Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

On my most recent re-read of this novel, I was struck by Thomas Sutpen's racial ambiguity, especially in the eyes of Miss Rosa. It seems partially to be a class thing, but it also makes him align more neatly with his son, Charles Bon.

I was also struck by (but don't know how to handle) the multiple references to the "fairy tale" or "ogre tale" (in Miss Rosa's words) of the Sutpen story. If this story could be considered a fairy tale (and this claim might be a way at getting at the mythic status of the story in the community), it is an original fairy tale (one with a dark ending), scaring the children back into submission, rather than a Disney one that ends happily ever after.

Finally, in my discussions of the book this time around, I heard another compelling explanation of the Haiti thing. I had always chalked the reference up to Haiti's compelling power in the culture--you could say "Haiti" and even in the wrong time and place it would conjure up the memories of the only successful slave rebellion. But someone else pointed out that it could be Faulkner playing with his readers, intentionally misplacing it to show the constructed and contingent nature of the history that he is relating, telling them that the novel is all, in some important sense, just a story that couldn't possibly have happened. I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation, either, but it's another way of thinking about one of the novel's thorny problems. I find this book opening new possibilities and new depths every time that I read it.