Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1986.

Review by: Michael Viox, Caitlin Parker, and Casandra Willett

William Faulkner’s 1936 work titled Absalom, Absalom! is a novel that tells of the rise and fall of a figurative “empire” of the South during the time of the Civil War. It contains an out of order storytelling of a man named Thomas Sutpen and his dream to become rich and powerful in using his family and plantation to achieve it. There are various characters who narrate this story, all having some relation to Supten, his wife, children, or the slaves he owned and controlled to make his power successful. The true story of Sutpen is revealed as the novel progresses, and the flashbacks and anecdotes about Sutpen and those around him are what ultimately lead to the fall and death of this empire.
Each of the nine chapters of Absalom, Absalom has a main event and a general topic. The chapters come together quite nicely, and even though they can be confusing at times, each section of the novel describes an important event, flashback, or explanation that has occurred or is occurring.

Chapter 1 gives a background as to how the story came about, and introduces the reader to some of the main characters. The story begins with the character, Quentin Compson, receiving a letter from an old woman named Rosa Coldfield. She is interested in telling him the story of the South and of her life because Quentin is somehow connected to a man who she says is responsible for a lot of pain and suffering her life and in the life of her family. The main topic of the chapter is Rosa Coldfield’s narration of the man who they call Sutpen. She describes his character and tells Quentin about how he arrived in town and planned to build up his “empire” and make a name for himself. Rosa tells Quentin that her sister, Ellen, was married to Sutpen and that they had two children together, Henry and Judith. This chapter gives the reader an incite as to who the main characters are, and gives a backdrop to the main events that are going to surround these characters. This opening chapter is filled with a lot of important information, and the reader should pay attention to the events and background that are described in order to get a better feel for what is going to happen in the following chapters.

Chapter 2 revolves around Quentin’s father’s narration of the events regarding Sutpen’s Hundred. Sutpen’s Hundred, referring to the hundred acres of land on which Sutpen planned to build his estate, is his way of making a name for himself. The whole town becomes suspicious of Sutpen and the events that are going on with him and his slaves on his plantation. This chapter also refers to the marriage that Rosa Coldfield told Quentin about in the first chapter. It says that Sutpen decided one day that he wanted to marry Rosa’s sister, Ellen, and eventually they plan a wedding (which was not well attended) and are married. Chapter 2 is characterized by Sutpen’s motive to build up his plantation and his wealth, and it gives the reader an incite as to how Sutpen is going to behave as the book progresses.

Chapter 3 of the novel goes into detail about Rosa’s childhood and early life. Quentin’s father explains to him why Rosa is interested in telling Quentin about the story of Sutpen and why she feels so much hatred for him. Quentin’s father narrates Rosa’s childhood and describes how she was raised by her aunt, which was a very rocky relationship. Her visits to Sutpen’s Hundred are very distressing, and she dislikes going there. The reader learns that Rosa eventually will move to Sutpen’s Hundred. This chapter introduces Charles Bon, Henry’s friend, and describes his visit to New Orleans, and the suspicion that Sutpen had about him. Rosa eventually becomes orphaned, and prepares to move to Sutpen’s Hundred. Some of the main events of the novel begin to take place in this chapter. Chapter 3 sets the stage for the many events, a lot of them tragic, that begin to come about.

Chapter 4 of the novel consists of Quentin reading a letter that had been given to him by his father. This letter is extremely important to the events of the chapter and the entire novel. This chapter is full of controversy between Henry, Charles Bon, and Judith. The reader will discover something about Charles Bon that is the cause of a lot of violence and confrontation later on in the novel. A discussion of the war is present in this part of the novel, also. This novel is set during the Civil War, and Henry and Charles Bon are involved. This part of the novel ends with some startling news about Sutpen and Charles Bon.

Chapter 5 consists of Rosa returning to Sutpen’s Hundred. Rosa has a scuffle with Clytie, Sutpen’s daughter with one of his slaves. This shows her racism, which is one of the most important themes of the novel. As the chapter progresses, we learn that Rosa eventually moves to Sutpen’s Hundred and has plans to marry Sutpen until something goes awry. The closing of the chapter consists of Quentin thinking about the scene between Judith and Sutpen regarding the news about Sutpen and Charles Bon. This novel is full of Quentin, and others, recreating what had happened in the events of the novel. This is an example of another theme of the novel that keeps showing up; re-creating the past.

Chapter 6 also keeps in line with the re-telling of past events from a different point of view. Quentin, after receiving a letter from his father regarding Rosa, tells his roommate, Shreve, about the events of the South. This part of the novel gives the reader another point of view of the story, which is very helpful and important.

Chapter 7 continues on with Quentin telling the story of the South to Shreve. The reader learns a lot about Sutpen’s early life from Quentin’s re-telling. This information that we learn about Sutpen is very important in the understanding of Sutpen’s personality and the events of his early life. The reader will be surprised when reading this particular chapter. A lot of things are revealed, and the ending is full of violence and bloodshed.

Chapter 8 keeps in line with the re-creation and imagination of the events of the past, which are two important themes of this novel. Quentin and Shreve are imagining that certain events have occurred and are re-creating the story with their own interpretations and imaginations. This can be very interesting for the reader to read because they are able to see the opinions of another point of view. The reader can even have their own imaginations as to what happened in the South during this time period after reading Quentin and Shreve’s viewpoints. The chapter ends with a blowout between Charles Bon and Henry which ends tragically.
The final chapter of the novel tells about Rosa returning to Sutpen’s Hundred because of a sneaking suspicion that someone was hiding there. Rosa eventually makes it up the stairs and discovers one of the main characters of the novel in one of the bedrooms. The novel ends with another tragic event which can be seen as a culmination of the whole story, and is a metaphor for the legacy of Sutpen.

Although each chapter contains its own topic and own way of revealing Sutpen’s true history, the argument and theme that Faulkner presents that we in this literature course are discovering is the idea of race and how it is presented in the work. Race is an underlying influence of all narrations and opinions from each character. We can conclude that race is virtually the metaphorical meaning for the whole novel. This novel is said to be one of the first modernist texts, and William Faulkner writes this book in such a way that sparks the modernist movement, moving away from the traditional and toward experimental. The unconventional methods of storytelling indirectly elude to the themes and arguments about the civil war, particularly race, throughout the book.
The purpose of this book is to show what life was really like in the South during the Civil War and to show the views of those affected by it. It uses long descriptive sentences and narration as well as harsh, hurtful language. Racism plays a significant part in this book and William Faulkner shows us exactly how it was back then.
This is a book that is exceedingly difficult to get through. It might even take reading it a few times to fully understand what really happens. Sometimes one might even read a whole chapter and will not be able to decipher what occurred. Despite how intimidating the text may seem, this is a valuable piece of literature to read and understand. The audience must look past harsh, racist language, and must be able to get through lengthy, complex sentences. If one would like to learn something about history then this is definitely a book to be recommended. This is a book for an audience that isn’t afraid of a challenge and would like to push their boundaries on learning about the power of the South during the Civil War.

William Faulkner Biography

Life:

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. His parents were Murry and Maud Butler Falkner. William later changed the spelling of his last name by adding the “u.” His family was a typical “Old Southern Family” (Nobel). His family moved to Oxford, Mississippi where he grew up. While in school, he met Phil Stone who was the first to recognize his literary talent and became Faulkner’s literary mentor (Padgett).

During the first world he joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force. Although he had dropped out of high school, he enrolled in the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He dropped out of the University in 1920. His early jobs included working at a New York bookstore and working for a New Orleans newspaper called The Double Dealer. In 1925 Faulkner moved to New Orleans (Padgett).

Although he had just set down roots in New Orleans, Faulkner travelled to Europe. While in Paris, he wrote descriptions of the Luxembourg Gardens. These writing would later be revised for the closing of his novel Sanctuary (Padgett).

He married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. The two were wed at College Hill Presbyterian Church, just north of Oxford. Estelle brought two children to the marriage from her previous relationship. They couple lived in Oxford. To make ends meet, he was now working nights at a power plant. Despite his financial burdens, he bought a house in Oxford and named it “Rowan Oak” (Padgett).

In 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama. Alabama was born prematurely and only lived for a few days. In 1932, he took on a new job, mostly for finances, as screenwriter in Hollywood. In 1933, Estelle gave birth to the couple’s only surviving child. They named her Jill. Faulkner began working in Hollywood again where he met Meta Carpenter, the secretary and script girl for his coworker. Faulkner eventually began an affair with Carpenter (Padgett).

In the early 30’s, Faulkner took up flying. He bought a Waco cabin aircraft. Later he gave the Waco to his youngest brother, Dean, encouraging him to become a professional pilot. Dean crashed and died in the plane later in 1935. This left Faulkner filled with grief and guilt so he took care of Dean’s children (Britannica).

Although not technically an alcoholic, when Faulkner returned to Oxford in January 1936, he spent the first of many stays at Wright’s Sanitarium, a nursing home facility in Byhalia, Mississippi. Faulkner would go there to recover from his drinking binges (Padgett).

In 1936 he returned to Hollywood. Staying for under two years, he returned to Oxford. In January 1939, Faulkner was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Travelling to California in 1942, Faulkner, yet again, worked by writing screenplays. In March 1947, he publicly offended Hemingway at a debate and was forced to write an apology letter (Padgett).

Faulkner began another affair with a woman named Joan Williams in 1950. The two had begun a collaboration within their writing careers. Faulkner received many awards throughout his life. Two of these awards were the award of Legion of Honor and the Silver Medal of the Athens Academy (Padgett).

In March 1959, Faulkner broke his collarbone after he fell from a horse at Farmington. He was never the dame after his fall. On July 6, 1962, he fell from a horse again and was gravely injured. He signaled to be taken to the hospital and he died the same day of a heart attack at the age of 64. He was buried on July 7 at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford (Padgett).

Writings:

While attending school at Ole Miss he published his first short story in the student paper and his first poem in The New Republic. He then published his first collection of poetry, The Marble Faun, with Stone’s financial support, in 1924. (Gibson)

Sometime during his travels, he gave up poetry to concentrate on fiction. A famous writer by the name of Sheerwood Anderson recommended him to the New York publishers Boni & Liveright, and in February 1926 they published his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. It is novel stylistically ambitious and strongly evocative of the sense of alienation experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they seemed no longer a part. It is an unremarkable story and impressive achievement for William Faulkner. (Gibson)

In the next three years, he published two more novels—Mosquitoes, which is considered to be his weakest, and Sartoris, the first book set in what would later become his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Sartoris was originally titled Flags in the Dust but he had been having difficulty in finding a publisher so when the novel did appear, it was severely truncated. In 1973 Flags in the Dust was published. It is a long, leisurely novel, drawing extensively on local observation and his own family history that he had confidently counted upon to establish his reputation and career. (Britannica)

In 1929 he published his first major novel, The Sound and the Fury, which he says he had “written his guts” into. In this novel he combines a Yoknapatawpha setting with radical technical experimentation. The book experiments with unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, and successive "stream-of-consciousness" monologues. The three brothers of Candace (Caddy) Compson—Benjy the idiot, Quentin the disturbed Harvard undergraduate, and Jason the embittered local businessman—expose their differing obsessions with their sister and their loveless relationships with their parents. It is also narrated by the Compsons’ black servant, Dilsey, which provides the reader with new perspectives on some of the central characters. The novel contains a powerful yet essentially unresolved conclusion. Faulkner had always been willing to try new literary techniques, which tended to make his early writing inconsistent. But now his unerring ear and sense of place produced a book, according to one review, “worthy of the attention of a Euripides.” (Britannica and Gibson)

Between 1929 and 1932 Faulkner churned out more than 40 short stories. In 1930, he also published his next novel As I Lay Dying. It is centered upon the conflicts within the “poor white” Bundren family as it makes its slow and difficult way to Jefferson to bury its matriarch’s malodorously decaying corpse. Entirely narrated in 59 monologues by 15 characters that consist of the various Bundrens and people encountered on their journey, it is the most systematically multi-voiced of Faulkner’s novels. The novel ignores most of the conventions of traditional storytelling, such as chronological plotting and an authoritative point of view. It earned favorable reviews but mediocre sales. His next novel won him public acclaim. Published in 1931, Sanctuary is a novel about the brutal rape of a Southern college student. (Britannica and Gibson)

His next novel, Light in August, was a return to more traditional form. It revolves primarily upon the contrasted careers of Lena Grove, a pregnant young countrywoman serenely in pursuit of her biological destiny, and Joe Christmas, a dark-complexioned orphan uncertain as to his racial origins, whose life becomes a desperate and often violent search for a sense of personal identity, a secure location on one side or the other of the tragic dividing line of color. (Britannica)

In the next decade and a half he wrote four more novels, including Absalom, Absalom!, produced in 1936. In Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson from “nowhere,” ruthlessly carves a large plantation out of the Mississippi wilderness, fights valiantly in the Civil War in defense of his adopted society, but is ultimately destroyed by his inhumanity toward those whom he has used and cast aside in the obsessive pursuit of his grandiose dynastic “design.” By refusing to acknowledge his first, partly black, son, Charles Bon, Sutpen also loses his second son, Henry, who goes into hiding after killing Bon (whom he loves) in the name of their sister’s honor. Because this profoundly Southern story is constructed by a series of narrators with sharply divergent self-interested perspectives, Absalom, Absalom! is often seen, in its infinite open-endedness, as Faulkner’s supreme “modernist” fiction, focused above all on the processes of its own telling. (Britannica)

During this decade and a half he also wrote three short-story collections, most notably Go Down, Moses, yet another major work, in which an intense exploration of the linked themes of racial, sexual, and environmental exploitation is conducted largely in terms of the complex interactions between the “white” and “black” branches of the plantation-owning McCaslin family, especially as represented by Isaac McCaslin on the one hand and Lucas Beauchamp on the other. Six years separated Go Down, Moses from his next novel, Intruder in the Dust. (Britannica)

Intruder in the Dust published in1948, is a novel in which the character Lucas Beauchamp, reappearing from Go Down, Moses, is proved innocent of murder, and thus saved from lynching, only by the persistent efforts of a young white boy. Racial issues were again confronted, but in the somewhat ambiguous terms that were to mark Faulkner’s later public statements on race: while deeply sympathetic to the oppression suffered by blacks in the Southern states, he nevertheless felt that such wrongs should be righted by the South itself, free of Northern intervention. (Britannica)

In 1949 he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a Nobel laureate, the always-shy Faulkner now assumed an uncharacteristically public profile. He lectured widely, traveled to foreign countries for the State Department, and accepted a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Soon his nonfiction essays began to outnumber his new short stories. His last novels, A Fable, The Town, The Mansion, and The Reivers, earned tepid reviews. The quality of Faulkner’s writing is often said to have declined in the wake of the Nobel Prize. But the central sections of Requiem for a Nun published in 1951 are challengingly set out in dramatic form, and A Fable published in 1954, a long, densely written, and complexly structured novel about World War I, demands attention as the work in which Faulkner made by far his greatest investment of time, effort, and authorial commitment. A Fable won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Finally, in June 1962 Faulkner published yet another distinctive novel, the genial, nostalgic comedy of male maturation he called The Reivers and appropriately subtitled “A Reminiscence.” (Britannica)

Screenplays and Film:

The first film the William Faulkner was a part of was the film Flesh. Faulkner was and uncredited writer in Flesh which was released in 1932.

In the 1930’s Howard Hawks invited William Faulkner to Hollywood to be a screenwriter for the film that he was directing. As his work was slow and there was an increasing demand to provide for his growing family William Faulkner accepted the offer. William was officially credited for writing six Hollywood screenplays, five of which were directed by Howard Hawks.

A few of the screenplays that Faulkner wrote were Today We Live (1933), The Road to Glory (1936), Slave Ship (1937), Submarine Patrol (1938), Air Force (1943), To Have and Have Not (1944) and, The Big Sleep (1946). The most notable of these would be To Have and Have Not as is was the screen adaption of the Novel written by Ernest Hemingway.

A legendary, but possibly apocryphal, story about Faulkner relates how, after he had been hired by 20th Century-Fox as a screenwriter, Faulkner had been sitting around the Fox writers building for a few weeks without having done anything. A producer asked what he was doing, and Faulkner replied “nothing”. The producer asked if he had any ideas for a story. Faulkner replied that he had, but he was having difficulty writing in the studio and would be better suited to write at home. The producer told him it was OK to go home, assuming that Faulkner was referring to the home in Hollywood that the studio was renting for him. A few days later the producer called the hotel in which, was the room that the studio was renting for Faulkner. The producer learned that Faulkner had indeed gone home--to Oxford, Mississippi.

In 1942 The Saturday Evening Post published a short story written by William Faulkner titled Two Soldiers. The story was later adapted into a film directed by Aaron Schneider and won an Oscar in 2004 for best short film.

Works Cited:

Gibson, Christine. "William Faulkner's Struggle for Greatness." American Heritage.com. 25 Sept. 2007. 14 Jan. 2009 http://www.americanheritage.com/people/articles/-web/20070925-william-faulkner-southern-gothic-yoknapatawpha-mississippi>.

Padgett, John B.. "William Faulkner." Mississippi Writers Page. 2008. The University of

Mississippi English Department. 14 Jan 2009

"William Faulkner." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 15 Jan. 2009 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/202695/William- Faulkner>.

"William Faulkner". Internet Movie Database. 13 Jan. 2009 .

"William Faulkner The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 ." Nobelprize.org. 2009. The Nobel

Foundation 1949 . 14 Jan 2009

.

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