Beth at The Cassandra Pages and I here finish writing each other about our impressions from our second readings of William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, which each of us, unbeknown to the other, recently completed.  We're publishing the correspondence on both blogs.  Click here to read our first, second, third, and fourth, and fifth exchanges.

Peter, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed talking about this book with you! It's been so much more fun for me, and I bet a lot more interesting to our readers, than if either of us just wrote about it alone.

In college, I had lots of people to talk to in depth about books, and we were all equally excited -- I remember long dinner-table conversations that migrated to one of our dorm rooms, and went on into the night. Adult life isn't like that, but blogging does offer some great opportunities for communication. I'm grateful to our commenters here for their contributions to the conversation and wonder if any of them have additional thoughts about this form of book talk.

But mostly I want to thank you for helping me think more deeply about this remarkable book; it proved to me how our human minds really do thrive on input from others. I'm also keen to go on reading and talking about Faulkner, who seems to occupy a unique place in American arts & letters.  After posting this, I'm starting my re-read (40 years later) of The Sound and the Fury.

Beth

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Beth,

That was right slick, rereading one of my favorite novels and then learning the next day that you had just reread the same novel and wanted to exchange letters about it. The exchange felt even fuller on a blog with the comments people were kind enough to make. I especially appreciate Lorianne’s frequent, rich contributions.

I wonder if you or other readers have any thoughts about how someone wanting to try out Faulkner might best do so, generally speaking. I’ll take my answer off the air, as callers often say on the NPR talk shows, and see what develops in the comments.

Peter

Comments at The Cassandra Pages

Posted September 1, 2010.  Link to just this post.

a monstrous innocence

Beth at The Cassandra Pages and I are exchanging correspondence about our impressions from our second readings of William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, which each of us, unbeknown to the other, recently completed.  We're publishing the correspondence on both blogs.  The following is our fifth exchange; click here to read our first, second, third, and fourth.

Dear Beth,

Thomas Sutpen is a monster, but Grandfather learns what makes him tick. “Sutpen’s trouble was innocence,” Grandfather says, an innocence that Grandfather believes he never loses.

It’s hard to see what Grandfather was talking about at first.  Sutpen ruins four women’s lives in progressively more dishonorable ways.  At the last, he sires a child out of wedlock by his longtime companion and flunky Wash Jones’s granddaughter, who is forty-four years his junior.  (“‘He chose lechery,’ Shreve says.”)  When Sutpen learns that the child is a girl, though, he decides to treat his mare, who has just given birth to a male, better than Wash’s granddaughter, and tells her so:

“Well, Millie, too bad you’re not a mare like Penelope.  Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.”

It’s then that Wash kills him.

Shreve is correct, strictly speaking.  When marriage doesn’t produce a suitable male heir, Sutpen chooses lechery.  But he’s never a lecher, never someone interested in women for lust’s sake or even love’s.  He’s even a virgin when he first marries at age twenty, and he admits to Grandfather that he “could neither have suffered temptation nor offered it.”  He’s virile enough, the reader knows, but his sex drive like everything else takes a back seat to his design to acquire a plantation owner’s respectability.  Only after the Civil War ends and respectability is no longer an option does Sutpen get the granddaughter pregnant so he can at least have his design’s bare bones, the male heir.

Sutpen innocently hatches his design as a young teen in reaction to being slighted by the Tidewater plantation slave (and, through him, his master).  But his innocence is the rigid innocence of childhood that makes monsters of adults who never grow out of it, “that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out,” as Quentin says.

I think today’s religious fanatics, no matter what their persuasion, suffer from Sutpen’s brand of monstrous innocence.

Peter

° ° °

Dear Peter,

It's fascinating to me that Faulkner called Sutpen an almost-perfect tragic hero. I could possibly agree with that assessment of Joe Christmas, in "Light in August," but for me, a tragic hero has to have a very clear good side, a nobility of character, as well as fatal flaws. I never felt that with Sutpen, and part of the reason for that is Faulkner's own way of conveying his character: at a very great distance. So great in fact, that we cannot warm to him because (like all the characters, much more real because we hear them speak, see them move and interact as they also try to figure the man out) we're never close enough to really feel him in the flesh.

I think this distancing is a further reason why we can see Sutpen and his downfall as an allegory of the South itself. Faulkner, speaking about this book, said that the South labored under a curse - the curse of slavery. Curses, in the Old Testament style, affect not only the king/patriarch but his progeny and the entire tribe or nation-state under that leader, who refuse to "turn away from their wickedness;" the curse can extend "unto many generations." Faulkner seems to carry this out as he kills off all of Sutpen's descendants except for the feeble-minded Jim Bond; his slaves; even the old spinster Rosa who once ran away from him. Our poor narrator Quentin, grandson of the Grandfather who professed Sutpen's "innocence," doesn't escape either; apparently he knows too much and came too close to the source of the curse.

Which brings up a larger question about innocence itself. If slavery was indeed a "curse," -- or an evil -- did the entire South deserve what happened to it? What level of participation in a communal sin -- and we can think of many of these that societies have participated in and still do -- is required before an individual is guilty of complicity? Sutpen was certainly a willing participant; I doubt we could say such a thing about his West Indian slaves or his wives. Is he excused by the fact that he was born into a world where his "design" would be not only acceptable but admired, and where acquiring and exploiting slaves and women was behavior shared, to at least some extent, by all the adult males at the top? At what point does an adult, even one steeped in the prevailing culture, bear the responsibility of seeing it clearly and choosing for him or herself?

But going beyond the individual, since the book is also an allegory of a society, we have to ask what, if anything, can stop the curse and expiate the sin. If slavery was an expression of racism, we certainly can't claim that the elimination of slavery eliminated racism. Neither can we claim that the white male claim of superiority and privilege over all other groups was, or is, confined to the South; as subsequent history and even current events are proving, racism infects North American society as a whole, and has been present since white people first came to these shores.

I have to wonder if our continual collective "moving on" from one oppression to another -- Native Americans, blacks, women, Japanese, Vietnamese, gays, Muslims -- it's a long sad list -- without true self-reflection, justice for the victims of hate crimes, trials of leaders, or reparation for victims -- has contributed to the perpetuation of racism as an endemic and largely acceptable trait that repeatedly bubbles violently to the surface of American society. We have had prophets, too, calling us to truth and repentance, but have we really listened? It doesn't seem that way to me. Faulkner, writing this book in the 1930s, was trying to speak about the South as he saw it approximately sixty years after the Civil War. That's the same distance we now have from World War II; not long, but not short either. When we look at our history since 1940, what can we say about innocence? Who are the tragic heroes of these subsequent chapters? Who are the victims? Who are we? And where does it end?

Beth

Comments at The Cassandra Pages

Posted August 31, 2010.  Link to just this post.

a wretched and triumphant primitivism

women – and blacks – in absalom, absalom!

Beth at The Cassandra Pages and I are exchanging correspondence about our impressions from our second readings of William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, which each of us, unbeknown to the other, recently completed.  We're publishing the correspondence on both blogs.  The following is our fourth exchange; click here to read our first, second, and third.

Dear Peter,

My freshman year in college, I became friends with an engineering student from the South who lived near me in the dorm (yes, co-ed! 1970!) and was dating a close friend of mine. Like Quentin, he had a southern name previously unknown to me, and he had grown up in a totally different society of teas, lawn parties, cotillions and clear gender roles for both young men and women. He had had a sweetheart with another unfamiliar name - Marleve - and told me how she and all her friends used to get up an hour early to do their hair and put on their makeup before class. Meanwhile, we were burning our bras...if we wore them at all. He liked the university and did well, but he only lasted through his sophomore year, when he went home to be with his girlfriend, shaking his head when he said goodbye to me and saying, "I just could never quite get you Northern girls."

So what about Faulkner's women? If Thomas Sutpen is an archetype of a patriarch, desiring to create a dynasty through his male lineage (but definitely not chivalrous), what about the women around him?

We learn little about his first wife in the West Indies, the unknown octaroon who gave birth to his first son, Charles, repudiated because of his negro blood. His second wife, Ellen, perhaps comes closest to the idea of a "southern belle" - she's lovely, but fragile, and is part of a "deal" made between Sutpen and her father. Unhappy and unable to assert herself, but dutiful, she bears two children - Henry and Judith - before taking to her bed and dying after a slow, shadowy decline.

Then there's Rosa, the elderly woman whose long rambling narration, delivered to Quentin as a kind of verbal legacy, forms the "core" of the narrative. She's Ellen's cousin but much younger, who comes to live at Sutpen's Hundred with Judith and the negro servant, Clytie, after Ellen's death, and after Henry kills Charles and flees. Rosa, then in her early 20s, becomes engaged to Thomas after he returns from the Civil War (a shell of his former self), but breaks the engagement in outrage after he poses the condition that she bear him a son before the marriage to prove that she can; she goes back to town where she lives in miserable poverty, spinsterhood, and hatred for the next fifty years.

And perhaps the most enigmatic woman of all is the daughter, Judith, who resembles none of these women as much as her father. Peter, one of the most vivid scenes in the book for me is when we discover Thomas wrestling at night in the barn with his slaves, a sort of cockfight scene lit by lamps illuminating the faces of the men of the town, watching the spectacle and drinking whiskey. Henry, the son, can't bear it, but up in the hayloft we see Judith - a little girl then - looking down on the sweat and blood and violence with her implacable, unreadable face. Later, she becomes not a spinster but an archetypal widow, even though her marriage to her half-brother Charles is prevented, and later dies of smallpox. The only emotion we ever witness from her is a sudden gush of tears, almost instantly dried, when her father comes home and she tells him what has happened to his sons.

What do you think Faulkner is trying to tell us through the characters of these women? Are they stereotypes or true to the society he's portraying?

Beth

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Dear Beth,

The Absalom, Absalom! women seem locked into something tougher to break out of than the clear gender roles your disoriented Southern friend found missing at college.  To me, the Absalom women are closer to the earth – to something essential – than the men are, and they are more inclined to feel and to act not in furtherance of a design, as is always the case with Sutpen, but out of instinct (usually love) and emotion (usually hatred) alone.

To put it more negatively, the Absalom women seem subhuman.  But it’s a “subhuman” woman, Sutpen’s octoroon first wife, who follows her instinct (and a smart lawyer’s vague advice) to bring Sutpen down.

Women are like the novel’s blacks.  Funny how Sutpen tells Grandfather the story of his first marriage while Grandfather and he are waiting for Sutpen’s slaves and dogs to hunt down Sutpen’s French architect.  Quentin, who is telling the story of the story (much of the novel’s information is second, third, or even fourth-hand) to Shreve, makes the blacks out to be as primal as the dogs.  They are better hunters than the dogs: their sense of smell is as good as the dogs, but they don’t get stuck barking up the tree the architect entered when they realize he's been hopping through the trees for acres with Sutpen-like tenacity.  Well, when the architect is caught, Sutpen stops his story just at the point when he and his first wife get engaged.  Sutpen is caught, too, by someone as primal and indefatigable as his slaves, but in his story he doesn’t know it yet.

It takes thirty years for Sutpen, now at Grandfather’s office, to resume his story.  He tells Grandfather then that, shortly after their marriage, he learns of his wife’s one-eighth Negro blood,  “puts her aside,” and (he believes) settles up with her.  Grandfather, maybe “hollering,” says, “. . . didn’t the dread and fear of females which you must have drawn in with mammalian milk teach you better?”

Sure enough, as Grandfather surmises, the octoroon, with her lawyer’s help and quite like Sutpen’s slaves, amazingly hunts down the story’s chief “architect” a few paragraphs later. (For Sutpen is an architect of sorts: he endlessly talks about his “design” to which women are merely “adjunctive.”  “I had a design,” he tells Grandfather.  “To accomplish it, I should acquire money, a house, a plantation, slaves, and a family – incidentally, of course, a wife.”)  The octoroon grooms her son Charles with “mammalian love,” and her lawyer sends him off to Henry’s university with a letter of introduction.  Through the octoroon’s primal love for Charles and her nursed hatred for Sutpen, Henry brings Charles home to Sutpen’s Hundred one Christmas, and Sutpen knows he’s caught.  His and his progeny’s downhill slide starts there.

But the octoroon survives to enable her feebleminded grandson, Jim Bond, in turn, to survive the Sutpen family doom.  In contrast, none of Sutpen’s white lineage survives.

This sort of wretched and triumphant primitivism shared by the novel’s blacks and women – is Faulkner describing a problem or contributing to it?  I’m never sure with Faulkner.  This account of a talk Faulkner gave while a writer in residence at the University of Virginia reminds me of the endless debate over whether he was a racist or was someone who supported blacks’ equal rights:

He was not afraid to challenge his UVA audience, as became clear when he decided to commence his second Spring semester in “Residence” by delivering “A Word to Virginians,” a nine-minute speech urging them to help solve rather than exacerbate the growing crisis over court-ordered integration in the Jim Crow South. To 21st century listeners, his exhortations may sound more like temporizings, but at the time they were controversial, and to some in his immediate audience, as you can hear for yourself, unacceptable. (Faulkner at Virginia: An Introduction)

It’s the same with Faulkner and women.  I can’t tell what he really thinks about them.  But sometimes I believe I want to know what an author “really thinks” only because I find the topic’s richer treatment in his chosen genre to be so unsettling.

° ° °

The last question I’d like to raise about Absalom is the question of innocence.  Sutpen comes off as a monster – “the demon,” as Shreve is fond of calling him – yet Grandfather believes he is the victim of his own innocence.  Which is it?

Peter

[Photo by Ralph Thompson of Faulkner taking to students at the University of Virginia ca. 1957.  The school admitted its first black student in 1950 by court order, and it went coed in 1970.  Faulkner split his residence between Oxford, Mississippi and U. Va. from 1957 until his death in 1962.]

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Posted August 27, 2010.  Link to just this post.

dense as an overgrown swamp

Beth at The Cassandra Pages and I are exchanging correspondence about our impressions from our second readings of William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, which each of us, unbeknown to the other, recently completed.  We're publishing the correspondence on both blogs.  The following is our third exchange; click here to read our first and second.

Peter, what was the experience of reading this book like for you?

Beth

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Beth,

Faulkner's tragedies are the only works I can read half asleep and still not miss anything. I don't mean there's nothing to miss – on the contrary! At college, too: I dozed through most of my reading assignments, but I didn't have to turn the pages back very often for Faulkner. I think my conscious mind gets in the way with Faulkner. Faulkner gives it some bones to chew – all those big words to look up – but most everything else seems geared toward my subconscious.

Absalom is tough on the conscious reader. Its narrators, whether first person or third, pull him away from his regular reliance on plot and character development. Key plot details are buried in labyrinthine sentences. And characterization through dialog? Forget about it! All the characters sound the same: the dominant ones speak in short, objectively insignificant phrases, while the passive ones – Faulkner's Greek chorus – speak in those long sentences that process and repeat the dominant characters' phrases and put a kind of mental illness, or at least obsession and inexorable amazement, between the reader and the facts. No wonder we all relate to Shreve, who frequently tries to stop Quentin long enough to get a simple narrative point clarified: “'Wait,' Shreve said. 'For Christ's sake wait.'”

So Absalom examines reading, and Shreve is Faulkner's model reader. His conscious mind struggles with the narration, but his subconscious mind catches enough so that he's drawn into the sickness. Because he's a successful reader from outside the South – indeed, outside the U.S. – Shreve demonstrates the universal reach of Absalom's themes. I think it's also significant that Shreve survives, just as Faulkner, who's not known for hope, says in his Nobel acceptance speech that mankind will survive.

Peter

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Well, Peter, in part 1 of this conversation you compared me to Shreve, but I doubt that I'm a model reader! For one thing, I tend to read very fast, and that's not helpful to Faulkner. I really like what you said about his books requiring us to use our subconscious mind; it feels like you have to somehow uncouple your normal intellectual, analytical, processing mind and submit yourself to the flow of words, which are at times almost dreamlike and quite often rambling or even completely crazy.

I also love books like this that force me to slow down and engage with the writing itself, while at the same time immersing me in a mood and place that feel foreign, dark, ominous, and yet somehow seductive. I'm a very visual person so I'm always constructing mental images while I'm reading. With Faulkner I always feel like I'm in an old black-and-white movie, shot without enough light, and definitely scary; I am out of my element here; there's little comfort or familiarity. That mental place haunts me all the days I'm reading the novel, and for some time afterward. I never realized before that this book belongs to the genre of writing known as Southern Gothic, and while it's not about the occult or ghosts or vampires at all, this "haunted" and demonic quality is palpable.

When I stopped reading this book each day, I kept thinking about what he was doing. I was stunned by the complex construction of this novel. Multiple narrators, not always clearly identified at first; a great deal of stream-of-consciousness writing; extremely long sentences; and a story that's gradually revealed through flashbacks from many different points of view. The sheer mastery of the craft of writing was pretty thrilling.

What I found especially impressive is that even though the construction is as dense as an overgrown swamp, he doesn't call attention to it, he's not showing off (like some other masters of the "modern" novel we might name) -- it simply becomes another part of the world he is creating for us to inhabit as we read, and this tangled, dark complexity contributes to the book's mood of violence, tension, murky confusion, and impending doom. If I had to use one word to describe the mood of the novel, I might choose "tense" -- what about you?

And from here, I wonder if we might talk about the female characters in the book next, and about women and the South!

Beth

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Posted August 25, 2010.  Link to just this post.

the plot and that title

Beth at The Cassandra Pages and I are exchanging correspondence about our impressions from our second readings of William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, which each of us, unbeknown to the other, recently completed.  We're publishing the correspondence on both blogs.  The following is our second exchange; click here to read our first.

Peter, it's hard to know where to begin with this book, isn't it? We could talk about it as one of America's first modern novels, and analyze its structure. We could talk about Christianity, Calvinism, and slavery, and the concept of the elect and the damned, and how that's still playing out in our culture. Or, as Lorianne mentions in her comment to the first post, about how it addresses southern notions of "ideal" womanhood, and the patriarchy. that supposedly "protects" it. I hope we'll get to all of that eventually. Maybe what I'll do first, though, is spring off your wonderful, Faulkner-esque glimpse at the characters to talk about a little more about the plot, and explain the title, so people who haven't read the book won't go nuts or give up on us all together!

Basically, Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man born into poverty who gets money, goods, and slaves – we don't know exactly how – and comes into a small Mississippi town full of whispering, speculating inhabitants, acquires one hundred acres, and starts to build a plantation and mansion. His goal, beyond building this empire (on the backs of the slaves he's brought from the West Indies) is to establish a family dynasty, so he needs sons.

Faulkner himself said that slavery was the curse under which the South labors, and that Thomas Sutpen's major flaw was his belief that he was too strong to need to be part of the human family; those two curses and how they play out are the subject of the book. I'd argue that it goes even deeper, that what Faulkner explores here is racism itself, in the character of a person who believes himself to be elect while others – even his own flesh-and-blood – are cast aside because a tiny percentage of negro blood flows in their veins.

So – the title. In the Bible, Absalom is one of the sons of King David, but he rebels and fights against his father. His death occurs during a battle when his hair catches in the branches of an oak tree, unseating him and rendering him helpless (a clear parallel, I think, to the image of a lynched black man hanging from a tree.) Joab, the enemy, is told and comes back with a posse of soldiers and kills him. But when Absalom's death is reported to his father, David is inconsolable.

In many ways Thomas Sutpen is this kind of Old Testament patriarch; he has many human weaknesses and cruelties but he's also fascinating and exerts a powerful, some say demonic, force on everyone around him. Like the OT kings, he looms much larger than most of the other people on the stage, and affects them all, but he also causes his own downfall. Faulkner makes his story into an allegory not just about one family, but about the South and its downfall, just as the Books of Kings contain cautionary tales about rulers and justice, and what happens when they allow their human weaknesses to dominate their character and actions.

Faulkner may have doubled the name to "Absalom, Absalom!" because there are two sons in his story: Henry Sutphen, his legitimate and pure white son, and Charles Bon, whose mother was an octaroon (1/8 black) whom Sutphen married in the West Indies but repudiated and abandoned after he found out about her (and their son's) negro blood. Henry and Charles, unknown to each other as brothers, meet at university, and their paths toward self-discovery are an essential part of the book's plot.

Beth

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Beth, that's a great summary. I'd just add the incest angle. The Bible's story of Absalom's rebellion against his father David starts when Absalom's half-brother, Amnon, rapes Absalom's full sister, Tamar. The narrator's not wild about the rape, but the incest is the big sin. Absalom plots his revenge for two years, has Amnon killed, and flees when David finds out. In this respect, Henry Sutpen resembles Absalom: Henry kills his half-brother Charles to keep him from an incestuous relationship with Henry's full sister Judith, and then he flees.

But Charles resembles not only the incestuous Amnon but Absalom, also. The Bible infers that Absalom seduces Israel because David doesn't lift a finger to see him over the two years following Amnon's murder. Similarly, Charles is frosted that his father Sutpen never comes to him, never speaks to him, even after Charles knows Sutpen knows Charles has designs on Judith – a match Sutpen tries to get Henry to stop. So Charles seduces Henry and Judith because his father slights him, just as Absalom seduces Israel because his father slights him.

So I could see how Henry and Charles are both Absalom, which might help explain the title. The title may also be shorthand for David's repetitious lament after Absalom's death: “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!”  We're free to draw our own conclusions, I guess: there's no reference to Absalom or David in the novel even though Faulkner alludes to some classical and other biblical texts in it.

Peter

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Posted August 24, 2010.  Link to just this post.

a reader's dream

I read Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! this summer for the first time since college, and I wrote a response to it in my sketchbook last week with the idea of working it into a blog post here. A day after writing it, I got an astonishing email from Beth at The Cassandra Pages:

I've been planning a blog post this week, trying to connect some dots between my summer reading of two Faulkner novels, "Absalom, Absalom!" and "Light in August" . . . But it occurred to me that maybe it might be more fun and more interesting to do it as a conversation, and I wondered if you're familiar with those two novels . . .

We'll simulcast pairs of our correspondence on our blogs now and then as long as the gas lasts to write it. Here's the opening pair.

Peter, were you re-reading "Absalom, Absalom!" or reading it for the first time? Have you found it's different to read Faulkner as an adult than it was when you were a student? I've been on a little Faulkner kick this summer: I read this one, and the "Light in August," neither of which I'd read before, and plan to read "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" next - these are both books I was assigned in high school. I remember being impressed by them but I don't even recall the plots! But "Absalom, Absalom!" stunned me in so many ways. Maybe even though the civil rights struggle was in full swing when I was reading southern literature as an idealistic young person, the characters still felt very removed from the reality I knew. Now that I'm in my fifties and I've seen human racism and hatred in many forms, the rose-colored glasses are definitely off, but Faulkner still plunges me into a kind of human darkness and a part of American culture I find hard to truly grasp. I think I actually identified some with the character of Shreve, a northern boy who's being told this story by Quentin Compson, his roommate at Harvard.

--Beth

º º º

Dear Beth,

I could hardly finish your letter before writing you back. It's a reader's dream: I finish one of the few books that wants to bring on something physical, like a headache or a baby, for all the labor I put into it, and I learn that one of my favorite readers (and I don't mean of only my writing) has just read it, too. It's like we're twins and didn't know it – maybe twin mothers of a single child. I'll play Absalom, and you can be Absalom!

Or you're Shreve, and I'm Quentin, Faulkner casting us by our place: you, like Shreve (as you suggest), from both Canada and New England, and I a child of the Old South, though (as you say) not the Deep South of Quentin's Mississippi, the two (Quentin and Shreve) shivering in a Harvard dorm together one snowy night in 1910 for the last half of the novel, Shreve (he must have heard it from Quentin – who the hell knows how many times they've told it back and forth by the time the reader arrives) telling Quentin what Quentin's father told Quentin that Grandfather told him (Quentin's father) about what Thomas Sutpen told him (Grandfather) about himself (Sutpen (“'The Demon,' Shreve said”)), Sutpen finally telling somebody in Jefferson about his childhood, his traveling from western Virginia to Tidewater, Virginia (where I'm from, though now I live in Northern Virginia, or as my aunt who co-authored the Virginia history textbook we studied in seventh grade condoning slavery would call it, “Upper Virginia” – the utterance of “North” or “Northern” with “Virginia” as little countenanced here as the faces (and even the horses' faces) of our Confederate statues are from that polar, poles apart compass point) where he and his siblings see “the first black man, slave, they had ever seen” with his “mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones,” and he (Sutpen) being dissed by the black man in the monkey suit at the front door of the plantation's big house, and Grandfather (and, through him, us, the four of us – Quentin, Shreve, Peter, and Beth) collocating Sutpen's past with his and his West Indian slaves' mud-wrestling and his (Sutpen's, yes and Quentin's) eventual doom.

The funny thing is, Sutpen tells the story to Grandfather only to pass the time. Everyone else who tells it – Aunt Rosa, Grandfather, Father, Quentin, Shreve, I (Peter), and even you, Beth (“. . . since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking . . . Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry”) – tells it as therapy, as a fire hose might tell the story as water or maybe as the fire itself, the hose’s pump having surceased and surrendered before the War started or even before Sutpen's heart commenced pumping (doomed from the womb?), or tells it as a futile means of escape, as Mercury (the planet) might talk unstintingly to divert the sun in order to escape it or at least to gain some perspective by pretending to divert it, Virginia and Harvard and Vermont and maybe even Canada and the twenty-first century themselves caught in the orbit of Jefferson and Sutpen's Hundred and the War and the injustice of slavery, the institution's wickedness greater than my aunt's textbook would allow but not as black and white as the textbooks I would read later paint it but worse than black-and-white wicked for its convolution, for (for instance) Sutpen's two sons, the white Henry (Absalom,) and the mulatto Charles (Absalom!) who destroy each other probably even before they know they're brothers and before they understand the incest they both contemplate but which their sister is willing to accept, and maybe even before they (Absalom, Absalom!) ever meet or are born.

I'm with child to hear about your own experience with the book, Beth; I shouldn't presume to speak for you. And for your part, please don't get me wrong. To quote Quentin's last words, I don't hate the South. “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”

Peter

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Posted August 23, 2010.  Link to just this post.

leave it alone

The mosque. Must I get involved in this, too?

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Did you know that twenty percent of Americans now believe that the president is Muslim? The polling took place just before he first spoke about the mosque last week. Do the remaining eighty percent correctly identify Obama as a Christian? Hardly. “The number of people who correctly identify Obama as a Christian has dropped to 34 precent, down from nearly half from when he took office,” according to today's Washington Post.

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There are some sensible things being written about the Islamic community center, most of it written about the people who are trying to build the center and the people who live and work around where the center would open – the people who just want to be left alone. Here's are links to articles in this week's New Yorker and today's Washington Post about it. Turns out those people are human beings – Americans, even, if I may be so bold.

º º º

A new Time-SRBI poll found that 61 percent of Americans oppose building the center. Nearly twice as many people said the center, and the mosque inside it, would be an insult to Sept. 11 victims than said it would be a symbol of religious tolerance.

– Washington Post, Aug. 19, 2010, p. A4

The pollster put its participants on the horns of a false dilemma. The center is neither an insult to victims nor a symbol of religious tolerance. It is many other things, though, and mainly to those who intend to use it or who live or work around it. The pollster's false dilemma reminds me of Stephen Douglas's miscegenation argument, which Lincoln ably characterized in his response to it: “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.”

º º º

Must the president get involved in this, too? Can't he just say, "They have the right to build it.  It's not my place to say whether or not they should; those parties in interest are defined by New York City ordinance.  It's my place – and the place of all Americans – to defend that decision on the grounds of the First Amendment and of religious toleration."

Can't we just leave the Islamic community center, the people that will use it or will live or work around it – leave the entire local legal process involved in approving it – alone?

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There is no way to decide these questions [placing moral positions at odds with one another] other than by reference to some system of moral or ethical principles about which people can and do disagree. Because we disagree, we put such issues to a vote and, where the Constitution does not speak, the majority morality prevails.

– Robert Bork, The Tempting of America, p. 259.

Indeed, Madison, like Jefferson, argued . . . that a majority may do only those things “that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members.” Thus it is not simply the will of the majority that “rightfully” rules in a democracy, but the rational will of the majority. In the same vein, Jefferson wrote that “[i]ndependence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.” Thus, it is clear that Madison and Jefferson viewed the people as a moral entity, not simply as a collection of discrete value-positing individuals. The positivism of both Bork and Rehnquist is predicated on a kind of moral relativism that ultimately leads to nihilism.

– Edward J. Erler, in his introduction to Harry V. Jaffa's Storm Over the Constitution, p. xxix

Bork's argument for majority vote as a substitute for an unachievable moral consensus – his “majority morality” – is precisely Stephen Douglas's argument for Popular Sovereignty. By allowing a majority vote to determine whether each new territory would permit slavery, the United States government through Popular Sovereignty treated its citizens not as a “moral entity” but “as a collection of discrete value-positing individuals.” The result was Bleeding Kansas.

The nub of the mosque issue is the central issue of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln rejected Douglas's – and Bork's – notion that America cannot, as a society and through reason and difficulty, rediscover her first principles in the Declaration of Independence that animate the Constitution. As our Bill of Rights affirms, some things – like the Islamic community center and the president's religion – are not a matter of majority opinion or vote.

Posted August 19, 2010.  Link to just this post.

marginally different

One is either an Adams man or a Jefferson man. Historians and even ages favor one over the other, and when history is kind to one, it is rough on the other.  We're in the midst of an Adams boomlet, thanks in part to David McCullough's popular Adams bio and to the simplistic, popular interpretation of some DNA testing that put Jefferson in bed with Sally Hennings, one of his slaves.  But what does being an Adams or a Jefferson person really say about us?

Adams and Jefferson were pals, then enemies, then pals again. When they were first pals, they got a vote for American independence through the Continental Congress, Adams leading the floor fight with his oratory and Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence at Adams's behest. When they were enemies, Adams and Jefferson headed America's first two political parties and ran against each other in what might still be the dirtiest American presidential campaign on record. When they were finally pals again, old age and time had worn away some of the vindictiveness, and they started a correspondence that became one of the richest in American politics. Adams and Jefferson were so in tune that they both died on the same day – July 4, 1926, exactly fifty years after Declaration of Independence's signing.

But they were very different men. Adams was more the orator, Jefferson the writer. Adams was more ingenuous, Jefferson more of a party operative. Adams had more of a federalist concept of America, Jefferson (despite the Louisiana Purchase) was more states' rights. In their relationship, and to borrow a French proverb applied in a recent joint biography to Churchill and Roosevelt, Adams was the one who kissed, and Jefferson the one who offered the cheek. Adams was more crabby, Jefferson more cool. Finally, Adams wrote in his books; Jefferson did not.

That last distinction says it all, at least to one Oxford professor.

“What shall I say about Adams?” asks Daniel N. Robinson rhetorically in his Teaching Company lectures “American Ideals: Founding a 'Republic of Virtue.'” Robinson gropes for a way to get across how peevish and persnickety Adams was, and he comes up with this:

Adams and Jefferson had the two largest libraries in America. . . . Jefferson's books are in terrific shape. . . I shan't say that there are many volumes where the spine hasn't been cracked, but I just point out that they are in very good shape. Adams's books are in horrible shape. The margins are written up. He's got running arguments with authors who are identified as fools, louts, and dunderheads. His critics are addressed directly.

I'm an Adams man.

Posted August 18, 2010.  Link to just this post.

pool

Posted August 17, 2010.  Link to just this post.

my son

while I picked
my nose

my son played
kick the can

he was never in the room

but he learned it
anyway

   or

my son is the carpet
I am his sky

it's not as bad as it looks

I try to stay clear
keep my nose clean

    or

my son is the seabed
I shade.  I am his surface:

a sky for fish benighted

shifting nets of sunlight
that pull a fish's eye
like stars

    or

he stands stiff
nose against
the pane

waiting – never
in the room,
mind you –

for them to
take me out

Inspired by Big Tent Poetry’s prompt about possessions.

Posted August 13, 2010.  Link to just this post.

out-lincolning lincoln

My father and I spent this year's Beach Week on each other's history turf, he reading Doris Kearns Gooodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and I reading (or rather listening to – I'm a recent convert to Audible.com's unabridged readings) Lynne Olson's Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour. Each had read the other's book, so we had a couple of good conversations, one based on each book.

Pop has read at least a hundred books on World War II, I'm sure, but I usually don't take to them except for biographies. But the Founders and Lincoln – I love that stuff. And Citizens of London, though set in World War II, features a fellow Lincoln lover, a boarding-school teacher who has the lads over evenings to discuss Lincoln and Jefferson. Despite his shy ways – his audiences are always embarrassed for him because of his long, awkward pauses during speeches – Gil Winant also becomes a World War I fighter pilot, New Hampshire's all-time favorite governor, the first head of the Social Security board under Roosevelt, and the head of the International Labor Office until 1941, when Roosevelt appoints him as Ambassador to Great Britain, a post he holds until 1946.

Winant, whom I had never heard of until this book, is Lincoln without the guile. Like his hero, Winant is a Republican who does as much as he can for labor, introducing legislation to limit factory workers' hours and winning passage of a state welfare program that prefigures the New Deal. He even has Lincoln's honest, keen face, his disheveled dress and hair, and his piercing gray eyes. Winant's speechifying has the same effect as Lincoln's at the end as well as the beginning, too: his audiences' embarrassment usually turns to wild cheers after hearing out his honest and well-reasoned idealism. But, while Lincoln's ambition is “a little engine that knew no rest,” according to Lincoln's law partner Billy Herndon, Winant gives up his political ambitions by turning his support for Roosevelt's Social Security program into a national crusade, to the consternation of his fellow Republicans. His unqualified support for Roosevelt's New Deal ends the nascent movement to nominate him for president in 1936.

Winant becomes Britain's all-time favorite American ambassador for the same reason he's New Hampshire's all-time favorite governor: he's humble, hard working, and connects with common people. He sometimes puts off meetings with dignitaries in London so he can finish talking with the lowest classes of people there. When Britain's war effort is threatened by a miners' strike, its government calls on Winant, who convinces the miners to return to work. But he's loved principally because he does not doubt Britain's ability to fend off Hitler, he does nothing to avoid the hardships and danger associated with the bombing that London is subjected to for much of the war, and he does what he can to relieve their plight. He even goes broke giving his money away to the British poor. Along the way, he does what he can to support Churchill despite Roosevelt's frequent coolness to the prime minister, and he champions the Mustang P-51B bomber, which turns the tide of the air war in Europe enough to help ensure a successful D-Day invasion.

I enjoy biographies of three or four people like Citizens of London and Team of Rivals (and two of my other favorites, Merton & Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice and The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun). The author of such works usually contrasts her subjects to understand them better. Olson contrasts Winant (implicitly until the book's end) with fellow Americans Ed Morrow, the CBS broadcaster who revolutionizes radio news during his nightly broadcasts from London and elsewhere in the European theater, and Averell Harriman, the son of a railroad robber baron who serves as America's Lend-Lease administrator in Britain during the war. Murrow is almost as idealistic, almost as beloved in London, and just as uncaring about his personal safety as Winant. Harriman comes across as just has hardworking as Winant and Murrow, but he is more ambitious and cunning, marginalizing Winant before Roosevelt and doing what he can to look out for his own future.

Harriman blossoms in the tough, non-idealistic nationalism that takes hold of postwar America, emerging as a top-level negotiator and diplomat under Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. For Harriman, World War II is only a stepping-stone to a future in which he can finally escape the shadow of his father's success and reputation. Neither Winant nor Murrow transition well to prosperity- and Cold-War obsessed America, though. Winant suffers aimlessness and depression, and he commits suicide in 1947. Murrow gets rich and eventually leaves CBS after it treats its news division as something like a hobby in the 1950's, but he feels acutely the incongruity between the ideals and suffering he lived through in wartime London and the riches and insouciance of postwar America.

Citizens of London goes beyond its three principal protagonists, taking in many of the events and policies that define Anglo-American relations before, during, and after the war. It wasn't until the end of the book that I understood the book's entire scope, which should have been obvious to me from the title. The book is principally about London's citizens: a people who make sense of class distinctions even as they fight hand-in-hand for six years to repel and defeat Hitler, and a people whose suffering serves as a kind of chorus to sort out not only the book's protagonists but also Churchill, Roosevelt, and other actors in Europe's wartime theater.

Posted August 9, 2010.  Link to just this post.

ocean

Posted August 8, 2010.  Link to just this post.

looking for mist or rights

If you were to search the word “right” on the online Oxford English Dictionary, click the fourth entry out of nine, further limit yourself to some sense of right consonant with definition 3b on the resulting page (“The fact or position of having justice, reason, or fact on one's side.”), push all five of the buttons on the top of the page (Pronunciation, Spellings, Etymology, Quotations, and Date chart) and a lot more buttons that even this December's relaunch of OED.com will not offer, buttons such as Confusions, Connatural, Connections, Connivances, and Context (if OED buttons were published in alphabetical ranges like OED definitions), you would have something like Richard Tuck's impressive Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge 1979).

Before Tuck begins his fleshed-out, OED-like romp through the history of natural rights, he puts his own book in the context of other modern treatments of the history of natural rights. Unlike the richly patterned rug of natural rights theories Tuck discovers woven under our collective, ignorant feet, the accounts of that rug are sparse and threadbare. Tuck finds it ironic that “the language of human rights plays an increasingly important part in normal political debate [since World War Two], while academic political philosophers find it on the whole an elusive and unnecessary mode of discourse” (1).

But our age's misty, bipolar approach to rights – frequent, vague assertions of “human rights” divorced from the West's considerable theoretical history of natural rights – already may be put in at least some historical context, and Tuck attributes this political vs. philosophical irony to the legacy of Samuel Pufendorf, a German philosopher and contemporary of John Locke. Pufendorf limited natural rights to only actionable claims, and his views were picked up on a century later by Jeremy Bentham and the influential Utilitarians; therefore, many current political philosophers find reference to natural rights unnecessary. Why talk about natural rights if such rights are more easily discussed in terms of the duties someone else owes to the holder of such rights? Tuck points out that our current, poorly understood, post-Utilitarian notion of natural rights has helped to support authoritarian regimes (161-62).

But natural rights theories themselves have been mostly a conservative undertaking, I was surprised to learn, and in this respect Thomas Hobbes was no aberration. John Locke's liberal natural rights theory was a notable exception, a kind of culmination of natural rights' second flowering. Tuck finds that natural rights have enjoyed two great eras in Western history, 1350 to 1450, and then circa 1590 to 1670. “Seen against a background of European thought as a whole, [the “two great floruits of rights theories”] are freakish and fitful, and their dismantling has been a matter of high priority for succeeding generations” (177). Our nation happens to have been founded in an age already reacting to the last great natural rights flowering, but was founded on principles worked out at the end of that flowering. It explains some of the dissonance I hear in almost every paean to Jefferson or Lincoln.

I've moved now to my own theme and not Tuck's, however. Tuck never mentions Jefferson or Lincoln and, unlike me, seems to have no ax to grind. But he writes about some pretty interesting and subtle ax grinders over the past two millennia, and I'll leave you with two groups I discovered in his book that I feel an affinity toward, groups that together hedged the first, late-medieval natural-rights flowering.

The first group are medieval glossators (16).  Check out this paragraph from Wikipedia:

The glossators conducted detailed text studies that resulted in collections of explanations. For their work they used a method of study unknown to the Romans themselves, insisting that contradictions in the legal material were only apparent. They tried to harmonize the sources in the conviction that for every legal question only one binding rule exists. Thus they approached these legal sources in a dialectical way, which is a characteristic of medieval scholasticism. They sometimes needed to invent new concepts not found in Roman law, such as half-proof (evidence short of full proof but of some force, such as a single witness). In other medieval disciplines, for example theology and philosophy, glosses were also made on the main authoritative texts.

I really was born too late.

The second group – the French nominalists and conciliarists – ended the first great natural-rights flowering by providing an easy target for both the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance to take down natural rights for a hundred and fifty years or so. One of them – Jean Gerson – to whom Tuck attributes the first “fully fledged natural rights theory” (25), based his theory in part on his theology of union, a kind of theosis by which “man could come to be the same kind of being as God.” “Gerson kept a distance between God and man,” Tuck states, “but it was not a categorical break between two different kinds of being, as it was to be in Luther's theology.” Here's how Gerson's theology influenced his rights theory:

This theology also led Gerson to see the relationship between God and man as a reciprocal one between equals. Thus he argued for a natural covenant between God and man, which – and this is the crucial point – generated rights on both sides. According to Gerson, men have rights against God as a result of God's promise to them. . . . Because of this, we can see how freedom became an important value for Gerson: like Ockham (though with a number of important differences) he elevated the free wills of both man and God together. The arbitrary freedom of God's will was necessarily matched by a similar freedom of man's will – there could be no opposition between them. (30)

There's something of both political and theological babies that the Reformation and the Renaissance drained with that bath water. If we could but risk another bath, perhaps Western civilization would be born again.

Posted August 5, 2010.  Link to just this post.

light in august

Posted August 4, 2010.  Link to just this post.

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