(trans. Glenny)
Like an echo came a piercing laugh and a whistle from Behemoth. The horses leaped into the air, and the riders rose with them as they galloped upward. Margarita could feel her fierce horse biting and tugging at the bit. Woland’s cloak billowed out over the heads of the cavalcade, and as evening drew on, his cloak began to cover the whole vault of the sky. When the black veil blew aside for a moment, Margarita turned round in flight and saw that not only the many-colored towers but the whole city had long vanished from sight, swallowed by the earth, leaving only mist and smoke where it had been.
(trans. Glenny)
These are the impressive accents of authentic apocalypse. Woland is now austerely garbed; soon enough, Behemoth will be a fresh-faced pageboy; Koroviev is a dour dark knight; Azazello is seen in his true form, a demon white-faced with vacant, dark eyes. The Master and Margarita have died and been resurrected and will go to a lissome Limbo, where they will be forever joined in a post-existence of calm and peace, though still far from the light.
Huddling inside The Master and Margarita is Goethe’s scandalous Faust: Part Two, in which Faust has even less personality than the Master. Here, Mephistopheles is more a Christian devil than Woland, who is probably the best Christian in Mikhail Bulgakov, surpassing the problematic Yeshua.
Confronting a classical Walpurgis Night, Mephistopheles is shocked by all sorts of legendary monsters, “offering us both rear and frontal views.” Bulgakov cannot compete with the witches’ sabbath of Goethe, which goes on for one thousand five hundred lines, my favorite being:
Grau, grämlich, griesgram, greulich, Gräber, grimmig.
(Gray, grieving, grungy, gruesome, graves, and groaning.)
These are the monstrous griffins who hoard treasure yet are so used up that they cannot frighten even Mephistopheles. Goethe is the master of grotesquerie: his Sirens cannot sing, and his Lamiae, who should be rather vicious vampires, are overpainted worn-out whores whose only resource is to render their embraces most unpleasant. In this big league, Woland and Margarita would lose their positions.
I do not know precisely why Margarita and the Master are granted their pliable proxy for paradise. Even less can I surmise why the Master’s Pilate is exonerated and finally walks with Yeshua up a ray of light in conversational companionship. Happy endings need never be deprecated:
“Ye gods!” says the man in the cloak, turning his proud face to his companion. “What a disgusting method of execution! But please, tell me—” here the pride in his face turns to supplication—“it did not take place, did it? I beg you—tell me that it never took place?”
“No, of course it never took place,” answers his companion in a husky voice. “It was merely your imagination.”
“Can you swear to that?” begged the man in the cloak.
“I swear it!” answers his companion, his eyes smiling.
“That is all I need to know!” gasps the man in the cloak as he strides on toward the moon, beckoning his companion on. Behind them walks a magnificently calm, gigantic dog with pointed ears.
(trans. Glenny)
Had my beloved father remained in Odessa, I might have been born, but I would have been incinerated before my bar mitzvah. He reached Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, by way of London, and gave up speaking Russian for good. I like that calm and gigantic dog with pointed ears.
I intuit that my ambivalences toward Mikhail Bulgakov’s enchanted vision are not cognitive or aesthetic but are lodged in my own inward division between Jewish Gnosticism and my mother’s Orthodoxy. In my advanced years, she enters my dreams. She never admonishes, since she did not in this life, but still I wake with “The Auroras of Autumn” in my ears:
That we partake thereof,
Lie down like children in this holiness,
As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,
As if the innocent mother sang in the dark
Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,
Created the time and place in which we breathed…
And of each other thought—in the idiom
Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,
Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.
I come down to breakfast and face my wife at the table’s other end and murmur to her that I am weary “of the enigma of the guilty dream.” Yet tonight a guilty dream will recur. Yesterday afternoon, too exhausted to write any more, I sat with my research assistant and watched a Russian television serial of The Master and Margarita and focused upon the satanic ball, where Margarita is hostess. It was very well done, with many delicious naked damozels emerging from the fireplace, side by side with various malefactors. That entered my dreams last night and somehow augmented my guilt. I think I will end here with this tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov: he pervades my nightmares, and so indubitably has influenced me.
CHAPTER 40
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
WILLIAM FAULKNER
FAULKNER IS THE ONLY American novelist of my lifetime who has joined our national tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James. The influence of his work upon his life was that it became his life. That is true also of his forerunners Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and of Henry James, who meant little to Faulkner. In his late parable “Carcassonne,” chosen to end his collected stories, Faulkner’s surrogate prophesies a grand fate:
I want to perform something bold and tragical and austere he repeated, shaping the soundless words in the pattering silence me on a buckskin pony with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world. Still galloping, the horse soars outward; still galloping, it thunders up the long blue hill of heaven, its tossing mane in golden swirls like fire.
Steed and rider thunder on, thunder punily diminishing: a dying star upon the immensity of darkness and of silence within which, steadfast, fading, deepbreasted and grave of flank, muses the dark and tragic figure of the Earth, his mother.
Here his work triumphs over his outer life, and his fiction, the inward life, prevails. There were American poets contemporary to Faulkner who may be called great—Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane—and in one aspect of his art Faulkner was their peer: he was an extraordinary prose poet, akin to the Hemingway of the short stories or to Sherwood Anderson at Anderson’s rare best. The prose lyricism of Willa Cather and of F. Scott Fitzgerald is also worthy of this comparison, as are the best works of Faulkner’s disciples Robert Penn Warren and Cormac McCarthy.
The prose poetry is one aspect of Faulkner’s achievement, his romance side, which projects a world like Sir Walter Scott’s, chivalric and defeated. Equally large was his power of characterization, which owed much to Shakespeare and Cervantes, Dickens and Balzac. This power belongs to Faulkner the novelist, who emerged in As I Lay Dying. The earlier Flags in the Dust, published as the revised Sartoris, has Faulkner’s verbal splendor but not his extraordinary novelistic, almost Shakespearean ability to create separate selves.
Speaking to a class at the University of Virginia on April 13, 1957, Faulkner rather hazily reflected on Absalom, Absalom!:
The central character is Sutpen, yes. The story of a man who wanted a son and got too many, got so many that they destroyed him. It’s incidentally the story of—of Quentin Compson’s hatred of the—the bad qualities in the country he loves. But the central character is Sutpen, the story of a man who wanted sons.
It puzzles me why Faulkner burdened himself with the power of King David’s lament for his rebel son Absalom:
Then said Absalom to Ahithophel, Give counsel among you what we shall do. And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father’s concubines, which he hath left to keep the house; and all Israel shall hear that thou art abhorred of thy father:
then shall the hands of all that are with thee be strong. So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel. And the counsel of Ahithophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God: so was all the counsel of Ahithophel both with David and with Absalom. Moreover, Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Let me now choose out twelve thousand men, and I will arise and pursue after David this night: And I will come upon him while he is weary and weak handed, and will make him afraid: and all the people that are with him shall flee; and I will smite the king only: And I will bring back all the people unto thee: the man whom thou seekest is as if all returned: so all the people shall be in peace.
(2 Samuel 16:20–17:3, KJV)
And the king commanded Joab and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Deal gently for my sake with the young man, even with Absalom. And all the people heard when the king gave all the captains charge concerning Absalom. So the people went out into the field against Israel: and the battle was in the wood of Ephraim; Where the people of Israel were slain before the servants of David, and there was there a great slaughter that day of twenty thousand men. For the battle was there scattered over the face of all the country: and the wood devoured more people that day than the sword devoured. And Absalom met the servants of David. And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away. And a certain man saw it, and told Joab, and said, Behold, I saw Absalom hanged in an oak. And Joab said unto the man that told him, And, behold, thou sawest him, and why didst thou not smite him there to the ground? and I would have given thee ten shekels of silver, and a girdle. And the man said unto Joab, Though I should receive a thousand shekels of silver in mine hand, yet would I not put forth mine hand against the king’s son: for in our hearing the king charged thee and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Beware that none touch the young man Absalom. Otherwise I should have wrought falsehood against mine own life: for there is no matter hid from the king, and thou thyself wouldest have set thyself against me. Then said Joab, I may not tarry thus with thee. And he took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. And ten young men that bare Joab’s armour compassed about and smote Absalom, and slew him. And Joab blew the trumpet, and the people returned from pursuing after Israel: for Joab held back the people. And they took Absalom, and cast him into a great pit in the wood, and laid a very great heap of stones upon him: and all Israel fled every one to his tent.
(2 Samuel 18:5–17, KJV)
And Ahimaaz called, and said unto the king, All is well. And he fell down to the earth upon his face before the king, and said, Blessed be the Lord thy God, which hath delivered up the men that lifted up their hand against my lord the king. And the king said, Is the young man Absalom safe? And Ahimaaz answered, When Joab sent the king’s servant, and me thy servant, I saw a great tumult, but I knew not what it was. And the king said unto him, Turn aside, and stand here. And he turned aside, and stood still. And, behold, Cushi came; and Cushi said, Tidings, my lord the king: for the Lord hath avenged thee this day of all them that rose up against thee. And the king said unto Cushi, Is the young man Absalom safe? And Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is. 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!
(2 Samuel 18:28–33, KJV)
Thomas Sutpen, the ruthless, obsessive, destructive protagonist of what may well be Faulkner’s masterpiece, voices his will with a fervor so archaic that he suggested to his bardic maker the situation, though certainly not the character or personality, of the Biblical King David, whose saga commences in 2 Samuel and concludes in 1 Kings. I have been reading Faulkner since 1948 and writing about him intermittently since 1986. As I Lay Dying (1930) will always seem to me his most original and shattering work, but Cormac McCarthy, authentic disciple of Faulkner, prefers The Sound and the Fury (1929), and at an earlier time I valued Light in August (1932) more highly than anything else by the seer of Yoknapatawpha County, his imagined land. As a very old father of two middle-aged sons, I discover that my reactions to Absalom, Absalom! have changed.
Thirty years ago, it bothered me that Sutpen was so empty a personality. I almost agreed with Rosa Coldfield that he was a kind of Gothic demon rather than a man. He seems to have only one will and to possess only a specious morality. His weird desire for sons and grandsons has absolutely nothing to do with affection. I see now that none of this matters. There are three strong personalities in Absalom, Absalom!: Quentin Compson; his Canadian friend and roommate at Harvard, Shreve; William Faulkner the narrator. Quentin, Faulkner’s Hamlet, studies suicide at Harvard. Shreve, his Horatio—refreshingly, an outsider in Faulkner’s world—has a prophetic understanding of Sutpen’s saga, which is that in time all of the United States, not just the South, will be populated by a majority ensuing from miscegenation. Faulkner, who would like to get the entire novel into one long sentence, has nothing of Sutpen in him, and shares Quentin’s dark interest in incest. My former student Thomas Frosch illuminates Shelley’s defense of brother-sister incest:
The theme of incest, frequent in Romanticism, found a particularly strong “correspondent breeze” in Shelley. He calls incest “like many other incorrect things a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or of hate. It may be…the highest heroism” or “cynical rage” and “selfishness.” Incest is a paradigm of the kind of situation that typically compels his fascination, one in which the extremes of the ideal and the morbid meet. And yet in the case of Athanase, Shelley claims that something beyond incest lies at the root of his hero’s melancholy; he speaks of “Tears bitterer than the blood of agony” of “those who love their kind, and therefore die.” What lies beyond incest in Shelley, so unacceptable to him that, unlike incest, it cannot break through into poetic themes and images, at least idealized ones?
(Frosch)
Faulkner had read Shelley’s The Cenci and Laon and Cythna, the earlier version of what became The Revolt of Islam. In The Cenci, the horrible Count rapes his daughter, Beatrice, who retaliates by having him murdered, for which she is executed with the Pope’s approval. Father-daughter incest is seen as part of the heavenly tyranny of the European nation-state. But in Laon and Cythna, the martyred lovers are brother and sister, and Shelley’s ideal includes the breaking of the taboo against brother-sister incest. In a complex act of creation, Faulkner assimilated Shelley to Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, where an unsympathetic, hedonistic male decides to murder his mistress for having deceived him. But he has been forestalled by her lesbian lover, his half-sister, who has slain her for similar motives.
Thomas Sutpen in his youth had worked as an overseer in a West Indian plantation, where he had helped to subdue a black rebellion. He then married Eulalia Bon, the daughter of the plantation owner, who bore him a son, Charles. Discovering that Eulalia had black ancestry, Sutpen repudiated both wife and son, though leaving them what fortune he had accumulated. Later, he manifests in Mississippi, where he purchases one hundred square miles of land from a Native American tribe so whiskey-soaked that they do not realize they are being bilked. He builds a mansion on Sutpen’s Hundred and marries Ellen Coldfield, with whom he fathers Henry Sutpen as his presumed heir, and Henry’s sister, Judith.
At the University of Mississippi, Henry befriends Charles Bon, ten years his senior, without knowing that Charles is his half-brother. Thomas, Henry, and Charles go off to fight for the Confederacy, but only after Charles and Judith fall in love. After the war is lost, Thomas tells Henry the truth that Charles is not only hi
s half-brother but also partly black. Though Henry accepts a possible marriage of half-siblings, he cannot accept a “black” as a brother-in-law. He murders Charles in front of the mansion and then flees:
—You will have to stop me, Henry. “And he never slipped away,” Shreve said. “He could have, but he never even tried. Jesus, maybe he even went to Henry and said, ‘I’m going, Henry’ and maybe they left together and rode side by side dodging Yankee patrols all the way back to Mississippi and right up to that gate; side by side and it only then that one of them ever rode ahead or dropped behind and that only then Henry spurred ahead and turned his horse to face Bon and took out the pistol; and Judith and Clytie heard the shot, and maybe Wash Jones was hanging around somewhere in the back yard and so he was there to help Clytie and Judith carry him into the house and lay him on the bed, and Wash went to town to tell the Aunt Rosa and the Aunt Rosa comes boiling out that afternoon and finds Judith standing without a tear before the closed door, holding the metal case she had given him with her picture in it but that didn’t have her picture in it now but that of the octoroon and the kid. And your old man wouldn’t know about that too: why the black son of a bitch should have taken her picture out and put the octoroon’s picture in, so he invented a reason for it. But I know. And you know too. Don’t you? Don’t you, huh?” He glared at Quentin, leaning forward over the table now, looking huge and shapeless as a bear in his swaddling of garments. “Don’t you know? It was because he said to himself, ‘If Henry dont mean what he said, it will be all right; I can take it out and destroy it. But if he does mean what he said, it will be the only way I will have to say to her, I was no good; do not grieve for me.’ Aint that right? Aint it? By God, aint it?”
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 46