Tag Archives: AA

On Alcohol

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Alcohol struck me as a common thread throughout many of the novels we read this semester, particularly in TSAF, LIA, AA and GDM.  It is of course closely linked to Faulkner himself. In his literature, it seems to be consistently connected to masculinity and agency although in different ways depending on the characters. 

For example, in TSAF Mr. Compson appears to use alcohol as an escape from the reality of his declining family.  His wife indicates that alcohol consumption is a form of suicide for him and she accuses Dilsey of enabling him:  “Don’t you know what the doctor says?  Why must you encourage him to drink?  That’s what’s the matter with him now.  Look at me, I suffer too, but I’m not so weak that I must kill myself with whiskey” (TSAF 207).  Mr. Compson’s reliance on alcohol has an emasculating effect.  Jason connects his father’s alcohol abuse to Caddy’s pregnancy out of wedlock and subsequent failed marriage: 

“…and not letting her daughter’s name be spoken on the place until after a while Father wouldn’t even come down town anymore but just sat there all day with the decanter I could see the bottom of his nightshirt and his bare legs and hear the decanter clinking until final T.P. had to pour it for him and she says You have no respect for your Father’s memory and I says I don’t know why not it sure is preserved well enough to last only if I’m crazy too God knows what I’ll do about it just to look at water makes me sick and I’d just as soon swallow gasoline as a glass of whiskey and Lorraine telling them he may not drink but if you dont believe he’s a man I can tell you how to find out” (TSAF 240).

While Jason’s stream of consciousness shifts a few times in this passage, the sequence links the family shame brought on by Caddie, to Mr. Compson’s antisocial and addictive behavior.  It is also clear that Jason does not drink, most likely because he has lost respect for his father because of his dependency.  However, Jason’s abstinence calls his masculinity into question, something Lorraine is more than willing to vouch for.  There is also the scene in which T.P. and Benji drink sarsaparilla, while Caddie gets married, another instance of alcohol as a form of escape connected to Caddie’s lost virginity.  If virginity is the ultimate definition of femininity and whiskey drinking is the ultimate masculine pastime, TSAF seems to illustrate the destructive forces of adhering to extreme constructs of gender.

Sutpen and Jason are similar in their opinions of their fathers.  Sutpen’s father seems to be perpetually drunk, “snoring with alcohol” in the cart on the way to Tidewater, “filling the room with alcohol snoring” in the cabin in Tidewater.  Sutpen also credits an “alcohol fog” for his father’s decision to send him to school” (AA 187, 198, 200).  Gretchen Martin points out that the Sutpen’s experienced an extreme culture shift in leaving the backcountry for plantation life, claiming that “men like Sutpen’s father resented the dependence created by this [plantation] economic system” (Martin 5).  While Martin focuses on Sutpen’s father’s laziness, his resentment for leaving a more independent lifestyle as a yeoman could also be attributed to Sutpen’s father’s alcohol consumption. 

Even Sutpen himself remarks on the cultural change of plantation life:  “He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room” (AA 189).  Plantation society not only renders the Sutpen men dependent but also comes with a new set of standards for masculinity.  Gone is idea that masculinity is defined by physical strength, bravery or the ability to hold your liquor.  That definition is replaced with the image of the plantation owner who wears shoes even when he doesn’t need them and has a slave that basically breathes for him.  The independent yeoman is replaced with the seemingly vulnerable and dependent slave owner.  Sutpen becomes increasingly affiliated with alcohol consumption as the novel progresses.  At first described as someone so committed to his design that he did not have “not only the money to spare for drink and conviviality but the time and inclination as well,” he is frequently described drinking with Wash Jones upon returning from the war (AA 31).

Continuing in this vein are the entrepreneurs Lucas Beauchamp and George Wilkins. For the black men of “The Fire and the Hearth” in GDM, rather than a loss of agency as illustrated in TSAF and AA, the production of alcohol functions as a way to operate outside of the limited options they are given through share cropping.  In fact, it is through his alcohol production that we first see to what extent Beauchamp value’s his autonomy.  He is determined to maintain his monopoly of whiskey production:

“It was not that he had anything against George personally, despite the mental exasperation and the physical travail he was having to undergo when he should have been home in bed asleep.  If George had just stuck to farming the land which Edmonds had allotted him he would just as soon Nat married George as anyone else, sooner than most of the nigger bucks he knew.  But he was not going to let George Wilkins or anyone else move not only into the section where he had lived for going on seventy years but onto the very place he had been born on and set up competition in a business which he had established and nursed carefully and discreetly for twenty of them, ever since he had fired up for his first run not a mile from Zack Edmonds’ kitchen door” (GDM 43).

It is clear that he is not motivated by money since “he already had more money in the bank than he would ever spend” (GDM 42).  The moonshine business allows Beauchamp to earn money outside of the oppressive share-cropping system while outsmarting his white counterpart, Edmonds, inheritor of LQCM.  Of course moonshining is illegal, so Beauchamp is also circumventing not only the oppressive economic system in the South, but he is also challenging the legal system, and with a bit of a leap, Jim Crow laws as well.

Since TSAF focuses intensely on a family in the changing South, it makes sense that alcohol functions with more private and familial implications here.  Mr. Compson loses his independence in his addiction and the family seems to deteriorate at the same rate as his addition worsens.  In AA, white male aristocratic identity is being challenged, and alcohol abuse seems quite linked to that loss of self and the loss of independence inherent in plantation society.  Lastly in GDM, a novel that seems to subversively seek black agency, alcohol emerges as a function of that new found agency. While not mentioned here, Joe Christmas in LIA is also in the illegal alcohol business. It could be argued that LIA is a novel about crossing boundaries and their consequences, in which case, Joe Christmas’ gender bending could also be tied to his willingness to break the law, which he does through the illegal sale of alcohol.

Please note that all pagination is based on Google Books additions.

Martin, Gretchen. “Vanquished by a Different Set of Rules: Labor vs. Leisure in William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom!” The Mississippi Quarterly 61.3 (2008): 397. Web.

Echo, Echo!

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“History repeats itself,” so the old saying goes. I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, in whose work characters often disappear, are assumed to be dead, and reappear dramatically, in what I refer to as a kind of “living resurrection,” and the technique is effective both in a literary sense and in an example of art reflecting reality. People come in and out of our lives, and the circumstances around the coming and going are often completely out of our control. Faulkner employs a similar device in his works, with characters reappearing in the same or even different novels. The major difference is that for Hardy it was a strategic move to enhance plot, and in Faulkner it is not. Faulkner is interested not in the reappearance of a character for sake of effect, but in the shadow that is cast on the primary object by its secondary appearance; in other words, the echo. In a single line of AA, I had the sudden insight that for Faulkner, it is the echo itself that, more than anything else, he is absorbed by:

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space… (AA 210)

The whole novel of AA seems to be a reverberating echo of a story that changes in meaning, implication, essence, and style. In the same way that the four gospels are each a variation or echo of the other three, yet all four are needed to gain a complete picture of the life and passion of Christ, so too do the looping stories about Sutpen, Henry, Bon, etc. depend on all of the narrators to give a comprehensive understanding of them.

The echo of an image, a character, or a word, is the thing that can retroactively modify itself, and serves as the proof of time. In fact, the echo may be Faulkner’s fundamental way of understanding time. We spoke in class of the circular motion of LIA, and I see clearly now that the circle is Faulkner’s central geometric, artistic, and designing principle. All action happens in anticipation of its own reverberations in the future, and those future reverberations serve to clarify the past action. This is why you so often see the ABBA technique in Faulkner’s writing. I first became acquainted with this while reading Hugh Kenner’s superbly didactic introduction to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (Signet), where Kenner explains that this ABBA pattern is called a chiasmus, the literal definition of which is an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases. I found this pattern all over the novels we read.

Yet Faulkner also uses variations of the pattern. Sometimes, as in the case of the chiasmus, the echo is instantaneous, and sometimes it is delayed. Sometimes the echo is identical and sometimes is has changed. The title of AA itself is an instantaneous echo, with a comma providing the pause in time that allows the second Absalom to reverberate with exclamation what the first Absalom merely pronounced. An example of a delayed echo is in LIA, when a young Christmas says, “It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible” (81) followed 137 pages later by Hightower saying, “To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world” (318). The pattern is made more complex (in typical Faulkner fashion) by each part of the delayed echo being an echo itself: the former a cropped echo: ABC-AB-B and the latter a double echo with a variation on the second part: A-A-BC-BD. Faulkner seems to be playing with the idea of time and decay here. In one sense, the primary echo – the older Hightower’s echo of the young Christmas’s remark – has been inverted: what the youth saw as terrible the elder sees as unparalleled and fleeting. Further, Christmas’s echo points to what we traditionally perceive as an echo (the refracted sound getting softer and more distant as it travels) and Hightower’s points to the way that sound changes, not just in volume, but in essence as it travels.

When we started this class, I blogged that reading Faulkner was like being in a dense fog that slowly dissolves as you keep reading. Now, if someone were to ask what reading Faulkner is like, I would paint a different picture: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, and you shout a word. You hear it repeating over and over, yet each time it grows softer, farther, until there is silence again. Now think back to when you first shouted the word. Are you still standing in the same spot? Are you still you?

Faulkner’s Allegory

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Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! employs a vehicle of already established characters, Quentin Compson and Jason Compson Sr., from The Sound and the Fury, to create an allegorical story of The South. Thomas Sutpan is at the center of Mrs. Coldfield’s retelling in chapter one, and through her remembrance, becomes a demon-like figure. With a profusion of ruthless energy, Thomas Sutpan focuses on claiming respectability through the establishment of a house on expensive land and marriage with a woman that can strengthen his name. Understanding Thomas Sutpan as the embodiment of the Old South we begin to understand Faulkner’s point of Absalom, Absalom!.

Thomas Sutpan is described as a very intimidating individual and proficient with his double pistols that have worn down handles (AA 25). The sickness in his demeanor, that seems to stem from a hunger not for food or drink but for something unknown to the town, conveys a lack within him (AA 24). When we take the gossip of a southern town to understand an individual it proves difficult, especially at this point in the novel. When we take Thomas Sutpan’s characteristics and actions thus far and apply them to a broader category, the establishment of the South and the emergence of The Southerner, the plot becomes a developing allegory. Sutpan’s worn down pistols expresses the hard use of them, and the fact that at first he had nothing but his clothes, horse, and the two pistols shows the importance of firearms in the South. Sutpan represents the conviction of The Southerner in creating a place of their own amidst a battlefield. Firearms are stitched in the historical fabric of the South because of their importance in the establishment of the South (removal of Native Americans). Although firearms aren’t exclusive to the South, the attachment to them seems to be stronger because of its use in westward expansion. Firearms also gave the South the ability to fight in the Civil War against a government that threatened their way of life. His emaciated body expresses the arduousness of The Southerner and unwavering conviction while facing the hardship of expansion.

Thomas Sutpan represents the Old South and a mode of thinking that is viewed in a negative light in Quentin’s post Civil War society. There’s a reason Mrs. Coldfield speaks of him in such a negative way and although we know little of him yet, we know that he treats his family with no respect and had facilitated fighting between slaves for whites entertainment. The fighting ring he created symbolizes the cruelty of Southern slave-owners at an extreme. The fact that Thomas Sutpan never visited his wife’s family because he had all he could get from them shows a ruthless resourcefulness, an accelerated version of The South’s establishment. Not to compare his rudeness with The South’s establishment, but the reason for his rudeness being grounded in a vision of the future. His goal mimics The Southerner’s original goal and he is trying to achieve it with the straightest line possible. I can only assume that Sutpan meets a tragic end and that he is responsible for his own undoing. If my theory makes any sense (it hardly does for even I) then the ending of Sutpan in Faulkner’s allegory should be a bitter defeat and mark the beginning of a slow progression from the ways of the Old South.

Women in Faulkner

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Absalom Absalom! begins differently, compared to his other three novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, as the readers are quickly given a narration as to how the downfall of a family came to be.  Coldfield’s story of Sutpen, can easily be Ms. Burden, from LIA, or Hightower’s story, a story related to the Civil War that involves slavery and isolation. I found it quite interesting that Faulkner would situate a story prior to Quentin’s travel to Harvard and death. As told in The Sound in the Fury, the interpretation that Quentin’s death was primarily due to Caddy’s actions may be false. Absalom Absalom! Travels before the birth of Quentin, to a period that may explain why the once Aristocratic Compson family lost their wealth and reputation. The usage of “ghosts”, involvement of Mr. Compson, the non-present father figure in TSAF, and a female’s voice, may explain why Quentin was so heavily affected by Caddy’s actions and with his conversations with his father. Though Coldfield tells Quentin her stories due to his Ivy League education, “So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it…” My interpretation of Miss Rosa Coldfield’s reasoning as to why she chose Quentin to tell her story is similar to Ms. Burden’s forcefulness and want to control Christmas’s life and future in LIA. Miss Rosa Coldfield expects Quentin to join the literary profession, get married, own a house, and publish stories in magazines, yet she knows nothing about Quentin. Mr. Compson states, “Do you want to know the reason why she chose you… It’s because she will need someone to go with her- a man, a gentleman, yet one still young enough to do what she wants, do it the way she wants it done…” It seems Faulkner expresses each female in his novels as a demanding, emasculatory, and dominant figure in comparison to males that are easily manipulated and insecure with their own identity and inability to grasp control of their desires and futures.  Also, the analogy of ghosts to ladies “Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the war came and made the ladies into ghosts.”(AA!) , may implicitly tune into the ability of  women playing drastic roles in males without their presence being significant such as the lack of Addie’s presence in AILD, yet memories of her still allowed her to play a significant role in her son’s life through animal magnetism, a fish and a horse. However, due to Quentin’s naïveness, “Quentin thought, long ago when she was a girl—of young and indomitable unregret, of indictment of blind circumstance and savage event; but not now; only the lonely thwarted old female flesh embattled for forty-three years in the old insult; the old unforgiving outraged and betrayed by the final and complete affront which was sutpen’s death…”, in comparison to Mr. Compson’s belief of Miss Coldfield’s intentions, this leaves a question as to why did Faulkner decide Quentin be told this story instead of Quentin’s father or perhaps to another person who is more aware of Sutpen’s identity. By reading TSAF, LIA, and AILD, we are able to have a better grasp on how women, men, and the setting /town play a role into each person’s life through manipulation and interpretations.

A Few Scattered Thoughts on Absalom’s First 3 Chapters

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10 pages into Absalom I put the book down for a second on my lap and said, “My God, WHAT is going on in this novel?” Where is the Faulkner I’m used to? TSAF, AILD, and LIA had such bold voices. We got to know each character from the inside. We lived and breathed them, we became them. I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on any of these characters just yet. I know the peripherals, the reputations, the hear-say that goes drifting through family lore and town gossip like tumbleweeds on a dirt road. But I haven’t been put inside them yet, like Benjy or Jason or Darl or Dewey Dell. Even Quentin, whose mind once dazzled and disturbed, now feels distant. But alas, as I’ve come to learn, there is little clarity at the forefront of a Faulkner novel, and much more at the end. The fog has rolled in, and I suspect it will dissolve over the second half of the novel.

It is the telling of a telling of a story, told by Miss Coldfield and Mr. Compson to Quentin, who in turn will tell the story to his Harvard roommate (whom we’ve already met in TSAF) Shreve. With Faulkner there is an on-going trope of characters passing on stories, usually with a sense of urgency, which is appropriate since this was Faulkner’s main artistic achievement: “So they had to depend on inquiry to find out what they could about him.” (25) It’s important to correlate the travel and movement of characters (as discussed by Leigh Anne Duck in her essay) with the travel and movement of stories. The two are necessarily intertwined. So the “legend” of Sutpen and his “wild negroes” is a kind of stage drama witnessed by the town’s men and brought back to the others in the form of lore: “So the legend of the wild men came gradually back to town, brought by the men who would ride out to watch what was going on…” (27)

I loved Andrew’s reading of the connection between the French architect and Faulkner’s own role as writer, the two artistic tasks overlapping in the elements of structure, design, and function: a story, once it is told, being a kind of interior house for one to live in. The parallel is applicable on many levels. If we look at Hemingway’s grand metaphor for writing as being a long, exhausting battle with a fish, ultimately eradicated materially yet triumphant spiritually, it will be interesting to see what becomes of Sutpen’s Hundred and his mansion. It is noteworthy that if the French architect is a parallel for Faulkner’s own artistic endeavor, he is a character whose only agency comes with creative input, but who has been basically forced to undergo the erection of Sutpen’s relentless vision. This might suggest that Faulkner had an idea of himself as a kind of slave to his own artistry.

I’m also seeing strong parallels with Wuthering Heights, in the structure of a novel being a story entirely told by a medial character who stands between author and us as readers; in the complex romantic triangulation involving family members; in the incestuous undertones of siblings; in the house as an enclosed space where psychological dramas and family violence is acted out; and in the traditional Gothic theme of ghosts: “the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still…” (4)