When Quentin and Shreve discuss the story of Sutpen’s Hundred, there are few concrete pieces of evidence to which they can reference. Among these pieces of evidence are the five marble tombstones that Quentin sees when he visits the site with his father. The first two gravestones are for Sutpen and Ellen. Mr. Compson tells Quentin the story of Sutpen purchasing the stones: 

He ordered them from Italy, the best, the finest to be had – his wife’s complete and his with the date left blank: and this while on active service which had not only the highest mortality rate of any service before or since but which had a custom of electing a new set of regimental officers each year […] so that for all he knew, before his order could be filled or even received he might already be under ground and his grave marked (if at all) by a shattered musket thrust into the earth […] (155).

There is certainly something performative about Sutpen’s decision to buy these gravestones after his wife’s death. He goes out of his way to order the “finest” Italian marble money can buy, and buys a matching set for the two of them, even though he knows he was more than likely to die on the battlefield and never wind up being buried next to Ellen. Buying the gaudy stones as a matching set adds an air of posthumous legitimacy to the marriage, showing that he intends to rest with her in death, but Quentin notices that Ellen’s gravestone merely says “Ellen Coldfield Sutpen” along with her dates of birth and death – no “beloved wife of.” The absence of this phrase immediately stands out to Quentin. Sutpen is willing to buy his late wife a beautiful marble headstone (and a matching one for himself, which he may or may not ever use), but he declines to engrave her stone with any sort of declaration of his love for her. 

Judith follows in her father’s footsteps, buying three more expensive gravestones. The first of these is for Charles Bon, to whom Judith was engaged, but whom the narrators continuously emphasize she never grieved. This one cannot say “beloved husband of” since the two were never married, and Quentin wonders if she would have wanted to add that phrase onto Charles’s gravestone. When discussing Judith’s purchase of the additional gravestones, Mr. Compson says:

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 which would make the most spartan man resemble a puling boy, yet to them their funerals and graves, the little puny affirmations of spurious immortality set above their slumber, are of incalculable importance (156).

Mr. Compson frames women’s deaths as something frivolous in comparison to men’s. Women are so far removed from reality, he says, that they are indifferent to the threat of death’s eternal oblivion. However, funerals and graves – the markers of their lives that other people will see – are of “incalculable importance” to them. Faulkner really emphasizes Mr. Compson’s disdain for these markers, having him redundantly call them both “little” and “puny” in the same sentence. However, the frivolity of gravestones is of course not exclusive to women, as we have just seen Sutpen purchase arguably the most extravagant gravestones imaginable. Perhaps Sutpen evades such description because he is actively fighting in the war, thereby putting himself in a position to die a valorous battlefield death.

Mr. Compson’s narrative goes on to speculate on how the scene with the gravestones must have been like a garden scene written by Oscar Wilde, with scene shifters coming in at twilight to “strike [the gravestones] and carry them, hollow fragile and without weight, back to the warehouse until they should be needed again; the pageant, the scene, the act, entering upon the stage” (157). The performative nature is at its most blatant here, with Mr. Compson imagining the scene as a literal performance, and the gravestones as hollow props that are taken away at night. It is notable that, of all the pastoral poets who write garden scenes, Wilde is the one who is likened to this imagined performance. Famously a queer man, Wilde did not adhere to traditional heteronormative ideals of masculinity. It is no surprise, then, that he is grouped in with the feminine performance that Mr. Compson extracts from the gravestones Judith purchased.

The discussion of the gravestones ends here, but part of Quentin and Shreve’s conversation about Charles Bon’s mother seems to allude back to it. Shreve says:

[…] [T]he old Sabine, who couldn’t to save her life have told you or the lawyer or Bon or anybody else probably what she wanted, expected, hoped for because she was a woman and didn’t need to want or hope or expect anything, but just to want and expect and hope […] the old Sabine (not so old yet, but she would have just let herself go in the sense that you keep the engines clean and oiled and the best of coal in the bunkers but you don’t bother to shine the brightwork or holystone the decks anymore; just let herself go on the outside (243).

This passage echoes Mr. Compson’s speech about women living beautiful, simple lives. Shreve likens Bon’s mother’s womanhood to a sort of simplicity in life, saying that she doesn’t have to do anything but want, expect, and hope – all passive actions. He then describes her “letting herself go” as her failure to keep the outside of her home shiny and clean. Though no gravestones are mentioned here, it is not a stretch to think of polishing any potential gravestones when Shreve talks about shining the brightwork and holystoning the decks, since this would be part of the home’s exterior.

The performance of external appearances is consistently likened to femininity, even in death, in the men’s narratives throughout Absalom, Absalom!. The gendering of death and its markers is fascinating, and the contrast between the characters’ perceptions of the gravestones purchased by Sutpen and those purchased by Judith offers a vivid window into the gender dynamics that made up these characters’ world.

The detailed narrative of Sutpen’s history in Chapter 7 was a respite from the lack of information regarding his beginnings at the start of the novel. However, this refreshing feeling of being allowed into a previously withheld story was short-lived. As Faulker provided the backstory, he also made clear the problematic mode of telephone-style, regurgitated narration, which serves to intertwine the difficult layers of Sutpen’s history with the messy, unreliable history of the Deep South itself. 

The layered narration, which occurs throughout the novel, is once again apparent in this section. As readers are (finally) given some of Sutpen’s past, we are made all too aware of the filtration system of Southern storytellers it has passed through: Sutpen to Grandpa Compson to Jason Compson to Quentin to Shreve. Throughout the entire section, readers are dared to ask: what information is left out through forgetfulness, and what information is purposefully omitted? What may be added in or emphasized? It is also very interesting that Quentin relays the narrative to Shreve and compares himself to Sutpen and his grandfather to Shreve. While relaying Sutpen’s autobiographical outpour to his grandfather, Quentin says, “I reckon Grandfather was saying ‘Wait wait for God’s sake wait’ about like you are until he finally did stop and back up and start over again with at least some regard or cause and effect even if none for logical sequence and continuity.” (199). Quentin imagines the same sense of urgency to tell the story in Sutpen as he feels, and the same need for clarification and reasoning in his grandfather as he witnesses in Shreve. Throughout all of this, as readers we must constantly be looking for the purposeful framing through which the layered narrators wish (need) to tell the “Sutpen”’ story, and by extension, choose also to tell the macrocosmic story of the South (two grand stories of “falling”).

This need for reasoning and rationalization appears not only in the telling/structure of the story, but also in the content of the “Sutpen” story. After being confronted by the systems of oppression around him, and realizing his whiteness does not prevent him from being at the bottom of this newly discovered hierarchy, Sutpen seeks to climb up the ladder of Southern social order through a very pragmatic plan. In his mind, according to the Compsons, he need only to acquire land, money, and slaves to ascend to this ideal version of whiteness. In his simplistic, rigid plan, Sutpen takes on the desire for a clean bloodline, which leads him to reject his first wife due to her mixed race (212). This choice, according to himself and Grandpa Compson, is rooted in the practicality of his design. In a matter-of-fact, businesslike fashion, Sutpen apparently says, “I merely explained how this new fact rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design” (212). Sutpen goes on to falter along his impossibly straightforward path, parenting another mixed-race child and butchering all of his attempts at traditional white wealth (Matthews, 194). As Matthews points out, the faultiness of Sutpen’s “design” mirrors the problematic obsession with “rational” racial divides. He says, “ It’s the madness of reason that sustains the unnatural fantasy of property, whether of land or other humans (193). Sutpen’s lack of success, and his inability to detect blackness which leads him to inevitably become mixed up with it, highlights the defectiveness of the original divide (or original sin) of the South’s framework: white and black. Of course, as Matthews posits, this supposedly logical social construction is really just that– a construction, just as made up as Sutpen made up his own life of superiority. Matthews says, “only when (white) indentured servants began gaining their freedom and swelling the ranks of freed whites did planters decide to replace them with the sort of laborers who could be kept in permanent subjection: African chattel slaves. The insult Sutpen suffers at the hands of Pettibone’s black domestic slave, rebounds from the stone of debt enslavement structuring Deep South colonial plantation agriculture. In probing the rotten foundations of  New World design, Faulkner discovers layer after layer of insult, of “oppression and exploitation” (191). 

The layers of desperate storytelling (Rosa, Jason, Quentin) reflect the layers of failed justification for the system of slavery. No matter how many times it is told and retold and justified and rationalized– there is no moral or natural reason for slavery or the forced superiority of whites over blacks. Likewise, there is nothing redeeming about a man born into slave holding (Pettibone, previous Compsons) or one who finds his way there after insult (Sutpen). Perhaps, complicit in the same system in a more traditional way, this is why Grandpa Compson insisted on including his belief of Sutpen’s “innocence” while relaying the Sutpen history. 

Of course, all of the guilt, innocence, complicity, and complexity comes to an internal culmination when Quentin is forced to face the question: “why do you hate the south?”

Mere paragraphs into Chapter 8 of Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner offers this perplexing description of Quentin that while brief, is heavy with significance, especially considering how abruptly it appears: “Quentin (the Southerner, whose blood ran quick to cool, more supple to compensate for violent changes of temperature perhaps, perhaps merely nearer the surface)” (Faulkner 235). The structure of the description is perhaps most striking, as Faulkner places it in parenthesis. This functions as a sort of clarification, as is the description is meant to answer some sort of inquiry or distinguish Quentin in some clarifying way. He is with Shreve, who is a Northerner, and so perhaps this is the reason for distinction, but why does Faulkner do this in this moment, and why does he not give Shreve a similar description? The distinction is made about Quentin, and it is using a description that not only acts as a fitting description for Quentin the person, but for Quentin the Jeffersonian. Faulkner begins the parenthetical description with “the Southerner” which distinguishes him geographically and culturally. He is a southerner, and so he is not only geographically displaced from Shreve and Harvard, but also culturally, as his Southern experiences and values are alien to the Northern intellectual complex that Shreve represents. Faulkner then further describes a characteristic of not just Quentin, but given its placement, possibly of a Southerner as well, as he follows up with “whose blood ran quick to cool.” This is reminiscent of the idiom “blood ran cold” meaning a sudden sense of fear or shock. It also brings to mind the idea of someone being referred to “hot-blooded” if they are prone to sudden outbursts. Some mixture of the two ideas seems to be going on here, as Faulkner may be saying that Quentin’s blood, or metaphorically, his internal disposition, functions to shock itself away from rising emotions. What we know of Quentin from Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury is that he is ruled by his emotions, and that often takes him to places of mental fixation and anguish. Yet Quentin is also capable of normative function and present intellectual capacity. Perhaps Faulkner is saying that this is a result of not only his self-control, but also that that self-control is a core component of his Southern identity. “Violent changes of temperature” also recalls Quentin’s manic streams of thought, though Faulkner is not definitive on this as he follows that with “perhaps.” He offers another possibility with “perhaps merely nearer the surface” which suggests that while Quentin’s cool blood acts to suppress his hysteria from surfacing often enough, his struggles are still present deep down. This is obviously the case in TSAF, as those inner struggles are revealed over the course of his section, and ultimately his blood fails to cool them. Perhaps at his end, Quentin failed in his Southern-ness, maybe because he was too displaced from it, and his blood failed in its function of running quick to cool, but here I believe Faulkner has made this distinction because Quentin, while obviously being effected by the story that has been entrusted to him, still is the Jeffersonian, and so is still in possession of that southern identity. Faulkner wants to inform the reader through this simple line that Quentin is still Southern, but bringing attention to it is meant to show that it is something that must be addressed, because it has been disrupted enough that it can no longer be taken for granted.

“But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.” 

It has long been established that touch is one of humanity’s most basic, primal needs (though, historically, and even in contemporary society, a need which is withheld, underplayed, or overplayed for performance). Desire, sexuality, and physical pleasure often permeate through Faulkner’s mind and writing, and so it is no surprise that underneath much of the Sutpen mythology is a kind of deformed decorum and sexuality which adds an edge to much of what isn’t said. Much like The Sound and The Fury, Faulkner situates what the southern antebellum society labels as perverse at the center of psychological drives toward damnation—Henry killing Bon, a reaction to the sexuality they share alongside the sexuality which he projects onto his sister; Sutpen’s sleeping around, his ‘breed-like’ mentality, his eventual impregnation of the 15 year old and death, among a few—and while sexuality still holds a strong grip over the plot movement of Absalom, Absalom!, I would like to postulate that, at least for Miss Rosa, it is not sex which drives her, but the desire to simply be touched. 

Throughout the novel, it is driven home that Miss Rosa has somewhat of an isolated childhood; in her own words, she likens “that unpaced corridor which I called childhood” to the “projection of the lightless womb itself” (PAGE NUMBER). In chapter five, when the bulk of her think piece on humanity and touch comes to the forefront, she notes “as a child I had more than once watched her and Judith and even Henry scuffling in the rough games which they (possibly all children; I do not know) played, and (so I have heard) she and Judith even slept together, in the same room…” (112) highlighting that where Judith, Henry, and Clytie’s childhood’s merged (marked, particularly, by their ability to engage in physical closeness, violent, playful, or in rest) Miss Rosa could only speculate, never having experienced it herself, and hardly having known anyone else. While scholars have at times speculated on the queer, sometimes incestual nature between Clytie and Judith, Clytie and Rosa, Henry and Judith, and so forth, I believe largely the theories focusing on the queer nature between the women do not properly engage with Miss Rosa’s isolation. At the center of these theories is the emotionally driven, multiple page account of Rosa and Clytie’s touch, and where queer readings suggest Rosa is caught in this moment because of the inert sexuality which enraptured her, I suggest (though, of course, noting the other obvious queer references throughout Absalom, Absalom!) that Rosa is stunned by the touch itself, rather than the person who is touching her. 

The touch comes as Rosa tries to make her way up the stairs, toward the crime scene (where Judith waits with her dress and Bon’s body). Clytie attempts to stop her with words, and then physically, with her body. As Rosa follows the seconds leading into and after this encounter, she repeatedly notes she could not be stopped but by “the hand, the touch” (110). As soon as Clytie does physically assert herself, Rosa describes the “shocking impact” as something which “abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both…” (112). Her initial response, she describes as “not to her, to it speaking to it though the negro, the woman…” centers the touch as a kind of existence rather than an action, and when she reacts aggressively, she notes “we both knew it was not to her I spoke” (112). In other words, it is not the person, the identity, Clytie, whose touch startles her so much, but the physical dissolve of boundaries, the act of touching skin to another skin, which is alien, “not yet outrage…receiving no answer”, and which stopped her “dead” (111). The physical touch, which she is unknown to, not just sexually, but in its simplest of definitions, undoes conceptual boundaries which she places between the “I” and the “Other”, and the two of them are now “joined by that hand and arm which held us, like a fierce rigid umbilical cord, twin sistered to the fell darkness which had produced her” (112).

I’d really love to further delve into this distinction between sexuality and touch. I believe there is a lot of rich close reading to be done which can discuss not only the restrictiveness of erotica in Faulkner’s South, but the isolation which comes from the Past to the Present, the Future to the known, the Other to the Self.

One of the main themes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is perception. In the novel, there are four primary narrators, and each attempts to reconstruct the past with a very limited set of available facts. The four main narrators of the story provide accounts of Thomas Sutpen’s life that frequently include contradictory sets of detail and different descriptive approaches. It becomes impossible for the reader to garner what exactly happens in Sutpen’s life or why and how it is significant. This uncertainty and contradiction can be read as a commentary or demonstration of how narratives are shared, told, and changed to benefit the teller. Each narrator seemingly imprints much of themselves onto Sutpen.

According to the four fictitious storytellers, the murder of Sutpen by Wash Jones, and the murder of Charles Bon by Henry Sutpen, can be interpreted appropriately to reveal the whole significance of the narrative. The problem, of course, is that neither Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, nor Shreve were present at these crucial moments. Their reconstruction of history is largely an interpretive act of the imagination. And because three of the narrators are emotionally involved in the South’s shared past, they exaggerate fact into myth and history into legend.

Each narrator accepts certain facts, rejects others, and fills the blanks between action and motive with a hypothesis to fill in the gaps that will enable them to better tell the story. The narrators weigh, judge, and interpret the Sutpen legend from very different perspectives determined by their generation, personal relationship to the South, to Thomas Sutpen himself. By responding differently to the scattered Sutpen jigsaw, each narrator constructs their own version of “truth.” As a result, at the book’s end, four distinct figures of Thomas Sutpen emerge instead of one definitive portrait.

When Rosa tells Quentin about Sutpen’s settlement in Yoknapatawpha County, her perspective is colored as “a grim mausoleum air of puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness” (47). Rosa Coldfield tells her story to Quentin in a dark, hot, and airless room, with the blinds drawn and the doors locked. She has effectively cut herself off from the outside world for over 40 years. In this “coffin-smelling gloom,” Rosa seems almost as much a ghost as the shadowy figures she evokes from her past (4). She acknowledges that her life had been “destined to end on an afternoon in April forty-three years ago” when her brother-in-law Thomas Sutpen insulted the Puritan foundation that Rosa Coldfield had weighed and judged her world when he asked her to marry him (12). Shut up in her house, Rosa has, in essence, been a ghost for forty-three years. Sutpen seemingly haunts Rosa’s every waking moment. Her “outrage” overwhelmingly lends itself to her narrative style and lends itself to her “grim haggard amazed voice” (3). Her narrative style is described thus: “It (the talking, the telling) seemed (to him, to Quentin) to partake of that logic- and reason-flouting quality of a dream” (15). The dead are not dead to Rosa, and she tells her story with immense frustration and anger.

Jason Compson enacts a more detached style of narration. Employing this detachment, Mr. Compson avoids that degree of distorting rage that results when a narrator is perhaps too close to the subject matter. This is not to say that Mr. Compson isn’t immensely delusional in his own right. He has had no personal contact with Sutpen. Instead, he relies on many so-called Southern “Lost Cause” modes of interpretation when handling the subject matter. Mr. Compson’s normative masculine point of view paints Sutpen not as a violent white supremacist but a venerated hero who defied Lincoln and defended the Southern way of life by taking up arms in the Confederate army. To Mr. Compson, Sutpen’s “design” is a representation of the history and heritage of the South. Mr. Compson, the doomed, old, white Southerner barely clinging to power, is forced to inflate the character at the center of his narration. For him, Sutpen’s story becomes the whole declaration of Southern desire, execution, achievement, guilt, fate, and ruin.

The final narration of Thomas Sutpen’s story is a shared point of view from two narrators whose different backgrounds enact two very different degrees of emotional involvement in the reconstruction of the legend. Because Quentin was born and raised in the South, he views the Sutpen story “without the medium of speech” (172). To Quentin, every person born in the South retains a similar consciousness and a finetuned insight into certain modes of thinking because Southerners are united by a common heritage that forces its descendants to look not to the future but constantly to the past. This notion is seemingly inconceivable to Shreve McCannon, the intellectual Canadian. Shreve serves more as a stand-in for the Northern academic reader. He asks many of the same questions a person unfamiliar with Southern culture might ask. At one point, Quentin angrily asserts, “You can’t understand it [the South]. You would have to be born there.” (289).

As flawed as each narrator might seem, we cannot fully fault them for their skewed perspectives. Indeed, isn’t that the way we make our own inferences and determinations about the figures we’ve never met or encountered through the lens of ourselves?

As I was reading the last handful of chapters of Absalom, Absalom! for this week, I noticed that I was skeptical of the way in which Faulkner has decided to end the novel. More specifically, as a reader, I found myself questioning the truth behind Quentin’s answer to Shreve’s final question as he closes out his story about the Sutpen Family and Charles Bon. To end his novel, Faulkner writes:

“’Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?’

‘I dont hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I dont hate it,’ he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” (302-303)

With this final conversational exchange between Shreve and Quentin in mind, it is evident that Faulkner attempted to end his novel from the perspective of hope. However, this hope becomes severely buried within Quentin’s inner thoughts, hence the phrase “I don’t hate it” being repeated three times at the end of the novel. Based on our previous class discussions, we know that during the time period in which Faulkner’s works take place, the South is undergoing smaller changes, some of which these characters (like Quentin, for example) take some time getting used to. However, as readers, we beg ourselves to ask the questions: Does Quentin really enjoy life in the South? Is he primarily telling Shreve that he doesn’t hate it in order to get him to stop asking him so many questions about the Sutpens and Bon? Quentin does not particularly hate the South for its embedded norms about certain societal constructs like race, class, and gender, nor does he have any ill-will towards a Southern way of living. Instead, a part of him hates the South as a result of the familial trauma that the Sutpens (and in part, Bon) have left behind. His attempt at self-convincing in order to not hate the South comes from a place of hatred toward change. Shreve attempts to explain to him that in the future, the South will eventually diversify itself, meaning that it will not be solely populated by white people. Along with this, within his final chunk of dialogue, there is also the underlying message that the divisions of race and the racist, derogatory views of black people will fade away in time in the South as well. Although not explicitly stated in the text, it is particularly evident that Quentin is unaware of what to make of such ideas. In a sense, he wants to try to conform to the traditional Southern way of thinking and push back against such changes as a way for his own thinking to remain stagnant. However, when thinking about the ending of this novel on a larger scale, it is clear that Faulkner wants us as readers to understand that these changes might actually occur sooner than we all think. He utilizes a sort of distorted, yet also explicitly clear play on time through Shreve’s discussion of the future as an indication for what’s to come in his particular vision of the South.

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! truth is composite. One could even say it is a cubist rendering of a quasi-truth. It is an examination of a story from many different perspectives at once. Are they all wrong? Is the image, the story they tell, spurious for its lack of singular authority? Is a composite truth a lie?

In 1958, while speaking to a class at University of Virginia, Faulkner addressed the issue of truth and perspective. When asked about which character in Absalom, Absalom! had the right view, Faulkner said:

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it, but taken all together, the truth is in what they saw, though nobody saw the truth intact.

A reference is made in this Q&A to a blackbird, specifically a blackbird, more specifically, but not stated outright, the blackbird in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In the poem, the speaker, presumably but not certainly, the poet, examines a blackbird in thirteen very brief sections—each section a stanza—or “looks.” No single look gives the full truth about the bird. As Stevens says in the third section, “It was a small part of the pantomime.” As with the blackbird, so with Sutpen, who is central and subject but is not the whole pantomime. The pantomime is the portrayal, yes, but it is the way of looking at Sutpen that the novel is concerned with.

Throughout the novel, the reader must hold so many different details and jumps between narrators that reading requires more than simple literary pleasure. As Stevens says in the second stanza:

I was of three minds
like a tree
in which there are three blackbirds.

The reader must have a mind of multitudinous and yet singular thought, even as the novel seems to devolve and the narrators’ authority on dialogue and events become increasingly speculative and spurious. But if the novel lacks a single authoritative narrator, Faulkner is fully aware and even reassures us that we are not alone in being curious, excited, and frustrated all at once. (If we can contain these conflicting feelings simultaneously, why can’t we hold conflicting perspectives? Each contributes to a unified end.) About halfway through the novel, Faulkner introduces Shreve, Quentin’s roommate at Harvard, who becomes, for a moment, the reader’s best friend as he summarizes the story up to this point, acknowledging the wild ride and reinforcing the reader’s excitement as they learn, hopefully, that they are not as lost as they might think.

At one point, after control of the story has been handed over to Shreve and Quentin and the two appear to have blended into one, Faulkner assures us this is the case and even says:

It did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed truth, or fit the preconceived. (253)

These narrators now exist in the story they’re telling. Later in the chapter:

Shreve ceased. That is, for all two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which hone had been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry. (267)

Again, the telling of the story becomes the story. This does not get the reader any closer to the “truth” about Sutpen, but it does seem to get the narrators closer—actually, as close as they can get. This is also reminiscent of the fourth section of Stevens’ poem:

A woman and man
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

In the Virginia classroom Q&A, Faulkner attributes in passing that Sutpen was a character “a little too big” for the characters (who are presumably “a little too small”) to articulate on their own (“To see [him] all at once,” Faulkner said). “It would’ve taken, probably, a wiser or more tolerant or more sensitive or more thoughtful person to see him as he was.” Faulkner also states that he hopes there’s a fourteenth way of looking at the blackbird, and that is the reader’s image of Sutpen after having examined, experienced, exhausted, every other look.

I think Stevens sums this up as succinctly and metaphorically as any poet might:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. (VIII)

In her article, “Property in “Absalom, Absalom!”: Rousseau’s Legacy in Faulkner,” Julia Simon points out Faulkner’s reference to Rousseau’s Second Discourse in the beginning of chapter 7. Speculating on Sutpen’s early life, Quentin narrates:

“where what few other people he knew lived in log cabins boiling with children like the one he was born in—men and grown boys who hunted or lay before the fire on the floor while the women and older girls stepped back and forth across them to reach the fire to cook, where the only colored people were Indians and you only looked down at them over your rifle sights, where he had never even heard of, never imagined, a place, a land divided neatly up and actually owned by men who did nothing but ride over it on fine horses or sit in fine clothes on the galleries of big houses while other people worked for them; he did not even imagine then that there was any such way to live or to want to live, or that there existed all the objects to be wanted which there were, or that the ones who owned the objects not only could look down on the ones that didn’t, but could be supported in the down-looking not only by the others who owned objects too but by the very ones that were looked down on that didn’t own objects and knew they never would. Because where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence off a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy; and as for objects, nobody had any more of them than you did because everybody had just what he was strong enough or energetic enough to take and keep, and only that crazy man would go to the trouble to take or even want more than he could eat or swap for powder and whiskey” (179).

As Simon (and many other critics) note(s), the passage above (emphasis mine) references this passage of Rousseau’s 1775 Second Discourse on Inequality:

“The first one who, having enclosed a plot of land, had the idea to say: This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror could the human species have been spared by someone who, by pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditches, would have cried to his fellowmen: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruit of the earth belongs to everyone, and that the earth belongs to no one”  (3:164; translated by Julia Simon).

The Rousseauian allusion in Quentin’s second-person description of Sutpen– “Because where he lived the land belonged to anybody and everybody and so the man who would go to the trouble and work to fence off a piece of it and say ‘This is mine’ was crazy”– depicts Sutpen, or at least a young Sutpen in rural West Virginia, as naive to the notion of capitalist ownership or property, but ironically “crazy” enough to go on to claim land of his own as an adult. Of course, unlike the hypothetical “first one” to claim ownership of land posited by Rousseau, when Sutpen eventually claims his land, he does so in what is already a “civil society” in Rousseauian terms.  He is not, then, inventing or convincing others of the legitimacy of private property itself, but legitimizing his specific claim to the specific land he wants within the society at work in Mississippi in 1833. To legitimize his claim we see Sutpen navigate and quite literally capitalize off of white supremacy.  Faulkner describes the beginning of this understanding of white supremacy and capitalism as Sutpen travels as a child out of rural Virginia: “That’s the way he got it. He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room. That is, he had begun to discern without being aware of it yet” (183). It is as if Sutpen’s coming of age, his loss of innocence,  is defined by his attunement to the racialized labor systems surrounding him. We can read Sutpen’s development from innocent child to land and slave owner as historians have read the movement from what Rousseau perhaps calls “nature,” or a society without property, to capitalism. In other words, Faulkner seems to be making a comparison here between land ownership in the U.S and primitive accumulation in general. As marxist-feminist historian Silvia Federici describes, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in brief force” were pillars of the process of land privatization across Europe  (Federici, 62*). These too are the pillars we see in Sutpen’s acquisition of land and wealth– from his questionable travels, to his acquisition of a huge number of enslaved laborers, to the rumors that he stole his land from a Native American, to his son’s murdering of his secret, other son, and perhaps eventually even to his own bloody murder at the hands of Wash Jones. Perhaps we can read the two murders, of Bon and of Sutpen himself, to be related to white supremacist anxieties regarding paternity. As Federici and countless other historians also note, with increased land ownership comes decreased mobility and reproductive freedom for women because of the new importance of paternal lineage that came with land ownership. After learning Bon is mixed-race, Henry kills him to eliminate the threat of miscegenation between him and Judith. Wash Jones kills Thomas Sutpen because Sutpen has renounced his paternal obligation to his granddaughter’s newborn baby. In both cases, white men murder the man who threatens their socially upward intergenerational, familial trajectory (or fantasy).  

P.S. I also want to touch on something very intriguing that Simon points out: Faulker has signed himself as the sole owner and proprietor of the Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha Co., Mississippi map in the back of Absalom, Absalom. He’s invented fictional land and given himself the property rights. In doing this, I wonder how he is implicating himself in this legacy of the white supremacist violence of land ownership and generational wealth. 

*Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York : London: Autonomedia ; Pluto, 2003.

I’m not going to lie. Up until this very last reading assignment, I was having a really hard time agreeing with Jeff’s prefatory remark that Absalom, Absalom! is one of Faulkner’s masterpieces. I was thrown for a loop and finding myself frustrated by the dense, difficult prose, the excessive—what seemed to be to me, at least—tangential asides, and the absence of a narrative voice to anchor and tell the story. I am more than pleased—astounded—by how the novel comes together and ends. 

Having gained the position of hindsight, I certainly appreciate Faulkner’s artistic choices in the formal development of the mythic rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen told by the various narrators; and, Julian Murphet’s reading of Absalom, Absalom! provides the analog of film and cinema to translate my involvement as a reader/audience member, much like the position Quentin and Shreve inhabit towards the end of the novel. 

It is most likely no accident that Faulkner starts the storytelling of Absalom, Absalom! through the account of Miss Rosa Coldfield. The intertextual nod to Charles Dickens by creating a Faulknerian Miss Havisham replete with having her embody and live up to her last name does not go unnoticed. However, there is a closed-off, narrow sense within the immediate containment of Rosa’s first-person narrative, as well as being inside of the stifling space of the Coldfield house which is positioned 12 miles away from the novel’s center of gravity, Sutpen’s Hundred. Perhaps it is the one-sidedness of Rosa that attributes to this narrowness? Or, could it be Quentin Compson’s role merely as passive listener? Perhaps it’s a little bit of both…

The stagnant quality of being in the doldrums with Rosa Coldfield gives way to a little bit of an opening when Jason Compson, Quentin’s father, takes the narrative reins and proceeds to fill in the gaps of her version. Rather than storytelling via direct experience, though, Jason is able to flesh out Rosa’s initial skeletal story of Thomas Sutpen with an element Rosa lacks: testimony transmitted to him by his father, Quentin’s grandfather. Still, Quentin’s involvement is that of being the one who listens and receives the information. Much like Rosa, Jason is also divulging, editing, and coloring his narrative based on his subject position and the biases attached to it. 

Absalom, Absalom! becomes a home-run when the reader leaves the landscape of Mississippi and figuratively cuts to the space of the Harvard dormitory where Quentin and his Canadian dorm mate, Shreve McCannon engage in consolidating all of the accumulated narrative fragments and endeavor to “play” by reconstructing the story as co-creators. Because Rosa Coldfield and Jason Compson are immersed in the immediacy of Jefferson as a space and their relation to Thomas Sutpen as a figure, their respective accounts also possess a limited, myopic quality. Taking from Quentin’s thought of the “ripples” of storytelling (210), my mind’s eye as the reader envisions concentric circles distinguishing the various narratives provided by Rosa, Jason, Quentin via Jason via Grandfather/Colonel Compson, etc. Much like a film director zooming out the camera away from the closeness of the Jefferson landscape, the setting of Chapters 7 and 8 allows for a distancing in order to engage in the dialogical synthesizing of information by Quentin and Shreve. True, much of the gaps filled by Shreve and Quentin may be pure imaginative speculation, but, I appreciate the sense of wonder and the drive to want to make sense of the fragments motivating their act of storytelling together. 

By popular request, I declined to schedule a formal research session with the Library staff. Reading your proposals, I do think many of you have lots of research chops, which is great. But some seem a bit tentative about where to look for appropriate scholarly sources and expressed anxieties (understandable ones!) about the challenge of quickly assimiliating dense scholarly books, the messiness of Google Scholar, and the “too-muchness” of modern search-based research methods.

I thus wanted to share a very helpful doc that Library faculty member Jennifer Newman put together for my undergrads. You can ignore the one or two references to ENGL 252 but should attend to the list of resources. Perhaps the most useful, because the most targeted to literature research, is Gale, which many students may not know about.