Fire, Fuel, Zen and Emptiness: How Nagarjuna and Dogen Employ Language to Understand Emptiness

Disclaimer: This is not the final paper that I turned in as my term paper for the course "Aesthetics and Interprative Understanding 36" at Harvard in Fall 2010. Instead, it is the second draft (penultimate version). The structure, argument, and layout is more or less nearly identical. The only difference is that there are several grammatical errors, typos, and format errors (such as quotations) in this one. It was simply easier to upload this one seeing as I made corrections at the SOCH and did not save the final version, but instead printed it and turned in a physical copy.

Topic: How do (one or more) Buddhist thinker we have read this term understand "Emptiness." (My own research topic.

Note: I do not yet know how to properly upload a file so that the "Footnotes" and other format features on words are identical on the blog. Please excuse improper footnotes and critic this paper solely on its content.

                                    Aesthetics and Interpretative Understanding 36: Final paper

Professor and Teaching Fellow: XX-XX

By Bledar Blake Zenuni

Fire, Fuel, Zen and Emptiness: How Nagarjuna and Dogen Employ Language to

Understand Emptiness

Nagarjuna is perhaps the most influential polemicist in all of Buddhism.  Not only did Nagarjuna’s precise arguments on Buddhist teachings from the “Two Fold Truth” to the “Noble Eight-Fold Path” deconstruct theories of other competing schools of Buddhism at the time, but his founding of the Madhyamika school helped to achieve an exegesis of a particular type of Buddhism that was both abstract and theoretical in nature. In his Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna uses abstract metaphors and terse, succinct verses to expound his teaching of “The Two Fold Truth,” which emphasizes above all that conventional truths do not give one the ultimate truth about existence.  Conventional truths are acquired in the world as experienced by the empirical observations and the aggregate of ordinary perceptions, whereas ultimate truth is realized in the attainment of wisdom, which produces non-attachment, and the freedom of Nirvana. In his verses in “Mulamadhyamakakarika” Nagarjuna uses the deconstructive function of emptiness as the ultimate truth, arguing emphatically that to understand the causation of suffering, or dhuka, one must accept that all phenomena of existence are both empty and interdependent, constantly in flux, and that language is not the correct medium for the perception of such phenomena. In the first chapter of the Mulmadhyakmakakarika Nagarjuna argues that causes and conditions are empty of inherent existence or essence, but one cannot deduce this conclusion through language because words are linked with conventional truths, and, by extension, directly linked with the dukha of samsara and death. In other words, Nagarjuna uses words and language to deconstruct arguments against his Two-fold truth while urging audiences to accept emptiness as the ultimate truth and to denounce relying on words in their practice and understanding of Buddhism. Nagarjuna asserts that language belongs in the realm of conventional truth, and holds no relation to understanding the ultimate truth.  From Dogen’s perspective, however, language should not be used as a deconstructive force to to propitiate and control audience into accepting emptiness as the ultimate truth because such a function lacks a dynamical, dialectical relationship with the worldly truth. Put another way, language should not be denounced because it belongs to the realm of worldly truth, rather is a form of expression of one’s own innate Buddha-nature. In Dogen’s school of Zen, the substance of the universe is essentially one and the same with the Buddha. Language, therefore, is not used to deconstruct worldly experiences and to assert that empirical observations result in emptiness. Rather, it is used to include the reconstructive function of emptiness with respect to worldly truth, “whose core in the Buddhist scheme lies in dependent origination.”[1] The different methods by which Nagarjuna and Dogen use language seem to suggest that Nagarjuna and Dogen are at odds with each other in the function they believe the two-fold truth serves in Buddhism. However, both Nagarjuna and Dogen employ language as agents to expound their ideas: Nagarjuna uses words as expedient means to arrive at the “middle way,”—where worldly phenomena and the ultimate truth that are constantly changing and in flux with each other—and Dogen uses language as a way to penetrate the dukha, conveying the message that all sentient beings use language as a means of expression of the “ultimate truth.”

Nagarjuna theory of the Two-Fold truth states that Buddha’s teachings of dharma, or the accumulation of all good and evil deeds, is based on two truths: the “conventional truth” and the “ultimate truth.” The conventional truth states that the aggregate of all our perceptions is based on empirical observations in the worldly realm, whereas the ultimate truth is the realization of “emptiness,” by the acceptance of all worldly phenomena as empty of substance and essence. The Madhyamika school explains the concept of emptiness through the related concept of interdependence: all phenomena are empty of “essence,” or svabhava, implying that they have no intrinsic independent reality apart from the causes that led to their origination in the first place.  By implication, this means that language itself is interdependent on other phenomena, making it empty in itself. In Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna concerns himself with how to understand emptiness of phenomena, in particular the emptiness of inherent existence of all phenomena in nature. When Nagarjuna uses language to argue that emptiness is the ultimate truth, he means that “no phenomena exists inherently, that is, in virtue of being a substance independent of its attributes and in virtue of having an essence, but that does not mean that all phenomena are nonexistent tout court.”[2]  Nagarjuna’s development of the two-fold truth is a result of his use of language to convey that we cannot make sense of the idea of a thing’s nature since it is deconstructed into not having any intrinsic worth. Nagarjuna extrapolates this logic to argue that emptiness itself is empty of inherent existence. As such, language is a tool for Nagarjuna to convey to his audiences not that the acceptance of emptiness and change is a way to account for the Four Noble Truths, nirvana, Budha-hood, and all other fundamental Buddhist soteriological conceptions. “Thus, according to Nagarjuna, all things indicated by words—including emptiness, the Buddhist ultimate truth—are without intrinsic nature, because they are in fact substantiated by the objectifying power of words.”[3] In one of his verses, Nagarjuna goes on to:

“I, without grasping, will pass beyond sorrow. /

And I will attain nirvana, one says./

Whoever graps like this has a great grasping.”[4]

Nagarjuna’s implications are two-fold: first, one who has realized emptiness has realized the ultimate truth and will attain nirvana; second, the ultimate truth is a subtle realization that cannot be conveyed by language. Nagarjuna further implies that one’s usage of words is a form of “grasping,” and as one uses language to understand the ultimate truth, this leads to a positive reinforcement of further grasping. If language is a way of “grasping,” and attachment in the worldly realm, then this begs the question: how is one to teach the ultimate truth? Nagarjuna chooses to resolve this dilemma by employing another Buddhist soteriological term: expedient means. 

            Nagarjuna’s verses on fire and firewood illustrate that worldly truth and the ultimate truth are in flux with each other, in a changing system and the medium of language is but an expedient means to understanding the blaring paradox that all phenomena are both simultaneously empty of essence and interdependent on aggregates of other phenomena.  To understand this paradox, Nagarjuna sets up his metaphor on fire and firewood with the following verses:

“So, if one thinks that/

That which is burning is fuel/

If it is just this,/

How is the fuel being burned?”[5]

This implies that either the process of burning is identical to the fuel being used, or different, or overlap and are both different and the same. If they are different, then there will be no fire, and if they are the same, then fire and fuel will burn side by side, with fire not requiring the fuel. Nagarjuna follows this verse with another:

“And, if fire and fuel/

Preclude each other/

Then fire being different from fuel/

It must still be asserted that they connect.”[6]

Fire and fuel are thus interdependent, in that they are “different,  but connect.” But does this mean that they are dependent upon a third source? Whether or not this is true is irrelevant, since these verses illustrate that in themselves, fire and fuel are empty, but when they’re interdependent they function as fire and fuel should function in the worldly realm. By extention, this applies to all phenomena in the worldly realm. What Nagarjuna has accomplished in theses verses is to convey that language has no intrinsic worth in itself, since the full meaning emptiness cannot be understood through it.  However, it can function as an expedient means to illustrate metaphors and analogies of the how two

-elements such as fire and fuel could be understood as both empty in themselves and interdependent with each other.

 Moreover, Nagarjuna takes it as a fundamental philosophical task to provide an understanding of what Buddhist philosophy refers to as pratiyasamutpada—dependent coorigination. For Nagarjuna, pratiyasamutpada is the nexus between phenomena in virtue of which events depend on other events, “composites depend on their parts, and so forth.”[7] In Mulamadhyamakakarika Nagarjuna expounds on this idea:

“All things lack entitihood, since change is perceived/

There is nothing without entity because all things have emptiness/

If there is no entitihood, what changes?/

If there were entity, how could it be correct that something changes.”[8]

Nagarjuna’s use of language is extremely subtle in this verse. He argues that all things lack “entitihood,” and all change is perceived. By implication, the change that is perceived must therefore be the changes in the interdependence of all things interacting with each other  in the worldly realm. As one Buddhist scholar writes: “given that phenomena depend upon their conditions for their existence and given that nothing answering to an essence of phenomena  can be located in those conditions and given that there is nowhere else that an essence could come from, it follows that phenomena that arise from conditions are essenceless.”[9] But given that we are arguing that phenomena are essenceless through the medium of language, language itself is not essenceless, rather it is a tool, an agent, or a catalyst for the realization of the ultimate truth that all phenomena as essenceless.  Nagarjuna writes the following verse to convey an understanding of the truth of dependent arising:

“We state that what is dependent arising/

That is emptiness/

That [i.e., dependent arising] is dependent upon convention/

That itself is the middle path.[10]

Therefore, Nagarjuna uses language as an expedient means to convey his two-fold truth, which is really theory of change, seeking to understand the middle way. The middle way is a constituent of several variables: emptiness as the ultimate truth, all phenomena are dependently arisen, all phenomena are interdependent. Language is an expedient means to understanding how the middle way functions in terms of these two variables.

Language functions as a medium of expression in Dogen’s “Oneness of Enlightenment.” “Enlightenment, from Dogen’s perspective consists of clarifying and penetrating one’s muddled discriminative thought” to attain clarity, depth, and precision in and through our language in discriminative thought itself.[11] But  in this case, language is not an expedient means to understanding, and eventually accepting, the ultimate truth of the emptiness of all phenomena. Rather, language is the fabric of all existence. It is a form of expression for both sentient beings. Language is thus a medium of expression, guiding one to enlightenment or vision seeing as one is able to clarify and obliterate, through expression of language or thought, his ignorance to realize the Four Noble Truths of Dukha (suffering is a part of life), Samudaya (there is a cause to suffering), Nirodha (there is a way out of suffering), Magga (the path that leads out of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path). A particular example that illustrates the use of language as a medium of expression is the episode of “The Sound of the Valley Streams:”

The sounds of the stream are [the Buddha’s ]long, borad, tongue

The sights of the mountains are his pure body,

Eighty-four thousand gathas throught the night,

How can I expound them [to others] someday?”

The language that Dogen uses in this verses is at first non-existent, for he says “how can I expound them to others someday?” However, the above verse remarkably illustrates that Dogen’s view of language is deeply grounded in his notion of temporality. His reasoning that everything is temporally related, and that we make sense of the our Buddha-nature, which is innate in all beings, through expression. In the above episode, the protagonist, Su Tung- p’o is overcome with awe so much so that he cannot find a way to “expound,” the majesty of what he is experiencing.  What Dogen suggests, is that the insentient  beings, or the stream and the mountains, are expressing themselves to Su Tung- p’o through their Buddha-nature. They are a part of enlightenement and are communicating to Su Tung- p’o in boundlessly  majestic ways that does not involve language since it is not a part of their faculty. It is now the task of Su Tung- p’o to communicate what was expressed to him by the selfless insentient beings. Dogen goes on to indicate that only when Su Tung- p’o  is equally selfless will he be able to utilize his medium of expression, language, to communicate to others what has been expounded upon him. Dogen thus focalizes language as the agent of liberation from samsara and the end to all dukha.

The analysis on the language of Dogen and Nagarjuna leads one to conclude that Dogen and Nagarjuna are at odds with each other on their articulation of emptiness. Nagarjuna seems to suggest that emptiness is a deconstructive force, leading the audience to accept the fact that all empirical phenomena are fleeting, superficial, and peripheral. Moreover, Nagarjuna uses language to argue that understanding the relation between emptiness and the dependent origination of all phenomena is in fact  the middle way. For Dogen, it’s quite the opposite; he employs language as a means to understand examine emptiness as a deconstructive and a reconstructive force by perpetually causing change and and expounding all phenomena as inherently empty and inherently possessive of the Buddha nature. To Dogen, you yourself are the valley streams and the mountains, all phenomena is you and you are a part of all phenomena, with the two truths as the two foci  in the realization process of one’s buddhahood. However, a deeper look at The Treaties on the Middle suggest that Nagarjuna’s emptiness does not “suffer from a self-imposed, restrictive soteriology of ultimate truth,”[12] that is, worldly truth is not all together ignored in explaining how to realize one’s Buddha nature, rather both truths work in a deconstructive and reconstructive way, like two waves, acting in a reconstructive and deconstructive way to meet at one single middle point, a node, signifying the Middle Way. Nagarjuna’s understanding of emptiness is in turn seen as a theory of change, seeking to understand the causes and conditions to the question of cause and effect. What wider implications can this understanding have? Surely, Nagarjuna makes it clear that  language belongs in the realm of worldly truth, but that does not mean that it is excluded from the ultimate truth.  Nagarjuna states the following:

“ The Buddha’s expounded the dharma by means of two truths/

 Worldly Truth and the Supreme Truth/

Without the reliance on verbal expressions, the Supreme cannot be expounded/

Without grounding in the supreme, Nirvana is not realized.

As is the case for Dogen, so is it for Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna and Dogen are both not absolutists in their use of language in that it is not empty of “essence,” but an integral part of the bodhidharma of human beings who are capably of employing its usage for understanding worldly phenomena and, in the case of bodhisattvas, using it as an expedient means to get others to understand the ultimate truth. For all of its limitations, for both Dogen and Nagarjuna language is able to function (whether by expression as seen in the Sound of the Stream episode or by expedient means to recruit the audience to the Middle Way),  as potent agent of salvation from samsara. In other words, language plays an intrinsic part in understanding emptiness, and by, extension when one accepts emptiness of all things, he one is freed from attachment, then ignorance, and then liberated from the twelve links of conditionality and the dhuka.   

           

Bibliography

Hee-Jin, Kim, Dogen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen, Chapter 3, “Negotiating Emptiness,” Chapter 4, “The Reason of Words and Letters,” Chapter 5, “Meditation as Authentic Thinking,” State University of New York, New York, 2007.

Cook, Francis Harold, Enlightenment in Dogen’s Zen: Translation of Nine Essays from Shobogenzo, “The Buddha Right Before Us” pp. 17-30, “Kannon” pp. 89-106, State University of New York Press, 1989.

Cook, Francis Harold, How to raise an ox: Zen practice as taught in Zen Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, including ten newly translated essays, New York, Random  House Inc, 2006

Nagarjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika, Translated and Commentary by Jay L. Garfield,  Princeton

University Press, New York, 2008

---

[1] Cook, “Enlightenment in Dogen’z Zen,” p. 33

[2] Garfield, “Nagarjuna’s Middle Way,” pp. 89-92

[3] Ibid, pp. 93-94

[4] Chpater XXIV

[5] op.cit., “Fire and Firewood,” pp. 123-129

[6] op.cit., “Fire and Firewood,” pp. 123-129

[7] Hee-Jin, Kim “the reason of words and letters,” pp. 62-63

[8] op.cit,  Garfield, “chapter XII, ”  pp. 220-240

[9] op.cit, Garfield, “chapter XII explanation,” pp. 323-324

[10] op. cit, Garfiield, “chapter XII,  pp. 220-240

[11] op.cit, Hee-Jin, “Dogen on Meditation and Thinking” pp. 64-67.

[12] Hee-Jin p.52



Teaching Fellow's Comments

     

    I thoroughly enjoyed reading your paper.  You successfully engaged with extremely difficult questions in Buddhist philosophy (e.g., What is emptiness? What is Nagarjuna’s twofold truth?  What is Buddha-nature?).  Your thesis, moreover, is compelling.  You suggest that Nagarjuna and Dôgen differ in terms of their understanding of emptiness: the former you describe as deconstructive and the latter reconstructive.  This distinction is useful. It perhaps overlaps with the distinction between apophatic and kataphatic discourses on emptiness elaborated by scholars such as Gimello, Gomez, and others.  It also touches on a question we considered in our course regarding the Hua-yen school of Buddhism and their positive interpretation of emptiness.  Dôgen is very much heir to this tradition.  I think your idea of his theory of language as a medium of expression whose very existence constitutes the fabric of reality was really great. In your reading of Nagarjuna, moreover, you touch upon some important ideas: the metaphor of the fire and fuel as an example of his use of language as an expedient means (the same may be said about his use of the tertralemma), the theory of the twofold truth as a response to the problem of using language to teach the ultimate truth of emptiness. The second part of your paper considers a fundamental similarity shared by the two philosophers: their use of language as an expedient means.  The example you adduce of Su Tung-p’o’s poem was effective.  With respect to Nagarjuna, however, you missed the opportunity to consider his verse on p. 8 as his most explicit statement regarding his own use of language as an expedient means, particularly as it relates to the theory of the twofold truth.  Although some passages of the paper lack clarity and could benefit from a closer reading of the texts, you have accomplished a great deal in this short paper.  Your insights into the difficult concepts of emptiness, twofold truth, and Buddha-nature demonstrate a subtle understanding of Buddhist doctrine.  I hope to read more from you about these important issues in the future.  Great job!

 Professor's Comments:

Hi Blake, I just had a chance to read your paper and enjoyed it very much.  This is the most lucid student (including both graduate and undergraduate) paper on the nature of emptiness and its relationship to language I've ever read.  I liked your comparison of Nagarjuna and Dogen not only because of your very careful reading on the two thinkers, but more importantly of the fact that you approach them through their own ways of using language for religious training and spiritual progress. I read your paper with a personal interest as well.  In the 1990s in Japan among the scholarly circles of Zen, there was a well publicized debate on the legitimacy of Dogen's Buddhism.  Those who identified themselves as the upholders of "hihan bukkyo" or critical Buddhism, accusedDogen as an "essentialist" because for them Dogen treats Buddha nature as or as if, an eternal and constant substance.  They used Nagarjuna to justify their criticism.  Those who defendedDogen counterargued, often from a post-colonialist perspective, that Hihan Buddhists were working on a premise that Buddhism in India is the source, and therefor always more legitimate than its derivatives, such as Chinese Buddhism or Zen in Japan.  They claimed that Hihan Buddhists contradicts with themselves because if one holds fast to Nagarjuna's claim that all things are neutral in their own nature, it is impossible to presume that any type of Buddhist idea is more essential than others just because it represents a source both historically or geographically.  I won't go into the detail of how the debate developed and in the end deteriorated into political and factional strife among Buddhist intellectuals in some quite important Japanese universities.  But I thought that if those on both sides of that debate had access to your discussion, their debate would have ended with more academically fruitful outcome. You did an excellent job in your reading of both Nagarjuna and Dogen.  You remained sympathetic to both, and at the same time, were able to use one skillfully to illustrate the singularity of the other.  I think your paper itself is a manifestation of the virtue of the Middle truth.  Congrats on your accomplishment. Hope you are enjoying a nice winter break.  I look forward to having more chance to talk with you in spring. All the best, Ryuichi

Copyright, All rights reserved, BlakeZen, 2011.

William Faulkner Essay: The Sound and The Fury

Topic:

7) To what purpose does Faulkner employ 'the monument' ? You might
consider the characterization of Dilsey as monument in contrast to
the statue at the end of the Sound and the Fury, or the museum-like
preservation of objects in the Sartoris 'mausoleum'. 

WARNING: THIS ESSAY IS INTENDED FOR VIEWING BY MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY. SOME EXPLICIT CONTENT IS USED.

       

English 174f: William Faulkner’s Major Works

Midterm Essay 1: Option 

Teaching Fellow: Jesse Benjamin Raber

March 15, 2011,

By Bledar Blake Zenuni

They Endured: Faulkner’s Negro Who Transcends Time

            The characters in The Sound and the Fury are psychologically complex, haunted, prone to spells of vanity and desires, and ultimately tragic. Always one to play the role of the noble Southern gentleman, Quentin Compson III is passionate and neurotic, consumed with the ideal Southern values of chivalry and honor.  Quentin is tormented by his father’s nihilistic philosophy and degradation of women and negroes, as Jason Compson III provides no moral compass to steer Quentin away from the storms of his chaotic thoughts. Rational, cold, and calculating, Jason Compson IV is a cruel and racist man who will stop at nothing to ensure financial success. Caddy Compson, unlike her hypochondriac Mother, Mrs. Compson, is the novel’s maternal figure for her brother Benjy, the mute and mentally handicapped 33-year old, and Quentin’s best friend. Yet Caddy, for all her care giving, commits a heinous sin—by Southern standards of conduct and morality, and in the eyes of the Compson household— by having an affair with Dalton Ames. As a result of indulging in sexual desires, she’s “doomed and knows it.” (Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury, p. 1132).  And then there’s Dilsey. The Compson’s black servant, she’s the matriarch of both the Gibson and Compson families. Dilsey does not allow self-absorption to consume and corrupt her values. She is detached from selfishness and attachments to material goods and vanity. She is the one who nurtures all the Compson children, since both Mrs. Compson and Mr. Compson prove themselves to be incapable of displaying love and affection. She is not merely a physical entity, but a commonwealth of the endearing human spirit, Faulkner’s character creation who represents a monument for the preservation of moral virtues of compassion and selflessness in a world consumed by the entropy of time. Faulkner seems to suggest that, because the Compsons are slaves to their temporal desires, they cannot be fully human. However, Dilsey is the only character whose actions exemplify morality, since she is not concerned about self-aggrandizement, but with atonement by “the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb.” (Faulkner, p. 1106). 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 Dilsey as a monument, a figure who represents the preservation of hope and humanity. As one who has “seed the beginning, en…de ending, her actions seem to transcend time itself, since she is the only character who espouses order and restoration in the midst of pandemonium.

A monument is a symbol of stability, literally and figuratively. A marker typically of stone or concrete, it stands as a testament to the memory of a great individual or the preservation of a specific episode in history. Figuratively, it is an outstanding, enduring, and memorable example of an ideal or virtue. In The Sound and the Fury, Dilsey Compson is such an outstanding example of the virtues of selflessness and perseverance in the face of adversity. She is the most positive character in the novel. Her section is the fourth and final one and takes place on Easter Sunday, a time of resurrection. In this section, it is evident that Dilsey draws a great deal of strength from her faith. As Dilsey, Benjy and Luster walk home back from the church, an emotional Dilsey continues to weep after leaving the sermon:

“Dilsey made no sound, her face did not quiver as the tears took their sunken and devious courses, walking with her head up, making no effort to dry them away even” (Faulkner, p. 1106).

When Luster advises her to stop, since they’ll be “passing white folks soon,” Dilsey issues the enigmatic response “I’ve seed de beginning, en now I see de endin” (Faulkner, p.1106.) She keenly observes that she’s the only member of the household who has seen both the glory and the decline of the Compsons.  Furthermore, while all the other characters grow weak by looking inside their own psyches for support, Dilsey is the only one who gains her strength by looking outward. In contrast to Quentin and Jason, who expend their faculties to achieve great honor and great wealth, respectively, Dilsey’s energies are focused to being a faithful servant to the family and to her Lord.  In the church scene, Dilsey weeps for herself and for the Compsons, because, in the words of the pastor, she “sees de darkness en de death everlasting upon de generations” (Faulkner, 1105). While the Compsons crumble around her, Dilsey emerges as the only character who has successfully resurrected the values that the Compsons have long abandoned—hard work, endurance, love of family, and religious faith. As a monument-like figure, Dilsey’s humanity is proven by the course of her actions: maternal care of Benjy and Miss Quentin, and her patience in putting up with Jason’s cruelty.           

Dilsey not only endures the humiliation of Jason’s and Miss Quentin’s insults, but reciprocates with an equal and opposing reaction: love. Miss Quentin’s relationship with Dilsey is Faulkner’s most dramatic rendering of the duality between the mother-figure and child, the black servant, and the white child master. Miss Quentin’s contradictory feelings toward the black servant prevent her from receiving the maternal comfort she seeks. Dilsey defends Quentin against Jason’s insinuations:

“Hush your mouth, Jason, Dilsey said. She went and put her arms around Quentin. ‘Sit down, honey,’ Dilsey said. ‘He ough to be shamed of himself, through what aint your fault up to you.’ (Faulkner, p. 891).

But Quentin responds by pushing Dilsey away. And in Jason’s section, Quentin, stung when Jason calls her a “damned little slut,” calls to Dilsey for comfort:

“ ‘Dilsey,’ she says, ‘Dilsey I want my mother.’ Dilsey went to her. “Now, now,” se says, “He   aint gwine so much as lay his hand on you while Ise here.” (Faulkner, p. 1025).

Yet, when Dilsey touches Quentin, she is immediately rebuffed. Quentin knocks her hand down and cries out, “You damn old nigger” (Faulkner, p. 1030). Repeatedly, Dilsey is mistreated like this by Miss Quentin and by Jason, yet never once does she lose heart and fail to show the child maternal love. Dilsey is the only mother-figure Miss Quentin has ever known, but her ingrained perception that Dilsey is nothing more than a lowly black servant won’t ever enable her to openly accept Dilsey’s affections. As a result, she turns to cruelty, a method of treatment she has observed from Jason. Nevertheless Dilsey’s pride is not broken, her stature does not crumble. Like a proud, erect stone statue, she brushes the insults away with grace, and even continues to treat Miss Quentin in the same motherly way as before.

Dilsey is just as caring with Benjy as she is with the child Miss Quentin. To her, Benjy is innocent and in need of protection. Besides Caddy, the Gibsons are Benjy’s true caretakers and family. Dilsey’s actions prove that she is a devoted mother figure to the man-child, Benjy. Dilsey willingly employs her son and grandson, T.P and Luster, respectively, to be Benjy’s personal caretakers. Furthermore, on Benjy’s birthday, Dilsey purchases the cake with her own money. Dilsey lights the candles on the cake and tells Luster and Benjy to eat it before Jason sees and makes a fuss about an expense he has not paid for. Dilsey is more familiar with Benjy’s tendencies than anyone else, even Caddy. She is the only one who knows that Benjy will break into a state of hysteria if the left turn is taken at the monument of the Confederate soldier at the end of the square. She instructs Luster to take the right turn, since she knows that it’s a symbolic sense of order and security for Benjy. Associations define Benjy’s world, and the right turn at the monument at the end is Benjy’s association of order and temporality. Furthermore, Benjy knows what time is, since he feels Caddy’s loss when he no longer “smells trees,” (Faulkner, p. 1048). But, being mute and not possessing will nor deliberation, Benjy is unable to act, and helpless before the intrusions of the past. The past defines order and sequence in Benjy’s consciousness, and when the pattern is broken the loss is unbearable. After Caddy’s departure, Benjy unintentionally scares away a girl after he reaches out to grab her because she smelled “like trees,” (Faulkner, p. 1056). In The Sound and the Fury, Benjy is lost in time, as associations are fragmented, the past defines order, and a break from traditional patterns results in ceaseless nervous breakdowns. Dilsey, on the other hand, lives in the present; to her the past is irrelevant, time itself does not cause irreparable loss and tragedy, but provides the potential for reparation and salvation.  This is exemplified not only in her loyalty to Benjy and the Compson household after Caddy’s departure and Quentin’s suicide, but in the contrast her personality and actions portray to Quentin’s characterizations of blacks.

For Quentin Compson, a “nigger is not a person, so much so as a form of behavior, a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” (Faulkner, p.1016). By this definition, Dilsey is simply an “obverse reflection,” of the Compsons, a black maid whose behavior is modeled from the flaws and virtues of the Compsons, a sort of social chameleon without an intrinsic personality of her own. This thought process, however, most clearly reveals that Quentin’s personality, his pattern of thought and behavior are rigidly shaped by an escape mechanism involving the fragmentation of the self in temporality. Quentin seems to be almost obsessed with blacks, constantly thinking about their relationships to other blacks and whites, and the place they hold in society, both in Jefferson and in the North. Throughout his section, Quentin returns time and time again to “niggers”. When getting on northern street cars, he notices immediately whether or not “niggers” are aboard; when in the Compson household, he acutely observes the black servants, and when he goes off to Harvard one of the first few thoughts that come to his mind is “I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers” (Faulkner, p. 977). Despite his preoccupation with blacks, he is unaware of their psychology and personality. The irony lies in the discrepancy between what he believes about himself and his world, and what his thoughts and actions reveal. Quentin’s constant dwelling on blacks represents his unacknowledged awareness of the “other.” To him, the “obverse reflection” is the “other,” an individual whom he labels as a “negro,” or “nigger” when in Jefferson, and whom he must “remember to think of as a colored person,” when in the North. Put another way, Quentin’s cognitive dissonance presents itself when he begins to experience an alternative possibility of life in a divided world—the world in which Quentin, the southern gentleman is transformed to Quentin the Harvard undergraduate, transposed from Jefferson, where “niggers” live, to Massachusetts, where “colored people” live. The duality of a divided world in The Sound and The Fury is exemplified in Quentin’s section, since when in the North, Quentin must train himself to think of blacks as colored “people,” no longer “forms of behavior,” or “obverse reflections.” The blacks populating Quentin’s section become strategic figures for what is missing in Quentin’s white world and a subtle projection of his own internal state: his family’s history of service to the South and his father’s nihilism ultimately are sour ingredients in the recipe of Quentin’s psychology. He’s personality is defined by the past: his grandfather’s honor and service to the South, the antebellum South of his strong, brave, and courageous ancestors fighting for the preservation of their way of life and family values. In the end, Quentin tries to reenact the code of conduct of that time, getting trapped by the very own lofty ideals he tries to honor. In a word, Quentin’s perception of blacks and the duality of his world are based in temporality. He does not strive for the spiritual values of compassion and selflessness that Dilsey does, but for the temporal values of nobility, family honor, and knightly chivalry. His life ultimately ends in tragedy as he succumbs to his false sense of honor and loyalty and commits suicide. In contrast, the “other,” or the “obverse reflection of the white” man lives in the present, adhering to spiritual values without regression. It is through Dilsey, that the Compson household is redeemed, not through Quentin’s honor and his suicide. Since Dilsey’s section is the most lucid, the world in which Dilsey lives is an objective world, a world not governed by the loss of a war for preserving honor and the Southern way, but by the state of the present and the promise of salvation of the future. Whereas Quentin’s world is the projection of a distempered spirit, Dilsey’s world is an objective world in which an unbroken spirit who has “seed de beginin en de end,” endures with the promise of future salvation in her consciousness.           

The Sound and the Fury  is a tour-de-force that seems to be constructed in incoherent parts, with episodes and characters’ memories shuffled and reshuffled in no particular order. The novel begins with the mind of an “idiot,” traverses through the murky musings and memories of the Hamlet-like Quentin, roams over the deeds of the rationalist, but ruthless, Jason, and finally rolls into the tunnel of clarity and enlightenment. Throughout this whole ordeal of traversing the same territory in circling motion, one finds that each character is a subject to time, an actor in a role defined by their own psyche and neurosis. Since all the Compsons act in accordance with their temporal whims, they suffer misfortune and, ultimately, tragedy. Perhaps one of the messages of the novel, if it has one at all, is that ‘man’s misfortunes are confided in time.’ If this is so, then the following question could be raised: how can a Faulkner character be defined as “human,” if time and time again, his psychological dispositions substantiate the sum of his actions? Yet, in Dilsey’s section, time does not decay and ruin the idea that man is bound by time. In this section we are led to believe that man is able to transcend time and to endure the slings, arrows, and parting shots of outrageous fortune. Dilsey’s language, her whole way of being in the world, is manifestly transcendent. For her, it is not a misfortune to be in time, because, as she discovers in Easter service, man’s destiny is caught up in the “ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!” (Faulkner, p. 1105).  Twenty-one years after he wrote The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner spoke about man’s place in the world, stating:

“I decline to accept the end of man,” he said. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal… because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” (William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1949).

Not only does Faulkner relay a message of continuity of human morality and hope, but Faulkner also employs the words, “endurance,” and “sacrifice.” It can be no coincidence for Faulkner, consciously or subconsciously, that in the appendix of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner writes just two words for Dilsey’s character biography: “They Endured.” (Faulkner, p. 1141). Does this mean that Faulkner really did see Dilsey, the “nigger,” as the redeeming figure of the Compson household? If so, then what can one make of Faulkner’s comments two years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, that before he’d see Federal troops in Oxford, Mississippi he’d “go out in the streets with a gun and shoot every Negro in sight.” Perhaps it is too difficult to draw any conclusion from such questions or the author’s personal statements. All we one can conclude, is that, in Faulkner’s cosmos of  Yoknapatawpha county,  violence, chaos, and decadence are themes which resonate, but in the small town of Jefferson, a “nigger,” with a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice, endures.

 

Bibliography:

Faulkner, William: Faulkner: Novels 1926-1929: The Sound and the Fury, pp. 879- 1141, Library of America’s Literary Classics of the United States, New York, NY, 2006

William Faulkner Term Paper on "Absalom, Absalom."

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.