Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Wow! What a great book. And yes, like a Broadway show, the title ends with an exclamation point.

This is the first Faulkner entry in my book diary. I have read Faulkner previously but only long before the summer of 2020 when I began this diary. I read The Sound and the Fury in high school and was thrilled to discover the scope of what was possible in fiction. That pillar of modernist literature seems like an ambitious read for a high school class, but with a supportive teacher to guide us through that novel’s complexities, it really wasn’t that difficult. I read As I Lay Dying at UCLA for a class, called “The Great American Novel”. (We also read The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby, and Lolita, among others.) I read Light in August on my own, about the same time, and found that slow-going, frankly. And then I turned to other novels and novelists and left the rest of Faulkner’s large output untouched.

As Jim and I were moving a few months ago from our downtown apartment to our new apartment in Park La Brea, we culled most of the books we had collected to make for an easier move, and to create space for other uses in the new apartment. I kept a few dozen of my favorite hardbacks and the niche titles that were personal to me (gay fiction and books about Los Angeles, mostly), but got rid of a lot of paperback classics: books I loved reading, but didn’t need to own physically. My local bookstore had stopped buying used books during the pandemic, but they do accept donations so I made several trips carrying two bags at a time the three blocks to the store and unloaded them at the desk. As I dropped off the final load, the clerk thanked me. I said he was welcome but I also wondered to him if it would be possible to ask for a twenty dollar credit. He said, “I can do that,” and gave me twenty-five. I’ve been meaning to read more of Faulkner, and re-read the novels I’d read before, and the store had a very nice hardback edition of Absalom, Absalom! in a glass case, so I bought it with my credit and brought it home; one book I hadn’t read in exchange for dozens I had. I ended up re-reading Anna Karenina first.

Like The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, Absalom, Absalom! from 1936, is told through multiple narrators. In the The Sound and the Fury there are four: three children of the Compson family: Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and a third person narrator telling the story of a family servant named Dilsey. In Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson appears again as character and narrator. He commands the entire novel as the story is either told to him by another narrator or he tells the story himself as he speaks to someone else. But the story is not Quentin’s story and no others of the Compson family appear except for Quentin’s father. Instead, Quentin and the other narrators tell the story of Thomas Sutpen and Sutpen’s lineage from the time Sutpen first appeared in the town of Jefferson Mississippi in 1833 through the Civil War and Sutpen’s death up to the final dissolution of his line in 1909. Quentin learns this story in September of 1909, first from a Miss Rosa Coldfield (our first narrator), whose older sister, Ellen, married Thomas Sutpen, and from Quentin’s father, (our second narrator) who heard much of the story from his father who was Thomas Sutpen’s closest friend in town. Quentin then tells the story to his roommate at Harvard over one long night in January, 1910. The roommate, Shreve, also shares the narration in these later chapters, as he and Quentin speculate on what might have happened beyond the facts they know, or presume to know.

From The Sound and the Fury we know that Quentin will kill himself six months later, although there’s no hint of that in this novel. Quentin’s chapter in The Sound and the Fury takes place on June 2, 1910, the day that he jumps from a bridge into the Charles River and drowns. The parallels between the two novels, and divining the probable reason that Faulkner chose to have Quentin narrate much of Sutpen’s story, is one of the pleasures of Absalom, Absalom! More on that later.

The novel begins in Jefferson Mississippi in September 1909, with Miss Rosa Coldfield, an angry, old, woman, seemingly older than her 65 years. She is living alone in a house in town she used to share with her father until he died during the war, 45 years earlier. Rosa’s older sister, Ellen, who also died during the war, had been married to Thomas Sutpen, who created a plantation before the war twelve miles outside of town called, “Sutpen’s One Hundred.” Rosa begins to tell this story to nineteen year-old Quentin Compson as he sits with her in a darkened room in her house in town. As in the first chapter of The Sound and The Fury, the chapter narrated by the idiot son, Benji, this first chapter introduces to the reader a very complex story in a very disjointed way. We learn only bits and pieces, out of order as Rosa’s thoughts scatter through her memories, and with oblique references to people and incidents she knows well but we aren’t yet familiar with. Faulkner demands patience from his reader through this section, but the story emerges more clearly later, like a blurry projected image slowly being brought into focus. The novel’s pull for the reader is our quest to learn the specificity of what really happened.

Rosa has invited Quentin to her home because she has plans, later that evening, to go out to the remnants of the Sutpen plantation, now a single acre and a ruined mansion, and she wants young Quentin to accompany her for support and perhaps protection. So after the first short chapter, while Quentin and Rosa wait for nightfall, Quentin returns to his home and the second chapter picks up with Quentin and his father sitting on the porch (Faulkner calls it “the gallery”) with Quentin half-listening to more of the story from his father, who heard it himself from his father, who had been an early friend of Sutpen’s when Sutpen first appeared in town. Chapters III and IV continue Mr. Compson’s narration of the story as he tells it to Quentin.

In the very long Chapter V, written entirely in italics, we jump back to Rosa’s telling of more of her portion of the story to Quentin in her home, earlier that evening. For Chapter VI, we jump four months forward in time to January, 1910, and to a sitting room overlooking the quad at Harvard. Following that September evening in Mississippi, Quentin left for college, and now Quentin is telling the story to his eagerly listening roommate, Shreve. Chapter VII ostensibly continues with Quentin telling the story to Shreve, but the story he tells in this chapter centers on a story that occurred very early in Sutpen’s story when Sutpen is first building his mansion outside Jefferson, and during that story (from eighty years earlier), Sutpen tells the story of his life as a boy and young man. Sutpen’s tells this story to Quentin’s grandfather, who must have retold it to Quentin’s father, and retold again from father to Quentin who now retells it to Shreve. You can see that Faulkner has arranged his narrators so that the story comes nearly entirely second or third hand, compounding the intriguing challenge for the reader of discerning the truth and opening up the possibility for the narrators to speculate on several different interpretations as well as for the reader to invent their own. Chapter VIII continues with Quentin telling the story to Shreve, although by now they are both spinning the story together, filling in assumptions and motivations and speculations far beyond what Quentin can actually know. The final chapter, Chapter IX, concludes the long night of Quentin and Shreve telling the story, but also includes Quentin’s telling of what happened that night back in September when Quentin drove Miss Rosa out to the decaying mansion to confront what she thought would be there.

So what is Sutpen’s story? Well, the enjoyment of the novel is in the complexity and surprises of the story as it unfolds through hearsay and disordered chronology. So I’ll only give a skeleton synopsis here.

Thomas Sutpen was born in 1807-ish in the mountains of what would later become West Virginia. As a boy, he and his family moved to the tidewater region of Virgina where they settled as hangers-on to a plantation. Here, Sutpen developed the determination to become wealthy himself in the style he observed of the plantation owner. Learning that there were riches to be had in the West Indies, Sutpen becomes an overseer on a sugar cane plantation on Haiti. He does become rich, marries the daughter of the plantation owner, and has a son by her, but then, for reasons not immediately revealed, divorces her, leaving her and the child most of his wealth, and returning to the U.S. to start again on his path to wealth; his “design” he calls it.

He comes to Mississippi, in 1833, bringing twenty slaves with him from the Caribbean. He finagles one hundred acres of land outside of Jefferson from the native Americans and builds a mansion surrounded by cotton fields. In 1834, with one of his slave women, he fathers a daughter, Clytemnestra, called “Clytie.” In 1838, he marries a local girl, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen gives birth to a son and daughter: Henry and Judith. A few years later, Ellen’s mother gives birth to Rosa, Ellen’s much younger sister who becomes aunt to the slightly older Henry and Judith. Ellen and Rosa’s mother dies giving birth.

(A side note here. Absalom, Absalom! is a story of fathers and sons with almost no mothers present. The title of the novel comes from a Bible verse (II Sam. 19:4) where a father, King David, weaps over the death of his son, Absalom. Thomas Sutpen as a child is raised by a father and older sisters with no mother. Rosa Coldfield is raised by her father and an aunt after her mother dies in childbirth. Quentin Compson’s mother appears in The Sound and the Fury but she is never mentioned in Absalom, Absalom! and only his father appears. None of the women Rosa, nor Judith, nor Clytie are mothers.)

In 1859, Henry begins college in Oxford, Mississippi. There, he meets and dotes on an older student named Charles Bon. When Henry brings his friend home on school break, Ellen Sutpen works to arrange a match between Charles and Judith. But, in a private conversation, Sutpen tells Henry he forbids the two to marry setting up a central mystery (why?) and the central dramatic action as Henry decides how to respond.

Henry and Charles go back to school and then, with war starting, join the Confederate Army. Sutpen also joins the war, in a different regiment. During the war, the slaves run off and Ellen dies. Mr. Coldfield also dies and Rosa left alone moves out to the plantation to join Judith and Clytie.

At the end of the war, Henry kills Charles Bon at the gates of the plantation to prevent Charles from going through with his plan to marry Judith. Then Henry runs off to avoid being arrested for murder. Sutpen returns from the war to find his wife dead, his son gone, and his plantation in ruins, so for a third time, he starts again on his “design.” First he proposes to have a son with Rosa, who refuses him and moves back to town. Then he impregnates the fifteen year-old granddaughter of a white man named Wash Jones who lives on his property as a sort of caretaker. When that child turns out to be a daughter, Sutpen spurns the teen-aged mother and Wash kills Sutpen in anger and then kills the mother, the baby, and himself.

Next, a man appears at the plantation who is a son that Charles Bon had with a woman Charles knew in New Orleans. This is Charles Etienne de Saint Velery Bon. He arrives with a wife. They have a son, named Jim with the last name misheard as Bond. (Yes, his name is Bond, James Bond.) In 1884 both Charles E St V Bon and Judith die of yellow fever, leaving now only Clytie and Jim Bond (and perhaps Jim Bond’s mother; it’s unclear) at the plantation, and Rosa living in town.

And then, at last, in September 1909, Rosa takes Quentin out to the plantation because she believes someone else is living there. They arrive and confirm that Henry has returned, now very ill. Three months later, in December 1909, with Quentin off to Harvard, Rosa arranges for herself and an ambulance to go out to the plantation and bring Henry into town for medical care, but when they arrive at the mansion, Clytie, prepared for this, burns down the house, destroying it and killing herself and Henry. Jim Bond runs off. Rosa is injured and dies a few weeks later. Quentin learns of Rosa’s death by a letter from his father he receives at Harvard in January 1910.

It may seem I’ve given more than a skeleton summation of this complicated story, but I haven’t. There are many more details and twists and turns. It’s been a long time since I read a novel as I did this one where I couldn’t wait to return to it and find out the next part of the story. It’s really great. The secondhand narration gives the effect of having an incredibly baroque family story told to you by a relative who no longer cares to keep secrets no matter how shocking. And some of it is quite shocking almost nudging into over the top territory within the Southern Gothic style. But it’s all good fun as fiction, and it is all told in Faulkner’s amazingly rich and wonderful prose. After the first chapter, once the story begins to become clear, it’s not a difficult read, but you must be patient with some very long sentences (including what was at the time the longest sentence in literature beginning in Chapter VI on page 181 with, “Just exactly like father…” and finally reaching a period on page 187) and some highly elevated vocabulary.

When I read Ticket for a Seamstitch recently, the edition I read began with an essay by the author, Mark Harris, complaining about the kind of popular writing that spoon-feeds every detail of the story to a lazy reader, and Harris praises, instead, the kind of author, like Faulkner (Harris’ example) who makes the reader come forward to the material, rather than lay back. I appreciate that. I enjoy writing that asks me to participate, to stay aware and involved, that makes me look up a word I don’t know now and then. Absalom, Absalom! does that. I was brought along with the story, my mind constantly asking questions but willing to wait and noticing with pleasure when Faulkner finally got around to revealing his answers.

And I must say, like with The Brothers Karamazov, how thrilling it is to have a beautifully written and provocatively themed novel be, at its heart, just such a great story. Faulkner means nothing less than to tell a story of the rise and fall of the American south through the tragedy of an ambitious but morally corrupt man, but I cared about the man himself as a (fictional) person, not just as a symbol of anything larger, although that larger resonance is what lingers after the story is over.

I had a wonderful several days reading this novel and happily place it among the best I’ve ever read, as well as place the copy I bought beside my other favorites on the bookshelf in my new apartment.

I also want to share my thoughts about why I believe Faulkner chose to re-use his character of Quentin Compson to tell this story. But to do so, I must reveal the reason that causes Sutpen to forbid the marriage between Charles Bon and Judith. If you’d rather have that information in the artful (and Nobel Prize winning) way Faulkner reveals it in the novel, rather than from me, stop now.

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In Absalom, Absalom!, the question of why Thomas Sutpen forbids Charles Bon from marrying his daughter Judith is a central mystery. Because the conversation where he reveals his reason to his son Henry is a private conversation between just Sutpen and Henry, none of the novel’s narrators know for sure. Solving the mystery of what Sutpen says to Henry also reveals the answer to the literary question of why Faulkner gives their story to be narrated by Quentin Compson.

The novel proposes three answers as to why Sutpen would forbid a marriage between Charles and Judith. Any or all might be true. The second is especially resonant to Quentin.

First, we’re told that Charles has a mistress in New Orleans and a child, this is Charles Etienne de Saint Valery Bon. But not just a mistress, it may also be that Charles has married this woman, which would make him a bigamist if he married Judith. And, to further the scandal, the mistress is an octoroon, which would put dishonor on Charles as a white man if he had married her. That’s reason number one.

Reason number two is that Charles is actually Sutpen’s son, the son he had from his first marriage to the daughter of the Haitian plantation owner. Charles is Henry and Judith’s older brother (half-brother) which would make a marriage between Charles and Judith incestuous. This is the reason for Quentin to be in this novel. In The Sound and the Fury Quentin is tormented by sexual feelings toward his sister Cady, and at one point even confesses to his father that he and Cady have had sex, although this isn’t true. Cady is never mentioned in Absalom, Absalom! but readers of the earlier novel will remember Quentin’s obsession with his sister and will feel that hidden truth of his circumstance running like a live electric wire beneath everything Quentin says about Charles and Judith.

The incest theme also explains the title of the novel. In Second Samuel, chapters. 13-19 a son of King David named Amnon lusts for Tamar, who he calls “my brother’s sister” (so perhaps they are half siblings like Henry and Judith and Charles). Tamar refuses Amnon so Amnon takes her by force and then discards her. Then Amnon’s brother, Absalom, avenges tamar’s rape by killing Amnon, just as Henry kills Charles Bon. Absalom flees after the murder just as Henry flees. In the Bible story, Absalom eventually returns but avoids his father and then raises an army to usurp his father and become King. Absalom’s treason is put down and Absalom is killed though David had hoped to spare him. It is upon hearing the news of Absalom’s death that David cries out with a loud voice, “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!” (II Sam. 19:4). If Henry is Absalom in the incest and revenge part of the story, it is Charles Bon who becomes more like Absalom in the later defiance of the father part of the story.

But the incest theme is actually introduced long before the truth of Charles being Sutpen’s son is revealed, and in a different permutation of the triad: Henry, Judith, Charles. This is when Henry goes to college and first meets Charles. Henry, the provincial, is instantly beguiled by the older, cosmopolitan, Charles, who Faulkner often describes in feminine terms. Henry begins to model himself after the older man, developing feelings for Bon as both a brother and a lover. “Yes, he loved Bon, who seduced him as surely as he seduced Judith…” (p. 96). And before knowing that Bon actually is his brother Henry desires him as one.

Here is Bon speaking of Henry while at college together:

“whom he watched aping his clothing carriage speech and all and (the youth) completely unaware that he was doing it, who (the youth) over the bottle one night said, blurted–no, not blurted: it would be fumbling, groping: and he (the cosmopolite ten years the youth’s senior almost, lounging in one of the silk robes the like of which the youth had never seen before and believed that only women wore) watching the youth blush fiery red yet still face him, still look him straight in the eye while he fumbled, groped, blurted with abrupt complete irrelevance: ‘If I had a brother, I wouldn’t want him to be a younger brother’ and he: ‘Ah?’ and the youth: ‘No. I would want him to be older than me’ and he: ‘No son of a landed father wants an older brother’ and the youth: ‘Yes. I do’, looking straight at the other, the esoteric, the sybarite, standing (the youth) now, erect, thin (because he was young), his face scarlet but his head high and his eyes steady: ‘Yes. And I would want him to be just like you'” (pp. 315-316).

Henry and Judith both desire Bon, but only Henry’s desire is incestuous in that Henry also desires Bon as a brother, while Judith know him only as a potential lover. “Because he was her first and last sweetheart. She must have seen him in fact with exactly the same eyes that Henry saw him with. And it would e hard to say to which of them he appears the more splendid–to the one with hope, even though unconscious, of making the image hers through possession; to the other with the knowledge of the insurmountable barrier which the similarity of gender hopelessly intervened…” (p. 95).

Unable to possess Bon sexually, directly, because of the “insurmountable” probably that they are both men, Henry plots to possess Bon indirectly though his sister. So he begins to push Charles toward Judith even before Charles has met her. And specifically what Judith has that Henry thinks might be valuable to Bon, in the old South culture, is her virginity. But Henry realizes that virginity is only valuable when it’s vulnerable to be lost. “In fact, perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride” (p. 96). Henry imagines himself into both halves of the pair: Henry (as Bon) having sex with his sister (there’s the incest theme even without knowing that Bon is also Judith’s brother) and Henry (now as Judith) having sex with Bon, which is incest again even without knowing that Bon is actually (probably) Henry’s brother because we know that in any case Henry wishes Bon were his brother.

The last revealed reason that Sutpen tells Henry why Bon cannot marry Judith is that Bon is not only the son Sutpen had with the daughter of the plantation owner on Haiti, but that Sutpen had divorced the woman (“put her aside” Faulkner says) when Sutpen learned that she was part black. Thus, Bon is also part black and therefore unfit to marry his white daughter.

So there are three reasons against the marriage: bigamy, incest, and miscegenation. Any one would be sufficient, but perhaps all three are true; the second accounts for Quentin’s role as narrator in this novel, but in the perversity of Southern culture it is only the last obstacle to marriage that is truly prohibitive.