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.