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William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: An American Frontier Narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2009
Abstract
This essay seeks to extend Faulkner's imaginative writings beyond the temporal, spatial and aesthetic parameters of regionalism and modernism, according to which his work has been widely read. In an exemplary reading of his 1942 novel Go Down, Moses, I recontextualize Faulkner's fiction in a broader literary and discursive tradition of the US frontier narrative. To draw out the frontier meanings and tropes of Go Down, Moses, I examine closely those texts – Faulkner's and others' – that circulate around the major fiction and necessarily exert, I argue, interpretative pressure on it. These more secondary or contiguous texts include Faulkner's screenwriting for two of the great Hollywood Western directors, John Ford and Howard Hawks; his short stories and speeches; James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales; and the political discourse that emerged in response to the democratic crisis of the 1930s. Certain tropes and narratives – to do with colonialism, for example – that have been submerged within the Faulknerian southern narrative of the plantation, begin to surface, to reset the narrative in relation to a national project. Reading Faulkner in this way constructs a critical frame that is both diachronic and transregionalist, and thus contributes to current debates articulated within the revisionary project of new southern studies about the ways in which we think and write anew about the post-South.
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References
1 William Faulkner, “Address to the Delta Council, Cleveland, Mississippi, May 15, 1952,” in William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 126–34.
2 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 552. Blotner refers to William Faulkner, “The Tall Men,” in idem, Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1995), 45–62.
3 Douglas Powell, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 6.
4 While I limit my recasting of the Faulkner narrative to Go Down, Moses, the approach I take here can also draw out those frontier meanings of Absalom, Absalom!, and Requiem for a Nun, at least, that still lie submerged and overlooked.
5 Lewis P. Simpson, The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness of America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 268–69. For a discussion of the evolution of this term see Martyn Bone, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 42–52.
6 Annette Trefzer, Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
7 Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000).
8 In regionalist discourse, the regionalism of the 1880s and early 1890s, for example, is figured discretely from the 1920s “new regionalism.” See Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region and Empire,” in Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) for accounts of 1890s regionalism; and Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) for an account of 1920s and 1930s regionalism.
9 Lewis M. Dabney, The Indians of Yoknapatawpha (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 121.
10 Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 31–60.
11 Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 113–14.
12 See, for example, Beard, Charles A., “The Myth of Rugged Individualism,” Harper's Magazine, Dec. 1931, 13–22.Google Scholar Although not strictly speaking engaging with frontier mythology, the Nashville Agrarians' 1930 I'll Take My Stand undeniably formed a significant and influential part of a broader discursive return to the land. See Robert Jackson's chapter on Faulkner for a discussion of the similarities and, perhaps more importantly, the differences between Faulkner's and the Agrarians' vision, in Robert Jackson, Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). For comprehensive accounts of frontier rhetoric during this period see David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); and Ted Atkinson, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
13 “Progressivist” is Slotkin's category, which he sets up in opposition to the so-called “populist” frontier myth of Turner. See Slotkin, 22–26.
14 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Commonwealth Club Address,” American Rhetoric: Online Speech Bank <http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrcommonwealth.htm>.
15 Quoted in Turner.
16 Roosevelt.
17 Quoted in Wrobel, 138–39.
18 Faulkner, “Address to the Delta Council,” 131–32.
19 Robert Brinkmeyer also makes this argument in “Faulkner and the Democratic Crisis,” in Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner and Ideology: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1992 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 70–94.
20 William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 323. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text as GDM.
21 Murray C. Falkner, “Cowboys, Indians, and a Flying Machine,” in idem, The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 17, 49–61.
22 For example, Owen Wister's Lin McLean and Walter van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident. See Welling, Bart H., “Faulkner's Library Revisited,” Mississippi Quarterly, 52 (1999), 365–421Google Scholar; and Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner's Library: A Catalogue (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964). While there are not any clear or direct lines of influence between these popular westerns and Faulkner's texts, there are some common themes: Lin McLean laments the passing of the frontier, which is on the way out at the time of the novel's setting, and van Tilburg Clark's novel depicts the moral ambiguities from which the West, like the East, was not immune.
23 Faulkner gives Joanna Burden a western heritage in Light in August.
24 William Faulkner, “Golden Land,” in idem, Collected Stories, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
25 “Sutter's Gold,” MSS 1404; Howard Hawks Collection, 1925–1970; Arts and Communications, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University (treatment, July 1934, 108 pp.). “Drums along the Mohawk,” 15 March 1937, reproduced in George Sidney, “Faulkner in Hollywood: A Study of His Career as a Scenarist,” dissertation, New Mexico, 1960, 113–51. “Drums along the Mohawk,” MSS 55704, Huntington Library, dialogued treatment, 3 July 1937, 238 pp. Both Faulkner and Hawks were taken off the Sutter's Gold project, and although Ford's Drums along the Mohawk was released, Faulkner remains uncredited.
26 Kawin, Bruce, “A Faulkner Filmography,” Film Quarterly, 30 (1977), 12–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Kawin. Merrill Maguire Skaggs's recent study Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007) compellingly argues that Cather's and Faulkner's writings participate in a critical dialogue.
28 Trefzer, Disturbing Indians, 176; original emphasis.
29 Ibid., 88.
30 “Drums along the Mohawk,” 3 July 1937, 65.
31 James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer: or, the First War-Path (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 418. Further references to this text will appear parenthetically in the text as Deerslayer.
32 Jobaker is the only full-blooded Indian in the novel, but he promptly dies after appearing only very briefly, in “The Old People.”
33 Johnson, Bruce G., “Indigenous Doom: Colonial Mimicry in Faulkner's Indian Tales,” Faulkner Journal, 18 (2002–3), 101–28.Google Scholar
34 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).
35 Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (London: Paladin, 1972), 119.
36 Robert Dale Parker, “Red Slippers and Cottonmouth Anxieties: White Anxieties in Faulkner's Indian Stories,” in Gene M. Moore, ed., “Faulkner's Indians,” a special issue of Faulkner Journal, 18, 1–2 (2002–3), 81–100, 87.
37 Dabney, The Indians of Yoknapatawpha, 29.
38 On the subject of black–Indian studies, see James Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Indian–Black Experience in North America (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); as well as Jack Forbes, ed, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Black–Red Peoples (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
39 I am indebted to the anonymous Journal of American Studies reader for encouraging me to read Cora, Uncas and Sam Fathers in this way.
40 Eric Gary Anderson and Melanie Benson are undertaking important work in the field of the Native South. See, for example, Mississippi Quarterly, 60, 1 (2006–7), a recent special issue on American Indian Literatures and Cultures in the South.
41 Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 74.
42 Tiya Miles, “Uncle Tom was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery” in Brooks, 138. Miles reminds us that Native Americans were the first slaves in the Americas: in Brazil, and in both the Spanish-ruled Southwest and the English Jamestown settlement, Native Americans were pressed into labour; in 1676 the colonists in Virginia legalized the enslavement of Native Americans. See ibid., 140.
43 Michael Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press), 32. Of course, anxieties around citizenship – authentic native Americanness – arose once more during World War II; that is, at the time of the publication of Go Down, Moses, particularly in response to American Japanese, Italian and German communities.
44 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 1990), 171.
45 Dabney, 22.
46 Carolyn Porter, William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 144.
47 Ibid., 158.
48 Richard C. Moreland, “Compulsive and Revisionary Repetition: ‘Barn Burning’ and the Craft of Writing Difference,” in Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1987 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 49–50. See also Kartiganer: “retelling is the core of Faulkner's practice.” Donald Kartiganer, “Faulkner's Art of Repetition,” in Fowler and Abadie, 22.