Faulkner’s descriptions of Sutpen’s Hundred carry the distinct whiff of Carolyn Porter’s argument from chapter 1 of William Faulkner, which linked the process of creating Addie Bundren’s coffin with the task of the novelist himself. Where coffin-making was the central metaphor for the artist in As I Lay Dying, several passages hint that the architect as the artist who stands in for the novelist of Absalom, Absalom! Their efforts dovetail in an act of divine creation that sets the epic stage for the novel’s action.

The parallels between architect and novelist suggest that Faulkner is indentured to his art until Sutpen’s Hundred is complete. As Faulkner writes of the architect, “Only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again.” (29) Like the French architect, Faulkner’s job here is to roll into a strange town to build something out of virtually nothing – taking about two years to do so – and usually receiving no pay in the process.  Similarly, the French architect suffers through the process of the house’s creation, but seems to function more as a puppetmaster to the mud-caked Sutpen and slaves in the furious act of house-building; as Faulkner writes, “the little grim harried foreigner [architect] had singlehanded given battle to and vanquished Sutpen’s fierce and overweening vanity or desire for magnificence,” the result of which would have been a house “almost as large as Jefferson itself at the time.” (29) Curious here is that Sutpen is described as having been powerful enough to have dragged the artist from Martinique on this thankless task, yet the architect calls the shots in how the house itself is built. This complicated power-struggle suggests a metaphor for the novelist in deep thrall of his subject who still retains the power to create a context for that character: Sutpen’s Hundred seems to stand as Faulkner’s monument to Sutpen the man, somewhat like the monument Shakespeare builds to his beloved in Sonnet 55. His description that Sutpen wanted the house to be “as large as Jefferson” also illuminates Faulkner’s futile attempt to create something — whether Sutpen’s Hundred or the novel itself — large enough to represent this town, or the South, as a whole. (See also: “it had been created to fit into and complement a world in all ways a little smaller than the one in which it found itself.” [6])

It is no surprise, then, that Faulkner goes further to link his and the architect’s creative acts to those of God. As Quentin observes, “the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light.” (4) The sense we get here that Sutpen and Faulkner both are create something out of Nothing – with explicit references to Genesis – is buoyed by Quentin’s conversation with Ms. Coldfield, who says that “Northern people have already seen to it that there is little left in the South for a young man.” (5) The house is situated on a world that has been destroyed, neutered by war, and, later, subdivided by carpetbaggers — making Sutpen’s Hundred a powerful Something amid the great Southern Nothing.

The link between art-making, house-building and divine creation even run into how the story is told. Through the first three chapters we are not being told this story but are receiving it with a succession of “Yessums,” courtesy of Quentin, as if the story is divine wisdom, which, coupled with the divine resonance which Faulkner gives the story of the house’s creation, gives us the sense that Sutpen’s Hundred functions as Yoknapatawpha County’s axis mundi, so to speak, connecting the world in which the house is situated — the “small world” of the South — with the mythic world of the Gods. In creating the house Faulkner also creates the stage upon which the mythic drama (starring the heroic Jason, the femme fatale Clytemnestra [48], the prescient Cassandra [15, 47, 48] and Niobe [8], whose children are all killed) unfolds.