Absalom, Absalom! : allegory of evil
著者（英） Philip Williams
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 29
page range 83‑115
year 1979‑12‑30
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000016505
ABSAL0111, ABSALOM!
- ALLEGORY OF EVIL
PHILIP WILLIAMS
In whatever Nirvana he lives today, William Faulkner must be much bemused by the massive industry of research and interpretation that has arisen around the marvelous fiction he gave to the world. He may be chagrined if not shocked by yet another study, and that once again on the novel Absalom, Absalom! about which there are already hundreds of interpretive articles, scores of studies in books, and dozens of dissertations destined for publication or oblivion. The great volume of research on the book attests its importance but underscores the question whether anything of significance remains to be said. In a recent book on modern writers of the American South, however, Richard Gray has made this pertinent comment:
Like its author, Absalom, Absalom! is a bit of a puzzle. It is now generally regarded as one of the pinnacles of William Faulkner's achievement, and yet, when it first appeared, even its most intelligent reviewers were tempted to cite it as an exemplary piece of "bad writing." It has been described, and by people whose word on Faulkner is respected, as the crucial work in the Yoknapatawpha series, despite the fact that the vast criticallabors expended upon it, by those same people among others, have left it nothing less of an enigma. Unlike The Sound and the Fury or Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! has never been supplied with a satisfactory "Key": something that, while not explaining all of its labyrinthine complexities, might at least offer the reader a
convenient means of entry into them.1
It would be absurd to suggest that this study, or any other, may supply the key to this wonderfully baffling and complex book. No one can give a final answer to oversimple questions: What did Faulkner really mean to say in this book? What did he mean it to do to us?
How has he managed to orchestrate the story so that the very manner of its telling conveys crucial meaning? The total structure makes the point as no mere plot design might, so that in fact the medium is the message, as McLuhan would say. We will not perform a final miracle of resolving these issues; this revisionary approach to Absalom, Absalom!
will simply plead that it seeks to proceed from Faulkner's own com- ments on the subject, some of them made available only recently, which oblige us to put the book in a larger context than has been done. The thesis that we shall follow suggests that it is primarily as the author's overarching allegory of evil that Absalom, Absalom! claims its place as the greatest work by Faulkner and perhaps by any modern American novelist.
The germ of this allegorical reading is taken from The Cycle
of
American Literature, where Robert E. Spiller notes that "the reading of Absalom, Absalom! as merely a study of the failure of the South to re-establish its economic and social stability is to limit a work which is also an allegory of man's search for his soul."2 Taking the word "man" to mean"everyman," we find this comes very close to things Faulkner himself was to say later of his overriding moral concern in all his work, and not least this novel of amazingly dense, rich texture and almost unparalleled intensity.
It is surprising that this hint of "allegory" has not been given exploration in any length or depth, with one most unusual exception:
an essay seeing it as an allegory of jurisprudence!3 One writer refers.
in passing to "an allegorical meaning embracing the history of the South,"4 and another simply notes that "the novel invites allegorical or semi-allegorical interpretations [on] the corruption of the American Dream."" Neither thesis was expanded, and limiting the theme to the
"fall of the South" or even "the American Dream" is to miss the meaning as a universal allegory of temptation and falL The latter point is almost made in Hyatt H. Waggoner's fine book, William Faulknel': From Jifferson to the World.B
Waggoner insightfully alludes to Faulkner's use of allegory at many points: Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying must be taken as
"allegorical symbol"; Sanctuary is to be recognized as an allegory of
"evil modernism," which has brought despair to people like earnest Horace Benbow: "The Bear" -though paralleling biblical myths-
"does not seem ... to yield a completely consistent allegory"; "The Sound and the FU1Y is surely less allegoricaL .. than A Fable," where the "allegori- cal intention" is central. Significantly, Waggoner's splendid chapter on Absalom) Absalom! makes no reference to allegorical aspects, though late in the book he draws a conclusion that opens the door to a vital interpretation of the novel as allegory. "It would seem true in general to say that Faulkner's development has been in the direction of a more allegorical method." This point, and his comparison with Hawthorne's devotion to allegory which follows, would seem to justify our attempt to consider Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner's allegory of evil, much as A Fable was his deliberate allegory of goodness.
The strongest deterrent against this allegorical reading, perhaps, has come from the influential view of Cleanth Brooks that the key to an understanding of the book is to take it as a "tragedy of innocence."
The two large volumes, and many essays, on Faulkner by Brooks
represent some of the finest study done in the United States. In his newest book, William Faulkner: Towards Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, Brooks adds still further explication of his article "Absalom, Absalom!:
The Definition of Innocence," a view he has developed and defended for almost thirty years, seeing Thomas Sutpen as "an extreme example of 'American' innocence" and "a tragic hero."7 Surely-I would say
"sadly," in this case-it has been this viewpoint which has "endured and prevailed" in critical study of Faulkner.
Meanwhile, scores of careful critics have written to further define Absalom, Absalom! in terms of tragedy, some finding explicit parallels with classic Greek dramas; others stressing the movement from Sutpen's personal tragedy to "the larger social tragedy"8 of the South and many concurring with Waggoner that "Absalom, Absalom! is a classical-Chris- tian tragedy, at once Greek and Biblical," with universal meanings of tragic impact for all mankind.9 All these approaches appear to me to be valid in some degree; all contribute to better understanding of Faulkner's amazing achievement in the novel. The same positive appreciation must be given to many of the interpretations that find the critical key to be a reading of the book as myth. Scores of splendid studies analyze the mythical framework in Gothic, in Greek, in biblical, and in other mythological categories. All these analyses-some de- veloped extensively and very perceptively-can be seen as acceptable and even accessory to an allegorical approach. Some of them, es- pecially those showing how myths focus Faulkner's obsession with evil, as Brylowski's book does throughout, make indisputable and indispensa- ble points that any allegorical study must include.Io
There are other insightful approaches to Absalom, Absalom! and its basic form, ranging from calling its design that of epic,l1 or uniquely a "saga of the South,"12 to taking its suspense pattern as that of a
detective story, as Brooks observes several times in his books, and Gerald Langford concursP None of these suggestions need be neglected, nor should we pass over the careful studies of Faulkner's unique achievement in prose style and the "poetry" that mark Absalom, Absalom!, as we fix attention on the character of the book as an allegory of evil.
That the problem of evil is a consuming fire for Faulkner all agree.
Brylowski writes at the outset of his book that "Faulkner's thinking centers around an examination of the nature of evil. "!4 He concludes that "the problem of evil constitutes the focal point of his rational- empiric vision," and in the "mythic mode" which arises dialectically the author's aim is to transcend the problem in showing "the domi- nance of the spirit of man ... and to laugh the Olympian laugh."!5 That Thomas Sutpen, called "demon" countless times in Absalom, Absalom!, is a figure committed to a most evil design is generally acknowledged, though there is a tendency in some writers to romanti- cize and even to idealize his early actions, as we shall see. The view- point of allegory can show us his Satanic impact in corrupting the whole community around him by his temptations, and lead us to better under- stand how evil-even as seen in his devilish degradation-may ulti- mately be overcome, if not properly resisted on appearance.
That allegory is dear to the heart of Faulkner we know from many of his own statements in interviews and speeches. Talking with Jean Stein (one of his very special female friends!) in the Paris Review inter- view (Spring, 1956) which made literary history, Faulkner seemed to savour the word "allegory," as we note in this much-studied exchange:
INTERVIEWER: Are there any artistic advantages in casting the noyel in the form of an allegory, as the Christian allegory you
used in A Fable?
FAULKNER: Same advantage the carpenter finds in building square corners in order to build a square house. In A Fable the Christian allegory was the right allegory to use in that particular story, like an oblong square corner is the right corner with which to build on oblong rectangular house.
INTERVIEWER: Does that mean an artist can use Christianity simply as just another tool, as a carpenter would borrow a ham- mer?
FAULKNER: The carpenter we are speaking of never lacks that hammer. No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only.
vVhatever its symbol-cross or crescent or whatever-that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope. Writers have always drawn and always will draw, upon the allegories of moral consciousness, for the reason that the allegories are matchless.16 In these words we find Faulkner's own clues on the why and how of allegory.
Studies of the relationship of allegory and symbolism by such respected scholars as F. O. Matthiessen and Northrop Frye support our view that Faulkner fits the formal model of allegory as seen in Shakespeare and Milton, Hawthorne and Melville-all of whom gave us immortal Satan figures foreshadowing Thomas Sutpen!-but space
dictates that we limit our definition of allegory to one authorityY In his book Alleg01y: The Theory oj a Symbolic Mode, the fullest modern study of the subject in English, Angus Fletcher begins by saying:
Allegory is a protean device, omnipresent in Western literature from the earliest times to the modern era. No comprehensive historical treatment of it exists or would be possible in a single volume .... We have to account for an even wider variety of ma- terials than with categories like "satire," "tragedy," or "comedy."
... In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another.
It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that its words "mean what they say."18
One cannot think of a method or style better calculated to appeal to Faulkner with his "distrust of words" and delight in Me1ville-like ambiguities. The connections are made even clearer as Fletcher goes on to show that allegory almost always relates to demons or "The Daemonic Agent," that allegorical imagery is "cosmic," and its subjects deal more frequently with arch evil than with the good; that allegorical stories "are cases of highly obsessive action"; and that in the greatest writers (he stresses Shakespeare but also treats Dante, Spenser, Milton, Hawthorne, and others) the allegorical mode appears in the period of their art's highest maturity. Again, the parallels with Faulkner are obvious, though he is referred to directly only once (in a footnote ofthe 420 pp. text). This reference is to his voice on his recorded readings and points out his uniquely allegorical style in reading, a~oiding emphasis (matching his deliberately indecisive, long-drawn-out sen- tence structure) and expressing "hypotaxis [i.e. syntactic subordination]
which has no effect of variety, but rather creates a monotonous ground swell. "19
Northrop Frye's Anatomy oj Criticism (See Appendix) stresses that
the allegory and the artist employing it are especially "strong on the- matic interest," and emphasizes "how much impersonal dignity and richness of association an author can gain by the communism of convention," citing Faulkner's borrowing of the title The Sound and the Fury from Shakespeare.2o We need only observe that this conclusion of "the critics' critic" coincides perfectly with Faulkner's words quoted above and clearly expressed at many other points.
As in his allegory of the good man as a Christ figure in A Fable, so in portraying an incarnation of evil-Sutpen set forth in Satanic stature-Faulkner enriches his art by the archetypal overtones that allegory adds, often at subconscious or unconscious levels, for the serious reader. Even beyond the profound moral insights we derive in seeing the tragic developments here-the breakdown of family set against the Old Testament pattern shown in David and his sons (the deepest irony of the title is that David truly mourns for his sons and repents for his sins, as Sutpen never does), the corruption of the community around the demon in all respects, the betrayal of the South and the American Dream of freedom and justice for all men and women-beyond all the readings we make on the patterns of epic or drama or poetic vision- there is the added dimension of the challenge which the allegory lays upon us, as we face the kinds of existential temptations shown at the center of the story. We too must learn to turn from evil, to endure and prevail, as we pursue the major goal oflife to "overpass to love"-a phrase echoed four times on one page near the end of Absalom, Absalom!21 The allegorical form, in a moral sense, has always been directed quite deliberately to didactic ends, devoted to teaching a better way of life. Need we add that the presentation as distinguished from the purpose need not be overtly didactic-that in fact the openly didactic form ("naive allegory" in Frye's term) is self-defeating in our time?
T. S. Eliot may be the best parallel to Faulkner as moralist in this respect-again a hint is given by their conjunction in The Cycle of American Literature-for both have taken the most modern forms to interpret their most traditional themes. Like Eliot, whose early work deeply influenced him, Faulkner spurned didacticism. One general mark of modernism is the often-stated dislike for the allegorical, as noted by Matthiessen and Frye today and going back to the rise of nineteenth century realism. Both Melville and Hawthorne were em- barrassed by their out-and-out "allegoricalness" (see Appendix).
From the beginning Faulkner has stressed that the center of the novel's action, the most important element of "plot" in the true sense of Aristotle, is in the "fall of Sutpen." All the major critical studies- Brooks, Millgate, Vickery, Waggoner for example-follow Faulkner in taking this as the central "action" of the story, though all note the complexity of plotting in this book: Lawrence Thompson in fact out- lines four distinct plots, but the destructive course of exploitation Sutpen follows is seen to bind them all together.22 Though some critics regard the theme as centered on Quentin, because his "consciousness creates the story" so to speak, Faulkner has refuted this approach in at least tvvo ways by his personal comments on the book. In his recently published Selected Letters we find this first reference to the story in a letter (the date "probably Feb. 1934") to his publisher Harrison Smith:
The one I am writing now will be called DARK HOUSE or something of that nature. It is the more or less violent breakup of a household or family from 1860 to about 1910. It is not as heavy as it sounds .... Roughly, the theme is a man who outraged the land, and the land turned and destroyed the man's family.
Quentin Compson, of the Sound & Fury, tells it, or ties it together;
he is the protagonist so that it is not complete apocrypha. I use him because it isjust before he is to commit suicide because of his sister, and I use his bitterness which he has projected on the South in the form of hatred of it and its people to get more out
Ri
the story itself than a historical novel would be. To keep the hoop skirts and plug hats out, you might say. [Italics mineJ23The last line spoofs the era of Gone with the Wind: the portions I have italicized clearly show that the "story itself" is Sutpen's and that Quentin will be "used" to "get more out" (as Nick Carraway is foil to reveal The Great Gatsby) and also to de-romanticize the story. vVe also learn from this letter how far the author moved beyond his theme- kernel by adding biblical images, symbols, names, even the title, to elaborate on the allegorical and mythical potentials, though the original subject held it all in embryo with the figure of "a man who outraged the land" and thus showed his demonic dimensions from the outset.
In Faulkner's Revision of «Absalom, Absalomf" Gerald Langford shows how aspects I find allegorical are expanded from the original manuscript to the final version. But Faulkner's letters show the development at an even earlier stage. In a second letter to Smith ("August, 1934") Faulkner noted about six months after his first message on the novel with which he then was struggling: "I have a title for it which I like, by the way: ABSALOM, ABSALOM; the story
·of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him."24 Though this is too oversimplified to summarize the story, it is striking for the way it points to the biblical parallel and adds the Satanic sin of pride as key term for Sutpen.
Even the simplest straight-forward encyclopedia outline of the story, stripping away all the artistic sophistication of the narrative
structure and hence the real meaning as it is embraced by the very telling of the four contrasted "narrators," has value nevertheless in showing Sutpen's primacy-and his evil gambit in life.
The story centers on Thomas Sutpen, the son of a West Virginia poor white, and his attempts to fulfill his "grand design," to be accepted as a Southern aristocrat and founder of a wealthy family.
He establishes himself in Jefferson, Miss., and at the climax of his career he is elected colonel...in the Civil War. Returning to his estate, Sutpen's Hundred, after the war, he finds the plantation in ruins. His daughter's half brother and part-Negro lover has been killed by Sutpen's son, who has disappeared, and she has become a confirmed spinster. Sutpen's attempt to have another son by a poor-white girl ends in his murder by her grandfather.
When the Sutpen saga comes to an end in 1910, all that is left of his dream is an idiot Negro, Jim Bond, Sutpen's only living descendant, howling in the ashes of the burned house.25
Missing here are all the essentials, and the key to the meaning as allegory, in the demonic desires and drives ofSutpen which are revealed to have been at the root of all the "action." The great plantation was built on plunder and murder; the first of Sutpen's wives was rejected with the son who was gunned down at the gate of the Sutpen mansion later by his brother on Sutpen's goading. Besides the exploiting of blacks throughout-Sutpen uses them for breeding and out of his own lust but denies their humanity-we are shown how he used the Coldfield and Compson families to win "respectability" in a loveless marriage.
His final disgusting provocation of his killer comes by his abuse of the granddaughter when he treats her worse than his horse and the event brings death to her, her father, and her newly-born daughter. The
~:mly "good thing" we see about Sutpen from start to finish is his so-
called "courage," and that is of the order of Hitler, coming to fruition only in war's pillage-and war, as we see in Faulkner's later work, involves the greatest evil. In The Unvanquished and A Fable the true courage is shown by the pacifist rejection of violence.
Several of Faulkner's messages to students at the University of Virginia underline his view of Sutpen as evil incarnate, and his con- viction that Quentin, who fails to see this, holds "one of the most erroneous" views of Sutpen. "Probably his friend [Shreve] had a much truer picture of Sutpen .... Quentin was still trying to get God to tell him why, in Absalom, Absalom! as in The Sound and the Fury."26 The Satanic marks are specified in several of the author's responses to questions: Sutpen "said, I'm going to be the one that lives in the big house. I'm going to establish a dynasty, I don't care how, and he violated all the rules of decency and honor and pity and compassion."27 He "was ruthless, completely self-centered .... He was going to take what he wanted because he was big enough and strong enough, and I think people like that are destroyed sooner or later .... One has got to take a responsible part in the human family."28 Sutpen "was willing to destroy ... any individual who got in his way."29
These clear statements of strong-man Sutpen's will-to-power, not blinking a momerit at the sight of the evils entailed, should rule out any view of him as heroic model or as tragic victim of sociological or psychological forces (the South's "corruption" or his own "inno- cence"). Faulkner has cast him quite consciously in a role like Shakespeare's lago, Hawthorne's ChiIlingworth, Melville's Captain Ahab, and-most clearly-their greatest literary Satanic prototype, Milton's Lucifer, the angel of light who turned in pride and self-love to become the arch-evil Satan. Sutpen's first appearance in the book, second paragraph of the text in fact, gives the symbolic signs of the
hellish background and the interpretation of the rise of his plantation as the work of a devilish usurpation of the Creator God's power as shown by a parody of Genesis, Chapter One:
Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts .... Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the olden time Be Light.30
Without a doubt, many readers and-particularly-many critics have been put off the Satanic-demonic interpretation because the introduction of these elements appears first in association with the biased, not to say hostile and almost hysterically outraged, speeches of Rosa Coldfield. But as the situation develops, we see that Faulkner has played the clever trick of misleading us by having the wrong person say the right things about Sutpen from the very beginning, when none of us know enough to judge (she herself never really does). More importantly, the "demonic" view is taken consistently by Shreve (and at several points by the omniscient narrator as well), and as we have noted, Faulkner has said Shreve "has a much truer picture of Sutpen."
Shreve's early summary sets the allegorical picture quite precisely:
" ... this Faustus, this demon, this Beelzebub fled hiding from some momentary flashy glare of his Creditor's [equals "Creator God's"]
outraged face exasperated beyond all endurance, hiding, scuttling into respectability like a jackal into a rockpile" (p. 178). The so-called
"saner view" of the Gompsons-the General, the Father, and even Quentin-on which Brooks bases the interpretation of Sutpen's "inno- cence," we must remember, comes from persons whose bias is even more misguided and malignant. They are defenders of the ethic of the su- perior white plantation owners, who sought to find support for their position in Sutpen's rise to power. In the end they descend to the worst kind of cynicism (Father Gompson's nihilist rationalizations which spread ruin in his family) and-almost worst-monomaniacal idealism: Quentin's suicidal idolatry.
Given Faulkner's genius for creating names, it is especially im- portant to see that the titan's name Sutpen parallels Satan as possibly the closest "homonym" the author could create.31 Professor Ken- zaburo Ohashi, who has done a thorough study of the names in Faulkner's works, assures me that this name, unlike many of his other Southern family names, does not exist in real life and had to be coined by the author. Great authors have always been noted for onomastic (name-giving) brilliance, and in this point Faulkner's art is second to none. We have seen this in the Snopes family names; in Absalam, Absalamf, besides the excellent touches given by Rosa, Judith, Glytemnestra, and other symbolic names, we have Shreve as an original (more on this later) as well as Goodhue Goldfield and Bon (good) which becomes, by the third generation, Bond (enslaved one). But the central ban mat here is "Sutpen," and it seems' no coincidence that the very sound of his name matches "Satan."
There are other clear clues to the reading of this story as a recre- ation of the archetypal allegory of everyman's course to corruption in yielding to temptations, though the marvelously complex form of the book denies any interpretation of meaning a claim to absolute authority.
The power of the writing, its rich depth of "truth" (or "thirteen ways of
seeing truth" -the fourteenth left to each reader who has a better view- as Faulkner often said in echoing Wall ace Stevens), the joy in a new wisdom of discovery that can reach every reader's heart and mind-all these warn us that any commentary tends to misinterpret by its emphasis, and an oversimple reading is the worst to the degree it denies other truths in making its affirmations.
Another way, however, by which Faulkner has made clearer "the various shapes and avatars of Thomas Sutpen's devil's fate" (AA, p.134) is through imagery which presents his unique characteristics. We have written elsewhere of the way in which Faulkner signals his basic revelations of the traits of his men and women by the eye imagery he uses in a most extraordinary manner.32 Not only for Popeye "whose eyes looked like rubber knobs" (Sanctuary), Flem Snopes with eyes "the color of stagnant water," and Eula Varner with "eyes like cloudy hothouse grapes" (The Hamlet), but for virtually every person Faulkner presents, the earliest description brings a reference to the eyes which symbolizes the character. In the first description by General Compson we hear these ominous words on Sutpen: "a man with a big frame but gaunt now almost to emaciation, with a short reddish beard which resembled a disguise and above which his pale eyes had a quality at once visionary and alert, ruthless and reposed." Here the ambiguity tilts towards the sinister, as does the suggestion just above this sentence (also p. 32) that he was "like a man who had been through some solitary furnace expericence" (hinting of the atmosphere of hell that came with Rosa's and Quentin's first comments, as noted above).
If it is ironic (especially vis-a-vis the "innocence" approach) that this demonic interpretation arises from the objective words of a Compson given to admiration of his subject, it is even more noteworthy that the next view is also from Quentin's father: "your grandfather said that
his eyes looked like pieces of a broken plate" (p. 45-fitting symbol for the Fallen One). A few lines later we learn that Sutpen's eyes were
"hard and pale and reckless and maybe contemptuous even then."
All these eye images of Compson's references were on page 19 of the manuscript, according to findings by Langford, but they were revised and extended (made more directly allegorical) and then transplanted on different pages of the final draft of the text, showing Faulkner's close concern with them.
Rosa repeats the "ruthless" image when she recalls Sutpen's appearance on returning from the Civil War: "the same face which I had last seen, only a little thinner, the same ruthless eyes ... " (p. 159).
Compared with other books by Faulkner using the viewpoint of om- niscient narrator, there are relatively few eye images in Absalom, Absalom!
Almost all are on Sutpen while the eyes of the others, mostly his tragic victims, are hardly ever described. One of the last descriptions given of Sutpen (p. 348-the eye imagery was added late we see from Langford)33 tells us what Bon, the rejected son, saw in his father's expression the last time he met him before he died as Sutpen's scapegoat:
"the rocklike face ... the pale boring eyes in which there was no flicker."
We are forced to recall the cruel Popeye and Otis (demon child of The Reivers), two other villains whose eyes never blink. Earlier we read this generalization, "the Sutpen face not approaching, not swimming up out of the gloom, but already there, rocklike and firm and antedating time and house and doom and all" (p. 136) and feel the allegorical power of an immortal and universal figure of evil.
Langford's study of the textual revsions points to one other very important move on Faulkner's part to heighten the allegorical aspect when he expanded the seminal short story to create the novel:
... m the story "vVash," which was presumably the original con- ception of the Sutpen chronicle, Sutpen's unnamed son "had been killed in action the same winter in which his wife had died." The story contains no hint that Sutpen had had another son by a first wife. In other words, the callous unconcern for Jones's grand- daughter by an old man frustrated and embittered by the loss of everything to which he had devoted his life is the only basis for presenting him as one of the "bragging and evil shadows" the truth about whom is such a revelation to J ones that "he now saw for the first time, after five years, how it was that Yankees or any other living armies had managed to whip them." In developing the story into the novel, Faulkner probed into the conditions which had made Sutpen what he was. The result was a drama of doom -the doom set in motion when Sutpen repudiated a first wife and son because they turned out to have a trace of Negro blood and thus had to be dealt with, in Sutpen's world, not as human beings to whom he was obligated but simply as instruments no longer serviceable for accomplishing his purpose.34
This resonates with Faulkner's comment at the University of Virginia that Quentin was always asking "Why?"-\Vhy the events of Sutpen's life should generate such tragedy? The possible answer is that they showed the archetypal form of an allegory on the temptation and fall of man. If we can accept the evidence that Sutpen is Satanic, we are paradoxically in a far more hopeful position than if he, and by implication each of us, is fixed irresistibly in some psychological sense as victim of "innocence" or as innocent victim of family or regional influence, of social or economic determinism, or of genes or "the glands"-to use the words of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech. Faulkner in the UniveTSity brings this message quite directly in the author's com- ments on the question whether "A Rose for Emily" is a criticism of the
North or of the South. His reply is perfect for our purpose; it was, he said, rather "a story which he thought was tragic and true, because it came out of the human heart ... the conflict of conscience with glands, with the Old Adam. It was a conflict not between the North and the South so much as between, well you might say,.God and Satan."35
In the same forum, Faulkner later makes a similar point about A Fable when he says the diabolical Old General was made in the allegorical mold of "the dark, splendid, fallen angeL ... The Old General was Satan, who had been cast out of heaven ... because God Himself feared him ... he could usurp the legend of God."36 By recognizing Sutpen as Satan, the terrible tempter, we may summarize on the "why"
of Absalom, Absalom! as making these points: (1) underneath the allegorical conflict lies a great affirmation of human freedom, (2) opening the course of human life and the meaning of history to us by a better understanding of the drama of good and evil, (3) with tangents of traditional, biblical insight that include a factor ofjelix culpa (near the heart of many great literary works in the West), and (4) showing us again that the road to renewal and salvation is open, but "narrow is the gate"-narrower in the novel than in life, we take it, for almost all the characters of Absalom, Absalom! are seen to fall. Here the allegory is brought home to us, but before we examine how the various individu- als responded to temptation, let us see how Faulkner himself interpreted the above points one time in a speech which Brooks discusses in an appendix of his latest volume. When he delivered the commencement address at his daughter's junior college, Faulkner's words stressed again the struggle which goes on with Satan in everyman's heart, as Brooks shows us:
... God, Faulkner declared, "didn't merely. believe in man, He knew man. He knew that man was competent for a soul because
he was capable of saving that soul and, with it, himself." God's further purposes will thus be brought to conclusion ... through his agents. In this enterprise of completing the world, God has found a use for even that "splendid dark incorrigible" angel, the rebellious Lucifer. Instead of simply casting Lucifer "shrieking out of the universe," God permitted him to exist so as to "remind us of our heritage of free will and decision." God uses the "poets and philosophers to remind us, out of our own recorded anguish, of our capacity for courage and endurance. But it is we ourselves,"
Faulkner exhorted his audience, "who must employ them."
... Faulkner's general position reminds me very much of John 11ilton's own somewhat eccentric version of Christianity. Like Faulkner, Milton does not have much to say about man's need for grace .... There is the same stress on man's free will, and the responsibility that free will entails. There is, also, the same stress on God's refusal to suppress the Devil or protect mankind from his assaults. The wayfaring Christian ... must not expect to be sheltered from the temptations ... of the deviI,37
Thus Brooks writes near the end of his latest book on Faulkner.
The quotations and interpretations of Faulkner's terms Lucifer and Devil are hard to reconcile with the earlier restatement he had made of his thesis on Sutpen's "innocence." In our special appreciation of the "Appendix" we are not only grateful for the critic's inclusion of new Faulkner material (that seems not quite assimilated) but also indebted for a most enlightening interpretation which brings Brooks nearer to the concept of Absalom, Absalom! as allegory of evil.
The allegorical meaning of the novel seems to be symbolically ren- dered in Sutpen's story from the moment of his "fall" at the age of fourteen, even if his early state in the mountain society was not the natural Eden or primitive paradise that some commentators have taken
it to be. Evil and bloody violence were at work there too, though economic development was at a very early stage, without greed for private property or the exploitation of labor. Nor was Sutpen's "fall"
simply his move to enter the more advanced capitalistic society.
Hundreds of others were facing the same indignity he confronted and trying to find a course to more promising social environments. After he has been insulted at the plantation door and pondered his revenge (hiding like David of old in a cave), Sutpen makes his unique Satanic decision, having "learned ... there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went and became rich, it didn't matter how" (p. 242, my italics). He proceeds without caring, without love, from step to step in ever greater evil through the rejection of his first wife in Haiti, of his first son and later all his family, the corruption of the Coldfield and Compson families, the final turning of one son to the murder of another, right down to the culminating repudiation of his last child and his own death at the hands of Wash Jones swinging the scythe of Father Time. (An ancient allegorical symbol; see the grim reaper of Jeremiah in the Old Testament.)
Throughout his career Sutpen incarnates the root sin of pride, Shakespeare's "sinne of selfe-Iove," in full reflection of Lucifer's stance.
As noted in discussion of him in another novel, The Unvanquished, "his dream was only Sutpen." That the "kelson of the creation is love,"
as Faulkner would affirm with Walt Whitman, is grossly denied by Sutpen who turns the loving capacity inward upon himself in the fatal incurvatus in se. His Jefferson community grasped this key to Sutpen's character quite accurately: "They did not think of love in connection with Sutpen. They thought of ruthlessness rather than justice and of fear rather than respect, but not of pity or love."38
Seen as an allegroy of temptation and fall, of the totally corrupting
power of self-love as Sutpen personifies it, the saddest revelation of the novel is that all those around him were not only willing to consent to but even to comply with his demonic design. (The parallel historic cases of the Germans close to Hitler and the American lawyers who executed the Nixon designs against the law reveal Faulkner's prophetic insights at this point!) In his exhaustive biography, Faulkner, Joseph Blotner says that the author always saw Sutpen in symbolic terms (p.
892) and that "all major characters were seen in relation to Sutpen during composition."39 And they all succomb to his sinful designs.
Though they noted that Sutpen treated persons as animals, from his first appearance with the slaves he used for breeding and building to his treatment of poor Milly as a mare, or worse-though they sensed his use of people as things and said as much-the "good citizens" of Jefferson were none the less willing to join his ambitious program in
hopes it would serve their own ends.
Rosa Coldfield, though she had seen her parents and sister caught in his evil schemes, was nevertheless willing to enter his mansion as his wife until he made the terms repulsive: he would marry her only when and if she first bore him a son. Confessing her cupidity later, she finally turns to speaking of herself in the third person to shield herself from the shame. In her outcry of thirty pages on the "engagement," a tirade which Brooks admires for its poetry, she begins rather objectively.
After his years at war, "Thomas Sutpen came home; someone looked up where we were preparing the garden for another year's food and saw him riding up the drive. And then one evening 1 became engaged to many him" (p. 158). From here the passionate confession builds up:
It took me just three months. (Do you mind that 1 don't say he, but J?) Yes, 1, just three months, who for twenty years had looked on him (when 1 did-had to too-look) as an ogre, some beast out of a tale to
frighten children with; who had seen his own get upon my dead sister) s body already begin to destroy one another, yet who must come to him like a whistled dog at that first opportunity, that noon when he who had been seeing me for twenty years should first raise his head and pause and look at me. Oh, I hold no briif for myself who could (and would; ay, doubtless have already) give you a thousand specious reasons good enough for women, ranging from woman's natural inconsistency to the desire (or even hope) for possible wealth, position, or even the fear of dying manless which (so they will doubtless tell you) old maids always have, or for revenge. No. I hold no briif for me. I could have gone home and I did not. (pp. 158-9) As her monologue to Quentin rises in pitch she says that now she can see the" accelerating circle's fatal curving course of his ruthless pridfJ, his lust for vain magnificence" (p. 162), but then she not only forgave him- repeated shrilly several times-but agreed to marry him till he set the impossible condition. "Rosa Coldfield, safely engaged at last and so off the town" (p. l68)-"the brute inexplicable flesh's stubborn will to live, brought her (Miss Coldfield) to accept" (p. l70)-so Rosa speaks, objectifyi~g herself to ease the telling of it. In setting forth her sense of complicity with terrifying dramatic power, she really represents all those involved in consenting to the design, including many whose acceptance of evil was more obvious and extreme. Her father, Goodhue Coldfield, had recognized the Satanic force in Sutpen but agreed to supply him an economic base from which he launched his plantation project, pyra- miding his fortune at once to Coldfield's consternation and even more later by the latter's refusal to accept his share of the ill-gotten profits of their partnership. The same father betrothed his older daughter Ellen to give the "demon" respectability, and she soon became "a thor- oughgoing Sutpen."40
Allegorically, the Compsons represent three varieties of consent
to the power of evil. The first-generation "Southern gentleman,"
General Compson, takes pride in being friendly to this fast-rising Sutpen, finding reinforcement for his own immoral designs in supporting the slave system and conducting the tragic operations of war. Quentin's father makes a more cynical response, sufficiently corrupted by the design and its aftermath to resign himself to any extreme of evil. (The results are seen clearly in The Sound and the Fury, where he is the center of a totally corrupted family life.) Quentin is at the other extreme, and though his ambiguous absorption in the Sutpen story reaches to the most complex levels (as Faulkner foresaw, he is the ideal foil to extract the "story" from memory and imagination), it may be no mistake to summarize his position as "a lost idealist." A romantic in spinning mirages, on the one hand, he is a self-centered psychological case, unable to deal vvith his own evil impulses, on the other. If his father and grandfather are each in a way willing victims of Sutpen's design, there is no doubt that the demon brings additional cause for the sin of despair that ravages Quentin's mind and drives him to suicide.
Responding to Sutpen's repudiations and prejudices, Charles Bon and his mother, Eulalia, themselves embark on a course of using others for revenge and in this sense pay their Satanic model the compliment of imitation. If they are more to be pitied than blamed-Faulkner himself said we are even to "pity Sutpen" at the point of seeing his Satanic bent-41 there is no question that they take a willfully evil course, abusing Judith and others in trying to avenge their loss. Re- venge is always wrong, as in Hamlet where scholars point to the basic evil, forcing the tragedy, as the temptation the Prince submits to: to follow the will of the ghost and take justice into his own hands. The biblical ethic is clear in condemning all acts of personal revenge, which only can lead to feuding and greater evil. "Judgment is mine, says the
Lord," and even with clear provocation one is wrong to yield to the temptation to repay evil for evil. This is brought home in the final violence of Sutpen's death which some critics feel he deliberately brought about, pressing Wash Jones to the acts that destroyed them both as well as the sixteen-year-old mother and child.
Wash Jones represents the first of three types of moral consciousness which Faulkner described in the Stein interview, when he was speaking of the "matchless allegories": what he defined as "the trinity of consciousness." These are "Knowing nothing, knowing but not caring, and knowing and caring."42 Here caring means loving, and a good number of Faulkner's people fit the third category: Ike, Dilsey, Shreve (?), Ratliff, and especially The Corporal. Faulkner himself named the Old General to the class of knowing and not caring, and we find this fits for Sutpen in the allegorical mode. Wash Jones is the poor outsider who really does not know what life is about. For over twenty years he had literally idolized Sutpen:
"if
God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like," he felt while worshipping his Colonel's image (p. 282). He supported with absolute devotion whatever evil operations the "demon" carried out. He turned against him only at the end, upon the most cruel provocation, when he felt himself and his grandchild demeaned.Sutpen's "white, accepted" children consented in varying degrees to the devilish designs of their father. Henry, tortured to the point of distraction by his father-instilled prejudice against the taint of any black "blood," kills his half-brother Bon as Sutpen's tool. Then he rejects the family completely and lives as a "ghost" for forty years.
Judith was more heroic in resisting the demonic power that oppressed her. To a degree, she first took over her father's philosophy and tempted Bon's son to follow Sutpen's footsteps in abandoning a "black
family" to pass as a white. When, however, he refused (and he- ValeryjVelery-is seen as a Christ figure by critics, though his role in the story is minor), Judith turned to serving him. She stood by these part-black kinfolk till she died, attending Bon's son in sickness. Clytie shows the most heroic endurance of all, though from birth to death she is Sutpen's "victim." Symbolically, it is she who sets fire to the mansion to mark the fall of the "design," perishing herself in the blaze that brings all to ruin. Victory over the tempter by these women and Valery affirms human freedom in the midst of most bedeviled circumstances.
Traditionally, as Fletcher shows, allegory develops in greater qu- antity and quality on themes interpreting the power of evi1.43 Paradise Lost has more appeal than Paradise Regained for every generation and in the history of literature around the world, as we see confirmed today in comic books and TV scenarios and in pop-lit of every variety as well as in the classics from Aeschylus and Jeremiah to the current best of the East and West. This is as true in Faulkner's work as in that of his great predecessors, Americans Hawthorne and Melville, and the English giants Shakespeare and Milton. All of them have brought their Satan stories before the world to eventual (if seldom early) acclaim and honor. If recognition of these allegorical victories was slow, it was nevertheless much surer than that of the allegories on the "good"
archetypes. Captain Ahab, whom many critics today compare with Satan Sutpen, has meant a great deal more to the world than Billy Budd, the model of innocent love. But all these writers would affirm that in their interpretations of archetypal evil, their allegories were trying to help men to a deeper understanding of the human situation.
In portraying evil, their hope was to encourage the change of heart by which, in true repentance and renewal, a wiser compassion might
anse.
In many contexts Faulkner has cited the same intention, and his great novels have taken the same approach. In a sense he has made an advance on the course of his great predecessors by having the story of Sutpen arise as the partial recreation of the imaginative work of Shreve, whose name suggests "shrive: to hear confessions, to give absolution."44 The genealogy Faulkner added later to Absalom, Absalom! shows that Shreve endured and prevailed (he became a successful surgeon, according to the note). The implication is that his life-and each of us will feel his or her own life-is the richer for having passed through the hell and purgatory of the story and its profound allegory of evil.
APPENDIX
In Anatomy
rif
Criticism (see note 20) Northrop Frye makes many comments on allegory that are germane to discussion of Faulkner and Absalom, Absalom! He seems (unconsciously?) to regard allegory as a poetic structure, and this is significant in light of recent extended discussions of Faulkner as fundamentally a poet (see Brooks' new book and Blotner's biography, where almost half of Volume One is on Faulkner's poetry). Frye's definition of allegory and an "allegorical scale" he cites are relevant (pp. 90-1).We have actual allegory when a poet explicitly indicates the relationship of his images to examples and precepts, and so tries to indicate how a commentary on him should proceed. A writer is being allegorical whenever it is clear that he is saying "by this I also (altos) mean that." If this seems to be done continuously, we may say, cautiously, that what he is writing "is" an allegory ....
Within the boundaries of literature we find a kind of sliding
scale, ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-
exp~icit and anti-allegorical at the other. First we meet the continuous allegories, like The Pilgrim's Progress and The Faerie Queene ... . Next come the poetic structures with a large and insistent doctrinal interest, in which the internal fictions are exampla, like the epics of l\1ilton. Then we have, in the exact center, works in which the structure of imagery, however suggestive, has an implicit relation only to events and ideas, and which includes the bulk of Shakespeare. Below this, poetic imagery begins to recede from example and precept and become increasingly ironic and para- doxical. Here the modern critic begins to feel more at home, the reason being that this type is more consistent with the modern literal view of art, the sense of the poem as withdrawn from explicit statement.
Faulkner belongs with Shakespeare at the center of this scale, the high moral consciousness of his fiction using realistic imagery and subjects; his orientation in the biblical tradition treats the "truths of the heart, the old universal truths," as he said in his Nobel Prize speech of 1950.
In his chapter on "Allegory and Symbolism" in The American Renaissance (New York: Oxford, 1940), F. O. Matthiessen shows how most modern writers follow Poe and James in rejecting allegory in favor of symbolism. But he shows "that both allegory and symbolism can arise from the same thinking" (pp. 248-9). Though the terms have been used to differentiate Melville from Hawthorne, who chided himself for "an inveterate love of allegory," Matthiessen quotes Melville at length to show that he recognized "the part-and-parcel allegorical- ness of the whole" of Moby-Dick (p. 250). The only worthy review of
Moby-Dick on its appearance (probably by George Ripley, it was "one
of the two American notices of any discernment") "saw beneath the story-as Duyckinck also had-'a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life'" (p. 251). Melville was III
agreement with Hawthorne's desire "To Personify" (p. 244) an over- arching concept, the principle we see at work for Faulkner as for Shakespeare in allegorical versions of incarnate evil.
FOOTNOTES
1. Richard Gray, The Literature if Memory: Modern Tl'riters of the American South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), p.238. Gray sees the form to be tragedy, centered on the contradictions of the South and the conflict engendered. He goes beyond many of the critics who have taken this line by defining the sharp dialectic between Rosa (abolitionist-directed on the lines of "Whittier, Lowell, and Emerson; talking in Gotbic mode) and Mr. Compson (fatalist, calling Sutpen victim of Southernness) , with the styles of respective sections mirroring the attitudes (pp. 245-7). There is only a hint that the theme may reach beyond the fall of the South, striking a universal note (p. 254).
2. The Cycle of American Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p.224.
3. Marvin K. Singleton, "Personae at Law and in Equity: The Unity ofFaulkner's Absalom, Absalom!," Papers on Language and Literature, III (Fall, 1967), pp. 354-70.
It seems ironic now, in light of all that Faulkner has himself said about allegory, that Malcolm Cow1ey should have written: "With a little cleverness, tbe whole novel might be explained as a connected and logical allegory, but this, I think, would be going far beyond the author's intentions" -this in 1944 in an essay for the" New York Times Book Review" (The Faulkner-Cowley File, London: Chatto and ''''indus, 1966, p. 13). Cowley received a letter from Faulkner on this with
"hints about his work that I confess to not having developed .... The first was that what he regarded as his essential subject was not the South or its legend, but rather the human situation ... he thought back to archetypes not in Southern legend, but in the Bible" (p. 17). These are the hints the present essay will try to pursue.
4. vValter Brylowski, Faulkner's Olympian Laugh: Myth in the Novels (Detroit: vVayne State, 1968), p. 33. Peter Swiggert, The Art of Faulkner's Novels (Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas, 1962) refers to Absalom, Absalom! having an " atmosphere of social allegory" on the" aristocratic South" (pp. 11, 14) and" Sutpen as an allegorical representative of the South's Puritan aristocracy" (p. 163), but the focus is limited to the South and the allegorical aspect not developed.
5. Dona1d J. Foran, "vVilliam Fau1kner's Absalom, Absalom!: An Exercise in Affirmation," unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 1973, p. 198.
6. WilLiam Faulkner: From JqJerson to the World (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1959), pp. 83, 95, 207, 263; on Absalom, Absalom!, see pp. 148~69.
7. William Faulkner: Towards Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven and London:
Yale, 1978), p. 300. Here Brooks reaffirms his thesis that in Absalom, Absalom!
" it is tragedy he has given us" and Sutpen is seen as " an extreme example of , American' innocence" (p. 300). See "Absalom, Absalom!: The Definition of Innocence," The Sewanee Review, LIX (Autumn, 1951), pp. 53-558, for an early statement of this influential thesis. It is extended in his chapter on the novel in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven and London:
Yale, 1963), pp. 295-324. Elsewhere in his newest book, he seems to resist allego- rical readings of Faulkner, citing the difficulty of making works of fiction from
" allegorical strnctures" and seeing this as cause of the failure of A Fable, an overtly religious allegory (pp. 234-5). In his first book he similarly rejected the idea given by many critics-and later by Faulkner himself-that we may read Sanctuary as allegory (Yoknapatawpha, pp. 397-8).
8. Ilse Dusoir Lind, "The Design and Meaning of Absalom, Absalom!, " PMLA, LXX (December, 1955), p. 910. John L. Longley,Jr. has a chapter on "Thomas Sutpen: The Tragedy of Aspiration, " in The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes (Chapel HilI: University of North Carolina, 1963, pp. 206-18). Edmond Volpe says" the design of the story follows ... Greek drama" (A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner, New York: Farrar, Strauss; 1964, p. 189). Other influential studies that treat the book as tragic in form, chiefly "as the fall ,of the homeland" South, are Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (rev. ed., New York: Random House, 1962); Michael MilIgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1966); William Van O'Connor, The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1954);
Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale, 1959); and Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisianna State University, 1964).
9. Waggoner, op. cit., p. 168.
10. Brylowski's analysis of the varied levels of myth in the novel are brilliant and illuminating at many points. He suggests, with no persuasive evidence, however, that" in the fullest Aristotelian seme ... we may look upon Sutpen as a tragic character" (op. cit., p. 34). He sees the theme, as noted above, "to be the flaw in the design of the antebellum South ... the moral failure of Negro-white relations"
(p.21). In addition to this intensive study of myth, and that of Longley cited above, other interpretations in typological form include James H. Justus, "The Epic Design of Absalom, Absalom!," TSLL, IV (Summer, 1962); James Guetti, The Limits rif Metaphor (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell, 1967-here an insightful psycho- logical analysis sees Sutpen, and the book itself, as " a kind of imaginative schizo- phrenia, " p. 96); Vincent F. Hopper, " Faulkner's Paradise Lost, " VQR, XXIII (Summer, 1947-had allegory been explicated in this early essay, our job would have been done); Maxine S. Rose, "From Genesis to Revelation: The Grand Design of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, " unpublished doctoral dissertation, Uni- versity of Alabama, 1973 (this fascinating-often infuriating-analysis sees the novel paralleling the Bible in every way, including all the stages of biblical history and all the literary forms, with Sutpen alternately seen as God, David, a demon, and the Dragon of Revelation); Edgar W. Whan, "Absalom, Absalom! as Gothic Myth," Perspective, 3 (Autumn, 1950); and Joseph Gold, William Faulkner: A Study in Humanism from Metaphor to Discourse (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1966)-the philosophical reading is troubling (Sutpen is "the amoral person who can perpetrate any evil because he is untroubled by a sense of guilt" ... he is not a " demon" but a horror for his" want of humanity" ... and-the sentence just preceding-his failure is "the failure of Southern history," p. 34-all non sequitur, it seems), but the conclusion is excellent: "moralist and artist both were part of William Faulkner, and no matter which held temporary ascendancy, the writing that emerged was always affirmative ... a vision of life that incorporates and transcends the moral diversity of its details" (p.200).
11. See James H. Justus, supra note 10.
12. Gray, op. cit., pp. 238 ff.
13. Faulkner's Revision qf "Absalom, Absalom!" (Austin: University of Texas), 1971.
14. Bry10wski, op. cit., p. 15.
IS. Ibid., p. 229.
16. Reprinted in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. F. J. Hoffman and 01ga Vickery (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1960), pp. 74-5.
17. See Appendix for review of Frye's concepts and his scale of allegorical involve- ment in major authors.
18. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The TheOiY of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell, 1964), p. 1-2.
19. Ibid., p. 164.
20. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Prince ton University, 1969), pp. 53-4, 98.
21. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1936; citations from Modern Library ed., 1951), p. 136. Subsequent references to this volume will be cited in the text.
22. William Faulkner: An IntTOduction and Interpretation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), pp. 53-60.
23. Selected Letters qf William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Elotner (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 78-9.
24. Langford, op. cit., p. 84.
25. The Reader's Encyclopedia, ed. vVilliam Rose Benet (rev. ed.; New York: Crowell, 1965), Vol. I, p. 4.
26. Faulkner in the University, ed. F. L. Gwynn and Joseph Elotner (CharlottesviIIe:
University of Virginia, 1959), p. 274. Quentin's role is well explicated in The Faraway Country (Seattle: University of Washington, 1963), where Louis D. Rubin, Jr. calls the novel" a sweeping parable of the South's own hopes and its fate, " and
pinpoints the fundamental failure of love (pp. 50-58).
27. Gwynn and Blotner, p.85.
28. Ibid., pp. 180-81.
29. Ibid., p. 272.
30. Absalom, Absalom!, pp. 8-9. The language of Faulkner's novel is much more specific in its Satanic imagery than any of the models I have mentioned except
