About

This interactive essay was created using data from the Digital Yoknapatawpha database. It complements the long-form essay available in the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom!. It includes visualizations that are not possible to represent in print. It also functions as a standalone essay that explores characters, event, and language and events in Absalom, Absalom! using various data visualizations and displays. Each section can be read separately, but also forms part of a larger argument about the text: the characters, events, and language all refuse to let America's racial legacy stay neatly cordoned away in the past. Instead, they continue to haunt the present.

Created with design help from Arundathi Balasubramanian

Characters

"money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family — incidentally of course, a wife"

The Digital Yoknapatawpha database contains every character who appears in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. Each character has a set of attribute information, including their race, class, gender, number, rank, and vitality. With this information, we can create a demographic overview of all the characters.

Race and Kinship

One of the most salient pieces of demographic information in Absalom, Absalom! is its racial composition. The novel powerfully captures the Southern system of racial oppression that started with the enslavement of Africans before the Civil War and was continued through the creation of "Jim Crow" segregation laws after the Emancipation Proclamation. This long history of racial separation and its codification into explicit laws and implicit social practices, made race appear as a real and fundamental difference between people, even, if it was entirely socially constructed. Speaking of race in America more generally, Toni Morrison remarks that, "As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism." Absalom, Absalom! captures this "insanity" through the obsession each narrator has with race and kinship.

As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing.

The insanity of racism.

Toni Morrison - Conversations

Racial Demographics and Narrative Presence

Faulkner questions the differentiation of people based on race by suggesting that Charles Bon could be both brother and other to Judith and Henry Sutpen. This troubling of racial categories is visible in the demographic breakdown of the characters in the novel. There are 194 unique characters in Absalom, Absalom!. These characters can, in turn, be grouped by race. Doing so creates a raw demographic total for each group that can be converted to a percentage of the total number of the total population.

This raw demographic breakdown does not tell the whole story though. It does not take into account how often characters with different racial backgrounds actually appear in events. For example, there are 3 Native American characters who represent 2% of the total population of 194 characters. Yet, they occur so infrequently in the text that their weighted demographic presence is virtually 0%. The difference between the raw demographic total and the weighted demographic presence tells a powerful story about what kinds of characters get prioritized in the narrative.

Visualizing Character Demographics

Reducing diversity

Constituting a combined 5% of the population, multi-racial groups and Indian characters appear in less than 1% of the text's events

Over-representation of Whites

While weighting for presence causes some groups to disappear statistically, White characters are actually over-represented by 11%.

Mixed Ancestry

The difference between raw demographic total and weighted presence is almost equally as large for mixed ancestry characters.

This is because there are relatively few mixed ancestry characters in the text, but characters like Clytemnestra and Charles Bon appear quite often.

Erasing Blackness

Importantly, the increased focus on mixed ancestry and White characters comes at the cost of the Black characters. They constitute 23% of the population, but only appear 7% of the time.

This distinction highlights that the novel is more concerned with interactions between White and Mixed Ancestry characters than how either group might relate to the Black characters.

Raw Demographic Total
Weighted Demographic Presence

Visualizing Individual Character Presence

The data suggest that while Absalom, Absalom! is concerned with the 'color line', it is decidedly from a White perspective. Race and racial passing is only conceived in how it might trouble Whiteness and not how it might affect the Black community. This is visible with the presence of Charles Bon. He is the most ubiquitous Mixed Ancestry character by far. Still, compared to the other White characters he is simply another major character. Quite tellingly, the most present Black characters are the unnamed enslaved people, Sutpen transports to Jefferson to build his estate.

The sunburst chart below divides character presence by race and character. It shows each racial category and also displays the top 5 most present characters present.

Character Presence by Race
  • Click on the racial categories to toggle between more and less detail.

Challenging the Color Line

It is clear from reading Absalom, Absalom! that the novel is about Charles Bon's potential transgression across the 'color line.' The data reveal that the novel attends to this issue from a predominantly White perspective, and at the exclusion of all other non-White characters.

The various narrators only really care about racial passing if it threatens upper class white femininity. There is never a consideration as to how passing might affect the Black community.

Events

"maybe happen is never once"

Absalom, Absalom! resists summary. It is told from multiple, contradictory perspectives that each re-tell the same set of historical events. As each narrator tries to understand why the events happened they fundamentally reshape what happens. The basic facts are outlined cryptically in the opening pages:

"Sunday morning in June in 1833 when he [Sutpen] first rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his land no one knew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out of nothing and married Ellen Coldfield and begot his two children — the son who widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride — and so accomplished his allotted course to its violent...end"

William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!

More simply, Sutpen arrives in Jefferson in 1833, marries Ellen Coldfield, has two children, and the son, Henry, makes a widow of the daughter, Judith. Why Henry shoots his sister's fiancée is one of the central mysteries of Absalom, Absalom!

The different tellers of the tale — Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve — all take these basic facts and arrange them to tell their versions of the story and give their explanation of the why. What is revealing is not just what the narrators say, but also what they do not say. Each teller leaves out important clues that might help understand what happened. There is no way to ever get the "whole" story.

The Many Ways of Seeing Sutpen

While discussing Absalom, Absalom! at the University of Virginia in 1958, an audience member asked if any of the narrators had the right view. In other words, was there a way to get the "whole" story.

In Absalom, Absalom! is any one of the people who talk about Sutpen have the right view, or is it more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them [getting it?] right?

Faulkner at Virginia. "Do any of the story tellers have the right view?" University of Virginia. wfaudio29_1.11

Faulkner's response was telling...

Narrative Structure

Though the plot can be very confusing, it is clear from Faulkner's notes that he had an underlying structure. This underlying structure is sometimes referred to as the chronology or story. In fiction, the story is different than the plot. Though often used interchangeably, the story refers to the order of events as they happen chronologically, while the plot indicates the order in which they are told.

If the events in the novel were related in the order they occurred, Absalom, Absalom! would be much easier to understand. Actually, since the novel was so confusing even Faulkner's publishers asked him to include a chronology in the first edition of the text, so readers could get some grasp of the basic structure of the story. The structure of this chronology is already visible in the early manuscript pages of Absalom, Absalom!

Steve Railton reconstructed the Absalom, Absalom! chronology in detail and created an interactive chronology based on key events. The full chronology in the DY database consists of 644 individual events. Broadly speaking, these can be displayed in two ways:

  1. Story - The chronological order in which events occur.
  2. Plot - The order in which events are told in the narrative.
A narrative structure chart shows the relationship between story and plot. The story order is placed on the y-axis and the plot order, indicated by page numbers, is placed on the x-axis. As the chart moves to the right, it moves forward in the progression of the text. Whenever an event occurs lower on the y-axis, it indicates that it is happening earlier in the chronology. Conversely, whenever an event his higher on the y-axis it is happening later in the chronology of the story. This concept is easier to grasp by looking at some major events in Absalom, Absalom! in plot and story order.

Visualizing Narrative Structure

Plot Order

Thomas Sutpen's life can be reduced to three events: 1. He is born, 2. Moves to Jefferson, 3. Dies.

In the novel, these events are out of order. Sutpen arrives in Jefferson in chapter 1, dies in chapter 6, and is born in chapter 7. Accordingly, the narrative structure chart shows his arrival in the middle of the y-axis, death at the top and birth at the bottom.

Story Order

Rearranging the major events in story order places them from the bottom left of the chart to the top right. This is the order of events as they occur chronologically.

There are no jumps up and down because x=y.

All Events

Mapping all 644 events in a narrative structure chart creates an overwhelming jumble!

The major events provide some context as to what might be going on.

Hover over the chart to see the description of each event.

Narrated Events

Breaking down the narrative structure chart by how events are conveyed to the reader,narrative status, reveals underlying patterns

The events narrated through first-person narration, mostly run in a regular pattern from left to right at the top of the chart. These are the moments when the Quentin speaks to the different narrators.

Told Events

Told events are conveyed by a character telling a story.

The tellers —Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin's Grandfather, and eventually Quentin and Shreve — all start their stories in the deep past and make their way to the present. They repeat, change, and omit details from other versions, but their chronology is quite regular.

Other Events

Digital Yoknapatawpha also encodes three other types of narrative status: Remembered, Hypothesized, and Narrated+consciousness which is unique to Faulkner.

Though much fewer in number, they add another layer of mediation between the tellers and their tales.

Story Order

Reordering the events by story order highlights the distinction between narrated and told events.

The narrated events all happen towards the end chronologically, when Quentin is gathering the story.

The key event of the novel — Henry shoots Charles — right in the middle of the chronology, and framed by the history that precedes and follows it.

Plot by Date Order

Digital Yoknapatawpha also encodes probable dates for events. Date ordering shows the distances between events on the Y-axis based on time.

Date ordering highlights the historical distance between Sutpen's story (1808-1869) and Quentin's narrative present (1909-1910). Past and present appear disconnected.

Chronology by Date Order

Conversely, ordering the chronology by date shows the continuity between past and present.

The majority of events take place in the years around the time of the Civil War. For the South, and the United States more broadly, this is was a cataclysmic event whose meaning is still not settled in Quentin's present fifty years later.

Understanding why Henry shoots Charles cannot be disentangled from this history.

The Past as Narrative

The overlapping and disjointed versions of events capture Quentin's lived experience of exploring the past. This is not a neat linear chronology told by one authority in a history book, but the collective story of multiple voices who have shaped and reshaped the events to match their version of the truth. The tellers cannot be separated from their tales. It forces us to wonder if any version of the past can ever be true, or if it is simply another story we tell ourselves.

Language

"it struck word by word, the resonant strings of remembering"

The language in Absalom, Absalom! is very challenging. Faulkner's language constantly draws attention to itself. The text reminds us that what is said cannot be separated from how it is said.

The Long Sentence

Sentences in Absalom, Absalom! are very long. On average, sentences are around 43 words long. The longest sentence is 1,124 words. That's a 3-4 page college paper in one sentence! Compared to other American Classics, Faulkner's sentences are much, much longer.

Average Words per Sentence in Classic American Novels

For Faulkner, these long sentences are more than rhetorical pyrotechnics, they try to capture how the past continuously intrudes upon the present. Asked in an interview about why he wrote such long sentences, Faulkner contends that there is no such thing as "was" because everyone brings their past with them. His long sentences are a way to capture this sensation. In an interview he claims:

"a man, a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something"

Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958 Vintage Books, 1965

In a sense, the prose complements the narrative structure, which also sees the past continuously returning.

Neologisms

Faulkner also coins various neologisms, new words, by combining words or adding a prefix to an existing word. There are 30 of such words and many other words that are uncommon or archaic.

Often their meaning tarries between simple binaries, collapsing the neat distinctions created in language.

Neologisms force the reader to consider their meaning.

Is an "unorganism" alive or dead?

How can Quentin speak in "notlanguage"?

How can Charles be a "nothusband"?

Faulkner's recondite vocabulary draws attention to the fact that each individual fact disclosed by the teller is composed of individual words. These words can only be understood in context.

Parentheticals

Perhaps the most unique feature of the text is Faulkner's use of parentheses. There are 1278 total or 639 pairs. These parentheses occur across the text, and also nest within each other four levels deep.

  • () Level 1
  • (()) Level 2
  • ((())) Level 3
  • (((()))) Level 4

The nestings offer a network of digressions, modifications, amplifications, and dead ends. They represent the constant search for words to tell the story of the Sutpen family.

Parenthesis Nesting Levels in Absalom, Absalom

The parenthesis chart shows two important features. Parenthesis occur throughout the text but are most concentrated in chapter 6. Here the narrator keeps nesting deeper. Read grammatically, these are ever more baroque "asides" to the main narrative until the last final aside four levels deep is Quentin. Though it seems implausible that Faulkner planted this nesting four levels deep for readers to discover, it is a poetic reminder that Absalom, Absalom! is as much about Sutpen as it is about Quentin's understanding of Sutpen.

Faulkner's Language

The complexity of Faulkner's language forces the reader to consider the meaning of every word, in every long sentence, throughout the entire work. One cannot pull at any thread in the novel without loosening others. The past existed as a reality, but it can only be translated into the present in and through language.

Inconclusions

"Do you want to know what I think?"
"No," Quentin said.

The preceding vignettes cover only a fraction of the type of analysis of Absalom, Absalom! that is possible with the Digital Yoknapatawpha data. Indeed, the site features other rich and contradictory interpretations Absalom, Absalom!. In some sense, this is multiplicity is a property inherent to all databases: they make relationships between entities explicit that would otherwise be hard to detect. In another sense, the multiplicity of analyses is also idiosyncratic to Absalom, Absalom!, a text that categorically resists closure and requires constantly new interpretations. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw a large circle around its major themes and show how these cluster together. The characters, events, and language all try to reconcile the South’s racial past with its present only to suggest that this reconciliation is not possible. There will always be a disjunction between that which happened and that which is now happening.

For additional commentaries on Absalom, Absalom! see:

A common way to deal with this disjunction is to talk over it by telling a story, usually one with a happy ending. The storytellings in Absalom, Absalom! underscore that the telling cannot be separated from the tale and the teller. How a narrator speaks of characters is dependent on what character the narrator identifies with, the understanding of the past depends on the time the present is in, and the language spoken with depends on the listener spoken to. In the end, there is no conclusion to the conversation about race in America, only repetition. The conversation appears to be the point, though. By never allowing the text to truly ever close, Faulkner forces readers to critically re-examine their own relationships with the past, and, in turn, their relationships with themselves. It is only through this examination of the self that an understanding of the other becomes possible.