William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!--Sutpenの計画の破綻があらわす南部の罪過

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Sutpen's motive for acquiring the status of a big planter is based on his humiliating experience in his boyhood: he was told to go to the back door by an "ape-like" black servant. It seems to readers that his final object is to get land, blacks and a big house to spend such a comfortable life, lying in a hammock and being served drinks by a black servant. He explains, however, that his definite design is not to become a planter but to accept in his house both strange, poor orphans like himself and their descendants. Thinking of his demonic behavior, we can not help doubting whether his words are true. The circumstances in which he told the design to General Compson give us a clue to the answer to this question. At that time he came home on a day's leave during the War, and visited General Compson at the office to get advice as to why his design fell short of success. The conditions were too urgent to allow him to exaggerate his story or pretend to be a good person. His story, therefore, is considered true, even though he never welcomed any orphan after his success. Another reason is that he is so much larger than life that ordinary people find him difficult to understand. People ascribe to him such different and contradictory attributes as the demonic and the philanthropic. One of the most important characteristics of Sutpen is his innocence.This is different from the quality usually seen in American literature which means that a young man has lost his purity through experiences in a dirty, real society. In this novel it signifies his strong personality: he never changes his mind once he has made a decision to do something, and in other words nothing but his death can prevent him from achieving his design. This earnestness denotes the content of his innocence. It leads him to his success as a planter, while it also forces him to fail in his design. Once he believes in the code of the Old South that planters must not have a drop of black blood, he adheres to that code to the letter and to the end. The idea he accepts innocently compels him to lose the design: he has to leave his wife and son whom he has thought indispensable for his design when he becomes aware of her faint possession of black blood, and also he can not allow Judith's marriage to Bon proposed by Henry, because of his secret identification of Bon with his son with black blood. Moreover, he deserts Milly when he finds his baby female, because he wants to get a male successor. This selfish deed makes her grandfather angry to the extent that he murders Sutpen, because he has to give up his ambition to climb a social ladder, utilizing his position as a relative by marriage. His innocence impels him to run wildly toward the achievement of his design, which leads him to death. Faulkner uses only the word "design", not "dream", referring to the aspiration Sutpen himself talks about. That is because the author does not only think that Sutpen's aim is concrete like land, blacks and a big house, not ambiguous like a dream, but also that the position of Southern planters based on black slaves is absolutely different from any dream associated with a romantic yearning. In other words, he has a sense of guilt about the sins of the Old South so intense that he could not use the word dream when describing Sutpen's ambition.Time is the sum of intelligence which all people who live at that moment combine. The author, therefore, makes many characters describe their thoughts about the Sutpens. That is the meaning of time in this novel. In other words, time is that Quentin and Shreve, Miss Rosa, or Mr. Compson each creates in their imagination the idea and deed of people who lived in some period. Since their imagination jumps freely here and there in time, there appears several layers of time in one scene. Because Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness technique mimics the workings of the human mind, the circumstances of the Sutpens are represented more vividly. This is the structure of the novel and the reason characters' consciousness is shown changing as they recall incidents in Sutpen's life one after another, jumping back and forth in time. Making use of this time, Faulkner tries to search for what the South is through various descriptions of a figure who accepts the Southern code and considers segregation right innocently. The Old South depicted in the story is extremely tragic and at the same time sinful, as is demonstrated by the detail that the only survival of Sutpen's descendants is an idiot with black blood. That indicates Faulkner's realization of the Old South, because he thinks that a society supported by slavery and segregation should be absurd and unacceptable. He makes an attempt to manifest not only the agony the South has experienced but also the evil of the Old South through the rise and fall of Sutpen.

著者

成瀬尚孝
慶應義塾大学

William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!--Sutpenの計画の破綻があらわす南部の罪過

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