In Absalom, Absalom! characters’ references to ghosts and the supernatural symbolize the weight of inherited historical trauma that haunts the South and its inhabitants in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Throughout the novel, Quentin repeatedly references the “ghosts” that have haunted his youth, describing the experience of having grown up around elders who were alive to see—and to mourn—the height and decline of the pre-war South. He describes the region’s pre-war culture as “ghost-times” and the older generation who stubbornly clings to that culture as ghosts. He also laments that he, too, must exist as a ghost simply by virtue of being born in a place that can’t let go of its past.
Ghost imagery also evokes the pointlessness of clinging to a long-dead past—ghosts can haunt and impart misery on the living, yet they cannot effect tangible change. Miss Rosa’s decades-long grudge against the long-dead Thomas Sutpen, for instance, only serves to perpetuate her misery and alienate her from the rest of the world—following his insulting her, she lives the rest of her life as a shut-in, scorning events of her past she has no ability to change. After she dies, Mr. Compson writes in a letter to Quentin that his one hope for her is that, in the afterlife, she might be reunited with the absent dead against whom she held her grudges in life—and thus, in dying, gain “actual recipients of the hatred and the pity” that went unreceived during the years she spent fuming, all alone in her decrepit house and in her bitterness.
Ghosts and the Supernatural Quotes in Absalom, Absalom!
Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times;
His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
Maybe you have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe it’s better then maybe it’s fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad.
Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it’s something my people haven’t got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves […] and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget.
Ghosts and the Supernatural Symbol Timeline in Absalom, Absalom!
