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79 LEROY GAYLORD C. LEROY MYTHOPOEIC MATERIALS IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM: WHAT APPROACH FOR THE MARXIST CRITIC? The incompatibility between elements of the literary vision of Absalom, Absalom! and essentials of the Marxist world view— that represents the problem I want to deal with in this paper. How should the Marxist critic (the Marxist scholar/teacher/critic) relate to this incompatibility ? In order to explain more precisely what the problem is, let me say something about what we might call the fatality theme in AA. The helplessness and defeat of all— or virtually all— the protagonists is surely a conspicuous element in the moral vision of the novel. For those who strive with most energy (Sutpen himself) the defeat is the most ruinous. It is hardly possible to read the novel without thinking at one time or another of the rule of fatality in Norse saga— or Greek tragedy. And a sense of the ultimate powerlessness of the furious driving personae must surely be a main impression in the characters (Quentin and Shreve) through whose consciousness the significance of this story is being probed. Nor do we feel that these are special instances. On the contrary, the characters in the novel appear as emblems of people generally— and what we are dealing with is an aspect of "human nature as such," as Lukács used to say. An almost unrelieved powerlessness is felt to be the common denominator of the human situation. Man's inability to take command of history, in other words, is a primary impression the novel leaves with the reader. The fatality theme is amplified and reinforced in Faulkner's treatment of race. Racial antagonisms are felt to have been built into the very nature of men and women, and one has the sense that, in spite of the folly in these antagonisms, there is really no hope of our ever escaping them. Race in AA functions like human guilt in the moral sensibility of Catholic orthodoxy; it is a burden we will be doomed to carry forever. The illustration that runs throughout the novel is the story of Charles Bon, Sutpen's half-black illegitimate son, the conflict between Henry and Charles, the two half brothers, and, after Henry murders Bon, the continuation of the feud from one generation to the next, as in the ancient epics. No escaping this. It dooms all the characters. It is an obsession with most of them. We have to be careful here not to misinterpret the novel. We do not 80 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW want to imply that Faulkner himself necessarily shared the vision of powerlessness that is so pervasive, or, for that matter, that he himself necessarily believed that racial antagonisms are going to prove ineradicable . On this latter point, as a matter of fact, Faulkner shows clearly that he regards these antagonisms as fundamentally idiotic. But the concern here is not with the views of Faulkner himself, it is rather with the impression the novel makes on the reader. The question of whether Faulkner would or would not want to identify with the moral vision built into the novel is to be regarded, for my purposes in the present paper, as irrelevant. The problem for the Marxist critic lies in the incompatibility between the moral sensibility in the novel and the moral sensibility associated with the Marxist world view. When it comes to the fatality theme, for example, what Marxism stresses is not human powerlessness but its opposite. And as for race—so closely allied with the fatality theme here—Marxism stresses our need (not only our need, also our capacity) to create a society in which differences in race will be as inconsequential as differences in height or weight. Let me clarify the problem the Marxist critic encounters when he confronts the fatality theme in AA, even at the risk of some repetition. For the present I'm taking only this one theme as illustration—the theme of human powerlessness as it constitutes itself as part of the moral vision of the novel. And the difficulty has to do with the incompatibility between the sensibility associated with human powerlessness and a contrary sensibility that is now emerging...

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