Book #64: Absalom, Absalom!

Book #64: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

January 3, 2014


First book of the new year! I set a goal on my Goodreads account to read 75 books this year...freaking insane, and probably not going to happen. But I made my goal of 50 so handily last year, and...well, it's supposed to be a "challenge," so why not? Anyway, this is the first full-length text that I've read by Faulkner. I've always found the title interesting, and having read the book, I can say that I have no fucking idea what it means. And so...

In some ways, this book is similar to Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. It's the dramatic (really the stuff of Hollywood melodramas) epic story of a family in the South, before, during, and after the Civil War. It's told out-of-order, and from various perspectives. Quentin Compson, a young Harvard-bound student from Mississippi, gets sucked in to the story half a decade after the fact; it is implied in the chronology section at the end of the book that Quentin was so rattled by the events that unfolded (and was probably ill from the New England cold, since he obviously wasn't used to it or well equipped to handle it) that he died not long after telling the story to his college roommate, Shreve.

This book is not just about a family, though. I've stated before that one thing that I take from the books I've been reading is that living in the past, not letting things go and moving on, leads to a tragic life of misery and regret. That's clearly a message in this book, and not just for individuals like Rosa Coldfield, who still holds a grudge against Thomas Sutpen for insulting her. Okay, his proposition was pretty messed up. He first declared that he and Rosa, his dead wife's much younger sister, were engaged; he then proposed that he knock her up first, try for a boy, and if successful, he'd make her his wife. She left his once proud plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, in a huff, and held on to her rage against him for half a century, long after he had died.

It's Rosa's hunger for vengeance that brings Quentin into the mix. Although, the Compsons have always had some insider information about the strange, tragic story of the ruined Sutpens. For some reason that is never clear or explained, both of Quentin's paternal grandparents had the confidence of the Sutpens (both Rosa and Judith, her niece, confiding in the grandmother, and Thomas Sutpen himself in the grandfather). Quentin had already been hearing the incomplete details of the story from his father for years. On the one hand, he's grown weary of it (and that's completely understandable), though when Miss Rosa seeks his assistance, he learns far more, and delves into it much more deeply, than he ever wanted to.

Thomas Sutpen, the eccentric outsider who came to Jackson, Mississippi from parts unknown, is often referred to in the narrative as a "demon." But he's no more demonic than any driven person, and though his actions towards his children were deplorable (much worse than the insult to his sister-in-law), he was quite human. Quentin's grandfather knew, and so Quentin knew, that Sutpen came from ignorant mountain folk from West Virginia (though technically, as Shreve points out, West Virginia wasn't even a state yet by the time the Sutpens left it). When his family ended up living on the fringes of a huge Southern plantation, the young Sutpen was in awe of the plenty that the rich landowners had; hell, he was even jealous of the clothing worn by the slaves, and it was often observed in the text that the conditions of the "poor white trash" were worse than those of the field hands. Young Sutpen began to understand the Southern caste system when a slave at the plantation turned him away at the front door; he became determined to become the master of his own perfect, splendid Southern empire. The Civil War, and his own actions, brought about his ruin.

Sutpen leaves his first wife in Haiti because he learns, after their son Charles Bon is born, that she is part black. Of course, until the time of the Civil Rights Movement, a person who had any blood of African descent that could be traced would be considered "black," and subjected to the same treatment as all other black people. So Sutpen felt that he could not build his perfect Southern empire with his technically-black wife and child, so he paid them off and left them, sort of starting from scratch in Mississippi, where he married a white woman and had two white children, and a big plantation. He didn't have a great reputation in the area, being so mysterious and having such strange, backwoodsy ways, but he had the empire that he had dreamed of...for a while.

It isn't actually known for certain how Charles Bon came back into his father's life. Shreve and Quentin attempt to fill in this part of the story for themselves, imagining Sutpen's spurned wife as being bitter and seeking her own vengeance. They imagine a strange, maybe even miserable childhood for Charles Bon under her care, similar to the same kind of not-childhood that Miss Rosa had, as she was taught by her bitter aunt to hate the man who had tricked their family into allowing him to marry her sister. They don't know any of this about Bon for sure; it's all speculative. But it just goes to show how engrossed they've become in this story, even though most of the people involved died long ago. Anyway, they imagine that Bon's mother and some shady lawyer found out that Henry was attending the University of Mississippi at Oxford (the same school that Faulkner himself attended, in fact), and sent a too old Bon to school there to buddy up with his half-brother (whom he maybe didn't know was his half-brother at first?), and thus get revenge on Sutpen (maybe for money?). They don't even entertain the idea that Henry and Bon's meeting and friendship was a coincidence. While I'm not exactly fond of the idea of the spurned female character obsessing so much over the man that it takes over her entire life, she seems to be a common one in literature (and I think that this is familiar ground for Faulkner). And it does make more sense than having a 28-year-old Bon just happen to be attending the same little university as his own long-lost brother. But again, this isn't known for sure.

Bon very briefly, sorta, courts, and kinda-sorta becomes engaged to Henry's sister Judith. She is not Sutpen's only daughter at home; he has a mixed-race daughter named Clytie, born of one of his, ahem, personal slaves when Sutpen was still building his estate. Unlike Bon, Clytie was able to grow up alongside her brother and sister, and was even on somewhat equal footing with them. But she was still technically a slave, at least until after the war, though she stayed at Sutpen's Hundred until she burned it to the ground, with herself, and an aged outlaw Henry, inside of it. Yep. 'Cause Henry finds out from his father that Bon is his brother; Shreve and Quentin imagine that Bon and Henry both knew it, became open about it after leaving Sutpen's Hundred together, not to return until after the war...when Henry would shoot him dead at the front gate. So Rosa went to Sutpen's Hundred one night, years and years later, to take Henry down, and she brought Quentin along with her to be her strong arm. Henry had been hiding out at his childhood home for just a few years, hidden and cared for by his older half-sister. Rosa found out for sure that he was there, and Quentin did, too. His world was pretty much rocked, and when he later found out about the fire, and Rosa dying without having satisfied her need for vengeance, that seemed to overwhelm him...even to kill him.

Sutpen may have told his son to kill his own brother. He may have simply left the desperate kid with no option. He refused to acknowledge Bon in any way (at least, according to Shreve and Quentin's speculations), and that was all Bon ever really wanted (again, according to the guys). So Bon was going to get his father's attention, once and for all. He was going to marry his own sister. Shreve and Quentin even imagine that Henry, who admired and cared for his brother so much, tried to reconcile it somehow, but obviously he could not. The fact that Bon was part black didn't seem to bother Henry at all; it made him no more or less conflicted about the whole situation. The college boys in the early 1900's, looking back on the whole messy situation, seem to feel that if Sutpen had only done right by his first son, the whole situation wouldn't have gone down like it did.

Sutpen met a violent end himself. A few years after the whole situation with Henry and Bon (his daughter left without any marriage prospects, to die an old maid while caring for Bon's son from his first, also mixed-race wife), Sutpen was cut down by his own right hand man, Wash Jones. Sutpen, desperate for one last go at a son, must have given the same proposition to Jones's young granddaughter that he gave to his sister-in-law. The girl, the only family member that Jones had left, became pregnant, and had...a girl. Jones kills Sutpen, then goes on to kill his granddaughter and the baby, and to get himself killed by the police.

The Sutpen line does not die here, because Bon's son Charles also had a child, by a very dark black woman (Faulkner's descriptions of her, or perhaps his characters' descriptions of her, are extremely racist). It's said that his son, Jim Bond, the last of the Sutpen line, is ignorant and wild...basically, like his white great-grandfather Thomas Sutpen was. He is the lone survivor of the whole situation, having gotten out of the house or not been in it when Clytie burned it down. Quentin and Shreve cannot even wager a guess as to Jim's whereabouts. He is all that is left of the Sutpen empire, down to 1% of what it had once been.

Wow! Pretty crazy situation. It's no wonder that, even though Quentin had been hearing the story all his life, it had captured his imagination all over again with the recent situations that had arisen around him, and with the retelling of it all to his roommate. Quentin and his friend are piecing the story together with all kinds of information; first, second, and third-hand, incomplete, some of it often repeated, and many questions still unanswered. Shreve is fascinated by the story, and he, being Canadian, sees it as being uniquely Southern, in a land of people living in the past and living with regret. Quentin grapples with his own feelings about the South at the very end. Shreve speculates that Quentin hates the South, is perhaps bitter about the fact that a story from so long ago can still ruin so many lives, that the Civil War can still affect the way that people see the world and behave towards others. Quentin denies it, but he "protests too much"; perhaps this is a reflection of Faulkner's own feelings of, I don't know, guilt or shame about his own Mississippi background.

It took me a bit to get into this book, but I found myself as absorbed in the Sutpens' story as Shreve the Canadian. But I also found myself feeling the way that I'm sure Quentin had his whole life, that it was sad how people like Miss Rosa couldn't let the past go, couldn't forgive and move on with life. But then, maybe someone like Miss Rosa simply didn't have a choice. Maybe she had to become a ghost. Faulkner writes in the text how, prior to the Civil War, women of privilege were bred to be delicate, helpless ladies. This made them helpless when the war struck and they were faced with unspeakable hardships. Still, Rosa and Judith and Clytie endured together at Sutpen's Hundred...could they really be so physically strong but so emotionally weak? Did the war beat the fight out of them? I'm most disturbed at the thought of living a life like Miss Rosa's: sitting around all day in all black, living on charity, watching and waiting for the opportunity to exact revenge...for half a century! Seriously, I would rather be dead. The hardships of the war and the first few years of the Reconstruction wouldn't be as bad as that. At least then you'd be fighting to survive, and that's something. But to sit around and dwell in the past...that's a life of nothing.