Office Hours #1: Technically the Worst Paper I’ve Ever Written

The Time: Winter, Senior Year

The Class: English Senior Seminar
The general goal of the class was to prepare us for grad school, in much the same way that an AP class in high school is supposed to prepare you for college. The specific focus of the class was to look at the city of New Orleans through literary, historical, and critical texts.

The Assignment: Compare, contrast, and synthesize two critical essays on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, including an analysis of the role of New Orleans in the text. (If you haven’t read the novel, you may wish to read a summary of it before continuing.)

Final Draft

Easy Street and the Big Easy:
History and Class in Absalom, Absalom!

In “History and the Sense of the Tragic,” Cleanth Brooks argues against what he sees as a “typical misreading” of Absalom, Absalom! that reads the fall of Thomas Sutpen “as a myth of the fall of the Old South” (18, 29). According to Brooks, this is a misreading because Sutpen “is rationalistic and scientific, not traditional, not religious, not even superstitious” (28). Sutpen’s actions, then, are not motivated by tradition or religion, not to mention race, which are the standard signifiers of the South, but by his innocence. Brooks does not mean innocence in the way we usually conceive of it, as a sort of uncomplicated goodness, but rather as General Compson (via Mr. Compson via Quentin) defines it: “that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was all finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out” (Faulkner 211-212). This describes Sutpen’s “abstract approach to the whole matter of living” (Brooks 20). Brooks compares Sutpen to a robber baron whose “acquiring [of] a box at the opera did not usually spring from a love of music” (20). Sutpen’s design, to build a dynasty like that of the rich plantation owner whose slave turned Sutpen away as a child, is not based on any particular investment in the Old South power structure; his investment is in power, and he naturally uses the “ingredients” of the structure he finds himself in in order to achieve that power. Thus, Brooks argues that Sutpen’s tragedy, rather than being the monolithic tragedy of the South, is the individual tragedy of figures like Oedipus and Macbeth, the one who possesses an innocence “corrupted by success,” and the other who possesses a courage that never fails, even to the end (30).

Like Brooks, Dirk Kuyk, Jr., also sees Sutpen as a figure who “might actually deserve the word heroic” (Kuyk 191, emphasis in original). For Kuyk, however, Sutpen’s heroism is not the tragic heroism of personality that Brooks ascribes to him, but an actual measurable beneficence. While Kuyk agrees, as far as it goes, with the “essentially unanimous” interpretation of Sutpen’s design as being to establish a dynasty within the Old South power structure (i.e power accrued through the possession of slaves and land and passed down through the first-born son), he disagrees that mere power is Sutpen’s ultimate goal (192). Furthermore, he disagrees with those critics who go a step further and argue that Sutpen’s desire is to be admired by society, or that his success stands in as revenge for the wrong done to him as a child. Kuyk argues that none of these interpretations explain Sutpen’s actions. For example, most critics agree that Sutpen rejects his first wife after discovering that she is mixed-race (Kuyk 194). Kuyk, however, argues that “[r]acial mixing would not bar [Sutpen] or his wife from high status in the West Indies, and Sutpen himself did not object to it: Clytie seems to have been his daughter” (194). Thus, if a powerful dynasty is his only goal, he should have been satisfied with his first wife and son and not needed to leave and try again in Jefferson. Likewise, after achieving success in Jefferson, the appearance of Charles Bon should have posed no threat to him: “[Sutpen] does not seem to have [prevented Bon and Judith’s marriage] to prevent incest. Miscegenation neither offended him nor threatened a dynasty founded on Henry; and [if Bon’s legitimacy were actually defendable] primogeniture would have allowed him to found his dynasty on whichever son was his ‘rightful’ heir” (Kuyk 202). Again, then, there is no reason for Sutpen to be dissatisfied, and yet he is. To explain these inconsistencies, Kuyk offers his own elaboration on the nature of Sutpen’s design. He points to the conversation Sutpen has with himself following the incident with Pettibone’s slave:

“‘If you were fixing to combat them that had the fine rifles, the first thing you would do would be to get yourself the nearest thing to a fine rifle you could borrow or steal or make, wouldn’t it?’ and he said Yes. ‘But this aint a question of rifles. So to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what they did. You got to have land and n[*****]s and a fine house to combat them with. You see?’ and he said Yes again.”

(Faulkner 192)

Kuyk argues that Sutpen’s enemies are the plantation owners, and their rifles are their dynasties. Thus Sutpen’s design involves getting a “fine” dynasty of his own. The qualifier is significant, as it explains the inconsistencies previously mentioned. A dynasty founded on a mixed-race marriage, or including a mixed-race son and/or son-in-law, while still adequate, would not be “fine,” not by societal standards. For his dynasty to be an effective weapon, it needs to be as close to flawless as possible. But owning the rifle isn’t enough—he needs to be able to fire it. “To return the fire of those with fine rifles,” writes Kuyk, “one shoots back. The similar rifle fires in the opposite direction. The plantation owner had the little boy turned away; Sutpen will open the door and welcome [the little boy] into his family” (207). Thus, Sutpen does not merely want to participate in the system but to subvert it. According to Kuyk, “although his means of completing his design remain ruthless and wrong, his end is now seen not as selfish aggrandizement but as an attack on the immorality of dynastic society” (209).

To better understand these similar yet significantly different interpretations, we need to understand each author’s thematic investment, the lenses through which they are focusing their analysis. Brooks, as the title of his essay suggests, is invested in exploring the concept and practice of history. He points out that because Sutpen’s story is coming to us through multiple layers of interpretation he is less a “historical figure” and more “an imaginative construct, a set of inferences—a hypothesis put forward to account for several peculiar events” (Brooks 31). The forefront of the novel is not Sutpen himself, but Quentin and Shreve attempting to make sense of history. “The novel,” writes Brooks, “has to do not merely with the meaning of Sutpen’s career but with the nature of historical truth and with the problem of how we can ‘know’ the past” (31).

Brooks extrapolates from the construction of Sutpen to argue that “Absalom, Absalom! is a persuasive commentary upon the thesis that much of ‘history’ is really a kind of imaginative construction. The past always remains at some level a mystery, but if we are to hope to understand it in any way, we must enter into it and project ourselves imaginatively into the attitudes and emotions of the historical figures” (34). To understand Sutpen, then, Quentin and Shreve (or the reader) must not simply look at the dry facts, such as they are (or as much as they could be said to be facts, for that matter), but must imagine themselves within the historical space. Indeed, Quentin and Shreve do this explicitly when they imagine themselves as Charles and Henry riding away from Sutpen’s Hundred: “So 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” (Faulkner 267).

In his dissection of Quentin and Shreve’s relationship to history, Brooks seems to hint at another reason why some may be tempted to read Sutpen’s fall as the fall of the South, and why he disagrees. “What is it,” Brooks asks, “that Quentin as a southerner has that Shreve does not have? It is a sense of the presence of the past and with it an access to a tragic vision” (36). Thus, Brooks does place Sutpen’s “heroic and tragic” nature squarely in the psychic space of the South (29). This tragedy, however, is not immanent within Sutpen, but is embedded in his narrative by Quentin as he interprets it.

There is one more point I wish to make, in order to return to it later. Brooks argues that Sutpen, “[m]ore than most characters in literature, … is an imaginative construct” (31, emphasis added). I would argue, however, that a more imaginatively constructed character exists within Absalom, Absalom! itself—Charles Bon. Though the whole narrative is ultimately filtered through Quentin and Shreve, Sutpen’s story comes to us partly through those who actually knew him, namely Rosa and General Compson. Yet none of the people who speak about Bon—Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve—ever met him. The only hard evidence included in his narrative is the letter Judith gives to Mrs. Compson; everything else is speculative.

Leaving Brooks for the time-being, let us examine Kuyk’s analytical lens. Remember that, according to Kuyk, Sutpen’s design is “an attack on the immorality of dynastic society” (209). The defining traits of dynastic society are: patriarchal rule, slave ownership, and restricting wealth to a small upper echelon. Thus, the three aspects of immorality that Sutpen might be attacking are, broadly, sexism, racism, and classism. Given Sutpen’s treatment of women, and his clear desire to maintain the patriarchal nature of his dynasty, sexism is clearly not the issue. If he were attacking racism, then his first marriage would have been significantly more effective as a didactic tool than his second. And certainly Sutpen himself seems to wholeheartedly buy into slavery and the racial hierarchy. Thus, we are left with the final issue: class. It is this theme, then, that Kuyk is bringing to the table.

If the image of a rich man very publicly adopting a poor child seems familiar, perhaps you are thinking of a certain little orphan who sings a lot about tomorrow, and the New York tycoon who takes her in. Indeed, Sutpen is not dissimilar to Daddy Warbucks: both are self-made men, and both are looking to take in a poor child in order to make a statement, rather than out of any real affection (though Daddy Warbucks obviously ends up changing his tune). Not only that, but Annie takes place during the Great Depression—the same time Faulkner was writing Absalom, Absalom!. As Kuyk points out, in the 1930s “[p]lenty of nameless strangers were knocking at front doors. Many were sent around to the back. … The social legislation of the New Deal … might be said to spring from a conception a little like Sutpen’s” (209). Like Roosevelt, “Sutpen meant his design to teach society the lesson that those lucky enough to have risen above brutehood” (Sutpen’s word) “should at least care about the feelings of the unlucky” (208).

Lest this comparison go too far, however, it should be pointed out that Sutpen is not, despite Brooks’s and Kuyk’s assertions, a hero. Daddy Warbucks, as I said before, actually ends up caring about Annie, while Roosevelt (both in the film and in real life) affected thousands of lives, not just one. Not only that, but by Kuyk’s own admission, Sutpen’s design would likely never have had its desired effect, as the plantation class “would not … have understood it any better than, say, most readers have” (208). Sutpen himself may not have truly understood it. If his concept of morality is simplistic, his concept of immorality is likely also flawed. He is not pursuing his design because he understands, on a large scale, the immorality he is attacking; he is pursuing the design solely on behalf of his traumatized childhood self, the “boy-symbol” (Faulkner 210).

Finally, I would like to once again highlight the issue of Charles Bon. Kuyk sees the fact that Charles Bon is Sutpen’s son as the most important factor disqualifying him from fulfilling Sutpen’s design. One could argue that this is why Sutpen sees accepting Bon as completing his design “quite normally and naturally and successfully to the public eye, yet to [his] own in such fashion as to be a mockery and a betrayal of that little boy who approached the door fifty years ago and was turned away” (Faulkner 220). Even if Bon’s identity were kept secret, Sutpen would still be aware of it and know that he had failed to bring in a “nameless stranger” (Faulkner 210). Yet Sutpen’s design depends upon the public’s perception; so long as people think that he has accepted a stranger, his message still gets across. The bigger barrier, in my view, which Kuyk includes but skates over in his enumeration of Bon’s disqualifying qualities, is Bon’s class. Bon, by all appearances, is fairly well-off. Sutpen’s accepting him, then, would seem successful to the public because it would be a respectable marriage (assuming no one learned about the incest or miscegenation), yet would be a betrayal to Sutpen’s design because it would fail to address the immorality of plantation dynasties. Again, I will return to this point later.

Now we can see that in order to synthesize these two essay we need to address the connections between history and class. For this discussion our framework will be supplied by philosopher, literary critic, and contemporary (chronologically speaking) of Faulkner, Walter Benjamin.¹ In his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin explicates the idea of historical materialism, a mode of historical analysis heavily informed by Marxist philosophy. As such, historical materialists are very much invested in the class struggle, and seek to use history as a tool in that struggle. Historical materialism is placed in opposition to historicism. “[A]dherents of historicism,” writes Benjamin, “empathize … with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the ruler” (256). In response, historical materialism privileges the narrative of the oppressed over the narrative of the oppressor.

Let us begin by applying Benjamin’s apparatus to Sutpen, through both Brooks’s and Kuyk’s lenses (or imaginative constructions, as it were). Benjamin writes that “[t]he kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to;” it is “thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us” (254). This, in a way, explains Sutpen’s innocence as described by Brooks: his image of happiness is bound up with the time in which he lives, which in this case is during slavery. Furthermore, “[o]ur image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. … Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim” (Benjamin 254, emphasis in original). Sutpen can, in a way, be seen as trying to express this Messianic power in his design, to redeem his generation (at least, in terms of class). On the other hand, one could also argue that Sutpen’s idea of redemption is warped. In critiquing the German Social Democrats, Benjamin argues that they “thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren” (260). If Sutpen is empowered by attempting to redeem the sins of the past, he is corrupted by his focus on freeing the “nameless stranger” and “his descendants … from brutehood” (Faulkner 210). Likewise, Sutpen takes the idea that “[t]he class struggle … is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist” to its extreme (Benjamin 254), thinking that he can use those crude and material things as ingredients to make the cake of spirituality (so to speak). On the subject of Sutpen’s innocence, Benjamin writes that “[o]ne reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm” (257). One can see a similar attitude in Sutpen’s uncritical adoption of southern traditions and power structures. Indeed, this is yet another critique of Kuyk’s view of Sutpen as a heroic figure: by viewing the plantation system as the only valid route to success, Sutpen gives it credibility even as he is trying to attack it.

Finally, let us return to Charles Bon. I stated earlier that Bon is more of an imaginative construct than even Sutpen, and that his most disqualifying quality for being part of Sutpen’s design is his class. These two ideas are connected through a space that is only briefly seen in Absalom, Absalom!: the city of New Orleans. New Orleans itself is an imaginative construct, a city formed by conflicting narratives, some historical and others not.² A significant aspect of this construction is the social standing of gens de colour, or people of color, a term used to apply, generally, to people of mixed-race heritage, and, specifically, to those mixed-race people with especially light skin. Because of this distinction, the racial hierarchy in New Orleans differed from the binary black-and-white race relations of the rest of the Old South. Light-skinned people of color were, at various points in time, quite successful in New Orleans, sometimes by passing as white, sometimes not. In this way, New Orleans is embodied in the figure of Charles Bon. His construction in the imaginations of Quentin and his interlocutors is inseparable from the city; likewise, his social standing is only possible within the confines of New Orleans.

Thus, to salvage and synthesize both Brooks’ and Kuyk’s analyses, we must center our gaze not on Sutpen but on Charles Bon. It is there that we will find Faulkner most concisely exemplifying the intersection of history and class. Whether Bon is the true hero of Absalom, Absalom! (or indeed a hero at all) is the subject for another time.

1 While it may strike a reader of Benjamin as ironic (to the point of being disrespectful) that I am using his ideas to analyze a novel, given his distaste for the form, I would argue that Absalom, Absalom! (and, indeed, the Modernist movement in general) does not commit the fallacies which Benjamin protests against, and thus it is not inappropriate to apply his ideas in this discussion.
2 For example, the complex and controversial history of the term “Creole.”

Works Cited
Annie. Dir. Rob Marshall. Perf. Kathy Bates, Victor Garber, and Alicia Morton. ABC, 1999. Videocassette.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 1950. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 2007. 253-64. Print.
Brooks, Cleanth. “History and the Sense of the Tragic.” 1963. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: A Casebook. Ed. Fred Hobson. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 17-46. Print.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.
Kuyk, Dirk, Jr. “Sutpen’s Design.” 1963. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: A Casebook. Ed. Fred Hobson. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 189-218. Print.

Grade: C+

Professor’s Comments: “This is an intriguing paper, and on many different levels. Your title and your use of Annie is, quite literally, one of the best things I’ve ever seen done in a paper. (And I will now be singing “Easy Street” for days.) You’ve thought about Brooks and Kuyk in really complex and productive ways. The critical dialogue component was exceedingly strong. The issues that arose really happened at an execution and approach level. The first being that you didn’t have an intro/thesis that announced your interpretive foundation and/or analytical argument. As you went on in the paper, I could see moments where your intervention began to surface. Bon + NOLA, history/class, Sutpen’s design—all of these ideas need to work together simultaneously to ground your analysis. They also become the way you situate your intervention in relation to Brooks/Kuyk, i.e., what you’re building upon and detracting from and why. Much of the latter part of your paper read like a critique of the critics, wherein you use Benjamin to go beyond their framework. This was a good move. Within it, we also needed some concrete analysis from the novel that was advancing your argument. I could see threads throughout, but everything needed to be announced and set up more directly/clearly so that we could access and follow your analytical moves.
While the grade might not necessarily reflect this, there was a lot of great work in this paper.”

My Comments: This is, as far as I know, the lowest grade I ever got on a paper—and I really like this paper. Reading Absalom, Absalom! at the pace required for the class (~70 pages/day) and then having to write about it while also understanding and synthesizing what two other people think about it almost drove me to tears multiple times, so I’m kind of shocked that I came out the other side with anything remotely coherent to say about the novel, let alone interesting. And I got to cite the best version of Annie and one of my favoritest esoteric philosophers. Which, I should say, are not incidental factors—working my personal interests into papers has consistently been a guaranteed method for making them easier to write and more enjoyable to read. Keep in mind that professors are reading hundreds of papers at a time, many of which are predictable, surface-level rehashings of class discussions, with clunky, boring prose. It is, by and large, not fun. If a professor says they enjoyed reading your paper, that is the highest compliment they can give you as a writer.

That being said, I agree with almost all of my professor’s criticisms. I definitely did a poor job of clearly communicating my intentions throughout the paper, and while I’d like to say that that’s because I didn’t know what they were until the end (as was the case with many of my papers), looking at the outline below it seems like I had a decent idea of where I was going (though the file for the paper itself was created before both the second Notes file and the outline, so it’s possible that I was writing the outline as I went too, essentially planning one step ahead the whole time.) I still found it relatively easy to follow, but then again, I wrote it. As much as I tend to be wary of traditional formalistic requirements for paper structure, some structure is still necessary.

What my professor graciously did not mention is that the paper’s conclusion kind of comes out of nowhere and doesn’t feel like it’s really tying everything up. On a metatextual level I know that that’s because I was struggling with how to fit New Orleans in and ended up desperately tacking it on at the end, but if I’d just had a thesis statement at the beginning along the lines of, “In this paper I’ll show that neither Brooks or Kuyk are right about Sutpen’s heroism and that the real focus of their respective lenses should be on Charles Bon,” then it would’ve been fine. In academic writing, as in jazz, if you repeat something then it’s not a mistake. That might strike some as a disingenuous technique, but may I present Exhibit A, a paper that contains “a lot of great work,” but still got a C+. Don’t let good work get a bad grade just because you couldn’t find the perfect solution to a problem.

My one disagreement with the feedback is the bit about having “concrete analysis from the novel” in the Benjamin section. I feel like the points of analysis have been pretty well established by then, and it’s really more a matter of interpretation. That being said, I probably could have restated and recontextualized some of the passages referenced previously to make sure the reader is aware that those are still the textual evidence I’m using. This is the kind of “show your work” drudgery that I’ve always disliked about writing papers, but in this you should probably not follow my example.

Also, I want to point out that both of the footnotes in this paper are pointless and self-indulgent and shouldn’t be there. Referring back to my previous point about bringing in personal interests, sometimes that can be taken too far; make sure that it’s still relevant to the subject at hand.

Finally, this is a good example of how much of the work of writing a paper doesn’t end up in the paper. See below for my two separate “Notes” files that I’m sure made sense at the time, and an outline.

Pre-Production