B. Chapter One: The Narrative Biosphere of Go Down, Moses: Interconnection in
2. Ecological Interconnection: A Theoretical Overview
Many recent theories of ecological inter-dependence (emerging from diverse fields including ecology, ecocriticism, bioregionalism, eco-cosmopolitanism, animal studies and object-oriented-ontology) likewise posit new materialisms, new ways of interpreting causal phenomena. A number of these emerging models of connectivity share a philosophical through line in that they insist that human beings do not stand at the ontological-phenomenological center of the universe: “If we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into
themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate,” writes philosopher Ian Bogost; “To put things at the center of a new metaphysics also requires that they do not exist just for us” (9). Most of the existing ecological approaches to Faulkner tend to mimic the philosophical tendency highlighted here, placing the human characters at the center of Faulkner’s textual “network” and ignoring other elements at play within the model of interconnection presented by the novel.
The philosophical project of widening our understanding of causality—de-centering our understanding of the cosmos, de-wiring it from pervasive, overriding insistence upon human instrumentality—arrives in the form of diverse scholarly projects and theoretical rubrics. Bogost is one of many theorists working for broader understanding of the operations of objects, things typically understood as inanimate, as active agents of causality. Theorists working in the fields of animal studies and posthumanism (including the prominent scholars Marianne Dekoven, Cary Wolfe, and Donna J. Haraway) take so-called animals as their in-road to de-centering the human, pointing toward “an awareness of the intricate and massive interdependence between humans and other animals” (Dekoven 366). Go Down, Moses features many descriptions of human encounters with both animals (particularly dog, deer, and bear) and objects (such as harvesting
tools, gun-parts, divining machines, and trains).14
Many contemporary scholars similarly seek to interrogate and explore the nonhuman, particularly as manifested in the forms of objects and animals. Jane Bennett—a theorist taking aim not only at the dualism between human and nonhuman but also at the broader and equally baffling conceptual demarcation between life and non-life—writes about the manner in which humans encounter aggregated entities as assemblages, tableaus; she describes the experience of encountering such an assemblage in a remarkable passage about various items collected together, seemingly arranged, on a street named Cold Springs Lane: “When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather, that morning, with me” (5). Bennett further clarifies the manner in which this perceptual
experience arrives as the result of a precise tuning together of contingencies: For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might not have noted the bottle cap, and so on. But they were all there just as they were and so I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert (5).
The idea of “energetic vitality” expressed here is central to Bennett’s thought, which proposes that things need to be taken seriously as agents of causality that exist “in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects”; for Bennett, so-called stuff (seemingly life-less matter) exhibits a vibrant “thing-power” and provokes operations and effects on the
14 Though several of the vignettes (“The Fire and the Hearth,” “Was,” “Pantaloon and Black,” and the title vignette) center upon interplays amongst human characters and move in primarily humanistic directions, others (“The Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn”) emphasize nonhuman elements, speculating about animal consciousness and depicting a changing,
cosmos beyond any potential encounter with humanity (4). Within her philosophy of Vibrant Matter, the title to her 2010 book, all materiality is “vital”; nothing is inert or passive; boundaries between life and non-life, dead stuff and living consciousness, are meaningless (xiii). The term “vitality,” in this context, refers to “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and design of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). As Bennett points out repeatedly, our understanding of causality, ethics, politics and related concepts will necessarily broaden and change if we account for such affects and operations, or what she terms the “vitality” of things.
Our systems of thought include human beings as the only principle agents of responsibility and causality when, in fact, we are at the mercy of a distributive causality involving the agency of various swarms, conceptual tableaus, systems of interconnected parts and pieces.15 Numerous literary scholars attempt to figure out the manner in which the “new materialisms” articulated by Bennett and other thinkers might be meaningfully applied to literature. Writing in the context of imaginative works dealing with oceanic settings, Patricia Yeager thoughtfully speculates about potential applications of Bennett’s work to literature:
Bennett asks us to identify the contours of the swarm—the relations among its bits—and to abjure the romance of human purposiveness by thinking outside systems of instrumentality. What happens when we imagine human- ocean interfaces as fractal, Ping- Pong circuits in which every origin is multiple,
15 Bennett’s writing about Cold Springs Lane reveals a new way of thinking and writing about human encounter with the nonhuman: “In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (5).
outside intentionality, suspenseful, and heterogeneous? (Yaeger Sea Trash 539-540).16
Faulkner’s text explores precisely such “contours of the swarm”; the work is riddled with descriptions of packs, assemblages, and other such circuitous aggregations. The characters frequently encounter these “swarms” of vitality in the form of conceptual assemblages similar to those of Bennett’s description of the gutter on Cold Springs Lane. In rendering such images, Faulkner calls attention to the bits and pieces, the dizzying array of attuned and attenuated elements that compose his Yoknapatawpha universe.
16Yaeger invites us to think through causality, unbundling the concept from anthropocentric thinking. Answering this invitation, as her language suggests, poses new challenges to our imaginations and interpretative capacities. When we abandon instrumental logic we wade into an ontological wild west in which inexplicable potentialities roll past like so many tumbleweeds.