William Faulkner, The Hamlet

He had quite possibly been a foreigner, though not necessarily French, since to the people who had come after him and had almost obliterated all trace of his sojourn, anyone speaking the tongue with a foreign flavor or whose appearance or even occupation was strange, would have been a Frenchman regardless of what nationality he might affirm, just as to their more urban co-evals (if he had elected to settle in Jefferson itself say) he would have been called a Dutchman.  But now nobody knew what he had actually been, not even Will Varner, who was sixty years old and now owned a good deal of his original grant, including the site of his ruined mansion.  Because he was gone now, the foreigner, the Frenchman, with his family and his slaves and his magnificence.  His dream, his broad acres were parcelled out now into small shiftless mortgaged farms for the directors of Jefferson banks to squabble over before selling finally to Will Varner, and all that remained of him was the river bed which his slaves had straightened for almost ten miles to keep his land from flooding, and the skeleton of the tremendous house which his heirs-at-large had been pulling down and chopping up – walnut newel posts and stair spindles, oak floors which fifty years later would have been almost priceless, the very clapboards themselves – for thirty years now for firewood.  Even his name was forgotten, his pride but a legend about the land he had wrested from the jungle and tamed as a monument to that appellation which those who came after him in battered wagons and on mule-back and even on foot, with fling-lock rifles and dogs and children and home-made whiskey stills and Protestant psalm-books, could not even read, let alone pronounce, and which now had nothing to do with any once-living man at all – his dream and his pride now dust with the lost dust of his anonymous bones, his legend but the stubborn tale of the money he buried somewhere about the place when Grant over-ran the country on his way to Vicksburg. (pp. 731-732, Library of America edition) 

 

One of the more striking features of William Faulkner’s writing is how well he establishes mood and setting with just a few paragraphs.  In this long second paragraph to The Hamlet (1940), he fleshes out the Frenchman’s Bend territory, located at the southern end of Yoknapatawpha Country, and makes its denizens into the hard-scrabble, barely literate heirs to antebellum nobility.  In this seeming-paean to the lost grandeur of a pre-Civil War planter, Faulkner does a clever bit of foreshadowing in hinting at the rise of the common classes with the fall of the established landed gentry.  By creating something almost epic about the movement of the Anglo-Celtic descendents of the Appalachian mountain people into northeastern Mississippi, Faulkner creates an environment in which the decline of Will Varner’s power due to the machinations of Flem Snopes becomes something more than just a changing of the guard; it is in miniature a palace coup in which a plebeian is raised up to become emperor.

Faulkner began developing the shrewd, nefarious character of Flem back in the 1920s, but it is in the 1932 short story “Centaur in Brass” where many of the events later covered in The Hamlet first occurred.  Flem’s accomplishments here, from rising above the shady past of his barn burning father to becoming first Varner’s store clerk and later his boss and son-in-law, do not quite possess the Machiavellian air found in “Centaur in Brass.”  Yet when viewed as a first act in another rise-and-all, Flem’s character here is impressive in his combination of detached coolness and ambitious shrewdness.  This Flem is a more nuanced, fleshed-out character and while he influences much of the events in The Hamlet, he does not overshadow some of the other important characters.

The Hamlet is divided into four sections, with the first, “Flem,” devoted to the Snopes family and their arrival at Frenchman’s Bend.  Some of Faulkner’s finest writing is found here, especially in his establishment of the “horse trading” prowess of the Snopes.  Two important characters, Mink Snopes and V.K. Ratliff, are introduced for the first time.  Mink’s own trading of notes proves to be vital for Flem’s later rise at the store, while Ratliff’s observations about local life serve as a sort of moral anchor against which the Snopes’ machinations twist and tug against.  The narrative is rich with the little details of Flem’s beginnings at the Varner store that enhance reader understanding of latter events.  One example of this is the story that Ratliff tells of the goat scarcity.  It is a humorous piece, a smaller brother of sorts to the “Spotted Horses” story that later formed the nucleus of the fourth part, “The Peasants.”  Yet it also reveals the Snopes’ deviousness without being too heavy-handed with the details; it manages to pull off being a funny interlude and a foreshadowing of future events without the narrative feeling stretched or overworked.

However, it is in the second part, “Eula,” where Faulkner’s skill at characterization truly is on display.  Eula is such an exaggerated caricature of early 20th century Southern femininity that it would be easy to dismiss her as being nothing more than a piece of meat for the local men to drool over.  Yet there is something within this lazy, sexualized woman that transcends the confines of such parodic characters.  Her effortless seduction of a previous schoolteacher, her desire to lose her virginity, and the series of events that leads her to become married to Flem are remarkable in that despite in most cases such events would be too wild to be narrated effectively, Faulkner manages to pull off the great feat of making this seem not only plausible, but also integral to the overall plot (it also contains connections to Eula’s unstated seduction in “Centaur in Brass”).

The third section, “The Long Summer,” is an interlude of sorts, as Flem and Eula are absent due to their honeymoon in Texas.  Yet the scenes involving the idiotic Ike Snopes and his love for Houston’s cow are hilarious, albeit in a slightly unsettling way.  On a more somber note, the Mink/Houston/wife/horse events that leads to Houston’s murder at the hands of Mink is presented in a more tragic, yet still memorable fashion.  Despite the absence of Flem, this section does not falter much in the way of narrative development, as the other Snopes, themselves in their own ways as much a danger to ordered society as Flem is becoming, prove to be interesting characters in their own right.

As noted above, “The Peasants” contains the nucleus of the story of Flem bringing back wild, unbroken ponies from Texas and engaging in a series of horseflesh tradings that enriches him at the expense of others.  Now the owner of the old Frenchman plantation house, Flem’s last exploit involves his manipulation of local legend regarding buried treasure to cement his new position as the new lord of the land.  The story ends with Flem setting off for Jefferson and the events chronicled in “Centaur in Brass.”  It is an effective conclusion to this stage in Flem’s rise to power, as it sets the stage for future events without feeling like the story was ending on a cliffhanger or hadn’t been developed properly.  The Hamlet can function well as an independent novel, albeit one full of references to other stories published both before and after its initial release.  It is not one of Faulkner’s greatest novels, but it certainly is an excellent story in its own right, full of well-developed characters and some of the funniest scenes in any of Faulkner’s fiction.  It sets the stage for several stories to follow, making it a valuable part of Faulkner’s œuvre.

William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms)

And the doctor wore a night shirt too, not pajamas, for the same reason that he smoked the pipe which he had never learned and knew that he would never learn to like, between the occasional cigar which clients gave him in the intervals of Sundays on which he smoked the three cigars which he felt he could buy for himself even though he owned the beach cottage as well as the one next door to it and the one, the residence with electricity and plastered walls, in the village four miles away.  Because he was now forty-eight years old and he had been sixteen and eighteen and twenty at the time when his father could tell him (and he believe it) that cigarettes and pajamas were for dudes and women.

***

Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts.  One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes – an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but at the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels – the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such – whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarised statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it) and retailed for money and which on actual application proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trusties) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left him by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blind fount where he had met justice and been hurled back and down):  using the mails to defraud:  who felt that he had been defrauded by the third class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.

As much as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories are effective in creating a realistic setting with complex characters spitting into the winds of culture, family history, and fate, there is still the threat of narrative fatigue.  After a few stories on the Compsons, Snopes, Sam Fathers, or Doom, the reader already has a general idea what to expect from these characters when they are confronted with certain situations.  After 1929, Faulkner wrote very few non-Yoknapatawpha stories, but his 1939 novel, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (originally entitled The Wild Palms) stands out as perhaps one of his five most accomplished and moving novels.  If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem features two separate narratives, each connected only thematically by how the protagonist responds to moments of crisis.  Alternating chapters, “Wild Palms” and “Old Man,” tell the stories of a rich country doctor and a convict caught up in the aftermath of the 1927 Mississippi flood, as each battle against social conventions, desire, and fate.

The two quotes above underscore Faulkner’s use of parallel structure.  The doctor, Harry Wilbourne (itself a telling name), is trapped.  He becomes a country doctor, willy-nilly, just as he acceded to his father’s wishes and married the woman selected for him.  He is slotted into his father’s old role, with little say in the matter.  He doesn’t wear pajamas because his father disapproved of them.  He smokes cigars because that was expected of doctors in the 1930s.  His entire life is circumscribed by others’ expectations of what he, a doctor, ought to be, never mind what he himself might enjoy.  It is this growing frustration with his assigned social/occupational role that leads Henry to partake in the ultimate transgression for his social milieu, that of a clandestine affair and later flight from the village where he had lived virtually his entire life.

Contrast this with the convict described in the second quote.  He is younger, twenty-five at the time of the events of 1927, yet he too finds himself bound.  His binding is not that of a society expecting him to occupy a prestigious position against his will, but rather he is shaped by the pulp fiction dime novels that he reads.  This convict, for whom there is no name given in the “Old Man” chapters, rails against the deceptions that society has imposed upon its denizens through the dissemination of fictions that feature rogues and gentlemen thieves.  Condemned to serve fifteen years at Parchman State Penitentiary (itself a vast plantation worked by convicts under the watchful eyes – and guns – of guards) for armed robbery, this convict feels deprived of liberty, honor, and pride by the very institutions that instilled such notions into his young mind.

The alternating structure of the “Wild Palms” and “Old Man” chapters allows Faulkner to explore the different (and similar) paths Harry and the convict take in dealing with their crises.  For Henry, his love affair with Charlotte (herself a married woman) leads to a flight to the Gulf Coast, where both attempt to abscond not just from their spouses, but from the restrictions that their social class has imposed upon them.  It is as much a confining prison as that which the convict discovers at Parchman, where the freedom to choose how to live one’s life has largely been taken away by a society that expects total conformity to its rules and conventions.  Harry and Charlotte struggle to find happiness, feeling even from afar the scathing contempt born of their transgression.  Fear of further loss and agony over Charlotte’s pregnancy and what that might mean to even the shredded remnants of their reputations leads to a desperate attempt by Harry to abort Charlotte’s pregnancy.  Even though this ending, where the lovers cannot have full, “true” happiness due to their violation of social standards regarding the sanctity of marriage, risks having a cliched ending, Faulkner goes further and explores just how those implacable forces against we struggle can create something more than just a tragedy, something that is worth remembering even in grief and suffering because both are superior to nothingness.  The very last paragraph of “Wild Palms” states this eloquently:

So it wasn’t just memory.  Memory was just half of it, it wasn’t enough.  But it must be somewhere he thought.  There’s the waste.  Not just me.  At least I think I dont mean just me.  Hope I dont mean just me.  Let it be anyone thinking of, remembering, the body, the broad thighs and the hands that liked bitching and making things.  It seemed so little, so little to want, to ask.  With all the old graveward-creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeated clinging not even to the defeat but just to an old habit; accepting the defeat even to be allowed to cling to the habit – the wheezing lungs, the troublesome guts incapable of pleasure.  But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails:  and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint and it the night but he could face it, thinking, Not could.  Will.  I want to.  So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old.  Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. – Yes he thought.  Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

The tall convict’s story in the “Old Man” chapters approach issues of freedom and love from a different angle.  This unnamed convict, identified by his height through these chapters, finds freedom of a more literal sort when during the Mississippi flood of 1927, the inmates of Parchman are evacuated and his skiff (where he had rescued a woman from a tree) is forced apart from the rest of the crew.  Whereas Harry and Charlotte’s flight is from extra-legal conventions that bind perhaps even harder than the legal restraints that the tall convict escapes, his situation becomes perilous due to the very real danger of being killed as a fugitive or bound to serve even more time if caught.  He and the woman (who is pregnant) go up and down the river, trying to find Parchman, only to spend weeks separated.  Traumatic events frequently bring people closer together and the tall convict and the woman do form a bond, even though he is bound and determined to return to finish his sentence.
There is a connection here between the flooded Mississippi (the “old man” of the story) and the streams of human lives that intersect it.  Outside of rare tumultuous times, both flow from point to point with nary a pause.  The convict’s struggles against the river, against this inexorable tide that pushes against his desire to return to his familiar penitential life, is seen in a telling passage near the end of the penultimate “Old Man” chapter:

The lake was behind him now; there was but one direction he could go.  When he saw the River again he knew it at once.  He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.  But four weeks later it would look different from what it did now and did:  he (the old man) had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, the Old Man, rimpling placidly toward the sea, brown and rich as chocolate between levees whose inner faces were wrinkled as though in a frozen and aghast amazement…

Yet for the tall convict, as for Harry and Charlotte, fate proves to be fickle and treacherous.  Although the tall convict turned himself in voluntarily, he discovers that he now has had an additional ten years added to his sentence for escaping, even despite his intent to return.  While he receives this stoically, accepting it as part of fate, it is the betrayal of his female companion that angers him most, as she quickly moves on from their shared bond and forges a new one, despite her initial agreement to wait out those ten years for him to be free.  Here, there is a bitterness that tinges the earlier resignation to fate, a sense that despite what the tall convict had stated throughout the narrative, that there is still a spark of resentment and perhaps even an eagerness to resist what fate has had in store for him.  It is a sobering way to close If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, yet the tall convict’s “Women, shit” comment provides a sense that this tragedy is not the end of his life; he will continue to endure.

In a 1958 Paris Review interview, Faulkner made the following remark:

“No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach a man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral codes and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.”

This quote fits neatly with the characters of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.  Harry, Charlotte, and the tall convict all try to go beyond what their natures/society have dictated them to be.  Although each fails, there is something to be said for that desire to strive to do his or her duty, whether it is to love and cherish or to remember grief in honor of that lost love.  It is tempting to label the two stories contained within If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem as tragedies; after all, they do hold up the ideal of humanity as greater than its quotidian actions and desires.  Yet there is more to it than the inevitable failure of those goals.  We see characters striving to change the equation, to rewrite the rules and conventions and to forge something different.  There is a nobleness in those deeds, which Harry and the convict will likely not forget, that brings Faulkner’s original title, “If I forget thee, Jerusalem,” full circle.  That reference to suffering and loss also contains the germ of hope, as this suffering and sorrow will come to bear new fruit.  Like Harry, between grief and nothing we choose to take grief.


Originally posted in April 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.

William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

For most of the thirteen years leading up to the publication of The Unvanquished (1938), most of Faulkner’s short fiction and novels kept circling around the Ground Zero of Yoknapatawpha County:  the Civil War.  In “A Rose for Emily,” passing mention was made of Colonel Sartoris and his form of charity toward Emily.  Flags in the Dust (1929) follows the Sartoris family in its decline after the Civil War.  In Absalom, Absalom! we learn a bit more about the Compsons and their connection to the settlement of the county and their involvement in the Civil War.  “Barn Burning” introduced us to Ab Snopes, whose muddled role in the Civil War was, incidentally enough, first explored in The Unvanquished.  There are further ripple effects, forwards and backwards in Yoknapatawphan time, as the complex, tragic mix of pride, stubbornness, racism and classism, and the struggle of the everyperson to make his/her way through an often unforgiving environment all center around the real and fictional events of 1861-1865.

The Unvanquished, through seven episodes, tells the story of the Sartoris family during the second half of the Civil War, July 1863-April 1865, and into the Reconstruction years, ending in 1872.  Six of these seven episodes originally were short stories published between 1934-1936, with the seventh, “An Odor of Verbena,” appearing only with the complete novel.  It is told through the young twelve year-old eyes of Bayard Sartoris, Colonel John Sartoris’ eldest son, as he remains at home on the Sartoris plantation while his father and the other Yoknapatawpha men join the Confederate Army of the Mississippi in battles north and east of Jefferson.  The story begins with Bayard and the young slave Ringo playing a mock battle of Vicksburg when an older servant, Loosh, comes in and informs the boys that Vicksburg has fallen and that the Yankees are advancing through northeastern Mississippi toward Jefferson.  Soon enough, the two spot an advance Yankee patrol and Bayard pulls down a musket from the wall and shoots at him, killing a horse.  This opening episode, “Ambuscade,” reveals not just young Bayard’s naivety (he does not yet understand that there is an element of fear as well as respect in how Ringo and the other slaves treat him and his family), but also that turning point in the war where the advancing Union forces have begun liberating the slaves in the captured territories following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863.    Faulkner later reveals the depth to which the slaves knew of Lincoln’s proclamation in the third section, “Raid,” through this eloquent passage:

We never did overtake them, just as you do not overtake a tide. You just keep moving, then suddenly you know that the set is about you, beneath you, overtaking you, as if the slow and ruthless power, become aware of your presence at last, had dropped back a tentacle, a feeler, to gather you in and sweep you remorselessly on. Singly, in couples, in groups and families they began to appear from the woods, ahead of us, alongside of us and behind…men and women carrying babies and dragging older children by the hand, old men and women on improvised sticks and crutches, and very old ones sitting beside the road and even calling to us when we passed; there was one old woman who even walked along beside the wagon, holding to the bed and begging Granny to at least let her see the river before she died.

The path of human migration was not limited to the slaves moving toward the Mississippi River (where the Union Army was stationed) but also to the movement of refugees driven from their homes by the fighting.  During the last full year of the war, Bayard’s family leaves the Sartoris plantation behind, as the Colonel has ridden into town and urges his mother, the Granny, to take the family silver to Memphis for safekeeping from looters from both sides of the conflict.  As Granny, Bayard, and Ringo travel toward their destination, they are waylaid, saved only by the fortuitous arrival of the Colonel’s cavalry as they try to chase down the thieves, who manage to escape but without the silver they had taken.  There are several funny events in the middle episodes, such as when Granny later goes to the Union forces and petitions for the return of the silver that the soldiers had later taken from the plantation after another patrol came upon it while searching for the Colonel’s troop.  Through a series of shrewd negotiations, abetted by the shady Ab Snopes, they have engaged in a mule smuggling/selling operation that allows the family to make back the money lost.  In this episode, there are shades of actual events late in the war where soldiers on both sides and civilians would sometimes engage in a series of complex and perhaps illicit trades in order for the latter to survive as their crops were devastated by the fighting and lack of labor for harvest time.

Dearth of supplies and food, while featured at times in these stories, takes a secondary role to Bayard’s personal development.  Near the end of the fighting, Granny is killed by the sinister ex-Confederate bandit, Grumby, as she tries to ply on him her mule-trading scam.  Betrayed by Snopes, Grumby has her killed.  Bayard and others in the household begin tracking down Grumby’s men, when they stumble upon Snopes, who had been tied up and left for dead by Grumby.  Eventually, Grumby is cornered, killed, and one of his hands is chopped off in retribution for the treatment Granny received.  In this, we see Bayard progressing from a callow youth to a young adolescent who is fierce in his defense of family honor.  Later, in the final episode, set in 1872, we see this sense of honor tested, with Bayard learning that sometimes there is a time and place for fighting and another for peacemaking for a good greater than that of the family.

The Unvanquished is difficult to discuss without laying out the events that occur.  Faulkner skips ahead months, if not years, between the seven episodes and at times the narrative is comic and at others very somber.  This likely is due to the episodes originally being six short stories that were later edited together to form a mosaic novel.  In places, such as the shift from the plantation to the family engaging in the mule-trading business, the transitions are very abrupt and feel rough and underdeveloped.  Yet on occasion this sense of disjointedness actually serves to accentuate the confusion and calamities of the final years of the Civil War and the massive disruptions and displacements that took place.  While Bayard’s growth into the future leader of the Sartoris family is a key unifying thread, there is much here about how the Jefferson blacks viewed the war, how there were unscrupulous individuals like Snopes and Grumby who profited from the war, as well as how chaste love, such as that shared between Bayard and Drusilla, serves as a thematic counterpoint to the fighting and hatreds that spilled out.  By itself, The Unvanquished is not one of Faulkner’s best written or developed story sequences.  But as a sort of quasi-prequel that ties together the references made in his earlier fiction, it serves to unify the disparate threads found elsewhere and to give a sense of loss, privation, and pride even in defeat that became the hallmark of so many of his post-Civil War-set characters and stories.  For that, it is an invaluable part of the larger tapestry of Faulkner’s fiction, even if by itself it is a weaker work.


Originally posted in March 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner often jumped back and forth in narrative time from story to story.  His 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!, is, to some extent, a prequel to perhaps his most famous novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929).  In devising the reading order for the weekly Faulkner reads/reviews, I left his earliest novels, including The Sound and the Fury, for near the end in part because of my decision to follow the Library of America publication dates for their five volumes of Faulkner’s novels.  But it also is a benefit to cover a key character from that earlier novel, Quentin Compson, without having to refer explicitly to what happened to him in the earlier novel a narrative year (1910) after the concluding events in Absalom, Absalom!, as there is a mystery to him for readers unfamiliar with The Sound and the Fury that would otherwise be lost if they were already well-informed about his character and disposition (conversely, those who have read The Sound and the Fury first can derive enjoyment from seeing certain mysteries from that novel played out here in Absalom, Absalom!).

Absalom, Absalom! is a complex novel, perhaps one of Faulkner’s most difficult for neophyte readers to process.  It is a recounting in 1909 of events that took place over a period of time stretching from the early decades of the 19th century to the narrative present.  In it, Quentin, along with his father (whose outlook on life colors this novel as much as the earlier The Sound and the Fury) and a Canadian-born college roommate at Harvard, try to pry apart the mystery surrounding the Sutpen family.  Early on, it is revealed that the Compsons are descended from a close friend of Thomas Sutpen, who established the 100 acre Sutpen’s Hundred plantation on land bought from the Choctaws around the founding of Yoknapatawpha County.  In one sense, the piecing together of what happened to Sutpen’s family could be viewed as an analogue for what later occurred to the Compsons (themselves part of the former landed gentry who lost much of their wealth and prestige in the years following the Civil War), but Absalom, Absalom! is more than just a narrative of the decline of the antebellum Southern aristocracy.  It is a tragedy that envelops not just this particular strain, but also references in yet another light the complexities of black-white race relations in not just the South, but also the Caribbean (where Thomas Sutpen had lived for several years, with consequences that affected the generations that followed).  It can also be viewed (and the story’s title makes this rather explicit) as a filial rebellion similar to that of King David’s son, between two scions of the Sutpens, between Quentin and his family’s past, and between the older and newer Southern societies.

Fatality looms large in Absalom, Absalom!, as the characters, from Thomas Sutpen to his rejected eldest son to the odd relationship between that discarded child and Sutpen’s two children, all experience mortality in ways reminiscent of those surrounding the Biblical Absolom and his kin.  Heartache, anger, frustration at being cast aside for another, incestuous feelings – each of these is explored in the novel.  Faulkner does not make the connections directly, but instead he utilizes competing narratives pieced together by the two Compsons and Quentin’s roommate to create a mosaic portrayal of the Sutpen family and their amorous/homicidal tendencies.  To do this, Faulkner utilizes a running stream of conversation, as Quentin, his father, the roommate, Rosa Coldfield (herself the descendent of a family related by marriage to the Sutpens), and others to recreate (sometimes with purposeful discrepancies) those past events.  Below is a sample of this, dealing with Henry Sutpen, Judith Sutpen, and Charles Bon:

So Miss Rosa did not see any of them, who had never seen (and was never to see alive) Charles Bon at all Charles Bon of New Orleans, Henry’s friend who was not only some few years older than Henry but actually a little old to be still in college and certainly a little out of place in that one where he was – a small new college in the Mississippi hinterland and even wilderness, three hundred miles from that worldly and even foreign city which was his home – a young man of a worldly elegance and assurance beyond his years, handsome, apparently wealthy and with for background the shadowy figure of a legal guardian rather than any parents – a personage who in the remote Mississippi of that time must have appeared almost phoenix-like, full-sprung from no childhood, born of no woman and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust anywhere – a man with an ease of manner and a swaggering gallant air in comparison with which Sutpen’s pompous arrogance was clumsy bluff and Henry actually a hobble-de-hoy.  Miss Rosa never saw him; this was a picture, an image.  It was not what Ellen told her:  Ellen at the absolute halcyon of her butterfly’s summer and now with the added charm of gracious and graceful voluntary surrendering of youth to her blood’s and sex’s successor, that concurrent attitude and behavior with the engagement’s span with which mothers who want to can almost make themselves the bridges of their daughters’ weddings.  Listening to Ellen, a stranger would have almost believed that the marriage, which subsequent events would indicate had not even been mentioned between the young people and the parents, had been actually performed.  Ellen did not once mention love between Judith and Bon.  She did not hint around it.  Love, with reference to them, was just a finished and perfectly dead subject like the matter of virginity would be after the birth of the first grandchild.

Most of the novel is told through long, convoluted paragraphs that would be a complete mess to read if they were used to convey anything else other than the shifting perspectives of the narrators and the narrated individuals.  As it stands, it takes careful reading to piece together what is being revealed in passages such as this recounting on the part of Rosa Coldfield.  We see there is a mystery behind Charles Bon, in reference to his age (believed to be a bit old for college), wealth (rich in a poorer part of the country), and parentage (no parents are known at that time, but with the hint of a reveal later).  There is an explicit comparison between him and the Sutpens, as if there were a connection deeper than Bon’s courting of Thomas Sutpen’s daughter Judith.  Rosa is recounting what her mother, Ellen, had to say about her nephew, niece, and one-time friend of the former.  It is a second-hand account, with traces of yet another level of storytelling to indicate that what was being recounted was through the viewpoint of a potentially biased person.  There are similar such passages seen through the perspective of others who knew the Sutpens, leading to the development of a narrative where the “truth,” if there could ever be such an “objective” thing in light of the competing subjective accounts, has to be filtered through several perspectives that may or may not be withholding or distorting information.

This creates problems within the text for the reader to puzzle out, if she were so inclined.  Faulkner never directly says, until the concluding chapter, anything really definitive about these characters.  Instead, the stream of consciousness-like discussions between the Compsons and Quentin’s roommate, with Rosa’s occasional input, tells and retells the basics of the past in a way that makes it clear that the overarching issues that fueled the tragic events between Charles Bon, Judith, and Henry Stupen and between Thomas Sutpen and a squatter’s daughter after the Civil War are still present within Southern society.  Thomas Sutpen, along with the majority of the Southern aristocracy, focused so much of their energy on “purity” and preserving bloodlines.  In one of the great ironies of the novel, it is this desire for both that leads to the tragedies that occur and the inheritance being passed down to a character that Faulkner characterizes as the likely future symbol for what will transpire for countless Sutpen-like people in the South.  This theme, introduced late in the novel, is not as well-developed as the Absalom-family tragedy connection, yet it is unsettling in how it presents a somewhat pessimistic view of Southern society.  It reinforces some of Faulkner’s thoughts expressed in Light in August (1932) on race, yet today it seems to ring a false note.

Absalom, Absalom! is not for the faint of heart.  It takes a lot of effort to plow under the textual surface and turn up the nuggets Faulkner has buried underneath the complex presentation.  But if the reader makes that effort, he or she may be rewarded with a rich, complex, and ultimately tragic family history that contains not just allusions to Faulkner’s previous stories or to the Civil War and its effects on Southern society, but also to one of the more tragic Biblical tales.  It is not Faulkner’s best novel and certainly not one to read first (or second, or even third or fourth), but Absalom, Absalom! is the sort of story that makes the reader take pause for a moment to consider what she has just read.  Perhaps this need to pause and to reassess what was just read is the greatest testament to the novel’s power that can be given.  After all, discovering that for some, that the past is never over, that it has not indeed ever passed, is a rather disconcerting notion.  But sometimes we need to be disconcerted and for that, Absalom, Absalom! is a remarkable achievement and one of Faulkner’s better-constructed novels.


Originally posted in March 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat as part of a weekly "Faulkner Friday."  Novels reviewed from January-April will be reposted here on Fridays, while the short stories will appear on Wednesdays.