Introduction

doi:10.14325/mississippi/9781628461015.002.0006

Extract

The most arresting moment in Absalom, Absalom!, literally and figuratively, is when Clytie blocks Rosa Coldfield on the Sutpen’s Hundred stairs. The moment is unique in the novel for several reasons, standing as it does as one of its few instances of actual physical contact, but also for the significance to Rosa of its interracial aspect. Moreover it encompasses a broad thematic concern at the heart of the novel—indeed, in all of Faulkner’s South. Such a touching as Clytie’s is clearly an affront, and Rosa’s outraged response—“Take your hand off me, nigger!”—states openly thoughts that characters like Sutpen, Henry, and even Quentin harbor toward black-white somatic relations, but never utter.¹

The moment on the stairs is significant for what it points up about the meanings of touch to the novel and its characters, as well as in experience generally. In terms that are apposite to Rosa and Clytie’s encounter, Jennifer M. Barker states, “Tactility is a mode of perception and expression wherein all parts of the body commit themselves to, or are drawn into, a relationship with the world that is at once a mutual and intimate relation of contact. The … contact between touching and touched” and “the relationship of mutual, reciprocal significance that exists between them,” she continues, “are universal structures.”² We should immediately ask that Barker’s insistence on the universal quality of touching and structures of intimacy yield to the highly charged historical and racial character of Rosa’s and Clytie’s encounter. For, as we know, Clytie’s touch and Rosa’s reply occur within the double register of their antebellum, plantation history and Quentin’s Jim Crow context of 1910, in which the incident is recalled. Nevertheless, Barker’s account of the importance of touch, its unique power to unsettle or discomfit, has particular relevance to this scene.

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