The Signifying Abstraction:Reading “the Negro” in Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract A black presence dominates Absalom, Absalom!as it does perhaps no other Faulkner novel. Nowhere else is it so apparent that the Negro is an abstract force confounding southern life both past and present even while, paradoxically, stimulating much of that life and art. The material or experiential realities of black people do not figure into the conception of “the Negro,” an essentialized, always already “typed” configuration. A symbolic statement of this idea is suggested by the action of Miss Rosa Coldfield, one of the participants and narrators, who attempts to lift the weight of a coffin bearing the body of Charles Bon (whom she has never seen either alive or dead) in order to ascertain whether Bon’s body is, in fact, inside. In essence, she desires to validate Bon’s existence from sensory evidence; she is determined to know whether he is flesh or an imaginative construct. However, Miss Rosa is forced to apply not the most expedient sensory mechanism (that is, sight) but the only one available to her, and that one is insufficient for such a determination.