Rarely will a list of books recommended for summer reading include a novel by William Faulkner. It’s a difficult read, true. But this summer of our pervading pandemic, we do well to understand America’s legacy of violence. It’s such a legacy that is behind the thinking of a young white woman who can’t be asked to follow the rules, put her dog on a leash—not if the person doing the asking, politely, is a black man. Such stepping out of lines triggers fear in the woman who proceeds to call the police to report an African American—in Central Park! Save her! He might be dangerous!

Or what about those Americans, ignoring the necessity for physical distance, flaunting the look-ma-no-mask bare face. For many of these fellow citizens, only the blacks, Latinx, and Indigenous are COVID targets!

Police putting a knee down on the neck of a black man, and just waiting, five minutes, steadily keeping the black man’s neck. Hearing the screams of this man, I can’t breath. But holding the knee steady. Steady. Until there’s no life in the human being below his knee.

What will it be tomorrow? And the day after that and all the days and months and years to come?

When William Faulkner decides to stay at home, it’s a big deal. He’s tried Paris; he’s sat at an outdoor cafe, at a table right next to James Joyce. And while he looked on at the author of Ulysses, he, Faulkner, was tongue tied. Faulkner leaves, returns home to Oxford, Mississippi, and from Rowan Oaks, he’ll become the American writer, reflecting, from his “postage stamp,” the pervading narrative he’s learned from childhood, a narrative of imagery so engrossing as to have supplanted reality, giving birth to an entire system of thought. It’s no wonder, Faulkner thinks, that after the Civil War the foundation of American society is rumbling, refusing to rest.

Joyce can have Europe. He, Faulkner, will stay put, think about those seemingly innocent stories America tells itself.

How does it work? Because it works, otherwise, it wouldn’t wouldn’t have been worth all the fighting and dying for.

The Earth rumbles when Thomas Sutpen arrives back in the US, and lands in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County. The native son, tenant farmer’s son in Virginia, left the country when, at age 14 years old, when a black man, opening the front door of a plantation mansion, informed him that he would have to go to the door at the back—at the back—of the house.

Faulkner’s protagonist from The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson, has been resurrected to be Faulkner’s surrogate and listen, once again, to this narrative on how the South was defeated. Because it was defeated in this narrative in part by the arrival of this one man to Mississippi. And, according to Rosa Coldfield, the town’s poet laureate and (re)creator of this local version of an American tale, folks like Sutpen and those blacks her brought with him from Haiti, this union has ruined America, has brought it down nothing more than a playground for industrial business from the North, a tribe of people who don’t know anything about the peaceful, pastoral culture of Southern life.

Profit makers! Foreigners, all!

It’s Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom! All these many years later, Rosa Coldfield, an old dame, is determined to infuse the newest generation in the 1920s (Faulkner’s generation) with the true, that is, eye witness, account of what happened in the antebellum South, what happened before and after that War. Quentin Compson, all of 22 years old, his listening to what he’s heard before: Colonel Thomas Sutpen’s brand of doing business in Mississippi was unique! Unlike anything the town or the South or the country for that matter has ever seen!

It was nothing short of “demonic”!

What’s so unique about Thomas Sutpen? Nothing. If I encountered either Sutpen or Mr. Coldfield (Rosa’s father), before the Civil War, I would have been an enslaved woman, one of Supten’s coffee-colored offspring. Or a victim of a nephew, as Toni Morrison, an admirer of Faulkner’s work, pointed out in Beloved.

I wouldn’t have fared any better as a “freed” black woman after the War, as I would have been of no monetary value to the American market and Supten’s Mansion or Coldfield’s “farm.”

What Sutpen represents appears, as it always has, since the establishment of the peculiar institution is a narrative enforcement of cruelty. Sutpen’s actions are guided by a way of thinking about Self in relationship to others, particularly blacks, so as to justify the necessity for free labor. And it’s useful if, for a time, the acquisition of free labor from Africa is not only legalized but legitimized in the stories passed down from one generation of children to the next.

Faulkner, in the 1910s and 1920s Mississippi, would have sat on some adult’s lap to hear stories about the gallantry of Robert E. Lee. In Chicago, at my Catholic elementary, I heard about Robert E. Lee. I saw pictures of him in my history textbooks before I was told anything about Frederick Douglass. Devoid of all his anger and fight, of course.

Nonetheless, Sutpen, to the long-time plantation owners in Jefferson seemed to be infusing the narrative that was familiar to them with something different. Certainly different from them. A whirlwind, as Coldfield describes him, that “tore violently” through the landscape!

She, a “relic” of the antebellum South, has chosen Quentin as the honored receptor of her crafty narrative. Honored, because she suspects, he, like her, has struggled for the cause of maintaining the purity of whiteness. No narrative local or national should ever depict the mixing of the races! Coldfield has done her best to maintain the thinking of the old South, and Quentin, too, she imagines, as he desires to be a Southern gentleman and a Southern writer.

For Coldfield, Sutpen was no “gentleman.” He was nothing and then wealth makes him someone!

If you think this is irrational, well it is, and isn’t. Speaking on behalf of the memory of the dead, Supten’s exploits were out of bound. No decorum whatsoever. He, and he, alone, was ruthless. Cruel. Certainly to her family. Her sister forced to marry him as an exchange of sorts between, it seemed, to her Coldfield, a child at the time, between gentlemen—her father and Sutpen.

What happened to her and her niece, Judith, from a respectable family, class, was scandalous.

But he was an outsider. Like that of that labor force. But the latter, while black labor is a source of wealth for others, Supten amasses wealthy from who knows where, for his own rise well beyond what’s considered respectable among property owners. Arriving and hiring a French architecture and installing chandeliers!

Sutpen wasn’t homegrown but, instead, a demon. He looked like the driver of his carriage. And the horse, too. All wild! Beastly.

As I said, Faulkner has heard this story before. Sutpen the slaveholder, the Colonel, the father. His interest is with Quentin Compson who, in 1922, has never been a slaveholder, never owned land, even. All he’s inherited is a narrative. Some, like Rosa, would say, this narrative is his greatest because most valuable inheritance. More value to him as a citizen in the South, in America than even money, if push comes to shelve. It’s what will maintain his human beingness in a culture and a society unforgiving of difference, particularly racial and class difference.

It’s Quentin, student at Harvard, who is summoned by Coldfield to listen and then be an eyewitness. Not just any listener or eyewitness will do. She needs a reliable one.

And here’s the problem: it seems that Quentin is a little more loyal to Faulkner’s literary but exploratory guidance than he is to the poet laureate’s misplaced imagery of the nightmare. She reports the familial business of the enslaving capitalist class because she can’t imagine any other white class of people, let alone the plight of the enslaved and “freed” blacks, steadily lynched as entertainment at Sunday picnics during the years after Reconstruction when she is heavily engaged in “teaching,” not what the South lost but what it must, by all means, regain.

He, Quentin, must learn how to tweak, the narrative he’s inherited. It must speak less of loss now. The years of mourning, over, the blacks have lost, and we, the whites, has toppled them, sent them scurrying north. Silenced them. And like the Indigenous, their collective spirit extinguished, they are learning to know and accept, graciously, their place in society as servants, once again.

He, Quentin, must join the fight of those writers Agrarian writers, Robert Penn Warren, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Donald Davidson, Stark Young, John Crowe Ransom, and others. Join us. Join the struggle.

What’s unique about Quentin, however, is that he’s Faulkner’s creation. A native son, Faulkner is, nonetheless, is determined to uncover the engine that runs this narrative—just as determined as Coldfield is to employ narration to blanket in innocence the historical violence of enslavement. A grand engagement in the practice of cruelty. Quentin isn’t going to be programmed to be a passive listener. It’s his creation who is to join the struggle—but it’s the one to understand what is it that lies at the heart of this Southern, that is, American narrative…

And it lies somewhere in that room. At Supten’s Mansion.

It’s like coming into adulthood during a pandemic: Things will change afterward.

What’s in this room? Faulkner asks. It’s not a man arriving on in a horse-driven carriage. It’s not a man who married Rosa Coldfield’s sister and, later, after the War, made an indecent proposal to her: Bare a son. No love. Of course, no love. It’s not the demon, but a man dying that once young, once resembled Quentin, even.

This is but one missing scene from Coldfield’s narrative to reach without the aide of Coldfield. Listening to a writer communing with a grandiose, full of sound and fury—a narrative that guides her as she interprets “the garden,” the local one, covered in wisteria vines at Supten’s Mansion—isn’t the one Quentin can rely on if he wants to see, for once and for all, the true.

So Quentin sees Coldfield’s summer of wisteria. He sees, as she instructs, the “sun-impacted on the wall.” The wisteria, pervasive. Everywhere. She’s 14-years old then in the “vintage year of wisteria.” In that cultural garden, symbolic of the plantation life, is established by American writers before Quentin’s birth, a narrative to counter the negative publicity of Puritan wilderness folks and anti-slavers. Anti-Americans.

In the Southern garden, nothing is lost. The enslaved blacks are a tamed and placid lot. Whites are ladies and gentlemen, property owners. A productive class, contributors to the well being of the entire nation.

In Coldfield’s narrative, then, Charles Bon, Supten’s first and discarded son, is “black.” That is, he’s devoid of race. He’s therefore in the scheme of the cultural racial milieu, “absent.” Dead. Dispossessed of life. He’s a caricature in her narrative. His reality as the rightful heir of the plantation, and his “freedom” to roam freely and befriend his brother, Henry Sutpen, would be too much for Coldfield to contemplate, even if, after she hears the shot, she suspects as much.

Judith, her niece, falls in love with this man in that garden at Supten’s Mansion. “‘I never saw him.’” In that garden, it’s true, she never saw his face. “Charles Bon, Charles Good, Charles Husband-soon-to-be. But not to her. No to her.

But she “lurked” to glimpse this image of “love” on the plantation, there in the garden. “‘A picture seen by stealth, by creeping (my childhood taught me that instead of love and it it stood me in

good stead; in fact, if it had taught me love, love could not have stood me so) into the deserted midday room to look at it.’”

Was it all a dream? The wisteria summer, Charles Bob, love. Innocence.

Because he seemed so innocent, and so are we, the Coldfields, the South…

And then the Civil War ended. The dream, rudely interrupted by the demonic desire for freedom, crumbles at the very moment Rosa Coldfield hears the echo of the shot, the last shot that ends the dream at War and at home. Running “full tilt” towards the Mansion, she continues up the stairs to the bedroom until she is stopped by the cause of the “debacle” which, according to Coldfield, condemned her and Judith to the madness that will never emancipate her or them. But she, this coffee-colored Sutpen, will preside “‘aloof up the new.’” She, still a threat to the “‘portent of the old,’” dared to stop a white woman. Dared to put a hand on the shoulder of a white woman.

The killer of dreams; the creator of nightmares—touched a white woman!

The slap didn’t budge Clytie who stood perversely, an “‘inscrutable’” “‘paradox,’” not slave “‘yet incapable of freedom,’” baring the door to the room I’m not to trespass. Never to trespass.

So “‘I never saw his face.’”

I heard the shot, the echo of the shot. The War over, the defeat of a dream, replaced by that dead man lying in that room.

And for Quentin, he has questions: Killed by another man! And who is this other man? Why has he fled the crime scene? What has Charles Bon done?

Come fall, Quentin, having put distance between himself and Coldfield, sits shivering in a cold college dorm room. His roommate Shreve (a Canadian) sits nearby. He and Shreve reach Sutpen’s Mansion. They meet Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen. All on horseback. Before the gate, all four have paused.

Shreve: “‘We’re going to talk about love.’”

“‘—So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear.’”

“Henry doesn’t answer.”

“‘Who will stop me, Henry?’”

“‘—You are my brother.’”

“‘—No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with you sister.

Unless you stop me, Henry.’”

“Suddenly Henry grasps the pistol…”

“‘—You have to stop me, Henry.’”

Moving ahead, Henry turns his horse and points the gun—at Charles Bon!

This is what must have happened between the two brothers. Another missing scene.

Coldfield’s narrative of that summer of wisteria is a cover up of not only a local crime but also the crime of enslavement. The cruelty of denying the humanity of a people—first in narrative and then in practice.

It’s easy now for Quentin to move forward and hear and see the order: Kill him! Kill!

Quentin leads Shreve again to a field tent. Supten’s tent where Henry has been summoned to meet with his father.

He’s black! He’s your sister’s half brother. But he’s black! Black, Henry!

Kill him!

The absurdity that Camus must have recognized in Europe during the rise of the Nazis. In Spain. In France. All of Europe, too, have written a narrative in which only the “pure” is meant to survive. Only the unreality survives.

It’s no longer cruelty, but a way of life that becomes a system of repressions and omissions until hardly anything of life is visible. It’s the “design” in a corrupt brand of storytelling that becomes an inheritance of “innocence.” In that “design,” which Rosa Coldfield has intuitively incorporated into her narrative and Thomas Sutpen has adopted as his inheritance of “innocence,” essential for the role he takes on as a slaveholder, there’s no woman for the black, the enslaved as human.

Like Coldfield, the writer, Sutpen tells Quentin’s grandfather the story. “He was talking about himself. He was telling a story. He was not bragging about something he had done; he was just telling a story about something a man named Thomas Sutpen had experienced…” It’s the story he will pass on to his son, Henry. It’s the story Rosa Coldfield attempts to pass on to Quentin Compson.

“‘You see, I had a design in my mind.” He admits to making a “‘mistake.’” But he made a correction. “‘I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife.’”

But then he made a mistake, with the wife. She, her family “‘deliberately withheld” from him the true of her racial identity. He thought her Spanish. Then, he, Thomas Sutpen, had to explain: “‘This new fact rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design.’”

There will be no black people only enslaved blacks!

The eye witness is ready now. Quentin, having grown up listening to these legends of heroes and demons is actively restoring the missing scenes in order to make sense of these stories. And it’s working. He’s working.

And now the finale! To Sutpen’s Mansion, up those stairs, he’ll enter that room the first time to begin the draft. A dry run. A rehearsal for a final staging for an audience.

The second time he enters, his audience is already seated beside him. Miles away in another stale cold room up north at Harvard, Quentin sees his protagonist as clearly as he did that day during the summer.

So, once again, he looks down on the “yellow sheets” and “the wasted yellow face.”

Like an old book—already opened to the last page.

The “already corpse” moves.

And you are---?

Henry Sutpen.

And you have been here---?

Four years.

And you came home---?

To die. Yes.

To die.

Yes. To die.

And you have been here---?

Four years.

And you are---?

Sutpen.

And there’s a door, too, that Quentin can’t pass through… The only one able to think outside the given American narrative, can’t hold on to his own life as a result. In the end, Quentin can’t abide the “maelstrom of unbearable reality” just as Coldfield before him. His life as a writer is over. He’s already a corpse.

Just as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s protagonist, Aureliano Babilonia will never leave the room once he reaches the last line of those old parchments. He will be sealed inside the room (tomb) along with “everything written.”

Near the St. Charles River, the “two six-pound flat irons,” weighing more than “one tailor’s goose,” awaits him.

The “reducto absurdum of all human experience… still blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth,” Quentin tells himself. It’s story. One of defeat. All reduced to the absurd.

He meets his destiny weighed down in water.

Just tell yourself it’s a plague narrative because like the plague, it will be with us, returning after lying dormant, says Camus’ Dr. Rieux, waiting for the day to “raise it’s rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Go ahead. Don’t read Absalom, Absalom! Tell yourself a story about how the wisteria were “a pervading everywhere…”

Clinging to the dream that is a nightmare.