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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

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

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

in Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a ... More

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a haunted house seeking to climb the stairs only to be thwarted by a seemingly supernatural African American woman. These scenes signify the women’s contradictory roles as powerless property and powerful specters. Treated as property, the women do not just haunt the houses, they haunt as houses; they are conflated with the legal property of white families, even after the end of slavery. The women’s status as housekeepers, however, allows them a “keeping,” or possession of property, that provides them the power as specters to block the outsiders, who want to transgress the boundary of time to travel back into the past. Legal possession established by property rights confronts spectral possession signified by haunting.Less

Slave Capitalism in Faulkner

John T. Matthews

in Faulkner and Slavery: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2018

A central achievement of recent scholarship on capitalism has been the detailed case it makes for how extensively Atlantic capitalism relied on a global system of enslaved labor. Besides the direct ... More

A central achievement of recent scholarship on capitalism has been the detailed case it makes for how extensively Atlantic capitalism relied on a global system of enslaved labor. Besides the direct profits European investors extracted from colonial agricultural enterprises, establishing dominance over the production, manufacturing, and trade in commodities like cotton, gains also came from instruments of financialization in speculative investment, credit banking, and insurance—developing industries that fed on slave capitalism. Faulkner’s chronicle of the plantation regime exposes its dependence on financialized forms of slave capitalism, however much its participants deny them.  The particulars of financialized slaveholding in Absalom, Absalom! retain legibility under their attempted expungement by not-narration.  After considering capitalist derangements of personhood and time in the novel, contributor John T. Matthews turns to how its aesthetic responds to slave capitalism’s infliction of such violence.  Faulkner’s fiction formalizes the distortions of slave capitalism, but he redeploys such distortion in narrative and stylistic forms that resist capitalism’s demands.Less

Beyond the Door of the Big House: Slavery and Poor Whites in Faulkner and the Slave Narratives

Andrew B. Leiter

in Faulkner and Slavery

A comparative analysis of Faulkner’s fiction and African American slave narratives, this essay by Andrew B. Leiter addresses the relationships between slaves and lower-class whites. Faulkner ... More

A comparative analysis of Faulkner’s fiction and African American slave narratives, this essay by Andrew B. Leiter addresses the relationships between slaves and lower-class whites. Faulkner frequently depicts antipathy between poor whites and African Americans as a product of poor white resentment specific to their economic and social displacement. Contextualizing this presentation within the historical record and the slave narratives, this essay reverses traditional critical considerations of poor whites and slavery in Faulkner’s fiction. Those traditional considerations address what the slave economy means for the condition of poor whites in the antebellum South. They do not, however, address how the poor white presence defines Faulkner’s construction of slavery. The overt political implications of the slave narratives not only reveal the limitations of Faulkner’s slave world but they also reveal how the poor white presence mitigates the conditions of slavery in Faulkner’s fiction by displacing the brutalities of slavery with poor white suffering.Less

Faulkner, Slavery, and the University of Mississippi

W. Ralph Eubanks

in Faulkner and Slavery

Through an examination of the existing records of slaves once held at Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, contributor W. Ralph Eubanks explores the connection between these slaves who helped build the University ... More

Through an examination of the existing records of slaves once held at Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, contributor W. Ralph Eubanks explores the connection between these slaves who helped build the University of Mississippi and Faulkner’s fiction, as well as a new narrative that is evolving about Faulkner, slavery, and the University of Mississippi. Further, the essay evokes questions about how Faulkner constructed the relationship between Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, a relationship that has the University of Mississippi as a backdrop. Whether or not Faulkner had knowledge of the connections between the University of Mississippi and slavery, this new narrative twist makes us look at this relationship—as well as its historical context—in a new light.Less

Jason Compson, Belated Slave Master

Julia Stern

in Faulkner and Slavery

The slave master appears and then makes a belated symbolic reappearance in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. In this essay, Julia Stern traces master Thomas Sutpen’s ... More

The slave master appears and then makes a belated symbolic reappearance in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. In this essay, Julia Stern traces master Thomas Sutpen’s idiosyncratic practices, working along with his bonds people by day and engaging in spectacular wrestling matches against them at night. These agons allow Sutpen to re-enact his white supremacy. The essay then argues that Faulkner imagines Jason Compson as a white slave master born a century too late. Jason’s abuse of niece Quentin enacts the very treatment that enslavers practiced on their slaves, summarized by sociologist Orlando Paterson: natal alienation, social death, fictive kinship, human parasitism and ideological reversal. But Quentin reverses the master-slave relationship with Jason, re-appropriating 15 years-worth of child support money he has stolen from her. Stern concludes with a reading of Luster, Dilsey’s grandson, and his aesthetic ambitions, arguing that in this descendant of slaves lies the problematic and only hope for the Compsons, black and white.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

“Moving Sitting Still”: The Economics of Time in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

Jordan Burke

in Faulkner and History

This chapter explores the way in which the temporal blockages and aporias commonly identified in Absalom, Absalom! are symptoms of the fluctuating and troubled relationship between time and labor in ... More

This chapter explores the way in which the temporal blockages and aporias commonly identified in Absalom, Absalom! are symptoms of the fluctuating and troubled relationship between time and labor in the American South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through Thomas Sutpen and his descendants, Faulkner builds a web connecting time, narrative practice, and historical process which reflects both the changing socioeconomic milieu of the US South and the evolving narrative strategies employed by the plantocracy to reverse and refuse change. Sutpen serves as the primary figure for a hybridized and internally contradictory economy transitioning from agrarian “autonomy” to capitalist dependence and, concurrently, from a paternalist atemporality to the work rhythms more commonly associated with the industrial North. He is the Janus-faced symbol of the late-antebellum South, the admixture of the slave-owning aristocrat and the Cotton Kingdom protocapitalist.Less