Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! and the Failed “Design”
The novel is basically the story of one family’s destruction. But it also dissects the failure of an entire cultural project, the Southern Confederacy’s bid for independence in the face of Northern modernity. Through Thomas Sutpen’s rise and fall, Faulkner reveals how the South’s grand “design” was always doomed to collapse. Sutpen represents one man’s flawed ambitions as well as, in a larger sense, the South’s flawed ambitions made flesh. His design is the South’s design, and its catastrophic failure exposes the fundamental contradictions that destroyed Southern civilization.
Faulkner accents this point by using the word “design” frequently through the latter part of the text. Supten's proclaimed “design” is, according to the author, the South's grand design, a blueprint for creating lasting civilization out of raw strength, determination, exploitation and violence while pretending it was based on honor and nobility. The design attempted to transform stolen labor into legitimate wealth, racial oppression into natural hierarchy, and recent wealth into aristocratic tradition. Sutpen embodies this cultural project, and his spectacular failure reveals why the entire Southern design was built on quicksand. Faulkner shows us a culture destroying itself from within, and he does it by showing how the South’s foundational design contained the seeds of its own destruction.
The South’s design was doomed from the moment of its conception because it attempted to build permanent civilization on an impermanent foundation. The most devastating diagnosis of this fundamental flaw comes from Mr. Coldfield’s recognition of what the South actually built its entire project upon:
“[Mr. Coldfield] hated that country so much that he was glad when he saw it drifting closer and closer to a doomed and fatal war; that he would have joined the Yankee army, Father said, only he was not a soldier and knew that he would either be killed or die of hardship and so not present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected it economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage.” (Chapter 7)
This quote cuts to the heart of why the design failed. The South didn’t build its civilization on “the rock of stern morality” but on “the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage.” This is a cold slap in the face, a clear challenge to a duel in that earlier age. But you cannot create lasting architecture on shifting sands, and you cannot create legitimate civilization through illegitimate means. The design was structurally impossible from its inception.
Sutpen embodies this foundational flaw. His design follows the South’s blueprint exactly: acquire land through somewhat questionable means (never exactly revealed in the novel), build wealth through human bondage, create aristocracy through violence and exploitation, maintain legitimacy through elaborate fictions about honor and nobility. Every step follows the established pattern, but the entire pattern is built on quicksand.
The design didn’t fail because of external pressure or moral corruption over time. It did not even fail against the inevitable progress of modern times. It failed because it was trying to accomplish something impossible: building lasting honor on systematic dishonor, creating legitimate hierarchy through illegitimate exploitation, establishing moral authority through systematic brutality. The foundation was rotten, so the structure had to collapse.
The South’s design contained internal contradictions that made its failure inevitable. The most deadly contradiction lay in its obsession with racial purity and sexual control. The culture demanded absolute separation between races while simultaneously creating conditions that made that separation impossible to maintain. Sutpen’s abandonment of his first wife and child in Haiti when (apparently) he discovers their Black ancestry follows the design’s logic perfectly. The South’s blueprint required racial purity for legitimacy, so anything that threatened that purity had to be eliminated. But this created a cascade of violence that ultimately destroyed the very thing the design was meant to protect.
When Henry kills Bon to prevent the latter’s marriage to Judith, he’s following the design’s imperatives. Sutpen did not tell Henry to shoot Bon, but he planted the seed and set the karma in motion. The culture’s obsession with racial purity demands this violence (though, apparently, not when it comes to sexuality). But the murder eliminates Sutpen’s potential heir through Judith’s marriage, destroying the design’s natural progression (an irony discussed in Part One of my review). The attempt to preserve racial purity destroys the possibility of dynastic continuation.
This forces Sutpen into increasingly desperate measures to salvage his design. He rapes Milly Jones (though this is only inferred in the novel), trying to create a new heir through violent desperation. But this violates the design’s pretense of honor and nobility, revealing the brutality that always lay beneath the surface. When Wash kills Sutpen for treating Milly and the resulting daughter (not a son) as disposable, he’s responding to the design’s fundamental contradiction between its claims of honor and its practice of exploitation.
The cascade of violence reveals how the South’s design was always more self-destructive than honorable or a rebellion against material modernity. Every attempt to preserve its principles led to actions that violated those principles. The culture couldn’t sustain itself because it was built on contradictions that couldn’t be resolved.
The South’s design required transforming the exploitation of enslaved people into the foundation of aristocratic civilization. The culture had to maintain the fiction that wealth created through human bondage could become the basis for legitimate social hierarchy. This required elaborate psychological mechanisms of denial and mythmaking. Sutpen’s plantation represents this transformation in its purest form. The labor that builds his mansion, the wealth that establishes his position, the system that makes his design possible, all of it depends on human bondage. But the design requires treating this foundation as natural and legitimate rather than constructed and exploitative.
The Gothic decay of Sutpen’s Hundred becomes a metaphor for the decay of the entire Southern design. The physical structures crumble because they were built on rotten foundations. The economic system collapses because it was based on unsustainable exploitation. The social hierarchy dissolves because it was never legitimate in the first place. The design’s failure wasn’t caused by external forces but by its own internal contradictions.
The South created a system that made honest self-examination impossible and violent self-destruction inevitable. The culture couldn’t acknowledge what it was built on without destroying its own legitimacy. The South’s design created a psychological prison that trapped everyone within its boundaries, making escape impossible even for those who recognized its contradictions. The culture’s blueprint for civilization became a blueprint for psychological destruction.
The most devastating example comes in the exchange between Shreve and Quentin that reveals the inescapable nature of the design’s psychological inheritance:
“We don’t live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backwards and was it you folks that are free and the [n-word]s that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? Something you live and breathe in like air? A kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory and and happening that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? A kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forever more as long as your children’s children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?”
“‘Gettysburg,’ Quentin said. ‘You don’t understand it. You would have to be born there.’
“‘Would I then?’ Quentin did not answer. ‘Do you understand it?’
“‘I don’t know,’ Quentin said. ‘Yes, of course I understand it.’ They breathed in the darkness. After a moment Quentin said: ‘I don’t know.’” (Chapter 9)
This exchange reveals how the South’s design created a psychological trap that persists even after its material foundation has collapsed. Shreve can see the absurdity of living in a “vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory” about a design that has already failed. He recognizes the “entailed birthright” of perpetual grievance about a lost cause. But Quentin can’t escape what he’s inherited.
The design’s psychological mechanisms continue to operate even after its material basis has been destroyed. He corrects Shreve’s historical detail automatically, showing how deeply the design’s mythology runs in his psyche. He insists you have to be born into the design to understand it, but then admits he doesn’t know if he understands it himself. The repetition of “I don’t know” reveals his desperation. The South’s design has failed, but its psychological effects persist.
You can’t escape what you’ve inherited from a culture’s foundational project, but you can’t understand it either because it was built on contradictions that can’t be resolved.
The most devastating aspect of the South’s design was how it destroyed its own future. Every mechanism created to perpetuate the culture ensured its destruction. The design contained the seeds of its own annihilation. This can be seen in a simple pendant Judith gave Bon with her photograph inside. The token of love between them becomes the instrument of destruction when it is shown after his murder to actually contain the photograph of Bon’s mixed-race family. The symbol of the design’s romantic mythology becomes the symbol of its racial obsessions. The promise of dynastic continuation becomes the guarantee of extinction.
This pattern repeats throughout the novel because it was built into the design itself. The South’s blueprint for civilization required maintaining fictions that couldn’t be sustained. Every attempt to preserve the design’s principles led to actions that violated those principles. The culture couldn’t reproduce itself because it couldn’t resolve the contradictions at its core. Sutpen’s dynasty fails not because of external enemies but because of the design’s internal logic. His attempt to create lasting civilization through exploitation and violence leads inevitably to the collapse of that civilization. The South’s design was always a blueprint for cultural suicide.
The South’s design didn’t just fail, it passed its psychological poison to future generations. The culture’s foundational project became a form of inherited trauma that continued to destroy people long after the material basis for the design had collapsed. Quentin inherits not just Southern pride but the full psychological burden of the design’s failure. The novel suggests that this emotional inheritance is inescapable. Being born into the South means receiving the full burden of the design’s contradictions, and that burden is literally killing. Quentin’s psychological turmoil represents the logical endpoint of this process. He cannot escape what he knows about the design, cannot resolve the contradictions he’s inherited, cannot transform or transcend the cultural legacy.
Absalom, Absalom! presents the South’s design as a cultural project that committed suicide over an extended period. The Gothic atmosphere, the cycle of violence, the sexual exploitation, the racial obsession, the economic parasitism, the mythmaking, all of it served the design’s impossible attempt to create legitimate civilization through illegitimate means. The novel doesn’t offer redemption or hope for the design’s transformation. It presents diagnosis without cure, autopsy without resurrection. The South’s foundational project appears as a blueprint that couldn’t sustain itself because it was built on contradictions that couldn’t be resolved.
Through the Sutpen saga, Faulkner shows us what happens when a culture builds its design on “shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage.” The structure inevitably collapses, taking everyone inside with it. The only question is how long the collapse takes and how many people it destroys in the process.
The novel’s final image is of Quentin, alone at night in his Harvard dormitory, carrying the full weight of the design’s failure, suffering under the pressure of its contradictions. He represents an individual tragedy within the larger judgment of history on the South’s cultural project. The design that was supposed to create lasting civilization created lasting trauma instead.
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s verdict on the South’s design, and that verdict is devastating. The Gothic atmosphere eerily becomes the cultural diagnosis. The South haunts itself because it cannot face what its design actually created.
I must say I do not actually agree with Faulkner’s uncompromising stand in Absalom, Absalom! He dehumanizes the South and turns it into a monstrous horde that it mostly was not. It also had other, more legitimate reasons for its rebellion. Southerners were truly terrified of the North’s material capitalism and how that would change their agrarian virtues, mythic or not. But, nevertheless, what he says is true enough. The design was flawed in its very core. Faulkner rightly exposes it. I would only say he sensationalizes it in all his great novels, nowhere better than here in that regard.
So, while I am not as hard on the Old South as Faulkner clearly is, this does not diminish what is accomplished here, particularly in its affect on Quentin’s psyche as revealed in Part Two. The rebellion may have had its genuine nobility, but the heart of the matter was rotten to the core and Faulkner never captures that magnificent desolation better than in Absalom, Absalom!
(to be continued)
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