ABSALOM, ABSALOM! HAS no close precedent, even in Faulkner’s own works. Hindsight suggests now that much in modern fiction, and in modern opinion, should have prepared us for it, but it is not really surprising that most of the early reviewers were bewildered. Like The Waste Land, Absalom has many voices but no official, sanctioned Voice. The voices in it speak from many points of view, none of them removed from the criticism of irony. Absalom demonstrated once more Faulkner’s artistic courage.
Compared with Absalom, The Sound and the Fury seems almost traditional. It shocks us at first by asking us to see the Compson world through the mind of an idiot for whom the present has reality chiefly as it reminds him of the past, and it takes us through two subsequent limited views of many of the same events before, in the last section, we come back again to the present to stay. Yet everything in the first three sections prepares us for the last, which corrects and completes them by centering on Dilsey. Nothing in what has preceded the last section, and nothing within it, undermines Dilsey’s authority. Aesthetically, we are compelled to accept her and the criticism of the others which her character and actions imply.
In Absalom there is no Dilsey, or anything corresponding to her. There is only Quentin, who speaks with no special authority, mostly in the words of others, and who does not act at all; and Shreve, who speaks as one amazed, even outraged, by a tale hard to credit and almost impossible to understand, and who, when he is not repeating what Quentin has told him, invents a version based on no uniquely privileged knowledge of the facts. Quentin and Shreve together finally imagine a version of Sutpen’s story that has both plausibility and meaning, but the plausibility rests upon our willingness to accept as correct certain speculations of theirs for which they can offer no solid proof, and the meaning is left implicit, without even such partial dramatic statement as Dilsey gives to the meaning of the Compson story in her section of The Sound and the Fury.
Quentin has grown up with the Sutpen legend. He does not have to listen very closely to Miss Rosa Coldfield’s retelling: he already knows not only the main plot but many of the sub-climaxes and lesser actors:
His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts. . . .
Quentin has heard it before—and he will hear it again, from his father later on this same afternoon and later still from Shreve. He lacks only the sense of reality and meaning that neither Miss Rosa, with the bias created by her hatred of Sutpen, nor his father, with his surmises that are sometimes shrewd but sometimes wide of the mark, can give him. The fact about Sutpen’s story that will not let Quentin rest is that everything is known about it except what is most important to know.
As Quentin tells his college roommate what he has been told and what he discovered for himself the night a few months before when he went to the ruined house with Miss Rosa, the two of them imaginatively recreate and relive Sutpen’s story. The novel that emerges from their cooperative retelling has seemed to many readers best defined as a lyric evocation of the Southern past: the novel as poem. Quentin and Shreve retell the facts about Sutpen and his children in order to discover the feelings that can make the facts credible, rehearsing the deeds to discover the motives. The result is a kind of poem on time and death and the presentness of the past which seems so remote when we know only the “facts,” a poem on the failure of the old order in the South, created by an evocation of the “ghosts” that have haunted Quentin’s life. Quentin and Shreve are young, imaginative, easily moved to sympathetic identification. The joint product of their efforts, as they work with memory and imagination, evokes, in a style of sustained intensity of pitch, a feeling of the mystery and a sense of the pain and defeat of human life. It conveys its impressions through some of the most sharply realized images in modern writing in a rhetoric strained almost to the breaking point by an agony of identification with the suffering of the characters.
But Absalom cannot be completely understood in terms of this analogy with a lyric poem. The insight is useful in its pointing to pure evocation achieved through a strategy of indirection, but it leaves the central fact of the form of Absalom—its multiple retellings of what is in one sense already known and in another sense eludes knowing—unrelated to the feelings evoked and the meanings created by the form. Much of Faulkner’s fiction may be called lyrical, and criticism today forces on us a recognition of the fact that all successful novels are in some sense like poems. The uniqueness of Absalom is not to be found here, so much as in the fact that it takes its form from its search for the truth about human life as that truth may be discovered by understanding the past, in which actions are complete, whole, so that we may put motive, deed, and consequence all into one picture.
Early in the book, as Quentin listens to Miss Coldfield, there is a passage which takes us some distance toward a recognition of the central theme and intent of the novel and suggests its strategy:
Quentin seemed to see them, the four of them arranged into the conventional family group of the period, with formal and lifeless decorum, and seen now as the fading and ancient photograph itself would have been seen enlarged and of whose presence there the voice’s owner was not even aware, as if she (Miss Coldfield) had never seen this room before—a picture, a group which even to Quentin had a quality strange, contradictory and bizarre; not quite comprehensible. . . .
The whole effort of Quentin and Shreve, who end by becoming twin narrators, is to comprehend what is “not quite comprehensible.” There is something in the picture “not (even to twenty) quite right”: they try to get it right, correcting each other’s “faultings,” sometimes supplying alternative explanations, imagining alternative motives and actions, sometimes agreeing, as on Bon. What was true for Quentin’s father as he talked on the porch on that September evening before Quentin went out to the old house with Miss Rosa is only a little less true for Quentin and Shreve:
It’s just incredible. It does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable. . . .
Quentin and Shreve think they know the answer to the question that baffled Quentin’s father at this point in his narration, but other questions remain for them to speculate on. Their difficulty is not in any paucity of “evidence”—of massed anecdote, belief, interpretation, even “facts,” such as the letter Quentin has before him as they talk and his memory of what he saw and heard on his trip with Miss Rosa. Their difficulty lies in making the leap from facts, or what they or someone else can only suppose to be facts, to understanding, to insight, to meaning.
The story they finally put together is a product of their imagination working as best it can toward truth with the over-abundant, conflicting, and enigmatic material at hand. As bias is balanced against bias and distorted views give way to views with different distortions, fragmented and overlapping pictures of people and actions emerge from the multiple mirrors and screens of the telling. Then the fragments begin to fall into place for us and at last they cohere in a story possessing an immediacy, a distinctness of outline, and an evocativeness almost unparalleled in modern fiction. The dim ghosts evoked by Miss Rosa out of the distant past take on flesh and their actions finally take on meaning as we move from Miss Rosa’s memories to Shreve’s and Quentin’s imaginings. A story is told, and a meaning expressed, despite a technique seemingly designed to delay the telling and withhold meaning.
There is a curious and significant relation between immediacy and meaning, on the one hand, and the number and complexity of the reflectors and screens, the “difficulties,” on the other. “Then he thought No. If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain.” Quentin and Shreve are both troubled by the impossibility of checking in some incontrovertible way the correctness of their interpretations. All their reconstructions are prefaced by “as if,” spoken or unspoken. Yet for the reader there is more lifelikeness in what Quentin and Shreve partly imagine than in what is “known” —as a comparison of Chapter Eight, presenting Bon from his own point of view as imagined by Shreve and Quentin, with Quentin’s retelling of Miss Rosa’s initial presentation of Sutpen, whom she had “known” very well indeed, will show. The implication is clear. An act of imagination is needed if we are to get at lifelike, humanly meaningful, truth; but to gain the lifelikeness we sacrifice the certainty of the publicly demonstrable. “‘Wait. You don’t know whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you believe. Wait.’”
In the language of science, the experimenter is not passive in his experiment; his nature and purposes not irrelevant to his results. Shreve and Quentin supplement and correct each other; and Shreve, Quentin, and the reader join with Miss Rosa and Quentin’s father and grandfather in a joint effort to understand Sutpen and search out what is hidden. Sutpen cannot be questioned, and Quentin’s experience in the house has to be understood in relation to matters that cannot be known with certainty; and then it becomes hardly distinguishable from what has been posited, imagined. The tale that finally takes shape in the mind of the reader of Absalom is in several senses a cooperative construct—not a figment or a fantasy but something creatively discovered.
As it may be said of the naturalistic novel that it attempted to probe behind conventional interpretations and values to get at “fact,” so it may be said of Absalom that it tries to get behind not only received interpretations but the public facts themselves to get at what Faulkner has called in the introduction to “Monk” in Knight’s Gambit, “credibility and verisimilitude.” One of the meanings of Absalom is that the central effort of the naturalistic novel, to transfer a “slice of life” onto the printed page without any shaping act of imagination, interpretation, and judgment, is impossible. It is impossible not because the sacrifice of art to truth is too great a price to pay but because without the kind of imaginative effort and creation we find always at the center of art, there is not only no art but no truth.
THE COMPLICATIONS of the telling can be clarified somewhat if we think of the basic story—Sutpen, from his early youth through the death of his remaining son and half-Negro daughter—as having not one but several narrative frames. The telling of the story by Quentin to Shreve—and partly later by Shreve to Quentin—makes the frame which encloses all the others. But this telling and retelling is based on versions of the same story, or of parts of it, given to Quentin by Miss Rosa and father; and father’s version is based in large part on a version given him by his father, who got it in part from Sutpen himself. Since in Quentin’s version each of these people speaks in his own voice, often at great length and circumstantially, with unintended revelation of himself in the process, what we have in effect is a series of frames, one within the other, like the picture of a picture containing a picture, and so on.
The outer frame, the telling of the story within the present of the novel—not the present of the first chapter, which is a memory of a day some four months before—takes place in Quentin’s college room at Harvard in January, 1910. At first Quentin is alone, reliving in memory that afternoon in Miss Rosa’s house and the later talk of Sutpen by his father. Then Shreve comes in and together they go over the story once more, with Shreve doing much of the talking, basing his version on what Quentin has already told him and using his imagination to fill the gaps. When they come to Bon’s part of the story they are in perfect agreement, though about Bon and his motives and character they know less than about anyone else. Finally they go to bed and Quentin relives in memory once more the evening with Miss Rosa at the Sutpen house of which he has already told Shreve. This Shreve-Quentin frame is the largest and most distant of the frames.
In the first chapter then we begin where memory intersects the past at a point very close to the present, with Quentin becoming actively involved in the story whose general outline he has known for as long as he can remember. Almost at once we move back into the more distant past with Miss Rosa, without however being allowed to forget the present (now already past) in which Quentin sits in the stifling room and listens. Then this frame, this telling, is replaced by a frame supplied by father’s account of Sutpen and his speculations on the meaning of the letter he gives Quentin. Again we move back and forth between past and present—the present of the telling, which is already past by the time we are able to identify it. Then the absoluteness of this frame too is destroyed and we see father’s telling of the story as only another version, and not without its distortions. Shreve and Quentin talking in their college dormitory room now supply the frame to replace Miss Rosa in her “office” and father on the gallery. Miss Rosa’s inadequacy as interpreter—her bias—has been apparent all along, and now it becomes clear that some of father’s interpretations and speculations too are unacceptable: “. . . neither Shreve nor Quentin believed that the visit affected Henry as Mr. Compson seemed to think . . .” But on another matter, “‘maybe this was one place where your old man was right.’” As the frames are shifted and the implicit distortions discovered, we see the motive for the continual retelling. Each new version is a part of the search in which Quentin and Shreve involve the reader, the search for a truth beyond and behind distortion.
So the past has to be continually reinterpreted; and each reinterpretation becomes a part of the accumulating past; a part even of the past which it attempts to interpret. A knowledge of the end supplies the motive for the search for the beginning: the earliest part of the story—Sutpen’s boyhood and young manhood before he came to Jefferson—is retold by Quentin, as his father had told him, in response to Shreve’s reaction to Miss Rosa’s completed story of the “demon.” Perhaps the demon could be understood if we knew what made him as he was. So the telling circles in on the story from a different angle—Sutpen’s own account, multiply filtered, of his past and his intentions. The motive for the retellings, the reinterpretations, each of which adds new facts as well as a new perspective and makes necessary a reinterpretation of the facts already known, is constant, and it supplies the organizing principle of the novel.
SHREVE’S ROLE as interpretive listener and finally as partial narrator is crucial. By the time we discover his presence we are more than halfway through the book and we realize now that both Miss Rosa’s telling and father’s retelling are part of the past which Shreve and Quentin have rehearsed. Now a new frame, more distant from Sutpen, comes into focus. As father had been less intimately involved in the Sutpen story than Miss Rosa, so Shreve the Canadian is less involved than father. The movement is one of progressive disengagement, a moving outward from the center. Yet the parts of the story that Shreve retells are among the most vivid and circumstantial in the whole book. Shreve’s imagination moves freely. His presence in the story makes possible the widest of the circling movements through which the subject is approached.
In one of his recapitulations, Shreve calls Sutpen, in a caricature of Miss Rosa’s own words, “this Faustus, this demon, this Beelzebub . . . who appeared suddenly one Sunday with two pistols and twenty subsidiary demons,” thus reducing Sutpen to ordinary size by his humorous exaggeration and offering an implicit comment on Miss Rosa’s “demonizing.” His humorous summary follows immediately after a recital calculated to make us feel the weight and at least the partial justice of Miss Rosa’s terms. Shreve’s presence in the book is one of the ways in which the tone is controlled.
Shreve puts Sutpen’s whole story in another kind of perspective when he says, toward the end, “‘So he just wanted a grandson . . . That was all he was after. Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than the theater, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it.’” Absalom has been called Gothic and obsessive, but true Gothic cannot survive irony, and obsession does not admit criticism. Here the irony and the criticism are central. When Shreve speaks of “the money, the jack, that he (the demon) has voluntarily surrendered” his very language, even when he is not offering any explicit comment, provides a perspective that can come only with distance and that could not come from Quentin, who is part and product of what he is telling.
As Quentin and Shreve sit “in the now tomblike air,”
the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere . . .
what emerges is substantially different from what would have emerged had there been no Shreve for Quentin to talk and listen to. In the context of the passage I have just quoted we don’t know for sure that there was a dishonest lawyer who had private reasons for wanting Bon to come in contact with his father, Sutpen, much less that the reasons Shreve is giving for the posited lawyer’s actions are the true ones. But we are ready now, prepared by the interchange between Quentin and Shreve, to speculate with them, to invent probable characters and fill in details to make the story, the given incomprehensible facts, plausible. This is one of the most extreme examples of the conjectural method of the whole search that Quentin and Shreve are engaged in; and it is made to seem natural, right, because Shreve, who cannot be accused of excessive closeness to the material, offers the speculation.
In the last chapter Shreve’s presence becomes decisive. He speaks for most readers when he says
We don’t live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves . . . and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget . . . a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman . . .
This would be a peculiar sort of comment for one of the two narrators to make at a climactic point if there were as little aesthetic distance in Absalom as some have said. In Shreve’s definition of the difference between his own Canadian background and Quentin’s Southern one there is an implied comment on Sutpen’s story that Quentin would have been incapable of making. Not that Shreve is right and Quentin wrong, but that Shreve’s is another, and clarifying, point of view. “You cant understand it,” Quentin tells Shreve. “You would have to be born there.” To which a comment Shreve makes later, on another matter, could serve as a partial reply: “The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years.”
And it is Shreve who at the end offers the prediction that “the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere” and asks Quentin why he hates the South. Shreve adds distance, controlling irony, to a story that otherwise might be obsessive or too shrill. If his final question to Quentin is, perhaps, somewhat unprepared for, so that we may find the ironic effect a little forced at this point, nevertheless he discharges his crucial function in the story with wonderful economy. His point of view is not the final one because there is no final one explicitly stated anywhere in the book. There are only other points of view and the implications of the form of the whole.
IN THE ABSENCE of chronologically related plot as the controlling factor, the relations of points of view govern the order of the chapters. Chapter One is Miss Rosa’s. Miss Rosa lives in the past, in the cherishing of her hatred and her frustration. Quentin is restive as he listens, not only because of the heat, and partly discounts what she tells him. Her view of the past is simple, moralistic, and, to Quentin, quite incredible. For her Sutpen was an evil man, satanic, with no redeeming qualities.
The next three chapters are Quentin’s father’s. His point of view is that of the interested but emotionally uninvolved rational observer. Unlike Miss Rosa, father is impressed by the mystery of human action and frequently confesses himself baffled in his search for understanding. If he is biased in any way it is slightly in Sutpen’s favor, partly because the town condemned Sutpen and father is an iconoclast who has little respect for conventional opinion, partly because much of his information he got from his father, who was Sutpen’s one friend in the community, the only one willing to defend him against outraged public opinion.
Chapter Five is Miss Rosa’s again. We are now prepared for a verbatim report of a part of what she said to Quentin that afternoon. Miss Rosa, it is clearer now, not only hates Sutpen but judges him from a point of view not wholly distinct from his own. Sutpen’s actions destroyed not only his “design”—his plan for his life, his purpose—but hers. She shares, it begins to appear, both his racial and his class prejudices, and she hates him chiefly because he destroyed for her that social eminence, respectability, and security which it was the aim of his design to secure for himself and his posterity. Yet though we recognize and allow for her obsessive hatred, we learn much from her account that we should not otherwise know, and we cannot entirely discount her judgment.
Chapter Six is Shreve’s retelling of what Quentin has told him of what Quentin’s father has told Quentin. Shreve keeps calling Miss Rosa “Aunt Rosa”: he does not quite understand, and he is not concerned to try to master, the details of Southern kinship ties and class etiquette. He sees “this old dame,” Miss Rosa, and her tale without any of Quentin’s painfully mixed feelings, simply with astonishment verging on incredulity. The snow on Shreve’s overcoat sleeve suggests the distance from which he views this tale which began for us in the “long still hot weary” afternoon when Quentin sat with Miss Rosa. And Shreve himself, with his ruddy vitality, contrasts sharply with the other narrators—with the passive Quentin and with Miss Rosa herself, whose very existence seems a mere “disturbance” of the dust of that “dead September afternoon.”
Parts of Sutpen’s story have been told and retold now from points of view both hostile and friendly or neutral, by narrators within his own culture, and again from a point of view entirely external. How did he view himself? What would be added to our knowledge of him and his motivations if we could share his own self-awareness? Chapter Seven gives us Sutpen’s story, the first part of it largely in a paraphrase of his own statements and some of it in his own words, as he told it to Quentin’s grandfather—and as grandfather told it to father and father told it to Quentin and Quentin told it to Shreve: there is no certainty even in ipsissima verba, no possibility of getting back to “the thing in itself” of Sutpen’s consciousness.
Sutpen saw himself alternately in the role of innocence betrayed and the role of a man who had made some mistake in adding a row of figures. Grandfather does not question his self-evaluation, simply passes it on. We are given almost no reason and very little opportunity, within the early part of this chapter, to question Sutpen or to step outside his frame of reference. The poor child who had been turned away from the door of the rich man’s house conceived a design for his life calculated to put him in a position where he could never again be humiliated by anyone. Since he could see that the rewards in life went to the “courageous and shrewd” and since, though he felt sure he had courage, he had failed in his design, he must have made a mistake, a miscalculation somewhere. What could it be?
Toward the end of the chapter there is, not negative moral judgment and certainly not Miss Rosa’s hatred of Sutpen, but a kind of neutral clarification of Sutpen’s own story offered in the comments of Quentin prompted by the interruptions of Shreve. Quentin interprets the “design” as essentially “getting richer and richer” and the innocence as a kind of moral obtuseness:
that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was all finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out.
Quentin’s father, on whose report Quentin is drawing here, sees Sutpen as “fogbound by his own private embattlement of personal morality” but he seems to accept Sutpen’s idea that his design was created solely for the “vindication” of “that little boy who approached that door fifty years ago and was turned away.” He gives us Sutpen’s climactic question to grandfather without indicating that he thinks we should have to redesign it to make it ask another question, with different assumptions in it, before we could answer it:
‘You see, I had a design in my mind. Whether it was a good or a bad design is beside the point; the question is, Where did I make the mistake in it. . . .’
Most of the material of this chapter comes ultimately from grandfather, who was not only Sutpen’s “advocate” but the only one in Jefferson who knew about the past which had shaped him to be what he was. Since this report of Sutpen’s history has the additional advantage, if “inside knowledge” is an advantage, of resting on Sutpen’s own self-awareness, it constitutes an effective foil to the “demonizing” of Miss Rosa, through whom we first met Sutpen.
Chapter Eight is Bon’s chapter, his story (and Henry’s, but chiefly his) as interpreted sympathetically by Shreve and Quentin. Shreve is no longer amused, ironic. He has been drawn into the tale now: this is a part he can feel, thinks he can understand. And for the first time he and Quentin are in complete agreement in their interpretive reconstructions. It no longer matters who is speaking: each is capable of taking up where the other left off, completing the other’s thought. This is the most direct and circumstantial segment of the whole tale. It might be called interpretation by immersion, or by empathy. It penetrates Bon’s consciousness to discover his point of view, reporting his experiences in detail, complete with imaginary conversations for which there is no warrant in the literally known facts. In place of Miss Rosa’s bald summaries of Sutpen’s whole career, mingled with moral judgments, we have here a detailed “realistic” rendering of the qualitative aspects of a few of Bon’s experiences. There is no certainty, of course, that Shreve and Quentin are right in the details of their reconstruction. They are biased, for one thing, being young like Bon and easily aroused to sympathy by the spectacle which the idea of him presents. And they are relatively uninformed, for another thing; there are some very crucial facts that they cannot know for sure, such as when Bon told Henry, if in fact he did tell him, that he was not only his half brother but was part Negro. Yet the reader is led by the circumstantial solidity of this chapter to feel more certain that this sympathetic account of Bon is correct than he is of any other interpretation he has encountered so far in the book.
Chapter Nine presents what might be called a general perspective on the whole tale. We are beyond the uniquely biased views of those who were closest to Sutpen. Two things happen at this point. First, Quentin and Shreve come into the foreground of the picture explicitly as narrators. No longer merely voices speaking to us in the words of the past, chiefly through direct and indirect quotation, they now appear as preservers of a past which must in some degree be created in order to be perserved. We are told more of Quentin’s immediate sensations than we have been told before. The afternoon in Miss Rosa’s house when she talked to Quentin in the office seems far away, as though it were as remote in time as in space. Miss Rosa is dead, and we recall from her tale chiefly a sense of the “victorious dust” that her recital made Quentin think of at the time. All those able to speak from direct knowledge of Sutpen are now gone; all that remains is the mutual creative remembering of Quentin and Shreve.
The second thing that happens is that as the appearance of objectivity evaporates the “facts” come back into focus and we move out again from subjective to objective. We learn for the first time in this last chapter what Quentin experienced that night when he went with Miss Rosa to Sutpen’s decaying mansion. Everything before this has been hearsay, rumor, conjecture, hypothesis, or, at best, biased accounts of matters of fact. Here we are in the presence of something that we know “really happened,” the terrible culmination of the Sutpen story. We are in a position to understand and to respond emotionally and imaginatively. Quentin does not need to theorize, or even create an atmosphere. The bare, elliptical, subjective record, the fragmentary memory, of what happened that night is enough. Without what has preceded the record would be meaningless. We now see that Quentin had to prepare Shreve for this direct confrontation with the living past; that any literal-minded insistence on “sticking to the facts,” would have made it impossible for these facts, the only ones connected with Sutpen that Quentin can be absolutely sure of from personal experience, to convey any meaning.
Though Quentin’s meeting with Henry is the one thing in the novel which may conceivably justify a charge of pointless mystification—why are we not told what Quentin learns from Henry?—yet I think the bareness of this climactic episode suggests its own justification. This meeting was a confrontation with a flesh-and-blood ghost. Here is proof that the past is “real” (though not yet, for Quentin at the time, explicable). This is the shock that motivates the search for understanding. In giving us the incident only in the barest outline, Faulkner is following the Jamesian formula of making the reader imagine. By the time we come to the episode in the book we have plenty of material for the imagination to work with. We discover, better than if we were told, that the past is still alive, still with us, demanding to be understood.
We end, in this last chapter, sharing Quentin’s and Shreve’s certainty about just two other matters of the first importance: that Sutpen brought his destruction upon himself, and that Bon asked only for recognition. But the first of these certainties rests upon the second, and the second is itself “certain” only if we either decide to trust Quentin and Shreve to be right or if we have so far shared their imaginative adventure as to arrive with them at the same conclusion. It is, at any rate, beyond proof. The whole meaning of Sutpen’s history hangs on this leap of the imagination.
BUT ABSALOM, ABSALOM! is not an exercise in perspectivist history, it is a novel; it tells a story. Each chapter contributes something to our knowledge of the action. It is true that we know something of the end of the story before we know the beginning, but what we know of the end is tantalizingly incomplete until we get to the end of the book; and what we know of the beginning of Sutpen’s story, by the end of the book, could not have been understood earlier. If tricks are being played with time here, if the form is less conspicuously temporal than spatial or conceptual, it is not in the interest of obscuring the story but of making possible an existential understanding of it.
The versions of the Southern past that Quention has grown up with he recognizes as inadequate, but he is not interested in adding to them one more subjective version, his own. What he is interested in is “the truth.” But the truth, he discovers, and we discover with him, is no rabbit to be pulled out of the hat by some sleight of hand. The traditional novelist’s pretense of omniscience could be kept up only so long as Miss Rosa’s view of life obtained. Just because Quentin is interested in truth he must reject too simple a view of it. The “spatial” form of the novel is, from one point of view, symbolizes, from another, Quentin’s probing beyond and behind appearances to get at reality. Absalom is conspicuously an orderly book, but the order in it springs from within, from the human need and effort to understand, not from anything external to itself. It substitutes an aesthetic and human order for temporal order. The result is a story inseparable from its meanings.
But the screens, the baffles that keep us from getting directly at the facts, are not only thematically expressive, they serve a more elementary, but indispensable, need of fiction. They do not lessen but increase the suspense. We learn in the first chapter, for instance, that Sutpen must have said or done something outrageously shocking to Miss Rosa to precipitate her departure from his house. We do not learn what it was until much later, but meanwhile we have never been allowed entirely to forget it. Again, we hear of Wash Jones early as an ill-mannered “poor white” who brought Miss Rosa the news of Bon’s death. We learn later that he was responsible for Sutpen’s death, but not how. We find out later still something of the manner of the death, hearing of the rusty scythe. But only toward the end do we witness the death itself, one of the great scenes in literature. Meanwhile our conception of Jones has been growing so that by the time we see him kill Sutpen we are prepared to see the action of this grim and silent avenger as both psychologically motivated and far-reaching in its symbolic implications. Our knowing ahead of time something of what would happen—as though we had a premonition at once certain and indistinct—has not lessened but actually increased the impact of the scene.
The characters of Absalom grow, emerge and develop, as we catch glimpses of them from different angles. When we finally confront Judith directly, after we already know the outline of her life, we are prepared to feel her few words and actions reverberating in areas that would have been closed to us without the preparation. She has become a figure of tragic proportions. The fluid and subjective quality of Absalom’s sifting of memory implies no diminution or beclouding of the world of significant action.
IF SHREVE and Quentin are right in their sympathetic estimate of Bon, then the immediate cause of the tragic events that resulted in the failure of Sutpen’s design was his refusal to recognize his part-Negro son. Bon, Shreve and Quentin both believe, would have given up Judith and gone away if he had had any sign at all from his father, even the most private and minimal acknowledgment of their relationship. Shreve and Quentin cannot be sure that they are right. If they are wrong and Bon was a conscienceless extortioner, then the failure of Sutpen’s design was caused, not by moral failure but as he himself thought, by ignorance, by the simple fact of his not knowing when he married her that Bon’s mother was part Negro.
The title of the book, with its Biblical allusion, supports the hypothesis of Shreve and Quentin. Sutpen would not say “My son” to Bon as David said it to Absalom even after Absalom’s rebellion. And different as he was from his father, Henry acted in the end on the same racist principle, killing Bon finally to prevent not incest but miscegenation. One meaning of Absalom then is that when the Old South was faced with a choice it could not avoid, it chose to destroy itself rather than admit brotherhood across racial lines.
But the theme is broader and deeper than the race problem which serves as its vehicle and embodiment. Sutpen was a cold and ruthless man motivated by a driving ambition to be his own god. His intelligence and courage won him a measure of success, but his pride destroyed him. In Martin Buber’s contemporary terminology, for Sutpen other people were objects to be manipulated, related to him in an “I-it” relation. He not only never achieves, he never once even approaches, an “I-Thou” relation. Sutpen was the new man, the post-Machiavellian man consciously living by power-knowledge alone, refusing to acknowledge the validity of principles that he cannot or will not live by and granting reality to nothing that cannot be known with abstract rational clarity. He lives by a calculated expediency.
Sutpen the rationalist and positivist would have agreed with a pronouncement in a recent book-length attack on the Christianity of Eliot and other modern writers, that “Progress for the whole human race would be, if not inevitable, at least highly probable, if a sufficient majority of people were trained to use their reasoning power on their general experience, as a scientist is trained to use his reasoning power on his special experience.”1 Sutpen of course was not so much interested in the progress of “the whole human race” as he was in the progress of Sutpen, but there the difference ends. When he came to grandfather to review his life he was concerned to discover not which of his actions had been morally right and which wrong but where he had made the mistake which kept them from being, as modern scienteers would say, “effective.” “Whether it was a good or a bad design is beside the point.” When he put away Bon’s mother, his first wife, on discovering her taint of Negro blood, he did so, he told grandfather later, because he found her “unsuitable to his purpose”—that is, ineffective for the forwarding of his intelligently conceived plan. Later he could calculate no advantage to be gained by recognizing Bon as his son, and he was not one to be moved by the incalculable. There is point as well as humor in Shreve’s characterization of him as Faustus. He is also related to Ahab and Ethan Brand.
The total form of the novel implies the ultimate reason for the failure of Sutpen’s design.2 Considered as an integral symbol the form of Absalom says that reality is unknowable in Sutpen’s way, by weighing, measuring, and calculating. It says that without an “unscientific” act of imagination and even of faith—like Shreve’s and Quentin’s faith in Bon—we cannot know the things which are most worth knowing. Naturally Sutpen failed in his design, and naturally he could not imagine where his error had been. His error had been ultimately, of course, in the moral sense, that he had always treated people as things. Even Bon falls into the same error when he tries to use Judith as a lever to move Sutpen, to get recognition.
Absalom also has implications about the nature and role of history that are worthy of further thought. Quentin’s effort to understand Sutpen is an attempt to interpret all history, man’s history. Quentin encounters two conflicting modes of interpretation, is satisfied by neither, and creates, with Shreve, a third that has some of the features of both.
Miss Rosa’s interpretation epitomizes the traditional views with which Quentin has grown up. This “demonizing,” this interpretation in terms of inflexible moral judgment, does not, to his mind, explain: the past remains incredible and unreal. Nor is he satisfied by his father’s view that there is no meaning at all in history, that the only proper response is to call it a mystery that we are “not meant to understand.” Father is as close to nihilism here as he was in The Sound and the Fury. Between Miss Rosa’s belief that Southern history was God’s punishment of the South, and of herself in particular—precisely for what she is unable to imagine—and father’s denial of any intelligibility, Quentin is unable to choose.
The view that he and Shreve together work out has in common with these two views more than its tragic cast. Implicitly—and unlike Miss Rosa’s and father’s views the final one in the book is wholly implicit—they find room for moral judgment: Sutpen’s hubris, his narrow rationalism, his lack of love, all these are descriptions that imply the relevance of moral judgment. But Quentin and Shreve do not categorize Sutpen as simply a “bad” man: they know that to do so is to substitute judgment for explanation. With father they feel the mystery of human life, but they are not satisfied cynically to give up the effort to understand. The view in terms of which they operate is that of classical-Christian tragedy, at once Greek and Biblical: history contains both God’s judgment and man’s decision, both necessity and freedom, and it has sufficient intelligibility for our human purposes. But its meaning is neither given nor entirely withheld. It must be achieved, created by imagination and faith. Historical meaning is a construct.
Such a view of history contrasts sharply with Marxist and “scientific” theories of history, but it has much in common with the best historiography of the thirties and of our own time. It has in it something of the historical relativism of the school of Beard and Becker. Becker’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1931 criticized simplistic notions of historical “fact.” Robinson’s “new history,” more than a decade older than Absalom, had been an attack on “scientific” history. More recently, Herbert Butterfield’s essays on the philosophy of history, in History and Human Relations and Christianity and History, are written in terms of assumptions perfectly consistent with those that are operative in Absalom. Oscar Handlin’s recent Chance or Destiny: Turning Points in American History brilliantly displays the interpretive possibilities which a creative search like that of Quentin and Shreve may offer. As a novel built from the clash of conflicting views of history, Absalom seems to me as relevant now as when it was written.
No doubt Absalom gets its chief effect as a novel from our sense that we are participating in its search for the truth. Absalom draws us in, makes us share its creative discovery, as few novels do. The lack of an authoritative voice puts a greater burden on us as readers than we may want to bear. Faulkner ran this risk when he wrote it. He has had to wait long for a just appreciation of its greatness. Few readers were ready for it in the thirties. But if we can and will bear our proper burden as readers we shall find the rewards correspondingly great.
Absalom is the novel not denying its status as fiction but positively enlarging and capitalizing upon it. It appropriately closes Faulkner’s period of most rapid and successful productivity with a full-scale thematic exploration of what had been implied in all the major works so far: that fiction is neither lie nor document but a kind of knowledge which has no substitute and to which there is no unimaginative shortcut. Adding to this the implication that fiction is not unique in its dependence upon imagination and the necessary deviousness of its strategy, it suggests a view of life that Faulkner was to make increasingly explicit in later works.