“And the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was” (AA 4).

“Born and bred” in the deep South, Quentin inherits the collective conscious of a post-civil war culture and is therefore a “ghost” of this past as the attitudes and norms that were birthed out of it govern the environment that shapes his personality. But as we read the first four chapters of Absalom, Absalom! and learn about Rosa Coldfield’s family, we realize that, in a way, Quentin’s character is also a more specific “ghost” of the past that embodies the spirit of Rosa’s family. Quentin shares some neurotic qualities with various members of the family that motivate his most extreme behaviors including his suicide, and his most striking similarities are with Rosa’s nephew, Henry Sutpen.

Quentin’s relationship with Caddy mirrors that of Henry and Judith, who are said to have “closer than the traditional loyalty of brother and sister even; a curious relationship” (AA 62). While Quentin and Caddy are not actually incestuous as he claims, they too have a closer relationship than most siblings, as suggested by Quentin who drives himself crazy at Harvard constantly thinking of Caddy’s loss of virginity and rebellious sexuality. Caddy is represented as more masculine than Quentin as she loses her virginity before her brother and her sexual appetite becomes one of the family’s greatest problems.  Quentin muses on the importance of virginity among women and notes that “in the south [boys and men] are ashamed of being a virgin” (TSAF); therefore, the fact that Caddy is “unvirgin” before him is emasculating and troubling for her reputation. Henry is in a similar sibling dyad. Judith is suggested to be superiorly masculine to Henry: “this the hoyden who could – and did – outrun and outclimb, and ride and fight both with and beside her brother” (AA 52). This same gender role reversal is also seen in Mr. Coldfield and his sister (Rosa’s aunt), who Rosa claims to have been “twice the man that Mr Coldfield was and who in very truth was not only Miss Rosa’s mother but her father too” (AA 49). This unconventional dynamic is something that Quentin, Henry, and Mr. Coldfield all struggle with, and notably none of them succeed in the south (Quentin kills himself, Henry disappears, and Mr. Coldfield incarcerates himself in his attic and eventually starves himself). While their unfortunate ends were not necessarily the result of their emasculation, that is a common link among all of these misfits.

Quentin’s emasculation extends beyond his relationship with Caddy to college, where it is suggested that he may have a homosexual relationship with his roommate Shreve. Henry also shares a close relationship with his college roommate, Charles Bon, and while we do not know much about their specific interactions, the two are close enough to spend holidays together and enlist in the same army unit. Like Quentin in college, there is no mention of any women that Henry interacts with in the first four chapters of Absalom, Absalom! aside from Judith.

Quentin and Henry seem to share a similar disdain for the men with whom their sisters relate. After Charles and Judith are engaged, Henry allegedly kills his previously closest friend for reasons unspecified before chapter 4. Quentin tries to attack (with a mind to kill) both Dalton Ames and Herbert Head, but his own impotence prevents him from taking effective action like Charles.

Quentin and Henry have many common problems, but for better or for worse, Quentin is not as effective as Henry when he tries to confront his problems. Henry kills Charles, whereas Quentin cannot so much as throw a punch at Dalton Ames. Henry disappears (escaping his dysfunctional home), whereas Quentin actually kills himself. As we read on, attending to Quentin’s reception of the Sutpen story and Henry’s actions throughout, these parallel characters may provide insight as to how Quentin comes to take his own life, and how Henry comes to disappear from the Sutpen family.            

As promised, here’s the midterm (a little early).  It’s due via email on Saturday at 10am sharp.  No late work accepted; no tech excuses whatsoever.  Have fun, and feel free to go over the suggested 75 mins or so, but don’t be a wingnut and spend hours on this.

———————————————————–

SHORT ANSWER (30 mins/45% of grade):

choose 5 of 8 : be sure to write the corresponding # next to your answer!

1. Faulkner often claimed that TSAF grew out of a nearly obsessive image in his head: that of a young girl with “muddy drawers” climbing a pear tree to look in a window while her brothers looked up at her.  In what ways does this image, and the scene associated with it the novel, contain the major themes of the novel in a nutshell?
2. Why is incest with Caddy a fitting “solution” (if only in fantasy) to Quentin’s problems?  What does the obsession with incest tell us about Quentin’s character and about 1920s Southern society more broadly?
3. Compare and contrast the different sense of time of any two of the following characters: Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and Dilsey.
4. We know the stated reason for the trip to Jefferson that drives the plot of AILD: Addie’s request, after Darl’s birth, to be buried with her relatives in town. But what other motives do family members have to hit the road?
5. Why is the gramophone such a bewitching object at AILDs end?  What does it represent for the Bundrens?  In what ways does this object help to bring the novel to closure?
6. Chapter 6 of LIA begins with the enigmatic statement, “Memory believes before knowing remembers.”  What is meant by the oppositions memory/knowing and believing/remembering in this statement?  Give one example of how the plot fleshes out this rather abstract statement?
7. Christmas claims, at the beginning of Chapter 7, “On this day, I became a man” (146).  What is entailed in becoming a man for Christmas?  How does Christmas’s refusal to memorize the catechism form a template for later decisions?
8. What does Hightower’s father’s cloak mean?  What kind of narrative of the Civil War emerges from it, as opposed to the “cavalier” image of Hightower’s grandfather raiding the Union Army’s commissary?  What is at stake in Hightower’s reexamination (recollection) of his relationship to his father and grandfather (and/or his mother and “mammy”) in Chapter 20?

ESSAY: (40 mins/55%):

choose 1 of 3**

1. We have often discussed the many ways in which Southern society in the early 20^th century is dominated by a set of patriarchal norms regarding women: the “cult of virginity” that idolizes sexual purity and demonizes any deviations from it; the expectation that women remain confined to the home and “household management”; and the association of women with “soft” sentimentality rather than the “hard” work of production and civic involvement.  Do the novels we’re read primarily run with the grain of these patriarchal norms, or do they primarily contest them?  There is plenty of evidence for either proposition, so I’m looking for well-selected evidence and a strong argument.  You may want to call particular attention to the use of characters that conform to or diverge from “typical” femininity, and you should also think about issues of narrative voice: who speaks in the novels, and who is spoken for by others.

2. Many of the characters in the novels we’ve read seem to be “arrested” in a prior state of development, stuck in an obsessive or traumatic past moment, or otherwise dislocated in time.  Why is “arrested development” so fascinating to Faulkner?  What does the preponderance of “arrested” figures tell us about Southern society in this period?  Be sure to use examples of at least two or three characters in your answer.

3. The South has traditionally been considered “backwards,” a laggard in the process of social, cultural, and economic “development” that constitutes modernization.  But numerous recent theoretical accounts for such development emphasize that development always progresses unevenly, creating juxtapositions and linkages between “backwards” peoples/regions/practices and their more “modern” counterparts.  What are some of the ways that Faulkner’s work reveals this unevenness of modernization in the South?  How does Faulkner show the close contact between “modern” and “folk” people, places, and practices?  What are some ways that “backwards” and “forwards” ways of being are mixed in his work?  AILD is especially useful here, but TSAF and LIA could also be brought to bear on this question.

** For god’s sake, don’t misread this and try to write about all of them!!

*** I’m obviously using the standard abbreviations we’ve used throughout: TSAF = The Sound and the Fury; AILD = As I Lay Dying; LIA = Light in August

While reading (and struggling through) the first three chapters of Absalom, Absalom! I came across a recurring metaphor: the shell. There are numerous descriptions in the novel where something is described as having a means of structure, but lacking substance. For example, the word ‘ghost’ appears numerous times in chapter one. Mr. Compson said ‘Years ago we in the South made out women into ladies. Then the War came and made our ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?…’  (6-7). Not much further in the chapter another description describes Ellen “who even while alive had moved without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all” (8).  Ellen is described here as a ghost. The fact that she is a being who has has a body, but lacks substance essentially makes her a shell.

This shell metaphor is further continued when Stupen’s house is described. The house in which he lived in  “until he could furnish it as it should be furnished–” (39). Stupen lies for years in a shell of a home. It is an empty space that lacks not only family, but furnishing as well. It is not surprising that his home lacks substance as is he is also earlier described as being a ghost himself. He, similar to Joe Christmas, is a foreigner with no known background to the town.

The third description I found interesting and which fit into this metaphor of shell-like being, is when the narrator describes Judith in her “transition stage between childhood and womanhood…the state where, though still visible, young girls appear as though seen through glass and where even the voice cannot reach them; where they exist…in a pearly lambence without shadows and themselves partaking of it; in nebulous suspension held, strange and unpredictable, even their very shapes fluid and delicate and without substance, not in themselves floating and seeking but merely waiting, parasitic and potent and serene, drawing themselves without effort the post-genitive upon and about which to shape, flow into back, breast; bosom, flank, thigh.” (52).  While this description of Judith turns into a sexual one, its beginning describes young women as in a stage where they are not wholly human, but instead are shadowless beings. They’re described more like an energy that is afloat and idle.

I’m not exactly sure what exactly this metaphor means in relation to the novel as a whole, but I do think it is something to look at for since it has appeared many times within the first three chapters.

Like all of Faulkner’s novels that we have read this semester, the town, or the concept of ‘community’ plays a more insidious and ostracizing role.  Rather than being a cohesion of benevolence in numbers, characters such as Joe Christmas and Gail Hightower in Light in August, and Anse Bundren—well, technically the Bundren clan as a whole—in As I Lay Dying find inimicality among the more urbane (as far as ‘urbane’ can be considered in the rustic south) townsfolk.  While, in my last blog post, I noted the women of Jefferson as manipulative and homogenous—“she was now like the ladies had wanted her to be all the time, as they believed the minister’s wife should be”—and, likewise, the women of Jefferson in Absalom, Absalom continue this trend, but, surprisingly, the women of Sutpen’s Hundred do not counterpoise an exception (Faulkner LIA 66).

The large, and often difficult to track, imbroglio of AA’s narrative eventually leads us to the dark and comic wedding scene, and the abominable character of Ellen and Rosa’s innominate aunt, who, through her “grim virago fury of female affront” (I love that line, by the way), attempts to “[thrust] Sutpen down the town’s throat” by “thrusting the wedding itself,” delivering 100 invitations door-to-door (Faulkner AA 42).  The “fury of female affront” at first stemmed from the dubious past of Thomas Sutpen,“Being a woman, she was doubtless one of that league of Jefferson women who on the second day after the town saw him five years ago, had agreed never to forgive him for not having any past,” but soon evolves—after, interestingly enough, unsuccessfully attempting to derail the wedding between Ellen and Thomas—into pushing the same wedding (40).  Again we have the Southern Mob mentality present in the “league of Jefferson women,” who, in their communal hatred of Sutpen, ‘create’ the “virago” of Rosa’s aunt.  Rosa’s aunt’s passing out invitations door-to-door, while seeming to be an act of kindness toward her niece, is an actual “affront” on Thomas, as she saw the “marriage was now a closed incident,” the “thrust[ing] him back into the gullet of public opinion” forces the townsfolk to react to the marriage, and their pelting of Thomas and Ellen with compost and dirt as they exit the church (40).  Not too nice.

Born into a world seething with hatred at Rosa’s unintended matricide, and guided by her tutelary aunt, it’s not surprising that Rosa is likewise a vessel of “outraged female vindictiveness” filled through a “masonry of females” molding Rosa into the embodiment of vengeance, the “lone justification for the sacrifice of her mother’s life, not only a living and walking reproach to her father, but a breathing indictment ubiquitous and even transferable of the entire male principle” (46-7).  This can even be stretched to a sense of degendering: Rosa’s aunt is described as being “twice the man that Mr. Coldfield was,” but also “in very truth…not only Miss Rosa’s mother but her father too” (49).  This becomes directed at Thomas, who, comically unaware, becomes the lone target of the aunt’s transferred vindictiveness—“and the other [the first being Mr. Coldfield]—Sutpen—who probably could have engaged and even routed them…did not even know that he was an embattled foe” (49).

The narrative is, of course, full of contemptuous men, as well—how often is Thomas characterized as simply a beard with teeth? and Henry’s killing Charles at the gates—but the women in the novel are setting themselves up to be quite the, well, “viragos” that Faulkner had first termed while describing the aunt.

As Quentin makes a reappearance in Absalom, Absalom, I was naturally putting his narration in dialogue with The Sound and the Fury. We’ve spoken in class about how Quentin is a leaky narrator, that voices of others, more dominant than himself, will take over Quentin’s body and begin expressing their own will. This aspect of Quentin is particularly at play in AA, not just as it develops Quentin as a character, but as it ‘houses’ AA’s major theme of decrepitude, permeability and disappearance.

Quentin is a particularly apt narrator as the novel deals with the dialogue between generations. Quentin is able to effectively house these distinct voices and put them into conversation, sometimes even viewing them as apparitions (4). However, Quentin is unable to contain these stories fully and has leaky skin, as it were, for a narrator. This confusion of Quentin’s will and the will of the stories embedded within him mirrors the general pronoun and generational confusion Faulkner presents to readers. But what is of most importance to Quentin’s inability to carry all the weight of other narrators is the implications it brings to the disappearance of southern aristocracy. History is one of the paramount losses in war, and, as the south enters reconstruction, there is a desperate sense that these histories will be lost. Quentin, as the youngest male in AA, is given these stories to carry and distribute. The theme of Quentin as history text is developed when it is implied that Miss Rosa wants to talk to Quentin because she thinks his grandfather might have told him something of value to her.

To push further, Quentin’s narrative ability must be held against the major image of Sutpen’s mansion. With a maniacal single-mindedness, Sutpen constructs his home in which Ellen is later housed. At one point the house is likened to Bluebeard’s Castle (47), as Ellen is described to have disappeared within one of the many chambers. This comparison brings undercurrents of violence, but more importantly, the idea of compartmentalization. Bluebeard’s castle only works if each room acts in total isolation such that each door offers the promise of something different, yet the tragedy lies in the fact that all the rooms are linked in their crescendo of horror. However, with Sutpen’s house there is leakage between the rooms as Rosa is able to more than once eavesdrop on conversations, “…she had acquired or cultivated by listening beyond closed doors not to what she heard there but by becoming supine and receptive, in capable of either discrimination or opinion or incredulity…” (52). This description of Rosa seems transferable to Quentin especially after considering the line, “the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad” (7). So then, Sutpen’s mansion, a leaky attempt at permanence, can be seen as a manifestation of Quentin’s narrative role as porous container of history.  It will be interesting to follow the extent to which Quentin’s narration and the Sutpen “castle” remain cohesive or disintegrate throughout AA.

Quentin Compson is an interesting vessel for Miss Coldfield to pass along this story given the obvious similarities between his relationship with Caddie and Judith and Henry Sutpen’s relationship. Both Quentin and Henry love their sister in a way that goes beyond typical sibling love. Both are obsessed with the purity of their sister and trying to prevent an outsider from penetrating through the purity of their sister by taking her virginity. In Quentin’s case, he knows that he cannot stop Caddie from seeing other men. Caddie thus loses her virginity, and as if grasping for straws, Quentin tries to convince her to lie and tell the family that in fact Quentin is the only man she’s been with and is the father of her unborn child. Henry, on the other hand, has more control over Judith. Or, in another sense, Judith does not have any sense of autonomy like Caddie, and allows herself to be moved like a chess piece into a corner of the board and left to wait until she is needed again. The love triangle between Judith, Henry, and Charles Bon is an interesting one in the way that each character does not love the other two for who they are, but what they represent and replace.

Henry’s love of his sister clearly has an incestuous aspect to it. Quentin’s father recalls that, “the town knew that between Henry and Judith there had been a relationship closer than traditional loyalty of brother and sister even; a curious relationship (62).” However, it seems that Henry doesn’t necessarily love his sister so much as he is merely (like Quentin) obsessed with the idea of her purity, and the inventible act of that purity being removed by another man, an outsider. In this way, I think it is clear that Henry looks to Bon more as his ideal companion than his sister Judith. Because Henry seems to have such a close relationship with Bon, arguably a brother-like relationship, he views Bon as the clear candidate for Judith’s mate. “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” (77). In the first part of this quote, we can see that Henry uses Bon as a replacement for himself in his desire to be Judith’s husband, a desire he knows cannot become reality. At the same time, this second part of the quote reveals the fact that Henry is also using Judith as a replacement for himself in his desire to be “despoiled” by Bon. Henry knows that his desire for both his sister and his friend cannot be fulfilled in the society in which he lives. So instead he places both Judith and Bon in a situation in which they will be united as replacements for Henry’s dual fantasies. 

Bon has similar feelings for Henry and uses Judith as a replacement to fulfill his forbidden desire to be with Henry. “Perhaps in [Bon’s] fatalism he loved Henry the more of the better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object was the youth” (86). For both Bon and Henry, Judith is a mere vessel with which to fill forbidden desires. Judith, for her part, seems to lack any desire to go against the wishes of either Henry or Bon. We learn that, “[Judith] must have seen him in fact with exactly the same eyes that Henry saw him with” (75).  They both see Bon as this outsider, a glamorous foreigner who can perhaps free them from the fate of Sutpen’s Hundred. However, Judith does nothing to change her fate. She merely waits for her future to be decided by others. After Bon writes to her and confirms their engagement, yet says, “I cannot say when to expect me” (104), we learn that Judith simply began to make her wedding gown. We do not learn if Judith anxiously waited for word from Bon, only that she waited. We do not learn that Judith was filled with joy by the proposal, only that she accepted the proposal. While Judith appears to lack desire, Henry and Bon are both consumed with desires that cannot be fulfilled, and use Judith as a replacement for the lover who they cannot have. 

Among the many descriptions and impressions the reader gets of Thomas Sutpen, one of the most frequently repeated is the sense that he arrived in Jefferson “out of no discernible past” (11). Not only is his family history unknown to the townspeople, but virtually everything about him seems to appear from nothing—his estate, his slaves, his wealth. Whether fleeing a painful or criminal past or simply looking for a fresh start, Sutpen embodies a uniquely American sentiment that an individual can become whoever he or she wishes to be. The same impulse that brought immigrants to the New World in the first place is demonstrated by Sutpen’s almost imperialistic project in Jefferson. Charles Bon, too, is described in these terms: “a personage who in the remote Mississippi of that time must have appeared almost phoenix-like, fullsprung from no childhood, born of no woman, and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust anywhere” (74). The American imagination is uniquely fascinated by such figures—from Jay Gatsby to Don Draper—but what is an individual’s responsibility to remain loyal to, or at least acknowledge, his or her roots?

In chapter 3, the narration examines the transformation of Ellen Coldfield after many years of marriage to Sutpen. Describing her shopping trips, Mr. Compson tells Quentin that Ellen would remain in her carriage and demand that merchants bring out items for her to look at, knowing all the while that she won’t purchase any of them. Ellen’s actions are depicted as “…a bland and even childlike imposition upon the sufferance or good manners or sheer helplessness of the men, the merchants and clerks…” (73). This scene stood out for me in light of Ellen’s upbringing, as the daughter of a poor but—seemingly—virtuous merchant. Years of marriage to Sutpen seem to have eroded her sense of self, and she gradually draws away from her family. Her treatment of the store clerks is the perfect embodiment of this removal from her previous reality. Whether this is simply a case of someone coming into money and no longer being comfortable with the family she left behind, or something more dark and complex, is open for debate. But it strikes me that it has as much to do with Sutpen himself as it does with his wealth.

With more than half of the novel in front of me, there is obviously a great deal I don’t yet know about Sutpen, Bon, and even Ellen. Certainly, in abusive or otherwise unhealthy family environments, it is understandable (admirable, even) that someone would run away and look to start over. But in other cases, I wonder if the desire for newness and independence does a disservice to one’s parents, siblings, and ancestors. In Ellen’s case, her new life exposes the shortcomings of her old one, and this friction gradually leads her to cut off contact with her sister (until she is about to die). There is a class element here, but Sutpen’s personal story and his menacing drive forward seems to have swept Ellen away from the person she is, or was. In a broader sense, this can be read as an allegory for American ambition and individuality, a particularly fraught issue for immigrant families who struggle with the choice between assimilation and isolation. Tracing not only the movements of these characters, but also who and what they left behind, will be a key to thread to follow for the remainder of the text.

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.