One aspect of the beginning parts of Go Down, Moses that stuck out to me were the animal references, and the inter-mingling between animals and humans. A “buck” is a male deer, and one of the main characters is called Uncle Buck. Faulkner’s physical description of Uncle Buck is animalistic, “Uncle Buck didn’t mount a horse like he was any sixty years old either, lean and active as a cat, with his round, close-cropped white head and his hard little gray eyes and his white-stubbled jaw, his foot in the iron and the horse already moving, already running at the open gate when Uncle Buck came into the seat” (7). Uncle Buck, Uncle Buddy, and the ambiguous narrator “Cass,” live together in a house on their land, but readers quickly see they are joined with multiple dogs and a fox who run loose in the house. When Uncle Buddy says, “‘What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said, “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?’”(5), it shows the close linkage they have to their animals. The line between black and white people in the South at this time is clear, straight, and strict, it is uncrossable and there is no cohabiting between slaves and their masters.

By contrast, the line between humans and animals is blurred, they live together and so the people have animal-like characteristics while the animals are given human traits. For example, Uncle Buck’s horse is named “Black John,” and the slave they are chasing—Tomey’s Turl is on a mule named “Jake.” As Uncle Buck is chasing down Tomey’s Turl, he and Black John are morphed into other animals chasing the slave down, “Black John came out of the trees, driving, soupled out flat and level as a hawk, with Uncle Buck right up behind his ears now and yelling so that they looked exactly like a big black hawk with a sparrow riding it…” (8). When Uncle Buck and Cass lose Tomey’s Turl (TT) and head for the plantation they know TT goes to in order to see his love, they interact with the owners of the plantation, Mr. Hubert and his sister Miss Sophonsiba. The description of Miss Sophonsiba’s attire is again somewhat animalistic, as Cass views her ensemble as “…the earrings and beads clashing and jingling like little trace chains on a toy mule trotting and the perfume stronger too…” (10-11). Miss Sophonsiba compares Uncle Buck to “a bee sipping from flower to flower and not staying long anywhere and all that stored sweetness to be wasted on Uncle Buddy’s desert air…(11).

The fyce they use to help hunt down Tomey’s Turl is given human characteristics, instead of just barking he yells, shrieks, and screams (18). Finally, Miss Sophonsiba is compared somewhat to a bear hunting for a bachelor (Uncle Buck). When Uncle Buck accidentally enters her bedroom to sleep, not knowing she was there, Mr. Hubert says, “‘You come into bear-country of your own free will and accord. All right; you were a grown man and you knew it was bear-country and you knew the way back out like you knew the way in and you had your chance to take it. But no. You had to crawl into the den and lay down by the bear. And whether you did or didn’t know the bear was in it dont make any difference’”(21-22). Miss Sophonsiba is romantically interested in Uncle Buck, and she and Mr. Hubert try to use Uncle Buck’s mistake to their advantage, essentially to “capture” him and force him into marriage. These instances are all in section one of the novel, the “Was” section, and I’m curious to see what Faulkner may be saying about the relationships between black and white people, and people and animals. They are exceptionally different, and I’d like to know why.

On the surface, that’s an easy question — Rosa, Ellen, Judith, Clytie, two – three Haitian mistresses that might as well be nameless — but when you expand the question to ask what they signify as women in a novel and a time period, the thought becomes even more thought-provoking.

In considering female characters in our other novels, I can recognize many strong female personalities from the free-spirited yet determined Caddy + Quentin Jr., the stern motherly Dilsey that holds the Compsons together, the valiant Drusilla going gung-ho into the battlefield, and the stubborn yet keep-your-head-up-high type Lena Grove but in Absalom, Absalom! there is not one woman that competes with these figures in terms of some distinguishable, positive attribute.

To put it bluntly, Rosa Coldfield, though a central female character, is crabby. So was Mrs. Compson in TSAF but at least there were other female figures that offset her cynicism. Rosa’s pessimism and exorbitant view of herself spreads throughout this novel like wildfire unhindered by the shell-casings that are Ellen and Judith Coldfield or the broken down negro women present in the Sutpen household — in a final, climactic scene, an aged yet vehement Rosa yanks the hatchet from the incompetent Quentin barging down the Sutpen attic door but not before “Coldfield turned on the step and struck Clytie to the floor with a full-armed blow like a man would have” (AA 295). The contrast between Rosa and Clytie is nearly a complete role reversal from Dilsey and Candace in terms of dependency.

Simply in contrast to every other female in the book, Rosa is empowered and unstoppable spewing out ceaseless tirades against Thomas Sutpen yet all the same doesn’t put up a fight in marrying him: “because now he was all we had, all that gave us any reason for continuing to exist… Not that we would or did need him” (124). Rosa’s self-contradictions not only make her unreliable as a narrator, they also make her seem pompous and thus unlikable.

But what are these contradictions born out of? It all comes back to the root of the novel in the first place: Thomas Sutpen. In a Women’s Studies piece titled “Marriage and the Invisibility of Women in Absalom, Absalom!” author Linda Dunleavy argues that “Since he” — Sutpen — “needs women to have sons, they become the repositories of presence” (Dunleavy 458). Admittedly, Sutpen doesn’t show particular affection for the women in his life; the only time he’s noted as showing any sort of sentimentality is when he discovers that Henry kills off the man of his nightmares, Charles Bon: ” ‘Henry’s not —–?’ ‘No. He’s not here.’ — ‘Ah. And—–?’ ‘Yes. Henry killed him.’ and then burst into tears” (128).

Ostensibly, though there are women in Absalom, Absalom! they conform to patriarchal expectations of servitude and subjugation and the one woman who has any possibility of rebelling and not serving Sutpen’s “design” concedes thereby fulfilling not just Sutpen’s design but the patriarchal design of the society. In this regard, Absalom, Absalom! serves as a prime example of how women are confined by their society.

Works Cited

Dunleavy, Linda. “Marriage and the Invisibility of Women in Absalom, Absalom!.” Women’s Studies, vol. 22, no. 4, Sept. 1993.

In addition to the primary texts I am planning to cover for my final project, which include The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!, I have located the secondary sources covered below. I searched a number of locations, including OneSearch, Google Scholar, WorldCat, JSTOR, Project MUSE, and ebrary. While researching, I used strategies such as citation chaining and OneSearch’s “Browse Shelf” feature in order to find additional relevant pieces. The search terms I used included keywords such as cloister, enclosure, and seclusion in combination with Faulkner, as well as the names of the specific characters I plan on discussing. In addition, I had some success in OneSearch and WorldCat using subject headings connected to physical space and architecture, such “Architecture, Domestic, In Literature”, “Space in literature,” and so forth in combination with a search on Faulkner.

Berger, Aimee E. “Dark Houses: Navigating Space and Negotiating Silence in the Novels of Faulkner, Warren and Morrison.” Dissertation, University of North Texas, 2000.

This is an interesting dissertation that discusses, among other things, the relationship between various marginalized characters in Faulkner’s works and their spatial environment and how a physical structure such as the Sutpen house can function as a “sanctuary” of sorts for certain characters despite the darkness associated with it.

Moffitt, Anne Hirsch. “The City Specter: William Faulkner and the Threat of Urban Encroachment.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2012, pp. 17-36,130.

This paper explores the spatial concepts I’m interested in on a larger scale. Here, the town of Jefferson itself is portrayed as desiring seclusion in the face of approaching urbanization. Light in August is the focus, so this desire is discussed in terms of its interaction with Hightower’s contradictory wishes to both cloister himself and remain in Jefferson after being the subject of scandal and gossip.

Pearson, Erin. “Faulkner’s Cryptic Closet: Forbidden Desire, Disavowal, and the “Dark House” at the Heart of Absalom, Absalom!” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3/4, 2011, pp. 341-67.

Pearson discusses the contradiction that can emerge when one cloisters oneself by exploring “the ways in which hiding requires being partially known” (341). She examines this concept in terms of various Absalom, Absalom! characters with a focus on space and queer theory.

Ruzicka, William T. Faulkner’s Fictive Architecture : The Meaning of Place in the Yoknapatawpha Novels. UMI Research, 1987.

This is a print book that I still need to pick up from Hunter’s library. While doing so, I will browse the Faulkner shelves and possibly other sections to hopefully find additional relevant sources. This work seems to be a good overview of the physical spaces featured in Faulkner’s works, but I will have to look through it in person to see how helpful it will be for my project.

Visser, Irene. “Reading Pleasure: Light in August and the Theory of the Gendered Gaze.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 1997, pp. 277-87.

This piece discusses the various characters in Light in August who “live secluded lives, wishing to evade visibility, the controlling influence of the social gaze” and operates from the framework of the male gaze, bringing to the fore the feminization of some of the cloistered male figures in this work (278).

Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is clearly peopled by an assortment of characters whose racial background, social status, gender, sexual behavior, or other characteristics relegate them to the margins of “normal” society. Some of these characters retreat even further from society by becoming cloistered individuals and thus physically isolating themselves from Jefferson’s prying eyes. I wish to explore this concept through a Yoknapedia entry on secluded figures in Faulkner’s works.

Characters who are highly cloistered in terms of their physical environment, such as Joanna Burden, Rosa Coldfield, Hightower, Mrs. Compson, and even Mrs. Hines, however minor she appears, are readily apparent in the works we’ve read. However, cloistered individuals in Faulkner’s works fall at various points on a spectrum that extends to encompass individuals such as Joe Christmas, who, despite his participation in Jefferson’s workforce and his characterization as a wanderer who travels freely from place to place, could be seen as being trapped within a mental cloister engendered by the prejudiced society in which he lives. As Hasratian notes in “The Death of Difference in Light in August,” Christmas “is inescapably self-enclosed” (57). I would like to touch on this concept of mental cloistering as well if space permits.

In particular, I wish to explore the antecedents for and results of these cloistered existences in Faulkner’s works, as well as what occurs when characters, such as Hightower and Mrs. Hines, step outside these physical boundaries that they have set for themselves. In terms of antecedents, I am interested in the interaction of individual choice and societal pressures in the decision to enshroud oneself in a cloistered environment. Additionally, Faulkner often characterizes these secluded environments as overpowering the senses of “outsiders” who enter these spaces, with their dirtiness, decay, and various smells (the ever-present smell of camphor in Mrs. Compson’s bedroom comes to mind), and I would like to cover this aspect as well. I may also narrow my general topic by discussing the gendered presentation of the phenomenon of cloistering in the three novels, as male cloistered characters such as Hightower are sometimes feminized.

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner frames an account of the American South in the late 1800’s within the novel’s present narrative conditions of Quentin’s experience in the North in the 1900’s. Through Quentin and Shreve’s recollection of the rise and fall of Sutpen’s Hundred, we get the sense that the destruction experienced in the South casts its shadow onto the North. Arguably, the destruction of which Quentin speaks can be felt across the United States. The story’s particular account of Southern ruination is passed generationally from Rosa to Quentin and from Quentin’s grandfather, to Quentin’s father and onto Quentin. However, what makes Quentin’s knowledge of Sutpen’s ruin important is the geographic mobility he grants to the history of the South.

Miss Rosa understands the importance of giving the narrative of the South legs. She chooses Quentin as the ears of her story knowing that his admittance to Harvard puts him in a position to reproduce and disseminate the story within the North. It turns out, she’s right. Quentin shares the story of Sutpen’s Hundred with Shreve. In this way it is passed rhetorically through oral histories that travel both generationally and geographically. The letter Quentin receives from his father also serves as a rhetorical representation of Southern culture. While the function of orality and language are crucial for constructing the history of the South, it becomes apparent through Quentin’s account that there are visual, or material, components to Quentin’s recollection of the South. The story constructed within his dorm room extends beyond the stories told through language. In other words, the materiality of the South penetrate Quentin’s present in the North.

As Quentin and Shreve attempt to corroborate the scraps of narrative offered by Rosa and Quentin’s father, imagery of the South fills the boys room at Harvard. Initially, this imagery of the South is produced linguistically through Quentin’s recognition of the letter from his father. Yet the “the familiar blurred mechanical Jefferson Jan 10 1910 Miss” and his father’s words “My dear son” catalyze Quentin’s experience of the physical attributes of his Southern home within his New England dorm room. Quentin’s alienated and abstract memory of the South is made material as “his father’s sloped fine hand… could lie on a strange lamplit table in Cambridge.” In spite of the snow on Shreve’s arm that indicates the unforgiving New England winter just outside their window, the letter manifests Quentin’s recollection of physical and geographical markers of the South. At once, Quentin experiences the bodily sensation  of “that dead summer twilight – the wistaria, the cigar-smell, the fireflies – attenuated up from Mississippi and into this strange room, across this strange iron New England snow.”

The Southern materiality constructed via Quentin’s recollection is important because it punctures Shreve’s imagination of the South as geographically partitioned from his Northern experience. As Quentin and Shreve quilt together the narratives of their predecessors, they create the material reality of the South within the North. This material excess challenges the Northern imagination of an alienated and ideological disparate South. Ultimately, the narrative reconstruction Quentin and Shreve enact bridges the notion of a partitioned United States and opens within Absalom, Absalom! a reading of a universally and unconsciously troubled United States.

“He was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time. All that he was concerned about was the possibility that he might not have time sufficient to do it in, regain his lost ground in.”(A.A.223)

Quentin in his narration of Sutpen’s design and his redesign not only unravels Sutpen’s past which brought the bits of pieces of previous events together, but also revealed his resilient, determined and unyielding nature. Before narrating Sutpen’s third attempt to fulfill his ‘design in mind ‘(194, 212), Quentin provides Shreve with new information about Sutpen. Faulkner uses Shreve’s constant interrupting phrase of  ‘The demon, hey?'(177, 181,198, 214, 217, 224) to maintain suspense and keep us on track with Quentin’s narration of his grandfather’s narration of Sutpen’s personal narration. The cycles of narration coincide with the completion of Sutpen’s ‘design in mind’ and are finally interpreted through Shreve’s view of events and eagerness to have Quentin give him a chance to play “‘No,’ Shreve said; ‘you wait. Let me play a while now.'”(224)

In chapter 7 of A.A., Faulkner for the first time allows Sutpen to reveal his past childhood, his bitterness and realizations. ‘He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men…That is he began to discern that without being aware of it.’ (183) His character begins to develop amid comparing his family’s poverty in the log cabin and the monkey dressed nigger’s denial to allow him to enter the rich white man’s house and further degrade him by ‘ never to come to that front door again but to go round to the back.'(188) A pivotal moment which indeed sets the first line in Sutpen’s design in mind. ‘You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with…tiptoeing out of the house. He never saw any of his family again.’ ‘He went to the West Indies’.(192) Thus, his design is put into action and the first round of his design starts in search of money, land, slaves and lineage.
In his time shifts between presenting Sutpen as a child , Sutpen in his sixties and referring to Sutpen’s youthful struggle to fulfill his design, Faulkner is an embodiment of  ‘the modernist commitment to “unknowing”.When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them.'( Weinstein, Philip.Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction) Shreve’s comment on this unfamiliarity with the progression of events is clear in his words to Quentin ‘Your father seems to have an awful lot of delayed information awful quick, after having waited forty-five years.'(214) Till this chapter, Faulkner kept the others (readers and characters) unaware of the real design, its progress and the true interrelations between the characters’ movement and actions. For the first time, the main design is clear and reveals Sutpen’s relentless pursue of extreme wealth and pure power. Pure to the extent that makes him end the first round of his design, abandon his first wife of mixed blood and refuse to acknowledge his children. They are but shadows in this design and Charles is compared to ‘a little child that rushes out onto the football field to take part in the game and the players run over him.'(214)

However ironic it sounds when thrown in the light of  Sutpen’s constant obsession of fulfilling his plan and have ‘no monkey-dressed nigger anywhere under the sun to come to the door and order the child away.'(215) Sutpen has his own son ordered away because he didn’t fit in the plan. Thus, the second round has to commence with him seeking Coldfield’s partnership in business and in life by proposing to Ellen and conceiving two pure white children who could keep this gained power and respect within their Southern Society. Everything is going according to the planned design until the unacknowledged son is killed at the hands of Henry, the pure white son who makes his sister Judith a widow and forces the second round of the design to come to a halt.        ‘The result would be that that design and plan to which he had given fifty years of his life had just as well never existed at all.'(219) Here, the first information presented in Absalom, Absalom  comes only as a second round in Sutpen’s design which Faulkner skillfully unwraps through his multiple narrators.

‘If shrewdness could not extricate him this second time as it had before, he could at least depend on the courage to find him will and strength to find him a third start toward that design.'(219) Sutpen’s third round begins with an offer to Miss Rosa to end her spinster ship and that ‘ they try it first and if it was a boy and lived, they would be married.'(228) Upon her understandable refusal, Sutpen doesn’t waste any time for time might not be suffice and shifts to Walsh’s granddaughter whose delivery of her baby puts an end to the third round of Sutpen’s design as well as puts an end to Sutpen’s life at the hands of her angered aspiring grandfather. Furthermore, Faulkner refuses to smoothly end the game of ‘knowing and unknowing’ between Shreve and Quentin with the failure of Sutpen’s third round. The skillful writer has Shreve collect all the threads of the design from Quentin’s narration and suddenly present Quentin’s realization of narrating false information ‘It wasn’t a son. It was a girl.'(234) For Faulkner time might not be sufficient for Sutpen to have a new design, but it is sufficient for him to have a new cycle of narration.

While I was reading Absalom, Absalom! and other Faulkner novels, one thing became clear- the use of repetition. In this novel, more than the others, repetition of a story with all its speculations and points of views, lends to its complicated read. I wanted to focus on the two most obvious repetitions seen – the first being the title itself, and the other the last lines on the novel. I thought it was interesting that these two moments stood out to me the most- but it does show the circularity of Faulkner’s work. While speaking to Shreve- the comic relief in this depressing story- he asks Quentin “why do you hate the South?”(Faulkner 303), in which Quentin answers “I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it! (Faulkner 303). This last interaction in the novel is very telling. The repetition of Quentin’s response seems more like he is convincing himself rather than defending himself. What interested me was the fact that Shreve asked him why he hated the South- and Quentin answers that he doesn’t hate “it”. Why would he substitute the word South for this larger, more elusive “it”. “It” includes the South, but also includes the burden that Quentin probably feels being the heir to Compson line, and his other family drama seen in TSAF. He repeats this deluded mantra in the “iron New England dark” which contrasts with the heat of the South, in order to show the emerging anxiety- and the slight resentment Quentin has towards where he has grown up. This repetition at the end, correlates to the repetition seen in the title and very start of the novel. What interested me most with the title of the novel is not only the repetition, but the use of the exclamation point as well. Absalom in the Biblical sense was the son of David, who rebelled against him. While placing this story in the context of the novel, its meaning is more clear. Absalom was known for his flowing hair and beauty, and while he was going to fight his father for the throne, his hair got caught in a tree and while he was stuck, he was killed. The Biblical punishment seems clear- that vanity, pride, and reaching for something that is not yours-  will lead to one’s demise. But when David finds out his son- and heir- has died, he says “ “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”(2 Samuel 18:33). When I saw the exclamation points in this context, Faulkner’s title makes more sense. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about the different points of views on a particular story, and the passing on of information from one generation to another. Quentin is receiving this story from his father, who got it from his father, and in that there is this sense of continuity. The father son dynamics in the text correlate to the dynamic seen in the Bible. Charles Bon was this good looking, intelligent, cultural, and urban man who fundamentally differs the wild Sutpen. But his confidence and affable nature led to his destruction. This hostility, and inability to claim a child as an heir is seen in both stories. In Faulkner’s novel its as if Charles Bon’s existence is this rebellion on the image that Sutpen had wanted for himself, and therefore needed to eliminate and ignore. It is also telling that both the names Absalom, which translates into “father of peace”, and Charles Bon, which translates into “good” both represent a new generation that could have been full of hope but were cut down by their fathers.  

I’m not going to use the word “overboard” exactly, but Faulkner’s descriptions of food in “Pantaloon in Black”… whew:

“…and raised a spoonful of the cold and glutinous pease to his mouth. The congealed and lifeless mass seemed to bounce on contact with his lips. Not even warmed from mouth-heat, pease and spoon spattered and rang upon the plate…” (135)

“He drank again, swallowing the chill liquid tamed of taste or heat with while the swallowing lasted, feeling it flow solid and cold with fire, past then enveloping the strong steady panting of his lungs until they ran too suddenly free as his moving body ran in the silver solid wall of air he breasted.” (141)

“Then, drinking, he discovered suddenly that no more of the liquid was entering his mouth. Swallowing, it was no longer passing down his throat, his third and mouth filed now with a solid and unmoving column which without reflex or revulsion sprang, columnar and intact and still retaining the mold of his gullet, outward glinting in the moonlight, splintering, vanishing into the myriad murmur of the dewed grass. He drank again. Again his throat merely filled solidly until two icy rills ran from his mouth-corners…” (142)

(And I cannot help but think, not for the first time, of Stella Gibbons: “The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it.”)

I could do a sort of careful literary analysis here – is the food representative of a sort of earthly solidity that Rider cannot achieve in this fugue state? His connection to humanity? His connection to humanity via his wife, with food as representative of hearth, nurturing, and home, and liquid as a sort of higher, purer order? I mean, sure. But it’s been done already, and with the prose here, I just literally can’t even. “Mouth-heat”?

Is Faulkner actually… parodying himself? In the same way that the commedia dell’arte has come, in its twentieth-century forms at least (thinking especially of pantomime), to parody modern theatrical conventions? I honestly… cannot tell.

This is very hard for me to parse, not least because I don’t have that much faith in Faulkner’s sense of humor, and not least because I’m not sure that I could tell Faulkner apart from good Faulkner parody. In this story, the dialogue, too, seems to be more of “too much”: “Lemme lone, Acey… Doan mess wid me now” (130); “Ah kin pass even wid miss-outs. But dese hyar yuther boys—” (146) But is that parody or is that… just Faulkner? Am I being dense here in not recognizing this as parody, or am I being totally boorish by refusing to believe that this can be “real”?

I think the reason that it’s so hard (for me at least) to identify parody (or not) here is that parody largely depends on taking a particular, recognizable aesthetic style to its extreme. But Faulkner’s style is already highly stylized. I’d be tempted to call it camp, but stylization alone is not enough to call something “camp” – something must also be earnest and unselfaware, as well as a failure according to conventional standards of aesthetic taste. Also, “camp is a tender feeling,” which in this case I do not feel (despite having felt it in absolute masses for many campy things, my favorite being an Off-Broadway musical called “Trip of Love.”)

So is this high literary camp, intentional parody, or merely bad? Do standard literary understandings of aesthetic / prose style fail to accommodate or describe high stylization like Faulkner’s? Am I giving Faulker too much benefit of the doubt based on his literary reputation, or too little based on my own aesthetic response and preference for novels that prioritize interiority? (Is this where I express my growing conviction that Faulkner has benefitted already from nearly a century of intense and still-extant lit-bro culture?) It’s possible that, as Faulkner might have it, “Ah just misread de sign wrong,” but… I really have no response to that sort of quote other than the strong, shuddery conviction that it is bad writing. And “Ah doan needs no mo of hit” (142, wince).

[google-drive-embed url=”https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1elIoki7NMoriE26BHsyyN2xXpzNVTEKn0reXnBul86s/preview” title=”GDMslides” icon=”https://drive-thirdparty.googleusercontent.com/16/type/application/vnd.google-apps.presentation” width=”100%” height=”600″ style=”embed”]