Reading the ledgers

Mississippi Quarterly

Volumn 55, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 303-358

  Godden, Richard ^a   Polk, Noel ^b  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI   (United States)

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EID: 61349159176     PISSN: 0026637X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, in William Faulkner: Novels 1942-1954, ed. Joseph L. Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 193.
2. Christopher Craft argues that puns actually enact a drive towards the same in so far as their sound "cunningly erases, or momentarily suspends ... semantic differences." He goes on to gender their structures, marking the pun's drive towards the "homophonic" as "homoerotic"; by contradistinction the acknowledged pun, a declared site of difference, is heard "hetero," though having been identified as a pun, it cannot escape its defining and residual homophony (which contains that which cannot be named). Craft is too clever by far: we cite him only to draw out the troubling semantic play in "oral intercourse" ("Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Ernest," Representations 31 (1990), 38.
3. Our questions, here and elsewhere, at times risk the pedantry of literalism. We take that risk to be one inherent in the ledger form. The ledgers as chronicles offer an annalistic narrative, which, neither adequately sequential nor at all causal, leaves out more than it puts in. Isaac translates the ledgers as grounds for his own theoditic teleology, that is to say, he is a bad reader of the commissary documents in genre terms because he develops them in a form that begs no questions.
4. Mark Tushnett, The American Law of Slavery: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p.33.
5. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Capital in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 5.
6. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 335, 348.
7. See also Susan Bucks-Morse, The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 177-185, 190-197.
8. Winthrop Jordan (telephone interview, May 22, 2002) says he knows of no documented cases of homosexual contact between owners and slaves; he is certain such relationships existed but are not likely to have been documented. His White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p.78, notes one case in 1630 in which an "angry Virginia court sentenced 'Hugh Davis to be soundly whipped, before an assembly of negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro.'" Given that period's fear of miscegenation and intolerance of fornication, Jordan speculates that the negro with whom Hugh Davis lay might well have been female. But the peculiar language - "defiling his body" - seems to us to contain some horror that could not be directly named. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs records an incident powerfully suggestive of miscegenous homosexuality: "As he [the master] lay there on his bed, a mere degraded wreck of manhood, he took into his head the strangest freaks of despotism; and if Luke [the slave] hesitated to submit to his orders, the constable was immediately sent for [to whip him].
9. Some of these freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated. When I fled from the house of bondage, I left poor Luke still chained to the bedside of this cruel and disgusting wretch." Before this we learn that "some days he was not allowed to wear any thing but his shirt, in order to be in readiness to be flogged" (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987], p. 192). We are grateful to Theresa Towner for calling this to our attention.
10. At least one of Faulkner's possible sources for Buddy's word specifies that Spintrius should specialize in troilism and arcana. Suetonius's The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, of which Faulkner had a copy in his library, makes three references to "spintrae," and in relation to Tiberius's love life details their pleasures: "In his retreat at Capri there was a room devised by him dedicated to the most arcane lusts. Here he had assembled from all quarters girls and perverts, whom he called spintrae, who invented monstrous feats of lubricity, and defiled one another before him, interlaced on a series of threes in order to inflame his feeble appetite" (The Lives, ed. Joseph Gavorse [New York: Modern Library, 1931], p. 145).
11. As so often throughout this paper, we are grateful for the scrupulous work of Nancy Dew Taylor. For fuller details on possible sources for "Spintrius" see her note to the name, Annotations to William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 151.
12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a useful gloss on our activity: she notes that "the potency of any signifier is proven and increased, over and over, by how visibly and spectacularly it fails to be adequate to the various signifieds over which it nonetheless seeks to hold sway. So the gaping fit between on the one hand the Name of the Family, and on the other the quite varied groupings gathered in that name, can only add to the numinous prestige of a term whose origins, histories, and uses may have little in common with our recognizable needs." Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 72.
13. We thank Mark Clark for pointing out the chiasmus in these names.
14. In an email communication of April 10, 2002, Allen Williams, Associate Curator of the Historic New Orleans collection at Loyola University, writes: "In all of The Historic New Orleans Collection's sources on New Orleans prostitution circa 1880, not one addresses male prostitution. Of course, the situation certainly existed, but [we] can't say there was an exclusive male brothel in the city. Al Rose's definitive study of Storyville doesn't discuss it, nor is there a reference in any of the Blue Books. This was verified by Pamela Arceneaux, head librarian and authority on the New Orleans flesh industry.... In fact, our only source concerning the gay scene is a 'Fess' Manetta interview, 'Queers in the District,' in the Bill Russell oral history cassettes. Manetta, she says, describes the scene then (circa 1915 or so) in terms which make it sound very much like the bar scene today.... Young men were sometimes kept in European female brothels to service interested clients, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was also the case here...."
15. Faulkner did not close the break begun by the dash. In editing the Library of America text I came close to supplying one, to follow the close parenthesis on p. 196, which would have read ") - ". I left the irregularity against the possibility that Faulkner might be trying in his own prose to replicate the ragged and irregular jottings of the ledger entries (NP).
16. We should indicate that Buck and Buddy make their initial sustained appearance in The Unvanquished (1938), and more particularly in the story "Retreat." There are several differences, as one might expect: in "Retreat" Buddy goes to war, not Buck; that text makes no mention of Brownlee; the twins display no contrasting nuances of gender; the plantation key is neither suggestive nor a nail; and property rather than sexuality lies at the center of the three-page account (The Unvanquished. William Faulkner:Novels 1936-1940, ed. Joseph L. Blotner and Noel Polk [New York: Library of America, 1990], pp. 350-353). "Retreat" specifies that Buck and Buddy operate a system for freeing their inherited slaves, whereby those slaves "buy" liberty "not in money ... but in work from the plantation" (p. 351). In addition, the earlier text notes that the twins persuade white "dirt farmers" to "pool their little patches of poor hill land along with niggers and the McCaslin plantation" (p. 352). Pooled land results in "white trash" whose families have shoes, and some of whose children go to school. Faulkner adds that such "ideas about men and land ... didn't have a name ... yet" (p. 352). We are reminded, anachronistically, of the cross-racial activities of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (1934-1935). The point to make here, however, is that between The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses, Faulkner's characterization of Buck and Buddy appears to shift emphasis, from labor to desire. Perhaps the years between 1938 and 1941, in that they see large-scale Southern land enclosure and the attendant dispossession of a black tenantry, prompt his recasting of the twins. Since by 1941 the black body is less and less bound to the land by debt or labor (though still the body whose work created and maintained a white landowning class) landowners needed to retain it by means other than work: hence the emergence of Brownlee, Buck, Buddy and their desires. We thank Peter Nicolaisen for reminding us of the twins' earlier appearance, and different representation, in The Unvanquished.
17. The ledgers and the surrounding text only say "Carolina"or "Callina." Don H. Doyle notes that the "population that followed into Lafayette County came largely from the old southeastern states." The 1850 census reveals that 23 percent of white heads of households in Lafayette County were from North Carolina, 22 percent from South Carolina. (Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha [Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001], p. 59.)
18. Here we depend heavily on Taylor's annotation of "Refused 10acre peace fathers Will" in her Annotations to Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses," p. 153
19. and on Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber's "'Old Carothers's Doomed and Fatal Blood': The Layers of the Ledgers in Go Down, Moses" (in The Faulkner Journal 12 [Spring 1997], 87-88). Schreiber uses her detection of L.Q.C.'s father's putative crime to ratify Isaac's version of L.Q.C.; her case being that incestuous miscegenation is a transgenerational sin. We extend Taylor's insight, and deploy Schreiber's hypothesis about what happened in Carolina to very different ends.
20. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 25. The passage continues: "Sometimes white kinspeople, scandalized and outraged, moved aggressively to break such wills - occasionally, by having the man declared incompetent or, more bluntly, insane."
21. The phrase seems to be Williamson's; he, at any rate, is the first scholar we know of to use the term in Faulkner studies (New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States [New York: Free Press, 1980], pp. 44-54).
22. Our thinking here is informed by the work of Evgeny Pashukanis in his Law and Marxism (London: Ink Links, 1978)
23. particularly the chapter on "Commodity and the Subject," pp. 109-133.
24. Much of part 4, indeed, much of Go Down, Moses, consists of free indirect discourse, an authorial option which allows Faulkner simultaneously to identify with and yet remain distant from a creation. More is involved than a "mixture" or "average" of subject positions and modes of enunciation (V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [New York: Seminar Press, 1973], p. 142). Instead, in free indirect discourse, "an author and character speak at the same time" (p. 144). Although in particular passages and phrases author or character may take precedence, the reader is always likely to be aware that any word, as the potential locus of "two differently orientated voices," may carry a "double intonation" in which two speech acts interfere with one another (pp. 144, 157).
25. See also Michael Toolan, The Stylistic Function: A Literary Linguistic Approach (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 74-82.
26. For a detailed analysis of this incident, see Richard Godden, "Agricultural Adjustment, Revenants, Remnants and Counter-Revolution in Faulkner's 'The Fire and the Hearth,'" Faulkner Journal, 12 (Spring 1997), 41-55.
27. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Landscape in Rousseau, Nietszche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 200. Faulkner studies - that is, nearly all commentators on Go Down, Moses - have agreed with Isaac in following Buddy's belief that Eunice committed suicide, and nearly all readings of Go Down, Moses of which we are aware are based upon Isaac's interpretation of that suicide as having been caused by old Carothers's incestuous union with his and Eunice's daughter Tomy.
28. See, for a representative sampling: Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), p.126;
29. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 262, 448;
30. John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner's Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 262-63;
31. Dirk Kuyk Jr., Threads Cable-strong: WHliam Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1983), pp. 116ff.;
32. and Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 137.
33. See also all the essays and genealogies in Arthur W. Kinney, ed., Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), and especially Kinney's introduction, p.5. We cite these well-known books not to be contentious but simply to note how "official" or "institutionalized" this reading of Go Down, Moses has become.
34. Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 201-214
35. and Thadious M. Davis, Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), pp. 239-247, are honorable exceptions to this general rule, but neither writes directly about the problem of genealogy in the novel.
36. It is worth noting that Faulkner himself provided somewhat contradictory extra-textual evidence. On June 23, 1942, right after Go Down, Moses was published, he wrote a letter to an inquiring neighbor who wanted to know about the ledgers. Faulkner wrote: "The ledger exerpts [sic] in Go Down Moses were a little to set a tone and an atmosphere, but they also told a story, of how the negros became McCaslins too. Old McCaslin bought a handsome octoroon and got a daughter on her and then got a son on that daughter; that son was his mother's child and her brother at the same time; he was both McCaslin's son and his grandson" (Noel Polk "'How the negros became McCaslins too ...': A New Faulkner Letter," Southern Cultures, 5 (Fall 1999), 103-108.
37. Faulkner here returns to his notorious practice with interviewers of answering as simply as possible; even if he intended Carothers to be taken as an incestuous miscegenator, the novel provides no evidence of it; nor does it suggest that Eunice is a "handsome octoroon." Apparently while he was writing Go Down, Moses he drew at least three different genealogical charts; they at any rate appear on the versos of pages of preliminary typescripts of that novel (Thomas L. McHaney, ed., William Faulkner Manuscripts 16 Volume I "Go Down, Moses," Typescripts and Miscellaneous Typescript Pages [New York: Garland, 1987], pp. 240-241).
38. The two apparently earlier (p. 241) genealogies do not deal with the part-black McCaslins at all, but they introduce other McCaslins - e.g., Lucius I (b. 1845) and Lucius II (b. 1895) - who were dropped from the family. The third genealogy (p. 210) clearly claims L.Q.C.'s fathering of Turl: it draws a line directly from old Carothers to Tomey's Turl, who appears on the same generational line as Buck and Buddy and their white sister - that is, as one of their siblings; but no line connects him with Eunice or Tomey, just as no line to any of the siblings goes through a named mother. This genealogy has been in print since 1961, in James B. Meriwether, The Literary Career of William Faulkner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 31.
39. Arthur Kinney suggests that Carothers may not know that Tomasina is his child by Eunice and that Eunice commits suicide as a reaction to his denial (p. 5).
40. See Noel Polk, "Man in the Middle: Faulkner and the Southern White Moderate," in his Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), pp. 238-241.
41. Isaac's reconstruction of Eunice's death bears interesting resemblances to Molly's reconstruction of Butch's execution. The comparison stands as evidence that black victims of legal or extra-legal violence elicit explanatory responses that both bear and solicit revision. Butch's mother, Molly's daughter, died in childbirth, leaving Molly to raise him (p. 270). Molly was also "the only mother ... [Roth] ever knew" (p. 77); thus we may take Butch and Roth as brothers. At the University of Virginia, Faulkner admitted that he used the names Joseph and Benjamin interchangeably" (Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwyn and Joseph L. Blotner [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959], p. 18).
42. See also Taylor, Annotations to William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses," p. 225. Consequently we may understand Molly's reference to Butch as "Benjamin" to refer to "Joseph," since Joseph, Jacob's favored son, was sold in Egypt by his brothers. Joseph rises in the Pharaoh's eyes, and when Jacob's sons revisit Egypt to buy corn, Joseph recommends that they return home and bring Benjamin (a favorite left safely in Canaan) back with them into Egypt. Joseph eventually seeks by trickery to retain his brother Benjamin with him in Egypt. The story is as elaborate as Molly's use of it is simple.
43. For an illuminating reading of Butch as displaced labor, and of Go Down, Moses as a whole in relation to the economics of the late thirties and early forties, see John T. Matthews, "Touching Race in Go Down, Moses," in New Essays on "Go Down, Moses," ed. Linda Wagner Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 21-47.
44. See also Cheryl Lester, "If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and the Great Migration: History in Black and White," in Faulkner in Cultural Context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), pp. 191-219
45. and her "Racial Awareness and Arrested Development: The Sound and the Fury and the Great Migration (1915-1928)," in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 123-145.
46. James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 4.
47. "... if the Nazarene had found carpentering good enough for the life and ends He had assumed and elected to serve, it would be all right too for Isaac McCaslin ..." (p. 229). Poor, self-serving Isaac can't get even his martyrdom right: Jesus left carpentering to engage the world toward his "life and ends." Isaac takes up carpentering precisely to escape that engagement. His reading of the Bible, here and elsewhere, seems no more acute than his reading of the ledgers.
48. He bases his "sight" on an explicit refusal of "citation." We are told that "he would never need to look at the ledgers again" (p. 200), and that he did not do so.
49. Paul Ricoeur notes, "to make up a plot is already to make the intelligible spring from the accidental, the universal from the singular, the necessary or probable from the episodic." He adds that plots "do not see the universal, they make it spring forth." Our purpose has been (care of the documents in their "episodic," "accidental," "singular" and chronicular form) to make Ricoeur's point in relation to Isaac's projection (and self-projection concerning Eunice). Put another way, again via Ricoeur's phrasing, we seek to draw out "the play of discordance internal to [Isaac's] concordance." See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. K. McLaughton and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 41, 38.
50. As to the family's lore about the mixing of bloods, the record of "The Fire and the Hearth," the only other chapter in the novel which concerns itself with genealogical bloodlines to a significant degree, would have L.Q.C. Lucas's grandfather. Lucas says directly to Zack: "The same thing made my pappy that made your grandmaw" (p. 37), a claim which may contradict or confirm the other; that is, nothing in Lucas's statement here keeps old Carothers from being both his father and his grandfather. But later in the same episode, that same narrative voice refers to Lucas's "white grandfather, Carothers McCaslin himself" (p. 40) - which assertion, if true, would provide evidence for L.Q.C.'s liaison with Eunice. Likewise, Lucas thinks to himself that "old Carothers never seemed to miss much what [blood] he give to Tomey that night that made my father" (p. 44). Much later, Roth Edmonds notes Lucas's "quarter strain not only of white blood and not even Edmonds blood, but of old Carothers McCaslin himself" (p. 80). With "a quarter strain" of Carothers' blood Lucas would be L.Q.C.'s grandson. Finally, that same narrative voice, discussing Turl's and Tennie's children, notes that James, the eldest, ran away from home, putting "running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth" (p. 81). Thus it would seem that the family "lore" would have L.Q.C. as Lucas's grandfather. But note that when Lucas first goes to Zack Edmonds to demand that he return Molly, the narrative voice - which strikes us as adopting the mode of free indirect discourse which shifts between the position of an implied narrator and that of a particular character. Free indirect discourse leaves undecideable whether the voice has an omniscient narrator's authority or that of a character - that voice's claim that "old Carothers McCaslin ... had sired him [Lucas] and Zack Edmonds both" (p. 36), which is chronologically impossible, since Lucas was born in 1874 and L.Q.C. died in 1837. The only explanation we can formulate for Lucas's claim on L.Q.C. as his "sire" is that he is preparing to confront Zack essentially over the matter of his own manhood, his pride in his wife's fidelity, and he wants to claim as much of Carothers' strength as he possibly can.
51. See Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), particularly pp. 19-14, 68-96.
52. Nicolas Rand, "Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis," in The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, eds. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 21.
53. See also Abraham and Torok, "The Shell and the Kernel: The Scope and Originality of Freudian Psychoanalysis," in their The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Nicolas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 79-98.
54. Peter Nicholls' work on deferred action was particularly helpful in our formulation of what the language of the ledgers does not do: see his "The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms and Toni Morrison," in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. Sue Vue (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50-74.
55. The annotational work of Taylor is an exception. See her entries on "Mulejosephine Broke Leg @ shot" and "Spintrius," which are crucial to our argument, pp. 150-51.
56. Note also Catherine G. Kodat's unpublished paper "Faulknerian Homotextuality: The Saming Change in Go Down, Moses," delivered at the American Literature Associaton's annual meeting, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 2001.
57. See John Duvall, "Faulkner's Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic," in Faulkner and Gender Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1994, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), pp. 48-72.
58. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 1.
59. A Butlerian neologism: in Bodies that Matter she speaks of the persistence of the disavowed, or of "disidentification" (p. 4).
60. Susan Donaldson, "Faulkner and Sexuality," Faulkner Journal, 9 (Fall 1993/Spring 1994), 5.
61. "Barn Burning," in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 12.
62. Sylvia Fry, Water from Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 235.
63. On black rebellion see Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 95;
64. William Freeling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina 1816-36 (New York: Harper, 1969), pp. 58-60;
65. and Stephen Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion (New York: Mentor, 1973), pp. 12, 17.
66. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 31.
67. We adapt the title of Jay Mandle's study of black labor. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
68. "The Fire and the Hearth" gives a slightly different history of L.Q.C.'s "tremendous abortive edifice." As he left it, the house was "two log wings which Carothers McCaslin had built and which had sufficed old Buck and Buddy, connected by the open hallway which, as his pride's monument and epitaph, old Cass Edmonds had enclosed and superposed with a second storey of white clapboards and faced with a portico" (p. 35). The house would thus seem to be a monument not to Old Carothers's "vanity's boundless conceiving" but rather to Cass's.
69. See note 27. The phrase "split referent" is Paul Ricoeur's. See his "The Metaphoric Process of Cognition, Imagination and Feeling," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 153.
70. See Calvin S. Brown, A Glossary of Faulkner's South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p.83.
71. We thank James B. Carothers for suggesting this. We also thank Joseph Urgo for reading the manuscript and making several useful comments.