Incredulous Narration of Absalom书.pdf

University of Oregon Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! Author(s): Peter Brooks Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer, 1982), pp. 247-268 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: /stable/1770556 . Accessed: 27/09/2011 08:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms Conditions of Use, available at . /page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@. University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature. PETER BROOKS Incredulous Narration: Absalomn Absalom! TO THE CRITIC concerned with the design and project of narra- tive, Faulkners Absalom, Absalomr! presents a particularly inter- esting and challenging case. It appears to be one of those Modernist works that both sum up the entire nineteenth-century tradition of the novel-particularly its concern with genealogy, authority, and patterns of transmission-while subverting it, working its subversion in such ways as to reaffirm the traditional problematics of the novel without accepting its solutions. Here is a novel which in its appendix offers us a chronology, a genealogy, and a map, traditional systems for the order- ing of experience from which Absalom, Absalom! so markedly and self-consciously departs, yet by which it is also haunted, as by the force of an absence. Absalom., Absalom! may indeed be very much the story of the haunting force of absences, including formal absences, in the wake of whose passage the novel constructs itself. In particular, to the critic interested in concepts of plot and plottedness