"Go Down, Moses" and Go Down, Moses

NOTES 'GO DOWN, MOSES" AND GO DOWN, MOSES John L. Selzer The Pennsylvania State University Over forty years have passed since the publication of William Faulkner 's story "Go Down, Moses," but readers are still divided over what to make of its protagonist. Some regard Gavin Stevens sympathetically: they see him as a man of "knowledge and integrity," a "'new' southerner, aware of his heritage but personally free from its corrupting forces";1 they consider him a cultivated "gentleman" who feels a "special responsibility for the Negroes" in the story,2 a man of "humane instincts" who serves as a "vehicle for Faulkner's belief in the redemptive potential, floundering though it may be, of education and idealism."3 But others regard Stevens as a much less attractive character. They consider him an "uncompromising outsider to the Negro way of life" who "completely fails to understand, or seriously to affect, the situation" around him,4 a man who "is continually surprised and continually exasperated by the Negroes."5 In short, critics seem unable to decide if Stevens is a man like Ike McCaslin who, despite serious failings, honestly tries in Go Down, Moses to expiate the sins of his fathers or if Stevens more like the book's Roth Edmonds, a morally unregenerate exploiter who, despite certain better instincts, can only repeat those sins. Responses to Stevens depend largely on whether readers approach "Go Down, Moses" as a self-contained short story or as the conclusion to a novel with the same title. Certainly if "Go Down, Moses" is considered as an autonomous short story, if Gavin Stevens' actions are interpreted without reference to the other six stories that precede it in Go Down, Moses, he comes off very well. After all, when Molly Beauchamp asks him to help her "find my boy," her criminal grandson Samuel Beauchamp who had escaped Jefferson's jail six years before to start "a business called numbers" in Chicago, Stevens responds without hesitating and without doubting her intuitive sense that something threatens Samuel.6 When Stevens learns from the town's newspaper editor that Samuel is to be electrocuted that night for murdering a Chicago policeman , Stevens arranges to protect Molly from the news of the crime and execution and to have Samuel's body returned to Jefferson for burial. Stevens even underwrites the cost of the casket, its transportation, flowers , and the other funeral expenses; to raise the necessary money he first solicits Wilmoth, the newspaper editor, and the other white townspeople and then silently makes up the balance himself. Next, Stevens attempts 90Notes to comfort Molly by going to see her at Miss Worsham's musty, unpainted house at the edge of town. Finally, he joins the funeral procession itself when Samuel's body is driven to the gravesite. Thus, even though Stevens cannot comprehend or alleviate Molly's grief, it is easy to understand why many readers have seen him as a sympathetic man of ideals, as a responsible gentleman, as a "new southerner," even as the "conscience of the white South."7 However, "Go Down, Moses" cannot be read responsibly outside the contex of the other stories of Go Down, Moses. True, a number of scholars have argued explicitly against the unity of Go Down, Moses. Marvin Klotz, for example, has argued that the book is not an artistic whole and that its final story "has nothing to do" with the others— "nothing to do with the incest of old L. Q. C. McCaslin, the renunciation of Ike, or the South's 'injustice to the Negro.'"8 His point is reinforced by the many critics who examine particular stories in Go Down, Moses, especially "The Bear," in isolation from the others. In the past two decades as scholars have catalogued Faulkner's own statements about the book and have noted more and more conclusively the interrelationships among the parts of the novel, a consensus has emerged that Go Down, Moses is indeed a unified and indivisible whole. Faulkner himself insisted that "'The Bear' was part of a novel. That novel . . . happened to be composed of more or less complete stories, but it was held together by one family, the Negro...