Episode 5: Blending Black and White in ABSALOM, ABSALOM! Artwork

Great American Novel

Few literary terms are more hotly debated, discounted, or derided than the "Great American Novel." But while critics routinely dismiss the phrase as at best hype and as at worst exclusionary, the belief that a national literature commensurate with both the scope and the contradictions of being American persists. In this podcast Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt examine totemic works such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Toni Morrison's Beloved that have been labeled GANs, exploring their themes, forms, and reception histories, asking why, when, and how they entered the literary canon. Readers beware: there be spoilers here, and other hijinks ensue...

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Great American Novel

Episode 5: Blending Black and White in ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

July 23, 2021 • Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt • Season 1 • Episode 5

0:00 | 1:22:40

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William Faulkner's dizzyingly complex, Lost Cause-dismantling 1936 novel about the rise and fall of a Southern plantation owner who "outraged the land" amid the Civil War is perhaps the most formidable Great American Novel one can tackle: it has the distinction of making Moby-Dick look accessible! But Absalom, Absalom! is not only a tour-de-force of modernist experimentation with its long, incantatory sentences and seemingly endless convolutions; it's also an inquiry into the nature of knowledge, historical "facts," and storytelling. As speculation mounts about the motives driving Thomas Sutpen's all-consuming "design" to create a lineage in Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner pokes a finger in the eye of America's racial anxieties, asking why the fear of miscegenation might compel a man to violent, immoral extremes. Ultimately, the novel repudiates just about every aspect imaginable of the roseate tradition of Southern literature, or what Faulkner called the "hoop skirts and plug hats" vision of Confederate mythologizing that his own novelist great-grandfather, W. C. Falkner, helped establish in the postbellum era. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel that challenges us to question our inculcated ideas of how narratives communicate, forcing us to learn to read anew in exhausting but exhilarating ways.

CORRECTION: One of your intrepid hosts stated that Faulkner was "burned in effigy" for having moderate views during the Civil Rights era in Oxford MS. Although he could point you to the source for this, it seems not to be borne out by the other more reliable sources...so probably there was no burning in effigy. On the other hand, there were death threats, rocks tossed through his windows, and even a mean letter to the editor about him written by his own brother.

Canon Fodder: Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell

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