- 1 Dimock points out that Faulkner’s “ironic twist that winners do not in fact win” enhances his imagi (...)
1The close connection William Faulkner perceived between Japan and his own homeland, the South, is emphasized by Wai Chee Dimock, who points to the fact that both lands lost a war against America, “an ordeal no doubt further amplified in the minds of the defeated” (Dimock 6). After Faulkner visited Japan in August 1955, he left a message to the Japanese, entitled “To the Youth of Japan,” in which he says that “it is war and disaster which remind man most that he needs a record of his endurance and toughness” (Essays 83). Those who gain “endurance and toughness” are, of course, not the winners but the losers of war, and he continues to say that young Japanese writers “will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth,” such as justice and freedom (84). Although this paradox that grants universal truth to the defeated1 is one of the features of Faulkner’s literature, it remains to be explained why only the losers are able to obtain the truth.
2The true node that ties Japan to the South lies in finding human sublimity in the sense of shame and guilt caused by losing a war. For example, the Japanese postwar critic Jun Eto considers that Japanese spiritual maturity was established through guilt and recognition of loss after the collapses of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1867 and the Emperor’s regime in 1945 (Sherif 118). After these national tipping points, Japan gave rise to great literature with a unique confessional style, as Faulkner prophesized. As will be shown in this essay, this style was heavily influenced by Christianity in Japan, but the authors who adopted it did not necessarily devote themselves to writing about Christian beliefs. Likewise, Fred Hobson points out that “to tell about the South” in the postbellum period was more or less an act of confession or purgation of dark, sinful memories with the hope of eliminating them, even though the confessors found themselves dredging up further nasty memories (7-8). In Hobson’s view, Southerners dared to impose shame and guilt on themselves that they had not before the Civil War (10), which led them to feel their special, distorted significance in history. Hobson’s analysis of postbellum discourses shows that losers were caught in sublimating their defeat through confession, and this tendency was also undoubtedly inherited by Faulkner. Although his literature is peppered with characters’ confessions, he makes a point of praising the glory of humanity in the minds of the defeated rather than God’s salvation and redemption for them, as evidenced in his posing a question and answering it, as follows: “Q. How would you pray to God for human justice and racial salvation? A. I dont believe man prays to God for human justice and racial salvation. I believe he affirms to God that immortal individual human dignity which has always outlasted injustice” (Essays 110-11). Largely focusing on “The Bear,” which has a unique confessional narrative, this essay examines why its main character Isaac (Ike) McCaslin, although not a pious Christian, uses the narrative to indict his grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (Old Carothers), for the unforgivable sin of incest. This exploration proceeds with reference to Japanese confessional literature, thereby suggesting that the confession allows Ike to nullify his sense of guilt, shame, and weakness, and to conceive of himself as an innocent man with an understanding of human truth and freedom. Although Ike deems his grandfather a disgusting character, this essay also demonstrates that the latter is “sacred” to Ike because he propels the weak Ike to assume a special role in the cursed white family of the McCaslins. In the second half of the essay, a comparison is drawn between “The Bear” and “Barn Burning” to highlight the weakness of Abner Snopes in the second story: as a father, he does not have the transcendental power of Old Carothers and therefore cannot exert influence over his son Sarty.
- 2 Concerning the critics who feel sympathy with Ike’s decision and praise him as “an ethical hero,” s (...)
3In Section 4 of “The Bear,” Ike McCaslin rejects his inheritance from his deceased grandfather, a slave owner, by referring to the Bible. Although his elder cousin, Cass Edmonds, insists that he accept what he is owed, Ike refutes this advice, saying that the ownership of slaves and property should be in God’s hands and not in those of a white landowner. As if he were a pious Christian, Ike says that the cultivated land of the South should be returned to God. Ike’s refusal of McCaslin’s profit from slavery sounds moralistic,2 but it is doubtful whether he abrogates his claim from the bottom of his heart. While Ike’s horror at his grandfather’s exploitation of slaves leads him to waive the inheritance, his behavior still seems to be swayed by his grandfather’s influence. Ike has a strong self-awareness of his cursed fate as McCaslin’s only legitimate son, so while he liquidates the legacy, his blood relations with Old Carothers remain strong.
- 3 As an antithetical interpretation to Simon’s, see, for example, Honeini 165-67. He dubs Gavin Steve (...)
- 4 Terrell Tebbetts observes that Ike is no better than Roth Edmonds, who tries to cut off the family (...)
4If Ike’s atonement for his grandfather’s sin is the primal theme of “The Bear,” then the story should present some indication of the spiritual or economic emancipation of the slaves’ descendants. In other words, as the title denotes, all stories in Go Down, Moses should be in sync with the account of the Old Testament Book of Exodus, in which the people in bondage are finally liberated by Moses (see Kleppe 364). Its final story “Go Down, Moses,” however, deals with black woman Mollie Beauchamp’s grief at her grandson’s execution. She faces the fact that Butch Beauchamp killed a (presumably) white policeman, yelling about the white master Roth Edmonds, who “got him” and “sold him in Egypt” (Moses 362). The white lawyer, Gavin Stevens, asks for a donation from the white residents of Jefferson and holds a solemn funeral for Butch, which might show some atonement for the sins of racism in the end (Simon 42).3 Nevertheless, the deliverance of the black people is not fulfilled, and this open ending of the text triggers the suspicion that Ike’s consideration toward his black relatives is merely an ostentatious performance. In fact, Stevens’s kindness highlights Ike’s absence from Mollie’s grief (Tebbetts 84), which he should alleviate with his power, as if he were Moses. Although Ike repeatedly ascribes to them the virtue of perseverance, saying, “‘Because they will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are’” (Moses 281), this kind of verbal praise reinforces the superior white position and defers actual black liberation (see Penner 417). My observation is supported by Ike’s words to Ross Edmonds’s black lover, who descends from the Beauchamps, Old Carothers’s shadow family. The particulars as to their affair in “Delta Autumn,” that they risked what is close to incest to have a baby, remind him of the nightmare of incest between Old Carothers and his black daughter, Tomasina. When Ike sees a mixed-race baby in the black woman’s arms, he refuses to accept it, at least in the present state of the South. He attacks her in his mind, thinking, “Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America. . . . But not now! Not now! He cried, not loud, but in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: ‘You’re a nigger!’” (Moses 344). Although her skin color is almost white, he still perceives it as dark and cries out “Not now!” in the face of a child born through interracial intercourse. In this respect, Ike’s attitude matches that of his grandfather, who did not recognize the black son he had had with Tomasina and instead bequeathed him a thousand dollars as an atonement (Carden 71). The ending of “Delta Autumn” betrays Ike’s innermost narrative, which keeps to the traditional ideology and opposes the account of manumission in Exodus.4 If Ike’s conscience generated from the Bible was flawless, or if he truly aimed at being a Moses for the black people, he would transfer the land ownership not to the white Edmonds but to the black Beauchamps (see Simon 46).
- 5 Michael Millgate points out that because Ike’s parents have already passed away in his childhood, h (...)
- 6 After hunting the buck, Michael D’Alessandro says, “Ike assumes a newfound masculinity deriving fro (...)
- 7 The logic presiding over Butch’s execution seems no different from that of the white preacher in Ma (...)
5Why does Ike not engage in emancipation when he persistently refers to the Bible as the rationale for renouncing his position as descendant? This is probably because Christian beliefs are not what he abides by, and God is a rhetorical means to expel the grandfather’s authority. Yet, another question arises: Who is the God-like figure who pushes him to deny his sinful grandfather? Given that such a figure must be a significant mentor, Sam Fathers, who is descended from Black and Native American blood, can legitimately embody it.5 The man who dabbed the blood of the buck Ike had hunted onto the young man’s face seems to be a symbolic father because he initiates Ike into the wilderness and informs him of the sacredness of nature.6 Along with Sam Fathers, the big bear Old Ben, an avatar of the wilderness receding behind civilization, inspires Ike with a pure spirit to confront Southern society in its humiliation and disgrace. However, these figures are not Ike’s God because he spends his life mainly in Jefferson, not living in the woods as they did. In addition, if they are God for Ike, the significance of the Bible also remains cloudy, as they are the victims of the same Christianity that helped Southerners exploit the woods and non-white races. Even when looking for a connection between “The Bear” and Exodus, the latter does not provide insights into the heart of the former. Although Ike aims to “‘set at least some of His lowly people free’” (Moses 248) as Moses did, he does not actually show up as a savior in “Go Down, Moses,” where Mollie laments the fate of her black family and awaits the salvation of God (see Winn 462-63).7
6Read in the light of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, “The Bear” offers up new interpretative prospects, especially regarding the relationship between Ike and Old Carothers. In ancient Egypt, King Akhenaten promoted monotheism, honoring the solar god Aton. However, Egyptians had traditionally practiced polytheism and, after he passed away, monotheism was targeted by subsequent kings. In Freud’s speculation, Moses, one of the Egyptian nobility and a strong believer in the cult of Aton, took his followers out of the country to pass down the monotheistic doctrine, yet was killed by them because of his strict father-like character. The people without a leader reached Midian, where Aton was mixed with the indigenous volcano god Yahweh, and that religion was eventually transformed into Judaism. During the transformation, the Egyptian Moses somehow overlapped with a Midianite priest named Moses and became a conduit between the god Yahweh and the people. Thus, according to Freud, there were two Moseses in the history of Exodus: one a furious, strict advocate of the cult of Aton and the other a mild priest from Midian. However, it is the Egyptian Moses that subsequently became known as the savior of the persecuted Jews in Egypt, and thus stands as one of the remarkable leaders in the Bible.
7The Egyptian Moses was interesting to Freud because he was killed by his disciples and became apotheosized. The two contradictory elements, homicide and worship, seem to be in conflict, but Freud makes this unambiguous by claiming that the sense of remorse derived from killing the strong leader sublimated him into a god-like figure. This theory had already been examined in his previous work dealing with the relationship between patricide and religion, Totem and Taboo, in which he insists that the original sin of Christianity derives from patricide, occasionally seen in various ancient tribes. The embarrassment of the envious sons who killed the great father who dominated all properties and women of the tribe invoked a deep contrition against their deed. Then, as if to subdue the anger of the dead father and honor him, the sons made him the god of the tribe and denied themselves privileges that only their father had enjoyed. The dead father evolved into the Judeo-Christian God, who ordained his people not to forget their original sin, innately engraved within their nature. Moses and Monotheism follows Totem and Taboo in this reading, but in analyzing the Egyptian Moses, Freud spots a vicious aspect hidden in the etymology:
What is sacred was originally nothing but the perpetuated will of the primeval father. This would also elucidate the ambivalence of the word, hitherto inexplicable, which expresses the conception of sacredness. It is the ambivalence which governs the relationship to the father. “Sacer” does not only mean “sacred,” “blessed,” but also something that we can translate by [sic] “accursed,” “worthy of disgust” (“auri sacra fames”). (Moses and Monotheism 156)
- 8 He points out God’s scheme for the South, yet his exegesis is removed from the orthodox catechism a (...)
8If God is the being that provokes a simultaneous sense of disgust and awe, then the Christian God is not qualified to be Ike’s idol, largely because he does not show great respect nor disgust toward Him when he quotes the Bible in criticizing the evil of slavery. Compared to Cass’s critical observation that the “perverse, impotent, or blind” God did nothing for the South, Ike claims that the omnipresent God watched how the cursed South got degraded (Moses 245-46).8 Ike’s objective exegesis does not reveal either religious rapture or hatred of God. As pointed out earlier, Sam Fathers and Old Ben cannot be God figures either, because Ike only idolizes them. Who then, if not the Christian God, Sam Fathers, or Old Ben, could act as Ike’s “sacred” being? The answer is none other than Old Carothers himself, the man of power, wealth, and shame. The misdeeds of the grandfather, especially his sexual exploitation, are so repugnant that Ike was determined to reject the legacy of his grandfather as “the old wrong and shame itself” (334); in short, Old Carothers is nothing but Ike’s Other, whom he wants to be both separate from and identical to. As Terrell Tebbetts writes, “seeking to become the opposite of old McCaslin, Ike may have become his mirror image, as controlled by him as Roth is” (87). In Eric Sundquist’s idea, the totem animal, such as Old Ben, must be killed “in order for his sacred status to be made manifest” (145); likewise, Old Carothers must be denied (killed) by Ike, and thereby, the former’s disgusting sacredness is reinforced.
- 9 Regarding the contradiction in Ike’s quoted statement, see Simon 46-47.
9Old Carothers, who invokes a sense of sacredness and disgust to Ike, somehow achieves a similar status as Moby Dick for Ishmael, who ambivalently says that the whale’s whiteness “symbolizes whatever grand or gracious thing,” while “no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul” (Melville 227). As Ishmael cannot let go of the paradoxical idea of the white whale that embodies both grace and horror, Ike cannot escape the dark shadow of his grandfather. “The Bear” does not indicate Ike’s admiration for his grandfather at all, but nonetheless, his leverage makes Ike mull over his own purpose and conceive of the fateful role of eradicating the cursed blood of the McCaslins. Casting himself as “the evil to destroy the evil” (Moses 248), Ike not only takes in a doomed predestination as the offspring of the unrepentant slave owner, but also seems elated by the special mission of exterminating the evil running through his body. Ike does not succeed in breaking out of the terrible circle initiated by Old Carothers (Millgate 211), but the very impossibility of so doing gives him a sense of felix culpa. Unlike Quentin Compson, who “cannot seize his father’s authority because there is no authority to seize” (Irwin 149), Ike spots the authority in his forebear that both feels revolting and satisfies his self-esteem. In a sense, Old Carothers provides the ambivalent “sacred role” for his grandson and therefore functions as an indispensable God-like figure to Ike. Michael D’Alessandro observes that “Ike’s vision [melded] with the biblical birth of the natural world foreshadows a god-like autonomy on Ike’s part to recreate himself” (390), but his “god-like autonomy” is actually achieved not in nature but under the leverage of his God. If Ike holds on to the observation that the legacy “was never Grandfather’s to bequeath [Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy] to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never old Ikkemotubbe’s to sell to Grandfather for bequeathment and repudiation” (Moses 246), he already has no claim to the legacy, making his special mission worthless.9 The more immoral Old Carothers is, the more sacred Ike McCaslin’s mission becomes. The grandfather himself and his legacy must be kept for Ike’s liquidation and the establishment of his “subliminal” role as a new Moses. His narrative becomes inclined toward a religious confession when he reports to God the articles of sin his grandfather perpetrated as if they were his own. However, it can be argued that by denouncing the filthy legacy, Ike desires to establish an innocent self and become a moral mentor to his cousins as “uncle to half a county” (3). Without his grandfather’s power and property, or Sam’s hunting skills, Ike recognizes himself as powerless, especially since after the Confederacy was defeated, slavery was abolished, and the Big Woods shrunk from logging. In a way, Ike’s sense of sin might stem not only from his grandfather’s record, but also from his failure to maintain the patriarchal norms of the Old South. He cannot demonstrate the physical subjective power of a slaveowner, as his grandfather, nor of a hunter, as Sam Fathers. Moreover, his character is prone to demonstrate “a young boy’s high and selfless innocence” (103).
10In the postbellum world, where industrialization crushes the foundations of the traditional Southern regime, Ike cannot exert his power either as a slaveowner or hunter, but can only be a diminished subject. Viewed from the other side, his innocence derives from being powerless; to borrow a phrase from Lucas Beauchamp, Ike “turned apostate to his name and lineage by weakly relinquishing the land” (39; emphasis added). “Delta Autumn” fully displays the weak and old Ike at almost eighty, the age of Moses in Exodus, and that fragile figure mirrors his essential core. Due to his physical and economic powerlessness, he becomes naïve, which does not necessarily mean that he is selfless. In lieu of pursuing material and physical power, Ike longs for a spiritual power that gives him noble subjectivity, and for that reason, he emulates the inner life of Sam Fathers, rather than the modus vivendi of hunting for a living. Ike does not immediately battle a strong animal as Sam did; what Ike experiences and learns from him is the spirit of nature, expressed as the understanding that the creatures and materials “myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part” are “healed already into the wilderness’ concordant generality” (313). Ike’s will to gain innocence explains why he emphasizes the need to read the Bible “with the heart,” in dialogue with Cass:
[I]f truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You dont need to choose. The heart already knows. He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because maybe they dont need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart. Because the men who wrote his Book for Him were writing about truth and there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart. (249; emphasis added)
11Referencing “the heart” five times in just one short passage, Ike considers that the biblical truth depends on one’s heart rather than its description. What is noted here is that because Ike links truth to the heart, truth is confined to the spiritual sphere, not the earthly contents over which humans discuss, meditate, and sometimes fight (Winn 468). The truth for Ike can be reduced to those concepts: “honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love,” all of which “touch the heart” (Moses 283). As the truth remains within the range of spirituality, “Ike does not attempt to change the material circumstances of black sharecroppers on McCaslin land or to empower his disenfranchised Beauchamp relatives” (Carden 69), nor weigh in on a physical, racial conflict such as the one between Zack Edmonds and Lucas Beauchamp (See Lion in the Garden 225). Lucas suspects that Zack raped his wife Mollie while she was nursing Roth Edmonds, whose mother had died during the delivery. When he goes to Zack’s home with a razor in his hand and tells him to stop the alleged rape, they have a fight “like an embrace” (Moses 56) with their lives at stake. This kind of epic battle between white and black kin does not fall on Ike, who confines himself to the spiritual world of the heart and truth. His physical encounters in adolescence with animals alongside Sam Fathers and Boon Hogganbeck triggered a moment of initiation, yet they did not threaten him the way Zack was by Lucas. The truth of the heart absolves Ike from the physical conflicts bequeathed by slavery and grants him justice, love, and innocence, which are nothing but the will to power in a disguised form, as pointed out by Nietzsche in his aphoristic style: “Enrollment, so as to satisfy the will to power in a larger whole: submission, making oneself indispensable and useful to those in power; love, as a secret path to the heart of the more powerful—so as to dominate him” (406). Ike’s entry into the spiritual sphere, which seems to oppose the path of Old Carothers, suggests his hidden desire for the will to power, and the entry is only enabled by conceiving of both his hatred for and submission to his grandfather. The next section further shows how the weak obtain power and innocence through confession in the case of Japanese literature.
12The abnegation of his grandfather’s legacy is the truth for Ike and also grants him innocence. This mechanism of enhancing subjectivity by presenting it as truth or innocence is what Nietzsche harshly criticized as the Christians’ will to power, but the difference is that Ike does not submit to God, who forgives the sins of believers and consequently provides them with a sense of purification. Ike’s innocence stands in contrast with Old Carothers’s character, who was “hard and ruthless to get a patrimony to leave behind himself and strong and hard to keep it until he could bequeath it” (Moses 103; emphasis added). While Old Carothers, the “hard, ruthless, and strong” God, does not warmly welcome a stray sheep like Ike, the latter highlights his innocence by accusing his grandfather of a misdeed, despite the fact that it is only briefly mentioned in the ledgers. The “weak” Ike obtains the status of innocent subject, taking advantage of the heinous sin committed by his “strong” grandfather. According to Julia Simon, because no factual truth proves Ike’s interpretation of the ledgers, the reader perhaps should not “attempt to settle accounts by modeling divine justice or even human justice” through his narrative (48). Based on her theory, the harrowing suicidal scene with Eunice might have been fashioned by Ike’s naïve, innocent imagination. To accept Ike’s justice and innocence is to approve of his attempt at being a moral authority over others by “disclaiming the master position” (Carden 69). The goal Ike aims at is not to actually become a Moses-like figure for the suffering black people; rather, by denying his grandfather, Ike fancies himself to be a sacred character like Moses, and the fancy itself suggests nothing but his will to power.
13Ike’s biblical narrative can be illuminated by examining the literary manner adopted by some Japanese writers when Japan entered a new era after two hundred years of isolation during the Edo period. When the country accepted Western civilization in the ensuing Meiji era, some Japanese, especially the samurai warrior class, were afraid that their status would diminish because of the new democratic ideology. Curiously, many of the writers from that class, such as Kanzo Uchimura and Katai Tayama, converted to Christianity and invented a particular confessional style, generated from Christian tenets and heavily concerned with their raison d’être. Modern Japanese critic Kojin Karatani exquisitely explains why they became Christians and incorporated this confessional style into their literature:
Since the ethos of the warrior class was in every sense the ethos of Hegel’s “Master,” samurai who could no longer be masters in reality had to search for a new way to maintain this identity. Bushido [the modus vivendi of the samurai] was Christianized, almost without modification, through a process reminiscent of the permeation of Christianity among the upper class and intelligentsia of ancient Rome. . . . The reversal that Christianity made possible for these samurai was that of becoming masters of themselves (subjects) by giving up their status as masters in the world. By abandoning their worldly rank as masters and subjecting themselves entirely to God, they gained subjectivity. It was by means of this inversion that Christianity sent shock waves through the ranks of the fallen samurai of the Meiji era. (85; emphasis added)
14The authors began their confessions about their religious conversions or made their characters own and be mortified by the sexual sins and betrayals they committed. According to Karatani, however, the mechanism by which they displayed their sins to be redeemed came from the same resource in the heart: the will to power. They were defeated by the invasion of Western civilization into Japan and could not protect the Tokugawa regime, which ensured their status as samurai soldiers. After it was dismantled, they were urged to repair their subjectivity.
It was these converts to Christianity who initiated the practice of confession in modern Japan, but this was not because of their belief in modern Japan. Why, for example, is it always the defeated who confess and not those in positions of power? It is because confession is itself a manifestation in twisted form of a will to power. Confession does not necessarily imply remorse. Behind a facade of weakness, the one who confesses seeks to become a master, to dominate. (Karatani 86; emphasis added)
- 10 Freud also references the difference between Judaism and Christianity in terms of confession. Since (...)
15While Karatani discusses the typically Japanese incarnation of this Christian confessional style, critiqued in different ways by Nietzsche and Foucault, a similar tendency can be observed in the American South after the Civil War. According to John T. Irwin—who explores the relationship between God, Father, and Son in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!—whereas Judaism is a religion of physical genealogy through bloodlines, Christianity guarantees converted people a new spiritual life; it is thus called a religion of spiritual genealogy (165).10 Christianity’s idiosyncrasy lies in its rejection of worldly powers. Hence, confessional Japanese literature foregrounds in different narrative styles the anguished hearts of characters affected by prohibited love affairs, degradation, faithlessness, and defeat. Along with Ike, who feels vulnerable in his environment, Japanese Christian writers thought that submitting themselves to God by confessing their weak hearts would help implement a new subject and avert their gaze from reality. This inverted mechanism is applicable to Ike, who manages to find love despite his grandfather’s rape of his black daughter.
16When he attempts “to be better than a fair woodsman” (Moses 196) at the age of ten, Ike, who “already relinquishe[s] his will” (199), goes deep into the woods without a gun, watch, or compass, in a state of “humility and peace” (199). As the Christian authors of Meiji Japan plunged to the bottom of the mind by abandoning swords, Ike relinquishes weapon and will and then meets the spirit of the woods, Old Ben, who is depicted as “immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon’s hot dappling, . . . dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him” (198; emphasis added), as if the bear transcended time and space and was not a creature but a flawless idea. Because this experience is overwhelming, it must be one of the occasions that drove him to pursue spirituality and to make little of worldly matters among people. Even if he “thinks of himself as the Mosaic figure” (Winn 462), he cannot be identical to the Moses of the Exodus, who intermediated God and people, the top and foot of Mount Sinai. Unlike his grandfather, Ike withdraws from sexual enjoyment and avoids having a child because of the apprehension that he/she will be burdened with the same role that burdens him. Such abstinence reveals the extent to which Ike sticks to the idea of the innocent subject, exempt from physical communication, fights, and even love. In that sense, his denunciation by the woman of “Delta Autumn” is right: “‘Old man, . . . have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?” (346; emphasis added). Indeed, Ike might well have forgotten or abandoned perceptible pleasures, sorrows, and love in the pursuit of his own innocence and spiritual freedom.
17This paper has analyzed the distorted relationship between Ike and Old Carothers, the former contesting the power of his strong grandfather in a way that echoes Freud’s account of the relationship between the god-like father and his sons. Ike capitalizes on the religious quality of eliciting innocence, which allows him to distance himself from temporary racial problems. As the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber points out, one who heavily longs for God or the purified self becomes unaware of God’s gift to us: “Just as the ‘self’-seeking man, instead of directly living something or other, a perception or an affection, reflects about his perspective or reflective I, and thereby misses the truth of the event, so the man who seeks God, instead of allowing the gift to work itself out, reflects about the Giver—and misses both” (80). Buber’s observation warns us that, because the ardent pursuit of innocence conversely triggers separation from the object, we must stand on the created ground to feel God’s grace hidden underneath it.
- 11 Virginia Fowler quotes an episode in The Hamlet in which V. K. Ratliff says that because Bayard Sar (...)
- 12 Hans Skei applauds “Barn Burning” for its lack of “any of the sentimentality that destroys so many (...)
18In the remainder of this essay, I analyze the father-son relationship of Colonel Sartoris (Sarty) Snopes and Abner (Ab) Snopes in “Barn Burning” as its comparison to that of Ike and Old Carothers highlights how the transcendental father, regardless of whether he be good or evil, is integral to establishing the son’s subjectivity. There are some differences between “Barn Burning” and “The Bear,” one of which is that while Ike returns from the big woods after the ritual initiation, Sarty goes into the woods after sensing his father’s death, never to return to the family; “the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing” (“Barn” 25) do not necessarily guarantee him peace of mind as the big woods do for Ike. Sarty never appears in later works picturing Snopes’s development and fall; thus, the reader does not know how he grows up to establish himself after the initiation. However, it is a fact that he has to rely only on his own capacities as he cannot count on the spiritual or economical help of figures such as Sam Fathers, Old Ben, Cass Edmonds, or Old Carothers. Unlike Ike, Sarty must survive in the cold nature that is “the clan’s identifying characteristic” (Hiles 333). While Ike does not have to worry about financial problems and thus can maintain his innocent self, Sarty has to address the predicament of poverty filled with the smells of cans “whose labels his stomach reads” (“Barn” 3) and this precipitates a “Pavlovian response” (Atkinson 196) from him. Although Sarty betrays his father based on the pure cause of justice and conscience, his initiation into the woods does not necessarily grant him the spiritual freedom and bliss that Ike feels after refusing his grandfather’s legacy. Oliver Billingslea optimistically points out that Sarty achieves his freedom in the Emersonian sense of the unification with the Fate or Over-Soul (292), but unlike the innocent Ike, Sarty still has leeway in becoming like his father, who burns the barn because of “the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself” (“Barn” 21) running through his body.11 This Emersonian trait should be attached to Ike, as the harsh reality that Sarty faces does not allow him to feel the transcendental idea.12
19The difference between the two stories is not only noticeable in the two main characters, Sarty and Ike, but there is also an outstanding contrast in the descriptions of the fathers. While Old Carothers has vast property to bequeath to his offspring, Ab is a typical poor white who depends on shares from his landlord. However, the divergence does not lie so much with the respective economic circumstances of the two families, as with Sarty’s lack of mixed feelings of awe and disgust toward his father, such as Ike’s experiences in relation to his grandfather. Although Ab is depicted as a strong father who controls his family with violence, he is not provided with a “sacred” power like Old Carothers that paradoxically enables his grandson to establish his innocent self. Because Ab’s influence over his family does not extend beyond physicality, he cannot reign in Sarty’s spirit and prevent him from going to Major de Spain to report his father’s arson. His act can be called patricide with respect to the result (see Zender 49). Ike’s refusal of primogeniture is also patricide, but owing to the magnitude of his power, his grandfather haunts Ike’s mind, and he is obsessed with eradicating the cursed paternal line of the McCaslins; Ike’s subliminal mission is virtually sustained by the evil God, his grandfather. In contrast, Ab cannot be God to Sarty because the father does not have the power to dominate the son during life and after death. Although Sarty’s brave behavior brings about his father’s death, he presumably will not dwell on his dead father or even bear a sense of guilt, as the last line of the story suggests: “He did not look back” (“Barn” 25).
20In contrast to Ike, who largely shows disgust toward his grandfather, Sarty shows sympathy for and even tries to support his vicious father. However, this tendency betrays his father’s powerlessness because nobody would need to show sympathy for a strong man. For example, when a big boy calls Ab “Barn burner!” after the arson trial, Sarty spontaneously springs on the boy, even though he is “half again” the size of Sarty:
He [was] leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full fight and himself already leaping into pursuit as his father’s hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold voice speaking above him: “Go get in the wagon.” (6)
- 13 John T. Matthews observes that Sarty’s revolt against his father is his response to the “peace,” “d (...)
- 14 The change of the word from the first mouthed “Pap!” to “Father!” signifies Sarty’s lament of not h (...)
21His action may be targeted toward winning his father’s favor, but as he tells himself after the family wagon leaves the town, “Maybe he’s done satisfied now, now that he has…” (6). Sarty’s goal is to wreak vengeance against the towners for his “weak” father. However, the father is not only indifferent to his son’s piety, but also casts doubt on him, saying “‘You were fixing to tell them’” the truth about the burning; he strikes his son “hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly” (8). Although Sarty accepts his father’s violence in the name of discipline, he never perceives any transcendental power. “The old blood which . . . had been bequeathed him willy nilly” (21) inhibits him from being removed from his father, but eventually he abandons him because he is not “strong and hard” (Moses 103) like Old Carothers. When Sarty enters the premises of De Spain’s magnificent mansion with his father, he forgets “his father and the terror and despair both, and even when he remembered his father again . . . the terror and despair did not return” (“Barn” 10). This is the moment when the father “as principle of prohibited authority” (Zender 51) falls, and it is also a tragic moment for Sarty because he finds himself not having a strong father, either virtuous or evil, to whom he can yield.13 Therefore, the final entry into the woods can be interpreted not as positive but as tragic, a reminiscence of the fate of Quentin Compson, who, perceiving the powerlessness of the father, cannot help but drown himself in the river. Sarty’s cry after his father’s death sounds like a parting elegy to a weak father: “Father. My father, he thought. ‘He was brave!’ He cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: ‘He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!’” (“Barn” 24).14 Sarty’s feeble “whisper” bertrays his consciousness of his father’s weakness, which the son would rather ignore.
22Ike’s rejection of his grandfather is intended to demonstrate alienation from his vice, but “The Bear” insinuates that Ike is like him in craving spiritual power. Comparing Bayard Sartoris in “An Odor of Verbena” to Ike helps us understand why Ike’s strategy of using Christian confession is connected to his will to power. Because Bayard is a member of the celebrated family in Jefferson, the Snopes, other people in the town expect him to take vengeance against Ben Redmond, who killed Bayard’s father, Colonel Sartoris. However, Bayard goes to Redmond’s office without a gun, and he allows Redmond to leave the town alive against the expectations of the others and Bayard’s stepmother, Drusilla. Bayard ends the bloody chain of killing that was deemed a sublime tradition of the South, the tradition that Drusilla mentions when handing her gun for killing Redmond to Bayard: “‘How beautiful you are: do you know it? How beautiful: young, to be permitted to kill, to be permitted vengeance, to take into your bare hands the fire of heaven that cast down Lucifer’” (“An Odor” 238). Bayard vacillates with regard to his plan—bound to disappoint the others, who never doubted the justice of vengeance—but in the moment of decision, he never employs a confessional narrative as Ike does or Christianity in his own fashion, as when Drusilla refers to her gun as “an attribute only of God’s” (237). The difference between Ike and Bayard is that Bayard does not desire authoritative power, but rather freedom from the leverage of his noble family. While he smells the odor of the verbena in Drusilla’s room, he never submits to the noblesse oblige of the Sartorises; Ike expresses disgust toward his grandfather, but Ike is not outside of his grandfather’s sway.
- 15 Richard Godden, albeit briefly, mentions the dog Old Moses within the frame of labor. Different fro (...)
23Ike admits that his grandfather’s vicious streak also runs through him, recognizing that in his escape “he was taking with him more of that evil and unregenerate old man” who got a child from his black daughter and dismissed her “because she was of an inferior race” (Moses 281). He cannot deny the fact that he inherits the cursed strain of his grandfather—a circumstance that is reminiscent of Faulkner’s attitude toward Mississippi, “[l]oving all of it even while he had to hate some of it because he knows now that you dont love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults” (Essays 42-43). Despite hate and faults, Ike loves and embraces his destiny as the grandson of Old Carothers. Ike, who attempts to assume Moses’ role in the emancipation of his black relatives, does not leave hope for the next generation. In this respect, his figure might be foreshadowed in “Was,” in the figure of the comical dog named Old Moses,15 that “[wore] most of the crate [of the fox] around his neck until Uncle Buddy kicked it off of him” (Moses 28). That dog does not obtain the object he aims at and remains locked in the crate of self-consciousness. Nevertheless, the confined innocent life might be snugger than the open, relentless life that Sarty must go through to survive. A comparison of the two characters, Ike and Sarty, shows that a strong father figure, even if revolting, is the integral foundation of the self in the defeated South.