Vintage International 1990
Marc J. Cohen
Absalom, Absalom! is said to be Faulkner’s most difficult but most brilliant work. Absalom presents the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”
Described as ‘hard-core Faulkner’, one review says: “The words and writing are critically acclaimed since your parents were in school. The examples of how a war can raze an entire culture’s edifice of identity are compelling, each person’s doom and curse being common among her kin and her countrymen: ghosts and sex and violence and cruelty, gut wrenching drama to challenge any soap opera or miniseries or movie. There are themes and studies aplenty within the nightmare realm of Faulkner’s masterpiece.”
Absalom, Absalom! includes characters and shadows from The Sound and the Fury but delves more deeply into the surrounding world and Southern inheritance that S&F traces. The multiple voices and perspectives each clamor to have their story told, to get to the heart of how they understood the fecund and exhausted world and their role in it. Faulkner orchestrates shifting sympathies and the reader is struck with how deeply immersed we become with the characters and the unfolding mystery at the heart of the work. Racism and its imbedded structure in Southern history at first seem to be the background against which the drama of the story is played out; but ultimately slavery and its de-humanization of all involved becomes the project of the book to explore—although from an unusual and intimate angle.
This book will offer the Salon much to discuss in its gorgeous language and complex subjects: racial identification, pride, identity, impact of history on family, the drive of revenge, the struggle to claim selfhood in a broken world. . .
SALON DETAILS
- Five meeting study
- Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, Vintage Classics edition (1995); ISBN-: 978-0099475118
If you would like to request this study or have any questions about it, please contact us.
“Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. -Marcel Proust