10 pages into Absalom I put the book down for a second on my lap and said, “My God, WHAT is going on in this novel?” Where is the Faulkner I’m used to? TSAF, AILD, and LIA had such bold voices. We got to know each character from the inside. We lived and breathed them, we became them. I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on any of these characters just yet. I know the peripherals, the reputations, the hear-say that goes drifting through family lore and town gossip like tumbleweeds on a dirt road. But I haven’t been put inside them yet, like Benjy or Jason or Darl or Dewey Dell. Even Quentin, whose mind once dazzled and disturbed, now feels distant. But alas, as I’ve come to learn, there is little clarity at the forefront of a Faulkner novel, and much more at the end. The fog has rolled in, and I suspect it will dissolve over the second half of the novel.

It is the telling of a telling of a story, told by Miss Coldfield and Mr. Compson to Quentin, who in turn will tell the story to his Harvard roommate (whom we’ve already met in TSAF) Shreve. With Faulkner there is an on-going trope of characters passing on stories, usually with a sense of urgency, which is appropriate since this was Faulkner’s main artistic achievement: “So they had to depend on inquiry to find out what they could about him.” (25) It’s important to correlate the travel and movement of characters (as discussed by Leigh Anne Duck in her essay) with the travel and movement of stories. The two are necessarily intertwined. So the “legend” of Sutpen and his “wild negroes” is a kind of stage drama witnessed by the town’s men and brought back to the others in the form of lore: “So the legend of the wild men came gradually back to town, brought by the men who would ride out to watch what was going on…” (27)

I loved Andrew’s reading of the connection between the French architect and Faulkner’s own role as writer, the two artistic tasks overlapping in the elements of structure, design, and function: a story, once it is told, being a kind of interior house for one to live in. The parallel is applicable on many levels. If we look at Hemingway’s grand metaphor for writing as being a long, exhausting battle with a fish, ultimately eradicated materially yet triumphant spiritually, it will be interesting to see what becomes of Sutpen’s Hundred and his mansion. It is noteworthy that if the French architect is a parallel for Faulkner’s own artistic endeavor, he is a character whose only agency comes with creative input, but who has been basically forced to undergo the erection of Sutpen’s relentless vision. This might suggest that Faulkner had an idea of himself as a kind of slave to his own artistry.

I’m also seeing strong parallels with Wuthering Heights, in the structure of a novel being a story entirely told by a medial character who stands between author and us as readers; in the complex romantic triangulation involving family members; in the incestuous undertones of siblings; in the house as an enclosed space where psychological dramas and family violence is acted out; and in the traditional Gothic theme of ghosts: “the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still…” (4)