I don’t hate it

August 26, 2025

The end of Absalom, Absalom! crowned my labored effort through what I consider to be the hardest Faulkner work; I read it for a class and found Faulkner’s use of language by far the most discursive, bendy, and infinitely unfurling. It, naturally, resolves (or at least, acknowledges) the inter-generational tension spanning past and present while tacitly accepting the impossibility of knowing much of anything (the mystery remains so, conjecture unable to illuminate the shadows cast by the procession of time). Most of all, the end–with the last glimpse of Quentin’s resolve before the events of The Sound and the Fury–is beautiful. I could stretch back further and further until I end up on the other side of the book– for example, how Quentin and Shreve stretch beyond the confines of the present and blend with and interpose on Henry and Bon’s procession¹– but I’ll focus firmly on the objective end, the last blotches of ink, the thinning leaves a reminder that prose is terminable. Shreve asks Quentin one final question²:

“Why do you hate the South?”

“I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

His ambivalence toward the South retrospectively haunts the text and, if one were to march into a reading of The Sound and the Fury, mediate such irrevocably. It is all beautiful, painful, and mystifying to hear Quentin’s cry, to contextualize this character against the events of Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, to feel, viscerally, the guttural cry of this harrowed adolescent, away from his home and blooming in adulthood, latch onto that faithful word, home, and refuse to let go, irrevocably, irrevocably. It is a tortured, defiant cri de coeur. He recognizes Southern moral degeneracy in its absolute proximity: even in the North, he feels the South’s incessant heartbeat. Steeped in this history of moral transgressions, hopelessly entangled with ideas of virginal purity, and devote in faith to an absolute symbolic order, he cannot reject the South or decouple Southern history and his own.

While traveling and being interviewed in Japan³, Faulkner was asked

Q: Do you love the South?

and answered

Faulkner: Well, I love it and hate it. Some of the things there I don’t like at all, but I was born there, and that’s my home, and I will still defend it even if I hate it.

It’s an interesting inversion: anchoring the question around love instead of hate. It’s also entirely proposed rather than supposed; Shreve supposes that Quentin already hates the South ("Why do you hate"), where Faulkner’s interviewer does not guide their question ("Do you love"). Such is the drama of fiction.

Both of their responses effuse ambivalence; are steeped in a mystifying, contradictory complexity. They clearly converge, though this muddle is too hazy to observe the contours of their intersection, the waters roiled by a playful hand: to obscure. What can still be observed–and, more so, felt–is the contradiction, the inability to reconcile the ghosts of the past with the spectres of the future. It is, as Irving Howe puts it, an image of the South suspended between “an irretrievable past and an intolerable future”. Life and fiction alike reify this incongruity; what remains is only to proceed into the future despite.

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Quentin’s harrowing words are their veracity. While deeply entrenched in the Southern condition, they also seem to diffuse elsewhere: for one, nestling firmly in my own heart. This implant rises many ready images of two irreconcilable poles, ambivalence saturating the conduit between, past present future, a nebula in flux. He cannot efface history, nor does he want to. At the same time, he cannot accept it.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever hated someone, something. I have felt hate, but the distance of memory brings clarity, and that hate becomes hate*. Maybe instantaneous hate is real, its intensity overriding mediation, but to stretch a stance temporally is to nuance with the troughs and crests of feeling and reify a contiguous stance. It is natural that poles of intensity thus meet in ambivalence, and, although I’m not Southern, I too am forever caught between the poles of love and hate, dichotomies I can only ever briefly align with. And so, the echoes of Quentin’s cry and the reverberations of Faulkner’s response resonate with me: reverberating against my ribs, amplifying with the drone of my heart and the boiling of my blood, welling in my throat with a forgone clamour.⁴