Faulkner’s descriptions of Sutpen’s Hundred carry the distinct whiff of Carolyn Porter’s argument from chapter 1 of William Faulkner, which linked the process of creating Addie Bundren’s coffin with the task of the novelist himself. Where coffin-making was the central metaphor for the artist in As I Lay Dying, several passages hint that the architect as the artist who stands in for the novelist of Absalom, Absalom! Their efforts dovetail in an act of divine creation that sets the epic stage for the novel’s action.

The parallels between architect and novelist suggest that Faulkner is indentured to his art until Sutpen’s Hundred is complete. As Faulkner writes of the architect, “Only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again.” (29) Like the French architect, Faulkner’s job here is to roll into a strange town to build something out of virtually nothing – taking about two years to do so – and usually receiving no pay in the process.  Similarly, the French architect suffers through the process of the house’s creation, but seems to function more as a puppetmaster to the mud-caked Sutpen and slaves in the furious act of house-building; as Faulkner writes, “the little grim harried foreigner [architect] had singlehanded given battle to and vanquished Sutpen’s fierce and overweening vanity or desire for magnificence,” the result of which would have been a house “almost as large as Jefferson itself at the time.” (29) Curious here is that Sutpen is described as having been powerful enough to have dragged the artist from Martinique on this thankless task, yet the architect calls the shots in how the house itself is built. This complicated power-struggle suggests a metaphor for the novelist in deep thrall of his subject who still retains the power to create a context for that character: Sutpen’s Hundred seems to stand as Faulkner’s monument to Sutpen the man, somewhat like the monument Shakespeare builds to his beloved in Sonnet 55. His description that Sutpen wanted the house to be “as large as Jefferson” also illuminates Faulkner’s futile attempt to create something — whether Sutpen’s Hundred or the novel itself — large enough to represent this town, or the South, as a whole. (See also: “it had been created to fit into and complement a world in all ways a little smaller than the one in which it found itself.” [6])

It is no surprise, then, that Faulkner goes further to link his and the architect’s creative acts to those of God. As Quentin observes, “the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light.” (4) The sense we get here that Sutpen and Faulkner both are create something out of Nothing – with explicit references to Genesis – is buoyed by Quentin’s conversation with Ms. Coldfield, who says that “Northern people have already seen to it that there is little left in the South for a young man.” (5) The house is situated on a world that has been destroyed, neutered by war, and, later, subdivided by carpetbaggers — making Sutpen’s Hundred a powerful Something amid the great Southern Nothing.

The link between art-making, house-building and divine creation even run into how the story is told. Through the first three chapters we are not being told this story but are receiving it with a succession of “Yessums,” courtesy of Quentin, as if the story is divine wisdom, which, coupled with the divine resonance which Faulkner gives the story of the house’s creation, gives us the sense that Sutpen’s Hundred functions as Yoknapatawpha County’s axis mundi, so to speak, connecting the world in which the house is situated — the “small world” of the South — with the mythic world of the Gods. In creating the house Faulkner also creates the stage upon which the mythic drama (starring the heroic Jason, the femme fatale Clytemnestra [48], the prescient Cassandra [15, 47, 48] and Niobe [8], whose children are all killed) unfolds.

I’ve sent individual comments via email to every student (BA + MA) who has submitted a second medium-length entry.  A couple of thoughts:

–the pot’s a bit light, as they say in Texas Hold ‘Em: if you haven’t posted at least two medium-length entries, make arrangements to do so or otherwise get in touch, since these assignments are a very substantial part of the grade.

–make sure to use tagging to designate, at a minimum, the length of the entry and the text/s it concerns.  So an entry on Lena will be tagged MEDIUM and LIA, plus perhaps GENDER or MOVEMENT or whatever else you can think of.

–I’m really pleased with what you’ve done so far as a group (well, two groups, technically): the second entries, on the whole, were markedly improved from already strong first entries.  Things are shaping up nicely.

–if you did an entry but didn’t get feedback, get in touch and I’ll look into it.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” Chapter six of Light in August begins this way. Readers are given an extremely vivid description of one of Christmas’ most intimate memories, the one with the toothpaste. Though it may seem insignificant, when looking for secondary and tertiary meanings under the primary literal one, as readers we can infer the effects of toothpaste.

“Once in the room, he went directly on his bare and silent feet to the washstand and found the tube. He was watching the pink warm coil smooth and cool and slow onto his parchmentcolored finger when he heard footsteps in the corridor and just beyond the door.” There are many things in these few sentences. One, we know Christmas is a very quiet boy. It also seems clear that he is often unnoticed; “…he was like a shadow, small even for five years, sober and quiet as a shadow.” The interesting thing about shadows are even though they are associated with the dark, they need the light to exist. The squeezing of the toothpaste onto his finger airs on the side of sexual and phallic. There is an image of a worm-like thing coming out of a bigger thing, or maybe there is a suggestion of ejaculation.  As the memory progresses Christmas is “squatted, among delicate shoes and suspended soft womangarments…pink-and-white…making his mouth think of something sweet and sticky to eat, and also pinkcolored…when he discovered the toothpaste in her room he had gone directly there, who had never heard of toothpaste either, as if he already knew that she would possess something of that nature and he would find it (p.120).” Before things were obviously phallic but very quickly there comes a switch between manliness and femininity. Christmas finds himself surrounded by womanly things and even seems to like it. He uses the word “delicate” which suggests a calm, gentle tone when describing or thinking about women. The toothpaste also belongs to the woman and he can taste something sweet and sticky, the implication blurred between whether Christmas is referring to the toothpaste or his ‘fantasy’ of woman.  The toothpaste is also not his, despite being five, Christmas knows the toothpaste isn’t his and what he is doing is wrong; “When they went away, he would replace the toothpaste and also leave (p.121).” Christmas is semi-aware of the difference between right and wrong at a young age. Toothpaste also serves as a representation of modernity. Toothpaste is something from the city, maybe even only the elite use it. There is the obvious meaning of hygiene and cleanliness, also the toothpaste belongs to a dietician which is very ‘modern.’

In one memory we learn quite a bit about Christmas. He is like a shadow, which means he is quiet, often lurking, and often falls into the background, alone. He also seems to be ‘obsessed’ with modernity, represented in the toothpaste, but cannot handle it hence his vomiting. Or maybe for the reader it represents Christmas’ attempt at modernity but it is taken away from him. “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” Chapter six begins with this quote. What we believe is the truth stays longer with us than what we know we remember and maybe what we think happened never happened at all. Christmas shares a memory from age five. Who Christmas is at present and who he was at five are different, what Christmas understood to have happened could have changed with perception as he aged.  

Faulkner’s Light in August, is a novel that grapples with the vague notion of race and how an individual’s racial identity is determined specifically by a white male in contemporary culture. Joe Christmas, a central character of the novel, is described as “parchment colored” and by virtue of being an orphan, he nor the society surrounding him can confirm if he is black or white. Through this, Faulkner demonstrates how the very attempt to confirm if an individual is black or white, is an absurdly simple-minded and meaningless notion.

Faulkner published the novel in 1932 only nine years after the United States v Thind case, in where the United States Supreme Court decided that Bhagat Singh Thind could not be a naturalized citizen of this country because he was not white. At a time where American society had three categories for races, (White, Black, Red) Thind argued that as an Indian, his ancestry traced back to the Caucasian line, therefore giving him a White background. In response, the Supreme Court deemed that “the conclusion that the phrase “white persons” and the word “Caucasian” are synonymous does not end the matter. The term “race” is one which, for the practical purposes of the statue, must be applied to a group of living persons now possessing in common the requisite characteristics, not to groups of persons who are supposed to be or really are descended from some remote, common ancestor. It may be trust that the blond Scandinavian and he brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.” (http://www.pbs.org/rootsinthesand/i_bhagat2.html)

More importantly, the Supreme Court clarifies the exclusivity of the privilege of being called white by stating that “what we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” (http://www.pbs.org/rootsinthesand/i_bhagat2.html) The Judicial branch clearly articulates that culture, as seen through the gaze of the common white man, and not biology dictates the understanding of race. There are countless examples that I won’t go into of why “common man” and “common speech” explicitly means “white man” and “white speech” (why don’t we have a Men’s History Month, and White History Month? because it is the standard).

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling that who is a “free white persons” is to be interpreted by the understanding of a common man, Faulkner is writing the story of Joe Christmas, whose racial identity is vague and shifting in accordance with the people he is interacting with.  Christmas’ first memory of his racial identity is shaped by the white man at the security desk who persistently watches Christmas as he plays with other children, with a “profound and unflagging attention.” (138) Faulkner writes, “with more vocabulary but no more age he might have thought this is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time.”(138) In his three years at the orphanage, it is this white man who “was a more definite person that anyone else in his life.” (137) The white man’s gaze of disgust is what Christmas realizes differentiates himself from the rest of the children. He understands that this differentiation has negative implications and thus “he accepted it.” (138) He feels deserving of punishment because he is different, because he is not white. He is not old enough to put these thoughts together but his unconscious and his memory fuel his motives and actions in his later life.

The power of a common white man in determining the race of other individuals is employed further in Joe Brown’s confession to the sheriffs about the fire. When he is accused of having been at the incident and having tried to falsely convince someone that there were no victims in the house, Brown becomes desperate and turns the case around by claiming that Christmas is a “nigger,” he contemptuously says, “go on, accuse me, accuse the white man that’s trying to help you with what he knows. Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run.” (97) The marshal and sheriff, who have both seen Christmas before and have never previously speculated that he was black, decide to take Joe Brown, a white man’s word about Christmas’ racial identity.

In contrast, when Christmas is leaving Jefferson, he is wandering and comes in contact with a group of women and men, in the dark where he can not see, Faulkner writes, that “he could smell negro, he could smell cheap cloth and sweat.” (117) One of the men peers down and observes Christmas, then remarks to the group, “it’s a white man.” (117) Faulkner includes this contrasting interpretation of race to show how the white man holds absolute control over the determination of race and to reveal the absurdity in the relative, irrational demarcation of race.

I’ve posted some more questions to guide your reading of the last two chunks of the novel.  If you’ve not read past ch 16 and are sensitive to “plot spoilers,” you should avoid reading the last cluster of questions.

Off-topic, but since we’re headed to the midterm, I thought I’d share this wonderful post from a CUNY colleague describing a “reverse midterm.”  Sounds like a great idea and one I’ll certainly use.  Next term.  Oh well.

A few new questions on chapters 12-15 are up on the questions page.  See you tomorrow.