William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: a Critical Review

By Maruthavanan Natanam

Faulkner's Go Down, Moses is, perhaps, the most neglected of his fiction. The present work undertakes a critical re-evaluation of this novel, explores the hitherto unknown dimensions of Faulkner's poetic art, and reveals his poetic genius in all its glory in this novel. It has thrown critical insights into the uniqueness of  Go Down, Moses as a novel, an esthetically devised three-dimensional literary artifact.

Ever since its publication in 1942, Faulkner's  Go Down, Moses has drawn serious critical attention to the problem of terming it as a novel or a collection of short stories. This book has put an end to the eighty-year-old debate and established that it is a novel, thus easing the critical tension the novel has created. Further, it has resolved the hitherto unresolved critical issues such as the function of Part IV in " The Bear"  and the justification of the title of the novel.

The first chapter of this book projects Faulkner as a committed artist, telling stories in a new idiom and a novel manner and thus appealing to the reader's imagination. The second chapter focuses on the historical, social, and cultural climate of the South and its impact on his works. The third chapter highlights Faulkner's achievement of generic excellence and how his poetic imagination is at play in this achievement. The fourth and fifth chapters form the climax of this book and bring to the limelight the greatness of Faulkner as a unique poet. A Note appended to this book explains how Faulkner's conception of Time has molded his narrative poetics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maruthavanan Natanam
• Release date: Oct 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215680216

Book preview

Title Page 

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses:

A  Critical  Review

Maruthavanan Natanam

Copyright

Copyright@2022 Maruthavanan Natanam

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Dedication

To My Loving Grandchildren

S. Suhanthan

S. Sudhiksha

V. Ridhvik 

Preface

Go Down, Moses, being a writerly text, and Faulkner being a demanding artist, the reader must bring into the text a capacity for concentration and contemplation. Indeed, out of my strenuous efforts involving the application of scholarship, critical and imaginative faculties, and artistic abilities, I have brought out this book, with its sharp focus on the literary value, meaning, and message of this unique work of Faulkner.

In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner's sophisticated artistry and technical virtuosity have shaped the social problem of racial integration into the critical problem of the integration of the seven discrete stories. As such, Go Down, Moses should be situated in the social and cultural milieu of the South. Out of this context, its meaning is incomplete and irrelevant. Therefore, I attempt a close study of this novel from the socio-psychological and socio-ethical standpoints and solve the critical problem of integration of these discrete stories. I also focus on Faulkner's achievement of artistic objectivity which means the subordination of the message to the literary demands of the material.

Moreover, some critical questions elude answers. They are the questions related to the unity of the novel, the function of Part IV in The Bear, the importance of Ike’s initiation to adulthood and its relevance to Southern society, and the justification of the title of Go Down, Moses. These questions remain unanswered even today, even after more than eight decades. I have recorded the answers to these questions in this work.

In the novel, Go Down, Moses, which reads like a poem, Form, and Content are inseparable, and more than that, they have become one and the same. This book brings to the limelight the hitherto unknown dimensions of Faulkner's poetic genius. It will be a breakthrough in Faulkner criticism and fill up the intellectual vacuum. It will certainly be a feast to the hearts and souls of lovers of literature all over the world. 

With the aesthetic beauty and the content of the conveyed message being brought out in this book, Faulkner's readers and critics will marvel at Go Down, Moses, the inimitable and wonderful work of Faulkner. They cannot help but exclaim, ‘Wonder, thy name is Faulkner.’

Committed Creationist

William Faulkner is one of the celebrated American fictionists. Undeniably, he has enriched American literature with his virgin imagination, his fictional vitality, his sophisticated craftsmanship, and his profound spiritual vision.  Ever since the publication of Soldiers’ Pay, Faulkner has become a critical gold mine.[1]

William Cuthbert Falkner, later known as William Faulkner was born on 25th September 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. His father was Murry Cuthbert Falkner and his mother was Maud Butler. His family was upper-middle class. When Faulkner was a young boy, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi. He joined the Royal Canadian Airforce, at the outbreak of the First World War. But he did not serve in the air force. He came back to Oxford. He studied at the University of Mississippi for three semesters but discontinued his studies.

During his childhood, Faulkner’s artistic imagination was nurtured by his mother Maud, his grandmother, Leila Butler, and Caroline Barr, the African American nanny who brought him up from his infancy.  At the age of seventeen, Faulkner met Phil Stone, who became his mentor and encouraged him to bring out stories and novels. He wrote his first novel Soldier’s Pay. With the publication of other novels and stories, he achieved fame and won Nobel Prize for Literature.[2]

It is the expose´ of the South in the novels and stories of Faulkner that has continually engaged the critical attention of perspective readers and critics. Thus, Faulkner is a place artist and period artist focusing his fictional lenses on the life situation in the South. All the same, his substantial handling of the raw material transcends the regional setting.

It is the cultural milieu of a place and a time that has given birth to literature and this phenomenon is referred to as the Southern Renaissance. Incidentally, it can never be gainsaid that Faulkner is the most distinguished founder of Southern Literature. With his total identification with the South and with his deep commitment to his art of fiction, Faulkner projects himself as an eminent Southern fictionist.  He is called the Dostoevsky of the South.[3] Eudora Welty praises her mentor, Faulkner is, of course, the triumphant example in America today of the mastery of place in fiction.[4]  Faulkner’s mythopoeic imagination creates a fictional county, Yoknapatawpha, on the model of Lafayette County, Mississippi, with its cultural climate. Though Faulkner is a regionalist, he evolves into a nationalist and a universalist with the strength gained from regionalism.

Faulkner sets most of his fiction in the South. Jefferson, the seat of the fictitious county, bears resemblance to Oxford of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner introduces the names of places like Memphis and uses them in his fiction. His Yoknapatawpha county is populated with Indians, African Americans, Planters, townspeople, yeomen farmers, poor decadent whites, and the opportunistic whites of the Deep South. Specifically, he writes in the Southern idiom. To cite an instance, in Faulkner’s Pantaloon in Black, Rider, an African American says, Ah’m snakebit.[5]  ‘Snakebit’ refers to ‘snake poison’, a southern slang term for ‘bootlegged whisky.’

Set against the historical and social milieu of the South, Faulkner’s works explore history as the provider of the knowledge of right and wrong so that not only the Southerners but also the Americans, in general, can transform the world into a better place. As such, the Southern milieu has not only shaped the mind and art of Faulkner but also conditioned his artifacts. On the importance of milieu, René Wellek says, "literature occurs only in a social context, as part of a culture, in a milieu."[6]  Yet again, the observation of Wilbur Scott reads well in conjunction with the argument of Wellek: Art is not created in a vacuum; it is the work not simply of a person, but of an author fixed in time and space answering to a community of which he is an important, because of the articulate part. [7] Interestingly, the present work demonstrates how Faulkner is answering to his community, the Southern community in an enchanting way.

Faulkner remains entrenched in the mores and traditions of the plantation life of the South. In his preparation strata, before he evolved into an admirable artist of the South, one identifies his reading resources. Faulkner was a voracious reader. He kept on reading avidly the works of great artists such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Mark Twain, Melville, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Balzac. The Keatsian influence is evident from Faulkner’s making Cass in Part IV of The Bear in Go Down, Moses read out to his cousin, Ike, a passage about a fair lady from Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. Incidentally, Shakespeare and Keats have caused an appreciable and positive influence on the minds of American intellectuals, particularly such greats as Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and E.E. Cummings. Indeed, with his sharp retentive capacity, keen sense of observation, streamlined scholarship, storytelling ability, inborn talents, and acquired writing talents, Faulkner has proved himself to be an equipped artist. The greatness and strength of Faulkner lie in his skill to marry imagination with realistic naturalism.

Faulkner’s literary career involves three phases. In the early phase, he wrote The Marble Faun, Soldier’s Pay, and Mosquitoes. These works reveal that Faulkner was a budding artist who was yet to master his art. Therefore, it was a period of apprenticeship. To put it in clear terms, one identifies the Bildungsroman features in Faulkner and the protagonists of this early trilogy. The second phase is remarkable for Faulkner’s fine literary creativity. It was during this period that Faulkner published his major novels and stories. Sartoris makes the first version of Yoknapatawpha, the fictitious county of Lafayette, Mississippi. The Sound and the Fury is a tour de force that marked the flowering of Faulkner’s genius. It is The Sound and the Fury that established Faulkner’s literary preeminence and won him immortality. He was extremely fond of The Sound and the Fury.

As I Lay Dying is a magnum opus. It is universally accepted that As I Lay Dying is an extremely complex work and it is inexhaustible. In fact, it is highly rated as one of the three monumental works of the twentieth century, the other two being James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is followed by Sanctuary, These 13, Light in August, A Green Bough, Doctor Martino, and Other Stories and Pylon. Cast in rhetorical style, Absalom, Absalom! is an excellent work. The Unvanquished demonstrates Faulkner’s conception of short fiction not as discrete units but as parts of a greater whole. The Wild Palms manifests Faulkner’s experimentalism. The