The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Faulkner · a novel in nine chapters, with a Chronology, a Genealogy and a map · Random House, 1936 · scored on Faulkner’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Historical novel as investigation; Southern Gothic and family tragedy told by interested witnesses who conjecture, contradict and invent
Mythos
Absalom and Amnon and the sister between them, with David’s lament inverted; the founder who calls a domain out of the swamp; the house that falls by a curse in the blood
Phase
From Sutpen’s birth in the western Virginia mountains, given in the Chronology as 1807, through the founding, the war and the killing at the gate, to the night visit of September 1909, the fire that December and the telling at Harvard in January 1910
Presentation
Fiction; nine chapters spoken by four narrators in turn, the fifth set almost wholly in italics, with an appended Chronology, Genealogy and map of Yoknapatawpha County
Register
The long periodic sentence, holding a scene, a judgment on it and a second scene in parentheses; Rosa’s grievance, Mr. Compson’s ironic fatalism, Shreve’s comedy and Quentin’s dread in one shared idiom
Scale
One family and its plantation, its legitimate and repudiated children, and the society that made them, across a century and from the frontier to Cambridge
Governing Proposition
In September 1909 Miss Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin Compson how Thomas Sutpen came out of nowhere with enslaved men from Haiti, tore a plantation out of the Mississippi swamp, founded a family and lost it when one son killed the other at the gate; four tellers, the last two of them students in a cold room at Harvard, work out why. The wager of the novel is that the design of a self-made dynasty in a slave society rested on the refusal of kinship across the colour line, that the refusal destroyed what it was meant to protect, and that the past reaches the living only as stories told by those who need it to mean something.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens in a closed office on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in 1909, where Miss Rosa Coldfield sits with Quentin Compson and tells him about Thomas Sutpen. It opens, that is, on a voice and on the name it gives him: “man-horse-demon”, a stranger who came into the county with a band of enslaved men from Haiti and a captive French architect, and called a plantation out of the swamp as if by decree: “Be Sutpen’s Hundred”. Rosa has hated him a long time. She needs the story told, and she has chosen Quentin to hear it.
The book is built of nine chapters and four tellers. Rosa speaks the first. Mr. Compson speaks the next three to Quentin on the gallery that evening, and the fourth of his ends with a letter. The fifth is Rosa’s again, set almost wholly in italics. The last four move to a room at Harvard in January 1910, where Quentin and his Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, take the story up after a letter from Mr. Compson reports Rosa’s death; the seventh carries Sutpen’s own account, as he once gave it to General Compson. After the ninth chapter stand a Chronology, a Genealogy and a map of Yoknapatawpha County, which Faulkner appended and which belong to the book. The Chronology is flat and dated; the chapters are neither.
Rosa’s Sutpen is a demon, and she has a scene to show it. In the stable he fights his own slaves naked while his daughter Judith watches from the loft and his son Henry vomits. The scene stands in the book, and so does the demon’s other face: the later chapters reduce him to a poor boy turned away from a planter’s front door, who kept a ledger of his design. The story the four tell runs across a century, from his birth in the western Virginia mountains, set down in the Chronology as 1807, to the burning of his house and the disappearance of the last of his blood in 1910. Rosa holds one end of it. The book’s argument is that no one holds the whole.
Movement II
Mr. Compson takes the story up that evening on the gallery, in a voice of ironic fatalism that turns the Sutpens into figures of Greek tragedy. He tells of Sutpen’s wedding and of the town that watched it, at length. He has a question to answer that Rosa did not: why Henry, the son, shot Charles Bon, his sister Judith’s suitor, at the gate of Sutpen’s Hundred. His answer is a theory of Bon’s past, an octoroon mistress bound to him by a ceremony, so that a marriage to Judith would have been a bigamy, and Henry a brother defending a sister’s honour.
The theory is wrong, and the book needs it. A reader given the true cause first would take it as a fact; a reader who has lived for three chapters inside Mr. Compson’s explanation takes the true cause, when it comes, as a reversal, and sees what the error was for. Mr. Compson needed a story in which the South’s ruin was a tragedy of manners and fate. Every teller in the book makes the past in the shape of a need, and Mr. Compson’s is the need to find the ruin elegant.
His fourth chapter ends with a document, the one thing in it not spoken by him. It is a letter from Bon to Judith, written in stove polish on paper looted from a ruined house. A letter is the nearest thing to a witness the book contains, and it settles nothing: it tells what Bon chose to write, in the only ink he had. The document closes the father’s chapters as the Chronology will close the book, flat beside the speech around it, and as little able to say why.
Movement III
The fifth chapter is Rosa’s monologue, set almost wholly in italics, and it is held at one pitch, a grievance kept for decades. In it she is on the stairs of Sutpen’s house after the shot at the gate, and is stopped by Clytie’s hand. Clytie belongs to the house and is never admitted to its story; she stops Rosa on the stairs, and the narration, which cannot enter her, stops there too. The book will keep its Black lives at the centre of what happens and at the edge of what is told, and it knows that it does.
Then the scene moves north. In January 1910 a letter from Mr. Compson reaches Quentin at Harvard to say that Rosa is dead, and his roommate, Shreve McCannon, a Canadian with no stake in any of it, asks him to “Tell about the South”. From here to the end the two students do the telling, in a cold room, by turns, Shreve joking and pressing, Quentin answering. What they know is what Rosa and Mr. Compson told, and what they do not know they begin to supply.
The descendants pass through their talk: Charles Etienne Bon, and after him Jim Bond, the last of the blood, who will be left howling in the ruins. They are seen as the tellers see them, from outside, and the book does not pretend otherwise. Its subject by now is not only what happened at Sutpen’s Hundred but who has been allowed to tell it, and the two who tell it last are a Mississippian who cannot leave it alone and a Canadian who finds it, at first, a kind of comedy.
Movement IV
The seventh chapter carries Sutpen’s own account, as he gave it once to General Compson. A poor boy from the western Virginia mountains is turned away from a planter’s front door, and the design is born at that door: to have what the planter had, the land, the house, the slaves and a son to inherit them. He goes to Haiti. On a sugar estate there under siege he walks out into the dark and puts down the revolt. He marries, and when he learns of his wife’s African descent he puts her and their son aside as a mistake in the design, and begins again in Mississippi. The design ends at a fishing camp, with Wash Jones and a scythe.
In the eighth chapter the two students reach what no witness has told them. Quentin and Shreve imagine the war, the regiment, and a night in the camp in 1865 when Sutpen spoke to Henry; and as they imagine it they become Henry and Bon, the two pairs merging in the narration, so that four young men in two times are one telling. The form does here what the book is about: the past is made by those who tell it, and the making is the only way it can be reached.
What Sutpen told Henry, in their telling, is that Bon is his son by the first wife, and that her blood is Black. Henry could bear incest; this he cannot bear: “the miscegenation, not the incest”. Henry shoots Bon at the gate. The title opens here: Absalom killed his half-brother Amnon over their sister Tamar, and David mourned his son; Henry kills his half-brother over their sister, and the father has already refused to know the son. Whether Quentin knows Bon’s blood from Henry or has inferred it, the book never says.
Movement V
The ninth chapter returns to the September night of 1909, after Rosa’s afternoon, and to the visit to Sutpen’s Hundred that the whole telling has been circling. In the decayed house there is a wasted man in a bed. Asked why he has come back, he answers that he has come home “To die”. It is Henry, and the book gives his whole return in those two words.
In December the house burns. Jim Bond, the last of the blood, is left howling in the ruins, and in 1910 he is gone. The domain called out of the swamp is taken back by vines and fire; of the dynasty the design was meant to found there remains a voice in the dark that no one in the book can name as kin. The Chronology after the chapter records the dates, flatly, and where it sits uneasily with the narration that uneasiness stands open, part of the book’s question of what any record can hold.
In the cold room Quentin gives Shreve his last answer, and it is the book’s last fact: “I dont hate it”. Whether it is the truth or its opposite the book leaves open. Rosa needed a demon, Mr. Compson a tragedy, Shreve a love story; Quentin needs the South not to be what the story has shown it to be, and cannot have that. The past has reached him the only way the book allows, as a story told, and it has not let him go.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it is harder here than it looks, because the book tells one story four times. Remove Mr. Compson’s three chapters and the wrong theory goes with them, the octoroon mistress and the bigamy, which the right one must overturn: the book needs the error so that the truth about Bon’s blood lands as a reversal and not as a fact. Remove Rosa’s fifth chapter and her long grievance is an anecdote; remove Shreve and Quentin has no one to tell it to and no one to contradict him. The parts are required. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the sentence, not the structure: the rhetoric says some things three times within a clause, a vocabulary of intensity recurs past its use, and Mr. Compson’s chapter on the wedding and the town spends more than it buys. A tenth or so of the verbal mass is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the design of a self-made dynasty in a slave society rests on the refusal of kinship across the colour line, and the refusal destroys the dynasty it was meant to protect. Sutpen puts aside his first wife and their son when he learns of her African descent, and the son returns. Henry can bear the thought of incest but not his sister’s marriage to a brother with Black ancestry, “the miscegenation, not the incest”, and kills him at the gate. The second disclosure is about knowing: the Southern past reaches the living only as stories told by those who need it to mean something, and Quentin’s need is the book’s last fact. Held off the top because the Black lives at the centre, Clytie, Charles Etienne Bon and Jim Bond, are seen only from outside. The book knows its narrators cannot see them, and that knowledge is part of the disclosure, but it does not open them.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Elevation is frequent and dreadful. Sutpen fights his slaves naked in the stable while Judith watches from the loft and Henry vomits. Rosa is stopped on the stairs by Clytie’s hand after the shot. Bon writes to Judith in stove polish on paper looted from a ruined house. On the Haitian estate under siege, Sutpen walks out into the dark to put down the revolt. Wash Jones stands with the scythe at the fishing camp. In 1909 a wasted man in a bed says he has come home “To die”, and in December the house burns, with Jim Bond howling in the ruins. Held below the higher reaches because the voice is pitched at elevation almost throughout, and a pitch sustained for nine chapters flattens its own heights: at times the reader is exhausted before the summit rather than lifted to it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, and the title is its blueprint. In the second book of Samuel, Absalom kills his half-brother Amnon for the violation of their sister Tamar, and David mourns his son. Here Henry kills his half-brother Bon to prevent his marriage to their sister Judith, and the father who should mourn has already refused to know the son. The inversion of David’s lament bears weight: Sutpen never calls Bon his son. Around it the book builds a founding myth, a domain called out of the swamp with “Be Sutpen’s Hundred”, the fall of a house by a curse in the blood, and Rosa’s demon, “man-horse-demon”, whom the later chapters reduce to a poor boy turned away from a planter’s door. Myth and particular are held at once: the demon is also a man with a ledger. Held a step from the top because Mr. Compson’s Greek tragedy is partly allusion, worn as a manner.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Southern historical romance of the plantation and the war, and Faulkner turns it inside out. The same matter is told as an investigation that cannot close, by narrators who conjecture, contradict and invent, until the most important facts, Bon’s blood and what Sutpen said to Henry in the camp in 1865, are reached by two students imagining in a cold room in Cambridge, with no witness. Invention is made the method of history. The stake was real: the book was hard, and it sold poorly. Held below the top on two counts. The layered narrator who reconstructs another man’s story was Conrad’s, in Lord Jim; and the larger break with the instrument of the English sentence had already been made in The Sound and the Fury. This book bends that departure toward history rather than starting it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and nearly all the knowledge goes. Told in order by an omniscient narrator, this is a Gothic family tragedy with a secret. Told as it is, it is a novel about how a society makes its past, and about who is permitted to know it. The fact of Bon’s ancestry is withheld to the end, late enough that every earlier version, Rosa’s demon and Mr. Compson’s octoroon, is exposed as a story its teller needed. In the eighth chapter the form performs the knowledge: Quentin and Shreve become Henry and Bon, the two pairs merging in the narration, so that the act of telling becomes the act it tells. Even the appended Chronology, flat and dated beside the narration, belongs to the argument about what a record can hold. Held off the very top only because the long Compson chapters at times carry information as a container would.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: ninety years of reading that have not settled the book, from Cleanth Brooks to Edouard Glissant, and a long argument over race in Faulkner that is still going on. The questions stay open in the text. How does Quentin know what he knows about Bon’s blood, from Henry on the night visit or by inference? How much of the eighth chapter is invention? Where the appendices and the narrative disagree, is it error or design? Is Quentin’s last denial the truth or its opposite? Formal depth yields too: the book’s pairs, Henry and Bon, Quentin and Shreve, Judith and Clytie, Sutpen and Wash, reorganise on each return. Held a step down only because some of the critical return is the reconstruction of a deliberately hidden plot, which is difficulty before it is depth.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The field is the American novel of the 1930s, in English. The force: the book reorganised what a historical novel could be, making the reconstruction of the past by interested voices both its subject and its form, and setting the colour line at the root of a nation’s founding story. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its reach is largest outside its own language and region, in the founding sagas of Latin American fiction, where García Márquez named Faulkner a master and the Buendías’ founding of Macondo is a cousin of Sutpen’s Hundred; in Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa; in Glissant’s Caribbean reading; and at home in Toni Morrison and the Southern novel after it. Held below the top because much of that reach runs through the whole Yoknapatawpha cycle, with The Sound and the Fury taking a large share, and because in 1936 the book moved few readers, and reach so delayed is discounted.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Ninety years, and the survival shown is steady. The text is whole, in print since 1936, and has its place in the Library of America. Its presence is continuous in university teaching and in a steady critical literature, and it has been translated into the principal European languages. It has outlived its conditions: the romance of the Lost Cause that it answered is history, and the book is read for what it saw in that romance. That wide and steady presence is credited. Two things keep it from the widest survival: its difficulty keeps its general readership narrower than its name, and its racial vocabulary and the opacity of its Black characters make it a contested text in some classrooms. Ninety years is a long test, and still short of the centuries behind the summit.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long periodic sentence, which can hold a scene, a judgment on it and a second scene in parentheses, and of a construction that releases one fact across nine chapters without a slip in the order of disclosure. The opening, a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon”, sets a cadence and a weight the book sustains to its end; Rosa’s fifth chapter, in italics, holds a voice at a single pitch of grievance; the eighth manages four people in two pairs without confusion of reference. Three charges hold it below the top: the narrators share one idiom, so that Rosa, Mr. Compson and Shreve, who should sound unlike, often sound like Faulkner; the vocabulary of intensity hardens into tics; and the appended Chronology and Genealogy, where they disagree with the narrative, do so at least partly through carelessness.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the siege of the Haitian sugar estate in the 1820s, and Shreve’s joking in the snowbound room at Harvard in 1910. One law governs both: a design that treats people as means will be undone by the people it has made, and every telling of it is shaped by the teller’s need. Sutpen sets his first marriage aside as a mistake in the design; Bon is the mistake returning. Shreve, the outsider with no stake, still invents the love story he needs, and Quentin, who has every stake, cannot bear the conclusion. The range is very wide: frontier founding, Gothic house, war, a Canadian’s comedy, a table of descent. Charged: the appended dates sit uneasily with the narrative in places, and Mr. Compson’s ironic fatalism sometimes runs on a looser law than the rest.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders, held by one design. Consciousness, in Rosa’s grievance and Quentin’s dread. The family: a dynasty of two marriages, legitimate and repudiated children, brothers and sisters across the colour line. Labour and property: slavery, a plantation built by enslaved men from Haiti, a French architect held captive. Class: the poor white boy at the planter’s door, Wash Jones and his granddaughter. The state and the war: secession, the regiment, the surrender. History, from the western Virginia frontier to Haiti, New Orleans, Mississippi and Cambridge, across a century. The sacred, in the Old Testament frame of fathers and sons. The natural order: the swamp cleared, the house taken back by vines and fire. Each order is a field of the one design. Held a step down because the war is almost wholly offstage, and women’s lives other than Rosa’s are told rather than inhabited.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.5, then The Bottomless Well at 9.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.3. A form in which the act of telling becomes the act it tells, so that a novel about how a society makes its past could not be told any other way; ninety years of return that have not settled how Quentin knows what he knows; and a myth built on the inverted lament of David for Absalom, with a founder who calls a domain out of the swamp.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6, held by the sentence and not the structure: a rhetoric that says some things three times within a clause, a vocabulary of intensity that recurs past its use, and Mr. Compson’s chapter on the wedding and the town, a tenth or so of the verbal mass permitted rather than compelled. Next above it, The Sublime and The Swerve at 9.0: heights flattened by a pitch held for nine chapters, and a departure whose layered narrator was Conrad’s and whose break with the English sentence had already been made in The Sound and the Fury.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Swerve at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by five tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.2. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, published by Random House, New York, in October 1936. It is scored as one book: the nine numbered chapters, with the Chronology, the Genealogy and the map of Yoknapatawpha County that Faulkner appended, which are part of the work. Later corrected texts differ from the first edition in detail, not in structure, and nothing here depends on the difference. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening phrase, Rosa’s name for Sutpen, his word of founding, Shreve’s request, Henry’s two words, the phrase of the eighth chapter and Quentin’s last answer. The story of Absalom, Amnon and Tamar is from the second book of Samuel. Cleanth Brooks and Edouard Glissant are named as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page and word counts, the length of the longest sentence, the date and editor of the corrected text, the particular dates on which the appendices and the narrative disagree, the titles and dates of the criticism, the reviews of 1936 and the particular translations, are not given. Citations are by chapter and episode.