Rule of solus ipse in a Decaying World: Defying character of the American South in William Faulkner’s The Tall Men

Abstract

A trope for the mode of individual self-expression analogous of the regional character(s) of the American South in William Faulkner’s short story, The Tall Men (1941), the rule of solus ipse corresponds to the state of individual in a fallen world of fears, anxieties, and uncertainties surmounted betwixt the World Wars. Binding Faulkner’s characterization with his contemporaneous literary equivalents of the era, ‘solipsism’ appeared as an existential niche of the defying character of the modern individual. As an epitome of devastated American South in successive periods of Reconstruction, progressive era and Great Depression, Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha, thus, both maps and transgresses the boundaries of his Southern stories to the extent his characters trespass the border between the individual and collective experience. Due to his joint literary appeal for gathering the local color with internationalism, studies on Faulkner’s writing have given utmost emphasis on his legacy in Modernist literature. This article aims to bring forth the defying character(s) of the American South in William Faulkner’s short story, The Tall Men, whose rule of solus ipse grounds the inbred resistance against the grain of the demise imposed by the Reconstruction and its succeeding era of progressivism and the Great Depression in American history.

Keywords

• Solus ipse / Solipsism
• William Faulkner
• American South
• reconstruction
• Progressivism
• Great Depression

References

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