THE CURSE OF GOD IN FAULKNER'S GO DOWN, MOSES

Abstract

William Faulkner frequently employed religious perspectives throughout his work. This article explores Faulkner's use of religious motifs in Go Down, Moses. The main protagonist of the book, Isaac McCaslin, is caught up in a complex web of religious influences which form his world view from boyhood to old age. Though he is nurtured on the spiritual primitivism of his mentor, the part-Indian Sam Fathers, it is nevertheless a personal form of Stoicism and especially the Protestant faith of the South which will have the most pervasive influence on him and his family. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner encodes a myth of an inescapable curse of God by subtly patterning the McCaslin genealogy on the Old Testament patriarchs, open ing up for a Bakhtinian intertextual reading of the book. Q. Who do you like best in the Old Testament? Faulkner: Oh the story of Abraham. I like all of it. They were scoundrels and blackguards and doing the best they could, just like people do now. —Faulkner in the University An understanding of the religious complexity of Go Down, Moses can help to clarify why Isaac, the main protagonist, has been seen as a virtuous ascetic, one of God's elect, a saint, or even a Christ-figure, as well as an unromantic anti-hero, one of God's damned, or simply a cop-out. In his article 'The Theological Complexity of Faulkner's Fiction', John W. Hunt explores the simultaneous presence of Stoic and Christian elements in Faulkner's work. Hunt illustrates how Faulkner successfully combines the dogmas of each tradition to achieve not a mere 'dualism, not mere strain, not a contradiction. His is a religious centre of tension'.1 This tension reaches its culmination, it can be argued, in Go Down, Moses, where elements of primitive spiritualism, Shamanism, and Transcendentalism are also woven into the discourse of the novel. Go Down, Moses aims at a genuine heteroglossia of metaphysical perspectives. Mikhail Bakhtin defines the concept of heteroglossia precisely as a centre of tension, 'a locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide' to work out new relationships.2 © Oxford University Press 1996 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Sun, 22 May 2016 06:09:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 3O2 THE CURSE OF GOD An elaboration on the religious complexity of Go Down, Moses will not be further pursued as the limited concern of this article is the relationship between the novel and the Bible, and especially the Old Testament. Faulkner's characters discuss, examine, question, interpret, misquote and translate the Bible—in short, they bring the Bible into the dialogue of the book, at the same time as much of the narrative is patterned on the major events of Christian history. The stories do not simply have allegorical significance, they stand in a complex reciprocal relationship to the text they allude to. Some of the characters both re-enact biblical events at the same time as they explore their meanings as they become conscious of the implications of Christianity for their own lives. Though the characters in Go Down, Moses may allude to or even act out biblical events, they can never be equated with them. History, in a dialogic view, simultaneously repeats and renews itself. Consider, for example, that Roth in 'The Fire and the Hearth' is 'a young man still, yet already possessing something of that almost choleric shortness of temper which Lucas remem bered in old Cass Edmonds but which had skipped Zack' (59).3 Even the biblical Moses, Joseph Reed points out in his study ofBakhtin and the Bible, 're-enacts the experiences of the three main patriarchs [Joseph, Jacob and Abraham] of Genesis'.4 These descriptions illustrate how in a genealogy, members can transmit traits without losing their individuality. Such is also the case in literary history. 'A literary genre,' Bakhtin claims, 'reflects the most stable, eternal tendencies in literature's development. Always pre served in a genre are undying elements of the archaic which undergo 'constant renewal, which is to say ... contemporization.'5 The Old Testament is brought into the dialogue of Go Down, Moses partially as an attempt to establish what relevance it bears to the twentieth-century South. Ike and Cass interpret and apply the archaic text to modern conditions, and Gavin Stevens' 'serious vocation was a twenty-two-year-old unfinished translation of the Old Testament back into classic Greek' (371). This backwards movement into history is a simultaneous progression. It evokes a longing for a return to innocence, a wish to understand where we went wrong, and even a groping to grasp the oral word of God before its transcription into text.