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Sutpen's Designs: Masculine Reproduction and the Unmaking of the

Self-Made Man in "Absalom, Absalom!"

J. CHRISTOPHER CUNNINGHAM

The Mississippi Quarterly. 49(3):563-589

MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY, 1996.

1996

research-article

English

0026637X

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26475655

Copyright 1996 Mississippi State University

edsjsr.26475655

JSTOR Journals

SUTPEN'S DESIGNS: MASCULINE REPRODUCTION AND THE UNMAKING OF THE SELF-

MADE MAN IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

[T]he Archimedean paradox is . . . the paradox of the self-made man The problem i', mechanics is the

appropriate form of the making of men in machine culture, the form of virgin birth proper to that culture....

This is what sex in machine culture looks like.

--Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines(n1)

Breeding, however, when applied to humans, is a term that tends to be used by people who are not

themselves so nice. .

--Walter Benn Michaels, "The Souls of White Folk"(n2)

THE NAME OF ABSALOM, ABSALOM! NOT-SO-NICE SELF-MADE MAN, Thomas Sutpen, comes to us

from the Greek Thomas, this latter a rendering of the Hebrew word for "twin," t'om. Such duplicity resonates

with the twinned exclamation of the novel's title, and indeed gives access to the obsessive concern with

reproduction and repetition found throughout the text. All of which would be little more than a New Critical

non sequitur but for the insistence of recent critics like Mark Seltzer and Walter Benn Michaels that we pay

attention to such provocative wordplay. Indeed, in his reading of American naturalism, Seltzer has

articulated an entire network of cultural anxieties and imagined negotiations surrounding the slippery and

multivalent notion of reproduction. Counterpoised to a feminine, bodily logic of creation, Seltzer identifies a

masculine "autonomous and masturbatory economy of production" (p. 31), one that finds most perfect

expression in the paradoxical self-creation of the self-made man (p. 171). On the other hand, writing on the

cultural and biological reproduction of race, Walter Benn Michaels suggests that by the 1920s the "class-

passing" of a self-made man like James Gatz/Jay Gatsby represents a dangerous, transgressive force in

conflict with an increasingly virile ideology of American class and racial purity (pp. 195-196). Through a

reading of Faulkner's novel of self-production and -reproduction, I extend both Seltzer's and Michaels's

accounts of "the paradox of the self-made man," arguing that America continued to be obsessed with the

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"appropriate" forms of men-making. A site of intense cultural conflict, not only does the self-made man give

us entry into the broader problems of reproduction and "breeding," but "he" comes to represent competing

and, for Sutpen at least, violently incoherent ideologies of what it means to be American.

The Self-Made Man

Twins generate a kind of representational or reproductive conundrum: there is no answer to the question of

which one of the two comes first, of which twin is the original. Each twin forever indicates its double in a

paradoxical and infinite circularity of signification: they are both, of course, originals--they are produced from

the same union of egg and sperm, their genetic material is unique--and yet, simultaneously, they are both

forever "copies" of each other. Original and reproduction in one (or two, as it were), twins offer us a means

of access, an analogical entry to the set of issues and problems generated by the self-made man. Twins--to

bring this etymological trajectory full circle--suggest a tentative way of thinking, specifically, about Faulkner's

self-made man, the "twin" of Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen, and, ultimately, a way of thinking about

the multiple logics of reproduction that he and the text (re)produce.

There are two Thomas Sutpens--he is, as it were, twins. The first is precisely that: the first, the origin, the

original. This is the Sutpen who "abrupt[s]" "out of a quiet thunderclap,"(n3) who arrives in Jefferson on

horseback, "man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air" (p. 35). This is the

Sutpen "who came out of nowhere" (p. 5) "acquired his land no one knew how and built his house, his

mansion, apparently out of nothing" (p. 9), who, a veritable Jehovah, decrees his plantation into existence,

"creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's hundred like the oldentime Be Light" (p. 5). This Sutpen,

this unmovable prime-mover, emerges complete and whole from out of the Mississippi swamp and creates

an estate and dynasty through the pure force of his willing it to be so.

The "second" Thomas Sutpen--the first one's twin, as it were--is understood (even if by the very same

narrators) in very different terms. This latter Sutpen is precisely not the Sutpen who comes from nowhere,

who creates from nothing the most impressive something in the county. Or perhaps we might say the

"nothing" and "nowhere," for this Sutpen, are indeed something and somewhere: this Sutpen's origin, while

absent, is very much at issue, very much present. For if the "first" Sutpen is the first term in a series (the

origin [al]), this latter Sutpen is a later term in a series whose previous terms are quite conspicuously

absent. This Sutpen "came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before,

knew for certain was his own anymore than the horse was his own or even the pistols" (p. 13), a Thomas

Sutpen whose origin is a matter for question and speculation, and whose past (though unknown) might give

him reason to "[seek] some place to hide himself' (p. 13). This Sutpen does not create a mansion out of

nothing but rather creates one out of resources that are invisible, absent, elsewhere. For this Sutpen, the

elsewhere, absence, and invisibility of his previous existence are not only topics of conversation but,

furthermore, a source of dismay and distrust in the community into which he intrudes himself.

These are the two Thomas Sutpens, the "Sutpen twins." And just as twins continuously circulate the

questions of which is the original and which is the copy, so too are questions about Sutpen's origin and

originality continuously circulated and deferred by the text. Sutpen is simultaneously both the origin and

origin-lacking: as a self-made man, he, "so far as anyone . . . knew either had no past at all or did not dare

reveal it" (p. 14). It should be noted that this is not merely an epistemological issue but an ontological one

as well; the question is not just whether we can know Sutpen's past but whether he has a past at all.

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On two occasions in the novel, Thomas Sutpen is willing to reveal at least some of his history to Quentin's

grandfather. While his narratives (separated in their telling by some twenty years), when put together,

resolve much of the mystery surrounding Sutpen and his origin, there nevertheless remain crucial gaps in

both what Sutpen is willing to tell--and can tell--about himself. Simultaneously pursuing two trails--the

fleeing architect's spatial one and Sutpen's temporal one--Grandfather Compson is told of Sutpen's descent

from the Appalachian mountains of (West) Virginia, his life in coastal Virginia, all leading up to the crucial

confrontation with the butler. After this point, Sutpen's narrative becomes increasingly episodic, skipping

over years of time and thousands of miles of space:

"He went to the West Indies. That's how he said it: not how he managed to find where the West Indies were

nor where ships departed from to go there, nor how he got to where the ships were and got in one nor how

he liked the sea nor about the hardships of a sailor's life and it must have been hardship indeed for him, a

boy of fourteen of fifteen who had never seen the ocean before, going to sea in 1823. he just said, `So I

went to the West Indies....'" (p. 299)

In spite of an apparent unwillingness (or inability or a deeming it unnecessary) to fill in these and other

narrative lacunae, there are nevertheless other moments when Sutpen's history defies even his own efforts

of explanation:

and I reckon Grandfather was saying Wait wait for God's sake wait' about like you are until he finally did

stop and hack up and start over again with at least some regard for cause and effect even if none for logical

sequence and continuity.... and he telling it all over and still it was not absolutely clear--the how and the why

he was there and what he was.... (p. 308)

Ignoring the question of how Sutpen's story could have "regard for cause and effect" while abusing "logical

sequence and continuity," we must recognize not only that Sutpen's past is hidden beyond the possibility of

our (and Grandfather Compson's and the town's) knowing but that this past seems to be hidden from and

confused for Sutpen himself. Indeed, in a certain, very real sense, Sutpen has neither spatial nor temporal

origin:

But that was past now, the moment when he last could have said exactly where he had been horn now

weeks and months (maybe a year, the year, since that was when he became confused about his age and

was never able to straighten it out again, so that he told Grandfather that he did not know within a year on

either side just how old he was) behind him. So he knew neither where he had come from nor where he was

nor why. (p. 283)

Finally, in spite of all that we end up knowing about him, Thomas Sutpen is both a man without a history--a

man who does not know where he came from, nor how old he is, a man who emerged complete from

nowhere- and a man who conspicuously lacks his history.

Thus, as Seltzer suggests, the self-made man has everything to do with reproduction: Sutpen, in his act of

self-creation, (re)produces himself from nothing. Likewise, self-making must be understood as a self-re-

making, and thus the issue of reproduction, understood in terms of representation, becomes crucial as well.

To anticipate, we must understand Sutpen as involved in several different kinds of reproduction: he

(re)produces himself after the confrontation with the butler; he copies, i.e., reproduces, the plantation owner

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whose front door is denied him; and he reproduces in the biological sense. Of prime importance is the

tracing of the various logics that motivate these narrative, semiotic, and biological reproductions--

reproductions that proliferate both from Sutpen and, ultimately, from the text itself.

History, Narrative, and Reproduction

Although Absalom, Absalom! is woven out of the "rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking" (pp.

378-379), out of reports, legends, hearsay, conjecture, and imagining, constructed out of "according to"s,

"he said"s, "they said"s, and "they will have told you"s, there are nevertheless four (or five) narrators whose

histories dominate and structure the text.(n4) We will turn eventually to the logic according to which these

multiple narratives get reproduced (the logic that relates them), but first we will examine the internal

historical logics that determine and order their individual production.(n5) That is, each of these narratives is

motivated by, and functions according to, a more or less consistent notion of history--of how it moves, of

why things happen as they do, of how to make sense of the raw data of historical event and personage.

Beginning with Rosa Coldfield, continuing with Mr. Compson and Thomas Sutpen, and concluding with the

Shreve/Quentin narrative, we can discover the historical paradigms that govern each of the respective

histories.

Rosa's notion of history emerges from her conservative Methodist background: the history that she

produces is ordered by a traditional, Protestant logic of good and evil, divine justice and retribution, and the

inescapable corruption of sins that are passed from generation to generation.(n6) In Rosa's narrative,

Sutpen is from the beginning, and consistently throughout, figured as a devil, a "demon," an active agent of

Manichaean evil. Emerging from the swamp, "faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard" (p. 4),

"enclosed by [his] effluvium of hell, [his] aura of unregeneration" (p. 11), Rosa's Sutpen is understood as

actively creating and orchestrating the destruction and evil which befalls their two families. When Judith

unflinchingly witnesses the fight in the stable, Rosa comments, borrowing the diction and syntax of King

James, "his own triumph had outrun him; he had builded even better in evil than even he could have hoped"

(p. 32). At the conclusion of her account of her engagement to Sutpen, and his subsequent "insult," Rosa

offers her fullest and most explicit condemnation:

[H]e was not owned by anyone or anything in this world, had never been, would never be.... Because he

was not articulated in this world. He was a walking shadow. He was the light-blinded bat-like image of his

own torment cast by the fierce demoniac lantern up from beneath the earth's crust and hence in retrograde,

reverse; from abysmal and chaotic dark to eternal and abysmal dark.... (p. 214)

Sutpen's mark of corruption, according to the historical-religious logic in play, must, like original sin, return to

afflict his offspring. "[T]he two half-ogre children" (p. 11) of the ogre Sutpen are first confronted with their

doom when Henry kills Bon: "the two of them, the two accursed children on whom the first blow of their

devil's heritage had but that moment fallen" (pp. 167-168). Likewise, Rosa attempts to understand the

events and the end her family ultimately faces in terms of the same logic of original sin. She can only

imagine what past evil was returning to haunt them:

as though there were a fatally and curse on our family and God Himself were seeing to it that it was

performed and discharged to the last drop and dreg. Yes, fatality and curse on the South and on our family

as though because some ancestor of ours had elected to establish his descent in a land primed for fatality

and already cursed with it, even if it had not rather been our family, our father's progenitors, who had

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incurred the curse long years before and had been coerced by Heaven into establishing itself in the land

and the time already cursed. (pp. 20-21)

Indeed, as this passage suggests, her family's "curse" is part of the same "fatality" that returns to destroy

the South; her family is marked by the fundamental sins of the culture and society in which it lives,

condemned according to the blind justice of an unflinching divinity.

For alongside the active evil of the "demoniac" Sutpen and the genealogical transmission of curse and

fatality, there is the over-riding logic of an omniscient deity whose justice is absolute. For Rosa, it is finally

this principle of divine retribution that gives order and meaning to the meaningless destruction of the

Sutpens, the Coldfields, and the South itself. At their first interview, Quentin guesses why Rosa "wants it

told": so that people will "know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our? men

and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and?lineage from the earth" (p.

8). Again later, in her account of Bon's murder, Rosa suggests that human beings function merely as

"instrument[s] of that justice which presides over human events [, a justice] which . . . runs smooth, less

claw than velvet: but which, by man or woman flouted, drives on like fiery steel and overrides both weakly

just and unjust strong, both vanquisher and innocent victimised, ruthless for appointed right and truth" (pp.

166-167). It is this God, this justice, that guides their fatality, that holds accountable their curse, that exacts

"Thomas Sutpen's devil's fate" (p. 167).

As Faulkner critics have long pointed out, the perspective presented by Miss Rosa is quite different from

that presented by Mr. Compson, who as "a fatalist and something of an easy cynic" (Brooks, p. 307), offers

a narrative suggestive of a starkly different historical logic. Within his telling of the stories, there is an

appreciation for, and acceptance of, paradox and inconsistency, of the inevitability of events in time, of a

senseless and recalcitrant fate. Specifically, Mr. Compson's history is informed by something like the logic of

Classical Creek tragedy.(n7) First, there is the recurrent motif of theatricality in the stories that are told by

Quentin's father: the characters are understood in terms of roles, acting out parts as if in a theatrical

production. Ellen speaks "her bright set meaningless phrases out of the part which she had written for

herself" (p. 83), playing a "role" in which she "might have risen to actual stardom" (p. 83). Likewise, Sutpen

"act[s] his role too" (pp. 86, 87), "a role of arrogant ease and leisure" (p. 87), unfortunately "unaware . . . that

while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage

manager, call him what you will--was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious

shadows and shapes of the next one" (pp. 87-88).

Furthermore, and more relevant to our purposes, Compson's history is buttressed by allusions and analogy

to--even the props of--Greek drama. Compson refers to Rosa as "Cassandra-like" (p. 72), and Sutpen,

figured repeatedly as simply a "face," becomes something "like the mask in Greek tragedy" (p. 74).

Likewise, although the name "Clytemnestra" is chosen by Sutpen himself, Compson offers something

approaching literary critical commentary in his account of Sutpen's choice:

He named Clytie as he named them all.... Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name her

Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding

augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who

must have almost taught himself to read.... (pp. 73-74)

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Compson speaks here with something like the flippancy of the critic, with an almost aesthetic sensibility with

regard to the "scenes" and the "characters" he portrays. To propose (however facetiously) that Sutpen

"intended" to name "Clytie" "Cassandra" out of a sense of "dramatic economy . . . to designate the presiding

augur of his own disaster" is to take Sutpen and his story out of the realm of history and to situate him and it

within the inevitable logic of fate and fiction.

What is perhaps most striking about Compson's narrative is his exploration and acceptance of the apparent

inconsistencies and paradoxes of his own story.(n8) Compson's is probably the closest thing in the novel to

an objective reporting of the known facts and events of the past. Each of the narratives has as its raw

material a set of events that are known to have occurred, and a "cast of characters" who are known to have

existed and to have been involved in these events. Each narrator must make certain choices about how to

explain the way the events came about and why the people acted as they did. Paradoxically, it is

Compson's narrative--the one that seems closest to the bare chronology and cast available--which seems

to make the least sense, that becomes most ensnarled in the working of an ironic and inevitable fate or

destiny. Compson is very clear about the inconsistencies in his tale: at a crucial juncture in his account of

the events involving Judith, Bon, Henry and Sutpen, he pauses to lay out the central paradoxes of his story,

indicating how nonsensical their actions seem to be (pp. 122-123), concluding, "It's just incredible. It just

does not explain" (p. 124). I would argue that it is Compson's willingness to accept the inscrutability of

history that ultimately transforms his narrative into tragedy. Where Quentin and Shreve are willing to try to

explain their characters, to give them motivations and intentions, to resolve their apparent inconsistencies

(even if this necessitates a more explicit move into "imagination" and "conjecture"), Compson's acceptance

of paradox makes his history inevitable, determined by an inescapable fate: although the people of history

did not act for reasons that are comprehensible, although the things they did run counter to our

understanding of them and their situation, we are nevertheless left with the fact of their having done these

things. If they had to do them (because we know they did), but we can't understand why, then it was

something else, a logic of tragic fate, that was acting through them.

Faulkner's text is densely allusive throughout, and the motif of theatricality functions in other places and in

other ways in the text, but it seems to me that it is within the (relatively stable) boundaries (narrative

boundaries are often uncertain and porous in this novel) of Compson's narrative, within the context of an

"objective," and thus inevitable telling of history, that allusion and theater mingle to produce a history that

approaches Classical tragedy. If characters are merely "roles," if they are "actors" in the "production" that is

their lives, then the "lines" they speak, their entries and exits, their moments of crisis and climax are

inescapable, foretold, merely and ultimately fate.

Clearly, we need to be wary with regard to the autonomy we ascribe to Thomas Sutpen's own narratives;

the form in which we receive them is mediated through several "generations" of hearsay. Nevertheless, I

would argue that the tales told to General Compson by Sutpen in the swamp and later in Compson's office,

maintain a certain "authority" and "authenticity"; that the text is willing to insist on the quality of their

transmission; and, most importantly, that these tales suggest an historical logic that is differentiable from

those operating in the other narratives.

I propose that Sutpen's history is propelled by--for lack of a better formulation--a "rationalist" or

"Enlightenment" notion of history. That is to say, Sutpen's understanding of his own past, and of the way

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history "makes sense," relies upon the self-consciousness and agency of the Cartesian, monadic subject

operating in a scientific, comprehensible and deterministic world: according to such a view, history can and

must be understood according to a rational calculus of agency and casualty.(n9) The beginning of Sutpen's

narrative recounts his family's "falling" out of the mountains; they are borne downward by a momentum that

carries them ultimately to coastal Virginia. Along this trail, Sutpen begins to learn, or "discern," something of

the differences between white and black, and "between white men and white men" (p. 282). Yet his

preliminary understanding (his "innocence") assumes that these latter differences are "just a matter of

where you were spawned and how; lucky or not lucky, and that the lucky ones would be even slower and

[other than the unlucky to take any advantage of it or credit for it, feel that it gave them anything more than

the luck" (p. 282). This cultural innocence, this understanding of a society based upon "luck," is violently

abused when Sutpen is refused the front door of the plantation owner by the butler-slave. This moment is

crucial because it produces the fragmentation of identity which constitutes Sutpen as a subject. When the

butler refuses him entry, "something in him . . . escape[s]" (p. 293). This part which leaks out turns around

and offers him a first moment of reflexivity, of seeing himself as he is seen by the Other:

something in him had escaped and . . . was looking out from within, the balloon face [of the butler] just as

the man who did not even have to wear the shoes he owned . . . looked out from whatever invisible place he

(the man) happened to be at the moment, at the boy outside the barred door in his patched garments and

splayed bare feet, looking through and beyond the boy, he himself seeing his own father and sisters and

brothers as the owner, the rich man (not the rigger) must have been seeing them all the time.... (p. 293)

In an ironic twist on the Hegelian master-slave narrative, in which the slave achieves self-consciousness

through its relationship with the master, the slave here, as figure for the absent master, fragments Sutpen's

sense of self--or more precisely, it produces in Sutpen a sense of self. This fragmentation is figured quite

literally as a multiplication of internal, conflicting selves, first as two "debaters"--"arguing with himself quietly

and calmly" (p. 292)--and then as three, as a third self listens in on the other two-- "he just lay there while

the two of them argued inside of him, speaking in orderly turn, both calm, even leaning backward to be calm

and reasonable and unrancorous . . . and he just listening, not especially interested . . . hearing the two of

them without listening" (pp. 295-296).

It is this self-consciousness (understood in some limited way as class consciousness) that is the condition

of possibility for the formulation of Sutpen's design. Once he sees himself as he is seen, and understands

the societal implications of this gaze, he can imagine a different way of being, and of being seen. The

changing of the self is contingent upon a self-conscious relationship with the self, upon the possibility that

the self might be otherwise:

If you were fixing to combat them that had the fine rifles, the first thing you would do would be to get

yourself the nearest thing to a fine rifle you could borrow or steal or make. wouldn't it? and he said Yes. `But

this sent a question of rifles. So to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do

what he did. You got to have land and riggers and a fine house to combat them with. You see?' and he said

Yes again. He left that night. (p. 297)

The novel, in a certain sense, is "merely" a playing out of the consequences of this moment of self-

consciousness, and of the design that is enabled by it: the trip to the West Indies, the marrying of Eulalia,

the repudiation of her, the conquest of Sutpen's Hundred, etc. What becomes crucial for our discussion is

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the retrospective account of this history offered by Sutpen to General Compson during the War. For this

account is an attempt by Sutpen to figure out what went wrong with his design; specifically, it is an attempt

to "discover that mistake which he believed was the sole cause of his problem" (p. 338): "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, Where did I

make the mistake in it, what did I do or mis do in it, whom or what injure by it to the extent which this would

indicate'" (p. 329). For Sutpen the "bad stuff" that happened, the almost incomprehensible coincidence that

brings Bon back to marry Judith, represents an error of calculation and planning, a missed comma in "his

formula and recipe of fact and deduction" (p. 344), a flaw in his design:

And he not calling it rettibution, no sins of the father come home to roost; not even calling it bad luck, but

just a mistake: that mistake which he could not discover himself and which he came to Grandfather, not to

excuse but just to review the tracts for an impartial (and Grandfather said he believed, a legally trained)

mind to examine and find and point out to him. Not moral retribution you see: just an old mistake in fact

which a man of courage and shrewdness . . . could still combat if he could only find out what the mistake

had been. (pp. 333-334)

Where Rosa invokes divine "retribution" for the "sins of the father," and Compson calls upon an

aestheticizing logic of tragic and paradoxical "bad luck," Sutpen insists on the essential rationality of history.

My intention to this point has been to find the central motivating logic for each of these histories. By "central"

I mean that logic that attempts to explain the failure of Sutpen's design. For Rosa, it is the work of a

ruthlessly just God. For Compson, as in the story of Oedipus, it is the inscrutable, inevitable working of fate.

For Sutpen, it is a mistake. And indeed, a great deal of Faulkner criticism has also focused on this very

issue--it was Sutpen's "innocence," his lack of "imagination," his lack of a moral sense, and so on (Brooks,

pp. 296-297; Kartiganer, p. 26; Waggoner, p. 183). What all of the latter have in common is the shared

assumption that the central enigma in the novel is Henry's murder of Bon.(n10) And, as Brooks pointed out

long ago, this is the case for Miss Rosa and for Mr. Compson before Quentin's encounter with Henry

(Brooks, pp. 437-438). Up to this point, when Bon's relation to Sutpen is revealed, what must be explained

is why Henry would kill his friend and sister's suitor. However, for Sutpen, as it must be for Quentin and

Shreve, the central historical task is quite different. For them, the project must be to make sense of the point

of greatest historical non-sense, the locus of the incomprehensible in this novel: the monstrous coincidence

that brings Bon to Sutpen and his family.(n11) This specification becomes crucial as we turn to the last of

the narratives--that of Shreve and Quentin--where it becomes less easy to divine a single, structuring

historical logic. In some sense, Quentin and Shreve end up with the most complex historical model, one that

resists the more or less reductive tags suggested for the previous histories.(n12) Thus, the specific question

we need to ask of this narrative is how it generates this unhappy reunion--how does tints history produce

such a coincidence?

The answer lies in the expansion of the "parts" of Bon's mother, and, especially, of the lawyer (the "legal

guardian" mentioned in passing by Mr. Compson [p. 90]). In this drama, two minor bit parts, two standard-

bearers, are suddenly skyrocketed into starring roles. Chapter 8 begins with Shreve and Quentin's

rehearsal, their recapitulation, of the pivotal scene between Sutpen and Henry at Christmas. In this version,

Sutpen tells Henry that Bon is his brother, and, more significantly, that "'He has known all the time that he is

yours and your sister's brothers'" (p. 369). However, Shreve insists that at this point "Bon didn't [know]" (p.

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369).(n13) Yet to get Bon there in the first place, without casting him as a bad guy, Shreve must turn to a

figure who would know about Sutpen, and who would have ill-will towards him: "the other wife" (p. 369). We

can hear Shreve improvising here, doing a narrative riff, coming across what had been but a minor motif,

recognizing its possibilities, and working it into a central narrative melody: "Listen," he ad-libs, "don't you

remember how your father said it, about how not one time did he--the old guy, the demon--ever seem to

wonder . . . how the other wife managed to find him . . ." (p. 369). Shreve continues, and, in the pages that

follow, develops this other wife, this new character with such potential, describes her raising of Bon, and her

"shaping and tempering him to be the instrument" (p. 374) of her and his revenge: "bringing him along to the

moment when she would say `He is your father. He cast you and me aside and denied you his name. Now

go'" (p. 371).

However, almost immediately, Shreve finds Bon's mother inadequate to the task before her (that is, him).

The woman he produces, "the old Sabine" (pp. 378, 379, 380), quickly becomes incapable of orchestrating

the set of events that Shreve knows need to be orchestrated. Indeed this "implacable" (p. 374) figure begins

to rot away (as so many of the women in this novel do), to "let herself go" (p. 379), absorbed only in the

sufficiency of her hating, "because she was a woman and didn't need to want or hope or expect anything,

but just to want and expect and hope" (p. 379). In her place, Shreve discovers a much more suitable and

capable villain with a much more suitable motivation: a lawyer engaged in a certain kind of financial

speculation. At the tail-end of his Eulalia riff, Shreve raises the issue of money and the access Bon had to it

while growing up, spinning off several variations on the theme, ending with: "Or maybe she was so busy

grooming him that she never thought of the money now . . . and so all to check [Bon] up about the money

would be the lawyer" (p. 375). Then, a few lines later, "Sure, that's who it would be: the lawyer, that lawyer

with his private mad female millionaire to farm" (p. 375). Shreve continues, picking up steam, "--that lawyer

who . . . had already been plowing and planting and harvesting [Bon] and the mother . . ..--that lawyer who

maybe had the secret drawer in the secret safe and the secret paper in it" (p. 375)-a piece of paper that

plotted Sutpen's trajectory, that detailed Sutpen's full "intrinsic" and "emotional" assets (p. 376).

From this point, Shreve abandons Bon's mother altogether as an historical agent, investing the full power of

explanation in the lawyer. In a certain sense, Shreve's "investment" in the lawyer is a kind of narrative

speculation (Shreve puts up narrative capital in the expectation that the lawyer will pay off by solving the

historical riddle), parallel to the lawyer's investment and speculation in Bon.(n14) If there is a structuring

logic to Shreve's historical model (at least with regard to this pivotal narrative-historical conundrum), it is

one that still relies on the notion of human agency (as did Sutpen's) but which has money (figured as

"human capital" in the form of Bon and Sutpen) as its prime motivation (as opposed to family, or class

mobility), and one whose machinations are performed by an almost invisible hand (as opposed to Sutpen's

flat-footed, anything-but-invisible conquest). Ultimately, Shreve and Quentin's history turns, not on revenge,

or family, or class, or fate, or Cod, but on the active pursuit of financial gain, on economic speculation. (It is

entirely appropriate that this logic of speculation occurs within the most speculative of the narratives. It is

also perhaps not coincidental that, written in the wake of the Crash, in the midst of the Depression, by an

author who was nostalgic for "real estate," Absalom, Absalom! ultimately situates historical blame on the

shoulders of a lawyer, at the feet of a shifty, cynical, and opportunistic logic of financial speculation.)(n15)

Indeed, according to their narrative, the lawyer (who is, actually, something closer to a personal accountant

or broker) is depicted as a Machiavellian genius, able to plot, plan, and orchestrate with a sophistication and

subtlety beyond the dreams of a brutishly obvious Sutpen. Perceiving early on the potential of Judith

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("daughter, daughter? daughter?[p. 376]), the lawyer's scheme takes shape around orchestrating the very

eventuality whose explanation the lawyer was created to produce. By sending a pliable Bon to the

University of Mississippi, where he will meet Henry (thanks to the lawyer's obsequious letter [pp. 392-394]),

Shreve and the lawyer begin to see a possibility of return on their respective investments:

1859. Two children. Say 1860, 20 years. Increase 200% times intrinsic val. yearly plus liquid assets plus

credit earned. Approx'te val. 1860,100,000. Query: bigamy threat, Yes or No. Possible No. Incest threat: :

Credible Yes and the hand going back before it put down the period, lining out the Credible writing in

Certain, underlining it. (p. 387)

The rest is, so to speak, History.

There is certainly more to Shreve and Quentin's history than the plotting of the lawyer--indeed he falls out

soon after this point in the narrative. Later, Henry and Bon become the central figures in a "chivalrous

romance,"(n16) pursuing ends and acting with motivations that are most fully explicated in this version. It is

also in this narrative that the drama of the Sutpens comes closest to historical allegory (the South's rejection

of its own multiracial genealogical and cultural heritage). However, as I argued above, the tragedy (and

Shreve and Quentin's history eventuates in the tragic as well) of the Sutpens hinges upon the occurrence of

a coincidence that taunts rational explanation. Whatever else Quentin and Shreve might say or invent, they

have to account for the return to the prodigal father: their account of this moment ultimately relies upon--

again, for lack of a better formulation--something like a cynically modern capitalist notion of history.

Each of the four narratives that make up the novel is ordered by an internal historical model, an individual

logic that motivates its particular account. However, there is an over-arching logic that ties these histories

together, that links them, that governs and allows their successive reproduction. For not just anyone is

allowed to tell stories in this novel, and not just anyone is allowed to hear them. There is a line of

succession, a narrative genealogy that traces through a series of men. What will concern us, as we

conclude this section, is the way narratives (representations--reproductions) are created or generated

(reproduced), who relates them to whom, and how they are then repeated and re-created (reproduced).

The stories that are told in the novel get passed along, and indeed create a new genealogy--one that does

not necessarily follow familial lines, and that passes directly from man to man, circumventing feminine

mediation.(n17) The oldest parts of the story trace a path that leads from Sutpen to General Compson to

Mr. Compson to Quentin, and, finally, to Shreve. I propose that this genealogical path suggests a logic of

masculine reproduction.

This reproduction--the reproduction of narrative--must be understood in at least two senses. First, it is

perhaps obvious that each of the narratives related in Absalom, Absalom! is always already a re-telling, a

re-creating of a previous version. The account that Mr. Compson offers to Quentin is a more or less reliable

reproduction of the one that was told to him by his father, which was itself a reproduction of the story told to

him by Sutpen himself. Likewise, the story Quentin tells Shreve, and the one they reproduce together are

again copies, versions, reproductions of the ones that came before. Sutpen's story (the ostensible original),

while obviously not a perfect fit with this notion of reproduction, nevertheless, as we will see, occupies an

ambiguous position: the problem of self-madeness discussed above should suggest some of the difficulties

of identifying Sutpen as a reliable source or origin--the nature and status of Sutpen's reproductions

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(narrative and otherwise) will be the central preoccupation of the next section. Thus one of the ways this

genealogy works is simply by virtue of retelling tales that have already been told.

Perhaps more interestingly, we need to understand "reproduction" here (while still keeping in mind the

signification of representation) in an almost biological sense. That is, these stories are not simply passed

on, bequeathed to succeeding "generations"; they don't exist in some abstract sense, but exist, and are

brought into existence only through, and within the context of, masculine union. It is but tautology to suggest

that the reproduction that is storytelling only occurs through intercourse: stories are not simply told, they are

told to and/or with someone.

I'm not suggesting an actual sexual union between Sutpen and General Compson, or incest between Mr.

Compson and Quentin. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of the homosocial obviates the need for such a

literalizing move.(n18) However, we should not, on the other hand, ignore the homoerotic moments in the

text. There are, for example, strong suggestions of an attraction between Bon and Henry (a homoeroticism

that is simultaneously mediated through the erotics of incest(n19)), but in the context of this discussion, the

more interesting pair is Shreve and Quentin. The text is not that subtle: there is the reference to the

"meaningless" "ritual[s]" "of college boys in secret rooms at night" (p. 146); there are the obsessive

descriptions of Shreve's "pink naked almost hairless skin" (p. 343, also pp. 271, 318); there is Shreve's

(phallic) pipe, upon which he pulls throughout the evening, at one point overturning "a scattering of white

ashes" (p. 318). Perhaps most explicit are the description of the "curious . . . way they looked at each other .

. . almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself" (p. 374), the reference to "the little

death" (p. 343), and Quentin's orgasmic "violent" and "uncontrollable" jerking after they've gone to bed (pp.

449-450). In this light, it is perhaps significant that it is between this pair--between whom the homoerotic

thematics is most explicit--that the most "creative" narrative reproduction takes place(n20): Shreve and

Quentin create new characters, explanations, events; at moments, as we have seen, Shreve is almost

spluttering with the inspiration of narrative invention. If narrative reproduction has something to do with

masculine intercourse, might it not follow that the most literal version of intercourse is the most

(re)productive?(n21)

The point ultimately is that the reproduction of narrative through masculine intercourse creates the

genealogy laid out above. The kind of masculine discursive union that allows for the narrative reproduction

that produces this narrative genealogy represents a kind of end-run around the unreliable biology that

requires both masculine and feminine principles. For the men in a text that is so distrustful of the feminine,

such a logic is the only viable, reliable option.(n22)

Before concluding this section, we need to address the place of Rosa in the framework articulated above.

Obviously, she does not easily fit into an exclusively masculine system of reproduction--as a woman, she is

a narrating anomaly. However, there are several factors which suggest that Rosa occupies a unique

position vis a vis the text, a position which would allow her a speaking position. First of all, there is the

question Rosa herself raises about her own gender and sexuality. In her account of her discovery of

sexuality, Rosa rejects traditionally feminine symbols in favor of more traditionally masculine figures: her

desire is evoked not as a flowering, or "bloom," or "leaf," but rather as a "root" (p. 179). Indeed, the

"summer of wisteria" Rosa "lived out not as a woman., a girl, but rather as the man which [she] perhaps

should have been" (pp. 178, 179). Moved by the romance of Bon and Judith, yet personally ignorant of

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love's conventional incarnations, she "became all polymath love's androgynous advocate" (p. 182).

Furthermore, when she falls in love with Bon, whose face she will never actually see, she loves him, "[b]ut

not as women love" (p. 182). Whether Rosa's desire for Bon is mediated through Judith, or her desire for

Judith has to be figured that way is left unclear: at one point, Rosa imagines saying to Judith, "'Let me sleep

with you . . . Let us lie in bed together while you tell me what love is,'" offering her precious "penny's

modicum "of love "not to him, [but] to [Judith]" (p. 185).

If Rosa's sexuality is represented as somewhat ambiguous, by the time she speaks with Quentin, such

questions are more or less moot. Childless, husbandless, Rosa is by this point entirely outside of the

conventional economy of sex, gender, and biological reproduction.(n23) A virgin at sixty-five, her femininity

is rewritten either as the "impotent and static rage" of a sexless child, or as "the rank smell of female old

flesh" (p. 4; Page, pp. 104-105)--note that "female" modifies "old," not the reverse: her flesh is more old than

female.

Indeed, it was Sutpen and his insult that took her out of this economy in the first place. Outraged by his

suggestion, she breaks the engagement, returns to town, and settles down to forty-three years of

"impotent," or rather sterile, fury. The other effect of Sutpen's words was to produce the "outraged

recapitulation" (p. 4) that Quentin was called to witness. If Sutpen's suggestion that they breed before

marrying to make sure the offspring is male is understood as a verbal rape--Rosa attests to the violent

impact of the intercourse--then, in a very real sense, his seed (his few words) bear fruit. Sutpen's rape

simultaneously obviates the possibility of biological reproduction for Rosa (she will have no man after this

moment), and impregnates her with the narrative seed that comes to term in the story she reproduces for

Quentin. Thanks to Sutpen, Rosa never gives birth to a baby--only to a narrative.

In an essay that proposes a critical reevaluation of Rosa's status in the novel, Rosemary Colem

persuasively argues that Quentin, as a narrator, is produced from the union of Rosa's and Mr. Compson's

narratives. Although as part of her argument she argues at some length (at greater length and

thoroughness than I have done here) for the ambiguity of Rosa's gender and sexual desire, Colem ends up

eliding these complexities when she unproblematically insists on positioning Rosa as "the mother of the

narrative" and "as Quentin's literary mother."(n24) In a certain sense, Rosa is the mother of the narrative

she produces; but it seems to me that it is precisely because she is not a mother, because the text

understands her as someone who cannot be a mother--because she is problematic as a "she"--that the text

allows her to speak at all. Indeed, it should be noted that, although Rosa is allowed to speak, she and her

narrative are both repeatedly mocked and dismissed by later narrators (e.g., Mr. Compson and Shreve, not

to mention generations of critics). Her unique position may allow Rosa to speak, but it does not guarantee

that she will be taken seriously within the system of masculine reproduction.(n25)

Sutpen's Designs

There are really two parts to Sutpen's design. The first part has to do with the idea of self-making that we

explored in the first section of this essay: to "combat" the system which turned him away from the front door

of the plantation owner's house, Sutpen must re-make himself. A bootstrap human being, Sutpen is plagued

(as indicated above) by the paradox of this bootstrap-pulling: self-making involves the erasure of the original

from which the new self is reproduced--Sutpen becomes the second term whose first term is absent, a copy

with no original, a simulacrum. At the same time, we need to recall Seltzer's point that the self-made man

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represents a way for men to circumvent feminine, biological reproduction. It is time now to tease the

consequences of the former point when coupled with the misogynist (or, at least, `gynophobic') impulse of

the latter.

The second part of Sutpen's design is that, as Shreve succinctly put it, "'he just wanted a grandson'" (p.

271). The accomplishment of this becomes problematic for Sutpen, because he, like the text itself, is

distrustful of the feminine and its unreliable reproductions. Sutpen repudiates his first wife because of a two-

fold "misrepresentation" (p. 328): she and her family neglected to inform him of her black blood, which

results in the child Charles Bon, who then, because of this blood, is a faulty, or mix-representation of

Sutpen. Indeed, as much as possible, Sutpen tries to avoid integrating the feminine into his design: a wife,

necessary for reproduction, is nevertheless merely "adjunctive" (p. 315) to his plan. As Sutpen so perfectly

formulated it, "I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a

family--incidentally of course, a wife" (p. 329). The ideal realization of Sutpen's design would therefore be

the duplication of the father--that is, the children as paternal reproductions.(n26) For the most part, and for

better or worse, this design of masculine reproduction succeeds.

Ironically, with the exception of Henry, Sutpen's children are understood by the text as remarkably good

copies of their father.(n27) Like Sutpen himself, Bon suddenly appears, "apparently complete, without

background or past" (p. 114), "almost phoenix-like, full-sprung from no childhood" (p. 90), and is furthermore

characterized by Sutpen's "impenetrable imperturbability" (p. 115; we will pursue the significance of

"impenetrable" Sutpen faces below). When Sutpen returns home during the War, he and Judith don't talk:

"They did not need to talk. They were too much alike" (p. 151). Likewise, when Rosa arrives after Bon's

murder, she confronts Clytie, who presents (excepting her color) yet another reproduction of "that

inscrutable . . . face, that cold implacable mindless . . . replica of his own which he had created "(p. 171;

note that it is Sutpen alone who "created" this "replica"). Even Bon's son, Sutpen's ("black") grandson, in a

passage that echoes the descriptions of both Bon and Sutpen, is described "as if he had not been human

born but instead created without agency of man or agony of woman and orphaned by no human being" (p.

245). Indeed, later, when this second Charles Bon begins to brawl, he fights "with that same fury and

implacability and physical imperviousness to pain and punishment, neither cursing nor panting, but

laughing" (p. 259); or, again, in a moment of powerful irony, Shreve describes him as a man "who had not

resented his black blood so much as he had denied the white, and this with a curious and outrageous

exaggeration . . ., almost exactly as the demon himself might have done it" (p. 259). Ironically, and tragically

for Sutpen, out of his four offspring (he generated every gender/race permutation possible: mulatto female,

white female, mulatto male, white male), Henry, the one that mattered most to Sutpen, the central figure in

the design, is the one who is the "worst copy"--indeed, he spends most of the novel "aping" Bon (p. 397)--

trying to copy the copy of his father.

As a last example of this notion of children as reproductions, I want to turn to a passage that rewards some

scrutiny, and that will take us to the final point in our discussion of reproduction and Sutpen's design. As her

first memory of her sister and the rest of the Sutpen family, Rosa recalls

a glimpse like the forefront of a tornado, of the carriage and Ellen's high white face within it and the two

replicas of his face in miniature flanking her, and on the front seat the face and teeth of the wild negro who

was driving, and he, his face exactly like the negro's save for the teeth.... (p. 24)

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We have, as before, Henry end Judith figured as "replicas" (the only time in the novel Henry will be

characterized as such)-but it's more interesting, more curious than simply that: they are "replicas of his

face." This is such an odd formulation because "his face" has no antecedent: Sutpen is literally nowhere to

be seen; Sutpen's children are, like Sutpen himself, copies of an absent original. Then: "on the front seat

the face and teeth of the wild negro who was driving" (a strange image in itself: it is the face and teeth that

occupy the seat, not the "wild negro"), "and he"--we assume, as the obvious antecedent for this "he," the

"wild negro"--"his face"-- (assumedly) still the face of the "wild negro" just mentioned--"exactly like the

negro's save for the teeth." The last minute arrival of this "like" immediately forces us to reevaluate our

assignment of antecedents: "he" and "his face" must refer to Sutpen. Although he is apparently in the

carriage with his family and driver, we only "see" him through the mediation of his replication and

resemblance. As if in a Hall of Mirrors, the "actual" Sutpen is invisible, deferred by a series of reflections,

erased by an endless circle of representation: Sutpen looks like the children and the driver, who look like

Sutpen, who looks like . . ., and so on. Indeed, the syntactic logic of the sentence itself all but erases him

from existence: the "he" and "his" which mark his place are understood to do so only in retrospect--we don't

know that we have seen him until after the fact--Sutpen comes into focus only as a kind of after-image in the

peripheral vision of syntactic closure. The scene leaves us with two children and a slave who are described

as copies of something that has been erased, copies of a face which is, although physically present,

completely absent.

I would suggest that this representational paradox is the logical result of the reproduction of the self-made

man. When Sutpen, as a self-made man, as a human simulacrum, reproduces himself in his children

(according to an untrusting masculine principle of reproduction), he simply generates copies of a copy. The

above reading begins to indicate the disturbing and paradoxical implications of such a reproductive

equation.

Like succeeding "generations" of a photocopy or video-recording, in which the original image recedes into

an ever-more profound obscurity or fades toward palled blankness, Sutpen and his copies ultimately tend

toward illegibility. Sutpen himself is principally imagined in one of two ways: he is described either as

shadowy/insubstantial or as inscrutable/impenetrable. Likewise and unsurprisingly, the "good" reproductions

of Sutpen rehearse these same characterizations: Bon is "shadowy, almost substanceless" (p. 114),

"impenetrable" (p. 115), "impenetrable and shadowy ... a myth, a phantom" (p. 128), wears an "expression .

. . you might call smiling except it was not that but just something you couldn't see through or past" (pp. 384,

389); Judith's face is "impenetrable" (p. 150), "impenetrable, absolutely serene" (p. 157), "impenetrable, . . .

calm, . . . absolutely serene" (p. 158), an "impenetrable mask" (p. 252); Clytie's face is "rocklike and firm

and antedating time" (p 169), "rocklike and immobile" (p. 170), "inscrutable . . . cold implacable mindless"

(p. 171); finally, Jim Bond, the idiot son of the second Charles Bon, "wraith-like and insubstantial" (p. 467),

the heir apparent to Sutpen, is reduced in the end to a bodiless, incomprehensible howling. By pursuing an

ideal of masculine reproduction, Sutpen's design de-signs, i.e., un-signs, un-marks, erases itself: it pursues

its own internal logic to its own self-deconstructive conclusion. This is Sutpen's "mistake."

By way of concluding this section, I would like to suggest the fundamental coherence of Sutpen's

reproductive logic and the novel's internal semiotics. For it seems clear that Sutpen's reproduction of

himself is in some way related to, or perhaps merely another example of, the text's obsession with, and

proliferation of, signs (signifiers) of absence, of copies and reproductions with no originals. After Sutpen and

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his progeny, perhaps the most significant examples are the unrepresentable moments around which the text

is structured. That is to say, most of the key confrontations in the text are unrepresented,unrepresentable:

Sutpen forgets both the message he was to deliver and the exact words the butler spoke to him (pp. 286,

290); the Christmas conversation between Sutpen and Henry is repeatedly rehearsed by the narrators, yet,

for all that, ultimately unknown; Rosa is unable to adequately represent in language the meaning of the

words Sutpen used to insult her (it seems that words are insufficient to represent themselves); and, perhaps

most central, we never know, never "get past" the final conversation between Bon and Henry before Henry

shoots Bon.(n28)

But this semiotic logic does not stop here. The text, for example, is all but obsessed with the figure of the

echo. Quentin's body is a "barracks," "an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names" (p. 9). The

narratives themselves as they are told and retold must be understood as the inescapable reverberation of

an absent, yet unquiet history--"the tale, larger than its telling, . . . the powerful evocation of another

absence" (McPherson, p. 443). Like Henry's gunshot, "a shot heard only by its echo "(p. 190), like the

stories that Quentin never hears for the first time because he has always known them (p. 266), "happen is

never once but like ripples maybe on. water after the pebble sinks, . . . that pebble's watery echo whose fall

it did not even see" (p. 326). Likewise, we find a kind of "visual echo" in Rosa's memories of the Sutpens

and their house: "even when I saw it for the first time that I could remember I seemed already to know how

it was going to look just as I seemed to know how Ellen and Judith and Henry would look before I saw them

for the time which I always remember as being the first" (p. 27). Or again, the "vision" of the wild carriage in

the passage examined earlier is "the vision of [her] first sight" of the Sutpens. In this odd formulation, the

scene is not actually her first sight but her "vision" of her "first sight." Its priority is undercut by its mediated

quality, transforming her vision into a re-vision, a revision that is further revised by the disclaimer that she

"must have seen Ellen and the children before this": Rosa's "first vision" is actually a re-vision of a re-vision,

an echo of an echo.

And yet again, during the "summer of wisteria," when Rosa is in love with Bon, she describes her detective-

like obsession with the signs and traces of his passage: she discovers him in the erased, already-raked-

over path of the garden (p. 184), in the "invisible imprint of his absent thighs" "upon the nooky seat" (p.

184): "the obliterating sand, the million finger-nerves of frond and leaf, the very sun and moony

constellations which had looked down. at him, the circumambient air; held somewhere yet his foot, his

passing shape, his face, his speaking voice, his name .." (p. 184). In love with an echo, with a signifier

whose signified is forever absent, Rosa laments, "I never saw him. I never even. saw him dead. I heard a

name, I saw a photograph, I helped to make a grave: and that was all" (p. 181). A figure for the semiotic

logic of the text itself, Rosa's love, her "visions and revisions," endlessly displace, defer, erase, and refer the

real, the origin, the original, occupied, finally, with an endless proliferation of copies and reproductions.

Ultimately, the semiotic logic of the novel itself follows--reproduces--the masculine logic of reproduction as it

is formulated in and carried out by Sutpen's design(s). Such a logic "conceives" reproduction as

representation, as copying, yet it is betrayed by the reproductive paradox of the self-made man.

Reproduction, Representation, and the Logic of Saming

These two stories of masculine reproduction--narrative and semioticbiological--although deriving very

different results, nevertheless register consistent anxieties about feminine reproduction. Narrative

reproduction, and the resulting masculine genealogy, is successful because it represents a viable

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alternative to, and circumvention of, "the feminine principle." Likewise, one of the sources of the failure of

biology is the necessary admixture of the feminine--Sutpen's design fails, in part, because of feminine

"misrepresentations": Eulalia "misrepresents" Sutpen in the child Bon, just as Ellen "misrepresents" him in

the Coldfieldian Henry. The success of narrative reproduction, coupled with the failure of its biological

counterpart, indicates a fundamental distrust of both femininity and its power of biological reproduction. I

would argue, finally, that these two stories of reproduction both cooperate in a more fundamental distrust of

"difference" as such, and operate according to something I will call a "logic of saming."(n29)

This idea of saming can help us to connect the reproductive issues with which we have been concerned

with other aspects of the novel that have received less attention in this reading. I am thinking, for example,

of the thematic of homoeroticism considered in passing above. Likewise, a logic of saming suggests a way

of connecting both of these (masculine reproduction, homoeroticism) with the erotics of the same operating

in the incestuous desires of Henry, Rosa, and Bon for Judith. The narcissistic, almost autoerotic quality of

Sutpen's self-making, of his design, the desire for the same represented by Henry and Bon, Quentin and

Shreve, Henry and Judith, and Judith and Rosa all cooperate in a thematics of sameness and in anxieties

about difference. For the flip side of this logic of saming is the fear and rejection of the feminine we have

noted and seen operating, and also the fear of miscegenation that, according to Shreve and Quentin's

account, ultimately motivates Henry's murder of Bon. Indeed, it is in their account that the two sides of this

logic are most radically juxtaposed: the threat/thrill of incest is violently reversed and replaced by the

unacceptable prospect of miscegenation.

The reading proposed here ultimately situates Faulkner's novel at the point of intersection of two different

sets of cultural anxieties about reproduction. Absalom, Absalom! participates in, and reproduces, both the

anxiety about race, "breeding," and class identified by Walter Benn Michaels in "The Souls of White Folk,"

and that of femininity and biological reproduction considered in Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines.

Navigating the Scylla of self-madeness and class mobility on the one hand, and the Charybdis of feminine

reproduction on the other, Absalom, Absalom! must be seen as endorsing an aestheticized logic of narrative

reproduction, ultimately rejecting as unfeasible and unreproductive a design based on self-re-creation and

on an attempt to usurp biological reproduction from the feminine. Ironically, and as presaged by the

insistent, repetitive lament of the title of the novel itself, Sutpen is the unhappy father of two sons, two

genealogies--he leaves behind a legacy of two sets of reproductions: A dynastic design which ends in

incomprehensible howling and apocalypse, and a narrative genealogy which insistently and consistently

reiterates this very failure.

(n1) (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 171.

(n2) In Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 195.

(n3) William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 4.

(n4) The number of separate narrators/narratives has been a source of some critical debate. Some early

critics argued for three (see, e.g., Michael Millgate, "Absalom, Absalom!" in Twentieth Century

Interpretations of "Absalom, Absalom!" ed. Arnold Goldman [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,

1971], pp. 43-47); others add Sutpen to make four (e.g., Donald M. Kartiganer, The Fragile Thread: The

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Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979]). James M.

Mellard (Doing Tropology: Analysis of Narrative Discourse [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987]) has

split up the traditional conflation of Shreve/Quentin, arguing persuasively for five distinct narrators. Although

I find such a distinction generally compelling, for reasons that are laid out below, I will continue to treat the

account that Quentin and Shreve create together as a single narrative with its own internal historical logic.

See note 12.

(n5) Kartiganer argues for a psychological basis to the narrators' interpretive tellings of the Sutpen history.

Although our individual readings coincide at certain points, I extend Kartiganer's psychological approach by

suggesting that the individual narratives have wider philosophical implications. Clearly, one of the points of

the novel is to explore "the nature of historical truth and ... how we can `know' the past" (Cleanth Brooks,

William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1963], p.

309); my point will be that one of the things that Faulkner does in these narratives is to explore the

possibilities and limitations of a set of specific Western historiographical paradigms. Faulkner's ultimate

point is that one of the reasons historical truth is illusory is that the available frames for historical

understanding are inadequate. See also Mellard, who approaches the novel's investigation f historical

understanding through a tropological analysis of the five separate narratives: "most of [the novel's] critical

and interpretive issues devolve to the problems of tropological elements in the major discourses comprising

it" (p. 93).

(n6) For a somewhat different perspective, see Millgate, who likens Rosa's narrative to decadent Jacobean

drama (p. 43). Mellard casts Rosa's Manichean framework in the "dualistic" terms of heroic Romance (pp.

98-103, esp. pp 98-99). In contrast to the account presented here, Kartiganer suggests that the evil

introduced by Rosa's diabolical Sutpen renders both him and the events surrounding him essentially

incomprehensible (p. 73). See also Hyatt Waggoner, "Past as Present: Absalom, Absalom!" in Faulkner: A

Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966),

p. 178.

(n7) For a different perspective on Compson's narrative and the Classical motifs to be used throughout, cf.

Kartinger, pp. 76ff, esp., pp. 76-80. Also, cf. Mellard who relates the tragic "emplotment" of Compson's

account to a metonymic, which is to say, "rational, logical, even scientific consciousness" (p. 103). Although

Compson's narrative is the closest thing the novel has to an "objective" (and, paradoxically, the most

nonsensical) reporting of the known events, I will suggest that it is Sutpen's account which betrays the

greatest faith in rationality as a means of historical understanding.

(n8) For more on this aspect of Compson, see Waggoner, pp. 178-179; James Guetti, "Absalom, Absalom!

The Extended Simile," in Goldman, pp. 76-77; Kartiganer, p. 87.

(n9) Brooks and Waggoner understand Sutpen in a similar way, asserting his essential rationalism (Brooks,

pp. 306, 308; Waggoner, p. 183). Kartiganer takes this rationalism even further to suggest that Sutpen "is

the imaginationless man," and that as such he is totally incapable of "symbolic thinking," much less of

making sense of the events that undo his design (pp. 26, 90). This seems to me an overstatement of the

case and a misunderstanding of the source of Sutpen's puzzlement. While by no means a sophisticate,

Sutpen is nevertheless an astute observer and manipulator of the social symbolic. His acquisition and

mobilization of commodities that signify wealth and respectability--including such commodities as the

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French architect and Judith Coldfield--betray not a literalist misunderstanding of the "symbols of society"

(Kartiganer, p. 90), but, if anything, an anticipation of the ever-less-literal performances of commodity

culture. Indeed, as Walter Benn Michaels points out, it is the ability of self-made men like Sutpen (and, for

example, Jay Gatsby) to manipulate the symbols of society that makes them so disruptive to accepted

notions of class (Faulkner himself makes essentially this point; see Millgate, p. 50n). With regard to

Sutpen's bewilderment, it stems, as I will argue, not from a lack of imagination but from the inability of his

historical model to make sense of the text's central historical enigma--how Bon, his abandoned son, ends

up on his doorstep. However, in his difficulties with making sense of this event, he is not unique. For an

entirely different reading of Sutpen, cf. Mellard, who argues for a synecdochic logic to Sutpen's

consciousness and narrative, his "design" functioning as "the synecdochic figure that gives the emplotment

of his narration the shape of comedy" (p. 115).

(n10) See for example, Arnold Goldman, "Introduction," in Goldman, p. 3; Kartiganer, pp. 7071; Brooks, p.

310.

(n11) Brooks argues that only after Henry and Quentin's conversation does anyone know "the dark secret

that underlay the Sutpen tragedy" (p. 317)-according to Brooks, not even General Compson knew that Bon

was Sutpen's son (pp. 437-438). Although it seems to be the case that Mr. Compson does not know the

secret (before Quentin's meeting with Henry), I would argue, that, on the contrary, it seems logically

necessary that General Compson knew about Bon. Otherwise, there is no point in Sutpen's going to

General Compson for his "legally trained mind." Without this crucial piece of information, Sutpen's plea to

Compson for help becomes absurd, pointless, and disingenuous--Sutpen may by many things, but he is

never any of these.

(n12) Waggoner argues that Shreve and Quentin reject the inflexible dogmatism of Rosa's account anti

what he sees as the essential nihilism of Mr. Compson's in order to combine them into "Classical-Christian

tragedy" (p. 184). By contrast, Kartiganer suggests that Quentin and Shreve "decide" to "make" Bon Henry's

brother "because it so richly suits the condition of their youth" (pp. 72, 93). This decision thus transforms the

Sutpen history, appropriately, into a "Byronic romance," into a tale of love and a quest for identity (p. 93).

Again, I would propose that what both of these accounts fail to acknowledge is the centrality of Bon's return

as the narrative/historical condition of possibility for either "tragedy" or "romance."

For Mellard, Shreve's satiric-ironic stance renders the Sutpen history into an "antiromance" (pp. 119-129),

while Quentin's all-embracing consciousness is characterized by a "detached awareness" of the limits of

each of the contained narratives; Quentin's narrative of narratives, then, ultimately understands the story of

Sutpen in terms of an unredeemed and unredeeming irony that is wholly without satire (pp. 129-139).

However, in spite of Mellard's specification, I continue to address Quentin and Shreve together here

because the point in the novel at which Shreve and Quentin confront what I argue is the central historical

enigma is one of the points at which Faulkner insists on a kind of narrative fusion of the two speakers: "it

was Shreve speaking, though save for the slight difference which the intervening degrees of latitude had

inculcated in them . . . it might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the

voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal . . " (p. 378).

(n13) For an explanation of Shreve's defense of Bon, see Kartiganer, pp. 96 97.

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(n14) Note that speculation was often understood as a figure for, or type of, "unnatural" reproduction. Thus,

it is perhaps no surprise that Sutpen is involved in several crucial and productive speculations--as we have

seen, he is a master of creating something out of nothing (or out of a borrowed or absent something):

Sutpen plants his land "with seed cotton which General Compson loaned him" (p. 46); he generates his

fortune and furnishes his mansion through the legally questionable manipulation of "a bill of lading" and Mr.

Coldfield's credit (p. 323); indeed Sutpen's own self-making represents a kind of speculative generation.

With the novel's being written in the wake of the stock market crash, in the midst of the Depression, there is

a certain coherence to the fact that the text ultimately extracts a heavy price for these wild speculations.

We should also notice that these three schemes of generation represent alternative, non-feminine, non-

bodily, and non-biological modes of reproduction. In fact, in the first case (and in the second,

metaphorically), we should remark the fact that by borrowing the seed for his first crop, Sutpen avoids an

active or personal role in the agricultural insemination. As I will argue, such machinations are part of a

fundamental and pervading unease with biological creation in all of its manifestations, machinations that are

but lesser instantiations of the text's attempt to imagine masculine, non-corporeal circumventions of

feminine creativity. For more on seeds and the anxiety of biological creation, see Seltzer, p. 32.

(n15) For a discussion of the impact of the Depression on Absalom, Absalom!, see Robert Penn Warren,

"introduction," in Warren, p. 5. Elsewhere, Warren points out Faulkner's antagonism toward "the New South"

(p. 3). Again, it seems to me not by chance that one of the sources of Sutpen's downfall is a lawyer out to

make a buck.

(n16) See, for example, Mellard, pp. 124-126.

(n17) Before we can conclude, we will need to return to Rosa and address her special status and place in

this genealogy. I will argue that, while her femininity problematizes the logic I am suggesting, there will be

factors which will, in turn, make her gender and sexuality problematic, and so enable her participation in this

male genealogy.

(n18) See the Introduction, esp. pp. 1-2, 25, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

(n19) For a discussion of the erotic attractions of the incest plot for Shreve and Quentin, see Kartiganer, pp.

93-97.

(n20) Although it is difficult to tell whether it is intentional, Kartiganer's account of Quentin and Shreve's

narrative "communion" is quite suggestive in this respect. According to his reading, their telling of the story

traces a trajectory that begins with "the growing sense of communion, of the created tale as a cooperation

of minds, the speakers giving themselves gradually up to each other as the only means of giving

themselves to that past they are trying to comprehend" (p. 98). Kartiganer then argues that after Quentin

and Shreve's successful narrative union (rendered in the text as a single voice of italicized type), we see

"the painful disintegration of the communion . . . there is an inevitable wrenching apart by both Quentin and

Shreve" (p. 104). Kartiganer's account is so interesting because it lays out so well a kind of erotics of

narrative production--the result of which is both the succeeding generations of the genealogy and, of

course, narrative itself.

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(n21) That Quentin and Shreve's narrative is the most imaginative and conjectural has been noted by

generations of Faulkner critics. For a couple of different accounts of why it is so imaginative, cf., for

example, Waggoner, p. 177, Kartiganer, pp. 96-97.

(n22) Thus, I must disagree with Kartiganer's conclusion that "At the bottom of this modern tragedy is the

inability of one man to speak to another" (p. 106). Closer to the mark is Karen McPherson's observation of

Sutpen's difficulties with representation and narration ("Absalom, Absalom!: Telling Scratches," Modern

Fiction Stories, 33 [1987], 431450). I would agree that Sutpen is distrustful of narration and exchange to the

extent that he is distrustful of Female representation (a distrust gained from his experience with Eulalia,

Judith, and Milly Jones, and revealed in his insult to Rosa); however, her focus on the "verbal sterility" of his

children misses the fecundity of his extra-familial reproduction--the sequence of stories that are told and

retold within, by, and about the book (of which this essay is, in some sense, yet another generation) is

ultimately Sutpen's legacy.

(n23) Sally R. Page offers an analysis of what happens to the women in Faulkner's texts who are

"prevented from achieving the normal fulfillment of [their] sexual drives," of which Rosa "is the most

extensively developed . . . of this type" (Faulkner's Women: Characterization and Meaning [Deland, Florida:

Everett/Edwards, 1972], p. 102). She argues that in Faulkner the denial of "normal" feminine roles produces

in such women a compensatory and illusory view of life; see pp. 102-109.

(n24) "Family Ties: Generating Narratives in Absalom, Absalom!" Mississippi Quarterly, 41 (Summer 1988),

420.

(n25) Although I differ with Colem on some specific points, my understanding of the ambiguities in Rosa's

sexuality and gender certainly owes much to the reading she offers.

(n26) For more on the masculinist fantasy of procreation as self-replication and the way such a logic

functions in naturalism, see Seltzer, pp. 32-33.

(n27) For other discussions of the similarities between Sutpen and his children, cf., for example, Brooks, pp.

302-304, Page, p. 179: Page describes Judith as "infected" with Sutpen's destructiveness, while Brooks

acknowledges the similarities but stresses the differences.

(n28) This revises Warren's suggestion that Faulkner's texts in some way emerge out of or are centered

around some "archetypal scene--a flash--in which all else, story and character, would be hidden" (p. 13).

What is so striking, at least about Absalom, Absalom! is that this scene (or scenes)-Henry facing Bon, Bon

facing Sutpen, Henry facing Sutpen, Sutpen facing the butler, and so on--remains elusive, ultimately

unrepresentable: That central moment or set of moments around which the obsessive narrations revolve

finally resists all attempts to be rendered visible and present. McPherson makes very much the same point

in a beautiful reading of the encounter between Henry and Quentin (Faulkner, p. 464). Structurally

palindromic and ordered by doublings and reflections, the encounter centers around the subjectless

infinitive "to die": "Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about absence, about ceasing to be . . . (p. 443).

(n29) I borrow the phrase from Naomi Schor. See "This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming To Grips

With Irigaray," differences, 1 (Summer 1989), 38-58.

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ILLUSTRATION

~~~~~~~~

By J. CHRISTOPHER CUNNINGHAM, Duke University

Copyright of Mississippi Quarterly is the property of Mississippi State University and its content may not be

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