The following is a blast from my past life as an academic: the text of a paper I presented at the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association held in New Orleans in the Spring of 2000.
Absalom, Frankenstein!: Faulkner's Neo-Gothic Narrative
From the quasi-epistolary method of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly and the ghost-story framing device of Henry James's The Turn of The Screw, to the collaboration of the writer-heroes in Bram Stoker's Dracula (whose assemblage of journals/diaries enables the discovery of both the vampire's "plot" and the means of defeating him), the Gothic tale has traditionally foregrounded its own genesis as a narrative and existence as text. This preoccu-
pation with form and formation, though, is not reflected by the literary criticism of such works, which typically adopts a thematic approach and focuses on the setting, atmosphere, and character types connoted by the very label "Gothic." Case in point: critics' analysis of William Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!. Making only passing reference to Absalom as "an intricately constructed and immensely complex work," Leslie Fiedler stresses the thematic elements of Faulkner's novel: [It] "seems the most deeply moving of all American Gothic fictions. In the history of that genre, Absalom, Absalom! is remarkable for having first joined to the theme of slavery and black revenge, which is the essential sociological theme of the American tale of terror, that of incest, which is its essential erotic theme." Conversely, Cleanth Brooks, who has made the most persistent and perceptive study of Absalom's narrative structure, disavows any "cheap mystery mongering" on Faulkner's part and denies that the novel represents a "terrible Gothic sequence of events." While critics have variously noted either the Gothic elements or the complex narrative structure of Absalom, I hope to demonstrate that these two facets are inextricably intertwined in Faulkner's novel. In arguing this point, I will juxtapose Absalom with an ostensible precursor text that foregrounds its own existence as a narrative: Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein.
Shelley's 1831 introduction, which elaborates on the origin of her novel, might also have provided the inspiration for Faulkner's masterpiece. According to Shelley, the impetus for Frankenstein was provided by Lord Byron's proposed ghost story contest; in turn, one can assert that Faulkner's novel is generated by the contesting stories of its narrators--the first of whom (Rosa Coldfield) actually leads her listener (Quentin Compson) to envision the ghosts of the Sutpen family in the room with them. The link forges a bit stronger when one considers Shelley's introductory summary of a ghost story that the group of vacationers at the Swiss villa read just prior to Byron's proposed contest: "There was the tale of a sinful founder of his race of his race whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise." This sounds like a proleptic synopsis of Faulkner's novel, where the ill-fated Thomas Sutpen sees his grand design (to bequeath a Southern plantation to a male heir) result in ruin and heartache.
The juxtaposition of Frankenstein and Absalom is further justified when one moves from Shelley's intro and into her novel itself. Both Victor Frankenstein and Thomas Sutpen are Gothic hero-villains leading almost parallel lives. Just as the reanimator Victor's desire to "father" a "new species" leads him into the "unhallowed damps" of German graveyards, Sutpen's desire to father a Southern dynasty lead shim into the miasmal swamps of Mississippi. The megalo-
mania and blind obsession of these figures forces both to try to create life outside the sanctified bond of heterosexual marriage--Victor in his turning away from his fiance Elizabeth Lavenza to become the sole progenitor of his Monster, Sutpen in his proposed and performed breeding experiments, respectively, with Rosa Coldfield and Milly Jones. Both fathers disgustedly disown their first-borns--Frankenstein's Monster and Charles Bon--denying them the family name and fortune. The fathers also ban any wedding banns when these scorned children return and request that Victor and Sutpen provide a female mate. Ostensibly the Monster and Bon are trying to force paternal recognition, but it's precisely the fathers' steadfast refusal to accept their sons that precipitates the fall of the House of Frankenstein/Sutpen. Such scenarios elicit Gothic motifs of family entanglement (in terms of both issues of inheritance and intimations of incest), but I must stress once again that I am less interested here in thematic parallels or intertextual allusions than in comparison of narrative structures. Or more precisely: a contrast of narrative structures. My goal here is to illustrate Faulkner's deliberate deviation from the paradigm of Shelley's Gothic novel and radical problematizing of the coherence of his own narrative.
Faulkner's vaunted modernist fragmentation of narrative order and sequence in Absalom can be viewed as a grotesque distortion of the symmetrical form of Frankenstein. Shelley's neatly-layered text moves down through Walton's, Victor's, and the Monster's respective testimonies and then back out again. If the story of Frankenstein and his Monster begins mysteriously and in media res as the two figures are glimpsed from Walton's ship in the Arctic, Shelley's tripartite narrative proceeds to put its plot in order, by establishing the circumstances/sequence of events that led up to that point and then returning to that inciting moment at novel's end. By contrast, Faulkner's figurative house of fiction is not so squarely framed. The novel's recourse to past events does not arrange a smooth timeline of the Sutpen story and reveals its retrospective narrators as terminally plagued by the effort to make sense of Southern history. In Absalom, the past does not serve simply to motivate and elucidate the present but rather to impinge hauntingly upon it, as figured by the central consciousness of Quentin Compson: possessively "peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts." Almost symptomatically, there is a continuous displacement in Absalom of a seemingly present moment that proves to have already been engulfed by the past. While Frankenstein returns to the present moment of its frame story at novel's end, Absalom does not return to its origin point of Rosa's September 1909 conversation with Quentin in her Mississippi home but instead skips ahead to Harvard dorm room in January 1910 (Rosa, the reader learns, is now a buried corpse; incidentally, one could argue that Quentin himself has already passed away in the minds of Faulkner's readers, by virtue of the June 1910 suicide recounted in the previously published novel The Sound and the Fury).
Faulkner's disjointed narrative lacks not just the symmetry but the simple disclosure of Shelley's novel, in which Frankenstein and his Monster both step forward to offer first-person accounts of their history. But in Absalom Thomas Sutpen and Charles Bon are presented not as individual speakers but as ghostly memories. Their histories are obscured by over four decades of darkness and distance and are mediated by a host of narrators (Rosa, Quentin, Mr. Compson) who prove unreliable due to personal bias or to incomplete information leading to mere speculation. Besides Rosa's obsessive testimony, readers and exegetes of the Sutpen story have only hearsay, rumor, and scraps of physical evidence to work with. One such scrap of paper is central to the detective work in Absalom yet also distinguishes Faulkner's novel from Shelley's in terms of Gothic textuality. If Frankenstein is a narrative embedded in a letter, Absalom is a narrative enveloping a letter (whose content/meaning cannot be properly deciphered). I refer, of course, to Charles Bon's letter to Judith Sutpen during his tour with the Confederate army, a letter subsequently handed over to Quentin's grandmother and passed down through the generations of the Compson family. "Incurably pessimistic, without date or salutation or signature," the letter is of imprecise origin and unclear motivation. Is it a love letter providing evidence of Bon's relationship with Judith? The letter's vague message that "we have waited long enough" leads the reader to ask, For what? One can assume here that Bon is making the marriage proposal that leads the Sutpen men to strike him down preemptively, but the assumption must remain just that. Rather than forming the vital clue or code for deciphering the bloody events of the Sutpen story, the letter, in the words of Mr. Compson, "just does not explain."
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Venture back to the Macabre Republic tomorrow for the conclusion of this article.
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