William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the Immortalized Artist:On the Successes and Failures of Thomas Sutpen’s Ruthless Design

Kate GambleAdvisor: Austin Graham

April 7th, 2014

AcknowledgementsI would like to offer my sincerest thanks to the following:

To Courtney Rein and Jonathan Howland, for first introducing me to Faulkner when I was 16 years old. You are both the origins of my enjoyable obsession, and I likely would

have avoided approaching the author on my own had it not been for your class.

To my parents, for allowing me to complain indefinitely about the thesis process, and especially to my mother, for purchasing the entire Faulkner section of Green Apple books

as an encouraging and daunting gesture.

To Austin Graham, for being an invaluable resource and mentor throughout the process. I am inexpressibly fortunate and grateful to have worked with someone who knows and

loves Faulkner so well, and I couldn’t have found a better match. I can’t thank you enough for your time, energy, effort, tolerance and encouragement. You’re an inspiration

to Faulkner nerds everywhere—myself included—and a reminder of why I came to Columbia.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale RamonThe maker’s rage to order words of the sea,Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.1

-Wallace Stevens (1934)

1 Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets. n.d. Web. 5 April 2014.

Section I: Sutpen and Faulkner

I. Who is Thomas Sutpen?

When asked twenty years after its completion “What character or incident caused

you to write Absalom, Absalom!?” William Faulkner immediately replied: “Sutpen.” The

other characters, he explained, “I had to get out of the attic to tell the story of Sutpen.”2

Indeed, Thomas Sutpen—protagonist and contextual nucleus of the orbiting text that is

Absalom, Absalom!—had been lurking in the back of Faulkner’s mind long before and

after he wrote Absalom, often making brief appearances in other works as a prototypical

and elusive colonel figure. Sutpen, as Faulkner forged him, is shrouded in mystery and

entirely impenetrable, as much to the characters who desperately attempt to describe him

in Absalom as to Faulkner’s readers who similarly attempt to understand what it is he

represents and why Faulkner insisted upon such elusiveness of character. That Faulkner

chose to devote an entire novel—and arguably his greatest one, at that—to the

scrutinizing of one man’s character and story, suggests his tremendous significance

within the context of Faulkner’s work as a whole. Buried deep within Sutpen’s narrative

as well as his ethos are some of Faulkner’s deepest concerns about life, death, and human

nature. Sutpen is an occasion for Faulkner to explore and express his beliefs on the power

of art and his own identity as an artist.

Thomas Sutpen is one of the most speculated upon figures in the Faulknerian

canon, and thus has received countless interpretations. This is due, in large part, to the

fact that he can be read as any number of archetypal figures; part of critics’ fascination

2 Daniel J. Singal. The Making of a Modernist. (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997): 193.

with Sutpen is his simultaneously distinct and malleable character that allows for each

interpretation to be convincingly argued. The first and perhaps most widely-accepted

interpretation is that Sutpen is a mirror for the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture3

and an illustration of how the idealized South might be subverted. Sutpen exudes the

superiority and self-absorption that defines the Southern plantation owner who is

implicated in the moral and historical crime of slavery. Other interpretations read Sutpen

as a colonialist or imperialist figure4, who takes over a piece of land, enslaves everyone

involved in its acquisition, and uses it to gain power and fortune at the cost of others—

even his family. In more admiring readings, Sutpen is an existential hero5, embodying the

power of free choice and wondering, later, where and when he made the “wrong” choice.

In others, he is a contemporary Greek tragic hero6, whose monomania and hubris leads to

his ultimate self-destruction; the quintessential American7 pursuing his dream and will to

happiness; or the patriarch8 concerned only with establishing a line of descendents. Many

critics consider him to be some combination of a Platonic idealist9 and a racial purist10,

whose desire for a flawless legacy translates into guiltless racism and sociopathic self-

centeredness.

3 Shirley Callen, “Planter and Poor White in Absalom, Absalom!, Wash and The Mind of the South.” South and Central Bulletin 23.4 (1965): 24-36. 4 Dirk Kuyk Jr., Sutpen’s Design. (Charlotteseville: University Press of Virginia, 1990)5 William J. Sowder, “Colonel Thomas Sutpen as Existentialist Hero.” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1962): 3.6 Owen Robinson, Creating Yoknapatawpha. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).7 Margaret D. Bauer, “Hank Morgan Finds the Flaw in Thomas Sutpen’s “Design”: Southern: American: Human.” South Central Review, Vol 5. No. 4 (1988): 53-59.8 Robert Con Davis , “The Symbolic Father in Yoknapatawpha County.” Journal of Narrative Technique 10 (1980).9 Malcolm Cowley, “William Faulkner’s Legend of the South.” Sewanee Review Vol. 53, No. 3 (1945): 343-361.10 Christoph Irmscher, “Facing “Absalom, Absalom!.”Amerikastudien/American Studies 42.4 (1997): 601-11.

Virtually all of these interpretations can be substantiated by Sutpen’s story,

behavior and character, and there is no doubt that Faulkner invited such speculation.

Though Faulkner is often considered to be a distinctly Southern writer, his characters

need not be limited to strictly Southern, or even strictly American contexts and

interpretations; as he consistently stated himself, Faulkner’s concerns were universal and

his novels intended to address “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself”11.

It is for this reason that I believe Faulkner’s intentions in creating Sutpen were far higher,

far broader and far more personal than merely representing an American figure. Sutpen

embodies the artistic condition that Faulkner himself lived, breathed and often resented—

one of ruthlessness, dissatisfaction, and the implacable wish to be immortalized by what

he produces.

Many of Faulkner’s characters have been read as representations of the artist—

like Quentin Compson of Absalom, who collects bits and pieces of Sutpen’s story and

attempts to assemble it into a cohesive history—but Sutpen rarely has. Though Absalom

is generally accepted as a commentary on art and form—largely due to Quentin’s

obsession with constructing narrative—Sutpen is often read as merely the plot-point or

central figure around which Quentin’s artistic imagination revolves, but not as the artistic

visionary himself. Closer attention, however, to Faulkner’s language in describing

Sutpen’s “design,” as well as Sutpen’s place in the larger context of Faulkner’s work,

reveals indisputable links between Sutpen and Faulkner’s lofty, idealized vision of the

artist figure. The striking similarities between Sutpen’s character and Faulkner’s own

perception of himself as an artist reveal ties between the two men that bind them

unbreakably: a fascination with immortality, a plaguing dissatisfaction with reality, a

11 William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. NobelPrize.org (10 December, 1950). Web.

meticulous and visionary design, an unstoppable creative impulse. Together, these

components forge a true Faulknerian artist.

II. Colliding Contexts

The context in which Faulkner devised and constructed Thomas Sutpen reveals

essential insights into his function—in the context of Absalom as well as in the larger

context of Faulkner’s weighty ambitions as a writer. Faulkner was, as a writer, deposited

directly into the transitional period of time between the Victorian and Modernist periods,

and was steered towards the Modernist methods that attempted to “restore a sense of

order to human experience under the often chaotic conditions of contemporary

existence.”12 Faulkner’s exemplary modernist features are indisputable, from his

meticulous focus on radical form, to his collapse of myth and structure, to his infamously

unhappy view of history. Most relevant to Faulkner’s work is the often-articulated

modernist assertion that “art makes life”13, as articulated by Modernist critic Peter Gay.

The Modernists expressed their fascination with the nature of the artist and his ability to

forge new worlds and new lives with their art, rather than merely mimicking or recreating

real life. One of Faulkner’s most prominent Modernist features is the belief he expressed

in the artist’s ability to transcend history and reality, and the way that he communicated

this belief through stories that, ostensibly, had little to do with art or artists. Absalom,

Absalom! is exactly this—Faulkner’s characteristically Modernist defense of the artist, as

shown in the character we would least expect it: Thomas Sutpen.

12 Peter Gay, Modernism. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010): 8. 13 Ibid. 7.

The biographical context into which Absalom was born is equally critical to its

literary and artistic contexts. Critics and biographers of Faulkner have called attention to

certain habits of the writer that likely informed his work in significant ways, the most

fascinating being what many call his “masks”; Faulkner was known for his tendency to

imagine and perform a variety of different “personae”, which many believed to be a tactic

in further distancing himself from ever being conclusively perceived or identified. Many

consider this role-playing, in which Faulkner described himself as a variety of characters

—a pilot, a bohemian artist, a town-bum, a bootlegger, a farmer and a fisherman—a

symptom of his true artistry and creative power.14 Due to these many changing identities,

there is no “certain Faulkner”, and what resulted instead was a writer “whose life outside

writing not only has never truly come clear to us, but in a strange way never existed.”15

There is no doubt that this personal feeling of multiplicity and unease informed the

chiseled and well-developed characters that Faulkner went on to write, the most (and

almost excessively) developed character being none other than Thomas Sutpen.

Another noteworthy biographical fact was Faulkner’s plaguing disappointment

with his own life and the American South he inhabited, as well as a notable, recurring

anxiety about death and mortality, which had plagued him since childhood. This ever-

present fear of death, combined with his grave disillusionment, formed Faulkner’s “deep

aversion to the real world”16, which in turn motivated him to form his own, alternate

reality through his writing—a reality in which “not the mirrored world but the invented

one is paramount.”17 His work, in the most basic sense, was a reaction to the culture he

14 Agostino Lombardo, The Artist and His Masks. (Rome, Bolzoni Editore, 1991): 27.15 Donald M. Kartiganer, Faulkner and the Artist. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996): xv.16 Robert Hamblin, “Saying No to Death.” (Jackson: University of Press Mississippi, 1996): 24.17 Robert Hamblin, “Saying No to Death”, 14.

lived in as well as a poignant revision of it, through which he could exaggerate the faults

he saw in the real world (moral corruption, historical wrongdoings, human tragedy) and

at the same time highlight its beauties (the power and complexity of the human heart). By

methodically recreating the world around him, Faulkner established himself as a maker18,

capable of drawing from a myriad of historical realities in order to instill them into a

cosmos that was distinctly his own.

This pure and unwavering creative power extended far beyond Faulkner’s desire

to formulate his own identity and imagery as a writer. No longer inspired by the

American South and its lost ideals, Faulkner seemed to develop his own form of faith: a

faith in the artist and his capacity to “defeat time and death” with what he creates19. What

results is a novel and a protagonist who exert the strength and endurance of the artist and

the prototypical American that Faulkner admires—a man who crystallizes Faulkner’s

own identity, who revives a lost Victorian sense of purity and purpose, and who

exemplifies the hard work and perseverance in which Faulkner believed. Sutpen is

Faulkner’s vehicle for proving the power and agency of the artist to transcend the “futility

and failure”20 of everyday life through his artistic design. The concept of the creative

design is what binds Faulkner to Sutpen, in terms of what causes it, how it is executed,

whether it succeeds or fails and, most importantly, whether it ultimately immortalizes the

artist who imagines it.

Fundamentally, Faulkner’s artistic design in Absalom is a complex re-telling of

the formation and execution of Sutpen’s own design. No word or motif in the novel is

emphasized as much as this design, which seems to become synonymous with its creator.

18 Kartiganer, xix.19 Hamblin, “Longer than Anything.” (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996): 275.20 Kartiganer, xv.

The novel follows Quentin Compson as he attempts to piece together the fragments of

evidence that together comprise Thomas Sutpen’s narrative: how he appeared in Jackson,

Mississippi seemingly out of nowhere, acquired a piece of land, established a plantation

and created a family, all with unforgiving and ruthless determination. Though much of

the novel takes place as a dialogue between Quentin and a handful of other characters

who knew Sutpen in some way, what grounds the novel and unites its characters is a

fascination with Sutpen’s great design and what follows it. Sutpen’s design is that of this

legacy, and in many ways of his own identity; his final work of art is a carefully-crafted

amalgam of his plantation, his family, his identity, and the lofty legend that succeeds

them. It is this meticulous level of artistry—from blueprint to final structure—that

characterizes Sutpen as a creative icon and Absalom as its study; everyone involved in the

re-telling of Sutpen’s story seems simultaneously traumatized and enraptured by it,

determined to understand what motivated the design and why, ultimately, it failed. The

novel is a deeply elusive, wandering portrait of the artist figure that embodies Faulkner’s

palpable regard for the artist’s determination and his ability to transcend time.

III. Creating Yoknapatawpha County

Faulkner’s unique artistic vision, through which he defied his own contemporary

reality in order to create his own mythic one, takes the form of the Southern microcosm

that is Yoknapatawpha County. Critical to understanding Faulkner’s religious-like

valuation of art over life is an understanding of the reasons behind Faulkner’s formation

of this small, imaginary county, within which all of his characters live, grow and die.

Countless critics have attributed his decision to create such a realistic microcosm to

Faulkner’s plaguing dissatisfaction with his own life and with the South that he grew up

in; part modeled on actuality, and part imagination, Yoknapatawpha’s existence confirms

the power of the invented world and one where the artist, not God, is “Sole Owner &

Proprietor.”21 Driven by Faulkner’s growing belief in the power of art to “assert the

artist’s ego in the face of death”22, Yoknapatawpha’s strikingly believable, meticulously-

detailed nature is proof of the artist’s ability to transcend the real world by creating an

entirely new one. Yoknapatawpha became so real to Faulkner, that he could not be sure

“whether I had invented the world to which I should give life or if it had invented me,

giving me an illusion of greatness.”23 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha are tied in undeniable

ways, each encouraging one another to partake in the illusion that this created network of

real-seeming characters and events was as real, as relevant, and as memorable—if not

more so—than actual history.

There is no doubt that Faulkner’s decision to ground the majority of his novels in

this invented world is closely tied to his faith in the creative, transcendent power of art

and writing. Clearly disturbed by his awareness of his own looming immortality,

Faulkner forged Yoknapatawpha as an insular realm within which his characters could

safely orbit, as well as one within which he could ground himself and his work. Faulkner

was outspoken about his motivations in creating the county, explaining that “there’s a

case of the sorry, shabby world that don’t quite please you, so you create one of your

own.”24 This creative gesture is a direct response to the disappointment and inadequacy

21 Hamblin, Saying No to Death, 14.22 Ibid. 1323 Ibid. 1324 Hamblin, Saying No to Death, 23.

that Faulkner felt constituted his own life and the American South that he found himself

trapped in.

Critical to understanding Yoknapatawpha is understanding its distinctly visionary

nature. A large part of Faulkner’s dissatisfaction at the time during which he created this

miniature world stemmed from his belief that the American dream had virtually

abandoned Americans. Yoknapatawpha, it seems, is Faulkner’s own dream, which, like

the American dream, becomes essentially indistinguishable from the people and places

which compose it. In a later essay entitled “On Privacy”, Faulkner essentially eulogizes

the American Dream—with a capital D—about which he believed “we dozed, we slept,

and it abandoned us.”25 This particular vision consists of “liberty in which to have an

equal start at equality with all other men”26, and in which all men have the right to pursue

their ambitions freely and privately. The idealized “Dream” that Faulkner believed had

“abandoned us” values, above all, the right to pursue individuality—it is a world in which

“every man would be a king”27 because of his “individual dignity and freedom.”28 This

freedom of man to pursue his objectives entirely alone and unquestioned is, to Faulkner,

paramount.

There is no doubt that this idea of the all-consuming “Dream”—through which

those living it merge with it, and vice versa—informed Faulkner’s creation of his own,

realistic dream, and, more importantly, Thomas Sutpen’s dream. This dream surfaces,

too, in Absalom in the form of Sutpen’s design, which becomes entirely interchangeable

with the man himself; Sutpen’s dream is an even smaller microcosm within the larger one

25 William Faulkner, “On Privacy.” Essays, Speeches & Public Letters. Edited by James B. Meriwether. (New York: The Modern Library, 2004): 65.26 Ibid. 6327 Ibid. 6328 Ibid. 62

that is Yoknapatawpha. These small and scattered worlds are the vessels through which

Faulkner proved the artist’s ability to revive a dream that, in the real world, was slowly

but surely fading.

Section II. Sutpen’s Design

I. What is Sutpen’s Design?

Two fundamental designs exist in Absalom, Absalom!. The first is Thomas

Sutpen’s design upon arriving in Jefferson, Mississippi, and the second is Faulkner’s in

creating Thomas Sutpen. To understand each design completely and thoroughly is to

understand a great deal about Faulkner and how he perceived himself and the nature of

his art. There are as many overlaps as there are discrepancies between Faulkner’s design

and Sutpen’s, both of which reveal critical insights into Faulkner’s greater goal in the

novel; at the same time that Sutpen displays qualities that Faulkner openly admires and

associates with successful artists and successful men, he also makes mistakes that doom

him to failure. To say that Faulkner either admired or despised Sutpen would be an

oversimplification, but it is, on the other hand, helpful and insightful to ask why exactly

he invested Sutpen with certain virtues and characteristics—even ones that led to his

doom and his detriment. While it is clear from both Absalom and his outside writings that

Faulkner revered the endurance and ruthlessness Sutpen committed to his grand “design”

as well as its creative and visionary nature, Sutpen also seems to be a warning from

Faulkner of the silent tragedy that occurs when a creator becomes devoured by his own

creation. The complex relationship between Sutpen and his design reveals Faulkner’s

same struggle in separating himself from his work. Whether or not either succeed in

distinguishing himself from his tangible legacy is a critical question to ask.

To understand how and in what ways Sutpen’s design resembles Faulkner’s, one

must first understand how it arose, what comprised it, how it was executed and what its

consequences were. Perhaps even more fundamental is how Faulkner describes Sutpen’s

character, and how this character resembles Faulkner’s idea of a creative genius and his

conception of himself. Faulkner’s meticulous and mystifying descriptions of Sutpen

invest him with an air of mystery and greatness closely resembling his own elusive

identity, making it clear that Sutpen is more than just a colonel and more than just a man.

What he is, exactly, is much less obvious.

Faulkner’s first descriptions of Sutpen are deliberate in their ambiguity, as he

carefully avoids acknowledging that Sutpen is a real, human man. Instead, the first four

pages of Absalom are riddled with mystical, supernatural and almost demonic imagery.

With his first appearance, Sutpen emerges as a haunting “ghost”29 rather than a real

human, and next, as a “man-horse-demon” who “out of quiet thunderclap he would

abrupt upon a scene”30. Faulkner insists, from the first page of the novel, that Sutpen

quite literally appeared out of thin air—a notion that invests in Sutpen a mystical,

magical and almost godlike quality. Faulkner confirms Sutpen’s immortal air once again

on the first page of the novel, as he describes Sutpen “creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the

Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light.”31 From the first moments of Absalom,

Faulkner defines Sutpen by his creative power—a power to create himself, his land and

his legacy out of virtually nothing. Similarly critical to Sutpen’s character is his total lack

29 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, 1990): 4.30 Ibid.31 Ibid.

of identity and, more importantly, his apparent lack of history as “a man who so far as

anyone knew either had no past at all or did not dare reveal it—a man who rode into town

out of nowhere.”32 Sutpen has nothing, and thus has nothing to lose. All he has, according

to Faulkner, is a blank slate, a fresh start, and the agency to create something.

As Faulkner’s descriptions of Thomas Sutpen progress in the opening sections of

the novel, it becomes unclear, at times, whether Faulkner is describing Sutpen himself or

just Sutpen’s ambition; Faulkner’s language seems to meld physical descriptions of

Sutpen with equally elaborate descriptions of Sutpen’s mental condition. He first focuses

on Sutpen’s appearance, describing him as a man “with a short reddish beard which

resembled a disguise and above which his pale eyes had a quality at once visionary and

alert, ruthless and reposed in a face whose flesh had the appearance of pottery”33.

Immediately after, he describes Sutpen’s feverish state of mind, in which he lives “alone

and unaided and not through blind instinctive will to endure and survive but to gain and

keep to enjoy it”34 —whatever exactly it may be. Faulkner is much more interested in the

mindset than the man that contains it, describing Sutpen as “the slave of his secret and

furious impatience” with the sense “of a need for haste, of time fleeing beneath him,

which was to drive him for the next five years.”35 The portrait we see of Sutpen at the

beginning of Absalom gives us a detailed image of the “quiet and unflagging fury”36 that

defines his character—a fury that both inspires and drives the “design” that Sutpen

diligently executes.

32 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, 1990): 10.33 Ibid. 24.34 Ibid. 24.35 Ibid. 25.36 Ibid. 28.

The words that Faulkner consistently repeats in an attempt to describe Sutpen

almost become him for the first 40 pages of the novel: fury, conviction, endurance,

ruthlessness, rush and impenetrability. These same words, traits and phenomena are what

lead to the creation of his great design, or “that secret end”37 that Sutpen, throughout

Absalom, relentlessly pursues. His own identity, it seems, is secondary to this design; we

hear about the design—not exactly what it is, but what it is like—long before we hear

actual words from Sutpen’s mouth (a scarce occurrence). Similarly, the actual

composition of the design seems to fall secondary to the concept behind the design itself,

as Faulkner devotes far less attention to the actual execution of the design than he does to

its plan and its ultimate destruction. To understand Sutpen’s design is to understand

Sutpen’s visionary character and grandiose dream—the actual elements that comprise it

are merely vehicles and shells which contain it.

These three vehicles of execution are, for Sutpen, simple: a house, a family, and,

ultimately, a legacy. Attached to this legacy, too, is a radically new, self-established

identity. His house and his children are simultaneously the instruments of Sutpen’s

design, the agents of his legacy, and the continuation of his selfhood—literally and

metaphorically. Faulkner often describes each of these entities as forced extensions of

Sutpen himself, through which and in which he has imbued his own austere ruthlessness,

“as though his presence alone compelled that house to accept and retain human life; as

though houses actually possess a sentience, a personality and character acquired not from

the people who breathe or have breathed in them so much as rather inherent in the wood

and brick or begotten upon the wood and brick by the man or men who conceived and

37 Ibid. 29

built them.”38 It is clear from Faulkner’s language that Sutpen’s house and family are

distinctly manufactured to contain his great design and nothing more; Sutpen—and by

extension, Faulkner—is obsessed with the idea of the design itself rather than the

disappointing form it ultimately takes. What matters far more than the final product of the

design—the house, the children, the legacy—is the agency, control, and sense of

“authorship” involved.

In the rare moments of Absalom where we actually hear Sutpen speak about his

design, his true ruthlessness emerges. Much of Absalom revolves around the alleged

“mistake”—a disproportionately casual word for what it refers to—that Sutpen makes in

having a child with a woman of a mixed race. Though this mistake, according to the

novel, is what leads to Sutpen’s inevitable doom, he still makes several attempts

throughout the novel to simply move past it. With regards to the mother of the child,

Sutpen explains how he “found that she was not and could never be, through no fault of

her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design which I had in mind”39, and thus he

disposes of her accordingly. Sutpen’s immediate, almost sociopathic disposal of this

woman also points to the Platonic nature of his design, which in part takes the form of a

commitment to racial purity. According to Sutpen, this woman “would have made an

ironic delusion of all that he had suffered and endured in the past and all that he could

ever accomplish in the future toward that design”40; this one minor and likely

undetectable flaw taints Sutpen’s design so completely that he must start from scratch in

order to rebuild it. Even after this allegedly colossal “setback”, “he did not give up…he

38 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 67.39 Ibid. 194.40 Ibid. 211.

never did give up.”41 Despite Sutpen’s keen awareness of the inevitable failure of his

design, he refuses to submit to it, but rather continues relentlessly to pursue it. This

ruthlessness, it seems, is the primary ingredient of Sutpen’s design.

II. What motivates Sutpen’s Design?

Once it is clear how and in what form Sutpen’s design is to manifest itself,

another critical question arises: why did he come up with it and what exactly drives it?

Sutpen seems to appear in Absalom with his plan entirely pre-determined, as if he were

born with it. To understand the motivation behind Sutpen’s design is to understand

Faulkner’s own design with the novel and his motivations in creating a relentless, design-

driven protagonist. These incentives deeply link Sutpen to Faulkner and to the figure of

the committed artist that Faulkner so often envisions.

A passage almost exactly halfway through Absalom epitomizes Sutpen’s blind,

unwavering commitment to his design and its powerful inevitable quality. It becomes

clear by this point in the novel that the design transcends the man entirely:

All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life, never life with what all the men and women that had died to make him had left inside of him for him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and watching to see if he was going to do it right, fix things right so that he would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead.42

This moment seems almost revelatory or religious for Sutpen, as if the design is

suddenly planted within him by some divine power. He is simultaneously slave to and

41 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 215.42 Ibid. 178.

executor of the design, unable to explain exactly why he must pursue it but only that he

must do so. “Above a maelstrom of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings”43, this

design represents “his code of logic and morality, his formula and recipe of fact and

deduction”44 around which he can lay the groundwork for his life. Though the physical

products are simple—a house and a family—the symbolic weight they carry are, to

Sutpen, immeasurable; both are attempts to establish a legacy and, in turn, avoid the

effects of time. At the root of Sutpen’s legacy is a resistance to time and a desire for

immortality—two qualities often associated with the creation of a work of art. It is only

through his creations that Sutpen can be preserved and extended infinitely, and thus they

become the outlets for his design.

Faulkner is candid in describing Sutpen’s weakness in the face of passing time—a

weakness that infects many of Faulkner’s characters, within Absalom as well as outside

of it. Sutpen is mentally crippled by this awareness, “himself diffused and in solution

held by the electric furious immobile urgency and awareness of short time and the need

for haste…concerned (not afraid: concerned) not that old age might have left him

impotent to do what he intended to do, but that he might not have time to do it before he

would have to die.”45 At the root of his urgency is a fundamental fear of death, as Sutpen

is transparently and consistently plagued by “the twin fears of dehumanization and

death”46. His urgency is almost maniacal, and becomes increasingly so as time passes and

Sutpen becomes more and more aware of “the fact that the thread of shrewdness and

courage and will ran onto the same spool which the thread of his remaining days ran onto

43 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 221.44 Ibid.45 Ibid. 129.46 Hamblin, “Saying No to Death”, 271.

and that spool [was] almost near enough for him to reach out his hand and touch it.”47

The more Sutpen tries to secure his legacy, the further it slips away from him. This does

not, of course, faze him, but rather motivates him to further wage his war on time.

Faulkner, with his unusual use of words, seems to carefully and deliberately

freeze Sutpen in a constant state of pursuit, as if this is the state he was born into as well

as the one in which he will die. Sutpen, in a way, is his ceaseless pursuit, “galloping

through avatars which marked the accumulation of years, time, to the fine climax where it

galloped without weariness or progress, forever and forever immortal”48. Faulkner’s

language fixes Sutpen in this state of static “galloping”; there is no culmination or point

of fruition to Sutpen’s design, but rather a constant and inevitable decline from the

moment we become aware of its existence. His children are described as empty,

amorphous ghosts, and his home is “the shell, the cocoon-casket marriage-bed of youth

and grief…reserved for something more: some desolation more profound than ruin.”49

This quality of pre-determined doom and destruction comes closely paired with Sutpen’s

futile effort to defy the passage of time, and acts as a critical defining feature of the

artistic figure that both Sutpen and Faulkner embody. Epitomized in a description by a

secondary character, Grandfather Compson, Sutpen is described as a man with “just a

will to endure and a foreknowing of defeat but not beat yet by a damn sight.”50 According

to Sutpen’s story, half of being a visionary is understanding that your dream is doomed to

fail. This knowledge, to Faulkner, is unique to the artist.

47 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 224.48 Ibid. 231.49 Ibid. 109.50 Ibid. 207.

III. What makes Sutpen an artist?

It is now my intention to compare Sutpen’s design in Absalom with Faulkner’s

own design in forming the novel, in order to explore Faulkner’s conception of the artist

figure. The thematic ties, virtues and characteristics of Sutpen’s character with the artist

figure that Faulkner so often describes suggest a fascinating overlap of creative power,

self-definition, legacy and transcendence—efforts that Faulkner addresses in his fiction

as well as in his non-fiction. Sutpen’s great design most basically reflects a desire to

transcend human life into the sphere of immortality, so that he can be preserved by what

he has produced, as an artist is preserved by the work he leaves behind. This artistic

legacy binds Faulkner to Sutpen in ways that also transcend Absalom and spill into much

of Faulkner’s work; beneath Absalom lies the recurrent Faulknerian question of whether

or not a man can defy mortality by way of what he creates while living. Faulkner and

Sutpen are bound by their belief “in that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is

a might-have-been which is more true than truth.”51 The artistic ability to dream and

design, to imagine a “might-have-been”, invests in artists the power to become immortal

through their work.

Sutpen’s pursuit of immortality is far more candid and aggressive than Faulkner’s

own. His Platonic plan is clear, in that “he must pursue absolute ‘flawlessness’ in his

dynastic design if he wishes to transcend the ephemeral flesh-and-blood world into which

he was born and attain a level of existence so far above animality that it is possible to

‘live on’ endlessly after death.”52 The way that Sutpen attempts this transcendence is

virtually through “the creation of a radically new identity for himself”53, a notion that,

51 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 119.52 Daniel J. Singal, The Making of a Modernist, 109.53 Ibid. 196.

biographically, Faulkner also grappled with. This self-sculpting, it seems, is both a talent

and a habit of an artist, as “Sutpen has rejected his history, convinced that he can create

himself de novo, as if he were an object to be sculpted.”54 In the pivotal scene in Absalom

where Sutpen recounts his life story and the development of his design aloud to an

acquaintance, he does so with “detached and impersonal interest” as if “telling a story

about something a man named Thomas Sutpen had experienced.”55 Like an obsessive

craftsman, Sutpen is constantly observing his work and trying to perfect it, consistently

unsatisfied with his product but unable to do anything about it. Faulkner, too, dabbled in

his own efforts to create and sculpt his own identity, except that he chose to develop

several varying personae instead of a single distinguished one. Both men extended the

scope of their creative power so far that they were able, in a way, to author their own

identities.

We can observe nuances far more subtle than Sutpen’s aggressive quest for

immortality that characterize him as a Faulknerian artist. Sutpen is described as

possessing a distinctly mythic and mad quality, for “if he was mad, it was only his

compelling dream which was insane and not his methods.”56 Sutpen’s “madness” is

expressed in the most mundane of ways as he quietly attempts to construct his legacy.

This madness is a unique combination of extreme power and desolation, as Faulkner

explains that “he was the light-blinded bat-like image of his own torment cast by the

fierce demoniac lantern up from beneath the earth’s crust and hence in retrograde…

clinging, trying to cling with vain unsubstantial hands to what he hoped would hold him,

54 Ibid. 200.55 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 197.56 Ibid. 134.

save him, arrest him”57; almost maniacally, Sutpen clings to the dream that he believes

will fix him into immortality. This quality of madness is one that Faulkner knows well

and grapples with constantly. “The artist’s driving impulse,” Faulkner repeatedly said, “is

‘to say No to death’”58, an assertion that often drives his most artistic characters into

quasi-crazed mindsets through which they believe they can conquer time with what they

create. Similarly associated with this madness is what Wallace Stevens calls the artists’

“Blessed Rage for order”59, a rage that in Absalom takes the form of Sutpen’s obsessive

crafting of Sutpen’s plantation out of an unscathed wilderness. Closely tied to this raging

quality is the characterization of Sutpen as a “demon”—a word that Faulkner often used

to describe “the artistic impulse within an individual”60. This maniacal “rage” is a distinct

quality of the Faulknerian artist figure, and likely one that Faulkner himself related to.

Critical to Faulkner’s conception of the artist’s rage is the unique, godlike knowledge or

insight that comes with it; Sutpen’s design-driven “madness” comes paired with a power

that makes him more capable, more discerning and more visionary than his

contemporaries who fail to understand his dream.

57 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!. 139.58 Hamblin, “Saying No to Death”, 278.59 Ibid. 280.60 Ibid. 275.

Section III: Faulkner’s Artist in Other Work: Saying No to Death

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg,

or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.61

Faulkner’s work before and after Absalom confirms his commitment to and near-

obsession with conceiving of his own, unique vision of a true artist. In looking at both the

non-fictional work—speeches, letters, interviews and essays—as well as the fiction that

precedes and follows Absalom, two things become clear: first, that Thomas Sutpen had

occupied his thoughts and continued to do so even after he published Absalom, and

second, that he was fascinated with the complicated relationship between man, life, and

art. In the context of his outside writings, Faulkner’s characterization of Sutpen becomes

simultaneously clearer and more complex, as do his reasons for writing Absalom.

Faulkner’s fascination with the artist figure emerges constantly in his non-fictional

writings, as does his distinctive image of what comprises it. Sometimes, in these writings,

Faulkner refers to this figure simply as “the artist”, but just as often speaks of the artist in

the form that he knows best: the writer. What is fascinating about this universal author is

how closely he resembles Thomas Sutpen.

A few of Faulkner’s other works stand out remarkably when considered in the

context of Sutpen’s character, because of the hauntingly familiar-sounding assertions

Faulkner makes about art, life, legacy and failure. Intertwined in these statements are

ones that reveal his fascination with the potential for art to defy death by preserving the

artist in a state of immortality. It is this notion—of artwork as an eternal vessel of an

artist’s ambition—that ties Sutpen to Faulkner on such a deeply personal level; both men

61 William Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel” in Lion in the Garden. Edited by James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. (New York: Random House, 1968): 240.

are bound to the belief that they can fix themselves forever in the work that they create.

Though many of these outside works were written after Absalom, they reveal Faulkner’s

commitment to articulating the pivotal role of the artist. What is striking when looking at

these later works is the cold and ruthless figure that emerges, once again, from their

descriptions: Sutpen.

Though Faulkner is perhaps one of the most quotable authors in history, there are

a few especially notable statements that reveal the deep-seated beliefs that likely drove

him to forge a character like Sutpen. Some of the most staggering of Faulknerian

wisdoms were borne from his 1956 Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel for the

Paris Review, in which he explicitly describes his conception of the artist—his virtues,

his duties and his doom. Implicit in these descriptions is Faulkner’s own deep sense of

obligation to the craft of writing and respect for those willing to pursue, ruthlessly, the

design that they feel they were born to execute. Again, Sutpen and his design re-emerge.

Both the specific language of his statements as well as the weighty, almost religious

beliefs behind them link Faulkner to Sutpen in the ruthless and visionary designs to

which they both commit their lives.

When asked during the interview “What makes a good novelist?” Faulkner

explained that an artist is “a creature driven by demons” who is “completely amoral in

that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work

done.”62 Much like Sutpen in his almost sociopathic commitment to his design, the

Faulknerian artist will sacrifice whatever necessary in order to get the result he wants.

Faulkner was, of course, constantly asked about himself as a writer as well as his literary

contemporaries, but he often responded to these literary-driven questions with universal,

62 Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel”, 239.

sweeping statements on artists in general; artists, to Faulkner, are not necessarily bound

by their individual craft but rather by their ability to conceive of a vision. Throughout the

interview he hones his vision of the writer, elaborating that:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.63

This particular statement is a much-analyzed one, firstly because of the ruthless, amoral,

dream-driven artist figure he describes, and secondly because Faulkner was extremely

hesitant in naming his literary influences—past or contemporary. His deliberate reference

to “Ode on a Grecian Urn” further reveals Faulkner’s fascination with the transcendent

quality of art that the poem is famous for addressing; it is artistic and masterfully-

executed dreams like Keats’ “Urn” that succeed in fixing their creators into immortality.

Much like the figures on Keats’ urn who are frozen in a state of perpetual motion,

Faulkner freezes Sutpen in his constant of “galloping”, pursuit and perseverance. This

simultaneous motion and stasis characterizes the larger aims of both writers, as Keats and

Faulkner both similarly address the ability of works of art—whether urn or novel—to

somehow fix the characters they contain in a moment in time, while also allowing them

to move again when contemplated in the future. The idealistic “he” Faulkner describes in

this interview perpetually comes to life as Faulkner circles in on his distinct identity.

Even 20 years after Absalom had been written and sealed, Faulkner seems to be

describing the same discontented, implacable man that he knows so well—whether it is

himself, or Sutpen, or some amalgam of the two.

63 Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel”, 239.

As the interview progresses, so does drama and the weight of Faulkner’s

assertions. The interviewer, aware that she had struck a chord with Faulkner in asking

him about the importance of art, pushes Faulkner to articulate exactly why it is that he

writes. He explains:

The aim of the artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.64

It is this statement that succinctly and strikingly epitomizes Faulkner’s belief in the

“fixing” power of art and the men that it preserves. Faulkner critic Robert Hamblin

scrutinizes this passage in his essay “Saying No to Death”, exploring Faulkner’s

fascination with the artist’s power to defy death—or, the “irrevocable oblivion”65—

through his work. Hamblin points out that critics have given far more attention to the first

portion of Faulkner’s statement—the notion of art as arrested motion—and in doing so

have in large part ignored the second proposition—the notion that art can “move again”

at any point in the future. Hamblin argues that Faulkner was particularly determined to

make sure that his art would be continually “revived” in this way, both in his constant

reincorporation of past characters as well as in his frequent reluctance to reread his

already-published work.66 By allowing his characters to grow and change over time,

Faulkner insisted that they were just as susceptible to change as real human being. As

Faulkner grew older and, in turn, more aware of his own mortality, he became more and

more committed to the vitality of his work.

64 Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel”, 253.65 Hamblin, “Saying No to Death”, 17.66 Ibid. 18.

It is perhaps for this reason that two years after publishing Absalom, Faulkner felt

the need to return to Thomas Sutpen in his novel The Unvanquished. Like most of

Faulkner’s later novels, the novel takes place in Yoknapatawpha County during the Civil

War, and follows father-and-son duo John and Bayard Sartoris—two archetypal,

Faulknerian colonels. Though Sutpen is only mentioned briefly as a local wartime

acquaintance, his cameo reinforces the weight of Sutpen’s character in the greater context

of Faulkner’s work. One of the characters states briefly that “no one could have more of a

dream than Colonel Sutpen,”67 and continues to describe the “cold ruthless man” who

appeared out of nowhere, built a legacy, “lost everything in the War like everybody

else”68 and then continued to rebuild his plantation. Moments after, Faulkner inserts a

warning—perhaps sincere, perhaps not—against dreams like Sutpen’s, when a character

claims that “a dream is not a very safe thing to be near…if it stays alive long enough,

somebody is going to be hurt.”69 Sutpen’s “dream”—one that his contemporaries consider

both dangerous and impossible—permeates the deepest corners of Faulkner’s work. In

this re-incorporation, Faulkner assures us that Sutpen has made his mark on

Yoknapatawpha County, scribbled his name on the wall and fixed himself forever in

Faulkner’s world.

Faulkner’s statements in the 1956 Paris Review interview articulate a mental and

moral framework that Faulkner had been developing long before he spoke the words

aloud. It is no coincidence that his answers return consistently to the concept of art and

immortality and the ways that they are intertwined. Towards the end of the interview,

Faulkner concisely claims that “nothing can destroy the good writer…the only thing that

67 William Faulkner, The Unvanquished. (New York: Vintage International, 1991): 221.68 Ibid. 221.69 Faulkner, The Unvanquished, 223.

can alter the good writer is death.”70 This desire to avoid destruction is one that Faulkner

almost obsessively struggled with, and it is this desire that he implants deep in the mind

of Sutpen. Sutpen is only the first of innumerable Faulknerian characters who are

fundamentally plagued by their unwillingness to confront the inevitability of death and,

in turn, try to impress themselves upon something with the potential to endure.

In perhaps one of his most poignant proclamations, which surfaced in a private

letter to Joan Williams, Faulkner observed: “That’s the answer, the reason for it all, the

one and only way on earth you can say No to death: the best, the strongest, the finest, the

most enduring: to make something.”71 These momentary, lucid statements concisely

reveal Faulkner’s great reverence for those who wish to create. It is critical to consider

these off-the-record writings, because they differ so greatly from his often complicated

fictional prose; rarely in his novels can we decipher such clear messages. We can only

assume, then, that these messages are imbued in his stories and the characters they

contain.

In addition to the physical legacy that Sutpen so deliberately crafts in Absalom,

there emerges in Faulkner’s work an unusual weight placed on individual objects that are

passed down in order, in some way, to preserve someone’s legacy. Critics have pointed

out Faulkner’s almost obsessive attention to seemingly insignificant relics, like the statue

of John Sartoris in Sartoris, Benjy’s slipper in The Sound and the Fury, the family

ledgers in Go Down, Moses and even Bon’s letter in Absalom that survives a number of

generations in order to reach the hands of present-tense Quentin. There is no doubt of

70 Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel”, 253.71 Hamblin, “Saying No to Death”, 9.

Faulkner’s near religious belief in the ability of physical objects to contain and preserve

truths of the past, in order to make them “move again” with life. Faulkner openly

admitted to this deeply-founded wish to refer back to older, better worlds, using remnants

of them, “desiring, if not the capture of that world and the feeling of it as if you’d

preserve a kernel or leaf to indicate the lost forest, at least to keep the evocative skeleton

of the desiccated leaf.”72 So strong was Faulkner’s preservationist instinct that he seemed,

as he grew older, to believe more and more in the power of his printed works to

perpetuate his own legacy. Though he rarely acknowledged his own wish to be so

“preserved”, it is clear in his later statements on the writer that he was constantly

questioning his own legacy as an artist.

The most striking admission of his own effort to be kept alive through his works

appeared in the Foreword to The Faulkner Reader, written in 1953 by the man himself.

Faulkner had, at this point, written the majority of his most well-known works, and was

entering a later phase of his life with a heightened awareness of his old age and

impending death. The foreword is arguably the most concise and honest attempt by

Faulkner to describe why the writer writes and how his work is, in many ways, both his

doom as well as his legacy. Manifesting as both a justification for and a reflection on the

work being honored in The Faulkner Reader, this carefully-crafted foreword is perhaps

Faulkner’s most candid acknowledgement of his desire to “say No to death”—through his

printed work that will survive him, but more importantly through the men and women

who will keep it alive when they read it. Most striking about The Faulkner Reader and its

foreword is that Faulkner was wholly unaware of the monumental effect this collection

was to have on his career. It was, in fact, this collection that came to concretize

72 Hamblin, “Saying No to Death”, 13.

Faulkner’s legacy as an innovative Modernist writer, and so it is all the more fitting that

this foreword so poignantly epitomizes Faulkner’s most fundamental concerns and

objectives.

The foreword begins with the simple telling of a story: “It was 1923 and I wrote a

book and discovered that my doom, my fate, was to keep on writing books.”73 This

amalgam of doom and fate is one that pervades all of Faulkner’s work—Absalom

especially. Much like Sutpen, Faulkner seems to feel as if he has no choice in the matter,

but rather that he creates what he does because he was born to do so. After this statement,

Faulkner dives into a drawn-out description of a writer—again, an anonymous “he”—

who, too, is steered and piloted by some higher, unknown power:

Because one was too busy writing the books during the time while the demon which drove him still considered him worthy of, deserving of, the anguish of being driven, while the blood and glands and flesh still remained strong and potent, the heart and the imagination still remained undulled to follies and lusts and heroisms of men and women; still writing the books because they had to be written after the blood and glands began to slow and cool a little and the heart began to tell him, You don’t know the answer either and you never will find it, but still writing the books because the demon was still kind; only a little more severe and unpitying: until suddenly one day he saw that old half-forgotten Pole had had the answer all the time.74

Though, as usual, we must parse a lengthy, Faulknerian single sentence, his description

of this demon-driven artist figure boasts an eerie resemblance to a figure we now know

well: Sutpen. This “anguish of being driven” is one that both Sutpen and Faulkner’s artist

endure consistently, and is the exact force that motivates them to create what they do.

Faulkner admits, at this moment, that even after “the blood and glands began to slow and

cool”—even after he begins to enter old age—he still feels that he must continue to write,

73 William Faulkner, The Faulkner Reader. (New York: Random House, Inc., 1931): Foreword.74 Faulkner, The Faulkner Reader, Foreword.

despite the fact that “you don’t know the answer either and you never will find it.” This

endurance despite—despite impending immortality and despite an unrelenting sense of

predetermined doom and failure—characterizes Faulkner and the tragic artistic heroes he

imagines.

Faulkner continues, in the foreword, to explain what exactly the “answer” is as to

why writers write. The simple answer, he claims, for all types of writers, is “to uplift

man’s heart”, whether this be the writers who are “trying to be artists”, the writers who

“write simple entertainment”, the writers who “write to shock” or the ones who are

“simply escaping themselves and their own private anguishes.”75 Though this list of

writers seems strange and perhaps irrelevant, one can only assume that Faulkner himself

identifies with each and every category. This answer, too, comes across as an

oversimplification, and one much too optimistic to be coming from Faulkner. This is why

he elaborates on the complexity of this wish to “uplift”:

…This hope and desire to uplift man’s heart is completely selfish, completely personal. He would lift up man’s heart for his own benefit because in that way he can say No to death. He is saying No to death for himself by means of the hearts which he has hoped to uplift, or even by means of the mere base glands which he has disturbed to that extent where they can say No to death on their own account by knowing, realizing, having been told and believing it: At least we are not vegetables because the hearts and glands capable of partaking in this excitement are not those of vegetables, and will, must, endure.76

This moment manifests as Faulkner’s testimony, through which he admits the artist’s

selfish desire to preserve, empower and mythologize himself through his work and

through the lives it effects in the future. This “uplifting”, to Faulkner, is a transference of

the writer and his spirit into the body of another living human; with an almost religious

75 Faulkner, The Faulkner Reader, Foreword..76 Ibid.

feeling, Faulkner believes that the writer is essentially resurrected when his work is read

by another and thus “moves again”. This power of regeneration and renewal is critical to

Faulkner’s understanding of art and its ability to “defy” death, especially in its fascinating

and faithful tying together of the human body with the human mind. He believes,

wholeheartedly, in the power of bodies—whether human bodies, or actual books and

bodies of work—to contain a man’s spirit, to perpetuate it, and to revive it.

Faulkner most candidly addresses his (or “the writer’s”) concern with death in the

last paragraph of the foreword, which takes the form of an unusual expression of hope.

One cannot help but transfer Faulkner’s “he” to the man himself, as he expresses his

calm, firm belief that he will be sustained through his writing:

So he who, from the isolation of cold impersonal print, can engender this excitement, himself partakes of the immortality which he has engendered. Some day he will be no more, which will not matter then, because isolated and itself invulnerable in the cold print remains that which is capable of engendering still the old deathless excitement in hearts and glands whose owners and custodians are generations from even the air he breathed and anguished in; if it was capable once, he knows that it will be capable and potent still long after there remains of him only a dead and fading name.77

Though what Faulkner writes here is undoubtedly complicated, this last moment in the

foreword conveys a simple vision in which a writer is regenerated when someone,

somewhere, reads his words and his moved by them. This, according to Faulkner, is all it

takes: generations after he is “no more”, a living, breathing human will read his printed

words and, in some way, bring him back to life. It is through this vision that Faulkner

once again reinforces his unrelenting faith in the tangible; it is clear from his language of

“hearts” and “glands” and “breathing” as well as the “cold print” that Faulkner’s idea of

immortality is unusually physical. The objects that a man creates—whether books, for

77 Faulkner, The Faulkner Reader, Foreword.

Faulkner, or a home and a children, for Sutpen—are what contain him and ensure some

sort of physical presence in the future, for the very reason that they can be rediscovered.

This, according to Faulkner, is precisely the design of all artists: to create something that

can last for the reason that it can “move again” with life once they no longer can.

These later non-fictional instances of Faulkner’s writing unearth a deep-seated

philosophy that inspired his earliest novels and expanded and exploded as Faulkner

continued to develop as an artist. Though he rarely spoke so candidly about his aims as a

writer in his earlier years, it is clear in returning to his earlier novels that the “design” for

immortality was floating on the horizon—if not in the foreground—of his mind. Aside

from the striking correlation between Faulkner’s vision of the artist-writer figure and the

equally-ambitious vision of Thomas Sutpen, there appear in Absalom moments of clarity

where Faulkner expresses the desire to leave something behind in an effort to be

immortalized by it—not explicitly in the context of Sutpen and his legacy. One moment

in Absalom epitomizes this effort, and emerges almost as a step-aside from the thick,

detail-driven plot of Absalom as well as an opportunity for Faulkner to address the wish

that him and Sutpen share. In the passage, the narrator reflects upon a letter—“a scrap of

paper”—that has been passed on through several generations for the purpose of Sutpen’s

memorialization. The narrator (who is likely Sutpen’s daughter, Judith, though we can

never be entirely sure) contemplates the significance of this preserved artifact, and seems

to assert that it carries inside it not just the words of its writer but also the legacy of the

man it describes:

…and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block

of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don’t even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. 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 it would be something just because it would have happened, to be remembered if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason 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…78

This momentary tangent incorporates virtually all of the elements of both Faulkner and

Sutpen’s designs, as well as the themes addressed in Faulkner’s later non-fictional

statements: death, decay, creation and immortality. The passage begins by presenting the

“problem” with life—someone lives, “tries”, dies, and is remembered only by a decaying

gravestone with arbitrary writing on it. This, according to the Judith, is unacceptable

because “it doesn’t matter”, and so she suggests a solution. This solution quite apparently

takes the form of Faulkner’s own philosophy with which we are now quite familiar—to

create something, “something, anything”, that can be passed on to someone else, and be

remembered in this sharing. It is in this passing-on that the creator is remembered in a far

more real way than he would be by “a block of stone with scratches on it”, most

importantly because it is something shared by living, breathing, humans. The passing of

this object is all the more significant because both parties—the creator and the receiver—

are mortal, but are in this act the agents of immortalization. Critical to Faulkner is that

this “mark” or “scratch” passes between humans who can identify with the need to be

preserved.

78 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 101.

The vague and elusive language in this passage makes it all the more clear that

this is a moment in Absalom where readers can take a step back from the obsessive

unfurling of Sutpen’s design in order to explore its greater implications. In the context of

the novel, this passage can be read as a justification of Sutpen’s relentless efforts to

pursue his design and establish his legacy; Sutpen fears that he will die and that his name

will appear only on an insignificant tombstone that no one will visit. To prevent this, he

decides to create something to pass on—his plantation and his children—in the hopes that

he can be remembered and immortalized by it. In the greater context of Faulkner’s life

and work, however, this passage erupts with meaning: it epitomizes Faulkner’s

conception of the true artistic vision to be forever fixed within the objects he leaves

behind. This passage offers a brief but powerful moment of hope in the high tragedy that

is Sutpen’s self-imposed rise and fall—a hope that Sutpen has, perhaps, managed to

scribble his name firmly and deeply enough for it to be remembered.

Section IV: Successes and Failures

…he must have felt and heard the design—house, position, posterity and all—come down like it had been built out of smoke, making no sounds, creating no

rush of displaced air and not even leaving any debris…Because he did not give up. He never did give up.79

It is critical to first observe the nature of Sutpen’s various successes and failures

in executing his design before gauging Faulkner’s own with Absalom, Absalom! Though

Sutpen’s obsessive, intricate design ultimately results in his own downfall, there are

undoubtedly elements of his idealism and ruthlessness that Faulkner considers signs of

success. Though Faulkner insists, through Absalom, that Sutpen ultimately self-destructs,

79 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 214.

it is important to note that he says the same thing about most true artists, himself

included; failure is inevitable for men with dreams, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that

they are lost or forgotten. The reasons for Sutpen’s failure are more important than the

failure itself, in that they reveal aspects of Sutpen’s character that Faulkner identified

with and respected as well as the ones that he seemed to condemn. As demonstrated in

the passage above, Faulkner undercuts his own descriptions of Sutpen’s failure with an

indisputable admiration for his perseverance.

Well-known Faulkner critics like Philip M. Weinstein and Owen Robinson have

viewed Thomas Sutpen as an artist figure for more than just his visionary quality, but also

because of the notion that he, in a way, aggressively writes his way into the fabric of

Southern society.80 This, at first, appears as a success. In this way, Sutpen’s story both

develops and dissolves from a distant design into a living, breathing narrative—whether

he ever intended this or not. Not only does Sutpen, writer-like, attempt to shape his own

narrative based on the most basic, well-established of Southern ideals, but he manages to

do so in the biggest, most grandiose of ways. It is with this “bigger and better” attitude

that Sutpen observes his Southern neighbors and recreates what he sees, constructing a

magnified version of the prototypical Southern plantation. Many attribute this

dramaticized imitation to Sutpen’s “theatrical” side, through which he takes the form of

an actor studying a role and performing it “with the fervour of the born-again.”81 It is this

dramatic, ostentatious vision for his design that emerges as both Sutpen’s vice and his

virtue; in trying so desperately to “outdo” his own limitations with his artistic vision,

Sutpen loses control of his own narrative, and finds himself leaving behind a painful,

80 Philip M. Weinstein, Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 139-40.81 Weinstein, A Cosmos No One Owns, 140.

burdened legacy that he likely never intended. In this way, we can compare Faulkner and

Sutpen as writers and storytellers, with designs and visions perhaps far greater than they

could realistically execute. Both men ultimately lose control of the Sutpen story: Sutpen,

in his failure to maintain control over the legacy he has designed, and Faulkner, in his

scattered and unreliable telling of Sutpen’s life.

Sutpen’s downfall is complex, manifesting itself as a combination and subsequent

collapse of the American dream of self-creation, the Southerner’s dream of owning a

plantation and the artist’s dream of immortalizing himself. Sutpen is never fully accepted

into the Jefferson community and is constantly considered an outsider, because “he

surpasses all of them in the grandeur of both his success and his failure.”82 One of the

most strange and striking elements of Sutpen’s failure is how entirely unfazed he is by it;

Faulkner describes how numbly Sutpen recounts his own life story, “since he was not

talking about himself…he was just telling a story about something a man named Thomas

Sutpen had experienced, which would have been the same story if the man had no name

at all, if it had been told about any man or no man over whiskey.”83 Faulkner, too, seems

to deliberately distance himself from Sutpen’s story, referring to it as “the rag-tag and

bob-ends of old tales and talking”84, belittling the narrative as merely one of many

arbitrary and exaggerated Southern legends. This narrative nonchalance suggests that

Sutpen’s failure is, in many ways, irrelevant because it is inevitable.

The blueprint of Sutpen’s failure is carefully crafted by Faulkner to contain

elements that are just as admirable and inspiring as they are destructive. A large factor in

Sutpen’s downfall is his visionary nature, which drives him into an inescapable “bigger

82 Robinson, Creating Yoknapatawpha, 58.83 Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 199.84 Ibid. 243.

and better” attitude. Some critics interpret this damaging ambition as an “overdose”85,

through which Sutpen injects himself into a culture by recreating his own contrived and

exaggerated version of it—a version that neither he nor his community can maintain. It is

this determination that Faulkner simultaneously identifies with and admires as both the

vice and the virtue of true artists; almost always their designs are so intricate and

ambitious that they either fail immediately or self-destruct. In this way, Faulkner

transforms Sutpen’s alleged failure into an example of the artist’s condition, in which “he

creates his own narrative with an integrity that will accept no alternative or deviation.”86

Sutpen’s artistic integrity, idealistic purity, and adherence to his vision are the critical

components of his failure, but also the ingredient’s for his achievement. Though flawed

in its execution, Sutpen’s design is unparalleled in its ardor and conviction, and therefore,

to Faulkner, a true artistic feat.

This inevitable condition of simultaneous success and failure epitomizes

Faulkner’s conception of the artist. “All of us”, he explained, “failed to match our dream

of perfection…so I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”87

Faulkner accepts and embraces this “splendid failure”, because “once he did it, once he

matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat,

jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide.”88 According to him,

men like himself—and Sutpen—are born to pursue an unattainable dream, because this is

the healthiest possible condition for an artist. The cost of possessing an artistic vision is

knowing that it can never come to fruition—that the dream will never match its earthly

85 Robinson, Creating Yoknapatawpha, 62.86 Ibid. 63.87 Faulkner, “Interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel”, 238.88 Ibid. 238.

form. The god-like and creative impulse of the artist—through which both Sutpen and

Faulkner attempt to design and arrange their own self-sustaining microcosms—suggests a

deeper desire to be somehow mythologized by what they create. Whether the artist

acknowledges this immortal wish or not, his creative instinct is a symptom of some great

artistic craving for transcendence, paired with a proportional foreknowledge of its

impossibility. Though Faulkner asserts ostensibly that both he and Sutpen failed, again

and again, to align their creative designs with reality, there is no doubt that he succeeded

in fixing them both within his words and within the masterpiece that is Absalom,

Absalom!. Through Faulkner’s words, both he and Thomas Sutpen “move again” with

life, long after their respective failures.

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