Absalom, Absalom! in Classics Without All the Class

Oct 02, 2016 James rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, 2016-reads, university-reads

“‘Wait,’ Shreve said; ‘for Christ’s sake wait. You mean that he —’”

Extraordinary. Not only this book (and what a book) in both narrative and technique (and what spectacular skill), but the more extraordinary that “Absalom, Absalom!” still ranks, some half-decade later, as one of my more unforgettable reading experiences. See how—inhaling—Faulkner spins out his multi-perspectival tale of rage, revenge, and Southern desire; and how Faulkner moreover complicates it, this so-called central/singular “‘Wait,’ Shreve said; ‘for Christ’s sake wait. You mean that he —’”

Extraordinary. Not only this book (and what a book) in both narrative and technique (and what spectacular skill), but the more extraordinary that “Absalom, Absalom!” still ranks, some half-decade later, as one of my more unforgettable reading experiences. See how—inhaling—Faulkner spins out his multi-perspectival tale of rage, revenge, and Southern desire; and how Faulkner moreover complicates it, this so-called central/singular tale, with bias upon bitterest bias, even his own, fracturing his narrative into a spiderweb ceaseless in its expansion of interpretations, embellishments, and misrepresentations, his characters insisting upon themselves and their own accounts even in the face of contradiction. And how unassuming the beginning seems, with the ultimate deception of the quietude in “the long still hot weary dead September afternoon” (that early description of our narrative present already gathering its own tireless energy), and the iconic image of the “wisteria vine,” before Faulkner’s momentum’s unappeasable devouring.

This general momentum thoughout the novel, picking up unstoppable speed even on page one where Miss Coldfield’s subjectivity uncoils the first membranous tendrils, would soon exemplify Faulkner’s stance on narrative, truth, and history, all of which seldom if ever ossifying into solitary incontrovertible meaning, but which are subject to a process of meaning-making and -remaking that never quite rests. As “Absalom, Absalom!” unravels, that despairing biblical exclamation mark echoing our own cry for elusive coherence, we strive with Quentin (of “The Sound and the Fury” fame that I haven’t read yet due to fear) and his Harvard friend Shreve towards understanding the past as relates to Thomas Sutpen, Quentin’s grandfather’s friend, and thus to the South, as though the past, Sutpen, and the South can each be so objectively delineated. Not so. Faulkner renounces this paradisal simplicity, opting instead for murkier multiplicities of thought truer to what he sees as humanity’s untidier way of processing and articulating fiercely subjective realities.

Much can be made of Faulkner’s style, so distinctive by feel as to acquire that unquestioned right to self-adjectivisation and, by extension and notwithstanding his racism, nevertheless a literary canonisation. For it takes a certain Faulknerian sensibility, with that faintly apocalyptic mood, to parcel out phrases like Henry’s “irrevocable undefeat,” Miss Coldfield’s “impotent yet indomitable frustration,” and especially (as she in her pure pent-up hatred not so much characterises as curses him) Thomas Sutpen’s “effluvium of hell.” At the novel’s dark center stands “rocklike Sutpen,” who in death becomes more contested myth than man, yet the much more alive because of how much others’ imaginations sustain his legend, feed it, “as though as a man he did not exist at all.” Self-justifications, repudiations, and deep grievances animate this mesmerising work where simple though dismissive gestures (“the nub of the insult”; the audacity) spiral from mere ripple to tsunamic wave, the consequences of these butterfly effects assuming mythic proportions.

Yet professing any kind of love for Faulkner must again account for his racism, for how his characters freely employ dehumanising racial slurs though he himself was white. In an article called “Faulkner and Desegregation,” James Baldwin cornered him on this point (i.e., for the civil rights movement to “go slow”), though left his fiction out of said criticism, as Casey Cep notes in the great @newyorkermag article called “William Faulkner’s Demons” from November reconciling this very problematic aspect with his art. Toni Morrison herself, too, while not exactly giving him a pass (“I don’t care if Faulkner is a racist”), studied Faulkner’s writing in her master’s thesis. I don’t know. One unequivocally condemns an author’s racism, and should, yet can admire the work on its own terms, whose imagining here of his “maelstrom of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings” descends to depths most Dostoevskian, unfurling into a grandeur both Homeric and perverse. Whether on memory, history, or doomed ambition, “Absalom, Absalom!” dumbfounds in its respective exploration of each. Exhaling.
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Jan 09, 2011 Kayla rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, own, 1001-read, classics-read, school

I really liked the story and the mystery behind Sutpen's Hundred. However, the writing made it difficult for me to really get into the book. Usually I love Faulkner's writing and his stream-of-consciousness style, but Absalom, Absalom was full of paragraphs that would be over a page (or pages) long and sometimes these paragraphs would only contain three or four sentences that just go on and on, full of commas and colons and semi-colons. I feel like I missed a lot because there was so much inform ...more

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