B006JHRY9S EBOK (29 page)

The second chapter has Quentin and his father (the same September night in 1909) narrate again the creation of Sutpen’s Hundred and its furnishing. The chapter then dilates on the details of Sutpen’s marriage to Ellen Coldfield. Later we will learn—but only later—that this was his second marriage; we then realize why he was in such a hurry. Humiliated by the insult at the door, deceived later by the racially mistaken first wife, he had no time to lose if he was to build his plantation, launch his dynasty, and get his revenge. Likewise, the children born of this second marriage could not know—yet—that they were shadowed by an earlier sibling, their dark twin. Here again both views are true, incompatibly so. Faulkner forces the two views—rising from different times and places—eventually, and violently, to encounter each other. Charles Bon is relentlessly on his way to Sutpen’s Hundred, driven by his mother’s thirty-year-old, race-wounded history. Retrospectively, we grasp that the long-simmering anger caused by Sutpen’s abandonment of her was not to be gainsaid. Up close, however—to everyone but Sutpen—the unfurling courtship of Judith and Bon reads as sweetness and light.

When Quentin presses his father for more information about Rosa in the third chapter, Mr. Compson furnishes the town’s understanding of her warped childhood. He tells of her father’s death during the war, and he closes on Wash Jones riding a mule to her house in 1865, saying: “Air you Rosie Coldfield?” (AA 72). Talking further to Quentin during the same night in September, Mr. Compson launches the fourth chapter by envisaging Henry and Bon traveling together to New Orleans, after Henry’s mysterious break from his family. Mr. Compson enters their drama empathically, and both young men come powerfully to life: Henry choosing love for Bon over fidelity to his own family, Bon riskily revealing to Henry
the details of his exotic New Orleans experience. That revelation culminates in Bon introducing Henry to the octoroon mistress whom he has morganatically married and by whom he has a child.
(Morganatic
designates a marital arrangement in which neither wife nor offspring may legally inherit. It was a procedure often used by French royalty and their nonaristocratic mistresses, centuries earlier, and it still flourished in nineteenth-century New Orleans. This arrangement would have ensured that when Bon later married a white woman, the line of descent and inheritance would be protected.) Unable to supply other motives for their quarrel, Mr. Compson tries to believe that Henry killed Bon because of the octoroon. This chapter concludes virtually where the preceding one left off, citing again Wash Jones’s words to Rosa Coldfield: “Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come on out yon. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef” (AA 110).

Thirty-eight pages later, we are only three brief sentences further along! What could justify such circular movement? The answer is that the murdered Charles Bon we earlier knew of had no narrative density—his was merely the name of a man who had inexplicably been killed—whereas the fourth chapter has created him, generously and generatively. He has begun to matter. We learn of his love for both Henry and Judith, and we are invited by Faulkner’s narrative procedure to identify with his plight. In the next chapter, he will speak movingly in his own voice, by way of an 1865 letter to Judith (in Mr. Compson’s possession). There he wryly recounts to his fiancée the disasters of the war and his decision to return to Sutpen’s Hundred so that they may marry. We know—but still not why—that Henry will end by killing him rather than permit the union to take place. The climactic eighth chapter accesses Bon in yet a different fashion—this time by way of Quentin and Shreve, as they imagine him traveling earlier to Sutpen’s Hundred, filled with expectation and anguish. This last version of Charles Bon is a young man who—informed by his mother who his father is, but not why his father repudiated mother and son—desperately seeks paternal recognition. He has waited patiently, all his life and now these four years of the war, for Sutpen to recognize him.

By providing present experience before revealing that experience’s long-concealed antecedents, Faulkner allows us to grasp both the innocence of the Sutpen children’s love for Bon and the tangled noninnocence behind Bon’s appearance at the university. Their love for him—which in Henry’s case will not survive the scandalous (later) revelation of black blood—takes
Absalom
into racial territory Faulkner had never entered before. Whites
loving blacks, always on condition of not knowing that they are black: this narrative arrangement bristles with implication. Half French in his sophistication, half American in his vulnerability; half female in his charm, half male in his strength; half white by his father, part black by his mother: Bon blends elegance and power, unillusioned shrewdness and generosity of spirit. These come together to produce a suppleness of being that no pure line of descent could make available. He is the text’s utopian image of what miscegenation might
really
enable, though no one in the story is prepared to consider this possibility once he is “outed” as black. Identified thus—his history exposed and communicated—Bon cannot be loved, nor admired, nor admitted into the precincts of his white family. Once racially fixed, he must either submit to be “nigger” or die the death. Given Bon’s unflinching courage, his choice is not surprising.

But more than courage is now involved in this novel of black and white relations in the South. Bon emerges as the most strenuously reinvented character in the novel—reinvented because, as in
Light in August
, the facts are not all in, never will be. Bon cannot be objectively known, he can only be interpreted—by the other characters in their present experience of him, by the narrators later seeking to make sense of what happened. The narrators perforce encounter the Sutpen saga as a mix of the known (never enough) and the plausible (never fixed once and for all). Though each of them grasps that Bon’s motives were the key to this “bloody mischancing of human affairs” (AA 84), they read him in different ways. We have seen how Mr. Compson enters Bon’s life, imagining his unillusioned wisdom as that of a “youthful Roman consul” come to visit northern Mississippi’s “barbarian hordes” (77). His Bon is above all
curious:
a curiosity for Mr. Compson to figure out, a man curious to understand these quaintly uncivilized Mississippians.

When Quentin and Shreve, in the last chapters of
Absalom
, turn toward Bon, they see him no less as the key to the novel’s murderous enigma. For them, though, the “bloody mischancing” must circulate around something more than fate or curiosity, must have risen from the tormented human heart. They decide on an “overpass to love”—a history that, at its racial core, must have centered on heartbreak—and their Bon (the novel’s final version) is no merely sophisticated traveler. “
I am a good deal younger than I thought”
this Bon muses,
“My God, I am young, young, and I didn’t even know it”
(AA 265, emphasis in the original). Young, confused, stumbling in his present 1859 crisis (however long ago it happened for his twentieth-century interpreters), this Bon—like Joe Christmas—doesn’t know what he’s going to
do next. He seeks only the merest sign of recognition from Sutpen—with that he’d leave for good—and he’d accept even less: “
a sheet a scrap of paper with the one word ‘Charles’ in his hand, and I would know what he meant and he would not even have to ask me to burn it. Or a lock of his hair or a paring from his finger nail and I would know them because I believe now that I have known what his hair and his fingernails would look like all my life’
(269, emphasis in the original). A lock of hair: it has become a love story.

Henry pleads with Bon—“You are my brother”—to forego his quest, not force the issue. Bon replies: “No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” (AA 294). Bon is unpacifiably both. No other novelist approaches Faulkner when it comes to loving what you hate, hating what you love. This unmanageable heart-truth underwrites
Absalom
and makes it live and breathe. “The human heart in conflict with itself”: so Faulkner characterized his core concern when receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950. What is this but to center his great work on the plight of human beings who find themselves intolerably self-entrapped? Doomed by what their culture has taught them they must be—yet can no longer bear to be? Faulkner’s most compelling protagonists seethe with convictions at odds with their feelings. Over time, agonizingly, they lose their inner coherence. The territory Faulkner opens to anguished reilluming is not—as in his own life—the confusions of love, or the war that was missed at first and mendaciously claimed later. In
Absalom
it is the reality—at once his own and his region’s—of interracial intimacy cohabiting with repudiation. They are us and not-us, cherished and abandoned—dark twins inseparably bonded by blood, beyond joining because of that shared blood.

By the end,
Absalom
has revealed in Charles Bon all that he is and cannot be. Bon a nigger? Given what we have seen of the suave and sophisticated white-skinned Bon, the inappropriateness of “nigger” virtually explodes on the page. In mid-nineteenth-century Mississippi, if Bon “were” black, he would have been a slave, and none of
Absalom
’s love-investments would have been possible. Since he “is” black—as we learn after many hours of reading him as white—we recognize with renewed power the absurd brutality of racial stereotype. Absurd because Bon so transcends the stereotype, brutal because its daily imposition prevented Mississippi slaves from remotely becoming Bon. Faulkner has created, in the guise of this socially impossible figure, so much that the South had experienced but could not allow itself to conceptualize.

Nor does it stop here. Bon has a child, though not by Judith, and this child’s story comes to figure as the mixed-blood nightmare that replaces
Sutpen’s lily-white dream of dynastic descent. Unlike his father’s, Charles Etienne’s racial awakening is brutally swift. He was born in a New Orleans in which he “could neither have heard nor yet recognised the term ‘nigger,’ who even had no word for it in the tongue he knew who had been born and grown up in a padded silken vacuum … where pigmentation had no more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle shades” (AA 165). Suddenly, this child is seized by Clytie and transported—without explanation or shared language—to a northern Mississippi where the space he inhabits has altered beyond recognition:

the few garments (the rags of the silk and broadcloth in which he had arrived, the harsh jeans and homespun which the two women bought and made for him, he accepting them with no thanks, no comment, accepting his garret room with no thanks, no comment, asking for and making no alteration in its spartan arrangements that they knew of until that second year when he was fourteen and one of them, Clytie or Judith, found hidden beneath his mattress the shard of broken mirror: and who to know what hours of amazed and tearless grief he might have spent before it, examining himself in the delicate and outgrown tatters in which he perhaps could not even remember himself, with quiet and incredulous incomprehension) hanging behind a curtain contrived of a piece of old carpet nailed across a corner. (165)

The courtly twinned image at which ragged Charles Etienne stares in this shard of broken mirror reveals the chasm between what he was and what he is. Each present item of clothing reads as the despoliation of a former item of clothing. His New Orleans-furnished body has been displaced by his Mississippi-furnished body, none of this his own choosing. Like his father, Charles Etienne materializes as culturally impossible, torn between here and there, now and then. Puritan northern Mississippi and Catholic New Orleans, the jagged racist present and the harmonious race-neutral past share him incoherently. His solution to these incompatible cultural markings is to combine them as crucifixion. One needs (as one needed with his father) an infrared light to read the black man in this white man. But Charles Etienne makes it easier by guaranteeing, through premeditated acts of violence, that he be recognized as both at once. He chooses for wife exactly the kind of black woman that white and black alike will read as scandalous. Abreast of the nuances of every stereotype that entraps him, he projects nothing except trouble upon black and white alike.

And it is not over yet. The book ends on the note of his brain-damaged, dark-skinned son, Jim Bond. The last of the Sutpen line, this orphaned figure
remains howling somewhere in the woods. No one is left who could claim him—unless it be Quentin Compson. Paralyzed by his own race-tormented inheritance, how could Quentin either recognize or fail to recognize—in the mirror of this unassuageably howling idiot—his own dark twin?

Cognition can take forever to become more than cognition. Quentin pores over this story, seeking the detail, the clue, that will unravel its mystery. I have already quoted the innocent detail that later ignites into illumination: “I [Rosa] 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.” So casually said by Rosa: Sutpen’s face on the negro girl Clytie as well as his own daughter. Quentin’s climactic trip to Sutpen’s Hundred (occurring in narrative time at the beginning of the novel, but opened up and passed on to the reader only at the novel’s end) lets him figure out the portent of that white-engendered dark face. “And she didn’t tell you in the actual words,” Shreve says about Quentin’s seeing Clytie there, “nevertheless she told you, or at least you knew” (AA 289). At least you knew: if Sutpen could beget one black child, he could beget others. He could and did beget Charles Bon.

The murder finally takes on its meaning. The morganatic marriage only goes so far, not very far at all. The incest motive goes further, tormenting Henry for the four years of the war. Finally, though, there is miscegenation, and this barrier is nonnegotiable—Henry “thinking not what he would do but what he would have to do. Because he knew what he would do” (AA 292). Perhaps the book’s brilliance is most at work here.
Absalom
must manage to
think through
something that its actors—once they know that the obstacle to marriage is miscegenation—are incapable of thinking about at all.
Absalom
’s strenuous withholding of information—the reasons for its circuitous movement through time—reveals its purpose. We are all but finished with the book when we learn that Bon is not just brother but black brother. Faulkner has suspended that discovery over the entire narrative, releasing it only in the penultimate pages. All previous interpretations of Bon’s murder remain intact. But the racial motive is both the most decisive (the one that can command life-altering behavior) and the last Faulkner can supply. He must withhold it from Bon himself, from most of the other characters, and from the reader as well.