I’ve decided to narrow my investigation of the topic of identity to Absalom, Absalom! and the various approaches to storytelling we see throughout the novel. I want to explore how narrative invention functions as a key to selfhood. Even characters who are telling other characters’ stories—and are fabricating whole swaths of biographical information—are participating in a process that is far more alive than the act of grasping at memories of a dead past.

Brooks, Peter. “Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!” Comparative
Literature, vol. 34, no. 3, 1982, pp. 247–268.

This Brooks piece examines how AA subverts typical modes of narration and how truths about characters and past events can be regarded in this slippery world of storytelling. He looks at the blurred boundaries between narrator and narratee and illustrates how both are participants in the storytelling process of sense-making, which contains more information than the story itself. His discussion of the concept of “difference” as a mode of creating meaning in storytelling and personal identity can also be put in conversation with the Godden and Fowler pieces.

Fowler, Doreen. “Revising The Sound and the Fury: Absalom, Absalom! and
Faulkner’s Postmodern Turn.” In Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John
N. Duvall, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

In this chapter, Fowler details Jacques Lacan’s theory of “subjectivity arising out of alienation.” The theory describes how individuals begin their lives with no sense of separation (“I” vs “you”) but then have a moment of “splitting” where they begin to define themselves as distinct from the “other.” Fowler draws parallels between this theory and Sutpen’s personal journey — and letter writing (and storytelling in general) seems to be one of the primary ways characters go about this individuating “splitting” process. This theory lends credence to the argument that letters and stories both define characters and create voids inside of them.

Godden, Richard. “Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti, and Labor History: Reading
Unreadable Revolutions.” Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s
Long Revolution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007, pp. 49–
79.

This chapter speaks to the tenuous nature of identity in AA, particularly for Sutpen. The explanation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic offers helpful context about the lack of concreteness of selfhood and its dependence on external individuals and artifacts.

Krause, David. “Reading Bon’s Letter and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”
     Modern Language Association, vol. 99, no. 2, Mar. 1984, pp. 225–241.

This David Krause piece dives into the many scenes of letter reading in AA and dissects the idea of text as both document and monument. Writing, speaking, and listening are all complex elements of these epistolary moments and contribute to the simultaneous fashioning and deconstruction of identity.

Lears, T.J. “True and False Things: Faulkner and the World of Goods.” In Faulkner
and Material Culture, edited by Ann J Abadie, and Joseph R Urgo, University
Press of Mississippi, 2007. 

This chapter describes how Faulkner viewed the self as well as his art as a made “thing” that is susceptible to change. This speaks to the presence of letters in AA as art, artifact, and expression of selfhood, all of which are mutable in their own ways.

Matthews, John T. “The Marriage of Speaking and Hearing in Absalom, Absalom!”
     ELH, vol. 47, no. 3, 1980, pp. 575–594.

Matthews looks at Faulkner’s characters’ individual relationships with language, and shows how Sutpen’s “innocence” reveals itself through his underdeveloped understanding of language. Sutpen’s narration of his own life is the most lifeless of them all because it strives for absolute coherence rather than engaging in a kind of invention.

Identity is a fluid concept in the world of Faulkner. In Absolom, Absolom!, Quentin is described as “an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names” (AA, 9), while Light in August is filled with characters whose names are entirely circumstantial and who can be written on by society like parchment. Faulkner is constantly describing people as echoes and shadows of themselves, or, like Reverend Hightower, sagging vessels for a life of non-existence. And yet, a thread through all of Faulkner’s novels is the tragedy of a lost Southern identity and a ceaseless search for solid ground (Light in August‘s peripatetic Lena exemplifies this wandering).

Faulkner brings this lifelong grapple with identity to the surface in Chapter 17 of Light in August. Referring to a sleeping Hightower, he says, “There was a quality of profound and complete surrender in it. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear…which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death” (LIA, 393). In this description, the “I-Am” — a fixed identity — is based on fleeting (and unflattering) qualities like pride, hope, vanity, and fear. Faulkner then equates the relinquishment of these qualities to death, suggesting there is no “I-Am” without them. My question is— in Faulkner’s conception of the world, is there such thing as true selfhood, or is every person an empty vessel waiting to be filled or drawn upon? Can “the I-Am” be something of substance, or is it always a brew of pride, hope, vanity, and fear?

Preliminary Bibliography:

Fowler, Doreen. “Revising The Sound and the Fury: Absolom, Absolom! And Faulkner’s
Postmodern Turn.” In Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John N. Duvall, and
Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

Henninger, Katherine R. “Faulkner, Photography, and a Regional Ethics of Form.” In
     Faulkner and Material Culture, edited by Ann J Abadie, and Joseph R Urgo,
University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 

Honnighausen, Lothar. Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors, University Press of Mississippi,
2006. 

Lears, T.J. “True and False Things: Faulkner and the World of Goods.” In Faulkner and
Material Culture, edited by Ann J Abadie, and Joseph R Urgo, University Press of
Mississippi, 2007. 

Tebbetts, Terrell L. “‘I’m the man here’: Go Down, Moses and Masculine Identity.” In
     Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John N. Duvall, and Ann J. Abadie,
University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

Weinstein, Philip. “Postmodern Intimations: Musing Invisibility: William Faulkner,
Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.” In Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John
N. Duvall, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

Light in August is narrated in the third person, but Faulkner frequently makes this omniscient narrator feel like a present character rather than an inconspicuous storytelling voice. There’s a sense of fate in the instances when the narrator emerges from the shadows— as if to make us aware that the characters are living on the precipice of an inexorable doom. One of the first moments like this that stands out is in Byron’s meeting with Lena. She asks him probing questions about the man who goes by “Brown,” and as he thinks about his response, the narrator intrudes: “Byron is already in love, though he does not yet know it” (55). It creates an almost cinematic effect where time stands still and an objective truth (inaccessible by the people experiencing the present moment) is observed by some higher power.

This voice inserts itself into Christmas’s experiences as well. In chapter 7, as we see him navigate the McEachern house and plot his escape, the narrator transitions from an ethereal presence to a highly visible figure in his internal thoughts: “He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still in a cage” (160). Once again, this narrator makes its presence known when an unnamed tragedy or failure lies ahead. And Christmas’s tragedy, like Byron’s, is defined by the knowledge he lacks at this particular moment in time. Time and knowledge fail to meet at the proper points and Faulkner’s characters are left struggling to manipulate one or the other.

Interestingly, Christmas seems to have the power to penetrate the time-knowledge bank of this omniscient figure. He can’t access specifics, but he can sense danger like an animal in the wild (Faulkner makes several uncomfortable comparisons between Christmas and animals). In chapter 5, during his violent late-night encounter with Brown, he thinks to himself: “Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something” (104). It’s a premonition that repeats at the end of the chapter: “Something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me” (118), left without a period to officially end the thought or contain the moment. With these intrusive and foreboding thoughts, Faulkner is giving Christmas the power to (at least partially) transcend the temporal barriers that other characters are confined by. It’s an interesting narrative move — particularly in light of The Sound and the Fury, where again, the novel’s central Black figure Dilsey, is the only character who lives beyond the limiting first-person and painfully present experience of time. Whether these special sensitivities are racist animalistic depictions of his Black characters or empowering tools of agency seems like a worthy topic of debate.

The concepts of name, inheritance, and free will all seem to be bound tightly together throughout the entirety of The Sound and the Fury, but particularly during Jason’s section. Jason rejects his Compson name and instead embraces his mother’s blood line— just as fervently as his mother (who constantly frets about the Bascomb family name) embraces him as the favorite child. Ironically, he literally carries his father’s name (Jason) with him wherever he goes. And yet, he attributes his cruel behavior toward Caddy’s illegitimate daughter Quentin to his attempt to maintain his mother’s name. Chasing Quentin and the man in the red tie all over town, he thinks: “Me, without any hat, in the middle of the afternoon, having to chase up and down back alleys because of my mother’s good name” (232).

To add to the irony, the passage continues with: “Like I say you cant do anything with a woman like that, if she’s got it in her. If it’s in her blood, you cant do anything with her.” Blood lineage, according to this moment’s rationale, is too powerful for anything to overcome it. In saying so, however, Jason is acting hypocritically as someone who actively rejects half of his blood line, not to mention the blood line he shares with this young girl who he considers beyond repair. “Once a bitch, always a bitch” (180), he crudely says at the opening of the chapter.

Later on when Quentin, Jason, and Caroline are eating dinner together, Quentin returns to this concept of powerlessness, but due to breeding rather than blood: “‘Whatever I do, it’s your fault'” she says to Jason. “‘If I’m bad, it’s because I had to be. You made me. I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead'” (260). She believes her free will has been snatched not by the universe or fate, but by her uncle. Her namesake’s freedom, meanwhile, was seized by the paralyzing systems of morality and conduct that suffocated him. Their feelings of lost freedom are quite similar, and fittingly, their solution is the same, with the young Miss Quentin reminiscently threatening suicide.

Despite the fact that both Quentins act in response to their immediate environments (as opposed to divine or cosmic forces), Caroline continues to see these behaviors as inherited and/or fated traits. “…she has inherited all of the headstrong traits. Quentin’s too. I thought at the time, with the heritage she would already have, to give her that name, too. Sometimes I think she is the judgment of both of them upon me” (261). Not only does Caroline believe Quentin was handed a destiny through her name, she believes Quentin is the recapitulation of both Caddy and Quentin—the children she failed before. Through this lens, life is a continuous time loop that tortures you with your past mistakes. It’s the purgatorial existence from which both Quentins yearn to escape, and the tragedy of it all appears to lie in the fact that this hellish recurrence is the only thing left of both the old south and the family that’s disintegrating inside of it.

After Bayard and Ringo avenge Granny’s death in “Vendée,” Bayard’s disillusionment with male violence inspires a series of observations about the distinctions between men and women. This time of reflection and introspection suggests a leap of maturity and self-governance for Bayard, but also betrays his lingering childlike need for heroes and the inherently paradoxical nature of these gallant figures.

The first notable comment is made at the very beginning of “Skirmish at Sartoris.” Bayard is remembering how, on Election Day, the women and men were oriented like opposing armies, and he begins to dissect the reasons why that might have been the case. He begins by analyzing the men involved, positing that they have simply gotten used to behaving as a military unit. He then takes his reflection a step further, wondering if the danger and violence of conflict are not just the unfortunate consequences of men’s militaristic tendencies, but the innate draw: “…men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting” (188), says Bayard in what is perhaps a newly percolating criticism of the violent culture into which he was born.

His thought finally turns to the women on the other side of the metaphorical battlefield as he considers their position during the war: “…all the women in Jefferson were actually enemies for the reason that men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered” (188). Bayard is imbuing this group of women with the force of an army, and rather than framing them as defeated or powerless to the superior male army that speaks for them, he characterizes them as the only southern militia that has not yet surrendered.

Later in “Skirmish at Sartoris,” Bayard once again reflects on the female experience while taking a jab at southern male behavior: “…they were strange times then. Only like I said, maybe times are never strange to women: that it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks” (194). In this imagining, women are no longer an emboldened army, but rather a transcendent body that observes their male counterparts like an omniscient God watching his creatures scurry about down below. Bayard, soon after, subtly mocks his father, who belittles women for their lack of political acumen: “…like Father said, women cannot believe that anything can be right or wrong or even be very important that can be decided by a lot of little scraps of scribbled paper dropped into a box” (204). Bayard is distinguishing what he says from what his father says (“like I said” vs “like Father said”)—and considering the ways Bayard has borne witness to Granny’s acute awareness of the power of little scraps of scribbled paper, he is starting to resist the latter in favor of the former.

There are markers of growth in this new pattern of questioning and resisting the narratives of authority figures. And yet, Bayard is still approaching this internal revolution childishly—reducing women to a monolith and lionizing them as a replacement for the men that have disappointed him. His reductive beliefs, however, find themselves in clear contradiction in “An Odor of Verdena.” He explains that Mrs. Wilkins refrains from offering him a horse and pistol “because she was a woman and so wiser than any man” (215). And yet after Drusilla hands him a pair of pistols and kisses his hand—a clear endorsement of violence—he still holds fast to his claim that “they are wise, women are—a touch, lips or fingers, and the knowledge, even clairvoyance, goes straight to the heart without bothering the laggard brain at all” (238).

These constantly shifting (and clashing) images of women as simultaneously militaristic and sublime—peacemakers and warriors—show just how unsettled Bayard is in his beliefs and his view of the world around him. Drusilla’s madness may be the thing that finally breaks these two-dimensional illusions and leads to his nuanced final act of concomitant courage and pacifism.

I felt disoriented inside The Unvanquished until we arrived at the narrative around the great locomotive chase in “Raid.” It felt uncharacteristically grounded and reflective, and helped contextualize much of the novel’s tone and presentation of war. The following passage particularly stood out to me: “Because wars are wars: the same exploding powder when there was powder, the same thrust and parry of iron when there was not—one tale, one telling, the same as the next or the one before” (94). Following a seemingly relentless sequence of events, this moment of pause shows Bayard’s strain in crafting a meaningful narrative out of these stray pieces. Whatever “tale” is produced is simultaneously essential to Bayard’s understanding of his circumstances and completely void of any real meaning, as the story of all wars is fundamentally the same.

Storytelling seems central to Bayard’s existence in Yoknapatawpha. He lives not just for his experience of having once seen the Hawkhurst train in action, but for his ability to regale the more-intelligent Ringo with the memory. He even considers hearing more stories about the train from Drusilla equivalent to having more experiences himself, and stays awake listening to them out of “the need to keep even with Ringo” (93). These stories, in turn, are meant to somewhat compensate for the lackluster stories of war Bayard’s father comes home with. “‘Believe me, boys; take my word for it,” his father says to him, “there’s more to it than this, no matter what it looks like. I cant prove it, so you’ll just have to believe me” (95).

Even while the train—in all its tangible grandeur—seems to thrill Bayard and ground his amorphous narrative of war, he ultimately seems disillusioned by it. Much of his imagining of war has a chivalric hue, with the “thrust and parry of iron” (94) and “poste and riposte of sweat-reeking cavalry” (95). And yet, the central moment of physical combat that lives in his mind is executed “not by two regiments or two batteries or even two generals, but by two locomotives” (96). There’s a vivid collision here between the fanciful Old South and the oncoming barrage of modern industrialization. There are shadows of classic warfare in the trains— their movement across the land reminiscent of horses and the iron rails taking the place of iron swords and armor. Their mechanical and impersonal nature, however, removes much of the romance Bayard holds onto in his reckoning of war. He may believe that the story of war is forever the same, regardless of whether the fighting is done with gunpowder or swords. But this moment of internal discord feels pivotal in acknowledging the tectonic shifts that are subtly but significantly altering the world (and the stories) around him.