I begin with Faulkner’s text on account of the fact that it has become almost canonical (if there is a postplantation canon) within these interpretive schemes—
Absalom, Absalom! has proven almost equally productive and frustrating for critics who trace connections between the South and the Caribbean, and has given rise to a
correspondingly extensive body of critical work. But let us begin with the text itself.
The reader learns, even before Quentin’s account of Sutpen’s time in Haiti (Quentin being the fourth narrator of this story, hearing it from his father, who inherited it from Quentin’s grandfather, who in turn heard it from Sutpen—none of these narrators is entirely reliable), that Sutpen has acquired money, slaves, and the ability to speak “a sort of French” from some location to the south of Yoknapatawpha. This evidence, in itself, does not dictate Sutpen’s presence in the Caribbean, as all three of these assets could have been gained at any number of points around the Gulf Coast, still within the boundaries of the slaveholding South; the revelation that Sutpen’s architect came from Martinique comes later. Rather, it is the character of Sutpen’s slaves, apprehended by the residents of Jefferson as more brutal and animalistic than any of the more “domesticated”
local slaves, that marks his origin story as incontrovertibly exotic. These are men (and two women, Quentin’s father takes care to note) that Sutpen would use to “drive the swamp like a pack of hounds,” one of whom a local hunter stumbles upon lurking in “the absolute mud like a sleeping alligator,” and the speech of whom the astonished denizens of the town, having presumably little familiarity with Creole French, misidentify as
“some dark and fatal tongue of their own” (27). The exoticism lies not merely in the slaves’ sublime subhumanity, however, but in their capacity to perform actions that none of the “local” slaves in Jefferson could; the residents of the town theorize, in reaction to the astonishing fecundity of Sutpen’s crops, that his slaves “had the power to actually conjure more cotton per acre from the soil than any tame ones had ever done” (56-57).39
39 Faulkner’s later reference to “sugar cane sapling size and three times the height of a man” growing in Haiti is probably an oblique linkage to the agricultural skills of Sutpen’s
Ferocity, brutality, bestiality, even the hint of vague supernatural powers: the qualities of his servants infuse Sutpen’s own origin story with these same elements.
Such is the background the reader receives prior to finally being told, much later in the text, that it is indeed the Caribbean, particularly Haiti, from which Sutpen has derived his slaves, his fortune, and one of his sons.40 In addition to its utilitarian function for Sutpen, however, Haiti constitutes an imaginative double to the South in the functioning of Absalom’s narrative. Sutpen’s West Indian scheme, in its origins and its eventual bloody conclusion during the slave revolt (in addition to the more far-reaching consequences brought about by the child he conceived there), displaces the South as the true site of exploitation, danger, and economic risk and reward. This is reflected in the structure of Sutpen’s rise and fall; in a sense, we might say that his narrative as a whole is simply the culmination of the events he set in motion on the island, events founded on both economic and sexual objectification and exploitation.41 More to the point, however, Haiti is the site of the most protracted and concerted racial violence in the text, with Sutpen’s continuing forceful subjugation of his (Haitian) slaves in Mississippi a virtual continuation of, rather than separation from, the brutality of his Haitian endeavor. In terms of textual function, Haiti is predominantly a “theatre for violence and injustice and
slaves mentioned here; evidently, they are trained in some mystical tropical method of cultivation (202).
40 This is a potential point of contention, as it may be legitimate to consider Clytie, who is born of one of Sutpen’s Haitian slaves, as a Creole West Indian; her mother is Haitian, yet she is conceived and born in Mississippi. Whether Clytie can thus be regarded as Haitian herself is open to interpretation.
41 Hosam Aboul-Ela, among others, strongly insists on the centrality of this section of the novel to the story at large, noting that the “ramifications” of the Haiti sequence “affect developments throughout the novel,” and that the passage thus plays a “germinal role,”
“hover[ing] above the reconstructed narrative, supplying a cohesion that temporality cannot” (130, 148).
bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty,” its soil “manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation,” while the South is surprisingly muted, “the civilized land and people which had expelled some of its own blood and thinking and desires that had become too crass to be faced and borne longer”
(202). Such, at least, is the interpretation passed down from Quentin’s grandfather to his father and on to Shreve.42 Certainly, the South in Faulkner’s fiction as a whole (in Go Down, Moses, for example) betrays some of these same significances, yet in Absalom the traumas of historical racial violence are displaced almost entirely onto the Caribbean.
There are two immediate answers to the logic of this decision, both unfavorable to Faulkner. The first is that the author simply did not know enough about Haiti to offer a cohesive, accurate portrayal of its historical woes. This position is fortified by his misdating of the Haitian Revolution, which I will treat in more depth later in this chapter.43 Such is the perspective of Maritza Stanchich, who, in a 1996 article in
42 As a matter of fact, almost all of Absalom’s commentary on the “savagery” of Haiti seems to come from General Compson rather than Sutpen himself; Quentin’s grandfather interprets the Haitian setting, as well as certain of Sutpen’s reactions to it (most prominently his reaction to sugar, which I shall discuss later) as intrinsically tied to narratives of subjugation, hatred, and vengeance. Unfortunately, this does not work strongly in service of any exegesis of Haiti’s textual role; most of General Compson’s characterization, here and elsewhere in Faulkner’s fiction, is concerned with his status as a “founding father” of the Compson family and his affiliation with certain (aristocratic, military) aspects of the Old South. From this we might tentatively conclude that Faulkner’s attribution of the “darkness” of Haiti to this character in particular marks his attitudes as more deeply rooted in Southern soil and thus more widespread than any subjective axe-grinding on the General’s part, yet this reading is subject to interpretation.
43 There is also considerable resistance to this perspective. Many critics have attempted to show, through both textual and extratextual evidence, that Faulkner did indeed understand more about the state of affairs in Haiti during the early 19th century than he lets on in Absalom. See John T. Matthews, “Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back,” which finds in certain biographical details as well as stylistic tactics a keen awareness of the Haitian situation on Faulkner’s part. Matthews
Mississippi Quarterly, declared that “by far the most marginalized character in Absalom, Absalom! is the West Indies, the source of Sutpen's wealth, the site of his original sin”
(606). Stanchich portrays Sutpen as the latest in a long string of both real and fictive exploitations of the island, endeavors that essentially see the region as a simple site for colonial violence. If Faulkner was indeed underinformed about Caribbean history, it stands to reason that he would either fill the gaps in the historical narrative with what he did know of colonial violence in the South, or else regard the violent past in that region as simply an amplified version of the same.44 The second direct answer to Absalom’s displacement is that Faulkner is a revisionist who wishes to minimize the trauma of the South’s history by juxtaposing it with traumas that he perceives as more severe. This is the charge introduced (though eventually fulminated against) by Richard Godden in
“Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions” (1994), in which he notes that Faulkner effectively “rewrites one of the key facts of nineteenth- century black American history, in what looks suspiciously like an act of literary counterrevolution” (685). Godden claims that Sutpen’s slaves are “historically free and yet doubly constrained,” laboring under the onus of both Sutpen’s regular violence toward them and Absalom’s narrative, which marks them as slaves despite their legal emancipation (689).
even goes so far as to suggest that he uses a native Haitian expression—“the farming of bones” to refer to sugar agriculture in Absalom (255).
44 Again, Matthews goes to some length to show what knowledge Faulkner had of Haiti and its history. He cites in particular three instances of indirect contact between Faulkner and the West Indies: longstanding U.S. military presence in Haiti that cultivated a certain image of the nation in the minds of the public, Faulkner’s scriptwriting experiences in Hollywood that brought him into contact with more far-reaching Caribbean and Latin American storylines, and his specific work on a screenplay (Slave Ship) that dealt with a slave-smuggling enterprise between Africa and Cuba.
Both of these readings, I believe, make valid points. While I am not quite ready to claim, with Stanchich, that Faulkner’s text replicates the same colonial oppression of Haiti that it purports, in the eventual undoing of Sutpen’s scheme by the actions he performs there, to decry, I am aware that any elision of historical racial trauma on Faulkner’s part does not speak strongly to his desire to do so. All the same, it may be more productive to consider the Haitian section of the novel in light of what its explication, or rather its lack of explication, can tell us about how postplantation history manifests itself between the South and the Caribbean. Though, as George Handley notes in Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000), the representation of Haiti in Absalom leaves much to be desired as a self-contained description of the Caribbean, it nonetheless functions as a strong statement of how “Haiti and the sea it inhabits” comes to serve as “a scapegoat for the barbarism and violence of the United States’ own slavery system”
(136). The issue at stake is less Faulkner’s attempt to divulge some essential truth about Haiti than the Southern methodological imperative to address, however indirectly, its own history through the invocation of another region.
It may be most productive to reexamine the relevant sections of the text in this light. The frame of the Haitian segment is Quentin’s grandfather’s recollection of a story told to him by Sutpen during a hunt for Sutpen’s escaped architect, who proves remarkably adept at evading the pair, their dogs, and the wild slaves alike: “‘He went to the West Indies… that was how he said it. He and Grandfather were sitting on a log now because the dogs had faulted. That is, they had treed—a tree from which he (the architect) could not have escaped yet which he had undoubtedly mounted… it was three hours before they comprehended that the architect had used architecture, physics, to elude
them” (192-193). The architect (who, as Faulkner mentions earlier in the novel, comes from Martinique) eludes his captors in something of the same manner that the Caribbean section of the novel as a whole steadfastly refuses to be explicated—Sutpen and General Compson briefly acquire the trail, then lose it, with only enigmatic clues as to how it proceeded.45 Correspondingly, the tale that Sutpen tells is illuminated only in isolated fragments, certain significant moments that its subsequent tellers extrapolate into narrative. Quentin’s grandfather recalls that Sutpen told him
not how he managed to find where the West Indies were nor where ships departed from to go there, nor how he got to where the ships were and got in one nor how he liked the sea nor about the hardships of a sailor’s life and it must have been hardship indeed for him, a boy of fourteen or fifteen who had never seen the ocean before, going to sea in 1823… [there was nothing of] what had happened during the six years between that day when he, a boy of fourteen who knew no tongue but English and not much of that, had decided to go to the West Indies and become rich, and this night when, overseer or foreman or something to a French sugar planter, he was barricade in the house with the planter’s family (193, 199).
Certain extremely significant (for Quentin and Shreve) elements of the story receive only the briefest mention, such as Sutpen’s acknowledgment of Eulalia Bon, the planter’s daughter and future mother to Charles Bon: “the girl just emerging for a second of the telling, in a single word almost, so that Grandfather said it was like he had just seen her too for a second by the flash of one of the muskets” (201). The narrative here is brought to (both literal and figurative) light in brief bursts; just as Eulalia’s face is only visible in isolated flashes during the revolt, the narrative of Sutpen’s experience on the plantation only arises sporadically and incompletely.
45 There is a further parallel and irony in the fact that the architect has not simply outrun or outlasted his captors, but has deployed the most “rational” of all methods—applied science—to escape. This methodology stands in stark contrast to that of the wild, also Caribbean-raised slaves, which operate on pure instinct, hinting that there is more to the region than appearances might indicate.
The details given by Sutpen are thus insufficient to the role of the Haitian section in the novel as a whole; General Compson’s constant complaints that Sutpen does not tell the whole story are a clue to this lack. However, it is worth recalling that the story of Haiti undergoes four iterations in Absalom, from an initial teller clearly unwilling to explain himself fully, the hearer of which must almost forcibly convince that teller to adopt “some regard for cause and effect even if none for logical sequence and continuity,” down through generations progressively more explicative in their attitudes toward history, until it reaches Shreve, constructor of the most elaborate historical narratives of all (199). Haiti, then, becomes not only a potential repository for inflated, neocolonial visions of trauma, the opaque, primitive heart of darkness that the story’s interpreters seem to make of it, but also a necessary plot device, the hidden link that not only suggests, but requires interpretation on their part.46 After all, as Quentin’s father states in a crucial passage, the existing historical evidence, “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales” and a collection of “letters without salutation or signature,” is itself inadequate to the task of addressing history’s lack of narrative, a lack that the interpreters of Sutpen’s story feel most keenly in the Haitian section of the novel (80).47
46 The “heart of darkness” is not an idle comparison; several of Faulkner’s descriptions of Haiti, particularly Sutpen and the planter shooting their rifles “at no enemy but at the Haitian night itself, lancing their little vain and puny flashes into the brooding and blood- weary and throbbing darkness” seem to derive directly from Conrad’s work (204). In particular, this passage echoes Marlowe’s observation of the French ship quixotically
“firing into a continent” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, Gene M.
Moore, ed. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995. pp. 41). Faulkner’s admiration for Conrad’s writing is well-known.
47 Coincidentally, Glissant designates “the longing for history” and the search for the
“true origins” of the Sutpen family as central to the task of Absalom (Caribbean Discourse 79, italics in original).