Absalom, Absalom!
Encyclopedia
Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic
novel
by the American
author William Faulkner
, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South
, taking place before, during, and after the Civil War
, with the focus of the story on the life of Thomas Sutpen
.
, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of becoming rich and a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson
to his roommate at Harvard University
, Shreve, who frequently contributes 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 non-chronological order and often with differing details, resulting in a peeling-back-the-onion way of revealing the true story of the Sutpens to the reader. 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, as well. 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 Jefferson, Mississippi
, with some slaves
and a French architect
who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American
tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen’s Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man’s daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy.
Henry goes to the University of Mississippi
and meets a fellow student named Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Bon home for Christmas, where he and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, 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 Haiti
as the overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon, who bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen had not known that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he found out 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, where 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.
Henry, possibly because of his own potentially (and mutually) incestuous feelings for his sister, as well as quasi-romantic feelings for Charles himself, is keen to see the two wed (allowing him to imagine himself as surrogate for both). When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry refuses to believe, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in New Orleans. They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company where they join the Confederate Army and fight in the Civil War
. During the war, Henry wrestles with his conscience until he presumably resolves to allow the marriage of half-brother and sister; this resolution changes, however, when Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is part black. At the conclusion of the war, Henry enacts his father's interdiction of marriage between Charles and Judith, killing Charles at the gates to the mansion and then fleeing into self-exile.
Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his home, whose hundred square miles have been reduced by carpetbaggers and punitive northern action to one, and dynasty. He proposes to Rosa Coldfield, his dead wife's younger sister, and she accepts. However, Sutpen insults Rosa by demanding that she bear him a son before the wedding takes place prompting her to leave Sutpen's Hundred. Sutpen then begins an affair with Milly, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a squatter who lives on the Sutpen property. The affair continues until Milly becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. Sutpen is terribly disappointed, because the last hope of repairing his Sutpen dynasty rested on whether Milly gave birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside, telling them that they are not worthy of sleeping in the stables with his horse, who had just sired a male. An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen, his own granddaughter and Sutpen's newborn daughter, and is in turn killed by the posse that arrives to arrest him.
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 Clytie, herself 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 starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining Sutpen is Jim Bond, Charles Bon's Black grandson, a young man with severe mental handicaps, who remains on Sutpen's Hundred.
fighting the empire his father built. 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 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. These two curses combined to ruin Sutpen.
Absalom, Absalom! juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation, with the implication that reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative. Faulkner, however, stated that although none of the narrators got the facts right, since "no one individual can look at truth", there is a truth and the reader can ultimately know it.
While many critics have tried to reconstruct the truth behind the shifting narratives, or to show that such a reconstruction cannot be done with certainty or even that there are factual and logical inconsistencies that cannot be overcome, 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.
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.
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 The Sound and the Fury
, which tells the story of the Compson Family, with Quentin as one of the main characters. Although the action of that novel is never explicitly referenced, the Sutpen family's struggle with dynasty, downfall, and potential incest parallel the familial events and obsessions that drive Quentin (??) and Miss Rosa Coldfield to witness the burning of Sutpen's Hundred.
, helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature
. In 2009, a panel of judges called Absalom, Absalom! the best Southern novel of all time.
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
, taking place before, during, and after the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, with the focus of the story on the life of Thomas Sutpen
Thomas Sutpen
Thomas Sutpen is the focal character of William Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen arrives in Faulkner's imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi in the 1830s and established a 100 square mile plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, in an attempt to create his own personal dynasty...
.
Plot summary
Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas SutpenThomas Sutpen
Thomas Sutpen is the focal character of William Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen arrives in Faulkner's imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi in the 1830s and established a 100 square mile plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, in an attempt to create his own personal dynasty...
, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of becoming rich and a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson
Quentin Compson
Quentin Compson is a fictional character created by William Faulkner. He is an intelligent, neurotic, and introspective son of the Compson Family. He is featured in the classic novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as well as the short stories, That Evening Sun and "A Justice"...
to his roommate at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Shreve, who frequently contributes 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 non-chronological order and often with differing details, resulting in a peeling-back-the-onion way of revealing the true story of the Sutpens to the reader. 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, as well. 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 Jefferson, Mississippi
Yoknapatawpha County
Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county created by the American author William Faulkner, based upon and inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi and its county seat of Oxford, Mississippi...
, with some slaves
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and a French architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen’s Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man’s daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy.
Henry goes to the University of Mississippi
University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, is a public, coeducational research university located in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1844, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses located in Booneville, Grenada, Tupelo, and Southaven as well as the...
and meets a fellow student named Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Bon home for Christmas, where he and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, 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 Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...
as the overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon, who bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen had not known that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he found out 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, where 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.
Henry, possibly because of his own potentially (and mutually) incestuous feelings for his sister, as well as quasi-romantic feelings for Charles himself, is keen to see the two wed (allowing him to imagine himself as surrogate for both). When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry refuses to believe, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in New Orleans. They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company where they join the Confederate Army and fight in the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. During the war, Henry wrestles with his conscience until he presumably resolves to allow the marriage of half-brother and sister; this resolution changes, however, when Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is part black. At the conclusion of the war, Henry enacts his father's interdiction of marriage between Charles and Judith, killing Charles at the gates to the mansion and then fleeing into self-exile.
Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his home, whose hundred square miles have been reduced by carpetbaggers and punitive northern action to one, and dynasty. He proposes to Rosa Coldfield, his dead wife's younger sister, and she accepts. However, Sutpen insults Rosa by demanding that she bear him a son before the wedding takes place prompting her to leave Sutpen's Hundred. Sutpen then begins an affair with Milly, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a squatter who lives on the Sutpen property. The affair continues until Milly becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. Sutpen is terribly disappointed, because the last hope of repairing his Sutpen dynasty rested on whether Milly gave birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside, telling them that they are not worthy of sleeping in the stables with his horse, who had just sired a male. An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen, his own granddaughter and Sutpen's newborn daughter, and is in turn killed by the posse that arrives to arrest him.
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 Clytie, herself 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 starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining Sutpen is Jim Bond, 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 itself is an allusion to a wayward sonAbsalom
According to the Bible, Absalom or Avshalom was the third son of David, King of Israel with Maachah, daughter of Talmai, King of Geshur. describes him as the most handsome man in the kingdom...
fighting the empire his father built. 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 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. These two curses combined to ruin Sutpen.
Absalom, Absalom! juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation, with the implication that reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative. Faulkner, however, stated that although none of the narrators got the facts right, since "no one individual can look at truth", there is a truth and the reader can ultimately know it.
While many critics have tried to reconstruct the truth behind the shifting narratives, or to show that such a reconstruction cannot be done with certainty or even that there are factual and logical inconsistencies that cannot be overcome, 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
Jungian archetypes
Carl Jung created the archetypes which “are ancient or archaic images that derive from the collective unconscious” Also known as innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic symbols or representations of unconscious experience emerge...
, 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
Quentin Compson
Quentin Compson is a fictional character created by William Faulkner. He is an intelligent, neurotic, and introspective son of the Compson Family. He is featured in the classic novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as well as the short stories, That Evening Sun and "A Justice"...
in particular.
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.
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 The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
, which tells the story of the Compson Family, with Quentin as one of the main characters. Although the action of that novel is never explicitly referenced, the Sutpen family's struggle with dynasty, downfall, and potential incest parallel the familial events and obsessions that drive Quentin (??) and Miss Rosa Coldfield to witness the burning of Sutpen's Hundred.
Influence and significance
Absalom, Absalom, along with The Sound and the FuryThe Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
, helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
. In 2009, a panel of judges called Absalom, Absalom! the best Southern novel of all time.
Trivia
- The title refers to the BiblicalBibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
story of AbsalomAbsalomAccording to the Bible, Absalom or Avshalom was the third son of David, King of Israel with Maachah, daughter of Talmai, King of Geshur. describes him as the most handsome man in the kingdom...
, a son of DavidDavidDavid was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, an ancestor of Jesus Christ through both Saint Joseph and Mary...
who rebelled against his father (then King of Kingdom of Israel) and who was killed by David's general JoabJoabJoab the son of Zeruiah, was the nephew of King David and the commander of his army, according to the Hebrew Bible.- Name :...
in violation of David's order to deal gently with his son. Another parallel to the Biblical story is that Absalom had his half-brother executed for raping Tamar, his sister. Faulkner's novel substitutes a seduction for the rape. - The 1983 Guinness Book of World Records claims the "Longest SentenceLongest English sentenceThere have been several claims for the longest sentence in the English language. Claims revolve around the longest printed sentence, as there is no absolute limit on the length of a written English sentence; a sentence describing successive reading, for example, could be infinitely long, and one...
in Literature" is a sentence from Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,300 words. - Faulkner's short story "Wash" tells the story of the birth of Sutpen's illegitimate daughter to Wash Jones' granddaughter, and of Jones' murder of Sutpen, and then his own granddaughter, and his great-granddaughter (whereupon he sets fire to the house the mother and child are in).