Absalom, Absalom

TrHE view that Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner's greatest novel, his most complex and rewarding literary work, makes it easy to forget that the novel was written for the most part in Hollywood while Faulkner was paid scriptwriter. He would work on the novel early in the morning before going to the studio to write screenplays, participate in story conferences, and work on location at various film projects. The novel contains number of indelible images, including central one in which Quentin and Shreve sit a lamplit table to collaborate on the Sutpen story. The two students, together in foreign environment, sit in the room and contemplate one another's perspectives and insights across this juxtaposition of intellectual energies.1 The collaboration, the strange meeting of talents, produces compelling historical narrative. Whether their story is true enough is matter of some debate, but what is unquestionable is the amazing productivity of their joint effort. In one night they outline an American epic. Quentin and Shreve, as collaborators, must have originated not in Faulkner's experience as sole owner and proprietor of the apocryphal county but in his successful record as an employee in the Hollywood studio system. Only there did he sit regularly at lamplit tables from interlocutors in order to get story told. Absalom, Absalom! is about history and mythmaking and narrative and storytelling and all the rest, so aptly and thoroughly explicated over the past decades, but it is about one more thing as well. Absalom, Absalom! is about movie-making, and the production of images and moving pictures under the strange, forced, and often brutal conditions of an environment foreign to everyone, Hollywood

Aesthetics · Art · Cinema and Media Studies · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

• Some Trashy Myth of Reality's Escape”

  Peter Lurie•American Literature•2001

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