Go Down, Moses: Experience and the Forms of Understanding

The Kentucky Review Volume 3 | Number 1 Article 2 1981 Go Down, Moses: Experience and the Forms of Understanding John Earl Bassett Wayne State University Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Bassett, John Earl (1981) "Go Down, Moses: Experience and the Forms of Understanding," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 3 : No. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol3/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact . Go Down, Moses: Experience and the Forms of Understanding John Earl Bassett G o Down, Moses at first was to be simply a collection of five stories, the "general theme being the relationship between white and negro races here." 1 Writing to Robert Haas in May 1941 that he needed a quick money-making project, Faulkner outlined a volume to include 'The Fire and the Hearth," "Pantaloon in Black," 'The Old People," "Delta Autumn," and "Go Down, Moses." All were then in versions different from what appeared in Go Down, Moses and Other Stories a year later. The book would have been much like The Unvanquished, a series of connected yet separate magazine pieces about the Civil War and the Sartoris family. Soon thereafter Faulkner changed directions. He revised an unpublished story, "Almost," in which young Bayard Sartoris from The Unvanquished was a character, changed Bayard to Cass Edmonds, and placed the revised story, "Was," first in his new typescript. That summer he arranged the network of interracial genealogy that connects the tales, and developed Lucas from a stock comic figure into an individualized character with pride, dignity, and shrewdness. Then the story of Isaac McCaslin and a bear in the wilderness took over his imagination. Ike McCaslin grows out of earlier Faulkner characters such as Horace Benbow, for whom corruption of the real and unattainability of the ideal, involvement and escape, presented such traumas. Quentin Compson is another predecessor, and moreover is the actual protagonist of "Lion" and an implicit protagonist of magazine versions of 'The Old People" and "The Bear." 2 Quentin's obsession in The Sound and the Fury with recapturing a past that has fled, a state of purity or an idyllic world in which he plays a special role, anticipates Ike's similar fixations and a comparable inability to grow in time, to compromise and adjust. 3 In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin's quest to learn about his past, or more specifically to unravel a particular episode-Henry shooting Charles 3 Bon-becomes a search for self-justifying fictions about that past. Ike McCaslin similarly creates a fiction of self-justification. In its final form, Go Down, Moses explores the relationship between such human fictions and the events, experiences, and feelings on which they are based. It dramatizes the tragic and comic distance between human understanding and the experiences being understood. It does not ridicule human fiction-making, but rather suggests the need for fictions, conventions, and social forms to contain and convey strong emotional experiences, and to make social action meaningful. It illustrates, however, the danger of reifying or mystifying codes and conventions as transcendent or preexistent. On the one hand, Go Down, Moses, grounded in paternalistic conservatism, repudiates the radical challenge to tradition, convention, and social continuity. On the other, it challenges social and racial assumptions of the South in which Faulkner writes, assumptions based on ignorance and exclusion of the experiences and perspective of half the population. By interweaving stories of blacks and whites in Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner illustrates the need for forms of communication and understanding that are not only open and dynamic, but also selfcritical. The opening story, "Was," establishes an ambivalently comic tone. It introduces two central themes-slavery. and ownership of the land, and the ritualistic and conventional aspects of human behavior. "Was" immediately draws attention to its own fictionality. Set before the Civil War, its story is passed down orally to Ike later, and undergoes, Faulkner implies, the same distortions and alterations as all oral tradition. The absence of capital letters and conventional punctuation, as well as a cumulative style, draw attention to the fictive as well as the oral dimension of the discourse. When the actual "tale" begins, moreover, Faulkner deconventionalizes the realistic "hunt for an escaped slave" by a series of comic devices that at the same time conventionalize the chase as tall tale. Events are ritualized but bizarre. Uncle Buck stops for his necktie; he and Cass stay for breakfast before leaving home; at Warwick they stop for another meal and appropriate social exchanges; the whole sequence occurs "about twice a year." 4 Catching Turl, however, is not really what the chase is all about, at least to Buck and Buddy-to Turl it is. The chase is really an elaborate attempt to outfox Hubert so he cannot bring Turl back and meanwhile dump Sophonsiba on Uncle Buck. In tandem with the rituals, therefore, a series of games unify the story. 4 The chase is a kind of game, or decoy-game, analogous to the foxes and dogs. Bets are placed: Hubert bets five hundred dollars Buck can catch Turl at Tennie's cabin. Games also involve traps, and finally Sophonsiba traps a husband. The only way out for Buck is through another game-a card game, and only on a rematch when his twin brother redeems him, with help from his black cousin. Apparently, however, even the poker game is not "for real," since Sophonsiba does finally marry Uncle Buck. Games and rituals denaturalize the search for Turl, remove it from the category of serious slave hunt and develop it as symbolic comedy. Not only are they piled on top of one another, and presented with irony, but they are continually inverted. Faulkner opens up the very forms and conventions of communication in his society to radical examination. Although his novels rarely make explicit social or political criticism of the South, they profoundly examine the basic assumptions and codes on which the social and political systems depend. The poker game is the most important example in "Was" of inversion. 5 It is based on a condition counter to all other poker games-to lose is to win, to win is to lose: 'The lowest hand wins Sibbey and buys the niggers" (p. 24). To win the hand is to "lose" a slave or a wife or some other responsibility. Faulkner examines the meaning of ownership. Ike McCaslin owns "no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's" (p (...truncated)