Southern Cypher

ABSALOM, ABSALOM!-William Faulkner-Random House ($2.50).

Among contemporary U. S. novelists, William Faulkner has the distinction of being one of the most powerful, certainly the least predictable, usually the hardest to read. Although he is the master of a swift and straightforward narrative prose that he has demonstrated in Sanctuary and other works, the plots of his stories are usually deliberately obscured until they resemble cyphers requiring careful study before they can be understood. Apparently only interested in such readers as are willing to work. Author Faulkner has compared story telling with the action of a man dealing cards out of a pack, and unobtrusively dropping the joker. The cards of little value are the routine stuff of fiction-descriptions, analysis of motives, local color-and the joker is the key that gives meaning to them.

There are so many jokers wild in Absalom, Absalom! that most readers will feel that the cards have been hopelessly stacked against them. It is the strangest, longest, least readable, most infuriating and yet in some respects the most impressive novel that William Faulkner has written. At first glance it is so pompous in its language and so ridiculous in its theme that readers accustomed to honest dealing will call at once for a new hand. Its action takes place simultaneously on three levels, and although Author Faulkner includes a map, a chronology and a cast of characters to help keep the sequences clear, they do not help much.

The main story deals with Thomas Sutpen, an ambitious planter who settled near Jefferson, Miss, in 1833. Another tale deals with Quentin Compson, a Harvard freshman born and raised in Jefferson, who. in 1910, tried to figure out what had lain behind the Sutpen tragedy. A third deals with Rosa Coldfield, Sutpen's sister-in-law, and with Quentin's father, who told Quentin what they knew of the Sutpens. (Still a fourth story can be detected only by readers of The Sound and the Fury.) Thus readers must not only figure out what happened to the Sutpens, but also make allowances for Quentin's false or true hypotheses about them and for the bias and confusion of his informants.

Thomas Sutpen arrived in Jefferson with a group of wild slaves, built himself a great mansion, married, raised a son Henry and a daughter Judith, became a Confederate colonel, died at the hand of a poor white squatter whose daughter he had seduced. Previously Sutpen had married in Haiti, left his wife when he discovered she had a-spot of Negro blood in her veins. But his son by this first marriage became Henry Sutpen's friend, fell in love with Judith, was at the point of marrying her, despite his knowledge of their kinship, when Henry killed him.

Before leaving for Harvard 50 years later, Quentin Compson. who was one of the principal figures of The Sound and the Fury, heard fragments of this story, with fact and fiction intermingled. At Harvard he discussed the whole tragedy with his roommate, and the book is apparently the fruit of that discussion, a compound of their speculations, Quentin's memories of his father's words, of his last glimpse of the last living Sutpen. Thus Author Faulkner leaves it up to the reader to decide how much of the story is a reflection of the boy's inflamed imagination. For example, he does not make it clear if he means that Sutpen's oldest son actually contemplated an incestuous marriage with his half-sister, with her brother's consent, or if he means this powerful chapter to be interpreted only as a sign of Quentin's fevered dreaming. At the end of Quentin's attempt to peer into the past he is left trembling and frightened at what his imagination has called up.

Here Author Faulkner plays his last joker, for readers of The Sound and the Fury will recall that Quentin Compson himself has been guilty of incest with his sister, and that he commits suicide while at Harvard as a result.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.