Your illusions are a part of you like your flesh and bones and memory.

Absalom, Absalom! is phenomenal. I've was never a lover of Faulkner's work prior to reading this. I admired him a lot, his formidable technical accomplishments, his near unmatched power in terms of his capacity to conjure otherworldly prose in the context of American literature in the twentieth century. But this is the book that did it for me. It's bitter. It seethes with rage and resentment And, in all the characters, but particularly Thomas Sutpen, has some of the most memorable and lifelike characters in the entire American canon.

I won't even attempt to address the complexities of the plot because the plot in this novel is secondary. When you read this book, you feel a sense of rage, ask questions about complicity and innocence, and ask yourself whether the notions of heroism and villainy mean anything at all. Sutpen and the domain he constructs is obviously an allegory for the South. For a system built "not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage". Sutpen is a gross, wildly ambitious example of this process. He's a man seemingly without qualms. He exploits the system in which he lives with single-minded intensity and almost disarming innocence about the potential consequences of his actions. but I am not convinced that this makes him any worse than the Compsons or the Coldfields or other families who benefit from the system of slavery.

Absalom, Absalom! is about how to construct an empire and the mythological edifice it rests on. Of course, it's a book about slavery and the South, about generational curses and fate, but at a deeper level its a book about narratives and myths. Every individual, every society, every nation needs a story. It needs a narrative to orient it. A set of myths to sustain it. And I think this might be the core of the book. Two of the most important characters in this book - Thomas Sutpen and Charles Bon - are defined by the murkiness of their background, their lack of a clearly defined history. They seek, through trial and toil, to build themselves a narrative which is acceptable to the world around them, which aligns with its norms, which legitimates them. But the reckoning is inevitable, not only for them, but for the society in which they exist because the entire edifice is built on a lie.

In its very structure, Absalom, Absalom! gestures to the impossibility of arriving at the truth. The perspectives, the biases, the blind spots of the characters reflect a society built on lies. Memory itself is an inherently contested field. Its a thing which makes us feel, which we do reflexively, but which has the capacity to deceive us:

That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less; and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

Thomas, the South, the other characters. They are all obsessed with the memory of themselves. They are ghosts who are haunted by ghosts. They are possessed by "wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago". They can't let go, they can't reckon with the past, they don't even want to. I don't think this is a Southern curse so much as it's a human one. The spectre of history will always loom large. We can't escape it.

This book visceral and powerful and strikingly innovative and I think what resonates with me most is that Faulkner correctly identifies that, sometimes, it's nigh on impossible to arrive at the truth. To even determine what really happened versus what people think happened. I rarely say this, but I think this novel is one of the two or three most essential American reads.