Haunting the Good Neighbor: Faulkner’s Caribbean Imagination in Go Down, Moses

Abstract

Bethany Aery Clerico Haunting the Good Neighbor: Faulkner’s Caribbean Imagination in Go Down, Moses [T]he grave, save for its rawness, resembled any other marked offwithout order about the barren plot by shards ofpottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read. —William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (131-32) G o Down, Moses explores the relationships between Southern blacks and whites following Emancipation through Isaac (Ike) McCaslins struggle to reconcile his family’s participation in slavery. A “genealogical puzzle,” the texts fragmented family relations take shape within a region whose future is uncertain as racial lines grow increasingly blurred (Llewellyn 497). The text’s form represents a dizzying intersection ofpast, present, and future wherein the reader must struggle to apprehend the relationships between generations. These historical shifts are replete with references to Columbian discovery, an­ tebellum excess, Reconstruction, and World War II. Specifically, Ike’s investiga­ tions into his family’s history culminate in 1940, which positions the text within a political moment where Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was ad­ vancing the Good Neighbor policy, generally considered a well-intentioned for­ eign policy that improved US-Caribbean relations.1 Indeed, at the time Faulkner wrote Go Down, Moses, US nationalism was defined through its intersections with the Caribbean, and the parameters of those relations were established in response to an embattled Europe. This reading, then, contextualizes Go Down, Moses and its puzzling presentation of race relations within these hemispheric and global moments to reassess Faulkner’s interest in politics and historiography. As Go Down, Moses slides between past and present, Faulkner employs a series of tropes that divide Ike’s genealogical endeavors into puzzle pieces: clues and repetitions appear in the text “without order” yet, when read through the lens ofthe Caribbean, they reveal instead a “profound meaning” that can help critics reconceptualize Faulkner’s intervention into national historiography. ‘The policy was not specific to the Caribbean, but to all of Latin America. However, this article is primarily interested in the island archipelago as a symbol of both fragmentation and unity, which I find echoed in the structure of Go Down, Moses. Precedents for theorizing through the Caribbean’s geographic features can be found in the work of Edouard Glissant and Antonio Benitez-Rojo. 5 6 Bethany Aery Clerico Faulkner’s Caribbean Imagination in Go Down, Moses Reading Go Down, Moses through the historical matrix of US-Caribbean relations adds to the burgeoning critical interest in transnational analyses of Faulkner. As Americanists increasingly catalogue hemispheric literary histo­ ries, they necessarily attend to the commonalities and asymmetries between New World spaces.2 However, scholars read a Caribbean presence in Faulkner primarily through Absalom, Absalom!—a text that engages the Caribbean directly. In that novel, Thomas Sutpen acquires family, prestige, and posses­ sions through a trip to Haiti, and his ascension is written against the back­ drop ofthe Haitian Revolution. Such readings by critics like Vera M. Kutzinski, Barbara Ladd, Richard Godden, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and John Lowe have helped reframe Faulkners terrain through their transnational treatments of Absalom, Absalom! Kutzinski notes that Faulkners imaginative landscape ex­ tends beyond the US South: “It is the Americas, not just the southern parts of the United States, that constitute Faulkners literary and cultural ‘region,’ and he, in turn, is reconstituted by the perspectives and claims of this larger terri­ tory” (59). Working through Kutzinskis hemispheric definition of Faulkner’s literary region, I consider how a reading attuned to this larger landscape can enrich discussions of Go Down, Moses and our sense of the political moment in which Faulkner was writing.3 For example, critics have already described how the histories ofNew World slavery intersect with Faulkner’s exploration of contemporary US race relations. Ladd catalogues Faulkner’s “deep familiarity” with political events in the Caribbean (142), and argues that his “rich histori­ cism” captures the “intricate historical relationships among New World slave cultures” (144). Additionally, Eiko Owada asserts that “it is not too much to say that Faulkner’s awareness regarding slavery and its legacy was informed by the terms of...