Absalom, Absalom!
LC Class PS3511.A86 | | |
Preceded by | Pylon | |
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Followed by | The Unvanquished |
Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen.
Absalom, Absalom!, along with The Sound and the Fury, helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 1949.[2] In 2009, a panel of judges called Absalom, Absalom! the best Southern novel of all time.[3]
Plot summary
Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the dual aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard College, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story.
Thomas Sutpen arrives in
Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets fellow student Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Charles home for Christmas, and Charles and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, Thomas Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the proposed union.
Sutpen had worked on a plantation in the French West Indies as overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon. They had a son, Charles. Sutpen did not know that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he discovered that he had been deceived, he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child (though leaving them his fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also later learns of Sutpen's childhood, when young Thomas learned that society could base human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas' plan to start a dynasty.
When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry refuses to believe it, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in
Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his dynasty and his home, whose hundred square miles have been reduced by
The story of Thomas Sutpen's legacy ends with Quentin taking Rosa back to the seemingly abandoned Sutpen's Hundred plantation, where they find Henry Sutpen and Clytemnestra (Clytie), the daughter of Thomas Sutpen by a slave woman. Henry has returned to the estate to die. Three months later, when Rosa returns with medical help for Henry, Clytie mistakes them for law enforcement and starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining Sutpen is Jim Bon, Charles Bon's black grandson, a young man with severe mental handicaps, who remains on Sutpen's Hundred.
Analysis
Like other Faulkner novels, Absalom, Absalom! allegorizes Southern history. The title refers to the
The history of Thomas Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture. Sutpen's failures necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an idealistic South. Rigidly committed to his "design", Sutpen proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a part-black woman, setting in motion his own destruction.
Discussing Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner stated that the curse under which the South labors is slavery, and that Thomas Sutpen's personal curse, or flaw, was his belief that he was too strong to need to be a part of the human family.[5]
By using various narrators expressing their interpretations, the novel alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of Faulkner's South, where the past is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time; it thus also explores the process of myth-making and the questioning of truth.
Absalom, Absalom! juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation—with the implication that reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative.[citation needed] Faulkner stated that, although none of the narrators got the facts right since "no one individual can look at truth", a truth exists and that the reader can ultimately know it.[6] Most critics have tried to reconstruct this truth behind the shifting narratives, or to show that such a reconstruction cannot be done with certainty or even to prove that there are factual and logical inconsistencies that cannot be overcome. But some critics have stated that, fictional truth being an oxymoron, it is best to take the story as a given, and regard it on the level of myth and archetype, a fable that allows us to glimpse the deepest levels of the unconscious and thus better understand the people who accept (and are ruled by) that myth—Southerners in general and Quentin Compson in particular.[7]
The use of Quentin Compson as the primary perspective (if not exactly the focus) of the novel makes it something of a companion piece to Faulkner's earlier work
In popular culture
The 1983
The final lyric of Distant Early Warning, a single released by the Canadian rock band Rush, is the word 'Absalom' repeated three times. Drummer Neil Peart, the band's lyricist, said he "loved the sound of" the title of Faulkner's novel and was inspired to look up the Biblical story of Absalom after reading the novel. "Since one of the main themes of the song was compassion, it occurred to me that the Biblical story was applicable."[10]
See also
References
- ^ "George Salter's Covers #50–99". Coverbrowser.com. Retrieved 2012-09-07.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2021-09-12.
- ^ "Oxford American: The Best Southern Novels of All Time (138 books)".
- ^ "2 Samuel 15". Retrieved 2018-02-02.
- ISBN 9780195154788. Retrieved 2012-09-07.
- ISBN 9780195154788. Retrieved 2012-09-07.
- ^ See M. Boyd, The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as Critique, p. 68 ff.
- ^ According to count by R. Poplett Jan 2016.
- ^ Jones, Josh (July 16, 2014). "5 Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On". Open Culture. Retrieved April 19, 2017.
- ^ "Distant Early Warning by Rush - Songfacts". www.songfacts.com. Retrieved 23 March 2019.