“Ah,” Mr. Compson said. “Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?”
Absalom, Absalom is one of those books that enthrals you—the deeper in you go, the more you feel haunted by it, fascinated and intrigued. Whether this is your first foray into Faulkner or a return to his pulsing and complex vision, Absalom, Absalom! is the broiling centre of his evocation of the American South, tackling its passionate history – its horrors and its heroes – head on. The book itself becomes about how we narrate our story, and how our individual story is always enmeshed with the world we come from, even when that history is indigestible. This is Faulkner at the height of his powers – battling through the fraught and agonised realms of racism, class prejudice, rigid gender roles – showing how these struggles play out against the legacy of the Civil War and the collapse of a culture rooted in inequality.
That’s the heavy stuff, but what makes the novel so enriching is our deep engagement with the characters—with Miss Rosa, with Quentin Compson, with Thomas Sutpen—who give life to these larger conflicts as they play out their own extraordinary drama.
“You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over.”
Absalom, Absalom! is all at once historical fiction, a murder mystery, a meta-fiction, a broken family tale, a romance, a war story, a psychological exploration–and, at its heart, a deeply American tragedy. You can choose any one of these lenses to focus your reading, and still the voices of the characters will clamour for attention, demand that their story be told. Judith (quoted above) puts words to the entanglement of people with each other, how we all trying to weave our own pattern on the loom together and how this pulls and tugs. This is also a book to re-read, each exploration rewards with further insights into the human spirit.
“Good God! William Faulkner. What can I say? Certain books and certain writers knock you to your knees and lead you to wonder why you even bother to get up in the morning and think, much less write. I said to Eudora [Welty] one night that I thought of Faulkner as the biggest, boldest mountain, and I’m scared to even stand at the foot of it, so vast and frightening it is. And she lowered her head and her voice and said, ‘I won’t even visit the country in which that mountain stands.’ So that’s my response to your question about Faulkner. He’ll change your life for sure, but he’ll scare you when the topic of your own writing arises. Go with God, baby.“
Tennessee Williams, interview with James Grissom, New Orleans, 1982
There are still some places left on our study of Absalom, Absalom!, the second in our ‘Faulkner & his children’ series, focusing on the author’s work, critical heritage and the generations of extraordinary writers who have followed in his wake. John Allemand and Deborah Lawunmi, the two facilitators, bring to the table a history with this book and a passion for Faulkner’s vision, as well as an understanding that the agonies he exposes are still with us today.
