Faulkner to the Nth Degree

(The Faulkner Project) Absalom, Absalom! from Faulkner Novels 1936-1940.  Library of America.  *****

I have a long-ago memory of a PBS documentary that I watched about Faulkner—I guess it was an American Masters—in which he supposedly said to someone, after completing Absalom, Absalom!, “This is the greatest novel ever written by an American.”  An oddly revealing remark, by a man who was normally modest about his work.

I don’t think it’s even the greatest novel ever written by Faulkner.  But I do think it’s the most Faulknerian of the novels, and the one to which, in a certain sense, all the other novels point.  It’s a mammoth story about the South, about race, incest, miscegenation, slavery, storytelling, told in the most flowery rhetoric imaginable.  It’s just this side of parody, but it’s definitely on this side, and at its best it’s magnificent.  One person tells the story to another: an ancient woman (who’s actually younger than I am now, but she’s had a hard life) named Rosa Coldfield tells it to Quentin Compson, who bats it around with his father (one of the most flowery and boozy rhetoricians in the South, and whose own father was involved in the plot), then tells it to his college roommate Shreve McCaslin, a Canadian.  Quentin, whom we met first in The Sound and the Fury and who is obsessed with female honor, his sister, and incest, is just months from taking his own life.  One of the most brilliant aspects of this stunningly brilliant novel is the choice of Quentin as one of the narrators, one of the people pondering these events.

(I felt this time that I finally understood Quentin’s obsession with the story, as I came to this brief scene of Rosa Coldfield recounting it to him.  Henry Sutpen is speaking to his sister Ellen, about the man she was supposed to marry, Charles Bon.

“Now you can’t marry him.

            Why can’t I marry him?

            Because he’s dead.

            Dead?

            Yes.  I killed him.

            He (Quentin) couldn’t pass that.  He was not even listening to her.”

That was the thing that Quentin, if he weren’t such a Hamlet-like prevaricator, wishes that he could have done (murder the person who wanted to marry his sister).  He wishes he had the nerve of Henry Sutpen.)

I wish I knew more about the composition of the book (once I finish with the novels, I intend to read the most recent Faulkner biography).  Faulkner began it in 1934, though the plot hearkens back to a story he wrote in 1931.  He worked on it much of that year, then decided it had become “inchoate” and wrote Pylon rapidly.  He took it up again in March of 1935 and finished it in January of 1936.  (The next line in the LOA chronology is, “Drinks heavily and is hospitalized in Wright’s Sanitarium, small private hospital in Byhalia, Mississippi.”)  During that time his brother died in an airplane that Faulkner had sold him; Faulkner moved to Hollywood on a contract of $1,000 per week to write the script of the film Paths of Glory for Howard Hawks, getting up early to work on Absalom, Absalom! before he went into the studio.  He also began his “intermittent and sometimes intense fifteen-year affair” with the 28-year-old Meta Carpenter, Hawk’s secretary.  In that midst of all that he composed a great novel.

In many ways it seems to be a story about telling a story.  Each time a new narrator begins, he or she chooses a different place, and thereby creates a completely different story.  Our sympathies and emotions keep shifting.

The first narrator, Rosa Coldfield, speaks about the man—Thomas Sutpen, the protagonist—who showed up in Jefferson when she was young, bought a huge tract of land outside of town, and set about building a magnificent house with the help of a French architect and a primitive and mysterious band of slaves.  Eventually he married her sister Ellen and had two children. Henry and Judith.  Henry eventually attends the University of Mississippi, and encounters an extremely sophisticated man from New Orleans named Charles Bon, whom he brings home to meet his sister.  All of this is happening in the late 1850’s, as the war is brewing.  Ellen immediately sees this man as the perfect match for her daughter, and all but announces their engagement when they’ve barely met.  Unfortunately—and unbeknownst to Ellen—Bon is Judith’s half-brother, the son of a Haitian woman whom Sutpen married years before.  So their marriage would be, technically, incest—Quentin perks up when he hears that—and there is also the problem that Bon’s mother was part Negro.  Henry looks up to Bon as a mentor and loves him as a brother, and confronts a huge moral dilemma.

The war intervenes, and both men go off to fight for the confederacy, as does their father.  There is some hope that “the war will solve” the dilemma—one or all of them will be killed—but that doesn’t happen.  Henry decides he has to kill his brother, and Sutpen—in his hope to create a dynasty which will outlive him—is back to square one.  Though the plot sounds complicated, I haven’t begun to suggest its twists and turns.  There are many more, to the point where Faulkner had to create a chronology and a list of characters at the end.

I will admit that, in my previous readings, there was a moment when I wanted to dispense with the rhetoric and just get on with the (rather incredible) story, so that I found myself impatiently hurrying through the book (young men are so stupid.  Especially young men who want to read all of world literature).  This time I didn’t do that; I sank into the tangled sentences (the way you might do with Proust, or Henry James) and let myself appreciate and enjoy them.  This is Faulkner at his most Faulknerish.

I also found myself surprisingly in sympathy with Sutpen, who by the end of the novel has become a kind of monster.  His origins were in West Virginia (a state I just traveled through for my uncle’s memorial service, and where my maternal family originates), and after his mother died and his drunken father moved the family south and west, there was an occasion when young Thomas approached a plantation on some kind of business and was told, by a house slave, to take his business to the back door.  That moment of humiliation inspired all he did after that.  Sutpen eventually became a kind of mad man, but that moment of humiliation was real.  And of course the story—as all great literature does—shows us how futile it is to try to overcome humiliation with achievement.  The most magnificent house in that part of Mississippi winds up as a pile of rubble.

Faulkner described the book to his editor as the story “of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him.”  Hence the title.  And if it isn’t my favorite Faulkner novel, it is the one I’m most glad to have reread, at least so far.  There’s something magnificent about its sustained power.  If you were going to select a novel to stand up to Moby Dick (another candidate for the greatest novel ever written by an American), this might be the one.