The truth is... It is after having read and enjoyed Sound and Fury, Light in August and As I Lay Dying... that I decided I wanted to read more works from Faulkner. Perhaps not the right choice for me at this point, Absalom, Absalom! seems both more challenging and less satisfying.
Due to the fact that I cannot see much differences between the narrative voices I've encountered so far, at times it seems to me that W.F. is giving us his many drafts of the same story to read, letting us decide what to make of it. I am still curious to see how the whole will appear to me once I reach the end,.. but making my way to there will require some patience.
Ah. Well. I had not realized that you had read those works. If you've read those three (in particular), then
Absalom, Absalom! makes a great deal of sense as the next work to read.
I read Faulkner in an idiosyncratic order which I wish I had not (thus, the first work I read was
As I Lay Dying (which I think was a very good first book of his to read) followed by
Absalom, Absalom! Only then did I read
Light in August, a few other things, and then, many years later
The Sound and the Fury). I should probably re-read all of them but my impression--in retrospect--is that
Absalom, Absalom! is his greatest achievement, followed closely by
The Sound and the Fury, and that the latter is much easier to read, especially once the first part is finished. In a way, if you read The Sound and the Fury backwards, it's almost a blueprint (or perhaps a guide) to how to read
Absalom, Absalom!
Although I am loath to turn to Wikipedia for worthwhile literary criticism, I do think that the entry on
Absalom, Absalom! contains a few insights that are worth considering. Because it's such a complex work, it's hardly reducible to easy summary; nevertheless, the following observations are, I think, helpful.
"Absalom, Absalom! juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation—with the implication that
reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable [my emphasis] and therefore imaginative. Faulkner stated that, although none of the narrators got the facts right since "no one individual can look at truth," a truth exists and that the reader can ultimately know it. Most critics have tried to reconstruct this truth behind the shifting narratives, or to show that such a reconstruction cannot be done with certainty or even to prove that there are factual and logical inconsistencies that cannot be overcome. But some critics have stated that, fictional truth being an oxymoron, it is best to take the story as a given, and regard it on the level of myth and archetype, a fable that allows us to glimpse the deepest levels of the unconscious and thus better understand the people who accept (and are ruled by) that myth—Southerners in general and Quentin Compson in particular.
By using various narrators expressing their interpretations, the novel alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of Faulkner's South, where the past is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time; it thus also explores the process of myth-making and the questioning of truth."
I disagree with Faulkner. I do not think a single truth exists. I think there is a truth that exists for each character that is different for every other character. We are all imprisoned, to an extent, by our positions and our viewpoints and so our truths (and our knowledge) may overlap. But "turth" will never be the same thing for any two people. And I think that
Absalom, Absalom! is the perfect example of that.
(perhaps because English is not my first language). I do not see much poetry in it, but such a superabundance of words as I have never seen before!
