English 174f:
William Faulkner’s Major Works
Term Paper: Absalom, Absalom
Teaching Fellow: Jesse Benjamin Raber
May 10, 2011
By Bledar Blake Zenuni
Stranger, Quo Vadis? A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey
In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson’s resolution to “try to take people for what they think they are,” is an auspicious resignation for a character who is psychologically complex, haunted, prone to spells of vanity and desires, consumed with the Southern ideal of chivalry and honor, and ultimately tragic. Quentin’s psychology and pattern of thought are so compelling that Faulkner makes him the narrator of Absalom, Absalom! Throughout the novel, Quentin and Shreve re-examine Thomas Sutpen’s identity, or, more accurately, his attempt to create an identity for himself as the patriarch of his dynasty. Quentin broods over the way his own identity has been determined through the inheritance of his father and grandfather. When he opens his father’s letter while at Harvard, Quentin not only ponders about what has become a sort of Pandora’s box, but also begins talking to it—“talking apparently to the letter.” (Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!). Furthermore, we see Quentin and Shreve “facing one another across the lamp lit table on which lay the fragile Pandora’s box of scrawled paper.” (Faulkner, p. 258). Faulkner’s appropriation of the myth insinuates Pandora’s box in the problem of the identity of Absalom, Absalom!’s central figure: Thomas Sutpen. Are there any elements of nobility and hope among the calculating, cruel, and ruthless aspect of his personality? Is Sutpen, with his confident self-assertion, really the personification of the modern day slogan,“American Dream,” a microcosm of the South, or a microcosm of America? The contrast between his “innocent,” almost naïve, upbringing in the mountains of West Virginia, to the depravity of his reign as plantation master of Sutpen’s Hundred seems to suggest that there is no hope for Sutpen after he establishes Sutpen’s Hundred. Faulkner sets up a dual world in which the young Sutpen inhabits a “mountain paradise,” or Rousseau’s society of the “Natural Man,” and the accomplished Sutpen, the one who savagely stops at nothing to achieve his dream of wealth, land, status, and power, inhabits Hobbes’ society where the dog-eat-dog world is preferable to a “cold, brutish, nasty, and short,” existence in the Arcadian commonalty of nature. By making the transition from living in the West Virginian mountains, where he had never seen a black person before, to the plantation society that makes him wealthy, Sutpen adopts the South’s society of slavery. The curse of slavery brings much destruction to the South, making it the burden of all burdens. According to Quentin’s grandfather, Sutpen made the mistake of assuming that “the earth was kind and gentle”—the safe, comforting mother it had been in his West Virginia mountain childhood. But Haiti had taught him that it was actually a “dark volcanic body whose heart and vital energies were expressed in the chanting and rums of slaves who still lived close to its primal power.” (Kartinger, Faulkner and the Natural World, p. 128). In effect, Sutpen’s downfall, the failure of his design to found a dynasty of his own, is caused not by the depravity of his actions but by the depravity of the South, that is, the depravity that is slavery. Although, Sutpen’s design might still have failed if the South won the Civil War—since a Southern victory would not have removed Henry’s dilemma because he presumably would still have had to shoot Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred for miscegenation—Sutpen’s Hundred would have prospered through the exploitation of the slaves. Just as Quentin Compson’s personality is defined by the Southern ideals of chivalry and honor, Sutpen’s immense cruelty is defined by the cruelty and depravity of the marriage between slavery and Yoknapatawhpha County, a microcosm of the South. From its fecund soil he draws his strength, and through violent physical conjunctions with their avatars, “the wild niggers,” he took with him from Haiti to Mississippi, he repeatedly restages the union that produces his wealth and power. In Absalom, Absalom! , Quentin Compson’s ideal Southern gentleman, Thomas Sutpen—strong, courageous, family-minded, and a veteran of a Civil War—becomes a product of not any innate Melvillean “natural depravity,” but of the “heart of darkness:” the Hobbesian society he inhabits. For the white man, Yoknapatawpha country cannot accommodate the timeless spiritual values of compassion and selflessness that Dilsey possesses in The Sound and the Fury. In Faulkner’s mind, Thomas Sutpen is not the antagonist of Absalom, Absalom! but a tragic figure, who maintains a sense of “innocence,” throughout his life and whose crimes are paralleled by, and implicated in, the South’s crimes against dark-skinned people.
When Sutpen was thirteen of fourteen, he went into the woods, not “even telling himself where to go”: his body, his feet, just went there, a place where “a game trail entered a cane brake and an oak griddle that he would cook small game on sometimes.” (Faulkner, p.188). Just having been humiliated by a slave, Sutpen first thinks: “I can shoot him,” but soon realizes that the object of his vengeances is beyond Pettibone, the slave master, and he realizes that shooting him would do no good. He imagines Pettibone watching him approach the door and laughing at him and his family from behind his Negro servant. The young, illiterate, and uneducated Sutpen quickly deduces by himself that “there ain't any good or harm either in the living world that I can do to him [Pettibone],” because he realizes his true insignificance in the landed society (Faulkner, p. 297). It is at this point that Sutpen first devises his “design,”: move west, get rich, gain fame, and finally achieve the social status of a powerful man which he needs to found a dynasty of his own. When General Compson tells this story, he fashions the idea that “his [Sutpen’s] trouble was innocence,” (Faulkner p. 274). General Compson does not define the word in a conventional sense; Compson’s definition is that Sutpen “believed that all that was necessary [for the success of his design] was courage and shrewdness and the one he knew he had and the other he believed he could learn if it were to taught.” (Faulkner, p. 305). When Quentin and Shreve piece together Thomas Sutpen’s story, Quentin asserts that this naivety had been Sutpen’s heritage from his mountain rearing. As one critic suggests:
“His childhood had not instilled in him a strong sense of family—he seemed almost totally indifferent to his family except for the episode with his sister and the carriage—but the privation and isolation of the mountains had contributed to his simplistic approach to the world.” (Ragan, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! p. 110).
Sutpen realizes that he must eradicate this simplistic approach to the world if he is to get the privilege he desires. His “innocence,” betrays him into thinking that the accumulation of similar possessions will grant him privilege. Though class and social distinctions were not too rigid during antebellum South, “Sutpen discovers that the accumulation of wealth is not sufficient to meet his needs.
Both Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson comment on his need of respectability, a quality he can never fully achieve without a sense of past.” (Ragan, p. 113). Though in Yoknapatawpha county Sutpen has no known sense of past, his “Southern,” values—of family, honor, chivalry, and tradition—are not inherited values, but rather appropriated in typical bourgeois fashion from the community of Yoknapatawpha county in which he has settled. When Sutpen travels to Haiti, Sutpen acquires the ruthlessness and cruelty of the land. As general Compson describes Haiti:
“A little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea, which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed, the civilized land and people which had expelled some of its own blood and thinking and desires that had become too crass to be faced and borne longer, and set it homeless and desperate on the lonely ocean.” (Faulkner, p. 202).
From General Compson’s description, one gets the sense that the landscape of the Haitian Island is so dark and evil that it would break any man. For Thomas Sutpen, his first obstacle was to overcome the challenges posed by his adopted land. The scars on Sutpen’s body serves as reminders of horrid and bloody confrontations between him and the Haitian blacks. Through subduing them, Sutpen subdues the earth whose riches gave him access to authority and position. Quentin questions Sutpen’s identity at this point, since throughout Absalom, Absalom! Quentin is trying to accept Thomas Sutpen as a gentleman worthy of the title of general, like his grandfather. As Quentin and Shreve discuss Sutpen’s past, Quentin speculates that “Sutpen was able to walk out into the night and conquer the Haitian rebels because his was a body with “white arms and legs shaped like theirs and from which blood could be made to spurt and flow as it could from theirs and containing an indomitable spirit.” (Kartinger, p. 130).
After learning Haitian-French, subduing the Haitian blacks, and purchasing slaves of his own, Sutpen’s first attempt to establish his dynasty comes at a bargain with the Haitian land. He unknowingly commits miscegenation by marrying a woman of distant black ancestry, the product of which is his son, Charles Bon. His bargain with the land was struck, and though he achieves all he set out to do in Haiti, he cannot accept the outcome. He realizes that his wife is not, and could never be, through “no fault of her own,” adjunctive or incremental to the design which he had had in mind since he was a thirteen or fourteen year old boy. (Faulkner, p. 300). As general Compson states, Sutpen reached the point where “he can say ‘I did all that I set out to do and I could stop here if I wanted to and no man to chide me with sloth, not even myself.’” (Faulkner, p. 300). Despite Sutpen’s achievements, the accumulated wealth and family, Quentin suggests that Sutpen had not lost his “innocence” in the thirty years, that his outlook and his motivation had remained essentially unchanged. Sutpen’s “innocence,” cannot allow him to accept the distant black ancestry of his first wife, for it will not satisfy the conditions of his grand design. Instead, he repudiates his wife, brings along a dozen slaves, and sets out for the American South.
After years of toil and labor in Yoknapatawpha county, and building a plantation with his own hands, Sutpen’s bargain with the Mississippi earth is signaled by miscegenation—as in the earlier case with his Haitian adventure—but this time resulting from a deliberate connection with a slave woman. The products of Sutpen’s miscegenation, is Clytie and Charles Bon. They alone survive the collapse of his dynasty, “in the sense that Clytie controls the house-hold up to the point of its fiery end, and Charles’ idiot grandson is the only living Sutpen at the end of the novel. “ (Kartinger, p. 132). Sutpen’s again maintains his “innocence,” when he realizes that Charles Bon is his son with the first wife whom he had repudiated. After making this realization he has two choices: he could have kept his mouth shut and allowed Charles Bon to marry his half-sister, Judith, thereby being a willing abettor in another case of miscegenation but allowing his design and dynasty to flourish, or he could risk it all and stop the marriage from happening. Sutpen chooses the latter case, which causes the downfall of Sutpen’s Hundred along with Henry’s and Sutpen’s enlistment in the Civil War.
Sutpen returns from the Civil War as a decorated general, yet he finds his plantation in a state of decrepitude. Nevertheless, upon his return the slave-system of the South feeds his cruelty and ruthlessness once again, for he’s able to draw strength from his bloody fights with his (now ostensibly freed) slaves, maintaining the status of patriarch of his ruined family. After the marriage with Miss Rosa does not produce a son, Sutpen imposes his will upon a local, uneducated, poor farmer—Wash Jones— to turn a blind eye to Sutpen’s affair with Wash Jones’s fifteen-year old daughter, Milly. Wash allows this because his attitude toward Sutpen is based on his notion of white supremacy. Forced to acknowledge, as the boy Sutpen had, that “Sutpen’s slaves were better housed and clothed, he rationalizes his own position as follows: “Sutpen is a white man, and all white men are created equal, were in equal in the eyes of God at least.” (Ragan, p. 120). But when talk of the loungers in the store becomes too much to bear, he accosts Sutpen in the scene overheard by Quentin’s grandfather. Wash demands that Sutpen take responsibility for his actions and assumes that he will marry Milly if it becomes necessary: “And I know that whatever your hands tech, whether hit’s a regiment of men or an ignorant al or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right.” (Faulkner, p. 280). Sutpen, however, makes no moral distinction between his compounding Jones’s granddaughter with a regiment or a dog, and after Milly gives birth to a girl, Sutpen gives Milly a verbal beating to Jones’s disbelief and horror. Sutpen’s reaction is more “innocent,” than it is cruel, for he’s governed by the same young-boy mentality to have a son rather than any innate cruelty or inhumanity. His reasoning remains linear and simplistic: why should he be without an heir, left hopelessly to die as someone without any social position, while others, like the slave-owner he was humiliated by as a boy, have an empire of their own? Sutpen’s adherence to this boyhood dream allows the landscape of Yoknapatawpha, and the power structure within it, to make him believe his cruelty is justified and necessary. After Wash Jones has heard the exchange between Sutpen and his granddaughter, he responds in immediately grim and deadly fashion: he cuts Sutpen down with the scythe he had borrowed two years before to cut the weeds from around the cabin. The uneducated, socially unaccomplished Wash Jones then takes his own life and that of his granddaughter and the newborn girl, but not before he delivers a nihilistic speech:
“Better if his kind and mine too had never drank breath of life on this earth. Better that all who remain of us be blasted from the face of it than that another Wash Jones should see his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown onto the fire.” (Faulkner, p. 278-89).
When the posse arrives on the scene, Wash Jones rushes at them with the scythe after completing his intention and killing his granddaughter and the infant. He approaches them in silence, “posing no real threat, in Mr. Compson’s view, offering only a symbolic one they cannot understand,” and is killed without putting up a fight. (Ragan, p. 121). At this point in the chapter, Quentin concludes by picturing Sutpen in his prime attempting to justify his desire for a son, after correcting Shreve’s misperception that Milly’s child had been a boy.
Thomas Sutpen’s fatal “innocence” is really a willed ignorance of human responsibility that stands for the whole of the land of the South. Just as the land is ravaged by the Civil War, and at times burned to a scorched earth by Sherman and other commanders, Sutpen’s Hundred is ravaged by his institutionalized mentality to treat others as expedient means in order to achieve his own ends. In a novel populated by fragmented memories, psychologically traumatized individuals, a household of madness, a breakdown of the South’s economic and social system, and the entropy of time, Faulkner employs Sutpen as a symbol of how the burden of the South, that is, slavery, destroys a man who comes from a land that is seemingly primitive, but full of innocent and simple people. Sutpen’s desire to achieve his goal of founding a dynasty is, to him, perfectly logical, and consistent with the social and political structure of Yoknapatawpha county. Through the character of Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner is writing in the line of tradition in which fiction and fact are entangled by blacks and whites. That is, Thomas Sutpen’s relationship to his black slaves, and to Clytie and Charles Bon, are defined by the history of the relationship of blacks and whites in the South. Whites in the South are the ones who cut down the trees, clear the swamps, tame the wild animals from the forests and jungles, and, in the end, tame the dark-skinned Africans within an institutionalized, and, in their minds, perfectly Christian, system. In such a system, Thomas Sutpen is innocent in General Compson’s and Quentin’s mind, for the problem is not Sutpen’s personality or some innate natural depravity, but his entrapment in the temporal institutions of slavery, politics, and the social elite class in which he is an active player. Everything in Sutpen’s personality suggests that the white slave master defines his own relationships to others on no innate moral basis, but on the moral template that the South has in place. This means that time is not on Sutpen’s side, since it is not on the side of the South in the civil war, and just as Sherman’s march symbolizes the encroachment of time upon the end of slavery, Wash Jones’s scythe symbolizes the encroachment of time upon the end of Sutpen’s design. Up until the end of his life, Sutpen views people as expedient means because he is conditioned to view them that way by the land he lives in. His thought process most clearly reveals that his personality, his pattern of thought and behavior are rigidly shaped by an escape mechanism involving the fragmentation of the self in temporality.
Sutpen seems to be almost obsessed with the perfect execution of his design—which means that miscegenation is out of the question—and with the bloody battles he participates in with his Haitian slaves. From his arrival in a cart with his “dark crew,” to the rise and fall of Sutpen’s Hundred, time is always in the background for him. Despite this preoccupation with time and the desire for a male heir to complete his dynasty, Sutpen is unwilling to accept defeat, whether it be in battle commanding his soldiers, or in his plantation field. The irony lies in the discrepancy between what he believes about himself and his world, and what his thoughts and actions reveal. Sutpen’s constant dwelling on his bloody fights with his Haitian slaves represents his “innocence,” or rather his unacknowledged awareness of not just the slaves but also everyone living in and nearby his mansion. As is the case for Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, “a nigger is not a person, so much as a form of behavior, a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” (Faulkner, Novels: The Sound and the Fury, p. 1016). Put another way, Sutpen’s cognitive dissonance presents itself when he begins to experience an alternative possibility of life in a divided world—the world in which Sutpen, the naïve boy, undergoes the humiliating and often painful growth into, as Miss Rosa calls him Sutpen the “demon” man. The duality of a divided world in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, is exemplified in Quentin Compson’s preoccupation with the blacks of Jefferson and Sutpen’s Haitian slaves. The blacks populating both novels
become strategic figures for what is missing in both Quentin’s white world and Sutpen’s Hundred and subtle projections of their own internal states. In a word, Sutpen’s preoccupation with his Haitian slaves is similar to Quentin’s preoccupation with blacks in The Sound and the Fury: both men are products of the South’s institutionalized system of slavery, and therefore, trapped in a dark land where time demands retribution for the burden of slavery.
Thomas Sutpen’s “innocence,” lies in the fact that he believes in the just cause of his design, but not in the methods of achieving that end. The injustice springs from the Hobbesian world he inhabits. An outsider observing Sutpen within Yoknapatawpha County would see that Sutpen is neither innocent nor heroic, (but neither is he a “demon”). Faulkner has written Absalom, Absalom! in such a way that we must see Sutpen’s insensitivity toward his first wife and son, Charles, toward Ellen and Rosa Coldfield, toward Wash Jones’s granddaughter Milly and toward his slaves. In the accounting language of Chapter 8, Faulkner makes it clear that for Sutpen these people are “merely ciphers on a mental balance sheet, instrumental to his design but as expendable or replaceable as livestock.” (Wagner-Martin, William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, p. 97). Sutpen fails to acknowledge individual human kinship, just as he fails to see his slaves nothing more than livestock to work as beasts of burden, to wrestle with, and if necessary, to slaughter to achieve his life-long ambition. Furthermore, Sutpen doesn’t display human commonality, because he believes that he can achieve what he needs to achieve on his own:
“Deeply related to Sutpen’s failures to acknowledge individual human kinship is the failure to accept responsibility for the landscape that is intimately linked to the human community. The landscape is at the heart of a gendered symbolic economy that shapes the elaboration of Yoknapatawpha County in all of Faulkner’s books.” (Wagner-Martin, William Faulkner, p. 97).
To an extent, Absalom, Absalom! departs from the other novels set in Yoknapatawpha County. While the books that preceded it are richly endowed with a sense of locale, Absalom, Absalom! is the first which could with justification be called “southern,”—the first in which the regional setting contributes significantly to thematic development. That is, nature, the land, and the plantation that Sutpen creates define his personality, molding him into a “typical southerner,” whose treatment of others in lower social classes is unjust and cruel, yet in order with social norms and conventions. Various characters see Sutpen as representative of “traits endemic in southern society. Rosa goes so far as to call him not just a demon, but as God’s excuse for the South’s defeat. However, the reader sees that the South was defeated all along, for Sutpen did not create the system in which he was a part of, but rather, the land created him. Mr. Compson seems to discover in his story justification for his own sense of futility, since Compson’s own life has been attenuated by the era of southern humiliation. Furthermore, “Sutpen’s career parallels the rise and fall of the entire region as a powerful economic and political entity, and the issue of the white man’s exploitation of the blacks—the theme of southern racism—brings about the destruction of both Sutpen’s design and the social system which gave it birth.” (Ragan, p. 158). Little wonder, then, that Quentin apparently offers Sutpen’s story in response to the demand to “Tell about the South.” (Ragan, p. 158). Faulkner, created the character of Sutpen as one who is linearly innocent, that is, innocent in the sense that he believed he could achieve his goal of founding a dynasty through the belief in himself and his ability to learn what was required. In Faulkner’s world, the male “is expected to lose his innocence in a discovery of the true nature of reality.” (Beck, Faulkner, p. 88). Sutpen never loses this “innocence,” this narrow thinking, for he is a product of the Hobbesian plantation system, not the creator of it; therein lies his tragedy.
Bibliography
Beck, Warren, Faulkner, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1976.
Bloom, Harold, Modern Critical Interpretations: The Sound and the Fury, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1988.
Ellingson, Ter, The Myth of the Noble Savage, University of California Press, Los Angels, 2001.
Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom!, Random House, Inc, 1990.
Faulkner, William, Novels: 1926-1929, Library of America, New York, 2006.
Kartiganer, Donald and Abadie, J. Ann, Faulkner and the Natural World: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1996.
Martin, Linda Wagner, William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2006.
Ragan, David Paul, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: A Critical Study, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1987.
No comments:
Post a Comment