The attractor begins to take shape

The attractor begins to take shape when we examine the multiperspectival narratative structure of Absalom, Absalom!. In the text, Sutpen’s story ostensibly is puzzled over by four internal narrators—Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin Compson, and Shreve McCannon—whose narratives are themselves presided over by the external narrator, seemingly there to locate us in place and time and provide stage directions as the characters engage in their incessant discourse. I say “ostensibly” because no clear-cut boundaries exist between the narratives of Quentin and Shreve and because other narratives are embedded within the main internal narratives—Sutpen’s story to General Compson, General Compson’s story to Mr. Compson, Bon’s letter to Judith, and so forth. In addition, the boundary between the external and the internal narratives is itself fuzzy, with Sutpen’s story at times seemingly coming from the external narrator yet tenuously focalized through an internal narrator. We often cannot know where one voice ends and another begins.p.123Out of this cacophony of voices, however, the plot of the text emerges, just as the attractor pattern emerges when the evolving behavior of a chaotic dynamical system is plotted in state space. We can compare each of the stories that is told about Sutpen to a trajectory upon the strange attractor. Although the strange attractor comprises one infinitely long, never-repeating trajectory, different sets of initial conditions give rise to trajectories that visit different sections of the attractor. With regard to time, proximity, and connection to the principal players in the events at Sutpen’s Hundred, each of the internal narrators begins from a different set of initial conditions. Rosa Coldfield, on the one hand, is seemingly closest in all respects: she actually knew all the principal players except Bon and lived for a time at Sutpen’s Hundred. Shreve McCannon, on the other hand, is furthest away: he was born after all the players except Henry, Clytie, and Rosa had died; he hears of the events at second-, third-, and fourth-hand; and he has never even been to the South, let alone to the cursed parcel of land where Sutpen’s tragedy played itself out.p.123