Narrating the Indeterminate: Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract

Like Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! deals with a minimal number of plot events. One hot afternoon, Quentin Compson listens to Miss Rosa Coldfield tell the story of the Sutpens; that evening he listens to his father fill in gaps in Miss Rosa’s story; and, six months later at Harvard, he and Shreve McCannon stay up all night piecing together the rest of the puzzle. The only events taking place in the present are instances of storytelling, and the one present-day action scene—Quentin’s journey with Rosa to Sutpen’s Hundred—comes to us only through a flashback. Like Virginia Woolf, however, William Faulkner attempts to convey “everything, everything!” within certain constraints. Instead of a drawing on a roving trajectory of focalization, he focalizes the overall narrative through various internal narrators in turn, and each narrator contributes to the emerging pattern of the Sutpen story.

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple space to the old ineradicable rhythm.

—Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!

But now we discover an abundance of systems whose behaviour, although governed by precisely-known laws, cannot be predicted even in principle because they are so unstable. To know the law is not necessarily to know the behaviour.

—Michael Berry, “Chaology: The Emerging Science of Unpredictability”