Introduction to the Text and Overview of Key Points

Numerous critics have remarked upon the theme of interconnection—as pertaining to communities, family histories, racial dynamics, and nonhuman (ecological) elements—in Go Down, Moses, one of William Faulkner’s structurally panoramic novels. The work’s focus upon history and causality (explored in the context of a complicated, miscegenation-laden, multi- ethnic, and, ultimately, geographically migratory family tree) historically and persistently serves as a logical site for critical investigation. Further, the novel’s structure—in addition to its deep thematic rooting in setting (in both bioregional and community-based senses of the term)— clarifies and bolsters these themes of interconnection, symbioses, and mutually determined destiny. GDM’s composition as a series of cross-referential vignettes dovetails intriguingly with this thematic focus upon connectivity in familial, racial and geographic contexts. The text

itself—like the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family which provides its cast of characters, and the setting (ranging from the wilderness zone of the big woods, to the plantation, to the town of Jefferson)—emerges as a motley crew of composite parts and irreconcilable contrasts.

Throughout the various sections of the text, Faulkner conjures vibrantly rendered imagistic tableaus encompassing both human and nonhuman elements. These conceptual

assemblages frequently manifest in the form of chase scenes and hunting sequences. Faulkner, a recognized pioneer of many of the stylistic innovations characteristic of the modernist

movement, experiments in this text with a cinematic form, preferring montage and movement over static description. The structure of the novel, reifying and reinforcing this imagistic preoccupation, gathers together seemingly disparate elements into an autonomous total collective. In the fields of eco-theory and eco-philosophy, a variety of divergent paradigms— each envisioning the composition of the biosphere (both local and global) as a similarly

relational network—see emergence in recent years. The reading of Faulkner’s text put forth here will account for this emerging panoply of competing models of ecological interconnection, reconcile the novel’s unique structural composition with its environmental thematic impetus, locate the model put forth in GDM on a continuum of competing paradigms, elucidate the novel’s unique view of biological and ecological interdependence, and, finally, connect the human drama (historically, the central context for critical analysis of the work) to the connected overarching theme of landscape change.

In the 2009 book, William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape, Charles S. Aiken performs an invaluable, meticulously researched, and carefully explained study of Faulkner’s methodology of landscape depiction and topographic representation. He pays particular attention to the manner and extent to which the real-life Mississippi locales of Oxford and Lafayette County inform the depictions of their fictional counterparts (Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, respectively): “Many analogies exist . . . but close scrutiny reveals profound breakdowns between the actual and the apocryphal”; “Yoknapatawpha, then is not an actual place but a fictional mutation with certain of its geographical components drawn from a reality that was deliberately altered” (23-4).11 To the extent that Faulkner’s depiction of place demonstrates an ethic of representational fidelity, this concern seems targeted at the life-world—the nature, constituency, and relational dynamics characterizing human and biotic communities—

11 _{We may readily infer, based upon Aiken’s language here, that Faulkner largely ignored} concerns about textual adherence to the strictures of real-life geography; he made alterations from the actual topography and appears to have done so methodologically.

engendered by the novel.12

The formal shifts and experimentally nonlinear structure of Faulkner’s writing in GDM each operate in keeping with the mandates of an author unconcerned with the static, stratified form of the landscape yet deeply concerned with, almost fixated upon, the encounters,

interactions, relationships, connections, and systems of movement located within (and

transpiring and operating upon) the nonhuman biosphere. In keeping with this authorial fixation, the idea of a causal network resonates throughout the human drama of GDM, mostly connotative of racial strife and familial inter-relations, in the setting of the novel—composed of contrasts and encompassing townships, plantation-zones, and wild, untamed reaches of the earth—and, finally, in the formal structure of the text itself. Though composed of seven distinct vignettes each taking place in a separate time period and, in several cases, featuring distinct central characters, GDM, nevertheless, functions as a cohesive total novel.

Despite its continuity and cohesion, the text mistakenly appeared, in terms of historical labeling, marketing, and interpretation, as a short story collection. Faulkner was irked by this upon initial publication, insisting that the work be understood as a novel (Buell 7). This initial error plagues criticism of the text throughout the decades, preventing the sort of coherence seen in criticism of Faulkner’s more famous works (Wagner-Martin 5). Faulkner’s insistence that the work not be understood as a collective, but as a total entity, speaks to both his well-established interest in a style of modernist fragmentation and, as I argue in this chapter, his thematic preoccupation in this novel with assemblage, variegation, and questions of autonomy and

12 _{Conversely, the verbal or visual mapping of an actual Mississippi geography functions, in and} of itself, as a secondary concern to be readily dispensed with or deliberatively altered in the interest of thematic emphasis.

individuation.

This analysis will refrain from referring to the compositional segments of the novel as stories in an effort to avoid perpetuating the confusion surrounding the structure of the text. The distinction between novel and short-story-cycle is integral because the vignettes are not meant— carefully juxtaposed, sequenced, and cross-referenced as they are—to stand on their own as artistic units. In this sense, the text may not be fairly positioned as radically distinct in form from the most lauded works in Faulkner’s canon. A careful look at the most critically analyzed

works—The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; A Light in August; and Absalom, Absalom!— reveals that each similarly features marked shifts in chronology, point-of-view, and tonality. When contextualized properly, the fact that the novelistic structure of GDM flew under the critical radar must be considered an anomalous phenomenon; equally fragmentary and episodic works by Faulkner evade even hesitant, resistant, or temporary categorization as story cycles.13

The true distinction between GDM and such core-canon works relates more directly to theme than formal structure. The novel’s ecological sensibility imposes and encourages this particular critical obfuscation: unlike the aforementioned texts, it lacks a humanistic through-line tying everything together. Faulkner’s insistence that GDM responds best to analysis

understanding it formally as a novel rather than collection forces readers and critics to evaluate the parameters and requirements necessary for our consideration of a given piece of writing as a unified, thematically cohesive, novelistic whole. The notion that a novel must revolve around a single human character or set of characters, while short story collections and cycles may be

13 _{The confusion surrounding GDM originates with a title error on the part of the publisher (Go} Down, Moses and Other Stories). Critics, however, failed for many decades to correct the error and the text is, to this day, readily discussed as a story cycle.

organically unified by times, places, ideas, and other such considerations, represents a dangerously anthropocentric interpretative position: such a literary expectation emerges as symptomatic of, and in keeping with, a worldview in which everything (place, the cosmos, life, being) presumptively organizes itself, coheres, around human beings and human beings alone. The distinction between short story cycle and novel bears no relevance in consideration of the novel’s intellectual merit and artistic cohesion; however, it carries prescient and persistent relevance in contextual relation to an authorial project of deconstruction, one related to ecologically problematic and staunchly anthropocentric expectations concerning phenomenological and cosmic organization.