LITERATURE: Absalom, Absalom! – Character Description

Again on Faulkner’s style, his description of aging and the normal gaining of weight is done with a flourish:

He was not portly yet, though he was now getting on toward fifty-five. The fat, the stomach, came later. It came upon him suddenly, all at once, in the year after whatever it was happened to his engagement to Miss Rosa and she quitted his roof and returned to town to live alone in her father’s house and did not ever speak to him again except when she addressed him that one time when they told her that he was dead. The flesh came upon him suddenly, as though what the negroes and Wash Jones, too, called the fine figure of a man had reached and held its peak after the foundation had given away and something between the shape of him that people knew and the uncompromising skeleton of what he actually was had gone fluid and, earthbound, had been snubbed up and restrained, balloonlike, unstable and lifeless, by the envelope which it had betrayed. (p. 81)

Holy guacamole. That’s some process, no? One of the things I noticed is that while the aging encompasses years, Faulkner employs several short sentences to step up the pace of his emphasis on the speed of this in Sutpen (of whom he is speaking).

There is also the bringing in of a whole lot of characters–Rosa, Wash Jones, the negroes, the people–as if to attest to this physical change. Perhaps this is a grounding technique, a base of reality and thus credibility.

There is the mixing in of time, of eras: “not portly yet, though he was now getting on toward fifty-five. The fat, the stomach, came later.” “the year after whatever it was happened to his engagement to Miss Rosa and she quitted his roof and returned to town,” and “one time when they told her that he was dead.” There are even more, but this seems to illustrate something that Faulkner does quite a bit in this work; he hints at things, large events, big drama, and continues with little references that grow into a story. It’s as if he is giving pieces of the puzzle–though this is not a mystery story–while focusing on the characters in the story and not letting us forget the story line.

Then of course there is that textural ending: “the uncompromising skeleton of what he actually was had gone fluid and, earthbound, had been snubbed up and restrained, balloonlike, unstable and lifeless, by the envelope which it had betrayed.” How visual, how real to the touch. The transformation of hard bone into liquid, the taut sausagelike feel of a well blown-up balloon, the paper skin or envelope, which holds it all together even while this exterior has been a bit of a liar to reality.

Very nice.