Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" (review)

At its best, Thadious Davis's new book reconfigures the portent of William Faulkner's most racially invested novel, Go Down, Moses. Her project is to make us see, at the novel's center, not the perplexed, guilt-ridden, white Ike McCaslin—generally recognized as the focal intelligence of the book—but rather the game-playing, black (and apparently minor) figure, Tomey's Turl. "I have approached Tomey's Turl," Davis writes, "from the legal perspective of his being a righted and willful black subject" (8). The doubly disowned son and grandson of Old Carothers McCaslin, Turl appears as a racial ground zero, a figure of maximal damage, minimal agency. So previous Faulkner commentary has tended to read him. By contrast, in "righting" Turl's unrightedness, Davis labors to grant him a "will" (the will to self-directed movement and to sexual fulfillment) that not only reverses the dominant and deforming "will" of Old Carothers, but reveals black resistance itself as answering to the collective (and legalized) abuse that American slavery enjoined upon its black population for several centuries.

In making her case, Davis combs through American legal history, showing property itself to be not "things" but rather "rights in and to things" (79), rights systemically denied to Blacks. This book is energized by a disciplined anger directed more at the racial injustice disfiguring American history than at Faulkner's representation of it. She grants "the metaphoric power of his language struggling with an interrogation of what it means to be white" (208), even as she compellingly pressures Go Down, Moses to reveal, as the figure in its carpet, a series of "repercussive" reconfigurations of Tomey's Turl's drama. Lucas Beauchamp's struggles, Rider's anguished moves, Butch Beauchamp's criminal trajectory—all these racially charged turnings re-enact Turl's insistence on "rightedness" in the face of a system declaring him unrighted. Davis persuasively reads Ike McCaslin's career as shaped by this grounding agon: "The figure of Tomey's Turl presides over Ike's development, over his construction of his grandfather and his paternal heritage, over his relation to land, property, and succession" (38).

Such reconfiguration of the resonance of race in Go Down, Moses is the good news. The bad news is that this study suffers from a reach in considerable excess of its grasp. Determined to produce a sort of magnum opus not just about this major Faulkner novel, not even just about the racial blight deforming American history, but also about the various domains of knowledge and activity pertinent to the contemporary critical enterprise, Davis writes:

The messy but dynamic entanglements of slavery and law, property and rights, power and domination, race and gender, games and sport, ideologies and philosophies, literature and history, memory and imagination, experiential realities and imaginative projection, social constructions and cultural phenomena have all necessarily informed and engaged my thinking about this subject.

(3)

Either an inner voice or someone whom she trusted ought to have whispered to her: less is more. No one can effectively coordinate the discourses attaching to all the realms identified in that passage, and Davis's book pays a heavy price for trying to do so.

The price is of extrinsic materials briefly 'lassoed' into circulation but not transformed into argument. (This study is burdened with 624 footnotes, half of them inert because they are not pressed into synergistic relation with the claims animating the main text.) A sort of centrifugal traffic reigns instead—the text straining outward, hooking into extrinsic materials, but rarely effecting the centripetal countermove that would turn these materials into enlarging insight. No context of extra-Faulknerian citation is sustained long enough to bear fruit; the book is frustratingly dispersive. Davis seems unable to resist the prospect of corroborative authority promised by her wealth of citation, but such promises deliver only on condition that they be made germane to the argument at hand...