Faulkner and Morrison: Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved

In this Delve, we’ll read Willima Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), both of which consider the many scars, healed and not, caused by enslavement and the Civil War. Thinking about history, memory, and what Morrison calls “rememory,” we’ll consider what it means to live in a nation, to inherit its past, and to fight for a better future.

There are many excellent reasons to read William Faulkner and Toni Morrison in tandem. Morrison herself articulates a crucial one in a 1981 interview, where she aligns her aims as a writer with what Faulkner’s fiction accomplished: “[He] wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good—and universal—because it is specifically about a particular world. That’s what I wish to do.” It doesn’t matter that Yoknapatawpha County only exists on the map that Faulkner sketches, his novels bring it to vivid and complicated life. Morrison’s fiction does something similar for her characters, usually Black women who she depicts with caring attention and particularity. Without ever erasing what is unique about their experiences, she makes sure that persons long overlooked can be seen by readers around the world as “good—and universal.”

A compelling case can be make that one of these two authors is the “best” U.S. writer of the twentieth century. Their works are formally innovative and unflinching in their assessment of the nation’s history, particularly as it concerns enslavement and its long aftermaths. Here, too, Morrison offers a crucial key to what reading this “American” past can mean when done with deft care: “The most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction, the one most fraught, is its language—its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked, and unmasking language.” She may be talking about reading nineteenth-century fiction in the passage but it also offers an excellent guide for thinking about the kind of work she (and Faulkner) wrote, especially as they pressure words to try and account for “unspeakable things unspoken.”

Texts:
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Beloved by Toni Morrison

Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.

Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.

Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.