This paper examines American southern white male characters’ incapacity to laugh vis-à-vis their pursuit of personal and family perfection in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. The thesis is that the southern American white male characters’ incapacity to harness laughter suggests their emotional attachment to solipsistic pursuit of personal and family perfection. The emotional immediacy leads to their unknowing of social changes in the post-bellum American South. Based on Henri Bergson’s theory, Section I discusses laughter as a human, rational capacity. It serves as intellectual activity to distance from the mechanical inelasticity of pursuing perfection, and from the stumbling ontology of southern American white patriarchal families. Section II examines Thomas Sutpen’s and Jason Compson’s inelastic pursuits of perfection in their individual and familial designs. Section III centers on Quentin Compson’s rare laughter in The Sound and the Fury, in relation to his pursuit of southern family historical truth in Absalom, Absalom!.. The laughter is an epiphany of family impermanence, as well as a suicidal attempt to unknow its absurdities and restore his ontological perfection at the present moment. Section IV offers an interpretation of Benjy Compson’s incapacity to laugh, not as literary mechanic to parody intellectual disabilities in constructing rational coherence, but as machinic desire for interconnectedness. The southern white men’s incapacity to laugh in the two novels forges an affective palimpsest, laying bare differential southern white men’s complex attachment to unattainable perfection.
