Absalom presents two narrators standing at opposite poles in their understanding of time. The first, Rosa Coldfield, tells Quentin Compson, who listens patiently, about what might be called the life and times of Thomas Sutpen. This rather erroneous description of his act, however, immediately suggests something missing in his conception of Sutpen, namely a life and a time. She takes Sutpen out of time and treats him as an immortal, viewing him alternately as a god and a demon. Quentin, the second narrator, has an opposite sense of time: a philosophically complete understanding of time in the sense expounded by Henri Bergson. This understanding results from the cultural process of osmosis, through which full understanding is inherited. While Rosa's problem may appear as an isolated insensitivity to this heritage, Faulkner delicately traces Rosa's problem, not to Rosa, but rather to her relationship to the story she tells, to her involvement in it- here. In this plot, we see Rosa's problem not as an isolated problem, but as a crisis of understanding at the very heart of Faulkner's struggles in writing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The monologues of Rosa Coldfield that Quentin listens to have one thing at their center: Thomas Sutpen. At the heart of his understanding is his belief in his immortality. When she learned of his death, she denied it: “'Dead,' I cried. Dead? You? You are lying; you are not dead, heaven cannot, and hell does not dare, does it/”. This denial of Sutpen's end is complemented by a denial of his beginnings when she remembers the first time she saw Sutpen: "he first came to town with no discernible past." In these first and last moments, Rosa expresses her belief in Sutpen who comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. In his mind, he is not a creation evolving from start to finish, but is perpetually suspended somewhere in between, outside of time. When he goes to war, she “just stands there and waits for Thomas Sutpen to come home,” with no doubt in her mind about his survival, even in the bloodiest war. This point of view is not only present in Rosa's memories: the macro-structure of Sutpen's life, but also in the micro-structure. When she describes her memory of his proposal to him, she says, "he never thought about what he asked me to do until he asked her." Just as in her life as a whole, in her actions she sees no cause, no beginning, no thought, only pure action. As these actions came out of nowhere, they “left no trace to save those instantaneous and incredible tears.” His actions appear to be a single point of energy with no density, no matter or existence outside of their pure energy. Even the words he speaks “are not to be spoken and heard but are to be read carved in bland stone.” Spoken sentences involve a progression of individual words, one after the other, and therefore a progression over time. Rosa rejects this and instead understands that her words occur all at once, in an inscription. The lack of dialogue extends to Rosa's entire monologue. Although she occasionally remembers something she said or was said directly to her, her story is essentially devoid of any dialogue. The denial of Sutpen's existence between moments extends to his entire story. She sees time as a series of points, not as a progression or succession. If the essence of time is, as definedHenri Bergson, two things: “points”, but “in addition, the obscure and mysterious passage from one position to another”. next,” then Rosa clearly stripped down her story of the second as the move from one position to the next. It is this succession from one to the other which creates what Bergson posits as essential to all beings in time: duration. By stripping her characters of duration, she becomes one of the two degenerate types of historians Nietzsche speaks of: the antiquarian. She “mummifies” her past by varnishing each past moment like a piece of furniture then puts it aside to deny its existence in a set of larger moments, as one would refuse a piece of furniture a place in a room. By doing this, Nietzsche says that one “wraps oneself in the odor of rot.” Perhaps this is exactly what Quentin detects when he senses a "coffin-smelling darkness" in the room where he sits and listens to Rosa's story. By mummifying and stripping Sutpen and her entire past of all flux, she strips the past of its temporality. The problem of her temporality is compounded by the small number of moments she sees in the past; while it provides the reader with snapshots, it provides very few snapshots. It considers each set of times as composed only of a few isolated moments. Recounting the three months immediately after Sutpen returned home, she says: “And then one afternoon in January, Thomas Sutpen came home; someone looked up to where we were preparing the garden for another year's food and saw him coming up the driveway. And then one evening, I got engaged to marry him." She reduces these three months to two single moments. Her reduction of time is even more apparent on a large scale. As the reader might believe from the story of Rosa, her life was just a few moments: the moment Bon died, the moments he handed his father food in the attic, the moment Thomas Sutpen proposed to her, and a few others. Nothing the rest of her life is revealed except these moments She is therefore also, like the other of Nietzsche's two degenerate historians, the monumental historian As Nietzsche describes it, “very large parts of the past are forgotten, despised and. flow (...) and only the embellished facts stand out like islands. Thinking of the past, Hightower says that "the world hangs in a green suspension in color and texture like light through colored glass." He sees the past as a still life, more specifically, in the description of the material as glass-like and green, it seems possible that this is a reference to Keats's green Greek urn. Whether or not this is the case, the urn is a good objective correlative of what Rosa has done over time. By choosing a few monumental moments from her past and depriving these moments of any movement, she makes her past a kind of gel on an urn. Quentin is patient during Rosa's monologue but near the end, the narrator reveals that Quentin "wasn't listening." .” He didn't listen because there was "something he couldn't convey." He needs to go back and remember something, and from the first moments of remembering he shows himself interested in everything about the life and times of Thomas Sutpen that Rosa was not, namely the era and its existence as a living, breathing creature. . In one sentence, he wanted to retemporalize the story that Rosa had told him. Only moments after Rosa's voice quiets in the hot Mississippi night, he introduces a main element into the story that was missing from the hours ofRosa's monologue: the dialogue. He imagines the dialogue between Henry and Judith just after Henry kills Judith's lover, Good: Now you can't marry him. Why can't I marry him? Because he is dead. Dead? Yes. I killed him. By assuming this past as a medium in which one word could follow another, Quentin assumes temporal succession in a way immediately foreign to Rosa's creation. But the description immediately preceding this reenactment by Quentin of Judith running toward the door after hearing the gunshot that killed Bon already revealed Quentin's interest in temporal succession. Cluttering his description with signifiers of temporal flow, he recounts that Judith "stopped, looking at the door," "then quickly caught up with the white girl and stood before her as the door sank in and the brother stood there without hat. . . the pistol is still hanging on his side. Words like stop, quickly, and again all fundamentally suggest an understanding of time conscious of its quality as a succession of moments, each passing into one another. All this: “He (Quentin) couldn’t pass that. » Quentin reconceptualizes this climactic moment as having everything Rosa has ever seen in her own past and then extends this to Sutpen's entire story. At the beginning of his own story, he still calls Sutpen a demon: “Jones crouched against a post, getting up from time to time to pour canister for the demon” (183). But even as he refers to the demon, he also refers to the demon as existing in a situation in which moments follow one another, the passage of time is suggested in the phrase "from time to time." Quentin deepens awareness of this flow by correcting Rosa's notion that Sutpen's actions come out of nowhere. In each of Sutpen's actions, Quentin imagines Sutpen's uncertainty before acting. Considering the moment in Sutpen's childhood when Sutpen was refused entry to the plantation's big house, Quentin imagines Sutpen arguing with himself: "But I can shoot him: he argued with himself and others: No. It would be of no use: and the first: What shall we do then and the other: I don’t know.” The extent to which Sutpen's decisions result from timely deliberation is almost exaggerated in this passage alone, but the presentation of each decision emphasizes the way in which each moment flows from the last. In this false internal argument he also sees a child aware of the consequences of his action, where Rosa saw his actions as somehow predetermined. The causal and direct movement apparent in Sutpen's life testifies to the retemporalization achieved by Quentin. Rosa's description ignores this second aspect of Bergson's definition of time, but Quentin captures what Bergson calls "the obscure and mysterious passage from one position to another." Quentin sees Sutpen's time as "a succession of states each of which announces what follows and contains what precedes it." At this moment when he imagines the child Sutpen arguing with himself, another hypothesis is missing from Rosa's story, and another element which serves to place Sutpen in a temporal continuum: a young Sutpen. Quentin sees a definitive beginning in Sutpen's life: "he was born in West Virginia in the mountains" (220). And he also tells of Sutpen's death. The larger structure of Sutpen's life gains a sense of continuity that is not only present in Quentin's story, but also in the characters in Quentin's story. Sutpen realizes in this story that "he always knew he had courage, and although he may have doubted recently whether he had acquired thistrick that he believed he had at one time, he still believed that there existed somewhere in the world to be learned and that if it could be learned, he would already learn it.” Quentin not only imagines a man existing in time, he also presents a man aware of his existence in time. This awareness underlines the interiority of Quentin's view of Sutpen. To understand the duration of something else, Bergson says that one must “enter into it.” Duration is the absolute of being, it is its core, and understanding this about another person implies that you understand their “states of mind”; that you are in contact with the subjectivity of this being. To do this, says Bergson, “I insert myself into it by an effort of imagination”. But this act, and the absolute understanding that accompanies it, can only be given by what Bergson says is the highest act of understanding: intuition. As suggested by the constant use of the word "imagination", as well as the interiority of Quentin's gaze, Quentin has this intuition of the absolute with his characters. The narration of Rosa and Quentin is clarified by the distinction made by Faulkner between the terms memory and knowledge in Light in August. The dense and tangled description begins: “memory believes before it knows how to remember. He believes longer than he remembers.” Memory precedes knowledge, or the things that can be remembered, we can temporarily assume are inherited rather than learned through experience. As Thomas Sutpen's entire story took place before Quentin was born, his understanding clearly comes from something innate. Shreve tells Quentin "you already knew everything, you had already learned it, you had already absorbed it without the means of speech, one way or another since you were born and living next to it" (212) . Without the medium of speech, the clearest substitute for experiential knowledge at present, Quentin still understands. In this same passage, Faulkner makes an incredibly subtle but obvious connection between Quentin's mode of understanding and the definition of memory just mentioned: Shreve goes on to say that everything Rosa and her father had said to Quentin "does not said nothing to you, but rather struck, word by word, the resonant strings of memory” (emphasis mine 213). Remembering, in its more traditional sense, would not make sense here because it would imply that Quentin actually experienced something. Assuming that memory is something that precedes knowledge, as Lumière tells us in August, this moment suddenly makes sense. Quentin's possession of memory brings something vital to his recreation of Sutpen. Unlike knowledge, which allows us to memorize information, memory leads to belief. Belief implies subjectivity, and although Quentin is able to imagine more about Sutpen's subjectivity than just his beliefs, the word "belief" suggests the subjective evocative powers of memory. In its capacity to let one individual enter into another, memory therefore seems close to Bergson's intuition or rather it seems that memory provides intuition. What Rosa works from is knowledge, the memory of the events of her own life. “Know” gives a clearer contextual definition a moment after the definition already mentioned when it says that young Joe Christmas “knew that.” He had been doing this for almost a year.” The knowledge comes from personal experiences, just like Rosa's knowledge of Absalom, Absalom. Rosa says her story comes "from the senses, from sight, from smell: the muscles with which we see, hear and feel, not the mind, not the thought: memory does not exist." In another apparent reference to thedefinition of Light in August, we learn that there is no memory in Rosa's story because she is overwhelmed by the experiential data of the past. Rosa's knowledge leads her to mythologize history, while Quentin's knowledge allows him to fictionally create Sutpen's life. As Frank Kermode tells us, “myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change”. This stillness of Rosa's story contrasting with the change of Quentin's is exactly what we found in the Bergsonian distinction between the two narrators. But why doesn't Rosa also have access to the absolute, she too was born and raised in this climate? Is it Quentin’s Harvard education that sets him apart? Considering Quentin in The Sound and the Fury (Quentin (SF) from here on), the difference in storytelling methods seems not to do with the individual, but rather with the individuals' relationship to the story they are tell. Even though Quentin (SF) does not consciously tell a story like Quentin (AA), he nevertheless tries to make sense of his past, so much so that Jean-Paul Sartre says he appears as a "man sitting in a space open ". care and look back.” But looking back, he falls into extreme temporal confusion. He remembers a series of moments disconnected from any temporal anchoring. At one point, his mother proclaims, "We sold Benjy's pasture so Quentin could go to Harvard like your brother." Your little brother". He returns to this moment several times, remembering elsewhere that his mother had said to him: "How much money from your school did they sell the pasture so that you could go to Harvard". In these two memories , there is a syntactic sense of suspension in which memories of the past have no beginning or end. In a long page of dialogue he remembers: Get out of this water, are you crazy But she n? didn't move, his face was a white blur framed by his hair in the blur of sand. Get out now. Faulkner leaves out capital letters and punctuation to emphasize the lack of limits for each statement in the mind of. Quentin Aside from not having clear beginnings and endings, there are very few memorable moments Throughout Quentin's monologue, he is obsessed with a select set of events as Sartre noted, “around; a few central themes (Caddy's pregnancy, Benjy's castration, Quentin's suicide) gravitate to innumerable silent masses” (268). From this brief description, it should be clear that Quentin, even with his Harvard education, has sunk into the same understanding of the past that Rosa has in Absalom, Absalom. Rosa now brings a little more coherence to her understanding of the past than Quentin (SF), but this seems to be the result of Rosa's conscious effort to tell a story in Absalom, Absalom. Both share essential characteristics in their accounts of the past. Both understand time as a series of points isolated from any temporal succession from past to future. What can explain the difference between the two Quentins and the similarity between Quentin (SF) and Rosa? Unlike Quentin (AA), Rosa and Quentin (SF) simply work from memories of their own experience. They work from knowledge as opposed to memory, and as this definition given earlier reveals, memory provides the subjectivity of a past time, whereas knowledge is only information. But why don't Quentin (SF) and Rosa also have this memory, also born in the South? The lower level of understanding that Quentin (SF) brings to his own understanding of the past seems due to the corrupting influence of personal involvementin its own history. In this moment already mentioned, where Rosa refers to the source of her knowledge, she says that all "the sense, the sight, the smell", all the experiential implication, "the resulting sum is generally incorrect and false » (143). As a tentative hypothesis, we might say that personal experience, rather than being the only gateway to understanding, actually obscures understanding of other times and other people. What Faulkner seems to be proposing here is an extended version of Marcel Proust's hypothesis in A. Remembrance of Things Past. In this novel, the narrator encounters a constant problem when faced with a physical object in the present: "they seemed to hide, beyond what my eyes could see, something that they invited me to come and take but which despite all my efforts I never succeeded in discovering. . . I would stay there, motionless, looking, breathing, trying to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or felt.” The narrator realizes that there is something about the intensity of the present that never allows you to go beyond your perceptions. Going beyond perceptions is the path to the Bergsonian absolute because “what constitutes the essence of a thing cannot be perceived from the outside”. In Proust's idea, not only does physical involvement not help you achieve the absolute, it actually harms your effort. The narrator's solution and the one that Proust followed in his own life was to lock himself in a blocked room, far from the sensory world. But Faulkner seems to take this theory further by suggesting that not only does physical involvement obscure the essence of something in the presence of something, but it also obscures your view of it in memory. Thinking about his own past. Quentin (SF) agrees with his father by saying: "It is only when the clock stops that time comes to life." The progression of time seems too cumbersome to allow the processing of personal experiences, and this Only by taking something out of its temporal context, the context that provides its essence, can we even begin to accept it. The same is not true for Quentin when he deals with the past in Absalom. , Absalom Faulkner seems to put his finger on what Dorrit Cohn says is "the altered relationship between the narrator and his protagonist when that protagonist is his own past." change is found in the gap between Quentin (SF) and Quentin (AA). Quentin's possession of a Bergsonian temporality opens the way to morality in his story where a non-Bergsonian temporality virtually excludes morality. comes the possibility for one moment to influence the next, comes causality. Closely related to causality is the notion of consequence, or “something that follows logically or naturally from an action or condition.” Finally, when we recognize the multiple possibilities of action in a situation where we stop considering action as a predetermined judgment and morality is possible. This emerges most forcefully in the differentiation made by Quentin between his vision of Sutpen and that of Rosa. In Quentin's story, Sutpen's death encounters the same thing as in Rosa's story: “He is dead. I know he's dead and how can he, how can he be? But Quentin quickly clarifies that this sentence "did not mean what Aunt Rosa meant: where did they find or invent a bullet that could kill him but how can we let him die without having to admit that he was wrong, to suffer and regret it.” . Rosa denies Sutpen's death due to her belief in Sutpen's immortality. On the other hand, Quentin refuses him death by, 1983. 63-95.