Absalom, Absalom!
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 01:08PM This coming Sunday (July 6th) will be the 46th anniversary of William Faulkner's death. In no relation to that date, I have recently finished reading Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (Potential spoilers follow. However, as with any truly great work of art, someone else's comments on it shouldn't spoil your own encounter with it.)
One of the earliest things I picked up from Absalom, Absalom! was the way in which the narrative and its variety of voices concerned itself with questions of knowledge. Quentin Compson needs to know the life story of Thomas Sutpen. While many commentators focus on Sutpen's role as a God-like father figure to the families entangled in his "design" (see especially Carolyn Porter's essay "(Un)Making the Father" in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner), I quickly became engaged in my reading with the possibilities and frustrations of "knowing" Sutpen. This very particular engagement with the text was enforced by the accessible but by no means clearly laid allusions to Old Testament figures and situations. Towards the end of the novel I had collected in my imagination a whole slew of such allusions: Sutpen as Abraham, as Israel, as David; Charles Bon as Ishmael and as Able; Henry Sutpen as Isaac, as Cain, and, of course, as Absalom from 2nd Samuel--and the comparisons go on. If not weakened by their sheer number, the allusions to the Old Testament are weakened further by the difficulty of making them stick as interpretive aids. Why call Absalom, Absalom! a Biblical work of art? What do I mean by "Biblical" in this literary context, and what do knowledge questions have to do with such an aesthetic characterization?
The accessibility of literary comparisons between Faulkner and the Bible does not mean that such comparisons are accurate or even helpful in interpretation of either texts. For instance, Shreve constantly interjects into Quentin's narrative the words "the demon" whenever the unnamed subject of Quentin's recital can be identified as Thomas Sutpen. Later in the novel, when the narrative shifts to concern itself with Charles Bon as Sutpen's firstborn son, Faulkner clearly marks where Shreve does not clarify the subject of the narration. The fact of Shreve's interjections should suggest that whatever initial celebrations of Thomas Sutpen as patriarch are suspect to immediate revision; and the "unspoken" understanding of Charles Bon's status should suggest that the initial ambiguity of his character must be either incorporated into the narrative family, and thus left unquestioned, or repelled. Nothing of these literary identifications compare to denominational understanding of the Bible--one must instead offer a critical examination of the religious text and uncover conceptual grounds for understanding certain acts. It is by knowing how a type of story can be told that we are able to interpret our telling of it.
Thus, once we know how to tell and to read a "Biblical" story, we know how to tell and read similar stories. And by way of this knowledge, the comparative details of two stories lose critical importance. Accepting both the Bible and Absalom, Absalom! as texts, we can interpret the one in terms of the other without referring to the other as a template or basis. What I mean by this (that comparative interpretation need not rely on postmodern "ungroundedness" to complete its task) can be the subject of another post, but suffice it to say that the primacy of Absalom, Absalom!'s biblical import--as opposed to psychoanalytic, historical, or sociological import--comes from the fact that the conditions for the novel's narrative are related to the conditions for the Bible's narrative. Both the Bible and Absalom, Absalom! are told from a variety of sources and authors in an effort to reconstruct a lost knowledge. For the Bible, this lost knowledge is the image of God; it is understood to have some relation to and genesis for the figure of man, and therefore the narratives of the Bible recite the histories of men most related to the image of God. Likewise, the lost knowledge of Absalom, Absalom! is the full story of Thomas Sutpen; and the characters of the novel--even Sutpen himself--understand their genetic truth to reside somewhere in the narratives of Sutpen's relatives.
By placing the conditions of knowledge in a recantation of familial histories, Absalom, Absalom! does what the Bible does to recall the unknown and thereby earns the description "biblical". It helps that the characters of Faulkner's novel read as gigantic figures, such as Sutpen's arrival to Jefferson on horseback, or as images conjured from faith, as in Miss Rosa's description of Charles Bon:
I dont know even now if I was ever aware that I had seen nothing of his face but that photograph, that shadow ... even before I saw the photograph I could have recognized, nay, described, the very face. But I never saw it. I do not even know of my own knowledge that Ellen ever saw it, that Judith ever loved it, that Henry slew it: so who will dispute me when I say, Why did I not invent, create it?
The conditions of knowledge in Absalom, Absalom! are conditions of faith, of engagement with a design or plan that both admits of free will and demands total subjugation. It is a knowledge that could be grasped by staid analysis, as in the lawyer's reports on Sutpen's progress, or with "levity," as with Shreve's reactions to his own curious involvement in the retelling. But to have full strength as a meaningful work of art, Faulkner's genius is shown in his ability to pull from an otherwise straighforward story the woven wistaria of Sutpen's Hundred.
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments