MEMORY CUES IMBRICATED IN NINETEENTH CENTURY FAMILY PHOTOS FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH: ON WILLIAM FAULKNER’S ABSALOM!ABSALOM!
MEMORY CUES IMBRICATED IN NINETEENTH CENTURY FAMILY PHOTOS FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH: ON WILLIAM FAULKNER’S ABSALOM!ABSALOM!

Summary/Abstract: My paper attempts to trace the relationship between prose pictures and their context in William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! by considering the five photos referred to in the novel. I mean to analyze in what way pictures record mediations of race, (family/collective) traumatic memory and history and to what extent they point to memory as an act of dislocation in a person’s grasp of life. Throughout my analysis of the above images, I argue that these photos stand for the discrepancy between the myth of the family and hidden past memories; they deploy power relations as engrained in the content of memories one tries to transmit to another. In the end, the photo as the mnemonic locus of the middle-class white “family myth” regains its authority. The movement is from the picture as an index of family dysfunctions that might still find resolution if one chooses to understand the interdependence of the white and black communities to the general use of family pictures in the nineteenth century as a case of a white-run binding authority over what Southern memory stands for, a binary-type value system.

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