Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

physical copy from the SMU library, finished 04/04/2025

In March of 2024, The Atlantic posted their list of “The Great American Novels” of the last century. They then demanded, “You have to read them.” This is my diary of doing just that.

Originally published in 1936, my copy of Absalom! Abasalom!, which I borrowed from the Fondren Library on the campus of SMU, where I work, was published in 1951 by The Modern Library, and once, it seems, was owned by a woman named Mary Barb Elliott. I know this because “Mary Barb Elliott” is inscribed inside the cover in neat cursive.

If I Google “Mary Barb Elliott Dallas,” no exact match comes up, but I wonder if this book was from the collection of a Mary Ann Elliott, who I found graduated from SMU, was a Phi Phi there, and passed away in 2019.

In Absalom! Absalom!, we are back with sad Quentin Compson, who we just met in The Sound and the Fury, which immediately preceded this novel on The Atlantic’s list. We know from that novel that Quentin died by suicide, but if you Google “why did Quentin Compson commit suicide?” (again, back to Google), the iffy/weird AI-produced answer that appears is that he was overwhelmed by his “intense grief over his sister Caddy's perceived loss of innocence and his own inability to reconcile his traditional Southern ideals with the reality of her actions.”

Okay, maybe?

What we learn in Absalom! Absalom! is that Quentin (and his family) has always been surrounded by Southern men who chose to end their own lives. It’s becoming clear that there are so many patterns in Faulkner’s work —the same story that gets told over and over again from different angles, characters with names of other characters —that Quentin seems to be part of something circular and tragic.

The setting is 1910, in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Quentin is a student at Harvard. He is recounting a story about the Supten family, who lived alongside his own family in Jefferson County, Mississippi, to his Canadian friend, Shreve.

If we didn’t know from The Sound and the Fury, we glean from the earliest pages of Absalom! Absalom! that Quentin is plagued by history. “Plagued” may be too soft a word. He is pummeled by the past, head-to-toe beat down by the unrelenting effects of the past and the legacy of the Civil War.

In one typically rambling Faulkerian passage, in fact, we learn that Quentin’s “very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth” (12). Faulker continues, “He was barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence” (12).

Yes, this seems oppressive. It seems circular, as I mentioned above, and awful. There are many circular and awful moments in this novel, but I also marked a section I thought was particularly lovely, about the endurance of words of paper:

“And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something —a scrap of paper —something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least is would be something just because it would have happened, to be remembered even if only from passing one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reasons that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish…” (127-128).

The ellipses are there in the text, a neat moment which serves to emphasis the meaning of the line.

And here’s where I’m swooping back to Mary Barb Elliott, who donated her home library to the library of her alma mater. In particular, she donated this physical copy of Absalom! Absalom!, which I was able to wander up one day and retrieve from the shelf, and then read, and then write about, and then return for someone to one day wander up and retrieve.

I do love how paper lives on.

sm