Absalom, Absalom!

"It’s an emotionally powerful book about race in the South. The other books that I’ve recommended are straightforward. William Faulkner is something else. Faulkner gives you nightmares, he gets inside your psyche and presents the terrors of the South. And he does it in such an interesting way. Absalom, Absalom, in its own right, is a representation of how history works. The narrators keep going back to try to find out what really happened during the Civil War period. They go through a historical process of excavating the past and coming to terms with terrible truths. “To move forward, we must understand our history and combat its capacity to drag us down” Why did their ancestors do what they did? Why does the South continue to be haunted by the Civil War? Faulkner explores many different explanations, but finally comes down to race. Absalom, Absalom is quite old. It was written in the 1930s, much earlier than the other books I recommended. And yet the notion that we must come to terms with our racial sins is extraordinarily timely. Faulkner’s representation of Wash Jones, Thomas Sutpen, the Coldfields, the Compsons and the Snopes family offers enormous insight into class divisions in the South. (By the way, Stephanie McCurry’s first book, Masters of Small Worlds , regarding white yeoman farmers of low country, South Carolina, addresses this really forcefully as well.) The extent to which white solidarity across class lines is sustained, despite the way the Southern system worked to the disadvantage of impoverished whites, is fascinating. The notion that whiteness was a privilege was powerful enough to ensure unity under the Confederacy. Race and class both contributed to the power dynamics that operated in Southern society and national society too."

"So the thread that runs through all of these novels to one degree or another is the American Civil War. In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner dramatizes that massive calamity in really personal terms. He’s able to drill down into the psychology of having been a Southerner in the war and after, in what’s called the ‘Lost Cause of the Confederacy’. Many Southern writers—the Southern Agrarians, for instance—were very nostalgic about a return to an antebellum world. They’re deeply criticized—and always have been—for wanting to go back, as though it were anything to desire or anything that existed. That’s another point: the antebellum as understood from a nostalgic point of view didn’t exist. There was no such place with big fluffy skirts and wisteria and magnolia. All this is a dream. And what Faulkner does, in the grittiness and experimentation that we see in Absalom, Absalom! , is he reveals the antebellum as a fantasy. Faulkner does take some of the same attacks today that we would have reserved for people like the Southern Agrarians, because people do think of him as a nostalgic writer for some reason. I don’t think he is at all. Faulkner is very clear-eyed about the world before the American Civil War as being a time that was invented, constructed, made up. He gets this from experience. As a child, he listened to his grandfather talking about the Civil War. His grandfather would get a lot of old Confederate soldiers around: they would have parties and parades and he would hear them chatting, gossiping and talking about the old days. He got a front-row seat on how a past period in history—any past period in history—is a construct that’s agreed upon between parties. That’s true for any of us. I might give a starry-eyed view of the 1990s and maybe people who had lived through them would agree with me. That then becomes the constructed story from which to proceed. That’s what Faulkner is saying in Absalom, Absalom! : history is a construct. This starts from the very beginning. The character Quentin Compson is a boy who was born about the same time as William Faulkner. Faulkner was born in 1897, so the 19th century and the Civil War are the past for him: the very recent past, but still the past. And therefore people like Quentin Compson in the novel, or William Faulkner, the novelist, can only access that lost period of time before the Civil War through stories. In the novel, Quentin Compson seeks out characters who can tell him about what happened from personal experience. One he goes to is called Rosa Coldfield. She was very young during the Civil War, but now she’s an old, Miss Havisham-type character. She was gravely wronged by Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen’s whole design in life was to create a legacy for himself so that he could develop his poor white ancestry into something that would have more control and agency in the world. In order to do that, he has to have children. So at one point in the novel he comes to Rosa Coldfield and basically asks, ‘Will you marry me to breed children?’ That’s not what a girl wants to hear and Rosa Coldfield never gets over the sting of having been approached in this manner by this man. She just lets the world pass her by and slowly decays into her chair. Quentin goes to her as a young child to get the story of Thomas Sutpen, and she speaks to him. He just listens. What Faulkner is showing us is that a story is always a perspective because Rosa calls Sutpen an ogre. That’s her perspective on him: he ruined her life. After this great insult she no longer trusted men. It ruined the possibility of having romantic attachments for her. So that’s the first picture of Thomas Sutpen that Quentin gets. And if you read the opening ten pages or so of Absalom, Absalom!, Sutpen appears on the page in almost the same way as a photographic negative. There’s a synesthesia. The auditory function of Quentin listening becomes a visual function, and he can see, in front of his eyes, Thomas Sutpen appearing out of history as a fully formed ghost. He looks at that fully formed ghost, and he thinks, ‘I’ve got it. This is Thomas Sutpen.’ But then, as he goes to other people and asks about Sutpen, he realizes that the story of Thomas Sutpen is never fixed. It’s always changing. It’s always becoming something new. There are always hidden mysteries, things we don’t know. There’s only one primary document in the entire novel, and that’s a letter written by Thomas Sutpen’s son, Charles Bon. That letter is described through narrative so Quentin doesn’t see it. Everything is completely conditional on the person who is telling the story. That’s Faulkner’s way of telling us that all of history is like that. One final point on Absalom, Absalom! : it complicates the story of marginality in the South and in America in general. Faulkner seems to be telling us that there’s a massive conglomeration in history of people who are in marginal positions trying to get a better one, to arrange themselves in a place where they have more. Thomas Sutpen is one such character. He is born in the mountains of western Virginia—before there was such a place as West Virginia—in 1807. It’s never exactly clear whether it’s Scottish or Irish, but he’s the son of immigrants. I think Scottish myself. He even says at one point that his parent couldn’t speak English—she would probably have been speaking some variant of Gaelic. He’s coming from that world and the interesting thing about Sutpen is that when he’s living in the mountains of Virginia at the beginning of the 19th century, he has no idea of racial tensions, of racial history. He doesn’t know about race at all. He doesn’t understand it, he’s living in a complete state of innocence. Then he comes to a place called Tidewater, Virginia. This was a big plantation hub at the time and he meets a plantation owner for the first time. He’s a shoeless boy and he sees the plantation owner has got things he doesn’t have. This man can sit in a hammock all day long and does what he likes. The famous story from the novel is that Sutpen tries to get into the plantation owner’s house, and it’s a black man that comes to the door, a slave. He tells Sutpen to go around the back. That’s how Sutpen realizes that injustice exists and that he can be the target of it, as a boy from a poor white Scottish immigrant family. From there he then goes on to try to build this legacy that will somehow elevate his family, his genealogy to a position of power. His evil in Absalom, Absalom! —and Sutpen is evil—comes from realizing that the injustice is happening, and you can either be on the top of the pile, or you can be at the bottom of the pile. That’s the pragmatic way in which he enters into it. From there, he begins to understand that there is such a thing as race, and race division, which he ruthlessly exploits. In the novel, he goes to Haiti and gets himself a lot of slaves. To bring this back to history, this is Faulkner’s comment on the United States. The US invasion of Haiti took place between 1915 and 1934. As Faulkner is writing the novel, the United States is doing colonial exercises and conquest in Haiti. Thomas Sutpen is a mimetic of the broader injustice of American colonialism. All that and the massive complexities of vying for power and position, vying not to be the subaltern or the lowest of the low, that’s what the novel dramatizes."

"Yes. Absalom, Absalom! is, I guess, a story about stories. It’s ostensibly the story of Thomas Sutpen, who sets up a plantation called Sutpen’s Hundred, on 100 square miles of prime real estate in Mississippi that he has basically robbed from the First Nation people and sustains via slavery. He’s still a hero. In Mississippi terms, this makes him one of the great knights of the South. But it’s a story told through his wife’s sister—who at one stage he tried to marry—who is now an elderly woman, telling it to a Harvard student called Quentin Compson, who then discusses it with his college roommate. So it’s a bit like what we would call in England ‘Chinese whispers’, or in America ‘Telephone’: the story is passed down and becomes distorted each time you hear it to the point that there is no actual truth, no definitive version of the Sutpen story.t “There is the sense of it being a haunted land, still screaming, with no clarity or resolution” There’s a great line early on in Absalom, Absalom! where he talks of “a deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with baffled garrulous outraged ghosts.” So there is the sense of it being a haunted land, still screaming, with no clarity or resolution. There are only different versions of events, all of them self-serving, depending on who is telling the story at that moment. The classic Faulkner line that everybody trots out, from Requiem for a Nun , is: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But Absalom, Absalom! is the great iteration of that line. It’s not even past, it’s not even real, it’s become a chimera or a fabrication, another story being told. It’s a live issue that is sustaining and replenishing people. Or, in an awful way, they are kind of yoked to it, doomed to have the same argument again and again and never get to the end of it. Absalom, Absalom! —to the point that it baffles a lot of people—is the greatest exploration of that Southern theme. It’s the dark, twisted cousin of Gone with the Wind . Gone with the Wind is also about plantations, but it frames the South as a bastion of gallantry: the Lost Cause, a utopian world that was cruelly torn down, “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South.” Whereas, here, it’s the illegitimate Black children that you’ve had with your slave who come back to haunt you and ruin your perfect, phoney, suspect world. It’s a great book. It’s a book I was utterly obsessed with at college. But, I have to confess, I’ve only read it once. Most books I love I will reread regularly, but this is—fittingly, like the Southern swamps—so dense. You’re constantly hacking through the foliage of the prose. It has these long, circuitous sentences that bamboozle you, lull you, turn you around. It’s like a weird labyrinth. Periodically I’ve tried to return. Perhaps now I have finally left enough time to make another proper attempt to get back into it. That may be the way to do it. But it’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? Because Faulkner’s writing is so lush and so dense that you would imagine the way to do it must be a slow immersion. You think: I’m going to set aside a month and I’m going to read a page, de-tangle each sentence properly. The slow cooking approach. But, possibly, if you do that, you start to go a bit mad, lose track of the plot and your own place in it. So perhaps quicker is better. I don’t know."