Reprise: Reverberation, Circumambience, and Form-Seeking Sound (Absalom, Absalom!)

The Reprise takes up among his most sensitive readers, Faulkner and his Absalom, Absalom!. Through Conrad, Faulkner was seeking a literary racial form for the historical present of a segregated and unreconstructed South: “reverberation.” Bringing sound studies to bear upon narratology, the Reprise argues that Faulkner’s difference from Conrad lies in the place of history: as action at a distance, reverberation in narrative involves one actor completing in the present what another could not in the past. The Reprise brings the traces of Polish in Conrad’s grammar to bear upon Faulkner’s continuation of Conrad’s project of listening, a project that also complements Du Bois. Ultimately, the novel becomes in Faulkner’s hands a technology for recording history and its negativity.