In the historical period prior to the Civil War, the very bedrock of Southern identity and culture relied on boundaries as a defining force. For many in the South, one’s identity was not based on who one was in isolation or actuality, but rather it was primarily characterized by binary opposition: Was one black or white? Was one a slave or a slave-owner? Was one capable of asserting control over other people and things, or simply reduced to an object belonging to another person? As the necessity of boundaries being an identity-giving force was unique to the South, one of the most notorious characters in the novel, Thomas Sutpen, is confronted with the concept of boundaries for the first time when he arrives there:
He was born in West Virginia…where he had never even heard of, never imagined, a place, a land divided neatly up and actually owned by men who did nothing but ride over it on fine horses…he did not even imagine then that…there existed all the objects to be wanted which there were, or that the ones who owned the objects not only could look down on the ones that didn’t…So he didn’t even know there was a country all divided and fixed and neat with a people living on it all divided and fixed and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own” (179).
Faulkner details how Sutpen, the primary enforcer of boundaries within the novel, was not even able to conceive of their existence prior to learning of and living within the South. Sutpen’s inability to “imagine that there existed to be all the objects to be wanted which there were” is used to show that the enforcement of boundaries is not something that is natural, but is rather an ideology that is used to promote hierarchy and provide identity. Faulkner conjures hierarchical imagery to drive in this point: Sutpen’s description of the South begins with men who “do nothing but ride over [the land] on fine horses.” In this description, the men are elevated above the land on their horses, objects that they have manipulated to better enable them to retain control over the land and other people, similarly to how Southern aristocrats utilized slaves. However, Faulkner believes that while these boundaries are apparent within the South and to Sutpen, they lack true power. He equates the people to the country when he describes both as being “all divided and fixed and neat,” showing that the power that the men “on fine horses” believe they hold over the South is merely an illusion. Faulkner also touches on the lack of meaning that boundaries contain by highlighting the arbitrariness of them, noting that they are dependent on “what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own.” Faulkner uses this passage to pose the fundamental question of the novel: once we become part of a society defined by boundaries, is it ever possible to break them down and partially return to a state in which we cannot “imagine a land divided neatly up and actually owned?”
As the South plunges headfirst into the Civil War within Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner details the disintegration of Southern values during and after the Civil War and considers whether these boundaries, once fundamental to the Southern identity, can ever truly be broken down. Faulkner considers the use of boundaries, both in the physical sense (objects) and the metaphorical sense (relationships and hierarchies), and binary opposition by characters entrenched within the Old South as a form of grounding themselves while their surroundings crumble away. While the characters of the Old South are insistent on retaining binary opposition as a way of understanding the world around them, we see the younger characters who grow up both during and after the war strive to destroy the boundaries that held their ancestors back. Faulkner ultimately believes that boundaries can be stripped away within a post-Civil War South, and that a more homogeneous world is not only possible, but inevitable.
In detailing Faulkner’s consideration of boundaries within Absalom, Absalom!, I will begin by discussing the disintegration of both literal and metaphorical boundaries contained within the text. I will then provide a meta-textual analysis of how Faulkner’s use of jumbled narrative devices serve to break down boundaries for the reader. Finally, having analyzed the multiple representations of boundaries provided within the text, I will return to the thesis and main question of the essay: Can the boundaries governing society ever truly be broken down?
The entrenched boundaries within the South are used to provide identity through binary opposition, and as a result many characters fight to sustain boundaries rather than break them down at various points in the novel out of fear of losing their identity. Sutpen, a man who grew up wholly unaware of the existence of boundaries, finds his purpose in constructing his legacy according to the boundaries integrated into Southern life. Sutpen’s identity is dependent on the existence of boundaries to the extent that he is willing to destroy his family in order to sustain them–Sutpen is unwilling to allow Bon, who we find out is the interracial partial sibling of the Sutn children, to marry Judith. When Henry meets Sutpen at a Confederate camp, Sutpen essentially commands Henry to kill Bon in his telling Henry that Bon is part black:
“ –He cannot marry her, Henry.’ Now Henry speaks.
—You said that before…And now… it wont be much longer now and then we wont have anything left: honor nor pride nor God…no land…nothing matters except that there is the old mindless meat that dont even care if it was defeat or victory, that wont even die, that will be out in the woods and fields, grubbing up roots and weeds.—Yes. I have decided. Brother or not, I have decided. I will. I will…
—He must not marry her, Henry…his mother was part negro” (283).
Although Henry desires to break down boundaries in that he is willing to marry off his brother to his sister in order to sustain his affection for Bon, as the son of Sutpen he is unable overcome the racial boundaries that an interracial marriage would dismantle. Henry believes at first that because the South is losing the war, boundaries such as incest do not matter any longer because by the end of the war they “won’t have anything left: honor nor pride nor God” nor “land.” The very South that Sutpen once saw as “neat and divided” will now crumble and decay as the war is lost, and as such Henry believes that the wedding between Judith and Bon should be permitted. Yet even in Henry’s quest to break down boundaries, he gives into the racially charged binary opposition that the South uses to sustain itself. He describes the slaves back in the South as “the old mindless meat” who will “be out in the woods and fields, grubbing up roots and weeds,” effectively reducing them to nothing more than sacks of flesh whose only job is to perform manual labor. Thus, when Sutpen tells Henry that Bon’s mother was “part negro,” Henry knows that he must kill Bon before he lets him marry Judith. Although Henry wants desperately to break down boundaries, he has been inculcated with racist sentiments by virtue of being Sutpen’s son, and fails to overcome the racial boundaries entrenched within the Old South.
After Henry murders Bon, Rosa and Clytie likewise take part in a racially charged encounter centering largely around the hierarchical boundaries entrenched within the South. As Rosa attempts to run up the stairs in the hopes of locating Henry and Judith once she arrives at Sutpen’s 100, Clytie commands: “Dont you go up there, Rosa.’…it was as though it had not been she who spoke but the house itself that said the words—the house which he had built, which some suppuration of himself had created about him as the sweat of his body might have created” (111) Rosa is shocked by Clytie’s attempt to prevent her from ascending the stairs. Clytie, a mixed race woman, is not only standing up to a white woman, but she is doing it within the house of Sutpen, a place created to accord with the codes of the Old South and where boundaries have never yet been broken. Through their interaction on the stairs, Faulkner presents a moment in which boundaries could be broken down, in which Rosa and Clytie could set aside their racial differences in favor of solving the tragic series of events that have unfolded. Sutpen’s house is even described as taking part in the collapsing of boundaries as it is “the house itself that said the words.” However, Rosa is unable to overcome the racial boundaries that have been inculcated into her worldview. Although Rosa is seemingly able to come to terms with Clytie calling her by her first name, much like Henry is able to come to terms with Bon being his sibling, she is unable to allow the complete disintegration of pronounced racial boundaries when Clytie touches her. Rosa states that “she touched me, and then I did stop dead…my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into…outrage at that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh” (111-112). The concept of retaining control over one’s body is, as Ta Nehisi Coates discussed in his novel “Between the World and Me,” central to the black experience. Slaves’ bodies were continually abused by whites, and Clytie has undoubtedly experienced situations that have taken away her agency as a black woman; both in Faulkner’s era and today, black people have had their bodies continually violated at the will of whites. While Rosa is willing to let less substantial boundaries, such as Clytie calling her by her first name, come down, she is appalled when her body is “violated” in that she is simply touched by a black person. Clytie touching Rosa’s flesh and breaking down a physical boundary is substantially different from any other action, because, as Rosa states, “there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering” (112). No longer is Rosa able to sustain the “decorous ordering” of the South if a black woman, no matter who she is, is able to touch Rosa at will–ultimately, Rosa finds that she cannot accept the destruction of the physical boundaries that have provided the bedrock of black exploitation. The power that boundaries hold over the lives of those in the South is displayed through Faulkner’s detailing of two characters who, despite their inner desires to break boundaries down, find themselves unable to overcome the racial boundaries of the Old South.
Although boundaries are clearly entrenched within the Old South, as the threat of the Civil War looms and the standoff eventually occurs, boundaries are able to be broken down by the younger characters within the novel. Much of the novel is concerned with the disintegration of the boundaries that Southern society imposed upon relationships–specifically, incest, gay relations, and miscegenation. The central conflict of the novel surrounds the relationship between Judith, Henry, and Bon. Henry is a prime example of a character who seeks to dismantle the boundaries that define suitable relationships; it can be reasonably inferred that Henry has feelings for Bon, who is a man (and who we later learn is biracial), and for Judith, who is his sister. Henry is described as being “seduced” by Bon and “ap[ing] his clothing and manner and…his very manner of living” (76). Not only is Henry attracted to Bon, but he also desires to be just like him; Henry attempts to behave and dress in a similar manner to Bon as a way of dismantling the boundaries between them. Henry, who is “given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking, ratiocination,” is depicted as being inclined to follow his feelings and intuitions, to love others both regardless and in spite of divisions, and to reject the boundaries that are inherently manifested from the mind (76). Henry continually prioritizes feelings, intangible intuitions produced by the soul that are wholly subjective, over his thoughts, which, being produced by the mind, are much more concrete. Faulkner further emphasizes the prevailing force of feelings in Henry’s decisions when he writes that Henry “never thought. He felt, and acted immediately. He know loyalty, and acted it, he knew pride and jealousy” (77). Moreover, Faulkner writes that Henry spent four years with Bon, even though he “knew that the four years…would be in vain.” This is the first insight within the passage into Henry’s thoughts as opposed to his feelings, and he chooses to follow his feelings instead by staying with Bon.
Faulkner goes on to describe Henry’s motives in marrying off Judith to Bon, writing: “the brother realizing that…taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride” (77). Here, Faulkner most clearly emphasizes the breaking down of boundaries within the relationship between Henry, Judith and Bon. Henry is described as trying to “metamorphose” into both Bon and Judith in their engaging in sexual intercourse; not only are boundaries dismantled in Henry’s feelings for both a biracial man and his sister, but Henry symbolizes the urge to destroy boundaries completely in his desire to transform into Judith and Bon. Although Henry engages in the same rhetoric of binary opposition typically used to sustain boundaries, as he names Bon the “despoiler” and Judith the “despoiled,” and claims that Judith’s virginity, much like the people of the South, is “depend[ent] on its loss, absence to have existed at all,” he ultimately reaffirms the dismantling of boundaries as he imagines himself in both roles, metamorphosing into “the lover, the husband” and “the sister, the mistress, the bride” (77).
Faulkner ultimately addresses Henry’s killing of Sutpen, writing that “he loved, grieved, and killed, still grieving and, I believe, still loving Bon…knowing that the four years…would be in vain” (77). Henry desires to reject boundaries but finds that, in order to be the son of Sutpen, he has no other choice but to uphold them in his killing of Bon. While Bon’s death at Henry’s hand is, as established prior, an example of the boundary between blackness and whiteness being sustained, the boundary entirely upheld as, even after death, Henry is left “still loving Bon.” In this sense, while Bon may have died to uphold Sutpen’s values, boundaries are still reduced; Henry’s love for Bon is able to transcend the boundary between life and death, as Henry continues to love Bon even after he has passed. Henry symbolizes the struggle that all who seek to dismantle boundaries face in navigating the world around us: finding a way to balance societal expectations with a personal desire to live in a less rigid and taxonomized world. While Henry does falter in an important moment in that he gives into boundaries by killing Bon, he refuses to deny himself his continued love for Bon and thus is still able to reduce boundaries in a sense.
Quentin and Shreve’s retelling of the events that occurred at Sutpen’s 100 serves as yet another vehicle for Faulkner to dismantle boundaries; this time, the boundary between past and present. As Quentin and Shreve discuss the Sutpen family’s tragic story, they find themselves sinking into the past and transforming into the now deceased people contained within the story. As they descend into the story, Quentin and Shreve increasingly lose both their place in time and space; when describing Bon and Henry’s return to Sutpen’s 100 over Christmas, Quentin and Shreve find themselves so immersed in the story that “it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking” and become entrenched in the past to the point that there is “not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two–Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry” (267). Quentin and Shreve become fully integrated into the story and seemingly achieve what Henry desired through his idea of marrying off Judith to Bon–Quentin and Shreve are able to “metamorphose” into Bon and Henry, and break down the boundaries between the past and the present in their retelling of the story.
The boundary between reality and fantasy also crumbles in their recounting of the Sutpen tragedy, as Quentin and Shreve become “not two…in a New England college sitting-room but one in a Mississippi library sixty years ago…see[ing]…the sister and the lover in the garden…disappear[ing] slowly beyond some bush or shrub starred with white bloom–jasmine, spirea, honeysuckle…–names, blooms which Shreve possibly had never heard and never seen although the air had blown over him first which became tempered to nourish them” (236). Not only are Quentin and Shreve able to transcend the boundary between past and present, but they are able to both inhabit Henry’s consciousness at the same time as they become “one in a Mississippi library sixty years ago.” Furthermore, Shreve is able to break down the boundary between reality and fantasy as he becomes integrated into the South of the past, a place which he has never ventured in reality, to the point that he is able to imagine the “jasmine, spirea, and honeysuckle” on the bushes having never even heard of those kinds of flowers before. Moreover, Faulkner describes Shreve as the force that is able to conjure up these images of the past, regardless of whether they are accurate or not, when he writes that “the air had blown over [Shreve] first which was tempered to nourish [the flowers].” Not only is the boundary between past and present blurred for Shreve and Quentin here, but the boundary between truth and falsity is blurred for the reader, as they can never be sure if the images of the Old South conjured by Shreve are accurate.
To further emphasize Quentin and Shreve’s submerging into the past and subsequent breaking down of boundaries, Faulkner uses their confusion of climate to symbolize their removed state from a concrete time and place. At the beginning of the story, while Shreve and Quentin are still largely situated in the college sitting-room and not yet lost in the story, Shreve is described as having “no sleeve on his arm at all…only the smooth cupid-fleshed forearm and hand,” signifying that Shreve’s Northern blood and identity is still largely intact as he is accustomed to the cold weather. However, as the story progresses and as Shreve plays an instrumental part in its reconstruction, Shreve is described as wearing an “overcoat buttoned awry over the bathrobe” (235). Shreve’s identity becomes increasingly confused as he slips from the present to the past and metamorphoses into the characters within the Old South, symbolized in his becoming colder (more like a Southerner) as the story progresses. At the height of their retelling of the story, Quentin and Shreve are described as “the two the four the two facing one another in the tomblike room: Shreve, the Canadian, the child of blizzards and cold in a bathrobe with an overcoat above it….Quentin, the Southerner…in the thin suitable clothing…his overcoat…lying on the floor” (276). Here, we see a complete reversal of Quentin and Shreve’s identities; Quentin, the Southerner, has discarded his coat in the New England cold, while Shreve, a Canadian who is accustomed to this frigid weather, is bundled in both a jacket and a bathrobe. Not only are Quentin and Shreve lost somewhere between the present and the past, but in their recounting of the story they have also muddled the boundaries that sustain the most fundamental parts of their identities.
While Quentin and Shreve serve to show the ways in which boundaries can effectively dismantled through storytelling, Faulkner ultimately returns to Sutpen’s 100 at the end of the novel as a true test of whether boundaries can be broken down in the South itself. After Clytie lights Sutpen’s 100 on fire, fearing that Rosa’s arrival is to turn Henry in for the now antiquated murder of Bon, nearly everybody in the house dies. As Sutpen’s 100 crumbles to the ground, Clytie and Henry are killed in the fire while Jim Bond, the biracial grandson of Charles Bon, is the only member of the Sutpen family left standing. As the house burns down, Bond is described as the “creature which bellowed…wraithlike and insubstantial,” while Clytie, the only other person of color in the house, is described as “the light thin furious creature” (300). Sutpen’s 100, constructed by a man whose life’s goal was to enforce boundaries to give himself identity, collapses, and with it the boundaries that oppressed the people of color living within the house. No longer are Clytie and Bond referred to as “negroes,” “slaves,” or “n—–s,” all taxonomizing terms that rely on an opposite (whiteness) to provide them their meaning. Instead, they are instead called “creatures,” a term that can be used to describe nearly anything alive–be it plants, animals, or humans–and, as such, a term that effectively discards the use of binary opposition to provide identity that the Old South relied so heavily upon.
Moreover, Bond is further described as “the scion, the last of his race, seeing it too now and howling…But they couldn’t catch him. They could hear him; he didn’t seem to ever get any further away but they couldn’t get any nearer and maybe in time they could not even locate the direction of the howling anymore” (300). Bond is unable to be located or placed, able to evade all who look for him but can be continually identified by his screams. Bond transcends the boundaries of space in that he is everywhere yet nowhere at once–he has no static location, and can never be found, yet he now fills the entirety of what once was Sutpen’s 100 with his howls. Bond transforms into something much like a ghost after the fire; he haunts Sutpen’s 100 with his eerie howls and occupies an unbounded identity in that others are never able to find or see him, but can rather feel his presence. As Sutpen’s 100 goes up in flames, so too do the boundaries that it was built to sustain. Now Bond, the antithesis of the values of the Old South that Sutpen so desperately clung to, is the only fragment of Sutpen’s family that remains on the land. Bon symbolizes the inevitability of boundaries breaking down; Sutpen was willing to collapse his family to sustain the rigid boundaries of white supremacy in preventing the marriage of Judith and Bon, yet the very thing that he most feared–an interracial child, who is technically a part of the Sutpen legacy–is all that remains by the end of the novel.
Faulkner goes on to issue his conception of what he believes to be an inevitable world without boundaries. In Shreve’s utterance of some of his last words of the novel, he states that “the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time… in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings” (302). Faulkner ends the novel with a hopeful look towards the future, issued by a character wholly removed from the Old South and its reliance on boundaries. Shreve is able to imagine a homogeneous race that extends across the entirety of the western hemisphere, and believes that one day all people will have “sprung from the loins of African kings.” Shreve conceives of a world where the boundaries that led to the destruction of the Sutpen family do not exist, and that the Jim Bonds, the individuals who are unable to be taxonomized, will triumph. Faulkner’s brief window into the future shows that he believes the disintegration of boundaries is inevitable–it may have taken the collapse of the Sutpen family, and it may take “a few thousand years,” but ultimately boundaries can and will be dismantled in Faulkner’s view.
Not only does Faulkner use the characters’ relationships within the novel as a way of dismantling boundaries, but he intentionally blurs the boundaries between truth and falsity for the reader with his use of unreliable narration. Shreve and Quentin are two of the primary narrators of the story, and both are largely unreliable: Quentin has received much of his information from secondhand sources such as his father, and Shreve has never even ventured into the South. As Quentin and Shreve recount the story of Sutpen’s 100, there are multiple factual inconsistencies that are exposed in their narration. At one point, Quentin claims that Sutpen was in West Virginia and Shreve stops him: “ ‘Not in West Virginia,’ Shreve said… ‘Because if he was twenty-five years old in Mississippi in 1833, he was born in 1808. And there wasn’t any West Virginia in 1808… ‘All right all right all right,’ Quentin said” (179). The incorrect fact that Quentin includes in his narration of the story, and that Shreve, a complete outsider to the Sutpen family, is able to uncover, serves to effectively undermine the story in its entirety. In order to continue reading, the reader is forced to internalize that not only may the details be false, but the larger plot is equally as likely to be fabricated or exaggerated. As the boundaries between fact and fiction contained within the narration are taken down, Faulkner challenges the reader to partake in a real life experience devoid of concrete boundaries by reading the novel.
Moreover, as the story is essentially told in its entirety by secondhand sources, Faulkner leverages this unconventional plot structure as another way of challenging the reader to overcome the destruction of boundaries between truth and falsity. Quentin reconstructs the thoughts of Judith and Henry at one point in the novel, and imagines that they thought that “maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished…like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks…the pool attached…to the next pool which the first pool feeds…let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky” (210). Quentin’s insights into the “thoughts” of Judith and Henry serve to highlight the subjectivity of stories. Just as a pebble creates ripples, after-effects, when it is thrown into a pool, a story will always touch on biases that are incorporated into each individual’s retelling of it. Faulkner uses the metaphor of the pool to signify how our biases shape our understanding of the world around us and alter the ways in which we retell stories–including Quentin, Shreve, Rosa, Mr. Compson, and all of the other characters in the book who narrate the events that occurred at Sutpen’s 100. Moreover, as the storytellers become further removed from the actual event, as the “ripples” pass into a second, third, fourth “pool,” the story becomes further distorted by inconsistencies and individual biases. The additional “pools” that Faulkner describes “contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity” and they “reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky,” signifying how different people will always have different opinions and motives that shape their telling of stories, and that even descriptions of the most objective and concrete things, like the sky, are inevitably altered by biases. Faulkner uses removed narrators such as Quentin and Shreve to make it apparent to the reader that the story they are becoming invested in is undoubtedly warped and incorrect in some ways by virtue of its being passed down through multiple people. Thus, the reader themself is challenged to overcome the boundary between truth and falsity in that what they may perceive as an objective account of events is actually anything but that.
Lastly, Faulkner uses the textual elements of the novel to symbolize the dismantling of boundaries–as he collapses narrative styles, he combats the strict structures that sustain boundaires. In the chapter before last, at the height of Quentin and Shreve’s recounting of the story, there are multiple abrupt jumps in time and space, signified through different textual structures. Faulkner describes Quentin and Shreve facing “one another in the tomblike room” and then suddenly switches into the past without warning, as an omniscient narrator states that “(–the winter of ‘64 now, the army retreated across Alabama, into Georgia; now Carolina was just at their backs” (276). Faulkner collapses the traditional boundaries of storytelling in that both his plot and textual representations are not linear or uniform. Faulkner continually jumps back and forth from the past and the present without a clear transition or warning, whereas most stories are either presented in a series of events or contain isolated flashbacks. Additionally, while most authors stick to uniform textual devices, such as using one signal for dialogue or using either normal font or italics for the whole novel, Faulkner jumps between textual styles frequently. Over the course of the novel, Faulkner uses dashes, quotation marks, and italics to symbolize speech, and sporadically switches between italics and normal font when both relaying narration by other characters and delving into the past. Faulkner’s collapsing of narrative styles through his inconsistent textual representations meta-textually serves to further collapse boundaries for the reader.
Although boundaries are clearly rooted deeply within the South in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner utilizes all parts of his novel to illustrate to readers that boundaries can be broken down, and allows readers to engage in an experience devoid of boundaries in the very act of reading his book. Faulkner thus believes that boundaries can be overcome, even in the places where they are most entrenched.