In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner traces the McCaslin family past back to its origin to illustrate the racial intersection that generates the story of the South through the memory and stream of consciousness of the white and a few black members of the family. With its complex episodes of the huge McCaslin clan, the novel recounts and represents southern history marked by the institution of slavery and racism. As a long representation of a family history as well as a regional history, this complex narrative covers a long span of time from the 1830s through antebellum time to 1940 and thereabout. Time, as one of the central concerns, goes back, stops and begins at somewhere with memory in the novel. The narrative of the story line develops and culminates with Ike McCaslin’s renunciation of his patrimony, and eventually runs down to what it was and to Genesis, attempting to unite all the family stories in a white man’s lifetime. So the reader is brought into and went through many family members’ recollections. These remembrances weave the stories together that the novel throughout is an exercise of employment of numerous memories and stream of consciousness as Faulkner’s specific narrative.
Memory counts in Go Down, Moses since Faulkner’s tie to southern regional history is always shown clearly through memory. Faulkner’s employment of memory in the historical contexts in which he writes are seemingly complex in a ragbag of memories, yet tenuously and meticulously deployed. Admittedly, Faulkner’s novel always associates with the past and engages in southern historical contexts cautiously and collaboratively. But it is important to note that while the novel contains much historical ground, Faulkner is “rarely sentimental or nostalgic about the past” (Minter 56). David Minter expounds the way southern history is ushered into Faulkner’s novel in two distinctive ways and how it is entangled with Faulkner’s narrative:
History enters Faulkner’s fiction in at least two distinguishable modes and on at least four different levels, […]. In one mode history comes as past experience, as lived time, as actual events and actual people; in another mode it comes as remembered experience, as recollected or recorded time, as shadows of events and shades of people (Minter 56).
The remembered experience does not remain in the past; it rather often lives a life of its own in Faulkner’s novel. And through the deployment of memory, both two modes5 appear in Go Down, Moses, yet Faulkner seems to shed light on the remembered experience through memory both to tackle the issues of race, region and gender and to recapture the most serious problem, the racial dichotomy, in the Deep South. Thus, the significance and complexity of Go Down, Moses lie in the presence of history with memory, recalled as shadows or ripples of the events, as its force within a long continuance of reaction and mediation with the unearthed southern history.
Faulkner’s management of the story line begins in the fictional present with his most history-haunted protagonist Ike McCaslin, and traces from the present back to history “out of the old time, the old days” (Faulkner 4), plunging right into memory.
Faulkner presents the prelude story “Was” as memory from Isaac McCaslin, as the outlived family member on the plantation, who narrates the story told to him by Cass Edmonds from a child’s point of view. Faulkner establishes a fictional present at the beginning, and then shifts fast to a tale Isaac recollects, since “this was not something participated in or even seen by [Isaac] himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff” (3).
Faulkner’s technical success changes from Cass’s voice into Isaac’s memory in the
5 David Minter suggests that the great complexity of Go Down, Moses derives in part from the
dual presence of history. See Minter’s “Truths More Intense than Knowledge: Notes on Faulkner and Creativity.”
third-person narrative. The reader does not yet see clearly the relevance those familial events in the past have for Ike, but is rather given more information about him than he can be understood at this present point in the very first story, which conflates the past with the present and brings the familial relationship into the front. The importance and complexity of this fascinated juxtaposition of present and past cannot be fully grasped until Part Four of “The Bear.” The fictional present of the novel in Part One of “Was”
is established in 1941, which is the latest period in Uncle Ike’s lifetime, as the past events through recollection are vividly reenacted in the rest of the stories that happened in and after 1859.
As Ike’s memory recedes to the past for unearthing historical pieces of the family stories, part of which he actually learns from Cass, who provides the stories an elusive viewpoint, and much of the narrative in the opening story relies on Cass’s voice. In
“Was,” Ike’s flashback retells one piece of his McCaslin family history about Uncle Buddy and his father Uncle Buck, but in “The Fire and the Hearth,” the voice of a black McCaslin member emerges. The reader is brought into Lucas Beauchamp’s mind. Similar to old Ike’s, Lucas’s stream of consciousness restores part of the family history. His memory not only extends its scope far back to his childhood and his relationships with the Edmonds family members, but also to the marriage life with his wife Molly and the plantation life with the present owner Roth Edmonds. His entwined memories expose the inextricable relationship that ties the white patriarch and his southern slaves together on the land. Lucas’s stream of consciousness keeps returning to his early childhood and his ancestry when Roth Edmonds was born.
Putting his private past into the center of the family history, Lucas returns back and forth between his mental process and his treasure hunting in reality. As Joseph Reed observes, “Faulkner develops an almost invisible technique to render Lucas’s thought-processes, continually transmitting significant but subtle shifts between one
train of thought and the next” (189). In “Fire and the Hearth,” past and present constantly interpenetrate and interrupt each other. Lucas’s remembrance of things that took place forty-three years ago parallels his present action as the plot proceeds further to reveal the past events.
By moving through the fictional present into the past, memory travels through time, gradually restoring southern plantation life, and sometimes breaks into the moments of insight to other character’s memory, such as Roth’s flashback. Similar to Lucas’s recollection, Roth’s memory also restores and re-constructs his family history.
Hence another voice of the white McCaslin family comes to the fore. Roth remembered the history of the family’s Beauchamp Negroes, whose strain was “not only of white blood and not even Edmonds blood, but of old Carothers McCaslin himself, from whom Lucas was descended not only by a male line but in only two generations ”(Faulkner 101). Roth’s flashback goes to Lucas’s youth and his own childhood when he was raised by Molly as his substitute mother. The story line develops in “The Fire and the Hearth” from the present conversation between Roth and Molly, tracing the black line, male branch of family blood three generations back, and returns again to the presence of Lucas in face of Roth Edmonds. This kind of time traveling marks the characteristics of Faulkner’s fictional narrative.
It is obvious that the characters’ thought-process or memory sets in motion part of the narrative progression in Go Down, Moses. Indeed, the novel comprises numerous memories and streams of consciousness from different characters as distinctive narrative voices. In “Pantaloon in Black,” the narrative voices of the white and the black juxtapose through a black young man’s memory. Rider after Mannie’s funeral struggled and confronted with the memory of his wife. Returning to his house, he tracked his private past, preoccupied with the memory of his six-month marriage life and felt its overwhelming weight infilterating the house: “the dusk-filled single
room where all those six months were now crammed and crowded into one instant time until there was no space left for air to breathe” (135). Rider’s memory is so heavy and choking that the ghost of Mannie returns and temporarily reunites the couple as time condenses and stops for them. Memory’s effect appears heavier and more forceful in this black man, since it not only links the past and the present, but also unites the living and the dead. However, as Lee Anne Fennell puts it, “if memory is a hedge against mortality and forgetting, it also exacts a price—the agonizing grief that the acknowledgement of loss entails” (47), Rider’s remembrance indeed holds his wife back from death yet he needs to recognize the high price of it, although he experiences the power of memory in transcending mortality and keeping the dead alive.
Through Rider’s memory of his wife, Faulkner reveals Rider’s story in detail by having a white sheriff’s deputy to retell Rider’s grief and his subsequent murder of a white man with an indifferent, unaffectionate voice. The word “Pantaloon” in the title suggests that the story is close to “drama,” presented by the black and re-narrated by the white. Rather than focusing on Rider’s loss of Mannie, which leaves him bereft, the white deputy reports the murder in a twisted version by erasing the very grief that drives Rider’s actions in the first place. It appears a bitter irony that his wife should be so inattentive to the story calling for sympathetic response and understanding of a man’s loss of wife. Faulkner casts a light on a racial tragedy, illustrating how the whites deny a black’s grief and refuse to step into the black’s heart until they find a racial outlet in the murder. The significance of memory becomes more obvious in that memory in “Pantaloon in Black” not only shapes the very expression of southern society in the 1930s, but brings out the distinction between the voices of a white Southerner and a local black man in reality. It sketches the strict racial dichotomy that resides in the white Southerner’s mind, a situation that is made clear in the deputy’s
distorted narrative. It also reveals the racial wounding rooted in the white South’s racism.
The blacks in “Pantaloon in Black” have no blood relationship with the McCaslin clan, but this story serves as a “structural subversion of the family chronicle that could bring the stories together into a more cohesive novel” (Aboul-Ela 62). Carl E. Rollyson describes the effect of “Pantaloon in Black,” a seemingly “tangential aspect of Rider’s story,” which, rather, stands out as a foreground of the tension between the two races continuously presented in the previous stories: “To complete the suspension of character development in the McCaslin story, so that the old times which Lucas remembers are not immediately juxtaposed to Isaac’s memories of “The Old People”” (102). “Pantaloon in Black” involves a memory that brings out contemplation upon Southern racial problems rather than emphasizes a direct appeal to sympathy. Through Rider’s memory, Faulkner represents a black man’s bereavement and mirrors a white deputy’s racial prejudice his narrative creates.
Memory here distances the reader from Lucas’s remembrance in “Fire and the Hearth” to Ike’s childhood experience in “The Bear” as a structural deployment.
In “Fire and the Hearth,” Lucas’s memory reaches back to the old time when old Carothers got the land from the native Indians. But in “The Old People” Faulkner moves out of the character’s viewpoint in the previous stories and into an omniscient narrative voice, a third-person narration. The historical pieces here extend far beyond the present moments to the prehistoric conditions of the American wilderness before it recedes under the economic development of the white settler: the family history traces back to the past of Sam Fathers and to American wilderness. The omniscient narrative presents Ike’s childhood with Sam Fathers, which unfolds their hunting life in the woods and Sam’s slave experience on the plantation. On the one hand, Ike’s childhood experience together with Sam Fathers as a companion, helps Ike “continue
to live past [his] seventy years and then eighty years, long after the man himself had entered the earth as chiefs and kings entered it” (Faulkner 159). On the other hand, it takes the reader on the way to the central problem of the Deep South; that is, slavery.
The omniscient voice in “The Old People” suggests that Ike will remember the hunting experience at eighty and also shows that his hunting life in the wilderness has an enormous effect on his relinquishment later. In the wilderness with Sam Fathers, an interracial character of black and Indian blood line, Ike learns not just the skill and code of hunting but sees his family line as a historical consequence by miscegenation and his patrimony as doomed and cursed by slavery and exploitation.
Ike’s memory in “The Bear” has its special import, as Carl Rollyson explains:
[r]etrospection on the events related in “The Bear” has begun even before the events themselves can properly be said to have ended.
Groups of men, very carefully chosen by Faulkner for the representativeness of their experiences in or beside the wilderness, gather around the old bear to remember the past. (106)
Faulkner tends to make Ike an observer of the historical processes on the Southern plantation. He also makes different racial characters of Native Americans, the blacks and the whites to assemble together in order to remember American past and its historical changes in the South. Ike’s vision of history in “Delta Autumn” illustrates his obsession with the past and his attempt to redeem its evil, as he was aware that Roth’s light-skinned mistress was a descendant of the Beauchamp line and thus gave cynical advice to her so as to end the result of miscegenation that history has repeated itself in the present. He refuses a black member of his own family, which unwittingly repeats the crime of the McCaslin past in a new context, for Ike cannot accept what history has made him or changed the blood line in the present. However, history is never simply in the past, as Faulkner expounds:
no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his or her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him. (Faulkner in the University 84)
In fact, memory demonstrates the effect of excavation and accumulation as the reader gradually assembles the fragments of the family story into a composite whole from the antebellum past to the present time during World War II. Memory not only serves as a narrative form that transcends several individual life stories and generations for representation, but also as a formal concern of Faulkner to explore the consequences of slavery: miscegenation and racism, exposing what slave history has left to the Southerners.
From memory and recollection, the voices of the numerous protagonists, the white and the black members of the McCaslin family, together constitute a fuller picture of the family past. Throughout Go Down, Moses, these various voices, via memory and stream of consciousness, present southern slave experience and the historical changes in the South. There are the primary white voices of Ike McCaslin, Cass and Roth Edmonds, and Buck and Buddy McCaslin, presenting the complex relationship to or their more “dominant” situations over the slaves. There are also the scattered black voices of Lucas Beauchamp, Rider, unnamed Negro mistress of Roth, and Butch Beauchamp, exposing the strained tension under slavery and the individual relationship with the white after the Emancipation. Susan V. Donaldson specifies Faulkner’s unconventional, multi-voiced narrative as postmodern-like
“revision/parody of the South’s master narrative”:
[I]t is a broken, murky, confused retelling, without a proper beginning
or ending, […]. The very confusion of the narrative—fragmented, multi-voiced, often unpunctuated, sometimes disoriented in its chronology—suggests something of its postmodern character,6 […]. It is a narrative that recounts and critiques the making of sameness and otherness in the master narrative of southern history. (11)
Faulkner’s narrative strategy unsettles the master narrative of southern history, since it is presented as “fragmented and multi-voiced” through the characters’ memories.
Within memory Faulkner’s narrative leads the reader to move through different time spans, as William Rueckert comments on Faulkner’s method in managing fictional time:
Faulkner has an extraordinary time-sense and seems to hold all the time of a given fiction simultaneously in his imagination and swim around through it as if it were the very element of his being-as-fiction-writer.
This has the effect of altering our conception of linear time without ever destroying time. (166)
Rueckert’s remark about time suggests that time is a significant element in understanding Faulkner’s representation of southern history. Faulkner departs from the pattern of linear time and “scramble[s] chronology and sequence” (Kinney 49).
Presumably, he complicates and obscures the causes and consequences of the familial events. The mixed sequence and the delayed revelation in the series of stories help to demonstrate the concept of time as flexible and fluid in the novel.
Faulkner’s employment of memory not only exemplifies the historical scenes being close and convincing, since memory evokes emotional and psychological
6 Susan Donaldson suggests Jean Francois Lyotard’s idea of postmodern character in narrative as a history that has eschewed the old rules and that is in the process of narration looking for new “rules and categories.” See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
changes of the characters, such as Rider, but it also carries fictional possibility of temporal movement. The presentation of temporal accounts in Go Down, Moses allows the reader to rechart the events in chronological order of their occurrence and, as Dara Llewellyn points out, “the reader must decipher lineage in this collection by examining how time flows. Faulkner helps effect this deciphering of the flow of time by turning the series of stories into a genealogical puzzle” (Llewellyn 497). While solving this puzzle, the reader is surrounded with several partial family histories moving back and forth between the tangled stories that refer to different time flows.
In Faulkner’s representation, the Civil War memories as a pivot in the novel, then, manifest dual relationships to time. On the one hand, as demonstrated through Ike at his old age, memory maintains a tied relationship that it carries the past to the present.
In Faulkner’s representation, the Civil War memories as a pivot in the novel, then, manifest dual relationships to time. On the one hand, as demonstrated through Ike at his old age, memory maintains a tied relationship that it carries the past to the present.