Absalom, Absalom!--William Faulkner's Novel of the Death of the Old SouthConsidered by many Faulkner scholars to be his masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! was read by goodreads group "On the Southern Literary Trail" in April, 2012. And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! Second Samuel, 18:33, King James VersionInterestingly enough, Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind were both published in 1936. Both were novels of the Old South. However, while Margaret Mitchell chose to romanticize that society, William Faulkner removed any element of fanciful romance from the story revolving around the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a man with a design to found a patriarchal dynasty, but who lost everything in his attempt to do.Faulkner originally titled his novel, "Dark House," but as he wrote his complex story adopted the story of King David and his son Absalom as a more appropriate fit with the figure of Thomas Sutpen and his family. This was a novel that Faulkner struggled with through false starts, interruptions with his work as a screenwriter for Howard Hawks, and the death of his younger brother Dean who died in a plane crash in 1935. Further, his initial submissions to his publisher were returned to him as being confusing and incapable of being understood.Faulkner's premise for Sutpen's story is no one person is capable of knowing what truth is. History is an amalgam of documentation, memory, and the telling of it. One lawyer colleague of mine has as his motto, "Perception is reality." For the reader of "Absalom, Absalom!" it is quite similar to being a member of a jury, listening to the testimony of multiple witnesses, weighing their demeanor, their testimony, their biases and prejudices, viewing the exhibits, and ultimately, as a group determining what is the truth of the case tried before them.Faulkner had his characters and story in mind. His problem was how to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen and the lives of his children which occurred in the past by characters in the ostensible present of the novel. Among his working papers was a flow chart showing the sources of information and the basis of how his characters knew what they did. At the top was Thomas Sutpen, originally named Charles. From Sutpen, a line flowed to Rosa Colfield, who would be Sutpen's sister-in-law. Another line flowed to the right to General Compson, his only apparent friend, to his son Quentin Compson II. In the center at the bottom of the working page is Quentin Compson III, whom we originally meet in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin is linked to Sutpen by his direct connection to Rosa Colfield who tells the story from her perspective, and from information passed down to him by his grandfather and father. Quentin emerges as the central thread from whom we learn the "evidence" of the case of Thomas Sutpen. Then, in a masterstroke of structure, Faulkner provides the reader with Quentin's Harvard roommate, Shreve McCannon, an outsider, a Canadian, who provides questions and his own interpretation of the information Quentin provides him.In essence, Faulkner's structure is much akin to eating an artichoke, peeling the delicate leaves from it, nipping the tender flesh from the base of the leaves, until we reach the unveiled heart, the ultimate delicacy, or in literary terms, what the reader discerns to be the truth.Thomas Sutpen appears in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in 1833. He is a mystery. He is a man without a past, without a lineage. Nor is he forthcoming about where he has come from, or the source of his wealth that allows him to purchase one hundred square miles of land from Old Chickasaw Chief Ikkemotubbe. With him, Sutpen has a band of wild negro slaves who speak in a language unknown to the inhabitant's of Jefferson. Sutpen also carries with him a French architect who will design and direct the building of Sutpen's big house.This information is provided by Rosa Colfield, the sister of Ellen, whom Sutpen courts in peremptory fashion. Referring to Sutpen as man-horse-demon, Rosa reveals her biases and prejudices against Sutpen. For it develops that prior to her death, Ellen had put the responsibility of protecting her children, Judith and Henry, when she is no longer alive. Sutpen will curtly propose to Rosa to become his second wife, but she will leave after being insulted by Sutpen for reasons that will be made considerably later in the novel.Not only is reading "Absalom" a bit like dining on an artichoke, it is also very much like peeling an onion, layer after layer. Through Grandfather and Father Compson we learn that Sutpen had come from the mountains of western Virginia, from a poverty stricken family. Sutpen is turned away from a Tidewater Virginian's front door by a slave. This rejection will deepen Sutpen's desire to be as rich as any man. Sutpen becomes an overseer on a Haitian plantation. He puts down a slave revolt. He is awarded for bravery by being given the plantation owner's daughter in marriage. However, he puts her aside upon discovering that her complexion is not the result of a Spanish mother, but a black descendant. Not only does Sutpen put her aside, but his son by her. The thought of a marriage of miscegenation does not fit in with Sutpen's design to be landed gentry in Northern Mississippi.Sutpen's downfall is foreshadowed by the appearance of Charles Bon, enrolled as a student in law at the infant College, Oxford. Bon becomes fast friends with Henry, who idolizes the elegant older man from New Orleans. That Bon meets Judith during a visit to Sutpen's plantation is inevitable. Sutpen's wife, Ellen, considers Bon to be Judith's future husband. However, it would appear that Bon has more desire for Henry than Judith. The homoerotic electricity of the relationship is palpable, though neither man ever indicates the occurrence of a sexual act.The coming Civil war prevents resolution of Bon's relationship with Judith. Henry and Bon join the University Grays formed at Oxford and head to war, with the belief that all the South held that defeat was impossible. Sutpen also went to war as a General. His bravery is never at question. However, as a result of a talk with Henry regarding Bon, Henry repudiates his position as heir to the Sutpen holdings. Nevertheless, although he say he does not believe what his father has told him about Bon, which is never directly revealed to the reader, Henry hope that the war will resolve the issue of Bon's marriage to Judith. Perhaps the war will remove one or both of them, making any confrontation unnecessary. But it does not.Is Charles Bon the son of Thomas Sutpen? How will Henry resolve the propriety of Bon's marriage to Judith since the war left them both survivors? And what of Thomas Sutpen's fate? What will come of Sutpen's One Hundred when it becomes part of a conquered nation? What secrets do Thomas Sutpen's house still hold that Rosa Colfield demands that Quentin ride with her to that dark house before he leaves the South to become a student at Harvard?"Absalom, Absalom!" is Faulkner's pivotal novel of the death of the Old South. In it he leaves no doubt that he considered slavery to be the institution that condemned it and destroyed it. Shreve McCannon, the outsider, the neutral observer, the Canadian, astutely observes that the descendants of those that once held no freedom would rule the hemisphere.Faulkner's opinion of "Absalom, Absalom!" was, "I think it's the best novel yet written by an American." Random House, headed by Bennet Cerf, was excited by the novel, stating on the jacket that it was Faulkner's most "important and ambitious contribution to American literature." The novel was released October 26, 1936.Typical of literary criticism of the time, Faulkner remained their favorite whipping boy. Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker/ said the novel was consistently boring, that he didn't know why Faulkner wrote it, and that he didn't understand it. Harold Strauss, writing for the New York Times said that "its unreadable prose should be left to those who like puzzles." Faulkner's Early Literary Reputation In America by O.B. Emerson, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan (1984) What the critics of the 1930s did not recognize was that Faulkner had discovered modernist techniques already used by Woolf, Conrad, Kafka, and Joyce. Today, typical analysis of "Absalom" is that its sole competitors in contemporary American literature are Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography, Frederick R. Karl, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, New York, 1989, page 582.I'd say Karl is right. And as for prose for people who like puzzles, think of peeling all those leaves off that artichoke. That succulent heart, dipped into drawn butter is worth the work.
Review #9 of "Year of the Review All Read Books"In one sense I, as a Texan, am a Southerner, my state, formerly its own nation--those two words oft used interchangably in a non-American sense--a member of the Confederacy, the seventh state to do so, though not without the most prominent man in the state's history, Sam Houston, fearing against it like a lone Jeremiah, but still doing so by a vote of 166 to 8; and in another sense my South is not Faulkner's South, is not the Deep South, arguably not even the Old South as some of my ancestors fled the South proper because of Reconstruction and sought reprieve in Texas where it was apparently not so heavy handed;--but yes, my South because I did have relatives and ancestors fighting for the Confederacy (perhaps and likely dying) owning slaves (perhaps and likely committing atrocity and torture) and yes even my own grandmother commonly referred to all black people as "niggers," but also the notSouth, the Texas that thinks it is still a republic, still sovereign, the notSouth in that as much of my family is born and bred in Texas antebellum there is still another branch that began in Illinois and headed west toward California, abstaining likely from the whole war, or even perhaps fighting for the Union so that in some sense my living in Texas has nothing to do with South or notSouth, with Confederacy or Union anymore than it has to do with the French Huguenots and Scottish Calvinists that delivered my surname to a continent that no white man is native to. So like Quentin Compson I feel both part of the South and wholly understanding of it, but also am not of it since the South died in 1865 and I live only in a small broken crypt of what once was the South. And this is a book of the South and of families. Not just the mighty Sutpen, but the Coldfields, the Compsons. All the families wrecked by that war, most agreeing with it, some nailing themselves in attics to protest it. The books starts in mythic quality. Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin Compson of the mighty Thomas Sutpen who rose out of mystery and terror and forged for himself an empire in the tiny town of Jefferson Mississippi. He built a monstrosity of a house with a kidnapped French architect, wrestled with wild niggers--never ordinary, housekeeping niggers, always referred to as "wild" because that word alone underlines the sheer ferocity of his will that he would only want wild and half-crazed animals that would slave away in tenacious fear and fury to erect him a mighty plantation. He procures a wife from one of the locals and she bares him two children and always he appears mild, cold even, calculating. And for much of the story we have no idea what his motive is. Why he wants to attack his plan with such relentless force. Rather he just is force, he is a great and powerful wave of fate itself upon the land. And while layers are plastered onto the narrative by way of Quentin and his father and Rosa and Shreve, the mythic quality starts to strip away. Because the reader encounters Henry and Judith Sutpen and Charles Bon and Wash Jones. All throughout Sutpen has that same implacable will about him but his family and friends are fragile and breaking like the very South itself. Charles and Judith fall in love, or perhaps they do not fall in love, perhaps Judith only falls in love and Charles has no notion or intention to marry as he already is to an octoroon woman. Henry repudiates his father and birthright when his father tells him that Charles cannot marry Judith. The reason is guessed at. And the better the guesses sound the more they become fact. Henry repudiates Sutpen because he insulted his friend Charles by suggesting he married an octoroon, or that Charles is actually Sutpen's son from a former marriage. These two are taken as fact but near as I can tell it seems to be as much hypothesizing on the characters part as it is actual fact. And perhaps Charles really did fall in love with Judith and the reason for his silence is because Henry demands that he stay away from her. And even though they are half-siblings Charles still wants to marry her, will marry her with that same tidal force of will as Thomas Sutpen. And Henry kills him, whether because of threat of incest or bigamy or miscegenation or his own distant colored blood. Henry kills him. But Rosa, the only one alive at the time of the events remarks how she never even saw his body. Could it be that Charles was not even killed, that there was no body, that the myth of Sutpen's Hundred is just as much conspiracy, that Charles and Henry fled the South together because it was the South that was murdered and being buried? None of our characters saw the body. Rosa never saw Charles alive. There is only a name on a tombstone. I found myself sad at the end of this story. It's strange enough to be sad by most fiction which we patently know to not be true. But the sadness came from the invention of Shreve, a fiction within the fiction. One would probably think there would be a diminishing return, but the hypothesis that Shreve proposes in which Charles really is truly in love with Judith, will marry her, and in which Henry can't decide whether he approves of the marriage or not, loving Bon, loving Judith, hating his father, yet, especially after discovering Bon has negro blood, wanting to defend the honor of the family he repudiated, knowing in his heart his father was right: Bon cannot marry Judith. And consider the title, the original story. Absalom rebelled against his father King David and when he is killed David weeps in utter misery, wishing he was the one to have died. Could Sutpen have wept in utter misery? At the ruin of his family, the destruction of all his work not just by the Union but by his own past? As cruel and twisted and perverse as the South was, is there not still a cry for it? Because at least it was a place once without that past, that past of failure and ruin, that past that never passes, as we go on to learn. And I was sad for Quentin. Who does not hate the South, he does not does not does not. And in a matter of months there won't be a South to hate or a Quentin to not hate it. There will only be time and death and whatever passes for time beyond death; probably memory and the immortal sin it carries with no movement and no urgency, only its irresolute and staunch presence, like a defeated Southerner calling into the North "well kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yet air they?"
What do You think about Absalom, Absalom! (1991)?
Starting to read Absalom, Absalom! might feel, at first, like walking into your friends having an important conversation but, because you missed the first half of it, you can’t tell whom it’s about and why they sound so absorbed by it - and they’re so concentrated that they can’t and won’t listen to you requesting that they please start over. All you can do is try to make sense of the clues and signs you’re able to grasp and try to figure out for yourself - at least for the time being - bits of the narrative. Of course, you could also excuse yourself and give them some privacy - but you’d be missing out on a great book. Like the making of a pearl: mollusks depositing calcium carbonate in concentric layers, as a defense mechanism, against a potentially threatening irritant (such as a parasite inside the shell, or even a grain of sand in rare cases), isolating it from their mantle folds. That’s how I like to imagine William Faulkner wrote this novel: he idealized the plot and his characters, and then realized something tragic would have to happen to them that would be their demise - the threatening irritant: a crime - and instead of telling his tale conventionally, he slowly protected and isolated it with layers and layers of different perspectives from various unreliable narrators. In how many different ways can the same story be told? Can each one of these (co)exist on their own?There are mainly four people - Rosa Coldfield, father and son Jason and Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon, the latter’s roommate - in this quest of trying to understand and ultimately make sense of what they’ve heard about the events that took place over the course of a century, as the fates of the Sutpen, Coldfield and Bon families are encapsulated from the 1800’s until the early 1900’s.Each one of these four voices - which at some point are all narrators of the story - have some knowledge of what happened in certain periods of time. Part of that knowledge, though, is pure guessing or interpretations based on their own points of view, and so it’s up to us - who are reading a story from someone who’s heard of a story from others - to be careful as to what we can assume as fact or merely personal conclusion. While Miss Rosa, who's emotionally involved and was a living part of the tragedy, fuels her narrative with sentimentality and bias, Mr. Compson relies on a hear-and-say account, since he’s heard it all from his own father; Quentin and Shreve approach the subject more objectively - in black and white, ironically one might say considering this particular book -, just summarizing all the information they’d obtained from several sources, while still trying to attribute what were the underlying reasons in all of the character’s actions.The novel’s plot is basically about the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man who has a project for his life since he was a teenager: to have a big mansion, a family and heirs to carry out his name. Arriving in Jefferson, Mississippi, he is able to obtain some land and through the course of a few years, builds up his sumptuous mansion. The next step is to find a wife: Ellen Coldfield, a local woman, whom he marries and gives him two children: Henry and Judith. It all seems to be working accordingly to his plans until Henry, who’s now in the University, brings home for Christmas his fellow student and best friend Charles Bon, whom Ellen Coldfield hopes will marry her daughter. The simple possibility of this wedding brings drastic consequences to the lives of the three families, and only through analyzing their past we can begin to comprehend why an unexpected killing took place and how that altered Sutpen’s schemes and how he felt he would have to try again.Completing the merits of the book, Faulkner gives us beautiful and interesting analogies, long Proustian sentences and uses a lot of visual elements to portray the character’s feelings, and he’s still able to assign unique ways in which all of his storytellers can express themselves and stand on their own as singular voices. Not in all passages appears to be an obvious narrator, but through paying attention to detail and getting acquainted with their manners, it’ll be easier to identify whose voice it is you hear.Rating: while the story is in fact very interesting and keeps you curious until the end to find out what really happened to the families involved and begging for a reliable narrator who will just lay out all the cards for you, the innovations in style and the narratives Faulkner employed here are what really grabbed my attention and impressed me the most. I found Absalom, Absalom! so well crafted and written that I just couldn’t help but wonder more than a couple of times “how did he ever idealized something like this?” For that: 5 stars, no less.
—Renato Magalhães Rocha
Have you ever looked at one of Picasso's abstract females? You know the ones I mean. The woman has a head in which the prominently jutting nose splits the face into two sections with violently contrasting colours. Other body parts, hugely disproportionate, seem to bulge and dangle everywhere. You contemplate it for a while, shake your perfectly symmetrical head, put your elegantly tapered fingers pensively to your shapely chin, and think, "There's a human being in there somewhere. I can see all the body parts. But why does it look so incredibly bizarre?" Well, that's sort of how I felt reading this novel. If I had to sum it up in one phrase it would be: Convoluted, convoluted!Mind you, I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from trying this. I'm told by those in the nose know that it's much better on a second reading. If I went back to the Picasso, maybe all those skewed arms and legs and, well, you know, other things would shift around and suddenly look like a regular human being. And if I go back to the Faulkner, maybe all those characters, fragments, flashbacks, rehashings, and long drawn out italicized monologues will shift around and suddenly make sense like a regular novel.I don't know, though, whether I'll ever go back. But that's just me.
—Richard
Faulkner è uno scrittore estremamente complesso da affrontare, nel senso che i suoi libri non possono costituire un semplice passatempo, ma impegnano intellettualmente ed emotivamente il lettore, sottoponendolo ad un notevole sforzo di attenzione e di interpretazione. In questo romanzo, come già in “L’urlo e il furore”, convivono, marcatamente contrapposti eppure armoniosamente gestiti, l’ossequio alla tradizione più classica e lo sperimentalismo più ardito. Questo perché sotto il profilo tematico lo scrittore riprende magistralmente motivi già visitati dai grandi narratori del passato, attingendo anche a piene mani dai toni e dai contenuti della tragedia: il fato, la vendetta, la lussuria, l’orgoglio, l’odio di razza, l’incesto, la guerra e, naturalmente, la morte… Sono storie drammatiche e disperate quelle che narra e il modo in cui lo fa è sempre singolare, sconcertante, a tratti abbacinante. La scrittura di questo romanzo, infatti, tocca livelli altissimi di lirismo e coinvolge in modo addirittura doloroso. Scarna, essenziale e allo stesso tempo ridondante; metallica ed estenuante, è fatta di continui ritorni e ripetizioni di termini, di concetti, di fatti, e si articola in periodi lunghissimi che sembrano volutamente impedirci di tirare il fiato. Lo sviluppo lineare, anzi ‘normale’ e tranquillamente fruibile dell’intreccio è completamente stravolto da un vortice di punti di vista che si alternano senza chiare indicazioni di trapasso dall’uno all’altro e riprendono gli stessi eventi in modo diverso e talora contrastante. Di volta in volta un personaggio racconta gli avvenimenti a cui ha assistito, o racconta ciò che gli è stato raccontato da chi era presente, oppure racconta ciò che ha soltanto intuito o dedotto o immaginato… Particolarmente suggestiva l’ultima parte, nella quale la narrazione trova il suo epilogo e il suo senso definitivo, con i due interlocutori, Shreve e Quentin, che si affiancano e si identificano progressivamente con i protagonisti del racconto: Henry e Bon. E la decadenza, la rovina della famiglia Sutpen si intreccia fino a sovrapporsi alle sorti della guerra e alla dissoluzione dello stesso Sud, un mondo destinato all’estinzione proprio per gli stessi motivi sui quali aveva fondato la propria grandezza. Titanico.
—Ginny_1807
