{"id":24019,"date":"2012-06-28T17:27:34","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T17:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24019"},"modified":"2013-06-09T15:23:08","modified_gmt":"2013-06-09T15:23:08","slug":"how-william-faulkner-tackled-race-%e2%80%94-and-freed-the-south-from-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24019","title":{"rendered":"How William Faulkner Tackled Race \u2014 and Freed the South From Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

How William Faulkner Tackled Race \u2014 and Freed the South From Itself<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-06-28<\/p>\n

John Jeremiah Sullivan<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

A poll of well over a hundred writers and critics, taken a few years back by Oxford American magazine, named William Faulkner\u2019s<\/a> \u201cAbsalom, Absalom!<\/a>\u201d the \u201cgreatest Southern novel ever written,\u201d by a decisive margin \u2014 and the poll was conducted while looking back on a century in which a disproportionate number of the best American books were Southern \u2014 so to say that this novel requires no introduction is just to speak plainly.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s the kind of book a person would<\/em> put first in a poll like that. You can feel reasonably confident, in voting for it, that nobody quite fathoms it enough to question its achievement. Self-consciously ambitious and structurally complex (unintelligible,<\/em> a subset of not unsophisticated readers has always maintained), \u201cAbsalom, Absalom!\u201d partakes of what the critic Irving Howe<\/a> called \u201ca fearful impressiveness,\u201d the sort that \u201ccomes when a writer has driven his vision to an extreme.\u201d It may represent the closest American literature came to producing an analog for \u201cUlysses<\/a>,\u201d which influenced it deeply \u2014 each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history \u2014 and like \u201cUlysses,\u201d it lives as a book more praised than read, or more esteemed than enjoyed.<\/p>\n

But good writers don\u2019t look for impressedness<\/em> in their readers \u2014 it\u2019s at best another layer of distortion \u2014 and \u201cgreatness\u201d can leave a book isolated in much the way it can a human being. (Surely a reason so many have turned away from \u201cUlysses\u201d over the last near-hundred years is that they can\u2019t read it without a suffocating sense of each word\u2019s cultural importance and their duty to respond, a shame in that case, given how often Joyce was trying to be amusing.) A good writer wants from us \u2014 or has no right to ask more than \u2014 intelligence, good faith and time. A legitimate question to ask is, What happens with \u201cAbsalom, Absalom!\u201d if we set aside its laurels and apply those things instead? What has Faulkner left us?<\/p>\n

A prose of exceptional vividness, for one thing. The same few passages, in the very first pages, remind me of this \u2014 they\u2019re markings on an entryway \u2014 sudden bursts of bristly adjective clusters. The September afternoon on which the book opens in a \u201cdim hot airless\u201d room is described as \u201clong still hot weary dead.\u201d If you\u2019ve ever taken a creative-writing workshop, you\u2019ve been warned never to do this, pile up adjectives, interpose descriptive terms between the reader\u2019s imagination and the scene. But here something\u2019s different. Faulkner\u2019s choices are so precise, and his juxtaposition of the words so careful in conditioning our sense reception, that he doesn\u2019t so much solve as overpower the problem. The sparrows flying into the window trellis beat their wings with a sound that\u2019s \u201cdry vivid dusty,\u201d each syllable a note in a chord he\u2019s forming. The Civil War ghosts that haunt the room are \u201cgarrulous outraged baffled.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…No book that tries to dissect the South\u2019s psyche like that can overlook its founding obsession: <\/strong>miscegenation<\/strong><\/a>. There we reach the novel\u2019s deepest concern, the fixed point around which the storm of its language revolves.<\/strong> After Sutpen ran off to Haiti as a young man \u2014 it emerges that a humiliating boyhood experience, of hearing a black slave tell him to use the back door of a big house (he wasn\u2019t good enough for the front), had produced a shock that propelled him to flee \u2014 he married a girl there and fathered a son with her. Soon, however, he discovered that she had black blood, and that his son was therefore mixed, so he renounced them both. He sailed back to the South to become a planter. A plausible thing for a white Southern male to have done in the early 19th century. But what Faulkner doesn\u2019t forget, and doesn\u2019t want us to, is the radical amorality of the breach. On the basis of pure social abstraction, Sutpen has spurned his own child, his first son.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He remarries in Mississippi, with Miss Rosa\u2019s older sister. They have two children, a boy and a girl. Now Sutpen has land, a mansion and progeny. He is almost there, almost a baron. We\u2019re not absurd to think of Gatsby here; one of the most perceptive recent statements on \u201cAbsalom, Absalom!\u201d was made by the scholar Fred C. Hobson<\/a> in 2003, a simple-seeming statement and somehow one of the strangest things a person could say about the book, that it is \u201ca novel about the American dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

As in any good book of that type, the past hunts Sutpen and finds him: His son, Henry, goes off to the fledgling University of Mississippi, where he befriends another man, Charles Bon. On a holiday visit to Sutpen\u2019s Hundred, Bon meets Henry\u2019s sister, Judith, and falls in love with her \u2014 or makes up his mind to possess her. What Henry and Judith don\u2019t know is that Bon is Sutpen\u2019s abandoned Haitian son, come to Mississippi via New Orleans, evidently in a sort of half-conscious, all but sleepwalking quest to find his father. Charles Bon is thus both half-black and Judith\u2019s half-brother…<\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How William Faulkner Tackled Race \u2014 and Freed the South From Itself The New York Times 2012-06-28 John Jeremiah Sullivan A poll of well over a hundred writers and critics, taken a few years back by Oxford American magazine, named William Faulkner\u2019s \u201cAbsalom, Absalom!\u201d the \u201cgreatest Southern novel ever written,\u201d by a decisive margin \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20],"tags":[11113,11112,2640,2327,490],"class_list":["post-24019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-absalom","tag-john-jeremiah-sullivan","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-william-faulkner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}