Moby Bear: Thematic and Structural Concordances between William Faulkner's "The Bear" and

Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"

Author(s): Rick Wallach
Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Fall, 1997), pp. 43-54
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078195 .
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Moby Bear: Thematic and
Structural Concordances
Between William Faulkner s
"The Bear" and Herman
Melville's Moby Dick

byRickWallach
Numerous critics have noted similaritiezs between Faulkner's "The Bear"

and Moby Dick. Considering how much discussion and investigation the

novella has always elicited, though, it is surprising that the thematic and

structural affinities between the two works, which so many have remarked

have never been in detail. Such a of Melville's

upon, investigated comparison
Faulkner's story reveals that the later work the earlier one
epic with engages
in an intense intertextual dialogue. There are sufficient
points of engagement,

in fact, so that in keeping with the genealogical of "The Bear,"

emphasis
with all of the problematic relationships that its treatment of genealogy entails,
we may argue for Moby Dick the status of parent text to Faulkner's story, and

not to "The Bear" itself, but to the extended structure of its context, the
only
novel Go Down Moses, as well.
episodic
The claim of Melville's novel upon Faulkner's attention is well documented.

In interviews over three decades, he insisted that Moby Dick was among
given
a small group of "favorite books." As recorded by Meriwether and Millgate

(1980), these interviews include the University of Virginia student newspaper

(1931) and the New York Herald Tribune (1931 and 1948). Faulkner claims
that he read the novel to his the time he composed Go Down
daughter during
Moses (48), and restates his admiration forMoby Dick during his Japanese
 44 SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

tour (110) and later with Cynthia Greer (110). We therefore know that
Faulkner loved and admired Melville's masterpiece, but its imprint upon
"The Bear" is readily discernable regardless. For example, R.W.B. Lewis

mentions parallel themes and the significance of "the ironic co-existence" of

in both (307), and Guetti notes the "neat between the

opposites parallel"
of the tales (59), whereas Poirier invokes Melville in order to
plotting
contextualize Faulkner's tale historically (50).
Harold Bloom notes that Old Ben, "at once mythological and realistic, serves

something of the function of the noble synecdoche of Melville's great White

Whale, Dick" (1986, Bloom also an excellent
Moby frontispiece). supplies
to this In The Anxiety sets
critical approach "noble synecdoche." of Influence, he
forth six textual that alert a reader to the oedipal a
of poem
signals relationship
to its precursor. These signals, which he calls "revisionary ratios" (14), are
of composition whereby the later text appropriates and assimilates
strategies
the themes, or patterns of the earlier.1 Bloom
metaphors, rhythmical designed
his approach for a practical criticism of poetry. However, reading
to recognize

the operations of his strategies also seems eminently suitable for a poetics of

fiction, since offer not into textual but into the

they insights only parallelism,
of divergent between texts as well.
significance emphases
Because many critics have examined in detail the preoccupation of both

works with the and rituals of the hunt, we will our

archetypal myths begin
with what Bloom call Faulkner's "daemonization," or
enquiry might bypassing
of Melville's text, in order to express on his own terms the same mythological

archetypes. The hunt is no mere recreational exercise, nor is it even

significant
because it supplies food and other staples of life. "In its narrative
simply
form, Moby Dick fits the traditional literary form of the quest romance,"
writes Mclntosh. "It is a voyage or quest to a monster?the
James slay
White Whale; to explore a distant
place
or underworld in search of a treasure

or secret; and to use that secret to redeem common existence?in the book's

terms to restore Adam' (Ch. 7) and his many descendants to their

'antique

1 concern the poet's

Three of these strategies?"kenosis," "askesis" and "apophrades"?vaguely

personal sense of relation to a predecessor rather than with the text itself, are often difficult to
distinguish from each other, and operate like metaphysical principles rather than analytical
propositions. The others are "clinamen," or misreading, whereby a poet "clears textual space"
for him or herself; "tessera," or "completion and antithesis," whereby a poet directly contradicts
or extends the themes of a precursor text in a new way, and "daemonization," whereby the
later work seems to bypass its precursor by addressing itself directly to the same archetypal

symbols or circumstances that the earlier text does (14-15).

MOBY BEAR 45

rights in a heartless universe" (29). As myth, the hunt combines the elemental
drives for food and shelter with religious and psychological imperatives of

quest romance, so that food as an object is transformed from amere

biological
into a boon as well. As he sets out on the hunt, young
necessity spiritual
Isaac McCaslin is not yet aware that his own quest will enable him
someday
to transform a about his into a program for
shocking discovery genealogy
personal redemption.
Thus, the hunt becomes a way of life, a
multiply purposeful powerful
semiotic system that charges disparate activities with meaning, organizes
them to if arbitrary, relations, and even binds individuals
according logical,
toward a common purpose. The of the hunt, as has
myths Joseph Campbell
often described them, are energy and "There is
releasing directing signs.
no realistic on the Pequod made coherent relations among its
society by
characters," notes "The is unified the hunt
Rogin; Pequod symbolically, by
for the white whale" (107). For the racially and culturally polyglot
"Anacharsis Clootz deputation" of the Pequod, who would otherwise have
so little in common, the hunt coordinates the
including language, only
social body. the and mixed crew of Major de
Similarly, racially socially

Spain and General Compson's annual wilderness expedition is held together,

both physically and in terms of purpose, by the hunt. The culture of the
hunt is an intrinsic element of southern life, one which still serves the
ritual purpose of uniting the otherwise disjunct elements of southern society
at if brief, intervals:
regular,

northern know a called most southern

Many boys hobby hunting;
know as a way of life. is a masculine
boys hunting Hunting
democracy; the gentry like Major de Spain and General Compson
drink, and hunt with or beside Sam Fathers and Tennie's
play poker
both of whom have Negro blood. . . . it is rumored,
Jim, Faulkner,
had to be assured of good hunting inVirginia before he could settle
down as a writer in residence at 234).
Jefferson University (Utley,

Bloom argues that in the process of daemonization "The later poet opens
himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent that does not
poem
to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor"
belong
(15). By focusing
on the hunt for a bear?as opposed, for example, to some

legendarily immense ten-point buck?Faulkner reaches Melville into

beyond
an of almost unfathomable one far older than
archetypal myth antiquity, any
As relates, "in the high . . . and
whaling saga. Joseph Campbell Alps again
in Germany ... a series of caves the ceremonially skulls
containing arranged
46 SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

of a number of cave bears have been discovered, dating from the period (it is almost

incredible!) of Neanderthal Man" (339). These caves, also containing primitive

have been dated "to the .. which
. is
hunting implements, interglacial period
to say, not later than 75,000 B.C." (341). The function of hunting rituals, in

view, is to coordinate man the hunter with the natural

Campbell's rhythms
and of nature, as well as
epicycles spiritually biologically.
Nevertheless, if the hunt holds a mirror to the of time, it also
depths
mirrors the sanguine rule of force in nature.2 Despite the boon of self

knowledge which Ike obtains in the denouement of his personal quest

romance, he also recognizes the ferocity, if not of nature, then of a culture

envisioned as its dark simulacrum. the use of Biblical allusions,

Through

especially by invoking the visitation of the fathers' sins upon their children,
the extended narrative scheme of Go Down, Moses encompasses a
temporal
reach from the aforetime of native lore and Old Testament to the
prophecy,
disasters of recent history.

This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two
. . .where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very
generations
cracks . . .Chinese and and Jew,
of the sidewalks African and Aryan all
breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which

nor cares.... No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don't cry
for retribution, he thought: The people who have destroyed it will

accomplish its revenge (347).

The bitter and irremediable irony of Ike's double vision transfigures "The Bear"

in turn, from amere of romantic quest into amuch more complex

recapitulation
vision of the frangibility of cultural institutions and the human spirit alike.

Faulkner's rereading of the hunt quest's very archetypology suggests Bloom's

second "ratio." Tessera clarifies how Faulkner Melville's concerns

reinterprets
in terms of the terrible social and spiritual problems of the modern South:

"A poet his precursor, so the parent

antithetically 'completes' by reading
poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as
though the

precursor had failed to go far (14). Nowhere is the strategy of

enough"
Faulkner's of Moby Dick as apparent as in his treatment of racial
rereading

2
The concourse of man's culture and the natural world is a crucial theme in "The Bear" as well
as inMoby Dick. As Rogin observes, "the whales only become dangerous because of the aggression
of their enemies. Although whales are peaceable unless attacked, Melville does not divide the
cosmos between human violence and natural harmony. The human ferocity visited on whales
reduces men to nature; it does not separate them from it" (114).
MOBY BEAR 47

issues, and nowhere are those issues made apparent as as in the contrast
subtly
of Sam Fathers and Queequeeg. The who serves as
polynesian harpooner
Ishmael's mentor and friend, a of his tribe, abdicates
pureblooded prince
to be
his throne because he believes himself contaminated by contact with

Christians. that Christians are both 'miserable and wicked,'

"Discovering
he has decided to 'die a pagan' but has remained an exile," notes Carolyn
Porter. "Melville's ironic inversion here of the story Americans were
telling
themselves about the . . . the rhetorical at
savages presupposes strategy
work throughout his treatment of Queequeeg. He situates Ishmael and
a double process; as the alien familiar, the
Queequeeg together by grows
familiar grows alien" (83).

Faulkner, resorting to the specter of the intractable southern horror

by
of miscegenation, this strategy even more since Sam
redeploys ironically,
Fathers is, like the the son of an Indian but a
royal Queequeeg, King, by
black slave. In "The Bear," such corruption is as indelible as the
harpooner's
own of savagery, the elaborate tattoos written into his flesh. Sam's
badge
isolation, however, is equally caused by his deliberate physical separation
from white culture, and his psychological separation the
reconfigures
physical fastness of Melville's seas. Sam Father's then initiates, in
tutelage
turn, Ike's from a culture which ostracizes mixed breeds,
spiritual separation
and which progressively grows unfamiliar to the as the
boy
undiscriminating wilderness becomes familiar. Sam's instruction takes the
form of an initiation rite, a
preparation for the more earnest rituals of the
hunt itself.3 When later on the youth delves into the moral at
corruption
the heart of his civilization, southern culture has already become sufficiently
alien to him that he his own withdrawal from it, a withdrawal so
begins
complete that he permits his to terminate with himself.
physical lineage
The stain of polluted blood, originally physical, is transfigured into a
condition of the and a of cultural behavior, no
spirit generalized product
longer indelible but subject to a kind of redemption:

'Lydenberg reminds us that the entry into mythic time always entails a loosing of the bonds to
the mundane world, and that nature, deemed the ground of the real by western philosophy, is
really more akin to myth: "In this rite the established social relations dissolve; the artificial
ranks of Jefferson give way to more natural relations as Sam Fathers is automatically given the
lead. The bear and Sam are both taboo. . . .And Sam, the high priest, although alone admitted
to the arcana and trusted with the tutelage of the young neophyte, is yet outside the
pale, living
by himself, irrevocably differentiated from the others by his Negro blood, and yet kept pure
and attuned to nature by his royal Indian blood (283).
48 SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

To him it was as though

ledgers the
in their scarred cracked leather
were one one
lifted in
down
their sequence
bindings being by fading
and spread open on the desk or perhaps upon some
apocryphal Bench
or even Altar or before the Throne itself for a last and
perhaps perusal

contemplation and refreshment of the Allknowledgeable before the

yellowed pages and the brown thin ink inwhich was recorded the
and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution faded
injustice
back forever into the anonymous communal original dust_(250).

Thus, Faulkner's rereading of

Moby Dick is also made apparent in his

of the novella's posture as The so-called

handling bildungsroman. 'cetological
center' of Moby Dick, which accounts for much of its textual mass, depends
for its composition upon the availability of many other texts
concerning
whales. The sheer of possible data allows Ishmael to much of
freight spend
his narrative interrogating the science of cetology. The self-examination

proceeding from his study, meanwhile, enables him, from multiple, often

contradictory angles, to spend the years of the voyage himself in

reshaping
detail in full view of his narratee.

By contrast the wood lore of "The Bear" is an oral tradition rooted in native

American folkways, which Ike learns by example from the laconic Sam Fathers,
or from the even more reticent Boon. The McCaslin family ledgers of Chapter

IV, meanwhile, serve the same purposes that

structurally dilatory cetology
serves in Moby Dick. The allow for multiple perspectives,
ledgers provided by
their several writers, upon the mystery of Ike's lineage and culture, and the

books generate new meaning as well as Considered as an aspect of

ambiguity.
z.quest romance, Ike's discovery and exploration of his star-crossed family history
has been to a mythic descent-and-return like
compared epicycle. "Something
this fourth section is probably as close as contemporary fiction can come to that

moment in the traditional career of the hero when he descends into the dark

underworld, encounters his ancestry, and has a vision of the future," writes

Lewis (316). What dramatically links the fourth chapter to the rest of the
story "is the literal near-simultaneity of the death of Old Ben and the discovery

of mixed blood in the McCaslin clan. . . .The action in Section Four is made

by the experience preceding it: the ritual in the wilderness contains

possible
the decision in the
commissary" (314). Thus, the fourth chapter's separation
from the rest of a text which is often distinguished as its
"mythic"
or "ritual"

greater part, is more apparent than real.

Faulkner's clinamen, or of Moby Dick, upon his use of the

misreading pivots
of relinquishment. In "The Bear", notes Poirier, Faulkner's "effort
metaphor
MOBY BEAR 49

to the constituents of reality is called a word which

reshape 'relinquishment,'
also describes Isaac's rejection of his inheritance and his visionary possession
of the wilderness" (50). Ike's crucial decision to abjure of his
possession
inheritance also presents a ironized of Ishmael's
highly reinterpretation
to the drowned for whom "in landlessness alone
apostrophe Bulkington,
resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God" 23). In both
(Chapter
texts "landlessness" represents freedom, and in both, it entails
spiritual again,
a freedom achieved But as C.L.R. out, the Pequod
by flight. James points
represents the state-of-the-art of nineteenth-century industrial production,
and it is Ahab, not Bulkington, who rejects its economic system: "He says,
in effect, to hell with business and (1). The commitment of
money"
and his to their economic system, the industrial ethos
Bulkington shipmates
of the Pequod, destroys them because with the exception of Ishmael and

Starbuck cannot how Ahab has violated that ethos. The

they comprehend
his own industrial to become a
captain relinquishes stewardship deranged
Old Testament prophet, wreaking eye-for-an-eye vengeance for the loss of
his leg. Faulkner's of this state of landless' freedom Ike's
rereading interprets
of his property not as a deliberate of ownership,
relinquishment only rejection
but a turning away from the entire economic
system ownership and cultural

signifies. When Ike renounces his cotton farmer's patrimony?is there perhaps
some special irony in the mutual whiteness of whale and cotton??to become
a carpenter, with all ofthat trade's New Testament his decision
significance,
echoes and redeems Ahab s apostasy.
simultaneously
Faulkner also reinterprets Melville's paradoxical treatment of trust versus

blind obedience. When Boon sees Old Ben mauling his dog, like Ahab he
abdicates the rules of the hunt to attack Old Ben with his knife. The dog
Lion is Boon's Fedallah, his eyes and evil temperament him a
yellow lending
demoniac aura similar to that of Ahab's hidden Like his maritime
harpooner.
model, Boon personalizes his enemy. Thus, he reverts to a more
primitive
frame of mind wherein the bear was envisioned as a creature manlike
possessing
to be more as an than as prey of the hunt: "The
spirit, regarded adversary
fact that the bear, unlike other animals, walks on the sole of his foot with the
heel the ground and leaves a of heel, toe and arch like that
touching footprint
of a human being had a great
impact
on the mind of primitive man," notes

LaBudde. In certain Native American traditions, like the Algonkian, "good

sportsmanship dictated that the bear should be attacked only with weapons
such as the spear or axe," as Hallowell reports; "the bear was considered such
an unusual sort of animal, it was that the use of these was
thought weapons
the manly way of attacking the beast" (188). One may argue variously what
 50 SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

Boon's motives are?either to save or avenge the wounded

already mortally
Lion, or to avenge his own past humiliations the bear, which
by actually
resulted from his awful marksmanship.
Ahab s scars link him to the scarred, alienated Boon as well as to the faceless,

scarred white whale; just so, the whale's freight of old harpoons and crooked

jaw link him with Old Ben, with his deformed leg and freight of old bullets
and buckshot. Their common a common as
physiognomies portend destiny
well, for as Ahab's suicidal of the whale ruin to his and
pursuit brings ship
crew, Boon's assault on Old Ben ramifies into the deaths of Lion
impetuous
and Sam, and the dissolution of a generations-old camaraderie, the Compson
/ de Spain group. Hence, also describes a
hunting "relinquishment" shattering
disavowal of the viability of the hunt myth in the modern age, even of the
as Melville it. Ike's disavowal is, of course,
myth configured preceded by
Sam Fathers's all but deliberate withdrawal from life itself, which in turn
carries to a conclusion near-fatal illness and ritualistic
logical Queequeeg's
demand for a coffin-"canoe" in chapter 110 of Melville's epic.
Once more, Faulkner shifts the tragic focus of "The Bear" to a
crucially
more modern arena. The disaster of the Pequod entails neither the death of

Moby Dick nor the destruction of the seas, but the death of Old Ben
symbolically brings down the wilderness itself, victim of a consumptive system
like the one so elaborately detailed in the whale-processing of
chapters
Melville's novel. Yet by the time of Ike's maturity, this system has run

amok with an unselfconsciousness a property of Ahab, a

originally
destructiveness Melville to the system, but which "The
largely counterpoised
Bear" as its normative attribute.
deploys
Other parallels between the breakdown of the rules of the hunt and the
rules of modern which Faulkner reinterprets in his novella include
production
de that Old Ben "has come into my house and
Major Spain's complaint

destroyed my property, out of season too. He broke the rules" (205 ), a pathetic

fallacy de Spain employs to redouble his party's dedication to the hunt much
as Ahab the crew of the Pequod. Bear and man are
harangues moving together
out of the realm of natural into an arena of broken orders, where any
rhythms
may all equally. In contrast to Ishmael's
tragedy they perform together engulf

lengthy exposition of the processing and consumption of the whale, Faulkner

condenses the of Old Ben to Boon's collection of his crooked

appropriation
paw to use as Lion's grave marker (312). In a telling abdication of the ritual

of the hunt, the party neither nourishes itself on Old Ben nor
exigencies
returns some part of the slain animal to the master of its race.
symbolic spirit
Instead, in contrast to the gravity Ike's first buck (158), the great
attending
MOBY BEAR 51

bear is left lying around for the voyeuristic indulgence of the locals (236
237). We are never told whether his carcass has been buried.

This failure to consume the bear recalls a passage in Moby Dick,

striking
which recounts Ahab's highly uncaptainlike habit of eating alone in his cabin.
"The meals are the of Ahab's isolation from the men with whom he
symbol
works," writes this passage from Melville's text; "He lived in the
James, citing
world as the last of thegrisly bears lived in settledMissouri" [emphasis added] (3).
The cruel history of Southern greed and inhumanity renders the entire

/ de Spain party as isolated as Ahab himself, since "Their

Compson original
sins have alienated them from nature. Thus their conquest of Old
irrevocably
Ben becomes a rape. What in other circumstances have been is
might right,
now a violation of the wilderness and the Southern land" 281
(Lydenberg,
282). Indeed, the of Old Ben's treatment to a social
implicit sacrilege points
and technological change in American life which simultaneously links
together, and distinguishes between, Boon and Ahab. In another echo of the

irrelevance of economics to Ahab, Boon, whom Ike has been warned will

miss his supper, has himself beneath an isolated old tree

planted against
which he has apparently battered his gun like themad captain stabbing futilely
at the white whale. In the dismembered weapon, whose wooden stock is
we may also discern a reference to the dismembered Ahab
missing, parodie
and his In any case it is clear that Boon's
specially forged harpoon. inability
to shoot has once humiliated and inflamed him. In his Boon
again hysteria,
seeks to destroy the who are Old Ben's and diminished
squirrels pitiful
removes. The apparent waste of the bear's carcass also illuminates how Faulkner
has Hoke's milltown out of the wreckage of the Ahab
reshaped Pequod.
viewed his crew as little more than a machine, and his of
killing rejection
Starbucks concern for the economics of the hunt is ironically inflected in

Boon's employment by the lumber company, "who had decided that Boon

might be better as a town marshall than head of a logging gang" (302).

Like the plantation system Ike's "relinquishment" symbolically rejects, the

of Faulkner's to a shadow
whaling industry day had dwindled of itself. Whale

oil has been replaced by the coal and petroleum products which power the

logging train Ike now ridesthrough the progressively diminishing wilderness,

or Roth's car, which Ike must later ride in orderto reach any of
pockets
wilderness at all. Unlike the technology of the Pequod's mass
day, production
now commodities on a scale, towards not just of the
grander extinguishment
creatures of the wilderness, which it sweeps aside like Old Ben's carcass, but
the wilderness itself.
Ike travels no great distance from this pathetic scenario to his
disappointing
 52 SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

apostasy in "Delta Autumn", wherein he so callously to the

responds plight
of his nephew's mistress. From the perspective of the classic hunt myth, the

disrespect accorded the slain Old Ben anticipates Roth's brutal disavowal of
his child and its mother, a darker form of "relinquishment" in sharp distinction
to young Ike's original of the term. Old Ike hints that he may
understanding
intuit this connection when he suddenly gives the woman his hunting horn
as she departs. even here, in this abortive of Ike
Perhaps closing episode
McCaslin's quest romance, Faulkner pays subtle to the precursor of
homage
his tale. Is itmerely coincidental or ironic, as we contrast the expressions
finally
of a single myth that operates on both land and sea, that this mulatto woman,

orphaned by her lover, her time, and her culture all three, met Roth "because
a box of to fall out of a boat" (343), and that she arrives
groceries happened
and as well?
departs by boat

Finally, the novella's disrupted narrative time scheme reveals that the

of the hunt is no more nor less than a recursive of the

metaphor metaphor

explorations implicit in writing

"In the general outlines
itself.of the major

of its 'The Bear' seems a neat to Dick. . . .The

portion narrative, parallel Moby
hunt in general is suggested to be an attempt to give order to something that

may be finally beyond order, the wilderness and the quintessence of the

wilderness, the bear," writes Guetti (59). Similarly, the narrative encompasses
and reorders the same materials, the hunt itself, and holds them
including
up to each other in shifting so that their various relations are
juxtapositions,

constantly re-illuminated and new meanings exposed among those relations.

Like the whaler Rachel that rescues Ishmael, narrative time in
eventually
"The Bear" cruises deviously. The patterns of broken orders, disrupted natural

and disenfranchised social structures which the narration

rhythms, comprise
occasion Ike's most scenes of self-examination and
explicit self-reconfiguration.
Thus, the time scheme of the novella seems folded, twisted, and
equally
broken. Ike, like Ishmael, reaches into his own and his family's past, or
projects
himself into his future, building new meanings by deconstructing old and
as yet unrealized situations alike. Guetti contends that "a reader cannot fail

to notice the parallels between the manner in which Ike McCaslin approaches
the 'truth' of the wilderness and the usual form of Faulkner's own rhetorical

methods. The insistence upon incoherence, upon the abrogation of rules, and

upon permanent non-resolution as values that have been seen to be

positive
characteristic of Faulkner's are all in
imagination expressed metaphorically
Ike's attitudes" (61).

Every discovery Ike makes about his lineage echoes and is interpreted
to the events of the great bear hunt of his
according revelatory years-long
MOBY BEAR 53

The events of the hunt, on the other hand, accumulate to explain his
youth.
response to his terrible discoveries about his grandfather, and the conduct of

his adult life. Ultimately, even Faulkner's time scheme deconstructs itself in

much the same way that Ishmael's reflections constantly undercut each other.
In the linear time of reading, Ike's wife's hysterical laughter anticipates the

mad hysteria of Boon, which, chronologically, occurred many years earlier.

The novella's antepenultimate episode, concerning the big rattlesnake Ike

encounters while searching for Boon in chapter five (313-314), is a pr?cis of
this narrative strategy. The snake, which is reborn when it sheds its skin,

and which measures rattles to its with

chronology by adding rattlestring
each shed, is enveloped in images of time. It symbolizes both death and
timelessness, called "the old one, the ancient and accursed... the once-bright

of its youth dulled now." The encounter seems to time:

markings suspend
"At last it moved. . . . and then its loops in and
going gone," working deftly
out of shadows like the flow of Faulkner's narrative itself. The coils
shifting
appear to contain the snake's immobile head, which never alters its attention
to Ike. Then Ike lowers the foot he had in mid-air
slowly, literally suspended
when he the snake. the old serpent as "Chief and
spotted Addressing
"Grandfather," Ike conflates his own history?from his Grandfather, Lucius

Quintus Carothers McCaslin, whose and the land, to

greed cruelty corrupted
the mystic buck who initiated him into mystery?with the history of his

civilization and the wilderness it is corrupting.

Although this scene, with its pacing and imagery, recalls the subsiding
whirlpool of the sinking Pequod, with its stationary black bubble, it also
points to Faulkner's simultaneously parodie and tragic recasting of the hunt

motif. As Ishmael recounts:

I was then, but drawn towards the vortex. When I

slowly, closing
reached it, it had subsided to a creamy Round and round then,
pool.
and ever towards the button-like black bubble at the
contracting
axis of that circle . . . did I revolve
slowly wheeling (Epilogue).

Like Ishmael's watery vortex, the fluid circuits of the rattlesnake alert Ike to

his proximity to the axis mundi, a lone tree full of squirrels.

symbolized by
But Boon Hogganbeck, the human wreckage of the Southern legacy of

deemed unfit for town life, does not to the

miscegenation, though belong
world of Sam Fathers s Indian either.
mythic predecessors
In a parodie departure from the salvation presaged by Ishmael's magically
becalmed sea, Ike discovers only the maddened Boon his rifle, a
flogging
that cannot a proper seed. We have said that
phallic implement ejaculate
 54 SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

Faulkner's ironies are

irremediably bitter. In a sense, this scene, with its own

deeply tragic ironies, summarizes the entire project of Go Down, Moses, and

up the threads of meaning so knotted "The Bear":

gathers intricately through
that the two great heroic acts of the novel, Boon's naked assault on the bear

and Ike's renunciation of his should both threaten to dwindle

patrimony,
with time and the world of Southern arrogance into such exhausted and

impotent denouements.

Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks ofGod, Vol. I: Primitive Religion. New York: Viking, 1969
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Guetti, James. "The Sound and the Fury and 'The Bear'." William Faulkner. Ed. Harold Bloom.
New York: Chelsea House. 1986. 55-62.
Hallowell, A. Irving. "Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere." Bear, Man and God.
Ed. Francis Lee Utley, Lynn Z. Bloom and Arthur F. Kinnney. New York: Random
House, 1964. 187-189
James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Detroit: Bewick/Ed, 1978.
LaBudde, Kenneth. "Cultural Primitivism inWilliam Faulkner's 'The Bear'." Bear, Man and
God. 226-232.
Lewis, R. W. B. "The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner's 'The Bear'." Bear, Man and
God, 306-322.
Lydenberg, John. "Nature Myth in The Bear." Bear, Man and God, 280-289.
Mclntosh, James. "The Mariner's Multiple Quest." New Essays onMoby Dick or,The Whale.
Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 23-52.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick or, The Whale. Berkeley: Arion /U of California P, 1989 edition.
Meriwether, James B. and Michael Millgate, eds. Lion in theGarden: Interviews with
William Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1980.
Porter, Carolyn. "CallMe Ishmael, or How toMake Double-Talk Speak." New Essays on "Moby
Dick". 73-108.
Poirier, Richard. "The Bear." William Faulkner. 49-54.
Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art ofHerman Melville. Berkeley: U
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Utley, Francis Lee. "Pride and Humility: the Cultural Roots of Ike McCaslin." Bear, Man and
God. 233-260.