Absalom, Absalom!

Thirteen ways of looking at Sutpen

Five voices tell the story: an outside narrator, Rosa Coldfield, Quentin's father, Quentin and Shreve. They draw on a dozen other sources and on their own guesses, and they contradict each other. Stephen Railton, who built the University of Virginia's chapter-by-chapter guide to the book, warns that no event in it can be said for certain to have happened.

A student in 1958 compared the book to Wallace Stevens's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Faulkner agreed. No one person can look at the truth, he said. Each teller sees part of Sutpen, and the reader, after all thirteen views, makes a fourteenth that Faulkner hoped was the true one.

He explained Shreve's part in 1957. Shreve was the one who kept the story tied to reality. If Quentin had been left alone to tell it, Faulkner said, it would have become completely unreal.

The first readers found it so hard that Faulkner added help. His editor, Hal Smith, was alarmed by the manuscript, and the 1936 edition ends with Faulkner's own map of the county, a family tree and a chronology of 33 events. Railton advises first-time readers not to look at that chronology early, because it gives away what the story holds back.

Sutpen's design

Sutpen was born in 1808 in the mountains of western Virginia, into a poor white family. When he was about fourteen his father sent him with a message to a plantation house. An enslaved man at the front door told him to go round to the back.

That moment gave him what the novel calls his design: to own a plantation, slaves and a house of his own, and to found a family line through a son. He left for the West Indies. As an overseer on a sugar plantation in Haiti he helped put down a slave revolt and married the planter's daughter. They had a son.

Then he left them both. He told Quentin's grandfather that his wife could never be part of the design, so he provided for her and put her aside. Only near the end does the book reveal why. He had learned that she had Black ancestry.

Faulkner took the title from the Bible, from King David's cry over his dead son Absalom in the Second Book of Samuel. He said the title came to him the moment he thought of a man who wanted sons, and whose sons destroyed him.

Two brothers and a sister

In Jefferson Sutpen married Ellen Coldfield in 1838 and had two children, Henry and Judith. With an enslaved woman he also had a daughter, Clytie. In 1859 Henry went to the university at Oxford and brought home a friend for Christmas, Charles Bon of New Orleans. Bon and Judith became engaged.

Sutpen recognized Bon as the son he had abandoned, and said nothing to him. On Christmas Eve 1860 he told Henry that Bon was his half-brother and forbade the marriage. Henry called his father a liar and rode off with Bon. They fought side by side through the Civil War.

In 1865, in the last months of the war, Sutpen called Henry to his tent and told him the rest. Bon's mother, he said, was part Black. Henry had been ready to accept a marriage between half-siblings. He would not accept this. When he and Bon rode home, Henry shot Bon dead at the gate of Sutpen's Hundred.

Donald Kartiganer, in the Mississippi Encyclopedia, puts this at the center of the book. Henry's murder of his Black brother, he writes, is the key to the history of Southern violence that the novel tells.

Racial language and violence

The novel uses the n-word 152 times, more than any other racial term in it. The count comes from a study by Johannes Burgers and Susan Scott Parrish, made for the Norton Critical Edition.

The word is not spread evenly. Most uses fall in chapter 7, which tells Sutpen's own story, and Sutpen is involved in 87 percent of the scenes where it appears. In the scene at the plantation front door alone it appears sixteen times. Burgers and Parrish read this as the moment a poor white boy learns both race and class at once.

The book's first page already uses it. Rosa describes Sutpen arriving with a band of enslaved Africans, and the slur she uses there comes back as a refrain through the book. Sutpen fights his slaves bare-handed for sport while his neighbors watch, and once his children watch too. Faulkner called those fights another instance of Sutpen's ruthlessness.

Sutpen's end is violent too. In 1868 he gets Milly Jones, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter of his handyman, Wash Jones, pregnant. When the baby is a girl he tells Milly it is too bad she is not a mare. Wash kills him with a scythe, then kills Milly and the baby, and dies charging a posse.

In French

The novel took longer to reach Paris than Faulkner's earlier books. Éditions Gallimard published Absalon ! Absalon ! in 1953, translated by René-Noël Raimbault with Charles-P. Vorce. Gallimard issued a revised translation in 2000, with a preface and notes by the Faulkner scholar François Pitavy.

The story itself has French threads. Sutpen's architect is French, and Sutpen made his first fortune on a French planter's estate in Haiti, in a country whose language he had to learn. Faulkner's own time in Paris came a decade before the novel, in the autumn of 1925.