Discovering The Story

William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom is a narrative masterpiece.  The facts of the story are rather spare.  Thomas Sutpen is shaped by a childhood rooted in his lower class roots and works the rest of his life to overcome it.  He goes to Haiti for riches where he marries the daughter of a sugar plantation owner.  When he finds out she is part black, he divorces her because she doesn't fit his plan.  He arrives in Yokanaptawpha County, buys a 10 square mile plot from the local Indian chief.  He develops it, marries a woman from the town and has two children, a boy and a girl.  When the boy goes off to college he meets a mysterious student from New Orleans who is named Charles Bon.  He brings him home for the holiday and arranges an engagement between Bon and his sister Judith.  Sutpen calls his son Henry in and tells him that Bon is actually his half brother from the mother in Haiti.  The two young men go off to war and when they return, as Charles comes back to marry Judith, Henry kills him at the door to the house.  He does this not because of the incest but because he has  learned that Bon is part black.  Henry disappears and Sutpen returns from the Civil War with no son to inherit his dream.  Finally he is killed by one of the poor white farmers who lives on the plantation because Sutpen fathers a baby by the man's granddaughter.

And that is basically it.  There are a few other details and the sad denouement, but that is the plot.  Admittedly it is a bit convoluted (a typical Faulknerian schema), but the book is 378 dense pages far more than seem necessary for the lean events of the narrative.  Faulkner's genius is in the way he tells the story.  These facts are not revealed in simple linear fashion.  Instead the structure of the book is like a spiral staircase with the same points in time returned to from the perspective of different characters who add new and important details.  It also is a bit like peeling an onion with layer upon layer of revelation.

The other technique which Faulkner employs is to have those telling the stories to invent the facts that fill in the blanks between the known.  The question is not whether these events are true, but rather if they make sense given what is known about the people involved.  The last part of the book focuses on Quentin Compson (who is tangentially brought into the story because of family relationships even though Sutpen lived well before he was born) at Harvard telling his friend Shreve the story at night in their dorm room.  They riff off of each others tellings and create a persuasive narrative of grand scope.

That Faulkner can pull this off without slipping into the boredom of repetition or the absurdity of fantasy is a real coup.  It is a reminder that the best stories sometimes lie in between the facts we know as our imagination builds a bridge.