'Well, Milly; too bad you're not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.'[1]
'Call me Aunt Judith, Charles.'[2]
At fourteen, Thomas Sutpen's world of boundless possibility closed upon itself in the face of a plantation door. He had known community, as a boy in the West Virginia hills, where a man's gun was his pride and his possession but the gun did not possess the man-- he offered it to others to hoist, to touch, to test its action and to feel its recoil, it was an object in the world of alienation and identity and meaning in the wondrous substantiality of which all could share, all could find themselves. But the plantation he discovered, as he was turned from the door by the Negro slave his message in his hand and his anxious expectation in his head, was a positive world closed upon itself, unknown to others, repulsing others, an other without connection to others, a repulsion without countervailing attraction. He was captured by the mere evanescent force of it, for it was a force without outlet precisely because of its insubstantiality, its lack of connection to any world but itself. So he created his own, consuming, positive and exclusive world, into which all would be drawn and to which none would be offered escape. Sutpen created his design, and the design was he.
Judith and Henry were the offspring of that design, the symbiotic siblings, the ogre children. It was Judith who showed it, in its demoniacal totality, its festering enclosure. So it appeared to Rosa Coldfield, as Judith commanded that wild carriage ride into Jefferson on that Sunday morning, as Judith stared transfixed from her concealment in the hay loft upon the bloody spectacle below, her octoroon playmate by her side. Out of that spectacle sputtered Henry, submitted to it, coerced, he fell out of it into his mother's arms from between the panting sweaty scarred and bleeding naked slaves, beneath the feet of his father stripped to the waist and standing triumphant above them, he spewed out of it vomiting his impotent revulsion, he, the Coldfield, the sensitive one, repulsed and consumed.
But in her demoniacal appearance within Judith lay her capacity for transcendence. She was a demon, an ogre child, a spirit living on the dark side, in the shadow of the design, but a spirit, and this was her hope. This of course her mother never knew, could never understand, because Ellen was after all bound by it, caught in its web of doom, unable to see beyond it, spiritless-- "she seemed to have encompassed time."[3] But Judith was will, she willed that carriage into town, she snuck into that hay loft to see her father's bloody spectacle. Henry was as bound to the design as he was repelled by it; like his father, he was that uneasy blend of absolute repulsion that concealed his absolute enclosure. It was thus that Judith and Henry were inseparable-- she exhibited exactly the demoniacal in the design without thereby internalizing it, where Henry was its embodiment.
Their paths cross in the library that Christmas night at Sutpen's Hundred, the middle term in their crossing, in this existential dialectic, Charles Bon, a shadow, the mere point of contact and transition between them. To Henry, however, he was life, he was substance itself. As for Judith, it was her love that was her substance, not Bon himself, like Mississippi
By that meeting in the library, to which Judith was no party, merely an accident, Judith was transfigured. Henry stalked and snuck away, he gave the lie and turned his back to his father, but as he rode silently alongside Charles Bon on the way to New Orleans New Orleans
But Judith was transfigured. As Henry collapsed into his father's design, Judith reached beyond and rose above it. It is true that she would not have listened to her father if he had deigned to explain to her why he forbade her marriage to Bon, but it was not out of Sutpen stubbornness; it is true that she would not have cared why he forbade it, but it was not to her father that she would have reacted, negatively, defiantly. She and her father were enigmas one to the other, even in the intimacy of their similarity. They did not need to speak, but in the unspoken vow of silence that bound them was absolute mis-relation. Sutpen was, after all and before all, his design, his morality the dry ciphering of careful calculation besmirched but by that "one mistake," but Judith found herself outside it. She was propelled beyond it by the very force of Henry's own collapse into it, her demoniacal will become faith. That night in the library Judith and Henry crossed paths like two stars that come too close, propelling one another outward and apart by their own repulsive attraction, one into the oblivion of impenetrable space, the other into its heart.
There are other sparks of spirit that flash briefly, then fade, from within the otherwise impenetrable darkness of the design. Consider Rosa , trapped by the design to such a degree that she was prepared to marry it--
You see, I was that sun, or thought I was who did believe there was that spark, that crumb in madness which is divine, though madness know no word itself for terror or for pity. There was an ogre of my childhood... and I forgave it; there was a shape which rode away beneath a flag and (demon or no) courageously suffered-- and I did more than just forgive: I slew it, because the body, the blood, the memory which that ogre had dwelt in returned five years later and held out its hand and said 'Come' as you might say it to a dog, and I came.[4]
--until Sutpen himself, in line with his design, delivered the insult that Rosa could not brook, Rosa, who spent her lonely evenings penning romantic odes to southern soldiers, as she hauled food by pulley to her father who had walled himself into the attic to escape the same. She could not until the end was at hand rise above the lowly station that nonetheless placed her upon the cot above the pallet on which the slaves slept at night. She could not die until Sutpen's Hundred and with it Henry and Clytemnestra were no more, this was her only peace. Yet Rosa too knew love, the same love that Judith knew and equally sure, the love of Charles Bon, but whose essence she knew, left at her door when he and Henry had stopped by on their way back to the University of Mississippi that summer day. And when Wash Jones showed up to take her to Sutpen's Hundred after the war, to find Judith at the top of the stair clutching at that picture of Bon with the octoroon mistress, Rosa at one instant saw the hope within the doom pass before her as she ran up those stairs, the coffee-colored face stopping her at their foot, saying "Dont you go up there, Rosa.
That was how she said it, that quiet, that still.... Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. Possibly even then my body did not stop.... I do not know. I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman's flesh. Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both.... But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. Yes, I stopped dead... I crying not to her, to it; speaking to it through the negro, the woman, only because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon, expecting and receiving no answer because we both knew it was not to her I spoke: 'Take your hand off me, nigger!'
I got none.... We stood there so... until the voice parted us, broke the spell. It said one word: 'Clytie,' like that, that cold, that still: not Judith, but the house itself speaking again, though it was Judith's voice.[5]
But Rosa , by her own account, "was born too late."
Then there is the French architect:
"And Grandfather saw the eyes in the gaunt face, the eyes desperate and hopeless but indomitable too, invincible too, not beaten yet by a damn sight Grandfather said, and all that fifty-odd hours of dark and swamp and sleeplessness and fatigue and no grub and nowhere to go and no hope of getting there: just a will to endure and a foreknowing of defeat but not beat yet by a damn sight: and he took the bottle in one of his little dirty coon-like hands and raised the other... then flung the hand up in a gesture that Grandfather said you simply could not describe, that seemed to gather all misfortune and defeat that the human race had ever suffered into a little pinch in his fingers like dust and fling it backward over his head,... and then he took not only the first drink of neat whiskey he ever took in his life but the drink of it that he could no more have conceived himself taking than the Brahmin can believe that the situation can conceivably arise in which he will eat dog."[6]
And finally there is Wash
would see Sutpen (the fine figure of a man as he called it) on the black stallion, galloping about the plantation, and father said how for that moment Wash's heart would be quiet and proud both and that maybe it would seem to him... that this world where he walked always in mocking and jeering echoes of nigger laughter, was just a dream and an illusion and that the actual world was the one where his own lonely apotheosis (Father said) galloped on the black thoroughbred, thinking maybe, Father said, how the Book said that all men were created in the image of God and so all men were the same in God's eyes anyway, looked the same to God at least, and so he would look at Sutpen and think A fine proud man. If God himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like.[7]
But Wash
It would be easy enough to view Judith merely as a victim of the twin dooms of the south and of her father's design; her mother carried her along to Memphis to purchase her trousseau, Judith oblivious to Ellen's own part in that doom, when Charles Bon hardly knew her name; she waited in the garden as her fate was sealed in the library that Christmas night; she waited on Sutpen's Hundred through four years of war as Bon and Henry engaged in the dialectical joust in which she, and not Bon, was the mediate shadow; she stood at the door as Bon fell dead into her arms, she undaunted and unfooled clutching at the picture of Bon and his octoroon mistress. She brought her father's mottled progeny, one by one, to Sutpen's Hundred to die, and as if to etch the design into granite permanence she placed their tombstones, one by one, upon the hillside alongside her own.
Yet it is exactly in the silence of that polished stone that we glimpse the reflection of Judith's being, for we cannot in fact apprehend it, it does not appear, it succumbs like her to the yellow fever that she contracted at the bedside of Charles Etienne de Saint Valery Bon. But from those burnished slabs echoes the voice of love. In this cold and lifeless image of her father's design, we see precisely the very irreality that it was to her. When she brought Bon's letter to Quentin's mother, she expresses, in the clearest and most eternal terms, the illusion that that cold stone was to her, and in this expression her own transcendence of the design that that cold stone was posited to reperesent, "Me, you want me to keep it?" (Quentin's mother);
"'Yes,' Judith said. 'Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying only they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something-- a scrap of paper-- something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself... at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish....[9]
In the end only Judith transcends the "spurious immortality" conferred by granite slabs. We can imagine her, sitting with Charles Etienne de Saint Valery Bon, that "hereditary negro concubine, who had not resented his black blood so much as he had denied the white..."
(Because there was love Mr Compson said There was that letter she brought and gave to your grandmother to keep... and who to know what moral restoration she might have contemplated in the privacy of that house, that room, that night, what hurdling of iron old traditions since she had seen almost everything else she had learned to call stable vanish like straws in a gale;-- she sitting there beside the lamp in a straight chair, erect,... and he standing there... she watching him, not daring to move, her voice murmuring, clear enough and full enough yet hardly reaching him: 'Charles': and he: 'No, Miss Sutpen': and she again, still without moving, not stirring so much as a muscle, as if she stood on the outside of the thicket into which she had cajoled the animal which she knew was watching her though she could not see it, not quite cringing, not in any terror or even alarm but in that restive light incorrigibility of the free which would leave not even a print on the earth which lightly bore it and she not daring to put out the hand with which she could have actually touched it but instead just speaking to it, her voice soft and swooning, filled with that seduction, that celestial promise which is the female's weapon: 'Call me Aunt Judith, Charles')[10]
NOTES
[1] William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, New York
[2] Ibid. p. 169
[3] Ibid. 59
[4] Ibid. 135
[5] Ibid. 111-114
[6] Ibid. 207
[7] Ibid. 226
[8] Ibid. 229
[9] Ibid. 100-101
[10] Ibid. 168-168
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