Absalom, Absalom! The Significance of Contradictions

58 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW LEON S. ROUDIEZ ABSALOM, ABSALOM! THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTRADICTIONS ... as soon as we consider things in their motion, their change, their life, their reciprocal influence on one another. Then we immediately become involved in contradictions. Engels, Anti-Dühring I shall, within the span of this essay, discuss several contradictions; some are specific to the text of Absalom, Absalom! or to William Faulkner himself, others are more general in nature but can be exemplified in that novel. There is, however, a different kind of contradiction that involves the notion of written text and affects my approach to it. Hence, a few preliminary considerations are necessary. Indeed, the written text embodies a basic contradiction. On the one hand, it is all we have and need to have, for we can, from a set of writings, reconstruct the world. On the other, because of the unmotivated , symbolic attributes of writing, it does not exist until it is read. Conceivably, an uneducated person from a far country might recognize in Michelangelo's Pietà a representation of human beings, even though he or she could not grasp its significance; that same person, if accustomed to scrolls and ideograms, might not be able to identify a book as such— let alone read it. In discussing a text, one needs therefore to stress the reading process without losing sight of the act of writing, also remaining aware of the necessary difference between what is read and what was written. If the subject of writing1 imbues the work with conscious intent and craftmanship, what that subject does is also affected by unconscious desires and the flow of cultural and ideological notions to which it is prey. The reader functions on similar levels, and his or her unconscious and preconscious components bear upon the reading process and consequently upon the production of signification. Nevertheless, in present society, the reader's components and those of the writer are seldom identical. Louis Althusser has submitted that today we could well be undergoing a "dramatic and laborious ordeal" as we discover both meaning and practice for some of the "simplest" gestures of existence: "seeing, listening, speaking, reading"2—gestures that up to now had been taken for granted. The latter is obviously the one that concerns me most. It has 59 ROUDIEZ long been recognized that there is a problem when speaking and listening , or writing and reading, are paired. Too often, however, the problem has been stated in terms of a failure in communication, an inadequacy of language. Just as classical economists, in studying value, wages, and labor had non-consciously substituted labor for labor-power, language had been substituted for the actual writing and reading processes . Thanks to Marx and Freud, the emphasis can now be placed where it belongs — on the heterogeneity of the writing and reading subjects, historically and socially localized, acted upon and reacting to the forces of history and class. As the reader becomes involved with a written text, a subject of narrative comes into being; that is, the reading subject produces a narrative as the printed characters are being deciphered. In the simplest of instances, that narrative coincides with what was written (and is either read silently or aloud for others to hear). That is usually true of folk tales or fairy tales; whenever it happens, it signals the existence of a stable society where the writing, its reciters, readers, and listeners are in harmony within the ideology. The original writer of the tale has vanished, his or her role has been assumed by the social group or class that has incorporated the writing into its tradition; the latter has been frozen into a nearly immutable order, and the message is eagerly absorbed by a willing or subjugated audience. Children of the French bourgeoisie at the beginning of the century were reared in an atmosphere of social stability analogous to the one I have just posited. Remembering his own childhood, Sartre has illustrated that receptive process, a version of which took place as he listened to his mother read familiar stories to him: "I became sensitive to the rigorous succession of words: with each reading they would return, always the...