Absalom, Absalom! was William Faulkner’s eighth novel and the first to include a map of its setting, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In many respects, it is Faulkner’s most ambitious work, and it caused him more trouble to write than any novel other than The Sound and the Fury (1929). He was working on early versions of Absalom even before writing Pylon (1935), though the bulk of the work was done between early spring 1935 and winter 1936.
This was an especially difficult period for Faulkner, as his attention was divided between work on his manuscript and work on shorter pieces, which he needed to publish to maintain financial stability. Work on his novel was also frequently interrupted by trips to Hollywood to write screenplays, another indispensable source of income. To make matters worse, in November 1935, his brother Dean was killed in a plane crash, and the combined stress of all these events created an additional obstacle in the form of some of Faulkner’s worst drinking bouts.
The novel contains two parallel narratives, one involving the rise and fall of the Thomas Sutpen family, and the other involving 21-year-old Quentin Compson’s reconstruction of that saga. Quentin Compson first appeared in The Sound and the Fury, but in fictional time, his activities in Absalom, Absalom! occur less than a year before his suicide in the earlier book.
William Faulkner
Quentin gradually learns the details of Sutpen’s story through a series of conversations with interlocutors including an old woman named Rosa Coldfield, his father, and his Canadian roommate at Harvard, Shrevlin McCannon. For the most part, these characters become the narrators of the story, though what they know is occasionally filtered through an authorial narrative voice. Not only do the characters remember different details of the Sutpen story, but they also differ frequently in their interpretations of characters and events. At times, they encounter gaps in the narrative or inexplicable actions, and they often remedy those gaps by supplying their own imaginative reconstructions of events and motivations. This is especially true of the conversations between Quentin and Shreve in their Harvard sitting room, which dominate the novel’s final chapters.
Much of the enormously complex story of Sutpen himself is provided by Faulkner in a chronology and genealogy that appear at the end of the book. Sutpen is born in the West Virginia mountains in 1807 to a poor white family of Scottish-English descent, and 10 years later his family moves to the Tidewater region of Virginia.
When he is 14, Sutpen is sent to a plantation house with a message but is turned away by a Black servant, who considers him to be white trash. This event appears to be the turning point for Sutpen that prompts him to implement the “design” the novel speaks of and to run off to Haiti to make his fortune on a sugar plantation. There he meets and marries his first wife, the daughter of a plantation owner, and helps to suppress a slave revolt. Upon the birth of his son, Charles Bon, Sutpen learns of his wife’s Negro blood and repudiates her; he then strikes out for Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County.
He arrives in Jefferson in 1833, bringing with him from the West Indies a horde of “wild Negroes” and a captive French architect. This strange group immediately begins to clear swampland on which to build his plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred. Despite his shady origins and uncouth behavior—which includes late-night “raree shows” featuring brawls with and among his slaves—Sutpen gains the town’s grudging respect by marrying Ellen Coldfield, a local merchant’s daughter, and accumulating a fortune in the cotton business.
A son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith, are born to Sutpen and Ellen, but not before Sutpen also fathers a daughter, Clytemnestra or “Clytie,” with a slave. Henry meets Charles Bon at the University of Mississippi and introduces him to Judith, and they become engaged. On Christmas Eve, 1860, virtually the eve of the Civil War, Sutpen tells Henry about Bon’s origins, but Henry refuses to listen, repudiates his birthright, and runs off with Bon to enlist in the Confederate army. During the war, in which Sutpen also participates, Ellen dies, and Henry, upon his return, murders Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred, then disappears.
Rosa Coldfield, Ellen’s sister, moves to Sutpen’s Hundred and soon becomes engaged to Sutpen. He insults her, however, by proposing that they have a child first and marry only if it is a boy—an heir to replace Henry. Utterly mortified, she leaves him.
In his quest to find an heir, Sutpen turns to Milly Jones, the granddaughter of Wash Jones, an admirer of Sutpen’s who has come to live in an abandoned fishing camp on the property. But when Sutpen’s child by Milly turns out to be a daughter, he insults her as well, and Wash kills him with a scythe.
At this point, Charles Etienne (de) Saint-Valery Bon arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred. He turns out to be Charles Bon’s child by an octoroon “wife” he had kept in New Orleans before coming to Mississippi. On separate trips to New Orleans, both Sutpen and Henry apparently had discovered Bon’s secret.
Bon’s son comes to live at Sutpen’s Hundred under the care of Judith and Clytie, and after disappearing for a number of years he returns with an extremely dark-skinned wife. They have an “idiot” son named Jim Bond, but a few years later malaria claims Charles’s life, as well as that of Judith Sutpen.
This is the point at which the novel’s past finally merges with its present. In September 1909, after the conversations in which Rosa has been recounting the Sutpen story to Quentin, the two of them go out to Sutpen’s Hundred to investigate Rosa’s claim that someone—or “something,” as she puts it—has been living in the decaying house for the past four years. In an upstairs room, they find an emaciated, 70-year-old Henry, still hiding from the authorities.
When Rosa returns in December to bring Henry back to town, Clytie sets fire to the house, leaving Jim Bond to howl in the smoldering ruins.
The key questions raised by this narrative and explored by various narrators involve the nature and motivation of Sutpen’s “design” and Henry’s motives for killing Charles Bon. The former appear to derive from the 14-year-old Sutpen’s experience at the Tidewater plantation, which crystallized for him a southern class structure that placed even African Americans above his “white trash” status. Sutpen reacts by attempting to raise himself to the level of the plantation owners who rejected him. This explains most of his actions, from his experience in Haiti to his search for a male heir.
For both Rosa and Mr. Compson, this “design” is inimical to southern tradition. Rosa portrays Sutpen as the demon in a fable about the destruction of the southern way of life, which she also celebrates during the war by writing poems about fallen Confederate heroes. The more detached, ironic Mr. Compson finds Sutpen’s flaw to be his “innocence,” an innocence that makes him aspire to create an aristocratic heritage into which one can only be born, as Mr. Compson’s own father had been.
Sutpen’s story is certainly, at some level, an allegory of southern history. The climax of Quentin’s efforts to get to the bottom of it occurs when Shreve asks him, “Why do you hate the South?” and the novel ends with Quentin protesting, somewhat disingenuously, “I don’t hate it!” (303).
The critic Robert Dale Parker observes that Mississippi had no long history of plantation culture but saw the emergence of plantations only when poor whites migrated west to plant cotton in the 1830s and 1840s—about the time Sutpen arrived in Jefferson. This historical fact makes Sutpen’s story typical, not anomalous, and it suggests that in the novel, Faulkner is not endorsing but exposing the myths of southern heritage that inform Rosa’s and Mr. Compson’s narratives.
As for Henry’s motives, a number of hypotheses are offered and rejected in the course of the novel, and they center on the unknown “trump card” that Sutpen supposedly played in that fateful Christmas Eve conversation with Henry. The first possibility is that the decisive revelation was the identity of Bon’s father, and that Henry murdered Bon to prevent incest between half-brother and half-sister.
Next, Mr. Compson proposes that Sutpen, who had traveled to New Orleans to investigate Bon, told Henry of Bon’s octoroon wife. On this theory, Henry murdered Bon to prevent bigamy. The final hypothesis, and the one Faulkner’s text seems to endorse, is that Sutpen told Henry of Bon’s African blood, so Henry murdered Bon to prevent (further) miscegenation.
This reading is borne out by the novel’s conclusion, in which Sutpen’s mixed-race progeny preside over the final destruction of his “design.” Many critics have seen in the novel Faulkner’s characteristic ambivalence about race as well as larger issues about the role of race in southern culture and American culture in general.
One such study is that of Thadious Davis, who finds simultaneous attitudes of antipathy toward and dependence upon African Americans in the characters’ obsessive need to define themselves in opposition to the category of the “Negro.”
The most prevalent attitude in criticism on the novel, however, focuses on the way its narrative structure makes the act of fiction-making or storytelling itself a central theme. For Robert Dale Parker, the novel casts suspicion on its various narrators and the stories they tell in order to critique compulsively repeated myths like those about the South, and Myra Jehlen takes this reading one step further.
In her view, with the discovery of Henry in the decaying Sutpen mansion near the end of the book, the story moves from the realm of myth to the realm of history, from the realm of fantasy wish-fulfillment to the realm of objective existence. This move coincides with the ascendance of the theory that miscegenation was Henry’s true motive, which for Jehlen represents the historical truth that all the novel’s characters try to deny.
An opposed reading of the novel is that of James L. Guetti, who considers it the radical culmination of a tradition of skepticism that runs through Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. For Guetti, the failures of the various narrators to make sense of Sutpen’s story show the inevitable failure of language to make sense of the world or to represent an objective truth.
Most important, Guetti sees this idea as the link between the novel’s two parallel narratives. While some critics, including Parker, have found Sutpen to be completely lacking in imagination, Guetti sees his pursuit of his “design” as itself an imaginative act, one that parallels the various attempts of Quentin, his father, Rosa Coldfield, and Shreve to reconstruct it imaginatively.
Just as Sutpen’s attempts to make meaning out of his life as a southerner are thwarted by his life’s essential meaninglessness, so the narrators’ attempts to make sense of his story are thwarted by the meaninglessness that haunts language.
A comment Faulkner made to his publisher when he first conceived the novel sheds further light on the parallels between its two narratives. He said, “The story is of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him” (Blotner, 334). Having repudiated his heritage, Sutpen pursues his design to recreate his own identity, and as Guetti notes, the culmination of his imaginative act of self-creation is the creation of a son:
“Sutpen’s conception of fatherhood, as his conception of the entire world, is founded upon the conviction that the begetting of a son is not a physical or a literal act, but an imaginative and metaphorical achievement; fatherhood is the creation of the essential element in a design, in a structure that will endure” (Guetti, 91).
But as Faulkner suggested in his own description of the novel, the creation of sons is the success that will also be the failure of his design: it is the sons who will destroy the father. Specifically, it is Sutpen’s mixed-race descendants who ultimately destroy his design.
First Charles Bon, and then Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, appear out of nowhere at the door of Sutpen’s Hundred, just as the 14-year-old Sutpen had appeared at the door of the Tidewater plantation house, and their appearance suggests an inversion of the scene in which Sutpen is turned away by the slave. Their rejection becomes the “flaw” or unintended consequence of his design that rises up to destroy it for good when Clytie burns down the house, destroying Henry, the surviving “legitimate” heir, and leaving only Jim Bond to howl among the ashes.
This struggle of the narrators to impose their identities on Sutpen’s story is clearly what Rosa Coldfield has in mind when she mentions “the raging and incredulous recounting (which enables man to bear with living).” Rosa herself is a poetess, and she admits that this struggle lies behind her reasoning for telling her story to Quentin:
“So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it.”
But like Sutpen’s mixed-race children, Quentin has his own designs on the narrative he has inherited from Rosa and his father, designs that are in some ways opposed to those of the older generation. Quentin’s revisions of the narrative are the products of his ambivalence toward the South, as well as the more personal family conflicts that lead to his suicide in The Sound and the Fury.
More important, Quentin’s own narrative is fated to be rewritten by other writers and listeners, a process we already glimpse at the end of the novel in his conversations with Shreve. Perhaps, then, the novel’s conception of the inevitable failure of fiction-making is based not on the inaccessibility of objective truth, but instead on the fact of mortality, which ensures the mortality of narratives in the sense that it dooms them to misreading and rewriting.
Sources
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Davis, Thadious. Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Guetti, James L. The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967.
Gwin, Minrose C. The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Jehlen, Myra. Class and Character in Faulkner’s South. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.
Parker, Robert Dale. “Absalom, Absalom!” In The Questioning of Fictions. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies 76. New York: Twayne, 1991.
Pearce, Richard. The Politics of Narration: James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
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