Lindsey Arnold

ENG 4990
11-5-2021
Tin Men

William Faulkner’s text Absalom, Absalom! opens a conversation on race relations within

the Sutpen narrative and analyzes how these relationships between people of black and white

heritage function. Faulkner’s descriptions of these relationships across the board are in terms of

people being spoken of as cogs in a machine. Through using a Marxist approach to this text, the

reader can glean that Faulkner comments on the unequal relations between races by describing

characters, their actions, and their feelings with vocabulary that suggests a mechanical and

machine-like tendency. This leads to the conclusion that characters create a machine-like life and

perpetuate the racist system through their unequal molds in society.

Faulkner begins his descriptions of people in machine-like terms with Sutpen himself in

the early phases of Sutpen’s relationships with the Coldfields. Sutpen has been arrested and the

Coldfields vouch for him to get released from jail even though they are the ones who should be

trying to keep him there. Faulkner describes, “And it did not help him any that at least two of the

citizens who should have made two of the teeth in the outraged jaw served instead as props to

hold the jaw open and impotent while he walked out of it unharmed” (40). Here the reader sees

the town depicted as a jaw with sharp teeth and each person is compared to a tooth in that jaw,

waiting to bite down on Sutpen and keep him imprisoned. However, the Coldfields are instead

depicted as little props or, in other words, machines that hold this jaw open and keep it from

biting down on Sutpen. While the rest of the town is compared to an aspect of the human form,

the Coldfields are compared to machinery. The suggestion here is that the Coldfields vouch for

Sutpen not because they believe him to be innocent, but because the white man is always ‘right’,
even if he is technically in the wrong. Coldfield is identified as having misgivings about him but

still vouches for him. The same situation would not likely have played out if Sutpen were a black

man. He is granted immunity that a person of color would not have received because of the color

of his skin and the color of those who are vouching for him. This is clear through the description

that the Coldfields ‘should’ be teeth in the jaw but instead are the machines perpetuating the

unequal treatment of blacks.

Faulkner moves next to a description of Rosa and her thoughts about Charles Bon after

he has died. She is helping carry his coffin and she thinks about how she cannot feel the weight

of his body inside. Rosa narrates, “Occurrences… stop us dead as though by some impalpable

intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as

though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone” (122). This description suggests that

while in the midst of this life-changing experience – the death of another human being – there is

somewhat of a lack of feeling. It is mundane. The reference that Faulkner makes of their society

as a vacuum suggest that all of these experiences are getting sucked in and disappearing. It also

depicts the lack of ability to get oneself out of the life these characters are living. They cannot

escape and continually get sucked right back in, even if they are trying to make a change. They

recognize this, as Rosa comments on feeling as if they are in a vacuum, but each recognition

lasts for only a second and then is sucked back into the ugliness of society and forgotten. This

vacuum-like society serves to carry on the racist society, never allowing people of color to make

meaningful connections with people who are white, a fact solidified by a line close by in which

Rosa comments that she ‘never saw him’ and therefore could not have had a relationship with

Bon. The characters are all in a machine that will not let them out of this life they are destined to

live. They cannot break out because of the way society continues to function.
 One of the most fascinating descriptions of a character in machine-like terms comes

when Charles Bon II returns home with a wife who is of black heritage, perhaps the darkest-

complexioned character we come across in the book. She does not speak much and rarely

interacts with people in the town. She is described as, “The woman who, even a year later and

after their son was born, still existed in that aghast and automaton-like state in which she had

arrived” (166). This is arguably the most straight forward machine description found in the book,

and it is likely no coincidence that it is used to describe the darkest character. This suggests that

she is the most machine-like one of them all and brings up the question of whether she is

intentionally acting as a machine to keep others away or if she has been beaten down so often by

the society she lives in that she has become more machine than human. Later on in that

paragraph, after Bon III is born, a line reads, “There followed something like a year composed of

a succession of periods of utter immobility like a broken cinema film, which the white-colored

man who had married her spent on his back recovering from the last mauling he had received”

(167). The significance of this machine description of their life together is two-fold. First, they

are described as seeming like they are in a ‘broken cinema film’, suggesting that they feel like

they are not in control of their lives but rather following the script that is already written and

watching from the outside. They do not have a choice in the scene that comes next, just as they

do not have a choice in the racist system they live in. Second, it suggests that the white man had

been ‘mauled’ by the black woman by entering into this life with her because having this life

makes it much harder for him to function in society. This is extremely unhealthy. He does not

benefit from their relationship, but only suffers. One of the closest relationships between a white

and black person in the text is described in the most anti-human terms, showing the perpetuation

of the system even in those relationships that, on the surface, appear to negate it.
 Faulkner follows with an interesting description of relations between Henry and Bon,

showing their strange sibling relationship seemingly different from the norm of race relations but

serving, ultimately, to enforce the social statuses. Bon and Henry are at war and discussing the

predicament of Bon marrying Judith. There is dissent between bon and Henry and high emotion.

The narration plays out, “You would not even have to know for certain yourself because who

could say but what a Yankee ball might have struck me at the exact second you pulled your

trigger” (274-275). Bon comments here on the fact that Henry could kill him in battle without

anyone knowing and without Henry even having to be certain of his killing Bon. We can see

Henry here connected closely with a gun, his anger with Bon matching the anger commonly

present before the pull of a trigger. His anger is portrayed as the machine – a gun – by the

suggestion that if he were to lose his temper, that would play out as him killing Bon. This, in

turn, would serve to perpetuate the class system with the black man losing and the white man

winning, solidifying the unequal spaces that each claim on the social ladder. This suggestion of

how Henry might eliminate Bon from the world and from his life follows through when Henry

actually kills Bon by pulling the trigger on a gun and shooting him. The distinction, however, is

that it is not done at war where there could be an out for Henry and the blame would not fall on

him. Instead Henry kills him out in the open when it is obvious that he is the one at fault. This

suggests the immunity of the white man. Henry, the cog in the racist machine, needs no excuse

for killing a black man, because he is so far above him in status.

Sutpen serves to illuminate the race systems clearly in his want to have another son

before he is too old. His description is as follows: “Possibly he could get but one more son…as

the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality” (224). In Sutpen’s

search for a means to another son, he becomes a cannon, one of perhaps the most destructive
machines. Similar to a cannon, he shoots at people and hurts others in his blind pursuit of what

he desires. He already has two sons, but one fails to impress him in his strength and manliness,

and one has black blood. He is not satisfied because this son, even though he appears white, is

not pure because of his mother’s partial black descent. This causes Sutpen to turn into this

destructive machine and wreak havoc because he is so focused on having another son who

satisfies his image of what his son should be. While he already has a strong-willed son who

should make him happy, he fails to acknowledge him because of the social hierarchy. Even

though Bon is biologically his son, exhibits characteristics that would impress Sutpen, doesn’t

appear black, and wants to be acknowledged as Sutpen’s son, this still isn’t enough for Sutpen.

He has so ingrained the characteristics of his society within and so formed to the machine

structure, that he acts as a leading player in the destruction of anything that stands in the way of

the white man’s vision.

There is an interesting switch at the end of the book when Faulkner creates a distinction

between Quentin and the other characters whom he has been hearing and telling a story about.

As he leaves the house with Aunt Rosa after seeing Clytie, Quentin is described as, “Breathing

fast and hard of the dark dead furnace-breath of air, of night where the fierce aloof stars hung”

(297). Quentin is leaving Miss Rosa and Jim after the fire and is feeling almost ill after the

experience. He is breathing the air of his machine-society, unclean air as from a furnace. He has

just commented on how Jim helped Rosa, and she did not even thank him but simply said

goodnight. The experience of seeing the machine in action allows him to recognize the machine-

like quality in himself. The furnace is burning him from the inside out. The air of his society is

toxic and does not match with a healthy life. There is one more description of Quentin that

caught my attention. Faulkner writes, “Quentin, the Southerner, the morose and delicate
offspring of rain and steamy heat in the thin suitable clothing… his overcoat… lying on the floor

where he had not even bothered to raise it” (276). This serves as a fascinating metaphor because

everyone is a machine in this society and Quentin, having recently realized this, wants to break

from the mold and so leaves himself in the rain. Machines, being made of metal for the most

part, rust when they are left to the elements. Therefore, by leaving his machine body out in the

rain, he is letting himself rust and, consequently, damaging the machine of society. He

intentionally does not raise his coat to cover himself because damaging even one piece of the

machine likely damages the whole entity. Quentin, therefore, is the only character directly trying

to break out of his racist society.

Faulkner’s intricate choices of descriptions that relate people to machines allow the

reader an entrance point into understanding his greater comments on how a racist society

functions. When everyone acts as a cog in the machine, change fails to occur. Even some

seemingly small action on the part of each character serves to perpetuate the machine of society.

All of Faulkner’s descriptions lead to a central evaluation of the racist society: people must

actively work to break out of it in order for change to occur.

 Works Cited

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York, Vintage International, 1986.