Dirimens copulatio and metalinguistic negation in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!(William Faulkner )

In response to a question about Sherwood Anderson's style, William Faulkner described writing as "a matter of imagining any number of things. The writer at the moment of putting it down has got to be a censor, to say Now, this is right, this is wrong, and to throw away the wrong" (Faulkner 229). According to Faulkner, Anderson did not follow this mandate, yet to his style the concomitant "fumbling and clumsiness" were essential. Faulkner may have inherited something from his old mentor in New Orleans, for although Faulkner's own writing style is decidedly more complex than Anderson's, its very complexity, the lengthy adjectival and adverbial clauses that endlessly refine their subjects, also seems to violate this rule of self-censorship, of keeping the right and discarding the wrong. What might be just a stylistic and rhetorical tendency in Faulkner's prose is raised to a formative structural principle in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). For a novel ostensibly obsessed with the recovery of history, its narrators contradict each other and themselves, couch their narratives in negative and conjectural terms, and cast upon each version of Thomas Sutpen's history an essential indeterminacy. Absalom's characteristic uses of rhetorical negative clauses give the impression of throwing wrong narrative possibilities away; it is through these performed instances of negative supposition, however, that the narrative voice betrays its reluctance to purge the imaginary or suppositional and, in bifurcation, releases its claim to certainty.

Critical reading and interpretative practices in Faulkner criticism, as well as in literary criticism in general, have turned away from poetics and toward questions of history, culture, and power. Andre Bleikasten identifies this moment, as it pertains to Absalom criticism, as the publication of Eric Sundquist's "Absalom, Absalom! and the House Divided" in 1983. Bleikasten complains, "Faulkner's importance, [Sundquist] argued, is not to be sought in his contribution to the art of the novel but in the seriousness with which he addresses social and historical themes.... Nearly all recent Faulkner criticism starts from similar premises" (206-07). Depending on how accurately this claim describes the current state of Absalom criticism, my own study would appear to be obsolete, in dialogue with critics who regard Faulkner's literary style as constructive of aesthetic effect. My hope, however, is to show how formalist questions can illuminate the dynamics of the social and political registers which have made Faulkner so appealing to New Americanist criticism of the past two decades.

This essay locates the nexus of Absalom's swarming narratives in negative and collaborative narration. An investigation into the poetics of negative narration at the syntactic level will yield a model for the narrative strategy--the rhetorical figure dirimens copulatio--deployed in the larger compositional structure of the novel itself. In brief, I suggest that Absalom's narrative structure--the successive attempts to tell Thomas Sutpen's story that continually "one-up" each other by negating and amending the story immediately prior--adopts the same formal logic as that of the rhetorical figure "it was not x, but y" (dirimens copulatio). Drawing attention to the metalinguistic and temporal elements of that figure, this essay provides a way to understand the formal interrelation between the novel's conflicting accounts of Sutpen.

Such an understanding of Absalom can account for both rhetorical and political approaches to the novel. Whereas this study begins from structural analyses of syntax and discourse, it finds that the new categories, like metalinguistic negation, needed to explain the narrative logic on a rhetorical level are the same ones that on a theoretical level define the novel's racial, legal, sexual, and political ontologies of identity. This essay may not give the final word to the questions of race, class, gender and law that have made the novel so successful in politically-oriented and identity-sensitive literary criticism, nor may it exhaust the endless debate over Faulkner's style that makes his writing so frequently the subject of rhetorical and linguistic analyses. But it does bridge the two approaches, using the structure and logic provided by linguistic analysis to shape and clarify the political one. Narrative "fumbling," I argue, is a complex strategy of interrelation, one that can be read to model the complicated relation between categories of race, class, and sexuality.

The "fumbling" that arises from the use of negative narration exhibits authorial indeterminacy but also gestures at and obtains more complex relations between story and significance than either simple metaphoric allegory or metonymic realism would. Faulkner implies such recognition in a later statement about the effects of Anderson' s style: "That the truth did come out of all the heavy-footedness and the fumbling ... gave something to the final result that no imitator could match probably" (Faulkner 229). Despite his admiring criticism of Anderson's idiosyncratic style, Faulkner's own elaborate phraseology and seemingly endless strings of modifying clauses can also be seen as instances of narrative "fumbling." For example, Mr. Compson's description of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom also uses negative narration, as marked by the frequency of "nots" and "buts":

 
   [Sutpen] looked like a man who had been sick. Not like a man who 
   had been peacefully ill in bed and had recovered to move with a 
   sort of diffident and tentative amazement in a world he had 
   believed himself on the point of surrendering, but like a man who 
   had been through some solitary furnace experience, ... like an 
   explorer say, who not only had to face the normal hardship of the 
   pursuit which he chose but was overtaken by the added and 
   unforeseen handicap of the fever also and fought through it ... not 
   through blind instinctive will ... but to gain and keep it the 
   material prize for which he accepted the original gambit. (24) 

The image of the peacefully ill man living in gratitude for his recovery may be negated, but it still both counters and inflects the successive image of the feverish "furnace experience." And in the same sentence, the same rhetorical use of "not ... but" occurs to qualify the motives for recovery. The last clause, which identifies a material cause for fighting through the fever, would lose much of its descriptive force without the prior clause, which dismisses will to survive as a factor in the recovery. Without "not through blind instinctive will," the reader might not sense the irony of a man deliberately fighting a life-threatening fever only in order "to gain and keep it the material prize." In each of these cases we might say that the prior clause functions as an ironic cast, shaping then evacuating the space which the second clause is to fill. Thus the perversity of replacing an instinctual drive, such as the will to survive, with a questionably avaricious one, the will to gain a material possession, carries important ironic and descriptive weight.