A Sound “Almost Human”: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses

Abstract

.Tony M. Vinci A Sound “Almost Human”: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses F aulkners Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel haunted by more than the ghosts of the dead. Not only do the enduring traumas of slavery, the exploitative violence of the American Indian Wars, and the threat of WWII frame the intersecting chronicles of the McCaslins and Beau­ champs, but animal spirits stalk the deep woods, and human and nonhuman machines disturb the entire county ofYoknapatawpha. Contesting Judith Bry­ ant Wittenberg’s claim that Go Down, Moses is “a distinctly anthropocentric novel” (51), in this article I argue that Faulkners concentration on the im­ brications between human and nonhuman subjectivities in Go Down, Mo­ ses provides reason to read the novel as a nonanthropocentric, and possibly even an antianthropocentric, work. Aligning “the human” with male white­ ness, Faulkner challenges anthropocentric values by situating the recognizable tropes of the ghost, the animal, and the android as ethical categories that blur the boundaries ofhuman subjectivity and make possible an intimate proximity between human and nonhuman otherness via trauma. Faulkners ghosts har­ ness elusive traumatic energies and express them as dislocated images or voices from the past, allowing for an unsettling engagement with cultural atrocities, typically those experienced by marginalized figures not considered “human” enough to be traumatized. Marked by their conspicuous lack of human lan­ guage, the animals in Go Down, Moses become powerful mediating figures, enabling interaction between personal loss, cultural atrocity, and metaphysi­ cal possibilities. Perhaps most provocatively, Faulkner delineates economically and sexually exploited slaves and ex-slaves as android figures who exist only in the white imagination as unaffected beings capable ofperforming rudimentary work but incapable of experiencing trauma or understanding the socio-politi­ cal dramas in which they perform. These animal-machines carry burdens that not only lack expressive outlets but are linked semiotically with the technologi­ cal forces of trains and automobiles in the novel that threaten to eradicate the natural and the spiritual, enabling the dominant culture to displace the anxiety caused by their own atrocities onto those whom they victimize and oppress. These nonhuman categories fall into a semiotic system in which they blur and intertwine, becoming “a field ofdistinctions, differences, proximities, voids, 23 24 Tony M. Vinci A Sound “Almost Human”: In Go Down, Moses enigmas, wonderments, uncanny twists, and possibilities that” expand the defi­ nition ofthe human subject in Go Down, Moses from a discrete individual into a complicated network ofbeings in the continual process of becoming-with oth­ erness (La Capra 174). Through this experimentation with other-than-human characterizations and relations, Faulkner disrupts traditional geographies of the center and the margins and, in doing so, accesses traumatic energies that have been subsumed and oversimplified under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. As Minrose C. Gwin argues, Faulkner recognizes the inability to heal trauma; thus, his negotiation of the traumatic in Go Down, Moses seeks to sustain engagement with the “open wound”—personal and cultural experi­ ences ofabsence and loss that cannot be closed but must be addressed perpetu­ ally through the “witnessing to and a listening for the incomprehensible” (32, 21). As the complex psychological and cultural after-effects of the traumatic are deeply idiosyncratic and can never be traced directly to a singular moment or cause, these wounds—their symptoms and sources—are difficult to locate. However, according to Gwin, unruly traumatic articulations can be navigat­ ed indirectly: “trauma necessitates articulation, but that articulation may be obliquely directed through sites displaced from the wounded one” (22). While Gwin does not address specifically how Faulkner’s text performs this maneuver of displaced articulation, I suggest that he employs the ghost, animal, and an­ droid as relays to the incomprehensible elements of the traumatic. In this way, trauma is not suppressed or rejected in the narrative; rather, by never situating it solely within the framework of the known and accepted, Faulkner fosters an ethic of radical openness that is free to resonate in both the interstices and imbrications between human and nonhuman subjectivities and, consequently, engages the traces of trauma that reside there. To clarify Faulkners treatment of the nonhuman as a means to cross cul...