Note that I’ve posted questions on the rest of AA.  Enjoy the holiday and remember: Yoknapatawpha is lovely this time of year.

The Sutpen and Bon gravestones seem particularly important to the narrative for a number of reasons. Judith’s enigmatic character is explored through the erection of some of the stones, particularly Charles Bon’s as she uses proceeds from the sale of the family store to pay for his grave. Remaining funds from this sale are used for Charles Etienne’s gravestone and Judith’s own, for which Clytie must have “scrimped and saved the money to finish paying out the stone” (Faulkner 170). Judith uses the inheritance Sutpen endeavored to keep from Bon to bury him on the very property he was denied, which must signify more than the defeat of Sutpen’s design.

The inscription on Judith’s tombstone is also telling: “Suffered the Indignities and Travails of this World for 42 Years, 4 Months, 9 Days, and went to Rest at Last February 12, 1884. Pause, Mortal; Remember Vanity and Folly and Beware” (Faulkner 171). It calls attention to the inevitability of death and warns against “vanity,” the unprofitable employment of time, and “folly,” or foolishness. This inscription could easily be read as an indictment of Sutpen’s behavior. Judith’s interactions with Charles Etienne signal a much different approach to the illegitimate Sutpen line than that of her father, to whom she had been so closely linked. In fact, the only family that surrounds Judith is the products of Sutpen’s relationships with black women.

It is difficult not to juxtapose Mr. Compson’s narration of Judith giving his mother Bon’s letter and the inscription on Judith’s tombstone:
“then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter” (Faulkner 101).
This section calls attention to the untenable nature of storytelling and as a result, the unreliability of the narrators in the novel, none of whom were present for the any of the events they narrate. Mr. Compson’s use of the word “doubtless” when describing Judith’s actions after receiving Bon’s letter hints at how uncertain his narration actually is (Faulkner 100). All that is left of Judith is in fact a block of stone with scratches. Her tombstone is perhaps the most reliable remaining indicator of her character if we can believe Quentin’s “imagining” of the “careful printed directions Judith must have roused herself (from delirium possibly) to write down for Clytie when she knew that she was going to die” (Faulkner 170). Still, the narrators in the novel, and the reader, all struggle to identify just what the “scratches were trying to tell.”

The tombstone narrative also introduces Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon and miscegenation is further explored. Judith is once again willing to trade property ownership for the benefit of a member of her part-black family. Judith seems to not only be expressing the evolution of her character but also the changes the south faces after the war: “I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive” (Faulkner 168). Sutpen’s efforts prove futile as his “illegitimate” children and descendants become entangled with his white children, which seems to foreshadow the inevitable mixing of races in the south. It is difficult to decipher what “mattered once” to Judith, or what the narrator believes mattered once to her. The narrator/Judith could be referring to class status, family, race, southern values in general or all of these things simultaneously. Perhaps because Judith has witnessed the loss of class status, family and the diminishment of southern values, Charles Etienne’s racial purity is no longer important.

Lastly, Mr. Compson comments on the beautiful lies women lead when referencing the tombstone’s Judith has arranged seems important to include:
“They lead beautiful lives—women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality. That’s why although their deaths, the instant of dissolution, are of no importance to them since they have a courage and fortitude in the face of pain and annihilation… yet to them their funerals and graves, the little puny affirmations of spurious immortality set above their slumber, are of incalculable importance” ( Faulkner 156).

Mr. Compson describes women to be “divorced from” and “irrevocably excommunicated from all reality” while he narrates a story that, while based in reality, is for the most part imagined. Furthermore, while Judith and Clytie use much needed funds for gravestones, which certainly seems frivolous, Sutpen purchases gravestones for himself and his wife from Italy, which follow him and his troops until he is able to return home with them. Much like the use of the word “doubtless,” this passage seems to say exactly what it doesn’t mean. The “indignities and travails” Judith suffers throughout her life, as a result of the actions of her rather, enable her to overcome his “vanity and folly,” illustrating that it is perhaps the men, Sutpen and the novel’s narrators included, who are “excommunicated from all reality.”

            Absalom, Absalom! is a blurring of reality and imagination both in the form and content of the story. Faulkner hints at this theme throughout, interspersing an occasional “I imagine” or “it must have been…” in the long-winded monologues of Miss Rosa, Jason, Quentin, and Shreve. In addition to the admittedly speculative (rather than authoritative) meta-narrations of the Sutpen family history, the characters themselves are quite fixated on proving the reality of events by associating important moments with actions or physical markings. Their efforts are a reflection of South’s efforts to preserve their perspective reality of the Civil War. The heroes of Miss Rosa’s time that fought for the Confederate Army are vulnerable to being forgotten after defeat by the Union, and as such, monuments and markers become extremely important to the South in order to represent the noble Confederate effort. Miss Rosa, Judith, and Quentin (among others) demonstrate this concept in relation to their personal lives and histories, and Quentin’s suicide is a metaphor representing the unfortunate result of strong sentiments without successful action or proof of one’s effort to succeed.

            Jason interprets Judith’s giving her letter from Bon to Mrs. Compson to reflect Judith’s desire for proof of their correspondence. By giving the letter to someone else, she not only has a witness but the artifact takes on a life of its own by simply entering the hands and thoughts of another person: “And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something – a scrap of paper – something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday” (101). This sentiment repeats itself with Miss Rosa’s desire to somehow prove that Charles Bon was a real man rather than just a story or a figment of the family’s imagination. In order to know he is real, she seeks tangibility:  by touching him, seeing him, or feeling his weight after his death, she would have one real moment attached to this person that could give him life in her mind: “I tried to take the full weight of the coffin to prove to myself that he was really in it […] For all I was allowed to know, we had no corpse; we even had no murderer […] he was absent, and he was; he returned, and he was not; three women put something tin the earth and covered it, and he had never been” (122-123). These moments are the foundation for the entire novel, as the only substantive elements of the Sutpen-Bon story that Jason, Shreve, and Quentin have to speculate on are the letter Judith leaves in the Compsons’ care, the gravestones of the Bon family, and the uncertain memories that Miss Rosa shares with Quentin. Thus, these monuments and moments are necessary for the Compsons and Shreve to even speculate a history of an otherwise legacy-less family whose line will end with Miss Rosa. In passing her story onto Quentin, Miss Rosa is keeping her family’s legacy alive, or at the very least she is making her perspective official in the act of the telling: “It’s because she wants it told he thought so that people whom she will never see and whose names wshe will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at least why God let us lose the War” (6).

            Quentin, on the other hand, tries desperately to associate a proof of action with his negative feelings towards Caddy’s lovers in TSAF, but he is incapable of taking (and later proving) action when the moments present themselves. To defend his sister’s honor, Quentin tries to dual Dalton Ames to the death, but never actually manages to hit or even be hit by his nemesis. These facts are very important to Quentin, who follows up the fight (or lack there of) by asking Dalton Ames “did you hit me”, and later coming to the tragic realization that, contrary to Dalton’s assertion, he never actually left a mark on Quentin: “I was trying to sleep even when after a while I knew that he hadnt hit me that he had lied about that for her sake too and that I had just passed out like a girl but even that didnt matter anymore” (TSAF 62). A similar event occurs with a classmate at Harvard, whom Quentin tries to hit when hallucinating that he is Dalton Ames. Again, Quentin asks twice “did I hurt him any?” (TSAF 164), interested if he was able to leave a mark on his mistaken target. Despite the fact that he has lost the fight, what counts for Quentin is that he might have left some kind of visible impact to account for his position in their altercation. Unfortunately Quentin fails to hit Dalton, it is implied that he fails to hit Gerald (the college classmate), he fails to preserve Caddy’s innocence, and he even fails to attend class which renders his presence at Harvard utterly forgettable. Without any physical marks (or monuments) of his efforts despite the fact that he persistently fails, there is really no proof that Quentin made any effort at all. His chapter is concluded by Quentin’s giving in to his own lack of reality (or lack of proof of existence) when he commits suicide.

Please don’t forget to evaluate my teaching using the (relatively) new online system.

Warning: Minor film spoiler alert

This past weekend I saw 12 Years a Slave, and couldn’t help but think about the film in relation to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. While 12 Years a Slave takes place in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, and the large majority of Faulkner’s work that we read takes place after the war, I tried to imagine how the legacy of these characters would fit in to Yoknapawpha County. One way in which the film’s world and Faulkner’s world coincide is with an interest in miscegenation. Though miscegenation is not one of the film’s more prominent subject matters, it is most certainly present. The sexual contact between white men and black women in 12 Years a Slave is a one-sided affair, which takes place late at night in dark houses. Sadistic, alcoholic plantation owner Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender) creeps into the slave quarters – rundown, rotting shacks set off between the cotton fields and large, white plantation home – and repeatedly has his way with Patsy, his most prized slave. Later we see the result of these secret affairs in a child that is not spoken of, but assumed to be the daughter of Patsy and Epps. While Epps seems to love this child and accept her as his own, I couldn’t help but wonder what will happen to her in ten years when the south is engulfed in Civil War? I picture Epps going off to war and the daughter living alone and silent in the empty house, not unlike Clytie at the end of Absalom, Absalom!

I imagine that one aspect of about miscegenation, as a literary subject, that fascinated Faulkner is the contrast between the action and the result. I think it’s a safe assumption that in the years before, during, and following the Civil War, sexual relations between white and black took place in secret, behind closed doors. Faulkner and the film both seem to portray miscegenational relationships as being a common, yet unspoken part of southern culture. If slaves are believed to be property, then of course it is not surprising that slave owners would use slave bodies for acts of sex as well as labor. This would all be inconsequential to the lives and views of aristocratic southern white men if they were able to simply slip out of bed after their wives fall asleep and sneak into the slave quarters. However, Faulkner’s fascination is not in the act of miscegenation so much as the result. What happens when miscegenation forces itself into the public view? What happens to the offspring of white and black parents? In Faulkner’s post-war world, the lives of racially mixed characters end in violence – Charles Bon, Joe Christmas, and Clytie all die violent, painful deaths. The daughter of Thomas Sutpen and Milly dies at birth.

In the film’s penultimate scene, we see Solomon (a kidnapped free black man from Syracuse, NY) essentially rescued by Mr. Parker – a white man and friend, also from Syracuse – from the Epps’ plantation after twelve years of slavery. As Parker escorts a stunned Solomon to the carriage that will take him away from this hell, a disheveled, wild-eyed Epps repeatedly refers to Solomon as his “property,” threatens violence, and acts like an animal. I saw this as a striking look at how the two Americas, the one north and the one south of the Mason/Dixon line were irreconcilably different. While almost the entire film is set in the slavery-accepting south, it is not until we see Epps interact with the northerner, Mr. Parker, that we see just how truly different these two men are, and how neither one could ever convince the other of his views. It is an interesting scene if one considers the years of reconstruction following the Civil War. How did men like Epps adapt to this new world? How did anyone born and bred in the pre-war south adapt to this new world? I see Epps as representing the violence and inhumanity of the plantation-owning society that is still very much felt in the trauma of Faulkner’s post-war south, as the people of Yoknapatawpha County try to make sense of their culture, history, and place within the changing landscape of post-war America.

Whew!  Questions up for the exhausting chapter six: enjoy.

Don’t forget that I’ll be screening AILD on Tuesday at 7pm in the newly renovated space adjacent to the cafeteria in HW on the 3rd floor.  Pizza/soda too.  Feel free to bring a friend, and auditors most welcome.