B006JHRY9S EBOK

by Philip Weinstein

  “LOOK[ING] AT ALL THE OBJECTS FROM THE OTHER SIDE”: ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

  Absalom, Absalom! was not easy for Faulkner to write, and it is not easy to read. An all but intolerable amount of implication is wrought into its charged three hundred pages. It is not a matter of erudite meanings like those inserted by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound into their allusive modernist poems The Waste Land and the Cantos. In those overladen poems—countless scholars have made careers tracing the allusions—the concrete text serves as a locus for the most rarified musing. Not so for Absalom. Its allusions are helpful but supply no key. Rather, in an onslaught of emotionally laden prose that is remarkable even for Faulkner, the book twists and turns as it strains to give shape to an overarching racial vision of the South. Coleridge spoke of poetry as language expressing a “more than usual state of emotion” brought under “more than usual order.” On that model, Absalom is Faulkner’s most poetic novel.

  The events of the novel are crucial, but Absalom’s identity lodges in its way of delaying and repositioning those events. Events happen in time: Absalom conveys how we actually go about grasping their meaning. Our tactic for doing so—as Faulkner’s earlier masterpieces suggest as well—is retrospection. We live forward, even as we understand by later looking back. A comparison between the linear events of the story and Faulkner’s way of circuitously plotting the same events—letting them come clear, or look different, later—makes this plain. Here is Absalom synopsized into linear sequence:

  A boy named Thomas Sutpen is born around 1808, in the mountains of (what would become) West Virginia. After his mother dies, his father takes him and his sisters eastward. He joins his father in working on a large Tidewater plantation, and he encounters there the plantation’s black slaves. At age fourteen or so, he is told by his father to take a message to the planter in the big house. A black butler stops him at the front door, forbids his entrance, and tells him (in effect) that trash like him may enter only through the back door. He is never to forget this humiliation. Trying to avenge the wound to his psyche, he determines to become as rich as the planter whose butler had humiliated him. To do this, he heads to the West Indies, never seeing his family again. End of part 1.

  Thomas Sutpen succeeds on a Haiti plantation. After putting down a slave revolt, he is offered as reward the planter’s daughter. They marry, and a son is born. Later, Sutpen learns that the planter’s wife is part black. In the American South (if not in Haiti), this fact would doom his design to establish a plantation dynasty. So Sutpen abandons his family (paying for this handsomely) and heads to Mississippi. He arrives in Jefferson in 1833 with slaves (one of whom is a child named Clytie), money, and a “design” in place: to become a wealthy planter. He buys his land (Sutpen’s Hundred), builds his mansion, and takes as (second) wife the daughter, Ellen, of a local tradesman, Goodhue Coldfield. By 1841, they have produced two children, Henry and Judith, and in the next two decades he becomes the region’s most powerful planter. End of part 2.

  In the late 1850s, Henry attends the University of Mississippi, where he falls under the spell of a sophisticated young man, Charles Bon, of New Orleans. Henry brings Bon to Sutpen’s Hundred, where Bon meets and falls in love with Judith. Ellen is overjoyed at the prospective marriage. In November 1860, Lincoln is elected president. That Christmas, Henry inexplicably breaks with his family, traveling to New Orleans with Bon. Henry and Bon enter the war the following spring, seeing action during the next four years. Ellen dies in 1863, heartbroken; a year later, Ellen’s father dies. The much younger Coldfield daughter, Rosa, moves to Sutpen’s Hundred. Bon returns to Sutpen’s Hundred in 1865 to claim Judith as his bride. Henry comes with him and, for unknown reasons, shoots Bon dead. Henry then flees. Sutpen returns home after the war, proposes to Rosa, and is rejected. He takes up with Milly, the granddaughter of his poor white worker Wash Jones. Milly gives birth to a girl whom Sutpen repudiates (he wants a son for his dynasty). Wash overhears Sutpen’s insult to Milly—“too bad you’re not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable” (AA 236)—and, incensed, kills Sutpen, along with Milly and the newborn baby. The sheriff’s party comes, and when Wash does not surrender, they kill him. End of part 3.

  In 1870, an octoroon with her eleven-year-old, white-skinned son appears at Sutpen’s Hundred. Judith learns that she is Bon’s New Orleans widow, and the boy, Charles Etienne, is Bon’s son. Mother and son return to New Orleans, the octoroon dies soon after, and Judith sends Clytie to bring the boy back to Sutpen’s Hundred. Forced to be negro in Mississippi, when he had been comfortably creole in New Orleans, Charles Etienne does not adapt. As a young man, he seeks out violent racial encounters. He then leaves home, returning with a mentally deficient black woman as his bride. They produce (in 1882) a brain-damaged child, Jim Bond. Charles Etienne and Judith Sutpen both die of yellow fever in 1884. Clytie remains with Jim Bond in the dilapidated Sutpen mansion during the next twenty-five years. Rosa lives alone in her father’s Jefferson home. In September 1909 Rosa summons Quentin Compson to come see her. She tells him someone is living at Sutpen’s Hundred, and she passes on to him her understanding of the tormented family history. That night Quentin goes with her to Sutpen’s Hundred. They find a dying Henry Sutpen, home after forty years of flight, being cared for by Clytie. Quentin discusses with his father the events he has heard and witnessed, shortly before departing for Harvard that fall. End of part 4.

  With his Canadian roommate, Shreve, Quentin probes the Southern tragedy that has been foisted on him. In January 1910, Quentin receives a letter from his father telling him that Rosa has returned to Sutpen’s Hundred, trying to save Henry. Seeing her coming—and thinking the purpose is to arrest Henry for the murder of Bon forty-five years earlier—Clytie sets fire to the mansion, killing herself, Henry, and (eventually) Rosa. Of Sutpen’s tormented family, only Jim Bond remains alive, howling in the distance. Quentin and Shreve discuss these distressing events, laboring to produce a story that might make sense of it all. They want most to know why Henry would have killed Bon in 1865. They decide that this act of violence did not spring from Bon’s being already married to an octoroon. Instead, they see Bon as the son of Sutpen and his first wife, Eulalia. Bon would have been returning (in 1865) to Sutpen’s Hundred not just to claim a wife but to compel acknowledgment from his father. Finally, they believe that Sutpen could not acknowledge Bon because this son suffered from black blood. Referring to Jim Bond howling in the night, Shreve poses a last question to Quentin—“Why do you hate the South?” Quentin responds in agony, “I don’t hate it…. I dont. I dont!” (AA 311, emphasis in the original). End of part 5 and of the tragedy of the South.

  Why didn’t Faulkner narrate the materials of Absalom in something like this sequence? The answer is that my linear summary does not tell how, in ongoing time, its actors and tellers (and readers) actually encountered all this experience. Converting earlier (mis)understanding into retrospective clarity, my paragraphs assume an all-knowing perspective, omitting the confusion that precedes enlightenment. From the beginning, I provide the comprehensive mapping that only retrospective mastery can provide—later. Of course my grasp of the events is retrospective. Drawing on repeated readings, I have straightened out and made sequential Absalom’s tangled time-weave, providing the orderly peace of was rather than the chaotic turmoil of is. By contrast, Faulkner’s creative effort centers on rendering the stumbling and confusion as it might have felt when it was happening. Only by attending to the events as Faulkner narrates them can we home in on the novel’s racial freight.

  Absalom opens in September 1909. The Sutpen it first features is no infant in West Virginia (in the early 1800s) but a tyrannical adult who has ruined Rosa Coldfield’s life and who—dead these past forty-three years—cannot be forgiven. As with Joe Christmas, Faulkner has us first encounter Sutpen as an adult who has damaged others, long before showing him as a child damaged by others. Rosa’s conversation with Quentin—suffused with anger toward this “
demon”—fills the first chapter. On Sunday mornings (so Rosa learned from her deceased sister Ellen) Sutpen would have his carriage—Ellen and the children inside it—roar up to the church at breakneck speed. Rosa closes the chapter by telling Quentin of Sutpen’s more offensive, indeed bestial, wrestling match with one of his own slaves. It seems that he used to permit his own children to watch this monstrous event in a ring—white and black onlookers surrounding it—where the two men would fight “not like white men fight with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad” (AA 20). Monstrous: in the antebellum South, whose priorities Rosa passionately defends, no white master would treat his slaves thus. The master could have them beaten, even maimed. But he would not touch them intimately, as an equal, in a public setting. Henry responded to this scandalous racial intimacy by vomiting, while Judith, we’re told, gazed on imperturbably. The scene ends in Rosa’s voice: “But I was not there. I was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time—once on Judith and once on the negro girl beside her—looking down through the square entrance to the loft” (24).

  Rosa reads the fight between Sutpen and his slave as scandal, but it comes to look different when we are allowed (many chapters later) to put into play the realities of Sutpen’s upbringing. In the mountain territory where he grew up, one proved one’s mettle by physical strength. In that space uncontaminated by racial difference or private property or invidious wealth, personal identity and value got established by dint of one’s fists. A couple of decades later, Sutpen might have stepped into the ring with one of his slaves with no aim of wounding the sensibilities of his wife or children. In nostalgic fashion (“his only relaxation fighting his wild niggers in the stable” [AA 214]), he might have been confirming an earlier model for understanding his self-worth. He might have been demonstrating that he deserved to be master because he was still physically in charge. Likewise, when we learn later about his past, we realize that the furiously speeding carriage—read by Rosa as demonic—echoes an earlier humiliation involving a carriage. As a boy, he had helplessly watched as his older sister, walking on the road, refused to give ground before the planter’s approaching carriage. The horses had reared, the slave driver had cursed, the elegant occupants had glared: “then he was throwing vain clods of dirt after the dust as it [the carriage] spun on” (191). A defiant gesture some twenty-five years later, we now see, echoes and poignantly attempts to reverse an earlier class-inflicted humiliation. For the reader, it is not a matter of later correcting a wrong reading of these scenes with a right one. Rather, both are true to the place and time where they occur. Rosa could see only as she saw, while a racially innocent Sutpen might have seen according to his earlier mountain schema. Faulkner ensures, by his structure of delayed information, that we read the scene both ways, and both times, as real.

  The second chapter has Quentin and his father (the same September night in 1909) narrate again the creation of Sutpen’s Hundred and its furnishing. The chapter then dilates on the details of Sutpen’s marriage to Ellen Coldfield. Later we will learn—but only later—that this was his second marriage; we then realize why he was in such a hurry. Humiliated by the insult at the door, deceived later by the racially mistaken first wife, he had no time to lose if he was to build his plantation, launch his dynasty, and get his revenge. Likewise, the children born of this second marriage could not know—yet—that they were shadowed by an earlier sibling, their dark twin. Here again both views are true, incompatibly so. Faulkner forces the two views—rising from different times and places—eventually, and violently, to encounter each other. Charles Bon is relentlessly on his way to Sutpen’s Hundred, driven by his mother’s thirty-year-old, race-wounded history. Retrospectively, we grasp that the long-simmering anger caused by Sutpen’s abandonment of her was not to be gainsaid. Up close, however—to everyone but Sutpen—the unfurling courtship of Judith and Bon reads as sweetness and light.

  When Quentin presses his father for more information about Rosa in the third chapter, Mr. Compson furnishes the town’s understanding of her warped childhood. He tells of her father’s death during the war, and he closes on Wash Jones riding a mule to her house in 1865, saying: “Air you Rosie Coldfield?” (AA 72). Talking further to Quentin during the same night in September, Mr. Compson launches the fourth chapter by envisaging Henry and Bon traveling together to New Orleans, after Henry’s mysterious break from his family. Mr. Compson enters their drama empathically, and both young men come powerfully to life: Henry choosing love for Bon over fidelity to his own family, Bon riskily revealing to Henry the details of his exotic New Orleans experience. That revelation culminates in Bon introducing Henry to the octoroon mistress whom he has morganatically married and by whom he has a child. (Morganatic designates a marital arrangement in which neither wife nor offspring may legally inherit. It was a procedure often used by French royalty and their nonaristocratic mistresses, centuries earlier, and it still flourished in nineteenth-century New Orleans. This arrangement would have ensured that when Bon later married a white woman, the line of descent and inheritance would be protected.) Unable to supply other motives for their quarrel, Mr. Compson tries to believe that Henry killed Bon because of the octoroon. This chapter concludes virtually where the preceding one left off, citing again Wash Jones’s words to Rosa Coldfield: “Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come on out yon. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef” (AA 110).

  Thirty-eight pages later, we are only three brief sentences further along! What could justify such circular movement? The answer is that the murdered Charles Bon we earlier knew of had no narrative density—his was merely the name of a man who had inexplicably been killed—whereas the fourth chapter has created him, generously and generatively. He has begun to matter. We learn of his love for both Henry and Judith, and we are invited by Faulkner’s narrative procedure to identify with his plight. In the next chapter, he will speak movingly in his own voice, by way of an 1865 letter to Judith (in Mr. Compson’s possession). There he wryly recounts to his fiancée the disasters of the war and his decision to return to Sutpen’s Hundred so that they may marry. We know—but still not why—that Henry will end by killing him rather than permit the union to take place. The climactic eighth chapter accesses Bon in yet a different fashion—this time by way of Quentin and Shreve, as they imagine him traveling earlier to Sutpen’s Hundred, filled with expectation and anguish. This last version of Charles Bon is a young man who—informed by his mother who his father is, but not why his father repudiated mother and son—desperately seeks paternal recognition. He has waited patiently, all his life and now these four years of the war, for Sutpen to recognize him.

  By providing present experience before revealing that experience’s long-concealed antecedents, Faulkner allows us to grasp both the innocence of the Sutpen children’s love for Bon and the tangled noninnocence behind Bon’s appearance at the university. Their love for him—which in Henry’s case will not survive the scandalous (later) revelation of black blood—takes Absalom into racial territory Faulkner had never entered before. Whites loving blacks, always on condition of not knowing that they are black: this narrative arrangement bristles with implication. Half French in his sophistication, half American in his vulnerability; half female in his charm, half male in his strength; half white by his father, part black by his mother: Bon blends elegance and power, unillusioned shrewdness and generosity of spirit. These come together to produce a suppleness of being that no pure line of descent could make available. He is the text’s utopian image of what miscegenation might really enable, though no one in the story is prepared to consider this possibility once he is “outed” as black. Identified thus—his history exposed and communicated—Bon cannot be loved, nor admired, nor admitted into the precincts of his white family. Once racially fixed, he must either submit to be “nigger” or die the death. Given Bon’s unflinching courage, his choice is not surprising.

  But more than courage
is now involved in this novel of black and white relations in the South. Bon emerges as the most strenuously reinvented character in the novel—reinvented because, as in Light in August, the facts are not all in, never will be. Bon cannot be objectively known, he can only be interpreted—by the other characters in their present experience of him, by the narrators later seeking to make sense of what happened. The narrators perforce encounter the Sutpen saga as a mix of the known (never enough) and the plausible (never fixed once and for all). Though each of them grasps that Bon’s motives were the key to this “bloody mischancing of human affairs” (AA 84), they read him in different ways. We have seen how Mr. Compson enters Bon’s life, imagining his unillusioned wisdom as that of a “youthful Roman consul” come to visit northern Mississippi’s “barbarian hordes” (77). His Bon is above all curious: a curiosity for Mr. Compson to figure out, a man curious to understand these quaintly uncivilized Mississippians.

  When Quentin and Shreve, in the last chapters of Absalom, turn toward Bon, they see him no less as the key to the novel’s murderous enigma. For them, though, the “bloody mischancing” must circulate around something more than fate or curiosity, must have risen from the tormented human heart. They decide on an “overpass to love”—a history that, at its racial core, must have centered on heartbreak—and their Bon (the novel’s final version) is no merely sophisticated traveler. “I am a good deal younger than I thought” this Bon muses, “My God, I am young, young, and I didn’t even know it” (AA 265, emphasis in the original). Young, confused, stumbling in his present 1859 crisis (however long ago it happened for his twentieth-century interpreters), this Bon—like Joe Christmas—doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. He seeks only the merest sign of recognition from Sutpen—with that he’d leave for good—and he’d accept even less: “a sheet a scrap of paper with the one word ‘Charles’ in his hand, and I would know what he meant and he would not even have to ask me to burn it. Or a lock of his hair or a paring from his finger nail and I would know them because I believe now that I have known what his hair and his fingernails would look like all my life’ (269, emphasis in the original). A lock of hair: it has become a love story.