and 
and In his illuminating essay "Absalom, Absalom!: The Novel as Impressionist Art," Albert Guerard in distinguishing the exclusions from and connections between the two above mentioned novels observes,"The actual connections come down, very nearly, to a hometown, a father, a freshman year at Harvard; and briefly, Luster"(311). While the rooms are different , in each case the freshman year at Harvard includes a roommate named Shreve or Shrevlin, with the Christian name of McCannon in Absalom, Absalom! (henceforth AA) and MacKenzie in The Sound and the Fury (henceforth TSATF). In this paper I will examine the role of Shreve in each novel.
While the roommates are the same, the rooms are different, and the two Shreves--or the same Shreve notShreve--serve different roles in each novel. In TSATF we first meet Shreve, and while he plays a relatively minor role, we see some of the same characteristics that we will see later--foremost among them his wonderful humor.
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
We hear Sheve before we see him. In TSATF, according to the narrator-roomate Quentin, we hear Shreve's "bed-springs and then his slippers on the floor hishing" (49). What a wonderful Southern word is "hishing"--some onomatopeia with a Southern drawl. But Shreve is a northerner, from so far north, Edmonton , that he is from across the border. He will joke in response to a question as to whether he is a gentleman, "No. I'm Canadian." (93)
In his essay "Faulkner and the Community," Cleanth Brooks provides a hint of Shreve's primary function of being from outside the South, outside the Community (quoted at length for context):
"The reasons are obvious: the decay of religion, increasing moral relativism, the sheer growth of cities, industrialization, mechanization--all these factors tend to break up the cohesion generated by common background, traditional beliefs, and close personal associations. The relatively tight small-town and farming communities of the older America have been disappearing. But they had not disappeared from the world in which Faulkner grew up, and they have an important place in the world that they created in his fiction.
I, too, grew up in such a world. I took for granted the values I shared with my fellows. It was only years later that I became fully conscious of the beliefs, values, and attitudes that I shared, quite unreflectingly, with others. For such a sense of community is like the air we breathe. One simply takes it for granted. It is only when one is deprived of that air--when one begins to stifle and gasp-that he realizes its importance. Once we have lost our community--and usually not until we have lost it--do we come to value it, or even see it for what it is."
When Quentin is deprived of the moist, warm air of the South, when he stifles and gasps in Massachusetts, he will realize its importance, or its damning effects in his case. But Shreve is an outsider--and so he can appreciate Quentin's community in a more detached way. As he says at the end of AA "I just want to understand it [the South] if I can. . .Because it's something my people haven't got"(AA 289). One problem, though, in writing about Shreve is that you cannot consider him in the chronology of his life; rather one must look at Shreve in the chronicity that Faulkner wrote about him. Shreve was first born in TSATF, and really did not come to fruition as a well-rounded character until AA. Albeit, AA is set five months prior to the Quentin section of TSATF.
In TSATF Shreve serves as the roommate who cares about Quentin as Quentin goes about his last living day on the planet, and in the North. Quentin is an intuitive character--he senses something is wrong in Quentin's world," You taking a cut this morning?" (49). For only 9 months of rooming together, Shreve and Quentin are very close--something that we will note again in AA, where they have been roomates for only four months. But Shreve knows the Compson history, and the two roommates can do more even than just complete each other's sentences. Their closeness is also illustrated by Spoade, a senior who will appear later in the day with the Blands, and who gets Quentin riled with some loose language about "sluts,"which will remind Quentin of Caddy. Spoade calls Shreve "Quentin's 'husband,'" a nonsexual term (Note 1)referring to duties in the household of the college room, and another example also of how close the roommates are.
Also early on Shreve displays his intuition and insight into Southern culture in observing, "In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin"(50), a reflection that gets Quentin to thinking about his father's disregard for the honor of virginity. Shreve also shows his wonderful sense of humor when he returns from class to find Quentin dressed in a suit, "Is it a wedding or a wake?" (52). On the same page he follows that up with probably his funniest line in TSATF when he observes of Deacon in the G.A. R. (Grand Army of the Republic) parade, "There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old nigger." Yes," I said. "Now he can spend day after day marching in parades. If it hadn't been for my grandfather, he'd have to work like whitefolks"(52).
In addition to his wonderful humor, Shreve is also showing us that he has been hearing the history of the Compson family from Quentin. This is not surprising when we consider that Shreve had virtually taken a graduate course in Southern history five months earlier in hearing, and telling, the Sutpen story in AA.
While time sequencing is hard to track in the Quentin section of TSATF, Shreve and Quentin apparently have one more meeting later that same morning, after Quentin has gone out and gotten the flatirons. Before asking about the flatirons, which Quentin says are just a pair of shoes (65), Shreve again shows his dimay and humor--and now more suspicion by enquiring, "Say, what're you doing today, anyhow? All dressed up and mooning like the prologue to a suttee. Did you go to Psychology this morning?"Shreve then tells Quentin about the letter from Mrs. Bland whom he derisively refers to as Semiramis. We later learn the derision comes from Mrs. Bland's attempts to interfere, "She called Shreve that fat Canadian youth twice she arranged a new room-mate for me without consulting me at all, once for me to move out, once for" (67) (Note 2)
Shreve continues throughout the Quentin section as helper, defender, and cleaner upper of the difficulties that Quentin gets into for the balance of the day. After Quentin is arrested on suspicion of dishonorable intentions with the Italian girl, Shreve appears with the Blands, Spoade, and two girls. Shreve is instrumental in arranging for Quentin's release and also provides his opinion of the Italians, " damn wops."(92) Twelve pages later, Shreve is again cleaning up Quentin's mess helping him tend to his shiner that he got in a fight with Gerald Bland who reminds him of Dalton. "'You need a piece of beefsteak for that eye," Shreve said.'Damn if you wont have a shiner tomorrow'"(104). Shreve then helps us the readers to understand the motivations of the fight with Bland, which is critical since Quentin cannot remember even the fight itself.
As we heard Shreve's slippers "hishing," so Shreve quietly slips out of the story, his presence implied as Quentin is going back out to the river "seeing on the rushing darkness only his own face no broken feather unless two of them but not two like that going to Boston the same night then my face his face [emphasis added]for an instant"(109). In the chronicity of the story telling, the last references in the story are to Shreve's hairbrush, and the second letter to Shreve that Quentin is going to mail on his way to his date with the fish, who will be the only ones to see the shiner on Easter Saturday.
ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
Five months earlier, on a cold winter's night in December in a similar (Note 3) setting at Harvard, Shrevlin McCannon and Quentin chronicle the Thomas Sutpen story in Absalom, Absalom!
In AA, Shrevlin is a much more fully developed character, with an important role as co-narrator from Chapter 6 on. Shreve is very funny, very insightful, serves as speculative narrator, and , not surprisingly, given his physical description in TSATF as "a little shapeless, fatly intent"(65), he is a corpulent character in AA.
Shreve's physical description in AA is a curious one. He is constantly depicted as fat and pink "His naked torso pink-gleaming and babysmooth, cherubic, almost hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moonlike, rubicund face"(147) Shreve is sitting in the one room with the window open and no shirt on, "no sleeve on his arm at all now" His physical description and these odd feats serve to illustrate how cold it is in Boston--as opposed to the warmth and wisteria of the South. "So it is zero poutside, Quentin thought; soon he will raise the window and do deep breathing in it, clench fisted and naked to the waist" (176) (Note 4). Later in the evening, Shreve finally puts on a bathrobe and an overcoat. "He was hugging himself into the bathrobe now as he had formerly hugged himself inside his pink naked almost hairless skin"(220).
Shreve serves as a co-narrator from Chapter 6 on. He has heard the stories before and eagerly enters into the speculation. In the scene where Quentin is speculating about the "monkey nigger" who turned Henry Sutpen away from the door, Quentin speculates that he was housebred in Richmond, maybe. . . ("Or maybe even in Charleston,"Shreve breathed.) (188). The co-speculation is better shown in a passage in which Quentin is speculating about his grandfather's speculation. "His (Quentin's) face was lowered. He spoke still in that curious, that almost sullen flat tone [Faulkner's?] which had caused Shreve to watch him from the beginning with intent detached speculation and curiosity, to watch him still from behind his (Shreve's) expression of cherubic and erudite amazement which the spectacles intensified or perhaps actually created"(206)(Note 5) . The speculation reaches the point of the not possible in the joint speculation that Quentin and Shreve engage in having Henry picture Judith and Bon walking together in the garden behind Sutpen, "and it would not matter here that the time had been in winter in that garden too and hence no bloom nor leaf even if there had been someone to walk there and be seen there since, judged by subsequent events, it had been night in the garden also"(236).
Shreve is enthusiastic "Go on" repeated throught, impatient--except that he knows when it is too soon to give away the ending of the story at the end of Chapter 6 , funny--almost always (Note 6) , brash--he keeps calling Sutpen "the demon" (181, 198, et. passim),historian--"And there wasn't any West Virginia in 1808 because---" (179),and smart--too smart, since he has ingested everything about the Sutpens and the Compsons that he has heard in the last 120 days. Shreve is also a mystery unraveler "Who told Sutpen or your grandfather either, which of them it was who was hit?"(275). But this smartness suggests another role that Shreve fulfills. Shreve is Faulkner.
Shreve is a convenience for Faulkner, a device or character who allows Faulkner to ramble in his wonderful rambling style, to speculate, withdraw, reformulate, reoffer. Shreve speaks in fairly short sentences, but when he is narrating and starts laying out paragraph-length sentences, it is clearly Faulkner's genius orating: "The old man didn't move and this time Henry didn't say 'You lie', and 'It's not true' and the old man said,'Ask him. Ask Charles then' and then Henry knew that that was what his father had meant all the time and that that was what he meant himself when he told his father he lied. . ."(237). And on and on in the wonderfulness and awesomeness that is the magic of William Faulkner. Not only one of the characters---"So that now it was not two but four of them riding two horses through the dark over the fozen ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two--Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry"(267), but Shreve is also finally by the end of AA, one of the magician of Yoknapatawpha County's principal assistants.
SHREVE's LAST VIEW--HIS FACE MY FACE
Starting as an important minor character in The Sound and the Fury, Shreve changes names but only grows in importance in Absalom, Absalom! So the story of the dysfunctional Compsons and the two college friends, evolves with the aid and abetting of a rotund Canadian. And so the greatest novel in American Literature (Mosher)comes down to a conversation between two college Freshmen on a dark night in a cold room. If Quentin had had the balance of Shreve, had he been able to follow the Proustian dictum to "lower the level of attainable felicity," he might have, like Shreve, gone on and lead a productive life had he, like Shreve, also gotten through the Great War. Shreve's patients back in Edmonton where he returned to (Note 7) must have been intrigued to hear the stories of the Sutpens and the Compsons. This time the story of Quention also, and of Shreve's own last view of Quentin that night on the streetcar , "my face his face for an instant" (TSATF 109). And the stories, the sad and funny stories, of Shreve himself.
ENDNOTES:
1. At West Point, as late as the 1960's roomates were called "wives."
2. Early on Sunday AM, 6 July of this year, I got on a plane and sat across from a 75 year old Black man from Mississippi, who, upon seeing my copy of Absalom, Absalom! remarked,"that Faulkner fellow did not write very well; he did not know punctuation." He was very learned and therefore very empathetic toward Faulkner, but thought he would put me on, using some Southern humor. In truth he was a retired District Attorney, and a very funny and wise man.
3. In TSATF, Quentin and Shreve are living in a three room suite with a sitting room and separate bedrooms. In AA, they appear to be living and sleeping in only one room with Quentin's bed on the right side of the room, Shreve's on the left.
4 .See also 205-06.
5. The speculative narrator reminds one of Hawthorne's speculative narrator in "Young Goodman Brown," "it may have been an ocular deception assisted by the uncertain light," or some of Edwin Arlington Robinson's narrators, "and if she thought it followed her/she may have reasoned in the dark/that one way of the few would hide her and leave no mark/" from "The Mill," and elsewhere.
6. Shreve's funniest line in the story is on page 288. In response to Quentin's comment that Bon and Henry were in the tenth graduating class, Shreve wryly remarks "I didn't know there were ten in Mississippi that went to school at one time."
7. as Nick Carraway returned to his roots, the Midwest.
WORKS CITED
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: First Encounters. New Haven: Yale, 1983.
Dain, Martin J. Faulkner's County: Yoknapatawpha. New York: Random House, 1963
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1986.
______________. The Sound and the Fury. A Norton Critical Edition (2d ed.), ed. David Minter . New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Guerard, Albert J. "Absalom, Absalom!:The Novel as Impressionist Art," from THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL (University of Chicago Press) (EGL26 Handout)
Morris, Willie and William Eggleston. Faulkner's Mississippi. Birmingham: Oxmoor House, 1990.
Mosher, Thomas, Phd. Class Notes, Engl 26, Summer l997.
Padgett, James B. William Faulkner Homepage at the University of Mississippi. Available, 13 July 1997, http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/cm.html#McCannon Shreve, and related pages.