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Faulkner: Week 2

Faulkner: Week 2. Options!. Option 1: Try to stay on track w/ the schedule Skip “ Pantaloon in Black” and “The Old People” Jump right in to “The Bear” today Option 2: Spend an extra week on Faulkner, drop the film and reading on the last week “ PiB ” and “The Old People” today

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Faulkner: Week 2

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  1. Faulkner: Week 2

  2. Options! • Option 1: Try to stay on track w/ the schedule • Skip “Pantaloon in Black” and “The Old People” • Jump right in to “The Bear” today • Option 2: Spend an extra week on Faulkner, drop the film and reading on the last week • “PiB” and “The Old People” today • “The Bear” on Thurs

  3. Option 1: • Here is a list of some of the main “lines of inquiry” that we have been tracing through this text so far: • Domesticity & Race (gender) • The hunt (masculinity) • Marriage, Family Relations (lineage) • History of slavery (Johnson) • Shifting “meaning” of race (O&W) • Question of property/the land (Isaac’s repudiation) • In groups, discuss how your “line of inquiry” can be extended into a discussion of “Pantaloon in Black.” Find quotes to open up the conversation and formulate discussion questions for the larger group. Discuss the issues amongst yourself.

  4. Back to “the hunt” “He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man’s hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document: - of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; bigger than Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better; older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and who knew better; older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and the deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter; - the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quite and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies…” (184).

  5. Final Questions for “The Bear” • What is the connection drawn, in this story, between “the hunt” for Old Ben and the middle part of the story about Ike’s reading of the ledger and his argument with Cass? • What connections are drawn between the two which also resonates out to the earlier stories (all “hunts” in themselves) and the later story, particularly “Delta Autumn”?

  6. Answer #1: History/storytelling • “the best of all talking… listening” • ongoing ritual mythmaking in the South • The ledgers contain a history only evident in the “silences” • Bearing witness to Johnson’s “epistemological violence”

  7. Answer #2: Masculinity • The hunt is a ritual of masculinity/manhood • McCastlin genealogy is about negotiating patriarchal lineage and race in the name of the distribution of property • Both are tied into questions of fatherhood and inheritance

  8. Answer #3: Wilderness • The woods as a school/Old Ben as Ike’s “alma mater” • Woods as a principle of transcendence for masculine identity • Wilderness also makes property a fiction. Or does it?

  9. Back to “The Bear” • I’ve picked out a few passages for close examination: • Fonsiba and her husband (262-268) • Issac’s repudiation (270-273) • Issac on war (275-278) • Issac and his wife (297-301) • How do we extend our current lines of inquiry with the issues and topics brought up in these passages? • What is GDM arguing about the relation between these issues?

  10. Delta Autumn “That’s right. Go back North. Marry: a man your own race. That’s the only salvation for you – for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait. Marry a black man. You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it’s revenge you want. Then you will forget all this, forget it ever happened, that he ever existed-” until he could stop it at last and did, sitting there in his huddle of blankets during the instant when, without moving at all, she blazed silently down at him. Then that was gone too. She stood in the gleaming and still dripping slicker, looking quietly down at him from under the sodden hat. “Old Man,” she said, “have you lives so long and forgotten so much that you don’t remember anything you every knew or felt or even heard about love?” (346).

  11. Delta Autumn

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