(To read Part 1 of this article, scroll down to yesterday's post.)
Mr. Compson's comment also serves as an apt description of the narrative enveloping Bon's letter, and signals how Faulkner's modernism substitutes epistemological uncertainty for epistolary realism. In Frankenstein, letters form faithful guides to events, as in Walton's travelogue mailed home to his sister in England. Moreover, letters furnish documented evidence, validating the oral accounts of the novel's narrators (e.g. the love letters of Felix De Lacey and Safie, which the Monster gives to Victor and Victor to Walton). Letters can also be grouped with other helpful texts in Frankenstein--the much-needed hermeneutical guides that conveniently fall into the Monster's hands, such as Victor's journal detailing the Monster's own creation story, and the found copy of Paradise Lost that helps structure the Monster's relation to, and rebellion against, Victor. But if Frankenstein facilitates the act of reading, the tantalizing Absalom frustrates it by literally withholding important pieces of text. Mr. Compson launches into a chapter-long monologue about Bon's letter before finally handing it over for Quentin's/the reader's perusal. Similarly, Mr. Compson's letter to Quentin at Harvard detailing Rosa' burial is fragmented by Faulkner's narrative, interrupted in mid-sentence at the start of Chapter 6 and not completed until the book's penultimate page. The placement of Mr. Compson's letter ("lying on an open textbook beneath the lamp") symbolizes how Sutpen/Southern history has followed Quentin north and overtaken his college studies, but this
juxtaposition also hints at the way Faulkner's narrative taunts readers by presenting a letter that is neither an "open text" nor clearly illuminated.
Faulkner even seems to mock the role that texts play in Gothic conventions when Quentin's sardonic roommate Shreve suggests that the lawyer for Bon's mother "maybe had the secret drawer in the secret safe and the secret paper in it." Such statement steers the narrative towards Northanger Abbey territory yet also drives home an important point, since Shreve here is forced to invent a series of letters rather than draw upon existing letters as evidence. This, in turn, brings me to my final comparison of the narrative dynamics of Frankenstein and Absalom. When Victor's narrative wanes along with his health, closure is provided by "Walton, in continuation." The journalistic captain serves as a diligent recorder of the events of Victor's last days and as an eyewitness to the climactic scene of the Monster brooding over Victor's corpse in the ship's cabin. Walton's ensuing conversation with the Monster not only allows the latter to confess to his criminal vengeance against Victor but also resolves any Todorovian hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations of what goes on in the novel. Victor's wild story is verified when Walton himself encounters the Monster, who proves neither demonic fiend nor figment of Victor's strained imagination. It is precisely for this reason that I disagree with Rosemary Jackson's reading of the open-ended "structural indeterminacy" of Frankenstein, a reading that points to the Monster's drifting away on his ice-raft in the novel's final lines. Let's not allow our reactions be colored by all those black-and-white
Frankenstein movies from Universal Studios; Shelley's unvanquished Monster is not set to return and wreak havoc in some sequel. Readers have no cause to doubt the Monster's stated intention of launching himself upon his own funeral pyre (however chillingly, the Monster is a man of his word in the novel, as when he vows to be with Victor on the latter's wedding night).
While Frankenstein does achieve a sense of closure/cohesiveness, the conclusion to Faulkner's novel proves much more troubling. Walton's faithful reporting in continuation of Victor's narrative contrasts sharply with the storytelling tactics of Quentin and Shreve, who can only speculate about dramatic scenes involving the Sutpens. Like Shelley, Faulkner manipulates his plot to maximize suspense (building toward a climax in which Quentin confronts the dying, bed-ridden fugitive Henry inside the Gothic ruins of the Sutpen mansion), but whereas Walton's eyewitness account ultimately dispels any mystery regarding the concluding events in the ship's cabin, Shreve's conversation with Henry is kept behind a closed door by Faulkner. The reader has no way of knowing if Henry actually confessed to murdering his half-brother and potential brother-in-law, Charles Bon, just because the latter possessed black blood. Was Bon cognizant of his mixed racial makeup? Did he consciously play the role of Frankenstein's Monster and, with vengeance in mind, insinuate himself back into the life of Thomas Sutpen and his kin? Henry could shed significant light on such matters, but Faulkner confines him to the shadows offstage. The author's deliberate indeterminacy forces readers into the same position as the novel's characters--incapable of making sense of, and taking definitive meaning from, the bloody history of the Sutpens.
When he learns that Walton has been taking down notes, the dying Victor lingers on as editor of the manuscript that will come to bear his name: he "corrected and augmented [the notes] in many places, but principally in giving the life and spirit to conversations he had with the enemy. 'Since you have preserved my narration,' said [Victor], 'I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity.'" Yet it is precisely such a mutilated narrative about Thomas Sutpen (a man fated to be mowed down by a rusty scythe) that has been passed down to readers within/of Absalom, Absalom!If Gothic tales frequently presented themselves as recorded text, then Faulkner with mordant wit countermines such notion. Rosa tells Quentin she has chosen him to hear her version of the Sutpen story in the hopes that he might chronicle it: "So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe someday you will remember this and write about it." But largely because Quentin cannot stop remembering the sordid details of the Sutpen story and its parallels with his own family situation, Quentin will commit suicide and thus never "write about it." All this, though, is not meant to negate the Gothic and to repeat the shortcoming of Cleanth Brooks's criticism that I cited at the outset. The crafted complexity of Absalom is not merely an equal and opposite reaction to a Gothic novel like Frankenstein. Faulkner's is a Gothic narrative not just because it embeds Gothic themes or relates horrific events, and it is neo-Gothic not just because it updates the medieval European setting and situates it within an American context. If, as I have been suggesting throughout this paper, Faulkner modernizes the Gothic, he simultaneously Gothicizes his modernism. The reader of Absalom is entrapped by its labyrinthine sentences, exhausted by the attempt to navigate its dark passages and unlock its secrets. Taking the Promethean theme of Shelley's novel to heart, Faulkner structures a narrative that serves as a haunting reminder: there are just some things we are not meant to know.
No comments:
Post a Comment