Backlisted - Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Absalom, Absalom! is the subject of this episode and William Faukner's ninth novel first published in 1936. Returning to Backlisted as our guest is Professor Sarah Churchwell. Also under discussion are Sweet Home, a book of short stories by Wendy Erskine, and Thomas Bernhard's classic Old Masters.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'03 - Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine11'56 -The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard17'15 - Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. I have to start by commending Andy for one of the most joyous nights of music I've had for a very, very long time. On Monday, with a group of fellow musicians, including the great Stephen Page of Faber and Faber on drums,

and the great Hannah Griffiths, agent and publisher on bass, Andy on keyboards and vocals, they produced the whole of Abbey Road by the Beatles not one of the simplest albums I mean we're not talking bridge over troubled water here folks we're talking about one of one of the great iconic albums of of the 60s by the most famous band of all and it was brilliant and we sang every single song at the top of our voices all the way through. We drank far too much. And we felt strangely kind of elated and happy to have been there, happy to recognise that Abbey Road is actually a bloody brilliant town.

I would like to also say thanks to all the backlisted listeners who came, quite a few backlisted listeners who came along and gave money to the Literacy Trust. It was the Literacy Trust, so thank you very much. You'd expect me to go, oh, it was great, right? Oh, it was brilliant. It was absolutely incredible. All my 51-year-old self got to behave like an absolute fool

on the stage diving of the 100 Club. And you will confirm, John, we really rocked it, right? Given the amount of time you'd rehearsed, I thought you were tighter than you had any right to be. I mean, really, really musically, you didn't feel you were making kind of shabby compromises. You know, I don't really like tribute bands. I mean, I wouldn't go and see the bootleg Beatles.

Well, maybe I would, but maybe I enjoy it. Maybe I've learned a lesson. But everybody loves the sing-along. And also, because there were lots of people in the audience who knew a lot of the people

who were playing, it was, I don't think I've ever been to a gig quite like it. And I would certainly hope that Shabby Road or whatever you're going to call yourselves next,

the Not Too Shabby Road, you'd do it again. Hey, we managed to sell out the 100 Club on a Monday and we've raised, we think all in all we'll end up raising about 10 grand for this history trust i'm raising a glass yeah let's all raise our glass of our sudden comfort here to uh whiskey just a little whiskey well it's actually it's not it's red wine everybody just but you'll see you'll see why it should be whiskey in a moment but i was such a laugh it took me days to recover

i haven't recovered now. In fact, this is the most adrenaline I've had coursing through my system since Monday night. I almost don't know what to do with it. Good, because we're going to need it. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us on the dusty porch of a dilapidated mansion in Mississippi, the heavy scent of wisteria and cigar smoke hanging in the air as we listen to the grim, haggard, amazed voice of an old woman telling us about the lives of people we will never meet. Is it rude?

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today, back, she's back, back, back. For the fourth time as a guest on Backlisted, Sarah, before I introduce you properly, Sarah Church, everybody knows that, come on. Sarah, what were the three previous books you've discussed on this podcast? Well, and you know, it's interesting because I was thinking about this in the run up to this book, and that they're really, they do kind of go together in a way that I hadn't really thought about you have slowly mined the scene go on so the first one that I brought in lo these many years ago was Nella Larson's

absolutely brilliant novel passing think about it often just still the book that everybody should go back to that enough people have not heard of then we did have a change of pace with although still set in the 1920s um with it with anita luce's brilliant gentleman prefer blondes which is much funnier than anybody thinks it is who has only seen the marilyn monroe movie um or indeed has not seen the marilyn monroe movie and then we the last time i was uh in these uh hallowed halls we discussed gail jones's unforgettable Corregidora, or Corregidora, as you guys like to say it. And you got that republished in the UK.

We got that republished, which is very, very, very exciting. So well done, Backlisted. Yay, well done, Backlisted. But yay, well done, Sarah, for bringing a series of brilliant books for us to take a tiny amount of the credit for. I must say Corregidora, Coridora Corregidora that is one of the most incredible books we've done on backlisted I'm we love all our children I wouldn't say that but I wouldn't say that if I

didn't mean it it is blew me away yeah to have a book of that quality that isn't known obviously the Toni Morrison backstory that she'd edited it and that book had some, we feel, must have had some kind of influence on the way she went, the way her career went after that, particularly with Beloved. Well, the reason why Sarah is able to bring a series of books is because she's an expert. She's a professor of American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the School of advanced study at the university of london as well as working as a critic prize judge tv and radio pundit sarah is also the author of books on marilyn monroe f scott fitzgerald and her most recent published in paperback earlier this year by bloomsbury behold america which has transformed your profile

has it not it has really changed my profile, yes. I bet it has, yeah. A history of America first and the American dream called Excoriating and Brilliant by Ali Smith and which inspired historian Dan Snow to call Sarah his number one contributor when it comes to US politics. And I dare say you will be... Oh, you guys, I'm blushing.

I dare say you will be bringing some contemporary resonances to our attention for the book we talk about today. Oh, I think that I'm blushing. I'd say you will be bringing some contemporary resonances to our attention for the book we talk about today. Oh, I think that's a fair bet. Let's say that that book, should we say what the book is? So the book Sarah's joining us to discuss today is one of the great classics of 20th century American literature, Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, first published in 1936 by Random House.

Widely considered one of the key novels that went on to win Faulkner, first published in 1936 by Random House, widely considered one of the key novels that went on to win Faulkner the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the reasons why I suggested Absalom, Absalom was I was thinking back on Corregidora and realizing that, of course, from my point of view, it's quite clear that Gail Jones is taking on Absalom, Absalom in that book and rewriting it for women. And then I suddenly thought, wait a minute, we haven't actually done the origin. And the conversation between the two novels is absolutely extraordinary. I'm going to be bringing up the name Toni Morrison as well.

Well, I would have thought so. It would be wrong not to. Quite soon. But before we do that, John, what have you been reading this week? Well, a bit of a change of pace from Falkner. I'm reading a really, really, I think, delicious collection of short stories by Wendy Erskine called Sweet Home. Wendy Erskine is a teacher from East Belfast. And these stories were some of them originally published by the excellent journal Stinging Fly.

And in fact, this edition of the book is published by Stinging Fly she is I guess doing the kind of observational sympathetic working class stories if you're even remotely a fan of I think I previously on a podcast raved about Lisa Blower I've also raved about Anna Burns-Miltman, who was... There is an amazing amount of, I think, really interesting writing coming out of Ireland. They are characters set in ordinary life in East Belfast. The first story starts in a beauty parlour and it's called To All Their Jews and you go through each of the characters

who, for some reason, the beauty parlour becomes a centre of their lives. Pop culture references abound throughout the book in that regard she has something of the humorous generous quality of roddy dole but there's a brilliant i wish i could read more of it but out of context it wouldn't work a story called 77 pop facts you didn't know about gil courtney which is done it's basically a short story done as a series of smash hits facts. And it is, you know, I mean, I can read one of them just because it cheers me up always. This is fact number 39. In a 1993 interview, Van Moroven was asked if he could remember Gil Courtney. He said

no. But I'll read you a little bit of one of the stories just to give you the flavour. This is a story called Arab States Mind Narrative. And the heroine of the story is Paula give you the flavor this a story called arab states mind narrative and the the heroine of the story is paula mccray and she's in a slightly kind of flabby marriage isn't going brilliantly to a man called jimmy and she notices on television that some an old school friend of hers uh that you think of he's probably gone out with called ryan hughes has now become a kind of an expert on uh middle eastern politics she gets very excited about this and starts to read up about middle eastern politics and then actually takes it on she's noticed that she's he's appearing at a literary festival she's so she decides she's going to go in newcastle so she has to fly that

she's going to go and visit him but I just thought this gives you the flavor a couple of passages she's talking to Jimmy her husband about whether he remembers Ryan he now calls himself not just Ryan Hughes but Ryan Kedroff Hughes she says she's reading the book section of the Sunday paper when she sees that a crime writer's appearing at a book festival in Newcastle uponupon-Tyne. In smaller letters, much smaller letters underneath, are those also appearing. This person, that person, never heard of him, never heard of him, never heard of her. And Ryan Kedroff Hughes.

He would be talking about his forthcoming book, Arab States, Mind and Narrative. There isn't a photo, just one of the crime guys sitting in front of a bookcase. Paula goes on the computer to order the book. While she's there, she has a quick look at flights to Newcastle, which is surprisingly reasonable. By the way, Paula says one day when she and Jimmy are having their tea, I don't suppose you ever remember me talking about Ryan Hughes. We're going back way back here, you know, university, we're going back years. No, you don't remember me mentioning him at all? Nope.

Never heard of the fella. You sure? You sure you can't remember him? Nope. Well, he's not called that anymore anyway, says Paul. He's called Ryan Kedroff Hughes. Just thought you might remember him. He's on the TV these days.

Politics shows. Oh, well, now you've told me that's on politics shows. I know exactly who you're talking about. You do? No. Actually, hold on, he says. That fella. politics shows. I know exactly who you're talking about. You do? No. Actually, hold on, he says. That fella. I think I do actually know who you mean.

Yeah, yeah. He was always at Mick's Christmas parties. Mick was the only person from your course that was normal. Mick was dead on. That guy you're on about was always there, always in the kitchen crapping on about something or other. You know, turn the music down so I can talk because people might really need to hear what I have to say.

I think I might actually, I think I might have actually had a run in with him once. Sort of Lord Snooty type of fella. Might not be the same person, says Paula. He wasn't like that at all. Ryan Hughes was actually incredibly left wing. Well, this guy I'm thinking of was a bit of a dick, says Jimmy. Well, the guy I'm thinking of wasn't a dick, says Paula. Might not even be the same person. Did you know him? Well, the person you say wasn't a dick. No. Well, the guy I'm thinking of wasn't a dick, says Paula. Might not even be the same person. Did you know him? Well, the person you say wasn't a dick. No. Well, he might have been the dick I'm talking about.

He wasn't a dick, says Paula. That's right. And so it goes on. But I won't tell you, but it's everything that you would hope that the story would deliver on. It does. Who's it published by? It's published by Stinging Fly.

And I think she's got a deal now with a UK publisher as well, but I really, really recommend it. Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine. Andy, what have you been reading? Hang on. I've got to get something out of my bag first.

There's a lot of rustling going on, listeners. Oh, there's something else. Well, actually, I'm going to talk about who I've been reading this month. Right. So about a month ago, John and I went down to the End of the Road Festival. On my way out the door to get on the train to go down to Dorset, I grabbed a handful of books from the pile in my office of stuff that I think I might enjoy.

And in my Airbnb on the Saturday night on the outskirts of Salisbury I fell in love and I want to tell the world right I have discovered the work of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhardt who died in 1989 some of whose books are being republished by faber everyone says about bernhardt who likes bernhardt when you read one you want to read another one and they're right i've read seven in a month right he is my utter dreamboat crush so first of all i'm just going to read one of his stories a book here called the voice imitator 104 stories by thomas bernhardt they're all very short first of all i'm going to read the story his stories. There's a book here called The Voice Imitator, 104 stories by Thomas Bernhardt. They're all very short. First of all, I'm going to read the story Disappointed Englishman. Now that everything is a metaphor for Brexit, bear that in mind as I read you this story written in the 1980s. Several Englishmen who were inveigled by a mountain guide in eastern

Tyrol into climbing the Traitsinnen with him, were so disappointed after reaching the highest of the three peaks, with what nature had to offer them on this highest peak, that then and there they killed the guide, a family man with three children and, it seems, a deaf wife. When, however, they realised what they had actually done, they threw themselves off the peak, one after the other. After this, a newspaper in Birmingham wrote that Birmingham had lost its most outstanding newspaper publisher, its most extraordinary bank director and its most able undertaker. And if that isn't a Brexit metaphor, I don't know what is. So that's not very representative of Thomas Bernhardt. Why do I love Thomas Bernhardt so much? Basically, every Thomas Bernhardt book seems pretty similar to every other

Thomas Bernhardt book. They all involve single paragraphs. Every book is one paragraph, pretty much. The Loser, which is the first one that I read, is a book about three aspiring concert pianists, one of whom is Glenn Gould. And the book is the narrator complaining about what it's been like to have lived for a bit with Glenn Gould and how it ruins the whole of your life if you yourself had aspirations to become a concert pianist. Right, so there's that one. There's another book which is published by Nozzing Hill Editions called My Prizes and Accounting.

John, you would particularly like this one. This is a book in which Thomas Bernhard writes nine essays about the nine literary prizes he has won in his career and why they all stink and why he shouldn't have accepted them. There's another one here called Old Masters. This is probably of the ones that I've read is the one that I recommend first and foremost. Again, there's no paragraphs.

It's a man looking at another man in an Austrian art gallery looking at a painting for 200 pages. And it's both Michael Hoffman hoffman the poet michael hoffman says about bernhardt that it's almost but not quite hilarious that's the most british thing i ever heard as a term of praise it's right it has this internal rage which reaches a point of hilarity and then keeps going you know like with a kid where you would say to a kid, okay, funny, not funny, funny, stop it, right? It's on the not funny into funny into this is too much, right?

And he needles you and he needles you and he presses you and he never stops and he keeps going. There's no paragraph breaks. And it repeats and it repeats and it repeats, right? And it works up this brilliant momentum via repetition and this kind of almost motoric beat. It's like where this dyspeptic thing reaches a kind of level of ecstasy. It becomes so full of dark energy, right?

Bikettian? It is bikettian, yeah. It is Becketian. The one I've read, which I love, was Wittgenstein's Nephew, which I read years ago. Yeah, I was talking about this on Twitter and a guy called Zemblematic was saying, oh, it's very interesting with The Loser

because The Loser is about Glenn Gould and talks about Bach quite a lot. He said, I was sort of interpreting the way the book shifts as like Bach variations. It's almost built in a musical way. And I was thinking of interpreting the way the book shifts as like Bach variations. It's almost built in a musical way. And I was thinking, oh, that's really interesting, because for me, that motoric, that repetitive beat is like Noy, is like the group Noy, or like the drummer Klaus Dinger,

one of the three greatest drummers that ever lived. Right in, if you want to know who the other two are, my verdict is definitive. I'm telling you now, listeners, I'm telling you now, there's going to be a Bernhardt episode of Backlisted. I just have to find the right victim to drag on into the studio to do it. Time now for an advert.

Yeah. Yes, pretend it. Exactly. So I suppose if we were reading out some Faulkner, we'd read it out over something by the Orman Brothers or... I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. We'll see, we'll see.

No, no, no, no. We'll see. But Faulkner's writing in the 30s, so actually if we want to listen to contemporary music, we would be listening to jazz. And that's what he would have been listening to as far as I know, although I don't actually claim to know Faulkner's musical taste. Rather than thinking about the musical background, though, of course, it is the liquid

background that one really has to think about with Faulkner. And I always think a favorite line of mine from Faulkner's is something he said when he gave a brilliant interview as one of the early Paris Review interviews. It's one of the all-time great interviews. And the interviewer said, you know, he only needed a few things. I don't have this verbatim, but the gist is, he only needed a few things in order to write, and it was a pencil and some paper and some quiet and some whiskey. And then the interviewer said, but bourbon, right?

And Faulkner said, bourbon? I ain't that particular. Between nothing and scotch. I'll take scotch. We've got to we've got to as if by magic, we have a clip relevant to that theme. Bill Mayhew. Sorry about the odor. Jesus. W.P.? I beg your pardon? W.P. Mayhew, the writer? Just Bill, please. You're the finest novelist of our time. Why, thank you, son. How kind. I had no idea you were in Hollywood.

All of us undomesticated rioters eventually make our way out here to the Great Salt Lake. That's probably why I always have such a powerful thirst. A little social lubricant, Mr. Fink? No, it's a little early for me. Have you ever written a wrestling picture? Mr. Fink, they have not invented a genre of picture that Bill Mayhew has not at one time

wanted to say. Yes, I have taken my stab at the wrestling form, as I have stabbed at so many others, and with as little success. I gather that you are a freshman here, eager for an upperclassman's counsel. However, just at the moment, I have drinking to do. Why don't you stop by my bungalow,

which is number 15, late on this afternoon, and we will discuss wrestling scenarios and other things literary. And that is... The Great Barton Fink. The Great Barton other things literary and that is the great so that's the late john mahoney who of course went on to be frazier's dad in the sitcom frazier uh playing um wp mayhew a thinly thinly veiled portrait of william faulkner and of course Faulkner actually for quite a long time I mean he was in Hollywood for like 20 years he was and he really made his living from writing for Hollywood rather than from writing his novels like many of his contemporaries but he was actually a notably successful screenwriter unlike for example his contemporary Scott Fitzgerald, who was notably an unsuccessful screenwriter.

But he's writing for Hollywood after he's written the sequence of great novels, which sort of kicks off with Sound and the Fury in 1929, As I Lay Dying, 1930, Sanctuary, 31, Light in August, 32. He does a weird book, which I've never read, called Pylon in 1935. And then Absalom, Absalom. And you chose this because this, you think, is his masterpiece. I think it is his masterpiece. And yes, again, answers can come in on postcards

for those who want to debate me on it. Many people will say... Don't at me. You know, exactly. A lot of people will say A Light in August. Not only do I think that Absalom, Absalom is Faulkner's masterpiece, for me, it is probably the greatest American novel of the 20th century. Whoa!

Big claims. I really think it is. I can argue the toss, but it's certainly in the top three. And I guess we have a few minutes to try to explain why we think that is the case. But so exactly, so in a seven-year period, he went from, so Sound the Fury is basically his second novel, give or take. He struggled with this first and then revised it. And that's the one he liked the best he always said

hey you can't really trust bill on these things though you know i mean he's not he's not a reliable narrator our bill and this book is about unreliable narration we can't trust the word the man says i'm gonna put i'm gonna like whiskey i'm gonna pause you with full respect. Because I want to just tell listeners who haven't read the book, I'm going to try, using this terrible blurb, I'm going to try and tell them what the book is about. Okay, but then I decided to challenge myself by coming in and seeing if I could summarise an unsummarisable book. Okay, Sarah.

It's a terrible blurb. The blurb is terrible and it's got a spoiler. Is it hilariously bad? It's like if somebody... It has a spoiler in it, yeah. It's like if someone had blurbed Citizen Kane and gone deprived of his sled Rosebud. Right?

So maybe I won't read the blurb. And the best joke we've ever done on the show. Sarah, why don't you come on, summarise the unsummarisable. I'll give it a crack, it is indeed a novel that you cannot summarise and I was thinking when I came back to it and it's probably the 10th or 11th time that I've read it and I still don't understand it

but I keep trying You know what he said don't you, he said, some people say you can't understand your writing even after they've read it two or three times what approach would you suggest for them? Read it four times Which is also from the Paris Review interview I absolutely love that read it a fourth time exactly and I've taken him as word and that is what I've tried to do but I was thinking when I when I picked it up off my shelf and you guys can attest I have it is

absolutely kind of riddled with some post-it notes and and stuff and it looms much larger in my memory I think of it as a much longer book than it is, because he packed so much into it. No, I just think of it as this kind of behemoth. And it's not, it's 300 pages. So I mean, it is a behemoth in terms of what it's doing. But it's actually not that intimidating in terms of page numbers. It is not a quick read. No, it is not a quick read. It is an intensely challenging read. So the shortest summary of it is that it's, and we should note that it was read so the shortest uh summary of it is that it's

um and we should note that it was written in the same year so it was published in 1936 as john just said and it's basically a grown-up gone with the wind is what it really is which of course was also published in 1936 they were published at the same time and the only thing that faulkner um was willing to be drawn in to say about gone with the wind which of course went on to become the publishing phenomenon you know he dreamt of such sales as Gone with the Wind had. Absalom sold something like 6,000 copies when Gone with the Wind sold millions and millions. And he said, they asked, they tried to draw him in on it and he wouldn't be baited. And they said, what do you think about Gone with the Wind? And he said, no story takes 1,037 pages to tell, which I should have remembered in thinking that it's longer than

it is because this is actually a pretty tight 300 pages. So it's basically Gone with the Wind in a gothic nightmare form. So the shortest version, I was trying to condense it down to like a tweet, right? And the shortest version of this book, it's even, this is a short tweet even, is that it is about how intersectionality will bring down white patriarchy. That's what it's about. how intersectionality will bring down white patriarchy. That's what it's about. It is about the radical uncertainty of historical memory.

It's about the process that transforms fact into myth. And it's an allegory of the Civil War asking what makes brother kill brother in 1865. How did it do? That is pretty good, I have to say. You got the job

i can write blurbs on the back of it i'm gonna read the blurb but not the spoiler spoiler right as a poor white boy redacted from then on he was determined to force his way into the upper echelons of southern society. Sutpen's relentless will ensures his ambitions are soon realised. Land, marriage, children. But after the chaos of the Civil War, secrets from his own past threaten to destroy everything he has worked for. I mean, it's not... I mean, it's not wrong, but it's deeply misleading, superficial,

and kind of misses the point. John, I'm going to put you on the spot. So I come to you and I say, oh, I see you're reading Absalom, Absalom. What's it about? You can answer that question in a hundred different ways. For me, it is one of the great novels about the impossibility of telling the truth, that the truth is always a version of the truth.

It's almost like there is a side to Faulkner that you feel he is like some sort of grand investigator. He's interrogating the past. You're never not inside somebody's head in this book, okay? So there is no narrator guiding you through it. Well, there are several, right? Four, five? So, yeah, so should we just give a couple of key facts

so that people can kind of ground themselves? Would that be useful? Okay. So, it's a novel that it's full of flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks and memories within flashbacks and stories that are told at different points. And digressions within flashbacks.

And digressions within flashbacks, within memories. And then the memories are uncertain themselves. So, it's radically destabilizing. You know, this is high modernism. We're in 1936. This is, think Ulysses, but in the American Deep South. And he was a massive, he was a worship joist. Yeah, absolutely.

So this is a deliberately challenging and destabilizing read. And fundamentally, it's about unreliable narrators. But it's really about unreliable narration rather than just relying on them. It's about how unreliable narration is built into human consciousness to human memory to storytelling there's no such thing as reliable narration and and who are those unreliable so our unreliable narrators are it begins with a young man called quentin who readers of the sound and the fury will remember who's the protagonist of the sound and the fury quentin compson we should actually let me back up even further for a second and say that for those who have never

read any Faulkner before, it's probably worth explaining Yachna Patafa. So what Faulkner does across these books that we mentioned from The Sound and the Fury through Absalom Absalom, and indeed through later books as well, including The Reavers, is he creates a fictional universe in Mississippi that is based on his hometown. He it jefferson mississippi and he places it in the fictional yakna patafa county and yakna patafa county is basically a high modernist marvell universe it is right that is genius that is genius absolutely that is brilliant mgu the mississippi gothic universe exactly and so there are these there are certain characters who who recur but each one has their own storyline and their own backstory their own

mythology each one has their own powers and their own tragedies and their own fates and sometimes they intersect and sometimes he'll go back and he'll rediscover a marginal character and make them the center of another novel and he'll do all of that kind of thing we've got a clip here of faulkner the quality is not brilliant but it is william faulkner talking about absalom absalom and this is his view of what is going on in the book in terms of what sarah was just talking about i think that uh no one individual can can look at truth it's blind you look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it,

but taken all together, the truth is in what they saw, though nobody saw the truth intact. So these are true as far as Miss Rosa and as Quentin saw it. Quentin's father saw what he believed was true. That was all he saw. The old man was himself a little too big for people of no greater stature than Quentin and Miss Rosa and Mr. Compton to see all this.

It would take him probably a wiser or more tolerant or more sensitive or more thoughtful person to see them as you are. It was, as you say, 16 ways of looking at the Blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out that when the reader has read all these

16 different ways of looking at the Blackbird, the reader has his own 14th image of that Blackbird, which I would like to think is the truth reader has his own image of that black bird which i would like to think is the truth now the implication of that i just want to pick up from that and from what you were saying sarah one of the things i found really rewarding in the book and seemed really uh innovative is the implication from that that truth is subjective to the point where early in the book what's presented by somebody giving you what they see as just the facts is no more or less valid than by the end of the book, the two boys at Harvard actively encouraging one another

to come up with fictionalized versions of events about which they actually know little or nothing. Is that something that Faulkner repeats in other books? Is this a theme of Faulkner's writing that he comes back to? You know, the story is no more or less true than what you think is a factual account. Absolutely. I mean, it's really about the act of mythologization, right? And one way of thinking about this book is that it's about the transformation of fact through memory into history, into mythology. But what's so interesting about Faulkner is that he keeps suggesting that the mythology might be truer than the facts, and that through the mythology, we might get at some truths that the facts don't get at. And he strongly implies that Quentin and Shreve got it right, even though they're spinning conjecture, even though they don't know. And in

fact, there's a great line that Quentin says that I often kind of underscore for my students, because it seems to encapsulate the idea. Quentin thinks to himself that he's either imagining it so vividly, he thinks to himself, he could see it. He might even have been there. Then he thought, no, if I had been there, I could not have seen it this plain. The importance of distance, the importance of time, the importance of actually being able to recognize suppressed motives. I mean, it's also about bias, right? There are things that Miss Rosa cannot admit to herself about what happened to her.

And there are things that Quentin's father, in good faith, reports to his son that he believes to be the truth. But because Mr. Compson is an old Southern gentleman, there are things that he would not admit that these modern young men think, hang on, we think this is what's what. So that's why it's about revisionist history they are really trying to strip away the mythology but by doing so they

end up risking rebuilding the mythology and faulkner is also faulkner also via i don't know implication but there certainly seems a self-awareness you know faulkner is pulling himself into that circle right within the novel there is an extent to which the novel i felt anyway reading it the novel knows it's a novel and is keen that you know it's a novel because it's all part of the same circle of storytelling and myth making and i should have just said that of course the mythology isn't the end of it so it's actually fact memory history mythology fiction yeah okay there's a lovely thing he says in the in the in the paris review interview about that you know that he that i think one of the great things that he does is he he takes this tiny microcosm he calls it a cosmos of my own and he says i can move these people around like god

not only in space but in time too the fact that i have moved my characters around in time successfully at least in my own estimation proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people given that all fiction in the end has to be about time it's about how stories exist within time and how and you know his famous and and now i discover a heavily copyrighted quote the past isn't dead it isn't even past which was uh used in a woody allen film and that falkner mistake sued because it wasn't it wasn't attributed i think that is the sort of the the key into falkner is that he creates this world and proves to you that time that the characters time that they are somehow embodying

they're they're they're embodying almost like kind of mythological that's why the marvel thing is so brilliant could i could i just also i'd like to and i found out a little fact that i didn't know the past is dead it's not even past which really ought to be batlist's motto yeah so do you know what novel that comes from which sanctuary it's actually and it's the play of requiem for none not the novel okay so it comes from the play which is requiem for none is a sequel to sanctuary i should say which is where my slip of the tongue came from it was not speaking out of nowhere requiem for none yeah dramatized Dramatized by Albert Camus as Requiem pour un nom, subsequently punned by Serge Gainsbourg as Requiem pour un con,

which means the thing you think it means, right? So Gainsbourg always, always with the deep French cultural pun. Well, we don't actually even have to go to Requiem for None, though, or indeed to Gainsbourg always with the deep French cultural pun. Well, we don't actually even have to go to record for none, though, or indeed to Gainsbourg for this, because there are several lines in Absalom, Absalom that encapsulate this and won't get us sued by the Faulkner estate. One of which is Quentin saying, maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. In that context, I wanted to give a brief shout out of my own, if I may, because I first encountered Absalom as a postgraduate. Yes, it's one of our questions. When, Sarah, did you first encounter Absalom? With so many of the books that I bring in, I read Absalom first as a graduate student and then as a graduate student teacher when I was at the feet, as it were, but almost literally, because they were up on a stage, of some very, very great teachers at Princeton. I taught Absalom a couple of times there.

One for Michael Wood, who many of your listeners will know from his wonderful essays for the London Review of Books. And he gave one of the most memorable lectures I ever heard on Absalom, in which he posited that we all know what the Western is, and that what we need to think about when we think about Faulkner is that there is a genre called the Southern and that where in, um, in the Western it is once upon a time in the West, but in the Southern it is, Oh God, not this again.

That's the Southern. That's one of the things we should say that is let's call it what it is confusing for the first time reader oh that was a second or third time generations of characters who have similar or the same name come around again and again the implication is this the the events within the frame of the story or stories take place over three generations but the implication is that they have been repeating in patterns for significantly longer longer and will carry on doing so right i mean faulkner actually ended up giving a genealogy at the end of Absalom. And when we were teaching it, and I've always used this, we actually turned it into a family tree,

which I have in front of me, which is easier to read than the genealogy. And it is one of those books where you need to think about how the people are connected to each other, because part of what Faulkner wants to do is to muddy those waters, is to, I mean, in every sense, right? It is, so we should say, I mean, it is fundamentally a book about miscegenation. And it is about not just racism as the original sin at the heart of American history, which Faulkner sees very, very

clearly, and it is 1936. And it's really, really important, I think, to state that. People will have all kinds of different views about what a white man from Mississippi of Faulkner's generation, what he would have to say about his grandfather owned slaves and what he would have to say about, about racism. But I think a couple of important things here where we need to at least give him his due. And in my view, why this is such an important book is that he sees that it's not

just racism that is at the heart of the failing of the American experiment. It is that, and these are all kind of tied up together, it's the denial of difference. And that's why I said intersectionality at the beginning. It's not just the fact that white male patriarchy wants to assert its power over the landscape. So we have a central character that Quentin and Shreve are trying to understand is a man called Thomas Sutpen, who came out of very poor West Virginia in the 1830s. And somehow, he's a kind of early Gatsby figure. Actually, no, I shouldn't say he's an early Gatsby figure. This is 10 years after Gatsby.

But he's a weird kind of Gatsby figure in that he emerges out of nowhere with this giant mansion and all of this money and all of these slaves. And he creates and is that kind of vision of the american dream of the self-made man but for sutpen because he's in the south and because it's antebellum america the slaves are absolutely crucial to his vision of that power and he wants to have a genealogy he wants to have a dynasty that he wants to create for himself he calls it the design and that is what will look like power to sutpen and that becomes a kind of image of the American dream and what Faulkner sees in 1936 is that the American dream is built not just on slavery but on the denial of slavery on the active repression of the fact that you are depending on

slavery to get you where you are on the active denial of the fact that you actually need the women that you're going to deny power to and that all of this comes back to bite Sutton. And so what he has is he has this design that tries to exclude all of these people, all of these others that are black and women and mixed race, and all of the things that he doesn't want to admit in this vision of white American patriarchal hegemony. And they all come back and they destroy his project from within. And that's an extraordinary thing for a white man whose grandfather owned slaves in Mississippi to see clearly in 1936. And for me, where Faulkner really nails the way that race works in America, and again, why I would say it's intersectionality, is that this is also very much and simultaneously a book about class and about how important class is

in driving uh supin's design and in driving his ambitions and in and in undermining his ambitions it's class also um that brings him down and this book was written a year after uh the great w.e.b du bois the um great black historian wrote black reconstruction in america which came out in 1935 and in that book dubois famously talks about what he calls the psychological wage of whiteness and what he means by that is that no matter how poor white people are in america they get this extra bonus point for feeling superior to black people and that that amounts to a psychological wage and it is effectively why there won't be he says says, effectively why there hasn't been kind of labor unrest

and there hasn't been a socialist revolution effectively because white people are given that extra bonus point. Now that feels pretty pertinent today in a lot of what's going on. So what drives Sutton is his sense. So he has this kind of Freudian primal scene where he, as a young man, as a as a teenager he encounters he's sent to the house of a rich man and he falls into and that's faulkner's metaphor he falls into a knowledge

of race and class that there are other people that people look at the world differently and he always thought that being white was going to give him that edge and then he suddenly realizes that being white isn't sufficient yeah and he has to do better and that's what kind of drives his tragedy crucially turned away by a black servant at the door in a in a better suit than he is wearing which is why it is class and race okay so sarah you were saying about the southern what was the southern the southern was the southern oh God, not this again. Oh God, not this again. So we have a clip here

from a 1952 CBS documentary of Faulkner talking. I mean, it's very stagey, but it's great. So stick with it, okay? It has a brilliant payoff. With a chap called Phil Stone, who was an early supporter of Faulkner's.

He remembered the friends who believed in him when few did. Phil Stone, a lawyer who was William Faulkner's earliest critic and supporter. Hello, Bill. How are we? Cool, but... You and the King have a good time? He's a fine gentleman, Stone. He even got along with me.

And you, if anybody, knows how easy that is. That's true. Well, I'm proud you finally made it. Came back from New Haven in 1950, and you had this voice. And you wrote a lot more of it. We had it typed up and sent off. Everybody turned it down. And you wrote Sartre's, which we knew would sell,

and it didn't sell. And The Sound and the Fury, which was a fine book and didn't sell. And as I Lay Dying, which was another fine book and didn't sell. Then we got the notion of you going off to England, see if you couldn't get recognition there like Frost and Pound and Eliot did. That didn't work so well. Came back and wrote Sanctuary and that put things over. I knew all the time you were a first-rate writer. I knew I was betting on a sure thing

but the trouble was nobody else knew it. So you're the reason I have to wear a necktie in the middle of the week. That little film is very staged, it is very staged, but there is something, there's something very sweet about it. And also what comes across is, is Faulkner's sense of humour, which, you know, you might be, you might be forgiven for not noticing in some of the work.

I have to say, I'm going to raise a slight, no, I'm not going to say this isn't one of the greatest novels of the 20th century sarah thank you but i would like to make the point that this is one of the most challenging novels i think we've done on backlisted just in terms of the prose the prose requires you i think to take quite a leap absolutely it's so stylized at points yeah and uses rhythm and repetition both of which as we've already established i like both but uses rhythm and repetition in a way that frequently the narrative is being parked for a while and i i found this challenging and i you know yeah i'm good at

reading you are good i got a i got a prize but but no i found found it hard. It is. And the richness. Yeah. The, you know, the southern sweetness to the point of an almost kind of decadent. Yeah. Richness. Exactly. It's supposed to be like that, right? And that's the thing.

So I absolutely agree. But now you've queued up something for me, if I may. Go, go. Now, I'm not going to attempt to do a Faulknerian Mississippian accent. Oh, that's a shame. I'm from Chicago, and that would offend everyone, left, right, and center. But what I will do is try to slow down and just intimate a draw. But what I want to suggest is that what Faulkner does, excuse me, he's one of those modernist writers who's meta enough that he gives you his technique as he goes and he

tells you he kind of gives you the um the the the decoder ring that you need to know how to unlock his prose or at the very least how to like you know to use a a slightly unsavory metaphor to how to relax and enjoy it right um and the the i know that's not a savory thing for me to say but the but the the thing is is that um the i think about faulkner the way i think about henry james um and some of the other great challenging writers and just about my own experience of reading them and certainly like everybody i've found it's not like i just suddenly picked this up and thought oh i've got it this is completely clear to me i mean it's opaque and it's difficult and it's and it's frustrating and you want to say just bill just tell me what's going on.

But of course, it's deliberately destabilizing, deliberately disorienting. That's part of the process and part of what he wants us to think about. But I also think that with writers like Faulkner or James, they're the ones that leap to mind for me, who are so much their own stylists and so much their own sentences and their own way of writing. That for me me the metaphor I always think of is that it's like swimming and that when you learn how to swim and you know how they teach you they tell you not to fight the water and let the water take you where it wants

to go and for me the currents of writers like Faulkner and James are so strong right and and so I just give myself up to the current and so there are pages where you kind of lose track and you're just kind of letting the words wash over you. And I think that's fine as long as we go back to Faulkner's key piece of advice, which is read it a third or fourth time. This is the advice I think that percolates through this passage. So I wanted to read at least one of the very famous passages from this book, partly to give a flavor of exactly how challenging it is in the ways that Andy is saying. What I'm about to read will probably make no sense whatsoever, no matter how hard I try to imbue it with sense. I think there is sense in it.

So this is Miss Rosa talking to Quentin. It's actually Quentin's memory, his reconstruction of what Miss Rosa said to him six months earlier. But this is Miss Rosa talking to Quentin. um and but this is miss rosa talking to quentin once there was do you mark how the wisteria sun impacted on this wall here distills and penetrates this room as though light unimpeded by secret and attritive progress from mode to mode of obscur's myriad components? That is the substance of remembering. Sense, sight, smell. The muscles with which we see and hear and feel. Not mind, not thought. There is no such thing as memory. The brain recalls just what the muscles grope for, no more, no less, and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

So that initial sentence that is so hard to hear and to understand for secret and attritive progress from moat to moat of obscurities myriad components but if you think about that of sunlight dappling through dust moats with the wisteria and it's coming through the wisteria covered windows so it's shadow and light and dappled and moat and the idea is that the moats are bit by bit progress by progress they are building into something that you can, that not that you can understand, but that you can sense. And there's a really important thing about Faulkner, which some people, I mean, you know,

the technique in Absalom, I think is done to a, because it's over a much greater historical scope. So it's in a way, it's a big symphony whereas as i lay dying which is probably his most famous book the one that tends to get taught because it's short but it is the same technique really which is voices overlapping and unreliable narration and the shortest chapter in well certainly fucking in all of american literature famously my mother is a fish yeah which is just worth but what is difficult for people is that there's a there's a kind of poor hick family who express themselves with the articulacy of a deep profound philosophical kind of clarity and poetry so that's in as i lay dying yeah and also i think in this

book that there is the philosophical kind of overlap but when he wants to be a very very good and observant novelist and give you the sense of something that's actually happening that somebody remembers that really sticks in the memory he does that brilliantly as well so this is miss rosa when she's much younger she's living in the house in in in supman's house and she's carrying uh the the coffin of charles uh bond who has been murdered uh has been shot shot down the stairs so an important part of the narrative I remember how as we carried down the stairs and out to the waiting wagon I tried to take the full weight of the coffin to prove to myself that he was really in it and I could not tell I was one of his pallbearers yet I could not would not believe something which I knew could not but

be so. Because I never saw him, you see, there are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse, just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate is accepted, but which digestion cannot compass. Occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum and fade vanish are gone leaving us immobile impotent, helpless, fixed, until we can die, until we can die. I mean, so this is, that sense of being stuck is so, all the way through the book. Sarah, I would like to pick up something you said earlier

about contemporary resonance. Two things I'd like to ask you about. The first one is in relation to Gatsby. You drew a line from Sut relation to gatsby you drew a line from suppen to gatsby i would like to throw in the confidence man by herman melville as well right yeah the american confidence trick stroke self-creating man yeah myth whatever yeah the american dream yeah may or may not be the term that one would use where do you see the contemporary resonance in that in absalom absalom specifically in relation to that at the moment you feel that that's a clear and present thing yeah absolutely so as i said at the at the top i mean to me, so this is a book about Thomas Sutton's desire, as Quentin says, he wants to get richer and richer. That's what Sutton wants to do. So call that the American dream, I think, perfectly reasonably.

and that central, this patriarchal vision is central to how he envisions his own power and his own success. So he's not just a self-made man on his own terms. He has to have this family and this dynasty around him. And he has to have these slaves. The slaves are absolutely central to his sense of what his own white power would look like and what it would feel like. And what happens is without giving too much away, the best way to explain it without giving too much away is that there's a kind of Jane Eyre. And I've mentioned the gothic a couple of times and there is a kind of riff on jane eyre here right so um so something's in the attic there's someone's there is a um and with a similar kind of background so what happens is that every time that sup and tries to assert the purity of his white lineage race keeps coming back because you can't actually get rid of

it it will not go away right so he keeps trying to to say that he can he can create this life in america that that is dependent on race but will in no way be undermined by race and he can't he simply can't and that's what the story is about and so what's amazing is there's this character in the middle of the story so So something calls it his design. And it's this web that he's trying to weave in this network that he's trying to create. And he doesn't know. He keeps trying to figure out what the mistake is that he made. And he doesn't understand that the mistake that he made, in one sense, you could say

it's that he doesn't understand the role that other people play in this society. But in a basic sense, it's that he underestimates the black woman at the heart of the story and she's on she's the penelope unweaving his web and she has an equal and opposite design to his and she's determined to bring him down and she does so it's basically about the fact that you know that everybody else is time is coming and that's why i think it's incredibly relevant now also can i add to that um we mentioned gail jones earlier and we mentioned tony morrison when we talked when we did an episode about beloved earlier in the year one of the things that i don't think i'd appreciate about tony morrison but actually i i thoroughly appreciated having read her relatively recently prior to reading Absalom Absalom is the extent to which Morrison's project is

a literary one indeed filling in the gaps created by the American canon exactly up to that point right yep and yet as you said earlier that almost reflects in the terms I've put it there that reflects unfairly on Faulkner because Faulkner is this peculiar mixture, it seemed to me, of things that we would find offensive now and tremendous humanism in terms of seeing fully developed characters from every point of view. But there is a case for the prosecution with Faulkner, isn't there? Absolutely, there is, and Baldwin makes it quite well.

James Baldwin really kind of says he concedes the madness and moral wrongness of the south but at the same time he raises it to the level of a mystique which makes it somehow unjust to discuss southern society in the same terms in which one would discuss any other society so i mean i think the thing about faulkner is that he is this legacy that you can't not wrestle with if you're an American writer. And what's so interesting is to see what all the great black American writers do with him. And what Baldwin does with him is different from what Morrison does with him is different from what Gil Jones does with him. But they're all wrestling with him, wrestling with him, as he would have said.

And they're all building on him, right? So they're taking those foundations and then saying, OK, he took it so far, but from their point of view, perhaps not far enough. But also, so, you know, as you say, giving credit where it's due, okay. I mean, you know, we should say we are sitting around here as three middle-class white people. So our view of this is going to be different from other people's view of it. What I find extraordinary about Faulkner is that regardless of where you come down on the Baldwin side of things about whether he does enough with it, it's that he sees it so brutally and so clearly and so plainly, and he builds his story around it. And what happens over the course of the story, and again, without giving too much away, but I don't think you get the sense of the profundity of it

without at least touching on this, is that various possibilities are scrolled through as to why Charles Bond was murdered. And one possibility is incest. And one possibility is bigamy. And one possibility is miscegenation. And as Faulkner rolls, like shuffles the cards of what are the various things, you realize kind of how clearly he can see what it is that is, you know, to use your imagery of rotting from a moment ago, what is rotting american society from within and and that as as i keep saying i think i personally as a you know white girl from chicago

um you know born 100 years after he was um i find that a remarkable thing for a white mississippian of his generation to see but i fully concede that other people are going to have you know different perspectives on that okay listen before we wrap up um we can't go without a little quiz yeah and uh so i've got a clip here and i'm going to direct this at mitch right okay this is i didn't know i was having a quiz no exactly so it doesn't seem entirely fair but i'm going to so mitch this is for you which novel so it's it's the mid-1950s yeah william faulkner is being interviewed by some students at the university of mississippi which novel have they asked him about here i was impressed with one book of his there was a young man intelligent a little more sensitive than most, who simply wanted to love mankind. And when he tried to break into mankind, to love mankind, man

wasn't there. That to me was the tragedy of that book. That to me is the threat which all the young writers nowadays have got to be on guard against. The pressure to relinquish, submerge individuality of the me into a mass of us. And I think that that in a first-rate writing has been in terms of the individual has been in terms of the individual who, even in the more and team of the world, was still me, myself. He got his elbow skinned and his head but now then, but just with other heads and other elbows, not with machines. There was nothing in the team and moral of the world to restore his his soul by compressing him into a

relinquish relinquish much of the I am. Salinger. Yeah, yeah. That is the best description I have ever heard of why we still read the catcher in the right i think i i agree with that and and also making the link that fallen does there of saying well i like the story of holden caulfield but i also recognize that holden caulfield story is that young writer's story the idea of what do you do to keep your individuality when you go cap in hand to the world and the world says we're not interested. But you can also hear echoes there of that connecting

to his other masterpiece that we haven't, we've only just name checked, which is A Light in August. And A Light in August is really in a sense about, I mean, you can imagine that being him describing A Light in August as well, a man going in search of his humanity and they're not listening. Cool, it's good. And so I'm afraid we must leave it there Driving a Light in August as well. A man going in search of his humanity and they're not listening.

Cool. It's good. And so I'm afraid we must leave it there and extract ourselves from the endless coils of narrative and say farewell for now to Yoknapatafa. Yoknapatafa. Yoknapatafa. Yeah. America. Our thanks as ever to Sarah for providing us with the shining ball of twine to guide us through the maze.

And to our producer, Nicky Birch, for dispensing the gentle balm of coherence on our fevered ruminations. You can download over 100 of our previous motes. Follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. Thank you for listening.

See you all later. The podcast is never dead. It's not even a podcast. It's not.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.