81. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
OPD: 1936
format: 311-page paperback
acquired: April read: Nov 26 – Dec 7 time reading: 19:52, 3.8 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: classic theme: Faulkner
locations: Mississippi, Massachusetts, and somewhere behind Sherman’s Civil War advance line
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

"Why do you hate the South?"

"I don't hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately, "I don't hate it," he said. I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!

Well, at four minutes a page, I found this hard. This is my twelfth Faulkner novel as I work through his fiction. So, I don't say that randomly, this is hard for Faulkner.

Many serious critics and fans consider this his best work. He apparently thought so himself, delivering it to his publisher with the comment that he wrote the great American novel. It's The South, captured in the story of Colonel Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen arrived in Mississippi in 1833 with no known past, and acquired 100 acres of prime land from a Choctaw outside of fictional Jefferson, the Sutpen 100. Then he acquired respectability by marrying a woman in town, Ellen Coldfield, daughter of a devout shop owner. That is not say he wasn't considered wild or immoral. He came to town with 8 French-speaking slaves (illegally imported), fathered a child by one. He was arrested for the manner in which is acquired the material to furnish his house. He was crazy, but he acquired his respectability, had a son and daughter. And when the Civil War came, joined the Confederate army, as did his son. But at the end of the war, Sutpen now a widower, an odd sequence of events happened. His son shot his daughter's fiancé and his own best friend, a kind of dandy from New Orleans, and then this son disappeared. Sutpen's daughter, widowed before marriage, would never marry. Sutpen lost his name and lineage.

But we are not told this story in any direct manner. It's relayed through storytelling voices. First through Rosa Coldfield, the younger sister of Ellen. As an old lady, nearing her own death, she relays this story to a family friend, young Quentin Compson, about to leave for school at Harvard, in faraway northern Massachusetts. Her monotonous voice she relays this Quentin, in the hot Mississippi summer, in the stuffy indoors with aged dust motes, in long endless sentences. Quentin, puzzled, is taken in. That's the first section, the first telling. In the remaining length of the book Quentin sits with his roommate, Canadian student Shreve. Together they continue the story, partially through a letter from Quentin's father, and egged on continuously by a curiously shirtless Shreve in the freezing Massachusetts winter. At points Shreve is reading Quentin's father's letter to Quentin, the version of the story that was relayed to Quentin's father by Quentin's grandfather. Who is speaking, what is the source, how reliable is any of this, what is factual and what is conjecture.

Whatever it is, the weird story is not the point, it's what's under the story, the why. The story gets farther and farther out there, but never far enough to motivate these deranged characters. They are always worse than that.

One of the interesting aspects of the story, and also what makes it so difficult, is the way it's relayed. Whether Rosa Coldfield, Quentin, his father, Shreve, or at times, Quentin and Shreve in unison, to story is relayed in monotone, relentlessly, a dispassionate voice, except when Shreve cries, "Wait!", and Quentin never does wait. There is a possession. Like Virgil's Sibyl, this a Sibylline telling, and incantation, sometimes coming in two parallel voices. Sentences and paragraphs go on for pages, the voice carrying over, circling in on itself, making it very hard to keep track. I had to keep backtracking to figure out where I was (hence my four-minutes a page.)

In a backhanded criticism, I was never really bored. I was always interested, although often mentally exhausted. It has its own propelling force to carry you along. But in a more direct criticism, it's not my favorite Faulkner. The overall point simplifies down too much for me, by which I mean once I finished, I felt done. I don't spend time wondering on it, like I do most of Faulkner's other books. It wraps itself up. I've dug in while reading, and I'm leaving those holes as they are, incomplete, equipment derelict, nothing cleaned up, just lumps with scattered junk (perhaps in the Mississippi mud, and perhaps only there till the next heavy rain).

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/365030#8702439 ( )

Faulkner is a challenge. Long parenthetical phrases and stream of consciousness (?) asides make it difficult to follow the story, but I was determined, this to finish this one.

I struggled with this book for a variety of reasons. I came to it with great expectations. I knew Faulkner as a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and an extremely celebrated and revered writer. I also knew his reputation for basing much of his writing in the South. I knew his connections to Oxford, Mississippi, the University of Mississippi and to The University of Virginia, which I attended briefly in the early 60s. I was not prepared for his unique writing style. He loves stream of consciousness, run on sentences and lyricism. I was not prepared for the lengthy sentences which contradicted themselves and presented multiple alternative explanations from one phrase to the next. Events were revisited many, many times in and out of sequence leaving the reader with doubt as to what was, in some sense, the real story. Many writers have explored events from a variety of viewpoints of the participants and those who learned about them second hand. This left me sitting back and constantly wondering if I understood what was just said. I found myself, just as I did when I read Borges' Ficciones, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I knew this was great, I just was not following the bouncing ball.

I found myself turning to the Chronology and Genealogy sections of this edition to keep myself somewhat grounded. Who was what to whom seemed to keep changing, mid-sentence at times. An annotated version would probably help here as well, but that was not available to me. It was also clear that lots of foreshadowing was going on. Something bad was definitely going to happen, but not now, and under what terms or sequence of events was it ever going to happen. Were we finally going to be let in on the secret, or was this just time for another hint? It kept me reading even if I wasn't getting it. Maybe on the next page. Paragraphs never seemed to end, so stopping was harder than usual.

I was also clueless to the biblical story that was being alluded to. In my search to get some grounding, I turned to Wikipedia and learned the biblical backstory. It was clear the brother was going to kill his older half-brother to avenge his sister. But what was the motivation? Weren't they best of friends? Why did it take years? Was he disturbed that his older brother was going to marry his recently disclosed half-sister? Had he seduced her? Had he raped her? Was she a willing participant? Was he revenging the father who abandoned him and his mother? I still don't know. I can't spill the beans. And then there's the mostly absent father. Was all this his doing? Did he have no shame? Did he care for anyone? Was this all striving to get where no one thought he could go? Again, I just don't know.

And last but in no way least was the setting. The slavery based South before, during and after the Civil War. I was not at all prepared for the constant, yes constant, use of the N-word without any seeming reservation. This was clearly treated as normal and acceptable. Not only was racial degradation everywhere, and so was sexual subjugation. I am not surprised this was never made in to a movie. Too much of the underbelly of society was front and center. There was no story without all the things that can't be touched on the screen.

I'm hoping this depravity is not in the rest of Faulkner's works. If so, I may take a pass. Caveat emptor. ( )

Thomas Sutpen starts with very little, and attempts to build a family with power and money in the American South before the Civil war. He survives the war, but the cost of his dreams has scarred his family. The violent death of his son, and the reason for it are the main focus. ( )

Dark, dense, confusingly written, ambivalent and ambiguous - Faulkner's novel is complex and problematic, and yet also compelling, poetic and rich. While ostensibly the story of one demagogue, Thomas Sutpen, who rules the lives of family and neighbours in small-town Mississippi, it is more fundamentally a fractured dirge for the 'Old South'. Through a number of unreliable/reliable narrators, it digs into the painful and twisted ways in which sex, family and race are corrupted in that time and place, among the mutilated, abandoned or misbegotten characters who populate it. It's a confrontational novel: confronting the reader, and evidently the author, with the ways in which the unpleasant features of human desire and hate can consume families and communities within a culture and history of oppression and violence. ( )