Coming Out through History's Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom!

At a Faulkner conference not long ago, a scholar posed the question, "Why Absalom, Absalom!? Why do we keep returning to it, stuck in it?" It haunts us, I suggest, partly because we're still trying to avoid the question at the heart of its narrative, which is figured in the symbolic threat of interracial gay romance. This novel's reception history as well as its own thematized reading practices confirm that our official histories secretly harbor the very homoerotic desires condemned by their oppressive traditions. Adumbrating a growing body of recent queer scholarship, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) implicitly forwards an ethical rather than ontological understanding of gay identity.¹ Foregrounding this understanding allows me to extend to homoeroticism an approach like Toni Morrison's "effort" in Playing in the Dark "to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject"—to "the preserve of white male views" that still perceives itself as "removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States." As Morrison attests, there is no "romance free of what Herman Melville called ‘the power of blackness.'"² And there is none free of homoerotic desire.

Absalom opens with the insistent evocation of a question: Why does Miss Rosa choose Quentin to hear the history she tells? She claims that her purpose is financial: she imagines Quentin selling her story to a magazine some day, perhaps when he is newly married and in need of extra money. In what becomes a recurring theme of hermeneutic doubt and indeterminacy, however, contrary evidence leads Quentin to suspect that Miss Rosa has undisclosed motivations. The "queer archaic sheet of ancient good notepaper" she sends him as a "summons, out of another world almost," suggests that she aims at more than offering him a marketable tale: "It's because she wants it told."³ Quentin first decides that she might simply need to explain the Civil War through her history, but he rejects this answer because it doesn't account for her need of him. Miss Rosa is a writer and could pen the story herself. Quentin's father also conjectures broadly and unconvincingly as to her motivation. Adding to Miss Rosa's aura of mystery is the "ancient association of the rose with secrecy," a sub-rosa text.⁴ The novel thus opens by insistently posing a question while simultaneously frustrating any desire for a clear answer. Why does Miss Rosa want Quentin to hear her story? There is something "queer" about the history she recounts (5), something whose queerness stems partly from its inscrutability.

The other characters try to understand Miss Rosa's motivation for telling this history by seeking clues in her story itself. Chronologically, it begins in the early nineteenth century with Thomas Sutpen and his rise from poor mountain boy to rich and feared Mississippi plantation owner. Sutpen married Miss Rosa's older sister and had two children by that marriage, Henry and Judith. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Henry killed Judith's fiancé, Charles Bon, with whom he was in love and who was his and Judith's half-brother by Sutpen's earlier marriage. Sutpen had repudiated Bon and his mother when he discovered she was partly of African descent. Bon's murder heralded Sutpen's failure to achieve his dream of becoming a plantation patriarch: Henry disappeared after shooting Bon, Judith never married, the war reduced Sutpen's estate to a small fraction of its original size and profitability, and the grand mansion finally became a decrepit relic of frustrated aspirations.

The novel opens in the summer of 1909, with the aged Miss Rosa telling this history to young Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. The first half of Absalom rotates narrative voices among Miss Rosa, Quentin, Mr. Compson (Quentin's father), and an omniscient narrator, each of whom expresses...