Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time

Twayne's Masterwork Studies #148

by Arthur F. Kinney

Go Down, Moses is one of William Faulkner's most direct and powerful assessments of race relations in America. In this compelling study, Arthur F. Kinney asserts that it is also his most personal - and perhaps most important - novel. Composed of seven complete stories spanning several generations in Faulkner's fictitious Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the book's structure is deceptively simple. Indeed, Faulkner's publisher incorrectly printed the first edition with the title Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, until Faulkner insisted that the work be treated as a novel. Together, the stories' multiple viewpoints create a complex mosaic of the McCaslin family, whose white and mulatto branches are the product of several defining instances of miscegenation. The illicit mixing of races creates a repeating pattern of ambiguous and morally compromised relationships in which master and slave can be blood relatives, leaving later generations to struggle against a legacy of exploitation that sears the psyches - and the landscape - of the American South. The book's longest episode, "The Bear," which in altered form has become one of Faulkner's best-known short works, poignantly demonstrates how the dehumanizing effects of ownership also alienate people from nature and ultimately from themselves.
A radical departure in form and content from the nostalgic plantation novels once common in southern fiction, Go Down, Moses provides an honest and penetrating appraisal of the slave economy and racial domination from the plantation era to the dawn of the civil rights movement. Kinney presents numerous historical documents and offers concrete details from Faulkner's life that show how Faulkner accurately re-created his region's history in his fiction. Kinney also reviews evidence suggesting that Faulkner's own ancestors may have provided the model for the McCaslin's miscegenation.
A chronology uniting the novel's seven stories into a single sequence of events provides evidence for a central argument in Kinney's highly original that the scrambling of time employed in Faulkner's presentation of events masks a key source of meaning that has been overlooked in previous analyses. By jumping backward and forward in time, Faulkner's narrative structure emphasizes thematic parallels between disparate events, enabling him to juxtapose and link the days of slavery with 20th-century America. By reordering Faulkner's "miscegenation of time," Kinney exposes additional meanings that more starkly situate Faulkner's work in the context of the vital issues of his era - issues that retain their urgency to the present day.

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1996

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most of these Twayne commentaries, this volume offers a reasonable history of the critical reception of the novel, as well as offering a balanced reading of its own. There is rather more attempt to tie the book to a number of events in Mississippi history than in some of the other texts of this series. Sometimes these links feel a little forced, though the novel's subject matter at least gives ample warrant for attempting as broad a contextualization of Faulkner's views on race as possible.