The Best Novels about the History of the United States

You’ve chosen five novels about the history of the United States. Can you explain what you mean by that, and what kind of books you were looking for?

To me, the United States, and especially the United States of the 20th century, is a Petri dish of crisis. It’s a nation whose 250-year history has often been described as ‘the American experiment’ because there’s an attempt at a whole new style of government, of social organization, that had never existed before. I view crisis as having a double-barreled definition: It’s a time of great terror, of great loss, but also of great opportunity. It’s the ending, the breaking down of an old social system, and the beginning of a new.

This is why I’m an Americanist. It’s a perfectly controlled experiment: 250 years of the United States, and then the longer, maybe 400 or 500 years of the colonial project in the Americas. It’s an emergent social system—or collection of social systems—but also something that causes massive anxiety. So you can say that the United States originates in the anxiety of history, the anxiety of breaking away from an entirely old system into an entirely new system.

What we see with these five novels that I have chosen is the same thing. Each one reiterates that the Americas, and the United States in particular, are a series of crises—a massive one, if we look at the American Civil War (1861 to 1865). It resonates through all these novels. It was the bloodiest war in American history—not eclipsed by World War I or World War II in terms of deaths of Americans. Over 600,000 Americans died on the Confederate and Union sides. It’s a massive modern crisis and in novels like Absalom, Absalom!, it permeates the entire novel.

In terms of the books you’ve chosen,  several of them are very long and most of them, I would say, are quite difficult to read. They’re not quick, escapist historical novels like, say, I, Claudius. Is it the subject matter that requires that kind of approach, do you think? 

Yes, that’s 100 percent what’s happening in all these novels. The difficulty of the text, the experimentation of the text, is required by the fact that they are talking about history. What the novels are trying to point to is that history is entirely provisional and contingent. It’s contingent on our perspectives, and it’s provisional because we are always changing it. We’re always changing our view of history, what history is.

The process of making history is a process of storytelling, these novels seem to say. So you tell me the story, and I tell you the story back, and we negotiate the story that we will settle on. That process is extremely complex so you can’t take that and give a very linear, straightforward narrative. It must be a narrative with occlusions and aporias and missing pieces and do-overs. Let’s tell that story one more time from a different perspective or a different angle.

That’s what we see in all these novels and that’s why they’re so difficult to read. Gravity’s Rainbow is extremely difficult to read because it’s trying to pull in everything. It runs from the beginning of the colonial project in the Americas and the Puritans all the way through to the Second World War. And it does so in absolute minute detail. So Pynchon can give you a throwaway line, a not even completed sentence, and you can look that up, and read all night long on that one sentence and the history behind it. He’s packing in the whole history of the European encounter with the Americas into that novel. So even though it’s long, you can’t do that packing in without masses of confusion involved.

Absalom, Absalom! is the same. It’s attempting to tell a linear story of a person’s life, Thomas Sutpen, but it’s told from hundreds of angles by many narrative voices, all competing in many ways, to get a picture of this person out there in the world who is a historical character. And I think what Faulkner or Pynchon or Vollmann or any of these authors are telling us is that that’s the only way you can do it. You must have that level of experimentation.

How familiar do you have to be with the history going into these novels? Inevitably, you’re going to be looking up stuff as you’re reading, but how much of the broad history do you think you need to know before setting out?

You should simply begin by reading the books—you don’t really need to go and read a history book on it first. I’m a Faulknerian so with Absalom, Absalom! I know what Faulkner’s talking about historically. He doesn’t just talk about the United States, he talks about Haiti, about Africa. I’m conversant with that. That’s not so with Thomas Pynchon. He mentions so many historical topics, you could spend your whole life reading history books just to prepare yourself to read Gravity’s Rainbow—which obviously no reader could or wants to do. So my suggestion is, even with Absalom, Absalom! and Faulkner, if you’re not really conversant with the history, just dive in. Because as a work of literature, it is also beautiful. It’s something that really stirs you. It has such a deep, personal dimension that that side of it alone drives you through the text wonderfully. Then, as you encounter these historical moments, maybe one of them fires you up with some sort of enthusiasm to go and do a bit more reading on it.

That’s how I approach Pynchon as well. There are moments in reading Thomas Pynchon where you have to put the book down because you can’t believe, on an emotional and psychological level, what you’ve just read. There’s an Ernest Pudding and Domina Nocturna moment, for example, that’s really shocking. That shock is what drives you through the text, but you may not have the historical knowledge to know what you’re reading on a cerebral level all the time.

Let’s turn to the books. Let’s start with Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo, which is 800+ pages. Could you start by saying what the book is about and what piece of history it’s investigating? 

One important thing to know about Underworld is that it is Don DeLillo’s masterwork. If you take his whole oeuvre, he has a warm-up period of five to six novels. Then he hits a novel called The Names, and from that book, about five novels on, we have Underworld. That period, from The Names to Underworld is an amazing stretch in literature. He’s really on his game and does absolutely fantastic work.

But I would say Underworld caps it. It’s just a wonderful novel to read, though challenging. It comes out in 1997, so it’s the last novel that he writes in the 20th century, which is very apt, as it has this theme of moving on from periods of history.

It’s about history from the period before the Second World War, very firmly into the Cold War, and the period following the Cold War. DeLillo sees the post-World War Two period as a time of decline and decay. The old, pre-World War Two world is simultaneously decaying and falling apart in front of us and it’s being recycled. This is an important theme across DeLillo and a common postmodern theme: We live in a world now of recycling. We don’t make new things. We take what was old and we repurpose it and change it. In Underworld, this is shown with the baseball.

The novel begins with an absolutely fabulous prologue: people say it’s the best prologue ever written. It’s called “The Triumph of Death.”  It’s only 40 pages long—so you could read the prologue by itself and then decide whether you want to read the other 800 pages or not. That might be a good way into Underworld. 

It opens with a 1951 baseball game. That’s typical DeLillo, mixing in mundane things, like going to see a baseball game—though this is by no means a banal game. It’s the 1951 World Series, when Bobby Thomson, the batter for the Giants, hits the  ‘shot heard around the world.’ That moment is the pinnacle of the enthusiasm of the old world, the pre-war period. The ball that Bobby Thomson hits is caught by a young kid called Cotter Martin, who has bunked off school to see the game. This ball then becomes something that runs through all 900 pages of the novel. It keeps cropping back up, because it’s a relic of the world that has gone. Don DeLillo is able to give the baseball religious significance.

The ball passes from hand to hand. Cotter Martin’s father doesn’t see its magic the way his son does, so he sells the ball because he knows it will fetch a good price. The ball passes from hand to hand and ends up in a baseball museum. The idea is that this thing that was of magical significance in the old world becomes merely a divertissement in the new, something that you would go to a museum to see. It’s no longer a living tradition, but something that’s peered at through glass.

That’s how DeLillo sees our world. The latter part of the 20th century and the 21st century are hangovers from the old world. We look at things from that time, but we don’t experience them anymore. That leads to the decay in the novel—because if you’re not living the tradition, then the tradition itself falls apart.

There’s a theme of waste and garbage that runs through the novel. One of the main characters, Nick Shea, works in waste management and recyclables. He thinks to himself, ‘How can we take what is wasted and ruined and destroyed, and recycle it into something new?’ And you get some really funny, interesting riffs on this idea. For instance, halfway through the novel, they go into a condom museum. Your sexual life is something you should be living, it’s not something to look at in a museum, but life has become stilted, something for the museum or the landfill—which is another place where our old lived experiences end up.

In the book, I think he goes back decade by decade through the second half of the 20th century. Is that how he covers the history, through that structure?

Yes. He goes from the very beginning of the Cold War, right up until the period in which he’s writing, the 1990s. He dramatizes various things. In the prologue, J. Edgar Hoover is sitting watching the ball game when he’s told by his agents that the Russians have started their testing of nuclear bombs. As with Pynchon, it’s one of those moments when there’s a little throwaway line that you then have to go and find out more about. You can spend a long time investigating the 1951 Russian tests of nuclear weapons that were a response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Up until that point, it wasn’t clear that the Russians would respond militarily with their own nuclear weapons. So this is the moment that the Cold War begins.

There’s this mixing of history and art and different fields coming together in the novel. “The Triumph of Death”, which the prologue is named for, is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It’s of masses of skeletons doing all sorts of things, one of those wonderful, Bruegel paintings where you can go into minute details for hours and hours—very much like a DeLillo novel.

But it’s not the real painting, it’s a reproduction. Someone has taken a magazine print of Bruegel’s painting, ripped it up into pieces and flung it out over the baseball field. J. Edgar Hoover is very excited to be at the ball game, and as he walks around after the ‘shot heard around the world’, he notices pieces of the painting all over the place and it gives him joy. He thinks, ‘Oh, I love that painting. I love the skeletons. I love that they’re killing everyone.’ Hoover is a war maniac in the novel. He wants a world governed by the bomb and he associates “The Triumph of Death” with the knowledge that the Russians are going ahead with their atomic project and the US can retaliate. That’s the world we’re in now, a world governed by the bomb, governed by a blind might that is quite happy to destroy everything.

We also get moments where we’re in the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. That’s another big theme that runs through it. Sometimes you’re reading the novel and there will be a tiny detail like a minor character on the subway and they’re holding on to the rail with plastic gloves on. You’re not told why, but the reason is AIDS. Everyone’s wearing latex to protect themselves from the AIDS epidemic.

There are two characters in the novel, Sister Edgar and Sister Grace, who go into slum areas. There’s one called the Wall, and it’s the epitome of the degradation and decay of the society in which they live. So many people have AIDS. AIDS is used in the novel as a symptom of a larger malaise. That’s quite problematic to think about now, but remember  DeLillo was writing in 1997, so it was a much more contemporary epidemic to him.

Let’s go on to the next book you’ve chosen, which is Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. This is probably the toughest book on this list to understand. It was published in 1973 and there have been lots of comparisons with Ulysses and James Joyce. You’ve already said a bit about it, but why don’t you start with the basics: what Gravity’s Rainbow is about and why it’s worth persevering with. 

Even more so than Underworld, Gravity’s Rainbow shows us the broad sweep of United States history. It shows it across a much broader period of time. Tyrone Slothrop, who is the protagonist of the novel, is always harking back to his Puritan ancestors. He’s thinking of his behavior now as somehow consistent with the things that his Puritan ancestor, William Slothrop, was involved in. It’s all the same sorts of things that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestors were—and this, for Pynchon, is a direct line back to the very beginning of United States fiction.

So the novel goes from that Puritan period that is alluded to here and there—we get some longer passages about it and it’s always present—through to the turn of the century, and then right through into the Second World War, and the rumblings of the Cold War.

Gravity’s Rainbow spatially disconnects the history from just the landmass of the Americas. It opens in London, England. It’s all about military and scientific think tanks, secretive groups that are coming up with new ways to wage war, including psychological warfare. In the pre-modern period, it was about physical might: you had to go and vanquish your enemy with muscle. We have undergone a passage through the 20th century from a much more muscular way of exercising power to softer and softer power. I think this is what Thomas Pynchon shows in his novel—that soft, esoteric, hidden power being used and explored by governments all over the world. They’re all trying to cohere around this psychological warfare that we fight now. There’s the physical warfare too, because they’re obsessed with the building of bombs and rockets.

The novel also goes to Germany and to Southern Africa. One of the characters is an ex-Nazi and goes to participate in the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in what is modern day Namibia.

So there is lots and lots going on, lots of historical periods, lots of geographical areas—which is perhaps the reason why Gravity’s Rainbow is such a challenging book to read.The whole thing is quite dizzying. For that, I would suggest that you just persevere over a longer period of time. You can chunk it down. If you find a companion reader that tells you how to split it up, you can say, ‘OK these are the sections on (say) the Holocaust’ and go and read those parts. It’s a book to read slowly, because there’s so much in it that it can be overwhelming to take in in one go.

What does Gravity’s Rainbow of the title refer to?

It’s about the trajectory of a V2 rocket. The trajectory of the rocket corresponds to dozens of different philosophical or scientific theories about how rockets fly and what rockets do.

The end of the novel is quite instructive for this idea of a trajectory because it breaks down into little cameo sections. They’re little philosophical tracts, of 500 to 1000 words. They give you a perspective, a closing thesis on what it is that we’ve been reading about. Some of them are jokey stories, some of them are explicitly tracts or theses. One is called “The Ascent”, the last one is called “The Descent”: we get the actual trail of the rocket as it moves through the sky.

There’s a horrible determinism because the rocket is descending upon a crowd of people and they’re asked to “reach between your own cold legs’’—in other words, to masturbate. This is how Pynchon ends the novel. What he means is that you don’t have any effect over the falling of this bomb, so enjoy it. It’s very odd.

But what those last moments also do is link together the two themes that have been running through the novel, which are sex and death.

One of the main plot points that runs through the story is the fact that Tyrone Slothrop was part of a Pavlovian experiment in his childhood where his sex response was linked to the movements of a rocket. During the whole course of the novel, Slothrop believes—and we’re never sure, if he really does believe it—that whenever a rocket is launched anywhere in the world, it causes a sex response. So the launching of a rocket and an erection are the same thing to Slothrop. This, to me, just wonderfully illustrates this idea of the determinism of history, the historical events that Slothrop lives through. It happens to many characters in the novel—that the historical events that they live through are not external to them in any way, shape or form. They invade the most personal components of their own being.

Sex is a very personal component of anyone’s being, and we would like to think it was separate from the blind, automatic determinism of history. But Pynchon questions this. He says, ‘What if all your sexual responses, all your responses of pleasure of any kind, are all determined by material, historical forces that are completely beyond you?’ This is the horror vision of Gravity’s Rainbow, I think, and you see it throughout the novel. There’s one minor character—a wonderful character—who believes that his entire being has become synonymous with World War One. So World War One and him are the same thing. He even believes that when World War One ends, he will physically die. He doesn’t have an identity outside the historical milieu in which he lives.

How did you come across Gravity’s Rainbow and why do you think it had such an impact on you? 

It’s required reading as an Americanist. If you don’t read it, you might as well pack up. But as a book, when you start reading it, especially if these things are of interest to you… I’ve written a lot on the effect of history on the individual and I’m interested in phenomenology. I think that the vast material movements of history and the individual are in a dialectic: that neither one or the other is in control. We are co-creational of the world we’re in. So that’s my philosophical point of view, and I take that from people like Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

And I think if that’s your philosophical interest—or if you’re interested in the mechanical determinists like Ivan Pavlov—then this is more than a novel, it’s a philosophical tract as well. No one knows anything about Pynchon because he won’t talk to anyone, but he is extremely well-read. I’m not sure how much he knows about Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, but it’s in there anyway. He’s certainly read Pavlov till it’s coming out of his ears. He knows about the theories, the science, the philosophies and the history of philosophy. If you’re looking for a philosophical novel, you can’t get a better one than Gravity’s Rainbow.

Let’s go on to your next choice, The Dying Grass (2015) by William Vollman. This is 1000+ pages, but I saw a Washington Post review saying it’s the reading experience of a lifetime—so quite an endorsement. Can you say what it’s about and what’s so good about it?

This novel is about the Nez Perce War, part of the Indian Wars. Unlike my other choices, its temporal scope is quite defined: it’s by and large set in the 1870s—though it does have little flashes here and there of people in the present day looking at photographs of the 1870s. At that time, we’d just had the American Civil War—the crisis to end all crises for the United States. Although we’re in the Nez Perce War of 1877, the history of the Civil War follows the novel all the way through.

The novel dramatizes two sides: the American army, who we follow through their campaigns, and the Native American people.

If you look at the American army, you see the psychology of the men and of the people as a unit has utterly changed since the Civil War. When more than 600,000 of your countrymen have died—we’re still dealing with that now, and for that to have happened within a decade, the psychologies of people have been immensely affected.

There’s an interesting text to look out for on this that’s really good for anyone who studies Faulkner, but really helps with this novel, too. It’s Michael Gorra’s book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. It came out in 2020 and does an excellent job of laying out the history of the Civil War and what a massive psychological cataclysm it was. In it, he discusses Ulysses S. Grant’s time in Lafayette during the Civil War. He talks about Grant’s soldiers going into civilian houses to use them as hospitals and barracks and confiscating food and other resources. We see this dramatized in Faulkner’s novels all the time with buried treasure throughout the South. Even in the 1950s, people are hunting for buried silver. This is the treasure that the southern United States tried to hide from the advancing Union army.

The reason this is important for The Dying Grass is that the Civil War was the first war in which the distinction between soldier and civilian had been effaced and war had become mechanized. We’re seeing a modern American army that is completely dehumanized by having been through this brutal, bloody war.

There are wonderful things that Vollmann does with his typesetting of the novel. All the American army sections are very blocky, because these aren’t people, they’re automatons. They talk like automatons and if anything comes up that’s sentimental or to do with the soldier as a person, it’s often broken off with an ellipsis. ‘We don’t want to talk about that. We want to talk about how we’re going to get this Native American leader called Chief Joseph.’ They’re chasing him, and they’re only interested in the military goal.

Whereas if you go to the sections where the book deals with the Native American people, everything’s indented. There are hundreds of enjambments. It flows like a river. He’s showing us the still human aspects of the Native American people, as opposed to this army that has become completely dehumanized.

Throughout the novel, you see that the soldiers who are involved in the army are still doing things like writing letters home to loved ones. One of them spends much of the novel trying to write love poems for his fiancée. But he struggles to do it because everything that surrounds him is this horrible, mechanized, dehumanizing system that is the American army that is crushing to his individuality and humanity. Writing a poem home to his lover becomes an impossible task: you see him constantly with little half-finished poems because he just can’t do it.

If you’re looking for a novel that gives you historical fiction at its most minute and forensic then you should read The Dying Grass. It goes into so many details. We’ve got dentistry, as it was practiced during the Nez Perce War. We’ve got sexual practices. We’ve got love letters. We’ve got the control of supply lines and army resources. We’ve got the treatment of animals: there’s a moment in the novel where they talk about the Native American horses that they’ve caught, and they have to shoot them because they can’t transport them. Again, it’s life being effaced by this horrible mechanical process.

It gives you blow-by-blows on the military strategy. It’s a real historical period that he’s writing about and one of the main protagonists is Oliver Otis Howard, a general during the Indian Wars. The novel has him talking in quite minute detail about the military strategy of the period.

The novel also gives you perspectives on hunting and the decline of the indigenous way of life.

All of these really accurate and minutely examined moments in history are there on the page all the way through. It’s wonderful and the book to look out for if you’re looking for a really intense historical novel.

Is it reasonably easy to read?

The novel could be accused of having a single note, because although it’s very long, we don’t change scene much. We’re following the United States Army on a quite laborious march after the Native Americans. They’re pushing them further and further towards Canada. They want to catch them because they’re bloodthirsty but they also wouldn’t mind if they push them out beyond their jurisdiction—what the Native Americans in the novel called ‘the medicine line.’ This was a belief at the time that the Canadian border was a medicine line. So that’s what’s going on in the novel, over its 1,300 pages. There’s never a change. So those who don’t like that, won’t like this novel. But I come back to what you’re reading it for, which is the massive detail that he’s put into an exploration of that one series of events.

We’re now at your fourth choice, which is Native Son by Richard Wright. Tell me about this book, which dates from 1940. 

This is a very important novel when we’re thinking about the history of the United States, because it links the historical and racial perspective. Native Son is informed by the realities of segregation, Jim Crow, the national dialogue around white supremacism, and modes of thinking and seeing race which were really unexamined in the United States at the time. 1940 is very early for such an acute and honest portrayal of race relations in the United States. This really was very new and quite shocking in the way Wright does it, because he doesn’t pull any punches. He shows a fully actualized African American person written from the perspective of himself, an African American person.

It’s a controversial novel, because Bigger Thomas, who is the protagonist, is a multiple murderer. He kills two people. You fall into a trap if you strictly read Native Son like a moral parable because there’s nothing moral about Bigger Thomas.

The first one, Mary Dalton, the daughter of his boss, he kills by mistake. He’s in her room and if he were found in her room as a black man, in 1940, he would be lynched. So he holds her mouth shut so she doesn’t make any noise and she suffocates. He’s not in that situation of his own choice, so we could say he’s pushed into it by the social world in which he lives.

Later on, there’s another character called Bessie Mears. She’s Bigger Thomas’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. At one point he lets slip to her that he’s done this atrocious thing, and that the person the law is hunting is him, and then they sleep together. He realizes that he can’t keep her alive to be a witness, so he kills her. So it’s the killing of Bessie in the novel where you go, ‘Whoa! That went too far. Now you are the antagonist of this novel, rather than the protagonist. You’ve crossed a moral line.’

What Wright is doing is humanizing Bigger Thomas. He’s not trying to lionize him or hold him up as a moral genius. He’s saying that this is what becomes of human beings when they are dehumanized, brutalized and pushed to the very ends of their abilities to cope in any legal or moral way.

Wright paints a picture of a full and rounded human, which is very important in the novel, because this hadn’t been done. If you take someone like William Faulkner, when he wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1929 he wrote the character of Dilsey Gibson. She’s an African American woman who works for the Compsons in the novel. She’s a wonderful character but she’s a caricature. Faulkner was unable to show an African American person on the page who was also a fully realized human being. Later on, in 1932, Faulkner writes Light in August about the character Joe Christmas. He’s a lot more well realized, but the thing about Joe Christmas in Light in August is that he is racially ambiguous. In order to humanize Joe Christmas, Faulkner had to lighten his skin. He couldn’t think of any other way around this, whereas what Richard Wright does, only eight years later, is say, ‘I’m going to show you the African American experience, point blank as it is.’

And would you say there’s a historical element in the novel? Is he reflecting on history like the other novels?

Native Son is based on a real murder case. Richard Wright is not responding to history as a bystander. He reads about the case in the Chicago Tribune and thinks, ‘This is a story that really tells me something about the world I’m living in right now.’ He was coming to terms with these things in much the same way Bigger Thomas is. If we could ever think of a character as an avatar for an author, we can think of Bigger Thomas as an avatar for Richard Wright.

Wright was an extremely political writer.  He was involved in political agitation. If you read Frantz Fanon, one of the things he tells us is that if there is a prolonged period of injustice, the only response is violence. Richard Wright is for the political solution, up to and including protest, agitation and violence. Bigger is showing that psychological space taken to its absolute and tragic endpoint, in which the subjugated must engage in violence. That was key to Richard Wright’s thinking and he got into lots of debates on this.

There were other African American writers at the time, like Zora Neale Hurston, who took a very different route. She took a humanist route: ‘I’m a human being in the world, and I don’t need to get involved in racial politics, merely because I happen to be black.’ To Richard Wright’s mind, that was an abandonment of the political expediency of the time and the things that African American writers should be doing—which is trying to shine a light on the social and political particularities and struggles of African American people. That’s what’s going on and Bigger Thomas is a dramatic representation of that.

Okay, let’s get to the final book. This is Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, published in 1936. This is probably the shortest book on the list—but with famously long sentences. 

So the thread that runs through all of these novels to one degree or another is the American Civil War. In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner dramatizes that massive calamity in really personal terms. He’s able to drill down into the psychology of having been a Southerner in the war and after, in what’s called the ‘Lost Cause of the Confederacy’. Many Southern writers—the Southern Agrarians, for instance—were very nostalgic about a return to an antebellum world. They’re deeply criticized—and always have been—for wanting to go back, as though it were anything to desire or anything that existed. That’s another point: the antebellum as understood from a nostalgic point of view didn’t exist. There was no such place with big fluffy skirts and wisteria and magnolia. All this is a dream. And what Faulkner does, in the grittiness and experimentation that we see in Absalom, Absalom!, is he reveals the antebellum as a fantasy.

Faulkner does take some of the same attacks today that we would have reserved for people like the Southern Agrarians, because people do think of him as a nostalgic writer for some reason. I don’t think he is at all. Faulkner is very clear-eyed about the world before the American Civil War as being a time that was invented, constructed, made up.

He gets this from experience. As a child, he  listened to his grandfather talking about the Civil War. His grandfather would get a lot of old Confederate soldiers around: they would have parties and parades and he would hear them chatting, gossiping and talking about the old days. He got a front-row seat on how a past period in history—any past period in history—is a construct that’s agreed upon between parties. That’s true for any of us. I might give a starry-eyed view of the 1990s and maybe people who had lived through them would agree with me. That then becomes the constructed story from which to proceed.

That’s what Faulkner is saying in Absalom, Absalom!: history is a construct. This starts from the very beginning. The character Quentin Compson is a boy who was born about the same time as William Faulkner. Faulkner was born in 1897, so the 19th century and the Civil War are the past for him: the very recent past, but still the past. And therefore people like Quentin Compson in the novel, or William Faulkner, the novelist, can only access that lost period of time before the Civil War through stories.

In the novel, Quentin Compson seeks out characters who can tell him about what happened from personal experience. One he goes to is called Rosa Coldfield. She was very young during the Civil War, but now she’s an old, Miss Havisham-type character. She was gravely wronged by Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen’s whole design in life was to create a legacy for himself so that he could develop his poor white ancestry into something that would have more control and agency in the world. In order to do that, he has to have children. So at one point in the novel he comes to Rosa Coldfield and basically asks, ‘Will you marry me to breed children?’ That’s not what a girl wants to hear and Rosa Coldfield never gets over the sting of having been approached in this manner by this man. She just lets the world pass her by and slowly decays into her chair.

Quentin goes to her as a young child to get the story of Thomas Sutpen, and she speaks to him. He just listens. What Faulkner is showing us is that a story is always a perspective because Rosa calls Sutpen an ogre. That’s her perspective on him: he ruined her life. After this great insult she no longer trusted men. It ruined the possibility of having romantic attachments for her.

So that’s the first picture of Thomas Sutpen that Quentin gets. And if you read the opening ten pages or so of Absalom, Absalom!, Sutpen appears on the page in almost the same way as a photographic negative. There’s a synesthesia. The auditory function of Quentin listening becomes a visual function, and he can see, in front of his eyes, Thomas Sutpen appearing out of history as a fully formed ghost. He looks at that fully formed ghost, and he thinks, ‘I’ve got it. This is Thomas Sutpen.’

But then, as he goes to other people and asks about Sutpen, he realizes that the story of Thomas Sutpen is never fixed. It’s always changing. It’s always becoming something new. There are always hidden mysteries, things we don’t know. There’s only one primary document in the entire novel, and that’s a letter written by Thomas Sutpen’s son, Charles Bon. That letter is described through narrative so Quentin doesn’t see it. Everything is completely conditional on the person who is telling the story. That’s Faulkner’s way of telling us that all of history is like that.

One final point on Absalom, Absalom!: it complicates the story of marginality in the South and in America in general. Faulkner seems to be telling us that there’s a massive conglomeration in history of people who are in marginal positions trying to get a better one, to arrange themselves in a place where they have more. Thomas Sutpen is one such character. He is born in the mountains of western Virginia—before there was such a place as West Virginia—in 1807. It’s never exactly clear whether it’s Scottish or Irish, but he’s the son of immigrants. I think Scottish myself. He even says at one point that his parent couldn’t speak English—she would probably have been speaking some variant of Gaelic.

He’s coming from that world and the interesting thing about Sutpen is that when he’s living in the mountains of Virginia at the beginning of the 19th century, he has no idea of racial tensions, of racial history. He doesn’t know about race at all. He doesn’t understand it, he’s living in a complete state of innocence. Then he comes to a place called Tidewater, Virginia. This was a big plantation hub at the time and he meets a plantation owner for the first time. He’s a shoeless boy and he sees the plantation owner has got things he doesn’t have. This man can sit in a hammock all day long and does what he likes.

The famous story from the novel is that Sutpen tries to get into the plantation owner’s house, and it’s a black man that comes to the door, a slave. He tells Sutpen to go around the back. That’s how Sutpen realizes that injustice exists and that he can be the target of it, as a boy from a poor white Scottish immigrant family.

From there he then goes on to try to build this legacy that will somehow elevate his family, his genealogy to a position of power. His evil in Absalom, Absalom!—and Sutpen is evil—comes from realizing that the injustice is happening, and you can either be on the top of the pile, or you can be at the bottom of the pile. That’s the pragmatic way in which he enters into it.

From there, he begins to understand that there is such a thing as race, and race division, which he ruthlessly exploits. In the novel, he goes to Haiti and gets himself a lot of slaves. To bring this back to history, this is Faulkner’s comment on the United States. The US invasion of Haiti took place between 1915 and 1934. As Faulkner is writing the novel, the United States is doing colonial exercises and conquest in Haiti. Thomas Sutpen is a mimetic of the broader injustice of American colonialism. All that and the massive complexities of vying for power and position, vying not to be the subaltern or the lowest of the low, that’s what the novel dramatizes.