Supernatural+Creatures

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Early on in //Absalom, Absalom!// Faulkner heavily sprinkles references to otherworldly forces and creatures / beings that are supernatural in nature; or if not overtly supernatural, certainly mysterious in undertone. The most frequently referenced creature is an **ogre**, which will be discussed at greatest length here. Additionally, there are repetitive references to creatures such as a **djinn, vampire, butterfly, moth,** and **phoenix**, that will be unpacked. [Sidenote: ghosts are also mentioned at length in the early chapters of AA!; so much so, however, that they deserve their own, separate post]. While an ogre, djinn, phoenix, and vampire are all supernatural in ways, the mentionings of the butterfly and moth in AA!, while not traditionally supernatural, are not described within the commonsensical realms one would assume. Usually, Faulkner employs descriptions of the creatures when he is describing certain qualities of characters in the story.

An early ogre-spotting occurs when Rosa describes early memories of the adults in her childhood “... a child to whom out of the overheard talk of adults my own sister’s and my sister’s children’s faces had come to be like the faces in an ogre-tale between supper and bed…” (15). This instance connects to another of Rosa’s incessant details of her upbringing: that of listening from behind doors. This ogre-reference harkens to the fact that because Rosa did not have a playful, youthful childhood, but rather one of hidden watchfulness, she clearly regarded some adults in her life, one in particular, as scary or monster-like. Many pages later, Rosa continues to characterize her childhood, and Sutpen, slightly covertly, to ogre-like qualities: “... in which the ogre-face of her childhood would apparently vanish so completely…” (52). This mysterious disappearing is echoed on an earlier page: “And what she saw then was just that ogre-face of her childhood seen once and then repeated at intervals and on occasions which she could neither count nor recall, like the mask in Greek tragedy interchangeable…” (49). Interestingly, she connects the ogre’s face (Sutpen) to one of a Greek tragedy, which has monstrous connotations in its own right, especially from the perspective of a young person. Joseph R. Urgo and Noel Polk extrapolate on this childhood / ogre connection in //Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!//: “An ogre is a hideous man-eating monster in lore and folktales (OED). Rosa’s image suggests the nightmare quality of her sense of the Sutpen family. We cannot tell from the novel whether the nightmare vision is one she had contemporaneously with her childhood visits to Sutpen’s Hundred or one she imposes on her young self as an older narrator thinking back about her total experience with Thomas Sutpen. To read properly, readers must keep both contingencies active because both are equally plausible and worth considering” (17). The ambiguity with which we are advised to keep in mind when regarding Rosa’s ogre descriptions of Sutpen is fitting to the larger format of the text, which is framed as a story being told, and which includes memories from both adulthood and childhood.

This ambiguous connotation shifts, however, as Rosa begins to attribute ogre-like qualities to Sutpen more overtly. Always regarding him with suspicion and an air of darkness, she attempts here to pin down via supernatural-creature-example just how he makes her feel. Rosa describes, “It was as though the sister whom I had never laid eyes on, who before I was born had vanished into the stronghold of an ogre or a djinn…” (16). She also possibly views Sutpen as “an ogre or a djinn” because he took her sister away from her home in marriage.

To take a minute to define a **djinn**: there are a multitude of origin definitions, so I will present a few that most fit within the possibility of Faulkner’s usage regarding describing Sutpen: [|"any of a class of spirits, lower than the angels, capable of appearing in human and animal forms and influencing humankind for either good or evil."] [|"Jinn (الجن‎‎, al-jinn), also] [|romanized] [| as djinn or] [|anglicized] [| as genies (with the more broad meaning of] [|demons] [|),] [|[1]] [| are] [|supernatural] [| creatures in early] [|Arabian] [| and later] [|Islamic mythology] [| and] [|theology] [|."] [|"In Arabian lore, djinn (also spelled jinn) are a race of supernaturally empowered beings who have the ability to intervene in the affairs of people."] [|"They feed on human blood and can poison their victims with a touch."]

Stemming from this knowledge of a djinn, we can shed light on the next passage describing Sutpen and the Christian church: “... since now and at last this ogre or djinn had agreed for the sake of the wife and the children to come to church, to permit them at least to approach the vicinity of salvation…” (16). Rosa’s scornful, sarcastic reference to salvation suggests ties to his djinn characteristic, as in some definitions it is described as somewhat demonic. Although terming him as a djinn, she feels that “at least” he allowed them to maybe be saved, if not himself.

Diverging slightly but significantly from Rosa’s vivid descriptions of Sutpen, she also describes multiple other characters, namely Ellen, as being akin to dark animalistic mutations, which I will quickly mention below, for reference: A **butterfly**: Most typically described as beautiful, colorful, delicate, fluttering, and generally pleasant, the butterfly that Rosa describes here is anything but those things as she bitterly references her sister’s flight from their childhood home into that of Sutpen’s, “ -- the woman who had quitted home and kin on a flood of tears and in a shadowy miasmic region something like the bitter purlieus of Styx had produced two children and then rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly…” (54-55). This butterfly (Ellen) is described amazingly as emerging from the “shadowy,” smelly, swampy waters of the Underworld; a most unusual, creature-like description of a butterfly. She later harkens back to another unusual, death-centric description of a butterfly to characterize the decay of her sister: “She had lost some flesh of course, but it was as the butterfly itself enters dissolution by actually dissolving: the area of wing and body decreasing a little, the pattern of the spots drawing a little closer together…” (67), and her eventual death: “Ellen was dead two years now -- the butterfly, the moth caught in a gale and blown against a wall and clinging there beating feebly…” (66-67). As previously seen, Rosa merges her descriptions of the butterfly with that of a **moth**, perhaps signalling the fluid metamorphosis Ellen was going through as she shifts back and forth through life, decay, and death: “... but that it would have been wasted on her since the clinging moth, even alive, would have been incapable now of feeling anymore of wind or violence)...” (67). A **phoenix**:  Of Rosa’s description of Charles Bon, she seems to be at a loss of words of how to describe him and any previous life he lived when she says that he was, “ -- a personage who in the remote Mississippi of that time must have appeared almost phoenix-like, fullsprung from no childhood…” (58). This classification of Bon being from an unnatural spawning maintains Rosa’s consistent tendency to classify others as supernatural.  A **vampire**:  Finally, Rosa, in a description of herself, uses a vampire to explain the solitary state she was living in, just trying to stay alive: “...: it is as though she were living on the actual blood itself like a vampire, not with insatiability, certainly not with voracity, but with that serene and idle splendor…” (68).

Works Cited:
Urgo, Joseph R., and Polk, Noel. // Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! // Mississippi: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2010.