The Yoking of "Abstract Contradictions": Clytie's Meaning in Absalom, Absalom!

THE YOKING OF "ABSTRACT CONTRADICTIONS": CLYTIE'S MEANING IN ARSALOM, ARSALOM! Thadious M. Davis* A tense combination of kinship and race forms a pivotal theme in Absalom, Absaloml. This double-pronged theme provides a useful key to the central meaning because, on one level, the novel relies on race and kinship as the Southerner's traditional means of identifying himself and defining his place in society. In William Faulkner's novel, the problematical issue of "black" blood in a white family creates an unresolved tension in the general thematic design involving kinship and race. Faulkner questions the accepted cultural assumptions about race in regard to family. He explores the notion that "black" blood in the world of the traditional South automatically excludes the individual from conventional bonds of kinship, whether personal, familial, or societal, simply due to a denial of the basic humanness of "the Negro." Moreover, Faulkner develops in his novel a pattern of symbols which presents "Negro" not merely as a racial distinction but as a metaphorical presence, essentially an antithetical, shadowy force operating within a closed society to challenge the impersonal mechanisms contrived for identifying family members and for defining "the central I-Am" of the individual.1 In considering the race-kinship theme, one might think immediately of Thomas Sutpen's rejection of his mountaineer family after his encounter with the "monkey nigger," a servant in a tidewater mansion , or of Sutpen's subsequent rejection of his own black son, Charles Bon; or one might consider Sutpen's white son, Henry, who kills his brother Charles Bon not because Charles would incestuously marry his sister, Judith Sutpen, but because as a black, Charles would be guilty of miscegenation in marrying his white sister. However, there is another major thread in the theme that has gone virtually unnoticed. It involves the role of Clytie, Sutpen's slave daughter, who remains on the family's plantation in a paradoxical position as member and nonmember of the Sutpen family. 'Thadious M. Davis is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in Black Scholar and Obsidian and her scholarship in the CLA Journal and CEA Critic. She is currently completing a book on Faulkner under a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. 210Thadious M. Davis Clytie is the character in Absalom, Absalom! who best sustains the meaning of "the Negro" as both blood kin and fellow human being. Generally dismissed by critics,2 Clytie is a central character in the Sutpen legend, and in the resolution of the narrative tensions created by three of the narrators—Rosa Coldfield, Quentin Compson, and Shreve McCannon. Clytie "in the very pigmentation of her flesh represents that debacle" [the Civil War] (p. 156), and "presiding aloof upon the new, she deliberately remained . . . the threatful portent of the old' (p. 157) . Her skin color manifests both her race and the social environment in which she exists. She encompasses at once the harmony and the antagonism possible in family and race relations in the South. Much more than any other black character in the novel, Clytie is symbolically and literally a fusion of the two worlds of traditional Southern life. Nonetheless, she is a direct contradiction of both: a Black Sutpen. Like the other mixed-bloods in Absalom, Absaloml, Clytie has no simple refuge in a private life as a black person. She is bereft of all that gave meaning to black life: the black family and the black church. Although deprived of the vital sustenance of communal identity, she is far from Elnora, the hymn-singing cook-housekeeper of Flags in the Dust and Sartoris who is also the daughter of a white master. Clytie is even unlike Dilsey of The Sound and the Fury, who remains the Compsons ' servant while symbolically serving on Easter Sunday as the extant possibility for human survival and love. Neither hymn-singing nor church-going, Clytie is not simply a servant member of the Sutpen household; she is a member of the family, marked with the Sutpen face. Legally chattel before the war, and an institution afterward, Clytie is a coffee-colored Sutpen who is defined primarily in terms...