Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner

The Artist as Cuckold

The Artist as Cuckold In order to believe that Thomas Sutpen rejects Charles Bon because he has black blood, readers have blithely been willing to do a good deal of fancy footwork around some significant obstacles. First, you have to believe that Sutpen is far more race-conscious than he proves himself to be in any other place in the novel. Second, you have to believe that Bon at birth had physical characteristics—skin pigmentation, hair texture, lip thickness: something—that identified him as black, but which disappeared as he got older so that he could enroll at the University of Mississippi and pass as white all of his life. Third, if you believe that Sutpen was worried about dynasty, traditional problems of primogeniture, you have to overlook the Mississippi law that forbade a black son to inherit a father's estate. Nevertheless, Bon's "blackness" overwhelms discussions of Absalom , Absalom!, because it provides the novel's character-narrators, after many trials and errors, with a motive that allows them to explain why Henry Sutpen kills Charles Bon at the gates of Sutpen's Hundred . But Quentin and Shreve posit Bon's blackness verylate, toward the end of chapter 8, in the scene they create together in which Sutpen summons Henry to his tent on the eve of battle and informs him about Botf s racial heritage (AA 283). Sutpen's revelation provides a focus, a release, a renewed energy, for the narrative quagmire they have been in. From this moment, the narrative becomes a sort of endgame . The preforeordestinated scene at the gate of Sutpen's Hundred toward which the narrative has been moving becomes, finally, inevitable: the novel relaxes from its hems and haws, its stops and starts, its proffered and then rejected explanations. In three pages Charles Bon is dead: Henry has kilt him dead as a beef. But Sutpen's revelation asks a major question that the boys, in their 138 The Artist as Cuckold headlong rush toward climax, simply beg. Why should the strong, imperious, even demonic father give the responsibility for stopping an incestuous and miscegenous union to the son? Why not stop it by killing Bon himself or by whisking Judith away to a nunnery, say, since obviouslyjust forbiddingthe marriage is not going to work? The answer lies first in the fact that Quentin and Shreve know from the beginning that Henry and not Sutpen kills Bon, and their narration must move toward that act, which is the narrative nub of the novel. Moreover, and more importantly, Sutpen's relegation of that responsibility to his son reaffirms to the reader how specifically Absalom is a son's story and not a father's. Absalom insists throughout that the source of its narration is also its focus: thus the responsibility that this fictionally-created father hands to this fictionally-created son is very much at Absalomy s center. What finally pushes Henry over the edge is not any affirmation that blood may not marry blood, but that black blood maynot mingle with white: the ultimate white horror is not just Thomas Sutpen's ace in the hole, but Quentin's and Shreve's as well. We should be suspicious of the suddenness and the sufficiency with which the race card provides a solution for the boys' narrative convolutions. Of course, it's been a long cold night in the Harvard dorm, and they may simply want to get to bed. But in a novel which questions everything, it is very curious that they do not question anything in this scene. They simply accept race as the one piece of acceptable information that allows their Hamlet-hero Henry finally to act. I repeat: in this reading, incest, by itself, is not enough. Race replaces incest as the key concern; indeed, the narrators specifically pare incest away from the terms of the climactic confrontation: "So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant beaf (293), Bon taunts Henry. I'm not your brother, he continues: "I'm thenigger that's going to sleep withyour sister" (294). Sutpen's race card, then, overwhelmsboihAbsalom's narrators and its critics. For the most part, even critics who have pursued other themes—history, culture, gender, language, and narrative theory, for example—have accepted race's centrality to Absalom, and Bon's black blood has become the still point around which the world of Absalom The Artist...