The 1999 Norton Scholar's Prize Winner

Four years after the publication of the first edition of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Wallace Stevens described a modern aesthetic form which necessarily acted against its own status as a (fixed) form¹. "What will [temporarily] suffice" in "Modern Poetry" would replace, as the mind's object, what is--or, perhaps more faithfully to the modernist vision, what used to be. The poem of the motion of the mind in time would replace the poem of permanent meaning.

The fundamental difference between present and past, the breakdown of static forms, and the necessity of temporal flow all inform Stevens' aesthetic, which works towards a dynamic experience in time, as a substitute for the communication of truth independent of time. I think an understanding of this (self-subverting) form has some important and complicated implications for a reading of Absalom, Absalom!, especially in terms of the relationship of historicity to orality in the novel, and of its distinctive and relatively homogeneous prose style. Ultimately to be found in these themes are the novel's fantasies of its form and of its reader.

The new aesthetic defines itself in relationship to an implied old one which, because of some historical break ("Then the theatre was changed/to something else"), no longer works. If Absalom, Absalom!, formally and thematically, offers a substitute for a now-inadequate "souvenir," it may be necessary to begin its exploration with the souvenir itself: namely the communication of positive historical truth in fixed form.

Many critical interpretations of Absalom, Absalom! move towards the common conclusion that the way narrative works in the novel makes impossible the passing of meaning from one subject (teller or author) to another (listener or reader)². According to these readings, the novel becomes the demonstration of the inadequacy of its own (linguistic) medium. James Guetti finds in the various narratives the final indication "that the gap between experience and meaning in this novel must remain unbridgeable, and that the narrative is only, after all, words" (81). Of principal interest to Guetti's reading is the distance, in space and especially in time, between the facts (what he calls the "meaning") of the Sutpen history, and its various narrators. The intensity with which the tellers construct their narratives reflects the desperation of their frustrated reaches for historical truth.

I would suggest that the conclusions of Guetti and others are not so much conclusions as points of origin: that the final uncknowability and untellability of the truth of the Sutpen history may be the conditions for the possibility of the way narrative works in Absalom, Absalom! When Guetti says that "each attempt to understand, each vision, arises out of a moment of failure" (80), he points to uncertainty as a motivation for the construction of narratives. Guetti's insight is that uncertainty here means that narrative is necessarily, at least to a degree, fictional narrative. John T. Matthews puts it this way: "Absalom is not inseminated by a single closed meaning or a discrete set of meanings, but must disseminate the seed, fostering a family of tellings" (152). And telling here, precisely because it cannot completely be reporting, is creating, and the intensity of telling (and of listening) in Absalom, Absalom! is creative intensity. The novel stipulates the impossibility of achieving historical truth (Guetti's "meaning"), but it does not support the unqualified characterization of this impossibility as a "failure." Nor, as Carolyn Porter makes clear, does it simply evade the problem of unknowability with an oversimplified "appeal to imagination's superiority over reality" (57). Instead, it offers an alternative view of the process of narrative, within which it implies a dynamic substitute for the communication of facts.

In order to understand this alternative conception it is necessary to understand the importance of the orality and aurality of telling and listening in the novel. The character-narrators of Absalom, Absalom! are not writers but oral storytellers (and the narratees are not readers but listeners):

Absalom, Absalom!'s fantasy of oral narrative depends upon the contemporaneity of telling and listening. The creation of the narrative by the speaker is not anterior to but simultaneous with its experience by the hearer (which is why, in the passage cited above, "it did not matter...which one had been doing the talking"). The minds of both figures move as one with the sound of the language of the narrative. There is no question of a congruence between meaning on one part and understanding on the other: there is instead a unison of motion. This temporary and temporal unity becomes in the novel a substitute for the passing from one subject to another of permanent, nonlinguistic truth in fixed form, which, like Sutpen's design for an enduring estate and dynasty, is doomed to fail because it tries to resist the eroding flow of time. Because the novel cannot sustain the notion of communication, it offers, instead, a fantasy of communion, "where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false" (253).

This communion is based on a unison of motion in time; the language of telling-listening must have a structure that allows the minds of both figures (teller and listener) to pass through it with a particular kind of rhythm. In other words, the language must have its own temporality and action, to substitute for the temporality and action of "content."

The gesture which the opening phrases of Absalom, Absalom! make is, apparently, the gesture of marking the temporal ("From a little after two oclock until almost sundown") and physical ("in what Miss Coldfield still called the office") ranges within which the action of the first chapter will unfold. They specify--which is a way of saying that they name the limits of--the imaginary (fictional) time and space that contain what follows. But the prose is already also doing things in other dimensions. The lines, in the process of defining the chapter's temporal and spatial boundaries, are also revealing the imperfection of these boundaries (thus "from a little after...until almost" and "what Miss Coldfield still called"), and perhaps even suggesting the incapacity, of the narrator or of the narrative language, to more completely isolate the fiction.

"Because her father had called it that...." Here the first element from outside the temporal boundaries of the chapter comes into play across those boundaries. While the narrative pretends to set temporal limits for itself, it simultaneously works to erode them and make them permeable. And then it continues to do so, next with something a little more grammatically dramatic--the dash which, instead of a period, follows the limiting gesture. The most obvious way in which the opening sentence spills over the boundaries it creates for itself is by simply continuing: the sentence does not end with the gesture, but expands, down the page and in the reader's mind. I would suggest that the limiting gesture not only comes undone here, but that it necessarily comes undone; its breakdown is the novel's first example of the interplay between the effort to halt and contain, and the reality of flow and expansion. The sentence, so long as it refuses to end, participates in temporal flow and delays becoming, itself, a limited, static form.

Why does it resist for so long--and at the risk of becoming unreadable--its own inevitable conclusion and stasis? Another way to ask this question is, Why is the old form a 'souvenir,' abandoned? The answer, I think, is the key to the novel's prose.

The opposition of stasis and flow is most immediately accessible at the level of metaphor: the "dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers" is tomb-like, full of "dim coffin-smelling gloom" (4). What cannot or will not move decays--or, more precisely, what will not flow with time is decayed by time. The "flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them" are eroded by the motion not of air (since the room is still) but of time, the passing through "forty-three summers."

The metaphor for the speaking voice (Rosa's) is flowing water: "the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand..." (4). The flow of Rosa's narrative, its "running," becomes the means not only of her access to Sutpen but also of her sustained life; it is what makes her "one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had" (4). At this earliest moment in the novel, Rosa's "telling," because of the way it flows in time (like water, the metaphors suggest, and not like words printed on pages), is the most living element: her voice is the only thing moving in the "dim hot airless room."

The flow of her narrative voice and the flow of water are connected by metaphor to temporal flow, and then, by another metaphor, more specifically to the consciousness of temporal flow:

The being moved in this passage, which (through his consciousness of temporal flow) distinguishes "the dreamer" from "the sleeper," is a kind of substitute for understanding or being convinced. The sleeper has static knowledge (and, in this case, the knowledge of stasis); the dreamer's consciousness is given up, instead, to motion.

Insofar as the structure of Absalom, Absalom! itself is a "severe shape" like Sutpen's "monument," it will be threatened by the same erosive forces which (thematically) destroy his design. Perhaps the clearest revelation of how it might work to do so comes on page 225:

The "happy marriage of speaking and hearing" (257)⁴ in which Quentin and Shreve are joined here is, explicitly, one which allows them to transcend the problem of stasis associated with written forms. The unison in which the two (interchangeably) tell and listen, so long as they continue to do so, liberates them from the stillness of the closed sentence or clause or paragraph, and, by the logic of the novel's metaphors, from impotence, decay, the failed attempt to make permanent meaning.

When I call the form of Absalom, Absalom! a self-subverting one, I mean that its prose is constantly trying to create for itself this same kind of liberation--even if it can only fail to do so. At this point I would suggest that the telling and listening that happen at the primary level of plot (between Quentin and Rosa in the room in her house, Quentin and his father on their veranda, Quentin and Shreve at Harvard) may themselves be considered in terms of metaphor, or at least as the device through which the novel works out the problems of its own form. The novel's most fundamental problem, the fact it most uniformly struggles against, may be that it is a novel. Its punctuation, its necessary beginning and ending, the materiality of its ink and pages--all of these elements, especially insofar as the reader is conscious of them, make stasis, and not temporal flow, the dominant aesthetic reality. But it imagines a kind of narrative situation which might allow the participants to transcend such stasis, to give themselves up (like "the dreamer," above) to the motion of the story's language in time. The "marriage of speaking and hearing" is the figure of such a possibility: teller and listener (the two are interchangeable) give up the effort to create permanent meaning (they may ultimately, in these moments, be giving up no less than their individual subjectivities) so that their minds may move in time with the narrative language.

For an example of how identity or subjectivity is an obstacle to the marriage, take these lines from page 8: "Whatever her reason for choosing him, whether it was that or not, the getting to it, Quentin thought, was taking a long time." Quentin here asserts his own subjectivity in speculation and analysis about Rosa's narrative, and part of his speculation and analysis include the projection of a subjectivity (Rosa's) onto that narrative--he is questioning "her reason for choosing him" as narratee. His preoccupation distances him from the narrative and prevents the marriage of speaking and hearing; his efforts to know (like the sleeper) keep him from being moved (like the dreamer). Only much later, in his conversation (communion) with Shreve, will he be able to release his hold on subjectivity and move with narrative language in time, in unison not only with Shreve, but also with Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon: "not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over frozen December ruts," etc.

Not ordinary telling and listening but the "marriage of speaking and hearing" is the novel's vision of a moving, antiformal form, and as such I think it reveals the novel's fantasy of its relationship to its reader. This fantasy, though, involves a number of problems, again at the level of form. Carolyn Porter, in her conclusion, frames the dilemma of the novel's relationship to its reader this way:

The novel's fantasy, then, is one in which the reading mind animates it to such a level that it is no longer a static form. It asks the reading consciousness to simultaneously move and be moved by its prose, in an attempt to transcend not only its own physicality (to become "as free now of flesh as the father who decreed and forbade") but also the reader's identity as a detached, independent subjectivity. Absalom, Absalom! wants to achieve a kind of motion within which it does not matter "what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed--the blood, the immortal brief recent intransient blood which could hold honor above slothy unregret and love above fat and easy shame" (237).

¹Carolyn Porter, in an essay called "William Faulkner: Innocence Historicized," makes reference in passing to a connection between Stevens' lines and the "version of the story" created by Quentin and Shreve in the novel's late chapters. I think there is more to be found here, and I will spend the next few pages looking into the connection Porter notices.

²I will take James Guetti's study as a representative example. For another, see Walter J. Slatoff's Quest for Failure. Slatoff argues that Faulkner "makes the search for meaning or design of his novels so enticing and yet so futile an occupation."

³References to the novel are cited parenthetically in the text throughout. All references are to the 1986 edition, Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text.

⁴For an extensive study of this kind of "marriage," see John T. Matthews, "Marriages of Speaking and Hearing in Absalom, Absalom!" in The Play of Faulkner's Language.