Chronotopes of law in William Faulkner's novels, 1930-1939

The essay will analyze Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), in the light of the narrative and narratological interaction between the traditional chronotopes of law (the trial, the prison), the horizontal chronotopes of the barn, the ‘shuttered’ house and the river, and the vertical chronotopes of the fire and the flood. The essay argues that while the catalyst function of the vertical chronotopes to trigger a potential challenge to official law is always accelerated by two main kernels/nuclei deeply embedded in Southern obsession for miscegenation (the rape and murder of a white woman and the lynching of an alleged mulatto), the potentially overthrowing action of these chronotopes does not, in the end, bring about any real change in the course of human and legal justice. With the truth literally buried by fire and water, the characters’ quest is perpetually thrust back into the stasis of non-contemporaneity.