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Samson: Maleness, Charisma, Warrior Status, and Hair

Susan Niditch

in "My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man": Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel

This chapter explores the nexus in Israelite culture between maleness, charisma, warrior status, and hair. Central to this chapter is a close reading of tales in Judges 13–16 about the superhero ... More

This chapter explores the nexus in Israelite culture between maleness, charisma, warrior status, and hair. Central to this chapter is a close reading of tales in Judges 13–16 about the superhero Samson, a Nazirite from birth. Themes of us versus them, Israelite versus Philistine, are in part created by images of hair. The chapter also includes a close philological analysis of Judges 5:2, an important line about warriors in an ancient poem, and a study of the long-haired, would-be hero Absalom, ambitious and rebellious son of King David, whose hair suggests charisma only to become a source and symbol of his undoing.Less

 Failed Fathers: Personal Indulgence, Public Woe: Pattern 8

Paul Borgman

in David, Saul, and God: Rediscovering an Ancient Story

At the height of Israel's monarchal and communal glory, King David soon gives way to indulgences both physical and familial. He yields to the lure of another man's wife, and covers up his adultery by ... More

At the height of Israel's monarchal and communal glory, King David soon gives way to indulgences both physical and familial. He yields to the lure of another man's wife, and covers up his adultery by having the husband killed. Worse, at least in terms of its effect on communal well‐being, is the wrongdoing of an indulgent father: son Amnon, who rapes a sister without reprimand from his father; son Absalom, who kills his brother Amnon and stirs rebellion in the kingdom with no word or action from his father; finally, son Adonijah, to whom David has never spoken a word of displeasure—a son who surreptitiously seeks the throne without his enfeebled father's endorsement. Just as Eli before him, David falters grievously as a father, with momentous negative consequences to the people he is supposed to be ruling. In the end, as David lies dying, we find a twist in the pattern that yields a culminating insight into David's character and an added confirmation of what God found in David that pleased the divine heart. The paternal indulgence pattern begins with Eli, whose two sons die (I, 2:12‐4:22), followed by David‐the‐father, whose son Amnon dies (II, 13:1‐29); son Absalom dies (II, 13:30‐19:15); finally, son Adonijah, with whom David finally deals firmly—a son whose death is not attributed to David's fatherly indulgence (1 Kings 1:5‐2:25).Less

 News of Death—Public and Private Davids: Pattern 9

Paul Borgman

in David, Saul, and God: Rediscovering an Ancient Story

Before hearing about how David the father faces hearing news of three successive sons' deaths, we are shown David's response to death‐news of three successive political opponents, or would‐be ... More

Before hearing about how David the father faces hearing news of three successive sons' deaths, we are shown David's response to death‐news of three successive political opponents, or would‐be opponents. Taken together, the six instances of David's responding to death‐news, preceded by the Eli instance of responding to the same news, repeat formal elements in such a way as to shed increased light on the complexity of David. The tension between the private‐ and public‐Davids, for example, comes into clear focus, setting the narrative stage for a seventh instance, an epilogue of sorts, of private‐David working in synch with public‐David, toward communal well‐being. Six instances of death‐news begins, again, with Eli hearing of his sons' death (I, 4:10‐18), followed by David receiving news of Saul's & Jonathan's deaths (II, 1:1‐27); King David hearing of Abner's death (II, 3:28‐39), then of Ishbaal's death (II, 4:5‐12); then father‐David hearing of his infant son's death (II, 12:15‐24); of son Amnon's death (II, 13:21‐39); of son Absalom's death (II, 18:24‐19:8). The pattern is complete with a twist: father‐David, as king, says “no” to son Adonijah upon hearing ominous (not death) news (I Kings: 1:5‐31).Less

Incest and Miscegenation

Werner Sollors

in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

How do incest and miscegenation relate to each other? One of the most terrifying scenes in American literature is arguably Shrevlin McCannon and Quentin Compson's imaginative speculation, in William ... More

How do incest and miscegenation relate to each other? One of the most terrifying scenes in American literature is arguably Shrevlin McCannon and Quentin Compson's imaginative speculation, in William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), about what may really have occured in 1865 when Henry Sutpen murdered Charles Bon at the gate of Sutpen's Hundred, an act no one else witnessed, but about which different stories circulate. Quentin and Shreve ultimately infer that the white Henry must have murdered his mixed-race half-brother in order to stop Bon's marriage with Henry's white sister, Judith Sutpen, for the union would have provoked both brother–sister incest and miscegenation. Later, Henry comes back to his father's house and secretly lives and ultimately dies there with his biracial sister, Clytie. This theatrical, arid climactic reconstruction comes near the end of the novel, set in 1910, shortly before Quentin commits suicide.Less

“Lee Smith Talks about Southern Writing”

Lee Smith

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This chapter presents an interview with Lee Smith, who shares her views on Southern writing and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in particular. According to Lee, she read Absalom, Absalom! like ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Lee Smith, who shares her views on Southern writing and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in particular. According to Lee, she read Absalom, Absalom! like some people read the Bible. She recalls that she first read Faulkner when she was in college, claiming that she was blown away by the language. She reveals that she was drawn to it because like anybody who is from the South and who would write about it, she was also alienated from it. Later, as she was trying to write, she was interested in the writing itself and in the technique. She adds that Faulkner wrote each one of his novels with a diffrent narrative strategy. Lee concludes by declaring that “Faulkner is rewarding to read at whatever point you are in life”.Less

“The Book That Changed My Life”

Alice Mcdermott

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This chapter presents an interview with Alice McDermott, who talks about the book that changed her life: Absalom, Absalom!. McDermott first narrates how she discovered Absalom, Absalom! and her ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Alice McDermott, who talks about the book that changed her life: Absalom, Absalom!. McDermott first narrates how she discovered Absalom, Absalom! and her initial reaction to William Faulkner's storytelling. She says the Faulkner novel reinforced for her the importance of the storyteller and the impulse to tell a story. She goes on to discuss the influence of Faulkner's approach to his work, or his beliefs about literature, on her own writing life. McDermott shares that she writes with no literary theory in mind: all she has is a guess about what the story requires. While she would love to write a chronological narrative, the stories she has told thus far “have demanded something else of me”.Less

Specters on Staircases: Race, Property, and the Gothic in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by ... More

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.Less

“New Technique in Novel Introduced”

Wallace Stegner

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This chapter is an essay which considers William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, the story of demonic Thomas Sutpen's rise from poor white to opulent planter. Faulkner's narrates Sutpen's ... More

This chapter is an essay which considers William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, the story of demonic Thomas Sutpen's rise from poor white to opulent planter. Faulkner's narrates Sutpen's matrimonial experiments with whites and Negroes, his desire for a son and a perpetuated name, and the final dissolution of that dream in a flaming house haunted by the whimperings of a half-wit mulatto who is the only survivor of the Sutpen blood. The story is presented through the mouths of seven different people, in what Bernard De Voto calls a “series of approximations.” Absalom, Absalom! cannot be dismissed as 400 pages of turgid and invertebrate sentences about psychopathic ghosts. The text argues that the mere technique of Absalom, Absalom! may prove to be a significant contribution to the theory of the art of fiction, and that the novel will not be the last, or the best, to approach its materials in this way.Less

“History, Rooted in the Present”

Carlos Fuentes

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

In this chapter, the author reflects on how history, in William Faulkner's novels, is rooted in the present, “where we can all come together in remembrance and desire.” The author recalls the dinner ... More

In this chapter, the author reflects on how history, in William Faulkner's novels, is rooted in the present, “where we can all come together in remembrance and desire.” The author recalls the dinner he attended some years ago at William Styron's house on Martha's Vineyard in honor of President Bill Clinton. He and the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez were guests. When Clinton asked each one of them what their favorite novel was, the author mentioned Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Clinton went on to narrate his visit to Faulkner's house in Oxford while he was a teen and quoted a couple of passages from The Sound and the Fury. The author concludes by quoting Faulkner: “The present, you know, began 10,000 years ago, but the past began one minute ago”.Less

“Absalom, Absalom!”

Paul West

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This chapter talks about Absalom, Absalom!. It begins by saying that “William Faulkner's vicarious heroic would have taken him to reunions of the American pilots who formed the Eagle Squadron of the ... More

This chapter talks about Absalom, Absalom!. It begins by saying that “William Faulkner's vicarious heroic would have taken him to reunions of the American pilots who formed the Eagle Squadron of the Royal Air Force...His true heroics, visible and audible on every page, depend on fecundity, on the constant chance of saying something original by way of oratory.” It argues that Absalom, Absalom! is a visionary novel, a model of the impenitently pensive work of art. In conclusion, it notes that there is one big thing about Faulkner: he reminds you that, “when the deep purple blooms, you are looking not at a posy but at a dimension”.Less

Seduction and Sedition: James, Duke of Monmouth and Seduction‐Story Paradigms

Toni Bowers

in Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760

James, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85) embodied the paradoxes involved in distinguishing between force and fraud in late seventeenth‐century England. He appears as both seducer and victim of seduction in ... More

James, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85) embodied the paradoxes involved in distinguishing between force and fraud in late seventeenth‐century England. He appears as both seducer and victim of seduction in innumerable literary productions of the late 1670s and early 1680s, including John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681). The figure of Monmouth proved a magnet for a Protestant nation anxious about a Catholic succession, specifically that of the aging Charles II's designated heir, James, Duke of York. Monmouth led an armed rebellion after James's accession in 1685, a rebellion that resulted in bloodshed, dislocation, and, eventually, governmental savagery against his supporters. The Monmouth Rebellion became a site for public debate over the doctrine of passive obedience and the problem of imagining virtuous resistance to authority. Monmouth's cause and execution continued to resonate, paradoxically, among tory writers, for whom his tragic career as seduced seducer made visible pressing anxieties about their own positions as collusive and coerced subjects.Less

Designing Spaces: Sutpen, Snopes, and the Promise of the Plantation

Scott Romine

in Faulkner's Geographies

This essay argues that the plantation emerges a key site in Faulkner’s imagined geography of Yoknapatawpha County. For Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! and Flem Snopes in the Snopes trilogy, the ... More

This essay argues that the plantation emerges a key site in Faulkner’s imagined geography of Yoknapatawpha County. For Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! and Flem Snopes in the Snopes trilogy, the plantation offers the promise of a secure, coherent position with a social order. Such fantasies collapse, however, as space proves irreducible to intention and design. Attempting to manipulate the signs of the plantation order, Sutpen and Snopes find that the plantation is never quite inhabitable, and their respective attempts to enter into and command a social order end in disarray. Through an analysis of these two major characters, this essay argues that their careers are symptomatic of fantasies of stable geographies and coherent fictions of space that operate throughout Faulkner’s fiction.Less

Faulkner’s Caribbean Geographies in Absalom, Absalom!

Valérie Loichot

in Faulkner's Geographies

This chapter provides an extensive view of the multifarious presence of the Caribbean in Absalom, Absalom! If Faulkner’s novel fails to produce a faithful Caribbean geography as a description of the ... More

This chapter provides an extensive view of the multifarious presence of the Caribbean in Absalom, Absalom! If Faulkner’s novel fails to produce a faithful Caribbean geography as a description of the surface of the earth in the strict sense of the term, it nonetheless provides a multiply complex notion of the Caribbean (Haiti, Martinique, and New Orleans) through an incarnation of the landscape in the characters’ bodies. The essay reads Faulkner through the lens of French phenomenologist Claude Romano by privileging landscape over geography. It also establishes a dialogue between the Mississippi author and Caribbean writers such as Aimé Césaire, Edwidge Danticat, and Édouard Glissant.Less

Faulkner in the Histories of Film:: “Where Memory Is the Slave”

Julian Murphet

in Faulkner and Film

Julian Murphet’s essay locates Faulkner and film squarely within a “cinematic century” that began in the 1890s and, by the end of the twentieth century, had seen its obsolescence due to the advents ... More

Julian Murphet’s essay locates Faulkner and film squarely within a “cinematic century” that began in the 1890s and, by the end of the twentieth century, had seen its obsolescence due to the advents of digital media. That medial loss, however, only serves to supercharge the historical content of film, one Murphet finds lodged in both watershed films and filmed events (Griffith’s Birth of a Nation; the footage of Auschwitz’s liberation) and in film form—the literal darkness or “nothing” between each frame. Quentin emerges as a paradigmatic, while also key “witness” to the film century’s history of losses, his subjectivity marked with a premature melancholy and strickenness which, by way of Jean-Luc Godard, Murphet traces to film and to film’s own history.Less

In the Book of the Dead, the Narrator Is the Self: Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker as a Response to Faulkner’s Haiti in Absalom, Absalom!

Sharron Eve Sarthou and Jay Watson

in Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas

This essay argues that Faulkner’s 1936 novel presents Haiti as an infantilized and demonized land, a trope that has been historically used to marginalize Haitians and rationalize US paternalism in ... More

This essay argues that Faulkner’s 1936 novel presents Haiti as an infantilized and demonized land, a trope that has been historically used to marginalize Haitians and rationalize US paternalism in Haiti. Countering this long history of oppressive representations, Danticat’s 2007 novel focuses not on the blurring of racial lines that makes Haitian figures like Charles and Eulalia Bon so fascinating to Faulkner and his white narrators but on subtler forms of ethical hybridity and transnational entanglement that make her Haitian and Haitian American characters complex and compelling. These characters are all in various ways implicated in Haiti’s difficult history, but they also prosper in the US, claim a historically situated culture, and exhibit a complex understanding of their own responsibilities to the past, the present, and maybe even the future, and often speak two or more languages.Less

Journal Entries

Thornton Wilder

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This chapter contains a number of journal entries, written between April 10, 1940 and November 6, 1949. In them, Thornton Wilder talks about three of William Faulkner's novels: Light in August, The ... More

This chapter contains a number of journal entries, written between April 10, 1940 and November 6, 1949. In them, Thornton Wilder talks about three of William Faulkner's novels: Light in August, The Hamlet, and Absalom, Absalom!. Wilder first comments on Light in August, the climax of which is the castration of the half-Negro demon-hero Joe Christmas. According to Wilder, Faulkner represents the humiliation of the once gallant South in sexual terms; the Negro's strength is perpetually before their eyes to remind them of their loss. He then turns to what he believes is Faulkner's fancy overwriting in The Hamlet before concluding with a discussion of Absalom, Absalom! and its motif that the institution of slavery set in motion its own retribution.Less

“William Faulkner: The Novel as Form”

Conrad Aiken

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This chapter focuses on what it calls William Faulkner's genius for form and his continued exploration of its possibilities, as against the unusual concern with his violence and dreadfulness of his ... More

This chapter focuses on what it calls William Faulkner's genius for form and his continued exploration of its possibilities, as against the unusual concern with his violence and dreadfulness of his themes. It discusses Faulkner's uncompromising and almost hypnotic zeal with which he insists upon having a style, which is evident in novels such as Absalom, Absalom!, The Wild Palms, and The Sound and the Fury. It argues that Faulkner's style, though often brilliant and always interesting, is all too frequently downright bad. It also comments on Faulkner's passion for overelaborate sentence structure and concludes that despite the bad habits and the willful bad writing, Faulkner's style as a whole is extraordinarily effective.Less

“Reading Faulkner from a Writer’s Point of View”

Kenzaburo Oe

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

In this chapter, the author offers a reading of William Faulkner from his point of view of as a writer. He begins by discussing one of Faulkner's unique narrative techniques, “reticence,” and ... More

In this chapter, the author offers a reading of William Faulkner from his point of view of as a writer. He begins by discussing one of Faulkner's unique narrative techniques, “reticence,” and explaining that when he reads Faulkner's novels, he always puts the translations beside the originals, whenever they are available. He claims that he experiences Faulkner through a triangular circuit for the transmission of verbal symbols—Faulkner; the translator, who is a specialist; and himself, a reader of the words of the other two. He also reflects on his response to Faulkner's attitude toward writing novels and to his way of activating the imagination. Finally, he considers Faulkner's way of manipulating his male and female characters by focusing on his novels The Hamlet, The Mansion, The Wild Palms, and Absalom, Absalom!.Less

“On Coming Late to Faulkner”

Padgett Powell

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

In this chapter, the author talks about coming late to William Faulkner. He begins by saying that “if you discover the Old Man late: you have heard of him if you have heard of William Shakespeare, if ... More

In this chapter, the author talks about coming late to William Faulkner. He begins by saying that “if you discover the Old Man late: you have heard of him if you have heard of William Shakespeare, if you have heard of the Civil War, and your apprehension of him will be constituted of a vague kind of hybrid of those entities grown out of more or less local soil...” According to the author, if you come to Faulkner late you may escape finding yourself enthralled, intoxicate, intestate. He recalls the time his English teacher gave him a copy of Absalom, Absalom! and says he was not the same boy when he finished reading the novel.Less