Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! is arguably Faulkner’s most difficult, but also his most brilliant work. Eminent Faulkner critic and historian Fred Hobson (2003), like many others, claims that it is Faulkner’s masterwork, “not only because of the richness of its story . . . its tragic dimension, its prose, and its narrative complexity (The Sound and the Fury shares these, after all) but also because of its keen historical sense.  Absalom is the Faulkner novel that deals . . . most centrally with what C. Vann Woodward calls ‘the burden of southern history’—that is, the racial burden—and it is a work that paints in many particulars, a realistic picture of antebellum life in the Deep South and explores the origins and the meaning of ‘aristocracy’ in that region.  In no other Faulkner novel, perhaps no American novel, are all elements of that critical triumvirate, race, class, and gender, explored so compellingly”.

Absalom, Absalom tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, a brooding and enigmatic stranger who comes to fictional Jefferson in the early 1830’s with a wagon load of enslaved Haitians and a French architect from New Orleans to wrest his mansion out of the  muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness, to sculpt it into an aristocratic bastion of power and to engender a dynasty through the force of his sheer will.  Faulkner says that Sutpen was a man “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him”—true–but Sutpen is both the progenitor and the author of his own downfall through a curious combination of sheer innocence, blind pride, and moral bankruptcy. 

Coming back to Absalom, Absalom! after many years feels like returning to a haunted house you once loved. The place is still there, echoing with monstrous voices, still as impressive and unlivable as ever!  While Absalom, Absalom is one of Faulkner’s most Gothic novels, Faulkner’s gift is to wed that genre’s ghostly, claustrophobic intensity to modernist formal experimentation, his technical innovations (shifting perspectives, fragmented chronology, intricate, lyrical prose, etc.) adding to the oppressive emotional weight of an intergenerational past which suffuses the present.

Deborah Robbins (1981) explains that for the characters in Absalom, Absalom, telling is a matter of life and death: “[T]he narrators speak with the desperate eloquence of people who fear the interruption of a story they must tell, a story of great personal significance. Each shapes the Sutpen material to a pattern reflecting the teller’s own idiosyncratic vision, hoping to win confirmation of the identity defined by that ordering of experience. But while Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Shreve and Quentin all seek witnesses to their self-creation in the stories they tell, all resist the self-effacing passivity of listening. To assume the role of teller is to make a claim to identity, while to surrender that claim is a small death. Thus, the right to tell is repeatedly challenged and usurped in the novel as the narrators compete for the instrument of self assertion”.

So where does that leave us—the readers?  Do we surrender to the tale or do we compete (or collaborate?) with its narrators in a search for meaning: Duncan Aswell (1968) claims that Faulkner’s “daring and brilliant strategy in Absalom, Absalom! is to divide us against ourselves, our emotional against our intellectual responses, by providing us with continually more irresistible and subtle rhetorical arguments until we forget what we have been asked to take on faith and what we can safely accept as known and proven. Faulkner plays upon precisely those needs and desires in us that he shows operating in his characters, and demonstrates the truth of his fable by making us equally blind and hopeful participants in the search for illumination”.

Please join us as we compete and collaborate with some of literature’s most famous narrators in unraveling the mysteries of this spellbinding classic!

JOINING DETAILS:

• Seven-week study led by John Allemand and Deborah Lawunmi live on Zoom
• Mondays, 28 September – 9 November 2026, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)
• £350 for seven meeting study with two facilitators (17.5 hours)
• Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, Norton Critical Edition (2023), edited by Susan Scott Parrish, ISBN-10: 0393422585, ISBN-13: 978-0393422580.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.