THE OPENING LINES of the Canterbury Tales powerfully give voice to the desire to go on pilgrimage: the return of spring not only stirs the world of nature to grow and procreate, it stirs people to “longen” for pilgrimage (1.12). Curiously, while these opening lines depict the urge to go on pilgrimage as an almost natural, universal force, the closing lines of this prologue describe a more specific purpose for undertaking the journey to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury: “The hooly blisful martir for to seke, /That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke” (1.17–18). Although people in the Middle Ages went on pilgrimage for many reasons, including for as disparate purposes as religious renewal or as an expression of social status, the seeking of health, particularly of a miraculous restoration to wholeness, animated many visits to saints’ shrines. The lists of miracles attached to various saints tell the story, repeatedly, of individuals with far more severe conditions than Chaucer's pilgrims being cured. Some shrines had a greater reputation for miraculous healing than others, but we need only look to Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend for a description of visits to the tomb of the “hooly blissful martir” St. Thomas Becket:

Though Chaucer raises the possibility of travelling to Canterbury for health reasons, most of the pilgrims do not easily conform to the catalogue of disabilities listed in The Golden Legend. The Wife of Bath is partially deaf, but none seem lame, blind, or mute. And yet, the Wife is nevertheless one of several figures of embodied difference. Looking just at the pilgrims, the Wife's deafness stands alongside the Pardoner's indeterminate gender and possibly phlegmatic condition, the Summoner's diseased face,and the Cook with his ulcerous leg.

At the close of “Wild Palms” (1939), Harry Wilbourne, like Quentin before him, survives to be a crypt, but in this case both the construction of the tomb and the identity of its occupant are explicit. Imprisoned for the botched abortion that led to the death of his mistress, Charlotte Rittenmeyer, Harry rejects suicide in the form of a cyanide capsule proffered by the offended husband in favor of fifty years hard labor in Parchman prison, during which time he will turn his body into a mausoleum containing the memory of Charlotte:

To come upon this, having read Absalom, Absalom! and recognizing that Quentin and Harry share analogous functions as “vault,” is to be shocked by the explicitness of the later text. Faced with Quentin's paralyzed “rigidity,” and sensing deletions, I searched among mutilated signs in order to locate an encrypted secret that remains finally unspeakable, at least for its bearer. In contradistinction, Harry not only declares that he has introduced a loved body into his own body for safekeeping, but he proves it.

In 1791 slaves revolted on San Domingo: “the world's richest colony” was overrun in a black revolution whose forces “defeated the Spanish; inflicted a defeat of unprecedented proportions on the British, and then made their country the graveyard of Napoleon's magnificent army.” By 1804 the Americas had their first black national state, the independent republic of Haiti. In 1823 Thomas Sutpen left Virginia for the West Indies, where, in 1827, he put down an uprising among slaves on a French sugar plantation on Haiti. As due recompense, he married the owner's daughter and achieved a son (1829). The dates are important because they indicate that Faulkner has the hero of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) “earn” the properties upon which he will eventually base his plantation “design,” improperly. There were neither slaves nor French plantations on Haiti in 1827. Faulkner's chronology creates an anachronism that rewrites one of the key facts of nineteenth-century black American history, in what looks suspiciously like an act of literary counterrevolution.

Those Faulkner scholars who notice urge “error” – I am unconvinced. The Haitian revolution had lasting consequences for the slaveholding states of the South where, during the 1790s, white panics about slave revolts were endemic. Indeed, “Saint Domingo [became] the symbol for black liberation struggles throughout the hemisphere and touched off a series of new insurrectionary attempts”: Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vessey in 1822, Nat Turner in 1831; to turn to the major North American black rebellions is to discover allusions to Haiti.

Seventeen-ninety-one and 1848 are years of revolution; but why in 1934 should Faulkner create and indulge witnesses who would deny that fact? In conversation with General Compson in 1863, Thomas Sutpen suppresses his recognition that to be master is to rest enclosed in the Jacobinical head of a slave. In 1909, Rosa Coldfield delivers a philippic, in preparation for forty-four years, turning on her refusal to acknowledge that the darkness of the “dark house” derives from the instability of the black labor from which it and she take their form. Sutpen was born in west Virginia in 1807 (or thereabouts), while Rosa Coldfield was born in 1845 in Jefferson, Mississippi; they were apprenticed to the peculiar institution, and their denials are therefore perhaps understandable. What is less so is why Faulkner should be interested in evoking and compounding them.

Sutpen's story is nothing if not persistent. Its line of transmission extends from the first gossip at his appearance in Yoknapatawpha County (1833) to Quentin's last denial in “the iron New England dark” of 1910. Why go on so, when Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared three million slaves “free,” and the crucial dependencies of slave production were radically reconstructed between 1863 and 1877?

Eric Foner's recent study of that reconstruction calls it “America's unfinished revolution,” and to read the historical documents surrounding tenancy during the mid-thirties (as Faulkner wrote Absalom, Absalom!) is to recognize that the New Deal constitutes the South's “Second Civil War,” another revolution from without, initiating a second and more radical reconstruction of southern labor.

In 1865 Henry Sutpen shoots Charles Bon dead at the gate to Sutpen's Hundred. In 1909 Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin Compson what she knows of that death and the events that follow it. I offer the dates merely to indicate that Rosa has had forty-four years in which to get her story straight and yet remains capable of statements such as, “for had I not heired too from all the unsistered Eves since the Snake?” and “I became all polymath love's androgynous advocate” (p. 117). Whether or not one deems her phrasing poetically dense (apt perhaps in an elegist) or transgressive (“a challenge to what we might call the paternal phallic authority of a text's meaning”), the upshot is mystification.

Rosa has nominal grounds for obscurity; before breaking into the Hundred in 1909 and talking to Henry, she apparently does not know who the murder victim is, beyond his being Henry's university friend and Judith's suitor. However, as Eric Sundquist persuasively argues, when she enters the Hundred to confront the corpse, she appears possessed of a covert account of Bon's identity. Faced with Clytie, blocking her way to the stairs and to the body in Judith's bedroom, Rosa “crie[s]”, “And you too? And you too, sister, sister?” (p. 112). Since she specifically does not address the term “sister” to Judith (“and not to Judith, mind”) but to Clytie, and to Clytie's face, “which was at once both more and less than Sutpen” (p. 112), it follows that Rosa recognizes Clytie as sharing a sister's relation to Bon.

What follows concerns the end and is less a conclusion than an allusion to work undone. I have contended that during the '30s, or more properly between 1929 and 1939, Faulkner uses the Compson material to mount a sustained exploration of how owners owned so much, for so long, by such “peculiar” means, and in the teeth of partial self-knowledge and sustained opposition. Faulkner's recognition that in the South black passes into white by way of a typical and persistent pattern of labor generates a style of speech that adds up to his key class inheritance. However, by deploying that speech to anatomize the labor impasse of the southern owning class, Faulkner risks taking himself, perceptually and stylistically, apart. On which self-defeating grounds it is perhaps understandable that the vocalist most adept at the doubling, division, reflexivity, and extension that characterizes Faulkner's turn to labor in the '30s should die, rise again, almost die, and partially recover (though in debilitated form). Quentin's last manifestation, as Harry, is little more than a figment of an intertext, a figure glimpsed occasionally among the implicit structures of an under-announced relationship between novels. With Quentin falling finally silent, white will never be quite so black again, and, arguably, the voices through which Faulkner returns to issues of labor and mastery will lack the tensile extension, the taut self-splitting, the driven and occlusive virtuosity of the work that has been studied here.