“Singing God Bless America in bars at midnight”: political commentary in “Delta Autumn”

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                Early in “Delta Autumn,” as the hunting party drives to the woods, the audience witnesses a political discussion that situates the narrative against the backdrop of totalitarianism. Edmonds cynically suggests that there will be no more hunting trips, asking, “After Hitler gets through with it? Or Smith or Jones or Roosevelt or Wilkie or whatever he will call himself in this country?” (322). In these lines, he suggests that the specter of Fascism transcends individual figures and nations, implying that its rise may be inevitable. After Legate counters that Americans are strong enough to resist such a takeover, Edmonds shoots back, “How?… By singing God Bless America in bars at midnight and wearing dime-store flags in our lapels?” While we learn later in the story why Edmonds behaves so cantankerously, he does make a potent critique of patriotism here, one that resonates 70+ years later. Ike refuses to accept this stance, however, curiously using the Civil War as an example of the nation’s strength in the face of adversity. A number of issues complicate the positions taken by these men—the racism of the South juxtaposed with Hitler’s notions of racial purity; pride in America vs pride in their ancestors who fought to destroy it; a sense of American exceptionalism tinged with the sense that the country is falling apart. These hypocrisies offer insight into the shifting attitudes of people in the South as history moves further from the Civil War and closer to Civil Rights.

                Continuing his political commentary, Edmonds rattles off a litany of complaints about the state of the country—it is almost disturbing how closely many of his statements resemble present-day attitudes:

“And what have you got left?… Half the people without jobs and half the factories closed by strikes. Half the people on public dole that wont work and half that couldn’t work even if they would. Too much cotton and corn and hogs, and not enough for people to eat and wear. The country full of people to tell a man how he cant raise his own cotton whether he will or wont, and Sally Rand with a sergeant’s stripes and not even the fan couldn’t fill the army rolls. Too much not-butter and not even the guns—“ (323)

A nascent Tear-partier, Edmonds seems to be overflowing with complaints about both government intrusion and the inequalities produced by the American system. What I find fascinating about his rhetoric—and that of contemporary politicians of the same mindset—is the co-mingling of patriotism with a “sky is falling” attitude about the state of the union. While Edmonds is depicted as cynical beyond compare, we often hear from contemporary pundits who claim to love America and see any government action whatsoever as a threat to what the country “actually” stands for. Yet the same exact complaints were, apparently, being leveled in the 1930s and 40s (and earlier). It seems ironic that those who profess their love of this country with the greatest vigor (with lapel pins shining) take such issue with the fundamental mechanisms of the government itself. Meanwhile, anyone left of center who raises questions about the American system is castigated as someone who “hates” America. Juxtaposed with Edmonds’s harsh critique, Ike’s romantic view of America—expressed through his attitudes about the wilderness—appears naïve and trite. Perhaps this demonstrates that even a figure as seemingly noble as Uncle Ike is powerless as the world moves towards Fascism, world war, and eventually, nuclear destruction.

“Although I have not been quite a month on the road”: Slowness, Reluctance, and Lena’s Battle With the Narrative

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There is a certain molasses-like quality to the beginning of Light In August. The opening chapter describes a character, a setting, and a mode of transportation that seem really to seep more than actually move. The first page of the first chapter opens upon Lena Grove “watching the wagon mount the hill toward her” (Faulkner 3) but does not move much further forward; instead, we find Lena five pages later still waiting for the wagon to move pass her and learning that she had already “passed it about a mile back down the road” while walking on foot (Faulkner 7). The opening is made so slow by a marked reluctance perpetuated not only by the characters but also from the land itself. The wagon is not merely moving slowly, but it is almost as if it refuses to catch up with Lena, knowing it will have to pick her up if it passes her. It is a reluctance that seems active; there is a certain deliberateness to acts that should be passive (the movement of a wagon, the setting of the sun, the refusal to meet one another’s gaze). It is almost as if the narrative itself is attempting to ignore Lena Grove to death; as though it would be possible for the very words of the novel themselves to keep Lena from ever intruding not only on Jefferson but on the entire novel itself.

Lena brings with her nothing but opposition to the ways of the people of Jefferson. She is young, mobile, and literally creating life and change within herself. She serves as a striking departure from the staid manners of the townsfolk of Jefferson and its surrounding areas. In a relatively short time Lena has already come “further than [she] has ever been before” from Alabama to Mississippi (Faulkner 3). She is frighteningly capable of movement, especially for a pregnant woman. This is upsetting and unsettling for everyone who encounters her. Lena is an object to be gawked at and discussed, but she is not someone to be interacted with. The men who watch her walking assure themselves that “she knows where she is going” to rid themselves of the responsibility of carrying her along on her way (Faulkner 9). With all of her freshness and mobility Lena can only bring an unwanted amount of change. It is no wonder that she is summarily rejected by everyone she meets in the first chapter; they sense that she will stir things up. Even when Armstid must finally move his wagon, and consequently offer Lena a ride the rest of the way into town, he takes her on less by choice and more by force. He does not move the wagon close to her; rather “they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically toward her” (Faulkner 11).

However, every character still helps Lena get where she is going. The characters she encounters as she nears Jefferson know that it is their job to resist her but they also seem to know that their helping her is inevitable. Armstid stays talking to Winterbottom as long as he possibly can in the hopes that Lena might become someone else’s responsibility in the meantime though he also knows that “she’ll have company, before she goes much further” (Faulkner 9). They make a show of avoiding her gaze and not looking at her. Even as Armstid is driving her to his home in his wagon the narration reveals that he “has never once looked full at her” (Faulkner 12). They do not help Lena on purpose. Instead, they seem to help Lena entirely against her will. She is not given anything out of the generosity of anyone’s heart. Instead, the first chapter is littered with moments like the awkward offering of money from Armstid’s wife. Her actions are sudden and deliberate but done almost without consciousness; she “jerks off one shoe and strikes the china bank” in such a meaningful way but refuses to give the money to Lena herself. The narrative is desperate to prevent Lena from achieving her goal of getting to Jefferson yet somehow she has more control of the story than the story has of her. She knows she must get to Jefferson and though no one wants to help her she still manages to reach the town. It is a struggle between Lena and her powers of change up against a narrative that wants to keep her away so she cannot make anything actually change. Yet somehow Lena is the victorious one.

The Machine on the Mound: Technology Comes to Yoknapatawpha

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“The ominous sound of machines, like the sound of the steamboat bearing down on the raft or the train breaking in upon the idyll at Walden, reverberate endlessly in our literature…It is difficult to think of a major American writer upon whom the image of the machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape has not exercised its fascination” (Marx 16).

The concept of the machine, particularly one as powerful and “ominous” as a locomotive is potent in Faulkner’s The Bear.  Isaac McCaslin’s repugnance and visual refusal of the new planning mill now occupying Major de Spain’s woods coincides with Leo Marx’s theory that the machine possesses the ability to bifurcate history into both the present and the imagined pastoral ideal.  In this case, “the suddenness and finality of change” originating from the machine’s cut alienates the purlieus from a more industrialized modernity (31).  Isaac’s rapidity in stabling his horse, and refusal to view deforestation at the hands of a compound of “stacked steel rails red with the light bright rust of newness and…piled crossties sharp with creosote, and wire corrals and feeding-troughs for two hundred mules” parallels his rejection of inheritance.  The sylvan untamed becomes uxorious for Isaac, and his moral passion and commitment to the wilderness seems to supersede both his heritage and marriage.

But there is another, more comical account of ‘the Machine’ entering ‘the Garden’ in Go Down, Moses: Lucas Beauchamp, in his quest to unearth a supposed buried treasure, employs a divining machine to facilitate a bootless errand. While without the weight, both figuratively and literally, of a locomotive, the divining machine shares a few similarities with Marx’s machine.  Both stem from a more industrialized, urban location, and intrude into the rustic—the salesman and divining machine hail from Memphis—and both exude a strange, preternatural mysticism that fascinates those introduced to it.  The locomotive may carry a magnitude of virility, but the divining machine possesses a strange and enviable sagaciousness somewhere in its enigmatic shell.  The machine itself is described as an “oblong metal box with a handle for carrying at each end, compact and solid, efficient and business-like, and complex with knobs and dials” that serves to stupefy Lucas in bemusement as he first encounters it (79 Emphasis Added).  Its complexity of modern knobs and dials remain to the end, and, even as Lucas hands over the machine to Edmond, the “bright cryptic dials and gleaming knobs” proves unmasterable for both Lucas and Winston (125 Emphasis Added).

The machine is determined to withhold its knowledge.  Its sentience is alluded to on more than one occasion, but apparently there must be some sort of arcane ritual to grant its compliance.  “I just happen to think how rich I’d be if I just knowed what hit knows,” Lucas muses one night before embarking with the salesman and Winston to the mound (88 Emphasis Added).  But, alas, its impervious and business-like valor prevails, and, like the chaste and virtuous field-maiden warding off the increasingly frustrated noble libertine, the machine “don’t seem to know how to say nothing but No” (89).  We can’t all assume mastery over the machine, Lucas, but that is exactly its lure—without its mysticism and indomitable nature, it couldn’t possibly possess the categorical attraction strong enough to both symbolize the complexities of modernity while also demarcating temporal space into bucolic nostalgia and bewildering present.

🙂

– Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

– Marx, Leo. Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Print.

On Alcohol

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Alcohol struck me as a common thread throughout many of the novels we read this semester, particularly in TSAF, LIA, AA and GDM.  It is of course closely linked to Faulkner himself. In his literature, it seems to be consistently connected to masculinity and agency although in different ways depending on the characters. 

For example, in TSAF Mr. Compson appears to use alcohol as an escape from the reality of his declining family.  His wife indicates that alcohol consumption is a form of suicide for him and she accuses Dilsey of enabling him:  “Don’t you know what the doctor says?  Why must you encourage him to drink?  That’s what’s the matter with him now.  Look at me, I suffer too, but I’m not so weak that I must kill myself with whiskey” (TSAF 207).  Mr. Compson’s reliance on alcohol has an emasculating effect.  Jason connects his father’s alcohol abuse to Caddy’s pregnancy out of wedlock and subsequent failed marriage: 

“…and not letting her daughter’s name be spoken on the place until after a while Father wouldn’t even come down town anymore but just sat there all day with the decanter I could see the bottom of his nightshirt and his bare legs and hear the decanter clinking until final T.P. had to pour it for him and she says You have no respect for your Father’s memory and I says I don’t know why not it sure is preserved well enough to last only if I’m crazy too God knows what I’ll do about it just to look at water makes me sick and I’d just as soon swallow gasoline as a glass of whiskey and Lorraine telling them he may not drink but if you dont believe he’s a man I can tell you how to find out” (TSAF 240).

While Jason’s stream of consciousness shifts a few times in this passage, the sequence links the family shame brought on by Caddie, to Mr. Compson’s antisocial and addictive behavior.  It is also clear that Jason does not drink, most likely because he has lost respect for his father because of his dependency.  However, Jason’s abstinence calls his masculinity into question, something Lorraine is more than willing to vouch for.  There is also the scene in which T.P. and Benji drink sarsaparilla, while Caddie gets married, another instance of alcohol as a form of escape connected to Caddie’s lost virginity.  If virginity is the ultimate definition of femininity and whiskey drinking is the ultimate masculine pastime, TSAF seems to illustrate the destructive forces of adhering to extreme constructs of gender.

Sutpen and Jason are similar in their opinions of their fathers.  Sutpen’s father seems to be perpetually drunk, “snoring with alcohol” in the cart on the way to Tidewater, “filling the room with alcohol snoring” in the cabin in Tidewater.  Sutpen also credits an “alcohol fog” for his father’s decision to send him to school” (AA 187, 198, 200).  Gretchen Martin points out that the Sutpen’s experienced an extreme culture shift in leaving the backcountry for plantation life, claiming that “men like Sutpen’s father resented the dependence created by this [plantation] economic system” (Martin 5).  While Martin focuses on Sutpen’s father’s laziness, his resentment for leaving a more independent lifestyle as a yeoman could also be attributed to Sutpen’s father’s alcohol consumption. 

Even Sutpen himself remarks on the cultural change of plantation life:  “He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room” (AA 189).  Plantation society not only renders the Sutpen men dependent but also comes with a new set of standards for masculinity.  Gone is idea that masculinity is defined by physical strength, bravery or the ability to hold your liquor.  That definition is replaced with the image of the plantation owner who wears shoes even when he doesn’t need them and has a slave that basically breathes for him.  The independent yeoman is replaced with the seemingly vulnerable and dependent slave owner.  Sutpen becomes increasingly affiliated with alcohol consumption as the novel progresses.  At first described as someone so committed to his design that he did not have “not only the money to spare for drink and conviviality but the time and inclination as well,” he is frequently described drinking with Wash Jones upon returning from the war (AA 31).

Continuing in this vein are the entrepreneurs Lucas Beauchamp and George Wilkins. For the black men of “The Fire and the Hearth” in GDM, rather than a loss of agency as illustrated in TSAF and AA, the production of alcohol functions as a way to operate outside of the limited options they are given through share cropping.  In fact, it is through his alcohol production that we first see to what extent Beauchamp value’s his autonomy.  He is determined to maintain his monopoly of whiskey production:

“It was not that he had anything against George personally, despite the mental exasperation and the physical travail he was having to undergo when he should have been home in bed asleep.  If George had just stuck to farming the land which Edmonds had allotted him he would just as soon Nat married George as anyone else, sooner than most of the nigger bucks he knew.  But he was not going to let George Wilkins or anyone else move not only into the section where he had lived for going on seventy years but onto the very place he had been born on and set up competition in a business which he had established and nursed carefully and discreetly for twenty of them, ever since he had fired up for his first run not a mile from Zack Edmonds’ kitchen door” (GDM 43).

It is clear that he is not motivated by money since “he already had more money in the bank than he would ever spend” (GDM 42).  The moonshine business allows Beauchamp to earn money outside of the oppressive share-cropping system while outsmarting his white counterpart, Edmonds, inheritor of LQCM.  Of course moonshining is illegal, so Beauchamp is also circumventing not only the oppressive economic system in the South, but he is also challenging the legal system, and with a bit of a leap, Jim Crow laws as well.

Since TSAF focuses intensely on a family in the changing South, it makes sense that alcohol functions with more private and familial implications here.  Mr. Compson loses his independence in his addiction and the family seems to deteriorate at the same rate as his addition worsens.  In AA, white male aristocratic identity is being challenged, and alcohol abuse seems quite linked to that loss of self and the loss of independence inherent in plantation society.  Lastly in GDM, a novel that seems to subversively seek black agency, alcohol emerges as a function of that new found agency. While not mentioned here, Joe Christmas in LIA is also in the illegal alcohol business. It could be argued that LIA is a novel about crossing boundaries and their consequences, in which case, Joe Christmas’ gender bending could also be tied to his willingness to break the law, which he does through the illegal sale of alcohol.

Please note that all pagination is based on Google Books additions.

Martin, Gretchen. “Vanquished by a Different Set of Rules: Labor vs. Leisure in William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom!” The Mississippi Quarterly 61.3 (2008): 397. Web.

Echo, Echo!

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“History repeats itself,” so the old saying goes. I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, in whose work characters often disappear, are assumed to be dead, and reappear dramatically, in what I refer to as a kind of “living resurrection,” and the technique is effective both in a literary sense and in an example of art reflecting reality. People come in and out of our lives, and the circumstances around the coming and going are often completely out of our control. Faulkner employs a similar device in his works, with characters reappearing in the same or even different novels. The major difference is that for Hardy it was a strategic move to enhance plot, and in Faulkner it is not. Faulkner is interested not in the reappearance of a character for sake of effect, but in the shadow that is cast on the primary object by its secondary appearance; in other words, the echo. In a single line of AA, I had the sudden insight that for Faulkner, it is the echo itself that, more than anything else, he is absorbed by:

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space… (AA 210)

The whole novel of AA seems to be a reverberating echo of a story that changes in meaning, implication, essence, and style. In the same way that the four gospels are each a variation or echo of the other three, yet all four are needed to gain a complete picture of the life and passion of Christ, so too do the looping stories about Sutpen, Henry, Bon, etc. depend on all of the narrators to give a comprehensive understanding of them.

The echo of an image, a character, or a word, is the thing that can retroactively modify itself, and serves as the proof of time. In fact, the echo may be Faulkner’s fundamental way of understanding time. We spoke in class of the circular motion of LIA, and I see clearly now that the circle is Faulkner’s central geometric, artistic, and designing principle. All action happens in anticipation of its own reverberations in the future, and those future reverberations serve to clarify the past action. This is why you so often see the ABBA technique in Faulkner’s writing. I first became acquainted with this while reading Hugh Kenner’s superbly didactic introduction to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (Signet), where Kenner explains that this ABBA pattern is called a chiasmus, the literal definition of which is an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases. I found this pattern all over the novels we read.

Yet Faulkner also uses variations of the pattern. Sometimes, as in the case of the chiasmus, the echo is instantaneous, and sometimes it is delayed. Sometimes the echo is identical and sometimes is has changed. The title of AA itself is an instantaneous echo, with a comma providing the pause in time that allows the second Absalom to reverberate with exclamation what the first Absalom merely pronounced. An example of a delayed echo is in LIA, when a young Christmas says, “It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible” (81) followed 137 pages later by Hightower saying, “To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world” (318). The pattern is made more complex (in typical Faulkner fashion) by each part of the delayed echo being an echo itself: the former a cropped echo: ABC-AB-B and the latter a double echo with a variation on the second part: A-A-BC-BD. Faulkner seems to be playing with the idea of time and decay here. In one sense, the primary echo – the older Hightower’s echo of the young Christmas’s remark – has been inverted: what the youth saw as terrible the elder sees as unparalleled and fleeting. Further, Christmas’s echo points to what we traditionally perceive as an echo (the refracted sound getting softer and more distant as it travels) and Hightower’s points to the way that sound changes, not just in volume, but in essence as it travels.

When we started this class, I blogged that reading Faulkner was like being in a dense fog that slowly dissolves as you keep reading. Now, if someone were to ask what reading Faulkner is like, I would paint a different picture: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, and you shout a word. You hear it repeating over and over, yet each time it grows softer, farther, until there is silence again. Now think back to when you first shouted the word. Are you still standing in the same spot? Are you still you?

Repetition in Go Down Moses (and other places)

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In all of Faulkner’s work we have seen a tendency for repetition.. Both Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! essential repeat the same plot through different layers of narration in order to generate a depth of historical and psychological meaning. While, Sound and the Fury used this repetition in the context of the decay of a southern family, Absalom, Absalom! linked this decay to a cinematic survey of the history of the south.  As I Lay Dying and Light in August both meditated on cyclicity in rural life. As I Lay Dying focused on the linkages between poor whites and the cycles of the earth, and the sort of comedic effect that sort of repetition has on modernisation and “progress”. Light in August was more concerned with the repetitions of racial violence originating in slavery, through the Civil war and into the contemporary south.

It seems fitting to end with Go Down Moses. We have been targeting, for the purposes of this class, these five novels as a particularly fertile stage of Faulkner’s creative output, with works expressing a sort of thematic linkage and imaginative progression. While Absalom, Absalom! seems, in many ways, to represent a climax to the sort of southern modernism that Faulkner was developing, the “short stories” of Go Down Moses allow him to work with repetition is new ways. For me, the dual project of uncovering the family history of the McCaslin family, while generating linkages between the stories in structure and theme, provided a distinctly Faulknerian sort of pleasure, which helped to expand the imaginative universe of Yoknapatawpha. Filling in the gaps between the stories provided a concrete sort of metaphor for the way that space and time operate between the memorable generations or moments in a rural community.

I read “Fire and the Hearth” and “The Bear” as closely related stories. The similarity in structure was somewhat difficult to grasp, but I think the hunt for the bear and the vaudevillian drama surrounding the whiskey still both helped to prefigure the more revealing second halves of each story. Isaacs obsessive thinking through the conceptualization of ownership and inheritance in a family rich off of slavery and stolen land, and Lucas’s obsession with the gold piece which would link him, despite his racial separation, to the patriarch of the McCaslin family. The unsettling conclusion of “The Bear” satirizes the idea of “owning” the land, while the touching conclusion of “Fire and the Hearth” reflects on the difference between familial love and the structure of family.

“Delta Autumn” surprised me, then, in it’s close relation to “The Bear”, while “Go Down Moses” felt like a sort of epilogue to “Fire and the Hearth”. “Delta Autumn” showed, to Isaac and the reader, that the sort of racial sexual advantage that white plantation owners exercised over slaves cannot be written out of history or the present, while simultaneously examining the complexity of that sexual relationship, and the agency of the black woman. All of this in a story that mirrored the hunting scenes of “The Bear” in a way that thematically foregrounded the historical incestual repetition that Roth’s lover represents. “Go Down Moses”, meanwhile, provides a touching but essentially brutal examination of the effects of sharecropping, and white paternalism. The money and effort of the concerned white community protecting the matriarchal figure of Molly Worsham have no effect on the reality of her grandson’s death, and her ability to understand the truth of the situation they attempt to cover up.

These concluding stories, as counterpoints to the larger stories that textually prefigure them, represent the dual narrative focus of Go Down Moses. Just as the miscegenated family tree of the McCaslin family is split into white and black branches, the separation between white and black is reiterated within nuclear families in the tree itself. Like Absalom, Absalom! and most of Faulkner’s other work, Go Down Moses suggests that the reader of both novels and history must parse through many repetitions before discovering the originary transgression of the american South–and that even this history may uncover figures so spectral and fleeting that no concrete moral clarity will ever calcify.

endgame (BA + MA)

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Just a quick rundown of what you owe me, as you wrap up all of your various assignments.  The numbers are the same for BAs/MAs:

blogs: six posts all together

wikis: 3/2/1: three short, two medium, one long (or equivalent essay)

Remember that it’s much better to rush something out than to fail to finish an assignment.  Thinking like an economist, let’s say you submit an absolutely wretched post, a D minus.  That’s a 60/100, which is +60 points over giving me nothing.  So there is a free lunch.

Thomas Sutpen: A Man’s Man

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Absalom, Absalom!, like Light in August before it, reflects a shift in Faulkner’s literary approach and subject matter from a focus on single families, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, to larger, though fragmented, communities. Thomas Sutpen, the central figure in Absalom, Absalom!, stands as the patriarchal locus of the townspeople of Jefferson that is so captivated, mesmerized and repulsed, by him. All of the novel’s narrators give voice to the obsessive nature with which the entire town observes and judges Sutpen. Albeit for different reasons (i.e. Rosa’s personal resentment, Shreve’s quest for knowledge of the South), they are each compelled to outline his mysterious and complicated influence on themselves, their families, and the town of Jefferson at large. In this light, Sutpen’s presence may be seen for the patriarchal notions he upholds.

Quentin’s narration, in particular, reflects the complex reverence, founded by fear and lack of understanding, that Sutpen’s contemporaries held towards him. Quentin, like the citizens of Jefferson, Sutpen’s neighbors, see him in light of the influence he carved out and collected for himself from that “best virgin bottom land in the country” (AA 26). More specifically, he and they, both, see this influence in light of its patriarchal domination, as is reflected by Quentin’s ponderings on the essence of fatherhood in a conversation he has with Shreve: “Yes. Maybe we are both Father . . . Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us,” (AA 210). In Quentin’s mind Sutpen is painted as an ultimate, capital “F”, Father figure, which harks back to Quentin’s own allusions to Sutpen, based on Rosa’s first descriptions of him, as embodying a Godlike essence: “Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them . . . drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light” (AA 4).

This latter association is particularly interesting, considering the perspective that created it (Quentin’s) versus the one that inspired its creation (Rosa’s). In other words, the question that begs to be answered is: “What meaning lies in the fact that Quentin likens Sutpen to God based on Rosa’s continuous and explicit reference to him as a ‘demon’ and ‘ogre’?” Firstly, I would point to the different social standing each character embodies. Rosa, who describes herself as “an orphan a woman and a pauper,” holds a much lower status in the social hierarchy of the time compared to Quentin (AA 12-13). Simply because of his maleness and the respectability, declining though it is, of the Compson name he bears, Quentin is able to neutralize Rosa’s acutely negative portrayal of Sutpen into one marked by first and foremost by awe, rather than disgust. Secondly, Quentin is the direct descendant, the grandson, of Sutpen’s first friend in Jefferson, General Compson. This highlights the patrilineal aspect of Quentin’s privilege that leads him to develop such a reverent conception of Sutpen.

Sutpen himself, too, reflects the novel’s patrilineal structure and focus. His ultimate goal in life, what motivates his every action, is revealed by the “design” he refers to in Chapter 7 (AA 212). This “design,” of course, is fundamentally entwined in patriarchy and patrilineality. As he supposedly explained to General Compson, “To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife,” it becomes clear that Sutpen’s objective was about establishing a solid patriarchal footing in the place of Sutpen’s Hundred (AA 212). The money, the mansion, the slaves and plantation would serve to perpetuate power within the Sutpen lineage, or family. That Sutpen is concerned primarily with his theoretical male descendants, his patrilineage, is more than clear from his assessment of the role his theoretical wife will play into his scheme: necessary for biological reasons, but not symbolically integral to his plan, personally meaningful, or emotionally beneficial.

Race and Gender in Go Down, Moses.

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It is clear that Go Down, Moses is an exploration of the issue of race in imaginary Yoknapatawpha County.  The development of the relationships between the white and black characters of the novel becomes the primary focus while plot, in my opinion, seems to be secondary.  The first section of the book entitled, “Was” is rather horrific, yet sadly unsurprising, in how the white men gamble for the ownership of their slaves.  However, what really was intriguing for me, as a reader, was the section entitled, “The Fire and the Hearth,”  where the reader is introduced to the character of Lucas Beauchamp.  We are told that Lucas is, “not only the oldest man but the oldest living person on the Edmonds plantation, the oldest McCaslin descendant even though in the world’s eye he descended not from McCaslins but from McCaslin slaves…” (36).  Through his introduction, the reader is given the impression that Lucas carries with him a sense of entitlement.  Even though he is a man of mixed ancestry, he is still the oldest descendant of the McCaslins and that makes him better than some others.  Additionally, we later discover that Lucas is a descendant of the McCaslins through his father’s side which, in his mind, is far superior than being a descendant through the mother’s side.  For example, when Lucas goes to Zack Edmonds house to take back his wife, he explains, ” ‘Because you are a McCaslin too’ he said. ‘Even if you was woman-made to it. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe that’s why you done it: because 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…’ ” (51).  This dialogue illustrates Lucas’s disdain for any man born into the McCaslin line through woman and also his feelings of superiority to women.  There seems to be this constant reminder of Lucas’s dominance over the female characters in his life.  Lucas threatens Zack with a razor in order to gain back his wife and he is scheming to send a man to prison in order to keep him away from his daughter.  While Lucas does feel a sense of confidence and entitlement that is rare in some of Faulkner’s novels, he still knows that society will always see him as a black man.  “He turned toward the room where the fire was, where his supper waited.  This time he spoke aloud: ‘How to God,’ he said, ‘can  a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife?…’ ” (58).  Lucas knows his position and in the eyes of society he is still a black man, lesser than a white man, even if he is the descendant of old Carothers McCaslin.  What does a man with a sense of entitlement who is seen as lesser in the eyes of society do? — dominates what is considered lesser than him, of course.  In this novel, that would be the women.  He is able to dominate the women of his life (his wife and daughter), but also finds ways to attempt to dominate the other men who were brought into the McCaslin line through the maternal side, namely Zack Edmonds.

The scene where Lucas attempts to kill Zack over the possession of his wife is also very important because of how Faulkner portrays Lucas.  The two words that come to mind immediately are barbaric and savage.  First off, the reader is constantly being reminded of the “white man” that it is impossible to forget race within this scene.  For example, the narration of this scene states, “In the first of the light he (Lucas) mounted the white man’s front steps and entered the unlocked front door and traversed the silent hall and entered the bedroom…” (51).  This scene almost becomes exactly that – the black man versus the white man.  The weapons that Faulkner gives both men also speaks volumes and are very representative of the types of men these characters are.  For example, Lucas has brought a razor to kill Zack with, while Zack possesses a pistol in his drawer.  The use of the razor is so barbaric and the juxtaposition between it and the pistol is a reflection of the difference between the white man and the black man.  To me, this novel seems to be about domination – how one person can dominate another.  Obviously, I have plenty of reading left so I am unsure of where the novel will take me.  However, the message I currently see from Faulkner regarding the race relations in this novel, is that at the heart of it, it is about man dominating man and who wins in the end.