Absalom, Absalom! and the Semiotic Other (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 1957, when he was asked to explain his characterization of Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner replied, Although Faulkner's comments on his own work should be regarded with a certain level of skepticism, this one is particularly suggestive for readers of Absalom, Absalom!--but less for what it reveals than what it conceals. The "somebody," the "servant" who bars Sutpen's entry is, as the text emphasizes again and again, black. That Faulkner fails to recall this detail (elsewhere he omits the servant entirely and states that it is the owner of the house--the "white Virginian"--who tells Sutpen to go to the back door [qtd. in Gwynn and Blotner 272]) is consistent, in terms of representation and repression, with the narrative's structuring of racial difference. As Toni Morrison has convincingly argued, white American literature and identity is made possible through, and founded upon, a "dark, abiding, signing, Africanist presence" (5); this is clearly evident in Absalom, Absalom!, which explores and interrogates this constitution of subjectivity through racial "othering." Specifically, blackness or Africanism is presented in the novel as a sublimated force that continually threatens the stability of the white, patriarchal "design" and, as such, can be read as analogous to what Julia Kristeva has called the semiotic. From this perspective, race in Absalom, Absalom! emerges as a dramatization of the dialectic between the symbolic and the semiotic--where the latter ultimately undermines and challenges the hegemony of the former.