William Faulkner by Godden Richard;

Author:Godden, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Reading the Ledgers:

Textual Variants and Labor

Variables

Richard Godden and Noel Polk

THE Old People” opens with Buck and Buddy tangled on the horns of a latently black beast;1 the story closes with two males in bed, dark hand to white “flank.”2 At either end, “The Old People” exhibits associative transformations rendered only slightly less shocking by their not being singular. The first four stories in Go Down, Moses, read cumulatively, release a whispered ur-narrative, or more properly an ur-narrative kit, whose constituent parts (bed; woman under erasure; male cross-racial couple; corpse) with each emergence advance toward emergency. The nub of that emergency, or so this argument has run, is to be found in the contradictory need of the planter class to loose and retain the bound body of African American labor, circa 1940–41. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that the clarifying series, or rather the generative contradiction which is its final referent, should yield another variant in “The Bear, ” particularly since the fifth story of Go Down, Moses turns on an act of repudiation involving the systematic release of a black work force. The logic of the ur-narrative has been understood to require that any planter who vehemently and overtly repudiates the black body that is his substance risks not simply death (or material transformation) but the covert restoration of that body to him in alternative forms. Since in section 4 of “The Bear” Faulkner gathers the documentary evidence for Isaac McCaslin’s case against his class, and offers a clause by clause transcription of his making of that case, one might expect to find, among the finer points of the repudiator’s argument, the emergent intimations of a countercase—or, more literally, beds, women in erasure, male couplings across racial lines, and corpses. Indeed, given the sustained and detailed nature of the repudiation, the recovery of an equally particularized and shocking emergency among the subsemantics of that case is systemically likely.

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