Absalom shows two narrators who find themselves at opposite poles in their understanding of time. The first, Rosa Coldfield, tells Quentin Compson she patiently listens to what might be called the life and times of Thomas Sutpen. This rather incorrect description of his act, however, immediately suggests something missing in his notion of Sutpen, namely a life and times. He takes Sutpen out of time and treats him as immortal, alternately considering him a god and a demon. Quentin, the second narrator, has an opposite sense of time: an almost philosophically complete understanding of time in the sense expounded by Henri Bergson. This understanding occurs through the cultural process of osmosis, through which full understanding is inherited. While Rosa's problem might appear as an isolated insensitivity to this legacy, Faulkner delicately traces Rosa's problem, not to Rosa, but rather to her relationship to the story she is telling, to her involvement in it. In this outline, we see Rosa's problem not as an isolated problem, but as a crisis of understanding at the very heart of Faulkner's struggles in writing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThe Rosa Coldfield monologues that Quentin is listening to have one thing at their center: Thomas Sutpen. At the center of his understanding is the belief in his immortality. When he learned of his death he denied it: “'Dead' I cried. Died? You? You lie; you are not dead, heaven cannot, and hell dare not, do you/”. This denial of Sutpen's end is complemented by a denial of his beginning when he recalls the first time he saw Sutpen: "for the first time he entered the city without a recognizable past." In these first and last moments, Rosa affirms her faith in Sutpen that she came from nowhere and isn't going anywhere. In his mind, he is not a creation in motion from beginning to end, but is perpetually suspended somewhere in the middle, outside of time. When he leaves for war, she simply "stays there and waits for Thomas Sutpen to come home," never having any doubt that he would survive even the bloodiest war. This vision is not only present in Rosa's memory of the macrostructure of Sutpen's life, but also in the microstructure. In describing his memory of his marriage proposal to her, he says, "he had never thought about what he asked me to do until the moment he asked me." Just as in his life as a whole, in his actions, he sees no cause, no beginning, no thought, just pure action. Because these actions came out of nowhere, they “left no ripples to save those instant, incredible tears.” His actions appear to be a single point of energy with no density, no matter, and no existence outside of their pure energy. Even the words he says “must not be said and heard but read, carved in insipid stone”. Spoken sentences presuppose a progression of individual words, one after the other, and therefore a progression of time. Rosa rejects him and instead interprets his words as if they were present all together, in an inscription. The lack of dialogue extends to Rosa's entire monologue. While she occasionally remembers something she said or was told directly, her story is mostly dialogue-free. The denial of Sutpen's existence between moments extends throughout his story. For her, time is a series of points, not a progression or succession. If the essence of time is, as Henri Bergson defined it, two things: “points”, but “furthermore, the dark and mysterious passage from a positionto the other." next”, then Rosa clearly stripped her story of the second as a passage from one position to another. It is this succession from one to the other that creates what Bergson deems essential for all beings in time: duration. By stripping her characters of duration, she becomes one of the two degenerate types of historian Nietzsche speaks of: the antiquarian. She “mummies” her past by varnishing each past moment as a piece of furniture and then setting it aside to deny its existence in a larger set of moments, as you would deny a piece of furniture a place in a room. In doing so Nietzsche says that one "wraps oneself in a smell of putrefaction". Perhaps this is what Quentin perceives when he smells a “coffin-like darkness” in the room where he sits listening to Rosa's story. In mummifying and stripping both Sutpen and his entire past of any flux, he strips the past of its temporality. The problem of his temporality is compounded by the small number of moments he sees in the past; if it provides snapshots to the reader, it provides very few snapshots. He sees each series of time as consisting of only a few isolated moments. Recounting the three months immediately following Sutpen's return home, he says: “And then one afternoon in January Thomas Sutpen came home; someone looked up where we were preparing the garden for another year's food and saw him riding down the drive. And then one evening I got engaged to him." He reduces these three months to two single moments. Its time reduction is even more noticeable on a large scale. As the reader might believe from Rosa's story, her life lasted only a few moments: the moment of Bon's death, the moments when she delivered food to her father in the attic, the moment when Thomas Sutpen asked her to marry him and a few others. Nothing else in his life is revealed except these moments. You are therefore also like the other of Nietzsche's two degenerate historians, the monumental historian. As Nietzsche describes, “very large portions of the past are forgotten and despised, and pass away. . . and only individual embellished facts stand out like islands." Antiquing and monumentalizing his past, he does a similar thing to his past that Gail Hightower does to hers in Light in August. Thinking about the past, Hightower states that “the world hangs in a green suspension of color and texture, like light through stained glass.” He sees the past as a still life, more specifically, in both the description of the material as glassy and green, it seems possible that this is a reference to Keats's green Greek urn. Whether it is or not, the urn is a good objective correlative of what Rosa did with time. By choosing a few monumental moments from his past and depriving these moments of any movement, he makes his past something akin to freezing on an urn. Quentin is patient during Rosa's monologue but near the end, the narrator reveals that Quentin "wasn't listening." .” He didn't listen because there was "something he couldn't ignore." He needs to go back and remember something, and from the first moments of contemplation he is interested in everything that Rosa was not in the life and times of Thomas Sutpen, namely time and his existence as a living, breathing creature . . In one sentence, he was interested in re-temporalizing the story that Rosa had told him. A few moments after Rosa's voice faded in the warm Mississippi night, he inserts a primary element into the story that had been missing in Rosa's hours of monologue: dialogue. Imagine the dialogue between Henry and Judith immediately after Henry kills Judith's lover, Bon: Now you can't marry him. Why can't I marry him? Because he died. Died? YES. I killed him. Taking this past as the means in which one word can follow another,Quentin assumes temporal succession in a way immediately alien to Rosa's creation. But the description that immediately precedes Quentin's reconstruction of Judith running towards the door after hearing the shot that killed Bon has already revealed Quentin's interest in temporal succession. Filling her description with signifiers of time flow, she tells of Judith “pausing, looking at the door,” “then quickly joined by the ageless white girl in front of her as the door broke in and her brother stood there hatless. . . the gun still hanging at his side. Words like pause, fast and still all fundamentally suggest an understanding of time that is conscious of its quality as a succession of moments passing into one another. All this: "He (Quentin) couldn't get over it." Quentin reconceptualizes this climactic moment as having everything Rosa has never seen in her past and then extends this to Sutpen's entire story. Early in his story, he still refers to Sutpen as a demon: "Jones crouched against a post, occasionally rising to pour from the demijohn for the demon" (183). But at the same time as it refers to the demon, it also refers to the demon as existing in a situation where moments succeed one another, the passing of time being suggested in the phrase "from time to time." Quentin deepens the awareness of this flow by establishing Rosa's idea that Sutpen's actions come out of nowhere. In each of Sutpen's actions, Quentin imagines Sutpen's uncertainty before acting. Considering the moment in Sutpen's childhood when Sutpen was refused entry into the big house on the plantation, Quentin imagines Sutpen arguing with himself: “But I can shoot him: he argued with himself and with the other: No. It would be of no use: and the first: What will we do then and the other: I don't know". The extent to which Sutpen's decisions arise from timely deliberation is almost exaggerated in this passage, but the exposition of each decision emphasizes the way in which each moment grows out of the one before it. In this false internal argument she also sees a child aware of the consequences of his action, while Rosa saw her actions as somehow preordained. The causal and direct movement evident in Sutpen's life is a testament to the re-temporalization that Quentin has completed. Rosa's description ignored this second aspect of Bergson's definition of time, but Quentin captures what Bergson called "the dark and mysterious passage from one position to the next." Quentin sees Sutpen's time as "a succession of states, each announcing what follows and containing what precedes it." When she imagines the child Sutpen arguing with himself, another assumption is missing from Rosa's story, and another element that serves to place Sutpen in a temporal continuum: a young Sutpen. Quentin sees a definite beginning in Sutpen's life: "he was born in West Virginia in the mountains" (220). And it also tells of Sutpen's death. The larger structure of Sutpen's life gains a sense of continuity that is not only present in Quentin's story, but also in the characters within Quentin's story. Sutpen realizes in this story that he "still knew he had courage, and although lately he may have come to doubt whether he had acquired that cunning he once believed he had, he still believed that it existed somewhere in the world to be learned and that if it could be learned, he would learn it again.” Quentin not only imagines a man existing in time, but also presents a man aware of his existence in time understand the durationof another thing, Bergson says that one must “enter into it”. Duration is the absolute of being, it is the nucleus and understanding this regarding another person implies understanding their “states of mind”; that you are in contact with the subjectivity of that being of yours. To do this, says Bergson, “I insert myself into them by an effort of imagination”. But this act, and the absolute understanding that derives from it, can only be given by what Bergson defines as the highest act of understanding: intuition. As the constant use of the word “imagination” suggests, along with the interiority of Quentin's gaze, Quentin has this intuition of the absolute with his characters. The origin of the distinction between Rosa's narrative and Quentin's is clarified by Faulkner's distinction between the terms memory and knowledge in Light in August. The description, dense and intricate, begins like this: “memory believes before knowledge remembers. He has believed longer than he remembers.” Memory precedes knowledge, or we can temporarily assume that things that can be remembered are inherited rather than experientially learned. Since Thomas Sutpen's entire story occurred before Quentin was born, his understanding clearly comes from something innate. Shreve tells Quentin “you already knew everything, you had learned, you had already absorbed without the medium of speech somehow from being born and living alongside it” (212). Without the medium of speech, the clearest substitute for experiential knowledge in this moment, Quentin understands again. This same passage Faulkner draws an incredibly subtle but obvious connection between Quentin's mode of understanding and the definition of memory just mentioned: Shreve goes on to say that everything Rosa and her father had told Quentin “he told you nothing more than he struck, word for word, the resonant strings of memory” (emphasis added, 213). Remembering, in its most traditional sense, would not make sense here because it would imply that Quentin actually has experienced something. Assuming that memory is something that comes before knowledge, as the Light of August indicates, this moment suddenly makes sense. Quentin's possession of memory brings with it something vital in his reconstruction of Sutpen. Unlike knowledge, which gathers information, memory brings with it belief. Belief implies subjectivity, and while Quentin is able to imagine more about Sutpen's subjectivity than his beliefs, the word "belief" suggests subjective powers of memory magic. In its ability to let one individual enter another, memory seems so close to Bergson's intuition or rather it seems that memory provides intuition. What Rosa works on is knowledge, the memory of events in one's life. “To know” means to give a clearer and more contextual definition a moment after the definition already cited when it is said that the young Joe Christmas, “knew that. He had been doing it for almost a year." The knowledge comes from her personal experiences, just like Rosa's knowledge in Absalom, Absalom. Rosa says that her story comes from "sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and feel and feel not mind, not thought: memory does not exist". In another apparent reference to the definition of Light in August, we learn that memory does not exist in Rosa's story because she is overwhelmed by experiential data from the past. Rosa's knowledge leads her to mythologize the story, while Quentin's knowledge allows him to fictitiously create Sutpen's life. As Frank Kermode tells us “myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change”. This immobility of Rosa's story contrasted with the change of Quentin's is precisely what we found in theBergsonian distinction between the two narrators. But why doesn't Rosa also have access to the absolute, was she also born and raised in this climate? Is it Quentin's Harvard education that sets him apart? Considering Quentin in The Sound and the Fury (Quentin (SF) from here on out) the difference in storytelling methods seems not related to the individual, but rather to the individual's relationship to the story he or she is telling. Although Quentin (SF) is not consciously telling a story like Quentin (AA) does, he is still trying to make sense of his past, so much so that Jean-Paul Sartre says he appears to be a “man sitting in an open place caring and looking backwards". But looking back, he falls into extreme temporal confusion. It remembers a series of moments disconnected from any temporal basis. One moment his mother proclaims, “We sold Benjy's pasture so Quentin can go to Harvard like your brother. Your little brother." He returns to this moment a number of times, elsewhere recalling his mother saying, "With your school money, the money they sold the pasture for so you could go to Harvard." In both of these memories there is a syntactic sense of suspension in which memories of the past have neither beginning nor end. In a long page of remembered dialogue, he recalls: Get out of that water, you're crazy But she didn't move, her face a white blur framed by the blur of sand from her hair. Leave now. Faulkner leaves out capitalization and punctuation to emphasize the lack of boundaries for each statement in Quentin's mind. In addition to having no clear beginning and end, there are very few remembered moments. Throughout Quentin's entire monologue, he is haunted by a select series of events; as Sartre observed, “countless silent masses gravitate around some central themes (Caddy's pregnancy, Benjy's castration, Quentin's suicide)” (268). From this brief description it should be clear that Quentin, despite his Harvard education, is mired in the same understanding of the past that Rosa possesses in Absalom, Absalom. Now Rosa brings a little more coherence to her understanding of the past than Quentin (SF), but this seems like the result of Rosa's conscious effort to tell a story in Absalom, Absalom. Both share essential characteristics in telling the past. Both understand time as a series of points isolated from any temporal succession from the past to the future. What can explain the difference between the two Quentins and the similarity between Quentin (SF) and Rosa? Quite simply, both Rosa and Quentin (SF) work from memories of their own experience, unlike Quentin (AA). They work from knowledge as opposed to memory and, as the definition given above reveals, memory provides the subjectivity of a past time, while knowledge is just information. But why don't Quentin (SF) and Rosa also have this memory of being born in the South? The lower level of understanding that Quentin (SF) brings to his own understanding of the past appears to be due to the corrupting influence of personal involvement in his own history. In that already discussed moment, where Rosa refers to the source of her knowledge, she says all the “sense, sight, smell,” all the experiential involvement, “its resulting sum is usually incorrect and false” (143). As a provisional hypothesis, we might say that personal experience, rather than being the only gateway to understanding, actually obscures understanding of other times and other people. What Faulkner seems to propose here is an extended version of Marcel Proust's hypothesis in A Remembrance of Things Past. In this novel, the narrator encounters a constant problem when confronted with a physical object in the present: “it seemed thatwere hiding, beyond what my eyes could see, something that they invited me to come and get but that despite all my efforts I was never able to discover. . . I stood there motionless, looking, breathing, trying to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelled." The narrator realizes that there is something about the intensity of presence that never allows you to go beyond your perceptions. Going beyond perceptions is the path towards the Bergsonian absolute because "what constitutes the essence of a thing cannot be perceived from the outside". In Proust's idea, physical involvement not only does not help you achieve the absolute, but actually harms your efforts. The narrator's solution and the one that Proust followed in his life was to lock himself in a closed room, away from the sensory world. But Faulkner seems to take this theory further by suggesting that not only does physical involvement cloud the essence of something while in the presence of something, but it also clouds your vision of it in memory. When thinking about your past. Quentin (SF) agrees with his father in saying; “Only when the clock stops does time come to life”. The advancement of time seems like too much of a burden to allow for the processing of personal experiences, and only by extracting something from its temporal context, from the context that provides its essence, can one begin to get to grips with it. The same is not true for Quentin when dealing with the past in Absalom, Absalom. Faulkner seems to put his finger on what Dorrit Cohn says is "the altered relationship between the narrator and his protagonist when that protagonist is his own past." This alteration causes a “profound change in the narrative climate”. The nature of this change is found in the shift from Quentin (SF) and Quentin (AA). Quentin's possession of a Bergsonian temporality leads to the opportunity for morality in his story in which a non-Bergsonian temporality virtually excludes morality. With the succession of moments comes the possibility that one moment influences the next, causality arrives. Closely related to causality is the notion of consequence, or “something that follows logically or naturally from an action or condition.” Finally when you recognize the multiple possibilities of action in a situation you stop seeing action as a preordained judgment and morality becomes possible. This emerges most forcefully in Quentin's differentiation between his view of Sutpen and that of Rosa. In Quentin's story, Sutpen's death is met with the same thing that was met in Rosa's story: “He's dead. I know he's dead and how can he, how can he be?" But Quentin immediately says that this sentence “did not mean what Aunt Rosa meant: where did they find or invent a bullet that could kill him but how can he be allowed to die without having to admit that he was wrong and suffer and regret it” . Rosa denies Sutpen's death because of his belief in Sutpen's immortality. It would seem that Faulkner ran into the problem of personal involvement not only in his characters, but also in his own writing. Between the writing of the two Quentins, Faulkner wrote Light in August, a book in which “the growing narrative dislocations of Faulkner's time received more. attention than any other aspect of the novel” (Sundquist 77). Eric Sundquist sees this novel, about the mulatto Joe Christmas, as having a “distorted form” more than any other Faulkner novel. Sundquist's central argument is that these temporal dislocations and distorted form are the result of Faulkner's interaction with the novel's questions. The mulatto tragedy was “the only tragedy that, 1983. 63-95.