ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

Introductory

Although published as early as 1936, Absalom, Absalom! has acquired the reputation of being one of Faulkner’s finest works, and there have been critics who regard it as his single greatest one. It is not only one more large piece in the overall mosaic that constitutes the Yoknapatawpha saga, but both in its subject matter and in its mode of narration, it displays the essence of Faulkner literary art at its peak. Faulkner was to write a great many more books and short stories during the remainder of his life (see the annotated Faulkner bibliography at the end of this syllabus for the listing of titles), but it is generally agreed that none of them surpassed the virtuoso triumphs of this one.

Since you have already read three volumes of Faulkner, you will not be surprised to learn that the subject matter of this book is not entirely dissimilar, for it recounts the legend of another Yoknapatawpha family, this one going as far back as its founder, a Thomas Sutpen who, born in 1807, comes to Yoknapatawpha in 1833. As you would expect, too, there will be episodes about plantation life before the Civil War, about the relationships between blacks and whites, and about Sutpen’s descendants down into the 20^th century. Unlike the families of the old Jeffersons landed "aristocracy," however, Sutpen is another type entirely - an ambitious nouveau riche who appears suddenly and plans to launch his family, his dynasty, on a massive scale all at once with the hundred miles of land he acquires; "Sutpen’s Hundred," and a huge plantation mansion designed by a French architect he had brought along with him.

But the novel is not to be read as historical fiction, in the usual sense of that term. For Faulkner’s interest, as you know, is not in the past itself but rather in the "presentness of the past," that is, the way in which the past continues to exert profound and pervasive impact on the present.

Moreover, you will discover, it is not a direct account of Thomas Sutpen and his family that the novel gives you so much as it is the perceptions of that account as pieced together by the narrators in the present time of the novel. Thus we have immediately not one but at least two strands: what narrators learn, believe, or even guess about Sutpen - together with the impressions made on them of their gradual discoveries. Characteristically, therefore, the Sutpen story is told several times, leaving the "true" story in doubt for a long stretch of the book. Moreover, information is withheld, only gradually and partially revealed, interpreted and re-interpreted from varying perspectives. Of the several narrators in the novel, only one (Miss Rosa) ever actually knew Thomas Sutpen, the others having been born long after he died.

The narrative, consequently, moves backward and forward in time, adding occasionally to the reader’s mystification, and long stretches are told in dialogue between two of the narrators who frequently must guess because they do not know what events might actually have taken place. These two narrators you have met before in The Sound and the Fury: Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve (full name Shrevlin McCannon).

Finally, it must be pointed out, Faulkner’s prose style in many pages of this novel displays him at his most baroque (if that term may be applied here): elaborately extended sentences; the piling up of words, phrases, and images (pushing the resources of language to the limit); disregard for the conventions of punctuation (note in the opening sentence: "the long still hot weary dead September afternoon"); the use of three, four, or five adjectives, adverbs, or verb side by side, rather than one. If the predominant Hemingway style is lean, pared, economical, succinct, then the pre-dominant Faulkner style - at least in the novel - is flamboyant, rich, decorative, embellished. The effect is sometimes that of hallucinated language, sometimes that of intensely wrought poetry - both adding to the richness of texture and sensory impressions. Needless to say, the novel is not one for "speed reading," but if you will read slowly, letting yourself come under the spell of Faulkner’s style here, you will have an unusually rich experience.

There is explicit help this time from the author himself. For the Modern Library reprint of Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner provided both a chronology and a genealogy, which have been included in subsequent editions. They are included in the text assigned for this course (as is Faulkner’s hand-drawn map of Yoknapatawpha County). You will want to consult both chronology and genealogy - perhaps while reading the novel or, if you want to maintain the element of suspense, after you have finished.

Note: The title, Absalom, Absalom! alludes to the Biblical story of King David and one of his sons. When David learns what his own deeds have resulted in, he says, "O Absalom, my son, my son... would God I had died for thee O Absalom, my son, my son." Thomas Sutpen, as you will see, reacts very differently to the fate of his son.

GUIDE TO READING: Comments and Suggested Study Questions

The questions included are intended only as an aid to your understanding. Do NOT send in your answers.

Chapter I.

1. Rosa Coldfield is telling her story to Quentin Compson this September afternoon in 1909 because, she says, "maybe you will enter the literary profession... and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it" (pp. 9-10). Actually, he never does, but as you will see in later chapters when he is at Harvard, he will indeed talk about it, and at great length.
2. Note how, as Miss Coldfield summons up the events of the past, Sutpen is visualized through her as "man-horse-demon" (p. 8), as "fiend, blackguard and devil" (p. 15), as "ogre or djinn" (p. 23) who "abrupted" from nowhere. Because of him, "God let us lose the War" (p. 11) in order to purge the land of this "demon" and his lineage. A question to keep in mind throughout Miss Coldfield’s narratives is, how should you assess her story? Is she a totally reliable narrator?
3. Note that the italicized passage on p. 9 gives the first brief synopsis of the Sutpen story. Note also that Quentin, as he tells his father (pp. 11-12) already knew some of it (as everyone in Jefferson did) and to his question of why she wants Quentin present, Mr. Compson explains that undoubtedly she will want Quentin to come back with the buggy and go somewhere with her that evening to find, he suggests, "the skeleton (if it be a skeleton) still in the closet" (p. 13).
4. Note that Miss Coldfield’s direct narration to Quentin begins on p. 14 and runs to the end of the chapter: Sutpen’s appearance in 1833, his land and house, his marriage to Ellen (Rosa’s older sister), the children, Judith and Henry, the wild rides to church, Sutpen’s boxing matches with his Negro slaves. All of this is interspersed with Miss Coldfield’s references to events that happened later. Note particularly the passage at the bottom of p. 18 referring to the death of her sister Ellen and what happened to Judith and Henry, ending with the sentence: "I saw that man return - the evil’s source and head which had outlasted all its victims who had created two children not only to destroy one another and his own line, but my line as well, yet I agreed to marry him." is it clear that this summary merely points to much that is left to explain?

Chapter II.

1. Note that it is twilight of the same day, Quentin and his father sitting on the gallery (verandah) until it is time for Quentin to go back to Miss Coldfield’s.
2. The narrative from p. 31 to p. 43 shifts to the omniscient point of view, recounting what the town of Jefferson knew about Sutpen. Contrast this version of the events from 1833 onward for a few years with that given to Quentin by Miss Coldfield in Chapter I.
3. Note that it took two years for Sutpen to build his house out there twelve miles from town. Note the details of the magnificence of the house but that for the next three years it was unpainted and unfurnished, so that Sutpen "lived in the Spartan shell of the largest edifice in the county" (p. 39).
4. Note (pp. 42-43) that Sutpen’s quest for a wife is directed to the least likely candidate on the surface, a daughter of Mr. Coldfield - a man totally opposite to Sutpen in every way. From what you have already learned of Sutpen, can you understand why?
5. From p. 43 to the end of the chapter the narrative is picked up by Mr. Compson, who tells it to Quentin. Note that the style of his section is quite straightforward, conversational, matter of fact, in contrast to the style of Miss Coldfield’s narration. A link to the Compson family is established because General Compson (Mr. Compson’s father, Quentin’s grandfather) had assisted Sutpen on several occasions.
6. Note the attitude of the townspeople toward Sutpen: that when he arrives with the elaborate furnishings for the house, they are sure the goods were stolen and even indict him for crime (pp. 43-44); that ‘the women...had agreed never to forgive him for not having any past" (p. 52); that after the wedding, a mob throws trash at him (p. 57). Do you understand why the town resents him?

Chapter III.

1. Although this chapter continues the narrative related by Mr. Compson to Quentin, the style is different. Note that in Chapter II, Mr. Compson’s story is put in quotation marks throughout, that is, his talk is reported directly. In this chapter the quotation marks are lacking, and although he is still the narrator we get a mixture of conversational tone and a heightened, more elaborate sentence structure, sometimes reminiscent of Miss Coldfield’s narration.
2. Note that the narration of Miss Coldfield’s relationship to Sutpen, Ellen, Henry, and Judith includes many shifts in time, that strict chronological order is not followed. Do you see any reason for this?
3. Note carefully the reference on p. 61 to the fact that Sutpen fathered blacks as well as whites. His get (a rarely used word meaning offspring) included a mixed white-black daughter Clytemnestra, who is therefore half-sister (although illegitimate) to Judith. The name Clytemnestra is from Greek legend in Homer’s Iliad: wife of Agamemnon, she murders him when he returns from the Trojan Wars and is herself murdered by their son Orestes. Like L.Q.C. McCaslin in Go Down, Moses, Sutpen thus has two lines of descendants: whites and mixed white-blacks.
4. At various points in this chapter we are told that Miss Rosa is to become Sutpen’s wife after the death of Ellen. Yet we know the marriage never took place, without, as yet, knowing why. Do you see why this information is withheld? Is it because Mr. Compson doesn’t know? Is it because the explanation can only come later from Miss Rosa herself?
5. Note the strange account of what happens to Mr. Coldfield during the War and his ultimate death in the attic where he has locked himself in. A character secretly locked away in a room is a common feature of Gothic tales.
6. The friendship between Henry Sutpen and his college chum Charles Bon is described at length. Faulkner withholds until much later the full story of Charles Bon.
7. Note the change in Thomas Sutpen’s stature (p. 72): he has become ‘the biggest land-owner and cotton planter in the country," and although "he was not liked... he was accepted; he obviously had too much money now to be rejected."

Chapter IV.

1. This chapter running from p. 88 to p. 133 continues Mr. Compson’s narrative, and therefore present time in the novel is still the twilight hours before Quentin is to return to Miss Rosa’s home.
2. Note the way in which part of the Charles Bon story is revealed. No sooner have we learned that he wanted to marry Judith, than we are told Sutpen was opposed, and shortly that the body of the dead Bon is brought into the house (p. 91). Here again, Faulkner’s method reveals information gradually - the climax of an event is given before we know the reasons.
3. Note that Bon does not regard his New Orleans black liaison as a barrier to his marriage to Judith "certainly not as valid objection to marriage with a white woman - a situation in which probably all his contemporaries who could afford it were likewise involved..." (p. 92) Nor was it dissimilar (as we have already learned) from Thomas Sutpen’s own liaison with his slave woman, which resulted in the birth of Clytie. What, then, is the reason for Thomas Sutpen’s adamant objection to the marriage of Judith and Bon? And why is it (as we are told on p. 99) that "Henry had to kill Bon to keep them from marrying"?
4. Note throughout this chapter how much knowledge Mr. Compson does not actually possess. When he describes encounters between Henry and Bon in great detail, he often says, "I imagine that," or "It is not hard to imagine." Is it clear that he is constructing (or reconstructing) a possible or probable series of events, but that much of what he relates to Quentin is guesswork?
5. Why do you suppose that what Henry evidently objects to so strongly is not Bon’s having a part-black mistress and a child by her, but Bon’s marrying the woman? Is it the potential bigamy, then, that motivates Henry to kill Bon?
6. Note the remarkably worded letter Bon had sent Judith, the letter Mr. Compson reads to Quentin (pp. 129-132). Did Bon, indeed, as Mr. Compson thinks, love Judith? Note that Mr. Compson’s narration is interrupted briefly as we are given (in parentheses, pp. 132-133), Quentin’s imaginative depiction of the scene in which Henry murders Bon.
7. Note the final sentences of the chapter (p. 133), Wash Jones’ telling Miss Rosa that Henry has killed Bon. We have known earlier that this had happened. Do you see why Faulkner’s method of narration requires him to trace out fully the background of the close relationship between Henry and Bon, even though we had been told earlier that the relationship ended in murder?

Chapter V.

1. Italicized passages in the novel represent what characters are thinking, not what is actually being said. This whole chapter (except for a brief part of p. 172) is printed in italics. Consequently, we have here Quentin’s recollection in thought of what Miss Rosa had told him, as contrasted with what she says directly to him in Chapter I.
2. Note carefully the time elements in the chapter. Much of it concerns events at the end of the War (1865) subsequent to the death of Bon and the disappearance of Henry. There are also flashbacks to Rosa at the age of fourteen (1861), followed with events during the war years on up to Thomas Sutpen’s return.
3. Sutpen’s return confronts him with a ruined plantation, his son Henry dead, and his grand design therefore destroyed. Given what you know about him to date, do you understand why he aims to create what he had lost - to rebuild his fortune and to acquire a new wife who will give him sons to carry on the lineage to re-establishing the dynasty? Note the passage on p. 160: "We were right about what he would intend to do: that he would not even pause for breath before undertaking to restore his house and plantation, as near as possible to what it had been."
4. Do you understand why Rosa accepts the engagement with Sutpen? If it is not for love, as she says, what is her motivation?
5. What are the "bold blank naked and outrageous words" (p. 167 and again p. 168) Sutpen speaks to Rosa, as a result of which she leaves immediately and goes back home? When do you actually find out? Not until you know will you understand the rage that has remained with her for more than forty years.
6. The reference (bottom p. 171, top p. 172) to Sutpen’s death is so oblique that you may miss it. Would you not expect, however, that a subsequent section of the novel will depict the death scene in detail?
7. Note that we are still awaiting the result of Quentin’s return to Rosa Coldfield’s house that evening to accompany her to the old Sutpen place. The visit is not reported in this chapter so that you have another instance of Faulkner’s withholding information until some later scene. All you know at present (see the last sentences of the chapter, p. 172) is that Rosa says to Quentin, "There’s something in that house....Something living in it. Hidden in it. it has been out there for four years, living hidden in that house." Note how this conclusion of the chapter compares to the similarly dramatic conclusion of each of the preceding chapters.

Chapter VI.

1. Note that the time is January, 1910, and the place is Harvard University, where Quentin shares a room with Shreve. This will be the "present time" for the remainder of the novel, Chapters VI through IX. The rest of Sutpen’s story, consequently, must come through the dialogue between Quentin and Shreve.
2. Shreve asks Quentin, "Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all" (p. 174). Do you see that the rest of the novel will constitute a kind of answer to these questions, hence enlarging the meaning for Quentin (and Shreve) not only of the Sutpen story itself but this story’s representing symbolically the larger history of the entire South?
3. Note that you learn at last what Sutpen’s "outrageous" words were to Rosa, that "they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry" (p. 177). Can you now begin to understand the depths of Rosa’s hatred for that "demon"?
4. Consider that in this chapter you are getting Shreve’s imaginative reconstruction of what had happened (most of the time all that Quentin says is, "Yes"), so that you have a narrative removed three phases in distance and time from the actual events: what Shreve interprets and projects, based on what Quentin had learned, and Quentin’s knowledge, in turn, derived in part from Rosa Coldfield’s account, from Mr. Compson’s account, and from what the town of Jefferson knew or thought it knew. We do not know how much of the imaginative reconstruction by some of the narrators is "true."
5. In addition to repeating information you had previously been given, consider how much new illumination you derive from Shreve’s reconstruction: how Sutpen and Judith ran a store after the War to earn money; another account of Sutpen’s death; Judith’s sending for a woman, the octoroon who had been Charles Bon’s wife and her son, Charles Etienne De Saint Valery Bon, the son living at first with Judith and then with Clytie afterward. Note, however, that you still have not been given an explanation of who Rosa Coldfield believes was still living at the Sutpen house in 1909.

Chapter VII.

1. We have known nothing about Sutpen prior to his appearance ("abrupting," as Rosa put it) in Jefferson in 1833, and most of what we know about him since then has been colored by Rosa’s account. Note how this chapter relates what Sutpen’s past had been as he had related it to Quentin’s grandfather, and as Quentin and Shreve now reconstruct it.
2. Note the crucial importance of the revelation (pp. 229-332) that Sutpen as a boy had been turned away from the front entrance to a great house by a Negro servant who told him "never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back" (p. 232). Is it clear, then, when Sutpen runs away from home it is because he has decided "to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what the man did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with" (p. 238). In short, is it clear that Sutpen’s model for his life is the landed gentry of the Antebellum South (with all that this implies)?
3. Note throughout this chapter how much you learn about Sutpen which explains his behavior and clears up what has been mysterious in the past: Do you understand why Sutpen felt compelled to "put aside" the woman he had married in the West Indies? Do you find it credible that he said he felt conscience stricken about the wife and the son she had borne him, the son who would carry on his lineage? But that he thinks money payments will suffice? Do you understand now why Coldfield was obligated to Sutpen and therefore willingly gave his daughter Ellen in marriage to Sutpen? And, most important, do you understand why Sutpen could not permit Judith to marry Charles Bon?
4. Note how explicit Sutpen is to Quentin’s grandfather in stating, "You see, I had a design in my mind. Whether it was a good or a bad design is beside the point; the question is when did I make the mistake in it, what did I do or misdo in it, whom or what injure by it to the extent which this would indicate. I had a design...." (p. 263). Is it a flaw in Sutpen’s character that leads both to the grand design and to its destruction?
5. Note the circumstances that lead to Sutpen’s death and the ironical twist pointed out by Quentin at the end of the chapter: "It wasn’t a son. It was a girl."

Chapter VIII.

1. Note in this chapter how you finally get an explanation for the killing of Charles Bon by Henry, a deed known to you ever since Miss Rosa related it to Quentin in Chapter IV.
2. Compare the account in this chapter of Henry, Judith, and Charles Bon to the version furnished to Quentin by Miss Rosa earlier in the book. Do you see the differences not merely in the external "facts" but in the interpretation?
3. Note Charles’ simple wish, to be accepted as a son by his father, not even in words but in a glance: "That’s all I want. He need not even acknowledge me; I will let him understand just as quickly that he need not do that, that I do not expect that, will not be hurt by that, just as he will let me know quickly that I am his son" (p. 319). In the light of what you already know about him and learn later in the chapter, do you find his statement convincing?
4. At what point in this chapter is Henry convinced that Bon is in fact his half-brother?
5. What do you think of Bon’s suggestion to Henry: "So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear" (p. 356).
6. Consider the importance to Thomas Sutpen of what might have happened: If he permitted the marriage of his half-son Bon to his daughter Judith (unthinkable to him because Bon is part Negro, even aside from the incest that would result), the racial mixture of their offspring would be totally unacceptable in Sutpen’s grand design.

Chapter IX.

1. Note that this chapter gives us the long-withheld account of whom Rosa Coldfield and Quentin found in the old Sutpen house, as recalled by Quentin, after he and Shreve have gone to bed.
2. Although the fire destroys the old house, with Clytie and Henry Sutpen still in inside, one Sutpen descendant is still left alive, the idiot Jim Bond. How does this totally ironic conclusion of Thomas Sutpen’s grand design seem appropriate?
3. Note Shreve’s concluding remark to Quentin "Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South" (p. 378). Do you see why Shreve has drawn his conclusion from Quentin’s account of the Sutpens and Southern life? Do you accept Quentin’s answer: "I dont hate it! I dont I dont!...?
4. If you read into Quentin’s perceptions of the Sutpen story, your knowledge of Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, do you see any parallels between the two books?
5. Remind yourself that in the full sequence of Chapters VI-IX you have an account reconstructed, imagined, in the dialogue between Quentin and Shreve. Much of their account may not be accurate. Does this matter?

Concluding Comments

The richness of Absalom, Absalom! has led readers and critics to multiple interpretations. One view is to see the story of Thomas Sutpen (and Quentin sees it this way) as very much like an ancient Greek tragedy in which a man convinced of his innocence and filled with ambition sets out to create a great design for himself and his descendants but through a fatal flaw (arrogance or pride - hubris, the Greeks called it), is himself the instrument of his own downfall and the collapse of his design. Another view sees it as a Faulknerian commentary on how the lack of compassion, of love, of humanity (in Sutpen himself, in Rosa, in the Sutpen children) - all essential elements in Christianity - results in disaster. There is also the parallel to the Biblical story of King David, who causes his son Absalom to kill his other son Amman because of the incest the latter commits with his half-sister. And there are interpretations that focus primarily on the novel as a picture of the tragedy of the South, which during much of its history exploited humans through slavery and which acquiesced to the consequences of both casual miscegenation and brutal treatment of blacks by the dominant whites. In this latter view what is Thomas Sutpen but a man who imitates the pattern of the socially and economically successful and their racial views as well?

None of these interpretations contains the whole novel and perhaps there is some element of appropriateness in all of them. Finally, now that you have completed your reading, you can see how Faulkner’s techniques in the novel (the structure, the multiple narratives, the style) though difficult and demanding, to be sure, are not a mere embellishment but are integral to the meanings and the texture.

AS I LAY DYING

The Faulkner works read earlier will have prepared you to read this novel on your own. You will find Faulkner’s use of viewpoint chapters interesting; they raise the question of the unreliable narrator, the narrator who cannot be trusted either because he does not have the necessary information or because his needs and self-interest lead him to conceal the truth, even from himself.

This novel is best read by your keeping two central ideas in mind: (1) what meaning is unfolded as the novel progresses, and (2) how that meaning is achieved.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books by Faulkner

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, publisher is Random House (New York), which also later reissued most of the earlier titles.

The Marble Faun. Boston: Four Seas Co., 1924.

A collection of early poems.

Soldier’s Pay. New York: Boni and Liveright,1927.

This first novel concerns the life of a badly wounded soldier who returned from World War I.

Mosquitoes. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.

A novel derived from Faulkner’s satirical view of people he encountered in New Orleans.

Sartoris. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929.

The first novel in what was to develop into the Yoknapatawpha saga. The scene is Jefferson in the 1920’s but family memories going back to Colonel Sartoris in the Civil War play a part.

The Sound and the Fury. New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929.

Faulkner’s first major work, incorporating his rich and complex narrative manner.

As I Lay Dying. New York: Cape and Smith, 1930.

Another Yoknapatawpha novel, this time dealing with rural folk.

These Thirteen. New York, Cape and Smith, 1931.

Early stories, later reprinted in Collected Stories.

Sanctuary. New York: Cape and Smith, 1931.

A Yoknapatawpha novel of sensation and violence, deliberately written, Faulkner said, as a shocker that would sell, but the underlying elements are more serious than his comment implies.

Light in August. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932.

A major work in the Yoknapatawpha saga.

A Green Bough. New York: Smith and Haas, 1933.

Another collection of Faulkner’s poems.

Doctor Martino and Other Stories. New York: Smith and Haas, 1934.

Another group of short stories. Later reprinted in Collected Stories.

Pylon. New York: Smith and Haas, 1935.

A novel about barnstorming aviators, growing out of Faulkner’s interest in flying. Not part of the Yoknapatawpha series.

Absalom, Absalom! 1936

A complex retelling of the story of the Sutpens’ Yoknapatawpha from early in the 19^th Century to the end of the dynasty.

The Unvanquished, 1938

A collection of interrelated short stories set in the period of the Civil War and shortly after. Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, they are stylistically much simpler than much of Faulkner’s fiction. Includes many Yoknapatawpha characters who figure in other books.

The Wild Palms, 1939

Two separate novellas, printed in alternating chapters: one dealing with a convict and a Mississippi flood (sometimes published separately as The Old man (i.e., Old Man River); the other with an unhappy marriage.

The Hamlet, 1940

Faulkner’s first novel about members of Snopes family in Yoknapatawpha County, in part adapted from some earlier short stories. The Snopes are "poor white trash" who gradually invade the countryside around Jefferson.

Go Down, Moses, 1942

A collection of Yoknapatawpha short stories originally printed in magazines. Several deal with the relation of blacks and whites. The masterpiece in this volume in "The Bear."

Intruder in the Dust, 1948

Explores the evil of segregation and racial intolerance through the device of a crime detection story in which a 16-year-old boy and his uncle free an innocent black man who has been charged with murder. A highly popular novel (and later, a movie).

Knight’s Gambit, 1949

A collection of commercially successful short stories originally published in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. The central figure is Gavin Stevens, a Jefferson attorney, who also appears in Intruder in the Dust.

Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1950

Brings together most of Faulkner’s serious short fiction written during the previous decades, in contrast to the collection in Knight’s Gambit.

Requiem for a Nun, 1951

Revives the character Temple Drake from Sanctuary in a three-act play with intervening passages of narration.

A Fable, 1954

Employs the battlefields of World War I and a mysterious Corporal to retell the events of the Passion Week of Christ.

Big Woods, 1955

A collection of short stories, mostly about hunting, which Faulkner had written earlier.

The Town, 1957

This second novel in what was to become the trilogy of the Snopes family depicts how the Snopeses swarm into Jefferson and begin to displace the old families in positions of power.

The Mansion, 1959

The final volume in the Snopes trilogy.

The Reivers, 1962

Faulkner’s last novel, a comic romp in which he revives the character of Boon Hogganbeck from "The Bear," Miss Reba (the bordello madam from Sanctuary), and others.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Note: The bibliography is enormous and still growing. Following is a highly selective listing of a dozen books you may find useful for background information or for interpretive comments.

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974.

A massive compilation of information, including almost 1900 pages of text and more than 200 pages of notes. All the facts you could possibly want - and perhaps more than you would ever need.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.

Critical studies of the man and the fiction.

Cowley, Malcolm. The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962. New York: Viking Press, 1966.

Valuable insights clarifying Faulkner’s literary purposes emerge from this record of the correspondence between the writer and one of his most sympathetic critics.

Gwynn, Frederick., and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959.

Valuable for Faulkner’s own commentary on his work. Edited from tape recordings made in his lecture-conferences with students..

Hoffman, Frederick J. William Faulkner. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961.

A compact (134-page) introduction to Faulkner and his work. Now somewhat out of date, but still valuable for interpretive comments on many of the books

_____________and Olga W. Vickery, eds. William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960; revised ed. 1966.

Excellent collection of critical essays, providing a survey of viewpoints and critical approaches through the period covered.

Jelliffe, Robert A., ed. Faulkner at Nagano. Tokyo: Kenkysuha Ltd., 1956.

Transcriptions of Faulkner’s conferences with Japanese students and his responses to their questions about his work, his intentions, his methods. Later reprinted in Lion in the Garden, see Meriwether entry below.

Leary, Lewis. William Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha County. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973.

A compact (214-page) introduction to the life and the works, written for the general reader. Interpretations are fairly representative of current attitudes.

Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1966.

Intensive critical analysis of the novels and short stories.

Meriwether, James B. and Michael Millgate. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. New York: Random House, 1968.

Brings together the texts of significant interviews with Faulkner "here and abroad from the beginning of his career to its end." Also reprints the text of the Nagano seminars (see Jelliffe above).

Slatoff, William J. Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960.

Concentrates on Faulkner’s use of language, rhetorical patterns, and other elements of style.

Volpe, Edmund L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964.

Helpful interpretations of the work, the background, and the man.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT #2: THE WORKS OF WILLIAM FAULKNER

Please write a paper from 10-15 pages long dealing with all five of the Faulkner titles selected for this course. The paper should reach the instructor in Week 15 of the trimester.

In writing your paper, you may choose to limit yourself to your own insights, reflections, and comments instead of consulting critical works on the literary works. You must be sure, however, to use internal evidence - evidence from within the literary work itself - to support your views. If you should decide to use critical or biographical materials from other books, be sure to give credit to your sources by documenting them in the conventional way.

Suggested Topics

1. The Alienated Character in Faulkner
2. Point, Counterpoint in Faulkner [the use of parallels and/or contrast in Faulkner’s works, with specific and concrete references to the text. Be sure to do both of these: (1) point out the parallels and/or contrasts, and (2) tell how they function within the work]
3. Faulkner’s literary technique [how meaning is achieved through the use of the interior monologue may be a good subject for a paper here]
4. Structure and Meaning in Faulkner’s Works [how the structure of each work contributes to the meaning of that work]

Please note that in writing an analysis of a literary work, you must deal not only with what a work means but also how it achieves that meaning.

If you wish to propose a topic of your own, please consult the instructor for approval in advance.

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