Absalom, Absalom: A Ghost(ish) Story

For me, the most captivating aspect of Absalom, Absalom is the relationship between Henry and Judith Sutpen. This brother/sister relationship contains competitiveness, incestuous urges, and telepathic connectivity. What struck me most about their particular relationship was the idea that I had read about similar relationships in other novels. In Donna Tartt’s contemporary The Secret History, it is discovered by an outsider protagonist that a set of twins is engaging in sexual activities with one another. Furthermore, the female twin, like Judith Sutpen, is described as having masculine qualities. In Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, siblings Flora and Miles are interpreted by their nursemaid as sexually corrupted beings with telepathic powers. It is important to note that what we find out about Henry and Judith’s strange relationship is also an interpretation, in this case from Quentin’s father, one of several narrators relaying the rise and fall of the Sutpen family in Absalom, Absalom.
Quentin’s father says: “…perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover…” This is, in fact, mere speculation on the part of Quentin’s father, Mr. Compson. However, it is so twisted and clever that I, who has only the words on the page as evidence, took it to be true of Henry’s relationship toward his sister. Henry’s urge for Charles Bon, whose every act he emulates, to marry (and presumably bed) his sister is interpreted by Mr. Compson as a way of, somehow, “de-virginizing” Judith on his own and, thereby, somehow, controlling that loss of the precious.
As for their mystical connectivity, Mr. Compson discusses “that telepathy with which as children they seemed at times to anticipate one another’s actions as two birds leave a limb at the same instant.” Mr. Compson/Faulkner also uses the word “clairvoyance.”
This novel is an epic account of a man’s attempt to acquire a name and a place in this life. However, the account of Sutpen’s children by Mr. Compson gives the Sutpen saga the feel of a ghost story at times. The mentions of clairvoyance, spells and body-snatchings (“as though it actually were the brother who had put the spell on the sister, seduced her to his own vicarious image which walked and breathed with Bon’s body”), as well as the image of Miss Rosa Coldfield creeping around as a child, listening behind closed doors, certainly give the novel an eerie quality, and make the story within the story read like a ghost story (a la The Turn of the Screw).
It is not only a ghost story because of its, at times, chilling nature. There is also the fact that actual figures from the past are being conjured and mingling with those of the present. This can be most clearly seen in the re-telling of the story by Quentin and his roommate Shreve: “First two of them, then four; now two again. The room was indeed tomblike…”