The book I finally managed to finish early this morning is Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. I'm quite sure I tried to read it when I was in college, because according to my old list book, during the spring quarter (1980) of my sophomore year I read Light in August and The Sound and the Fury. Although my record-keeping wasn't as detailed back then as it is now, I appear to have read them right after Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics, apparently for my own amusement. That seems funny to me now. Tired of Aristotle? Why not relax with a little Faulkner? After the two Faulkner novels, I read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, so hmm, my choices were as eclectic then as now.
I chose to go back to Faulkner now because he was a white man who wrote about race and the South and the Civil War. Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, a year before Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I thought there might exist some sort of dialogue between the two books, even if only within my own head. But if there is, I couldn't hear it. I felt rudely jerked out of the colorful, jazzy world of the Harlem Renaissance into the misery of the Old South, the South that can't let go of the old ways, for whom the War Between the States is forever raging, with victory just around the corner, the South where having just one great-grandparent of African ancestry dooms you to being referred to as "the octoroon" in a novel by a white man who was actually sympathetic toward your cause.
OK, this is supposed to be a review, so I'll summarize -- but of course this is a famous novel, taught in universities. I could easily grab a summary from Wikipedia or from many other blogs, and so I'm not sure what the point is for me to write my own. Having said that, here goes (with no concern for "spoilers," since every detail of the plot is all over the internet). Absalom, Absalom! is the story of a man, Thomas Sutpen, raised in the mountains of West Virginia before there was a West Virginia, who is so horrified by the Black slave of a rich white man who tells him to go to the back door that he decides to go to the West Indies and make a lot of money and start a dynasty of people who will never be told to go to the back door by a Black person. His plan goes awry, of course -- in Haiti, he accidentally marries a woman with some African ancestry and has a son by her, and despite his attempt to start over in Mississippi, the son ends up following him there, befriending his second son (by a woman without African ancestry) and becoming engaged to his second daughter (he also has a daughter by one of his slaves, so that daughter, his first, also is his slave (until 1865) and serves in his house), and his second son ends up killing his first son and running away, and later his first son's son (by an "octoroon") comes to live at the Sutpen mansion and ends up having a son (Sutpen's great-grandson) with a woman who has only African ancestry, and his first daughter (the former slave) ends up raising both the grandson and later the great-grandson (who is intellectually disabled), and in the end she burns down the house, killing herself and the second son, due to a misapprehension caused by an old woman who is the younger sister of Sutpen's second wife. Also, in the middle of all that, Sutpen and his two sons fight in the Civil War.
Got that? In addition, the novel is an allegory about the South and is related to the Bible story of Absalom, King David's son.
Sutpen's intellectually disabled great-grandson, Jim Bond, survives the fire, and on the last page of the book, the Canadian roommate of the grandson of a friend of Sutpen's who tells us most of the story says,
I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it won't quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won't show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.
In a way, this rather nasty comment is quite prescient of Faulkner, since in 1936 people didn't yet know that we all come from Africa. Of course, his character doesn't say that, he says that eventually everyone in the western hemisphere will have African ancestry, that the "white race," not that there is one, will fall. Which, to men like Sutpen and the current batch of white supremacists, his true descendants, would seem rather a threat. But I'm unhappy that Faulkner makes this part-African man who is "going to conquer the western hemisphere" intellectually disabled. I don't know what that means, what it symbolizes or allegorizes. Probably it's significant, or maybe it isn't, but in either case I'm missing the point.
That grandson of Sutpen's friend has a name: Quentin Compson. The year is 1910 and he is 18 or 19 at the time he tells the story to his Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, one long cold January night in Cambridge, Massachusetts (they are students at Harvard). Of course, Quentin has heard most of the story secondhand (thirdhand, fourthhand), from his father and that younger sister of Sutpen's second wife, and both of them heard the story from other people, so it isn't clear whether the story we hear is completely accurate. Different people tell it differently, adding to the unremitting joy of the novel. Oh, and Quentin is going to kill himself in a few months, according to an earlier book (The Sound and the Fury). I remembered that, and kept looking for some mention of his impending death in this book, but it isn't there. He's deeply troubled, but no mention is made of where that's going to lead.
I found it hard to believe that these two young men (Quentin and Shreve) could be so completely enthralled by the story. But when I was 19, and tried to read Absalom, Absalom!, 70 years after Quentin is supposed to have told the story to Shreve, I thought it was enthralling too. I got bogged down and couldn't finish it, but I was enthralled. And maybe it's really a story for young people, maybe only young people can find the story enthralling instead of absurd. I'm no longer young and I didn't enjoy the book, on any level. I'm glad I finally finished it, and it does fit into this year's reading theme. Maybe it helps me understand the white South better. I don't know. Glad it's over.
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