Rereading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (the greatest achievement in American literature), I’ve realized anew how relatively temporally close Quentin is the events Rosa Coldfield is relating. Coldfield relates the story of Sutpen to Quentin (though he knows it already — it’s in his blood from growing up in Jefferson) in 1910, and Coldfield makes it clear that Sutpen was the reason God saw fit to let the South lose the war. Coldfield wants Sutpen’s story told so that those

who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read [the story of Sutpen] and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.

It is, in other words, a story of the Civil War. And while that seems so very distant to us now, it’s easy to understand the lingering resentment Southerners feel in the story. After all, it’s only been forty-some odd years since the war when Quentin sits in Coldfield’s house, listening to the story of the most mysterious man in the county.

For us today, that’s the nearness of the Vietnam War, something that’s still in most everyone’s cultural consciousness. Many are still upset about “Hanoi Jane,” and I suppose that resentment might be something akin to what Coldfield is feeling in the novel: a resentment of a defeat that seems due to so many non-military, non-combat reasons.

Yet it’s still difficult for me to understand the continuing resentment many white Southerners feel about a defeat that was almost a century and a half ago. “The South will rise again!” would have made sense in Quentin’s turn-of-the-century culture, but another century after that and so many are still boiling about it?

Then again, a century and a half is nothing compared to the length and depth of some of Europe’s ethnic and national resentments. Hatred and disappointment never die, I suppose.