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wathohuc 's review for:
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
Some folks find Faulkner hard to appreciate, if not even a bit pretentious. I can see where that comes from. But I nonetheless think he is a genius. His writing style is and was revolutionary for its time, and he captures an essence of a rotting, decaying south, in all its moroseness, depression, backwardness, and spiritual sickness that is stunning. He is a master of perspective in story-telling and his often critiqued stream-of-conciousness style, for all its complexity, works. It may be hard at times to follow, but once the rhythm is discovered, it makes sense. Sometimes miraculously so.
A few comments on the actual story: one empathizes at a certain level with Thomas Sutpen and the basic ignorance that drove him to his fate. He was a bastard, to be sure; but it was almost as if his environment condemned him to his fate at the very moment when he experienced some kind of self-awareness epiphany. He just wasn't capable of understanding the swirling ideas and thoughts that accompanied his epiphany as a poor white mountain man in a time of southern slavery and racism.
There is much more to say about the various characters in the story, the incest, the miscegenation, the abuse, etc.; but I only want at this moment to just touch on one thing that stuck out to me which concerns the character of Wash Jones and the very tangential subplot surrounding him. In some ways, Wash Jones strikes me as a mirror image of Thomas Sutpen himself, only with the tables ironically turned. And Thomas Sutpen himself, whose plan or project was precisely to mitigate the circumstances for poor white men in ante-bellum slave cultures, ended up actually treating Wash Jones in the very dismissive and abusive manner in which Sutpen's treatment by the plantation owner of his own youth propelled his own epiphany and quest. It was a very subtle, but poignant irony in the story, I thought. The crux of the book gets so enmeshed in the incest and racial mixing involving Thomas Sutpen's various offspring (Henry, Judith, and Charles Bon), that this little side story with Wash Jones can get lost in the drama. But I also think it is no small thing that it is Wash Jones who is the one who kills Thomas Sutpen, when Thomas Sutpen up to that point was almost as if he were a feared, indestructable, "demon." Thomas Sutpen meets his end by the very mirror image of himself and within the very same context that made him who he became.
For anyone who thinks to tackle this Faulkner masterpiece, I have one suggestion: don't pore and ponder and labor over the grammar and the stream-of-consciousness structure. Don't try to decipher it. That will only make you more frustrated and confused. Just read it, and read it at a fairly quick pace with a fairly regular rhythm. I think if you read it this way and don't let yourself get overwhelmed or awed by what you may have been led to believe about Faulkner's "daunting" style, you will actually find that it's not all that hard after all.
A few comments on the actual story: one empathizes at a certain level with Thomas Sutpen and the basic ignorance that drove him to his fate. He was a bastard, to be sure; but it was almost as if his environment condemned him to his fate at the very moment when he experienced some kind of self-awareness epiphany. He just wasn't capable of understanding the swirling ideas and thoughts that accompanied his epiphany as a poor white mountain man in a time of southern slavery and racism.
There is much more to say about the various characters in the story, the incest, the miscegenation, the abuse, etc.; but I only want at this moment to just touch on one thing that stuck out to me which concerns the character of Wash Jones and the very tangential subplot surrounding him. In some ways, Wash Jones strikes me as a mirror image of Thomas Sutpen himself, only with the tables ironically turned. And Thomas Sutpen himself, whose plan or project was precisely to mitigate the circumstances for poor white men in ante-bellum slave cultures, ended up actually treating Wash Jones in the very dismissive and abusive manner in which Sutpen's treatment by the plantation owner of his own youth propelled his own epiphany and quest. It was a very subtle, but poignant irony in the story, I thought. The crux of the book gets so enmeshed in the incest and racial mixing involving Thomas Sutpen's various offspring (Henry, Judith, and Charles Bon), that this little side story with Wash Jones can get lost in the drama. But I also think it is no small thing that it is Wash Jones who is the one who kills Thomas Sutpen, when Thomas Sutpen up to that point was almost as if he were a feared, indestructable, "demon." Thomas Sutpen meets his end by the very mirror image of himself and within the very same context that made him who he became.
For anyone who thinks to tackle this Faulkner masterpiece, I have one suggestion: don't pore and ponder and labor over the grammar and the stream-of-consciousness structure. Don't try to decipher it. That will only make you more frustrated and confused. Just read it, and read it at a fairly quick pace with a fairly regular rhythm. I think if you read it this way and don't let yourself get overwhelmed or awed by what you may have been led to believe about Faulkner's "daunting" style, you will actually find that it's not all that hard after all.