98. Thoughts on the South

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Absalom

Today is the eve of Christmas Eve, and Friday, so I'm taking advantage of the reduced WiFi traffic and sitting at the Bank Cafe. It's also raining. Poured most of the night and morning and now is down to showers, but cold and breezy showers. Feels almost Chrismasy. 

I'm pausing before I commence the second chapter of Absalom. The book is mostly about events in the 1830s to 1870s; it is being told in 1909; and it was written in the 1930s. For Faulkner, the Civil War was as distant as WW2 is for us. Recent enough for us to have heard first hand accounts and for it to have shaped our everyday reality in many obvious ways, yet it still feels like it belonged to a completely different world -- though I'm not sure Faulkner's Mississippi had changed as much as the U.S. has changed in the past 70 years.

For Quentin, on the other hand, the War of Northern Aggression was only as far back as the Vietnam War is for us. If you imagine him as a Millennial (God forbid), I'm not sure the difference between WW2 and Vietnam would seem that dramatic. Both would be events from an almost unimaginable "olden days."

And the Civil Rights Movement (that provoked the other civil war that divided my family) was still 30 years in the future for Faulkner and over 50 years in the future for Quentin. The disease had not been cured in the 1860s but rather had settled down into a chronic condition -- like Chicken Pox immediately turning into an active case of Shingles. So neither Quentin nor Faulkner are really talking about the past at all. Removing the "chattel" element of the equation didn't change all that much as the warped beliefs that underlay the "peculiar institution" remained. (A side effect of which being the Electoral College that just gave us a President elected by a minority of the voters.)

Sutpen's two pistols

I wondered about these first time through, and did a little research this time. My concern was that there was talk of an accuracy that surprised me in a muzzle loading hand gun. While Faulkner doesn't say this, there being two of them suggests they could have been a pair of dueling pistols -- possibly with rifled barrels -- and thus relatively accurate at, say, under 50 meters. Of course if Faulkner wants us to imagine something like an early Colt revolver, this would be an anachronism by a few years at least. Yes, I know that no one cares but me.


I appreciate that, to Sutpen, it's the house and not the plantation that is significant, but you'd think something would be said about the creation of the plantation, and that that would have been done first to pay for the house. In a way Sutpen's priorities are like someone settling in a hostile country and first building defenses before doing anything else.

On my page 42, Faulkner spells out what it means for the father of Ellen and Rosa to have been a Methodist steward: "...a man with a name for absolute and undeviating and even Puritan uprightness in a country and time of lawless opportunity, who neither drank nor gambled nor even hunted...."

The incident following the wedding of Sutpen and Ellen is interesting and believable. That it is the property-less classes that act against Sutpen is curious but believable. To what extent are they enforcing group norms and to what extent are they just taking advantage of an opportunity for semi-sanctioned violence? I don't know, but these would also be the men who followed Generals Lee and Jackson and who would form the rank and file of the KKK. 

And that's the end of chapter two.

Next - 99. Absalom again