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).

“Perhaps We Were the Two Moths”

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A preoccupation with sleep permeates much of the first four parts of The Unvanquished. This focus seems to serve a couple of different functions in the text. First, it appears to highlight the degree of trauma that Bayard and Ringo experience during the war years by drawing attention to the myriad points at which they are jolted awake by some new war-related episode, such as the numerous moves of the trunk filled with the Sartoris silver. Sleep, then, is viewed as both a temporary escape from the war and as a source of fear of what is yet to come. Sleep therefore appears to Bayard to be a permeable border between a somewhat normal world (as normal as their world can be in wartime) and the world of direct contact with the war, and the line between sleeping and waking is often blurred in the novel. A prime example of this occurs in the following text, which marks the moment at which Ringo and Bayard, barely awake as they continue their flight from the Union forces who accosted them the day before on the road to Memphis, are intercepted by unknown assailants who prove to be Bayard’s father and his men: “Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else”

A second dimension of the fixation on sleep is its association with a lack of power or knowledge. Those who indulge in sleep are portrayed as being vulnerable during a time in which vulnerability was a dangerous thing. Bayard describes how Granny and Ringo, while carrying out their mule theft and reselling scheme, would strike their targets at supper time because the soldiers would often be sleepy and therefore not at their most perceptive.

Additionally, Drusilla underlines what she sees as the positive aspects of forgoing sleep: “‘Why not stay awake now? Who wants to sleep now, with so much happening, so much to see?” (100). And for Ringo and Bayard, Loosh’s apparent lack of sleep appears to deepen the wisdom that they have already ascribed to him in terms of his knowledge of the current state of the war. As they follow him in an attempt to gain access to the information he has, they see him “with that look on his face again which resembled drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now” (22).

Bayard and Ringo attempt to increase their war-related knowledge by forgoing sleep in order to listen to war stories told by Bayard’s father and by Drusilla. Upon Colonel Sartoris’s brief return at the beginning of the novel, they are thwarted in this desire, so they instead sit on the stairs, in a state somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, listening to Sartoris speaking to Granny in secret about the state of the war. Bayard states, “Perhaps it was the dark or perhaps we were the two moths, the two feathers again … because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake” and “…I knew we had slept on the stairs for some time” (18). Bayard’s repeated characterization of himself and Ringo as moths (as he does earlier in the first section: “the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers rising above a hurricane” (7)) reveals his desire to be able to rise above and to be omniscient observers of all that is going on around them, although his choice of moths also implies fragility in the face of great peril. In another instance, Bayard seems to be struggling with feelings of inferiority to Ringo. As they are traveling toward the railroad at Hawkhurst, which Bayard is careful to remind us he has seen while Ringo has not, Bayard appears to be keeping close tabs on Ringo as they travel as if to ensure that he does not acquire any knowledge that Bayard does not have and appears satisfied that he spends much of the trip asleep:

I took the parasol and he laid down in the wagon and put his hat over his eyes. ‘Call me when we gitting nigh to Hawkhurst,’ he said, ‘so I can commence to look out for that railroad you tells about.’ That was how he travelled for the next six days–lying on his back in the wagon bed with his hat over his eyes, sleeping, or taking his turn holding the parasol over Granny and me and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad which he had never seen though which I had seen that Christmas we spent at Hawkhurst. (81)

“Rigid Flowers” and Gaudiness: Jason and Dilsey’s Clashing Worldviews

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Although there are countless contrasts between the characters highlighted in the last two sections of The Sound and the Fury (Jason’s section, “April Sixth, 1928” and Dilsey’s section, “April Eighth, 1928”), one that is particularly compelling to me is the distinction made between the two segments’ central characters in terms of environmental indicators revealing the clash between the two characters’ worldviews.

Jason’s worldview is a very black and white one, as evidenced by his hateful dismissals of nearly everyone around him, including his own family members, based on reductive dichotomies (men = good, women = bad; white = good, black = bad, etc.) and his parallel inability to see anyone other than himself as a fully-fleshed person. Correspondingly, the environment in which Jason moves is a dark and drab one. The environmental cues hinting at Jason’s dark inner world exist in two somewhat paradoxical forms: decaying but ever-present nature and sterile urbanization. One instance of the coexistence of these elements occurs in the landscape surrounding Jason in the town of Mottson shortly after he becomes violent toward an elderly man while questioning him in an attempt to locate Quentin II. He describes an “empty platform where an express truck stood, where grass grew rigidly in a plot bordered with rigid flowers and a sign in electric lights,” which aligns with his overly rigid stance toward life (311). On the Compson property itself, the decaying weeds covering the property where sculpted gardens once reigned, in the glory days of the Compson family, signify the encroachment of nature onto the small amount of land that the family still owns, existing alongside the slow intrusion of urbanization, represented by the transformation of much of their land into a golf course, as discussed in class.

Dilsey’s view of the world is more colorful and expansive, resulting in the formation of warm and loving relationships with not only her family and select members of the Compson family but also the wider community of Jefferson, as evidenced by the affectionate greetings she receives from those she passes on her walk to church in the novel’s final section. The imagery interspersed throughout her quasi-narration of the last section is expressive of this. Dilsey is described as emerging from her cabin next to the Compson house on a Sunday morning clad in various articles such as a “maroon velvet cape” and “a dress of purple silk” as she moves among her various tasks. As she makes her way to the Compson house, “A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover” (266).

Also interesting is the manner in which these divergent worlds collide. Evidence of both worlds is observed by Jason and Dilsey alike and is intertwined throughout both of their narratives. Such a collision occurs in the opening lines of Dilsey’s section, upon her entrance into the Compsons’ world from her own home on their property:

The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. (265)

Since the world of Dilsey’s cabin is contained within the Compsons’ land, the color and life with which aspects of her life are infused appear to be merely specks of brightness within the larger, darker landscape of the Compson home. “Bleak and chill” days, “gray light,” and disintegrated “venomous particles” that violently pierce her skin assail her in the outside world.

Jason experiences similar collisions with what he views as “gaudy” intrusions into his rigid life. The colorful, dazzling fair that has come to Jefferson is a prime example. Jason spends a substantial portion of his section ranting about this fair, believing that it brings nothing of import to the town, although the people of Jefferson clearly derive satisfaction from it. Since Jason views everything in life as a transaction, he is of course unable to enjoy anything for the sake of enjoyment. This anger, which manifests throughout much of Jason’s section, perhaps reaches its zenith when Jason becomes frustrated with his search for Quentin II (“with her face painted up like a dam clown’s”) and the man with the bright red tie (232). When he sees the two in a passing car, recognizing both Quentin II’s face and the red tie, he “saw red,” stating “When I recognised that red tie, after all I had told her, I forgot about everything” (238). These incidents highlight an additional difference between Dilsey and Jason. When Jason is confronted with something that challenges his worldview, he often reacts with rage and violence, whereas Dilsey relies on her copious inner strength to traverse whatever comes her way.

“Every Man is the Arbiter of His Own Virtues”

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I would like to zero in on a quote occurring twice within the stream of consciousness section appearing toward the end of Quentin’s narrative, “June Second, 1910,” in The Sound and the Fury. During an imagined conversation with his father in which Quentin falsely confesses to committing incest with his sister Caddy, Quentin’s father states that “every man is the arbiter of his own virtues” (176). Although the meaning of this statement (and Quentin’s section as a whole) is still not completely clear to me, the quote evokes for me the dueling nature of Quentin’s thoughts as he approaches his death (his own moral code and his love for his sister in opposition to social mores) and provides insight into societal attitudes of the time regarding women’s sexuality.

Quentin’s final internal monologue is bookended by the phrases “The three quarters began. The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence” and “The last note sounded. At last it stopped vibrating and the darkness was still again” (176; 178). These markers usher in and out the tumult of thoughts accompanying Quentin’s final preparations for his suicide and indicate the contrast between the outer world and his inner turmoil. Toward the beginning of this section appears the first instance of the statement at hand: “every man is the arbiter of his own virtues,” directly followed by “whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise,” perhaps in reference to Quentin’s decision to commit suicide (176). Providing additional emphasis, Quentin’s father repeats the statement toward the end of the section: “every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing” (178). Quentin’s father appears to be advocating for individuals’ ascription of meaning to take precedence over the meanings delineated by society.

Although an aspirational statement, Quentin’s father’s assertion doesn’t otherwise ring true for me, since while it is true that societal values are simply constructions, the extent to which one can define one’s own virtues and have these definitions mean anything in society varies greatly dependent on one’s gender, race, etc. Such descriptive power appears to be reserved for men like Quentin and his father. Rather than being simply an abstract concept to puzzle over, this issue for Caddy is rooted in her lived experience. Although Caddy does indeed define and live by her own standards by freely expressing her sexuality, there is a point at which her autonomy ends: once she is “found out” by her husband when he realizes that she is pregnant, her personal standards move her beyond the boundaries of acceptable femininity of the time and she is punished severely through permanent separation from her daughter and home (as enforced by her own brother, Jason). Furthermore, although Caddy’s loss of her virginity and her subsequent promiscuity do help to precipitate the downfall of the Compson family, the person whom these events affect most harshly is Caddy herself, a fact that is shrouded within Quentin’s thoughts. Thus, Caddy certainly does not appear to be the arbiter of her own virtues.

However, Quentin himself is also unable to extract himself from the values that society thrusts upon him and Caddy. Based on descriptions of their relationship appearing throughout Quentin’s section, Quentin and Caddy appear to be quite close; they can perhaps even be seen as doubles in a sense, as made apparent within Quentin’s internal monologue when he describes them as fusing into one entity: “if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark” (176). Quentin seems to view Caddy’s struggles as intertwined with his own and perhaps sees them as encapsulating the general clash of individuals against stringent societal norms. This thought of Quentin’s may also indicate, however, that despite their closeness, Quentin is unable to see Caddy fully: he seems to have trouble thinking of her as a whole person who is separate and distinct from himself. The fractured manner in which Quentin sees Caddy is reiterated for the reader through the fact that we are never granted access to Caddy’s own thoughts. Instead, we view them through other, male, characters’ eyes such as Quentin’s, and this lens through which Caddy’s and Quentin’s own experiences are filtered is that of society, a lens that Quentin cannot quite set aside. Quentin grapples with this complexity until almost the moment of his suicide.

I Don’t Hate The South

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In the final scene of AA! when Quentin recounts when Henry Supten is found in the Supten’s Hundred and explains to Shreve how Clytie burns the house down with her and Henry inside and Jim Bond running away.

In this final chapter while Quentin is telling the story to Shreve Faulkner uses “cold” language. He describes how cold the room is with “icelike bedclothing.” Shreve opens up the window with the snow’s “unearthly glow” visible. Shreve comments on Quentin’s uncomfortableness in the room, in the North. As Quentin tells the story to Shreve he continues to be plagued by the cold in the room, getting chills.

Quentin’s story recounts when Henry Supten is found in the Supten’s Hundred and explains to Shreve how Clytie burns the house down with her and Henry inside and Jim Bond running away.

Quentin’s story clearly contrasts Shreve’s earlier statement, “…to always be reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago?” (289)

Quentin’s story, the demise of Supten, and his remaining heir to the Supten dynasty a mixed race oaf running into the forest. It’s clear that Quentin’s story does not mimic the one of pride and glory and is the type of story that showcases the narrative of “defeated grandfathers and freed slaves” (289). Quentin’s tale of Supten and the narrative of the fall of the Old South makes Quentin physically uncomfortable in his room with Shreve and he cannot come to terms with his realization about his feelings about the South. Quentin’s “Story of the South” is one of downfall rather than pride and glory.

At the end of the novel, Shreve asks Quentin “why do you hate the South?” (303) Quentin replies panicked denying that he doesn’t. Quentin becomes uncomfortable with denying the South and potentially accepting a new place as his “home” leaves Quentin in an uncomfortable place. We can wee at the end that Quentin’s identity is wrapped in the South, but he seems to deny that identity through the story he tells.

 

Action and Interpretation in “Pantaloon in Black”

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The text “Pantaloon in Black” provides two distinct and opposing interpretations of the main character’s actions following his wife’s death.  The first interpretation, which is presented in the first chapter, is fostered by Rider’s words and glimpses of his state of mind.  The second, which dominates the second chapter, is the deputy’s personal interpretation of Rider’s actions.

The first chapter encourages the reader to interpret Rider’s actions in light of his concern and connection to his wife.  The text’s exploration of Rider’s internality reveals the impact that his wife’s loss had on him.  Mannie means nearly everything to his home life so that her loss also means the loss of his home.  Upon returning to the house, he is presented with a feeling of vacancy.  The narrator reports, “when he put his hand on the gate it seemed to him suddenly that there was nothing beyond it.  The house had never been his anyway, but now even the new planks and sills and shingles, the hearth and stove and bed, were all a part of the memory of somebody else…” (GDM 132-133).  “The hearth and stove and bed” are all tangible objects which signal the intangible richness of family life.  For Rider, they symbolize Mannie’s presence, which makes it especially difficult for him to enter the home and encounter these objects following her death.  When Rider mentions that these things are “all a part of the memory of somebody else,” he suggests that the post-Mannie version of himself is not the same person as the Rider who lived with Mannie.  The hearth pertains to the Rider who lived with Mannie.  It appears that that Rider dies out with the fading embers in the hearth.  The text includes a striking image of the post-Mannie Rider watching as his and Mannie’s fire, that which was supposed “to have lasted to the end of them,” goes out (GDM 133).  The image of Rider “himself standing there while the last of light died about the strong and indomitable beating of his heart and the deep steady arch and collapse of his chest” indicates the profound meaning that the fire and, Mannie more generally, brings to Rider and his home.  By likening this fire to that of Lucas Beauchamp and Molly, which stayed lit throughout their decades-long life together, the text suggests that Rider’s loss was a loss of many potential years of married life.  Her passing signals the end of many things for Rider.  It is the death of his past and future married life, his home, and his prior existence.

Given Rider’s deep connection to his wife, it seems only appropriate that feelings of anguish to dominate his thoughts.  It is clear that he has an active internal life which he reveals when he claims “Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking” (GDM 152).  The tragedy of his wife’s passing has stuck profoundly at the basis of his existence and calls into question the reason for his continued existence.  Rider must now actively decide to participate in life and the basic functions—like breathing—that support life.  The narrator suggests that his work at the mill helps distract him from thinking about his this.  The text reads, “Then the trucks were rolling again.  Then he could stop needing to invent to himself reasons for his breathing…” (GDM 138).  In light of this, it also seems that Rider seeks out the gallon of alcohol and partakes in other behavior to take his mind off of his own anguished existence.

The text encourages the reader to interpret Rider’s physical actions in light of the glimpse into his thoughts and feelings that it provides.  It suggests that Rider does what he does out of a need to smother the anguish of Mannie’s loss.  On the contrary, the deputy, who is not privy to Rider’s mental state and who views blacks through a racist lens, formulates a completely different interpretation of Rider’s physical actions.  He recounts the events since Mannie’s burial while supplying an explanation of how Rider’s actions demonstrate his (and other blacks’) inhumanity.  He takes Rider’s behavior as evidence of his more general claim that “when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they [African Americans] might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes” (GDM 147).  For the deputy, the main character’s actions signal a lack of respect and concern for his wife.  For instance, he understands Rider’s presence at the job the day after the funeral as senseless and disrespectful.  Interestingly, when one considers that the job offers to distract him from “needing to invent to himself reasons for his breathing” and takes him out of the home that so powerfully reminds him of Mannie, it becomes clear that it is because she dominates his thoughts that Rider goes to work.  In other words, the same actions that appear motivated by grief to the reader are interpreted by the deputy as evidence of Rider’s disregard for her.  The deputy’s prejudice, which he reveals when he begins his story with “Them damn niggers,” disposes him to read Rider’s behavior in a particular way (GDM 147).  Furthermore, given his wife’s indifferent responses to her husband’s story, one wonders how much the nature of their relationship influences how the deputy views that of others.

The Chase in “Was”

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[#6]

What stood out to me in “Was,” was the recurring motif of a “chase.” Throughout the chapter there are multiple chases or “pursuits” as Daniel G. Ford labels it in the journal article “Mad Pursuit in ‘Go down, Moses.'”

The main pursuit in this story is the annual chase of Tomey’s Turl (TT), who leaves twice a year to meet up with Tennie. To Uncle Buck, the idea of the chase has become so routine that he doesn’t even rush to fetch Tomey’s Turl because he knows exactly where he’ll be. However, in getting TT back it requires Uncle Buck to see Mr. Hubert Beauchamp, where he is being chased/courted by Miss Sophonsiba. Ford states, “At any rate, pursuit is the important thing in ‘Was’ and more than once the narrator affirms a deep satisfaction in pursuit over and above its fulfillment by saying, ‘it was a fine race'” (Ford, 116).  These pursuits are indicative of the clash between the “black-white relationships.” The power struggle (or lack there of) within each of these individual relationships.

This is evident in the chase between Uncle Buck and TT:

Because, being a nigger, Tomey’s Turl should have jumped down and run for it afoot as soon as he saw them. But he didn’t; maybe Tomey’s Turl had been running off from Uncle Buck for so long that he had even got used to running away like a white man would do it. (8)

To me though, these acts of pursuit appear to be comical and even theatrical.  Even the relationship between Uncle Buck and Mr. Hubert gave way to some comic relief:

“Five Hundred dollars,” Mr. Hubert said. “Done.”

“Done,” Uncle Buck said.

“Done.” Mr. Hubert said.

“Done, ” Uncle Buck said. (16)

But it’s also just another example of “racing;” Who’s the better of the two? Uncle Buck and Mr. Hubert are constantly at odds with one another, both trying to out-win each other; pursuing one another.  And I think this is represented by the bookend chase between the fox and the dog, Moses. Who’s to say who’s the fox or the dog in this scenario? But again, it just reiterates the black-white relationship.

From my understanding, this story sets up the conflict for the rest of the novel. I think it’s about what “almost was.” It’s what Ford describes as “The familiar Faulknerian technique of freezing time so that moments of unfulfilled pursuit may be examined…” (115). “Was” is an opportunity to understand a piece of fragmented history that “almost was” and to forge that into our understanding of the complexities of what is happening in the story’s “present.”

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. N.p.: n.p., 1973. Print.

Ford, Daniel G. “Mad Pursuit in ‘Go down, Moses.’” College Literature, vol. 8, no. 2, 1981, pp. 115–126., www.jstor.org/stable/25111382.

 

The White Ghost of Labor: Pantaloon in Black

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There is a second ghost haunting Rider in Pantaloon in Black. While Mannie’s specter appears briefly only to fade away, the grim reality of economic inequality begins to emerge all around Rider. Marriage, domesticity, productive labor, and even religion seemed to serve as a check to nihilistic cynicism, a sort of fantasy of empowerment in which Rider had a space that was indeed his, but as he returns to his cabin after burying his wife the illusion vanishes in an instant.

But when he put his hand on the gate is seemed to him suddenly that there was nothing beyond it. The house had never been his anyway, but now even the new planks and sills and shingles, the hearth and stove and bed, were all a part of the memory of somebody else, so that he stopped in the half open gate and said aloud, as though he had gone to sleep in one place and then waked suddenly to find himself in another: “Whut’s Ah doin hyar?”   (133)

With Mannie’s death, all that which was constitutive of his identity became vacant of personal signification. That which “had been his” is realized to be only rented property from a white landowner. The labor he invested into repairing and developing the home seems at this point fruitless and misdirected, inevitably only increasing the value of a property owned by someone else. “Whut’s Ah doin hyar,” is a question that begs an answer to no only what is his purpose in a space defined by loss, but even on a grander scale, what is his function in the social hierarchy writ large? If that which was meaningful before could be rendered so empty so easily with the death of a loved one, then how fragile and absurd must his own place  be within a social and even spiritual system?

The world begins to close in around him much like the prison cell he eventually ends up in. The oppressiveness of this constriction has a very particular hue to it:

…between the close walls of impenetrable cane-stalks which gave a sort of blondness to the twilight and possessed something of that oppression, that lack of room to breathe in, which the walls of his house had had. (141)

This coloration of objects of labor again appears later:

The jug was still in his hand when he entered the clearing and paused among the mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber-stacks. He stood now of the unimpeded shadow which he was treading again as he had trod it last night, swaying a little, blinking about at the stacked lumber, the skidway, the piled logs waiting for tomorrow, the boiler shed all quiet and blanched in the moon. (144)

The very specific coloring of the sugar cane fields and lumber yards as “blond” culminating in the terminus description of the moon’s blanching (read bleaching) effect suggests an underlying white power structure dominating and coloring economy in racial oppression. That Rider’s occupation of logging would be linked through the descriptor of blondness to the sugarcane fields suggests a persistent link in the organizing principles behind both contemporary and past forms of black labor. Logging, codified with modernity, made possible by advanced machinery and modern technical apparatus is nonetheless linked through its blond hue with the cane fields, one of the primary crops cultivated by slavery in the American south and one of (if not the primary) crop that began the instantiation of slavery in the Caribbean.  It is against the backdrop of this silent economic history of oppression that Rider feels the “constriction” of his breath, the limiting factors beyond which he cannot expand. All the fruits of his labor are to be inevitably reaped by the silent white specter of racial inequity.

Thus the salience of the rigged poker game. As the sheriff McAndrews later remarks after Rider’s death, “Birdsong has been running crooked dice on them mill niggers for fifteen years.” The white man cheating the black laborers in a rigged game is metonymic of the greater socio-economic structure laid bare to Rider as the pacifying structures of domesticity and even religion are vacated from his belief system.  Without the veil of “productivity” and “peace” (note the similarity between the word peace and pease soup Rider finds unpalatable (135 and 136), he can no longer eat that which is fed to him), the sham of the system appears to Rider in its totality. Birdsong’s murder in this respect does not so much seem an act of random violence from a desperate man, but rather an act of retribution upon that system which has enslaved and deluded. It is not so much that the grief of Mannie’s death caused Rider to go into a violent self-destructive spiral as that it removed the illusion of control from Rider’s perception. Rider does not choose imprisonment and death, he realizes that it was already a quality of his constricted life as a racialized other and embraces it.

 

Getting to the Root of the Problem in Go Down Moses

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“How to God,” he said, “can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he wont?”

The tone of Lucas’s question may sound theoretical, but it could also be interpreted in a literal sense. How, indeed? This is not the only example of a Faulkner character struggling to verbalize something to another person. It is more than characterization on Faulkner’s part; he is exposing a fundamental social and racial issue.

There are two problematic factors:

  1. The characters are male and the issue stems from one “stealing” the other’s wife
  2. One character is white and the other is black

Masculinity often implies reticence. Men take action – they don’t talk too much. This is demonstrated best (or most unfortunately) by Rider after the death of his wife. He self-destructs because he is unable to communicate with others about his grief. After Zack Edmonds takes Molly into his house, Lucas spends six months in silence. To ask Edmonds to stop would mean that Lucas would have to openly acknowledge the situation, thereby admitting some weakness on his own part. When he does confront Edmonds, he does it almost unconsciously.

“I wants my wife. I needs her at home.” Then-and he hadn’t intended to say this…shaking, unable to remember taking the bucket up even-then he said: “I reckon you thought I wouldn’t take her back, didn’t you?”

Although Molly does return home that evening it is not enough for Lucas. As a man, he still needs to take action. The subsequent scene in which Lucas shoots at Edmonds demonstrates the ways in which men are expected to communicate and interact.

Why doesn’t Lucas object sooner? Certainly, it’s also tied up in the dynamics of the plantocracy: master and slave. As Godden points out, the biggest threat to the plantocracy is revolution. We think of revolutions as action, but they begin with words. Although the black body is bound, the black voice can pose a threat if it grows in numbers and moves people to action. In this case, however, Lucas does not have anyone that would join voices with him. His conflict with Edmonds is unique to him.

Faulkner reveals the consequences of this moment in later chapters. The two sons, Roth and Henry, who are as close as brothers suddenly experience the conflict and tension of their circumstances, but they cannot talk about it. They cannot form the questions or dialogue because it has not been modeled for them by their fathers. Faulkner outlines the underlying motivations and inner conflicts that fuel the problem. He does not provide his characters with the words, but he poses the question to the reader. “How to God,” he said, “can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife?” Having the backstory and the character details, we must admit that he can’t. It is through the readers admission that Faulkner highlights the larger issues.