Recently my friends and I organized a William Faulkner reading group. We read Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and then The Sound and the Fury (1929). While Sound was published first, Absalom takes place first chronologically, so we read that one first.
Stylistically, the two novels could hardly be more different. Absalom, written in third person, consists almost entirely of long, complex, lyrical sentences (one of them running some seven pages), a prose-poetic text in which Faulkner holds back nothing. He makes no attempt to create realistic dialogue; each character is simply a puppet for his show. Although some have leveled this as a criticism, I actually think it works perfectly fine. I have no commitment to strict realism. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly in first person, and only rarely does Faulkner wax lyrical here. Dialogue is simplified and stream-of-consciousness abounds.
I approached these texts primarily through a psychoanalytic lens, given my recent interest in the framework. I believe this was fruitful, and it’s not like Faulkner made it difficult to do so. Both texts brim with incest, homoeroticism, and family psychodrama. Really, I think Faulkner’s project here can be read as, among other things, an inquiry into the psychological impact of the Civil War and the end of slavery.
The death of the old southern aristocracy and the Confederacy is akin to castration in Lacan: it happens to everybody, and what matters is how we deal with it. And indeed, as per Du Bois, does the planter class die:
With the Civil War the planters died as a class. We still talk as though the dominant social class in the South persisted after the war. But it did not. It disappeared… The disaster of war decimated the planters; the bitter disappointment and frustration led to a tremendous mortality after the war, and from 1870 on the planter class merged their blood so completely with the rising poor whites that they disappeared as a separate aristocracy. It is this that explains so many of the characteristics of the post-war South: its lynching and mob law, its murders and cruelty, its insensibility to the finer things of civilization. [1]
Benjy, the mentally disabled Compson son, is literally castrated (a bit on the nose, Mr. Faulkner?) after running after a couple of neighborhood girls. Quentin Compson internalizes the decline of his family, sublimating into an obsession with his sister Caddy’s chastity. Quentin tries to enforce the old aristocratic family values onto his sister in a desperate attempt to keep them alive. When she becomes pregnant, his only possible response is to turn against himself and commit suicide. Even his obsession with his sister is a form of internalization, because he identifies with her (in a narcissistic-erotic fashion) to such an extent that he treats any breach on her body as a breach on his own: before he resorts to his own suicide, he first tries to convince Caddy to join him in death, like Romeo and Juliet.
He also tries to convince his father that in fact he impregnated Caddy, so that he may face whatever consequences may come alongside with her. Of course, his father refuses to believe him. I think we can surmise that Quentin, on some level, wishes it had been himself who had impregnated his own sister, because that would be more bearable. Quentin’s wish is to re-enact the Oedipal drama with his sister instead of his mother, who is chronically ill and largely absent. He similarly threatens to kill the father of Caddy’s unborn child.
Quentin’s older brother Jason, however, externalizes his anger, blaming his problems on Jews, women, Black people, each in turn. It’s hard to say much about Jason because he’s so straightforwardly sadistic (but not unbelievably so) that, although he lies, cheats, and steals, he brings forth a sort of unfiltered emotional honesty (of course, however, concealing his own sense of insecurity and powerlessness).
Similarly in Absalom, the sublimated love triangle between Judith, her brother Henry, and her half-brother Charles Bon raises interesting questions about the link between identification and eroticism. Henry’s father Thomas Sutpen tells him that in fact Charles Bon is Henry’s half-brother, Sutpen’s son from a previous relationship, and Henry refuses to believe him, even though deep down he knows it’s the truth. But then when Henry learns that Bon is part-Black, he kills him. For Henry, incest is preferable to miscegenation. Mr. Compson lays it all out as such:
In fact, perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realising 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. [2]
In Absalom Quentin repeats the Henry-Charles homoeroticism with his Harvard roommate Shreve, to whom he passes along the Sutpen story, and with whom he tries to piece together its missing parts. The uncovering and telling of the Sutpen story, a sort of psychoanalytic operation for Quentin (i.e., dealing with the repressed unconscious) fails to deliver on its promise of deeper understanding and acceptance. “Why do you hate the South?” Shreve asks Quentin in the final passage. “I dont hate it,” Quentin replies. “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!” [3] Poor kid, not long for this world. Drowned in the fading of honeysuckle, so says the memorial plaque at Harvard.
Thomas Sutpen has his own psychological baggage: he travels to Haiti (likely the modern Dominican Republic, as slavery had been abolished in the western half of the island) and works for a slaveowner, and in fact suppresses a slave rebellion firsthand. From Haiti he brings back slaves to build his empire in Mississippi. He can never truly forget the scenery of the rebellion; it animates his brutality and control over his own slaves in Mississippi. He even refuses sugar in his coffee because the smell reminds him of the burning canefields.
In Haiti he partners with a woman and they have a son, Charles Bon. Sutpen abandons both. Like King Lear, he casts off his own child, thus bringing forth his own destruction (similarly with the Compsons vis-a-vis Caddy). When Bon turns up at college in Louisiana and befriends Sutpen’s other son Henry, and eventually pursues his own half-sister, Thomas Sutpen has his own “return of the repressed” moment in which he once again sees the face of his estranged son (the first Absalom), an amalgam of white Sutpen and Black slave blood, who will eventually be killed by his own half-brother Henry (the second Absalom).
The ur-trauma of Faulkner’s entire oeuvre is the Civil War, which is almost never confronted directly, only briefly, and only several layers removed from the actual events (Quentin and Shreve spin their own yarn of Charles and Henry’s wartime experience). It is the unspeakable menace which, whether anyone admits it, set the basis for the entire edifice of the postbellum South, a society repressed of its own past.
Faulkner often quipped that all he read were Shakespeare and the Bible. Both shine through in these texts: even in the titles, one a Shakespeare reference (Macbeth’s soliloquy, “[Life] is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”) and the other Biblical (King David’s wayward son, Absalom). For the Sutpens and the Compsons alike, family ruin as divine retribution rings true: the lineage becomes its own undoing. This is an obvious allegory for the self-undoing of the southern slave-owning aristocracy as a whole.
Quentin Compson is the thread that ties together the two novels: in Absalom it is to him Miss Rosa Coldfield tells the tale of the rise and decline of Thomas Sutpen, her brother-in-law, the slave-owner patriarch of the Sutpen’s Hundred plantation, the man who built his empire from scratch. Quentin ponders why she tells him:
It’s because she wants it told he thought so that people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth. [4]
There you have it.
In Sound I believe Benjy is the key to understanding the decline of the Compsons, but I haven’t figured out quite how. His own mother, a Compson by marriage only, explicitly refers to him as a punishment on the family. However, at the end of the novel, the Black servant matriarch Dilsey, who effectively raised all of the Compson children (and grandchildren, i.e. Caddy’s daughter Quentin), brings Benjy to church, and sobs for the tragedy she’s witnessed over the previous decades. “I’ve seed de first en de last,” she says. [5]
In that same final chapter Quentin (not the son Quentin, but Caddy’s daughter, whom she named after her late brother), goes missing, haven stolen money from her uncle Jason, money he’d stolen from her in the first place. Her grandmother immediately assumes that Quentin has committed suicide, just like her late namesake uncle. “Quentin left a note when he did it,” the mother says. She is not surprised, because their names are the same, that they would both perish in the same fashion: “I knew the minute they named her Quentin this would happen.” [6] However, it turns out Quentin has not committed suicide, she’s just been sleeping around with the man in the red tie again. A hopeful note to end on?
Faulkner claimed that Absalom, Absalom! was the greatest American novel to date. Arrogant as he was (and as are many artists), he wasn’t necessarily wrong; for me the only real contenders are his own earlier novels, and Moby-Dick. Faulkner approached his object of study with an unwavering commitment to honesty and depth, and through his body of work he became arguably the most important American writer of the 20th century. All American literature since is, in one way or another, a response to Faulkner.
Every read and re-read of his novels, especially these two, is a unique and challenging experience. Here’s to many more re-reads!