Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

Read for the second time in October 2012.

I’ve long held this, along with “The Sound and the Fury” as my two favorite Faulkner novels, though “The Sound and the Fury” is the one which I have found myself re-reading with periodic frequency. This is possibly because so much of the first half of the “The Sound and the Fury” is difficult to comprehend. I still don’t quite know where Benji gets castrated for example, and I’ve read the book probably five times.

“Absalom, Absalom!” is just as difficult it turns out. Faulkner’s prose, which has no equal that I am aware of, frequently ascends into some kind of exalted gibberish, more difficult to parse than anything in “The Sound and The Fury.” I don’t try to parse it all. I somehow absorb the story and relish in the beauty of his writing and let my incomprehension evaporate into the ether.

But what I love about Faulkner, at his best, is the way real human suffering is imposed from real human character’s attempts to assert control over a universe in which they have none. There is, from the onset, a palpable sense of fated doom. This is Shakespeare brought to the South. One parallel between “Absalom, Absalom!” and “The Sound and the Fury” which may account for the reverence for which I hold each, is the ineffectual internal indecisiveness of Henry Sutpen and Quentin Compson (in “The Sound and The Fury” specifically though he appears in both). Faulkner does an exceedingly good job of depicting internal struggle and anguish in his novels, of characters torn by internal conflict.

I’m also impressed by Faulkner’s mockery of manifestations of human vanity, things like honor and glory. He writes a nice soap opera, and the richness of the southern background. Of pride mixed with the humiliation of defeat. Of a way of life that he criticizes bitterly and yet still will not fully repudiate. Faulkner’s depiction of the human condition is so focused and honest, it’s jaw-dropping. He’s never swayed by sentimentality or misplaced anguish, but seems to always be endeavoring for the truth despite the futility involved.

With a keen eye, Faulkner grapples with and depicts the truth as honestly as he possibly can, and yet despite that truth, human emotion and suffering are still treated with importance. He does not take the god’s eye view of humanity where nihilism is taken to its most logical end and suffering is a source of lighthearted diversion. He gives us the world as it is, lack of meaning and futility and all, and allows us to feel the self-created anguish of real characters without ironic distance, and thus all the more poignant because we know just how futile it is.

This is why Faulkner is the best to me, and why the post-modernists with their educated references and empty intellectualism and comic-book tones are only entertainment. I distinguish between literature for intellectuals and literature as art. And, to me, Faulkner is literature as art, and the very best of it at that.