Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper makes the case that Absalom, Absalom! (1936) presents William Faulkner’s first significant artistic challenge to the ideologically saturated plantation regimes of the American South. The novel both identifies the flows of information, resources, and capital that sustained the slave system of the antebellum South and meditates on the entropy produced when such an institution fails on a large scale and, with it, the systems of representation that uphold it. I begin by analyzing the planter patriarch Thomas Sutpen, not as a man, but as a coercive ideology replicating itself through an epistemology of textual space. As forceful as this plantation ideology initially appears, Faulkner also identifies the internal contradictions that erode its power and hold over those who engender it. Though he situates the weakening of this ideological paradigm during the Civil War, he also indicates that it is not war alone that is responsible. Rather, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. Importantly, Faulkner imagines the ensuing entropy in terms of an express disenchantment with textual signification. It is not simply existential angst that the characters articulate, but a disillusionment with the textual epistemology of the plantation system as it enters into a period of chaos and reformation.