Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner begins with a confusing and jumbled narrative. Miss Rosa sends for Quentin in a note. She explains that she has heard he will be going to Harvard and if he pursues a career in writing, she has a story she would like him to write down. She tells a bitter and sad story about Sutpen who she believes is the ruin of her and her family.

We learn right away, Sutpen is not one to be trusted, however he is welcomed into Yoknapatawpha County. Sutpen is extremely interesting because he provides a mystery. The first chapter is a story focuses on a man who as readers, we know nothing about except for the fact that he is not a gentleman and we know nothing about him. We know he is “hiding out” but we do not know from who or what. “He wasn’t a gentleman. He wasn’t even a gentleman. He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, knew for certain was his own anymore than the house was his own or even the pistols, seeking some place to hide himself, and Yoknapatawpha County supplied him with it (p.9).” Despite knowing nothing about Stupen, and his history Miss Rosa is more focused on the fact that Sutpen is the furthest thing from a gentleman. Is this a personal fascination or are we taking a look at what is important in Southern culture? “No: not even a gentleman. Marrying Ellen or marrying ten thousand Ellens could not have made him one. Not that he wanted to be one or even be taken for one (p.11).” Why is this so important to Miss Rosa especially since she was so young when this story had occurred? Is she invested in the reader believing her? The chapter ends with Sutphen becoming a beast. “…and Ellen seeing not the two black beasts she had expected to see but instead a white one and a black one, both naked to the waist and gouging at one another’s eyes as if their skins should not only have been the same color but should have been covered with fur too. Yes. It seems that on certain occasions, perhaps at the end of the evening, the spectacle, as a grand finale or perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself (p.21).” Negroes fighting are shown as a sport. Here, Sutphen participates in this sport. What kind of man participates in a sport for negroes, that is the question Miss Rosa wants us all to ask. And she leads us in our search for an answer, someone who needs power or to dominate.

The first chapter of Absalom, Absalom! is a jumbled narrative given to Quentin Compson by Miss Rosa. However, her story focuses on a man named Sutphen who she believes is the cause of her and her family’s ruin. The chapter ends leaving questions though, who is Sutphen? Why did these people let him into their lives? We are supposed to dislike him from the beginning which is clear from the constant reminder of him not being a gentleman, which would be obviously important to south at this time. At a first glance, readers are left with more questions then comments.

I found the ending of LIA to be very fitting seeing as how the story was set up. Sure the story had to do with Byron and Lena, but it seemed that the main focus was on Christmas himself. In order to place importance on these two characters it was an appropriate choice to wrap up the story with them. As we’ve discussed, it was also a comic relief for Christmas’s very disturbing ending. But I also thought it was a very insensitive choice for Lena to be constantly traveling across America. She has a child now and the best thing she could do was give the child some form of stability, instead of relying on the kindness of strangers to take care of them. Maybe once she can find a man that can look past her having a child, that she actually loves she will settle down, but we will never know. It seems she is happy with just herself, never seeming to show any emotion for Byron. It doesn’t even seem as though they’re friends, but still Byron continues to pine for the relationship that will never be. Although our narrator in this chapter is rooting for him, I could not see how, being he was an eyewitness to Lena’s disinterest. In the beginning of the story we see Lena as a bit desperate to find the man whom abandoned her. But, by the end we see her in relation to the Bildungsroman. She realized that Burch was a jerk, and that she could be perfectly happy on her own.  She was also strong enough to walk away from a chance at a relationship with someone stable because she wouldn’t be happy in that relationship. It would seem in her current state, at that current time in history, she would be much more likely to take anyone that would accept her. But no, she wants what she wants and I’d think that she’d be happy even if she never met that special someone. Lena just seemed to be in her own little world the entire novel. She was the only characters seemingly unfazed by the murderer on the loose and never got involved. All she wanted was self-actualization, which she achieved. While on the other hand Byron was trying to do all he could to seem more attractive to her. He was trying to get a murderer away with murder; he helped deliver her baby, found her shelter, all of these things were for naught. In achieving self-actualization it would seem that he could have to let Lena out of his life and say enough is enough, and if you won’t be appreciative of all I’ve done for you and be with me then I’m done. But no, he will just wander with her aimlessly, with his pathetic attempts at flirting until she finds someone else. In the end it seemed as though his life without her was much more stable than life with her. You could say that living a boring life is pathetic and he could have used some adventure, but nay I say. Stable job, good reputation, good work ethic, strong religious ties, seems much better to me than the latter he chose. Trying to do something illegal by lying to the police, getting his butt kicked by Burch, having constant reminders that the longer you spend with this uninterested woman, the longer he’ll remain a virgin, the eventual time where he witnesses Lena fall in love. It just seems as though he was doing the right thing by remaining a stick in the mud. By living this life it seems he is not achieving this character building we all like to see in a novel.

MAs, we’ll talk about this tonight, but I wanted everybody to have access online as well.  BAs, we’ll discuss on Friday.  Basically, you’re responsible for drafting a 1,000 word proposal for a long entry in the Yoknapedia by 11/19, a week from today.  More detailed guidelines are on the wiki.  For those who are interested in a more traditional research paper, I’ve also posted a very sketchy list of possible topics I’ve thought of while creating the course as well.  And as you probably know, we’ve all been compiling a list of potential topics for the long Yoknapedia entries on the entry list page.

From the first two chapters of Absalom Absalom! clearly Faulkner’s ability to switch tones–or views– captures not the essence of Thomas Sutpen, but the essence of interpretation. Because we view the story through different frames of narration and time, Faulkner is able to displace the careful reader and underline the limits of interpretation of time both in and out of the text. The story thus far is an interpretation all from Quentin’s grandfather, Miss Coldfield, Quentin, and the omnciscient narrator. These layers within the story justify Faulkner’s fascination for not just other characters in the novel, but for the relationship between the text, reader, and time. Faulkner makes the reader conscientiously interact with the text, reminding the reader which frame of reference to interpret from. For instance, the omniscient narrator states (italics not in text), “it was at this time that he began to invite the parties of men which Miss Coldfield told Quentin, out to Sutpen’s Hundred to camp…”(30). In the middle of the sentence, Faulkner de-centers the story to stop the reader to highlight the following moments of the story as something that had already once happened. Here, Faulkner gives his writing the static quality of an urn, where its events are conscientiously relayed to the reader as moments in time. Further down the page, Faulkner alludes to the power of the past in the middle of his sentences, with “…General Compson said…”(30). These intermittent allusions to time’s passage make the novel’s events questionable, but also make the text more intimate for the reader. The reader is reminded that the past although fixed, is also alive in the present. 

From AA and his previous novels, Faulkner is fascinated with the tension between past, present, and future. For Faulkner, Benjy, Quentin the Bundren family, Christmas, Lena, Hightower, etc. the past is very much alive. Faulkner is able to depict these liminal states like an image fixed on an urn. Shifting time and point of view manifests images for the reader into something similar to a memory. Because the reader interacts with the text, or is thrown in the liminal state of the text, Faulkner is able to make time stop, and give events in his novels to have the potential to (in the words of Miss Coldfield) to blow away (45). This is Faulkner’s aesthetic. Producing images of liminality and constantly shifting his characters and his readers, Faulkner is able to produce a plot that is as sympathetic as images of Greek figures present on an urn cast many years ago.

    When I started Absalom Absalom!, I was unsure as to why Faulkner needed to return to the Comspson family to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen. Why not bring back the Bundrens, have this be a story told by Hightower to Byron Bunch, or introduce a new set of characters? However, as I progressed in the story, I began to see why the Compsons are such a useful vessel through which Faulkner could tell not only the story but variations of the same story of Thomas Sutpen and the history of his property.
    At a basic level, Quentin and his father Jason Comson Sr are of enough education to understand and relay the story without a significant amount of dialectical play. Should the Sutpen story have been told by someone like Anse Bundren or Dilsey, Faulkner’s extremely complex prose and diction which with he writes the voices of Quentin and Jason Sr would seem out of place. Their high level of speech thus blends with Faulkner’s own third person narration, allowing the story of Sutpen to blend a bit more seamlessly with the events of the present in the book. Although it is not entirely necessary to read The Sound and the Fury before Absalom, Absalom!, it certainly makes the reader familiar with both the intellectual speech (or pseudo-intellectual drunken ramblings) of Jason Compson Sr and the literary, Ivy League educated mind of his son.
    The history of the Compson family in Jefferson also allows this novel to be told well from their perspective. The Compsons have a long history in Jefferson, and Quentin’s grandfather was actually present for the events of the story. This historical grounding in the town allows Quentin’s grandfather to tell Jason who would later tell Quentin the story of Sutpen’s arrival in Jefferson from the experience not only of being there but of being an already established family in Jefferson. The story of Sutpen and his deeds can then be told from the point of view of a Southern aristocratic family, a point of view that would create a greater sense of difference between the long term residents of Jefferson and the strange arrival of Sutpen and would magnify the strangeness of his growth in reputation and amassing of an enormous amount of land  in a community where the same families have been powerful and relevant for some time. Also, there are some connections between the Sutpen family history and the Compson family as seen in The Sound and the Fury. “It’s going to turn and destroy us all someday, whether our name happens to be Sutpen or Coldfield or not” remarks Quentin when he questions Coldfield’s motivations in telling him the story (7).  This connects the Sutpen house with the eventual collapse of the Compson household in The Sound and the Fury as they are two works that detail a fall from greatness for a Southern family. Here, Faulkner links the history of the Sutpens and Compsons by even more than a connection through the grandfather; they are both families who collapse inwards.
    Although Absalom, Absalom! is not narrated internally as his section in The Sound and the Fury is, the novel, in the present, is centered on Quentin Compson and his hearing and eventual telling of the story of Sutpen’s Hundred and its founder. Quentin is obviously younger here than he is in his The Sound and the Fury chapter and is about to head up north to study at Harvard. Quentin here suits the overarching narrative of Absalom, Absalom!: a story told by people who were not there or not as involved to people who also were not there. Quentin is too young to have remembered or been alive during the events of the story told to him, which allows Faulkner to present him better as a blank slate to receive the variations of the Sutpen story from a temporal distance far enough away where the differences in story would not conflict with his own memory of the actual events. He only can know what he is told. This also creates one of the issues of the novel that have already arisen in the first two chapters: which version of the story is more correct? As Quentin is now two generations behind, he, like the reader is unable to discern what is true about Sutpen and unable to object to what is false, as the whole story to the young Quentin is essentially just that, a story.

This is ahead of the game for the BAs, but no plot spoilers at any rate.  I’ve had a nagging feeling that Bon’s writing to Judith using stove polish for ink was significant somehow but have not seen anyone tackle the question in the literature.  So I was pleased to find a blog on … TA DA: the history of the cast iron stove, one that has a fascinating entry on advertisers’ associations of stove polish with racial blackness.  This would make a fascinating Yoknapedia entry (perhaps even a long one) or research paper.

We’ll spend the first part of class tomorrow discussing the end of LIA and then get as far as we can into a discussion of AA!  So make sure you’re read Ch1 at least.  Then you’ll be responsible for Chs. 2-3 for Fri, and we’ll be back in tune with the syllabus.  Also remember that you’re responsible for a blog post for tomorrow.

Just an announcement regarding our department’s annual prize competition.  Entries are due on Monday, February 24th, and I strongly encourage everyone to submit his/her final essay for this course (BA and MA).  There are many prizes for which your work would be appropriate, and some of the prizes are pretty rich.  Here’s the 411:

PRIZES APPLICATION FORM