Reading Faulkner is a lot like reading Melville. You just can’t believe a person could have held all those thoughts in their head at once. You just can’t believe somebody could notice all the noticings of a world, real and imagined at the same time, and get them onto paper.
The central character in Absalom Absalom is Thomas Sutpen, and I use central because I’m not reading this in an English class and it feels odd, even at 44, to call him a main character despite him only existing in the story through memories and stories of others who lived around him. This is one of a million reasons why Faulkner is a m*********er. Like Moby Dick, there are forces present in his pages that are painstakingly measurable to somebody with the correct expertise, and yet impossible to get your arms or brain around when you’re immersed in his world.
And not to force too much English class logic onto it, but if there’s a white whale in this book, it’s the American South, and I don’t think anybody ever catches it so much as has stories to tell about it.
Which is sort of the whole idea of the book. This isn’t a recommendation, by the way, so much as a note-to-self masquerading as a reminder why I’ll be re-reading this again in coming years. It’s a meditation on how to write like people talk, like people think, and why some of the best aspects of stories are the holes and gaps and inconsistencies we can’t quite piece together but fall in love with the tales of.
Despite too many dog ears, underlines, and quotes - this is the passage I feel like I needed to write with my own hands. These belong here, transcribed (my emphasis in bold).
This is what amounts to dialogue from a dorm root chat between friends, Quentin and Shreve, in the latter 3rd of the book. This first part is lamenting what it meant to have the title of General thrust upon you, for the South, during the Civil War:
Quentin had not even put on this overcoat, which lay on the floor where it had fallen from the arm of the chair where Shreve had put it down. They did not retreat from the cold. They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits’ travail of the two young men during that time fifty years ago, or forty-either rather, then forty-seven and then forty-six, since it was ‘64 and the starved and ragged remnant of an army having retreated across Alabama and Georgia and into Carolina, swept onward not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side—Chickamauga and Franklin, Vicksburg and Corinth and Atlanta—battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say ‘Go there’ conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but no grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip three separate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their own own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot to death…
The talk continues. I’m editing a bit for spoilers here, and preserving the essence where I’ll jump you back in:
…because at last they were going to do something, at last he could be something even though that something was the irrevocable repudiation of the old heredity and training and the acceptance of eternal damnation. Maybe he could even quit talking about his Lorraine duke then, because he could say now, ‘It isn’t yours not his nor the Pope’s hell that w are all going to: it’s my mother’s and her mother’s and father’s and their mothers’ and fathers’ hell, and it isn’t you who are going there, but we, the three—no: four of us. And so at least we will all be together where we belong, since even if only he went there we would still have to be there too since the three of us are just illusions that he begot, and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
That lineage of the possession of hell really stuck into my brain. The connection to it, almost the inheritance of it, yeesh. This is how you wrestle with a life before yours that you can’t comprehend.
He didn’t just think to notify us; and not only not shoes and clothing but not even any need for them, and not only no land nor any way to make food, but no need for the food since we have learned to live without that too; and so if you don’t have God and you don’t need food and clothes and shelter, there isn’t anything for honor and pride to climb on and hold to and flourish. And if you haven’t got honor and pride, then nothing matters. Only there is something in you that doesn’t care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be out in the woods, moving and seeking where just will and endurance could not move it, grubbing for rots and such—the old mindless sentient undreaming meat that doesn’t even know any difference between despair and victory, Henry’…
…They still walked backward, slow and stubborn, listening toward the North for the end of it because it takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing, and they had been walking backward slow for a year now so all they had left was not the will but just the ability, the grooved habit to endure.
There’s a lot of darkness in this story, don’t get me wrong. These quotes - they’re around a history of murder, slavery, incest, war, and that’s not even the half of the awful things. They explore, not only possessing the internal concept of character that allows a person to make choices, but understanding how the same built up character inside of a person defines, in some sense, what can change versus what can only continue.
It’s relatably unrelatable on so many levels. How do we wrestle with the past? How do we even know the past? How do we even begin to make sense of experience that wasn’t ours, in the contexts of times that are as flawed as the persons and times that make up our arch? And how do we, if it’s even possible, not pass our misguided ambitions and shortcomings down?
For starters, we try not to be evil. That’s the obvious bit. But can we look back with understanding, let alone love?
Without giving too much away, in case this is a story maze you want to get lost in too, that’s the idea here. It’s about a painful history told through remembrances and stories from a million perspectives, and how despite the heartache and haze,
“The South,” Shreve said. “The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." It was becoming quite distinct; he would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.
You should hate it. There’s not really much of a reason not to. And yet, like Quentin closes the story, “I don’t.”
It’s a remarkable read. It’s a powerful, insane, and beyond human way to structure an impossibly large story.
MF’n Faulkner.
