Word: absalom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more than a decade. State Assemblyman George C. Rawlings, 44, a Fredericksburg attorney and avowed liberal, plans to make Smith's obstructionism on civil rights and other contemporary issues the focus of his campaign. Moderate State Senator William B. Spong, 45, is attempting to oust U.S. Senator Absalom Willis Robertson, 78, and Alexandria Attorney Armistead Boothe is trying for the seat of U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd...
...Absalom, Absalom...
...must sleep on a pallet on the floor. This primal wrong and first denial of equality leaves Roth in "a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit." Just how far Mississippi's troubles extend back into history is examined in Absalom, Absalom! That history is inexorably racial. The novel mercilessly strips away the romantic Southern mythology to reveal the brutal repression of slavery, the arrogance of plantation owners who could summon Negro girls to their beds as if they were ordering the carriage brought around to the door, the guilt behind...
...panting, difficult prose, the several 20th century narrators of Absalom, Absalom! pursue the story of Thomas Sutpen, who came to Mississippi with wagonloads of savage blacks in 1832 determined to change a lOO-sq.-mi. piece of virgin forest into a plantation. Sutpen is a creature of high-flown words and naked will-and perhaps the closest to a tragic hero in the classical Greek sense that U.S. literature has produced...
Thus the plot of Absalom, Absalom! sums up the fundamental Southern anxiety: to the racist's question, "would you want your sister to marry one," Faulkner adds "when he may be your brother?" This, Faulkner seems to say, lies at the heart of the almost paranoiac fear of the "mixing of bloods," which would call in question the belief in a difference between the races on which white dominance was founded, and which, as the owner of one of Mississippi's largest plantations said last week, is still "very real for many whites today...