The theme of alienation within Go Down, Moses permeates through the different McCaslin generations, yet always seems to revolve around the production of a deed, card, paper, or some sort of title. Yet Faulkner is somewhat guarded with his use of documentation, vacillating between documents which carry much symbolic weight and others which provide empty gestures toward meaning. This post offers a few different examples of alienation within Go Down, Moses.
Chronologically, much of the lineage rests on the card games Uncle Buck and Buddy play against Mr. Hubert. This game offers an abstraction by negotiating the exchange of human bodies on the order of ten cards. There is no inherent value in “Possible Strait against three Treys in sigt Not called” but the characters themselves recognize and imbue value onto this “Possible Strait” (GDM, 259).
In some ways the crux of the story seems to rest on Isaac’s disavowal of the purchase of the land. The abstraction of land ownership via a deed, Isaac concludes, should be utterly incomprehensible (indeed, much of the bear exposes the wilderness still inherent in the area, deed or no deed). Yet the deed preempts the clear-cutting and privatization of the forest. With the alienation of the land through the concept of ownership comes Isaac’s refusal of his inheritance. His inheritance offers an example of an empty documentary symbol (both figuratively and also literally as the single silver cup is emptied and instead filled with IOUs).
Lucas’ obsession with the buried money within “The Fire and the Hearth” is fuelled not by monetary value, but by recovering some artifact of the past and connection to Lucas’ lineage. Lucas need not worry about money as he has become more wealthy than even Edmonds, the white inheritor of the McCaslin property. Yet Lucas shows his distrust of this monetary value in his deposit interaction with the white man who tells him there is too much money to keep under a break in his hearth. Lucas asks “Will the bank keep it for a black the man same as for a white?” and once assured Lucas asks not for his money but “my paper” (106). This distrust is juxtaposed to the original McCaslin’s metal dispatch box which contains coins dated from nearly his time that Lucas does keep under a break in his hearth. The warmth seems to emit out from this box with flames which were “possessing a slow, deep solidity of heat, a condensation of the two years during which the fire had burned constantly above it, a condensation not of fire but of time, as though not fire’s dying and not even water would cool it but only time would” (50-51).
The final two images of alienation both carry much symbolic and practical weight and revolve around Molly. Once Lucas becomes hopelessly obsessed with finding the buried money, Molly walks to Edmonds’ in order to ask for a divorce. The legal divorce paper, while being merely a legal document separating her and Lucas, stands for her autonomy and own self-will despite everyone attempting to shield her frail self from the harsh reality. This is seconded in the final pages of the novel when Molly insists that Samuel’s death be recorded in the newspaper. While Gail Stevens spends the entire length of “Go Down, Moses” trying to keep the story of Samuel’s execution out of the papers, Molly refuses any attempts at paternalism and recognizes the power and implications behind the existence of a printed document, just as, in Absalom, Absalom!, Judith recognizes this power when she gives Bon’s letter to Quentin’s grandmother.
