[In the following excerpt, Lyday presents mixed opinions of Brooks's ideas.]

Cleanth Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) and William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978) have recently been reissued in twin paperback editions by Louisiana State University Press. The former volume was a kind of culmination of the literary wars between the Southern New Critics and the New York Intellectuals, who never really buried their differences as much as Schwartz implies. How does The Yoknapatawpha Country hold up after nearly thirty years? It has probably been the single most influential critical work on Faulkner ever published. It has certainly drawn more vigorous dissent than any other work on Faulkner, but that is largely because it refuses to fade into oblivion, as so many lesser books have done. It seems sentimental and backward-looking to many progressive-minded critics, yet it may provide more insight into the future than those critics would care to recognize. Indeed, some of those critics display more than a little of the "American innocence" that Brooks finds central to the meaning of one of Faulkner's greatest novels. Brooks's central theme in The Yoknapatawpha Country is the need for community. He argues that Faulkner's rural background provided him with a vantage point from which to criticize modern urban and commercial culture. In Faulkner's old-fashioned fictional world, the community is a powerful though virtually invisible force that constantly makes its presence felt. The individual finds his meaning in relation to the community, and the modern breakdown of traditional communal standards is responsible for our present disarray. The prophetic quality of The Yoknapatawpha Country is underlined by the fact that it was published at a time when the belief that eternal progress is America's destiny was at an all-time high.

Yet for many readers, Faulkner's community doesn't seem such a positive thing. It is dominated by white males, it contains plenty of bigotry, and it often stifles the individual's quest for personal fulfillment. Showing the influence of the Nashville Agrarians, Brooks attributes the positive qualities in Faulkner's world to his Southern background, but the negative qualities are "modern," "American," or simply universal. Brooks takes some Northern critics to task for "sociologizing" by assuming that Faulkner's more bizarre characters are typical Southerners, yet Brooks may be guilty of some sociologizing of his own by painting an overly rosy picture of the South. If Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! is, as Brooks claims, an example of American innocence, why can't Emily Grierson in "A Rose for Emily" (which Brooks discusses in Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond) be an example of Southern decadence? Does Temple Drake's behavior in Sanctuary show that women have a secret rapport with evil, or is Temple's depravity partly rooted in the double standards of Southern society? Does Mrs. Compson deserve all the blame for her children's plight in The Sound and the Fury, and is her husband, the heir of the tradition, just an innocent victim? Is the tradition itself not to blame for many of the ills in Yoknapatawpha? Are the outsiders in Light in August all aliens by choice, or does the community itself decide whom it will and will not admit? Brooks's tendency to defend the South against stereotypical American attitudes is understandable, but Faulkner's South seems considerably more flawed than Brooks's version.

Brooks also criticizes what he calls "symbol-mongering" by critics who allegedly wrench details out of context to impose an abstract pattern on Faulkner's novels, thereby failing to treat them as fiction, and he seals his argument with the rhetorical question, "Shall there be no more innocent consumption of pork chops and spare ribs in Yoknapatawpha County because someone has read The Golden Bough?" Granted that there are bad examples of every type of criticism, but it is now well established that Faulkner did indeed read The Golden Bough and drew on it in his fiction. In his notes to Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, Brooks includes a lengthy list of Faulkner's literary borrowings from writers such as Eliot, Housman, and Swinburne, but in his concluding chapter he argues against any direct influence on Faulkner by Bergson, even though Faulkner said he read Bergson. It is all right, the reader surmises, for Faulkner to draw on the writers of the Western literary tradition, but he must be protected from the newfangled ideas of Frazer, Freud, or Bergson, lest someone suspect that Faulkner was more of a modernist than Brooks believes. What seems most strange is that Brooks would deny Faulkner studies the very kind of exegesis he performed so well on The Waste Land when he showed how Eliot used Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. Mythic and other patterns are just as prevalent in Faulkner's fiction, in only slightly more disguised form, as they are in Eliot's poetry.

In Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, Brooks examines Faulkner's apprentice writings, the "non-Yoknapatawpha" novels, and selected short stories. As always, his commentaries shed abundant light on their subject, but Brooks clearly doesn't seem comfortable with these novels, and he sometimes engages in circular reasoning by arguing that the non-Yoknapatawpha novels are inferior because they are not set in Yoknapatawpha. Brooks may be vulnerable on these and other matters, but his point of view is also responsible for the tremendous wealth of insights that he brings to bear on Faulkner's work. These insights are nowhere better illustrated than in his comments on Absalom, Absalom!, a novel he analyzed brilliantly in The Yoknapatawpha Country and returns to in the Appendices to Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. Though one may question some of Brooks's assertions about the antebellum South, what is perhaps most significant about his argument is that Absalom, Absalom! may be not merely a parable of the Southern past, but a prophecy of the American future. Always challenging and controversial, Brooks's work on Faulkner, particularly The Yoknapatawpha Country, will stand as a monument long after most of Brooks's critics have been forgotten.