Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner by Rollyson Carl;

Author:Rollyson, Carl;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

If we stand back from the seven individual chapters of Go Down, Moses, and from our interest in the ways they are connected to each other, we see a larger structural principle in operation. The first three chapters deal with plantation life in the South and with the history of race relations between the dominant white master class and their repressed Negro slaves. The wilderness out of which the white man carved this world is a minor theme. In the next three chapters the major and minors themes are reversed, and the world of white civilization” is seen through the perspective of the wilderness as an encroaching set of future conditions. The resolution of this dialectic of wilderness and civilization is accomplished in the last chapter, briefly set in Chicago and then in Jefferson. In the town and the city, however, the same problems of white-black relationships occur, the same consequent question of what constitutes a genuine human community is posed.

The white man’s invasions of (in turn) the wilderness, the plantation, the town and the city are successively the focal turning points which define his increasing distance from his own sources. For Ike, man’s evil increases with the distance in time from man’s initial violation of the wilderness. But Go Down, Moses itself seems to argue that good and evil are the basic, unquantifiable antinomies of all stages of history. Butch Beauchamp, for instance, is not corrupted in the city. He goes to the city because he is already corrupt, and because he has as a result been expelled from his native land. The census taker who inquires after his real name and background is just as shocked as a member of Jefferson would be to hear that Butch does not care about his family, and does not concern himself about the disposal of his body. Although the census taker is also in a “numbers racket,” he does not treat Butch merely as a number, but responds to Butch’s own inhumanity as might any sensitive human being. Gavin Stevens, with his Heidelberg Ph.D., is not less humane than Ike, who has been schooled in the wilderness. A sense of humanity, in short, is not tied to a particular place, and Ike’s assumption to the contrary (that the wilderness is the special preserve of universal moral values) renders him powerless in a changing world. As in Absalom, Absalom!, past and present are not joined by emphasizing the sameness of any two periods of time, but by dramatizing history as a human process that is going on at all times and all places.

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