Subverting History

This chapter presents a reading of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! The novel’s interpretive conventions have led readers to focus their attention on the story of Thomas Sutpen and his intent to establish a plantation dynasty in Mississippi. However, it is argued that what is not told in a story like Sutpen’s may be as important as what is told. By paying attention to those empty spaces, breaks, and margins in the novel, and by resisting earlier characterizations of the text as a story primarily about Sutpen and his narrators, we discover a narrative that unravels almost as quickly as it is woven and history that is unmade nearly as soon as it is made. We also discover that those female characters who have been the subject of so much anguished commentary may indeed be more subversive than they appear through the eyes of earlier critics.