Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Quentin Compson: Tyrrhenian Vase or Crucible of Race?
- 2 Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti, and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions
- 3 Absalom, Absalom! and Rosa Coldfield: Or, “What Is in the Dark House?”
- 4 The Persistence of Thomas Sutpen: Absalom, Absalom!, Time, and Labor Discipline
- 5 Forget Jerusalem, Go to Hollywood – “To Die. Yes. To Die?” (A Coda to Absalom, Absalom!)
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
- Titles in the Series
5 - Forget Jerusalem, Go to Hollywood – “To Die. Yes. To Die?” (A Coda to Absalom, Absalom!)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Quentin Compson: Tyrrhenian Vase or Crucible of Race?
- 2 Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti, and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions
- 3 Absalom, Absalom! and Rosa Coldfield: Or, “What Is in the Dark House?”
- 4 The Persistence of Thomas Sutpen: Absalom, Absalom!, Time, and Labor Discipline
- 5 Forget Jerusalem, Go to Hollywood – “To Die. Yes. To Die?” (A Coda to Absalom, Absalom!)
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
- Titles in the Series
Summary
At the close of “Wild Palms” (1939), Harry Wilbourne, like Quentin before him, survives to be a crypt, but in this case both the construction of the tomb and the identity of its occupant are explicit. Imprisoned for the botched abortion that led to the death of his mistress, Charlotte Rittenmeyer, Harry rejects suicide in the form of a cyanide capsule proffered by the offended husband in favor of fifty years hard labor in Parchman prison, during which time he will turn his body into a mausoleum containing the memory of Charlotte:
so there was just memory, forever and inescapable, so long as there was flesh to titillate …. But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails: and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint in the night.
To come upon this, having read Absalom, Absalom! and recognizing that Quentin and Harry share analogous functions as “vault,” is to be shocked by the explicitness of the later text. Faced with Quentin's paralyzed “rigidity,” and sensing deletions, I searched among mutilated signs in order to locate an encrypted secret that remains finally unspeakable, at least for its bearer. In contradistinction, Harry not only declares that he has introduced a loved body into his own body for safekeeping, but he proves it.
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- Fictions of LaborWilliam Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution, pp. 179 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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