Morrison’s Return to Faulkner: A Mercy and Absalom, Absalom!

This chapter examines an intertextual relationship between Toni Morrison's novel, A Mercy (2008) and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). A Mercy returns to racial motifs in Faulkner's work and shifts the focus from the dominant culture to the marginalized and explores racial meanings that have eluded readers for whom black and white are discrete, dichotomous categories. Whereas the narrators of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! are the white upper class that Morrison calls “the dominant cultural body,” Morrison's novel incorporates narrators include all perspectives--white, black, Native American, free, and slave--and Morrison's culturally marginalized narrators foreground meanings that are implicit, but often withheld, disguised, or denied by Faulkner's narrators.