Ghostwritten: kinship and history in Absalom, Absalom!

Hurley, Jessica

"You always have to take the side of the dead."

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (23)

In 1994, Jacques Derrida established a new way of thinking about the ghost. In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, Derrida argues that an understanding of social justice without ghosts is impossible: "No justice," he writes, "seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead" (xix). Derrida's view of the ghost as a prompt to reparative action was widely influential across the disciplines. Avery Gordon's pathbreaking 1997 book Ghostly Matters built on Derrida's thinking to establish a new way of thinking about the exclusions of history, in which, as Arthur Redding neatly encapsulates in his survey of millennial ghost stories, "cultural practices articulate individual or collective subjective sensibilities by excavating alternative histories, or 'ghost' stories, by imaginatively summoning into presence those voices and beings that have been sacrificed to the march of progress and the consolidation of American literary and cultural traditions" (163). The presence of the ghost in a text, according to Gordon, signifies the "seething presence" of those who have not counted, who have not been taken into account, in the backstory of the present (8); and by paying attention to these not-quite-visible yet not-quite-invisible figures we can reach an understanding of what we are called on to undertake in the present to achieve something like social justice.

Such a calling is, however, not without its detractors. In a response to Specters of Marx, Slavoj Zizek offered an alternative perspective: that instead of welcoming ghosts, we should be seeking to exorcize them. In "The Spectre of Ideology," Zizek writes that "our primary duty is not towards the spectre, whatever form it assumes. The act of freedom qua real not only transgresses the limits of what we experience as 'reality,' it cancels our very primordial indebtedness to the spectral Other" (27-28). For Zizek, any hope of an absolute freedom requires that we not be tied to the past: there may well be specters, but our responsibility is to leave them in the past rather than to listen to them. Walter Benn Michaels excoriated the ghostly turn of deconstruction and New Historicism in The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004), arguing for a return to the subject and the knowable in opposition to the critical obsession with the unknowable and resistant ghost through which problematic (in Benn Michaels's view, at least) cultural identities are formed. Both Benn Michaels and Zizek read the ghost, at best, as a distraction from the real: a morbid fascination with the past which we use to justify an undeserved feeling of belonging in the present. In the center of these debates, the ghost stands accused: it must bear the weight of history and pass on to us the burden of history, or it must be revealed as a fraud, a gimcrack special effect serving only to keep us from the struggle at hand.

The function of literature as always both explicit and implicit, hiding and revealing, has rendered the study of fiction a particular rich resource for thinking through the paradox of the ghost. Does the appearance of ghosts in fiction imply a refusal to let go of a past that holds us back? Or does it suggest a broader understanding of what it means to be humanly responsible to others? When the ghost Beloved returns to haunt 124 Bluestone Road in Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, is Sethe right to welcome her in and feed her with everything she has, even to the point of a suicidal relation to the past? Is Quentin's suicide in The Sound and the Fury a consequence of his deeply embedded relation to the past in Absalom, Absalom!, or is the relationship that he develops with Shreve, Charles Bon, and Henry Sutpen in the act of telling the Sutpen story the only successful human relation he ever manages to achieve? In the complex and shifting relationships between public and private, self and other, past and present, the ghost and the novel both occupy privileged positions as mediators of difference. Literature, unlike political philosophy, allows for a both/and function: the ghost in fiction does not have to fall either on the Derridean side of the argument or the Zizekian one: like the ghost Beloved, it may be exorcized, but its call to us will still be there, like the whisper of a name on the wind. (1)

"So it would be necessary to learn spirits" (Specters xviii). The ghost can haunt the social; it can also, according to Derrida, make our individual Being a haunted space. (2) Between these two fields there is, however, a third term, crucial to the concept of the haunted house in literature and beyond, which has been somewhat excluded from ghost theory to this point: that of kinship, the great mediator between the personal and the social. (3) As Christopher Peterson explains, kinship is fundamentally troubled by the collapse of the clear distinction between life and death through what Derrida calls in Specters the "hauntological": Being initiated by the possibility of the other's death:

Insofar as it denotes a relation to the same kind ... the concept of kinship imagines a certain triumph over mourning, absence, and death by seeking to close the gap between self and other.... To fantasize that someone is our kindred spirit is to imagine that we might bridge the abyss that stands between us. Yet, if the alterity of the other can never be collapsed into the same--if "our" kin are never finally ours--then they are absent from the very beginning. (Kindred Specters 1)

The fantasy of immortality that is so important to Being is woven into how we understand kinship, the family as a means of never having to die, but this immortality-through-sameness is always haunted by the repressed recognition of the alterity of even our closest kin. The family thus serves as the perfect example of both a universal condition of hauntedness and the constant effort to deny or repress this condition: the image of the family around the hearth is persistently threatened by the haunted house, the way that ghosts from the very beginning of modernity have been linked not only to social or national but to family secrets. A dead king announces himself in 1600: "I am thy father's spirit" (Hamlet 1.5.9).

Both the family and the public sphere are haunted, then, but there is a complicated relationship between kinship as individual and private and history as social and public, haunting as epistemological and haunting as ontological, especially in America where the language of kinship has for so long inhabited political discourse (Lincoln's use of the phrase "house divided" to describe the nation during the Civil War, for example). In a country still feeling the effects of a civil war frequently described as fratricidal, it seems important to spend time with this relationship, to avoid the almost instant metonymy from individual to nation through the family which seems to allow for a particular model of hauntedness as politically useful. But is haunting the best way to understand the limits of the ways in which we are situated in time by both kinship and history? For history and kinship are both ways of understanding our existence in time. If history is the story that we tell ourselves as a nation, kinship has come to be theorized as an alternative story for those left out of the official master narrative. Elizabeth Freeman describes queer kinship as a volitional positioning of the self in history: "'[q]ueer belonging ... names the longing to 'be long] to endure in corporeal form over time, beyond procreation.... To want to belong, let us say, is to long to be bigger not only spatially, but also temporally, to 'hold out' a hand across time and touch the dead or those not born yet, to offer oneself beyond one's own time" (299). Being long, the extension of the self over time through kinship, is related here to identification, recognition, and embodiment, terms which are important in the discourse of history and the nation: I identify as American, I am recognized as American, I feel my body as an American body. Both kinship and history are stories that we tell ourselves in order to feel positioned in time and space. What happens if these stories become, or turn out to have been all along, ghost stories?

Side by Side (Not Face to Face): Storytelling and Embodied Identification

William Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! is what we might call a metaghost story, a novel about ghosts and haunting, how ghosts are made and how we come to be haunted and what being haunted and ghosted do to us, but one in which actual ghosts are notably absent. (4) In the present days of 1909 and 1910, Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve tell the story of the Sutpen family as it transpired before, during, and after the Civil War. The four different storytellers reveal different things at different times; we learn of incest, miscegenation, abandonment, and fratricide, but the heavily mediated nature of the information makes the texture of revelation as important as what is revealed. Looking back in time, in this novel, is as much about how the present is created by the past as it is about how the stories of the past are created in the present. In Gordon's terms, it is most definitely haunted. But by what?

Peter Ramos links the novel to Beloved, arguing that both attempt to represent the unrepresentable horrors of slavery through a shift in genre:

   a limit is established with regard to the historically-situated
   atrocity they both more or less address--a limit, not of language
   in general, but of the language of empirical, factual
   representation: what we conventionally mean by literary or
   historical "realism." To establish and then get beyond such a
   limit, both novels employ the tropes and literary techniques
   traditionally aligned with tales of the supernatural. In this way,
   they attempt to speak not silence, but that which might otherwise
   be unspeakable. These are ghost stories, except they are meant to
   be taken seriously. (48)

For Ramos, slavery becomes a kind of historical return of the repressed, with ghosts functioning as a symptom of that which cannot be directly represented. His argument, however, depends on taking the language of what I call "ghosting" as the language of actual ghosts. Beloved, as Gordon points out, features a distinctly material ghost, a solid ghost with a body and a name, even if this ghost is itself haunted by the nameless "Sixty Million and more" (140). It makes sense, with regard to such a ghost, to describe Beloved as a ghost story in which the presence of the supernatural casts doubt on the sufficiency of empirical realism. Absalom, Absalom!, however, does not engage so directly with the ghost story as to have an actual ghost in it. Ramos begins by claiming Sutpen as a ghost before describing each of the eight main characters also as ghosts: "almost all of the characters in the novel are referred to as ghosts either because they are remembered so vividly as to be conjured (all the players in the Sutpen drama), or they are so obsessed with and consumed by the past as to be ghosts themselves" (51). What, in the absence of a material or even an immaterial specter, is a ghost? Ramos suggests here what he does not state: that for Faulkner, ghost is a verb, one perhaps linked to remember, conjure, obsess, consume.

Ghosting as a verb in Absalom, Absalom! takes two forms: it is an engagement with history through narrative and a form of kinship. The first of these is established right at the start of the novel, when Quentin goes to visit Rosa, and is intrinsically bound up with storytelling. As Rosa tells Quentin the story of Sutpen, the telling is described as a haunting of the voice: "the ghost [of Sutpen] mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house," and the voice itself becomes a ghost like phenomenon: "Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish" (4). It is this second-order haunting that separates Absalom, Absalom! from the kind of ghosts used in more typical ghost stories; the specter haunting Rosa's story exists only in the moment of telling and renders the material world more like itself rather than existing separately from it. And haunting is contagious: listening to Rosa, Quentin experiences himself as not only situated in a South "peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times" but as an equally haunted figure, "the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was" (4). Not only haunted by the past, Quentin and Rosa are ghosted by it, made into ghosts by the telling and the listening.

Such a ghosting in the act of telling complicates the kind of history which is assumed by both Ramos and Gordon, in which "[a]bsent and present, these ghosts arise from and point toward some violent, unjust, unfinished history" (Ramos 49). Such a history may be unfinished and may exert an unimaginable pressure upon the present, but it is positioned, understandably perhaps, in the past. Faulkner's history, on the other hand, takes active issue with not only whether the past stays in the past but whether it happened in the past at all, positioning past actions as continuing into the present. John T. Irwin describes Faulkner's narrative structure as a direct challenge to a sequential view of history:

   the purpose and point of those narrations, and perhaps of all
   narration, is to use the temporal medium of narration to take
   revenge against time, to use narration to get even with the very
   mode of narration's existence in a daemonic attempt to prove that
   through the process of substitution and repetition, time is not
   really irreversible. (3-4)

While Irwin argues that Faulkner uses something like Freudian dreamwork to challenge history in the form of the various doublings that take place in the text, thinking of the relationship of the present to the past as a kind of ghosting rather than a kind of repetition allows a slightly different valence to emerge. Ghosting is not simply the presence of the past in the present as a mere repetition; nor does it allow for the clear subject/object divide that haunting suggests (I, in the present, am haunted by that, from the past). Ghosting changes the subject in the present; it makes him not only epistemologically different (what I thought was empirically true has been challenged) but ontologically changed (I am not what I thought I was).

Much has been made of Faulkner's highly recursive narrative structure in Absalom, Absalom!, but "revenge against time" seems like a particularly useful way to describe it because it so neatly combines form and content. Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi as a man with no history: "a man who so far as anyone ... knew either had no past at all or did not dare reveal it--a man who rode into town out of nowhere" (10). Sutpen, we learn later, has left his family and drawn a line through his history not once but twice: once when he leaves his poor white family in Virginia, and once when he abandons his wife and child in Haiti after discovering that she has black blood. Sutpen's design, his life plan in which he attempts to create himself a predetermined place in the world through sheer will, is an intensely future-oriented structure: as Richard Poirier writes, "[w]ithout any sense or knowledge of the past, Sutpen, through his son, would belong only to the future" (17). But its own secret history suggests that the past is not so easily disposed of. Sutpen's primal scene, the earliest in the story of the book but not revealed until the last third of the narrative, features him as a poor white boy being turned away from the front door of a rich white man and being told to use the back entrance by a house slave. This moment crystallizes a certain view of his socioeconomic situation for Sutpen, an experience that causes grief, shock, anger, and the desire for revenge: "to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what he did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with.... He left that night" (192). (5) Sutpen's one desire, the one from which his entire design originates, is revenge against the order of things; and it is not so much the resilience of the order of things that brings him down as the impossibility of keeping the past at bay which is revealed in the very temporality of such a desire. Revenge requires there to be a link between a past action and a future recompense, which is exactly the cause of the fall of the house of Sutpen. The return of his firstborn, purportedly part black son, Charles, to Sutpen's Hundred as best friend to his son and fiance to his daughter shows that he cannot keep his past where it should be, either temporally (in Sutpen's own youth) or geographically (in Haiti); and thinking of revenge as a promise in and to time may be usefully linked to the name of Sutpen's only surviving heir, the Negro idiot Jim Bond. What is revealed here is the paradox of starting from zero when that restarting has been motivated by revenge, which always implies a past history: even when the history seems to have played itself out, with the burning of Sutpen's Hundred, the Bond, the promise of revenge, still haunts the remains.

Just because Sutpen fails so extravagantly in his "revenge against time," however, does not mean that Faulkner is equally unsuccessful. While unfolding events in nonlinear time does not in and of itself mean that sequential time has been overcome, the combination of this narrative style with ghosting has an effect which is unique to Faulkner. Sutpen's primal scene is the only point in the novel where we see the shock of a realization that he is not the protagonist or teller of his own life story. Having gone to the big house to deliver a message, the repeated phrase which suggests the central cause of his stunning disappointment is, "He never even give me a chance to say it. Not even to tell it, say it" (192). Telling, or storytelling, is the most important thing that one can do in this text: it is the motor of the opening of the novel, when Rosa tells her story to Quentin in the hope that he will then tell it more widely, it is Sutpen's primary motive for setting the chain of events around Sutpen's Hundred into motion (for what is the design if not the story he wants to tell of himself?), and it is both what Quentin needs to do to engage with what he has heard and what pushes him to some kind of crisis at the end of the book. Putting such a high value on the act of storytelling creates two very distinct, equally important temporalities in the novel: the time of the events which are being described, and the time when they are being narrated. This is not an uncommon device, but the way that the narrative is structured creates the coming together of these times as a kind of degree zero for the text.

Quentin's different engagements with storytelling provide a model of this process. In the first scene of telling, when Rosa first makes contact with Quentin, the two times which are woven together are Rosa and Quentin's present and Rosa's own past: they sit in "a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat." The age of her flesh and of her house is described repeatedly and these images are resistant to interpretation; she is dressed in that "eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew" (3). There is no identification between her and Quentin, and the only way that she projects into his future is to imagine a time when he will sell her story for money--an unconvincing future, since we know from The Sound and the Fury that Quentin will commit suicide a month after the end of Absalom, Absalom! When the narrator becomes Mr. Compson speaking to Quentin, many of these aspects change. The speaker and the listener exist in the same, present space: the "summer of wistaria"; there is no description of Mr. Compson that draws attention to him as a different physical entity to Quentin. And Mr. Compson projects effortlessly into Quentin's future, as we learn that the smells of wistaria and Mr. Compson's cigar form "the scent, which five months later Mr. Compson's letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin's sitting-room at Harvard" (23). The narration detours back into Rosa speaking with no acknowledgement of scene or speaker until the end of the chapter when it is revealed that Quentin is there but "[h]e was not even listening to her" (140). We then arrive at Quentin's turn to speak, seemingly delivered there along with the letter from his father which arrives as a missive from the past: "his father's sloped fine hand out of that dead dusty summer where he had prepared for Harvard" (141). In the final section, where Quentin and Shreve jointly narrate and listen, the distinction between teller and hearer vanishes:

   (it was Shreve speaking, though save for the slight difference
   which the intervening degrees of latitude had inculcated in them
   ... it might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both
   thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the
   thought only the thinking become audible, vocal; the two of them
   creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales
   and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere,
   who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived
   and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least,
   to Shreve) shades too) quiet as the visible murmur of their
   vaporizing breath. (243)

The end point of this shared narration is a joint projection into a far distant future, one in which "the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. ... [A]nd so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings" (302).

Directly before Quentin and Shreve's final encounter with storytelling, then, we find two scenes of communication where either speaker or listener appears to be absent: Quentin, when Rosa is speaking, and Mr. Compson, as Quentin reads his letter (separated from its writer by both time and space). Compared to the power of the opening scene between Rosa and Quentin and the astonishing collapse of subjectivity between Quentin and Shreve which is to come, these small absences may seem unimportant. In fact, they serve as a vital stage in the narrative of what happens to storytelling in the course of the novel. In disappearing first the listener and then the speaker, they provide a model for the radical shift in what storytelling comes to mean in the Quentin/Shreve exchange, where one voice represents the subjectivities of two people who are both hearers and listeners. They also set up a shift which takes place in how the storyteller relates to the subject of the story. In eliding the physical body of Rosa in her second speech and that of Mr. Compson when he speaks through a letter, Faulkner makes of these moments of narration a ghostly phenomenon, where disembodied voices speak. And it is this disembodiment which is experienced by Quentin and Shreve in the passage quoted above, where separate bodies cease to matter as voices are shared in speaking of shadows, shades, ghosts from the past.

Such a disembodiment might render this ghost story more simple: that every narrator, sooner or later, becomes a ghost, as Ramos suggested. But the final stage in this narrative of narration is in fact a reembodiment, a turn to a different kind of physicality. Toward the end of the novel the collapse of subjectivity between Quentin and Shreve becomes a shared being among the speakers, listeners, and subjects of the story: Quentin and Shreve, Charles and Henry, "[s] o that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two--Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry" (267); and this shared subjectivity, unlike the haunting of Rosa's voice by Sutpen, has a specifically physical element: Shreve is "panting himself, as if he had had to supply his shade not only with a cue but with breath to obey it in," and the two young men in the cold of a New England night "did not retreat from the cold. They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits' travail of the two young men during that time fifty years ago" (275). Not haunted so much as ghosted, Quentin and Shreve are involved in a kind of two-way possession: their subjectivities possess and are possessed by those of Charles and Henry, and their bodies are directly altered by this experience just as Shreve feels that he has to in turn affect the body of his particular ghost, to animate it, bring it back to corporeal life (I am not who I thought I was).

Storytelling, then, has its own narrative in Absalom, Absalom!: one in which haunting, the disembodied presence of the past in the present, becomes ghosting, the two-way, embodied interrelation of the present and the past. If there is revenge to be taken against time, this would seem to be the way to do it. Faulkner's great achievement here is to present one model of revenge, that of Sutpen's wish to draw a line under the past, to refuse to identify with it, and then formally to offer a different model in the narrative structure of the novel. What we learn from the transformation of sequential time into something more like a chiastic temporal structure (the past and future meet at the moment of narration and radiate out from there) is that while we may use stories to take revenge against time, time is also taking revenge against us. True storytelling here is a kind of possession, a revenant which will not let go. The ghostly future of this book is Quentin's suicide; part of the recursive structure of Absalom, Absalom! is that we as readers must read our extradiegetic knowledge back into the book, so that Quentin appears ghostly, in the shadow of his own death, even as he is at his most embodied or alive. As Derrida suggests on the back cover of The Post Card, stories ghost us, even the ones we count on for self-definition; they can live on after our tellings of them, our readings and writings of them.

   You were reading a somewhat retro love letter, the last in history.
   But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of
   address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open
   letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.... What
   does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it
   possible? Its destination traverses you, you know longer know who
   you are. At the very instant when from its address it
   interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it
   divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you.

The Three of Us are Just Illusions that He Begot: Kinship and Embodiment

It is a common trope in Faulkner criticism to distinguish between national history and family history as the critical focus: one is presented as the metaphor and one as the real thing. Donald M. Kartiganer writes in exemplary fashion that "[m]ore perhaps than the chronicler of a mythic corner of Mississippi, Faulkner is the premier American novelist of family" (381), and Gwendolyn Chabrier states confidently that "[the] family can be seen as a reflection of Southern society at large" (vii). But, as we have seen, if storytelling becomes a technique for both embodiment and ghosting then the way we understand history changes, becomes chiastic, and it is precisely within the language of kinship that this process occurs, rendering the two much more dependent on each other than such critical language would suggest. For kinship, much like Faulkner's particular brand of storytelling and historical understanding, is a way of being embodied temporally: Freeman, we may recall, described it as a desire "to endure in corporeal form over time" (299). It is, however, a way of enduring through time that depends on being recognized. If ghosts in history are those oppressed figures who have not been recognized in the official story, then Faulkner offers us here a story of what happens to those figures who are not recognized within the family. And what is remarkable is that rather than becoming more ghostly over time, as we might expect from Gordon's model of haunting, they become more solid, more embodied.

As John N. Duvall points out, of "his biological sons, Sutpen recognizes only one" (113). His father's refusal to acknowledge him as his son makes Charles into a ghostly figure; he seeks the acknowledgement because it will embody him,

   Because he knew exactly what he wanted; it was just the saying of
   it--the physical touch even though in secret, hidden--the living
   touch of that flesh warmed before he was born by the same blood
   which it had bequeathed him to warm his own flesh with, to be
   bequeathed by him in turn to run hot and loud in veins and limbs
   after that first flesh and then his own were dead. (255)

This disembodying refusal of recognition produces what Judith Butler describes as "the ungrievable life"(24), whereby

   On the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives
   at all, they cannot be humanized; they fit no dominant frame for
   the human, and their dehumanization occurs first, at this level.
   This level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some
   sense delivers the message of dehumanization which is already at
   work in the culture. (25)

Butler's emphasis on the temporality of dehumanization (or, as she will call it later, "spectrality" [111]) is complicated in interesting ways by the recursive temporality of Absalom, Absalom! When we first meet Charles, in Rosa's narration, we know only that he has been killed by Henry: the violence toward him is the first thing that we encounter. We then discover (in this order) that he has a mixed-race mistress in New Orleans, that he is Sutpen's abandoned son and therefore Henry and Judith's half brother, and finally that he himself has black ancestry. (6) The journey here in the narrative is one from violence in discourse to violence in practice, as the actual description of the shooting comes late in the book, and the dehumanization, from eligible bachelor to would-be miscegenator, follows the same pattern, if you accept the premise (which seems to be Henry's) that the discovery that Charles is partly black makes him less human, easier to kill. The problem with this interpretation is that the narrative structure works against it. Because it keeps doubling back, bringing us to the same moments from different perspectives, we cannot help but notice that we have greater access to Charles's interiority each time we visit, for example, New Orleans. While Charles becomes less human for Henry, he becomes more human for us. The more embodied he becomes in his fictional being, reaching forward through time to embody himself in Shreve, the more spectral he becomes to Henry, leading to a shooting that is both a rejection of kinship ties (you will never marry my sister and become part of my family because you are black) and its ultimate affirmation (you will never marry my sister and become part of my family because you are our brother).

Kinship, then, may be a way of "being long," but what kind of kinship are we looking at here? In a society which offers him no room to "be long" in the family to which he desires to belong, Charles extends himself in two ways: through storytelling, in the ghostly coupling of himself and Shreve, and through a deeply troubled biological lineage. And where we might expect the biological offspring route to be less troubled by spectrality than the storytelling experience, the opposite is in fact true. It is important to remember that Sutpen does get a legacy, through Charles's child and grandchild; the racist historiography that reads his design as a failure ignores the extant family, the black one, in favor of the white one that was always already lost, the spectral one. The story of Charles's family is the story of the struggle from spectrality to materiality. After Charles has been dehumanized and killed, his son, Valery, is brought to live with Judith at Sutpen's Hundred and is described as precisely outside of the kinship bonds which would make him comprehensible, make him human: "this child with a face not old but without age, as if he had had no childhood, not in the sense that Miss Rosa Coldfield says she had no childhood, but as if he had not been human born but instead created without agency of man or agony of woman and orphaned by no human being." This kinlessness makes him spectral, immaterial; upon dying, Mr. Compson predicts, he will leave "no bones, no substance, no dust ... as if he were the delicate and perverse spirit-symbol" (159). Valery Bon grows up in the Sutpen household where he has no official place, where he is always "that forlorn little boy invisible between them," and when he leaves he goes to find his body. He does this first by marrying "a coal black and ape-like woman," bringing what his body signifies in secret to the surface (166). He then proceeds to instigate every fight that he can and which he always loses: he is reembodied over the course of a year by being beaten into his own body, so that when he returns to Jefferson it is his injured body which is noticed first, "his head bandaged and his one arm in a sling and the other in a handcuff" (169). He refuses to speak or explain, to be anything except body, and this refusal is embodied yet further in his son, in turn: Jim Bond, Sutpen's last surviving heir and the end point of the journey from the spectral, the disembodied, to the material and dumb. "[T]he Jim Bond, the hulking slack-mouthed saddle-colored boy" (173), whose name is not even a proper noun, whose mouth is not built for speaking, whose color signifies only an object, dead skin.

And yet, the embodied presence of Jim Bond is itself a haunting. When the Sutpen house is burned down by Sutpen's daughter, Clytie, Jim Bond becomes the ghost which haunts it: "the creature which bellowed followed them, wraithlike and insubstantial, looking at them out of the smoke, whereupon the deputy even turned and ran at him, whereupon he retreated, fled, though the howling did not diminish nor even seem to get any further away" (300). Peterson neatly brings together the textual and historical aspects of haunting in describing the continued existence of Jim Bond in the landscape of the text at its climax. He points out, first, that Jim Bond is a specter which haunts both Sutpen's Hundred and the story itself, when he is projected into the distant future by Shreve. He refers to the union-within-storytelling of Quentin and Shreve as "a nonreproductive reproduction that recognizes from the start its failure to repeat the self without remainder, without, that is, producing some specter" (Kindred Specters 121). If kinship claims to reproduce the same over time, the presence of a ghost at the end of the process reveals the impossibility of such claims. In the article version of the Absalom, Absalom! chapter of Kindred Specters, Peterson draws out more explicitly the connection between this haunted kinship and the historical content of the novel, arguing that

both kinship and slavery involve a dialectical logic whose pretensions to synthesis are always haunted by the otherness they exclude. This is not to suggest that kinship is identical to slavery. The point is rather to imagine a nonidealized conception of kinship that begins by recognizing how the other exceeds the vocabulary of the same: how those whom I designate as "kin" are only phantasmatically so. "My" kin remain strangers, in other words, because they are not finally of the same kind--because they are not, after all, mine to claim. ("Haunted House" 258)

For Peterson, the dialectic at work in Absalom, Absalom! seems to be a fully Hegelian dialectic, swallowing up difference, that is established and then haunted by its exclusions. It would seem, however, that there would have to be a three-term dialectic in play here, that kinship, history, and storytelling are equally important and braided into each other in ways which complicate Peterson's model of synthesis plus remainder. To read Absalom, Absalom! within the haunted dialectical model of kinship is to assume that the novel agrees with the general tenor of contemporary criticism: that seeing and listening to ghosts is a politically productive process which helps us to come to terms with the traumas of history. Close attention to the way that kinship functions within the novel, however, suggest that the relationship of the present to its ghosts may be more complicated.

Actual People: Refusing Identification

That kinship means that you want to transmit yourself exactly as you are, a perfect replication through time, is an assumption shared by both Peterson and Freeman. A reading that focuses, as Peterson's does, on the Quentin and Shreve section of the book might well support this, as they identify with their subjects to the point where distinctions between them collapse and all four characters become replicants of each other (and it is hard to see this as anything other than radical and therefore positive). But this idea of kinship is also critiqued in the book, since it is exactly this collapse of difference which is Sutpen's dream, a fundamental part of his design. He wants his children to be just like him. Each time that this replication process occurs, however, it produces a kind of horror. The striking image of his two daughters watching him fight his slaves, for example, is so unnerving to Rosa that it is disavowed even in the moment of its telling: "But I was not there. I was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time--once on Judith and once on the negro girl beside her--looking down through the square entrance to the loft" (22). This uncanny doubling across racial divides is echoed in the descriptions of Sutpen as being identical to his slaves: the first by Rosa when he is riding in his carriage to church, "his face exactly like the negro's save for the teeth" (16), the second by Mr. Compson when he describes the two years Sutpen spent building his house, during which time he "and the negro crew ... went stark naked save for a coating of dried mud" (26). Even Sutpen's poor white worker Wash Jones, the man who eventually kills him, has been described as a Sutpen double; Duvall writes that Wash "resembles the father Sutpen left behind; he also resembles what Sutpen might look like had he not left his father. In age, of course, they could only be brothers" (113). Far from ordering the world in a straight path of patriarchal descent, kinship-as-perfect-repetition serves only to cross and collapse binaries of gender, race, and time itself: son becomes father becomes twin.

Far from it being Faulkner's project to show that identities collapse into being identical with each other and using haunting to show the excess that is created by this process, then, in fact, the problem with this process as it is represented in this novel is that it can be too successful, too able to swallow or disappear not only the other but the ghost of the other, to consume without remainder. The kind of embodiment-through-identification that we see between Quentin and Shreve thus starts to seem more problematic than progressive, and Quentin's physical reaction at the climax of that story, when "he began to jerk all over, violently and uncontrollably until he could even hear the bed" (288) might be more usefully read not as an occluded sexual climax between Shreve and Quentin (Peterson, Kindred Specters 120) or as an "orgasmic reaction to the completion of the story of Henry and Bon" (Duvall 115), but rather as an exorcism, a forceful disaggregation of his consciousness from Shreve's. Such a reading would at least account for the fact that after this moment Quentin and Shreve are no longer joined in the act of storytelling, but rather Quentin takes on the narration of his experiences at Sutpen's Hundred in 1909, and Shreve adopts the role of questioning interlocutor. We might also recall that, in the pattern within the novel of different accesses to the future at different moments of storytelling, the future becomes more controlled by the past the greater the level of identification between speaker and listener. Rosa, who is strictly delineated from Quentin, affects him very little in the 1910 narration, while Mr. Compson, who is both kin and less actively demarcated from Quentin in the text, sends the letter which kickstarts the act of narration in 1910, and Shreve's total identification with Quentin ends with an expression of mastery over not only a future moment but every moment between now and then, in the future anterior of "I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings." Bearing in mind the bleakness of historical determinism in the text, from the seemingly fated destruction of the Sutpen family to the extradiegetic death of Quentin in the book's future, it seems that we will have to find an alternative to this overly successful double process of kinship-as-replication and story-telling-as-replication if we are to find a way out of the trap of history, to find a way not to be living in the history of the future anterior.

Perhaps one way out might be in a certain refusal of identification, of a failure to embody, which occurs in the text at a moment where a different kind of kinship is described. Towards the end of the Civil War, Judith receives a letter from Charles saying that he is coming back to marry her. She takes this letter and gives it to Quentin's grandmother, justifying her action by saying that

   maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give
   them something--a scrap of paper--something, anything, it not to
   mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it,
   not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would
   be something just because it would have happened, be remembered
   even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to
   another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something
   that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason
   that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is
   because it never can become was because it cant ever die or
   perish.... (101)

Far from being an invitation towards embodied identification, which requires a subject with which to identify, transmission through time here is predicated on a perishable message which might never even be read. The emphasis is on acknowledging the distance between people, not collapsing it; the impossibility of identification is related to the necessity of "passing from one hand to another". This way of understanding the condition of being related to others is intimately tied to death: what makes us alive is that fact that one day we will die, which allows relationality to exist because it is the one thing that we all have in common. Yet it does not produce the kind of excess which Peterson describes as spectral. Spectrality in Peterson's view, just as kinship in Freeman's, is based on a certain kind of desire: the desire to reach out across time, whether from the perspective of the present day looking to the past with a kind of archival longing, the desire to continue to exist over time, or the assumption that when we are haunted it is because ghosts have something they want to tell us. What we see in the transmission of Judith's letter, however, is a refusal of direct contact, an insistence on the textuality of the ways in which we mediate between past and future, a rejection of desire as a mode of temporal orientation. Ironically, perhaps, her emphasis on text renders the relationship between past, present, and future ultimately unreadable, not unmarked, but radically resistant to interpretation and to interpretation's ghostly twin, identification. (7)

Storytelling may turn out to be something of a red herring in Absalom, Absalom! It creates a form of embodied identification which has frequently been read as politically useful, an alternative to traditional forms of both kinship and determinist historiography. Yet Faulkner also critiques such identification, showing it to be just as oppressive as the modes it hopes to overpass. But a rejection of such processes does not necessarily mean that there is no mode of better living offered in the novel, and if one is to be found, it is perhaps in the figure of Rosa--the figure most often left aside, both in the novel and in critical discourse, for being too old-fashioned, too transparent. We feel like we know her type and her motives, her all-too-predictable female jealousy. Her kind of transparency, however, is peculiarly opaque; she is not a sympathetic figure; she blocks readerly and critical attachment. But at the end of the novel, we learn twice that Rosa has a unique kind of agency: "she refused at the last to be a ghost" (289).

This refusal has a political edge. At the very start of the novel, Mr. Compson voices a theory of ghosts which positions women as outside of historical action: "Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?" (7-8). For the patriarchal Mr. Compson, the war, which removes fathers and brothers from the social frame, ghosts Southern women by removing the kinship structures within which they could fulfill their social role as "ladies." Mr. Compson's view is implicitly shared by critics who, in attempting to restore to Rosa the role of agent within the text, do so by attempting to write her into the logic of reproductive kinship. Both Rosa's failures and successes are viewed in these terms; Sally R. Page writes that Rosa is "excluded from the normal female role of marriage and motherhood" (102), and Olivia Carr Edenfield describes Rosa's "inability to fit into any of the roles [mother, daughter, sister, aunt, lady, wife] that she should have been able to take for granted'" (qtd. in Lazure 480n). When Erica Plouffe Lazure wishes to rescue Rosa's reputation and represent her with historical agency, she argues that, rather than failing to inhabit the usual kinship structure, Rosa succeeds in becoming a mother and lover through her storytelling relationship with Quentin: "By transforming her wounds into narrative, by finding a willing listener with whom she can birth her story, Rosa can reclaim her womanhood and her humanity" (493). (8) To conflate membership in a kinship community with the attainment of humanity, as Lazure does here, is, however, to follow Mr. Compson's assumption that life outside of kinship is what ghosts us, while in fact, as we have seen, in this text it is precisely the overidentification called for by kinship both real and imaginary that turns us into ghosts. It is by refusing such identifications, by being "neither aunt cousin nor uncle Rosa," by being, as Shreve says, "no kin to you, no kin to you at all" (142), that Rosa becomes capable of changing history rather than simply embodying it.

The moment that Rosa refuses to be a ghost is exactly the moment where she gains agency in the text. She refuses to live in the unfinished end of history, inactive, immaterial, so she returns to Sutpen's Hundred and initiates the crisis of the family saga. Unlike Quentin, ghosted, suicidal, she refuses to be inhabited by the past like "a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts" (7). Benn Michaels writes that ghosts in fiction function as "the deployment of history in the constitution of identity": they bring the past into the present and make them part of our own experience, allowing us to have memories that we could not possibly have and then construct our cultural identities around the having--or not having--of these memories (7). Absalom, Absalom! reveals the cost of such a gesture: that we will be locked into patterns of destructive repetition and that our identities will be defined neither by our actions nor our beings, but by the actions of others, long dead. Rosa offers an alternative to this doomed relationship with the past. She positions herself in history without identification with past or future, at her moment alone, and in so doing, she offers a relationship with the past which is neither dangerous, as when the past ghosts the present, or instrumentalizing, like Shreve's imaginary lawyer, constructing versions of the past in different forms for personal gain. Mr. Compson, when we finally read the second half of his letter reporting Rosa's death right at the end of the book, describes her as having "herself gained that place or bourne where the objects of the outrage and of the commiseration also are no longer ghosts but are actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity" (301-02). Ghosts are not necessarily a sign that we should pay attention to the historically oppressed, or of that alterity that we exclude when we refer to our kin as "ours." They can also signify a refusal: a refusal to affectively engage with the past in a way that assumes that we can imaginatively identify with it, that it is readable enough for us to be able to master it. (9) The problem with ghosts is not that we do not offer them enough recognition, but that we recognize them too easily, and this claim to recognition presumes a mastery over the past that is often a way of ghosting ourselves, a refusal to fully engage with the present, to get up out of our darkened rooms and to become, not ghosts, but historical actors.

University of Pennsylvania

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(1) For the many, many different ways in which the role of the ghost in Beloved has been read, see (among others) Benn Michaels ("You Who Never Was There"), Daniel Erickson, Deborah Horvitz, Peter Ramadanovic, Barbara Hill Rigney, and Roland Vegso.

(2) Derrida is reading Heidegger in Specters; I therefore maintain the Heideggerian capitalized form of Being that is used by both Derrida and Christopher Peterson.

(3) There may be a gendered element to this exclusion: the ghost story in America was a form primarily written by women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this literary history has been long underrepresented (see Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar). Derrida writes about kinship in a purely patrilineal way in Specters, focusing on the relationship between Hamlet and his father. As I will demonstrate, Faulkner both describes and critiques the patrilineal obsession with intergenerational transmission that excludes women from history.

(4) My focus in this article is very narrowly directed at ghosts. Haunting this term, but excluded from it, are two other major theoretical concerns: trauma theory, which offers a model of unconscious repetition which could account for the compulsion of Quentin to repeat the traumatic history of the Sutpen family (and the South more generally) in his narration and in his later suicide (see Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra); and the uncanny, which would read the same events as an example of doubling (Quentin/Shreve and Charles/Henry) and the confusion between the human and the mechanical (see Freud and Nicholas Royle). My reasons for excluding these theories are several. Firstly, while ghost theory has been popular in critical theory for some time, in literary studies it is often thought of as something that the more important uncanny has been "reduced to" (Masschelein 62). In prioritizing ghost theory as a separate discipline, I reject this reading of it as a subset of the uncanny and argue for its importance on its own terms. Secondly, both the uncanny and trauma theory rely on a passive model of subjectivity to account for strange occurrences; both doubling and traumatic repetition happen outside of the conscious mind. My interest here is in how the subject responds actively to the experience of being ghosted.

(5) To take seriously Sutpen's rebellion against a capitalist class system adds in another temporal dimension that could be usefully considered here: when Faulkner was writing Absalom, Absalom! in 1936, left wing writers were agitating for exactly this kind of change. For an argument for spending more time in this dimension and reading Faulkner as politically radical, see Ted Atkinson, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology and Cultural Practice.

(6) I do not mean to imply here that the final and most "true" truth about Charles is that he is of African descent. I do take seriously, however, two arguments made by other scholars regarding revelation in Absalom, Absalom! Joseph R. Urgo writes that "[t]he difference between Absalom, Absalom! and its predecessors is that perspectives are folded over one another to provide a single, recognizable text, or series of pictures, by two of the narrators themselves--and not solely by the reader.... Quentin and Shreve make a Sutpen story from materials which Quentin produces and Shreve ultimately shapes, or directs, into a coherent pattern" (59). Accepting this means that we can take seriously the pattern of revelation not as an uncovering of truth but as a decision that Quentin and Shreve make as they construct the story together. They place this information in the climactic position within their story; it therefore seems appropriate, in an analysis of this story as it stands, to accord the final revelation a certain significance. Martin Kreiswirth also suggests this significance in his analysis of Charles's introduction into the story as someone from a possible multiracial heritage: "Regardless of plausibility or textual authority, once Charles is said to be racially part African American, his social categorization for Quentin and Shreve entirely changes; as such, although nothing visible or outward has changed, he is now both the same as he was before, but also wholly different" (132). In a society in which the imputation of "one drop"--true or not--can have a very real social impact, the presence or not of the "drop" itself ceases to become the final arbiter of significance.

(7) For a full theoretical account of the importance of accepting the past's resistance to identification, see Heather Love's Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (31-52).

(8) Lazure offers an excellent review of the many ways in which Rosa has been read as a failure in "A Literary Motherhood: Roas Coldfield's Design in Absalom, Absalom!"

(9) See Lauren Berlant's The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture for an argument for the political need for "an inheritance without a mimetic compulsion or fear of emotional opacity" (67).