I just finished
listening to the audiobook of William Faulkner’s celebrated novel Absalom, Absalom! The book has had a
major influence on world literature, but, ironically, not always in Faulkner’s home
country, the U.S.A.
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| William Faulkner |
In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner creates a complex plot structure that is one of the novel’s most unusual features. That
meandering architecture does have its antecedents—Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier springs to mind.
The tales of the
various narrators in Absalom, Absalom! are
filtered through the voice of Quentin Compson, a Harvard undergraduate from the
rural Mississippi town of Jefferson, where most of the book’s action takes
place. Quentin tells the story in 1910 to his roommate, Shreve, though the timeframe
of the story is mostly mid-19th century.
But the plot is
not a linear progression through history. Instead, the story unfolds in
temporal loops that keep circling back to certain key events, revealing with
each telling another part of what occurred in a particular episode. As the
loops around a certain incident accumulate, the reader is able to assemble a more
complete picture of that event. These loops are like the twists of a cord, or
the frills at the edge of a doily, moving forward, but never in a straight
line.
At one point in
the novel, Faulker beautifully describes the worldview that underlies his
highly original method of storytelling:
“Maybe nothing
ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe
on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool
attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool
feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature
of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in
a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s
watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the
original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm…”
In other words,
each event in a story resonates with every other event, whether we realize the
connections or not, just as the characters in the novel seem to repeat the same
actions from generation to generation. Thomas Sutpen, the Southern, self-made
partriarch who is the dominant figure in the novel, marries two women without
divorcing the first. The son that he never acknowledged from his first marriage
similarly attempts bigamy, but…well, I won’t reveal what happens for those who
haven’t read the novel. It’s like a cycle of Greek tragedies on a Southern
plantation, and then some.
Absalom, Absalom! has been described as “Southern Gothic”
but I don’t think there’s a lot of the Gothic in Faulkner’s book. To me,
“Gothic” implies the presence of otherworldly beings and phenomena, and the
characters of Absalom, Absalom! are very
much of this world. What could be more material than Thomas Sutpen’s
relentless, Balzacian energy to procreate and to build and rebuild his
plantation? I would describe Faulkner’s novel as Southern baroque, since it has
the ornateness, grandeur, and sensuality of a baroque basilica.
The style of the
novel also has a leisurely, baroque flow. Here’s a passage from the opening
paragraphs that gives a flavor of the book’s style, which makes it such a
pleasure to hear certain sections of the novel read out loud in a Mississippi
drawl:
“Her voice would
not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom
sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by
the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into
which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of sparrows like a flat limber
stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long
embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint
triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she
resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and
then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to
patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were
the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.”
OK, there are
some otherworldly beings there, I’ll give you that.
The novel’s
baroque diction and plot were a tremendous influence on several of the greatest
South American magical realist writers, particularly in novels such as Gabriel
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera,
and Autumn of the Patriarch. I would
add Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, Conversation
in the Cathedral (which you should read if you haven’t—fantastic book!), and
Manuel Puig’s wonderful saga, Heartbreak
Tango.
It’s curious to
me that so few writers of Faulkner’s own country have emulated either his style
or his plot structure. He is one of the few North Americans to win the Nobel
Prize for literature, isn’t he? I do think Toni Morrison's novel Jazz has some of Absalom, Absalom in its winding plot structure and the ornateness of its language.
Maybe part of
the problem is that Faulkner is a complicated case when it comes to race and
gender, and who wants to touch complexity in this day and age? Faulkner
probably thought of himself as an enlightened person when it came to those
issues, at least in the context of the time when Absalom, Absalom! was published, which was 1936. And in some ways Faulkner
was enlightened. There is a character in the novel who nails himself into his
own attic and starves to death rather than be drafted into the Confederate army
during the Civil War. The book discusses relationships between the races. Those
were certainly taboo subjects for a white Southern writer to depict at that
time. Despite those moments in the book, Faulkner could be faulted over and
over for his obsessive use of the “n” word and his stereotypical description of
African Americans. The women characters in the novel are paper dolls. For those
of us still living with the legacy of the history Faulkner describes in Absalom, Absalom!, the book is a grab
bag as a role model for other writers.
Or is it that
Faulkner’s baroque, Southern sensibility is not in tune with the WYSIWIG
culture of Puritan America? Who has time for a sentence that goes on for the
better part of a page in a world where stock market trades
are logged by the millionth of a second? I experienced this firsthand when I
was listening to the audiobook of Absalom,
Absalom! on the way to work. I would arrive at the parking lot at my office
and I couldn’t shut off the narrative till the actor reading the book had come
to a stopping point, so I would sit in my car for a couple of minutes while the
time ticked away making me later and later for work, and I paused in my Toyota
Corolla listening to Faulkner’s sazerac-infused prose, waiting for that
beautiful, winding river of a sentence to finally reach its delta.
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