The most individual is the most universal (1)—-Understanding “location” through William Faulkner

The individual that can be expressed is a kind of universality. It can even be said that the more individual the more universal, because the existence of these individual is separated from all external supports, and we can only see the full picture by exploring its deepest part. Compared with the public domain that is influenced by the times, customs and even the context, these individual that project inner shadows undoubtedly stand more firmly on the universal ground. What we are talking about is not just the creator’s self-biography, but also grasping a paradigm, a universal force or phenomenon. What maintains individual and universal is necessarily a transcendence concept, which originates from the individual but transcends the so-called “secular value” and exists through a universal image from a private perspective. As mentioned above, “location” is a specific relationship between the decentralization of transcendental knowledge and the flow of consciousness. Its existence is borrowed from the perspective of the individual, but it is also widely used in the public context. The individual and the universal have shown a phenomenal balance in it. At this time, from the perspective of structuralism and semiotics, “location” assumes an irreplaceable role of meaning in public dialogue. Various concrete or abstract things can be expressed through “location”. A priori knowledge allows us to grasp the interpretation behind it without understanding “location”. As a result, “location” has become one of the possibilities of the carrier of transcendence, and the expression of “location” in various cultural creations also proves this point. For this reason, choosing “location” as the expression of “the most personal is the most universal” is understandable, and I will continue to clarify the specific use of “location” in creation.

The geographical location of the earliest literary works to date should be the “Atlantis” mentioned in Plato’s Dialogue, and the most influential literary works contain the “location” afterwards should be William Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha County”. Except for the three novels that are unrelated to them, all of Faulkner’s novels revolve around “Yoknapatawpha County”, a “location” completely fictionalized by him. Therefore, the core of talking about Faulkner’s novel is actually to explore how everything he wants to show is constructed and happened in Yoknapatawpha County, and Yoknapatawpha County is actually a very individual concept, it completely comes from Faulkner’s heart and is called ” my apocryphal county. ” by the author himself. It carries the core of everything Faulkner wants to express. From an extremely subjective perspective, Faulkner tells of everything that industrial civilization and modernization process have infiltrated the southern United States through “Yoknapatawpha County”. The “location” in this novel’s story is also in his narrative system, like a link, pulls all the images he wants to express about the southern United States. From Jefferson Town to Yoknapatawpha County to the entire southern United States, the “Old South” traditions and phenomena constitute the triplet of inverted pyramids that exist in Faulkner’s series of novels, one that is completely dominated by “location.” The huge projection reflects the background of the times and personal destiny at the same time. The grand south and specific events are shown in this location in Yoknapatawpha County. At the same time, it also involves more locations and events in the south, such as “Memphis” (the capital of Mississippi, USA) repeatedly mentioned in The Sound and the Fury, Jason used the wealth he acquired in Yoknapatawpha County to go to the kilns in Memphis for consumption, and then brought a series of debts and troubles back to Yoknapatawpha County, he himself lives completely under the complete financial relationship of the capitalist society. Memphis metaphors that the erosion of capitalism and its obscenity and depravity can be sublimated into a confrontational relationship between the “New South” and the “Old South” through the link with Yoknapatawpha County, the “New South” represented by Jason How to devour the “Old South”. The “Civil War” repeatedly mentioned in Absalom, Absalom is more closely related to Yoknapatawpha County. Thomas Sutpen gained his wealth in Yoknapatawpha County because of the traditional slavery system in the South, and also because of the total loss of southern values ​​brought about by the Civil War, he was destroyed in Yoknapatawpha County. The rise and fall of Yoknapatawpha County perfectly coincided with the decline of the South in history. The dialectics of people and events carried by Yoknapatawpha County as a “location” and the complexity of the connection make the “inverted pyramid triplet” not only a superposition relationship, but a further tightness trinity.

“Yoknapatawpha County” in Faulkner’s works is the core component of effectiveness and the “location” is closely related to the transcendental concept of our cognition and its associated context. Space is the only external a priori causes the location is fundamentally the basis of narrative in human thinking. All our external descriptions are based on an accurate understanding of “location”. It is inherently one of the guarantees of the reliability of our narrative. And according to the basic theory of story writing, all stories or events need a stage or scene to occur. Their essence is “location”, that is to say, location is the abstract core of narrative creation from the beginning. The importance of the ” Yoknapatawpha County ” is based on this abstract core, Faulkner has completed the construction of a more concrete “location” that transcends the public context from the perspective of an individual. Yoknapatawpha County does not exist in the real world, even if it does have a source of inspiration in the real world, its essence is still a product of imagination, a product derived from Faulkner’s personal mind. The essence of its imagination constantly reminds and hints readers of what it does as “the abstract side of location”. So, from the beginning, its individual has been related to the universal transcendental concepts existing in human cognition. It originated from the “false reality” described by the imagination of the private mind. Faulkner gave readers a kind of “post-truth” experience by describing Yoknapatawpha County. Although everything that happened in “Yoknapatawpha County” did not conform to the objective factual “real”, the emotions felt by the readers are the same, and may even be closer to the truth itself, that is, in fact, that false stories bring actual emotional experiences. Through the changes in the literary works of Yoknapatawpha County, we are able to experience the changes of the “Old South” in the southern context in our own cultural context. The projection of a prior in the cultural context makes insight into the transcendence concept in Faulkner’s works becomes possible, and the dialectics of individual and universal are firmly established in this process. Not only that, the individual and universal of the “location” link in Yoknapatawpha County is not only between Faulkner and the reader, it is also reflected in the text itself. Yoknapatawpha County has never been given a general description in the novel. The observation of the characters in the book is the same as the observation of the readers. They are both very individual and limited perspectives. The only difference is that, with the counterpoint structure of Faulkner’s polyphonic writing, readers can switch back and forth through different private perspectives to achieve an overall grasp of the Yoknapatawpha County and the events staged by it. In other words, Faulkner’s text tried to immerse readers in the process of gaining universal understanding from multiple individual perspectives from the beginning. This feature is particularly evident in As I Lay Dying. The switching of the consciousness of different characters constitutes the overall polyphonic narrative, and the complete incident is laid out from the individual perspective, and the essence of this incident is only leaving from a “location” and going to another “location”.

Obviously, the “location” in literary works is not only used by Faulkner. Albert Camus also created a story by fictionalizing a “location” in his work “The Plague.” And compared to Faulkner’s fiction, Camus has made the fiction more thorough, so that the main location “Oran” in The Plague is completely an abstract conceptual “location”, it is not important in itself, it is important It is the metaphor it carries, and how the reader can perceive a philosophical system with universal value from such a completely private concept. García Márquez has returned to Faulkner’s fiction of “location”. “Macondo” undoubtedly has prototypes derived from reality. When highly incredible details are embedded in a highly realistic frame, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez successfully constructed an unforgettable “location” based on his imagination that also carries the turmoil of the South American era. But no matter what, regardless of the degree of fiction of the “location” in literature, it is always a process in which individuality transmits the power of universality through the construction of context, and readers grasp the universality of individuality through it, The transcendental nature of “location” makes it a perfect stage to carry the story and immerses readers in it by the multiple and complex context. The point that the most individual is the most universal is undoubtedly established in literature.

However, as I mentioned earlier, “location” can be interpreted as an intentional flow of consciousness while taking on the transcendental concept. Transcendental concepts are difficult to express in visual form (the result of vision is from It is essentially an experience), and the relationship between logic and context, as well as the relationship between privateness and universality, is using a certain “imaginary space” in the expression of images. The “location” in literary works is important to me. It is undoubtedly a revelation, but it is not visual. But can the relationship between the flows of consciousness be visualized? This is my further exploration, and I finally found the answer in a series of Tarkovsky’s films and set the tone of my creation.