In Second Samuel 18, we hear King David’s wail upon learning of the fate of his rebellious son: “O my son Absalom—my son, my son Absalom—if only I had died in your place! O Absalom my son, my son!” He feels this depth of emotion for this son, Absalom, who murdered another of his sons—from a different mother—over the rape of Absalom’s true sister. Sounds bad! After being forgiven by his father, Absalom became puffed up with pride and eventually tried to take King David’s kingdom. A complex and puzzling story that may not reflect most people’s life experiences.
William Faulkner, however, thrived on this sort of dark, Gothic morass and chose this story as both the model and the title for his 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the novel’s title).
Overview
Faulkner chose to portray the societal moral underbelly of the South through the lens of David’s story. During in Faulkner’s day, the legacy of slavery continued to thrive despite the elimination of the institution, and its impact across every demographic in the South was still unmistakable. Faulkner chose a planter who had traveled west with an irregular fortune and a band of slaves to purchase and develop a massive plot of land in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha county in Mississippi.
This pioneer, Thomas Sutpen, is unpleasant and self-obsessed—seeking to become the respected, feared patriarch of a great family that he would sire in Mississippi. His one apparent positive is that in an unusual way for the times, he respects and surprisingly appears to have the respect of his slaves, who seem willing to do pretty much anything he asks of them out of this good will. It feels puzzling for a first-time reader.
Unfortunately, Sutpen’s desires to be the powerful and beloved benefactor of the family go more in the way of King David than the Von Trapp family. His children are odd, his wife is depressed and simply withdraws from life, and there appear to be more than one mother in the picture. And other children emerge. To keep this review short and eliminate spoilers, I’ll just say that during the fall of Sutpen, we see the whole Absalom story emerge in his children. It’s very dark and the final disposition of the line of Sutpen is a painful one.
Construction of the Novel
The reason this novel is seen as one of Faulkner’s two best novels (the other being The Sound and the Fury)—and frequently is listed as one of the top American novels ever—is the way he builds the narrative. This is one of Faulkner’s experimental novels. Not only do we have to work through his famous stream of consciousness narrative style, but in Absalom, Absalom! we also learn quickly that the story is told progressively through flashbacks and also from the point of view of multiple unreliable third party narrators piecing the story together years after the events.
Initially, we learn things about Sutpen and his family that we accept. But as the story continues, the narrator restates something he had glossed over earlier and the new detail forces us to take a new position. This continues throughout the book. It almost feels like the reader is fighting through the (beautiful) complex prose to get to a new clue about the story.
The tone and color of the novel is very dark throughout, as is typical of the Southern Gothic genre. Faulkner makes it clear through these devices that the oppression and prevention of agency of both the slaves, but also the “poor whites” in the story is a scar on the entire South. He also ensures that the reader sees many of the ways the elites in the South created a culture to excuse and perpetuate slavery. Many readers might feel uncomfortable reading this (along with some of the period language we don’t accept now), but I think Faulkner does us a service by shining a bright light on the mechanisms that allowed this injustice to begin and then also to continue for many years after the law prohibited it. These methods are different in scale but not in kind with how elites continue to manipulate and segregate non-elite populations around the world in our own era.
How to Read it!
Readers unfamiliar with Faulkner may be tempted to put the book down early due to his tendency to “flow” ideas to the reader with long, heavily-symbolic sentences and the confusing family trees. Write down the family relationships as you discover them or find one pre-built online. And regarding the sentences, trust me, if you read for flow and not comprehension, it will all start to sound amazing to you. Faulkner did not pick words just because he thought they’d make him sound smart. He built his sentences intentionally to convey an atmosphere in a precise way.
Conclusion
Is Absalom, Absalom! worth reading today? Yes, there are words that will make many uncomfortable—but the strategy of banning words to make hard ideas go away has been a proven failure. There are situations that are dark and reveal the deep sinfulness in human nature in a way that will also cause some folks—primarily those who wish away this darkness in their own natures—to struggle. But I believe readers will be rewarded by reading this creative and revealing novel that should still be viewed as one of the greatest novels in the American canon.
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