The Integration of Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses"

Abstract

The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider, the central character in William Faulkner's short story Pantaloon in Black, cannot be understood. This may be of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he cannot be understood has ramifications, because Pantaloon in Black seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down, Moses, which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending on the success one has in integrating Pantaloon in Black into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down, Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it cannot be made to cohere. More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish's idea that interpretations are produced (not by individuals directed by texts, but) by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class? is that interpretative communities produce texts inexorably and inevitably in their own image. But Fish's idea of an interpretive community is something like the Modern Language Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale school-bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed (so he believes) for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions. What if, however, even English professors are members of communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community, by virtue of the fact that they speak through