From Edith Hamilton’s essay “William Faulkner: Sorcerer or Slave,” collected in The Ever Present Past—
Mr. Faulkner’s novels are about ugly people in an ugly land. There is no beauty anywhere. Whether he deliberately excludes it or does not perceive it, no one can say; but at least he says himself that a blossoming pear tree in the moonlight looks like hair streaming up from the head of a drowned woman, each hair distinct in the water from the others. He describes the scent of a blooming shrub, still wet with dew, as sickening. To walk through the woodlands in summer in “a gloom dimmer than the gray desolation of November” is to feel “malicious little eyes” watching (birds? squirrels?) while under foot the oozing earth crawls with snakes.
But the land is worse, far worse, than all of these unpleasant features put together. It ruins the people it nourishes. A dark curse lies on it. It was “already tainted before any white man owned it . . . from that old world’s corrupt and worthless twilight as though in the sailfulls of the old world’s tainted wind which drove the ships.” Columbus’, presumably. The initial curse, connected with the dispossession of the Indians, appears to be—Mr. Faulkner is not quite clear about it—inherited by the North as well as the South, but its full effect is shown concentrated in the South. “Don’t you see?” young Ike McCaslin cries in “The Bear.” “Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, lie under the curse.”
The people, thus doomed, are like the land that dooms them. It is part of the fate that molds them. “Our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent, shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooking image.” At this point Poe comes irresistibly to mind. “The dank tarn of Auber—the misty mid region of Weir—the ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir.” It is the point in the realm of romance where extremes meet, Poe’s lovely and lost Ulalume and Mr. Faulkner’s curse-ridden men
Biblioklept 