SOURCE: Putzel, Max. “What Is Gothic about Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Literary Journal 4, no. 1 (fall 1971): 3-19.

[In the following essay, Putzel presents an overview of Absalom, Absalom! examining several gothic elements in the work as techniques used by Faulkner to create a vision of the American past that conveys decay and decline while also providing the reader with a sense of lost greatness.]

1.

During the second World War, when he was just setting out to build Faulkner's reputation into the national monument it has since become, Malcolm Cowley placed Absalom, Absalom! “in the realm of Gothic romances, with Sutpen's Hundred taking the place of the haunted castle on the Rhine, with Colonel Sutpen as Faust and Charles Bon as Manfred.”¹ By now one is aware of so many louder literary echoes, so many prototypes and conventions Faulker assimilated into his ambitious novel, that one hesitates to single out the Gothic vein once again. What if Leslie Fiedler does call it “the most gothic of Faulkner's books”? He has found a Goth hiding under the bed of practically every virgin in American literature, and I cannot agree with him that it is the Gothic form “that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers.”²

Rather I tend to share Cleanth Brooks's annoyance when he calls this Faulkner's greatest work and insists it is a great deal more than “Gothic sauce to spice up our preconceptions about the history of American society.” He cites as a typical misreading one preface that starts off, “It is a terrible Gothic sequence of events, a brooding tragic fable. …”³

Undaunted by these strictures critics nevertheless go on using the epithet without defining it or explaining why it seems to them important. Thus Michael Millgate, considering Absalom more like Jane Eyre than Moby-Dick, finds that Faulkner has resumed the Gothic tradition from “European sources,” without saying what these are, what they signify, or how Faulkner came by them.⁴ As Millgate observes, both Faulkner's and Charlotte Bronte's plots are set in great houses which harbor secret inmates and are set on fire by desperate females, who go up in flames. The Pequod and the House of Usher also harbor secret inmates and go down in water, though the Pequod is without desperate females. Are these significant likenesses—or distinctions? The question might rather be whether these are stately tragic endings or just melodramatic and contrived. Insofar as they may be “Gothic,” is it a virtue or a flaw?

Concluding his essay “Revaluation of the Gothic Novel” with an unusually warped summary of the “diseased and disgusting” world depicted in Sanctuary, Robert D. Hume decides it is indeed Gothic, hence “offers no conclusions.” “It emphasizes psychological reaction to evil,” he writes, “and leads into a tangle of moral ambiguity for which no meaningful answers can be found.”⁵ To counter such a self-defeating and pointless conclusion one must both redefine the Gothic and give some regard to the corpus of Faulkner's work. For this purpose I think Absalom a more promising starting point than Sanctuary if only because the segment of Faulkner's world it transects is more comprehensive with respect to human and literary history than Sanctuary taken by itself. Here I propose to test Brooks's conclusion and some others against my own reading and to give the Gothic element no more than its due in accounting for the book's triumphs and its shortcomings.

2.

Any examination of a book with such a singular title must pause to consider the relevance of that title to the author's intention. Faulkner could have picked one alluding to the house of Sutpen or even the house of Compson. Just as the title of the favorite earlier work which introduced Quentin recalls the disintegration and despair of Macbeth, so the title of this sequel evokes the anguish of David in his Pyrrhic victory over his rebellious son. In each case the hero's soliloquy summarizes the despair that comes over him as his ambitious career passes in review before his eyes and he sees himself diminished by the punishment it has invited. What distinguishes Sutpen from David is that he founds no line and has no prophet like Nathan to point out the enormity of his transgressions. Starting from humble, country-bred obscurity, both do achieve epic renown. We can believe what Faulkner told his questioners at Charlottesville, that “the old man was himself a little too big for people no greater in stature than Quentin and Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson to see all at once.”⁶

To scale him down to the dimensions of a Montoni or Schedoni would render the whole saga trivial. His demonic traits and mysterious origin may be products of Miss Rosa's reading, or simply her ignorance and frustration. The only friend he had, General Compson, was impressed with his innocence. At any rate, Faulkner saw him in a loftier, more compassionate perspective, and the last thing he had in mind was to create another Melmoth. His narrators constantly liken Sutpen not only to David, but often as well to the Homeric Agamemnon and to Bayard, the latter-day French chevalier who was without fear and without reproach. All the analogies are significant and reinforce Ilse Dusoir Lind's recognition that it was Faulkner's intention “to create, through utilization of all the resources of fiction, a grand tragic vision of historic dimension.”⁷

The other myths are brought in not because Faulkner means to borrow their plots but rather to suggest connotations that are enriching and mutually revealing. Where Joyce had borrowed a structural plan from the Odyssey and Eugene O'Neill had rifled the Oresteia to find a plot for his Civil War trilogy, Faulkner had a different motive and method. To determine these we have only to look at the structure of Absalom.

It falls into two nearly equal parts divided into nine chapters. The first five recount what young Quentin hears from Miss Rosa Coldfield and his father on the afternoon and evening in September 1909 that end with his driving Miss Rosa out to the Sutpen domain and returning, much shaken, to his naked bed. The narrative is reflected in Quentin's bored, half listening, divided consciousness and recollection of previous tedious retellings of the same matter, the mysterious rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. After meeting Clytemnestra and Henry Sutpen and seeing the witless black Jim Bond that night, Quentin's boredom gives way to avid, anxious concern. Only in the last four chapters do we see why. These amplify the same fable, as Quentin and his Harvard roommate Shrevlin McCannon try to reconstruct and interpret what Quentin had learned, sitting in their dormitory rooms on a bitter cold night the following January. The mystery has come to have a bearing on Quentin's life. Analogies between his heritage and those of Henry Sutpen and his elegant but somehow tainted brother Charles Bon seem to circumscribe and thwart him, so that he has an obsessive need to discover and order the details of a disaster in which he has become an unwilling participant. During the four months that have elapsed he has come to identify first with one, then with all the Sutpen children, black as well as white. Into his conversations with Shreve he has interpolated more information, some of it acquired prior to his séance with Miss Rosa, some of it pieced together subsequently, and an important item of it lying on the study table on an open book between the two boys. It is a letter from his father postmarked Jefferson, Miss., 10 January 1910, reporting Miss Rosa's death following a second visit to Sutpen's Hundred, probably on Christmas Day, which resulted in the firing of the great ruined house and the deaths of Clytie and Henry in the holocaust.⁸ The second part of Absalom begins with a fragment of that letter and ends a few lines after the rest of that fragment describing the old lady's funeral and speculating on the lasting power of her hatred for her brother-in-law. Chapter seven (the second in part two) introduces crucial information derived from General Compson's reminiscences of Sutpen's own account of his beginnings, how he formed his design, and where it went wrong. It also contains the reflections of Wash Jones, his poor-white tenant, his worshiper, and at last his infuriated murderer. The Jones episode is especially revealing since much of it is retold verbatim from a story Faulkner published two years before the novel. Thus it betrays the germ of the entire myth.⁹

Apart from Bon's letter, one bit of primary evidence, the narrative emerges out of hearsay and garbled recollections, all of them biased by the feelings of the narrators, yet all tending to magnify its central character. Sutpen's domain of a hundred square miles of virgin wilderness is really too big to fit within the county, just as he himself is too big for the community. Memory might well be called the theme of the book—not just the fallible memory of mankind reverberating with historic facts beclouded and expanded into myths that impose their imperative on each generation as it looks back through the eye or listens through the ear of the gossiping eye witness, the historian, the skald—down the corridors of time. The past is alive, the present dying in this fable with so brief a present and no discernible future. No Solomon, Orestes or Fortinbras will enter to pick up the pieces.

So the symbolic pattern is more important than the literal or the chronological and impregnates the structure. It is here that we should expect to find the Gothic elements. The first half of the book is saturated with the heat and odors of subtropical summer, the second being distanced, “attenuated” by the iron cold of a Massachusetts winter. There is constant interplay, one set of symbols implying life in death, the other death in life, and there is ghostly interplay also between the living dead and the feebly living. To Quentin on his way to Harvard in 1909 the South is “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts” (p. 9).¹⁰ But the apparitions here belong in nature, not in the supernatural purlieus of Gothic novels. The paralyzing effect on Quentin and us of their unexplained acts, beliefs, and delusions is the more terrifying for their natural reality. The same misremembered past impinges on us as on Quentin. At the outset “still too young to be a ghost” (9), only four months later he tells Shreve he is “older at twenty than a lot of people who have died” (377).

However we try to dissociate this book from The Sound and the Fury we cannot forget that Quentin will be dead, too, within months. Faulkner makes no mention of his suicide when he dates the boy's death in his appendix. But the time symbols which obtrude from the first sentence of Absalom (“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown …”) ominously recall those of the author's favorite earlier work. As Absalom ends we hear the chimes in Harvard Yard dying away “into the icy air delicate and faint and musical as struck glass” (374) and recall Quentin shattering the crystal of his father's watch and breaking off its hands as the spring semester ends. Symbols of time mate with symbols of death, latticed yellow slashes of sun on dust motes like dead old paint, the coffin-smelling gloom inside Miss Rosa's house mixing with the perfume of twice-blooming wisteria, the wisteria recalling the summer of 1859 and anticipating the imagined remembrance of that odor Quentin sniffs when the letter reaches him in Cambridge fifty years later. So much could be said of those heady symbols, blending the past into the present, none remotely Gothic. Most eloquent of all is the scythe rusting beside Wash Jones's door ready to his hand when, in a moment of shattering recognition, he reaches for it to kill his master. The image of Wash brandishing that weapon of Time personified, reeling to his own death at the hands of the posse, is carried over from the short story, whence even this crazy tableau is overshadowed by that of the man on horseback, finally arrested by the scythe.

Here at last we come to what is Gothic in Faulkner. Medieval chivalry bulks large in every retelling of Sutpen's story as it did in the imagery of Sartoris before and would in The Unvanquished, right after Absalom. Miss Rosa can hardly think of her brother-in-law and his insulting offer of a trial marriage, apart from his horse. For her he is “Man-horse-demon,” and she makes Quentin visualize him in statuesque tableau: “Immobile, bearded and hand palm-lifted the horseman sat …”—which Quentin likens to Jehovah the Creator. Sutpen had first appeared in 1833 “with a horse and two pistols and a name nobody ever heard before” (14) and later turned his wife's drive to church each Sunday into a horse race and wrestled half naked with his slaves in a stable. When Rosa's sister, his wife Ellen, rushes in to reclaim her children a spectator mistakes her for a horse. Mr. Compson likewise visualizes Sutpen materializing “on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as if they had been created out of thin air” (32), and always reappearing on the roan till he rides off to war beside Colonel Sartoris “on the black stallion named out of Scott” (80)—named Rob Roy in the story “Wash.” Quentin's grandfather General Compson likewise remembered his horsemanship, recalling how he would canter round a sapling with those two pistols “and put both bullets into a playing card fastened to the tree” (33), so that all these centaur images become etched on Quentin's mind. Driving Miss Rosa out to Sutpen's Hundred he fancies he “might even hear the galloping hoofs; might even see at any moment now the black stallion and the rider rush across the road before them and gallop on …” (363).

Such emblems serve to identify Sutpen with the chivalric culture he has tried to emulate. The living reality of the tradition is a far cry from the “old headless horseman Ichabod Crane” Eula Varner invokes to rescue her from the lecherous schoolmaster. Sutpen's stallion has the smell and snort of a real horse, unlike the black charger of Poe's “Metzengerstein” or Til Eulenspiegel's steed whose hoofprint one fingered on the parapet of a castle one visited as a child. In the fumbling imagination of his happy worshiper Wash Jones, Thomas Sutpen is indeed a god, a very Christ. Wash thinks him capable of miracles and cheerfully offers up his granddaughter Milly as a human sacrifice to the “proud galloping image” passing across the years “without weariness or progress, forever and forever immortal beneath the brandished saber and the shot-torn flags rushing down a sky in color like thunder” after tasting of “the bitter cup in the Book” which the Yankees held to his lips (287-88). The vision derives word for word from the short story and so does the instant shattering of the godhead. Milly bears Sutpen a daughter and Wash overhears Sutpen liken mother and girl child with contemptuous disparagement to the mare which that morning had dropped a male foal. It is Sutpen's unconscious, bestial contempt for humanity that unmasks him, demolishing instantly Wash's faith in him whose condescension had bestowed dignity and a spark of hope on his drab life. What Sutpen's words have blasted is belief not only in Sutpen himself but in all “the gallant, the proud, the brave; the acknowledged and chosen best among them all” (290). At this Wash sees “his whole life shredded from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown into the fire” (290-91)—and takes his revenge.

3.

In one sense Absalom is a meditation on memory, the historical imperative that narrows the bounds of human aspiration and choice, behaving like captious Fate. Time has run out for chivalry, and what brushes the scales from Wash's eyes is part of a collective insight telling his whole generation and kind that the day of knights, damsels, vassals and slaves is ended. The day of Wash ends, too, but the day of the Snopes is at hand. Similarly Quentin penetrating the mysteries of the past can now sense the indignities Sutpen and his like have heaped on their descendants, black as well as white. It is an insight Faulkner himself achieved between writing The Sound and the Fury and conceiving Absalom. In the first Quentin goes home for Christmas, and in Virginia his railside exchange of banter with a country Negro on a mule tells him, “You are home again.” In Absalom he can't go home again but he can read and remember Clytie and Jim Bond—and Bon. The scales have fallen from his eyes, too.

Conspiring with history-as-fate, Sutpen's moral blindness or insensitivity derives from a weakness like David's, perhaps inseparable from the heroic genius. He can feel compassion only for his own bewildered boyhood self, and so conspires in his own destruction and that of his line. Just as David's crime against Uriah and Bathsheba led his son Ammon to debauch Absalom's sister, led Absalom to rebel, and possibly led Joab to defy the King and murder Absalom, so Sutpen's crimes against his wives and slaves lead his children into crimes against one another. And so Wash is led to ignore his last command: “Stand back, Wash.”

“I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world,” Faulkner told Cowley in a letter about Absalom. The moving things being “eternal in man's history,” he is forever “trying to put all mankind's history in one sentence.” Rightly understood that letter explains many traits including some evident defects in his style.¹¹ The intent to horrify in the manner of “Monk” Lewis, to mystify and explain in the manner of Mrs. Radcliffe, to berate human folly in the ranting manner of Maturin is not among them.

But in another sense Absalom discusses the three separate literary traditions that produced it. It was no accident that Sutpen's stallion was “named out of Scott” for Sutpen must have read Rob Roy. Each version of his story is couched in a separate literary manner. Miss Rosa's fevered vision of her maidenly dignity menaced by a demon is conveyed in the overheated rhetoric of a “poetess laureate” who doubtless borrowed from Scott and Shelley, perhaps too from Maturin. Mr. Compson echoes phrases culled from the Yellow Book, Reedy's Mirror, and the like. Handing Quentin Charles Bon's letter to Judith, he hazards the opinion Bon had loved her “after his fashion” (108). He visualizes Bon's mistress visiting his grave as “a garden scene by the Irish poet, Wilde” illustrated by “the artist Beardsley,” the lady (“in a soft flowing gown designed … to dress some interlude of slumbrous and fatal insatiation,”) followed by a “bright gigantic negress carrying a silk cushion and leading by the hand the little boy Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn” (193). Similarly, as the two boys at Harvard seek to edit the saga, the mocking voice of Shreve recalls Buck Mulligan baiting the embittered idealist Stephen Dedalus. Shreve, a plump sentimentalist like Buck, piles up Pre-Raphaelite visions of chivalry in the South, “because it's something my people haven't got. Or if we have it, it all happened long ago across the water” (361). Imagining Judith awaiting her brother and lover returning from the war, “Jesus,” Shreve exclaims, “who to know what she saw … what prayer, what maiden dream ridden up out of whatever fabulous land … the silken and tragic Lancelot” (320). Cynical or sentimental, he always gets things slightly skewed.

If all these voices do not emerge in the distinct accents of Gothic or romance, decadence or naturalism, it is because all are filtered through the troubled consciousness of Quentin. Just as we have to depend on Mr. Compson's recollection for the accents of General Compson and Wash, so we receive his own and Miss Rosa's reminiscences through Quentin's divided awareness, first doped by heat and boredom, later frozen with perplexity as the wrecked lives of Sutpen's children merge with his own unspoken anguish. Thus the style tends to monotony, and there is a trace of justice in Clifton Fadiman's scathing remark that “everybody talks the same language, a kind of Dixie Gongorism.”¹² The rhetorical excesses of the narrators are blurred by Quentin's confused desires, incestuous fancies, perhaps even by an impulse to love yet detest his brother; who knows what all?

Which elements then are Gothic? Certainly Miss Rosa's idea of Sutpen as demonic knight and satanic upstart. Her “light-blinded bat-like image of his own torment” (171) may mimic the verbose diatribes of Maturin or Shelley—or Lewis, who influenced both. “Pure Gothic nonsense,” John Lewis Longley rightly calls her spate of words.¹³ Both the emblematic horseman and the recurrence of allusions to ancient French style and manner—to Bayard and Carcassonne—link this legend to the medieval past. One recalls Faulkner accepting the rosette of the Legion of Honor “avec humilité” and knows what it signifies to lure a French architect, even to kidnap one, to build one's mansion. It may not be a Gothic mansion, but its ruined state connotes awe and perhaps deep nostalgia for a Gothic past. And what of terror?

4.

One effect of all the several Gothic revivals was to domesticate the past and make it uniquely our own—whatever ownership might claim it. In England and then in Germany that past was felt to be distinct from the mysterious lost perfection of Greece or Rome. Its crumbling, ivied ruins betokened authority overcome and mouldering decay, lost greatness and failing powers. I think that Faulkner's impression of his American past is an accelerated panorama of similar decay and decline. He sees Southern chivalry as a belated but genuine survival of medieval values and faith. It arose as the product of a noble dream and perished in the nightmare of civil war, victim of mercenary force and sterile philistinism. There is a dreamlike quality to the sequence of disclosure in Absalom. We perceive through the medium of Quentin's meandering, helpless search—the dreamer's agony in bondage to that with which he has no strength to cope.

The spiral movement in Absalom is one of relentless acceleration and mounting excitement and suspense. The book moves at first with deadly, clockwise slowness around the periphery of its legend. Quentin's reluctance to accompany Miss Rosa to Sutpen's Hundred is akin to his boredom with her chatter, yet also edged with dread. Her theory that there was a “fatality and a curse” on her family and the South has to be as heavily discounted as any other part of her indignation. It is absurd to think that her pious shopkeeper father (whatever her grounds for despising him) deserves affliction at the hands of a Sutpen who is less man than demon. To call her veracity in question is not, however, to imply that her delusions carry no weight in the society to which she belongs. Her very detachment from reality is a part of Quentin's reality, for it brackets her with his mother as she appears in The Sound and the Fury. She is in fact a surrogate for that self-centered neurotic. In his penetrating interpretation of The Sound and the Fury Brooks explains in detail how Mrs. Compson's inadequacies led to the disintegration of her husband and children. She supplies the essential ingredient for understanding Mr. Compson's cynical alcoholism, Jason's harsh materialism, Caddy's promiscuity, and the incestuous yearnings that led to Quentin's suicide.¹⁴ In Absalom Miss Rosa's tiresome complaints and fevered accusations echo his mother and mobilize in Quentin the same confused feelings. Pondering the imagined sacrifice Henry Sutpen had made to save his sister's and his family's honor, Quentin could hardly fail to recall the humiliation he had felt that very summer on learning that one of her lovers had got Caddy with child and on finding himself helpless to take revenge on Dalton Ames. Nothing of the sort is mentioned in Absalom, yet the repressed memories are dramatized in his hypothetical reconstruction of the Sutpen story.

On the drive out to Sutpen's place Quentin's attention drifts off until suddenly arrested by Miss Rosa's fury on recalling the news of Thomas Sutpen's death. “‘Dead?’ I cried. ‘Dead? You? You lie; you're not dead …’ But Quentin was not listening, because there was something which he too could not pass—that door, the running feet on the stairs …” (172). Quentin is not thinking of Sutpen's death but of Charles Bon's. He is imagining Henry bringing Judith word that he has killed Bon so soon after she at last received Bon's offer of marriage. From this point on he reads into the account of that tragedy tacit feelings about his hypochondriac mother, who arranged Caddy's impending marriage. We next hear Shreve's voice four months later, mimicking Miss Rosa, and we learn no more of Quentin's visit to Sutpen's Hundred until the end of that January evening.

Meanwhile, if Quentin is to discover what brought about the tragedy which so poignantly recalls his own loss and defeat he must summon up all he knows about Thomas Sutpen. Meditating while Shreve prattles, he recalls the Sutpen graveyard, where he and his father once paused to wait out a shower while quail hunting. Contemplating the extravagance of those tombstones, two imported from Italy midway through the war and three that Judith bought with the pitiful remains of her father's wealth, Mr. Compson muses on the “beautiful lives” women lead. The elaborate make-believe practiced by all these ladies serves to intensify the horror and savagery of the world inhabited by their men. Faulkner's insight into the grotesquely sex-divided world of men and women is strikingly like Joseph Conrad's, and what follows is reminiscent of Heart of Darkness and the sanctimonious gentility Marlow attributes to the two ladies—his aunt and Kurtz's Intended in the “Sepulchral City”—both scrupulously shielded from all knowledge of the blackened lives of white men in the jungle.¹⁵

“Yes,” says Mr. Compson. “They lead beautiful lives—women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality” (191). An episode in Sutpen's education to which too little attention has been paid is the reality of Haiti, which becomes the heart of Quentin's darkness as he relates it to the spectre of unending injustice and suffering he met face to face on his visit to the rotting gray mansion.

Born in the primitive mountain fastness of western Virginia, Sutpen had discovered the American caste system only when his family moved to the Tidewater plantation country. After a traumatic confrontation with the liveried black servant of a planter helped him formulate a scheme to avenge this boyhood humiliation, Sutpen made his way to Haiti, where he learned French and Creole, made his first fortune, and married the woman who would become Charles Bon's mother.

The year Faulkner published “Wash” Haiti was cut loose after twenty years' occupation by the United States Marine Corps. This event brought to mind its long history of genocide: how the island first found and ruled by Columbus languished under Spanish misrule, the entire Indian population of 300,000 being exterminated in the first century; how the French after acquiring it by treaty brought in black slaves to make it prosper through the earlier eighteenth century, until the Revolution inspired the blacks to rise up and exterminate the whole white population. That reign of terror in Haiti had been conducted with a mutual barbarity beside which the bloody events in Paris shone in morning innocence. A yellow fever epidemic and three gifted black rulers helped keep Napoleon from realizing his projected conquest of North America from that base, but all three died violently, and the land was plunged again in racial turmoil. There were no more white inhabitants when Sutpen came, though a few French business men were allowed to stop there, officially and privately despoiled, and covertly encouraged to beget bastards whose skin would be lighter than their mothers'. The palest of Haiti's colored people, according to a trustworthy account written about the time of Sutpen's arrival, “having but an untraceable tinge of African blood … were uproariously indignant if … accused of having any at all.”¹⁶

Sutpen was innocent in the sense of being uninitiated in the ways of Grandfather Compson's world. He was innocent indeed by the standards of Haiti—

a spot of earth which might have been created and set aside by Heaven itself, Grandfather said, as a theater for violence and injustice and bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty, for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doomed—a little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea, which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed. … And he overseeing it, riding peacefully about on his horse, … not knowing that what he rode upon was a volcano, hearing the air tremble and throb at night with the drums and the chanting and not knowing that it was the heart of the earth itself he heard, who believed (Grandfather said) that earth was kind and gentle and that darkness was merely something you saw, or could not see in …

(250-51)

Sutpen married and put aside his wife in a land where polygamy was commonplace but where marriage of any kind was the exception rather than the rule. It was a land where sadistic tyranny seemed the only alternative to violent anarchy.

It is the insights into Sutpen's experience that derive solely from the reminiscences of General Compson and the conjectured musings of Wash Jones that bring Quentin to some appreciation of the quality of Sutpen's tragedy. We, too, come to understand as he acts to avenge himself the baffled little boy turned away from the mansion door by the haughty black servant. We understand how such conditioning could teach the man to turn away the tainted, almost forgotten son who comes to his own door to be recognized. But the concluding chapter coming after these disclosures conveys a new sense of desolation and horror.

It is one thing to encounter a tragic hero in fable or history, quite another to walk into his house and meet his victims face to face, to touch one of them, picking her up “like a handful of sticks concealed in a rag bundle, so light she was” (370), addressing the other in the shuttered bedroom where he lay, “the wasted yellow face with closed almost transparent eyelids on the pillow, the wasted hands crossed on the breast as if he were already a corpse …” (373). It is with more than a delicate shudder that one forces oneself to realize one has participated in the catastrophe of a great tragedy, been an accomplice before the fact to the last deed of malice visited on the children and the children's children of the hero, that one has ridden with the Eumenides. The old house Quentin sees so briefly seems “to reek in slow and protracted violence with a smell of desolation and decap as if the mood of which it was built were flesh” (366). Now it goes up in smoke and flame and Quentin sees the face at the window, hears the bellows of a human voice, the two fellow creatures burning alive, the hapless orphan orphaned once again. These are no ghosts to fear but pitiful victims, known by their timeless suffering.

If the Gothic tale is intended to make us shiver deliciously at some imagined horror, that is certainly not what we feel as Quentin lies shaking bone-chilled in his dormitory bed. What we do share peering with him into the inscrutable darkness of the past is a most frightening vision of humanity. But we get it in wandering after-image, in remembered sights, and in overheard whispers. We get no facts about his meeting with Henry or even most of the words of his father's letter. Quentin's incoherent nightmare has become our own, constantly broken in on by Shreve's sardonic and willful misunderstanding, the voice of sophomoric realism that will not be still, which finally almost by accident puts into words the half-said thing that has lurked all along behind the troubled dream: “I think in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere” (378). It is a cryptic prophecy like Benito Cereno's last words: “The Negro.” When Shreve goes on to accuse Quentin of hating the South, he has fallen once more into error. Led into the heart of the South's darkness by Miss Rosa tottering after her revenge on Sutpen, Quentin has seen unrolled the endless scroll of man's injustice and folly and the compounding of these not in the South only, but in the whole fabric of the misremembered past. Himself a victim and an heir, he can neither love nor hate. He can only revert to his fearless passion for extinction—he who loved death best of all.

Surely Quentin's terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.

Notes

1. “William Faulkner's Legend of the South,” Sewanee Review, LIII (Summer 1945), 343-61, especially p. 348. While Cowley made the suggestion, its context is important. The following sentence reads, “Then slowly it dawns on you that most of the characters and incidents have a double meaning; that besides their place in the story, they also serve as symbols or metaphors with a general application.” Reviewing The Hamlet five years earlier, Cowley had compared Faulkner's books to “Gothic ruins, impressive only by moonlight,” an error he now sought to correct.

2. Love and Death in the American Novel. (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), p. 325 and p. xxiii, respectively. See also pp. 395-98 and 443-45.

3. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 295-96. The cited passage is from Harvey Breit's introduction to the 1953 Modern Library edition.

4. The Achievement of William Faulkner (London: Constable, 1966), pp. 162-63.

5. “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, LXXXIV (1969), 282-90, especially, p. 288. See also, Robert L. Platzner, “‘Gothic Versus Romantic’: A Rejoinder,” PMLA, LXXXVI (1971), 286-88.

6. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1959), p. 274.

7. “The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!” in Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga Vickery, eds. William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (N.p.: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1960), p. 278. Reprinted from PMLA LXX (December 1955), pp. 887-912.

8. The discrepancy between the facts given in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! should be noted, though one need attach no great significance to it. In the earlier novel Quentin travels by train to Jefferson for his Christmas holidays, while in the later novel he could not have done so without being aware of the burning of Sutpen's Hundred and the fatal illness of Miss Rosa which ensued. In Absalom Faulkner does not quite preclude the possibility of such a trip, but skirts the facts in accordance with a clear artistic purpose, to concentrate attention on the Sutpen plot and omit the Compson one.

9. “Wash: A Story,” Harper's, CLXVII (February 1934), 258-66, was not the first germ of Absalom but marked its transition from a modern to an historic setting. The genesis of Sutpen's design as of Popeye will be found in the unpublished short story “The Big Shot,” which obviously antedates the first setting copy of Sanctuary, May 1929. See typescript, Box 25, Ser. II B, item 2, at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and Millgate, Achievement of William Faulkner, pp. 159-61.

10. This and subsequent citations are taken from The Modern Library edition (New York: Random House, 1951), and page references are given parenthetically.

11. Faulkner to Cowley, early November, 1944. See Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), pp. 14-17.

12. “Faulkner, Extra-Special, Double-Distilled,” condensed from The New Yorker, October 31, 1936, in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren, in Twentieth Century Views. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 289.

13. The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1963), pp. 210-11, and cf. p. 217, where he speaks of Miss Rosa's “absurd Gothic demonism.”

14. Brooks, Yoknapatawpha Country, pp. 333-42. On p. 341 he concludes that “the downfall of the house of Compson is the kind of degeneration which can occur, and has occurred, anywhere at any time.”

15. For an inspired discussion of the similarities between Conrad's and Faulkner's attitudes and the fundamental differences in their ethics see Joseph X. Brennan and Seymour L. Gross, “The Problem of Moral Values in Conrad and Faulkner,” The Personalist, 41 (Winter 1960), pp. 60-70. In The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), James Guetti makes a detailed study of stylistic elements, the struggle between language and the ineffable, with reference mainly to Moby-Dick, “Heart of Darkness,” and Absalom.

16. My impressionistic thumbnail sketch of those aspects of Haiti's social history to which Faulkner makes no direct reference or specific allusion derives from a pioneer socio-historic study, James G. Leyburn, The Haitian People (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1941), which sums up all data that could have been available to Faulkner. Leyburn quotes on p. 82 from Dr. Jonathan Brown's The History and Present Condition of St. Domingo, (Philadelphia, 1837), which Leyburn praises in his annotated bibliography.