“Ah kin pass wid anything”: Blackness as Figural Excess in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

Abstract

.Christina Thyssen “Ah kin pass wid anything”: Blackness as Figural Excess in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses W hat would it mean to read Faulkner, from the horizon of the twenty-first century, not as a tragic writer, mourning the loss ofhis beloved wilderness, the old South, or moral purity, but as a writer of the catastrophic, writing after the end of the world? What might Faulkner teach us about the conditions of thinking in the aft math of natural disasters, the disappearance of species, financial meltdowns? And what would it mean to say that it is precisely in the confrontation with the most tragic theme in his writing, the question of race, that this transformation takes place? In this essay, I argue that Go Down, Moses, the novel which, according to A Companion to William Faulkner, represents “the first book in which Faulkner undertakes a ‘direct’ and sustained exploration of racial conflict” (Ladd 135), seems to achieve a kind of translation of Faulkner s Southern landscape that dislocates the logic ofhistorical inheritance and tragic mourning that Faulkner himselfhad established as the hallmark ofhis writing. While critics have argued since the novel’s publication about how to judge Faulkner s representation of black characters in this novel, my focus is on the way that blackness in Go Down, Moses comes to exceed its historical, represen­ tational, and racial definitions and establishes itselfinstead as a mode ofsigni­ fication that functions as an intervention into and weapon against a represen­ tational tradition that the text portrays as inherently destructive. I center my readings around the two black characters Faulkner affords the most extensive attention in Go Down, Moses, Lucas Beauchamp and Rider, and their perfor­ mance of a particular form of blackness across the novels landscape. I argue that Faulkners intervention in Go Down, Moses is through his appropriation offigures of blackness, not as a reimagined site of identity or as an expression of his tragic racist imagination, but much more radically by way of blackness liberated from figures ofnature, the human, history, mourning—a kind ofprefigural blackness which refuses integration into historical narratives and mod­ els ofidentity.1 ’Thus, unlike more historicist approaches to Faulkner’s work, I am not interested in tracing the extent to which Faulkner willingly or not participates in the affirmation and perpetuation ofhistorical, social, and cultural identity models, but instead how Go Down, Moses directly confronts and seeks to dismantle the linguistic foundation of such cultural structures through a form of linguistic dispossession. What has been 89 90 Christina Thyssen Blackness as Figural Excess in Go Down, Moses It has often been noted in the extensive literature on Faulkner and race that his depictions of African American characters are marked by stereotypes and openly racist views of black identity. Faulkner’s portrayal of black characters has generated an impressive canon of critical work,* 2 which largely focuses on the question of whether Faulkner’s writing aligns with or challenges the am­ bivalence and “racist imagination” that he expressed in his personal life with regard to the “race question.”3 One of the things that has established Faulkner as a tragic writer is his eloquent representation and portrayal ofthe curse ofthe Old South and his inability to generate an artistic vision that would participate in an intervention into that history. Much Faulkner criticism chides Faulkner’s writing for, as one critic writes, “its failure to enter into complete communion with the black lives it purports to represent” (Kodat 1017) and points to the stereotypical and dehumanizing treatment Faulkner gives his black characters. Faulkner’s failure to imagine African American agency beyond stereotypical roles generated from within a white racist consciousness has resulted in a view of Faulkner as a tragic writer whose writing exposes the violence and limita­ tion of white Southern ideology but fails to effectively intervene into this ide­ ology because ofhis own adherence to racist and conventional views.4 Eric Sundquist, for example, notes that Faulkner’s “excavation” into the American imaginary “revealed history itself to be a slave ship, a dungeon still holding captives nearly a hundred years after the end of slavery” (27). For Sundquist, this revelation means that Faulkner’s work...