Bear, Man, And Black: Hunting the Hidden in Faulkner's Big Woods (William Faulkner) (Critical Essay‪)‬

I. Faulkner's "big woods" (GDM 257) might better be called "small," such is the rate of their contraction from the moment of the Bear's death in December 1883. By June 1885, Major de Spain has sold the timber rights to a Memphis lumber company (234), thereby translating common-land use rights, common at least for the purposes of hunting, (1) into property rights. Post-sale, extant forestation exists as a commodity about to happen, whose residual form, circa 1942, will be that of a memorial park, "reserved" (243) and marked to protect the resting place of Sam Fathers and Old Ben's paw (235). It might be objected that I have telescoped a gradual process, seeing 1942 all too imminently in 1883. Yet the paratactic organization of Go Down, Moses (1942) sets disparate times side-by-side as a matter of course: parataxis involves propositions, phrases, or clauses that have been placed in sequence without any grammatical indication of their coordination or subordination to one another. The structure of Go Down, Moses may usefully be spoken of as paratactic insofar as any coordination of its parts depends upon inferences cast across pauses and changes in narrative direction, instigated by the gaps between the stories themselves. To experience temporal parataxis (a compounding of deja vu with the uncanny) is to reach for an explanatory focus, though the nature of the form may render such explanations elusive, since, in Adorno's phrase, the paratactical tends "inherently [to] elude subsumption under ideas" (134).