Then one morning Isaac was at home, looking at a newspaper . when he realized what it was and why. It was the date. It's somebody's birthday, he thought.
- "The Fire and the Hearth," Go Down, Moses
Go Down, Moses is as much a performative initiation for readers in the art of modernist writing and interpretation as it is the story of Lucas Beauchamp's struggles on the McCaslin plantation and Ike McCaslin's failed initiation to the wilderness. Rather than guiding readers "back" to a primeval wilderness from which civilization has estranged them, Faulkner enlists their collaboration in the construction of new meanings from the tangle of spent literary correspondences, competing oral and textual discourses, and wrecked physical environments that, for his generation of Southern writers, defined the modern landscape as a radically hybrid (in textual and technological as well as racial terms) zone of contestation and--potentially--transformation. Ostensible binarisms like "white" and "black," "book" and "land," "human" and "animal," "wilderness" and "home" are productively complicated in and by Go Down, Moses, not only when we learn from Ike McCaslin's failings or trace them to Faulkner's struggles against as well as for his Southern environment, but when we see through the self-thematizing reading process how we as hypocrites lecteurs or as Buell puts it, "both perpetrators and victims" are implicated, Faulkner might say, in the spilling of the life we love.
Go Down, Moses--a body of words called into existence, so to speak, by the disappearance of Callie's body--was what he wagered against financial and artistic liquidation: the loss of his property and mules, bondage in California, or surrender to the war effort, which he knew was displacing his peers around the world. It is also a gamble in representational terms, a set of risky maneuvers that plays itself out auto mimetically at points when black or hybrid characters take control of the games in which white characters consider them pawns, altering their own stories in unpredictable, often self-defeating, ways.
This essay has the followings:
Total words: 3443
Total reference: 2
Total price: £ 49.95
Click here to Order this essay!
Get Professionally written Essays that are:
• Written According to your Exact Requirements
• 100% Original and Non-Plagiarized
• Written by Expert
UK Writers
• Delivered to you before your deadline
Amazingly Low Prices - £9.95/page
