Haar: The Phenomenon of Grotesque in Modern Southern Fiction: Some Aspects of Its Form and Functio

Hans H. Skei

doi:10.22439/asca.v18i2.1673

Haar: The Phenomenon of Grotesque in Modern Southern Fiction: Some Aspects of Its Form and Functio

American Studies in Scandinavia ◽

10.22439/asca.v18i2.1673 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 97-98

Author(s):

Hans H. Skei

Keyword(s):

Southern Fiction

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Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction

10.1057/9780230611825 ◽

2008 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

John N. Duvall

Keyword(s):

White Identity ◽

Southern Fiction

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The Fable of the Writer in Southern Fiction

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300003574 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

pp. 249-266

Author(s):

Lewis P. Simpson

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Deep South ◽

The South ◽

Southern Fiction ◽

Yoknapatawpha County ◽

The One

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.

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