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His fierce dream of Sutpen's Hundred at first succeeds. But disaster overtakes him and his dream of a dynasty. His grown son Henry brings home a friend, Charles Bon, who courts Sutpen's grown daughter Judith—but who turns out to be Sutpen's never-acknowledged child by his first wife, whom he put aside when he discovered that the aristocratic Creole girl had a trace of Negro blood. The Civil War interrupts, and the men go off to fight. But when the weary combatants return and meet at the gate of the ruined plantation, young Henry Sutpen shoots down his half-brother Charles Bon. Why? Was it because of a fear that Judith would commit incest? Or miscegenation?
Thus the plot of Absalom, Absalom! sums up the fundamental Southern anxiety: to the racist's question, "would you want your sister to marry one," Faulkner adds "when he may be your brother?" This, Faulkner seems to say, lies at the heart of the almost paranoiac fear of the "mixing of bloods," which would call in question the belief in a difference between the races on which white dominance was founded, and which, as the owner of one of Mississippi's largest plantations said last week, is still "very real for many whites today."
Crisis of Identity. In Light in August, Faulkner demonstrated how the preoccupation with race can make it tragically impossible for a man to know who he really is, and dramatized the mindless virulence of white reaction to miscegenation. Joe Christmas, the book's hell-ridden hero, is a remarkably modern figure: in the psychological cant phrase of 1964, he suffers an "identity crisis" because he thinks he is part Negro successfully passing for white. Compounding his agonizing psychological fracture, Joe Christmas takes for his mistress a woman who embodies the Southerner's hated notion of the "outside agitator." Joanna Burden is a spinster, a Northerner, dedicated to helping Negroes. Her failure is that she is not able to know Negroes as individuals, but only as an abstract mass or a brooding presence. One day Joanna is found brutally murdered in her bedroom. Obviously Joe has killed her. But this would not have excited the town until an acquaintance of Joe Christmas says that he has always thought Joe was a nigger. That sets off the mob. In his description of Joe's lynching, Faulkner makes clear that vengeance does not expunge guilt, and expiation is nigh to impossible.
"When they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. 'Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell,' he said. But the man on the floor had not moved . . . From out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath . . . upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes."