The Negative Plate; or, Absalom, Absalom! and the camera’s voice

This chapter examines the structural tension between voice and image in Absalom, Absalom!, relating the novel’s formal resolutions to developments in photography, the printing press, and talking pictures. Considering the cognate set of mid-1930s relationships between word and image in the “photographic essay,” newspapers, and film, the chapter situates Faulkner’s artistic achievements in the context of larger cultural concerns about the storytelling capacity of visual images, the limits of textuality as an indexical medium, and the media’s commercial imperatives. The chapter directly relates these concerns to the tension in Faulkner’s aesthetic ideology between modernistic imperatives and antiquated romantic tendencies, since here the passage between text and image implies the “inheritance” and transmission of a romance gene from one media ecology to another by way of a hypnotizing tall tale. The chapter also looks closely at Pylon, examining a cultural mode of production and its relationship to capitalism more generally.