The Bitter Sum: Accounting for Racist Speech in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

The following is a brief linguistic analysis of the use of racially charged language created for the Norton Critical Edition of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. It supplements the introductory essay by Susan Scott Parrish, but also functions as a stand-alone piece that demonstrates how the Digital Yoknapatawpha data sets can be combined with other computational techniques to illuminate different aspects of Faulkner’s work.

Faulkner’s representation of race was complicated, just as was his own relationship with race. As a Southern white moderate, he voiced his anguish over the dehumanization of African Americans under Jim Crow segregation, but, at the same time, could also casually refer to people using racial epithets during a public retelling of a comic story. There is no shortage of literature on Faulkner and race in general, and regarding Absalom, Absalom! in particular.¹ Given this extensive critical history, it almost goes without saying that a computational analysis of word choice, especially with regard to racially charged language, cannot do justice to the complexities and nuances of either the text or Faulkner’s broader critical intervention. Nevertheless, using techniques common in Corpus Linguistics (CL) it is possible to give a bird’s-eye view of how the use of certain words is patterned. This pattern can then in turn inform subsequent close-readings.

The analysis here demonstrates that Faulkner’s use of racial language in Absalom, Absalom! is not incidental but carefully patterned. This is particularly pronounced with his use of the n-word — perhaps the most charged word in American English. Faulkner makes extensive use of this word throughout this text. As the data reveal, the n-word occurs most frequently in relation to Thomas Sutpen, and in particular his origin story in the 1820s in Tidewater, Virginia. When he is unceremoniously rebuffed at the front entrance of a plantation by an enslaved butler, he becomes simultaneously race and class conscious. He learns that there is not only a hierarchy between White-and-Black, but also between White-and-White. As a “poor white” he is excluded from the plantation system, and his only recourse is to commit linguistic violence against the perceived barrier to access: enslaved Blacks. For Sutpen, the abuse of the Black body serves as a proxy for attacking the White power structure that has rejected him.

Needless to say, the n-word occurs frequently in this analysis. It is expressed only in its full form when directly quoting Faulkner. Otherwise, its full version has been deemed gratuitous and unnecessary for data analysis.

The following piece uses several techniques available to standard CL analysis, alongside a more complex analysis exclusively available to practitioners who have access to the Digital Yoknapatawpha data set. These different techniques have been split into their own sections:

• Part 1: Statistical Overview - Analysis of the general linguistic pattern of the texts including word frequency and word bigrams.
• Part 2: Corpus Linguistics and Digital Yoknapatawpha - The DY database provides insight into what characters are where and at what time. Using this database, it is possible to reconstruct the language surrounding people, places, and times.²
• Part 3: Close-reading Chapter 7 - Close-reading of the specific chapter that uses the n-word the most.

With any textual analysis, some pre-processing is required. Many of these procedures are common CL techniques.³ For the analysis here the critical intervention has been to code all “racial words” by introducing a custom race vocabulary. This made it possible to identify individual racial words, but also to group them together in a meaningful way.

The chart below shows the ten most frequent non-racial words and racial words in the text. Hovering over the individual bars reveals their precise number and clicking on Non-Racial and Racial turns that particular series on and off.

What is immediately noticeable is that the n-word is the most frequent racial term. It exceeds the word “negro” by 46 counts. It occurs about a third as infrequently as the word Henry and twice as infrequently as the racially ambiguous Charles Bon. Importantly, the occurrences of the individual names of characters are not the same as the number of times they actually occur in the text. After all, the pronouns “he” or “she” could equally well denote a character, but that is not shown here.

Collocation is the process of determining which words appear together. This is done by creating n-grams, where “n” is the number of words that might match in a sequence. By determining the n-gram of particular words, we can get a better sense of the context. For example, in her research of British Newspapers, Dawn Archer has shown that the most common bigram (n-gram of two) for Muslim is “Muslim terrorist” (Archer 2016). Certainly, this strong association between these two words indicates how Muslims are represented in the British media. In similar fashion, we get a better sense of how Faulkner is using racial language by looking at the words immediately before and after them.

The phrase that stands out the most is one that Rosa Coldfield uses early on: “wild niggers” (4). It becomes a leitmotif for much of the text and the phrase will be repeated throughout. Yet, who repeats it and how it is repeated will change.

In their use of these phrases, Quentin and Rosa Coldfield share an inverse relationship. This is curious because it is Rosa who first uses the phrase when referring to the demonic Sutpen arriving in Yoknapatawpha:

Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatter-ran. (4)

This initial instance of the phrase uttered by Rosa is carried forward throughout the text. Interestingly, Quentin takes this singular note, and makes it a central resonance in his subsequent composition. What’s more, Rosa’s initial association between enslavement and wildness is another echo that reverberates. This is, despite the fact that she says it only once. The first hearing of the words provides an overture for all other versions.

We can also look at the word frequency data sequentially by casting it across the chapters. This indicates the frequency of a particular word in each chapter. It may be that some racial words are used in one part of the book and not in others. This gives some indication as to its value in the narrative.

Chapter 7 is particularly racially charged. While the text’s various narrators (Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, Shreve) predominate in certain chapters, it would be a mistake to attribute particular words to particular characters based on this raw data. We may recall that chapter 7 is a nested narrative in which we are told the story of Thomas Sutpen as he related it to General Compson who told it to Quentin, who is telling it to Shreve. There are so many narrative frames that it is very difficult to determine whose language this is. What is apparent is that the chapter in which most of Sutpen’s life is revealed is steeped in pejorative racist language. To be sure, in all the other chapters the word “negro” or “black” is used more frequently to describe African Americans.

Understanding when a certain word is used does not necessarily indicate who is using it. There is currently no way to determine who is speaking in Absalom, Absalom! This is a two-fold issue. Practically, there is no way to match the speaker with the racial terms, because the data is not available at that level of granularity. More philosophically, we may also wonder if anyone’s language is truly their own in the text. This is a community that has been shaped by the same story for generations. The cadence, register, and tone all inform particular leitmotifs that occur and reoccur throughout the narrative. Indeed, one of the interesting phenomena that CL reveals is just how often certain turns of phrase are repeated, re-worked, and re-contextualized. The singularity of the speaker is unsettled by the multiplicity of the spoken.

That being said, it is possible to investigate the proximity of racial words relative to characters. The Digital Yoknapatawpha database breaks down a text into events, which are, in turn, composed of locations and characters. By cross-referencing the words with the events, we can get some notion of what words are being used around what characters.⁴

While we could count all of the words associated with a character, this is not a relevant statistic. The words that make the most sense are the five most frequent race words discussed in Figure 1. These are: blood, black, negro, n-word, and white. As each character necessarily occurs with each word at a different frequency, the top five characters were selected by the number of appearances in the total number of the events.

The resulting chart is quite revealing. Among most of the characters, the ratio of the word negro vs. the n-word is relatively even. The most obvious difference is Thomas Sutpen. In events where he is present or mentioned the n-word occurs 132 times. Part of the reason for this is that Thomas Sutpen occurs in the most events throughout the text — 320 to be exact. Consequently, it makes sense that he has a higher chance of occurring in those events in which there is a particular racial word.

In order to get a better view into how often a racial word is used in the same event as a character, we need to normalize the data by the number of times the word occurs. This way we can understand, proportionally, how often a character is in an event when a particular word occurs. We know from the previous chart that the n-word occurs 152. Dividing the number of occurrences for each character by this number produces the percentage chart below.

The chart reveals, quite dramatically, that Thomas Sutpen is, in some way, part of the event 87% of the times that the n-word occurs. While it is not clear that he is using the word, it is also clear that he is the character with whom the racial epithet is most associated. Indeed, in one event it occurs 16 times. This is when Sutpen is barred from entering the front door of the plantation by the enslaved butler (187). It is this primal incident that shapes so much of Sutpen’s consciousness going forward. Linguistically, it becomes the gravitational center that draws in the worst racial language the American lexicon has to offer. At the moment that he becomes aware of his class difference, he resorts to racial antagonism.

The use of racial language is also time bound. Certain words are more prominent during certain periods than others. The DY data also includes speculative dates for each event. These dates consist of both an earliest possible start date and latest possible end date. Needless to say, establishing Faulkner’s chronology is not an exact science and the dates are best seen as an approximate measure. Nevertheless, they do give a general indication around what time the events take place.

This chart makes it apparent that the n-word is the most frequently used word in the 1820s, 1830s, 1860s, and 1910s. These are the pivotal episodes in the Sutpen saga: the establishment of a racial enslavement regime, its dissolution during and after the Civil War, and Quentin’s retelling of that story in 1910. After Sutpen has established himself in the 1840s and during Reconstruction, the words Black and Negro are used more frequently, albeit only a very few number of times.

Because the DY database has mapped the approximate location of the different events in Yoknapatawpha it is also possible to view this information spatially as it plays out across the narrative. Any number of data points can be plotted, but as this leads to map crowding, only those words directly related to African Americans were used. The different layers can be enabled and disabled by clicking on the legend.

The map confirms for a third time that much of the most vociferous racial language is related to Sutpen’s origin story in Tidewater, Virginia. This is not a dramatic reveal. Scholars have known that this was one of the key incidents of the text. What the linguistic analysis demonstrates is just how much Faulkner concentrated all the racial epithets in this one relatively small slice of text. This word density suggests how deeply this one incident shaped Sutpen.

With so much of the analysis of the n-word occurring in Chapter 7, it makes sense to zoom in on this chapter to get a better sense of how and why the word occurs here so often. There is no way to do so with the data available through DY, because the data need to be grouped thematically. The custom chart below has grouped the events together based on time period and connection between individual events.

It is important to remember that this chapter is actually told by Quentin who is following his grandfather’s telling as he heard it from Sutpen. In this framing, certain story content elicits Quentin’s use of the n-word, which spikes when he establishes the 1834 storytelling milieu, that is the hunt for the French architect (seen in green); when he follows Sutpen’s story back in time to his childhood residence near Pettibone’s Tidewater plantation; and when he describes Wash’s interactions with enslaved and free Black people in the environs of Sutpen’s land in the 1860s (seen in gold).

In each one, we witness a scene of intraracial humiliation wherein a White worker is made to feel subject to a member of the White plantocracy. What comes to represent this White-over-White hierarchy, however, is not the debased White person’s own body, but instead the Black body made to stand in for White power. On the road down from the mountains, the first Black person the young Sutpens ever see is that of a tavern bouncer, ejecting their drunken father as if he’s a “sack of meal” (182); next is the coachman who commands the young Sutpens out of the road; at Pettibone’s threshold it is the butler who tells young Sutpen “never to come to that front door again” (188); in the Mississippi woods, it is the Afro-Haitian hunters who bar the escape of the French-Martinican architect;⁵ at the plantation during wartime, where Wash Jones boasted that he was overseeing the enslaved, Black people would “stop him in the road that came up out of the bottom” (226) to explode his illusion with derisive laughter; finally, the Black midwife, who in 1869 is about to deliver a grandchild to Wash (whose Sutpen blood will “dispossess him” (Faulkner 1934, 262)), she “order[s] him out” (230) of his own cabin. In all these scenes, it is a Black laborer (bouncer, coachman, butler, hunter, field worker, midwife), in slavery or not far from it, who must act as a boundary marker, keeping underling Whites outside the tavern, great house, or shack; off the high point of the road; or within the edges of property. In these moments, the underling White thinks he hears “terrible [Black] laughing.”

The boy Sutpen, a prototype for these other White subaltern figures, comes to feel that this barrier of laughter, thin as the filament of a balloon, is there to protectively surround the space of the great planter. If one were to strike at the balloon, it would only issue out the laughter, while the thing the balloon surrounded, the “it” of propertied power, would go unharmed.⁶

Though this seems like a sophisticated reading of the semiotics of race for a thirteen-year-old boy, it also thins out to impossible two-dimensionality the lives of those Black laborers. Put schematically, one could say that Sutpen falls out of a White mountain subsistence economy into racial capitalism, but then misperceives Black labor, in all its forms, as a mere mocking filigree on — rather than the constitutive base of — White plantation property. He only reads the working Black body as the livery of White ease, not as that which makes White ease in the first place.

Relating these scenes, Quentin marks, again and again, instances of White-on-White humiliation by using this White-on-Black slur. But after Wash, in the final scene of the chapter, hears Sutpen mock the shared White ‘blood’ Wash had so long invested in, Wash finally leaves off abusing Black surrogates and “tech[es]” — fatally touches and teaches — Sutpen himself. As Wash’s notion of plantocratic honor is “shredded,” the need for a false target, by Wash, and by Quentin, disappears. Indeed, unlike his Canadian roommate, Quentin will not utter this slur again as the night wears on.

Absalom addressed, without yet solving, the problem that James Baldwin handed to White people in an interview in 1963. He said: “Now here in this country we’ve got something called a n[-word] . . . [I]t doesn’t exist in any other country in the world. . . . White people invented him. . . . It had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with . . . . You still think — I gather — that [this invention] is necessary. Well he is unnecessary to me so he must be necessary to you. I give you your problem back.” The linguistic analysis of Faulkner’s use of racial language in Absalom, Absalom! is quite striking. It demonstrates that he does not use the n-word casually and indiscriminately. Instead, it serves a specific purpose as a dramatic and thematic marker. The n-word is a way for Sutpen to denigrate the Black body at the very moment of his own sense of powerlessness. It is meant to redirect the class resentment he feels towards White enslavers onto the racialized bodies of the enslaved. Through this act of deflection, Sutpen is able to push to the periphery lingering anxieties about his own “poor white” heritage, and, by extension, his own sense of Whiteness.To borrow Baldwin’s insight, Sutpen invokes the n-word as a necessary means of self-preservation, but this, paradoxically, prevents him from ever finding common cause with the enslaved. Therefore, he can never find a way to dismantle the power structure, and he will spend the rest of his life trying to mimic the very society that rejected him.