I wanted start this blog post with just some quotes from the book that jumped out at me as I was reading them. With no apparent context, these simply just grabbed me at the time. How better to begin a post about Faulkner than to let his words speak for themselves.
“not against the wilderness but against the land, not in pursuit and lust but in relinquishment, and in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ’65 or no and placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and slaves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would set them completely free” (Faulkner 244). What a wild statement.
“There are some things He said in the Book, and some things reported of Him that He did not say. And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows. He didn’t’ have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because maybe they don’t need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart. Because the men who wrote his Book for Him were writing about truth and there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart.” And McCaslin
‘So these men who transcribed His Book for Him were sometime liars.’ And he
“Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart’s truth out of the heart’s driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them. Hat they were trying to tell, what He wanted said, was too simple. Those for whom they transcribed His words could not have believed them. It had to be expounded in the everyday terms which they were familiar with and could comprehend, not only those who listened but those who told it too, because if they who were near to Him as to have been elected from among all who breathed and spoke language to transcribe and relay His words, could comprehend truth only through the complexity of passion and lust and hate and fear which drives the heart, what distance back to truth must they traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-mouth?’ and McCaslin” (Faulkner 249).
“McCaslin had actually seen it, and the boy even at almost eighty would never be able to distinguish certainly between what he had seen and what had been told him: a lightless and gutted and empty land where women crouched with the huddled children behind locked doors and men armed in sheets and masks rode the silent roads and the bodies of white and black both, victims not so much of hate as of desperation and despair, swung lonely limbs: and men shot dead in polling-booths with the still wet pen in one hand and the unblotted ballot in the other” (Faulkner 278).
“They had a house once. That was sixty years ago, when the Big Bottom was only thirty miles from Jefferson and old Major de Spain, who had been his father’s cavalry commander in ’61 and -2 and -3 and -4 and his cousin (his older brother; his father too) had taken him into the woods for the first time. Old Sam Fathers was alive then, born in slavery, son of a Negro slave and a Chicksaw chief, who had taught him how to shoot, not only when to shoot but when not to; such a November dawn as tomorrow would be and the old man led him straight to the great cypress and he had known the buck would pass exactly there because there was something running in Sam Fathers’ veins which ran in the veins of the buck too, and they stood there against the tremendous trunk, the old man of seventy and the boy of twelve, and there was nothing save the dawn until suddenly the buck was there, smoke-colored out of nothing, magnificent with speed: and Sam Fathers said, ‘Now. Shoot quick and shoot slow:’ and the gun levelled rapidly without haste and crashed and he walked to the buck lying still intact and still in the shape of that magnificent speed and bled it with Sam’s knife and Sam dipped his hands in to the hot blood and marked his face forever while he stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too though the boy of twelve had been unable to phrase it then: I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever onward must become your death; marking him for that and for more than that: that day and himself and McCaslin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself, in repudiation and denial at least of the land and the wrong and shame even if he couldn’t cure the wrong or eradicate the shame” (Faulkner 334).
There is something deeply majestic about William Faulkner’s prose that I missed up until this text. I had thought over the course of the 3 books that I did read that I might have missed something in his writing that others saw. I thought that I didn’t give A Fable the time that it warranted maybe or I liked The Reivers but didn’t see majesty in it. The black humor of As I Lay Dying distracted me from the majesty of the prose or something. But Go Down, Moses is one of the finest books I may have ever read. It is wonderous in in the power of its prose at times to truly express something essential about America that I cannot stop thinking about. It was a truly exceptional experience reading this text. I will think about this book for a long time to come. Faulkner’s frank expressions on racism in America is something so wholly unique that I don’t know if I have ever heard a white author speak so clearly about the state of racism in America but without the grandstanding that often comes with this approach to the subject. Faulkner understands that his entire way of life is tied up with this deep evil and shame, the shame is the thing that I think is overlooked in these conversations, and it is this shame that you can see in the backlash to Black Lives Matter, the movement shames those who are opposed to it and the only response is the fight back but even in the fighting back those that have been shamed still have something to lose which makes their responses so distorted and why the right has curled around itself in this country and cannot help but turn itself inside out to free itself from the trap of shame and guilt. There are a few passages as I have copied above that speak for themselves. Faulkner here clearly lays out his thoughts on racism and slavery here that I think for the rest of the works that I have read of his are hinted at and you have to trust that you might agree with this person if he ever truly explained his notions out loud, and the same is true of his views on religion which I largely agree with – I imagine that has more to do with our upbringing and our interest in literature than the nature of Christian theology itself, but nevertheless, I find his slim writing on the subject here (voiced in an almost anonymous narrator) compelling. Beyond this, the short story construction including and surrounding “The Bear” is one of the most powerful pieces of prose I have ever read. It is spellbinding. I didn’t like the narration of the middle passage of years that leads to some of these notions expressed clearly, voiced by the nearly anonymous narrator Uncle Ike as he grows into adulthood. The love scene between him and an anonymous woman is transfixing. But the pace and decision to write it breathlessly was clever and well-executed but not enjoyable to read which is probably my own fault not the author’s. The End of the story “Delta Autumn” is a fascinating story full of intricacies that may have been largely lost on me as at that point in the book I was so thoroughly hooked that I just read ceaselessly until I had gotten to the ending and thought, ‘oh my’ silenced in speech at the beauty and proportion (to borrow from my current read) of the text. It was a magical experience finishing that story in particular.
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