Of course, it’s the kind of book a person
would put first in a poll like that. You can feel reasonably confident,
in voting for it, that nobody quite fathoms it enough to question its
achievement. Self-consciously ambitious and structurally complex
(unintelligible, a subset of not unsophisticated readers has always
maintained), “Absalom, Absalom!” partakes of what the critic Irving Howe called
“a fearful impressiveness,” the sort that “comes when a writer has driven his
vision to an extreme.” It may represent the closest American literature came to
producing an analog for “Ulysses,” which influenced it deeply — each in its way
is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history
— and like “Ulysses,” it lives as a book more praised than read, or more
esteemed than enjoyed.
But good writers don’t look for impressedness
in their readers — it’s at best another layer of distortion — and “greatness”
can leave a book isolated in much the way it can a human being. (Surely a reason
so many have turned away from “Ulysses” over the last near-hundred years is that
they can’t read it without a suffocating sense of each word’s cultural
importance and their duty to respond, a shame in that case, given how often
Joyce was trying to be amusing.) A good writer wants from us — or has no right
to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time. A legitimate question to
ask is, What happens with “Absalom, Absalom!” if we set aside its laurels and
apply those things instead? What has Faulkner left us?
A prose of exceptional vividness, for one thing. The
same few passages, in the very first pages, remind me of this — they’re markings
on an entryway — sudden bursts of bristly adjective clusters. The September
afternoon on which the book opens in a “dim hot airless” room is described as
“long still hot weary dead.” If you’ve ever taken a creative-writing workshop,
you’ve been warned never to do this, pile up adjectives, interpose descriptive
terms between the reader’s imagination and the scene. But here something’s
different. Faulkner’s choices are so precise, and his juxtaposition of the words
so careful in conditioning our sense reception, that he doesn’t so much solve as
overpower the problem. The sparrows flying into the window trellis beat their
wings with a sound that’s “dry vivid dusty,” each syllable a note in a chord
he’s forming. The Civil War ghosts that haunt the room are “garrulous outraged
baffled.”
The rules Faulkner doesn’t ignore in this novel he
tends to obliterate. The plot, for instance. There is none. He tells us on the
third page (in italics) pretty much everything that will happen in the book,
actionwise. If you ever feel lost, you can refer back to it, a little
not-even-paragraph that begins, “It seems that this demon — his name was
Sutpen — ”
A fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold
information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative
endeavor is keeping things from falling together too soon.” What we discover,
though, on advancing into the novel’s maze, is that Faulkner has given nothing
away, not of the things he most values. He’s not concerned with holding us in
suspense over the unearthing of events but in keeping us transfixed, as he goes
about excavating the soil beneath them, and tracing their post-mortem effects
(embodied, perhaps, by the worm that comes to light in a shovelful of dirt,
“doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen
again”). The nightmare of the Southern past exists — an accomplished thing. To
delve into the nature of the tragedy is the novel’s drama.
For the same reason, we can gloss the book’s narrative
without fear of spoiling anything. In 1909 a boy from the South named Quentin
goes north to Harvard. A brooding, melancholy boy — if we had been following
Faulkner’s work in 1936, when “Absalom, Absalom!” appeared, we would know that
Quentin is preparing to kill himself (the act occurs in “The Sound and the
Fury,” published several years before), and so he is, in a certain respect,
already dead, a ghost narrator. But for now he remains somewhat ambiguously
alive. (And who knows, the universe of imaginative fiction functions
differently: in this incarnation, he may survive.)
He has a Canadian roommate named Shreve — not an
American Yankee, to whom the South might seem offensive (or worse, romantic),
but a true foreigner, for whom it is appropriately bizarre. All of America is a
South to Shreve. He is like us: he needs to have things explained. “What is it?”
he asks Quentin about the South, “something you live and breathe in like air?”
In a series of halting exchanges, Quentin tries to answer, about the South and
what it does to people. “I am older at 20 than a lot of people who have died,”
he deadpans.
Quentin tells Shreve a story from his hometown in
Mississippi, about a visit he paid earlier that year to an old woman he knows as
Miss Rosa. She in turn had told him — indeed, had summoned him in order to
entrust him with — another story, one from long ago, before the Civil War. The
shape of the novel, then: a shifting frame (Quentin’s disintegrating mind)
inside of which plays out a historical novel, with narrators of varying
reliabilities, and some chronological jumping around, never violent.
Quentin has gleaned parts of this tale from his father
and grandfather, from letters and in-town gossip. This is what Quentin is, we
start to see, and what Southerners are or used to be: walking concatenations of
stories, drawn or more often inherited from the chaos of the past, and invested
here with a special, doom-laden meaning, the nostalgia that borders on nausea —
the quality that most truly sets the South apart from other regions, its sheer
investment in the meaning of itself. In Quentin this condition has reached the
level of pathology.
Miss Rosa’s story, which she has gnawed on most of her
life — “grim haggard amazed” — concerns a man named Thomas Sutpen, a shack-born
Virginian who appeared in their county in 1833, peremptorily bought an enormous
tract of land and set about trying to create a plantation dynasty. You can find
readings of “Absalom, Absalom!” that identify Sutpen as the novel’s main
character, but it’s not really even correct to call him a character. Quentin is
a character: he’s conflicted. It’s what he can make of Sutpen that will
come to absorb us. Sutpen himself inhabits the novel like a figure in an
Egyptian frieze. His beard possesses greater reality than his mind and heart. He
has no motives, or rather, he has only the uncomplicated motive of ambition. The
novel speaks of his “innocence,” meaning in this case not that he is free from
sin but that he knows only the sins of children, of wanting more and to be
first. The sort of innocence that wreaks destruction.
Faulkner makes a set of choices, in reconstructing
Sutpen’s past, that ought to draw our attention. He tells us that Sutpen’s
Ur-ancestor probably landed in Jamestown on a prisoner-transport ship, and that
he grew up in a cabin in the backcountry (in what would become West Virginia),
and that he spent time in Haiti. These details point back to the earliest South:
the English coastal colonies, as an extension of the West Indian world (many of
the first Virginians and Carolinians were born not in the Old World but on the
islands). Sutpen arrives with a band of “wild” African slaves, most of whom are
unfamiliar with any European tongue: they speak in an island Creole. In buying
his land, which he calls “Sutpen’s Hundred” — the name itself a straining toward
colonial affectation — he treats not with a white man but with a local Indian
chief, a Chickasaw.
What Faulkner gains from this bundle of references is
a suggestion of cycles, of something ongoing. As the Southern frontier murders
its way west over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries — a phase absent to
the point of amnesia from our national memory, but which re-emerges here like a
wriggling worm — the region keeps generating Sutpens, repeating its themes:
Indian removal, class resentment and land hunger, as well as a stubborn race
hatred that coexists with intense racial intimacy. Faulkner needed Sutpen’s
story to be not just authentically but intrinsically Southern this way, less a
symbol than an instance of the Southern principle. Only then does it
make an adequate object for Quentin to fixate upon and go mad contemplating.
No book that tries to dissect the South’s psyche like
that can overlook its founding obsession: miscegenation.
There we reach the
novel’s deepest concern, the fixed point around which the storm of its language
revolves.
After Sutpen ran off to Haiti as a young man — it emerges that a
humiliating boyhood experience, of hearing a black slave tell him to use the
back door of a big house (he wasn’t good enough for the front), had produced a
shock that propelled him to flee — he married a girl there and fathered a son
with her. Soon, however, he discovered that she had black blood, and that his
son was therefore mixed, so he renounced them both. He sailed back to the South
to become a planter. A plausible thing for a white Southern male to have done in
the early 19th century. But what Faulkner doesn’t forget, and doesn’t want us
to, is the radical amorality of the breach. On the basis of pure social
abstraction, Sutpen has spurned his own child, his first son.
He remarries in Mississippi, with Miss Rosa’s older
sister. They have two children, a boy and a girl. Now Sutpen has land, a mansion
and progeny. He is almost there, almost a baron. We’re not absurd to think of
Gatsby here; one of the most perceptive recent statements on “Absalom, Absalom!”
was made by the scholar Fred C. Hobson in 2003, a simple-seeming statement and
somehow one of the strangest things a person could say about the book, that it
is “a novel about the American dream.”
As in any good book of that type, the past hunts
Sutpen and finds him: His son, Henry, goes off to the fledgling University of
Mississippi, where he befriends another man, Charles Bon. On a holiday visit to
Sutpen’s Hundred, Bon meets Henry’s sister, Judith, and falls in love with her —
or makes up his mind to possess her. What Henry and Judith don’t know is that
Bon is Sutpen’s abandoned Haitian son, come to Mississippi via New Orleans,
evidently in a sort of half-conscious, all but sleepwalking quest to find his
father. Charles Bon is thus both half-black and Judith’s half-brother.
Henry inevitably realizes the truth, and that he
cannot allow Bon to marry his sister. At the same time, he loves Bon — they have
a blood bond in more than one sense. When the war breaks out, they sign up
together to fight against the North, suffering alongside each other. But the
whole time they’re gone to war, Bon is thinking of Judith, and when the two
young men at last ride back to Mississippi, Henry knows he must act.
There follows what is arguably the climax of the
novel, although by the time we get there, we’ve rehearsed its import more than
once. Quentin recounts it to Shreve in a trance, there at Harvard, almost a
half-century later, the two of them becoming through a form of
transubstantiation not themselves but Henry and Bon. “Happen is never once,”
Faulkner says.
“ — You shall not,” Henry tells Bon, meaning,
you shall not marry my sister.
— Who will stop me, Henry?
— No, Henry says. — No. No. No.
Now it is Bon who watches Henry; he can see the
whites of Henry’s eyes again as he sits looking at Henry with that expression
which might be called smiling. His hand vanishes beneath the blanket and
reappears, holding his pistol by the barrel, the butt extended toward
Henry.
— Then do it now, he says.
Henry looks at the pistol; now he is not only
panting, he is trembling [. . .]
— You are my brother.
— No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep
with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.
This is a novel that uses the word “nigger” many
times. An unfortunate subject, but to talk about it in 2012 and not mention the
fact hints at some kind of repression. Especially when you consider that the
particular example I’ve quoted is atypically soft: Bon, the person saying it, is
part black, and being mordantly ironic. Most of the time, it’s a white character
using the word — or, most conspicuously, the novel itself, in its voice — with
an uglier edge. The third page features the phrase “wild niggers”; elsewhere
it’s “monkey nigger.”
Faulkner wasn’t unique or even uncommon in using the
word this way. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein — all did so
unapologetically. They were reflecting their country’s speech. They were also,
if we are being frank, exploiting the word’s particular taboo charge, one only
intensified when the writer is a white Southerner. Faulkner says “Negroes” in
plenty of places here, also “blacks,” but when he wants a stronger effect, he
says “niggers.” It isn’t a case, in short, of That’s just how they talked
back then. The term was understood by the mid-’30s (well before, in fact)
to be nasty. A white person wouldn’t use it around a black person unless meaning
to offend or assert superiority — except perhaps now and then in the context of
an especially close humor.
Even if we were to justify Faulkner’s overindulgence
of the word on the grounds of historical context, I would find it unfortunate
purely as a matter of style. It may be crass for a white reader to claim that as
significant, but a writer with Faulkner’s sensitivity to verbal shading might
have been better tuned to the ugliness of the word, and not a truth-revealing
ugliness, but something more like gratuitousness, with an attending queasy sense
of rhetorical power misused. I count it a weakness, to be placed alongside
Faulkner’s occasional showiness and his incessant “not” constructions, which
come often several to a page: “and not this, nor that, nor even the other thing,
but a fourth thing — adjective adjective adjective — made him lift the hoe”
(where half the time those things would not have occurred to you in your natural
life, but old Pappy takes his time chopping them down anyway).
The defense to be mounted is not of Faulkner’s use of
the word but of the novel in spite of it, or rather, in the face of it.
“Absalom, Absalom!” has been well described as the most serious attempt by any
white writer to confront the problem of race in America. There is bravery in
Faulkner’s decision to dig into this wound. He knew that the effort would
involve the exposure of his own mind, dark as it often was. You could make a
case that to have written this book and left out that most awful of Southernisms
would have constituted an act of falsity.
Certainly we would not want to take the word away from
Bon, in that scene in the woods, one of the most extraordinary moments in
Southern literature. A white man and a black man look at each other and call
each other brother. One does, anyway. Suddenly, thrillingly, the whole social
edifice on which the novel is erected starts to teeter. All Henry has to do is
repeat himself. Say it again, the reader thinks. Say, “No, you are my brother.”
And all would be well, or could be well, the gothic farce of Sutpen’s dream
redeemed with those words, remade into a hopeful or at least not-hope-denying
human story. Charles Bon would live, and Judith would be his wife, and Sutpen
would have descendants, and together they might begin rebuilding the South along
new lines. Granted Bon would still be marrying his half-sister, but that doesn’t
bother Henry very much (the book tells us so), and life is rarely perfect. There
is nothing to keep Henry from saying it, to keep him from reaching out his hand
to his black brother, nothing except the weight of the past, the fear of
ridicule, his own weakness. Instead of his hand, Henry brings forth the pistol.
The scene is one of the last things Quentin and Shreve speak of before the end,
that is before Quentin tells us his final story — about the day his own destiny
collided with that of the Sutpens. I haven’t really told you everything up
front, you see — and neither does Faulkner.
Even when he does tell you everything, you can’t
entirely trust it. No surer sign exists of the book’s greatness than how it
seems to reconfigure itself and assume a new dimension, once we feel we know it,
and these shifting walls of ambiguity were designed by Faulkner himself. They
allow the text a curious liquid quality, so that it can seem alive, as if it
might be modified by recent history too. I found it fascinating to read the book
with a president sitting in the White House who comes from a mixed-race
marriage, and with the statistic having just been announced that for the first
time in U.S. history, nonwhite births have surpassed white ones. Some of the
myths out of which the novel weaves its upsetting dreams appear quite different,
like walking by a familiar painting and finding that someone has altered it.
This is a strange time to be alive in America, in that regard. Close one eye,
and we can seem to be moving toward a one-race society; close the other and we
seem as racially conflicted and stratified as ever. Racism is still our madness.
The longer that remains the case, the more vital this book grows, for Faulkner
is one of the great explorers of that madness.
The novel is about even more than that in the end. It
attempts something that had never been tried before in the art of fiction, and
as far as I know has never been since, not in so pure a form — to dramatize
historical consciousness itself, not just human lives but the forest of time in
which the whole notion of human life must find its only meaning. Not to have
failed completely at such a task is indistinguishable from triumph. The South
escaped itself in this book and became universal.
This essay is adapted from the foreword to the new Modern Library edition of
“Absalom, Absalom!” to be published by Random House in July.
