“Yes,” Quentin said.
“Come on,” Shreve said. “Let’s get out of this refrigerator and go to bed.”
Returning from the lost war, Thomas Sutpen starts over, though his plantation is now reduced to one square mile. He proposes marriage to Rosa Coldfield, Ellen’s younger sister, but only on condition that she first bear him a son. Rosa refuses. The desperate Thomas Sutpen then impregnates the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a loyal poor white on the plantation. Milly Jones bears a daughter, and the enraged Sutpen says that mother and daughter are not worthy even to enter the stable, since one of Sutpen’s mares has just given him a male colt. Wash Jones, properly incensed, murders Sutpen with a scythe. When the furious scene concludes, Milly, the baby girl, and Wash himself are all dead, Wash having resisted arrest:
“…So they waited in front of the dark house, and the next day Father said there were a hundred that remembered about the butcher knife that he kept hidden and razor-sharp—the one thing in his sloven life that he was ever known to take pride in or care of—only by the time they remembered all this it was too late. So they didn’t know what he was about. They just heard him moving inside the dark house, then they heard the granddaughter’s voice, fretful and querulous: ‘Who is it? Light the lamp, Grandpaw’ then his voice: ‘Hit wont need no light, honey. Hit wont take but a minute’ then de Spain drew his pistol and said, ‘You, Wash! Come out of there!’ and still Wash didn’t answer, murmuring still to his granddaughter: ‘Wher air you?’ and the fretful voice answering, ‘Right here. Where else would I be? What is—’ then de Spain said, ‘Jones!’ and he was already fumbling at the broken steps when the granddaughter screamed; and now all the men there claimed that they heard the knife on both the neckbones, though de Spain didn’t. He just said he knew that Wash had come out onto the gallery and that he sprang back before he found out that it was not toward him Wash was running but toward the end of the gallery, where the body lay, but that he did not think about the scythe: he just ran backward a few feet when he saw Wash stoop and rise again and now Wash was running toward him. Only he was running toward them all, de Spain said, running into the lanterns so that now they could see the scythe raised above his head; they could see his face, his eyes too, as he ran with the scythe above his head, straight into the lanterns and the gun barrels, making no sound, no outcry while de Spain ran backward before him, saying, ‘Jones! Stop! Stop, or I’ll kill you! Jones! Jones! Jones!’ ”
“Wait,” Shreve said. “You mean that he got the son he wanted, after all that trouble, and then turned right around and—”
“Yes. Sitting in Grandfather’s office that afternoon, with his head kind of flung back a little, explaining to Grandfather like he might have been explaining arithmetic to Henry back in the fourth grade: ‘You see, all I wanted was just a son. Which seems to me, when I look about at my contemporary scene, no exorbitant gift from nature or circumstance to demand—’ ”
“Will you wait?” Shreve said. “—that with the son he went to all that trouble to get lying right there behind him in the cabin, he would have to taunt the grandfather into killing first him and then the child too?”
“—What?” Quentin said. “It wasn’t a son. It was a girl.”
“Oh,” Shreve said. “—Come on. Let’s get out of this damn icebox and go to bed.”
The tragic farce culminates when Quentin accompanies Rosa to Sutpen’s Hundred, where they find an ailing Henry and Clytie, Thomas Sutpen’s daughter by a slave woman. Some months later, Rosa returns with a doctor. Clytie, thinking that it is the police, sets fire to the mansion, and burns to death with Henry. Presumably, the final Sutpen will be Jim Bond, a black grandson of Charles Bon.
I hate plot summaries, and this one is bound to be wrong anyway, because Faulkner so designs (if that is the right word) Absalom, Absalom! that it is not coherent. Faulkner, like his precursor Joseph Conrad, did not believe that any single perspective could yield the truth. Rosa Coldfield, Quentin’s grandfather and father, Quentin, and even Shreve, who is primarily a listener, see different versions of the story. Here is an opening trace of Rosa Coldfield’s perspective:
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.
It seems unlikely that Rosa wears mourning for the nothusband, Thomas Sutpen. One is not even certain she wears it for sister and father. Is it for the end of the Old Order? That end was prophesied in the remarkable passage introducing Sutpen’s frustrate design:
Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatter-ran. Immobile, bearded and hand palm-lifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the captive architect huddled quietly, carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest. Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light. Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was—the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople in notlanguage, like this: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation—(Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore violently. And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which—(Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—without gentleness. Which should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age, only—(Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died)—and died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield s
ays—(Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin Compson.
The Compsons, like the Bundrens in As I Lay Dying, manifestly constitute another of the most terrifying visions of family romance in literary history. But their extremism is not eccentric in the 1929–39 world of Faulkner’s fiction. That world is founded upon a horror of families, a limbo of outcasts, an evasion of all values other than stoic endurance. It is a world in which what is silent in the other Bundrens speaks in Darl, what is veiled in the Compsons is uncovered in Quentin. So tangled are these returns of the repressed with what continues to be estranged that phrases like “the violation of the natural” and “the denial of the human” become quite meaningless when applied to Faulkner’s greater fictions. In that world, the natural is itself a violation and the human already a denial. Is the weird quest of the Bundrens a violation of the natural, or is it what Blake would have called a terrible triumph for the selfish virtues of the natural heart? Darl judges it to be the latter, but Darl luminously denies the sufficiency of the human, at the cost of what seems schizophrenia. Quentin Compson pragmatically denies it by suicide.
What matters in major Faulkner is that the people have gone back, not to nature but to some abyss before the Creation-Fall. Eliot insisted that Joyce’s imagination was eminently orthodox. This can be doubted, but in Faulkner’s case there is little sense in baptizing his imagination. One sees why he preferred reading the Old Testament to the New, remarking that the former was stories and the latter, ideas. The remark is inadequate except insofar as it opposes Hebraic to Hellenistic representation of character. There is little that is Homeric about the Bundrens, or Sophoclean about the Compsons. Faulkner’s irony is neither classical nor romantic, neither Greek nor German. It does not say one thing while meaning another, or trade in contrasts between expectation and fulfillment. Instead, it juxtaposes incommensurable realities: of self and other, of parent and child, of past and future. When Gide maintained that Faulkner’s people lacked souls, he simply failed to observe that Faulkner’s ironies were Biblical. To which an amendment must be added. In Faulkner, only the ironies are Biblical. What Faulkner’s people lack is the Blessing; they cannot contend for a time without boundaries. Yahweh will make no Covenant with them. Their agon therefore is neither the Greek one for the foremost place nor the Hebrew one for the Blessing, which honors the father and the mother. Their agon is the hopeless one of waiting for their doom to lift:
“ ‘You see, I had a design in my mind. Whether it was a good or a bad design is beside the point; the question is, Where did I make the mistake in it, what did I do or misdo in it, whom or what injure by it to the extent which this would indicate. I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife. I set out to acquire these, asking no favor of any man. I even risked my life at one time, as I told you, though as I also told you I did not undertake this risk purely and simply to gain a wife, though it did have that result. But that is beside the point also: suffice that I had the wife, accepted her in good faith, with no reservations about myself, and I expected as much from them. I did not even demand, mind, as one of my obscure origin might have been expected to do (or at least be condoned in the doing) out of ignorance of gentility in dealing with gentleborn people. I did not demand; I accepted them at their own valuation while insisting on my own part upon explaining fully about myself and my progenitors: yet they deliberately withheld from me the one fact which I have reason to know they were aware would have caused me to decline the entire matter, otherwise they would not have withheld it from me—a fact which I did not learn until after my son was born. And even then I did not act hastily. I could have reminded them of these wasted years, these years which would now leave me behind with my schedule not only the amount of elapsed time which their number represented, but that compensatory amount of time represented by their number which I should now have to spend to advance myself once more to the point I had reached and lost. But I did not. I merely explained how this new fact rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design, and following which, as I told you, I made no attempt to keep not only that which I might consider myself to have earned at the risk of my life but which had been given to me by signed testimonials, but on the contrary I declined and resigned all right and claim to this in order that I might repair whatever injustice I might be considered to have done by so providing for the two persons whom I might be considered to have deprived of anything I might later possess: and this was agreed to, mind; agreed to between the two parties. And yet, and after more than thirty years, more than thirty years after my conscience had finally assured me that if I had done an injustice, I had done what I could to rectify it—’ and Grandfather not saying ‘Wait’ now but saying, hollering maybe even: ‘Conscience? Conscience? Good God, man, what else did you expect? Didn’t the very affinity and instinct for misfortune of a man who had spent that much time in a monastery even, let alone one who had lived that many years as you lived them, tell you better than that? didn’t the dread and fear of females which you must have drawn in with the primary mammalian milk teach you better? What kind of abysmal and purblind innocence could that have been which someone told you to call virginity? what conscience to trade with which would have warranted you in the belief that you could have bought immunity from her for no other coin but justice?’—”
This is Sutpen, as reported by Quentin’s grandfather, and ends with the latter admonishing Sutpen. For the rhetoric here of both men not to seem excessive, Sutpen must be of some eminence and his “design” of some consequence. But nothing in the novel persuades one of Sutpen’s stature or of his design’s meaningfulness. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Sutpen is a blind will in a cognitive vacuum; both figures seem to represent nothing more than a Nietzschean spirit of mere resentment, rather than the will’s deep revenge against time, and time’s “It was.” Faulkner evidently was persuaded of Sutpen’s importance, if only as a vital synecdoche for Southern history. More a process than a man, Sutpen has drive without personality. One can remember a few of his acts, but none of his words, let alone his thoughts—if he has thoughts. He is simply too abrupt a mythic representation, rather than a man who becomes a myth. Only the scope of his failure interests Faulkner, rather than anything he is or means as a person.
But Sutpen is indeed more like Conrad’s Kurtz than like Melville’s Ahab, in that his obsessions are not sufficiently metaphysical. Sutpen’s Hundred is too much Kurtz’s Africa, and too little the whiteness of the whale. From The Sound and the Fury through the debacle of A Fable, Faulkner centers upon the sorrows of fathers and sons, to the disadvantage of mothers and daughters. Faulkner’s brooding conviction that female sexuality is closely allied with death seems essential to all of his strongest fictions. It may even be that Faulkner’s rhetorical economy, his wounded need to get his cosmos into a single sentence, is related to his fear that origin and end might prove to be one. Nietzsche prophetically had warned that origin and end were separate entities, and for the sake of life had to be kept apart, but Faulkner (strangely like Freud) seems to have known that the only Western trope participating in neither origin nor end is the image of the father.
One can regret the weakness in structure manifested by the novels. Those weaknesses are minor: they scarcely bother us as we read As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! These extraordinary novels are enormous in imaginative and spiritual conception; their flaws are Shakespearean, careless and aesthetically inconsequential. As with Shakespeare, the sweep and richness are Biblical, and, indeed, it seems to me that Faulkner frequently writes in counterpoint to the Bible, largely against it, in a family quarrel akin to Emily Dickinson’s and to Herman Melville’s. C. Vann Woodward’s American Counterpoint catches the precise accent of Faulkner’s Gnostic undermining of Biblical typology when Woodward discusses the ravages of patriarch
al tradition in the realm of miscegenation, in which blood kin frequently were on the other side of the racial divide.
Like Shakespeare, Faulkner learned to achieve apotheosis in tragedy while remaining a comic genius at the core. This helps to account for his ways of handling the influence of the tragic ironist Joseph Conrad and the sublimely comic James Joyce. Conrad’s “impressionism” finally was to count for more than Joyce’s polyphony: Faulkner’s protagonists, rather like Hemingway’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, almost always are self-ruined idealists, knowingly failed High Romantic questers.
And yet Faulkner is more a Biblical than a Conradian novelist. This has misled critics as astute as Cleanth Brooks, who found a Christian residuum in Faulkner. Faulkner invariably subverts Biblical typology, and has a Gnostic quarrel with God that is closely related to Melville’s. His men and women know they are doomed, and they hope only for an interval during which their doom may be lifted. Faulkner’s greatness lies in the extension of that interval, crowding into it something close to a heterocosm, a world that is an alternative to nature and to history while powerfully representing both. The voices of Quentin, Shreve, and Faulkner rise and fall in that interval:
“I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died,” Quentin said.
“And more people have died than have been twenty-one,” Shreve said. Now he (Quentin) could read it, could finish it—the sloped whimsical ironic hand out of Mississippi attenuated, into the iron snow:
—or perhaps there is. Surely it can harm no one to believe that perhaps she has escaped not at all the privilege of being outraged and amazed and of not forgiving but on the contrary has herself gained that place or bourne where the objects of the outrage and of the commiseration also are no longer ghosts but are actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity. It will do no harm to hope—You see I have written hope, not think. So let it be hope. —that the one cannot escape the censure which no doubt he deserves, that the other no longer lack the commiseration which let us hope (while we are hoping) that they have longed for, if only for the reason that they are about to receive it whether they will or no. The weather was beautiful though cold and they had to use picks to break the earth for the grave yet in one of the deeper clods I saw a redworm doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 47