What To Do About Evil

Mark Lucas and I met today to discuss Go Down, Moses at a popular Danville coffee shop.  We spent over an hour discussing the plot and characters of this Faulkner novel.

He shared with me a very interesting account of words delivered by William Faulkner at the University of Virginia.  A questioner asked him about human responses to evil in the world.  He replied that he believed there were three.  The first response is to throw one's hands in the air and in despair determine that there is nothing that can be done.  The second stance is to recognize the evil and try to remove yourself from it.  The third attitude is to recognize the evil and work head on to change it.

In Go Down, Moses, the character Eunice embodies the first response.  When she discovers that the slave holder who has bought her and fathered her daughter has now raped his own child leaving her pregnant,  she walks into the stream and drowns herself.  She is overcome with grief but sees nothing to do but surrender.

On the other hand, the ostensible hero of the book Isaac McCasslin chooses the second course of action. He recognizes the evil and racism of the plantation system which he has inherited.  But, rather than addressing the issues, he chooses to repudiate his inheritance and instead to live in town while letting his cousin take over the family farm and its dehumanizing commerce.

Most interesting in the novel is that there is no character who recognizes the evil and tries to change it.  There is no Moses who demands that the people be released.  There are only flawed and broken folk trapped by the evil of a history of ownership and slavery.  But no character stands up and identifies the warped character of their culture and demands its change.

It is almost as if Faulkner leaves that task to his readers.  None of the characters in his book possess the moral vision and courage that is necessary to bring change.  They are ensnared and wait for some next generation, some Joshua to come and lead them into the land of promise.

It is as if Faulkner understood that the problems of racism were so deep that they would not be resolved in his generation.  He hoped as we still do for someone to come with the moral courage to bring change.