Ummagumma

The novel begins... I first started reading Faulkner in the 1980's. There was a long stretch of about 25 years or so where I didn't touch him at all. But, beginning with The Unvanquished , the past several summers I've returned to his remarkable works. I've written multiple essays out of that return, mostly pertaining to Absalom! Absalom! and  As I Lay Dying . Somehow, I never read Intruder in the Dust . I knew its reputation. They made a movie out of it which I’ve never seen. It has been quoted or referenced here and there in my wanderings. So this summer I finally fixed that little omission. Summertime is the best time to read Faulkner. For me, katydids sounding lazily in my woods sets the proper tone. It is a book I wrestled with, like I often wrestle with Faulkner. Not as complicated as attempting The Sound and Fury for the first time, but it took some focus to get into the stream of consciousness style. I was wrestling with it too much to enjoy it at first, tryi...

[ Read Part One ] [ Read Part Two ] [ Read Part Three ] [ Read Part Four ] I’m standing in the smoldering ruins of Sutpen’s Hundred. The big house is gone—burned down to its bones. I can still smell the smoke and soot, still feel the heat lingering in the air. I move carefully through the blackened debris, pushing aside charred fragments with the toe of my boot. Everything that once stood here—the ambition, the legacy, the illusion of order—is ash now. And yet, things remain. Figures. Echoes. Debris that isn’t just physical. The novel doesn’t end neatly, because Faulkner doesn’t believe in neat endings. What he leaves behind is more disturbing: pieces of people, fragments of memory, unanswered questions—and characters whose stories don’t conclude so much as hang there, unfinished, unresolved, vibrating with psychic tension. Here in the rubble, I see Henry Sutpen first—or what’s left of him. The son who pulled the trigger that blew apart a marriage that probably wasn't going to h...

[ Read Part One ] [ Read Part Two ] [ Read Part Three ] Coming back to Absalom, Absalom! after three decades felt like returning to a haunted house you once loved. The place is still there, echoing with monstrous voices, still as impressive and unlivable as ever. I have already unpacked Faulkner’s radical experiments with narrative, Quentin’s psychic collapse, and the South’s impossible “design,” but one last reckoning remains. This is not just a book about a failed family or a doomed culture. It is a book about how collapse itself is transformed into legend. Faulkner lets you see the machinery of myth-making in real time, how rumor and trauma and speculation fuse into a story that outlives its facts. At the molten core of that story is Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen is more than a character in a Gothic tragedy or a symbol of a collapsing civilization. He is a force of nature, vibrant, unstoppable, with a tragic flaw burning right through his design. He takes wilderness and sculpts it into ar...

[ Read Part One ] [ Read Part Two ] Absalom, Absalom! is one of my favorite novels, but I haven’t read it in a looooooong time. Getting reacquainted with it has been a thorough pleasure, even though pleasure seems like an odd word for a book this devastating. But that’s part of what makes it so powerful. Faulkner creates something beautiful out of material that’s absolutely brutal. Often, in his other great novels, he creates the beauty out of his incomparable prose. Interestingly, it is not his prose so much that carries this novel. It is his incredibly well-thought-out plot and how it unfolds out of this complex web of intricacies that is, for all its brutality, exquisite. 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 ...

[ Read Part One ] The first couple of times I read Absalom, Absalom! (1936) years ago, Quentin Compson was easily the character that intrigued me most. As I posted earlier, I was shocked when I discovered he committed suicide in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Reading those two novels out of order according to when Faulkner wrote them maximized the impact of his death for me. And I suddenly realized that Absalom, Absalom! is not a story where he is a principal narrator. It is a story that affects Quentin psychologically. He is more a part of the story reflectively than he is a teller of it. It is, mostly, told to him and he obviously wrestles with it throughout the novel. I just never suspected that this fascinating inner turmoil might lead to something other than his own coming to terms with the culture in which he was born and raised. Quentin barely speaks in Absalom, Absalom! You’d think the character who dominates the novel’s consciousness would have more to say, but he doesn’...

My 1990 paperback. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! has historically been my favorite of his novels. Perhaps oddly, I hadn’t read it in about 30 years. I guess Faulkner just wasn't part of my mind all this time.  But he is now.  The novel held up powerfully on this revisit and remains one of my favorite works by the author. Faulkner, we are told, was a master of the “Southern Gothic” genre. Truth be told, this is one of his most Gothic-like novels. More so than The Sound and the Fury , for example. It takes the claustrophobic intensity of that genre and marries it to modernist formal experimentation without sacrificing either tradition. Most writers who attempt this kind of fusion end up with something that feels like showing off, technical fireworks that distract from the story rather than serve it. Not with Faulkner. The novel opens with Rosa Coldfield’s obsessive voice and that decaying mansion, creating genuine Gothic dread that hangs over everything. Then it sustain...