The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Faulkner · a novel in seven parts · Random House, 1942 · scored as one work, the seven parts in their published order, on Faulkner’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A novel of linked parts; family chronicle, wilderness initiation and elegy, with farce at its two comic edges
Mythos
The house of bondage and Pharaoh’s house; the son sold into Egypt; the old god of the woods and its priest; the blood rite of the first kill; the patriarch’s sin visited on the generations; the heir who becomes a carpenter
Phase
From the first decades of the nineteenth century to about 1940, told out of order: 1859 first, the ledgers and the repudiation of 1888 in the longest part, an old man near eighty at the end
Presentation
Fiction; seven parts that can each be read alone, in the third person, with the ledger entries set into the fourth section of “The Bear” as entries, in their writers’ own spelling
Register
From the farce of a chase and a poker hand to the long deferred period of an argument, and from a deputy’s talk at supper to an old man’s elegy in a tent in the rain
Scale
One family over five generations, its white and Black lines one blood; a plantation, a commissary, the big woods and a hunting camp; one county, with a court, a sheriff’s office and an execution in another state
Governing Proposition
Seven parts, several of them first printed as magazine stories and all recast around one family, tell the McCaslins, white and Black, from old Carothers McCaslin’s purchases of slaves to an execution in Illinois about 1940. At their centre a boy reads his family’s commissary ledgers and learns what his grandfather did; at twenty-one he gives up the land. The wager of the book is that the deed to the land and the deed to people are one title, written in the same ledger, and that a white heir’s renunciation does not undo that inheritance but only moves it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens on Isaac McCaslin, and sets him in a phrase: “uncle to half a county and father to no one”. Then it goes back before his birth, to 1859, and to farce. Two old men are chased round a plantation; a poker hand is played in which a slave woman is the stake, with Tomey’s Turl dealing, and a hand of cards is held face down. Nothing in “Was” tells the reader who Turl is. The comedy is exact, and it is the comedy of men who will not read their own ledger.
Random House published the book in New York in 1942. Its first title page read Go Down, Moses and Other Stories; later printings dropped the last three words. Several of its parts had begun as magazine stories between 1935 and 1942, and they were revised for the book and recast around the McCaslin family. The book is dedicated to Caroline Barr, who raised Faulkner. It is scored here as one work: the seven parts in their published order, “Was”, “The Fire and the Hearth”, “Pantaloon in Black”, “The Old People”, “The Bear”, “Delta Autumn” and “Go Down, Moses”, with “The Bear” in its five sections, the fourth included.
The span of story time runs from old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin’s purchases of slaves in the first decades of the nineteenth century to about 1940. The genealogy that binds the parts is told by none of them. The white line runs down through the McCaslins and the Edmondses; the Black line, the same blood, runs through Tomey’s Turl and his children. The reader assembles it across the parts and out of order, as Isaac will, from entries.
Movement II
Lucas Beauchamp is the one Black life at the book’s centre that is not seen mostly from outside. “The Fire and the Hearth” sets him in two times: in the present, hunting buried gold with a salesman’s divining machine, a farce that runs longer than it needs to; and in the remembered past, against Zack Edmonds over Molly, with a razor and a cartridge that misfires. The real matter of the part is the second, and it is the book’s first sight of what the white and Black lines owe each other and will not say.
“Pantaloon in Black” has no McCaslin in it beyond the land. Rider grieves: he shovels a grave alone, he lifts at the mill a log that two men could not lift, and he goes on to the end the part gives him. Then the part cuts, once, to a deputy talking to his wife at supper, telling her in his own terms that such people do not feel as people do, and reporting how Rider sat in the cell saying he could not stop thinking.
The cut carries the part. The reader has been inside the grief, and now hears it read from the white sheriff’s office as proof that there was no grief to read. The part is the book’s blindness in small, and it keeps its place on that ground, though it is the loosest of the seven in its tie to the family, and its join shows.
Movement III
The wilderness half begins with a boy and a buck. Sam Fathers, son of a Chickasaw chief and a slave woman, teaches Isaac the woods; when the boy kills his first buck, its blood is marked on his face. The land itself was sold by Ikkemotubbe, and Sam is his son: the dispossession of the Chickasaw lies under the McCaslin title as the bondage of the slaves lies in it.
In “The Bear” the boy leaves the gun, then the watch and the compass, to be seen by the old bear of the woods, and sees it. The bear is the old god of the land and Sam Fathers its priest. The hunt that follows ends with Lion, the hound, at the bear’s throat and Boon Hogganbeck’s knife in it; Lion, the instrument, destroys what it serves. Sam Fathers dies the same day and is buried on a platform.
At the end of “The Bear” the lumber company’s train is in the woods: the fall of the old order, set in iron. The heights of the book are here, in the plain prose of the hunting sections, and they are the heights of a world the reader is shown at the moment of its sale.
Movement IV
Between the death of the bear and the train comes the fourth section, the longest single section of the book, an unbroken block. Isaac at sixteen reads by lamplight in the commissary the ledgers in the brothers’ own hand and spelling, and the entries are set into the novel as entries. From them he works out what old Carothers did: that the slave Tomasina was his daughter, that her son by him was his son and grandson, and that the woman Eunice walked into the creek on a Christmas day.
At twenty-one, in 1888, Isaac gives up the land, and argues with his cousin McCaslin Edmonds why. The argument goes round its circle more than once, and the prose defers its periods past what the argument earns: this is the book’s plateau, and its form is the form of an argument that cannot reach a period. The ledgers keep yielding in the meantime: the thousand-dollar legacy to Tomey’s Turl that Isaac and the brothers try to pay out to his children, and the silver cup filled with coins that turns into IOUs and copper.
Isaac becomes a carpenter by choice, in imitation of the Nazarene. He keeps no land and has no son. He believes that by refusing the inheritance he has stepped out of it, and the book lets him believe it for one part longer.
Movement V
“Delta Autumn” brings Isaac back to the woods near eighty, with Roth Edmonds and the hunting party, in a tent in the rain. A young woman comes to the tent with a child, Roth’s, and she is of Tomey’s Turl’s line: the same blood has returned. The old man gives the child a hunting horn and tells her to go North and marry a man of her own race. She asks him whether he has forgotten all he ever knew about love.
The man who gave up the land has repeated old Carothers’s refusal in a gentler voice. That is the disclosure at its full height: the book does not let its hero’s virtue stand as a solution, and turns its outside view of the Black lives at its centre on the white hero, as his failure. Renunciation has not undone the inheritance; it has only moved it.
The last part takes its title from the spiritual. Molly Beauchamp’s grandson has been executed in Illinois, and she keens that Roth Edmonds sold her Benjamin into Egypt. The white family becomes Pharaoh’s house, and the whole book the house of bondage. The body is brought home on the train to a family that the white town cannot see as one. The deed to the land and the deed to people were one title, and the book ends where the ledger does, with a debt.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder here than on Faulkner’s single-action novels, because the book was assembled and the joins show. “Pantaloon in Black” has no McCaslin in it beyond the land, and a reader can ask what it adds: it keeps its place as the one part that gives a Black man’s grief from inside and then from the white sheriff’s office, the book’s blindness in small. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: in “The Fire and the Hearth” the gold hunt and the salesman’s divining machine run as farce longer than the part’s real matter requires, and the fourth section of “The Bear” goes round its argument more than once. The core sequence, ledger to wilderness to the tent to the coffin on the train, is required in every link.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the deed to the land and the deed to people are one title, written in the same ledger; a white family’s history is a Black family’s history it will not name; and renunciation does not undo an inheritance but only moves it. It is built in steps. Isaac at sixteen reads the ledgers and works out what old Carothers did, and at twenty-one he gives up the land. Then “Delta Autumn” takes the repudiation apart: the old man tells a descendant of his family’s Black line to go North and marry a man of her own race, and repeats his grandfather’s refusal in a gentler voice. Held below the top because the Black lives at the centre, Lucas apart, are seen mostly from outside.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The wilderness kind: the boy who leaves the gun, then the watch and the compass, to be seen by the bear, and sees it; the bear’s death with Lion at its throat and Boon Hogganbeck’s knife; Sam Fathers dying the same day, and his burial on a platform. The grief kind: Rider shovelling a grave alone and lifting at the mill a log that two men could not, and, in the deputy’s report, sitting in the cell saying he cannot stop thinking. “Delta Autumn” rises to a dreadful height in the woman’s question to the old man, whether he has forgotten all he knew of love. Held below 9.0 because “Was” and much of “The Fire and the Hearth” are comic and earthbound by design, and the argument of the fourth section is a plateau.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The title is the spiritual’s call to Pharaoh, and the last part makes it literal: Molly Beauchamp, keening that Roth Edmonds sold her Benjamin into Egypt, turns the white family into Pharaoh’s house and her grandson’s executed body into the son sold into bondage, and the whole book becomes the house of bondage. The wilderness carries a second structure that bears load: the bear as the old god of the land, Sam Fathers, son of a Chickasaw chief and a slave woman, as its priest, the blood of the first buck marked on the boy’s face, Lion as the instrument that destroys what it serves, and the lumber company’s train as the fall. Isaac becomes a carpenter in imitation of the Nazarene. All of it stays particular: a commissary, a mule, a hound named Lion.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The departure is twofold. In form: a novel made of parts that also stand alone, set in no single time, with a genealogy the reader assembles across parts out of order, and a section that breaks the novel’s surface with documents in their own hand. In matter: the plantation inheritance read from its ledger by a white Southern writer in 1942, the heir’s guilt shown and his renunciation shown to fail. The stake was paid: the book was sold as “and Other Stories”, sold modestly, and was read for decades mainly through “The Bear” as a hunting story. Held near the gate because Faulkner had made his largest swerves already, and the book of linked stories had its precedents in Winesburg, Ohio and Dubliners: this is a turn within a developed method more than a new one.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. A family that cannot name its own members is told in pieces that do not name each other. “Was” gives the comic surface of 1859, a poker hand played for a slave woman with Tomey’s Turl dealing, without telling who Turl is; the ledger in “The Bear” tells it, long after; “Delta Autumn” makes the same blood return in a tent; the last part brings a body home to a family the white town cannot see as one. The reader learns the genealogy as Isaac does, by reading entries out of order: the book’s form is the ledger. The fourth section, an unbroken block, is the form of an argument that cannot reach a period. Held below 9.0 because “Pantaloon” and the farce of “The Fire and the Hearth” still read as stories brought in.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, not promise: eighty years of reading that have turned the book over without exhausting it. For a generation “The Bear” was read as a story of initiation in the wilderness and anthologised often without its fourth section; later readings put the ledger and “Delta Autumn” at the centre and found a book about race and property that the earlier reading had missed in plain sight. Both readings stand in the text. The genealogy keeps yielding: the date of Eunice’s death set against Tomasina’s childbed; the thousand-dollar legacy to Tomey’s Turl that Isaac and the brothers try to pay out to his children; the silver cup filled with coins that turns into IOUs and copper. The formal depth is equal: how the farce of “Was” keeps a crime out of sight is still being drawn.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the American novel and the composite novel of linked parts. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what the American novel could do with the plantation past, making a ledger the novel’s source document and testing the white heir’s repudiation until it fails, and the composite novel gained in it one of its most cited models. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “The Bear” became one of the most taught and anthologised American fictions of the century and shaped the wilderness and hunting narrative after it, while the reach of the book as a book is narrower, and partly hard to separate from Faulkner’s whole work, for which the Nobel Prize of 1950 was given. Together they sit above the gate and below the force of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed over eighty-four years. Form: the text is whole and in print without break, fixed in the Library of America text; the only charge is the first title page’s “and Other Stories”, which misled readers for a time and is long gone. Presence: continuous, in American literature courses, with “The Bear” widely anthologised, and translated into the main languages. Its surface, the dialect and the language of a 1940s Mississippi sheriff’s office, is fixed to its moment by intention, and is part of what the book shows. Held a tenth under the widest figure because the book as a whole is read below Faulkner’s best-known novels, and much of its presence is “The Bear” alone.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Faulkner’s command is at full stretch and in several instruments. The comic narrative of “Was”, the chase, the poker game, the hand of cards held face down, is as exact as anything he wrote. The turn in “Pantaloon in Black” from Rider’s consciousness to the deputy’s talk at supper is a single cut that carries the part. The opening of “Was” sets Isaac in one phrase: “uncle to half a county and father to no one”. The case against a higher mark is the fourth section of “The Bear”: periods deferred past what the argument earns, parenthesis nested in parenthesis, and prose that repeats the matter of the ledger it follows. The dialect is rendered with care, some of it broad. The making is load-bearing in the hunting sections, in “Pantaloon” and in “Delta Autumn”.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: “Was”, a farce in which a slave woman is a stake at poker and two old men are chased round a plantation, and “Delta Autumn”, an elegy in a tent in the rain. One law governs both: the land and the blood are one inheritance, and every white McCaslin act, the bet, the chase, the gift, the refusal, is a move in the ledger. “Was” is the ledger seen as comedy by men who will not read it; “Delta Autumn” is the ledger come due. “Pantaloon in Black” obeys the same law from outside the family: the land is still McCaslin and Edmonds land, and the law is the white sheriff’s. Charged a step: the magazine origin of “The Fire and the Hearth” leaves its tone wider than the rest.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders, integrated rather than listed. The family over five generations, its white and Black lines one blood. Slavery and its afterlife in tenancy, debt and the commissary. The land as property and as wilderness, and its destruction by the lumber company and the railroad. The Chickasaw dispossession: Ikkemotubbe sold the land, and Sam Fathers is his son. The law: the courts, the sheriff, an execution in Illinois. The sacred: the Nazarene, Egypt, the bear’s standing as a god of the woods. Consciousness, from a boy of ten to an old man near eighty. The natural order, in the seasons of the hunt. All route through the ledger and the woods. Held at 9.0 because its society is one county, and the town and the state enter only at the edges.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, then The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.1. A disclosure that land and people are one title in one ledger, tested against the book’s own hero until his renunciation fails; a Pharaoh structure enacted in the last part and a wilderness rite that bears the weight of a life; eighty years of reading that moved the book’s centre from the hunt to the ledger without exhausting either.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: the core sequence is required in every link, but the book was assembled and the joins show, in the farce of the gold hunt and in a fourth section that goes round its argument more than once. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.6: a real departure in form and matter, with its cost paid, but a turn within a method Faulkner had already made.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by two tenths and a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, published by Random House, New York, in 1942, its first title page reading Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. It is scored as one work: the seven parts in their published order, “Was”, “The Fire and the Hearth”, “Pantaloon in Black”, “The Old People”, “The Bear”, “Delta Autumn” and “Go Down, Moses”, with “The Bear” in its five sections, the fourth included. The magazine stories from which several parts began, printed between 1935 and 1942, are context and are not scored. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, the ledger entries among them, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the phrase from the opening of “Was”. Winesburg, Ohio and Dubliners are named as precedents and Faulkner’s other novels as the measure of his reach; neither is part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the year and the occasion of the change of title, the length in pages, the number of numbered sections in the other parts, the names of the editors of the corrected text, the Chickasaw words of Sam Fathers’s salute, the owner from whom Rider rents, the small inconsistencies of ages and years within the book, and the route of the book’s influence on later fiction of the South and of Black family history, are not given. Citations are by part, and within “The Bear” by section.