Liam Kiggins
Few texts foreground the tenuous nature of historical narratives more explicitly than William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! In the opening of the novel, as he wonders why he has been tasked with hearing the story of Thomas Sutpen’s failed attempt to establish an antebellum plantation dynasty, Quentin Compson describes a childhood filled with stories of the old South and the effect that such history has had on him. He likens himself to a haunted barracks filled with ghosts unable to reconcile themselves to the fever that had cured them of their mutual sickness (Faulkner 6). The sickness was slavery, the fever of the Civil War that looms over the entire narrative. Absalom, Absalom! depicts the death throes of slavery in America, referencing the Alabama convention where the provisional Confederate government was established, the abandonment of enslaved labor by Africans as the war progressed, and battles such as Corinth, Franklin, Vicksburg, and Atlanta. Although Faulkner directly confronts the normalized violence experienced by enslaved persons, his treatment of the most lucrative colonial slave economy in the Western Hemisphere is much more complicated. While Haiti provides the seeds for both the creation and eventual destruction of Sutpen’s Hundred, its depiction by Faulkner breaks with the historical verisimilitude of the rest of his narrative. The Haiti to which Sutpen journeys, in order to procure wealth and human beings for his “grand design” is one made possible by a rewriting of history that ignores Haiti’s 1791 revolution and subsequent abolition of slavery. Why does Faulkner distort the details of an international event that had such deep resonance for the South? The atypical structure of the novel invites speculation on the truth of events surrounding the Sutpen family, and so questions the knowability of history itself. At stake for Faulkner is how to approach the legacy of slavery in a novel concerned with the end of that institution in the South and the politics of its representations in the 1930s.
The monumental import of the 1791 revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue was immediately apparent to members of the U.S. planter aristocracy. As sitting president, Washington would advance a sum of $726,000 to French planters in the colony to aid in the suppression of the revolt while the governor of South Carolina worried that the rebellion “represented a ‘flame which will extend to all the neighboring islands and may eventually prove a not very pleasing or agreeable example to the Southern states’” (Horne 30). South Carolina, the state that would eventually be the first to secede from the union, became, in 1792, the first to bar further importation of enslaved Africans in response to events in the Caribbean. Beyond American concern with the political events unfolding in Saint-Domingue, the white population of the South avidly followed developments in the colony; as the critic Richard Godden notes, “during the 1790s, white panics about slave revolts were endemic” (Godden 685).
The specter of the Haitian revolution would persist in Southern memory well into the Civil War. In her acclaimed Civil War diary, Mary Boykin Chestnut mentions that she had “Read the story of Soulouque, the Haytian [sic] man: he has wonderful interest just now. Slavery has to go, of course, and joy go with it” (Chestnut 381). Chestnut’s hostility to the institution of slavery was complicated, she reaped the benefits of the comfort afforded to her by the system while being in principle opposed to living “with such degraded creatures around us— such men as Legree and his women” (385). While more concerned with supposed indignities to her fellow white women rather than the commonplace nature of rape and sexual violence that enslaved African women experienced, her reference to Haitian President Faustin Soulouque and post-revolutionary Haiti demonstrates an awareness of the challenge the nation continued to pose to a Southern domain heavily dependent upon slave labor.
Faulkner’s rewriting of Haitian history allows an important theme to emerge: Southern (and more broadly American) conceptions of male prowess. Sutpen’s sudden arrival in the village of Jefferson one Sunday and the cloud of speculation that surrounds his origins casts him in what the critic Wanda Raiford describes as the mold of a prototypical American figure “emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry[…]an individual standing alone” (116). Of course, Sutpen is not as solitary and self-made a figure as his introduction would suggest. His plantation estate is built on land bought through a Chickasaw Indian agent, and the house is primarily built by twenty enslaved Haitians that he oversees as they “drive the swamp like a pack of hounds” (Faulkner 23). Faulkner depicts Sutpen as being actively and physically engaged in the taming of his newly acquired land in a complicated narrative woven from many disparate perspectives. According to Quentin’s grandfather, “Sutpen never raised his voice at them, that instead he led them, caught them at the psychological instant by example[…]rather than brute fear” (Faulkner 23). However, the inherently violent nature of the racially stratified society of Mississippi cannot be suspended from any consideration of Sutpen’s actions. As Raiford notes when analyzing the supposedly fair fights that Sutpen engages in with his slaves, “The true power relations between the combatants are submerged into non-existence by the novel’s foregrounding of the individual bodies of the fighting men” (115). In fact, as is later revealed, Sutpen’s design to establish a plantation dynasty begins at the precise moment when he starts to understand his inferior position within Southern society as a poor white. Sutpen’s shock at discovering the marginal position that he and his family hold in Southern society is lifelong, and even after he flees Virigina to advance his position, this shock continues to drive his actions and his persistent need to demonstrate his prowess.
Sutpen’s plan to become rich in the West Indies sees him accept the position of overseer at a plantation. However, an attempted uprising threatens to take Sutpen’s life before he can gain the wealth necessary to become one of the plantation owners whose ranks he now desires to join. Sutpen aids in the suppression of the uprising and is rewarded with his engagement to the daughter of the Haitian plantation owner. This first marriage unravels when Sutpen realizes that his wife is Creole, and he abandons both her and their child, Charles Bon. Because of the structure of Absalom, Absalom!, this crucial part of Sutpen’s story is heavily filtered through the perspectives of different characters. Initially told to his grandfather, Quention has received the story from his father and now relays it to his Canadian roommate, Shreve. Faulkner includes Shreve tocomplicate the history of the antebellum South. Shreve allows Quentin to explain Sutpen (and the Southern order that he represents) to an outsider. But Shreve does not mirror the largely passive form of listening that Quentin performs in the first half of the novel. He frequently interjects as Quentin tells Sutpen’s story and eventually takes on a more dominant role as he recapitulates what he has already been told. Shreve’s pedantic correction to Quentin regarding the date of West Virginia’s admission to the United States provides a good example of his active involvement in the narrative (Faulkner 151). This correction reinforces the apparent concern with historical truth in Faulkner’s narrative, but also engenders frustration in the reader as the long–delayed revelation of Sutpen’s origins is postponed one final time. As Raiford points out, “Shreve is, like the reader seduced,” and suspends his objections until he becomes an active participant in the creation of the story alongside his roommate (Raiford 113). Shreve’s correction also emphasizes the arc of Sutpen’s journey from his impoverished origins in the western mountains of Virginia for “a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich…” (Faulkner 164).
Quentin tells Shreve that he “reckon[s] Grandfather was saying ‘Wait wait for God’s sake wait’ about like you are until he finally did stop and back up and start over again with at least some regard for cause and effect even if none for logical sequence…” (Faulkner 169). This speculative interruption comes at precisely the most fantastic moment in Sutpen’s account, his inexplicable suppression of the slave revolt. Sutpen does not tell “how he did it. He didn’t tell…that of no moment to the story…he just put the musket down…and walked out into the darkness and subdued them, maybe by yelling louder, maybe by standing, bearing more than they believed any bones and flesh could or should…” (Faulkner 173). Sutpen shows his wounds to Quentin’s grandfather, whose objection to this part of his companion’s story is not the unexplained mechanisms that allowed him to subdue this uprising, but how his marital engagement emerged from this act. The almost mythologizing treatment of Sutpen also strengthens the air that surrounds him for much of the narrative. Even by the time he is thoroughly invested in Quentin’s recounting of Sutpen’s story, Shreve continually interjects to bestow on Sutpen the title of “the demon” first given to him by Rosa Coldfield.
Faulkner’s description of the “air filled with the smoke and smell of burning cane and the glare and smoke of it on the sky…” which surrounds the besieged plantation in Haiti recalls one of the primary methods by which the historical Haitian Revolution was waged, the mass burning of the cane fields (Faulkner 173). By 1787, the colony was producing 131 million pounds of sugar a year at the expense of horrific conditions for the enslaved African population, and when the revolution began, these fields became prime targets for destruction (Horne 35). This passage is one of many in the Haitian sections where Faulkner gestures toward the historical revolution he declines to depict. Immediately before the uprising which Sutpen is to subdue, we hear of how “the old unsleeping blood that had vanished into the earth they trod still cried out for vengeance” (Faulkner 171). This desire for vengeance, so potent that it permeates the earth of the land itself, is somehow checked by Sutpen singlehandedly. This partial concealment by Faulkner of the first successful rebellion against slavery raises important interpretive questions for both this particular section and the novel as a whole.
The modernist experimentation that appears in earlier works such as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and The Fury emerges in Absalom, Absalom! with the multiple perspectives on Sutpen producing a narrative without any single authorized truth. Like many modernist authors, Faulkner demonstrates a consistent concern for memory and the interrelation between the past and the present. The distance between the two seems to collapse at several points in the novel, particularly when Quentin and Shreve attempt to create their own narrative surrounding Sutpen’s two sons. As they discuss Henry Sutpen’s and Charles Bon’s flight from Sutpen’s Hundred on the eve of the Civil War, suddenly there are “four of them, and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Henry-Quentin…” (Faulkner 227). They deviate from the narrative told by Quentin’s father and imagine that Charles was entirely aware of his parentage; thus, they enter what Raiford describes as “a rhetorical game that makes truth, and the details that support truth, irrelevant to their larger purpose” (Raiford 109). This breach with a desire to reach any specific truth tellingly comes immediately following the seventh chapter of the novel, which introduces the fictional Haiti and its historically inaccurate presence of slavery.
The disorienting prose style of Absalom, Absalom!, with its lengthy paragraphs and multiclausal sentences, serves to add an additional level of challenge to the conflicting perspectives of the various characters. Faulkner engages in his own version of Quentin and Shreve’s rhetorical game as he presents what Weinstein sees as modernist “juxtapositions and differed/deferred information, emergent patterns of dysfunction whose repercussions…he sees – and lets us see – but does not pretend to see beyond” (355). Like other modernist writers, Faulkner’s texts display clear anxieties about the consequences of the engine of progress that was rapidly transforming the world at the dawn of the 20th century. Perhaps this anxiety was felt all the more keenly for Faulkner because of his birth into a region still deeply defined by its defeat in the Civil War, even as the United States began to assume a more dominant role on the world stage. This imperial role would involve an almost twenty-year occupation of Haiti that ended just two years prior to the publication of Absalom, Absalom! As the Civil War continued to recede into the domain of history and became intelligible only through, as Quentin’s father describes, “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales…in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames…” (Faulkner 67). Quentin (and presumably to an extent Faulkner himself) certainly feel constrained by the specters of the antebellum South, specters deliberately preserved under the system of racial segregation that arose in the post-Reconstruction period.
Quentin’s likening of himself to a haunted barracks, with which this paper began, serves as a demonstration of just how potent the myth of the Lost Cause continued to be in Southern society decades after the Civil War. The valorization of the Confederate cause was already beginning as the war ended, and the seamlessness of its transition to a post-war South can be seen in the funeral service of Charles Bon. As Bon is interred at Sutpen’s Hundred, the brief service emphasizes his Confederate service by invoking the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who would later become the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan after it formed during Reconstruction (Faulkner 97). The powerful force of this deliberate distortion of history within Southern society would be something that Faulkner was aware of. Although Faulkner repudiates many aspects of both the antebellum South of his ancestors and the Jim Crow South in which he was raised; there persists an unsettling ambiguity in his attitudes towards his home. This attitude is not entirely unlike Quentin’s internal refrain of “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” when asked by Shreve why he hates the South (Faulkner 257). The question of whether Quentin is honestly answering Shreve in the negative or attempting to convince himself of his loyalty to his home lingers after the novel’s closing line.
In an infamous interview given in 1956 against the backdrop of federal integration, Faulkner stated he would fight for Mississippi against the United States if necessary, and even in his apology for his remarks, he urged for gradualism (Kodat 179). Faulkner’s use of Conradian language in his depiction of a Haiti sans-revolution as a “little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea…halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood…was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed…” demonstrates his difficulty in reconciling the horrific violence of the society that produced him with his personal attachment to that society (Faulkner 171). It was only due to the absence of Southern politicians from the legislature of the United States that Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator whose caning in the halls of the Senate became an abolitionist cause célèbre in the lead up to the Civil War, was able to successfully extend diplomatic recognition to the nation of Haiti. It came almost sixty years after its declaration of independence. Faulkner’s failure to extend literary recognition to the nation which blazed an alternate path for abolition half a century prior should raise questions about the almost supernatural feats he affords to the figure of Sutpen. Only a year prior to the publication of Absalom, Absalom!, W. E. B. Dubois’ historical work Black Reconstruction offered the first serious challenge to the still dominant Dunning School narrative of the years following the conflict. The contradictory Southern desire to both forget and remember obscures the memory of the second nation in the Western hemisphere to achieve independence, while at the same time invoking it to defend the maintaining of slavery, which is fitting for a novel concerned with the constructed and not necessarily reflective nature of history, both personal and national.
Works Cited
Chestnut, Mary Boykin. “From ‘A [Civil War] Diary from Dixie.’” Absalom, Absalom!, edited by Susan Scott Parrish, Norton Critical Editions, 2023, pp. 380-393.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! Edited by Susan Scott Parrish, Norton Critical Editions, 2023.
Godden, Richard. “Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions.” ELH, vol. 61, no. 3, 1994, pp. 685–720. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873340.
Horne, Gerald. Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015.
King, Richard. “From Haiti to Mississippi: Faulkner and the Making of the Southern Master-Class.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 14 (2011), pp. 93-106.
Kodat, Catherine Gunther. “William Faulkner: an Impossibly Comprehensive Expressivity.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, edited by Morag Shiach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 178–190. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Raiford, Wanda. “Fantasy and Haiti’s Erasure in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!.” South: A Scholarly Journal, vol. 49 no. 1, 2016, pp. 101-121. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/slj.2016.0032.
Weinstein, Phillip. “‘Make it New’: Faulkner and Modernism.” A Companion to William Faulkner, edited by Richard C. Moreland, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 342-358.