Original scientific paper

Go down, Moses: subversion and beyond

Sonja Bašić

Abstract

In the effort to redefine the place of "Go Down, Moses" in Faulkner's oeuvre the author reconsiders the boundaries between the novels assigned to Faulkner's 'major phase', stretching by more or less common consent from 1929 to 1942. She argues that Faulkner's experimentation is always juxtapositional, his narrative strategy combining two contrasted tendencies: the figural and the parodic. Although present in all Faulkner's novels, this doubleness, however, also allows her to make significant distinctions or groupings within the major period where "Absalom, Absalom!" should be seen as the great divide between the first figural group and the second 'parodic' group. She selects three novels from this second group: "The Wild
Palms", "The Hamlet" and "Go Down, Moses", stressing their shared hybridity of genre and structure, singling out "The Hamlet" as the culminating point. This 'redrawing of boundaries' finally allows her to place "Go Down, Moses" as another divide, both inside and outside the major phase, introducing the long late period in which 'Faulkner descends from the highest spheres of genius into a strata inhabited by great, even very great but only human writers.' And where "Go Down, Moses" stands wavering, in a somewhat precarious balance between the two spheres, partaking of both: a flawed work but indisputably still the work of a master.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

117964

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/117964

Publication date:

2.4.2001.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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