Doomed as Doomed Can Be

William Faulkner: not a big proponent, it would seem, of the famous Fiction 101 directive “show, don’t tell.”  What’s wrong with telling, after all?  If you’ve to something to say, don’t go dropping a bunch of hints about it—say it.  If, for instance, you want to get across that one of your characters is a puritan, there’s no reason to piddle around with assorted vignettes of him acting all “puritan-y”—just call him a puritan, for Heaven’s sake.  Time is money.

And let’s say you want to convey that the players in your novel Absalom, Absalom! are doomed.  Why bother with ominous mood-setting or grave harbingers or any such circumlocution when there’s already a perfectly good word to accomplish your goal?  It’s quite versatile, too: “the very situation to which and by which he was doomed,” “children which she had doomed by conceiving them,” “the current of retribution and fatality which…doomed all his blood,” “caught and sunk and doomed too,” or—this last one also quite comprehensive—“the oblivion to which we are all doomed.”

Doomed pitches a pretty big tent: it encompasses “doomed children,” “doomed ships,” a “doomed house,” “doomed and frustrated youth,” “doomed and tragic flower faces,” a “doomed and fatal war,” and two—count ’em—“two doomed races.”  Also “the lonely and foredoomed and indomitable iron spirit” (which is distinguished, presumably, from a post-doomed spirit, whatever exactly that would be.)

And if your characters’ doom is dooming them to some doom in particular, it works for that, as well: “doomed to marry,” “doomed to be a widow,” “doomed to be a murderer,” “doomed and destined to kill,” “doomed to contemplate all human behavior” (said human behavior involving a lot of marital and homicidal impulses, apparently).  It can be used for dramatic counterintuitive effect, like “doomed to live”—and then this permutation can be paired with various different subjects, as in “those who are doomed to live,” “I am doomed to live,” and “she and I both are doomed to live.”  It is also resilient, standing up to repeated, concentrated use in such iterations as “doomed to spinsterhood” (p. 146), “doomed to spinsterhood” (p. 147), and “doomed to spinsterhood” (p. 148).

Nor need there be any namby-pambying about the ultimate orchestrator of all these characters’ sorry fates: doom!  (Crash of thunder.)  “[T]he mistake…which, since he refused to accept it or be stopped by it, became his doom”; “that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure”; “the knell and doom of her native land”; “the family’s doom which Sutpen seemed bent on accomplishing” (this last one proving to be a family affair indeed as we are told that Thomas Sutpen’s son, Henry, also “play[ed] his final part in his family’s doom”).

At one point, two characters are discussing a third (doomed) character, in the light of some inherited insight: “‘Maybe he knew there was a fate, a doom on him, like what the old Aunt Rosa told you about some things that just have to be.’”  Not like what old Aunt Rosa showed you—what she told you.  QED.

The Mirror Crack’d

It’s got to be a tricky business for an author to portray a character as having irritating habits without the results becoming a bit irritating themselves.  Absalom, Absalom!’s Miss Coldfield, for instance, is predisposed to a variety of somewhat grating conversational mannerisms and, just our luck, she narrates an entire chapter, in the first paragraph of which she calls her brother-in-law, Thomas Sutpen, “that brute” four times (including “that brute progenitor of brutes”), a plain old unmodified “brute” once, and also a “brute instrument”—for a grand total of seven brutes on Chapter 5’s initial page.  (With an opening salvo like that, you can hardly say that you weren’t warned.)

For Absalom! to shift fully into the voice of a person already inclined to repeat herself is one of those infinite-regression, holding-a-mirror-up-to-a-mirror type of propositions, like an edgy undercover cop movie in which the ethically tainted protagonist starts feeling his own identity getting confused with that of the role he’s playing.  We’ve already seen that Miss Coldfield has issues with whimpering and—as the book has indelicately informed us—old-woman smell, but she also comes equipped with her own reticule of personal catch phrases.

“‘Oh, I hold no brief for Ellen,’” she says of her sister in the recollection that forms the book’s first scene.  “‘No, I hold no more brief for Ellen than I do for myself,’” she continues, and then, later, “‘No.  I hold no brief for myself.’”  Which you might think would be sufficient to get across this little bit of character coloration until you get to Chapter 5, which proceeds in the space of six pages to completely redefine “sufficient”: “Oh, I hold no brief for myself” (p. 128); “No. I hold no brief for me” (also p. 128); “I hold no brief for myself, I do not excuse it” (p. 131); “I do not excuse it.  I claim no brief, no pity” (p. 132); “No, no brief, no pity” (also p. 132); “No, I hold no brief, ask no pity” (p. 133).  This is your second warning: Run while you can!

Miss Coldfield is a fan of the word thousand, whether applied to questionable reasoning (“Now you will ask why I stayed there. I could…give ten thousand paltry reasons”; “I…could give you a thousand specious reasons good enough for women”) or to matters insignificant (“I did not say one of the thousand trivial things with which the indomitable woman-blood ignores the man’s world”; “talk, talk, talk of…the weary recurrent triviata of our daily lives, of a thousand things but not of one”).  Triviata?  I’m sure there’s some great pun to be made here about a trifling opera, but I am sadly lacking the music-literacy bona fides to do it justice.

When Miss Coldfield is in denial, she might as well have a sign around her neck: regarding her sister, she says on page 118, “I was not spying when I would follow her.  I was not spying, though you will say I was.  And even if it was spying, it was not jealousy.”  Not spying, got that?  No?  Let’s see if these selections, all from page 119, help convince you: “No, it was not that; I was not spying”; “Oh no, I was not spying”; “No, not spying, not even hiding”; “I became again that…woman…who was not spying, hiding.”  You should have run when you had the chance—you were warned!

Miss Coldfield finds herself at one point so startled to see an unexpected character that her brain seizes up even as the rest of her physical processes continue on about their business, a sensation she tries repeatedly to put into words—“the face stopping me dead…not my body: it still advanced, ran on”; “and I (my body) not stopping yet”; “I did stop dead. Possibly even then my body did not stop”; “I stopped in running’s midstride again though my body…still advanced”—until she eventually ends up sounding like the Eveready Bunny caught in the throes of a philosophical mind/body debate.

Of all the grooves the old gal’s broken Victrola gets stuck in, the deepest is a paranoiac one.  You know the “they” in “that’s what they say”?  Well, they would seem to have plenty enough to say about Miss Coldfield—her preoccupation with what she imagines is the town’s preoccupation with her is established in Chapter 5’s very first sentence: “So they will have told you doubtless already how I told that Jones to take that mule.”  Nor is any disinclination in her conspiracy-theorizing evident in the sentence that immediately follows: “That was all I needed to do since they will have told you doubtless that I would have had no need for either trunk or bag.”  And after that, well…just as Miss Coldfield does, “they” do have a tendency to repeat themselves (even if sometimes it’s a matter of what they can’t tell you rather than what they can), so I’ll provide an easy-to-skim list:

if not in my sister’s house at least in my sister’s bed to which (so they will tell you) I aspired (p. 107)

But they cannot tell you how I went on up the drive, past Ellen’s ruined and weed-choked flower beds and reached the house (p. 108)

But it was gone; and this too they cannot tell you: How I ran, fled, up the stairs and found no grieving widowed bride but Judith (p. 114)

Once there was (they cannot have told you this either) a summer of wistaria (p. 115)

the fear of dying manless which (so they will doubtless tell you) old maids always have (p. 128)

They will have told you how I came back home…. Oh yes, I know (and kind too; they would be kind): Rosa Coldfield, warped bitter orphaned country stick…they will have told you: How I went out there to live for the rest of my life (p. 136)

Yes, they will have told you: who was young and had buried hopes only during that night which was four years long…—they will have told you: daughter of an embusque who had to turn to a demon, a villain (p. 137)

Yes, Rosie Coldfield, lose him, weep him; caught a beau but couldn’t keep him; (oh yes, they will tell you) found a beau and was insulted (p. 138)

But I forgave him. They will tell you different, but I did. (p. 138)

One begins to wonder if this is intentional but overdone (Faulkner supplying Miss Coldfield an excess of these persecution-complex oratorical hiccups and his editor doing nothing to rein him in) or just the usual unintentional (Faulkner going about his standard once-to-the-well-is-never-enough routine and his editor doing nothing to rein him in).  This would be the part in the movie when the cop is looking at himself in the broken mirror that he’s just punched and his wife is standing behind him crying, “I don’t even know who you are anymore!”

Total Heavy-ocity

Some probably seems like an awfully milquetoast word to get much exercised over, but I’m not thinking here of the everyday, approximate-amount, “Would you care for some tea?” incarnation, but rather the “occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention” variety—the “some pure dramatic economy,” “some almost omniscient conviction” sort.

Clearly, some is not meant in these cases to suggest “a rough measure of intervention” or “a nonspecific supply of economy” or “a shtickle of conviction”—instead, in Absalom, Absalom!, some is insistently employed as the all-purpose spice of “meaningful”-sounding vagueness, ever at the ready to preface any phrase with a dash of portentous indeterminacy.

This is, of course, the same gambit as all of Faulkner’s sort ofs and kind ofs—these conceptual targets at which he aims are so abstrusely unstrikable, you see, that a near-miss is one’s best hope.  No, it is not a particular lugubrious and painless purgatory to which he refers, but “some lugubrious and painless purgatory”; not any precise sophisticated and ironic sterile nature, but “some sophisticated and ironic sterile nature.”  (Such Deep Thoughts put me in mind of Alvy Singer asking Annie Hall about a rock concert she has attended without him—“Was it heavy? Did it achieve total heavy-ocity?”)

Not only is this device used repeatedly, it is done so in a very non-nonspecific fashion: not just “some blankety-blank,” but “some blankety-blank of blankety-blank.”  So while there are a lot of examples like “some perverse automotivation” and “some heathen Principle, some Priapus,” there are a lot of examples like “some opposite of respectability” and “some stubborn coal of conscience” and “some ascendancy of forbearance” and “some esoteric piece of furniture.”  (Esoteric furniture.  Yes.)

As it happens, this device even manages on a number of occasions to incorporate a few other notable Absalom! buzzwords like effluvium (“some effluvium of Sutpen blood and character,” “some tangible effluvium of knowledge”) and undefeat (“some incorrigibility of undefeat,” “some indomitable desperation of undefeat,” “some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat”).  As for the rest of the list, well—it really is some sight to see:

On a related note, Absalom, Absalom! also contains “something of pride,” “something of pity,” “something of sanity,” “something of shrewdness,” “something of leisureliness,” “something of shelter and kin,” “something of weariness and undernourishment,” “something of will and intensity and dreadful need,” “something of that invincible despair,” “something of the old flavor of grim sortie,” “something of the ruthless tactical skill of his old master,” “something of that fierce impersonal rivalry between two cadets,” and “something of secret and curious and unimaginable delights.”

The Highest Form of Flattery

Previously on the topic of dullards and fools, I mentioned a Far Side cartoon whose caption read, “Yes, they’re all fools, gentlemen … But the questions remains, ‘What KIND of fools are they?’”  Similarly, I might ask, “Yes, the character of Henry in Absalom, Absalom! has been established as a puritan—way past the point of any doubt, God knows—but what kind of puritan is he?”

He is the sort, we read on page 86, whose “puritan heritage” gives him “that ability to be ashamed of ignorance and inexperience.”  Fine-tuning this, the author explains two pages later that this is a “puritan heritage which must show disapproval instead of surprise or even despair” and “nothing at all rather than have the disapprobation construed as surprise or despair.”

Tuned even more finely a page after this, the character is referred to as “Henry the puritan who must show nothing at all rather than surprise or incomprehension.”  This is because of his—same paragraph—“puritan’s provincial horror of revealing surprise or ignorance.”  (Fortunately, “Henry [is] not showing either.”)  Two pages later and just what kind of puritanism is Henry’s particular brand is left little in question—it is “that puritan character which must show neither surprise nor despair.”  (Surprise!)

Henry’s method for dealing with his up-and-comer’s socioeconomic anxiety is to pattern himself after his highfalutin college friend Charles Bon, who, big phony though he may be, is a very sophisticated big phony—Henry is among a number of star-struck fellow students who “aped his clothing and manner and (to the extent which they were able) his very manner of living.”

Yes, “Henry aped his clothing and speech.”  Nor were these the only subjects for his mimicry, which also occurred “while they rode together (and Henry aping him here too, who was the better horseman).”  Nor did it go without notice: “Bon…for a year and a half now had been watching Henry ape his clothing and speech.”  Bon, then, was “the mentor…whose clothing and walk and speech he had tried to ape.”*

One could say that Bon was “the sybarite…which Henry had begun to ape at the University.”  Or that Henry was the person “whom he watched aping his clothing carriage speech.”  Or that the give-and-take of their entire relationship was a “proffering of the spirit of which the unconscious aping of clothes and speech and mannerisms was but the shell.”  Or that there was a mystique “about Bon to be, not envied but aped if that had been possible, if there had been time and peace to ape it in.”

And even the longing sentiment and mellifluous poetry of a phrase like “time and peace to ape it in” cannot distract from the fact that this is all clearly just too much monkey business.

• • •

*A.k.a. “the mentor, the corruptor”; “the mentor, the guide”; “the mentor…the gambler”; “the friend, the mentor”; he with “the mentor’s voice”—these all within the space of pages 88 to 91.

Having and Giving and Sharing and Receiving

There’s a lot of talk of will in Absalom, Absalom!  I don’t mean the legal, bequeathing kind (although there is a bit of that) or in the future-tense sense, but of the “will to endure” variety, the “implacable will” sort of will.  The “ruthless will,” “volitional will,” “fierce constant will,” “sheer desperate will,” “blind instinctive will,” “furious unbending will” sense.  The “will to exist,” “sheer indomitable willing,” “will and intensity,” “will and endurance,” “energy and will,” “heart and muscle and will” will.  (As I said, there’s a lot of it.)

There’s also a fair amount of courage—“courage and fortitude,” “courage and skill,” “courage and pride,” “courage and honor and pride,” “honor and courage and pride,” “courage or cowardice,” “virtue or courage or cowardice”—and so forth, in that seemingly mix-and-match fashion.

And there are a number of instances of shrewdness, one of the more amusing of which is “that stupid shrewdness half instinct and half belief in luck, and half muscular habit of the senses and nerves of the gambler”—about which I can only say that I hope that gambler’s card-counting skills are better than his math.*

What is most amusing, though, is how these words come together on a weird collision course in Chapter 7, which flashes back to the young Thomas Sutpen seeking his fortune in the West Indies, a place “to which poor men went in ships and became rich…so long as [they were] clever and courageous.”  Sutpen’s self-evaluation on these two counts?  “‘[T]he latter of which I believed that I possessed, the former of which I believed that, if it were to be learned by energy and will…I should learn.’”

He indeed endures an arduous ocean voyage, bolstered by his belief “that all [that was] necessary was courage and shrewdness and the one he knew he had and the other he believed he could learn.”  Upon arrival, his assumptions at first seem to be confirmed: “he had found the place where money was to be had quick if you were courageous and shrewd.”  But then reality sets in: “he had believed that courage and shrewdness would be enough but found that he was wrong.”

Nevertheless, this does not shake his conception of himself as “a man of courage and shrewdness,” “the one of which he now knew he possessed, the other of which he believed that he had now learned.”  What setbacks he does suffer “were not the result of any failing of courage or shrewdness.”  And even when he has second thoughts, “he still knew that he had courage, and though he may have come to doubt lately that he had acquired that shrewdness which at one time he believed he had, he still believed that it existed somewhere in the world to be learned and that if it could be learned he would yet learn it.”

No, he remains largely confident (“he had no more doubt of his bones and flesh than he did of his will and courage”), even as certain ventures require multiple efforts: “if shrewdness could not extricate him this second time as it had before, he could at least depend on the courage to find him will and strength to make a third start.”  (When the story eventually shifts back to the present, we are told that “he (the old man)…still had the courage and even all the shrewdness too,” which provides welcome closure for those readers concerned if he would ever finally get that latter subject successfully under his belt.)

All of this leads up to a passage that must be reproduced in its entirety to convey how densely clustered the courage– and will– and shrewdness-related debris is that litters the area where these three forces finally meet head on.  (The information is being related by Thomas Sutpen’s acquaintance at the time, a Mr. Compson, grandfather of Quentin; I have deemphasized those less courageous/willful/shrewd portions.)

He was not concerned, Mr Compson said, about the courage and the will, nor even about the shrewdness now. He was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time. All that he was concerned about was the possibility that he might not have time sufficient to do it in, regain his lost ground in. He did not waste any of what time he had either. The will and the shrewdness too he did not waste, though he doubtless did not consider it to have been either his will or his shrewdness which supplied waiting to his hand the opportunity, and it was probably less of shrewdness and more of courage than even will which got him engaged to Miss Rosa within a period of three months and almost before she was aware of the fact Miss Rosa, the chief disciple and advocate of that cult of demon-harrying of which he was the chief object (even though not victim), engaged to him before she had got accustomed to having him in the house, yes, more of courage than even will, yet something of shrewdness too: the shrewdness acquired in excruciating driblets through the fifty years suddenly capitulant and retroactive or suddenly sprouting and flowering like a seed lain fallow in a vacuum or in a single iron clod.**

(Final score: Courage, 3; Will, 5; Shrewdness, 6.)

On the page that follows this…outpouring, we are told “the thread of shrewdness and courage and will ran onto the same spool”—about which I can only say, No kidding!

• • •

*I feel obliged to report that, of the two online versions of the book that I’ve looked at, one corresponds with my own printed copy in the quotation above, whereas another has it as “part instinct and part belief in luck, and part muscular habit,” etc.  (The editor’s note in the back of my Vintage International edition makes no mention of this being a corrected or contested part of the text; I have no idea of the history of this variation, but it feels like somebody along the way noticed that the gambler in question was giving 150% and made the necessary adjustments.)

**It’s impossible for me to read this and not hear Friends’ Joey Tribbiani in my head giving his “having and giving and sharing and receiving” wedding speech:

Kinda Sorta

Ah, words—they are powerful tools but not always up to the task.  Some concepts are too big or too slippery to be captured within their net, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot be moved still by our authors’ noble efforts to hunt such elusive prey nevertheless.  No, one cannot describe the indescribable—but how else are you going to end all those H.P. Lovecraft stories?

What is perhaps not so noble as wrestling with big concepts is, instead, constantly putting up signposts announcing, Get a load of these big concepts I’m wrestling!  One could understand how a writer, groping towards the ineffable, might sometimes employ a qualifier—“a sort of hushed and naked searching” or “a kind of furious inertness”—trying to convey a sense that the ideas in question could only be half-captured, or that a rough semblance was the best that words could sketch of an obscure subject.

Of course, one’s understanding of this might begin to flag if the writer employed this locution over and over and over.

Absalom, Absalom! is chock full of sort ofs and kind ofs, and not of the sullen-teenager variety, although even that attitude might be a welcome antidote to the “Dude, I can’t even explain it to you” vibe given off by these phrases and their implication that the book’s every action is swollen with such not-for-mere-mortals profundity as to exceed the capacity of any more precise description.  Their most common usage comes in adverbial phrases—a man getting out of a sickbed moves “with a sort of diffident and tentative amazement,” a sheltered boy lives “in a kind of silken prison,” and so on.

Arranged for neatness’ sake, below are some of Absalom!’s various net-castings in its attempts to ensnare the sublime.  (For whatever reason, with and in are the most popular prepositional weapons employed in this pursuit.)  I’ve removed all but the verb/adverb material, but the complete excerpts can be found here.

(Verb/adverb combos that presumably didn’t get the with-or-in preposition memo include “surrounded by a sort of Scythian glitter”—must be Disco Night at the Classics Department—and “drink[ing] himself insensible, to a sort of dreamy and destinationless locomotion.”  There are also such noun phrases as “a kind of entailed birthright” and “a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger,” which, filled, doesn’t exactly jibe with my own understanding of how a vacuum works, but never mind.)

The Question Remains

It’s one thing to drive a point home, but certain pieces of information in Absalom, Absalom! are delivered with all the finesse of a rhetorical nail gun—as if there might have been concern the intended audience suffered from short-term memory loss.  When the word fool is used, for example, it is not used sparingly—Miss Coldfield calls her sister a “blind romantic fool” three times in the first chapter, then later “blind woman mother fool” for good measure; and, as has been mentioned before, the phrase “self-mesmered fool” appears in the book twice as often as seems advisable (which is to say that it appears twice)—but Chapter 8, particularly as it concerns the characters of Charles Bon and a family lawyer, is the real fool’s paradise.

Bon is a fellow who, we have been told, has a tendency to wear a false smile (although “tendency” might not be a strong enough word considering that we are told this about nine times).  As to the mental acuity of the man behind the smile, we have the opinion of his attorney, “who considered Bon only dull, not a fool.”  Lest this evaluation slip from the mind in the space of a page and a half, we are almost immediately made further privy to the lawyer’s thoughts on his client—“even if he was too dull or too indolent to suspect or find out about his father himself, he wasn’t fool enough not to be able to take advantage of it.”

Ten pages after this—to ensure against any depreciation of the reader’s acquaintance with this relationship dynamic—we are reminded of Bon, “[l]ike that lawyer thought, he wasn’t a fool.”  (Aha, but now the dramatic complications deepen, as the sentence continues: “the trouble was, he wasn’t the kind of not-fool the lawyer thought he would be.”*)

The investigation into the complexities of this Bon-foolery persists eight pages on (although it has become so complex that the author himself seems to have gotten reversed which things the attorney thinks Bon is and isn’t): “Because, though the lawyer believed him to be rather a fool than dull or dense, yet even he (the lawyer) never for one moment believed that even Bon was going to be the kind of fool he was going to be.”**

Four pages later and, for those readers who might be thinking, “Seems like the finer points of Bon’s foolishness have gone underexplored in this chapter so far,” additional evidence arrives in epistolary form, “a letter…that boiled down to eighteen words I know you are a fool, but just what kind of fool are you going to be? and Bon was at least enough a not-fool to do the boiling down.”  (“Not-fool” now joining “self-mesmered fool” in the ranks of “fool-related terms and phrases one does not expect to see more than once within a single literary work.”)

Continuing on the same page, the subject somehow not yet exhausted, the lawyer offers some closing thoughts: “he still did not really believe that Bon was that kind of a fool, though he was about to alter his opinion somewhat about the dullness.”  Even with allowance for this final bit of wiggle room vis-à-vis the legal proceedings of Foolish v. Dull, surely the point has at last been more than driven home—it’s been driven home, taken inside, and put summarily to bed.

• • •

* Not-fool ?  (I guess I’m only surprised it wasn’t unfool.)

** 

                                (Gary Larson, The Far Side)

And, footnote p.s.: the parenthetical clarification “the lawyer” in this sentence is the book’s, not mine.

Serenity Now

When you see a particular word—for instance, calm—used almost 30 times within a single novel—for instance, Absalom, Absalom!—you might wonder of the author, Did he not have a thesaurus?  Wouldn’t a few synonyms have helped to spice up all that calmness?  Like maybe a serene or the occasional tranquil?

And then you start to notice all the serenes and tranquils.  Turns out they themselves are more than occasional.

No surprise that Judith, the character already described as calm a half-dozen times, is serene as well: she has, we are told, an “impenetrable and serene face.”  A page later, we are furthermore told—presumably to clarify that these are qualities not even one iota shy of 200-proof purity—that it is a face “absolutely impenetrable, absolutely serene.”  And then, a page after that, it is “the impenetrable, the calm, the absolutely serene face.”  (In classes on how to give presentations, this principle is known as Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.*)

Judith not only looks serene, she listens serene—“Judith listening with that serenity, that impenetrable tranquility.”  (Yes, her tranquility is as impenetrable as her face.)  And even when she recedes into the background of the narrative, there’s no doubt how she’s coming back on the scene—“Judith was absent, returning at supper time serene and calm.”  With her around, one serene a sentence will simply not suffice—“something walked with Judith and Clytie back across that sunset field and answered in some curious serene suspension to the serene quiet voice.”

In addition to Judith’s “impenetrable tranquility” and her “face calm cold and tranquil,” Absalom! includes “tranquil anticipation,” “tranquil disregard,” “tranquil and astonished earth,” “tranquil and unwitting desolation,” “melodious and tranquil” music, and “that profound and absolutely inexplicable tranquil patient clairvoyance of women.”  (It will likely not come as a great shock that this last item is far from the book’s only phenomenon to be deemed “profound.”)

Judith is calm even when irritated—“annoyed yet still serene”—which puts her in the relaxed company of a “serene and florid boast,” the “serene and idle splendor of flowers,” “the open door’s serene rectangle,” and “old age’s serene and well-lived content.”  One character in Chapter 6 speaks in a manner “serene, not even triumphant,” while another in Chapter 9 regards a situation “perhaps not even now with triumph…possibly even serene.”

The only things that get the serene treatment nearly as often as Judith are, oddly, various amorphous presences—“shapes fluid and delicate…parasitic and potent and serene”; “symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene”; and—in another demonstration of the can’t-have-too-much-serenity-in-a-single-sentence stratagem—“two shades pacing, serene and untroubled by flesh, in a summer garden—the same two serene phantoms.”

All of which makes you realize that apparently Faulkner did have a thesaurus, and it’s a good thing, too, or else this book would have been completely up to its neck in calms.

• • •

*Such insistent repetition also reminds me of Dudley Moore in Arthur, completely undissuadable by the aunt and uncle he encounters in a restaurant that he has not adequately conveyed how small the country is that his date comes from: “It’s terribly small.  Tiny little country.  Rhode Island could beat the crap out of it in a war.  That’s how small it is.”  (Aunt: “It’s small.”)  “Very little. It’s 85 cents in a cab from one end of the country to the other.  I’m talking small.”  (Uncle: “We understand it’s small, Arthur.”)  “They recently had the whole country carpeted—this is not a big place.”

Before the Storm

However it came to pass that a rediscovered WWII-era motivational slogan became the wildly prolific progenitor to seemingly thousands of mutant variations, there is now no end to signs, buttons, T-shirts, etc., telling us to “Keep Calm” and fill in the blank as the case may be.  As it happens, the original poster was designed in Britain in 1939, only three short years after Absalom, Absalom! was itself first published.  This interesting coincidence is, of course, neither interesting nor what anyone would define as a “coincidence,” but it will serve nevertheless as the rickety scaffolding from which I will launch into a number of wisecracks about how much William Faulkner likes to use the word calm.

There are a lot of “impenetrable faces” in Absalom, Absalom!, as has been mentioned elsewhere, and those impenetrable faces are usually of the calm variety—whether it’s “that calm absolutely impenetrable face,” “the impenetrable, the calm, the absolutely serene face” or, combining the both for a whole that is indeed no greater the sum of its parts, “two calm impenetrable faces.”

For all the fury going on around them, the book’s characters maintain surprisingly relaxed kissers (even if not always impenetrably so)—Absalom!’s provincial puritan Henry has a sister, Judith, who is alternately described as having a “calm face,” a “calm frozen face,” and a “face calm cold and tranquil.”  This is, genetically, to be expected, since Henry and Judith’s mother, Ellen, has, at various times, a “face white and calm” and a “face absolutely calm.”  (Henry himself has a touch of the same DNA, with his own “cold calm face.”)

There are not only calm faces on display—sometimes with their “eyes wide open and calm”—but “calm and sweet” voices to be heard, “repressed calm voice[s]” and “voices…sober enough, even calm.”  Some characters are “calm but logical” while others are “calm and undeviating”; positions are “stated calmly” and “argued calmly”; one woman is “saying ‘Yes, Rosa?’ calmly” and another is “standing calmly in a gingham dress”; there is “icy calm” to be seen as well as “calm incorrigible insistence.”  But it’s not until late in the book that the calm really begins to run riot.

Of the 30-plus calms and calmlys in Absalom, Absalom!, over half are in Chapter 7, where they sometimes double up even within the same sentence: “He was quite calm about it, he said, sitting there…arguing with himself quietly and calmly.”*  And, two pages later, as this unusually laid-back internal conflict continues to roil: “the two of them argued inside of him, speaking in orderly turn, both calm, even leaning backward to be calm.”  (The fiery conclusion to this epic moral conundrum?  “[H]e had argued calmly and logically with his conscience until it was settled.”)

“I was calm,” says another cool customer, still in the same chapter, “quite calm.”  Seems to be the order of the day!  The overriding eerie hush of Chapter 7’s placid trip is encapsulated in a moment featuring a minor character, a sheriff named Major de Spain: “[I]t was too quiet, too calm; so much too quiet and calm that de Spain said he did not realise for a moment that it was too calm and quiet.”

The resignation one might feel in the face of such tranquilizing repetition is given voice by the book itself in this final soothing nugget of ancestral wisdom: “Grandfather said that his very calmness was indication that he had long since given up any hope.”

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*For those who need things repeated to them and who prefer their adverbs written like adjectives, the sentence after this reads, “[t]here was only himself, the two of them inside that one body…arguing quiet and calm.”

Slap on a Smile

Henry Sutpen is a major player in the narrative of Absalom, Absalom!, and his depiction offers a master class in how to construct a fully-fleshed fictional personality through the accumulation of assorted detail.  If an author wanted to convey, for example, that a character was provincial and something of a puritan, how might he or she go about that process?  William Faulkner demonstrates.

One might begin by describing the character’s background, “raised in provincial North Mississippi.”  Here, in this “provincial backwater,” brought up in a “puritan country household,” the character might demonstrate his “puritan heritage” by spending a sexually tentative adolescence socializing with his fellow “provincial virgins.”  After this, he could move on to “a small new provincial college,” where his “puritan’s provincial horror of revealing surprise or ignorance” might be challenged by new experiences, but his “provincial soul” could remain intact, as well as his “puritan’s humility.”  (Another authorial strategy is to describe the character as having a “puritan character.”)

In the event that such techniques fail to adequately communicate the desired amount of puritanical provincialism, a writer might furthermore portray the protagonist’s “provincial face,” “provincial manners,” “fierce provincial’s pride,” and “puritan’s provincial mind.”  Or address him as “Henry, the provincial” and “Henry the puritan”—also effective.

This same light touch can be applied to rendering the subtleties of a character’s demeanor.  Take Charles Bon, Henry’s college chum, whose seemingly pleasant disposition is a facade meant to keep others at arm’s length—“an expression on his face you might call smiling except that it was not that but just something you couldn’t see through or past.”  Or, as is clarified later within the same sentence, “the smiling that wasn’t smiling but was just something you were not supposed to see beyond.”

The gradations of Bon’s countenance are more finely delineated as the chapter continues, with such additional descriptions as “that expression which might at a glance be called smiling,” “that expression which was not smiling but just something not to be seen through,” and “that expression you might call smiling but which was not, which was just something that even just a clodhopper bastard was not intended to see beyond.”  This rainbow of facial colorings is rendered with even greater precision (albeit to slightly more repetitive effect than one might expect contained in a single sentence) as Bon “lounged into the lawyer’s office and watched from behind that something which could have been called smiling…watching [the lawyer] from behind the smiling…listening courteous and quiet behind that expression which you were not supposed to see past.”

Oddly enough, it is the sight of his provincial puritan friend that especially elicits this toothy subterfuge: “Bon would look at him for a moment with that expression which could have been smiling…and Henry panting, ‘Stop! Stop!’ and Bon watching him with that faint thin expression.”  Or “Bon…sits looking at Henry with that expression which might be called smiling”; or “Bon…again watched Henry with that faint expression about the eyes and mouth which might be smiling.”  Considering that the above are among over a score of expressions exhibited in the book, it might rightly be the reader instead who—smiling or more likely wincing—is at some point compelled to pant, “Stop! Stop!”*

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*Among that score are a number of the amazed variety, no big surprise: “the expression of fatalistic and amazed determination,” “his expression of grim and embittered amazement,” “Shreve’s expression of cherubic and erudite amazement.”  At the other end of the emotional spectrum is one character with an “expressionless and rocklike face”—or, put another way (which Faulkner, of course, does): “the grim rocklike man who had looked at him…with absolutely no alteration of expression.”