Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom!, novel by American writer William Faulkner, published in 1936. The principal narrative, set in 19th-century Mississippi, involves Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man from the mountains of western Virginia who rebels against his family and his alcoholic father, suffers a life-changing insult by a black servant, migrates to Haiti and becomes an overseer of a plantation, marries but learns that his wife (and consequently their son, whom he rejects) is of mixed race, and then moves to the Deep South in 1833 to transcend his lowly origins by establishing and maintaining his own slave-driven empire—“"Sutpen’s Hundred.” Sutpen’s consuming notion of racial superiority undermines his closest relationships and proves his undoing. By the novel’s end his plantation is in ruins and his only living heir is a mentally deficient great-grandson of mixed blood. Faulkner’s title references Absalom of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), the rebellious son of King David.

Bracketing this mythic story, a central volume in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga, is the struggle of Quentin Compson, a young Mississippian at Harvard decades later (and the grandson of a Sutpen acquaintance), to come to terms with his native region and its race-based culture. Quentin tells much of the story in flashbacks, in response to his a question by his college roommate, a Canadian, about what the South is like and whether Quentin hates it, and one’s relationship to history and to the sins of the past is one of Faulkner’s abiding concerns in this work and several others.

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The novel was criticized by contemporary critics for its difficulty, turgid style (comprised of excessively long sentences, some of the longest in literary history), and convoluted, redundant narration offering differing detail. It lacks a traditional plot as such. Building on themes sounded in Light in August (1932) and other novels in the cycle, Faulkner’s inclusion of then-daring topics such as incest and lust against a backdrop of fratricide and slavery were controversial, and many Southern readers considered Faulkner’s exposure of social hypocrisy, with Sutpen’s grasping ambition crowding out any possibility of humane behaviour, to be an act of betrayal. The gaps and contradictions exposed by the multiple narrations beg epistemological questions concerning how we know what we know of historical matters. The work can be so confusing, in fact, that a chronology of events, a genealogy of the characters, and a map of the fictional setting of the story were added as appendices. Its difficulty notwithstanding, this is widely considered Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the finest works in American literature. It has also been described as the most important novel by any white American writer to confront the problem of race.