Tag Archives: GDM

New Orleans, the Confederacy, and Hating It

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I didn’t make nearly enough of the stirring story of toppling monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans this month. After reading GDM and AA in particular, we should have a keen sense of the depth of historical resonance as Mayor Landrieu has overseen the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The removals have been accompanied by protests and counter-protests, often with valences of fascism (e.g., burning torches and heavy arms) as well as more reasoned reactions by writers from right to left meditating on what it means to remember and/or memorialize the past.

For us, we should think of certain aspects of Faulkner’s legacy. For example, we might remember how large the War looms in the imagination of Quentin Compson, so much so that he feels emptied out in the present, “his very body an … empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names.” We might also reflect on two contrary vectors in Faulkner’s work that are highly relevant. On the one hand, we have Faulkner’s strenuous effort, amid the resurgence of nativism and white supremacy, to reveal the absurdity of racial ideologies (especially in LIA and AA via Christmas and Bon), and to attempt, however awkwardly at times, to inhabit black subjectivities and imagine black desires (especially via Lucas and Molly in GDM).

In similar fashion, Landrieu and other white elites, who very much still dominate the city and state governments and control a vast share of capital and influence, nonetheless have made a courageous effort to chip away at the toxic legacy of white supremacy with this act. On the other hand, we should remember that Faulkner shares with his liberal Southern counterparts an antipathy to some aspect of antiracist progressivism of his era and a strong preference for the kind of “going slow” on racial issues that King later mocked as meaning “never.” The very existence of these monuments in 2017 speaks to the equivalence of “later” and “never” in many minds up to this point, and the push to remove them now represents, one hopes, a growing will on the part of a substantial majority of the nation to reckon with this painful past. We need to replace what Landrieu calls “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy” in our official modes of memory with a more complex narrative in which white supremacy and the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples and members of minority groups is central to the formation and maintenance of “The South.” Here’s Landrieu’s speech, which is well worth a read: .

“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).

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.

 

lucas beauchamp, “the fire and the hearth”, and the mean(ing)s of production

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Images of capital and capitalist process abound in “The Fire and the Hearth.” Moving beyond the title itself, which introduces items that both nourish and produce (within spaces both domestic and industrial), the opening passages present images of capital (in the key item of the still), competition (both within the illicit industry of making alcohol as well as within the theme of social/familial/racial competition), labor, and industry.

A diagram of a North Georgian moonshine still.

Yet these aspects of capitalist industry and production are not delineated separately from the home, but complicated and enmeshed within it. For Lucas Beauchamp, the two are in and of themselves inseparable because of the space in which they are bounded: “the section where he had lived for going on seventy years […] the very place he had been born on and set up competition in a business which he had established and nursed carefully and discreetly […]—secretly indeed, for no man needed to tell him what Zack Edmonds or his son, Carothers (or old Cass Edmonds either, for that matter), would do about it if they ever found it out” (35). In this description, Lucas is implicated within a series of different power positions with respect to labor: while the text implies he is subordinate in position to the Edmonds through the vague threat of consequence should they ever find out, Lucas is also acknowledged as a capitalist operator in his own right, one who establishes and runs a business. What power industry accords Lucas, however, is troubled by the issue of his race—a problem which the story explores along multiple levels. (Consider, for example, that the site of Lucas’ own birth is also the site of his capitalist production; he, as a labor-product, emerges out of the same physical space as the alcoholic product he produces to sell.)

Within the Marxian definition, capital represents both (1) “governing power over labour and its products” specifically through ownership as well as (2) “stored-up labour” (“Profit of Capital” 1). While the text continually positions Lucas as capital (2) in conjunction with his labor, both with the still and with the agricultural upkeep of the farm, he seeks to become a capitalist through obtaining capital (1)—this concerns the gold as well as his family inheritance, but within a wider consideration may also bracket his own self-possession. As Lucas himself verbalizes, “I aint got any fine big McCaslin farm to give up. All I got to give up is McCaslin blood that rightfully aint even mine or at least aint worth much since old Carothers never seemed to miss much what he give to Tomey that night that made my father” (56, emphasis mine). Despite the acknowledged whiteness that Lucas contains within him, it remains a kind of economic artificial scarcity: the McCaslin blood he “owns” does not “rightfully” belong to him, or is valued differently. The prestige and status it affords is not extended to him. He is unable to make “capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood,” and is rather “impervious to that blood…indifferent to it” (101). Lucas’ white blood, contained within his (part-)black body, becomes inert, stripped of its power as social capital. For example, when Lucas attempts to speak his desires in court, he is ignored and chided (as “uppity”) by the white court until Roth Edmonds speaks on his behalf. What social capital Lucas has attempted to obtain and hoard for himself throughout the story remains, like the gold he attempts to locate, elusive. What little he is able to obtain only whets his appetite for more—an appetite he struggles to satisfy and ultimately surrenders.

In Richard Godden’s exploration of the role of labor within Absalom, Absalom!, he emphasizes the role of “personal dependency” within the paternalistic relationship between a white master and his black slaves (Godden 74). In particular, paternalism proves unpalatable for Sutpen, who rejects the system in part due to its implication of filial rights for black people within that system (75). It is this sense of inheritance that Lucas Beauchamp speaks to. In attempting to seize and retain economic capital, Lucas seeks to maintain a position of power along one axis—by managing production—while he is restrained from obtaining it along another (the social-racial). Despite his position as “not only the oldest man but the oldest living person on the Edmonds plantation, the oldest McCaslin descendant,” Lucas is aware that “in the world’s eye he descended not from McCaslins but from McCaslin slaves…supported by what Roth Edmonds chose to give him, who would own the land and all on it if his just rights were only known, if people just knew how old Cass Edmonds…had beat him out of his patrimony” (36). Lucas, fathered by the McCaslins and situated as the “oldest McCaslin descendant,” positions himself within the McCaslin lineage, a placement he believes makes him eligible for inheritance; however, this position is ultimately rejected and denied because of his race. Yet this denial, within the narration, is not presented unilaterally as a straightforward denial or exclusion, but implies the presence of competition. In Lucas’ view, he is “beat…out of his patrimony.” In response to this denial, he then becomes embroiled in plots centered around capital: he produces alcohol (illicitly) and is provoked into competition with his future son-in-law, is motivated on an obsessive quest to locate gold, and fights to restore his wife from working in the white man’s house (as a wife/mother/nursemaid) back into his own. As Lucas asks, “What’s ourn?…What’s mine?” (Faulkner 49). Like any good capitalist seeks to do, Lucas hunts for his own stake in the economic game, for capital to manage and oversee, which is his entirely.

Within the story’s resolution, social and real capital are intertwined and interconnected. When Lucas surrenders the “polished [divining machine], at once compact and complex and efficient-looking with its bright cryptic dials and gleaming knobs,” he “stood looking down on it” until he decides to turn away and never looks on it again. The device that was key to his quest for capital and his discovery of it is surrendered to Edmonds. When Edmonds offers Lucas use of it a few times a month, he is flatly rejected in a kind of final grasp at recovering social capital (through his refusal, a minor recovery of personhood and agency). Yet this is simultaneously colored by Lucas’ awareness that, despite his desires and his drive, “[he] reckon[s]…that money aint for [him]” (127). Whatever twenty-two thousand dollars was lying hidden and discovered by “two white men” is, for Lucas, elusive and unrecoverable, and made deliberately so by a system of factors around him, which includes both the professional space of the court and the salesman but also the domestic space of his white relations. Despite the money he has in the bank, he is isolated from the capital he desperately seeks—his rightful position within the lineage of the McCaslin line, and the social powers it conveys.

Pantaloon

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You may have wondered what the “Pantaloon” in “Pantaloon in Black” refers to. Pantaloon is the name of a stock character in the Italian comedic mode “commedia dell’arte,” which dates from the 15thC and features a number of stock characters. Pantalone (the Italian name) is typically an old, hunch-backed man, so the correspondence is far from perfect. Faulkner’s point seems to be that Rider’s actions and motives can only be comprehended by whites through the disfiguring lens of reductive racial typology. The story, then, gives the “comedy” a sick twist, making the conventions themselves the object of our attentions rather than the ostensible “comedy.” Here are some images of Pantaloon:

The Machine on the Mound: Technology Comes to Yoknapatawpha

Aside

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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.

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.