Author Archives: Jeff Allred

Joe Christmas’ Resurrection

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In Joe Christmas’ death scene he is resurrected and transcends out of his body and manifests himself in the mind of the townspeople. “The pent black blood seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.” In Christmas’ final scene he is able to finally shed the ambiguous color that has plagued him his entire life. He physically loses his racial identity as he becomes pale and the black separates from him. His biracial identity is literally ripped out of him by Grimm.

Faulkner’s Christ-figure misfit isn’t given the final say in the novel. I find this to be a bold choice and a direct commentary on the Christ-figure. Throughout this novel, there have been biblical allusions. Lena Grove mildly representing Virgin Mary, Joanna Burden representing John the Baptist, and Christmas representing Jesus Christ. The choice for Faulkner to twist and contort these characters into less than holy representations of these biblical figures is intriguing.

Focusing on Christmas, the sexist, possibly murderous, irredeemable character in this novel takes on this Christ role. Faulkner using someone who is the complete opposite of Christ pushes the death Christmas to be more controversial. Are we are the reader supposed to feel sorrow for Christmas? His murder at the hands of a white supremacist pushes the reader to feel bad for a character that maybe we shouldn’t feel bad for. Ultimately, Christmas’ murder is driven by hate, and in true Faulkner fashion, he flips the resurrection on its head.

Biblically, Jesus died for people’s sins, and those sins were absolved. Joe Christmas’ death does not absolve the town of their sins. His death instead instills the memory of Joe Christmas that will not fade from their memory. Christmas’ death serves to hold a mirror up to the town. His corpse, with the black and white in him physically separated is a visual representation of the racial divide that inhabits the town.

Abrogating Structure

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When Wash Jones comes to Rosa Coldfield with the news that her nephew, Henry Sutpen had killed his sister’s fiance at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred, Rosa knows that she must set off for Sutpen’s because she promised her deceased sister that, although her niece [Judith]  was years older than her, she would look after Judith. Upon reaching the home, Clytie tries to prevent Rosa from going up the stairs first by calling her by name [different than how she said her name in the past] and then by touching – grabbing- Rosa by her arm. This was monumental.

Clytie having addressed Rosa by her first name was not as shocking as one might think; Clytie called Rosa by her name since their childhood and to most people in Jefferson County, Rosa was still a child. However, Clytie grabbing Rosa’s arm was an act of defiance that their social structure could not abide. In grabbing Rosa’s flesh, Clytie declared herself an equal. In grabbing her arm, Clytie shook the rigid structure of social hierarchy and in flesh touching flesh, affirmed that race indeed, is only a rumor, not a fact. There is no superiority of one over the other, there is only flesh, “…that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh…there is something in the touch of flesh which abrogates…I crying out to her…because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon…” [AA, 111-112]. When Rosa spoke, her narration declares that she spoke not to Clytie, but to “it,” it being the rigid, racial structure of society which Clytie had defied with that grab.

Rosa’s terror sprang not only from this defiance, which could change Rosa’s way of life forever, but from what she was. Rosa recalled with equal parts horror, disgust, and a sprinkle of awe how Clytie and Judith not only played with the same toys, but on occasion, slept in the same bed [Judith’s] or pallet [Clytie’s] together. Based on Rosa’s fixation with Clytie and Judith’s childhood and their indecorous nocturnal placements, this moment of Black flesh making contact with White flesh as equals will stay with Rosa for all the days of her life. She will carry with her this unease / anxiety that Clytie’s flesh can make contact with Rosa’s flesh again.

 

Movement of Tomey’s Turl/Fox

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Unlike other characters in Go Down Moses, Tomey’s Turl is not content with remaining in a state of social stasis and it is for this reason that he is the central character of the book. The plot moves forward with his  sudden but not unexpected departure from the McCaslin plantation to Herbert Beauchamp’s plantation in yearning of his love, Tennie. At first reading, Buck and Buddy seem content with the stasis kind of life they lead; neither is married, they live together, and apparently, want to continue living in an all-male world, yet as the reader notes, Buck makes it a point to “put on his necktie while they were running toward the lot to catch the horses” [GDM, 7] because he would see Miss Sophonisba, who is looking for a husband. One must wonder, if Tomey’s Turl was not the catalyst of movement, would Uncle Buck have acted upon his secret desire to marry? It seems unlikely that he would ever have acted on marriage if not seemingly coerced into to, thanks to the stakes of the card game played with Beauchamp.

Both Uncle Buck and Herbert Beauchamp love to play cards and make wages, perhaps over anything, but it is unlikely that if Tomey’s Turl had not made the bi-annual journey to Tennie, neither man would have such a big wager – ownership of either Tomey’s Turl or Tennie and Miss Sophonisba’s marriage [to Buck].

In line with Tomey’s Turl being the catalyst of the plot, Tomey’s Turl is an allegory for the fox that is hunted by the dogs of people who find entertainment in this. The fox may run and think it is running toward freedom, but it is always forced back to its box under the bed, to be let out on a whim. It is not master of its own domain; it has to deal with the savagery imposed on it by people who deem this game/social hierarchy necessary.

Rider’s Last

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In “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner critiques indifference to racial violence by giving readers two iterations of Rider’s story which vary in how and how much they say about the man. From the moment he buries his wife until he kills Birdsong, the story is focalized through him and it is very detailed. It faithfully reports everything from his movement through the landscape to the unique physical sensation of the alcohol he imbibed. Readers should pity him because of his addiction and inability to cope with loss, both interconnected symptoms of his problematic understanding of self and masculinity. Through this sympathy he is thoroughly humanized as the story’s protagonist and as an African American male.  In the second part of “Pantaloon in Black,” his suffering and inability to cope are minimized by indifference as the story is shortened and told through by the white deputy to his wife. Everything that humanizes Rider to the reader is reinterpreted as evidence of the inhumanity of all African Americans, “but when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes. Now you take this one today–” (147). Here, he proceeds to tell a condensed version of the story in he really only recounts and emphasizes the parts of Rider’s last days that fully support his claim. As evidence of his claim that Rider might as well be a wild animal, he is sure to stress Rider’s brute strength in lifting the logs, ripping open the cell, and brawling with the prisoners. And how could he overlook Rider’s apparent lack of feelings and respect in picking up a shovel at the funeral and returning to work the next day. This is a dramatic reduction of Rider’s true story to a convenient narrative for a racist deputy to believe.

Upon finishing his account, he asks his wife what she thinks of it all to which she replies, “I think if you eat any supper in this house you’ll do it in the next five minutes…I’m going to clear this table then and I’m going to the picture show” (152). Her response is so routine, so ordinary that it is as if she had not just heard the violently tragic tale that her husband just told her, like she had not even listened to the twisted version he spun. It is the response of someone who is so desensitized to racial violence and is so convinced of the inhumanity of African-Americans that it effectively takes what was already a shortened account of Rider’s most traumatic hours and erases it from the world. Save for the fact that this fictional account of build up to a lynching has been recorded by Faulkner and included in this collection, the community that allows the response of deputy’s wife’s response will itself never hear his story again story again. 

“Woman-Made”

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The story “The Fire and the Hearth” in Go Down, Moses explores Lucas Beauchamp’s complex feelings regarding the interconnections of racism and sexism as he confronts the temporary loss of his wife Molly, both at the time of this loss and years later. Lucas describes the moments that precipitate Molly’s departure, during which he risks his life crossing a creek swollen with rain in order to bring back the doctor for Zack Edmonds’s wife, only to find upon his return that he is too late: Zack’s wife has died in childbirth. “It was as though on that louring and driving day he had crossed and then recrossed a kind of Lethe, emerging, being permitted to escape, buying as the price of life a world outwardly the same yet subtly and irrevocably altered” (46). Zack reacts immediately, essentially slotting Molly into her place for the purpose of child rearing, and perhaps sexual purposes as well, as if the two women are interchangeable objects. Despite his great love for his wife, Lucas’s struggles with this situation are contradictory and thorny, involving a flawed view of masculinity and womanhood.

Lucas is a concerned and angered observer of the subjugation to which Molly, as well as Zack’s deceased wife, have endured. Regarding Zack’s wife, he remarks,

It was as though the white woman not only had never quitted the house, she had never existed–the object which they buried in the orchard two days later … a thing of no moment, unsanctified, nothing; his own wife, the black woman, now living alone in the house which old Cass had built for them when they married. (46)

Upon Molly’s eventual return to him, Lucas notices further evidence of Zack’s callous behavior: she is wearing Zack’s wife’s shoes. Lucas notes that “They had belonged to the white woman who had not died, who had not even ever existed” (51).

However, Lucas seems unable to disconnect himself entirely from the sexist strains of the racism driving Zack’s behavior. This incapacity seems to be filtered through Lucas’s anxieties regarding the social gaze, which is apparent in his focus on the state of his masculinity in light of the situation in which he and Molly have become ensnared. Upon Molly’s return, Lucas concludes that “Yes … I got to kill him or I got to leave here” (48). Although he says “He could not have said why,” Lucas waits until daybreak to approach Zack (51). Lucas perhaps wishes to take the more brazen, and thus, more manly route, but a desire to shine a spotlight on Zack’s reprehensible actions may also be at play, despite the unlikelihood that the society surrounding them would take notice of what was sadly routine conduct. Adding a further wrinkle to the situation is Lucas’s analysis of the implications of the timing of the confrontation. Lucas evaluates the following possibility: “He keeps her in the house with him six months and I don’t do nothing: he sends her back to me and I kills him. It would be like I had done said aloud to the whole world that he never sent her back because I told him to but he give her back to me because he was tired of her,” revealing a concern over Molly’s perhaps evolving reputation resulting from her mistreatment as well (48). This fixation on masculinity is perhaps mixed in with his undoubtedly complex feelings regarding his inability from his place within a racist system to prevent Zack’s actions and confront this power structure.

This inability to completely disengage from the complicated structure of oppression that surrounds him and Molly is also wrapped up in his views of his and Zack’s shared yet distinct heritage. Lucas paradoxically contends with the violence haunting his racial heritage, the same lurking menace that victimizes Molly, by disparaging women. He refers to Zack and the other men on the Edmonds branch of the family as “woman-made” since they are descended from Carothers McCaslin through the female line, in contrast to Lucas (51). As he says, “what you and your pa got from old Carothers had to come to you through a woman–a critter not responsible like men are responsible, not to be held like men are held” (52).

Uneasy at the Thought of Thinking

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Faulkner fashioned Henry Sutpen as more of a feeling man than thinking man with the words, “Henry, the provincial, the clown almost, given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking…” [AA, 76] and I think Henry was subconsciously aware of it. Henry is a strange sort of man; although he feels, he is a something of a brute. Prior to leaving for University of Mississippi, Henry had never seen the world beyond his nose. Once at Mississippi, he meets and becomes completely enraptured by the older, mysterious, and cosmopolitan Charles Bon.

Everything about Charles Bon fascinates Henry Sutpen; his manner of speech and dress, his way with women, and even his mysterious past, which he wants to know. Henry Sutpen had never been as interested or devoted to anything as he was to being Charles Bon’s comrade. This is why he wanted a marital connection between Bon and his sister, Judith; it would permanently unite the two men in an acceptable fashion, as brothers. Henry could never be Charles and if Henry never learned all of Bon’s history, then he would at least help shape and always be a part of Bon’s elegant future. If only Charles had heeded the unconscious decree Henry demanded during that four year engagement probation period, but Charles did not; the contract of his first marriage remained.

According to Faulkner, Henry’s fixation with Bon and  his sister’s virginity was, “the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destoryed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband…perhaps that is what went on, not in Henry’s mind but in his soul. Because he never thought. He felt, and acted immediately”[AA, 77]. Henry was not a thinking man, he was a feeling man. Around Charles and to an extent, around his sister, Henry felt despair; he could never be with Bon nor he could he become Bon. If Bon lived, then Henry Sutpen would have to spend all his days thinking about this.

I am curious about several things, the first being, how different would life have been for Henry Sutpen if he had not disavowed his inheritance and run off with Charles Bon to help the Southern cause? What would have become of Thomas Sutpen’s legacy and his land? The second source for errant thoughts is, could Henry have reconciled the possibility of his half-brother, who may have had Black ancestry, married to his White sister if no one else would ever know? Would Judith have married him anyway? Why did the possibility of this ancestry all but eradicate Henry’s longing for and despair of Charles Bon?

Transcendent Ripples in Narrative Convergences

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Greg Forter discusses trauma at great length in  “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form” particularly in regards to traumatic effects that stem from indirect relationships to a specific traumatic event. Working from Caruth, Forter explores “trauma’s capacity to be represented or ‘known’ (by those who haven’t directly experienced it)” (262) in relation to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Working through Forter’s analysis, I am interested in the role trauma plays in a particular moment in Absalom, Absalom! where certain characters engage with each other in an seemingly impossible way that transcends time and space. Near the end of Faulkner’s novel, we see the convergence of two sets of young men in a mystic, specific way that seems to be engendered through their parallel characteristics and a kind of frenzied blurring of knowing. Readers have been following the conversational storytelling between Quentin and Shreve for much of the novel, their story’s main characters being Charles and Henry, among others. Around the time of the metaphysical convergence, there is a shift in the storyteller’s discussion, from Quentin speaking to Shreve, in a way that elucidates the blurry way in which they had begun to be wrapped up in the story itself, and / or in their retelling of it: “Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking” (267). We can tell from this passage that the clearness of their conversation is moving into a more fluid, shape-shifting format in their engagement. The convergence that transcends time and space in a physical-seeming way occurs shortly after Shreve takes the stage in the conversation (however shifty this stage may be): Faulkner writes, “So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two — Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry” (267). Pairing the young men up for us, based on their similarities in relation to one another, Faulkner takes a near metaphysical turn where the frame story, of Quentin and Shreve, converges with the narrative retelling of the additional story, of Charles and Henry. There is this repetitive picture being painted of the four men, Quentin, Shreve, Charles, and Henry, together during this time. Faulkner writes, “Four of them there, in that room in New Orleans in 1860, just as in a sense there were four of them here in this tomblike room in Massachusetts in 1910” (268) and again, “– four of them who sat in that drawing room of baroque and fusty magnificence which Shreve had invented and which was probably true enough…” (268). In these passages, there is vivid descriptions regarding the physical surroundings of the men, signifying the physicality in which this newfound party of four inhabits. In the earlier passage, there is a note of equality in this double-narrative-crossing where we know that the four not only inhabit New Orleans, but also Massachusetts, which shows that both locations are equally inhabitable by this mysterious foursome. Forter writes on convergences of worlds in the illustration of pools which ripple into one another: “Even more, the passage insists that the trauma of historical events affects those who do not live through them with the same force as those who do… The “ripples” produced by any event radiate outward in concentric ringlets, reverberating beyond their initial occurrence to affect those who were neither geographically nor temporally present when the stone first disturbed the waters of consciousness” (277). He notes that it is not necessary for a person to be geographically present for a rippling of connectivity to affect a person of a different time, and I believe that the double-narrative-crossing that occurs is a physical, perhaps playfully literal manifestation of this type of rippling effect that transcends time.

Sam Fathers & The cage of Tainted Blood

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Race and blood seem to be a reoccurring theme in all of Faulkner’s works we have read, as it was in the south. For the most part all the racial tension has been between black and white, but in Go Down Moses we are given a third group of people- the Native Americans. In “Old People” we are introduced to the character Sam Fathers. Sam is the son of Indian Chief Ikkemotubbe of the Chickasaw tribe and a quadroon slave from New Orleans. Though Sam is the son of a chief he is not raised in the Native American Community. His father married off Sam’s mom to another slave and sold all three of them to McCaslin, leaving the part white-part black-part Chickasaw Sam to be raised among the slaves. Even though his father did not raise him he still holds on to his Native American identity, being noticeably different from the other blacks and having a deep connection to nature.

Sam’s mixed race identity places him in a “cage he has been in all his life” (161). This cage is not that of his bondage as a slave, but of his mixed identity and tainted blood:

“He was the direct son not only by a warrior but of a chief. Then he grew up and began to learn things, and all of a sudden one day he found out that he had been betrayed the blood of the warriors and chiefs had been betrayed. Not by his father…He probably never held it against old Doom for selling him and his mother into slavery, because he probably believed the damage was already done before then and it was the same warriors’ and chiefs’ blood in him and Doom both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave him. Not betrayed by the black blood and not willfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat” (162)

Blood is a significant feature in this passage. Sam Fathers is the direct child of both royalty and a slave, placing him not only in 2-3 different races but also social classes. With the laws in the south at the time it only takes a single drop of black blood to be considered black. Though Sam’s father sold him and his mother it is his mother that he has to blame. With Sam’s mother being part black and part white she has the tainted blood of what is presumably a black slave and a white master, with the black blood in her ruining the white. This same blood rests in Sam, who’s understanding of his fathers decision to sell him and his mother, because what else was he supposed to do? With all this tainted blood inside him he is always at war with himself, even if we do not get to hear it from him.

This battle within ones self over racial identity is something we have seen before, specifically in Joe Christmas in Light in August. Christmas battled over his racial identity and his “black blood” throughout the novel. The difference between him and Sam is that Christmas didn’t know what his racial makeup actually was, which added to his internal struggles. Both these men abandoned by a parent had to find a way to live with the cage of tainted blood they were doomed to live in, though in Christmas’s case there was no escaping it.

[Blog 6]

Unmoored from Time

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Light in August has a fixation on time similar to that permeating The Sound and the Fury, although perhaps not to the level of obsession present in the latter. This focus is apparent in the novel’s exploration of some of its outsider characters’ interactions with time as a societal construct, Gail Hightower being a prime example. The characterization of Joe Christmas and Byron Bunch allows for an exploration of time as it intertwines with nature. Both of these characters display an inability to align themselves with time as well as nature, in which there is an absence of society’s conception of time and in which one might speculate that these outsiders could create a space for themselves.

Hightower is able to create his own sense of time, albeit one based on society’s construction of it, a vestige of his time spent “in life.” He uses this internalized sense of time to maintain a thread to this past life, particularly his time spent as minister of the church that he maintains within his periphery. Although enclosed within his home, Hightower remains alert to the emanation of music from the church during services: “He knows almost to the second when he should begin to hear it, without recourse to watch or clock. He uses neither, has needed neither for twentyfive years now. He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it” (366). Furthermore, “Without recourse to clock he could know immediately upon the thought just where, in his old life, he would be and what doing between the two fixed moments which marked the beginning and the end of Sunday morning service and Sunday evening service and prayer service on Wednesday night” (366). These threads thus have a double nature: they add a ghostlike, haunting presence to Hightower’s existence but are also sacrosanct for Hightower, revealing the contradictions inherent in his supposed isolation from the outside world.

Christmas’s contentious relationship with time and nature is at its most apparent during his brief attempt at escape after the murder of Joanna Burden. Within this short period, during which he exists off the grid, traveling through forests and living off the land, Christmas becomes completely disconnected from time, his state reflecting his status in society: a position on the margins. As we are told during this period, “He is not sleepy or hungry or even tired. He is somewhere between and among them, suspended, swaying to the motion of the wagon without thought, without feeling. He has lost account of time and distance; perhaps it is an hour later, perhaps three” (339). The reader also loses track of time along with Christmas; I found myself surprised to realize he had only been gone for a week or so before his capture. At the same time, he is paradoxically unable to become one with nature. We are told that “For a week now he has lurked and crept among its secret places, yet he remained a foreigner to the very immutable laws which earth must obey” (338). Thus, Christmas is a “foreigner” even when alone in nature and far from other people, unable to belong anywhere.

Like Christmas, Byron, upon quitting his job at the mill and briefly leaving Jefferson to start anew outside the town where he never truly belonged (although, as with Christmas, this is partially by choice), he finds himself becoming unmoored from time and also unable to feel at home in the land that surrounds him as he begins his journey. From the crest of a hill, he muses on nature’s indifference to him, not unlike Jefferson’s indifference to him:

But then from beyond the hill crest there begins to rise that which he knows is there: the trees which are trees, the terrific and tedious distance which, being moved by blood, he must compass forever and ever between two inescapable horizons of the implacable earth. Steadily they rise, not portentous, not threatful. That’s it. They are oblivious of him. ‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ he thinks. (424)

He is only roused during the events that follow and brought back into time by the sound of a train whistle. After his fight with Joe Brown/Lucas Burch, the train that will provide escape for Brown/Burch approaches and startles him awake, causing him to think, “this is the world and time too” (440). But this awakening is only temporary. Perhaps in his wanderings with Lena he will find belonging through constant movement.

Machinelike Existences in Light in August

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Descriptions in which humans and machines are equated abound in the beginning pages of Light in August. The purpose of these comparisons appears manifold, including both the more obvious commentary on work and automation and an engagement with the maintenance of social roles. Among the entities we are introduced to in the beginning portion of the novel are the various machines that may be left behind once the mill has exhausted the forests in the town of Doane’s Mill, along with its nameless and faceless men:

… some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan–gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled, and bemused. (4-5)

In Doane’s Mill, in which mill work is the only work available to able-bodied men such as Lena’s brother McKinley, the fates of these men and the machines they work with once they have outlived their usefulness are intertwined. Even Lena’s sister-in-law is reduced to a machine-like existence, stuck in an endless process of childbirth. The mill workers of Jefferson are characterized similarly. Despite the planing mill men’s interest in the arrival of a “foreigner” in the shape of Joe Christmas, they must soon return “to their work among the whirring and grating belts and shafts” (32). Soon enough Christmas himself, with his his “steady back and arms,” becomes one of these endlessly working men, albeit with a “baleful and restrained steadiness” (34). These characterizations recall Caroline Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who, comfortable in her role within the white patriarchy and accustomed to being waited on, calls out to Dilsey “with machinelike regularity” upon waking (Fury 270). Of course, Caroline’s machinelike existence is of a different quality; although associated with the fulfillment of a role typical of the time, it is the role of a wealthy white woman, and the life to which she has developed a mechanical adherence is one of leisure and pampering, unlike the laboring characters peopling Light in August thus far.

Lena, however, shows hope of breaking free from such an existence. She is in some ways a puzzling character, host to contradictory sentiments: she breaks boundaries by traveling alone as a visibly pregnant, visibly unmarried woman but seems to exist in a trancelike state while doing so. It is as if she has pushed her body, at least in the sense of movement from place to place, to break free from her expected role but her mind has not yet followed suit, therefore trapping her in a liminal zone. Her thoughts reveal this state as she reflects on her journey thus far and the people who have helped her: “She waits, not even watching the wagon now, while thinking goes idle and swift and smooth, filled with nameless kind faces and voices:…” (8). In their movement, the mules and wagons that carry Lena on her journey seem to progress in accord with her machinelike progress. While traveling on Armstid’s wagon, for example, his mules “plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis” (8).