99. Absalom again

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Absalom

p59 ...In a grim mausoleum air of Puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness Miss Rosa's childhood was passed, that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandralike listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation, while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayer her to overtake the disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes.

That's quite a sentence. As fond as I am of Cassandra, I don't see the connection here. The name "Cassandra" seems to connote something different for Faulkner than it connotes for me. And "presbyterian" seems to be a synonym of "Puritan" suggesting much the same upright qualities as "methodist." I am fascinated by the pairing of religious abolitionism in the north with the similarly religious nature of the South. I've never been able to parse the devout Christianity I associate in particular with General Jackson and his army. Perhaps there is a presbyterian aspect of this as it reflects community values as expressed by elders of that community, and not any global -- and certainly not an Ultramontane -- religious sensibility.

In the very next paragraph we learn that he had a child with one of his slaves and named her Clytemnestra. One of the advantage of rereading is that I can say that this is puzzling. That Quentin's father should invoke the House of Atreus is natural enough -- even if I don't see the actual connection -- but where would Sutpen have encountered these stories? And, dropping back down to Faulkner, what is that name supposed to suggest here? These are awfully loaded names to drop in at random. 

And I should perhaps remind the reader that I rate the story of the House of Atreus right up there with the invention of God and religion when it comes to human achievements. 


p61 ...He named Clytie as he named them all... Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name Clytie, Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read...

That doesn't help me at all. Since Clytie doesn't even have a voice in this book, how can she be a Cassandra?

If you think of this novel as a piece of music, it would be so frustrating to listen to. Themes continually begun only to be interrupted and not to be completed until the very end.

Chapter IV

There's a throw-away line here that I didn't pay much attention to my first reading, p88 "...He [Quentin] could almost see her [Rosa], waiting in one of the dark airless rooms in the little grim house's impregnable solitude. She would have no light burning because she would be out of the house soon, and probably some mental descendant or kinsman of him or her who had told her once that light and moving air carried heat had also told her that the cost of electricity was not in the actual time the light burned but in the retroactive overcoming of primary inertia when the switch was snapped: that that was what showed on the meter...."

This reminds me of one of James Thurber's characters (family members?) who was afraid that electricity was leaking out of her outlets if the outlets weren't all filled. I think I have that right. I think Faulkner tosses this in just to remind us that Miss Rosa has survived into a very different age. (Thurber was just demonstrating what characters he was related to.) 

Miss Rosa would have seen (or perhaps not) the rise of the Age of Railroads as well as the introduction of electricity. Not to mention the introduction of the germ theory of disease and Darwinism. Quentin is at Harvard a few years after Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, though I doubt that was front page news in rural Mississippi. My point (assuming I have one) is that none of all that "progress" has had much of an effect on "the disease" which is still rampant -- much the way obesity is currently so prevalent and yet so widely ignored. The diabetes statistics are acknowledged, but seemingly without comprehension. We invest in bariatric seats for theaters and bariatric gurneys for hospitals -- and those forklifts to get patients into and out of hospital beds -- and now we don't even have George Carlin around to "joke" about the problem.

...She would be wearing already the black bonnet with jet sequins; he knew that: and a shawl, sitting there in the augmenting and defunctive twilight [in my imagination Martha Grimes swoons as she reads this and spills her drink onto her Max Mara dress]... She would emerge with it [her umbrella] when he called for her and carry it invincibly into the spent suspiration of an evening without even dew [momentarily revived only to swoon once again], where even now the only alteration toward darkness was in the soft and fuller random of the fireflies below the gallery...

This is not the first time fireflies have been mentioned. I'm a little surprised someone so immersed in Mississippi would be aware of the importance of this detail. In Louisville we called them lightning bugs and they were one of the things I most enjoyed seeing again when I returned some years ago -- but I don't actually recall them in Alabama when I visited my "kin" there back in the 1960s. Did I not see them there or did I simply not notice them, the way we don't usually notice the air we move about in? 

It occurs to me, since I brought up Martha Grimes, that this novel is organized a bit like a mystery. We start with some of the facts. We get a theory -- a suspect -- that seems to make sense but is, of course, wrong because it is too early to be right. It's only later, when we get more facts and the insight of a better detective, that we figure out what actually happened.

p110 [Normally I give the page on which a paragraph starts if it continues on to another page, but since this paragraph started on page 108 and continues to page 113 I'm giving the page on which this passage occurs] "...So I [Quentin's father] can imagine him [Bon], the way he did it [told Henry about his Octaroon mistress/wife], the way in which he took the innocent and negative plate of Henry's provincial soul and intellect and exposed it by slow degrees to this esoteric milieu, building gradually toward the picture which he desired it to retain, accept..." Very like what Faulkner is doing with us, his readers.


I like how little Faulkner writes about the war -- since that isn't really his topic -- just enough to account for where the menfolk have been off to for those years. A wound at Shiloh. Service with the Army of Northern Virginia and, at the end, with Joe Johnston's army delaying Sherman's army. (I looked up Shiloh because the name reeks of Old Testament context. I hadn't realized how important it was in Jewish history, but I don't see any particular connection to our story.)

Chapter V

Here's something that puzzles me now. p134 ..."I [Rosa] had only to lock the house and take my place in the buggy... beside that brute [Wash Jones] who until Ellen died was not permitted to approach the house from the front..." So Sutpen's goal was not to stop this tradition but rather to be the one deciding who could come in from the front? He was not a social improver but simply envious. He wanted to be the rejector rather than the rejectee. Sutpen was a true upholder of Southern culture, just as his son Henry would prove to be the ultimate supporter of that culture. And Henry's exit, symbolic of the true end (I wish) of that culture, must needs be dramatic -- atop a funeral pyre of an equally symbolic antebellum plantation house.

p136 ...it stood [Sutpen's mansion], not ravaged, not invaded, marked by no bullet nor soldier's iron heel but rather as though reserved for something more: some desolation more profound than ruin, as if it stood in iron juxtaposition to iron flame, to a holocaust which had found itself less fierce and less implacable, not hurled but rather fallen back before the impervious and indomitable skeleton which the flames durst not, at the instant's final crisis, assail...

I think the credit here goes to Faulkner for my anticipating this foreshadowing of the ending we have no way of knowing about at this point in the telling of this story. I thought I was getting ahead of myself, but I find I was right where he wanted me to be. 

There is an important passage, too long to quote, at the beginning of this chapter about Rosa's reaction to Clytie, as she rushed into the house and is stopped in her tracks by her hand. Then there is this, much later in the chapter, p153 "...here [at Sutpen's Hundred] I had for company one woman... who was so foreign to me [Clytie] and to all that I was that we might have been not only of different races (which we were), not only of different sexes (which we were not), but of different species, speaking no language which the other understood, the very simple words with which we were forced to adjust our days to one another being even less inferential of thought or intention than the sounds which a beast and a bird might make to each other...."

p156 ...Clytie, not inept, anything but inept: perverse inscrutable and paradox: free, yet incapable of freedom who had never once called herself a slave, holding fidelity to none like the indolent and solitary wolf or bear (yes, wild: half untamed black, half Sutpen blood: and if 'untamed' be synonymous with 'wild,' then 'Sutpen" is the silent unsleeping viciousness of the tamer's lash) whose false seeming holds it docile to fear's hand but which is not, which if this be fidelity, fidelity only to the prime fixed principle of its own savageness; -- Clytie who in the very pigmentation of her flesh represented that debacle which had brought Judith and me to what we were and which had made of her (Clytie) that which she declined to be just as she had declined to be that from which its purpose had been to emancipate her, as though presiding aloof upon the new, she deliberately remained to represent to us the threatful portent of the old."

Chapter VI
p176 ...she [Rosa] wouldn't have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe....

As much as I love classical references -- especially to the House of Atreus -- I don't find any of these associations particularly apt. And Shreve the undergraduate, who's speaking here, gets less credit than Sutpen for at least meaning well. Someone else is compared to Cassandra and I still do not see it.

p178 I quoted this passage before where Shreve compares Sutpen to Faustus, but now I'm thinking Sutpen also reminds me of Fyodor Karamazov -- "...until she realized that he was not hiding, did not want to hide, was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm-doing before the Creditor overtook him next time for good and all..." Sutpen shares Fyodor's lust for life with Faust's striving to construct a new world, at least for himself. Also, it is precisely the man he wouldn't let approach his house by the front door who takes a literal scythe to him.

I just went to Wiki to confirm a suspicion that Faulkner had no clue about farming (seems true) and noticed "Callie" Barr, "(the black woman who raised him from infancy)." My dad, growing up in Louisville after the Great War, had his own Callie Barr. I still have pictures of them together and he sent letters to her, as well as to his mother, while stationed in the Pacific during WW2. One of the things I've never understood about Southerners is how so many of them were raised by women like Callie, who they may well have been closer to than to their own mothers, and yet still end up racist rednecks. (I never saw any evidence of this in my dad, but then he was a city boy from a city that had sided with the Union.)

Next - 100. Glee