Word: faulknerisms
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...Floor. Faulkner has explored this thesis in myriad ways, but none is more touching, or echoes the experiences of more Southerners, than the story of seven-year-old Roth Edmonds in Go Down, Moses. In all Roth's young life, his constant companion has been a Negro boy named Henry, son of a nearby Negro farmer. They have played and fished together, eaten the same meals and often slept in the same bed. "Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography stemmed...
Thus the plot of Absalom, Absalom! sums up the fundamental Southern anxiety: to the racist's question, "would you want your sister to marry one," Faulkner adds "when he may be your brother?" This, Faulkner seems to say, lies at the heart of the almost paranoiac fear of the "mixing of bloods," which would call in question the belief in a difference between the races on which white dominance was founded, and which, as the owner of one of Mississippi's largest plantations said last week, is still "very real for many whites today...
Crisis of Identity. In Light in August, Faulkner demonstrated how the preoccupation with race can make it tragically impossible for a man to know who he really is, and dramatized the mindless virulence of white reaction to miscegenation. Joe Christmas, the book's hell-ridden hero, is a remarkably modern figure: in the psychological cant phrase of 1964, he suffers an "identity crisis" because he thinks he is part Negro successfully passing for white. Compounding his agonizing psychological fracture, Joe Christmas takes for his mistress a woman who embodies the Southerner's hated notion of the "outside agitator...
Renunciation. In the series of novel las and short stories brought together in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner expressed most explicitly his hope that some day reconciliation may be found in an end to exploitation of one race by another. More than any other Faulkner character, Ike McCaslin grapples with and points the way to the moral and emotional resolution of the white man's guilt. Faulkner begins again at the beginning, where Ike McCaslin's ancestors with their slaves took the land from the Indians and tamed it to cotton. He then tells how Ike himself...
Ostensibly, Ike McCaslin's life is a series of hunting stories. As that, they are fine entertainment, often anthologized. But beyond that the stories make up a mystical, and for Faulkner truly religious, statement of man's holy relation to the wild land. What Ike McCaslin learns is that he can have peace only at the price of renouncing his claim to his father's slave-won, sharecropper-run plantation, "founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery not only to the human beings but the valuable...