B006JHRY9S EBOK (28 page)

“He don’t look any more like a nigger than I do. But it must have been the nigger blood in him. It looked like he had set out to get himself caught
like a man might set out to get married. He had got clean away for a whole week…. Then yesterday morning he come into Mottstown in broad daylight, on a Saturday with the town full of folks. He went into a white barbershop like a white man, and because he looked like a white man they never suspected him…. They shaved him and cut his hair and he payed them and walked out and right into a store and bought a new shirt and a tie and a straw hat … And then he walked the streets in broad daylight, like he owned the town, walking back and forth with people passing him a dozen times and not knowing it, until Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, ‘Aint your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let along a nigger too.” (657–8)

A culture’s racial vernacular speaks here, with energetic conviction. In this vernacular, “niggers” are all too likely—it is their “default” position—to be rapist-murderers who skulk and hide in the woods. They are typically dirty as well—and recognizable as such. One recalls the speeches Faulkner made twenty-five years later in which he reminded black people that, to deserve equality, they should act, dress, and smell like white people. In
Light in August
there is no place for such condescension. The novelist imaginatively knew, in 1932, what the letter-writer of the 1950s seems to have forgotten. Joe Christmas does not need to be reminded how to dress. With exquisite irony, he bestrides the town as though he owned it. A white barbershop, a new shirt and tie and hat, an unhurried parading through Mottstown as he waits to be recognized: his moves eloquently counter white racist expectations, point for point. He does not say a word. His performance says it for him: “I look like you, perhaps better than you. I am clean, tall, and self-possessed. I enter and exit your segregated spaces—your barbershop and stores—and you do not see my difference. You do not see it because it does not exist. It takes you forever to catch up to me.” I have invented this silent speech, yet something like it roils inside this mob of enraged whites. Confusedly, they register his insult and grasp that he is mocking the racial conventions that underwrite their sanity. “The Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men,” Baldwin wrote.
Light in August
is the first of Faulkner’s masterpieces to express the fallout of that insanity.

Absalom, Absalom!
was not easy for Faulkner to write, and it is not easy to read. An all but intolerable amount of implication is wrought into its charged three hundred pages. It is not a matter of erudite meanings like those inserted by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound into their allusive modernist poems
The Waste Land
and the
Cantos
. In those overladen poems—countless scholars have made careers tracing the allusions—the concrete text serves as a locus for the most rarified musing. Not so for
Absalom
. Its allusions are helpful but supply no key. Rather, in an onslaught of emotionally laden prose that is remarkable even for Faulkner, the book twists and turns as it strains to give shape to an overarching racial vision of the South. Coleridge spoke of poetry as language expressing a “more than usual state of emotion” brought under “more than usual order.” On that model,
Absalom
is Faulkner’s most poetic novel.

The events of the novel are crucial, but
Absalom’s
identity lodges in its way of delaying and repositioning those events. Events happen in time:
Absalom
conveys how we actually go about grasping their meaning. Our tactic for doing so—as Faulkner’s earlier masterpieces suggest as well—is retrospection. We live forward, even as we understand by later looking back. A comparison between the linear events of the story and Faulkner’s way of circuitously plotting the same events—letting them come clear, or look different, later—makes this plain. Here is
Absalom
synopsized into linear sequence:

A boy named Thomas Sutpen is born around 1808, in the mountains of (what would become) West Virginia. After his mother dies, his father takes him and his sisters eastward. He joins his father in working on a large Tidewater plantation, and he encounters there the plantation’s black slaves. At age fourteen or so, he is told by his father to take a message to the planter in the big house. A black butler stops him at the front door, forbids his entrance, and tells him (in effect) that trash like him may enter only through the back door. He is never to forget this humiliation. Trying to avenge the wound to his psyche, he determines to become as rich as the planter whose butler had humiliated him. To do this, he heads to the West Indies, never seeing his family again. End of part 1.

Thomas Sutpen succeeds on a Haiti plantation. After putting down a slave revolt, he is offered as reward the planter’s daughter. They marry, and a son is born. Later, Sutpen learns that the planter’s wife is part black. In
the American South (if not in Haiti), this fact would doom his design to establish a plantation dynasty. So Sutpen abandons his family (paying for this handsomely) and heads to Mississippi. He arrives in Jefferson in 1833 with slaves (one of whom is a child named Clytie), money, and a “design” in place: to become a wealthy planter. He buys his land (Sutpen’s Hundred), builds his mansion, and takes as (second) wife the daughter, Ellen, of a local tradesman, Goodhue Coldfield. By 1841, they have produced two children, Henry and Judith, and in the next two decades he becomes the region’s most powerful planter. End of part 2.

In the late 1850s, Henry attends the University of Mississippi, where he falls under the spell of a sophisticated young man, Charles Bon, of New Orleans. Henry brings Bon to Sutpen’s Hundred, where Bon meets and falls in love with Judith. Ellen is overjoyed at the prospective marriage. In November 1860, Lincoln is elected president. That Christmas, Henry inexplicably breaks with his family, traveling to New Orleans with Bon. Henry and Bon enter the war the following spring, seeing action during the next four years. Ellen dies in 1863, heartbroken; a year later, Ellen’s father dies. The much younger Coldfield daughter, Rosa, moves to Sutpen’s Hundred. Bon returns to Sutpen’s Hundred in 1865 to claim Judith as his bride. Henry comes with him and, for unknown reasons, shoots Bon dead. Henry then flees. Sutpen returns home after the war, proposes to Rosa, and is rejected. He takes up with Milly, the granddaughter of his poor white worker Wash Jones. Milly gives birth to a girl whom Sutpen repudiates (he wants a son for his dynasty). Wash overhears Sutpen’s insult to Milly—“too bad you’re not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable” (AA 236)—and, incensed, kills Sutpen, along with Milly and the newborn baby. The sheriff’s party comes, and when Wash does not surrender, they kill him. End of part 3.

In 1870, an octoroon with her eleven-year-old, white-skinned son appears at Sutpen’s Hundred. Judith learns that she is Bon’s New Orleans widow, and the boy, Charles Etienne, is Bon’s son. Mother and son return to New Orleans, the octoroon dies soon after, and Judith sends Clytie to bring the boy back to Sutpen’s Hundred. Forced to be negro in Mississippi, when he had been comfortably creole in New Orleans, Charles Etienne does not adapt. As a young man, he seeks out violent racial encounters. He then leaves home, returning with a mentally deficient black woman as his bride. They produce (in 1882) a brain-damaged child, Jim Bond. Charles Etienne and Judith Sutpen both die of yellow fever in 1884. Clytie remains with Jim Bond in the dilapidated Sutpen mansion during the next twenty-five
years. Rosa lives alone in her father’s Jefferson home. In September 1909 Rosa summons Quentin Compson to come see her. She tells him someone is living at Sutpen’s Hundred, and she passes on to him her understanding of the tormented family history. That night Quentin goes with her to Sutpen’s Hundred. They find a dying Henry Sutpen, home after forty years of flight, being cared for by Clytie. Quentin discusses with his father the events he has heard and witnessed, shortly before departing for Harvard that fall. End of part 4.

With his Canadian roommate, Shreve, Quentin probes the Southern tragedy that has been foisted on him. In January 1910, Quentin receives a letter from his father telling him that Rosa has returned to Sutpen’s Hundred, trying to save Henry. Seeing her coming—and thinking the purpose is to arrest Henry for the murder of Bon forty-five years earlier—Clytie sets fire to the mansion, killing herself, Henry, and (eventually) Rosa. Of Sutpen’s tormented family, only Jim Bond remains alive, howling in the distance. Quentin and Shreve discuss these distressing events, laboring to produce a story that might make sense of it all. They want most to know why Henry would have killed Bon in 1865. They decide that this act of violence did not spring from Bon’s being already married to an octoroon. Instead, they see Bon as the son of Sutpen and his first wife, Eulalia. Bon would have been returning (in 1865) to Sutpen’s Hundred not just to claim a wife but to compel acknowledgment from his father. Finally, they believe that Sutpen could not acknowledge Bon because this son suffered from black blood. Referring to Jim Bond howling in the night, Shreve poses a last question to Quentin—“Why do you hate the South?” Quentin responds in agony, “
I don’t hate it…. I dont. I dont!”
(AA 311, emphasis in the original). End of part 5 and of the tragedy of the South.

Why didn’t Faulkner narrate the materials of
Absalom
in something like this sequence? The answer is that my linear summary does not tell how, in ongoing time, its actors and tellers (and readers) actually encountered all this experience. Converting earlier (mis)understanding into retrospective clarity, my paragraphs assume an all-knowing perspective, omitting the confusion that precedes enlightenment. From the beginning, I provide the comprehensive mapping that only retrospective mastery can provide—later. Of course my grasp of the events
is
retrospective. Drawing on repeated readings, I have straightened out and made sequential
Absalom
’s tangled time-weave, providing the orderly peace of
was
rather than the chaotic turmoil of
is
. By contrast, Faulkner’s creative effort centers on rendering the stumbling and confusion as it might have felt when it was happening. Only
by attending to the events as Faulkner narrates them can we home in on the novel’s racial freight.

Absalom
opens in September 1909. The Sutpen it first features is no infant in West Virginia (in the early 1800s) but a tyrannical adult who has ruined Rosa Coldfield’s life and who—dead these past forty-three years—cannot be forgiven. As with Joe Christmas, Faulkner has us first encounter Sutpen as an adult who has damaged others, long before showing him as a child damaged
by
others. Rosa’s conversation with Quentin—suffused with anger toward this “demon”—fills the first chapter. On Sunday mornings (so Rosa learned from her deceased sister Ellen) Sutpen would have his carriage—Ellen and the children inside it—roar up to the church at breakneck speed. Rosa closes the chapter by telling Quentin of Sutpen’s more offensive, indeed bestial, wrestling match with one of his own slaves. It seems that he used to permit his own children to watch this monstrous event in a ring—white and black onlookers surrounding it—where the two men would fight “not like white men fight with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad” (AA 20). Monstrous: in the antebellum South, whose priorities Rosa passionately defends, no white master would treat his slaves thus. The master could have them beaten, even maimed. But he would not touch them intimately, as an equal, in a public setting. Henry responded to this scandalous racial intimacy by vomiting, while Judith, we’re told, gazed on imperturbably. The scene ends in Rosa’s voice: “But I was not there. I was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time—once on Judith and once on the negro girl beside her—looking down through the square entrance to the loft” (24).

Rosa reads the fight between Sutpen and his slave as scandal, but it comes to look different when we are allowed (many chapters later) to put into play the realities of Sutpen’s upbringing. In the mountain territory where he grew up, one proved one’s mettle by physical strength. In that space uncontaminated by racial difference or private property or invidious wealth, personal identity and value got established by dint of one’s fists. A couple of decades later, Sutpen might have stepped into the ring with one of his slaves with no aim of wounding the sensibilities of his wife or children. In nostalgic fashion (“his only relaxation fighting his wild niggers in the stable” [AA 214]), he might have been confirming an earlier model for understanding his self-worth. He might have been demonstrating that he deserved to be master because he was still physically in charge. Likewise, when we learn later about his past, we realize that the furiously speeding carriage—read by Rosa as demonic—echoes an earlier humiliation
involving a carriage. As a boy, he had helplessly watched as his older sister, walking on the road, refused to give ground before the planter’s approaching carriage. The horses had reared, the slave driver had cursed, the elegant occupants had glared: “then he was throwing vain clods of dirt after the dust as it [the carriage] spun on” (191). A defiant gesture some twenty-five years later, we now see, echoes and poignantly attempts to reverse an earlier class-inflicted humiliation. For the reader, it is not a matter of later correcting a wrong reading of these scenes with a right one. Rather, both are true to the place and time where they occur. Rosa could see only as she saw, while a racially innocent Sutpen might have seen according to his earlier mountain schema. Faulkner ensures, by his structure of delayed information, that we read the scene both ways, and both times, as real.