Images of Contraction and Expansion in "Go down, Moses"

The University of Notre Dame

Images of Contraction and Expansion in "Go down, Moses"Author(s): Robert ButlerSource: Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1966), pp. 6-27Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066381 .

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IMAGES OF CONTRACTION AND EXPANSION IN GO DOWN, MOSES

by Robert Butler

Olga Vickery has observed that Go Downt Moses » owes its essential unity to two factors - the recurrent hunt motif which forms the narrative framework of each chapter and suggests all of the novel's major themes and, secondly, the plantation civilization which provides a unified set- ting for the novel. It will be the purpose of this essay to point out another source of formal unity in Go Down, Moses - a system of contraction- expansion images which can be found in each important narrative sequence. Since this matrix of images presents and, to a great extent, clarifies all the major problems of the novel, a study of them will contribute greatly to putting the novel's characters and larger themes in perspective. This study will ultimately establish Lucas Beauchamp as the hero of the novel - in the classic sense of that term - and Ike McCaslin as merely another of the sternly qualified anti-heroes who crowd the pages of modern fiction.

The contraction-expansion imagery resolves itself into three basic symbols: the claustrophobic world of plantation culture, the airless world of the wilderness and the habitable world symbolized by the hearth. Wilderness and plantation form obvious countersymbols, both of which are destructive of human identity and the hearth is an intermediate symbol favorable to human living because it offers the shelter a creature as limited as man needs, without at the same time cramping him. While the plantation imposes rigid social and ethical dogma which necessarily chokes mankind by inclosing it in confines which are too restrictive, and while the forest of itself provides an air too rarefied for human consumption, the domestic life imaged in the hearth gives man an atmosphere dense e- nough to be nourishing and loose enough to be liberating. Seen from this point of view, Go Down, Moses is a series of variations on breathing themes- only after a character has found a truly human world can he "breathe11 easily, live life fully. Neither plantation nor wilderness in themselves are represented by Faulkner as viable human frameworks. The hearth, on the other hand, satisfies human need because it does justice to all significant aspects of human nature, whereas the other symbols are expressive of only a part of human nature and thus do violence to man's complex wholeness. If man were a machine, the plantation would be his proper home; if he were an animal, vegetable or disembodied spirit, the forest would surely fulfill all of his needs. But because Faulkner sees man in some sense as all of these things - machine, vegetable, animal and spirit - only the hearth will do as a symbol of fully cultivated humanity. Man's distinctness from nature requires that he live a somewhat confined existence within the limitations of the human community and an artificially constructed ffhome.lf At the same time, his vegetable and animal affinities require close contact with the soil, while his intellect and soul demand a vision of a

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transcendent world of absolute value. Faulkner even grudgingly admits that human complexity also has a mechanical aspect, a part of man and life itself which insists somewhat blindly on regularity and stability, an order which to a large degree is static. If all these human needs are not satis- fied, lfbreathingn problems inevitably develop - either onefs environment simply closes in on him or becomes diluted. In either case, choking results*

Lucas Beauchamp is the only character in Go Down, Moses who can se- cure a hearth for himself and hence is the only one who can deal effectively with the asthma and claustrophobia which attack such assorted creatures as Gavin Stevens, Ike McCaslin, Sam Fathers, Boon Hogganbeck, Roth Edmonds, Zack Edmonds and several others. An analysis of the three major symbols of contraction and expansion will explain the reasons for this.

The McCaslin-Edmonds Commissary crystallizes all the fices of plantation civilization and is by far the most oppressively claustrophobic symbol in the novel. A "small cramped and cluttered twilit room1' (298), everything about it suggests narrowness and bondage. It squats "like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall f65 or no" (255) and its merchandise is imaged in appropriately captive terms:

• c. • the ranked shelves of tobacco and overalls and bottled medicine and thread and plow bolts, the barrels and kegs of flour and meal and molasses and nails, the wall pegs dependent with plowlines and plow-collars and hames and trace-chains and the desk and the shelf above it on which rested the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold (two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators, yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on) • •<> (255-256)

Hardly a detail here does not have some ominous connotation of enslavement- everything is bottled, bolted, bound up, nailed or shelved: everything from the store merchandise to human beings and the land. The commissary, whose purpose it is to dispense food and perhaps offer a kind of social center for the plantation, exists as a grotesque parody of what it ought to be. It sells food which will imprison the buyer more than it will nourish him and it destroys all human bonds existing on a level more fundamental than cash payment.

Surely the most horrifying feature of the plantation is its automatic severing of moral ties between White and Negro and its substitution of purely economic bonds in place of them. Though the commissary's ledgers are a

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chronicle of slavery as it literally happened in Carothers McCaslin's Ante- Bellum South, it is clear throughout the novel that the term "nigger" (originating in plantation culture) continues to enslave the Negro. Lucas Beauchampt in retrieving his wife from Zack Edmondsf declares: flIfm a nigger but I'm a man too" (**7)i but he nearly has to kill Zack to prove his point. "Niggerflimposes a definition on Lucas which gravely threatens him with suffocation. Zack's supposed liberties with Molly make it difficult for him to inhale the same air with Zack: "After this? ... Me and you living in the same country, breathing the same air even.... After this? Get the pistol" (5*0 • Likewise does Lucas have trouble breathing just previous to the actual fight: "He stood panting in the rapid inhalations until it seemed that his lungs could not possibly hold more of it" (5**). Reflecting his cramped situation, Lucas1 eyes are "red like the eyes of a bayed animal" (55) • The fight itself is depicted with imagery as ritualistic and rigid as the formulaic relationship between the two men:

Then they did not move save their forearms, their gripped hands turning gradually until the white man's hand was pressed back- downward on the pistol. Motionless, locked, incapable of moving, the white man stared at the spent and frantic face opposite his. "I give you your chance," Lucas said. "Then you laid here asleep with your door unlocked and give me mine. Then I throwed the razor away and give it back. And then you throwed it back at me.'<55-56)

A grim, tight ritual has put the two men in a moral vise which threatens both with death and their situation is explicitly contrasted with an earlier, freer relationship which promised life and motion:

They had fished and hunted together, they had learned to swim in the same water, they had eaten at the same table in the white boy's kitchen and in the cabin of the negro's mother; they had slept under the same blanket before a fire in the woods. (55)

Not only does the plantation ethos threaten Lucas with suffocation by depriving him of his moral rights, it further circumscribes his humanity by denying him any meaningful legal rights. Again a pattern of constriction moves in on Lucas. In the court scene at the end of "The Fire and the Hearth," Lucas is carefully reminded of his "place" in Southern law: "You, nigger! Take off your hat" (128). When he calls Edmonds by his first name, he is again reminded by the clerk of the decorum proper to a Negro in court. Lucas' "place" in Southern legal structure is of such a restricted nature that he must even have Soth do his talking for him * not because Roth can make any claim to being a lawyer, but simply because he is white. He gets the divorce proceedings cancelled only after Roth requests it.

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Other examples of plantation culture depriving the Negro of his legal rights are numerous. Zack Edmonds, attempting to convince Lucas his relationship with Molly has been innocent, shouts in exasperation: >fBy God ... I never thought to ever pass my oath to a nigger. But I will swear - fl (V?). Somehow in this "honor"-conscious civilization, a white man is not expected either to give or honor his word to Negroes, as Lucas himself observes:

Kow to God ... can a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his wife? And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise he won't? (59)

Even the banks are not expected to make any legal commitments to the Negro* When Lucas inherits his money from old Carothers, he is forced to ask Zack if the bank will honor his money as much as a white man's. The depressing answer Zack comes forth with is: lfYes ... I will ask them toft (109).

The crowning legal injustice dealt Lucas is Ike McCaslin's repudiation of the McCaslin plantation. As Walter Taylor has remarked, 3 Lucas should inherit the land since he has descended from the male line whereas Cass has lesser claims to the title, having descended from the female line. Because of his skin color, Lucas is never considered as a possible inheritor. As Taylor again points out, it is part of the white man's curse that he has illegally inherited the land: ffBy false ownership of the land, then, Roth is caught in the old curse he inherited from his family. "*+

Denying the Negro both his moral and legal rights, the white man has severely contracted the outlines of the Negro's public world. He pays for this crime by a corresponding narrowing of his own inner world, as Gavin Stevens demonstrates at the novel's end. Despite a Harvard degree and a Heidleberg Ph.D., Stevens still enunciates all his culture's racial cliches - in a strange, gentlemanly sort of way. He characteristically dismisses Sam Beauchamp as "a bad son of a bad father" (375) » reminding one of his similar dismissal of Joe Christmas in Light in August. When he does extend his charity to the Negro, it is done in a most dubious manner. Collecting money for Sam's funeral, he has to apologize for the color of the dead man's skin: "It's to bring a dead nigger home. It's for Miss Worsham" (378). Impoverishing another man's humanity in this way, Stevens impoverishes his own inner life proportionately. When he is finally confronted with the funeral itself and the deeply human experience it projects, his own human resources are too withered to absorb it - he is overcome by a claustrophobia and asthma remarkably similar to that which threatened Lucas Beauchamp earlier in the novel:

"I'd better go," Stevens said. He rose quickly. Miss Worsham rose too, but he did not wait for her to precede him. He went down the hall fast,

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almost running; he did not even know whether she was following him or not. Soon I will be outside, he thought. There will be air, space t breath. Then he could hear her behind him - the crisp, light, brisk, yet unhurried feet as he had heard them descending the stairs from his office, and beyond them the voices:

"Sold my Benjamin. Sold him in Egypt." "Sold him in Egypt. Oh yes, Lord."

He descended the stairs, almost running. It was not far now; now he could smell and feel it: the breathing and simple dark, and now he could manner himself to pause and wait ... (380*381)

Running away from the intensely spiritual experience imaged in the Negro funeral because his "breathing" equipment - his capacity for absorb- ing life - is faulty, Stevens retires into his comfortable lawyer fs world. Trying desperately to forget the funeral, he ends the novel with this grossly shallow, yet reassuring, account of its exterior features:

She just wanted him home but she wanted him to come home right. She wanted that casket and those flowers and the hearse and she wanted to ride through the town behind it in a car. "Come on," he said. "Let's get back to town. I haven't seen my desk in two days." (383)

By taking the "air" out of the experience so that it becomes another stereotyped account of a "nigger's" fondness for show, Stevens can deal with it. He is capable of handling only one of life's three dimensions and uses Southern moral cliches to conveniently rid himself of the bother- some spiritual and moral aspects of life - at least as they pertain to the Negro. The price he pays is a corresponding dilution of his own inner faculties so that they function well only in the dessicated yet comfortable limits of the office which he's so anxious to get back to at the end of "Go Down, Moses." Incapable of handling complex, three dimensional human experience, Stevens slinks back into his "serious vocation ... a twenty- two-year-old unfinished translation of the Old Testament back into Classic Greek" (371)-

If the plantation ethic time and time circumscribes human possibi- lity, the wilderness at first offers a viable alternative to this crowded atmosphere. The chapter entitled "The Old People" establishes the essential contrast between plantation and wilderness values which "The Bear" will later elaborate on and qualify.

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After the death of Jobaker, Sam Fathers1 only contact with the primitive, free civilization his ancestry has given him roots inf Sam begins to feel acutely the plantation world closing in on him. As Cass Edmonds explains to Ike:

"Like an old lion or a bear in a cage," McCaslin said. "He was born in a cage and has been in it all his life; he knows nothing else. Then he smells something. It might be anything, any breeze blowing past anything and then into his nostrils. But there for a second was the hot sand or the cane-brake that he never even saw himself, might not even know if he did see it and probably does know he couldn't hold his own with it if he got back to it. But that's not what he smells then. It was the cage he smelled. He hadn't smelled the cage until that minute. Then the hot sand or the brake blew into his nostrils and then blew away, and all he could smell was the cage. That's what makes his eyes look like that." (167)

Plantation culture threatens Sam with suffocation ju6t as it will later endanger Lucas Beauchamp's breathing. Sam's way of dealing with the "cage" civilized life has constructed around him is to turn his back on civilization altogether and retreat into the wilderness. Appro- priately, Faulkner gives the forest a magnificently expanded rhetoric. Ike, in "The Old People," muses on the "profound, sentient, gigantic and brooding" (175) qualities of the forest. In "The Bear" the wilderness' meaning is further expanded until it takes on transcendental importance. Surpassing anything human, it is "bigger and older than any recorded document" (191) and it stands in constant mockery of man's civilizing impulses, the farms and lumber companies which Faulkner considers "man's puny gnawing of ... [the forest's] immemorial flank" (195)* The bear is likewise assigned an expansive rhetoric - until it finally acquires full mythic stature:

It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red- eyed, not malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and bullets they fired into it; too big for the very country which was constricting its scope ... [it] ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apothe- osis of the old wild life which the puny humans

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swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant; - the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless and absolved of all mortality - old Priam reft of his wife and outlived all his sons. (193-192*)

Ike first sees the bear fldimensionle6S, against the dappled ob- scurity11 (209) and, in the climactic scene where the bear is killed, it appears to Ike as "rising and rising as though it would never stop11 (2*fl).

Granted such an open, marvellously liberating environment, hunters overcome the "breathing" problems they might have encountered in civilized life. In "The Old People" Sam and Ike stand "motionless, breathing deep and quiet and steady" (182) as they await the buck. It is significant too that Ike, Sam and even the forest stop breathing at the crucial moment of the sequence, when they can either kill the buck or let it go. The whole scene freezes into a rigid tableau, reminiscent of the tableau which Lucas1 and Zack's fight ended up as: "the wilderness ceased to breath also, leaning, stooping overhead with its breath held, stupendous and impartial and waiting" (182) and Sam "stood; rigid, not breathing himself" (183). This tense image relaxes when Sam reverently allows the buck to escape, but it does present an ominous piece of foreshadowing of the magnificent frozen image of Boon, Idon and the bear:

It fell just once. For an instant they almost resembled a piece of statuary: the clinging dog, the bear, the man stride its back, working and probing the buried blade. Then they went down, pulled over backward by Boon's weight, Boon underneath ... then the bear surged erect, raising with it the man and the dog too, and turned and still carrying the man and the dog it took two or three steps towards the woods on its hind feet as a man would have walked and crashed down. It didn't collapse, crumple. It fell all of a piece, as a tree falls, so that all three of them, man dog and bear seemed to bounce once. (2*fl)

Tragically, this tableau doesn't melt - the bear falls as rigid as a tree, and just as irrevocably.

The death of the bear - and the end of the wilderness it sym- bolizes - precipitates several cases of claustrophobia. Sam must return to his "dark, little hut" (2^5) and cries desperately: "Let me out. Let me out" (2^5 )• Ike must go back to camp and eventually back to

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school , places which are as confining as Sam's hut or Lucas Beauchamp's place in court:

He could feel his breath coming shorter and shorter and shallower and shallower 9 as if there were not enough air in the kitchen for that many to breathe. (250)

After Lion's death Boon also has difficulty in breathing:

•••and then Boon's chest began to heave as though there were not enough air in all the woods, in all the wilderness, for all of them, for him and anyone else, even for him alone. (253)

When Cass asks Boon if he killed Sam Fathers, the agony of Boon's asthma is compounded by an attack of claustrophobia:

"Did you kill him, Boon?11 he said. Then Boon moved. He turned, he moved like he was still drunk and then for a moment blind too, one hand out as he blundered toward the big tree and seemed to stop walking before he reached the tree so that he plunged, fell toward it, flinging up both hands and catching himself against the tree and turning until his back was against it, backing with the tree's trunk his wild spect scoriated face and the tremendous heave and collapse of his chest, McCaslin following, facing him again, never once having moved his eyes from Boon's eyes. "Did you kill him Boon?11

"No!" Boon said. lfNo!ff (253-25*0

In this sequence, two kinds of claustrophobia are rather delicately counterpointed with each other. On the one hand we have Sam's breathing troubles stemming from the end of the wilderness, as suggested by the bear's mythic death. Boon's claustrophobia is of a quite different sort. Too dull to realize what the bear's death means in mythic terms, Boon is nevertheless capable of two fundamental human emotions - sorrow for Lion's death and shame for having killed Sam Fathers. V/hereas the imminent closing of the wilderness chokes Sam, the wilderness as still operative chokes Boon. The brute, amoral force of the wilderness has destroyed one of the few things he is capable of loving and his accomo- dating Sam's amoral "wilderness" impulses has also led him to commit an act he thinks might be murder* Clearly, Sam is crowded by civilized impulse encroaching upon primitive life - the reverse is true for Boon.

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Bee1 s experiences in the forest provide him with a vision both of the evil associated with civilization and the innocence and goodness of nature* Thus it directly results in repudiation of his birthright. Critical opinion over this decision has varied from R.W.B. Lewis1 unqualified praise of it to William Van 0f Connor's unqualified condem- nation of it.5 Faulkner himself has editorially qualified Ike's stature as hero by accusing him of moral passivity. 6 Our response to Ike, I think i is regulated most strongly by the value we assign to the wilderness. To those like Otis Wheeler who claim that the forest in Go Down, Moses is ffthe locus of the most perfect moralitylf7f ike becomes a heroic and tragic priest, America's only alternative to becoming a grimly materialistic and morally chaotic civilization:

As for the question of where man is to turn when the wilderness is gone, there seems to be no so- lution: we are apparently to be a race of Roth Edmondses. This is a negative philosophy of history, a philosophy of decline. There is no basis in the wilderness stories for the apparently opti- mistic belief reflected in Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech that man will endure and prevail. °

My purpose here will be to somehow unravel Faulkner's complex response to the wilderness and to Ike through an analysis of the imagery he applies to both. Ultimately this analysis will be directed towards an understanding of whether the meaning of Go Down, Moses is compatible with the optimism of the Nobel Prize address.

The first page of the novel tells us that Ike is "uncle to half a county and father to no one11 (3)* The imagery associated with Ike in these early pages is free and open, emphasizing Ike's great mobility, his lack of any limitations and encumbrances:

But Isaac was not one of these:- a widower these twenty years, who in all his life had owned but one object more than he could wear and carry in his pockets and his hands at one time, and this was the narrow iron cot and the stained lean mattress which he used camping in the woods for deer or bear or for fishing or simply because he loved the woods; who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were... (3)

Throughout the novel images of freedom and expansion are continually applied to Ike. In the forest he breathes easily and deeply, intuitively finding his way about and exposing himself to some of its greatest dangers

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with impunity. Though he discards his compass 9 he finds Ben and, though he rids himself of his rifle and gets so close to the bear that he can inspect the fleas on its paw, he leaves the scene unscathed.

He comes away from another encounter considerably less untouched* The entire relationship between Ike and his wife is presented in intri- cately counterpointed images of contraction and expansion - but Ike's categorical rejection of his marriage experiences leaves him forever incapable of dealing with experiences as complex as this. Like Gavin Stevens, Ike is disturbed by the complexities of three dimensional experience and has to dilute life and his response to it in order to •breathe11 comfortably.

His wife, with her voice "a passionate and expiring whisper of immeasurable promise11 (312), her breath "of love and incredible promise11 (312), at first offers Ike in human terms many of the possi- bilities for fulfillment which the wilderness had extended to him in non-human terms. When Ike completes the "wall-less and top- less and floor- less11 (312) house which he gives to his wife as a wedding present, the reader has an indication that Ike has finally brought to earth the transcendental vision he had acquired in the forest. Soon however, his wife becomes an image of imprisonment instead of promise - on their wedding night her previously promising voice orders Ike to "Lock the door" (313)# Likewise does she enclose their sexual life in a per- verse ritual: refusing to allow Ike to see her naked, she devises an elaborate procedure which requires him to turn his back while she un- dresses, to enter the bed only after the lamp has been extinguished, and to turn to her only after she has sufficiently covered them with sheets. She confronts him nakedly and freely gives herself to him only to extort a promise from him to reclaim his farm - a promise which he significantly breaks later.

Ike is presented in this scene with two extreme forms of experience, just as Sam Fathers had earlier been confronted with two extreme alternatives and Gavin Stevens will later face the same kind of situation in Sam Beauchamp's funeral. Just as Sam and Stevens oversimplify their responses to life at the expense of their own humanity, Ike proves incapable of dealing with human complexity and suffers gravely for this. At one pole is his own world of ideal fulfillment bringing his "wilderness" findings into the human realm, and, at the other pole is an arti- ficial world represented by his wife which demands compromise with Ike's ideal image of himself. Ike refuses to make compromises of any sort here by categorically rejecting his wife. Worse, he seems to identify her with all non-wilderness experience, all experience which doesn't meet the requirements of his dream:

She is lost. She was born lost. We are all born lost then he stopped thinking and even saying Yes, it was like nothing he ever dreamed, let alone

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heard in man- talking until after a no- time he returned and lay spent on the insatiate immemorial beach ... (315)

In this sense Ike becomes closely allied to the whole range of Faulkner Ys failed people and villains* So shocking an effect have the polar oppo sites of experience had on himf he rejects one extreme aspect of life and immerses himself wholly in its opposite « neglecting anything lying in between. In the same way Thomas Sutpen ruthlessly discards anything which does not accomodate itself to his "design" and Flem Snopes remains blind to anything which can not be translated into money value. Quentin Compson and Bayard Sartor is likewise can not live with anything which does not measure up to the standards imposed on them by an effete yet graceful Southern tradition. So too does Ike become an abstractionist 9 a man who deals with only the part of life which he considers attractive and who neglects all the rest. Ike reacts so violently against civilized life that the valuable lessons he learned in the wilderness become grossly over*- emphasized and actually hardened into a code which cripples him in coming to grips with anything existing on a less transcendent level. Just as Sutpen fs "design11 was his attempt to escape all temporal and spatial limitation, Ikevs vision of the wilderness is his way of escaping the human condition, what Yeats would call "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart11:

He seemed to see the two of them - himself and the wilderness - as coevals, his own span as a hunter, a woodsman, not contemporary with his first breath but transmitted to him, assumed by him gladly, humbly, with joy and pride, from that old Major de Spain and that old Sam Fathers who had taught him to hunt, the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both - the names, the faces of old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns. (35*0

Sutpen fs passionate dedication to his colossal "design11 and Quentin Compson fs quixotic battle with time both end in self-annihilation and Ike's attachment to the wilderness destroys him too. Ike misunderstands the wilderness - he sees only the transcendental vision which so

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captivated Sam Fathers but does not apprehend the wilderness as a killer of the only thing Boon Hobbanbeck was capable of loving. Boon, surpris- ingly, is capable of responding to the wilderness in a way which Ike is blind to, and is capable of a response which Ike desperately needs. Boon is able to distinguish between a human code of value and a transcendental ethic when he feels shame over killing Sam Fathers - Ike tragically confuses human and natural worlds and does violence to himself in the process. If natural and human worlds were coterminous, Boonfs mercy killing would be justifiable since it would allow Sam to be "reborn" in nature, acquire a new and equally valuable life. But because Faulkner sees man and nature as involved with each other but essentailly distinct, Boon's killing is a kind of murder which he is rightly bothered about. Ike fails to see this at the time of Sam9s death (He tells Case: "Leave him alone!. •• Goddamn it! Leave him alone" - 25*0 and as he grows older his misunderstanding of the man-nature relationship becomes more radical. Ultimately he decides that "the woods would be his mistress and his wife" (326) and subsequently isolates himself from humanity. Humanizing nature, he de- personalizes himself o If his ecstatic experiences in the wilderness can momentarily resolve all of life's ambiguities and contradictions, it is only because he vastly oversimplifies his condition. Examine, for example, the following immersion into nature:

... he had not stopped, he had only paused, quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth, and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undif fused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression ... (328-329)

Significantly, nothing human enters the scene - the dichotomies which torture Ike in the civilized world can be dissolved only after he first dilutes part of his nature by blending into the purely natural world. Ike's problems can be traced to his fundamental misunderstanding of the forest-initiated into the mythic nature of the wilderness by Sam Fathers, Ike confuses the forest as myth with the forest as reality. As myth, the forest can suggest and to some extent dramatize human value but in reality it is separate from man and can operate in defiance of human purpose. Ike misunderstands the wilderness in precisely the same way as Gail Hightower misunderstands his heritage or as the Sartorises misunderstand their past. Olga Vickery in her discussion of Sartoris might just as well be referring to Ike when she remarks:

The Sartorises chose to act in terms of legend instead of history. Out of "the dusk peopled

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with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things, n out of the stories of Charlemagne and Roland, the feats of gallant knights and the panoply of ancient battles, they created a legend of Sartoris and the Civil War in which disaster was made glamorous* But as this legend developed, it replaced history and it-* self assumed the validity of a historical pattern* Each of the Sartorises seeks to re-enact this pattern in his own life because he believes that only in this way can he fulfill his obligations to the past and perpetuate his traditions. At this point the myth created and controlled by the Sartorises asserts its control over them ... The legend and not the facts of history sends young* Bayard on his search for death. 9

If Boonfs madly selfish reaction to the squirrels at the end of "The Bear11 shocks usf Ike's response to the snake disturbs us too. Boon had adopted a crazed and immoral attitude towards the forest since Lion's death but Ike has adopted an almost equally dangerous moral attitude toward the forest since Sam's death. Unintentially parodying Sam's salute of the buck earlier in the novel , Ike utters "Chief ••• Grand-* father11 (330) to the snake, ignoring it as a symbol of human evil because, on a transcendental, mythic level, all of nature's creatures are good. He fails to realize that on an existential level the snake runs counter to human purpose. In constructing a Garden of Eden for himself, Ike tragically leaves Satan out of the picture.

For this reason, Bee is unable to deal effectively with human problems as they are presented to him in the novel. Categorically rejecting human evil in his own past, he cuts a futile figure when forced to deal with fallen creatures in a fallen world. He fails Lucas Beau- champ when Lucas comes to his bungalow demanding his inheritance money - Ike is by this time in a position to give Lucas only Carothers McCaslin's money and not the land which legally and morally belongs to Lucas. Ike now realizes "that no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if her were" (28l) - fallen man, as limited a creature as he is, can only destroy himself by questing too literally after a vision of absolutes. Ike's repudiation of his brithright is also responsible for his failing Roth's mistress in f 'Delta Autumn." She clearly points out to him the evil caused by his disregard for legality:

"I would have made a man of him. He's not a man yet. You spoiled him. You, and Uncle Lucas and Aunt Polly. But mostly you."

"Me?" he said. "Me?"

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"Yes. When you gave to his grandfather that land which didn't belong to him, not even half of it by will or even law." (360)

If man were perfect, unfallen, he could hold the land in "suzerainty"(257) in the "communal anonymity of brotherhood" (257)* Because man is imper- fect, a complex mixture of good and evil, he needs legal restrictions and repudiates the concept of legal ownership at his own and other's peril. Ike's irresponsibility severely limits three lives - his own, Lucas1 and Roth's - lives which could have been much more fully developed had not he misunderstood his own nature so radically*

Ike's meeting with the girl is imaged in the same claustrophobic, asthmatic terms as are so many other frustrated human encounters in this novel. His fingers are literally dried up: "gnarled, bloodless, bone- light, bone-dry old man's fingers" (362) and he is unable to move from his pallet when he wants to. After she leaves, he is left alone, "trem- bling, panting" (36*0, and "rigid, save for the shaking" (365).

Fonsiba and her preacher husband misunderstand themselves in precisely the same way as Ike misunderstands himself - and with the same tragic results. A similar system of contraction- expansion images is used to dramatize this. As Ike had repudiated his heritage, Fonsiba and her husband give up the share of the |l,000 legacy which is due to them. Their house in Arkansas is in much worse condition than the rented cabin which Dee must spend his old age in, but the effect on the inhabitants is the same - impoverishment, lack of human direction:

Hunched in the slow and icy rain, on a spent hired horse splashed to the chest higher and higher, he saw it - a single log edifice with a clay chimney which seemed in process of being flattened by the rain to a nameless and valueless rubble of dissolution in that roadless and even pathless waste of unf enced fallow and wilderness jungle - no barn, no stable, not so much as a hen-coop: just a log cabin built by hand and no clever hand either, a meagre pile of clumsily- cut firewood sufficient for about one day and not even a gaunt hound to come bellowing out from under the house when he rode up - a farm only in embryo, perhaps a good farm, maybe even a plantation someday, but not now, not for years yet and only then with labor, hard and enduring and unflagging work and sacrifice ... (277)

This is the side of nature which Ike's wilderness vision failed to account for, the land running its inevitable course counter to human purpose, or at least indifferent to it. Like Ike's wilderness, Fonsiba 's

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"farm" offers but few protective limits for man to define himself in - one step removed from the savage world of brute nature Y it obscures man1 6 understanding of himself and lives its life essentially removed from human aspiration and moral order.

The reasons Fonsiba's husband gives for leaving Yoknapatawpha County are identical to Ike's reasons for deserting his cultural past* Ike quests for a New Eden and Fonsiba's husband lusts after a New Canaan:

We are seeing a new era, an era dedicated) as our founders intended it, to freedom 9 liberty and equality for all, to which this country will be the new Canaan - (279)

Cass Edmonds, who tried hard to qualify Ike's enthusiasm for the wilderness, similarly tries to qualify their excitement over this new Canaan, this mythic world of unlimited human promise which in reality is a jungle* flWhat corner of Canaan is this?11 (279) he asks as he surveys the waste- land which Fonsiba's husband rhapsodizes over.

In both Ike's and Fonsiba's cases, a vision of freedom, release from human limitation, has ironically backfired - leaving humanity crowded more than ever because it is out of focus with life* As Cass leaves Fonsiba, the narrator tells us "... she did not even seem to breathe11 (280), reminding us of other failed people in the novel who are left in vacuums* Her husband is last seen with "lenseless spectacles •*• and plans for the Spring11 (293)- Ike similarly awaits Spring - a Spring which never comes - and by lfDelta Autumn11 his vision has so deteriorated that he can not focus on Roth's mistress:

And while he glared at her, his white hair awry from the pillow and his eyes, lacking the spectacles to focus them, blurred and irisless and apparently pupilless, he saw again that grave, intent, speculative and detached fixity like a child watching him. (359)

Clearly, Faulkner's presentation of Ike is not truly heroic and the wilderness as a human framework is seen with great irony* A hero and a viable human "home11 does emerge from Go Down, Moses however. Lucas Beauchamp triumphs in life - he is able to deal adequately with his "breathing" problems - because he understands himself and respects his human limitations. Whereas Gavin Stevens' lack of self-knowledge links him irrevocably to the plantation and Ike's ignorance about himself chains

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him to the wilderness, Lucas secures a hearth for himself becuase of his profound acceptance of the human condition and all the complexities it involves*

In contrast to all of the novel's human failures - who fail because they run away from the full richness of life - Lucas meets life squarely, holds his own and triumphs over his circumstances. Stevens repudiates two of life's three dimensions, Ike repudiates at least one important dimension of life, but Lucas does nothing of the sort. He is explicitly contrasted with his brother James who ran away to the North and his sister Fonsiba who "escaped0 to Arkansas:

But James, the eldest, ran away before he came of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all - that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only (as his sister was later to do) put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him ...

But Lucas remained. He didn't have to stay. Of the three children, he not only had no material shackles (nor, as Carothers Edmonds began to com- prehend later, moral ones either) holding him to the place, he alone was equipped beforehand with financial independence to have departed forever at any time after his twenty-first birthday. (105)

Refusing to be lured away by the propsect of a New Canaan or "freedom" in the North, Lucas stays in Yoknapatawpha County. Neither does he go to the other extreme and allow himself to be moulded according to the contours expected of him by plantation culture. He insists on his manhood while facing squarely all the forces which threaten it. Others escape to the wilderness, to the North, to Arkansas or to an office, but Lucas stands firm where he is and builds a meaningful life out of the materials he finds available to him in the real world. The materials combine to form a hearth, the center of love and meaningful domestic life - "the ancient symbol of human coherence and solidarity'1 (380),

Lucas is the only person in the novel who has a hearth which functions properly. The fire he lights on his wedding night outlasts both Molly and him (*f9) but all of the other hearths mentioned in the novel are either short-lived or in the process of dying out. Sam Fathers' hearth after Ben's death has "buried embers" (2**5) instead of a fire. Rider in "Pantaloon in Black" loses his hearth after his wife's death because it was "all a part of the memory of somebody else" (139)- Fonsiba 's hearth

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has "a miserable fire for which there was not wood sufficient" (278). Uncle Hubert Beauchamp's hearth is cold and unswept "in which the very bricks were crumbling" (30k). In each case a failure of human love or some other lack of human vitality is mirrored by a corresponding deteri- oration of a hearth.

Lucas1 fire continues to burn robustly, forming the center of his domestic life, which in turn is the nucleus of his life as a human being* When Roth tries to interfere with some of Lucas1 domestic affairs Lucas warns him:

"I'm a man," Lucas said. "I'm the man here. Ifm the one to say in my house, like you and your paw and his paw were the ones to say in his. You ain't got any complaints about the way I farm my land and make my crop, have you?" (120)

Lucas refuses to have his home violated, however saddled with the fact that his public life in Southern culture is hopelessly limited. Within the confines of his home, of which the hearth and its fire is the vital center, Lucas can develop hie humanity. In this way his hearth is an intermediate symbol in Go Down, Moses, lying between the moral extremes represented by the forest and the plantation. Samfs fire is extinguished because the forest is airless for him after Ben's death; Rider's fire goes out because the plantation world which makes an abstraction out of him closes in after his wife's death. Lucas, on the other hand, lives aloof from both the forest and the plantation - together with his wife in a self-contained domestic world. Isolated from the forces which attempt to crowd him, while still maintaining very strong human contacts, Lucas creates a world where love does not fail, a world which allows him to ffbreathe."

He nearly destroys all this when he becomes obsessed by the hunt for gold. In the process of his mad hunt he ironically commits the same crimes against himself and his family that Southern culture has perpe- trated on the Negro in general. He flagrantly violates legal bonds when he sells Roth's mule and when he at first refuses to honor George and Nat's marriage license. He is guilty of a far greater moral violation when he turns himself into a machine, neglecting his personal obligations to his wife. He even threaten 's Nat's marriage in a minor way by getting George to spend time and money on the hunt rather than on the house he is supposed to be repairing for his married life.

In the end though, Lucas' humanity asserts itself and saves the hearth he very nearly destroyed. Perhaps the way he is treated in court brings him to the shocking realization that his treatment of his own wife is similarly inhuman.

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The chapter "Pantaloon in Black11 presents a similar tension between hearth and plantation, this time working out in favor of the latter. Asthmatic and claustrophobic images are again counterpointed with images of human purpose. Rider's love for his wife is the center of moral order in his life and, when she dies, he is exposed to a world which deprives him of "air11 and forces him into acts of meaningless violence and self- destruction. As Rider proudly has told his friends, marriage has brought an end to his reckless bachelor days of gambling and drinking;

"AhYm thru wid all dat," and they married and he rented the cabin from Carothers Edmonds and built a fire on the hearth on their wedding night as the tale told how Uncle Lucas Beauchamp, Edmonds1 oldest tenant, had done on his forty five years ago and which had burned ever since; and he would rise and dress and eat his breakfast by lamplight to walk the four miles to the mill by sunup, and exactly one hour after sundown he would enter the house again, five days a wekk until Saturday • (138)

His "hearth" had brought a regularity and harmony into his life - if his schedule after marriage seems a bit mechanical, it is a welcome antithesis to the wildness and complete lack of stability which charac- terized his single life. When this order disintegrates with the death of his wife, Rider is assailed with severe breathing troubles. He moves in a "silver solid wall of air" (I*t8) and his house becomes a kind of vise:

"... they mounted the steps and crossed the porch and entered the house - the dusk-filled single room where all those six months were now crammed and crowded into one instant of time until there was no space left for air to breathe, crammed and crowded about the hearth •„• " (139-1^)

Asthma plagues him too« Trying to eat his supper, Rider breathes with "strong, deep pants, his chest arching and collapsing" (141) and in his sleep he snores with "deep troubled inhalations" (1^3)-

Rider attempts two cures. First he tries to lose himself in sheer physical activity - he goes back to the planing mill and works himself into a frenzy so that "he could stop needing to invent to himself reasons for his breathing" (2A5). All this only aggravates his situation as this painfully tense image of his lifting a huge log demonstrates:

For a time there was no movement at all. It was as if the unrational and inanimate wood had invested,

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mesmerized the man with some of its own primal inertia. Then a voice said quietly: "He got hit. Hit's off de truck,11 and they saw the crack and gap of air, watching the infinitesimal straightening of the braced legs until the knees locked, the movement mounting infinitesimally through the belly's insuck, the arch of the chest, the neck cords, lifting the lip from the white clench of teeth in passing, drawing the whole head backward and only the bloodshot fixity of the eyes impervious to it, moving on up the arms and the straightening elbows until the balanced log was higher than his head.

(145-I*f6)

This frozen scene is reminiscent of other tableaus in the novel such as Lucas' fight with Zack and the bear's death - and each tableau is the climax of a series of contraction- expansion images interacting and locking. Rider's tableau accumulates so much friction that it finally ends in an explosion - the log thundering onto the truck and Rider himself being propelled from the mill in a desperate frenzy.

He now tries a second cure, alcohol. "Gulping the silver air (whiskey) into his throat until he could breathe again" (1^8), Rider at first finds a release from his pressurized world. But this backfires too as the "silver air" solidifies, making him vomit:

Swallowing, it was no longer passing down his throat, his throat and mouth filled now with a solid and unmoving column which without reflex or revulsion sprang, columnar and intact and still retaining the mould of his gullet, outward glinting in the moonlight, splintering, vanishing, into the myriad murmur of the dewed grass. (1^9)

Running back to his house, he finds its walls closing in on him, causing a "tremendous panting of his chest" (150). His claustrophobia becomes most acute, of course, after his desperate murder of the foreman. In jail, Rider madly throws his cot against the wall and rips the steel door off its hinges, all the while realizing the impossibility of escapte. ("Ah ain't trying to get away." - 158) The whole scene ends up in a dreadful epiphany of the absurdity of human life without love:

"And Ketcham says that for a full minute that nigger would grab them as they came in and fling them clean across the room like they was rag dolls, saying, 'Ah ain't trying to get out. Ah ain't trying to get out,' until at last they

2k



pulled him down - a big mass of nigger heads and arms and legs boiling around on the floor and even then Ketcham says every now and then a nigger would come floying out and go sailing through the air across the room, spraddled out like a flying squirrel and with eyes sticking out like car headlights, until at last they had him down and Ketcham went in and begun peeling away niggers until he could see him laying there under a pile of them laughing, with tears as big as marbles running across his face and down past his ears and making a kind of popping sound on the floor like somebody dropping bird eggs, laughing and laughing and saying, 9Hit look lack Ah just cant quit thinking. Look Ah just cant quit. f And what do you think of that?" (159)

FOOTNOTES

1. Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 196*0, pp. 12*f-125.

2. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Modern Library 19**0)* P* 298. Subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are included in the text.

3. Walter Taylor, "Let My People Go: The White Man's Heritage in Go Down, Moses," South Atlantic Quarterly, LVIII (Winter, 1959> 29.

*f. Ibid. , p. 30.

5. R.W.B. Lewis, "The Hero in the Modern World: William Faulkner's The Bear," The Kenyon Review, XVIII (1951) 6*fl-6O* Lewis contends that Go Down, Moses represents a crucial shift in Faulkner's thinking, from a pessimistic, "Old Testament" point of view to a more hopeful "New Testament" attitude. He claims that Ike McCaslin, emblematic of this new outlook, "moves in a world of light - a light still meagre but definite; a new world in which values have been confirmed by being raised to a higher power" (p. 60). William Van O'Connor, however, interprets Ike's experiences in precisely the opposite way in his essay entitled

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"The Wilderness Theme in Faulkner's The Bear," William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism , ed. Olga Vickery and Frederick Hoffman, (Har court, Brace and World, Inc., i960) pp. 322-330. O'Connor sees Ike as ironically portrayed, his vision f!a kind of neurotic dream. "

6. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Botner (ed), Faulkner in the University (New York: Vintage Books, 1965 )f PP* 2^5-^6 • Here Faulkner strongly qualifies Ike's heroism by putting him into the category of people "that can't face and cope with the problems." He explains this more fully: "There seem to be three stages. The first says, This is rotten, I'll have no part of it, I will take death first. The second says, This is rotten, I don't like it, I can't do anything about it, but at least I will not participate in it myself, I will go off into a cave or climb a pillar to sit on. The third says, This stinks and Ifm going to do something about it. McCaslin is the second. He says this is bad and I will withdraw from it* What we need are people who will say, This is bad and I'm going to do something about it, I'm going to change it."

?• Otis Wheeler, "Faulkner's Wilderness," American Literature m (1959) i P. 135.

8. Ibid. , p. 13**.

9. Vickery, op. cit. , pp. 26-27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Bloom, Lynn Z« , Kinney, Arthur F. , Utley, Francis Lee (ed. ). Bear Man and God: Seven Approaches to William Faulkner's The Bear. New York, 1964.

How, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study* New York, 1951*

Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation. Baton Rouge, 196*f.

Articles

Backman, Melvin. "The Wilderness and the Negro in Faulkner's 'The Bear'*11 PMLA, LXXVI (1961) 595-600.

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Fisher, Richard E. "The Wilderness, the Commissary and the Bedroom: Faulkner's Ike McCaslin as Hero in a Vacuum,11 English Studies (1963) XLIV, 19-28.

Sowder, William J. flLucas Beauchamp as Existential Hero.11 College English, XXV (1963) 115-12?.

Stewart, David H. "The Purpose of Ike McCaslin. " Criticism, III (1961), 533-3^2.

Taylor, Walter E. "Let My People Go: The White Man's Heritage in Go Down, Moses." South Atlantic Quarterly XVIII (1959)$ 20-32.

Wheeler, Otis. "Faulkner's Wilderness." American Literature XXXI (1959), 127-136.

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Images of Contraction and Expansion in "Go down, Moses"

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