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Sutpen and The South: A Study of Absalom, Absalom!
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Seven years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury came Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The Sound and the Fury dealt with the fall of a family, Absalom deals with the fall of a society. The Quentin Compson of Absalom is not quite the same as the earlier Quentin: his concern is social rather than personal and his role is identified for the most part with a central quest in the novel—the quest to discover the truth about the rise and fall of his South. In its search for the truth about a whole society, the novel circles and shuttles back and forth in time, its sentences twist and strain, and its narrators attempt to recreate a past on the basis of some fact and much conjecture. Sometimes the narrators mislead unintentionally, sometimes they contradict one another, and often they are carried away by their own bias, preoccupation, or imagination. Yes, it is hard to come by truth, but still one might question whether a novel whose pitch is too shrill, whose approach is emotional and poetic, whose perspective seems unclear and shifting—one might question whether such a work presents the best way of getting at historical truth. The method of narration apparently mirrors not only the difficulty in getting at truth but the struggle to face truth. For all its straining, its complexities and obscurities, Absalom, I would conclude, is Faulkner's most historical novel.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965
References
1 Ilse Dusoir Lind, “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!” in Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (eds.), William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1960), p. 278; and in PMLA, lxx (December 1955), 887.
2 For example, Mrs. Vickery treats Sutpen as “a mirror image of the South”; O'Connor as “the essence of the history of the South”; Howe regards Absalom as the “story of the fall of the homeland”; Sullivan as “the complete statement of Southern ambition, execution and success, guilt, doom and destruction in one novel”; Hoffman as “the vision of the South as a whole (or of human society itself) as a creation of this selfish and impulsive drive”; and Waggoner as both “a lyric evocation of the Southern past” and a “search for the truth about human life as that truth may be discovered by understanding the past.” See Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 92–95; William Van O'Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1954), pp. 94–96; Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 161; Walter Sullivan, “The Tragic Design of Absalom, Absalom!” South Atlantic Quarterly, l (Oct. 1951), 560; Frederick J. Hoffman, William Faulkner (New York: Twayne, 1961), pp. 74–79; and Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1959), pp. 149–153.
3 This is Cowley's statement, which Warren paraphrases. See Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction to The Portable Faulkner,” and Robert Penn Warren, “William Faulkner,” in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, pp. 102 and 111 respectively.
4 Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 306, 307.
5 “Faulkner's Mythology,” in Three Decades of Criticism, pp. 83–84.
6 Avery Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1953), p. 11; and Herbert Weaver, Mississippi Farmers, 1850–1860 (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1945), pp. 11–13, 28–29, 41, 48, and 57.
7 Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933), pp. 41, 247–248; and Ward L. Miner, The World of William Faulkner (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 18–36.
8 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Knopf, 1946), i, 204.
9 See, for example, Howard W. Odum, The Way of the South (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 23; Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1947), p. 216; and Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York: Scribners, 1950), pp. 25–27.
10 The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), p. 24.
11 Ibid., p. 33. See also Frank Lawrence Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1949), p. 90.
12 Cash, p. 73. See also Craven, The Coming of the Civil War, pp. 17–18; and Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, p. 248.
13 Cash, p. 73.
14 Historians have long recognized that the Cavalier and planter legends derive from wishful thinking rather than fact. For early research on the subject, see Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.: privately printed, 1910), Preface and pp. 1–21 [recent editions of his works have been published by Russell and Russell]; and G. W. Dyer, Democracy in the South Before the Civil War (Nashville: Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1905), pp. 30–34. Although Wertenbaker established convincingly the non-aristocratic origins of the Virginia gentry, W. J. Cash, writing a generation later, had to explode the myth again. For other historical commentary, see Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War, pp. 17–34; C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 12–13; and William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: Braziller, 1961), pp. 17–18, 67, 96, 146–148, 203–205, and 334–341. The general acceptance of the Sartoris-Snopes interpretation of Faulkner's works suggests that the myth, in another form, still lives with us.
15 Cash, p. 71. Avery Craven states: “A careful study of biographical materials and facts revealed in the manuscript census shows that only some 7.73 per cent of the men who represented Virginia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee in the House and Senate from 1850 to 1860 were plantation owners or had come from families of plantation owners.” Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, p. 163.
16 William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1942), p. 256.
17 William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 258. These words are voiced silently by Colonel Sartoris' son as he broods over his father's character.
18 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 44.
19 Ibid.
20 Faulkner in the University, ed. by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1959), p. 281.
21 Many critics have recognized that the Sutpen story is Quentin's story too, that its full meaning does not make itself felt until the story has impacted upon Quentin's brooding, Hamletlike conscience. The very tension between Quentin and what he is hearing and telling gives the novel its peculiar shading and significance. Faulkner himself has said that Absalom is both the story of Sutpen and “the story of Quentin Compson's hatred of the bad qualities in the country he loves” (Faulkner in the University, p. 71). A good analysis of this aspect of Absalom may be found in an essay by Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 133–147.
22 Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 303. All quotations from Absalom are from this edition.
23 Cash, p. 42. See also Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, pp. 90–91.
24 That Faulkner places little stock in the genealogical claims of Southerners may be inferred not only from the origins he assigns to Sutpen but from the words he puts into the mouth of Sartoris himself: “In the nineteenth century … genealogy is poppycock. Particularly in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance and where all of us have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance is the Old Bailey.” Sartoris (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 92.
25 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1952), pp. 42–183; and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Folk: Then and Now (New York: Holt, 1939), pp. 126–144.
26 The Burden of Southern History, p. 62.
27 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
28 It is of course difficult to appraise the moral and psychological damage done to the Negro in the process of enslaving him. One can suggest, however, some historians and commentators who provide information and insight: Frederick Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (New York: Ungar, 1959); F. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York: Dryden, 1948); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom; W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Folk: Then and Now, Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1947); Daniel P. Mannix, in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Viking, 1962); and Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, edited by Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1960).
29 See Cash, pp. 97–98.
30 Howe, p. 164.
31 I owe this idea to Konrad Hopkins.