Historicity And Ahistoricity In Absalom, Absalom!

Though most Faulknerian critics have noticed the two contradictory facets of Absalom, Absalom!, namely, historicity and ahistoricity, the paradoxical relation between the two has not been fully addressed. The present dissertation recognises the dialectical interplay between historicity and ahistoricity and aims to excavate the inherent logic that binds the two together.In the text under scrutiny, the monument to patriarchal institutions has been destroyed and the destructive nature of the metaphysics of the binary system exposed. It gives reader the message that the salvation lies in a movement away from the prison of sexual, ethnic, economic and regional polarizations toward a world in which the Other is no longer the materialization of all negative qualities and a multiplicity of distinctive Selves can live in harmony. Faulkner's double identity as both the Self and the Other enables the novelist to be convinced that the binary differentiation and classification, unless repudiated, augurs the demise of humanity, and the only way out is to hear the full register of human voice. Faulkner is interested less in producing a self-contained totalizing project than in invoking new social and psychological paradigms that stress the necessity of motion, multiplicity, equality and connection.Through the employment of various ahistorical narrative strategies that incorporates the voices denied by traditional historiography, the text undermines and even transcends the dualistic posturing of Western rationality, the privileging of patriarchal modes and meanings. The new reality adores fluidity, multiplicity and the importance of the Others'perspectives in the construction of the truth, and serves as a paradigm of the novelist's humanistic aspiration. The surface inconsistency of historicity and ahistoricity is harmonized, at least momentarily, in Faulkner's efforts to create a space within which the unruly, transgressive expressions of the marginalized will be emancipated from the suppression beneath the totalizing narrative and the formerly silenced can raise their own voices in defence as well as in celebration.