"...and down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on the fourth, and in the center two of his wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad."
The story of Thomas Sutpen, who one day in 1833 appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, "on a big hard-ridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine"; who by mysterious means secures from an Indian the best land in the county, and proceeds with unflagging fury, with the assistance of a pack of wild slaves clothed in nothing but caked mud, to construct the grim mansion that serves as the centerpiece of the plantation known as Sutpen's Hundred; who by the same indomitable will wins the hand of Ellen Coldfield, with whom he has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith; and who, by carrying and disseminating the sin of slavery, wreaks destruction on his family and himself, and curses the descendants of Yoknapatawpha.
Sutpen's motivation, the reason behind his unflagging fury, is one of the great mysteries of the novel. The story's narrators, perpetually astonished, and perhaps not unlike Faulkner himself, are driven by one question: Why? It is one of Absalom's greatest literary legacies, how the legend of Sutpen is invented and reinvented by different narrators as they strive to find that kernel of truth which will explain the inexplicable. And it is not only the tale of Sutpen that is told and retold, but that of Judith and Henry; Ellen and her sister Rosa; Sutpen's half-black child Clytie; and Charles Bon, the young man from New Orleans who has a mind to marry Judith. By telling their stories over and again, in circular iterations, Faulkner is not merely trying to achieve a Rashomon-like effect of different perspectives. Rather, his characters become as large as an Agamemnon or Persephone, mythic figures who cast their shadow over all storytelling, and who change depending on the storyteller.
Reviewers often describe books as "triumphs," which has always mystified me (a triumph over whom? over what?). But Absalom truly feels like a triumph, the triumph of willing something to life that resists it, as Faulkner pursues his quarry with the same indomitable determination that spurs his main character. To put it crudely, he starts big and he stays big, and it is a joy (a joy verging on despair) to see him pull it off, to read 400 pages of prose that never lets up in intensity, that barrels forward with relentless venom and beauty.
And even in the book's few moments of repose, the music of his writing is always there, that wonderful music of the inner ear: "He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking..."
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