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It is clear that Southern writers in the 20th-century America were very much aware of the historical context of their region. Born and bred in the South where its heritage is the essential part of his life, Faulkner also shows the idea of history as the most critical figure in his fictional world. Faulkner's language, in its incessant and compulsory representation impulse of Southern past, has been always conscious of the South's struggles with its history. Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's “most historical novel,” is poignantly concerned with the traumatic effects of the Southern past, the Civil War in particular. His characters can never quite let the past go; they are eternally cursed to fight losing battles against “ghosts” called the past. This essay attempts to examine how Faulkner (re)defines history through memories, personal and generational, and through the narrative of loss of the past. Centering on the two major historical matrices of the novel, the Civil War and Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner looks back to the Southern past with the tremendous sense of mourning as well as with critical moral introspection, and rewrites the meaning of South's defeat of the War. Unlike his earlier war narratives, Faulkner here clearly moves beyond the established war narrative of sentimental glorification of South's “lost cause.” Faulkner' historical narrative in Absalom, Absalom!, through the fragments of memories, plays upon constructive and active interactions between telling and retelling, (re)interpretation and creativity, and the past and the present. This essay reassesses the very nature of Faulkner's historical narrative, opening up a new possibility for its modernist writing.
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William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, the Civil War, history, past, memory, loss, mourning, historical narrative
