This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.

This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

The Sound and the Fury depicts how information at a certain level of complexity acquires its own quasi-agency – a hyper-mimetic ability to replicate itself through surfaces and selves. Among the many objects and surfaces that exhibit this mimetic agency, two images – the clock and the statue – lie at the heart of Faulkner’s cartography of the postbellum plantation system and allow us to understand the author’s diagnosis of the modernization of the planter system, not simply as a scaling social order, but as a coercive flow of ideology in the the era of Jim Crow ascendency. This chapter shows that Faulkner imagines planter heritage as a social force that invades the psyche, vertiginously scaling through a series of mimetic surfaces to find expression both in the financialization of the New South and in the Confederate monuments that replicate ideology through the social body. The statue of the Confederate soldier is the ultimate case in point. The mimetic semblance is not alive, yet a commonality of plantation culture is enacted between this information object and those who are forced to endure its imprint, to become mimetic surfaces robbed of depth and immanent life.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

This chapter provides a close reading of Faulkner’s first depiction of the plantation manor and argues that it provides the prototype for a spatial pattern that will be repeated so often and in so many variable forms as to constitute the foundational archetype of networked space and information flow throughout the whole of the Yoknapatawpha fiction. In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner visualizes a vertically-oriented spatial symbolism in which a violent ideology is embedded in the artifacts and aesthetic objects of the Sartoris planter network so that this ideology is capable of replicating its content in individuals who inhabit this space. This predicament is most fully realized in Colonel Sartoris’s statue, for while the man himself is dead, the ideological information of his mimetic print circulates through the financial and technological infrastructure of bank and rail, using the innovations of modernity to disseminate itself even while reinforcing the racial and class suppositions of the slave system that preceded it.