"History into Narrative: William Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!'"

In this essay, I argue that Absalom, Absalom! is a quintessentially modernist historical novel in which history is both a subject matter represented through a multiplicity of visions and a source of experimental form, language and structure. Everywhere in the novel there is a dual focus: on the past for which the narrators are searching, that is, the history of the Sutpen family from before the Civil War into the twentieth century, and on the various narrators’ efforts to make sense of that history which manifests itself as memory, as imagination, and, occasionally, as artifact. The theoretical basis of my analysis of how each version of the past is shaped by ideological discourses about the South as well as by personal factors is drawn from the work of Louis Mink and Hayden White about the importance of narrativity in historiography and from Louis Althusser's ideas about how ideology frames our sense of ourselves in the world. I also use Wolfgang Iser's theories to describe how, in this novel, the meaning is intimately bound up with the activity of reading and how the narrative encourages reader participation.