Absalom, Absalom! And Acts Misreading

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, an older Thomas Sutpen asks himself, “[w]here did I make the mistake in [the past], what did I do or misdo in it”? (212). Sutpen’s “mistake” or “misdeed” throughout his life is connected with his role as a reader—of books and, more broadly, of the world around him. In this essay, I conceptualize Sutpen’s failed and subjective interpretations as misreadings—so as to account for both his literal acts of reading texts, and his metaphoric acts of reading and of interpreting the actual world. Sutpen’s overall failure to create his ideal genealogy is associated with his limited hermeneutic capacity to process and interpret both actual texts and the past. Let me begin with a scene involving Thomas Sutpen’s initial reading practices when still in school: here, let me propose a genealogy of misreading originating in Sutpen’s own initial misreading of a book as a child. In Chapter 7, Quentin narrates stories about Sutpen’s childhood which he had heard from his grandfather General Compson (Quentin’s grandfather and Sutpen’s only friend in Jefferson). Here, Sutpen describes to General Compson the time when he had attended school for a short period, after having descended from the mountains where he had been born and bred. According to Quentin, young Sutpen, who at the time lacked any experience and knowledge of society, had no resources other than the books his teacher read to students: “So I listened when he [the teacher] would read to us... whatever the reason, he read to us and I anyway listened, though I did not know that in that listening I was equipping myself better for what I should later design to do than if I had learned all the addition and subtraction in the book” (Faulkner 195). In this passage about Sutpen’s initial reading act, Sutpen hears stories about the West Indies, “a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich” (195), and the opportunities for economic success, a story to which he will return for his own “design.” As it turns out, Sutpen does indeed decide to go to the West Indies, “remember[ing] what [the teacher] had read” (196), and then becomes a very successful man, just as the story had promised. In this scene, reading is an act of listening to someone else reading a book aloud (“I listened when he [the teacher] would https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080520