted elsewhere in the state, they had to borrow an enormous padlock which they placed on the door. It belonged to the publican, Uncle Alec Holston.
The following morning, they awoke to find a whole wall of the shed had been removed plank by plank, with, of course, no sign of the robbers. The locals found the “bizarre playfulness” of this action “at once humorous and terrifying”, so naturally, it ended up as one of the settlement’s early legends.
But then they noticed the lock was missing, and Holston demanded compensation. But what to do? There was no town, so the settlement didn’t have a fund to pay him for civil expenses. No-one particularly wanted to dip into his own pocket, so the local elders decided they’d create a town and get the state to pay for the lock. And that’s just what they did, and so began “the monster Carolina lock’s transubstantiation into the Yoknapatawpha County Courthouse.” Its “iron and inviolable symbolism” had begun to transcend itself, and stand for something far greater, even though it was no longer there.
The idea arrives courtesy of Pettigrew, an incredibly ancient pillar of the community who is “adamantine . . . impermeable as diamond and manifest in portent” as he delivers the words that will overnight convert Jefferson from an anonymous settlement into a proper town;
“Uncle Alec hasn’t lost any lock . . . that was Uncle Sam.”
Suddenly, “like the rending of a veil”, the settlement’s whole future can be envisioned “like a glorious prophecy.” Jefferson will be a city. All they have to do is repair the jail, and build three more log walls against it to create a second building, which will be the courthouse, “which it had taken them almost thirty years not only to realize they didn’t have, but to discover that they hadn’t even needed.” And to prove it’s a courthouse, they plan to put in an official-looking iron box “that’s been in Ratliffe’s way in the store for the last ten years.”
Everyone chips in to help build it, and when it’s completed two days later, they step back to admire their work and realize that they’re now living in “Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi” - the start of the address on the schoolboy’s letter.
The next phase arrives in short order when civic pride kicks in - a shed simply isn’t grand enough for what it needs to symbolize - so they hire an architect to design a proper courthouse, complete with portico, dome and bell tower - a miniature of the one in the state capital of Jackson. (You can see the actual building Faulkner’s referring to if you visit his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, on which his fictional creation of Jefferson is based). The town now puts on a growth spurt with the site of the new courthouse at its centre; streets radiate outwards like the spokes from a wheel, and bit by bit (remember the image of the ripples on the pool?) the town expands, “thrusting each year further and further back into the wilderness.”
Meanwhile, the new building is rising “course by brick course”, gradually becoming “symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all: protector of the weak, judiciate and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and the hopes . . . “ So at the same time as it’s projecting its meaning outwards, it’s also drawing peoples’ attention towards itself as “the beacon, focus . . . and lodestar.”
And then, it’s finished. The townsfolk look at each other in amazement, “ for a moment at least capable of believing, that men, all men, including themselves, were a little better, purer maybe even, than they had thought, expected, or even needed to be.” It’s a perfect Symbol.
Then, in 1863, it’s burned to the ground by the invading Yankee armies during the Civil War. But it’s rebuilt to exactly the same design because it is not just a symbol, it’s the symbol. In fact, the symbolism itself has turned into myth - it’s “harder than axes, tougher than fire, more fixed than dynamite . . . immune”, so the symbolism endures even though, for a short time during the post-war construction work, its physical repository may no longer exist.
And that’s the way the courthouse remains. New generations of bureaucrats try to knock it down and put something ‘modern’ in its place. But they can’t. To do so would be to destroy a small part of themselves, their history adn community.
The courthouse, like our opening section, has progressed from being the subject of a folk tale, to being an inescapable truth. You can fill in the other parallels on the way.
Suffice to say that Faulkner completely understood how humans generate and organize meaning.
And this is illustrated in what (I promise) will close this section - the formation of a different type of symbol, that is not so much designed like the courthouse, the embodiment of a pre-existing idea, but one that evolves, as it were, in reverse, as a gradual accretion of meaning, and of history.
You may be wondering what happened to the Jefferson jailhouse after it was repaired:
. . . being older than all, it had seen all: the mutation and the change: and, in that sense, had recorded them . . . (if you would peruse in unbroken - aye, overlapping - continuity the history of a community, look not . . . in the courthouse records, but beneath the successive layers of calsomine and creosote and whitewash on the walls of the jail, since only in that forcible carceration does man find the idleness in which to compose, in the gross and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart):
Every year the jail has its new intake of inmates, and every year, they scratch something on the walls before these stories, doggerel, remarks and graffitoes are covered by fresh layers of whitewash. Then there are the layers of the outer walls; the original mud-chinked logs have not been removed, but sheathed in a new layer of brick, preserving all the marks that have been scratched into them.
Over a period of a century or more, these scratched and written marks amalgamate to become a sort of alternative history of Jefferson - certainly not the kind that would be written up in the town’s official records, but one that has actually been lived - with no gloss, no perspective, no rationalization or censoring. These are the raw materials of history which will endure as long as the walls stand, charting the development of Jefferson “from a halting place: to a community: to a settlement: to a village: to a town . . “ - a rather more complete schoolboy’s address than the courthouse managed to symbolize. Because the courthouse hasn’t actually lived so much history as the jail.
And if you’re alert to this living chronicle, you’ll be aware of “the shapes and motions, the gestures of passion and hope and travail and endurance, of the men and women and children in their successive overlapping generations long after the subjects which had reflected the images were vanished and replaced and again replaced . . . “ The jail is nothing less than “man’s incredible and enduring Was”.
And this, of course, is a fantastic resource for writers who aren’t so much interested by formal histories, but something in which they can invest a part of themselves, usually in the form of their imagination (the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon were our starting place for this particular theme). Faulkner finds his own point of departure in the form of a scratched inscription on a pane of glass, etched with a diamond ring which reads Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861.
And then he’s off, his imagination fired, writing an imagined story about a girl he has never met and knows nothing about. Faulkner makes her the jailer’s daughter (why else would a young girl be in jail?), waiting for the return of her beau from the Civil War. The story itself is “ a bubble, a minute globule which was its own impunity, since what it - the bubble - contained, having no part of rationality and being contemptuous of fact, was immune even to the rationality of rock” because it now exists as an element not just in his imagination but his readers’. He’s almost saying ‘disprove it if you can,’ knowing it’s virtually impossible.
So, from being “paradoxical and significantless”, the story of Cecilia Farmer has been snatched from oblivion, filtered through the artist’s consciousness, and, from that unpromising beginning as an insignificant scratch on a pane of glass, has been transformed into art.
And I can find no better example in literature of how meaning works than this one.
In the course of our trip around North America, Chris and I passed through twenty-seven states, and noted as we did so that the civic buildings in each state capital tended to look the same. There’d be a columned portico at the entrance, flanked on either side by two classically-influenced wings housing the admin offices, and the whole thing would be surmounted by a dome, usually sheathed in copper or lead, sometimes gilded, often with a bell tower at its apex. Some were far grander than others (the one in Austin, Texas takes some beating, but you’d expect that), they were designed built at different periods in America’s history, but they still conformed to this basic design. I doubt the various legislatures got together and agreed on a single blueprint, so it’s almost as if this is what Americans conceived State Capitols Were Supposed To Look Like. Of course, they may have been influenced by the Congress building in Washington DC, (the dome of which was completed in 1863), but the fierce independence of the Southern states and their unwillingness to copy Yankee models of anything might well preclude that argument. Whatever the explanation, it’s an example of Myth in action, and it’s a process that Faulkner remarks on at the start of Act Two of ‘Requiem for a Nun’, which is subtitled ‘The Golden Dome’.
Mississippi’s State Capital is Jackson which, according to Faulkner, was founded for that very purpose and no other. It didn’t develop at the point of a river crossing or an estuary, a source of water, or alongside a main road. It was decreed to be the centre of the state’s bureaucracy and legislature. Full stop. No other reason.
Faulkner doesn’t describe the building of the Capitol (which, it has to be said, is one of the grander examples - Mississippi was once the second richest state in the Union; now it’s the poorest), it erupts out of the ground like a force of nature (“[T]he earth lurched, heaving darkward the long continental flank, dragging upward . . . this gilded crumb of man’s eternal aspiration, this golden dome preordained and impregnable, this miniscule foetus-glint tougher than ice and harder than freeze . . . “) The dome is an “Idea risen” from the depths of mankind’s subconscious thoughts concerning justice and authority. This is what those qualities look like. So the dome has to be large, imposing, “holding the eyes of all”. But it can’t just be big; it also has to embody the dream of civilization, so it has to be tall, graceful, aspirational, thrusting upwards into the sky, aiming at the heavens.
It’s the symbolic representation of a myth, a graphic depiction of something utterly abstract yet elemental. And it’s also, of course, a symbol of POWER and MONEY. The bigger your capitol, the better your state economy must be doing (which is rather ironic now, since Missisippi seems only to come top of league tables compiled about bad things, like poverty and obesity). It’s what Americans accurately, but not delicately, refer to as “swinging dick” syndrome.
Now contrast this with the courthouse and the jail at Jefferson, the administrative seat of Mississippi’s Lafayette County, and see how they were built - one being an offshoot of the other. Cue one of Faulkner’s best shaggy dog stories set in his (only slightly) fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County.
In the beginning was a shed built of logs when Jefferson was nothing but an insignificant settlement in the northern part of the state. It was used for a variety of purposes, one of which was a jail.
Then, the local militia caught some Natchez Trace bandits - maybe three or four, but the story soon exaggerated it to rather more than that figure. The settlement had never had proper prisoners before, only the odd drunk, so they’d never needed anything to secure the shed. And so, on capturing these particular desperadoes, who were wanted elsewhere in the state, they had to borrow an enormous padlock which they placed on the door. It belonged to the publican, Uncle Alec Holston.
The following morning, they awoke to find a whole wall of the shed had been removed plank by plank, with, of course, no sign of the robbers. The locals found the “bizarre playfulness” of this action “at once humorous and terrifying”, so naturally, it ended up as one of the settlement’s early legends.
But then they noticed the lock was missing, and Holston demanded compensation. But what to do? There was no town, so the settlement didn’t have a fund to pay him for civil expenses. No-one particularly wanted to dip into his own pocket, so the local elders decided they’d create a town and get the state to pay for the lock. And that’s just what they did, and so began “the monster Carolina lock’s transubstantiation into the Yoknapatawpha County Courthouse.” Its “iron and inviolable symbolism” had begun to transcend itself, and stand for something far greater, even though it was no longer there.
The idea arrives courtesy of Pettigrew, an incredibly ancient pillar of the community who is “adamantine . . . impermeable as diamond and manifest in portent” as he delivers the words that will overnight convert Jefferson from an anonymous settlement into a proper town;
“Uncle Alec hasn’t lost any lock . . . that was Uncle Sam.”
Suddenly, “like the rending of a veil”, the settlement’s whole future can be envisioned “like a glorious prophecy.” Jefferson will be a city. All they have to do is repair the jail, and build three more log walls against it to create a second building, which will be the courthouse, “which it had taken them almost thirty years not only to realize they didn’t have, but to discover that they hadn’t even needed.” And to prove it’s a courthouse, they plan to put in an official-looking iron box “that’s been in Ratliffe’s way in the store for the last ten years.”
Everyone chips in to help build it, and when it’s completed two days later, they step back to admire their work and realize that they’re now living in “Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi” - the start of the address on the schoolboy’s letter.
The next phase arrives in short order when civic pride kicks in - a shed simply isn’t grand enough for what it needs to symbolize - so they hire an architect to design a proper courthouse, complete with portico, dome and bell tower - a miniature of the one in the state capital of Jackson. (You can see the actual building Faulkner’s referring to if you visit his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, on which his fictional creation of Jefferson is based). The town now puts on a growth spurt with the site of the new courthouse at its centre; streets radiate outwards like the spokes from a wheel, and bit by bit (remember the image of the ripples on the pool?) the town expands, “thrusting each year further and further back into the wilderness.”
Meanwhile, the new building is rising “course by brick course”, gradually becoming “symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all: protector of the weak, judiciate and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and the hopes . . . “ So at the same time as it’s projecting its meaning outwards, it’s also drawing peoples’ attention towards itself as “the beacon, focus . . . and lodestar.”
And then, it’s finished. The townsfolk look at each other in amazement, “ for a moment at least capable of believing, that men, all men, including themselves, were a little better, purer maybe even, than they had thought, expected, or even needed to be.” It’s a perfect Symbol.
Then, in 1863, it’s burned to the ground by the invading Yankee armies during the Civil War. But it’s rebuilt to exactly the same design because it is not just a symbol, it’s the symbol. In fact, the symbolism itself has turned into myth - it’s “harder than axes, tougher than fire, more fixed than dynamite . . . immune”, so the symbolism endures even though, for a short time during the post-war construction work, its physical repository may no longer exist.
And that’s the way the courthouse remains. New generations of bureaucrats try to knock it down and put something ‘modern’ in its place. But they can’t. To do so would be to destroy a small part of themselves, their history adn community.
The courthouse, like our opening section, has progressed from being the subject of a folk tale, to being an inescapable truth. You can fill in the other parallels on the way.
Suffice to say that Faulkner completely understood how humans generate and organize meaning.
And this is illustrated in what (I promise) will close this section - the formation of a different type of symbol, that is not so much designed like the courthouse, the embodiment of a pre-existing idea, but one that evolves, as it were, in reverse, as a gradual accretion of meaning, and of history.
You may be wondering what happened to the Jefferson jailhouse after it was repaired:
. . . being older than all, it had seen all: the mutation and the change: and, in that sense, had recorded them . . . (if you would peruse in unbroken - aye, overlapping - continuity the history of a community, look not . . . in the courthouse records, but beneath the successive layers of calsomine and creosote and whitewash on the walls of the jail, since only in that forcible carceration does man find the idleness in which to compose, in the gross and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart):
Every year the jail has its new intake of inmates, and every year, they scratch something on the walls before these stories, doggerel, remarks and graffitoes are covered by fresh layers of whitewash. Then there are the layers of the outer walls; the original mud-chinked logs have not been removed, but sheathed in a new layer of brick, preserving all the marks that have been scratched into them.
Over a period of a century or more, these scratched and written marks amalgamate to become a sort of alternative history of Jefferson - certainly not the kind that would be written up in the town’s official records, but one that has actually been lived - with no gloss, no perspective, no rationalization or censoring. These are the raw materials of history which will endure as long as the walls stand, charting the development of Jefferson “from a halting place: to a community: to a settlement: to a village: to a town . . “ - a rather more complete schoolboy’s address than the courthouse managed to symbolize. Because the courthouse hasn’t actually lived so much history as the jail.
And if you’re alert to this living chronicle, you’ll be aware of “the shapes and motions, the gestures of passion and hope and travail and endurance, of the men and women and children in their successive overlapping generations long after the subjects which had reflected the images were vanished and replaced and again replaced . . . “ The jail is nothing less than “man’s incredible and enduring Was”.
And this, of course, is a fantastic resource for writers who aren’t so much interested by formal histories, but something in which they can invest a part of themselves, usually in the form of their imagination (the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon were our starting place for this particular theme). Faulkner finds his own point of departure in the form of a scratched inscription on a pane of glass, etched with a diamond ring which reads Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861.
And then he’s off, his imagination fired, writing an imagined story about a girl he has never met and knows nothing about. Faulkner makes her the jailer’s daughter (why else would a young girl be in jail?), waiting for the return of her beau from the Civil War. The story itself is “ a bubble, a minute globule which was its own impunity, since what it - the bubble - contained, having no part of rationality and being contemptuous of fact, was immune even to the rationality of rock” because it now exists as an element not just in his imagination but his readers’. He’s almost saying ‘disprove it if you can,’ knowing it’s virtually impossible.
So, from being “paradoxical and significantless”, the story of Cecilia Farmer has been snatched from oblivion, filtered through the artist’s consciousness, and, from that unpromising beginning as an insignificant scratch on a pane of glass, has been transformed into art.
And I can find no better example in literature of how meaning works than this one.
